With the miracles of Jesus the New Testament presents the modern reader with a conundrum so tangled that we may just about despair of making any sense of it. We admire Jesus’s ideals (even if in a part of our mind we find them unrealistic) and his moral teachings (even if a part of our ego recoils from them). Having read our way through the dark works of the Eastern European fantasists from Kafka to Kundera, we are no longer so quick as we might once have been to dismiss the Book of Revelation as a grand expression of paranoia. Having lived through a time of state-sponsored terrors of unbelievable proportions, we no longer find Paul’s antipolitics so peculiar. Living daily in a new economic order of Winner Take All, we may even begin to see the point of Luke’s targeting the fundamental injustice of riches, of haves and have-nots. But stopping storms, curing blindness and leprosy, exorcising demons, raising the dead—come on. We either consign these marvels to the realm of fairy tales and the superstitions of prescientific peoples or take the more moderate view that there “may be something there”—a substrate of incidents that originally made perfectly good scientific sense but to which marvelous explanations were later appended. Couldn’t Jesus’s stopping of the storm on the Lake of Galilee have been just a coincidence: he said “cease” and, lucky for him, the storm just happened to end? Couldn’t the feeding of the multitude of five thousand with five loaves and two fish be a simple case of inflation (of the numbers of people involved) and deflation (of the amount of food available) that occurred over time in the repeated telling of the story? Couldn’t the supposed cures have been of hysterical, rather than real, illnesses? Could Jesus simply have been a clever magician who resorted to tricks, perhaps with the complicity of his closest disciples, in order to enlarge his gullible following?
The hypothesis of Jesus the Magician is actually pretty weak, since none of the miracles recounted in the gospels is explicable by this hypothesis alone. One needs to make additional assumptions—the disciples had heaps of food hidden in a nearby cave in preparation for the multiplication “miracle,” the people raised weren’t really dead, the “lepers” were wearing leper makeup from a Martin Scorsese film—that require either sleight of hand beyond the powers of even the most accomplished prestidigitator or a level of credulity that cannot be posited even of children. Beyond this, we must bear in mind that the witnesses knew the people whose ailments were cured, even knew those raised from the dead—which would make a pretended “cure” much more difficult to effect than would be the case nowadays in, say, the tent of a televangelist.
There is, in addition to the (very nearly) insurmountable difficulty of establishing the practical mechanics for such sham miracles, an invidious precondition to such a theory: Jesus himself must be shown to have been a sham, hoodwinking multitudes for his own questionable purposes. Though it is possible to imagine someone like Machiavelli descending to such trickery (or, more likely, advising someone else to try it), it is downright impossible to square such motivation with the man who is presented to us in the gospels. What is far more likely is that these stories accrued to Jesus in the course of the development of the oral tradition and that by the time the evangelists came along there were already set “wonder stories,” meant to prove that Jesus was the promised Messiah.
A careful analysis of the texts of the gospels, however, has convinced many scripture scholars that several, perhaps even a majority, of the basic miracle stories go back to the most primitive layer of the oral tradition—that is, to the testimony of the original eyewitnesses. One of these scholars is John Meier, whose multivolume study of the “historical Jesus,” A Marginal Jew, still in progress, devotes more than five hundred pages to the miracles of Jesus—a more exhaustive analysis than, I think, has ever been attempted before. Meier is careful to distinguish between what is historically knowable and what is “metahistorical.” The miracles—if they could have occurred—he classifies as “metahistorical” because they are, of their very nature, beyond anything that can be proved to have happened. Meier’s modest conclusion is simply that “the statement that Jesus acted as and was viewed as an exorcist and healer during his public ministry has as much historical corroboration as almost any other statement we can make about the Jesus of history.”
