Jesus and the Trojan War: Myth and Meaning for Today

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Part 1

Looking Forward to the Past

Chapter One

Blue Remembered Hills

Where did the time go to? The question is familiar to everyone, and one obvious answer is that the vanished time has moved from the present into the past. Obvious as the answer may be, though, it does seem to imply - rather like the question itself, which uses words such as where and go - that the past occupies space somewhere, or is a place of some kind. Perhaps, then, there is another question: Where is this limbo called the past, into which present time vanishes?

Some may wish to pursue such metaphysical questions, theorising about time and space, as countless wise men have done across innumerable centuries, and will doubtless continue to do. It may be wise of us, however, if at this very early point in our discussion we neatly side-step areas which are the province of philosophers, mathematicians and physicists, or at least spend no more than a little of our time on them. Perhaps it is enough for our purposes simply to accept that the past lies somewhere on a continuum called time, one of the elements or dimensions in which we live and move and have our being. Time is the location of those things that have come and gone, those things that are here now, and those things that have yet to be. In that sense, the lost time that our opening question went in search of has simply passed along a constantly moving conveyor belt of future, present and past.

It may not be as simple as that, though. In his theory of special relativity, Albert Einstein contended that any distinction between past, present and future is illusory. Furthermore, he proposed that there is no way of knowing which of any two events preceded or succeeded the other. Curiously enough, our time-space language can be equally baffling. The imagery that we use puts the past behind us, while the future is said to lie ahead of us: and yet, we would say that the next generation - that is, the people who live in the future - follow us, which seems to suggest that the future is not ahead but behind. For practical purposes, though, the conventional concept of sequences is much more manageable and is the one we will work with. We can be fairly confident that we have left the past behind, and can re-visit it only in our imagination.

Einstein constructed a four-dimensional mathematical abstraction, adding time as the fourth dimension to Euclid’s three, and it is within this space-time geometry that we conceptualise time as the dimension of change. An infinite number of parallel and concurrent sequences of events have occurred and continue to occur in threedimensional space, and the intervals between these successive events create the continuous line of elapsed time.

It can be questioned, however, whether it is true that an infinite number of sequences can be said to define infinite time, stretching back eternally, just as it stretches forward eternally. There was, it seems, a starting point for time, calculated at 13.7 billion years ago (although that ‘point seven’ does feel rather precise!) and perhaps time will eventually come to an end.

Mathematical models aside, this place which we call the past can not be said to exist in any concrete sense, or if it does, it is not available or accessible to us. We cannot go there: at least, at the time of writing no scientific or technological developments have made it possible for us to go there physically or literally. While recognising that as blindingly obvious, it is a critically important point to emphasise when thinking about the past and what we can know about the past. Ways have been devised for attempting to gain access to the past, but we are bound to concede that these devices have their limitations.

One escape attempt from the here-and-now is science fiction. It is interesting to note that time travel, the subject of much sci-fi writing, is usually futuristic and less often makes a journey into the past. Einstein believed that in theory at least, travel into the future is possible; but he calculated that should you make a trip into the future, you will not be able to go back to your starting point - that is to say, he believed travel to the past is not possible. Interestingly, if it were possible literally to re-visit the past, it would no longer be the past, but would have become ‘now’ once again.

In more recent years, other scientists have built on Einstein’s work, specifically on his concept of the line of time being a curved one or a loop, and models have been developed to theorise how a time-traveller could take a short cut across the time loop and so arrive in the future. One day, perhaps. But as for the past, there seems to be no reason to believe that we are ever going there.

To an extent that can be neither measured nor imagined, far and away the greatest number of sequences of events which have ever occurred had already come and gone aeons before human beings arrived on the planet, with their capacity for inquisitiveness and inquiry. Indeed, innumerable sequences of events continue to occur without being observed by any human eye. By definition, therefore, there is no record or memory of those primeval events, and the visual images of that infinite number of occurrences have vanished at the speed of light into the dark silence of the space between the stars - just as the images of events in our own time vanish. And for the moment, we will leave those images of the past out there in space.

Shakespeare was clearly aware of the ephemeral nature of the stage on which life’s dramas are enacted, as it all melts into air, thin air...

