The religion of these adherents, who came to be called “Christians,” appeared at first to be a somewhat kinky variety of Judaism but gradually grew away from orthodox Jewish tenets, not so much in its ethical concerns, which remained focused on characteristically Jewish values of justice, mercy, charity, and brotherhood, but in its innovative theology, which took Jesus to be not only Messiah but Lord of the Universe who sits at God’s right hand. The closer the Christians came to deifying Jesus, the more they tended to alienate the Jews from whom they had sprung. The longer the Christians meditated on the events of Jesus’s life and death and their subsequent experiences of his “resurrection,” the higher he seemed to rise in the heavens, till they began to acclaim him not only “Savior of the World” but “God’s Only Son,” whose sufferings had redeemed us from sin and whose resurrection held out the promise of our own.
The writings these Christians began to collect—narrations about Jesus and the first Christians, letters of exhortation and encouragement by early “apostolic” figures—gradually took on for them a sacred character, not unlike the character of the Jewish scriptures, the so-called Hebrew Bible—which the Christians continued to revere and read aloud at their meetings (and interpret from their own idiosyncratic theological perspective). The new writings would over the succeeding centuries be gathered into a definitive collection, called the “New Testament” and appended to the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures that they now called the “Old Testament.” The first five books of this New Testament—the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and Luke’s Acts—became for Christians the new Torah, as the apostolic letters became the new Prophets, with Paul, the most important, at their head, just as Isaiah stood at the head of the Hebrew Prophets. The New Testament, at about one-third the length of the Old, contains no equivalent of the Writings, the third-ranking part of the Hebrew Bible, though the Book of Revelation, which closes the collection, is closely imitative of the apocalyptic Hebrew Prophecy of Daniel.
These books and letters of the New Testament are of varying quality and importance. Because they are the work of many hands, they exhibit some of the quirks and contradictions of the Old Testament, the story of whose composition spans more than a millennium and a half. But because they were written over a fifty-year period by two generations of authors, many of whom had some contact with one another, they also exhibit a marked consistency and even unity.
In nothing is their unity so evident as in their portrayal of Jesus. Though he is presented in various lights and shadows, depending on the concerns, personality, and skill of each author, he exudes even under this treatment a remarkable consistency, so that we feel on finishing his story, whether it is told well or badly, simply or extravagantly, that we know the man—and that in each telling he is identifiably the same man. This phenomenon of consistency beneath the differences makes Jesus a unique figure in world literature: never have so many writers managed to convey the same impression of the same human being over and over again. More than this, Jesus—what he says, what he does—is almost always comprehensible to the reader, who needs no introduction, no scholarly background, to penetrate the meaning of Jesus’s words and actions. The Sermon on the Mount, the Good Samaritan, the Washing of the Feet, the Empty Tomb: all these and many more gestures, instructions, and symbols are immediately intelligible not only to the simplest reader but even to the unlettered and the immature.
There is no other body of literature approaching its two thousandth birthday of which the same may be said. The works of the Hellenistic historians, the Roman poets, and even the rabbinic commentators of the same period require learned introductions and a mass of accompanying footnotes to be penetrated by a reader of the twenty-first century. To appreciate how singular the gospels are, one should also attempt to comprehend a work like Virgil’s Aeneid, written within a hundred years of the gospels but today requiring months of study of its cultural setting if one is to reach an elementary understanding of its meaning.
What especially makes the gospels—from a literary point of view—works like no others is that they are about a good human being. As every writer knows, such a creature is all but impossible to capture on the page, and there are exceedingly few figures in all literature who are both good and memorable. Yet the evangelists, who left no juvenilia behind them—no failed novels, rhythmless poems, or other early works by which we might judge their progress as writers—whose Greek was often odd or imprecise, and who were not practiced writers of any sort, these four succeeded where almost all others have failed. To a writer’s eyes, this feat is a miracle just a little short of raising the dead.
