Rod of JesseOn the Jesus of the Gospels

&Doubt of his Existence

by Ernest WernerFormerly Pastor, Grace Lutheran Church, Altoona, PA, AssistantPastor, Trinity Lutheran, Lancaster, PA, Minister, First ParishUnitarian, Ashby, MA, Minister, First Unitarian Society, Ithaca, NY, &Member of the Chaplains’ Staff, Cornell University.

And there shall come forth a Rod out of the stem of Jesse.& a Branch shall grow out of his roots& the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him...

With Righteousness shall he judge the Poor& reprove with Equity for the Meek of the earth:

& he shall smite the Earth with the Rod of his Mouth& with the Breath of his lips shall he Slay the Wicked...

From Isaiah 11

Dwarf Lion PressTrumansburg NY

Table of Contents

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PART ONEJesus without Embarrassment 1.

Jesus’ Humanity in the Four Gospels 3.Why This Sketch May be Doubted 5.

What Facts can Legends give? 7.John Erskine on The Human Life of Jesus 11.

Doubt of Jesus 15.Doubt of Jesus ‘Now’ 20.

Allegro’s Bizarre Theory 26.Allegro’s Procedure Exposed 30.

The Case of Albert Schweitzer 37.Schweitzer’s own Crisis Resolved 41.The Quest of the Historical Jesus 43.

Schweitzer gives Credit 46.The Enigmatic Jesus of Albert Schweitzer 49.

The Messianic Secret 50.

PART TWOThe Baptism of Jesus 52.

John the Baptist Historical 57.A Desert Temptation Myth 60.

Postscript: a Personal Word 63.Return to Galilee: Public Act, Obscure Beginnings. 64.

The Boy Jesus in the Temple 66.The Calling of the Four 67.

A Day in Capernaum: The Synagogue 70.A Day in Capernaum: Simon’s house 72.

In His Own Village (‘Own country’) 74.Mythic Aspect of ‘Own Country’ 77.

Later Versions of this Tale 80.Matthew & the Sermon on the Mount 82.

The Son of Man 87.Lord of the Sabbath 89.

Dubious Associations & Lowly Companions 92.Jesus as Bridegroom 93.Bridegroom as Myth 95.

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Source & Transformation of the Jesus-Bridegroom 96.Demons 98.

Demons as Old Belief 100.Jesus No Exorcist 103.

Beelzebub 105.Who (And Where) Are Jesus’ Family? 107.

The Sower 109.A Secret for the Chosen Few 111.The God of the Seed Sowing 112.

Woman with an Issue of Blood & Jairus’s Daughter 113.Two Miraculous Feedings 116.

The Withered Hand 119.‘Christ Stilleth the Tempest’ 121.

The Sign of Jonah 126.The Syrophoenician Woman 130.

Ephphatha 131.The Veil Lifts 134.

‘Thou Art the Christ!’ 136.‘Get Thee Behind Me, Satan!’ 138.

Simon bar-Jonah 139.The Son of Man Unveiled in his Redemptive Role 142.

Daniel’s Vision an Influence on the Gospel 144.The Transfiguration, or Jesus seen in his Glory 147.

The Last Demoniac a Little Boy 151.The Parable of the Unclean Spirit 154.

Blind Bartimaeus 155.

PART THREEEntry of Christ into Jerusalem 158.

Cursing of the Fig Tree 165.Schweitzer on the Cursing of the Fig Tree 167.

Aaron’s Rod Metaphor 170.Growth in Myth 172.

The Anointing of Christ 175.The Earlier Tale 178.

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PART FOUR A Lazarus ExcursusAppropriation of Meaning: Lazarus I. 181.

The Tale of Lazarus II. 183.Lazarus a Double of Christ III. 186.

Lazarus as Myth IV. 189.Lazarus a Useful Symbol V. 191.

Osiris Correlation: Lazarus VI. 193.The Specter of a Phallic Deity: Lazarus VII. 198.

Akwanshi, a Myth in Stone: Lazarus VIII. 199.Akwanshi II. 201.

Akwanshi III. 205.Leonid Andreyev’s Lazarus: Lazarus IX. 206.

James’s Jolly Corner: Lazarus X. 212.What All this Can Mean: Lazarus XI. 217.

PART FIVEThe Gospel Recast 219.

Insight & Discovery 221.Enigma of Authorship 223.

This Gospel’s Authority 225.The Story Upended 227.

Marking the Contrast 229.Another Jesus 232.

Presence 234.The Speaking Christ 237.

Synoptic Anticipations of John’s Technique 240.The Speaking Christ an Early Practice 244.

PART SIXWeek of the Passover 246.

Jesus’ Final Days 248.The Great Commandment 249.

Mark’s Realism 251.Last-minute Eschatology 252.

The Passion Begins 254.

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Preparations for the Last Supper 255.The Last Supper I. 256.

The Last Supper II. 258.The Last Supper III. 260.

The Fourth Gospel’s Different Version: Last Supper 264.Gethsemane 266.

The Garden of Meeting in John 268.Jesus Before the Sanhedrin 270.

Variations in Luke: first Jewish trial 272.Variations in John 275.

Christ Before Pilate I. 277.Christ Before Pilate II. 279.

Christ Before Pilate III. 281.The Man of Sorrows I. 282.

The Man of Sorrows II. 284.Christ Before Pilate in John 288.

The Man of Sorrows in the Fourth Gospel 290.The Crucifixion I. 292.

The Crucifixion II. 295.The Crucifixion III. 297.

Deposition and Burial 301.The Empty Tomb 303.

Luke’s Variation Examined & Contradicted 306.Matthew’s Version 307.

Emmaus 309.Luke’s Jerusalem Resurrection Scenes 311.

The Risen Jesus & Mary Magdalene (in John) 312.Other Resurrection Scenes in the Fourth Gospel 314.

John’s Mysterious Last Chapter 317.

CONCLUSION: DOGMATA(Or, Opinions firmly held.)

I. 320.II. 323.

III. 324.IV. 326.

Index 335.Appendix on Gothic style 338.

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Citations & CreditsAll due credits are given either in the text or in footnotes. Some

few are incomplete, for which I express my regrets. Since this book isdesigned for the Reader, I have tried to avoid any frivolous distraction.

Biblical references to the different translations used are often missing but therule is very simple:

(a) Whenever a Biblical citation is given without special credit, it isto be assumed that the Revised Standard Version (RSV) has beenused. (b) Quotations in Elizabethan English are, of course, taken fromthe classic and excellent King James Version (KJV) unless theRevised Version of 1881 is mentioned (RV). (c) Otherwise, translators and modern versions are named,especially Goodspeed, The New English Bible (NEB), The NewJerusalem Bible (a Catholic translation), and the several translatorsof The Complete Bible (Chicago University Press).

AcknowledgementsI lay claim to no such scholarly authority as we have had (and

ought to be grateful to have) in such men as Alfred Loisy or RudolfBultmann or England’s CH Dodd or America’s Edgar J. Goodspeed, tomention none of recent date. Scholarship is fundamental to thinking – ithas been fundamental to me. But scholarship is one thing and thinking isanother. Scholarship furnishes but thinking illuminates – and blessed arethose rare spirits who are equally gifted in both.

With Ralph Waldo Emerson whom I regard as America’s pre-eminent sage I hold that we must be willing to learn from anyone, includingthe simplest among us, but that each must learn to think for himself.

I express my heartfelt gratitude toward my daughters, Helen Cox, asearching, vigorous mind whose achievements in art and education haveshown me that the book is understandable by one who works in otherfields, and Shirley Werner (Mrs. William Johnson) for a highly intelligentand gently critical reading of the manuscript as a classics scholar. I thankalso my daughter Lois Werner-Gallegos for painting the ‘stained-glass’window whose photo adorns my cover. My son, Thomas Werner,suggested that the first finished version of the manuscript was too long, andthis was also the opinion of Jill Swenson, whose judgments and expertisehave been a great help. I have removed 26,000 words from that earlierversion without impairing the general idea.

The debt I owe my wife, which is never to be paid, I hint of in thededication.

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PART ONEJESUS WITHOUT EMBARRASSMENT

It would embarrass me to put the name of Jesus in my title and Ihave assigned it to a secondary place, preferring instead Rod of Jessewhich refers to a Messianic prophecy in the Book of Isaiah. That issomething largely external to ourselves, and this I do not feel to beembarrassing, whereas we may be embarrassed when confessing to ourown faith. This book, although in some deep sense a statement of theauthor’s beliefs, confesses only to a question.

As a symbol Rod of Jesse brings to mind a branch newly sprungfrom the root of a devastated tree, but it speaks also of the Messianicscepter which is to be restored to Israel, and in the ‘forgotten language’of an age-old myth it speaks of generation and begetting and of otherdeep, unmentioned things – which have a place here. Initially, ourquestion is only whether such a prophecy is enough to explain thedream. Is it enough of itself to explain the creation of so remarkable afigure as Jesus? Is he the mere creature of the religious imagination, assome critics maintain?

With fairness to both sides I propose to examine the questionwhether Jesus lived a life tangibly of flesh and blood and of mostlyordinary incident, like any other man. In a way it is a very modest thing:we are only asking for the Fact. It would be useless to offer yet anotherversion of his ‘Life’ as outright history because in some deep sense theman is out of reach. Instead, we must inquire frankly of the myth whichthe Gospels would offer us to see what we have here because our themeinvolves us in the exploration of a doubt. We know a great deal todayabout ‘Jesus and his times,’ thanks to the studies of generations ofscholars, but what all this research goes to show is that, in truth, we knowvery little of the man. He is more obscure to history than his fame wouldsuggest.

I might almost have done better, then, to call my book, The(mere) Idea of Christ in the Gospels, or God in Man, because it’s not ahuman Jesus, merely, which we find in these old Gospels on every page. Unfortunately, this title has been ‘taken’ although without the suggestiveaddition of the little word in parentheses. It was Santayana who used itfor an essay of his published some sixty years ago which revealed hisnative Spanish-Catholic bias almost as frankly as in his autobiography – apleasing bias in such a disillusioned mind. Although his own philosophy

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is decidedly austere, a genuine Catholic piety is expressed in his book,and in rendering homage to that piety, he reveals a religious aspect of hissoul.

The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, or God in Man comes down to astress on our human experience because without the human vesture ofthe god the mere Idea is an empty romance. And the Idea as theGospels give it so insists on the man that a frank acknowledgment of ourquestion is called for. Did Jesus live as a man who held for the most partquite ordinary beliefs, who attended his body and washed and dressed,who knew confusion or disappointment or desire or sorrow? Or mustwe take the Gospel merely for its Symbol? Is the man unnecessary if weaccept the sacred illustration? Santayana comes close to sayingsomething like that when he takes these old documents at face valuewithout caring whether this or that incident may have happened aswritten. He is unconcerned to deny the miracles of Christ, for instance,and with a trace of sophistry affirms their possibility. Instead of lookingfor events behind the tales, he will understand the ‘moral’ truth of a thingwhich is expressed in ‘dramatic’ pictures or Teachings or even fables. Not to say by this that the Gospels are in any sense high drama: they areeffective in a liturgical setting when handled by an understanding pastor,but overall, except possibly the Fourth Gospel, they are verymiscellaneously composed.

Our New Testament scholars have taught us that it was the aimof no Evangelist to record the mere facts of this life as Santayana was wellaware. There is nothing of the journalist in the Evangelist. Not a word inthe Gospels describes the face of Jesus except to say once that it shonelike the sun, or again that he looked around him with anger, nor isanything told of his manner except for the action expressed, which isoften half miraculous and half verbal with only the barest description ofthe miracle itself. If we do find in these old writings an illustration of Godin man, that’s not to say that Jesus is presented as a god because thatwould be false to the early tradition. Only in the latest portions of theGospels is the nearness of God to our human Christ suggestive of anIncarnation.

What Santayana discovers in the Gospels is a spirit attuned to thetragic character of life which gives us their abiding value. It is thechastened spirit which has shed the world’s illusion, and this is focusedsupremely in the figure and fate of Jesus. To understand the Gospel is tounderstand the sorrows and the humility of Christ or the meaning of his

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compassion and forgiveness. For like any good Catholic, Santayana hasfallen back on the early doctors of the church, those who came after theGospels were written. He is very frank in affirming the value of theselater (but still very early) traditions, believing that these later doctors hadat least brought out a deeper mystery in their own inspirations.

Can we settle for this? Certainly, his Christ is as tenderlydescribed as, say, the famous painting of the head of Christ by GuidoReni, which is today unfashionably beautiful – but still beautiful. Nevertheless, something is missing in these eloquent pages: Jesus ismissing as a sort of solid body. And I want to know if he is missing alsofrom the Gospels. Where is the stress on the man as historical, whichSantayana passes over rather lightly? For it is really the humanpredicament which he finds in deepest illustration in this ancient timelessGospel, and my question is whether our predicament requires thetangible fact of a Jesus who once lived and died in historical time. Is itenough, then, to settle for the religious Idea which is so beautifully given? Or must we have, at last, the definite fact for our own satisfaction?

JESUS’ HUMANITY IN THE FOUR GOSPELS

Our Gospels portray Jesus as a miraculous man who could, aswe know, feed a multitude with a few loaves and fishes or cure a blindman in one case by spitting on his eyes and laying on his hands. Imention this detail (from Mark 8,23) because it is the primitive quality of itwhich makes it real. We are then inclined to think that he may well havedone such a thing in his endeavor to cure a blind man – we credit hismore primitive existence without a blind acceptance of the miracle. Oragain, awakened by his disciples during a storm on the lake, he rebukedthe wind and waves as a master might threaten an unruly dogwhereupon the wind and waves subsided, greatly to the astonishment ofhis disciples. Coincidence? It would be very extraordinary had such acoincidence occurred and yet a distinguished Jewish scholar accepts thestory on those terms. Quite a few of Jesus’ miracles are of healings anddemoniac cures, which are characteristic of the man, and once, like anIndian faquir, he walked on water. Apart from his Teachings, he doescomparatively few things which are unattended by miracle before hisarrest in Gethsemane after which he stands trial like any ordinary man. The impression of his humanity remains and the miracles tend to bedismissed: it is the modern approach.

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When hauled before Pontius Pilate he is accused of callinghimself the King of the Jews, which amounts to a charge of sedition. It isa charge whose gravity the Gospels would encourage us to overlook byhaving Pilate treat it as an irony which reflects his contemptuous attitudetoward Jews. After examining him Pilate finds Jesus innocent of anycharge deserving death and has him beaten to placate the mob. According to the Fourth Gospel it is here that the Roman says famously,‘Ecce homo!’ when presenting a Jesus draped in purple as a kingcrowned with thorns. According to Matthew the mob cannot beplacated by Pilate’s appeals. The Roman calls for a bowl of water andwashes his hands of the verdict before turning him over to be crucified.

Jesus submits to these indignities despite his miraculous powerand we are likely to take this part of the story as more natural-seemingalthough the miracle continues. The very sun is darkened on GoodFriday afternoon from noon until three o’clock, and after lying for twonights in his tomb, the Crucified rises from the dead: the place is found tobe empty, the body gone. Proof of his Resurrection is that his disciplesand also some women followers saw him afterwards alive.

Although nowhere portraying him as an ordinary human being,the Gospels are nonetheless emphatic that Christ ‘came in the flesh.’ AtJacob’s Well he asks a woman for a drink of water before revealing herpast, and he thirsts on the cross where he dies like a man. Beforeentering Jerusalem he wept over the city, according the Luke. In Johnhe weeps at the grave of Lazarus. Such natural touches as these of tearsand thirst, or elsewhere flaring anger or spontaneous compassion arewoven into the fabric of a miraculous life. We can easily cite data likethis to fill out our impression of the man. In the village of Nazareth hebelongs to an ordinary family who misunderstand him. Mark calls hismother Mary without a word of description, and if she were found to bean elderly woman grown stout from child-bearing or fidgety and worriedover her son it wouldn’t be inconsistent with Mark’s idea because ourprimitive Evangelist once gives the names of four brothers of Jesus,although he tells us nothing else about them elsewhere. He mentionssisters also without naming any. And Jesus might have been theyoungest of this numerous family instead of eldest, as far as Mark isconcerned. This does seem very natural to us.

In connection with a sermon to his own townspeople, Mark callsJesus a carpenter when the townspeople express their astonishment athis Teaching. Where had a carpenter got it all? Matthew claims only

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that they called him ‘the carpenter’s son.’ Was he a rabbi then? He isoften called rabbi since evidently he knew Scripture thoroughly well andquoted it in the old-fashioned Jewish way which gave its simplemeanings a surprising turn. As a villager, a member of a large family, acarpenter become a rabbi, he seems a very natural sort of man. If Jesuswere only a myth, it is strange that he should have been placed in suchdefinite surroundings.

WHY THIS SKETCH MAY BE DOUBTED

The common assumption is that history and legend are mingledin the Gospels of Jesus, and this is almost certainly right. It does temptus, however, into a way of reading the Gospels which seems to work justby laying the miracles aside. That his birth was heralded by angels, orthat he was in infancy visited by Eastern Kings (or properly, by Magi) wedon’t, of course, affirm. All that sort of thing we ascribe to the poetry ofthe Gospels whereas in the story as a whole a constant sense of history issuggested in the fabric of the legend.

If, then, a sketch of Jesus’ life like the one just given is open todoubt it is because we have made him plausible by a selective reading ofthe Gospels before us. Our interpretation lays miracle aside under theimpression that we are reaching back to history, and in the process wehave discarded the very legends which gave us our story. Can this beright if we then stand accused of picking things out as we please anddiscarding the rest on no principle at all except for modern unbelief? It isthe very procedure of those scholars who propose to give us thehistorical Jesus and it rests on a set of assumptions. I would say to them,Gentlemen, you read the Gospel on this ‘common sense’ approach forwhatever seems plausible in it and discard the portions which you don’tcredit. The emerging conception of Jesus you call historical because itmeets your standard in conceiving the way it ‘must have been.’ Outsidethe frankly skeptical school, which has been a powerful influence fromDavid Strauss to Rudolf Bultmann, nearly all the New Testament scholarssift the legend this way.

And not just our trained scholars but our philosophers and menof letters also. Look at Bernard Shaw who has quoted Rousseau assaying, ‘Get rid of the miracles and the whole world will fall at the feet ofJesus Christ.’ This, by the way, is from his preface to Androcles and theLion which, if dated with respect to mere detail, shows the ‘comedic’

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playwright’s impressive grasp of these Gospels. Jean Jacques Rousseauis a figure of the Enlightenment: the mood is modern. This view istherefore commonplace among the cultured. A more remarkable essayon the ‘subject’ of Jesus and the Bible than even Shaw’s preface toAndrocles is that by Matthew Arnold in his Literature and Dogma. Matthew Arnold’s method is to put the miracles mostly aside except thathe is tender toward the healings because there are so many reports ofthem. It is a point of view. One accepts that the impossible is impossibleand makes do with what remains.

Then are we really helped by getting rid of miracles? ThomasJefferson composed a version of the Gospels which was surprisinglyample and in which the Teachings were included and various doings ofJesus, but no miracles. More radically and strenuously, Tolstoy did this,too: Tolstoy who after writing War and Peace learned Greek in order toread the Gospels in the original. (Jefferson read Greek, too, it is fair toadd). So we have works like these, Jefferson’s the more modest andnaive, Tolstoy’s the more opinionated. The same difficulty has been metby many another man of letters who would offer us a plausible version ofthe Gospel tale, but nothing enduringly has come of it.

Is the modern procedure in vain? I mean by the modernprocedure exactly this assumption that our text can be penetrated and agiven story held up to the light and turned this way and that to yield itsoriginal fact. It is as if we believed that the miracle had been laid on likegold leaf on a Russian icon or like the Sacred Heart of Jesus displayed onhis sleeve. We do sometimes seem to see what ‘really must havehappened’ in these tales. Allowing for exaggerations of legend we creditourselves with sense enough to see beyond it. So our historical Jesus is‘plucked’ from the Gospels, or one could even say that he is rescued fromthem rather than taken outright, which is felt to be impossible. Theprocess of sifting these old tales has brought us a variety of Jesus figuresas we have trusted to our own good sense while seeing through thelegend.

Throughout this essay we disregard any obligation of doctrine orreligious belief and embrace instead as our all-sufficient principle just thatof understanding. I accept the miracle and the myth which it implies. Such as they are, these Gospels are the one prime source for any life ofChrist. What they attest with given evidence is the human fact of Jesus,yet questions remain. We allow that invention occurs and we considerthe Negative argument without surrendering our belief that the Gospels

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have a claim on history. Is it not worth while to understand the tale theytell without an impossible struggle to believe them?

WHAT FACTS CAN LEGENDS GIVE?What lump of solid history, for instance, might we extract from

the Christmas legends of Matthew and Luke which we recognize to befables? Any at all? It is a prophecy from the Book of Micah which willexplain these tales:

But thou, Bethlehem, Ephrata, though thou be little among thethousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto methat is to be ruler in Israel whose goings forth have been from ofold, from everlasting. (Micah 5,2.)

Micah’s book is a compilation of Hebrew oracles dating from the 5thcentury BC. In these high-flown words addressed to Bethlehem we havethe dream of Israel, promising an ideal King who is to arise in David’scity. Whatever sort of king he was, David has figured ever after as thehero among the kings of Israel beginning as a shepherd lad who slewGoliath with a stone. Many a graceful gesture and bold exploit isascribed to David – and many a Psalm! We may have in such traditionsthe vivid legends of a warrior-prince whose reign was followed by theGolden Age of Solomon. Jerusalem was a Jebusite city before the timeof David, who took it for his own capital and kept its old name: Uru-salimmeans City of Peace. How could the nation forget him after it fell onhard times? A legendary king becomes the basis for a new ideal.

Our quoted prophecy doesn’t use the name Messiah, but it was avery slow growth before the full conception of the Christ was achieved. The Hebrew name, like the Greek Christos, means Anointed One. Wethink of high ceremony, of gorgeous robes and rituals of crowning andinvestiture done before a joyous assembly. These are occasions of statewhen the significance of office is vivid in the minds of all: the AnointedOne is given his role. Thus when Micah speaks of one coming forth to beruler in Israel, he is looking toward the past as well as the future anddrawing on past ideals to express a hope, and it this famous apostropheto Bethlehem which inspires the legends of Christmas by the logic of alater faith. Every other Gospel tradition tells us that Jesus was a Galilean. Alone, the Christmas legends of Matthew and Luke place his birth inBethlehem for the reasons stated.

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But these are two different legends. Matthew introduces thequoted prophecy in a fabulous setting. (2,6) Certain Magi journeyingfrom the East have been following his Star but in Jerusalem they losetrack of it and must inquire in Herod’s court: ‘Where is he that is bornKing of the Jews?’ Micah’s prophecy is recalled by the chief priests andscribes to put them on track of the Holy Child again – and put a jealousHerod on track, also. Evidently, the Magi are astrologers and gifted indivination, but had they an inkling of the consequence, they could neverhave asked such a dangerous question in the court of Herod the Greatbecause their visit leads to the slaughter of ‘all the male children inBethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under.’ Yeteven this, Matthew pretends, is in fulfillment of prophecy:

A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation,Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoledbecause they were no more. (2,18.)

Once the Magi have learned where the Messiah is to be born, the Starreappears to lead them to the very house in which ‘they saw the childwith Mary his mother.’

What is the reason for such an aberration in this inconstant Star? Alfred Loisy has called the Matthew story a typical ‘myth of a divinechild, a Solar Deity, whom the dragon of darkness would devour at hisbirth.’ If that is true, it is a myth which has taken the form of history,which is to say, of legend. Others have called it the ‘myth of theendangered child’ which we meet also, for instance, in the story ofKrishna. As for the Star, it may have been overpowered momentarily bythe dragon of darkness until the dragon’s own design could be achieved.

Matthew’s dark tale is not a happy story and we owe itsassimilation to our own happy Christmas to artists of the Renaissance orearlier who show the Magi kneeling to the Child amid bright ruins of acountry stable where cattle gaze on the scene or some donkey pokes itsnose in. Were it not for the angels floating about, the Magi would seemout of place here. All this must have surprised Matthew, however, whonever dreamt of bringing the holy family to Bethlehem, as Luke does,because he has assumed that they lived there.

The happy scene, which is far from Herod’s court, is adaptedfrom Luke’s Christmas tale, which has over many years of Christmaspageants absorbed the Magi and their Star. It is Luke, therefore, whosets the scene and in so doing gives us Christmas. This Evangelistdelights to reveal the lowliness of Jesus and here he has him born in a

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stable, thanks to a No Vacancy in a Bethlehem inn. It is only his midnightangels appearing in a shining light that may be said to touch onMatthew’s somber contrasts of night and Star, of Solar Child and darkdesigns, but Luke preserves his pastoral undisturbed because his angelmakes announcement to mere shepherds in the fields to whom (thesesame daffy shepherds) a heavenly chorus appears to sing of Peace onearth, goodwill toward men:

Fear not (says the angel) for behold I bring you good tidings ofgreat joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born thisday in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. Andthis shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapped inswaddling clothes, lying in a manger. (2,10.)

A manger, a feeding trough for horses and cattle, to chime with thelowliness of this unappreciated Messiah! Once again Micah’s prophecyhas brought us to the city of David. Only, we are not to expect of thishumble birth a ruler in Israel. That has now been given up in exchangefor the Savior.

Luke’s pastoral, which in my childhood was read in services ofLutheran worship, has always seemed to me among the most beautifulpassages in Scripture, but his tale is also fitting for the theme he stresses. Without the lowliness of Christ, no Christ: it is a transformation in theMessianic ideal. I see, too, in the lowly babe ‘wrapped in swaddlingclothes and lying in a manger’ a reminiscence of another baby lying in alittle ark made of papyrus reeds and daubed with pitch, there to befound by a bathing princess and adopted into Pharaoh’s household.

The late distinguished Edgar J. Goodspeed suggests that Jesusreally was born in Bethlehem and offers these legends in proof. This is abolder conjecture than piecemeal picking because it is conceivable thatboth legends assert a common fact. They ask to be taken that way, andDr. Goodspeed is quite aware that the two are otherwise incompatible,having grown up independently of one another. On Goodspeed’s viewthe common fact is known. Only, why are we not simply told of it, then? Why do none of our Gospels say: ‘It was so!’ Instead, they deliver adatum of Jesus’ birth wrapped in fanciful tales which stray off in twodirections.

See what a lot of trouble these legend-makers have gone to andwhat imaginations were required to reveal something that might havebeen said outright, yet Matthew takes on a moral confusion about an

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erratic Star whose momentary failure he must cover with an artificialprophecy, and the case is no better with Luke, assuming that his purposeis to decorate known fact. It may seem that angels singing of a Savior’sbirth in the middle of nowhere and shepherds tramping to town frommidnight fields in search of a mewling infant who is lying in a box offodder would be an easy poetic conception to a certain type of mind. Iquite deny it. To present Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem as fact of history,Luke must bring his parents from Nazareth where he believes they areliving. How to give them a reason for going to Bethlehem and then placethem in a stable where, to be sure, he desires to have them to illustratethe lowliness of the infant Savior? These problems he solves with hisdescription of a census required by Caesar Augustus which is, alas,mistakenly conceived.

Probably the Evangelist is vaguely recalling a historical eventwhen he tells us that everyone, in order to be enrolled, must go to hisown city. Artistically, he accounts for the great stir of people this wayand obtains his overcrowded inn, but such a decree as he describesrequires of Joseph that he abandon his livelihood in Nazareth to take aMary ‘great with child’ on a journey. He must leave his mountain village,go up to Jerusalem no small distance and then beyond it for another tenmiles. Small wonder that Mary delivers her baby almost on arrival intown! And all of this to register his name for taxes! As for Bethlehem, hemust go there because he is ‘of the house and lineage of David.’

Luke’s account is valuable for ‘fact’ in giving us the CaesarAugustus era because it shows the Evangelist’s belief that Jesus was bornthen. A conscious man of letters, he ties his legend into history moredeliberately than our scribal Matthew. But why does he commit himselfto a census so impossibly conceived except to bring about the aims of hisstory?

We do not know where Jesus was born, or when. No more didMatthew when adapting his myth or Luke when devising his fable. IfMatthew’s tale reflects his birth under Herod the Great, which is possiblefact, we are left with the odd result that Jesus was born a few years‘before Christ’ according to the calendar. Herod died shortly before theChristian era and his sons divided up the rule.

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JOHN ERSKINE on The Human Life of JesusAre place-names traditionally more reliable than the wonders

told of in those places? At Cana Jesus turned water into wine, at Nainraised a corpse from its bier, at Gadara cast demons into swine, atBethsaida cured one blind man by spitting and at Jericho cured anotherby a spoken word. There is a peculiar convincingness about the namingof places: there they are. On the strength of a place-name, we aretempted to posit an original fact.

John Erskine’s essay on The Human Life of Jesus1 shows that aCatholic humanist may reason along these lines. First, a wonder occursand a tradition arises which remembers the place of it. Sometimes oneof Jesus’ own disciples – John, for instance, as the supposed author ofthe Fourth Gospel – makes a miracle out of a significant memory. It wasat a Wedding in Cana in Galilee that the mother of Jesus told him, ‘Theyhave no wine,’ and he replied, ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet come.’ A strange reply, these words in Jesus’mouth, and it has often been wondered at. Woman, he calls his mother,as if she were a woman of a lower caste. Nevertheless, she turns to theservants saying, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’ Six stone jars are standingnearby, and Jesus tells the servants, ‘Fill the jars with water,’ and then,‘Now draw some out and take it to the steward of the feast.’ A wine ofrare quality has been obtained. No word of command has been spoken,no audible prayer.

What can have happened to give rise to such a tale as this if itrests on a fact? Did the original thing done by Jesus and remembered inconnection with a wedding at Cana resemble the miracle described? Ordid Jesus have them serve fresh water on purpose to guests welldrunken? Such was the inspiration of Robert Graves, who made bold tosee a ‘hit’ on Jesus’ part for daring a novel idea: tasting fresh water theyliked it! Or else it might have been only a ladleful drawn for the stewardthat Jesus miraculously transformed instead of all those brimming stonepots which would have furnished the wedding guests wine by the gallon. This odd solution is the compromise of Father Raymond Brown whoaccepts the miracle but shudders to think of the inordinate quantitytransformed.

What does John Erskine say? His book is an act of faith: he will

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have no part in weakening our confidence in Gospel history, and hewould have us conceive the human life of Jesus as he conceives it,demonstrating that such a man did in truth once live and suffer thosethings which are common to all – in the course of a singular life, to besure. He will dare to say of Jesus’ response to his mother’s request at thewedding: ‘He did what she asked, and she knew he would.’ This he says inchapter two before taking it back again in chapter five with respect toany miracle performed. No doubt it was something Jesus did, he thinks,and something his mother had asked for – this is the vague fact that ourhumanist is driven to, for the Wedding at Cana. Again in chapter ten hedeclares, ‘I have made it clear that I do not believe in the Wonders,’ theancient world being as it was ‘very weak in science.’

Surely the Catholic modernists were better off in taking theWedding at Cana for a deliberate Symbol, as for instance Baron vonHügel did in his classic article on the Gospel of John in the EncyclopediaBritannica. But Erskine is not only thinking of modernism, which theCatholic Church had in 1907 condemned. He is thinking back to themodern denial of Jesus’ very existence in defending his human life, whichis supposed to be illustrated here. So he must believe that somethingvaguely unexplained has happened in that place, Cana of Galilee. Thebeautiful story can have no value, then, unless such a wedding onceoccurred there. Yet ironically the Symbol returns. Poet-scholar that he isat heart, Erskine must treat the Wedding at Cana as if it mattered to us bymeaning something. Of itself it means nothing more than any otherancient wedding. A Galilean villager, then, who is otherwise unknowntook a woman to wife at a wedding to which Jesus was invited, and hisdisciples, and his mother. We must affirm the original facts even if wedraw them from our own imagination as Erskine does when he spins apious fantasy:

It was Mary who really watched over the evening’s progress. The household was not rich, and even a few guests more thanhad been planned for would exhaust the provisions, to themortification of bride and groom. It was to save them fromembarrassment that Mary and Jesus planned together.

Planned together: but ‘Mary’ and Jesus surely did not plan a miracletogether, and besides (later on – in another chapter) such a miraclewould be unedifying:

To be able to turn water into wine would be a greatconvenience, especially at a large party where the wine had

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given out, but it would teach nothing about the duty to be just inall our dealings, or to be humble toward God and man.

And here the humanist blunders, since the whole significance of Jesus’turning water into wine is in the Symbol expressed. Erskine disposes ofthe miracle at the heart of the Johannine Tale in a tactful manner,delaying his confession to the last. Three times in his book he has turnedto the Wedding at Cana, having each time to discover a meaning in itwithout accepting the wonder told of, which is the whole reason for thestory’s existence. Not all the subtlety of a John Erskine can dissolve thecontradiction here because, in a word, he proposes to show us thesignificance of the Wedding at Cana after denying its significance. He willtell us what this Gospel means after denying that it means what it says.

The significance of the story for us is that Jesus was present at thewedding and shared the happiness of his friends. He began andended his ministry, he carried it out at every stage, in examplesof social-mindedness. There was to be no place in the Kingdomof God for narrow or isolated hearts; to think of him as a lonelySaviour, a Prometheus, is a great error. When his mother cameto him with the problem of the wine, we are sure she had tointerrupt a cheerful conversation with some other guests.

In sum, he would ignore the miracle of Christ because he finds no valuein the Sign given. Who needs so much wine at a village wedding? Andwhy are Christ’s powers expended on a trifle? Although ‘convenient’ ashe says, such a miracle ‘would teach nothing about the duty to be just in allour dealings, or to be humble toward God and man.’ Of course not, butthis is beside the point. Missing its significance, then, and being vaguelyaware of his failure, Erskine distracts us by alluding to Micah:

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good: and what doth theLord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and towalk humbly with thy God? (Micah 6,8.)

He would substitute a moral lesson for the Wedding of Cana, havingfailed to get anything out of it except his own preference for a sociableJesus, but his purpose is one of evasion. Well-conceived and warmlyportrayed, his Jesus at the Wedding of Cana is no figure of history but anovelist’s character built up out of admirations and imaginations dear tothe novelist, an amiable Jesus, a man of no narrow views who shares afestive hour with friends and is on hand to figure out a way to spare them

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2. Alfred Loisy, Origins of the New Testament (University Books, 1962, p. 199.)

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embarrassment when the wine gives out. All of this, alas, without a hintof what it was that Jesus did or how he did it.

What of the mother of Jesus in this tale, ‘Mary who reallywatched over the evening’s progress’ and ‘planned together’ with Jesusto do whatever it was he did? Writing in a sentimental mood, Erskinemakes free use of the adored name, ‘Mary’ – a Virgin addressed by namein Luke’s Gospel when the Angel Gabriel salutes her. In fact, she isn’tmentioned by name at the Wedding of Cana and this is no accident. Jesus’ mother isn’t named in the Fourth Gospel, from which this tale istaken. She is said to be present at the cross along with two other Marysin this Gospel, but John has named only two of them Mary, and one ofthem is Jesus’ aunt (his mother’s sister). When Jesus speaks to thismother from the cross, he once again calls her Woman. These are nohair-splitting distinctions.

For as it happens, ‘the mother of Jesus is not mentioned by herproper name’ in the Wedding at Cana because

‘this mother stands also for the Judaism which waited for theKingdom of God, and it is in that character that she is made todeclare “there is no more wine.” Jesus begins by answering thatbetween him and his putative mother there is nothing incommon, because there is nothing earthly in his origin...’2

The quoted words are those of Alfred Loisy, a supreme Catholic scholar,and they show the quality of a sincere endeavor to understand theGospel as we have it when the Evangelist’s deliberate withholding of themother’s name is honored for its peculiar significance. Instead of jugglingtexts and moralizing and dodging the issue but faithful to the very word,Loisy tells us just what that significance consists in. The whole Weddingtale is, in effect, a mystical Symbol which the Evangelist composed toillustrate the supersession of one Religion by another. Judaism, for theFourth Gospel, has been superseded by the advent of Christ, who cameto fulfill it and surpass it. The miracle is not to be discarded, therefore, because thereby did Jesus ‘manifest his glory, and his disciples believedin him.’ Such is the Scripture given and its meaning understood. Loisy isnot embarrassed by the myth and he does not seek to replace it. Wedon’t, of course, by the mere act of understanding such a tale, arrive atfact of history: we do arrive at the author’s thought.

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3. Edgar J. Goodspeed, An Introduction to the New Testament (Chicago, 1953, p. 317)

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DOUBT OF JESUS

Whether the men of antiquity ever doubted that Jesus had livedI cannot say. It is our modern question, true, but was it theirs? For itseems to be widely assumed by our historians that the ancients did notquestion his apparent existence, at least not in those writings whichsurvive. A rare Roman reference to Christ found in Tacitus’ Annales15.44 mentions him as the founder of the vulgar Christian sect (‘Auctornominis.’) Along with an allusion to ‘Jews under the instigation ofChrestus’ found in Suetonius, who gets even the name wrong, there is noearly external reference to Jesus outside a disputed passage in Josephuswhich is at best an evidence that has been tampered with and possibly amere forgery. It has no solid value.

We know that very early Docetists were to be found who deniedthat Christ had come in the flesh. What can it mean for us unless weunderstand the reason for their denial? These were people who heldthat Jesus had appeared among men as an apparent man. Goodspeedhas given a sample of Docetic thinking from the Acts of John, so-called,in which a disciple, John, is speaking:

‘Sometimes when I would lay hold of him, I met with a materialand solid body, and at other times again when I felt him, thesubstance was immaterial and as if it existed not at all.’ This wasa Jesus who left no footprints, who seemed sometimes tall andsometimes short, and who, when he was being crucified below,was also conversing with John in a cave above Jerusalem.3

So these early Docetists denied that Christ had come in the flesh,no doubt in part because they understood that the deeds of Jesus asdescribed were impossible to a man. They denied his human existenceon our terms while conceding his human appearance on theirs. It was apoint of view which the New Testament is concerned to deny, and all theearly Catholic writers also deny passionately. As late as the (early) fifthcentury AD St. Augustine attacked them in a sermon, which shows howthe viewpoint persisted. The First Epistle of John says:

Every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in theflesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus isnot of God. This is the spirit of Antichrist. (I John 4)

Surely, the author of the Acts of John in Goodspeed’s quotation

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has only devised a theory which is implicit in the several Resurrectiontales. In Luke’s Gospel the Risen Christ appears bodily to walk a fewmiles incognito with a pair of disciples on the road to Emmaus until theyrecognize him in the breaking of bread, whereupon he disappears. John’s Christ is equally phantasmal when he appears suddenly amongthe disciples behind closed doors to breathe on them the Holy Spirit orwhen he reappears eight days later to exhibit his wounds to a doubtingThomas and chide his unbelief: ‘Blessed are those who have not seenand yet believe.’ If the very Gospels have fallen back on this kind ofthinking to solve the problem of the Resurrection, why not make a theoryof it to explain the amazing tales of Jesus then in circulation?

It is no easy thing to pass through the iron gates of a dead worldand awaken it to life or to lay aside the thousandfold assumptions wemake in every act of understanding and then to comprehend an ancientmood. History may seem an easy thing to know if you reduce it toinformation: the dates of battles or the names of kings, but this becomesquickly a bore. Facts are crucial to our understanding, yes, and it may bea great thing to establish for the first time a particular fact, but thehistorian’s grand aim is not to furnish lists but to open another world toour fascination and astonishment, like a foreign country seen for the firsttime.

Explicit doubts of the life of Jesus were raised in the 18th centuryby a man of letters and learning, Charles François Dupuis, who derivedreligion very largely from astrology in a famous book, Origine de tous lescultes (1794 – 1795). Earlier he had traced the origin of the zodiac toUpper Egypt, and in this book he described Christ as an ‘allegoricalpersonage’ representing the sun and Christianity as an allegory representing‘celestial phenomena.’ (This epitome we owe to Andrews Norton). It issaid that the hubbub caused by his book was a factor in Napoleon’sdecision to go to Upper Egypt. Rarely can a book have had soconsequential an influence! In his book, Jesus the Nazarene, MauriceGoguel quotes Dupuis’ own words:

‘Jesus is still less man than God. He is, like all the deities thatmen have adored, the sun; Christianity is a solar myth. When weshall have shown that the pretended history of a God, who isborn of a virgin in the winter solstice, who is resuscitated atEaster or at the Vernal equinox, after having descended into hell,who brings with him a retinue of twelve apostles; whose chiefpossesses all the attributes of Janus – a God, conqueror of the

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4. Maurice Goguel, Jesus the Nazarene (New York: Appleton, 1926, p. 7.)

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prince of darkness, who translates mankind into the empire oflight, and who heals the woes of the world, is only a solar fable,... it will be almost as unnecessary to inquire whether there was aman called Christ as it is to inquire whether some prince is calledHercules.’4

Notice that here it is only the number of the Twelve Apostles thatcorresponds to the Zodiac, which represent a circle of animals. Elsewhere, Dupuis declares that Capricorn, or the Ram, corresponds tothe Lamb of God because the sun enters Capricorn at the winter solstice,the time of Jesus’ birth, but here he strikes a false note. He is rightenough in claiming an astrological reference to the liturgical calendar forChristmas, which occurs at the time of the winter solstice, but he slights aprime fact of history by substituting a Ram for the Spring lamb required bythe Jewish Passover. Of the two Christmas legends in the Gospels, wemay add, neither one suggests a season of the year.

Now the 18th century was not, in general, disposed to deny thelife of Christ. Most of the Deists like Thomas Paine or Thomas Jeffersonthought highly of the Nazarene but poorly of ‘priestcraft.’ Jefferson’sBible we have already remarked on. Or consider Voltaire, who admiredJesus but hated the church, basing this in part on his knowledge ofhistory. A certain Bolingbroke is said to be among the first of themoderns to deny the life of Christ, but Charles François Dupuis gave thememorable shock. In deriving the liturgy and its myths from astrology,he laid down a hypothesis which is alive to this day in the study of Mithra.

Among the relics of Mithraism, which has left us no writings, arequeer bestial figures of Aion, or Time, showing the head of a lion on thestanding body of a man who is wrapped up and down with a greatcoiling serpent. This image may represent the course of the sun as it risesthrough the Zodiac. A typical Mithraic altar in bas-relief will show thehero-god Mithra slaying a bull which is half-collapsed under the god’sknee as his sword pierces its heart and a scorpion pinches the bull’stesticles. This almost looks like the pain of a sexual renunciation, butFranz Cumont, whom I am following for the astrology, explains that thesun as it waxes in strength enters the sign of Taurus which marks thebeginning of spring. The return of winter is announced when the suntraverses the sign of the Scorpion. We see from the debris of history how

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5. William R. Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch: A Commentary on the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch(Fortress Press 1985.)

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thoroughly the mysteries of Mithra were involved with astrology whenthe symbols of the Zodiac are

...stamped on these lifeless things

which yet survive. Around this same time another French writer, oneCount Volney, derived the name ‘Christ’ from the Hebrew Heres orCheres, meaning Sun. This is perhaps absurd, but the two words have incommon the key letters: Chrs (and the Hebrew is written withoutvowels). Shemesh is the usual Hebrew word for sun to which we mustcompare Shamash, the Mesopotamian sun god. Heres is poetic and rare. As for Christos, it is unrelated to the sun, although the Messiah waslooked for under the image of the Star of Jacob. The mysterious name ofone supposed Messiah, Bar Kochba, seems to mean, ‘Son of the Star.’ Easter in the Western church is made to fall invariably on the Day of theSun, and in AD 354 Pope Julius I ‘assimilated the festival (of Christ’sbirth) with that of the birth of Mithra,’ according to the CatholicEncyclopedia. Mithra was a god of light or of the sun. Animated,probably, by considerations like these Volney derived the name of Jesusfrom Yes (not our English word, of course) ‘which is formed by the unionof three letters, the numerical value of which is 608, one of the solarperiods.’

In the Book of Revelation ‘Jesus’ openly calls himself ‘the rootand the offspring of David, the bright Morning Star,’ (22,16. RSV) and weread in a primitive Christmas hymn quoted by Bishop Ignatius:

‘How then was he revealed to the aeons?’‘A star shone in heavenBrighter than all the stars,And its light was ineffableAnd its novelty caused astonishment;All the other starsTogether with sun and moonBecame a chorus for the star,And it outshone them all with its light.’5

Dr. Schoedel, whose translation I quote, thinks that this Star may refer toMatthew’s Christmas Star, with support from the context, but I think itrefers directly to Jesus because its outshining even ‘sun and moon’

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reminds me of Joseph’s dream in Genesis (37,9) in which the sun andmoon and eleven stars – the eleven stars of his jealous brothers – madeobeisance to the future savior of their family.

There is yet another early hymn (not here to be described andfar too long to quote) which is called The Song of the Pearl or The Hymnof the Soul based on a greater than a Christmas Star. It is found in theso-called Acts of Thomas written in Syrian Edessa. In this hymn themysterious identity of the Eastern ‘hero’ is very readily resolved alonglines which Rendel Harris once suggested. It is, namely, a deeplymythical hymn of the Morning Star which (or rather, Who) figures in theSong as a Twin of the Evening Star and a child of Sun and Moon. Andthese astrological Twins (Morning and Evening Star) correspond toanother set of twins in the Acts of Thomas, namely, Jesus himself and histwin brother, Thomas.

Dr. Harris deserves real credit for his theory that Jesus and histwin, Thomas, had displaced Aziz and Monim, as the Morning and theEvening Stars were formerly called there. This rather puzzling hymn(Song of the Pearl) when taken astrologically explains the mysteriousseason of the disappearance of the Morning Star in a sort of longEgyptian darkness, during which the Evening Star enjoys its phase. Forin the season of the Morning Star, the Evening Star is not to be seen. Ofcourse it is the Morning Star who represents the immortal Twin. Impressive on early morning walks, it waxes in splendor before the sunrises even as the other stars are fading away. By contrast, the EveningStar sinks and dies in evening darkness as the mortal Twin. It is ofinterest that (as Rendel Harris has pointed out) in various bas-reliefs ofMithra, two youthful torch-bearers are to be seen in the corners, as itwere: one upholding his torch and the other holding it down. This lookslike a very plain reference to the Heavenly Twins.

To wrap this up, we may notice that Zeus offers a choice toPolydeukes (=Pollux) who is mourning over his wounded brother Kastorand pleading for his life:

Behold, of these two things I give you choiceentire; if you would escape death and age that all men hate,to dwell beside me on Olympos with Athene and Ares of the

black spear,that right is yours. But if all your endeavor is foryour Twin, and you would have in all things shares alike,

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6. The Odes of Pindar (University of Chicago Press, 1947 p. 127.)

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half the time you may breathe under the earth,half the time in the golden houses of the sky.’6

Richmond Lattimore

It is not a pair of (actual) stars that are to be called Castor and Polluxhere. Instead, and strikingly, the Heavenly Twins are related to theMorning and the Evening Star in Pindar’s Ode.

DOUBT OF JESUS ‘NOW’A self-taught scholar and a Scotsman, Mr. JM Robertson,

rekindled the question of Jesus for the English-speaking world about ahundred years ago, but an American scholar, Professor William BenjaminSmith, might almost claim priority here independently. These differentminds had more or less simultaneously worked up similar hunches, eachbelieving on different grounds that a human Jesus may never haveexisted. Overwhelmingly, their views were rejected, as of course wemust expect, and yet the first thirty years of the twentieth century weremuch occupied with the question thus raised – it was not an easyquestion. Even after the controversy died down, writers could be foundat mid-century or beyond who acknowledged the problem, as wenoticed ourselves in the case of Santayana or John Erskine.

JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON is not a famous writer or even, aswe say, quite ‘great’ but one of his many books lately republished, a two-volume History of Freethought in the 19th Century, is a work of greatmerit. I find it cited in a bibliography of the American historian,Preserved Smith. His Pagan Christs has also been reprinted, and it wasthis same versatile Robertson who did the Coleridge article and wroteportions on Shakespeare in my 1952 Britannica. Although probablynothing he wrote is as sheerly good literature as JS Mill’s essay on Liberty,the intrepid Scot shared the same passion for liberty and free-thoughtwhich Mill expressed with a beautiful tact. Whether he did entirelybelieve that Jesus had never ‘existed’ I am unable to say, but I thinkreally that he did not and could not whole-heartedly believe it withoutrelapses. He tells us that he came to the Negative view as a result oftrying to find the ‘historical Jesus’ and then in his Short History ofChristianity he allows that for the ‘ancient Jesuine eucharist,’ which was

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perhaps revived in a time of disaster, ‘a new meaning may have beenfound in the story of an actually slain man Jesus, whose death took asacrificial aspect from its occurrence at the time of the atoning feast.’ There you have his concession, which almost implies that the argument isabout something else.

One of Robertson’s hypotheses, then, is that Christianity was theoff-spring of a secret Joshua cult going back probably for hundreds ofyears into Old Testament times when a certain Joshua (he says) wasregarded as a god. Now in the Old Testament Joshua figures as asecond Moses, not a god, but after all he did once make the sun standstill, which is very godlike. Robertson’s hypothesis rests on a stronglymythical view of the Old Testament which is nowadays considered to beout of date, but this latter view is undoubtedly a phase and, in fact, if weobserve the behavior of these ancient Patriarchs and prophets, we findourselves up to the neck in myth outright, often grossly. When we thinkof Elijah, for instance, riding a chariot of fire drawn by horses of fire andlifted up to Heaven in a whirlwind, we have a comparison to Apollo ofthe kind that Robertson intended.

He dared to imagine furthermore that the Joshua cult wascarried on in conventicles of twelve. Now we have in the first place noevidence for a Joshua cult and it was pure guesswork on his part to posithis conventicles of twelve, yet I once saw a photograph of anarchaeologist’s Near Eastern find modeled in clay showing twelvefigurines (if I rightly recall) reclining in a ritual circle: figurines in a bowl. Male and female images they are and crudely made. They appear to benaked, and they have, of course nothing identifiably to do with anyJoshua cult. Nonetheless, they are a piece of antique evidence – forwhat? This Quakerlike bowl of nudes is no Roman orgy, judging fromthe sedate postures of the figurines, and we may think in passing of thoseostensible words of Jesus in the Egyptian Gospel of Thomas about theCoptic initiate’s entering the Kingdom when, without shame, he cantrample on his clothes.

He can offer no such tangible evidence for his cult, however,though it may be mentioned that the names of Jesus (in Greek) andJoshua (in Hebrew) are essentially the same, and he cites an odd sort ofpassage in the New Testament, found in the Epistle of Jude, whereaccording to certain manuscripts it is said that Jesus saved a people out ofEgypt and afterward destroyed those who did not believe. Compare thecurious idea of Paul in I Corinthians 10, where the Rock which followed

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the Israelites in the desert and from which they ‘drank’ is Christ! It isstrange to think that the Apostle would ‘find’ Christ in some such formamong the Israelites.

On such guesses as this Robertson was bold to erect hishypothesis, but sometimes his phrasing seems to betray him. It is veryeasy for any of us to slip back into the assumption of Jesus’ real existenceregardless of any doubts we may have felt. Our belief in the fact of hislife is supported by an ancient custom and has become a solid habit. Itwas habit for Robertson, too, but he was willing to consider thealternative and cast about for other possibilities. In his passion to explainhow Christianity could possibly come about without a Jesus, he wasdrawn to the idea of a common ancestral myth behind Jesus and Krishna,who was also regarded as a god incarnate come down from heaven toredeem us. We do see, of course, that here our critic is casting about forother possibilities and has seized on a very suggestive comparison whichmay be found already in Charles François Dupuis. What about hisJoshua cult, then? Are we to assume a vague connection? If so, andbecause as I have mentioned Joshua made the sun stand still, we mayhave in Robertson’s two hypotheses a common ancestor in Dupuis’astrological theory. Nor would I be surprised to learn that Dupuis hadgiven Robertson his incentive in the first place.

WILLIAM BENJAMIN SMITH, who once taught at Tulane and who,by the way, also contributed articles (on mathematics) to the 1952Britannica, was another versatile mind. Radical in his assumption thatJesus never lived, he differs from other critics, and from Robertsontremendously, in his endeavor to ‘help’ religion. He believed that he washelping to save Jesus, save the Gospels for us by denying the mere manof history and asserting that the Gospels were composed as deliberatesymbols, which allows him to make a Symbol of Christ (but also toexplain why it seems that Jesus originated in a widespreadMediterranean Jesus cult before the time of Christ). His first book hewas obliged to have translated into German as Der Vorchristliche Jesus tofind a publisher for it. His title designates a supposedly ‘prechristianJesus’ whose myth had existed for a century or more before the age ofPeter and Paul. For proof of this he turned to the Book of Acts, whichpurports to be an early Christian history. How suddenly (in Acts) doChristian churches spring up everywhere around the Mediterranean worldand with full-fledged religious faith and knowledge of Jesus! Is it not a caseof viele Brennpunkte or of spontaneous multiple origins of a common

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myth being fused together rather than a single ‘burning’ focus? We donotice, then, that Smith’s pre-Christian Jesus does not arise from aJoshua cult going back many centuries but is a broadly Mediterraneanmyth of more recent origin. Robertson’s hypothesis goes back as far ashuman sacrifice and seems designed to allow for crucifixion and theSacrament whereas Smith’s vorchristliche Jesus rests on such historicalevidence as we have in the Book of Acts. We must concede to Smiththat the evidence in Acts, which has little enough to do with anyApostles, does rather surprise us by the rapidity with which the Gospeltook root around that world. Yet Smith was drawn also to the view thatJesus represented a deliberate Personification of Israel under the name ofSon of Man. Is it quite the same thing? As with Robertson above heseems to waver between possibilities here.

Taken individually, any of these possibilities is suggestive andwhat they all have in common, of course, is that they propose to tell uswhere Jesus ‘came from’ without having shown us in the first place thathe never lived. We must bear this in mind, but do let us continue in spiteof that because real insight is to be gained here. In a later book, EcceDeus, which he published in English, Professor Smith develops his beliefthat our Gospels were designed symbolically by the authors anddeliberately so written, as if originally there was no question about it. Even the naive Gospel of Mark, which seems often to be realistic, wasread by its first readers for its Symbol.

ARTHUR DREWS whose famous book, The Christ Myth, has beentwice recently reprinted, is the best known member of our selectedcritics. His is surely the name most literary people will associate with theNegative view. A powerful mind, and really the most powerful of ourtrio, Arthur Drews was generous enough to acknowledge a debt to Mr.JM Robertson. To me this is touching compared to the scorn whichAlbert Schweitzer pours on these names as amateurs and outsiders. Mr.Robertson was a self-educated man from the age of thirteen, whereasProfessor Drews was a German academic philosopher. His vigoroustreatment of the question is founded on a very wide and searchingresearch, but he does occasionally give the same impression thatRobertson does of not entirely believing his own theory at all points. This isthe way of your thinker, however, who is pursuing his idea through amist, or blazing his trail in a forest. Drews is not simply setting out anopinion which he happened to pick up somewhere. He is engrossed in aproblem and a vision: he is testing out a genuine possibility, and he fights

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for it energetically, like a visiting strongman going among the theologiansand inviting any one of them to step into the ring. His contempt for theevasiveness of theology is strongly expressed – too strongly, in fact, butdone just in the manner of those downright German scholars who goafter these questions, or they used to, with hammer and tongs.

The gist of Drews’s theory is easily expressed because he believesthat more or less all of Christianity has been drawn from the Book ofIsaiah, in the sense of its being all expressed and foreshadowed there. This is a curious inversion of the common belief that the Book of Isaiah isa prophecy of Christ. Yet he gives a good overview of the astrologicaltheory also with many illustrations of it. What his latent belief amountsto, then, is a conviction that all of Gospel story might have been puttogether out of materials already available, no Jesus required. Yet thereis something inconsistent about a two-fold approach, as of a mindwavering between possibilities, and we have found this inconsistency inour other critics also. Which is it, Dr. Drews? Isaiah or astrology? Truthis, there are simple sources for both of these viewpoints. I said abovethat his Isaiah theory inverts the Christian belief in prophecy whereasobviously the astrology hypothesis goes back to the ever-useful CharlesFrançois Dupuis. Our critics are intelligent men and intrepid souls,humanists or men of letters or philosophers of no slight learning whooften startle us with insight, but they cannot be radically original – aseven Dupuis was not – because the fundamental viewpoints have beenaround for a very long time. (It is a point made elsewhere in a similarconnection by the eloquent William James).

John Stuart Mill has written that ‘All principles are most effectuallytested by extreme cases,’ and I would apply this to the Negative criticsthemselves because they represent the extreme of the general shockwhich our traditions have received and they try seriously to go beyondhalf-measures or dishonest compromise and its embarrassments. Theirsis the merit of going all the way, of carrying through, and of striving for a‘final result.’ Hence, their search for a pure principle. It is not, as such, themere evidence which prompts them, but a search for principle anddislike of a muddle. These are minds who demand consistency andgeneral truth and they stand for decision, choice, pronouncement basedon real acknowledgements: Jesus as myth, Gospel as myth. They havetaken up a position with respect to the claims of the Gospel, and insofar itis an austere religious act which they represent – in an age ofcomfortable religious habit.

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Yet even so these theories multiply, and our brief sketch does notattempt to cover them all. Without counting Drews’s Isaiah hypothesis,and by adding Professor Benjamin Smith’s view of the Gospels, we havefour seemingly distinct possibilities already:

*Jesus a solar myth*Jesus emerging openly from a long-concealed Joshua cult*Jesus descended ‘with’ Krishna from a common ancestor, and *Jesus written up as a deliberate symbol in Gospels done bywriters who knew perfectly well what they were doing andwhose first readers also knew it.

Our purpose is not one of historical survey of any of these minds or anyof these theories which have served us for a sampling. The Negativecritics have been roundly refuted and confuted or else ignored. Thework has been done and may be looked up in libraries and some of it onthe internet, whereas our interest is in the use of the Negative argument forany insight it gives into the Gospels as we have them. I would gladly bedone with these critics for now and get on with our survey, but I shallhave to describe the bizarre hypothesis of Professor John Allegro just tobring us up to date. Despite his peculiar idea whose weakness andfantastic nature I shall first expose we must return to him later on in thisbook to discover on a deeper level the strength of his challenge and theimportance of his delusion.

Good competent readable surveys were done in tidy books byShirley Jackson Case (Historicity of Jesus) and Fred. Conybeare(The Historical Christ). Maurice Goguel has given a perfectlyelegant brief survey of the Negative critics in the opening of hisJesus the Nazarene: Myth or History? and G. Stanley Hall gives acompendious review in his singular masterpiece, Jesus, theChrist, in the Light of Psychology. Probably there are many suchtreatments because, although I select only this leading trio forexample, there were many others drawn to the Negative view atthe time. Harry Elmer Barnes, in his Twilight of Christianity,somewhere mentions more than twenty such names. And thereis the occasional out-of-the way book of interest, such as GeorgBrandes’ Jesus, a Myth. A scholar of distinction in Europeanliterature, Brandes draws heavily on the parallel to William Tell,a supposedly historical hero to the Swiss but for whose existenceno evidence can be found.

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ALLEGRO’S BIZARRE THEORY

On the whole the better modern scholars teach that a Jesus whois obscure to history outside the Gospels did nonetheless inspire thetraditions which arose afterward in a cult of disciples and believers. OralTradition is primary until it comes to be written down, after which it isrelatively fixed. And these traditions embody the main facts of his life aswell as conveying his Teachings, which are supposed (by some) to havebeen written down by a disciple called Matthew. If true, that documenthas been lost, but it came to be recopied or embodied, more or less, inother documents which we have reconstructed from our presentGospels.

Such, I say, is the current view based on deep research andcareful reflection. It is in no real danger of being overthrown orsubverted among the majority. Nowhere has the Negative viewthreatened to engulf professional scholarship except for a 19th centuryDutch school and the singular case of a solitary German scholar, also ofthe 19th century. And let us say frankly that scholarship of highdistinction has come round to an acknowledgment of Gospel myth. It issomething for which theology has been preparing for more than ahundred and seventy years (or ever since David Strauss’s Leben Jesu in1835). Arthur Drews’s shocking title, The Christ Myth, has been absorbedinto the everyday working vocabulary of Rudolf Bultmann, a far greaterscholar. Equally remarkable concessions to the problem are to be foundin the brilliant work of Alfred Loisy who in a work composed around theturn of the century says: ‘The subject of this faith (namely, Jesus) is at nostage of its development presented to the historian as an actual reality.’(Gospel and Church, p. 50) But I must draw attention to the crucial wordhere: historian.

Despite the failure of the Negative argument to take, or might wesay in fairness, take more deeply, the critics and doubters have beenserious men and honest minds. They were explorers, in a sense, andthey, too, have belonged to the great trends of scholarship, but as I saythey represent the extreme of the general shock. One and all, the Negativetheories aforementioned are rational theories proposed by men whoseserious aim is truth. This much we must say in simple fairness. Anelement of irrational conviction no doubt enters in, as with all deepphilosophy, but a future historian looking back on the Negative argumentand writing without prejudice must describe these critics as offering a

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‘rational attack’ on the credit of the Gospels. I mean to say, it has beenrational until ‘now’ when Allegro presents his case.

John Marco Allegro belongs in this line of critics with respect tohis own radical doctrine, which was that the historical Jesus haddisappeared. And yet his case is unique. Unlike the members of ourrepresentative trio, he was a trained biblical scholar acquainted with theancient Near Eastern languages. He may be said to derive from thisearlier trend of ‘rational attack’ since his doctrine implies all the vastearlier evidence of history and anthropology and comparative religionsas well as any recent finds, most especially the Dead Sea Scrolls whichwere discovered in 1947. Professor Allegro was among the few scholarscalled in for original study on the scrolls, and his (earlier) Pelican book onthe Scrolls has been translated into eight languages. We must concede acertain brilliance to the man.

Yet with John Allegro the attack on the historical credit of theGospels ceases to be rational. A bizarre theory emerges in his book onThe Sacred Mushroom & the Cross, where the irruption of somethingarchaic overwhelms the thought of ‘Jesus,’ and it is this archaicsomething that he strives to rationalize. Already this notorious book is ageneration old, but has it ever been given its due? With respect to theurgency of its problem one might fairly describe it as a generation – Jung. Has anybody got to the bottom of Allegro’s bizarre masterpiece duringthe past forty years?

Although decked out with much appearance of scholarship andappendices and loaded with over a hundred pages of close-writtennotes, his proposition is the wild theory of an author fascinated by aprimitive obscenity which has taken possession of his mind. It is the factof this possession which I would indicate because the obscenity, which isinherent in his material, belongs to the archaic epoch to which he tracesthe origins of the Jesus myth. Withal, he writes in a lucid manner andachieves a balanced tone except for his chronic references to thegenitals, which occur with a compulsive frankness. As a literary curiosityhis Sacred Mushroom & the Cross stands queerly apart, like Doughty’sArabia Deserta or Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Idiosyncratic to the lastdegree, it is quite as peculiar to its author as The Religio Medici is to SirThomas Browne or his Essays to Emerson or the extravagant Ecce homoto Nietzsche alone. We cannot imagine another mind having written it,and this we may grant his odd masterpiece. It is a work of geniustwisted, and its very importance, I think, lies in the author’s obsession

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and its value in his will to destroy. Although I don’t make a great workout of Allegro’s Sacred Mushroom compared with a book likeSchweitzer’s Quest, it was a Sign of the Times, and all the moredisconcerting when its importance was ignored.

Few things show better the revolution through which this giftedmind had passed than the contrast between his chapter on Jesus in TheDead Sea Scrolls, which is so nicely written, and the strange theory of theSacred Mushroom, in which the story of Jesus is dismissed as a ‘hoax.’ Sothe case of John Allegro is one in which a recent scholar’s confidence in thefact of Jesus’ life had collapsed. The historical question is barelymentioned except to be dismissed, for despite the ‘subject’ of his book,Jesus has simply evaporated for John Allegro. All his interest is focusedon an ancient sex and drug cult whose deity is a fungus.

The year was 1970 and his book had reaped a harvest of distressin religion, the peculiar distress of the 1960’s. It appeared a decade afterDr. Gabriel Vahanian’s troublesome book on The Death of God, which inretrospect might be said to have seeded the clouds. Vahanian had daredto consider the Nietzschean myth in its meaning for our culture. Likelight from a star, the death of God had arrived at last in fundamentalistAmerica, but it was taken up by theologians who lacked Vahanian’sseriousness. Deprived of its shock except for a certain titillating value butwatered down and misinterpreted by writers who failed to grasp itshorror, the death of God was being offered as a Gospel – thisinconceivable blunder! The idea was bruited abroad in the nation’snews in 1965 almost as if the news were reporting a supernatural fact. Time magazine asked on its cover in huge bold letters, white on black: ‘IsGod Dead?’ Later on, I would find in a 19th century English periodical areference to a Gypsy belief that the ‘old God’ had died and that the Sonnow carries on in his stead, as if in reminiscence of Kronos yielding toZeus. It was only Gypsy theology which came to us in the debasedAmerican version of God’s death and a far cry from Nietzsche’s horrificinsight.

Thus did the 1960’s pave the way for John Allegro. In thepopular imagination it was the era of the Beatles and of LSD and itspsychedelic visions, but the quest was for vivid sensation rather thanGod. My own distinct sense of religion at that time was of an immenseunderlying restlessness and no small fascination with attractive falsehood. It was a heyday of the Hippies who withdrew from city and suburb togather in short-lived rural communes, heralds of a sexual revolution.

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Theirs was a dream of returning to Nature with woodsy living andgardens and odd jobs done for self-support and otherwise doing as theydamn well pleased. In a way, though – they were right. They were inreaction against a society which had become incredibly false. For thefirst time in our lives we saw bizarre costumes worn as public dress andugly styles deliberately cultivated with plenty of uncut, unkempt hair.

More than just deliberately shocking, obscenity was so much apart of all this that one has to see a value in it. The whole of society wasundergoing an archaic reversion because in the depths we were searchingfor life, vitality. Obscenity was a breathing-hole, and Allegro’s obscenitybelongs to his material against this background as something required bythe times, just as, for example, John Updike’s obscenity has belonged tohis material as a novelist, which is not at all to imply that these writershave enjoyed a happy fate. Professor Allegro ought to have shown verymuch more restraint than he did show but he became reckless, and JohnUpdike (suffer the example) would sacrifice his Great American Novel onPresident Buchanan to Memories of the Ford Administration where itscorpse has been strewn amid the furrows. No more than TrumanCapote in his unfinished Answered Prayers could Updike handle theerotic theme in naturalistic detail without paying for it. Capote, who wasanother writer of genius, pretended for years to be writing a big novel – Answered Prayers is masterly but a mere novelette where, for the firsttime in his writings, I believe, the erotic is suddenly to the fore. See howit all goes with the times. An earlier master than either of these, HenryJames, had warned of the danger to the literary artist of taking on theerotic too frankly. He cited the Italians of his day in illustration of it andwrote a wonderful tale, The Last of the Valerii, describing the worship of avenereal god dug up somewhere on Roman soil. It was a differentHenry, Mr. Henry Miller, who found his opportunity in those times, hisvoice like an artistic fog-horn, his melody confined to the piano’s ‘white’keys, but his integrity as an artist uncompromised – at the cost of allintegrity to his ‘form.’ The interior failure of his novels to be organizedwas a presage of the same failure in the highly gifted Jack Kerouac, ashort-winded artist who failed to find a footing for his muse in any sort ofdurable vitality. And this was the sort of thing, I say, which came to lightin the ‘Sixties.

John Allegro dug up his venereal god, metaphorically speaking,near where the Tigris and Euphrates converge just north of the PersianGulf. This was no classical statue but an obscene archaic imagination of

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the Phallic God which lies within the psyche, but deep-buried inunconsciousness. And he produced it by projecting into the fragments ofa dead language, a Sumerian for which we haven’t yet found our RosettaStone, the deliberate image of a venerated Phallus but with detailsborrowed in his case from a little mushroom whose semi-poisonousmedicine he requires for his ‘take’ on the myth of revelation: the sacredmushroom, in a word, produces visions. Of all the incredible turns whichhis thinking might have taken, he reduced his Jesus to a fantasy about amushroom in order to load his book with the weight of an archaic myth.

By ‘phallic god’ in this book we aren’t referring to gods endowedwith a mere erection or displaying one, like Grecian herms. That is notthe depth of it. By phallic god I mean the very phallus conceived as a godwhile being also indescribably ‘human’ although in forms which must testthe most plastic imagination. Such forms may be found among primitivestones: this we know. And such idols, or monsters, do exist in disturbedminds, as Dr. Bertram Lewin (as well as CG Jung) have understood. Iput my finger here on the unacknowledged image that took possession ofProfessor Allegro’s soul because, in terms of his book, as aforesaid, hemust reduce the phallic image to the dimensions of Amanita muscaria orelse sacrifice his mushroom. The unacknowledged image, then, is that ofthe Phallus as Man, and hugely life-sized.

That his procedures were mistaken, and even false, I shallpresently show, but Professor Allegro was not unique in having beenoverwhelmed by the powers he thought to summon and use. Many of ushave known the meaning of some such archaic reversion. Our very erahas been one of such collapses and overwhelmings, but in the best result,a new vitality has surged in with all its vital disorders and dangers.

ALLEGRO’S PROCEDURE EXPOSED

Allegro assumes, as a basis for his procedure, that Gospels andEpistles were written in a secret code designed to protect a mushroomritual whose supposed aim is to produce revelations. Of course, theserevelations are nothing but hallucinations which must vary hopelessly inevery mind. And then to imagine that a Medieval Catholic civilizationcould have grown out of the dissipations of a drug cult! WilliamBenjamin Smith was an Apostle of sanity in recommending the Gospelsas deliberate Symbols compared with this madcap theory, and yet thereis an affinity of sorts because both critics have refused the surface of the tale:

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the story of Jesus, they believe, does not mean what it says.

Of course, Professor Allegro’s authority is a recommendation,but one must evaluate. He writes that his book is ‘primarily intended’ forthe general reader, and it is as such that I respond. So when he relies onhis knowledge of ancient Near Eastern languages to lend credit to hisopinion, we are bound to notice the isolation of his mind. Where are hiscolleagues? He can show no connection with any school of thought andno derivation from any body of established knowledge for the peculiaressence of his idea. At the same time and of great importance, hischapters are related to vast realms of special knowledge in a manner thatobscures his idiosyncrasy. It is, for example, absurd to compare Jesus toa mushroom, thereby obtaining a phallic as well as a sacramentalassociation, but we know, for instance, of phallic monuments in Nigeriawhich even now retain some vestige of sacredness and are locallyregarded as the memorials – nay, the very images! – of ancient kings.

That he has borrowed the insights and theories of others toweave them into his scheme we discover on a close reading. Forexample, traces of Rendel Harris on the twin cults are to be found in hischapter on the Twins although it means very little in the way of honestdebt. So our learned philologist achieves the illusion of a theory whichbelongs to a larger philosophy and to anthropology and comparativereligions and ancient history, as if these very disciplines supported him.

Ironically, his mushroom thesis is adapted from a theoryproposed by a scholarly ex-businessman, Mr. R. Gordon Wasson, whohad convinced himself that Amanita muscaria was the original ‘food ofthe gods’ while citing many an old Vedic text in support of his idea. Justfor one example of that, citing the Rig-Veda (IX 97 9d):

By day he appears hari (color of fire), by night, silvery white,

Wasson appends a photograph to show that the Amanita, which is red byday, has a silvery appearance by moonlight. Now I think that Wasson’swhole theory is wrong, but never mind that here. He was very seriousabout his discovery of soma in this lowly mushroom and evensomewhere speaks of the Real Presence (!) of the god in connection withits eating. Unfortunately, his own experience with it was a failure. Hehad to switch to an intoxicating Mexican mushroom of a different speciesbefore achieving the heavenly vision.

Amanita muscaria is a semi-poisonous fungus whose first effect isto nauseate and whose after-effect (says Mr. Robert Graves) is ‘hang-

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over.’ In between, one is supposed to receive the sacred vision –supposed to have the benefit of soma or else enjoy communion with‘Jesus.’ In proof of his theory Allegro has borrowed a photograph of Mr.Wasson’s showing somewhere in the ruins of a medieval French churcha mural of Adam and Eve in which the Tree of the Knowledge of Good andEvil is sprouting branches which appear to have the form of Amanitamuscaria. It would have been the perfect place for an acknowledgmentof his indebtedness. Instead, we find deep buried in his notes whichhave grown into a thicket of a hundred and forty pages two or threeslight references to RG Wasson as also to another mushroom scholar, Dr.Puharich.

As for Professor Allegro’s methods, I must first remark that itwasn’t by any method that he made his discovery because to recognizethat the Gospels are written in code depended on insight. It was anunfathomable revelation, unique to Professor Allegro, and it cannot beexplained. None of us can explain how ideas occur when they comeunbidden to mind, but we do notice that it was Professor Allegro’s insightinto the meaning of a peculiar name, Boanerges, that opened his eyesand first cracked the Gospel code. (Boanerges as a problem distinctlyrelated to myth is another gift from Rendel Harris on the Twin cults withrespect to priority). As we know, it is the nickname which Jesusbestowed on two brothers, James and John, who were fishermen in theirfather’s business which they abandoned to become disciples. After itsbestowal, given only in Mark’s Gospel, it is never used again. Itsuniqueness is intriguing when the Evangelist tells us that it means ‘Sons ofThunder.’

Only, what language does it come from? What are theseunknown forms? Scholars have been guessing about that since the daysof St. Jerome because what Boanerges is said to mean no scholar canexplain on linguistic grounds: it seems not to be a proper form in Aramaicfor the translation given in Mark, where it certainly means what theEvangelist says it does in context. Allegro’s contribution to the puzzle isthat to a proper study of the word he has superadded a hunch: Sons ofThunder, he tells us, citing an ‘old’ Greek word, keraunion, was a widelyused Semitic epithet for the mushroom. Or else just for mushrooms, whichare observed to spring up after a thunderstorm. Given this fact, Allegroconcocts a word-cluster from the Sumerian as *GEShPU-AN-UR, whichhe interprets to mean ‘mighty man (holding up) the arch of heaven’ – inreference to the canopy of the mushroom. This word then he rearranges

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as pu-an-ur-ges, from which at last Boanerges is derived.

So to furnish an evidence that had escaped scholars of all sortsfor eighteen hundred years, he will rummage around in the lost languageof SUMERIAN from which, or rather from whose fragments, he will pourhis cornucopia of obscene suggestion, arranging and re-arranging thevery syllables in ever remarkable combinations to show us where thingshave come from. It works very simply: (a) He will take a word out of theGospels, or a name like Judas Iscariot, or a prayer like the Our Father –these are code words, code names, and they are not to be taken naively atface value. (b) Then he will show that undisguised obscene prototypesexist – in his reconstructed Sumerian – which reveal the meaning of theforgotten code, bearing always on either sex or the mushroom. (c) Hismethod, therefore, is one of arranging various syllables of ancientSumerian to achieve rhyme, assonance, or similarity to the key names inthe Greek Testament.

By this method he discovered that Iscariot came from ‘a jumbledSumerian title, *USh-GU-RI-UD’ which means, of all things: erect phallusof the storm. It means this despite the pre-posited asterisk by which heconfesses that no such exact combination of words was known to exist inancient Sumerian until he himself had put these syllables together. Thatis an evidence devised by himself. Everywhere the pre-posited asteriskfreckles his pages to confess, what his scholar’s conscience does notpermit him to conceal, that the particular word so marked is an inventionof his own. (As for the capital letters, they are conventional intranscribing Sumerian). We might compare to this elaborate ruse theopinion of Joseph Klausner, a distinguished Jewish scholar who haswritten sympathetically of Jesus: Klausner thinks that Iscariot may mean,Ish Kerioth (or Man from Kerioth, in the original).

What else is Professor Allegro’s method, then, except a Ouija-board sorcery by which the evidence required in support of his theory isall of his own manufacture? Only, his Ouija-board is a very big one: itconsists of Sumerian monosyllables. He writes of this ancient language,the oldest Near Eastern language we know of, that it ‘is put together like ahouse of bricks.’ (p. 15) The technical term for this kind of language isagglutinative, and what is much to his purpose, as he explains, is that‘Sumerian tends to keep these basic idea-words unchanged.’ Let thereader note this fact. I do not question the gifted Allegro when he speakswith expert knowledge to tell us that ‘Sumerian tends to keep these basicidea-words unchanged.’ That is interesting. It gives us the reason for his

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confidence in making rearrangements, such as *USh-GU-RI-UD’ to meanerect phallus of the storm when decoding the name of Christ’s betrayer.

Our Dead Sea Scrolls scholars as we know work with fragmentsalso, and Professor Allegro has been such a scholar, but they pore overtheir fragments to fit them together like pieces in a jig-saw puzzle underthe necessity of making sense and on the assumption that self-evidentwholes are being (imperfectly) restored. The array of Sumerian syllablesin Allegro’s hands lie under no such fitting and meaningful constraints. He fits them together as he pleases to build up structures of assonance orsimilarity wherewith to expose his posited Gospel code and in this strangemanner reveal a New Testament mushroom cult characterized by adecidedly erotic imagination. So they serve his theory, this jumble ofSumerian word-bricks, like the triangles and parallelograms in a Chinesepuzzle. TANGRAMS may be arranged in all sorts of combinations, too: thisway a house, that way a man, here an umbrella, there a bird – over andover again, the same pieces.

So you make word combinations – let me illustrate in English, ofcourse – like snowball or mudpie to discover new facts. That is to say,you can try. One might, for example, put together CAT and TAIL todiscover cattails if one were obsessed with a sort of vegetation whichmight be said to resemble a phallus. Conversely, those poor ancientSumerians who tended to keep their basic idea-words unchanged wouldnot likely concoct such combinations as ‘firearm’ or ‘necklace’ or‘whiplash’ or ‘cat’s-paw’ because here the building bricks have changedtheir meaning. When we speak of firearms, we don’t think of fire or armsand much less of arms afire. And to admit that the old Sumerians couldhave conceived of combinations like ‘firearm’ as easily as we do wouldbe for Professor Allegro to confess that his method could hardly be usedfor discovery when working backwards from clues which set the task. Whereas by assuming that the meaning of those syllables stays fixed, hemakes an easy job of it. He concocts an approximate sort of Sumerianrhyme out of whatever elements he chooses, then offers this rhyme as anexposé to some particular target in the Greek Testament.

Now pretend we are visitors from the moon and that we take afew of the more elementary words in English and combine them to arriveat discovery. We join eye and ball to discover eyeballs, or tooth andbrush to hit upon a lucky find. And we congratulate ourselves. Only,what could we hope to discover by joining ear and wig? Or why, if wehad ever thought to put lip and stick together, might we not have applied

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7. John M. Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom & the Cross (NY Doubleday 1970, p. 108.)

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it to a cigarette? The method is hopeless. Imagine a moon-dwellingscholar who had never seen a sleeve of canvas mounted on a swivel toserve pilots for a weathervane. Windsock is a word used with perfectpropriety with respect to the bricks combined because a sock need notenclose a foot, but could our scholar arrive at the discovery of this objectby joining wind and sock? Would anything induce him to think of joiningthem in preference, say, to breeze and bracelet? If anything did, wouldhe know what the combination represented? Or if, by some futuristicarchaeologist, he were presented with the object in question, would hediscover its uses and think to place it at an airport by playing with words? Let us concede the extreme of possibility: our scholar joins together windand sock to hit upon an airport’s windsock. What else might he discoverby joining water and shoe? What object might he find to represent awatershoe? Or why should he not hope to find foxglove in aveterinarian’s office?

Let me show by one small technical example, however, theextent of Professor Allegro’s recklessness, or rather, of his scholarlyderangement, the evidence for which is scattered throughout his book. Of Castor and Pollux, well known as Heavenly Twins, he writes:

Their joint name, Dioscuri means ‘phallus of the storm’, andappears in the New Testament name of Jesus’ betrayer, Iscariot,and as the title of Jesus himself, ‘son of God.’7

We have within this single sentence, chosen practically at random, aconcoction of unsupported assertion, nonsense and fraud. Iscariot wehave already dealt with, so consider, first, that the mythic nameDioscouri means no such thing as he asserts here, pretending to know itfor a fact whereas he knows perfectly well that the name denotes, ‘Boysof Zeus’ or if you like, ‘Lads of Zeus.’ Youth is indicated because theDioscouri are athletes and young warriors, stalwart fellows who make amighty pair. Dios, then, as the first part of this name, is simply thegenitive Greek form of the name Zeus and means therefore, Of Zeus orPertaining to Zeus or even rather crudely expressed, ‘Zeus-his.’ Nothingof phallus is here, not a trace, and nothing of storm apart from allreference to our Sumerian tangram, *USh-GU-RI-UD which would haveto be reassembled as *UD-USh-GU-RI to resemble the name Dioskouri.

As for the kouri half, or kouros in the singular, it denotes a youth

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and is a name well-known to art-lovers for a type of early Greek statues. One such handsome kouros had a room to himself in that first beautifulGetty Museum, the one built like a Roman villa. These kouri are not yetthe classical statues of Athens but rather ogling Cretan-like figures. Thedistinguishing features of the type are: (a) an erect stance (b) with onefoot placed slightly forward but (c) having the forward leg stiff andstraight. Always (d) the shoulders are broad, (e) the waist is narrow as inCretan statues and (f) the muscles are unnaturally defined and bulgingon torso, arms and legs, but in a pleasing manner. The kouri are (g) starknaked and present plump genitals which are larger than those to be seenin classical statuary. Facially (h) the kouri are mask-like and stylized andthere is often the hint of a satyr in the bulging eye and peculiar curve ofthe smile.

Thus as a class they stand on the threshold of a naturalism notfully attained, but they serve to illustrate the type of lads we have inmind, vigorous athletic males, when speaking of the lads of Zeus: Dios-kouri. It is a name which has been understood from ancient times to thepresent, and just as well by Professor Allegro as by me.

Lastly, then, the statement that Jesus as ‘Son of God’ is anothercase of Dios-kouros is fantastic and irresponsible. Dios does not remotelyappear in the Gospels where, on the contrary, Theos is the word, whichmight be used of any god, but in the Gospels usually of the biblical GodJahweh. Our Gospels give theou in the genitive and never call Jesus akouros (or ‘youth’) but a huios or son. Instead of Dioscouros we havehuios theou, of which Son of God is the strict and proper translation.

How strange, then, that John Marco Allegro, now regrettablyand prematurely deceased, should matter to us in quite the most seriousway, but it is his case, not his supposed discovery, that is important to us. He was a recent and accomplished scholar whose confidence in thehuman fact of Jesus simply gave way, and yet his Jesus was not simplylost to a void but replaced by an archetype. What fascinated this scholarwas a numinous find. By letting his imagination loose upon theselanguage fragments and other ancient obscurities, Professor Allegro noless than Dr. Frankenstein brought a tangible Specter to life, a ‘Thing’ inhis case that had lain under darkest tabu for hundreds of years. Usingmethods no less projective than those of the Alchemists he awakened aprimitive god and was captured by the fascination of it, believing with allhis soul that this Phallic God belonged, somehow, to the dim pre-historyof the Christian religion.

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8. See The Quest of the Historical Jesus (NY Macmillan paperback 1961, p. 398) for thesequotations.

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Stated thus abstractly, that belief is not false. We know ofancient phallic cults throughout Palestine, but Professor Allegro had sethimself the brilliant possibility of discovering a mushroom cult supposedto be hidden under a New Testament code, and he failed to demonstrateany such code or any such flourishing sex and drug cult as, sporadically,his own era and ours had been attempting.

I shall show what dim echoes that pre-historic era of Baals andTwins and Asherim may have left in our Gospels later on, when our studyhas prepared us for it.

THE CASE OF ALBERT SCHWEITZER

Albert Schweitzer in 1906, after surveying the ‘Jesus research’ ofa hundred and thirty years past, declared the result to be negative:

The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as theMessiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, whofounded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to giveHis work its final consecration, never had any existence.

The words are consciously dramatic – as if he meant to give the world ofscholarship a good hard shove. Remove one syllable here to completethe negation:

Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah,who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who foundedthe Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give His work itsfinal consecration, never had any existence.

Can a definite article make so much difference? Schweitzer isnot among the Negative critics, but he sees that a popular Jesus has beenlost to us, and I mean by this the Gestalt of Christ, or as it were the veryImage of which he writes that ‘it has fallen to pieces, cleft anddisintegrated by the concrete historical problems which came to thesurface one after another.’8 A well-known Jesus gone to pieces becausethe scholars were reading the Gospels like historians!

Probably no one has a greater name than Dr. Albert Schweitzeramong those who have concerned themselves with Jesus as a man of

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history, but I say so without prejudice to the question of his authority. Early and late, there have been other and better scholars in the Gospels,historians more deeply learned, linguists more expert. As an interpreterof the Gospels he is driven by tendency: this is a scholar who has an axeto grind and a theory to urge, and there is a potency in him often lackingin other scholars, a strength of intellect which is surprising in one who ishimself so much to the fore as an individual personality.

The Quest of the Historical Jesus, his famous book – it is even agreat book – was published in English less than half a decade after theappearance of its German original in 1906, which was called merely, VonReimarus zu Wrede. The German title gives only the names of twoscholars which bracket the many others in his survey; they are bookendnames which make a unit of the shelf. Already Mr. JM Robertson’sChristianity and Mythology had been published in 1900, raising thequestion whether ‘Jesus’ had been descended from a common ancientmythology that farther East had produced the figure of Krishna. Robertson receives only a disparaging footnote in Schweitzer but thatwill change in a later edition; he does notice this critic. Furthermore,William Benjamin Smith’s Vorchristliche Jesus was published bycoincidence in the same year as Schweitzer’s book. (We recall thatProfessor Smith had his book translated into German to have it publishedat all). And for the last member of our Negative trio, Arthur Drews’s DieChristusmythe appeared in 1909 between editions of the Quest. (Thedates are taken from Maurice Goguel). Schweitzer’s Quest has appearedin the middle of a stir, although not by any plan, and he will revise thisbook as the controversy ripens and take further account of it then.

