Recently
while on holiday I read the New Testament in the hotel’s Gideon Bible. I
had never read it all through before and I was astounded by the fate of
Ananias and his wife Sapphira. Soon after Christ’s death and
resurrection they promised to join the church, sell their property and
hand the proceeds over to the Apostles but they kept back some of the
cash and were accused by Peter of a sin against God. First Ananias ,who
dropped dead, then three hours later Sapphira, who did not know of his
death. Peter told her bluntly she was widowed and that the same fate
awaited her whereupon she too fell dead. The text clearly implies that
they had been punished. I could not recall ever before having been aware
of this brutal incident, which smacked more of Jehovah than Christ and I
decided to discover how Christians interpret and justify it by searching
the literature and questioning religious friends; they were all highly
intelligent, professionally qualified and most patient. What follows is
what I have learned and what I conclude.
There is no
extrinsic evidence of what happened, there is no reference to it
elsewhere in the New Testament and no prophecy is claimed for it in the
Old. The text is all we have to go on and that does not suggest
coincidence; very much the opposite, Luke used a Greek word usually
associated with death by divine judgment. In the absence of divine
intervention there is persuasive circumstantial evidence against Peter,
at least for manslaughter; he was prone to impetuous violence and he
must have been determined to impose his authority after his cowardice.
One person put the blame on Peter for this reason without saying how he
had killed them but there would have been laws against murder so he must
have thought it looked like natural causes. Perhaps a more plausible
explanation is that Luke put the story in to encourage the others to
stump up. It may have been going the rounds during the eighty years or
so between the alleged event and the writing of Acts, or Luke may have
invented it, inspired by the tales of punishment for pilfering in the
Old Testament or in Greek myths. However most Christians believe that
Acts 4&5 reveal the truth about a peremptory, punitive slaying by God;
and ‘God’ it appears must include Jesus as one of the Holy Trinity
though no one cared to confront this aspect. A Catholic source hails ‘a
miracle of God’s punishment’; at the other end of the spectrum
fundamentalists agree enthusiastically that the sentence was just.
Few
religious people were familiar with the incident; nor could they recall
that it had entered their religious education or been referred to in any
church service. During Easter when Acts are read to celebrate the
founding of the church, these verses are omitted, no one knew why; a
Roman Catholic said this cast doubt in his mind as to whether the story
was true, apparently without appreciating that if it were not true doubt
was cast on all Luke’s supernatural tales. Perhaps the reason for the
excision is that, although commentators are generally robust, some
individuals seem uneasy when having to consider the implications.
Christians worship with equanimity a God who presides over the savagery
of nature and the misery of babies infected with aids in the womb, but
summary execution is bitter fare for a Sunday morning.
It did not
seem to have occurred to anyone that the first punitive execution by
Christ is of particular significance, except as a cement to bind the
church. One theologian plaintively remarks that it is hard to imagine
Christ acting towards sinners as Peter did to Sapphira but the point is
not pursued; one or two opt rather half-heartedly for coincidence and
pass by as quickly as possible; a few hedge but most grasp the nettle
firmly in the name of divine retribution, richly deserved. One referred
to it as valuable proof for early Christians that God exists. One (in
1990) believed that the Devil himself personally corrupted the couple
and cited it as an example of Satan’s strategy and tactics for
destroying the church; a layman agreed and said Satan’s existence and
involvement were substantiated by the stories of his temptation of Eve
and Christ. So far not one has referred to Christ’s part in it or to His
power to predict the fate awaiting the wretched pair; the incident does
not chime with Christians’ view of Him.
No one
tried to resolve the extraordinary contradiction between a Christ who,
with memorable words, saved an adulteress from stoning and taught about
joy in Heaven over a sinner’s repentance, and a Christ who, as part of
the Holy Trinity, instantly slaughtered this couple with all their
imperfections on their heads; thus presumably condemning them to eternal
hellfire where they writhe to this day alongside Vlad the Impaler,
Stalin and Fred West. No believer liked to consider this. Some seemed
interested not in whether the story was true but only in its impact at
the time. Their theme was the importance of unity in the early days of
the Church and how these deaths served a useful purpose in helping to
secure it; one even used the ominous expression ‘the end justified the
means’. A Born Again Christian, the only one to seem familiar with the
story, dismissed coincidence but could not accept that God had done it
deliberately, even though all alternative explanations were rejected and
even though the same question about other miraculous but brutal events
was readily answered in the affirmative; is that what is called
‘denial’? The lack of clarity was blamed on the listener’s inability to
comprehend a higher truth. One Protestant gave a modern slant by blandly
calling it ‘zero tolerance’ but no one had the imaginative empathy to
visualize the terrible, sickening moment of death in modern terms; the
kneeling sinner with the Luger to the base of his skull. No one thought
of the fearful reality of it; it was just a means to an end.
The widely
accepted secular opinion is that the Gospels and Acts were written, not
with the intention of recording history in the way we understand it but
to influence the contemporaries at whom they were aimed. Some of the
events described there may have occurred, even though there is no
extrinsic evidence for any of them (and virtually none even for the
existence of Christ) but in the telling the stories of the New Testament
were usually given the slant of propaganda that nowadays we call ‘spin’.
This is a good example. Man has changed little in two thousand years.
Whatever
the motives were for the story the killings must have been relied upon
through the ages by intelligent, honest and otherwise compassionate men
to justify religious executions, provided of course they, like Peter,
could describe a transgression as a ‘sin against God’. I know this to be
so because I have friends of great integrity who approve and even
applaud the pitiless slaughter of Ananias and his wife by a being
claimed to be the essence of love and forgiveness. All pretty chilling,
I think.
I don’t
suppose Luke intended the appalling consequences; he was just trying to
boost the Sunday plate. His imagination probably helped the cash flow
but otherwise may have made little difference to the bloodstained course
of Christianity; the Scriptures contain a wealth of other inspirations
for remorseless cruelty and destruction. But Luke can’t be absolved
entirely; this is the only description in the New Testament of a killing
of human beings by Jesus, as opposed to mere threats of death, so it
must have had a dramatic impact. Five hundred years ago I could have
gone to the stake for writing this and I know men who might have sent me
there, or gone cheerfully to the stake themselves for reasons as trivial
if their faith required it. That is why faith, still rampant in the
world, so horrifies me; after 9/11 who can say my dread is groundless?
This study
has given me a new understanding of the nature of faith. It does not
arise from a conscious decision or an act of will, though those in its
grip like to think so; it is a visceral emotion akin to being in love,
and as impervious as love to reason or fact. High intelligence gives no
immunity, it merely allows the creation of ingenious question-begging
arguments to explain and justify. It is significant that otherwise
logical men are content to verify events described in the New Testament
by prophesies in the Old and verify those same prophesies by their
fulfilment in the New. It was noticeable that believers relied on the
Bible as proof of both mundane and supernatural events but when
confronted with an obvious Biblical absurdity or an unanswerable
question the point was immediately dismissed as ‘unimportant in relation
to the real issue’; it didn’t matter how Sapphira died nor whether the
Devil was real, it didn’t matter what date Adam was created nor whether
Mary was a virgin. It seems that faith requires and promotes reliance on
circular arguments, the ability to believe mutually exclusive
propositions simultaneously and the capacity to be oblivious of the
contradictions and cruelties of the texts, regarded as sacred, from
which it stems. Faith, like love, is blind.
Faith has
never had much success as an instrument of peace or harmony. We have but
recently escaped the religious wars and persecutions of the Middle Ages
and the centuries of bloodshed that followed. Now the antic is leading
us off again, setting Hindu and Christian against Muslim, Muslim against
Hindu, Christian and Jew, inspiring young men to fly airliners into
skyscrapers, and nations to claim the lands of others; all in the name
of their One True Religion. Faith is the source of the eerie composure
of both President Bush and Osama Bin Laden. Both have God on their side.
Faith, like
love, once had an evolutionary advantage; for example unity derived from
total allegiance and belief in a leader and his teachings would make a
pack more effective in hunting, fighting and competing for resources;
humans will have as hard a task taming faith as they have had in taming
desire. Another advantage has been Man’s compulsion to learn the causes
of things, a compulsion so powerful that when he fails he invents them.
Throughout Man’s history new objects of adoration have repeatedly been
dreamed up to satisfy his desperation to placate by worship whatever
affects his life that he cannot understand. As a result his credulity is
almost limitless; without a shred of proof he will believe in anything
mysterious from alchemy to alien abduction. But the most potent
compulsion of all is the will to survive, which nature satisfies by
fecundity, and faith by the promise of life after death. Those who most
yearn for immortality are perhaps the most strongly motivated to
preserve their genes by procreation; if so the numbers afflicted by
faith will increase.
I hope that
one day Man will be rid of the fearful goad of blind faith that has
driven him since he first tried to explain the rising and setting of the
sun. If evolution offers no escape then somehow we must find for
ourselves a way to break this link with our primitive past; somehow be
weaned of this balm for immaturity. We no longer pray to the sun or
sacrifice to images of stone. We are learning the dangers of some of the
instincts we carried from the caves fifty thousand years ago, but faith,
the irrational belief in the unprovable, though it brings serenity to
some, threatens to cause the horrors that so-called sacred books
predict. How can we escape while we teach our children that it is
commendable to believe in things incapable of proof and that their lives
must be ordered by cruel and contradictory texts written by untutored
men in ancient days? Let us raise them in the clear light of moral and
ethical systems based on reason, equity and kindness, that do not depend
on incomprehensible mysteries or invisible, imaginary worlds peopled
with demons and angels. Only the elimination of faith can make this
possible.
But is it
too soon? Perhaps the passion for mysteries we nurtured in the firelight
flickering on the daubed walls of our caves is still too deep within us,
so that as one faith fades another flourishes; Ra gives way to Mithras,
Mithras to Christ, Christ to Allah; and then who knows? Faith may have
been as indispensable on our journey as aggression, altruism and desire
and an attempt to cast it off as hopeless as persuading the world to be
celibate or as teaching a fish to breathe air. Some at last have seen
faith for what it is but for mankind as a species this revelation is
perhaps not too early, but too late.
Paul
Albrecht (Easter
2003)