by Lydia Davis
God was so real for him that he could not distinguish God’s present activity from any future activity. He had a sense of time in which the future and the present merged, in the intensity of his vision.
Jesus’s sayings and parables are often characterized by paradox, as in, again, “Love your enemies.” Those who love their enemies have no enemies. Or: “Do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return” (Luke 6:35). Lending without expectation of repayment is not lending. Or: “You must be as sly as a snake and as simple as a dove” (Matthew 10:16). To adopt the posture of the snake and the dove at the same time is a contradiction.
Whereas his followers were more serious-minded, Jesus tended to employ comic hyperbole and graphic exaggeration, as in the following: “It’s easier for a camel to squeeze through a needle’s eye than for a wealthy person to get into God’s domain!” (Mark 10:25). As The Five Gospels explains, “This saying presented difficulties to the Christian community from the very beginning. Some Greek scribes substituted the Greek word [for] rope (kamilon) for the term [for] camel (kamelon) to reduce the contrast, while some modern but misguided interpreters have claimed that the ‘needle’s eye’ was the name of a narrow gate or pass, which a camel would find difficult, but not impossible, to pass through.”
Jesus’s sayings and parables are often characterized by humor, paradox, and exaggeration combined. In the parable of the mustard seed, for instance, he compares God’s domain to the lowly mustard weed. He uses the image of the mustard weed as a parody of Ezekiel’s mighty cedar of Lebanon and the apocalyptic tree of Daniel, traditional images for God’s domain at that time. Jesus is poking fun at the symbol of the mighty tree that prevailed. But the evangelists were swayed by that same symbol to try to bring Jesus’s metaphor closer to it. “What is God’s imperial rule like? What does it remind me of? It is like a mustard seed which a man took and tossed into his garden. It grew and became a tree, and the birds of the sky roosted in its branches” (Luke 13:18–19). (King James Version: “Unto what is the kingdom of God like? and whereunto shall I resemble it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and cast into his garden; and it grew, and waxed a great tree; and the fowls of the air lodged in the branches of it.”)
Many of Jesus’s sayings and parables employ a concrete natural image, as, for instance: locust, rooster, snake, fish, dove, sparrow, crow, fox, camel, shirt, coat, belt, hand, foot, cheek, hair, eye, city, marketplace, synagogue, house, lamp, lampstand, jar, couch, seat, needle, bushel basket, grape, wine, wineskin, vineyard, salt, leaven, dough, bread, meal, seed, grain, sickle, harvest, sun, rain, dust, mountain, stone, pearl, coin, timber, splinter, bramble, thorn, thistle, reed, slave, master, doctor, beggar, bailiff, judge, emperor, bridegroom, toll collector. The concrete image is exploited in a surprising and unusual way, as for instance: “Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor are grapes picked from brambles” (Luke 6:44).
Jesus often raised questions from a literal to a metaphorical level. His sayings and parables were customarily metaphorical and without explicit application. Because his parables were told in figurative language, because the figures could not be taken literally, because the application of the saying was left ambiguous, what he said was difficult to understand, and the disciples often did not know what he was saying. (Mark made the disciples out to be stupid; this was one of his particular biases, and it is he who has Jesus say such things to his disciples as “Are you as dim-witted as the rest?”) But Jesus did not explain. Instead, he gave them more questions, more stories with unclear references. The answer shifted the decision back onto his listeners. Jesus’s style was to refuse to give straightforward answers.
Jesus emphasized reciprocity: “Forgive and you’ll be forgiven” (Luke 6:37).
Jesus spoke out against divorce.
Jesus gave injunctions difficult for early communities to practice (such as “Love your enemies” and the injunction against divorce).
He may have realized the potential danger he incurred by challenging the status quo.
During a meal, Jesus might very likely have engaged in some symbolic acts. He probably made use of bread or fish and wine. (Bread and fish were the staples of the Galilean diet.)
It is possible that one of the disciples betrayed Jesus and that Jesus may have become aware of that betrayal.
Jesus did not speculate about the appearance of the Messiah in the last days or about counterfeit messiahs and false prophets.
* * *
Another saying or parable characterized by exaggeration or hyperbole is the following: “That’s why I tell you: don’t fret about life—what you’re going to eat—or about your body—what you’re going to wear. Remember, there is more to living than food and clothing.… Think about how the lilies grow: they don’t slave and they never spin. Yet let me tell you, even Solomon at the height of his glory was never decked out like one of these” (Luke 12:22–28). The exaggeration: Human beings are not given clothing by God in the same way that lilies are clothed.
The King James Version of this passage reads: “Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat; neither for the body, what ye shall put on. The life is more than meat, and the body is more than raiment.… Consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
The Scholars Version has the ring of “translationese” to it, an effect partly of colliding dictions (the slangy “decked out” sits unhappily in the same sentence as the more formal and archaic “one of these”—and numerous other examples of these unhappy marriages can be found throughout the translation); and partly of “wooden-ear” choices such as the pairing of “Yet let.” There are, further, rhythmical deficiencies that make it far less generally euphonious than the King James Version, though it is undoubtedly more accurate and based on a more accurate version of the original text.
