Sunday, Dec. 25, 2011

Some of around 6 million Muslims who attend the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, gather on Dec. 16, 2007, around the ancient cuboid-shaped Kaaba, Islam's most sacred site, which is situated within the city's Masjid al-Haram Mosque. KYODO PHOTO

By MICHAEL HOFFMAN

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Some eight centuries later — roughly 1280 B.C. — Moses led the Israelites out of bondage: "And Israel saw that great work which the Lord did upon the Egyptians and the people feared the Lord, and believed the Lord, and his servant Moses."

But not for long.

They were free — but starving in the trackless desert. "And the children of Israel said unto (Moses): 'Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots, and when we did eat bread to the full.' God provided bread, but the people were thirsty, and cried, 'Wherefore is this that thou has brought us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst?' "

God sent water, but when Moses ascended Mount Sinai to receive the Law — the core of what became the first five books of the Bible's Old Testament — the people wavered again, and in his absence made a golden calf to worship.

God was furious. "And the Lord said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiffnecked people. Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them."

Moses soothes Gods anger. He ascends and descends the mountain many times, sometimes alone, sometimes with the tribal elders. "And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend." Moses receives the Law, inscribed on stone tablets. And the people cry out as one, "All that the Lord has spoken we will do!"

But they didn't. God led the children of Israel to the Promised Land and helped them conquer it, that they might cleanse it of its "Baalim"- the Canaanite pantheon headed by the fertility god Baal — and dedicate themselves to the exclusive worship of Yahweh.

But the Baalim were seductive. They had names, they had identities, they were representable in beautiful images, as Yahweh most emphatically was not ("Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images" is one of the Ten Commandments). Baalim joined their worshipers at sacred feasts and in sacred prostitution. Baalim inflamed and satisfied those human instincts that Yahweh and His grim commandments suppressed. Ecstasy, abandon, madness, human sacrifice were the delight of Baalim and the horror of Yahweh. Much later, Christians and Muslims were promised a deathless afterlife in return for their self-restraint. What did Yahweh offer?

Nothing but Himself — His invisible, inconceivable, ungraspable Self: "Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all the people, for all the earth is mine. And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation."

The Israelites were a primitive people. They were not ready to be a kingdom of priests. God, like any helpless parent, alternately threatened and coaxed. He sent foreign armies to mete out His divine punishment, and He inspired prophets to plead His divine case: "And Samuel spake unto all the house of Israel (c. 1000 B.C.), saying, If ye do return unto the Lord with all your hearts, and put away the strange gods ... , He will deliver you out of the hands of the Philistines." The people promised and were delivered, but the "strange gods" beckoned again — repeatedly, irresistibly.

The first chapter of monotheist history, spanning more than 1,000 years beginning with Abraham, thus ends in failure, in God's furious destruction of the two little Israelite kingdoms of Israel (720 B.C.) and Judah (586 B.C.) at the hands of His chosen instruments, the empires of Assyria and Babylon respectively.

"Israel is a scattered sheep," lamented the prophet Jeremiah; "the lions have driven him away." Yet "a small number," he prophesied, a saving "remnant," would return, for Israel's "redeemer is strong; the Lord of Hosts is His name."

Abraham had another son — Isaac's elder half-brother, Ishmael, the father of Islam.

The Bible story is that Abraham's wife, Sara, unable to conceive, urged him to "go in unto" her Egyptian maid, Hagar, who did conceive. Sara's jealousy, fired by Hagar's taunts, boiled over and the maid fled with her child into the desert. There God appeared to her and said, much as He had to Abraham, "I will make him (Ishmael) a great nation." Hence Muslims, no less than Jews, claim descent from Abraham.

There are vague tales of Jewish tribes in the Arabian Peninsula as early as 1000 B.C.; certainly by Muhammad's time (A.D. 570-632) they were flourishing there as traders and pastoralists. They stood out as monotheists among the polytheist Arabs.

Jewish men opposed to a U.S.-sponsored Mideast peace summit pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, Judaism's holiest site, on Nov. 26, 2007. AP PHOTO

Among the Arab gods was al-Ilah or Allah, the chief god of Mecca. Muhammad, Mecca-born, was a caravaneer, a thriving man of business — but he was also, evidently, of a reflective turn, and much drawn to the "One God" of the Jews. Meditating in a cave one day, he was visited by the angel Gabriel, who commanded him, "Recite, in the name of the Lord who created man from clots of blood."

