Christ

by Jack Miles

  Michael is the prince of Israel, the angel or subaltern deity who has that special assignment. What we find after the Persian occupation of Israel is a mythology significantly different from the Canaanite-flavored mythology that preceded it. When God says “No one fights by my side … except Michael,” he makes clear that he needs allies and that his enemies are by no means entirely under his control; unlike Babylon and Assyria as described in Isaiah, they are much more than mere tools in his hand.

  In short, the Devil who tempts God in the Gospel According to Luke is an enemy of cosmic proportions and, unlike God’s erstwhile Canaanite rivals, is evil by definition. As the Gospel story develops, its way of allowing Satan to subsume all historical opposition to God’s people will become a way of indefinitely postponing divine military action—action like that which God once took against Pharaoh. Indefinite postponement of itself turns historical action into cosmic action inasmuch as the end of time is the end of the cosmos as mankind has known it.

  5 In the life of God: The Aramaic of Daniel 7:13 is the indefinite bar ‘enaš, yielding in the Greek huios anthropou, “a son of man” or “a human being,” and suggesting, in context, a symbol rather than a personage. Daniel sees “a lion with eagle’s wings,” “a bear with three ribs in its mouth,” and eventually “a human being.” In the Gospels, however, where Jesus uses this phrase of himself dozens of times and nobody else does so even once, the standard wording is definite: ho huios tou anthropou. He turns Daniel’s image into a personage and identifies himself as that personage.

  6 the Persians, who were the real power: For more on the Jewish restoration under Cyrus and on the Second Temple of Zerubbabel as a Persian project, see John L. Berquist, Judaism in Persia’s Shadow: A Social and Historical Approach (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995).

  7 The celibacy—more exactly, the asexuality—of the Lord God: Jesus is a historical figure, but God the Son is not. The sexuality of God the Son cannot then be a proper subject for historical discussion. The emphasis here is, accordingly, on the words of God the Father in the Old Testament as evidence of what would be in character for him if and when he became a male human being as God the Son. There has, of course, been extensive speculation about the sexuality of the historical Jesus. Different scholars have offered different, more or less plausible reasons to believe that Jesus was celibate, or that he was not; that he never left his mother’s home, or that he did; that he was married, or that he was not; that he had children, or that he did not; that he was homosexual, or that he was not; and so forth. For a good discussion of these and other psychological speculations about the historical Jesus, see John W. Miller, Jesus at Thirty: A Psychological and Historical Portrait (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 1997).

  8 the Judean exiles when they returned: The word Jewish, referring to a large, internationally dispersed population retaining nonetheless a national identity and homeland, is an anachronism as applied to the group that returned from exile in 538 B.C.E. Judean or Judahite is preferable, though the point need not be insisted on.

  PART TWO

  1 already being hunted: In departing from John’s exposition to include so much of Luke and, here, briefly departing from Luke to insert something from Matthew, I obviously obscure the separate literary intentions of these authors. However, as historical criticism has made clear, one cannot speak of their intentions as separate without immediate qualification. Before the four canonical Gospels took the shape they now have, they underwent considerable, even massive, mutual interpenetration, and that fact has always licensed commentators, consciously or unconsciously, to continue in the same direction—that is, to continue mixing them.

  In the introduction to his The Honest Account of a Memorable Life, An Apocryphal Gospel (Rocky Mount: North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, 1994), p. vii, Reynolds Price writes:

  Such a shuffling of sources is frowned upon by many New Testament scholars as disruptive of what they take to be the mutually exclusive errands of the four evangelists. I dissent from their prohibition, as did most early Christian writers, for one large reason. The first three gospels may well have been built by just such a process of conflation and interleaving; and since the most inexplicable acts of Jesus are described with a flat-footed refusal to heighten their marvels, most of those events mix well with one another. From whichever gospel we draw them, they seem so starkly matter-of-fact that in general they lie together easily.

