1.
Jesus of Nazareth was born around 2,000 years ago in an
obscure outpost of the Roman Empire called Galilee. Raised in the family of a carpenter named Joseph, as an
adult he began a career of itinerant preaching and healing that ultimately led
to his arrest and execution by the Roman authorities. Regardless of such obscure beginnings and his outwardly
ignominious end, Jesus' doctrine, spread by dedicated followers, eventually
took over the Roman Empire itself.
Everything we know about Jesus comes to us through the writings of his followers, particularly through the four Gospels found in the Bible. That these writings were composed decades after his death, and by whom we are not certain, makes it difficult to gauge their historical reliability. The questions raised are many: Do the Gospel writers quote Jesus accurately? Do they give the actual facts of his life? What exactly did Jesus teach, and can we ever really know his original teachings? Do the doctrines of the different churches correspond to Jesus' teachings (or what we can reconstruct of them)? And finally: Is there anyone, whether scholar or church leader, who can provide trustworthy answers to such questions?
Among the readers of this introduction I'm hoping there are some who believe religion is a sham, and that the Christian religion is a more dangerous sham than most. I'm hoping this because I know very well the perspective such readers come from, and I was mostly in agreement with them for a number of years. Certainly I can see the dozens of arguments against even entertaining the possibility that the Christian preachers are right. I'll even grant that, yes, the Christian preachers are not right. They're wrong. And I'll lay my cards on the table by saying straight off that I'm a Christian myself. And that I am wrong too.
If you can get your head around such strange statements, or at least entertain the possibility that there may be something to them other than nonsense, you're quite generous. I hope you continue reading.
There are myriad ways in which Jesus' teachings have been
understood over the centuries. The
debates stretch back to the very beginning. Recent discovery of the lost Gnostic gospels in Egypt has
brought home to us the breadth of interpretation that was current in even the
first centuries of Christianity.
But one needn't go to suppressed gospels to see a range of interpretations
of Jesus. Anyone who carefully studies
the New Testament can see that the writers of the different books not only
factually contradict each other on many points, but even seem to write from
somewhat distinct theological positions.
So the Bible itself does not really give a final, unanimous decision.
Our modern perspective on these problems is at once more
focused and more complex. Though
advances in scholarship have added new dimensions to our understanding
(dimensions neither the ancient Gnostics nor the Protestant reformers could have
had) these advances have not decided the debate. If anything, the possibilities for differing interpretations
of what Jesus intended seem only to have increased during the past two
centuries. [For a rough
presentation of some of the current spectrum see: HISTORICAL JESUS] In this climate, the situation of those
who want simply to "understand the facts" becomes thorny: stuck between
religious people claiming certainty on the one hand, and historians and
scholars posing probing questions on the other (and disagreeing among
themselves) many people wonder if there's anything about Jesus that can be
pinned down so as to get even a rough idea. Are there any facts all sides agree on?
To simplify things greatly, one might say that most modern
people who know something about Jesus take one of two views:
1)
Jesus of
Nazareth is the Christ, the only Son of God, who was incarnated on this earth
in order to die in atonement for the sins of mankind. Jesus of Nazareth was both man and God.
2)
Jesus of
Nazareth was an itinerant healer in first-century Palestine who preached a
doctrine of "the kingdom of Heaven." He may or may not have considered himself the promised
Jewish Messiah. His doctrine
stressed voluntary sharing, unselfish love of others and indifference to
material wealth. It was also
characterized by a belief in the imminent coming of God's kingdom through
divine intervention in history.
Considered subversive, he was arrested and executed by the Roman
authorities.
Of course orthodox Christians take the former view, while most secularists take the latter. Regardless of which view one takes, however, one thing is clear: the best sources available for the life of Jesus are the New Testament Gospels. Though orthodox Christians may believe the Gospels narrate events that actually happened--i.e., that happened as described--and secularists may insist that any historical truths found in the Gospels are obviously shrouded in legend, in either case the fact remains: our best information about Jesus is in the Gospels.
The Durationist Gospel is in the main a collection of documents introducing the best elements of this best source of information about Jesus. I haven't prepared this collection in order to present either a new view of Jesus or the orthodox view, but simply a solid introductory view. I want to offer an introduction to Jesus, to the question of Jesus--a question in many people's minds, whether they are secular or religious. Because even to those not attracted to Christianity--and I believe there are good reasons to be repelled by some of the social phenomena attendant on Christianity--the question of Jesus remains a fascinating one. The historical variables that come into play when one tries to figure out what he taught, the variety of witnesses, the odd combination of agreement and disagreement in the different documents--all of it makes for a compelling historical mystery.