In nothing do the evangelists succeed so unabashedly as in their depictions of Jesus’s sufferings, their careful, step-by-step recountings of his arrest, interrogations, torture, humiliation before hostile crowds, condemnation, the public parade in which he is conscripted to carry the splintery instrument of his own death, his crucifixion with spikes, his slow dying, displayed to all in his death agony. If, as the Roman centurion admits after he is dead, “This man was truly God’s son,” then the Father chose for this son of his a time to be born in which one might die by the most painful means that human beings have ever devised.
So intense was the suffering of Jesus before and during his crucifixion that the early Christians could not bring themselves to depict it. We have, almost from the very beginning of Christianity, Christian art—pictures that form a distinctively Christian message: in grave slabs as early as the first century we see the Church depicted as the saving ark of Noah, the Holy Spirit depicted as the descending dove of Acts, and figures of early Christians, both men and women, praying with uplifted hands, as Muslims still do today. In the catacombs, we find a crumbling mosaic of Christ as the Unconquered Sun (an image borrowed from ancient mythologies), a quickly daubed Good Shepherd, many portrayals of the Last Supper, even a tender fresco of the Madonna and Child. But nowhere is there a crucifixion scene. The first one ever will be carved in wood as one of many scenes from Jesus’s life—in a side door of the exquisite basilica of Santa Sabina, a Roman church of the fifth century that stands on the Aventine Hill. It will take the early Christians four centuries to bring themselves to portray the crucifixion of their Messiah. By the time they get around to it, Augustine of Hippo lies dying, the barbarian hordes are overrunning the empire, and Patrick is in Gaul making his fateful travel plans to evangelize the Irish. By the time they get around to it, in other words, they are no longer early Christians; they are already on the verge of the Middle Ages. And still they are careful not to let this abomination occupy a central place in their churches.
This central fact of Jesus’s life, his grisly suffering and death, traumatized the first Christians; and even though it was the central reality they had to contend with, they could not look at it directly. Crucifixion was the ultimate form of Roman humiliation; and to understand it properly, we have to imagine a grove of huge poles set up in a central thoroughfare, where any day as we pass by we may see fellow citizens pinned to the poles with great iron nails, pierced through their joints, ripped open and left to be drained of blood as if they were animal carcasses. Every day freshly crucified victims appear on the poles as the old victims expire and are carted off for burial. The crucified men, twisted, bloody torsos stripped for all to see, anti-Adonises, writhe and grimace most horribly in their pain. Delicate citizens pass by quickly with averted eyes, while the more sportive and cruel among us taunt the nailed men, in the same way that people today stand outside prisons to scream at criminals on their way to the gas chamber, the electric chair, the lethal injection—the way people always gathered eagerly in ages past to witness public executions. We spit on the pierced men and tell them how happy their pain makes us, how richly they deserve it, that our only wish is to see their dying last as long as possible.
Not only their clothes but what John the Elder calls “the pride of life,” the rightful pride that every man (especially a man as young as Jesus, i
n his early thirties) takes in his own body and bearing, has been stripped from these utterly naked men. The public, physical humiliation—beginning with the flogging of Jesus by Roman centurions, the mock crowning with thorns (which were pressed down into Jesus’s scalp), and all that followed—this was a trauma not only to Jesus’s followers but to Jesus, to his soul as well as his body. Lest he should miss out on even the worst psychological torment he could possibly experience, the Father himself—his Abba, whom Jesus always felt to be with him—withdrew his presence, forcing Jesus to cry out accusingly not long before his death in the words of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you deserted me?” (The great American biblical scholar Raymond Brown used to remark that there is no human being who does not utter the words of this prayer sooner or later. But we, unlike Jesus, have good reason to expect God’s absence.) What could anyone add by way of further suffering?
