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 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 New Testament. That these writings were composed decades after his death, and by whom we are not certain, makes it difficult to gauge their accuracy. The questions raised are many: Do the Gospel writers quote Jesus accurately? Do they give the actual facts of his life? What exactly did he teach, and can we ever really know these original teachings? Do the doctrines of the Church correspond to Jesus' teachings (or what we can reconstruct of them)? And finally: Can anyone, whether scholar or cleric, provide trustworthy answers to such questions?
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 current modern perspective 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 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 contentious 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 is anything about Jesus that can
be pinned down so as to get 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 preacher and 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.
Jesus' 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. Jesus' teachings were considered subversive, and he was
arrested and executed by the Roman authorities.
Of course orthodox Christians will 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. Orthodox Christians may believe the Gospels narrate events that actually happened (i.e., that happened as described), while secularists believe that whatever historical truths found in the Gospels are shrouded in quite a bit of legend. But in either case the fact remains: our best information about Jesus is the Gospels.
I haven't prepared these documents in order to present either a new view of Jesus or the orthodox view. Instead I want to offer simply an introduction to Jesus, to the question of Jesus--a question in people's minds, whether secular or religious. Because even to those not attracted to Christianity--and there are good reasons to be repelled by some of the social phenomena of modern Christianity--the question of Jesus remains a fascinating one. The historical variables that come into play when one seeks to figure out what Jesus really taught, the variety of witnesses, the odd combination of agreement and disagreement in the Gospels, besides the somewhat different portrait of Jesus one finds in the letters of Paul--all this makes for a compelling mystery.
The fact is that contrary to what barroom skeptics occasionally assert, it is certain that Jesus the man existed. Jesus is not a fictional or mythological character. One proof of this is the following: Even atheist scholars who insist that the Bible wildly misrepresents Jesus' life and teachings--even these acknowledge that he walked the roads of Palestine and preached something or other. So how is it that this poor teacher from an obscure town in Galilee--a man from an oppressed minority whose life was cut short by an ignominious death--how is it that he could ignite a movement that would eventually take over the Roman Empire and is still going strong today? What spark or ideas were in him that could give him such power?
My point is quite simple: the crucial question about Jesus
is not whether he existed, nor is it whether Darwinian evolution is true or not
(I think it is), nor is it whether the Sunday TV evangelists are right or
rather hypocritical idiots (I think most are). Rather the crucial question about Jesus is what he taught
about God, himself and humankind as he wandered from town to town with his
ragtag followers. Also whether he
considered his arrest and execution part of his mission or whether these were
unforeseen: i.e., a mission cut short.
These questions are important because we get through Jesus, whatever he
intended, one of the most influential doctrines in the history of the world, a
doctrine that shapes our history continuously whether we are Christian or
secular. What exactly was his
doctrine? Can we know it with any
reliability?
2.
Probably the best way to begin 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 who were brought up as Protestants in one of the more
fundamentalist or right-wing churches.
The Jesus in their minds is inextricably tied up with their church's
pastor and the doctrines he spouted from the pulpit; tied up with the stink of
hypocrisy and intolerance--of being preached at by overly confident,
self-righteous people lacking in curiosity and more or less devoid of social
conscience. I believe this Jesus
has little, very little, to do with Jesus of Nazareth. This American right-wing Jesus is a
byproduct of the social obsessions of a particular community; it is not the
radical figure one encounters in the ancient texts. That so many
American preachers can go on with their ministries so many years without
hardly ever addressing most of the things Jesus talked about is an amazing fact
but finally just another proof of how good we human beings 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. But most Christians go to
church not to be troubled but to be comforted: to be reinforced in their rightness and strengthened in their
prejudices. The American preachers
understand this, and have filled their churches by flattering the masses. The antidote to the preachers is of
course Jesus himself, as we find him in the Gospels: but we need to learn to
read the texts with new eyes, to hear 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, although there are probably many Christians
who would claim I am not. They
would reject my Christianity because I don't hold to certain elements of the Nicene
Creed, certain things I consider allegories at best and holy superstitions at
worst. But also, 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 modern 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 likelihood of
being authentic.
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. The
original draft of the Durationist Gospel represented my own choices.
I should point out that
neither my selection nor its arrangement was ever envisioned as a kind of replacement for
the Bible. That would be presumptuous on the part of anyone who would undertake
it. But I always thought it was
better, faced with someone interested in Christianity, to present something
less imposing than the whole Bible with its seventy-two books. This was the main or initial
justification for my project. Which
texts from the Bible would I want to give someone who was curious, someone who
wanted to read the important texts in a more focused format than the whole
1,500 pages of Scripture?
Such a person, I thought, should learn something of the creation and the
fall; and they should learn, above all, the story of Jesus the Messiah. This
would be the bare minimum. Further
study could come later, after the essentials had been encountered.
The texts compiled here
will give non-Christians this most basic of introductions. If such readers pursue their questions
further, the Durationist Gospel was worth compiling.
Another early goal of
the project was 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. Such a text 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).
My own attempt would have brought together the essentials from the three
synoptic Gospels--Matthew, Mark and Luke--and added various passages from
John. I eventually gave up this
attempt, 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 four
Gospels in one narrative frame was destructive to the wholeness and brevity we
find as characteristic of the Gospel genre.
A third goal I set
myself was to ensure that the Durationist Gospel would include all the
possible sayings of Jesus.
I use the term possible here because we of course
cannot be certain which of the words attributed to Jesus in the ancient texts were
really spoken by him and which were merely attributed to him by followers. From my own studies I'm convinced the
sayings with the greatest likelihood of authenticity are to be found in the
three synoptic Gospels and also that the recently discovered Gospel of Thomas
may contain authentic sayings. The
teachings in the Durationist Gospel are thus compiled mainly from Matthew, Mark
and Luke. Appended to the biblical
material, however, is a further selection of sayings from the 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 main Gospel harmony itself, but have placed them after
it. In other words, there is a
clear division between texts that are biblical and texts that are not:
apocryphal material is placed after the biblical material.
Also included with in
my collection is an apocryphal tale from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas that I've
always considered of great interest.
My seventy-some pages
thus contain the following:
1)
several chapters
from Genesis;
2)
a brief prologue
introducing the partial gospel harmony;
3)
nearly all of the
Gospel of Matthew, to which I've added
4)
passages from
Mark, Luke and John, appended by
5)
a collection of
further sayings from Luke and John, and
6)
a collection of apocryphal
stories and sayings, from, among other sources, the Gospel of Thomas.
The
opening texts from Genesis are presented in the King James translation, which
may be off-putting to some readers.
All New Testament or Christian apocryphal texts are in more recent
English translations, the former in the NIV version.
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
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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