The Map is Not the Territory: Herodotus and the Myth of Hoplite Battle

Another piece from the archives -- April 2003, believe it or not -- where it's just been gathering dust...

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There was an article in the New York Times last week, examining the books which have had the greatest impact of late in the White House. Last Autumn Dick Cheney read An Autumn of War by Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and military historian, whom he later invited to dinner. Cheney told his aides that Hanson’s writings reflected his philosophy. In An Autumn of War Hanson wrote approvingly of the ancient Greek view of war as ‘terrible but innate to civilization — and not always unjust or amoral if it is waged for good causes to destroy evil and save the innocent.’ He asserted that we were in an ‘outright bloody war against tyranny, intolerance and theocracy,’ and he called for going to war ‘hard, long, without guilt, apology or respite until our enemies are no more.’[1]

Hanson has long argued that the ‘Hoplite Battle’ was the central military act in ancient Greece. This ‘Hoplite Battle’ was a swift and decisive clash of well-armed social equals, fighting and willing to die in defence of their lands. These social equals, Hanson believes, relied not on ruse or cunning for victory, instead depending on their own courage, discipline, and martial skill. E.M. Walker, writing in the first edition of the Cambridge Ancient History elegantly explained that ‘To the Greeks a battle was in the nature of a duel; it was an agon, in which honour was satisfied and the pursuit ceased when the enemy acknowledged defeat by asking for a truce for the burial of his dead.’ Such battles were almost inevitably ritualistic, as W.R. Connor argues in his 1988 article on the symbolism of early Greek land warfare.

This model of hoplite battle generated by believers in a Greek way of war is well-known and generally accepted. 

The opposing armies would deploy on a plain, typically agricultural land at the edge of the invaded territory. Often organised by tribal regiments, arrayed in a line with the best men stationed in the front and rear ranks, the heavy infantry would be protected on the flanks by light infantry and cavalry. Omens would be taken, and sacrificial animals slaughtered in a ritual shedding of blood. Commanders would address their men, and the signal for battle would be given. Both armies would advance, covering the last hundred or so yards at a run. It seems unlikely that the two armies collided at full tilt, but when they met a giant melee of pushing and stabbing would begin. Men must have fallen, whether dead or wounded, or simply because they lost their footing due to pressure from behind. As men fell, gaps would have appeared in the front lines, which enemy hoplites sought to enlarge; eventually the pushing – the othismos – would enable one army to penetrate the enemy line. This breaching of the line, the pararrhexis – was a sure sign of defeat, and the army whose line had been broken would turn and run. The victorious army would generally not pursue for long, instead opting to make the battlefield its own; they stripped the armour from the enemy dead and gathered their own dead for burial. A victory marker, called a tropaion, would be erected at the spot where the enemy line had been broken and the enemy had turned and fled. The defeated army, having regrouped, would send a herald to request a truce to enable them to retrieve their dead: this request was an admission of defeat; indicating that the outcome of the battle had been accepted

The basic origins of this thesis are clear enough. In a famous speech he attributes to the Persian Mardonius,[2] Herodotus describes the Greek Way of War, noting that:

‘When they have declared war against each other, they come down to the fairest and most level ground that they can find and there they fight, so that the victors come not off without great harm; and of the vanquished I say not so much as a word, for they are utterly destroyed.’ (Hdt. 7.9)

This passage from Herodotus is generally taken at face value and reinforced by passages from Thucydides,[3] Demosthenes,[4] and particularly Polybius [5] in order to gain an insight into the ‘Greek Way of War’.

The problem with these passages is that they all highly rhetorical; they are hardly sober reflections on the nature of contemporary warfare. The core passage from Herodotus is exceptionally complex, loaded with problems and ambiguities. Remember at all times that this speech surely does not represent anything Mardonius said; rather these words have been put into his mouth by the Greek Herodotus. Why? In the first place its main function is to show the heroism of the free Greeks, who are willing to die to defend their homeland; unlike, in this respect they stand in sharp contrast to the Persians, who like to fight their wars without unnecessary casualties. The Greek willingness to sustain casualties horrifies Mardonius; yet modern calculations suggest that in most Greek battles the defeated army would suffer perhaps 14 or 15 per cent losses, with the victor losing only one man in twenty. It is also odd to see a Persian being surprised at the Greek desire for decisive battle, since earlier in his account Herodotus shows the Persians as deeply exasperated by the Scythian refusal to face them in the open field; the Scythian scorched earth policy so infuriated the Persians that Darius supposedly wrote to the Scythian king to ask him to face the Persians in the open field (Hdt. 4.126). The historicity of this letter may be questionable, but of more interest is the fact that when it suited his purposes, Herodotus was quite capable of presenting the Persians as devotees of decisive battle.

It’s also odd that Herodotus represents Mardonius as seeing the Greeks as tactically inept and not inclined to use terrain to their advantage; think what happened at Thermopylae, one of history’s finest examples of the tactical use of terrain (Hdt. 7.201-228; Diod. 11.6-10). Is Herodotus simply saying that the Persians misunderstood the Greek capacity for flexibility in warfare?

Consider the passages from Demosthenes (9.47-52) and Polybius (13.3.2-7): both men are harking back to a Golden Age of Hoplite Warfare that may never have existed. Polybius appears to be talking about the Lelantine War, more than five centuries before his own day. And Demosthenes is praising the honourable methods of the old Spartan enemies, despite the fact that in the funeral speech ascribed to him by Thucydides, Pericles scorned those very Spartans for their reliance on stratagems and ruses! (Thuc. 2.39.1) The rhetorical content of both passages renders them automatically suspect. Even the passage from Thucydides (4.126.5-6), who at least knew what he was talking about, is not entirely safe. After all, it purports to represent what Brasidas said to inspire a force of troops who were relatively new to hoplite warfare, as they were feeling threatened by ‘savage’ Illyrians. It is hardly surprising that he would laud their method of warfare.

We need to keep these issues in mind, as when presented with a picture as compelling as that drawn by Hanson, it is all too easy to forget that this is a ‘model’ or an ‘ideal type’. It is a tool to enable us to gain understanding of Greek battle, synthesizing features which are common to many, but by no means all, Greek battles in an attempt to manufacture a mental construct which never ‘really’ existed. This does not mean that the model is useless, simply that we have to be careful how we apply it. There’s a school of ‘pop psychology’ called Neuro-Linguistic Programming, one of the central principles of which is that ‘The map is not the territory’. Regardless of the merits or otherwise of NLP, when it comes to Greek Warfare we should make a point of keeping in mind this distinction between maps and territories.

Consider firstly the claim that the ‘Hoplite Battle’ was the central act of Greek warfare. This claim simply doesn’t bear serious scrutiny. It is, frankly, disingenuous to speak of ‘Greek warfare’ and ‘hoplite warfare’ as if the two were synonymous. In Thessaly, for instance, cavalry was the dominant military arm; this is hardly surprising when one envisages the Thessalian landscape’s plains and gently rolling hills (Plat., Leg. 1.625d); there appear to have been Thessalian hoplites, but they were less significant than the cavalry (Xen., Hell. 6.1.8-9). The ‘primitive’ Greeks in the mountains of western Greece, such as the Acharnanians, Aetolians, and Ozolian Locrians, fought as lightly-armed missile troops, specialising in skirmishes and ambushes (Thuc. 1.5, 3.94, 97-8). The Cretans and Rhodians were famous for their skills with the bow and sling, respectively. The Greeks of the island poleis may have been more inclined to naval rather than land warfare – after all, who were they going to fight? The Sicilian Greeks appear to have relied far more on their cavalry than on their hoplites; Thucydides’ account of the early stages of Athens’ doomed Sicilian expedition indicates that the Syracusan hoplites were inexperienced and ineffective, unlike their potent cavalry and missile troops.

It could be countered that although these states were all Greek, none of them was truly a mainstream Greek society. What of the Greeks in the ‘hoplite heartland’ of the Peloponnese, Central Greece, and Euboea? For states such as Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Corinth, Argos, Plataea, and so forth, warfare generally meant hoplite warfare. But in some respects the very term ‘hoplite warfare’ seems meaningless. In the first place, as Louis Rawlings has argued, hoplite warfare did not solely consist of battles. Hoplites could on occasion fight as marines, and could serve a police function or perform garrison duties, as well as participating in raids and reprisals – effectively acts of guerrilla warfare.

