Bronze Age Religion

It's one of those weird jibes that some make against the Christian faith - that it's the religion of a bunch of Bronze Age shepherds.

It's a strange thing to say. First up because the New Testament was written in Roman times. Not the Bronze Age at all. In fact given that the majority of the Old Testament is reckoned to have been written from about the 9th Century BC on (albeit often based on earlier stories) - the vast majority was in fact written in the Iron Age. It's a shame to start such a jibe based on a historical inaccuracy.

It's also weird because it begs the question - so what? What's so great about the Plastic Age that means a philosophy that allegedly dates from the Bronze Age (which it doesn't) can be laughed at? How can the Age that has given us such countless horrors think previous Ages were so philosophically impoverished? Of course, we've got iPads and Britain's Got Talent and stuff - but why, as the bard asked, must we suffer each race to believe that no race has been grander? It makes no sense at all.

And another reason why it's weird - the people at whom it is aimed don't give a pair of foetid dingo's kidneys whether it's a Bronze Age religion or not. They wouldn't even bother to point out that it's not. Most real fundamentalists are too historically illiterate to believe such a time existed - as the acceptance of modern archaeological dating schema would put most of the Stone Age before the beginning of the world. Such a jibe is as the idle wind, which they regard not. My expectation is that the number of people who would think "ooh - Bronze Age religion" and promptly give up their faith is around about the same number of fingers on the average foot.

And then, of course, the Bronze Age had much to commend it. Mass slaughter on a 20th or 21st Century scale was pretty well unheard of - largely because  there weren't masses of people. But the Bronze Age saw no nuclear vaporisation of cities. If one bunch of Bronze Age people did have to kill another bunch, chances are at least they ate them - so much more environmentally friendly. There was no Tesco. The M25 did not exist - and neither did Manchester CIty. People lived in peace with their environment, except when burning down all the forests or wiping out the megafauna that had survived the Stone Age or eating their neighbours.

And it was the culmination of the Megalithic Age. Sure, the Beaker Folk of the Neolithic had got the basics of Stonehenge, for example, in place - but it was their Bronze Age successors who continued it. In medicine, they could carry out trepanning from which some people even survived - albeit I reckon there'd be a lot of screaming in Beaker Tongue going on. They had a good idea of astronomy - they had to have, as it told them when to sow and when to hunt. In fact, I reckon if you asked 100 Bronze Age folk and 100 moderns, the Bronze Age people would be the ones who knew which way the sun went round each day.

In fact, I've a suspicion that most modern people, on a day-to-day basis, couldn't start a fire, tell the time or kill an auroch if dropped into the middle of the Bronze Age. All our modern scientific sophistication is blotchy - just a few people know how to make the bits that make up a smartphone, while the rest of us struggle to programme a TV remote, and think milk comes from chickens. Give the average 21st Century person a lump of ironstone, some charcoal and some chunk of chalk and they'd just bang them together to see if they could make fire, I reckon.  And we think the Bronze Age people were so backward because they couldn't make iron.

So enough of the sneers about the Bronze Age. People lived and died, just as much then as now. They knew the joy and fear we do. They wondered about the world as we do. They fell in love and mated and brought up kids just like we do. Sure, they didn't have Facebook.

So I rest my case.