We seem to be faced here with a kind of irreducible historical mystery. We may grant that Mary Magdalene was not possessed, perhaps only the victim of a particularly vicious form of schizophrenia, symbolized by “seven devils,” and that the “possessed boy” of Mark’s Gospel was really an epileptic. We may grant that the “lepers” of the gospels had psoriasis or eczema or any of a variety of virulent skin diseases that ancient peoples had not the medical knowledge to distinguish from authentic leprosy. We can, according to Meier, claim that Jesus walking on the water never happened but is only a theologoumenon, a symbolic epiphany of Jesus who appears to us in the dark—that is, in our worst hour—to say: “It is I [or ‘Here I am’ or even the Hebrew God’s ‘I am’], so don’t be afraid.” But we cannot, it would appear, brush aside the miracles of healing as old wives’ tales. The people who witnessed them believed they had occurred. At least some of the people, like Mary Magdalene, who experienced them found in this extraordinary attention reason to devote themselves permanently to Jesus’s mission. To have been rendered sane or healthy or living once more must, after all, have struck the individual so cured as an overwhelming proof of God’s personal care—a miracle for me.
These inexplicable phenomena were viewed by Jesus and his followers as proofs of the coming of God’s Kingdom. They were, in their eyes, the fulfillment of the Isaian prophecies that the Anointed One would cast out all the evils that infect our world—disease and death, among them—and effect such a peace in nature that even “the lion shall lie down with the lamb.” If the “mark of the Beast” signals hatred and destruction, the most salient mark of the Messiah is that he comforts and heals. When the followers of John the Baptizer come to Jesus on behalf of John, who has been imprisoned by Herod Antipas, they ask: “Are you the One-Who-Is-to-Come, or should we be looking for someone else?” Jesus replies, borrowing Isaiah’s very words: “Go and let John know what you have seen and heard: the blind coming to sight, cripples walking, lepers cleansed, the deaf hearing, the dead raised, and the Good News brought to the poor. Happy indeed is anyone who is not alienated by what I do.” This saying of Jesus, reported in identical passages of Matthew and Luke, clearly goes back to Q, the lost collection of Jesus’s sayings that must have preceded these gospels by three or four decades.
In the final analysis, the modern problem with miracles is little different from what the ancient one would have been. If one believes in a God who heals, then healing in itself—whether of the quotidian kind or of an uncommon and spectacular sort—will hardly seem inconceivable or out of reach. If one cannot conceive of such a God—of an ultimate Goodness at the heart of the universe—miracles are, both intellectually and emotionally, off limits. In speaking of the medically inexplicable cures that have been occurring for a century and a half at the French shrine of Lourdes, John LaFarge, son of the American painter of the same name and a man who dedicated his life to peace and reconciliation, remarked cogently: “For those who believe in God, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not, no explanation is possible.”
1 This is Herod the Great, friend of Augustus, who was crowned “king of Judea” by the Romans and ruled from 37 to 4 B.C., just long enough to be the king who attempts to kill the infant Jesus by a wholesale slaughter of Bethlehem’s male infants, as recounted in Matthew 2:16–18. His son, Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Perea from 4 B.C. to A.D. 39 and stepfather of Salome, will execute John the Baptizer.
2 Of course, avoidance of shame is hardly confined to the Orient. Robert Graves was not far off the mark when, in I, Claudius, he gave the face-saving Roman imperial family all the elegant but empty manners of the English upper classes.
3 Levites were lower clergy, who could assist at the Temple liturgy but could not offer sacrif
ice, which was reserved to the Aaronid priesthood.
4 Matthew seems to have used a form of this prayer (traditionally called the “Our Father” or “Lord’s Prayer”) that was in current liturgical use, thus the “our.” Being more apocalyptic (and more Jewish) than Luke, he substitutes for Luke’s “each day” “this day,” as if there may not be another. His version of the forgiveness clause is slightly more restricted than Luke’s: instead of “sins,” “debts,” which are to be forgiven insofar as I have forgiven others; Luke assumes that the speaker has already forgiven everyone everything.
