Christ

by Jack Miles

  Yet to imagine a first-century Jew imagining God in this way, even before the disastrous Jewish Wars, is to imagine a Jew in distress. Instead of the predicted kingdom of God, there has come the kingdom of the Romans, and its oppressiveness dwarfs that of all previous oppressors. What was a devout first-century Jew reading the Book of Daniel in a trusting, straightforward, precritical way to think as he or she noted its disconfirmation by events? Had God been mistaken? Had he failed to foresee the rise of Rome? What the radical reversal in the divine identity implied by the pacifist preaching of Jesus suggests is that a Jewish writer of powerful imagination projected this crisis of faith into the mind of God, transforming it into a crisis of conscience. God had broken his own covenant, and the fact that he had broken it had to matter to him. He knew he should have stopped Rome. He knew he had not done so. From that simple notion, a composition of enormous complexity could be derived.

  A good many historical critics, it should be noted, have based their reading of the Gospels on speculation about the historical consciousness of Jesus. Beginning with Albert Schweitzer in 1901, many have believed that Jesus—living under Roman rule, intensely aware of Jewish tradition, and experiencing what we would call cognitive dissonance between the two—inserted himself into the apocalyptic mythology of his day by personifying the “son of man” image of Daniel 7 and then identifying himself as the personage in question. Jesus believed, Schweitzer concluded, that by his own agency and, finally, his own death, Rome would fall, history would end, and God’s Kingdom would be established for all time.

  More recent scholarship tends to believe that this and related, more or less learned scriptural identifications were made not by Jesus during his lifetime but only about Jesus after his death. So it may well have been, yet the protagonist of the Gospels as we encounter him on the page acts as if he has made these identifications himself, and on this literary datum may be grounded an interpretation in which historical speculation about the remembered mind of Jesus yields to literary speculation about the imagined mind of God at that historical juncture. For literary purposes, in other words, it does not matter whether the historical Jesus referred to himself as “Son of Man” or not, so long as the literary character Jesus Christ does so on the page. Nor need it matter that the effect this character produces on the page, as the page is read by some contemporary interpreter, may not have been intended by all or even by any of the writers who produced the Gospels. It is proper to a literary classic that it touch readers generation after generation, century after century, in ways that transcend the intentions of the originating author.

  But having gone thus far in claiming space for a literary reading of the Gospels, let me immediately concede that nonhistorical readings vary in the degree to which they are informed by history. A fantastical or mystical or morally didactic reading, for example, might prescind almost entirely from historical information. The reading offered in this book, by contrast, admits history roughly to the extent that it is admitted in the interpretation of a historical novel. Moreover, though one does not read a historical novel in order to extract history from it, a general awareness of historical time and geographic place colors and contributes to the aesthetic effect, which, as interpreted, may be historically suggestive without entailing any outright historical claim.

  Against the usual Christian spiritualization of the Old Testament, the interpretation offered here is, then, a relative materialization of the New Testament, in which God’s real-world, land-and-wealth-and-offspring promises to the Jews are expected to remain on his mind—which is to say, on Jesus’ mind—and in which they are allowed, without shame, to remain on his hearers’ minds as well. What such an interpretation of the Gospels suggests about the historical situation behind them is that a theodicy—a moral justification of the behavior of God—whose plausibility had survived several centuries of fluctuating foreign oppression finally came into crisis under the steadily worsening Roman oppression of the first century.

  According to the received theodicy, first formulated after Israel was conquered by Assyria and Babylonia, that double defeat did not mean what it seemed to mean. The Lord’s victory over Egypt had been a real victory, but his apparent defeat by Assyria and Babylonia was not a real defeat. No, Assyria and Babylonia were actually tools in the hands of the Lord, who, far from defeated, was in perfect control of events and merely punishing Israel for its sins. Painful as it might seem to accept the claim that a national god who had once been so favorable had now turned hostile, the alternative was the loss of that god as a potential future support and protection. Since Israel’s sense of itself as a people had become inseparable from its sense of covenant with the Lord, life with him even in an angry and punitive mood was preferable to life altogether without him.

  By the expedient of attributing its enemies’ victories to the action of its own god, Israel saved that god from suffering the same kind of defeat that Israel itself had suffered. But the price of this expedient was high. It required a massive inculpation of the people of Israel—a blaming of the victim, if you will—and an uncomfortable emphasis on anger and vindictiveness in the characterization of the god. Even at the start, these features of the theodicy were felt to be so costly that it was necessary to add, when presenting it, that God would not always conduct himself thus. Israel’s national good fortune would be restored before long, and with it a much happier relationship between the god and his people.

  But for how many centuries of continuing oppression, especially as different oppressors succeeded one another, could this revision of the covenant remain adequate? The historical suggestion implied by the literary reading of the Gospels offered here is that for a significant segment of the Jewish population, a further revision came to seem necessary. It became necessary to concede the obvious and to redefine the Lord as a god whose return to action as a warrior was not just delayed but altogether canceled, and then to adjust his warlike character accordingly. Not the least part of this adjustment was a revision of his relationship to the other nations of the world; for if the Lord could no longer function effectively as anybody’s enemy, then he was necessarily everybody’s friend. And if his covenant love was now indiscriminate and universal, then so also must be the love of his covenant partner.

