Rod of Jesse

On the Jesus of the Gospels & Doubt of his Existence

by Ernest Werner
Formerly Pastor, Grace Lutheran Church, Altoona, PA, Assistant Pastor, Trinity Lutheran, Lancaster, PA, Minister, First Parish Unitarian, Ashby, MA, Minister, First Unitarian Society, Ithaca, NY, & Member of the Chaplains Staff, Cornell University.

And there shall come forth a Rod out of the stem of Jesse. & a Branch shall grow out of his roots & the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him... With Righteousness shall he judge the Poor & reprove with Equity for the Meek of the earth: & he shall smite the Earth with the Rod of his Mouth & with the Breath of his lips shall he Slay the Wicked...
From Isaiah 11

Dwarf Lion Press

Trumansburg NY

Table of Contents PART ONE Jesus without Embarrassment 1. Jesus Humanity in the Four Gospels 3. Why This Sketch May be Doubted 5. What Facts can Legends give? 7. John Erskine on The Human Life of Jesus 11. Doubt of Jesus 15. Doubt of Jesus Now 20. Allegros Bizarre Theory 26. Allegros Procedure Exposed 30. The Case of Albert Schweitzer 37. Schweitzers own Crisis Resolved 41. The Quest of the Historical Jesus 43. Schweitzer gives Credit 46. The Enigmatic Jesus of Albert Schweitzer 49. The Messianic Secret 50. PART TWO The Baptism of Jesus 52. John the Baptist Historical 57. A Desert Temptation Myth 60. Postscript: a Personal Word 63. Return to Galilee: Public Act, Obscure Beginnings. 64. The Boy Jesus in the Temple 66. The Calling of the Four 67. A Day in Capernaum: The Synagogue 70. A Day in Capernaum: Simons house 72. In His Own Village (Own country) 74. Mythic Aspect of Own Country 77. Later Versions of this Tale 80. Matthew & the Sermon on the Mount 82. The Son of Man 87. Lord of the Sabbath 89. Dubious Associations & Lowly Companions 92. Jesus as Bridegroom 93. Bridegroom as Myth 95. vii

Table of Contents Source & Transformation of the Jesus-Bridegroom 96. Demons 98. Demons as Old Belief 100. Jesus No Exorcist 103. Beelzebub 105. Who (And Where) Are Jesus Family? 107. The Sower 109. A Secret for the Chosen Few 111. The God of the Seed Sowing 112. Woman with an Issue of Blood & Jairuss Daughter 113. Two Miraculous Feedings 116. The Withered Hand 119. Christ Stilleth the Tempest 121. The Sign of Jonah 126. The Syrophoenician Woman 130. Ephphatha 131. The Veil Lifts 134. Thou Art the Christ! 136. Get Thee Behind Me, Satan! 138. Simon bar-Jonah 139. The Son of Man Unveiled in his Redemptive Role 142. Daniels Vision an Influence on the Gospel 144. The Transfiguration, or Jesus seen in his Glory 147. The Last Demoniac a Little Boy 151. The Parable of the Unclean Spirit 154. Blind Bartimaeus 155. PART THREE Entry of Christ into Jerusalem 158. Cursing of the Fig Tree 165. Schweitzer on the Cursing of the Fig Tree 167. Aarons Rod Metaphor 170. Growth in Myth 172. The Anointing of Christ 175. The Earlier Tale 178.

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Table of Contents PART FOUR A Lazarus Excursus Appropriation of Meaning: Lazarus I. 181. The Tale of Lazarus II. 183. Lazarus a Double of Christ III. 186. Lazarus as Myth IV. 189. Lazarus a Useful Symbol V. 191. Osiris Correlation: Lazarus VI. 193. The Specter of a Phallic Deity: Lazarus VII. 198. Akwanshi, a Myth in Stone: Lazarus VIII. 199. Akwanshi II. 201. Akwanshi III. 205. Leonid Andreyevs Lazarus: Lazarus IX. 206. Jamess Jolly Corner: Lazarus X. 212. What All this Can Mean: Lazarus XI. 217. PART FIVE The Gospel Recast 219. Insight & Discovery 221. Enigma of Authorship 223. This Gospels Authority 225. The Story Upended 227. Marking the Contrast 229. Another Jesus 232. Presence 234. The Speaking Christ 237. Synoptic Anticipations of Johns Technique 240. The Speaking Christ an Early Practice 244. PART SIX Week of the Passover 246. Jesus Final Days 248. The Great Commandment 249. Marks Realism 251. Last-minute Eschatology 252. The Passion Begins 254. ix

Table of Contents Preparations for the Last Supper 255. The Last Supper I. 256. The Last Supper II. 258. The Last Supper III. 260. The Fourth Gospels Different Version: Last Supper 264. Gethsemane 266. The Garden of Meeting in John 268. Jesus Before the Sanhedrin 270. Variations in Luke: first Jewish trial 272. Variations in John 275. Christ Before Pilate I. 277. Christ Before Pilate II. 279. Christ Before Pilate III. 281. The Man of Sorrows I. 282. The Man of Sorrows II. 284. Christ Before Pilate in John 288. The Man of Sorrows in the Fourth Gospel 290. The Crucifixion I. 292. The Crucifixion II. 295. The Crucifixion III. 297. Deposition and Burial 301. The Empty Tomb 303. Lukes Variation Examined & Contradicted 306. Matthews Version 307. Emmaus 309. Lukes Jerusalem Resurrection Scenes 311. The Risen Jesus & Mary Magdalene (in John) 312. Other Resurrection Scenes in the Fourth Gospel 314. Johns Mysterious Last Chapter 317. CONCLUSION: DOGMATA (Or, Opinions firmly held.) I. 320. II. 323. III. 324. IV. 326. Index 335. Appendix on Gothic style 338.

Citations & Credits

All due credits are given either in the text or in footnotes. Some few are incomplete, for which I express my regrets. Since this book is designed for the Reader, I have tried to avoid any frivolous distraction. Biblical references to the different translations used are often missing but the rule is very simple: (a) Whenever a Biblical citation is given without special credit, it is to be assumed that the Revised Standard Version (RSV) has been used. (b) Quotations in Elizabethan English are, of course, taken from the classic and excellent King James Version (KJV) unless the Revised Version of 1881 is mentioned (RV). (c) Otherwise, translators and modern versions are named, especially Goodspeed, The New English Bible (NEB), The New Jerusalem Bible (a Catholic translation), and the several translators of The Complete Bible (Chicago University Press).

Acknowledgements
I lay claim to no such scholarly authority as we have had (and ought to be grateful to have) in such men as Alfred Loisy or Rudolf Bultmann or Englands CH Dodd or Americas Edgar J. Goodspeed, to mention none of recent date. Scholarship is fundamental to thinking it has been fundamental to me. But scholarship is one thing and thinking is another. Scholarship furnishes but thinking illuminates and blessed are those rare spirits who are equally gifted in both. With Ralph Waldo Emerson whom I regard as Americas preeminent sage I hold that we must be willing to learn from anyone, including the simplest among us, but that each must learn to think for himself. I express my heartfelt gratitude toward my daughters, Helen Cox, a searching, vigorous mind whose achievements in art and education have shown me that the book is understandable by one who works in other fields, and Shirley Werner (Mrs. William Johnson) for a highly intelligent and gently critical reading of the manuscript as a classics scholar. I thank also my daughter Lois Werner-Gallegos for painting the stained-glass window whose photo adorns my cover. My son, Thomas Werner, suggested that the first finished version of the manuscript was too long, and this was also the opinion of Jill Swenson, whose judgments and expertise have been a great help. I have removed 26,000 words from that earlier version without impairing the general idea. The debt I owe my wife, which is never to be paid, I hint of in the dedication.

ROD OF JESSE PART ONE JESUS WITHOUT EMBARRASSMENT

It would embarrass me to put the name of Jesus in my title and I have assigned it to a secondary place, preferring instead Rod of Jesse which refers to a Messianic prophecy in the Book of Isaiah. That is something largely external to ourselves, and this I do not feel to be embarrassing, whereas we may be embarrassed when confessing to our own faith. This book, although in some deep sense a statement of the authors beliefs, confesses only to a question. As a symbol Rod of Jesse brings to mind a branch newly sprung from the root of a devastated tree, but it speaks also of the Messianic scepter which is to be restored to Israel, and in the forgotten language of an age-old myth it speaks of generation and begetting and of other deep, unmentioned things which have a place here. Initially, our question is only whether such a prophecy is enough to explain the dream. Is it enough of itself to explain the creation of so remarkable a figure as Jesus? Is he the mere creature of the religious imagination, as some critics maintain? With fairness to both sides I propose to examine the question whether Jesus lived a life tangibly of flesh and blood and of mostly ordinary incident, like any other man. In a way it is a very modest thing: we are only asking for the Fact. It would be useless to offer yet another version of his Life as outright history because in some deep sense the man is out of reach. Instead, we must inquire frankly of the myth which the Gospels would offer us to see what we have here because our theme involves us in the exploration of a doubt. We know a great deal today about Jesus and his times, thanks to the studies of generations of scholars, but what all this research goes to show is that, in truth, we know very little of the man. He is more obscure to history than his fame would suggest. I might almost have done better, then, to call my book, The (mere) Idea of Christ in the Gospels, or God in Man, because its not a human Jesus, merely, which we find in these old Gospels on every page. Unfortunately, this title has been taken although without the suggestive addition of the little word in parentheses. It was Santayana who used it for an essay of his published some sixty years ago which revealed his native Spanish-Catholic bias almost as frankly as in his autobiography a pleasing bias in such a disillusioned mind. Although his own philosophy

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is decidedly austere, a genuine Catholic piety is expressed in his book, and in rendering homage to that piety, he reveals a religious aspect of his soul. The Idea of Christ in the Gospels, or God in Man comes down to a stress on our human experience because without the human vesture of the god the mere Idea is an empty romance. And the Idea as the Gospels give it so insists on the man that a frank acknowledgment of our question is called for. Did Jesus live as a man who held for the most part quite ordinary beliefs, who attended his body and washed and dressed, who knew confusion or disappointment or desire or sorrow? Or must we take the Gospel merely for its Symbol? Is the man unnecessary if we accept the sacred illustration? Santayana comes close to saying something like that when he takes these old documents at face value without caring whether this or that incident may have happened as written. He is unconcerned to deny the miracles of Christ, for instance, and with a trace of sophistry affirms their possibility. Instead of looking for events behind the tales, he will understand the moral truth of a thing which is expressed in dramatic pictures or Teachings or even fables. Not to say by this that the Gospels are in any sense high drama: they are effective in a liturgical setting when handled by an understanding pastor, but overall, except possibly the Fourth Gospel, they are very miscellaneously composed. Our New Testament scholars have taught us that it was the aim of no Evangelist to record the mere facts of this life as Santayana was well aware. There is nothing of the journalist in the Evangelist. Not a word in the Gospels describes the face of Jesus except to say once that it shone like the sun, or again that he looked around him with anger, nor is anything told of his manner except for the action expressed, which is often half miraculous and half verbal with only the barest description of the miracle itself. If we do find in these old writings an illustration of God in man, thats not to say that Jesus is presented as a god because that would be false to the early tradition. Only in the latest portions of the Gospels is the nearness of God to our human Christ suggestive of an Incarnation. What Santayana discovers in the Gospels is a spirit attuned to the tragic character of life which gives us their abiding value. It is the chastened spirit which has shed the worlds illusion, and this is focused supremely in the figure and fate of Jesus. To understand the Gospel is to understand the sorrows and the humility of Christ or the meaning of his

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compassion and forgiveness. For like any good Catholic, Santayana has fallen back on the early doctors of the church, those who came after the Gospels were written. He is very frank in affirming the value of these later (but still very early) traditions, believing that these later doctors had at least brought out a deeper mystery in their own inspirations. Can we settle for this? Certainly, his Christ is as tenderly described as, say, the famous painting of the head of Christ by Guido Reni, which is today unfashionably beautiful but still beautiful. Nevertheless, something is missing in these eloquent pages: Jesus is missing as a sort of solid body. And I want to know if he is missing also from the Gospels. Where is the stress on the man as historical, which Santayana passes over rather lightly? For it is really the human predicament which he finds in deepest illustration in this ancient timeless Gospel, and my question is whether our predicament requires the tangible fact of a Jesus who once lived and died in historical time. Is it enough, then, to settle for the religious Idea which is so beautifully given? Or must we have, at last, the definite fact for our own satisfaction?

JESUS HUMANITY IN THE FOUR GOSPELS

Our Gospels portray Jesus as a miraculous man who could, as we know, feed a multitude with a few loaves and fishes or cure a blind man in one case by spitting on his eyes and laying on his hands. I mention this detail (from Mark 8,23) because it is the primitive quality of it which makes it real. We are then inclined to think that he may well have done such a thing in his endeavor to cure a blind man we credit his more primitive existence without a blind acceptance of the miracle. Or again, awakened by his disciples during a storm on the lake, he rebuked the wind and waves as a master might threaten an unruly dog whereupon the wind and waves subsided, greatly to the astonishment of his disciples. Coincidence? It would be very extraordinary had such a coincidence occurred and yet a distinguished Jewish scholar accepts the story on those terms. Quite a few of Jesus miracles are of healings and demoniac cures, which are characteristic of the man, and once, like an Indian faquir, he walked on water. Apart from his Teachings, he does comparatively few things which are unattended by miracle before his arrest in Gethsemane after which he stands trial like any ordinary man. The impression of his humanity remains and the miracles tend to be dismissed: it is the modern approach.

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When hauled before Pontius Pilate he is accused of calling himself the King of the Jews, which amounts to a charge of sedition. It is a charge whose gravity the Gospels would encourage us to overlook by having Pilate treat it as an irony which reflects his contemptuous attitude toward Jews. After examining him Pilate finds Jesus innocent of any charge deserving death and has him beaten to placate the mob. According to the Fourth Gospel it is here that the Roman says famously, Ecce homo! when presenting a Jesus draped in purple as a king crowned with thorns. According to Matthew the mob cannot be placated by Pilates appeals. The Roman calls for a bowl of water and washes his hands of the verdict before turning him over to be crucified. Jesus submits to these indignities despite his miraculous power and we are likely to take this part of the story as more natural-seeming although the miracle continues. The very sun is darkened on Good Friday afternoon from noon until three oclock, and after lying for two nights in his tomb, the Crucified rises from the dead: the place is found to be empty, the body gone. Proof of his Resurrection is that his disciples and also some women followers saw him afterwards alive. Although nowhere portraying him as an ordinary human being, the Gospels are nonetheless emphatic that Christ came in the flesh. At Jacobs Well he asks a woman for a drink of water before revealing her past, and he thirsts on the cross where he dies like a man. Before entering Jerusalem he wept over the city, according the Luke. In John he weeps at the grave of Lazarus. Such natural touches as these of tears and thirst, or elsewhere flaring anger or spontaneous compassion are woven into the fabric of a miraculous life. We can easily cite data like this to fill out our impression of the man. In the village of Nazareth he belongs to an ordinary family who misunderstand him. Mark calls his mother Mary without a word of description, and if she were found to be an elderly woman grown stout from child-bearing or fidgety and worried over her son it wouldnt be inconsistent with Marks idea because our primitive Evangelist once gives the names of four brothers of Jesus, although he tells us nothing else about them elsewhere. He mentions sisters also without naming any. And Jesus might have been the youngest of this numerous family instead of eldest, as far as Mark is concerned. This does seem very natural to us. In connection with a sermon to his own townspeople, Mark calls Jesus a carpenter when the townspeople express their astonishment at his Teaching. Where had a carpenter got it all? Matthew claims only

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that they called him the carpenters son. Was he a rabbi then? He is often called rabbi since evidently he knew Scripture thoroughly well and quoted it in the old-fashioned Jewish way which gave its simple meanings a surprising turn. As a villager, a member of a large family, a carpenter become a rabbi, he seems a very natural sort of man. If Jesus were only a myth, it is strange that he should have been placed in such definite surroundings.

WHY THIS SKETCH MAY BE DOUBTED

The common assumption is that history and legend are mingled in the Gospels of Jesus, and this is almost certainly right. It does tempt us, however, into a way of reading the Gospels which seems to work just by laying the miracles aside. That his birth was heralded by angels, or that he was in infancy visited by Eastern Kings (or properly, by Magi) we dont, of course, affirm. All that sort of thing we ascribe to the poetry of the Gospels whereas in the story as a whole a constant sense of history is suggested in the fabric of the legend. If, then, a sketch of Jesus life like the one just given is open to doubt it is because we have made him plausible by a selective reading of the Gospels before us. Our interpretation lays miracle aside under the impression that we are reaching back to history, and in the process we have discarded the very legends which gave us our story. Can this be right if we then stand accused of picking things out as we please and discarding the rest on no principle at all except for modern unbelief? It is the very procedure of those scholars who propose to give us the historical Jesus and it rests on a set of assumptions. I would say to them, Gentlemen, you read the Gospel on this common sense approach for whatever seems plausible in it and discard the portions which you dont credit. The emerging conception of Jesus you call historical because it meets your standard in conceiving the way it must have been. Outside the frankly skeptical school, which has been a powerful influence from David Strauss to Rudolf Bultmann, nearly all the New Testament scholars sift the legend this way. And not just our trained scholars but our philosophers and men of letters also. Look at Bernard Shaw who has quoted Rousseau as saying, Get rid of the miracles and the whole world will fall at the feet of Jesus Christ. This, by the way, is from his preface to Androcles and the Lion which, if dated with respect to mere detail, shows the comedic

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playwrights impressive grasp of these Gospels. Jean Jacques Rousseau is a figure of the Enlightenment: the mood is modern. This view is therefore commonplace among the cultured. A more remarkable essay on the subject of Jesus and the Bible than even Shaws preface to Androcles is that by Matthew Arnold in his Literature and Dogma. Matthew Arnolds method is to put the miracles mostly aside except that he is tender toward the healings because there are so many reports of them. It is a point of view. One accepts that the impossible is impossible and makes do with what remains. Then are we really helped by getting rid of miracles? Thomas Jefferson composed a version of the Gospels which was surprisingly ample and in which the Teachings were included and various doings of Jesus, but no miracles. More radically and strenuously, Tolstoy did this, too: Tolstoy who after writing War and Peace learned Greek in order to read the Gospels in the original. (Jefferson read Greek, too, it is fair to add). So we have works like these, Jeffersons the more modest and naive, Tolstoys the more opinionated. The same difficulty has been met by many another man of letters who would offer us a plausible version of the Gospel tale, but nothing enduringly has come of it. Is the modern procedure in vain? I mean by the modern procedure exactly this assumption that our text can be penetrated and a given story held up to the light and turned this way and that to yield its original fact. It is as if we believed that the miracle had been laid on like gold leaf on a Russian icon or like the Sacred Heart of Jesus displayed on his sleeve. We do sometimes seem to see what really must have happened in these tales. Allowing for exaggerations of legend we credit ourselves with sense enough to see beyond it. So our historical Jesus is plucked from the Gospels, or one could even say that he is rescued from them rather than taken outright, which is felt to be impossible. The process of sifting these old tales has brought us a variety of Jesus figures as we have trusted to our own good sense while seeing through the legend. Throughout this essay we disregard any obligation of doctrine or religious belief and embrace instead as our all-sufficient principle just that of understanding. I accept the miracle and the myth which it implies. Such as they are, these Gospels are the one prime source for any life of Christ. What they attest with given evidence is the human fact of Jesus, yet questions remain. We allow that invention occurs and we consider the Negative argument without surrendering our belief that the Gospels

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have a claim on history. Is it not worth while to understand the tale they tell without an impossible struggle to believe them?

WHAT FACTS CAN LEGENDS GIVE?

What lump of solid history, for instance, might we extract from the Christmas legends of Matthew and Luke which we recognize to be fables? Any at all? It is a prophecy from the Book of Micah which will explain these tales: But thou, Bethlehem, Ephrata, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting. (Micah 5,2.) Micahs book is a compilation of Hebrew oracles dating from the 5th century BC. In these high-flown words addressed to Bethlehem we have the dream of Israel, promising an ideal King who is to arise in Davids city. Whatever sort of king he was, David has figured ever after as the hero among the kings of Israel beginning as a shepherd lad who slew Goliath with a stone. Many a graceful gesture and bold exploit is ascribed to David and many a Psalm! We may have in such traditions the vivid legends of a warrior-prince whose reign was followed by the Golden Age of Solomon. Jerusalem was a Jebusite city before the time of David, who took it for his own capital and kept its old name: Uru-salim means City of Peace. How could the nation forget him after it fell on hard times? A legendary king becomes the basis for a new ideal. Our quoted prophecy doesnt use the name Messiah, but it was a very slow growth before the full conception of the Christ was achieved. The Hebrew name, like the Greek Christos, means Anointed One. We think of high ceremony, of gorgeous robes and rituals of crowning and investiture done before a joyous assembly. These are occasions of state when the significance of office is vivid in the minds of all: the Anointed One is given his role. Thus when Micah speaks of one coming forth to be ruler in Israel, he is looking toward the past as well as the future and drawing on past ideals to express a hope, and it this famous apostrophe to Bethlehem which inspires the legends of Christmas by the logic of a later faith. Every other Gospel tradition tells us that Jesus was a Galilean. Alone, the Christmas legends of Matthew and Luke place his birth in Bethlehem for the reasons stated.

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But these are two different legends. Matthew introduces the quoted prophecy in a fabulous setting. (2,6) Certain Magi journeying from the East have been following his Star but in Jerusalem they lose track of it and must inquire in Herods court: Where is he that is born King of the Jews? Micahs prophecy is recalled by the chief priests and scribes to put them on track of the Holy Child again and put a jealous Herod on track, also. Evidently, the Magi are astrologers and gifted in divination, but had they an inkling of the consequence, they could never have asked such a dangerous question in the court of Herod the Great because their visit leads to the slaughter of all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under. Yet even this, Matthew pretends, is in fulfillment of prophecy: A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled because they were no more. (2,18.) Once the Magi have learned where the Messiah is to be born, the Star reappears to lead them to the very house in which they saw the child with Mary his mother. What is the reason for such an aberration in this inconstant Star? Alfred Loisy has called the Matthew story a typical myth of a divine child, a Solar Deity, whom the dragon of darkness would devour at his birth. If that is true, it is a myth which has taken the form of history, which is to say, of legend. Others have called it the myth of the endangered child which we meet also, for instance, in the story of Krishna. As for the Star, it may have been overpowered momentarily by the dragon of darkness until the dragons own design could be achieved. Matthews dark tale is not a happy story and we owe its assimilation to our own happy Christmas to artists of the Renaissance or earlier who show the Magi kneeling to the Child amid bright ruins of a country stable where cattle gaze on the scene or some donkey pokes its nose in. Were it not for the angels floating about, the Magi would seem out of place here. All this must have surprised Matthew, however, who never dreamt of bringing the holy family to Bethlehem, as Luke does, because he has assumed that they lived there. The happy scene, which is far from Herods court, is adapted from Lukes Christmas tale, which has over many years of Christmas pageants absorbed the Magi and their Star. It is Luke, therefore, who sets the scene and in so doing gives us Christmas. This Evangelist delights to reveal the lowliness of Jesus and here he has him born in a

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stable, thanks to a No Vacancy in a Bethlehem inn. It is only his midnight angels appearing in a shining light that may be said to touch on Matthews somber contrasts of night and Star, of Solar Child and dark designs, but Luke preserves his pastoral undisturbed because his angel makes announcement to mere shepherds in the fields to whom (these same daffy shepherds) a heavenly chorus appears to sing of Peace on earth, goodwill toward men: Fear not (says the angel) for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you: Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. (2,10.) A manger, a feeding trough for horses and cattle, to chime with the lowliness of this unappreciated Messiah! Once again Micahs prophecy has brought us to the city of David. Only, we are not to expect of this humble birth a ruler in Israel. That has now been given up in exchange for the Savior. Lukes pastoral, which in my childhood was read in services of Lutheran worship, has always seemed to me among the most beautiful passages in Scripture, but his tale is also fitting for the theme he stresses. Without the lowliness of Christ, no Christ: it is a transformation in the Messianic ideal. I see, too, in the lowly babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger a reminiscence of another baby lying in a little ark made of papyrus reeds and daubed with pitch, there to be found by a bathing princess and adopted into Pharaohs household. The late distinguished Edgar J. Goodspeed suggests that Jesus really was born in Bethlehem and offers these legends in proof. This is a bolder conjecture than piecemeal picking because it is conceivable that both legends assert a common fact. They ask to be taken that way, and Dr. Goodspeed is quite aware that the two are otherwise incompatible, having grown up independently of one another. On Goodspeeds view the common fact is known. Only, why are we not simply told of it, then? Why do none of our Gospels say: It was so! Instead, they deliver a datum of Jesus birth wrapped in fanciful tales which stray off in two directions. See what a lot of trouble these legend-makers have gone to and what imaginations were required to reveal something that might have been said outright, yet Matthew takes on a moral confusion about an

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erratic Star whose momentary failure he must cover with an artificial prophecy, and the case is no better with Luke, assuming that his purpose is to decorate known fact. It may seem that angels singing of a Saviors birth in the middle of nowhere and shepherds tramping to town from midnight fields in search of a mewling infant who is lying in a box of fodder would be an easy poetic conception to a certain type of mind. I quite deny it. To present Jesus birth in Bethlehem as fact of history, Luke must bring his parents from Nazareth where he believes they are living. How to give them a reason for going to Bethlehem and then place them in a stable where, to be sure, he desires to have them to illustrate the lowliness of the infant Savior? These problems he solves with his description of a census required by Caesar Augustus which is, alas, mistakenly conceived. Probably the Evangelist is vaguely recalling a historical event when he tells us that everyone, in order to be enrolled, must go to his own city. Artistically, he accounts for the great stir of people this way and obtains his overcrowded inn, but such a decree as he describes requires of Joseph that he abandon his livelihood in Nazareth to take a Mary great with child on a journey. He must leave his mountain village, go up to Jerusalem no small distance and then beyond it for another ten miles. Small wonder that Mary delivers her baby almost on arrival in town! And all of this to register his name for taxes! As for Bethlehem, he must go there because he is of the house and lineage of David. Lukes account is valuable for fact in giving us the Caesar Augustus era because it shows the Evangelists belief that Jesus was born then. A conscious man of letters, he ties his legend into history more deliberately than our scribal Matthew. But why does he commit himself to a census so impossibly conceived except to bring about the aims of his story? We do not know where Jesus was born, or when. No more did Matthew when adapting his myth or Luke when devising his fable. If Matthews tale reflects his birth under Herod the Great, which is possible fact, we are left with the odd result that Jesus was born a few years before Christ according to the calendar. Herod died shortly before the Christian era and his sons divided up the rule.

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ROD OF JESSE JOHN ERSKINE on The Human Life of Jesus

Are place-names traditionally more reliable than the wonders told of in those places? At Cana Jesus turned water into wine, at Nain raised a corpse from its bier, at Gadara cast demons into swine, at Bethsaida cured one blind man by spitting and at Jericho cured another by a spoken word. There is a peculiar convincingness about the naming of places: there they are. On the strength of a place-name, we are tempted to posit an original fact. John Erskines essay on The Human Life of Jesus1 shows that a Catholic humanist may reason along these lines. First, a wonder occurs and a tradition arises which remembers the place of it. Sometimes one of Jesus own disciples John, for instance, as the supposed author of the Fourth Gospel makes a miracle out of a significant memory. It was at a Wedding in Cana in Galilee that the mother of Jesus told him, They have no wine, and he replied, Woman, what have I to do with thee? Mine hour is not yet come. A strange reply, these words in Jesus mouth, and it has often been wondered at. Woman, he calls his mother, as if she were a woman of a lower caste. Nevertheless, she turns to the servants saying, Do whatever he tells you. Six stone jars are standing nearby, and Jesus tells the servants, Fill the jars with water, and then, Now draw some out and take it to the steward of the feast. A wine of rare quality has been obtained. No word of command has been spoken, no audible prayer. What can have happened to give rise to such a tale as this if it rests on a fact? Did the original thing done by Jesus and remembered in connection with a wedding at Cana resemble the miracle described? Or did Jesus have them serve fresh water on purpose to guests well drunken? Such was the inspiration of Robert Graves, who made bold to see a hit on Jesus part for daring a novel idea: tasting fresh water they liked it! Or else it might have been only a ladleful drawn for the steward that Jesus miraculously transformed instead of all those brimming stone pots which would have furnished the wedding guests wine by the gallon. This odd solution is the compromise of Father Raymond Brown who accepts the miracle but shudders to think of the inordinate quantity transformed. What does John Erskine say? His book is an act of faith: he will

1. NY Willliam Morrow & Co. 1945

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have no part in weakening our confidence in Gospel history, and he would have us conceive the human life of Jesus as he conceives it, demonstrating that such a man did in truth once live and suffer those things which are common to all in the course of a singular life, to be sure. He will dare to say of Jesus response to his mothers request at the wedding: He did what she asked, and she knew he would. This he says in chapter two before taking it back again in chapter five with respect to any miracle performed. No doubt it was something Jesus did, he thinks, and something his mother had asked for this is the vague fact that our humanist is driven to, for the Wedding at Cana. Again in chapter ten he declares, I have made it clear that I do not believe in the Wonders, the ancient world being as it was very weak in science. Surely the Catholic modernists were better off in taking the Wedding at Cana for a deliberate Symbol, as for instance Baron von Hgel did in his classic article on the Gospel of John in the Encyclopedia Britannica. But Erskine is not only thinking of modernism, which the Catholic Church had in 1907 condemned. He is thinking back to the modern denial of Jesus very existence in defending his human life, which is supposed to be illustrated here. So he must believe that something vaguely unexplained has happened in that place, Cana of Galilee. The beautiful story can have no value, then, unless such a wedding once occurred there. Yet ironically the Symbol returns. Poet-scholar that he is at heart, Erskine must treat the Wedding at Cana as if it mattered to us by meaning something. Of itself it means nothing more than any other ancient wedding. A Galilean villager, then, who is otherwise unknown took a woman to wife at a wedding to which Jesus was invited, and his disciples, and his mother. We must affirm the original facts even if we draw them from our own imagination as Erskine does when he spins a pious fantasy: It was Mary who really watched over the evenings progress. The household was not rich, and even a few guests more than had been planned for would exhaust the provisions, to the mortification of bride and groom. It was to save them from embarrassment that Mary and Jesus planned together. Planned together: but Mary and Jesus surely did not plan a miracle together, and besides (later on in another chapter) such a miracle would be unedifying: To be able to turn water into wine would be a great convenience, especially at a large party where the wine had

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given out, but it would teach nothing about the duty to be just in all our dealings, or to be humble toward God and man. And here the humanist blunders, since the whole significance of Jesus turning water into wine is in the Symbol expressed. Erskine disposes of the miracle at the heart of the Johannine Tale in a tactful manner, delaying his confession to the last. Three times in his book he has turned to the Wedding at Cana, having each time to discover a meaning in it without accepting the wonder told of, which is the whole reason for the storys existence. Not all the subtlety of a John Erskine can dissolve the contradiction here because, in a word, he proposes to show us the significance of the Wedding at Cana after denying its significance. He will tell us what this Gospel means after denying that it means what it says. The significance of the story for us is that Jesus was present at the wedding and shared the happiness of his friends. He began and ended his ministry, he carried it out at every stage, in examples of social-mindedness. There was to be no place in the Kingdom of God for narrow or isolated hearts; to think of him as a lonely Saviour, a Prometheus, is a great error. When his mother came to him with the problem of the wine, we are sure she had to interrupt a cheerful conversation with some other guests. In sum, he would ignore the miracle of Christ because he finds no value in the Sign given. Who needs so much wine at a village wedding? And why are Christs powers expended on a trifle? Although convenient as he says, such a miracle would teach nothing about the duty to be just in all our dealings, or to be humble toward God and man. Of course not, but this is beside the point. Missing its significance, then, and being vaguely aware of his failure, Erskine distracts us by alluding to Micah: He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good: and what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God? (Micah 6,8.) He would substitute a moral lesson for the Wedding of Cana, having failed to get anything out of it except his own preference for a sociable Jesus, but his purpose is one of evasion. Well-conceived and warmly portrayed, his Jesus at the Wedding of Cana is no figure of history but a novelists character built up out of admirations and imaginations dear to the novelist, an amiable Jesus, a man of no narrow views who shares a festive hour with friends and is on hand to figure out a way to spare them

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embarrassment when the wine gives out. All of this, alas, without a hint of what it was that Jesus did or how he did it. What of the mother of Jesus in this tale, Mary who really watched over the evenings progress and planned together with Jesus to do whatever it was he did? Writing in a sentimental mood, Erskine makes free use of the adored name, Mary a Virgin addressed by name in Lukes Gospel when the Angel Gabriel salutes her. In fact, she isnt mentioned by name at the Wedding of Cana and this is no accident. Jesus mother isnt named in the Fourth Gospel, from which this tale is taken. She is said to be present at the cross along with two other Marys in this Gospel, but John has named only two of them Mary, and one of them is Jesus aunt (his mothers sister). When Jesus speaks to this mother from the cross, he once again calls her Woman. These are no hair-splitting distinctions. For as it happens, the mother of Jesus is not mentioned by her proper name in the Wedding at Cana because this mother stands also for the Judaism which waited for the Kingdom of God, and it is in that character that she is made to declare there is no more wine. Jesus begins by answering that between him and his putative mother there is nothing in common, because there is nothing earthly in his origin...2 The quoted words are those of Alfred Loisy, a supreme Catholic scholar, and they show the quality of a sincere endeavor to understand the Gospel as we have it when the Evangelists deliberate withholding of the mothers name is honored for its peculiar significance. Instead of juggling texts and moralizing and dodging the issue but faithful to the very word, Loisy tells us just what that significance consists in. The whole Wedding tale is, in effect, a mystical Symbol which the Evangelist composed to illustrate the supersession of one Religion by another. Judaism, for the Fourth Gospel, has been superseded by the advent of Christ, who came to fulfill it and surpass it. The miracle is not to be discarded, therefore, because thereby did Jesus manifest his glory, and his disciples believed in him. Such is the Scripture given and its meaning understood. Loisy is not embarrassed by the myth and he does not seek to replace it. We dont, of course, by the mere act of understanding such a tale, arrive at fact of history: we do arrive at the authors thought.

2. Alfred Loisy, Origins of the New Testament (University Books, 1962, p. 199.)

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ROD OF JESSE DOUBT OF JESUS

Whether the men of antiquity ever doubted that Jesus had lived I cannot say. It is our modern question, true, but was it theirs? For it seems to be widely assumed by our historians that the ancients did not question his apparent existence, at least not in those writings which survive. A rare Roman reference to Christ found in Tacitus Annales 15.44 mentions him as the founder of the vulgar Christian sect (Auctor nominis.) Along with an allusion to Jews under the instigation of Chrestus found in Suetonius, who gets even the name wrong, there is no early external reference to Jesus outside a disputed passage in Josephus which is at best an evidence that has been tampered with and possibly a mere forgery. It has no solid value. We know that very early Docetists were to be found who denied that Christ had come in the flesh. What can it mean for us unless we understand the reason for their denial? These were people who held that Jesus had appeared among men as an apparent man. Goodspeed has given a sample of Docetic thinking from the Acts of John, so-called, in which a disciple, John, is speaking: Sometimes when I would lay hold of him, I met with a material and solid body, and at other times again when I felt him, the substance was immaterial and as if it existed not at all. This was a Jesus who left no footprints, who seemed sometimes tall and sometimes short, and who, when he was being crucified below, was also conversing with John in a cave above Jerusalem.3 So these early Docetists denied that Christ had come in the flesh, no doubt in part because they understood that the deeds of Jesus as described were impossible to a man. They denied his human existence on our terms while conceding his human appearance on theirs. It was a point of view which the New Testament is concerned to deny, and all the early Catholic writers also deny passionately. As late as the (early) fifth century AD St. Augustine attacked them in a sermon, which shows how the viewpoint persisted. The First Epistle of John says: Every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of Antichrist. (I John 4) Surely, the author of the Acts of John in Goodspeeds quotation
3. Edgar J. Goodspeed, An Introduction to the New Testament (Chicago, 1953, p. 317)

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has only devised a theory which is implicit in the several Resurrection tales. In Lukes Gospel the Risen Christ appears bodily to walk a few miles incognito with a pair of disciples on the road to Emmaus until they recognize him in the breaking of bread, whereupon he disappears. Johns Christ is equally phantasmal when he appears suddenly among the disciples behind closed doors to breathe on them the Holy Spirit or when he reappears eight days later to exhibit his wounds to a doubting Thomas and chide his unbelief: Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe. If the very Gospels have fallen back on this kind of thinking to solve the problem of the Resurrection, why not make a theory of it to explain the amazing tales of Jesus then in circulation? It is no easy thing to pass through the iron gates of a dead world and awaken it to life or to lay aside the thousandfold assumptions we make in every act of understanding and then to comprehend an ancient mood. History may seem an easy thing to know if you reduce it to information: the dates of battles or the names of kings, but this becomes quickly a bore. Facts are crucial to our understanding, yes, and it may be a great thing to establish for the first time a particular fact, but the historians grand aim is not to furnish lists but to open another world to our fascination and astonishment, like a foreign country seen for the first time. Explicit doubts of the life of Jesus were raised in the 18th century by a man of letters and learning, Charles Franois Dupuis, who derived religion very largely from astrology in a famous book, Origine de tous les cultes (1794 1795). Earlier he had traced the origin of the zodiac to Upper Egypt, and in this book he described Christ as an allegorical personage representing the sun and Christianity as an allegory representing celestial phenomena. (This epitome we owe to Andrews Norton). It is said that the hubbub caused by his book was a factor in Napoleons decision to go to Upper Egypt. Rarely can a book have had so consequential an influence! In his book, Jesus the Nazarene, Maurice Goguel quotes Dupuis own words: Jesus is still less man than God. He is, like all the deities that men have adored, the sun; Christianity is a solar myth. When we shall have shown that the pretended history of a God, who is born of a virgin in the winter solstice, who is resuscitated at Easter or at the Vernal equinox, after having descended into hell, who brings with him a retinue of twelve apostles; whose chief possesses all the attributes of Janus a God, conqueror of the

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prince of darkness, who translates mankind into the empire of light, and who heals the woes of the world, is only a solar fable, ... it will be almost as unnecessary to inquire whether there was a man called Christ as it is to inquire whether some prince is called Hercules.4 Notice that here it is only the number of the Twelve Apostles that corresponds to the Zodiac, which represent a circle of animals. Elsewhere, Dupuis declares that Capricorn, or the Ram, corresponds to the Lamb of God because the sun enters Capricorn at the winter solstice, the time of Jesus birth, but here he strikes a false note. He is right enough in claiming an astrological reference to the liturgical calendar for Christmas, which occurs at the time of the winter solstice, but he slights a prime fact of history by substituting a Ram for the Spring lamb required by the Jewish Passover. Of the two Christmas legends in the Gospels, we may add, neither one suggests a season of the year. Now the 18th century was not, in general, disposed to deny the life of Christ. Most of the Deists like Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson thought highly of the Nazarene but poorly of priestcraft. Jeffersons Bible we have already remarked on. Or consider Voltaire, who admired Jesus but hated the church, basing this in part on his knowledge of history. A certain Bolingbroke is said to be among the first of the moderns to deny the life of Christ, but Charles Franois Dupuis gave the memorable shock. In deriving the liturgy and its myths from astrology, he laid down a hypothesis which is alive to this day in the study of Mithra. Among the relics of Mithraism, which has left us no writings, are queer bestial figures of Aion, or Time, showing the head of a lion on the standing body of a man who is wrapped up and down with a great coiling serpent. This image may represent the course of the sun as it rises through the Zodiac. A typical Mithraic altar in bas-relief will show the hero-god Mithra slaying a bull which is half-collapsed under the gods knee as his sword pierces its heart and a scorpion pinches the bulls testicles. This almost looks like the pain of a sexual renunciation, but Franz Cumont, whom I am following for the astrology, explains that the sun as it waxes in strength enters the sign of Taurus which marks the beginning of spring. The return of winter is announced when the sun traverses the sign of the Scorpion. We see from the debris of history how

4. Maurice Goguel, Jesus the Nazarene (New York: Appleton, 1926, p. 7.)

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thoroughly the mysteries of Mithra were involved with astrology when the symbols of the Zodiac are ...stamped on these lifeless things which yet survive. Around this same time another French writer, one Count Volney, derived the name Christ from the Hebrew Heres or Cheres, meaning Sun. This is perhaps absurd, but the two words have in common the key letters: Chrs (and the Hebrew is written without vowels). Shemesh is the usual Hebrew word for sun to which we must compare Shamash, the Mesopotamian sun god. Heres is poetic and rare. As for Christos, it is unrelated to the sun, although the Messiah was looked for under the image of the Star of Jacob. The mysterious name of one supposed Messiah, Bar Kochba, seems to mean, Son of the Star. Easter in the Western church is made to fall invariably on the Day of the Sun, and in AD 354 Pope Julius I assimilated the festival (of Christs birth) with that of the birth of Mithra, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia. Mithra was a god of light or of the sun. Animated, probably, by considerations like these Volney derived the name of Jesus from Yes (not our English word, of course) which is formed by the union of three letters, the numerical value of which is 608, one of the solar periods. In the Book of Revelation Jesus openly calls himself the root and the offspring of David, the bright Morning Star, (22,16. RSV) and we read in a primitive Christmas hymn quoted by Bishop Ignatius: How then was he revealed to the aeons? A star shone in heaven Brighter than all the stars, And its light was ineffable And its novelty caused astonishment; All the other stars Together with sun and moon Became a chorus for the star, And it outshone them all with its light.5 Dr. Schoedel, whose translation I quote, thinks that this Star may refer to Matthews Christmas Star, with support from the context, but I think it refers directly to Jesus because its outshining even sun and moon

5. William R. Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch: A Commentary on the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch (Fortress Press 1985.)

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reminds me of Josephs dream in Genesis (37,9) in which the sun and moon and eleven stars the eleven stars of his jealous brothers made obeisance to the future savior of their family. There is yet another early hymn (not here to be described and far too long to quote) which is called The Song of the Pearl or The Hymn of the Soul based on a greater than a Christmas Star. It is found in the so-called Acts of Thomas written in Syrian Edessa. In this hymn the mysterious identity of the Eastern hero is very readily resolved along lines which Rendel Harris once suggested. It is, namely, a deeply mythical hymn of the Morning Star which (or rather, Who) figures in the Song as a Twin of the Evening Star and a child of Sun and Moon. And these astrological Twins (Morning and Evening Star) correspond to another set of twins in the Acts of Thomas, namely, Jesus himself and his twin brother, Thomas. Dr. Harris deserves real credit for his theory that Jesus and his twin, Thomas, had displaced Aziz and Monim, as the Morning and the Evening Stars were formerly called there. This rather puzzling hymn (Song of the Pearl) when taken astrologically explains the mysterious season of the disappearance of the Morning Star in a sort of long Egyptian darkness, during which the Evening Star enjoys its phase. For in the season of the Morning Star, the Evening Star is not to be seen. Of course it is the Morning Star who represents the immortal Twin. Impressive on early morning walks, it waxes in splendor before the sun rises even as the other stars are fading away. By contrast, the Evening Star sinks and dies in evening darkness as the mortal Twin. It is of interest that (as Rendel Harris has pointed out) in various bas-reliefs of Mithra, two youthful torch-bearers are to be seen in the corners, as it were: one upholding his torch and the other holding it down. This looks like a very plain reference to the Heavenly Twins. To wrap this up, we may notice that Zeus offers a choice to Polydeukes (=Pollux) who is mourning over his wounded brother Kastor and pleading for his life: Behold, of these two things I give you choice entire; if you would escape death and age that all men hate, to dwell beside me on Olympos with Athene and Ares of the black spear, that right is yours. But if all your endeavor is for your Twin, and you would have in all things shares alike,

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half the time you may breathe under the earth, half the time in the golden houses of the sky.6 Richmond Lattimore It is not a pair of (actual) stars that are to be called Castor and Pollux here. Instead, and strikingly, the Heavenly Twins are related to the Morning and the Evening Star in Pindars Ode.

