Book Review - Jerusalem: the Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore

 Jerusalem: the Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore

London: Phoenix, 2012 (first published 2011)      ISBN 9781780220253

One of the blurbs on my edition of this book calls it "a tour de force", and there is no doubt that Jerusalem lives up to that particular piece of praise as well as all the others that it has gained since publication. It is the story of Jerusalem for sure, but along the way the reader learns much of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, of the Arabs, Romans, Ottomans, Russians and British, of Crusader Kingdoms and Sultanates, and of modern geopolitics.

Like all great works of non-fiction, Montefiore has woven much more into his story than the bare bones. The reader comes away from this work with a much broader knowledge of Western and Middle Eastern history than they would have a right to, given the books ostensible subject matter. The reader does of course gain an intimate knowledge of the development and trials of Jerusalem itself, as well as wonderful little titbits of other information such as the origin of the phrase "Bob's your uncle", the fact that Rudolf Hoess, Franz von Papen and Rudolf Hess were all in Jerusalem at the same time, and that the future King George V got tattooed when there, in the same place as his father.

These little nuggets of information are the cherries on top of the wonderfully rich dessert of history that Sebag Montefiore serves up. Thankfully his style, and the easily digestible short chapters make it both easy to read, and easy to absorb the information.

Sebag Montefiore writes in the last pages of the book that "for 1,000 years, Jerusalem was exclusively Jewish; for about 400 years Christian; for 1,300 years, Islamic, and not one of the three faiths ever gained Jerusalem without the sword, the mangonel or the howitzer."

The history of this city is a history of rapine, destruction, and war. It is also a history of worship, ecstasy and wonder. It is a story of immigration, emigration, and cosmopolitanism. It is the story of a city that on many occasions threatened to die, but is in many ways the most important city on Earth. The origins of Jerusalem are obscure and biblical, although recent archaeology has proven that King David did in fact exist.

Until the arrival of the Romans, and sometimes even after, Jerusalem was a backwater. Holy to the Jews, it was of small interest to others apart from being an attractive place to loot, owing to the gold that was held in the Temple.

Rome and Herod brought some stability to Jerusalem, although religious fever often led to riots, and there was also a continuous underground of Jewish rebellion against Roman rule. This was mainly driven by Jewish fundamentalism; a belief that gentiles could not rule God's chosen people. Jesus was part of this milieu.

The disaster of AD70 when the Romans sacked the city and destroyed the Temple after yet another Jewish rebellion, signalled the end of any Jewish control of the city for nearly 1,900 years. Jews were expelled, and Jerusalem once again became a backwater.

After an interval of Byzantine rule, the Arabs took the city in AD630. Soon after came the building of the Dome of the Rock, which raised Jerusalem to a holy site for its third religion (and which has led to many of the trials and tribulations the city has suffered down the years). Montefiore explains that this move was partially political, as the ruler of Jerusalem, Abd Al-Malik did not control Mecca and so needed a counterweight to the shrine there.

While the Muslims tolerated both Christians and Jews, life was not easy for them under Islamic rule. The Crusaders however were worse. The Crusader Kings, who were essentially freebooters looking for land, were often dangerous to each other, but not as much as they were to both Jews and Muslims.

Saladin's relatively enlightened rule was but a short interlude between the Christian crusaders and the Mamluks and Ottomans, who ruled Jerusalem for 400 years. For most of that time the city was again a backwater - Jews were forbidden the Temple Mount, and Christian worship was heavily circumscribed (although the Christians seemed to rank ahead of the Jews in the eyes of the Pashas and Sultan).

As the Ottoman Empire sank into sloth and corruption, Western countries began to influence what happened at the centre of Christendom. Kings, Czars and Emperors vied with each other to endow churches, fund pilgrimages and gain the upper hand in the machinations to do with the operation of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The rise of millenarian ideas in the USA and Britain led to a push to allow Jews back to Jerusalem so that biblical prophecies of the Armageddon could be fulfilled. Montefiore clearly explains how these ideas led to massive changes on the ground in Jerusalem (one of Montefiore's ancestors funded Jewish settlement there) and on policy. The Balfour Declaration was a ground-breaking change in geopolitical thinking, even though one of the major reasons it was made was to mobilise Jewish support for Britain's fight in World War One.

Montefiore brings the history up to the present with descriptions of the internecine terrorism performed by both Jews and Arabs during the British Mandate and beyond, and explains how so many chances to find a workable peace have been missed: when one side felt politically strong enough to offer terms, the other side was too weak to accept them.

The uneasy state of peace that currently entails in Jerusalem has come at the cost of almost total segregation of Jews, Muslims and Christians from each other, and the destruction of what was a unique culture. It seems that we humans have not learnt a thing from the history of this holy and benighted place.

There is so much more in this book than I have noted here - it is an accessible wonder, and well worth reading. You will learn a lot.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

 The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

London: Penguin, 1990 (first published 1979)       ISBN 0140134689

The discovery in 1945 of a series of religious texts that had been buried for over a thousand years caused a sensation in the world of religious scholarship. The so-called Nag Hammadi library contained all sorts of texts and fragments of Gnostic teaching including Gospels and other treatises. They were translated from the original Greek into Coptic, and the best speculation is that they were buried in the sand by monks afraid of punishment for holding condemned texts in their library.

Elaine Pagels is probably the greatest known English speaking scholar of these texts, and in this book she explains the differences between the Gnostic and Orthodox view of Christianity. It is a fascinating peek into the early days of the Christian Church and Bible as we know them today. In a series of chapters dealing with subjects ranging from views of the Resurrection, Persecution, what makes a true Church, to whether God is male and what Gnosis (knowledge) actually means in Christian life and belief.

