Christ

by Jack Miles

  In the first edition of his great work, Schweitzer risked a quasi-Nietzschean sarcasm in certain lines and passages that he excised from later editions. The passage just quoted is one such.

  The deepest question in this discussion, deeper than the question of history as a criterion for truth in religion, is What, if anything, can function as such a criterion? Can scripture, read historically or allegorically or in any other way, play that role? In the earliest Reformation debates, Catholics cogently objected that without some outside authentication, no one would be able to distinguish what was scripture from what was not. Scripture, therefore, could not in and of itself be the needed criterion. Then could tradition as interpreted by church authority be the needed criterion? Protestants cogently counterobjected that without some outside authentication, no one would be able to distinguish who was pope from who was not. Tradition, therefore, could not be the needed criterion either. Intellectually, as Richard H. Popkin shows in “The Intellectual Crisis of the Reformation” (chapter one in The History of Scepticism From Erasmus to Spinoza [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979, revised edition]), the two sides fought each other to an intellectual draw as completely as, in the Thirty Years War, they would fight themselves to a military draw. Yet their debate was anything but inconsequential. As Popkin shows, the writings of Sextus Empiricus and therewith the core of the classical tradition of skepticism became available just as the Reformation debate was being joined. The result was that the intellectual crisis of the Reformation became a rehearsal for the intellectual crisis of the Enlightenment. That is, the question of whether scripture could serve as a criterion for religious truth became a rehearsal for the broader question of whether anything could serve as a criterion for truth in general—the question that received a provisional but surprisingly durable answer when Descartes, to quote a contemporary French cleric, “taught his age the art of making Skepticism give birth to philosophical Certainty” (cited in Popkin, p. 172). Though Popkin’s subject is skepticism rather than biblical interpretation, his work well illustrates the dictum that to understand the history of biblical interpretation in the West is to understand the history of Western thought itself.

  For much of the twentieth century, it was a commonplace of New Testament studies to oppose “the Jesus of history” to “the Christ of faith.” Discussion of the Jesus of history was invariably linked to the name of Albert Schweitzer. Discussion of the Christ of faith was much less frequently linked than it should have been to the name of Martin Kähler, the author—in 1892, years before Schweitzer’s 1906 sensation—of The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1964). Where Schweitzer thought the quest of the historical Jesus an intellectual success but a religious irrelevancy, Kähler thought it an intellectual failure as well as a religious irrelevancy. Bultmann, especially as linked to the “neo-orthodox” theology of Karl Barth, might seem the descendant of Kähler rather than of Schweitzer. I link him to Schweitzer because, like Schweitzer, he so energetically and impressively mastered what he had determined, in advance, to be irrelevant.

  4. Paul William Roberts, reviewing Thomas Cahill, Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus, in The New York Times, April 23, 2000. The reviewer may exaggerate the religious aspirations of historical criticism, but not by much.

  5. For a lively but serious review of this research, paying particular attention to American scholarship, see Charlotte Allen, The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus (New York: The Free Press, 1998). A penetrating analysis of the methodology of “the quest for the historical Jesus” is to be found as an appendix to Donald Harman Akenson’s Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998); Akenson develops his critique further, noting that the Christ of Paul appeared a generation before the Jesus of any of the Gospels, in Saint Saul: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). A more neutral, international, and academic survey may be found in Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide, translated by John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998; originally published as Der historische Jesus: Ein Lehrbuch [Göttingen: Vanden-hoeck und Ruprecht, 1996]). The case for and against the success and/or relevance of historical-Jesus research is argued in The Jesus Controversy: Perspectives in Conflict (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press, 1999) by two American scholars, John Dominic Crossan (for) and Luke Timothy Johnson (against), with the tie-breaking vote (for, with qualifications) cast by a German scholar teaching in the United States, Werner H. Kelber.

  6. Ibid., p. 10.

  7. Ibid., p. 298.

  8. James Barr, Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1983), p. 159.

  9. An American example in this vein, published just before Enlightenment thinking went into hibernation in American cultural and political life, is Thomas Smith Grimké, Oration on the Advantages, to Be Derived from the Introduction of the Bible, and of Sacred Literature, as Essential Parts of All Education, in a Literary point of View Merely, from the Primary School, to the University. Delivered Before the Connecticut Alpha of the ΦBK Society, on Tuesday, September 7, 1830 (New Haven, Conn.: printed by Hezekiah Howe, 1830).

  10. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974). See also Frei’s Types of Christian Theology, edited by George Hunsinger and William C. Placher (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), and his Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, edited by George Hunsinger and William C. Placher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

  11. Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (London: Oxford University Press, 1967).

