Stephen
Mitchell: The Gospel According to Jesus. HarperPerennial. 312 pp.
Well-known
translator Stephen Mitchell has added another title to the burgeoning
literature of revisionist interpretations of Jesus. The book is entitled The
Gospel According to Jesus, and in what follows I will show that it should
rather be called The Gospel According to Stephen Mitchell. The need for such
a name change will come as no surprise to most readers. One might expect as
much from titles as transparent as the one on the top of this book.
Mitchell
follows the now familiar pattern. Purporting to present the core of Jesus'
teachings, he begins by expunging from the Gospel accounts all those passages deemed
inauthentic. Once the offending passages have been excised, Mitchell offers us
the remaining parables and sayings in the cadre of a scaled-down
"Gospel" similar in structure and movement to the Synoptic Gospels
Matthew, Mark and Luke. Mitchell's new Gospel is a translation and
harmonization performed by himself of all that he judges to be authentic in the
three original Synoptics. The resultant new biography of Jesus--the supposed
"Gospel according to Jesus"--is then burdened with the author's
extensive commentary and notes, which together make for an excellent portrait
of Mitchell's careful efforts to bend every recorded word of Jesus to his own
purposes and deny everything that doesn't quite fit. This, as well, is just as
one might expect.
Mitchell's
presumption to judge both Jesus' life and the correctness of his teachings is
at times overbearing, at times embarrassing. Through it all the reader must be
grateful that Mitchell at least includes Jesus in the enlightened circle he
himself frequents. Mitchell's sure hand in judging the texts of the world's
spiritual traditions--both East and West, both North and South--comes from his
own great learning and spiritual wisdom--a wisdom he evidently absorbed through
his many years familiarity with the Great Masters of the Transcendent Eastern
Schools of Universal Harmonic Truth: i.e., the Zen Masters, the Taoists, the
Buddhists.
But
Stephen Mitchell is not just any old flake. He's not just out to show that
Jesus and the Taoists teach "the same thing." It will be noticed that
the "Spiritual Master" Jesus that emerges from this book has much in
common with the Jesus presented by John D. Crossan and his colleagues in the
Jesus Seminar. This is not a coincidence, as Mitchell has made obvious use of
the work of the "historical Jesus" movement in his attempts to
determine which passages of the Gospels are authentic. So there is scholarship
and not just tendentious scissors work behind his selection of passages.
Regardless
of the scholarly influence, there are still important differences between the
scholars' Jesus and Mitchell's. Whereas the pared down Jesus of J.D. Crossan is
a (granted, rather quite interesting) peasant revolutionary of first-century
Palestine, the pared down Jesus of Stephen Mitchell is an enlightened spiritual
Master in a Zen Buddhist mode. For Mitchell, then, Jesus is important not
because he can become the subject of careful anthropological and textual
guesswork--as is the case with the detective Crossan--but rather because he can
be made to echo the "Perennial Philosophy" better represented by Zen
and Taoism. Jesus, Mitchell implies, is a Master nearly as great as Lao-Tze or
Ramana Maharshi.
The
book is ultimately a tiresome affair. Everywhere in the notes one finds
Mitchell offering lines from Lao-Tze or tales from Zen anthologies as "the
best commentary" on this or that saying of Jesus. If Jesus' doctrine of
the Kingdom of Heaven can be interpreted in terms of Taoist detachment, then we
must conclude that both traditions are getting at the same thing. This is the
burden of Mitchell's international spiritual porridge. We must not let all the
unfortunate later doctrines of the merely Christian churches get in our way
of appreciating this great Guru Jesus. Late discovery, after all, is better than
none.
Anyone with a sense of history should be able to see the
problem with Mitchell's approach. Regardless of our uncertainties concerning the details of Jesus' life,
it is clear that he was not born into the same cultural milieu that gave rise
to Chuang-Tze or Lao-Tze. The constant references to traditions like Taoism
when interpreting Jesus' words are thus as irrelevant as references to Pink
Floyd lyrics would be. (Actually even less relevant perhaps, since the members
of the rock band at least made their music in a post-Christian society.) Jesus
of Nazareth grew up in a community that worshipped the God of Israel, not
abstract naturalistic notions of the Way. To say that the Chinese
"Tao" is the same thing as the Hebrew "YHWH" is to splish
and splash in the shallowest waters of New Age pop reductivism.
Congratulations, Mr. Mitchell.
That
Jesus knew the Prophets, that he knew the stories of the Hebrew Bible as well
as the Mosaic Law--this is evident to anyone who reads the Gospels. Jesus' life
and teachings fulfill that Hebrew tradition and complete it by founding a new
dispensation, one moreover that was prophesied before his coming. In attempting
to tell us of his "authentic" Jesus, Mitchell studiously ignores the
concrete context of Jesus' life, preferring instead to wash away all
"unnecessary doctrine" in a sea of platitudes woven from strands of
pop psychology, Zen minimalism and Buddhist One-an-ism.
Mitchell
includes as an appendix to his work a collection of assessments of Jesus made
by various historical figures: Jefferson, Shaw, Spinoza, Gandhi, Emerson. Most
of these quotes are meant to buttress Mitchell's credentials as an unbeliever:
namely, they almost universally echo his own assertions that Jesus was a great
spiritual teacher, but that the Gospels contained in the New Testament are not
to be trusted. Thus Christian readers must not think that Stephen Mitchell is
alone in his disparagement of the Bible. There are, he implies, other great men
who stand with him. As if Christian readers hadn't noticed the presence of
revisionist skepticism before.
Written
in an easy, offhand manner, by turns mawkish and politically correct,
Mitchell's book is just right for post-Christian Americans who have enough
energy to read a little between their favorite talk shows. For those interested
in Jesus, however, there are much better books around, starting with the
Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Eric
Mader-Lin
Ron Buchheim's Response to this
Essay
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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