Out Of The Earth

Out Of The Earth by Professor EM Blaiklock MA Litt. D

CHAPTER TWO
ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE SAYINGS OF CHRIST
PART ONE
The Papyri and the Parables
Archaeology and the Gospels— The significance of the Dead Sea Scrolls-Pliny and the policy of persecution-the documents of recantation from Theadelphia-the Wheat and the Tares-the Bad Steward and the Tebtunis papyri-graft in ancient Egypt-the story of Menches-the Prodigal Son and the papyri-letter of Longus-Repudiation documents.
ON the life of Christ and the story of his trial and death, archaeology has little to offer. The towns of the Lord's ministry and habitation have themselves in many cases disappeared. The site of Capernaum itself is a matter of controversy, though it seems certain that Tell Hum is the successful claimant. The synagogue excavated by the Germans in 1905 is probably the meeting-place mentioned by Luke (7: 5). Jerusalem and Herod's temple disappeared in the savage destruction which followed the great rebellions of Vespasian's and Hadrian's day. All that remains to illustrate the Gospel story are scratchings on the stones of 'the Pavement' in Pilate's judgement hall.
They appear to be the relics of some soldiers' gambling game, and speak of those who diced for garments by a
cross.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are not without their relevance.
These famous documents were a library of texts, commentaries, and devotional works, hidden in remote caves, before the Romans destroyed their headquarters, by an ascetic sect. The site, at Qumran on the Dead Sea, has been excavated, and together with the scrolls provides evidence of a group whose life and testimony was a protest against the religious corruption of the Sadducees, and the arid formalism of the Pharisees.
In the Qumran Community we find again 'the Rem-nant', the faithful few, in whom Jewry's pure faith ever found preservation and expression. Their withdrawal to the traditional refuge of the wilderness, and their godly activities there, suggest something of the background
and inspiration of John the Baptist. They also reveal those pure springs from which were fed the souls of those who move in front of the Gospel story-the parents of John, Mary herself, and the good Joseph, Simon, Anna, the widow with her mite . ..
The sources generally for the life of Christ are, however, literary. They are ancient, abundant and reliable.
Archaeology can chiefly illustrate His words, and the world of His teaching, and this it does with astonishing vividness. To demonstrate, three Gospel parables are chosen-the Wheat and the Tares, the Bad Steward, and the Prodigal Son. Another chapter will speak of some non-biblical sayings of Christ.
It must have been somewhere in the vicinity of the year
A.D. 250 when a family group attended at the local town clerk's office in the little Egyptian town of Theadelphia.
The systematic persecution with which a dying paganism was afflicting the church was at its height, and the long arm of the Emperor Decius was seeking out the Christians by the Nile.
An accommodating Government had made it possible for those so disposed to avoid all penalty by renouncing Christ. Pliny, the governor of Bithynia, writing to the Emperor Trajan in A.D. 112 had first laid down the prac-tice. The letter survives, and the mode of procedure, in Pliny's words, was this:
In the meanwhile, the method I have observed towards those who have been denounced to me as Christians is this: I interrogated them whether they were Christians; if they confessed it I repeated the question twice again, adding the threat of capital punishment; if they still persevered, I ordered them to be exe-cuted. For whatever the nature of their creed might be, I could at least feel no doubt that contumacy and inflexible obstinacy deserved chastisement. There were others also possessed with the same infatuation, but being citizens of Rome, I directed them to be carried thither.
These accusations spread (as is usually the case) from the mere fact of the matter being investigated and several forms of the mischief came to light. A placard was put up, without any signature, accusing a large number of persons by name.
Those who denied they
were, or had ever been, Christians, who repeated after me an invocation to the gods, and offered adoration, with wine and frankincense, to your image, which I had ordered to be brought for that purpose, together with those of the gods, and who finally cursed Christ—none of which acts, it is said, those who are really Christians can be forced into performing-these I thought it proper to discharge. Others who were named by that informer at first confessed themselves Christians, and then denied it; true, they had been of that persuasion but they had quitted it, some three years, others many years, and a few as much as twenty-five years ago. They all worshipped your statue and the images of the gods, and cursed Christ.
As in Bithynia, so it was in Theadelphia. One of the more sombre parables of the Lord was finding illustration.
The wheat and the tares grow together, and it is only the Day of Judgment which separates the true from the false, and the genuine from its imitation. And the Day of Judgment is sometimes the coming of persecution, and the sword of authority outstretched against that which challenges its baseness, and recognizes, beyond all earthly might, the power of the living God. In such times the weak and unconvinced fall off, and they alone remain whose faith is true, and who count all things, even life itself, as loss for Christ.
