Christ
Page 40
In John 8, Jesus and the Jews whom he is confronting, not to say baiting, in the Temple demonize one another. In a verbal joust of great subtlety, even brilliance, they compete with one another in demonization. I have chosen to linger over rather than to hurry past this mutual demonization. Other critics may attach less importance to it than I do, but to eliminate it altogether from this chapter would be to eviscerate the chapter as literature. The same must be said of the suggestion that passages suggesting Jewish complicity in the judicial murder of Jesus should be eliminated outright because these passages are historically dubious and have been made grounds for anti-Semitism. Implicit in that suggestion is the truly sinister notion that if the passages in question were historically reliable, then they could properly be grounds for anti-Semitism. This last is just the error that must be identified, quarantined, and repudiated. The Italians of the twenty-first century are not Christ-killers because first-century Italians drove the nails, any more than the Jews of the twenty-first century would be Christ-killers even if it should someday be proven—as someday it might be—that first-century Jews brought the charge.
8 Only a few modern translations: One that seems to is Everett Fox’s in The Five Books of Moses (New York: Schocken Books, 1995; p. 27):
If you intend good, bear-it-aloft,
but if you do not intend good,
at the entrance is sin, a crouching-demon,
toward you his lust—
but you can rule over him.
9 What is it that has been hidden: In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987), critic René Girard, in collaboration with Jean-Michel Oughour-lian and Guy Lefort, explores the relevance of his seminal theory of “mimetic desire” and “mimetic violence” for the interpretation of the Gospels.
For Girard, covetousness and envy are the most primitive forms of desire, all desire being learned. Covetousness and envy that cannot be contained as productive ambition and benign emulation may degenerate into malign and destructive rivalry. When such rivalry grows violent enough and spreads far enough to infect an entire society, it can climax with the identification of a scapegoat who is blamed for the violence and whose sacrifice temporarily restores peace. In Girard’s view, the process by which mimetic desire leads to mimetic violence is more ancient than literature, more ancient perhaps than speech. Its most archaic surviving evidence is to be found in the violence of the oldest myths, and these provide most of the evidence for the theory.
Girard reads the Gospels not as one more myth among the many that his theory aims to explain but as, uniquely, the repudiation of the cruel logic that all the other myths have in common, the logic by which an innocent victim is gratuitously defined as guilty, singled out as the source of contagion in a community, and then wantonly sacrificed for the supposed health of the community. In the Gospels, as Girard reads them, the innocent Christ is seen as innocent even as he is sacrificed. It is this which makes the Gospel story exceptional. When his innocence is vindicated, the demonic guilt-transference process is exposed and, in principle, repudiated. That repudiation—in which, so to speak, scapegoating itself is scapegoated—is, for Girard, the essence of Christian revelation and the start of Christian redemption.
The point of contact between Girard’s theory and the reading of the Gospels offered here is a broadly shared understanding of resentment. For both, resentment leads to war, and the transcendence of resentment to peace. Both see in Christ’s preaching as well as in the Gospel story a vision of resentment transcended. The point of difference between the two lies in the view taken toward sacrifice and, above all, toward scapegoating. The deliberate, even suicidal, self-sacrifice of God is central to the interpretation offered here. Girard, by contrast, attending very little to God as a character in the Gospel story, has been reluctant to interpret the Crucifixion sacrificially, seeing sacrificial interpretations of the Gospel as entailing a pollution by pagan myth of the great Christian antimyth. As he once said in an interview, “I scapegoated [the Letter to the] Hebrews and I scapegoated the word ‘sacrifice’ ” (Religion & Literature, 25, 2, Summer, 1993, p. 29). In the interpretation offered here, Hebrews is honored, and repentant self-sacrifice is distinguished from the victimization of the innocent that, as Girard’s theory correctly stresses, the Gospels were the first to identify as such.
10 The Greek word hosanna: The Hebrew imperative at Psalm 118:25 is hoši‘ah, followed by the particle of entreaty na’. Though Aramaic was the most widely spoken language of the country, a Hebrew word frozen into a cheer may well have been used even by Aramaic-speaking Jews. If a crowd of Aramaic-speakers chose to cry “Hosanna, Jesus!” in Aramaic, allowing the first word to have its normal lexical force, the words would be hoša ‘-na’ yešu‘ah, a rhyming pun deriving from the fact that the name Jesus and the cry Hosanna! have a common root. But apart from the fact that the text does not in fact read “Hosanna, Jesus,” there is little of this kind of Semitic punning in the Gospel of John, which is an original composition in Greek. Though the Gospel plays many word games, the games are semantic far more often than they are morphological.
PART FOUR
1 writings by Samuel Beckett: I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On: A Selection From Samuel Beckett’s Work, edited and introduced by Richard W. Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1977).
2 tended to accrue by reattribution: See Jack Miles, God: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), pp. 19–24.