DOUBT OF JESUS NOW

A self-taught scholar and a Scotsman, Mr. JM Robertson, rekindled the question of Jesus for the English-speaking world about a hundred years ago, but an American scholar, Professor William Benjamin Smith, might almost claim priority here independently. These different minds had more or less simultaneously worked up similar hunches, each believing on different grounds that a human Jesus may never have existed. Overwhelmingly, their views were rejected, as of course we must expect, and yet the first thirty years of the twentieth century were much occupied with the question thus raised it was not an easy question. Even after the controversy died down, writers could be found at mid-century or beyond who acknowledged the problem, as we noticed ourselves in the case of Santayana or John Erskine. JOHN MACKINNON ROBERTSON is not a famous writer or even, as we say, quite great but one of his many books lately republished, a twovolume History of Freethought in the 19th Century, is a work of great merit. I find it cited in a bibliography of the American historian, Preserved Smith. His Pagan Christs has also been reprinted, and it was this same versatile Robertson who did the Coleridge article and wrote portions on Shakespeare in my 1952 Britannica. Although probably nothing he wrote is as sheerly good literature as JS Mills essay on Liberty, the intrepid Scot shared the same passion for liberty and free-thought which Mill expressed with a beautiful tact. Whether he did entirely believe that Jesus had never existed I am unable to say, but I think really that he did not and could not whole-heartedly believe it without relapses. He tells us that he came to the Negative view as a result of trying to find the historical Jesus and then in his Short History of Christianity he allows that for the ancient Jesuine eucharist, which was

6. The Odes of Pindar (University of Chicago Press, 1947 p. 127.)

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perhaps revived in a time of disaster, a new meaning may have been found in the story of an actually slain man Jesus, whose death took a sacrificial aspect from its occurrence at the time of the atoning feast. There you have his concession, which almost implies that the argument is about something else. One of Robertsons hypotheses, then, is that Christianity was the off-spring of a secret Joshua cult going back probably for hundreds of years into Old Testament times when a certain Joshua (he says) was regarded as a god. Now in the Old Testament Joshua figures as a second Moses, not a god, but after all he did once make the sun stand still, which is very godlike. Robertsons hypothesis rests on a strongly mythical view of the Old Testament which is nowadays considered to be out of date, but this latter view is undoubtedly a phase and, in fact, if we observe the behavior of these ancient Patriarchs and prophets, we find ourselves up to the neck in myth outright, often grossly. When we think of Elijah, for instance, riding a chariot of fire drawn by horses of fire and lifted up to Heaven in a whirlwind, we have a comparison to Apollo of the kind that Robertson intended. He dared to imagine furthermore that the Joshua cult was carried on in conventicles of twelve. Now we have in the first place no evidence for a Joshua cult and it was pure guesswork on his part to posit his conventicles of twelve, yet I once saw a photograph of an archaeologists Near Eastern find modeled in clay showing twelve figurines (if I rightly recall) reclining in a ritual circle: figurines in a bowl. Male and female images they are and crudely made. They appear to be naked, and they have, of course nothing identifiably to do with any Joshua cult. Nonetheless, they are a piece of antique evidence for what? This Quakerlike bowl of nudes is no Roman orgy, judging from the sedate postures of the figurines, and we may think in passing of those ostensible words of Jesus in the Egyptian Gospel of Thomas about the Coptic initiates entering the Kingdom when, without shame, he can trample on his clothes. He can offer no such tangible evidence for his cult, however, though it may be mentioned that the names of Jesus (in Greek) and Joshua (in Hebrew) are essentially the same, and he cites an odd sort of passage in the New Testament, found in the Epistle of Jude, where according to certain manuscripts it is said that Jesus saved a people out of Egypt and afterward destroyed those who did not believe. Compare the curious idea of Paul in I Corinthians 10, where the Rock which followed

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the Israelites in the desert and from which they drank is Christ! It is strange to think that the Apostle would find Christ in some such form among the Israelites. On such guesses as this Robertson was bold to erect his hypothesis, but sometimes his phrasing seems to betray him. It is very easy for any of us to slip back into the assumption of Jesus real existence regardless of any doubts we may have felt. Our belief in the fact of his life is supported by an ancient custom and has become a solid habit. It was habit for Robertson, too, but he was willing to consider the alternative and cast about for other possibilities. In his passion to explain how Christianity could possibly come about without a Jesus, he was drawn to the idea of a common ancestral myth behind Jesus and Krishna, who was also regarded as a god incarnate come down from heaven to redeem us. We do see, of course, that here our critic is casting about for other possibilities and has seized on a very suggestive comparison which may be found already in Charles Franois Dupuis. What about his Joshua cult, then? Are we to assume a vague connection? If so, and because as I have mentioned Joshua made the sun stand still, we may have in Robertsons two hypotheses a common ancestor in Dupuis astrological theory. Nor would I be surprised to learn that Dupuis had given Robertson his incentive in the first place. WILLIAM BENJAMIN SMITH, who once taught at Tulane and who, by the way, also contributed articles (on mathematics) to the 1952 Britannica, was another versatile mind. Radical in his assumption that Jesus never lived, he differs from other critics, and from Robertson tremendously, in his endeavor to help religion. He believed that he was helping to save Jesus, save the Gospels for us by denying the mere man of history and asserting that the Gospels were composed as deliberate symbols, which allows him to make a Symbol of Christ (but also to explain why it seems that Jesus originated in a widespread Mediterranean Jesus cult before the time of Christ). His first book he was obliged to have translated into German as Der Vorchristliche Jesus to find a publisher for it. His title designates a supposedly prechristian Jesus whose myth had existed for a century or more before the age of Peter and Paul. For proof of this he turned to the Book of Acts, which purports to be an early Christian history. How suddenly (in Acts) do Christian churches spring up everywhere around the Mediterranean world and with full-fledged religious faith and knowledge of Jesus! Is it not a case of viele Brennpunkte or of spontaneous multiple origins of a common

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myth being fused together rather than a single burning focus? We do notice, then, that Smiths pre-Christian Jesus does not arise from a Joshua cult going back many centuries but is a broadly Mediterranean myth of more recent origin. Robertsons hypothesis goes back as far as human sacrifice and seems designed to allow for crucifixion and the Sacrament whereas Smiths vorchristliche Jesus rests on such historical evidence as we have in the Book of Acts. We must concede to Smith that the evidence in Acts, which has little enough to do with any Apostles, does rather surprise us by the rapidity with which the Gospel took root around that world. Yet Smith was drawn also to the view that Jesus represented a deliberate Personification of Israel under the name of Son of Man. Is it quite the same thing? As with Robertson above he seems to waver between possibilities here. Taken individually, any of these possibilities is suggestive and what they all have in common, of course, is that they propose to tell us where Jesus came from without having shown us in the first place that he never lived. We must bear this in mind, but do let us continue in spite of that because real insight is to be gained here. In a later book, Ecce Deus, which he published in English, Professor Smith develops his belief that our Gospels were designed symbolically by the authors and deliberately so written, as if originally there was no question about it. Even the naive Gospel of Mark, which seems often to be realistic, was read by its first readers for its Symbol. ARTHUR DREWS whose famous book, The Christ Myth, has been twice recently reprinted, is the best known member of our selected critics. His is surely the name most literary people will associate with the Negative view. A powerful mind, and really the most powerful of our trio, Arthur Drews was generous enough to acknowledge a debt to Mr. JM Robertson. To me this is touching compared to the scorn which Albert Schweitzer pours on these names as amateurs and outsiders. Mr. Robertson was a self-educated man from the age of thirteen, whereas Professor Drews was a German academic philosopher. His vigorous treatment of the question is founded on a very wide and searching research, but he does occasionally give the same impression that Robertson does of not entirely believing his own theory at all points. This is the way of your thinker, however, who is pursuing his idea through a mist, or blazing his trail in a forest. Drews is not simply setting out an opinion which he happened to pick up somewhere. He is engrossed in a problem and a vision: he is testing out a genuine possibility, and he fights

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for it energetically, like a visiting strongman going among the theologians and inviting any one of them to step into the ring. His contempt for the evasiveness of theology is strongly expressed too strongly, in fact, but done just in the manner of those downright German scholars who go after these questions, or they used to, with hammer and tongs. The gist of Drewss theory is easily expressed because he believes that more or less all of Christianity has been drawn from the Book of Isaiah, in the sense of its being all expressed and foreshadowed there. This is a curious inversion of the common belief that the Book of Isaiah is a prophecy of Christ. Yet he gives a good overview of the astrological theory also with many illustrations of it. What his latent belief amounts to, then, is a conviction that all of Gospel story might have been put together out of materials already available, no Jesus required. Yet there is something inconsistent about a two-fold approach, as of a mind wavering between possibilities, and we have found this inconsistency in our other critics also. Which is it, Dr. Drews? Isaiah or astrology? Truth is, there are simple sources for both of these viewpoints. I said above that his Isaiah theory inverts the Christian belief in prophecy whereas obviously the astrology hypothesis goes back to the ever-useful Charles Franois Dupuis. Our critics are intelligent men and intrepid souls, humanists or men of letters or philosophers of no slight learning who often startle us with insight, but they cannot be radically original as even Dupuis was not because the fundamental viewpoints have been around for a very long time. (It is a point made elsewhere in a similar connection by the eloquent William James). John Stuart Mill has written that All principles are most effectually tested by extreme cases, and I would apply this to the Negative critics themselves because they represent the extreme of the general shock which our traditions have received and they try seriously to go beyond half-measures or dishonest compromise and its embarrassments. Theirs is the merit of going all the way, of carrying through, and of striving for a final result. Hence, their search for a pure principle. It is not, as such, the mere evidence which prompts them, but a search for principle and dislike of a muddle. These are minds who demand consistency and general truth and they stand for decision, choice, pronouncement based on real acknowledgements: Jesus as myth, Gospel as myth. They have taken up a position with respect to the claims of the Gospel, and insofar it is an austere religious act which they represent in an age of comfortable religious habit.

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Yet even so these theories multiply, and our brief sketch does not attempt to cover them all. Without counting Drewss Isaiah hypothesis, and by adding Professor Benjamin Smiths view of the Gospels, we have four seemingly distinct possibilities already: *Jesus a solar myth *Jesus emerging openly from a long-concealed Joshua cult *Jesus descended with Krishna from a common ancestor, and *Jesus written up as a deliberate symbol in Gospels done by writers who knew perfectly well what they were doing and whose first readers also knew it. Our purpose is not one of historical survey of any of these minds or any of these theories which have served us for a sampling. The Negative critics have been roundly refuted and confuted or else ignored. The work has been done and may be looked up in libraries and some of it on the internet, whereas our interest is in the use of the Negative argument for any insight it gives into the Gospels as we have them. I would gladly be done with these critics for now and get on with our survey, but I shall have to describe the bizarre hypothesis of Professor John Allegro just to bring us up to date. Despite his peculiar idea whose weakness and fantastic nature I shall first expose we must return to him later on in this book to discover on a deeper level the strength of his challenge and the importance of his delusion. Good competent readable surveys were done in tidy books by Shirley Jackson Case (Historicity of Jesus) and Fred. Conybeare (The Historical Christ). Maurice Goguel has given a perfectly elegant brief survey of the Negative critics in the opening of his Jesus the Nazarene: Myth or History? and G. Stanley Hall gives a compendious review in his singular masterpiece, Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology. Probably there are many such treatments because, although I select only this leading trio for example, there were many others drawn to the Negative view at the time. Harry Elmer Barnes, in his Twilight of Christianity, somewhere mentions more than twenty such names. And there is the occasional out-of-the way book of interest, such as Georg Brandes Jesus, a Myth. A scholar of distinction in European literature, Brandes draws heavily on the parallel to William Tell, a supposedly historical hero to the Swiss but for whose existence no evidence can be found.

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ROD OF JESSE ALLEGROS BIZARRE THEORY

On the whole the better modern scholars teach that a Jesus who is obscure to history outside the Gospels did nonetheless inspire the traditions which arose afterward in a cult of disciples and believers. Oral Tradition is primary until it comes to be written down, after which it is relatively fixed. And these traditions embody the main facts of his life as well as conveying his Teachings, which are supposed (by some) to have been written down by a disciple called Matthew. If true, that document has been lost, but it came to be recopied or embodied, more or less, in other documents which we have reconstructed from our present Gospels. Such, I say, is the current view based on deep research and careful reflection. It is in no real danger of being overthrown or subverted among the majority. Nowhere has the Negative view threatened to engulf professional scholarship except for a 19th century Dutch school and the singular case of a solitary German scholar, also of the 19th century. And let us say frankly that scholarship of high distinction has come round to an acknowledgment of Gospel myth. It is something for which theology has been preparing for more than a hundred and seventy years (or ever since David Strausss Leben Jesu in 1835). Arthur Drewss shocking title, The Christ Myth, has been absorbed into the everyday working vocabulary of Rudolf Bultmann, a far greater scholar. Equally remarkable concessions to the problem are to be found in the brilliant work of Alfred Loisy who in a work composed around the turn of the century says: The subject of this faith (namely, Jesus) is at no stage of its development presented to the historian as an actual reality. (Gospel and Church, p. 50) But I must draw attention to the crucial word here: historian. Despite the failure of the Negative argument to take, or might we say in fairness, take more deeply, the critics and doubters have been serious men and honest minds. They were explorers, in a sense, and they, too, have belonged to the great trends of scholarship, but as I say they represent the extreme of the general shock. One and all, the Negative theories aforementioned are rational theories proposed by men whose serious aim is truth. This much we must say in simple fairness. An element of irrational conviction no doubt enters in, as with all deep philosophy, but a future historian looking back on the Negative argument and writing without prejudice must describe these critics as offering a

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rational attack on the credit of the Gospels. I mean to say, it has been rational until now when Allegro presents his case. John Marco Allegro belongs in this line of critics with respect to his own radical doctrine, which was that the historical Jesus had disappeared. And yet his case is unique. Unlike the members of our representative trio, he was a trained biblical scholar acquainted with the ancient Near Eastern languages. He may be said to derive from this earlier trend of rational attack since his doctrine implies all the vast earlier evidence of history and anthropology and comparative religions as well as any recent finds, most especially the Dead Sea Scrolls which were discovered in 1947. Professor Allegro was among the few scholars called in for original study on the scrolls, and his (earlier) Pelican book on the Scrolls has been translated into eight languages. We must concede a certain brilliance to the man. Yet with John Allegro the attack on the historical credit of the Gospels ceases to be rational. A bizarre theory emerges in his book on The Sacred Mushroom & the Cross, where the irruption of something archaic overwhelms the thought of Jesus, and it is this archaic something that he strives to rationalize. Already this notorious book is a generation old, but has it ever been given its due? With respect to the urgency of its problem one might fairly describe it as a generation Jung. Has anybody got to the bottom of Allegros bizarre masterpiece during the past forty years? Although decked out with much appearance of scholarship and appendices and loaded with over a hundred pages of close-written notes, his proposition is the wild theory of an author fascinated by a primitive obscenity which has taken possession of his mind. It is the fact of this possession which I would indicate because the obscenity, which is inherent in his material, belongs to the archaic epoch to which he traces the origins of the Jesus myth. Withal, he writes in a lucid manner and achieves a balanced tone except for his chronic references to the genitals, which occur with a compulsive frankness. As a literary curiosity his Sacred Mushroom & the Cross stands queerly apart, like Doughtys Arabia Deserta or Joyces Finnegans Wake. Idiosyncratic to the last degree, it is quite as peculiar to its author as The Religio Medici is to Sir Thomas Browne or his Essays to Emerson or the extravagant Ecce homo to Nietzsche alone. We cannot imagine another mind having written it, and this we may grant his odd masterpiece. It is a work of genius twisted, and its very importance, I think, lies in the authors obsession

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and its value in his will to destroy. Although I dont make a great work out of Allegros Sacred Mushroom compared with a book like Schweitzers Quest, it was a Sign of the Times, and all the more disconcerting when its importance was ignored. Few things show better the revolution through which this gifted mind had passed than the contrast between his chapter on Jesus in The Dead Sea Scrolls, which is so nicely written, and the strange theory of the Sacred Mushroom, in which the story of Jesus is dismissed as a hoax. So the case of John Allegro is one in which a recent scholars confidence in the fact of Jesus life had collapsed. The historical question is barely mentioned except to be dismissed, for despite the subject of his book, Jesus has simply evaporated for John Allegro. All his interest is focused on an ancient sex and drug cult whose deity is a fungus. The year was 1970 and his book had reaped a harvest of distress in religion, the peculiar distress of the 1960s. It appeared a decade after Dr. Gabriel Vahanians troublesome book on The Death of God, which in retrospect might be said to have seeded the clouds. Vahanian had dared to consider the Nietzschean myth in its meaning for our culture. Like light from a star, the death of God had arrived at last in fundamentalist America, but it was taken up by theologians who lacked Vahanians seriousness. Deprived of its shock except for a certain titillating value but watered down and misinterpreted by writers who failed to grasp its horror, the death of God was being offered as a Gospel this inconceivable blunder! The idea was bruited abroad in the nations news in 1965 almost as if the news were reporting a supernatural fact. Time magazine asked on its cover in huge bold letters, white on black: Is God Dead? Later on, I would find in a 19th century English periodical a reference to a Gypsy belief that the old God had died and that the Son now carries on in his stead, as if in reminiscence of Kronos yielding to Zeus. It was only Gypsy theology which came to us in the debased American version of Gods death and a far cry from Nietzsches horrific insight. Thus did the 1960s pave the way for John Allegro. In the popular imagination it was the era of the Beatles and of LSD and its psychedelic visions, but the quest was for vivid sensation rather than God. My own distinct sense of religion at that time was of an immense underlying restlessness and no small fascination with attractive falsehood. It was a heyday of the Hippies who withdrew from city and suburb to gather in short-lived rural communes, heralds of a sexual revolution.

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Theirs was a dream of returning to Nature with woodsy living and gardens and odd jobs done for self-support and otherwise doing as they damn well pleased. In a way, though they were right. They were in reaction against a society which had become incredibly false. For the first time in our lives we saw bizarre costumes worn as public dress and ugly styles deliberately cultivated with plenty of uncut, unkempt hair. More than just deliberately shocking, obscenity was so much a part of all this that one has to see a value in it. The whole of society was undergoing an archaic reversion because in the depths we were searching for life, vitality. Obscenity was a breathing-hole, and Allegros obscenity belongs to his material against this background as something required by the times, just as, for example, John Updikes obscenity has belonged to his material as a novelist, which is not at all to imply that these writers have enjoyed a happy fate. Professor Allegro ought to have shown very much more restraint than he did show but he became reckless, and John Updike (suffer the example) would sacrifice his Great American Novel on President Buchanan to Memories of the Ford Administration where its corpse has been strewn amid the furrows. No more than Truman Capote in his unfinished Answered Prayers could Updike handle the erotic theme in naturalistic detail without paying for it. Capote, who was another writer of genius, pretended for years to be writing a big novel Answered Prayers is masterly but a mere novelette where, for the first time in his writings, I believe, the erotic is suddenly to the fore. See how it all goes with the times. An earlier master than either of these, Henry James, had warned of the danger to the literary artist of taking on the erotic too frankly. He cited the Italians of his day in illustration of it and wrote a wonderful tale, The Last of the Valerii, describing the worship of a venereal god dug up somewhere on Roman soil. It was a different Henry, Mr. Henry Miller, who found his opportunity in those times, his voice like an artistic fog-horn, his melody confined to the pianos white keys, but his integrity as an artist uncompromised at the cost of all integrity to his form. The interior failure of his novels to be organized was a presage of the same failure in the highly gifted Jack Kerouac, a short-winded artist who failed to find a footing for his muse in any sort of durable vitality. And this was the sort of thing, I say, which came to light in the Sixties. John Allegro dug up his venereal god, metaphorically speaking, near where the Tigris and Euphrates converge just north of the Persian Gulf. This was no classical statue but an obscene archaic imagination of

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the Phallic God which lies within the psyche, but deep-buried in unconsciousness. And he produced it by projecting into the fragments of a dead language, a Sumerian for which we havent yet found our Rosetta Stone, the deliberate image of a venerated Phallus but with details borrowed in his case from a little mushroom whose semi-poisonous medicine he requires for his take on the myth of revelation: the sacred mushroom, in a word, produces visions. Of all the incredible turns which his thinking might have taken, he reduced his Jesus to a fantasy about a mushroom in order to load his book with the weight of an archaic myth. By phallic god in this book we arent referring to gods endowed with a mere erection or displaying one, like Grecian herms. That is not the depth of it. By phallic god I mean the very phallus conceived as a god while being also indescribably human although in forms which must test the most plastic imagination. Such forms may be found among primitive stones: this we know. And such idols, or monsters, do exist in disturbed minds, as Dr. Bertram Lewin (as well as CG Jung) have understood. I put my finger here on the unacknowledged image that took possession of Professor Allegros soul because, in terms of his book, as aforesaid, he must reduce the phallic image to the dimensions of Amanita muscaria or else sacrifice his mushroom. The unacknowledged image, then, is that of the Phallus as Man, and hugely life-sized. That his procedures were mistaken, and even false, I shall presently show, but Professor Allegro was not unique in having been overwhelmed by the powers he thought to summon and use. Many of us have known the meaning of some such archaic reversion. Our very era has been one of such collapses and overwhelmings, but in the best result, a new vitality has surged in with all its vital disorders and dangers.

ALLEGROS PROCEDURE EXPOSED

Allegro assumes, as a basis for his procedure, that Gospels and Epistles were written in a secret code designed to protect a mushroom ritual whose supposed aim is to produce revelations. Of course, these revelations are nothing but hallucinations which must vary hopelessly in every mind. And then to imagine that a Medieval Catholic civilization could have grown out of the dissipations of a drug cult! William Benjamin Smith was an Apostle of sanity in recommending the Gospels as deliberate Symbols compared with this madcap theory, and yet there is an affinity of sorts because both critics have refused the surface of the tale:

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the story of Jesus, they believe, does not mean what it says. Of course, Professor Allegros authority is a recommendation, but one must evaluate. He writes that his book is primarily intended for the general reader, and it is as such that I respond. So when he relies on his knowledge of ancient Near Eastern languages to lend credit to his opinion, we are bound to notice the isolation of his mind. Where are his colleagues? He can show no connection with any school of thought and no derivation from any body of established knowledge for the peculiar essence of his idea. At the same time and of great importance, his chapters are related to vast realms of special knowledge in a manner that obscures his idiosyncrasy. It is, for example, absurd to compare Jesus to a mushroom, thereby obtaining a phallic as well as a sacramental association, but we know, for instance, of phallic monuments in Nigeria which even now retain some vestige of sacredness and are locally regarded as the memorials nay, the very images! of ancient kings. That he has borrowed the insights and theories of others to weave them into his scheme we discover on a close reading. For example, traces of Rendel Harris on the twin cults are to be found in his chapter on the Twins although it means very little in the way of honest debt. So our learned philologist achieves the illusion of a theory which belongs to a larger philosophy and to anthropology and comparative religions and ancient history, as if these very disciplines supported him. Ironically, his mushroom thesis is adapted from a theory proposed by a scholarly ex-businessman, Mr. R. Gordon Wasson, who had convinced himself that Amanita muscaria was the original food of the gods while citing many an old Vedic text in support of his idea. Just for one example of that, citing the Rig-Veda (IX 97 9d): By day he appears hari (color of fire), by night, silvery white, Wasson appends a photograph to show that the Amanita, which is red by day, has a silvery appearance by moonlight. Now I think that Wassons whole theory is wrong, but never mind that here. He was very serious about his discovery of soma in this lowly mushroom and even somewhere speaks of the Real Presence (!) of the god in connection with its eating. Unfortunately, his own experience with it was a failure. He had to switch to an intoxicating Mexican mushroom of a different species before achieving the heavenly vision. Amanita muscaria is a semi-poisonous fungus whose first effect is to nauseate and whose after-effect (says Mr. Robert Graves) is hang-

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over. In between, one is supposed to receive the sacred vision supposed to have the benefit of soma or else enjoy communion with Jesus. In proof of his theory Allegro has borrowed a photograph of Mr. Wassons showing somewhere in the ruins of a medieval French church a mural of Adam and Eve in which the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is sprouting branches which appear to have the form of Amanita muscaria. It would have been the perfect place for an acknowledgment of his indebtedness. Instead, we find deep buried in his notes which have grown into a thicket of a hundred and forty pages two or three slight references to RG Wasson as also to another mushroom scholar, Dr. Puharich. As for Professor Allegros methods, I must first remark that it wasnt by any method that he made his discovery because to recognize that the Gospels are written in code depended on insight. It was an unfathomable revelation, unique to Professor Allegro, and it cannot be explained. None of us can explain how ideas occur when they come unbidden to mind, but we do notice that it was Professor Allegros insight into the meaning of a peculiar name, Boanerges, that opened his eyes and first cracked the Gospel code. (Boanerges as a problem distinctly related to myth is another gift from Rendel Harris on the Twin cults with respect to priority). As we know, it is the nickname which Jesus bestowed on two brothers, James and John, who were fishermen in their fathers business which they abandoned to become disciples. After its bestowal, given only in Marks Gospel, it is never used again. Its uniqueness is intriguing when the Evangelist tells us that it means Sons of Thunder. Only, what language does it come from? What are these unknown forms? Scholars have been guessing about that since the days of St. Jerome because what Boanerges is said to mean no scholar can explain on linguistic grounds: it seems not to be a proper form in Aramaic for the translation given in Mark, where it certainly means what the Evangelist says it does in context. Allegros contribution to the puzzle is that to a proper study of the word he has superadded a hunch: Sons of Thunder, he tells us, citing an old Greek word, keraunion, was a widely used Semitic epithet for the mushroom. Or else just for mushrooms, which are observed to spring up after a thunderstorm. Given this fact, Allegro concocts a word-cluster from the Sumerian as *GEShPU-AN-UR, which he interprets to mean mighty man (holding up) the arch of heaven in reference to the canopy of the mushroom. This word then he rearranges

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as pu-an-ur-ges, from which at last Boanerges is derived. So to furnish an evidence that had escaped scholars of all sorts for eighteen hundred years, he will rummage around in the lost language of SUMERIAN from which, or rather from whose fragments, he will pour his cornucopia of obscene suggestion, arranging and re-arranging the very syllables in ever remarkable combinations to show us where things have come from. It works very simply: (a) He will take a word out of the Gospels, or a name like Judas Iscariot, or a prayer like the Our Father these are code words, code names, and they are not to be taken naively at face value. (b) Then he will show that undisguised obscene prototypes exist in his reconstructed Sumerian which reveal the meaning of the forgotten code, bearing always on either sex or the mushroom. (c) His method, therefore, is one of arranging various syllables of ancient Sumerian to achieve rhyme, assonance, or similarity to the key names in the Greek Testament. By this method he discovered that Iscariot came from a jumbled Sumerian title, *USh-GU-RI-UD which means, of all things: erect phallus of the storm. It means this despite the pre-posited asterisk by which he confesses that no such exact combination of words was known to exist in ancient Sumerian until he himself had put these syllables together. That is an evidence devised by himself. Everywhere the pre-posited asterisk freckles his pages to confess, what his scholars conscience does not permit him to conceal, that the particular word so marked is an invention of his own. (As for the capital letters, they are conventional in transcribing Sumerian). We might compare to this elaborate ruse the opinion of Joseph Klausner, a distinguished Jewish scholar who has written sympathetically of Jesus: Klausner thinks that Iscariot may mean, Ish Kerioth (or Man from Kerioth, in the original). What else is Professor Allegros method, then, except a Ouijaboard sorcery by which the evidence required in support of his theory is all of his own manufacture? Only, his Ouija-board is a very big one: it consists of Sumerian monosyllables. He writes of this ancient language, the oldest Near Eastern language we know of, that it is put together like a house of bricks. (p. 15) The technical term for this kind of language is agglutinative, and what is much to his purpose, as he explains, is that Sumerian tends to keep these basic idea-words unchanged. Let the reader note this fact. I do not question the gifted Allegro when he speaks with expert knowledge to tell us that Sumerian tends to keep these basic idea-words unchanged. That is interesting. It gives us the reason for his

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confidence in making rearrangements, such as *USh-GU-RI-UD to mean erect phallus of the storm when decoding the name of Christs betrayer. Our Dead Sea Scrolls scholars as we know work with fragments also, and Professor Allegro has been such a scholar, but they pore over their fragments to fit them together like pieces in a jig-saw puzzle under the necessity of making sense and on the assumption that self-evident wholes are being (imperfectly) restored. The array of Sumerian syllables in Allegros hands lie under no such fitting and meaningful constraints. He fits them together as he pleases to build up structures of assonance or similarity wherewith to expose his posited Gospel code and in this strange manner reveal a New Testament mushroom cult characterized by a decidedly erotic imagination. So they serve his theory, this jumble of Sumerian word-bricks, like the triangles and parallelograms in a Chinese puzzle. TANGRAMS may be arranged in all sorts of combinations, too: this way a house, that way a man, here an umbrella, there a bird over and over again, the same pieces. So you make word combinations let me illustrate in English, of course like snowball or mudpie to discover new facts. That is to say, you can try. One might, for example, put together CAT and TAIL to discover cattails if one were obsessed with a sort of vegetation which might be said to resemble a phallus. Conversely, those poor ancient Sumerians who tended to keep their basic idea-words unchanged would not likely concoct such combinations as firearm or necklace or whiplash or cats-paw because here the building bricks have changed their meaning. When we speak of firearms, we dont think of fire or arms and much less of arms afire. And to admit that the old Sumerians could have conceived of combinations like firearm as easily as we do would be for Professor Allegro to confess that his method could hardly be used for discovery when working backwards from clues which set the task. Whereas by assuming that the meaning of those syllables stays fixed, he makes an easy job of it. He concocts an approximate sort of Sumerian rhyme out of whatever elements he chooses, then offers this rhyme as an expos to some particular target in the Greek Testament. Now pretend we are visitors from the moon and that we take a few of the more elementary words in English and combine them to arrive at discovery. We join eye and ball to discover eyeballs, or tooth and brush to hit upon a lucky find. And we congratulate ourselves. Only, what could we hope to discover by joining ear and wig? Or why, if we had ever thought to put lip and stick together, might we not have applied

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it to a cigarette? The method is hopeless. Imagine a moon-dwelling scholar who had never seen a sleeve of canvas mounted on a swivel to serve pilots for a weathervane. Windsock is a word used with perfect propriety with respect to the bricks combined because a sock need not enclose a foot, but could our scholar arrive at the discovery of this object by joining wind and sock? Would anything induce him to think of joining them in preference, say, to breeze and bracelet? If anything did, would he know what the combination represented? Or if, by some futuristic archaeologist, he were presented with the object in question, would he discover its uses and think to place it at an airport by playing with words? Let us concede the extreme of possibility: our scholar joins together wind and sock to hit upon an airports windsock. What else might he discover by joining water and shoe? What object might he find to represent a watershoe? Or why should he not hope to find foxglove in a veterinarians office? Let me show by one small technical example, however, the extent of Professor Allegros recklessness, or rather, of his scholarly derangement, the evidence for which is scattered throughout his book. Of Castor and Pollux, well known as Heavenly Twins, he writes: Their joint name, Dioscuri means phallus of the storm, and appears in the New Testament name of Jesus betrayer, Iscariot, and as the title of Jesus himself, son of God.7 We have within this single sentence, chosen practically at random, a concoction of unsupported assertion, nonsense and fraud. Iscariot we have already dealt with, so consider, first, that the mythic name Dioscouri means no such thing as he asserts here, pretending to know it for a fact whereas he knows perfectly well that the name denotes, Boys of Zeus or if you like, Lads of Zeus. Youth is indicated because the Dioscouri are athletes and young warriors, stalwart fellows who make a mighty pair. Dios, then, as the first part of this name, is simply the genitive Greek form of the name Zeus and means therefore, Of Zeus or Pertaining to Zeus or even rather crudely expressed, Zeus-his. Nothing of phallus is here, not a trace, and nothing of storm apart from all reference to our Sumerian tangram, *USh-GU-RI-UD which would have to be reassembled as *UD-USh-GU-RI to resemble the name Dioskouri. As for the kouri half, or kouros in the singular, it denotes a youth

7. John M. Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom & the Cross (NY Doubleday 1970, p. 108.)

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and is a name well-known to art-lovers for a type of early Greek statues. One such handsome kouros had a room to himself in that first beautiful Getty Museum, the one built like a Roman villa. These kouri are not yet the classical statues of Athens but rather ogling Cretan-like figures. The distinguishing features of the type are: (a) an erect stance (b) with one foot placed slightly forward but (c) having the forward leg stiff and straight. Always (d) the shoulders are broad, (e) the waist is narrow as in Cretan statues and (f) the muscles are unnaturally defined and bulging on torso, arms and legs, but in a pleasing manner. The kouri are (g) stark naked and present plump genitals which are larger than those to be seen in classical statuary. Facially (h) the kouri are mask-like and stylized and there is often the hint of a satyr in the bulging eye and peculiar curve of the smile. Thus as a class they stand on the threshold of a naturalism not fully attained, but they serve to illustrate the type of lads we have in mind, vigorous athletic males, when speaking of the lads of Zeus: Dioskouri. It is a name which has been understood from ancient times to the present, and just as well by Professor Allegro as by me. Lastly, then, the statement that Jesus as Son of God is another case of Dios-kouros is fantastic and irresponsible. Dios does not remotely appear in the Gospels where, on the contrary, Theos is the word, which might be used of any god, but in the Gospels usually of the biblical God Jahweh. Our Gospels give theou in the genitive and never call Jesus a kouros (or youth) but a huios or son. Instead of Dioscouros we have huios theou, of which Son of God is the strict and proper translation. How strange, then, that John Marco Allegro, now regrettably and prematurely deceased, should matter to us in quite the most serious way, but it is his case, not his supposed discovery, that is important to us. He was a recent and accomplished scholar whose confidence in the human fact of Jesus simply gave way, and yet his Jesus was not simply lost to a void but replaced by an archetype. What fascinated this scholar was a numinous find. By letting his imagination loose upon these language fragments and other ancient obscurities, Professor Allegro no less than Dr. Frankenstein brought a tangible Specter to life, a Thing in his case that had lain under darkest tabu for hundreds of years. Using methods no less projective than those of the Alchemists he awakened a primitive god and was captured by the fascination of it, believing with all his soul that this Phallic God belonged, somehow, to the dim pre-history of the Christian religion.

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Stated thus abstractly, that belief is not false. We know of ancient phallic cults throughout Palestine, but Professor Allegro had set himself the brilliant possibility of discovering a mushroom cult supposed to be hidden under a New Testament code, and he failed to demonstrate any such code or any such flourishing sex and drug cult as, sporadically, his own era and ours had been attempting. I shall show what dim echoes that pre-historic era of Baals and Twins and Asherim may have left in our Gospels later on, when our study has prepared us for it.

THE CASE OF ALBERT SCHWEITZER

Albert Schweitzer in 1906, after surveying the Jesus research of a hundred and thirty years past, declared the result to be negative: The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give His work its final consecration, never had any existence. The words are consciously dramatic as if he meant to give the world of scholarship a good hard shove. Remove one syllable here to complete the negation: Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give His work its final consecration, never had any existence. Can a definite article make so much difference? Schweitzer is not among the Negative critics, but he sees that a popular Jesus has been lost to us, and I mean by this the Gestalt of Christ, or as it were the very Image of which he writes that it has fallen to pieces, cleft and disintegrated by the concrete historical problems which came to the surface one after another.8 A well-known Jesus gone to pieces because the scholars were reading the Gospels like historians! Probably no one has a greater name than Dr. Albert Schweitzer among those who have concerned themselves with Jesus as a man of

8. See The Quest of the Historical Jesus (NY Macmillan paperback 1961, p. 398) for these quotations.

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history, but I say so without prejudice to the question of his authority. Early and late, there have been other and better scholars in the Gospels, historians more deeply learned, linguists more expert. As an interpreter of the Gospels he is driven by tendency: this is a scholar who has an axe to grind and a theory to urge, and there is a potency in him often lacking in other scholars, a strength of intellect which is surprising in one who is himself so much to the fore as an individual personality. The Quest of the Historical Jesus, his famous book it is even a great book was published in English less than half a decade after the appearance of its German original in 1906, which was called merely, Von Reimarus zu Wrede. The German title gives only the names of two scholars which bracket the many others in his survey; they are bookend names which make a unit of the shelf. Already Mr. JM Robertsons Christianity and Mythology had been published in 1900, raising the question whether Jesus had been descended from a common ancient mythology that farther East had produced the figure of Krishna. Robertson receives only a disparaging footnote in Schweitzer but that will change in a later edition; he does notice this critic. Furthermore, William Benjamin Smiths Vorchristliche Jesus was published by coincidence in the same year as Schweitzers book. (We recall that Professor Smith had his book translated into German to have it published at all). And for the last member of our Negative trio, Arthur Drewss Die Christusmythe appeared in 1909 between editions of the Quest. (The dates are taken from Maurice Goguel). Schweitzers Quest has appeared in the middle of a stir, although not by any plan, and he will revise this book as the controversy ripens and take further account of it then. Meanwhile, there was plenty of myth on hand closer to home. Already in the field of professional New Testament study before his time a mythical interpretation of the Gospels had been urged by a scholar of distinction, Bruno Bauer, who came gradually to doubt the very existence of Jesus. (Schweitzer devotes a masterly chapter to Bauer in his Quest). More famously, David Friedrich Strauss had (as of 1835) examined the Gospels in a careful study of the mythical element. Strauss never supposed that Jesus had not existed but he introduced the question of myth in Gospel study with a vigor, a sincerity, a frankness not seen among the authorities before his time. The appearance of this book made impossible his continuing in a university career at that time. Nevertheless, his Life of Jesus, Critically Examined was translated by young Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot) of English literary fame. It is a

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veritable monument and even, all by itself, a kind of period. Two full chapters of the Quest are devoted to David Strauss: To understand Strauss one must love him. And Dr. Schweitzer was not a man to pretend that he could not understand David Strauss. Only in an indirectly related way, then, is his Quest a study of the Gospels. More properly, it is an examination of Gospel scholarship, and it is his mastery of this scholarship that is the real ground of his authority. At times he is ambivalent toward the scholars. Although his book opens with a panegyric on the German temperament and praise for its courageous theology, he sounds a sober note of warning in conclusion. First this on page one: The greatest achievement of German theology is the critical investigation of the life of Jesus. What it has accomplished here has laid down the conditions and determined the course of the religious thinking of the future. Then this on page 398: Those who are fond of talking about negative theology can find their account here. There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus. All through the 19th century German biblical scholars were searching for a Jesus who could be described without a tax on our credulity. The legends of the Gospels were sifted for fact or better yet, explained. Jesus wasnt seen by his exhausted disciples walking on the sea, for instance, as the Gospels tell. He waded forth in wind and waves to help them pull the boat ashore. Thus did a distinguished German scholar suggest how this tale might have arisen, but how perfectly arbitrary! Why not instead a collective hallucination? Why not Dr. Goodspeeds idea that the disciples had only seen Jesus walking along the shore? Why not myth outright? A Jesus conceived historically is offered instead of the miraculous Christ of Gospel story, but to satisfy the German depth he must retain his value for religion. One doesnt ask if this is possible: it is required. Only, what sort of man can have a religious value for us if the other part of Catholic teaching is stripped away, a teaching well put in Luthers bold word: This man is God? Gospels which were once so simple that even common folk could understand them became obscure to the very historians, who ceased to read them as chronicles of the life of the Savior and treated them as documents of history. As we (of the West) do not

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dream of exempting the miracles of Krishna or the revelations of Mohammed from the conditions of human life, so the biblical scholar does not exempt the miracles and revelations of Christ when he conceives him as a figure of history. But how do we sift the age-old tradition or separate the presumed facts of that life from the legend that is supposed to contain them? The matter might be very simple if all we had to do is strip away the legendary part of an ancient record to peel down to underlying fact because then it would be very easy to arrive at a historical Jesus. Any humanist could do it, anyone with a sense of the contrast between legend and fact. Our difficulty is that the lines are never clear because tradition is a body, not a mixture. Whatever there may be of real fact and dense matter of history in these transparent legends and palpable myths (and there may be a good deal of it) it is nonetheless fused with the Expression. So its not like lifting a doll out of a box or brushing the sand away from an age-old find. Schweitzers very survey implies that the research of the modern era has lacked any sure principles for discriminating Gospel fact from Gospel myth. How blurred is the historical delineation of this life compared with the distinctness of the legend! Of course, you are going to blur your portrait every time you pass your sponge over it to wash away its legendary detail. Our Gospels are often contradictory but they are never indistinct. It is history that makes Jesus indistinct when the legends have ceased to be credible. Now Schweitzer found his own discriminating principle in a theory about Jesus primitive message, and on this basis he sought to bring the ancient man to life, uncontaminated by modern assumptions and feelings and liberal values. Believing that one particular find out of all that previous scholarship had put a golden key in his hand, he made a principle of eschatology, which means in plain English a doctrine, or a theory, of the Last Things: Jesus is to be conceived as a man wholly caught up in his announced conviction, The Kingdom of God is at hand! One had to take that literally. Everything should be understood from that point of view. It would explain why Jesus had determined to die, for instance, if we assume that a genuinely historical Jesus had ever made such a decision. Schweitzer believed that he could get more out of Gospel history than other scholars had, yet it was not simply as a historical figure that Jesus continued to matter to him because the weight of an earlier faith

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had shifted to any primitive remainder. It was evidently a natural process. If the God has disappeared, yet our focus remains and our habit. We thought we saw a dappled sunlight on the forest floor and now we look for those beams among the shadows. We have lost a kind of sustenance in losing the divine in Christ and we might wish to have it back again. It is a paradox in Albert Schweitzer that he will fight for those earlier values on these newer terms without any real clarity as to how the mere Jesus of history should matter to us. He will never answer this question in a satisfactory manner. It is a lacuna in his thought.

SCHWEITZERS

OWN CRISIS RESOLVED

Schweitzer had been brought up in a parsonage to rather conventional beliefs about Jesus which were associated with deep and holy feelings. He does not speak of his father as having expressed any thoughts except for the ordinary things we expect of our preachers, nor does he give sign of any conflict between father and son, but as he developed into a young scholar, he ceased to give inner assent to the Creed. When he learned at the university that a sanctified tradition could not prevent the advance of historical science had not prevented its advance, he concentrated on the historical figure of Jesus. That had to be real, if nothing else was, and so implicitly he would concentrate religion on the Primary Fact of Jesus life and let the rest of it go by the board. Theology had no real interest for this born voyager because he was a modernist, a liberal, but in view of all that he was seeking in Jesus, in view of his caring, it was not a thought-out position. To all appearances he is undisturbed by modern thinking, however. He is supposed to be undisturbed it is the German hypothesis. At twenty-four he became a doctor of philosophy, writing his dissertation on Kant, and a year later (1900) when preparing a lecture on Nietzsche news of that philosophers death reached me, as he later put it. Evidently, he sees himself among the chosen in a sort of electric connection. After further study he became a licentiate in theology, and was then by a fluke shortly afterwards appointed Principal of the St. Thomas Theological College in Strassburg, a proud appointment but it came too early in his life. Lecturer, scholar, principal, preacher (and by the way, an unprofessional concert organist), and that heavy thing! a Good Fellow: the sort of young man who could entertain Countess Soand-so at the piano or be introduced to an Adolf Harnack, a gentleman

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with a fancy calling card whose own young thoughts were already in print: he was trapped. Suddenly at thirty he decided to give it all up after reading an appeal in a missionary magazine which was directed to those on whom the Masters eyes already rested, and who would reply simply to the Masters call, Lord, I am coming. It was the sort of magazine his father sometimes read in church. Schweitzer is a man of discrimination, a critic, a teacher, an artist and a passionate heart. Such a man is not to be torn out of the whole course of his life by a vapid tract picked up somewhere in a church vestibule, but we are never to understand the crisis he resolved by his renunciation of the world: it is withheld from us. Shaw says somewhere that all real writing is confession, and this is no doubt true, but we find in Albert Schweitzer no description of his inner life. Even his autobiography, Out of my Life and Thought, lacks intimacy. I would call attention, however, to something else. We may notice that an Idea of Jesus very different from any sort of historical Jesus has entered into this forsaking of things which has also the quality of a longed-for escape. What Idea of Jesus was it, then? Or else simply, what was he responding to in such an abrupt decision which was nonetheless a long time preparing, as he tells us? Surely, he did not think back to a diminished historical Jesus, a man of olden time whose very teachings were peculiar and then think his way to a decision to abandon everything that had opened up before him. Much less was he responding to the inauthentic Master of the missionary magazine, a Pretend Jesus whose eyes were resting on him and whose imaginary call he would reply to saying, Lord, I am coming. But the magazine is only his excuse. It has suggested a way out because already his life is a burden which he seeks to relieve. Insofar as any Jesus may be said to enter a decision so natural, so entirely involved with his ordinary day-to-day experience, it is surely the remembered Christ of the Gospels who might say to a man, Sell that thou hast and give to the poor, and come, follow me, and thou shalt have treasure in Heaven. Schweitzer is responding to the Idea of Christ in the Gospels, the whole Idea. After reaching his decision, he will cut his own life in half: he resigns his post as principal of the theological college to enroll under the medical faculty of Strassburg University and prepare himself for an African mission. Astounding. The singular act is followed by a charitable response on the part of the medical faculty who waive his fees because otherwise he couldnt well afford it. He has acted in faith: he is Peter

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venturing out on the waters after Jesus says, Come. At this earlier time in his life Schweitzer conceives of the Gospel as a world-denying faith, but his task is suddenly immense and he plunges into everything at once. His way of renouncing the world is to use it up. In fact, he is never unworldly in the manner of an Oriental sage who might forsake an emperors court to live apart somewhere nearby a waterfall. It will take him seven years to become a medical doctor and after that he must beg money of friends and acquaintance to build a primitive hospital, but Schweitzer is a man with a forehead of brass and his personality is strong. Not before the age of thirty-eight can he leave for (then) French Equatorial Africa. Meanwhile, there is everything else to be done yet. There is his music. He is a highly accomplished organist with a particular love, a Lutheran love of Bach. It is possibly his first and truest love, this music of his, and always it will be his refuge, but in French Equatorial Africa where are the pipe organs of old European churches? In the year in which he publishes Von Reimarus zu Wrede, he will publish another book called The Art of Organ-Building and Organ-Playing in Germany and France. This is a man who can say, The fight for a good organ is to my mind part of the fight for truth.9 He had been known to climb into an organ loft and make his own repairs, and once as a child he had leaned against a church wall to prop himself when he overheard an organ playing (we may think of Ramakrishna as a boy swooning away at the sight of flying geese). Now he becomes the organist for the concerts of the Paris Bach society, although excused from rehearsals, now during the years that he has taken up the study of medicine. It shows how radical his sacrifice was, but unforeseen at the time, a grace was preparing itself. A piano coated with zinc against the depredations of tropical insects and equipped with pedals to mimic the organ tone, a gift of the Paris Bach Society, he will take to Africa and has somewhere humorously described its transportation up river in a chiefs dugout canoe big enough for six pianos.