  The early Christian writer most to Price’s point is Tatian, who produced his Diatessaron, a harmonization of the four (not just the first three) canonical Gospels only a few decades after they were written. If the process of canonization had proceeded a bit more slowly, Tatian’s text might well have become “the” Gospel, and scholars in our day would have to factor out its four (or more) sources in the way they have done for the Pentateuch. Since this did not happen, the utility of separate exegesis of the four canonical Gospels is self-evident, but Price is nonetheless correct to note the narrative compatibility and susceptibility to rearrangement of the contents of the three Synoptic Gospels. (See above, pp. 295–96.)

  To what he says, I would add that even the gap between the Synoptics and the fourth Gospel shrinks when the focus is kept on the character revealed through the stories as distinct from those stories themselves. Under a heading like “Jesus Endangered” or “Jesus Misunderstood” or “Jesus the Teacher,” the Synoptics and John adduce different evidence—that is, they tell different stories. But the character about whom they give testimony is recognizably the same character, and they approach him with much the same set of underlying preoccupations.

  Read in the original, the four Gospels are much more quickly recognizable by their style than they are in any translation that I know of. Stylistically, Matthew and John differ much more in Greek than the Elohist and Yahwist sources of the Pentateuch differ in Hebrew. Despite this, if an episode from Matthew is inserted into John or vice versa, the effect is one of no more than mild surprise: An always unpredictable character is seen to have done something particularly unpredictable but not something utterly out of character. This may explain why, even when the Gospels were read in Greek by native Greek-speakers, the impulse toward harmonization was so strong, and why it remains alive today. The distinct and distinctly engaging aesthetic effect that the canonical Gospels produce as a quartet is an effect of interrupted editing. As the reader notices this, he feels himself not just invited but practically required to resume the editorial process. It is virtually impossible to finish a reading of the four without having already begun unconsciously to harmonize them. Since all professional writers are at least the editors of their own work, they may experience this “Gospel effect” with particular intensity and then manifest it by producing in writing—as Reynolds Price did—the written Gospel harmonies that ordinary readers produce only in their minds.

  2 a head-smashing kind of god: If the distinction between friend and foe were to be abolished to such an extent that God could no longer be said to have enemies and his worshippers could no longer ask him for help in defeating their own enemies, then the Book of Psalms would have to be retired almost in its entirety, for there are very few Psalms that do not, at some point, allude to a fight in progress and ask God’s assistance in winning it. This is true even of the most poetic and meditative of the Psalms. Psalm 139, for example, contains these beautiful quatrains:

  Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?

  Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?

  If I ascend to heaven, thou art there!

  If I make my bed in Sheol, thou art there!

  If I take the wings of morning

  and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

  even there thy hand shall lead me,

  and thy right hand shall hold me.

  If I say, “Let only darkness cover me,

  and the light about me become night,”

  even the darkness is not dark to thee,

  the night is bright as the day, />
  for darkness to thee is as light.

  (139:7–12)

  But the same Psalm, before it concludes, presents the Psalmist urging that God become the enemy of his enemies because he himself has so assiduously been the enemy of God’s enemies:

  Do I not hate them that hate thee, O Lord?

  And do I not loathe them that rise up against thee?

  I hate them with perfect hatred;

  I count them my enemies.

  Search me, O God, and know my heart!

  Try me and know my thoughts!

  And see if there be any wicked way in me,

  and lead me on the path everlasting!

  (139:22–24)

  To the modern sensibility, hatred and contention come jarringly in after “the wings of morning,” but such juxtapositions of delicate sentiment and virulent hatred were familiar and indeed almost conventional when the Psalms were written, or so we must infer from their extreme frequency. That modern readers have the reaction they do is one measure of the historic success of Jesus’ radical “pacification” of the image of God. There are times, of course, when Jesus speaks in a more warlike way, not to mention innumerable times in the course of history when warlike Christians have embraced the bloodiest verses of the Old Testament precisely because they were bloody. Nonetheless, the incongruity between Jesus’ inaugural sermon and a very long list of earlier biblical texts cannot be gainsaid even after all necessary lexical and anthropological qualifications have been made.