Meanwhile, there was plenty of myth on hand closer to home. Already in the field of professional New Testament study before his timea mythical interpretation of the Gospels had been urged by a scholar ofdistinction, Bruno Bauer, who came gradually to doubt the veryexistence of Jesus. (Schweitzer devotes a masterly chapter to Bauer inhis Quest). More famously, David Friedrich Strauss had (as of 1835)examined the Gospels in a careful study of the mythical element. Straussnever supposed that Jesus had not existed but he introduced the questionof myth in Gospel study with a vigor, a sincerity, a frankness not seenamong the authorities before his time. The appearance of this bookmade impossible his continuing in a university career at that time. Nevertheless, his Life of Jesus, Critically Examined was translated byyoung Mary Ann Evans (‘George Eliot’) of English literary fame. It is a

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veritable monument and even, all by itself, a kind of ‘period.’ Two fullchapters of the Quest are devoted to David Strauss: ‘To understandStrauss one must love him.’ And Dr. Schweitzer was not a man topretend that he could not understand David Strauss.

Only in an indirectly related way, then, is his Quest a study of theGospels. More properly, it is an examination of Gospel scholarship, and itis his mastery of this scholarship that is the real ground of his authority. At times he is ambivalent toward the scholars. Although his book openswith a panegyric on the ‘German temperament’ and praise for itscourageous theology, he sounds a sober note of warning in conclusion. First this on page one:

The greatest achievement of German theology is the criticalinvestigation of the life of Jesus. What it has accomplished herehas laid down the conditions and determined the course of thereligious thinking of the future.

Then this on page 398:

Those who are fond of talking about negative theology can findtheir account here. There is nothing more negative than theresult of the critical study of the life of Jesus.

All through the 19th century German biblical scholars were searching fora Jesus who could be described without a tax on our credulity. Thelegends of the Gospels were sifted for fact or better yet, explained. Jesuswasn’t seen by his exhausted disciples walking on the sea, for instance, asthe Gospels tell. He waded forth in wind and waves to help them pullthe boat ashore. Thus did a distinguished German scholar suggest howthis tale might have arisen, but how perfectly arbitrary! Why not insteada collective hallucination? Why not Dr. Goodspeed’s idea that thedisciples had only seen Jesus walking along the shore? Why not mythoutright?

A Jesus conceived historically is offered instead of the miraculousChrist of Gospel story, but to satisfy the German depth he must retain hisvalue for religion. One doesn’t ask if this is possible: it is required. Only,what sort of man can have a religious value for us if the other part ofCatholic teaching is stripped away, a teaching well put in Luther’s boldword: ‘This man is God?’ Gospels which were once so simple that evencommon folk could understand them became obscure to the veryhistorians, who ceased to read them as chronicles of the life of the Saviorand treated them as documents of history. As we (of the West) do not

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dream of exempting the miracles of Krishna or the revelations ofMohammed from the conditions of human life, so the biblical scholardoes not exempt the miracles and revelations of Christ when heconceives him as a figure of history.

But how do we sift the age-old tradition or separate thepresumed facts of that life from the legend that is supposed to containthem? The matter might be very simple if all we had to do is strip awaythe legendary part of an ancient record to peel down to underlying factbecause then it would be very easy to arrive at a historical Jesus. Anyhumanist could do it, anyone with a sense of the contrast betweenlegend and fact. Our difficulty is that the lines are never clear becausetradition is a body, not a mixture. Whatever there may be of real factand dense matter of history in these transparent legends and palpablemyths (and there may be a good deal of it) it is nonetheless fused with theExpression. So it’s not like lifting a doll out of a box or brushing the sandaway from an age-old find.

Schweitzer’s very survey implies that the research of the modernera has lacked any sure principles for discriminating Gospel fact fromGospel myth. How blurred is the historical delineation of this lifecompared with the distinctness of the legend! Of course, you are goingto blur your portrait every time you pass your sponge over it to washaway its legendary detail. Our Gospels are often contradictory but theyare never indistinct. It is history that makes Jesus indistinct when thelegends have ceased to be credible.

Now Schweitzer found his own discriminating principle in atheory about Jesus’ primitive message, and on this basis he sought tobring the ancient man to life, uncontaminated by modern assumptionsand feelings and liberal values. Believing that one particular find out of allthat previous scholarship had put a golden key in his hand, he made aprinciple of eschatology, which means in plain English a doctrine, or atheory, of the Last Things: Jesus is to be conceived as a man whollycaught up in his announced conviction, The Kingdom of God is at hand! One had to take that literally. Everything should be understood fromthat point of view. It would explain why Jesus had determined to die, forinstance, if we assume that a genuinely historical Jesus had ever madesuch a decision.

Schweitzer believed that he could get more out of Gospel historythan other scholars had, yet it was not simply as a historical figure thatJesus continued to matter to him because the weight of an earlier faith

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had shifted to any primitive remainder. It was evidently a naturalprocess. If the God has disappeared, yet our focus remains and ourhabit. We thought we saw a dappled sunlight on the forest floor andnow we look for those beams among the shadows. We have lost a kindof sustenance in losing the divine in Christ and we might wish to have itback again. It is a paradox in Albert Schweitzer that he will fight for thoseearlier values on these newer terms without any real clarity as to how themere Jesus of history should matter to us. He will never answer thisquestion in a satisfactory manner. It is a lacuna in his thought.

SCHWEITZER’S OWN CRISIS RESOLVED

Schweitzer had been brought up in a parsonage to ratherconventional beliefs about Jesus which were associated with deep andholy feelings. He does not speak of his father as having expressed anythoughts except for the ordinary things we expect of our preachers, nordoes he give sign of any conflict between father and son, but as hedeveloped into a young scholar, he ceased to give inner assent to theCreed. When he learned at the university that a sanctified traditioncould not prevent the advance of historical science – had not preventedits advance, he concentrated on the historical figure of Jesus. That hadto be real, if nothing else was, and so implicitly he would concentratereligion on the Primary Fact of Jesus’ life and let the rest of it go by theboard. Theology had no real interest for this born voyager because hewas a modernist, a liberal, but in view of all that he was seeking in Jesus,in view of his caring, it was not a thought-out position.

To all appearances he is undisturbed by modern thinking,however. He is supposed to be undisturbed – it is the Germanhypothesis. At twenty-four he became a doctor of philosophy, writing hisdissertation on Kant, and a year later (1900) when preparing a lecture onNietzsche ‘news of that philosopher’s death reached me,’ as he later putit. Evidently, he sees himself among the chosen in a sort of electricconnection. After further study he became a licentiate in theology, andwas then by a fluke shortly afterwards appointed Principal of the St.Thomas Theological College in Strassburg, a proud appointment but itcame too early in his life. Lecturer, scholar, principal, preacher (and bythe way, an unprofessional concert organist), and – that heavy thing! – aGood Fellow: the sort of young man who could entertain Countess So-and-so at the piano or be introduced to an Adolf Harnack, a gentleman

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with a fancy calling card whose own young thoughts were already inprint: he was trapped. Suddenly at thirty he decided to give it all up afterreading an appeal in a missionary magazine which was directed to those‘on whom the Master’s eyes already rested,’ and who would ‘reply simplyto the Master’s call, Lord, I am coming.’ It was the sort of magazine hisfather sometimes read in church.

Schweitzer is a man of discrimination, a critic, a teacher, an artist– and a passionate heart. Such a man is not to be torn out of the wholecourse of his life by a vapid tract picked up somewhere in a churchvestibule, but we are never to understand the crisis he resolved by hisrenunciation of the world: it is withheld from us. Shaw says somewherethat all real writing is confession, and this is no doubt true, but we find inAlbert Schweitzer no description of his inner life. Even hisautobiography, Out of my Life and Thought, lacks intimacy. I would callattention, however, to something else. We may notice that an Idea ofJesus very different from any sort of historical Jesus has entered into thisforsaking of things – which has also the quality of a longed-for escape.

What Idea of Jesus was it, then? Or else simply, what was heresponding to in such an abrupt decision which was nonetheless a longtime preparing, as he tells us? Surely, he did not think back to adiminished historical Jesus, a man of olden time whose very teachingswere peculiar and then think his way to a decision to abandon everythingthat had opened up before him. Much less was he responding to theinauthentic ‘Master’ of the missionary magazine, a Pretend Jesus whoseeyes were resting on him and whose imaginary call he would reply tosaying, ‘Lord, I am coming.’ But the magazine is only his excuse. It hassuggested a way out because already his life is a burden which he seeksto relieve. Insofar as any Jesus may be said to enter a decision sonatural, so entirely involved with his ordinary day-to-day experience, it issurely the remembered Christ of the Gospels who might say to a man, ‘Sellthat thou hast and give to the poor, and come, follow me, and thou shalthave treasure in Heaven.’ Schweitzer is responding to the Idea of Christ inthe Gospels, the whole Idea.

After reaching his decision, he will cut his own life in half: heresigns his post as principal of the theological college to enroll under themedical faculty of Strassburg University and prepare himself for anAfrican mission. Astounding. The singular act is followed by a charitableresponse on the part of the medical faculty who waive his fees becauseotherwise he couldn’t well afford it. He has acted in faith: he is Peter

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venturing out on the waters after Jesus says, ‘Come.’ At this earlier timein his life Schweitzer conceives of the Gospel as a world-denying faith, buthis task is suddenly immense and he plunges into everything at once. Hisway of renouncing the world is to use it up. In fact, he is never unworldlyin the manner of an Oriental sage who might forsake an emperor’s courtto live apart somewhere nearby a waterfall. It will take him seven yearsto become a medical doctor and after that he must beg money of friendsand acquaintance to build a primitive hospital, but Schweitzer is a manwith a forehead of brass and his personality is strong. Not before the ageof thirty-eight can he leave for (then) French Equatorial Africa. Meanwhile, there is everything else to be done yet.

There is his music. He is a highly accomplished organist with aparticular love, a Lutheran love of Bach. It is possibly his first and truestlove, this music of his, and always it will be his refuge, but in FrenchEquatorial Africa where are the pipe organs of old European churches? In the year in which he publishes Von Reimarus zu Wrede, he will publishanother book called The Art of Organ-Building and Organ-Playing inGermany and France. This is a man who can say, ‘The fight for a goodorgan is to my mind part of the fight for truth.’9 He had been known toclimb into an organ loft and make his own repairs, and once as a child hehad leaned against a church wall to prop himself when he overheard anorgan playing (we may think of Ramakrishna as a boy swooning away atthe sight of flying geese). Now he becomes the organist for the concertsof the Paris Bach society, although excused from rehearsals, now duringthe years that he has taken up the study of medicine. It shows howradical his sacrifice was, but unforeseen at the time, a grace waspreparing itself. A piano coated with zinc against the depredations oftropical insects and equipped with pedals to mimic the organ tone, a giftof the Paris Bach Society, he will take to Africa and has somewherehumorously described its transportation up river in a chief’s dugoutcanoe ‘big enough for six pianos.’

THE QUEST OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS

When The Quest of the Historical Jesus was published he wasthirty-one years old, a man of strong will and many accomplishments, averitable White Bull of a man, and that book (Reimarus) came forth into

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the world as a summons. Having responded to the Call of Jesus in hisfeeling, he is bent on intellectual truth. His passion and his honesty, hiswide learning and a vigorous intelligence not yet worn to the bone revealthemselves. He is everywhere resolute, and there is a quality oftremendousness about this book, which is written in a bold, frank,unforced style. We cannot read this book without an impression of hisdeep intelligence and I marvel that he covered so much ground.

In the Altoona Public Library, which was then housed in a merewing upstairs of one of the public schools, I discovered The Quest of theHistorical Jesus as a young pastor in that Pennsylvania railroad town. Although Schweitzer had barely figured in our classes at Concordiaseminary, I had read his autobiography there, Out of My Life andThought, which was published in an attractive 35 cent Mentor book, andnow I was drawn to the Quest. Clearly, the English title of this bookreminds us of the common phrase, ‘going in Quest of,’ so that thiscontraband of the higher criticism is being smuggled under flag of askillful literary allusion to a Grail Quest. In England theology is a timidaffair where literary people and a few philosophers have done theirthinking for them, but who invented this inspired title? It was FC Burkitt,an excellent scholar, who saw the value of the book, but I think we owethis title to the translator. A plain German sentence early on Mr. W.Montgomery, BD, translated as follows:

This dogma (namely, of the unity of the two natures in Christ,God and man) – this dogma had first to be shattered before mencould once more go out in quest of the historical Jesus.

What a suggestion of pilgrimage! What an invitation to pilgrimage,whereas in German Schweitzer had written ‘ehe man den historischenJesus wieder suchen konnte.’ His words are very plain. The idea is notthat of men setting out on a Quest for the Holy Grail of solid fact, but onlyof one’s looking for the Jesus of history after a shattering of dogma,which means a collapse in the very supports of belief. Mr. W.Montgomery has transformed a grave sentence into poetry. Theendeavor is to make the Quest palatable, although for Albert Schweitzerthere is something ruinous about it, and there is no question that inGermany the search for the historical Jesus is a skeptical quest. Theeffect of his book from my perspective has been to subvert ourconfidence in the familiarity of Jesus, but generally speaking, he was ableto surprise the world of scholarship with its own results by gathering themtogether in his masterly survey. It was the scholars’ own critical study that

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had become negative. It was historical problems that had ‘cleft anddisintegrated’ the figure of Jesus.

During this period of medical study Schweitzer continued toproduce other works, and in 1911 before revising Reimarus he wouldpublish yet another survey dealing with research on the Apostle Paul sincethe time of the Reformation. In this book he begins to take notice of theproblem presented by Professor Arthur Drews and his Christ Myth whereDrews has argued very powerfully that nothing of the life of Jesus is to befound in the Epistles. William Benjamin Smith is also mentioned inpassing but he is scorned as an amateur ‘stammering out confusedly’what a couple of Dutchmen – Dutch, not German – have already written. I am not sure this is fair but as Emerson says, ‘Your goodness must havean edge to it, else it is none,’ and good Schweitzer has his edge. It israther the Dutch scholars who count for him here because several of themhad impugned the Epistles of Paul and some had denied the life of Christ. They will furnish his link, historically, between Bruno Bauer and theNegative critics of the 20th century.

Our trio of Negative critics he will treat more fully when herevises Von Reimarus zu Wrede, but why does he revise this book? Weread the Quest in translation with no sense of its incompleteness but hecannot leave it alone, he must enlarge it and give it a new title. It will bepublished in 1913, the year in which his Psychiatric Study of Jesus ispublished and further volumes of Bach’s Complete Organ Works, ofwhich he is co-editor. It is the year of his medical diploma and of hisdeparture for Africa, the year of his marriage to Helene Bresslau, thecomely daughter of a Jewish historian whose at-home gatherings he usedto attend. (She’d set her cap for Schweitzer and became a nurse for thecause).

As to the renovated Quest, however, it is simply to be calledGeschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung which means, The History ofResearch into the Life of Jesus. It is a proud title deservedly, and asaforesaid, it is just this deep survey of modern scholarship that is the realground of his authority on the question of Jesus. Now at last we find athorough treatment of no fewer than nine of those I have called theNegative critics, including our sample trio by name, and we are notincluding the Dutch scholars under this term. JM Robertson getssomething better than a footnote here, and William Benjamin Smith andArthur Drews are seriously noticed. He has cared enough about them todo this under circumstances of his varied labors. By this time a scholarly

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literature has come into existence devoted to the refutation of thesecritics, and he may have felt it a matter of professional obligation to takethem on forthrightly, but remember how he had echoed the Negative‘result’ already in the Quest when recommending a Jesus so at odds withour usual conception of him. The quality of Schweitzer’s historical figure isthat of a prophet belonging to a buried antiquity, one whose doctrinehad been forgotten and whose personality had been misconceived. Hemeans to introduce a barely tolerable Jesus. Where is he going to findroom for the fellow? It requires the very negation we began with, of a‘Jesus of Nazareth’ familiar to the liberal scholars but ‘... who never hadany existence.’ Schweitzer’s deep task in bringing forth a Jesus after hisown conception involves him in this kind of negation, and yet his boldnesshere seems rather feigned. It is the audacity of the pulpit and meant, Ithink, to ground the shock of having to affirm the Jesus he presents.

SCHWEITZER GIVES CREDIT

Not every great find is discovered in a cave or unearthed by anarchaeologist’s spade. One of the two oldest manuscripts of the NewTestament was discovered by young Count Tischendorf in the monasteryat Mt. Sinai, where it had been put in a basket of trash because themonks were cleaning house. When Tischendorf perceived itsimportance, they refused to let him have it, clutching to the monasticbosom a manuscript they had intended to burn.

Schweitzer’s discovered Jesus of history, as he believed, wasfound in the pages of a comparatively recent manuscript – by others, notby him. As to the manuscript, which was very big, it had been given to alibrary at Wolfenbüttel from the Nachlass of a deceased professor ofOriental languages, Hermann Samuel Reimarus, who died a few yearsbefore the American Revolution. Reimarus was a man of vigorousintelligence and independent thought who left his readers in no doubt ofhis views. He had read the Gospels shrewdly and naively (but he seemsnaive only in retrospect of all that we have learned since his time) and itwas his view of Jesus’ message that having gradually worked its way intoNew Testament scholarship Schweitzer would adopt.

The value of this manuscript was recognized by an impecuniousauthor who had once been a minister’s son and who began to publishportions of it in 1774, issuing these over the next few years. This man,who had accepted the post of librarian at Wolfenbüttel for the sake of an

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income, was none other than GE Lessing, a famed dramatist and critic. Out of consideration to the family of Reimarus and because it was evendangerous then to publish heterodox books, these selections werepublished anonymously and came to be known as the WolfenbüttelFragments, having titles such as, for example:

The Toleration of the DeistsThe Decrying of Reason in the PulpitThe Aims of Jesus and his Disciples

There were seven of these Fragments published, all told, and for doing itLessing came under attack by the chief pastor of Hamburg. It does notappear that he was in legal danger, however, and he responded with avigorous defense until the government confiscated the Fragments ‘andordered Lessing to discontinue the controversy.’ (Britannica 1952)

Hermann Samuel Reimarus was thus a Deist writing in defenceof rational religion before the time of Immanuel Kant. He was inclined totreat Jesus as a charlatan who had conspired with his cousin, John theBaptist, to deceive the public. (And this is a specimen of his naivete. It isonly Luke’s Christmas fable that makes John out to be a slightly oldercousin of Jesus and one who ‘leapt’ in his mother’s womb when she wasvisited by the Virgin Mary). Crucial in the imagined scheme, then, was apreachment of a world about to end before the coming of the Kingdom ofGod, and this element in the Gospels – of a Kingdom to be establishedfollowing great catastrophes – Reimarus considered to be Jesus’ originalmessage. It had been overlaid by his knavish disciples, who had to adjusttheir Gospel when the expected Kingdom did not materialize andbecause they had something going in the flourishing sect which it was intheir own interest to preserve. Fundamental to all, then, was ProfessorReimarus’s conviction that a primitive message, which it was still possibleto discern, had been obscured by the revisions of the disciples.

In Schweitzer’s day the serious acceptance of this view hadbegun to take hold as the prominent fact about Jesus although it was notdirectly from Reimarus at this date that the fresh impetus came. It wasthanks to an ‘epoch-making book’ by Johannes Weiss called ThePreaching of Jesus about the Kingdom of God published in 1892. It hadappeared, therefore, almost fifteen years earlier than Schweitzer’s Quest. ‘When I began to study theology,’ writes Rudolf Bultmann, ‘theologiansas well as laymen were excited and frightened by the theories ofJohannes Weiss.’ Schweitzer’s contribution was to place this emphasis

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where it belonged: its modern recovery belongs to Reimarus. He wasable to show how the eschatological idea keeps recurring thereafter inone major scholar after another, which made its acceptance irresistible,but a part of that irresistible force was owing to Schweitzer’s own sterncriticisms of those liberal scholars (‘the theology of the last forty years’)who had tried to ignore or deny this primitive element.

It is evident that Jesus was mistaken in proclaiming the advent ofthe Kingdom of God and warning of the tribulations of the End Time, if intruth this was his message, but he is definitely a man of history on theseterms and intimately bound up with the beliefs of his own people. Quiteradically, then, he becomes a Stranger to us by sharing in so marked adegree a peculiar and urgent mood of the times. It is to be understoodthat Jesus did not invent the eschatological message which had burstforth publicly in the preaching of the Baptist.

So Schweitzer didn’t simply take his Jesus out of Reimarus’sbook like a jocular Shaw lifting some of his characters ‘bodily’ out ofDickens. It was already there in the 19th century scholarship he hadbeen trained in. What is distinctive is exactly the value he placed on thisview of things. For Schweitzer, this is indeed the Golden Key wherebyeven the periods of Jesus’ ministry and the grand linkage of its parts canbe recovered. Have we Parables which speak of harvest time? It isbecause the Kingdom of God will arrive at the harvest. Crucial above allother passages in the Gospels to show that Jesus expected the ‘coming ofthe Son of Man’ during his lifetime and was disappointed about that arehis words to his disciples in Matthew 10,23:

When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next; for truly Isay to you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israelbefore the Son of Man comes.

But eschatology is in the air. After Johannes Weiss, scholars are ready totake it up in earnest and Schweitzer will describe an eschatologicalschool, not that he ever belonged to one. His own drastic positioncoupled with a pugnacious literary personality would leave him stranded. He does not become a colleague. I have called him a White Bull, usingan ancient Messianic epithet, because of his self-chosen singularity. Hestands alone. Something far too much had once imposed on thepromising child and the man is not to be infringed on. He has no roomfor colleagues or even for disciples: he takes up all the room himself.

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THE ENIGMATIC JESUS OF ALBERT SCHWEITZER

Now his own distinct belief is that Jesus has a secretunderstanding of his role in the Kingdom even before it arrives, andconfident of this he will decide to die for his fellows and disciples toshorten a preceding tribulation before the time of the end. It isconceived to be a dreadful phase when afterwards the Messiah (who hadnot yet come: Jesus is not yet Messiah) would appear in the sky. Nevertheless, at the heart of it all in Schweitzer’s conception Jesus dies invain for his beliefs, tragically but heroically, because his voluntary sacrificehad no such result as he expected. (Christianity was not the expectedresult: he has not intended to ‘found a religion.’) Whether we are to ratehim highly depends on what we make of his delusion.

Schweitzer is aware of the difficulty of his idea and of ourreluctance to accept it because a Jesus acting on such an obsessioncannot be made understandable to the multitude(‘allgemeinverständlich’) so that he must be for us ‘etwas Fremdes undRätselhaftes,’ something Strange and Riddling, or as Mr. W. Montgomeryhas put it in better English: ‘The historical Jesus will be to our time aStranger and an Enigma.’ (It is understood, of course, that Schweitzerwould never use a harsh word like deluded to describe him as I do here,but his Jesus ‘clings’ nonetheless to a ‘fixed misconception’ about theKingdom of God and a ‘false belief regarding (himself)’ as I take thesewords in quotes from a dictionary definition). This was a final stress,then: a popular Jesus is impossible. It was the result of his endeavor toreplace a popular Jesus by a prophet from another era, but a man of histimes who had actually lived. He will even dare to say that a realknowledge of Jesus may prove to be an offence to religion.

Yet his preaching during these years of medical study lacks thequality of boldness: the White Bull does not appear in the pulpit. It’srather for the scholars to come to terms with his insight. He is like a manweighing stones in his hands: in his left the stone of the Negative criticswho deny the life of Christ, and in his right the Stone of Acknowledgementof an eschatological Jesus. ‘Gentlemen,’ he seems to be asking wholefaculties of scholars, ‘pray, which of these stones shall I toss in your laps?’

Our question, then, is whether this intrepid scholar did not afterall put a foot in his own snare. After placing Jesus so emphatically andstrangely in his own ancient time, he pretends to find a religious value inhim under these distressing disadvantages. Among which, to say so in

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passing, is the revelation that Jesus’ ethic will not do. It was an ethic ofshort duration because already the Apostle Paul had set it aside. Yetsurely the word is poorly chosen: ethic? ‘Go thy way,’ says Jesus to aleper cleansed. ‘Show thyself to the priest and offer for thy cleansingthose things which Moses commanded.’ (Mark 1,44.) What ethic shouldthis prophet have except for sharing the custom of his people?

There is more here than a simple rejection of Jesus’ propheticmessage. Schweitzer has abstracted a supposed ethic from the Teachingsof Jesus because he wants to shift his own Gospel to the plane ofabstraction, of thinking, of philosophy. He regards these abstractions asinvulnerable, and he resorts to this sort of thing to get away fromparticulars like this word of Jesus to the leper. Moreover, he will assureus in outright defiance of the meaning of words that ethics is the essence ofreligion. No scholar believes it. Quite apart from theology, even theanthropologists and philosophers do not accept that, but Schweitzer isundeterred. He will eventually complete the ethic of Jesus by aRevelation of his own contained in the formula, Reverence for Life. Theformula is strikingly modern and secular (notice the absence of God in aformula which speaks of reverence). It was an idea which came to him‘unforeseen and unsought’ as he was being taken up the Ogowe riverwith his doctor bag by a few black men and their steamboat was makingits way through a herd of hippopotamus. Time and place have matteredto his insight, but the principle satisfies by its universality. There isnothing in it to embarrass the philosopher in Schweitzer, and by his lifethus given in service he renews the divine example: he is himself theExemplar.

After his death at the ripe age of ninety a manuscript wasdiscovered among his effects which had been wrapped in linen andstored away. It seems to have been written in his seventies and waspublished under the title, Reich Gottes und Christentum. Inscribed on themanuscript was the word definitiv, but just as in the beginning of hiscareer, he had reconstructed the life of Jesus on the basis of his masterprinciple. Increasingly dogmatic and reducing his affirmations to hardknots lacking all transparency, he affirms his tragic hero.

THE MESSIANIC SECRET

Near the end of The Quest of the Historical Jesus in a portion ofthe book which brings us closer to his own thought, Schweitzer describes

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a coincidence which must have for him the value of a Sign. For on the‘self-same day’ in 1901 that his earlier ‘Sketch’ of the life of Jesus waspublished, dealing with The Secret of the Messiahship, another scholar, anolder, riper scholar, William Wrede, had published a book called TheMessianic Secret. The titles were strikingly similar but each had taken adifferent standpoint and the two perspectives could not be reconciled. According to Professor Wrede, Jesus never kept to himself a Messianicsecret such as Schweitzer imagined when taking Mark’s Gospel at facevalue. The portrayal of Jesus as a man holding such a secret was adevice of the Evangelist’s. It was a fiction designed to plant an evidenceof a later faith in an earlier tradition.

The English Quaker prophet, George Fox, once described theeffect on him of a mere church steeple by saying that ‘it struck at my life’– he couldn’t abide the tepid worship of the English ‘steeple-house.’ Thatresponse might also describe the effect on Albert Schweitzer of WilliamWrede’s book: it struck at his life because in a single stroke Wrede hadremoved the whole assurance on which the younger scholar had restedhis conception of the life of Jesus. It was his unique penetration of thatguarded secret that had enabled him to reconstruct the ministry,whereas Wrede’s assumption was that the earliest tradition still discerniblein Mark knew very well that Jesus had not appeared to be Messiah duringhis lifetime.

Now it is very clear from the Epistle to the Romans, for example,or later on from some of the early sermons reported in Acts that Jesuswas acknowledged to be the Messiah after his Resurrection and becauseof it. CH Dodd, with authority, declared those early sermons to be primespecimens of the early kerygma (or ‘preachment.’) Inasmuch as Romansalso is taken to be earlier than any Gospel, a common view among thescholars now is that Jesus did not go beyond an eschatological messageeven in his thinking, but as it goes against the Gospels to say so, this viewof the matter is doubtful.

As between Wrede and Schweitzer, it was all a question of howMark’s Gospel is to be taken: Either history or myth, in Schweitzer’swords. Either you may trust the given story for the history in it (afterstriking out the miracles) or else you dissolve the evidence of the giventext. Such an argument is inconclusive. Any decision here must turn onthe inner thoughts of a Jesus given in an old legend whose frank burden(that is, message) favors Schweitzer but whose character (becauselegendary) invites Wrede’s hypothesis. In connection with Mark’s Gospel

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to which we now turn, we shall find that something may be said foreither view. Later on in the Tale of Bartimaeus we shall notice thatAlbert Schweitzer and William Wrede have both stumbled ratherclumsily, each man clinging to his viewpoint through thick and thin.

PART TWO

THE BAPTISM OF JESUS

We first meet Jesus in history as one responding to a stir amonghis people: a stir of which he is not himself the cause. A prophet namedJohn had set up in the wilderness of Judea, calling upon his people torepent because the Kingdom of God was drawing near. ‘The axe is laidunto the root of the trees!’ he warned, and to escape ‘the wrath to come’folk must turn to God, casting wickedness aside and bringing forth fruitsworthy of repentance. And the sign of such repentance, or the outwardtoken of decision, was to undergo a rite of baptism, during which thepenitents immersed themselves in the Jordan river, probably in theprophet’s presence.

Although the stir caused by John was considerable, it is unlikelythat more than a few folk came out at any one time to hear the prophet'searnest warnings before stepping into the Jordan to be baptized. Probably they were immersed in their clothes or in whatever scantwrappings they used to cover their nakedness, and a point of someimportance is that they were baptized in a river, apparently because thewater had to flow. They wouldn’t have been baptized, then, in the Seaof Galilee to the north or in the Dead Sea to the south because flowingwater in the ancient myth is living water and the Jordan's flowing streamis what the prophet chose. That he believed in a myth of living water,however, puts it wrongly: the very question is anachronistic, were we toask it, as if supposing that his thoughts were doctrines. John did notinvent the rite of baptism, and in prescribing it, he will have honored inhimself an indistinct presumption that had been fostered by an age-oldpractice. Baptism was already then a rite widely used and we simplynote John's actual practice and couple it with a widespread myth.

The Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran, who practice frequentablutions to this very day on the shores of the Euphrates, claim to bedescended from the Baptist. They are an interesting study: a folk who livealong the river. They are not a Christian people and regard Jesus as anapostate who softened or perverted the teachings of John. Lady

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Drower, who visited them over several years and studied their rites andread their Scripture, supposes that they are descended from an ancientfertility cult. The people are compulsive baptizers. Brides in their bridaldresses are immersed, and women after childbirth, so their Scripturessay, are to be baptized in the river daily for a month in all weathers,although Lady Drower reports that in wintertime they are allowed to liein bed and suffer themselves to be splashed. Living water is a vital beliefamong the Mandaeans and it holds them to the river.

These people also use a sacrament of bread and water, bakingthe round wafer on the wall of an outdoor oven, and they make a waist-high cross of sticks for one of their rituals and drape it with a scarf,looping it over the arms exactly as our Western Catholics and otherliturgical folk do sometimes in Lent. Some of these symbols and rites aremore widespread than Christians suppose. The Mandaeans honormarriage and regard it as a duty, rejecting a celibate state even for theirpriests, and there is to this day (or was in Lady Drower's day) a curiouslyphallic shape to the doorway of a ritual hut which they build or renovateannually for a major rite. This doorway, as shown in her photographs, isabout the height of a tall man but very narrow, rounded on the top andcurving outward as it rises: a very curious and probably a totallyunconscious symbol among the Mandaeans themselves, whose sexualmorality is several notches above our own. Inasmuch as they believethemselves to be descended from the Baptist, and have acquired a dislikeof Jesus accordingly, they seem to be a living evidence of other earlycults and different perspectives. Those scholars who would derive theirtraits from the Christian religion must tell us how a resistant folk can havebeen permeated by the rites of their rivals.

We must include among the world's baptizers the multitudes ofIndia who baptize themselves in the Ganges. Or is it truly a baptismwhich the poor heathen of India do? Our danger here is that we may bemisled by a doctrinal concept or thrown off track by a prejudice, forundoubtedly it is a baptism which these pious pilgrims do, climbingdownstairs in different modes of dress and undress to wash, soak, swim,dunk themselves, even dive and play in the flowing Ganges. What isdifferent in India is only that people baptize themselves, requiring nopriest and doing it each his own way to his own satisfaction. For themthe Ganges is sacred – is (or once was) a god. And the flow of the river,baptism done in running water, is a point in common.

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It remains to add that Pharisees also baptized converts at thetime of Christ, showing that there is nothing in the act of baptism thatgoes contrary to the Jewish religion.

Jesus submits to this rite, which is described as ‘a baptism ofrepentance for the forgiveness of sins,’ but what is it that has brought himto John, then, if it was not an act of repentance? Tradition has it that hewas a villager from Nazareth in Galilee, a country lying to the north, andhe must have journeyed south to hear a prophet in the wilderness ofJudea (as Matthew tells) but why he went, except for the commonreason, we don’t know. Apart from the general stir we cannot guess athis thoughts, and whether on arrival he heard the Baptist preach once orseveral times, or if he remained for a season and became a disciple, wecannot tell.

According to the Markan legend, this baptism is for Jesus arevelation. John’s tremendous warnings may have awakened him to hismission. Or he may have been in a heightened state before going out toa prophet whose garb resembled the dress and manner of Elijah, ofwhom it was said that ‘he wore a garment of haircloth with a girdle ofleather about his loins.’ (II Kings 1,8.) Compare Mark on the Baptist who‘was clothed with camel’s hair, and had a leather girdle around his waist,and ate locusts and wild honey.’ Legend will have it so because Elijahwas to return to the world before the coming of the Messiah, and by theevidence of Mark – our earliest Gospel – the Baptist was mentioned inthe same breath as Elijah in the popular rumor.

What our legend states as fact if we take the Tale as Scripturegives it, is only that:

In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and wasbaptized by John in the Jordan.

At once a blossoming legend takes us into the sphere of myth:

And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw theheavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like adove; and a Voice came from Heaven, ‘Thou art my belovedSon; with thee I am well pleased.’ (Mark 1,9.)

We have again echoes of earlier Scripture here, as this of the secondPsalm which I cite only to show the great freedom with which the HebrewScripture is used for prophecy:

I will tell of the decree of the LORD: He said to me, ‘You are mySon, today I have begotten you.’ (Psalm 2,7.)

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The Voice from Heaven is similar to this, yet different, and scholars findan echo from Isaiah also in Mark’s account:

Behold, my Servant, whom I uphold, my Chosen, in whom mysoul delights. (Isaiah 42,1.)

A knowledge of Hebrew Scripture out of which these traditions havegrown shows that we are deeply in the myth of prophecy fulfilled. Wasit, then, that only Jesus saw the Heavens opened and a dove descendingin consequence of his baptism, as Mark implies? Or do these traditionstell us that the Baptist also heard that Voice and saw the dove? TheGospels are inconsistent here but why look for objective fact in a Talefrom which that standard has disappeared?

Matthew is self-conscious about the Markan myth because itdescribes a baptism of repentance in which Jesus participates. In hislonger version of the Tale he invents a revealing dialogue between Jesusand John, for when Jesus came to be baptized:

John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptizedby you, and do you come to me?’ But Jesus answered him, ‘Letit be so now; for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.’ (3,14.)

He explains away the reason of the Baptist’s rite because he sees in Jesusa sinless man. It is a transparent maneuver and may hint of the survivalof an early fact which Mark’s tradition had preserved despite itsembarrassment to a later belief. If so, it would illustrate a certain tenacityof fact within the very thrift of legend.

What is it that we know of this event strictly as knowledge? It isnot very much, and hardly enough to prevent the Negative critics fromsaying that the mere appearance of John the Baptist, as a known figurepreaching of Judgment Day, was of itself enough to start a rumor of thearriving Messiah. The logic of it is Shelley’s logic:

If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Already for Count Volney this is the argument:

Conformably to the calculations received by the Jews, nearly sixthousand years had passed since the imagined creation of theworld.’ (That time had been fixed for a renovation of the worldby a great deliverer of whom there was a general expectationthroughout Asia). ‘This coincidence produced a fermentation inmen’s minds. Nothing was thought of but an approaching end.

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Men interrogated the hierophants and their mystic books, whichassigned various periods for it. They expected the Restorer. Inconsequence of talking about him, some one said that he hadseen him; or we may suppose that some enthusiast believedhimself to be that personage, and collected partisans. Thesepartisans deprived of their chief by an incident, true withoutdoubt, but which passed in obscurity, gave occasion by thestories which they told, to a rumor which was graduallyorganized into history. On this foundation, all the circumstancesof the mythological traditions were very soon arranged, and theresult was an authentic and complete system, which it was notpermitted to doubt. (As quoted by Andrews Norton)

It is a genuine argument and sensibly reasoned. There is noabsolute denial of an ‘enthusiast’ who may have believed himself to bethe expected personage: it shows us (this in passing) that at the heart ofthe Negative argument is a question of reference. Sheer physicalness isnot the question of Jesus, but rather: What is shown us in the name ofJesus? And what, of this that is shown, can be thought to be real?

A man whose name is given as (in Hebrew) Joshua has comefrom a village in which he lives (the village is named) to receive or enactthe baptismal rite supervised by John. This is what we know of fact fromour legend, assuming as we may that our legend reports on fact, but whyshould this concern us at all except prospectively? It is because of whatwe know otherwise of Jesus and value in him, or in association with hisName, that we might care in the least for his dunking any more than forthe joyous pilgrims who splash and play in the Ganges, or for those river-dwelling Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran. Apart from its significance in thelarger myth of Christ, the bare fact could not concern us, and yet hissignificance is expressed in miraculous terms. Significance is not a fact ofhistory: its habitation is the mind and its expression (very often) thesymbol. Were we to delete the miracle from Mark like zealousUnitarians, and thus the rending of the sky and the dove descending andthe heavenly Voice, nothing of this Tale would signify: nothing would beleft to us except the report of a commonplace fact which anycommonplace writer might have imagined about a man otherwiseunknown.

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10. St. J. Thackery translation cited in John Dominic Crossan’s, The Historical Jesus: The Lifeof a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (HarperSanFrancisco 1991 p. 231.)

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JOHN THE BAPTIST HISTORICAL

We seem not to have a single reference to Jesus that can’t betraced to Christian rumor, whereas John the Baptist is a figure of history. Josephus has reported his life in a credible manner as he does, forinstance, that of the hermit Bannos, of whom he writes (quoting I.Abraham) that he ‘lived in the desert, used no other clothing than grewon trees, and had no other food than what grew of its own accord, andbathed himself in cold water frequently, both by day and by night, inorder to preserve purity.’ A case of frequent ritual lustrations: a solitaryBaptist, so to speak.

Josephus, then, a Jewish historian of those Gospel-writing timesdevotes a passage to John in his Jewish Antiquities (18. 116-19):

For Herod had put him to death, though he was a good manand had exhorted the Jews to lead righteous lives, to practicejustice towards their fellows and piety towards God, and sodoing to join in baptism. In his view this was a necessarypreliminary if baptism was to be acceptable to God. They mustnot employ it to gain pardon for whatever sins they committed,but as a consecration of the body implying that the soul wasalready thoroughly cleansed by right behavior. When others toojoined the crowds about him, because they were aroused to thehighest degree by his sermons, Herod became alarmed. Eloquence that had so great an effect on mankind might lead tosome form of sedition, for it looked as if they would be guided byJohn in everything that they did. Herod decided therefore that itwould be much better to strike first and be rid of him before hiswork led to an uprising, than to await for an upheaval… (John)was brought in chains to Machaerus... and there put to death. (Abridged).10

The message of a Kingdom of God impending is absent from Josephus. Itseems a deliberate omission. Possibly he has wanted to avoid stirring upany further ‘nervousness’ associated with an apocalyptic fervor. Or itmay be that he meant to slight the Jesus sect. It matters not for ourpurposes what his reasons were. The crucial point is that he hasn’t takenhis story of the Baptist from the Gospels, which in spite of their legendary

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quality preserve the message of a Kingdom which might upset any kingwith its rumor of upheaval.

So Josephus gives a genuine reason for the execution of John inHerod’s alarm, thereby giving us a connection to history, whereas theGospels, although faithful to a message which explains that alarm, omitany political reason for Herod’s assassination of the prophet. Mark tellsus that at his birthday feast Herod made a foolish promise to thedaughter of Herodias, a sister-in-law whom he had taken to wife. Salome, then, whose name appears to be unknown to Mark, had sopleased him by her dancing that he swore a mighty oath and boundhimself to an extravagant gift, ‘even half of my kingdom!’ On instructionsfrom her mother, she asked to have the head of John the Baptist broughtin on a platter. And all because a wicked Queen had been rebuked bythe prophet for marrying her brother-in-law and living in sin. This is thepsychology of fairy tales. It is impossible to believe that a powerful andwicked King couldn’t turn aside a foolish dancing girl simply because shehad wriggled before him with an Eastern voluptuousness and he hadsworn before his guests.

The Gospel tale is a pleasing melodrama which has captured theimagination of many an artist: of Oscar Wilde in his play Salome, of PaulManship who did the Prometheus at Rockefeller Center and gave us abronze miniature of Salome with John’s head at her pointed toes, ofAubrey Beardsley in his ink drawings, and who knows how many othersbesides? We like such melodramas because they seem to bring the truthhome to us even as we gasp at the horrors portrayed or shed a willingtear. Mark’s Gospel tale conveys a folkish protest against luxury and theimplied voluptuousness of the dance, and of course against Herodias’sadultery.

Apart from its embedded fact, where does the story come from? Has Mark invented it? Undoubtedly, it shows his love of story. In a veryshort Gospel it takes up as much space as his account of the crucifixion. Matthew tells the tale in half as many words and Luke omits it entirely. What we know is that the unknown artist who devised this fable wasinspired by earlier Scriptures. Herod’s extravagant promise to Salome isforeshadowed by King Ahasuerus’s identical promise to grant the requestof his own Queen Esther ‘to the half of my kingdom’ except that in theearlier tale the Jewish Esther asks that her life and the life of her peoplebe spared while her enemy at court, the wicked Haman, is hanged by theneck. Another wicked ‘head’ is attacked in the Book of Judges when,

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after ‘the stars in their courses fought against Sisera,’ the virtuous Jaeldrives a tent stake through the temple of the sleeping commander,whom she had lured into her tent after his defeat. This motif, by which awoman deceives an enemy commander and single-handedly takes hislife, is copied by the Apocryphal Scripture of Judith, who single-handedlydeceives the besieging Holofernes and his host by entering the enemycamp with her maid as a traitor to her people. A widow, Judith is helpedin her wiles by her extraordinary beauty and her perfumes andadornments as a woman of wealth. On the fourth day of her stay shebeheads the drunken sleeping General Holofernes with his own sword,wraps the head in his bejeweled ‘mosquito-netting’ (NEB), bags it in hermaid’s carry-all, and by a wily prearrangement, they both leave the campunmolested, apparently to pray. A further connection with the legend ofthe Baptist was an arrangement whereby Judith, during her unviolatedstay in Holofernes’s tent, went out each night to bathe herself in the springin the valley of Bethulia. (Judith 12,7.) She did it for three days and nights,returning afterwards to the camp purified. It was something more than adaily bath, this ritual lustration.

There is a curious erotic motif in these three tales also, which isreminiscent of Salome. Esther was taken from the harem to become aQueen and the beautiful Judith had gradually brought Holofernes to apoint of irresistible desire which would have been a factor in hisdrunkenness, or rather in her seductiveness when offering wine. Thevirtuous Jael was also unviolated by an exhausted Sisera (becausenothing of the sort is mentioned) and yet there is a subtle hint of an eroticseduction in that he asked for water and she gave him milk.

Here were ample sources in the Jewish Scriptures for the motifsin our Baptist legend. We have three heroines, females, attacking heads,in Esther’s case because her deed results in a hanging. Transpositionsare easy and our unknown inventor, furnished with these structures, hadonly to switch from good to evil and cast the beheading female in therole of dancing girl and wicked queen (a double role akin to Judith’swith her helpful maid). The wicked king goes unpunished in this tale anda virtuous prophet is beheaded instead. We have not pretended to seethrough the legend in arriving at this result. We have simply comparedJosephus’ factual report of John’s imprisonment in Machaerus withMarkan fable, for which we found a triple source in the books of Estherand Judges and Judith. Notwithstanding the form of legend heregenuine historical fact is embedded in this legend.

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A DESERT TEMPTATION MYTH

Jesus is baptized: very well, he joins in a common public‘baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.’ Historically, theBaptist movement is the beginning of the Gospel, according to Mark, andyet his version of the Tale may be called a myth of Messianic ordination. It is only in prospect of the surrounding story that we describe it aslegendary (which in that sense it is: it belongs to our world). Whereas inits significance it is too clearly a myth of ordination or a kind of anointingbecause we have in this Jesus the beloved ‘Son of God’ attested by aVoice from Heaven. As soon as Christ appears in history, legend clotheshim and myths arise.

Following the Heavenly Voice, our earliest Gospel gives its nextfact (assuming the fact) with an extraordinary brevity:

The Spirit immediately drove (Jesus) out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; andhe was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered to him. (Mark 1,12.)

Who can deny that this is a myth quite as much as a legend? Foralthough I use these words in the usual way, we acknowledge a contrastbetween them: Myth is the more fantastic and unreal. As Mircea Eliadewas fond of stressing, myths are set in illo tempore just as children’s fairytales begin with ‘Once upon a time.’ Only, as it happens, that ‘once upona time’ of a Hansel and Gretel can never be found on a calendar or givenas a date.

I suppose also that Satan is a myth having no more real existencethan the goat-footed Pan whose likeness he sometimes borrows, havinggoatish thighs and cloven hoof, and we must surely allow that Jesus’being driven into the wilderness by a Spirit which thus takes possession ofhim resembles no experience we may have – short of delusions andmadness.

Our passage, then, is from the seeming legend of Jesus’ baptismto the frank myth of his wilderness Temptations, although in fairness wehave recognized despite the quaintness of it all that our Gospels intend tobe giving us also matters of fact. This is not to say that Mark might havehoped to find somewhere a pigeon like the dove that descended onJesus. The fusion of fact and self-evident myth which we find so puzzlingin our Gospels had already occurred in the traditions which theEvangelist received: he didn’t first receive a history which he ‘spoiled for

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us’ by changing it to something else, as if he actually knew the real historyof Christ and had dressed it up with legend, thinking to improve it. Markhimself received the Gospel myth before contributing to its fabrication. However deeply he reshapes the given tale, its transformation of anearlier event (or a life) could happen in a ripe soil only as an untraceablefolk-phenomenon.

So to make a special point of this: we cannot hope to trace thelegend to its origins because of its setting in a framework of myth. RudolfBultmann and other ‘Form Critics’ have labored with great learning andingenuity to get behind the written Gospels, but they never trace this orthat Tale or this or that Saying beyond the Sitz im Leben of the earlychurch. It is as much as to say that they can only claim to understandwhat these things meant to the earliest Christians. We cannot hope tounderstand the rise of a living myth by beginning with the facts of Jesusbecause it is just these earliest facts which are forever beyond our reach.

What we make out as an evident claim on history is thatfollowing his baptism, Jesus endured a wilderness ordeal beforebeginning to preach. (The forty days’ duration is a mythical echo ofIsrael’s forty years’ wandering in the desert before the conquest ofPalestine). Yet our history, conceived in this modernizing style, is ratherflat. We have only imagined his supposed ordeal as a substitute for theancient myth of his Temptation, and yet it is that same myth which is thesource of any fact we could imagine in replacing it.

It is Matthew and Luke, two later Evangelists, who give us ourfamous Temptation tryptich in which Jesus, having fasted forty days andforty nights, ‘was afterward an hungred.’ This tale comes from a lostdocument which they happen to share, each working of courseindependently of the other. In the first of these panels, the Tempterappears to the hungry Christ to say, ‘If thou be the Son of God, commandthat these stones be made bread,’ and Jesus replies, ‘Man shall not liveby bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth ofGod.’ His reply not only leans on Scripture: it consists of Scripture.(Deuteronomy 8,3) Then on the pinnacle of the Temple to which he hasbeen spirited, he receives a challenge to his faith from his Satanic host: ‘Ifthou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall givehis angels charge concerning thee, and in their hands they shall bearthee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone.’ This is a veryclever Devil who quotes Scripture to Jesus now, and Jesus replies: ‘It iswritten again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.’ (Deuteronomy

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6,16) Then finally in a third panel after taking him up to an ‘exceedinghigh mountain’ the Devil promises him all the kingdoms of the world‘and the glory of them’ if he will fall down and worship him, and Jesusreplies, ‘Get thee hence, Satan! for it is written, Thou shalt worship theLord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.’ (Deuteronomy 6,13). Satan departs and then angels come to minister to Christ.

A shallow mind might call this tale a mere fable and laugh at itsquaintness, but an iron severity in the religious demand is what thistryptich conveys. It is written, says Christ. Each of his replies is takenfrom Scripture and aptly applied. (The panels are given in a differentorder by the Evangelist Luke, who is of course unacquainted withMatthew’s Gospel). Yet a question remains. Whose motive findsexpression here? Or more audaciously, What experience were thesevivid imaginations designed to convey?

It is impossible to suppose that these well-developed HellenisticTales can have come unaltered by tradition from Jesus himself because,indeed, the Gospels are tradition. And yet symbolic truth, to bedeserving of the name, must reflect our experience: must give us in theSymbol an apprehension of reality. And that is just the question ofreligious myth. Why might the narrative of his Temptations not go backto Jesus after a solitary desert ordeal when in the universal experience ofmankind ordeal of that sort belongs to the primitive vocation? It may betoo much to say that we are in the presence of an experience of Jesushere because the experience given is that of the myth outright, but we canhardly deny (as if we knew) that we may have here a reflection of anevent in the life of Jesus to which of course his disciples would attachtheir own understanding.

Quite what that experience was during his desert sojourn ofloneliness and fasting, if we assume this, or what Jesus may have believedof it, if he had the experience, we cannot know, but these Temptations atthe outset of his ministry belong to the ancient Idea of Christ. We haveonly tried to peer into the myth: we make no claim to have got at the‘facts’ by laying the mythic veil aside. And we have not disfigured themyth, accordingly. Fact is not in question here because foreverunavailable. Whether Jesus suffered delusions, for instance, does notremotely concern us as a matter of fact. What the myth describes is awilderness Temptation which has taken this dream-like form. Of all thewonders in the Gospels, it is only the Transfiguration of Christ that shareswith our Temptation tale full claim to be regarded as myth outright.

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POSTSCRIPT: A PERSONAL WORD

To show the value, sometimes, even of delusions which mayoccur to normal minds, I cite an experience told me a few years ago bymy wife. She was a nurse-midwife employed by local obstetricians andliked to be called Connie. On one occasion, as it happened, she saw apregnant woman, a visitor from another state, who had fallen seriously illand could not find a doctor. My wife was so alarmed by her conditionthat she gave her an IV infusion then and there in the office, thinking toprotect the baby. Then she rounded up a doctor.

Next day from a hospital bed the woman told her in so manywords: ‘Do you know that yesterday my father visited me? I think hecame in through the window as I was lying there and sat down in thechair to talk with me for a few minutes.’ Now the office was on thesecond floor and her father had been dead for two years, but this theyoung woman said, and she said it just like that, giving it out for a fact. She also said, ‘I told this to my sisters and they wept.’ Connie replied,‘Had I known of this yesterday, I would have admitted you at once!’ Weare in the sphere of Oral Tradition here, of course, because this story wastold me by my wife, but as we see from the story, all the participants,sisters, patient and midwife saw the omen as grave: Beware!

Having acted earlier in reaction to the woman’s condition,Connie now responded to her vision by instructing her not to allow anydoctor to discharge her until she had seen the very doctor under whoseimmediate care this woman was. Understanding the omen of the vision,she thought of the possibility that another doctor, unacquainted with thewoman’s case and overlooking its seriousness, might discharge her (thesort of thing that might happen in a revolving practice). The patientwillingly and solemnly agreed.

She demythologized her myth afterward saying, ‘I don’t reallyknow what I think of things like that.’ Nor did Connie, of course, but seethe fact at issue here. A pregnant woman seriously ill is treated by amidwife who finds her condition alarming and breaks into the doctors’schedules for help. When told of the vision next day, it reinforces hersense of the seriousness of the patient’s condition. The woman nowrestored to a balanced mental state wonders at last if it were possible forher dead father to visit her for a conversation like that, coming inthrough the window. The important meaning of the vision survives thisquestioning and the result is achieved in spite of it, yet the vision wasinsofar confirmed when the woman lost her baby afterwards.

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RETURN TO GALILEE: Public Act, Obscure Beginnings.After his legendary Baptism and a Temptation in the wilderness

which is given in a myth, Jesus returns to Galilee and proclaims theKingdom of God. Mark says that he does this ‘after John’s arrest,’ whichis a noteworthy fact caught up in these legends – if it really be so. Why,after John’s arrest? Why not, instead, after the wilderness Temptations?

If we allow that our Temptation tryptich may represent a realexperience of Jesus, a contradiction is implied here. For if at this time(let us imagine) he knew himself to be the Son of God – but we are out ofour depth as soon as we say such a thing. After all, what do we know ofthat? It is only as a story that we are understanding these things, and yetfrom a perspective within that story we may wonder why a newly-christened Son of God should have stayed by the Baptist until thatprophet’s arrest and then, leaving the region, continued to preach hismessage elsewhere. A consistent myth might have had Jesus bringing hisown superior Teaching out of the wilderness whereas Mark’s curtaccount of these things implies to the historian that he began his work asa disciple of John’s.

An impression of Christ’s indebtedness to the Baptist deriveseven more strongly from Matthew when he puts Mark’s epitome of Jesus’early message into the Baptist’s mouth: ‘Repent, for the Kingdom ofHeaven is at hand.’ (Matthew 3,2) Since we have no reason to doubtthat this was the gist of the Baptist’s preaching, Jesus will then seem to amodern reader to be repeating him, but the Evangelist doesn’t mean toimply that he was indebted to the desert prophet (nor was that intendedby Mark). As believers in prophecy these Evangelists don’t think ofinfluence. Any real echo of John in Jesus’ message, if that had beenpreserved, is simply proof that the Baptist was his predicted forerunner.

A Gospel of the Kingdom of God is the burden of Jesus’ Teachingas the Synoptics portray him. He is not a moralist but a prophet, and hedoesn’t emphasize ‘religious belief,’ placing stress on other things. It isfair to say that he has no doctrine, no formula, no system, no ‘right idea’– how absurd! Jesus has nothing of the churchman about him, nothingecclesiastical, and no theology. He takes the faith of his people forgranted and touches on matters which concern us all because thenearness of the Kingdom of God calls for a decision made heart and soul,once and for all, in contrast to the lives we live. The deed of faith he callsfor is a cleavage in life. Peacemakers are blesséd in his Teaching: they are

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to be called sons of God, and yet he ‘brings not peace but a sword’ andhe will say in Luke’s Gospel that ‘No man, having put his hand to theplow and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God.’ (Luke 9, 62.) Wefeel at once an urgency in these words, but where is the tax on ourcredulity?

What our Synoptic legend gives us for an opening, then, is thatwhen Jesus began to preach in Galilee (except for requiring baptism: thisis absent) he continued the Baptist’s own theme, and yet there is nothingin the desert prophet’s message to compare to the Teachings of Christ. Although legendary in form, our earliest Gospel declares for a fact that hewas thus baptized in common with many in Israel, and that he overcamethe Tempter, and that after John’s arrest he returned to Galilee with aGospel of the Kingdom. This has the look of honest history, and it is onlyin prospect of the Evangelist’s handling of the story and the miracles tocome that one would think of denying it.

It is terribly important to understand this matter of the handlingof the story. Mark’s Gospel was written to answer the question: Why wasthe Son of God unknown? Why unrecognized even by his family or thevillagers who saw his wonders? And then from the standpoint of theNegative argument, one transposes: Why is Jesus unknown? Or why hasNazareth no memory of the man? Or where is his family? Certain storiesin his Gospel can be read from this standpoint because of the ambiguityof Mark’s obscurity theme, which he handles very shrewdly. This earliestGospel is our pattern Gospel, and aspects of this theme have been takenup by all four Evangelists.

Matthew, for instance, because he has borrowed so heavily fromMark, is obliged to reproduce the obscurity of Christ (or the so-calledMessianic secret) which for Mark is a basic theme. Already in theChristmas tale, as we have seen, the Magi fail to find their way to the holychild, at first, and blunder into Herod’s court. Afterward, warned by anangel in a dream the family hide in Egypt to escape a slaughter whichfalls upon ‘all the male children of Bethlehem’ from two years old andunder. When the ministry begins Matthew presents the reader with a two-fold withdrawal on the part of Jesus. This goes beyond Mark, who says ofJesus’ return only that he ‘came’ into Galilee after John’s arrest. Matthew writes rather more carefully that ‘he withdrew into Galilee,’ as ifit was dangerous to remain at the scene, and then he adds what Markomits to say: ‘leaving Nazareth he went and dwelt in Capernaum by thesea.’ In course of portraying his public appearance, his very debut,

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Matthew describes a withdrawal. It is another evidence of Jesus’obscurity. From the scene of a known historical event, that of thenotorious Baptist, Jesus has withdrawn. Where to? The Four Gospelsknow him as a villager from Nazareth, but he has forsaken this village.

Luke is the other Evangelist who borrows heavily from Mark. Heuses Mark in his own way, but he too is obliged to the secrecy theme. Although each of these later Evangelists has given his Gospel animpressive foreground in telling a Christmas story, what those tales havein common is a mingling of glory and lowliness. In both of them Jesus ishard to find, has to be looked for. Luke tells of no Magi and is undisturbedby Herod and his court and his slaughters. Instead, there are mereshepherds ‘watching in the fields by night’ when angel choirs appear in‘the glory of the Lord’ bringing tidings of the birth, but see the obscurityin such a rustic revelation. And even they, following the heavenly choir,have to leave the fields to look for a babe ‘wrapped in swaddling clothesand lying in a manger.’ Has ever a King’s obscurity been as deep?

THE BOY JESUS IN THE TEMPLE

Earlier than his beautiful pastoral, Luke has reproduced anelaborate legend about the Baptist’s birth. It is decked out with psalmsthat have gone over into liturgy, such as the Magnificat, but inconnection with Jesus’ obscurity it sets our literary Evangelist a peculiartask. He has furnished his Gospel foreground in hanging tapestries andembroidered vestments to offset his lowly swaddling clothes and crib ofstraw. Now he must go beyond these enchantments of a lowly glory tobridge the early revelations and the humble life to be described by a Taleof Jesus in the Temple as a boy. It is unique to this Gospel, and the onlytale in the canonical Four to tell anything of Jesus before his manhood atthirty.

With his parents, then, a boy of twelve, he has made thecustomary visit to Jerusalem to observe the Passover and afterwards hasstayed behind. His parents suppose him to be in the company and go aday’s journey ‘and they sought him among their kinsfolk andacquaintances; and when they did not find him, they returned toJerusalem.’ Nor did they quickly find him there but ‘after three days theyfound him in the Temple’ among the teachers, listening and askingquestions. The boy amazes everyone by ‘his understanding and hisanswers,’ but his parents are astonished rather to find him there, and

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when his mother complains of this treatment and pleads their anxiety, theboy replies, ‘How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I mustbe in my Father’s house?’

A very superior painting has been made of the scene by HeinrichHofmann showing a comely, modest, brown-eyed lad, and evidently aJewish boy, holding forth among the wondering, aged doctors andscribes. Art thus lends reality to the imagination, but is it, then, the tale ofa Jewish prodigy as a literal-minded historian might be tempted to takeit? There would be nothing improbable in that, but Luke is really intenton other themes. A shadow of sorts has fallen over Mary’s understandingof her son when she can’t think where to find him – even she! Wouldthat she had remembered the angelic tidings of Gabriel and followed theclue because the precocity shown here is that of the Son of God as a boy. Offered in the guise of history, Luke’s legend is a parable of sorts tellinghis readers that even the parents of Jesus could find him only with difficulty. And not just anywhere! The terms of the Christian experience areillustrated here, and the Evangelist has understood his business inaddressing them. Like Mark, who writes to answer the question, Whywas the Son of God unknown? Luke has written to a similar question:Why is Jesus hard to find? And the answer is only, It must be so – it wasalways so. Even his parents did not always know where to find theunusual boy.

THE CALLING OF THE FOUR

Jesus is passing along the Sea of Galilee. This is a broad lakeabout twelve miles long out of which the Jordan flows south to the DeadSea, and here he summons his first disciples by calling them away fromtheir work. They are two pairs of brothers, fishermen all, and first he seesSimon and Andrew, who are ‘casting a net in the sea.’ Activity like this isa sign of Mark’s artistry because story puts us at the scene, whereas forstraight history it is a rather imaginative detail.

Jesus says to the pair: ‘Follow me, and I will make you becomefishers of men.’ There is a kind of humor in it, as in a folk tale. We callsuch words as these occasional because they belong so particularly to theoccasion. Mark excels in these casual touches, and then he writes, ‘Immediately they left their nets and followed him.’ Now mind it, please. He says immediately. So did they leave their nets in water and wade outto follow Jesus like men hypnotized? Or did Peter roll up the nets while

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Andrew ran home to tell mother? Legend like this leaves a good deal ofplay to the imagination, but we are not at liberty to take a bold word like‘immediately’ and say that they made arrangements to follow Jesus as soonas it was convenient for them to wind up affairs. Evasions like that arefalse to the story as given. Alas, so is Dr. Goodspeed’s benign suggestion,excellent man and great scholar though he was, that the story indicates aprevious acquaintance on their part during which Jesus had come toknow these fishermen and won their confidence. While seeming to offera reason for this prompt abandonment of their nets, Goodspeed evadesthe primitive character of the tale in which its peculiar charm is to befound.

Farther along he ‘saw James the son of Zebedee and John hisbrother, who were in their boat mending the nets.’ He saw them, but notas if to say, ‘Ha! there you are, fellows!’ For why should we suppress thewonder of it all which the primitive tale conveys? He saw them: his eyefell upon them: they would do. ‘Immediately’ he called them ‘and they lefttheir father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and followedhim.’ It is like a parable by the Evangelist: Jesus Calls. With a word hepulls men away from their father because he can, and because he isworth it, but that shrewd detail of mending the nets and the given nameof Zebedee lift Mark above mere homily.

We cannot tell how far this tale is legend and tradition or how farinvention. This earliest Evangelist is a gifted artist of a Gothic sort(forgiving the anachronism) but he could never manage as activecharacters full Twelve Disciples in a Gospel so naively written. They arementioned sometimes collectively, but it is only Peter, James and Johnwho figure in our story. Poor Andrew loses status already in the list of theTwelve (Mark 3,16) when, rather tremendously, ‘James the son ofZebedee and John the brother of James, whom (Jesus) surnamedBoanerges, that is, sons of thunder’ separate the lesser brother from‘Simon whom he surnamed Peter’ and who is, of course, first among thedisciples. Even from that early foursome Andrew disappears when (as ifkeeping the figure of four) it is Jesus who displaces him, so that Jesus andthe three aforenamed are the actors in the tale. Curious to say, a patternof 2+2 (that is, two pairs of brothers) is displaced in the earliest Gospelby a pattern of 1+3, which as it happens resembles also the pattern ofthe Gospels themselves in which the first three (or the so-calledSynoptics) are supplemented by a Fourth and final Gospel of a whollydifferent character.

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It is Mark’s limitation as an artist that holds us to three chosendisciples, but the newly-constituted foursome appears when Jesus raisesthe daughter of Jairus, or is Transfigured, or when he prays in the Gardenof Gethsemane accompanied by the favored three. Number is somehowimportant here, but I must leave it to the reader to tell me why. It seemsto play into the Symbol-thesis of William Benjamin Smith. But why four? One might write of the four named winds that Aeolus kept imprisoned ina cave, or of the four corners of the earth in the cosmology of an earlychurch father. Thus too did ancient thinkers excogitate four elements ofEarth, Air, Fire and Water, guided by the archetype. I remember theremark once of an infant daughter during a little walk on which she heldmy finger: ‘Daddy, it does really seem as if the earth is square!’ Of theTwelve Disciples, then, it is only Peter, James and John who are actors inthe Synoptic tale except for Judas Iscariot when he betrays Christ.

I mention these things at all not because I am a numerologist butbecause CG Jung, whom I greatly admire, places great emphasis uponthe unconscious collective significance of the number Four. Among otherthings it belongs to completeness. As such it figures in the four-folddivision of the mandala-circle, a symbol of the achieved Self (much incontrast to the ego). In association with Chinese symbolism it representsearth and mother. In the recent Catholic dogma of the Assumption ofthe Virgin – Mary’s elevation to Heaven – Jung saw a completion of theTrinity.

Of course, there are yet other numbers which figure as groups orsymbols in the Gospels: twos, threes, sevens, seventy, Twelve Disciples. We have sometimes a pairing of Jesus and Peter. The Sons of Thunderact as a pair when they ask for Twin Heavenly thrones or offer to calldown fire from Heaven. Peter and John are sent together into Jerusalemto make ready for the Passover, and the same pair reappear in certainsections of Acts. Of course this latter pairing represents a curious sort ofcrossover between the pairs of brothers given earlier. It is really as ifLuke were artistically altering a pattern too pronounced.

It is worthwhile saying that the famous Twelve Disciples of Jesus,so far as any representation is concerned which would set them apart asindividual men, are for the most part and with the exceptions mentionedabove, only lists of names in the Synoptic Gospels – and lists which cannotbe made to agree with one another, just as the genealogies of Jesusgiven by Matthew and Luke do not agree.

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A DAY IN CAPERNAUM: The SynagogueJesus, then, having summoned his first disciples goes next into

Capernaum where on the Sabbath he enters the synagogue and teaches. The people are ‘astounded at his teaching,’ as Moffatt translates from theGreek, or in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible (RSV) ‘they areastonished’ because he taught them ‘as one who had authority and notas the scribes.’ It is very sudden, this appearance of Jesus in a rabbi’srole when coming into Galilee ‘after John was arrested.’ If this is history,we must allow that much has been omitted. And, for instance, the wholequestion of where he lived is unanswered.

It is the way of fable to be brief, and Mark never hesitates. Veryquickly, and before we have time to ask, for instance, Where are thefishermen now?, something will happen to divert us because‘immediately there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit.’(Mark 1,22). Disturbed by the unexpected presence of Jesus in thesynagogue, a demoniac starts up and cries out:

What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have youcome to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.’(Mark 1,23.)

Now what sort of recognition is this? It sounds as if he knew of himbeforehand as a sort of neighbor, but then why does he ask, ‘Have youcome to destroy us?’ Ask this of a visiting teacher? Our Evangelist istrading on the ambiguity. In one sense he has established the ‘fact’ ofJesus of Nazareth: ‘I know who you are!’ It is undoubtedly Mark’s desirethat we should take it this way, but the ‘unclean spirit’ of our story has amind of its own and when our demoniac cries out, ‘I know who you are,the Holy One of God,’ he verges on a rupture of the Messianic secret. Byvirtue of the demon within, this man has access to a deeper, an inhumanknowledge of Who Jesus is.

So Jesus rebukes him by addressing the demon: ‘Be silent, andcome out of him!’ Whereupon the demoniac cries out with a loud voiceand is convulsed. Mark is a realistic artist and in his simple shrewdaccount the demon obeys this Lord of spirits only after a last act ofresistance, like a dog giving its victim one last shake. Again the peopleare amazed, saying: ‘What is this? A new Teaching! With authority hecommands the unclean spirits and they obey him.’

What if, instead of treating these legends historically, we hadtaken them up at face value without asking if they were real? Certainly,

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they are stories of wonders and revelations, and of revelations given nowfrom the mouth of a wilderness prophet and a Voice from Heaven oragain from the mouth of a demoniac. Considered from that perspective,these tales are naive. Jesus has summoned disciples without having firstachieved any distinction in the world, and in the synagogue he hasastounded folk by his Teachings and subdued a demoniac by hisauthority, although the Teachings have not been recounted. Not a wordof them has been given us, although twice Mark has called on us toadmire them as we think of those astounded people. Their words havebeen remembered in a tale which praises Jesus as a Teacher for havingcast out a demon. Our Evangelist, it seems, is almost too naive and evenrather inept unless, as may happen, he is skilled in sleight-of-hand.

Supposing that he had decided to give a sample of the ‘newteaching’ instead of leaving it to our imagination, would it haveresembled the famous Teachings of Christ as we have them, for example,in the Sermon on the Mount? Is that what he wants us to think of whenthe ‘new teaching’ is praised? How easy it would be to draw thatconclusion – and what a mistake! For the ‘new teaching’ is one and thesame thing with the Messianic secret or, as we might say, the Idea ofChrist, which Mark cannot allow Jesus to reveal at this early time. Histale is confused here although his intention is plain. The same teachingwhich is able to ‘command unclean spirits’ has just been given by thisobstreperous demon! Mark is keeping his secret, that is, the Messianicsecret under wraps, but he is eager to have Jesus tell it as soon as he can.

We may fairly call this tale a fable, then, because it is that, butsuch a thing might once have been a piece of Oral Tradition reflecting areal event. If so, we are at liberty to brush aside its supernatural details,and that has been the way of the distinguished Frederick C. Grant in TheInterpreter’s Bible where he translates the demoniac’s question into theidiom of psychopathology: ‘Have you come from over the hills to work usharm here in Capernaum?’ It is ‘the terrified query of a partiallydemented man’ on this approach, and those who take the way of Dr.Grant can cite no lesser authority than the Wizard of Zurich, Dr CG Jung,who as a trained psychiatrist was well-acquainted with schizophrenia andall sorts of disorders. Jung very roundly insists that the phenomena ofpossession are evident in shattered minds. Besides, don’t we havedemoniacs in Africa today and exorcists who know how to cure them? Their possession is our psychopathology: we bridge the gap by a deeperscience.

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Yet if we save this tale as the report of something that happenedonce, what have we saved except the bare affirmation of fact lyingsomehow obscurely ‘behind’ the given legend? In rinsing away itsuniqueness, we have denied the Evangelist’s claim and lost our footing inthe understanding of his myth. Our rumored Jesus is thoroughly vagueexcept as this legend has been defining him. It is the Given Tale as itstands which contains all our value if a value is to be found here.

A DAY IN CAPERNAUM: Simon’s houseAfter Jesus leaves the synagogue, he ‘entered the house of

Simon and Andrew, with James and John.’

A house at last, but it is Simon’s house, and here with hisdisciples he observes the Sabbath as a day of rest. Otherwise, where didhe live? Unlike the Baptist or the solitary Bannos of whom Josephuswrites, Jesus dwelt among men in a town and he must have had a placeto stay. Mark leaves the matter vague. One commonly assumes that hestayed with Simon Peter and this is possible, but rather odd. First did hesay, ‘Follow me and I will make you fishers of men,’ and then did he askthem for lodging?

We must rid ourselves of any idea that the Evangelist is areporter of fact. Mark cannot tell us where Jesus lived and does not tellus that he lived with Simon Peter. He has in hand only a tradition that hedwelt at Capernaum, but a tradition that recommends itself in stubborncontrast to such a name as Jesus of Nazareth. Nevertheless, when histale requires the setting of a house, as for instance when men arebreaking through a roof just to get near this Teacher, he describes him asbeing ‘at home.’

Religion hasn’t suffered from this vagueness, curiously enough,because, as I say, it is story that puts us at the scene. We return to thestory when Jesus enters this house to find that Simon’s mother-in-law islying sick with fever. How very intimate that detail is! And it suggeststhat Mark knows very much more about Jesus than I have given himcredit for. Jesus takes her by the hand and lifts her up. The fever leavesher and she serves them.

It is gesture which counts for Mark here and carries the deepermeaning because this is not just an item of fact such as a biographerwould supply. Healing is the basic gesture here and Jesus’ taking of thewoman’s hand is a tangible value so that Mark attests his reality by that

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grasp. And then ‘he lifted her up’ or ‘he made her rise’ (thus Goodspeedtranslates) whereupon she served them. It is veritably a resurrection to‘life’ that is prefigured in this modest healing, and these prefigurings areno mere accident. Like an Oriental artist repeating his pattern, Mark willhave his Jesus take the hand of a lifeless twelve-year-old girl as themourners are wailing and speak in a symbol: ‘Talitha cumi!’ which is,being interpreted, ‘Damsel, I say unto thee, arise!’ (Mark 5,41 KJV) Isn’tthis a Resurrection? Or again, he will lift by the hand an ‘epileptic’ boyseemingly dead after he’d expelled an unclean spirit from him. (Mark9,27.)

In this first Capernaum scene, Mark’s meaning, or his Symbol, ifyou like, is carried through to the end, but he masks the symbol by hisrealism. That evening after sundown when the Sabbath has ended the‘whole city’ gathers about the door of Simon’s house bringing ‘all whowere sick or possessed with demons,’ of whom there are many in thisGospel of demoniacs. Now Jesus works many a cure, casts out manydemons, and ‘he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knewhim.’ It is a prohibition which will become a Markan stereotype.

Next morning very early he goes out to a lonely place for prayer. Implicit is the believer’s question, Where is he? (Or, why is this Jesus notto be found? That is the Negative view). When others awaken he has tobe looked for, just as the Boy in the Temple had to be looked for. Simonand ‘those who were with him’ find him and say: ‘Everyone is searchingfor you.’ It is the state of mind of many flocking to the Jesus cult whodon’t find an easy satisfaction there. Teachers and missionaries will usethese pointed tales as they assure folk of Jesus’ help. Gifted in teaching,they will employ gestures of hand-grasping and imaginary raising up inhomilies of consolation, just as our own preachers do.

Jesus does not return to Simon’s house. The Sabbath rest hasended with enthusiastic crowds and now, without so much as a morningmeal or a turning back to say good-bye, he begins a tour ‘throughout allGalilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons.’ (Mark1,39.) It is a great fact, this launching of his ministry. The decisivenessrequired of his disciples is well-expressed by this abrupt departure whenhe replies to Simon: ‘Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preachthere also; for that is why I came out.’

It is nonetheless a paradox. If this strange healing prophetsearches people out, yet he flees from those who have been aroused byhis own sensational deeds. After a cure in which he touches a leper (!) he

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‘could no longer openly enter a town, but was out in the country.’ Absent – and yet he is ‘around.’ He is sought out in the countryside:‘People came to him from every quarter.’ It is imperative that Jesus besomehow available. One believes that as a condition of faith.

But the Evangelist has dealt with us shrewdly because thatrealistic first Day in Capernaum has substituted for a history of Jesus’beginnings. The miraculous healing of a leper is no such historyalthough, within the fable, when Jesus charges him to ‘Go, show yourselfto the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded,’ wehave the implication of fact in that Jesus is shown as one observing theJewish religion. This is how the history is conveyed, and yet Mark givesno description of that tour of Galilee although it represents theinauguration of Jesus’ ministry since he now has disciples. We arediverted by story detail, like that of Simon’s mother-in-law, but we knowvery little about how he began. What villages he entered, how he wasreceived, what sort of rebuffs he coped with, how he established himself,what emergencies arose, what in particular he did here or there, how heand his disciples ate, slept, managed, washed their clothes, paid theirway – we cannot even imagine it on the basis of a generality about hispreaching in all the synagogues and casting out their many demons.

Mark’s traditions may be true in all essentials, depending on ourdefinition of ‘essentials,’ but the history of this legendary life is vague. Hence, the Jesus of this first mentioned Galilean tour has no particular‘there,’ no Dasein. Outside Capernaum he is ‘somewhere,’ ‘anywhere,’‘everywhere,’ – he is out in the open country but not in town. In fact,Mark’s traditions require that Jesus be placed in towns. Consequently, hebrings him quickly back to Capernaum for his basis in apparent fact andto give a sense of location to his elusive and marvelous Jesus.

IN HIS OWN VILLAGE (‘Own country’)Mark has made a double of his tale of the Capernaum synagogue

when Jesus visits his ‘own country’ to preach an astonishing sermonthere, but with another result. The doubling does not consist in thenumber two – there are three synagogue tales in this Gospel – but in abold reproduction of an earlier motif. Whether fashioned out of losttraditions, then, or invented by the Evangelist, these two tales comprise adouble conceived with a single thought in mind and belong together liketwo halves of a torn dollar bill.

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He came to his own country, and his disciples followed him. And on the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue; andmany who heard him were astonished, saying, ‘Where did thisman get all this? What is the wisdom given to him? Whatmighty works are wrought by his hands! Is not this thecarpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses andJudas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ And theytook offense at him. And Jesus said to them, ‘A prophet is notwithout honor, except in his own country, and among his ownkin, and in his own house.’ And he could do no mighty workthere, except that he laid his hands upon a few sick people andhealed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief. (Mark6.)

A famous event in this life, but see where the contrast lies to Capernaumwhere the demoniac has recognized ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ and knows himfor ‘the Holy One of God.’ It is a pattern reproduced in reverse when hisown townspeople, who know him in a familiar sense (we are presumedto be in Nazareth) yet fail to perceive ‘Who he is’ or ‘What he is’ becausethe demoniac knowledge is missing.

Given the brevity of the anecdote, the Evangelist has laid quitean emphasis on the villager’s ejaculations and yet, once more, not a wordof the sermon is quoted which had produced that astonishment. AtCapernaum this deficiency might have been excused as arising from theexcitements of the demoniac but it is reproduced here without excuse.

HUSBAND: ‘Jones gave an amazing talk at our Rotary luncheontoday. We were astonished by what he said and by his wisdom.’WIFE: ‘You wouldn’t think that of Jones! What did he say?’HUSBAND: ‘Oh, I can’t tell you what he said. But we sat therewith our mouths open!’

Mark doesn’t care what Jesus might have taught on such occasions (if wesuppose the occasions) else he must have given us a clue. Instead, hegives a random sort of gossip which is loaded with everything he wants tosay. The townspeople have attested Jesus’ very ordinary humanity (hissolid existence) in taking offense. They have given his mother a nameand named four brothers. Sisters are mentioned in passing – it is rathersweet, if all this were historical, to think of his sisters. Only the father isabsent from this list. Jesus is made to seem familiar on the mostcommonplace terms, especially when they deflate a prophet byremembering that he was once a carpenter.

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11. The Babylonian Talmud, Boston, 1918. Tract Succah, Ch. V. p. 82. Text reference aboveto Zechariah in our English Bible is chapter 1,20.

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Was Jesus a carpenter? Or was it rather the case that Mark sawthe value of making him something definite? Only this once in theGospels is he called a carpenter, being commonly addressed as Teacheror Rabbi, or described as a Kyrios. Our scribal Matthew, when absorbingthis earlier Gospel, calls him ‘the carpenter’s son,’ and Luke omits thedetail entirely. Now I have seen in the Babylonian Talmud a reference to‘carpenters’ in which two Messiahs, namely, bar David and bar Joseph, aredesignated ‘carpenters.’

‘It is written (in Zechariah): “And the Lord showed me fourcarpenters.” Who are the four carpenters? Said R. Hanah barBizna in the name of R. Simeon the Pious: Messiah b. David, andMessiah b. Joseph, Elijah, and Cohen Zedek.’11

What a piece of luck, to come across a passage like that! Beyondquestion, these names are one and all symbolic. We have in Elijah a so-called legendary figure who is identified with the Baptist in our Synoptics,while as for Cohen Zedek, these are words that every rabbi will instantlytranslate. They mean in Hebrew, righteous priest, and I would imaginethat the mythical Melchizedek would be a type of that. This Melchizedekis a fabulous figure as late as the Book of Hebrews but in Genesis 14,18 isthe mysterious priest who serves bread and wine to ‘Abram’ whenblessing him. His name means King of Righteousness (‘Zedek’ is‘righteousness’); he is called King of Salem and described as a ‘Priest ofthe Most High God.’ This singular ministration takes place, moreover,before God has established his covenant with ‘Abram,’ whose name isthen expanded and whose innumerable male descendants are requiredto be circumcised ‘on the eighth day’ (as Jesus was) in token of thatcovenant.

Now it is true that the cited text in Zechariah gives ‘smith’ or‘blacksmith’ instead of ‘carpenter’ in modern translations, but we find‘carpenter’ in the venerable King James, as also here in the BostonTalmud Society publication of 1918. It is no great matter. The citationshows matter independent of our Gospels and taken from the ParentReligion in which a ‘carpenter’ or ‘smith’ or some sort of artisan may bethought of as a symbolic designation for Messiah bar Joseph, as for theDavidic king yet to rule, or Elijah, who was clearly no ‘carpenter,’ orCohen Zedek, who has the distinction of being a ‘righteous priest.’

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Already we have seen how our Evangelist tells of Jesuspromising to make four fishermen into ‘fishers of men’ with a sort ofcountry humor, but in that very character, as fishers of men, theydisappear from the Gospel at once. We never see them becoming that,never read of them being trained in how to draw men like fishermenhauling in nets. Instead, like junior Baptists and sorcerer’s apprenticesthey go forth to preach repentance and warn men and heal them and‘cast out demons.’ It would be quite in keeping with the Markan ‘style’ tocall Jesus a carpenter in a double sense – naively, as by those foolishfellow citizens who thought, absurdly, that they knew this man as acarpenter, but symbolically for those who had an inkling of this other, thisrabbinic strand. (The Talmud having grown out of long-standing oraltraditions, it is of course the unwritten Talmud I allude to). These areknotty questions and technical points and I leave it to the scholars toanswer them for us without professing to know the fact. We quiteunderstand that nothing would have prevented Jesus, as a rabbi, fromhaving been trained in a carpenter’s trade. (One early Christian Fatherpretends to know of wooden plows that Jesus made that were still inexistence – for the tangible fact). My point is that the Markan referenceto ‘carpenter’ smacks of an idiosyncrasy in his style. For any historicaltruth we have the gossip of these misunderstanding and astonishedvillagers, which is reported in evidence some forty years later. Aproposthe historical question, Bultmann thinks the tale was invented from aproverb: A prophet is not without honor except in his own country.

We speak of this famous tale, then, as Jesus’ Rejection atNazareth, although ‘Nazareth’ has not been named here, Mark speakingonly of ‘his native place,’ ‘his own country.’ Nor in truth has Jesus beenrejected here where the people’s astonishment brings about the ‘action’of the proverb. An outright rejection at Nazareth occurs only in the ThirdGospel, Luke’s, where after making a favorable impression on thevillagers Jesus manages to enrage them. It is a very different story and,in fact, so very different that the immensely learned Edersheim insists ontwo such visits. He is reluctant to believe that Luke would change theMarkan tale quite so freely.

MYTHIC ASPECT OF ‘OWN COUNTRY’So Bultmann thinks the Nazareth tale was invented from the

proverb which Jesus recites in the synagogue. It is that same proverb

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from which Mark has taken his word patris when speaking of Jesus’ ‘owncountry’ instead of naming his village:

A prophet is not without honor except in his patris, and amonghis own kin, and in his own house.

Jesus has been performing wonders elsewhere at some indefinite place,we know not where, and Mark begins his tale by saying that he wentaway from ‘there’ and came ‘into his patris.’ Although the proverb willshortly echo this and make a verbal double of the word, it seems a littlestrained here. Jesus has lately crossed the lake from the Decapolis and isalready ‘home’ in Galilee (Mark 5,21) which it would be natural to callhis own country. Mark has no aversion to the name of Jesus’ village andhas told us earlier that Jesus ‘came from Nazareth’ to be baptized byJohn. Wouldn’t it have been more natural here to use the village nameagain? – but it’s Luke who names the village.

A word has been substituted for a name, or rather, for two namesbecause on closer view something else is missing from this tale besides‘Nazareth.’ We have no mention here of Jesus’ father beyond a dimreminder in this word. Patris is like the French patrie or GermanVaterland in its allusion to the father, which is in Greek as in Latin, pater. Is there no inkling of myth in this dim reference? Mark’s tale isrealistically told. He has made Jesus’ family credible enough in passingwhen the villagers give their names, all except for his sisters, who arementioned, and his unnamed father. It is the father’s absence fromJesus’ patris which leaves the myth intact inasmuch as he comes into theregion of the father, and so also, to make a metaphor of it, into thesphere of the father’s purpose. What happens in his patris foreshadowshis rejection at Jerusalem as an unrecognized Messiah.

One might fairly ask, however, if Jesus’ failure to performwonders at Nazareth is not also a token of this story’s authenticity? Bythis point in the Gospel, Jesus has ‘rebuked’ wind and waves when aboat is caught in a storm, and his disciples have marveled at the greatcalm which follows, yet here among the villagers who remember him, he‘could do no mighty work.’ He is suddenly not as miraculous as mererumor would make him out to be, but he is all the more credible for thatreason. Such is the logic of the case, and my point respecting Mark isthat he understands this. That kind of discernment and artistry is by nomeans beyond the shrewdness of our primitive author.

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So the shadow of myth falls on these tales of Jesus preaching inhis patris and earlier in the synagogue at Capernaum, which areapparently fictions. Such things may well have happened in his life andwe cannot deny it, but these tales are no report of those events. OurEvangelist has no knowledge of the scenes he describes and is working withtraditions. Being a born story-teller he recomposes them and bends themto his purpose. We grant that his artistry is naive, technically speaking,but he is much less naive than those for whom he writes, and his story takesthe form of myth because it is Gospel faith (or myth) which he has for hisresources. Notwithstanding a third and different synagogue tale placedwithin the narrative between these two, the tales are a deliberate double. Although separated by several other tales, they illustrate the Messianicsecret when taken together. Once again, a primitive artistry is at work. Mark knows what he intends and he is confident of his effect. As ever,then, his theme is that of the unrecognized Christ, or from the Negativestandpoint, of a hidden, unknown, unrecognized Jesus.