In addition to this, the Hanson thesis assumes that Greek warfare followed an uninterrupted learning curve, where two centuries or more of ‘pure’ hoplite warfare came to an end with the Persian Wars, after which hoplite battle became more and more sophisticated over the course of the Peloponnesian Wars and the Theban Hegemony. Such an assumption is unwarranted, and is lacking in evidence, as there is hardly any evidence for how battles were fought before Marathon, and what little evidence there is appears to contradict Hanson’s idea. Furthermore, this thesis ignores cultural differences between various Greek states and assumes that all hoplite armies fought in an essentially identical fashion, which was not the case.

Consider the Athenian army, which appears to have been officially mobilised very rarely before the late sixth century. Scythian archers were a common subject on Athenian vase paintings in this period; curiously, on some vases they are shown as operating in association with the regular infantry, shooting from between the hoplites of the front ranks. They are reminiscent of the archers in the Iliad, relying on their comrades’ shields for protection (Hom., Il. 4.112-4, 8.266-72). It might seem unsafe to rely on Vase illustrations as evidence for Athenian warfare during the ‘Golden Age of Hoplite Battle’, but this notion of missile troops being deployed amongst the hoplites seems to have been a Spartan practice during the seventh century. Several passages from Tyrtaeus testify to the importance of missile troops in early Spartan warfare, notably when he exhorts them as follows:

‘And you, light-armed, squatting under a shield here and there, must throw great rocks and hurl smooth javelins while you stand close to the heavy armed.’ (Tyrt. Fr. 11.35-8)

Lest we be tempted to argue that missile troops were integrated into the Spartan army only in its early history, it is worth contemplating Herodotus’ somewhat cryptic statement that each Spartan at the battle of Plataea was accompanied by seven helots, while a single helot accompanied each hoplite of the perioikoi. These helots were equipped as light-armed missile troops, and were reportedly ‘in attendance’ on the hoplites, which probably indicates that they were not deployed simply on the flanks (Hdt. 9.10.1, 9.29.1). This is irreconcilable with the notion of hoplite battle as a battle of equals, with the disdain supposedly felt by hoplites for the use of missiles in battle, and with the basic notion of hoplite tactics being based on solid lines of heavily armed infantrymen.

Thucydides makes Pericles scorn the Spartans for their reliance on trickery, and their tactics at Thermopylae seem to defy everything that the model of ‘Hoplite Battle’ takes for granted. Herodotus claims that the Spartan hoplites at Thermopylae turned and pretended to flee, only to turn back and strike the Persians who had broken ranks and fallen into disorder in attempting to press their apparent advantage (Hdt. 7.211.3). Such a stratagem looks decidedly unGreek, foreshadowing the famous ‘Parthian Shot’ or even Mongol tactics. It might not be surprising that the Spartans should have been capable of such a manoeuvre, though, considering the fact that unlike the free citizen militias so feted by Hanson, they were in effect professional soldiers who engaged in a life-long training programme. Even the Athenian phalanx at Marathon, however, appears to have exhibited a degree of flexibility unimaginable for the phalanxes we read of in the pages of Thucydides and Xenophon; or at least unimaginable for their phalanxes as seen through the prism of our model of ‘hoplite battle’ (Hdt. 6.113).

If the Spartans and Athenians offer exceptions to the model of ‘Hoplite Battle’, the Thebans stand out in blatant defiance of it. The hoplite infantry was indeed the dominant military arm in Boeotia, but the aristocratic cavalry played a crucial role in Boeotian battles, notably the Boeotian victory over Athens at Delium in 424 (Thuc. 4.90-6). The Boeotian cavalry pursued the defeated Athenians until nightfall; this murderous pursuit cost the Athenians dearly and was hardly in accordance with the spirit of ‘Hoplite Battle’ (4.96.8, 101.2). What’s more, the cavalry had been instrumental in the Boeotian victory, rather than just its aftermath. The Boeotian left wing had been under pressure from the Athenian right, so Pagondas sent two cavalry squadrons to support the beleaguered infantry. The cavalry rode behind a hill, staying out of sight, and appeared in such a way as to surprise the Athenians who broke and fled, thinking that a new army had arrived (4.96.5-6). Such reliance on surprise might seem contrary to the openness so characteristic of conventional model of ‘Hoplite Battle’, but it was clearly not regarded as dishonourable among the Boeotians: it seems clear that the Boeotian victory over Athens at Coronea in 446 was regarded as a heroic victory (3.62.5, 67.3, 4.92.6), despite being an ambush rather than a set-piece battle (1.113.2).

The notion of the ambush at Coronea being a decisive battle – and it surely was decisive – is an interesting one, as it forces the question of what Greeks thought of when they spoke of battle. When Greeks spoke of battle, did they automatically mean the set-piece hoplite battle as envisaged by Hanson, and apparently as indicated by Herodotus in his Mardonius speech? Hanson argues, following Pritchett, that the existence of an extensive vocabulary devoted purely to set-piece hoplite battles demonstrates the centrality of shock battle to Greek culture. The careful delineation of the set-piece battle's various stages and areas of the battlefield might support this thesis, but while this certainly might indicate how important shock battle was to the Greeks, it might equally mean nothing more than that that unlike other forms of military engagement, the pitched battle between hoplites had easily distinguished components. After all, the fact that an activity has its own jargon hardly indicates how important it was to the wider culture.

Such pitched battles were known as ‘drawn-ups,’ as ‘battles by agreement,’ as ‘battles in the plain,’ and as battles that were ‘just and open.’ The problem with this analysis is that with the exception of parataxis – ‘drawn-up’ – these terms are quite rare in our sources. This perhaps suggesting that the pitched battle was a far less frequent occurrence than modern writers would like to admit. There is no doubt, for instance, that the battle of Coronea in 446, as mentioned already, was a fully-credited battle, but it would be hard to use any of the terms Pritchett and Hanson cite to describe it. Or look at the battles of Sphacteria in 425 or Amphipolis in 421 – both battles were notable for the asymmetry of the opposing sides’ losses – for example, seven of Brasidas’ men fell at Amphipolis, as against 600 or so of Cleon’s – this asymmetry is attributed by Thucydides to neither battle being a pitched or drawn up battle (Thuc, 4.38.5, 5.11.2). But even the term parataxis was not used exclusively to refer to hoplite battles. Xenophon uses the term for cavalry formations (Hell. 4.3.5, 7.5.23), and Polybius uses it not specifically for Greek infantry encounters, but also for battles between Romans and Gauls (2.18.2, 2.26.8), Romans and Gauls and Etruscans together (2.20.2, 4), and Macedonian phalangites against Illyrians (2.70.6).

Other terms for battle are frustratingly vague, and are never applied in a manner exclusive to the pitched hoplite battle. The Homeric term ponos, used by Herodotus on occasion, really just means ‘toil’ or ‘struggle’ (Hom., Il. 6.77; Hdt. 6.114, 7.224.1), and the verb symballein, conveying the sense of ‘coming together’ is used to refer to battle in a vague sense by both Homer and Herodotus (Hom., Il. 3.70, 20.55; Hdt. 1.77, 1.82, 7.210.2). Kindunos, meaning ‘danger’ or ‘risk’, is used frequently by Polybius (1.33.4, 34.9, 2.28.9, 3.84.15), but again has no specific application to hoplite warfare, and even agon, which basically means ‘contest’, is usually applied to battles in a largely metaphorical way, whether by Phormio addressing his men (Th.2.89.8) or Polybius describing the battles of the Trebia or Cannae (3.71.5, 116.2).

The term mache is indiscrimately applied to battles of all sorts by Greek writers. It implies virtually nothing about the nature of the fighting which took place. Homer uses it constantly for mass fighting, but also occasionally for single combat (Il. 7.263, 11.255, 11.542). Herodotus describes pitched battles such as Marathon and Plataea as machai (6.117.1, 9.69.1), but also uses the term to mean simply a style of warfare, as practised by the Lydian cavalry, the Sagartians, or even the Greeks, in the Mardonius speech (1.79, 7.85.2, 7.9.1). Thucydides uses the term in a broad sense for the encounters at Sphacteria (4.39.1), Delium (4.93.2, 95.2, 101.1, 101.3), Amphipolis (5.11.2, 12.2), and Mantinea (5.74.1, 75.1, 75.4). This is particularly striking, when we remember that he specifically said that neither Sphacteria nor Amphipolis was a pitched battle; it might seem odd that he does not apply any more precise term than mache to describe Mantinea, say. Xenophon also uses this vague, generalised word when he writes of such classic set-piece encounters as the Nemea River, second Coronea, Leuctra, and second Mantinea (Hell. 4.2.23, 4.3.16, 6.4.8, 7.5.27); but also uses it in the famous ‘Tearless Battle’ of 368 (Hell. 7.1.32), even though this was not even a battle; no fighting took place, only the slaughter of fleeing Argives and Arcadians.