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
We were there. Each of us can find ourselves somewhere in that brutal scene, as taunters, comforters, indifferent passersby. But, more profoundly, we were there because this entire action of Jesus, of submitting to this awful suffering, was done on our behalf, we the taunting, frightened, indifferent friends of Jesus. “Greater love than this no man has than that he lay down his life for his friends.” That is Jesus’s own explanation of his motivation. “God so loved the world that he gave away his only son. God sent this son of his into the world not to judge the world but that through him the world might be saved.” That is the Fourth Gospel’s explanation of the Father’s motivation. “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.” That is Jesus’s prayer to the Father, asking him to ignore our motivation.
The early Christians, the original friends of Jesus, so sympathized with Jesus’s pain and had been so traumatized by it that they could not bring themselves to depict the stark reality of his suffering, except in words—that is, in the accounts of the four gospels, which are as clipped and precise as the four authors knew how to make them. Only in the fifth century, nearly a century after the Roman state had discontinued the practice of crucifixion and no one living had witnessed such a procedure, did Christians forget the shame and horror of the event sufficiently to begin to make pictures of it. By the time they began making such pictures, many of the gruesome details of actual crucifixion had been forgotten; and Jesus is depicted on the cross not as a man in agony but as the artist supposed he must have appeared at his resurrection. One detail, in particular, was completely forgotten. The gospels imply that Jesus was nailed to the cross through his hands and feet, fulfilling the description in Psalm 22 (“They pierced my hands and my feet”); and this serves well enough as a rough description. All artists from the fifth century on took this to mean that Jesus was nailed through the palms of his hands, and this is how we see him depicted down to the present day. But if a man were to be crucified through his palms, he would quickly slide off his cross, because the bones of the hands are insufficiently strong and stable to hold the weight of a body. Jesus was crucified through the bones of his wrists. We are now certain of this, because Israeli archeologists have dug up bodies from Jesus’s time that were crucified in this Roman manner.
It may be that all during the centuries that Christians could not bring themselves to portray the crucified Christ they had a picture of Jesus’s sufferings, a picture that they claimed was “not made by human hands.” There is, at least, an ancient tradition that such an image existed as a treasure of the Eastern church and that, after many adventures, it came to rest at Constantinople. There are some indications that this picture may be what we now call the Shroud of Turin, which in the fourteenth century was brought back from the crusades by a plundering French nobleman and finally found its way to the cathedral of Turin in Italy. Ancient creases in the cloth give evidence that the Shroud was at one time displayed face out with the unsightly corpus of the crucified folded out of view. A few years ago carbon-14 dating done on the Shroud yielded a medieval, not a first-century, date. But since then other scientists have discovered that there is on the surface of the cloth a bioplastic coating—that is, a form of bacterium that reproduces itself and interferes with accurate carbon dating. Such a coating appears to cover many ancient objects made of fiber.
The Shroud is approximately fourteen feet long by three and a half feet wide and contains a faint, straw-colored image of a naked man, who would have stood about six feet tall. The corpse would first have been laid on its back on the lower half of the Shroud, which would then have been folded over the front of the body. The image on the Shroud is indeed of an entire body, back and front. There is no convincing evidence that the image was painted on the cloth. Rather, apart from the bloodstains, which were made by real human blood, the image appears to have been created by intense heat, but heat which did not scorch, a process no one can explain.
In 1898, Secondo Pia, a councilor of Turin, who owned a new invention called a camera, took photographs of the Shroud during a rare exhibition. As he developed his negatives, something quite unexpected happened. Whereas Pia had looked forward to capturing, at best, the ghost of a ghostly image, the human face and body that began to show themselves on his negatives were far more definite and recognizable than the image on the Shroud itself. One sees a muscular, barrel-chested, well-proportioned man, pierced in wrists, feet, and side, the eyes of his haunting Semitic face closed in death. The Shroud image, however it was made, is a genuine negative (except for the bloodstains), which makes Secondo Pia’s film “negative” a positive.