“Consider the lilies how they grow” sings to us more than “Think about how the lilies grow” for several reasons having to do with rhythm: in the first line, the scansion of the three-syllable “Consider,” accent on the second syllable, propels the line forward and the three-syllable “the lilies,” accent again on the second syllable, continues the momentum, whereas “Think about” causes the line to stutter; we stumble over the awkward rhymed pair of “about how”; and the monosyllables “how the” slow the motion further, so that the concluding “lilies grow” sounds flat and unexciting. The sentence as a whole is rhythmically disorganized. In the King James Version the line is divided by a perceptible caesura into two three-word phrases with alliterated middle words, “Consider the lilies” and “how they grow,” that could conceivably stand alone, which creates a pleasing balance, the caesura giving a gentle emphasis to the word “lilies.” This balance of paired phrases is echoed in the more closely parallel pair that immediately follows—“they toil not, they spin not”—and in fact maintained through the entire passage quoted above, from just after the opening “Therefore I say unto you” until the concluding “and yet I say unto you,” when the departure from the pattern heightens the eloquence of the closing declaration. But in the Scholars Version the balanced structures so precisely maintained in the King James Version are often either slightly lopsided—“they toil not, they spin not” becomes “they don’t slave and they never spin”—or abandoned altogether—“The life is more than meat, and the body is more than raiment” becomes “there is more to living than food and clothing.” Other rhetorical devices—repetition, alliteration, assonance—that are deployed in the King James Version to further tie the passage together may be absent or seem almost accidental in the Scholars Version.
But I find that when I turn to the King James Version for comparison, beautiful though it is, my ears often cease to hear. It is hard to tell what it is that closes my ears: whether it is the familiarity of the King James Version, or its association with an inaccessible Jesus figure, or its lyricism. It may be th
at the words of this translation are so well-known by now that they cease to convey anything; certainly they convey nothing fresh coming from a newly perceived Jesus. It may be that the somewhat antique flavor of the language (the translation was done by a group of forty-seven scholars in the early seventeenth century, relying heavily on earlier work by William Tyndall) further distances the thoughts from us. It is hard to measure just how much attention the very beauty of the language attracts to itself and distracts from the thoughts it expresses. In any case, my attention is in fact turned less effectively to the substance of Jesus’s thought in the King James Version than in the more modest Scholars Version—just as the modest (and terse) Jesus tended to direct attention away from himself and toward God (unlike some of his proselytizers). So that, oddly, the unlyrical style of the Scholars Version—the constant jolts, the rockiness—has a tonic effect: it keeps me awake, or keeps the text awake, it refreshes it, allows me to hear it.
* * *
The paradoxical effect of putting Jesus back into his historical context, the context of his time, among other sages of his time, other wandering charismatics, is that he, through the style of his language, and through what it reveals of his character and his thought, becomes newly outstanding. The effect of the Jesus Seminar’s patient, “critical” detective work in what Thomas Jefferson called “paring off the amphibologisms,” is to reveal Jesus more fully than he was revealed before. In this case, anyway, where skepticism clears the way, there is room for belief.
The “final general rule of evidence” of the Jesus Seminar is this: beware of finding a Jesus entirely congenial to you.
“Finding him congenial,” here, would mean “seeing him as you want to see him,” “seeing him as your preconceived notions would have you see him,” “distorting or skewing what you see into what you want to see.”
This was their protective amulet against bias, against obfuscation, against muddy thinking. It’s a wonderful recommendation in general, one that one might advisedly adopt as one’s own guiding principle in life, with certain substitutions: Beware of seeing your native land the way you want to see it rather than the way it is. Beware of seeing a favored ideology the way you want to see it rather than the way it is. Beware of seeing your leaders, political or otherwise, the way you want to see them rather than the way they are.
It occurred to me as I made my way here and there along these paths of history that there is a joy in independence, in the risk of independence in one’s thinking and making, and there is joy even in contemplating the works of the independent thinker. But what also occurred to me is that there is a feeling of safety, a reassurance, in being an uncritical follower, especially of an independent thinker, a revolutionary, especially of a newly discovered independent thinker or revolutionary, and that the challenge to the follower, consequently, is to remain independent in turn—even of those we admire, of those who are themselves independent. In other words, to continue to look with clear eyes, with the eyes of the “critical scholar,” at Jefferson, at Paine, at Jesus, at the Jesus Seminar, for fear that otherwise we have eyes but do not look. Or maybe that we look but do not see.