Pliny in the letter already quoted, reports success for his policy of moderation, for so he imagined it. "The contagious superstitition" of which he disapproved, was clearly checked. He wrote:
It is certain at least that the temples, which had been almost deserted, begin now to be frequented; and the sacred festivals, after a long intermission, are again revived; while there is a general demand for sacrificial meat, which for some time past had met with but few purchasers. From hence it is easy to imagine what multitudes may be reclaimed from this error, if a door be left open to repentance.
•
We have left meanwhile a little group from the Theadelphian church waiting the petty magistrate's pleasure outside the governmental office in the Egyptian town.
Several of them were members of one family, who had in some past year adopted the Emperor's name. They were there to sign documents which repudiated their Christian faith, they and others to the number of at least nineteen, whose writings of recantation were discovered in 1904 and 1907 among the papyri. This is what the Aurelian family read and signed with appropriate witnesses:
To the superintendents of offerings and sacrifices at the city. From Aurelius... son of Theodorius and Pantonymis of the said city. It has ever been my custom to make sacrifices and pour libations to the gods and now also I have in your presence in accordance with the commandment poured libations and sacrifice and tasted the offerings, together with my son Aurelius Dioscuros and my daughter Aurelia Lais. I therefore request you to certify my statement.
A second document runs:
To those chosen to have charge of the sacrifices, from Aurelia, wife of Ammonarios, from the village Theadelphia, and who always sacrifices and reverences the gods, together with the children of the Aurelian family, Didymos and Nouphios and Taat.
We have ever continued to sacrifice and to reverence the gods with the children of the Aurelians Didymos and Nouphios, and now in your presence according to the orders we have poured libations and have sacrificed and have tasted of the sacrifices, and I demand of you that you witness this with your signature for me. Farewell.
Another of these strange documents, published in 1907, was held by a pagan priestess. "Aurelia Ammonous Mystos priestess of Petesouchos the great god" was her description. Since it is very unlikely that a priestess would be wrongly accused of Christianity, it is a fair guess that Aurelia had become a Christian, and then recanted under threat of punishment.
Such is the illustration of the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares which archaeology has been able to supply.
A second parable, which finds similar illustration, is that of the steward who lost his post. The story is told in Luke 16, and ends with words some have misunderstood.
"And the lord commended the unjust steward because he had done wisely." The lord who thus praised the dishonest fellow is not the Lord Jesus. He has no capital L.
He was the steward's own lord, his master, his employer.
Rich enough to laugh at the loss of a few barrels of oil and wine, the owner dropped some words of rueful praise for the smart dealing of which he was the victim. And this is the parable's point: the rogue of the world will leave no stone unturned to gain his end. The world will watch and grimly praise him, as he turns the world's resources to his purpose. What of this enterprise in a nobler sphere? Cannot Christians scheme as indefatigably for the Kingdom's sake? "Make friends," the Lord concluded, "by means of the Mammon of Unrighteousness." If scamps can use money to build themselves comfort, cannot others use it for God?
From the Egyptian papyri emerge, in fact, a large group of scamps in office. It was a highly regimented age, and in Egypt especially, where an ancient fiscal system had been taken over by the Greeks first, and then the Romans, the ramifications of taxation and governmental controls were astonishing in their complexity. Human nature being what it is, where law runs to seed, there, too, graft flourishes. In illustration let us meet one Menches, and certain of his ilk.
It was nomination day in the local town board of Oxyrhynchus, seventeen hundred years ago.
"We nominate Nilus," said the members of the third ward.
The chairman said, "Nilus shall be overseer." "Upright Nilus," said the members, "success to him." So runs the text of the minutes on a tattered papyrus.
When Menches with like formality was appointed town clerk of Kerkeosiris in 119 B.C., the council minutes had probably just as respectable a tale to tell. But Menches had written a letter the week before. How many of the senators knew about it? Menches himself seems to have hoarded copies of his private correspondence, for early in our twenty first century Grenfell and Hunt found a crocodile cemetery at Tebtunis. The crocodile was as sacred as the cat in Egypt, and received honourable burial. Sick of finding the dry carcasses where he had hoped for sarcophagi and baksheesh, a workman smashed one open with his pick, and revealed that it was stuffed with waste papyri. Most of the documents were official records, and Menches' note was among them. This is what Menches wrote:
On being appointed to the post of town clerk, I will pay at the village 50 artabae of wheat, and 50 artabae of pulse, namely, 20 of lentils and 10 of bruised beans, 6 of mixed seed, 10 of peas, 3 of mustard and 1 of parched pulse: total 100 artabae.
Now the office he sought was honorary. Here he offers payment, and his letter mentions no recipient and bears no date.
What perfidy lies hidden with Menches' dust!
Simpler men were eager to escape the honorary burden.
We may read, for example, the pathetic appeal of a doctor who found himself saddled with a local magistracy:
After toiling for four years at my post, he wrote, I am become very run down, my lord. I entreat you, my preserver, have pity, and order me to be released from my duties. Add instructions, please, that those practising medicine be granted exemption, especially those who, like myself, have passed the examination.