THE QUEST OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS

When The Quest of the Historical Jesus was published he was thirty-one years old, a man of strong will and many accomplishments, a veritable White Bull of a man, and that book (Reimarus) came forth into

9. As quoted by AB Lemke, one of Schweitzers translators.

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the world as a summons. Having responded to the Call of Jesus in his feeling, he is bent on intellectual truth. His passion and his honesty, his wide learning and a vigorous intelligence not yet worn to the bone reveal themselves. He is everywhere resolute, and there is a quality of tremendousness about this book, which is written in a bold, frank, unforced style. We cannot read this book without an impression of his deep intelligence and I marvel that he covered so much ground. In the Altoona Public Library, which was then housed in a mere wing upstairs of one of the public schools, I discovered The Quest of the Historical Jesus as a young pastor in that Pennsylvania railroad town. Although Schweitzer had barely figured in our classes at Concordia seminary, I had read his autobiography there, Out of My Life and Thought, which was published in an attractive 35 cent Mentor book, and now I was drawn to the Quest. Clearly, the English title of this book reminds us of the common phrase, going in Quest of, so that this contraband of the higher criticism is being smuggled under flag of a skillful literary allusion to a Grail Quest. In England theology is a timid affair where literary people and a few philosophers have done their thinking for them, but who invented this inspired title? It was FC Burkitt, an excellent scholar, who saw the value of the book, but I think we owe this title to the translator. A plain German sentence early on Mr. W. Montgomery, BD, translated as follows: This dogma (namely, of the unity of the two natures in Christ, God and man) this dogma had first to be shattered before men could once more go out in quest of the historical Jesus. What a suggestion of pilgrimage! What an invitation to pilgrimage, whereas in German Schweitzer had written ehe man den historischen Jesus wieder suchen konnte. His words are very plain. The idea is not that of men setting out on a Quest for the Holy Grail of solid fact, but only of ones looking for the Jesus of history after a shattering of dogma, which means a collapse in the very supports of belief. Mr. W. Montgomery has transformed a grave sentence into poetry. The endeavor is to make the Quest palatable, although for Albert Schweitzer there is something ruinous about it, and there is no question that in Germany the search for the historical Jesus is a skeptical quest. The effect of his book from my perspective has been to subvert our confidence in the familiarity of Jesus, but generally speaking, he was able to surprise the world of scholarship with its own results by gathering them together in his masterly survey. It was the scholars own critical study that

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had become negative. It was historical problems that had cleft and disintegrated the figure of Jesus. During this period of medical study Schweitzer continued to produce other works, and in 1911 before revising Reimarus he would publish yet another survey dealing with research on the Apostle Paul since the time of the Reformation. In this book he begins to take notice of the problem presented by Professor Arthur Drews and his Christ Myth where Drews has argued very powerfully that nothing of the life of Jesus is to be found in the Epistles. William Benjamin Smith is also mentioned in passing but he is scorned as an amateur stammering out confusedly what a couple of Dutchmen Dutch, not German have already written. I am not sure this is fair but as Emerson says, Your goodness must have an edge to it, else it is none, and good Schweitzer has his edge. It is rather the Dutch scholars who count for him here because several of them had impugned the Epistles of Paul and some had denied the life of Christ. They will furnish his link, historically, between Bruno Bauer and the Negative critics of the 20th century. Our trio of Negative critics he will treat more fully when he revises Von Reimarus zu Wrede, but why does he revise this book? We read the Quest in translation with no sense of its incompleteness but he cannot leave it alone, he must enlarge it and give it a new title. It will be published in 1913, the year in which his Psychiatric Study of Jesus is published and further volumes of Bachs Complete Organ Works, of which he is co-editor. It is the year of his medical diploma and of his departure for Africa, the year of his marriage to Helene Bresslau, the comely daughter of a Jewish historian whose at-home gatherings he used to attend. (Shed set her cap for Schweitzer and became a nurse for the cause). As to the renovated Quest, however, it is simply to be called Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung which means, The History of Research into the Life of Jesus. It is a proud title deservedly, and as aforesaid, it is just this deep survey of modern scholarship that is the real ground of his authority on the question of Jesus. Now at last we find a thorough treatment of no fewer than nine of those I have called the Negative critics, including our sample trio by name, and we are not including the Dutch scholars under this term. JM Robertson gets something better than a footnote here, and William Benjamin Smith and Arthur Drews are seriously noticed. He has cared enough about them to do this under circumstances of his varied labors. By this time a scholarly

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literature has come into existence devoted to the refutation of these critics, and he may have felt it a matter of professional obligation to take them on forthrightly, but remember how he had echoed the Negative result already in the Quest when recommending a Jesus so at odds with our usual conception of him. The quality of Schweitzers historical figure is that of a prophet belonging to a buried antiquity, one whose doctrine had been forgotten and whose personality had been misconceived. He means to introduce a barely tolerable Jesus. Where is he going to find room for the fellow? It requires the very negation we began with, of a Jesus of Nazareth familiar to the liberal scholars but ... who never had any existence. Schweitzers deep task in bringing forth a Jesus after his own conception involves him in this kind of negation, and yet his boldness here seems rather feigned. It is the audacity of the pulpit and meant, I think, to ground the shock of having to affirm the Jesus he presents.

SCHWEITZER GIVES CREDIT

Not every great find is discovered in a cave or unearthed by an archaeologists spade. One of the two oldest manuscripts of the New Testament was discovered by young Count Tischendorf in the monastery at Mt. Sinai, where it had been put in a basket of trash because the monks were cleaning house. When Tischendorf perceived its importance, they refused to let him have it, clutching to the monastic bosom a manuscript they had intended to burn. Schweitzers discovered Jesus of history, as he believed, was found in the pages of a comparatively recent manuscript by others, not by him. As to the manuscript, which was very big, it had been given to a library at Wolfenbttel from the Nachlass of a deceased professor of Oriental languages, Hermann Samuel Reimarus, who died a few years before the American Revolution. Reimarus was a man of vigorous intelligence and independent thought who left his readers in no doubt of his views. He had read the Gospels shrewdly and naively (but he seems naive only in retrospect of all that we have learned since his time) and it was his view of Jesus message that having gradually worked its way into New Testament scholarship Schweitzer would adopt. The value of this manuscript was recognized by an impecunious author who had once been a ministers son and who began to publish portions of it in 1774, issuing these over the next few years. This man, who had accepted the post of librarian at Wolfenbttel for the sake of an

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income, was none other than GE Lessing, a famed dramatist and critic. Out of consideration to the family of Reimarus and because it was even dangerous then to publish heterodox books, these selections were published anonymously and came to be known as the Wolfenbttel Fragments, having titles such as, for example: The Toleration of the Deists The Decrying of Reason in the Pulpit The Aims of Jesus and his Disciples There were seven of these Fragments published, all told, and for doing it Lessing came under attack by the chief pastor of Hamburg. It does not appear that he was in legal danger, however, and he responded with a vigorous defense until the government confiscated the Fragments and ordered Lessing to discontinue the controversy. (Britannica 1952) Hermann Samuel Reimarus was thus a Deist writing in defence of rational religion before the time of Immanuel Kant. He was inclined to treat Jesus as a charlatan who had conspired with his cousin, John the Baptist, to deceive the public. (And this is a specimen of his naivete. It is only Lukes Christmas fable that makes John out to be a slightly older cousin of Jesus and one who leapt in his mothers womb when she was visited by the Virgin Mary). Crucial in the imagined scheme, then, was a preachment of a world about to end before the coming of the Kingdom of God, and this element in the Gospels of a Kingdom to be established following great catastrophes Reimarus considered to be Jesus original message. It had been overlaid by his knavish disciples, who had to adjust their Gospel when the expected Kingdom did not materialize and because they had something going in the flourishing sect which it was in their own interest to preserve. Fundamental to all, then, was Professor Reimaruss conviction that a primitive message, which it was still possible to discern, had been obscured by the revisions of the disciples. In Schweitzers day the serious acceptance of this view had begun to take hold as the prominent fact about Jesus although it was not directly from Reimarus at this date that the fresh impetus came. It was thanks to an epoch-making book by Johannes Weiss called The Preaching of Jesus about the Kingdom of God published in 1892. It had appeared, therefore, almost fifteen years earlier than Schweitzers Quest. When I began to study theology, writes Rudolf Bultmann, theologians as well as laymen were excited and frightened by the theories of Johannes Weiss. Schweitzers contribution was to place this emphasis

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where it belonged: its modern recovery belongs to Reimarus. He was able to show how the eschatological idea keeps recurring thereafter in one major scholar after another, which made its acceptance irresistible, but a part of that irresistible force was owing to Schweitzers own stern criticisms of those liberal scholars (the theology of the last forty years) who had tried to ignore or deny this primitive element. It is evident that Jesus was mistaken in proclaiming the advent of the Kingdom of God and warning of the tribulations of the End Time, if in truth this was his message, but he is definitely a man of history on these terms and intimately bound up with the beliefs of his own people. Quite radically, then, he becomes a Stranger to us by sharing in so marked a degree a peculiar and urgent mood of the times. It is to be understood that Jesus did not invent the eschatological message which had burst forth publicly in the preaching of the Baptist. So Schweitzer didnt simply take his Jesus out of Reimaruss book like a jocular Shaw lifting some of his characters bodily out of Dickens. It was already there in the 19th century scholarship he had been trained in. What is distinctive is exactly the value he placed on this view of things. For Schweitzer, this is indeed the Golden Key whereby even the periods of Jesus ministry and the grand linkage of its parts can be recovered. Have we Parables which speak of harvest time? It is because the Kingdom of God will arrive at the harvest. Crucial above all other passages in the Gospels to show that Jesus expected the coming of the Son of Man during his lifetime and was disappointed about that are his words to his disciples in Matthew 10,23: When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next; for truly I say to you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes. But eschatology is in the air. After Johannes Weiss, scholars are ready to take it up in earnest and Schweitzer will describe an eschatological school, not that he ever belonged to one. His own drastic position coupled with a pugnacious literary personality would leave him stranded. He does not become a colleague. I have called him a White Bull, using an ancient Messianic epithet, because of his self-chosen singularity. He stands alone. Something far too much had once imposed on the promising child and the man is not to be infringed on. He has no room for colleagues or even for disciples: he takes up all the room himself.

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Now his own distinct belief is that Jesus has a secret understanding of his role in the Kingdom even before it arrives, and confident of this he will decide to die for his fellows and disciples to shorten a preceding tribulation before the time of the end. It is conceived to be a dreadful phase when afterwards the Messiah (who had not yet come: Jesus is not yet Messiah) would appear in the sky. Nevertheless, at the heart of it all in Schweitzers conception Jesus dies in vain for his beliefs, tragically but heroically, because his voluntary sacrifice had no such result as he expected. (Christianity was not the expected result: he has not intended to found a religion.) Whether we are to rate him highly depends on what we make of his delusion. Schweitzer is aware of the difficulty of his idea and of our reluctance to accept it because a Jesus acting on such an obsession cannot be made understandable to the multitude (allgemeinverstndlich) so that he must be for us etwas Fremdes und Rtselhaftes, something Strange and Riddling, or as Mr. W. Montgomery has put it in better English: The historical Jesus will be to our time a Stranger and an Enigma. (It is understood, of course, that Schweitzer would never use a harsh word like deluded to describe him as I do here, but his Jesus clings nonetheless to a fixed misconception about the Kingdom of God and a false belief regarding (himself) as I take these words in quotes from a dictionary definition). This was a final stress, then: a popular Jesus is impossible. It was the result of his endeavor to replace a popular Jesus by a prophet from another era, but a man of his times who had actually lived. He will even dare to say that a real knowledge of Jesus may prove to be an offence to religion. Yet his preaching during these years of medical study lacks the quality of boldness: the White Bull does not appear in the pulpit. Its rather for the scholars to come to terms with his insight. He is like a man weighing stones in his hands: in his left the stone of the Negative critics who deny the life of Christ, and in his right the Stone of Acknowledgement of an eschatological Jesus. Gentlemen, he seems to be asking whole faculties of scholars, pray, which of these stones shall I toss in your laps? Our question, then, is whether this intrepid scholar did not after all put a foot in his own snare. After placing Jesus so emphatically and strangely in his own ancient time, he pretends to find a religious value in him under these distressing disadvantages. Among which, to say so in

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passing, is the revelation that Jesus ethic will not do. It was an ethic of short duration because already the Apostle Paul had set it aside. Yet surely the word is poorly chosen: ethic? Go thy way, says Jesus to a leper cleansed. Show thyself to the priest and offer for thy cleansing those things which Moses commanded. (Mark 1,44.) What ethic should this prophet have except for sharing the custom of his people? There is more here than a simple rejection of Jesus prophetic message. Schweitzer has abstracted a supposed ethic from the Teachings of Jesus because he wants to shift his own Gospel to the plane of abstraction, of thinking, of philosophy. He regards these abstractions as invulnerable, and he resorts to this sort of thing to get away from particulars like this word of Jesus to the leper. Moreover, he will assure us in outright defiance of the meaning of words that ethics is the essence of religion. No scholar believes it. Quite apart from theology, even the anthropologists and philosophers do not accept that, but Schweitzer is undeterred. He will eventually complete the ethic of Jesus by a Revelation of his own contained in the formula, Reverence for Life. The formula is strikingly modern and secular (notice the absence of God in a formula which speaks of reverence). It was an idea which came to him unforeseen and unsought as he was being taken up the Ogowe river with his doctor bag by a few black men and their steamboat was making its way through a herd of hippopotamus. Time and place have mattered to his insight, but the principle satisfies by its universality. There is nothing in it to embarrass the philosopher in Schweitzer, and by his life thus given in service he renews the divine example: he is himself the Exemplar. After his death at the ripe age of ninety a manuscript was discovered among his effects which had been wrapped in linen and stored away. It seems to have been written in his seventies and was published under the title, Reich Gottes und Christentum. Inscribed on the manuscript was the word definitiv, but just as in the beginning of his career, he had reconstructed the life of Jesus on the basis of his master principle. Increasingly dogmatic and reducing his affirmations to hard knots lacking all transparency, he affirms his tragic hero.

THE MESSIANIC SECRET

Near the end of The Quest of the Historical Jesus in a portion of the book which brings us closer to his own thought, Schweitzer describes

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a coincidence which must have for him the value of a Sign. For on the self-same day in 1901 that his earlier Sketch of the life of Jesus was published, dealing with The Secret of the Messiahship, another scholar, an older, riper scholar, William Wrede, had published a book called The Messianic Secret. The titles were strikingly similar but each had taken a different standpoint and the two perspectives could not be reconciled. According to Professor Wrede, Jesus never kept to himself a Messianic secret such as Schweitzer imagined when taking Marks Gospel at face value. The portrayal of Jesus as a man holding such a secret was a device of the Evangelists. It was a fiction designed to plant an evidence of a later faith in an earlier tradition. The English Quaker prophet, George Fox, once described the effect on him of a mere church steeple by saying that it struck at my life he couldnt abide the tepid worship of the English steeple-house. That response might also describe the effect on Albert Schweitzer of William Wredes book: it struck at his life because in a single stroke Wrede had removed the whole assurance on which the younger scholar had rested his conception of the life of Jesus. It was his unique penetration of that guarded secret that had enabled him to reconstruct the ministry, whereas Wredes assumption was that the earliest tradition still discernible in Mark knew very well that Jesus had not appeared to be Messiah during his lifetime. Now it is very clear from the Epistle to the Romans, for example, or later on from some of the early sermons reported in Acts that Jesus was acknowledged to be the Messiah after his Resurrection and because of it. CH Dodd, with authority, declared those early sermons to be prime specimens of the early kerygma (or preachment.) Inasmuch as Romans also is taken to be earlier than any Gospel, a common view among the scholars now is that Jesus did not go beyond an eschatological message even in his thinking, but as it goes against the Gospels to say so, this view of the matter is doubtful. As between Wrede and Schweitzer, it was all a question of how Marks Gospel is to be taken: Either history or myth, in Schweitzers words. Either you may trust the given story for the history in it (after striking out the miracles) or else you dissolve the evidence of the given text. Such an argument is inconclusive. Any decision here must turn on the inner thoughts of a Jesus given in an old legend whose frank burden (that is, message) favors Schweitzer but whose character (because legendary) invites Wredes hypothesis. In connection with Marks Gospel

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to which we now turn, we shall find that something may be said for either view. Later on in the Tale of Bartimaeus we shall notice that Albert Schweitzer and William Wrede have both stumbled rather clumsily, each man clinging to his viewpoint through thick and thin.

PART TWO THE BAPTISM OF JESUS

We first meet Jesus in history as one responding to a stir among his people: a stir of which he is not himself the cause. A prophet named John had set up in the wilderness of Judea, calling upon his people to repent because the Kingdom of God was drawing near. The axe is laid unto the root of the trees! he warned, and to escape the wrath to come folk must turn to God, casting wickedness aside and bringing forth fruits worthy of repentance. And the sign of such repentance, or the outward token of decision, was to undergo a rite of baptism, during which the penitents immersed themselves in the Jordan river, probably in the prophets presence. Although the stir caused by John was considerable, it is unlikely that more than a few folk came out at any one time to hear the prophet's earnest warnings before stepping into the Jordan to be baptized. Probably they were immersed in their clothes or in whatever scant wrappings they used to cover their nakedness, and a point of some importance is that they were baptized in a river, apparently because the water had to flow. They wouldnt have been baptized, then, in the Sea of Galilee to the north or in the Dead Sea to the south because flowing water in the ancient myth is living water and the Jordan's flowing stream is what the prophet chose. That he believed in a myth of living water, however, puts it wrongly: the very question is anachronistic, were we to ask it, as if supposing that his thoughts were doctrines. John did not invent the rite of baptism, and in prescribing it, he will have honored in himself an indistinct presumption that had been fostered by an age-old practice. Baptism was already then a rite widely used and we simply note John's actual practice and couple it with a widespread myth. The Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran, who practice frequent ablutions to this very day on the shores of the Euphrates, claim to be descended from the Baptist. They are an interesting study: a folk who live along the river. They are not a Christian people and regard Jesus as an apostate who softened or perverted the teachings of John. Lady

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Drower, who visited them over several years and studied their rites and read their Scripture, supposes that they are descended from an ancient fertility cult. The people are compulsive baptizers. Brides in their bridal dresses are immersed, and women after childbirth, so their Scriptures say, are to be baptized in the river daily for a month in all weathers, although Lady Drower reports that in wintertime they are allowed to lie in bed and suffer themselves to be splashed. Living water is a vital belief among the Mandaeans and it holds them to the river. These people also use a sacrament of bread and water, baking the round wafer on the wall of an outdoor oven, and they make a waisthigh cross of sticks for one of their rituals and drape it with a scarf, looping it over the arms exactly as our Western Catholics and other liturgical folk do sometimes in Lent. Some of these symbols and rites are more widespread than Christians suppose. The Mandaeans honor marriage and regard it as a duty, rejecting a celibate state even for their priests, and there is to this day (or was in Lady Drower's day) a curiously phallic shape to the doorway of a ritual hut which they build or renovate annually for a major rite. This doorway, as shown in her photographs, is about the height of a tall man but very narrow, rounded on the top and curving outward as it rises: a very curious and probably a totally unconscious symbol among the Mandaeans themselves, whose sexual morality is several notches above our own. Inasmuch as they believe themselves to be descended from the Baptist, and have acquired a dislike of Jesus accordingly, they seem to be a living evidence of other early cults and different perspectives. Those scholars who would derive their traits from the Christian religion must tell us how a resistant folk can have been permeated by the rites of their rivals. We must include among the world's baptizers the multitudes of India who baptize themselves in the Ganges. Or is it truly a baptism which the poor heathen of India do? Our danger here is that we may be misled by a doctrinal concept or thrown off track by a prejudice, for undoubtedly it is a baptism which these pious pilgrims do, climbing downstairs in different modes of dress and undress to wash, soak, swim, dunk themselves, even dive and play in the flowing Ganges. What is different in India is only that people baptize themselves, requiring no priest and doing it each his own way to his own satisfaction. For them the Ganges is sacred is (or once was) a god. And the flow of the river, baptism done in running water, is a point in common.

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It remains to add that Pharisees also baptized converts at the time of Christ, showing that there is nothing in the act of baptism that goes contrary to the Jewish religion. Jesus submits to this rite, which is described as a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, but what is it that has brought him to John, then, if it was not an act of repentance? Tradition has it that he was a villager from Nazareth in Galilee, a country lying to the north, and he must have journeyed south to hear a prophet in the wilderness of Judea (as Matthew tells) but why he went, except for the common reason, we dont know. Apart from the general stir we cannot guess at his thoughts, and whether on arrival he heard the Baptist preach once or several times, or if he remained for a season and became a disciple, we cannot tell. According to the Markan legend, this baptism is for Jesus a revelation. Johns tremendous warnings may have awakened him to his mission. Or he may have been in a heightened state before going out to a prophet whose garb resembled the dress and manner of Elijah, of whom it was said that he wore a garment of haircloth with a girdle of leather about his loins. (II Kings 1,8.) Compare Mark on the Baptist who was clothed with camels hair, and had a leather girdle around his waist, and ate locusts and wild honey. Legend will have it so because Elijah was to return to the world before the coming of the Messiah, and by the evidence of Mark our earliest Gospel the Baptist was mentioned in the same breath as Elijah in the popular rumor. What our legend states as fact if we take the Tale as Scripture gives it, is only that: In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. At once a blossoming legend takes us into the sphere of myth: And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove; and a Voice came from Heaven, Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased. (Mark 1,9.) We have again echoes of earlier Scripture here, as this of the second Psalm which I cite only to show the great freedom with which the Hebrew Scripture is used for prophecy: I will tell of the decree of the LORD: He said to me, You are my Son, today I have begotten you. (Psalm 2,7.)

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The Voice from Heaven is similar to this, yet different, and scholars find an echo from Isaiah also in Marks account: Behold, my Servant, whom I uphold, my Chosen, in whom my soul delights. (Isaiah 42,1.) A knowledge of Hebrew Scripture out of which these traditions have grown shows that we are deeply in the myth of prophecy fulfilled. Was it, then, that only Jesus saw the Heavens opened and a dove descending in consequence of his baptism, as Mark implies? Or do these traditions tell us that the Baptist also heard that Voice and saw the dove? The Gospels are inconsistent here but why look for objective fact in a Tale from which that standard has disappeared? Matthew is self-conscious about the Markan myth because it describes a baptism of repentance in which Jesus participates. In his longer version of the Tale he invents a revealing dialogue between Jesus and John, for when Jesus came to be baptized: John would have prevented him, saying, I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me? But Jesus answered him, Let it be so now; for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness. (3,14.) He explains away the reason of the Baptists rite because he sees in Jesus a sinless man. It is a transparent maneuver and may hint of the survival of an early fact which Marks tradition had preserved despite its embarrassment to a later belief. If so, it would illustrate a certain tenacity of fact within the very thrift of legend. What is it that we know of this event strictly as knowledge? It is not very much, and hardly enough to prevent the Negative critics from saying that the mere appearance of John the Baptist, as a known figure preaching of Judgment Day, was of itself enough to start a rumor of the arriving Messiah. The logic of it is Shelleys logic: If winter comes, can Spring be far behind? Already for Count Volney this is the argument: Conformably to the calculations received by the Jews, nearly six thousand years had passed since the imagined creation of the world. (That time had been fixed for a renovation of the world by a great deliverer of whom there was a general expectation throughout Asia). This coincidence produced a fermentation in mens minds. Nothing was thought of but an approaching end.

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Men interrogated the hierophants and their mystic books, which assigned various periods for it. They expected the Restorer. In consequence of talking about him, some one said that he had seen him; or we may suppose that some enthusiast believed himself to be that personage, and collected partisans. These partisans deprived of their chief by an incident, true without doubt, but which passed in obscurity, gave occasion by the stories which they told, to a rumor which was gradually organized into history. On this foundation, all the circumstances of the mythological traditions were very soon arranged, and the result was an authentic and complete system, which it was not permitted to doubt. (As quoted by Andrews Norton) It is a genuine argument and sensibly reasoned. There is no absolute denial of an enthusiast who may have believed himself to be the expected personage: it shows us (this in passing) that at the heart of the Negative argument is a question of reference. Sheer physicalness is not the question of Jesus, but rather: What is shown us in the name of Jesus? And what, of this that is shown, can be thought to be real? A man whose name is given as (in Hebrew) Joshua has come from a village in which he lives (the village is named) to receive or enact the baptismal rite supervised by John. This is what we know of fact from our legend, assuming as we may that our legend reports on fact, but why should this concern us at all except prospectively? It is because of what we know otherwise of Jesus and value in him, or in association with his Name, that we might care in the least for his dunking any more than for the joyous pilgrims who splash and play in the Ganges, or for those riverdwelling Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran. Apart from its significance in the larger myth of Christ, the bare fact could not concern us, and yet his significance is expressed in miraculous terms. Significance is not a fact of history: its habitation is the mind and its expression (very often) the symbol. Were we to delete the miracle from Mark like zealous Unitarians, and thus the rending of the sky and the dove descending and the heavenly Voice, nothing of this Tale would signify: nothing would be left to us except the report of a commonplace fact which any commonplace writer might have imagined about a man otherwise unknown.

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ROD OF JESSE JOHN THE BAPTIST HISTORICAL

We seem not to have a single reference to Jesus that cant be traced to Christian rumor, whereas John the Baptist is a figure of history. Josephus has reported his life in a credible manner as he does, for instance, that of the hermit Bannos, of whom he writes (quoting I. Abraham) that he lived in the desert, used no other clothing than grew on trees, and had no other food than what grew of its own accord, and bathed himself in cold water frequently, both by day and by night, in order to preserve purity. A case of frequent ritual lustrations: a solitary Baptist, so to speak. Josephus, then, a Jewish historian of those Gospel-writing times devotes a passage to John in his Jewish Antiquities (18. 116-19): For Herod had put him to death, though he was a good man and had exhorted the Jews to lead righteous lives, to practice justice towards their fellows and piety towards God, and so doing to join in baptism. In his view this was a necessary preliminary if baptism was to be acceptable to God. They must not employ it to gain pardon for whatever sins they committed, but as a consecration of the body implying that the soul was already thoroughly cleansed by right behavior. When others too joined the crowds about him, because they were aroused to the highest degree by his sermons, Herod became alarmed. Eloquence that had so great an effect on mankind might lead to some form of sedition, for it looked as if they would be guided by John in everything that they did. Herod decided therefore that it would be much better to strike first and be rid of him before his work led to an uprising, than to await for an upheaval (John) was brought in chains to Machaerus... and there put to death. (Abridged).10 The message of a Kingdom of God impending is absent from Josephus. It seems a deliberate omission. Possibly he has wanted to avoid stirring up any further nervousness associated with an apocalyptic fervor. Or it may be that he meant to slight the Jesus sect. It matters not for our purposes what his reasons were. The crucial point is that he hasnt taken his story of the Baptist from the Gospels, which in spite of their legendary

10. St. J. Thackery translation cited in John Dominic Crossans, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (HarperSanFrancisco 1991 p. 231.)

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quality preserve the message of a Kingdom which might upset any king with its rumor of upheaval. So Josephus gives a genuine reason for the execution of John in Herods alarm, thereby giving us a connection to history, whereas the Gospels, although faithful to a message which explains that alarm, omit any political reason for Herods assassination of the prophet. Mark tells us that at his birthday feast Herod made a foolish promise to the daughter of Herodias, a sister-in-law whom he had taken to wife. Salome, then, whose name appears to be unknown to Mark, had so pleased him by her dancing that he swore a mighty oath and bound himself to an extravagant gift, even half of my kingdom! On instructions from her mother, she asked to have the head of John the Baptist brought in on a platter. And all because a wicked Queen had been rebuked by the prophet for marrying her brother-in-law and living in sin. This is the psychology of fairy tales. It is impossible to believe that a powerful and wicked King couldnt turn aside a foolish dancing girl simply because she had wriggled before him with an Eastern voluptuousness and he had sworn before his guests. The Gospel tale is a pleasing melodrama which has captured the imagination of many an artist: of Oscar Wilde in his play Salome, of Paul Manship who did the Prometheus at Rockefeller Center and gave us a bronze miniature of Salome with Johns head at her pointed toes, of Aubrey Beardsley in his ink drawings, and who knows how many others besides? We like such melodramas because they seem to bring the truth home to us even as we gasp at the horrors portrayed or shed a willing tear. Marks Gospel tale conveys a folkish protest against luxury and the implied voluptuousness of the dance, and of course against Herodiass adultery. Apart from its embedded fact, where does the story come from? Has Mark invented it? Undoubtedly, it shows his love of story. In a very short Gospel it takes up as much space as his account of the crucifixion. Matthew tells the tale in half as many words and Luke omits it entirely. What we know is that the unknown artist who devised this fable was inspired by earlier Scriptures. Herods extravagant promise to Salome is foreshadowed by King Ahasueruss identical promise to grant the request of his own Queen Esther to the half of my kingdom except that in the earlier tale the Jewish Esther asks that her life and the life of her people be spared while her enemy at court, the wicked Haman, is hanged by the neck. Another wicked head is attacked in the Book of Judges when,

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after the stars in their courses fought against Sisera, the virtuous Jael drives a tent stake through the temple of the sleeping commander, whom she had lured into her tent after his defeat. This motif, by which a woman deceives an enemy commander and single-handedly takes his life, is copied by the Apocryphal Scripture of Judith, who single-handedly deceives the besieging Holofernes and his host by entering the enemy camp with her maid as a traitor to her people. A widow, Judith is helped in her wiles by her extraordinary beauty and her perfumes and adornments as a woman of wealth. On the fourth day of her stay she beheads the drunken sleeping General Holofernes with his own sword, wraps the head in his bejeweled mosquito-netting (NEB), bags it in her maids carry-all, and by a wily prearrangement, they both leave the camp unmolested, apparently to pray. A further connection with the legend of the Baptist was an arrangement whereby Judith, during her unviolated stay in Holoferness tent, went out each night to bathe herself in the spring in the valley of Bethulia. (Judith 12,7.) She did it for three days and nights, returning afterwards to the camp purified. It was something more than a daily bath, this ritual lustration. There is a curious erotic motif in these three tales also, which is reminiscent of Salome. Esther was taken from the harem to become a Queen and the beautiful Judith had gradually brought Holofernes to a point of irresistible desire which would have been a factor in his drunkenness, or rather in her seductiveness when offering wine. The virtuous Jael was also unviolated by an exhausted Sisera (because nothing of the sort is mentioned) and yet there is a subtle hint of an erotic seduction in that he asked for water and she gave him milk. Here were ample sources in the Jewish Scriptures for the motifs in our Baptist legend. We have three heroines, females, attacking heads, in Esthers case because her deed results in a hanging. Transpositions are easy and our unknown inventor, furnished with these structures, had only to switch from good to evil and cast the beheading female in the role of dancing girl and wicked queen (a double role akin to Judiths with her helpful maid). The wicked king goes unpunished in this tale and a virtuous prophet is beheaded instead. We have not pretended to see through the legend in arriving at this result. We have simply compared Josephus factual report of Johns imprisonment in Machaerus with Markan fable, for which we found a triple source in the books of Esther and Judges and Judith. Notwithstanding the form of legend here genuine historical fact is embedded in this legend.

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ROD OF JESSE A DESERT TEMPTATION MYTH

Jesus is baptized: very well, he joins in a common public baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Historically, the Baptist movement is the beginning of the Gospel, according to Mark, and yet his version of the Tale may be called a myth of Messianic ordination. It is only in prospect of the surrounding story that we describe it as legendary (which in that sense it is: it belongs to our world). Whereas in its significance it is too clearly a myth of ordination or a kind of anointing because we have in this Jesus the beloved Son of God attested by a Voice from Heaven. As soon as Christ appears in history, legend clothes him and myths arise. Following the Heavenly Voice, our earliest Gospel gives its next fact (assuming the fact) with an extraordinary brevity: The Spirit immediately drove (Jesus) out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered to him. (Mark 1,12.) Who can deny that this is a myth quite as much as a legend? For although I use these words in the usual way, we acknowledge a contrast between them: Myth is the more fantastic and unreal. As Mircea Eliade was fond of stressing, myths are set in illo tempore just as childrens fairy tales begin with Once upon a time. Only, as it happens, that once upon a time of a Hansel and Gretel can never be found on a calendar or given as a date. I suppose also that Satan is a myth having no more real existence than the goat-footed Pan whose likeness he sometimes borrows, having goatish thighs and cloven hoof, and we must surely allow that Jesus being driven into the wilderness by a Spirit which thus takes possession of him resembles no experience we may have short of delusions and madness. Our passage, then, is from the seeming legend of Jesus baptism to the frank myth of his wilderness Temptations, although in fairness we have recognized despite the quaintness of it all that our Gospels intend to be giving us also matters of fact. This is not to say that Mark might have hoped to find somewhere a pigeon like the dove that descended on Jesus. The fusion of fact and self-evident myth which we find so puzzling in our Gospels had already occurred in the traditions which the Evangelist received: he didnt first receive a history which he spoiled for

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us by changing it to something else, as if he actually knew the real history of Christ and had dressed it up with legend, thinking to improve it. Mark himself received the Gospel myth before contributing to its fabrication. However deeply he reshapes the given tale, its transformation of an earlier event (or a life) could happen in a ripe soil only as an untraceable folk-phenomenon. So to make a special point of this: we cannot hope to trace the legend to its origins because of its setting in a framework of myth. Rudolf Bultmann and other Form Critics have labored with great learning and ingenuity to get behind the written Gospels, but they never trace this or that Tale or this or that Saying beyond the Sitz im Leben of the early church. It is as much as to say that they can only claim to understand what these things meant to the earliest Christians. We cannot hope to understand the rise of a living myth by beginning with the facts of Jesus because it is just these earliest facts which are forever beyond our reach. What we make out as an evident claim on history is that following his baptism, Jesus endured a wilderness ordeal before beginning to preach. (The forty days duration is a mythical echo of Israels forty years wandering in the desert before the conquest of Palestine). Yet our history, conceived in this modernizing style, is rather flat. We have only imagined his supposed ordeal as a substitute for the ancient myth of his Temptation, and yet it is that same myth which is the source of any fact we could imagine in replacing it. It is Matthew and Luke, two later Evangelists, who give us our famous Temptation tryptich in which Jesus, having fasted forty days and forty nights, was afterward an hungred. This tale comes from a lost document which they happen to share, each working of course independently of the other. In the first of these panels, the Tempter appears to the hungry Christ to say, If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread, and Jesus replies, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. His reply not only leans on Scripture: it consists of Scripture. (Deuteronomy 8,3) Then on the pinnacle of the Temple to which he has been spirited, he receives a challenge to his faith from his Satanic host: If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee, and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. This is a very clever Devil who quotes Scripture to Jesus now, and Jesus replies: It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. (Deuteronomy

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6,16) Then finally in a third panel after taking him up to an exceeding high mountain the Devil promises him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them if he will fall down and worship him, and Jesus replies, Get thee hence, Satan! for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. (Deuteronomy 6,13). Satan departs and then angels come to minister to Christ. A shallow mind might call this tale a mere fable and laugh at its quaintness, but an iron severity in the religious demand is what this tryptich conveys. It is written, says Christ. Each of his replies is taken from Scripture and aptly applied. (The panels are given in a different order by the Evangelist Luke, who is of course unacquainted with Matthews Gospel). Yet a question remains. Whose motive finds expression here? Or more audaciously, What experience were these vivid imaginations designed to convey? It is impossible to suppose that these well-developed Hellenistic Tales can have come unaltered by tradition from Jesus himself because, indeed, the Gospels are tradition. And yet symbolic truth, to be deserving of the name, must reflect our experience: must give us in the Symbol an apprehension of reality. And that is just the question of religious myth. Why might the narrative of his Temptations not go back to Jesus after a solitary desert ordeal when in the universal experience of mankind ordeal of that sort belongs to the primitive vocation? It may be too much to say that we are in the presence of an experience of Jesus here because the experience given is that of the myth outright, but we can hardly deny (as if we knew) that we may have here a reflection of an event in the life of Jesus to which of course his disciples would attach their own understanding. Quite what that experience was during his desert sojourn of loneliness and fasting, if we assume this, or what Jesus may have believed of it, if he had the experience, we cannot know, but these Temptations at the outset of his ministry belong to the ancient Idea of Christ. We have only tried to peer into the myth: we make no claim to have got at the facts by laying the mythic veil aside. And we have not disfigured the myth, accordingly. Fact is not in question here because forever unavailable. Whether Jesus suffered delusions, for instance, does not remotely concern us as a matter of fact. What the myth describes is a wilderness Temptation which has taken this dream-like form. Of all the wonders in the Gospels, it is only the Transfiguration of Christ that shares with our Temptation tale full claim to be regarded as myth outright.

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ROD OF JESSE POSTSCRIPT: A PERSONAL WORD

To show the value, sometimes, even of delusions which may occur to normal minds, I cite an experience told me a few years ago by my wife. She was a nurse-midwife employed by local obstetricians and liked to be called Connie. On one occasion, as it happened, she saw a pregnant woman, a visitor from another state, who had fallen seriously ill and could not find a doctor. My wife was so alarmed by her condition that she gave her an IV infusion then and there in the office, thinking to protect the baby. Then she rounded up a doctor. Next day from a hospital bed the woman told her in so many words: Do you know that yesterday my father visited me? I think he came in through the window as I was lying there and sat down in the chair to talk with me for a few minutes. Now the office was on the second floor and her father had been dead for two years, but this the young woman said, and she said it just like that, giving it out for a fact. She also said, I told this to my sisters and they wept. Connie replied, Had I known of this yesterday, I would have admitted you at once! We are in the sphere of Oral Tradition here, of course, because this story was told me by my wife, but as we see from the story, all the participants, sisters, patient and midwife saw the omen as grave: Beware! Having acted earlier in reaction to the womans condition, Connie now responded to her vision by instructing her not to allow any doctor to discharge her until she had seen the very doctor under whose immediate care this woman was. Understanding the omen of the vision, she thought of the possibility that another doctor, unacquainted with the womans case and overlooking its seriousness, might discharge her (the sort of thing that might happen in a revolving practice). The patient willingly and solemnly agreed. She demythologized her myth afterward saying, I dont really know what I think of things like that. Nor did Connie, of course, but see the fact at issue here. A pregnant woman seriously ill is treated by a midwife who finds her condition alarming and breaks into the doctors schedules for help. When told of the vision next day, it reinforces her sense of the seriousness of the patients condition. The woman now restored to a balanced mental state wonders at last if it were possible for her dead father to visit her for a conversation like that, coming in through the window. The important meaning of the vision survives this questioning and the result is achieved in spite of it, yet the vision was insofar confirmed when the woman lost her baby afterwards.

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ROD OF JESSE RETURN TO GALILEE: Public Act, Obscure Beginnings.

After his legendary Baptism and a Temptation in the wilderness which is given in a myth, Jesus returns to Galilee and proclaims the Kingdom of God. Mark says that he does this after Johns arrest, which is a noteworthy fact caught up in these legends if it really be so. Why, after Johns arrest? Why not, instead, after the wilderness Temptations? If we allow that our Temptation tryptich may represent a real experience of Jesus, a contradiction is implied here. For if at this time (let us imagine) he knew himself to be the Son of God but we are out of our depth as soon as we say such a thing. After all, what do we know of that? It is only as a story that we are understanding these things, and yet from a perspective within that story we may wonder why a newlychristened Son of God should have stayed by the Baptist until that prophets arrest and then, leaving the region, continued to preach his message elsewhere. A consistent myth might have had Jesus bringing his own superior Teaching out of the wilderness whereas Marks curt account of these things implies to the historian that he began his work as a disciple of Johns. An impression of Christs indebtedness to the Baptist derives even more strongly from Matthew when he puts Marks epitome of Jesus early message into the Baptists mouth: Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. (Matthew 3,2) Since we have no reason to doubt that this was the gist of the Baptists preaching, Jesus will then seem to a modern reader to be repeating him, but the Evangelist doesnt mean to imply that he was indebted to the desert prophet (nor was that intended by Mark). As believers in prophecy these Evangelists dont think of influence. Any real echo of John in Jesus message, if that had been preserved, is simply proof that the Baptist was his predicted forerunner. A Gospel of the Kingdom of God is the burden of Jesus Teaching as the Synoptics portray him. He is not a moralist but a prophet, and he doesnt emphasize religious belief, placing stress on other things. It is fair to say that he has no doctrine, no formula, no system, no right idea how absurd! Jesus has nothing of the churchman about him, nothing ecclesiastical, and no theology. He takes the faith of his people for granted and touches on matters which concern us all because the nearness of the Kingdom of God calls for a decision made heart and soul, once and for all, in contrast to the lives we live. The deed of faith he calls for is a cleavage in life. Peacemakers are blessd in his Teaching: they are

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to be called sons of God, and yet he brings not peace but a sword and he will say in Lukes Gospel that No man, having put his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God. (Luke 9, 62.) We feel at once an urgency in these words, but where is the tax on our credulity? What our Synoptic legend gives us for an opening, then, is that when Jesus began to preach in Galilee (except for requiring baptism: this is absent) he continued the Baptists own theme, and yet there is nothing in the desert prophets message to compare to the Teachings of Christ. Although legendary in form, our earliest Gospel declares for a fact that he was thus baptized in common with many in Israel, and that he overcame the Tempter, and that after Johns arrest he returned to Galilee with a Gospel of the Kingdom. This has the look of honest history, and it is only in prospect of the Evangelists handling of the story and the miracles to come that one would think of denying it. It is terribly important to understand this matter of the handling of the story. Marks Gospel was written to answer the question: Why was the Son of God unknown? Why unrecognized even by his family or the villagers who saw his wonders? And then from the standpoint of the Negative argument, one transposes: Why is Jesus unknown? Or why has Nazareth no memory of the man? Or where is his family? Certain stories in his Gospel can be read from this standpoint because of the ambiguity of Marks obscurity theme, which he handles very shrewdly. This earliest Gospel is our pattern Gospel, and aspects of this theme have been taken up by all four Evangelists. Matthew, for instance, because he has borrowed so heavily from Mark, is obliged to reproduce the obscurity of Christ (or the so-called Messianic secret) which for Mark is a basic theme. Already in the Christmas tale, as we have seen, the Magi fail to find their way to the holy child, at first, and blunder into Herods court. Afterward, warned by an angel in a dream the family hide in Egypt to escape a slaughter which falls upon all the male children of Bethlehem from two years old and under. When the ministry begins Matthew presents the reader with a twofold withdrawal on the part of Jesus. This goes beyond Mark, who says of Jesus return only that he came into Galilee after Johns arrest. Matthew writes rather more carefully that he withdrew into Galilee, as if it was dangerous to remain at the scene, and then he adds what Mark omits to say: leaving Nazareth he went and dwelt in Capernaum by the sea. In course of portraying his public appearance, his very debut,

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Matthew describes a withdrawal. It is another evidence of Jesus obscurity. From the scene of a known historical event, that of the notorious Baptist, Jesus has withdrawn. Where to? The Four Gospels know him as a villager from Nazareth, but he has forsaken this village. Luke is the other Evangelist who borrows heavily from Mark. He uses Mark in his own way, but he too is obliged to the secrecy theme. Although each of these later Evangelists has given his Gospel an impressive foreground in telling a Christmas story, what those tales have in common is a mingling of glory and lowliness. In both of them Jesus is hard to find, has to be looked for. Luke tells of no Magi and is undisturbed by Herod and his court and his slaughters. Instead, there are mere shepherds watching in the fields by night when angel choirs appear in the glory of the Lord bringing tidings of the birth, but see the obscurity in such a rustic revelation. And even they, following the heavenly choir, have to leave the fields to look for a babe wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. Has ever a Kings obscurity been as deep?

THE BOY JESUS IN THE TEMPLE

Earlier than his beautiful pastoral, Luke has reproduced an elaborate legend about the Baptists birth. It is decked out with psalms that have gone over into liturgy, such as the Magnificat, but in connection with Jesus obscurity it sets our literary Evangelist a peculiar task. He has furnished his Gospel foreground in hanging tapestries and embroidered vestments to offset his lowly swaddling clothes and crib of straw. Now he must go beyond these enchantments of a lowly glory to bridge the early revelations and the humble life to be described by a Tale of Jesus in the Temple as a boy. It is unique to this Gospel, and the only tale in the canonical Four to tell anything of Jesus before his manhood at thirty. With his parents, then, a boy of twelve, he has made the customary visit to Jerusalem to observe the Passover and afterwards has stayed behind. His parents suppose him to be in the company and go a days journey and they sought him among their kinsfolk and acquaintances; and when they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem. Nor did they quickly find him there but after three days they found him in the Temple among the teachers, listening and asking questions. The boy amazes everyone by his understanding and his answers, but his parents are astonished rather to find him there, and

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when his mother complains of this treatment and pleads their anxiety, the boy replies, How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my Fathers house? A very superior painting has been made of the scene by Heinrich Hofmann showing a comely, modest, brown-eyed lad, and evidently a Jewish boy, holding forth among the wondering, aged doctors and scribes. Art thus lends reality to the imagination, but is it, then, the tale of a Jewish prodigy as a literal-minded historian might be tempted to take it? There would be nothing improbable in that, but Luke is really intent on other themes. A shadow of sorts has fallen over Marys understanding of her son when she cant think where to find him even she! Would that she had remembered the angelic tidings of Gabriel and followed the clue because the precocity shown here is that of the Son of God as a boy. Offered in the guise of history, Lukes legend is a parable of sorts telling his readers that even the parents of Jesus could find him only with difficulty. And not just anywhere! The terms of the Christian experience are illustrated here, and the Evangelist has understood his business in addressing them. Like Mark, who writes to answer the question, Why was the Son of God unknown? Luke has written to a similar question: Why is Jesus hard to find? And the answer is only, It must be so it was always so. Even his parents did not always know where to find the unusual boy.

