Essays One

by Lydia Davis

  Thomas Paine, whose path crossed that of Benjamin Franklin early in his career (Franklin, who met him in London, advised him to seek his fortune in America) and that of William Cobbett late, became a hero in the United States because of his pamphlet, for which, although he was always out of pocket, he accepted no profits so that cheap editions might be widely circulated. He was another independent thinker drawn to invention, like Jefferson and Franklin, and after the war was over, he settled down for a while to design a smokeless candle and an iron bridge without piers. Then (to abbreviate the story), whereas he had been regarded as a hero for speaking his mind, he began getting into trouble for the same tendency. In England, in 1791, he published Rights of Man, this time voicing support for the French Revolution and also for republicanism, outlining a plan for popular education, relief of the poor, pensions for aged people, and public works for the unemployed, all to be financed by the levying of a progressive income tax. The ruling classes found these ideas menacing and indicted him for treason, but he was already on his way to France. There, he became involved in the revolution and put himself at risk once again by saying what he thought, this time opposing the execution of the monarch, thereby antagonizing Robespierre’s radicals and causing himself to be thrown into prison.

  It was in prison that he wrote the first volume of The Age of Reason, an exposition of the place of religion in society and in part a critique of the Bible. He believed in a Supreme Being but did not think Jesus Christ had any divine origin. He did not think the story of Mary and the Holy Ghost was believable. He objected to the barbarity of the Old Testament and questioned the authenticity of the New Testament. He said that “if Christ had meant to establish a new religion, he would have written it down himself.” He said in his introduction to the book that he had intended this one to be his last writing because he knew it would make him unpopular but had started it earlier in his life than intended because of finding himself in prison. He wrote in the preface, “It contains my opinions upon religion. You will do me the justice to remember that I have always strenuously supported the right of every man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine.”

  The book did indeed make him very unpopular. He returned to the United States to find that he was widely regarded as the world’s greatest infidel. Though he was poor, ill, and given to bouts of drinking, he continued to attack privilege and religious superstitions. (While still in France, he had published another pamphlet, “Agrarian Justice,” that protested inequalities in property ownership and added to his enemies in establishment circles.) He died lonely and without funds in 1809. Six people attended his funeral. (His bones were later exhumed by William Cobbett, in fact, who took them to England with the intention of giving them a proper funeral, but on the way lost them.) For more than a century following his death, he continued to be thought of in the terms of his obituary—as one who “did some good and much harm.”

  The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus, by Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, is dedicated to Thomas Jefferson, among others. As Jefferson and Paine did, it takes a fresh look at the Bible, specifically the four gospels of the New Testament along with a fifth, the Gospel of Thomas. (Like Jefferson’s and Paine’s works, it also takes a risk thereby—laying itself open to a negative reaction from public opinion and the establishment. In fact, at least one of the scholars in the Jesus Seminar lost his university position as a result of this work, and others were forced to withdraw from the project as a consequence of institutional pressure.) One difference, however, is that this is a work of critical scholarship and at various times has involved between thirty and two hundred scholars (seventy-four are listed in the roster at the back of the book).

  Along with the commentated and color-coded gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, and Thomas, The Five Gospels contains various front and back matter, including an “Index of Red & Pink Letter Sayings,” and is supplemented throughout with other matter, including chronologies, figures, and “cameo essays” in boxes clarifying certain points or issues. One, for instance, compares versions of the Lord’s Prayer with interesting results.

  As described in its preface, this is the collective report of gospel scholars working together on a common question: What did Jesus really say? The scholars “first of all inventoried all the surviving ancient texts for words attributed to Jesus. They then examined those words in the several ancient languages in which they have been preserved. They produced a translation of all the gospels, known as the Scholars Version. And, finally, they studied, debated, and voted on each of the more than 1,500 sayings of Jesus in the inventory.”

