Forensic History A Brief Introduction
Those familiar with my previous posts will be aware that I have an interest in history and have developed an approach to the subject that I have dubbed 'forensic history'. I call it that because it attempts to encompass all 3 of the definitions of the term 'forensic' in a historical context i.e.:-
1. Relating to, used in, or appropriate for courts of law or for public discussion or argumentation.
2. Of, relating to, or used in debate or argument; rhetorical.
3. Relating to the use of science or technology in the investigation and establishment of facts or evidence in a court of law: a forensic laboratory. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/forensic
The first precept of forensic history is that all history depends at least in part for its meaning upon where we start the clock. It is however saved from infinite regression by the existence and study of 'prehistory'.
This gives us a backstop against which forensic history rests and it is where the disciplines of archaeology, anthropology, paleontology, cosmology and a number of other sub-divisions of professional academia and the sciences kicks in.
Of course in a perfect world there would be a clean break between the historic and the prehistoric and it could be confidently stated that forensic history is both a post 9/11development and a product of the Information Age by which it was both 'born' and 'borne' ....so to speak.
This however is not a perfect world and no such neat divisions between history and prehistory really exist.
Forensic history therefore begins with the appearance of the first hominids and attempts to gather evidence from the fragments that they left, and as we have evolved over the past 5 million or so years.
Forensic History always ends yesterday, after which it becomes the latest 'news' of course .
The primary aim of forensic history at the outset was to falsify and refute conspiracy theories and to interrogate them on the basis of declared evidence, leading to theoretical assumptions about the plausible meanings of historical events.
As such the discipline aspires to keep faith with the methodologies of social science.
This approach is highly reactive to current events and its raison d'étre is to imbed such events in a historically cultural context, in that sense it is a first responder, an emergency history debate of the information age and most especially the 'blogosphere'.
For that reason the recent comments made by Pope Benedict XVI during his current historic 'state' visit to Britain have triggered a Forensic History response, that is to say a response with check-able facts.
The trip is the first to the UK by a Pontiff since John Paul II in 1982. It is also the first to be designated a state visit because the Pope has been invited by the Queen rather than the church.
Since both institutions are the subject of critical analysis on these pages of my Multiply site I want to temporarily suspend the deconstruction of British royalty, to focus on the common bond between Pope and Queen, their professed Christianity and their roles of heads of Churches and extensive communities of faith.
In order to contextualise this interesting collision of anachronisms, the first evidence I want to invoke is the ephemeral nature of these apparently ancient institutions and most particularly the phenomenon of the Christian church.
A small shift in historical perspective demonstrates I think, the relativity of the antiquities and distortions in the hall of mirrors that imbues the Church with a venerable but highly dubious authority
IS CHRISTIANITY A MODERN FAD?
According to the Old Testament Adam and Eve were created in 3760 BCE (Year 1 of the Jewish calendar). This from a biblical understanding of events was the origin of humanity.
We need not consider the Old Testament too carefully here, that would obviously mean taking on Judaism and Islam as well, which is far too ambitious a task for an already overstretched blog like this.
So we'll attempt to place the Christian Gospels in their historic context here as they appeared in what has since become known as The Holy Land in the disputed modern area of Palestine/Israel.
In the best Wikipedia tradition the introductory paragraph on the History of Christianity throws up all these lovely links from which we can reap lots of further evidence if we chose:- Christianity began spreading says Wiki, initially from Jerusalem, and then throughout the Near East, ultimately becoming the state religion of Armenia and Ethiopia in 325, of Georgia in 337, and then the State church of the Roman Empire in 380. Becoming common to all of Europe in the Middle Ages, it expanded throughout the world during the Age of Exploration. Christianity has thus become the world's largest religion.[1]
The first vehicle for this rapid spread was of course the Roman Empire. Early Christian cults such as the Godfearers (or 'Fearers of God') are considered to be of significant importance to the popularity of the early Christian movement.
The Romans appear to have 'gone native' in Palestine and the newly emergent Christian sects comprised of both dissident Jews and Judaefied gentiles
They represented a group of gentiles who shared religious ideas with Jews, to one degree or another. However, they were not converts, but a separate gentile community, engaged in Judaic religious ideas and practices, (see Noahidism for the modern parallel).
These partially assimilated gentiles were the proto-Christians out of which early Christianity began to emerge and flourish they were known as proselytes and proselytism has remained a central feature of Christianity ever since. A righteous proselyte was a gentile who had converted to Judaism, was bound to all the doctrines and precepts of the Jewish economy, and was considered a full member of the Jewish people.
