The Sayings of Whom?
Following are some paragraphs about Jesus from Guy
Davenport's introduction to The Logia of Yeshua.
The book is a collection of the sayings of Jesus edited and translated by
Davenport and Benjamin Urrutia.
Davenport's introductory portrait of the figure of Jesus 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 was remembered with this same kind
of hyperbole that was native to the Hebraic imagination: They said he could magically
multiply fish and bread (to praise his generosity), that he could walk on
water, make the blind see and the dead come alive.
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 Dipper" 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 logia 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. Though there are things
here I don't agree with, the presentation of Jesus as teacher and ironist is
convincing. Davenport stresses an
aspect of Jesus that the churches have far too much ignored in their
epoch-making debates over the metaphysics of redemption and the theology of grace. Jesus' own words, the subversive and
liberating potential in these words, has too often been left behind by the
leaders of Christendom.
In The Logia of Yeshua
Davenport and Urrutia hope to prod readers toward a new evaluation of Jesus'
words. The Jesus that concerns
them is not the Christ of later Christian theology, that ultimate Sacrifice we
read of in the Epistle to the Hebrews, but rather Jesus the wandering teacher,
Jesus the weaver of existential riddles and paradoxes. The logia in the book's title means
"sayings," and in their translations Davenport and Urrutia approach
Jesus' sayings the way a trained classicist would approach the fragments that
remain of the Greek pre-Socratics.
The main concern in both cases is the quest for clarity. The guiding questions are: What do the
Greek words of the original really mean?
What did they mean in their historical context? How shall we render these words in our
modern English without imposing our own concepts on them (concepts that only
matured much later)?
In his introduction Davenport reminds us that the earliest writings
about Jesus were most likely collections of his sayings. Such collections were later used by the
gospel writers when they came to write their stories of Jesus' life. It is because of this priority of
sayings collections that scholars have long considered certain core sayings to
be the most reliable parts of the gospels. Jesus' own words as recorded in the gospels have more chance
of being accurate than any other words about him in those books: about what he did or
where he went, for instance; about what others said of him. This relative reliability is a good
thing for Christians: it means that when we read Jesus' sayings there is at
least some likelihood we are reading his authentic words rather than words
invented by oral tradition or the gospel writers themselves.
Anyone with a copy of The Logia of Yeshua will see that I've modified Davenport's
above-quoted lines a bit.
Everywhere in Davenport's book Jesus is referred to as Yeshua, the
Semitic version of his name. It is
the same in the introductory paragraphs I've quoted above. In reproducing these paragraphs here,
however, I decided to replace Davenport's "Yeshua" with
"Jesus," just as I've replaced his "Yohannan" with
"John."
The reason Davenport and Urrutia chose to
use the more correct Semitic versions of names in their book is not only that
of scholarly accuracy. It's clear
that one of the goals of their translations is to force the reader to appreciate
the sayings of Jesus as if reading them for the first time. For in reading them as something new,
it is thought, readers will find in Jesus' words things they hadn't noticed
before. Davenport and Urrutia thus
strive to defamiliarize Jesus' sayings: to make them new.
The Semitic rendering of proper names is
just one strategy in this project of defamiliarization. Jesus is not to be the familiar figure
we take for granted but rather "Yeshua," a man we perhaps don't
really know. John the Baptist is
in fact "Yohannan the Dipper," Jerusalem is "Yerushalayim." The mild shock of these more foreign
versions of the names is intended to put an extra step between the reader and
that all-too-easy familiarity with things known since Sunday school that Davenport
and Urrutia see as the enemy of a more just appreciation of Jesus and his
teachings.
I think much in Davenport and Urrutia's project is effective. In particular the notes show care in
the work of isolating and reconstructing the sayings. Also they seek to translate Jesus' words in a clear and
direct manner according to what the Greek actually says rather than according
to later theological interpretations of what it should mean. The Semitic versions of names,
however--their Yeshua and Yirmiahu and Yerushalayim--this I feel is
unfortunate. It draws too much
attention to itself and is no help whatever in interpreting the logia. Take the following logion for example,
number 95 in their collection:
[Entering the temple,
ordering the merchants to leave, folding up the tables of the money-lenders,
driving out the sellers of doves, sheep, and oxen] Take all these things
away! It is written in the book of
the prophet Yeshayahu, My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the
nations. And it was prophesied
through Yirmiahu, Has this house, which is called by my name, become a cave for
robbers? And the father has spoken
through Zechariah: There shall be no more merchants in the house of the Lord of
Hosts in that day.