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

[The Tempest 4:1]

Similarly, the familiar Remembrance Day hymn, ‘Our God, our help in ages past’ demonstrates an acceptance of life’s transient quality:

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,

Bears all its sons away;

They fly forgotten, as a dream

Dies at the opening day.

In a letter written from his Nazi prison cell, Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke of mankind’s longing for the past, which reminded him of a song: ‘It’s a long way back to the land of childhood, But if only I knew the way!’ [Bonhoeffer 1953]. Bonhoeffer had to add conclusively and sadly that there is no such way.

It is Everyman’s constant and inescapable experience that the fleeting moment of what we call the present, the ‘now’, immediately becomes the past; and the as-yet future inevitably and all too soon becomes the ‘now’, and is equally destined to vanish instantly into the irrecoverable past.

Whether or not our propensity for dividing time into past, present and future is illusory, all are doubtless aware that life’s journey moves in one direction only, and there is no going back. Housman’s Shropshire Lad [1989] knew it:

Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.

Looking back at that lost, far country of the past seems to generate not simply a nostalgia for the blue remembered hills, but at best a resignation and at worst a resentment that we can not come again to those happy highways. It may be questioned whether the highways were indeed happy, something we shall discuss later; but what is certain is that we cannot return to the land of lost content.

What seems to be a futile quest, searching for and wishing to recover lost time, is the subject of much of Proust’s monumental À la Recherche du Temps Perdu-a title perhaps inappropriately mistranslated by Shakespeare’s words, ‘Remembrance of things past’. Unlike Housman’s wistful recollection of blue remembered hills, the theme that runs through this vast eleven-volume work is a rather despairing sense of how time has put our past experiences beyond recovery. The Recherche is a quest, a quest for time that is perdu, lost.

This rather fatalistic contemplation of time’s ‘ever-rolling stream’ may serve as an unnecessary, and possibly unwelcome, reminder that yesterday has gone and today is going, but it is also an important first stage in a discussion of the meaning of history.

Our wish to rescue and preserve the past is an age-old quest, perhaps as old as humankind itself, and the questions begin to arise: What was our past, and when did it have its beginning? Just as individuals develop a keen interest in discovering their roots and seeing how far back their family tree can be drawn, so whole peoples and races have attempted to look back into time immemorial, and developed and perpetuated beliefs not only about their own origins but also about the origins of the world in which they live.

For some present-day physicists, the answer to the question, ‘How and when did it all get started?’ would be (for the present, anyway) ‘In the beginning was the big bang’. At that point in an unimaginably distant past, the theory is - and possibly it will remain as open to question as any other creation theory - that a spark ignited a cosmic explosion which created matter, and time itself began in that instant. Theories and models have been devised and calculations made to describe an expanding universe, and expanding at an ever-increasing rate at that. Others envisage a universe which will not only cease to expand but also begin to contract, until in a future expressed by an incomprehensible row of noughts the whole thing will come to an end in some kind of vanishing point. It is conceivable that it will then start all over again, just as universes may have come into being and then ceased to be, countless times before.

It may be difficult for a modern, educated mind to conceptualise where a ‘big bang’ could have taken place, since there was not yet any space in which a cosmic explosion could occur; or to wonder when it could have happened, since time had not yet begun. It is intriguing, too, to think that we have words (if we do) to describe something that did not yet exist: chaos does not fit the bill - there was neither light nor darkness, no up or down, no vacuum, no emptiness. How much more, then, would primeval, if not primitive, people begin to strive to find explanations for all those phenomena which they knew to be outside their control or influence - a sun which rose and warmed and set, a moon constantly and consistently changing shape, birth and death, sickness in people and in animals, bumper harvests and crop failure, earthquakes and floods and droughts - and then to begin to think about how it all began?

Less scientific or not quite so dramatic, perhaps, but for all that intriguing in their own right, are those ancient peoples’ concepts of how our world or worlds came into being, and how mankind came to people the earth, concepts which are to be found in cultures of many kinds in many parts of the world.

The Alcheringa or Dream-time of the Australian aboriginal peoples is surely one of the most fascinating of these traditions, in that it not only stretches back into the mists of unknown numbers of centuries - the aboriginal peoples are thought to have inhabited Australia for at least 40,000 years and probably more - but also continues as a vital, living element in these ancient peoples’ present-day communities. For the native Australians, the vastness of their land is criss-crossed with ‘dream lines’ which map the travels of countless ancestral cultural heroes from the very beginning of time, and record primeval encounters between animals which became people and people who became animals, bringing human beings and places into existence. Those creative ancestors are seen more as spirits than as human beings, born of the earth to which they long ago returned, and those mythic locations - rocks and water holes, for example - are still revered as sacred by their descendants.

