However one may receive the news of Mary’s virginity and miraculous parthenogenesis,17 there can be little doubt that she was not the Ever-Virgin of subsequent popular piety (a piety later raised by the Greek church to the level of doctrine). The gospels mention that Jesus had “brothers and sisters,” who were not (despite the best efforts of apologists) “cousins.” At any rate, the case for Mary’s supposed “perpetual virginity” required, as the fathers of the Eastern church understood these matters, that her hymen not be broken in giving birth—since an unbroken hymen is what makes a virgin a virgin. This realization led them to the conclusion that Baby Jesus had appeared suddenly in his mother’s arms without ever having passed through the birth canal. Just about the only people who have been able to swallow this one are males sequestered in desert monasteries at an early age without the opportunity to ever witness an actual birth, whether animal or human. The rest of us are left to wonder what happened to the placenta, which kills a woman if it remains in the uterus: did it conveniently disappear, or was it also delivered into Mary’s arms, making for a rather messy miracle? Jesus, who in his teaching referred explicitly to the terrible pain endured by women in labor, no doubt had his information from witnessing his mother’s subsequent pregnancies and labors—and could hardly imagine her an exception to the ordinary human lot.
The totality of the mise-en-scène, as Luke unfolds it, forbids our ascribing to Mary anything but a very down-to-earth character. Between the angelic entrances and exits, he gives us Mary and Joseph trudging along the road to Bethlehem, unable to get out from under a most inopportune tax problem (though tax problems are never opportune):
Now it happened that at this time Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the whole Roman world [for the sake of more accurate taxation]. This census, which was the first, was made while Quirinius was governor of Syria, and everyone went to be registered, each to his own town. So Joseph set out from the town of Nazareth in Galilee for Judea, to David’s town called Bethlehem, since he was of David’s House and lineage, in order to be registered, along with Mary, who was pledged to him in marriage and who was already expecting a child. Now it happened that, while they were there, the time came for her delivery, and she gave birth to a son, her firstborn. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the living-space.18
Mary and Joseph are not relegated to a romantic stable “because there was no room for them in the inn,” the old, inaccurate translation. What is far more likely is that they were relegated to an unused room, originally set up for domestic cattle, because there was no room for them in the crowded family quarters of Joseph’s poor Bethlehem relations, who could no doubt count to nine and may have relegated them to the worst room because they disapproved of such an embarrassing pregnancy. First, the tax man descends at the worst possible moment, forcing a most untimely journey; then you end up on your sister-in-law’s uncomfortable old pullout; then, believe it or not, the contractions begin.
What we have here, it seems to me, is a picture of Jesus’s parents bearing up under the very oppressions that their son will later rail against: political injustice—the grand and arbitrary gestures, made in flagrant disregard for the deep concerns of ordinary human beings (who cut no figure on the world’s stage), that so facilely issue forth from Caesar and all his presumptuous ilk—as well as petty, person-to-person stinginess, the low-level withholding of generosity that can make such a burden of daily life. At its profoundest, our celebration of Christmas, which continues to maintain such an inexplicable hold on our whole culture, is not “good news” about material acquisitions (as everything from department stores to television commercials proclaims to us): it is, rather, a dramatization of the simple triumphs of common humanity, in which joy at a baby’s birth can overcome the most grievous official oppressions, and even the pedestrian aggravations, of ordinary life. “When a woman is in labor,” the adult Jesus will remind us in John’s Gospel, “she suffers all the pain that is necessary to this experience. But then her baby is born; and the intensity of her sufferings is wiped from her memory—because of the joy she possesses in having brought a new human being into the world.”
