Christ

by Jack Miles

  Frei’s impact would perhaps have been greater had he more energetically offered ad hoc or, better yet, ad hominem applications of his insight to contemporary historical-critical commentary on the Bible. The literary option had been foreclosed, he believed, because of a mistake made in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was then that

  the [literarily] realistic or history-like quality of biblical narratives, [though] acknowledged by all, instead of being examined for the bearing it had in its own right on meaning and interpretation was immediately transposed into the quite different issue of whether or not the realistic narrative was historical.

  This simple transposition and logical confusion between two categories or contexts of meaning and interpretation constitutes a story that has remained unresolved in the history of biblical interpretation ever since. Were we to pursue our theme into the biblical hermeneutics of the twentieth century, I believe we would find that with regard to the recognition of the distinctiveness of realistic biblical narrative and its implications for interpretation, historical criticism, and theology, the story has remained much the same.18

  It has indeed remained much the same. In his occasional mentions of influential contemporaries, especially German exegetes and theologians like Rudolf Bultmann, Karl Rahner, and Jürgen Moltmann, Frei provides a glimpse of what might, if pursued, have grown into a remarkable critique. But though Frei’s ideas were intrinsically controversial, he himself seems to have been no controversialist.

  Frei published his magnum opus in 1974, and as of that date the middle path that he saw as logically “the most natural thing”—the path that was neither, to use his terminology, “explication” (history) nor “application” (theology)—remained anything but the most natural thing to most who wrote about the Bible.19 During the last quarter of the century, thanks in part to Frei and Kermode, later joined by Harold Bloom, Robert Alter, Gabriel Josipovici, and a few others, the neglected option began to be explored. Even now, however, as compared with historical criticism, it remains a marginal option.

  The art of contradiction

  If the appreciation of the Bible as art ever moves from the margins to the center of biblical studies, it will bring a distinct new problematic with it, for what can be stated concisely enough as doctrine cannot be evoked concisely in narrative or poetry any more easily than it can be painted simply on canvas. Neil MacGregor, director of the National Gallery in London, writes in a discussion of Jan Gossaert’s sixteenth-century masterpiece The Adoration of the Kings:

  Making an image of God who has become man is … a tricky business. Artists attempting it have to negotiate a series of specifically visual problems, unknown to authors. Paradox is easy to write, but hard to paint. The Gospel tells us quite straightforwardly that the helpless, swaddled infant is in reality God incarnate, but how do you show that it is God in nappies, that the purpose of this child is to redeem the world by his death? How can a painter make clear that the man brutally being put to death on a cross, to every human eye a man completely ordinary and like any other, is also totally divine; that limitless power has chosen absolute submission?

  Like all great religious images, Gossaert’s Adoration neither simply illustrates a religious story nor interprets it according to the painter’s own caprice. It translates into a visual language a pictorial theology, a distillation of the Western Church’s teachings on the dual nature of Christ, as at once God and man, taking into account centuries of pious poring over sacred texts to find hidden meanings and correspondences, and to wring from them every drop of possible meaning. Gossaert’s picture does not show us the birth of Christ: it paints a meditation on the meaning of the birth of Christ and why it matters to us now.20

  MacGregor eloquently states the challenge that Gossaert faced and met, but he understates the comparable challenge that the authors of the Gospels faced, not to speak of the difficulty posed to modern readers by the mixed means the Gospels employ to meet that challenge. The nature of the challenge itself can easily be seen in two contrasting incidents from the Gospel According to Mark.

  In Mark 14:34–38, Jesus is only an hour away from his arrest, and he knows it:

  He began to feel terror and anguish. And he said to them, “My soul is sorrowful to the point of death. Wait here, and stay awake.” And, going on a little further, he threw himself on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, this hour might pass him by. “Abba, Father!” he said. “For you everything is possible. Take this cup away from me. But let it be as you, not I, would have it.” He came back and found them sleeping, and he said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep? Had you not the strength to stay awake one hour? Stay awake and pray not to be put to the test. The spirit is willing enough, but human nature is weak.”

  In this passage, Jesus seems to speak not as God but as a man speaking to God. He prays to be spared his ordeal, much as the Psalmist prays in Psalm 59:1–4:

  Rescue me from my enemies, my God,

  be my stronghold from my assailants.

  Rescue me from evil-doers,

  from men of violence save me.

  Look at them, lurking to ambush me!

  Violent men are attacking me,

  for no fault, no sin of mine, O Lord.

  For no cause, they race to besiege me.