Before 1945, all we knew of any Gnostic texts were what had come down to us from those Orthodox who had written condemnations of them, and Pagels compares those denunciations with what we now know through access to the Nag Hammadi texts.

As Pagels points out in the book, the modern concept of separation between religion and politics would have been unknown in the time of the creation of these texts. What we see in them is a way of searching for truth, but not a way to be organized into an institution which could grow and face the vicissitudes that the Christian faith were suffering at that time.

For to be a Gnostic was to reject the hierarchies and strictures of the Orthodox Church. Gnosis was much more a personal issue - the texts consistently reinforce a believer's duty to engage in a personal relationship with Christ to find the secret of faith. In fact the idea that Gnostics (those that know) had access to secret knowledge was key to their movement. As Pagels writes it, it seems that many Gnostics felt themselves to be superior to others who were not 'spiritual' in their religious outlook and activities. Through quotation from the Nag Hammadi texts, Pagels shows that there was contention within the Gnostic world about whether those that merely observed the rituals of Christianity were indeed true Christians at all. Some said no while others thought yes, but they had yet to reach the fullness of faith.

Gnostics were essentially exclusive, while the Orthodox were essentially inclusive. The Gnostics, believing that only the truly spiritual or initiated were true believers, were forever questioning each other. Schisms and splits are a given if there is no agreed way to determine who is in and who is out. The Orthodox, on the other hand, simply required from an adherent a profession of faith (the Creed), participation in the rituals of the Church, and obedience to Church hierarchy. There is no need, if one is Orthodox, to reach within oneself to find the truth - the Bishop gives it to you.

As well as discussing the political implications of the Gnostic movement, there is also in the book much discussion of the theological differences between Gnosticism and Orthodoxy, and these differences are fascinating.

Gnostics held - for the modern Christian - quite unorthodox views about the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ, and indeed the figure of God. Gnostics, with their spiritual view, actually denied that Christ physically died and came back - they explained it was all part of a spiritual manifestation. The Gnostics also dance dangerously close to ditching monotheism, with the idea that the creator (or demiurge) was beholden to another ultimate deity. This theory led to a school of thought where the physical world was to be ignored and deprecated, as it was only the world of the spirit which has validity. So while these Gnostic texts were suppressed early in the Churches history, these ideas continued, driving heresies such as Bogomilism, Catharism and other sects.

The great fighters against Gnosticism, Irenaeus and Tertullian are well represented in this book, with many of their most telling criticism still carrying weight today. They went hard particularly at the Gnostic idea of an individual searching for Christ by themselves. The Orthodox countered with questions such as how does a searcher know when they have found what they are looking for? On what basis or authority do they base their findings? Why would God keep the gift of salvation secret, only to be revealed to a few?

The other thing to keep in mind when reading this book is that the Bible as we know it was being compiled at the time of the creation of these texts, so potentially any of the Gnostic texts could have found their way into it. Pagels forwards the view that the Bible was collated by those that were Orthodox in part to 'win' the political and religious battle against the Gnostics. The books chosen for the New Testament certainly favour the Orthodox interpretation of the life and teachings of Christ, and Paul's Letters specifically re-affirm the kind of Church we know now, as well as putting women in their place (Pagel's chapter on the masculinity of God is fascinating and shows that the Gnostics were more enlightened on that front, not only being happy for women to be fully involved in worship, but also emphasising the role of Mary Magdalene in Jesus' story, as well as explicitly pointing out the feminine side to the Godhead).

Pagels has packed a lot into what is quite a short book, so while it's not long, it is dense. It's a great introduction to Gnostic thought and writing, and a good primer on the Orthodox reaction to what became a heresy. I'm going through my shelves of books on religion with a view to thin the herd - this one is a keeper.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Bible for Grown-ups by Simon Loveday

The Bible for Grown-ups : a new look at the good book by Simon Loveday

London: Icon Books, 2017              ISBN: 9781785782633


This book is an easy-to-read breakdown of the history of the creation of the Bible. It is not a theological work in any great way, nor is it a work that attempts to tear down faith. Simon Loveday has used a limited number of sources, and the King James version of the Bible, to show us how and why the good book was created, and how the politics and history of the Jews in Judea and Israel affected what was written, how it was written, and what was excluded from the book.

The beauty of this book is that Loveday has given the reader a relatively easy to digest version of current Bible scholarship and shows us when each book was written (sometimes who wrote it!), and how editors and "redactors" have changed what was originally written to suit their purposes. He also shows us occasions where a mis-translation has had a big effect on the course of belief.

In his discussion of the New Testament, Loveday explains how it was the letters of Paul that were the first part of that book to be written, with the Gospels coming afterwards when the developing Church needed something written down to guide them. In fact Loveday writes that it was Paul who created what we know as the Christian Church today, not Jesus. One thing that I think is important that Loveday mentions is that the New Testament as we know it today wasn't in existence before about 350AD, even though most of the writings it contains were written hundreds of years before. The Gospels were written, especially Matthew and Luke, to ensure that the life of Jesus fulfilled the prophetic predictions of the Old Testament. So, the Bible isn't history, but it is an attempt to uncover truth, and the way it was written and constructed should make the reader wary of taking it too literally, although the messages of the New Testament are clear.

In the final section of the work Loveday shows us the literary qualities of the Bible, something that was quite different to the other literature (Roman and Greek) of the time, and how the Bible introduced the idea of character development into writing, and so arguably set the course for the development of literature as we know it today.

Like the curate's egg, The Bible for Grown-ups is good in parts.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell