JESUS in ALEXANDRIA

JESUS in ALEXANDRIA The premise of this paper pertains to several nested narrative arcs of history that contain nearly half a millennium of Judeo-Christian history on either side of the birth of Jesus. It is about an understanding of the term ‘Messiah,’ and what this meant to Jews of the period immediately before the birth of Jesus and afterwards, into the days of Paul and Peter and even Augustine, who represents the beginning of a long line of Judeo-Christian philosophers in the millennium to follow. I cannot expound beyond what can be found on WIkipedia regarding contemporary thoughts on the ‘Messianic Age.’ The Talmudic literature both before and after1 was essentially a generalization of the story of creation – corresponding to the seven days of creation would be seven eons of humanity, and the seventh would be the Sabbath, the day of rest and peace. It is hardly extravagant to suggest that Jesus’ ministry can be characterized as pertaining to the Messianic Age. That is, in the days of peace there would be no evil and everyone lived through the spirit of God; yet this does not deny the fact that one can attempt to live that way now, and whenever that ‘now’ occurs. So one might consider his ministry as demonstrating what life shall be like in the ‘Days of the Messiah,’ which, to take this poetically or literally, allowed him to say he was the Messiah. I shall not question the claim one way or another, however, for I am quite willing to accept all the miracle stories that are extant in the literature; because given this reading, there is no reason that the traditional Hebraic understanding cannot also hold sway,2 and that a “New Testament” or “New Covenant” is only a parallel draft of the laws that shall be extant in a time when all people are about as good as people can get. So it hardly matters whether that era is so far in the future it is irrelevant to ask “how soon?”3 If Jesus’ interpretation of the Age of the Messiah is revisionist, it holds to any eschatological interpretation extant among Jewish sages of the time. This is to say it might have been argued through Talmud, but probably wouldn’t have been arrived at solely through Talmudic study. My premise is that, given a little outside fermentation, it was arrived at Maimonides, for example comes well after–but he is expounding on an interpretation of the words of various sages that came long before Jesus. 2 ..as explained in a companion essay “Speaking of Ben Zoma” 3 My reference is to a manuscript that has been verified as being written around AD 125 CE (National Geographic Society, The Gospel of Judas) where Jesus laughs at his interlocutor when he asks if anyone alive now will witness the ‘days to come,’ and the Jesus in this old manuscript says it is so many aeons in the future that is is senseless asking when all will be ready to know the House of God. 1 1 quite logically within a Jewish framework by someone who had reasons to believe, or at least worried that, he might be the Messiah. The premise of the title is that before Jesus comes to meet John the Baptist, he had already studied at, and absorbed the works of the greatest library in the world. He studied there, perhaps even in the circle of Philo, who was himself soon to become a renowned Hellenic Jewish scholar among the Romans. It is even possible that, during the reign of Tiberius, he met a young scholar named Claudius there–the son of Drusus and brother to the general Germanicus, father of the ill-famed Caligula governing Rome at the time of the Crucifixion. My postulate is that, according to Jewish lore, if the boy Jesus heard any of the tales surrounding his birth, the shepherds, the coming of the wise men, or the spontaneous veneration given the infant when he was brought to the Temple for his circumcision4 (assuming all these tales were extant at the time and not created after he returns as a miracle-worker), the young man might have wondered if, indeed he was to be the Messiah. And so he grew up and absorbed all there was to learn about the Law of Israel–for such a one who is to be a Messiah must know the laws inside-out, for it’s not to be expected they’d all come to him entirely naturally. But let us also assume that at that time the Hebrew literature concerning the Messiah was not extremely helpful, and that in the oral tradition was often conflicting. It would only make sense that after exhausting all the Jewish sources concerning his given role in life, and after much prayer seeking God’s deeper sourcebook, he should consider some extra-curricular reading. This was not necessarily for guidance, but rather to confirm the many hunches he had about the role of his people in this world, and indeed, of the meaning of the world at large. Having framed the picture of this young man, the question of his intellectual development before we meet him in his thirties becomes obvious. As a child we see him last when his parents accidentally leave him behind at the Temple, and we have the story of a twelve-year-old spending three days interrogating the rabbis, and being interrogated in turn. Who is this child asking such Talmudic questions? It is perhaps apocryphal, a story made up after the fact about a genius scholar. But at some point, we know he does become a This might well have been the alternate Temple in Alexandria, if, as the stories tell, the family migrated to Egypt to escape the slaughter of the newborn in Galilee. 4 2 genius scholar, not just in the Christian texts, but according to Josephus who lived through the destruction of the Temple some forty years later. I am postulating that after he is accepted into the adult Jewish community through his Bar Mitzvah, that he returns to the country of his infancy–where Joseph and Mary had fled to escape the massacre of the infants which Herod supposedly ordered in the township of his birth. So my hypothesis is that he spent his college years at the Great Library, that he went out into the desert to do his post-graduate studies with the Essenes…or other such specialists in the mystic lore of the Kabbalah. This lore was a recognized part of Jewish learning, but would have been unavailable to the twelve-year-old interrogating the rabbis about the Days of the Messiah and the so-called Kingdom of God. Again, we must attempt to reconstruct the Judaism or the time, when the priesthood of the Temple hierarchy was under the Sadducees. Herod, in asserting his role as a Jewish leader, has brought in high priests from the Diaspora in Babylon and Alexandria. It is a time in which the priest class, who represent an aristocracy, has just been employed by Herod the Great to greatly enlarge the Temple, expanding the Temple mount with a footprint twice its original size, and building a temple edifice worthy of the Graeco-Roman world. In parallel, it is a period which for later Jewry represents a flowering of new theological growth. These are the days of Hillel and Shamai, and soon the great Rabbi Akiva. These are the centuries known for promulgating the “Wisdom of the Fathers” (Pirkey Avot) relating to the prophets of the Babylonian Exile and the Great Assembly or Convention under Rabbi Ezra including wisdom of sages up to that time. This is the century also known for the birth of a literature of mystic knowledge, later known as the Kabbalah. In Jesus’ day, the mystic tradition included two wise men, or “ziggut,” rabbis who were allowed to use two versions of the ancient methods of communion with God.5 At some point in the story of Christ, Hillel and Shammai were the opposing ‘ziggutim,’ whose direct access to God left them to preside over the Sanhedrin in difficult cases.6 The point I am making here, however, is that the young Jesus, if we are to suggest that he consciously laid out a program The Biblical narrative of the early military exploits of the tribes, described in Judges, frequently notes the use of the Urim and Thummim, dice or bones for casting of lots. The ziggutim, however, apparently had gone beyond throwing bones (probably having given it up much the same time as the Greeks, where the practice still remained into the Age of Pericles), but used two opposing meditation practices to access God’s throne and weigh difficult questions. 6 We should note here, that in the haste of Jesus’ trial during Passover, there was no time to call on them for a deciding vote. 5 3 of studies, would have included the mystic knowledge last in the syllabus before returning to carry out his mission. That Jesus spent many years of study, prayer, and meditation in the desert prior to his last years of wandering and preaching has long been suggested, but it’s not generally thought that he had all the worldly scientific and rational knowledge of his day under his belt when he did so. Yet it only makes sense that before he steps out to die for the sins of the world, he was “worldly wise.” He had read all there had ever been written about suffering and justice outside of the Biblical narrative, and that he had come to know all that humanity knew of itself at that time. In effect, he was able to judge for himself what the role if the Messiah was to be for his people, and what he should think of God’s promises to his ancestors in light of a cacophony of sins of the world around him. Know thyself. For those who are devout enough to believe that Jesus was God on earth, they should consider that he would want to know all that people thought of themselves, and be able to speak intimately and powerfully to any and all of the wisest men on their own terms. And why wouldn’t he, even as a child, try to excel in all the narrative and associated laws of God and his people? In Luke, Chapter 2 it’s told how Joseph and Mary, when traveling to the Temple for the Passover, accidentally left him behind for three days. Then it is said that the rabbis in the Temple were astonished at his learning. But simply knowing the laws as recorded in Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus and Deuteronomy is not a criterion of a learned Jew…one would not be astonished at this. To be learned is reserved for someone who, at the very minimum, can compare examples of the law, as shown in the scripture according to Rabbi Yishmael’s Thirteen Rules.7 The rules for interpreting law occur in the siddur, or the Jewish prayer book, during the opening section of the morning prayers, immediately after concluding the reading of the order of the Temple sacrifices. This is extremely symbolic, for every observant Jew is given the protocol for interpreting law, which is, as we understand it in Western culture, a notion of citizenship. Thus, its place immediately after the description of sacrifices is in contradistinction to the aristocratic rule of the priesthood. Even beyond the ‘aristocracy’ of lawmaking, the meaning of this section describing the ritual for each of the daily sacrifices, including the protocol for mixing the various incenses, is a reminder to anyone using the prayerbook that one’s prayers are essentially a ‘poor substitute’ for what was, in the days of the ancestors, the preferable and very holy method of communication with God, and that it was the duty of the priests to give sacrifices for the people. The priest class descended from Moses’ parental lineage–that of his brother Aaron–and was entirely supported by taxation, which is the origin of tithing. One reads quite clearly, on a daily basis, that to mix the incense improperly was a sacrilege whose penalty was death. In this we must recognize that the Holy of Holies and communicating with God was extremely critical to life. Yet the double meaning here is that the very concept of prayer is in question given the great ritual meaning of sacrifice. My own interpretation has probably been shared by many thousands reciting these sections before me, that when the siddur was originally instituted, the ‘Akidah’ section relating to the institution of sacrifice was carefully included to pacify the priest class. The Akidah opens with the story of Jacob, Isaac and the ram caught in the bushes. It ends, most appropriately, with Rabbi Yishmael’s thirteen rules for interpreting the Bible. 7 4 These are the rules for interpreting the law, and they entail knowing not only every story of any transaction or outcome of an action in the Bible, but all the precedents of interpretation of these transactions as given by great rabbis since the prophets. By the time of Jesus, nearly five hundred years since the Babylonian Exile (including several prophets prior to the exile), the precedents recorded in books and in the oral tradition is the Talmud. So for the rabbis to be astounded at the boy Jesus’ learning, we can guess that he was familiar at least, with the rudiments of this level of knowledge and the uses to which Rabbi Yishmael’s rules were put. Disputing Talmud at twelve is not at all beyond possibility–for today I’m sure you could find at least one twelve-year-old genius in Hassidic Lakewood, NJ who might do the same. So the New Testament stories suggest that we consider what Jesus could do at twelve to understand what was behind the quick and easy retorts to be found in Gospels when he was thirty. Why should we think he may have read Plato, Xenophon, Euclid, Archimedes, Aristotle, and Epicurus as well? This is the postulate I’m proposing here. To press that argument I shall propose the cultural boundaries of the Jewish world in his day were nearly as blurred and continuous with the non-Jewish world as they are today; which is to say, there was already an extensive centuries’ old “westernized” Jewry in existence all around him. This is hard to believe after nearly two thousand years of European experience made it almost impossible to believe such a well-established Jewish cultural presence could ever have existed in the ancient world. The Graeco-Jewish philosopher Aristobulus had declared, a generation before Jesus’ time, that the great works of Greece– even Hesiod and Homer–owed a debt to the Jewish learning.8 And Josephus, in his book Anti-Apeiron, quotes from now-lost sources of Aristotle’s students,that their teacher referred them to Jewish texts. This effectually means that there was little that modern scholars discuss about ancient Greece that scholars of those times mightn’t have discussed as well. In reading the story of Herod the Great one realizes the influence that Judea seems to have played in the political game of the Mediterranean, where, in the post-Alexandrian period Persia and Egypt could be likened to the king and queen of the opposing team, Herod made the Jewish bloc into a free-rook or knight available to either side after Julius Caesar’s death, a place it was to retain There is a strong argument, for example, that the arguments of Theophrastus and Glaucon in The Republic are a direct response to the Book of Job, which Socrates attempts to circumnavigate.. 8 5 through the reign of the line of Caesar Augustus, through that of Nero and Marcus Aurelius, when the influential rise of Judeo-Christianity was undermining Graeco-Roman culture. The great library contained translations of every book available to the Greek trade routes of Alexander’s old empire; this included trade with India and Khwarezm, Tibet and China. Alexander the Great’s missions would have brought great books of the Mauryan Empire of India –the Arthashastra, Dharmashastra, and Vedas that to the library. For some reason, modern scholars don’t dare think of the cross-fertilizations that were taking place continually in those days. But Josephus tells us in his Antiquities that the founders of the library were so intent on obtaining copies, in translation, of all the known books in the world that they’d convinced the Jewish priesthood to have the Hebrew translated to Greek for an immense sum. What, indeed, would have convinced the Sanhedrin to contravene a traditional prohibition against profaning the sacred books of Jewish learning? The Ptolomies, that is the rulers of Greek Egypt, offered to buy thousands of Jewish slaves out of their bondage to present owners, all those captured during recent military victories over Seleucid-run satrapies or the Maccabees of Israel! They redeemed thousands of slaves as the price to translate all the books of the Bible into Greek! Now if word of this got spread around that such was the value placed on books of learning, there can be no doubt that any foreign merchants to Tibet and Xinqiang (where to this day the priests wear imitations of Greek helmets) obtained scrolls and brought translators with them to Ptolemaic Egypt to sell at a good price to the Library’s royal keepers. And what this also means is that by Jesus’ time, several generations after the founding of the great library, there were scholars in Alexandria who had read many of these works, and would hire themselves out as teachers to anyone seeking wisdom. All of this is to help us form another picture of the Jesus we already know–a possible, or hypothetical picture, but also a somewhat deeper picture of what he might have meant and why, occasionally, his sayings or responses to questions or rebukes seem cryptic. He was, indeed, thinking and acting on a very different plane from anyone then, or even anyone now. But it is the furthest from my wish to suggest, as many would, that Jesus of the Gospels is simply passing on wisdom gleaned from Socrates or Kautila, Epicurus, or even Siddartha. Far from it. What he might have learned from any of the previous ‘wise men of history’ we shall be happy to presume he knew 6 already –for what is important is not at all a matter of knowing or learning anything. What is most important is what he meant by what he said. And this, he knew quite well could never be attributed to an outside source in the political climate of the Jews of those times. For the time of the Herods was no more than four generations since the last of Mattathias’ sons governed Judea, and to read any of the three Books of the Maccabees, it is clear that their policy was ruthless against any Hellenistic or Greek-educated Jews. The Maccabees might be compared to modern-day ISIS in their religious fanaticism, and it is to the Maccabean line of Priests and kings that Herod, his sons and grandsons belong. Thomas A Kempis says we must ‘imitate Christ.’ So put yourself in his place. Given all of the data Joseph and Mary could give him about the stories of his birth, his infant ceremony at the Temple (which may well have been the second Temple outside Alexandria), a very young Jesus had reason to believe he might be the Messiah. We also know that he had human sensibilities –which includes defects that allowed him to question and suffer– he was meant to be one of us and as is told about Gethsemene, he too, had to struggle with his faith in that belief. He had to discover what the Messiah was to be, with all that it would entail. We must not think that, as God incarnate, he had the answers written on a look-up tablet in his head. He had to search for answers and learn from God’s manifesting himself in his life, just as any of us seeking the truth. Yet what was the Messiah for the Jews at that time? Most of what we hear of this is from the Christian testimony and reconstruction of events. For the Jews, he was primarily conceived as a great leader, rather like another Moses, who would–with the help of God’s mighty outstretched arm, perform miracles to overthrow oppressive rulers and give the Jews independence. In the retelling of the Gospels, this is always the answer the Pharisees kept expecting. If indeed he was the Messiah as so many suggested, why wouldn’t he declare himself openly and call down the wrath of God on the Romans? Forty years after Jesus died, Simon Bar Kochba did just that. He declared himself Messiah, while the aged Pharisee, Rabbi Akiva backed his claim and the Jews were freed of Roman rule for three years, until Titus destroyed the Temple, Bar Kochba was beheaded and Akiva flayed to death. But even before this event, any smart Jewish boy growing up would have had the example of another Jewish Messiah who had established an independent Jewish nation. This was, of course, Judas Maccabee and his younger brother Jonothan, who successfully freed the Jews of the Seleucid 7 Greek Empire and set up an independent and autonomous state of Judea until it was conquered by Pompey in 63BC and made a roman vassal state. Herod the Great (that is, the first of a close to hundred year dynasty) sided with Marc Antony during his battle with Caesar Augustus, and overthrew the Maccabean kingdom, and later ingratiated himself with Augustus in Rome and was named King of the vassal state of Judea by the Senate. He went on for the next 37 years to make it a centerpiece of Roman dominions and economy–investing in the expansion of the Temple, the building of ports and fortresses (such as Masada), at the same time turning around abusive taxes to large public works that employed the masses and made him a great benefactor. So why should a smart young boy, tasked with figuring out what his role as the Messiah would be, think that simply freeing the land from the Romans and its Herodean (though Jewish) governors would end up any different than the corrupt Hasmonean state of the Maccabees had become when they threw out the Greeks? What ELSE we forget is that the Pharisees were the dissenters, the outsiders, the free-thinkers who controlled the essentially democratic synagogue culture of the towns. Both Pharisees and Sadducees would have been concerned that since the Maccabees, the kingship no longer descended from the line of David. The Sadducees who controlled the Temple, were upset with Herod (the first) for bringing in priesthood from Babylonian and Egyptian Diaspora! To try to picture ourselves in Jesus’ time, which we must do if we are to understand the Gospels, we must take a step back then, to the origin of the Maccabean line. And this story leads us directly to the overwhelming magnet which Alexandria played as both inspiration and a devilish obsession for Jewish life at the time. We think of that political environment in terms of Rome, and then of the Pharisees, who in the Gospels would seem to be the major players. But it is far more complicated. What would we think of some historian in the far-flung future describing a Supreme Court decision as being the outcome of a fight between Democrats and Republicans without the stories of those parties’ evolution over the previous hundred years? Better that they should describe it through whatever Hollywood and the media were saying. And in fact, throughout Jesus’ entire lifetime, it was Alexandria that was the center of all cultural life in the Roman Empire at that time–just like Hollywood and its minor satellite Las Vegas serve us today. Not only that, but it was the home of the Great Library, a Hollywood filled with Harvard and MIT graduates. 8 Roman history is quite complicated and fascinating,9 yet we must consider it as essentially taking over and reunifying what had been the Mediterranean branch of the Greek empire established by Alexander the Great about three hundred years prior. And If you think of this three hundred year period as roughly the same as the present age of the United States, you can get a feeling of the sense of what this might have felt like for a people who’d had two independent states (Judah and Israel) for well over a thousand years–plus or minus several years in Exile under Nebuchadnezzar in Babylonia– but reestablished by Darius the Persian a short generation later. This is the same Darius and his son Xerxes who figure so greatly in the stories of Greece, of Athens and Sparta–of the Peloponnesian War and the subsequent rise of Macedonia, and Alexander the Great, who studied under Aristotle. And what we also overlook is that when Alexander expanded his empire across Persia and up to the gates of India, he had Jewish guides and eventually generals, and he put many Jews in charge of ministries because they were a lettered people who had relatives across the Asian diaspora since the days of King Solomon, of Homer, and Hesiod, of the Amoritic and Phoenician trade-routes that took over from the cultures of Crete and Egyptian Pharaohs during the days of Moses and the Judges lived. Jews spoke local languages all the way to what is present-day Samarkand and were a key information resource to the young Alexander, who had learned the role of information and supply lines and advanced planning from Aristotle’s school assignments–for all this was contained in Xenophon’s military manual for princes –The Education of Cyrus the King. What this has to do with Jesus’ time is that Alexander, in his respect for academics, gave the Jews Macedonian status and passports, and put them in charge of his colonies–the most important of which was Alexandria, in charge of the key port to world maritime culture, with the Nile Delta controlling all Red Sea trade leading to Jedda, Persian delta, and India. So by Jesus’ time–after the Romans had extended the Greek privileges to Jews outside of Israel, the Herod the Great was the Jewish procurator. He shared some Samaritan lineage, so he was a good Roman representative of the two ‘Peoples of the Book’ in the Holy Land. There were several Herods who ruled over the Holy Land during Jesus’ lifetime: Herod the Great, Herod Archelaeus, Herod Antipas, and Herod Agrippa. Herod the Great met the wise men and in the stories of the Gospels ordered the infants killed; Archeleus was one of his sons, the next two, now the third generation, were cousins. Herod Antipas was married to his cousin, Herodias, whose daughter was Salome. Herodius’ brother was Agrippa who had been Caligula’s tutor. Archelaeus was banished to Gaul by Caesar Augustus, and Antipas was banished to Gaul by Caligula. 