  And yet earlier, in Mark 6:45–52, Jesus exercises an effortless, godlike power that belies his later, anguished prayer. In the earlier passage, we read:

  Right away he made his followers get into a boat and go on ahead to the other side [of the Sea of Galilee], near Bethsaida, while he himself dismissed the crowd. Having seen them off, he headed up into the hills to pray. As night fell, the boat was well out on the sea, while he himself was still on the land. He watched them straining at the oars, the wind having turned against them, and then, just before dawn, he came toward them, walking on the sea. He would have walked past them, but they saw him walking there on the sea, thought he was a ghost, and cried out because the look of him terrified them. But then he spoke up and said to them, “Take heart. It is I. Don’t be afraid.” Then he got into the boat with them, and the wind dropped off. They were absolutely and totally dumbfounded.

  In this passage, Jesus seems as un-human as in the earlier passage he seems un-divine. This is particularly so if we recall that in the Old Testament power over the sea is one of the signature powers of the Lord God. Thus, Psalm 107:23–30 (RSV), to choose one among many possible examples, reads:

  Doing business on the great waters,

  they saw the deeds of the Lord,

  his wondrous works in the deep

  For he commanded, and raised the stormy wind,

  which lifted up the waves of the sea.

  They mounted up to heaven, they went down to the depths;

  their courage melted away in their evil plight;

  They reeled and staggered like drunken men,

  and were at their wits’ end.

  Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble,

  and he delivered them from their distress;

  He made the storm be still,

  and the waves of the sea were hushed.

  Then they were glad because they had quiet,

  and he brought them to their desired haven.

  Which of these two portrayals is correct? In the year 325, the Council of Nicaea, the first ecumenical council in church history, defined—by what may fairly be characterized as an act of premodern literary criticism—the dogma that both were true.21 At that time, the emperor Constantine prevailed upon church leaders to paper over the textual inconsistencies of the now centuries-old New Testament, not to speak of their own political differences, by defining Christ as, once and for all, both human and divine. Historical criticism is capable of, in effect, repealing this dogma, rejecting those parts of the New Testament that attribute divinity to Christ as later inventions, and reconstructing upon the foundation of what appear to be the earliest verses alone an internally consistent, merely human h
istorical Jesus. For decades there was a distinctly modernist, confrontational excitement about just that undertaking.

  Yet times change. In our own day, postmodern criticism, though scarcely a tool of ecclesiastical orthodoxy, relishes contradiction and values sheer interest, even ironic interest, over progress, about which, at least as regards artistic creation, it tends to be dubious.22 If the agreement to disagree that the emperor imposed at the Council of Nicaea proved stimulating for so many earlier centuries in art, architecture, poetry, and music, why may we not once again experience the same contradiction—the same inconsistency, if you wish—as stimulating in the New Testament text itself?

  Modern historical criticism remains free, in other words, in the pursuit of its own still-legitimate purposes to resolve the contradiction between two passages like those quoted above from the Gospel According to Mark by tracing them to two originally separate, originally noncontradictory sources, one of which regarded Jesus as divine while the other did not. But postmodern literary criticism, at least when it is post-rather than neohistoricist, is equally free to stress that however these two contradictory passages may have found their way into the same Gospel, they produce in combination a unique effect upon a reader open to experiencing that effect. Centuries of premodern readers possessed the necessary openness as a deeply ingrained cultural habit. Postmodern readers can perhaps manage only a semblance of the same openness, but the rewards of doing so are significant, for the dramatic power of Christ as a character on the page is inseparable from this contradiction. The Incarnation is Christianity’s breathtaking addition to Judaism’s already long list of divine self-contradictions.

  Passages that assert or strongly suggest the divinity of Christ are undeniably less frequent in the New Testament than those asserting or strongly suggesting his humanity. However, the divinity passages tint all the others the way a drop of dye tints a glass of clear water. If I have seen you drunk and brawling once, I can see you sober and peaceable any number of times and know that the full truth about you is not, just then, on display. There is something similarly scandalous, even monstrous, about divinity. Once glimpsed, it remains in the mind. There is, most especially, something monstrous about the Jewish deity. Yahweh Elohim is not the Jewish Zeus. The Greek gods all had genealogies and offspring. Human in form, they were reassuringly human in identity as well, because they existed in a population of others like themselves, interacting with them, competing with them, just as humans do with one another. Not so Yahweh Elohim: The God of the Jews is alone in the cosmos, sexless, fatherless, motherless, and, for long, also childless. After creating the human race in his image, God relates to his creature at first only as original to image, not as father to child. God must adopt fatherhood. He must choose it. It is not, so to speak, natural to him. In the monstrosity of this deity’s assuming human form lies the elusive remoteness, the uncanniness, that radiates so unmistakably from the pages of the New Testament, most especially from the pages of the Gospels. What staggers the imagination and gives the Christian myth its power is not that some god or other should have become some man or other but that Yahweh should have become Jesus.