What have these tales in common? In each case Jesus preachesin a synagogue near where he is living, or has lived. Each time heastonishes people by a sermon of which, strictly speaking, we hear not aword. The astonishment is a stereotype. It is what the people say thatcounts for the story, although at Capernaum, the demoniac’s testimonymust be included in this, which brings us to the matter of shared contrasts. The demoniac at Capernaum in hailing ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ seems torecognize him as a man, but the demon within has known him from aworld of spirits and dreads him as ‘the Holy One of God.’ At Nazareththe people’s recognition is warped by an inexplicable obscurity. Jesusmarvels because of their ‘unbelief’ because they should have known himfor – for what, exactly? A prophet? Or the Son of God? Mark hides abold inconsistency behind his proverb because he has Gospel faith inmind as it was formulated later. This would have been unsuitable inJesus’ mouth when preaching in his ‘own country,’ although theEvangelist will dare to put this later faith in his mouth after Peter has hailedhim as the Christ. To this day the poor folk of Nazareth are pitied bypious pastors because they failed to see in Jesus what our believers see. Mark’s design has succeeded artistically in showing on the basis of thesetales that Jesus ‘lived,’ and that he belonged to a well-known villagefamily and was himself known to his neighbors as the carpenter.

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LATER VERSIONS OF THIS TALE

What then of Matthew and Luke, our other prime authoritieshere? We know that they depend heavily on Mark. How do they treatthese details of ‘carpenter’ and ‘patris’ which on my view are involved inmyth? For one thing, not passively, because in their handling of thematter, they are reworking his scheme. Luke recasts the story entirely,and his version is the more influential of these later accounts, whereasMatthew is a better transcriber. He is better, that is, in respect of anysupposed historical value in Mark’s account.

Matthew dislikes to call Jesus a carpenter, for instance, butwhether or not he is thinking of the Messianic ‘carpenters’ of rabbiniclore we cannot say. In any case he has the people call Jesus ‘thecarpenter’s son.’ It is seemingly a rather slight change but suddenly itmakes a big difference. If Mark had intended a shrewd reference to theMessianic ‘carpenter,’ Matthew has only brought to mind the carpenter’strade, which is displaced upon the father. So also with any mythical hintconveyed in the word patris. It is wiped away when Matthew ignoresthat earlier omission of a human father who now becomes an ordinaryvillager to be mentioned in connection with his family.

It is ironic, then, that Mark’s original account, which thatEvangelist has fashioned out of his own traditions, gains in historicalvalue by its absorption in Matthew, but obviously, the Negative argumentis not disconcerted by this. Nor is the matter settled by Luke’s account,either, because the Third Evangelist has gone beyond his source in Markto compose a different story.

Quite as cleanly as Matthew, he removes any trace of mythicalreference from Mark’s patris by naming Jesus’ father. Omitting Mary’sname and the four names of his brothers, he has the people ask, ‘Is notthis Joseph’s son?’ Nowhere does he say anything of a carpenter butNazareth is named at last. Nothing is left of the myth which is discerniblein the Markan tale.

It seems to me that Luke has invented his more developedversion of this tale, which overlaps the earlier, but others may supposethat he found it amid the traditions, and since in theory this is possible,why might the Lukan version not be closer to fact? Two objections maybe raised against this possibility. For one thing, Luke’s story favorsGentiles over Jews and, as is very well known, his is preeminently theGentile Gospel. This makes his rather elaborate version suspect. Besides

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that, unless we are charmed by his extra detail, the larger story is clumsilytold although it begins well; but have we never known a beautiful boy oftwelve, say, who is favored in every respect except one? Jacob, I mean,is taller than the average of his age and beautifully handsome, having apale complexion and dark curly hair and large, sensitive eyes: equally, hismind is quick and he is very perceiving. But ask him to throw a baseballand Jacob is clumsy; invite him to soccer and he stumbles. Luke is aJacob among the Evangelists. He does all things well until he tries tomake up his own story; then he is clumsy. At Nazareth, where in theMarkan tale Jesus is foredoomed to lack of recognition, lack of honor,but nothing really worse than that, things are made to take an ugly turnin Luke’s recasting. By the end of the sermon ‘all in the synagogue werefilled with wrath.’ Driving Jesus out of town, they try to hurl him‘headlong’ over a cliff. It is a complete loss of control by the story-tellerwhen things get so far out of hand, and yet his beginning here is actuallyrather beautiful and worth a closer look if we care to examine theworkings and variations in these legend-makers and Evangelists.

Jesus has stood up to read and is given the Isaiah scroll which heopens to the words:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.He has sent me to proclaim release to the captivesand recovering of sight to the blind,to set at liberty those who are oppressed,to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. (Luke 4,18 Is. 61,1.)

(Or: ‘the year of the Lord’s favor,’ as in Goodspeed and the NEB). Then,as if he were drawing on eyewitness reports, Luke continues: ‘And heclosed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; andthe eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to sayto them, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ That is amarvelous touch. ‘And all spoke well of him and wondered at thegracious words which proceeded out of his mouth.’ (Luke 4,20.)

Luke is making up for the lack of a sermon in Mark’s simple tale,which he sees as a defect. And so it is, strictly speaking, except that hedoesn’t perceive Mark’s purpose in having the people’s gossip carry hismeaning. Moreover, since he has no record of any such sermon, he hassomehow to give the impression of one, and he begins by falling back onthe Prophet Isaiah. Here the beauty lies, and then, very briefly, in thegraceful manner of Jesus’ sublime disclosure in saying, ‘Today this

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Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ This latter word is to becomprehended only in faith, and here Luke’s touch is sure. Audacity hascleansed Christ’s modesty of self-effacement because Luke’s is a Jesusvirgin-born, a Son of God who bested the Tempter in his three-foldtemptations. Our American way of reading everything for fact, fact, factrather misses this quality, but if we understand these words, we knowwhat it is about Jesus that Luke is intent on showing us, what it is that hewants us to believe about him as we read his Gospel.

In sum, then, Luke is an intelligent writer who has found a way ofgiving the missing sermon, which he perceives as a lack also in thesynagogue at Capernaum. Furthermore, he has perceived that thesetales belong together, and so he brings them together, side by side but ina reverse order. Instead of Jesus going first to Capernaum, he goes toNazareth first and Capernaum directly afterwards, and having solved the‘problem’ of the missing sermon by giving so full an impression of one,Luke is able to give the Capernaum tale as Mark has written it and withno sense of deficiency.

MATTHEW & THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

Now Matthew has ‘minded’ the lack of a sermon in Mark’spaired synagogue tales quite as much as Luke, and he has made acompensation for Mark’s deficiency which is different from Luke’s andrather more conscientious, although he drops away one of the tales. Thescene in the Capernaum synagogue he simply omits. Gone is thedemoniac along with his involuntary witness to the Holy One of God. Nofear: there will be plenty of demoniacs. And yet the omitted story has leftits trace in Matthew, as we shall see. In a complete turn-around from theMarkan fable he supplies the one thing, instead, which Mark had failed togive, namely, a sermon.

It was an interesting decision on the part of this Evangelist toignore the tale of the Capernaum synagogue because he has ‘used up’nearly everything else Mark contains. He is not opposed to Mark’s habitof ‘doubling’ things and will copy his two miraculous Feedings, one of5,000 men, another of 4,000. Elsewhere, he retains the involuntarytestimony of demoniacs; on one occasion he will double a demoniac. Itis simply a misplaced emphasis in Mark’s tale that annoys him, for whyshould that primitive Evangelist praise the Teachings of Jesus so highlywithout giving so much as a word of them? Yet a sentence out of that

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discarded story he will save for use:

And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds wereastonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who hadauthority, and not as their scribes. (Matthew 7,28 Mark 1,22.)

This is the conclusion of the Markan tale which Matthew now takes fromits original setting and appends to the Sermon on the Mount.

This first Evangelist is the scribe among the Four, a scholar whoconveys the Teachings of Jesus intelligently and beautifully whileadjusting them to circumstances unlike those in which the Master taught. He nowhere plays down the native Jewishness of Jesus or his ownexpress faith in Hebrew prophecy. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesusrequires of his disciples a continuing observance of the Law because thatis a part of the grand fulfillment:

For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass away, onejot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the Law, till allthings be accomplished. Whosoever therefore shall break one ofthese least commandments, and shall teach men so, shall becalled least in the Kingdom of Heaven. (Matthew 5,18. RV.)12

Jesus, or else the Matthean scribe, had in mind the written Hebrew withits yodhs and curlicues.

We could easily show the popularity of this Sermon among allsorts and types of minds, also in India. For many it seems to exist invirtual independence of the Gospel, like the trial of Socrates or the NobleEightfold Path, yet is found nowhere else except in this Gospel. AsMatthew reports the Teachings he so clearly loves and treasures, heoffers no orthodox theology. Everything is seen from within the religionof Jesus’ own people. There is no ‘theory’ here except a vision of faith. Instead of giving out a ‘doctrine’ of God, Jesus teaches men to pray:

Our Father, which art in Heaven,Hallowed be thy Name!

Thy Kingdom come!Thy Will be done on earth,

As it is in Heaven.Give us this day our daily bread,And forgive us our debts,

As we forgive our debtors.

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And lead us not into temptation,But deliver us from Evil.

So the Sermon on the Mount has an elevated religious quality, free ofdogma, hence the widespread preference for it over ‘doctrinal’ religion. It is a preference which has grown out of our Western reaction to thedissolution of dogma. Jefferson, Franklin, Voltaire, Lessing all prefer theTeachings of Jesus to the semi-philosophical doctrines of the church.Already, then, in Matthew’s setting Jesus’ fame has ‘spread throughoutall Syria’ and great crowds have followed him, bringing those who arevariously afflicted to be cured:

Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when hesat down his disciples came to him, and he opened his mouthand taught them, saying:Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom ofHeaven.Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons ofGod.

Here are some of the opening Beatitudes, of which Matthew gives nine,but we have throughout this Sermon (Matthew 5 to 7) many remarkablesayings which have left an echo in the mind:

salt of the earthlet your light so shinecity set on a hillturn the other cheeklove your enemiespearls before swine

We nearly all know vaguely of Jesus’ stern warnings against anger:

Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be indanger of the judgment and... whosoever shall say, Thou fool,shall be in danger of hell fire.

Equally stern is a warning against lust:

Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committedadultery with her already in his heart.

What a wonderful severity – beyond our own attainment of thisstandard. This is no droning moralism but an insight offered with implicitwarning. It is the inwardness of the religious spirit which Jesus requires

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of his disciples and in requiring it, he awakens our assent. Even oaths areprohibited, as Quakers and Tolstoyans have maintained:

Swear not at all; neither by Heaven, for it is God’s throne, nor bythe earth, for it is his footstool; neither by Jerusalem, for it is thecity of the great King. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head,because thou canst not make one hair white or black. But letyour communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever ismore than these cometh of evil.

Here also we find the germ of non-resistance in Jesus’ saying,‘Resist not evil,’ which set Tolstoy to marveling, and it is in this sermonthat Jesus observes how the sun is ‘made to rise’ on good and evil alikeand rain is ‘sent’ to the just and the unjust. Alms-giving is praised if wedon’t make too much of it ourselves, hence when ‘the left hand does notknow what the right hand is doing!’ And here fasting is taken for granted (as of old) but its mournful countenance is reproved for the same reasonthat prayers are better made in secret than by ‘hypocrites’ on astreetcorner ‘to be seen of men.’ Our commonest words for this qualityin Jesus’ Teaching are inwardness, spirit, and essence.

Emerson declares that ‘in our flowing affairs a decision must bemade. Any decision is better than none – but set out at once on one!’ So also Jesus, with a clang of antiquity:

Enter ye in at the strait gate, for wide is the gate and broad is theway that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go inthereat; because strait is the gate and narrow is the way whichleadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

This is the old Jewish doctrine of the Two Ways which recurs when hesays furthermore: ‘No man can serve two masters. Ye cannot serve Godand Mammon’ (and Mammon, here treated like a god in a deliberatemetaphor, means riches or money). Mindful of mortality, Jesus urges thelaying up of treasures in Heaven ‘where neither moth nor rust dothcorrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. For whereyour treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ Beyond an anxious carefor ‘what we shall eat and what we shall drink,’ he reminds us of the liliesof the field: ‘they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you,that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’ Weare to ‘seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness’ and take ‘nothought for the morrow.’

In this same chock-full Sermon we have his ‘Judge not, that ye

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be not judged;’ and Jesus asks:

Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, butconsiderest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

There is promise in this sermon and consolation:

Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, andit shall be opened unto you.

Only, do not sit at home on Sunday morning and knock on yourtelevision set, for we are warned against false prophets who come to usin ‘sheep’s clothing’ but inwardly are ‘ravening wolves.’ A simple test isgiven: ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’ We must have a care to oursouls and are by all means to avoid the contaminations of the world:

Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye yourpearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet andturn again and rend you.

It was this pictorial way of putting things that Whitehead had inmind when he said of Jesus that ‘he spoke in the lowest abstractions ofwhich language is capable.’ And yet – what are these Teachings? Whatis this brilliant array? Our best scholars have long ago determined thatthis famous Sermon is no ‘sermon’ at all but a choice selection of theTeachings arranged by the Evangelist’s skill and placed in the artificialsetting of a ‘sermon’ on a ‘mount.’ No question can be raised againsttheir genuineness, wherever they came from, but in its setting, theSermon on the Mount has no more claim upon historical fact than theabandoned scene in the Capernaum synagogue.

Alone out of all the miracles and wonders of the Gospels, theseTeachings bear witness to themselves and were in nowise concocted forthe purposes of serving a fiction, and this irrespective of how the‘argument’ might turn out in anybody’s mind. Here the foot is on a rockalthough such Teachings might be imitated – and have been (palely, forexample, by a modern Kahlil Gibran). Nor is the genuineness of theTeachings any proof of the ‘life’ of Jesus – except for the attribution of atradition found in the Synoptics. Luke has given them more at random ina similar form. So striking is the overall convergence of these Teachingsin two independent Gospels that scholars universally posit a commonsource in a written Teaching document (Q) composed before the writingof Mark but now otherwise lost. And more of that presently.

Matthew’s achievement is in the grand arrangement of theTeachings when one considers the piecemeal and miscellaneous quality

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of any tradition prior to its literary gathering. And it does appear that‘others’ besides Jesus have here and there amended or even added tothe Teaching tradition because the Sermon is unequal. Nor can we saynow just which are the words of Jesus and which not, except that insome few cases we can say with assurance: ‘These are not.’

Apart from ‘authenticity’ there is the question of truth. Thosecharming words about the lilies of the field cannot mean anything to thestreet children of Buenos Aires, the homeless of New York, or the flood-ravaged poor of Bangladesh – as we understand. The Book of Job goesfarther, and already in Isaiah we have read of the righteous person dyingyoung and the sinner living to a great age – and we may add, amidluxury and pleasures and ‘things’ often got by rapacity, deceit and crime. If we cannot ‘serve two Masters,’ yet the service of Mammon often payswell, and we fall back for consolation on Ruskin’s avowal – the avowal ofa man of moderate wealth who knew what money meant to him: ‘Thereis no wealth but life.’

THE SON OF MAN

Going back to Mark now because he is our primary source forthe story to be told, we may recall that he has brought us back toCapernaum after a wandering in Galilee when Jesus was so besieged bycrowds that he could no longer openly enter a city. We remember, too,that nothing in particular has been told us of those wanderings exceptthat he once cured a leper by a touch in which we saw a somewhatdisconcerting proof of Jesus’ bodily reality.

Back in Capernaum we are told that Jesus is at home althoughquite what this means is otherwise obscure. Mark knows nothing about itbeyond the mere tradition that Jesus dwelt there. Compare to this afamous logion given in Matthew and Luke when a man, or a scribe, tellsJesus that he will follow him wherever he goes and Jesus replies:

Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son ofMan hath not where to lay his head. (Luke 9,58.)

Apart from its tenderness – for this is a little poem – these words belongto the Idea of Christ in the Gospels in showing us how Jesus and anywould-be disciples must venture beyond the security of family and home. We are, of course, not resolving discrepancies here or pronouncing onmatters of fact.

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A paralytic has been carried to Jesus’ home where a crowd hasjammed the doorway, making it impossible to get through. So the cot-bearers break through the roof and lower the pallet to Jesus. It is apreposterous touch, but one can imagine that sort of thing happening ina town of flat roofs. Besides, it is the very boldness of the story-tellingwhich is pleasing. We know beforehand that Jesus will cure the paralyticbecause that is a given, yet the Evangelist is shrewd enough to temper hismiracle by its setting, and some of our latent incredulity is diverted to thisdetail.

Jesus is not surprised by any of this although his roof has beenbroken through. Fancy a calm like that with your Indian guru on hispillow! Or think of a Chinese Zen master who would have driven thesefools away with a stave. But Mark has told his fable very quickly, neverhesitating, and if these improbabilities were removed, there might benothing especially worth telling. (Matthew has removed them and hisstory is flat). So Jesus will see in the importunity of these fellows anexpression of ‘their faith,’ and he says to the paralytic, ‘My son, your sinsare forgiven.’ Scribes are present on this occasion who are offended bythese words and they say to themselves, ‘It is blasphemy! Who canforgive sins but God alone?’

Now in the setting of the Gospel the forgiveness of Jesus issomething far more than a harmless encouragement, but the response ofthe scribes is perfunctory because they speak to Mark’s purpose. Foreven given an occasion like this and scribes present then, it was not ablasphemy for him to say: ‘My son, your sins are forgiven.’ At most itmight have seemed a sort of usurpation of a priestly role or an evasion ofthe Temple cult and its traditions, but scribes like these, and lawyers,Pharisees and Sadducees with few exceptions are stock enemies of Jesusin the Gospels. Offended because that is their role in the story, they vexthe discerning heart of Jesus who ‘perceives in his spirit’ that theyquestion him. Quite as if he hadn’t thought of it before, or as if the logicof the tale did not require it, he challenges these murmurers by asking,‘Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, Your sins are forgiven, or to say,Rise, take up your pallet and walk?’ The question is too rudimentary ashe cries out impatiently, ‘But that you may know that the Son of Man hasauthority on earth to forgive sins –’ The sentence breaks off; it is nevercompleted. It was almost a slip of the tongue. Jesus turns directly to theparalytic: ‘I say to you, rise, take up your pallet and go home.’ And thishappens. Taking up his cot the paralytic passes through the crowd.

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Jesus had almost given his secret away at that high momentbecause a shrouded revelation is conveyed in this term, Son of Man. Ithas a special meaning in his mouth, especially in Mark, but there isnonetheless a common side to it, a sort of dictionary meaning whichkeeps the mystery under wraps because as an idiom in the Aramaiclanguage, ‘son of man’ or bar Enosh means simply man or ‘generic man,’as one might say.

What shall we say of a story like this which remains unforgettablejust because the paralytic was let down to Jesus through the roof? I likewhat my old Britannica says of Robert Henryson’s most famous work, theMorall Fabillis of Esope, comprising 13 fables retold:

The outstanding merit of the work is its freshness of treatment. The old themes are retold with such vivacity, such fresh lights onhuman character, and with so much local ‘atmosphere,’ thatthey deserve the credit of original productions.

Those words might fairly be applied to the Gospel of Mark. Here, too, wediscover a freshness and vivacity imparted to traditions. Althoughlacking in polish, Mark has survived to us almost wholly intact, unlike thedocument of Jesus’ Teachings. Its own merit has saved this earliest,crudest and yet most vital of the Gospels notwithstanding that Matthewand Luke, and later John, were written in hopes of displacing it!

LORD OF THE SABBATH

Mark’s quirky habit of doubling things, whatever else it means, isa way of giving emphasis. It is a peculiarity of Jesus in the Gospels thathe refers to himself in this strangely impersonal way as the Son of Man. Why does he? Even the scholars are puzzled by this because they mostlyinsist on taking his Gospel for history at all costs. Some of them, believingthat he used this term and falling back on the lexicon, will treat it as anAramaic idiom for ‘man’. Others, with a vivid sense of the mystery of apre-Christian Son of Man myth foreshadowed in the Book of Daniel, maydoubt that he used this term at all.

Why not take Mark at face value? For whether or not this is‘history’ is a question that may fairly be postponed, and if we read thisEvangelist observingly, and read him on the whole, he will show us by hishandling of the term that a myth of the Son of Man belongs to his scheme.

Shortly afterward, then, we are told of a second occasion when

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Jesus refers to himself in this strange manner, and we have here a typicalMarkan stress and a true double because in these early intimations of theSon of Man his high importance is conveyed under a veil. This other taleis very slight. Jesus is passing through grainfields where his disciplespluck and eat the ripened ears. It is the Sabbath day, and Pharisees arepresent who complain that they ‘are doing what is not lawful on theSabbath.’ It is not a question of theft here because the laws ofDeuteronomy allow this sort of munching:

When you go into your neighbor’s standing grain, you may pluckthe ears with your hand, but you shall not put a sickle to yourneighbor’s standing grain. (Deuteronomy 23,25.)

Rub and eat but do not otherwise gather. Or rather, rub and chew. Myfather, whose boyhood was spent in Russia, once told me how folk therewould rub away the chaff and chew ripe wheat like chewing gum, and Ihave done that. Wheat has a high gluten content and makes a rubberymorsel to chew on. What the Pharisees object to is work on the Sabbath,the innocent stripping of wheat or barley being deemed a form of work. Jesus replies to them as follows:

Have you never read what David did, when he was in need andwas hungry, he and those who were with him: how he enteredthe house of God when Abiathar was High Priest and ate thebread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but thepriests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him? Andhe said to them: The Sabbath was made for man, not man forthe Sabbath; so the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath. (Mark 2,23.)

The little tale is artificial. Scholars note that ‘Abiathar’ is a slip for‘Ahimelech’ but more to the point here is the absence of Jesus’ name sothat David’s name can be off-set by the Son of Man to make a Messianiccomparison, and yet the grandeur of the Lordship claim is veiledbeforehand when Jesus says, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not manfor the Sabbath.’ This is a sound rabbinical dictum that brings the matterdown to earth and appeals to our common sense, which makes the talerealistic. CC Torrey, late of Yale, took this latter saying for an authenticword of Jesus and treated the Son of Man, or bar Enosh, as an idiom:

The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath;therefore man is master even of the Sabbath.

– Where the Son of Man has disappeared in this very smooth English,

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and Jesus is clearly not referring to himself. Strictly speaking, we haveexchanged the text here for a conception of what the historical Jesus‘must have said.’

Professor Torrey held that our (Greek) Gospels are imperfecttranslations of lost and elegant originals written in the Aramaic of Jesus. Far from being late, they were close to eye-witness accounts, and hislucid translation of the Gospels was a rendering in English of his ownpainstakingly reconstructed Aramaic ‘originals.’ First he invented ahypothesis concerning the lost text; then he invented the text andtranslated that. In the sentence quoted above, the mystery of the Son ofMan has been replaced by good common sense.

Others also, besides Torrey, believe that ‘Son of Man’ in theGospels has really an idiomatic rather than a technical meaning. DidJesus only mean to say, therefore: ‘I, a son of man like all the sons ofmen...’ whenever he used this term?

Beyond question, the Gospel of Mark (in 14,62) refers the Son ofMan to an old prophecy in Daniel 7,13:

I saw in the night visions,and behold, with the clouds of heaventhere came one like a Son of Manand he came to the Ancient of Daysand was presented before him…

The Son of Man in this vision is a Heavenly Man, and in the NewJerusalem Bible we find a note on Daniel’s vision: ‘This human figurerepresents the people of God, but may well bear an individual sense too,as their leader and representative.’ Scholars are thus generally agreedthat the Son of Man in Daniel is a symbolic figure. He is a Heavenly Beingbelonging to a future as yet unrealized rather than a definite personalitylike Jesus.

A myth develops from this strange seed into the tale of a lowlySon of Man who cannot forget his Heavenly origin or evade a divine dutywhich he came into this world to accomplish. It is a myth which hasserved the lowliness of Christ as a human being subject to conditions. There is always a remembered glory in the sorrowful office of a Son ofMan who has ‘come’ to visit among the lowly and encourage them, andforgive them, and heal them; and beyond the lowliness motif and deeperis the act of God which is set against the powers of the world and theinstitutions of religion. No matter how sorrowful is the destiny of Jesus in

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these Gospels, Mark’s own underlying motif is that of a redemptivesacrifice and Resurrection.

DUBIOUS ASSOCIATIONS & LOWLY COMPANIONS

After curing the paralytic, Jesus had passed by one ‘Levi the sonof Alphaeus’ at a tax office and said, Follow me. ‘And he rose andfollowed him,’ just as Simon and Andrew did when they left off castingtheir nets or the sons of Zebedee when they forsook their father tobecome ‘fishers of men.’ Is Levi now a disciple?

‘Levi the son of Alphaeus’ is only a name. Having risen to followJesus, he has nothing else to do and is never mentioned again, butafterwards we find Jesus ‘at table’ with a number of publicans or otherdisreputable people, and in that scene we have ‘scribes of the Pharisees’complaining of these lowly associations: ‘Why does he eat with taxcollectors and sinners?’ Jesus thereupon replies:

Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those whoare sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners. (Mark2,17.)

This has the look of later myth rather than anything Jesus might havesaid because here the Son of Man has ‘come’ to visit among the lowly ofthe world and summon them by encouragements and forgiveness. Matthew is not altogether satisfied by this statement and being sensitiveto the Teachings of Jesus, he sticks in a supplement: ‘Go and learn whatthis means, I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ And Luke improves onMark from a liturgical perspective, as it were, by having Jesus say:

I am not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. (Luke 5,32. RV.)

Where the Revised Version (of 1881) brings out the sense of it betterthan other translations do by giving just that sense of Presence which thestory is designed for.

Matthew, in a further step, also drops away the name of ‘Levi theson of Alphaeus’ to call this publican Matthew instead, a name which isfound in the Markan list of Twelve, but is it the Evangelist’s own name,therefore? Is it a kind of signature? Although that’s sometimes claimedhere, it is most unlikely.

A probing Gospel scholarship has shown that Matthew and Lukehave each incorporated a distinct body of Teachings (Q) in what is

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essentially Mark’s basic Gospel. There is a deep scribal intelligencedisplayed in Matthew’s Gospel, and one doesn’t look for a scribe amongthe publicans. To my mind the Teachings of Jesus are presented morebeautifully in this Gospel than in Luke’s – whatever the reason for thatmay be. Matthew’s are the Beatitudes we cherish, and his the version ofthe Lord’s Prayer in common use, and it is this first Evangelist who hasgathered these miscellaneous Teachings into five or six discourses, theSermon on the Mount being only the first (and also best) of thosebunchings. Luke gives these same Teachings also, as I say, but in hisGospel they tend to be strewn.

As for the Evangelist’s real name, then, it is unknown. We don’tknow who any of these Evangelists are because the earliest of our Gospelmanuscripts are anonymous. These were not ‘books’ written by knownauthors but clusters of traditions gathered for use in the earlycongregations and then reworked (as by Mark) into coherent larger tales. Presumably these traditions arose among Jesus’ earliest followers beforebeing put to use in the cult. One of the old traditions holds that adisciple, Matthew, gathered the Lord’s teachings in the original tongue,and it is thus conceivable that the first Gospel came later to be given theheading, ‘According to Matthew’ or, in Greek, Kata Matthaion, for thisvery reason. If only we knew! The bare title requires to besupplemented as ‘The Gospel According to Matthew,’ but that title is alater tradition.

We use the familiar names of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John forconvenience and out of habit, and because after all we have no quarrelwith an acknowledged tradition. Nevertheless, it is a point of real interestthat the primitive documents of the life and Teachings of Jesus were writtenby unknown men at dates unspecified and in places unknown.

JESUS AS BRIDEGROOM

Although the veil is not yet lifted in this first half of Mark’s Gospel,Jesus will also speak of himself as a bridegroom, but how is he abridegroom? Robert Graves pretends that he was a bridegroom, or atleast that he was a king who once married a queen in a secret coronationrite. (It was to remain an unconsummated marriage). This fantasyGraves concocted out of African coronation ceremonies and two simpleremarks in the Gospels, plus a devastating revision: the secret coronationof the ‘King’ is borrowed from the mocking Roman soldiers who crown

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Jesus with a crown of thorns. Earlier than John Allegro had RobertGraves thus penetrated the disguise of the Gospels, but as we see in theresult: different disguises, different finds.

Only once has the Synoptic Jesus called himself a bridegroom. He was speaking in a figure and the reference is oblique. John’s disciplesand the Pharisees were fasting but his own disciples did not, and whenpeople came to ask him why, he said:

Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? (Mark 2,19.)

This is even better in the virile idiom of the Revised Version which retainsthe King James and translates the Greek:

Can the sons of the bride-chamber fast while the bridegroom iswith them?

It is an inspired reply – superb. And yet we may doubt that he said this. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus takes fasting for granted, whereashere he excuses his disciples’ slackness about fasting. How does thecomparison work? Are we to take seriously his role as a bridegroom – seriously but not literally? Or should we treat his words like any mereimagination and make of them a colorless abstraction, as if he only meantto say: ‘How can you make these fellows fast when they’re with me?’ Stripped of its imagery, this is what his answer boils down to, but that isabsurd. Jesus’ reply is a parable in the form of a question and to stripaway the image destroys it.

The Fourth Gospel also compares him to a bridegroom byhaving John the Baptist say it, but the treatment lacks Mark’s realism. The Baptist’s disciples have come to tell him how everyone is flocking toJesus suddenly, and he declaims rather grandly:

He who has the bride is the bridegroom; the friend of thebridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at thebridegroom’s voice. Therefore, this joy of mine is now full. Hemust increase, but I must decrease. (John 3,29.)

This is highly artificial, and our modern scholars do not believe that Johnever said anything of the kind. It belongs to the myth of the Gospel thatthe Baptist can be made to bear witness to the Christ in this soundingmanner, but why does he compare him to a bridegroom? And where isthe bride? The reason for it must be sought in a myth and not somehowin a secret marriage.

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BRIDEGROOM AS MYTH

There are in the Old Testament certain few symbols ofbridegrooms associated with myth. One of these is a solar image. InPsalm 19, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God,’ we read of theheavens:

In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as abridegroom coming out of his chamber.

For the people of antiquity, the sun is no mere ‘burning stone.’ We readin Malachi (4,2) of the ‘Sun of righteousness’ which ‘arises with healing inhis wings,’ and he surely had not seen this image in some Egyptian tomb. The very radiance of the sun is sought in the countenance of God: ‘Lord,lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us.’ (Psalm 4,6.) And thislight is conferred on a people redeemed from darkness who are upliftedlike the sun:

The Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightnessof thy rising.’ (Isaiah 60,3.)

This in turn becomes a prophecy of Jesus’ birth, which is set about withsolar myth: ‘the Dayspring from on high hath visited us,’ says the priestZechariah in Luke, and I have mentioned earlier how Matthew’s nativitytale may be taken as a solar myth in which the divine Child (=new Sun)is threatened by the devouring dragon of darkness (King Herod and theFlight to Egypt). It is a commonplace that the Christmas festivalgravitated to the winter solstice, or to the time of year when the sun isrenewed. By contrast, an omen occurs during the crucifixion when thesun is unnaturally darkened for a space of three hours. (Mark 15,33.)

Now consider this in the light of our theme. It is the way of theNegative critics to compare myth with myth, and if we begin with ahypothesis of solar myth, such comparisons may be drawn and suchparallels considered. In this case, as it happens, none of it is relevant toJesus’ enigmatic status as a bridegroom, and I must ask the Reader’spatience for having introduced these seeming irrelevancies. A modernscholar can find no use for a merely verbal coincidence like this, and Iam not aware that Psalm 19 was ever taken as a prophecy of theMessiah, like the ‘Star out of Jacob’ bespoken by Balaam. (Numbers24,17.) Certainly, Jesus is not thinking of the 19th Psalm when aftermaking his wedding comparison, he goes on without a break toanticipate a coming doom:

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As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. But a time will come when the bridegroom will be taken fromthem, and when that day comes, they will fast. (Mark 2,19.Goodspeed.)

It is a strange sort of bridegroom who knows beforehand that he is to betaken away, but here the story itself is speaking. Jesus is torn from hisfriends, and in his absence the disciples revert to the fasting from whichhis mere presence had excused them.

SOURCE & TRANSFORMATION OF THE JESUS-BRIDEGROOM

Never mind that Jesus’ comparison of himself to a bridegroom isfleeting and oblique. He means it for an answer: it is to carry that weight. His disciples do not fast because as ‘sons of the bride-chamber’ they arein his presence. Surely, a bride must be thought of, however remotely! And for the indicated wedding, conceived as myth, we find a prototypein the marriage of Jahweh and his people:

You shall be called ‘My delight is in her,’(‘Hephzibah’)

and your land ‘Married,’(‘Beulah’)

For the Lord delights in you,and your land shall be married.

As a young man marries a maiden,so shall your Builder marry you;

And as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride,so shall your God rejoice over you.

(Alex. R. Gordon translating Isaiah 62,4.)13

We must not seize on this too hastily, however. A caesura has occurredbecause the sacred marriage has undergone a change. Above all, itwould be false to think that Jesus will call himself, even implicitly, ‘God,’and most especially not in these Synoptic Gospels. The divine weddingconceived by the Hebrew poet cannot be imagined as an event. We aregiven comparisons, and from the promising names of Hephzibah andBeulah, we pass to imaginations of delight and prosperity.

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Quite different is the wedding in which Jesus figures as thebridegroom because we have him before us in the event of his life. Themyth is transformed because the Messiah has come, and this is his warrantfor excusing the ‘sons of the bride-chamber’ from a fasting which belongsto the Old Time before the New Creation, which the bridegroommetaphor anticipates. Covertly, it is a Messianic claim but this is betweenus and Mark, who shares the knowledge with his reader. What elseexcept the presence of the Christ can suspend the ordinary duties andobservances of religion? Christ is the miracle of the world’s renewal, andlater on his very birth is remembered in a season of joy. Only, was itreally so for the disciples, who are not shown in these tales as rejoicing?

It belongs to Mark’s handling of the Messianic secret to keep thisaspect of the dignity of Christ under wraps except for a reminder of theglory. Viewed simply as doctrine, since he writes for believers, thewedding obliquely referred to is essentially the same as the ‘marriage ofthe Lamb,’ which we find in the Book of Revelation (19,7). And if thelanguage of the Seer of Patmos goes beyond the deliberate realism ofMark, it represents his belief nevertheless. We see just how much he haskept under wraps from the Seer’s ultimate vision:

I saw a new Heaven and a new Earth... and I, John, saw the holycity, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of Heaven,prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. (Revelation 21.)

Here the vision of Isaiah blossoms anew and is transformed. I cannotregard this poetry as other than beautiful, and it belongs to the glory ofHandel that he could rouse us to the potency of this strange book in hisimmortal Messiah. Certainly, the poetry is visionary, fantastic, and evenweird. A Heavenly Jerusalem descending as a bride – to marry a Lamb?

Mark is deliberately realistic and our comparison to Revelationmay seem remote, but it is Mark’s contribution to be realistic, far more sothan Matthew and Luke, and despite an array of miracles. Only whenJohn comes along, the unknown author of the Fourth Gospel, is Mark’srealistic story-telling overshadowed by the verisimilitude of which thisunknown man of genius, John, was capable. It is a verisimilitude whichdoes not offset a certain deliberate artificiality in the style of this author’spresentation, which strikes me as Oriental.

Finally, then, did Jesus ever say that about the sons of the bride-chamber in the presence of the bridegroom? Certainly, assuming that helived, it is possible, but if these words are really his own, then, ironically,

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the ‘historical Jesus’ has been misconceived by those who see him as aneschatological prophet. For here the speaker knows himself to be theChrist and does not care to conceal it from the discerning few.

DEMONS

Wherever Jesus goes, in these early portions of the Markan tale,he casts out demons. There seem to be a great many of them. Alreadythe words of the Capernaum demoniac had suggested a plurality:

What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have youcome to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God. (Mark 1,24.)

The demoniac’s outcry speaks for the whole realm of demons which hasbeen disturbed by the appearance of the ‘Holy One of God,’ but thegathered worshipers also attest a plurality of spirits in their admiringwords: ‘With authority he commands even the unclean spirits and theyobey him.’

An early impression given by Mark’s Gospel, then, is that Jesuscasts out demons in great numbers. They are veritably a pest in the land;there is a ‘manyness’ to the demonic fact from the outset. On his firstevening at Simon’s house as soon as the Sabbath was past ‘they broughtto him all who were possessed.’ Were there so many demoniacs inCapernaum, then? For they seem to be everywhere. During his first tourof Galilee with a few disciples, he went ‘preaching in their synagoguesand casting out demons.’ They are a lurid mirror of Christ’s presence, anunclean horde of spirits who know him at sight or sense his whereaboutsfrom a distance, but they are fastened on their victims with a kind ofthirst; so they resist or plead and bargain with him, unwilling to forsaketheir prey. It is a noteworthy fact that these demons do not prompt theirvictims to evil-doing. A demoniac is not Satanic: it is the evil done to thevictim that Jesus cures. And he always prevails. The spirits depart with ashriek or in silence, sometimes leaving their victim in a swoon. Characteristically, they have cried out in recognition of Jesus at once, butit is not so much that they know his name as that they betray his identity,for what they attest is a sort of inferior revelation which only the readerunderstands, never the disciples, never the auditors.

What do these stories mean? Are they reflections of an activityon the part of an obscure Galilean Christ-figure? We are in no position todeny that such things happened, and if not exactly these events, then

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others like them which, if lost as eye-witness descriptions and reports,have been retained in fable. This would be an aspect of the thrift oflegend. The very legends might be accurate, for instance, with respect tothe demoniac responses that Jesus’ awesome presence provoked. Morethan once the Christ of the Fourth Gospel is thought to be possessed: ‘Hehas a demon, and he is mad; why listen to him?’ (John 10,20.) So hemight be thought to have been, as we say, daemonic, although this isalmost certainly not the case.

On rational grounds, then, Mark’s Gospel tells of myth because itdescribes a strife with demons, but generally speaking the legends mayrest on events in a ‘life.’ And as ever: a very obscure life because thesedemoniac tales are no mere exaggerations of transparent fact, as they aresometimes taken. There is no transparent fact here in any of this, and weshall see why that is so, but the bare possibility that a ‘Jesus of Nazareth’coped marvelously with deranged minds and (human) spirits obsessed ordivided we may never deny. Possibility, only, is in question here.

But if we treat these tales as ‘cases’ of psychopathology, we pay aprice for that. A plausible approach to the demoniac tales neutralizes theEvangelist, and our meager result is that disturbed minds tended toexhibit their disorders in the presence of Jesus. This ‘saves’ three of thefour tales in Mark and puts a welcome end to the supernatural, which themodernist avoids in his embarrassment over the fact of myth in thisGospel. And we get an impressive Jesus out of it, an ‘impressivepersonality.’ On the testimony of CG Jung the asylums were full ofapparent ‘demoniacs’ who exhibited symptoms of possession and split-mindedness. So the case for a reasonably conceived historical Jesusappears to be a strong one on these psychological grounds. We note, ofcourse, that he must calm the very minds which he has first disturbed,but his effect (if this is that) must be impressive.

What happens to the meaning of it all? The awkward presenceof a demon in an otherwise acceptable tale we may ascribe to a processof legend-making before dismissing it. ‘People thought that way then. We understand things differently now.’ In either case, Mark’s version orour conjectured revision, we suppose that a thing which ‘happened’once is being accounted for, although it seems rather odd to depend ona rejected legend for a supposed matter of fact. But ‘wide is the gate andbroad is the way’ that leads to plausibility because at bottom it is guess-work. Used here, it is a costly way of dismissing Mark’s realm of demonswhile retaining a ‘historical Jesus’ who copes with disturbed individuals.

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And the cost is this, that we lose the myth which we have been so eagerto get rid of but which expresses, as myth, exactly what it is that Markcares to convey. Even more than that: we lose the thing which the mythcontains, for as I propose to show by incremental steps and stages (itcannot be done all at once) the life of Jesus will be found, if anywhere, inthe myth which conveys him and by no means in substitutes orconjecture. Having myself gone through the modernist experience, I wellunderstand the allure of an interpretation which makes ‘good sense’ outof a described miracle and a myth of demons. But how if it disfigures thestory under consideration in vain endeavor to ‘find’ a fact at the heart ofit? How if ironically we collaborate with the myth-maker in makingthings seem ‘real’ while rejecting the myth he has made? The Markanstory is of Christ’s acknowledgement by demons. Reinforced by Matthewand Luke, we shall find no honest way around that.

DEMONS AS OLD BELIEF

No question, then, that Mark uses demons to write his tale of theChrist because of what they signify. Above all, they give us a Jesus whohas not otherwise been recognized as Christ, so that Mark’s demoniacshave a role for the reader in letting us in on the secret. Like Hamlet’sfather’s ghost, they have a function in the tale, and as soon as this functionhas been carried out, they disappear; but the fact is a trifle suspicious. How so, that demoniacs appear in such rumored numbers only in the firsthalf of this Gospel, after which they are forgotten? Can demons havebeen prevalent in Palestine only at first? – and then Jesus swept thecountry clean? The answer is easily given although the matter has beenhugely overlooked: Mark’s demoniacs attest the secret of Jesus anddescribe him as ‘the Son of God’ until they are no longer needed. Andtheir peculiar testimony is no longer needed after the Christ has beenrecognized by the first human being, namely, Peter ‘on the way to thevillages of Caesarea Philippi.’

In view of Mark’s purposeful handling of demoniacs, it is fair toask whether he believes in demons, really? Or are they simply a part ofhis tale? The demoniac who lived among the tombs, breaking his chains,bruising himself with stones, on seeing Jesus ‘from afar’ runs to pay himhomage, crying:

What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.’ (Mark 5,7.)

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With his disciples, Jesus has just crossed the Lake of Galilee to a countrycalled Gadarenes (or Gerasenes) and once more the demoniac knowshim at sight, but in a further step he knows him ‘from afar.’ No longer isJesus in Galilee but in pagan territory, and for once he doesn’t silencethe testimony. Otherwise, this demoniac functions like the one in thesynagogue and all the many demoniacs who are mentioned but notshown. Despite his fantastic trappings, which give the story itsdistinctiveness, he can only bear witness to the Christ and give himopportunity to cure:

For Jesus had said to him, ‘Come out of the man, you uncleanspirit!’ And went on to ask him, ‘What is your name?’ Hereplied, ‘My name is Legion, for we are many.’ (5,8.)

It is a tremendous word in its setting, Legion, a Latin word which impliesa host of demons who beg Jesus ‘not to send them out of the country.’ Aherd of swine ‘numbering about two thousand’ are feeding on the hillsideand the demons say, ‘Send us to the swine, let us enter them.’ He givesthem leave and all the swine rush down a slope and drown. When thetownspeople learn of this, they are terrified and beg Jesus to depart.

The story is fantastic entirely but it makes a good fable, althoughthese same imaginations take up a whole page in a Gospel of only fortypages. Rather shrewdly, Mark has used this tale to remind his readersalso that Jesus’ presence may terrify – it is a consolation for his absenceand bears on our theme. In vain do we look behind such a legend todiscover a convulsion in a graveyard that once frightened away twentypigs. The detail which makes our story pleasing on its own terms is thenput down to exaggeration, and the myth is destroyed for the sake of aflimsy assurance.

What does smack of history is a tradition of demoniacs reflectingan old belief. Demons of which the Evangelist had no experience areassigned to Jesus’ world, which is already remote. And in representingthe Christ as one who speaks to demons and commands them, he placeshim in illo tempore, that yonder time which is the sphere of myth. IfMark, for instance, had come on an epileptic boy convulsing, he musthave recognized the ‘falling sickness’ for what it was, and when he writesof such a boy as one possessed of an ‘unclean spirit,’ he describes theepilepsy well enough so that Matthew in taking over the tale can give it aname. Surely, this ‘old’ belief in demons reflects an Aramaic traditionwhich originated in the Holy Land, but what vital meaning has this oldbelief for Mark, who lived, we think, in Rome? I say that he manipulates

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his demoniacs, but there are scholars who get around that by reading theSymbol: they say that for Mark this purge of demons represents the routof pagan gods before the advance of the Gospel.

So what am I calling an old belief? Geza Roheim collected morethan a hundred folk-tales from the Australian aborigines to find that ‘theyare variations of one constant theme; the struggle of human beingsagainst demons.’ That is an old belief because for the aborigines whoinvented these tales demons were malignant spirits active now in fears ordreams or deaths or distress in the bowels. I notice, too, that LudwigFeuerbach has quoted Count Volney (our Enlightenment critic) on evilspirits among the North American Indians:

‘The fear of evil spirits is one of their dominant and mosttormenting notions; their most fearless warriors are like womenand children in this respect; they are terrified by a dream, anocturnal apparition in the woods, a harsh cry.’14

A belief in demons was prevalent throughout the Asian world asmany a grotesque temple sculpture testifies, but these grotesques areonly memorials of a primitive belief which had once upon a time beenverified by the frightful experience of savage minds. Such a belief willsurvive long afterwards as an ‘old’ belief which has lost its ancient hold. Mankind are not then coping with demons directly any longer, just asMark’s readers were not, but like ourselves, they are coping with fears. Those Asian temple grotesques are devoted to the idea of protectionagainst demons, but the people of India or China who erected thesetemples would hardly fear the approach of demons as they were strollingin the precincts or believe that these frigid grotesques could repel them ifthey came. That would be the chronic nightmare of primitive savageryand age-old ignorance, such as Geza Roheim and Count Volney weredescribing. It is the idea which is effective and not a grotesque stonestatue which expresses that idea. So also in Mark, it is the meaning of hisdemons which is uppermost. An invisible warfare is represented, and theassociated fear is expressed and resolved.

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JESUS NO EXORCIST

We have in Jesus

(a) a figure associated with myth(b) given in traditions(c) written down as legends(d) by men who did not know him(e) and written for use in the cult.

A falsely natural Jesus has become popular, in part because of the veryendeavor to find the historical Jesus. Even ministers seem to assume thatwe can turn to the Gospels and discover the natural man after makingallowance for the expected exaggerations and correcting a few things, orignoring them. The whole endeavor to uncover the underlying historyhas shown us that such a relatively easy discovery of the man isimpossible, yet the illusion is widespread. It seems especially popularamong the liberal types – it almost distinguishes the type – to supposethat we can ‘know’ Jesus as a natural man.

And it is this very assumption, this complacent positing of thefigure, which accounts for the learned error of describing him as anexorcist. Jesus is not an exorcist, but he emerges as an exorcist for thehistorian because the tales as a group, if we ignore the particulars, seemto imply that activity on the part of the imagined figure. Understand,please: this learned error is not the result of careful study or attention tothe text. It arises as a general impression after the text has beendismissed. On no one given story does our historian rest his case whendescribing Jesus as an exorcist, but on the collective impression only thatsome such activity must have been carried on to account for these demoniaclegends. Of course, it is a worthy enough hypothesis from the historian’sviewpoint, but this same easy hypothesis rests for all its ground on certainlegends and sayings and traditions which are stubbornly particular and‘difficult.’

Jesus is nowhere presented as an exorcist, nor is it fitting to callhim that on the evidence at hand. Exorcism is a technique, and basically itis magic. Whether a home-made technique or a prescribed ritual makesno difference: there will be various ‘doings.’ Your exorcist will have hisprocedures and incantations and what-not all. I have read (probably inthe National Geographic) of a living African exorcist who used to splashhis ‘victims’ with water until he possessed himself of a piece of modernequipment: a rubber hose, after which his ‘victims’ were accustomed to

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being squirted. Jesus has neither ritual nor technique. No prayers aresaid. There is no laying on of hands or even a touch. We do find a fewstrange healing procedures for diseases, and very inconsistentlydescribed, but we never see Jesus applying a method supposed to beeffective when driving out demons, nor does he call upon the name ofGod to cast them out, so that the marks and trappings of exorcism aremissing. His authority over the demons is lordly and immediate. Whenhe encounters demoniacs in going among the people, he addresses thedemons directly, commands them to depart, and they go, although notbefore they have betrayed his identity. This is the Markan stereotype:

Whenever the unclean spirits beheld him, they fell down beforehim and cried out, ‘You are the Son of God.’ And he strictlyordered them not to make him known. (3,11.)

Far from being an exorcist who ‘must have had’ a technique or aprocedure when he applied himself to the expulsion of demons, as if forhim it were a kind of task, he is depicted purely as a lord over demons,one who has an absolute and immediate authority.

But there may seem to be an exception to this, especially in thepractices of others. Mark’s Gospel knows of a man casting out demons inJesus’ name who ‘was not following us,’ as the disciples put it in tellinghim of this. This is a point in favor of the Negative argument because inthis case Jesus’ own Name works to cast out demons even when used byone who is not a disciple (Mark 9,38). How does it happen that such aName was available for use, a name effective without the presence of theman thus named? Curiously enough, Luke writes in Acts of certain‘itinerant Jewish exorcists (who) undertook to pronounce the name ofthe Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits.’ (Acts 19,13.) Needless tosay, given Luke’s Gentile bias, these poor Jewish exorcists fared badly inthe case of the ‘seven sons of a Jewish High Priest named Sceva’ when,instead of fleeing at the mention of the sacred name, the evil spiritanswered them: ‘Jesus I know, and Paul I know, but who are you?’ Whereupon the demoniac ‘leaped on them, mastered all of them, andoverpowered them, so that they fled out of that house naked andwounded.’

Signs of exorcism are otherwise missing from Mark with theexception of a single detail, but since der Teufel steckt im Detail we mustnotice that Jesus asks the name of the demoniac at the tombs. Since onthis level of belief a power is conferred merely by knowing a demon’s

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name, Jesus might have been remembered by tradition for asking ademon’s name. Trouble is, that he doesn’t go on to use this name as anexorcist would. And so why does he ask? It is rather Mark who gains hispoint about the ‘manyness’ of demons by a name which brings thevastness of a Roman Legion to mind.

Instead of exorcism which, as I say, is a technique or a kind ofmagic, there is something else to be associated with Jesus, some aspectof his character, if only because of his traffic with demons. To that aspectof his presentation in the Gospels we must turn.

BEELZEBUB

The notoriety of Jesus so disturbs his own people that they goout to ‘seize him.’ Or ‘lay hold of him’ or ‘take charge of him,’ as thevarious translations give it. Notice how any of these translations conveysits affirmation of his sheer ‘physicalness.’ A crowd has flocked to himseemingly from everywhere, from Syria and beyond the Jordan, fromTyre and Sidon on the coast, from Jerusalem to the south. Attracted byhis wonders and his cures, hanging on his words, people press on himand his disciples until they cannot even eat:

And when his friends heard it, they went out to seize him, forthey said, ‘He is beside himself.’ (Mark 3,21.)

Or as Goodspeed lucidly translates:

His relatives heard of it and came over to stop him, for they saidthat he was out of his mind.

It is only Mark among the Evangelists who dares to tell us of this alarmedventuring forth of his ‘people,’ thereby associating Jesus with fears of adisordered mind, but is he too naive to grasp the implication of it, assome may believe? Ah, then we are fortunate to possess a primitive factwhich an embarrassed tradition has not otherwise preserved! Or is thisrather a piece of artistry which is designed to bring home theextraordinary quality of Jesus and his deed?

And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, ‘He ispossessed by Beelzebub, and by the prince of demons he castsout the demons.’ (3,22.)

The story of the family’s excursion is cut off, after the bare mention of it,to make room for the accusation of the scribes. They don’t say that Jesusis a demoniac like those he cures, which would be foolishness, but rather

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that he is demonic in the sense of holding higher rank among the verydemons, and this reflects on the family’s fear to reinforce the impression. Jesus is not described to us. Everything is conveyed by reflection andindirectly. We know more about the habits and appearance of Confuciusfrom the Analects than of Jesus in the Gospels, where everything abouthis manner, dress, appearance, size, everything in which he might havebeen compared to others, must be inferred. So also here with the chargesagainst him, and yet the result is an impression of an extraordinaryquality in the man associated with an extraordinary energy.

Dare we call him daemonic, as a German Romantic poet mighthave aspired to be? – in proof of his own genius, of course. Socrates hada touch of the daemonic. He spoke of having ‘a certain divinity’(daimonion ti) which came to him as a kind of warning voice to guardagainst missteps, a daimonion strangely silent at his trial. But Jesus is notdaemonic in the sense of Socrates. He has no private traffic with adaimonion, hears no prompting voice – he is a man of faith, not arelentless questioner troubled by admonitions welling up from within. Jesus is not a man with a flair, and there is no escaping the sphere ofmyth. The demonic belongs to his myth, belongs to the sphere of the ‘old’belief described in these Gospel tales.

As for Beelzebub, suffice it that the name is difficult. Moderntranslations revert to the Greek spelling, Beelzebul, and Dr. CyrusGordon, basing his opinion on the finds at Ugarit, suggests Baal-Zebub,which we know from the Old Testament as the name of the ‘god ofEkron’ to whom a Jewish king applied for a cure, disastrously of course.(I Kings 1,2). The Synoptic designation of Beelzebub as ‘prince of thedemons’ suggests an evil deity of an intermediate rank, notwithstandingJesus’ prompt reply:

How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided againstitself, that kingdom cannot stand. (Mark 3,25.)

Here also we have his famous words about a ‘house divided against itself’that Lincoln used, earlier in his career, when accepting the nominationfor the U. S. Senate as a Republican from Illinois. And here also, beforeJesus has done with these scribes, we have the unforgivable ‘sin againstthe Holy Ghost’ which once drove John Bunyan to distraction for fearthat he had committed it.

But where is the so-called Beelzebub controversy? It exists in ourimagination. Jesus’ reply is not a coherent discourse but a passage

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compacted of several brief arguments bunched together and not quite allin tune. There is no one story here. Instead, we have a pair ofoverlapping tales which individually are not well-formed. A family tale ispushed aside to make room for Jesus’ impressive reply to the Beelzebubaccusation, but the underlying story is in confusion. So when Jesus‘called them to him’ (called the scribes) to make reply to their dangerousaccusation, did he call them to his home, where the story is set? Did hecall them ‘then and there?’ Remember that his family have set out forhim. Have they arrived? When they say, ‘He is beside himself,’ is itmeant for a public explanation which the scribes comment on? Or dothey meet the scribes at all? There is no one event here. It is only Markwho brings these unsorted traditions into a scheme of his own. Whatmatters is the substance of tradition, not the makeshift form of the tale.

If the Negative argument is left intact after this, so is the sense ofbelievers that this man lived. Are both perspectives possible? It is atribute to this primitive Evangelist’s artistry that he conveys a sense of theman by keeping him in sight as human. This is no parading demigod (asProfessor William Benjamin Smith maintains in what is surely amisreading of the Gospels). Yet Mark is not a man who knew his Jesus;he must invent, and to the extent of our confidence that the Gospel Jesusis no mere creature of artistry and fiction, we may affirm a thrift oftradition that has exalted a man, no doubt, but has also caught him upand conveyed him as one remembered.

WHO (AND WHERE) ARE JESUS’ FAMILY?After Jesus’ famous reply to the Jerusalem scribes, Mark takes up

anew his people’s effort to reclaim him as his mother and his brothersarrive to find him surrounded by such a crowd that they cannot getinside. Presumably, it is the same house as before and the same crowd,too, because it is surely the same story: Mark has simply resumed hisunfinished tale of the family after the Beelzebub interval. Our moderntranslators, scrupulous to a fault and very idiomatic, have the messengerssay that his mother and brothers are ‘outside asking for you.’ Yes, ofcourse they are asking for him, and very politely, no doubt; weunderstand as much, but this misses a primitive (again I say a Gothic)stress. Literally the words go:

Behold, thy mother and thy brothers and thy sisters outside seekthee!

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And this circumstance of being unable to reach Jesus, of having to seekhim, is a deliberate emphasis here as it was earlier in Mark when Simonfound him praying one morning. Or as in Luke when his parents soughtin vain for the twelve-year-old boy until they looked in the Temple. These Gospels stress by their treatment of the tales how necessary it is toseek, how hard it is to find Jesus, whereas our modern scholars, positinga supposed fact behind the legend, slight that aspect of the expression. Mark never forgets his reader, who is to feel the plight of his mother andbrothers and sisters when even they must stand outside the circle of theprivileged and seek.

Jesus’ answer is surprising and superb. He is untrammeled byfamily ties in serving the Kingdom of God and he loosens the narrowligature without a second thought, by a question: Who are my mother andmy brothers? Looking on those who are sitting around him he says:

Behold, my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will ofGod is my brother and sister and mother.

In his preface to Androcles and the Lion Shaw says of Jesus that heteaches ‘the widening of the private family with its cramping ties into thegreat family of mankind under the fatherhood of God.’ That is theimmediate impression of this story on a man of high intelligence, butthere is a genuine doubt about a tale in which a serious question is evadedwhen Jesus’ grand gesture in embracing his listeners as his real kinsmendiverts us from the crucial question he poses: ‘Who are my mother and mybrothers?’ For when those around him ‘see’ his mother in their ownmidst, when they ‘see’ his brothers and sisters in themselves, anawakening occurs. Now an earlier and ordinary regard for Jesus’ familyis dismissed after the disclosure of an immortal fact: ‘Whoever does thewill of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.’ It is we, therefore, wewho belong to Jesus and are his family!

Jesus was no longer an ordinary man to be heard of like Nero orPaul. Rather, he was everywhere being preached as the Christ who haddied in a sacrifice before returning to life. Mark’s human Jesus is themysterious Son of Man, who was altogether a figure of faith, and we arecaught up in our own benign imaginations to suppose (if we do suppose)that Jesus was a great man who, being widely talked about, had wonpeople to his faith by his wondrous humanity or his marvelous Teachings. As one crucified ‘under Pontius Pilate’ and long since risen from thedead, he could no longer be found in his mere humanity.

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Thus runs the early challenge: ‘Why do we know nothing of thefamily of this human Jesus? You Christians teach that he has risen fromthe dead and ascended to Heaven and he’s now out of reach, but whereare his people, then?’ Mark responds by composing a tale like this, ormore likely, recomposing a traditional tale. What other answer can hegive as a propagandist for the Gospel? Here is a legend which handles adifficult question by diverting us from it, or such is the argument for mythhere. It’s a very good argument, but we must in honesty remember thatnothing factual can be settled by argument. Our abiding thought,therefore, is that the Negative argument is a particular view taken towardthe evidence. It neither furnishes the evidence nor dissolves it becausethe evidence is given in the tale and beyond the given evidence wecannot go.

Matthew contributes a further skillful touch to the legend inhaving Jesus, when making his reply, stretch forth his hand to the gathereddisciples: a gesture which the early preacher is invited to repeat as he re-tells the tale, looking around at those who hear him. This is what thestory means beyond any possible reference to the attitude of Jesustoward his relatives, concerning which historically we are much in thedark. Certainly, it is possible that this event occurred: we do not knowenough to deny it, but in the setting of the Gospel, Mark has turned itwith shrewdness and cunning to his underlying theme.

THE SOWER

Our Synoptic Gospels place the activity of Jesus mostly in Galileewhere he is often found nearby the Sea (or Lake) of Galilee. Mark tellsus, for instance, that he gave the Parable of the Sower after stepping intoa boat because of the press of the crowd. Our Teacher is shown to be aresourceful fellow if he can make a pulpit of a boat, but was the day sovery calm, then? Or did Simon Peter now and then dip in his oar?

The directness is the man. He gives his lesson from a boatbecause he is ready for anything and we never find him at a loss. But adetail like this belongs to the Evangelist’s artistry rather than to history. Itis the ‘convincing’ detail which gives his placement of the story itsparticular hook, just as when earlier Jesus promised to make Simon andAndrew ‘fishers of men,’ or when those cot-bearers broke through hisroof to reach him. Mark is good about those details and pegs his story tothe spot.

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The parable itself is rather flat. Something is missing here and weare left to guess at its meaning. ‘A sower went out to sow,’ (and we bringto mind Van Gogh’s Sower with a pouch slung at his waist). Some seedfalls by the wayside where the birds snatch it up; and some on rockyground; and some of it among thorns, where it sprouts up only to bechoked. The seed that falls on good soil ‘grows up and increases andyields thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold.’ We have learnednothing new by these reminders. Not everything we sow will come tofruition, some of our projects will fail, as of course we have known.

When taken for its ‘moral’ the Sower disappoints. Jesus does notmoralize and whereas his briefer parables in Matthew, say, challenge usto look for a likeness to the Kingdom, the Sower leaves us asking formore. Why is the Parable told? On re-reading it, we see that its homelydetail lacks point:

Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it had not much soil, andimmediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil; and whenthe sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root it witheredaway. (Mark 4,5.)

Very well, we have considered a few things that might happen to seedscattered on rocky ground, but why are we told this? Mark is aware thathis parable cannot stand by itself. He will attempt to dismantle it as soonas it is told and then treat its several parts as if each had anothermeaning, but he is fumbling here. First he withholds his meaning, nodoubt deliberately, by telling a somewhat pointless parable which hethen labors to redeem with an allegorical interpretation. A depth ofmyth behind his surfaces is what Mark is striving to suggest.

It is Jesus who is made to interpret his parable, of course inMark’s behalf, and he at once assigns a meaning to it which the simpletale has lacked: ‘The Sower sows the word.’ We seize on this, of course,because it gives his parable its point, but how should we have knownthis? For there is nothing in the parable as told to make us think of aSower who has gone forth to sow words. Thus Jesus is put in the role ofan Aesop forced to explain his own fable, especially when he goes on tosupply the Markan allegory.

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A SECRET FOR THE CHOSEN FEW

First, however, he makes reply to the disciples’ question abouthis parables:

To you has been given the secret of the Kingdom of God, but forthose outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeedsee but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand;lest they should turn again, and be forgiven. (Mark 4,11.)

According to this, a parable lacking point is told to no purposedeliberately. Or even worse, told for the very purpose of keeping ‘thoseoutside’ in the dark. It makes nonsense of his Teaching if Jesus ever saidthis, but really it is the Evangelist who is fumbling here. Mark is at best aGothic sort of workman, and if the end result is a kind of beauty in hisGospel, it is because his underlying purpose is deep and sure.

The words attributed to Jesus recall a prophecy taken fromIsaiah’s account of a vision which befell him when he saw the Lordseated on his throne, ‘high and lifted up’ in the temple. Whether he wasliterally inside the temple when the vision befell him I cannot say, but theprophet is undone by this vision in which he is summoned to his task. Winged seraphim fly about and call to one another in clamorous praise,and only after his lips are touched by a burning coal is he fit to speak. Isaiah (as it seems) forecasts a calamity for Israel when the Assyrian hostwill disperse the Northern Kingdom, our famous Lost Ten Tribes. TheLord (Adonai) gives the prophet his message in poetry:

Hear and hear, but do not understand; see and see, but do not perceive! Make the heart of this people fat, and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes,

lest seeing and hearing they ‘understand with their hearts, and turn (to)be healed.’ If we suppose that the prophet’s vision, althoughunquestionably genuine, arose from something within himself or evensimply from a long brooding, a kind of desperate exasperation speaks inthese words, which culminate in judgment. For as with several Hebrewprophets, Isaiah would discover the cause of the nation’s misfortune inthe people’s unresponsiveness.

It is this impressive prophecy, or rather this mystery, which Markattributes to Jesus’ own Teaching because in the Evangelist’s mind aparallel may be drawn in strictest logic, for if the Lord (Adonai) had made

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the futile preaching of Isaiah a judgment on the people, how was itotherwise with the effect of Gospel preaching whenever that preachingshould fail? By putting Isaiah’s words (or the words of his vision) intoJesus’ mouth the Evangelist would make it a part of that same ancientmystery why some were drawn to the Gospel and others not, or whysome who once believed then fell away, like the seed on rocky soil.

Nevertheless, when Jesus will say, ‘To you has been given thesecret of the Kingdom of God but for those outside everything is in parables,’Isaiah’s tremendous irony is turned into a settled doom from which thereis no appeal. The Evangelist is intent upon his mystery. He is addressinghis readers and hearers, and he would give them a sense of beingprivileged insiders. Already as believers they have access to theKingdom of God, but now they are to be led more deeply into its secretsas the lesson unfolds.

THE GOD OF THE SEED SOWING

We have in this parable the reminiscence of an older god whosemyth Mark assimilates to the Gospel of Jesus. Embedded in the societyfor which he writes, the old myth makes it possible for him to introducehis Gospel in that setting when the older god is displaced by Jesus, who isunderstood to be taking over his role in illustration of a higher purpose.

It is the ancient god of the seed corn who in his simpleagricultural role is displaced by the Sower of the Word, a change in hisrole which makes our simple parable a metaphor, and this is what savesit and justifies the care Mark gives it. When taken as metaphor, theSower sows the word of Resurrection. Otherwise we have a parablewhich offers no new insight along with an allegory which tends tomeander and a preposterous explanation of the reason for tellingparables at all, namely, to hide secrets instead of conveying a Teaching.

What is hidden here, then, is Mark’s own deeper myth, whichhe intends to convey to the reader under the aspect of a mystery. Wehave only to mention the Messianic Secret to remind ourselves that whathe is driving at all along is a mystery not yet fully in view. Certainly,then, we may read the earliest portions of Mark in full view of Gospelmyth (or kerygma) which finds its veiled expression more than once, aswhen Jesus early on calls himself the Bridegroom. It is a point to benoticed that while the superb realism of Mark is aimed at making thepresentation of his Jesus real and giving him a quality of Dasein, yet he

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doesn’t conceal the underlying myth. Nor is he trying to conceal that. The purpose of his realistic treatment is not one of concealment of the mythbut of frankest affirmation of the man.

Not history, as the record of a genuine Teaching, but thecircumstance of the Evangelist and his readers will explain this parable andits reshaping. Mark has only the traditions of a flourishing Jesus cult. Some few were written down, no doubt, and are lost to us now except asthe Evangelists have preserved them. Others survived by word ofmouth. We must avoid overrating Mark because of his comparativeearliness: ‘Because he was early he was closer to the facts.’ There wereno longer any original facts. Everything, every tale, every saying, everyaspect of the Gospel had already passed through an oral phase. TheEvangelist did not receive a history which he then began to decorate withlegends; but he has first received a faith, or (its equivalent) a myth. Mark isa creative figure in that early sacramental cult and this Gospel, thistraditional writing, is his own inspiration.

WOMAN WITH AN ISSUE OF BLOOD & JAIRUS’S DAUGHTER

Once after crossing the Sea of Galilee Jesus is met by a mancalled Jairus, ‘one of the rulers of the synagogue,’ who falls at his feetsaying:

‘My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay yourhands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.’ (Mark5,22.)

Jesus goes along as a great crowd surges about. Jairus, then, is one whoknows of Jesus as a healer and is willing to trust him, even ratherdesperately, but where is this place? We seem to be on the western shoreof the lake somewhere in Galilee, but a sense of location, of place,depends on the specific detail of a story whose locale is otherwise vague.

Nevertheless, the story is a ‘good one’ and Mark will once moresplit it, so to speak, to work another tale into the action. We saw how hedid this, a little confusingly, when he wedged the Beelzebub controversyinto a tale about his family going forth to bring Jesus home, but here histechnique is successful. Of these tales the gracious Montefiore says: ‘Howwell these stories are told!’

On his way to Jairus’ home, then, Jesus is touched by a womanwho for twelve years has ‘suffered much under many physicians, and had

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spent all that she had’ because of an ‘issue of blood.’ She has noconnection to Jairus except to delay the action while his daughter is lying‘at the point of death.’ Although she is nameless, we know of herintimate ailment and its twelve-year duration and of her bad luck withphysicians, and we are given her inmost thought: ‘If I touch even hisgarments, I shall be made well.’ When she does so, the hemorrhageceases.

Again, the Markan ‘touch’ which conveys a sense of Jesus’ realityand shows his healing power when ‘contacted.’ The woman has acted infaith; her gesture is her prayer, and Jesus turns to ask, ‘Who touched mygarments?’ because he is aware ‘that power had gone forth from him.’ Not that he willed it. The cure was involuntary. He is so full of it that itspills out when the right connection is made, but the disciples reply: ‘Yousee the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say, Who touched me?’ Nevertheless, he continued to look for the woman who ‘knowing whathad been done to her, came in fear and trembling and fell down beforehim, and told him the whole truth.’ The whole truth – as if she had stolensomething. Then he says: ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go inpeace, and be healed of your disease.’ We pass from magic to logic,from an inaccessible potency which she was able to breach by faith to agrace voluntarily conferred, ‘Go in peace and be healed.’

We enjoy the interplay of persons here, and as far as I know,Oriental myth rarely presents such a realism as this. That a power hasgone forth from Jesus of which he is conscious is a function of the Son ofGod, no doubt, but when he pauses to look around and ask, Whotouched me? we feel a kinship with the man. On both counts our storysatisfies a desire to have in him an Immanuel figure: God is with us. Weshould like an access to Jesus on these same terms if we could find one,and the story tells us, rightly or wrongly, that faith is such an access.

The Woman with an Issue of Blood exists for us as a woman in astory but not otherwise. If we say of this tale, ‘It happened!’ she losessomething of her spiritual value. She was lucky, like some cripple whoonce threw away his crutches at Lourdes. The harder the fact, the moreexternal. We are left outside the wonder of it, and our own gaping needgoes begging, whereas in the fable we simply assume her prior faith inthe God of Israel and we pity the distresses of her years.

A message is sent to Jairus after this delay: ‘Do not trouble theTeacher, your daughter has died!’ An improbable message, but Jesusreassures the ruler of the synagogue, ‘Do not fear, only believe!’ And

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then he dismisses the crowd. This is not for the multitude; it is no time forshow; something else, something deeper is required. Of course, thesecrecy motif is implicit here. ‘He allowed no one to follow him’ exceptPeter, James and John, the favored three.

On arrival he finds a tumult of mourners who are ‘weeping andwailing loudly,’ and once again he speaks with an immense innocence ashe addresses them: ‘Why do you make a tumult and weep? The child isnot dead but sleeping.’ So great is his faith, if we think of his humanity,but these are also the words of a god for whom death is a sleep. In harshcontrast to the wailing, the mourners laugh at him for saying this, but heputs them outside. Always, he is masterful. Only her parents and a fewdisciples enter the girl’s room where he takes her by the hand and says:Talitha cumi. For we seem to have his very words (or as given in somemanuscripts often preferred: Talitha koum). They mean, when translatedfrom the Aramaic, ‘Maiden, arise.’ She immediately gets up and walksabout, Mark says, ‘for she was twelve years old.’ Those present are‘overcome with amazement. And he strictly charged them that no oneshould know this, and told them to give her something to eat.’

Jesus’ lofty and innocent mind is on another plane, as weunderstand, but how could he have charged these parents to keep thiswonder strictly quiet with mourners outside who must be thought of asawaiting the discomfiture of this meddler? Here the Gothic artist is atwork in Mark. As with demons, so with deeds: Jesus refuses to have hiswonders told abroad lest the very deeds betray his secret. And yet it’s asecret that cannot be hid. That is Mark’s answer to one of two possiblequestions: Why was your Jesus not known to be the Christ during hislifetime? Or else, simply: Why is your Jesus unknown?

Bultmann tells us that the advice about giving the child‘something to eat’ is meant for a proof that she is not a spirit or aphantom but a live damsel walking about, and that is very good, but hedoesn’t pretend that any sort of demonry was involved in thisresuscitation. I remark on this because elsewhere he comes very close tosaying that demonry and therefore exorcism (!) was involved in all thevarious cures and healings of the Synoptic Gospels, although only byimplication of course because the fact is not plain. Or even visible. OurWoman with an Issue of Blood who had gone to doctor after doctor afterdoctor: should she have tried an exorcist instead? Bultmann is mistakenin seeing exorcism in all Jesus’ cures. Mark has made, in fact, a sharpdistinction between the casting out of demons and cures such as these.

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Another interesting observation, but a very different one, hasbeen made by a French Catholic psychoanalyst, Dr. Françoise Dolto, in apublished conversation with Dr. Gérard Sévérin. (See The Jesus ofPsychoanalysis, NY 1979.) Like Robert Graves, Françoise Dolto is richlyimaginative and even fanciful in her comments, but without pretendingto a scientific exegesis. She treats the text for what she can make of it inthe play of her own thought and her own informed insights, and sheremarks on the parallel between the girl’s age at twelve, the age ofmenstruation, and the twelve years of the older woman’s ‘issue of blood.’ (The woman is also addressed, I might add, as Daughter).

Apropos our theme, CG Montefiore says of this passage, ‘Thewhole story is told with consummate art,’ and this is the judgment of aJewish scholar and man of letters who believes that a genuinely historicalhuman being, Jesus, is the original source of the Markan inspiration. Always the possibility exists that real events may lie behind such tales,and always the Negative argument is left hanging over that abyss ofpossibility.

It is a merit in this earliest Evangelist that his writing is so veryspare, and this will have something to do with the thrift of tradition. Hewill tell us his fact and it will speak, but he mostly doesn’t decorate histales or comment on his most effective strokes – as I have done. On theother hand, that ‘consummate art’ of which Montefiore speaks is not tobe denied. We have seen by many and transparent signs that the writtenexpression as such, the finished Gospel, is artistic, inventive and fictitious. Whatever Mark lacks of knowledge his own imagination has supplied. Itis this quality which the Negative argument insists on our recognizing inthe name of honesty, but at last it is not a question of victory or defeat orof proof either way. It is simply a question of what, on this basis, we maychoose to believe.

TWO MIRACULOUS FEEDINGS

Whatever else we may say of the miracles of Jesus, they belongto the primitive Gospel, and they were once a part of his appeal. ‘For theJews require a sign,’ says the Apostle, ‘and the Greeks seek afterwisdom.’ (I Corinthians 1,22.) I doubt if very many Greeks were seekingafter wisdom, but they were surely not averse to signs because it is our

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15. A daughter, Dr. Shirley Werner, wonders if the Greek for ‘seek after wisdom’ (sophianzetousin) is a circumlocution for philosophein and comments: The Jews look for signs, whilethe Greeks on the other hand ‘do’ philosophy.

16. Edgar J. Goodspeed, An Introduction to the New Testament (University of Chicago Press1937, p. 125.)

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Greek Testament in which these wonders abound.15 In this respect ourGospels resemble such Old Testament books as Samuel and Kings, someof whose miracles they have repeated. And some of these things,anticipations, tales, gestures are worth considering.

For instance, when Jesus fed 5,000 men with only five loavesand two fishes, he did it because a great multitude had followed him into‘a lonely place.’ So might an Oriental demi-god have done in somemeandering Indian epic, but in Mark this tale exaggerates a miracle oncedone by the Prophet Elisha, who told his servant to set ‘twenty loaves ofbarley’ before a group of hungry men. When the servant asked, ‘Howam I to set this before a hundred men?’ Elisha gave promise: ‘They shalleat and have some left.’ And so it happened.

Then what about the Jesus who figures in this legendary tale? Do we keep him in the name of a ‘historical Jesus’ or does he vanish withhis legend? We have touched on this before, of course, and we recallthat in his popular Life of Jesus the distinguished Edgar J. Goodspeed haddealt gently with this tale by suggesting a smaller crowd who weremeagerly fed. The theory of legend implied by that we breathe in withthe air, but the works of Dr. Goodspeed are wisely written. Was there noaccommodation to the people in a suggestion which preserves the bareform of the tale?

Goodspeed was aware of the Elisha parallel. ‘The shadow ofElijah or Elisha falls on almost every page of the Gospel of Mark,’ hewrites for ministers and other more scholarly readers in his excellentIntroduction to the New Testament. ‘It is a striking fact that almosteverything Jesus is reported as doing in Mark has parallels’ in the ‘Elijahand Elisha cycles of the Books of Kings.’16 The radical fact is presentedwith a gentle touch but the latitude is wide because ‘for some reason theselective memory of the early church instinctively recorded about Jesusanything that recalled the doings of these great prophets.’

In truth, we may suppose that this Feeding was based on thatearlier pattern, itself a myth. Isn’t this Dr. Goodspeed’s implication? For

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otherwise we must suppose a queer situation:

Jesus once fed a crowd with scant provisions of his own, and hisdisciples remembered it so that the story became known to theearly church. Unfortunately, the early church could notremember it without a hint from Scripture. As an event, it hadno survival power until the bare memory of it had merged withthe Elisha tale in a comparison which served to select thatparticular deed of Jesus for the record. Of course, luckily for theearly church, quite a few things that Jesus did ‘recalled thedoings of these great prophets.’ And by implication, a number ofother things which he did...

No. Dr. Goodspeed did not believe that, but he didn’t care to rub ournoses in the radical fact: namely, that the miracles of Elijah and Elishafurnished a source for the invention of tales about Jesus. Thus were oldmiracles minted anew by the same process that made the old: by humanimagination.

I don’t mean that our Evangelist is a mere copycat. Nothing elsein Mark reveals with such clarity his use of doubling as his two Feedingtales, but this is a miracle which is transparently symbolic. In the twelvebaskets of loaves left over from the Feeding of the 5,000 and the sevenbaskets left after the 4,000, Alfred Loisy saw reference to Israel and theGentiles, whose symbolic numbers these are. Mark’s deliberaterepetition of the tale is not the blunder of a writer who cannot see thathis ‘traditions’ have given him two versions of the same event, as somescholars have believed, but what a gross exaggeration of the Elisha talethis is if we think only of numbers. How does Mark get away with this? Itis the symbol which makes him acceptable because what Elisha did wasonly a miracle whereas here we have a symbol of communion. Even theformality of the rite is implied when the thousands of communicants areseated in groups ‘by hundreds and by fifties’ before the priestly Jesuslooks to Heaven, blesses and breaks the loaves. (Mark 6,41 Mark 14,22.) We have passed from miracle to sign, and in arriving at the sign we havereached significance.

Are we to conceive of this earliest Gospel as the product of anEvangelist working deliberately with symbols, as for instance the subtleartist of the Fourth Gospel has done? Or as Professor William BenjaminSmith believed in advocating the Negative argument? This goes too far. Mark is an artist intent on his meaning, but he no more thinks of symbolsthan he does of traditions. He has his material and he knows how to

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handle it. He understands his effect and how to achieve it, and thesymbol emerges.

These twin Feedings may gratify an appetite for wonders butthey succeed because they represent a miracle in which the believersparticipate. By whatever consecrated hands the loaf is given, it is Jesuswho distributes bread to communicants. He feeds and is fed upon: it isthe enactment of a sacred myth, and in the Fourth Gospel, where themyth is overwhelming, he will even say: I Am the Bread of Life. As mindsenclosed in a Mystery enacted by the fellowship – it is the multitude whichis fed – they received these tales without difficulty. The story impressesthe gathered believers because it is miraculous, as is fitting, but it worksits effect because the symbol tells, and because the miracle is shared.

Matthew keeps these two Feedings as Mark has given them, butLuke omits the second as superfluous. It is a matter of indifference to ourtheme. These later Evangelists use the earliest Gospel as a valuablesource for their own purpose, but they never treat him as sacredScripture because their own purpose is to supplant him after absorbingwhat they care to take in and modifying as they choose. Despite hisomission of the Four Thousand, Luke quite as much as Matthewappreciates the Markan doubles and introduces some of his own. As,indeed, later on does John, who also tells one tale of the Feeding of5,000. In a reflection of the Elisha story, the Fourth Gospel tells us whatthe other Gospels fail to say, that these were barley loaves.

THE WITHERED HAND

The prophecies of Jesus which our Gospels find in the OldTestament – are they prophecies? forecasts? Do they not rather seem tobe borrowings out of other times which are then reapplied to his case? What they meant for the prophets who uttered them no longer decideshow they are to be taken by the Evangelist if only they can be shown tobear on Jesus somehow. Matthew will quote a prophecy,

Out of Egypt have I called my son,

which is fulfilled in the Holy Family’s flight from Herod, but in the Book ofHosea, from which this is taken, these words recall the Exodus. Theyserve as a reminder of Jahweh’s deliverance and precede his complaintin deploring the worship of Baal, and nowhere in the prophet’s mind isany forecast of the Holy Family. What Matthew understands, whose ownserious intelligence in these matters we mustn’t underestimate, is that the

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sacred legends surrounding Jesus’ birth echo in his imagination with thegreat omen of the deliverance, and he invites us to see this.

It is thus with certain Gospel tales also. Jesus’ Feeding of amultitude is related to Elisha’s doings only in the bare borrowed miracle;it is only the gesture for which a use has been found. And if a scholar likeDr. Goodspeed can see in these borrowings a tendency to compare thereal deeds of Jesus with certain ancient tales, the Negative critics arguewith equal conviction that these borrowings may show that he has beeninvented, at least in part.

Nor do all of these borrowings leap to the eye. Consider theMarkan tale of Jesus entering a synagogue to find a man with a witheredhand. Pharisees are present ‘and they watched him to see whether hewould heal him on the Sabbath.’ At once he addresses the man with thewithered hand: ‘Come here.’ And then he puts a question to them: ‘Is itlawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?’ They are silent and he looks around with anger, grieved at their hardnessof heart. ‘Stretch out your hand!’ he commands, and when the manreaches toward Jesus, his hand is restored. All is quickly and pointedlytold.

Now in the Book of Kings we find a tale of Jeroboam and acertain prophet in which this identical motif occurs. The prophet remainsanonymous because the tale concerns only Jeroboam, who became kingof the Northern Tribes after a division in Israel. In the fable, however, hehas erected a golden calf at Bethel and journeys there to makeannouncement from the altar: ‘Here is your God, Israel, who broughtyou out of Egypt!’ We are uncertain of history here, but that does notconcern us. Robert H. Pfeiffer, late of Harvard, has supposed that the ‘sinof Jeroboam,’ for which he is abominated in this tale, was his endeavorto establish (or revive?) centers of worship at Bethel and Dan. At thattime Jerusalem was ruled by King Solomon’s son.

At any rate, an unnamed prophet has been summoned byJahweh to curse calf and altar in the presence of the angry king who‘stretched out his hand from the altar saying, Seize him!’ Whereupon thestretched-out hand of Jeroboam withered, nor could he draw it back untilhe pleaded with the man of God, after which his hand was restored. Mark reproduces only the gesture of that thrust-out withered hand andthe associated cure, but its occurrence in the Old Testament talerecommends it and even aids its acceptance. The symbol of anoutstretched hand must have been attractive to an Evangelist for whom

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the touch of Jesus is so important; a writer fully aware of the worshiper’ssensed need.

That Jesus ‘looked around with anger’ is a superbly humanresponse to the Pharisees’ aloofness, and we feel a certain nearness to hiswarmth, but the later Synoptists lose a valuable and convincing humantrait by ignoring this anger, whereas to establish the convincing humanityof his miraculous Jesus is Mark’s aim in giving such details. On the otherhand, the scribal Matthew adds a touch of his own when he has Jesusdefeat his opponents in argument before working his cure:

‘What man of you, if he has one sheep and it falls into a pit onthe Sabbath, will not lay hold of it and lift it out? Of how muchmore value is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good onthe Sabbath.’ (Matthew 12,9.)

These might, of course, be Jesus’ own words, but they might equallyhave been the words of a wise rabbi.

‘CHRIST STILLETH THE TEMPEST’The miracles of Jesus attest his identity, showing that he is the

Christ: this is what they have come to mean in the Gospels where theyare made to serve an original scheme. Rather than feats of divinity, theyare signs of a covert revelation but their significance is misunderstood, nodoubt in keeping with the Messianic secret. Only in the Fourth Gospeldo they reveal the Messiah openly to his friends because here at last allsecrecy is cast aside.

So there is a certain inconsistency about the miracles in theseearlier Gospels because in failing to reveal Christ, they stumble in theirpurpose. Nor will Jesus have his secret revealed this way: he forbids it. When Pharisees ask him for a sign from Heaven, his response is inkeeping with the realism of the earliest Evangelist:

He sighed deeply in his spirit, and said, ‘Why does thisgeneration seek a sign? Truly, I say to you, no sign shall be givento this generation.’ And he left them, and getting into the boatagain he departed to the other side. (Mark 8,11.)

Small wonder that these words impressed a man like Shaw who, ofcourse believing that there was something real behind these manymiracles, thought that Jesus was embarrassed by them. Professor PaulSchmiedel of Zurich, who was a contemporary of the Negative critics,

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cited these very words out of Mark as a pillar on which to rest ourconfidence in the historical reality of the Gospel. They do seem tocontradict the many miracles in Mark or at least to diminish theirimportance, and it is this which makes the weary sigh of Jesus and hisrefusal of a sign attractive to moderns, although I am not persuaded thatthe moderns have quite understood the Evangelist here.

Overall, we notice a genuine reserve about the miracles andcures. The demoniac at the tombs is permitted to ‘tell how much theLord has done for him’ because he dwells in pagan territory across thelake, but in Galilee Jesus commonly suppresses the report of his deeds. An exception occurs when he cures the paralytic ‘that you may knowthat the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins,’ but others whoenjoy the benefit of his cures are urged not to tell. Of course, people dotell; he cannot hush them up; but even so, nothing comes of this tellingexcept a trail of rumors.

On one occasion Jesus calms a storm at sea by a word of rebuketo wind and waves, but here too the Markan theme is struggling toemerge and dominate a borrowed tale. (Then is something real behindit? Do we need to posit something more than just this borrowing?) Certainly, there is a wizardry to this Merlin-like commanding of theelements which rage until their Lord rebukes them. (The word in Greekis epitimao and would carry the meaning here, quoting Thayer: ‘torebuke – in order to curb one’s ferocity or violence.’) The awed disciplesask, ‘Who then is this, that even wind and waves obey him?’ but they canfind no answer to their question in the miracle which they havewitnessed. Unlike the demoniacs who give tongue to the mystery ofJesus, these wonders are dumb. On the other hand, the point of thestory lies in the disciples’ question which asks for the reader’s affirmationof Jesus as the Son of God.