3 turn the Jordan Valley into a torrent of death: Visions like this one—indeed, far more extravagant visions than this one—fill the Book of Revelation, a book whose inclusion in the Christian Bible came only after a long debate. While that book undeniably represents a late explosion of apocalyptic imagery, its overall effect is an ironic reversal of classic apocalyptic hope. In early Christian imagery, the lamb of the apocalypse was often represented holding a war pennant crooked in his front foreleg over the caption, in Greek, NIKA, “He conquers.” The caption and pennant may seem to be the negation of the lamb, but a more plausible reading, given the whole course of the New Testament before the Book of Revelation, is that the lamb negates the pennant and the caption. And as for the derived icon, so also for the text itself.
4 “in the case of the Gospel”: Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). I quote from an excerpt published in The Atlantic Monthly, September 2000, pp. 63–6.
EPILOGUE
1 In an earlier book: That earlier book was to have been this book. More exactly, the two books were to have been just one book. My initial intention, inspired by a recording of J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, was to write a biography-shaped reading of the Bible that would show how the Lord of Hosts became the Lamb of God. Emotionally, this intention arose from the opening antiphonal chorus of the oratorio, which expresses a dismayed astonishment, a grief-stricken horror, that seemed to me to have vanished from contemporary aesthetic responses to the Gospel.
See him!
Whom?
The Bridegroom!
See him!
How?
As if a lamb!
The Bridegroom of Israel turned into a sacrificial animal! The two choirs sob out their agitation and incomprehension. Later in the chorale that, sung five times, holds the enormous oratorio together, their question receives a fuller formulation:
Before your noble visage
World powers would shrink and quail.
Why are you spat upon so?
Why are you deathly pale?
Your eyes, they shone so brightly
No light could equal them.
Who turns that light to darkness,
To judgment, and to shame?
(my translation)
There was nowhere to look for an explanation of this enormous change in God, except in God’s own past. But since my way of looking into God’s past, as I began to develop it, envisioned a sequential reading of scripture, I had to choose whether to write
about the Hebrew scriptures in the Jewish or in the Christian order, the order of the Tanakh or the order of the Old Testament. That Jews and Christians do not follow the same order in reading the same texts is a fact largely ignored by both groups, and my initial, uncritical expectation was that either order would work for the purpose I had in mind.
There seemed to be two key literary facts. First, God Incarnate moves the action forward in the Gospels just as God does in Genesis and Exodus. The Gospel According to John, deliberately echoing the Book of Genesis, begins “In the beginning.” Whatever the metaphysical relationship between Yahweh and Jesus (father to son, speaker to word, priest to victim, and so forth), they are dramatically equivalent or at least suggestively similar on the page. Second, whether the Gospels are read after the Writings, which conclude the Tanakh, or after the twelve minor prophets, which conclude the Old Testament, the effect is that of a sudden burst of divine activity following a long lull.
I chose the Tanakh over the Old Testament because in it this slowing or ebbing is so much more pronounced. At the end of the Old Testament, the expectation that God may return to action is still alive despite God’s failure to act. Crucially, though God is doing nothing, he is still speaking through his prophets. He is, so to speak, still keeping in touch. By the end of the Tanakh, however, God has not only ceased acting, he has also ceased speaking, and his silence weighs heavily. Though he has not disappeared, he is rarely addressed, and little indeed seems to be expected of him. An examination of his character as developed first in the Tanakh and then in the New Testament could therefore have, I supposed, the structure of a Classical symphony, minus the minuet (there is no minuet, no scherzo in the Bible). The first movement, the Allegro, would be God at the start of the Tanakh. The second movement, the Largo, would be God at the end of the Tanakh. The third movement, the Presto, would be God Incarnate in the New Testament.
What I discovered, instead, as I approached the end of a book-length discussion of the Tanakh, was the pervasive sense of an ending which that collection conveys through its closing books. My judgment—surely debatable, but I felt it quite powerfully—was that the collection in this order “wanted” to end where it did. Its structure was not Allegro, Largo, Presto but Allegro, Andante, Largo. I felt, as I might even more impressionistically put it, the encroaching presence of an ancient editor wrapping things up and shutting things down. Deferring to him, allowing my book to end where his ended, I let the pen fall from my own hand.
This, then, is how God: A Biography, which never discusses and only rarely even mentions the New Testament, came into existence. Instead of the one book I had set out to write, I concluded that there would have to be two books: one each on the West’s two distinct and long-hallowed editions of sacred scripture, Judaism’s Tanakh and Christianity’s two-testament Bible. The second book would pursue the original idea. The first book, God: A Biography, would report what I had found on the alternate path that I had trod half by accident.
2 in critic Harold Bloom’s sense: See The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). As a poetic misprision of the Tanakh, the New Testament falls into Bloom’s second category, “Tessera, which is completion and antithesis”: “A poet antithetically ‘completes’ his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough” (p. 14).