  12. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, editors, The Literary Guide to the Bible (Cambridge: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 607. See also Kermode’s summary, concluding statement on p. 609:

  It is an empirical fact that each book has its own history; it is also true that the association of many books in a canon was the result of a long historical process and owed much to chance and much to the needs and the thinking of people we know little or nothing about. But it is also a fact that works transmitted inside a canon are understood differently from those without, so that, if only in that sense, the canon, however assembled, forms an integral whole, the internal and external relations of which are both proper subjects of disinterested inquiry. Nor need we suppose that we have altogether eliminated from our study of canonical works every scrap of the old organicist assumptions, every concession to a magical view of these worlds and their profound, obscure correspondences. When we have achieved that degree of disinterest we shall have little use for the canon or for its constituents, and we shall have little use either for poetry.

  The phenomenal history of the Bible as an anthology of uniquely wide diffusion is commonly but illogically invoked as a justification for the study of historical phenomena in the Bible. That is, the influence of this text in so many places over so many centuries is invoked as a reason to pay particular attention to the events and circumstances that are recounted in the text or that formed the cultural matrix for its original composition. But to this claim one might well reply, “Non sequitur,” objecting that if it is the influence that is important, then it is the influence that most deserves study. Don’t study sunspots and sun storms if it is sunburn that concerns you.

  The Bible has not usually wielded its influence in conjunction with any independently acquired knowledge of the ancient world from which it emerged. The extent to which it does so even now is debatable, though surely the assumption by so many scholars, enacted in so many school curricula, is that this is how the Bible should wield its influence. The deeper trouble is that historical criticism, by dissecting the Bible and considering its component parts separately, offers for contemplation a text that has had—in just that dissected, anatomized form—no influence before modern times. There is room, then—and to claim th
is is surely not to claim too much—for a form of Bible study that would stress the effect that the collection produces as a whole rather than the effects produced separately by its separable parts.

  13. Peter J. Thuesen, In Discordance With the Scriptures: American Protestant Battles Over Translating the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 154.

  14. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 88. It would be interesting to hear Kermode’s views on the experience of listening to a novel on audiotape.

  Cf. Kermode (The Literary Guide to the Bible, p. 454) on the literary technique of John the Evangelist:

  The method by which [John] arranges … inconspicuous repetitions of word, idea, or incident—the literary devices which add up to what E. M. Forster called “rhythms”—may well owe something to Jewish liturgical practice. In the Passover readings the bread of the ceremony is said to replace the forbidden fruit of Genesis 2 and to foretell the manna which will again descend at the coming of Messiah. It has sometimes occurred to me that the subtleties of construction, the more or less occult relationship of parts, that we admire in favored novels owes a largely unconscious debt to ancient liturgical practice. This is a part of one’s justification for calling John a protonovelist.

  15. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967). See, especially, the subchapter “Le Dehors et Le Dedans,” pp. 46ff.

  16. Cited in Thuesen, In Discordance With the Scriptures, p. 3.

  17. Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated from the German by Willard Trask (New York: Anchor Books, 1957). Mimesis appeared in German in 1946 and was first published in English by Princeton University Press in 1953.

  18. Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 16.

  19. “Hermeneutically, it may well be the most natural thing to say that what these accounts are about is the story of Jesus the Messiah, even if there was no such person; or, if there was, he was not in fact the Messiah; and quite regardless of whether or not he (if he did exist) thought of himself as such; and regardless finally of the possible applicative significance of such a story and of the messianic concept to a modern context. Many elements may enter into the way a story makes sense, but its sheer narrative shape is an important and distinctive one which should not be confused with others—especially that of estimating its abiding religious meaning and that of assessing the narrative’s cultural context or the reliability of the “facts” told in the story.” (Ibid., pp. 133–4)

  20. Neil MacGregor with Erika Langmuir, Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art (London: BBC Worldwide Limited, 2000), p. 13. The dean of a California seminary commented to me in 1999 that many of her students do not recognize a painting of the Madonna and Child as other than a painting of an unidentified woman with a baby. Yet I suspect that however lost the iconographic language of European religious art may be, it may be through the recovery of that language that a more fully lost language—the language of medieval biblical commentary as set forth in Henri de Lubac’s four-volume Exégèse médiévale (Paris: Aubier, 1964)—may come to seem worth recovering. The language of intense and intensely playful internal reference continued to be spoken in painting well after it had become a dead language in written exegesis.