5 The person in need can be oneself. Though the story of the householder is preserved only in Luke, Jesus’s saying “Ask, and you shall receive …” also turns up in Matthew, both evangelists having derived it from Q. But in Matthew, who is likely to be closer to Q’s words, the saying ends with Jesus’s promise that “your Father in heaven will give good things to those who ask him.” Luke’s substitution of the courage-giving “Spirit” for “good things” almost certainly reflects his greater awareness of state persecution against Christians. If the hunches of some scholars are correct—that Matthew was based in Asian Antioch while Luke was active in the Pauline communities of Greek-speaking Europe (like Achaia and Macedon)—the difference in Roman policy toward Christian communities in these two regions could well account for the differing report of this saying in these two evangelists.
6 We have come in modern times to think of rabbis as Jewish “clergy,” but in the first century they were still an innovation and not considered officials (as were the Temple priests and levites).
V
Drunk in the Morning Light
The People of the Way
THE PARTICULARS OF RESURRECTION, however one may interpret them, make for fascinating reading; and the encounters of the disciples with the risen Jesus, as the evangelists retell them, form a unique collection in the annals of the world. Their uniqueness lies not only in their singular subject but in the details inserted by the evangelists into the narratives, details which were, surely in some cases, divulged by the original participants. As I read the recountings of these explosively joyful experiences, I am always aware of the smells of spring breaking through the clotted earth and linen fresh from the laundry—the sweetness of life overcoming the molderings of death.
In Mark’s narrative, as we have already seen, Mary Magdalene and two other women make their way to the tomb “very early on the first day of the week … as the sun was rising,” this last, modestly inserted detail indicating that they will just miss the resurrection itself. Stunned to find the tomb open and, inside, a strange and talkative young man dressed in white, they drop their spices for the dead and run headlong from the tomb, frightened out of their wits, but on their way (according to Matthew) to “tell his [male] disciples,” who are cowering elsewhere. The bright April sun must have made vivid the flowing robes and veils of the women, now wild and in full flight, and warmed their arms and faces till they could begin to suspect that something wonderful had happened.
In John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene is the first to behold the risen Jesus. She is in a spring garden close by the tomb. Through copious tears, she sees a man coming toward her, whom she takes to be the gardener. “Woman,” he asks her, “why are you weeping? Who do you want?”
“Sir,” wails Mary, “if you have taken him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will go and remove him.”
“Mary,” says the “gardener”—and with that one word Mary knows who it is.
“Rabbuni!” she cries out, using the most august Aramaic for “rabbi,” and clutches him to her.
Luke presents us with two dejected disciples leaving Jerusalem as the shadows are lengthening along the road in the sunny afternoon of this most unusual day. They are joined along the way to Emmaus by a third man, who listens politely to their talk of their rabbi, one “Jesus of Nazareth, who showed himself a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and the whole people.” But he was “handed over” to be crucified with the complicity of “our chief priests and leaders.” “Our own hope,” admit the two travelers to the newcomer, “had been that he would be the one to set Israel free. And this is not all: it is three days [by Jewish reckoning, that is, from Friday to Sunday] since this happened; and some women from our group have astounded us: they went to the tomb early this morning, and when they could not find the body, they came back to tell us that they had had an angelic vision declaring him alive.”
The third man, well versed in scripture, explains to them that “it was necessary that the Messiah should suffer before entering into his glory.” Then, Luke tells us, “starting with Moses and going through all the prophets, he explained to them the passages throughout the scriptures” that concerned the Messiah. “As they drew near the village … he made as if to go on, but they pressed him to stay with them saying, ‘It is almost evening, and the day is nearly done.’
