The Enigma at Junction 11

The Christian Oracles Written by Greek Jews

Do you have a favourite road sign? I do. It’s on the M4 motorway as you head towards London. It says: “For The Oracle leave at Junction 11.” It always makes me wonder.

We don’t have much to do with oracles these days, but they were a constant in the classical world. The most famous was at Delphi, on Mount Parnassus, about 200 kilometres north west of Athens. On the seventh day of each month, for nine months in the year, anyone who needed the answer to a question would travel to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. There they would present their conundrum to the Pythia, the priestess of the shrine, the mouthpiece of the god of prophecy. Questions could be on any subject, love, war, politics, health, religion, anything that bothered the questioner. But they could only be asked on that one day in the month when the oracle was open for business. When Alexander the Great tried to consult the oracle on a day when the Shrine was closed, the Pythia refused to listen to his question. Furious, Alexander dragged her from her chambers, demanding she hear him. Struggling to get free she cried ‘you are invincible, young man’. Hearing this, Alexander released her, ‘I have my answer’, he said.

But Alexander misunderstood. The oracle was not predicting his success in war, which was the question he wanted to put to her. She was simply responding to her inability to break free of his grasp. And Alexander was not invincible. He died in his thirties, while on a campaign; probably poisoned by one of his generals.

The oracle at Delphi was renowned for her ambiguous answers. It didn’t stop people travelling long distances to seek her advice, but the answers they received were rarely straightforward. When King Croesus of Lydia asked the oracle if he should attack Persia she told him that if he did so, he would destroy a great empire. Croesus took this as a sign that he should go to war. But the empire he destroyed was not Persia, it was his own. Similarly, when the emperor Nero asked the oracle when he would die, she told him to beware the 73rd year. He went away, believing he was safe for a long time, he was not yet 30. But shortly afterwards he killed himself (some say he was murdered) after a revolt led by Galba who was 73 years old.

The word oracle comes from the Latin orare, meaning to speak or pray. Properly, an oracle can only be described as such if it delivers a verbal message. But the word oracle is often used more broadly. In the Bible, the High Priest had two stones set into his breastplate. Known as Urim and Tumim (probably meaning Lights and Perfections), they are often referred to as oracles. They were used in divination, though the Bible doesn’t explain how. The Talmud explains that the king or high priest would consult them in times of crisis. The answer would be given by the stones lighting up.

Among the most intriguing oracles are those attributed to the ancient Sibyls. The Sibyls were prophetesses in ancient Greek folklore, old women who had been granted eternal youth by Apollo. According to legend, in the 6th century BCE one of the Sibyls offered the Roman king Tarquinius Priscus a collection recording all the Sibylline prophecies. Tarquinius refused to buy them, so she set fire to six of the volumes. When he saw what she had done, Tarquinius relented and bought the remaining three books, for the same price as she had originally asked for all nine. The books were placed in the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, until they were destroyed in a fire that consumed the Temple in 83 BCE.

However, in the early 4th century CE, long after the Sibylline books had been lost, the church father Lactantius quoted them as pre-Christian prophecies of the truth of Christianity. Describing them as ‘Divine testimonies’ he claimed that they predicted the coming of Christ. Other Christian theologians, including Eusebius of Caesarea and Augustine, followed his example. quoting from works that they called the Sibylline Oracles, believing they were pagan testimonies which anticipated the monotheism of Christianity.

The Sibylline Oracles became hugely influential in the Middle Ages, particularly among millenarian theologians who believed that the Last Days were about to begin. By the early Renaissance, the Sibylline Oracles had become regarded as parallels to the prophetic revelations in the Bible. Just as God’s word had been revealed to Israel’s prophets, so too, some people believed, it had it been revealed to the Sibyls and recorded in the Sibylline Oracles.

The Sibyls themselves found their way into renaissance art; Michelangelo included them alongside Hebrew prophets on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. If you go to Sienna cathedral and look at the mosaic pavement, you will see a portrait of two Sibyls alongside that of Hermes Trismegistus. He was a mythical character who, like the Sibyls, was believed to be a repository of ancient wisdom, handed down since the time of Adam.

The problem with all this is that the Sibylline books in the Temple of Jupiter had been lost to history when the shrine was destroyed half a millennium earlier. Some of their content had been partly reconstituted from various sources, but the bulk of the works that the church fathers quoted from, and which Renaissance philosophers believed represented the long lost ancient wisdom, were actually far more recent than anyone realised. They were written at various periods between the 2nd century BCE and 7th century CE. Many were written in Alexandria, the Greek city on the Nile delta, others were composed in Syria and Asia Minor.

The Sibylline Oracles from Alexandria were written by Jews. Although they were Jews, their cultural outlook was Greek and when they chose to write works explaining or interpreting their religion, it was natural for them to do so in Greek.  To give them more credibility they garbed them in an antique style. Although to the untrained eye the Sibylline Oracles appear to be part of ancient Greek literature, many of them actually postdate Christianity.

Sometime later early Christian writers adapted the Jewish texts, and added more material of their own. This explains why Lactantius and others saw them as foreshadowing Christianity, a considerable amount of their content had been written by early Christians.

The Sibylline Oracles were first printed in 1545. Over the course of the next few decades, as textual criticism became more sophisticated, scholars began to challenge the accepted view of their age. They ceased to be regarded as repositories of ancient wisdom. By the 18th century, a parlour game had emerged in Italy which the one of the contestants had to guess the meaning of a one world clue given by one of the other participants. The game was called Sibilla. The Sibyls had completed their transition, from repositories of ancient wisdom to objects of fun.

Which brings us back, sort of, to the Oracle at Junction 11. I had often thought of visiting it, but have never done so. I had a feeling that if I did, it might ruin my image of an ancient priestess in a shrine dispensing words of wisdom just off the M4 corridor. In turns out that I was right. The oracle at junction 11 is not an oracle at all. It’s a shopping mall. The Pythia would have been devastated. Unless of course she had foreseen it.