Christ

by Jack Miles

  Hellenistic Jewry regarded the Jewish scriptures in Greek as literally miraculous in origin—the translation was seen as an act of God—and as no less divinely inspired than the Hebrew. When belief in Christ spread from the Greek-speaking Jews of Palestine to the Greek-speaking Jews of this populous Mediterranean diaspora (a population perhaps five times larger than the Jewish population of Palestine), the Greek scripture was already in place “waiting” for it. In short order, the Septuagint became the scripture of the new movement,2 and its New Testament, written with the Septuagint intensely in mind, would become Hellenistic Jewry’s greatest contribution to world literature. All but one of the authors of the New Testament were ethnic Jews, but only one, at most, was a Palestinian Jew living in Palestine at the time he wrote. The Mediterranean Jewish Diaspora, not Palestine, is the home country of the New Testament, including, very emphatically, the Gospels. Even the Gospel of John, whose rhetorical affinities with the Dead Sea Scrolls have suggested that its author could conceivably have been a Palestinian Jew, is written in Greek and has the subculture of Hellenistic Jewry as its principal frame of reference.

  After 70 C.E., when Rome destroyed Jerusalem, deported much of the population of Judea, and ended even limited political autonomy for the Jews, the Hebrew and Aramaic languages became a newly important line of religio-ethnic demarcation in the Roman empire. This was so because Hellenistic Jewry had already become a major source, if not the major source, of converts to Christianity. Sociologist Rodney Stark argues persuasively that Christianity remained a majority-Jewish movement until long after the New Testament canon was complete. We must recall that this new Jewish sect migrating outward from Palestine was, at the start, very small by comparison with the Jewish diaspora already in place. If 80 percent of diaspora Jewry declined the Christian invitation, Stark argues, the acceptance of it by the remaining 20 percent—presumably the most Hellenized fifth—would have sufficed to create a movement with 1 million members by 250 C.E. even in the absence of any Gentile converts.3 There were, of course, many Gentile converts, but conversion to early Christianity did not seem a renunciation of ethnicity to Jews. In fact, the opposite was the case: It seemed a relative renunciation of ethnicity to Gentiles. To practitioners of Greco-Roman polytheism, conversion to Christianity seemed, understandably, like affiliation with a movement that was overwhelmingly Jewish both in content and by membership. For reasons too complex to go into here, this was, in fact, part of its appeal.

  With regard, more narrowly, to the understanding or understandings of the Bible that were taking shape at this time, Rabbinic Judaism—with Christianity, one of the two forms of Palestinian Judaism that had survived the cataclysm of 70 C.E.—increasingly saw the scripture in Greek as the Christians’ scripture or, more accurately perhaps, as the apostates’ scripture. Among Christians, by contrast, the earlier attitude of the Greek-speaking Jewish diaspora—that the scripture in Greek was simply the Word of God—lived on.

  The notion, commonplace in our day, that if you have not read a work in the original, you have not read it was rare in the first centuries C.E. That notion became truly widespread only with the rise of printing and with the printing-generated concept of copyright. Before printing, there was little or no notion of authorship as ownership of a sort that did not entail physical control over the actual copies of a given work.4 This separability of product from producer explains, in part, why so many ancient works are anonymous: Their authors lacked the motive that modern authors have for labeling their spiritual property. The same separability explains how in antiquity a translation could seem the equivalent of the original. For modernity, a work in translation stands at a perceptibly greater distance from its author than does the same work in the original. For antiquity, the original was already at so great a distance from its author that the translation could scarcely stand at any greater distance. Attribution, under these circumstances, was a property of the text rather than an indication that the text was the property of an author.

  As just suggested, there is evidence that when recently exiled Aramaic- and Hebrew-speaking Jews encountered their own scriptures in the oppressor’s Greek language, the result was a sharpened awareness of translation as such,5 a new awareness whose long-term consequences have perhaps been too little recognized. For a majority of the long-established and acculturated Greek-speaking Jews of the Mediterranean diaspora, however, little or no such awareness clouded the use of translated scripture, and these were the Jews who, in essence, created the two-testament Christian Bible.

  Christianity’s new scriptures crystallized in time into something close to a canon. By 367 C.E., when Athanasius, the patriarch of Alexandria, used the word canon for a list of the twenty-seven books that still constitute the New Testament, the process was essentially complete. It is plausible, though not certain, that while the Christian canon was taking shape, Christian editors were taking a second look at the canon of Jewish scriptures in Greek and deciding to move the expectation-filled books of prophecy—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve minor prophets—from the middle to the end of the collection. It may be, however, that this “Christian” order is actually a pre-Christian Jewish order favored in Alexandria over the Palestinian Torah-Prophets-Writings order that became standard in Rabbinic Judaism. In any event, reordered or not but seen stereoptically with the new Christian texts, the received Jewish texts became the Old Testament of the Christian Bible.6

  The adjective old in the term Old Testament originally functioned, it should be noted, rather as old functions in the term Old World. The older covenantal relationship between God and the Jews, though sometimes disparaged, was often celebrated in the founding centuries of Christianity’s new covenant and, in any case, was never simply repudiated. If it had been, the older scriptures would surely have been repudiated with it. This alternative was in fact proposed in the mid-second century, but, revealingly, it was rejected. A religious community whose ethnic majority was still Jewish found it morally impossible to regard the Jewish scriptures as other than the Word of God. It should be noted, in passing, that the referent of the word testament or covenant was not, in the first instance, a collection of texts but the relationship of a group of people to God. The old testament/covenant (in Latin, testamentum means what is meant in English by covenant) was the relationship of Israel to God; the new testament/covenant expanded that relationship to admit the rest of mankind.