THE CALLING OF THE FOUR

Jesus is passing along the Sea of Galilee. This is a broad lake about twelve miles long out of which the Jordan flows south to the Dead Sea, and here he summons his first disciples by calling them away from their work. They are two pairs of brothers, fishermen all, and first he sees Simon and Andrew, who are casting a net in the sea. Activity like this is a sign of Marks artistry because story puts us at the scene, whereas for straight history it is a rather imaginative detail. Jesus says to the pair: Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men. There is a kind of humor in it, as in a folk tale. We call such words as these occasional because they belong so particularly to the occasion. Mark excels in these casual touches, and then he writes, Immediately they left their nets and followed him. Now mind it, please. He says immediately. So did they leave their nets in water and wade out to follow Jesus like men hypnotized? Or did Peter roll up the nets while

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Andrew ran home to tell mother? Legend like this leaves a good deal of play to the imagination, but we are not at liberty to take a bold word like immediately and say that they made arrangements to follow Jesus as soon as it was convenient for them to wind up affairs. Evasions like that are false to the story as given. Alas, so is Dr. Goodspeeds benign suggestion, excellent man and great scholar though he was, that the story indicates a previous acquaintance on their part during which Jesus had come to know these fishermen and won their confidence. While seeming to offer a reason for this prompt abandonment of their nets, Goodspeed evades the primitive character of the tale in which its peculiar charm is to be found. Farther along he saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who were in their boat mending the nets. He saw them, but not as if to say, Ha! there you are, fellows! For why should we suppress the wonder of it all which the primitive tale conveys? He saw them: his eye fell upon them: they would do. Immediately he called them and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and followed him. It is like a parable by the Evangelist: Jesus Calls. With a word he pulls men away from their father because he can, and because he is worth it, but that shrewd detail of mending the nets and the given name of Zebedee lift Mark above mere homily. We cannot tell how far this tale is legend and tradition or how far invention. This earliest Evangelist is a gifted artist of a Gothic sort (forgiving the anachronism) but he could never manage as active characters full Twelve Disciples in a Gospel so naively written. They are mentioned sometimes collectively, but it is only Peter, James and John who figure in our story. Poor Andrew loses status already in the list of the Twelve (Mark 3,16) when, rather tremendously, James the son of Zebedee and John the brother of James, whom (Jesus) surnamed Boanerges, that is, sons of thunder separate the lesser brother from Simon whom he surnamed Peter and who is, of course, first among the disciples. Even from that early foursome Andrew disappears when (as if keeping the figure of four) it is Jesus who displaces him, so that Jesus and the three aforenamed are the actors in the tale. Curious to say, a pattern of 2+2 (that is, two pairs of brothers) is displaced in the earliest Gospel by a pattern of 1+3, which as it happens resembles also the pattern of the Gospels themselves in which the first three (or the so-called Synoptics) are supplemented by a Fourth and final Gospel of a wholly different character.

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It is Marks limitation as an artist that holds us to three chosen disciples, but the newly-constituted foursome appears when Jesus raises the daughter of Jairus, or is Transfigured, or when he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane accompanied by the favored three. Number is somehow important here, but I must leave it to the reader to tell me why. It seems to play into the Symbol-thesis of William Benjamin Smith. But why four? One might write of the four named winds that Aeolus kept imprisoned in a cave, or of the four corners of the earth in the cosmology of an early church father. Thus too did ancient thinkers excogitate four elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water, guided by the archetype. I remember the remark once of an infant daughter during a little walk on which she held my finger: Daddy, it does really seem as if the earth is square! Of the Twelve Disciples, then, it is only Peter, James and John who are actors in the Synoptic tale except for Judas Iscariot when he betrays Christ. I mention these things at all not because I am a numerologist but because CG Jung, whom I greatly admire, places great emphasis upon the unconscious collective significance of the number Four. Among other things it belongs to completeness. As such it figures in the four-fold division of the mandala-circle, a symbol of the achieved Self (much in contrast to the ego). In association with Chinese symbolism it represents earth and mother. In the recent Catholic dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Marys elevation to Heaven Jung saw a completion of the Trinity. Of course, there are yet other numbers which figure as groups or symbols in the Gospels: twos, threes, sevens, seventy, Twelve Disciples. We have sometimes a pairing of Jesus and Peter. The Sons of Thunder act as a pair when they ask for Twin Heavenly thrones or offer to call down fire from Heaven. Peter and John are sent together into Jerusalem to make ready for the Passover, and the same pair reappear in certain sections of Acts. Of course this latter pairing represents a curious sort of crossover between the pairs of brothers given earlier. It is really as if Luke were artistically altering a pattern too pronounced. It is worthwhile saying that the famous Twelve Disciples of Jesus, so far as any representation is concerned which would set them apart as individual men, are for the most part and with the exceptions mentioned above, only lists of names in the Synoptic Gospels and lists which cannot be made to agree with one another, just as the genealogies of Jesus given by Matthew and Luke do not agree.

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ROD OF JESSE A DAY IN CAPERNAUM: The Synagogue

Jesus, then, having summoned his first disciples goes next into Capernaum where on the Sabbath he enters the synagogue and teaches. The people are astounded at his teaching, as Moffatt translates from the Greek, or in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible (RSV) they are astonished because he taught them as one who had authority and not as the scribes. It is very sudden, this appearance of Jesus in a rabbis role when coming into Galilee after John was arrested. If this is history, we must allow that much has been omitted. And, for instance, the whole question of where he lived is unanswered. It is the way of fable to be brief, and Mark never hesitates. Very quickly, and before we have time to ask, for instance, Where are the fishermen now?, something will happen to divert us because immediately there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit. (Mark 1,22). Disturbed by the unexpected presence of Jesus in the synagogue, a demoniac starts up and cries out: What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God. (Mark 1,23.) Now what sort of recognition is this? It sounds as if he knew of him beforehand as a sort of neighbor, but then why does he ask, Have you come to destroy us? Ask this of a visiting teacher? Our Evangelist is trading on the ambiguity. In one sense he has established the fact of Jesus of Nazareth: I know who you are! It is undoubtedly Marks desire that we should take it this way, but the unclean spirit of our story has a mind of its own and when our demoniac cries out, I know who you are, the Holy One of God, he verges on a rupture of the Messianic secret. By virtue of the demon within, this man has access to a deeper, an inhuman knowledge of Who Jesus is. So Jesus rebukes him by addressing the demon: Be silent, and come out of him! Whereupon the demoniac cries out with a loud voice and is convulsed. Mark is a realistic artist and in his simple shrewd account the demon obeys this Lord of spirits only after a last act of resistance, like a dog giving its victim one last shake. Again the people are amazed, saying: What is this? A new Teaching! With authority he commands the unclean spirits and they obey him. What if, instead of treating these legends historically, we had taken them up at face value without asking if they were real? Certainly,

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they are stories of wonders and revelations, and of revelations given now from the mouth of a wilderness prophet and a Voice from Heaven or again from the mouth of a demoniac. Considered from that perspective, these tales are naive. Jesus has summoned disciples without having first achieved any distinction in the world, and in the synagogue he has astounded folk by his Teachings and subdued a demoniac by his authority, although the Teachings have not been recounted. Not a word of them has been given us, although twice Mark has called on us to admire them as we think of those astounded people. Their words have been remembered in a tale which praises Jesus as a Teacher for having cast out a demon. Our Evangelist, it seems, is almost too naive and even rather inept unless, as may happen, he is skilled in sleight-of-hand. Supposing that he had decided to give a sample of the new teaching instead of leaving it to our imagination, would it have resembled the famous Teachings of Christ as we have them, for example, in the Sermon on the Mount? Is that what he wants us to think of when the new teaching is praised? How easy it would be to draw that conclusion and what a mistake! For the new teaching is one and the same thing with the Messianic secret or, as we might say, the Idea of Christ, which Mark cannot allow Jesus to reveal at this early time. His tale is confused here although his intention is plain. The same teaching which is able to command unclean spirits has just been given by this obstreperous demon! Mark is keeping his secret, that is, the Messianic secret under wraps, but he is eager to have Jesus tell it as soon as he can. We may fairly call this tale a fable, then, because it is that, but such a thing might once have been a piece of Oral Tradition reflecting a real event. If so, we are at liberty to brush aside its supernatural details, and that has been the way of the distinguished Frederick C. Grant in The Interpreters Bible where he translates the demoniacs question into the idiom of psychopathology: Have you come from over the hills to work us harm here in Capernaum? It is the terrified query of a partially demented man on this approach, and those who take the way of Dr. Grant can cite no lesser authority than the Wizard of Zurich, Dr CG Jung, who as a trained psychiatrist was well-acquainted with schizophrenia and all sorts of disorders. Jung very roundly insists that the phenomena of possession are evident in shattered minds. Besides, dont we have demoniacs in Africa today and exorcists who know how to cure them? Their possession is our psychopathology: we bridge the gap by a deeper science.

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Yet if we save this tale as the report of something that happened once, what have we saved except the bare affirmation of fact lying somehow obscurely behind the given legend? In rinsing away its uniqueness, we have denied the Evangelists claim and lost our footing in the understanding of his myth. Our rumored Jesus is thoroughly vague except as this legend has been defining him. It is the Given Tale as it stands which contains all our value if a value is to be found here.

A DAY IN CAPERNAUM: Simons house

After Jesus leaves the synagogue, he entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. A house at last, but it is Simons house, and here with his disciples he observes the Sabbath as a day of rest. Otherwise, where did he live? Unlike the Baptist or the solitary Bannos of whom Josephus writes, Jesus dwelt among men in a town and he must have had a place to stay. Mark leaves the matter vague. One commonly assumes that he stayed with Simon Peter and this is possible, but rather odd. First did he say, Follow me and I will make you fishers of men, and then did he ask them for lodging? We must rid ourselves of any idea that the Evangelist is a reporter of fact. Mark cannot tell us where Jesus lived and does not tell us that he lived with Simon Peter. He has in hand only a tradition that he dwelt at Capernaum, but a tradition that recommends itself in stubborn contrast to such a name as Jesus of Nazareth. Nevertheless, when his tale requires the setting of a house, as for instance when men are breaking through a roof just to get near this Teacher, he describes him as being at home. Religion hasnt suffered from this vagueness, curiously enough, because, as I say, it is story that puts us at the scene. We return to the story when Jesus enters this house to find that Simons mother-in-law is lying sick with fever. How very intimate that detail is! And it suggests that Mark knows very much more about Jesus than I have given him credit for. Jesus takes her by the hand and lifts her up. The fever leaves her and she serves them. It is gesture which counts for Mark here and carries the deeper meaning because this is not just an item of fact such as a biographer would supply. Healing is the basic gesture here and Jesus taking of the womans hand is a tangible value so that Mark attests his reality by that

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grasp. And then he lifted her up or he made her rise (thus Goodspeed translates) whereupon she served them. It is veritably a resurrection to life that is prefigured in this modest healing, and these prefigurings are no mere accident. Like an Oriental artist repeating his pattern, Mark will have his Jesus take the hand of a lifeless twelve-year-old girl as the mourners are wailing and speak in a symbol: Talitha cumi! which is, being interpreted, Damsel, I say unto thee, arise! (Mark 5,41 KJV) Isnt this a Resurrection? Or again, he will lift by the hand an epileptic boy seemingly dead after hed expelled an unclean spirit from him. (Mark 9,27.) In this first Capernaum scene, Marks meaning, or his Symbol, if you like, is carried through to the end, but he masks the symbol by his realism. That evening after sundown when the Sabbath has ended the whole city gathers about the door of Simons house bringing all who were sick or possessed with demons, of whom there are many in this Gospel of demoniacs. Now Jesus works many a cure, casts out many demons, and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. It is a prohibition which will become a Markan stereotype. Next morning very early he goes out to a lonely place for prayer. Implicit is the believers question, Where is he? (Or, why is this Jesus not to be found? That is the Negative view). When others awaken he has to be looked for, just as the Boy in the Temple had to be looked for. Simon and those who were with him find him and say: Everyone is searching for you. It is the state of mind of many flocking to the Jesus cult who dont find an easy satisfaction there. Teachers and missionaries will use these pointed tales as they assure folk of Jesus help. Gifted in teaching, they will employ gestures of hand-grasping and imaginary raising up in homilies of consolation, just as our own preachers do. Jesus does not return to Simons house. The Sabbath rest has ended with enthusiastic crowds and now, without so much as a morning meal or a turning back to say good-bye, he begins a tour throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons. (Mark 1,39.) It is a great fact, this launching of his ministry. The decisiveness required of his disciples is well-expressed by this abrupt departure when he replies to Simon: Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also; for that is why I came out. It is nonetheless a paradox. If this strange healing prophet searches people out, yet he flees from those who have been aroused by his own sensational deeds. After a cure in which he touches a leper (!) he

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could no longer openly enter a town, but was out in the country. Absent and yet he is around. He is sought out in the countryside: People came to him from every quarter. It is imperative that Jesus be somehow available. One believes that as a condition of faith. But the Evangelist has dealt with us shrewdly because that realistic first Day in Capernaum has substituted for a history of Jesus beginnings. The miraculous healing of a leper is no such history although, within the fable, when Jesus charges him to Go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, we have the implication of fact in that Jesus is shown as one observing the Jewish religion. This is how the history is conveyed, and yet Mark gives no description of that tour of Galilee although it represents the inauguration of Jesus ministry since he now has disciples. We are diverted by story detail, like that of Simons mother-in-law, but we know very little about how he began. What villages he entered, how he was received, what sort of rebuffs he coped with, how he established himself, what emergencies arose, what in particular he did here or there, how he and his disciples ate, slept, managed, washed their clothes, paid their way we cannot even imagine it on the basis of a generality about his preaching in all the synagogues and casting out their many demons. Marks traditions may be true in all essentials, depending on our definition of essentials, but the history of this legendary life is vague. Hence, the Jesus of this first mentioned Galilean tour has no particular there, no Dasein. Outside Capernaum he is somewhere, anywhere, everywhere, he is out in the open country but not in town. In fact, Marks traditions require that Jesus be placed in towns. Consequently, he brings him quickly back to Capernaum for his basis in apparent fact and to give a sense of location to his elusive and marvelous Jesus.

IN HIS OWN VILLAGE (Own country)

Mark has made a double of his tale of the Capernaum synagogue when Jesus visits his own country to preach an astonishing sermon there, but with another result. The doubling does not consist in the number two there are three synagogue tales in this Gospel but in a bold reproduction of an earlier motif. Whether fashioned out of lost traditions, then, or invented by the Evangelist, these two tales comprise a double conceived with a single thought in mind and belong together like two halves of a torn dollar bill.

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He came to his own country, and his disciples followed him. And on the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue; and many who heard him were astonished, saying, Where did this man get all this? What is the wisdom given to him? What mighty works are wrought by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us? And they took offense at him. And Jesus said to them, A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house. And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands upon a few sick people and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief. (Mark 6.) A famous event in this life, but see where the contrast lies to Capernaum where the demoniac has recognized Jesus of Nazareth and knows him for the Holy One of God. It is a pattern reproduced in reverse when his own townspeople, who know him in a familiar sense (we are presumed to be in Nazareth) yet fail to perceive Who he is or What he is because the demoniac knowledge is missing. Given the brevity of the anecdote, the Evangelist has laid quite an emphasis on the villagers ejaculations and yet, once more, not a word of the sermon is quoted which had produced that astonishment. At Capernaum this deficiency might have been excused as arising from the excitements of the demoniac but it is reproduced here without excuse. HUSBAND: Jones gave an amazing talk at our Rotary luncheon today. We were astonished by what he said and by his wisdom. WIFE: You wouldnt think that of Jones! What did he say? HUSBAND: Oh, I cant tell you what he said. But we sat there with our mouths open! Mark doesnt care what Jesus might have taught on such occasions (if we suppose the occasions) else he must have given us a clue. Instead, he gives a random sort of gossip which is loaded with everything he wants to say. The townspeople have attested Jesus very ordinary humanity (his solid existence) in taking offense. They have given his mother a name and named four brothers. Sisters are mentioned in passing it is rather sweet, if all this were historical, to think of his sisters. Only the father is absent from this list. Jesus is made to seem familiar on the most commonplace terms, especially when they deflate a prophet by remembering that he was once a carpenter.

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Was Jesus a carpenter? Or was it rather the case that Mark saw the value of making him something definite? Only this once in the Gospels is he called a carpenter, being commonly addressed as Teacher or Rabbi, or described as a Kyrios. Our scribal Matthew, when absorbing this earlier Gospel, calls him the carpenters son, and Luke omits the detail entirely. Now I have seen in the Babylonian Talmud a reference to carpenters in which two Messiahs, namely, bar David and bar Joseph, are designated carpenters. It is written (in Zechariah): And the Lord showed me four carpenters. Who are the four carpenters? Said R. Hanah bar Bizna in the name of R. Simeon the Pious: Messiah b. David, and Messiah b. Joseph, Elijah, and Cohen Zedek.11 What a piece of luck, to come across a passage like that! Beyond question, these names are one and all symbolic. We have in Elijah a socalled legendary figure who is identified with the Baptist in our Synoptics, while as for Cohen Zedek, these are words that every rabbi will instantly translate. They mean in Hebrew, righteous priest, and I would imagine that the mythical Melchizedek would be a type of that. This Melchizedek is a fabulous figure as late as the Book of Hebrews but in Genesis 14,18 is the mysterious priest who serves bread and wine to Abram when blessing him. His name means King of Righteousness (Zedek is righteousness); he is called King of Salem and described as a Priest of the Most High God. This singular ministration takes place, moreover, before God has established his covenant with Abram, whose name is then expanded and whose innumerable male descendants are required to be circumcised on the eighth day (as Jesus was) in token of that covenant. Now it is true that the cited text in Zechariah gives smith or blacksmith instead of carpenter in modern translations, but we find carpenter in the venerable King James, as also here in the Boston Talmud Society publication of 1918. It is no great matter. The citation shows matter independent of our Gospels and taken from the Parent Religion in which a carpenter or smith or some sort of artisan may be thought of as a symbolic designation for Messiah bar Joseph, as for the Davidic king yet to rule, or Elijah, who was clearly no carpenter, or Cohen Zedek, who has the distinction of being a righteous priest.

11. The Babylonian Talmud, Boston, 1918. Tract Succah, Ch. V. p. 82. Text reference above to Zechariah in our English Bible is chapter 1,20.

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Already we have seen how our Evangelist tells of Jesus promising to make four fishermen into fishers of men with a sort of country humor, but in that very character, as fishers of men, they disappear from the Gospel at once. We never see them becoming that, never read of them being trained in how to draw men like fishermen hauling in nets. Instead, like junior Baptists and sorcerers apprentices they go forth to preach repentance and warn men and heal them and cast out demons. It would be quite in keeping with the Markan style to call Jesus a carpenter in a double sense naively, as by those foolish fellow citizens who thought, absurdly, that they knew this man as a carpenter, but symbolically for those who had an inkling of this other, this rabbinic strand. (The Talmud having grown out of long-standing oral traditions, it is of course the unwritten Talmud I allude to). These are knotty questions and technical points and I leave it to the scholars to answer them for us without professing to know the fact. We quite understand that nothing would have prevented Jesus, as a rabbi, from having been trained in a carpenters trade. (One early Christian Father pretends to know of wooden plows that Jesus made that were still in existence for the tangible fact). My point is that the Markan reference to carpenter smacks of an idiosyncrasy in his style. For any historical truth we have the gossip of these misunderstanding and astonished villagers, which is reported in evidence some forty years later. Apropos the historical question, Bultmann thinks the tale was invented from a proverb: A prophet is not without honor except in his own country. We speak of this famous tale, then, as Jesus Rejection at Nazareth, although Nazareth has not been named here, Mark speaking only of his native place, his own country. Nor in truth has Jesus been rejected here where the peoples astonishment brings about the action of the proverb. An outright rejection at Nazareth occurs only in the Third Gospel, Lukes, where after making a favorable impression on the villagers Jesus manages to enrage them. It is a very different story and, in fact, so very different that the immensely learned Edersheim insists on two such visits. He is reluctant to believe that Luke would change the Markan tale quite so freely.

MYTHIC ASPECT OF OWN COUNTRY

So Bultmann thinks the Nazareth tale was invented from the proverb which Jesus recites in the synagogue. It is that same proverb

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from which Mark has taken his word patris when speaking of Jesus own country instead of naming his village: A prophet is not without honor except in his patris, and among his own kin, and in his own house. Jesus has been performing wonders elsewhere at some indefinite place, we know not where, and Mark begins his tale by saying that he went away from there and came into his patris. Although the proverb will shortly echo this and make a verbal double of the word, it seems a little strained here. Jesus has lately crossed the lake from the Decapolis and is already home in Galilee (Mark 5,21) which it would be natural to call his own country. Mark has no aversion to the name of Jesus village and has told us earlier that Jesus came from Nazareth to be baptized by John. Wouldnt it have been more natural here to use the village name again? but its Luke who names the village. A word has been substituted for a name, or rather, for two names because on closer view something else is missing from this tale besides Nazareth. We have no mention here of Jesus father beyond a dim reminder in this word. Patris is like the French patrie or German Vaterland in its allusion to the father, which is in Greek as in Latin, pater. Is there no inkling of myth in this dim reference? Marks tale is realistically told. He has made Jesus family credible enough in passing when the villagers give their names, all except for his sisters, who are mentioned, and his unnamed father. It is the fathers absence from Jesus patris which leaves the myth intact inasmuch as he comes into the region of the father, and so also, to make a metaphor of it, into the sphere of the fathers purpose. What happens in his patris foreshadows his rejection at Jerusalem as an unrecognized Messiah. One might fairly ask, however, if Jesus failure to perform wonders at Nazareth is not also a token of this storys authenticity? By this point in the Gospel, Jesus has rebuked wind and waves when a boat is caught in a storm, and his disciples have marveled at the great calm which follows, yet here among the villagers who remember him, he could do no mighty work. He is suddenly not as miraculous as mere rumor would make him out to be, but he is all the more credible for that reason. Such is the logic of the case, and my point respecting Mark is that he understands this. That kind of discernment and artistry is by no means beyond the shrewdness of our primitive author.

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So the shadow of myth falls on these tales of Jesus preaching in his patris and earlier in the synagogue at Capernaum, which are apparently fictions. Such things may well have happened in his life and we cannot deny it, but these tales are no report of those events. Our Evangelist has no knowledge of the scenes he describes and is working with traditions. Being a born story-teller he recomposes them and bends them to his purpose. We grant that his artistry is naive, technically speaking, but he is much less naive than those for whom he writes, and his story takes the form of myth because it is Gospel faith (or myth) which he has for his resources. Notwithstanding a third and different synagogue tale placed within the narrative between these two, the tales are a deliberate double. Although separated by several other tales, they illustrate the Messianic secret when taken together. Once again, a primitive artistry is at work. Mark knows what he intends and he is confident of his effect. As ever, then, his theme is that of the unrecognized Christ, or from the Negative standpoint, of a hidden, unknown, unrecognized Jesus. What have these tales in common? In each case Jesus preaches in a synagogue near where he is living, or has lived. Each time he astonishes people by a sermon of which, strictly speaking, we hear not a word. The astonishment is a stereotype. It is what the people say that counts for the story, although at Capernaum, the demoniacs testimony must be included in this, which brings us to the matter of shared contrasts. The demoniac at Capernaum in hailing Jesus of Nazareth seems to recognize him as a man, but the demon within has known him from a world of spirits and dreads him as the Holy One of God. At Nazareth the peoples recognition is warped by an inexplicable obscurity. Jesus marvels because of their unbelief because they should have known him for for what, exactly? A prophet? Or the Son of God? Mark hides a bold inconsistency behind his proverb because he has Gospel faith in mind as it was formulated later. This would have been unsuitable in Jesus mouth when preaching in his own country, although the Evangelist will dare to put this later faith in his mouth after Peter has hailed him as the Christ. To this day the poor folk of Nazareth are pitied by pious pastors because they failed to see in Jesus what our believers see. Marks design has succeeded artistically in showing on the basis of these tales that Jesus lived, and that he belonged to a well-known village family and was himself known to his neighbors as the carpenter.

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ROD OF JESSE LATER VERSIONS OF THIS TALE

What then of Matthew and Luke, our other prime authorities here? We know that they depend heavily on Mark. How do they treat these details of carpenter and patris which on my view are involved in myth? For one thing, not passively, because in their handling of the matter, they are reworking his scheme. Luke recasts the story entirely, and his version is the more influential of these later accounts, whereas Matthew is a better transcriber. He is better, that is, in respect of any supposed historical value in Marks account. Matthew dislikes to call Jesus a carpenter, for instance, but whether or not he is thinking of the Messianic carpenters of rabbinic lore we cannot say. In any case he has the people call Jesus the carpenters son. It is seemingly a rather slight change but suddenly it makes a big difference. If Mark had intended a shrewd reference to the Messianic carpenter, Matthew has only brought to mind the carpenters trade, which is displaced upon the father. So also with any mythical hint conveyed in the word patris. It is wiped away when Matthew ignores that earlier omission of a human father who now becomes an ordinary villager to be mentioned in connection with his family. It is ironic, then, that Marks original account, which that Evangelist has fashioned out of his own traditions, gains in historical value by its absorption in Matthew, but obviously, the Negative argument is not disconcerted by this. Nor is the matter settled by Lukes account, either, because the Third Evangelist has gone beyond his source in Mark to compose a different story. Quite as cleanly as Matthew, he removes any trace of mythical reference from Marks patris by naming Jesus father. Omitting Marys name and the four names of his brothers, he has the people ask, Is not this Josephs son? Nowhere does he say anything of a carpenter but Nazareth is named at last. Nothing is left of the myth which is discernible in the Markan tale. It seems to me that Luke has invented his more developed version of this tale, which overlaps the earlier, but others may suppose that he found it amid the traditions, and since in theory this is possible, why might the Lukan version not be closer to fact? Two objections may be raised against this possibility. For one thing, Lukes story favors Gentiles over Jews and, as is very well known, his is preeminently the Gentile Gospel. This makes his rather elaborate version suspect. Besides

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that, unless we are charmed by his extra detail, the larger story is clumsily told although it begins well; but have we never known a beautiful boy of twelve, say, who is favored in every respect except one? Jacob, I mean, is taller than the average of his age and beautifully handsome, having a pale complexion and dark curly hair and large, sensitive eyes: equally, his mind is quick and he is very perceiving. But ask him to throw a baseball and Jacob is clumsy; invite him to soccer and he stumbles. Luke is a Jacob among the Evangelists. He does all things well until he tries to make up his own story; then he is clumsy. At Nazareth, where in the Markan tale Jesus is foredoomed to lack of recognition, lack of honor, but nothing really worse than that, things are made to take an ugly turn in Lukes recasting. By the end of the sermon all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. Driving Jesus out of town, they try to hurl him headlong over a cliff. It is a complete loss of control by the story-teller when things get so far out of hand, and yet his beginning here is actually rather beautiful and worth a closer look if we care to examine the workings and variations in these legend-makers and Evangelists. Jesus has stood up to read and is given the Isaiah scroll which he opens to the words: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. (Luke 4,18 Is. 61,1.) (Or: the year of the Lords favor, as in Goodspeed and the NEB). Then, as if he were drawing on eyewitness reports, Luke continues: And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. That is a marvelous touch. And all spoke well of him and wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth. (Luke 4,20.) Luke is making up for the lack of a sermon in Marks simple tale, which he sees as a defect. And so it is, strictly speaking, except that he doesnt perceive Marks purpose in having the peoples gossip carry his meaning. Moreover, since he has no record of any such sermon, he has somehow to give the impression of one, and he begins by falling back on the Prophet Isaiah. Here the beauty lies, and then, very briefly, in the graceful manner of Jesus sublime disclosure in saying, Today this

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Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. This latter word is to be comprehended only in faith, and here Lukes touch is sure. Audacity has cleansed Christs modesty of self-effacement because Lukes is a Jesus virgin-born, a Son of God who bested the Tempter in his three-fold temptations. Our American way of reading everything for fact, fact, fact rather misses this quality, but if we understand these words, we know what it is about Jesus that Luke is intent on showing us, what it is that he wants us to believe about him as we read his Gospel. In sum, then, Luke is an intelligent writer who has found a way of giving the missing sermon, which he perceives as a lack also in the synagogue at Capernaum. Furthermore, he has perceived that these tales belong together, and so he brings them together, side by side but in a reverse order. Instead of Jesus going first to Capernaum, he goes to Nazareth first and Capernaum directly afterwards, and having solved the problem of the missing sermon by giving so full an impression of one, Luke is able to give the Capernaum tale as Mark has written it and with no sense of deficiency.

MATTHEW & THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

Now Matthew has minded the lack of a sermon in Marks paired synagogue tales quite as much as Luke, and he has made a compensation for Marks deficiency which is different from Lukes and rather more conscientious, although he drops away one of the tales. The scene in the Capernaum synagogue he simply omits. Gone is the demoniac along with his involuntary witness to the Holy One of God. No fear: there will be plenty of demoniacs. And yet the omitted story has left its trace in Matthew, as we shall see. In a complete turn-around from the Markan fable he supplies the one thing, instead, which Mark had failed to give, namely, a sermon. It was an interesting decision on the part of this Evangelist to ignore the tale of the Capernaum synagogue because he has used up nearly everything else Mark contains. He is not opposed to Marks habit of doubling things and will copy his two miraculous Feedings, one of 5,000 men, another of 4,000. Elsewhere, he retains the involuntary testimony of demoniacs; on one occasion he will double a demoniac. It is simply a misplaced emphasis in Marks tale that annoys him, for why should that primitive Evangelist praise the Teachings of Jesus so highly without giving so much as a word of them? Yet a sentence out of that

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discarded story he will save for use: And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes. (Matthew 7,28 Mark 1,22.) This is the conclusion of the Markan tale which Matthew now takes from its original setting and appends to the Sermon on the Mount. This first Evangelist is the scribe among the Four, a scholar who conveys the Teachings of Jesus intelligently and beautifully while adjusting them to circumstances unlike those in which the Master taught. He nowhere plays down the native Jewishness of Jesus or his own express faith in Hebrew prophecy. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus requires of his disciples a continuing observance of the Law because that is a part of the grand fulfillment: For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass away from the Law, till all things be accomplished. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, shall be called least in the Kingdom of Heaven. (Matthew 5,18. RV.)12 Jesus, or else the Matthean scribe, had in mind the written Hebrew with its yodhs and curlicues. We could easily show the popularity of this Sermon among all sorts and types of minds, also in India. For many it seems to exist in virtual independence of the Gospel, like the trial of Socrates or the Noble Eightfold Path, yet is found nowhere else except in this Gospel. As Matthew reports the Teachings he so clearly loves and treasures, he offers no orthodox theology. Everything is seen from within the religion of Jesus own people. There is no theory here except a vision of faith. Instead of giving out a doctrine of God, Jesus teaches men to pray: Our Father, which art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy Name! Thy Kingdom come! Thy Will be done on earth, As it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, And forgive us our debts, As we forgive our debtors.
12. All citations from the Sermon on the Mount are take from Matthews Gospel, 5 to 7.

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And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from Evil. So the Sermon on the Mount has an elevated religious quality, free of dogma, hence the widespread preference for it over doctrinal religion. It is a preference which has grown out of our Western reaction to the dissolution of dogma. Jefferson, Franklin, Voltaire, Lessing all prefer the Teachings of Jesus to the semi-philosophical doctrines of the church. Already, then, in Matthews setting Jesus fame has spread throughout all Syria and great crowds have followed him, bringing those who are variously afflicted to be cured: Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down his disciples came to him, and he opened his mouth and taught them, saying: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Here are some of the opening Beatitudes, of which Matthew gives nine, but we have throughout this Sermon (Matthew 5 to 7) many remarkable sayings which have left an echo in the mind: salt of the earth let your light so shine city set on a hill turn the other cheek love your enemies pearls before swine We nearly all know vaguely of Jesus stern warnings against anger: Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment and... whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire. Equally stern is a warning against lust: Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. What a wonderful severity beyond our own attainment of this standard. This is no droning moralism but an insight offered with implicit warning. It is the inwardness of the religious spirit which Jesus requires

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of his disciples and in requiring it, he awakens our assent. Even oaths are prohibited, as Quakers and Tolstoyans have maintained: Swear not at all; neither by Heaven, for it is Gods throne, nor by the earth, for it is his footstool; neither by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King. Neither shalt thou swear by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black. But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil. Here also we find the germ of non-resistance in Jesus saying, Resist not evil, which set Tolstoy to marveling, and it is in this sermon that Jesus observes how the sun is made to rise on good and evil alike and rain is sent to the just and the unjust. Alms-giving is praised if we dont make too much of it ourselves, hence when the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing! And here fasting is taken for granted (as of old) but its mournful countenance is reproved for the same reason that prayers are better made in secret than by hypocrites on a streetcorner to be seen of men. Our commonest words for this quality in Jesus Teaching are inwardness, spirit, and essence. Emerson declares that in our flowing affairs a decision must be made. Any decision is better than none but set out at once on one! So also Jesus, with a clang of antiquity: Enter ye in at the strait gate, for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat; because strait is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. This is the old Jewish doctrine of the Two Ways which recurs when he says furthermore: No man can serve two masters. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon (and Mammon, here treated like a god in a deliberate metaphor, means riches or money). Mindful of mortality, Jesus urges the laying up of treasures in Heaven where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Beyond an anxious care for what we shall eat and what we shall drink, he reminds us of the lilies of the field: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. We are to seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and take no thought for the morrow. In this same chock-full Sermon we have his Judge not, that ye

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be not judged; and Jesus asks: Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brothers eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? There is promise in this sermon and consolation: Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. Only, do not sit at home on Sunday morning and knock on your television set, for we are warned against false prophets who come to us in sheeps clothing but inwardly are ravening wolves. A simple test is given: By their fruits ye shall know them. We must have a care to our souls and are by all means to avoid the contaminations of the world: Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet and turn again and rend you. It was this pictorial way of putting things that Whitehead had in mind when he said of Jesus that he spoke in the lowest abstractions of which language is capable. And yet what are these Teachings? What is this brilliant array? Our best scholars have long ago determined that this famous Sermon is no sermon at all but a choice selection of the Teachings arranged by the Evangelists skill and placed in the artificial setting of a sermon on a mount. No question can be raised against their genuineness, wherever they came from, but in its setting, the Sermon on the Mount has no more claim upon historical fact than the abandoned scene in the Capernaum synagogue. Alone out of all the miracles and wonders of the Gospels, these Teachings bear witness to themselves and were in nowise concocted for the purposes of serving a fiction, and this irrespective of how the argument might turn out in anybodys mind. Here the foot is on a rock although such Teachings might be imitated and have been (palely, for example, by a modern Kahlil Gibran). Nor is the genuineness of the Teachings any proof of the life of Jesus except for the attribution of a tradition found in the Synoptics. Luke has given them more at random in a similar form. So striking is the overall convergence of these Teachings in two independent Gospels that scholars universally posit a common source in a written Teaching document (Q) composed before the writing of Mark but now otherwise lost. And more of that presently. Matthews achievement is in the grand arrangement of the Teachings when one considers the piecemeal and miscellaneous quality

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of any tradition prior to its literary gathering. And it does appear that others besides Jesus have here and there amended or even added to the Teaching tradition because the Sermon is unequal. Nor can we say now just which are the words of Jesus and which not, except that in some few cases we can say with assurance: These are not. Apart from authenticity there is the question of truth. Those charming words about the lilies of the field cannot mean anything to the street children of Buenos Aires, the homeless of New York, or the floodravaged poor of Bangladesh as we understand. The Book of Job goes farther, and already in Isaiah we have read of the righteous person dying young and the sinner living to a great age and we may add, amid luxury and pleasures and things often got by rapacity, deceit and crime. If we cannot serve two Masters, yet the service of Mammon often pays well, and we fall back for consolation on Ruskins avowal the avowal of a man of moderate wealth who knew what money meant to him: There is no wealth but life.

THE SON OF MAN

Going back to Mark now because he is our primary source for the story to be told, we may recall that he has brought us back to Capernaum after a wandering in Galilee when Jesus was so besieged by crowds that he could no longer openly enter a city. We remember, too, that nothing in particular has been told us of those wanderings except that he once cured a leper by a touch in which we saw a somewhat disconcerting proof of Jesus bodily reality. Back in Capernaum we are told that Jesus is at home although quite what this means is otherwise obscure. Mark knows nothing about it beyond the mere tradition that Jesus dwelt there. Compare to this a famous logion given in Matthew and Luke when a man, or a scribe, tells Jesus that he will follow him wherever he goes and Jesus replies: Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head. (Luke 9,58.) Apart from its tenderness for this is a little poem these words belong to the Idea of Christ in the Gospels in showing us how Jesus and any would-be disciples must venture beyond the security of family and home. We are, of course, not resolving discrepancies here or pronouncing on matters of fact.

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A paralytic has been carried to Jesus home where a crowd has jammed the doorway, making it impossible to get through. So the cotbearers break through the roof and lower the pallet to Jesus. It is a preposterous touch, but one can imagine that sort of thing happening in a town of flat roofs. Besides, it is the very boldness of the story-telling which is pleasing. We know beforehand that Jesus will cure the paralytic because that is a given, yet the Evangelist is shrewd enough to temper his miracle by its setting, and some of our latent incredulity is diverted to this detail. Jesus is not surprised by any of this although his roof has been broken through. Fancy a calm like that with your Indian guru on his pillow! Or think of a Chinese Zen master who would have driven these fools away with a stave. But Mark has told his fable very quickly, never hesitating, and if these improbabilities were removed, there might be nothing especially worth telling. (Matthew has removed them and his story is flat). So Jesus will see in the importunity of these fellows an expression of their faith, and he says to the paralytic, My son, your sins are forgiven. Scribes are present on this occasion who are offended by these words and they say to themselves, It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone? Now in the setting of the Gospel the forgiveness of Jesus is something far more than a harmless encouragement, but the response of the scribes is perfunctory because they speak to Marks purpose. For even given an occasion like this and scribes present then, it was not a blasphemy for him to say: My son, your sins are forgiven. At most it might have seemed a sort of usurpation of a priestly role or an evasion of the Temple cult and its traditions, but scribes like these, and lawyers, Pharisees and Sadducees with few exceptions are stock enemies of Jesus in the Gospels. Offended because that is their role in the story, they vex the discerning heart of Jesus who perceives in his spirit that they question him. Quite as if he hadnt thought of it before, or as if the logic of the tale did not require it, he challenges these murmurers by asking, Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, Your sins are forgiven, or to say, Rise, take up your pallet and walk? The question is too rudimentary as he cries out impatiently, But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins The sentence breaks off; it is never completed. It was almost a slip of the tongue. Jesus turns directly to the paralytic: I say to you, rise, take up your pallet and go home. And this happens. Taking up his cot the paralytic passes through the crowd.

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Jesus had almost given his secret away at that high moment because a shrouded revelation is conveyed in this term, Son of Man. It has a special meaning in his mouth, especially in Mark, but there is nonetheless a common side to it, a sort of dictionary meaning which keeps the mystery under wraps because as an idiom in the Aramaic language, son of man or bar Enosh means simply man or generic man, as one might say. What shall we say of a story like this which remains unforgettable just because the paralytic was let down to Jesus through the roof? I like what my old Britannica says of Robert Henrysons most famous work, the Morall Fabillis of Esope, comprising 13 fables retold: The outstanding merit of the work is its freshness of treatment. The old themes are retold with such vivacity, such fresh lights on human character, and with so much local atmosphere, that they deserve the credit of original productions. Those words might fairly be applied to the Gospel of Mark. Here, too, we discover a freshness and vivacity imparted to traditions. Although lacking in polish, Mark has survived to us almost wholly intact, unlike the document of Jesus Teachings. Its own merit has saved this earliest, crudest and yet most vital of the Gospels notwithstanding that Matthew and Luke, and later John, were written in hopes of displacing it!

LORD OF THE SABBATH

Marks quirky habit of doubling things, whatever else it means, is a way of giving emphasis. It is a peculiarity of Jesus in the Gospels that he refers to himself in this strangely impersonal way as the Son of Man. Why does he? Even the scholars are puzzled by this because they mostly insist on taking his Gospel for history at all costs. Some of them, believing that he used this term and falling back on the lexicon, will treat it as an Aramaic idiom for man. Others, with a vivid sense of the mystery of a pre-Christian Son of Man myth foreshadowed in the Book of Daniel, may doubt that he used this term at all. Why not take Mark at face value? For whether or not this is history is a question that may fairly be postponed, and if we read this Evangelist observingly, and read him on the whole, he will show us by his handling of the term that a myth of the Son of Man belongs to his scheme. Shortly afterward, then, we are told of a second occasion when

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Jesus refers to himself in this strange manner, and we have here a typical Markan stress and a true double because in these early intimations of the Son of Man his high importance is conveyed under a veil. This other tale is very slight. Jesus is passing through grainfields where his disciples pluck and eat the ripened ears. It is the Sabbath day, and Pharisees are present who complain that they are doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath. It is not a question of theft here because the laws of Deuteronomy allow this sort of munching: When you go into your neighbors standing grain, you may pluck the ears with your hand, but you shall not put a sickle to your neighbors standing grain. (Deuteronomy 23,25.) Rub and eat but do not otherwise gather. Or rather, rub and chew. My father, whose boyhood was spent in Russia, once told me how folk there would rub away the chaff and chew ripe wheat like chewing gum, and I have done that. Wheat has a high gluten content and makes a rubbery morsel to chew on. What the Pharisees object to is work on the Sabbath, the innocent stripping of wheat or barley being deemed a form of work. Jesus replies to them as follows: Have you never read what David did, when he was in need and was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God when Abiathar was High Priest and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those who were with him? And he said to them: The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath; so the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath. (Mark 2,23.) The little tale is artificial. Scholars note that Abiathar is a slip for Ahimelech but more to the point here is the absence of Jesus name so that Davids name can be off-set by the Son of Man to make a Messianic comparison, and yet the grandeur of the Lordship claim is veiled beforehand when Jesus says, The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. This is a sound rabbinical dictum that brings the matter down to earth and appeals to our common sense, which makes the tale realistic. CC Torrey, late of Yale, took this latter saying for an authentic word of Jesus and treated the Son of Man, or bar Enosh, as an idiom: The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath; therefore man is master even of the Sabbath. Where the Son of Man has disappeared in this very smooth English,

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and Jesus is clearly not referring to himself. Strictly speaking, we have exchanged the text here for a conception of what the historical Jesus must have said. Professor Torrey held that our (Greek) Gospels are imperfect translations of lost and elegant originals written in the Aramaic of Jesus. Far from being late, they were close to eye-witness accounts, and his lucid translation of the Gospels was a rendering in English of his own painstakingly reconstructed Aramaic originals. First he invented a hypothesis concerning the lost text; then he invented the text and translated that. In the sentence quoted above, the mystery of the Son of Man has been replaced by good common sense. Others also, besides Torrey, believe that Son of Man in the Gospels has really an idiomatic rather than a technical meaning. Did Jesus only mean to say, therefore: I, a son of man like all the sons of men... whenever he used this term? Beyond question, the Gospel of Mark (in 14,62) refers the Son of Man to an old prophecy in Daniel 7,13: I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a Son of Man and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him The Son of Man in this vision is a Heavenly Man, and in the New Jerusalem Bible we find a note on Daniels vision: This human figure represents the people of God, but may well bear an individual sense too, as their leader and representative. Scholars are thus generally agreed that the Son of Man in Daniel is a symbolic figure. He is a Heavenly Being belonging to a future as yet unrealized rather than a definite personality like Jesus. A myth develops from this strange seed into the tale of a lowly Son of Man who cannot forget his Heavenly origin or evade a divine duty which he came into this world to accomplish. It is a myth which has served the lowliness of Christ as a human being subject to conditions. There is always a remembered glory in the sorrowful office of a Son of Man who has come to visit among the lowly and encourage them, and forgive them, and heal them; and beyond the lowliness motif and deeper is the act of God which is set against the powers of the world and the institutions of religion. No matter how sorrowful is the destiny of Jesus in

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these Gospels, Marks own underlying motif is that of a redemptive sacrifice and Resurrection.