9 9 Alexandrian Jews were extremely rich and powerful. Jews were also part of the Greek military system, having supplied generals to Cleopatra’s army, and with Graeco-Jewish military camps founded in the upper Nile. For Jewish history this was extremely important, because after Alexander’s death, when the empire was split into the Syrian Seleucid branch, the Egyptian Ptolemaic branch and the soon-to-emerge Roman branch. Only Carthage –the surviving Phoenician colony–laid outside the empire. All this is key to understanding the Holy Land as it had assumed a Roman administration, essentially a taxing system to maintain peace, trade, and economic growth, by Jesus’ time. Now, what do we find? Antiochus the Syrian, head of the Seleucid branch decided to rescind Jewish privileges. One might suppose they were too close to the Syrians in semitic descent. Antiochus, we know of from the Hanukkah story….from the Book of the Maccabees. If your Bible includes the Apocrypha, there are three different stories of Antiochus’ desecration of the Temple, and the Jewish uprising against him led by Mattathias and his sons, the eldest Judas Maccabee. Jews, by the way, don’t have these three books, which don’t have anything about the miracle of the Menorah in them. It is from Josephus that we learn of the “Festival of Lights.” Apparently there was a Hanukkah in Jesus’ time, but the story isn’t the same. And the modern story leaves off where the consecrated oil came from. The reason, or at least my hypothesis about the reason, is this. By Jesus’ day there was another Temple… a mini-Temple that was administered by priests in the line of the priest Onias, who fled Jerusalem in the days of Antiochus to find refuge with his cousins who had ‘Macedonian’ passports under Ptolemy. The entire story of the flowering of Jewish life under the Egyptian Ptolomies, who were Macedonian Greeks intermarried with Egyptian Cleopatras (and there were several of them, too) to establish an Egyptian line is never told. That these same Jews were ministers and generals under those Cleopatras and their Ptolemies is also a story that later Jews seemed not to be proud of. Their days in Egypt are decidedly NOT like the days of Moses, but more like when Joseph was the Chief Minister of the Pharaoh, and to be a Jew was to have a claim on high status with important connections. Why Jews refrained from telling this story throughout the Middle Ages is understandable, for the Roman Empire became Christian under Constantine, and the Gospels remembered the Jews as being the Pharisees who condemned Jesus to the cross under Pontius Pilote. To 10 corroborate the story of how enmeshed the Jews of that time were in the politics of Greece and the rise of Rome is not something a disenfranchised people needed to know. Alexandria was one of the richest cities in the world, controlling the taxes of the Nile and the Red Sea Indian-African-Far Eastern trade. And who ran the bureaucracy and supplied much of the elite corps of the army? A good part of them were Jews, quite like the Jews of today, or even the Jews in Benjamin Disraeli’s time who helped run Queen Victoria’s colonies. The Jews keep falling into this role of “outsider-overseer” because of this culture of literacy; for the prayers of the common people made them all farmers of books. And so we have Esther and Mordecai’s, back to the Exodus and all of the narrative given by Moses before entering into the Promised Land. There is enough in five books rolled into a scroll to till for years. Yet even before books, as in Joseph’s time, the Jews apparently worshiped the Word, and the Logos of the Name; and this is the interpretation that Philo of Alexandria was arriving at contemporary with the days in which we know Jesus grew to manhood. So we are NOT drifting as far from the story of Jesus as you might think. In the story of Herod’s decree to kill the newborns, Joseph and Mary make the journey to the “Land of Onias,” which is what the Hellenic/Egyption Jewish quarter was called. The Hellenic Jews observed Jewish laws and probably most of their customs, but spoke Greek and no longer spoke Hebrew at home. It was as much against these ‘modern’ Jews that the Maccabees had revolted as the troops of Antiochus, for they mercilessly slaughtered anyone caught in a gymnasium or attending Greek theater. But the Hellenic Jews outside of Israel still gave their tithes to the Temple in Jerusalem. Naturally, one could seek refuge and find ready work with the Jews of Egypt. So why shouldn’t a young boy seeking wisdom, after attaining manhood in Galilee at his Bar Mitzva, decide to find work in Alexandria. He might find a room or bed with friends his parents, for certainly there would be someone who still knew them when he was there as an infant. A second or third cousin, perhaps? Room and board, and a chance to study with a scholar at night. He might even find a job copying manuscripts in the neighborhood of the Library itself!? I believe there is ample reason to suggest this hypothesis-that Jesus of Nazareth spent many years studying the great works of the ancient world before returning to his land to save his people. The big question is, not what was he studying and what did he read–but what would he be looking for? What 11 knowledge of this world was relevant beyond what he could get from prayer, meditation, and presumably, inner or even oral converse with God? I am asking this entirely within the framework of a believer, for it makes less sense