In another sea-tale later on, Jesus walks by night across thewaters to his troubled disciples, as we know. A gale has wearied out theoarsmen, but as soon as he climbs in the boat, the gale winds cease. It isa different story and separately told, but together, these tales representanother Markan double. Unlike the Feedings, which reduplicate a singletale, they constitute a double structure which tells of Jesus’ tranquillizingeffect on a stormy sea. And this fact is a sign of their importance becausethe technique of Gospel doubling (and all the Evangelists follow Mark inthis) is a deliberate stress. It is especially the first of these tales, theCalming of the Storm, that matters to Mark. Brief and blunt, its

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inconspicuous reference beyond the mere doubling is unmistakable,once it is seen, and rather surprising because in this modest anecdote wefind of all strange things a reminiscence of the fable of Jonah.

As I say, it is another borrowed tale, another of those storieswhose motif has been adapted from the Jewish Bible like Elisha’s severalbarley loaves or Jeroboam’s withered hand, but as we saw in those twocases, these borrowings don’t leap to the eye. Legends transmogrifywhen these borrowings are put to different uses, and it is fair to say thatin the Calming of the Storm Mark’s reference to the original fable isdeliberately occult. Our exegetes are aware of this and in the margin ofthe Nestle Greek Testament we find in Latin abbreviation the editor’sown reference to it.17 We also learn from FC Grant that this oddreminiscence of Jonah was noticed by St. Jerome, translator of theVulgate. In fact, Mark’s reference is a crux. An interpreter who neglectsit will miss the deeper meaning of the Markan tale.

Once more, then, to bring out the likeness more distinctly, Jesusand his disciples are crossing the Sea of Galilee when (says Mark) ‘a greatstorm of wind arose, and the waves beat into the boat,’ so much so thatthe disciples are frightened. Strangely enough, Jesus is asleep on acushion in the back of the boat! It is an odd sort of detail and really tooabsurd because even the fishermen among the disciples are fearful ofsinking. They wake him up to say, ‘Teacher, do you not care if we perish?’ He awakes, rebukes the wind and says to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ In the‘great calm’ which follows he asks them, ‘Why are you afraid? Have youno faith?’ And they marvel among themselves. The whole thing istremendously naive.

Now compare the Book of Jonah, which is a clever piece offiction that has been placed among the prophets because Jonah happensto be a prophet to whom, by definition, the Word of Jahweh comes. Asthe story opens, the Word of Jahweh sends him to Nineveh to cry againstits wickedness, but instead of going there he takes ship for Tarshish to get‘away from the presence of the Lord.’ In response to this colossaldisobedience the infuriated Jahweh ‘hurled a great wind upon the sea,and there was a mighty tempest’ which threatened to break up the ship. The sailors cry out to their gods, and in Moffatt’s translation, they haveeven ‘flung the tackle of the ship overboard, in order to lighten her,’

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whereas Jonah, who is impervious to the dreadful signs of Jahweh’swrath, has gone off to lie down in the ship’s hold where the captain findshim fast asleep. This is a thumping absurdity which puts me in mind of‘the man at the wheel’ who

‘was made to feel contempt for the wildest blow/ Tho’ it oftenappeared when the gale had cleared/ That he’d been in his bunkbelow.’

The captain says, ‘What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call upon yourgod... that we do not perish!’

Absurdity matches absurdity here: Jonah ‘in the sides of the ship’and Jesus on his pillow are both asleep in a howling storm, but is itsupposed to be funny? Or does the Hebrew narrative ask to be soundedmore deeply? Given the indiscriminate wrath of a Jahweh whothreatens to sink a ship because of a single guilty man, and one whoseiniquity captain and crew know nothing about and can’t be accused ofsheltering, we may have in the biblical version an underlying folk talewhich has been taken up and used to higher purpose. Or if not, then wemay have in the fable as it stands the ‘dramatic’ use of a primitive ethicwhich author and audience had really outgrown, very much as in a fairy-tale.

We make no direct comparison between Jesus and Jonah, ofcourse, because as men, as prophets, they are incommensurable. It is apoint worth bearing in mind. Thus the raging waters are pacified byJonah very differently when he gets himself thrown overboard at his ownsuggestion, the sailors having cast lots to find out whose fault it is that this‘evil’ has come upon them. He says, ‘Take me up and throw me into thesea, then the sea will quiet down for you.’ Instead, they row harder! They are very reluctant to throw him into a yawning storm out of suddenregard for the god he worships, but they have no choice. After he isthrown overboard the sea ceases from its raging; the sailors sacrifice tothe Lord and make vows; and the Lord ‘appoints’ a ‘great fish’ toswallow the disobedient prophet. He must spend ‘three days and threenights in the belly of the whale’ until he is vomited out upon dry land. Thewording in this Italicized quotation comes from Matthew’s Gospel (KingJames and RSV) where Jonah’s ‘great fish’ has become the fabled whale.

A certain residue of myth clings to this mere fable, then, anddeepens the comedy, and I have dwelt on this because to a nicety it willbear on what is to come. One of the older scholars, Oxford’s TK Cheyne,

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once compared Jonah’s ‘great fish’ to Tiamat, devouring monster ofBabylonian lore. (Technically, he puts Nebuchadrezzar in place ofTiamat in making this association). And the link between them, betweenJonah’s ‘great fish’ and the primordial goddess, he found in the Book ofJeremiah where a lurking Tiamat had furnished a prophet his metaphorof engorgement:

I shall punish Bel in Babylon and make him disgorge what he has swallowed. In future the nations will stream to him no more.Get out of her, my people; save your lives, each one of you, from Yahweh’s furious anger.

(Jeremiah 51,44. The New Jerusalem Bible.)

Bel is another name for Baal and Babylon the monster that hadswallowed up a people for seventy years. Thus Jonah may be taken torepresent a missionary people who are called to be a Light to the world,and his adventures bear on the lesson which Israel has had to learn fromits captivity in Babylon. Right or wrong, this is the prophetic theory: anation is punished for its sins and Israel had been set to school. Out ofthe Babylonian Captivity, moreover, we have the Babylonian Talmud orat least its beginnings, so vital to Jewry, followed by the rebuilding ofIsrael and its rebirth in the spirit of prophecy: an incomparable fruitageout of a nation’s catastrophe. It was a poet in that captivity, or onereflecting on its spiritual meaning, who gave us the sublime conception ofthe Suffering Servant.

So it is possible to read Jonah seriously and even deeply, and inThe Anchor Bible Dictionary I find a lesson on the Hebrew verb yarad,meaning ‘go down, descend,’ which relates the tale of Jonah to theancient hero-myth.18 Four times the prophet ‘goes down’ as, forinstance, into the port city or into the ship before embarking, and oncethere is an echo of yarad when he ‘fell into a deep sleep’ (wayyeradam). In these deliberate repetitions the article finds ‘a continuous hint thatJonah’s flight from God is not merely “horizontal” to another part of the

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world, but actually a “descent,” ultimately into death and the underworld.’ It is a comment of rabbinic subtlety.

We understand that Jonah ‘the son of Amittai’ is no meresymbolic figure. As a fictitious character he is definitely that particularJonah. Even his name is borrowed from a prophet who is mentioned inthe Book of Kings (II Kings 14,25). Why this realism? Probably in askingthis much credence for his fable, the story-teller meant only to detain thesimpler folk in that state of mind we call belief until the lesson sank in. Bychoosing the name of a prophet of whom almost nothing is known, hegained acceptance for his story.

THE SIGN OF JONAH

We have come upon a Mystery at the heart of Mark’s Gospel,and one which is reserved from the profane. It is the Mystery touchinghis covert reference to Jonah, which we have found to be implicit in theCalming of the Storm. Nevertheless, our primitive Evangelist is confidentthat the Sign intended will be interpreted by teachers of the didache, thatis, of the ‘New Teaching’ which was spoken of earlier. Mark is onlyreshaping a tradition for use in a flourishing Jesus-cult, and there isnothing here of a challenge to our mother wit, say in the later manner ofa James Joyce, who sets out to enslave the reader. On the surface theCalming of the Storm is a demonstration of Jesus’ power or an evidenceof his faith, but in its deeper aspect as touching on the Mystery, it is a firstcovert reference to the death and Resurrection of the Son of Man.

In Matthew’s Gospel when ‘some of the scribes and Pharisees’ask Jesus for a sign, he speaks of Jonah in a stern reply:

An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign; but no signshall be given to it except the Sign of the prophet Jonah. For asJonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, sowill the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart ofthe earth. (Matthew 12,39.)

This dark hint of death and Resurrection is myth on the face of it, surely. The condemnation of ‘an evil and adulterous generation’ is meant tocurb a hankering for ‘miracles’ among the believers for whom theseGospels were written, so the words as they stand were composed afterthe time of Jesus unless (as for Schweitzer) he forecast his ownResurrection. Luke’s Gospel speaks of the Sign of Jonah a littledifferently:

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This generation is an evil generation; it seeks a sign, but no signshall be given to it except the sign of Jonah. For as Jonahbecame a sign to the men of Nineveh, so will the Son of Man beto this generation. (Luke 11,29.)

At once we see that Luke is more spare because he says nothing of thewhale. So Matthew’s triads are missing from our literary Evangelist,probably because he takes them for granted instead of drawing out theparallel between Jonah in a whale’s belly and the Son of Man in theheart of the earth – a parallel embarrassing to modern scholars and eventhen, among Gentiles who ‘had not the Law,’ somewhat undignified. The omission has led to a long-standing confusion. From at least the timeof David Strauss our scholars have cried: ‘Away, then, with anysuperstition about the whale!’ – except that now they can’t tell us whatthe Sign of Jonah signifies.

What else could it signify? What else could it be if not whatMatthew says it is by stating it in such a distinct parallel that even a childof twelve can tell us what it means. As for the mere analogy, yes: Jesuswas crucified on Friday and rose from the dead on Easter Sundaymorning: ‘three nights’ are not required for that, but our scribal Matthew,who loves to quote prophecy, has quoted verbatim from the Septuagintthose words about Jonah to draw his rigid parallel. He keeps a naturalsequence between Jesus’ description of the Sign of Jonah and thesubsequent repentance of the men of Nineveh whereas Luke breaks thenatural sequence by inserting, first, a saying about the Queen of Shebawhich Matthew places last. Otherwise, the versions are nearly identical.

So we have in Luke a statement that ‘Jonah became a sign to themen of Nineveh’ without reference to Matthew’s whale. How did he? Was it by his preaching, or was his mere presence in the city a sign tothem? Luke draws the tacit parallel when writing: ‘as Jonah... so will theSon of Man be to this generation,’ which means, surely, in like manner asJonah, or in the same way or to the same degree or in some comparablesense. But how do we compare these two, Jonah and the Son of Man? How is Jesus in like manner a Sign to ‘this generation,’ and why to Jonahin particular?

What seems at first to be a comparison of persons melts away inJesus’ words: ‘Something greater than Jonah is here.’ We commonlytake these words much as Moffatt translates: ‘Here is One greater thanJonah.’ Or as the King James very skillfully gives: ‘A greater than Jonahis here.’ But these translations also interpret, whereas the Greek says,

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‘something.’ Or in other words, something more than simply anotherman. ‘There is more than Jonah here,’ writes Goodspeed. ‘What is hereis greater than Jonah,’ says the New English Bible. The Jerusalem Biblegives: ‘There is something greater than Jonah here.’ What possibly canthis something be? – unless of course implicitly, as Matthew frankly says,Christ’s Resurrection.

One might say that Jonah became a sign to the men of Ninevehas a preacher, I suppose as Isaiah became a sign to the men of Jerusalem,or Ezekiel to the exiles, or Amos to the men of the north country. Verywell, then, but why does Jesus compare his message of the Kingdom toJonah’s stark message: ‘Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall beoverthrown?’ If we compare these two prophets as ‘preachers ofdoom,’ is Jonah a better comparison than the prophet Isaiah? Why thisparticular choice? Evidently, the comparison is a poor one if based onmessage. Locale, then? Jonah preached in Nineveh, which was a pagancity of ‘three days’ journey in breadth.’ Jesus never set foot in a pagancity, not Tiberias on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, which hemight easily have reached on foot or by boat, nor Sepphoris, which issaid to be an ‘afternoon’s walk’ from Nazareth and is described as averitable jewel of a half-pagan city. Tyre and Sidon are mentioned inthe Gospels (as Sepphoris is not) only because Jesus visited thecountryside in those regions. As for the effect of their preaching, the menof Nineveh repented at the preaching of Jonah from the king on down:the whole city repented, whereas Jesus was crucified outside the walls ofJerusalem with a placard affixed to the cross. Very well, then, but ifcontrast is the point of comparison, then how will the sign of the Son ofMan be like unto the Sign of Jonah?

It is equally difficult to suppose that Jesus as a person, or in hismere presence, is the Sign of Jonah. Rudolf Bultmann tries to take it likethis but if so, then Jesus must say to those who are asking for a sign, ‘Theonly sign to be given to this generation is the Sign of Jonah, whichhappens to be myself and the message I preach.’ Meaning exactly whatto his hearers? The Sign of Jonah how? See what a magnitude of mythwe sacrifice for these modern evasions if Matthew’s ‘three days and threenights’ isn’t meant! I can find no grounds for comparing Jesus and theSign of Jonah except on Matthew’s basis, where the comparison ismonumental.

Now a critic of this interpretation might fairly ask if the men ofNineveh were standing by when Jonah was cast up by that monstrous

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fish? Of course, it is absurd to think so, but our fabulist is not aCambridge logician, and to demand in all seriousness how the men ofNineveh might have known of Jonah’s ‘three days and three nights in thebelly of the whale’ is to strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. We mightbetter ask why the populace repented at his preaching if they had reallyno part in his impressive wonder, which rises over his journey like theorb of the moon.

In story-telling one simple rule always holds: what has alreadyhappened in a story belongs to the momentum of the action. Cause-and-effect is the province of the moralist and fabulist long before it is aprinciple of science. Was that whole affair of howling storm andbreaking ship and the swallowing up of Jonah required just to turn him toNineveh? I think it asks for the conversion of the city. Magnitudesbalance magnitudes, and one thing follows another as the story followsits theme. In Joseph Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus, everything waitsfor the black man, finally waits for his death – and his name is JamesWait. It’s his lungs; he can’t breathe and is coughing his life away. Aviolent storm overtakes the Narcissus, a ship under sail barely surviving. Afterward, thwarting headwinds and a vast immobilizing calm arrest thevoyage until the black man’s tardy ghastly gasping death. Either onewithout the other would be less of a storm, less of a desperate calm. Breath is restored to the sails when James Wait, sewn in canvas, strikeswater in a burial at sea.

More than fiction is involved in the necessary carry-over ofJonah’s adventure to the men of Nineveh, and to see it clearly we lookonce more at the underlying myth, which we have considered above. On this level, of course, the values of the story are rather drasticallychanged. The comical aspect is suppressed or discarded as soon as thedeeper myth is recalled. Jonah’s being puked out on the beach is nocomedy to myth, where his three-day sojourn represents a hero’sstruggle with the monster of the deep. In the original myth his beingvomited out at last defeats the monster. How can he ever lose this aura? Once a hero, always a hero. Your Samson rending his young lion ‘as hewould have rent a kid’ doesn’t dwindle to an Androcles after Delilahbetrays him and his hair is shaved and he is bound in ‘fetters of brass.’ His hair will grow back again, his God will look on him with favor, and hewill live to pull down the Temple of Dagon by breaking its pillars.

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THE SYROPHOENICIAN WOMAN

The stark insistence of the primitive Evangelist is that the demonsknow at once Who Jesus is, even from afar, whereas by contrast the verydisciples cannot seem to fathom the mystery. After he calms a storm byrebuking wind and waves they ‘fear a great fear’ and ask, ‘What mannerof man is this?’ (KJV) or ‘Whatever can he be?’ (Moffatt) or ‘Who can hebe?’ (Goodspeed) – they are not entirely in the dark, but through theentire first half of this Gospel they can do no more than verge on aquestion which the demoniacs have answered in futile outcry. Ofcourse, it would be most unfitting for the revelation to be given bydemons, whose function is only to bring out the Messianic secret. Wemust await Peter’s Confession when at last Jesus will disclose the Mysteryof the Son of Man, which no demoniac has shouted aloud and whichMatthew’s Gospel speaks of under the Sign of Jonah. So when thisknowledge passes to humanity, it begins to be enlarged. Thereafter thedisciples will be admonished to silence just as hitherto the demons werealways forbidden to tell.

A step toward that pivotal moment comes when Jesus travels tothe region around Tyre and Sidon (Mark 7,24). There we read:

And he entered a house and would not have any one know it,yet he could not be hid. But immediately a woman, whose littledaughter was possessed by an unclean spirit, heard of him, andcame and fell down at his feet. (Mark 7,24.)

We may notice that his futile wish to remain hidden resembles his troublewith demoniacs, although in this case Jesus seeks only to conceal hispresence. Nor can it be unmeaning that he is discovered by a womanwhose daughter is possessed by a demon.

Now the woman was a Greek, a Syrophoenician by birth. Andshe begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.

The demoniac at the tombs, seeing Jesus from afar, came running up to‘worship’ him but here, somewhere out of sight, it is a Syrophoenicianwoman who has heard of him and comes to fall down at his feet. We arenever brought into the demon’s presence; we never meet her daughter. Before long, we cease to require the demoniac testimony, and in thisthird tale of possession we have a demon at a distance.

It may be only the case that Mark has reshaped his ‘tradition’ infashioning this tale. Realistically, this mother is under no necessity tolearn of Jesus’ visit from a daughter’s whispering demon; she may have

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heard of his fame. All this ‘could have happened,’ in other words, and itbelongs to the Markan realism that the inference is left to ourselves. Nevertheless, her entire action represents the usual stereotype of animmediate demonic perception of the Christ followed by an intrusion: ‘hecould not be hid.’ The demon (as I suppose) has perceived the nearnessof the Christ in a remote and pagan region and has uttered or mutteredthe knowledge through a daughter. A striking dialogue follows whenJesus replies:

‘Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take thechildren’s bread and throw it to the dogs.’ But she answeredhim, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs under the table eat thechildren’s crumbs.’

Shaw, by the way, loved this tale – how could he not? Jesus’ suddenrudeness is almost a Shavian touch, and the woman’s pert and wittyreply delighted the Irishman, who supposed that she had touched theheart of Jesus when he told her:

‘For this saying you may go your way. The demon has left yourdaughter.’ And she went home, and found the child lying inbed, and the demon gone.’

The demon-at-a-distance gives him none of the usual trouble; it is theSyrophoenician woman who overcomes her daughter’s ‘unclean spirit’ ina brush with Jesus, and we pass from his encounters with demons on aplane of myth to seeming legend. Yet nothing is resolved by this. Thestory is not more real than another, and once more we flip the coin ofour question to find that it lands on its edge. Thus can CG Montefiore, inhis day a leader of Reform Judaism, write of this tale:

The story is one of great beauty and charm. Whence thiswonderful attractiveness of so much of the Gospel narrative, thismarvelous combination of power and simplicity? Whence thisimpression of firstclassness, of inspiration?

His own decision is affirmative: ‘Without Jesus, no Mark.’

EPHPHATHA

We have seen how Jesus took Jairus’s daughter by the hand andsaid, ‘Talitha cumi.’ (‘Maiden, arise.’) Very different is the cure of theSyrophoenician maiden whose unclean spirit is dismissed at a distance. What counts in the latter tale is an interlocution which verges on

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epiphany, thanks to a demon in the background. In Matthew’s version,borrowing from Mark, this breaks through openly when the woman, aforeigner, addresses Jesus in Messianic terms: ‘Have mercy on me, OLord, thou Son of David!’ Mark is not quite ready to have anyone speakso openly of his identity as Christ, having a tighter control over hisMessianic secret and its step by step disclosure.

We may ask if there is any truth to the journey which broughtJesus and this woman together? Nothing else is known of any sojourn inthat region, and the return to the eastern shore of the Lake is by a rovingcircuit which makes little sense on the map. (That’s no disproof of it, ofcourse, for why should a meandering journey make sense to anyoneexcept the sojourners themselves?) It’s another journey of which theEvangelist knows nothing except for the Syrophoenician woman and, inthis case, an appended itinerary. So it is rather like Mark’s nondescriptaccount of that first tour of Galilee whose sketchiness he covered by theCleansing of the Leper. What stands out in the story next to comehappens ‘somewhere’ – we have no honest sense of place. But theMarkan story bears on theme when Jesus utters a symbolic word,‘Ephphatha!’ in course of a cure. It means, ‘Be thou opened!’ and is afurther step toward revelation. (Mark 7,33.)

Despite the absence of a definite locality, which is insofar anabsence of fact, the story impresses by its realism when a deaf man ‘whocould hardly speak’ (EV Rieu) is cured by poking and spitting, but thiscrudeness may be proof of Mark’s artistry. He counts on the credit hisreaders will bring to the story, and he knows that its crudeness will passfor an honest report of things far-off and foreign. We mislead ourselves ifwe seize on such detail as primitive fact because, in truth, everythingculminates in a symbol. The tale even ends with a moral when Jesus ispraised because ‘he maketh both the deaf to hear and the dumb tospeak.’

More carefully, then: a deaf man ‘who could hardly speak’ isbrought to Jesus with a request that he ‘lay his hands upon him’ andJesus ‘takes him aside from the multitude privately.’ Then he puts hisfingers in his ears

and he spat and touched his tongue; and looking up to Heaven,he sighed and said to him, ‘Ephphatha,’ that is, ‘Be opened.’

All is symbolic, but the bearing of the symbol is implicit. This namelessman taken somehow aside from the multitude, being deaf to the Word,

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cannot bear witness to the Christ. A cunning contrast is prepared to a‘deaf and dumb spirit’ yet to come, and this Markan double – a deaf man‘who could hardly speak’ and a ‘deaf and dumb spirit’ – serves to bracketPeter’s Confession in the sense that it belongs to a larger sort ofbracketing, a series of tales which make up the steps of this revelation,during which the testimony of the demons is discarded.

Bultmann regards this tale as a sort of exorcism because of theelaborate method used to cure the man, but where is our demon? Youcannot have an exorcism on the strength of a mere method unless youproduce a demoniac. One argues: Yes, but it is understood that inantiquity ‘demons’ were responsible for such a condition as that. This islearning misapplied. Would Bultmann care to say that the simple folk ofPalestine (or Rome) couldn’t recognize sickness as sickness or disability asdisability without discovering that a sick child or a lame relative was ademoniac? That would be absurd. Of course, one thinks of Luther andhis thunderclaps and apparitions, his devils on every rooftop, but wasLuther himself a demoniac with every attack of the gout? A hastyattribution of devilish influence is commonplace – but does one call thedoctor or the priest? Bultmann’s conscientious assumption would implythat every physician was a witch doctor in the eyes of the common folk,like those natives in Africa who thought that Dr. Schweitzer not onlycured disease but could inflict it at a distance. The argument goes almostdown to animism, much as Heinrich Schliemann discovered Troy, orthought he did, by digging right on past it to a deeper stratum.

The Gospel of Mark distinguishes between those who aredemoniacs and furnish testimony, and those who are cured of illness ordisability. When the disciples are sent out two by two, ‘they cast outmany demons, and anointed with oil many that were sick and healedthem.’ (Mark 6,13.) Simon’s mother-in-law, whose fever was ‘rebuked’in Luke but not in Mark, the leper who was touched, the paralytic letdown through the roof and cured by a word of authority, the man with awithered hand, the woman with an issue of blood, Jairus’s daughter werein no sense demoniacs; and this poor fellow, who is deaf and hardly ableto speak, cannot be made over into a demoniac by the mere descriptionof an elaborate healing method. What matter if it resemble those ofexorcists? Fingers in ears, spit on the tongue, the looking to Heaven, themandatory sigh, the magical word, ‘Ephphatha’ – yes, of course, thesemethods are veritably primitive. I wonder if Mark has used them toestablish the solid reality of his Jesus at a distance from the reader’s own

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world. One feels that he must have lived – to be such a crude fellow. Orwe may choose to read the symbol here. Jesus begins to open the earsof humanity to the Word and confers a capacity to speak it, although forMark to have anyone speak it openly just yet would be premature. Inkeeping with his stedfast theme he will have Jesus charge them ‘to tell noone’ of the cure afterwards:

but the more he charged them, the more zealously theyproclaimed it

because this is a secret that cannot be kept. As for the charge itself, we arereminded of a similar absurdity which ends the tale of Jairus’s daughter.

Elsewhere in Mark we find that Jesus requires no procedure ofany sort in working similar cures. Then either this Evangelist has naivelytranscribed such inconsistencies without an effort to iron them out, orelse, when as here he describes a realistically primitive procedure, he hashis own reasons for doing that. The principle is, that his realism serves tomake Jesus real and his details serve the symbol.

THE VEIL LIFTS

No less realistic is the healing of the blind man of Bethsaidawhich comes immediately before the story of Peter’s Confession. It isanother tale unique to Mark and resembles the cure of the deaf anddumb in its primitive technique. As moderns, we can be attracted to itsprimitive aspect and we might like to seize on its details as ‘history’ butonce again the realism here, in which a blind man recovers his visionwith some difficulty, expresses a symbolic emphasis on seeing andperceiving.

The villagers of Bethsaida bring the blind man to Jesus and begfor his touch. Again, he leads the man away out of the village, this timeafter taking his hand, of course:

And when he had spit on his eyes and laid his hands upon him,he asked him, ‘Do you see anything?’ And he looked up andsaid, ‘I see men, but they look like trees walking.’

An effective detail.

Then again he laid his hands upon his eyes; and he lookedintently and was restored, and saw everything clearly. And hesent him away to his home saying, ‘Do not even enter thevillage.’ (Mark 8,22.)

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Once more, we have a request to keep it quiet which is futileunder the circumstances, but the motif of the Messiaic secret must bekept. No less futile are those 19th century interpretations which find inthe realism of the tale record of Jesus’ practice when curing a blind man. In his remarkable book, Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology, G.Stanley Hall quotes two of the scholars who have commented on the‘second imposition of hands’ in this cure:

Perhaps, said Paulus, Jesus somehow manipulated out of his eyessome very aggravating dust or possibly some morbid growth thathad rendered vision imperfect; or, says Venturini, he maypossibly have removed a cataract with his fingernail, andperhaps he made two steps in the operation because, as weknow now, to heal too suddenly would have been dangerous.19

This might be laughable if it were less disgusting, and yet ‘science’ is atwork in these rational conjectures. Nor is the speculation worthless,considered as a possibility, except for its wrongheadedness and theunderlying naivete – Paulus and Venturini have mistaken a fable for aphotograph. In fact, we have a filmed evidence, attested by Dr.Puharich, of one (deceased) Arigo, a South American healer who usedto work in a light trance when processing patients who flocked to him. He was sometimes observed (and photographed) applying an ordinarypenknife to the eyeball for the removal of cataract. Astoundingly, as alsoshown on film, these operations were endured by patients while standingin line who gave no sign of visible discomfort under the spell of thispowerful and attractive healer.

What the example shows is that Mark did not require a Jesus forhis described techniques; he needed only his Arigo, but I don’t deny thatthis story might by a happy chance rest on preserved actual fact. Whenwe know that blindness is found in various degrees and conditions – whynot? It would be foolish to deny ancient fact if we lack the means toverify denial, but my point is a simpler one. It is to notice the unmistakableutility of this tale in the complex Markan scheme; and notice its placementcoming right before the episode in which Jesus is perceived as the Christfor the first time by the first man. Furthermore, in between this cure andthe one about the deaf and dumb, Jesus holds discussion with hisdisciples about his two feedings of the multitude saying:

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Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your heartshardened? Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do younot hear? And do you not remember?... Do you not yetunderstand? (Mark 8,17.)

It is catechesis with emphasis and drives the ‘New Teaching’ home. Ineffect, the Evangelist is reminding his readers, who are of coursebelievers, what sort of responses are expected of the faithful: Respondwith understanding to the hearing of the Word, and testify. Try to seewho Jesus is – try very hard, like the blind man who ‘looked intently... andsaw everything clearly’ after he laid his hands on him a second time.

‘THOU ART THE CHRIST!’Now Jesus passes on from Bethsaida going north to the villages

of Caesarea Philippi: And on the way he asks his disciples, ‘Who do mensay that I am?’ This is a ‘funny’ question but the reply is even stranger:

And they told him, ‘John the Baptist; and others say Elijah; andothers one of the prophets.’ (Mark 8,27.)

Why these droll parallels? It seems that he invites them by his question,which is really very odd. After all, this is a man who at one early point,‘could no longer openly enter a town’ or who is followed by a ‘multitude’when he withdraws to the sea, and yet, going by the form of his question,he seems to be asking for his name and he gets back ‘John the Baptist’ or‘Elijah’. No? It is very strange. Were he asking for comparisons – butno, because here he is identified with John the Baptist or Elijah. That is nomere comparison.

It is very clear that Jesus is not asking for his name but for hisdeeper, his hidden identity. He is not at all astonished by what the peoplesay of him, and as it happens, these very strange identities figure in anearlier Markan double after Jesus had sent out his disciples two by two:

King Herod heard of it; for Jesus’ name had become known. Some said, ‘John the baptizer has been raised from the dead;that is why these powers are at work in him.’ But others said, ‘Itis Elijah.’ And others said, ‘It is a prophet, like one of theprophets of old.’ But when Herod heard of it, he said, ‘John,whom I beheaded, has been raised.’ (Mark 6,14.)

This is nicely told. Jesus’ Name had become known, yet by the evidenceof the tale this very name has been identified with the names of other

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prophets, including Elijah, who in a popular myth was supposed to returnbefore the coming of the Messiah, or the beheaded Baptist who waslooked upon as yet another forerunner. We can’t be surprised at hearingthe disciples repeat these rumors, then, but clearly they are rumors, as theNegative critics maintain, and the sacred Name is placed among them andeven confounded with them. Technically, of course, all this is onlypreliminary to the accomplishment of Mark’s design. A weakened wall isbending and about to burst from the pressure behind it as Jesus repeatsthe question:

‘But who do you say that I am?’ Peter answered him, ‘You arethe Christ.’ And he charged them to tell no one about him.

Loisy is right to insist that this Gospel belongs to the early catechesis, or asMark would say, to the ‘new teaching’ which in reality is cultic teaching. We have here a Jesus who is asking the very question which a Christianteacher asks.

Although mythical in form, it doesn’t follow that this tale is whollyunreal, and we who are far removed from these seeming events must bemodest in describing them. We can’t say that Peter did not declare forChrist, as he may have done in circumstances like these on the road toCaesarea Philippi. All that is possible, but it is matter of belief: historyeludes us here except as it may be given in the form of myth. And in viewof the importance of this pivotal Confession, it is a fairly desiccated mythexpressed in only three or four terse lines. A writer of fiction, reaching afirst climax in a story as dense as this little Gospel’s, would hardly ‘do’ itwith this adamantine brevity. This is certainly a tradition. Here at last inthis primitive Gospel the recognition of Christ has reached humanityamong these disciples.

Once more, then, as the fable stands, it gives the tradition of aclaim which may well be the fact of Peter’s primacy in declaring for theChrist. We know of Peter (=Cephas) as first witness of the Resurrectionin Paul’s Epistles for a historical reference, but in the legends of theGospels we read of women who were first to see the Risen Christ. It isconceivable that Peter’s Confession was invented to restore his primacyas ‘first witness’ to the Messiahship of Jesus.

In Christopher Isherwood’s ‘novel’ (it is almost a novel) onRamakrishna, a Hindu mystic of the 19th century, that strangely powerfulman once asked a follower, ‘Listen, (So and So) calls “this” anincarnation of God. Can it be so? Please tell me what you think.’ And by

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“this” we are to understand a reference to himself. The answer elicited isan admiring one and Ramakrishna, after a few remarks, smiles and says,‘Well – I know nothing about it.’ We are troubled by a sense ofabsurdity here, a hint of vanity. Jesus, likewise, would betray his humanvanity by prodding his disciples for such myths and recognitions as theygive – if this were not a piece of early catechesis. As in the tale itself, theteaching is imparted by question and answer. The question is pre-determined and the answer is expected. Once the pupil has given it tothe teacher’s satisfaction, he knows thereafter what to say.

‘GET THEE BEHIND ME, SATAN!’Peter’s Confession, then, is his declaration to Jesus, ‘Thou art the

Christ!’ Apart from any question whether it happened, the tale in itself is apiece of catechesis clothed in myth. Until now the disciples have beenobtuse. They have gaped and wondered at Jesus’ miracles and theyhave failed to grasp the revelations of the demoniacs. In contrast to thedisciples’ chronic incomprehension Peter’s Confession is a ‘leap of faith.’ Like the outbursts of the demoniacs, it comes abruptly – at long last. Mark’s artistry, as I cannot overstress, is Gothic in its wondrousimaginations and crude vitality, and yet there is a shrewdness in hishandling of this tale. For when Jesus charges his disciples to ‘tell no oneabout him,’ he plainly indicates that he is Christ, and yet the Evangelist isshy of this designation and his Jesus doesn’t go on to speak of himself asthe Christ. Instead, he would open the disciple’s minds to the Mystery ofthe Son of Man which they are not in the least expecting:

The Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by theelders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, andafter three days rise again. (Mark 8,31.)

It seems a creed in contradiction to the faith. And for saying this, Petertakes him aside and begins to admonish him. Something of this disciple’sardor is shown in this bluff upbraiding of his master, but he cannot helphimself. Peter has his role to play, and there is a divine necessity in theserough chidings. Jesus is touched to the quick, and turning to see hisdisciples he rebukes Peter in words which have become proverbial:

Get thee behind me, Satan! For thou savorest not the things thatbe of God, but the things that be of men.

The New English Bible gives: ‘Away with you, Satan! You think as menthink, not as God thinks.’ Goodspeed is felicitous and ultra-modern: ‘Get

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out of my sight, you Satan! For you do not side with God but with men.’ Good translation is a rare and difficult art, and Goodspeed is a master. Jesus is not complaining of an attitude but of a misunderstanding. Hesays in effect, You savor success, triumph, reign, long life, a good name,and you imagine that Christ will bestow these gifts, but the ‘things that beof God’ are unfathomable. They have a deeper urgency and requiresacrifice. Suddenly in this Gospel the Way of the Cross appears, and thisis a Mystery in which the faithful participate as they share in the sufferingsand the Resurrection of the Son of Man.

Peter takes a set-back in this rebuke but he gains in mythicstature. By speaking aloud the secret which Jesus has always forbiddenthe demons to reveal, he himself becomes the vehicle of a Satanic influencein ironic confirmation of the truth of what he says. It is a great sign to usthat Jesus should respond like this to the ‘presence’ of Satan, but what aturn this tale has taken! The whole demoniac stereotype is transformed. We no longer need the testimony of demons because the revelation hasstruck humanity in a veritable thunderbolt. Peter is no demoniac,certainly, nor has Satan ‘entered’ him as in other later Gospels he entersJudas. On our terms this is all a metaphor, but whence the marvelouswords of Jesus? If he didn’t actually say his famous, ‘Get thee behind me,Satan!’ we have to assume that when myth arises, the anonymoustradition shows the capacity of a Shakespeare. Decidedly, it is aninspiration that Peter’s response to Christ should be marked by thestrange ambivalence of this foundational personality. Zeal andtemptation, affirmation and denial go hand in hand when, as by a passingcloud, he is overshadowed by Satanic presence.

SIMON BAR-JONAH

Matthew makes play with a sort of echo in the dialogue betweenJesus and his disciple on the way to Caesarea Philippi:

Thou art Christ.Thou art Peter.

Both names are highly symbolic, and it’s clear that for Matthew also thismoment is of crucial importance, so much so that he changes thedialogue. He is gloriously bold in having Peter say, ‘Thou art the Christ,the Son of the living God!’ whereupon Jesus responds by saying:

Blessed art thou, Simon bar-Jonah! for flesh and blood hath not

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revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in Heaven. And Isay also unto thee, That thou art Peter and upon this Rock I willbuild my church, and the Gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.(Matthew 16,17)

He is jubilant. We have here no immediate shut-down of the Messianicsecret: instead, Jesus welcomes a Revelation which flesh and bloodcannot give and bestows on Peter (in words unquoted here) the Keys ofthe Kingdom. Herewith the distinctive Markan note is lost because as Ihave just made clear, Mark with a deeper imagination has used Jesus’rebuke (‘Get behind me, you Satan!’) to validate Peter’s Confession. Matthew’s revision is more pious and respectable, but it’s ratherconventional. A pious scribe has knocked away the keystone of theMarkan structure. In failing to appreciate the role of Mark’s demoniacs,he fails to grasp the Messianic secret as a structure – and for a fact, bothMatthew and Luke, while retaining so much of the wording, mishandlethe Messianic secret because they overlook Mark’s stepwise disclosure. As Matthew retains the words, Jesus’ famous Get thee behind me, Satan! has no more reference to the demoniac theme than if a wife should sayto her husband, ‘You devil, you!’

But Matthew has other gifts to give, and despite his mishandlingof the Markan source, he has given us an invaluable primitive datum inthe form of Peter’s name: Simon bar-Jonah. If treated as a piece oftradition, this passage, mingling old and new, looks like the occasion inhistory (or in myth) when Simon the fisherman first received the highlysymbolic name of Peter. Petros in Greek resembles petra, a rock, and thismimics the Aramaic play on Kepha, a name which is also a wordmeaning rock. Our Peter, a Rock, is thus known as Kephas in the Greekof Paul, or in long-standing English usage, Cephas.

Why doesn’t the Evangelist use the Aramaic Cephas, then? Ourconventional estimate of Matthew’s Jewish quality may be a little too one-sided: it needs the wise corrective of Rabbi (Dr). Leo Baeck, which Iquote because it is much to the point. Describing ‘what is mostcharacteristic’ of this Gospel, he writes:

‘(Matthew) represents an attempt, less to offer another version ofthe Gospel, than to bring together the traditions accumulatedover a period of time, in the past and in the present, which hadformed and crystallized in different places. It is the Church,becoming conscious of its catholic task and beginning to take

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shape, that speaks here (and) which would bring together andreconcile the contradictions (of the old and the new Law, forexample.) Everything has its place in this Gospel: the earlier aswell as the later, that which has been as well as that which hasdeveloped, and therefore also both what is friendly and what ishostile to the Jews... It is the mediating Gospel and, as it were,wants to represent a harmony of the Gospels. It wants to effect abalance (but) not by melting down diversity...’20

Matthew seems to be quite conscious of doing this, too, as when Jesus,after teaching his disciples, asks them:

‘Have you understood all this?’ They said to him, ‘Yes.’ And hesaid to them, ‘Therefore every scribe who has been trained forthe Kingdom of Heaven is like a householder who brings out ofhis treasure what is new and what is old.’ (Matthew 13,51.)

If we ask, then, what is new and Catholic in Peter’s Confession, theanswer is easy. What is new is Church: it is new with respect to anyhistory of Jesus, who knew nothing of churches. However, whatconcerns us here is the Evangelist’s use of the old and original nameswhich answer to Rabbi Baeck’s belief that Matthew ‘contains in its ownway more than a little of the oldest traditions.’

Matthew’s Simon bar-Jonah is often confused with anothername, Simon, son of John, which we find a few times in the FourthGospel, although these names are quite distinct because these forms,even in the Greek, are just as different as Jonah is different from John inEnglish. I stress this because some of our linguists and lexicographers(who are normally our authorities) would identify these names – wouldtreat ‘Simon, son of Jonah’ as if it meant, ‘Simon, son of John.’ In fact,this is a most unwary surrender to the sly intention of the FourthEvangelist who gives evidence of wishing to be rid of the symbol impliedin the name bar-Jonah. For the author of the Fourth Gospel is asembarrassed by the Sign of Jonah as any modern exegete with areputation to uphold, and for the very same reason: this last, mysteriousEvangelist is far from naive. We have no mention of the Sign of Jonah inhis Gospel but instead a clumsy substitute when Jesus says openly inJerusalem, ‘Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ (John

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2,19.) After foisting this absurdity on Jesus, the Fourth Evangelistexplains that ‘he spoke of the Temple of his body.’ And there you have afootprint of the Sign of Jonah. In this manner John refuses the pretensethat Jonah’s being cast out of a whale is a prototype of the Redeemer’sResurrection (how undignified!) We are also encouraged to forget thatSimon bar-Jonah is by virtue of his name (an ancient fact) associated withthe Sign of Jonah in the only Gospel to tell us in full what the Sign of Jonahmeans.

From the perspective of the Negative argument this subtlesubstitution is an example of the way in which a primitive fact, in this casea name laden with a mythical significance, is later replaced by a pseudo-fact, namely, a pretense that Simon’s father’s name was John. Thismakes the overall myth more ‘real’ by disguising the primitive aspect of it.

THE SON OF MAN UNVEILED IN HIS REDEMPTIVE ROLE

So Jesus predicts the death and Resurrection of the Son of Manafter Peter has called him the Christ, and this represents a new turn. Aswe know, Jesus will speak of himself in this strangely impersonal manner,using a Semitic idiom for man in his common humanity. When Ezekiel iscarried in a vision to the valley of dry bones, the Spirit asks him, ‘Son ofman, can these bones live?’ He is recalled to his humanity in presence ofthe divine Spirit, whereas with Jesus it means something more:

He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer manythings and be rejected... and be killed, and after three days riseagain.

A peculiar role marks this ‘son of man’ as one who is set apart for aunique task, which is described in a myth. For even if this scene did oncehappen as described, and as Albert Schweitzer believed, Christ’s forecastanswers to the Sign of Jonah wherein the Son of Man is designated as theSign to be given. (Matthew 12,38.)

Twice more the solemn prophecy is repeated in the Markan tale,a triple emphasis to indicate the new direction which the story has taken. Henceforth we look forward to Jerusalem, and in preparing his disciplesfor his strange and tragic task, Jesus will instruct them in private. Untilnow his secret has been sealed off in the disclosures of the demoniacs,none of which were understood. Or else it was implied, as when theEvangelist would plant the Mystery of the Resurrection in a simpleParable of the Sower, not at all explicitly but as a thing to be understood.

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And now at last the Messianic secret has reached a believing humanityamong a few disciples who are at once pledged to secrecy.

Throughout the earlier half of Mark’s Gospel this secret has been,as it were, under pressure to come forth, but Mark has felt that he cannotgive it too quickly in deference to the earliest traditions – such has been thescholarly hypothesis. Now it bursts forth, despite the brevity of Peter’sConfession. For having just confided the mystery to his disciples indeepest secrecy, Jesus summons a crowd ‘out of nowhere’ to say:

If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and takeup his cross and follow me. (Mark 8,34.)

Story-telling takes second place to instruction rather nakedly here andclearly Mark is too abrupt. His Gospel has entered on its deepestChristian themes as he awakens this strange term, Son of Man, which hehad earlier used with a deliberate reserve. Do we know in fact that Jesusspoke of himself this way? Adolf Harnack somewhat cautiously believedit, although he was unwilling to point to any particular passage inevidence of that, distrusting the written record. Other scholars, lesssevere than Harnack, have also ‘believed’ it. FC Burkitt wrote, ‘When...Jesus speaks of himself as ‘the Son of Man,’ a phrase in Aramaic identicalwith ‘the Man,’ he must mean ‘the Man – you know whom I speak of.’ Burkitt takes a very strange usage for granted. Why ever would Jesusrefer to himself as the Man? Or say in effect, when anticipating his arrest,‘The Man shall be betrayed into the hands of men?’ Not at all. Rather,when Jesus speaks this way in reference to himself, he means always tojoin himself to his appointed and predestined task.

I have mentioned earlier CC Torrey’s translation of Mark 2,28:‘The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath: thereforeman is master even of the Sabbath.’ Elsewhere he will translate theidiom in full as Son of Man. The Professor foists on Jesus an attitudetoward the Mosaic Law which is impossible to square with the Sermonon the Mount. Such an attitude, which would make one’s observation ofthe Sabbath a matter of individual discretion, seems unlikely in a seriousand intelligent Jew of the time. Likewise would Professor Crossansubstitute the translation ‘Man’ for the Markan term and thus take it foran idiom. These learned minds, who represent a sort of consensus inscholarship, don’t want to burden the historical Jesus with a connectionbetween the Son of Man and the Sign of Jonah as Matthew understands it– regarding this as impossible. They do however wish to believe (as I do

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not) that Jesus spoke those very words. So Crossan in his Historical Jesuswill translate a well-known passage from Q by having Jesus say:

Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the humanbeing has nowhere to lay its head.

The human being has not? The poor people of Palestine had not whereto lay their heads? Peter had not when Jesus slept at his house? Crossanconceives of a Jesus in poverty because of his assumed renunciations, aradical Jesus who teaches his disciples to be beggars. Do the quotedwords above support that? Taken from Q they belong to an aspect of theSon of Man myth which would stress his lowliness and invite our pity. The austere demands of the Kingdom of God are tempered in theexpressions of this sympathetic Christ, for these words are not meant as adescription of Jesus’ modus vivendi. Spoken in reply to a scribe who hassaid to him, ‘Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go,’ they are areminder, the more touching for its tenderness, of what the Kingdom ofGod requires – and what it can give.

DANIEL’S VISION an Influence on the GospelAround the middle of the second century before Christ a Syrian

king by name of Antiochus IV, called Epiphanes, desecrated theJerusalem Temple by causing swine to be offered in sacrifice on an altardedicated to Zeus. We think what religion has meant to that mosttenacious of all peoples, the Jews. Three years later, to the day, aTemple purged and cleansed was reconsecrated to its proper religiousfunction under Judas Maccabaeus.

Now during the reign of this Antiochus IV the Book of Danielwas published under the pretense that it was a very ancient bookcontaining the deeds and visions of a ‘Daniel in the lion’s den’ who livedat the time of Nebuchadrezzar, but it was no such thing. In reality, thebook is ‘the first real apocalypse,’ as Robert H. Pfeiffer has called it,directed against the abuses of Antiochus Epiphanes just as the Book ofRevelation is directed against the abuses of Rome. Epiphanes figures inthe prophet’s vision symbolically, taking the absurd form of ‘a little horn’which had the eyes of a man and ‘a mouth speaking great things,’ and hisoverthrow is predicted by an angel who interprets Daniel’s vision.

So the Book of Daniel is a bold fiction whose hero is imaginary: asort of pattern book, almost, for those who would see in the Gospels amythical Jesus, although in truth, and despite the presence of an

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eschatological element in the Teachings, no scholar regards the Gospelof Mark, or any other Gospel, as an apocalypse. Daniel was designed asa deliberate artifice aimed at rousing a people’s morale – at all costs. Aprophet who could read the writing on the wall, inscribed there by adisembodied hand during Belshazzar’s feast on the night in which thatking was slain, could reliably foresee the downfall of Antiochus, once thesymbol were understood.

By far the most important vision in the book and one we haveearlier refered to is that in which Daniel one night, disturbed by dreams,sees ‘one like a son of man’ come into the presence of the ‘Ancient ofDays,’ who is a terrifying elder seated on a throne of flames. Now it isclear from the setting if we read it under instruction of good scholarshipthat this apparently human figure, ‘one like a son of man,’ represents apeople (Daniel 7,18) just as the ‘four great beasts’ in a preceding visionrepresented four kingdoms, beginning with Babylon and coming down tothe so-called Seleucids, ending with Antiochus Epiphanes. ProfessorWilliam Benjamin Smith was insofar correct in stressing the symbolicnature of the Son of Man. Once more, then, here is the key passage fromDaniel:

I saw in the night visions,and behold, with the clouds of heaventhere came one like a Son of manand he came to the Ancient of Daysand was presented before him.And to him was given dominion and glory and kingdomthat all peoples, nations, and languagesshould serve him;

Moreover, it is said of his rule that

his dominion is an everlasting dominion,which shall not pass away,and his kingdom onethat shall not be destroyed. (Daniel 7,13.)

The visionary figures of the Bible are not terribly fixed. Do we not havein this vision the true original of the later Christian idea of Jesus coming asa Judge on clouds of heaven? And in the vision of the Ancient of Dayswe discover certain of his features which have been transferred to theSon of Man depicted in the Book of Revelation:

Then I turned to see the Voice that was speaking to me, and on

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turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of thelampstands one like a Son of man clothed with a long robe andwith a golden girdle round his breast. His head and his hair werewhite as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame offire... (Revelation 1,12.)

Compare Daniel 7,9:

As I looked, thrones were placedAnd one that was Ancient of Days took his seat.His raiment was white as snow,and the hair of his head like pure wool.His throne was fiery flames,

its wheels were burning fire...

The ‘monstrous’ image of Christ in the opening of Revelation is meant torecall the earlier Apocalypse, and the borrowing is unashamed. Yetsomething is missing in these extravagant Heavenly visions and mythswhen applied to Jesus as we find him in the Gospels. His humanlowliness is missing, that sense of earthly pilgrimage conveyed in wordswe have quoted above:

Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son ofMan hath not where to lay his head. (Luke 9,58.)

This is also rather mythical, as it seems to me: it is the aspect of Jesuswhich Santayana had in mind when he called him a ‘pilgrim god.’ Nevertheless, the Gospel tale has been fed by the idea of a human lifeassociated with a thousandfold particulars and a most distinctivecharacter. Now if the Negative critics be right, then we have in theGospels an original myth in which the imagination of a glorious HeavenlySon of Man (in Daniel and Enoch) has been transformed into an earthlyJesus who hungers and thirsts, teaches in parables, gives his Sermon onthe Mount, rebukes the hypocrisy of established religious dignitaries(‘whited sepulchers’) and suffers abuse, is arrested, hauled before theSanhedrin, hauled before Pilate, and then crucified. All that stubbornand pervasive historical invention on the basis of Daniel’s fantastic vision! Whereas on the usual view the process has gone in the oppositedirection and a supernatural Son of Man myth has been attached to ahistorical figure. Certainly, the visible process in the Gospels goes theother way: it is a human Jesus on his way to the villages of CaesareaPhilippi who is visibly transformed into a Supernatural Being in a visionwitnessed by Peter, James and John. We understand this vision to be

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also, unquestionably, a myth, but it seems to be set amid the legends andteachings of a man who once lived. We have no further interest in themeaning of the Son of Man, having now covered the myth. We turn tothe Transfiguration of Jesus in turning on this Gospel’s pivot.

THE TRANSFIGURATION, or Jesus seen in his GloryIt is the later Evangelists who give us tales of Jesus’ birth, not

Mark, but what are these tales? Are they legends? For if Matthew’s talemay reflect a solar myth, yet because it is set amid historicalcircumstances (Magi arrive at Jerusalem, seek audience with Herod,learn of Bethlehem as the place of birth) we may call it a legend. Whenthe wonder of a tale is encased like this in knowable circumstance, wespeak of legend in no technical sense, but in the usual way ofdistinguishing legends and myth.

Certainly, the Gospel is shot through with streaks of myth, aswhen a Voice from Heaven addresses Jesus at his baptism, for example,but on the whole these Gospel tales, these seeming traditions, sifted andpondered by learned minds, have been judged to be legends, and so theyhave mostly seemed to us in this book. We haven’t been required by anyevidence so far to accept the Negative viewpoint even as we consider itspossibility and allow that we cannot refute it.

Myth outright, pure and simple, we have encountered only in theTemptation tryptich of Matthew and Luke where in a nameless desertJesus met with Satan and withstood his temptations. That sort of thingwe are calling a myth in the ordinary sense of the word because itbelongs to another sphere: to a desert in which the Son of God can meetthe Prince of Darkness. Whereas legends by contrast belong to thepresent world and seem adornments or exaggerations of real events. Ofcourse, we also know of myth in a deeper sense, as a scholar will use theterm for the structure of the Gospel tale, a structure called kerygma (or‘proclamation’) and reflecting the fixed content of the earliest preachingdescribed in the Book of Acts. In this peculiar sense, the myth does notrefer to events which are unreal, but to an idea which lies beyond thereach of history: the myth is one of prophecy and its fulfillment whichunderlies the Gospel tale.

Now bearing the common distinction in mind and with anawareness of its limitation, I say that the Transfiguration of Christ is theone other tale in the Gospels, besides his Temptation, which ought to be

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regarded as myth outright, pure and simple. But is it really so? Have Inot myself described the Calming of the Storm as a myth, and perhapsused this term in one or two other places? And what of the Resurrectionof Christ? It is surely a myth, and the supreme myth of all: but it isnonetheless (I say) Resurrection which is myth and not the severalResurrection tales which are very plainly legends. One and all, theselatter tales are set within known circumstance and natural fact, givingevery appearance of association with real events associated with thePassover season in old Jerusalem when Jesus perished. No suchhistorical circumstance, no such definite place or time, can we associatewith the Transfiguration, as Mark is well aware.

After six days Jesus took with him Peter and James and John,and led them up a high mountain apart by themselves; and hewas transfigured before them, and his garments becameglistening, intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleachthem. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses; and theywere talking to Jesus. (Mark 9,2.)

A week has passed since Peter’s legendary Confession, and now, as if hemeant to provide it Sunday to Sunday, Mark has given us the scene of awitnessed Revelation, and the only such scene in his Gospel. Its purpose isto set forth the worth of Jesus and show his rank among the prophets inconfirmation of Peter’s Confession. For we make an acute distinctionbetween a Confession in which the Revelation is implicit and thesubsequent Transfiguration of Christ, in which the glory of the Son ofGod is revealed.

And Peter said to Jesus, ‘Master, it is well that we are here; let usmake three booths, one for you and one for Moses and one forElijah.’ For he did not know what to say, for they wereexceedingly afraid. And a cloud overshadowed them, and avoice came out of the cloud, ‘This is my beloved Son; listen tohim.’ And suddenly looking around they no longer saw anyonewith them but Jesus only.

We have a unique interlocking of the Heavenly and earthly inthis scene, and we notice once again how the motif of the Markanfoursome reappears in another form when Peter, who belongs to thesphere of the world, intrudes upon the vision (3 + 1). For Jesus isrevealed as a Heavenly Being in this vision conversing with Moses andElijah. In Luke’s account ‘the fashion of his countenance was altered’and in Matthew ‘his face did shine as the sun.’ Despite his inaptness for

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the Heavenly sphere, Peter intrudes upon the beatitude of Jesus with anabsurd proposal to build booths for the Three.

Except for Peter’s strange intrusion, this metamorphosis of Jesusallows of no intercourse between the Heavenly Three and the favoreddisciples, just as in paintings of the scene the Heavenly Three areenclosed in clouds or circles, safely sealed off from any contamination ofthe lowly mundane. However, with James and John we make a second,lower foursome consisting of three very earthly disciples incompanionship with a revealed Son of God. Mark’s handling of the Sonof Man theme combines the lowly human and the glorious divine, but theglory of the Transfiguration reminds us a little of the Son of Man’sappearance in Daniel.

Various features of this vision have been influenced by a myth ofMoses when receiving the Ten Commandments , a fact which RudolfBultmann would have us ignore. He is the one theologian of his day whospoke most candidly of Gospel myth when urging that it could be got ridof, so that only its essence should be required of the faith of modern manand not the myth itself. And he was right enough in having believed thatthe spirit of the Gospel counts above all else in that regard, rather thanour having to believe impossible things.

Once again, it is a question of embarrassment. Bultmann wantedto deliver us from that by paring away the Gospel’s myth to reach anessential message which he was never able to describe. I suppose in hisown mind this imaginary essence might have resembled that ‘Pure Being’which Professor Heidegger used to lecture on, and no doubt with a stresson the importance of one’s having an authentic Dasein = more literally,‘existence.’

I am no fundamentalist, but all of this means to me thatBultmann was lost in the woods, theologically. Get rid of the myth whichhas expressed and conveyed the Gospel? Get rid of the only Expressionwhich the Gospel has to find another for something else which the Gospelreminds you of? That’s like getting rid of the wolf that ate Little RedRidinghood’s grandmother while keeping an essence of the tale, which inRollo May’s opinion has something to do with a girl’s menstruation. Mybelief is that if a unique and final Revelation was ever conveyed by thismyth, you ought to preach it. There is no need to demythologize theGospel on behalf of modern man, who can be taught to understand themeaning of things, including symbolic and metaphorical things.

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Bultmann would deny the influence of Exodus in shaping thisTransfiguration vision because he wants to regard it as a displacedResurrection tale, basing this on a primitive Christian tale discovered on afragment of Egyptian papyrus. For if he could have traced theTransfiguration of Jesus to a corpus of Resurrection tales, he couldcontinue to assume on his own grounds (as he did assume) that therewas something real behind it. An experience, no doubt. TheResurrection tales, as I have said, are presented as legends, one and all. And theologians like Bultmann have believed, if not quite seriously inResurrection, at least in something called ‘a Resurrection experience,’which enables them to hold to the appearance of belief.

It is evident that the Transfiguration myth was ‘late’ in arisingbecause ‘as they were coming down the mountain, (Jesus) chargedthem to tell no one what they had seen, until the Son of Man should haverisen from the dead.’ This is Dr. Bultmann’s point respecting Resurrection,but there are other things to be considered also. Let me emphasize thosethings in the express words of the tale for a comparison with Exodus.

After six days Jesus taking along Peter and James and John wentup ‘a high mountain apart’ and was ‘transfigured before them.’ Elijah and Moses appear and converse with Jesus – we learnnothing of that high converse except in Luke, later on. A cloudovershadows them, a Voice from the cloud: ‘This is ‘my BelovedSon.’

It does seem likely that the author of this pericope was thinking of theascent of Moses on Sinai, as CG Montefiore has suggested. (Exodus 24,12-18.)

(a) Moses was on Sinai for six days.(b) He took Joshua along. I underline the name of Peter herebecause he alone figures in the vision.(c) They went up a high mountain apart, namely, Sinai, leavinginstructions to the elders and Aaron below.(d) The pair of Moses and Joshua resemble the pairing of Mosesand Elijah who appear to Jesus on the mount, and as I say, alsothe ‘pairing’ of Jesus and Peter in the sense suggested above.(e) A cloud overshadowed Sinai (for the six daysaforementioned).(f) On the seventh day God, or his Voice called from the cloud toMoses.

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Here are six points of comparison, and if these parallels are inexact, praytell, where in the New Testament citations of prophecy and other echoesof the Old are they exact? Mark is too inventive to make a passiveparallel and thrusts Peter into the role of a bungler here. It is a well-known story motif that a hero will be off-set by his companion. Inpopular American folklore, the Lone Ranger is offset by Tonto, Batmanby Robin, Popeye by Wimpy, Superman by his own alter ego, Clark Kent. (I might even mention the comical reversal of this convention in DonQuixote if only I had read that novel). And Brother Lawrence is thebungling sidekick of Francis of Assisi in the Little Flowers. A point to beestablished by these reminders is that Peter, who seems quite real tochurch-goers because preachers love to dwell on his human fraility, is alegendary figure. In Matthew he will walk on water, in Acts cure ahopeless cripple and raise the dead, and fantastically enough, inpresence of Moses and Elijah, this Galilean fisherman recognizes theHeavenly Pair without so much as an introduction. How so? It’s absurdto suppose that Moses stood there with the Tables of the Law in his armsor that Elijah’s fiery chariot was off smoking in the distance; nor wouldJesus in his ‘glistering’ garments and rapt in converse with these visitorsfrom Heaven turn aside from his exalted interview to explain things as asocial courtesy to three astonished fishermen. Really, Jesus is not anactor at the nub of the story but a transfigured Subject or Being: and wedo well to remind ourselves that our English word, transfiguration, ismetamorphosis in Greek. It is really the tableau which gives the crucialmessage, the assembling of a transfigured Jesus with Moses and Elijahbefore these three disciples. As for the word spoken out of a cloud, it onlyrepeats what we heard at his Baptism.

THE LAST DEMONIAC A LITTLE BOY

All along, Mark has been telling us that Jesus cast out demons,one after another, and what he means to say by these reiterations is onlythat the Kingdom arrives when Jesus arrives. If we find nothingincredible in demons as a conceivable rare phenomenon, it is becausethe mind in its pathology may resemble the old demoniacal possession.

So this tradition of Jesus curing demoniacs reflects an old belief,as I have said before. And Mark works over these traditions with astrong sense of appropriation and a vigorous originality, never hesitatingto invent things which he believes to be appropriate to the faith.

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Demons are assigned to Jesus’ world, which Mark believes in firmlyenough but remotely because it is already far away. It would be much tosay that he believes in demons quite as he portrays them, and hishandling of these tales is enough to show us that. He manipulates hisdemoniacs, working like an artist to create his effect, and now, directlyafter a Transfiguration, he will show us a final case in which Jesus expelsa little boy’s unclean spirit, which is described as deaf and dumb.

With his three favorites, he descends the mountain to rejoin theother disciples, who are quarreling with a few scribes in the midst of anexcited crowd. ‘Immediately,’ says Mark, ‘all the crowd, when they sawhim, were greatly amazed and ran up to him and greeted him.’ See howthe stereotype recurs one step farther along. Earlier it was thedemoniacs who responded to Jesus’ presence with amazement; now it isthe crowd who are amazed to see him. I have mentioned before thedistinguished name of CC Torrey, late of Yale, who believed that ourGreek Gospels were inferior translations of well-written and much earlierAramaic Gospels of which no fragments remain. Torrey’s was an effortto place the lost originals very close to Jesus in defiance of the usual viewof scholars, and with respect to the amazement of the crowd here at themere sight of Jesus, he substitutes the word excitement, drawing on theAramaic which he supplies. The crowd is ‘excited’ over a boy whoseconvulsions the disciples couldn’t cure. Such is Professor Torrey’splausible theory, but my own view is that this amazement has beentransferred to the crowd by the Evangelist, who is preparing to abandonhis demoniac theme.

When Jesus inquires of the reason for the argument, one of thecrowd replies:

‘Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a dumb spirit, andwhenever it seizes him, it dashes him down; and he foams andgrinds his teeth and becomes rigid; and I asked your disciples tocast it out, and they were not able.’ (Mark 9,17)

A dumb spirit? Mark has described a case of epilepsy without giving it aname, although Matthew in copying this tale calls it epilepsy. That is, heuses a word meaning ‘moon-struck,’ which names the disease, just as if hehad called it the ‘falling sickness.’ Moon-struck in our sense the boy isnot, and we may be sure that Matthew had no more intention ofascribing his epilepsy to a malignant moon than Hippocrates would havedone in presence of a seizure like that. Thus he names the disease and inkeeping with Mark’s story motif, he ascribes it to a demon. It is hardly to

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be doubted, then, that these Evangelists do both recognize a distinctionbetween illness and demoniac possession because elsewhere in his talesMark makes that distinction. Who will doubt that either one of themwhen falling ill would have summoned the local Hippocrates rather thanan exorcist? Of course, I don’t mean at all that he wouldn’t avail himselfof prayer or call in the elders of the church (James 5,14), but he knowsthe sharp difference between illness and possession, and the epilepticboy he uses for a purpose.

When Jesus thus learns from the boy’s father of his disciples’incapacity to heal, he almost gives himself away:

‘O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How longam I to bear with you? Bring him to me.’

They are almost the words of a god, and they point back to his conversewith Moses and Elijah, as if he longs for that beatitude. The Son of Man isweary of humanity and its lack of faith, and yet Mark imparts a humanvigor to the words which makes them convincing in their setting. It isone of the several fine touches in this earliest Gospel that make thepersonality of Jesus impressive.

And they brought the boy to him; and when the spirit saw him,immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground androlled about, foaming at the mouth.

The spirit isn’t stupid, merely dumb, and it has recognized the Christ. Sovividly has Mark told his tale that it makes him seem an eye-witness. Weoverhear even the incidental remarks which pass between Jesus and thefather of the boy:

‘How long has he had this?’‘From childhood. And it has often cast him into the fire and intothe water, to destroy him; but if you can do anything, have pityon us and help us.’‘If you can! All things are possible to him who believes.’‘I believe! Help my unbelief!’

Artistically, it is very well done. Jesus’ humanity is expressed amid theserevelations as that of a right virile fellow, but notice that belief is suddenlyin question here because Mark is addressing the reader in these tales. Jesus then adjures the demon:

You deaf and dumb spirit, I command you, come out of him, andnever enter him again.

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Such words serve a double purpose. After a wordless outcry when‘convulsing him terribly,’ the unclean spirit abandons the boy and Markabandons the demoniac theme, having achieved his aim. Henceforth,except for passing mention of a stranger who was casting out demons ‘inJesus’ Name’ (!) the theme is dropped, and in a Gospel so crowded withdemons initially, we don’t meet with another. The Messianic secret hasentered on a new phase. In private, Jesus prepares his disciples for thedeath and Resurrection awaiting the Son of Man.

As for the boy, who lay like a corpse afterward, Jesus takes himby the hand and lifts him up ‘and he arose.’ We have learned to believein his touch, and here we believe in his power to revive. Whoever failsto see that this raising prefigures Resurrection has misunderstood thehigh symbolic value of the tale for Mark and for his earliest readers andinterpreters.

THE PARABLE OF THE UNCLEAN SPIRIT

In only one of his parables does Jesus speak of unclean and evilspirits apart from any metaphors struck off in the Beelzebub controversy,and the later Synoptists have placed it close to that controversy, probablybecause they found these things together in Q. It is a memorable parablebut lacking in Mark, despite his obsessive concern with demons anddemoniacs. How so? Is it because he was unacquainted with Q? (Wedon’t know that). Or is it because he didn’t find it useful? Here is theparable:

When the unclean spirit has gone out of a man, he passesthrough waterless places seeking rest, but he finds none. Thenhe says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ Andwhen he comes he finds it empty, swept and put in order. Thenhe goes and brings with him seven other spirits more evil thanhimself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of thatman becomes worse than the first. (Matthew 12,43 Luke11,24.)

We are reminded of the lessons of experience, but what a contrast to thedemons of Mark who tremble at the sight of Jesus and call out his name! The vagrant spirit of the parable ‘has gone out of a man’ – we know notwhy – to wander in the wastes. Its departure seems voluntary until weask for the meaning of the tale because evidently the man had got rid of ithimself, or had simply awakened one day to find himself free of it – for

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the time being. And free of what, exactly? The returning spirit is out ofsight because of course there is no demoniac in view and none to bethought of: the very spirit thinks only of his house which he was pleasedto find ‘empty, swept and put in order,’ and if we believe in its ominousreturn with a crowd of other spirits, it is because we have inferred someconsequence of degradation or evil habit. We know what such relapsesmean, and as I say, demoniacs are not to be thought of here. Exorcism isirrelevant to this parable because it has to do with watchfulness, self-care,and the urgent preservation of any ‘new life’ which may have started upwithin us – lest we lose it and relapse to a worse state than before. William James’s homely analogy in his chapter on Habit is to thedropping of a ball of yarn we might have been winding up, carefullyround and round. Away it rolls and a good deal of winding has to bedone over again.

In a word, the parable is symbolic. It knows that apart frommadness or outright possession our demons exist as habit, weakness, evilinclination and the like, but they are not the tangible spirits conceived ofin the old belief, where in the scheme of the primitive Gospel theyillustrate the meaning of the Messianic secret. These metaphoricaldemons of ours know only what we know or what we may remainunconscious of within ourselves.

The lucid quality of this parable implies a Teacher who has (itseems) cast off the old belief, and we ask ourselves: Is this the voice ofJesus? For the parable when understood leaves us wary of relapsesrather than fearful of demons, whereas the earliest Evangelist gives us aJesus who is so solidly historical that he shares the superstitions of his age. And we respect this in Mark. If nothing else, we feel the Gothic force ofthis author despite his manipulated demoniacs. After all, he has only histraditions to go by: he must invent. Whatever actual traffic withdemoniacs the ‘Jesus of history’ may have had we know only byinference. Clashes of some sort are supposable but the cited parablepoints beyond the rude superstition of the demoniac tales as the Teacheraddresses our natural good sense. Unlike the Apostle Paul, with hisemphasis on sin and grace, Jesus never addresses men as if they couldnot.

BLIND BARTIMAEUS

The cure of Blind Bartimaeus just before the Entry intoJerusalem is another of Mark’s double tales, and one designed to recall

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the blind man of Bethsaida (‘I see men as trees walking.’) We go frombeta to beta in bringing this double together and pass from a blind manremembered only by his place to one whose very name is doubled bymention of his father because of course bar-Timaeus names the father. These are hardly accidents of ‘fact’ which have survived some forty yearsof Oral Tradition: they are pointed literary contrasts. Of two menreceiving insight into the Mystery of Christ, Bartimaeus is the moreadvanced and he will shortly prove to be the very type of a perfectdisciple. The Messianic secret is far more open to Bartimaeus than it wasto the groping blind man of Bethsaida, whom Jesus had to lead by handaway from the crowd and cure twice by his primitive methods. Story-telling is at issue here, not a record of two historical events made intolegends. For in the Markan development, it is really as if the secret hasbegun to leak out, despite all Jesus’ stress on privacy as he instructs thedisciples in the Mystery of the Son of Man.

We meet Bartimaeus near the end of the journey to Jerusalem. Let’s use Goodspeed’s elegantly ‘mod’ translation of this story:

And they came to Jericho. As he was leaving town with hisdisciples and a great crowd, Timaeus’ son Bartimaeus, a blindbeggar, was sitting at the roadside. When he heard that it wasJesus of Nazareth he began to cry out, ‘Jesus, you Son of David,take pity on me!’Many of the people rebuked him and told him to be still. But hecried out all the louder, ‘You Son of David, take pity on me!’Jesus stopped and said, ‘Call him here.’And they called the blind man and said to him, ‘Courage now! Get up, he is calling you!’ And he threw off his coat and sprangto his feet and went up to Jesus. Jesus spoke to him and said,‘What do you want me to do for you?’The blind man said to him, ‘Master, let me regain my sight!’Jesus said to him, ‘Go your way. Your faith has cured you.’And he immediately regained his sight and followed Jesus alongthe road. (Mark 10,46.)

So then, a blind beggar sitting outside Jericho hears from thecrowd that ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ is passing by. At once he begins to cry outand say, ‘Jesus, you Son of David, have mercy on me!’ – and at once thepoint is made because this is immediately a Messianic term. Why is it thatan expert may stumble here when we, who do not groan beneath aweight of learning, find the matter simple and clear? On the strength of a

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theory Albert Schweitzer denies that the blind man was calling to Jesus. Our nimble Bartimaeus is for him a figure of history and he only wishes todeny that a beggar-in-a-crowd could possibly hail Jesus by a Messianicdesignation. His whole endeavor is for fact. We are to trust ourcorrectible Gospel for its load of data as long as we know the boundariesof possibility. It is a wonderful approach to exegesis: we can know how itmust have been before the Evangelist dare tell us how it was. Andwhatever does Albert Schweitzer make of the very words which thisblind beggar had cried aloud? He was praying!

Wrede also blunders here when he denies against all evidencethat the words, thou Son of David, are Messianic, and that is absurd. Isuppose if pressed the good professor might have replied, ‘Oh, well, yes. Generally, yes, this epithet is Messianic, but not here, not as if there wasany broaching of the Messianic secret!’ He defends his position by anartificial distinction between a transcendent secret involving demons anda lower sort of knowledge. Mark makes no such distinction, and if wemiss the intended reference here, we overlook the shrewdness of theMarkan scheme. For the Messianic secret is giving way. We haveconsidered how the Syrophoenician woman whose daughter waspossessed of a demon knew immediately the whereabouts of Jesus whenhe was hidden in a house and wished to be left alone. The tale movesbeyond outright demoniac recognitions to an implication that some sortof demoniac muttering had given the secret away. The Gestalt is self-evident, and outside the gates of Jericho we meet another version of it. Only, see it, please! As soon as Bartimaeus calls for mercy crying, ‘Jesus,thou Son of David!’ the crowd will try to shut him up:

‘And many charged him that he should hold his peace: but hecried the more a great deal, Thou Son of David, have mercy onme.’ (10,48.)

The Messianic secret is declared very loudly by a blind beggar,just as the demons used to declare it; and the crowd takes over thefunction of Jesus, who no longer tries to silence this disclosure: ‘Many ofthe people rebuked him and told him to be still.’ One has to concede,certainly, that Son of David is not so openly a Messianic designation as ifthe beggar had called him the Christ. It is more of a wish, more muted,in that sense, and yet when Jesus pauses to say, ‘Call him here,’ he hasresponded to this muted attestation, and in the next action described, hewill enter Jerusalem to open and extraordinary Messianic acclaim whenthe very crowd will cry: ‘Hosanna! Blessed be the Kingdom of our father

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David that is coming!’

Those who are inclined to side with Schweitzer may ask ifBartimaeus can have been really blind if ‘he threw off his coat and sprangto his feet and went up to Jesus?’ This doubt appeals to the realistsamong us but it belongs to a type of misconceived biblical interpretationwhich would degrade the meaning of a tale in hopes of squeezing out asolid fact. Again and again we have seen it, have we not? All suchinterpetations, and they are legion, evade the myth. Many of them areplausible but they sprawl. Eventually it dawns on us that our oneprimitive fact is not the thing we guess at but the Gospel in hand.

PART THREE

ENTRY OF CHRIST INTO JERUSALEM

Although Mark’s narrative is naive, his story is well told. Christhas drawn near Jerusalem for the first time in his prophetic career. Hesends two disciples into a village nearby where (and we quote the quaintKing James) ‘Ye shall find a colt tied, whereon never man sat. Loose himand bring him.’ Need we emphasize the Evangelist’s intention todescribe his miraculous foreknowledge? Or is the distinguishedGoodspeed right in supposing that ‘Jesus has secretly prepared for histriumphal Entry,’ a theory that preserves the realism of the detail? Certainly the touch about ‘a colt whereon never man sat’ is an evidenceof myth because a longed-for King enters Zion

lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass

in the vision of the Prophet Zechariah (9,9). Sacred use requires of thebeast an innocence in proof of its fitness for the occasion. A cripplecannot be a priest by the laws of Leviticus, and a lamb devoted tosacrifice must be taken from the best among the flock. Among the fire-worshiping Persians, the very fire must be purified in rituals of re-ignition,and if this much even the Gentiles do in their service to God, will theChildren of Promise place the Messiah on any old nag?

Now Mark makes short work of the Entry proper when he writes:

They brought the colt to Jesus and threw their garments on it,and he sat upon it. And many spread their garments on theroad, and others spread leafy branches which they had cut fromthe fields. And those who went before and those who followedcried out, ‘Hosanna! Blessed be he who comes in the name of

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the Lord! Blessed be the Kingdom of our father David that iscoming! Hosanna in the highest!’ ( Mark 11,7.)

The Negative argument is that this is a myth which fulfills the vision ofZechariah, and we have reason enough to doubt that Mark knewanything at first hand of the event he reports when we see how muchattention is given to the detail of the clairvoyant procuring of an ass. Wasthat a preparation for what is immediately a spontaneous demonstration? Or has the Evangelist shrewdly diverted us from the poverty of hisresources? Given the oracles of Zechariah,

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter ofJerusalem! Lo, your King comes to you; triumphant andvictorious is he, humble and riding on an ass (9,9.)

we have a motive for myth as well as an opportune suggestion, and for afact there are several details in the Passion story which are foreshadowedin Zechariah. Moreover, the case for myth is strengthened as we bear inmind that the Entry of Jesus into Jerusalem is invariably the Palm Sundayliturgy.

Our legend, which is somewhat loosely packed with ‘filler,’ doesnonetheless in lumps of bare assertion make its claim on history, and ifthat claim cannot be made good in any sense: if Gospel legend is dubiousas such, we lose the distinctness of the offered fact (assuming fact) inblurring the tale. A vaguely remembered Jesus is not especially worthknowing. If merely indistinct, why should we care more for Jesus thanfor Zeno of Citium or Pythagoras? If the tradition lacks its edge, there isno distinctiveness in its truth. Can we say nothing for the legend on itspositive side? Or does the implied claim of fact carry us no further than aquestion? It isn’t fragments we arrive at in our discriminating study,whether of myth or history, because each single reference is in referenceto the whole Gospel. Touch myth and extend it, touch history andextend that. I mean: we extend the reach of one or the other at themerest touch by a sort of surmise. These two are interpenetrated andinseparable as we see in the Entry tale where the implied claim is at oncehistorical and Messianic, intertwined.

Our view of the Markan fact here is a test case, therefore. Nowhere else in the Gospels is the claim of historical fact intrinsicallystronger than here: not for the Sermon on the Mount or the Visit toNazareth or Peter’s Confession or the Journey through Samaria. I say,intrinsically because the Baptism of Jesus or his crucifixion ‘under Pontius

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Pilate’ connects his tale with known historical figures. Alone of Gospeltales the Entry of Jesus must be classed with these external facts ofBaptism and crucifixion on the strength of its specific claim and itsdefinite location. We know it occurred during Passover season at thegates of Jerusalem, and we know it for an event of high significance. Andof course it is connected to the week in which this prophet perished. Otherwise, the many legends of the Gospels are never so honestlyconnected to time and place. But whereas Jesus’ Baptism rests on therough-clad Baptist for its historical link and the crucifixion recalls aPontius Pilate who is remembered by Josephus and others, the Entry intoJerusalem has no footing in known history outside the very legend.

It is extraordinarily bold in this respect, but its association withritual is troubling because ritual belongs to cult and we know how theseancient cults could furnish idols and apparitions, tales and parades forthe gods. Cults love ritual and your liturgy is a fine way of pretending. Just the other day I saw a photo of a miniature Celtic cult wagon cast inbronze which was found somewhere in Austria and is dated to theseventh century before Christ. Around the platform of a four-wheeledchariot stand warriors and priestly attendants. A goddess of giantstrength upholds a votive vessel amidst her retinue. Altogether the sceneis one of parade: it is handsomely executed. If not as superb as the bestof the Viking bronzes, it goes beyond the crude work of the early MiddleAges. Six hundred years before the time of Christ we have thuspreserved in bronze a pagan ritual enactment in which a mythical dramabecomes real, becomes ‘history’ in the eyes of townsfolk or worshipersbefore whom the ritual is played. It is not surprising that the Negativeargument will see in the Entry of Christ into Jerusalem just that same sortof thing.

Yet the Gospel tale in its brevity does not suggest a god or even adivine figure but a man: Jesus mounts the unridden colt and a shout goesup. Those of his retinue who stroll around the jogging beast cry out witha certain easy Oriental exuberance to the astonished pilgrims streaminginto the city:

‘Hosanna! Blessed be the Kingdom of our father David that iscoming!’

In truth, this could be liturgical also. It is like the moment in a Polish‘Oberammergau’ when the Christus rides out of a rural chapel seated ona donkey and someone of the crowd will shout aloud: There goes Christ! Only, in the legend given by Mark the cry of Hosanna! is raised and

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‘Hosanna’ is an appeal to the king for help: Eastern kings in ancient timewere Messiahs or sacred or in Babylon or Egypt outright gods, and eventhe Caesars borrowed the pretence of divinity with a certain irony, Isuppose. Hosanna! A public recognition of Jesus as Messiah is shown inthe acclamation when ‘many spread their garments in the way: andothers cut down branches off the trees, and strawed them in the way.’ They did that because they were welcoming their King to Zion accordingto the legend.

We bring the scene to mind without knowing what happened indetail. Whether Jesus jumped on the colt or was ceremoniously liftedonto its back, whether the unridden beast pranced excitedly and had tobe tamed by a lordly manner – all that sort of thing belongs to guesswork. Unless such speculative detail is handled by a gifted artist who happensalso to be a scholar (such a writer was Ernest Renan) mere Hollywood isthe result because we have only imagined ourselves at the scene, as ifthat had been preserved in traditions. The scene has not been preserved:it is imagined.

Our sense that the legend grew out of particulars of this lifereflects the credit we tend to accord the Gospels, but it is the given legendwhich creates our sense of Jesus’ distinctiveness and individuality. I don’tmean by this that the legend carries no fact because it is our belief that itdoes, but whatever there may be of fact in the legend is available to us inthe legend as given: not otherwise. We cannot pluck facts from legend aswe pick an apple from a tree: We take the ‘apple’ by accepting the tree.A good legend is good for that, but of course it all rests on belief. Andthe grand consideration remains that the insecurity of our knowledge ofJesus in history is set over against the Express Legend and its richportrayal of the Galilean Messiah.

Mark’s spare account of the Entry has been elaborated by thecopying Synoptists who drew from their imaginations. Matthew gives thequestion of the hour when a stirred city is roused to ask, ‘Who is this?’and reply is given: ‘This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee.’(Matthew 21,11.) A simple enough answer, it seems historical incharacter. Matthew is describing his own understanding of how peoplesaw Jesus on that occasion. It is very Jewish and is not, as such,supernatural. Thus has the very tradition understood Jesusretrospectively although Matthew, writing half a century afterwards, hadno idea who said what on that occasion except for knowing what theoccasion required.

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Then Luke, who is especially fond of legend, brings Pharisees intothe scene where they serve him as puppets. After the crowd’s joyous cryof Hosanna! they bid Jesus, ‘Teacher, rebuke your disciples!’ and heanswers by saying, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones wouldcry out.’ Brave, poignant words in season! For what the Gospel thusexpresses (and the liturgy) is the spiritual elevation of this modest Christ,and his deserving of the tribute, and that’s Luke’s intention. What theremay be of precise fact in these details we cannot know. All has beenwritten by inspiration and this shows rather beautifully how the laterSynoptists have added to Mark’s simpler account.

And then, as written only in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus wept overJerusalem saying, ‘Would that even today you knew the things that makefor peace!’ The whole Passion of Christ is foreshadowed in these inspiredtouches, but retrospective prophecy is at work when the Third Evangelistsupplies a dreadful forecast of the siege of Jerusalem:

The days shall come upon you when your enemies will cast up abank about you and... dash you to the ground, you and yourchildren within you. (Luke 19,43.)

The prophecy had been fulfilled long years before the Evangelistcomposed this scene. It is artistry that is at work when the sorrows ofChrist are set in contrast to the looming destruction of the Holy City. What is more fitting than a forecast of this awful doom uttered by arejected Messiah?

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning thosewho are sent to you! How often would I have gathered yourchildren together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings,and you would not! (Matthew 23,37 Luke 13,34.)

This would imply a good many endeavors on his part to ‘gather thechildren’ of Jerusalem over the years, whereas our scholars suppose thathis ministry was brief: a matter of months instead of years. Bultmannthinks the words of this Lament are drawn from a myth of Wisdom whofigures as a goddess in the Apocrypha, a Hagia Sophia who once dwelton earth and called to men to follow her, but all in vain. We arereminded of an extent to which the legend describing this life has fallenback upon invention, but how far does that go?

Already DF Strauss had doubted the occasion of the Entry intoJerusalem, and so did Alfred Loisy. Bultmann follows in the samelearned tradition which denies that the Entry of Christ happened as the

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legend gives it. Unwilling to take it for history, these scholars seem tothink it has no importance to the Gospel fundamentally and shows onlythe tendency of a later tradition to ascribe a Messianic character to Jesus. One has to concede that this acclaimed Entry despite its Messianicpretension is ignored by Paul, who stresses a ‘newness of life’ derivingfrom a veritable incorporation of our being ‘into’ a Living Christ uponacceptance of his Gospel ‘in faith.’ It was surely not the rumor of anytrumpery parade that showed the Apostle how Jesus had acknowledgedhis Messianic dignity. Only, let us concede that what is absent fromPaul’s version of the Christ myth may yet be essential to the Gospel ashistory – if it be that. This is what I strive to establish here, not to refute theNegative argument but to define the evidence.

For Rudolf Bultmann, then, to take the legend of the Entry forhistory is ‘absurd’ because it is ‘absurd’ to suppose that Jesus intended tofulfill the prophecy of Zechariah or to suppose ‘that the crowdrecognized the ass as the Messiah’s beast of burden.’ And it would beabsurd to suppose that. A crowd recognizing an ass? What our legendtells us as the main thing is that Jesus entered Jerusalem to such acclaimand recognition, to joyous cries of Hosanna! and the waving of branches(John’s Gospel says palm branches): that he entered Jerusalem distinctlyin a Messianic parade – and that he went on shortly afterward, whetherthat day or next, to the Cleansing of the Temple by driving from theprecincts those who bought and sold there. Now how is that absurd? There is nothing here to warrant an assumption that a ‘crowd’ hasacknowledged its Messiah by a spontaneous induction based upon thebeast he sat on: that is Dr. Bultmann’s figment. The legend reports only(as fact) that Jesus acknowledged his Messianic dignity by an Entry whichwas remarkably public and plain in the Symbol enacted. Now did he ordid he not? That depends on the truth of the legend and this we do notsolve except by judgment. How such event came about, or why it cameabout if it did, or what conditions prevailed, we cannot know in detail. Legend is frustrating to the historian in this respect. It has no interest inunadorned fact and offers its tale as an expression of meaning. Pro orcon, our judgment of the legend rests on sincerest belief.

As a churchman, Rudolf Bultmann is unwilling to dissolve thelegend of the Entry into sheerest nothing, as his principles require. Howfind any value or substance in the legend if the main thing be denied? But he will give the believers a sop by writing:

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‘It is conceivable that in the Synoptics it was not the inhabitantsof Jerusalem that made up the shouting crowd, but the pilgrimsgoing up to the feast, or alternatively, the disciples. And thereport of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem with a crowd of pilgrims fullof joy and expectation (at the Kingdom of God that was nowcoming) could provide the historical basis which became aMessianic legend under the influence of Zechariah 9,2.’21

A substitute, a mere conjecture, replaces the ruined legend, and yet thesubstitute resembles the legend because it has no other ground. Apartfrom the legend, what excuse? A meager possibility has been conceivedto patch up a vacancy, but how does he treat this legend which provideshim his patch? An archaeologist coming on a buried find applies a softbrush to wipe the sand away. Not so Bultmann who in denying theMessianic gesture crumbles away the very feature of the legend whichgives it point and significance: it is ‘absurd.’ And I insist that this destroysthe given legend, but well and good, if he must do so in the name oftruth. Only, instead of leaving it alone – let it lie there, Dr. Bultmann! –he turns back to the repudiated thing and digs around in it for somethingto affirm.