Where does this leave us? The ‘hoplite battle’ is to some extent a chimera; set piece battles took place on a surprisingly infrequent basis. Interstate warfare was indeed a commonplace of Greek life, but when we read that a battle took place, we should not automatically assume that it was a pitched battle between two similarly armed and trained groups of hoplites. Ancient rhetoric has led modern writers to ignore the evidence, and instead to force the facts that we have to fit a flawed and generalised theory. Herodotus’ celebrated description of the Greek way of war, although it is very useful for studying the ideology of what set-piece battles did take place, does not provide us with a microscope to scrutinise all ancient battle accounts. Rather, it is a distorting mirror, warping the way we study Greek warfare. Without Herodotus to lead us astray we might not have been tempted to assume a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model of Greek warfare, and would have recognised that there was no ‘Greek Way of War’. Greece in the Archaic and Classical periods is best viewed as a military matrix, throwing up many variants on how heavily-armed infantry could be used in battle, with or without the assistance of cavalry, missile troops, or even ships.

University of Warwick, April 2003.

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[1] Kakutani, Michiko, ‘Critic’s Notebook; How Books Have Shaped U.S. Policy’, New York Times, April 5, 2003, Late Edition – Final, Section D, Page 7, Column 5.

[2] Yet wars the Greeks do wage, and, as I learn, most senselessly they do it, in their wrongheadedness and folly. When they have declared war against each other, they come down to the fairest and most level ground that they can find and there they fight, so that the victors come not off without great harm; and of the vanquished I say not so much as a word, for they are utterly destroyed. Yet speaking as they do the same language, they should end this dispute by the means of herald and messengers, and by any means other than fighting; or if needs must that they war against each other, they should discover each where the strongest defence lies, and there make his essay. (Hdt. 7.9.2)

[3] Now as for these Illyrians, for those who have had no experience of them, the menace of their attack has terror; for their number is indeed dreadful to behold and the loudness of their battle-cry is intolerable, and the idle brandishing of their arms has a threatening effect. But for hand-to-hand fighting, if their opponents but endure such threats, they are not the men they seem; for having no regular order, they would not be ashamed to abandon any position when hard pressed; and since flight and attack are considered equally honourable with them, their courage cannot be put to the test. Besides, a mode of fighting in which everyone is his own master will provide a man the best excuse for saving himself becomingly. They think, too, that it is a less risky game to try to frighten you from a safe distance than to meet you hand to hand; otherwise they would not have taken this course in preference to that. And so you clearly see that all that was at first formidable about them is but little in reality, startling merely to eye and ear. If you withstand all this in the first onrush, and then, whenever opportunity offers, withdraw again in orderly array, you will the sooner reach safety, and will hereafter know that mobs like these, if an adversary but sustain their first onset, merely make a flourish of valour with threats from afar in menace of attack, but if one yields to them, they are right upon his heels, quick enough to display their courage when all is safe. (Thuc.4.126.5-6)

[4] But for my own part, while practically all the arts have made a great advance and we are living today in a very different world from the old one, I consider that nothing has been more developed and improved than the art of war. For in the first place I am informed that in those days the Lacedaemonians, like everyone else, would spend the four or five months of the summer “season” in invading and laying waste the enemy’s territory with heavy infantry and levies of citizens, and would then retire home again; and they were so old-fashioned, or rather such good citizens, that they never used money to buy an advantage from anyone, but their fighting was of the fair and open kind. But now you must surely see that most disasters are due to traitors, and none are the result of a regular pitched battle. On the other hand you hear of Philip marching unchecked, not because he leads a phalanx of heavy infantry, but because he is accompanied by skirmishers, cavalry, archers, mercenaries, and similar troops. When, relying on this force, he attacks some people that is at variance with itself, and when through distrust no one goes forth to fight for his country, then he brings up his artillery and lays siege.  I need hardly tell you that he makes no difference between summer and winter and has no season set apart for inaction. […] For so far as a campaign is concerned, provided, men of Athens, we are willing to do what is necessary, we have many advantages, such as the nature of his territory, much of which may be harried and devastated, and countless others; but for a pitched battle [agōn] he is in better training than we are. (Dem. 9.47-52)

[5] The ancients, as we know, were far removed from such malpractices. For so far were they from plotting mischief against their friends with the purpose of aggrandizing their own power, that they would not even consent to get the better of their enemies by fraud, regarding no success as brilliant or secure unless they crushed the spirit of their adversaries in open battle. For this reason they entered into a convention among themselves to use against each other neither secret missiles nor those discharged from a distance, and considered that it was only a hand-to-hand battle at close quarters that was truly decisive. Hence they preceded war by a declaration, and when they intended to do battle gave notice of the fact and of the spot to which they would proceed and array their army. But at the present they say it is a sign of poor generalship to do anything openly in war. Some slight traces, however, of the ancient principles of warfare survive among the Romans. For they make declaration of war, they very seldom use ambuscades, and they fight hand-to-hand at close quarters. (Polyb. 13.3.2-7)

Chesterton and Orwell: Reflections on 1984

“But among critics whose interest in Chesterton is extra-literary,” wrote Ian Boyd in John Sullivan’s 1974 work G.K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal, “those who perhaps have done the most damage to his artistic reputation are a group who might be called the professional Catholics. For them, Chesterton is an institution to be defended rather than an author to be discussed.”

It’s an important point, and one I was reminded of yesterday when reading David Allen Green’s speculations that Orwell penned Nineteen Eighty-Four in response to Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill. I was tempted towards kneejerk reactions. They're rarely of use to anybody.

“Why did George Orwell call his last novel Nineteen Eighty-Four?” asks Green, “The usual explanation for the choice of title of Nineteen Eighty-Four is that it was a play on the last two digits of 1948, the year the manuscript was finished. This has never convinced me. I think there may be a better explanation, which comes from George Orwell’s intellectual hostility to the Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton.”

Afraid to come upon a blood red cup and the beating of the wings of an eagle...

Before observing that the action in Napoleon begins in 1984, Green concedes that the coincidence upon which his theory is based has been previously noticed, but says that he is unaware of any other attempt to assess the alternative explanation that he offers.

Green describes Napoleon as he understands it, and assembles an impressive litany of quotations from Orwell scornfully dismissing a host of Catholic writers for what he regarded as their intellectual dishonesty. Focusing on the preface to Napoleon, Green casts the book as a diatribe against progress and observes that:

“Taking the stories as a whole it is not too much of a strain to see Nineteen Eighty-Four as a riposte to The Napoleon of Notting Hill. There are many points of comparison. Both books show that a belief in revolution that appears to have gone wrong, and both focus on the frustrations of a sympathetic central character as he attempts to challenge the prevailing system. Both are utopian/dystopian visions, containing prophecies extrapolated from current trends.”

It’s an interesting thesis, but the more I look at it, the less I think it plausible, not least because it seems to me that although it's a commonplace among Chesterton fans that Orwell may have intended his title as a reference to Chesterton’s work, I think this unlikely; still less do I think Orwell's book a riposte to Chesterton's.

Wherever I see a red pillar-box and a yellow sunset, there my heart beats...
Even if we can dismiss as ahistorical the popular notion that Nineteen Eighty-Four was so named as a playful reference to 1948, the year in which Orwell finished writing it, we should at least recognise that there are other theories beyond the two Green cites.

“Orwell’s title remains a mystery,” wrote Robert McCrum in the Observer in 2009. “Some say he was alluding to the centenary of the Fabian Society, founded in 1884. Others suggest a nod to Jack London’s novel The Iron Heel (in which a political movement comes to power in 1984) or perhaps to one of his favourite writer GK Chesterton’s stories, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which is set in 1984.”

Well, only the opening sequence of Napoleon is set in 1984, the bulk of the book being set a decade later and the finale being set a further twenty years after that, and it’s rather stretching things to call Chesterton Orwell’s favourite writer, but still, McCrum’s general approach is sound; he doesn’t think the supposedly popular 1948-Nineteen Eighty-Four theory worth even a mention, and notes that there are several theories as why Orwell bestowed that now notorious date on the book. He could also have mentioned, for instance, the possibility that Orwell had been influenced by his late wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s poem ‘End of the Century, 1984’.

It seems at least as likely that the quest for what lay behind Orwell’s setting of his story in 1984 is a fool’s errand. Peter Davison’s note on the text of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of the novel notes that Orwell “first set his story in 1980, but, as the time taken to write the book dragged on (partly because of his illness) that was changed to 1982, and, later, to 1984.”