  3 Jewish population in the first century: Estimates have been lowered somewhat in the past generation, but not in a way that would affect the claim that the Roman and the Nazi shoahs bear comparison. Salo W. Baron estimated the Jewish population within the borders of the Roman empire at just under 7 million, with slightly more than a million others living outside its borders, mostly to the east; the Jewish population of Palestine he placed at not higher than 2.5 million (Encyclopaedia Judaica [New York: Macmillan, 1972], vol. 13, p. 871). Paul Johnson writes: “Though it is impossible to present accurate figures, it is clear that by the time of Christ the diaspora Jews greatly outnumbered the settled Jews of Palestine: perhaps by as many as 4.5 million to 1” (A History of Christianity [New York: Atheneum, 1976], p. 12). Subsequent estimates generally fall between these extremes. Thus, Wayne Meeks in The First Urban Christians (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983) estimates 1 million Jews in Palestine, 5 million to 6 million in the diaspora.

  4 The first-century historian Josephus: Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, book 6, chapter 9, section 3. not as implausible as they might otherwise seem: Cf. Salo W. Baron, above: “The figures transmitted by such distinguished historians as Josephus and Tacitus ranging between 600,000 fatalities and 1,197,000 dead and captured are not quite so out of line as they appear at first glance. Jerusalem’s population had been swelled by countless numbers of pilgrims from all over the Dispersion and refugees from the provinces previously occupied by the Roman legions.”

  5 “whether there is any likelihood”: Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I—XII, Anchor Bible Series, vol. 29 (New York: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 367–68.

  6 Rabbi Ovadia Yosef: John F. Burns, “Israeli Rabbi Sets Off a Political Firestorm Over the Holocaust,” The New York Times, August 8, 2000, sec. A, p. 10.

  7 “The SS hanged two Jewish men”: Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1982), p. 79; originally published in 1958.

  “To the martyrs”: Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets, Volume II (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1975) ©1962. A more recent, psychologically shaped Jewish theology is found in David R. Blumenthal, Facing the Abusing God: A Theology of Protest (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993). Theological reflection on these passages seems almost inevitably, in our day, to yield a theology of protest. Literary reflection on them in the first century may have yielded at least a protest in pantomime.

  8 Historically, this genesis: See Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999); Arthur J. Droge and James Tabor, Noble Death: Suicide and Martyrdom Among Christians and Jews in Antiquity (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992); and Lacy Baldwin Smith, Fools, Martyrs, Traitors: The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). Of exceptional interest for showing how the possibly suicidal death of Jesus was seen in a Hellenistic culture that tolerated and even admired suicide is Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat, Le Suicide du Christ, Une Théologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998).

  9 alternately yehoshua‘ or yeshua‘ in Hebrew: Like so many Hebrew names, this name is a sentence, in this case meaning “The Lord (yeho or ye) is salvation (shua’).” The Gospel of Matthew, which often seems to presume a knowledge of Hebrew in its readers, has an angel instruct Joseph: “You must name him Jesus because he is the one who is to save his people from their sins” (1:21).

  The form yehoshua‘ is standard in the Hebrew of the earlier books of the Tanakh, notably the Book of Joshua itself; the form yeshua‘ sometimes replaces it in the Hebrew of later books like Ezra. In the Greek of the Septuagint (the pre-Christian Greek translation of the Tanakh), I?sous is the word that translates both Hebrew forms of the name Joshua. In the Greek of the Gospels, I?sous is also the name of the Savior. How, then, does it happen that the Savior’s name has not come down to us as Joshua rather than as Jesus?