“So he went into the village to stay with them. Now while he was with them at table, he took the bread and said the blessing, then broke it and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened,” reports Luke, “and they recognized him; but he had vanished from their sight. Then they said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us as he talked to us on the road and opened the scriptures to us?’ ”
The motifs of light and heat emphasize important themes. Time is precious; and just as the “day” of the prophets of Israel had to come to an end, the “day” of Jesus is “nearly done,” to be succeeded by the Age of the Spirit that is about to break upon the disciples. The light of day—the limpid, physical presence of the Son of God in their midst, talking with them, breaking bread—will be transmuted into the fire in their hearts, the invisible presence of the Spirit to which they must respond from now on, even if their journey lies in darkness.
From now on. The Age of the Spirit is also the Age of the Church; and if such a phrase makes us shudder a little, bringing on historical memories of Grand Inquisitors and human bonfires, this was hardly the case for the disciples, whose insignificant “Church” was, to begin with, a collection of no more than a hundred-odd marginal men and women. They banded together, at first in fear that Jesus’s fate might prove to be their own. But gradually they took courage, and finally they went public. The transition period—between the morning of resurrection and the first fearless, out-loud announcement that “he is risen”—took nearly seven weeks, stretching from the Sunday after the beginning of Passover to Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, which Greek-speaking Jews called Pentecost.
At the beginning of this period, at least some disciples (and we don’t know how many) were the recipients of appearances of Jesus, such as the appearances to Magdalene and the two travelers on the road to Emmaus. The huddled Twelve (now eleven since the betrayal and departure of Judas) became aware of Jesus in their midst on more than one occasion. These “appearances” were not like the appearance of an incorporeal ghost. Magdalene seems to have clung to a very material Jesus; he invited Thomas, the skeptical disciple who had been missing during an earlier appearance, to “feel” the wounds in his hands and side (where a soldier’s lance had pierced him while he hung dead on the cross); and he even ate food.
It is impossible to say, after two thousand years and in a world whose categories and measurements are so different from those of the first century, what the nature of these appearances might have been. To set them down as a hoax would do a significant disservice to the teaching that surrounds them. As in the case of Jesus’s miracles, we would have to imagine that the most sublime moral sentiments ever expressed had somehow been drafted in the service of a cheap fraud. To hypothesize that the disciples were the victims of mass hysteria would be almost as problematic: Jesus appeared to groups, certainly, but first of all to individuals (who cannot be accused of mass hysteria); and the disciples of Jesus, simple though many of them certainly were, were not notable so much for their fanciful imaginations as for their plodding literalness—hardly the ideal ground f
or hysteria of any sort. It seems wisest to say that the disciples believed that they had encountered the risen Jesus, that he was looking much better than when they had seen him last (to the extent that some of them didn’t even recognize him at first), and that, despite the ease with which he appeared and disappeared, he was tangible.
How long this sequence of experiences lasted we cannot say. The evangelists seem to swing between asserting that everything happened in one day, after which Jesus withdrew from them permanently, and assuming a longer period of some forty days, after which Jesus took formal leave of his faithful disciples and ascended into the heavens. Either there was something about these experiences that left the minds of the recipients clouded as to time and circumstance or the experiences themselves were of such a timeless nature that it seemed afterward impossible to insert them into a normal, consecutive chronology.
The courage that the disciples would eventually display came to them, they believed, from “the Spirit,” their reception of which was, like that of Jesus’s resurrection, an experience unlike any other. In John’s Gospel, the risen Jesus breathes on them and says: “Receive the holy Spirit.” In Luke, he merely tells them in his final instruction to “remain in the city till you are clothed with power from on high.” Then, in the Acts of the Apostles, written by Luke to extend the story of his gospel into that of the early Church, the Spirit is described as descending on the disciples ten days after Jesus’s ascension, in a dramatic theophany replete with Old Testament wind and fire. “When the Day of Pentecost came,” the Twelve, their number again complete by the appointment of Matthias to replace the lost Judas, were gathered together with Jesus’s family and some unnamed male and female disciples (possibly one hundred twenty in all, probably fewer), in a house in Jerusalem,
Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) Page 19