I suspect that many readers will be too busy grappling with
the novel versions of the names Isaiah and Jeremiah to dwell much on other
aspects of the translators' rendering of this logion. The translation presents an unnecessary encumbrance. Notice too how the narrative framework
of the gospels is creeping in: Davenport and Urrutia provide the context
between brackets. One cannot blame
them for doing so in this case, but one wonders then to what extent others of
the logia might not be separable from their context in narrative.
Regarding the question of proper names, Davenport and Urrutia are
certainly part of a trend among contemporary literary translators. But I am against this movement toward
faithful transcription of names.
In reading the Iliad I
don't care to learn of the sulking of Akhilleus or the exploits of Aias. The heroes that I know are Achilles and
Ajax. It's unfortunate that our
best translator of Homer, Robert Fitzgerald, saw fit to ignore the tradition we
have in English for the names of Homer's characters. And here before me on my desk I've a copy of The
Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii. The writer that the editor of this
volume has in mind is known in my language as Dostoyevsky, or, at the very
least, Dostoevsky. If one really
wants to write of Aias or Dostoevskii or Kayin brother of Hevel and first
fratricide, then one ought to do it in the languages in which these names were
forged: Greek, Russian and Hebrew respectively. When translating into English one should show respect for
traditional usage.
The semitically correct names in The Logia of Yeshua are not as much of a drawback as one
might think given my carping.
Thankfully the majority of the logia have no proper names
mentioned. And the book is good
too in its use of extra-biblical sources such as The Gospel of Thomas.
The editors have shown a balanced approach to the question of what Jesus
may actually have said. We are not
given a discernibly gnostic Jesus, nor on the other hand an overly canonical
Jesus. In their notes Davenport
and Urrutia justify their decisions with a scholarly moderation. All except for note 98 that is.
In writing these lines I'm reminded of driving through the farmland of
Wisconsin where I grew up. Every
handful of miles one would come across a big red barn on the side of which
would be painted in huge white capitals "JESUS SAVES." I'm wondering if Guy Davenport's barn
down in his neck of the woods in Tennessee might not have huge white letters on
the side reading "YESHUA IRONIZES." And I'm wondering too just what this slogan might mean, and
if it can offer the world a notion of Jesus anywhere near as appropriate to him
as that on our Wisconsin barns.
An online review of The Logia of Yeshua, though generally commendatory, ends
with the following reservations:
Davenport and
Urrutia display an astonishing anti-Christian bias when they write in their
Introduction that the Gospels are merely "the graves of the Logia."
They imply that the logia of Yeshua are somehow spiritually deeper than their
narrative context. They write that these sayings can be read somewhat like Zen
koans. This is true. But it is also true that for almost 2000 years many
contemplative Christians have pondered the Gospel narratives as koans too. In
fact, most Christian monks and nuns still practice an ancient form of prayer
called Lectio Divina, in which one reads a Gospel story or psalm several times
over and then lets the intellect become quiet, allowing the story to sink ever
more deeply into the soul. Extracting "Q" from the Gospels may be a
refreshing experiment, but it does not necessarily mean that readers will gain
deeper levels of wisdom.
The reviewer, Robert A. Jonas, makes this point after
appealing to the power of the Holy Spirit in the ancient Christian
community. For example: Although
many scholars believe John's gospel contains little that is authentic Jesus,
yet John's gospel may have been written in the same Spirit that Jesus knew.
John's Gospel is
named as "inauthentic." And yet it may well be that the authors of
John's Gospel lived, told stories, celebrated liturgies and wrote accounts of
Jesus that Jesus himself would have welcomed. John's is the most mystical of
all the Gospels. Christian mystics throughout the ages have been nourished by
John's detailed descriptions of spiritual consciousness. Even if Jesus never
really said the words that are ascribed to him in John, is it not possible that
these words are nonetheless true--true in the sense that they are inspired from
the same center of awareness and Presence that lived in Jesus? Christians call
that center the Holy Spirit. It is the dynamic center of identity that formed
the core of the early Christian communities. Is it not possible that when we
hear that voice, even in contemporary spiritual communities, we are sometimes
hearing the voice of Jesus?
Many would insist these remarks are irrelevant to Davenport
and Urrutia's project. Yet I am
inclined to believe the reviewer's assertion: the historical Jesus would
probably have welcomed much of what John's gospel ascribes to him.
Eric Mader
02/29/04
Taipei
Check THE LOGIA OF YESHUA at
Amazon.com
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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