  Israel, as God’s partner in the original covenant, was expected to demonstrate its status as such by its exclusive devotion to the Lord. As the new covenant is proclaimed, Israel’s sin, its infidelity and failure to be exclusive in its devotion, is more forgotten than forgiven. The God who will no longer reward or punish his covenant partners as he once did can no longer require of them what he once required. Henceforth, it is not their devotion to him but their devotion to one another and, even more remarkably, to strangers that will signal their status as his. To the extent that they keep this one commandment, to that extent the divine warrior will be excused from ever again taking up arms. Israel will have no enemy because no one will have an enemy other than Satan, the enemy of all.

  God Incarnate does indeed understand himself to be, as to his human identity, the “Son of Man” of Daniel 7. But in this capacity, rather than establish the Kingdom of God by military force, he preaches military renunciation: He urges his followers to turn the other cheek. Going dramatically beyond even that, he reveals what he will not do—what no one any longer must expect him to do—by going without protest to his own execution on the gallows of the oppressor. The covenant revision is communicated, in sum, not only by prophetic preaching but also by a traumatic, cathartic, climactic, and, not least, ironic sacred drama in which the central role is played by God himself.

  Did the historical Jesus actually foresee the worst for his nation, despair of anything like divine rescue, and then—by a bold but conceivable modification of Israelite prophecy—infer that, rather than the prophet of God, he was God himself become incarnate to turn the bad news into an ironic kind of good news? As noted, the all-but-universal assumption on the part of contemporary historical critic
s is that others turned Jesus into Christ and then into God after his death.

  I myself, rather than suppose that Jesus was a simple preacher drafted, as it were, against his will into a larger role, find it historically more plausible to suppose that he was complicitous in his own mythologization, a messenger who intended somehow to become the message, a provocateur who stimulated others to further provocation. Israel Knohl* and Michael O. Wise† claim, on evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls, to have identified historical figures who, before Jesus, believed themselves or were believed by their followers to be divine, suffering messiahs. One need not accept the exact identifications they propose to recognize that, on the evidence they adduce, the idea of combining these elements—divinity, suffering, and messianism—had grown religiously plausible in Palestinian Jewry well before its Christian enactment.

  The new research has attracted as much attention as it has because a chasm separates the claim that the Messiah must suffer from the far bolder claim that the suffering messiah is God Incarnate. And, to be sure, even though Jesus makes this claim in the Gospel of John, it remains possible that the idea behind the claim may not in fact have emerged until decades after his death—that is, until closer to the time when the Gospel of John was written. A careful and conservative scholar, the late Raymond E. Brown, asked forty years ago in his great commentary on John

  whether there is any likelihood that Jesus made such a public claim to divinity as that represented in [John 8:58, “Before Abraham was, I AM”], or are we dealing here exclusively with the profession of faith of the later Church? As a general principle it is certainly true that through their faith the evangelists were able to clarify a picture of Jesus that was obscure during [his] ministry. However, it is difficult to avoid the impression created by all the Gospels that the Jewish authorities saw something blasphemous in Jesus’ understanding of himself and his role. There is no convincing proof that the only real reason why Jesus was put to death was because he was a social, or ethical, reformer, or because he was politically dangerous. But how can we determine scientifically what the blasphemous element was in Jesus’ stated or implied claims about himself? In the clarity with which John presents the divine “I AM” statement of Jesus, is he making explicit what was in some way implicit? No definitive answer seems possible on purely scientific grounds.

  There, as it seems to me, the matter still rests. I am content, however, to leave further discussion of this point to the historians, for the explosion of religious and literary creativity that turned material defeat into spiritual victory is no less remarkable as the achievement of Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries after his death than as his own creation. The spectacle of the Lord of Hosts put to death by the enemy ought, in principle, to have ended forever a covenant predicated on the Lord’s ability to protect his friends and defeat their foes. In practice, for those who made the commemoration of that awful spectacle a covenant ritual, its meaning was that a new covenant between God and mankind had taken effect that was immune to defeat, a covenant that could withstand the worst that Satan, standing (as in the Book of Revelation) for all historical enemies past or future, could inflict. Whatever provoked this brilliant adjustment of the idea of covenant (and scholars, significantly, are unanimous that the Gospels were all written after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.), it is conceptually analogous to the adjustment made when the victories of Assyria and Babylonia were defined as the punitive actions of God. The far-reaching implications of this revision are a matter to which we shall return at the start of Part Four. What the revision creates, in the end, is a new theodicy, a new way of maintaining that there is still a god and that he still matters in the face of historical experience to the contrary.

