Alexander or Jesus?

The Origin of the Title "Son of God"

Broad

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781630879464
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

To many people, the four Gospels are seen as biographies of Jesus of Nazareth, who was declared by God to be his Son. To many more, these Gospels are works of theology, incorporating the myths, stories, and legends surrounding a then little-known young Jew who lived two thousand years ago. This book explores the reasons why such a comparatively obscure person should be called "Son of God" soon after his death. William Broad sets stories of Jesus against the backdrop of the religions of the time and shows how St. Paul in Greece chose the mythical title "son of a god" for Jesus as being one that would attract the attention of his Gentile hearers and reveal his great significance. However, Broad notes that Jesus was not the first historical person to have been called a son of god. Alexander the Great had been so titled 350 years before. Alexander or Jesus? explores stories of this remarkable king and shows that these tales significantly affected the way the Gospels declared the Divine Sonship of Jesus. It further reveals that Jesus' birth and his epiphany are not the unique events that many believe.

1

The Pedigree of the Term Son of God (pre 350 BCE)

The area with which this book is concerned stretches from the river Danube to the upper reaches of the river Nile and from the Adriatic Sea to Hindu Kush. From the sixth until the second century BCE, this was an area dominated by three cultures: Persian, Egyptian and Greek. The struggles between these cultures form the background to the thesis. Ideas about their gods were worked out against a background of war and conquest.

What immediately emerges from an examination of the cultures of Persia and Egypt is that the king was an essential part of them. As Frankfort points out: “The ancient Near East considered kingship the very basis of civilization.”1 This is not just because the king was the person who held temporal power, though that was an important factor, but because the whole ethos of the cultures was based on the concept of monarchy. As will be seen, the king was a significant part of the religious practices of such cultures. The same had been true of Greece and Macedon, but by 350 BCE Athens had experimented with democracy and the role of the king was being reassessed throughout Greece.

The purpose of this chapter is to establish the religious beliefs and practices of Persian, Egyptian and Greek cultures and to investigate the part played by the king in each. When that is done, the nature and authority of kingship will be explored and as will the kings relationship with the gods of his realm. Finally the question must be asked as to whether the term “Son of God” had meaning in each culture, and if so, in what way?

The religions of all three cultures were polytheistic. Each religion, it is widely accepted, had developed from the interaction of humans with the force of nature and the efforts of men and women to exercise some influence over this force by prayer, sacrifice and ritual. “At first the supreme force would seem awesome and mysterious,” writes Silverman, “but once it could be comprehended as an entity, it could be recognized, understood, and then reinterpreted in a familiar and recurrent form. In a way, it could be harnessed. It became humanized [my italics].” That is, it was put in terms that the individual could understand. He goes on: “Once the form of the deity had been developed, a legend, myth, or story was formulated to explain its origin and associations, and in this process the god received a name. Stories were told about these deities. They went into battle and travelled by boat. Some even drank to excess . . .”2 In other words, the gods were like men in almost every respect, capable of loving and hating, rewarding and punishing those in their power. Indeed, it was their immortality that seemed alone to differentiate them from humankind.

The religions of these three societies had also this in common; they had no definitive scripture and no identifiable founder. They had no Bible and no Koran and they had no Jesus and no Buddha. Knowledge of the religions of ancient Persia and ancient Egypt depends upon ostraca, carvings and murals, amplified by some writings of Greeks who had visited them. Though the Greeks wrote about their own religion, this tended (as will be seen) to be in the form of stories, myths and legends rather than descriptive accounts It follows that there can be no certainty of what was and what was not to be held as true. Further, since the religions were constantly evolving, it can be little more than speculation as to what is held to be the religious view of the peoples for much of the time.

Ancient Persia

The area known to the world as Mesopotamia produced societies of great antiquity—the Hittite, Assyrian and Babylonian empires to name but three. They were ruled by kings who were first and foremost war leaders and as such had absolute power.3 Success in war to both king and people meant expansion, wealth and security; failure meant annexation, annihilation and slavery. So a strong king was a good king, able to protect the people that he ruled, and, by conquering surrounding territory, increase his nation’s wealth and security, and perhaps even create an empire. For example, when in 550 BCE Cyrus (the Great) acceded to the throne of Persia (then a province of the Babylonian empire), he established the new Persian empire by conquest. He overran Lydia and Babylon; his son, Cambyses I, conquered Egypt, and Darius I (next in line) annexed Afghanistan, making him king of the largest empire yet seen in the Middle East. In only one enterprise Darius failed; his move westward was checked at the battle of Marathon in 492 BCE and this began a long series of wars which was only to end with the total success of a Greco-Macedonian army under the command of Alexander the Great, which led to him becoming the Great King of Persia.

The pantheon of gods worshipped by the Persians was forever expanding and changing, though it is clear that by the time of Cyrus the chief of their gods was Ahura–Mazda, a name which means either “God of Iran” or “Wise Lord.”4 This very changeability led to religious tolerance, the Persians being able to adapt to or to assimilate the religions of the people they conquered. So when Cyrus entered Babylon in triumph, he took the hand of Bel Marduk (the Babylonian divinity) to signify that he had been adopted as his son.5 When he discovered a Jewish enclave in Babylon, Cyrus permitted those who wished to return to Jerusalem and provided them with financial assistance to rebuild their temple,6 actions which earned him the title Messiah.7 And for similar generosity, when Darius became ruler of Egypt, he was accorded the title Setetu-Ra (Ra hath begotten him) and took his place in the hierarchy of the religion of Egypt.8 The religion of the Persians grew and expanded. Westerners found it an easy religion to accept; ancient writers equated Ahura–Mazda with Zeus and Jupiter.9

The Persians were in due course to receive the wisdom of the prophet Zarathustra or Zoroaster though exactly when he lived is unclear. Although his ideas were to transform the faith of the Persians by the introduction of the reverence for fire, his teaching are irrelevant to this book in that they did not involve the role of the king and nowhere did Zarathustra teach that the king was a god.10

In fact, the kings of Persia had never been divine. “Contrary to the opinion of some Greek authors,” writes Briant, “the king himself was never considered a god.”11 Frankfort provides a rationale for this fact. The royal rulers received their authority from the gods and had to respond to this by reacting to the way those gods showed their power in the lands they ruled. Mesopotamia, literally the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, was dominated by those rivers and they were unpredictable in the extreme. The king of Persia ruled over a land of constant change and had to cope with whatever happened. He stood between the gods and his people, an earnest of the sympathetic but unpredictable will of the Persian gods and he was mortal.12 Alexander, by becoming Great King of the Persian Empire, did not become a god or son of a god.

Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was originally a country whose borders were determined by the watershed of the lower reaches of the river Nile. This river floods and dries on a yearly pattern and the people that live on its banks enjoy excelle...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Pedigree of the Term Son of God (pre 350 BCE)
• Chapter 2: What We Know of Alexander the Great
• Chapter 3: The Title Son of God in Canonical and Extra-Canonical Jewish Writings
• Chapter 4: Son of God in the New Testament
• Chapter 5: Son of God in Extra-Canonical Writings to 165 CE
• Chapter 6: Son of God in the Roman Empire
• Chapter 7: The Argument
• Endpiece
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Bibliography