Is this to arrive at historical knowledge? It is surely the ExpressLegend undisfigured, not replaced, in which any possible fact is to beapprehended. We don’t extract a portrait from a stained glass windowby smashing the glass and obtaining thereby a photograph. Or as in thecase of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, an X-ray of which reveals a shadowymale face, a crudely painted face beneath its perfect charm, one doesn’tget a ‘historical Blue Boy’ by scraping off the finished portrait to get to the‘face’ which the X-ray exposes. My example, of course, is a mere analogyand not a piece of logic, but what these mere examples stress is theinvaluable fusion of something prior (whatever it was) in the achievedexpression.

My premise, my conviction after many years, is that legendcannot be penetrated. Yet if there be reason to affirm a ‘nucleus of fact,’we must go beyond such vague conjectures as in our example Bultmannsettles for. That whole analysis of his (which might conceivably be true,might be correct historically) does nonetheless reject the prime thing givenin the Legend, its own assertion that a Messianic Entry happened. Yet

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coupled with the Cleansing of the Temple which follows upon it, it seemsa perfectly adequate reason to explain why Jesus was crucified.

So we are brought to the rich value of the given text. It is ourone conceivable source for any history given in the Expression vs. asource to be discarded in favor of a plausible conjecture. When siftingfor history, avoid crass replacements and educated guess-work becausewe do not know what any given legend may preserve in its retentiveexpression. To the Negative critics we concede that we cannot say forsure that any Gospel legend is not a myth, whereas we surely know that amere assumption of a fact which is supposed to lie behind the‘distortions’ of a legend boils down to guess-work. Given, that legends doarise, as all without exception do believe, or that real history is conveyedby those legends we distinguish from myth, we are impoverished if weforsake the character of the legend. Jesus, then, if he be in the Gospels atall, may have been expressed there with a distinctness and a completenessthat our skeptics have not imagined.

CURSING OF THE FIG TREE

Now to my mind Jesus’ Entry into Jerusalem and his Cleansing ofthe Temple stand up as fact, presumably, and no ‘quantity’ of associatedmyth can vitiate our sense of a genuine history conveyed by this tale,granting that we can only believe it; but so do those who reject it onlybelieve to the contrary.

An affirmative belief rests on the very legend which is skimpilytold in the earliest account (for whatever reason) and elaborated byMatthew and Luke, but the first fact is that it is there. Its meaning isexpressed in the myth of a rejoicing Zion aroused to welcome its long-desired Davidic King, but yet a myth transformed by the later event:

Ride on, ride on, in majesty!In lowly pomp, ride on to die.

I see no fatal wandering into error as we continue to consider bothpoints of view, the mythical as well as the historical. Nor do I see evasionor fear of decision in allowing full play to the Negative argument (orreally to the ‘dialectic’ of this book). For the Negative argument is adragon with seven heads and not easily put down. Both viewpoints arepossible. Each has its reason behind it and both can be carried through.

Scholars may hold the opinion that the pre-Markan tradition

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(which they reconstruct hypothetically) joined the Entry and theCleansing in a single tale and, in effect, a single act. The reason would bethat Matthew and Luke, working independently of one another but eachdrawing on certain common sources, tell us that Jesus having thusentered Jerusalem went next to the Temple and drove away the money-changers and all their traffic, and spoke in his wrath those memorablewords about a ‘house of prayer’ and a ‘den of thieves.’ Whereas Marksays simply that Jesus went into the Temple:

and when he had looked round at everything, as it was alreadylate, he went out to Bethany with the Twelve. (11,11.)

After acclamation, retirement. You need your anti-climax as well asproper preparation, artistically, and Mark has achieved a greaterpsychological realism respecting the Entry by separating off the tale of theCleansing. In between, he inserts an overnight stay in the village whereJesus lodged that week and the strange tale of The Cursing of the FigTree, which sets the mind a puzzle:

On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he washungry. And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went tosee if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he foundnothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. And he saidto it, ‘May no one ever eat fruit from you again.’ And hisdisciples heard it. (11,12.)

Then comes the Cleansing of the Temple, after which the authorities areafraid to arrest him because of the multitude. Another night is passed inBethany; then

As they passed by in the morning, they saw the fig tree witheredaway to its roots. And Peter remembered and said, ‘Master,look! The fig tree which you cursed has withered.’ (11,20.)

Whereupon Jesus speaks the famous words about a faith that movesmountains.

Taken seriously, the cursing of a fig tree out of season is anirrational act, and even downright nonsensical, but this Evangelist has onseveral occasions, had we but noticed them, shown that the ‘mind’ ofJesus is to be set apart from the ordinary. We saw it earlier ourselves, tomention only this example, when Jesus urged Jairus and his wife in allseriousness to tell no one about his reviving the twelve-year-old girldespite a crowd of mourners waiting suspensefully outside. In a word,Jesus’ unseasonable curse is a Markan device, and no doubt by our

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standards a crude one, but it serves his design when afterward the figtree is found to be withered away.

Or was it the same tree that Simon Peter noticed in the morning? If the doubt be allowed, the story can be taken realistically by all whoallow Jesus his peculiar behaviors, as of course many do. Not for the firsttime, we notice in such a thing as this a slight concession on the part ofthe Evangelist to our possible doubt of the miracle. Mark is the onlyEvangelist who shows a kind of care for his legends which enables us totake them on other terms. Effectively, the purpose of the Fig Tree tale,besides its symbolic value, is to entangle us however briefly in awonderment about this ‘Jesus.’ For even if we believe (as those believersdid) that he could ‘do anything,’ and might well ‘do anything’ at anytime, we are diverted somewhat from those other larger and publicevents in wondering why he did this little thing. So frequently and sosuccessfully does Mark divert us from what would otherwise count as amain focus that we must see it as a deliberate technique. Had thisEvangelist a doubt about the Entry into Jerusalem or the Cleansing of theTemple, or did he know of such doubts? For it goes without saying thatone of the several heads of the aforesaid dragon finds opportunity to putin an appearance here.

SCHWEITZER ON THE CURSING OF THE FIG TREE

Now we might always care to say, in keeping with the Negativeargument, that a ‘Jesus’ who cursed a fig tree in the manner describednever lived. The tale is then imaginary but what can it mean? Was itmisunderstood by the Evangelist or understood so crudely by itsprimitive inventor that we lack the means of grasping something sooutlandish? Considered solely in itself (apart from the attached moral)the parable is not a story about a faith that moves mountains. It tells onlyof Jesus’ disappointment at finding no fruit amid the leaves of a fruit-bearing tree and then, most unfairly, of a penalty on the tree.

But Mark is not literal-minded although realistic in his portrayal,and going by the best interpretation I have come across, thedisappointing tree must signify an Israel which had not borne fruit for Jesusand whose fate it was to be blasted. Whether or not it was conceived afterthe siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple (in 65-70 AD) Idon’t attempt to say, but it seems so. It will have been written from a laterChristian perspective.

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Given his importance to the whole question of a historical Jesus,Albert Schweitzer’s realistic view of the episode is worth considering. For really we must ask ourselves how far to go in affirming the facts withinthe legend if we mean to affirm them? Schweitzer trips up here – but theremay be a reason for this. We arrive at no principle in noticing his viewbut the example is a good one or, as we say, instructive.

For Dr. Schweitzer is emphatic. As an interpreter he embracesthe common opinion that we can see through the opaque legends ofthese Gospels, and he takes the story literally as far as Jesus’ curse isconcerned. In a thesis offered for his medical diploma, The PsychiatricStudy of Jesus, he defends the sanity of a man who curses a tree in a stateof delusion. The book is published in that remarkable year, 1913, whenso many of his things came out, including his revision of the Quest inwhich, at last, he takes up the whole array of Negative critics anddisposes of them like a Samson among the Philistines.

It was a time of seasonal change in the course of anextraordinary life, and much has to be excused to simple overstrain in aman who had been so given into his life and was now on the verge oftearing himself away. Farewell, old organs of Europe which he lovedwith all his heart. A newly-christened physician, a middle-agedbridegroom, preacher, author, co-editor of an edition of Bach’s music, infact, a famous man: and he was giving up his place in that society. Good-bye, father, a pastor-father who had given him his beloved Jesus. Good-bye to a mother on the platform who refused to wave good-bye,disapproving a decision which she saw as a waste of his talent. Whatawaited him in Africa was a dug-out canoe and a journey up river.

Like his famous Quest and the book on Paul, his Psychiatric Studyis another survey, in this case of a few psychiatric books such as TheInsanity of Jesus by Charles Binet-Sanglé, MD. Schweitzer is aware thatpsychiatry may seem to have a case here, and he remembers out of hislearning that DF Strauss had once considered Jesus ‘from our point ofview a fanatic... in full possession of all his faculties.’ On the other handand in a view not seriously considered, the irrational aspect of the Gospeltale might be put down to the hazards of an oral tradition. For instance,The Parable of the Barren Fig Tree is found in Luke’s Gospel (13,6) where itis only a story Jesus tells, but Schweitzer has no interest in a theory whichwould make Jesus’ cursing of a fig tree a mere parable. He holdsdoggedly to the cursing, although of course without any actual miracle. Was Jesus subject to irascible moods and arbitrary cursings, then?

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Surely, if he cursed a fig tree out of season... But Dr. Schweitzer has atheory to explain this and demands that we acknowledge the fact:

We must... retain without question the historical kernel thatJesus pronounced the curse over a fig tree on which he hadvainly sought to find nourishment.22

In fairness, he may have meant this only as asseveration, but he followsup these arbitrary words with a revision of the tale. We learn that Jesuscondemns this tree ‘not to withering but to unfruitfulness to all eternity.’(p. 71) Why not to withering, since the story tells of withering? Schweitzer sticks to the exact words of Jesus (‘May no one ever eat fruitfrom you again,’) and pits them against the story from which they aretaken. We are reminded of Goodspeed’s interpretation of the Feeding ofthe 5,000 by these wily devices. Each scholar rejects the intent of alegend while pretending to give the fact which inspired it, but of coursethis is backwards logic. Was it not the legend which gave rise to the thingbelieved in? The ‘fact’ is guesswork. There may not have been a fact,this fact, at all.

Schweitzer discerns the ‘historical kernel’ of this tale because heunderstands the reason for the curse, a reason of which he himself, in amuch earlier work, is the discoverer. Remember that his Jesus is aneschatological prophet with his very own Messianic secret (DasMessianitätsgeheimnis). We have then, once more, a ‘historical Jesus’who has come to Jerusalem to offer himself as a ransom, believing thathis death will usher in the Messianic Age. Also, we know from a survivingJewish apocalypse, The Book of Enoch, that the Messianic Age is to be atime of most abundant fruitfulness. So then for Dr. Schweitzer’s theory:Jesus had expected this leafy tree to offer him figs irrespective of the seasonbecause of the nearness of the Messianic Age and in consideration of hissecret identity. As he interprets the state of mind of Jesus, he falls into thelanguage of moral reproach:

This tree is to remain barren because it deceived by the richnessof its foliage the unrecognized future Messiah in his earthlyhumility and hunger.

Unfortunately, this interpretation lacks innocence. A legend whichmakes little sense has been exchanged for an interpretation which makesno sense at all. Does anyone suppose that by such methods and on such

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assumptions real history has been arrived at? Schweitzer’s stark result hascome of peeling away the accretions of credulity and wishfulness. As atype of interpretation, it is ‘rationalist,’ like the view of that scholar whothought that Jesus might have cured a cataract by scraping it off with hisfingernail. The facts about Jesus are supposed to be lying near thesurface of the tale, and one gets to them by a combination of wiseexcisions and bold hypotheses. In the Cursing of the Fig Tree the fact isplainly in view and to extract it our interpreter cuts half the story away,yet the stray fact that Jesus once cursed a tree because he was hungry,considered in itself, is comical, like Shaw’s asking if Jesus swore when hestepped on a nail in the carpenter’s shop. That is a heavy price to pay fora fact which exists only as a conjecture based on old legends.

I wonder, though, if yet another factor is at work in the mind ofthis complicated man. Helene Bresslau, his gifted wife, is a Jew,daughter of a famed Jewish historian whose Sunday evening ‘at homes’Schweitzer had been attending, no doubt to his profit. An attractivewoman, Helene set her cap for Schweitzer and on learning of hisintentions trained to be a nurse. Schweitzer tells nothing of this. He isfamously tight-lipped about all family matters. From later evidence itseems he may have disappointed her (I am thinking of the gossip of thenatives), but that is irrelevant here.

Had he taken the view that Jesus’ cursing of a fig tree was a laterChristian parable told against Israel, he must have been pained. Instead,by taking the words of Jesus literally he gained a three-fold advantage. For one, he obtained yet another solid fact in Jesus’ historical realitywhile saving a piece of the story. Also, he found a clever use for histheory of the Messianic secret. For a third, he spared himself having tobelieve that Jesus could have been portrayed cursing Israel, evensymbolically. That would be out of the question if he is really cursing atree.

AARON’S ROD METAPHOR

So we have three main declarations of fact in these Synopticswhich make a tripod on which any history of Jesus rests:

his Baptism by John the Entry into Jerusalem his crucifixion under Pontius Pilate.

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That, our Gospels declare, is history. And of this tripod, two legs aresupported by connection to known historical figures, namely, John theBaptist and his prophetic career and the notorious Roman ProcuratorPontius Pilate. The third fact asserted stands on its own. We have onlythe Gospels for any record of it, and yet they invite a sort of creditbecause of these other connections. Compare Mark’s dance of Salome,which is a folkish melodrama conveying the fact of John’s execution byHerod Antipas as Josephus reports it. No one questions Josephus onthis. That disciples borrowed an unridden colt in the manner describedreads like fiction, no doubt, but that Jesus entered Jerusalem toMessianic acclamations is ostensibly the fact.

A critic might ask why I weaken my case by insisting on an Entry,considered as fact, which goes beyond external attestation? But if youremove this Messianic Entry despite its bold public claim what do theother facts amount to? You have the rumor of an unrecognized Messiaharising from a desert baptism and one more Roman crucifixion underPontius Pilate. Take away the Entry as representing the character ofGospel fact and, in effect, you deny that these Gospels as they stand tellanything worth having of the Messianic character of Jesus. None ofwhich, to be sure, suffices as proof because I prove nothing here, butgiven for the moment our tripod of main facts asserted, we have asplausible history concerning Jesus:

His Baptism by John.A prophetic career in GalileeDisciples (followers)(Herod’s assassination of the Baptist)Entry at festival time in Jerusalem: a Messianic gestureCleansing of TempleChrist before PilateRoman crucifixion (quelling riot)

Observe in the very repetition here how our tripod facts have sproutedand blossomed like Aaron’s Rod. Such is the way of the mind incomposing its thought, and I repeat a formula which I have used oncebefore: It is not fragments we arrive at in our discriminating study,whether of myth or of history, because each particular of Gospel Tale isin reference to the entire Gospel. Touch myth and extend it, touchhistory and extend that. With due regard for the Negative argument andall possible respect for the destructive analyses of a Bultmann and hispeers, we do arrive at affirmative thought.

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This tripod of basic factual assertion is, as I stress, an expansiblesprouting nucleus which again we can illustrate by a further repetition. We have as plausible history, suddenly, first that when he was baptized inthe river Jordan by the prophet John, he performed an act ofrepentance in preparation for Judgment Day and the imminent Kingdomof God. Afterwards, following a desert ordeal, he took up a ministry as aknown Galilean whose native village, Nazareth, we have no other recordof, at the time. The legends give Capernaum, however, as his chosendwelling.

This same Jesus uttered Teachings having a peculiar charm andforce, but distinctly of a Hebrew type, really as if he had been aprovincial rabbi, and ‘Rabbi’ he was often called. This body of Teachingsis no mere rumor, no sort of walking on water or raising of the dead. Weopen our Gospels to discover what they are. Transmitted by the earlydisciples and passed on by word of mouth, they have been modified,supplemented, altered or misunderstood, but we do actually have them,and in thus supplementing the skeletal facts given from Baptism toCrucifixion, this tremendous fact of Q rears like a distant Gibralter whichit will take some years yet for the rains to wash away.

It is hard to imagine who could have put forth teachings soextensive in behalf of a fostered myth, and we have the testimony of agossipy and unreliable Bishop Papias, once of Hierapolis in what is todayTurkey, that the disciple Matthew composed the oracles of the Lord in theHebrew tongue. It is possible that some sort of earlier document like thatserved as a basis for Q. On the other hand, to take a modern example,Shaw gives a complete pamphlet, The Revolutionist’s Handbook, as asupplement to a single play. Given his wit and his comedic penchant,this is by no means an unserious, trifling work. Or take various passagesfrom the Gospels themselves (such as Matthew 11,2-30 Luke 7,18-35,missing in Mark and drawn, therefore, from Q) where John sends toJesus from prison to ask, ‘Art thou he that should come, or do we lookfor another?’ Some of the most beautiful words of Jesus are contained inthis passage, but every line of it on either version may be understood asfabricated on the myth hypothesis. There is no proof of history in apassage like that which contains indications of myth.

GROWTH IN MYTH

In a classic article in the Encyclopedia Britannica, Baron von

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Hügel found that the Fourth Gospel had seven accounts ‘in common’with the Synoptics, although they have not very much in common andare very differently treated. They are, briefly, those of:

The Baptist and JesusCleansing of the TempleCure of the Centurion’s sonFeeding of the MultitudeWalking on WaterAnointing at BethanyEntry into Jerusalem

This list of von Hügel’s reminds us of a well-known tradition in Gospelinterpretation which teaches that the Fourth Gospel has replaced themany miracles of Christ with Seven Signs. These are:

The Wedding at Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine.Cure of the Centurion’s son Cure of the Paralytic Feeding of the MultitudeWalking on WaterCure of the Man Born Blind The Raising of Lazarus

There is some overlap here. Some of the miracles recorded in theSynoptics are repeated in John as Signs, but the differences areimmense. The whole character of the Fourth Gospel is different fromthat of the Synoptics, and whatever else it may mean, this differencereveals a growth in myth. Read straight through, John achieves thatcumulative effect we feel when reading one of the greater dialogues ofPlato. It is enough to kindle the soul. Not to say that John is anotherPlato; he falls below him in philosophy, and his superb artistry isHellenistic and lacks the classical restraint.

Some of the author’s changes, however, he makes for thepurpose of serving his own design. Notice, for instance, in von Hügel’slist the order in which those tales are given, where soon after the Baptismof Jesus a Cleansing of the Temple occurs. Only much later comes theEntry into Jerusalem. Did Jesus cleanse the Temple twice? John hassimply changed his story around. A devout mind entirely, he is anunscrupulous historian. This strange and mystical author, a mind rich,purposive, serious, deep and subtle, has no intention of recopying Mark. He sees what Mark has done, and he sees that he can do it better. This is

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genius. He sees how the very presentation of the Christ may betransformed. ‘I lay down my life,’ says this Johannine Son of Man, andsays it openly to the Jews before even entering Jerusalem. ‘No one takesit from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay itdown, and I have power to take it again. This charge I have receivedfrom my Father.’ (John 10,15.)

The peculiar drama in which he lays down his life to take it upagain, or the so-called Passion of Christ, is here characterized by a rareelevation and serenity which is unique to the Fourth Gospel. And here itis, I must say, that John achieves his incomparable effect. Nothing Iknow of in world literature ranks alongside it in this respect; nothing toapproach the mystical intensity which John achieves in the very process oftransforming and creating his own myth of the Christ. And this is one ofhis reasons for changing the story around. A violent act such as theCleansing of the Temple and its civic consequence mustn’t be allowed todisturb the poignancy of John’s concluding and triumphant themes.

Yet the Cleansing is useful to the author (we mentioned it earlier)also in disposing of the Sign of Jonah. After making ‘a whip of cords,’ hedrives away the sheep and the oxen and the money-changers, pours outthe coins and overturns their tables. His disciples remember that it iswritten, ‘Zeal for thy House will consume me,’ and he is asked by theJews for a Sign to justify this violence. It is then that he says, ‘Destroy thisTemple, and in three days I will raise it up,’ displacing the Sign of Jonah asa forecast of Resurrection. I like the ‘whip of cords’ which Mr. JMRobertson thinks to derive from the Egyptian Osiris as he is painted onthe walls of the pyramids. When I was a little boy, my father got hold ofsome leather thongs out of which he braided a whip complete with itsown thick handle, and flicking this whip he tried to spin my little woodentop. John’s detail of the whip is a nice touch.

Notice, however, that the Jews have demanded a Sign of Jesuswhen he speaks of the ‘Temple of his body.’ Only seven miracles are toldof in this Gospel, but there are surely more than Seven Signs to be foundhere, of which the Crucifixion is supreme: ‘I, if I be lifted up from theearth, will draw all men unto me,’ this Savior proclaims, and ‘this he saidsignifying what death he should die.’ (John 12,32.) The whole Gospel isa Gospel of Signs.

Yet this final Evangelist doesn’t make much of Jesus’ triumphalEntry into a city long since destroyed. Jesus finds a young ass and thecrowds cry Hosannah (John citing Zechariah, as Matthew does) but ‘his

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disciples did not understand this at first.’ (John 12,16.) Only after he is‘glorified’ do they remember that this has been done to him. Thus Johnsubordinates the Entry to other symbols which govern the inauguration ofthe Redeemer’s Passion. One of these, the Resurrection of Lazarus, willtake us as deep as the sea and immerse us in the symbol. Another and alesser symbol is the Anointing of Christ, which von Hügel mentions in hislist of seven similarities. This invites comparison with the Synoptics tobring out the extraordinary freedom of John’s use of traditions. We dealwith the Johannine version first (‘The last shall be first’) and then lookback to earlier and different anointing legends.

Although these legends are unmiraculous entirely, yet theybelong to the myth of Christ. Even if it be true that Jesus was onceanointed in some such manner, a comparison with John will bring outvery plainly a growth in myth as we pass beyond the Synoptic thresholdinto a sphere where every aspect of the primitive Gospel is deliberatelytransformed.

THE ANOINTING OF CHRIST

All four Gospels tell that Jesus was anointed by a woman at adinner, but only Matthew and Mark tell quite the same story, evidentlybecause Matthew has absorbed the earlier tale although slightlyabbreviating it. As with certain other tales, however – the Calling of theFour, the Rejection at Nazareth – Luke offers a version of his own, asomewhat elaborate version about a woman and a dinner, but retainingfrom Mark a suggestive clue: the name Simon is kept for the host as givenin the earlier account. John’s version shares details with both Synopticversions, as it seems, but he is closer to Mark in placing the Anointingbefore Jesus’ death as a sort of preparation for his burial.

John is the one who makes the most of this Anointing becausehe is able to weave it deeply into his flowing tale. He is more compactthan Luke, yet imparts a greater richness to the story, and he sticks closerto the primitive tradition in associating the Anointing of Christ with thePassion. It is John’s version which has given an immortal stamp to thetale, and although its value suffers out of context, like that of a jewel priedout of its setting, here it is complete:

Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, whereLazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. There theymade him a supper; Martha served, but Lazarus was one of those

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at table with him. Mary took a pound of costly ointment of purenard and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with herhair; and the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was to betrayhim) said, ‘Why was this ointment not sold for three hundreddenarii and given to the poor?’ This he said, not that he caredfor the poor but because he was a thief, and as he had themoney box he used to take what was put into it. Jesus said, ‘Lether alone, let her keep it for the day of my burial. The poor youalways have with you, but you do not always have me.’ (John12.)

Now Bethany is where Jesus stayed for the Passover, a village nearJerusalem, and we meet this name in Mark ‘when they drew near toJerusalem... and Bethany at the Mount of Olives.’ (It was when Jesussent off two disciples for a colt). By contrast, John has Jesus coming infrom a wilderness village called Ephraim (11,54) instead of coming downfrom Jericho, and coming earlier, seemingly on the Friday before PalmSunday. It’s not impossible, of course, that this last Evangelist knew morethan Mark did, and certainly he is giving more details, but it raises aquestion of the value of the Fourth Gospel as an eye-witness account.

There is a very strong old tradition tracing the Fourth Gospel tothe recollections of the Apostle John who in his extreme old age has asort of long-winded way of repeating himself, and one has to make adecision about this. One has to see it as historical fact or as a literarydevice having its own peculiar effectiveness. I see it as a device, butthanks to details like those in the Anointing of Jesus, others may notagree. The learned JB Lightfoot, once Lord Bishop of Durham, couldwrite in 1893 when defending this Gospel, ‘That the narrative bears on itsface the credentials of its authenticity. It is precise, circumstantial,natural in the highest degree. Inference. It is the work of aneyewitness.’23 And even today there are critics, a few, who would placethis Gospel as the earliest of the Four. But let us consider these details.

Jesus has come to this supper a couple of days before his Entry,but at whose house? By inference (although never stated) it is the homeof Lazarus and his sisters, Mary and Martha. Only Lazarus is named as‘one of those at table with him,’ for instance. Only Martha is mentioned

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as serving, and Mary finds her pound of nard (=spikenard) wherewith tobathe the Lord’s feet. Were we omniscient, as of course we cannot be,we might instantly recognize in the doings of these sisters and even intheir names traits borrowed from a little tale in Luke where Marthaprepares a supper for Jesus (she ‘serves’) while her sister Mary sits at hisfeet. (Luke 10,38.) It is Mary who is praised for doing that in this Lukantale whereas Martha is admonished when she asks him to make her sisterhelp: ‘Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things;one thing is needful.’ Very effective and very Oriental, I would say; afavorite text of pastors: ‘One thing is needful.’

With some allowance for Lazarus as a sort of lay figure at a feast,John’s tale might nevertheless be that of an eye-witness participantrecollecting the matter in his old age, but it’s curious that he has given usa family in Bethany so wholly unknown to the Synoptic tradition when hehas described Jesus earlier as ‘loving Martha and her sister and Lazarus.’ Nor does Jesus stay there for Passover. They are willing to feed him andhis disciples, and Mary ‘wastes’ a ‘pound of costly ointment of pure nard’when anointing his feet, yet he will spend that week in the house (Marksays) of ‘Simon the leper’ or else, possibly, ‘Simon the potter,’ as CCTorrey insisted when comparing the Aramaic.

It is Luke who furnishes the name of Lazarus, and he alone of theSynoptists, in his Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. This is one of histhree great parables where, of course, that Lazarus must be ascribed tothe imagination of its author. It is the Lazarus of the parable who hasgiven his name to the lazaretto, a sort of hospital for lepers and othersloathesomely afflicted, but in the parable he is just a poor beggar who layat a Rich Man’s gate where only the dogs licked his sores. He dies andthen in course of time the Rich Man dies and finds himself ‘in anguish inthis flame.’ He lifts up his eyes in Hell and seeing Lazarus above nestledin the bosom of Father Abraham begs him to ‘send Lazarus to dip theend of his finger in water and cool my tongue!’ A great gulf is fixedbetween them, it cannot be done; so then he prays that Abraham mightat least send Lazarus back from the dead to warn his five brothers, all ofwhom stand in need of such warning, and Father Abraham makes replyin a tremendous dialogue. (Luke 16,29.) We are of course consideringthe Johannine borrowing here, and we recall that it is Lazarus who israised from the dead in the Fourth Gospel. It is a tale unique to thatGospel, but in the features described, it shares with Luke’s parable aLazarus who is associated with Resurrection.

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Another point answering to Bishop Lightfoot’s qualities to befound in John (‘precise, circumstantial, and in the highest degreenatural’) is that the Evangelist mentions by name Judas Iscariot and hispious wish that the price of the ointment might have been given to thepoor. Replying to this, Jesus speaks of the day of his burial: ‘The pooryou always have with you, but you do not always have me.’ And theprecise form of these words (in John 12,8 Matthew 26,11) may beevidence of a borrowing from Matthew’s Gospel in the opinion of the lateBW Bacon, of Yale, from whose interpretation I have drawn.

It is some years since I have read Bacon on this, but I rememberthat he mentioned with some disdain the author’s idea of having Marywipe Jesus’ feet with her hair, but how like a loving woman, I say of thistender gesture – ‘and the house was filled with the fragrance of theointment,’ writes John. The beauty of the gesture is its intimacy; it is sovery suggestive of love, and of nearness, but there is yet somethingdiscerning in the Professor’s squeamishness: there is an atmosphere in theFourth Gospel which is sometimes much too close. A great masterpiece,yes, but the author’s rare achievement is purchased at a price.

Artistically, the woman’s perfumed hair helps displace the sceneat the tomb, where the dead man’s stench has been spoken of. TheFourth Evangelist has to get rid of this Lazarus whom he has summonedfrom his rotten grave and who must one day return there. What shouldhe do with the fellow in presence of the Resurrected Christ? This is whythe man who was raised from the dead speaks no word to Jesus at thisfeast, makes no gesture, is not spoken to. Always, the disconnection wasimplicit. Motionless and silent, he sits at table with Jesus inertly toremind us only that the thing has happened, a man without a future inthe story.

THE EARLIER TALE

Christ, which is to say, Messiah, means the Anointed; and unlesswe take his Baptism for an anointing, Jesus nowhere else fulfills thataspect of his name, except at Bethany. Now the Baptism of John was apublic rite, a common washing in the Jordan to signify repentance, and ifwe take that for the Anointing of Christ, it is because of the descent ofthe Dove, signifying Spirit, and a Voice from Heaven announcing ‘Mybeloved Son!’ Miracle transforms his Baptism into a Symbol or implicitmyth. But the legend of Bethany (to speak of legend) would show us on

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very humble terms that the Anointing of Jesus was a fact, albeit a deedmost humbly performed and far removed from high occasion. As such, itwears the aspect of a folk tale, grown of rumor or imagination: anunrecognized Messiah is anointed in the house of a leper.

Mark’s version, copied by Matthew, replaced by Luke,transformed by John, and basic to all is a very simple affair:

While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as hesat at table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of ointment ofpure nard, very costly, and she broke the jar and poured it overhis head. But there were some who said to themselvesindignantly, ‘Why was the ointment thus wasted? For thisointment might have been sold for more than three hundreddenarii and given to the poor.’ And they reproached her. ButJesus said, ‘Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She hasdone a beautiful thing to me. For you always have the poor withyou, and whenever you will, you can do good to them; but youwill not always have me. She has done what she could; she hasanointed my body beforehand for burying. And truly, I say toyou, wherever the Gospel is preached in the whole world, whatshe has done will be told in memory of her.’ (Mark 14,3.)

Except that she is remembered only in her deed. What seems to be theaccidental omission of her name is deliberate artistry: we are not toremember a woman who did this, a Sarah, a Judith, or in the latertraditions of the Catholic church, a Mary Magdalene. We are toremember only the gesture of the anointing and the Evangelist achievesthat. It is one of the outstanding Gospel tales. Also, no Judas ismentioned: it is John who invents that detail, aiming for the intenserealism of effect which we call verisimilitude. What’s elaborate here arethe words of Jesus, who overlooks the slight implied by the murmuring(since his doom is foreseen) and, instead, defends the woman. From hiswords, also, the Fourth Gospel has drawn its remark about the poor justas Mark (or else Jesus) draws from Deuteronomy (15,11): ‘For the poorshall never cease out of the land.’

The nameless woman breaks the alabaster jar and pours theointment over Jesus’ head. It is like that earlier breaking of the roof for aparalytic because for a woman to break an alabaster jar in her fingers thisway is incredible, but we accept it as a part of the story. It is symbolic. Just as the ass that Jesus rode into Jerusalem is an unmounted colt, this

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is not a jar to be filled with something else after its consecrated usage. Itsbreaking anticipates the breaking of the loaf at Supper: ‘This is my body,’and I only mention it to show how instinctively we read these tales forwhat they mean. As for a notion that she only broke a sort of seal, thatagain would substitute a fib for a fable.

We see by comparing the two that John’s ‘latest’ version is themore satisfying, artistically, but it is nonetheless from the earliest Gospelthat he has derived certain ideas for his own tale and its placement inBethany. Luke’s quite different version proves to be useful for a crucialdetail. We are far removed from the Passion in Luke’s account whereJesus is invited to dine with a Pharisee named Simon, like the leper inMark. A sinful woman comes into the room uninvited, but the Phariseeallows her. She is, however, rather notorious and he knows of her. Withan alabaster flask of ointment she stands behind Jesus weeping as hereclines at table, and she begins to wet his feet with her tears which shewipes away with her hair. It is the Lukan sentimentality which puts her atthe Savior’s feet whereas John avoids that when he borrows this detail.

This nameless sinful woman, by virtue of her very sin, hasacquired Mary Magdalene’s name, from whom Jesus cast out sevendevils, but legend is no great respecter of fact. Simon the Phariseeinwardly fumes: ‘If this man were a prophet, he would have known whoand what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.’ A tolerant host who allows himself to be put upon – what is she doing inhis house? – finds occasion in her ministrations to doubt that Jesus is aprophet, but Jesus reads his mind. ‘Simon, I have something to say toyou.’ Follows a parable about a pair of debtors, each forgiven a debt butin one case forgiven a huge debt: which of them loves the benevolentcreditor more? Then Jesus upbraids him: ‘Do you see this woman? Ientered your house, you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wetmy feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me nokiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet. Youdid not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet withointment. Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, forshe loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little.’ And to thewoman: ‘Your sins are forgiven... Your faith has saved you, go in peace.’

We note an inconsequence in the logic here. The woman’s sinsare forgiven ‘for she loved much,’ whereas the debtor of the parableloves his creditor more because he is forgiven. Beyond that, Jesus’upbraiding of his host reminds us of his behavior in the Rejection at

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Nazareth (another Lukan story). This is a Gentile Gospel whose integrityis insofar assured in that Luke never forgets that Jesus is a Jew, andsprung from Jews who at his birth observed the circumcision, purifiedthemselves, presented the male-child to the Lord, and offered in sacrifice‘a pair of turtle-doves, or two young pigeons.’

So here we find the source for John’s detail of Mary’s anointingthe feet and wiping away the ointment with her hair. What an elaboratefiction has the Fourth Evangelist woven! Drawing from Mark and Lukehe has devised the richest and most effective of the Anointing tales andset it in his invented family of Martha, Mary and Lazarus.

PART FOUR A LAZARUS EXCURSUS

APPROPRIATION OF MEANING: LAZARUS I.As we have seen, the Fourth Evangelist is one who dares to

change the story of Jesus while observing a certain wise deference to theearlier Gospels. The names of Lazarus and his sisters echo those in Luke. Common to both are Martha’s busy-ness as one who serves, Jesus’greater intimacy with Mary, who is the woman at his feet, and theassociation of Lazarus and Resurrection. Yet Luke tells only of a pair ofsisters, says nothing of where they live or of any brother they have,knows nothing of any role they had in anointing Jesus. As for Luke’sLazarus, he is only a poor beggar covered with sores who is imagined ina parable.

Professor Benjamin Wisner Bacon believed that the FourthEvangelist had invented the family of Lazarus, drawing his clues fromLuke, and I believe he is right.

Before Jesus was anointed at Bethany and prior to his Entry intoJerusalem, Lazarus had been raised from the dead. In this earlier tale hissisters play a characteristic role and the dead man is seen emerging fromhis tomb. We select the figure of Lazarus, then, for an interpretation ofthe myth which carries us beyond a strict exegesis to interpretationproper, although never in violation of the story. For otherwise theReader would tax me with an inconsistency and urge my own objectionsagainst me. We have, throughout, objected to a lax departure from thegiven story, or an easy sort of sliding away into complacent assumptions. Above all, we have rejected a technique of offering substitutes when, forinstance, a given tale is modified in such a way as to conceal a rejectionof what it essentially means. Examples of this were given in John

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Erskine’s treatment of the Wedding at Cana and Goodspeed’s treatmentof the Feeding miracle and Albert Schweitzer’s handling of the Cursing ofthe Fig Tree. All had rejected a miracle which the legend had intendedto give. Meaning is what rules here, so that we make no objection, forinstance, to Baron von Hügel’s symbolic treatment of the Wedding atCana because in his acceptance of the symbol he doesn’t mutilate,abridge, distort or otherwise replace the tale. And yet even so,something remains undone here. What do you make of it yourself, mydear Baron? You have told us what the story means in general, but whatdoes it mean – to you? And this is no mere plea for subjectivity,suddenly. The science of exegesis and the practice of it requires of usthat we go beyond a strict understanding of the text into anappropriation of meaning to which we must give our own Expression. Always, therefore, a genuine appropriation of meaning is a newly originalthought. It is in this sense that I hold Matthew Arnold to be a greatinterpreter in that he gave expression to the meaning of the Bible as heapprehended it after having ‘done’ the exegesis (and of the whole Bible,no less!) It’s not a question of my believing his result. I find himsometimes unconvincing, although I do rather love the way he reachesthe lost believer in a man like myself.

Does our fidelity to the written word confine us to a moldymanuscript and reduce us to mere antiquarians or pedants? Farewell,then, generations of rabbis! Farewell, any value to Scripture! Ifinterpretation of the written word were only a matter of handlingconcepts, this might even be so. You begin with a mind conceived as aclean and efficient machine for the processing of ideas, and on this tabularasa you record the impressions pouring in through the traditional ‘five’senses. It is then the role of intelligence to invent concepts or as we liketo call them, abstract ideas, by which to master the influx of sensations. Our efficient brain-machine, by nature neutral and objective, a meretool, has been used to organize and classify the mind’s experience, soconceived.

All that may be true as far as it goes, but this process does notdescribe those deeper acts of understanding by which we take our placeamong the civilized or make ourselves humane. And the reason why itdoes not bears on the character and shaping of the soul. Here is noquestion of belief or unbelief, but we are not to evade ourselves, and thatis why our strictest, our most honest and painstakingly accurate readingof Scripture leads us into an appropriation of its meaning to which we

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must give our own Expression, at last. Twice over in the act ofunderstanding must the Spirit awaken us, because the first act, which isthat of appropriating a meaning, is already a creative act and then theexpression of this meaning is another.

There is no escaping this human labor of appropriating meaningswhich are, in the raging flood of psyche, everywhere contaminated witha thousandfold ties to the Past and everywhere grown into it by athousand vital roots. An Einstein can no more escape this labor than asage like Emerson, as we see when the great physicist concerns himselfwith socialism and criticism of our institutions, or with ethics and religionand even with God. It is just in this matter of Wisdom that Einstein isborne away in the same flood that carries us all. As soon as we openourselves to the human and spiritual task of thought and understanding,we are submerged by an overwhelming heritage which flows into ourImmediacy and demands to be fused with it. I don’t mean thismechanically: we are not asked to be preservers of antiques as thecondition of humanity. But this submerging Past is that same Sourcewhich has nourished and shaped us. Prior to the tasks of thought, wehad remained incognizant of it. If maybe your typical ‘modern man’shuns this experience, we nonetheless recognize that the higher levels ofhuman spirituality belong always to thought and meaning. This mustinclude all profound science, all art, poetry, dance, music, all philosophyand all religion.

THE TALE OF LAZARUS II.When Lazarus falls sick, his sisters send word to Jesus: ‘Lord,

behold, he whom thou lovest is sick.’ (John 11,3.) Nothing would seemmore natural than such a simple human plea, but it is really ratherstrange. Was it natural for these sisters to send word to a prophet whosemanner of life was that of a wandering teacher? John has namedBethany as the site of our tale, but Jesus is at present ‘beyond Jordan, inthe place where John at first baptized.’

The two sisters have summoned him because they have thesame confidence in his powers that Jesus’ mother showed at theWedding of Cana when she told her son, ‘They have no wine.’ Bothtales are peculiar to the Fourth Gospel and in each he responds in adisconcerting manner. His mother he seems to rebuke by asking‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’ While as for poor Lazarus, Jesus

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lets him die first, delaying his journey on purpose before telling hisdisciples, ‘Our friend Lazarus sleepeth, but I go that I may awake him outof sleep;’ and all of this in Hellenistic-Oriental fashion ‘that the Son ofGod might be glorified thereby.’

On arriving at Bethany, he learns that Lazarus has lain in histomb ‘four days already,’ and before he enters the village Martha goesout to meet him. She is able to do in the story what the reader can’t doin reality, but her uttered prayer is one that many a reader might havetaken to heart: ‘Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.’ The apparently casual word is laden with a subtle intention (‘If thou hadstbeen here!’) which awakens in the worshiper his own yearning for Christ,especially when she calls her sister ‘secretly’ saying:

‘The Master is come, and calleth for thee.’

John’s is the Gospel of the Parousia and he would place us in thePresence of Christ: ‘He calleth for thee.’ What Mark achieved in his tale ofthe Woman with an Issue of Blood John has intensified. There, a secretprayer was uttered, a woman’s promise to herself based on faith, itsanswer requiring a mere touch of Jesus’ robe. The intimacy of it isshown the reader but hidden from the crowd. Here, if we placeourselves in the position of the worshipers to whom this Gospel was readaloud (for so it was designed) we know that the Teacher is here (becausewe believe it) and the woman’s words carry a reassurance. There is agood deal of this quality to be found in the Fourth Gospel. I might call ita subliminal directness of the Lord’s speaking Presence, so that Martha’squiet message to her sister is not a piece of authentic tradition butartistry, sheer artistry, and fully intended by the Evangelist in its subtleeffect.

Mary rises in haste to go to Jesus who ‘was not yet come into thetown, but was in that place where Martha met him.’ The place isindefinite. Jesus must be met outside Bethany and come to stand onlybefore Lazarus’ gravestone. On reaching ‘the place where Martha methim’ Mary falls at his feet and speaks once more the words her sisterspoke: ‘Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.’ Shesays only that and nothing else, having fallen before her Lord. A subtledifference between these sisters is thus portrayed. It is Martha who mustact as agent here: she ‘serves’ in bringing Jesus and Mary together, butunlike her sister, she doesn’t fall at Jesus’ feet and after expressing herfaith, she asks for a favor which opens up a very remarkable dialogue in

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which the Lord must contend with her imperfect faith. I quote it lest wemiss the peculiar Oriental quality of this deeply religious Gospel, so unlikeMark’s:

I know that even now (said Martha) whatsoever thou wilt ask ofGod, God will give it thee.Jesus saith unto her, Thy brother shall rise again.Martha saith unto him, I know that he shall rise again at theresurrection at the last day.Jesus said unto her: I Am the Resurrection and the Life. He thatbelieveth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: andwhosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

The King James version quoted here and the Revised Version of 1881keep the original change of tense which we lose in the moderntranslations:

Martha said...Jesus says to her...Martha says to him...Jesus said...

At its core, the dialogue rises into immediacy, but this point might beoversubtle were it not so plain in Greek. No hearer gathered for worshipin the ecclesia could miss it. Even the sliding back into the past tense iseffective here: He said to her, ‘I Am the Resurrection and the Life,’ andthus it stands forever, a pronouncement. ‘Believest thou this?’

Martha then attests her faith in Christ as the Son of God. For allits brevity, it is a majestic passage, and yet there is no tenderness in it. We cannot be tender before such awesome claims, which are very soonto be demonstrated. Jesus is kindly to Martha but a trifle stern. Mary heloves.

It is after this passage with Martha that Mary has come to fall athis feet and utter her few believing words. As she lay weeping, Jesus‘groaned in the spirit and was troubled.’ Other mourners, too – Jews,they are called here – stand about weeping. ‘Where have ye laid him?’he asks, and they say: ‘Lord, come and see.’ Jesus wept. And oncemore we rise briefly into the present tense:

‘Jesus again groaning in himself cometh to the grave. It was acave, and a stone lay upon it. Jesus said, Take ye away the stone! Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, bythis time he stinketh, for he hath been dead four days. Jesus

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saith unto her, Said I not unto thee that, if thou wouldst believe,thou shouldst see the glory of God?’

‘Take ye away the stone!’ It is a word of command and he will be servedin this command. There were servants to do this and it was done, forsuch grave-stones were sometimes round as millstones (I have seen aphotograph of one such). ‘Then they took away the stone from the placewhere the dead was laid.’ The upheaval, the solemn removal of thestone opens upon the forbidden, but the moment is passed in prayer asJesus lifts up his eyes to say: ‘Father, I thank thee that thou hast heardme.’

And when he had thus spoken, he cried with a loud voice,Lazarus, come forth!And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot withgraveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesussaith unto them, Loose him, and let him go.

LAZARUS A DOUBLE OF CHRIST III.When Jesus declares in words of the most tremendous solemnity

(in James Moffatt’s translation):

I am myself Resurrection and Life! He who believes in me will live, even if he dies, And no one who lives and believes in me will ever die,

we might well say with the officers of the Pharisees: ‘Never man spakelike this man.’ (John 7,46.) Surely, these grandiose words are key to thefable of Lazarus which is important to John as an illustration of his ownconviction. It would be foolish to suppose that he believes his own fable. It is Jesus in this ancient mystic’s mind who is raised from the dead andhas ascended into Heaven, but for simple people who want to see aResurrection ‘happen’ he brings Lazarus out of his cave.

Say what you will of these literary devices, but the Evangelist hadno interest in showing us a dead man revived as a mere curiositybecause that would distract us from his aim. Always, it is Jesus whocounts for this Evangelist, never a Lazarus or his like, such as a man bornblind who is enabled to see, or an invalid cured after thirty-eight years:wonders which reflect on Jesus. And it is a main purpose of this Gospelto show us Jesus in a double aspect. He is ‘there’ and he is ‘here.’ He isvividly ‘there’ in his works, thanks to the author’s verisimilitude instimulating our imagination, but he is also the Living Christ who speaks

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from Heaven above:

No man hath ascended up to Heaven but he that came downfrom Heaven, even the Son of Man which is in Heaven.

This he seems to say in discourse with a pious Pharisee where his wordsare strangely mingled with the author’s own (John 3,13). We findinstances throughout this Fourth Gospel where believers yet unborn areaddressed in Jesus’ words, so to speak, beneath the action of the givenscene. An intense realization of Jesus as the Son of God who wills evennow to call us as his friends is this author’s peculiar aim, and Lazarus isbut a particular moment within the overall demonstration.

After the Resurrection had ceased to produce appearances, aliving Jesus was sought in the Spirit of the Christian fellowship, and tofurnish a Gospel which will answer to the believer’s desire is ourunknown Author’s aim. I mean to say, of course, he will assist thebeliever because his or her collaboration was depended on and with alittle encouragement willingly given. John knew very well what he wasdoing. The believers were only dimly aware but much gratified.

And remember, the Gospel of John is late, although our scholarshave never established the date of its publication. For we have here aculmination in the storied myth of Jesus beyond which it is impossible toadvance. John will give his reader everything that story can give. Morethan this, an intenser devotion, is impossible. Everything in this Gospel iswritten for the moment of the reader, and when Jesus cries, ‘Lazarus,come forth!’ it is not only for Lazarus’ sake that his voice is loud butbecause this is the voice which is to awaken all the dead of this world. Believers who are gathered in worship will want to hear (in mimicry) thatsame voice resounding.

Jesus dismisses Lazarus at once because his usefulness isexhausted in that one brief appearance. Henceforth, the two havenothing to do with one another. They exchange never a word. As Jesusdoes not exert himself to move the stone, neither will he touch thiswalking mummy, much less embrace him despite the earlier message ofthe sisters: ‘Lord, he whom thou lovest is sick.’ Instead, he says: ‘Loosehim, and let him go!’ I am no translator and my seminary Greek haslong since eroded away, but the excellent Goodspeed, who conceivesthe plight of a revived Lazarus in practical terms, misses the point whenhe translates: ‘Unbind him, and let him move.’ (The RSV correctly gives:‘Unbind him, and let him go.’) Surely, the Greek would be even more

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suggestive. All three verbs in that command are associated with:loosening, separation, going away, dismissal, retirement, withdrawal, andone of them with divorce! The whole idea of the Evangelist is: Get rid ofLazarus, having once brought him to life! Understand, Reader: Thismummified specter is what we see of Lazarus alive and all that we see ofhis doing in the whole Gospel because for the rest he is nothing but adummy or a name. He exists for a moment and his moment has usedhim up. We detect in the wonder no trace of rejoicing.

So when we are told later on that he ‘was one of those at tablewith him’ when Jesus was anointed by Mary of Bethany, that solemention of the resuscitated dead is colorless and neutral. Even at asumptuous repast – the ointment speaks of wealth – Lazarus doesnothing, has no revelation to give, imparts no word of cheer. Devoid ofmovement, he is ‘there’ for a while as the dumb object of a rumoredcuriosity to be mentioned one last time as the target of a rumoredassassination plot. We never see him again. He is wholly forgotten in theResurrection scenes of the Christ, having served his one immortalappearance.

In effect, Lazarus is a Double of Christ whose use is todemonstrate a process. We see his resurrection under conditions whichmatch those of Jesus’ tomb, where another stone is rolled aside and inwhich it is possible to walk. The Evangelist is too wise to show us a deadJesus coming alive because that would profane the Mystery by intrudingupon it. The Resurrection of Christ is a sacred Mystery for John, not aprocess to be gawked at. The marks of decay are not to be seen in hisperson, and I think that we don’t have the effects of his death upon Jesusbefore the age of the Medieval realism with its starved, sculpted Christsor the rigid, greenish corpse in Matthias Grünewald’s Crucifixion. Everything ugly, frightful, horrible, hateful in death our Evangelisttransfers to the specter of Lazarus, who absorbs the darkness whichChrist has cast off.

Lazarus is a Symbol because the Fourth Evangelist has chosen amethod of deliberate fiction to project the Resurrection upon a darkmirror. It is possible, moreover, and even probable, that other mythswere in his mind because other myths were swarming in that world. Thisis not to imply that he set out to copy these other myths any more thanPlato did when he wrote the Phaedo or Symposium. John is not aborrower but a maker, and if in the mummy motif an Osiris had enteredhis thought, it was not in the least his intention to copy and imitate that but

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to supersede and abolish. John’s faith is the conviction of the JewishScripture fulfilled, and for this Evangelist the Resurrection of Jesus is primary and surpassing.

In conceiving the tale of Lazarus, he created an enduring Symbolwhich has fascinated artists even of the 20th century: Eugene O’Neill,Eliot, Leonid Andreyev. What better proof of inspiration? Certainly, hisLazarus cannot claim the deeper reality of Christ, but his mummy-likefigure has arisen of necessity. His egression from the cave of this mystic’sdeep imagination completes the Symbol of Christ if only we can learn tosee Jesus in relations of polarity where, I think, he always stands. Risingabove an antipathy which this Gospel arouses, we concede an inspirationin John mightier than any to be found in the Gothic shrewdness of aMark, or the scribal care of a Matthew, assembling the Master’sTeachings, or the literary finesse of Luke: for these Synoptists are,essentially, assembling and moulding Traditions (of whatever final worthwe may judge these Traditions). John is no assembler of Traditions: hetransmutes them.

LAZARUS AS MYTH IV.The Raising of Lazarus is of all the miracles of Christ the most

impressive. It is the Evangelist’s own deliberate composition and writtenfor the manifest purpose of giving us the vision of a resurrection beforeJesus’ own, that is, the actual visible moment of a dead man’s comingalive. Were it poorly done it would be only grotesque, but this author isa master and his effective little tale demonstrates what Jesus means insaying: I am the Resurrection and the Life. On the whole this FourthGospel reveals the stamp of a deep mind, audacious and wise andcontent to be narrow. His focus is very narrowly on Christ conceived asa Revealer who illuminates the world, a Redeemer who saves it, aHeavenly Christ who once indwelt and transformed the person of Jesus. In this last authentic Gospel which has carried the idea of Christ to itscompletion the author’s intention governs all. Myth has awakened fullyhere: it has all but passed into philosophy – which would extinguish it,however, had that actually happened.

I am certain that this story is a myth, but the author’s ability tomake things seem real has misled people of the highest intelligence. Hiscircumstantial details have given the Gospel its air of eye-witnessauthority, or rather its verisimilitude, but we have spoken of this aspect

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earlier and we remember that this quality belongs entirely to art. Wemay speak of a witness’s veracity, but we never speak of hisverisimilitude. We are not dealing with facts in such a singular tale, then,just because its particulars are effectively given. And they are effectivelygiven, allowing for an Oriental style which is foreign to an undevelopedtaste. Overall, one has to concede that the Johannine details are oftenvery like the particulars furnished by an old man remembering his storyand mentioning oddments of fact or circumstance as they happen tooccur to him or else repeating himself, but this is also, as I conceive, adeliberate technique. That circumstantial quality is clearly the reasonwhy a distinguished scholar like Bishop Lightfoot could write a hundredyears ago ‘that the narrative bears on its face the credentials of itsauthenticity.’ It may seem to, especially when assisted by the believer’swish that it might be so.

Only, what do scholars do with such miracles when theyattribute this Gospel to a doddering Apostle who had once witnessedthese things and spent years and years in meditation to ‘bring out theirspiritual significance?’ They explain them away as pious lies inspired bybenevolence to illustrate a doctine. We found traces of this even in socultured a man of letters as John Erskine, whose Human Life of Jesus weconsidered earlier. Or consider again the strange presumption of eye-witness authority in Graves and Podro’s Nazarene Gospel Restored,Graves as a learned, witty poet and Joshua Podro, a profound Jewishscholar. Graves is one for whom the life of Jesus is ‘well-attested,’ andthese two treat the tale of Lazarus (who is authentically rechristened‘Eliezer’) as a story factual, reliable, and remembered in detail. Theytreat the story this way, I should say, cooperatively as joint authors, but itis rather Graves who is famous for eccentric theories. For Robert Graves,then, Lazarus was truly dead and Jesus did come to Bethany andconverse with the sisters, the stone was rolled away from the tomb andJesus did call for Lazarus in a loud voice: all just as remembered andpreserved for posterity until (as I imagine it) Mr. Robert Graves nudgedPodro in the ribs and said, ‘Hold, fellow! Are we going to believe it?’

It is this sort of absurdity into which the good Bishop’s theorycrumbles when ‘everything else’ is taken for fact but the miracle denied,and really, it is this sort of learned Tomfoolery which makes TheNazarene Gospel Restored a book everywhere learned, curious andinteresting, and most peculiar. A sort of positivism is at fault here, an

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inability to value what is given in a myth, and a positivism of this sort istoday the wisdom of the vulgar.

I think of a Hollywood film where a Jesus who is never quite themaster of his powers and who never knows quite what may happenstoops to a dark burial hole to fiddle around until suddenly the nakedarm of Lazarus, like the swoop of a hawk’s talon, reaches out to grab himand almost pulls him in. The unintended comedy of a scene like that istraceable to philosophy. It’s the positivism of the man in the street, andthe same in a filmmaker unconscious of his travesty as in yourfundamentalist Protestant and your workaday Catholic. Robert Graves,our positive-poet, blunders into comedy and literary outrage because heconceives the tale of Lazarus (or Eliezer) as a ‘history’ in which the verydetails are real. A bowdlerization he would protest in Shakespeare heperpetrates upon the Gospels without awareness of shame, so in hisGospel Restored, Jesus’ magnificent word, ‘I Am the Resurrection and theLife,’ reduces to a ‘chat’ about the resurrection. So too when Jesusstands before the open cave having failed to awaken Lazarus, he mustturn to Martha and say, ‘He’s dead.’

LAZARUS A USEFUL SYMBOL V.Once brought forth from the cave of an Evangelist’s imagination,

Lazarus has a life of his own.

I am Lazarus, come from the deadCome back to tell you all, I shall tell you all...

As the Reader may recall, TS Eliot in one of his poems ascribes this to acertain J. Arthur Prufrock, who can only imagine himself for once in hislife speaking like that, and understanding these words symbolically, ofcourse. It is a thought he rejects, however, because it would have beentoo embarrassing ‘after the cups, the marmalade, the tea/ among theporcelain,’ – too embarrassing in that polite society,

If one, settling a pillow by her head, Should say, ‘That is not what I meant at all.

That is not it, at all.’

It is only a brief moment that Lazarus enjoys in a longish poem, yet whenhe announces himself in the imagination of this ageing coxcomb, we feelourselves addressed because it is really the poet who lifts the mask to hisface; but is it the Lazarus we know from the Gospel? Eliot would stand

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his looming figure over against a heedless society with a promise ofmomentous tidings. His sudden presence is enough to give the message,of course, but it’s interesting to notice that The Love Song of J. ArthurPrufrock was published in 1917. How efficiently does Lazarus serve thispoem in two brief lines! Our lives must not be trivial, great things mayburst upon us.

I feel no impulse to complain of a poet’s use of this symbol as I doof Robert Graves’s well-meaning degradation of the Gospel of John inthe name of history or fact. Eliot’s is an appropriation of the symbol towhich he gives another meaning; but this is a very different thing from adisfigurement of the original tale – and a denial of the original meaning. Symbols may have a life of their own, then, and we use them to expressthe deeper meanings and evoke the deeper thoughts.

If we suppose in reference to Eliot’s poem, however, that Lazaruswas a man of Bethany who lived once and knew Jesus, he is then nolonger a mere symbol for Prufrock, who must have made a very differentsort of remark to the imaginary woman on her couch:

PRUFROCK: Oh, these endless teas! (Indicating an empty saucer).Left-over crumbs on a porcelain plate! Shouldn’t there be moreto life than this?WOMAN: But Arthur, there’s your tennis. (Yawning, as she tapsher lovely mouth).PRUFROCK: No no. I am thinking of something quite different. Take the case of a Lazarus, for instance.WOMAN: Who, now? The one who was raised from the dead?PRUFROCK: That Lazarus, yes. Don’t you suppose he askedsomething more of life after coming back like that? Something...tremendous which is lacking in ours?WOMAN: (With a sigh). Well, I suppose he knew of things wemight like to know, of course, but Arthur, we must wait.

Nothing comes of this exchange. A supposedly historical Lazarus canonly tease the curiosity of this foppish Prufrock, who would never think ofdelivering any momentous tidings and in the greatness of his spiritlooming above a society of trifles. He can only imagine himself doing thatbefore running away from his own imagination. It is nonetheless becauseLazarus carries a meaning for Prufrock that the symbol arises, butunfortunately, only to remind him of a life confined to surfaces. Conceived as a man who lived once (and thus misunderstood) Lazaruseludes us, remaining at best a curiosity or a freakish exception.

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24. JH Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (Harper Torchbook,p. 79.)

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What, then, of the deeper aspects of this Symbol? Already wehave seen him as a sort of mummy, which is to say, a ‘dead man’hampered by his bindings and wrapped about the face. We knew him asone lying in the grave: ‘Your brother will rise again...’ ‘I know that he willrise again in the Resurrection...’ ‘Where have you laid him?’ Nevertheless, he does actually rise up in his grave and walk.

If I say, then, that Lazarus appears to me to be a relic of a mucholder god displaced by Jesus, it’s not because I find a clue to this in theGospel: it is because his Symbol reminds me of an age-old phallic deity, averitable stench of a god (and one who is called a ‘filth’ in an oldEgyptian text) but likewise a god of annual Resurrections and a man-god,so described by Sir Wallis Budge: I am thinking, then, of Osiris, thePhallus of Ra. And of course we are suddenly reminded of our friend,John Allegro, by these explicit reminders.

OSIRIS CORRELATION: LAZARUS VI.Our poor groping human Lazarus may seem too slight a peg on

which to hang a reminder of an Egyptian god. We find in the Gospel nohint of divinity associated with Lazarus apart from Jesus. As a manunmistakably dead who illustrates the truth of Jesus’ words, his role inthe play, so to speak, is so distinctly a part of the Evangelist’s aim that wemay suppose him to be John’s own invention rather than a piece oftradition that had escaped the Synoptic nets. He appears in the tale as atownsman of Bethany living with two sisters; and one of these women,the preferred sister, Mary, pours out a costly ointment which fills thehouse with its fragrance, much in contrast to the earlier stench of thetomb mentioned by the other sister.

If I do not say that Lazarus is Osiris, then (and I do not) it is yet acurious fact that Osiris is brother of two sisters, Isis and Nephthys, one ofwhom, the beloved Isis, is associated with a marvelous perfume whichshe is able to impart to others. I make no great thing of this parallelexcept to note the bare fact of it. A contrast between the stench of thetomb and the perfume of the gods appears elsewhere in Egyptianmythology, and with other gods. ‘The odor of the Horus-eye is on thee!’say the priests to King Pepi II in a ritual of the tomb.24

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At most, then, Lazarus is a relic of a god displaced, a souvenir ofthe Egyptian imagination that an Evangelist has transferred to a humanbeing subject to Jesus. Only, of course, we mustn’t identify the walkingcorpse of the Gospel with Osiris, Lord of the Underworld, but is there novestige of the older god in Lazarus’ mummy-like resurrection? Forexample, I mention the Sed feast which Professor Breasted calls‘probably the oldest feast of which any trace has been preserved inEgypt’ when ‘the king assumed the costume and insignia of Osiris, andundoubtedly impersonated him.’ We may emphasize that he assumedthe (royal) ‘costume and insignia of Osiris’ because to suppose that aPharoah could be wrapped like a mummy in a play is unseemly andabsurd. No more does a Pope when washing the feet of a chosen few inimitation of Christ lay aside his garments and wrap in a towel as Jesusdid. We must allow its magnificence to the Egyptian imagination whenBreasted tells us that ‘One of the ceremonies of this (Sed) feastsymbolized the resurrection of Osiris,’ for ‘in the end the deceasedPharoah became Osiris and enjoyed... the same felicity in the hereafterwhich had been accorded the dead god.’ (p. 39.)

We have another curious parallel in the comparative passivity ofthe two figures because Osiris is unable to revive himself. His one vitalitylay in the regenerative function. We have, for instance, carved in bas-relief the god’s sarcophagus out of which his phallus impressivelyprotrudes. Above it hovers Isis in the form of a hawk, and thus does shebeget a son, Horus, by whom, or by the famous Eye of Horus, the god isrevived. Although vandals have defaced the phallus of the god, it is yetquite distinct and the entire sculpture is done with the beautiful skill ofthe Egyptians.

It is Breasted who stresses the passivity of this ‘god of the dead’when he writes: ‘Osiris is in function passive. Rarely does he become anactive agent on behalf of the dead... It is the services of OTHERS on behalfof Osiris (not BY Osiris) which the dead (as Osiris) enjoys.’ (164) Howdifferent is the Christ of the Fourth Gospel who of his own accord laysdown his life and has power to take it up again. (John 10,17.) If Osirisspeaks in the language of this Gospel, he is reduced to saying: ‘Because Iam brought to life, ye shall live also.’

Now the faded parallels which I suggest here are doubtless toofar-fetched to make of Lazarus a deliberate surrogate of the Egyptiangod, nor do I claim as much, but have we no reminders here? Is structurenothing? We have in any case so far described:

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25. Although not a strict parallel, it is worth mentioning that Jesus has delayed his journeyfor two days in order that Lazarus may die. Moreover, the Jews plot to kill Lazarus after hisresurrection.

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(a) A brother and two sisters, one of them associated with acostly perfume in contrast to the stench of the tomb. (Osiris hasalso a brother by whom he is slain).25

(b) An enacted resurrection scene, one a royal liturgy and theother, a literary composition. (I don’t mean that John knew ofthe Sed feast – what we know is only that the more primitivereligious hankering is always for depiction. One acts out themyth portrayed, and John’s depicted scene is not less dramaticand visual for its taking a literary form).

(c) A shared passivity. If Osiris’s generative powers are able tobeget a son to restore him, he is nevertheless unable to raisehimself.

Implicitly, we have also (d) a parallel between Osiris and Christ, of whomwe may say that as far as the Fourth Gospel goes, both are gods. However, we have already placed this Jesus in a polar relationship toLazarus, who represents a dark and negative pole because he is repulsiveto think of as a corpse already putrid. To bring out the implied scheme,we have something like the following structure here:

OSIRIS LAZARUS

A mummy A mummy-typeA filth (one mention only) A stench Raised from the dead Raised from the deadBrother of two sisters Brother of two sistersPerfume of Isis Perfume of Mary

OSIRIS JESUS

A god resurrected A god resurrectedCelebrated annually Celebrated annuallyYet polluted and dismembered Pure and uncorrupted

In this scheme Osiris has no single correlative, and Jesus and Lazarusdivide the archetype between them.

Osiris is a traveler. At one stage his floating casket migrates to

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Byblos, which I take for a Phoenician city north of Tyre and Sidon, whereIsis discovers him inside a wooden pillar (a pillar!) Later on, he isdismembered by the evil Set and his pieces scattered about, and thesehave to be gathered before the god can be buried. His phallus, which isso important to this myth, is found to have been swallowed by a fishcalled Oxyrhynchus resembling the American pike. As his pieces werescattered far and wide, so too his religion came to pervade the Romanworld in the cult of Isis, wherein he is sometimes called Serapis byblending the names of Osiris and Apis, a bull-god of Memphis. Weneedn’t attribute a scholar’s deep knowledge of Egyptian religion to ourcosmopolitan Evangelist, yet certainly an Egyptian influence was in theair he breathed – wherever it was that he breathed this air, whetherEphesus or Alexandria or somewhere in Syria. Quite what he knew indetail of this cult we cannot say and yet his Lazarus reminds us of a godwho had been buried as a mummy if only because his wrappings arethose of a mummy who has risen from the dead.

According to JH Breasted in his Development of Religion andThought in Ancient Egypt Osiris began as the god of the Nile and wasessentially the Nile river – just as an Egyptian priest had maintainedcenturies ago, a priest named Chaeremon as cited by Dupuis. It was theannual fertility made possible by the overflowing Nile, and of course itsannual recession, which gave Osiris his primary character. ProfessorBreasted finds amid all his varieties that he represents the principle of life,whether as a fertilizing river or in spring vegetation or as Lord of theUnderworld. He is a sympathetic god because of his annual fate andbecause tender relationships are found in his family. Breasted looks onthese tender feelings as evidently the earliest yet known to find a religiousexpression. Nor could so popular a god be confined to the realm of thedead. In an Egypt whose official religion was a solar cult, Osiris mustascend to the sky, there to be integrated somehow with the sun-god Raas well as the priests could manage it, and with a thousandinconsistencies. It is in this solar realm, at last, that he is described as thePhallus of Ra. He is called that in the Book of the Dead once only (as faras I know) and once also described as a ‘filth’ (or possibly as the‘excrement’ of Osiris). Few and confusing as these references are – herethey are!

Missing from the scheme above, however, and even ratherconspicuously is the phallic aspect of Osiris, which is so prominent in hismyth and which of course we have emphasized. For not only is this

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god’s dismembered phallus needed for his resurrection, but it was evenprominent in his cult, which (at least in one locale) used to celebrate afestival devoted to the phallic emblem. Why is it missing from ourscheme, then? Because we must assign just this phallic aspect somehow tothe Gospel correlation. Otherwise our comparison loses its point and wemay seem to be verging on obscenity for its entertainment value.

But even Professor John Allegro is not to be accused of that. Hisassault on the Christian sensibility was a type of violence, but how manycould recognize this in a society in which that sensibility has fairlydwindled away? Allegro, I think, had arrived at a realistic estimate of‘churchianity’ and was frankly fed up, but for all his distortions and smearshe wasn’t unserious, and he remains therefore important – say rather, hiscase remains important by virtue of that ominous book, The SacredMushroom & the Cross. It is the most important of his works – and deeds. Whatever his motives or faults, he cast prudence aside and did an about-face in his personal faith to bring Jesus into certain ancient phallicassociations by effectively although not literally denying his historicalexistence except in the form of a phallic mushroom. The horrid implicationwas that Christianity had arisen from drug-induced revelations in anorgiastic cult. This is strictly nonsense and shows the warping of ascholarly mind.

One might almost call his case a sort of transitory insanity and yetI do not think he was insane. Now regrettably deceased, he was ascholar of indisputable gifts prior to his breakdown, and the aberration ofsuch a book as this needs to be accounted for. I am not attracted to thebiographical task, but as an interpreter of religion I see him as a mindoverwhelmed and perhaps to some extent resentful. Wrong or wrong-headed as I believe his results were, it wasn’t wholly inappropriate in thesetting of the times (and of our times) for this exasperated man to dig upcertain primitive obscenities wherewith to challenge or refute a greatreligion in decline, and in such awful decline as to disturb those fewperceiving among us who may care for veracity more than forrespectability and position. This was his achievement, and in that respectit was bizarrely successful. We can no more ignore this ancientobscenity, once it is brought into view, than we can swallow Nietzsche’smyth of God’s death with complacency.

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THE SPECTER OF A PHALLIC DEITY: LAZARUS VII.Without delay we assign the phallic role to Lazarus and thereby

complete our thought, which has the value of distinctness. Remember,please, that we have seen the tale of Lazarus as a fiction because it canbe nothing else. John’s treatment is in its way intensely ‘realistic,’ but theresult is a story that cannot be tampered with. As a fiction, then, thestory gives us a fictitious Jesus also, and the scheme we have proposedabove is based frankly on the symbolic aspect of all these figures:

(a) Jesus and Lazarus stand in a polar relationship, symbolically.(b) A correlation with Osiris is described because a reminiscenceof the god is discernible in the Lazarus figure.(c) Jesus and Lazarus divide the (Osiris) archetype betweenthem, insofar as such a changeable god may express anunderlying principle.(d) No connection could be found between Osiris and the Gospelpair in one essential trait, leaving the scheme incomplete. Unlessa phallic connection is found, or made, the scheme is of no help.

Our Fourth Gospel, then, knows nothing of ancient phallic cults and isuntainted by obscenity. It is we who have made the connection. What isit, then, that has driven us beyond the biblical tale? Was it John Allegro,who awakened the imago of such a god in his Sacred Mushroom & theCross and tried to fasten it on Jesus? Or is it not rather that, on broadergrounds, the phallic connection is asking to be made? Certainly, we havegiven Allegro his role and responded to his error. I have been careful tosay that he shies away from outright denial of the ‘historical Jesus’ in thebook which is his masterpiece, but in a lesser book published around thattime called, The End of a Road, (Dial Press NY 1971) he declares that ‘theJesus, like the Dionysus of the related Bacchic religion, is but apersonification of the sacred fungus, the ‘smeared’ or anointed, the‘Christ,’ the phallic representative of the ancient fertility godYahweh/Zeus.’ (p.42) This is surely plain enough, and I believe it iswrong. In specifics he is wrong, but is he altogether wrong in reviving thearchaic phallic deities in connection with our religion? And our times?

Now John Allegro is not the source of any insight contained inthis essay. He has been useful to our theme because his mere examplehas made it easier for me to introduce the phallic role ascribed above,and because he was conspicuous and timely. As for Lazarus, then, it issurely his own mummified figure which invites the phallic connection, given

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the archaic reversions of the age – I mean, if it should ever occur to us tomake such a bizarre assignment. This is understandably difficult and Iappreciate beforehand any Reader’s reluctance to follow me in this. Afurther difficulty lies in the naming of Osiris in connection with one of ourGospels. Osiris is foreign to the Bible, and I am well aware that amention of this god’s name flies against all our habits. I have no wish tofoist absurdities upon the Reader and in using this comparison at all, Ihave only asked that Lazarus bear the weight of a shadow: it is the mereshadow of Osiris passing by out of sight.

But let us review once more the point of comparison of a figurelike Lazarus to the phallic Osiris among Egyptian gods.

Among his several roles Osiris is the mummy-god in the Egyptianpantheon. Is there another such? I do not think so. It is true that he hasother forms, as we have just reviewed. A god out of whose body wheatmay be growing and who becomes Lord of the Underworld is a god ofmany stages and guises, and yet it is Osiris as a mummy-god with whomthe pharaohs came in time to be identified after death when theythemselves became mummies. Although originally worshiped in a solarcult, the pharaohs came at last to join with Osiris in hopes of rising to alife beyond. According to Breasted, it is in connection with the Osiris cultthat we find the earliest of the Passion plays in which the death andresurrection of the god was enacted.

Now of all the figures in the Gospels it is only Lazarus who comesbefore us bound and hampered in his wrappings after being dead. It ishis one moment, really. Even ‘alive’ he is effectively a mummy, and wesee only his emerging when

he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot withgraveclothes; and his face was bound with a napkin.

Can this image represent the shadow of a phallic deity? Surely, theintrusions of a John Allegro or the (possible) reminiscence of an Osirianresurrection are not enough to establish any such identity if the Lazarusfigure itself is not the prime magnet. I have used these examples anddevices to illustrate a meaning, but something else is prior to theseillustrations and basic here. That something else, to use the word againwith its heavy significance, is ARCHETYPE. For the moment I am reducedto assertion and can only say, Lazarus is phallic by the nature of theSymbol, although I am hard-pressed to explain why this is so. He is, as Iconceive him, a walking mummy, and his resurrection is archaic. Certain

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26. Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Bollingen Series XLII,Princeton University Press 1954, p. 236.)

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old fantasies would have him float out of his cave, and this could beargued. In any case, he is hampered by his wrappings, as the words ofJesus show, and as a mummy revived, he is the depiction of an archaicwonder. Such a resurrection is anciently phallic. It is even a kind ofphallic festival transmuted. Why this is so remains to be shown byexample.

AKWANSHI, A MYTH IN STONE: LAZARUS VIII.Erich Neumann’s Origins and History of Consciousness gives us

the following lines taken from the Book of the Dead:

Who then is this? It is Osiris or (as others say) Ra is his name (or)it is the Phallus of Ra, wherewith he was united to himself.

Who then is this? It is Osiris; or (as others say) it is his dead bodyor (as others say) it is his filth. (My italics.)26

Despite the differences between a strange old god of theHellenistic world and the human brother of two sisters in John’s Gospel,we might fairly compare the dead and ‘stinking’ body of Lazarus to thedead god’s ‘filth,’ which I suppose refers to the body’s decay. But thenwhat? It is surely no reason for dragging the ‘Phallus of Ra’ into thecomparison because that has to do only with Osiris, who for a moment isimagined in such a form. It is a moment in the recitation of a liturgywhen, in a word, Osiris is suddenly all phallus. And it is only the idea ofsuch a phallic being which is in comparison here.

Only, what do we mean by calling a god a phallic being? Wesurely go beyond a mere display of the mummy-god’s phallus here, suchas we described above. Rather, we must mean to equate the humanfigure of Osiris with the phallus, somehow, and even to merge them inthought. Had we no reason for doing so, it would be an irrationalprocedure. The very idea of such a merger seems inconceivable exceptthat on the very evidence it has often been conceived, as we shall see. Evidently, the phallic being represents an Archetype, or as we might alsocall it, a transcendental Symbol. Why it exists at all is impossible to know,but on the very evidence it is lodged out of sight in the human psyche,being a primitive vestige of no more concern to us, ordinarily, than thevermiform appendix except for its being sometimes awakened orinflamed. And of course as it goes without saying, expressed. This is

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simply the idea that a phallus may represent a king, or a god, or a Self.

Now I propose to introduce in evidence a type of phallic stonesfrom the ‘Dark Continent,’ and very primitive stones supposed torepresent dead kings or phallic gods. As visibly as any symbol could, theyshow that this idea has been expressed in stone. We do have this ideareferred once to Osiris in the text cited above, and with the Reader’spatience, I propose to look for the same connection in the figure ofLazarus. The Symbol which we take him for must be phallic inherently. Our scheme is merely artificial if the archaic connection is not there inthe first place, no matter how deep-buried or forgotten. In this respect,nothing is drawn directly from Osiris except a comparison. Everythingrests on Lazarus directly. Either we perceive him in his role as a darklyphallic myth, or else our scheme is lost.

For we seem to have painted ourselves into a corner if we arenot to appeal to the bare intuition. And what good is that? Intuitionsmay, indeed, be true or even astonishingly true, and I think we do mostlybelieve this. A valid intuition is no whim. It may furnish us withknowledge beyond our ken, but our intuitions have no rational statusand we cannot give them as a reason for anything beyond an appeal toour feelings. So how to uncover the archetype in Lazarus? Reason itself– our much-vaunted Reason! – would be a mistaken way to proceedhere. Argument cannot suffice us where demonstration is called for,evidence is called for. We proceed by way of example.

AKWANSHI II.A most potent expression of the idea we consider and for our

purposes decisive are those groups of phallic stones called Akwanshi. These incredible stones, which are undoubtedly sacred, are to be foundin the forests and villages of the Cross River Valley of Nigeria. They havebeen well-studied and excellently photographed in Philip Allison’s AfricanStone Sculpture, and I hardly know where else, in what other book onAfrican sculpture, to find such an impressive array of them.

Mr. Allison, who had a career in Africa, credits Frobenius (1913)with the (European) discovery of these phallic stones based on theremark of a black African dock-worker in Hamburg who said withreference to Nigeria, ‘In my country is every old-time man big stone.’ For the stones are often somewhat voluminous as they sway forth out ofthe ground, fairly life-size in the impressive specimens although there aresmaller stones among them. Despite their varying styles they are

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recognizably, awesomely phallic, and I should think that any normal manmight look on them with gratitude and fascination.

Allison takes the name Akwanshi to mean ‘dead person in theground.’ They represent, in fact, dead Kings, as he reports. As aforesaid,Philip Allison had a long experience in Africa and writes of these matterswith exactness and authority, and not as the tour guides. Clearly, theAkwanshi are gods or men (‘old-time man big stone’) because they areoften engraved with the stylized bearded faces and bodies of ‘kings.’ Inote as a stylized feature, for instance, that they tend to have ladderedcheeks, whatever that may signify. Commonly enough, there is aprotruding boss at the navel, very stout. In light of the researches ofWilliam Robertson Smith in other spheres, I feel justified in believing thatthese kings or gods (for the primitive king is a god) are truly fathers of thetribe, founders and social members of it. They are not, as it were,separable curiosities, and they would not be confined to the past. Asthese marvelous photographs illustrate, the Akwanshi are sometimesdecorated, apparently with grass wrappings, or else chalked. In effect,they are worshiped because involved in sacred rites.

The name has more recently been questioned by Ekpo Eyo, whowould limit Akwanshi to the smaller uncarved stones amongthem. The larger phallic stones he calls Atal, believing that theyrepresent known legendary figures. This seems a type ofEuhemerism, which will not allow the gods to be gods: they weremen first, as perhaps these Akwanshi were once really meant tobe, which would put them in the category of the pharaohs ratherthan of an Osiris who began as the Nile and only became a man(in appearance a man) in course of time. As they stand now,mute objects amid disrupted tribes, these stones are hardlymonuments of remembered persons because of their obliteratingphallic quality and the stylized engravings, but are they any lessmementoes of phallic gods and tokens of resurrection for as longas they are standing? My bias shows as philosophical: I amequally opposed to R. Gordon Wasson’s designation of Amanitamuscaria as the food of the gods.

There are 29 such groups of stones, according to Philip Allison, althoughsometimes individuals are found. Their style varies somewhat betweendifferent groups in the Cross River valley, and a census of the stones givestheir total number at 295. Commonly, they are organized in a circle,which reminds me of the knobbed six-foot (wooden) posts organized in a

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circle by the American Indians, around which they are shown to bedancing in one of the drawings of the Colonial artist, John White. Thismere fact, of a circle of ‘headed’ posts in the village, suggests thearchetypal.

In an exhibition of Oceanic art sponsored some years ago byIthaca College (NY) I saw an island totem pole from which a surprisinglylarge carven phallus arose, a reticulated carving flat as a plank but verydistinctly formed in the rise of the erection. In the fretwork was thecrouching image of a man. And there, too, quite as unmistakably as inthe Akwanshi, is your archetypal image, by which of course we meanonly the expression of the archetype whose out-of-reachedness (the veryquality which makes us call it transcendental) prevents a scientificknowledge of its nature.

As between the American Indians dancing in a circle aroundtheir big knobbed posts, and the South Sea islanders conceiving of a maninside a phallus, and the primitive Africans of Nigeria, we have distinctiveanalogies to a common idea: it is the idea of a phallus containing a man,or of a man who is a phallus. The Akwanshi are possibly later on thescale of European historical time than the Gospels themselves, but that isno objection to their primitive character. European history is not thecalendar by which the whole world moves. Can anyone doubt, forinstance, that in many an Indian village or on many a dusty road inAfghanistan we may find the very garb and the very practices of biblicaltimes? Think only of long-skirted women bringing pitchers to the villagewell, whence they will carry the water away on their heads. And so herein the Cross River valley where, untouched by Europe for many longcenturies and unacquainted with Arab culture or Egyptian art, lived atribal folk who have kept their own primitive worships intact – to ourown good fortune, I may say. For we have now presented in the stonescalled Akwanshi (or else Atal) the most vivid imaginable evidence for theirrational union of Phallus and Man: the very Phallus being figured in itsown shape, yet incised with the features of ‘dead men in the ground’who give a human character.

There is a passage in the Bible where such a phallic being mightonce have made appearance in a very old tale – according to ProfessorJohn Allegro. And here, I think, he may be right, depending on whichversion of the ancient text is right. Allegro was a specialist in biblicalHebrew, and such as it is, text and tale are plainly before us.

The episode concerns Saul’s visit to the witch of Endor when as

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the embattled king he sought her out in hopes of raising the ghost of theProphet Samuel for counsel. In Allegro’s own words (p. 173):

... the witch was eventually prevailed upon to disturb Samuel athis rest. ‘What do you see?’ asks Saul. ‘I see God (‘Elohim’)coming out of the ground,’ she replies. ‘What does he look like?’questions her client. ‘Like an ‘erection’ (so the ancient versions)wearing a robe.’ Whereupon Saul recognized the deadSamuel’s ghost...

So the ancient versions? Rudolf Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica supports with aquestion mark the possible reading Allegro has chosen, but he maynonetheless be right. In the usual text, the witch has seen an ‘ish zaken’(an old man) ‘oleh’ which means ‘coming up, mounting up, arising.’ Andshe sees him wearing a robe. But there is evidence that the ‘ancientversions’ Allegro appeals to have used another wording instead of ishzaken, and by substituting an ish zakuph arising (on the basis of old textswhose interpretation is left to the specialist) we get man seen as an‘erection arising.’ Zakuph means erect, most distinctly, and as a noun itmay designate an erection.

In support of his claim for ‘ancient versions’ Allegro cites theSeptuagint’s translation here as orthion, which means that the witch sawa man ‘straight up, going upwards, upright, or standing,’ and not that shesaw an ‘old’ man. And from this one would infer a Hebrew zakuph. Hecites also an old Latin version corresponding to the Greek word ‘straight,’and besides these two he cites a Syriac version also. Obviously, Allegro’squiver is full.

A recent translation of the verses in I Samuel 28 given by P. KyleMcCarter, Jr., in the Anchor Bible commentary reads as follows:

v. 13 ‘Do not be afraid!’ the king said to her. ‘What do you see?’ ‘I see a god,’ she told him, ‘coming up from the earth!’ v. 14 ‘Whatis his appearance?’ he asked her. ‘An erect man is coming up,’she said, ‘and he is wrapped in a robe.’

Do we find the least concession here to Allegro’s possibility, of whichKyle McCarter was surely aware? Right or wrong, Allegro’s translation isprofessionally up to the mark, and if he happens to be right, we have abiblical evocation of the Akwanshi archetype. I mean, if Samuel did soappear to the witch in the story-teller’s original idea, and ‘covered with amantle,’ we have a presumption that he might not have been raised fromthe dead otherwise. Resurrection and phallus are associated in the Osiris

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myth and conjoined in the Akwanshi. If Allegro’s restoration of theancient Hebrew text is right and his translation sound, we have areminiscence of that same conjunction here.

AKWANSHI III.In a book whose aim it is to probe the origins of war in our

society’s mental condition, Black Ship to Hell, Brigid Brophy conceives ofa sort of phallic resurrection:

‘When the father triumphs over death, he is really triumphingover castration. His resurrection is the renewal of his generativepowers... The dead lie down – they cannot move or raisethemselves – just as the quiescent sexual organ lies down... whenthe organ re-asserts its sexual power it does so by rising again.’

Brigid Brophy is insofar a Freudian intellectual, a writer of recognizedliterary gifts who is working at a high level of consciousness when theassociation of phallus and resurrection presents itself to her imagination. Psychiatry, however, goes beyond such a conscious fantasy as hers,interesting as that may be, into a deeper and more terrible fact describedin its literature. For in minds broken by madness we find an evidence ofthe very archetype parading which goes beyond a simple phalliccomparison like that above to the fundamental idea of phallic being.

For this is an idea which is known to occur in schizophrenia,showing that the locus of the archetype is not in stones or learned booksbut is within us, and always capable (so it seems) of being summoned tolife. A simple proof of this is that schizophrenics have been known tothink of themselves as phallic beings in the very sense described above. With no commitment to a theory of archetypes that I know of, theAmerican psychiatrist, Dr. Bertram Lewin, has described the peculiarsyndrome. He makes the observation that the phallic delusion seems tooccur especially in those who feel themselves being eaten. A strangeassociation! And it reminds me of Geza Roheim’s theory thatschizophrenia originates in an oral trauma. Suffice it, the bare allusion: Ionly report the fact that Dr. Lewin has known of patients who, in ourcontext, may think of themselves as a sort of living Akwanshi, or in theFreudian terms of Brigid Brophy, who might conceive of themselves asthe ‘re-assertive’ sexual organ because of its renewable and astonishingvitality.

Now schizophrenia, as we know, is a disease very deeply studiedbut not yet well understood. Even its causes are not understood, but we

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27. Andreyev’s Lazarus may be found in The Seven that were Hanged & Other Stories,Modern Library paperback, 1958.

