Christ

by Jack Miles

  In each of these four areas, Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity both saw fit to revise the character of God as it was understood as late as the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E., which marked the demise of every other variety of official or unofficial Judaism. In doing so, both built on such intellectual foundations as those just sketched, all of which were laid before the Temple was destroyed. While these foundations were being laid, it must be noted, a large and noisy apocalyptic literature was being written, of which many examples have survived to instruct scholars in modern times. Apocalypticism was emphatically not a revision of the character of God, however, and certainly not a revision in the direction suggested above, but, rather, an emotionally fevered and intellectually clouded theological conservatism. The longer God’s promised military intervention was postponed, the more grandiose, horrific, and overwhelming—the more “apocalyptic,” to use the word in its modern sense—that intervention became in the imagination of the architects of this conservatism. The more gargantuan God’s intervention became in imagination, the greater, in turn, became the pressure to pin it to the calendar, but the greater, as well, became the fear that any date set would become yet another date missed. The result of this contradictory pressure to both set the date and escape it was a literary subgenre of oracular calendar coding, aimed at preserving “deniability” for the deity, whatever happened or failed to happen by the encrypted date. Though both Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity were marked at the start by such apocalypticism, both movements were, as already noted, more deeply marked in the long run by their repudiation of it. The voluminous apocalyptic literature has been, in the main, excluded from both the Jewish and the Christian canon, and this not by oversight but by design, for what the movement led to, historically, was utter catastrophe.

  By contrast with sterile apocalypticism, more liberal, fertile currents within world Jewry began even before 70 C.E., a revision in their understanding of God and of the historical hopes and social boundaries that had been linked to that understanding. The destructions of 70 C.E. and of 135 C.E. accelerated this revision, with the Christian revision entering its most creative period shortly after 70 C.E. and the Rabbinic shortly after 135 C.E. The Gospel story, a story in which the Jewish God is condemned, tortured, and executed by the foreign oppressor of the Jews, is a particularly violent and dramatic way to announce that that God is no longer a warrior prepared to rescue the Jews from foreign oppression but, rather, a savior who has chosen to rescue all mankind from death. The New Testament story as a whole—combining the Gospel story with the story of the early church—is a particularly radical and disruptive way to announce that God has exchanged warfare on behalf of the Jews for missionary teaching through the Jews. But neither of these ideas, not even the “supersessionist” second one, can possibly have occurred first to Gentiles. The world did not—until certain radical Jews issued it an invitation—have any designs on the identity of the Jewish God, nor did the world aspire to membership, however qualified, in the Jewish nation. Extreme as these “Christian” ideas are, they can only have been at their conception a Jewish response to an excruciating and uniquely Jewish dilemma, one to which Rabbinic Judaism was required to develop—and did develop—its own distinct and equally original response. And these new ideas, like all new ideas, can only have been fabricated from available revisionist resources, including at least the four varieties indicated above.

  Just as Christ (not “the” Christ) is the Word Incarnate of Christianity, so Torah (not “the” Torah: one does not use the article when the word is being used as a proper name) is the Word Incarnate of Rabbinic Judaism, scripturalization being a terrestrialization and, to that extent, an incarnation of the divinity. Each of these two entities, Christ and Torah, is inseparable from God, and yet somehow each can be and was used to revise God. Christ is the more blatant revisionist of the two: “You have heard it said … but I say unto you …” Torah as the object of the radically intensified study that developed after the destruction of Jerusalem—is, in comparison, more subtle, more analytic, more gradualist, more comprehensive, and above all less dramaturgical, but it achieves in the end an analogous outcome.

  Is the New Testament compatible with the Old Testament? The question is ill-conceived. One might as well ask, for the question would be exactly parallel: Is the Talmud compatible with the Tanakh? Is any revision compatible with that which it revises? Though neither the New Testament nor the Talmud admits the fact except obliquely, and though both can easily be quoted in denial of the fact, each is a revision of the older Hebrew scriptures. And the revisions are clearly incompatible with each other. As for the older scriptures, as twice edited and doubly owned, they are socially and textually incorporated into two parallel responses to a single religious, political, and intellectual crisis. The great subject, the epic argument, of the Bible in its second, Christian edition, is the changing of the mind of God. But the great subject of Torah and Talmud, taken together, is the same subject pursued in a different manner.

  A SECOND PASSOVER

  Before the festival of the Passover, Jesus, knowing that the hour had come for him to pass from this world to the Father, having loved those who were his in the world, loved them to the end.

  —John 13:1

  The aesthetic distinctiveness of the Christian revision of the identity of God is that it is a dramaturgically realized revision—a theatrical revision that fuses the four kinds of novel thinking listed above into a literary work with scenes, characters, dialogue, and action. As the Lord gathers with his followers on the last night of his life, the script that they will follow is the script for a reenactment of the Passover, the miracle that defined God as the Lord of Israel a millennium earlier. In the words and actions of this script, the four areas of conceptual revision mentioned above find interlocking and mutually intensifying dramatic expression.