They if male were to be circumcised and both sexes immersed in a mikvah before they could celebrate Passover.
A gate proselyte was a "resident alien" who lived in the Land of Israel and followed some of the customs, but had not converted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_centers_of_Christianity
So here we have it so far, between roughly 2,000 and 1,700 years ago gentiles influenced by but frequently not fully integrated into Jewish society began to fan out throughout the Roman Empire carrying with them the seeds of an early Christianity.
Their Messianic message of redemption through the trinity enjoyed increasing popular appeal in the pagan world, especially amongst women who were treated as equally spiritual beings with souls and the promise of eternal life in their own right.
The adoption of Christianity was however patchy and for centuries it sat side by side with pagan symbols and beliefs in societies that were clearly hedging their bets.
The similarities with the current New Age belief systems and the pragmatic eclecticism of 21st century 'spiritualism' in the West are clear I think.
Those many ancient monuments in Europe that have both Pagan and Christian symbols are no different in form to those who now adorn themselves with Pentacles and Yin-Yang designs...the mass production of totemic merchandise creates a symbolic cross-fertilisation of spiritual identities, both now in our own epoch and then in the past I believe.
What we are dealing with here however is in historical terms a very recent development. Contrary perhaps to popular belief Christianity is not an 'old time religion' at all, depending of course where we start the clock. As indicated above all history is relative.
The implication here however,is that if God really did send his only begotten son to save us all it was very much an afterthought on his part. Perhaps he was waiting for the Roman Empire to come along to establish his European franchise who can say, but he waited a very long time.
In order to truly contextualise the origins of those ideas that developed into modern Christianity we need to see where it fits into a timeline of human evolution.
It is reasonable I think to set it within a context of human society in the Middle East where it is my contention that it represents a fairly recent development.
Indeed from this perspective the very Judaism out of which Christianity emerged is itself not terribly old, even in human terms 5,760 years ago, i.e. Judaic Year 1... is not a very long time at all.
To illustrate the point just consider the proto-township of Tell Abu Hureyra in modern day Syria where there were two separate periods of settlement, with a period of abandonment between.
An Epipalaeolithic settlement was established here around 11,500years ago emerging from the Natufian culture in a northeast expansion from their earlier settlements in the southern Levant
It consisted of a small number of round huts, probably constructed from degradable materials such as wood and brush, with the settlement housing a few hundred people at most.
During this time most food was obtained from hunting, fishing and gathering wild plants. Huts contained underground storage areas for food. The main animal hunted was gazelle during its annual migration. Wild plants harvested during that early period included einkorn wheat and emmer wheat and two varieties of rye. The townsfolk of early Abu Hureyra were experimenting with farming and were also hunter gatherers, pragmatists and eclecticists just like us.
It is not known what if any religious customs this community followed at the time but they lived and thrived in a settlement nine and a half thousand years before the claimed birth of Christ. That is also of course somewhere around 5,000 years before the Jewish Year 1 when these people were fashioning tools from stone and bone and weapons that were capable of bringing down a gazelle in full flight. These were highly sophisticated people.
After a period of abandonment, a Neolithic settlement was established at Abu Hureyra, perhaps 10 times as large as the earlier settlement and one of the largest at that time in the Middle East.
Mud-brick houses were constructed and a large mound was built up under the settlement mainly from the remains of old houses. An increasingly wide variety of plants was cultivated and examination of human skeletons has shown various deformities that have been associated with laborious agricultural work, particularly the grinding of grain which was primarily although not exclusively women's work. Animals were also herded during this latter phase of urbanisation.
Pottery was used from around 5,300 BCE and weaving of cloth began some time before that.
The settlement was finally abandoned around 7,000 years ago.
I think Tell Abu Hureyra puts the arrival of Christianity into a historical and geographical context and since today is also Yom Kippur it is significant I think that we have even placed Judaism as a relatively modern phenomenon.
However some recent research suggests that some of our dates for farming at Abu Hureyra may be too conservative.
Hitherto, the earliest archaeological finds of domestic cereals in southwestern Asia have involved wheats and barleys dating from the beginning of the Holocene, 11–12000 calendar years ago.
New evidence from the site of Abu Hureyra suggests that systematic cultivation of cereals in fact started well before the end of the Pleistocene by at least 13000 years ago, and that rye was among the first crops.
