Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History)

311 Pages·2001·0.78 MB·English

by  Thomas Cahill

Desire of the Everlasting Hills
The World Before and After Jesus
BY THOMAS CAHILL
Desire of the Everlasting Hills ii
Copyright
Desire of the Everlasting Hills
Copyright © 1999 by Thomas Cahill

Cover art and eForeword to the electronic edition copyright ©
2004 by RosettaBooks, LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or

reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission

except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles

and reviews.

For information address [email protected]

First electronic edition published 2004 by RosettaBooks LLC,

New York.

ISBN 0-7953-3207-6
Desire of the Everlasting Hills iii
Contents
eForeword
Introduction
What Do the Everlasting Hills Desire?
Chapter I. Greeks, Jews, and Romans
The People Jesus Knew
The Waiting Game
Chapter II: The Last of the Prophets
The Jesus the Apostles Knew
His Mothers Son
Chapter III: The Cosmic Christ
Paul’s Jesus
Encountering Evil
Chapter IV: The Gentile Messiah
Luke’s Jesus
A Miracle for Me
Chapter V. Drunk in the Morning Light
The People of the Way
Where is Jesus?
Chapter VI. The World Made Flesh
The Jesus the Beloved Disciple Knew
The Bead of the Poor
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Chapter VII: Yesterday, Today, and Forever
The World after Jesus
Tomorrow
Notes and Sources
The Books of the New Testament
Chronology
Acknowledgments
Index of Biblical Citations
General Index
About the Title
Desire of the Everlasting Hills v
eForeword

Thomas Cahill is a life long scholar and a student of ancient Greek,
Latin and Hebrew and has studied with some of America’s most
distinguished literary and Biblical scholars. Thomas Cahill set out
to create a seven set of popular non-fiction which would convey
the roots of our collective history. His achievement has been to
bring these titles alive for a modern reader while basing his work
on prodigious research with original sources.
The sub-title tells it all: The World Before and After Jesus. Desire
of Everlasting Hills is the third volume in the Hinges of History
series.
In Desire of the Everlasting Hills, Thomas Cahill takes up his most
daring and provocative subject yet: Jesus of Nazareth, the central
figure of Western civilization.
Introducing us first to “the people Jesus knew,” Thomas Cahill
describes the oppressive Roman political presence, the pervasive
Greek cultural influence, and especially the widely varied social
and religious context of the Judaism in which Jesus moved and
flourished.
We see Jesus as a real person, sharp-witted and sharp-tongued,
but kind, humorous, and affectionate, shadowed by the inevitable
climax of crucifixion. Mary is a vivid presence and forceful
influence on her son. And the apostle Paul, the carrier of Jesus’
message and most important figure in the early Christian
Desire of the Everlasting Hills vi
movement, finds rehabilitation in Thomas Cahill’s realistic,
revealing portrait.
This unique presentation of Jesus and his times is for believers
and nonbelievers alike (for Jews and Christians, it is intended by
the author as an act of reconciliation).
RosettaBooks is proud to publish the first three titles in Thomas
Cahill’s planned seven volume Hinges of History collection –
How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995), The Gifs of the Jews (1997)
and Desire of the Everlasting Hills (1999). All three of these titles
continue as bestsellers as each title in the series builds on those
which precede it.
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Desire of the Everlasting Hills 1
Introduction
What Do the Everlasting Hills Desire?
Desire of the Everlasting Hills 2
History has much to do with hills. From the Hill of Zion on which
King David built Jerusalem to the Athenian Acropolis, from
Bunker Hill of the American Revolution to Malvern Hill of the
American Civil War, from Iwo Jima’s Mount Suribachi to
Vietnam’s Hamburger Hill, the hills of this world have been
prized. Much of humanity’s recorded story has taken place on
their flanks and summits, and how much blood, of both
conquerors and conquered, has been absorbed by their
accommodating soils no one can say.
In Rome I love to climb the Janiculum, which the ancients
called the “Golden Mountain” because of its yellow sand. One of
the splendid natural defenses of Rome, it is a ridge that rises
steeply from the west bank of the sludge-green Tiber and gives
spectacular views of the great city that is spread beneath it. Like
other strategic hills, it has known many battles.
It was just a century and a half ago—in 1849—that armies last
clashed on its summit around the ornamental Renaissance arches
of the Gate of San Pancrazio and in and out of the charming
medieval buildings that lie beyond the gate and on whose walls
one can still discern the work of bullets. What the bullets did to
the men who fought here has long been concealed by earth. The
winners were French troops in service to a reactionary pope,
outraged that Italians would dare take up arms against him in
their attempt to dissolve the Papal States and unite Italy. The
losers were boys as young as fourteen, tragically outnumbered
but fighting with the insane bravery of youth, inspired by their
charismatic leader, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and his no less charismatic
wife, Anita. Today, each Garibaldi has a noble equestrian
monument on this summit. Garibaldi with his saintly, mild
demeanor surveys the city from his lofty marble platform;
superwoman Anita, cast in bronze, raises a firearm in her right
hand as she suckles a baby at her left breast, all the while urging
her horse forward. They lost the battle but won the war; for
beneath the hoofs of Anita’s advancing charger one can make out
in the distance Michelangelo’s bone-white dome of Saint Peter’s
and the lilliputian statelet of the Vatican, to which the pope’s
vestigial temporal power has been confined since 1870. The dead
Desire of the Everlasting Hills 3
child-soldiers have no monument in marble or bronze, just a
street sign—Piazzale dei Ragazzi di 1849 (Great Square of the
Boys of 1849)—but their spirits haunt the slender umbrella trees
that cluster mournfully in the Villa Doria Pamphilj, the vast
seventeenth-century parkland that runs beside the scene of their
deaths, where dirt paths are named in their memory and the boys
of contemporary Rome kick footballs and fly kites.
The Janiculum is more than a Roman hill. It speaks to
Everyman, for one patch or another of its sloped ascents can serve
to remind almost any traveler of his own ancestral history. At the
southern end of the hill the alleys of Trastevere wind mazelike in
patterns established more than two millennia ago. Until the Tiber
silted up, ships sailed upriver from the Mediterranean, depositing
exotic cargoes and even more exotic human specimens in the port
of Trastevere. From every corner of the ancient world they came
here with their strange costumes and peculiar practices, Greeks
and Syrians bearing the crushed pride of the vanquished, Gauls
and Britons displaying their lately acquired refinements, Oriental
merchants speaking languages but dimly understood, Africans of
every kind—Egyptians, Berbers, Nubians—and Jews with uncut
beards, the whole babble contained within Trastevere’s narrow
streets whose haphazard apartment buildings, designed to cram
in as many souls as possible, leaned over the filthy streets, nearly
blocking out the sky. Trastevere (in those days Trans Tiberim,
the Place-across-the-Tiber) was exciting and a little dangerous,
as it remains today, a place where basic cravings—for food, sex,
revenge—can spurt unexpectedly into view.
It is instructive to select one or two of these groups of migrating
visitors and see how they fared in subsequent ages. The Jews, for
instance, have now been in Rome longer than anyone else,
boasting lines of descent far more ancient than any non-Jewish
Italian can claim, back to the beginning of the Roman empire
and earlier. The first Roman home of the Jews was Trastevere, as
memorial fragments found here still testify. These have been
mounted in the portico of the Basilica of Santa Maria, where you