by Jack Miles
10 “I haven’t noticed”: Louis Begley, Mistler’s Exit (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 92.
11 elevates the body … above an altar: The fact that Masaccio portrays the Trinity above an altar and inside a chapel whose architecture is part of the painting may suggest that the painting was not, in fact, an altarpiece. However, the meaning of the work is the same in either case. Art historian John Shearman writes that the altar shown below the chapel in the painting
is a part of its meaning, in that the antetype [of the chapel] in the Old Testament, the Tabernacle of the Covenant, had an altar outside it; but this is a fiction of an altar, and fictions cannot be consecrated. I think there is no good evidence of a real altar to which the fresco served as dossale; and a real altar seems rendered redundant by the fiction. For that reason the Trinity is not strictly an altarpiece. But because it is one virtually, it had a great effect upon the way artists thought about altar-pieces, nowhere more than in Venice.
Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 66.
12 “awareness that, before we die”: Allen Wheelis, The Listener: A Psychoanalyst Examines His Life (New York: Norton, 1999), p. 210.
PART ONE
1 Back then, it says: Among the four canonical Gospels, the Gospel of John appears last, but its opening scene evokes the true opening scene of the life story of God the Son.
No one writing on Jesus is spared the task of making some expository sense of Mamalujo, to borrow James Joyce’s coinage (in Finnegans Wake) for the fusion in the Western mind of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Historical criticism has coped with the knotty quadruplication of the Gospel story by separating Mamalu—the three “Synoptic” Gospels—from Jo, noting the enormous overlap among Matthew, Mark, and Luke and then usually assigning priority to Mark as a source for the other two. If Mark came first, then Mark, so the hypothesis goes, may lie closest to remembered truth about the historical Jesus. Then would come Matthew, then Luke, and last, as furthest from the historical truth, would come John.
For a discussion of Jesus as God Incarnate, however, a different strategy is in order, one that assigns priority to John and, after John, to Luke. The Gospel of Luke, though one of the three Synoptics, differs from the others in that it is the first half of a two-volume work with a clearly mythic structure. In the first volume, the Gospel proper, the Spirit of God descends invisibly upon the Virgin Mary to conceive God’s human self in her womb. The Spirit descends again, this time visibly, to acclaim her child, now grown to manhood, at his baptism, when his redemptive work begins. In the second volume, the Acts of the Apostles, the Spirit descends once again to conceive the church—“the mystical body of Christ,” as Paul will call it—in the hearts of Christ’s followers.
In the New Testament as we now have it, an ancient editor has inserted the Gospel of John between Luke and Acts, perhaps because this arrangement provides a striking new setting for the climactic dialogue that comes at John 13–17 on the night when Jesus is arrested. In this dialogue, interpreted in this book as the last testament of God, Jesus explains to his followers that during his lifetime he has been their “Paraclete,” an untranslatable Greek word combining the meanings of the English words counselor, ally, advocate, comforter, and even inspiration (as in “You have been an inspiration to me”). Facing death, he promises to send them “another Paraclete,” his own Spirit in another form. After his death, he will keep this promise by visiting them after his resurrection and breathing his Spirit into them (John 20) and then, a second time, by sending his Spirit upon them in the form of tongues of flame (Acts 2). When Acts follows John, this second, confirming fulfillment of Jesus’ promise—commemorated still in the Christian sacrament of confirmation—thus follows quickly upon the promise itself.
Scholars usually assume that John follows Luke because an ancient editor wanted all four Gospels grouped together and because it was somehow evident that John was written last. Against this hypothesis, it must be noted that John comes second rather than fourth in some ancient manuscripts. Mamalu and Jo were evidently not separated in the second century by the chasm that separates them in the twenty-first. In any event, by whatever editorial process the sequence Luke-John-Acts came into being, these three works taken together now constitute 37 percent of the total text of the New Testament; and in this sequence they strikingly highlight the activity of the Spirit of God. In other words, God is more noticeably the protagonist in Luke-John-Acts—whether as Jesus or as the Spirit of God determining the course of events before Jesus’ birth and after his death—than he is in Matthew-Mark.
Broadly, the Gospel story told in this book follows the order of events as given in John but expands it by inserting in Part Two an “infancy narrative” and a Galilean ministry from the Synoptics, especially from Luke. Parts of Acts (as well as, much more briefly, certain later books of the New Testament) are then discussed in Part Four. This eclectic procedure undeniably neglects the literary specificity of each work thus touched on; but the intent of the procedure is not to discuss all or indeed any of the books of the New Testament as separate works, much less to reconstruct the historical truth about Jesus, but rather and only to discuss God Incarnate as a character found in all of them. By a further narrowing, the intent is not to discuss every passage involving Jesus but only to examine a selection of passages that foreground his identity as God Incarnate and highlight the revision that is accomplished through him of the identity of God as previously revealed in the Old Testament.