The most interesting Bible critic now writing in English on the subject of antithetical completion or supersessionism—the view that the Christian Bible has “superseded” the Jewish Tanakh and that Christianity has “superseded” Judaism—is Jon D. Levenson, Albert A. List Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard University. In an essay entitled “Theological Consensus or Historicist Evasion? Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies” (quotations from Levenson, here and following pages, from Levenson, The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, and Historical Criticism: Jews and Christians in Biblical Studies [Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993], pp. 100–102), Levenson cites as a latter-day example of supersessionism the work of Walter Eichrodt, a German theologian who
thought history would bear out his claim that the Hebrew bible stands in “essential coherence” with the New Testament. It is this notion that accounts for the anti-Judaism that pervades Eichrodt’s Theology [of the Old Testament, published in German in 1933 and in English translation in 1961], as when he wrote of the “torso-like appearance of Judaism in separation from Christianity.” Strange, is it not, that the Jews have never noticed that their tradition is only a torso—especially since Christians have been telling them this for nearly two millennia?
Levenson’s charge, as suggested by the title of his essay, is that Eichrodt evaded what was properly a religious commitment by basing it on historicist argumentation that could not (and cannot) bear the weight. Levenson then asks whether literary argumentation can bear the same weight, contrasting two literary commentaries on the Bible, both published in 1981: Northrop Frye’s The Great Code on the Christian Bible, and Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative on the Jewish Bible. Levenson notes that Alter concedes a certain continuity between the Tanakh and the New Testament,
but he goes on to say that “the narratives of the latter were written in a different language, at a later time, and, by and large, according to different literary assumptions. It therefore does not seem to me that these two bodies of ancient literature can be comfortably set in the same critical framework.” Here I am tempted to invert my remark about Eichrodt and to ask why, if the two Testaments do not constitute a profound unity, Christians for thousands of years (including Northrop Frye in our time) have never noticed.
Though neither Frye nor Alter writes as a representative of a religious tradition, and though both seem impatient with theology, the truth is that the unit each chooses for his study is dictated by his heritage, Christianity for Frye, Judaism for Alter. I suppose each could come up with an aesthetic argument for the superiority of his own canon, but the chances of winning the other over would be about as great as the chance that Pablo Christiani or Nachmanides could have won over his opponent [at a famous theological debate] in Barcelona in 1263.
Levenson detects a tone of sovereign indifference bordering on condescension in both Frye and Alter and infers that, if they ever did meet in debate, aesthetic superiority would surely have to be the issue before them. At the same time, neither Frye nor Alter denies the legitimacy of the other’s enterprise, and one may imagine another similarly assorted pair of critics willing to concede (and not just as a way of dismissing) the aesthetic distinctness of each other’s canons—distinctness, I stress, not superiority. A step beyond that would come when each went on to write a book-length aesthetic appreciation of the other’s canon.
This step is not necessarily a large one. At any rate, it will not seem large once it begins to be taken, for in our day the postmodernist notion that art does not progress is becoming commonplace. In the first lecture of her popular televised history of painting, Sister Wendy Beckett says, apropos of the cave paintings at Lascaux, “Art changes, but it doesn’t get better; and in the great hall of the bulls, with these images of majesty and power, so strong and so dignified, we understand that painting starts at the top” (Sister Wendy’s Story of Painting, British Broadcasting Company, 1996, cassette one). Painting starts at the top, in other words, and goes neither up nor down but forward. I submit that scripture too may be understood to start at the top and yet to go forward.
The art of the New Testament consists overwhelmingly in its artful reuse of the Hebrew scriptures. This reuse is often (not always) intentionally supersessionist, but I would insist that to appreciate this supersessionism artistically is to reduce it to mere succession—to reduce it, in other words, to a strong misreading. Challenging the validity of this option, Levenson writes:
To say that the Hebrew Bible has complete integrity over against the New Testament is to cast grave d
oubt upon the unity of the Christian Bible. It is like saying one can read the first ten books of the Aeneid as if the last two did not exist, and this, in turn, is to say that the last two add nothing essential: the story can just as credibly end without Aeneas’s slaying Turnus.
To this, I can only respond as someone who has attempted to do what Levenson says cannot be done. In God: A Biography, I observed, as a literary critic rather than a theologian or a historian, that the first ten books of the biblical Aeneid existed in two different arrangements, that of the Tanakh and that of the Old Testament. I then proceeded to read the Tanakh as if neither the Old Testament arrangement of its contents nor the New Testament epilogue to them—equivalently, the last two books of the Aeneid—existed. In Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, I turn, equivalently, to a reading of all twelve books. I would note, in my defense, that the Aeneid does not exist in two distinct editions with authority and antiquity comparable to the Jewish and Christian editions of the scriptures that both Jews and Christians read. Yet I would concede that a crucial opening step is taken—a step much larger than it sometimes looks—when one confronts the Bible as a secular classic, as if, indeed, it were just the Aeneid. That step made, an infinity of aesthetic experiments becomes possible, and thereafter the proof of the pudding must be in the eating.
3 others put [those words] into his mouth: Many of the sayings of Jesus in the Gospels fall into the category of perennial Jewish or Judeo-Hellenistic wisdom. Their interest, such as it may be, owes little to the fact that they are spoken by the Messiah or the Son of God or God Incarnate. As spoken by any Jew or, for that matter, by any Gentile, they would be equally interesting. Such a saying is Matthew 18:15–17 (NJB):