  While I was at work on this book, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of Israel’s right-wing Shas party, created a scandal by suggesting in a sermon that the Jews who suffered and died in the Nazi Shoah may have died because of Jewish sin. When this statement came up in conversation in Los Angeles, a friend of mine recalled with anger and sadness that, as a boy in the 1940s, he had heard the rabbi in his Orthodox shul preach this interpretation of the Shoah not just once but repeatedly. Reactions against such statements—including both my friend’s anger and the scandal that erupted in Israel over Ovadia Yosef—are, of course, as much a part of contemporary Jewish thought as are the statements themselves, but the sadness and the scandal are instructive for anyone attempting to make sense of Jesus.

  How did the divine warrior end up preaching pacifism? Christian theology has tended to speak of this change as spiritual growth in God, though rarely using a phrase like “spiritual growth.” The answer suggested here is that God made a new human virtue of his divine necessity. He found a way to turn his defeat into a victory, but the defeat came first. For some, to be sure, no divine defeat is so devastating as to extinguish forever the hope of victory. But for others, considering the number and magnitude of the defeats, a different conclusion has seemed inevitable: If God must be defined as a historical-time, physical-world warrior whose victory has simply been postponed indefinitely, then there might as well be no such god. Indefinite postponement is tantamount to cancellation. Effectively, after such a conclusion, the only choices left are atheism or some otherwise unthinkably radical revision in the understanding of God.

  This is a question that is called with devastating starkness in Elie Wiesel’s Night (1958):

  The SS hanged two Jewish men and a youth in front of the whole camp. The men died quickly, but the death throes of the youth lasted for half an hour. “Where is God? Where is he?” someone asked behind me. As the youth still hung in torment in the noose after a long time, I heard the man call again, “Where is God now?” And I heard a voice in myself answer: “Where is he? He is here. He is hanging there on the gallows.”

  If God will not rescue us, then is there a god? If there is and he still will not rescue us, then is he a weakling or a fiend? It should go without saying that Wiesel did not write this scene as an apology for Christianity. But the scene cannot fail to evoke the Crucifixion for Christian readers, and Wiesel cannot have failed to notice and intend this.

  In sum, the disarmament of the divine warrior in the first century mirrors, though with different consequences, his disarmament in the twentieth century. The dedication to The Prophets, the most widely read of the books of the late Abraham Joshua Heschel, the most influential Jewish theologian of the twentieth century, reads:

  TO THE MARTYRS OF 1940–45

  All this has come upon us,

  Though we have not forgotten Thee,

  Or been false to Thy covenant.

  Our heart has not turned back,

  Nor have our steps departed from Thy way

  … for Thy sake we are slain.…

  Why dost Thou hide Thy face?

  —from Psalm 44

  Heschel had every reason to think of these lines—from Psalm 44, quoted in full above (pp. 106–08)—when thinking of the martyrs of 1940–45, but other Jews nineteen centuries before him, thinking of other martyrs, had no less reason to turn to the same Psalm. And one of them, whether or not the one in question was Jesus himself, may have gone on—like the Jew witnessing the hanging in Night—to imagine that the Jew on the gallows, this time, was truly God himself.

  THE PRICE OF HIS PACIFISM: JOHN IS MURDERED

  At the time when Jesus declared that the prophecy “He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives” was “fulfilled even as you listen,” John the Baptist was an actual captive hoping for a proclamation of liberty. Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, had had him arrested for daring to criticize Herod’s incestuous marriage. If Jesus was all that John had said he was at the Jordan, not to speak of all that Jesus himself had claimed to be in Nazareth, then was John’s freedom at hand?

  Before Jesus’ sermon, John might have raised that question hopefully. Afterward he raises it with a clear undercurrent of anxiety. If Jesus is telling him to love the treacherous Herod, emulating
God the Father, who allows his sun to shine equally on debauched kings and ascetic preachers, then has John been mistaken about Jesus? Was he deluded when he said, “I am unfit to loosen the strap of his sandal,” and predicted, “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire”? Or did he fail to realize just what he was saying when, in a very different vein, he saluted Jesus as “the Lamb of God”? A prophet speaking the word of God rather than simply his own words may not always grasp the full import of everything the Holy Spirit prompts him to say. That phrase came from nowhere and, at the time, seemed to go nowhere. Does John begin to see where it can lead?

  The implications of Jesus’ words may escape some, but they will not have escaped John, who, immersed in Jewish tradition, cannot expect the divine warrior to declare himself a noncombatant. As for Jesus, as this query reaches him, though he respects John as the last and finest flower of the tradition he is revising, he does not defer to him—an aloofness that John and his followers cannot fail to sense. “Through the time of John,” Jesus will later say, “it was the Law and the Prophets. From that point forward the Kingdom of God has been preached, and the world has been challenged to enter it” (Luke 16:16). John’s preaching (“The axe is laid to the root” and so forth) assumed that God did indeed have enemies and would unhesitatingly treat them as such. If Jesus is now saying something disturbingly different, John cannot miss the implications for his own grim situation. Capricious murder has been the hallmark of the Herodian dynasty, and John is at the mercy of a Herod.