  First, Satan, whose power explains in no small measure why God has not kept his ancient promises to the Jews, is a character in this reenactment, though he never speaks. The role that he plays is comparable to that of Pharaoh at the first Passover. It is he who must finally be subdued; it is he who must finally be forced to acknowledge the manifest superiority of the Lord. The victory that the Lord wins over Satan by rising from the dead is only a victory in principle. In practice, Satan’s power will continue for a long, long while to come. Yet the Lord’s people win through the Lord’s resurrection a foretaste of victory now and the assurance of total victory later—along with, crucially, an explanation of why total victory cannot be immediate. They must be persecuted as the Lord has been persecuted before they too can triumph as he has triumphed.

  Second, at every step in this second Passover, the Lord is a teacher. He controls the flow of words and actions as a pedagogue must. The Word of God presents himself to his followers as, in effect, a text to be read. Repeatedly, he states that what he is doing for them or in their presence is an example to be taken as such. Jesus is, in person, “the light of the world” (John 8:12), God’s light unto the Gentiles in person, but his disciples must carry this light to the world. They may be frightened now, they may feel that he has left them orphaned, but after his death, his Spirit, the “Paraclete,” will enter them and embolden them to continue his instructive and redemptive work.

  Third, their reward as members of his new covenant will be, in the first instance, their intimacy with him, an intimacy that will bring them into intimacy with one another as well. They are to express their love for him not directly but indirectly, by loving one another. This is, in fact, his covenant command to them. As the First Letter of John will later put it: “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love” (RSV; 1 John 4:7–8). If God is love, then God Incarnate is love incarnate. What makes brotherly love not just a commandment but a covenant commandment is that the brethren are collectively to incorporate and so continue the Incarnate God’s l
ove for them. They are to love one another as he loved them—that is, with more than the force of spontaneous human affection. The same act by which they are to inspire and attract the world will comfort them with an experiential glimpse of the reward that awaits them after their eventual victory over Satan.

  Fourth, as for that victory, it will be achieved only when God corrects and repairs his own creation. Satan, whom Jesus has called “a murderer from the start,” will not be finally defeated until the Lord revokes, for everyone, the curse of mortality that he spoke against his human creatures after their disobedience. By “passing over” from death to life, Jesus, who has taken the ancient curse upon himself, will be the first to prove that this reconciliation has truly come about. But where he has gone, they will follow.

  Each of these four revisions of the character of God has been under way throughout the Gospel, but the four come together at the conclusion of the Gospel of John as four subjects in a great fugue. They are held together and made to work polyphonically by the character, Jesus himself, who “performs” them all simultaneously.

  At the first Passover, the Lord played a role that, were he to play it again now as God Incarnate, would have him sending his disciples before Caesar (not Pilate) to demand the liberation of the Jewish people. On the eve of such a second Passover, Jesus would be found not in Jerusalem or even in Judea but on the far side of the Jordan River, on a mountain somewhere in the desert, awaiting his liberated people. If Caesar, despite a series of admonitory, empirewide afflictions, were to ignore Jesus’ demand, then Jesus would order his people to flee to him. In preparation for their flight, their escape from Roman bondage, each Jewish household would slay a lamb, splash its blood on the lintel, and then eat it at a meal rehearsing what would become a perpetual commemoration of this second liberation. Jesus would then send an avenging angel to slay the firstborn of the Romans throughout the empire, from the palace of Caesar down to the lowliest slave in a Roman galley. The Jews alone would be spared in this slaughter, for the blood of the second Passover lamb, splashed on their lintels, would save them, signaling the Lord’s angel to “pass over” them. After they crossed the Jordan River en route to his holy mountain, the pursuing Roman legions would drown in a flash flood of epic proportions that would turn the Jordan Valley into a torrent of death.

  So the story would unfold were the Lord of Hosts to return in power, but the Lord will never return with that kind of power. That he will not is the premise, if not in fact the central point, of this second Passover. To make that point, the role the Lord himself chooses to play in this Passover is, shockingly, the role of Passover lamb. The blood of this paschal lamb will save his disciples, as the blood of the original Passover lamb saved the Israelites in Egypt, not from death in a single massacre but from the curse of mortality itself. Rather than being splashed on lintels, the Lord’s blood will be symbolically drunk as the sign of a new covenant. Thereafter, by subjecting himself to the full force of the curse that he swore against his first human creatures, the Lord in effect will repent of it, atone for it by his death, and begin a new creation that will correct the old. At his resurrection, as the firstborn of this new creation, Jesus will “pass over” from death to eternal life, leading the way for his followers as the Lord led Israel from Egypt to Canaan. Having become one with him by symbolically eating his flesh and drinking his blood, his disciples have his word that they will pass over into the eternal life of the new creation just as he has done. This is his covenant promise to them, the promise that will be sealed and solemnized once and for all by the shedding of his own blood.