The Mary of the gospels is a tough little survivor, who keeps on coming. Given her high expectations for her firstborn, she is bitterly disappointed at the way he actually turns out. When he comes home to preach in the small-town Nazareth synagogue, the audience is exceedingly unimpressed, and she must endure the shame of her neighbors’ rejection of her pride and joy. (“Where did this guy get all this stuff? … Isn’t this the carpenter, Mary’s son?”) The unexpected strangeness of Jesus’s teaching finally prompts Mary to round up Jesus’s brothers and set off to bring him home from his travels for a good rest (and maybe a little chicken soup). He is plainly, as they say to one another, “out of his mind.” Here is this child, who was supposed to pull the princes from their thrones and restore the fortunes of Israel, talking about loving the enemy and turning the other cheek. Mary, with her keen sense of retributive justice, had been counting on something with more testosterone in it. But it is also this same Mary who, when Jesus is completely disgraced and undergoing the ultimate public degradation—naked, nailed to a pole, and bleeding to death—sticks by him (though Simon Peter, Matthew, and similar supporters are nowhere to be seen), even if it means keeping company with some of her son’s more unconventional friends, like that tramp from Magdala. In the iconographic tradition, Mary is shown as the one who cradled Jesus’s dead body after it was taken down from the cross. In Michelangelo’s best-known Pietà, she is depicted as a virginal girl, but larger than her son’s corpse, and her nurturing breasts are emphasized. All this to move the viewer to pietà (pity), because for the son the mother was always young and vibrant, and for the mother this was always her little boy.
The mothers of firstborn sons who go on to do great things are often of the Mary variety, pushing their kid to do what he doesn’t want to do (like the miracle at Cana),19 expressing withering dissatisfaction on inappropriate occasions, but being there when all is lost. Jesus was a man and he had a human psyche, a psyche formed largely by his mother’s extraordinary nurture. However much he, as a reflective adult, modified her attitudes and diluted her prejudices, much of his instinctive outlook was formed by this fierce, unbending woman, so that in many ways Jesus’s worldview is already spelled out in the Magnificat, the most obvious model for which was Hannah’s triumphant song (more than a thousand years earlier) on the birth of her son, the prophet Samuel. But then, everybody has a mother.
1 The Greek prefix eu-, meaning “good,” becomes in Latin ev-. The Greek stem aggel- becomes the Latin angel- (and direct source of the English angel). The Greek ending -os and the Latin ending us indicate a (male) person; the Greek ending -ion and the Latin -ium indicate a thing. Thus, aggelos and angelus mean “messenger,” while euaggelion and evangelium mean “good message,” this last giving us such English words as evangelize and evangelist.
2 Armageddon, though it has entered many languages as the site of the final battle between good and evil, appears in the Bible but once: in the final book, Revelation. It means “the mountain of Megiddo.” Though Megiddo in northwestern Palestine was a crossroads in ancient times and the scene of many battles, there is no mountain there, so we must take the term, as I have here, as broadly symbolic.
3 Baptism means “immersion.” Lustral bathing was a common practice not only among Jews, for whom it was chiefly a purification after sex or contact with a corpse, but also among Greeks, Romans, and many other peoples, who associated it with release from ritual sin (that is, sin incurred by transgressing some taboo) and new health or wholeness.
4 The Hebrew patronymic ben becomes bin in Arabic and bar in Aramaic.
5 John Dominic Crossan, the leading proponent of the theory that Jesus was a peasant revolutionary, is a reputable scholar, if rather on the edge. Jesus as a sage (of one cultural variety or an
other) was widely proposed earlier in the century (by Albert Schweitzer, for instance) but has now fallen somewhat out of fashion. The fantasy about Jesus coming down from the cross etc. has been most recently proposed by an Australian writer named Barbara Thiering. Her theory rests on a reading of the tiny scraps of papyrus (many containing a single character or less, only one a full word—kai, meaning “and” in Greek) found in Cave 7 at the Dead Sea. These “documents” are so uninterpretable that they might as well be tea leaves. The theory that only a minority of Jesus’s sayings can safely be attributed to him is proposed by the Jesus Seminar, a self-appointed California group of scholars and others (such as Hollywood movie directors) who meet occasionally to vote (!) on such matters.
6 The names of the four evangelists (or gospel writers), Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are also used of their work, so that phrases like “in Matthew” or “the original Matthew” should normally be taken as referring to Matthew’s Gospel, not directly to the author himself.