By more recent times, somewhere in the third millennium BCE, Egypt had developed a number of religious centres, each believing that its god or gods had created the earth in some far-distant First Time. Later still, around 1500 BCE, creation myths were evolving in Asia. The teachings of the Persian prophet Zarathustra included the narrative of the universe being created by Ahura Mazda, the supreme god who had existed from all eternity. In this Zoroastrian tradition, the newly-created universe was egg-shaped, a concept found also in Polynesian, African, Japanese, and Chinese creation myths, among others.

In India, at about the same time as Zarathustra, the emerging Hindu hymns of the Rig Veda included creation myths, one of them telling how, when there was neither light nor darkness, the god Indra or Vishnu separated the heavens from the earth, creating the universe out of chaos. That element of chaos is to be found within the creation narratives of many widely-differing cultures - among them, Chinese, Tibetan, Scandinavian, Greek and Hebrew.

Varying creation myths exist among African peoples and tribal groups, some resembling the Australian traditions of an origin brought about by spirits and creatures that are part animal, part human, other traditions having uncanny similarities to the pantheon of Greek mythology or the biblical story of the Hebrews’ God making the first man from clay.

In the eighth century BCE, the Greek poet Hesiod sang about the foundation of the world. After invoking the Muses to inspire him to tell of the coming of the first gods, Hesiod opened his Theogony: ‘In the Beginning there was only Chaos, the Abyss’ and he goes on to tell how Gaia the Earth came into being, and out of the Abyss were born night and then day.

The Hebrew Bible, too, opens with the words ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’. But everything was still primeval chaos: ‘The earth was a vast waste, darkness covered the deep, and the spirit of God hovered over the surface of the waters’ [Genesis 1:1–2]. In this as in so many other creation stories, matter already existed but its existence was chaotic and unformed, until the creator-god gave it shape and set everything in its place.

It was not only in the ancient Hindu myths, or those of Australian Aborigines, that there were to be found creatures and gods that were half human, half animal. Egyptian hieroglyphs show gods with the head of an ibis, a falcon or a jackal. In the ancient Greek myths, the gods frequently take on the form of animals - Zeus as a swan, for example, and Athene as an owl; and in the Iliad there is a single reference to a unique title for Apollo, ‘Smintheus’, mouse god, perhaps the bringer of plague.

The Bible’s first story presents a serpent that can speak, not a god in the story, but later identified as the tempter, or Satan. Immediately following the biblical creation narrative comes the story of the temptation of Eve and Adam in the Garden of Eden. The serpent, the most cunning creature in all of God’s creation, suggests to Eve that were she to eat the fruit on the forbidden tree in the middle of the garden, she would be just like God, and know both good and evil. Not only does Eve do as the serpent suggests, but also gives some of the fruit to Adam. God curses the serpent, and turns Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, as punishment for their disobedience.

Even by New Testament times, animal imagery was still being used to signify divine presence. At Jesus’ baptism, the gospel narrative tells, the spirit of God was seen to descend on him ‘like a dove’.

Tucked away between the Bible’s first stories, of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, of Enoch (who was said to have been taken up by God without dying) and Methuselah (who lived to be nearly a thousand years old), and the stories of the Tower of Babel, and Noah and the Flood, there is a fragment, just one verse, which refers to the Nephilim who lived on the earth ‘in those days as well as later’. This apparently isolated verse explains that this race of demigod giants, who were fathered by the sons of the gods and born to the daughters of men, ‘were the heroes of old, men of renown’ [Genesis 6:4].

It is interesting to note in passing, that in considering possible meanings for what appears to be a tiny fragment from an ancient Semitic document, we have an example of the challenges that face translators and commentators, and it raises questions for us as we begin to think about mythology. For centuries, English translations of the Hebrew text (of which there have been many) have described the giant Nephilim as ‘sons of God’, whereas more recent translations render the text as ‘sons of the gods’. Working within a monotheistic tradition, earlier translators could have been expected to keep an eye on orthodoxy and were almost bound to conform (as they did) with the standard singular, capital-G God. But who were the sons of this one God, who fathered the heroes of old, the men of renown? And if ‘sons of the gods’ is more accurate, where does a pantheon, with generations of little-g gods and demi-gods, fit into this ancient history, if it is a history?