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do understand that the schizophrenic is a desperate mind. In case of thephallic being idea, which implies those same ‘archaic vestiges andprimitive modes of functioning in the unconscious’ which Jung wrote ofand Freud acknowledged, it may be that his very desperation awakensthe archetype – for all that I know to the contrary. It was certainlyinteresting to me to read Dr. Adolph Storch on this disease. I have nolocal access to his book which I read very carefully twice many years ago,but the impression which remains is that he would regard schizophreniaas a sort of failed religious strategy.

Our yet unfinished task invites us respecting Lazarus. Do weknow that his figure has ever anywhere attracted an association to theinconceivable Phallic Man? We do know it, in fact, and we have a clearevidence of this strange identity in a work of art which is at onceunconscious and inspired.

LEONID ANDREYEV’S Lazarus: LAZARUS IX.Like many a Russian tale, say one by Chekhov or Turgenev,

Andreyev’s story has no ‘plot’ device and does not depend oncontrivance. We look for that sort of thing in O. Henry but the Russianartist depends for his interest on our humanity. It is his theme whichfascinates and our pleasure in reading him is not to be deferred to asurprise ending.

In the case of the tale under consideration, our interest lies in thebloated figure of Lazarus and his stolid person as the author describeshim. We see a reflection of the Gospel in his appearance at a festivetable ‘after three days and nights in the mysterious thraldom of death,’but Andreyev makes no effort to retell the biblical story and gives us adifferent Lazarus, instead.27 A whiff of good old-fashioned Russiannihilism haunts the tale to assist the imagination, but our focus is on aLazarus once beloved who has become a man of dreadful aspect; and itis here that our inspired Russian has described all unconsciously hisgruesome version of the archetype. In Lazarus, as he invites us toimagine him:

the restoration had not been complete; ...death had left upon hisface and body the effect of an artist’s unfinished sketch seen

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through a thin glass. On his temples, under his eyes, and in thehollow of his cheek lay a thick, earthy blue. His fingers wereblue, too, and under his nails, which had grown long in thegrave, the blue had turned livid. Here and there on his lips andbody the skin, blistered in the grave, had burst open and leftreddish glistening cracks, as if covered with a thin glassy slime. And he had grown exceedingly stout. His body was horriblybloated and suggested the fetid, damp smell of putrefaction.

It is a measure of the artist’s success that he has brought forth hissymbol in its wrapping, much as the witch of Endor raised Samuel-Elohim from the ground in his robe. Without this it would beunacceptable: these very disguises allow us to approach this revenant ofan ancient god, whereas if Andreyev had been conscious of playing witha phallic symbol, the effect of his story would have been one ofcleverness instead of truth, and its deep mystery would have beenfrittered away.

Of course, it is difficult to unmask such a symbol – it was not easyto discover it – because any associated detail, if exposed too frankly,becomes comical and slightly indecent. So I merely allude to certainaspects of the phallic nature by isolating a few words of the paragraphquoted above, which occurs at the outset of the story and sets its tone:

* a thick earthy blue* fingers were blue* nails which had grown long in the grave* burst open * glistening ...as if covered with a thin, glassy slime* he had grown exceedingly stout... horribly bloated* fetid, damp smell of putrefaction

We are caught up at once in our fascination with his dreadful aspect. Here at the outset is a masterly fusion of his mortal disintegration and thefirst appearance of a phallic being. It is a triumph of artistic inspiration. At first, however, the awful condition of this Lazarus is overlooked orexplained away. His friends rejoice with feasting and musicians as hehimself is seated passively, although arrayed like a bridegroom!

His garments (were) gorgeous and festive, glittering with gold,bloody red and purple...(but) someone recklessly lifted the veil...and uncovered the truth in its ugly nakedness.

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What vivid clues these are! Someone has approached him to ask what itwas like to be ‘There’ and caring nothing for the questioner and hisfoolish curiosity, the apathetic Lazarus does not respond, but the guestsare struck, then, with the realization that he had been dead for threedays and they await his answer. A second time the questioner asks andhis heart sinks, but there is no response.

On the table, as if forgotten by Lazarus, lay his livid blue hand,and all eyes were riveted upon it, as though expecting thedesired answer from that hand.

Downcast and fearful, as if impelled to know this bridegroom’s secret, thequestioner puts his question yet a third time; but now the apathy andsilence of this ‘exceedingly stout... horribly bloated’ figure is borne inupon the guests. When his livid hand moves slightly, they sigh and lifttheir eyes, but the festivity dies away. Even the music stops. Why?

Given the meaning of his strange appearance on our terms(because it is our Symbol we interpret) we have drawn very near to anancient tabu against lifting the veil, as if a fearful old god had beenrevived and were in danger of declaring himself. Not the phallus, then,but the intrusion of the phallic monster is ugly. Suppressed, these archaicdemigods may not emerge again except obscenely, whence the tabu.

Those who look too closely on Lazarus or peer into his vacanteyes fall into a mournful apathy, droop dully and pine away. The void ofeternity has overcome them. And here is a sign that Andreyev’sconsciousness is taken up by a Russian nihilism, against which he offersthe service of his art in protest. It is a curious fact that the appearance ofthis monstrous being is related to the myth of God’s death, albeitimplicitly as a universal darkness which issues from the gaze of Lazarus:

...and this darkness enveloped the whole universe. It wasdispelled neither by the sun, nor by the moon, nor by the stars,but embraced the earth like a mother, and clothed it in aboundless, black veil...

The death of God is well represented by the extinction of the sun and byan infinity which is nothing but an endless waste, and I suppose thethought of these rhetorical horrors, in themselves no doubt terrible forthose who dream such dreams, might have been meant to send a chill upthe spine, but Andreyev doesn’t terrify. He succeeds only in fascinatingthe reader, and at last it is Lazarus who is consumed by desert and thenight in a groping pursuit of a setting sun which will rise again.

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For there is nothing to be done with this revived and terribleLazarus except to get rid of him. From afar the world is fascinated,because of course he has become the object of a morbid curiosity, butwoe to those who would approach him! One after another his friendsabandon him until one night even his caring sister Martha leaves. A windrises, a door bangs back and forth, and Lazarus does not stir. His secondlife is as nothing for him. He can only exist, like that livid hand of his‘which lay upon the table as if he had forgotten it.’ Devoid of animation,of joy, of hope, of friends, he is a Sign. The encroaching desert creeps tohis dwelling to emphasize the sterility of this lonely bridegroom, for it isonly the heedless and innocent children who carry him food. But thismere mention of a daily offering of food, besides the thoughtfulnessimplied, resembles also a service to idols.

Although abandoned at home by those who cannot endure hispresence, Lazarus’ fame has spread elsewhere and the story is taken upwith his baleful influence. A Roman sculptor in quest of an unearthlybeauty visits him to spend the night and goes home blighted. EventuallyAugustus Caesar summons him to Rome, and it is during his voyage toItaly ‘on the saddest and most gorgeous ship that was ever mirrored inthe azure waves’ that a subtle erotic image occurs when aboard thesilent ship,

the water seemed to moan as it parted before the short, curvedprow.

But why this erotic note? The contrast is ironic. No such image ofconsummation is associated with Lazarus except for the wedding dresswhich henceforth he lives in. We are reminded here of the twin rails onwhich Andreyev’s symbol rides. One is that of the ugly bridegroom amida sterile desert – because there is never a thought of a bride; but asecond rail, as we might say, is simply that of archaic myth, so that herethe erotic reference is embedded in myth. It is the water of the seawhich answers to the bride.

Arrived in Italy, Lazarus is taken to Rome amid the pomp of agreat festive procession, and we are here recalled to the old obsceneprocessions in which a giant phallus was displayed. It is another proofthat Andreyev’s figure requires its supporting myth. Furthermore, whenLazarus is presented to Caesar, and very reluctantly on the part of hisattendants,

expert painters, barbers and artists were secured, and theyworked on Lazarus’ head the whole night.

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We compare the old practice of adorning idols with paints and perfumesand royal trappings. I have read of an idol in Egypt that was dailyanointed with oil and reclothed. Even in this business of redoingLazarus’ head there is a sort of blind veneration of the awful figurebecause there is something superhuman about him. We hardly dare callhim a human being without remembering the other side of him. WhenCaesar interrogates him:

‘Why did you not salute me when you entered?’Lazarus answered indifferently, ‘I did not know it was necessary.’‘You are a Christian?’‘No.’

After confronting him, Caesar discovers the disguised horror of this Beingwho has been given an amiable and stout appearance with cosmeticsand paints, still clad in his wedding dress! Afflicted at night with a senseof his doom, thanks to this interview, he has Lazarus’ eyes burned outand sends him home. Now the Specter returns to his desert, where ithad been his habit of an evening to follow the setting sun. Once again,eye-sockets seeking the light and arms outspread, a silhouette against thered sky, he stumbles out into the desert toward the setting sun, but fromthis last venturing into wilderness and night he never returns.

Now as aforesaid, it was by an unconscious inspiration that thispassionate Russian artist could arrive at his Lazarus and the many subtleclues to his corrupt and strangely phallic identity. Had he the leastthought of exploiting a phallic being, or of working in a thinly-veilederotic imagery – this artist who was by no means afraid of sex – he musthave betrayed himself somewhere by a naughty word or at the veryleast, by a stroke of audacity, like a Joyce or an Updike, writers whodelight in their audacity. There is nothing of that quality here. Andreyevis a deeply innocent writer but possessed by his dream, and it is only wewho have understood his Lazarus as a reflection of the archetype. Anarchaic reversion is depicted here, and just such an archaic reversion asDr. Adolf Storch explored in the minds of schizophrenics. Fortunately forourselves and for the case in hand, what the insane can give us only intheir madness, an artist may give us in his works, but shaped and madeintelligible or beautiful.

It is interesting to see the resourcefulness of unconsciousinvention in furnishing those environmental supports, as reference orreplica, which Andreyev’s phallic being requires, lest such an anomalousfigure find himself out of place in his own story. Thus his Lazarus having

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28. It’s too remote and a mere pun, but I take a certain delight here in ‘beestings’ (one word,also spelled ‘biestings’) from the Anglosaxon. It’s the first thickish milk given by a cow aftercalving.

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known the chill of death sits in a broiling sun which

‘beat down mercilessly upon all living things (until) even thescorpions, convulsed with a mad desire to sting, hid under thestones. (Yet) he sat motionless in the burning rays, lifting high hisblue face and shaggy, wild beard.’

The curve of a scorpion’s tale, ‘convulsed with a mad desire to sting,’ isreminiscent of the ‘short, curved prow’ of the sailing vessel furrowingthrough the bridal sea. Something, even, of this curve is suggested in thesculptor’s greeting, ‘You are as fat as a barrel,’ which adds its own furtherdimensions.

The scorpion’s sting is in its tail, as is the honeybee’s, and twiceAndreyev mentions bees; once when describing the freshly-arrivingguests who

burst into stormy exclamations, and buzzed around the house...like so many bees.

Too remote? Certainly, for any conscious effect this is too remote, andyet it adds its honey to the erotic theme. As for stinging (comparepricking and needling) I do happen to remember a line of poetry frommany years ago in which the poet wrote: ‘Set to my skin/ the stingingbees of love.’ This falls short of Yeats’s ‘clay and wattles’ cottage in a‘bee-loud glade,’ but on the point in question – there it is.28

Or take for a final example of these further hints and allusionsAugustus Caesar’s words to Lazarus:

‘Like a caterpillar on the fields, you are gnawing away at the fullseed of joy, exuding the slime of despair and sorrow.’

Where the phallic image combines with the full seed of joy and theexuded slime recalls an earlier mention of reddish glistening cracks, as ifcovered with a thin glassy slime.

So much, then, for an evidence from Leonid Andreyev to showthat a Lazarus derived from the Bible, despite his transformation, may becast in this archaic phallic role. Of all the persons in the Gospels, it is hewho has attracted the archaic phallic projection, thus showing that hecan. And I do not know of another such case. Moreover, there seems tobe a certain fittingness to it simply by virtue of his (archaic) resurrection.

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29. I have used Clifton Fadiman’s selection in The Short Stories of Henry James (NY: TheModern Library, 1948.)

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Our consideration of this evidence rests literally on the quotedwords of the story, although certainly Andreyev’s own tale is innocent ofall these motives; and if our treatment has suffered a trace of obscenity, itis because an unveiling of the Symbol has required that. From thetremendous Akwanshi stones of Nigeria to the phallic aspects of Osiris tothis fascinating Russian tale, we have traced a common underlying form,which is that of the man-phallus (or phallic god). And we have remindedourselves, thanks to Dr. Bertram Lewin, of the fantasy of the insane mindin which just such a phallic identity may recur as an image of the Self.

Now this underlying and traceable form I take for evidence of anArchetype which is otherwise out of reach and whose existence we canonly posit on the basis of its varying yet somehow also commonexpressions, but the bearing of this Archetype on ourselves has yet to beshown; and this is the last step to be taken in our treatment of Lazarus. Or should I say, in our getting rid of him, as even the Gospel is eager todo. It is an expression of the underlying archetype where we might leastexpect to find it in a story by the eminently respectable (ex-patriate)American artist, Henry James, and it is altogether pertinent to our theme. Short of dropping things in a heap of confusions, James’s story is thehandiest illustration I can think of to show the meaning of it all, especiallyin its bearing on ourselves. We have only to consider, once more, itsvery language and its metaphors to relate all these pieces. We can evenrelate ourselves to the fantasy of the schizophrenic or to the Lazarus ofLeonid Andreyev by the aid of Henry James’s surprising story, which forthis reason alone, of course, is very much worth our while. For we aredealing with a myth in treating of Lazarus, and we are probing the sort ofreality the myth conveys.

JAMES’S JOLLY CORNER: LAZARUS X.29

In this complex story an elderly American gentleman, SpencerBrydon, returns to New York City after a lifetime abroad to take aparticular interest in a corner house of four storeys – the ‘Jolly Corner’ –where ‘the old silver-plated knobs of the several mahogany doors...suggested the pressure of the palms of the dead.’ In this ample vacant

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house had he spent the holidays of his ‘overschooled’ youth, and therehis family had remained for many years.

So with an old friend, a Miss Staverton, he broaches his questionas they are shown about by a Mrs. Muldoon, who looks after the place byday. What if, like his dead brothers, he’d stayed on in a businesslike wayinstead of making a life for himself elsewhere out of his own choices? Money is not the sole object: what might he have made of himself? Thequestion is haunting, and Spencer Brydon will come alone at night fromhis club or hotel almost expecting to meet ‘some strange figure, someunexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an emptyhouse.’

It is this ‘strange figure’ which will assume the form of his alterego, although not at first because the earliest intimations of it are ofsomething vaguely daunting. He imagines himself opening

a door into a room shuttered and void, and yet so coming, witha great suppressed start, on some quite erect confrontingpresence, something planted in the middle of the place andfacing him through the dusk.

We think of John Allegro’s ish zakuph, the ‘quite erect confrontingpresence’ of Samuel in his robe when summoned by the Witch of Endor. Even at the climax of his quest, Spencer Brydon senses the presence of

something all unnatural and dreadful... a figure which stood... asstill as some image erect in a niche or as some black-vizoredsentinel guarding a treasure.

A suggestion of antiquity is in the air, and if nothing about this ‘quiteerect confronting presence’ is as highly-colored as Andreyev’s floridLazarus, at least the ‘hard-faced houses... had begun to look livid in thedim dawn.’ More than just ghosts (which he talks of with his friend) orwitchery (‘great blank rooms... absolute vacancy reigned... nothing butMrs. Muldoon’s broomstick, in a corner’) when he and Miss Stavertonhave emerged to the ‘comparatively harsh actuality of the Avenue... (it reminds him) of the assault of the outer light of the Desert on the traveleremerging from an Egyptian tomb.’

But Brydon cannot give up his queer solitary quest, and he listensfor ‘all the old baffled forsworn possibilities’ when going about with hiscandle by night. To Alice Staverton he will say:

‘It’s only a question of what fantastic, yet perfectly possible,development of my own nature I mayn’t have missed. It comes

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over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep downsomewhere within me, as the full-blown flower is in the smalltight bud...’‘I believe in the flower,’ (she replies.) ‘I believe it would havebeen quite splendid, quite huge and monstrous.’‘Monstrous above all!’ her visitor echoed; ‘and I imagine, by thesame stroke, quite hideous and offensive.’

Even if we disregard an unconscious phallic allusion in ‘the small tightbud’ which has grown into something ‘quite splendid, quite huge andmonstrous,’ it is verily the same note which Andreyev has struck in hisLazarus except that Spencer Brydon is in quest of a monstrous possibility,as he conceives his alter ego.

A deep secrecy shrouds this private quest. Mrs. Muldoon doesn’tdiscover the packet of candles hidden away in a built-in drawer. She’snot one to be ‘craping up to thim top storeys in the ayvil hours’ andleaves at dusk, but even Alice Staverton doesn’t know, can only dream ofthe extent of his ‘morbid obsession.’ As for anyone else, let them supposeas they may. Let them believe that he leaves his club to go to his hotel,or vice versa, instead of sneaking away nights to his ‘jolly corner.’ Hewants nobody to know of his queer prowling, which he knows must seemabsurd, and by balancing club off hotel, he finds it easy to hide under afalse impression:

‘Everything, everything conspired and promoted; there was trulyeven in the strain of his experience something that glossed over,something that salved and simplified, all the rest ofconsciousness.’

The point is psychological here, yet in the very imagery describing that‘something’ of a personal easement about this haunting of an emptyhouse when he could ‘let himself go,’ the ‘something’ that glosses over,salves and simplifies his consciousness reminds us curiously of the ‘thinglassy slime’ of Andreyev’s bloated figure, where death’s visible traces onhim were like ‘an artist’s unfinished sketch seen through a thin glass.’

Of course, it is easy to leap at the seeming absurdity of a phallicstrain in James’s hero where no such theme is struggling into the light,but even the barest of hints is a hint, for the human mind is very subtle. When Spencer Brydon likens himself to ‘some monstrous stealthy cat’ hetakes a monstrosity upon himself which is otherwise projected on hisDouble. Furthermore, he is the one who conspicuously uses ‘his single

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eye-glass’ and not his alter ego. One-eyedness is a well-known phallicclue, and I believe an example of this may be found in Joyce’s Ulysses, tomention no other.

Spencer Brydon even shares with Lazarus a common theme ofdeath and resurrection, and I say this knowing full well that James’simagination is no longer biblically determined. Like his famous brotherWilliam, he understands this whole experience as somehow psychic andoccult; so I don’t imply that Henry James had Lazarus in mind. No morewas he thinking of Osiris when ‘the harsh actuality of the Avenue’ struckSpencer Brydon on coming out of doors like ‘the outer light of the Deserton the traveller emerging from an Egyptian tomb.’ James was supremelyconscious of his meaning in this story which was written late in lifebecause Spencer Brydon represents himself, Henry James, an ex-patriateAmerican literary artist who as the superbly intelligent grandson of anAlbany (NY) millionaire might more ‘sensibly’ have pursued a career inbusiness or at very least in one of the established professions. It istherefore an event in his own undisclosed experience he is writing of. James has had his own experience of the momentous encounter. Onenight, as the story goes on:

‘He’s there, at the top, and waiting’ (Spencer Brydon exclaims.)‘His wrath, his menaced interest, now balances with his dread’because the monstrous alter ego has been hunted until he has‘turned.’

Cold fear comes over him, then sweat breaks out. He is conscious of a‘duplication of consciousness.’ Remarkably enough, the final awakeningof this monstrous presence (‘Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human’)comes only with Spencer Brydon’s ‘resumption of his campaign after adiplomatic drop, a calculated absence of three nights.’ Now then, threenights: and we may think of the ‘three days and three nights’ of the Signof Jonah, because in any case we have in the mere mention of a threenights absence the characteristic lacuna, after which the specter arises. Without a lacuna there is no resurrection.

Any such event is a numinous event, and James is fully consciousof its dreadful nature. The nearness of the specter produces an immenserevulsion in Spencer Brydon. High upstairs he finds a door ‘closed sincehis former visitation, the matter probably of a quarter of an hour before.’ It is a discovery to make a man’s eyes bulge.

‘Ah this time at last they were, the two, the opposed projections

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of him, in presence; and this time, as much as one would, thequestion of danger loomed.’ Were he to open the door ‘all thehunger of his prime need might have been met, his high curiositycrowned, his unrest assuaged’ – but he cannot open the doorand stands there, ‘close to the thin partition by which revelationwas denied him.’

Under the importunity of the event and ‘for reasons rigid and sublime’ hedecides that any conceivable meeting between the two must be injuriousto both, which nicely suits the polarity involved (just as we do not bringthe poles of a magnet together). The terror of such a possible encounteris immense and Spencer Brydon ‘knew

– yes, as he had never known anything – that, should he see thedoor open, it would all too abjectly be the end of him... It wouldsend him straight about to the window he had left open, and bythat window, be long ladder and dangling rope as absent as theywould, he saw himself uncontrollably insanely fatally take his wayto the street.’

Accordingly, he retreats, gives up his quest and full of dread and cautionprepares to make his way deep downstairs. Only now it is the specterwho doesn’t give him up and when at last our hero manages to reach thebottom floor, it is to find a ‘penumbra, dense and dark’ in which thefearful specter gathers to reveal himself in ‘his planted stillness, his vividtruth.’ A deep paradox qualifies the revelation because this alter ego is atonce himself, and yet emphatically not himself. What he sees is a veryrich gentleman covering his face with his hands, on one of which twofingers are missing. We note

‘his queer actuality of evening-dress, of dangling double eye-glass, of gleaming silk lappet and white linen, of pearl button andgold watch-guard and polished shoe. No portrait by a greatmodern master could have presented him with more intensity...’

When suddenly the vivid apparition drops his hands to show his face, it isa horror.

‘...that face... It was unknown, inconceivable, awful,disconnected from any possibility... the presence before him wasa presence, the horror within him a horror... Such an identityfitted his at no point, made its alternative monstrous. ...the face ofa stranger... whoever he might be, evil, odious, blatant, vulgar...’

Earlier, when he first became aware of the presence of ‘something all

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unnatural and dreadful,’ he understood that ‘to advance upon (it) wasthe condition for him either of liberation or of supreme defeat,’ and withtrepidation and discretion he advanced. Now to his infinite horror, it isthe specter which advances aggressively, and Spencer Brydon swoonshis deathly swoon. It is a tremendous hours-long swoon, and somethingmore than a swoon, until in bright daylight he awakens with his head inAlice Staverton’s lap. (She had, of course, met the housekeeper andgained entrance).

‘What he most took in... was that Alice Staverton had for a longunspeakable moment not doubted he was dead.‘It must have been that I was... Yes, I can only have died. Youbrought me literally to life.’Where was he for all those hours? ‘Out there in my strangedarkness – where was it, what was it?’ Except as a momentarydeath, he cannot understand ‘the depth and the duration of hisswoon.’

The story is very deep. James’s hero had summoned courage enough toface the evil and degraded aspect of himself and affirm his own choice ofhis own life. Evidently there will be something monstrous in one’sencounter with the Double if Spencer Brydon’s alter ego has consisted injust those aspects of a possible life which the higher self sloughs off. Clearly, also, the higher self is chosen.

As a result of his courage Spencer Brydon is resurrected to anew life. He now embodies the vitality of the alter ego without itsmonstrous distortions. It is an aspect of the phallic image now united tohimself when he ‘comes to life’ with his head in Alice Staverton’s lap.

WHAT ALL THIS CAN MEAN: LAZARUS XI.I believe we have dislodged Professor Allegro’s Amanita

muscaria by proposing the figure of Lazarus for a phallic connection inthe Gospels, should any be required. Others may well believe that noneis required, and I concede to them willingly that no such thing as a‘phallic Being’ is to be found in the Fourth Gospel. A phallic archetypelodged somehow in the human make-up haunts the figure of Lazarus: this isall that I claim.

John Allegro was probably the most formidable of recent criticsto deny the ‘life of Jesus,’ despite the wild turn of his argument, and in

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The Sacred Mushroom & the Cross he spoke effectively to a period of sexand drugs, a demoralized period in a disorderly time – our own period,perhaps – almost seeming to offer in his theory a remedy or a permission. In answering him on the point I have indicated a few seeming linksbetween a god like Osiris and a Lazarus emerging from his cave. Themere action of a dead man coming forth on his feet is like that of aSamuel-Elohim appearing for the moment as an ish zakuph. We havecompared this to the Book of the Dead which speaks of Osiris as ‘thephallus of Ra,’ and we considered the tremendous Akwanshi stones. Mention was also made of Dr. Bertram Lewin’s report of the phallic Selfidea sometimes found in schizophrenics. It is therefore possible to seekthe phallic aspect of a Lazarus in his whole body on the strength of hisactive role.

We have made a polarity of Lazarus and Jesus, opposed thoughthey are, because every comparison must bring out a contrast betweenthem, but as I have earlier remarked, Lazarus completes the Symbol ofChrist by standing at an opposite extreme. He is unable to raise himselfand lies putrid in the grave until Jesus calls him forth. Yet by virtue of hisbeing raised from the dead, he partakes of the miraculous and may besaid to hold his treasure in an earthen vessel. He is surely meant to becompared with Jesus as the Resurrected Son of God, although we must askourselves if in his role as a symbol he doesn’t serve as a magnet to attractto his negative pole what the positive force of Christ can only repel. Notonly is Lazarus ominous, therefore, but he is also disgusting.

The Scottish authority, William Robertson Smith, writes: ‘In thelanguage of physics, sanctity is a polar force, it both attracts and repels.’ Of course, he is thinking along different lines, but we have an illustrationof this polarity in the deliberate pairing of Jesus and Lazarus. Thecomplete Symbol is a polarity involving good and evil, life and death,attraction and repulsion. Despite the fiction which the Fourth Evangelistemploys or invents here, the Raising of Lazarus belongs to the Gospel.

Lazarus is also a link which places the Symbol of Christ in itsnecessary past because Jesus is not a myth sprung up out of nowhere orcome down from Heaven. And thanks to Leonid Andreyev, we haveseen just how far these archaic aspects may be taken. The Russian tale issatisfying, as if it resolved something deeply within ourselves, becausereally it is a bridge to the archetype. The mere figure of Lazarus, the merefiction, attracts the phallic archetype, which is not to say that theEvangelist has intended Lazarus as a phallic being. It is only our

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interpretation which can make that connection, but we do acknowledgethe biblical derivation of Andreyev’s figure as, by contrast, we can find noconceivable such derivation for Allegro’s fantastic mushroom.

As for the Henry James story, it has shown us a quality of horrorand revulsion in Spencer Brydon’s encounter with his alter ego which wecan associate with Andreyev’s Lazarus. Each tale describes an artist’sintuition of a monstrosity which bears or may bear on a Self. This is plainenough in James, and was it not fascinating to notice the many clues toan archetype of which he was unconscious? Both tales repudiate themonstrous figure. Andreyev sends Lazarus into a barren desert, and Spencer Brydon triumphs over death by facing up to his ghost.

William Blake has written a prophetic epitaph for the Lazarus Ihave imagined:

Each Man is in his Spectre’s powerUntill the arrival of that hour,When his Humanity awakeAnd cast his own Spectre into the Lake.

Blake knew whereof he wrote so succinctly, just as Henry James did, butthe experience is rare and seems an event unique to a life when it comes– should it come. Blake is biblical but (I think) hardly Christian. Jamesisn’t Christian at all. Despite its lack of a definitely biblical connection, hisJolly Corner best reveals the experience wrapped up in the unreachableArchetype.

PART FIVETHE GOSPEL RECAST

Several times have I mentioned the Fourth Gospel, mostly inpassing, to remark its distinctiveness. In the Wedding at Cana Jesusproduces wine without a word of command or a gesture of any sort. Theevent is a Sign: the transformation of the water comes after his mother(= the Old Religion) tells him, ‘They have no wine.’ Or we saw howJohn has removed the Cleansing of the Temple from Passover week, thelast of Jesus’ life, to place it near the beginning. Or we noticed hisembarrassment over a Sign of Jonah in which the vomiting out of arunaway prophet becomes a prophecy of the Resurrection. In that sameconnection the Evangelist obliterates a fact of tradition in the form of aSemitic name, Simon bar-Jonah, which he changes to Simon, Son ofJohn.

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What is really at issue for the Fourth Evangelist is an entirerecasting of the Gospel that transforms the person of Jesus. We have justdone examining the tale of Lazarus as a deliberate myth. Of course, insome sense the Synoptics have also recast the underlying traditions, butthere is a quality of legend about those earlier Gospels whereas we nolonger find legends of that sort in John. Instead, we have myths outrightand very bold fictions. This author is no longer assembling tales into alumpy Gospel like Mark’s. The Fourth Evangelist seeks only thecompleteness of his Symbol. A series of piecemeal contributions, such asthe curing of yet another Bartimaeus or the raising from her sickbed ofyet another daughter – and these things kept as a matter of record –could only detract from the force of his own tremendous myth. TheSigns, instead, are reduced in number and greatly expanded bytechniques of story-telling and verisimilitude. Instead of addinganecdotes he adds detail.

This final Evangelist is intent on creating a more satisfactory myth. He isn’t satisfied with the earlier Gospels because he has mastereddeeper themes. When Matthew writes of the church, for instance, as theonly Evangelist even to use the word, he thinks of its rules and itsauthority. One might aspire to be a member in good standing in such anorganization as that, but in John’s fellowship of the Spirit one feels athome. More than the others, he seeks to achieve the realization of Jesus inthe sacred community. His is the Gospel of the Mystic Soul for whom theFather and the Son are an indwelling consolation. It is also, ironically,the Gospel of love – despite its animosity toward the Jews. Appropriately, this final Gospel opens with a hymn:

In the Beginning was the Word (=Logos) And the Word was with God, And the Word was God.

And so forth mysteriously and gloriously because the Heavenly Logos is alesser divinity, sharing in the very quality of God. In the Synoptic Gospelsthe Son of Man could be expected in the clouds for Judgment, but therewas never a thought that he had anything to do with the creation of theworld, whereas the Logos is declared to be the instrument of creation. Coming into a world he had made and to which (it is implied) he hasimparted a sort of indwelling Reason, ‘the Word became flesh and dweltamong us.’ Nevertheless, this pre-existent Logos now appearing in theperson of Jesus is met with rejection:

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He came unto his own, and his own received him not; but to allwho received him, who believed in his Name, he gave power tobecome children of God.

An elevated worship of Jesus has developed in the Great Congregationfor which this Gospel has been composed. It was evidently a MotherChurch bent on extending its influence widely and succeeding in thataim. ‘We beheld his glory,’ the author dares to say, ‘the glory as of theonly begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.’ (John 1,14.) If takenliterally, this would make our Evangelist an eye-witness of the life to bedescribed: so far does this Gospel dare to go when advancing its claim. Or these words might have been uttered once by a Christian prophet in amoment of inspiration or invented by a poet who composed the hymn,as if by merely uttering such a wish you could almost taste its fulfillment. A serious claim of history is of course very distinctly intended, despite itsmythical form.

After this opening, all mention of the Logos ceases henceforth,and that is rather strange. Why was it introduced if it has no bearing onthe life to be described? Its disappearance suggests that a mystical poemalready in use has been borrowed for an opening chord. Conceived as aunity, this Gospel was nevertheless not written ex nihilo but composed orre-composed out of available materials. Woven into the prologue, thehymn of the Logos casts its glow over a Gospel in which Jesus under aveil of flesh and blood is uniquely the Son of God. Hence the paradox ofJesus in this Gospel. Lifeless, he bleeds on the cross at the thrust of aspear; but he has come into this world from a Heaven beyond, and havingnow returned there, he continues to speak from Heaven. It is a subtle effectand very shrewdly built up until we reach certain unique farewelldiscourses in which he speaks most intimately in his prayers and to hisdisciples – and to us, because every direct thing that he says in thisGospel can be taken to heart. It is designed for that. John’s is the Gospelof the spoken Word: it is meant to be read aloud, its full effect requiringthat. It is the most impressive liturgical Gospel.

INSIGHT & DISCOVERY

The Fourth Gospel I first truly understood as a young Lutheranpastor in the Pennsylvania town of Altoona whose cobblestone streetsand steep neighborhoods were like a village in a fairy-tale. Quaintlyhuddled houses up and down the hills were painted against the sooty

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atmosphere in solid reds, deep yellows, outright browns. It was anotherview of the world I got there, and once before dawn outside ourparsonage, going for a solitary walk uphill, I was seized by a sense of themystery of things. It was a moment quickly gone, but it brought home tome a sense of the uncanny, as if there was nothing anywhere that couldnot present its tangible mystery. And there was something wonderfulabout this knowledge.

As to the Fourth Gospel, it was quite a different matter butnonetheless an event in my life, a moment of understanding which burston me in our tidy brick parsonage living room where I sat recuperatingfrom a pile-up of sicknesses. A common flu neglected had passed intopneumonia (which I was unaware I had) and then to meningitis after adrive to Lancaster for interviews. I woke up stiff and disabled nextmorning but saved by the swift action of my wife and by Dr. JuliusBloom, a physician of repute in that city who came to my home beforecalling an ambulance. Recuperating afterwards, I was weak, absurdlyweak, and rose from my couch to float tiptoe across the room now andthen before retreating to sit down. All I could do was sit and read.

The Fourth Gospel was for me at that time an enigma and abother. I was undisturbed by Mark and the Synoptics because I couldthink of them (then) as merely legendary, not doubting that an actualtradition of Jesus lay behind the particular tales. True enough, that I wasdisappointed in the supposed revelation when once the ministry hadthrust me into the daily endeavor. Even in the Sayings of Jesus I couldfind no gleam of revelation, as when he says in the Sermon on theMount: ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’ How was that arevelation when it might have been said by my own Uncle Bill? And yet Iwasn’t in reaction against the Synoptics, which I was still hopeful of,whereas I had begun to dislike the Gospel of John. So I took up JamesMoffatt’s racy translation and began to read it through. A good threetimes running I must have read it through, straining to isolate the nub ofmy dislike. When insight came I was appalled. It was, of course, my ownthought which had appalled me.

What made for such a quake of insight in my weakness was myappreciation of this Evangelist’s technique, which involves a good deal ofhypnotic repetition. He creates a persona for Jesus which hemanipulates to great effect (because the thing is masterfully done). Certainly, we must say of this great Evangelist that he is not above theuse of artifice and imagination in creating his illusion. A deliberate

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repetitiveness is characteristic and seems, at times, contrived to bewilderthe reader or even slightly to annoy him. I have always the impressionwhen reading John that he means to keep the reader a little off balanceso as to make an opening for his peculiar insinuations. Now it may benaive of me, but it is the impression. This Evangelist knows what it meansto be among the masters of a cult. And yet this Gospel exists to serve thebelievers who come to it for the very thing it offers, and offers soeffectively that some sort of radical faith on the Evangelist’s part may bepresupposed. I don’t say that John is insincere but only that he isunscrupulous. Faith implies a disposition to take these things to heart, andgiven that sort of willingness, the substance of Jesus’ discourse goesbeyond any trick of manipulation in addressing the worshipers needs.

ENIGMA OF AUTHORSHIP

We find that the Fourth Gospel is often very satisfying to abeliever who likes to have his devotion kindled, or at least – perhaps Ishould say – to a wise pastor who likes to stir his people’s tender feelings. It was designed for that because it seeks to encourage us and make usbelievers and to kindle our love for those in the fellowship. Unfortunately(and we do not discuss the history of these dissensions) it is deeplymarred by its hatred of those Jews in the story who reject Jesus’ claims,which go beyond anything he might say of himself in the Synoptics. Itwould be unthinkable in the Gospel of Matthew for Jesus to say openlybefore the Pharisees, ‘I am the Light of the world,’ although we seem tobe half-way there when in the Sermon on the Mount he tells his disciples,‘You are the salt of the earth... You are the light of the world.’

Of all the Gospels, then, this last authentic Gospel is the leastsatisfactory to a historian. For one thing, its Jesus is presented throughthe medium of the author’s personality, although it was perhapsinevitable that something like this must happen, given a deep mind and astrong personality intent on recasting the old traditions. For in the largerworld of John they required to be recast: they were becoming obsoleteand would be seen as provincial in the thriving cities of the Hellenisticworld. We have mentioned already John’s abandonment of the wholedemoniac scheme. It is Jesus in this Gospel who is insulted by theaccusation that he has a demon; and in a grand conception it is Satanwho must enter the heart of Judas Iscariot, whereas to make a demoniacof him would be absurd.

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The revisions in this Gospel extend to the basic ideas. TheKingdom of God, for instance, which so dominates the SynopticTeaching is mentioned only once or twice whereas ideas fundamental tothe Persian religion or the Zoroastrian, ideas of Light, Truth, and Life, arenow essential to John. Refurbished myths of Judgment and Eternal Lifeare also to be found among his innovations. This is a highly sophisticatedGospel. Its myth is far advanced from our perspective, but in his ownworld John has begun to demythologize. No more than Mark, however,had he a personal acquaintance with Jesus, or any fuller knowledge ofhis life as far as we can tell, despite the Gospel’s pretense that it rests oneyewitness authority.

I must qualify these remarks, however, by allowing that our senseof a strong personality at work may be only an illusion, although a verystrong one. A careful study of this Gospel has led to a belief which is nowvery common among the scholars that certain large sections of it haveonly been sewn together. A redactor, so-called, is supposed to havejoined a narrative of Signs and wonders with a half-Gnostic farewelldiscourse which was independently composed. It may be so, but noticehow this theory imitates the two source theory about Matthew and Lukewhich shows how these intermediate Evangelists have joined togetherMark’s narrative of the Messianic secret with the Sayings of Q. Be that asit may, a basic historical frame is kept of a Jesus who comes fromNazareth and is ‘crucified under Pontius Pilate,’ and within this familiarframe we feel an overall unity in the Fourth Gospel. Our old pastorsused to compare John to a ‘seamless robe’ in describing its quality,borrowing that image from John’s account of the Passion, but themodern investigator discovers seams in the robe, and many an authorityfinds that the Gospel has been somewhere disarranged, almost as if anearly scribe had dropped its pages on the floor. Considering how thisGospel is put together, then, it may be the case that we have here theregional effect of another cult in a different locale. And nobody knows tothis day where the Gospel was written. An ancient tradition tells us thatit was composed in Ephesus by the Elder John, or even by the disciple ofthat name, which is possible on historical grounds but incredible withrespect to what it has to say of Jesus.

For my part whenever I have read this Fourth Gospel over aperiod of fifty years, I seem feel the force of a ruling personality. Itsauthor belongs to that enduring element in the myth of religion whichaspires to dominion, and he uses Jesus in the guise of a Revealer, a

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Shepherd who cares for his flock, a self-declaiming Son of God, a Doer ofunheard-of wonders who appeals to these wonders as a ground forbelief. I think nothing shows the manipulation of Jesus like this Gospel. Itis this which makes him unscrupulous, although he justifies himself byimplicit claims of inspiration. (One has to read between the lines for this,but I think he intends that). And I think we must concede him a sort ofawesome, deep, desperate sincerity because he has thrown in his lotheart and soul with a community of believers. Sink or swim: we are all inthis together! If we take his Gospel seriously at face value throughout,John will appear to us as a strangely truculent Converted Jew, but I amafraid that Dr. Bultmann has rolled over in his grave just now, as I wrotethis sentence.

If a single great mind is responsible for this Gospel, we may thinkof him as a great man unknown. It is possible. A genuine inspiration ishere, somewhat troubled by adversity; also narrative genius mixed inwith lesser stuff; a thinking in symbols; a depth of faith; seriousness,poignancy – and as I say, rash hatred of the Jews. (We bear in mind thatthis Gospel was very early opposed by certain Christians in Asia Minor). Its shortcomings include a stuffy atmosphere, a tendency to drone, atiresome obviousness, and the aforesaid disorders. What is it that canexplain its hypnotic potency, then? I fall back on what I said above whenmany years ago it seemed to me that John’s befuddlements were adeliberate technique. In Moffatt’s translation, the one I read at themoment of insight, the text has been reorganized and yet the sense camestrongly home to me that John meant to disconcert the reader’s mind sothat the illusion he seeks to create would ‘take.’

THIS GOSPEL’S AUTHORITY

We cannot simply write this Gospel off, whoever the Evangelistwas. There is too much against that. John’s bold transformation of aJesus-tradition that reminds us of the Synoptics is successful on its ownterms. A legendary process which had already been fixed in writings,most of them now lost, and some of them, probably, wild and spuriousbeyond our imagining, has here been taken over by a man of intellect. Itis the method of the written Gospel which he recasts, preserving theoriginal myth (or kerygma) in an adaptation suited to another world. What is great about the Fourth Gospel is its powerful Expression, whicharises from a greater depth of mind. You may see this by comparing

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Luke’s Gospel, which we praise for its literary finesse and where you willfind various literary motives and some pretty pieces, but no such depth ofmind as we find in John. Even the myths in Luke are shallower thanJohn’s.

Has faith no right to express itself without being liable to thecharge of unreality? No one complains of music that someone hascomposed it or of poetry that someone has made it up. And few of uswould deny the life of Buddha just because an Oriental artist has made aroyal figure of him, endowed with a vast halo and seated on a lotus-throne. How far may expression go along artistic lines when handling, ortransforming, matter of history? We want the reality conveyed, but welove the Expression. I do sometimes wonder to what extent a residue offundamentalism may prevent our appreciation of the Fourth Gospel’sclaim on history within the sevenfold veils of its mystical faith andOriental extravagance.

It may be that John did not compose a history in our sense of theword, or even in the manner of Josephus or Herodotus, but its claim onhistory has made his Gospel important. The sublimest expression ofmystical thought cannot satisfy if it fails to convey a sense of reality. It is aquestion to be asked, therefore: Just what is the real content of thiswriting? And this we can hardly evaluate without a grasp of the author’sdesign. True enough, that he is tremendously original, innovative,inventive and fictitious in his sweeping methods, but is he only that? Forlike his predecessors the Evangelist purports to be giving us a genuinehistory of the man Jesus. And that is just our problem. I think we mustconcede to this author his own belief that the myth he tells of happened,but we do find it hard to understand quite the nature of his belief. Insome strange sense he believes in a myth he is creating, but he is not aman to take himself literally at all points or even, possibly, at very manypoints. John, at last, is the Symbolist that Professor William BenjaminSmith thought all the Evangelists deliberately were, but he is also on ourview (as Professor Smith did not concede) the serious historian of amiracle. John believes in the Fact, and we misread him if we take lightlyhis claim that ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.’ This is theradiant essence of his belief.

We might make a stab at defining his aim by comparing JosephConrad’s famous statement of his aim as a novelist:

‘My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of thewritten word to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before

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all, to make you see. That – and no more, and it is everything.’

Is the Fourth Gospel a novel? Because this looks almost like a statementof the Evangelist’s purpose. He is aware of the worshiper’s desire toknow Jesus more intimately. His religion promises that: why should it notdeliver? Mindful of the believer’s hankering to experience, if possible, alittle bit more, he writes to serve this deeper aim. After Jesus has enteredJerusalem, certain Greeks ‘that came up to worship at the feast’approach one of the disciples, Philip, a man without a role in theSynoptics, to say: ‘Sir, we would see Jesus.’ The primitive theme revolvesand is transformed. Recall from Mark how Simon told Jesus, ‘Everyone issearching for you!’ Mark treats the matter realistically and sends Jesusaway among the villages of Galilee but John veers upward. The questionof these worshiping Greeks leads directly into one of the elevatedpassages in the Johannine Discourses of Jesus:

The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly,truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth anddies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit...

Now is the Judgment of this world, now shall the ruler of thisworld be cast out, and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, willdraw all men to myself.’

Here speaks a Jesus drawn from the Evangelist’s own faith rather thanfrom any record of the past.

THE STORY UPENDED

As in the earliest Gospel, the Baptist’s appearance is thebeginning of the story proper, yet everything is changed about toaccommodate this different atmosphere and the story is much modified. Gone is the thundering desert prophet denouncing a generation ofvipers; gone, any mention of his baptism of repentance and along with itany message of a ‘Kingdom of Heaven at hand.’ Now the Baptist openlyand repeatedly subordinates himself to the Messiah and points him out tohis own disciples. Although he is made to say, ‘I saw the Spirit comedown from Heaven like a dove, and it remained on him,’ we are not toldthat he baptized Jesus. An awkwardness which had embarrassedMatthew does not appear at all in John. Instead, when the Baptist seesJesus coming toward him he says:

‘Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!’

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On his first described sight of Jesus he makes open announcement ofsacrifice and reconciliation. The complete myth is implied, which only hisdeath has accomplished; and the announcement receives a doubleemphasis when next day again (and I abridge):

John was standing with two of his disciples; and he looked atJesus as he walked, and said, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God!’ Thetwo disciples followed Jesus who turned and said to them, ‘Whatdo you seek?’ And they said to him, ‘Rabbi, where are youstaying?’ He said to them, ‘Come and see.’ (1,35.)

How different is this version of the opening tale! And yet a commontheme is struck. We may recall yet once again how at the beginning ofMark’s Gospel Peter spoke for ‘everyone’ when he sought out Jesus. Here the theme is echoed when Jesus asks the two disciples: ‘What doyou seek?’ Far from being casual utterances which the ‘memory of theearly church’ had preserved, Peter’s simple statement in Mark and Jesus’artless question in John are contrived by the Evangelists themselves. Each of these unknown ‘composers’ points to his Gospel’s deep theme atthe outset. The Fourth Evangelist extends this to an invitation: ‘Comeand see.’ And in a deliberate emphasis Philip almost at once repeats theinvitation verbatim, speaking to Nathanael.

So in John’s Gospel the disciples of the Baptist know at once whoJesus is and what he means, and at once they spread the Word; but seehow this renovated myth turns the Gospel of Mark upside down! AfterJesus has invited John’s disciples to come along we read:

So they went and saw where he was staying, and spent the restof the day with him. It was then about four in the afternoon. One of the two who followed Jesus after hearing what John saidwas Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. The first thing he did was tofind his brother Simon. He said to him, ‘We have found theMessiah’ (and) he brought Simon to Jesus, who looked him inthe face and said, ‘You are Simon, son of John. You shall becalled Cephas (that is, Peter, the Rock). (1,39. NEB)

This is a wonderful verisimilitude, but it gives the lie to an earlier tradition– or visa versa. What happens to Peter’s Confession if Andrew, theinsignificant brother, informs him of the Christ on the strength of Johnthe Baptist’s revelation? – Andrew being originally a disciple of John’s(and nothing said about this pair of brothers called away to be ‘fishers ofmen.’) The entire structure of the Markan story is collapsed. Is it the same

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story, then? In respect of these fundamental aspects, our answer must beNo.

It is my own belief, however, that John has understood Markbetter than Matthew and Luke have understood him. He has understoodhis shrewdness and his deeper intent, and he has seen how the wholepresentation of this Gospel might be done in a manner more satisfactoryto himself and better adapted to a later environment. Before this Gospelwas written down, Jesus had already become a sort of god. The furtherenhancing of his figure in John is one more step, a crucial step, in theenhancements of tradition.

What remains as a lingering perplexity is the strange persistence oftradition, which somehow resists the most drastic changes. Certainly, it isgiven to no man, and to no one event, to change traditions. Peter mayno longer make his inspired Confession here or Jesus declare, ‘Upon thisRock!’ But the primitive name Simon bar-Jonah, although defaced inthat form, survives as Peter: Petros: Cephas: the cognomen given Simon(in the legend) at the time of his Confession. John boldly reduces Peter’srole in the opening scenes which are described with verisimilitude, buthe cannot get rid of a name (Kepha in the Aramaic) so radicallyassociated with Simon the fisherman.

MARKING THE CONTRAST

Plainly, the Fourth Gospel stands in contrast to a traditionrepresented by Mark and Q, which are thought to furnish the basicSynoptic stuff. And the Synoptic Gospels we have everywhere assumedto be earlier simply because for the greater part of two centuries past,this has been the usual scholarly belief. Can John, originatingsomewhere in a great Hellenistic city such as Ephesus or Alexandria orAntioch, represent a wholly independent tradition? Something outlyingor isolated? Are we to think that he was unacquainted with theSynoptics? It’s most unlikely; the more so because he has read Mark sodiscerningly, as it seems to me. The difference in quality is deliberate. John’s Gospel represents a plowed-under tradition which he subvertedfor his own reasons, and successfully, because this mystical Gospeldespite its flaws has become the most important of the four, religiously. But he failed to displace the other Gospels, as he intended. Certainly, henever wrote to supplement Mark, as both Matthew and Luke havesupplemented the earliest Gospel by incorporating Q. No: John wrote his

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Gospel to sink Mark out of sight among people who were familiar with theSynoptic tradition. His aim was to make the earliest Gospel obsolete.

It belongs to the strategy of this subtle Evangelist, however, thathe must pay his respects to the very tradition he subverts: and he must dothis to obtain any hearing at all.

Briefly, then, let us consider the matter. Mark is a traditionaldocument or else it is nothing. As such, he is witness to traditions of aGalilean Jesus who as a teacher and healer and wonder-worker oncejourneyed to Jerusalem to be crucified, after which, for so the traditionstell us, he was raised from the dead. We see immediately – we alwayshave – how this transparently legendary Gospel of Jesus could behistorical, for there is nothing to be said against the basic structure. Astrange prophetic figure crucified: what is unhistorical about that, withrespect I mean to the assumptions it rests on? But that much of Mark’shistory John has retained.

Now it goes without saying that even this earliest of our Gospelscannot be as early as the lost traditions it rests on, and we know thatMark is not quite true to these earlier traditions because the unfolding ofhis story depends on a Messianic secret which we take to be his owndevice. That is, we take it that way generally but without prejudice toChrist’s intention in the Messianic Entry. An earlier tradition is showingbeneath the surface of his tale like the washed-out ink of a palimpsest,and what it seems to show is that Jesus makes no claim to be Messiah. Itis Mark, therefore, who portrays him as a Christ with a secret.

John’s disabling of the Markan tale is, therefore, not a crucialargument against him, but then what of Q? What of those Teachingsonce assembled by Matthew in the Hebrew tongue, the supposedoriginal Teachings of Jesus which would have been gathered as Logiaafter they had been variously and miscellaneously translated into Greek? Sea sponges, I have read, represent in miniature a sort of giant colony,and if a living sponge is ground down artificially, its elements are said tobe able to reassemble themselves into a different sponge. If so, thenMatthew’s Hebrew version of the Teachings was reassembled along thelines of a sea sponge – always on the assumption that he made hiscollection at all.

But we actually have Q, and there is no mistaking the authenticityof these Teachings. They are among the solidest evidence that we have ofthe life in dispute, even granting that a supposed document containing

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these Teachings has not been seen by a single researcher. Its bareexistence is a deduction, and we posit various stages through which theTeachings must pass before ever the first word is written. And what dowe mean by a primary oral stage? Exactly what is primary? Ultimately,was he a Teacher? – in contrast to a rousing prophet of a Kingdomimpending? Yet on the hypothesis, and since we have the famousTeachings, the basic three-fold scheme is very simple:

(a) We have one ancient testimony to Matthew’s collection ‘in theHebrew tongue.’ This is ascribed to a Bishop Papias of AsiaMinor by a historian writing early in the 4th century. It may bedubious, but in fact it is ‘there.’ (b) We posit a lost Greek document which may representsomebody else’s collection of Teachings ascribed to Jesus andgathered we know not how.(c) Our scholars have reconstructed this document by comparingMatthew and Luke.

We have then a distinct body of Teachings shared in a peculiar way bytwo Evangelists writing independently of one another, and we know wellenough how they treat a written source because we see this clearly intheir common use of Mark. Strikingly, and even wonderfully, adocument of Jesus-sayings like that described as Q was found in the dryclimate of Egypt in 1945 marvelously preserved. It is a late documentcalled ‘The Gospel of Thomas’ and very Gnostic in its temper, but itresembles Q, which it is not, in being a collection of Jesus’ supposedTeachings, some of which we find in our own Gospels plus othersbesides, and a few of which are rather strange. Story content is lacking. Here, then, is an archaeological document in proof that such documentsexisted as, first, the German scholars were describing in the Quelle orRedenquelle, as aforesaid (= Sayings Source).

Thus Q is a very genuine evidence: these are authentic Teachingswhich only just fall short of historical proof. No one who reads theBeatitudes or the Lord’s Prayer can fail to ascribe them to the influence –one might almost say, of a singular mind, but that would be hasty. Weshould rather ascribe them to a remarkable inspiration whose humansource our Synoptics trace to a describable Jesus.

However, this fact of Q represents a prime difficulty about theFourth Gospel because the very Teachings are grossly absent from John. More than simply ignoring them, the Fourth Evangelist has replacedthem extensively by vastly different Teachings uttered in a different style,

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and by a series of conversations which in the case of the Woman at theWell or Jesus’ conversation with Pontius Pilate we know to be imaginary. Conversation of this sort is lacking in the Synoptic tradition but soplentiful in John that Goodspeed – the brilliant Goodspeed! – comparesthis Gospel to a type of Hellenistic dialogue. Such is the contrast; and foran intelligent reader who makes the comparison, it is bewildering.

No doubt it is possible to overestimate the supposed uniquenessof these Synoptic Teachings, speaking historically, because they areclearly Jewish teachings characteristic of an age, although of a rarequality, to be sure. And it is in their quality that we must seek for theiruniqueness, as we find the uniqueness of Shakespeare in Shakespeareand not in the Elizabethan style. Were it otherwise – if these logia withinour Gospels did not express a genuine strand in Jewish faith – it wouldhave been impossible for Rabbi (Dr). Leo Baeck to write his deep studyof ‘The Gospel as a Document of the History of the Jewish Faith’ basingon the Synoptic Gospels and excluding John.

Now the absence of Q from John reminds us ironically that thesesame Teachings are absent also from Mark, who is among the Synoptics. What did the earliest Evangelist think of them? Was he thinking of Qwhen echoing a petition of the Lord’s Prayer about forgiveness? All weknow is that Mark wasn’t felt to be incompatible with Q, as the laterSynoptics bear witness. Whether the Fourth Gospel is incompatible theReader may judge when we see what Jesus says there.

I believe that Mark wrote to supplement the Teachings becauseof all that Q leaves out of the early Christian preaching or kerygma. Ourmistake in the matter is to imagine that Mark is a disciple of Jesus whomust be hanging on his words: he is not. Mark is a believer, and he‘misses’ that more developed Gospel which is absent from Q (=Jesus didnot teach the Gospel which was later preached about him: a veritableaxiom and even a commonplace). This is surely why he dares to haveeven Jesus suggest that later Gospel when he foreshadows the voluntarydeath of the Son of Man or speaks of his Resurrection ‘after three days’following Peter’s Confession.

ANOTHER JESUS

Now the Johannine Jesus differs from the one in Mark above allelse, as we imply, because he is forever revealing himself. Gone now isthe Messianic secret:

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This, the first of his Signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, andmanifested his glory; and his disciples believed in him. (2,11.)

Only the blindness of his opponents can preserve the divine incognito,only their darkened minds keep them from understanding what he says,and yet it must be confessed that he is not always plain. Enigma,deception and insult are found in his mouth because he misleads hisbrothers about a visit to Jerusalem (John 7,8) or says to the Jews, withwhom he is quarreling:

It is my Father who shows me honor. You say he is your God,yet you have never come to know him. But I know him. If I say Ido not know him, I will be a liar like yourselves. (John 8,54.Goodspeed)

Everywhere he speaks in accents foreign to the Synoptics. Often, he willmake grandiose claims deliberately to call attention to himself anddemand belief whereas, for instance, the Synoptic Jesus would hush thevery disciples. The effective result is to give us another Jesus, a NumberTwo. I am reminded of the principle of Ku Chieh-kang, who is quoted byArthur Waley in his translation of the Analects: ‘One Confucius at a time.’

Consider Jesus’ conversation with a certain Nicodemus, an oldPharisee who visits him by night and is told that we must be ‘born anew...born of the Spirit,’ which greatly perplexes him. It is often the case inJohn that those who inquire of Jesus are reduced to simple-mindedness. ‘Can a man be born when he is old?’ asks Nicodemus, whereupon Jesusdescribes a Spirit which moves like the wind: ‘You do not know whenceit comes or whither it goes.’ The very words prepare a theme because inthis Gospel we do not know whence Jesus comes or whither he goes. Hehas a kind of habit of appearing or disappearing unexpectedly. Appliedto Spirit, however, these words introduce a doctrine of grace which isforeign to the Synoptics where Jesus’ preachments are addressed to usmore simply, as for instance when he says: ‘Enter ye in at the strait gate,for broad is the way that leadeth to destruction.’ We can act on thesewords if we choose, whereas in John something else must happen to usfirst because: ‘Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enterthe Kingdom of God.’

The teaching is difficult and the old Pharisee does notunderstand. Step by step, the words of Jesus as he expounds his mysticaldoctrine pass into the author’s own words until he has very plainly takenover the discourse, as when Jesus says:

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If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe how canyou believe if I tell you Heavenly things? No one has ascendedinto Heaven but he who descended from Heaven, the Son ofMan. (John 3,13.)

Clearly, then, we have in the Fourth Gospel a most unsecret Messiah. Aseries of revealing ‘I AM’ sayings has been woven into the texture of thisGospel, seven in number:

I AM (says Jesus betimes)the Bread of life (6,48)the Light of the world (8,12)the Door of the sheepfold (10,7)the Good Shepherd (10,14)the Resurrection and the Life (11,25)the Way, the Truth and the Life (14,6)I Am the True Vine (and you are the branches: 15,1 ff.)

Once he says in controversy with the Jews, ‘Before Abraham was, I AM,’thereby associating himself with the supposed Name of God mostintimately, and for saying this, the Jews take up stones against him. (John8,58.) Twice in John they attempt to stone Jesus although we findnowhere a hint of such a fiction in the Synoptics.

There is a kind of human unreality about the Jesus of the FourthGospel despite the singular opinion of Professor William Benjamin Smiththat he is more fully humanized here and better furnished with humansentiment compared to the demigod which Professor Smith would find inMark, but this is a judgment that is wrong on both counts. Even JMRobertson, who claimed Smith as a colleague in the Negative argument,could not accept his opinion on that. I find (and so did Santayana find)that Mark’s virile portrait is convincing despite his array of wonders, butof course we must allow that the quality of virility may be owing to themind and art of the primitive Evangelist.

PRESENCE

John’s focus is the living Christ. He means to bring his Jesusbefore us without a sense that he is confined to the past, or that his verydeeds are drifting ever further away. Yet there is nothing lacking in thisEvangelist’s sense of the past. In no sense does he cancel the history ofJesus or doubt of a singular Incarnation in a human life. He shows veryplainly that this life is over and done. The work of Christ is an achieved

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fact. Symbolically, Jesus will say on the cross: ‘It is finished.’ And yetthere is something always on-going, the work of Redemption isunfinished, so really it is the Evangelist who takes on himself thecontinuing work of Revelation, which is to us, of course, very strange.

There is a word of Paul’s or pseudo-Paul’s in Colossians (adisputed Epistle) where he writes, or else an impostor writes with anextraordinary presumption:

I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I completewhat is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his Body, thatis, the Church. (Colossians 1,24.)

Translation of the verb in question here (‘what is lacking’) is difficult, andthe most readable of the Catholic translations takes an edge off this:

It makes me happy to be suffering for you now, and in my ownbody to make up all the hardships that have still to be undergoneby Christ for the sake of his Body, the Church. (New JerusalemBible.)

We are not concerned with Paul just now, and I only cite this evidence ofa certain early boldness in apostles, prophets and teachers, generally,who carry on a living work of Christ, whether by suffering in his behalf orspeaking in his Voice or giving revelations in his Name.

The Fourth Evangelist, whose psychology as a writer we mustassume to resemble our own, implies or even believes that he is inspired. It is a desperate belief. He would represent his audacious Gospel as alabor of faith grounded in Jesus’ own activity and in his given words butyet words which the Evangelist supplies in order to express his idea. Icannot accept the Fourth Gospel on this basis, but it must be concededthat its Jesus promises a continuing inspiration. Professor RaymondStamm once of Gettysburg Seminary was very strong on this point of acontinuing Redemption in John’s Gospel. Old Dr. Stamm when I knewhim was a middling sort of scholar (I am none) and he didn’t understandmy sharp doubts of this Gospel as a pastor. Ardent and desirous in hisown belief, he impressed on me the continuing Revelation in John.

But these are rather negative thoughts about the Evangelist’sattitude and his methods which are difficult for us, and strange. So let uscome to the effective Presence in this Gospel which, in some strangeway, the Evangelist has imparted to his Christ. Certainly, the Evangelist isa very solid Somebody-or-other. And there is something in his Gospel – Isay it as a matter of long experience – which is rather tremendously solid.

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What is it? Although this Jesus is presented in his Nearness by John’scommanding literary techniques, he is not to be sought in the pages of abook. For the Evangelist clearly intends that his reality is to be sought ina fellowship of the Spirit to which a unique Revelation has been given. Idon’t mean to be saying that he is not to be sought in the soul becauseJohn is mystic enough to encourage that, and certainly his Gospel isaddressed to our inwardness. But Jesus is always faith-received, and thefaith is to be nourished and supported by a community of believers. Mystic or no, John would never suggest that we can hope for a genuineexperience of the living Christ, as it were, alone. We must belong heartand soul to the community of a Spirit already referred to in theNicodemus conversation and which is, at last, personified and given thedignity of a title when Jesus promises to send his disciples the Parakletos. This word signifies a Comforter or Advocate (or more strictly, one who iscalled to our side: called to help).

The vital conception owes much to the Jews, who were by nowtransforming their Shekinah into just such a holy Presence or Nearness. Originally, the Shekinah had been a Cloud by day and a Fire by nightguiding the Israelites in the wilderness. but under any name, Shekinah,Paraclete, or Holy Ghost, or even Wisdom, it is an indwelling Spirit ofGod given to the Chosen People. (That is the form of the myth). And sothe People are the (ideal) receptacle: the People are the Temple. JosiahRoyce has drawn from this ancient idea his own myth of the BelovedCommunity. It’s a potent idea, and in its different forms it belongs to theheart of the Jewish and Christian faiths, but here we are to notice acontrast to the anti-Jewish sentiment in this Gospel, which makes itsmysterious author all the more difficult to explain. For without thatspiritual community at his own living core, John’s famous mysticism, so-called, would be an empty thing, as mysticism mostly is. Without thiscommunity of Friends (for here the disciples are called friends) this Jesuswould have no earthly dwelling.

As a matter of technique, then, John ascribes the glory of theHeavenly Christ to the Jesus of the past because he means to set a livingJesus within that community. A creative imagination is overruling here,and inspiration from within. It is not the historical Jesus he describesotherwise than in reference to the believed-in Fact. Albert Schweitzer’sproblem does not concern him.

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THE SPEAKING CHRIST

At the very outset of his Gospel (as we have seen) the FourthEvangelist veils his deep promise in a casual exchange between Jesusand a pair of the Baptist’s disciples:

What do you seek?Rabbi, where are you staying?Come and see.

It was another Jesus who made his appearance as a prophet accordingto the Synoptics where he took the initiative in calling disciples: ‘Followme, and I will make you fishers of men.’ In John he tells his firstfollowers: ‘You will see Heaven opened, and the angels of God ascendingand descending upon the Son of Man.’ Gone from the Fourth Gospel isany call for repentance because of a Judgment about to burst upon theworld. Already has the Fourth Evangelist begun to demythologize,although for John also Jesus will ‘come again’ in a manner not toodisconcerting as he tells his disciples during the Last Supper:

In my Father’s house are many mansions. I go to prepare a placefor you and... I will come again and receive you unto myself, thatwhere I am, there ye may be also. (14,2.)

These are deep-lying continuities. Outright rupture is avoided, but thevarious facts reported by the early traditions have little value for John,whose Gospel may be read as the report of an immense transformation.

Where is Jesus for us? Because in John, as I have said, it is onlyin the fellowship of the Spirit that his Jesus is to be found. Otherwise wehave nothing:

‘Where is he?’ his neighbors ask a man who was cured of hisblindness by ‘the man called Jesus.’ ‘I do not know,’ he replies.(9,12)

It is our situation the Evangelist has in mind in devising this imaginarydialogue; we are ‘born blind’ unless we are ‘born of the Spirit.’ Afterwards, Jesus finds the man:

‘Do you believe in the Son of Man?’‘And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?’‘You have seen him, and it is he who speaks to you.’‘Lord, I believe.’

‘You have seen him!’ And so his reality is attested to us. Notice that it isJesus who finds the Man Born Blind, not the other way around. All the

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initiative lies with him, however much the worshiper desires hisNearness.

‘You will seek me and you will not find me (says Jesus.) Where Iam you cannot come.’ (7,34)‘You are from below, I am from above. You are of this world, Iam not of this world.’ (8.23)

There is a good deal of this sort of thing in the Fourth Gospel, all of itdesigned to correspond to a believer’s experience, which is of course oneof disappointment, suffering, bereavement and hope. Early or late, hereor there, Jesus appears unexpectedly, but he cannot be brought by ourprayers and would not respond if our calamity were on the scale of Job’s. We saw how he delayed before going to the sisters of Lazarus becausethe Evangelist understands as we all do the postponements of faith. Initially, his promise is to show us Jesus, but he gradually withdraws thispromise as the Gospel develops, stressing instead that Jesus has beenseen.

The various Signs are used in John’s Gospel deliberately asreasons for belief, and the Evangelist works them into his emphasis on‘seeing.’ An interesting exchange occurs between Jesus and an officialfrom Capernaum who, having heard that he was nearby in Cana, beggedhim to ‘come down’ and heal his son, who lay at the point of death. Jesus speaks, then the official:

‘Unless you see Signs and wonders you will not believe.’‘Sir, come down before my child dies.’

It is a beautiful technique. We are taken at once by the father’simportunity, which we feel to be convincing, but notice the irrelevancy ofJesus’ own words which the father brushes aside. No offense is given,however, because he wasn’t asking for a Sign, nor was he promising to‘believe’ if one had been given. The man is asking for help, whereasJesus’ reproof (which is of course directed to the reader) simply statesthe author’s theme. Then the Sign is given with a promise: ‘Go, your sonwill live,’ and on arriving home the man is told that ‘the fever’ broke‘yesterday at one in the afternoon’ (NEB), the very hour of Jesus’promise, whereupon the official and all his household ‘believe.’

Thus we find in the Evangelist’s very endeavor to bring home arealization of this Heavenly Jesus a real argument for the Negative critic. His Jesus has become the Evangelist’s mouthpiece and, in effect, his owncreation, although technically this is no prejudice to the possible fact of

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that life. We have nowhere discovered that the ancient oral traditionswhich were later preserved in these Gospel gatherings were emptyimaginings and could be written off as fantasy and make-believe. Whatwe do see, and with John most especially, is that the themes of faith areimposed on the very traditions.

John’s is a Jesus who serves a living faith and who must work hisinitiatives on us. Just as he found the Man Born Blind after curing himand withdrawing, so did he find the Paralytic of Bethesda afterward. Theman had been ill for thirty-eight years, and in raising him up, Johnprepares for the Raising of Lazarus. First there is Jesus’ command: ‘Rise,take up your pallet and walk.’ And then, after finding the man in theTemple: ‘See, you are well! Sin no more...’ But after this characteristicattestation of a seen wonder, the Evangelist associates the voice of Jesuswith the Resurrection of the dead; and we remember that he ‘cried witha loud voice’ to bring Lazarus out of the tomb. At bottom, John isintroducing the very theme of the living Voice of Jesus who says here,among many other things:

Truly, truly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, whenthe dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those whohear will live. (5,25.)

It is we who are meant to take these words to heart.

In contrast to the Messianic secret, John’s is the Gospel of themanifest Christ, and the author is not shy of his theme. Once Jesus’ ownbrothers taunt him about this as the Feast of Tabernacles nears:

‘Leave here and go to (Jerusalem) that your disciples may seethe works you are doing. For no man works in secret if he seeksto be known openly. If you do these things, show yourself to theworld. (7,2.)

A typical Johannine contrast but a rather crude irony because ‘showinghimself to the world’ is the very thing he has been doing all along. Jesusanswers in part:

Go to the feast yourselves; I am not going up to the feast, for mytime has not yet fully come.

‘So saying,’ the Evangelist writes, ‘he remained in Galilee. But after hisbrothers had gone up to the feast, then he also went up, not publicly butin private.’ (7,9.) Naturally, the folk in Jerusalem are looking for Jesus. ‘Where is he?’ they ask, repeating the question which had been asked ofthe Man Born Blind; and when Jesus appears suddenly teaching in the

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Temple ‘the Jews marveled at it... Here he is, speaking openly!’ Theymight very fairly have asked him: ‘Rabbi, when did you come here?’because that – again, a question of location, Presence, place – that wasthe very question, had we paused for it, of the Five Thousandmiraculously fed after he had withdrawn from them and they began tolook for him and found him on the other side of the lake. (6,25.) Thoseat the Temple now speculate aloud: ‘We know where this man comesfrom; and when the Christ appears, no one will know where he comesfrom.’ Jesus’ reply is a challenge: ‘You know me, and you know where Icome from?’ It is not to be thought, but once again we round upon theprimitive Markan theme. Jesus’ neighbors in his own country alsothought that they knew him, even naming his brothers. What, of course,they did not know in Mark was that he was ‘the Holy One of God,’ as thedemoniac in the synagogue at Capernaum had already earlier exclaimed.

SYNOPTIC ANTICIPATIONS OF JOHN’S TECHNIQUE

Already in the Sayings Source as our scholars have restored it,we find a lofty declaration about the seeing and hearing of certainundesignated things:

Blessed are the eyes which see what you see! For I tell you thatmany prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and didnot see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it. (Luke10,23 Matthew 13,16.)

This was said to the disciples privately, as Luke explains and Matthew’ssetting implies. Question is, what does it mean? In one of my firstsermons as a student vicar I preached on this text when meeting my loyalcongregation in a boxy stucco house where we assembled for worship. My sermon was carefully memorized but what I remember of it now is asudden flaring on my part in which I reproached a world at large for notbelieving these things. I had naively assumed that the blessed realityJesus speaks of was available in church, thereby confounding the meretokens of faith, such as these quoted words are, with the inner gift whichfaith lays hold of.

Already in Q we find a foreshadowing of the Fourth Evangelist,who so often invites his reader to an imaginary seeing and hearing ofJesus. Where does the difference lie? Partly in the privacy of themoment. The Johannine Christ might almost have uttered a saying likethe one here quoted in the streets of Jerusalem, whereas our Synoptists

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have retained the Messianic secret and place the disciples’ privilege moredefinitely in the past.

But there is another side to this matter in the Redenquelle whenJesus cautions the faithful not to be taken in by false appearances, or infact, not to be taken in by any appearances at all:

If anyone says to you (in ‘those days’) Lo, here is the Christ! orThere he is! do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophetswill arise and show great signs and wonders... So if they say toyou, Lo, he is in the wilderness, do not go out; if they say, Lo, heis in the inner rooms, do not believe it. (Matthew 24,23. Luke17,22.)

A Christ who appears is rejected in favor of a Christ who is not to beseen. The same disciples who were praised for being in the presence ofJesus are now told that they are not to look for his presence in thosedays. But of course! It is the nature of history that things pass away. However, what is at issue here for readers and hearers is that thetangible, visible grounds of the disciples’ security in the faith arewithdrawn. The disciples themselves are sealed off in a sphere ofunapproachable authority. They have seen what we cannot see. Onebelieves in a Christ that someone else has seen on someone else’s say-so. The Christ who has already come, although unknown to us, overrides anappeal to evidence.

Elsewhere in the Synoptics we learn that John the Baptist hassent to Jesus for a confirmation in his belief:

Now when John heard in prison about the deeds of the Christ,he sent word by his disciples and said to him, Are you he who isto come, or shall we look for another? And Jesus answered them,Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive theirsight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear,and the dead are raised up, etc. (Matthew 11,2.)

Originally, John had warned that the One to come would bring his‘winnowing fork in hand’ to thresh the wheat of Israel and burn the chaff‘with unquenchable fire.’ Why now, after being imprisoned for his fieryalarms, does he send his question to such a man as Jesus? Althoughconceivable as a piece of history, the Baptist’s inquiry asks for theMessiah on terms unlike those he once preached. (The answer given is acryptic Messianic affirmation based on key verses in Isaiah 35).

After this visit Jesus speaks to the crowds about John. Notice

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the continuing emphasis on seeing:

What did you go out into the wilderness to behold? A reedshaken by the wind? Why then did you go out? to see a manclothed in soft raiment? Behold, those who wear soft raiment arein kings’ houses. Why then did you go out? To see a prophet?(Matthew 11,7. Luke 7,24.)

Jesus may well have spoken these emphatic words, and yet this is anappeal to the Baptist’s fame. Jesus is unnecessary to the logic of it. Hisrole is only to remind us of a prophet who is taken as the Messiah’sforerunner, ‘Elijah who is to come.’ The mere reminder suffices as proofthat the Messiah must have come, even if a Jesus is unknown. The fact is,then, that John was convincing as a herald of the Kingdom.

A dependency on rumor, if it were only that, could not satisfy anEvangelist whose readers are members of a Jesus-cult which rests onfaith and (as we say) sacraments, but what has he to offer them excepthis own belief in a tradition whose folkish character he understands? (The leaders of the Jews, for instance, understood a teacher’s use offable). This is why we find an endeavor to realize Jesus which extendsfrom the Gothic artistry of Mark to the sophistical methods of the FourthEvangelist. Belief is uppermost, and a discriminating understanding ofhistory or a serious and careful assessment of fact takes second place. The common endeavor is to bring Jesus home to the reader’s perceptionand grasp. It is this which has required the Evangelist’s art and hisinventions, which go beyond the simpler fictions to be found in areceived tradition, and of course it is just this aspect of the Gospels whichmakes us ask, How real is this Jesus? Or how real is any of it? Withoutenlarging the point, I believe that a serious and believing presentation ofthe Gospel (notwithstanding the myth) never deals with anything that issimply unreal.

After his reminder of Christ’s Messianic wonders Matthew(11,25) presses on toward a deeper realization when Jesus thanks theHeavenly Father

‘that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hastrevealed them unto babes.’

What things? What are these hidden things? We misunderstand Jesus’prayer if we take ‘these things’ in reference to any particular things at allbecause the implication is that everything is hidden from the wise andprudent, everything having to do with Jesus or with faith in Christ. And the

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old preachers understood this very well whenever they quoted thesewords. You must believe as a ‘babe’ because it is only ‘unto babes’ thatthese things can be revealed. Then comes a tremendous declaration onthe part of Jesus:

All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no oneknows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Fatherexcept the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to revealhim.

Matthew has fitted this passage in very successfully. We feel no contrastin his Gospel between this elevated claim and the Jesus of the Parablesor of the Sermon on the Mount, or the ecstatic Jesus hailing Simon bar-Jonah. Nevertheless, we must call this compact statement, as thescholars do, Johannine. For it really has just that character, and it mighthave been lifted almost word for word from the Fourth Gospel (which infact does not contain it) because the myth is really open here. Lastly,then, having cast his veil aside, Jesus utters a familiar invitation:

Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I willgive you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I ammeek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matthew 11,28.)

Although unique to this Gospel among the canonical Four, the familiarwords of Jesus echo a passage in an earlier book called Ecclesiasticus, orthe Wisdom of Jesus, Son of Sirach, which was written in the timesbetween the Testaments, Old and New. It is Wisdom herself, calledSophia in Greek and personified, who speaks the word of invitationthere:

Come to me, you who are untaught, And pass the night in the house of instruction.

Come unto me! This is the first of the Apocryphal words which haveinfluenced the Saying in Matthew. Others follow when Jesus Sirachcontinues, speaking in Sophia’s behalf:

Get her for yourselves without money,Put your neck under her yoke,And let your soul receive instruction.She is to be found close by.See with your own eyes that I have worked but little,

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And yet found myself much repose. (Ecclesiasticus 51,23. 30)

We pass beyond the purely Johannine tone in Jesus’ famous invitationexcept for the device itself, of so directly addressing the reader. And Ithink we must say in fairness to the Gospels that the appealing quality ofJesus’ invitation surpasses the passage in Ecclesiasticus from which somuch of it has been drawn; and drawn by whom? For it’s possible thatthe Evangelist has composed these words, whose purpose seemsdesignedly liturgical.

A deeper thought is this. Sophia, a goddess, speaks in the bookcalled Jesus, Son of Sirach. And Jesus speaks in words which echo hers. Baruch Spinoza, the excommunicated Jewish philosopher, is notable forhis high appreciation of Jesus, whom he compares to Wisdom. Had hepossibly these two passages in mind when describing Jesus in terms ofWisdom? And if these were the sources of his comparison, did Spinoza,a modern mind, really credit the human existence of Jesus? Or did helook upon him – look on the Symbol – thus benignly because he couldtake it for a Symbol without offending his Jewish soul. Spinoza was verylearned in Medieval Jewish lore. He would not have cared for theFourth Gospel at all. It would be very interesting to know moredefinitely, as I do not pretend to know, if the great name of Spinozacould be added to the list of those who have believed that Jesus neverlived.

THE SPEAKING CHRIST AN EARLY PRACTICE

To imagine that Jesus gave his invitation on some historicaloccasion makes little sense. To whom was he speaking when he said,‘Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden?’ The invitation inMatthew is spoken to a world at large. Its effectiveness doesn’t dependon Jesus’ having said it once but on our having imagined him saying itonce and for all.

Matthew’s use of this technique is rather slight compared with itsdevelopment in John, yet clearly such utterances as these were designedto be read aloud by the leader of an assembled Christian group to makethe voice of Jesus come alive. In the Odes of Solomon, so-called, anearly Christian document Jesus says openly although not by name (he isunnamed in the Odes):

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For I have risen and stand by themAnd speak through their mouth.

Bultmann quotes these words in a footnote which tells of earlier scholars,Hermann von Soden (1892) and Hermann Gunkel (1913) who wereaware of the practice. Gunkel says, ‘One can suppose that not a fewsayings, which have come down to us in the New Testament asutterances of Jesus, were originally spoken by such inspired men in thename of Christ.’ An English pioneer is J. Rendel Harris whose translationof the Odes beautifully brings out the cultic practice.

Where the intention is thus transparent, the thought of aprophet’s unscrupulousness when inventing such words for his Lord canhardly arise as a moral objection. The very practice is set openly within acommon agreement to have it done this way. The people were eager toimagine such words as these on the strength of a given faith, and to hearthem again and again. So too with the Fourth Gospel. What we see asunscrupulousness on the part of John (or what I did as a young pastor)has grown out of a common disposition on the part of leaders andworshipers to realize Jesus and his Presence as intensely as possible. Theywanted to imagine these things, and after the preaching of the Kingdomhad died away, the endeavor to realize Jesus became a new focus for thenew religion.

Thus the Fourth Gospel is based on traditions which havethemselves begun to be myths. Yet in this Gospel’s individual quality, it isclearly the heart-felt work of a master spirit who contributes of his best tothe Jesus persona. I use the Latin persona deliberately because theanimating spirit of this Gospel and the Voice which speaks through themask is the wise author’s own. We may well believe that a historicalJesus lies behind this impressive tale, thanks to the Synoptic tradition andour understanding of Q. It is nonetheless clear that in the Fourth Gospel,at last, the methods employed and the imaginations resorted to havemade of this Christ a living myth.

And John’s is a myth fed by two springs. The actual story isderived from certain prior historical events, somewhat like a historicalnovel. The revelation is derived from his own mystical faith learned firstin some Jewish school and as unshakably deep as the child in the man. Nevertheless, he does not repeat the lessons of the past. His expressionof faith is an inspiration welling up from within and his invention goesbeyond any merely legendary decoration to the creation of a Symbol. John is a mystic, foremost of all New Testament writers; and the only

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mystic, compared even with Paul. Empty yet rich; desperate yetconsoling; passionate, hateful, loving, decided; he is able to summon upthe mightiest imaginations.

We must say of this Evangelist that his faith is not the credulousbelief of those for whom he writes. He is not an ignoramus, nor is hisunderstanding rudimentary and crude. He is an artist-philosopher inrespect of his gifts and a psychologist before the age of psychology. Essentially, his faith is derived from the faith of Israel, and he is also apassionate, biassed, rigid mystic – rigid in his conviction, therefore,because mysticism as such is volatile and elusive. As a creative mindJohn is no mere transmitter of things over and done, when he has Jesussay:

‘These things I have spoken to you, while I am still with you. Butthe Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in myname, he will teach you all things, and bring to yourremembrance all that I have said to you.’ (And also this:) ‘Ihave yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear themnow. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into allthe truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, butwhatever he hears, he will speak...’ (John 14,25f. and 16,13.)

This is John’s own excuse. It is almost half a prayer. The author stands inplace of a Jesus who utters his promises and encouragements to thelistening cult.

PART SIX

WEEK OF THE PASSOVER

The festival during which Jesus was crucified outside the walls ofJerusalem has imparted its meaning to the memorials by which themultitudes of Christians annually observe the sacred season. For now itis Jesus who has become our Passover in the estimation of believers. Heis the Lamb of God, as John the Baptist calls him at his first appearance inthe Fourth Gospel: Passover being centered in the sacrifice of anunblemished Spring lamb whose bones may not be broken and whoseflesh must be eaten up with nothing saved over. It is because of thisassociation with a Jewish holiday that Jesus’ last week is memorialized inan annual liturgy, beginning with Palm Sunday, so that the seasonalobservance of his death and Resurrection should be determined not at

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all by the date on which it happened (for this date is unknown) but likethe Passover itself by the first full moon of Spring. We see at once veryreadily that the astrological dating of an annual liturgy whose supposedprototype in a real event cannot be dated historically plays into the Negativeargument, and the more so because this same liturgy mourns the death ofthe god and in the deepest of symbols partakes of his body beforecelebrating his Resurrection with rejoicings.

The liturgical embodiment of a god’s annual dying and hisResurrection (for it is only as the Son of God that Jesus can have beenraised from the dead) – this fact of a liturgical form reminds us that anannual death and resurrection of a highly favored god was observed insacred rites throughout the ancient Near East. Where this began, or inwhat primitive rite, we can scarcely imagine because in various placesthe god is differently named, whether as Osiris or Serapis, as he came tobe called in the Hellenistic cult of Isis, or Tammuz, for whom the womenof Jerusalem used sometime to mourn outside the Temple, or Adonis orAttis or Dionysis. Only within the last ten years have I learned to my owngreat surprise that Baal, of all gods, may be added to this list. A godportrayed in the image of a man and whose title, Baal, means simplyLord, a god denounced by the Hebrew prophets – a god ofresurrections! The addition of Baal to this Near Eastern list comes ofdiscoveries made in 1929-1930 near Ras Shamra in excavations of theancient city of Ugarit where we find – the French archaeologists havefound liturgies remarking on the death of Baal in the dry season, wheneven the streams dry up. The Ugaritic Baal is particularly associated withthunders as in Psalm 29, a veritable hymn to the Storm god and sodescribed in the New Jerusalem Bible. The Psalm celebrates not onlyJahweh’s fearful ‘voice’ and rushing winds but also his destructivelightning, and it culminates in his triumph as he is seated upon the floods. Scholars believe that this Psalm has been borrowed for Jahweh from thecult of Baal. With returning rains the Ugaritic liturgy proclaims: ‘Baallives!’

What appears to be the case is that the death of Jesus during thePassover season has been merged with the Passover sacrifice, while at thesame time his death is linked to his Resurrection and, in that respect,assimilated to the Mediterranean death and resurrection gods. First theLamb of God is slain – and then he rises from the dead! Oh, yes, tobring these two things fully together is too incongruous, and yet somesuch merging of different myths is presupposed. Otherwise, how it can be

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that a Passover lamb, which was required of old to be eaten up entirelyovernight – how it can be that such a lamb should rise from the dead? Charles François Dupuis would explain this by his theory of a Sun mythunderlying all these resurrection gods. At the time of the Spring equinox(and thus also of the Spring lamb) the death of the god is mourned andhis resurrection celebrated.

JESUS’ FINAL DAYS

The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem, although very skimpilydescribed in Mark’s Gospel, would have been the enactment of aMessianic symbol based on the prophecy of Zechariah. It was nounmeaning celebration. Shortly afterward, whether that same day ornext, Jesus cleansed the Temple. Such, I say, is the record’s own claim offact, even if it be exaggerated or perchance unfounded. The Jewishauthorities are disturbed by this intruder but they don’t arrest him forfear of riot (Mark 14,2). An invincible popularity protects him in thesepublic acts when Jerusalem is thronged.

Now these may certainly be facts and so intended by thelegends, but they are mixed with anecdotes which fail as history andhave no bearing on the theme. It is surely out of place to have Jesusappealing to the baptism of John after the Temple authorities havechallenged his disorderly action. ‘Was it from Heaven or from men?’ hedemands of the priests. And we are asked to believe that they are afraid toanswer him for fear of the people. However genuine the Cleansing, an actwhich has within the Gospel good claim to be authentic, this defense isartificial and is followed by a Parable of the Vineyard which belongs inthe same category as the Cursing of the Fig Tree. It is a late Christianinvention the covert effect of which is to blame Israel for the execution ofthe Son of God.

So this early Jerusalem material is mixed and, overall, adds up toonly so much ‘filler.’ Questions arise, disputes, and Jesus triumphs overall. When certain flattering Pharisees and Herodians put a dangerousquestion: ‘Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?’ he replies, ‘Why putme to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me look at it... Whoselikeness and inscription is this?’ ‘Caesar’s.’ ‘Render to Caesar the thingsthat are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ (Mark 12,13.)