  A number of different factors, or “rules of evidence,” as the Seminar calls them, come into play in determining which words in all likelihood originated with Jesus himself and were handed down from the time of the oral tradition into the written tradition and which words were editorial or storytellers’ additions contributed by the evangelists themselves.

  Nothing extant was written down during Jesus’s lifetime. Thus, only what could have been transmitted orally from Jesus’s time, only what was memorable for one reason or another, easily memorized, can be proved to have been Jesus’s words or close to them. “Only sayings and parables that can be traced back to the oral period, 30–50 C.E. [i.e., A.D. 30–50], can possibly have originated with Jesus.” For this reason, when there are many versions of a saying or parable, usually the briefest and simplest will be the oldest one, the one closest to the original. Also, a parable may reveal evidence of mnemonic techniques common in oral literature—triadic structures and the repetition of catchwords—and thus be more likely to have been handed down from the oral period.

  A storyteller will tend to supply dialogue appropriate to the occasion, putting words in Jesus’s mouth that would not have been handed down independently from the oral period, and those additions can be spotted and identified as the contributions of the storyteller. The first narrative gospel, the Gospel of Mark, was not written until about A.D. 70. It was preceded (A.D. 50–60) by “sayings” gospels—that is, gospels that did not embed sayings and parables within a narrative. The names of the authors of the four gospels in the New Testament are names made up and assigned to them. It is not known what their actual names were. Surviving fragments of other, unknown gospels indicate that there were once many gospels. About twenty are known, and there may be many more.

  A comparison of gospel texts in which parables are recounted will reveal a core parable that may have been handed down from the oral period. Likewise, similar material coming from different sources will imply that the material existed independently at an earlier time. Stylistic analysis of a single gospel will reveal habits of thought or flourishes characteristic of one evangelist (e.g., Mark’s attitude toward Jesus’s disciples, Matthew’s fondness for the phrase “in the heavens”), which can then be pared away.

  An example of a comparison of texts would be setting side by side the two accounts of Jesus’s dictation of the Lord’s Prayer, one in Matthew and one in Luke. When we take away editorial emendations by the evangelists, such as “who art in heaven,” which was one of Matthew’s favorite phrases and one that does not appear in Luke, we are left with a form of four petitions that Jesus probably did address to God, though not assembled into a single prayer: that the name of the Father be revered, that he impose his imperial rule, that he provide daily bread, and that he forgive debts. The only word, however, that we can be certain Jesus spoke is the opening word Father, or Abba in Aramaic. Curiously, because of what we cannot be sure he said, the one word he surely said, Abba, assumes great force.

  * * *

  A consideration of the historical context in which the gospels were written—the early years of the evolving Christian movement—will reveal still more about the ideological bias or proselytizing tendency of the evangelist and influence our reading of a gospel. For instance, Luke, unlike Matthew, omits Jesus’s admonition “When anyone conscri
pts you for one mile, go an extra mile.” Since his gospel was a defense of the Christian movement for Roman consumption, Luke may have omitted the admonition for fear that it would offend the Romans, who were probably the ones doing the conscripting. Another instance: Parables involving masters leaving and returning were especially popular with the evangelists because they foreshadowed the later accounts of Jesus leaving and returning, and so have to be examined with particular vigilance.

  As they searched for the authentic words of Jesus, members of the Seminar had to proceed on the assumption that his voice was distinctive in a crowd of Galileans that included other sages. A sage was a repository for received wisdom, free-floating proverbs, witticisms of the time. Some of this commonly accepted wisdom of the time may have been attributed to Jesus by the evangelists, and some of it may in fact have been repeated by him. Since it is not distinctive, we can’t know. For instance, one of the evangelists has Jesus say, “Be at peace with one another,” but this was a common sentiment that nearly everyone uttered at one time or another, so one can’t say these were Jesus’s words.

