I can’t remember not being able to read. It was a bit like breathing. We read everywhere, even under the blankets at night when I was so young that, when my mother whispered hours later “are you asleep?” I answered “yes”.
But reading is not a natural state; until a century or so ago most people were non-literate, even our Western societies. Just look at the Nineteenth Century shipping records of our forebears arriving in Australia: “can read a few words”, “can read but not write”, or often enough “Illiterate”. Many could not even achieve the dignity of being able to sign their names. In an average family at that time the children would be without schooling, women were never taught to read, so at best it would be the one adult male –say 15 % of the population – who could read. But this did not mean that society was without ideas or history or narratives. The bards had prodigious memories. Our own First Nations people have spoken accounts that clearly recall events over 10,000 years.
Most of the world’s belief systems were oral traditions. Writing was often invented for record keeping for – you guessed it – taxation purposes; it was a latecomer, a product of settled living in cities. Slowly, parts of some belief systems became scriptures — religious ideas written down – but this was rare. While the Greeks or Romans had narratives about their deities they never thought to write down any system of belief.
So what possessed all the Gospel writers to undertake such labour? And since Matthew and Luke clearly knew Mark’s narrative, why would they write down their own accounts? Though they share much, the gospels are quite individual, deliberately crafted documents. Why? Well, Jesus and his early followers all came from the Jewish biblical tradition of the book – of the word written down be it of belief, of prayer, of ethics or of history which together we now call the bible. The gospels are in some ways part of that written tradition. But they are not written down as history. It’s tempting to see them as a sort of biography, but that’s missing the mark. The gospels were written down as (inspired) responses about Christ’s actions and teaching, in particular circumstances of time and place, answering the concerns of a particular community.
This Sunday’s gospel is just such a response. Several generations after Christ’s death Rome had lost patience with this troublesome province of Judaea and sent four core legions plus auxiliaries – some 60,000 professional soldiers under Vespasian and then Titus – to suppress Galilee and then to demolish Jerusalem. After a bitter, dreadful siege in 70CE, they destroyed most of the city except for three of Herod’s towers and some wall, and razed the Temple to the ground. Much of the surviving population was enslaved or put to the sword, some were sent to Rome to be shown with treasures taken from the Temple. Booty for Rome. The ultimate humiliation. As an aside, we know the appearance of these plundered items– the Menorah, the sacred trumpets and the sacred table of the bread, because they were illustrated on the triumphal arch of Titus near the Roman Forum.
(The final Jewish defenders held out in the desert stronghold at Masada. 73CE. Facing defeat, each senior male killed his family, and the men drew lots as to who would take out each other till the last man standing fell on his own sword. These men who had heroically fought against the occupying forces were given the earliest numbers in Israel’s army today. They vowed that”Masada shall not fall again”.)
It is thought that Mark, the earliest gospel, and then Matthew and Luke were written during and after this time, when all Jewish society must have been terribly shaken by the loss of the city of David and Solomon as well as that centre of their religious identity.
Matthew this Sunday reflects something of this – the sheep are lost and in great need of guidance. The gospel describes Christ sending the apostles out to minister with power over the spirits and to cure sicknesses. Then the evangelist pauses, almost interrupts himself to name, and so personalise, each of the twelve – who of course represent the twelve of the tribes of Israel, before sending them out on this mission of care and compassion. Now, the Matthean community was a significantly Jewish Christian one, and was thus suffering a particular sense of loss. To compound this, after the destruction of the temple the Sanhedrin (Jewish Council) moved to Jamnia near the coast; there, increasingly, they discussed the incompatability between Judaism and Christianity. This culminated in around 90CE in a decision to expel Christians from the synagogues.
This was devastating for Jewish followers of Jesus; for all four gospels clearly show that Jesus centred a deal of his teaching in the synagogues and had lived and died a practising Jew. While there was conflict with some pharisees, there had seemed no contradiction. Now a great part of the Matthean community had to choose between their culture and their belief. Families were divided, communities felt they had lost their heritage and more. And so, in today’s gospel Jesus is recorded as making his concern for the his own explicit: “ go only to the lost sheep of Israel”, avoid both the gentiles and the Samaritans.
Nowhere else in any of the gospels would this sort of instruction make sense, we know that early on before the gospels were written the disciples realised that they were sent to ‘all nations’; but here the Matthew community is comforted by the understanding that Jesus is the Christ for all Israel first. And so we can read the gospel and share some of their distress.
This ability to read the gospel, so that each reader can share immediately the teaching of that time, leads naturally to a larger issue. For the following 1500 odd years reading and writing was and is the most humanising activity. Through documents secular and sacred we have been able to share the extrarodinary flights of the human mind and imagination as well as the riches of spiritual thought and belief. Pope Leo’s recent encyclical wrote of human beings as “magnificant”. This is true when we look at the greatest of human literature – from the psalms to Dante’s vision of heaven and hell, but looking at today’s world some human beings seem pretty appalling – even wicked. A.I. tells me that “There are currently approximately 19 major ongoing wars and over 120 smaller-scale armed conflicts globally, marking the highest number of state-based conflicts since World War II.” In the 81 years since that peace was declared, the world’s scientists and economists and agriculturists have achieved marvellously – and yet we have gone backwards to the savage cruelty of more war. And today it’s very possible to do worse, and abandon armed conflict to the unchecked brutality of an unrestrained A.I. system designed to achieve maximum effect. I suppose that means more people dead.
In a very recent interview a leading Australian banker spoke of workers objecting to being made redundant in an email written by A.I. He seemed in two minds as to whether this was reasonable or unreasonable. In fact the same algorithm was actually deciding when and who should actually lose their jobs, and then writing and delivering the emails. He spoke of people as valuable because they were productive. All this went pretty much unremarked. Everyone failed to see that A.I. was concentrating power in the hands of a very few individuals who designed the bases on which the whole algorithm was planned, and thus, decision-making was and is being concentrated in the hands of a tiny anonymous minority who answer to nobody. It was dreadful.
In a small way, this is the stuff of Leo’s encyclical. The algorithm is not morally neutral; but “embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations.” It is designed on the basis of achieving maximum effectiveness or productivity, — and human beings are either productive or non-productive. This may be true, but is quite wrong; human beings are valuable as God’s creation (Imago Dei) per se, and that machines have usurped those most human of things – reading and writing – in order to decide who and how people should be denied the dignity of work, as the previous Leo described it, was and is utterly wrong.
In addition: once you value human beings as productive you must devalue the non productive. Infants, the old, the disabled, the intellectually challenged are a burden on society. For Hitler and Nazism that lead to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Extirmination. The ultimate in de-humanization.
It has been argued that in a post-literate world, “multimedia communication democratizes information and offers highly efficient ways to convey complex data instantly”. But in our Joys and griefs – and in our spirituality as well as our scholarship — we are far more than complex data, as Matthew’s gospel makes clear. While human beings may seem rather unimpressive at times, humanity itself can be magnificent and we as a community must refuse to allow it to be de-humanised.
Images:
1. Cunieform writing from the British Museum website
2. South inner panel of Arch of Titus, Rome Wikimedia commons
3. Rocky outcrop of Masada National Park, Israel,
4. Three Wise Men only in gospel of Matthew. (The church of San Appolinare nuovo, Ravenna, Italy). The wise men are important to the Matthean community as they show Gentile scholars going to worship the Jewish infant Christ.
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David. Rush says:
Such a thought-provoking article. You illustrate so well the development of the skills of humanity from the gospel writers to the development of literacy of recent generations But a very timely warning that our humanity is a risk with the all encompassing threat of AI