There may, in short, be no special significance to the date.

That which is large enough for the rich to covet is large enough for the poor to defend...

That said, there’s much of value in the piece, not least the litany of quotations from Orwell’s writings which go some way to substantiating Randal Marlin’s observation in Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion that,

“Orwell had his baggage of prejudices, against Roman Catholics (Irish in particular) and gays, for example. G.K. Chesterton, who was not Irish, excited his great antipathy, perhaps because Chesterton was so adept at using words in defence of causes Orwell opposed and in ways that Orwell objected to, as explained in his essay ‘Notes on Nationalism’”.

Green's collection of quotations suggest that Orwell was less bothered by religious dishonesty than by Catholics. One thing that’s clear from them is that Orwell never really understood Chesterton, a failing which Greene seems to share. Green argues that the possibility that the title of Nineteen Eighty-Four was drawn from Napoleon “allows us to explore an often overlooked part of Orwell’s political outlook: the deep hostility of a decent and progressive liberal to the intellectual and moral dishonesty of religious conservatives.”

We’re into ‘begging the question’ territory there, but still…

A madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man...

One of Orwell’s earliest published writings appeared in Chesterton’s G.K.’s Weekly. Entitled ‘A Farthing Newspaper’, it dealt with corporate influence on public opinion through the news media, a concern which Chesterton shared and which has, of course, hardly become less relevant with the passing decades. John Rodden observes in George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation that – far from harbouring a deep hostility to a man who’d helped launch his career – Orwell generally admired Chesterton, who he resembled in many ways, notably in his patriotism and his love for the commonplace and the common man.

If Orwell developed an antipathy towards Chesterton, it was because he felt that in his later work he had sacrificed his talent and his intellectual honesty to propagandising for the Catholic Church; regardless of the merits or otherwise or Orwell’s analysis, it’s important to recognise that Orwell believed that the dishonesty he perceived was a hallmark only of “the last twenty years or so” of Chesterton’s life.

Most critics of Chesterton's work perceive a difference between his writing before December 1914 and his writing after his recovery from a rarely-broken coma that lasted for several months – Dudley Barker, surveying Chesterton’s oeuvre in Sullivan’s G.K. Chesterton: A Centenary Appraisal, observes that “not much needs to be said, indeed, about most of what Chesterton wrote after 1914”, and it’s this latter writing that Orwell so disparaged.

Napoleon, it should be pointed out, was not one of Chesterton’s later books; indeed, it was one of his earliest, published in 1904. Far from being “written from the point of view of a Catholic populist,” as Green says, Napoleon was written when Chesterton was an Anglican; indeed, Chesterton wouldn’t be accepted into the Catholic Church until 1922, eighteen years after Napoleon’s publication. Indeed, Napoleon is curious, as Christopher Hollis comments in his 1970 book The Mind of Chesterton, for being “alone among Chesterton's books,” almost devoid of references to religion.

Every man is dangerous ...  who cares only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself.

In truth, I’m not convinced that Green really understands Napoleon at all, not compared to, say, Terry Pratchett, who showed a sure understanding of the book’s engine when he said of Chesterton that:

“It’s worth pointing out that in The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill he gave us two of the most emotionally charged plots in the twentieth century: one being that both sides are actually the same side; it doesn’t matter which side we’re talking about, both sides are the same. This has been the motor of half the spy novels of the century. The other plot can’t be summarised so succinctly, but the basic plot of The Napoleon of Notting Hill is that someone takes seriously an idea that wasn’t intended to be taken seriously and gives it some kind of nobility by so doing.”

Consider Green's claim that the hero of the book is “Auberon Quin, an eccentric who suddenly becomes king.” Is this really accurate? I would have thought that insofar as Napoleon has a hero at all, it’s the ‘Napoleon’ of the title, the Adam Wayne who becomes Provost of Notting Hill and conqueror of London.

Does the book really focus on the frustrations of a sympathetic central character as he attempts to challenge the prevailing system? Hardly: Quin changes the system with ease, for a joke, and Wayne embraces the new system with a violent passion.

Can Napoleon really be described as either a utopian or a dystopian vision, containing prophecies extrapolated from current trends? Not really – Chesterton opens with a spread of the sort of predictions so common in his only day only to discard them and say that none of these prophecies or trends mean anything. People, he believes, don’t really change.

The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. ..

I’m not even convinced by the idea that Napoleon is best known nowadays for “its preface, entitled Introductory Remarks on the Art of Prophecy,” and supposedly a few hundred words long. The opening chapter bears that title, and it clocks in at 1,700 or so words, but I’m far from sold on the idea that this is why the book’s best known now, and I’m certain this isn’t “Chesterton’s clearest and best known statement against ‘progress’”, not least because it's not about progress so much as it is about prophecy, about whether the future can be predicted.

Chesterton isn't really interested in the prophecies of his contemporaries, after all; he needs his book to be set in places that he knows and loves, but cannot set it in his own day so casts his tale into the future, and needs to justify why it's not that different from the present.

What's more, if you take a look at the selected Chesterton quotations of ‘progress’ at the American Chesterton Society, you’ll see that not one is from Napoleon.

In any case, contrary to Orwell’s claim, Chesterton didn’t fear progress; what he was sceptical of was the cult of progress that was rife throughout the Edwardian era, before it was laid low in the trenches of the Western Front. And if Chesterton ever penned a definitive statement on that, it was in the second chapter of Heretics, published the year after Napoleon, and addressing themes he would return to again in 1908’s Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday.

I should stop, as I feel I’ve fallen into the trap of treating Chesterton as an institution to be defended rather than an author to be discussed. Boyd is probably right when he says that Orwell’s take on the later Chesterton as a violent propagandist is merely a hostile version of the caricatured portrait of Chesterton as Catholic champion so held forth by his Catholic supporters.

If you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time...

And there is something to be said for considering the idea that at some level Orwell might have written his work in response to Chesterton. That's what Christopher Hollis thought, at any rate:

“Chesterton wrote The Napoleon of Notting Hill in 1904, proclaiming that he was narrating events that were to happen in eighty years time -- that is to say, in 1984. There is no exact evidence that Orwell had this coincidence in mind when he chose the title of his own book.

But, whether intentional or not, Orwell’s book, in which the death of freedom brought with it the death of every decency even down to the proverbial honour among thieves, was certainly a protest against the irresponsibility of Chesterton's forgetfulness of the great lesson: he who draws the sword will perish by the sword, and violence, when once employed, cannot easily be quenched. It is hard, as one looks at the tale of current violence, not to sympathise with Orwell's impatience.”

Chesterton, of course, wrote before the Great War in which his brother died, and the Spanish Civil War where Orwell witnessed the horrors of violence begetting violence.

Anyway, I may think utter bunkum the idea that Orwell intended Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984 as a riposte to an intellectually dishonest Chesterton, but I’m glad I’ve been given food for thought. That original post is well worth the pondering, not least because it shows how a "decent and progressive liberal" can have an almost obsessive -- even bigoted -- antipathy towards Catholics.

Remember, Remember

A couple of years ago I had rather a long discussion with an evangelical Anglican friend of mine, a mathematician of Calvinist inclinations, about Foxe's Book of Martyrs and perhaps the most famous passage in that dubious old tome, this being his account of the execution of bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley on 16 October 1555. I was trying to explain that Latimer's celebrated exhortation to Ridley was almost certainly a pious fiction.

Play the Man...

Most of you know the line, I expect. I first learned it when I read Ray Bradbury's brilliant Fahrenheit 451 eight or nine years back:

"They crashed the front door and grabbed at a woman, though she was not running, she was not trying to escape. She was only standing, weaving from side to side, her eyes fixed upon a nothingness in the wall as if they had struck her a terrible blow upon the head. Her tongue was moving in her mouth, and her eyes seemed to be trying to remember something, and then they remembered and her tongue moved again:

'Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.'"

What a line. What a cry to confidence. What panache. What rot.

The first edition of Foxe's Book of Martyrs carries no trace of this line, which seems, in any case, a tad eloquent for a man about to be burned alive -- it certainly doesn't really tally with Latimer's behaviour and words as otherwise related by Foxe. The account of the executions in Foxe's first edition was clearly based on the detailed eyewitness accounts given him by Augustine Bernher and George Shipside, both of whom were close associates of Ridley and Latimer. 

Absent from the 1563 edition, but present in the 1578 one, the question is how did it come about? Granted, Foxe sought for further information when expanding his original text, but he'd clearly gone to great effort in his first edition to get his account of Latimer and Ridley's executions as accurate as possible, and it's difficult to see why Bernher and Shipside would have refrained from sharing this detail with him, were it authentic.