Muhammad recited. After his death his recitations were collected into a book called the Quran (literally, "the recitation"). Readers of the Bible will find much in it that is familiar. They will recognize in "Allah" their own one supernatural, personal, ethical God. "Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Universe, the Compassionate, the Merciful"; "Believers, be ever mindful of Allah, praise Him morning and evening ... so that He may lead you from darkness to the light"; "It is He who gives life and death, and when He decides upon an affair, He says to it, 'Be,' and it is."

A Jew or Christian feels, if not altogether at home here, at least like a guest in a not unfriendly house. Muhammad's initial purpose seems to have been to replace Arab polytheism with a fairly close adaptation of Jewish ethical monotheism. Only when Jews rejected his overtures did he shape Islam into a separate religion.

Jews, Christians and Muslims spring from common stock. They share a "Holy Land," roughly modern Israel, remarkable for nothing else except, historically speaking, remoteness and inhospitality of landscape.

They also share the core idea of Abrahamic monotheism, and the worship of God via a "holy book." Still, somehow, they did not take to each other, except fitfully, here and there — Islamic Spain, for instance, where Muslims and Jews together created a cultural golden age that lasted from the 10th century to the Christian reconquest of the 15th.

Each was offended by the others' manner of worshipping the "one true God." To Jews, Christians were "idolaters" who had forsaken the One God to worship a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. To Christians, the Jews had killed Christ; the Gospel of Matthew has the frenzied Jews crying out en masse, "His blood be upon us, and on our children."

And the Quran warns Christians: "Speak nothing but the truth about God. The Messiah, Jesus the son of Mary, was no more than God' apostle and His Word. . . So believe in God and His apostles and do not say: 'Three.' Forbear, and it shall be better for you. God is but one God. God forbid that He should have a son!"

In 1587, there were some 200 Christian churches in Japan, serving 150,000 Japanese Christians. A mere 30 years of missionary work, beginning with the Jesuit priest St. Francis Xavier' arrival in Kyushu in 1549, had borne rich fruit.

The 18th-century British historian Edward Gibbon, in "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," discerned five causes for Christianity' triumph in Imperial Rome in the 4th century A.D. They are relevant as well to 16th-century Japan: (1) "The inflexible, and, if we may use the expression, the intolerant zeal of the Christians"; (2) the Christian doctrine of a future life; (3) "the miraculous powers ascribed to the primitive church"; (4) "the pure and austere morals of the Christians"; (5) "the union and discipline of the Christian republic."

To these, many historians add a sixth — the compelling uniqueness of Jesus. "Jesus of Nazareth was, in terms of his influence, the most important human being in history," writes Johnson (in "Jesus: A Biography from a Believer [2010]). Further, "The unique event of someone both God and man appearing on earth is the essence of Christianity."

Cite what causes you will, Roman Christianity' rise from being a despised and persecuted fringe sect to its position as the supreme religion of Western civilization was astonishingly improbable. But it happened, and a European missionary in Japan in 1587 — let' say, on June 23, 1587 — might reasonably have foreseen something similar happening here.

On June 24, his optimism may have wavered, for on that day the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, hitherto friendly toward the missionaries, abruptly declared Christianity a "pernicious doctrine" and gave its foreign purveyors 20 days to leave the country.

Even at that, our hypothetical missionary' "inflexible, intolerant zeal" might have fortified him, and plausibly enough, for Hideyoshi' edict remained for a time a dead letter. But his successor, Tokugawa Ieyasu, revived it, declaring in 1614 that "the Kirishitan band have come to Japan. . . to disseminate an evil law, to overthrow true doctrine, that they may change the government of the country."

That was the beginning of the end of Japan' "Christian century." By 1640, there had occurred "the most cruel persecution and torture of Christians ever witnessed on this globe. . . lasting more than 40 years until the last drop of Christian blood was spilled," as the German physician and chronicler Engelbert Kaempfer, posted with the Dutch East India Company at Nagasaki, observed early in the 18th century. Pockets of "hidden Christians" remained, but to all intents and purposes Christianity in Japan was finished. It remains feeble to this day, despite the country' Westernization in most other respects.

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