DUBIOUS ASSOCIATIONS & LOWLY COMPANIONS

After curing the paralytic, Jesus had passed by one Levi the son of Alphaeus at a tax office and said, Follow me. And he rose and followed him, just as Simon and Andrew did when they left off casting their nets or the sons of Zebedee when they forsook their father to become fishers of men. Is Levi now a disciple? Levi the son of Alphaeus is only a name. Having risen to follow Jesus, he has nothing else to do and is never mentioned again, but afterwards we find Jesus at table with a number of publicans or other disreputable people, and in that scene we have scribes of the Pharisees complaining of these lowly associations: Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners? Jesus thereupon replies: Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners. (Mark 2,17.) This has the look of later myth rather than anything Jesus might have said because here the Son of Man has come to visit among the lowly of the world and summon them by encouragements and forgiveness. Matthew is not altogether satisfied by this statement and being sensitive to the Teachings of Jesus, he sticks in a supplement: Go and learn what this means, I desire mercy and not sacrifice. And Luke improves on Mark from a liturgical perspective, as it were, by having Jesus say: I am not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. (Luke 5,32. RV.) Where the Revised Version (of 1881) brings out the sense of it better than other translations do by giving just that sense of Presence which the story is designed for. Matthew, in a further step, also drops away the name of Levi the son of Alphaeus to call this publican Matthew instead, a name which is found in the Markan list of Twelve, but is it the Evangelists own name, therefore? Is it a kind of signature? Although thats sometimes claimed here, it is most unlikely. A probing Gospel scholarship has shown that Matthew and Luke have each incorporated a distinct body of Teachings (Q) in what is

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essentially Marks basic Gospel. There is a deep scribal intelligence displayed in Matthews Gospel, and one doesnt look for a scribe among the publicans. To my mind the Teachings of Jesus are presented more beautifully in this Gospel than in Lukes whatever the reason for that may be. Matthews are the Beatitudes we cherish, and his the version of the Lords Prayer in common use, and it is this first Evangelist who has gathered these miscellaneous Teachings into five or six discourses, the Sermon on the Mount being only the first (and also best) of those bunchings. Luke gives these same Teachings also, as I say, but in his Gospel they tend to be strewn. As for the Evangelists real name, then, it is unknown. We dont know who any of these Evangelists are because the earliest of our Gospel manuscripts are anonymous. These were not books written by known authors but clusters of traditions gathered for use in the early congregations and then reworked (as by Mark) into coherent larger tales. Presumably these traditions arose among Jesus earliest followers before being put to use in the cult. One of the old traditions holds that a disciple, Matthew, gathered the Lords teachings in the original tongue, and it is thus conceivable that the first Gospel came later to be given the heading, According to Matthew or, in Greek, Kata Matthaion, for this very reason. If only we knew! The bare title requires to be supplemented as The Gospel According to Matthew, but that title is a later tradition. We use the familiar names of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John for convenience and out of habit, and because after all we have no quarrel with an acknowledged tradition. Nevertheless, it is a point of real interest that the primitive documents of the life and Teachings of Jesus were written by unknown men at dates unspecified and in places unknown.

JESUS AS BRIDEGROOM
Although the veil is not yet lifted in this first half of Marks Gospel, Jesus will also speak of himself as a bridegroom, but how is he a bridegroom? Robert Graves pretends that he was a bridegroom, or at least that he was a king who once married a queen in a secret coronation rite. (It was to remain an unconsummated marriage). This fantasy Graves concocted out of African coronation ceremonies and two simple remarks in the Gospels, plus a devastating revision: the secret coronation of the King is borrowed from the mocking Roman soldiers who crown

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Jesus with a crown of thorns. Earlier than John Allegro had Robert Graves thus penetrated the disguise of the Gospels, but as we see in the result: different disguises, different finds. Only once has the Synoptic Jesus called himself a bridegroom. He was speaking in a figure and the reference is oblique. Johns disciples and the Pharisees were fasting but his own disciples did not, and when people came to ask him why, he said: Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? (Mark 2,19.) This is even better in the virile idiom of the Revised Version which retains the King James and translates the Greek: Can the sons of the bride-chamber fast while the bridegroom is with them? It is an inspired reply superb. And yet we may doubt that he said this. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus takes fasting for granted, whereas here he excuses his disciples slackness about fasting. How does the comparison work? Are we to take seriously his role as a bridegroom seriously but not literally? Or should we treat his words like any mere imagination and make of them a colorless abstraction, as if he only meant to say: How can you make these fellows fast when theyre with me? Stripped of its imagery, this is what his answer boils down to, but that is absurd. Jesus reply is a parable in the form of a question and to strip away the image destroys it. The Fourth Gospel also compares him to a bridegroom by having John the Baptist say it, but the treatment lacks Marks realism. The Baptists disciples have come to tell him how everyone is flocking to Jesus suddenly, and he declaims rather grandly: He who has the bride is the bridegroom; the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegrooms voice. Therefore, this joy of mine is now full. He must increase, but I must decrease. (John 3,29.) This is highly artificial, and our modern scholars do not believe that John ever said anything of the kind. It belongs to the myth of the Gospel that the Baptist can be made to bear witness to the Christ in this sounding manner, but why does he compare him to a bridegroom? And where is the bride? The reason for it must be sought in a myth and not somehow in a secret marriage.

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There are in the Old Testament certain few symbols of bridegrooms associated with myth. One of these is a solar image. In Psalm 19, The heavens declare the glory of God, we read of the heavens: In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber. For the people of antiquity, the sun is no mere burning stone. We read in Malachi (4,2) of the Sun of righteousness which arises with healing in his wings, and he surely had not seen this image in some Egyptian tomb. The very radiance of the sun is sought in the countenance of God: Lord, lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us. (Psalm 4,6.) And this light is conferred on a people redeemed from darkness who are uplifted like the sun: The Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising. (Isaiah 60,3.) This in turn becomes a prophecy of Jesus birth, which is set about with solar myth: the Dayspring from on high hath visited us, says the priest Zechariah in Luke, and I have mentioned earlier how Matthews nativity tale may be taken as a solar myth in which the divine Child (=new Sun) is threatened by the devouring dragon of darkness (King Herod and the Flight to Egypt). It is a commonplace that the Christmas festival gravitated to the winter solstice, or to the time of year when the sun is renewed. By contrast, an omen occurs during the crucifixion when the sun is unnaturally darkened for a space of three hours. (Mark 15,33.) Now consider this in the light of our theme. It is the way of the Negative critics to compare myth with myth, and if we begin with a hypothesis of solar myth, such comparisons may be drawn and such parallels considered. In this case, as it happens, none of it is relevant to Jesus enigmatic status as a bridegroom, and I must ask the Readers patience for having introduced these seeming irrelevancies. A modern scholar can find no use for a merely verbal coincidence like this, and I am not aware that Psalm 19 was ever taken as a prophecy of the Messiah, like the Star out of Jacob bespoken by Balaam. (Numbers 24,17.) Certainly, Jesus is not thinking of the 19th Psalm when after making his wedding comparison, he goes on without a break to anticipate a coming doom:

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As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. But a time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them, and when that day comes, they will fast. (Mark 2,19. Goodspeed.) It is a strange sort of bridegroom who knows beforehand that he is to be taken away, but here the story itself is speaking. Jesus is torn from his friends, and in his absence the disciples revert to the fasting from which his mere presence had excused them.

SOURCE & TRANSFORMATION OF THE JESUS-BRIDEGROOM

Never mind that Jesus comparison of himself to a bridegroom is fleeting and oblique. He means it for an answer: it is to carry that weight. His disciples do not fast because as sons of the bride-chamber they are in his presence. Surely, a bride must be thought of, however remotely! And for the indicated wedding, conceived as myth, we find a prototype in the marriage of Jahweh and his people: You shall be called My delight is in her, (Hephzibah) and your land Married, (Beulah) For the Lord delights in you, and your land shall be married. As a young man marries a maiden, so shall your Builder marry you; And as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so shall your God rejoice over you. (Alex. R. Gordon translating Isaiah 62,4.)13 We must not seize on this too hastily, however. A caesura has occurred because the sacred marriage has undergone a change. Above all, it would be false to think that Jesus will call himself, even implicitly, God, and most especially not in these Synoptic Gospels. The divine wedding conceived by the Hebrew poet cannot be imagined as an event. We are given comparisons, and from the promising names of Hephzibah and Beulah, we pass to imaginations of delight and prosperity.

13. The Complete Bible, An American Translation (Chicago University Press 1939.)

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Quite different is the wedding in which Jesus figures as the bridegroom because we have him before us in the event of his life. The myth is transformed because the Messiah has come, and this is his warrant for excusing the sons of the bride-chamber from a fasting which belongs to the Old Time before the New Creation, which the bridegroom metaphor anticipates. Covertly, it is a Messianic claim but this is between us and Mark, who shares the knowledge with his reader. What else except the presence of the Christ can suspend the ordinary duties and observances of religion? Christ is the miracle of the worlds renewal, and later on his very birth is remembered in a season of joy. Only, was it really so for the disciples, who are not shown in these tales as rejoicing? It belongs to Marks handling of the Messianic secret to keep this aspect of the dignity of Christ under wraps except for a reminder of the glory. Viewed simply as doctrine, since he writes for believers, the wedding obliquely referred to is essentially the same as the marriage of the Lamb, which we find in the Book of Revelation (19,7). And if the language of the Seer of Patmos goes beyond the deliberate realism of Mark, it represents his belief nevertheless. We see just how much he has kept under wraps from the Seers ultimate vision: I saw a new Heaven and a new Earth... and I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of Heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. (Revelation 21.) Here the vision of Isaiah blossoms anew and is transformed. I cannot regard this poetry as other than beautiful, and it belongs to the glory of Handel that he could rouse us to the potency of this strange book in his immortal Messiah. Certainly, the poetry is visionary, fantastic, and even weird. A Heavenly Jerusalem descending as a bride to marry a Lamb? Mark is deliberately realistic and our comparison to Revelation may seem remote, but it is Marks contribution to be realistic, far more so than Matthew and Luke, and despite an array of miracles. Only when John comes along, the unknown author of the Fourth Gospel, is Marks realistic story-telling overshadowed by the verisimilitude of which this unknown man of genius, John, was capable. It is a verisimilitude which does not offset a certain deliberate artificiality in the style of this authors presentation, which strikes me as Oriental. Finally, then, did Jesus ever say that about the sons of the bridechamber in the presence of the bridegroom? Certainly, assuming that he lived, it is possible, but if these words are really his own, then, ironically,

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the historical Jesus has been misconceived by those who see him as an eschatological prophet. For here the speaker knows himself to be the Christ and does not care to conceal it from the discerning few.

DEMONS
Wherever Jesus goes, in these early portions of the Markan tale, he casts out demons. There seem to be a great many of them. Already the words of the Capernaum demoniac had suggested a plurality: What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God. (Mark 1,24.) The demoniacs outcry speaks for the whole realm of demons which has been disturbed by the appearance of the Holy One of God, but the gathered worshipers also attest a plurality of spirits in their admiring words: With authority he commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him. An early impression given by Marks Gospel, then, is that Jesus casts out demons in great numbers. They are veritably a pest in the land; there is a manyness to the demonic fact from the outset. On his first evening at Simons house as soon as the Sabbath was past they brought to him all who were possessed. Were there so many demoniacs in Capernaum, then? For they seem to be everywhere. During his first tour of Galilee with a few disciples, he went preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons. They are a lurid mirror of Christs presence, an unclean horde of spirits who know him at sight or sense his whereabouts from a distance, but they are fastened on their victims with a kind of thirst; so they resist or plead and bargain with him, unwilling to forsake their prey. It is a noteworthy fact that these demons do not prompt their victims to evil-doing. A demoniac is not Satanic: it is the evil done to the victim that Jesus cures. And he always prevails. The spirits depart with a shriek or in silence, sometimes leaving their victim in a swoon. Characteristically, they have cried out in recognition of Jesus at once, but it is not so much that they know his name as that they betray his identity, for what they attest is a sort of inferior revelation which only the reader understands, never the disciples, never the auditors. What do these stories mean? Are they reflections of an activity on the part of an obscure Galilean Christ-figure? We are in no position to deny that such things happened, and if not exactly these events, then

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others like them which, if lost as eye-witness descriptions and reports, have been retained in fable. This would be an aspect of the thrift of legend. The very legends might be accurate, for instance, with respect to the demoniac responses that Jesus awesome presence provoked. More than once the Christ of the Fourth Gospel is thought to be possessed: He has a demon, and he is mad; why listen to him? (John 10,20.) So he might be thought to have been, as we say, daemonic, although this is almost certainly not the case. On rational grounds, then, Marks Gospel tells of myth because it describes a strife with demons, but generally speaking the legends may rest on events in a life. And as ever: a very obscure life because these demoniac tales are no mere exaggerations of transparent fact, as they are sometimes taken. There is no transparent fact here in any of this, and we shall see why that is so, but the bare possibility that a Jesus of Nazareth coped marvelously with deranged minds and (human) spirits obsessed or divided we may never deny. Possibility, only, is in question here. But if we treat these tales as cases of psychopathology, we pay a price for that. A plausible approach to the demoniac tales neutralizes the Evangelist, and our meager result is that disturbed minds tended to exhibit their disorders in the presence of Jesus. This saves three of the four tales in Mark and puts a welcome end to the supernatural, which the modernist avoids in his embarrassment over the fact of myth in this Gospel. And we get an impressive Jesus out of it, an impressive personality. On the testimony of CG Jung the asylums were full of apparent demoniacs who exhibited symptoms of possession and splitmindedness. So the case for a reasonably conceived historical Jesus appears to be a strong one on these psychological grounds. We note, of course, that he must calm the very minds which he has first disturbed, but his effect (if this is that) must be impressive. What happens to the meaning of it all? The awkward presence of a demon in an otherwise acceptable tale we may ascribe to a process of legend-making before dismissing it. People thought that way then. We understand things differently now. In either case, Marks version or our conjectured revision, we suppose that a thing which happened once is being accounted for, although it seems rather odd to depend on a rejected legend for a supposed matter of fact. But wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to plausibility because at bottom it is guesswork. Used here, it is a costly way of dismissing Marks realm of demons while retaining a historical Jesus who copes with disturbed individuals.

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And the cost is this, that we lose the myth which we have been so eager to get rid of but which expresses, as myth, exactly what it is that Mark cares to convey. Even more than that: we lose the thing which the myth contains, for as I propose to show by incremental steps and stages (it cannot be done all at once) the life of Jesus will be found, if anywhere, in the myth which conveys him and by no means in substitutes or conjecture. Having myself gone through the modernist experience, I well understand the allure of an interpretation which makes good sense out of a described miracle and a myth of demons. But how if it disfigures the story under consideration in vain endeavor to find a fact at the heart of it? How if ironically we collaborate with the myth-maker in making things seem real while rejecting the myth he has made? The Markan story is of Christs acknowledgement by demons. Reinforced by Matthew and Luke, we shall find no honest way around that.

DEMONS AS OLD BELIEF

No question, then, that Mark uses demons to write his tale of the Christ because of what they signify. Above all, they give us a Jesus who has not otherwise been recognized as Christ, so that Marks demoniacs have a role for the reader in letting us in on the secret. Like Hamlets fathers ghost, they have a function in the tale, and as soon as this function has been carried out, they disappear; but the fact is a trifle suspicious. How so, that demoniacs appear in such rumored numbers only in the first half of this Gospel, after which they are forgotten? Can demons have been prevalent in Palestine only at first? and then Jesus swept the country clean? The answer is easily given although the matter has been hugely overlooked: Marks demoniacs attest the secret of Jesus and describe him as the Son of God until they are no longer needed. And their peculiar testimony is no longer needed after the Christ has been recognized by the first human being, namely, Peter on the way to the villages of Caesarea Philippi. In view of Marks purposeful handling of demoniacs, it is fair to ask whether he believes in demons, really? Or are they simply a part of his tale? The demoniac who lived among the tombs, breaking his chains, bruising himself with stones, on seeing Jesus from afar runs to pay him homage, crying: What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me. (Mark 5,7.)

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With his disciples, Jesus has just crossed the Lake of Galilee to a country called Gadarenes (or Gerasenes) and once more the demoniac knows him at sight, but in a further step he knows him from afar. No longer is Jesus in Galilee but in pagan territory, and for once he doesnt silence the testimony. Otherwise, this demoniac functions like the one in the synagogue and all the many demoniacs who are mentioned but not shown. Despite his fantastic trappings, which give the story its distinctiveness, he can only bear witness to the Christ and give him opportunity to cure: For Jesus had said to him, Come out of the man, you unclean spirit! And went on to ask him, What is your name? He replied, My name is Legion, for we are many. (5,8.) It is a tremendous word in its setting, Legion, a Latin word which implies a host of demons who beg Jesus not to send them out of the country. A herd of swine numbering about two thousand are feeding on the hillside and the demons say, Send us to the swine, let us enter them. He gives them leave and all the swine rush down a slope and drown. When the townspeople learn of this, they are terrified and beg Jesus to depart. The story is fantastic entirely but it makes a good fable, although these same imaginations take up a whole page in a Gospel of only forty pages. Rather shrewdly, Mark has used this tale to remind his readers also that Jesus presence may terrify it is a consolation for his absence and bears on our theme. In vain do we look behind such a legend to discover a convulsion in a graveyard that once frightened away twenty pigs. The detail which makes our story pleasing on its own terms is then put down to exaggeration, and the myth is destroyed for the sake of a flimsy assurance. What does smack of history is a tradition of demoniacs reflecting an old belief. Demons of which the Evangelist had no experience are assigned to Jesus world, which is already remote. And in representing the Christ as one who speaks to demons and commands them, he places him in illo tempore, that yonder time which is the sphere of myth. If Mark, for instance, had come on an epileptic boy convulsing, he must have recognized the falling sickness for what it was, and when he writes of such a boy as one possessed of an unclean spirit, he describes the epilepsy well enough so that Matthew in taking over the tale can give it a name. Surely, this old belief in demons reflects an Aramaic tradition which originated in the Holy Land, but what vital meaning has this old belief for Mark, who lived, we think, in Rome? I say that he manipulates

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his demoniacs, but there are scholars who get around that by reading the Symbol: they say that for Mark this purge of demons represents the rout of pagan gods before the advance of the Gospel. So what am I calling an old belief? Geza Roheim collected more than a hundred folk-tales from the Australian aborigines to find that they are variations of one constant theme; the struggle of human beings against demons. That is an old belief because for the aborigines who invented these tales demons were malignant spirits active now in fears or dreams or deaths or distress in the bowels. I notice, too, that Ludwig Feuerbach has quoted Count Volney (our Enlightenment critic) on evil spirits among the North American Indians: The fear of evil spirits is one of their dominant and most tormenting notions; their most fearless warriors are like women and children in this respect; they are terrified by a dream, a nocturnal apparition in the woods, a harsh cry.14 A belief in demons was prevalent throughout the Asian world as many a grotesque temple sculpture testifies, but these grotesques are only memorials of a primitive belief which had once upon a time been verified by the frightful experience of savage minds. Such a belief will survive long afterwards as an old belief which has lost its ancient hold. Mankind are not then coping with demons directly any longer, just as Marks readers were not, but like ourselves, they are coping with fears. Those Asian temple grotesques are devoted to the idea of protection against demons, but the people of India or China who erected these temples would hardly fear the approach of demons as they were strolling in the precincts or believe that these frigid grotesques could repel them if they came. That would be the chronic nightmare of primitive savagery and age-old ignorance, such as Geza Roheim and Count Volney were describing. It is the idea which is effective and not a grotesque stone statue which expresses that idea. So also in Mark, it is the meaning of his demons which is uppermost. An invisible warfare is represented, and the associated fear is expressed and resolved.

14. As quoted by Geza Roheim, Fire in the Dragon (Princeton, 1992, p. 31.)

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ROD OF JESSE JESUS NO EXORCIST

We have in Jesus (a) a figure associated with myth (b) given in traditions (c) written down as legends (d) by men who did not know him (e) and written for use in the cult. A falsely natural Jesus has become popular, in part because of the very endeavor to find the historical Jesus. Even ministers seem to assume that we can turn to the Gospels and discover the natural man after making allowance for the expected exaggerations and correcting a few things, or ignoring them. The whole endeavor to uncover the underlying history has shown us that such a relatively easy discovery of the man is impossible, yet the illusion is widespread. It seems especially popular among the liberal types it almost distinguishes the type to suppose that we can know Jesus as a natural man. And it is this very assumption, this complacent positing of the figure, which accounts for the learned error of describing him as an exorcist. Jesus is not an exorcist, but he emerges as an exorcist for the historian because the tales as a group, if we ignore the particulars, seem to imply that activity on the part of the imagined figure. Understand, please: this learned error is not the result of careful study or attention to the text. It arises as a general impression after the text has been dismissed. On no one given story does our historian rest his case when describing Jesus as an exorcist, but on the collective impression only that some such activity must have been carried on to account for these demoniac legends. Of course, it is a worthy enough hypothesis from the historians viewpoint, but this same easy hypothesis rests for all its ground on certain legends and sayings and traditions which are stubbornly particular and difficult. Jesus is nowhere presented as an exorcist, nor is it fitting to call him that on the evidence at hand. Exorcism is a technique, and basically it is magic. Whether a home-made technique or a prescribed ritual makes no difference: there will be various doings. Your exorcist will have his procedures and incantations and what-not all. I have read (probably in the National Geographic) of a living African exorcist who used to splash his victims with water until he possessed himself of a piece of modern equipment: a rubber hose, after which his victims were accustomed to

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being squirted. Jesus has neither ritual nor technique. No prayers are said. There is no laying on of hands or even a touch. We do find a few strange healing procedures for diseases, and very inconsistently described, but we never see Jesus applying a method supposed to be effective when driving out demons, nor does he call upon the name of God to cast them out, so that the marks and trappings of exorcism are missing. His authority over the demons is lordly and immediate. When he encounters demoniacs in going among the people, he addresses the demons directly, commands them to depart, and they go, although not before they have betrayed his identity. This is the Markan stereotype: Whenever the unclean spirits beheld him, they fell down before him and cried out, You are the Son of God. And he strictly ordered them not to make him known. (3,11.) Far from being an exorcist who must have had a technique or a procedure when he applied himself to the expulsion of demons, as if for him it were a kind of task, he is depicted purely as a lord over demons, one who has an absolute and immediate authority. But there may seem to be an exception to this, especially in the practices of others. Marks Gospel knows of a man casting out demons in Jesus name who was not following us, as the disciples put it in telling him of this. This is a point in favor of the Negative argument because in this case Jesus own Name works to cast out demons even when used by one who is not a disciple (Mark 9,38). How does it happen that such a Name was available for use, a name effective without the presence of the man thus named? Curiously enough, Luke writes in Acts of certain itinerant Jewish exorcists (who) undertook to pronounce the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits. (Acts 19,13.) Needless to say, given Lukes Gentile bias, these poor Jewish exorcists fared badly in the case of the seven sons of a Jewish High Priest named Sceva when, instead of fleeing at the mention of the sacred name, the evil spirit answered them: Jesus I know, and Paul I know, but who are you? Whereupon the demoniac leaped on them, mastered all of them, and overpowered them, so that they fled out of that house naked and wounded. Signs of exorcism are otherwise missing from Mark with the exception of a single detail, but since der Teufel steckt im Detail we must notice that Jesus asks the name of the demoniac at the tombs. Since on this level of belief a power is conferred merely by knowing a demons

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name, Jesus might have been remembered by tradition for asking a demons name. Trouble is, that he doesnt go on to use this name as an exorcist would. And so why does he ask? It is rather Mark who gains his point about the manyness of demons by a name which brings the vastness of a Roman Legion to mind. Instead of exorcism which, as I say, is a technique or a kind of magic, there is something else to be associated with Jesus, some aspect of his character, if only because of his traffic with demons. To that aspect of his presentation in the Gospels we must turn.

BEELZEBUB
The notoriety of Jesus so disturbs his own people that they go out to seize him. Or lay hold of him or take charge of him, as the various translations give it. Notice how any of these translations conveys its affirmation of his sheer physicalness. A crowd has flocked to him seemingly from everywhere, from Syria and beyond the Jordan, from Tyre and Sidon on the coast, from Jerusalem to the south. Attracted by his wonders and his cures, hanging on his words, people press on him and his disciples until they cannot even eat: And when his friends heard it, they went out to seize him, for they said, He is beside himself. (Mark 3,21.) Or as Goodspeed lucidly translates: His relatives heard of it and came over to stop him, for they said that he was out of his mind. It is only Mark among the Evangelists who dares to tell us of this alarmed venturing forth of his people, thereby associating Jesus with fears of a disordered mind, but is he too naive to grasp the implication of it, as some may believe? Ah, then we are fortunate to possess a primitive fact which an embarrassed tradition has not otherwise preserved! Or is this rather a piece of artistry which is designed to bring home the extraordinary quality of Jesus and his deed? And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, He is possessed by Beelzebub, and by the prince of demons he casts out the demons. (3,22.) The story of the familys excursion is cut off, after the bare mention of it, to make room for the accusation of the scribes. They dont say that Jesus is a demoniac like those he cures, which would be foolishness, but rather

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that he is demonic in the sense of holding higher rank among the very demons, and this reflects on the familys fear to reinforce the impression. Jesus is not described to us. Everything is conveyed by reflection and indirectly. We know more about the habits and appearance of Confucius from the Analects than of Jesus in the Gospels, where everything about his manner, dress, appearance, size, everything in which he might have been compared to others, must be inferred. So also here with the charges against him, and yet the result is an impression of an extraordinary quality in the man associated with an extraordinary energy. Dare we call him daemonic, as a German Romantic poet might have aspired to be? in proof of his own genius, of course. Socrates had a touch of the daemonic. He spoke of having a certain divinity (daimonion ti) which came to him as a kind of warning voice to guard against missteps, a daimonion strangely silent at his trial. But Jesus is not daemonic in the sense of Socrates. He has no private traffic with a daimonion, hears no prompting voice he is a man of faith, not a relentless questioner troubled by admonitions welling up from within. Jesus is not a man with a flair, and there is no escaping the sphere of myth. The demonic belongs to his myth, belongs to the sphere of the old belief described in these Gospel tales. As for Beelzebub, suffice it that the name is difficult. Modern translations revert to the Greek spelling, Beelzebul, and Dr. Cyrus Gordon, basing his opinion on the finds at Ugarit, suggests Baal-Zebub, which we know from the Old Testament as the name of the god of Ekron to whom a Jewish king applied for a cure, disastrously of course. (I Kings 1,2). The Synoptic designation of Beelzebub as prince of the demons suggests an evil deity of an intermediate rank, notwithstanding Jesus prompt reply: How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. (Mark 3,25.) Here also we have his famous words about a house divided against itself that Lincoln used, earlier in his career, when accepting the nomination for the U. S. Senate as a Republican from Illinois. And here also, before Jesus has done with these scribes, we have the unforgivable sin against the Holy Ghost which once drove John Bunyan to distraction for fear that he had committed it. But where is the so-called Beelzebub controversy? It exists in our imagination. Jesus reply is not a coherent discourse but a passage

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compacted of several brief arguments bunched together and not quite all in tune. There is no one story here. Instead, we have a pair of overlapping tales which individually are not well-formed. A family tale is pushed aside to make room for Jesus impressive reply to the Beelzebub accusation, but the underlying story is in confusion. So when Jesus called them to him (called the scribes) to make reply to their dangerous accusation, did he call them to his home, where the story is set? Did he call them then and there? Remember that his family have set out for him. Have they arrived? When they say, He is beside himself, is it meant for a public explanation which the scribes comment on? Or do they meet the scribes at all? There is no one event here. It is only Mark who brings these unsorted traditions into a scheme of his own. What matters is the substance of tradition, not the makeshift form of the tale. If the Negative argument is left intact after this, so is the sense of believers that this man lived. Are both perspectives possible? It is a tribute to this primitive Evangelists artistry that he conveys a sense of the man by keeping him in sight as human. This is no parading demigod (as Professor William Benjamin Smith maintains in what is surely a misreading of the Gospels). Yet Mark is not a man who knew his Jesus; he must invent, and to the extent of our confidence that the Gospel Jesus is no mere creature of artistry and fiction, we may affirm a thrift of tradition that has exalted a man, no doubt, but has also caught him up and conveyed him as one remembered.

WHO (AND WHERE) ARE JESUS FAMILY?

After Jesus famous reply to the Jerusalem scribes, Mark takes up anew his peoples effort to reclaim him as his mother and his brothers arrive to find him surrounded by such a crowd that they cannot get inside. Presumably, it is the same house as before and the same crowd, too, because it is surely the same story: Mark has simply resumed his unfinished tale of the family after the Beelzebub interval. Our modern translators, scrupulous to a fault and very idiomatic, have the messengers say that his mother and brothers are outside asking for you. Yes, of course they are asking for him, and very politely, no doubt; we understand as much, but this misses a primitive (again I say a Gothic) stress. Literally the words go: Behold, thy mother and thy brothers and thy sisters outside seek thee!

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And this circumstance of being unable to reach Jesus, of having to seek him, is a deliberate emphasis here as it was earlier in Mark when Simon found him praying one morning. Or as in Luke when his parents sought in vain for the twelve-year-old boy until they looked in the Temple. These Gospels stress by their treatment of the tales how necessary it is to seek, how hard it is to find Jesus, whereas our modern scholars, positing a supposed fact behind the legend, slight that aspect of the expression. Mark never forgets his reader, who is to feel the plight of his mother and brothers and sisters when even they must stand outside the circle of the privileged and seek. Jesus answer is surprising and superb. He is untrammeled by family ties in serving the Kingdom of God and he loosens the narrow ligature without a second thought, by a question: Who are my mother and my brothers? Looking on those who are sitting around him he says: Behold, my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother. In his preface to Androcles and the Lion Shaw says of Jesus that he teaches the widening of the private family with its cramping ties into the great family of mankind under the fatherhood of God. That is the immediate impression of this story on a man of high intelligence, but there is a genuine doubt about a tale in which a serious question is evaded when Jesus grand gesture in embracing his listeners as his real kinsmen diverts us from the crucial question he poses: Who are my mother and my brothers? For when those around him see his mother in their own midst, when they see his brothers and sisters in themselves, an awakening occurs. Now an earlier and ordinary regard for Jesus family is dismissed after the disclosure of an immortal fact: Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother. It is we, therefore, we who belong to Jesus and are his family! Jesus was no longer an ordinary man to be heard of like Nero or Paul. Rather, he was everywhere being preached as the Christ who had died in a sacrifice before returning to life. Marks human Jesus is the mysterious Son of Man, who was altogether a figure of faith, and we are caught up in our own benign imaginations to suppose (if we do suppose) that Jesus was a great man who, being widely talked about, had won people to his faith by his wondrous humanity or his marvelous Teachings. As one crucified under Pontius Pilate and long since risen from the dead, he could no longer be found in his mere humanity.

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Thus runs the early challenge: Why do we know nothing of the family of this human Jesus? You Christians teach that he has risen from the dead and ascended to Heaven and hes now out of reach, but where are his people, then? Mark responds by composing a tale like this, or more likely, recomposing a traditional tale. What other answer can he give as a propagandist for the Gospel? Here is a legend which handles a difficult question by diverting us from it, or such is the argument for myth here. Its a very good argument, but we must in honesty remember that nothing factual can be settled by argument. Our abiding thought, therefore, is that the Negative argument is a particular view taken toward the evidence. It neither furnishes the evidence nor dissolves it because the evidence is given in the tale and beyond the given evidence we cannot go. Matthew contributes a further skillful touch to the legend in having Jesus, when making his reply, stretch forth his hand to the gathered disciples: a gesture which the early preacher is invited to repeat as he retells the tale, looking around at those who hear him. This is what the story means beyond any possible reference to the attitude of Jesus toward his relatives, concerning which historically we are much in the dark. Certainly, it is possible that this event occurred: we do not know enough to deny it, but in the setting of the Gospel, Mark has turned it with shrewdness and cunning to his underlying theme.

THE SOWER
Our Synoptic Gospels place the activity of Jesus mostly in Galilee where he is often found nearby the Sea (or Lake) of Galilee. Mark tells us, for instance, that he gave the Parable of the Sower after stepping into a boat because of the press of the crowd. Our Teacher is shown to be a resourceful fellow if he can make a pulpit of a boat, but was the day so very calm, then? Or did Simon Peter now and then dip in his oar? The directness is the man. He gives his lesson from a boat because he is ready for anything and we never find him at a loss. But a detail like this belongs to the Evangelists artistry rather than to history. It is the convincing detail which gives his placement of the story its particular hook, just as when earlier Jesus promised to make Simon and Andrew fishers of men, or when those cot-bearers broke through his roof to reach him. Mark is good about those details and pegs his story to the spot.

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The parable itself is rather flat. Something is missing here and we are left to guess at its meaning. A sower went out to sow, (and we bring to mind Van Goghs Sower with a pouch slung at his waist). Some seed falls by the wayside where the birds snatch it up; and some on rocky ground; and some of it among thorns, where it sprouts up only to be choked. The seed that falls on good soil grows up and increases and yields thirtyfold and sixtyfold and a hundredfold. We have learned nothing new by these reminders. Not everything we sow will come to fruition, some of our projects will fail, as of course we have known. When taken for its moral the Sower disappoints. Jesus does not moralize and whereas his briefer parables in Matthew, say, challenge us to look for a likeness to the Kingdom, the Sower leaves us asking for more. Why is the Parable told? On re-reading it, we see that its homely detail lacks point: Other seed fell on rocky ground, where it had not much soil, and immediately it sprang up, since it had no depth of soil; and when the sun rose, it was scorched, and since it had no root it withered away. (Mark 4,5.) Very well, we have considered a few things that might happen to seed scattered on rocky ground, but why are we told this? Mark is aware that his parable cannot stand by itself. He will attempt to dismantle it as soon as it is told and then treat its several parts as if each had another meaning, but he is fumbling here. First he withholds his meaning, no doubt deliberately, by telling a somewhat pointless parable which he then labors to redeem with an allegorical interpretation. A depth of myth behind his surfaces is what Mark is striving to suggest. It is Jesus who is made to interpret his parable, of course in Marks behalf, and he at once assigns a meaning to it which the simple tale has lacked: The Sower sows the word. We seize on this, of course, because it gives his parable its point, but how should we have known this? For there is nothing in the parable as told to make us think of a Sower who has gone forth to sow words. Thus Jesus is put in the role of an Aesop forced to explain his own fable, especially when he goes on to supply the Markan allegory.

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First, however, he makes reply to the disciples question about his parables: To you has been given the secret of the Kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven. (Mark 4,11.) According to this, a parable lacking point is told to no purpose deliberately. Or even worse, told for the very purpose of keeping those outside in the dark. It makes nonsense of his Teaching if Jesus ever said this, but really it is the Evangelist who is fumbling here. Mark is at best a Gothic sort of workman, and if the end result is a kind of beauty in his Gospel, it is because his underlying purpose is deep and sure. The words attributed to Jesus recall a prophecy taken from Isaiahs account of a vision which befell him when he saw the Lord seated on his throne, high and lifted up in the temple. Whether he was literally inside the temple when the vision befell him I cannot say, but the prophet is undone by this vision in which he is summoned to his task. Winged seraphim fly about and call to one another in clamorous praise, and only after his lips are touched by a burning coal is he fit to speak. Isaiah (as it seems) forecasts a calamity for Israel when the Assyrian host will disperse the Northern Kingdom, our famous Lost Ten Tribes. The Lord (Adonai) gives the prophet his message in poetry: Hear and hear, but do not understand; see and see, but do not perceive! Make the heart of this people fat, and their ears heavy, and shut their eyes, lest seeing and hearing they understand with their hearts, and turn (to) be healed. If we suppose that the prophets vision, although unquestionably genuine, arose from something within himself or even simply from a long brooding, a kind of desperate exasperation speaks in these words, which culminate in judgment. For as with several Hebrew prophets, Isaiah would discover the cause of the nations misfortune in the peoples unresponsiveness. It is this impressive prophecy, or rather this mystery, which Mark attributes to Jesus own Teaching because in the Evangelists mind a parallel may be drawn in strictest logic, for if the Lord (Adonai) had made

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the futile preaching of Isaiah a judgment on the people, how was it otherwise with the effect of Gospel preaching whenever that preaching should fail? By putting Isaiahs words (or the words of his vision) into Jesus mouth the Evangelist would make it a part of that same ancient mystery why some were drawn to the Gospel and others not, or why some who once believed then fell away, like the seed on rocky soil. Nevertheless, when Jesus will say, To you has been given the secret of the Kingdom of God but for those outside everything is in parables, Isaiahs tremendous irony is turned into a settled doom from which there is no appeal. The Evangelist is intent upon his mystery. He is addressing his readers and hearers, and he would give them a sense of being privileged insiders. Already as believers they have access to the Kingdom of God, but now they are to be led more deeply into its secrets as the lesson unfolds.

THE GOD OF THE SEED SOWING

We have in this parable the reminiscence of an older god whose myth Mark assimilates to the Gospel of Jesus. Embedded in the society for which he writes, the old myth makes it possible for him to introduce his Gospel in that setting when the older god is displaced by Jesus, who is understood to be taking over his role in illustration of a higher purpose. It is the ancient god of the seed corn who in his simple agricultural role is displaced by the Sower of the Word, a change in his role which makes our simple parable a metaphor, and this is what saves it and justifies the care Mark gives it. When taken as metaphor, the Sower sows the word of Resurrection. Otherwise we have a parable which offers no new insight along with an allegory which tends to meander and a preposterous explanation of the reason for telling parables at all, namely, to hide secrets instead of conveying a Teaching. What is hidden here, then, is Marks own deeper myth, which he intends to convey to the reader under the aspect of a mystery. We have only to mention the Messianic Secret to remind ourselves that what he is driving at all along is a mystery not yet fully in view. Certainly, then, we may read the earliest portions of Mark in full view of Gospel myth (or kerygma) which finds its veiled expression more than once, as when Jesus early on calls himself the Bridegroom. It is a point to be noticed that while the superb realism of Mark is aimed at making the presentation of his Jesus real and giving him a quality of Dasein, yet he

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doesnt conceal the underlying myth. Nor is he trying to conceal that. The purpose of his realistic treatment is not one of concealment of the myth but of frankest affirmation of the man. Not history, as the record of a genuine Teaching, but the circumstance of the Evangelist and his readers will explain this parable and its reshaping. Mark has only the traditions of a flourishing Jesus cult. Some few were written down, no doubt, and are lost to us now except as the Evangelists have preserved them. Others survived by word of mouth. We must avoid overrating Mark because of his comparative earliness: Because he was early he was closer to the facts. There were no longer any original facts. Everything, every tale, every saying, every aspect of the Gospel had already passed through an oral phase. The Evangelist did not receive a history which he then began to decorate with legends; but he has first received a faith, or (its equivalent) a myth. Mark is a creative figure in that early sacramental cult and this Gospel, this traditional writing, is his own inspiration.

WOMAN WITH AN ISSUE OF BLOOD & JAIRUSS DAUGHTER

Once after crossing the Sea of Galilee Jesus is met by a man called Jairus, one of the rulers of the synagogue, who falls at his feet saying: My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live. (Mark 5,22.) Jesus goes along as a great crowd surges about. Jairus, then, is one who knows of Jesus as a healer and is willing to trust him, even rather desperately, but where is this place? We seem to be on the western shore of the lake somewhere in Galilee, but a sense of location, of place, depends on the specific detail of a story whose locale is otherwise vague. Nevertheless, the story is a good one and Mark will once more split it, so to speak, to work another tale into the action. We saw how he did this, a little confusingly, when he wedged the Beelzebub controversy into a tale about his family going forth to bring Jesus home, but here his technique is successful. Of these tales the gracious Montefiore says: How well these stories are told! On his way to Jairus home, then, Jesus is touched by a woman who for twelve years has suffered much under many physicians, and had

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spent all that she had because of an issue of blood. She has no connection to Jairus except to delay the action while his daughter is lying at the point of death. Although she is nameless, we know of her intimate ailment and its twelve-year duration and of her bad luck with physicians, and we are given her inmost thought: If I touch even his garments, I shall be made well. When she does so, the hemorrhage ceases. Again, the Markan touch which conveys a sense of Jesus reality and shows his healing power when contacted. The woman has acted in faith; her gesture is her prayer, and Jesus turns to ask, Who touched my garments? because he is aware that power had gone forth from him. Not that he willed it. The cure was involuntary. He is so full of it that it spills out when the right connection is made, but the disciples reply: You see the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say, Who touched me? Nevertheless, he continued to look for the woman who knowing what had been done to her, came in fear and trembling and fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. The whole truth as if she had stolen something. Then he says: Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease. We pass from magic to logic, from an inaccessible potency which she was able to breach by faith to a grace voluntarily conferred, Go in peace and be healed. We enjoy the interplay of persons here, and as far as I know, Oriental myth rarely presents such a realism as this. That a power has gone forth from Jesus of which he is conscious is a function of the Son of God, no doubt, but when he pauses to look around and ask, Who touched me? we feel a kinship with the man. On both counts our story satisfies a desire to have in him an Immanuel figure: God is with us. We should like an access to Jesus on these same terms if we could find one, and the story tells us, rightly or wrongly, that faith is such an access. The Woman with an Issue of Blood exists for us as a woman in a story but not otherwise. If we say of this tale, It happened! she loses something of her spiritual value. She was lucky, like some cripple who once threw away his crutches at Lourdes. The harder the fact, the more external. We are left outside the wonder of it, and our own gaping need goes begging, whereas in the fable we simply assume her prior faith in the God of Israel and we pity the distresses of her years. A message is sent to Jairus after this delay: Do not trouble the Teacher, your daughter has died! An improbable message, but Jesus reassures the ruler of the synagogue, Do not fear, only believe! And

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then he dismisses the crowd. This is not for the multitude; it is no time for show; something else, something deeper is required. Of course, the secrecy motif is implicit here. He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James and John, the favored three. On arrival he finds a tumult of mourners who are weeping and wailing loudly, and once again he speaks with an immense innocence as he addresses them: Why do you make a tumult and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping. So great is his faith, if we think of his humanity, but these are also the words of a god for whom death is a sleep. In harsh contrast to the wailing, the mourners laugh at him for saying this, but he puts them outside. Always, he is masterful. Only her parents and a few disciples enter the girls room where he takes her by the hand and says: Talitha cumi. For we seem to have his very words (or as given in some manuscripts often preferred: Talitha koum). They mean, when translated from the Aramaic, Maiden, arise. She immediately gets up and walks about, Mark says, for she was twelve years old. Those present are overcome with amazement. And he strictly charged them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat. Jesus lofty and innocent mind is on another plane, as we understand, but how could he have charged these parents to keep this wonder strictly quiet with mourners outside who must be thought of as awaiting the discomfiture of this meddler? Here the Gothic artist is at work in Mark. As with demons, so with deeds: Jesus refuses to have his wonders told abroad lest the very deeds betray his secret. And yet its a secret that cannot be hid. That is Marks answer to one of two possible questions: Why was your Jesus not known to be the Christ during his lifetime? Or else, simply: Why is your Jesus unknown? Bultmann tells us that the advice about giving the child something to eat is meant for a proof that she is not a spirit or a phantom but a live damsel walking about, and that is very good, but he doesnt pretend that any sort of demonry was involved in this resuscitation. I remark on this because elsewhere he comes very close to saying that demonry and therefore exorcism (!) was involved in all the various cures and healings of the Synoptic Gospels, although only by implication of course because the fact is not plain. Or even visible. Our Woman with an Issue of Blood who had gone to doctor after doctor after doctor: should she have tried an exorcist instead? Bultmann is mistaken in seeing exorcism in all Jesus cures. Mark has made, in fact, a sharp distinction between the casting out of demons and cures such as these.

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Another interesting observation, but a very different one, has been made by a French Catholic psychoanalyst, Dr. Franoise Dolto, in a published conversation with Dr. Grard Svrin. (See The Jesus of Psychoanalysis, NY 1979.) Like Robert Graves, Franoise Dolto is richly imaginative and even fanciful in her comments, but without pretending to a scientific exegesis. She treats the text for what she can make of it in the play of her own thought and her own informed insights, and she remarks on the parallel between the girls age at twelve, the age of menstruation, and the twelve years of the older womans issue of blood. (The woman is also addressed, I might add, as Daughter). Apropos our theme, CG Montefiore says of this passage, The whole story is told with consummate art, and this is the judgment of a Jewish scholar and man of letters who believes that a genuinely historical human being, Jesus, is the original source of the Markan inspiration. Always the possibility exists that real events may lie behind such tales, and always the Negative argument is left hanging over that abyss of possibility. It is a merit in this earliest Evangelist that his writing is so very spare, and this will have something to do with the thrift of tradition. He will tell us his fact and it will speak, but he mostly doesnt decorate his tales or comment on his most effective strokes as I have done. On the other hand, that consummate art of which Montefiore speaks is not to be denied. We have seen by many and transparent signs that the written expression as such, the finished Gospel, is artistic, inventive and fictitious. Whatever Mark lacks of knowledge his own imagination has supplied. It is this quality which the Negative argument insists on our recognizing in the name of honesty, but at last it is not a question of victory or defeat or of proof either way. It is simply a question of what, on this basis, we may choose to believe.

TWO MIRACULOUS FEEDINGS

Whatever else we may say of the miracles of Jesus, they belong to the primitive Gospel, and they were once a part of his appeal. For the Jews require a sign, says the Apostle, and the Greeks seek after wisdom. (I Corinthians 1,22.) I doubt if very many Greeks were seeking after wisdom, but they were surely not averse to signs because it is our

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Greek Testament in which these wonders abound.15 In this respect our Gospels resemble such Old Testament books as Samuel and Kings, some of whose miracles they have repeated. And some of these things, anticipations, tales, gestures are worth considering. For instance, when Jesus fed 5,000 men with only five loaves and two fishes, he did it because a great multitude had followed him into a lonely place. So might an Oriental demi-god have done in some meandering Indian epic, but in Mark this tale exaggerates a miracle once done by the Prophet Elisha, who told his servant to set twenty loaves of barley before a group of hungry men. When the servant asked, How am I to set this before a hundred men? Elisha gave promise: They shall eat and have some left. And so it happened. Then what about the Jesus who figures in this legendary tale? Do we keep him in the name of a historical Jesus or does he vanish with his legend? We have touched on this before, of course, and we recall that in his popular Life of Jesus the distinguished Edgar J. Goodspeed had dealt gently with this tale by suggesting a smaller crowd who were meagerly fed. The theory of legend implied by that we breathe in with the air, but the works of Dr. Goodspeed are wisely written. Was there no accommodation to the people in a suggestion which preserves the bare form of the tale? Goodspeed was aware of the Elisha parallel. The shadow of Elijah or Elisha falls on almost every page of the Gospel of Mark, he writes for ministers and other more scholarly readers in his excellent Introduction to the New Testament. It is a striking fact that almost everything Jesus is reported as doing in Mark has parallels in the Elijah and Elisha cycles of the Books of Kings.16 The radical fact is presented with a gentle touch but the latitude is wide because for some reason the selective memory of the early church instinctively recorded about Jesus anything that recalled the doings of these great prophets. In truth, we may suppose that this Feeding was based on that earlier pattern, itself a myth. Isnt this Dr. Goodspeeds implication? For

15. A daughter, Dr. Shirley Werner, wonders if the Greek for seek after wisdom (sophian zetousin) is a circumlocution for philosophein and comments: The Jews look for signs, while the Greeks on the other hand do philosophy. 16. Edgar J. Goodspeed, An Introduction to the New Testament (University of Chicago Press 1937, p. 125.)

