Jesus Christ gives meaning to ancient history and geography

by Damien F. Mackey “After three days they found him in the Temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers”. Luke 2:46-47 Jesus, who even as a child of twelve was skilfully able to teach Jerusalem’s teachers, would later, as an adult, correct many misconceptions and false traditions on a whole range of issues. ‘You have heard that it was said … but I tell you …’ (e.g. Matthew 5:38). This was the voice of One who spoke words of unerring authority (Mark 1:21-22): “They went to Capernaum; and when the Sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes”. Just as when he had been a boy of twelve, when his listeners were “amazed” (ἐξίσταντο) by his knowledge, so now, again, at Capernaum, were those who heard him “astounded” (ἐξεπλήσσοντο) by his authoritative speech. And Jesus continues today to teach us, through the Scriptures, and in prayer. For, in a mere two verses filled with meaning, Jesus will succinctly span BC history, from Creation down to his own approximate era, and will, in so doing, identify for us the location of the Garden of Eden (Luke 11:50-51): ‘Therefore this generation will be held responsible for the blood of all the prophets that has been shed since the beginning of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who was killed between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, this generation will be held responsible for it all’. Eden was the holy place to which Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, had brought their sacrifices, and in whose vicinity Cain slew Abel (by cutting his throat like a sacrifice?) (cf. I John 3:12). Jesus is telling us that the Jerusalemites who persecuted the prophets, and who even slew some of them (e.g., Zechariah son of Jehoiada and Urijah son of Shemaiah), including the last one, Zechariah son of Berechiah (cf. Matthew 23:35), were geographically of the same region as Cain and Abel had been, and were as well of the spirit of Cain, but not of the holy Abel. In other words, the long sought for location of Eden was the site of Jerusalem – obviously much altered topographically and greatly impoverished since the halçyon days prior to the Fall of Adam and Eve. This has many ramifications, including for the proper identification of the four rivers - generated by the one Edenic river (Genesis 2:10). Those four rivers, Pishon (פִּישׁוֹן), Gihon (גִּיחוֹן), Hiddekel (חִדֶּקֶל) and Perath (פְרָת), must have geographically en-framed Eden. Jesus, the Lord of History (and Geography), easily encompasses history from the beginning (Abel) until modern times (Zechariah) in two telling verses. In so doing, he helps us to know that this Zechariah was not the martyred Zechariah son of the High Priest, Jehoiada, since this Zechariah was not the most recent martyr. Urijah son of Shemaiah, for instance, had come after Zechariah son of Jehoiada. But even that was not so recent. Hence, Matthew 23:35 is not contradictory about Zechariah as many like to suggest. Jesus Christ is the Key to Knowledge and he is not about to contradict the Truth. That is done, instead, by the likes of the “experts”, the blind know-alls, the types who resisted Jesus and had him crucified (Luke 11:52): ‘Woe to you experts in the Law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering’. We lose all fine meaning, then, when we shift Eden, the central point of Genesis 2, from the region of Jerusalem to east of the Tigris (חִדֶּקֶל) and Euphrates (פְרָת) rivers, which easterly re-orientation seems to be the preferred location today for the ancient Garden of Eden. But: Ezekiel 5:5: “This is what the Sovereign LORD says: ‘This is Jerusalem, which I have set in the centre of the nations, with countries all around her’.” Editor Moses would have had only one place meaning in mind for “Cush”, when he wrote of the Gihon river that “it winds through the entire land of Cush” (Genesis 2:13). Moses is traditionally said to have led Egyptian armies into Nubia, or Cush (Ethiopia). That fixes the Gihon river as the Blue Nile. And the Tigris and Euphrates are well known. Those like Dr. David Rohl, who want to turn Moses’s “Cush” into the Kusheh Dagh in Iranian Azerbaijan: and search in vain for the vestiges of the Garden of Eden in that NE region of the ancient world, succeed only in emptying the Scriptures of their meaning and import. Some of the unhappy consequences of this are: • The authoritative words of Jesus Christ about Abel and Zechariah then become meaningless, and even unjust for his Jerusalemite “generation”. • The whole wonderful cosmic symmetry of the Fall of Man, and then the Redemption of Man, occurring in the same geographical location, is totally lost. “O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen”. • All the Garden of Eden symbolism at the Fall, of the tree and thorns and pain and sweat, ceases to be reflected by the same Garden symbolism at the Passion and Redemption: It now becomes a case of poet John Donne’s And new philosophy calls all in doubt: “Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone, All just supply, and all relation; Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot, For every man alone thinks he hath got To be a phoenix, and that then can be None of that kind, of which he is, but he.” And it is interesting that John Donne aimed this famous statement at the new philosophies, which were mathematically and science-based and anti-metaphysical, reflecting a world largely of a priori theory, rather than one of studied reality. The culmination of all of this would be a cosmography of models and numbers that has as much bearing upon reality as does the Kusheh Dagh location have for the Garden of Eden. Our models of Astronomy today are cosmographies lacking an inherent meaning, lacking what pope Benedict XVI called “a cosmology discerning the visible inner logic of the cosmos”.