7 The evangelists use several terms to describe the followers of Jesus. The “crowds” that run after him are not quite followers, but exhibit the fickleness and fascination with novelty that we expect of crowds. The “disciples” are all those who take the new teaching seriously. The “apostles” (from the Greek apostolos, meaning “envoy”) are designated spokesmen and -women. “The Twelve” are Jesus’s inner circle, made up of the five apostles already named—Simon Peter, Andrew, James, John, and Matthew (Levi)—plus seven more, including Thomas the Doubter and Judas, Jesus’s eventual betrayer.
8 This sentence, which is the Sixth Commandment, is found first in Exodus 20:13 in the narration of God’s giving of the Commandments to Moses and the Chosen People at Mount Sinai. Whenever a passage from the New Testament contains a quotation from the so-called Old Testament, that quotation is set in italics. For readers who wish to pursue such quotations to their original source, The New Jerusalem Bible (New York, 1985) provides complete marginal citations that unfortunately cannot be reproduced here.
9 Gehenna—in the prophetic literature it is called “the Valley of Hinnom”—was a hideous place south of Jerusalem where Canaanites once made holocausts of living children to the god Moloch and where pyres were kept burning for this purpose. Jesus uses it as an image of the ultimate horror.
10 The phrase that I have translated “unless the marriage is already spoiled” is often called “the exception clause”; it may refer to marriage within an illicit degree of kinship or to marital infidelity, in which case it would be better translated as “except in the case of her adultery.”
11 The idea that “only God is good” and human beings are evil was a commonplace not just among the Jews but throughout the ancient world. Polytheistic societies tended to imagine that only their far-off high god was truly good. “Thou shalt not defraud” is not actually one of the Ten Commandments, but Jesus cites the scriptures loosely and with the confidence of one who views the Hebrew texts as family documents—as does the entire rabbinical tradition.
12 The remains of Simon Peter’s modest home may still be seen at Capernaum.
13 Usually translated “privy” or “sewer,” the word that Matthew chooses is aphedron, Macedonian slang that would have sounded barbarous to Greek ears. Jesus was not bashful about referring to bodily functions, even if his translators are.
14 The picture of Jesus actually reading “from the scroll” of the scriptures comes not from Mark or Matthew but from Luke (4:16–22). This has led some scholars to wonder if Luke, whose gospel is probably later than Mark’s and may be slightly later than Matthew’s, has wrongly assumed that Jesus was literate. But the preponderance of the evidence suggests strongly that Jesus could read Hebrew and was extensively educated in the Jewish scriptures.
15 Popular opinion among Israeli Jews is more ambiguous than among American Jews. Though observant, Orthodox Jews number no more than twenty percent or so of the Israeli Jewish population, the rest (“secular,” or nonobservant) tend to the opinion that only the Orthodox way represents “real” religion and that the Conservative and Reform movements are forms of self-deception. But the mental gymnastics of these secular Jews—who defend the Orthodox way as the only one while steadfastly refraining from it themselves—suggest an ambiguity born of Israeli history, rather than a considered, logical position.
16 “The Kingdom of God” is Mark’s phrase; Matthew, more alert to Jewish sensitivities about “the Name” and therefore less willing to seem to speak casually of “God,” uses instead “the Kingdom of Heaven,” obviously with the same intent as the less polished, more spontaneous Mark. This is a good example of how the two evangelists differ from each other.
17 Parthenogenesis (literally, “virginal conception”), or reproduction from an unfertilized ovum, is not unknown in nature, though scientists tell us it is impossible in the higher forms of life, such as mammals. But it is probably no more impossible than the exaltation of the humble.
18 Luke does not use here pandocheion, the Greek word for “inn,” which he does use in the parable of the Good Samaritan, but kataluma, which means a “room (occupied by human beings).” Many contemporary scholars have questioned whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem, as both Matthew and Luke have it, or whether this is an assumption these two evangelists made because one of the Messianic prophecies (Micah 5:1) so predicts. But the questions about Bethlehem hardly constitute proof that Jesus was not born there.
19 During the wedding reception at Cana, Mary asks Jesus, who has not yet declared himself publicly, to do something about the fact that the hosts have run out of wine. Jesus objects to her noodging (“Woman, my Time has not yet come”), but in the end he acts spectacularly to head off the bridal couple’s embarrassment (John 2:1–11).