  Joshua would in fact have become the name by which the Savior was known in modern translations were it not for a confusion that resulted in the fourth century when Jerome translated the Bible into Latin from Hebrew and Aramaic (for the Old Testament) and from Greek (for the New Testament). Whenever Jerome found I?sous in the New Testament Greek, he translated it as Latin Jesus, whether Jesus or Joshua was the man being named. (There are, obviously, many references to Jesus in the New Testament and only a few—notably Acts 7:45 and Hebrews 4:8—to Joshua.) Regrettably, when translating yehoshua‘ or yeshua‘ from Old Testament Hebrew, he was not so consistent. He translated late occurrences of either name interchangeably as either Latin Jesus or Latin Josue. (Cf. Vulgate at Zechariah 6:11 [Jesus for yehoshua‘] and at Ezra 3:2 [Josue for yeshua‘].) But in the all-important Book of Joshua itself, he used only Latin Josue. The result was that most references to Joshua in the Latin Old Testament became Josue, while all references to Jesus in the Latin New Testament became Jesus. The striking fact that the two historical figures bore the same name was thus fatally obscured in what would be Western Christendom’s only Bible for a millennium.

  Conceivably, the Reformation, as it began to set aside Jerome’s Latin in favor of new vernacular translations from the Hebrew and Greek originals, might also have set aside Jerome’s Joshua/Jesus distinction as linguistically indefensible and might have thenceforth called either Joshua Jesus or Jesus Joshua. Had the change been made in either direction, God’s historic mission as military warrior for Israel (the mission discharged through the first Joshua) might have more audibly and ironically intruded upon his historic mission as pacifist warrior for the world (the mission discharged through Jesus, the second Joshua). But the Reformers apparently found the thousand-year-old mistake too deeply rooted for correction.

  10 “During the night”: Jesus’ stilling the storm is a miracle that appears in all four Gospels and in several different forms, with or without the walking on water. I offer here a harmonized version in which vertical strokes separate the combined sections from one another.

  11 Caesarea Philippi: “Philip’s Caesarea,” so called to distinguish it from another Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast, was ruled by Herod Philip, who—perhaps not surprisingly—seems to have surrendered his wife, Herodias, to his half-brother, Herod Antipas, without protest.

  PART THREE

  1 “The theme of these pages”: Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat, Le Suicide du Christ: Une théologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), p. 1, my translation.

  2 “Christ first bows h
is head”: Ibid., pp. 52–3.

  3 a remarkable passage in Paul’s Letter: See A. J. Droge, “Mori lucrum: Paul and Ancient Theories of Suicide,” Novum Testamentum 30 (1988):263–86.

  4 “Both the durability of the theme”: Le Suicide du Christ, p. I.

  5 “From the agnostic side”: Ibid., p. 4.

  6 “une vie dont on ne meurt pas”: Ibid., p. 182.

  7 they who are under the Devil’s control: The history of anti-Semitism, and the place within that history of the demonization of “the Jews” in the Gospel of John, is not the proper subject of this book; but lest silence on this subject seem to imply some degree of acquiescence, let me make a preemptive statement. Because anti-Semitism, like any other kind of ethnic prejudice, is evil in itself, any use of the Gospel text that fosters it is also evil. However, with apologies to the Shakespeare of Julius Caesar, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our texts but in ourselves. The cure for Christian anti-Semitism cannot lie in the emendation or bowdlerization of Christian texts but only in the reform of Christian habits. Let the texts say what they say and, as necessary, use them as material to teach against anti-Semitism. No text is so evil that it cannot be put to good use, or so good that it cannot be put to evil use.

  Both a literary and a historical disservice is done when it is suggested that because Jesus was a Jew, there can have been no hostility, even murderous hostility, between him and other Jews, up to and including the Jewish authorities of his day. In our own day, Yitzhak Rabin, the late prime minister of Israel, faced murderous, rabbinically endorsed hostility in the person of his assassin, Yigal Amir. (See Jacques Derogy and Hesi Carmel, Ils ont tué Rabin [Paris: Robert Laffont, 1996].) Rabin—whom some religious Israelis regarded as a rodef, a persecutor, or a moser, a traitor—was clearly not a victim of anti-Semitism, but there can be no doubt whatsoever that he was a victim of hatred. The point, of course, is that anti-Semitism is not the only form of hatred, and that Jews did not all get along in Jesus’ day any more than they do now.