  21. For an excellent popular account of this decisive event in Christian history, see Richard E. Rubenstein, When Jesus Became God: The Epic Fight over Christ’s Divinity in the Last Days of Rome (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999).

  22. Defined differently by everyone who invokes it, postmodernism is, for me, not a period that succeeds modernism but, rather, an attitude that rejects periodization as such. Modernism felt a great Hegelian confidence that history had a direction, even a destination. Thus, the recovery of the historical Jesus seemed the destined outcome of the history of New Testament criticism. Postmodernism, by contrast, has no such confidence and therefore feels none of the obligation that modernism felt to go where history is headed. History is going nowhere, it thinks, and so what’s the rush? Its mood is Kierkegaardian and ironic.

  As regards literature, postmodernism recognizes no large, collective enterprise with a clear direction that all legitimate participants must respect. Though the history of interpretation is not cyclical, there is no reason why what has been done already in interpretation may not be done again if we find it rewarding. God: A Biography was indebted to the character criticism of A. C. Bradley, whose major work, Shakespearean Tragedy, appeared in 1904. The more innovation comes to seem mere variation, the more easily the old and neglected can become new again. There exists no historical imperative to be obeyed or disobeyed. Nothing must be done. Anything might be done. When the results are interesting, they are not interesting because they constitute “progress.” Evidence coerces. Art merely seduces.

  Postmodern literary criticism has been faulted for arrogance toward the author and the author’s claims. Michel Foucault famously remarked that “the author is the dead man in the game of writing.” Though I do not regard this view to be the wave of “the” future (there is no “the” future), neither do I regard it as a fad that is now happily behind us. It is here to stay, along with all that preceded it. However, I must say that if the great fault of postmodern criticism has been that, in effect, it treats all books as if they were anonymously written, then this school of criticism may suit the Bible particularly well, because so much of the Bible is irretrievably anonymous and the authorship even of those portions of the Bible that bear some kind of attribution is quite often in dispute.

  Modern historical criticism has labored diligently to bring the Bible to the “normal” condition of clearly identified authors with consistent agendas and clearly identified audiences. Postmodern criticism can and should acknowledge the value, even the grandeur, of this enterprise of rationalization and yet not surrender its right to observe that historical criticism almost inevitably aborts certain highly stimulating and fruitful kinds of literary engagement. For me, both kinds of criticism are interesting and legitimate. And certainly for the modest purposes of this book, the matter need not be pushed much past the recognition that an unintended effect is a real effect, which may be welcomed without prejudice to intended effects. Or, to use the nomenclature of historical criticism, one may ignore questions of authorship and dating in a given discussion while conceding their relevance to many other discussions. One may also concede that what “causes” an unintended effect may be someone’s first experiencing it and then talking about it.

  At such a moment, facing such an unintended effect and sensing the presence of an intrusive subjectivity, modernist historical criticism, like virtually all modernist criticism, catches itself in time, and muffles its inclination to join in the discussion as one might muffle one’s inclination to join in a laugh at a funeral. The critic may find the joke funny, but to laugh at it would interrupt the ceremony—or, in this instance, retard the collective enterprise. Postmodern criticism—going nowhere, we might say—feels no such inhibition. More important, it has time to linger over distractions and chance arrangements that, like a sunset, are intended by nobody but may lift the spirits of anybody willing to be led outdoors for a look.

  23. George MacDonald, The Golden Key, with pictures by Maurice Sendak, afterword by W. H. Auden (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), pp. 81–4.

  24. Kermode, The Literary Guide to the Bible, pp. 382–3.

  25. Interview in The Art Newspaper, No. 100, February 2000.

  26. The New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1950, chosen and edited by Helen Gardner (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 703.

  27. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, volume I, The Poems, revised, edited by Richard J. Finneran (New York: Macmillan, 1989), p. 240.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
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  Doubleday and Darton, Longman & Todd: Excerpts from The Jerusalem Bible, copyright © 1966 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd. and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., and Darton, Longman & Todd.

  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC: Excerpt from Afterword by W. H. Auden, copyright © 1967 by W. H. Auden, copyright renewed 1995 by Edward Mendelson, from The Golden Key by George MacDonald. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  Harvard University Press: Excerpts from The Literary Guide to the Bible by Robert Alter and John Kermode (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), copyright © 1987 by Robert Alter and John Kermode. Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press.

  The Jewish Publication Society: Excerpts from the Tanakh: The New JPS Translation According to the Traditional Hebrew Text, copyright © 1985 by The Jewish Publication Society. Reprinted by permission of The Jewish Publication Society.

  National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA: Scripture quotations from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1946, 1952, 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA.