In the air now, there’s a general feeling that somebody or other in the early church, probably St Paul, retrospectively glued Godhood onto poor Jesus, appropriating what was clearly a perfectly ordinary and unmysterious career as a Jewish preacher, and using it as a vehicle for weird shit. Jesus goes about encouraging people to be kind and forgiving; then, when he’s safely dead, he gets signed up as the lead of an unlikely cosmic drama he’d have been horrified by if he’d ever known about it. Lift the lid of the interpretation, and there’s the man underneath, a minor first-century religious reformer with a bit of a bee in his bonnet about gentleness. A well-intentioned and irrelevant person from the pre-Enlightenment ages of superstition. Result: happiness.
The trouble is that the historical sequence by which we get the story is exactly the other way round. The interpretation came first, before the narratives about him wandering around preachin’ and teachin’. Of all the documents in the New Testament, the oldest are St Paul’s letters (‘Epistles’) to the various early churches. They were written in the fifties AD, fifteen to twenty years after the crucifixion, and they are metaphor-heavy discourses about what Jesus was and what he meant. They don’t have the whole elaborated theological vocabulary for describing him that came later – partly because they themselves are helping invent that vocabulary – and they certainly don’t have the neat three-cornered diagram of the ‘Holy Trinity’ that Christianity is going to end up with, with God’s making, mending and sustaining aspects tidied up into ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Holy Spirit’. But they, the letters, do have an absolutely definite set of convictions about him that they are casting around for adequate words to express. That Jesus’s actions in the world were God’s own actions in the world; that where Jesus was present, God was directly present too; that his death and return from death were an initiative by God to take from humanity the weight of guilt and shame and disgust, and to show us a life larger than law. This cluster of propositions is Christianity’s first layer of organised words and understandings. It, not the biographies, is the foundation. Which means that the strange God/man mixture is there in the foundation. It may not be true, it may still be a piece of after-the-event fabrication or misunderstanding, but it is not an addition to the story. It is, itself, the thing the story is struggling to report.
We have the biographies (‘Gospels’) because early Christians – i.e. early believers in the God/man mixture in Jesus – wanted to illustrate it in story, to bring home (as only story can for human beings) its emotional force. They had some kind of a collection of his sayings, in the fifties and sixties of the first century, which they probably passed around in many slightly different copies. Now they expanded it, in coarse and workaday Greek, into a continuous narrative. This happened four times over, starting in the seventies with the one the New Testament calls the Gospel of Mark, and ending with John late in the nineties or early in the 100s, each unfolding of the story making a slightly different selection from the bag of memories and traditions, each tending to emphasise a particular theme in its portrait of him, each doing some topical work in the disputes of the decade it was written in. Note the language: the trade tongue of the whole eastern end of the Roman empire, not the Semitic dialect Yeshua actually spoke. The story already had its travelling clothes on. This is where Yeshua becomes Jesus. Note the timing too. In the late sixties, the long-awaited explosion had finally come in Palestine, with the outbreak of the first of three full-scale revolts, each of which would be suppressed with extreme prejudice by several legions of violence’s trained professionals.* When the Gospel stories started to be written, Jerusalem was already a ruin and the temple was rubble; the province’s countryside was beginning to be ethnically cleansed. The landscape of small towns and small-town synagogues, populated by yearning, fearful, angry people, was ceasing to exist. The Gospel writers were recreating a lost place and time when they described Jesus’s journeys fifty, sixty, seventy years earlier. The interpretation was always fused with the events.
* In the last of the three, the Bar Kokhba uprising of AD 132–6, an actual old-school military moshiakh appeared. The death toll was around six hundred thousand.
Moreover, even if you try to discard everything in the biographies which is explicitly devoted to storytelling Jesus’s divinity, and just concentrate on the bits which must have come most uncontentiously from the lost sayings-collection, you still don’t get back to a layer in which he’s just a wise person dispensing wisdom. The striking thing about the advice on behaviour he gives is how catastrophically impractical most of it is as a guide to the good life, if by a good life you mean something reasonably self-protecting, and concerned with next year, and with living in some kind of viable community. ‘Great moral teachers’ tend to be concerned with respecting your parents (Confucius), defining duty and justice (Socrates), detaching yourself from desire (the Buddha), discovering law (Moses), and getting people to see themselves as accountable individuals rather than fractions of a tribe (Muhammad). ‘If someone asks for your coat, give them your shirt too’ is not ‘great moral teaching’ in this sense. It is either foolishness, or something else.
Needless to say, the something else might be just: a mistake. C. S. Lewis produced one of the great Bad Arguments of all time when he proposed that Jesus must either have been (a) exactly what he said he was – what he said he was being, perhaps, slightly neatened up for the occasion – or (b) the wickedest person who ever lived. A pause for thought lasting no more than a millisecond produces, slap bang in the excluded middle that Lewis was trying to rule out, but which wobbles and gurgles all the same like the vast wide-open distended logical midriff that it is, an immediate option (c). That is, that Jesus really thought his burning, urgent, lover’s perception of humanity belonged in some way to the God of everything, but was just plain wrong. You can imagine any number of ways in which, in a charged and desperate and theologically expectant environment, an intense young man might persuade himself that it was up to him to reconcile God and humanity. Making him not the messiah, but just a very silly boy. Or indeed – option (d) – the mistake may after all have been the early church’s, and a Judaic Jesus with something completely different on his mind may simply have been lost in the translation from memory to words. But the story they told, once they told a story at all, was committedly the story of God-among-us, God entering into our lives and deaths.
Hold on, though. Aren’t there a zillion other ‘Gospels’, arbitrarily ignored and suppressed and edited out of the picture to produce the illusion of theological orthodoxy? You know, heaving with secret lore and hot sex? Well . . . no. Not really. Sorry. The publishers who’ve tried to cash in on the post-Da Vinci Code interest in Early Christian Freakiness by bringing out mass-market editions of The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Judas, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene and so on have had to work really hard to make the stuff seem thrilling. For one thing, hardly any of these books actually tell a consecutive but alternative version of Jesus’s life story. They don’t draw on different facts, details and memories about him; they were mostly written much later, in the late 100s, the 200s, even the 300s, and they are called ‘gospels’ because ‘gospel’ had by then become the name of something prestigious and authoritative, in rather the way that, On the Origin of Species being an extremely famous and influential book, we have – a quick Googling reveals – a slew of books called things like The Origin of Wealth, The Origins of Political Order, The Origins of the World’s Mythologies, The Origins of the British and The Origins of the First World War. What these other ‘gospels’ are instead is a series of pamphlets in which Jesus serves as the mouthpiece for the authors’ preoccupations, usually magical or esoteric. It isn’t that they cast an intriguingly different light on someone who is recognisably the same person as the one in the New Testament. They are worlds away in mood and tone and attitude.
The Jesus of the orthodox story treats people with deep attention even when angry. Their Jesus zaps people with his divine superpowers if t
hey irritate him. Orthodox Jesus says that everyone needs the love of God, and God loves everyone. Their Jesus has an inner circle you can be admitted to if you collect enough crisp packets. Orthodox Jesus likes wine, parties, and grilled fish for breakfast. Their Jesus thinks that human flesh and its appetites are icky. Orthodox Jesus is disconcertingly unbothered about sexuality, and conducts his own sexual life, if he has one, off the page. Their Jesus can generate women to have sex with out of his own ribs, in a way that suggests the author had trouble talking to girls. Orthodox Jesus says, ‘Don’t be afraid. I am always with you.’ The Jesus of these documents says, ‘Advance, Blue Adept, to the 17th Jade Portal of Amazingness, and give the secret signal with your thumbs.’* Read much of the rival ‘gospels’, and you start to think that the Church Fathers who decided what went into the New Testament had one of the easiest editorial jobs on record. It wasn’t a question of suppression or exclusion, so much as of seeing what did and didn’t belong inside the bounds of a basically coherent story.
* In effect. Believe me, I have done you a favour by condensing a vast amount of Gnostic wibble into this convenient joke.
But a strange story. Still, it cannot be denied, a very strange story; with a peculiar and untidy vision of the nature of God at the centre of it. Claiming that a provincial rabbi somehow embodies the impulse behind billions of years of history and unthinkable expanses of space does not have much philosophical dignity to it as a position. It is – let’s be honest – the kind of silly thing that a cult would assert. It entails a very odd, even comical, blending of the universal and the extremely local. It deliberately entangles unlikenesses. To have a creator who becomes a creature mixes up the conceptual layers of ordinary reality. It pokes a hole in reality and pulls some of the background through to form a lovely rosette; it ties a Möbius-knot in the fabric, like the paradox Bertrand Russell came unstuck on, when he was trying to compile a complete axiomatic basis for logic using set theory, and ran into the problem of the set that has itself for one of its members.* Or you could put the paradox in literary terms, and say that this is a story which has its author as one of the characters – not parachuted in all post-modernistically, to twist and trick and tease and hint that the whole structure is airy nothing, but the opposite, with the author brain-hurtingly embedded on exactly the same terms as the other characters, his presence having the effect of making the story more real, more consequential.
* A problem which has a lot more bearing on Christian belief than the sodding teapot, by the way.
What’s more, the mixture involved has the psychological power that matter-out-of-place famously does. It can be perceived as contaminating precious things that are supposed to be kept apart from each other. Things that are kept apart or set apart are ‘holy’ – that’s what the word ‘holy’ means – and the Christian move of giving God a human body literally messes with holiness, at least as the other two monotheisms define it. For two thousand years, the Christian story is going to strike first Jews and then Muslims too as a besmirching of the purity and absoluteness of the one God with cheap, nasty stuff from the pagan play-book, where gods walk the earth bamboozling kings and jumping on maidens. You can see their point. They had only just finished laboriously picking the human bad behaviour out of their picture of the God of everything, and along came Christians, putting human, fleshy qualities back in. How can God beget a son, asks the Qur’an? And it isn’t just quibbling over the powers of divinity. It’s saying that God stands (and must stand, if He’s to be truly God) apart from, and distinct from, the whole category of biological existence. Christians disagree. We disagree because the God/man mixture in Jesus brings us something more precious than conceptual purity: hope in trouble, consolation in suffering, help in anguish. It brings us a way out of the far worse and more destructive paradoxes of theodicy. But it does lay our story alongside some disconcertingly similar stories out of mythology, and it requires us to ask ourselves, clearly and carefully, what kind of story we think ours is.
As freethinkers have been gleefully reminding everyone for the last two centuries – always, somehow, with the air of playing a killer card no one has ever noticed before – the New Testament’s story of Jesus is not, to put it mildly, the only one humanity has ever come up with about a dying god. The ancient Greeks had Adonis bleeding out onto the springtime earth, and coming back to life three days later having renewed the world. The Egyptians had Osiris, ripped into shreds and scattered like holy flesh-confetti into all the nooks and crannies of matter. The Vikings had Odin getting wisdom by hanging nailed to a tree. It’s a common mythological move, a cultural basic, an anthropological golden oldie. Transcendent power goes down into the dark and allows itself to be extinguished, but then returns all the stronger, having incorporated into itself the strength of the opposing principle. A frequent Christian response, when this is pointed out, is to argue that all the other stories are foreshadowings or echoes of ours, which happens to be the one true story. But this, to me, seems rather obviously to set the big red Special Pleading alarm flashing, and to sound the klaxon of bullshit. I think a better answer is just to agree that universal is universal is universal. Everybody dies; everybody tells stories about gods; everybody is going to try, at some point, to make story-sense of death by subjecting one of the lustrous figures of the gods to it. The usual point of gods is that they’re immortal, which will make the death of one of them bring out all the more fiercely the existential scandal which is our own death. Gods, in anthropological terms, are where we put in concentrated form our sense of what our own being, our own aliveness, is. A god dies: being encounters non-being. Everyone sits up in their seats and leans forward, because the drama is our own. So perhaps that’s what Christianity is, the traditional god-dies theme being installed for the God of everything? If so, then the story I’ve just told is a myth. We can categorise Jesus’s adventures as forming an imaginative pattern like the pattern of the story of Odin, one whose function is to embody a deep piece of human meaning-discovery. One which is true (or maybe ‘true’) so far as it embodies true perception, rather than because it corresponds to any actual event.
But though Jesus’s story certainly has some mythic parallels, and acquired some mythic resonances as it became a whole culture’s founding artefact, it does not read like a myth. It’s the wrong shape, in a number of different ways. For a start, it doesn’t happen in the special time set aside for myths, the dream-time, the long-ago zone off to the side of calendar history where gods and heroes strutted their stuff. What year was it when Odin hung on the tree? The question does not compute. It’s a category error, like asking what colour accountancy is. Jesus’s story, by contrast, happens at a definite historical address. As Monty Python’s Life of Brian puts it, ‘Judea, AD 33, teatime’. From our point of view twenty centuries later, this may seem fairly misty and far-off, but it’s firmly within the documented, busy, event-stuffed course of human history, the zone of prose and politics, in which people like ourselves worked and worried as we do. Part of the point of the story is that it happens in ordinary time, amidst people who are already precoccupied and are not expecting anything special to come along. The story is about God coming into what’s ordinary, and changing it.
This same ordering of things – extraordinary into ordinary – applies, in fact, to Jesus as a protagonist, and makes him very different from a myth’s hero. In myth, our ordinary preoccupations get projected outwards in extraordinary form. They’re amplified into fantasy. Here, what is emphatically not our view of the world, not our set of natural priorities, not us, breaks inward into the world of our ordinary experience, and dwells among us, ‘full of grace and truth’. Instead of surging about looking superlative, as mythic heroes are prone to do, flexing enormous muscles or giving smiles of groin-melting beauty, Jesus does his best to complicate and perturb any worshipful reactions he might get, by asking awkward questions. ‘Why do you call me good?’ ‘Who do you say that I am?’ It may be normal for us as human beings t
o be worshipful, deferring to those in our local troupe of primates we perceive as being grander, stronger, wiser, braver, more glamorous than us; but Jesus, who in the Christian view is the one person who fully deserves worship, goes out of his way to demonstrate that he does not need it. We’re back at the non-rivalrous majesty of the creator. Jesus is not in the business of competing for our admiration, or for anything else. Nothing he has or is, in the story, is extracted from other people’s reactions to him. He shows us a vision of the good which does not ask us to bow down – though we may want to – but, over and over again, to stand up. (And to take the bed with us.)
If it isn’t a myth, then perhaps it is a tragedy. On the immediate face of it, this seems an unlikely category to find it in. Hello? It has a happy ending? Yes it does; it has the original ‘eucatastrophe’, or unexpected turning of events to the good. But it doesn’t have its happy end instead of the grim outcome that leaves the stage piled with bodies in a tragedy. It doesn’t procure its happy end by saying that with one bound Jesus was free, or that his friends rode up with a fast horse and a stepladder; or that, in any way, the necessities tragedy pays attention to, the necessities of pride and fear and anger and distrust, were prevented from having their full dire effect, and unrolling their consequences to their last inevitable gasp. The happy end of Jesus’s story is not a daydream of escape. It’s not like the bowdlerised eighteenth-century version of King Lear where Cordelia’s husband turns up to save her in the nick of time, and Lear goes contentedly off with her to live at her house. Yeshua’s story has its happy ending because of its tragic one: happiness after tragedy, on top of it, through it, achievable only by going to the very end of the tragic road.
Unapologetic Page 13
