Do you need history for faith?

Do you need history for faith?
Renuka Khandekar

There is a website on Express Online called hindumythology.com. Its full name at present is Hindu Mythology And Beyond. We want to make it multi-religious to suit who we are as a country. Slowly, we've begun expanding our information on festivals. Easter and Good Friday were recent additions. You could have knocked me down with a Communion wafer when we got an e-mail from the USA asking us to take the Christian festivals off, since "unlike Hindu myths like the Ramayan and Mahabharat, these are based on historical events, which is why half the world follows Jesus Christ".

Really, it would seem you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. Everybody (almost) screeched in horror about a website called Hindu Mythology. "God, how khaki!" said all the liberals and lefties that my profession is peppered with. When I suggested the exotic possibility that one could be a Hindu without political affiliation, there were raucous boos, since `positions' have already been taken on everything. But now it seems a cautious initiative towards multi-faith identity is also unacceptable to some. Or perhaps it was just the `mythology' versus 'history' that was troublesome?

Now where does one begin a dialogue or even a train of thought about this without giving offence? The historicity of the New Testament and therefore of Christ is based on the gospels or accounts, of four of Christ's disciples, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. His apostle, Peter, founded the Church. His apostle Thomas, came to India. St Paul chronicled Christ's followers in Acts Of The Apostles. But the Immaculate Conception and the Resurrection, which are the very foundation of Christianity, are seen by others not as history but as myth.

Similarly, when the Jews say that they alone have a covenant with God, that they are the Chosen, does the rest of the world believe it? The Christians, in fact, actively persecuted them in Europe for not having accepted Christ. But Christians accept the Old Testament. They accept that God parted the Red Sea, that He spoke to Moses from a burning bush, that He (and it was definitely a He, not a She) that sent all those afflictions to Job to test his faith. And then, Islam, which accepts both Old and New Testaments and counts Hazrat Isa as Hazrat Mohammed's predecessor (and before Isa, the Hazrats Adham, Nooh, Ibrahim and Moosa - Adam, Noah, Abraham and Moses).

The angel Gibreel (Gabriel) is believed to have spoken to the Prophet, evil goes about cloven-footed by the name of Shaitan, with an attendant demon called Iblis. The powers of darkness be- low are believed to be kept at bay with amulets, charms, taweezes. Equally helpful, the Catholic branch of Christianity has a saint (Anthony) to find lost things and a saint (Christopher) to protect you while you travel, while St Elizabeth of Hungary was canonised because the bread she had in her basket to feed the poor turned to roses, exactly as she said, to save her from her tyrannical husband.

Anyway, the news is, now trouble is brewing for the People of the Book Charles Darwin already brewed plenty with his theory of evolution. There are rightwing schools in America's Bible Belt and in Europe that refuse to teach Evolution because it runs counter to the Creation myth, oops, history, in the Bible. One wonders how these worthies will react to the April 16 issue of The Sunday Times Magazine (London). It has a cover story called `Breaking Faith - the gospel according to science'. Early Biblical history is the underpinning not just of Judaism but of Israel.

Now archaeologists, including Israeli scholar Ze'ev Herzog, a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University, suggest "that - as history at least - the Old Testament is bunk".

"After a century of extensive excavations in Israel, he wrote, archaeologists could report that `the Israelites did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at the most a small tribal kingdom". To fuel the fire, he added that "it will come as an unpleasant shock to many" that the God of Israel, YHWH (Yahweh or Jehovah), had a female consort and that the early Jews only adopted monotheism around the 7th century BC and not at Mount Sinai around 1250".

The eye of this storm is Megiddo, ancient ruins long held to be proof of Solomon's mighty empire, which may have just been "propagandist fabrication of subsequent biblical editors".

My point is, does it matter any more (except politically to Israelis and Palestinians)? After everything the world has been through, cannot faith be kept private, at least in this new millennium? And must we need "history" to believe in God? In which case, there's worse trouble ahead because nobody of any faith has returned from Heaven with a gospel on it. All our faiths exist because somebody said that something happened.