to ask it from any other perspective. Let us accept, as that Carthaginian (e.g. Canaanite) monk St. Augustine accepts it, that he was God’s only son. If so, he must still learn how to express himself to people. This was, if you remember, the first concern of Moses…to which God gave a rather odd response–that Aaron could do much of the speaking for him. In this young man’s case –even as God’s only son— the wisdom he would have sought in Alexandria was corroboration of his gut instincts on a host of issues that circled around a central one–what was the era or the reign of the Messiah to be and what, if anything was to come after? Let us also provide that he already knew very well what it was, yet how was he to describe it to humans in any terms they might grasp? Then there is the question of how to compress such wisdom into stories, passing the word of the Lord through students, and students of students, without committing anything to writing. These are questions that a young man with a mission would know had to be answered. And even Augustine would ask–as he wonders about how Moses might have written many things down he didn’t fully comprehend–Jesus could not act upon his instincts and inspiration alone. He would pray for guidance, just as we hear of any saints or prophets asking for guidance. Yet even with complete faith in God to provide the right words when the time came, a responsible youth does not leave the job for someone else to do. And a responsible student will attempt to find answers in the accumulated wisdom of the world, which was just a few week’s journey away in the Library of Alexandria. These are questions that any theologian would ask and still asks. Reading the disputed Gospel of Judas, for example, we find hints of these questions being asked, and indeed being answered by a laughing Jesus. One would assumedly find some clues in the large corpus of disputed gospels, those discovered in the Nag Hammadi trove for example. What the hypothesis actually suggests is that, if we allow that Jesus did study in Alexandria, and use his formidable intellectual talents to absorb and process much of what was known to humanity at the time–that he was there to learn something that Jewish teaching had not fully provided. He would have been there with a definite purpose in mind. One might suggest, along the lines of this premise, that he needed to prepare for another study he knew would absorb him the most…to prepare for 12 the esoteric knowledge of the Kaballah, where mystics rose to enter the realms of heaven, and to risk the thrills of Paradise and yet return to this mundane world– he was asking what we ourselves must ask: Either he was, or he wasn’t the Messiah. And if he was, what did it actually mean to be the Messiah? What now should he have to do? Jesus, in preparing for his mission as a fallible human, would have to keep asking himself these questions–and in asking them he knew he had no choice but to carry out that mission to discover the answer. There is no issue with the devout Christian who would say he obviously knew what was beholden of him–for his thoughts were God’s thoughts. But even the devout Christian knows he proves his ultimate humanity in the Garden of Gethsemane, the night before his crucifixion. It is then that all the apostles fall asleep and leave him alone to face a tormented fear about what the future really meant, and what he was doing. Perhaps, the devout would claim, Gethsemane is the only time in his life that his humanity was betrayed to him10. I would simply ask that if the story of Jesus is to represent ‘God made Man’ then let God understand humankind by being as close to humankind as possible, and not simply garbed in flesh and blood. He must be intellectually human as well, which includes skeptical queries and research. If Jesus is not intellectually human, which is to say ‘flawed,’ then he is not God-made-man to show us what a human might otherwise become in the Messianic era, it is only God-as-perfection posturing among us. This is not the place to resolve a discourse that has undoubtedly been addressed by theologians and their students for two millenia. All I wish to suggest is the hypothesis that on his road to Gesthemane and Golgotha, Jesus passed through as much as a decade of graduate studies at or in the vicinity of the Library in Alexandria. I believe that this hypothesis makes his humanity, and his three-years’ walking, teaching, and proselytizing a simple life of prayer even more spiritual and worthy of study. Even by Jews. Even by intellectuals who might wonder if the search for knowledge may be valuable, but possibly secondary to taking a course of action and be willing to die sooner than necessary for it. After all, the era of the Messiah could be here all the time. He might have been making a good point. The well-known King James’ exclamation “My God My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” is actually a quote from one of the Psalms of David, which ends in a glorification of God–so it is meant with double meaning and full of the higher spiritual meaning of suffering rather than of doubt. It is meant as the epitome of human perfection…of faith and qualities of Job. 10 13 14