It seems that somebody must have provided Foxe with this surely fictional detail at some point between the publications of his first and second editions, with Foxe eagerly accepting it as true, given how his description of the executions already echoed how the Apostolic father St Polycarp of Smyrna met his fate; Eusebius' account of Polycarp's death records that a voice had cried out "Be strong, Polycarp, and play the man."

Written by the Winners...

Foxe is a tricky source for historians, as it's very clear that it was written as propaganda, and indeed is a classic case of history being written by the victors -- which isn't always the way, for what it's worth -- and recently-persecuted victors at that. It's ultimately no more trustworthy than, say, a history of British involvement in Ireland as published by the IRA would be. 

The first English edition was published under state auspices a handful of years into Elizabeth's reign as a way of promoting the independence of Elizabethan England by showing that the Catholic Church was a brutal and cruel Antichrist. Foxe had begun work some years earlier, initially relying on propagandist tracts, designed to encourage opposition to the regime of Mary I, as his earliest sources. 

Unfortunately, Foxe was systematically used as state propaganda for centuries afterwards. As Diarmaid McCullough says in Reformation:

"From his various refuges in the exile communities abroad Foxe began gathering material which placed England Protestant sufferings against the background of the international fight with Antichrist. As Acts and Monuments, its English version first published in 1563 in the safety of Elizabeth’s reign and quickly nicknamed ‘Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, this massive and repeatedly expanded compilation became one of the cornerstones of English Protestant identity, a potent reminder of the militant character of the English Reformation."

After swelling to a monstrous size, the book was edited down by 1700 into an even more sensational treatise on the evils of Popery, luridly illustrated folios being preserved in England's churches in order to convince the English people of the evils of Catholicism.

Foxe reveals a huge amount of important stuff and is invaluable as a carefully-controlled source for sixteenth-century England. The thing is though, that he's far from impartial in his melodramatic accounts, he does his best to gloss over the fact that the persecutions were -- bizarrely and appallingly to our eyes -- anything but unpopular, he exaggerates the presence of weeping crowds crying in sympathy at the public executions, he plays down the extraordinary extent to which the persecuting authorities sought to persuade rather than convict most Protestants, he eagerly repeats obviously biased and unsubstantiated claims, and he conspicuously omits the martyrdoms of those he presumably felt deserved execution for their beliefs. 

He also egregiously passes over inconvenient facts like Ridley having supported Jane Grey and preached from the pulpit that both Mary and Elizabeth were bastards who were not entitled to inherit the throne, or that Latimer's hands weren't entirely free from the ashes of burnt heretics.

For all that, Foxe reveals a lot incidentally and despite his his own intentions, his work inadvertently demonstrating that popular support for the martyrs was often limited, and that the authorities frequently went to extraordinary lengths to try to save prisoners from the flames. Leaving aside the cynical fact that a repentant heretic was far more valuable than a defiant dead one, from their point of view, the Catholic persecutors were desperate to avoid condemning Protestants to death, as they believed that if they executed unrepentant heretics, they were effectively condemning them to eternal fire. 

If Mary and Pole hadn't died so soon...

Seemingly Mary received a rapturous welcome when she became Queen -- over opposition from the likes of Ridley -- in July 1553. More than 800 wealthy Protestants -- including Foxe -- fled England, and the Duke of Northumberland recanted his opposition to the Catholic Church after his rebellion was swiftly quashed, spontanteously admitting at the scaffold that his own Protestantism had been an opportunistic sham, motivated by ambition and greed. As early as 1554 it was a standard lament among the Protestants who had fled that the English people and clergy at large had returned to Catholicism, even in the parts of the country where Protestantism had been strongest. 

It doesn't take much to see pointers to the extent to which Mary's reign had returned England to Catholicism. Ten of the 23 bishops she'd inherited from her brother returned to unity with the Catholic Church, and after her death all bar one of her bishops rejected the Elizabethan settlement. More than two thirds of Edward's clergy returned to unity with the Catholic Church under Mary, and while much of this was surely down to simple opportunism, it's telling that many of them retained that allegiance after Mary's death. Indeed, even at the lowest levels of the clergy this was the case. Eamon Duffy, in Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor says it was possible in 1561 to walk from the Surrey border to the Sussex coast, crossing sixteen parishes in every one of which the incumbent had either died of influenza or been deprived of office for refusing to conform to the Elizabethan settlement.

Fires of Faith...

Contrary to popular misconceptions, largely rooted in Foxe's myth-making, Mary's reign was a golden age of Catholic preaching, publishing, and polemical argument, but unfortunately the whole period is unforgiveably tainted by Mary's persecutions of Protestants: more than 280 Protestant men and women were executed in just under four years, from February 1555 to November 1558, the most intense religious persecution of its kind anywhere in sixteenth-century Europe, an era when religious persecution was the done thing. 

Most people back then -- Catholics and Protestants alike -- believed that though regrettable it was sometimes necessary to execute people for their religious views. They believed heresy was worse than sin, that it begat sins and by causing people to sin, led to their damnation. Our eternal souls were at stake, and desperate action had to be taken to stem the heretical tide. It was this attitude that drove Mary I in her campaign against Protestants, and drove Elizabeth I in hers against Catholics.

If I can quote Duffy's Fires of Faith on this one:

"Religious persecution remained a viable government option, frequently resorted to all over Europe, well into the seventeenth century. Nor were barbaric forms of execution going out of fashion, least of all in England. Elizabeth I burned no Catholics, but she strangled, disembowelled, and dismembered more than 200. I should not myself care to allocate marks for brutality between these different methods of slow killing."

And that's not to get into those who were imprisoned or exiled, or the thousands who were slain in the suppression of Catholic revolts such as the Northern rebellion and the first Desmond rebellion, both of which took place in 1569, and the second Desmond rebellion of 1579-1583. Most of those who were executed under Elizabeth were nominally executed for treason, not for heresy, but one cannot really distinguish between the two in the sixteenth century: from the viewpoint of whoever was doing the persecuting, and given the whole question of supremacy, treason and heresy were often synonymous.

The burnings constitute an indelible stain on Mary's reign, and rightly so, but it's about time people started to get their heads around the fact that 'Bloody Mary' was nowhere near as murderous than 'Good Queen Bess'.

The Pearl of York...

In summarising the horrible ways in which Elizabeth had Catholics executed, I'm not sure why Duffy leaves out crushing, that having been the standard Elizabethan punishment for those who refused to plead their case. 

In 1586, for instance, St Margaret Clitherow, a 29-year-old butcher's wife who had converted to Catholicism a dozen or so years earlier, was arrested in York for the crime of having harboured Catholic priests -- a crime, in Elizabethan England, but one that Catholics were driven to, as without priests we cannot have Mass, cannot celebrate the Eucharist in remembrance of him, and share in that sacrament which is the source and summit of Christian life. A mother of three, Margaret refused to plead her case, as doing so would have meant that her children would have been made to testify, and would themselves probably have been tortured.

And so, rather than being tried for harbouring priests, she was executed for her silence. On the morning of Good Friday 1586 she was taken to the tollbooth at York's Ouse Bridge and was stripped naked. A handkerchief was tied across her face, and she was laid down with a sharp rock the size of a man's fist under her spine. A door was placed upon her, and rocks and stones were piled upon this, so that her spine broke and she was crushed to death. 

It took fifteen minutes for her to die.

Her broken carcass was left there for six hours.

Blood begets Blood...

One of Margaret's neighbours was a sixteen-year-old youth named Guy Fawkes who'd been baptised into the Church of England, but had become Catholic as a boy. His mother moved from York to Scotton, roughly thirty miles away, a year or so later.

Nineteen years after Margaret's martyrdom, Guy Fawkes was tortured to reveal his part in a murdeous conspiracy to blow up Parliament and kill King James I, who was hated by Britain's persecuted Catholics over his failure to remove from the Church's throat the State boot Elizabeth had planted there so firmly. Fawkes was sentenced to be hung, drawn, and quartered. 

And tonight people will light bonfires and set off fireworks to celebrate this.

Things, as you'd expect, got even worse for Catholics after the Gunpowder Plot. Shortly afterwards, parliament passed the Popish Recusants Act 1605, pressing the boot down further by -- for example -- barring Catholics from acting as legal guardians or practicing law or medicine, and mandating the receipt of Anglican communion. In 1613 there was even an unsuccessful attempt in Parliament to introduce a law to compel Catholics to wear a red hat, or coloured stockings, just so they'd be immediately identifiable. Legislated oppression against Catholics continued in all manner of ways until Robert Peel and Ireland's own Duke of Wellington gave way to popular pressure led by the Liberator himself, Daniel O'Connell, and pushed through the Catholic Relief Act of 1829. 