The evidence also indicates that hunter-gatherers at Abu Hureyra first started cultivating crops in response to a steep decline in wild plants that had served as staple foods for at least the preceding four centuries.
The decline in these wild staples is attributable to a sudden, dry, cold, climatic reversal equivalent to the ‘Younger Dryas’ period.
At Abu Hureyra, therefore, it appears that the primary trigger for the occupants to start cultivating caloric staples was climate change.
It is these beginnings of cultivation in the late Pleistocene that gave rise to the integrated grain-livestock Neolithic farming systems of the early Holocene. http://hol.sagepub.com/content/11/4/383.abstract
Epilogue
So the final comment in this brief contribution to the forensic history of Christianity (and incidentally all the Abrahamic religions) is that Pope Benedict XVI is merely the most recent manifestation of the Roman Empire's enduring spiritual and propagandist influences.
He is literally the mouthpiece for the spirit of Imperialism and his recent invitation from the British Queen is symbolic of the pressure these outmoded imperialist ventures are under, as they metaphorically attempt to scratch each others backs - in the face of the stress caused by widespread incredulity regarding their respective legitimacy and their rapidly waning influence and authority.
The Pope the Queen and the social order they each represent are redundant and useless. The Catholic Church is fatally undermined by its own corruption as is (in different ways) the Anglican Church that the Queen heads up as 'protector of the faith'.
The lessons we need to take heed of have their origins long before Christianity arose in the Middle East or the Jews laid claim to Israel.
Both Judaism and Christianity are new fangled belief systems that can be historically pinned down to a specific period of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history, when the modern age of global imperialism first began.
We now quite rightly turn our attention to the implications of climate change as the real prime mover in the history of evolution and we can safely ignore the wittering of the 83 year old Pope and the 84 year old Queen..... not because of how ancient they are but because of how recent and temporary they are.
As Stephen Hawking points out in his new book ' The Grand Design':-
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.
Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.
It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
So the world doesn't need the Pope's skewed views to continue its progress into the future, any more than the territories of the British Isles and the anachronistic British Commonwealth - needs advice or guidance (or anything at all for that matter) from the Queen.
This post represents a forensic historical approach to the meaning of the Pope's visit to Britain in the context of the cultural evolution of the regions covered by the Roman Empire - the crucible of the Roman Catholic Church is thus viewed here from a world-historical perspective.
Like any blog it is merely a rough outline of a much larger discourse on the meaning if historical events within a particular frame of reference,- and for reasons outlined above I have chosen here to call that framework forensic history.
The first precept of forensic history is that all history depends at least in part for its meaning upon where we start the clock. It is however saved from infinite regression by the existence and study of 'prehistory'.
This gives us a backstop against which forensic history rests and it is where the disciplines of archaeology, anthropology, paleontology, cosmology and a number of other sub-divisions of professional academia and the sciences kicks in.
Of course in a perfect world there would be a clean break between the historic and the prehistoric and it could be confidently stated that forensic history is both a post 9/11development and a product of the Information Age by which it was both 'born' and 'borne' ....so to speak.
This however is not a perfect world and no such neat divisions between history and prehistory really exist.
Forensic history therefore begins with the appearance of the first hominids and attempts to gather evidence from the fragments that they left, and as we have evolved over the past 5 million or so years.
Forensic History always ends yesterday, after which it becomes the latest 'news' of course .
The primary aim of forensic history at the outset was to falsify and refute conspiracy theories and to interrogate them on the basis of declared evidence, leading to theoretical assumptions about the plausible meanings of historical events.
As such the discipline aspires to keep faith with the methodologies of social science.
This approach is highly reactive to current events and its raison d'étre is to imbed such events in a historically cultural context, in that sense it is a first responder, an emergency history debate of the information age and most especially the 'blogosphere'.
For that reason the recent comments made by Pope Benedict XVI during his current historic 'state' visit to Britain have triggered a Forensic History response, that is to say a response with check-able facts.
The trip is the first to the UK by a Pontiff since John Paul II in 1982. It is also the first to be designated a state visit because the Pope has been invited by the Queen rather than the church.
Since both institutions are the subject of critical analysis on these pages of my Multiply site I want to temporarily suspend the deconstruction of British royalty, to focus on the common bond between Pope and Queen, their professed Christianity and their roles of heads of Churches and extensive communities of faith.
In order to contextualise this interesting collision of anachronisms, the first evidence I want to invoke is the ephemeral nature of these apparently ancient institutions and most particularly the phenomenon of the Christian church.