  Gospel as a mixed genre

  Reading the Gospels as literature means assigning them to a genre that combines history, fiction, and fairy tale. The poet W. H. Auden described the difference between fiction and fairy tale—with history as the understood background for both—in a brief, penetrating afterword to George MacDonld’s modern fairy tale The Golden Key. “Every human being,” Auden wrote,

  is interested in two kinds of worlds: the Primary, everyday, world which he knows through his senses, and a Secondary world or worlds which he not only can create in his imagination, but also cannot stop himself creating.

  A person incapable of imagining another world than that given him by his senses would be sub-human, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.

  Stories about the Primary world may be called Feigned Histories; stories about a Secondary world, myths or fairy tales. A story about the Primary world, that is to say, may be fiction—the characters in it and the events may have been “made up” by the writer—but the story must affect the reader in the same way that an historical narrative does: the reader must be able to say to himself, “Yes, I have met people like that, and that is how, I know from experience, such people talk and act.”

  … A Secondary world may be full of extraordinary beings … and extraordinary events … but, like the Primary world, it must, if it is to carry conviction, seem to be a world governed by laws, not by pure chance. Its creator, like the inventor of a game, is at liberty to decide what the laws shall be, but, once he has decided, his story must obey them.…

  History, actual or feigned, demands that the reader be at one and the same time inside the story, sharing in the feelings and events narrated, and outside it, checking these against his own experiences. A fairy tale … on the other hand, demands of the reader total surrender; so long as he is in its world, there must for him be no other.23

  Following Auden, how should we respond to the story of Jesus praying to be spared his final agony? Conceding that the event is fictional (after all, the Gospel accounts say that the only possible witnesses to this event were asleep when it occurred), we may nonetheless be affected by it just as we would be by a strict report, for we can easily say to ourselves, “Yes, I have met people like that, and that is how, I know from experience, such people talk and act.” Jesus in this moving instance of feigned history conducts himself as any man might whose friends have failed him in his moment of greatest need.

  As for the way in which Jesus’ anguished prayer may recall the words of Psalm 59, historians have good reason to find the fit suspiciously close and to suspect that the episode itself was constructed or modified to match the Psalm. The literary critic, by contrast, conceding that the episode may be partly or wholly an invention, will be content to prescind from that question and allow the allusions and quotations to produce their intended effect, unconcerned that real and feigned history may be mingling.

  So much for the first episode. What of the second, Jesus’ walking on the water and stilling the storm? Following Auden, we should respond to the miracle proper, the core of the episode, with “total surrender,” asking only that it conform to its own rules of operation—which, in this case, entails our taking the point that Jesus is God Incarnate. It is to this idea that we must yield. But because the Gospel is a mixed form rather than pure fairy tale, our response to this episode in its entirety is more complex than simple surrender. There was a historical Jesus, after all, and he did have followers. Moreover, even in a story that has elements of fairy tale, there may occur elements of fiction as distinct from fairy tale. Of this episode, we may legitimately ask, for example, Why did Jesus wait all night before coming to his disciples’ rescue? If he knew they were in trouble, why did he not rescue them sooner? These questions are proper to fiction rather than to either history or fairy tale.

  It is neither possible nor advisable for a twenty-first-century man or woman to wave away two thousand years of intellectual history and attempt to respond to the fantastical or miraculous in the New Testament as readers or hearers may have done in the first century. A premodern response to the miraculous is virtually impossible for any contemporary adult. But Auden does not require this. He urges only that we allow ourselves to approach in a mood of serious play a text that rewards such an approach. The mood of serious play may take some cultivation, but it still lies within our reach. Without denying that the New Testament does sometimes report historical events, we can open ourselves to its power in a new way if we can respond to the fantastical and the fictive within it as equal in importance to the historical.

  To this I would add only that engaging the New Testament by hearing the Old Testament within it engages what is most distinctive about the New Testament as a work of literary art. As Kermode has written,

  The literary
relations of the Gospels to the Old Testament [the same can be said of the entire New Testament] are as close and intimate as any that one can imagine between two texts. In establishing this intimacy the evangelists not only authenticated their story but discovered its materials. In constructing a realistic, history-like narrative in such an unusual way they created a distinctive genre; and in terms of that genre they produced unique works of art.24

  Because quoting a historically remote Psalm when discussing a passage in Mark is the sort of thing that preachers have done to good effect for centuries, secular critics, and not historical critics alone, have seemed to feel that if they did the same, they would be joining the church. Kermode is right that for the evangelists themselves these echoes were not just harmony but religious authentication. But those in our day who decline to acknowledge the allusions as authentication can nonetheless enjoy them as harmony—and must do so if they are not to miss the haunting elegance and acrobatic virtuosity of the New Testament performance.