1997
A Reading of the Shepherd’s Psalm
Once you have heard the Psalm of David a few times—or, more likely, many times, since this very popular and moving poem, or fragments of it, regularly recurs in movies, TV shows, songs—you tend to remember it, or at least isolated lines from it. Of all the many translations that exist, however, it is the King James Version that is so memorable and so often quoted. The very first line, with its four strong beats, is the first that remains engraved on our memory:
The Lórd is my shépherd; I sháll not wánt.
One source of its power is probably the immediate homely domestic or animal imagery—the introduction of the extended analogy that will follow: the Lord compared to the shepherd, and the “I” of the psalm compared to a sheep within a flock. Another source of the power of the line is its mostly monosyllabic, Anglo-Saxon vocabulary: lord, shepherd, want. Every word, in fact, is Anglo-Saxon, and every word is monosyllabic except for “shepherd.” The meter is initially the dancing amphibrachic (unstressed, stressed, unstressed; unstressed, stressed, unstressed). This is the meter of the classic limerick: “There once was / a girl from / Nantucket”; as well as other kinds of poems: “How dear to / this heart are / the scenes of / my childhood” (Samuel Woodworth, “The Old Oaken Bucket”). The line then slows to the walking iambic.
“Want” is a strong word, though with a different meaning from the one we usually give it today, the same meaning as in the sensible alliterative maxim “Waste not, want not”—if you are careful with what you have, you will never lack for what you need.
The plainness of the statement is further strengthened by the four-monosyllable negative statement: I shall not want. Contrast this KJV version with the Good News Translation: “The Lord is my shepherd; I have everything I need.” The meanings are not quite the same, for one thing, but for another, whereas “I shall not want” suggests a modest sufficiency, “I have everything I need” carries a slight suggestion of covetousness, a desire for material things, a tendency to appraise one’s possessions, and (in the repetition of “I”) a preoccupation with self. The emphasis in this version is on “have” and “need,” “I” and “I,” as opposed to the KJV double negative meaning “not lack.”
* * *
The extended metaphor of shepherd and flock continues in the second line:
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
This line, too, is pleasingly constructed, almost perfectly symmetrical—in fact, the beginning and end of each of the parts is symmetrical: “He maketh me … green pastures,” “he leadeth me … still waters.”
In this line, I puzzle over a couple of things: the many flocks of sheep I have seen over the years grazing in various pastures, here in upstate New York, or across the road from where my old school friend lives in the Cotswolds outside Bath, England, or as seen from the train in the Scottish countryside, seem to decide when they wish to lie down and when they prefer to be up on their feet grazing. They are without a shepherd, but I know that not so long ago, relatively, a shepherd did often accompany a flock of sheep. I cannot imagine, though, that a shepherd could make them lie down.
One of the many impassioned, anonymous commentators on the various websites that invite reactions to this psalm says, many times over, that sheep are stupid, and, further, that they need to be made to lie down. (Contrast this with the clear declaration of an online sheepherding manual, which implies at least one kind of intelligence: “Sheep have excellent memories.” I have read elsewhere—where and when I no longer remember—that a sheep can recognize the face of another sheep for as long as two years.) Perhaps one of the other translations, the nineteenth-century Young’s Literal, employing a gentler or more indirect verb, is closer to the reality of sheep behavior, or to the original text, here: “He causeth me to lie down”—in other words, the shepherd brings it about indirectly, by simply providing the pasture.
On the other hand, another of these website commentators offers—whether from personal experience or sound scholarship, or neither—the startling idea that if a lamb strayed too often from a flock, the shepherd might break one of its legs so that it would remain lying down in the pasture. I have not heard of this before, and of course I can’t imagine that the psalmist had this in mind.
Yet another commentator asserts that sheep are afraid of moving water and will drink only from quiet water. A picture I have in my mind, from a farm not far from where I live, is of a small, still pond with a single file of six or eight sheep on the far side of it walking calmly, as though in a dream, along the water’s edge toward another field. The water was still. They were not being led, or driven, as it happened; they were walking past it of their own accord.
Certainly it is true, however, that green pastures and still waters together create the im
age of a harmonious, fertile, and safe landscape in which sheep may flourish.
* * *
The parallel structure is continued in the next line, which has two parts, like the preceding line and the first line, and each of the two parts opens with “he” and a verb.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
The second verb, “leadeth,” is in fact the same as the second verb in the preceding line, and this repetition reinforces for us the idea of the shepherd as guide: first leading the sheep beside the still waters, now leading the sheep in the paths of righteousness. The interaction between “he”—the Lord—and “I”—the sheep—continues, though the sheep-ness of the I is abandoned in the first part—“He restoreth my soul”—and in the second part is sustained only by two words, “leadeth” and the strong and important (in sheep-rearing) “paths.”
In this line, the two parts of the sentence are separated by a colon rather than a period or a semicolon, and this change of punctuation creates a change of relationship between the two parts. Whereas the period and the semicolon signal that the two parts of the line are equal, syntactically, the colon signals to us that the second part follows from the first and explains or expands upon it: evidently, what the author of this psalm means by “He restoreth my soul” is that “he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.”