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otherwise we must suppose a queer situation: Jesus once fed a crowd with scant provisions of his own, and his disciples remembered it so that the story became known to the early church. Unfortunately, the early church could not remember it without a hint from Scripture. As an event, it had no survival power until the bare memory of it had merged with the Elisha tale in a comparison which served to select that particular deed of Jesus for the record. Of course, luckily for the early church, quite a few things that Jesus did recalled the doings of these great prophets. And by implication, a number of other things which he did... No. Dr. Goodspeed did not believe that, but he didnt care to rub our noses in the radical fact: namely, that the miracles of Elijah and Elisha furnished a source for the invention of tales about Jesus. Thus were old miracles minted anew by the same process that made the old: by human imagination. I dont mean that our Evangelist is a mere copycat. Nothing else in Mark reveals with such clarity his use of doubling as his two Feeding tales, but this is a miracle which is transparently symbolic. In the twelve baskets of loaves left over from the Feeding of the 5,000 and the seven baskets left after the 4,000, Alfred Loisy saw reference to Israel and the Gentiles, whose symbolic numbers these are. Marks deliberate repetition of the tale is not the blunder of a writer who cannot see that his traditions have given him two versions of the same event, as some scholars have believed, but what a gross exaggeration of the Elisha tale this is if we think only of numbers. How does Mark get away with this? It is the symbol which makes him acceptable because what Elisha did was only a miracle whereas here we have a symbol of communion. Even the formality of the rite is implied when the thousands of communicants are seated in groups by hundreds and by fifties before the priestly Jesus looks to Heaven, blesses and breaks the loaves. (Mark 6,41 Mark 14,22.) We have passed from miracle to sign, and in arriving at the sign we have reached significance. Are we to conceive of this earliest Gospel as the product of an Evangelist working deliberately with symbols, as for instance the subtle artist of the Fourth Gospel has done? Or as Professor William Benjamin Smith believed in advocating the Negative argument? This goes too far. Mark is an artist intent on his meaning, but he no more thinks of symbols than he does of traditions. He has his material and he knows how to

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handle it. He understands his effect and how to achieve it, and the symbol emerges. These twin Feedings may gratify an appetite for wonders but they succeed because they represent a miracle in which the believers participate. By whatever consecrated hands the loaf is given, it is Jesus who distributes bread to communicants. He feeds and is fed upon: it is the enactment of a sacred myth, and in the Fourth Gospel, where the myth is overwhelming, he will even say: I Am the Bread of Life. As minds enclosed in a Mystery enacted by the fellowship it is the multitude which is fed they received these tales without difficulty. The story impresses the gathered believers because it is miraculous, as is fitting, but it works its effect because the symbol tells, and because the miracle is shared. Matthew keeps these two Feedings as Mark has given them, but Luke omits the second as superfluous. It is a matter of indifference to our theme. These later Evangelists use the earliest Gospel as a valuable source for their own purpose, but they never treat him as sacred Scripture because their own purpose is to supplant him after absorbing what they care to take in and modifying as they choose. Despite his omission of the Four Thousand, Luke quite as much as Matthew appreciates the Markan doubles and introduces some of his own. As, indeed, later on does John, who also tells one tale of the Feeding of 5,000. In a reflection of the Elisha story, the Fourth Gospel tells us what the other Gospels fail to say, that these were barley loaves.

THE WITHERED HAND

The prophecies of Jesus which our Gospels find in the Old Testament are they prophecies? forecasts? Do they not rather seem to be borrowings out of other times which are then reapplied to his case? What they meant for the prophets who uttered them no longer decides how they are to be taken by the Evangelist if only they can be shown to bear on Jesus somehow. Matthew will quote a prophecy, Out of Egypt have I called my son, which is fulfilled in the Holy Familys flight from Herod, but in the Book of Hosea, from which this is taken, these words recall the Exodus. They serve as a reminder of Jahwehs deliverance and precede his complaint in deploring the worship of Baal, and nowhere in the prophets mind is any forecast of the Holy Family. What Matthew understands, whose own serious intelligence in these matters we mustnt underestimate, is that the

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sacred legends surrounding Jesus birth echo in his imagination with the great omen of the deliverance, and he invites us to see this. It is thus with certain Gospel tales also. Jesus Feeding of a multitude is related to Elishas doings only in the bare borrowed miracle; it is only the gesture for which a use has been found. And if a scholar like Dr. Goodspeed can see in these borrowings a tendency to compare the real deeds of Jesus with certain ancient tales, the Negative critics argue with equal conviction that these borrowings may show that he has been invented, at least in part. Nor do all of these borrowings leap to the eye. Consider the Markan tale of Jesus entering a synagogue to find a man with a withered hand. Pharisees are present and they watched him to see whether he would heal him on the Sabbath. At once he addresses the man with the withered hand: Come here. And then he puts a question to them: Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill? They are silent and he looks around with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart. Stretch out your hand! he commands, and when the man reaches toward Jesus, his hand is restored. All is quickly and pointedly told. Now in the Book of Kings we find a tale of Jeroboam and a certain prophet in which this identical motif occurs. The prophet remains anonymous because the tale concerns only Jeroboam, who became king of the Northern Tribes after a division in Israel. In the fable, however, he has erected a golden calf at Bethel and journeys there to make announcement from the altar: Here is your God, Israel, who brought you out of Egypt! We are uncertain of history here, but that does not concern us. Robert H. Pfeiffer, late of Harvard, has supposed that the sin of Jeroboam, for which he is abominated in this tale, was his endeavor to establish (or revive?) centers of worship at Bethel and Dan. At that time Jerusalem was ruled by King Solomons son. At any rate, an unnamed prophet has been summoned by Jahweh to curse calf and altar in the presence of the angry king who stretched out his hand from the altar saying, Seize him! Whereupon the stretched-out hand of Jeroboam withered, nor could he draw it back until he pleaded with the man of God, after which his hand was restored. Mark reproduces only the gesture of that thrust-out withered hand and the associated cure, but its occurrence in the Old Testament tale recommends it and even aids its acceptance. The symbol of an outstretched hand must have been attractive to an Evangelist for whom

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the touch of Jesus is so important; a writer fully aware of the worshipers sensed need. That Jesus looked around with anger is a superbly human response to the Pharisees aloofness, and we feel a certain nearness to his warmth, but the later Synoptists lose a valuable and convincing human trait by ignoring this anger, whereas to establish the convincing humanity of his miraculous Jesus is Marks aim in giving such details. On the other hand, the scribal Matthew adds a touch of his own when he has Jesus defeat his opponents in argument before working his cure: What man of you, if he has one sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not lay hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath. (Matthew 12,9.) These might, of course, be Jesus own words, but they might equally have been the words of a wise rabbi.

CHRIST STILLETH THE TEMPEST

The miracles of Jesus attest his identity, showing that he is the Christ: this is what they have come to mean in the Gospels where they are made to serve an original scheme. Rather than feats of divinity, they are signs of a covert revelation but their significance is misunderstood, no doubt in keeping with the Messianic secret. Only in the Fourth Gospel do they reveal the Messiah openly to his friends because here at last all secrecy is cast aside. So there is a certain inconsistency about the miracles in these earlier Gospels because in failing to reveal Christ, they stumble in their purpose. Nor will Jesus have his secret revealed this way: he forbids it. When Pharisees ask him for a sign from Heaven, his response is in keeping with the realism of the earliest Evangelist: He sighed deeply in his spirit, and said, Why does this generation seek a sign? Truly, I say to you, no sign shall be given to this generation. And he left them, and getting into the boat again he departed to the other side. (Mark 8,11.) Small wonder that these words impressed a man like Shaw who, of course believing that there was something real behind these many miracles, thought that Jesus was embarrassed by them. Professor Paul Schmiedel of Zurich, who was a contemporary of the Negative critics,

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cited these very words out of Mark as a pillar on which to rest our confidence in the historical reality of the Gospel. They do seem to contradict the many miracles in Mark or at least to diminish their importance, and it is this which makes the weary sigh of Jesus and his refusal of a sign attractive to moderns, although I am not persuaded that the moderns have quite understood the Evangelist here. Overall, we notice a genuine reserve about the miracles and cures. The demoniac at the tombs is permitted to tell how much the Lord has done for him because he dwells in pagan territory across the lake, but in Galilee Jesus commonly suppresses the report of his deeds. An exception occurs when he cures the paralytic that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins, but others who enjoy the benefit of his cures are urged not to tell. Of course, people do tell; he cannot hush them up; but even so, nothing comes of this telling except a trail of rumors. On one occasion Jesus calms a storm at sea by a word of rebuke to wind and waves, but here too the Markan theme is struggling to emerge and dominate a borrowed tale. (Then is something real behind it? Do we need to posit something more than just this borrowing?) Certainly, there is a wizardry to this Merlin-like commanding of the elements which rage until their Lord rebukes them. (The word in Greek is epitimao and would carry the meaning here, quoting Thayer: to rebuke in order to curb ones ferocity or violence.) The awed disciples ask, Who then is this, that even wind and waves obey him? but they can find no answer to their question in the miracle which they have witnessed. Unlike the demoniacs who give tongue to the mystery of Jesus, these wonders are dumb. On the other hand, the point of the story lies in the disciples question which asks for the readers affirmation of Jesus as the Son of God. In another sea-tale later on, Jesus walks by night across the waters to his troubled disciples, as we know. A gale has wearied out the oarsmen, but as soon as he climbs in the boat, the gale winds cease. It is a different story and separately told, but together, these tales represent another Markan double. Unlike the Feedings, which reduplicate a single tale, they constitute a double structure which tells of Jesus tranquillizing effect on a stormy sea. And this fact is a sign of their importance because the technique of Gospel doubling (and all the Evangelists follow Mark in this) is a deliberate stress. It is especially the first of these tales, the Calming of the Storm, that matters to Mark. Brief and blunt, its

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inconspicuous reference beyond the mere doubling is unmistakable, once it is seen, and rather surprising because in this modest anecdote we find of all strange things a reminiscence of the fable of Jonah. As I say, it is another borrowed tale, another of those stories whose motif has been adapted from the Jewish Bible like Elishas several barley loaves or Jeroboams withered hand, but as we saw in those two cases, these borrowings dont leap to the eye. Legends transmogrify when these borrowings are put to different uses, and it is fair to say that in the Calming of the Storm Marks reference to the original fable is deliberately occult. Our exegetes are aware of this and in the margin of the Nestle Greek Testament we find in Latin abbreviation the editors own reference to it.17 We also learn from FC Grant that this odd reminiscence of Jonah was noticed by St. Jerome, translator of the Vulgate. In fact, Marks reference is a crux. An interpreter who neglects it will miss the deeper meaning of the Markan tale. Once more, then, to bring out the likeness more distinctly, Jesus and his disciples are crossing the Sea of Galilee when (says Mark) a great storm of wind arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so much so that the disciples are frightened. Strangely enough, Jesus is asleep on a cushion in the back of the boat! It is an odd sort of detail and really too absurd because even the fishermen among the disciples are fearful of sinking. They wake him up to say, Teacher, do you not care if we perish? He awakes, rebukes the wind and says to the sea, Peace! Be still! In the great calm which follows he asks them, Why are you afraid? Have you no faith? And they marvel among themselves. The whole thing is tremendously naive. Now compare the Book of Jonah, which is a clever piece of fiction that has been placed among the prophets because Jonah happens to be a prophet to whom, by definition, the Word of Jahweh comes. As the story opens, the Word of Jahweh sends him to Nineveh to cry against its wickedness, but instead of going there he takes ship for Tarshish to get away from the presence of the Lord. In response to this colossal disobedience the infuriated Jahweh hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest which threatened to break up the ship. The sailors cry out to their gods, and in Moffatts translation, they have even flung the tackle of the ship overboard, in order to lighten her,

17. Namely, to Jonah 1,3 ff.

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whereas Jonah, who is impervious to the dreadful signs of Jahwehs wrath, has gone off to lie down in the ships hold where the captain finds him fast asleep. This is a thumping absurdity which puts me in mind of the man at the wheel who was made to feel contempt for the wildest blow/ Tho it often appeared when the gale had cleared/ That hed been in his bunk below. The captain says, What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call upon your god... that we do not perish! Absurdity matches absurdity here: Jonah in the sides of the ship and Jesus on his pillow are both asleep in a howling storm, but is it supposed to be funny? Or does the Hebrew narrative ask to be sounded more deeply? Given the indiscriminate wrath of a Jahweh who threatens to sink a ship because of a single guilty man, and one whose iniquity captain and crew know nothing about and cant be accused of sheltering, we may have in the biblical version an underlying folk tale which has been taken up and used to higher purpose. Or if not, then we may have in the fable as it stands the dramatic use of a primitive ethic which author and audience had really outgrown, very much as in a fairytale. We make no direct comparison between Jesus and Jonah, of course, because as men, as prophets, they are incommensurable. It is a point worth bearing in mind. Thus the raging waters are pacified by Jonah very differently when he gets himself thrown overboard at his own suggestion, the sailors having cast lots to find out whose fault it is that this evil has come upon them. He says, Take me up and throw me into the sea, then the sea will quiet down for you. Instead, they row harder! They are very reluctant to throw him into a yawning storm out of sudden regard for the god he worships, but they have no choice. After he is thrown overboard the sea ceases from its raging; the sailors sacrifice to the Lord and make vows; and the Lord appoints a great fish to swallow the disobedient prophet. He must spend three days and three nights in the belly of the whale until he is vomited out upon dry land. The wording in this Italicized quotation comes from Matthews Gospel (King James and RSV) where Jonahs great fish has become the fabled whale. A certain residue of myth clings to this mere fable, then, and deepens the comedy, and I have dwelt on this because to a nicety it will bear on what is to come. One of the older scholars, Oxfords TK Cheyne,

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once compared Jonahs great fish to Tiamat, devouring monster of Babylonian lore. (Technically, he puts Nebuchadrezzar in place of Tiamat in making this association). And the link between them, between Jonahs great fish and the primordial goddess, he found in the Book of Jeremiah where a lurking Tiamat had furnished a prophet his metaphor of engorgement: I shall punish Bel in Babylon and make him disgorge what he has swallowed. In future the nations will stream to him no more. Get out of her, my people; save your lives, each one of you, from Yahwehs furious anger. (Jeremiah 51,44. The New Jerusalem Bible.) Bel is another name for Baal and Babylon the monster that had swallowed up a people for seventy years. Thus Jonah may be taken to represent a missionary people who are called to be a Light to the world, and his adventures bear on the lesson which Israel has had to learn from its captivity in Babylon. Right or wrong, this is the prophetic theory: a nation is punished for its sins and Israel had been set to school. Out of the Babylonian Captivity, moreover, we have the Babylonian Talmud or at least its beginnings, so vital to Jewry, followed by the rebuilding of Israel and its rebirth in the spirit of prophecy: an incomparable fruitage out of a nations catastrophe. It was a poet in that captivity, or one reflecting on its spiritual meaning, who gave us the sublime conception of the Suffering Servant. So it is possible to read Jonah seriously and even deeply, and in The Anchor Bible Dictionary I find a lesson on the Hebrew verb yarad, meaning go down, descend, which relates the tale of Jonah to the ancient hero-myth.18 Four times the prophet goes down as, for instance, into the port city or into the ship before embarking, and once there is an echo of yarad when he fell into a deep sleep (wayyeradam). In these deliberate repetitions the article finds a continuous hint that Jonahs flight from God is not merely horizontal to another part of the

18. Article by Jonathan Magonet.

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world, but actually a descent, ultimately into death and the underworld. It is a comment of rabbinic subtlety. We understand that Jonah the son of Amittai is no mere symbolic figure. As a fictitious character he is definitely that particular Jonah. Even his name is borrowed from a prophet who is mentioned in the Book of Kings (II Kings 14,25). Why this realism? Probably in asking this much credence for his fable, the story-teller meant only to detain the simpler folk in that state of mind we call belief until the lesson sank in. By choosing the name of a prophet of whom almost nothing is known, he gained acceptance for his story.

THE SIGN OF JONAH

We have come upon a Mystery at the heart of Marks Gospel, and one which is reserved from the profane. It is the Mystery touching his covert reference to Jonah, which we have found to be implicit in the Calming of the Storm. Nevertheless, our primitive Evangelist is confident that the Sign intended will be interpreted by teachers of the didache, that is, of the New Teaching which was spoken of earlier. Mark is only reshaping a tradition for use in a flourishing Jesus-cult, and there is nothing here of a challenge to our mother wit, say in the later manner of a James Joyce, who sets out to enslave the reader. On the surface the Calming of the Storm is a demonstration of Jesus power or an evidence of his faith, but in its deeper aspect as touching on the Mystery, it is a first covert reference to the death and Resurrection of the Son of Man. In Matthews Gospel when some of the scribes and Pharisees ask Jesus for a sign, he speaks of Jonah in a stern reply: An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign; but no sign shall be given to it except the Sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. (Matthew 12,39.) This dark hint of death and Resurrection is myth on the face of it, surely. The condemnation of an evil and adulterous generation is meant to curb a hankering for miracles among the believers for whom these Gospels were written, so the words as they stand were composed after the time of Jesus unless (as for Schweitzer) he forecast his own Resurrection. Lukes Gospel speaks of the Sign of Jonah a little differently:

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This generation is an evil generation; it seeks a sign, but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of Jonah. For as Jonah became a sign to the men of Nineveh, so will the Son of Man be to this generation. (Luke 11,29.) At once we see that Luke is more spare because he says nothing of the whale. So Matthews triads are missing from our literary Evangelist, probably because he takes them for granted instead of drawing out the parallel between Jonah in a whales belly and the Son of Man in the heart of the earth a parallel embarrassing to modern scholars and even then, among Gentiles who had not the Law, somewhat undignified. The omission has led to a long-standing confusion. From at least the time of David Strauss our scholars have cried: Away, then, with any superstition about the whale! except that now they cant tell us what the Sign of Jonah signifies. What else could it signify? What else could it be if not what Matthew says it is by stating it in such a distinct parallel that even a child of twelve can tell us what it means. As for the mere analogy, yes: Jesus was crucified on Friday and rose from the dead on Easter Sunday morning: three nights are not required for that, but our scribal Matthew, who loves to quote prophecy, has quoted verbatim from the Septuagint those words about Jonah to draw his rigid parallel. He keeps a natural sequence between Jesus description of the Sign of Jonah and the subsequent repentance of the men of Nineveh whereas Luke breaks the natural sequence by inserting, first, a saying about the Queen of Sheba which Matthew places last. Otherwise, the versions are nearly identical. So we have in Luke a statement that Jonah became a sign to the men of Nineveh without reference to Matthews whale. How did he? Was it by his preaching, or was his mere presence in the city a sign to them? Luke draws the tacit parallel when writing: as Jonah... so will the Son of Man be to this generation, which means, surely, in like manner as Jonah, or in the same way or to the same degree or in some comparable sense. But how do we compare these two, Jonah and the Son of Man? How is Jesus in like manner a Sign to this generation, and why to Jonah in particular? What seems at first to be a comparison of persons melts away in Jesus words: Something greater than Jonah is here. We commonly take these words much as Moffatt translates: Here is One greater than Jonah. Or as the King James very skillfully gives: A greater than Jonah is here. But these translations also interpret, whereas the Greek says,

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something. Or in other words, something more than simply another man. There is more than Jonah here, writes Goodspeed. What is here is greater than Jonah, says the New English Bible. The Jerusalem Bible gives: There is something greater than Jonah here. What possibly can this something be? unless of course implicitly, as Matthew frankly says, Christs Resurrection. One might say that Jonah became a sign to the men of Nineveh as a preacher, I suppose as Isaiah became a sign to the men of Jerusalem, or Ezekiel to the exiles, or Amos to the men of the north country. Very well, then, but why does Jesus compare his message of the Kingdom to Jonahs stark message: Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown? If we compare these two prophets as preachers of doom, is Jonah a better comparison than the prophet Isaiah? Why this particular choice? Evidently, the comparison is a poor one if based on message. Locale, then? Jonah preached in Nineveh, which was a pagan city of three days journey in breadth. Jesus never set foot in a pagan city, not Tiberias on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, which he might easily have reached on foot or by boat, nor Sepphoris, which is said to be an afternoons walk from Nazareth and is described as a veritable jewel of a half-pagan city. Tyre and Sidon are mentioned in the Gospels (as Sepphoris is not) only because Jesus visited the countryside in those regions. As for the effect of their preaching, the men of Nineveh repented at the preaching of Jonah from the king on down: the whole city repented, whereas Jesus was crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem with a placard affixed to the cross. Very well, then, but if contrast is the point of comparison, then how will the sign of the Son of Man be like unto the Sign of Jonah? It is equally difficult to suppose that Jesus as a person, or in his mere presence, is the Sign of Jonah. Rudolf Bultmann tries to take it like this but if so, then Jesus must say to those who are asking for a sign, The only sign to be given to this generation is the Sign of Jonah, which happens to be myself and the message I preach. Meaning exactly what to his hearers? The Sign of Jonah how? See what a magnitude of myth we sacrifice for these modern evasions if Matthews three days and three nights isnt meant! I can find no grounds for comparing Jesus and the Sign of Jonah except on Matthews basis, where the comparison is monumental. Now a critic of this interpretation might fairly ask if the men of Nineveh were standing by when Jonah was cast up by that monstrous

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fish? Of course, it is absurd to think so, but our fabulist is not a Cambridge logician, and to demand in all seriousness how the men of Nineveh might have known of Jonahs three days and three nights in the belly of the whale is to strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. We might better ask why the populace repented at his preaching if they had really no part in his impressive wonder, which rises over his journey like the orb of the moon. In story-telling one simple rule always holds: what has already happened in a story belongs to the momentum of the action. Cause-andeffect is the province of the moralist and fabulist long before it is a principle of science. Was that whole affair of howling storm and breaking ship and the swallowing up of Jonah required just to turn him to Nineveh? I think it asks for the conversion of the city. Magnitudes balance magnitudes, and one thing follows another as the story follows its theme. In Joseph Conrads Nigger of the Narcissus, everything waits for the black man, finally waits for his death and his name is James Wait. Its his lungs; he cant breathe and is coughing his life away. A violent storm overtakes the Narcissus, a ship under sail barely surviving. Afterward, thwarting headwinds and a vast immobilizing calm arrest the voyage until the black mans tardy ghastly gasping death. Either one without the other would be less of a storm, less of a desperate calm. Breath is restored to the sails when James Wait, sewn in canvas, strikes water in a burial at sea. More than fiction is involved in the necessary carry-over of Jonahs adventure to the men of Nineveh, and to see it clearly we look once more at the underlying myth, which we have considered above. On this level, of course, the values of the story are rather drastically changed. The comical aspect is suppressed or discarded as soon as the deeper myth is recalled. Jonahs being puked out on the beach is no comedy to myth, where his three-day sojourn represents a heros struggle with the monster of the deep. In the original myth his being vomited out at last defeats the monster. How can he ever lose this aura? Once a hero, always a hero. Your Samson rending his young lion as he would have rent a kid doesnt dwindle to an Androcles after Delilah betrays him and his hair is shaved and he is bound in fetters of brass. His hair will grow back again, his God will look on him with favor, and he will live to pull down the Temple of Dagon by breaking its pillars.

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The stark insistence of the primitive Evangelist is that the demons know at once Who Jesus is, even from afar, whereas by contrast the very disciples cannot seem to fathom the mystery. After he calms a storm by rebuking wind and waves they fear a great fear and ask, What manner of man is this? (KJV) or Whatever can he be? (Moffatt) or Who can he be? (Goodspeed) they are not entirely in the dark, but through the entire first half of this Gospel they can do no more than verge on a question which the demoniacs have answered in futile outcry. Of course, it would be most unfitting for the revelation to be given by demons, whose function is only to bring out the Messianic secret. We must await Peters Confession when at last Jesus will disclose the Mystery of the Son of Man, which no demoniac has shouted aloud and which Matthews Gospel speaks of under the Sign of Jonah. So when this knowledge passes to humanity, it begins to be enlarged. Thereafter the disciples will be admonished to silence just as hitherto the demons were always forbidden to tell. A step toward that pivotal moment comes when Jesus travels to the region around Tyre and Sidon (Mark 7,24). There we read: And he entered a house and would not have any one know it, yet he could not be hid. But immediately a woman, whose little daughter was possessed by an unclean spirit, heard of him, and came and fell down at his feet. (Mark 7,24.) We may notice that his futile wish to remain hidden resembles his trouble with demoniacs, although in this case Jesus seeks only to conceal his presence. Nor can it be unmeaning that he is discovered by a woman whose daughter is possessed by a demon. Now the woman was a Greek, a Syrophoenician by birth. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. The demoniac at the tombs, seeing Jesus from afar, came running up to worship him but here, somewhere out of sight, it is a Syrophoenician woman who has heard of him and comes to fall down at his feet. We are never brought into the demons presence; we never meet her daughter. Before long, we cease to require the demoniac testimony, and in this third tale of possession we have a demon at a distance. It may be only the case that Mark has reshaped his tradition in fashioning this tale. Realistically, this mother is under no necessity to learn of Jesus visit from a daughters whispering demon; she may have

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heard of his fame. All this could have happened, in other words, and it belongs to the Markan realism that the inference is left to ourselves. Nevertheless, her entire action represents the usual stereotype of an immediate demonic perception of the Christ followed by an intrusion: he could not be hid. The demon (as I suppose) has perceived the nearness of the Christ in a remote and pagan region and has uttered or muttered the knowledge through a daughter. A striking dialogue follows when Jesus replies: Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the childrens bread and throw it to the dogs. But she answered him, Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs under the table eat the childrens crumbs. Shaw, by the way, loved this tale how could he not? Jesus sudden rudeness is almost a Shavian touch, and the womans pert and witty reply delighted the Irishman, who supposed that she had touched the heart of Jesus when he told her: For this saying you may go your way. The demon has left your daughter. And she went home, and found the child lying in bed, and the demon gone. The demon-at-a-distance gives him none of the usual trouble; it is the Syrophoenician woman who overcomes her daughters unclean spirit in a brush with Jesus, and we pass from his encounters with demons on a plane of myth to seeming legend. Yet nothing is resolved by this. The story is not more real than another, and once more we flip the coin of our question to find that it lands on its edge. Thus can CG Montefiore, in his day a leader of Reform Judaism, write of this tale: The story is one of great beauty and charm. Whence this wonderful attractiveness of so much of the Gospel narrative, this marvelous combination of power and simplicity? Whence this impression of firstclassness, of inspiration? His own decision is affirmative: Without Jesus, no Mark.

EPHPHATHA
We have seen how Jesus took Jairuss daughter by the hand and said, Talitha cumi. (Maiden, arise.) Very different is the cure of the Syrophoenician maiden whose unclean spirit is dismissed at a distance. What counts in the latter tale is an interlocution which verges on

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epiphany, thanks to a demon in the background. In Matthews version, borrowing from Mark, this breaks through openly when the woman, a foreigner, addresses Jesus in Messianic terms: Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David! Mark is not quite ready to have anyone speak so openly of his identity as Christ, having a tighter control over his Messianic secret and its step by step disclosure. We may ask if there is any truth to the journey which brought Jesus and this woman together? Nothing else is known of any sojourn in that region, and the return to the eastern shore of the Lake is by a roving circuit which makes little sense on the map. (Thats no disproof of it, of course, for why should a meandering journey make sense to anyone except the sojourners themselves?) Its another journey of which the Evangelist knows nothing except for the Syrophoenician woman and, in this case, an appended itinerary. So it is rather like Marks nondescript account of that first tour of Galilee whose sketchiness he covered by the Cleansing of the Leper. What stands out in the story next to come happens somewhere we have no honest sense of place. But the Markan story bears on theme when Jesus utters a symbolic word, Ephphatha! in course of a cure. It means, Be thou opened! and is a further step toward revelation. (Mark 7,33.) Despite the absence of a definite locality, which is insofar an absence of fact, the story impresses by its realism when a deaf man who could hardly speak (EV Rieu) is cured by poking and spitting, but this crudeness may be proof of Marks artistry. He counts on the credit his readers will bring to the story, and he knows that its crudeness will pass for an honest report of things far-off and foreign. We mislead ourselves if we seize on such detail as primitive fact because, in truth, everything culminates in a symbol. The tale even ends with a moral when Jesus is praised because he maketh both the deaf to hear and the dumb to speak. More carefully, then: a deaf man who could hardly speak is brought to Jesus with a request that he lay his hands upon him and Jesus takes him aside from the multitude privately. Then he puts his fingers in his ears and he spat and touched his tongue; and looking up to Heaven, he sighed and said to him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. All is symbolic, but the bearing of the symbol is implicit. This nameless man taken somehow aside from the multitude, being deaf to the Word,

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cannot bear witness to the Christ. A cunning contrast is prepared to a deaf and dumb spirit yet to come, and this Markan double a deaf man who could hardly speak and a deaf and dumb spirit serves to bracket Peters Confession in the sense that it belongs to a larger sort of bracketing, a series of tales which make up the steps of this revelation, during which the testimony of the demons is discarded. Bultmann regards this tale as a sort of exorcism because of the elaborate method used to cure the man, but where is our demon? You cannot have an exorcism on the strength of a mere method unless you produce a demoniac. One argues: Yes, but it is understood that in antiquity demons were responsible for such a condition as that. This is learning misapplied. Would Bultmann care to say that the simple folk of Palestine (or Rome) couldnt recognize sickness as sickness or disability as disability without discovering that a sick child or a lame relative was a demoniac? That would be absurd. Of course, one thinks of Luther and his thunderclaps and apparitions, his devils on every rooftop, but was Luther himself a demoniac with every attack of the gout? A hasty attribution of devilish influence is commonplace but does one call the doctor or the priest? Bultmanns conscientious assumption would imply that every physician was a witch doctor in the eyes of the common folk, like those natives in Africa who thought that Dr. Schweitzer not only cured disease but could inflict it at a distance. The argument goes almost down to animism, much as Heinrich Schliemann discovered Troy, or thought he did, by digging right on past it to a deeper stratum. The Gospel of Mark distinguishes between those who are demoniacs and furnish testimony, and those who are cured of illness or disability. When the disciples are sent out two by two, they cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many that were sick and healed them. (Mark 6,13.) Simons mother-in-law, whose fever was rebuked in Luke but not in Mark, the leper who was touched, the paralytic let down through the roof and cured by a word of authority, the man with a withered hand, the woman with an issue of blood, Jairuss daughter were in no sense demoniacs; and this poor fellow, who is deaf and hardly able to speak, cannot be made over into a demoniac by the mere description of an elaborate healing method. What matter if it resemble those of exorcists? Fingers in ears, spit on the tongue, the looking to Heaven, the mandatory sigh, the magical word, Ephphatha yes, of course, these methods are veritably primitive. I wonder if Mark has used them to establish the solid reality of his Jesus at a distance from the readers own

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world. One feels that he must have lived to be such a crude fellow. Or we may choose to read the symbol here. Jesus begins to open the ears of humanity to the Word and confers a capacity to speak it, although for Mark to have anyone speak it openly just yet would be premature. In keeping with his stedfast theme he will have Jesus charge them to tell no one of the cure afterwards: but the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it because this is a secret that cannot be kept. As for the charge itself, we are reminded of a similar absurdity which ends the tale of Jairuss daughter. Elsewhere in Mark we find that Jesus requires no procedure of any sort in working similar cures. Then either this Evangelist has naively transcribed such inconsistencies without an effort to iron them out, or else, when as here he describes a realistically primitive procedure, he has his own reasons for doing that. The principle is, that his realism serves to make Jesus real and his details serve the symbol.

THE VEIL LIFTS

No less realistic is the healing of the blind man of Bethsaida which comes immediately before the story of Peters Confession. It is another tale unique to Mark and resembles the cure of the deaf and dumb in its primitive technique. As moderns, we can be attracted to its primitive aspect and we might like to seize on its details as history but once again the realism here, in which a blind man recovers his vision with some difficulty, expresses a symbolic emphasis on seeing and perceiving. The villagers of Bethsaida bring the blind man to Jesus and beg for his touch. Again, he leads the man away out of the village, this time after taking his hand, of course: And when he had spit on his eyes and laid his hands upon him, he asked him, Do you see anything? And he looked up and said, I see men, but they look like trees walking. An effective detail. Then again he laid his hands upon his eyes; and he looked intently and was restored, and saw everything clearly. And he sent him away to his home saying, Do not even enter the village. (Mark 8,22.)

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Once more, we have a request to keep it quiet which is futile under the circumstances, but the motif of the Messiaic secret must be kept. No less futile are those 19th century interpretations which find in the realism of the tale record of Jesus practice when curing a blind man. In his remarkable book, Jesus, the Christ, in the Light of Psychology, G. Stanley Hall quotes two of the scholars who have commented on the second imposition of hands in this cure: Perhaps, said Paulus, Jesus somehow manipulated out of his eyes some very aggravating dust or possibly some morbid growth that had rendered vision imperfect; or, says Venturini, he may possibly have removed a cataract with his fingernail, and perhaps he made two steps in the operation because, as we know now, to heal too suddenly would have been dangerous.19 This might be laughable if it were less disgusting, and yet science is at work in these rational conjectures. Nor is the speculation worthless, considered as a possibility, except for its wrongheadedness and the underlying naivete Paulus and Venturini have mistaken a fable for a photograph. In fact, we have a filmed evidence, attested by Dr. Puharich, of one (deceased) Arigo, a South American healer who used to work in a light trance when processing patients who flocked to him. He was sometimes observed (and photographed) applying an ordinary penknife to the eyeball for the removal of cataract. Astoundingly, as also shown on film, these operations were endured by patients while standing in line who gave no sign of visible discomfort under the spell of this powerful and attractive healer. What the example shows is that Mark did not require a Jesus for his described techniques; he needed only his Arigo, but I dont deny that this story might by a happy chance rest on preserved actual fact. When we know that blindness is found in various degrees and conditions why not? It would be foolish to deny ancient fact if we lack the means to verify denial, but my point is a simpler one. It is to notice the unmistakable utility of this tale in the complex Markan scheme; and notice its placement coming right before the episode in which Jesus is perceived as the Christ for the first time by the first man. Furthermore, in between this cure and the one about the deaf and dumb, Jesus holds discussion with his disciples about his two feedings of the multitude saying:

19. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921. Vol. II, p. 606.

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Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? And do you not remember?... Do you not yet understand? (Mark 8,17.) It is catechesis with emphasis and drives the New Teaching home. In effect, the Evangelist is reminding his readers, who are of course believers, what sort of responses are expected of the faithful: Respond with understanding to the hearing of the Word, and testify. Try to see who Jesus is try very hard, like the blind man who looked intently... and saw everything clearly after he laid his hands on him a second time.

THOU ART THE CHRIST!

Now Jesus passes on from Bethsaida going north to the villages of Caesarea Philippi: And on the way he asks his disciples, Who do men say that I am? This is a funny question but the reply is even stranger: And they told him, John the Baptist; and others say Elijah; and others one of the prophets. (Mark 8,27.) Why these droll parallels? It seems that he invites them by his question, which is really very odd. After all, this is a man who at one early point, could no longer openly enter a town or who is followed by a multitude when he withdraws to the sea, and yet, going by the form of his question, he seems to be asking for his name and he gets back John the Baptist or Elijah. No? It is very strange. Were he asking for comparisons but no, because here he is identified with John the Baptist or Elijah. That is no mere comparison. It is very clear that Jesus is not asking for his name but for his deeper, his hidden identity. He is not at all astonished by what the people say of him, and as it happens, these very strange identities figure in an earlier Markan double after Jesus had sent out his disciples two by two: King Herod heard of it; for Jesus name had become known. Some said, John the baptizer has been raised from the dead; that is why these powers are at work in him. But others said, It is Elijah. And others said, It is a prophet, like one of the prophets of old. But when Herod heard of it, he said, John, whom I beheaded, has been raised. (Mark 6,14.) This is nicely told. Jesus Name had become known, yet by the evidence of the tale this very name has been identified with the names of other

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prophets, including Elijah, who in a popular myth was supposed to return before the coming of the Messiah, or the beheaded Baptist who was looked upon as yet another forerunner. We cant be surprised at hearing the disciples repeat these rumors, then, but clearly they are rumors, as the Negative critics maintain, and the sacred Name is placed among them and even confounded with them. Technically, of course, all this is only preliminary to the accomplishment of Marks design. A weakened wall is bending and about to burst from the pressure behind it as Jesus repeats the question: But who do you say that I am? Peter answered him, You are the Christ. And he charged them to tell no one about him. Loisy is right to insist that this Gospel belongs to the early catechesis, or as Mark would say, to the new teaching which in reality is cultic teaching. We have here a Jesus who is asking the very question which a Christian teacher asks. Although mythical in form, it doesnt follow that this tale is wholly unreal, and we who are far removed from these seeming events must be modest in describing them. We cant say that Peter did not declare for Christ, as he may have done in circumstances like these on the road to Caesarea Philippi. All that is possible, but it is matter of belief: history eludes us here except as it may be given in the form of myth. And in view of the importance of this pivotal Confession, it is a fairly desiccated myth expressed in only three or four terse lines. A writer of fiction, reaching a first climax in a story as dense as this little Gospels, would hardly do it with this adamantine brevity. This is certainly a tradition. Here at last in this primitive Gospel the recognition of Christ has reached humanity among these disciples. Once more, then, as the fable stands, it gives the tradition of a claim which may well be the fact of Peters primacy in declaring for the Christ. We know of Peter (=Cephas) as first witness of the Resurrection in Pauls Epistles for a historical reference, but in the legends of the Gospels we read of women who were first to see the Risen Christ. It is conceivable that Peters Confession was invented to restore his primacy as first witness to the Messiahship of Jesus. In Christopher Isherwoods novel (it is almost a novel) on Ramakrishna, a Hindu mystic of the 19th century, that strangely powerful man once asked a follower, Listen, (So and So) calls this an incarnation of God. Can it be so? Please tell me what you think. And by

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this we are to understand a reference to himself. The answer elicited is an admiring one and Ramakrishna, after a few remarks, smiles and says, Well I know nothing about it. We are troubled by a sense of absurdity here, a hint of vanity. Jesus, likewise, would betray his human vanity by prodding his disciples for such myths and recognitions as they give if this were not a piece of early catechesis. As in the tale itself, the teaching is imparted by question and answer. The question is predetermined and the answer is expected. Once the pupil has given it to the teachers satisfaction, he knows thereafter what to say.

GET THEE BEHIND ME, SATAN!

Peters Confession, then, is his declaration to Jesus, Thou art the Christ! Apart from any question whether it happened, the tale in itself is a piece of catechesis clothed in myth. Until now the disciples have been obtuse. They have gaped and wondered at Jesus miracles and they have failed to grasp the revelations of the demoniacs. In contrast to the disciples chronic incomprehension Peters Confession is a leap of faith. Like the outbursts of the demoniacs, it comes abruptly at long last. Marks artistry, as I cannot overstress, is Gothic in its wondrous imaginations and crude vitality, and yet there is a shrewdness in his handling of this tale. For when Jesus charges his disciples to tell no one about him, he plainly indicates that he is Christ, and yet the Evangelist is shy of this designation and his Jesus doesnt go on to speak of himself as the Christ. Instead, he would open the disciples minds to the Mystery of the Son of Man which they are not in the least expecting: The Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. (Mark 8,31.) It seems a creed in contradiction to the faith. And for saying this, Peter takes him aside and begins to admonish him. Something of this disciples ardor is shown in this bluff upbraiding of his master, but he cannot help himself. Peter has his role to play, and there is a divine necessity in these rough chidings. Jesus is touched to the quick, and turning to see his disciples he rebukes Peter in words which have become proverbial: Get thee behind me, Satan! For thou savorest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men. The New English Bible gives: Away with you, Satan! You think as men think, not as God thinks. Goodspeed is felicitous and ultra-modern: Get

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out of my sight, you Satan! For you do not side with God but with men. Good translation is a rare and difficult art, and Goodspeed is a master. Jesus is not complaining of an attitude but of a misunderstanding. He says in effect, You savor success, triumph, reign, long life, a good name, and you imagine that Christ will bestow these gifts, but the things that be of God are unfathomable. They have a deeper urgency and require sacrifice. Suddenly in this Gospel the Way of the Cross appears, and this is a Mystery in which the faithful participate as they share in the sufferings and the Resurrection of the Son of Man. Peter takes a set-back in this rebuke but he gains in mythic stature. By speaking aloud the secret which Jesus has always forbidden the demons to reveal, he himself becomes the vehicle of a Satanic influence in ironic confirmation of the truth of what he says. It is a great sign to us that Jesus should respond like this to the presence of Satan, but what a turn this tale has taken! The whole demoniac stereotype is transformed. We no longer need the testimony of demons because the revelation has struck humanity in a veritable thunderbolt. Peter is no demoniac, certainly, nor has Satan entered him as in other later Gospels he enters Judas. On our terms this is all a metaphor, but whence the marvelous words of Jesus? If he didnt actually say his famous, Get thee behind me, Satan! we have to assume that when myth arises, the anonymous tradition shows the capacity of a Shakespeare. Decidedly, it is an inspiration that Peters response to Christ should be marked by the strange ambivalence of this foundational personality. Zeal and temptation, affirmation and denial go hand in hand when, as by a passing cloud, he is overshadowed by Satanic presence.

SIMON BAR-JONAH
Matthew makes play with a sort of echo in the dialogue between Jesus and his disciple on the way to Caesarea Philippi: Thou art Christ. Thou art Peter. Both names are highly symbolic, and its clear that for Matthew also this moment is of crucial importance, so much so that he changes the dialogue. He is gloriously bold in having Peter say, Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God! whereupon Jesus responds by saying: Blessed art thou, Simon bar-Jonah! for flesh and blood hath not

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revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in Heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter and upon this Rock I will build my church, and the Gates of Hell shall not prevail against it. (Matthew 16,17) He is jubilant. We have here no immediate shut-down of the Messianic secret: instead, Jesus welcomes a Revelation which flesh and blood cannot give and bestows on Peter (in words unquoted here) the Keys of the Kingdom. Herewith the distinctive Markan note is lost because as I have just made clear, Mark with a deeper imagination has used Jesus rebuke (Get behind me, you Satan!) to validate Peters Confession. Matthews revision is more pious and respectable, but its rather conventional. A pious scribe has knocked away the keystone of the Markan structure. In failing to appreciate the role of Marks demoniacs, he fails to grasp the Messianic secret as a structure and for a fact, both Matthew and Luke, while retaining so much of the wording, mishandle the Messianic secret because they overlook Marks stepwise disclosure. As Matthew retains the words, Jesus famous Get thee behind me, Satan! has no more reference to the demoniac theme than if a wife should say to her husband, You devil, you! But Matthew has other gifts to give, and despite his mishandling of the Markan source, he has given us an invaluable primitive datum in the form of Peters name: Simon bar-Jonah. If treated as a piece of tradition, this passage, mingling old and new, looks like the occasion in history (or in myth) when Simon the fisherman first received the highly symbolic name of Peter. Petros in Greek resembles petra, a rock, and this mimics the Aramaic play on Kepha, a name which is also a word meaning rock. Our Peter, a Rock, is thus known as Kephas in the Greek of Paul, or in long-standing English usage, Cephas. Why doesnt the Evangelist use the Aramaic Cephas, then? Our conventional estimate of Matthews Jewish quality may be a little too onesided: it needs the wise corrective of Rabbi (Dr). Leo Baeck, which I quote because it is much to the point. Describing what is most characteristic of this Gospel, he writes: (Matthew) represents an attempt, less to offer another version of the Gospel, than to bring together the traditions accumulated over a period of time, in the past and in the present, which had formed and crystallized in different places. It is the Church, becoming conscious of its catholic task and beginning to take

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shape, that speaks here (and) which would bring together and reconcile the contradictions (of the old and the new Law, for example.) Everything has its place in this Gospel: the earlier as well as the later, that which has been as well as that which has developed, and therefore also both what is friendly and what is hostile to the Jews... It is the mediating Gospel and, as it were, wants to represent a harmony of the Gospels. It wants to effect a balance (but) not by melting down diversity...20 Matthew seems to be quite conscious of doing this, too, as when Jesus, after teaching his disciples, asks them: Have you understood all this? They said to him, Yes. And he said to them, Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the Kingdom of Heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old. (Matthew 13,51.) If we ask, then, what is new and Catholic in Peters Confession, the answer is easy. What is new is Church: it is new with respect to any history of Jesus, who knew nothing of churches. However, what concerns us here is the Evangelists use of the old and original names which answer to Rabbi Baecks belief that Matthew contains in its own way more than a little of the oldest traditions. Matthews Simon bar-Jonah is often confused with another name, Simon, son of John, which we find a few times in the Fourth Gospel, although these names are quite distinct because these forms, even in the Greek, are just as different as Jonah is different from John in English. I stress this because some of our linguists and lexicographers (who are normally our authorities) would identify these names would treat Simon, son of Jonah as if it meant, Simon, son of John. In fact, this is a most unwary surrender to the sly intention of the Fourth Evangelist who gives evidence of wishing to be rid of the symbol implied in the name bar-Jonah. For the author of the Fourth Gospel is as embarrassed by the Sign of Jonah as any modern exegete with a reputation to uphold, and for the very same reason: this last, mysterious Evangelist is far from naive. We have no mention of the Sign of Jonah in his Gospel but instead a clumsy substitute when Jesus says openly in Jerusalem, Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up. (John

20. The Gospel as a Document of the History of the Jewish Faith in Judaism and Christianity (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, Meridian Books p. 90 f.)