  Beyond canonization, one step toward scriptural unification remained to be taken. Greek-speaking Christianity, even after it began to group its scriptures into an Old Testament and a New Testament with fixed lists for the contents of each, still thought of them in the plural. The fusion of the many into one occurred only when the scriptures moved west of Italy, where Latin was, effectively, the only language in use. It was there that the Greek plural common noun biblia, meaning “books,” began to be misconstrued in popular Latin usage as the Latin singular proper noun Biblia that was its homonym. This mistake was pregnant with cultural consequence, for Latin Biblia, thus construed, did not mean “books,” it meant “The Bible” in, for the first time, our sense of the word. Western Christendom began to regard the many scriptures as effectively one. A grammatical misconception coincided with an epoch-making cultural reconception. Greek biblia, to repeat, was a common noun. Other books could be referred to by the same word. Latin Biblia would become a capitalized proper noun, a new and singular word for a new and singular thing.

  Greek, which had a definite article, habitually used it when speaking of the Judeo-Christian scriptures; thus, the normal expression was ta biblia, “the books” or “the scriptures.” Classical Latin lacked a definite article, but late Latin developed one and bequeathed it to the neo-Latin or Romance languages. When this happened, Biblia became, revealingly, la Bible in French, reflecting Christendom’s attitude toward its scripture as not just singular but also definite. Language apart, the Bible became, everywhere in Christian Europe, a definite as well as a singular thing.7
>
  Why it matters

  That Greek was the language both of the new, rather rough-and-ready texts that charismatics like Paul were writing for the emergent Christianity and of the far longer and more formal texts that Greek-speaking Mediterranean Jewry had been reading for centuries, was of enormous literary consequence. Linguistic homogeneity between the old and the new facilitated an interaction between them that bears comparison with that between Greek tragedy and the whole of earlier Greek mythology. The onstage action of a tragedy like Oedipus Rex scarcely goes beyond Oedipus’s discovery of the truth about his genealogy. Sophocles does not begin to review the whole of the mythology that the play presupposes. He takes it for granted that his audience in Athens will bring a rich background in that mythology into the theater with them. Crucially, they will know that Oedipus has unwittingly slain his own father long before, onstage, Oedipus himself does. By drawing on this cultural common holding, the playwright can both simplify his exposition and immensely enhance its emotional impact. The Greek-speaking Jews who wrote the New Testament assume a comparable knowledge not just of the life of Christ but also of earlier Jewish written and oral tradition. Though they explain the occasional Aramaic word or latter-day Judean or Galilean custom for readers in cities like Antioch and Corinth, they assume rather than provide an acquaintance in translation with the Jewish sacred scriptures to which they so freely allude.

  The Old Testament functioned, within the two-testament Christian Bible, as explicit or implicit harmony beneath the melody of the New Testament. All melodies have what musicians call implicit harmonies. When the Gounod melody of the Bach-Gounod “Ave Maria” is sung without the usual accompaniment of Bach’s pristine arpeggiated chords, the Western ear “hears” those chords anyway. Once the Tanakh was turned into the Old Testament and bound with the New Testament between the covers of what was felt to be a single, composite work, Christian exegetes received a kind of standing invitation to hear the Old Testament within the New in a similar implicit and “harmonic” way even when they found no explicit reference to it.

  Proceeding in this way, New Testament exegetes merely deferred to the intention of the New Testament writers themselves. Nothing could be clearer than that the founders of Christianity apprehended and expressed their own religious experience in inherited Jewish categories. The New Testament is new more by novel combination than by outright invention. The Old Testament provides virtually all the categories, images, diction, and narrative repertory or collective memory that the New Testament employs to convey its message. Sometimes the New Testament writers allude explicitly to the Old Testament. More often, the allusion is implicit but easily audible for those with ears to hear. In either case, the mechanism is both primitive and powerful. When I am speaking before a group and see heads nod at a reference, an almost physical bond springs up between me and those who thus acknowledge my story as theirs. The nod need not be a nod of agreement. What counts is that it is a nod of recognition. Paul and, after him, the authors of the Gospels employ Jewish scripture allusively so as to establish just this kind of intimacy with their Jewish readers and ultimately to persuade them of the continuity between the old revelation of God’s covenant with Israel and the new revelation of the expansion of that covenant to include the entire human race.