A small shift in historical perspective demonstrates I think, the relativity of the antiquities and distortions in the hall of mirrors that imbues the Church with a venerable but highly dubious authority
IS CHRISTIANITY A MODERN FAD?
According to the Old Testament Adam and Eve were created in 3760 BCE (Year 1 of the Jewish calendar). This from a biblical understanding of events was the origin of humanity.
We need not consider the Old Testament too carefully here, that would obviously mean taking on Judaism and Islam as well, which is far too ambitious a task for an already overstretched blog like this.
So we'll attempt to place the Christian Gospels in their historic context here as they appeared in what has since become known as The Holy Land in the disputed modern area of Palestine/Israel.
In the best Wikipedia tradition the introductory paragraph on the History of Christianity throws up all these lovely links from which we can reap lots of further evidence if we chose:- Christianity began spreading says Wiki, initially from Jerusalem, and then throughout the Near East, ultimately becoming the state religion of Armenia and Ethiopia in 325, of Georgia in 337, and then the State church of the Roman Empire in 380. Becoming common to all of Europe in the Middle Ages, it expanded throughout the world during the Age of Exploration. Christianity has thus become the world's largest religion.[1]
The first vehicle for this rapid spread was of course the Roman Empire. Early Christian cults such as the Godfearers (or 'Fearers of God') are considered to be of significant importance to the popularity of the early Christian movement.
The Romans appear to have 'gone native' in Palestine and the newly emergent Christian sects comprised of both dissident Jews and Judaefied gentiles
They represented a group of gentiles who shared religious ideas with Jews, to one degree or another. However, they were not converts, but a separate gentile community, engaged in Judaic religious ideas and practices, (see Noahidism for the modern parallel).
These partially assimilated gentiles were the proto-Christians out of which early Christianity began to emerge and flourish they were known as proselytes and proselytism has remained a central feature of Christianity ever since. A righteous proselyte was a gentile who had converted to Judaism, was bound to all the doctrines and precepts of the Jewish economy, and was considered a full member of the Jewish people.
They if male were to be circumcised and both sexes immersed in a mikvah before they could celebrate Passover.
A gate proselyte was a "resident alien" who lived in the Land of Israel and followed some of the customs, but had not converted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_centers_of_Christianity
So here we have it so far, between roughly 2,000 and 1,700 years ago gentiles influenced by but frequently not fully integrated into Jewish society began to fan out throughout the Roman Empire carrying with them the seeds of an early Christianity.
Their Messianic message of redemption through the trinity enjoyed increasing popular appeal in the pagan world, especially amongst women who were treated as equally spiritual beings with souls and the promise of eternal life in their own right.
The adoption of Christianity was however patchy and for centuries it sat side by side with pagan symbols and beliefs in societies that were clearly hedging their bets.
The similarities with the current New Age belief systems and the pragmatic eclecticism of 21st century 'spiritualism' in the West are clear I think.
Those many ancient monuments in Europe that have both Pagan and Christian symbols are no different in form to those who now adorn themselves with Pentacles and Yin-Yang designs...the mass production of totemic merchandise creates a symbolic cross-fertilisation of spiritual identities, both now in our own epoch and then in the past I believe.
What we are dealing with here however is in historical terms a very recent development. Contrary perhaps to popular belief Christianity is not an 'old time religion' at all, depending of course where we start the clock. As indicated above all history is relative.
The implication here however,is that if God really did send his only begotten son to save us all it was very much an afterthought on his part. Perhaps he was waiting for the Roman Empire to come along to establish his European franchise who can say, but he waited a very long time.
In order to truly contextualise the origins of those ideas that developed into modern Christianity we need to see where it fits into a timeline of human evolution.
It is reasonable I think to set it within a context of human society in the Middle East where it is my contention that it represents a fairly recent development.
Indeed from this perspective the very Judaism out of which Christianity emerged is itself not terribly old, even in human terms 5,760 years ago, i.e. Judaic Year 1... is not a very long time at all.
To illustrate the point just consider the proto-township of Tell Abu Hureyra in modern day Syria where there were two separate periods of settlement, with a period of abandonment between.
An Epipalaeolithic settlement was established here around 11,500years ago emerging from the Natufian culture in a northeast expansion from their earlier settlements in the southern Levant
It consisted of a small number of round huts, probably constructed from degradable materials such as wood and brush, with the settlement housing a few hundred people at most.