Even now, Catholics are technically third-class citizens in Britain, the only people specifically barred in law from even marrying someone who's in the line of succession to the throne. I'm okay with this, though; sure, it's unfair, but it doesn't make that much difference to Catholics' lives in reality. I doubt there are many Catholic schoolgirls who've been heartbroken by the prospect of having to choose between, say, Prince Harry and the Mass.

The bottom line for me is that I don't think we should be pulling threads out of the British Constitution to make a cosmetic change so that Catholics can feel better when in practice we have exactly the same rights as everybody else in Britain.

Things are okay now. The State doesn't approve of us, but it tolerates us. That's good enough, though there are signs that the tide is turning, and I just worry, at times, that that tolerance may ebb, as other groups, historically less oppressed than Britain's Catholics, demand not merely tolerance, but approval. 

But then, people who point this out tend to be misrepresented and barracked as bigots. Strange times. 

Tricks of the Mind: Thoughts on Derren Brown

Having recently had it recommended to me by a friend, I've been reading Derren Brown's Tricks of the Mind; I've had it for ages, but it's been gathering dust ever since I bought it as part of a "4 Books for £1" deal at a local charity shop, the kind of arrangement that exacts a higher toll on one's bookshelves than one's wallet. 

Brown's enthralling on the stuff he knows about, but unfortunately I had to wade through a feeble and derivative "why Christianity is rubbish" section before getting to the good stuff. The book proper, after the Preface, begins as follows:

"The Bible is not history. 

Coming to terms with this fact was a fiddly one for me, because I believed in God, Jesus and Satan (ish). And one aspect of believing in those things and meeting once a week with like-minded people is that you're never encouraged to really study the facts and challenge your own beliefs. I always imagined that challenging my beliefs might make them stronger."

That the Bible, crudely put, is not history, is hardly an earth-shaking statement. If Brown found it so, this probably reflects more on him than on the Bible, Christianity, or Judaism. While the Bible has a profound unity, it is also, in a somewhat banal sense, a library, and a library that contains all manner of literary forms and genres, only some of which claim to be relating what happened when, if that's what Brown means by 'history'.

This may have been Derren's experience; it certainly wasn't mine

I find it odd that Brown seems to think that Christians are never expected to study facts and challenge their beliefs; this certainly hasn't been my own experience, but it may be a fair reflection of Brown's own background, from which he seems to be generalising. Brown describes his religious background as follows: 

"Picture, if you require a good vomiting, a whole herd of us being encouraged to display the Pentecostal gift of 'talking in tongues' by a self-styled pastor, with the proviso that if we ceased babbling because we thought it silly then that was indeed the Devil telling us to stop. Envision, as a secondary emetic, me telling a non-Christian friend that I would pray for him, unaware of how unspeakably patronizing such an offer might sound. I would delight in being offended, and puff up with pride at being outspoken and principled. And this the result of a childhood indoctrination followed by years of circular belief to support it."

Brown, then, was a Pentecostal Evangelical in his late teens. Although I've never attended a specifically Pentecostal church, I used to go along to Manchester's main Evangelical Anglican one on Sunday evenings in order to get a serious handle on what my friends believed and why. One thing that I really got from attending there was a feeling of texture -- people believed all manner of things within the Christian matrix, and did so for all sorts of reasons. Some were incredibly curious, while others were incredibly credulous; some were deeply well-read, and some weren't well-read at all; some made a point of testing their faith by reading things and engaging with people who contradicted and opposed them, and others stayed in their own bubbles. 

I would be surprised if Brown's Pentecostal friends were radically different from my Evangelical ones in terms of their variety; indeed, it seems to me that such variety is typical for members of any belief group, given how I've seen the same range among Catholic and Atheist friends.

This looks like a man trying to rationalise a wish to walk away...

Brown, anyway, says that his road away from Christianity began when he saw a hypnotist while he was at university in the early 1990s -- he graduated from Bristol, where he'd studied law and German, in 1992. He describes how the hypnotist inspired him to find out more about mind control and other tricks, and to take up hypnotism himself, much to dismay of Christians friends, members of the university's Christian Union, and the congregation of the main student church in Bristol. This in turn led him to start wondering why people believe in the paranormal, which he says led him to ask certain questions...

Well, so he says. He also says that he'd not been to church with any regularity for a couple of years when he started down this road, which does rather lead one to think that he probably hadn't been all that serious about his faith before that point; indeed, it looks as though he must have stopped regular practice pretty soon after starting university, which makes this whole story look like a rationalisation after the fact. 

I mean, if he'd been as committed a Christian as he claims he'd been, why stop regular worship? It's not as if community isn't an important part of Christianity, after all. He was an Evangelical, remember; they tend not just to do Sunday worship, but also have house groups, and student Bible study groups, and debates, and talks, and all manner of things. It seems as though he'd never seriously engaged with any variety of Christianity as an adult, and had been drifting away from his faith long before he started dabbling in hypnotism and conjuring tricks.

A fair point, but not one he was unique in stumbling upon...

Still. He says that he started to think about the paranormal, and to read up on it, and says:

"What struck me about the people I knew who did believe in the paranormal was that they clearly had a circular belief system. Essentially, one believes X so strongly that all evidence that does not support X is ignored, and all events that fit in with X are noticed and amplified...  

The more I came up against this sort of thing, the more I became concerned that I, as a Christian, was falling into exactly the same trap. Was I not indulging the same sort of circular belief? Remembering prayers that had been answered, and forgetting those that weren't? Or deciding that they had been answered but in a less obvious way? What separated my belief from the equally firm convictions of my psychic friend, other than the fact that hers were less mainstream and therefore easier to poke fun at? Weren't we both guilty of the same comforting nonsense? Surely I was being a hypocrite. 

It's a question I still ask of intelligent Christians, because I would dearly like to hear a well-formed answer."

Confirmation bias is, of course, a huge problem, and it's a problem that goes rather beyond belief in God, the efficacy of prayer, and psychic healing. Far too often I've seen historians and others scholars cherry-pick their evidence, and Fern Elsdon-Baker's The Selfish Genius: How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin's Legacy, which I've recently read, details the tendency of contemporary pop-science books to focus on evolution from a zoological angle, without considering the rather challenging discoveries from the fields of botany and microbiology. Lawyers, of course, cherry-pick all the time, because advocacy is a very different thing from honest scholarship, which requires us to account for all the facts, however inconvenient.

So yes, this is a problem, especially in connection with prayer. It's why I get uneasy when people talk of keeping prayer diaries, in which they record their prayers and how they were answered, and with experiments where large numbers of people try to pray away illnesses or nonsense like that. Petitionary prayer is just one type of prayer, and few serious Christians think it's as simple as "having our prayers answered". Christians are expected to do it, of course, but it seems that our doing so is more about bringing us into harmony with God -- "not my will but thine" -- than about bringing God into harmony with us; he's a person, after all, not a machine, and he works, as they say, in mysterious ways.

C.S. Lewis put it well in his 1959 essay 'The Efficacy of Prayer', saying "The very question 'Does prayer work?' puts us in the wrong frame of mind from the outset. 'Work': as if it were magic, or a machine—something that functions automatically."

It can seem lazy to bring up C.S. Lewis in these discussions, as Lewis, sadly, has almost become a cliche in the popular mind, but he is very popular in the Evangelical circles in which Brown once mixed, so I'd be curious to know whether Brown ever attempted to engage with his work. I'd be very surprised if he hadn't been confronted with it at some point. Lewis gave a lot of time to thinking about petitionary prayer, tackling it in a number of essays and perhaps most memorably in his posthumously-published Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. He might not provide Brown with the answers he'd want, but I'm pretty sure he'd at least reassure him that intelligent Christians do at least try to grapple honestly with this aspect of their faith.

One of the great Dawkbot Tropes...

Anyway, Brown says that in order to avoid this self-directed charge of hypocrisy, he decided he'd start looking at the outside evidence:

"It's actually rather straightforward to do this with Christianity, although the believer is not usually encouraged to do so by his peers or pastors. 

Not only is the believer encouraged not to question or challenge his faith, but, to use Richard Dawkins' apt expression, any rational inquiry is expected to 'tip-toe respectfully away' one religion enters the room. It is dangerous to question from within, and rude to question from without. We are allowed to question people about their politics or ethics and expect them to defend their beliefs, or at least hold their own in any other important matter by recourse to evidence, yet somehow on the massive subject of God and how he might have us behave, all rational discussion must stop the moment we hear 'I believe'."