  The Five Gospels is a color-coded report of the results of those deliberations. In red are printed “words that were most probably spoken by Jesus in a form close to the one preserved for us.” Bold black signals that “Jesus did not say this; it represents the perspective or content of a later or different tradition.” The remaining two colors, pink and blue-gray, signal positions in between the two extremes: “Jesus probably said something like this” and “Jesus did not say this, but the ideas contained in it are close to his own.” The color-coded gospels “answer the question ‘What did Jesus really say?’ within a narrow range of historical probabilities.”

  The book does not specifically promise that a portrait of Jesus will emerge, but of course it does, through the sifting of texts to discover what Jesus probably said, because the more we learn about his style of speaking and thinking, the more we learn about his personality and character.

  * * *

  Until just a few months ago, for me the figure of Jesus had been so painted and repainted with layers of dogma, sentimentality, hypocrisy, hyperbole, prejudice, deception, and illusion that what might or might not lie beneath—the historical figure, the sage of Nazareth—was for the most part obscured. The very words traditionally associated with Jesus, including most of all the name “Jesus” itself, carried a burden of association that tended to close my ears before speech began. I see this in some others, still, if I mention Jesus or the words of Jesus—or perhaps it is not that their ears are closed but rather what is expressed by the Mandarin verb construction ting bu jian, “one listens but fails to hear.” (“Anyone here with two good ears had better listen!” is a traditional refrain that appears regularly in the gospels, especially following parables and sayings that were difficult to understand. It cannot be proven that Jesus himself actually said it.)

  The words of Jesus appear everywhere, all the time, in this culture: a reference to “turning the other cheek” (which it seems Jesus probably did advise) on a poster in a veterinarian’s examining room showing a kitten being licked by a puppy, a reference to shaking the dust from one’s feet in a comic strip in the Sunday paper (“And whatever place does not welcome you or listen to you, get out of there and shake the dust off your feet in witness against them” [Mark 6:11] is concluded by the Jesus Seminar not to have originated with Jesus but to have been a vindictive response by early missionaries). But the figure of Jesus that keeps appearing to us in this culture turns out to be in certain of its aspects unlike the historical Jesus, or unlike the Jesus that emerges in The Five Gospels “within a narrow range of historical probabilities.”

  Jesus wrote nothing, so far as we know. We do not know for certain that he could write; we are not even positive that he could read. His native tongue was Aramaic. We do not know whether he could speak Hebrew as well. His words have been preserved only in Greek, the original language of all the surviving gospels. However, it is possible that Jesus also spoke Greek, in which case some parts of the oral tradition preserved in the gospels may have originated with him. (Sometimes, as in Mark’s account of the raising of Jairus’s daughter, Jesus’s purported words were quoted, within the Greek gospel, in the original Aramaic, possibly for the reason that to readers of the Greek, the Aramaic Talitha koum would sound like a magic formula, whereas it simply means “Little girl, get up!”)

  Jesus was a carpenter.

  Jesus was probably a disciple of John the Baptist.

  Jesus was a sage, a wandering sage, a wandering charismatic. In his wanderings he was frequently accompanied by followers.

  Many of Jesus’s followers started as disciples of John the Baptist.

  He apparently abided by these rules while traveling: Not to carry a bag on his back, bread (food), a purse (money), or a second shirt (change of clothes). Not to move around town once he arrived, but to stay under one roof. He may have worn sandals and carried a staff. The staff and sandals would have been a concession to road conditions. More stringent would have been no staff and no sandals. (Another clue in the detective work of the Jesus Seminar was that early followers of Jesus were likely to be more severe in their asceticism than either Jesus himself or later followers.) But the guiding principle, in any case, was to trust in the provisions of providence.

  He paid little attention to food and clothing, except what was required for the day. His petition in the Lord’s Prayer—“Provide us with the bread we need for the day” (Matthew 6:11)—would therefore have been characteristic. (Luke expanded this from the single day to a more extended future by adding “day by day.”) He advised that others disregard food and clothing, as other sages also advised.