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2,19.) After foisting this absurdity on Jesus, the Fourth Evangelist explains that he spoke of the Temple of his body. And there you have a footprint of the Sign of Jonah. In this manner John refuses the pretense that Jonahs being cast out of a whale is a prototype of the Redeemers Resurrection (how undignified!) We are also encouraged to forget that Simon bar-Jonah is by virtue of his name (an ancient fact) associated with the Sign of Jonah in the only Gospel to tell us in full what the Sign of Jonah means. From the perspective of the Negative argument this subtle substitution is an example of the way in which a primitive fact, in this case a name laden with a mythical significance, is later replaced by a pseudofact, namely, a pretense that Simons fathers name was John. This makes the overall myth more real by disguising the primitive aspect of it.

THE SON OF MAN UNVEILED IN HIS REDEMPTIVE ROLE

So Jesus predicts the death and Resurrection of the Son of Man after Peter has called him the Christ, and this represents a new turn. As we know, Jesus will speak of himself in this strangely impersonal manner, using a Semitic idiom for man in his common humanity. When Ezekiel is carried in a vision to the valley of dry bones, the Spirit asks him, Son of man, can these bones live? He is recalled to his humanity in presence of the divine Spirit, whereas with Jesus it means something more: He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected... and be killed, and after three days rise again. A peculiar role marks this son of man as one who is set apart for a unique task, which is described in a myth. For even if this scene did once happen as described, and as Albert Schweitzer believed, Christs forecast answers to the Sign of Jonah wherein the Son of Man is designated as the Sign to be given. (Matthew 12,38.) Twice more the solemn prophecy is repeated in the Markan tale, a triple emphasis to indicate the new direction which the story has taken. Henceforth we look forward to Jerusalem, and in preparing his disciples for his strange and tragic task, Jesus will instruct them in private. Until now his secret has been sealed off in the disclosures of the demoniacs, none of which were understood. Or else it was implied, as when the Evangelist would plant the Mystery of the Resurrection in a simple Parable of the Sower, not at all explicitly but as a thing to be understood.

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And now at last the Messianic secret has reached a believing humanity among a few disciples who are at once pledged to secrecy. Throughout the earlier half of Marks Gospel this secret has been, as it were, under pressure to come forth, but Mark has felt that he cannot give it too quickly in deference to the earliest traditions such has been the scholarly hypothesis. Now it bursts forth, despite the brevity of Peters Confession. For having just confided the mystery to his disciples in deepest secrecy, Jesus summons a crowd out of nowhere to say: If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. (Mark 8,34.) Story-telling takes second place to instruction rather nakedly here and clearly Mark is too abrupt. His Gospel has entered on its deepest Christian themes as he awakens this strange term, Son of Man, which he had earlier used with a deliberate reserve. Do we know in fact that Jesus spoke of himself this way? Adolf Harnack somewhat cautiously believed it, although he was unwilling to point to any particular passage in evidence of that, distrusting the written record. Other scholars, less severe than Harnack, have also believed it. FC Burkitt wrote, When... Jesus speaks of himself as the Son of Man, a phrase in Aramaic identical with the Man, he must mean the Man you know whom I speak of. Burkitt takes a very strange usage for granted. Why ever would Jesus refer to himself as the Man? Or say in effect, when anticipating his arrest, The Man shall be betrayed into the hands of men? Not at all. Rather, when Jesus speaks this way in reference to himself, he means always to join himself to his appointed and predestined task. I have mentioned earlier CC Torreys translation of Mark 2,28: The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath: therefore man is master even of the Sabbath. Elsewhere he will translate the idiom in full as Son of Man. The Professor foists on Jesus an attitude toward the Mosaic Law which is impossible to square with the Sermon on the Mount. Such an attitude, which would make ones observation of the Sabbath a matter of individual discretion, seems unlikely in a serious and intelligent Jew of the time. Likewise would Professor Crossan substitute the translation Man for the Markan term and thus take it for an idiom. These learned minds, who represent a sort of consensus in scholarship, dont want to burden the historical Jesus with a connection between the Son of Man and the Sign of Jonah as Matthew understands it regarding this as impossible. They do however wish to believe (as I do

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not) that Jesus spoke those very words. So Crossan in his Historical Jesus will translate a well-known passage from Q by having Jesus say: Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the human being has nowhere to lay its head. The human being has not? The poor people of Palestine had not where to lay their heads? Peter had not when Jesus slept at his house? Crossan conceives of a Jesus in poverty because of his assumed renunciations, a radical Jesus who teaches his disciples to be beggars. Do the quoted words above support that? Taken from Q they belong to an aspect of the Son of Man myth which would stress his lowliness and invite our pity. The austere demands of the Kingdom of God are tempered in the expressions of this sympathetic Christ, for these words are not meant as a description of Jesus modus vivendi. Spoken in reply to a scribe who has said to him, Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go, they are a reminder, the more touching for its tenderness, of what the Kingdom of God requires and what it can give.

DANIELS VISION an Influence on the Gospel

Around the middle of the second century before Christ a Syrian king by name of Antiochus IV, called Epiphanes, desecrated the Jerusalem Temple by causing swine to be offered in sacrifice on an altar dedicated to Zeus. We think what religion has meant to that most tenacious of all peoples, the Jews. Three years later, to the day, a Temple purged and cleansed was reconsecrated to its proper religious function under Judas Maccabaeus. Now during the reign of this Antiochus IV the Book of Daniel was published under the pretense that it was a very ancient book containing the deeds and visions of a Daniel in the lions den who lived at the time of Nebuchadrezzar, but it was no such thing. In reality, the book is the first real apocalypse, as Robert H. Pfeiffer has called it, directed against the abuses of Antiochus Epiphanes just as the Book of Revelation is directed against the abuses of Rome. Epiphanes figures in the prophets vision symbolically, taking the absurd form of a little horn which had the eyes of a man and a mouth speaking great things, and his overthrow is predicted by an angel who interprets Daniels vision. So the Book of Daniel is a bold fiction whose hero is imaginary: a sort of pattern book, almost, for those who would see in the Gospels a mythical Jesus, although in truth, and despite the presence of an

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eschatological element in the Teachings, no scholar regards the Gospel of Mark, or any other Gospel, as an apocalypse. Daniel was designed as a deliberate artifice aimed at rousing a peoples morale at all costs. A prophet who could read the writing on the wall, inscribed there by a disembodied hand during Belshazzars feast on the night in which that king was slain, could reliably foresee the downfall of Antiochus, once the symbol were understood. By far the most important vision in the book and one we have earlier refered to is that in which Daniel one night, disturbed by dreams, sees one like a son of man come into the presence of the Ancient of Days, who is a terrifying elder seated on a throne of flames. Now it is clear from the setting if we read it under instruction of good scholarship that this apparently human figure, one like a son of man, represents a people (Daniel 7,18) just as the four great beasts in a preceding vision represented four kingdoms, beginning with Babylon and coming down to the so-called Seleucids, ending with Antiochus Epiphanes. Professor William Benjamin Smith was insofar correct in stressing the symbolic nature of the Son of Man. Once more, then, here is the key passage from Daniel: I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a Son of man and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and kingdom that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; Moreover, it is said of his rule that his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed. (Daniel 7,13.) The visionary figures of the Bible are not terribly fixed. Do we not have in this vision the true original of the later Christian idea of Jesus coming as a Judge on clouds of heaven? And in the vision of the Ancient of Days we discover certain of his features which have been transferred to the Son of Man depicted in the Book of Revelation: Then I turned to see the Voice that was speaking to me, and on

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turning I saw seven golden lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands one like a Son of man clothed with a long robe and with a golden girdle round his breast. His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire... (Revelation 1,12.) Compare Daniel 7,9: As I looked, thrones were placed And one that was Ancient of Days took his seat. His raiment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool. His throne was fiery flames, its wheels were burning fire... The monstrous image of Christ in the opening of Revelation is meant to recall the earlier Apocalypse, and the borrowing is unashamed. Yet something is missing in these extravagant Heavenly visions and myths when applied to Jesus as we find him in the Gospels. His human lowliness is missing, that sense of earthly pilgrimage conveyed in words we have quoted above: Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head. (Luke 9,58.) This is also rather mythical, as it seems to me: it is the aspect of Jesus which Santayana had in mind when he called him a pilgrim god. Nevertheless, the Gospel tale has been fed by the idea of a human life associated with a thousandfold particulars and a most distinctive character. Now if the Negative critics be right, then we have in the Gospels an original myth in which the imagination of a glorious Heavenly Son of Man (in Daniel and Enoch) has been transformed into an earthly Jesus who hungers and thirsts, teaches in parables, gives his Sermon on the Mount, rebukes the hypocrisy of established religious dignitaries (whited sepulchers) and suffers abuse, is arrested, hauled before the Sanhedrin, hauled before Pilate, and then crucified. All that stubborn and pervasive historical invention on the basis of Daniels fantastic vision! Whereas on the usual view the process has gone in the opposite direction and a supernatural Son of Man myth has been attached to a historical figure. Certainly, the visible process in the Gospels goes the other way: it is a human Jesus on his way to the villages of Caesarea Philippi who is visibly transformed into a Supernatural Being in a vision witnessed by Peter, James and John. We understand this vision to be

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also, unquestionably, a myth, but it seems to be set amid the legends and teachings of a man who once lived. We have no further interest in the meaning of the Son of Man, having now covered the myth. We turn to the Transfiguration of Jesus in turning on this Gospels pivot.

THE TRANSFIGURATION, or Jesus seen in his Glory

It is the later Evangelists who give us tales of Jesus birth, not Mark, but what are these tales? Are they legends? For if Matthews tale may reflect a solar myth, yet because it is set amid historical circumstances (Magi arrive at Jerusalem, seek audience with Herod, learn of Bethlehem as the place of birth) we may call it a legend. When the wonder of a tale is encased like this in knowable circumstance, we speak of legend in no technical sense, but in the usual way of distinguishing legends and myth. Certainly, the Gospel is shot through with streaks of myth, as when a Voice from Heaven addresses Jesus at his baptism, for example, but on the whole these Gospel tales, these seeming traditions, sifted and pondered by learned minds, have been judged to be legends, and so they have mostly seemed to us in this book. We havent been required by any evidence so far to accept the Negative viewpoint even as we consider its possibility and allow that we cannot refute it. Myth outright, pure and simple, we have encountered only in the Temptation tryptich of Matthew and Luke where in a nameless desert Jesus met with Satan and withstood his temptations. That sort of thing we are calling a myth in the ordinary sense of the word because it belongs to another sphere: to a desert in which the Son of God can meet the Prince of Darkness. Whereas legends by contrast belong to the present world and seem adornments or exaggerations of real events. Of course, we also know of myth in a deeper sense, as a scholar will use the term for the structure of the Gospel tale, a structure called kerygma (or proclamation) and reflecting the fixed content of the earliest preaching described in the Book of Acts. In this peculiar sense, the myth does not refer to events which are unreal, but to an idea which lies beyond the reach of history: the myth is one of prophecy and its fulfillment which underlies the Gospel tale. Now bearing the common distinction in mind and with an awareness of its limitation, I say that the Transfiguration of Christ is the one other tale in the Gospels, besides his Temptation, which ought to be

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regarded as myth outright, pure and simple. But is it really so? Have I not myself described the Calming of the Storm as a myth, and perhaps used this term in one or two other places? And what of the Resurrection of Christ? It is surely a myth, and the supreme myth of all: but it is nonetheless (I say) Resurrection which is myth and not the several Resurrection tales which are very plainly legends. One and all, these latter tales are set within known circumstance and natural fact, giving every appearance of association with real events associated with the Passover season in old Jerusalem when Jesus perished. No such historical circumstance, no such definite place or time, can we associate with the Transfiguration, as Mark is well aware. After six days Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart by themselves; and he was transfigured before them, and his garments became glistening, intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses; and they were talking to Jesus. (Mark 9,2.) A week has passed since Peters legendary Confession, and now, as if he meant to provide it Sunday to Sunday, Mark has given us the scene of a witnessed Revelation, and the only such scene in his Gospel. Its purpose is to set forth the worth of Jesus and show his rank among the prophets in confirmation of Peters Confession. For we make an acute distinction between a Confession in which the Revelation is implicit and the subsequent Transfiguration of Christ, in which the glory of the Son of God is revealed. And Peter said to Jesus, Master, it is well that we are here; let us make three booths, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah. For he did not know what to say, for they were exceedingly afraid. And a cloud overshadowed them, and a voice came out of the cloud, This is my beloved Son; listen to him. And suddenly looking around they no longer saw anyone with them but Jesus only. We have a unique interlocking of the Heavenly and earthly in this scene, and we notice once again how the motif of the Markan foursome reappears in another form when Peter, who belongs to the sphere of the world, intrudes upon the vision (3 + 1). For Jesus is revealed as a Heavenly Being in this vision conversing with Moses and Elijah. In Lukes account the fashion of his countenance was altered and in Matthew his face did shine as the sun. Despite his inaptness for

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the Heavenly sphere, Peter intrudes upon the beatitude of Jesus with an absurd proposal to build booths for the Three. Except for Peters strange intrusion, this metamorphosis of Jesus allows of no intercourse between the Heavenly Three and the favored disciples, just as in paintings of the scene the Heavenly Three are enclosed in clouds or circles, safely sealed off from any contamination of the lowly mundane. However, with James and John we make a second, lower foursome consisting of three very earthly disciples in companionship with a revealed Son of God. Marks handling of the Son of Man theme combines the lowly human and the glorious divine, but the glory of the Transfiguration reminds us a little of the Son of Mans appearance in Daniel. Various features of this vision have been influenced by a myth of Moses when receiving the Ten Commandments , a fact which Rudolf Bultmann would have us ignore. He is the one theologian of his day who spoke most candidly of Gospel myth when urging that it could be got rid of, so that only its essence should be required of the faith of modern man and not the myth itself. And he was right enough in having believed that the spirit of the Gospel counts above all else in that regard, rather than our having to believe impossible things. Once again, it is a question of embarrassment. Bultmann wanted to deliver us from that by paring away the Gospels myth to reach an essential message which he was never able to describe. I suppose in his own mind this imaginary essence might have resembled that Pure Being which Professor Heidegger used to lecture on, and no doubt with a stress on the importance of ones having an authentic Dasein = more literally, existence. I am no fundamentalist, but all of this means to me that Bultmann was lost in the woods, theologically. Get rid of the myth which has expressed and conveyed the Gospel? Get rid of the only Expression which the Gospel has to find another for something else which the Gospel reminds you of? Thats like getting rid of the wolf that ate Little Red Ridinghoods grandmother while keeping an essence of the tale, which in Rollo Mays opinion has something to do with a girls menstruation. My belief is that if a unique and final Revelation was ever conveyed by this myth, you ought to preach it. There is no need to demythologize the Gospel on behalf of modern man, who can be taught to understand the meaning of things, including symbolic and metaphorical things.

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Bultmann would deny the influence of Exodus in shaping this Transfiguration vision because he wants to regard it as a displaced Resurrection tale, basing this on a primitive Christian tale discovered on a fragment of Egyptian papyrus. For if he could have traced the Transfiguration of Jesus to a corpus of Resurrection tales, he could continue to assume on his own grounds (as he did assume) that there was something real behind it. An experience, no doubt. The Resurrection tales, as I have said, are presented as legends, one and all. And theologians like Bultmann have believed, if not quite seriously in Resurrection, at least in something called a Resurrection experience, which enables them to hold to the appearance of belief. It is evident that the Transfiguration myth was late in arising because as they were coming down the mountain, (Jesus) charged them to tell no one what they had seen, until the Son of Man should have risen from the dead. This is Dr. Bultmanns point respecting Resurrection, but there are other things to be considered also. Let me emphasize those things in the express words of the tale for a comparison with Exodus. After six days Jesus taking along Peter and James and John went up a high mountain apart and was transfigured before them. Elijah and Moses appear and converse with Jesus we learn nothing of that high converse except in Luke, later on. A cloud overshadows them, a Voice from the cloud: This is my Beloved Son. It does seem likely that the author of this pericope was thinking of the ascent of Moses on Sinai, as CG Montefiore has suggested. (Exodus 24, 12-18.) (a) Moses was on Sinai for six days. (b) He took Joshua along. I underline the name of Peter here because he alone figures in the vision. (c) They went up a high mountain apart, namely, Sinai, leaving instructions to the elders and Aaron below. (d) The pair of Moses and Joshua resemble the pairing of Moses and Elijah who appear to Jesus on the mount, and as I say, also the pairing of Jesus and Peter in the sense suggested above. (e) A cloud overshadowed Sinai (for the six days aforementioned). (f) On the seventh day God, or his Voice called from the cloud to Moses.

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Here are six points of comparison, and if these parallels are inexact, pray tell, where in the New Testament citations of prophecy and other echoes of the Old are they exact? Mark is too inventive to make a passive parallel and thrusts Peter into the role of a bungler here. It is a wellknown story motif that a hero will be off-set by his companion. In popular American folklore, the Lone Ranger is offset by Tonto, Batman by Robin, Popeye by Wimpy, Superman by his own alter ego, Clark Kent. (I might even mention the comical reversal of this convention in Don Quixote if only I had read that novel). And Brother Lawrence is the bungling sidekick of Francis of Assisi in the Little Flowers. A point to be established by these reminders is that Peter, who seems quite real to church-goers because preachers love to dwell on his human fraility, is a legendary figure. In Matthew he will walk on water, in Acts cure a hopeless cripple and raise the dead, and fantastically enough, in presence of Moses and Elijah, this Galilean fisherman recognizes the Heavenly Pair without so much as an introduction. How so? Its absurd to suppose that Moses stood there with the Tables of the Law in his arms or that Elijahs fiery chariot was off smoking in the distance; nor would Jesus in his glistering garments and rapt in converse with these visitors from Heaven turn aside from his exalted interview to explain things as a social courtesy to three astonished fishermen. Really, Jesus is not an actor at the nub of the story but a transfigured Subject or Being: and we do well to remind ourselves that our English word, transfiguration, is metamorphosis in Greek. It is really the tableau which gives the crucial message, the assembling of a transfigured Jesus with Moses and Elijah before these three disciples. As for the word spoken out of a cloud, it only repeats what we heard at his Baptism.

THE LAST DEMONIAC

A LITTLE BOY

All along, Mark has been telling us that Jesus cast out demons, one after another, and what he means to say by these reiterations is only that the Kingdom arrives when Jesus arrives. If we find nothing incredible in demons as a conceivable rare phenomenon, it is because the mind in its pathology may resemble the old demoniacal possession. So this tradition of Jesus curing demoniacs reflects an old belief, as I have said before. And Mark works over these traditions with a strong sense of appropriation and a vigorous originality, never hesitating to invent things which he believes to be appropriate to the faith.

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Demons are assigned to Jesus world, which Mark believes in firmly enough but remotely because it is already far away. It would be much to say that he believes in demons quite as he portrays them, and his handling of these tales is enough to show us that. He manipulates his demoniacs, working like an artist to create his effect, and now, directly after a Transfiguration, he will show us a final case in which Jesus expels a little boys unclean spirit, which is described as deaf and dumb. With his three favorites, he descends the mountain to rejoin the other disciples, who are quarreling with a few scribes in the midst of an excited crowd. Immediately, says Mark, all the crowd, when they saw him, were greatly amazed and ran up to him and greeted him. See how the stereotype recurs one step farther along. Earlier it was the demoniacs who responded to Jesus presence with amazement; now it is the crowd who are amazed to see him. I have mentioned before the distinguished name of CC Torrey, late of Yale, who believed that our Greek Gospels were inferior translations of well-written and much earlier Aramaic Gospels of which no fragments remain. Torreys was an effort to place the lost originals very close to Jesus in defiance of the usual view of scholars, and with respect to the amazement of the crowd here at the mere sight of Jesus, he substitutes the word excitement, drawing on the Aramaic which he supplies. The crowd is excited over a boy whose convulsions the disciples couldnt cure. Such is Professor Torreys plausible theory, but my own view is that this amazement has been transferred to the crowd by the Evangelist, who is preparing to abandon his demoniac theme. When Jesus inquires of the reason for the argument, one of the crowd replies: Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a dumb spirit, and whenever it seizes him, it dashes him down; and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid; and I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able. (Mark 9,17) A dumb spirit? Mark has described a case of epilepsy without giving it a name, although Matthew in copying this tale calls it epilepsy. That is, he uses a word meaning moon-struck, which names the disease, just as if he had called it the falling sickness. Moon-struck in our sense the boy is not, and we may be sure that Matthew had no more intention of ascribing his epilepsy to a malignant moon than Hippocrates would have done in presence of a seizure like that. Thus he names the disease and in keeping with Marks story motif, he ascribes it to a demon. It is hardly to

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be doubted, then, that these Evangelists do both recognize a distinction between illness and demoniac possession because elsewhere in his tales Mark makes that distinction. Who will doubt that either one of them when falling ill would have summoned the local Hippocrates rather than an exorcist? Of course, I dont mean at all that he wouldnt avail himself of prayer or call in the elders of the church (James 5,14), but he knows the sharp difference between illness and possession, and the epileptic boy he uses for a purpose. When Jesus thus learns from the boys father of his disciples incapacity to heal, he almost gives himself away: O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me. They are almost the words of a god, and they point back to his converse with Moses and Elijah, as if he longs for that beatitude. The Son of Man is weary of humanity and its lack of faith, and yet Mark imparts a human vigor to the words which makes them convincing in their setting. It is one of the several fine touches in this earliest Gospel that make the personality of Jesus impressive. And they brought the boy to him; and when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth. The spirit isnt stupid, merely dumb, and it has recognized the Christ. So vividly has Mark told his tale that it makes him seem an eye-witness. We overhear even the incidental remarks which pass between Jesus and the father of the boy: How long has he had this? From childhood. And it has often cast him into the fire and into the water, to destroy him; but if you can do anything, have pity on us and help us. If you can! All things are possible to him who believes. I believe! Help my unbelief! Artistically, it is very well done. Jesus humanity is expressed amid these revelations as that of a right virile fellow, but notice that belief is suddenly in question here because Mark is addressing the reader in these tales. Jesus then adjures the demon: You deaf and dumb spirit, I command you, come out of him, and never enter him again.

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Such words serve a double purpose. After a wordless outcry when convulsing him terribly, the unclean spirit abandons the boy and Mark abandons the demoniac theme, having achieved his aim. Henceforth, except for passing mention of a stranger who was casting out demons in Jesus Name (!) the theme is dropped, and in a Gospel so crowded with demons initially, we dont meet with another. The Messianic secret has entered on a new phase. In private, Jesus prepares his disciples for the death and Resurrection awaiting the Son of Man. As for the boy, who lay like a corpse afterward, Jesus takes him by the hand and lifts him up and he arose. We have learned to believe in his touch, and here we believe in his power to revive. Whoever fails to see that this raising prefigures Resurrection has misunderstood the high symbolic value of the tale for Mark and for his earliest readers and interpreters.

THE PARABLE OF THE UNCLEAN SPIRIT

In only one of his parables does Jesus speak of unclean and evil spirits apart from any metaphors struck off in the Beelzebub controversy, and the later Synoptists have placed it close to that controversy, probably because they found these things together in Q. It is a memorable parable but lacking in Mark, despite his obsessive concern with demons and demoniacs. How so? Is it because he was unacquainted with Q? (We dont know that). Or is it because he didnt find it useful? Here is the parable: When the unclean spirit has gone out of a man, he passes through waterless places seeking rest, but he finds none. Then he says, I will return to my house from which I came. And when he comes he finds it empty, swept and put in order. Then he goes and brings with him seven other spirits more evil than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first. (Matthew 12,43 Luke 11,24.) We are reminded of the lessons of experience, but what a contrast to the demons of Mark who tremble at the sight of Jesus and call out his name! The vagrant spirit of the parable has gone out of a man we know not why to wander in the wastes. Its departure seems voluntary until we ask for the meaning of the tale because evidently the man had got rid of it himself, or had simply awakened one day to find himself free of it for

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the time being. And free of what, exactly? The returning spirit is out of sight because of course there is no demoniac in view and none to be thought of: the very spirit thinks only of his house which he was pleased to find empty, swept and put in order, and if we believe in its ominous return with a crowd of other spirits, it is because we have inferred some consequence of degradation or evil habit. We know what such relapses mean, and as I say, demoniacs are not to be thought of here. Exorcism is irrelevant to this parable because it has to do with watchfulness, self-care, and the urgent preservation of any new life which may have started up within us lest we lose it and relapse to a worse state than before. William Jamess homely analogy in his chapter on Habit is to the dropping of a ball of yarn we might have been winding up, carefully round and round. Away it rolls and a good deal of winding has to be done over again. In a word, the parable is symbolic. It knows that apart from madness or outright possession our demons exist as habit, weakness, evil inclination and the like, but they are not the tangible spirits conceived of in the old belief, where in the scheme of the primitive Gospel they illustrate the meaning of the Messianic secret. These metaphorical demons of ours know only what we know or what we may remain unconscious of within ourselves. The lucid quality of this parable implies a Teacher who has (it seems) cast off the old belief, and we ask ourselves: Is this the voice of Jesus? For the parable when understood leaves us wary of relapses rather than fearful of demons, whereas the earliest Evangelist gives us a Jesus who is so solidly historical that he shares the superstitions of his age. And we respect this in Mark. If nothing else, we feel the Gothic force of this author despite his manipulated demoniacs. After all, he has only his traditions to go by: he must invent. Whatever actual traffic with demoniacs the Jesus of history may have had we know only by inference. Clashes of some sort are supposable but the cited parable points beyond the rude superstition of the demoniac tales as the Teacher addresses our natural good sense. Unlike the Apostle Paul, with his emphasis on sin and grace, Jesus never addresses men as if they could not.

BLIND BARTIMAEUS
The cure of Blind Bartimaeus just before the Entry into Jerusalem is another of Marks double tales, and one designed to recall

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the blind man of Bethsaida (I see men as trees walking.) We go from beta to beta in bringing this double together and pass from a blind man remembered only by his place to one whose very name is doubled by mention of his father because of course bar-Timaeus names the father. These are hardly accidents of fact which have survived some forty years of Oral Tradition: they are pointed literary contrasts. Of two men receiving insight into the Mystery of Christ, Bartimaeus is the more advanced and he will shortly prove to be the very type of a perfect disciple. The Messianic secret is far more open to Bartimaeus than it was to the groping blind man of Bethsaida, whom Jesus had to lead by hand away from the crowd and cure twice by his primitive methods. Storytelling is at issue here, not a record of two historical events made into legends. For in the Markan development, it is really as if the secret has begun to leak out, despite all Jesus stress on privacy as he instructs the disciples in the Mystery of the Son of Man. We meet Bartimaeus near the end of the journey to Jerusalem. Lets use Goodspeeds elegantly mod translation of this story: And they came to Jericho. As he was leaving town with his disciples and a great crowd, Timaeus son Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting at the roadside. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth he began to cry out, Jesus, you Son of David, take pity on me! Many of the people rebuked him and told him to be still. But he cried out all the louder, You Son of David, take pity on me! Jesus stopped and said, Call him here. And they called the blind man and said to him, Courage now! Get up, he is calling you! And he threw off his coat and sprang to his feet and went up to Jesus. Jesus spoke to him and said, What do you want me to do for you? The blind man said to him, Master, let me regain my sight! Jesus said to him, Go your way. Your faith has cured you. And he immediately regained his sight and followed Jesus along the road. (Mark 10,46.) So then, a blind beggar sitting outside Jericho hears from the crowd that Jesus of Nazareth is passing by. At once he begins to cry out and say, Jesus, you Son of David, have mercy on me! and at once the point is made because this is immediately a Messianic term. Why is it that an expert may stumble here when we, who do not groan beneath a weight of learning, find the matter simple and clear? On the strength of a

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theory Albert Schweitzer denies that the blind man was calling to Jesus. Our nimble Bartimaeus is for him a figure of history and he only wishes to deny that a beggar-in-a-crowd could possibly hail Jesus by a Messianic designation. His whole endeavor is for fact. We are to trust our correctible Gospel for its load of data as long as we know the boundaries of possibility. It is a wonderful approach to exegesis: we can know how it must have been before the Evangelist dare tell us how it was. And whatever does Albert Schweitzer make of the very words which this blind beggar had cried aloud? He was praying! Wrede also blunders here when he denies against all evidence that the words, thou Son of David, are Messianic, and that is absurd. I suppose if pressed the good professor might have replied, Oh, well, yes. Generally, yes, this epithet is Messianic, but not here, not as if there was any broaching of the Messianic secret! He defends his position by an artificial distinction between a transcendent secret involving demons and a lower sort of knowledge. Mark makes no such distinction, and if we miss the intended reference here, we overlook the shrewdness of the Markan scheme. For the Messianic secret is giving way. We have considered how the Syrophoenician woman whose daughter was possessed of a demon knew immediately the whereabouts of Jesus when he was hidden in a house and wished to be left alone. The tale moves beyond outright demoniac recognitions to an implication that some sort of demoniac muttering had given the secret away. The Gestalt is selfevident, and outside the gates of Jericho we meet another version of it. Only, see it, please! As soon as Bartimaeus calls for mercy crying, Jesus, thou Son of David! the crowd will try to shut him up: And many charged him that he should hold his peace: but he cried the more a great deal, Thou Son of David, have mercy on me. (10,48.) The Messianic secret is declared very loudly by a blind beggar, just as the demons used to declare it; and the crowd takes over the function of Jesus, who no longer tries to silence this disclosure: Many of the people rebuked him and told him to be still. One has to concede, certainly, that Son of David is not so openly a Messianic designation as if the beggar had called him the Christ. It is more of a wish, more muted, in that sense, and yet when Jesus pauses to say, Call him here, he has responded to this muted attestation, and in the next action described, he will enter Jerusalem to open and extraordinary Messianic acclaim when the very crowd will cry: Hosanna! Blessed be the Kingdom of our father

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David that is coming! Those who are inclined to side with Schweitzer may ask if Bartimaeus can have been really blind if he threw off his coat and sprang to his feet and went up to Jesus? This doubt appeals to the realists among us but it belongs to a type of misconceived biblical interpretation which would degrade the meaning of a tale in hopes of squeezing out a solid fact. Again and again we have seen it, have we not? All such interpetations, and they are legion, evade the myth. Many of them are plausible but they sprawl. Eventually it dawns on us that our one primitive fact is not the thing we guess at but the Gospel in hand.

PART THREE ENTRY OF CHRIST INTO JERUSALEM

Although Marks narrative is naive, his story is well told. Christ has drawn near Jerusalem for the first time in his prophetic career. He sends two disciples into a village nearby where (and we quote the quaint King James) Ye shall find a colt tied, whereon never man sat. Loose him and bring him. Need we emphasize the Evangelists intention to describe his miraculous foreknowledge? Or is the distinguished Goodspeed right in supposing that Jesus has secretly prepared for his triumphal Entry, a theory that preserves the realism of the detail? Certainly the touch about a colt whereon never man sat is an evidence of myth because a longed-for King enters Zion lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass in the vision of the Prophet Zechariah (9,9). Sacred use requires of the beast an innocence in proof of its fitness for the occasion. A cripple cannot be a priest by the laws of Leviticus, and a lamb devoted to sacrifice must be taken from the best among the flock. Among the fireworshiping Persians, the very fire must be purified in rituals of re-ignition, and if this much even the Gentiles do in their service to God, will the Children of Promise place the Messiah on any old nag? Now Mark makes short work of the Entry proper when he writes: They brought the colt to Jesus and threw their garments on it, and he sat upon it. And many spread their garments on the road, and others spread leafy branches which they had cut from the fields. And those who went before and those who followed cried out, Hosanna! Blessed be he who comes in the name of

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the Lord! Blessed be the Kingdom of our father David that is coming! Hosanna in the highest! ( Mark 11,7.) The Negative argument is that this is a myth which fulfills the vision of Zechariah, and we have reason enough to doubt that Mark knew anything at first hand of the event he reports when we see how much attention is given to the detail of the clairvoyant procuring of an ass. Was that a preparation for what is immediately a spontaneous demonstration? Or has the Evangelist shrewdly diverted us from the poverty of his resources? Given the oracles of Zechariah, Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Lo, your King comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on an ass (9,9.) we have a motive for myth as well as an opportune suggestion, and for a fact there are several details in the Passion story which are foreshadowed in Zechariah. Moreover, the case for myth is strengthened as we bear in mind that the Entry of Jesus into Jerusalem is invariably the Palm Sunday liturgy. Our legend, which is somewhat loosely packed with filler, does nonetheless in lumps of bare assertion make its claim on history, and if that claim cannot be made good in any sense: if Gospel legend is dubious as such, we lose the distinctness of the offered fact (assuming fact) in blurring the tale. A vaguely remembered Jesus is not especially worth knowing. If merely indistinct, why should we care more for Jesus than for Zeno of Citium or Pythagoras? If the tradition lacks its edge, there is no distinctiveness in its truth. Can we say nothing for the legend on its positive side? Or does the implied claim of fact carry us no further than a question? It isnt fragments we arrive at in our discriminating study, whether of myth or history, because each single reference is in reference to the whole Gospel. Touch myth and extend it, touch history and extend that. I mean: we extend the reach of one or the other at the merest touch by a sort of surmise. These two are interpenetrated and inseparable as we see in the Entry tale where the implied claim is at once historical and Messianic, intertwined. Our view of the Markan fact here is a test case, therefore. Nowhere else in the Gospels is the claim of historical fact intrinsically stronger than here: not for the Sermon on the Mount or the Visit to Nazareth or Peters Confession or the Journey through Samaria. I say, intrinsically because the Baptism of Jesus or his crucifixion under Pontius

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Pilate connects his tale with known historical figures. Alone of Gospel tales the Entry of Jesus must be classed with these external facts of Baptism and crucifixion on the strength of its specific claim and its definite location. We know it occurred during Passover season at the gates of Jerusalem, and we know it for an event of high significance. And of course it is connected to the week in which this prophet perished. Otherwise, the many legends of the Gospels are never so honestly connected to time and place. But whereas Jesus Baptism rests on the rough-clad Baptist for its historical link and the crucifixion recalls a Pontius Pilate who is remembered by Josephus and others, the Entry into Jerusalem has no footing in known history outside the very legend. It is extraordinarily bold in this respect, but its association with ritual is troubling because ritual belongs to cult and we know how these ancient cults could furnish idols and apparitions, tales and parades for the gods. Cults love ritual and your liturgy is a fine way of pretending. Just the other day I saw a photo of a miniature Celtic cult wagon cast in bronze which was found somewhere in Austria and is dated to the seventh century before Christ. Around the platform of a four-wheeled chariot stand warriors and priestly attendants. A goddess of giant strength upholds a votive vessel amidst her retinue. Altogether the scene is one of parade: it is handsomely executed. If not as superb as the best of the Viking bronzes, it goes beyond the crude work of the early Middle Ages. Six hundred years before the time of Christ we have thus preserved in bronze a pagan ritual enactment in which a mythical drama becomes real, becomes history in the eyes of townsfolk or worshipers before whom the ritual is played. It is not surprising that the Negative argument will see in the Entry of Christ into Jerusalem just that same sort of thing. Yet the Gospel tale in its brevity does not suggest a god or even a divine figure but a man: Jesus mounts the unridden colt and a shout goes up. Those of his retinue who stroll around the jogging beast cry out with a certain easy Oriental exuberance to the astonished pilgrims streaming into the city: Hosanna! Blessed be the Kingdom of our father David that is coming! In truth, this could be liturgical also. It is like the moment in a Polish Oberammergau when the Christus rides out of a rural chapel seated on a donkey and someone of the crowd will shout aloud: There goes Christ! Only, in the legend given by Mark the cry of Hosanna! is raised and

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Hosanna is an appeal to the king for help: Eastern kings in ancient time were Messiahs or sacred or in Babylon or Egypt outright gods, and even the Caesars borrowed the pretence of divinity with a certain irony, I suppose. Hosanna! A public recognition of Jesus as Messiah is shown in the acclamation when many spread their garments in the way: and others cut down branches off the trees, and strawed them in the way. They did that because they were welcoming their King to Zion according to the legend. We bring the scene to mind without knowing what happened in detail. Whether Jesus jumped on the colt or was ceremoniously lifted onto its back, whether the unridden beast pranced excitedly and had to be tamed by a lordly manner all that sort of thing belongs to guesswork. Unless such speculative detail is handled by a gifted artist who happens also to be a scholar (such a writer was Ernest Renan) mere Hollywood is the result because we have only imagined ourselves at the scene, as if that had been preserved in traditions. The scene has not been preserved: it is imagined. Our sense that the legend grew out of particulars of this life reflects the credit we tend to accord the Gospels, but it is the given legend which creates our sense of Jesus distinctiveness and individuality. I dont mean by this that the legend carries no fact because it is our belief that it does, but whatever there may be of fact in the legend is available to us in the legend as given: not otherwise. We cannot pluck facts from legend as we pick an apple from a tree: We take the apple by accepting the tree. A good legend is good for that, but of course it all rests on belief. And the grand consideration remains that the insecurity of our knowledge of Jesus in history is set over against the Express Legend and its rich portrayal of the Galilean Messiah. Marks spare account of the Entry has been elaborated by the copying Synoptists who drew from their imaginations. Matthew gives the question of the hour when a stirred city is roused to ask, Who is this? and reply is given: This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee. (Matthew 21,11.) A simple enough answer, it seems historical in character. Matthew is describing his own understanding of how people saw Jesus on that occasion. It is very Jewish and is not, as such, supernatural. Thus has the very tradition understood Jesus retrospectively although Matthew, writing half a century afterwards, had no idea who said what on that occasion except for knowing what the occasion required.

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Then Luke, who is especially fond of legend, brings Pharisees into the scene where they serve him as puppets. After the crowds joyous cry of Hosanna! they bid Jesus, Teacher, rebuke your disciples! and he answers by saying, I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out. Brave, poignant words in season! For what the Gospel thus expresses (and the liturgy) is the spiritual elevation of this modest Christ, and his deserving of the tribute, and thats Lukes intention. What there may be of precise fact in these details we cannot know. All has been written by inspiration and this shows rather beautifully how the later Synoptists have added to Marks simpler account. And then, as written only in Lukes Gospel, Jesus wept over Jerusalem saying, Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! The whole Passion of Christ is foreshadowed in these inspired touches, but retrospective prophecy is at work when the Third Evangelist supplies a dreadful forecast of the siege of Jerusalem: The days shall come upon you when your enemies will cast up a bank about you and... dash you to the ground, you and your children within you. (Luke 19,43.) The prophecy had been fulfilled long years before the Evangelist composed this scene. It is artistry that is at work when the sorrows of Christ are set in contrast to the looming destruction of the Holy City. What is more fitting than a forecast of this awful doom uttered by a rejected Messiah? O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not! (Matthew 23,37 Luke 13,34.) This would imply a good many endeavors on his part to gather the children of Jerusalem over the years, whereas our scholars suppose that his ministry was brief: a matter of months instead of years. Bultmann thinks the words of this Lament are drawn from a myth of Wisdom who figures as a goddess in the Apocrypha, a Hagia Sophia who once dwelt on earth and called to men to follow her, but all in vain. We are reminded of an extent to which the legend describing this life has fallen back upon invention, but how far does that go? Already DF Strauss had doubted the occasion of the Entry into Jerusalem, and so did Alfred Loisy. Bultmann follows in the same learned tradition which denies that the Entry of Christ happened as the

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legend gives it. Unwilling to take it for history, these scholars seem to think it has no importance to the Gospel fundamentally and shows only the tendency of a later tradition to ascribe a Messianic character to Jesus. One has to concede that this acclaimed Entry despite its Messianic pretension is ignored by Paul, who stresses a newness of life deriving from a veritable incorporation of our being into a Living Christ upon acceptance of his Gospel in faith. It was surely not the rumor of any trumpery parade that showed the Apostle how Jesus had acknowledged his Messianic dignity. Only, let us concede that what is absent from Pauls version of the Christ myth may yet be essential to the Gospel as history if it be that. This is what I strive to establish here, not to refute the Negative argument but to define the evidence. For Rudolf Bultmann, then, to take the legend of the Entry for history is absurd because it is absurd to suppose that Jesus intended to fulfill the prophecy of Zechariah or to suppose that the crowd recognized the ass as the Messiahs beast of burden. And it would be absurd to suppose that. A crowd recognizing an ass? What our legend tells us as the main thing is that Jesus entered Jerusalem to such acclaim and recognition, to joyous cries of Hosanna! and the waving of branches (Johns Gospel says palm branches): that he entered Jerusalem distinctly in a Messianic parade and that he went on shortly afterward, whether that day or next, to the Cleansing of the Temple by driving from the precincts those who bought and sold there. Now how is that absurd? There is nothing here to warrant an assumption that a crowd has acknowledged its Messiah by a spontaneous induction based upon the beast he sat on: that is Dr. Bultmanns figment. The legend reports only (as fact) that Jesus acknowledged his Messianic dignity by an Entry which was remarkably public and plain in the Symbol enacted. Now did he or did he not? That depends on the truth of the legend and this we do not solve except by judgment. How such event came about, or why it came about if it did, or what conditions prevailed, we cannot know in detail. Legend is frustrating to the historian in this respect. It has no interest in unadorned fact and offers its tale as an expression of meaning. Pro or con, our judgment of the legend rests on sincerest belief. As a churchman, Rudolf Bultmann is unwilling to dissolve the legend of the Entry into sheerest nothing, as his principles require. How find any value or substance in the legend if the main thing be denied? But he will give the believers a sop by writing:

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It is conceivable that in the Synoptics it was not the inhabitants of Jerusalem that made up the shouting crowd, but the pilgrims going up to the feast, or alternatively, the disciples. And the report of Jesus entry into Jerusalem with a crowd of pilgrims full of joy and expectation (at the Kingdom of God that was now coming) could provide the historical basis which became a Messianic legend under the influence of Zechariah 9,2.21 A substitute, a mere conjecture, replaces the ruined legend, and yet the substitute resembles the legend because it has no other ground. Apart from the legend, what excuse? A meager possibility has been conceived to patch up a vacancy, but how does he treat this legend which provides him his patch? An archaeologist coming on a buried find applies a soft brush to wipe the sand away. Not so Bultmann who in denying the Messianic gesture crumbles away the very feature of the legend which gives it point and significance: it is absurd. And I insist that this destroys the given legend, but well and good, if he must do so in the name of truth. Only, instead of leaving it alone let it lie there, Dr. Bultmann! he turns back to the repudiated thing and digs around in it for something to affirm. Is this to arrive at historical knowledge? It is surely the Express Legend undisfigured, not replaced, in which any possible fact is to be apprehended. We dont extract a portrait from a stained glass window by smashing the glass and obtaining thereby a photograph. Or as in the case of Gainsboroughs Blue Boy, an X-ray of which reveals a shadowy male face, a crudely painted face beneath its perfect charm, one doesnt get a historical Blue Boy by scraping off the finished portrait to get to the face which the X-ray exposes. My example, of course, is a mere analogy and not a piece of logic, but what these mere examples stress is the invaluable fusion of something prior (whatever it was) in the achieved expression. My premise, my conviction after many years, is that legend cannot be penetrated. Yet if there be reason to affirm a nucleus of fact, we must go beyond such vague conjectures as in our example Bultmann settles for. That whole analysis of his (which might conceivably be true, might be correct historically) does nonetheless reject the prime thing given in the Legend, its own assertion that a Messianic Entry happened. Yet

21. The History of the Synoptic Tradition (NY: Harper & Row,1972. p. 262.)

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coupled with the Cleansing of the Temple which follows upon it, it seems a perfectly adequate reason to explain why Jesus was crucified. So we are brought to the rich value of the given text. It is our one conceivable source for any history given in the Expression vs. a source to be discarded in favor of a plausible conjecture. When sifting for history, avoid crass replacements and educated guess-work because we do not know what any given legend may preserve in its retentive expression. To the Negative critics we concede that we cannot say for sure that any Gospel legend is not a myth, whereas we surely know that a mere assumption of a fact which is supposed to lie behind the distortions of a legend boils down to guess-work. Given, that legends do arise, as all without exception do believe, or that real history is conveyed by those legends we distinguish from myth, we are impoverished if we forsake the character of the legend. Jesus, then, if he be in the Gospels at all, may have been expressed there with a distinctness and a completeness that our skeptics have not imagined.