And right from the start I ought to set to rest an occasionally heard sound bite. Contrary to what barroom skeptics now and then assert, it is certain that Jesus existed. Jesus is not a fictional or merely mythological character. One proof of this is as follows: Even atheist scholars who believe the Bible wildly misrepresents Jesus' life and teachings--even they acknowledge that the man Jesus walked the roads of Palestine and preached one thing or another.
So how is it, then, that a poor teacher from an obscure town in Galilee--a man from an oppressed minority whose life was cut short by execution--how is it that he ignited a movement capable of taking over the Roman Empire itself, a movement still going strong today?
The crucial question is not whether Jesus existed. He obviously did. Nor is it whether Darwinian evolution
is true or not (I think it is), nor whether Sunday TV evangelists are on the
right track or are rather hypocritical idiots (I think many are). I hope that the "culture
wars" and many of the social debates that rage between believers and
non-believers can be put aside for the time, at least as regards my project
here. Because the crucial question
about Jesus is what he taught as he wandered from town to town with his
followers. And why these things
that he taught, and his actions, led so many to follow him so ardently. These questions can be taken up by
anyone without regard to most of the "hot-button" debates raging
today. They are important
questions because we get through Jesus, whatever he intended, one of the most
influential doctrines in the history of the world, a doctrine that continues to
shape our history and ourselves whether we are Christian or not.
2.
I am among those who think that the best way to approach
the question of Jesus is to forget most of what one has learned about him. This is especially true for those who
were raised Christian but shrugged off belief with adulthood. I'm thinking here
of the millions of now secular Americans brought up Protestants in one of the
more right-wing fundamentalist churches.
Inextricably knotted up in their minds with a particular right-wing
pastor and the doctrines he spouted, Jesus himself gets unfairly implicated in
homespun America hypocrisy and intolerance--the self-righteousness of people
who think they have the rules of life down pat, a cult of "already chosen
ones" who too often lack both curiosity and social conscience. For many Americans, secular and
religious alike, it is hard to separate Jesus from the impressions left by this
demographic.
In fact Jesus of Nazareth has little, very little, to do
with this right-wing Jesus. The
American right-wing Jesus is a byproduct of the social obsessions of a
particular community. What they
preach from their pulpits and TV broadcasts has scant connection with the
radical figure one finds in the ancient texts. That so many of these preachers can expatiate for so many
years without ever addressing most of the things Jesus talks about in the
Gospels is an amazing fact but finally just another proof of how good we humans
are at duping ourselves.
Jesus as preached in the churches is not nearly as
interesting, not nearly as troubling, as the figure we encounter in the Gospels. The problem is that most Christians go
to church not to be troubled but to be comforted: to be reinforced in their rightness and strengthened in their
prejudices. Well aware of this,
many American denominations fill their churches by flattering the masses. The antidote to this practice is of
course Jesus himself--Jesus as we find him in the Gospels. But we need to read these texts with
new eyes, to hear them with new ears.
Following are some paragraphs about Jesus from the scholar Guy
Davenport's introduction to The Logia of Yeshua. The
book is a collection of Jesus' sayings edited and translated by Davenport and
Benjamin Urrutia. The introductory
portrait is particularly poignant:
We do not yet know if Jesus spoke koine (common-market Greek) or Aramaic. The writers of the gospels thought that
their best hope for disseminating the Good News was to write in Greek, so a
Greek-speaking Jesus is what the world got.
There is a papyrus fragment of a lost gospel on which
only a few sentences are legible.
It was written in the first century and is therefore as close to Jesus'
time as the canonical gospels.
Jesus is on the banks of the Jordan, speaking to a crowd. Because of the tatters in the papyrus,
the effect of trying to read it is like being present but being too far back to
hear well. This must have happened
often enough. "Blessed are
the who? Did he say the swineherd was welcomed home?"
Jesus says something about a dark and secret place, and about weighing
things that are weightless. That
sounds like him. But then we are
told that he threw a handful of seeds into the Jordan and that they became
trees bearing fruit in the twinkling of an eye, and floated away down the
river.
This, too, is familiar in its unfamiliarity. If he could wither a tree, he could create one. If he could walk on water, he could make an orchard stand on it. If this gospel had been known before 1935, what wonderful paintings the Renaissance would have made of it--a Botticelli is easy to imagine. We also recognize the mythic accretion that had begun before the gospels were written. Jesus probably built a metaphor around the mystery of germination. In the retelling, and retelling, the metaphor turned into a magician's illusion.