It is one of the many questions we may have to continue answering, We simply do not know. Whichever is the more accurate rendering of the origins of the awesome Nephilim, though, we shall come across these giants again.

***

From all time, then, men and women seem to have had a fascination with their own origins and those of the earth and the heavens and all creation. Out of that fascination and wonder, they crafted stories and epics and sagas, which were handed down across countless generations. Many of these narratives took on the characteristics of what today we call history. Most are essentially religious and tell of golden ages inhabited by demi-gods and heroes.

It is to some of the narratives of those men of renown that we now turn our attention.

Chapter Two

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

To be told that one is living in the past may be felt to be an unjustified and unwelcome criticism. On the other hand, many people clearly enjoy reminiscing about the good old days, and take pleasure in telling anyone whom they can get to listen that things that aren’t what they used to be, nostalgically claiming that those were the days.

It is possible, though, that an obsessive interest in yesteryear, an unrealistic yearning for the return of once-upona-time, is a blind alley leading nowhere but to disappointment and disenchantment. It may be that the longed-for golden age is not going to dawn after all, and we may be left sitting there, looking forward in vain to the return of a glorious past that has vanished for all time (if it existed at all).

While one may enjoy the fantasy of sci-fi futures, daydreaming about the past is likely to be more realistic even if more prosaic. For one thing, our own past is more specific than the future, if only because we have already experienced it. Whether our memories are accurate is another matter, of course, a question at the centre of our discussion here. Housman’s Shropshire Lad looked back with nostalgia at blue remembered hills. It may be that we all recall the endlessly sunny summer days of school holidays, and dream of all the Christmases that were white when we were young. Is it possible, though, that those memories are idealised? Perhaps, like daydreaming about the future, recalling the past also involves imagination and creativity.

Just as individuals have a tendency to glamorise or idealise the past and long for the return of those good old days, so whole societies have created memories of their own long-lost golden ages. Some even had or have an expectation of the return of a great king or heroic figure, who will come back to restore his kingdom or herald the establishment of a perfect world.

The age-old quest to recover lost times, to know about a society’s origins and what it was that the men of renown did in the mythic golden age, is evidenced by the creative activities in which mankind engaged across the millennia. Their art, which helps us in some measure to rescue the past from oblivion, encompasses all the things that they made and the stories that they told. The significance of the artefacts that continue to be unearthed from archaeological digs is a topic to which we will return when examining more closely just what it is that we mean by history.

Objects that have lain buried in the ground for many centuries and which suddenly come to light, and the hidden ruins of buildings and cities which excavation discloses for the first time in hundreds or thousands of years, tell the historian a great deal about ancient societies and cultures. Unfortunately they reveal little or nothing of the actual events which took place within those societies, or about individuals who may have been involved in those events. Digging at Hissarlik in Turkey has revealed layer upon layer of ruined cities which may have been Troy, but has not found Achilleus or evidence of Homer’s Trojan war. Digging at Jericho in the West Bank has unearthed an ancient city long pre-dating the exodus, but has not found Moses or proof of an invading Israelite army. Digging at Cadbury Castle may tell us something about Britons and Saxons, but so far has not found King Arthur or Camelot.

To recover the epic heroes and to learn of their awesome escapades, we need to turn to the art of story-telling, the oral traditions found almost certainly in every culture around the world.

It is to be regretted that oral traditions and the art of story-telling have now largely disappeared from sophisticated western cultures, since these narratives are or were an intrinsic part of nations’ identity and heritage. The legends and the folklore that would once have been familiar to most if not all, sung by bards and minstrels, told and re-told by itinerant storytellers, and passed from generation to generation, are now to be found (those that have survived) only in books, there to be read by any who are interested, but in the process destined to become less and less familiar as time goes by.

Words such as myth, mythology, folklore and legend are beginning to appear here more frequently and it is time to make at least an attempt to give them more meaning, if not actually to define them. It will quickly be seen that distinctions are not easy