  The blood of other sacrificial lambs has symbolized entrapment in the human condition. The blood of this sacrificial lamb will symbolize liberation from it. “I desire mercy and not sacrifice,” the Lord said through the prophet Hosea (6:6), but it is the Lord himself, because of his ancient lack of mercy, for whom mercy is now most required. The disobedience of the first humans was a sin; yet it was not the enormity of that sin but, rather, the ruthlessness of God’s curse that brought death into the world. Thus, though sinners, for their own good, need to repent and be forgiven, it is God, in the end, who must atone for his vengeful and destructive reaction to their sin by restoring their immortality. God’s own ancient and long-running vengeance is the sin that, as the Lamb of God, the Lord himself takes away when he replaces the curse of death with a blessing of eternal life.

  Once he demanded that they offer sacrifice to him; now he sacrifices himself for them. Once he demanded that they serve him; now he serves them. Once he demanded that they love him; now he loves them “to the end” and instructs them that the mark of their covenant with him shall be not their devotion to him but their devotion to one another. It is through this that they will teach the world and through this that the world will know that he is Lord. Finally, he who once insisted endlessly on separation and difference now insists endlessly on unity. His final prayer for them is that they should be one—one with him, one with his Father, one with one another.

  “Take heart,” he says, moments before his arrest; “I have conquered the world” (REB; John 16:33). Has he in fact conquered the world? He has certainly not conquered it in the way that he once conquered Canaan. Of his enemies back then, no one—man, woman, or child—was left breathing. Now it is he, not his enemies, who will draw his last breath in torment. What would seem more obvious than that the world, in the person of the Romans who rule the world, has conquered him? Yet he has redefined conquest and in so doing redefined himself. He has given the crisis of his life a literally human form, and in that form, as the human being who embodies the crisis, he is carrying through his resolution of the crisis “to the end.”

  Has he conquered the world? The legendary dying words of Julian, the last Roman emperor to attempt (and fail) to reinstate paganism, were, in Greek: “Nenikēkas, Galilaie,” “Thou hast conquered, Galilean!” Julian used the same Greek verb for “conquer” that Jesus does. Though Rome’s concession, through Julian, will be three centuries in coming, the claim may surely be made that the Jewish God will win more in defeat, at the second Passover, than he won in victory at the first. The gods who will disappear as Christianity spreads throughout the Mediterranean are beyond counting. John Milton, in his “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” compares the fading of those gods to the fading of shadows before the rising sun. They are all, for him, Satan’s “damnèd crew,” and they begin immediately to “troop to the infernal jail” when Christ is born. Milton delights in listing them: Cynthia, the moon goddess of Greece, and Apollo, the sun god; the Lars and Lemures of Rome; the Baalim and Asheroth of Palestine; Hammon of Libya; Thammuz and Astarte of Phoenicia; Moloch of Canaan; and the animal-headed gods of the Nile. The last to go are Osiris of Egypt and Typhon, the hundred-headed dragon god of chaos (probably Semitic in origin), whom Greek mythology imagined lurking beneath Mount Etna:

  [Osiris] feels from Judah’s land

  The dreaded Infant’s hand,

  The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn;

  Nor all the gods beside

  Longer dare abide,

  Not Typhon huge ending in snaky twine:

  Our Babe, to show his Godhead true,

  Can in his swaddling bands control the damnèd crew.

  Milton wrote sixteen centuries after his namesake John the Evangelist, for whose first readers the claim that their contemporary—an obscure Jewish dissident executed as a Roman traitor—had somehow conquered the world and banished all its gods was surely far more difficult to credit than it was for the first readers of the Puritan poet. The line “Take heart, I have conquered the world,” spoken on the threshold of the most abject physical and mental degradation, produces an effect of daredevil defiance, an extravagance of self-confidence that is, at first, more intoxicated than intoxicating. Nothing is easier to credit than the reports that Jesus was regarded by some of his contemporaries as insane. Nothing is less surprising than that after his arrest he should have been abando
ned by all but one of his followers.

  “Blessed are the meek,” he has said previously, “for they shall inherit the earth” (Matt. 5:5). In secular terms—the terms, as it were, of political science—his line might be called a reflection on the fall of many empires, the thought that the arrogant invariably lose the earth serving as precursor to the thought that it may be, after all, the meek who inherit the earth. To be sure, the step from implicit antimilitarism to explicit pacifism—from the Lord looking down from heaven and seeing that the war horse cannot save to “Blessed are the meek”—is not logically necessary, but it is psychologically possible; and, depending on the circumstances, some such adjustment may have become psychologically necessary as well. In the dramatic and religious terms of the Gospel as a story, the pacifist thought that appears at the beginning as a promise returns at the end as a boast. Jesus promises his followers, as his career begins, that by their meekness, they shall inherit the earth. He boasts, just hours away from the terminal humiliation of his own meekness—from the moment when the “promise” of the beheading of John the Baptist is realized for him—that he has conquered the world. The promise and the boast are equally dramatic, but neither is sustainable unless it is God who speaks. The drama within the drama is that, yes, it is God who speaks, but who could have dreamed that his promises and boasts could ever lead to this result?