The Gospel of John gives powerful expression to an exalted understanding of Jesus’ identity that arose well before curiosity about the historical details of his life. It was not by slow, piecemeal elaboration but by a bold and early stroke of genius that the memory of an enigmatic Galilean preacher, wrongly and wrongfully executed for sedition, was transformed into the myth of God Incarnate sacrificing himself to reconcile the human race and its creator. In the letters of Paul, which date from the fifties and sixties C.E., a generation before the writing of the four Gospels and only a generation after the death of Jesus, this myth is already substantially in place. The historical Jesus has already been transcended by the divine Christ, whose self-sacrifice is already memorialized in the central recurring ritual of emergent Christianity. The fact, then, that among the four Gospels it is John that most fully shares this early “high Christology” with Paul suggests that John lies quite near to that original tradition-transforming impulse.
The debate that dominated Christian theology for two centuries after the last works of the New Testament had been written and before the First Council of Nicaea introduced formal dogma into the life of the church was a debate not about whether Jesus was God Incarnate but only about when the Incarnation—taking that event to be both the humanization of God and the divinization of a man—actually occurred. Had God the Son existed as God from the beginning of time? Did his life as both God and man begin at Jesus’ conception? Was divinity conferred when the Spirit descended upon him at his baptism? Was his divinization of a piece with the miracle of his resurrection? Or did he really become divine only when he ascended into heaven after his death? There are echoes of all the opinions implicit in these questions in different parts of the New Testament, but no New Testament text would prove more important to this debate than the Gospel of John. John is the stem from which blossomed the myth that defined Christendom, capturing the imagination of the Western world and holding it for a thousand years and more. It is perhaps for this reason that the name John in its many variations (like Ivo, João, Hans, Sean), diminutives (like Juanito and Gianni), and compounds (Jean-Paul, Gianfrancesco) is the most common masculine given name in the West.
I do not intend to justify the reading attempted here by claiming that, if we but formulate the question properly, John is more historical than Mark; much less that literary criticism is better at history than is standard historical criticism. John is not without value for those s
eeking to reconstruct the historical Jesus, but that is not the point. I concede that the reading offered here—a latter-day Gospel harmony—is literary and imaginative rather than historical, and therefore that it is inevitably subjective: the close reading of no more than a modest set of Gospel passages selected to bring a particular interpretive option into high relief. The apology I would make for such a reading is, first, that, as historical critics are always noting of one another, the most objective reading never entirely escapes subjectivity, particularly when the inner pluralism of the New Testament all but requires a degree of anterior selectivity in the interpreter; and, second, that this process of selectivity and recombination is not just inevitable but fruitful and rewarding.
2 John says in his oracular way: For convenience, I refer to the authors of the component works of the New Testament by the names that tradition has assigned them. Whether the author of the fourth Gospel is in fact John the son of Zebedee or “the beloved disciple” or indeed any single individual rather than several authors rewriting one another over time is a question that historical criticism will continue to ponder, but the authorship question must not be allowed to obscure more immediately relevant literary questions.
Authorship and publication did not divide in antiquity, in any event, quite as they do in modernity. The variability of textual witnesses to the several works that constitute the New Testament—a far greater variability than obtains among extant textual witnesses to the Torah—suggests that the border between composition (authorship) and copying (publication) was particularly fluid for the literate but geographically decentralized and war-disrupted movement that brought these works into existence. Publication, which was manual copying, seems commonly to have begun before composition was complete. A copyist might function as an editor, making what seemed sensible corrections in works that were not, at the start, regarded as sacred scripture. Taking a step beyond correction, he might function as, in modern parlance, a “contributing editor” and add to the received account.
The result of this process should not be regarded as merely the frustration of any given author’s intention, though that is surely among its effects. The result was, rather, the creation of a distinct aesthetic effect—the Gospel effect, we might call it—as different minds forged different links between Jewish tradition and the remembered life story of Jesus. A story modified by successive editors and contributors to the point that no one can truly claim to be its author acquires the special privilege and elusive power of true anonymity. When the Gospels are heard as anonymous, as stories we have “always known,” they do indeed tend to blend together, but it is just then that they begin to function as myth and to produce their most powerful effect.
With this in mind, I refer to the authors of the Gospels as infrequently as possible in my own discussion. When I do mention them, without intending to disparage the historical criticism that has so ingeniously recovered their individuality, I eschew circumspect historical-critical locutions like “the author or authors of the fourth Gospel.” So long as the focus is synthetic, on the effect of a text, rather than analytic, on the intent of an author or authors, such conscientiousness serves no purpose.
3 Mal. 4:5–6; some editions, 3:23–24: The Hebrew text of Malachi is divided into three chapters, while the ancient Greek translation of Malachi is divided into four. Verse by verse, the two texts are virtually identical; only the chapter division differs. Jewish editions of this book of the Bible follow the Hebrew text and have twenty-four verses in chapter three. Most, but not all, Christian editions follow the Greek text and have eighteen verses in chapter three plus six in chapter four.
4 God’s great enemy, the Devil: Most translators do not capitalize devil or attach as much importance as I do to the fact that the Greek definite article is used when the Devil is referred to in the story of the temptation of Jesus. My translation reflects my belief that the linked angelology and demonology of Hellenistic Judaism and early Christianity are ultimately Persian in origin.