JERUSALEM IN THE TIME OF JESUS
Golgotha, the site of Jesus’s execution, was then outside the city walls. The Temple, which had become a focus of Jesus’s criticism of the religious establishment of his day, towered over the Jerusalem skyline, as did Pilate’s fortress. From the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives, where Jesus spent his last night in prayer, he could look across the Kidron Valley and see looming above him the citadels of “church” and state that would convict him on the morrow.
Though corpses laid to rest on cloth may leave smudged impressions which a forensic pathologist could discern, they cannot leave exactly proportioned images of themselves. We must look elsewhere for an explanation. But if we assume that the Shroud is a clever medieval forgery, we must assume that it was made by an artist whose grasp of the negative-positive properties of photography was five centuries in advance of his time and whose understanding of anatomy was far in advance of that of all his medieval contemporaries. Such a theory, however, falls apart after a careful look at Pia’s negative. Every artist, especially one as facile as the Shroud artist would have to have been, is identifiable by his style, which is as characteristic of him as his signature or thumbprint. The negative image has no style whatever; there is no hand in it. It seems obviously a photograph, that is, an image made by light.
A medieval forger would also need to have been the only human being between the time of the emperor Constantine and our own to have been completely conversant with the details of Roman crucifixion. Before his crucifixion, the man on the Shroud was stripped naked and scourged over his whole body, the scourge marks especially visible on chest and back. The scourging was performed by two men of unequal height, standing in front and in back of the prisoner, and was effected by whips, which the Romans called flagri, to the ends of which were affixed small metal dumbbells. He received a blow of great impact across his right cheek, which caused considerable swelling below the eye and some displacement of the nose. The puncture wounds all around his head suggest that he was made to wear a cap or helmet of sharp, spiky objects. He was also made to carry for some time something rough and heavy across his shoulders. He seems to have fallen, perhaps more than once, abrading knees and nose. The nails of crucifixion—actually spikes about
a foot long—were driven through his wrists and feet. He died in agony, as do all victims hung in crucifixion, after hours of gradual suffocation and loss of blood. Soon after his death, his left side was pierced by an elliptical object, apparently aimed at his heart. From this wound, blood flowed copiously, collecting in pools at the small of the back and spreading across the cloth.
The hands, crossed over one another at the pubis, are almost too large for the body, reminding us that here is the body of someone accustomed to physical labor—“whose strong hands were skilled at the plane and the lathe,” in the words of a Celtic hymn. But it is the face in Secondo Pia’s negative that is the most arresting: humane, majestic, beyond conflict. Only a Rembrandt or an early icon artist could have come close to catching such an expression. This is the face of a dead man. Imagine, for a moment, what impact it would have if its eyes were to open.
Did those eyes open a moment later? Was this image impressed upon the cloth by the heat and light of new life? No laboratory will ever tell us, nor can any scientist give such questions a scientific answer. The questions are important, not because we can ever hope to answer them with human knowledge, but because they lead us to the ultimate question about Jesus: does his story make sense? For though we may admire his compassionate and uncompromising moral teaching, his healing care and prayerful life, his human story (like all others’) ends in suffering and death, a death as overwhelming and incomprehensible as any of us shall ever undergo. What is there here to nourish us?
“The bread that I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world,” said the Johannine Jesus. We do not have to adopt a theology of substitution—the theory that God required a spotless human victim to make up for human sin—to make sense of the crucifixion. Such a theory, it seems to me, is a remnant of prehistoric paganism and its beliefs in cruel divinities who demanded blood sacrifice. But Jesus’s suffering body is surely his ultimate gift, for it is his final act of sympathy with us. From all ages, human suffering has been the stumbling block that no life can avoid and that no philosophy has been able to comprehend. In the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Job, God refuses to explain why good people must suffer. In the New Testament, he still does not explain, but he gives us a new story that contains the first glimmer of encouragement, the only hint of an explanation, that heaven has ever deigned to offer earth: “I will suffer with you.”
Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) Page 25