This may have been Brown's experience, but it's certainly not been mine; time and again I've heard atheists challenging Christians about their faith, and I used to do so myself when I was an an atheist, before I grew out of such adolescent nonsense after doing a lot of reading, thinking, and arguing. 

This, frankly, is a Dawkinsesque trope, and one which I've simply never seen borne out by my own experience, whether as an atheist, a reluctant and uncommitted Catholic, or a convinced practicing one. I've asked loads of other Christians about this too, and like me they say it doesn't tally with their experiences at all. And it won't do to say that well, maybe Christians can be challenged, but other religions can't; I've attended pretty robust debates with Muslims and Jews too. 

There are times when it's inappropriate to challenge people about their beliefs -- at funerals, say -- but that's just good manners. In the main, this is something we can and do talk about. Indeed, there's a bit in 1 Peter which says that Christians should always be prepared to explain why they believe the things they do, and should be willing to do this with gentleness and reverence.

I suspect that Brown, like Professor Dawkins, has fallen victim to some confirmation bias himself on this one.

As for not questioning or challenging our faith, I think the old "test everything; hold to what is true" rather puts paid to that nonsense. This may have been Brown's experience, but it's rot to assume that this is the general rule. Look at Thomas's Summa Theologica; it grapples with pretty much every argument against religious belief that there is, and does so honestly and seriously. Yes, I know Richard Dawkins dismisses it on the basis of a handful of misrepresented pages, but it's pretty clear that Dawkins didn't understand those pages or read much beyond them. I'd call Dawkins' handling of Aquinas intellectually dishonest, but that'd be to do a disservice to dishonesty.

The heart of the matter...

After pausing to misrepresent the normal way in which religious believers in the Abrahamic tradition have always interpreted their texts, Brown eventually reaches the nub of his argument, saying:

"To me and my erstwhile fellow Christians, it all rested on whether or not Christ really came back from really being dead. If he was actually resurrected as it says in the Bible, then it's all true, regardless of what one thinks of Christians and their behaviour. If he didn't, then it's all nonsense, and Christianity is a delusion."

I think this is a bit simplistic, but yes, this is broadly right: "if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain," as Paul says. And as Timothy Radcliffe puts it, building on that, "if our faith is true, it is the most important thing in the world, and if it’s not true, why are we here?"

Brown says, rightly, that the burden of proof for this lies on the Christians who claim it, and that to their credit, Christians generally try to tackle this head on; he sketchily outlines a couple of arguments in favour of the Resurrection, saying that there are plenty more, but that all these arguments depend on our taking the New Testament stories as accounts of real events, and that there is a "vast amount of impartial biblical research" that shows that the Bible is not history. 

And it was at about this point that I decided that facepalming and headdesking were worthwhile practices, not least because the examples of arguments used by Brown relate, basically, to Jesus' tomb being empty, about which Michael Grant rightly says in Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels: "But if we apply the same sort of criteria that we would apply to any other literary sources, then the evidence is firm and plausible enough to necessitate the conclusion that the tomb was indeed found empty."

This is the kind of area where honest and intelligent sceptics need to grapple with Raymond Brown's Death of the Messiah and perhaps even more importantly N.T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God, which among other things demonstrates just how bizarre it was for a bunch of first-century Jewish fishermen to have gone around claiming that their friend had risen from the dead and was in fact God.

It all depend on looking at things properly...
So, going though Brown's claims sentence by sentence...

"We cannot value personal conviction when we are looking at to what extent the story stands up as fact. Such things must be put to one side; only evidence must be of interest."

Agreed. So when approaching the New Testament documents, and other roughly contemporaneous material, as historians we have to put aside our theological and philosophical preconceptions and convictions. If we start reading the texts in the assumption that Jesus was God -- or indeed that God certainly exists -- then we basically prejudge the texts to be accurate; likewise, if we start with the assumption that Jesus was not God -- or indeed that God doesn't exist, miracles don't happen, and there's nothing to the world other than matter and energy -- then we prejudge the evidence as inaccurate and false. 

Neither approach is honest or scholarly; given the scientific impossibility of proving the non-existence of God, the only intellectually honest starting position for a historian in looking at the Biblical texts is agnosticism. 

Of course, scholars should make up their minds, and will then do further work and interpret things in line with decisions they've made based on the evidence, but they should always be open to the possibility that they're wrong and be willing to revise their views in the light of new evidence or questions, arguments, and interpretations they'd never previously considered.

Oh! Schoolboy error!

"And the evidence shows very clearly that the stories of the New Testament were written in the first couple of hundred years after the historical Jesus died."

This is about as inaccurate as you're going to get. The stories of the New Testament, as Brown would describe then, can be found in developed forms in the four Gospels and Acts, as well as occasionally creedal statements and references to the Crucifixion and Resurrection in some Pauline letters. Said Pauline letters were written between 50 and the mid-60s AD, while it's recognised by all serious Biblical scholars that John, the last of the canonical Gospels to have been written, was complete by 100 AD; indeed, there's a fragment of it in Manchester's John Rylands Library which dates to about 125AD. 

Acts is likewise generally thought to have been written by the same date, for a variety of reasons. I happen to think it was probably written rather earlier than that, such that Luke and Acts were substantially as we have them by the mid-60s AD, but what's clear is that credible scholars see the New Testament narratives as First Century documents.

In other words, the stories of the New Testament were certainly written in the first seventy years after the historical Jesus died. They may even have been written, in some cases, in the first thirty to thirty-five years after the historical Jesus died. They were all written by 100 AD, and probably rather earlier. They were not written in 230 AD.

Another schoolboy error! Outrageous!

"These stories then continued to be edited and revised for political and social needs for much of the first millennium."

Sorry, but no, they didn't, Dan Brown fantasies aside. We have thousands of manuscripts -- whether intact, substantial, or merely fragmentary -- of the New Testament documents from the medieval and classical periods, and what's remarkable about them is how consistent they are. There are loads of minor differences, usually due to scribal error or abbreviations etc, but the textual critics have done quite a job with them. 

The New Testament documents, as we now have them, are almost certainly -- the odd punctuation mark aside -- as they would have been in the First Century, and that's not radically different from how they were when the Normans did their thing at Hastings.

Better, but still not quite true...

"Jesus was one of many teachers at a time of massive social upheaval and tension, and inasmuch as one can separate his words from those later put into his mouth, he taught a mix of a much-needed social vision ('The Kingdom of Heaven') and personal stoicism."

Personal stoicism? It makes very little sense to interpret Jesus as a Stoic, a Cynic, or an Epicurean; as John P. Meier keeps hammering home in A Marginal Jew, Jesus was Jewish, and his teaching needs to be understood in that context. Brown, tellingly, betrays no familiarity with this idea. 

At the back of the book, Brown says that he read Burton Mack's Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth, as a half-believer and finished with his belief in tatters, but this merely shows the need to read widely; Mack, who saw Jesus as pretty close to a Cynic, is very much on the fringes of New Testament scholarship in his conviction that Jesus is best understood as a kind of Hellenistic philosopher. 

As for social upheaval and tension, well, I wouldn't be so sure. The Roman senator and historian Tacitus, after all, in a potted summary of Judaean history, writes of first-century Judaea that, "In Tiberius' reign all was quiet" (Histories 5.9). Tiberius reigned from 14 to 37 AD, so was emperor during while Jesus was preaching and when he was executed. That's not to say that things weren't extremely messy before and after Tiberius' reign, but generally it seems that Jesus' lifetime was reasonably peaceful -- if not necessarily happy -- in his neck of the woods.

Serious conflation here, Derren

"After he died, and after the Kingdom of Heaven hadn't arrived, his followers formed communities that were persecuted or ridiculed; they needed stories and legends to inspire them and give them credence."

Brown's conflating stuff here, unfortunately. It is widely believed that early Christians expected the Kingdom of Heaven -- in an eschatological sense, rather than an ecclesiastical or Christological one -- to come fairly soon after the Resurrection, but it's clear that they didn't expect it to come immediately afterwards. Rather, they seem to have expected it to come within their own lifetimes, and only took to writing down the stories they told when it became clear that this might not be on the cards!

Sticking to the central story of Christianity -- the Crucifixion and Resurrection -- it's significant that the earliest New Testament book to have been written, 1 Thessalonians, which was written about 50AD, speaks of Jesus having been executed and raised to life, and also addresses the reality that Christians had died and that more would die before Jesus would come again. 