III
The Cosmic Christ
Paul’s Jesus
THE HORRIBLE THING that was going to happen, which Jesus told his closest followers about—at first gently and indirectly, then by ever stronger and more troubling allusions—was his own hideous execution, carried out in the Roman tradition of exquisite cruelty for all Jerusalem to see. This was no way for a prophet to end. Except for a few women, courageous to the point of foolhardy loyalty, his followers—the tax collector, the fishermen, the crowd-control experts, indeed the whole raft of self-important male strategists and thunder-thinkers who had attached themselves to the prophet—fled as far from the scene as their uncertain legs would carry them.
Simon Peter’s betrayal carried special opprobrium, because he had been the friend of Jesus’s heart. Jesus, knowing well what a tinderbox Jerusalem was, had never openly claimed to be the Messiah, only “a prophet”—and, most commonly, “the Son of Man,” that ambiguous title borrowed from the apocalyptic passages of the Book of Daniel. But he was delighted to hear Simon the Fisherman say the dangerous word out loud. Drawing near the Roman city of Caesarea Philippi, the name of which was meant to call to everyone’s mind both the emperor Caesar Augustus and the local tetrarch Herod Philip, Jesus had asked the disciples who surrounded him: “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” They answered variously John the Baptizer come back to life (John had been executed by Herod Antipas), Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the other prophets. “But you,” asked Jesus, “who do you say I am?” Simon, always the one to blurt things out, spoke up immediately, seeming to speak for all: “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.”
Jesus replied, “Simon bar-Jonah, happy man. Flesh and blood could never have told you this, only my Father-in-Heaven. You, too, have a part to play, for you are Rock,1 and on this rock will I build my synagogue, which the gates of Hades will never conquer. To you will I give the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
The strong bond of affection between the two men is palpable; and because of this, Jesus’s heart was heavy when, his arrest but an hour away, he told Simon Peter of his impending betrayal: “I tell you solem
nly, this very night before the cock crows, you will have disowned me three times over.” The impulsive fisherman swore up and down that this could never happen: “Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you!”
An hour later, when the Roman guard arrived at the little olive grove outside the city where Jesus had gone to pray, their clanging metallic entrance and the invincible brutality of their faces drained all courage from even his best friends, who took off quickly enough, leaving Jesus alone in custody. Peter did try for a while to follow at a distance, loitering in the courtyard of the high priest while Jesus was interrogated, till, because of his Galilean accent, he was identified as a follower of Jesus by serving girls and other bystanders. As they pressed him to own up, Peter became more and more indignant, at last cursing Jesus in order to make his denials credible. “And at once the cock crew,” and Peter recalled Jesus’s words to him, “and he went outside [beyond their scrutiny] and wept his heart out.”
Peter, like all the disciples, was traumatized by Jesus’s sudden reversal of fortune. Less than a week before, Jerusalem had given him a royal reception, welcoming him as the true “king” of the Jews. Now, in short order, he was flogged, pushed derisively through the same streets that had so recently exulted in him, stripped naked, nailed to some boards in a public place, and left to bleed to death in slow agony. Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who condemned him after a hasty “trial,” meant to have a little fun of his own with this execution and so had ordered a trilingual sign affixed to the top of Jesus’s cross, proclaiming him to be “The King of the Jews.” Yes, smirked the prickly governor, here was as much of a king as the annoying Jews would ever get: a pitiable, shuddering worm of a man, covered in bruises and rivulets of his own blood, his silly circumcised penis swelling for all to see, as he moaned incomprehensibly and died. The Temple priests, who had collaborated in the tortured man’s condemnation, were not amused by Pilate’s joke. The inscription only inflamed the crowds (who can always be expected to gather for the gorily diverting spectacle of a public execution): they spat on the dying man and mocked him, making lewd references to his sexual inadequacies and to his parentage, and generally convinced themselves that this thing they were ridiculing had never really been a man, only the ugly deformity that he now appeared to be.
Desire of the Everlasting Hills Page 9