Why then did Menches want the post? Reading between the faded lines in the private letters of the age we gather that an official could often turn a shady drachma.
Consider, for example, this letter of A.D. 200:
Ammonius to Apion, greetings. If you can, buy up the peaches on the market. Don't neglect it, for if the gods will, the Government is about to market them.
Don't be fainthearted. Manage this so that peaches can be bought through you alone, and know that you will not suffer as far as I am concerned.
It is curious that what is probably the first mention of peaches in all literature, should also introduce us to a bureaucratic marketing scheme, and to a shady plot to corner the crop. It was an advantage to Apion to have a friend like Ammonius in an official position!
Bad man Menches may have looked for more than inside information on marketing legislation. All the village taxes would pass through his hands. He would be registrar, too, of all trades and properties. "A certain Artemidorus, scribe of Ciris,'
" complains a lady named
Seniphibis,
"has registered me as having more land than
I possess, and in consequence inflicts much loss on me."
"The collection of corn dues," complains ahother in
A.D. 215,
"is based on obsolete lists of names, and the collections are involving injustice to many." Both documents give us a glimpse of a thoroughly corrupt bureaucracy. Menches, too, would deal with all applications for rent rebates. A burning question, as early as the first century, was the just rate of rebate for Government tenants in years when the flooding of the Nile proved disappointing. The bureaucrats seem never to have succeeded in establishing a workable sliding scale. Tiberius Julius Alexander, in the late first century, condemned the practice of basing rents on a past average, but as late as Hadrian we find the problem still worrying officialdom.
In both Greek and Roman times everything one did or ate in Egypt was taxed. Hermaiscus opened a vegetable shop in Broad Street at Pson in A.D. 222, and we have the receipt for his registration fee. All the other shops in Broad Street, and every trade, suffered like infliction. It even cost a handful of good drachmae to die, for there was a tax on grave-digging. There must have been pickings for men like Menches, if they "walked on their feet in the market place," to use the quaint term which appears in declarations of testamentary capacity.
It must have been annoying for a temperamental painter seeking to catch the glow of sunset, to have Menches assess his canvas, but, oddly enough, there was a tax on paintings. What an opportunity when a grandee passed through on the way to the Pyramids, and food and transport had to be requisitioned! It was well for the farmer next door to be the town clerk's friend, even at the expense of "31 dishes and one meal bowl," which Pachon took to the pawnshop on "the 10th" of an undecipherable month and year.
The accounts, of course, were audited. But what then?
A letter from Menches' hoard reads: "Polemon to Menches, greeting. The inspector from the Treasury will pass your village on the 10th, so try to have all arrears in order." Another official writes: "The inspector of temple finance is here. Write up your books and come to me, for he is a very stern fellow. If anything detains you, send them on and I will see you through, for he has become my friend."
It is obvious that the trickster and grafter of the Lord's pungent little parable was no isolated type. The crumbling documents from the Tebtunis crocodile provide realistic illustration both of the racy story, and the teller's didactic method. The parables were contemporary, relevant, and intimate.
For a final and briefer illustration let us turn to Luke 15 and the best known of all the parables the story of the prodigal son, or, as some have insisted, of the wonderful father. Among the papyri is a pathetic document of A.D. 100. It is from a delinquent boy to his mother, and reads:
Antonius Longus to Nilous, his mother, greeting.
Continually I pray for your health. I had no hope that you would come up to town. On this account I did not enter the city either. I was ashamed to come for I am going about in rags.
I beseech you, mother, forgive me.
I know what I have brought upon myself.
I have been punished, in any case. I know that I have sinned.・・・
... "I will arise and go to my father and say unto him,
'Father, I have sinned and am no more worthy to be called your son. •
All prodigals did not come home, nor, if they ventured back, found such a father as the one chosen by the Lord to show forth the love of God. Here, for example, is a public notice from the first or second century:
To Heracleides, strategos of the Hermapolite name, from Ammonius the elder, the son of Ermaeus, and his former wife A . . . along with her present husband Callistratus. . . .
Since our son Castor, along with others; by riotous living has squandered all his own property, and now has laid hands on ours and desires to scatter it, on that account we are taking precautions lest he should deal despitefully with us or do anything else amiss . ..
We beg therefore that a
proclamation be set up (that no one should lend him money).
There are many such documents among the papyri, some of them almost savage in their expression of deep resentment against wayward children. The following, for example, is part of a deed of disownment in which a father casts off two sons and two daughters:
Thinking to find you a comfort to my age, submissive and obedient, you in your prime have set yourselves against me like rancorous beings. Wherefore I reject and abhor you.
The document runs on with legal abuse for some five hundred words.
If the papyri are any indication, the father who killed the fatted calf for his lost boy's returning was gracious beyond the custom of that ancient world.