During this time most food was obtained from hunting, fishing and gathering wild plants. Huts contained underground storage areas for food. The main animal hunted was gazelle during its annual migration. Wild plants harvested during that early period included einkorn wheat and emmer wheat and two varieties of rye. The townsfolk of early Abu Hureyra were experimenting with farming and were also hunter gatherers, pragmatists and eclecticists just like us.
It is not known what if any religious customs this community followed at the time but they lived and thrived in a settlement nine and a half thousand years before the claimed birth of Christ. That is also of course somewhere around 5,000 years before the Jewish Year 1 when these people were fashioning tools from stone and bone and weapons that were capable of bringing down a gazelle in full flight. These were highly sophisticated people.
After a period of abandonment, a Neolithic settlement was established at Abu Hureyra, perhaps 10 times as large as the earlier settlement and one of the largest at that time in the Middle East.
Mud-brick houses were constructed and a large mound was built up under the settlement mainly from the remains of old houses. An increasingly wide variety of plants was cultivated and examination of human skeletons has shown various deformities that have been associated with laborious agricultural work, particularly the grinding of grain which was primarily although not exclusively women's work. Animals were also herded during this latter phase of urbanisation.
Pottery was used from around 5,300 BCE and weaving of cloth began some time before that.
The settlement was finally abandoned around 7,000 years ago.
I think Tell Abu Hureyra puts the arrival of Christianity into a historical and geographical context and since today is also Yom Kippur it is significant I think that we have even placed Judaism as a relatively modern phenomenon.
However some recent research suggests that some of our dates for farming at Abu Hureyra may be too conservative.
Hitherto, the earliest archaeological finds of domestic cereals in southwestern Asia have involved wheats and barleys dating from the beginning of the Holocene, 11–12000 calendar years ago.
New evidence from the site of Abu Hureyra suggests that systematic cultivation of cereals in fact started well before the end of the Pleistocene by at least 13000 years ago, and that rye was among the first crops.
The evidence also indicates that hunter-gatherers at Abu Hureyra first started cultivating crops in response to a steep decline in wild plants that had served as staple foods for at least the preceding four centuries.
The decline in these wild staples is attributable to a sudden, dry, cold, climatic reversal equivalent to the ‘Younger Dryas’ period.
At Abu Hureyra, therefore, it appears that the primary trigger for the occupants to start cultivating caloric staples was climate change.
It is these beginnings of cultivation in the late Pleistocene that gave rise to the integrated grain-livestock Neolithic farming systems of the early Holocene. http://hol.sagepub.com/content/11/4/383.abstract
Epilogue
So the final comment in this brief contribution to the forensic history of Christianity (and incidentally all the Abrahamic religions) is that Pope Benedict XVI is merely the most recent manifestation of the Roman Empire's enduring spiritual and propagandist influences.
He is literally the mouthpiece for the spirit of Imperialism and his recent invitation from the British Queen is symbolic of the pressure these outmoded imperialist ventures are under, as they metaphorically attempt to scratch each others backs - in the face of the stress caused by widespread incredulity regarding their respective legitimacy and their rapidly waning influence and authority.
The Pope the Queen and the social order they each represent are redundant and useless. The Catholic Church is fatally undermined by its own corruption as is (in different ways) the Anglican Church that the Queen heads up as 'protector of the faith'.
The lessons we need to take heed of have their origins long before Christianity arose in the Middle East or the Jews laid claim to Israel.
Both Judaism and Christianity are new fangled belief systems that can be historically pinned down to a specific period of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean history, when the modern age of global imperialism first began.
We now quite rightly turn our attention to the implications of climate change as the real prime mover in the history of evolution and we can safely ignore the wittering of the 83 year old Pope and the 84 year old Queen..... not because of how ancient they are but because of how recent and temporary they are.
As Stephen Hawking points out in his new book ' The Grand Design':-
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.
Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.
It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
So the world doesn't need the Pope's skewed views to continue its progress into the future, any more than the territories of the British Isles and the anachronistic British Commonwealth - needs advice or guidance (or anything at all for that matter) from the Queen.
This post represents a forensic historical approach to the meaning of the Pope's visit to Britain in the context of the cultural evolution of the regions covered by the Roman Empire - the crucible of the Roman Catholic Church is thus viewed here from a world-historical perspective.
Like any blog it is merely a rough outline of a much larger discourse on the meaning if historical events within a particular frame of reference,- and for reasons outlined above I have chosen here to call that framework forensic history.
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