The history of Israelite and Jewish belief about the sources of evil in the world has roughly an hourglass shape. At the start, in the upper end of the hourglass, there are three such sources. One: the gods of other nations, to whom a large measure of reality is conceded and who, when those nations oppose Yahweh, are seen as evil. The supreme example of a god at war with Yahweh is the divine Pharaoh, in his violent opposition to Yahweh’s intention to confer miraculous fertility upon his people in Pharaoh’s country. Two: Israel’s disobedience. It is Israel, rather than any rival deity, whose endless duel with Yahweh gives the Tanakh (the Hebrew scriptures in the Jewish order) most of its forward momentum and epic definition. Israel’s is the opposition that provokes Yahweh to grief and rage. Three: the mixed character of Yahweh himself, whose unpredictable power to do harm matches his power to do good. “I am Yahweh,” he says,
and there is no other.
I light the light, I dark the dark.
I cause prosperity, I wreak disaster.
I, Yahweh, do all these things.
(Isa. 45:6–7)
Let me offer just one illustration of this last and perhaps somewhat surprising source of evil. King David and a huge entourage have loaded the Ark of the Covenant onto an oxcart and are transporting it to Jerusalem, David’s new capital:
And when they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah put out his hand to the ark of God and took hold of it, for the oxen stumbled. And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah; and God smote him there because he put forth his hand to the ark; and he died there beside the ark of God. And David was angry because the Lord had broken forth upon Uzzah.… And David was afraid of the Lord that day; and he said, “How can the ark of the Lord come to me?” So David was not willing to take the ark of the Lord into the city of David; but David took it aside to the house of Obed-edom the Gittite. And the ark of the Lord remained in the house of Obed-edom the Gittite three months; and the Lord blessed Obed-edom and all his household.
And it was told King David, “The Lord has blessed the household of Obed-edom and all that belongs to him, because of the ark of God.” So David went and brought up the ark of God from the house of Obed-edom to the City of David with rejoicing. (RSV; 2 Sam. 6:6–12)
Uzzah is destroyed by Yahweh, and Obed-edom blessed by him, for reasons that defy explanation. Obed-edom—a Philistine born in Gath, to judge from his designation as “the Gittite”—has done nothing to merit especially good treatment by Yahweh. Uzzah, an Israelite who understandably and (one would think) laudably sought to prevent Yahweh’s ark from falling to the ground, has done nothing to merit capital punishment. David reacts to the execution of Uzzah just as the reader might: first with anger and then with fear. Later, when Obed-edom’s prosperity suggests that Yahweh’s anger has abated, David successfully brings the ark the rest of the way to Jerusalem and rejoices in the thought that his own household will now prosper just as the Philistine’s did.
When the sole god or even the dominant god in a pantheon doles out weal and woe with unfathomable unpredictability, the question How could a good god permit …? does not come up, and there is no logical need to postulate the existence of some evil god in order to explain human misfortune. One god, if the god is of a sufficiently mixed type, will suffice. How could a good god permit …? certainly did become a burning question in the course of Israelite and, especially, of Jewish history, but it was not a burning question at the start, for good and evil alternated in the God of Israel almost as unpredictably as good and ill fortune alternate in human existence.
At the neck of the historical hourglass of ancient Israelite and proto-Jewish thinking on this question, two developments combined to pinch the cosmology just summarized to a new and painful narrowness. First, in a process well illustrated in the latter chapters of the Book of Isaiah, Israel began to view the deities of other nations as altogether illusory rather than merely inferior to Israel’s deity. Second, Yahweh began to function as exclusively a principle o
f good rather than as, simultaneously, a principle of good and of evil. The consequences are obvious: As God became both a consistently good god and the only real god, the question How could a good god permit …? suddenly became unavoidable and indeed is faced for the first time in chapters adjacent to those in which the reality of all other gods is denied.
Just at this point in its history, as it happened, Israel was massively exposed to a persuasive answer to the new question. The empire that succeeded the Babylonian in Israel was the Persian, and Persian Zoroastrianism recognized two competing deities: Ahura Mazdah, the personification of good, and Angra Mainyu, the personification of evil. These two were not the only supernatural beings in existence, but all others were organized around them. The process by which Persian religious thought penetrated Israelite thought is impossible to reconstruct, for the record of their interaction during the two centuries when Persia ruled Israel is extremely slender. It is undeniable, however, that after this period the long Israelite entanglement with Semitic polytheism seems to be over, while a dramatic growth in the importance of Satan, or the Devil (definite article, capital letter), is easy to document, not to mention a concomitant growth in the number and importance of angels serving God and of devils serving the “new” Satan. In this transformation, the broadening that occurs at the base of the historical hourglass, erstwhile national deities are replaced by nationally “assigned” angels and devils. One sees this change most easily in the extracanonical Jewish literature of the last pre-Christian centuries, but it is also evident in the canonical Book of Daniel, especially at 10:20–21, where God speaks to Daniel in a vision:
“Do you know why I have come to you?” he asked. “Soon I must fight the prince of Persia again. When I leave, the prince of Greece will come. But let me tell you what is written in the Book of Truth: ‘No one fights by my side against all these except Michael, your prince.’ ”