His hearers understood hyperbole and parables as if by
second nature. Faith should be so
strong that it can move a mountain.
Only a child would take that literally, and he kept asking us to become
the kind of child who could believe it . . . .
He wrote nothing. It is as if Heraclitus had not written a book but told his
philosophy to grocers, fish-sellers, and housewives. True, like Socrates, who wrote nothing either, he was
surrounded by disciples who understood that they were to carry on.
What they, or somebody, remembered were his
sayings. When the gospels were
written and by whom we do not know.
"Matthew," "Mark," "Luke," and "John"
are probably fictitious names.
Jesus' life was already a myth (which can coincide with truth and be a
more vivid and symmetrical presentation of truth). History, in a coup de theatre worthy of Beckett, swept away practically all traces
of the historical Jesus. Our
certainties are three: He joined as a man in his thirties a reform movement led
by one John, called "the Baptist" as he had revived an ancient ritual
of symbolically washing away sin by immersion in running water. He had a coherent and charismatic ethic
that he preached along roads and in the open country for three years. He fell into the hands of the Roman colonial
authorities, who reluctantly respected the charge against him that he was a
revolutionary and disruptive presence.
He was cruelly executed by being nailed alive to an upright stake with a
crosspiece for the hands. Such a
mode of execution is torture, not dispatch.
In the logia, we see only the eloquent, wry, amused,
and angry Jesus; or, rather, we hear him.
The falsest myth about him may be the Romantic and Sunday school
pictures of him as a pious matinee idol with a woman's hair, neat beard, and
flowing robes. History can tell us that he wore trousers of the kind we call
Turkish, that he most certainly had oiled sidelocks and a full beard. A man so out-of-doors would have worn a
wide-brimmed traveler's hat, a caftan, or coat. His sandals are mentioned by John [the Baptist]. We can guess a witty smile
("Behold an Hebrew in whom is no guile!") and eyes capable of extreme
sternness and kindness. That he
could hold an audience entranced goes without saying.
Jesus was the real ironist Kierkegaard conceals behind
the face of Socrates in his doctoral thesis. Irony was his constant mode; it awakens the reflective
faculties. A father loves his
wayward better than his obedient son. Finding lost things pleases us more than knowing where
they are. Adhering strictly to the
law is strangely to disobey it.
Riches are worth nothing.
Heaven is not up but inside.
His ironic paradoxes and his often mystifying parables replicate the
strategies of Diogenes centuries before.
His paradox that stung worst was that religion
anaesthetizes religion. Any two
people, loving and agreeing with each other, was church enough, as it had been
for Amos seven hundred years earlier.
Identities aroused Swiftian satire in him, for "the kingdom of
heaven" recognizes no identity but human. . . .
In the sayings we can scarcely discern the metaphysics
and eschatology that the church, beginning with Paul, built around the vision
Jesus had of a redeemed humanity. . . .
These lines are some of the most evocative I know on Jesus the
man. Especially convincing is the
presentation of Jesus as teacher and ironist. Davenport awakens a sense of the concreteness of the man, a
real man in his particular cultural milieu, that is lost in the churches'
overly glossed portrait. The
subversive and liberating potential in Jesus' own words is too often left
behind by the Sunday preachers.
The voice and teachings of Jesus, the elements stressed by an approach
like Davenport's, have long been obscured behind the church-building mission of
Paul and the cosmic pessimism of Augustine. It is this focus on Jesus' words and actions, on what these
might mean in themselves, that most interests me.
3.
I am a Christian, though there are probably many Christians
who would consider my manner of belief eccentric. Unlike many Christians, I tend to relish rather than repress
the variety of interpretations of Jesus that have arisen over history. I find the different versions of Jesus
in the four Gospels to be a gift from God, one that should remind us of our
inability to reach certainty. That
we as human beings can never be certain we are right is one of the most
important tenets of my own creed.
To find Matthew disagreeing with Luke and Mark disagreeing with John is
a humbling aspect that should teach us to accept difference and debate because,
after all, difference and debate are enshrined in our scriptures. This might begin to hint at my
theological difference from many of the Christians around me. Presenting my own beliefs, however, is
not the goal of this project, so I won't go into such issues further.