One of the key things we need to remember when reading the Pauline letters is that they were written for the benefit of people who were already Christians, and who were already familiar with the story of Jesus, so these references, within twenty years of the Crucifixion, shouldn't be understood as things Paul made up around 50AD. They were already believed.

Just as interesting is the passage at 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul says:

"For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me."

This passage, though written in the mid-50s, clearly reflects a rather earlier tradition; indeed, it's almost a truism among Biblical scholars that the first sentence here -- if not the second too -- is a creedal statement, that is, it was a statement of belief that Paul received in the mid-30s, when he himself became a Christian, having previously persecuted them.

In other words, if the early Christians made up this stuff, they did it very quickly, pretty much immediately after Jesus' death. And this, of course, invites the question of why they would have done such a thing. How do we explain the early Church, as testified to by Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus, and others, if we're to dismiss the idea of the Resurrection?

So speaks a man who's clearly not read much ancient history

"So they created them: as was customary, words and actions that fitted present needs were put into the mouths and lives of historical figures and then read as history."

As was customary? Well, yes, this used to happen in ancient historical writing, but it took time: Livy put speeches into the mouths of Roman generals from hundreds of years before his day, speeches that probably tells us rather more about Augustan Rome than the Middle Republic, but this was centuries later, when said historical figures were shadows from the distant past; Herodotus had done the same thing, and it's clear that many of the taller tales he told had an aetiological purpose, a Kiplingesque function to explain things in his own day with reference to events long before he had lived; even speeches attributed by Tacitus to British chieftains decades earlier are clearly things he'd thought they would have said, poetic truths deployed artistically because he had no way of knowing what could have been said.

Not all ancient writers were like this, however, and it's ludicrous and flatly ahistorical to describe this sort of thing as 'customary': Thucydides and Polybius, for instance, make it clear that they tried to be as accurate as possible, especially with reference to things they could check. 

The Evangelists clearly had evangelistic rather than historical aims in writing their work, but they wrote close enough to the events they described to be able to check a fair amount of it, even if they weren't eyewitnesses to said events. Indeed, given that the earliest versions of the story of Jesus were extant in the immediate aftermath of his death, it's clear that there would have been been plenty of people around who could have criticised and contradicted any attempts to attribute words and deeds to Jesus fallaciously.

That's not to say that individual little details couldn't have been attributed to him, but the core structure facts of the story can hardly have been cooked up quickly, and we know they were in place in the mid-30s.

Myth-making takes time, that's the problem

"Inspiring figures were enormously bent, stretched and rewritten so that their 'lives' would fit what they had come to stand for."

Yes, this happened all the time in the ancient world, but again, it took time. It didn't happen quickly. This seems to be the main problem for Brown: he's convinced the Christian story took much longer to take form that it did, and given that he thinks it was developed over centuries, he's all too ready to believe that it was similar to, I dunno, Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus. This'd be a fair thing to think if the Gospels were late and consciously ahistorical texts like the Gnostic Gospels, but they were all written early, and clearly based on earlier -- and essentially stable -- traditions.

Communities, not committees, and in a traditional of oral teaching

"Although the Gospels are attributed to individuals, they were written largely by communities."

There's some truth to this; although the conventional attributions of the Gospels to their traditional authors can be dated to the early Second Century, it's clear that the Gospels arose within communities and surely reflected the cultures and concerns of those communities. This, however, is hardly grounds for discarding them as historically valueless.  

Michael Grant, to quote him again, says that, "Like Paul, the Evangelists depended to some extent upon eyewitnesses (or their children) and upon the handing down of tradition from person to person. For oral teaching, which required elaborate memorizing, was very highly developed among the Jews; and so the Gospels, too, were largely built up by oral transmission. As time went on the individual items of information (pericopae) which had thus been transmitted were moulded together into somewhat larger units for purposes of worship in the emerging churches."

We, of course, have no tradition of oral teaching, so it won't do to compare modern games of 'Chinese whispers' with ancient oral traditions. 

The different Gospels seem to have been written in different ways.

• Mark is the most primitive, and seems in some sense to have been the simple combination of a passion narrative with an account of Jesus' teaching; it's very plausible that it arose almost naturally within a community, but given how there's no consensus on where that community might have been, it seems foolhardy to describe it as the product of one.

• I strongly suspect that Matthew is an early Greek reworking of an Aramaic original, or at least a recomposition of Mark in light of other traditions some of which may have been in Aramaic and attributed to Matthew -- who if the text is trustworthy may well have been literate and competent at a form of shorthand -- but in any case, the mainstream scholarly position is that Matthew was written by a noneyewitness who depended on other sources, at least two of which were written; the vast majority of scholars believe that its author was a Jewish Christian, with most thinking he wrote in Syria, probably Antioch.

• Luke is presented, along with Acts, as the work of an individual, and there is no good evidence to suggest otherwise. The author of Luke speaks of several others having written accounts of Jesus' life before him, and puts forward his work as a systematic synthesis of these; certainly, he seems to have drawn extensively on Mark and also at least two other sources.

• John is something of a mystery, and its authorship has long puzzled people, with scholarship having varied over the years from seeing it as the work of a eyewitness to nothing of the sort, and seeing it as the most historical Gospel to the least historical one. Views vary wildly, with the one thing that's clear being that it's very different to the other three Gospels. It looks, on balance, to have arisen in a  different context to the other three Gospels, and to have been, ultimately, the work of two authors: one who wrote most of it, and then an editor from the same Christian community who added in a couple of extra passages, notably the conclusion. More than any of the other Gospels it can be described as the work of a community, but even then it was hardly the work of a committee; rather, it reflects the beliefs of the community in which it arose.

The core facts are remarkably stable, and there's no trace of them ever being otherwise

"Great and powerful stories were told, changed and rearranged over several generations."

Expressed in this way, this is massively simplistic. It seems, rather, that there were three stages in how the Gospels came to be composed: the earliest stage was that of simple memory, with people telling the stories based on what they'd seen or heard -- and we know this was happening in the mid-30s, when Paul met Peter etc; a stage when memories bedded down and were reflected upon, taking on colour with details being picked out based on the experiences and thoughts of the communities in which the tales were told; and finally a writing stage, where the traditions were shaped into written Gospels, which may in turn have been tweaked somewhat in light of the beliefs and experiences of the communities in which they arose.

This needn't have taken nearly as long as Brown seems to think; as I've said, I think there's a strong case for Mark and Luke being written by the mid-60s, with perhaps Matthew in the 70s and John by 90; in any case, scholarly orthodoxy has all four Gospels done and dusted by 100 AD. 

Luke clearly drew on Mark, but didn't rearrange the earlier Gospel so much as elaborate on it, adding to it somewhat. Matthew evidently drew on Mark too, and seems to have shared a second source, a collection of Jesus' sayings -- usually referred to as Q -- with Luke, probably rearranging his Q material somewhat in order to create five coherent sermons or discourses. Significantly, though, this isn't a manipulation of facts so much as an rearranging of sayings so as to give Jesus' teachings a more clear shape and to ease understanding. 

The basic structure facts stay the same across the Gospels. The Gospels may not be history, but they're historically invaluable. They're not just 'tales'.

It's not enough to know yourself; you must know your enemy too...
Brown says he has a layman's interest in this sort of scholarship, which is laudible if unconvincing; his understanding of this sort of stuff seems profoundly shallow, such that his atheism seems no more deeply-rooted than his faith had once been.  It seems to me, instead, as though he just swallows up things that support what he wants to believe.

His promotion of Richard Dawkins' ignorant The God Delusion as his favourite book, a "very important defence of atheism" which "systematically looks at every aspect of faith and 'proofs' of God's existence" is testimony to this, really. I happen to think Dawkins' book is important, simply because it's the highest profile modern rant against religion, and that as such it's good for Christians to read it, but that they shouldn't stop there; they should check what Dawkins says, and consider arguments against at every stage, just as they should with things they might be more inclined to believe.

As Mr Keating says in Dead Poets' Society, "When you read, don't just consider what the author thinks, consider what you think!"

My copy, for instance, has been read and reread, pondered and annotated to a point where the margins are blue with observations and cross-references. It is, frankly, an extraordinarily shoddy book, one that misrepresents Christianity and religious belief in general time and time again. Not that this is surprising: atheism, as Jonathan Sacks has said, deserves better than the New Atheists.

Like I've said, the bulk of Brown's book is fascinating. Well-written, informative, and witty, I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to know about memory, suggestibility, unconscious communication, distraction, confirmation bias, and all manner of other wonderful things. It's just a shame it's marred by such an ignorant and misleading opening chapter.