It is a reasonable compromise and artfully told. Or again whenconfuting Sadducees, strict students of the Torah who denied the

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resurrection of the dead, which is of course unmentioned in the Books ofMoses, Jesus uses a rabbinic logic when applying a text from Exodus,then adds: ‘He is not God of the dead but of the living.’ There is a qualityof authenticity in some of this controversy, therefore. What else shouldJesus sound like except a rabbi or a Jewish prophet? Only, we must becareful to avoid the error of supposing that we can settle matters of factin describing that sort of authenticity, which gives us no more than abasis for belief.

THE GREAT COMMANDMENT

Very good, certainly, is the Markan handling of the GreatCommandment but does it belong to a history of Jesus’ last days? Ascribe has put an innocent question, namely, ‘Which commandment isthe first of all?’ As we know, the Great Commandment is the well-known‘Love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself.’ FollowingJesus’ recitation of it the scribe says, ‘You are right, Teacher. You havetruly said that (God) is One and there is none other but he, and to lovehim with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all thestrength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than allwhole burnt offerings and sacrifices.’ The scribal enthusiasm brings fortha handsome compliment from Jesus in return: ‘You are not far from theKingdom of God.’ No trace of Gospel as such, no hint of kerygma isfound here but it seems authentic. It is the earliest Evangelist, we recall,who excels in the ‘occasional’ utterance.

Matthew omits the compliment to the scribe, which is a distinctloss artistically – and for that matter, ethically. For him it is a lawyer ofthe Pharisees who puts the question to test him, and that might show theEvangelist’s awareness that the tale needs an internal connection to itssurrounding drama. No issue follows on Jesus’ apt reply in Matthewsince it answers to their own belief, and Matthew has him add the words:‘On these two commandments depend all the Law and the prophets.’ Matthew’s is a more traditional and Jewish valuation of the Law. It is hewho makes Jesus declare in the Sermon on the Mount:

Think not that I am come to destroy the Law or the prophets...Till Heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in nowisepass from the Law, till all be fulfilled.

So why does he omit the scribe’s compliment and Jesus’handsome reply? No doubt he discerns in this flourish a story-teller’s

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embellishment. He knows how Mark handles his traditions and regardsthe handsome words of Jesus, which so contribute to the realism of hisaccount, as a Markan device. Matthew prefers a tradition, even ameager one, to a story-teller’s inventiveness. His Gospel is preeminentlya teaching Gospel and its author a scribe, a defender of the Law. Realism, and realistic detail, are no concern of the First Evangelist’s.

But it is Luke who has dealt most resourcefully with his traditionshere when he removes the Great Commandment from its Jerusalemsetting. Fearlessly, he turns the story upside down to make the lawyergive the Great Commandment instead of Jesus. And yet his motive istransparent. First the lawyer will put a tempting question, ‘Teacher, whatshall I do to inherit eternal life?’ ‘What is written in the Law?’ Christreplies. ‘How to you read?’ Follows the lawyer’s recitation of the GreatCommandment and Jesus says, ‘This do and thou shalt live.’ Only, thelawyer cannot leave it there. Having failed to pick a quarrel after justreciting ‘love thy neighbor,’ he detains him with another question: ‘Andwho is my neighbor?’ Jesus replies by telling the Parable of the GoodSamaritan which is found only in Luke – and this is clearly the reasonwhy Luke has turned Mark’s version of the Great Commandment upsidedown.

What shall we say of this parable apart from its fame? I believethat Luke’s three great parables, this one and the Prodigal Son and (theonly Jewish of the three) that of the Rich Man and Lazarus are Christiancompositions written with a story-teller’s care. Certainly, an exchangewhich deprives Jesus of his rabbinic summation of the Law and endswith the Good Samaritan makes him more of a Christian. Of the famousLukan three it is the least effective parable and its strong beginning Lukesoftens in a way that Mark would have taken a virile advantage of. For ifever a flash of Jesus’ anger was called for, it must have been in responseto this lawyer’s unserious and cynical question. Jesus’ first words thrustthe act of violence before the mind with implicit challenge: ‘A man goingdown from Jerusalem to Jericho fell among robbers who stripped himand beat him and left him half dead’ – ‘how would you respond if youcame on a man like that, even though an utter stranger?’ We have onlyimagined the added challenge which I give here, but a universal answerto it – if I could put my finger on the passage – we find already in Menciusthree or four centuries before Christ. The Confucian sage insists that ourinstinctive human response to seeing someone badly hurt or in distress isto help them, which is as much as to say that the Good Samaritan is

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potentially Everyman. When Luke will turn his parable so that a priestand a Levite pass by the half-dead traveler on the other side of the roadbefore a good Samaritan arrives, he slams at human nature disfigured orrepressed in these officials. As an argument the parable is falselyweighted, then, even if a double aspect of human nature is truly shownhere.

MARK’S REALISM In only five pages Mark has told of the Entry into Jerusalem and

given a distinct impression of those first triumphant days if we acceptthese tales as belonging to that final week. A writer far below thegreatest minds in his ability, he is an unselfconscious artist like those whohave chiseled out the carvings of our Gothic cathedrals, and asMichaelangelo or Bach or Shakespeare or Tolstoy are likewiseunselfconscious. There is no trace of egotism or self-display in Mark, nodeliberate brilliancy. Everything is homely and solid and to the point,and for the most part well-made. Everywhere the folk soul speaks in thisearliest Gospel which nonetheless reveals the character of the artist whomade it, which is another Gothic aspect of this primitive Gospel as Ruskindefines the Gothic style.

Apart from mere realism what of claimed fact in these Jerusalemlegends? I see claimed fact in three things so far:

(a) The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem. This is a Messianicgesture intended by Jesus – if it happened at all.(b) Cleansing of the Temple. A high prophetic deed or an act ofdisorder. It would disturb the Roman and Jewish authorities.(c) Jesus’ habit of retiring at night to the village of Bethanynearby.

All is devoted to a Jesus who, although miraculous, is yet as solidlyhuman as the Evangelist can make him to be. Mark’s is a Jesus who isnot perceived by his fellows as the kyrios within the story which he tells. Although he uses the actual word, kyrios, when persons are speaking toJesus, it is in the sense of ‘master’ or ‘sir’ and is so translated by theexcellent Goodspeed. Nowhere does the earliest Evangelist slip into themistake of himself calling Jesus Lord as Luke does several times whenindulging his faith. Mark intends to give us, so to speak, an actualMessiah in his depiction of a Galilean Son of Man, one who did actuallylive and who is placed solidly and memorably within his times. This is nomeandering deity scattering wonders about a fabled countryside who

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enters Jerusalem to work a miracle of death and Resurrection even if amyth of ransom, death and Resurrection is basic to the meaning of the tale. It is the kyrios Iesous whose cult the Evangelist serves, and he does onceanticipate the emerging Lord Jesus near the end:

As Jesus taught in the Temple he said, How can the scribes saythat the Christ is the Son of David? David himself, inspired bythe Holy Spirit, declared, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at myright hand till I put thy enemies under thy feet.’ David himselfcalls him Lord; so how is he his son? (Mark 12,35.)

‘David himself calls him Lord!’ It is someone in the early fellowship whofirst devised this tale after lighting on that Psalm with sudden insight. Mark will have found it ready-made in the traditions of a cult whosemore exalted kyrios has displaced a merely human Son of David. Itseems remarkable that a sense of the man, Jesus, should have survived asit has in a myth whose on-going transformation would lift him to theHeavens.

We must concede, then, that for all Mark’s shrewd realism heserves that larger myth. Jesus is well on the way to being transformed. In the words of the Nicene Creed he will become the kyrios-Messiahwhose humanity is lifted out of the realm of mere creatures except for ahalf-way association with our flesh, thanks to the Virgin. He is become:

...one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begottenof his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, VeryGod of Very God, begotten not made, being of one substancewith the Father by whom all things were made; who for us menand for our salvation came down from Heaven and wasincarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary and was mademan...

In these quoted words the myth, although never to be clarified logically,has reached its full expression.

LAST-MINUTE ESCHATOLOGY

Mark divides the Jerusalem period – the period of a week – intothree sections culminating in the Passion of Christ. After Jesus’ triumphalEntry and before the onset of the Passion he inserts a sermon givenprivately to four disciples concerning the Signs of the End, namely, thetribulations which are to precede the awesome coming of the Son of Man.

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It is good old-fashioned eschatology, the same which the FourthEvangelist has outgrown, and its presence in Mark’s Gospel reminds usthat these early Christians were prepared to suffer and that this Gospelwas written, in part, to encourage them.

The sermon is unique enough to deserve a name of its own andthe professors have given it one. They call it (or else call portions of it)the Little Apocalypse thus bringing to mind the great Apocalypse of St.John the Divine, a writing whose disastrous imaginations GeorgeBernard Shaw with his quite usual heroic honesty compared to theravings of a drug addict. That can be said of it. Against this, the Book ofRevelation was a favorite of Emily Dickinson’s, a highly gifted NewEngland recluse and poet whose many-sided imagination reminds us ofPoe sometimes except that she never dwells on corruption and is neverdepraved. Revelation is a book of myths to jar the poet in us, yes, but it isnonetheless grotesque. We melt before a Jesus who says:

Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear my voiceand open the door, I will come in to him and will sup with him,and he with me. (Revelation 3,20.)

But we shudder before a Christ whose face is as the sun, who holds in hisright hand seven stars and from whose mouth issues a sword. (The Bookof Revelation, I may say, yielded a surprising cache of material to CharlesFrançois Dupuis in his endeavor to derive religion from astrology). Apocalyptic of any sort belongs to another world, and if the LittleApocalypse in Mark doesn’t quite resemble the Apocalypse of John, yet ithas its own tremendous quality and is here placed in Jesus’ mouth:

When you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought notto be, then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Lethim who is on the housetop not go down, nor enter his house, totake anything away; and let him who is in the field not turn backto take his mantle. And alas for those who are with child and forthose who give suck in those days! Pray that it may not happenin winter. For in those days there will be such tribulation as hasnot been from the beginning of the creation which God createduntil now, and never will be (again). (Mark 13,14.)

I call that tremendous, but its awesome quality depends on the extent towhich we may believe it. Only, the placement of this sermon in themiddle of Passover week raises a question. Why here, if its placementbelongs to Mark’s composition? What has any of it to do with the Passionof Christ? Apart from this sermon we find only a trace of apocalyptic in

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those final days when Jesus makes answer to the High Priest’s urgentquestion: ‘Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?’

I am; and you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand ofPower, and coming with the clouds of heaven. (14,61.)

That, briefly, is Apocalypse. Which of Jesus’ disciples was there to hearit? Fundamentalists appeal to men like Nicodemus or Joseph ofArimathea who are associated with the Sanhedrin for this piece of eye-witness testimony if by a stretch it could be called that. So did Jesus for afact give this sermon to a chosen Four on the Mount of Olives? Did hepredict that the ‘wonderful stones’ of the Temple would be cast down ashappened some forty years later? Or does the Markan apocalypse fit intothe author’s scheme in some deeper sense which is not readily apparent? Between Jesus and his opponents there is no quarrel about apocalypticthat week and in his public teaching no mention of it. The very sermon isso far out of sight that it’s ‘private’ – hidden. Did it really occur, then?

This Markan sermon strikes me as a conglomeration of left-overs. These are but remnants of an unsatisfied apocalyptic dream, one whosepromises were unfulfilled but which continued to nag at the earlyChristians, and to attract them. We are so used to seeing in the Person ofJesus the Be-all and the End-all of this religion that we forget his earlierrole as one who carried forward the message of the Baptist. We knowthat the first Christians were fairly expecting the End of the world at anytime. A tale of death and Resurrection could not at first satisfy the Jewishimagination of a Day of the Lord. Jesus’ Resurrection appears, ifmysteriously, within a world to which it does not belong, but theapocalyptic imagination awaited a convulsion of the whole world.

The Little Apocalypse does summarize the old eschatology, theold belief and its hopes and fears. The curious chapter serves hiscomposition like a curtain drawn across the scene. Before that sermonJesus triumphs in Jerusalem. Afterward comes the Anointing of thislowly Christ, then followed by the treachery of Judas Iscariot, the LastSupper, Gethsemane, trials, crucifixion – it is the story of the Passion.

THE PASSION BEGINS

We have arrived at the sacred core of the earliest Gospel, andscholars tell us that we have now an embedded early document of specialhistorical value which the Evangelist has absorbed. If they are right inbelieving this, then our Gospels have preserved two crucial early

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documents by absorbing them, documents otherwise lost. The first ofthese is Q, our Sayings Source, which is embedded in Matthew andLuke. The Markan Passion narrative, comprising chapters 14 and 15 ofthis little book, would be the other lost document or be the substance ofit as Mark has recast it. Taken in the forms in which we have them, theseposited documents seem a quaint witness to a remarkable life.

Unlike the rest of Mark’s Gospel, which is somewhatmiscellaneous, the Passion account is consecutive. One thing followsanother in the unfolding logic of events. Even so, Mark’s handling of hismaterial is characteristic. The nameless woman’s Anointing of Jesusseparates the plotting of the priests and scribes for his arrest (‘not duringthe feast, lest there be a tumult of the people’) from Judas Iscariot’s offerto betray him for money. Mark loves to divide his tales this way as wesaw most recently when he separated the Withering of the Fig Tree fromits Cursing. It seems an evidence of technique when the perfidy of Judasfollows an Anointing which prepares for the sacrifice of this lowly Messiahand we are doubly prepared for what is to come. There is no suspense inthis tale because the death of Christ is ordained.

PREPARATIONS FOR THE LAST SUPPER

On the day of the sacrifice of the lamb the disciples ask, ‘Wherewill you have us go and prepare for you to eat the Passover?’ Jesusreplies:

Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you;follow him, and wherever he enters, say to the householder, TheTeacher says, Where is my guest room, where I am to eat thePassover with my disciples? And he will show you a large upperroom furnished and ready; there prepare for us. (Mark 14,13.)

It’s a slight action considered in itself. ‘Where shall we eat this Passover?’ The tale which describes it is skimpy and inconsistent, but alas it isevidence – or such evidence as we find in these Gospels. Scholarsdisagree rather tremendously about its meaning. A place has beenprepared for the supper before the disciples ask Jesus, ‘Where will youhave us go and prepare for you to eat the Passover?’ It would have beentheir role as disciples to make these preparations, only in this case a placefor the Supper has already been chosen and Jesus’ own disciples areunaware of that. When read as history, these ‘occasional’ words of Jesushave led to suspicions of an undiscovered plot. Mark has surely nothing

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of the sort in mind. Come now, is the man already waiting by theJerusalem gate with his jug between his knees? – waiting, as the storyplainly says, until a disciple happens to put the question to Jesus?

The story is another Markan double because it echoes an earliersending of a pair of disciples to fetch a colt on which no one had ever satand which they would find ‘immediately’ on entering a village. As to thesense of the words that ‘a man carrying a jar of water will meet you,’(RSV) we read that the disciples ‘went to the city and found it as he hadtold them.’ Goodspeed and Moffatt, two gallant, learned scholars, give usin another wording what Mark has intended in the overall consideration:‘You will meet a man carrying a pitcher of water,’ Goodspeed translates. Or ‘You will meet a man carrying a water jar.’ (Moffatt) Here is ourparallel to the disciples’ earlier finding of a colt when they entered avillage. All happens as Jesus has foreseen. Pitiable though it be, Christ’sdeath is not an accident or tragic: he has foreseen it and will drink the‘cup’ which the Father has given. These tales of his clairvoyance, ormore appropriately, of his foreknowledge emphasize Christ’s willingnessto die for a ‘ransom.’ Judas’s betrayal is also known of and itsconsequence foreseen. Such tales are useful to Mark in helping him fleshout the skimpiness of his traditions, and they will also suggest that in thisperiod of Christ’s submission his miraculous power has not disappeared.

THE LAST SUPPER I.Having found everything as Jesus foretold, the disciples

‘prepared the Passover. And when it was evening he came with theTwelve.’ No householder makes his appearance. Nothing is said of anupper room. We are simply placed at the table where Jesus at onceforetells his betrayal. The scene is a nugget written out with a perfecteconomy and ending with a solemn affirmation of prophecy fulfilled: ‘TheSon of Man goes as it is written of him.’

Can we doubt that the mere generality of Jesus’ announcement,‘One of you will betray me,’ or the generality implied in his saying, ‘Woeto that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed’ – can we doubt, I say,that this manner of speaking reaches beyond the mere traitor, who isunnamed, to embrace readers and auditors? For the little scene aswritten has been designed for the worshiper who is thus encouraged toask himself that exemplary question: ‘Is it I?’

A certain tenderness in the scene might seem to be the effect of

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high art if that did not involve a misconception. In fact, it is doubtfulwhether any art could arouse such a response by means so spare. Theliterary fact is that no such tenderness could be awakened nor any suchintimacy without an adequate expression. This announcement ofbetrayal is much too brief to explain those sacred associations whichseem to spring up in us here. All is posited on a prior inwardness, adevotion already given. The disciples have responded in the verypattern of an ideal loyalty and love which has been stricken by thethought of a betrayal as if that mere word had already carried the fullmeasure of the horror to come.

From the announcement of his betrayal, a tender scene, we passto the act of Jesus which is supposed to be the origin of the communionrite:

As they were eating, he took bread and blessed and broke it, andgave it to them and said, ‘Take; this is my body.’ And he took acup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and theyall drank of it. And he said to them, ‘This is my blood of thecovenant, which is poured out for many. Truly, I say to you, Ishall not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when Idrink it new in the Kingdom of God.’ (Mark 14,22.)

Considered apart from the rest, the scene is a little ceremony. Jesustakes bread from the table to bless it and break it, and this broken breadhe calls his body, which the disciples are bidden to eat. So likewise thePassover cup: he calls it ‘my blood of the Covenant’ and bids the disciplesto drink of it. Symbolically, then, Jesus is eaten during the same meal inwhich a Passover lamb is consumed. Thus do his disciples, who partakealso of this ‘blood of the Covenant’ renew an old covenant, but whoeverheard of a Teacher offering his body in the form of broken bread whichhis disciples are required to eat? Not to say that Mark is quite hung upon the symbol because his Jesus goes on to say: ‘I shall not drink again ofthe fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the Kingdom ofGod.’ In Mark’s Gospel as we have it, then, the ‘blood of the Covenant’has not ceased to be ‘fruit of the vine.’

The whole business is rather astonishing. A rabbi, a prophet, aGreat Teacher of humanity offers his body to be eaten under the aspectof bread, and yet an ancient and familiar custom has taught us that thewords spoken by Jesus belong to him uniquely. As for the disciples, theirrole is one of a wordless compliance because we read that when Jesustook the cup, ‘he gave it to them and they drank of it.’ That is all we are

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told of their response to so singular a gesture.

A page ago we noticed a moment of intimacy in an earlier sceneof the Last Supper when after revealing that one of his disciples wouldbetray him they asked him ‘one after another, Is it I?’ No such tenderinteraction is apparent here. An intimacy which is missing from thescene has already been transferred to the rite of communion. So werethe disciples taken aback by this act or left to wonder about a thing sostrange? We do not know. Does his symbolic breaking of the breadtouch them with its announcement of a Master who is to be broken indeath? We are not told that. Are they consoled by the gift which isimplied? Jesus refers to his ‘blood of the Covenant.’ Do they know whathe means by that? The little story tells us only of what Jesus did andnothing else – assuming that he did it at all.

As for the ‘fruit of the vine’ which he will drink again in theKingdom of God but never again with his disciples before Kingdomcome, this might reflect an earlier tradition about the Last Supper whichMark has blended with his sacramental account. It goes nicely with thetheory of eschatology. Jesus reminds his disciples very plausibly of theMessianic banquet which is coming, and except for a lingering difficultyabout a historical teacher who is supposed to know beforehand that hewill never again drink ‘the fruit of the vine’ this side of Paradise, it mightbe considered. Jesus speaks very calmly of the death he announces bythis act, and we cannot easily explain his serenity and resignation.

THE LAST SUPPER II.Now of course it is possible, speaking historically, that Jesus

never said those remarkable words about ‘my body (and) my blood ofthe Covenant, which is poured out for many.’ Dr. Joseph Klausner,whose great study of Jesus was written originally in Hebrew, deniesopenly that he can have spoken them although he accepts the Passovermeal as historical. And given the simple humanity of Jesus as a premise,why not? Klausner had received the Ph.D. degree from Heidelbergwhere he must surely have imbibed the German higher criticism forwhich, on his human side, Jesus is very solidly a Jewish rabbi of his times,or a prophet, a remarkable man, no doubt, but sharing fully in theancient Jewish life and thought. It is the old question ofZeitgebundenheit. A Jewish teacher of those days would not have said,‘Eat this broken bread which is my body.’ But what is there to object to ifthis Gospel tale actually reports a Passover meal as Jesus’ last?

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Against such a sturdy belief as Dr. Klausner’s there is no honestrefutation. He has not arrived at this by methods and techniques. Instead, it represents the ripened wisdom of all his knowledge and histhought when he discovers in this tale a fact which the Gospel traditionshave preserved, and our response is to say, It is possible, and not leastbecause we haven’t peeled away the incredible aspect of an impossiblestory in order to provide an imaginary substitute.

But are we really willing, then, say in the name of history and ofreason, to strip from Jesus these most arresting words as the Romansoldiers stripped his garments from him for the crucifixion? We feel thathis uniqueness is diminished if we take them away. They belong to himjust as his famous soliloquy belongs to Prince Hamlet or his Ninety-fiveTheses to Dr. Martin Luther. Something is lost of the integrity of thefigure without them. On Dr. Klausner’s common-sense procedures whendrawing facts from ancient texts, we get a Jewish rabbi who iscelebrating the Passover with his disciples before his arrest in the Garden. There is nothing very special about such a Passover meal, given date andplace and rabbi and disciples, all of which is drawn from the Gospel wehave corrected. The rescued fact is a commonplace. We must haveexpected it of such a Teacher but we have lost something of the qualitywhich makes Jesus Jesus – I keep stressing this – and not just anotherTeacher. We have passed from the very thing the story gives us to ageneral fact which certifies the Jewishness of the Teacher: but this is afact, generally, of which our Synoptic Gospels leave us in no doubt. Foreven Luke with his Gentile emphases is at pains to tell us that he wascircumcised on the eighth day.

So here we revive a distinction which is everywhere implicit inour theme. It is the contrast between the Express Jesus of the Gospelsand the posited figure of history, the so-called and confessedly obscure‘historical Jesus.’ There are several possible views we might take of theLast Supper and this is a contrast which embraces them all. Beyondquestion, it is the Express Jesus of the Gospels to whom these wordsbelong and to whom we are referring when we affirm this. Bear it in mind,please, because there is a very peculiar authority we ascribe to theExpress Jesus, and because there is another sort of Jesus who haunts ourinquiry like a shadow, namely, the historical Jesus. He may really haveexisted, of course, as one or another scholar has described him, asBultmann or Schweitzer or Ernest Renan have described him, and eacha little differently; but as far as I can make out, he exists only as a concept,

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and a rather odd sort of concept, too. For the historical Jesus is a positedhistorical figure whose very delineation is obscure from the outset. He isforever being drawn anew from the Gospels, and yet the reliability ofthese Gospels is constantly being questioned or challenged or denied.

Could we grasp this distinction lucidly, which comes down to aquestion of reference, we should understand the Negative argument in allits scope, and what it is the Gospels give us, and what they mean.

If the commonsense approach of Joseph Klausner permits thesturdy affirmation of a fact in this learned Jewish mind, very different isthe approach of the Negative critic. Initially, the Negative critic seizes onthose strangely attractive words of Jesus which are the focus of ourdifficulty. No less than Dr. Klausner he disbelieves that a historical Jesuswill have said them. It is too improbable or even fantastic that a Teachershould have asked his disciples in such a symbol to eat his body, but forthe Negative critic there is no fact of history here, no Last Supper whichis a simple Passover meal. It is simply a tale which shows how ‘Jesus’ hasestablished the rite of communion. So take a philosopher like ProfessorArthur Drews. On his own grounds he must classify the Last Supperamong those myths which are invented to explain rituals already existing. Men turn to such myths to account for the existence of a thing, or of arite, by showing the first act of the god by which it was created.

It is ironic, then, that the rite itself should be a sort of enactedmyth, but this is not a thing to be denied. Grant that we are nowherenear dismissing these Gospels as evidence of fact, yet certainly the actwhich Mark portrays is on our own terms a symbol. I repeat this: the actis a symbol but the common people do not want a symbol. They neverheard of it! This is the Body! It is the Blood of the covenant! As theCatholic Church has understood, the common man will not allow the veilof mystery to be lifted. It is this mystery which gives its sacred value tothe rite.

A superstitious literal-mindedness about this even Luther couldnot free himself of although acknowledging like any Calvinist that theritual bread is also bread, the wine also wine. The Roman doctrine hadtechnically denied that of the sacrament, the bread remaining bread onlyas it presents itself to our senses: in appearance, then.

THE LAST SUPPER III.Suppose that Jesus did break bread and call it his body, and

suppose, too, as Mark would have it, that after blessing the common cup,

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the wine of Passover, – ‘and they all drank of it’ – he said, ‘This is myblood of the covenant, which is poured out for many.’ Is this the voice ofthe Beatitudes or of the prophet come into Galilee following his baptismby John? Surely, if Jesus said these things we must make a new sort ofallowance for this man. What falls to the ground here when the story istaken literally is the mere conception of him as a rabbi. We lose themere prophet. We lose the Great Teacher of humanity. Who canimagine a Confucius instituting such a rite? No Teacher speaks this way.

These words depend for all their honest meaning on hisvoluntary death. At very least we have here a man of uniqueimagination and self-regard, a holy figure – rather than a wise. We comeclose to Albert Schweitzer’s idea of a Jesus seeking martyrdom, but thedifficulty is to know on strictly historical grounds whether he can havespoken these words which are at once so distinctive and so hard toaccept. An easy solution is to deny them. For implicitly it is the cult godwho would invite us here saying, Eat of my body, and be partakers of aNew Covenant in my blood because I am one who has died and risenfrom the dead, and you may become a part of all that by accepting thesetokens in good faith.

A few great names and others of distinction have accepted thewords of Jesus as historically his own, or so they inform us. Mixing thegreat and the less great I name four of them as David Strauss, ErnestRenan, once again Albert Schweitzer and then – who for a fourth? Sinceour question rests on a radical doubt we look for minds that havesuffered because of that doubt and I revive the name of an Americanhumanist, Paul Elmer More, a gifted classicist and literary figure who willeven say:

(As to the ‘historical authenticity of the Holy Supper’)... anunprejudiced study of the documents must lead to theconclusion that we have records, correct in essentials whilevarying, as would be expected, in details, of an actual event. That is to say, it is a simple fact of history that Jesus supped witha group of chosen disciples in Jerusalem just before his trial andcrucifixion, and that under the shadow of the coming tragedy hedid break bread and give the cup with the solemn words of theInstitution.31

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But this goes too far. It would be very difficult to accuse Joseph Klausnerof revealing a prejudice when denying that Jesus can have spoken ‘thesolemn words of the Institution’ simply because he conceives himhistorically as a believable rabbi. If anything, Professor More’s statementmay betray his own uneasiness in defending the ‘solemn words.’ And yetit is a courage in the man that he chooses to defend them.

Albert Schweitzer also takes the sacramental words as literallyspoken by Jesus in a mysterious Gleichniswort which the disciples are notsupposed to understand, and this in an early survey of scholarly opinion. Rashly enough – he is very young to be among the great – he condemnsthe earlier treatments, one and all, for having failed to understand theLast Supper in the light of eschatology, which is already at this early timehis ruling principle (and I translate as follows:)

‘As death draws near, and because with his death the Kingdom will come,Jesus rises to the triumphant height of those days on the lake shore. Atthat time he had celebrated a foretaste of the Messianic banquet with thefaithful; now he rises at the end of that final earthly meal and hands outthe ceremonial food and drink to his disciples while disclosing in a loftytone, after the cup is returned to him, that this is to be their last suchearthly meal because they would shortly be reunited at the banquet inthe Father’s Kingdom. Two words in particular hint of the significance ofhis Passion. The bread and wine which he is handing out in thisanticipation are for him his Body and his Blood because he is to bringabout the Messianic banquet by his deep surrender to a sacrificial death. The saying was but darkly apprehended, nor was it meant for hisdisciples. It was not supposed to make anything clear to them because itwas a sort of Parable that bore on his secret.’**

**In der Nahe des Todes richtet sich Jesus zu derselbensieghaften Grösse auf, wie in den Tagen am Seestrand: denn mitdem Tod kommt das Reich. Damals hatte er mit den Gläubigendie Vorfeier des messianischen Mahles gehalten; so erhebt ersich jetzt am Ende der letzten irdischen Mahlzeit und teilt denJüngern feierlich Speise und Trank aus, indem er sie miterhobener Stimme, nachdem der Becher zu ihm zurückgekehrtist, darauf hinweist, dass dieses das letzte irdische Mahl gewesenist, weil sie in Balde zum Mahl in des Vaters Reich vereinigt seinwerden. Zwei entsprechende Gleichnisworte deuten dasLeidensgeheimnis an. Für ihn sind Brot und Wein, die er ihnenbei der Vorfeier darreich, sein Leib und sein Blut, weil er durch

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die Hingabe in den Tod das messianische Mahl heraufführt. DasGleichniswort blieb den Jüngern dunkel. Es war auch nicht aufsie berechnet, es sollte ihnen nichts verdeutlichen – denn es warein Geheimnisgleichnis.

Although the position taken is defensible, the scholars of Germanyweren’t much impressed by his early book and paid little attention to it.

The great names here are those of David Strauss and ErnestRenan. In his Life of Jesus Critically Examined DF Strauss has put thematter succinctly:

To the writers of the Gospels, the bread in the commemorativesupper was the Body of Christ: but had they been asked, whetherthe bread were transmuted, they would have denied it; had theybeen spoken to of a partaking of the Body with and under theform of bread, they would not have understood it; had it beeninferred that consequently the bread merely signified the body,they would not have been satisfied.32

This puts the matter in a nutshell. Can we really go beyond it? One thingonly needs a further comment here. It is where he says, ‘To the writersof the Gospels.’ He doesn’t say, ‘to Jesus’ or even ‘to the disciples.’ When he adds that we can ‘hardly... doubt the institution of the ritualSupper by Jesus... in opposition to the testimony of Paul,’ we may suspecthim of a prudent tact in wishing to avoid an outright doubt. Amongthese German scholars that would not have gone unnoticed.

That leaves us, finally, the great name of Ernest Renan, whosebook is still in print. He is the most interesting case among these scholarsbecause of his peculiar aim in attempting to write this history, for whichhe had great gifts and a literary genius unsurpassed in all this realm ofhigh scholarship. As a matter of course, his sincerity has beenquestioned. He was a historian of great subtlety and discretion. There ismuch of the poet in Renan and something of the novelist. His tendencytoward ‘beautiful sentiment’ is held against him. John Erskine dislikesRenan for making the life of Jesus questionable – a strange complaint!

Renan ascribes the Words of Institution to Jesus withouthesitation and defends them as an Oriental metaphor which Westernminds are not accustomed to receive in the spirit intended. We mayrecognize a variant of Strauss’s idea here as quoted above. In the result

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it comes down to the same thing. For Jesus to have said in a strikingmetaphor: ‘This is my Body,’ means frankly for Renan as it does for DavidStrauss: it is his Body. The question for the Western mind is: Whatmeaning has that striking Oriental metaphor for us?

But even this is not the most important thing about Renan. Inoriginality he is preceded by Strauss, and yet he goes beyond him in thetriumphant composition of his famous book. Never underestimate theimportance of a real literary achievement. Strauss’s book belongs to theliterature of scholarship, Renan’s to the literature of the world. And itrests on a more distinct decision in this matter because inevitably one hasto choose. Renan has seen clearly that we don’t obtain a significantresult or even find our way to an interesting position without proceedingalong the lines of a chosen possibility. And he seems the most serene inhis choice among these four. It might be said against him, I suppose, thathis chosen possibility was after all acceptable in Catholic France forwhose citizens he was writing, but he is nonetheless lucid and decided inpursuit of his aim. It is implicit in the labors of Renan that he wishes toconceive the Jesus of history as a human being, recognizably of old, whoin his character and deeds is compatible with our well-developedreligious idea.

THE FOURTH GOSPEL’S DIFFERENT VERSION: LAST SUPPER

The Fourth Evangelist has recast the account of the Last Supper. Had he a better tradition than the spare accounts we have found in ourearlier Gospels? Surely not – although many a pious scholar prefers tobelieve that. Long since have we found in this last of the authenticGospels (as determined by the early Catholic Church) another sort ofJesus having a different bearing, another style, another Teaching: it is avery lofty Jesus who spends much time in Jerusalem. Nevertheless, thedivergence does not amount to an outright clash or a crass substitution. A man of deep mind and rigid faith, the author avoids that and he tellshis story well. Where are the contrasts here?

(a) The Last Supper is not a Passover meal in this Gospel. John hasmoved the event one day forward with the result that Jesus, the Lamb ofGod, will be crucified when the Passover lamb is slain. And for anotherresult, the discrepancy in dating has made it impossible for scholars todate the crucifixion. We do not know, exactly, when Jesus died.

(b) In this different Last Supper Jesus nowhere breaks bread to call it hisBody and says nothing of a Covenant in the shedding of his Blood. That

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ritual aspect of the myth was implicit in chapter 6 (as we saw) whereJesus tells the Jews: ‘He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood haseternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.’ (John 6,54.)

(c) Instead of offering these tokens of Body and Covenant Jesus performsanother eloquent gesture when during supper he rises to lay aside hisouter garments: ‘Then he poured water into a basin and began to washthe disciples’ feet, and to wipe them with the towel with which he wasgirded.’ This gesture borrows something of Mary’s recent anointing ofthe feet of Jesus with a ‘costly ointment’ and wiping it off with her hair. Unfortunately, the silent eloquence is spoiled a little for the careful readerby an exchange between Jesus and Peter of which I quote only thedialogue:

Peter: Lord, do you wash my feet?Jesus: What I am doing you do not know now, but afterwardyou will understand.Peter: You shall never wash my feet.Jesus: If I do not wash you, you have no part in me.Peter: Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head.Jesus: He who has bathed does not need to wash, except for hisfeet, but he is clean all over; and you are clean, but not all ofyou.’

This is pious nonsense but it can’t have been written by the author of thediscourses which follow. If the foolish words are omitted, the tale readsvery well.

d) The Fourth Evangelist uses the Last Supper as a setting for theimpressive discourses which follow, discourses at once intimate andmystical but of which the Synoptics know nothing at all. Thesediscourses transform the entire Supper, which has become a focus ofChristian devotion. Nothing in the Gospels – nothing in all the Bibleapproaches the depth of Christian devotion here.

(e) A final point of contrast bears on the question of witness. How dowe know of these things which are soon to be described or theimpending trials of Jesus which take place behind closed doors? In thenaive art of the Synoptics these final scenes are told without an indicationof how we might have learned such things, but the Fourth Evangelist isnot quite so naive. He is aware of the difficulty and will suggest apossible witness. After Jesus had predicted his betrayal, then, accordingto John, the disciples looked at one another.

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Now there was leaning on Jesus’ bosom one of his discipleswhom Jesus loved. (John 13,23.)

That is, whom he especially loved; and this will prove to be a triumphantconception. Peter, now, must ask the ‘beloved disciple’ to find out who itis, and the Lord replies: ‘It is he to whom I shall give this morsel when Ihave dipped it.’ When he gives the sop to Judas Satan enters into thetraitor and he is sent out into the night on his errand. The other disciplesare not privy to this exchange and do not understand.

The disciple whom Jesus loved is nowhere named in this Gospelwhich will claim for him a special role. Earlier we saw how at theopening of the Fourth Gospel Peter is deprived of his primacy whenAndrew tells him (from the Baptist!), ‘We have found the Christ!’ Now inthe concluding portions it will be a nameless disciple, described asbeloved, who displaces Peter from his preeminence. It is he, for instance,who will get Peter into the High Priest’s house because he is ‘known tothe High Priest,’ but how has that come about? One ancient speculationis that he was on such terms that he could ‘enter the court of the HighPriest along with Jesus’ because he was used to selling him fish, but this isabsurd. A fish-monger with privileges? FC Burkitt’s wiser suggestion isthat this disciple had been a Sadducee before being won to the messageof Jesus and this at least answers to the dignity required. But ProfessorBurkitt is deceived by the Evangelist’s cunning. An unnamed disciple hasno claim to be vested in the dignity of a Sadducee and, in truth, no claim onfact. Yet he is wrought mysteriously into the texture of this Gospel rightto the end and by an ancient tradition he is identified with the disciple Johnand even confounded with the author of the Gospel. In truth, however, wehave no idea who wrote this Gospel, any more than we do of when orwhere it was written. Its own witness to itself bears the signature of apowerful spirit. An artist of rare accomplishment, a psychologistundeceived by the facade of humanity, he is above all a believer in theJewish faith of old as it had come to expression in the Idea of Christ. Thisis the crucial Idea for the Fourth Evangelist and he gives it his all.

GETHSEMANE

The nighttime arrest of Jesus at a place called Gethsemane doesnot seem improbable or unhistorical. After the supper and the singing ofa hymn (‘the chanting of the second part of the Hallel’) Jesus and hisband go out to the Mount of Olives where he foretells the desertion of hisown disciples, citing prophecy: ‘I will strike the shepherd and the sheep

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of the flock will be scattered.’ (Zechariah 13,7) We do not pause toinquire whether or not this prophecy is appropriate here. It belongs toMark’s story and probably to his traditions. It chimes with the event andthat suffices the faithful. Peter at once declares his loyalty even if theothers should fall away and draws from Jesus a famous reply: ‘Verily, Isay unto thee, before the cock crows twice, thou shalt deny me thrice.’ And we see, of course, the legendary aspects here.

Arrived at Gethsemane he tells his disciples, ‘Sit here while I goyonder and pray’ – all except the favored three, Peter, James and John,who go a little farther with him. He tells them, ‘My soul is exceedingsorrowful unto death: tarry ye here, and watch,’ or in the art nouveautranslation of Edgar Goodspeed: ‘My heart is almost breaking. You muststay here and keep watch.’ Then he goes a little farther on, falls on hisface and prays:

Abba! (=Father) Remove this cup from me! Yet not what I willbut what thou wilt.

And the disciples fall asleep! Three times they fall asleep while hewrestles in prayer, three times he must rouse them (‘The spirit is willingbut the flesh is weak.’) Then the traitor arrives with his crowd.

Judas had arranged a signal whereby to identify his Masterwhom he approaches to kiss and Jesus is taken. Luke adds the poignantwords, ‘Judas, betrayest thou the Son of Man with a kiss?’ – but, ofcourse, all the scene is poignant and legendary. A follower standing bydraws a sword to smite the servant of the High Priest and cut off his earbefore the disciples escape – and Luke will have him heal that earwhereas in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus speaks the famous words, ‘Put upagain thy sword into its place, for all they that take the sword shall perishwith the sword.’ After which the disciples forsake him and flee.

Such is the story of Jesus’ arrest in the Synoptics, and a storywell-told; but it is just its dramatic effectiveness which raises the doubt. Here is a Jesus so amply forewarned of events to come that he issuffering in an agony of prayer beforehand. Luke even compares hissweat to great drops of blood. And those words in particular, ‘Let thiscup pass,’ surely refer us to the cup of communion in which, as all Mark’sreaders knew, we participate in the sorrows of Christ.

So the nighttime arrest of Jesus at Gethsemane (the word means‘oil press’) is not of itself implausible, but it is very clear that legend hasshaped the telling. We bring an alien interest to the Gospel when we ask

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of any part of it for an original historical version. What original version? For Mark the original version is just the story that he tells us, and he willjudge his success by the wise assemblage and right telling of thesetraditions of the Son of Man, a telling which has to commend itself to theother leaders of that cult. Were we to ask him point blank, ‘Sir, how doyou know these things?’ he could only be astonished at a deficiency inour understanding which he would feel at once to be beyond his powerto explain. Our mere question would not suffice to awaken thisEvangelist to a difficulty.

A curious incident follows the arrest which is told of only inMark’s Gospel when a young man ‘with nothing but a linen cloth abouthis body’ who is following the apprehended Christ is seized and leaveshis garment behind to run away naked. Is it Mark’s own portrait incameo? Or is it not simply the fact as it occurred, which is reasonenough for its being told of? But Mark is an inventive story-teller. YoungJoseph in Egypt fled away naked when Potiphar’s wife seized his garmentand he left it in her clutches, for a prototype. Or prophecy could be amotive here and if so, Alfred Loisy is on the right track when quotingfrom Amos,: ‘The stoutest of heart among the warriors shall flee awaynaked on that day.’ (Amos 2,16. JM Powis Smith in The Complete Bible).

Whatever else they are, these Gospels first and last are acomplete symbol, and my motive is to discover that symbol, whichmeans, to understand it. Here is a case where a young man’s escapepresents us with a wealth of suggestion. And we must reckon also withthe placement of this episode in Jesus’ Passion tale. Near the beginningof a foreseen ordeal, the incident of the linen cloth has brought to mindideas of youth, vitality, nakedness, escape. We know that Mark isenamored of his double structures, and the parallel which is explicit hereis of a youth wrapped only in linen and a Jesus wrapped in linen for hisburial. As anticipating Resurrection we may press this parallel too far,but the resources of a concentrated art, such as this Gospel is, are oftenmarvelous beyond the maker’s knowing. No image survives of Jesus’Resurrection in this earliest Gospel. Instead, we have this.

THE GARDEN OF MEETING IN JOHN

Already within the Synoptics the traditions of the Passionnarrative sprout and diverge. Matthew’s fine saying about perishing withthe sword is missing from Luke where, instead, and quite to the contraryJesus after supper says, ‘Let him who has no sword sell his mantle and

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buy one.’ (Luke 22,36.) Two swords are found then and he says, ‘It isenough.’ No word of reproach is spoken concerning its use to inflict awound, and as aforesaid Luke solves the difficulty about the slave of theHigh Priest by having Jesus cure him with a touch. Also, withoutmentioning any names he specifies that it was the slave’s right ear, I thinkmyself because it ‘chimes’ once more with prophecy:

Woe to my worthless shepherd, who deserts the flock! May the sword smite his armand his right eye! (Zechariah 11,17.)

Yes, of course, it is remote, but we must bear in mind that this ‘worthlessshepherd’ (namely, the High Priest) is the same that Jesus has mentionedearlier when quoting Zechariah in reference to himself: ‘Strike theshepherd, that the sheep may be scattered.’ (Zechariah 13,7.)

As ever, it is the Fourth Evangelist who freely recasts the tale,putting the scene of Jesus’ arrest in a garden beyond the Kidron valley. This place is not called Gethsemane and Jesus is not in agony here nordoes he pray to be spared what must come. All that would be out ofkeeping with John’s elevated Christ who has throughout looked forwardto his death serenely. Hence, the garden to which he has taken hisdisciples is simply a place where he is accustomed to meet them.

When the soldiers and Temple officers ‘with lanterns and torchesand weapons’ appear, Jesus goes forth to meet them asking, ‘Whom doyou seek?’ And they reply, ‘Jesus the Nazorean.’ At once he says, ‘I amhe,’ and they draw back and fall to the ground. It is an impressivemoment if we read this as Scripture. Then a second time he asks them,‘Whom do you seek?’ It is of course the Evangelist’s leitmotif whichreappears in this double, and we met it long since in the Gospel of John. Once again, then, the soldiers answer, ‘Jesus the Nazorean,’ and he says,‘I told you that I am he, so if you seek me, let these men go.’ Nothing issaid of their forsaking him or having to flee although Jesus had earlierforetold Peter’s denial, a different sort of forsaking which is yet to come.

It is now that Peter draws his sword (Peter!) and cuts off the rightear of the High Priest’s slave, who is given the name of Malchus. Thesenames embellish the Synoptic account with just that sort of verisimilitudewhich gains its credit, useful in fiction, from the naming of persons. Johnborrows the right ear, seemingly, from the Third Evangelist, but he wiselyabstains from Luke’s sentimental healing. Seeming also to borrow from

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Matthew, he has Jesus say, ‘Put your sword into its sheath. Shall I notdrink the cup which the Father has given me?’ At last a mention of thecup! It is the least reminder of the Gethsemane prayer. Now he is seizedand bound and led away.

What about that name, ‘Jesus the Nazorean?’ The usualtranslations give ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ here whereas the Greek gives ‘Jesusthe Nazorean’ or in a few ancient manuscripts, ‘Jesus the Nazarene.’ Our difficulty (as Alfred Loisy has pointed out) is that we cannot derive‘Nazorean’ from Nazareth linguistically. Might this name refer, then, toearly followers of the Baptist? Or was Jesus a member of a sect ofNazoreans who have left no other trace in history?

JESUS BEFORE THE SANHEDRIN

After his arrest, so the Markan story goes, Jesus is taken to theHigh Priest’s house where he is brought before the Sanhedrin that night,examined in a hasty trial and as hastily condemned. Witnesses aresought in course of this trial to testify against him but their testimonycannot be made to agree. A single piece of that false testimony is citedby Mark:

We heard him say, I will destroy this Temple that is made withhands and in three days build another, not made with hands.(Mark 14,58)

This distorted metaphor is almost a copy of Jesus’ words near thebeginning of John’s Gospel when he challenges the Jews saying, ‘Destroythis Temple and in three days I will raise it up.’ (2,19.) John would usethe words to replace the Sign of Jonah with something less embarrassing,but the saying is a piece of early tradition which arose afterwards whenthe Resurrection could be described in a metaphor referring to a Templedestroyed, as it was destroyed during the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD. This is the plain meaning of a rather homely forecast which theEvangelists would mostly ascribe to Jesus – except for Luke whoassociates it with the ‘first’ Christian martyr, Stephen, in Acts 6,14.

Thus the only false charge quoted by Mark is a piece of lateChristian testimony deliberately mangled, which makes his knowingreaders smile. Matthew follows Mark in repeating the ‘false accusation’but he will have it that on this point two witnesses agree because he ismindful of Mosaic Law which says, ‘No person shall be put to death onthe testimony of one witness.’ (Numbers 35.30.) The little correction is ascribal touch in this most Jewish of the Evangelists. Matthew’s source for

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this change is not a better knowledge of the fact but a better knowledge ofthe Jewish Law. The tradition invents itself as it goes along and makes aneat little correction.

Before his accusers (except in Luke) Jesus stands silent andmakes no defence. It is an impressive silence to which a prophecy mighthave borne its witness:

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not hismouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheepbefore her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.(Isaiah 53,7.)

Since Jesus will not condescend to reply to false accusation, the HighPriest puts the question directly: ‘Art thou the Christ, the Son of theBlessed?’ and he replies, ‘I am.’ It is a simple and direct avowal, theforce of which is stronger in the Greek (‘Ego eimi’) than in our ordinaryEnglish idiom. Liturgically, it is a supreme moment, but more importantlyfor us, it is the culmination of Mark’s Messianic secrecy theme, and that isits real meaning here. It is the climax of Jesus’ stand before the HighPriest when at long last, and for the first time publicly, he acknowledgeshimself to be the Christ. That is the one acknowledgement he has neveropenly made and has forbidden even the demons to testify in his behalf. Now he comes out with it before the High Priest of the old religion out ofwhich Christ himself has sprung. It is a moment to compare with Jesus’response at Peter’s Confession and a deliberate Markan double. Then hehad accepted Peter’s designation implicitly when charging his disciples‘to tell no one about him.’ Here the Messianic secret is cast aside. ‘I am,’he says in answer to the High Priest’s question. It is as much as to say, ‘Iam the Christ.’

Instead, however, he speaks of a time, evidently near at hand,when they will ‘see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power andcoming with the clouds of heaven.’ Is he really speaking of himself? Mightthis be embedded usage which has somehow survived in the traditions toshow us a Jesus who spoke of the Son of Man as someone else? Thatmight seem historical but in Mark, at least, the thing is plain. Nor doesthe High Priest miss the reference. He tears his mantle, ‘You have heardhis blasphemy! What is your decision?’ They condemn him to death. ‘And some began to spit on him, and to cover his face, and to strike him,saying to him, Prophesy! And the guards received him with blows.’ (Mark 14,65.)

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Matthew has taken something away from the effect of Jesus’open avowal as the sole ground of his condemnation, and he did it whenowing to his scruple about the Mosaic Law he made two witnesses agree. For this and other reasons in Matthew and Luke, I think these laterSynoptists don’t fully appreciate Mark’s wiser handling of the secrecytheme. They inherit it from Mark because of their copying, which issometimes rather passive, but now and again they miss his point. Remember, then, what the Messianic Secret signifies. Either we trace itback to Jesus (with Albert Schweitzer) or else we ascribe it to Mark (withWilliam Wrede) while finding in it, either way, impressive early evidenceof a period when Jesus was not thought of as Messiah and had not beenremembered that way.

Deep questions have been raised against this trial as describedbecause it goes against the Jewish practice to assemble the Sanhedrinlike this at night. (JM Robertson scoffs at the idea of fetching witnesses atnighttime). Moreover, it violates the Sanhedrin’s own laws to hold trialand pass a capital judgment all in one session. An overnight wait wasrequired before the death sentence could be passed according to thehistorian Guignebert, who is an authority on the customs of the Jews. Only a very extraordinary crisis could account for such extraordinarymeasures if these things ever happened as described. On the Negativeside, these tales might reveal the ignorance of Christ’s own disciples ofthe details of these events, especially as Jesus might have been examinedand his death determined behind closed doors.

VARIATIONS IN LUKE: first Jewish trialSome scholars believe that Mark’s tale of the Passion reflects an

older document which his Gospel has absorbed. If true, it would meanthat in the Passion tale we may be close to the events described. Only, inthis sense of the word we are referring to that portion of Mark whichfollows the Little Apocalypse.

It’s not surprising that the calamity of Jesus’ final days would bean earliest focus in the recollections of his followers, but is it true, then, asMartin Dibelius claims, that ‘the Passion story is narrated by all fourEvangelists with a striking agreement never attained elsewhere?’33 For wealready know that John’s Gospel presents a striking contrast to theSynoptics when closely compared. In fact, it is only large agreements

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that this Evangelist has aimed at in his recasting the myth, and it wouldbe just as fair to Professor Dibelius to say that despite manifestdiscrepancies between them in the Passion story, all Four Gospels can beused effectively during Lent and Holy Week, thanks to a largeconvergence between them in the impression they give of Jesus’ lastdays.

I have pointed out that Luke drops the one false accusationbrought against Jesus before the Sanhedrin to use it later on against themartyr Stephen, who is accused of saying that ‘Jesus the Nazorean’would destroy ‘this holy place.’ We should also notice that he puts offthis first trial until Good Friday morning, which leaves him nothing muchto say about Jesus’ confinement overnight except to tell that he wasmocked and struck and variously reviled by those who held him. Whywas he? Why this uncalled-for abuse following his mere arrest? Lukefails to give a reason for this treatment which in Matthew and Markcomes only after Jesus’ Messianic acknowledgements and, of course, inconsequence of that. Truth is, it was unnecessary to say anything at allabout Thursday night except that Luke is conscious of having displaced anighttime trial.

His morning session is not a new and different trial, a secondsession as which it might be defensible; the described interview at theheart of it is the same and its result is the same condemnation – minusthe beatings which have already occurred. We do notice, of course, thatJesus’ silence in face of false witness must disappear when the falsewitnesses are suppressed, yet Luke appreciates its dramatic value and itshigh importance in recalling prophecy. He reserves that silence for alater scene in which Christ is brought before Herod, the tetrarch ofGalilee. This Herod, the same who had arrested the Baptist, figures in noother account of the Passion, so that Jesus’ extraordinary appearancebefore him on this overcrowded Friday is one of which the otherEvangelists have nothing to say.

And it’s not the High Priest who particularly examines him herebut rather the whole Sanhedrin which comes at once to the question: ‘Ifyou are the Christ, tell us!’ Nor does Jesus reply in the affirmative, as inMatthew and Mark. Instead, he dares to scorn them: ‘If I tell you, youwill not believe; and if I ask you, you will not answer.’ (Luke 22,67.) Itisn’t their rudeness that he means to reprove by these words, althoughthat impression is commonly given by our modern translations except forthe priceless and literal RSV quoted here. Striving for realism, the

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modern translators would mostly bend this text toward seeming factwhen they make Jesus say (by inserting a word), ‘If I ask you questions,you will not reply.’ It is not a question of questions here, of give-and-takeor fairness. Only one question is before them and well does ourEvangelist know it: ‘Art thou the Christ?’ A sense of the impressiveness ofJesus’ presence enters in and the intimation is that these elders andpriests, even as they sit before him in judgment, wouldn’t or couldn’tanswer their own question. His words are meant as vindication, afterwhich he claims that ‘the Son of Man shall be seated at the right hand ofthe Power of God’ (Luke 22,69) and they all cry out together, ‘Are youthe Son of God, then?’

As in Matthew when answering, ‘You have said so,’ Jesus replies,‘You say that I am.’ They have not said so. They do not say that he is. These quaint answers are unsatisfactory and have puzzled even thetranslators, so it’s not a question here of Greek idiom but of a peculiarityor a deliberate enigma. The Jesus of our story (not the historical Jesus,of course) seems almost to mean that because they have pronounced themere words, Son of God, they have somehow affirmed the answerwithout intending it – and forgive me but there is a hint of smugness inthe primitive imagination which has conceived such a scene. In anycase, the gathered Sanhedrin (astoundingly) condemns the Son of God. They cry in one voice, ‘What further testimony do we need? We haveheard it ourselves from his own lips.’ And this concluding notice of‘further testimony’ is the one lingering trace of the banished witnesses inLuke’s revision. Now they rise up and take him to Pilate.

But one more thing remains to be said. We have not yet told ofPeter’s Denial in connection with all of this except for citing Jesus’eloquent prediction: ‘Before the cock crows twice, thou shalt deny methrice.’ In all four Gospels this famous denial interlocks somehow withJesus being dragged before the Jews, and in Luke’s version it comes justafter his being brought to the High Priest’s house. Peter has followedbehind and sits at a fire in the court yard where, first by one, then byanother he is recognized as ‘one of them,’ a Galilean and disciple ofJesus. Each time he denies it and the third time, even as he speaks, thecock crows! Whereupon Jesus (‘the Lord’) turns and looks at Peter,which brings everything to mind. Peter goes out and weeps bitterly.

Now this turning of Jesus at the very moment of Peter’s denial,or even the implication that Jesus and Peter were in sight of one another atthis time – these touches are Luke’s own invention. Directly afterward

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we read of Jesus’ being mocked and beaten by those who held him:‘Prophesy! Who is it that struck you?’ It is a touching moment andeffectively arranged. Had Jesus been taken before the Sanhedrin orgone indoors to face the High Priest, he could not have given the silentadmonishment of that timely look, but where is fact in these fictitiousalterations? And what shall we say of Luke’s attitude toward fact here? We know that he used Mark’s Gospel but he can’t have regarded Markas offering more than a possible version of what had occurred. Lukedares to give a different version and yet his own tale suffers from itsinconsistency, which suggests that he did not have a better source to goon. His tale is treated as a tale and rearranged to suit the story-teller’sliking.

VARIATIONS IN JOHN

In the Fourth Gospel Jesus is seized and bound before being ledaway to an old High Priest. The Synoptics do not mention these bondsnor this particular High Priest because first Jesus is taken to Annas ratherthan Caiaphas, whose name Matthew had introduced. It is an evidenceof the author’s greater assurance in his handling of contemporary factthat he should bring in a High Priest who had been removed from thatoffice years ago, to be followed by a series of Roman appointments. Caiaphas, then, who was High Priest that year, happened also to be hisson-in-law, and evidently Annas had retained a certain standing in theJewish system. Overall, it seems a point in favor of the Gospels thatcollectively they should manage to bring their myth – if this were only amyth – so definitely in connection to known history, and yet of course wehave also learned to prize this Fourth Evangelist’s verisimilitude.

Peter has followed Jesus after his arrest along with ‘anotherdisciple’ who being ‘known to the High Priest’ could enter his courtyard. We have already described the unnamed companion of Peter’s as thebeloved disciple. It is he who speaks to the maid at the door to let Peterinto the courtyard and set the scene for his three-fold denial. Implicitly,he is also the source for these informations.

Now then, a maid as a doorkeeper in such a tumult? She mustbe yielding to allow the beloved disciple his entry, I suppose, and sherecognizes Peter as a disciple. He denies it and goes over to warmhimself at a charcoal fire where he is recognized again and denies it asecond time in the same words: ‘I am not.’ Finally, a relative of the manwhose ear he had cut off asks if he had not seen him in the garden! He

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denies it a third time and the cock crows.

Elsewhere the High Priest’s questioning of Jesus, which is not tobe understood as taking place in sight of Peter, takes a very different turn. Nothing will be said of the Christ in this examination. It would be contraryto the open revelation which is made of Jesus in this Gospel to make hisself-disclosure now a basis for judgment. Nor has he opportunity tospeak of the Son of Man coming with the clouds of Heaven. That vividimagination belongs to a primitive idea of Judgment Day which John hasreplaced, as we noted once before, by having Jesus say:

‘Now is the Judgment of this world, now shall the Ruler of thisworld be cast out; and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, willdraw all men to myself.’ (John 12,31.)

It is too much to speak of a Jewish trial in John. There is no trial. Thereare no false witnesses: none are required. And the Sanhedrin is not to befound. Our Fourth Evangelist, again with greater skill, evades the wholedifficulty of the improbable gathering of the Sanhedrin at such a timebecause that august body had effectively condemned Jesus after theRaising of Lazarus. (John 11,49.) So Annas will question him now abouthis teaching and his disciples, and Jesus says in reply, ‘I have spokenopenly to the world...’ – words which might serve as a motto for the wayin which the farewell discourses and prayers are designed to involve us.

I have said nothing secretly. Why ask me? Ask those who haveheard me. They know what I said.

This is an insolent answer if we conceive of Jesus historically as a boundprisoner and a man in trouble, but the real audacity here is theEvangelist’s. We must not forget his cunning. John’s verisimilitude givesus no literary photography. He speaks to the mind and his focus is onJesus’ words replying to the High Priest but laying claim to the believer’sassent. One of the servants strikes him: ‘Is that how you answer the HighPriest?’ Jesus makes a short defense of his answer and is sent on toCaiaphas, still bound.

John has learned from his predecessors. We have in thehaughty reply a hint of Luke’s defiant Jesus when he says to theSanhedrin, ‘If I tell you, you will not believe me.’ That may have givenhim a clue. And we have in the shocking blow received – a blowdelivered by the hand, John says, and I suppose to the face – the sameeffective proof of a bodily presence which Mark achieves by his skillfuluse of Jesus’ touch or by his saying that Jesus’ own people went out to

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‘take charge of him.’ Psychologically, it is convincing, yet the sametechnique is available to any novelist. John’s impressiveness is that of astory well-told.

Nevertheless, he has nothing to tell of Jesus in the house ofCaiaphas from which, early in the morning, he is taken to the Romanpraetorium. John doesn’t openly contradict the Synoptic version of aJesus tried before Caiaphas in recasting his tale. Rather, he winsacceptance by a more subtle accommodation.

CHRIST BEFORE PILATE IOur Gospels are agreed that after the priests and elders had

done examining Jesus they handed him over to Pontius Pilate, and onceagain it is the Fourth Evangelist who surpasses the others in his story-telling here. He is the deepest mind of the four, but in fairness we mustask ourselves if the last of our Gospels to be written can bring us closer tothe scene? Rather has he preserved the history of these events in themanner of an artist’s mural. The inspiration behind our Gospels isunfathomable and seems to trace to Jesus, but the narrative rests on theEvangelist’s own conceptions and imaginations, inevitably.

We revert to the earliest and most rudimentary Gospel to getour bearings here. Mark’s account of a trial before Pilate is given in onlyhalf a dozen fundamental lines. When Jesus is brought to him earlyFriday morning he asks at once, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ andJesus replies, ‘Thou hast said.’ Or in a literal translation even moresimply: ‘You say.’ It is the only word exchanged between them, afterwhich the priests accuse Jesus ‘of many things.’ ‘Have you no answer tomake?’ Pilate asks. ‘See how many charges they bring against you.’ ButJesus makes no reply and Pilate is set to wondering about him, and thatis all.

No decision has been reached, no sentence passed. Instead, awavering indecision on Pilate’s part will appear in his dealings with thecrowd. The interview has struck its single spark. Can it surprise us onhistorical grounds that Mark has nothing more to tell? The disciples hadrun away. How could they know what had occurred?

It was necessary for Mark to shift his scene here, and yet hesuffers an abruption and his tale gets all mixed up. Any pretence of a trialof Jesus is simply dropped, but his tale is so rudimentary that most of it isleft to our imagination and its underlying chaos is masked by the tale ofBarabbas, to which we are now introduced. First we are told of Pilate’s

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annual pardon when he used to release ‘any one prisoner’ at thePassover feast. Barabbas was such a prisoner, a rebel ‘who hadcommitted murder in the insurrection.’ Now a crowd comes up – but letme quote the text:

And the crowd came up and began to ask Pilate to do as he waswont to do for them. And he answered them, ‘Do you want meto release for you the King of the Jews?’ (Mark 15,8.)

Mark has changed the subject but this is chaotic storytelling. We havejumped to Pilate’s sudden appearance before a crowd of petitionerswhich is allowed to disrupt a judicial proceeding, but what is this crowd? Are they supposed to be the crowd of Jesus’ accusers? Or have theyfollowed these accusers to learn the disposition of the case? Suddenlythey are pressing forward to demand an irrelevant favor – I mean,irrelevant to the case in hand. They have come out of nowhere torequest the annual pardon, and it is very strange that they should knowanything about a ‘King of the Jews,’ but interruption and all, they servePilate’s convenience. It was ‘out of envy’ that the chief priests haddelivered up Jesus and in the crowd’s importunity he sees a chance to lethim go. Instead, the crowd refuses. The priests have stirred them up toask for Barabbas instead, we know not how or when or why. For whywould these insinuating priests chance it with Pontius Pilate to seek therelease of a murderous insurrectionist? Yet Roman law and order willacquiesce in just that daring choice as Pilate turns over his unfinished trialto this importunate mob. With an entire lack of authority, of personalresource and self-respect, he asks them:

‘Then what shall I do with the man whom you call the King ofthe Jews?’ And they cried out again, ‘Crucify him.’ And Pilatesaid to them, ‘Why, what evil has he done?’ But they shouted allthe more, ‘Crucify him.’ (15,11.)

It is unreal. A Roman governor notorious for his cruelty now reasons invain with a clamoring mob to whom he yields a two-edged judgment. Not only will he crucify an innocent Jesus but further to appease them hewill release a rebel who is dangerous to the Roman authority. Howironic that the unreality of his behavior might yet attest the historicalreality of the basic event. The Evangelist cannot escape the tradition ofPilate’s condemnation, yet being mindful of persecution, he has no wish tooffend the Roman masters. Better that blame should be made to fall onthe Jews!

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The story is a dramatic fable as JM Robertson insists whenassigning it to ritual re-enactment and pageant or sacred drama. Theoutrageous contrast between an innocent Jesus and a Barabbas is justwhat the extreme quality of Jesus requires for its final emphasis. Altogether the contrast is too extreme – deliberately. It is a flash oflightning on the presence of Christ in the world: it is a wicked world. Ashistory our story is only melodrama, but as myth it is true.

CHRIST BEFORE PILATE: II.Matthew’s version of the trial scene is almost twice as long as

Mark’s, yet Pilate comes at once to his question, the same question; Jesusreplies, ‘Thou hast said’ (=‘You say’), the same answer. Then the manyaccusations and Pilate’s further question, Jesus remaining silent throughit all so that Pilate ‘wonders greatly.’

Before describing this interview, however, he tells of the patheticend of Judas Iscariot who after Jesus was ‘condemned’ repented andwent back to the Temple with his ‘thirty pieces of silver,’ the price of hisbetrayal. Although a trial hasn’t yet been shown, by taking its outcomefor granted Matthew gives a larger impression to his scene. Judasdeclares remorsefully, ‘I have sinned in betraying innocent blood,’ butthe priests and elders reply, ‘What is that to us?’ After refusing his returnof ‘blood money’ Judas flings it down and goes out to hang himself.

I must say something about prophecy as the Gospels conceive ofit here. In Zechariah 11 the prophet receives ‘thirty shekels of silver’ afterserving a symbolic term as the shepherd of a flock ‘doomed to be slain,’and on receiving his wage the Lord tells him to cast it into the treasury. ‘So I took the thirty shekels of silver and cast them into the treasury in thehouse of the Lord.’ So great is the Jewish regard for Scripture that itsmerest phrases have prophetic value. What matters for Matthew is onlythat Judas’s flinging the money down, and money in the same amount,chimes with Zechariah. No more than ourselves does he pretend thatZechariah’s action is a forecast of Judas’s action which might have beenunderstood beforehand by an interpreter. What matters is the merevibration of that iron string in the traitor’s legendary deed.

We thus witness the tragedy of Judas Iscariot before Jesus isbrought before Pilate, who then takes the initiative when asking thecrowd (and I give here a version found in ‘some ancient authorities’):

‘Whom do you want me to release for you? Jesus Barabbas orJesus who is called the Christ?’

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This tremendous and wonderful contrast gains all the more if we bear inmind JM Robertson’s point, that Bar-Abbas really means, ‘Son of theFather,’ which increases his suspicions of the fictitious nature of thescene.

And in a further amplification of the scene (all this without givingus one inch more than Mark could give of the supposed interview – theactual trial) Matthew adds the tale of Pilate’s wife who in the midst of allthis sent word to her husband saying, ‘Have nothing to do with thatrighteous man, for I have suffered much over him today in a dream.’ Matthew is a believer in dreams and this warning prepares for his master-stroke, unique to his Gospel, in which Pilate washes his hands of the affair. For when he sees that he cannot reason with the crowd

but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washedhis hands before the crowd saying, ‘I am innocent of this man’sblood; see to it yourselves.’ And all the people answered, ‘Hisblood be on us and on our children!’ (27,24.)

What a piece of devastating effectiveness – and of fiction! For the peoplehave wished a curse upon themselves, as the tale goes, and it is verystrange to find this in the most Jewish of our Gospels. We mustremember that these documents, so often redacted, are never altogetherthe work of one mind. This improbable curse points to a time later bymany decades than the scenes described when the conflicts betweenChristians and Jews had become acute. To make it clear, then, what thepresent author believes: the Jews did not reject a Jesus who was one oftheir own. Later on they rejected claims which were made about him as acrucified Messiah, a rejection which led to much bitterness.

Pilate’s famous gesture, according to Professor Guignebert, is acharacteristic Jewish gesture, and his words, according to the professor,fairly echo those of King David on learning of the assassination of Abner:‘I and my kingdom are forever guiltless before the Lord for the blood ofAbner... May it fall upon the head of Joab and upon all his father’shouse...’ (II Sam. 3,28) The professor’s conviction is that the episode isinvented and even half borrowed from a biblical prototype. We haveseen this sort of thing ourselves elsewhere, as when Mark has borrowedfrom a biblical prototype when telling of the man with the witheredhand.

CHRIST BEFORE PILATE III.Luke can tell us no more about the trial before Pilate than we

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already know from Matthew and Mark, but he does embroider andinvent to fill out the scene. First he quotes Jesus’ accusers who say, ‘Wefound this man perverting our nation, and forbidding us to give tribute toCaesar, and saying that he himself is Christ a King.’ Pilate’s questionarises from the accusation, as was implicit before, but it is the samequestion as before, exactly, and Jesus makes the same reply: ‘You say.’ Pilate reaches a decision quickly and tells the chief priests and themultitudes: ‘I find no crime in this man.’ But that only leads to a clamorabout Jesus’ ‘stirring up the people’ everywhere and as far away asGalilee, mention of which gives Pilate his out. For when he learns thatJesus is a Galilean, he sends him forthwith to Herod Antipas who is inJerusalem for the feast.

This is an unexpected turn in the Passion story and, among thecanonical four, unique to Luke’s Gospel. (It will turn up again in aspurious Gospel of Peter later on). Almost certainly, then, the thing is aLukan invention which makes of his Good Friday scheme an impossiblycrowded day. After all, this is the Evangelist who had postponed themeeting of the Sanhedrin until the morning hours. That comes first, andafter that business is done, Pilate must examine Jesus before sending himoff to Herod, wherever Herod may happen to be, there to interruptwhatever it is that Herod might be doing. Any one of these three eventsmight very well take up a morning and yet Luke will have Jesus alreadycrucified ‘about the sixth hour’ – around noon.

As the story goes, Herod is glad to see a man about whom he hasheard so many things. He would have liked to see a miracle (‘some signdone by him’) and pries him with many questions, but Jesus makes noanswer. The priests and scribes standing by accuse him vehemently butall in vain until Herod and his soldiers begin to make sport of him. Jesusis arrayed in gorgeous apparel and sent back to Pilate – a fourth event inLuke’s overcrowded Friday morning! The Roman magistrate must ‘calltogether the chief priests and the rulers and the people,’ and when theyreassemble he tells of his examination of the man, says frankly that he didnot find him guilty of any of their charges against him, informs them thatHerod likewise found in him ‘nothing deserving death’ and declares thathe will chastise Jesus and release him.

Out of nowhere, then, in response to this unexpected offer ofrelease comes the cry of the crowd: ‘Away with this man, and release tous Barabbas!’ But Luke has made no preparation for this outburst. Whois Barabbas? The Evangelist tacks on a passing explanation, but we have

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no idea what has stirred the crowd to such a peculiar choice. Wheredoes the idea of this choice come from? Up to now in the Lukannarrative we were dealing with Jesus. That such a peculiar demandwould occur to the crowd, or that a Barabbas yet unmentioned shouldbe released at all on grounds of Pilate’s willingness to release anotherman baffles the mind unless we assume a prior knowledge of ‘Barabbas’among his readers. It is an incoherency within his tale which theEvangelist has stumbled into by his drastic recasting of Mark wheninserting his own invention about Herod’s role in the trial of Christ.

This brings us to a fundamental point. For it clearly doesn’tmatter much to the church’s traditions that Luke has concocted animpossible tale. The appeal is to our protest against the wrongness ofsuch a condemnation. The appeal is immensely to the imagination. Thatwe are shown the wrongness of it all, over and over, is what counts. Piece by piece Luke’s tale is effective in making this appeal.

THE MAN OF SORROWS I.In Mark’s Gospel Pilate releases Barabbas to satisfy the crowd

and Jesus he hands over to be crucified, but first he will have himscourged. Twice, then, Jesus is beaten following a verdict ofcondemnation, and first when ‘the guards received him with blows.’ Now in connection with Pilate’s reluctant verdict he is scourged.

Quite what is meant by this scourging our skimpy records do nottell us – if these are records. Was scourging a technical procedurepreceding crucifixion? If so, it would have been administered withspecial whips and numbered strokes. Afterward the beaten and disabledvictim would be taken to his place of execution, probably in a cart. To bescourged is no light punishment. It would destroy all resistance andleave its victim limp. If something like this is meant by a supposedtradition that Mark is drawing on, his story veers off in another direction. For when he writes that ‘having scourged Jesus (Pilate) delivered him tobe crucified,’ he winds up the episode. We ought next to go to the sceneof crucifixion, but instead of that Mark inserts a tale of a very differentcharacter.

Now the soldiers lead Jesus ‘away inside the palace’ to make amockery of him and nothing more is said about the scourging. Do wepresuppose it? Do we imagine that after a lashing which must leave itsvictim enervated and strengthless, he could be borrowed for an hour ofbrutal sport during which all Roman discipline is cast aside as the soldiers

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become a mob? Mark in his extravagance will call together the wholebattalion to dress Jesus in a purple cloak, the color of royalty, in ironictoken of the accusation under which he is condemned. The soldiers plaita crown of thorns and thrust it on his head and spit on him and hail himas King of the Jews, even kneeling before him. Jesus is struck on thehead with a reed which in Matthew’s Gospel is first placed in his hand asa scepter, but where is any scourging here? It is another tale. After thismockery they strip away the purple robe ‘and put his own clothes onhim’ and lead him away to be crucified.

Does it greatly affect us, I would ask, this tale of the soldier’sabuse of the Christ? – the tale itself, I mean. For as a rule we are notmoved to pity and wonder on the strength of an anecdote and Mark’stale is very short. Yet undeniably there is something moving in thecontemplation of these scenes and a tenderness within which mourns thedeath of Christ. Why is that? It is not the anecdote which moves us butthe use which is made of it. Our virtuoso literary critic, JM Robertson, hasconsidered this deficiency in the various anecdotes of the Passionbecause for the most part they are much too sketchy to account for thegreat tide of Christian sentiment, and yet there that sentiment is and weshare in it, many of us. So for Robertson these sketchy tales fairly reduceto stage directions for the enactment of a play which would bring all ofthis to life (we mentioned this a while back). Of course, for our Negativecritic it is then possible to reduce the historical Passion to a mere play,but his insight is nonetheless keen: his feeling that the brevity does notexplain the sentiment and barely carries the tale. At the same time onehas to concede that in its very density and compression, the Gospel tale iseffectively told. Mark’s artistry is not to be underestimated and to callthese scenes mere stage directions goes a little too far.

Even given ancient pageant-like parades, in some of which thevery gods are lugged around on carts, it is enough that the liturgicalusage of the tale develops that enduring sentiment. That is where itsvalue lies. What is presupposed is a fellowship sharing in certain sacredintimacies and resting on its traditions, but a fellowship of mutualencouragements and remembrances which make these biblicalimaginations effective until at last, out of habit mostly, the mere anecdoteseems to account for it all.

We have not, of course, refuted Mr. Robertson in saying this andcertainly there is something of stage-craft in this mockery of a patheticking. There are reasons for saying so. The tale in Mark is not conceived

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as a history based on ascertained fact. It is conceived as a dramaticimagination based on traditions. In what wardrobe, after all, have thesesoldiers found a purple cloak? And from what convenient thorn-bushdid someone braid that crown of thorns? A dry reed is used for rod andscepter. Does Pilate keep dry reeds about the palace? There are reasonsfor doubting the fact behind the tale in the very accoutrements, reed,robe, and crown of thorns which so perfectly answer to the uniquecharge they mock and which is, of course, the ruling imagination here. Suddenly, it is all too appropriate and too convenient.

An incident is known to history, one such incident, in which acertain Karabas was dressed up as a mock king in the city of Alexandria. He was some sort of idiot paraded about to mock the visit of HerodAgrippa, a Jewish king whom we know from the Book of Acts. (Theevent is reported by Philo of Alexandria.) What does the mockery of avisiting king show us in this connection except that the public satire of aking, which we associate with ancient festival, was a widely known ideawhich could be borrowed for another use? As a conceivable source forour Gospel tale there is a temptation, to which Mr. Robertsonsuccumbed, to rest one’s case on the echo of a name: Karabas-Barabbas. More broadly, then, these ideas of satire could occur to the multitudeanywhere in its rioting and festival disorders. Even if a sitting king weretargeted this way he must do nothing to quell it. The sheergrotesqueness of it all deflects the revolutionary impulse.

We concede the possibility, then, that if Jesus had come to bethought of as a Messianic pretender (which is just what Pilate’s questionmeant) he would inevitably have that role in the impending Kingdom ofGod and he might very well in his humiliation and failure been mockedas a King.

THE MAN OF SORROWS II.Jesus is nowhere called the Man of Sorrows in our Gospels

although details associated with that old prophetic idea have beenborrowed for the Passion of Christ. It is a fact which counts heavily forthe Negative argument.

In Isaiah 53 (where the Man of Sorrows appears only this once inthe Bible) he belongs already to the past as well as to the future. Alreadyhe has ‘borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.’ ‘He was oppressed,’the prophet writes, ‘and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth.’ But who is he? The poet writes as if everybody distantly knows of him, or

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ought to know of him, yet he remains nameless. The event of his life isover and done: ‘he was cut off out of the land of the living... and theymade his grave with the wicked, and with a rich man in his death.’ Where? When? Later on, Jesus is seen to be prefigured here.

Belief in Christ involves belief in prophecy. Remember howJonah has prefigured the death and Resurrection of Christ in Matthew’sGospel. Evidently, something similar happens here and yet there is adifference. Jonah’s being swallowed up and then cast forth may wellprefigure the supernatural career of Christ, but Jesus cannot be Jonah(the thought is absurd). Whereas in course of time he becomes the Manof Sorrows. He borrows his features and undergoes a similar rejection,receives a similar contempt ‘although he had done no violence, andthere was no deceit in his mouth.’ Christians often see only theprefigured Christ in the chapter of Isaiah in which the Man of Sorrows, orin strict translation the Man of Pains appears but this is to overlook thedark (if also fictitious) individuality of the Man of Pains.

Not Isaiah but an unknown poet of the Babylonian Captivity isthe author of portions of the Book of Isaiah beginning with chapter 40. Itis this unknown poet who is the author of Isaiah 53. We know nothing ofhis life or doings. We call him a prophet by virtue of his poetry whichwas attached to the Isaiah scroll. Isaiah had foreseen a doom for hispeople except for a remnant who should survive, and this unknown poetwrites from within that catastrophe. His poems describe a SufferingServant. A people despoiled and captive, Israel languished in Babylonwhither the ‘cream of the crop’ had been deported. It is impressive tosee what courage and faith this poet could summon when composing histender encouragements and his lofty prophecies.

The Man of Pains, then, is conceived to represent Israel in itssuffering and near extinction. For the Servant is Israel itself, and yet (forthis is poetry) the Man of Pains redeems Israel: he is, insofar, a beingapart. It is to his own people that the poet is speaking when he writes:

Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted.But he was wounded for our transgressions,He was bruised for our iniquities,The chastisement of our peace was upon him;And with his stripes we are healed.

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The representative quality of this Man of Pains is that of an imaginedperson: he asks to be realized. And we remind ourselves that this is theview of his vorchristliche Jesus taken by William Benjamin Smith, whotook the Son of Man to mean Israel symbolically.

There are features in the sufferings of the Man of Pains, and morethan features, values which have been transferred to Jesus. If the Man ofPains is symbolic, can Jesus then be real? Certainly, his own story hasbeen shaped in retrospect upon this solemn chapter, and this much wemay concede to Professor Arthur Drews who wants to rest a corner ofthe Negative argument on it. Jesus did not have to exist to give us thefigure of our Gospels (the argument goes) because Isaiah had alreadyinvented him.

It is the fourth of the so-called Servant Poems from which theverses quoted above are taken. (Isaiah 53,4.) The bearing of this on themeaning of Jesus’ crucifixion, which these words call to mind, seemsalmost uncanny to those of us who were brought up in the Christiandoctrine, but that is largely a matter of habit, and this same unnoticedhabit may well have been at work in Professor Arthur Drews. For whenDrews suggests that practically the whole of sacrificial Christianity couldhave been drawn from these later chapters of Isaiah, he simply invertsthe Christian belief in prophecy. And his habit, I mean to say, assureshim of the essential identity of the two things. In fact, Isaiah 53 whencarefully read is no sort of program for the life or teachings of Jesus butinstead a vital source for Christian doctrine.

Is it possible to do what Drews has done when discrediting thelife of Jesus as a fact of history? Unquestionably, there are elements ofderivation here when the suffering Christ is described in terms borrowedfrom the Man of Pains. Yet a deep distinction is asking to be made herewhich Drews has failed to make. It is the difference between derivationand appropriation. Strictly speaking, the hypothesis of derivation doesnot require an intervening history. The poem suffices of itself and Jesus isits illustration: just copy him down! As such a copy he lacks anysubstance derived from the spirituality and faith of Israel during theintervening centuries. Although taken from a historical poem, he lacksthe dimension of history as Jesus does not.

During that same span of centuries when the Servant poemsbecame a part of the religious heritage of Israel, another influenceappeared, as we have seen, in Daniel’s myth of the Heavenly Man, or inhis actual designation, ‘one like a Son of Man’ (who appeared before the

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Ancient of Days). These are two quite different imaginations. Ofthemselves considered as imaginations they do not and cannot consort. No more can Keats’s vision of the rustic goddess Autumn in his odeconsort with Shelley’s Spirit of Night, who is also a goddess. Keats bringshis goddess to mind like a long-haired American girl without makeup andwearing a long dress:

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may findThee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep, Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers...

Shelley’s poem is an invocation of his goddess, declamatory, visionary:

Swiftly walk o’er the western wave,Spirit of Night!

Out of the misty eastern cave,Where all the long and lone daylight,Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,Which make thee terrible and dear, –

Swift be thy flight!

Different imaginations of different minds do not combine. Keats’sbeautiful Autumn (the beauty in our own minds, chiefly) doesn’t dwell ina misty eastern cave or weave dreams of joy and fear. Shelley’s goddess(‘Wrap thy form in a mantle gray, Star-inwrought’) could never be foundin the sweet timelessness of deep autumn:

...sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keepSteady thy laden head across a brook;Or by a cider-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

How does a paper Jesus derived from the Man of Pains, a figure whoactually dies, combine with Daniel’s immortal Heavenly Man? On whatpossible grounds can such a mismatch occur in the mere imagination? What could bridge them? For unlike the Heavenly Man who in comingbefore the Ancient of Days belongs to the heavenly sphere and isimmortal, the Man of Pains has suffered a human past. His promise isonly that ‘he shall see the fruit of the travail of his soul and be satisfied’

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because the Lord ‘will divide him a portion with the great.’ There aregiant incompatibilities here if we regard these mere imaginings.

But on a theory of appropriation we have a Third Something, aJesus whose substance as a man of history, a doer, a prophet, a teacher,a martyr embraces these mere possibilities in all the complexity of namedplaces and persons known to history and definite times: of Galilee, theBaptist, Jerusalem, Passover, Pontius Pilate. For the appropriation ofDaniel’s vision we have Jesus’ warnings of the Son of Man to come andfor Isaiah 53 his crucifixion under Pontius Pilate, which brings the solemnverses to the minds of his disciples. Appropriation integrates thesedisparities in a person having his own qualities. Not to say that in Jesusthese disparities cease to exist. They do not. It is the human density ofhis public career which can bring (or his disciples bring) theseincompatibles together. It is the result of the disciples’ faith that Jesuscan be described as the Servant who was ‘wounded for ourtransgressions’ and then presented as the Son of Man who will come inthe clouds. But were even these statements mere empty imaginations ontheir part, lacking an integrating central figure, nothing could hold themtogether. One would have a sense of their emptiness.

Arthur Drews is not entirely wrong. Detail taken from Isaiah 53has undoubtedly shaped the invention, as it also interprets, the accountsof the Passion of Christ. Yet compared with a hypothesis of derivationwhich makes a paper copy of Jesus, the appropriation of many Scripturesto a man who is seen as fulfilling them is the larger historical idea.

CHRIST BEFORE PILATE IN JOHN

According to the Fourth Gospel Jesus is taken first to the oldHigh Priest Annas. Then he is led bound to Caiaphas’ house wherenothing happens that we are told of, and in the morning he is taken toPilate. It was after the Raising of Lazarus and in Jesus’ absence that theSanhedrin had earlier condemned him. Any notion of a Jewish trial hereis only the echo in our minds of the Synoptic tradition.

But John will magnify the interview with Pilate when Jesus istaken to the praetorium. It is early in the morning on the day ofPreparation for the Passover, and the Jews will not defile themselves byentering in, so that Pilate has to come out to them. This is a realisticdetail which may reflect only the Evangelist’s artful storytelling. Theappearance before Pilate is John’s own opportunity for the dramaticpresentation of his Christ, and I mean of course his presentation to the

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world. Who else in all these Gospels can warrant the public fact of Jesusbetter than the Procurator of Judea, the procurer of taxes, the Romangovernor himself? It is he as I have said before who is remembered inthe Creed.

Pilate is reluctant to take on this prisoner and treats it as a matterof small importance but the Jews prevail, and when he summons Jesusin the praetorium he asks, ‘Are you the King of the Jews?’ A dialogueensues – a rare thing in the Gospels – during which Jesus’ initial non-answer verges once again on insolence (he is fearless before authority). This brings from Pilate a flash of scornful anger and it is then that Jesussays, ‘My Kingdom is not of this world.’ The famous declaration recastshis early Synoptic preaching when he had warned of a Kingdom at hand,yet a curious deference to the Synoptic tradition is visible here. For as inMark and the others where Jesus had replied, ‘You say,’ to Pilate’squestion, here when the Roman asks again: ‘So you are a king?’ Jesusreplies, ‘You say that I am a king.’ Which he does not. Then Jesus says,‘For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bearwitness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.’

As for Pilate’s famous reply, I quote the opening of one of FrancisBacon’s Essays: ‘What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and did not stay for ananswer.’ Bacon calls him jesting. We might rather call him nowadayscynical. But Pilate has already determined that Jesus is no criminaldespite his lofty manner, and he goes forth to ask the crowd if they willnot have him release this ‘King of the Jews’ according to their custom,and they cry for Barabbas instead. It is all very brief. We saw in Markhow the impression of a trial was shifted to the business of Barabbas andthe crowd, so little did the earliest Evangelist know of any interview withPilate, but here Barabbas is reduced to a passing mention because Johnknows how to invent: he knows how to develop the scene.

So Pilate has Jesus scourged now. It is an adroit timing. In Lukehe had merely offered to have him scourged and released whereas Johnmakes something of it. See the issue here as bearing on his purposebecause for John it is a question how best to present this Christ. After thescourging, when Pilate brings him forth to show his belief in Christ’sinnocence, we are being diverted by a story-teller’s devices. For theauthor’s deep purpose is not to show the Roman’s belief in his innocenceby exhibiting a beaten man: it is to show Jesus at all as a humiliated anddegraded King.