But I wonder what most "real" Christians would
think of this project, the Durationist Gospel. I think some, if they take a closer look at it, will welcome
it. Others will doubtless condemn
it out of hand. I will now try to
explain it.
For years I've thought of compiling a brief anthology of biblical and
apocryphal texts, a collection that would contain a sort of bare minimum for an
understanding of the Christian message.
Since for me the Christian message must be found in the life and
teachings of Jesus rather than in the pronouncements of any church, this
anthology would have to be an inclusive presentation of the variety of early
material we have on him, especially the material with a strong possibility of
authenticity.
At first the project presented itself as a challenge. As follows: If one were forced to save
the essentials of the Bible, if all of the Bible were to be lost except for fifty
pages, which fifty pages would one save?
Of course different people would make different choices. For a Christian
like myself, the story and teachings of Jesus would have to be central. The original draft of the Durationist
Gospel represented my choices.
But the Durationist
Gospel had a practical goal as well.
I always thought it better, faced with someone interested in
Christianity, to present them with something less imposing than the whole Bible
and its seventy-two books. Thus my
initial draft was also an answer to a pragmatic question: Which texts from
the Bible would I give someone who was curious about the faith, someone who
wanted to read the important texts in a more focused format? Such a person, I thought, should learn
the story of Jesus, but needed a basic sense of monotheism as well, and so he
or she needed also to read the stories of the creation and the fall. This would be the bare minimum.
The texts compiled here will
give non-Christians this most basic of introductions. If such readers pursue their study further, the Durationist
Gospel was worth compiling.
A third early goal of
the project was to include all possibly authentic sayings of Jesus. Though I wanted to keep the length of
the text to a minimum, I still wanted to have all the recorded sayings
contemporary scholars thought Jesus might actually have spoken. To do this I had to compile what is
usually called a "gospel harmony," i.e. a text in which the four
Gospel accounts are brought together in one narrative frame, a sort of
composite Gospel. I succeeded
partially in this, as I explain in the textual notes below.
The opening texts of the Durationist Gospel,
from Genesis, are presented in the King James translation. This may be off-putting to some
readers, but it may, on the other hand, introduce them to a language and a
cadence they've only heard bits of.
In any case the King James translation is without peer in terms of power
and concision.
The
results of my efforts may be judged to be clumsy or, worse, misguided. Nonetheless I don't know of a more
complete brief portrait of the life and teachings of Jesus than the one found
in these pages. I've tried to
fulfill the goals stated above, goals I consider worthwhile.
The
question will be asked about my title.
Why have I called this anthology the Durationist Gospel? I'm in the process of formulating an
answer to this question. Some day
I might actually try to give my answer.
Readers
should feel free to copy and distribute this file to any who might be curious
about the teachings of Jesus but have not yet read the Bible. A little quiet reading may awaken many
who are deaf to pushy exhortations.
Eric
Mader
November, 2004
Textual Notes
It wouldn't be
incorrect to call this text a gospel harmony. Such a harmony was compiled in antiquity by Tatian, but has
since been lost. Another attempt
was made in the 19th century by the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (see Tolstoy's
The Gospel in Brief), but this work presented mainly Tolstoy's
interpretation of Jesus' message rather than simply preserving the Gospel
sayings in one frame. My own
attempt would have brought together the essentials from the three synoptic
Gospels Matthew, Mark and Luke. In
the end I had problems completing my Gospel harmony, however, and the text as
it now stands is centered on what might be called a partial harmony. I found that trying to integrate too
much of the matter of the Gospels in one narrative frame was destructive to the
wholeness and brevity we find as characteristic of the Gospel genre.
The
Durationist Gospel is thus compiled mainly from Matthew, Mark and Luke, though
John is also represented by a series of selected texts. Appended to the biblical material is a
further selection of sayings from the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas as well as
five sayings from other ancient sources which have been judged by scholars to
have a possibility of authenticity.
But note: Out of respect for the established canon of the Bible I have
not incorporated any of the apocryphal texts, whether from Thomas or elsewhere,
into the narrative itself, but have placed them at the very end, after all the
biblical material. In other words,
there is a clear division here between texts that are biblical and texts that
are not.
My seventy-some pages
thus contain the following:
1)
several chapters
from Genesis;
2)
a brief prologue
introducing the partial gospel harmony;
3)
most of the Gospel
of Matthew, to which I've added
4)
passages from Mark
and Luke, appended by
5)
a collection of
further material from the biblical Gospels, followed by
6)
a collection of
apocryphal sayings, from, among other sources, the Gospel of Thomas.
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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