  But he and his disciples did not fast. On the contrary, he apparently liked to eat and drink, and probably enjoyed weddings. Among some people, he had a reputation as a “glutton and a drunk” (Luke 7:34).

  He probably did exorcise what were thought to be demons. But like other sages of the time, he did not offer to cure people. People seeking his help either petitioned in person or had someone petition for them.

  He rarely initiated dialogue or debate. Rather, he responded. (This sometimes provides another clue in the search: when he is shown, by the writer of the gospel, initiating a dialogue, these were probably not his words.)

  He was, like other sages of the ancient Near East, laconic, slow to speak, a person of few words.

  He was self-effacing, modest, unostentatious. He urged humility as the cardinal virtue by both word and example. He admonished his followers to be self-effacing.

  He tended to focus attention away from himself and on God instead.

  He rarely made pronouncements or spoke about himself in the first person.

  He made no claim to be the Anointed, the Messiah. He probably did not think of his work as a program he was carrying out. He was not an institution builder. (He was not a Christian, of course, but he was made to talk like a Christian by the evangelists.)

  He taught on his own authority, characteristically making his points by parables and aphorisms, not apparently invoking scripture.

  Jesus’s public discourse was remembered to have consisted primarily of aphorisms, parables, and retorts to challenges.

  The flat refusal, the unqualified statement, was characteristic of Jesus.

  Jesus frequently indulged in repartee. He was a master of enigmatic repartee. For instance, when asked by some Pharisees and Herodians whether they should pay a poll tax to the Roman emperor, he does not advise them either way but says simply: “Pay the emperor what belongs to the emperor, and God what belongs to God!” (Mark 12:17).

  His enigmatic sayings and stories were readily misunderstood and often provoked a strong negative response.

  He challenged the everyday, the inherited, the established. He undermined a whole way of life. He endorsed countermovements and ridiculed established traditions.

  He was antisocial. (I’m not sure how this fits in with his
possible enjoyment of weddings.) He erased social boundaries taken to be sacrosanct. He was sympathetic to outcasts and those who were marginal to society. He associated freely with outcasts (e.g., sinners—meaning nonobservant Judeans—and toll collectors).

  He rejected the notion that ritual impurity could result from contact with lepers, the dead, or gentiles. (The rabbis held that heathen dust was polluting and therefore made Judeans ritually unclean.) He felt that impurity could come only from within. “Listen to me, all of you, and try to understand! It’s not what goes into a person from the outside that can defile; rather, it’s what comes out of the person that defiles” (Mark 7:14–15). (King James Version: “Hearken unto me every one of you, and understand: There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.”) He had in general a relaxed attitude toward the law.

  He deliberately confused the distinction between insiders and outsiders. He believed that God’s domain belonged to the poor. (The early, Palestinian Christian community was essentially a movement of poor peasants. Many abandoned family ties, property, and social position in response to his summons.) He took a more liberal view of women and the status of women than was usual in the patriarchal society of the time.

  Jesus’s sayings and parables went against the social and religious grain—as, for instance, “Love your enemies” (Luke 6:27). They surprised and shocked: they characteristically called for a reversal of roles or frustrated ordinary, everyday expectations.

  He turned expectations on their head: “What does God’s imperial rule remind me of? It is like leaven which a woman took and concealed in fifty pounds of flour until it was all leavened” (Luke 13:20–21). Shocking, because leaven at that time was customarily regarded as a symbol of corruption and evil.

  He spoke often about God’s imperial rule. But he spoke of it as already present, not in apocalyptic terms. (It was Mark’s habit to speak in apocalyptic terms.) He conceived of it as all around but difficult to discern, close or already present but unobserved. (Evidence of this lies in Jesus’s major parables, which do not reflect an apocalyptic view of history: e.g., Samaritan, prodigal son, dinner party, vineyard laborers, shrewd manager, unforgiving slave, corrupt judge, leaven, mustard seed, pearl, treasure.)