  The Old Testament provides the means, in other words, both to express and to authenticate the new religious vision. At the start of the Gospel of Luke, we read:

  Seeing that many others have undertaken to draw up accounts of the events that have reached their fulfillment among us, as these were handed down to us by those who from the outset were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word, I in my turn, after carefully going over the whole story from the beginning, have decided to write an ordered account for you, Theophilus, so that your Excellency may learn how well founded the teaching is that you have received. (1:1–4, italics added)

  What Luke promises Theophilus (an otherwise unknown early Christian) is not principally factual accuracy, though that notion is not altogether absent from this preamble. What he promises is a demonstration that the events he is about to report—events already known from reliable earlier reports—constitute a fulfillment of which he and Theophilus are a part. Luke will show this in good part by linking those events to the providential course of events as memorialized in the Old Testament. That the Christian teaching is well founded means, in practice, not that it is objective or empirically documented but that it links demonstrably with God’s earlier work in the world. Scripture was not the only source of this knowledge, but for a literary undertaking it was the key source.

  It is beyond doubt that the writers of the New Testament were subject to a set of powerful contemporary influences from the Greco-Roman culture that surrounded them. A historical assessment of their work properly requires allowing for these influences at every moment. A literary assessment, however, does not require this or, at the very least, does not require it to the same extent. Thus, for a historian, the cult of the murdered, divinized, world-saving young Christ, the leader of a semisecret society who created a rite for his followers in which flesh was symbolically eaten and blood was drunk, cries out for comparison with the mystery cults of the Roman empire. Yet for a literary critic, even one aware of this cultural context, this sort of comparison need not be pursued. The Jews who actually wrote Christianity’s scriptures wrote them in such a way that they allude only to their own Jewish scriptures. Though a historian has every warrant to compare the cult of the divinized Jesus with, for example, the cult of the divinized Dionysus, a literary critic, finding no references to Dionysus in the text, has equally solid warrant to ignore him. Literary appreciation cultivates internal references, made for their aesthetic effect, by preference to external references, valuable for their historical information.

  Allusion legitimizes an intrusion of one text upon another or of one portion of a text upon another portion. The “hypertextual” syncretism that results turns the reader who notices into a kind of writer. Moreover, a reader thus stimulated may continue in the same direction on his own, making linkages that the author himself may not have intended. Thus, hearing the New Testament over the “accompaniment” of the Old Testament, Christian exegetes over the centuries have done as the New Testament authors themselves did, but more so, employing other Old Testament texts than the original writers employed to produce effects that those writers might well appreciate but cannot have anticipated. It is ironic, perhaps, that university-based historical criticism of the Bible has imposed on itself a chaste respect for the intentions of a set of biblical authors who were by no means so chaste in interpreting one another. The biblical rule and, for that matter, the postbiblical rule, both Jewish and Christian, down to the threshold of modern times was not the rule of deference to original intent but the rule of creative reuse.

  Appendix II

  THE BIBLE AS ROSE WINDOW (OR, HOW NOT TO SEE THROUGH THE BIBLE)

  A work of literary art is like a stained-glass window: It exists essentially not to be seen through but to be looked at. This is just how literary criticism classically responds to a work of literature, even when its subject matter is historical. There was a historical Hamlet, but Shakespeare criticism spends little time talking about him, nor does it compensate for the inadequacy of information about him by attempting a historical reconstruction of the Denmark of his day.1

  Why is New Testament criticism so very different? Rather than look at the rose window of the text, it labors endlessly to see through it. Overwhelmingly historical in its preoccupation, New Testament criticism pores over the text in the hope of finding a few passages, however brief, that may seem so devoid of ancient theological elaboration that through them the originating events themselves may be seen. Why does it do this? Why, if little independent historical information is to be had about Jesus, may such information not simply be dispensed with? Why may the Gospels not be read as the religiously motivated, artistically executed texts that an unforced reading would su
ggest them to be? Why take so narrowly instrumental an attitude toward a work of the imagination?

  Why New Testament criticism strains to see through stained glass

  There is about the historical criticism of the New Testament a Puritan heroism of renunciation that only religious commitment, buried as it often may be, can begin to explain. To appreciate how this ascetic attitude has come to the fore, we must return to the sixteenth century, when the Protestant Reformation, seeing, as it thought, the historical truth about Christ and Christianity in the New Testament, made that collection of ancient texts a criterion by which to reform the doctrine and the practice of the Roman Catholic church. Having assigned the New Testament this function, Protestantism acquired a motive to engage in the historical study of the New Testament with an accelerating intensity. At first this scrutiny, though it brought much to light that could be used to undermine the authority of Catholicism, brought little to light that could undermine the authority of the New Testament itself. But once the skeptical attitude of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment toward the miraculous was joined to the methodological skepticism of nineteenth-century critical history toward even the historically plausible, this situation changed radically. Critical lives of Jesus written in that century by David Friedrich Strauss in Germany and by Ernest Renan in France brought to the lay public in all of Europe a doubt about the historical reliability of the New Testament that had been building up among the learned for decades.