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From beginning to end this Fourth Evangelist aims to bring Jesushome to us with an unsurpassable intimacy and force of sentiment, hencealso this Gospel’s frequent appeals for our belief. The Christ in John is tobe made audible and visible and solid enough to be struck by the HighPriest’s attendant, yet he is also a brother to the believers, a friend to hisfriends, an ever-living Jesus who is to become a deep inner presence. That is John’s aim and achievement in a Christian world which verylargely accepts him. Is it a wonder that this Gospel is immortal despite itsflaws and its hatred of the Jews? For if we judge it apart from this hatred(if we can) it remains a supreme religious creation. Nor can it be judgedmerely as literal because it transcends the literal. That’s why in antiquityit was called pneumatikos: the Spiritual Gospel.

THE MAN OF SORROWS IN THE FOURTH GOSPEL

Jesus has been scourged and mocked. He is dressed in a purplerobe. A crown of thorns has been placed upon his head. Now Pilatepresents him to the crowd. How shall we think of this sorrowfulpresentation? It is missing from the earlier Gospels. Is it not, then, asupreme conception which only this Evangelist has arrived at? It wasoriginally Mark who had substituted the mockery of Christ and his crownof thorns for a scourging, but done out of sight of the crowd. It was Lukewho brought Jesus into the presence of a king, Herod Antipas, to bemocked and then arrayed in gorgeous apparel. John combines andmodifies these ideas. Ignoring Herod altogether he brings the chastisedand humiliated Christ into Pilate’s very presence in order to present himto the crowd.

So we notice here once more a development of the myth withinour very Gospels. The earliest of our Evangelists has presented thehumiliation of Christ effectively to the reader. Although the FourthEvangelist cannot do more than that, yet in his richer conception heseems to do more by presenting the Man of Sorrows publicly to theworld: Ecce homo! It is an inspiration. John has focused his sighting ofthe reality of the man on that image, which he presents with a three-foldBehold! His technique is worth a careful look.

Pilate announces to the crowd, ‘Behold, I bring him forth to you,that ye may know that I find no fault in him.’ (The New English Bibledoes this nicely: ‘Here he is, I am bringing him out...’) We have in this thepresence of the Man of Sorrows as one dressed in the tatters of divinity.

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Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns and thepurple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, Behold, the man!

Now logically it makes no sense for Pilate to have said (RSV) ‘Behold, Iam bringing him out to you that you may know that I find no crime in him.’ How does a presentation of the chastised Christ show that? Can such apublic exhibition demonstrate Pilate’s belief in his innocence? But theEvangelist is counting on the presumption of innocence here. He knowsbeforehand that his reader accepts this and, ever the master of histechnique, goes on to repeat the thing he means to emphasize: ‘Here isthe man!’ – as the famous presentation may be given in a moderntranslation which gives the force of the Greek.

There is no dwelling on the pathos of it. On sight of Jesus the crygoes up, Crucify! crucify!, and when Pilate resists this he is told by anargumentative crowd that Jesus deserves to die ‘because he has madehimself the Son of God.’ Historically, this is inconceivable: it belongsentirely to John’s self-glorifying and self-revealing Messiah. And theRoman is made even more ‘afraid’ by this charge. Such implausibles thereader accepts as a believer, but John’s technique of verisimilitude doesnot otherwise desert him. The upshot is yet another interview with Jesusin which he makes no answer to the question, ‘Where are you from?’ When Pilate comes forth yet a third time to appeal to the crowd he hasJesus brought out, takes his place on the seat of judgment as if toannounce a final decision and says, ‘Behold, your King!’ He is met withan uproar, a cry for crucifixion – but the uproar does not here concernus. We have focused on the way in which this Evangelist has achievedsuch a result in his Man of Sorrows. Convinced of his humanity andbelieving him to be the Messiah, he has used those earlier Gospels withimagination (and possibly, too, the devices of ancient cults) to give hisreaders the impression of that reality, not just as one receding into thepast but as a Presence.

There is another way of handling the translation here which wasdone by James Moffatt a hundred years ago. A Scottish Presbyterianscholar, Moffatt was followed in this innovation (largely) by America’sGoodspeed and I quote from the latter:

And Pilate went out again and said to the Jews, ‘See! I will bringhim out to you, to show you that I can find nothing to charge himwith.’So Jesus came out, still wearing the wreath of thorns and thepurple coat. And Pilate said to them, ‘Here is the man!’

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And then presently, after all else fails following that second interview:

He brought Jesus out and had him sit in the judge’s seat in theplace they call the Stone Platform, or in Hebrew, Gabbatha. Itwas the day of Preparation for the Passover, and it was aboutnoon. And Pilate said to the Jews, ‘There is your King!’

Tremendous, and yet laden with a deliberate religious overtone.

It is curious that the Greek would allow either translation here sothat whether it was Pilate who sat on the judgment seat or Jesus whowas made to sit there depends on the sequence of verbs (‘he broughtout... he sat’). There is no ‘he’ in the Greek: ‘he-sat’ is all one word andthe ‘he’ indicated by a change in the form of the verb.

The force of the passage is wonderfully brought out byGoodspeed’s rendering: See!... Here is the man!... There is your King! It isJohn’s achievement to have secured an emphatic presence but itremains an inspiration rather than in strictness a historical report. Hisadding the Hebrew word Gabbatha as the place of the judgment seat is afine touch. It is a word become solemn and even ominous in the Lentenservices of liturgical churches.

THE CRUCIFIXION I.In our earliest Gospel when Jesus is taken out to be crucified a

passer-by, a man fresh from the country, one Simon of Cyrene, is laidunder service and made to carry his cross. It is strange that we shouldhappen to know his name, but even his sons are assumed to be known toMark’s readers or at least to a few of them, and he mentions in passingAlexander and Rufus. Beyond this – ‘Greet Rufus, elect in the kyrios,’Paul writes in his Epistle to the Romans. Are we so close to the facts,then?

Subsequently, these men all disappear. Of Simon we know everso briefly his own name, his place of origin, the names of two sons andthe place, Golgotha, to which he must carry the cross. And that is all weever know of him or of Alexander and Rufus except for our supposingthat they became Christian after Simon’s service to Jesus. Otherwise, themention of Simon’s sons is too naive, for why should we care to be toldwho they were when our focus is on Jesus’ crucifixion?

This sort of diversionary aside is an old storyteller’s device, as isthe seeming naivete and piling up of names. Liars, too, are masters ofthese devices. It is only the transient impression that Mark has cared for.

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He has meant to connect us closer to the scene by inventing a legend ofhis own.

Once at Golgotha, we find nothing in the first half dozen lines tosuggest a point of view. There is no suggestion here of witness. It is all atfirst impersonal fact and offered as a kind of common knowledge. Thestory is sparely told, the bare essentials are given. We must certainlyadmire in these few lines (from Mark 15) the Evangelist’s restraint or thatof his tradition. The crucifixion is not described: the bare fact is asserted. We find no trace of an endeavor to arouse emotion or to go beyond thefacts reported:

And they bring him unto the place Golgotha, which is, beinginterpreted, The place of a skull. And they offered him winemingled with myrrh: but he received it not. And they crucifyhim, and part his garments among them, casting lots upon them,what each should take. And it was the third hour, and theycrucified him. And the superscription of his accusation waswritten over, THE KING OF THE JEWS. And with him they crucifytwo robbers; one on his right hand, and one on his left. (RV.)

The quality of fact here is suddenly very different. Instead of a single factwhich wanders off into irrelevant detail we have a rudimentary whole;instead of transient fact, the enduring record. These few brief lines standalone in their completeness. Had we nothing else to go on, they give astatement of the whole event. There is no description here to speak of. It is what the facts convey that stirs our imagination. Yet even this mostprimitive account shows certain borrowings from Scripture. There isevidence of derivation in some of these details:

I looked for pity, but there was none;And for comforters, but I found none...And for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink. (Psalm 65,21)

They divided my garments among them,And for my raiment they cast lots. (Psalm 22,18)

So there are echoes of the prophets and the Psalms in what the Gospelstell of Jesus’ death. Moreover, we find borrowings from the latertraditions which have been read back into the remembered event ofwhich possibly only the bare fact of it was known. It is borrowings of thisChristian matter which blended with prophecy furnish the mockery ofthose who pass by: ‘Aha!’ say the scorners as they wag their heads, ‘You

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who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourselfand come down from the cross.’

No less artificial is the derision offered by the chief priests andscribes. To think of it, chief priests and scribes taunting Jesus at thecross! It is a Gothic imagination. They say, ‘He saved others; himself hecannot save. Let Christ the King of Israel descend now from the cross,that we may see and believe.’ Even the robbers who are crucified withJesus join in the common abuse: it means that they were disappointed atthe limits of this Savior’s help. It is the same disappointment that aChristian must learn to accept.

After the mockery of Jesus, we come to a third brief section ofMark’s report. It stands equally with the first as something primitive andfundamental. It stands also very deeply within the myth. To my mindthe crucifixion of Jesus as presented fact speaks from within the verymyth – which may reflect only a long immersion in the Lenten liturgy, Isuppose.

Mark says: ‘When the sixth hour had come, there was darknessover the whole earth until the ninth hour.’ Goodspeed translates: ‘Atnoon darkness spread over the whole country and lasted until 3:00o’clock in the afternoon.’ It is tremendous and it is myth, but the Gospelsdo not argue the case: they state. To look behind the legend for aneclipse of the sun is simply wrong-headed, whereas the astrologicalhypothesis of Charles François Dupuis and Count Volney, quaint thoughit be, is much to the point. In his dying agony the Christ recalls thewasting sun before its seasonal renewal, as in his Resurrection he rises onthe Day of the Sun. In this respect has Christ replaced the sun myth byappropriation, the more advanced myth swallowing up the earlier until itdisappears. It is absurd to deny that frank myth has been an aspect ofthe Gospel’s appeal.

At the ninth hour Jesus cries with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lamasabachthani?’ Before this he has said nothing as the crucified, nor has hebeen shown in an action except for refusing the ‘wine mingled withmyrrh.’ More attention has been paid to what happened to his garmentsthan to him, but now he cries out just before dying, ‘My God, my God,why hast thou forsaken me?’

As we know, these are the opening words of the twenty-secondPsalm except that Mark has given them in Jesus’ native Aramaic ratherthan in Hebrew which would have given the form, ‘Eli, Eli, lama

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azavtani.’ On hearing this cry some of the by-standers say, ‘He is callingfor Elijah!’ Others rush to give him vinegar in a soaking sponge which islifted to his lips on a reed while some of the first say, ‘Wait! Let us seewhether Elijah will come to take him down.’ This uncanny juxtapositionof trifling misunderstandings and busyness following the cry of a supremedesolation is almost beyond invention. It is as real as truth and as true asShakespeare, but yet it might have been imagined as far as the argumentgoes, although to suppose that Jesus would not have cried out in thosedesolate words simply because they were written in a psalm pushes theNegative very hard.

After the offered vinegar Jesus cries out with a loud voice anddies. At that moment the curtain of the temple is torn from top tobottom. It was that which had separated off the Holy of Holies intowhich none dared enter save the High Priest, and he but seldom. Acenturion standing by is made to say at Jesus’ expiration, ‘Truly, this manwas a son of God!’ Like the mockery of those passing-by, this is areflection of Christian testimony.

Such is the tale which our earliest Gospel has given. Theperspective is Christian throughout. Behind it all there may have been acommon knowledge about a public event, but we are not as close to thatevent as our story would pretend. It should also be borne in mind thatthis sparely-told story could never have created the great internal fact ofChrist which has arisen within us (if it has) thanks to our sincereparticipation in liturgy and public worship. We may affirm withconfidence that Jesus died by crucifixion ‘under Pontius Pilate,’ while asfor the invented detail or the mythical setting, these are the terms whichconvey to us what the death of Christ has signified for the faithful.

THE CRUCIFIXION II.Matthew follows Mark very closely in his account, tells how

Simon of Cyrene was made to carry the cross, and how when they cameto Golgotha Jesus refused the ‘wine mingled with gall’ after tasting it,how the cross was posted with its ‘King of the Jews’, how the passers-by‘wagging their heads’ reviled him and challenged him to come downfrom the cross, and how the two crucified robbers also reviled him. It ismostly a copy but Matthew is not entirely passive. He tells that thesoldiers, after dividing his garments, ‘sat down and kept watch over himthere’ – and in a double of his own, he will post this same armed guardover Jesus’ tomb. To the mockery of the by-standers he contributes anaccusation that Jesus said, ‘I am the Son of God.’ Mark’s naivete in

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naming Simon’s sons he avoids, and he doesn’t write partly in thepresent tense. The moment of crucifixion he passes over entirely, writinginstead, ‘When they had crucified him.’ As in Mark he tells of a darknesswhich covered the land for the last three hours, and he saves the cry ofdesolation on the cross, being the only other Evangelist to record that.

After Jesus dies and the veil of the Temple is rent he adds to themyth of the darkened earth an earthquake. Rocks were rent, tombswere opened:

And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised,and coming out of the tombs after his Resurrection they wentinto the holy city and appeared to many. (Matthew 27,52.)

It is fantastic and yet, if we were reading fiction, this same imaginationmight please us as an omen of the meaning of the death of Christ. Thereis an inconsistency in the story inasmuch as the awakened dead must liein their opened tombs (or ‘memorials’) until Jesus has risen on Eastermorning, and this suggests that Matthew strained to fit the story in. OurEvangelist is not a thinker but a man of imagination and faith. Thatwhich belongs to the End Time has here ruptured the envelope of historyfor an ominous Sign.

Luke knows nothing of Matthew’s earthquake and the risensaints, but his embellishments are more extensive and more sentimental. Simon of Cyrene must bear the cross but on his way to the ‘Place of theSkull’ whose Hebrew name this Evangelist omits Jesus turns to speak tothe women bewailing him:

Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep foryourselves, and for your children. For behold, the days arecoming in which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and thewombs that never bare, and the breasts that never gave suck. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us, and tothe hills, Cover us. For if they do these things in the green tree,what shall be done in the dry? (Luke 23,28. RV.)

Tremendous words and very frightening if taken seriously, but theybelong to Luke’s own inspiration or to an unknown Christian prophetwhose document he has at hand. The weeping for Jerusalem isprophetic: its historic destruction is implied. Jesus’ addressing the‘daughters of Jerusalem’ recalls a women’s custom of bewailing thesorrowful fate of Jephtha’s daughter, who was slain for a foolish father’svow. To prophesy a blessing on the barren womb reverses the common

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sentiment ironically and to great effect, and the cry to the mountains andthe hills (Fall on us! Cover us!) is taken from the prophet Hosea. Thewords about the green tree and the dry are expressed with a lapidaryoriginality and nicely placed here, yet even this contrast is foreshadowedin an oracle of Ezekiel’s.

Luke has altered the mood of the crucifixion. The soldiers castlots for his garments, the by-standers mock and the soldiers also, Lukeinventively adds, when they offer the vinegar. We have the raillery ofone of the criminals who is here made to say: ‘Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!’ This is raillery? or is it not rather a prayer that isuttered in vain. The other malefactor rebukes him to say, ‘This man hasdone nothing wrong’ and he asks Jesus to remember him when hecomes in his Kingdom and Jesus replies, ‘Today shalt thou be with me inParadise.’ Luke’s device of having the malefactors speak draws fromJesus one of the Seven Last Words, of which only one, the cry ofdesolation, was given in Mark and Matthew.

Ironically, the Penitent Thief has not voiced the Christian faithmore truly than the malefactor whose desperation is rebuked. Railleryand rebuke are set equally in Christian terms, but with a differencebetween them which the Evangelist’s tale is designed to bring out. Thefirst of these malefactors implores the Christ to save him then and there,or as our preachers say, ‘on earth.’ The second asks for the possible:‘Remember me when thou comest in thy Kingdom!’ Jesus’ words inreply are in contrast to his earlier warning of a Kingdom of God at hand,a message never given quite urgently by Luke who has already mutedthe old eschatology: in John’s Gospel it will be barely a memory.

Nor does Luke preserve the desolation of the cross. Jesus’ starkcry is barely hinted of when he cries out with a ‘loud voice’ to pray,‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,’ before breathing his last. Anew and gentler inspiration has found expression in Luke, whose Gospelis prized in part for that reason. Not history but hagiography is what wehave here: it is what Luke had also before him when looking over hisvarious sources, including of course the Gospel of Mark.

THE CRUCIFIXION III.Luke has achieved a certain poignancy in the crucifixion scene

and John has Luke before him, but the Fourth Evangelist is rarelypoignant even where he is tender. It would violate his aim to attach usto his Jesus by a bond of sympathy. Symbolically, I may add in this

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connection – for it just this moment has occurred to me – it is interestingthat when the Fourth Evangelist tells us, and he alone, that Jesus waspierced by a spear, this thrust comes only after he is dead.

Now in this final and revised account when Jesus is led out toGolgotha he carries the cross by himself: John says so expressly. Oncearrived:

And they crucified him and with him others two on this side andthat side and Jesus in the middle. (John 19,18 in literaltranslation.)

We know nothing of what these others may have done nor have theyany further role to play. In five or six lines John has brought us toGolgotha and crucifixion with only the image of Jesus bearing his cross. At once the Evangelist turns his attention to the wrangling of Pilate andthe Jews over the placard on the cross which Pilate has caused to bewritten in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. It reads:

Jesus the Nazoraios, the King of the Jews. (John 19,19.)

In these words we are brought to a reflection of sorts after havingstepped back from the immediate scene, a reflection of the Christianidea. But is Pilate at Golgotha? Not at all. The Jews have read thisplacard at the scene: that merely tells us what it says. John is describingthe complaint of the Jewish priests, no doubt earlier made, at his callingJesus King of the Jews, to which Pontius Pilate has replied, ‘What I havewritten, I have written.’ These words are famous because of all theygather from their setting. It is a sort of prophecy, an involuntaryproclamation to the world that Christ is King. Pilate’s utterance is akin tothat of Caiaphas in the Sanhedrin (John 11,51) when he rebuked theircollective uncertainty: it was better for them, he said, that one manshould die for the people than that a whole nation should perish. TheEvangelist will show how even the enemies of Christ step unwittinglyalong the path which God has marked out for them. It is a reminder tous that the entire scene involving Pontius Pilate is a fiction, but bydragging his name into the crucifixion story John has achieved a sense ofcontinuity and unity beyond that of the Synoptic tradition.

After this initial wrangling, which replaces any mockery of Jesusat the cross, we are brought back to the crucifixion. At once ourattention is turned to the soldiers’ gambling for Jesus’ garments, one ofwhich is a ‘seamless robe’ (or tunic). The prophetic psalm of which thisact is a fulfillment John quotes: it is Psalm 22 which opens with the cry of

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desolation – which he does not quote. Like Luke, the Fourth Evangelistsuppresses the desolation of the scene, but he is brave enough to quotethe prophetic psalm.

At long last, then, after the division of the garments, we shall bebrought into the presence of the crucified: we are finally ‘there.’ But thescene is surely imaginary and late. John spurns to have his crucified Kingdiscoursing with a Penitent Thief. Instead – and no half measures here! –he brings the mother of Jesus to the foot of the cross to receive a finalword from him. We have remarked before that she is nowhere namedin this Gospel, but her sister, ‘Mary, the wife of Clopas,’ is named: she isthere also with Mary Magdalene, and standing nearby, ‘the disciplewhom he loved.’ This sudden flocking of persons around a saint or heroin his crucial hours is a legendary motif. We find examples of this in theworld’s paintings. But the only hint of any such gathering in the Synoptictradition is Mark’s mentioning that Mary Magdalene and another Mary(‘the mother of James and Joses’) were among the Galilean women whohad watched these things from afar.

This sudden assemblage at the cross, then, is John’s owninvention. Strange to say – I don’t go into this – two of the women presentare named Mary besides the mother of Jesus who isn’t named at all. HasJohn a reason, then, for his refusal to name the mother of Jesus? Andwhy this blurring of a focus on the name of Mary? A puzzle of some sorthangs on this but I cannot resolve it.

Jesus, then, seeing his mother near the beloved disciple, says toher, ‘Woman, behold your son!’ And then to the disciple: ‘Behold yourmother!’ The woman does not question; the disciple does not ask. Weare far from any consideration of Jesus’ agony in these serenecommands, ‘and from that hour the disciple took her to his own home.’ What does it signify? This is no mere sidelight on Jesus’ thoughtfulness asa son; there is too much in the Gospel against that, but John is anEvangelist for whom events themselves may be symbols (remember theWedding at Cana). She, therefore, whom Jesus will not even address asmother (she is ‘woman’) is symbolic, not of course because she didn’t livebut because of all that she is made to carry. The unnamed disciplewhom Jesus loved is to acknowledge his mother; and she in turn, whowas formed heart and soul by the Old Religion, must accept her new-found son. This transaction is no reflection of an anti-Jewish hatred. TheOld Religion is superseded in the sacrifice of the Lamb of God (as theEvangelist believes) but it cannot be forgotten or neglected. The imagery

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of his faith is drawn from the ancestral religion whose very propheciesare fulfilled in the event which he would present to us.

Thus the Christ of the Fourth Gospel is not to be portrayed as thehapless victim of a human crime. His is a voluntary sacrifice, as we havesaid before:

For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my lifethat I may take it again.

Then further, once more:

And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men untomyself.

These are grandiose words. They stand entirely alone among theEvangelists as an interpretation of the crucifixion, and they introduce asublimity, or say simply, a mood which is foreign to the coarser realism ofMark and far superior to Luke’s sentimental touches. Religiously, theyhave proved to be triumphant. John has thrown the garment of his faithover the other accounts and has changed their meaning for us.

After his sole action in bringing mother and disciple together,Jesus says, ‘I thirst.’ It is the least concession to any realism in John’sdescription of the scene, yet even this fulfills a Scripture. A spongeful ofsour wine is held to Jesus’ mouth. After that he makes quietannouncement saying, ‘It is finished,’ bows his head and gives up theghost. It is over very quickly.

What’s missing here? Nothing is said, for instance, of thedarkening of the earth for those three solemn hours – but that of courseis a myth. The earth does not quake and the Temple veil is not rent – butthat is legendary. The absence of these primitive features might seem, ifanything, a gain in reality, and so I used to take it myself. But there is nohint of Jesus’ agony on the cross, no cry of desolation before he dies. What is missing in John’s studied verisimilitude, although it pass for reality,is just the quality of reality. His evasion of the horror of the crucifixion tellsagainst him.

Something of this unreality he compensates by a final incident inwhich the legs of the malefactors are broken to hasten their death. Atlast, a reminder of the violence of this hideous death. The bodies mustnot be allowed to hang on the Sabbath which begins at nightfall. Jesus isspared the breaking of his legs when he is found to be already dead. It ishere that he is pierced by a spear, supposedly in fulfillment of anotherprophecy. Blood and water issue from his side but who can read this

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symbol now? A familiar mistake is to make of this detail a fact of history. So taken, it becomes an artificial medical problem or a miracle. Wheredoes the water come from? Are we really to think of sacrifice andbaptism in this connection? Apart from that, John has contrived to showus how the intact frame of the dead Christ compares with the Passoverlamb which was slain on that same day and whose bones, also, must notbe broken.

Let us not blind ourselves to the Evangelist’s aim, which iseverywhere overruling. John has no more knowledge of the crucifixionthan Mark had. Both are separated from the event by ‘tradition’ andeach is intent on furnishing the worshiping cult with a portrayal of the lifeand death of the risen Christ. Never have the Evangelists supposed thatthey were writing only about a man of the past. Behind the Jesus theydescribe, and whose humanity they stress, there stands ever in mind amiraculous Christ in whom they mysteriously share a new life as theyawait a new creation.

DEPOSITION AND BURIAL

After Christ had breathed his last (says Mark) a centurionstanding there exclaimed: ‘Truly, this man was a son of God!’ It is arealistic detail that this centurion’s impulsive homage was awakened atthe moment Christ expired, but the point to be established is that Christhad breathed his last: it is a testimony to the final moment lest a RobertGraves arise to say that in his Resurrection Jesus had only awakenedfrom a swoon.

If disciples had been present at the scene, Mark must havementioned them because earlier he wrote that ‘they all forsook him andfled’ at Gethsemane. However, there are several women among hisfollowers ‘looking on from afar,’ three of whom the Evangelist names, aswe noticed a moment ago. It is this naming of the women which standsin contrast to the disciples’ absence.

Afterwards, and because it is the eve of the Sabbath, a certainJoseph of Arimathea, a most improbable disciple, approaches Pilate toask for the body of Jesus. Pilate marvels to think that Jesus can be deadso soon and sends for a centurion to verify the fact – he, no doubt, whohad supervised the crucifixion. Now does Pilate care so much to verifythis vile death that he will summon a witness and condescend to waitaround for his arrival? Our story is a fiction and makes of Joseph ofArimathea a ‘respected member’ of the Sanhedrin. He must have a

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certain standing, of course, before a Pilate would receive him. A Galileanfisherman could never do that.

The fugitive character with whom we may compare this Josephof Arimathea is Simon of Cyrene. Each comes out of nowhere to do hispart and then disappears forever. Simon of Cyrene, fresh from thecountryside, brings us closer to the scene in the sense of intimateacquaintance. Joseph of Arimathea, besides obtaining audience withPilate, takes care of Jesus’ body which must otherwise be thrown away. It is he who takes Jesus down from the cross and wraps him in a newlinen shroud to be laid in a rock-hewn tomb, but a tomb new enough tobe unused and spacious enough for the action which must take placeinside its chambers. It is a most uncommon grave for one who dies amartyr’s death and whose own disciples have fled to safety.

The story rides upon its motives here and almost writes itself. Mark handles the deposition from the cross in a participial phrase, ‘takinghim down.’ Yet masterpieces have been painted of this scene, and Imight say a word about that to make a point. The painter’s art lendsitself to elaborate compositions as well as to mythic scenes, and I canalmost imagine the limp body of Christ being handed down withouthaving the pictures before me. In the molding of the features, thestricken attitudes of the participants, and by the use of color, the paintingwill express a sentiment.

It is otherwise with sculpture, whose instruments are chisel andstone. I have never seen a sculpture of the deposition: imagine sculptinga ladder! Yet in Michaelangelo’s Pieta we have in polished marble a pairof figures, Christ and the Virgin, which express a quality of mourningbeyond all words and tears, and even somehow serene. It is a sacredart. The body of her beautiful son is lying limp across his mother’s amplelap; she is larger than her son. It was a stroke of genius on the sculptor’spart to give her this necessary proportion here, and she is as shrouded inher richly folded garments as he is almost naked in her lap. Nothing Iknow of in all the world can make the Catholic sentiment as beautiful asthis.

How do we come on Michaelangelo, then, so suddenly here, andwhy those others I allude to like Fra Angelico and Rogier van derWeyden? It is to illustrate once more the value of the religiousexpression and the means employed. Religion is the myth of God. Itsdeepest expression is highly imaginative, yet what person of sense willreject the Deposition of a van der Weyden for showing us a scene that

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never was? Or who will complain of Michaelangelo for giving us a thingthat never could have been except in the artwork itself? We must havethe Expression. Something fundamental has come to expression in thegreat works of religious art, as also in a Palestrina or a Bach or a Handel’sMessiah. It is of course telling that we have had no great Christian art inthe Twentieth Century. It is even a reason for going back to the crudelyGothic artistry of the Gospel of Mark, as we have done so often here.

THE EMPTY TOMB

The earliest Gospel tells of Jesus’ rising from the dead: it doesthat, and yet it doesn’t show him anywhere alive or tell us of his doingsafterwards except for a promise that he will appear. The disciplesthemselves do not reappear in the story. Instead, a young man in whitetells three women who have entered the tomb: ‘Ye seek Jesus theNazarene, the crucified. He is risen. He is not here. See the placewhere they laid him.’ (Literal translation). The young man is an angelwho understands the mission of the women before they speak. Afterdemonstrating that the tomb is empty he gives instructions which thesewomen are to pass on to the disciples and Peter. The women flee inconsternation and say nothing to anyone because they are afraid. Thetale is unresolved. Abruptly the Gospel ends.

Too much is left hanging here, and the scholars are mostlyagreed that the ending of this ancient Gospel has been lost or elsesuppressed. For how could its ending very well be lost when the Gospelitself has survived the well-intentioned depredations of its rivals? BothMatthew and Luke are inconceivable without Mark’s earlier work, whichthey were evidently written to displace. Mark’s survival, then, I mustascribe to his gift for story-telling, and to the sense he conveys ofconnection to these early traditions, and to the fundamental importanceof his scheme.

I sometimes compare the Gospel of Mark in my mind with theBayeux tapestry on which the Norman conquest is displayed on a longstrip of linen. The tapestry is 231 feet long and twenty inches high, aunique pictorial history set out in panels. Somewhat like a comic bookbut inexpressibly more beautiful and clean (I mean, clean in conception)it is explained in Latin with letters elegantly drawn. Like Mark it is animaginative history, although Mark is full of myths and as far as I knowthe tapestry is not. Both works have been done by highly gifted artistswho are nonetheless naive. The men’s heads in the tapestry, for

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instance, tend to be flat, but the horses are superb, as are the costumesand weaponry and tools, the ships and towers and tables and kings andwhat-not all. It is authentically of the period of its composition athousand years ago. The drawings which one artist made were in turnembroidered in colored wools, possibly by whole nunneries of women ifBishop Odo, half-brother of William the Conqueror, commissioned thiswork, as is believed. The story ends, says my Britannica (1952) ‘with theflight of the English from the Battle of Hastings, although the actual end ofthe strip has perished.’ The ending is lost of this beautiful work. How verystrange!

Professor BW Bacon, once at Yale, has somewhere suggestedthat Mark’s ending may have been suppressed because of a (supposed)crudeness in its portrayal of the Resurrection. That cannot be right. Foreven if the church did quash this ending, it was not on account of anycrudeness but because it undercuts the later legends. Its retaining anearlier tradition was inconvenient.

In particular, it was in Luke’s own interest to deflect that earliertradition. In Mark’s tale, which gives the basic Synoptic pattern, threewomen have come to the tomb first thing Easter Sunday morning toanoint the dead body. They are Mary Magdalene, another Mary who iscalled the mother of James the younger and Joses, and one Salome: thesame three who had watched the crucifixion ‘from afar.’ The Marys hadalso seen where the body was laid. Do we know these women? Not atall. We have never heard of them before (in this Gospel) but now Markhas need of them to bridge a gap between the crucifixion and the emptytomb because disciples are not available, having fled to safety. I mustsay, this grouping of three unheard-of women is more than a littlesuspicious. Mark is fond of triads of various types and some of which, ashere, are little more than groups of names. We have:

Zebedee and his sons, James and John. Apart from the baremention of his name Zebedee doesn’t figure in the action.

With Simon Peter these two brothers form the triad of Jesus’favorite disciples who are really the only ones to act.

There is another sort of triad involving Jairus and his daughterand the ‘Woman with an Issue of Blood.’ (Peter, James andJohn, by the way, had witnessed her raising).

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Jesus’ Transfiguration on the mount represents a double triad: atransfigured Christ with Moses and Elijah, and in a lower sphere,Peter, James and John.

After the Transfiguration on the way to Jerusalem Jesus’ forecastof his suffering and his Resurrection ‘after three days’ is giventhree times.

I think that one might fairly speak of a dramatic triad in thechoice offered by Pontius Pilate between Jesus and Barabbas.

Simon of Cyrene, who carried the cross, is mentioned with hissons, Alexander and Rufus. We never heard of any of thembefore. We know nothing of his sons. It is a triad of names.

Jesus is crucified between two thieves: that is a triad. He is alsomocked for having said, supposedly, that he would destroy theTemple and build it ‘in three days.’ Then from the sixth to theninth hour darkness covers the land: three hours.

We come at last to the three named women who are looking onfrom afar. As we know nothing of them from the tale, they countas a triad of names, but we understand their uses in bridging agap, and we see the likelihood of fictitious invention.

A naive author who is allowed to introduce names like this gets by veryeasily. This is not where the early tradition lies: the fiction is only a frame. It is in the words of the young man in white that the nugget of an earliertradition is to be found:

But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you toGalilee. There you will see him, as he told you. (Mark 16,7.)

These angelic tidings now constitute a Markan double by repeating whatJesus had told his disciples on the way to the Mount of Olives:

You will all fall away, for it is written: I will strike the shepherdand the sheep will be scattered. But after I am raised up, I willgo before you to Galilee. (Mark 14,28.)

Schweitzer is among the scholars who would take these words literally,supposing them to be historical. He imagines that Jesus here, planningfor his Resurrection, thinks to lead his disciples back to Galilee by walkingin front of them – on the analogy of his walking before them on the wayto Jerusalem when the disciples hung back and were afraid (10,32). Even conceding Schweitzer’s grounds, the thought is absurd. Are we toimagine that a man recently crucified is to be seen three days later

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walking his disciples back to Galilee as they follow along behind him? Apositive misunderstanding of ancient Scripture is nowhere greater evenin a Robert Graves. Christ’s quoted words are myth outright. This iskerygma placed in the mouth of Jesus.

What do the words really tell us? – in a promise repeated by theyoung man in white: ‘He is going before you to Galilee. There you will seehim, as he told you.’ When we bring these utterances together, they tellus that the disciples will see the risen Jesus in Galilee. This contradicts thelater tales of how Jesus appeared to his disciples in Jerusalem on EasterSunday. What need to send them off to Galilee? The stubbornness of anearly tradition works its effect on a tale set within a different frame, theEmpty Tomb – until a Luke comes along to set that tradition aside.

LUKE’S VARIATION EXAMINED & CONTRADICTED

Luke’s version of the Empty Tomb, in revising Mark, subvertsthat earliest tradition. Not that he cares to show his hand openly in thisbecause he is careful to mention Galilee in the angelic message, whichseems almost to echo Mark’s account although, in fact, he is replacing it. That the first appearance of the risen Christ came to Cephas in Galilee isinconvenient for Luke who means to introduce his Easter Sundayappearances in Jerusalem. The words of the young man ‘dressed in awhite robe’ he recasts entirely after first doubling the messenger. Nowhe becomes ‘two men in dazzling apparel’ and they begin by sayingbeautifully: ‘Why seek ye the living among the dead?’

A sound old commentary on Luke by Alfred Plummer cites apassage from Isaiah in which we have the words of the angels’ questionin that same order but where they carry a different meaning. Whatmatters for Luke is only that the words should chime. In the Greek thekey words are: seek living dead, and in that order. I will quote Isaiah’spassage from the Revised Standard Version first:

And when they say to you, ‘Consult the mediums and thewizards who chirp and mutter,’ should not a people consult theirGod? Should they consult (ie, seek out) the dead on behalf of theliving?

Luke gives:

Ti zeteite ton zonta meta ton nekron

And Isaiah in the Septuagint:

Ti ekzetousin peri ton zonton tous nekrous.

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The angels’ question to the women thus vibrates to Isaiah’s verse forLuke and other leaders of the Jesus cult who can ignore a colorlesstradition that Peter first saw Christ alive in Galilee. Historically, it is apoint of importance. The very Cephas (Rock) who first acknowledgedJesus as the Christ is also first to receive his vision of the risen Jesus. Nolegend survives of that appearance (although the Sign of Jonah survivesin Matthew, and the primitive name, Simon bar-Jonah.) Who can guesswhat devastations were endured in the disciples’ retreat to Galilee, if thatbe fact? Who can say with confidence that the story could even be told? What remains of that tradition is the foremost fact: Peter is the foremostApostle. On the evidence that survives Cephas is the founder of theResurrection faith.

Decisive in this matter and older than any of the legends of theGospels is the testimony of the Apostle Paul, whose formula in a fixedrecitation we find in I Corinthians 15. Let me extract only the skeletalfacts and repeat them:

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received,that:(a) Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, (b) that he was buried, (c) that he was raised on the third day in accordance with theScriptures...(d) and that he appeared to Cephas, (e) then to the twelve.

Paul’s Corinthian Letters were written possibly some fifteen years beforethe earliest of our Gospels. He says nothing of when Jesus appeared toCephas and never a word about Galilee, but only that he appeared toCephas first. It is the Markan nugget which gives us Galilee as the placeof that Resurrection appearance, a tradition kept by Matthew.

MATTHEW’S VERSION

Matthew’s Resurrection angel is a blaze of lightning seated atopthe stone he has rolled away. The two Marys have come out to thetomb: they have come to see it. Matthew makes no mention of (Mark’s)aromatic spices because the tomb has been sealed. Armed guards arelying unconscious on the ground.

Unfortunately, every one of these changes is bad. Soldiers at asealed tomb is an extravagance. As for the dazzling angel and hisearthquake – a quake which serves to ‘knock the soldiers out’ – it

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overshoots the mark, with a consequent loss in genuine dramatic power. The classic youth of Mark, a simple white garment thrown about hisbody, will tell the three women: ‘Behold, the place where they laid him!’and we have seen it ourselves.

Matthew does follow Mark in preserving his nugget of traditionand reserves the appearance of Jesus to a mountain in Galilee. It hasn’toccurred to the First Evangelist to replace that, but inconsistently he letsJesus meet the women who are rushing back to the disciples in ‘fear andgreat joy.’ Jesus says, ‘Hail!’ and the women fall and take hold of his feet. It is a curious detail, but from what John Allegro has to say about the Ishzaquph I might suppose that their taking hold of the Lord’s feet was proofthat his appearance was no apparition, no mere spirit. This encounter is,of course, very brief and Matthew uses it to have Jesus say, ‘Do not beafraid. Go and tell my brethren to go to Galilee, and there they will see me.’

The Galilean Resurrection in Matthew is briefly told:

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee to the mountain towhich Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him theyworshiped him, but some doubted. (28,16.)

Nothing more in the way of scene. Resurrection cannot mean forMatthew that stories ought to be told about the risen Jesus. He thereforeomits them. Jesus has only one true Word to speak in his Resurrectionand this is the word of mission:

All power is given unto me in Heaven and in earth. Go yetherefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name ofthe Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, teaching themto observe all things, whatsoever I have commanded you. Andlo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.

A Christian faith still acquainted with its Jewish roots speaks here. Whatelse was Israel’s calling except to teach all nations? What else is baptismbut a cleansing renewal for those admitted to the Kingdom? What else isobservance except Religion itself? And what else has Christ now becomeexcept the Son of God raised from the dead who can say, with amarvelous intimacy of relationship and in words of deep encouragement:‘Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world?’ This is a greatfaith which has arisen from the believed-in Jesus. One could fairly saythat Matthew has compressed the whole meaning of Jesus’ Resurrectioninto this strange and triumphant renewal of Israel’s mission as a light tothe Gentiles and a Servant to the world.

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EMMAUS

Luke’s tale of two disciples who meet the risen Jesus unawares isno ordinary legend. The disciples, who are at first unnamed, engage inconversation with a Jesus who is a stranger to them. One of the men isnever to be identified, despite his singular experience. The other, acertain Cleopas whom we have never heard of before, wasn’t one of theTwelve. Altogether, the circumstances of this unique event are obscure,and it happens out of the way – on the road to Emmaus. At a finalmoment Jesus reveals himself and disappears. Where else have we atale like this in our Synoptics?

A tale passed down in the Oral Tradition has the quality of thrift:it is reduced to essentials and types. Like a worn coin it has passedthrough many hands, but it must also be vital, like the rude bulb of agarden perennial. Luke’s is the contrivance of a literary man whosemotives are apparent. It was devised by the Evangelist himself and is thefirst of our Easter Sunday tales.

Two sorrowing disciples have set out on foot for a village someseven miles away. The journey is long, Jesus falls in beside them like astranger and when he inquires of their conversation, they briefly stop. Then Cleopas speaks: ‘Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who doesnot know what has happened there lately?’ ‘What things?’ They tell himof ‘Jesus of Nazareth... a prophet mighty in deed and word.’

They are reciting things which Jesus has no need to hear andwhich the reader is presumed to understand. Abruptly, Jesus replies tothe tale of their sorrows and disappointments:

‘O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophetshave spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should sufferthese things and enter into his glory?’

Beginning with ‘Moses’ (which is to say, the Pentateuch) he ‘explained tothem the passages all through the Scriptures that referred to himself.’ Here is no simple reference to Isaiah 53 and one or two Psalms. It ismeant comprehensively although Luke can’t afford to give examples – itwould take too long explaining them. Several examples of these peculiarinterpretations may be found in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho,and two fantastic examples of Paul’s own use of ‘Moses’ may be found inI Corinthians 10,1-5 and Galatians 4,21-31. The Jewish-Christianimagination was very resourceful in its application of prophecy.

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There are reasons for this awkward passage in Luke. We beganwith a pair of non-entities who set out to Emmaus for no assignablepurpose. Cleopas, when his name is later given, proves to be one ofthose fugitive characters who exists for this one moment only. He and hisshadowy companion have had a lesser role in the previous story than,say, Joanna, ‘the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward’ – in fact, no role at all. They serve Luke for a peg on which to hang a story that no one else hasheard of.

Jesus’ identity is veiled because otherwise their conversationwould have been impossible, and that conversation, not the ‘appearance’of the risen Jesus, is the real point. Its form is that of catechesis and itssubstance is the ‘Apostolic preaching’ or kerygma. Luke is nearing theend of his Gospel. He must prepare his readers for the transition fromthe simpler teachings of Jesus to the Apostolic kerygma, of which wehave a sample, for instance, in Peter’s sermon in Acts, chapter two. It isessential to kerygma that the life and death of Jesus, and hisResurrection, be connected to prophecy and its latter-day fulfillment. AnyScriptures which are supposed to be actual prophecies of Jesus Lukewith implicit confidence leaves up to the teachers and prophets of thenew community.

The disciples arrive at Emmaus and Jesus, still unrecognized,makes to go on when they say, ‘Stay with us for it is toward evening andthe day is now far spent.’ He consents to stay and they set out a meal. Jesus takes bread and blesses and breaks it and their eyes are opened. No sooner do they recognize the Lord than he vanishes.

Luke’s oblique reference to communion is deliberate. It gives histale its convincingness as a symbol of Christ’s Real Presence in thesacrament. Our story becomes a parable, although Luke might wish itcounted for more than that – as for ordinary believers it does. I haveseen a beautiful old Italian painting of ‘The Supper at Emmaus’ (1596 –1598) by Caravaggio ‘whose heightened sense of realism and use oftenebrism, or sharply contrasted effects of light and shadow’ became aninfluence, to quote the words of a recent Britannica which goes on to say:‘Scorning the traditional idealized interpretations, he took his modelsfrom the streets and painted them realistically.’ Exactly, because it is thecontrast of light and shadow together with his models who are takenfrom the very streets by which Caravaggio makes his portrayal of thesupper so intensely real.

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Nevertheless, it is an aspect of the Lukan tale that Jesus from awonderworker has in his Resurrection become a magical being who canappear among us in disguise and vanish in a moment.

LUKE’S JERUSALEM RESURRECTION SCENES

The two disciples at Emmaus depart for Jerusalem forthwith. They say, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us... while he opened to us theScriptures?’ (Luke 24,32.) On arrival they find the disciples gatheredtogether and before they can speak they are told, ‘The Lord has risenindeed and has appeared to Simon.’ At last, if only in passing, Lukeoffers this slight deference to the tradition of Cephas’ priority but with nomention of Galilee.

As they were speaking together Jesus himself ‘stood amongthem.’ It is very well put: stood among them! It makes of a mereappearance something very solid and yet in their fright they took him fora spirit, and once again Luke loses the thread here. The risen Jesus says:

Why are you troubled, and why do questionings rise in yourhearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Handle meand see, for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that Ihave.

To prove that it is he, the risen Jesus offers himself to their hands!, atranscendent being in their midst submitting to be poked and squeezedto prove that he is ‘flesh and bones.’ The disciples ‘disbelieve for joy,’notwithstanding that moments ago they had assured the two returningfrom Emmaus of the Lord’s appearance to Simon. (As for Simon, whereis he if the two returning disciples had ‘found the Eleven gatheredtogether?’) Jesus’ first offered proof is not enough. He asks if they haveanything to eat. They give him a piece of broiled fish and he eats itbefore them. Luke has stumbled badly here, not least because theseproofs are all in vain. They prove nothing to us. Yet after eating his fishJesus will say:

These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still withyou, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses andthe prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.

Impressive, because this opens the way to the Johannine theme: Theseare my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you. Thekerygmatic theme is then reiterated succinctly and again Jesus openstheir minds to understand the Scriptures. Afterward, he leads them out

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to Bethany, lifts up his arms in blessing and parts from them. It isn’tsuggested at all that he vanishes out of their sight.

Luke is supposedly the author of Acts, and if he had already thescheme of that book in mind, Jesus’ parting from his disciples in Bethanymerges psychologically with his Ascension to Heaven in the first chapterof Acts when he is lifted up in a cloud which takes him out of their sight. There it will be claimed that he had appeared to them alive with manyproofs during forty days. The cloud is a sign of the Son of Man who is oneday to come on the clouds of the sky, and the forty days remind us ofIsrael’s forty years in the wilderness and of Jesus’ temptation in thedesert.

Strictly speaking, as of course the reader understands, aconsideration of these Resurrection tales doesn’t belong to our themeand yet, in a fortunate inconsistency, it belongs very much to ourtreatment. The Gospels pass from the life of Jesus to his Resurrection inmuch the same story-telling style. Events are tied to believable socialsettings and it would be fair to speak here of legends of the Resurrection,which as a faith is rooted in the transcendental and, historically, in myth.

THE RISEN JESUS & MARY MAGDALENE (in John)Clearly, John is founded on the Synoptic tradition, but he merges

this with a Gnostic strain to achieve a greater intimacy. The result is atransformation of the Gospel in this narrative form. His lofty Jesus hasundergone a metamorphosis which makes of him a different being. Inevery human encounter he asserts an irresistible ascendancy. CompareLuke’s risen Jesus who must lead his disciples to Bethany before partingfrom them. John has no need of Luke’s ascending cloud because for himthe Resurrection of Jesus is already joined to the Ascension of Christ. Inhis first appearance Jesus sends word to his disciples to say: ‘I amascending.’

Consider, then, how this Evangelist opens his Resurrection tale. (I have made a composite translation here, blending the New EnglishBible and Goodspeed):

On the day after the Sabbath, while it was still dark, Mary ofMagdala came to the tomb. She saw that the stone had beenmoved away from the entrance and ran to Simon Peter and theother disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them:‘They have taken the Lord out of his tomb and we do not knowwhere they have laid him.’ So Peter and the other disciple went

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out and started for the tomb. They both ran, but the otherdisciple ran faster than Peter and reached the tomb first. Hepeered in and saw the linen wrappings there, but did not enter...

A perfectly natural depiction of the opening event if given the EmptyTomb as fact. Characteristically, the Evangelist has designated those whoparticipate in the first crucial social event. Gone is the young man inwhite as well as Matthew’s dazzling angel and the stricken soldiers at thetomb. Gone, too, are Mark’s three women or the several women ofLuke’s Gospel except for the merest of hints: ‘We,’ says Mary Magdalene,‘do not know where they have laid him.’ This is a little specimen ofJohn’s connection to an earlier legend which he cannot simply discard. And yet he has no use for the other women in this realistic treatment. Their numbers would require a sort of hubbub, a touch of hysteria even –would demand a more elaborate scene. By narrowing to just these threehe achieves his focus on the human interest aspect of the tale with whichwe identify.

So it is definitely an artistic decision when he ignores those firstangelic announcements in the Synoptics (and the whole earlier traditionthey stand for) and tells of a pair of disciples running side by side untilPeter lags behind and the younger arrives to stoop and peer inside. Andthere the linen wrappings are lying! Peter on coming up does enter thetomb and sees the wrappings, sees even ‘the napkin which had beenover his head, not lying with the wrappings but rolled together in a placeby itself.’ (John 20,7. NEB)

Superior artistry but almost certainly fiction, the point being thatsuch nice details cannot have passed down through forty years and moreof Oral Tradition. We have been placed for a moment in the immediatescene, and yet those warrants of written Scripture upon which thevalidity of Jesus’ Resurrection is made to rest must come. John writes ofthese exploring disciples: ‘Until then they had not understood theScriptures which showed that he must rise from the dead.’

The two disciples then go home, Mary stays at the tombweeping, and now at last ‘two angels in white’ appear in the tomb – afirst hint that John has taken his theme from Luke’s Gospel. Very calmly,the angels establish the absence of the body of Jesus from the placewhere he had lain. The Evangelist describes them as sitting ‘one at thehead, one at the feet’ of where the body was. Nor do these messengersrepeat the wonderful question in Luke: ‘Why seek ye the living amongthe dead?’ John’s own tremendous aim is in keeping with his theme.

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The angels ask her simply, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ and sheanswers as a grieving woman might to any pair of strangers: ‘They havetaken my Lord away, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ Yetonce again we have the great Johannine theme: our Lord, the RisenChrist, not here – and we don’t know where to find him.

With this reply Mary turns away to see a Jesus standing thereunrecognized. What a clever adaptation of the Lukan incognito, butonly very briefly. Jesus repeats the question of the angels, who aredismissed from the tale. His presence absorbs or abolishes theirs. ‘Woman, why are you weeping? Who is it you are looking for?’ Againand again John is thematic, yet all of it is as natural as a woman’sconversation with a gardener – because that’s who she thinks Jesus iswhen she says, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where youhave laid him, and I will take him away.’ She will take him away (a firstfaint glimmering Pieta).

Jesus then speaks only her name: ‘Mary!’ She turns to him andsays in Hebrew, ‘Rabboni!’ and then Jesus again:

Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; butgo to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Fatherand your Father, to my God and your God.

No mere angel but Jesus himself gives a message for the disciples, andwe note the intimacy of brotherhood and fellowship implied in thewords. The entire scene could not have been more perfectly written andperhaps it is because John is no mere ‘writer’ (although he may havebeen a writer as showing this much skill). In the background is asacramental cult which the Evangelist serves with his great myth.

OTHER RESURRECTION SCENES IN THE FOURTH GOSPEL

We have asked ourselves, Did Jesus live?, but we do not askourselves, Did he rise from the dead? The first question pertains toordinary matter of fact, the other to faith. We have asked if these myth-laden traditions and biographical documents do not convey to us acrucial life-history of this Jesus of whom they tell such an illuminating taleand whose very Teachings they claim to supply, but any sense ofaffirmation here falls short of a religious faith.

The Christian faith is tied to its own affirmation of fact, howevergritty and mundane. And yet, just as the bare fact does not amount tofaith, so here the mundane aspect of the Christian affirmation does notand cannot result in historical knowledge. Those who would rest their

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faith on demonstrated fact, as so often the Gospels pretend to, ask theimpossible. The Resurrection of Christ is not knowledge. Nor was it everan event contained in the world, although the legends contradict this byplacing it within a worldly environment. Speaking historically, Christ’sResurrection is to be placed among the myths. Scientifically, it is out ofreach. Philosophically, it is a Transcendental Idea. Only to religious faithcan the Resurrection of Christ be the first appearance in this world of theNew Creation or the Risen Jesus be ‘the first fruits of those who havefallen asleep.’ Resurrection is impalpable. Our consideration of it lifts themind beyond any history which we might seek and beyond any worldwhich we can discover. Faith goes beyond the commonplace to receivethe experienced miracle. Seen in its immediacy, the world itself isradically miraculous.

As in Luke’s version, so in this Fourth and final Gospel the risenJesus appears among his disciples who are gathered behind closeddoors. Yet the differences are crucial. Here when Jesus ‘came andstood among them’ John mentions that the doors were closed ‘for fear ofthe Jews.’ This is one of those deliberate swerves that a wise exegesis willtake into account when handling miracles. The mere thought of thepossibility (however unlikely) serves just that little bit to reduce the‘shock’ of Christ’s implausible appearance – which the reader isnonetheless expecting.

In a further contrast Jesus accepts the disciples’ fright on theirterms in Luke (‘Why are you troubled, and why do questionings rise inyour hearts?’). When John’s risen Christ comes to ‘stand among them’he says, ‘Peace be unto you.’ He shows them his hands and his side, andthe disciples are glad when they see the Lord. He ‘shows’ them and itsuffices, avoiding Luke’s array of proofs, and then John’s Christ confersthe Holy Ghost:

Peace be unto you. As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them and saith untothem, Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose soever sins ye remit, theyare remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they areretained. (20,21.)

See how much he achieves in these laden compressions. There is noexpectation of tongues ‘as of flame’ descending upon the disciples’foreheads as in (Luke’s) Book of Acts. The breath of Christ imparts theSpirit: it is a gesture which has been taken up in ancient liturgy. The

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earlier legend is here converged on but superseded as Jesus at oncecommissions his disciples.

Ecclesiastical ambitions appear in the extraordinary claim thatthe disciples have power to forgive sins or retain them. Here is evidenceof lateness and churchly pretension. Could Jesus, if once he lived, havetaught such a thing or conferred such a power on his disciples? And yeta doctrine of the sacraments depends on this belief. Matthew placessimilar words in Jesus’ mouth when he gives Peter the Keys of theKingdom after Peter’s Confession. In the Fourth Gospel John transfersthe ecclesiastical power to what is left of the Twelve although Judas ismissing and Thomas is absent.

Now it is surely by the author’s design that Thomas has missedthe demonstrations of Christ given when he came and stood among thegathered disciples. These were demonstrations of sight and word andbreath – ‘Touch me not’ Jesus had said to Mary Magdalene, and here tooamong the disciples is no distinct touch. The challenge set by Luke mustnonetheless be met. The Third Evangelist has offered tangible proofs ofResurrection and the Fourth Evangelist must meet his challenge to makehimself equal to his predecessor. When Thomas returns to the fellowshipand the others say, ‘We have seen the Lord,’ he expresses his disbeliefwith a vehemence that stops just short of oath-taking:

Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put myfinger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side,I will not believe. (John 20,25.)

Extraordinary, and from the viewpoint of literature masterful. John has,if anything, intensified the physical challenge. And he focuses thedisciples’ misgivings only on ‘Doubting Thomas’ who, in a set of Gospelsnotable for their doubles, is called the Twin (or in the King JamesVersion, Didymus, which is the Greek for ‘twin.’) Eight days later thedisciples are ‘again in the house.’ Thomas is with them, the doors areclosed, Jesus comes to stand among them and says: ‘Peace be with you.’ And then he speaks to Thomas directly:

Put your finger here and see my hands; and put out your handand place it in my side. Do not be faithless but believing!

And again it is extraordinary! Luke hasn’t made it clear that Jesus’demonstration of hands and feet was meant for an indication of hiswounds, whereas the Fourth Gospel (and the only one to speak of aRoman spear piercing Jesus’ side) focuses with entire frankness on the

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wounds, even implying a very considerable wound: ‘Reach hither thyhand and thrust it into my side!’ Jesus commands in the sturdy old KingJames. And we are not told that it happened. Instead, Thomas’s defiantunbelief collapses.

And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God. Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thouhas believed. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet havebelieved. (John 20,28.)

Words of unspeakable moment and force for anyone ‘brought up inchurch.’ And here the Fourth Gospel reaches its true ending except foran urgent resumé compressed into a sentence. That sentence will begiven below.

A final chapter was added to this Gospel (the scholars haveassured us) by a different hand – the evidence being in its different style. I could myself believe on the strength of the English version that thedoubled ending was a deliberate device of the author’s own. In anycase this remarkable final Gospel, which has given us ‘another Jesus,’comes to us with a doubled ending.

JOHN’S MYSTERIOUS LAST CHAPTER

At the end of chapter twenty this great mystical Gospel closeswith a distinct period:

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples,which are not written in this book; but these are written that youmay believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and thatbelieving you may have life in his name.

That writes finis to the Gospel quite plainly, and yet another Resurrectionscene is tacked onto that before the Gospel is rounded off by anothersimilar ending, except that now at the very end a stupendous claim isadded in plain reference to the beloved disciple:

This is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things, andwho has written these things; and we know that his testimony istrue. (John 21,24.)

So it looks as if the twenty-first chapter of John represents an Evangelist’safter-thought, but this is misleading. Scholars well versed in Greek tell usthat the literary style of this final chapter is suddenly different. It is a factwhich we, who are confined to English, mustn’t underestimate, as weeasily may.

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A consideration of the tale will show its incompatibility withJesus’ earlier appearance to his disciples when he said, ‘As the Fatherhas sent me, even so I send you,’ and breathed on them the Holy Spirit. For suddenly the disciples are at such loose ends that several of them,along with Nathanael, have gone out fishing and labored all the nightthrough without any luck. Now a band of disciples who have been sentforth under inspiration to carry on the Redeemer’s work would not spendthe night futilely fishing and then fail to recognize the Redeemer in hisreappearance, as happens in this final tale.

So then, our several disciples have gone out fishing. They are amixed group because Nathanael was never one of the Twelve. (Hismention imitates the Fourth Evangelist’s introduction of that name). Atdaybreak Jesus appears on the beach unrecognized.

‘Children, have you any fish?’‘No.’‘Cast the net on the right side of the boat and you will find some.’

And they do, at once making a catch too big to haul in. Then ‘thatdisciple whom Jesus loved’ says to Peter, ‘It is the Lord!’ (This imitatesthe Johannine motif which takes the edge off Peter’s primacy). Themeaning of the huge haul of fishes is obvious if we compare Luke’s Draftof Fishes, which occurred when Jesus first called the Four. The story isan imitation of that. Why are they fishing at night? Anglers, I know, maysometimes use lanterns to attract their fish, but here it is a case that Jesusappears at break of day to keep the Easter reference when he rose atdawn.

On recognizing Jesus, Simon Peter, who is ‘stripped for work,’puts his clothes on and leaps into the sea. It is a curiously awkward idea tohave him do this unnatural thing – or should we rather be thinking ofChristian baptismal candidates who, far from stripping naked to bebaptized, must put on gowns before they step into the water? Then thethought would be that when a catechumen wraps himself in hisbaptismal gown, he is ‘like’ Peter going to Jesus on a farther shore. Orfor another possibility, this absurdity may imitate the legend-maker’stechnique of providing a diversion from the main action to deflectsomewhat our natural incredulity. Otherwise, I can think of no reason toexplain the absurdity of a fisherman’s wrapping up before he jumps intothe water for a swim. All of my Readers who are swimmers well knowhow a wet garment impedes us in the swimming.

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On land, as now appears when all have come ashore, Jesus hasprepared a charcoal fire with fish lying on it, and bread. He asks them tobring some of the fish which they have caught and invites them tobreakfast. And still there is something of a veil over this mysteriousChrist: ‘None of the disciples durst ask him, Who art thou?, knowing thatit was the Lord.’ (KJV) A reader who has followed John’s text carefullythroughout knows how often Jesus appears and disappears, howunexpected is his presence, how mysterious his coming and going – themotif is deeply Johannine (and I do think it a good expression of thetranscendental aspect of the Resurrection. We are not to imagine anordinary fishermen’s breakfast on the beach).

John II, as we might call this fabricator, remarks that this is thethird time that Jesus showed himself to his disciples. Unless we discounthis Easter appearance to Mary Magdalene, we know this to be incorrect. Exegetes typically put this sort of thing down to the Apostle’s extreme oldage when fondly remembering events and yet forgetful of detail. Theremark precedes a triple question put to Peter in which the Lord asks him:‘Simon, son of John, do you love me?’ After each of Peter’s assurances,whose triple form recalls his threefold denial, Jesus will say: ‘Feed mylambs... Feed my sheep.’ And then, possibly, Peter’s martyrdom isforetold: ‘When you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and anotherwill gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go.’ The prophecyis followed in the course of the tale by the command: ‘Follow me...Follow thou me!’

Peter turns, apparently he and Jesus have been strolling side byside, and ‘saw following them the disciple whom Jesus loved, who hadlain close to his breast at the supper.’ He asks a curious question here:‘Lord, what about this man?’ What about the question itself? It seems anexcuse for Jesus’ enigmatic reply which plays into the last bit ofmystification in which John II would involve us: ‘If it is my will that heremain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!’ And then John IIgoes simply overboard: ‘The saying spread abroad among the brethrenthat this disciple was not to die.’ (We doubt this).

Yet Jesus did not say to him that he was not to die but, ‘if it is mywill that he remain until I come, what is that to you?’

How utterly tiresome, this pedantic mystification and pseudo-exactitude! And how pathetically effective in giving simple minds ‘something to thinkabout!’

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Demolished at last by the technique of this Gospel and nearing itsvery last words, we may be prepared to accept this without further ado. Or we may not. For those words about ‘the disciple who is bearingwitness to these things, and who has written these things’ require to bejudged in their own truth. They must call forth from us our own decisionabout them. Luke, who dared to assert that he had consulted those whohad been ‘eye-witnesses and ministers of the Word,’ made no suchtremendous claim for his Gospel as this. As for Mark’s Gospel, it is onlyan old ecclesiastical tradition that would assign the substance of it toPeter’s preaching, which the Evangelist is supposed to have heard as hisassistant and translator and written down, so to speak, all out of order. Although this Fourth Gospel is of all the authentic Gospels most distantfrom the life of Jesus, this contrived appendix makes for it the boldestclaim of all.

CONCLUSION

DOGMATA I. (Or, Opinions firmly held.)Have we answered our question, at last: Did Jesus live? Or was

it ever our aim to give an ANSWER to this question – one more answer,one more opinion? To pull an Ace of Hearts out of my sleeve at the lastminute or else, perhaps, an Ace of Spades would be a cheat. Ourquestion has been genuine, and the Negative argument remains a point ofview.

A simple yes or no does not suffice us because a vote cast eitherway cannot satisfy our longing for distinctness and resolution. Why isthat? It is because our question is somehow larger than the question. Somewhere else the answer lies to a question which our theme has onlysuggested.

If we take these same Gospels, as I do, for an evidence of thatlife, it counts only as a statement of belief. The man as such who livedonce is tremendously obscure. He has been caught up and transformed bythe myth which has embraced him and has insofar become a part of thatmyth in the setting of a known history and a definite time. It is the time ofthe Herods and of the Baptist and of Pontius Pilate. The pressingquestion in historical perspective is one of reference. Who is it or what isit we mean to identify by the name, Jesus? The Gospels themselves giveus two different versions of Christ. In which of these versions or in what

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particulars of word and deed do we profess to find the reality of hisfigure?

For a modern interpreter it is almost a duty to try to extract a‘historical Jesus’ from his myth and present him as a winsome humanbeing, a man of kindly impulse spreading encouragements, bolsteringfaith, and filled with insights – Hebrew insights. It cannot be done. Jesus’ life was fused with myth as events occurred and the myth arose. Our Gospel Jesus is not a man in plain view who is more or less decoratedby his legends and by the attribution of his unusual powers. The man is outof sight. A sort of rumor has replaced him. Mark’s virile Jesus wasconceived by the Evangelist when presenting his traditions. John’s Jesuswhen taken simply as a human being is unreal.

As for those many modern writers who thought they hadextracted a human Jesus from his myths, if the results are sympatheticthey reflect the author’s own ideals. It’s nothing to object to, of course,but we mustn’t take it for fact. I remember the pleasure I took as aseminarian in reading Upton Sinclair’s novel in which Jesus figures as alittle humpback. It did not offend me. Much more deeply was Icaptivated by Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus as an intern, and during thatsame year read Fosdick’s book, The Man From Nazareth (and see inFosdick’s title his answer to the Negative critics: it was an old-fashionedpaper Pocketbook with Rembrandt’s Jesus on its yellow cover). At first,too, I much liked John Erskine’s Human Life of Jesus because he writes sobeautifully. It is a very readable entertainment.

Such inoffensive depictions of Jesus have been thrown up in anumberless variety and in proof that Jesus has remained a myth. He isJesus, Man of Genius for J. Middleton Murry but a ‘hero’ for young AlbertSchweitzer, who thus aspired to sweep all romantic conceptions asidewith his own romantic and overstrenuous ideal. Nietzsche once in hisendlessly shimmering thought borrowed the idea of ‘idiot’ from FyodorDostoevsky’s novel to apply it to Jesus. Of course, the Russian authorhad given it a special meaning and Nietzsche’s idea is intriguing butwhimsical. He veers to extremes.

Harnack somewhere remarks that Jesus was not an ecstatic byway of a negative definition, and few there be who were ever as learnedin this history as Adolf Harnack, but just the other day I chanced on apassage in G. Stanley Hall in which he finds that Jesus was ‘more or lesserethic (i.e., hypersensitive, excitable, irritable), more habitually in a stateof exaltation or second breath.’ And this state, if ‘not ecstasy in the

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clinical sense… is inebriation with great ideas in Plato’s sense.’ No lessthan Albert Schweitzer does the learned Dr. Hall believe that we havefound ‘the new key by which psychology is now able to unlock the verysecret soul of Jesus himself, which has never been understood before.’ Ifonly it weren’t a different key in every other hand unlocking such amultitude of doors!

Not infrequently, the popular depictions of Jesus are apt to beshallow or even contemptible, and I say to this, Enough of Jesus-trash! It’s not a simple question of assailing fundamentalism because the Jesusof suburban America is often quite as unreal, as fake, as the vapidportraits of him hung in American living rooms. Liberal Protestants speakof Jesus as a Great Teacher and good man – where is he? Good how? This is in nowise clear to us from a reading of the Gospels. Good becausehe cast out demons, then? Or because he rebuked the Pharisees? Or isit not really because as a demi-god he scattered his benevolent miraclesamid the crowds?

Now of course, in his Great Teacher role he has at least thesolidity of the Teachings to support him, yet JM Robertson’s pointedquestion (which I have quoted once before) ‘What doctrine?’ remains inforce. We have the authentic document Q in which men of eminentlearning like Adolf Harnack and Karl Jaspers have found deepestmeanings in the merest lines. We have also those fine literary parables inLuke of the Good Samaritan, the Rich Man and Lazarus, and the ProdigalSon. They don’t jibe with the simple parables in Matthew and it’s onlythe Rich Man and Lazarus which is even authentically Jewish. Nor doesit cease to be true that your parable is an easy way to invent traditions. Itdoes reduce the authenticity of Mark that he has set the Teachings asideto put the kerygma in Jesus’ mouth, and no one can explain to us howthe Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount can have spoken like the Jesus ofJohn, most especially in his farewell discourses. Also, I find nothing ofthe uttered Teachings of Jesus in Paul’s Epistles. A self-appointedApostle who served a far-flung sacramental cult, he reduced his Gospelof grace to the death and Resurrection of the Son of God in whom wemay be joined (by faith) in ‘newness of life.’ Any distinctive vision of Jesusthe Great Teacher disappears from this varied assemblage and we obtainour Great Teacher at the expense of the Testament.

What we seek in conclusion now are definite results and Ipropose to give them here as well as I can. It would be foolish toconclude our study in futility, vagueness and frustration. Are affirmations

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to be made? Then let us make them. Are denials called for? Then let usdeny. My impression is that we have examined the substance of theGospels more extensively than other books on the subject, pro or con. Typically, these books are taken up with argument whereas we havemostly pressed the Gospels against the question. Statements to thecontrary of the Negative view I have sometimes made in a moment ofweakness, but they don’t constitute a refutation except in the impressivecase of John Allegro. Not argument, then, but the material itself hasbeen our concern.

DOGMATA II.Nowhere have I said that we cannot know Jesus at all. It would

be false to my own belief to leave that impression. Yet if anything canyield an evidence of this vanished life, it must be these same Gospelsthemselves – whence our difficulty, because it is too apparent that thecanonical Gospels are a fusion of history and myth. Invaluable documentsthough they be, the deep interest of the Evangelists lies in myths and infaith, but a faith realized in Christ’s prophetic fulfillments.

We do not know the man of history, as such. We haven’t the leastidea what he looked like. The various aspects of his person, his habitsand inclinations, his likings, his customs, his daily behavior – the Gospelsignore. We have no solid knowledge, even, of his social manner indealing with others. We have not a single passage out of his life which istruly consecutive and we know nothing of his village tours, except for theEvangelist’s constant assurances that he made them. (And of course thistraveling aspect of his life yields to the Negative argument for hisexistence as rumor). In most tales an honest environment is missing. Wesee him in his world but we never seem to see him in his place. All focusis on word and deed. Jesus in the synagogue? Yes, in Luke we havemention of the scroll and of Jesus seating himself before speaking. Thathardly constitutes environment, and generally the play takes place on anempty stage with perhaps a bare wooden table and two or three chairs.

There are nonetheless a couple of things to be noticed here. (a)The Gospels tell his story in the large, giving out the main external facts ofhis life as they bear on history. (b) Also, we have a veritablyincomparable array of incidents and Teachings to convey, as our Gospelsso distinctively do convey, a Jesus who resembles only Jesus.

So much depends on the perspective we bring to these Gospelsapropos our theme! What is the difficulty in believing that after John was

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arrested Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the Kingdom? Or what isthe real objection to the tradition (although skimpily preserved) that atthe end of a singular career Jesus entered Jerusalem in a Messianicgesture? The sole Negative objection to the gesture rests on its beingprefigured in prophecy. The tradition or else the Evangelists may have‘got’ the idea from prophecy. As Jesus or his disciples also may. You cansay, ‘We don’t know that it happened.’ Of course we don’t know: it is athing I have insisted on. Do we know anything better to the contrary? Youcan say, ‘The Teachings don’t give a hint of such a thing.’ No, indeed. The famous Teachings don’t even give the crucifixion of Christ in AdolfHarnack’s determination of Q. Shall we deny the crucifixion then? Mypoint on this is that the statement is made by the tale of the Entry alongwith the report of an associated Cleansing of the Temple. Remove theseacts and you remove the Roman incentive for the execution of a rabbiwho is otherwise a teacher, which is not to deny that the proclamation ofthe Kingdom may have been a factor also. And beyond the fact ofstatements made, not in the tales but by them, the troubling documentsexist. They are much too jagged, rugged, incoherent even to pass assmooth forgeries. Their bare existence and the credit they have alwayswon is a not inconsiderable fact.

Outside the Gospels what do we find of Jesus’ history? Hardlyanything at all. We find confession of faith in his divine role as onecrucified and raised from the dead. It is in the Four Gospels that thesubstance of the life has been preserved. Arthur Drews is right that wefind no ‘life of Christ’ in Paul. We find in Galatians (if this be Paul) thatGod sent forth his Son born of a woman and born under the Law. Asmuch as to say when subtracting the myth that he was born a humanbeing and a Jew. Then in Romans: ‘who was descended from Davidaccording to the flesh.’ At best that counts as a statement of belief. Thenfinally the Apostle’s recitation of the Last Supper ritual formula inCorinthians. This does not add up to a life. Pontius Pilate, for instance, isunmentioned by Paul except in the so-called Pastoral Epistles which arecommonly judged to be spurious.

DOGMATA III.Our Gospels are histories notwithstanding the myth. Even the

Fourth Gospel is in some deep sense a history despite its remoteness fromthe event of Jesus’ life, its transfigured Messiah, its dense atmosphereespecially in the farewell discourses, and its deliberate fictions. Removethe Synoptics entirely, yet John sets forth the basic facts which have a

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way of perpetuating themselves from Jesus’ Baptism (although it’s noteven described) to Pontius Pilate. The reality of history persists in itstransmutations.

Yet even when regarded as histories, the Gospels are documentsof a faith based on traditions which have attested this life. They take theircharacter from a myth for which they serve as instruments of teachingand propaganda. They are frank to illustrate this myth, and their authorswere unconstrained by any strict requirement of fidelity to fact – this istoo obvious. In its essence, this is a Jewish-Hellenistic myth and we don’tknow quite how it originated. We do know that it first grew into in itsHellenistic garb before it had shed, or even cared to shed the Jewishcharacter of its Lord. What an indication of primitive fact! For in itsdeepest import, the Gospel is the message of an Israel renewed if only inthe scattered seed and first sprouting. Of course, that same visionaryrenewal, which is experienced only within the fellowships, requires sucha transformation of Jewish customs and offers such a laxity of grace (if Imay say so) that the Israel of old stands on the verge of rejection and theGospel is thrown open to the world.

At first the myth is protean. It has no single character and noone abiding form. In its earliest days it was variously conceived anddifferent views of Jesus were held among his followers. The process ofrationalizing the myth had necessarily to come and began very early. Among its first steps was a development in the ‘teachings’ of thesponsoring communities. But we must also reckon with a development inthe story itself which comes then to be translated into liturgy and rites. Atthis point the myth is overwhelming, it is a flood. It is adjusted to theseasons of the year and there you have the frankest sort of mythicaldevelopment. A calendar of sacred commemorations is appointed aschurch officials arise. Astrology makes its entrance not least in theseasons and the calendar. Customs of great antiquity are sometimesaltered and live on in disguise. The Jewish Pentecost furnishes the dateof the Christian Pentecost, as if the date itself must not be given up. Aspects of the Passover survive in the ritual of Communion or thedesignation, Lamb of God. With no intention of flippancy I might almostcite Shakespeare’s playful lines:

...Nothing of him that doth fadeBut doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.

History and myth interwoven change and live on.

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The early rise of church officials is, for me, a problem. How sosoon? If Jesus is a simple prophet who sends his Twelve Apostles forthwith scant provisions, whence bishops so suddenly? How the earlyauthority of Jerusalem for a movement which began in Galilee? Or whyin Matthew already the Evangelist’s preposterous declaration (because itis surely his own) that these ragamuffin theologians are given power toopen or close the gates of Heaven? For with officialdom comes power,status and control, and the associated ills and evils.

If theology is interpretation of the myth, church doctrinerepresents control. Rivalries arise within the Christian groups, opponentsare overcome or banished, eccentric individuals are made to toe theline. Doctrines on the chief points develop through a series of councilsinto dogmas which give expression to a universal faith. And herewith thetragedy of the Christian past. For it may be doubted whether the religioncould have survived without this development, the same which has ledto the Catholic and Orthodox churches, but it cannot be doubted that afostering and protective dogma under strict official control is inimical tothe freedom of the spirit and to its finest expressions. You cannot havespirit without freedom.

For myself I find the Gospel when taken as a set of doctrinesincredible and rudimentary. Nor do I find in myself any wish to believeon these grounds although Jesus has remained a sacred figure for me. Isthat nothing more than life-long habit? It seems to go beyond that andtouch a certain dread which I associate with the sacred dimension: whatRudolf Otto has called the numinous. I think it is because a kind of dreadbelongs to the realm of the sacred. DOGMATA IV.

During his long farewell to the disciples at the Last Supper, theelevated Jesus of the Fourth Gospel tells them: ‘I have many things to sayto you, but you cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit oftruth is come, he will guide you into all truth.’ I, too, have left many thingsunsaid, and I must pray for the Spirit of truth and his guidance in bringingthis book to its end.

I. My own argumentThe argument has been fairly presented, I think. Up hill and

down dale, it has been my own argument too. Our study of the Gospelstouches on the origin of Christianity in the life of a man who, althoughfully and beautifully illuminated in Gospel legend, is otherwise obscure to

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history. We have looked in the Gospels for a Jesus who is a founder or atleast an instigator in the rise of a great myth only to find him very largelya product of that myth. And if the word myth is disturbing, you maysubstitute the word faith here: it will work just as well.

Then in some sense, conclusively, Jesus is not a fact of historyalthough it is fair enough to speak of a historian’s Jesus. It is because thehistorian’s conception rests on purely religious documents ofquestionable value – we accept his or her belief in the matter as onequalified for that. What is the grand fact we associate with Jesus? Areligion preached in his name, a peculiar Scripture set within anacknowledged faith, and a Church founded on Sacraments andtraditions, and of course the crucifix, images, pictures: iconography. Thegrand fact is the total fact, the whole tradition.

If Jesus be historical, as I affirm, he is a man remembered by thefaith he inspired. A wish to have him apart from that faith and know himas he was is bred of doubt. It may be a very reasonable doubt, but itreflects a desire on our part to read in history the story of a Revelation. We seem to have persuaded ourselves that we might believe with all ourheart if only we could see Jesus more nearly. Already the tradition has‘understood’ this and the Evangelists from Mark to John have done whatthey could to make him real. I suppose it must be called a success ontheir part to make us feel that we have more than we do have and toforget that the man is obscure. The significance of Christ is expressed inwhat we have. More would not help because a greater knowledge ofJesus in his naturalness would leave us where we are in the matter offaith. For if Christ is not the supernatural being which the Gospelsportray, where is his Revelation? History can give us no revelationexcept what our own experience provides, whereas the Idea of Christ inthe Gospels is of a divine disclosure.

The disjunction between Jesus’ ‘real history’ as we imagine it andthe subsequent tradition is a necessary disjunction from the viewpoint ofthe faith. ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe,’ saysJesus in John. And Paul: ‘Even though we once regarded Christ from ahuman point of view, we regard him thus no longer.’ Just what is this‘human point of view’ (kata sarka) of which he writes except the natural,

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the ordinary, the physical, the historical?34 For it was not in that one manknown simply in his human nature that a religious value lay. Speakingphilosophically, his value is to be sought in the faith he awakened as a lifelived authentically in the presence of God.

II. The religious imaginationWe are all by nature believers in the supernatural or the

miraculous. I find that even scientists are superstitious, as I myself am,and all the more so after laying church doctrine aside. The poet in uslooks for signs and often enough receives them, but the philosopherwithin stands off and says, ‘You understand that all of this is imagination.’ I take signs gratefully when I receive them, yet afterwards discover acollaboration on my part, unnoticed at the time.

The various enactments which we practice in our rituals have aliving root in primitive magic which is no longer recognized as such orwhich, if recognized, does not disturb us. Magic achieves its goal byimitation and dramatic substitutes, and if we look on the matterthoughtfully, we may find ‘imitation and dramatic substitutes’ in a bridalprocession or a Fourth of July parade. We find the same thing in ourseasonal pageants with costumed actors and rehearsed gestures,sometimes done by children. These pageants are never realistic. It isenough to watch the action or to imitate the great mythic event such as,for example, the birth of the Savior. ‘It is real because we saw it happen.’

Liturgy is based on the same principle except that the symbol is alittle more remote. The very sacraments convey potency and reality bysubstitutes and enactments. Where is the priest without his implementsand gestures? ‘Here is Christ,’ he promises as he displays the wafer orlays it on the tongue. Compare the cry of the crowd, as I mentionedearlier, when the man on his donkey rides out of the rural Polish chapel:‘There goes Christ!’ The experienced reality in such practices is notsimply recovered in memory: it is created. It is conceived.

Why ever suppose that imagination is less a door into reality thanour ability to add up 2+2 or conceive an abstraction? In practice weaccept the role of imagination. Has anyone a difficulty in seeing a gilded,glistening Buddha as in no sense a portrait of the man Gautama? And

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yet we welcome its splendid affirmation. It is the same with a life-sizedwooden crucifix, its nearly naked Jesus painted in flesh tones, that I sawin Pennsylvania near the chancel of an Orthodox church when attendinga wedding. However realistic the man on the cross in his graceful pose,this is simply a beautiful imagination recalling no scene ever seen.

III. Inner basis of religion: the archetypeSo is religion on examination merely imaginary? It can be that.

Or it can be imaginative access to reality, depending on our disposition. The image of Lazarus with its strange, wide-ranging associations connectsto all its outlets from a fundamental archetype: that is the locus of yourreality for such an imagination as this which bears on the image of theSelf – but of a ‘self’ to be overcome or cast away. As a double of Christ ina darker resurrection from a state of decay Lazarus was able to reflect aninfluence from Osiris at a rather advanced stage or from the Akwanshi ata more primitive. As such an image, then, the very image of the phallic(and somewhat putrid) god in his resurrection, I would prefer to speak ofa Lazarus archetype. That this archetype in all its potency lives on wesaw to our satisfaction in Andreyev’s tale of Lazarus, where the phallicimagery is almost conspicuous, as well as in Henry James’s The JollyCorner, where a covert phallic metaphor associates in a tale of self-discovery culminating in metaphors of death and resurrection. Who candismiss this sort of thing as mere fantasy? Andreyev’s powerful tale mightbe dismissed as a fantasy since ostensibly it is that, although it happens tobe a fantasy involving an image of the Self, but Henry James with greatersubtlety describes an experience which is altogether intelligible: noperson of sense can dismiss these imaginations as unexpressive of reality.

Now I recall the Lazarus archetype here to avoid collapsing theargument into abstractions. For the religious imagination, if it usesconcepts at all, has borrowed them from philosophy or morality. It is inthe imagination that the archetypes are reflected: it is the archetypewhich gives the religious imagination its reality. For the most ancientsymbols of religion are no mere spume of dreams. They have come byinspiration and they point us to the hidden depths of psyche, and I holdthat the greatest of present facts disclosing the unseen is depth of soul. Itis the soul which has knowledge of God, not simply the intellect. Whatany man cares for is the experience of his own life, and yet it is just thispassing experience, so dear to us, which gives to the present moment asense of something beyond or a depth within. We may sound this depth

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but we can never reach it. We are never there, we are here. It is thereligious imagination which sounds the depth.

Properly speaking, the archetypes are not symbols or images butan array of powers. They belong to our human endowment althoughthey are curiously and darkly out of reach, but they are nonethelesseffective. Of course, they are not of themselves an ‘experience.’ Theystructure experience. Thus (and I stick to the illustration while stillavoiding mere abstraction) it was the archetype which enabled suchgenuine artists as Leonid Andreyev and Henry James to give animaginative expression to the deepest experience. We misread thesesplendid tales if we take them for entertainments – except in the sensethat high art nourishes the soul. Evidently the archetypes function in thepsyche like instinct in dogs and birds, and yet more than merely instinct. It is characteristic of the archetypes that crisis awakens them. Theimaginations they inspire or the persons they project on become a focusof intensest caring. In the crises of our lives they provide a sort ofguidance for the serious mind and the pure in heart. Clothed in symbols,they convey a revelation of numinous quality to receptive minds. Only, arevelation of that sort is nothing unless we act on it. Hence it follows thatthe archetypes engage us. Or more accurately, it is we who engage themall unconsciously as we seek for our truth or struggle to find a right wayin our endeavors.

So the region of the archetypes is in no sense an array ofimaginations but an unimaginable dimension of formative powers. Andwhen these powers engage us, we verge on the ‘sacred interiors.’ Wemay therefore distinguish the historical value of Jesus, as I describe itabove, from the value of Christ as archetypal, while of course recognizingthat Jesus carries this value. I believe on good grounds that the Jesus ofthe Gospels, and no less the image of Buddha on different grounds,express the archetype of the Self. These vital myths engage us on thelevel of deepest experience. Speaking philosophically, the religious valueof Christ is of a different order than a supposed ‘life’ of Jesus. With nopretense of belief and no claim upon Christianity, I must acknowledge avalidity in myth, and in the life of faith.

IV. Why Jesus mattersSpeaking only for myself, I reach a three-fold result in respect to

the Negative argument:

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(a) Myth. Jesus is a myth as we ‘find’ him. The presented Jesus,the popular Jesus, is a myth.

(b) The Negative argument can be carried through. That is itstruth. Yet even when carried through, it is not entirelyconvincing.

(c) The historical Jesus is to be looked for within the writtenGospels as they stand, not in substitutes or replacements. Aboveall, the tales must be taken in their meaning.

I reject the ‘Jesus-wading’ exegesis which would explain the fable of hiswalking on water. We can never know what event, if any, lies behind amiracle or ever safely assume that Jesus is visible in these tales. A falselynatural idea of his person has become very familiar. We turn to theGospels while allowing for exaggeration and mistakes to perceive a Jesuswho is wise and good – a ‘friend of man.’ It is an illusion. In truth, wecannot see the man apart from his myth.

It is characteristic of Jesus as the Gospels portray him toemphasize the inner fact and to place great emphasis on spirit andessence, sometimes in contrast to customs and traditions which maybecome very dear to us. This emphasis on the essential is a mostattractive feature, but it falls short of the existential value of his death andResurrection. As a merely human fact Jesus cannot serve as a model ofthe spiritual life. What we see in the Gospels shows that he is far fromexpressing a universal ideal. If, then, an affirmation of his life is crucial tothe faith, it is to keep us from Gnosticism and unreality.

As the Gospel offers itself a realized human fact is at the heart ofits myth. Were it lacking, the mythic pattern of his death andResurrection would be reduced to a metaphorical whimsy instead of itsshaping the deepest experience. Archetypes do not coerce us: it is thequality of our experience and our own depth which will determine thevalue of the mythic pattern. The great Mystery of the Gospel and thebeliever’s participation in Christ require the bond which links to thatgenuine life. If the Gospel be taken as merely imaginary and Jesus himselfa mere Symbol, it is all too unserious to claim our allegiance. It is acurious fact, then, that while a mere belief in Jesus’ historical existence isnot yet Gospel faith, the very quality of that faith requires a belief in theman whose physical reality is so entirely out of reach. While yet, ofcourse, the value of Christ is in his being realized anew.

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People suppose (and the common man always supposes) thatreligion must be ‘definitely factual’ to be real, but the reality of religionconsists in the realization of its ideals. It is an inner and a felt reality butnot otherwise a present fact except as we live it. It is something we giveourselves into. The reality of what is sought is not lurking in the symbolor in the sacred text, for the text can only refer us to something else, thesymbol can only remind us of what is stirring within. No more is thereality to be sought in bare fact because all is myth if we look for barefacts of divinity. The reality is to be sought in the realization, and it hasoften been said, and wisely said, that we cannot have this reality withouttaking the Way.

A FINAL WORD

Our traditions are passing through a caesura in the faith. Merebelief, especially of the ossified sort which is offered to us, may be animpediment. After spending eleven years in training for the Lutheranministry, I was barely launched in that career before I discovered thedeadness of our sterile formulas. As for the religion of sentiment whichseems to flourish in the suburbs, it too easily degenerates and in itsdegenerate form is repulsive. Much of what passes for Christianity in ourchurches is very poor stuff. We do well to rid ourselves of Jesus-trashand cheap religion. The incision must be clean-cut; a clean break isimperative and may be costly. But the metaphor of caesura impliescontinuity after incision. It is simply our experience of things. What is oldperishes. What is new arises from the old and has its root there.

END