CURSING OF THE FIG TREE

Now to my mind Jesus Entry into Jerusalem and his Cleansing of the Temple stand up as fact, presumably, and no quantity of associated myth can vitiate our sense of a genuine history conveyed by this tale, granting that we can only believe it; but so do those who reject it only believe to the contrary. An affirmative belief rests on the very legend which is skimpily told in the earliest account (for whatever reason) and elaborated by Matthew and Luke, but the first fact is that it is there. Its meaning is expressed in the myth of a rejoicing Zion aroused to welcome its longdesired Davidic King, but yet a myth transformed by the later event: Ride on, ride on, in majesty! In lowly pomp, ride on to die. I see no fatal wandering into error as we continue to consider both points of view, the mythical as well as the historical. Nor do I see evasion or fear of decision in allowing full play to the Negative argument (or really to the dialectic of this book). For the Negative argument is a dragon with seven heads and not easily put down. Both viewpoints are possible. Each has its reason behind it and both can be carried through. Scholars may hold the opinion that the pre-Markan tradition

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(which they reconstruct hypothetically) joined the Entry and the Cleansing in a single tale and, in effect, a single act. The reason would be that Matthew and Luke, working independently of one another but each drawing on certain common sources, tell us that Jesus having thus entered Jerusalem went next to the Temple and drove away the moneychangers and all their traffic, and spoke in his wrath those memorable words about a house of prayer and a den of thieves. Whereas Mark says simply that Jesus went into the Temple: and when he had looked round at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the Twelve. (11,11.) After acclamation, retirement. You need your anti-climax as well as proper preparation, artistically, and Mark has achieved a greater psychological realism respecting the Entry by separating off the tale of the Cleansing. In between, he inserts an overnight stay in the village where Jesus lodged that week and the strange tale of The Cursing of the Fig Tree, which sets the mind a puzzle: On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. And seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see if he could find anything on it. When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season for figs. And he said to it, May no one ever eat fruit from you again. And his disciples heard it. (11,12.) Then comes the Cleansing of the Temple, after which the authorities are afraid to arrest him because of the multitude. Another night is passed in Bethany; then As they passed by in the morning, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots. And Peter remembered and said, Master, look! The fig tree which you cursed has withered. (11,20.) Whereupon Jesus speaks the famous words about a faith that moves mountains. Taken seriously, the cursing of a fig tree out of season is an irrational act, and even downright nonsensical, but this Evangelist has on several occasions, had we but noticed them, shown that the mind of Jesus is to be set apart from the ordinary. We saw it earlier ourselves, to mention only this example, when Jesus urged Jairus and his wife in all seriousness to tell no one about his reviving the twelve-year-old girl despite a crowd of mourners waiting suspensefully outside. In a word, Jesus unseasonable curse is a Markan device, and no doubt by our

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standards a crude one, but it serves his design when afterward the fig tree is found to be withered away. Or was it the same tree that Simon Peter noticed in the morning? If the doubt be allowed, the story can be taken realistically by all who allow Jesus his peculiar behaviors, as of course many do. Not for the first time, we notice in such a thing as this a slight concession on the part of the Evangelist to our possible doubt of the miracle. Mark is the only Evangelist who shows a kind of care for his legends which enables us to take them on other terms. Effectively, the purpose of the Fig Tree tale, besides its symbolic value, is to entangle us however briefly in a wonderment about this Jesus. For even if we believe (as those believers did) that he could do anything, and might well do anything at any time, we are diverted somewhat from those other larger and public events in wondering why he did this little thing. So frequently and so successfully does Mark divert us from what would otherwise count as a main focus that we must see it as a deliberate technique. Had this Evangelist a doubt about the Entry into Jerusalem or the Cleansing of the Temple, or did he know of such doubts? For it goes without saying that one of the several heads of the aforesaid dragon finds opportunity to put in an appearance here.

SCHWEITZER ON THE CURSING OF THE FIG TREE

Now we might always care to say, in keeping with the Negative argument, that a Jesus who cursed a fig tree in the manner described never lived. The tale is then imaginary but what can it mean? Was it misunderstood by the Evangelist or understood so crudely by its primitive inventor that we lack the means of grasping something so outlandish? Considered solely in itself (apart from the attached moral) the parable is not a story about a faith that moves mountains. It tells only of Jesus disappointment at finding no fruit amid the leaves of a fruitbearing tree and then, most unfairly, of a penalty on the tree. But Mark is not literal-minded although realistic in his portrayal, and going by the best interpretation I have come across, the disappointing tree must signify an Israel which had not borne fruit for Jesus and whose fate it was to be blasted. Whether or not it was conceived after the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple (in 65-70 AD) I dont attempt to say, but it seems so. It will have been written from a later Christian perspective.

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Given his importance to the whole question of a historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzers realistic view of the episode is worth considering. For really we must ask ourselves how far to go in affirming the facts within the legend if we mean to affirm them? Schweitzer trips up here but there may be a reason for this. We arrive at no principle in noticing his view but the example is a good one or, as we say, instructive. For Dr. Schweitzer is emphatic. As an interpreter he embraces the common opinion that we can see through the opaque legends of these Gospels, and he takes the story literally as far as Jesus curse is concerned. In a thesis offered for his medical diploma, The Psychiatric Study of Jesus, he defends the sanity of a man who curses a tree in a state of delusion. The book is published in that remarkable year, 1913, when so many of his things came out, including his revision of the Quest in which, at last, he takes up the whole array of Negative critics and disposes of them like a Samson among the Philistines. It was a time of seasonal change in the course of an extraordinary life, and much has to be excused to simple overstrain in a man who had been so given into his life and was now on the verge of tearing himself away. Farewell, old organs of Europe which he loved with all his heart. A newly-christened physician, a middle-aged bridegroom, preacher, author, co-editor of an edition of Bachs music, in fact, a famous man: and he was giving up his place in that society. Goodbye, father, a pastor-father who had given him his beloved Jesus. Goodbye to a mother on the platform who refused to wave good-bye, disapproving a decision which she saw as a waste of his talent. What awaited him in Africa was a dug-out canoe and a journey up river. Like his famous Quest and the book on Paul, his Psychiatric Study is another survey, in this case of a few psychiatric books such as The Insanity of Jesus by Charles Binet-Sangl, MD. Schweitzer is aware that psychiatry may seem to have a case here, and he remembers out of his learning that DF Strauss had once considered Jesus from our point of view a fanatic... in full possession of all his faculties. On the other hand and in a view not seriously considered, the irrational aspect of the Gospel tale might be put down to the hazards of an oral tradition. For instance, The Parable of the Barren Fig Tree is found in Lukes Gospel (13,6) where it is only a story Jesus tells, but Schweitzer has no interest in a theory which would make Jesus cursing of a fig tree a mere parable. He holds doggedly to the cursing, although of course without any actual miracle. Was Jesus subject to irascible moods and arbitrary cursings, then?

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Surely, if he cursed a fig tree out of season... But Dr. Schweitzer has a theory to explain this and demands that we acknowledge the fact: We must... retain without question the historical kernel that Jesus pronounced the curse over a fig tree on which he had vainly sought to find nourishment.22 In fairness, he may have meant this only as asseveration, but he follows up these arbitrary words with a revision of the tale. We learn that Jesus condemns this tree not to withering but to unfruitfulness to all eternity. (p. 71) Why not to withering, since the story tells of withering? Schweitzer sticks to the exact words of Jesus (May no one ever eat fruit from you again,) and pits them against the story from which they are taken. We are reminded of Goodspeeds interpretation of the Feeding of the 5,000 by these wily devices. Each scholar rejects the intent of a legend while pretending to give the fact which inspired it, but of course this is backwards logic. Was it not the legend which gave rise to the thing believed in? The fact is guesswork. There may not have been a fact, this fact, at all. Schweitzer discerns the historical kernel of this tale because he understands the reason for the curse, a reason of which he himself, in a much earlier work, is the discoverer. Remember that his Jesus is an eschatological prophet with his very own Messianic secret (Das Messianittsgeheimnis). We have then, once more, a historical Jesus who has come to Jerusalem to offer himself as a ransom, believing that his death will usher in the Messianic Age. Also, we know from a surviving Jewish apocalypse, The Book of Enoch, that the Messianic Age is to be a time of most abundant fruitfulness. So then for Dr. Schweitzers theory: Jesus had expected this leafy tree to offer him figs irrespective of the season because of the nearness of the Messianic Age and in consideration of his secret identity. As he interprets the state of mind of Jesus, he falls into the language of moral reproach: This tree is to remain barren because it deceived by the richness of its foliage the unrecognized future Messiah in his earthly humility and hunger. Unfortunately, this interpretation lacks innocence. A legend which makes little sense has been exchanged for an interpretation which makes no sense at all. Does anyone suppose that by such methods and on such

22. The Psychiatric Study of Jesus (Boston: The Beacon Press, p. 70.)

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assumptions real history has been arrived at? Schweitzers stark result has come of peeling away the accretions of credulity and wishfulness. As a type of interpretation, it is rationalist, like the view of that scholar who thought that Jesus might have cured a cataract by scraping it off with his fingernail. The facts about Jesus are supposed to be lying near the surface of the tale, and one gets to them by a combination of wise excisions and bold hypotheses. In the Cursing of the Fig Tree the fact is plainly in view and to extract it our interpreter cuts half the story away, yet the stray fact that Jesus once cursed a tree because he was hungry, considered in itself, is comical, like Shaws asking if Jesus swore when he stepped on a nail in the carpenters shop. That is a heavy price to pay for a fact which exists only as a conjecture based on old legends. I wonder, though, if yet another factor is at work in the mind of this complicated man. Helene Bresslau, his gifted wife, is a Jew, daughter of a famed Jewish historian whose Sunday evening at homes Schweitzer had been attending, no doubt to his profit. An attractive woman, Helene set her cap for Schweitzer and on learning of his intentions trained to be a nurse. Schweitzer tells nothing of this. He is famously tight-lipped about all family matters. From later evidence it seems he may have disappointed her (I am thinking of the gossip of the natives), but that is irrelevant here. Had he taken the view that Jesus cursing of a fig tree was a later Christian parable told against Israel, he must have been pained. Instead, by taking the words of Jesus literally he gained a three-fold advantage. For one, he obtained yet another solid fact in Jesus historical reality while saving a piece of the story. Also, he found a clever use for his theory of the Messianic secret. For a third, he spared himself having to believe that Jesus could have been portrayed cursing Israel, even symbolically. That would be out of the question if he is really cursing a tree.

AARONS ROD METAPHOR

So we have three main declarations of fact in these Synoptics which make a tripod on which any history of Jesus rests: his Baptism by John the Entry into Jerusalem his crucifixion under Pontius Pilate.

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That, our Gospels declare, is history. And of this tripod, two legs are supported by connection to known historical figures, namely, John the Baptist and his prophetic career and the notorious Roman Procurator Pontius Pilate. The third fact asserted stands on its own. We have only the Gospels for any record of it, and yet they invite a sort of credit because of these other connections. Compare Marks dance of Salome, which is a folkish melodrama conveying the fact of Johns execution by Herod Antipas as Josephus reports it. No one questions Josephus on this. That disciples borrowed an unridden colt in the manner described reads like fiction, no doubt, but that Jesus entered Jerusalem to Messianic acclamations is ostensibly the fact. A critic might ask why I weaken my case by insisting on an Entry, considered as fact, which goes beyond external attestation? But if you remove this Messianic Entry despite its bold public claim what do the other facts amount to? You have the rumor of an unrecognized Messiah arising from a desert baptism and one more Roman crucifixion under Pontius Pilate. Take away the Entry as representing the character of Gospel fact and, in effect, you deny that these Gospels as they stand tell anything worth having of the Messianic character of Jesus. None of which, to be sure, suffices as proof because I prove nothing here, but given for the moment our tripod of main facts asserted, we have as plausible history concerning Jesus: His Baptism by John. A prophetic career in Galilee Disciples (followers) (Herods assassination of the Baptist) Entry at festival time in Jerusalem: a Messianic gesture Cleansing of Temple Christ before Pilate Roman crucifixion (quelling riot) Observe in the very repetition here how our tripod facts have sprouted and blossomed like Aarons Rod. Such is the way of the mind in composing its thought, and I repeat a formula which I have used once before: It is not fragments we arrive at in our discriminating study, whether of myth or of history, because each particular of Gospel Tale is in reference to the entire Gospel. Touch myth and extend it, touch history and extend that. With due regard for the Negative argument and all possible respect for the destructive analyses of a Bultmann and his peers, we do arrive at affirmative thought.

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This tripod of basic factual assertion is, as I stress, an expansible sprouting nucleus which again we can illustrate by a further repetition. We have as plausible history, suddenly, first that when he was baptized in the river Jordan by the prophet John, he performed an act of repentance in preparation for Judgment Day and the imminent Kingdom of God. Afterwards, following a desert ordeal, he took up a ministry as a known Galilean whose native village, Nazareth, we have no other record of, at the time. The legends give Capernaum, however, as his chosen dwelling. This same Jesus uttered Teachings having a peculiar charm and force, but distinctly of a Hebrew type, really as if he had been a provincial rabbi, and Rabbi he was often called. This body of Teachings is no mere rumor, no sort of walking on water or raising of the dead. We open our Gospels to discover what they are. Transmitted by the early disciples and passed on by word of mouth, they have been modified, supplemented, altered or misunderstood, but we do actually have them, and in thus supplementing the skeletal facts given from Baptism to Crucifixion, this tremendous fact of Q rears like a distant Gibralter which it will take some years yet for the rains to wash away. It is hard to imagine who could have put forth teachings so extensive in behalf of a fostered myth, and we have the testimony of a gossipy and unreliable Bishop Papias, once of Hierapolis in what is today Turkey, that the disciple Matthew composed the oracles of the Lord in the Hebrew tongue. It is possible that some sort of earlier document like that served as a basis for Q. On the other hand, to take a modern example, Shaw gives a complete pamphlet, The Revolutionists Handbook, as a supplement to a single play. Given his wit and his comedic penchant, this is by no means an unserious, trifling work. Or take various passages from the Gospels themselves (such as Matthew 11,2-30 Luke 7,18-35, missing in Mark and drawn, therefore, from Q) where John sends to Jesus from prison to ask, Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another? Some of the most beautiful words of Jesus are contained in this passage, but every line of it on either version may be understood as fabricated on the myth hypothesis. There is no proof of history in a passage like that which contains indications of myth.

GROWTH IN MYTH
In a classic article in the Encyclopedia Britannica, Baron von

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Hgel found that the Fourth Gospel had seven accounts in common with the Synoptics, although they have not very much in common and are very differently treated. They are, briefly, those of: The Baptist and Jesus Cleansing of the Temple Cure of the Centurions son Feeding of the Multitude Walking on Water Anointing at Bethany Entry into Jerusalem This list of von Hgels reminds us of a well-known tradition in Gospel interpretation which teaches that the Fourth Gospel has replaced the many miracles of Christ with Seven Signs. These are: The Wedding at Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine. Cure of the Centurions son Cure of the Paralytic Feeding of the Multitude Walking on Water Cure of the Man Born Blind The Raising of Lazarus There is some overlap here. Some of the miracles recorded in the Synoptics are repeated in John as Signs, but the differences are immense. The whole character of the Fourth Gospel is different from that of the Synoptics, and whatever else it may mean, this difference reveals a growth in myth. Read straight through, John achieves that cumulative effect we feel when reading one of the greater dialogues of Plato. It is enough to kindle the soul. Not to say that John is another Plato; he falls below him in philosophy, and his superb artistry is Hellenistic and lacks the classical restraint. Some of the authors changes, however, he makes for the purpose of serving his own design. Notice, for instance, in von Hgels list the order in which those tales are given, where soon after the Baptism of Jesus a Cleansing of the Temple occurs. Only much later comes the Entry into Jerusalem. Did Jesus cleanse the Temple twice? John has simply changed his story around. A devout mind entirely, he is an unscrupulous historian. This strange and mystical author, a mind rich, purposive, serious, deep and subtle, has no intention of recopying Mark. He sees what Mark has done, and he sees that he can do it better. This is

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genius. He sees how the very presentation of the Christ may be transformed. I lay down my life, says this Johannine Son of Man, and says it openly to the Jews before even entering Jerusalem. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This charge I have received from my Father. (John 10,15.) The peculiar drama in which he lays down his life to take it up again, or the so-called Passion of Christ, is here characterized by a rare elevation and serenity which is unique to the Fourth Gospel. And here it is, I must say, that John achieves his incomparable effect. Nothing I know of in world literature ranks alongside it in this respect; nothing to approach the mystical intensity which John achieves in the very process of transforming and creating his own myth of the Christ. And this is one of his reasons for changing the story around. A violent act such as the Cleansing of the Temple and its civic consequence mustnt be allowed to disturb the poignancy of Johns concluding and triumphant themes. Yet the Cleansing is useful to the author (we mentioned it earlier) also in disposing of the Sign of Jonah. After making a whip of cords, he drives away the sheep and the oxen and the money-changers, pours out the coins and overturns their tables. His disciples remember that it is written, Zeal for thy House will consume me, and he is asked by the Jews for a Sign to justify this violence. It is then that he says, Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up, displacing the Sign of Jonah as a forecast of Resurrection. I like the whip of cords which Mr. JM Robertson thinks to derive from the Egyptian Osiris as he is painted on the walls of the pyramids. When I was a little boy, my father got hold of some leather thongs out of which he braided a whip complete with its own thick handle, and flicking this whip he tried to spin my little wooden top. Johns detail of the whip is a nice touch. Notice, however, that the Jews have demanded a Sign of Jesus when he speaks of the Temple of his body. Only seven miracles are told of in this Gospel, but there are surely more than Seven Signs to be found here, of which the Crucifixion is supreme: I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me, this Savior proclaims, and this he said signifying what death he should die. (John 12,32.) The whole Gospel is a Gospel of Signs. Yet this final Evangelist doesnt make much of Jesus triumphal Entry into a city long since destroyed. Jesus finds a young ass and the crowds cry Hosannah (John citing Zechariah, as Matthew does) but his

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disciples did not understand this at first. (John 12,16.) Only after he is glorified do they remember that this has been done to him. Thus John subordinates the Entry to other symbols which govern the inauguration of the Redeemers Passion. One of these, the Resurrection of Lazarus, will take us as deep as the sea and immerse us in the symbol. Another and a lesser symbol is the Anointing of Christ, which von Hgel mentions in his list of seven similarities. This invites comparison with the Synoptics to bring out the extraordinary freedom of Johns use of traditions. We deal with the Johannine version first (The last shall be first) and then look back to earlier and different anointing legends. Although these legends are unmiraculous entirely, yet they belong to the myth of Christ. Even if it be true that Jesus was once anointed in some such manner, a comparison with John will bring out very plainly a growth in myth as we pass beyond the Synoptic threshold into a sphere where every aspect of the primitive Gospel is deliberately transformed.

THE ANOINTING OF CHRIST

All four Gospels tell that Jesus was anointed by a woman at a dinner, but only Matthew and Mark tell quite the same story, evidently because Matthew has absorbed the earlier tale although slightly abbreviating it. As with certain other tales, however the Calling of the Four, the Rejection at Nazareth Luke offers a version of his own, a somewhat elaborate version about a woman and a dinner, but retaining from Mark a suggestive clue: the name Simon is kept for the host as given in the earlier account. Johns version shares details with both Synoptic versions, as it seems, but he is closer to Mark in placing the Anointing before Jesus death as a sort of preparation for his burial. John is the one who makes the most of this Anointing because he is able to weave it deeply into his flowing tale. He is more compact than Luke, yet imparts a greater richness to the story, and he sticks closer to the primitive tradition in associating the Anointing of Christ with the Passion. It is Johns version which has given an immortal stamp to the tale, and although its value suffers out of context, like that of a jewel pried out of its setting, here it is complete: Six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. There they made him a supper; Martha served, but Lazarus was one of those

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at table with him. Mary took a pound of costly ointment of pure nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (he who was to betray him) said, Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred denarii and given to the poor? This he said, not that he cared for the poor but because he was a thief, and as he had the money box he used to take what was put into it. Jesus said, Let her alone, let her keep it for the day of my burial. The poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me. (John 12.) Now Bethany is where Jesus stayed for the Passover, a village near Jerusalem, and we meet this name in Mark when they drew near to Jerusalem... and Bethany at the Mount of Olives. (It was when Jesus sent off two disciples for a colt). By contrast, John has Jesus coming in from a wilderness village called Ephraim (11,54) instead of coming down from Jericho, and coming earlier, seemingly on the Friday before Palm Sunday. Its not impossible, of course, that this last Evangelist knew more than Mark did, and certainly he is giving more details, but it raises a question of the value of the Fourth Gospel as an eye-witness account. There is a very strong old tradition tracing the Fourth Gospel to the recollections of the Apostle John who in his extreme old age has a sort of long-winded way of repeating himself, and one has to make a decision about this. One has to see it as historical fact or as a literary device having its own peculiar effectiveness. I see it as a device, but thanks to details like those in the Anointing of Jesus, others may not agree. The learned JB Lightfoot, once Lord Bishop of Durham, could write in 1893 when defending this Gospel, That the narrative bears on its face the credentials of its authenticity. It is precise, circumstantial, natural in the highest degree. Inference. It is the work of an eyewitness.23 And even today there are critics, a few, who would place this Gospel as the earliest of the Four. But let us consider these details. Jesus has come to this supper a couple of days before his Entry, but at whose house? By inference (although never stated) it is the home of Lazarus and his sisters, Mary and Martha. Only Lazarus is named as one of those at table with him, for instance. Only Martha is mentioned

23. Biblical Essays (London 1893 p. 125.)

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as serving, and Mary finds her pound of nard (=spikenard) wherewith to bathe the Lords feet. Were we omniscient, as of course we cannot be, we might instantly recognize in the doings of these sisters and even in their names traits borrowed from a little tale in Luke where Martha prepares a supper for Jesus (she serves) while her sister Mary sits at his feet. (Luke 10,38.) It is Mary who is praised for doing that in this Lukan tale whereas Martha is admonished when she asks him to make her sister help: Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; one thing is needful. Very effective and very Oriental, I would say; a favorite text of pastors: One thing is needful. With some allowance for Lazarus as a sort of lay figure at a feast, Johns tale might nevertheless be that of an eye-witness participant recollecting the matter in his old age, but its curious that he has given us a family in Bethany so wholly unknown to the Synoptic tradition when he has described Jesus earlier as loving Martha and her sister and Lazarus. Nor does Jesus stay there for Passover. They are willing to feed him and his disciples, and Mary wastes a pound of costly ointment of pure nard when anointing his feet, yet he will spend that week in the house (Mark says) of Simon the leper or else, possibly, Simon the potter, as CC Torrey insisted when comparing the Aramaic. It is Luke who furnishes the name of Lazarus, and he alone of the Synoptists, in his Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. This is one of his three great parables where, of course, that Lazarus must be ascribed to the imagination of its author. It is the Lazarus of the parable who has given his name to the lazaretto, a sort of hospital for lepers and others loathesomely afflicted, but in the parable he is just a poor beggar who lay at a Rich Mans gate where only the dogs licked his sores. He dies and then in course of time the Rich Man dies and finds himself in anguish in this flame. He lifts up his eyes in Hell and seeing Lazarus above nestled in the bosom of Father Abraham begs him to send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue! A great gulf is fixed between them, it cannot be done; so then he prays that Abraham might at least send Lazarus back from the dead to warn his five brothers, all of whom stand in need of such warning, and Father Abraham makes reply in a tremendous dialogue. (Luke 16,29.) We are of course considering the Johannine borrowing here, and we recall that it is Lazarus who is raised from the dead in the Fourth Gospel. It is a tale unique to that Gospel, but in the features described, it shares with Lukes parable a Lazarus who is associated with Resurrection.

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Another point answering to Bishop Lightfoots qualities to be found in John (precise, circumstantial, and in the highest degree natural) is that the Evangelist mentions by name Judas Iscariot and his pious wish that the price of the ointment might have been given to the poor. Replying to this, Jesus speaks of the day of his burial: The poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me. And the precise form of these words (in John 12,8 Matthew 26,11) may be evidence of a borrowing from Matthews Gospel in the opinion of the late BW Bacon, of Yale, from whose interpretation I have drawn. It is some years since I have read Bacon on this, but I remember that he mentioned with some disdain the authors idea of having Mary wipe Jesus feet with her hair, but how like a loving woman, I say of this tender gesture and the house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment, writes John. The beauty of the gesture is its intimacy; it is so very suggestive of love, and of nearness, but there is yet something discerning in the Professors squeamishness: there is an atmosphere in the Fourth Gospel which is sometimes much too close. A great masterpiece, yes, but the authors rare achievement is purchased at a price. Artistically, the womans perfumed hair helps displace the scene at the tomb, where the dead mans stench has been spoken of. The Fourth Evangelist has to get rid of this Lazarus whom he has summoned from his rotten grave and who must one day return there. What should he do with the fellow in presence of the Resurrected Christ? This is why the man who was raised from the dead speaks no word to Jesus at this feast, makes no gesture, is not spoken to. Always, the disconnection was implicit. Motionless and silent, he sits at table with Jesus inertly to remind us only that the thing has happened, a man without a future in the story.

THE EARLIER TALE

Christ, which is to say, Messiah, means the Anointed; and unless we take his Baptism for an anointing, Jesus nowhere else fulfills that aspect of his name, except at Bethany. Now the Baptism of John was a public rite, a common washing in the Jordan to signify repentance, and if we take that for the Anointing of Christ, it is because of the descent of the Dove, signifying Spirit, and a Voice from Heaven announcing My beloved Son! Miracle transforms his Baptism into a Symbol or implicit myth. But the legend of Bethany (to speak of legend) would show us on

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very humble terms that the Anointing of Jesus was a fact, albeit a deed most humbly performed and far removed from high occasion. As such, it wears the aspect of a folk tale, grown of rumor or imagination: an unrecognized Messiah is anointed in the house of a leper. Marks version, copied by Matthew, replaced by Luke, transformed by John, and basic to all is a very simple affair: While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of ointment of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the jar and poured it over his head. But there were some who said to themselves indignantly, Why was the ointment thus wasted? For this ointment might have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and given to the poor. And they reproached her. But Jesus said, Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you will, you can do good to them; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burying. And truly, I say to you, wherever the Gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her. (Mark 14,3.) Except that she is remembered only in her deed. What seems to be the accidental omission of her name is deliberate artistry: we are not to remember a woman who did this, a Sarah, a Judith, or in the later traditions of the Catholic church, a Mary Magdalene. We are to remember only the gesture of the anointing and the Evangelist achieves that. It is one of the outstanding Gospel tales. Also, no Judas is mentioned: it is John who invents that detail, aiming for the intense realism of effect which we call verisimilitude. Whats elaborate here are the words of Jesus, who overlooks the slight implied by the murmuring (since his doom is foreseen) and, instead, defends the woman. From his words, also, the Fourth Gospel has drawn its remark about the poor just as Mark (or else Jesus) draws from Deuteronomy (15,11): For the poor shall never cease out of the land. The nameless woman breaks the alabaster jar and pours the ointment over Jesus head. It is like that earlier breaking of the roof for a paralytic because for a woman to break an alabaster jar in her fingers this way is incredible, but we accept it as a part of the story. It is symbolic. Just as the ass that Jesus rode into Jerusalem is an unmounted colt, this

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is not a jar to be filled with something else after its consecrated usage. Its breaking anticipates the breaking of the loaf at Supper: This is my body, and I only mention it to show how instinctively we read these tales for what they mean. As for a notion that she only broke a sort of seal, that again would substitute a fib for a fable. We see by comparing the two that Johns latest version is the more satisfying, artistically, but it is nonetheless from the earliest Gospel that he has derived certain ideas for his own tale and its placement in Bethany. Lukes quite different version proves to be useful for a crucial detail. We are far removed from the Passion in Lukes account where Jesus is invited to dine with a Pharisee named Simon, like the leper in Mark. A sinful woman comes into the room uninvited, but the Pharisee allows her. She is, however, rather notorious and he knows of her. With an alabaster flask of ointment she stands behind Jesus weeping as he reclines at table, and she begins to wet his feet with her tears which she wipes away with her hair. It is the Lukan sentimentality which puts her at the Saviors feet whereas John avoids that when he borrows this detail. This nameless sinful woman, by virtue of her very sin, has acquired Mary Magdalenes name, from whom Jesus cast out seven devils, but legend is no great respecter of fact. Simon the Pharisee inwardly fumes: If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner. A tolerant host who allows himself to be put upon what is she doing in his house? finds occasion in her ministrations to doubt that Jesus is a prophet, but Jesus reads his mind. Simon, I have something to say to you. Follows a parable about a pair of debtors, each forgiven a debt but in one case forgiven a huge debt: which of them loves the benevolent creditor more? Then Jesus upbraids him: Do you see this woman? I entered your house, you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much; but he who is forgiven little, loves little. And to the woman: Your sins are forgiven... Your faith has saved you, go in peace. We note an inconsequence in the logic here. The womans sins are forgiven for she loved much, whereas the debtor of the parable loves his creditor more because he is forgiven. Beyond that, Jesus upbraiding of his host reminds us of his behavior in the Rejection at

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Nazareth (another Lukan story). This is a Gentile Gospel whose integrity is insofar assured in that Luke never forgets that Jesus is a Jew, and sprung from Jews who at his birth observed the circumcision, purified themselves, presented the male-child to the Lord, and offered in sacrifice a pair of turtle-doves, or two young pigeons. So here we find the source for Johns detail of Marys anointing the feet and wiping away the ointment with her hair. What an elaborate fiction has the Fourth Evangelist woven! Drawing from Mark and Luke he has devised the richest and most effective of the Anointing tales and set it in his invented family of Martha, Mary and Lazarus.

PART FOUR A LAZARUS EXCURSUS APPROPRIATION OF MEANING: LAZARUS I.

As we have seen, the Fourth Evangelist is one who dares to change the story of Jesus while observing a certain wise deference to the earlier Gospels. The names of Lazarus and his sisters echo those in Luke. Common to both are Marthas busy-ness as one who serves, Jesus greater intimacy with Mary, who is the woman at his feet, and the association of Lazarus and Resurrection. Yet Luke tells only of a pair of sisters, says nothing of where they live or of any brother they have, knows nothing of any role they had in anointing Jesus. As for Lukes Lazarus, he is only a poor beggar covered with sores who is imagined in a parable. Professor Benjamin Wisner Bacon believed that the Fourth Evangelist had invented the family of Lazarus, drawing his clues from Luke, and I believe he is right. Before Jesus was anointed at Bethany and prior to his Entry into Jerusalem, Lazarus had been raised from the dead. In this earlier tale his sisters play a characteristic role and the dead man is seen emerging from his tomb. We select the figure of Lazarus, then, for an interpretation of the myth which carries us beyond a strict exegesis to interpretation proper, although never in violation of the story. For otherwise the Reader would tax me with an inconsistency and urge my own objections against me. We have, throughout, objected to a lax departure from the given story, or an easy sort of sliding away into complacent assumptions. Above all, we have rejected a technique of offering substitutes when, for instance, a given tale is modified in such a way as to conceal a rejection of what it essentially means. Examples of this were given in John

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Erskines treatment of the Wedding at Cana and Goodspeeds treatment of the Feeding miracle and Albert Schweitzers handling of the Cursing of the Fig Tree. All had rejected a miracle which the legend had intended to give. Meaning is what rules here, so that we make no objection, for instance, to Baron von Hgels symbolic treatment of the Wedding at Cana because in his acceptance of the symbol he doesnt mutilate, abridge, distort or otherwise replace the tale. And yet even so, something remains undone here. What do you make of it yourself, my dear Baron? You have told us what the story means in general, but what does it mean to you? And this is no mere plea for subjectivity, suddenly. The science of exegesis and the practice of it requires of us that we go beyond a strict understanding of the text into an appropriation of meaning to which we must give our own Expression. Always, therefore, a genuine appropriation of meaning is a newly original thought. It is in this sense that I hold Matthew Arnold to be a great interpreter in that he gave expression to the meaning of the Bible as he apprehended it after having done the exegesis (and of the whole Bible, no less!) Its not a question of my believing his result. I find him sometimes unconvincing, although I do rather love the way he reaches the lost believer in a man like myself. Does our fidelity to the written word confine us to a moldy manuscript and reduce us to mere antiquarians or pedants? Farewell, then, generations of rabbis! Farewell, any value to Scripture! If interpretation of the written word were only a matter of handling concepts, this might even be so. You begin with a mind conceived as a clean and efficient machine for the processing of ideas, and on this tabula rasa you record the impressions pouring in through the traditional five senses. It is then the role of intelligence to invent concepts or as we like to call them, abstract ideas, by which to master the influx of sensations. Our efficient brain-machine, by nature neutral and objective, a mere tool, has been used to organize and classify the minds experience, so conceived. All that may be true as far as it goes, but this process does not describe those deeper acts of understanding by which we take our place among the civilized or make ourselves humane. And the reason why it does not bears on the character and shaping of the soul. Here is no question of belief or unbelief, but we are not to evade ourselves, and that is why our strictest, our most honest and painstakingly accurate reading of Scripture leads us into an appropriation of its meaning to which we

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must give our own Expression, at last. Twice over in the act of understanding must the Spirit awaken us, because the first act, which is that of appropriating a meaning, is already a creative act and then the expression of this meaning is another. There is no escaping this human labor of appropriating meanings which are, in the raging flood of psyche, everywhere contaminated with a thousandfold ties to the Past and everywhere grown into it by a thousand vital roots. An Einstein can no more escape this labor than a sage like Emerson, as we see when the great physicist concerns himself with socialism and criticism of our institutions, or with ethics and religion and even with God. It is just in this matter of Wisdom that Einstein is borne away in the same flood that carries us all. As soon as we open ourselves to the human and spiritual task of thought and understanding, we are submerged by an overwhelming heritage which flows into our Immediacy and demands to be fused with it. I dont mean this mechanically: we are not asked to be preservers of antiques as the condition of humanity. But this submerging Past is that same Source which has nourished and shaped us. Prior to the tasks of thought, we had remained incognizant of it. If maybe your typical modern man shuns this experience, we nonetheless recognize that the higher levels of human spirituality belong always to thought and meaning. This must include all profound science, all art, poetry, dance, music, all philosophy and all religion.

THE TALE OF LAZARUS II.

When Lazarus falls sick, his sisters send word to Jesus: Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick. (John 11,3.) Nothing would seem more natural than such a simple human plea, but it is really rather strange. Was it natural for these sisters to send word to a prophet whose manner of life was that of a wandering teacher? John has named Bethany as the site of our tale, but Jesus is at present beyond Jordan, in the place where John at first baptized. The two sisters have summoned him because they have the same confidence in his powers that Jesus mother showed at the Wedding of Cana when she told her son, They have no wine. Both tales are peculiar to the Fourth Gospel and in each he responds in a disconcerting manner. His mother he seems to rebuke by asking Woman, what have I to do with thee? While as for poor Lazarus, Jesus

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lets him die first, delaying his journey on purpose before telling his disciples, Our friend Lazarus sleepeth, but I go that I may awake him out of sleep; and all of this in Hellenistic-Oriental fashion that the Son of God might be glorified thereby. On arriving at Bethany, he learns that Lazarus has lain in his tomb four days already, and before he enters the village Martha goes out to meet him. She is able to do in the story what the reader cant do in reality, but her uttered prayer is one that many a reader might have taken to heart: Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. The apparently casual word is laden with a subtle intention (If thou hadst been here!) which awakens in the worshiper his own yearning for Christ, especially when she calls her sister secretly saying: The Master is come, and calleth for thee. Johns is the Gospel of the Parousia and he would place us in the Presence of Christ: He calleth for thee. What Mark achieved in his tale of the Woman with an Issue of Blood John has intensified. There, a secret prayer was uttered, a womans promise to herself based on faith, its answer requiring a mere touch of Jesus robe. The intimacy of it is shown the reader but hidden from the crowd. Here, if we place ourselves in the position of the worshipers to whom this Gospel was read aloud (for so it was designed) we know that the Teacher is here (because we believe it) and the womans words carry a reassurance. There is a good deal of this quality to be found in the Fourth Gospel. I might call it a subliminal directness of the Lords speaking Presence, so that Marthas quiet message to her sister is not a piece of authentic tradition but artistry, sheer artistry, and fully intended by the Evangelist in its subtle effect. Mary rises in haste to go to Jesus who was not yet come into the town, but was in that place where Martha met him. The place is indefinite. Jesus must be met outside Bethany and come to stand only before Lazarus gravestone. On reaching the place where Martha met him Mary falls at his feet and speaks once more the words her sister spoke: Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. She says only that and nothing else, having fallen before her Lord. A subtle difference between these sisters is thus portrayed. It is Martha who must act as agent here: she serves in bringing Jesus and Mary together, but unlike her sister, she doesnt fall at Jesus feet and after expressing her faith, she asks for a favor which opens up a very remarkable dialogue in

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which the Lord must contend with her imperfect faith. I quote it lest we miss the peculiar Oriental quality of this deeply religious Gospel, so unlike Marks: I know that even now (said Martha) whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God will give it thee. Jesus saith unto her, Thy brother shall rise again. Martha saith unto him, I know that he shall rise again at the resurrection at the last day. Jesus said unto her: I Am the Resurrection and the Life. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. The King James version quoted here and the Revised Version of 1881 keep the original change of tense which we lose in the modern translations: Martha said... Jesus says to her... Martha says to him... Jesus said... At its core, the dialogue rises into immediacy, but this point might be oversubtle were it not so plain in Greek. No hearer gathered for worship in the ecclesia could miss it. Even the sliding back into the past tense is effective here: He said to her, I Am the Resurrection and the Life, and thus it stands forever, a pronouncement. Believest thou this? Martha then attests her faith in Christ as the Son of God. For all its brevity, it is a majestic passage, and yet there is no tenderness in it. We cannot be tender before such awesome claims, which are very soon to be demonstrated. Jesus is kindly to Martha but a trifle stern. Mary he loves. It is after this passage with Martha that Mary has come to fall at his feet and utter her few believing words. As she lay weeping, Jesus groaned in the spirit and was troubled. Other mourners, too Jews, they are called here stand about weeping. Where have ye laid him? he asks, and they say: Lord, come and see. Jesus wept. And once more we rise briefly into the present tense: Jesus again groaning in himself cometh to the grave. It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it. Jesus said, Take ye away the stone! Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh, for he hath been dead four days. Jesus

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saith unto her, Said I not unto thee that, if thou wouldst believe, thou shouldst see the glory of God? Take ye away the stone! It is a word of command and he will be served in this command. There were servants to do this and it was done, for such grave-stones were sometimes round as millstones (I have seen a photograph of one such). Then they took away the stone from the place where the dead was laid. The upheaval, the solemn removal of the stone opens upon the forbidden, but the moment is passed in prayer as Jesus lifts up his eyes to say: Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And when he had thus spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth! And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go.

LAZARUS

DOUBLE OF CHRIST III.

When Jesus declares in words of the most tremendous solemnity (in James Moffatts translation): I am myself Resurrection and Life! He who believes in me will live, even if he dies, And no one who lives and believes in me will ever die, we might well say with the officers of the Pharisees: Never man spake like this man. (John 7,46.) Surely, these grandiose words are key to the fable of Lazarus which is important to John as an illustration of his own conviction. It would be foolish to suppose that he believes his own fable. It is Jesus in this ancient mystics mind who is raised from the dead and has ascended into Heaven, but for simple people who want to see a Resurrection happen he brings Lazarus out of his cave. Say what you will of these literary devices, but the Evangelist had no interest in showing us a dead man revived as a mere curiosity because that would distract us from his aim. Always, it is Jesus who counts for this Evangelist, never a Lazarus or his like, such as a man born blind who is enabled to see, or an invalid cured after thirty-eight years: wonders which reflect on Jesus. And it is a main purpose of this Gospel to show us Jesus in a double aspect. He is there and he is here. He is vividly there in his works, thanks to the authors verisimilitude in stimulating our imagination, but he is also the Living Christ who speaks

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from Heaven above: No man hath ascended up to Heaven but he that came down from Heaven, even the Son of Man which is in Heaven. This he seems to say in discourse with a pious Pharisee where his words are strangely mingled with the authors own (John 3,13). We find instances throughout this Fourth Gospel where believers yet unborn are addressed in Jesus words, so to speak, beneath the action of the given scene. An intense realization of Jesus as the Son of God who wills even now to call us as his friends is this authors peculiar aim, and Lazarus is but a particular moment within the overall demonstration. After the Resurrection had ceased to produce appearances, a living Jesus was sought in the Spirit of the Christian fellowship, and to furnish a Gospel which will answer to the believers desire is our unknown Authors aim. I mean to say, of course, he will assist the believer because his or her collaboration was depended on and with a little encouragement willingly given. John knew very well what he was doing. The believers were only dimly aware but much gratified. And remember, the Gospel of John is late, although our scholars have never established the date of its publication. For we have here a culmination in the storied myth of Jesus beyond which it is impossible to advance. John will give his reader everything that story can give. More than this, an intenser devotion, is impossible. Everything in this Gospel is written for the moment of the reader, and when Jesus cries, Lazarus, come forth! it is not only for Lazarus sake that his voice is loud but because this is the voice which is to awaken all the dead of this world. Believers who are gathered in worship will want to hear (in mimicry) that same voice resounding. Jesus dismisses Lazarus at once because his usefulness is exhausted in that one brief appearance. Henceforth, the two have nothing to do with one another. They exchange never a word. As Jesus does not exert himself to move the stone, neither will he touch this walking mummy, much less embrace him despite the earlier message of the sisters: Lord, he whom thou lovest is sick. Instead, he says: Loose him, and let him go! I am no translator and my seminary Greek has long since eroded away, but the excellent Goodspeed, who conceives the plight of a revived Lazarus in practical terms, misses the point when he translates: Unbind him, and let him move. (The RSV correctly gives: Unbind him, and let him go.) Surely, the Greek would be even more

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suggestive. All three verbs in that command are associated with: loosening, separation, going away, dismissal, retirement, withdrawal, and one of them with divorce! The whole idea of the Evangelist is: Get rid of Lazarus, having once brought him to life! Understand, Reader: This mummified specter is what we see of Lazarus alive and all that we see of his doing in the whole Gospel because for the rest he is nothing but a dummy or a name. He exists for a moment and his moment has used him up. We detect in the wonder no trace of rejoicing. So when we are told later on that he was one of those at table with him when Jesus was anointed by Mary of Bethany, that sole mention of the resuscitated dead is colorless and neutral. Even at a sumptuous repast the ointment speaks of wealth Lazarus does nothing, has no revelation to give, imparts no word of cheer. Devoid of movement, he is there for a while as the dumb object of a rumored curiosity to be mentioned one last time as the target of a rumored assassination plot. We never see him again. He is wholly forgotten in the Resurrection scenes of the Christ, having served his one immortal appearance. In effect, Lazarus is a Double of Christ whose use is to demonstrate a process. We see his resurrection under conditions which match those of Jesus tomb, where another stone is rolled aside and in which it is possible to walk. The Evangelist is too wise to show us a dead Jesus coming alive because that would profane the Mystery by intruding upon it. The Resurrection of Christ is a sacred Mystery for John, not a process to be gawked at. The marks of decay are not to be seen in his person, and I think that we dont have the effects of his death upon Jesus before the age of the Medieval realism with its starved, sculpted Christs or the rigid, greenish corpse in Matthias Grnewalds Crucifixion. Everything ugly, frightful, horrible, hateful in death our Evangelist transfers to the specter of Lazarus, who absorbs the darkness which Christ has cast off. Lazarus is a Symbol because the Fourth Evangelist has chosen a method of deliberate fiction to project the Resurrection upon a dark mirror. It is possible, moreover, and even probable, that other myths were in his mind because other myths were swarming in that world. This is not to imply that he set out to copy these other myths any more than Plato did when he wrote the Phaedo or Symposium. John is not a borrower but a maker, and if in the mummy motif an Osiris had entered his thought, it was not in the least his intention to copy and imitate that but

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to supersede and abolish. Johns faith is the conviction of the Jewish Scripture fulfilled, and for this Evangelist the Resurrection of Jesus is primary and surpassing. In conceiving the tale of Lazarus, he created an enduring Symbol which has fascinated artists even of the 20th century: Eugene ONeill, Eliot, Leonid Andreyev. What better proof of inspiration? Certainly, his Lazarus cannot claim the deeper reality of Christ, but his mummy-like figure has arisen of necessity. His egression from the cave of this mystics deep imagination completes the Symbol of Christ if only we can learn to see Jesus in relations of polarity where, I think, he always stands. Rising above an antipathy which this Gospel arouses, we concede an inspiration in John mightier than any to be found in the Gothic shrewdness of a Mark, or the scribal care of a Matthew, assembling the Masters Teachings, or the literary finesse of Luke: for these Synoptists are, essentially, assembling and moulding Traditions (of whatever final worth we may judge these Traditions). John is no assembler of Traditions: he transmutes them.

LAZARUS AS MYTH IV.

The Raising of Lazarus is of all the miracles of Christ the most impressive. It is the Evangelists own deliberate composition and written for the manifest purpose of giving us the vision of a resurrection before Jesus own, that is, the actual visible moment of a dead mans coming alive. Were it poorly done it would be only grotesque, but this author is a master and his effective little tale demonstrates what Jesus means in saying: I am the Resurrection and the Life. On the whole this Fourth Gospel reveals the stamp of a deep mind, audacious and wise and content to be narrow. His focus is very narrowly on Christ conceived as a Revealer who illuminates the world, a Redeemer who saves it, a Heavenly Christ who once indwelt and transformed the person of Jesus. In this last authentic Gospel which has carried the idea of Christ to its completion the authors intention governs all. Myth has awakened fully here: it has all but passed into philosophy which would extinguish it, however, had that actually happened. I am certain that this story is a myth, but the authors ability to make things seem real has misled people of the highest intelligence. His circumstantial details have given the Gospel its air of eye-witness authority, or rather its verisimilitude, but we have spoken of this aspect

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earlier and we remember that this quality belongs entirely to art. We may speak of a witnesss veracity, but we never speak of his verisimilitude. We are not dealing with facts in such a singular tale, then, just because its particulars are effectively given. And they are effectively given, allowing for an Oriental style which is foreign to an undeveloped taste. Overall, one has to concede that the Johannine details are often very like the particulars furnished by an old man remembering his story and mentioning oddments of fact or circumstance as they happen to occur to him or else repeating himself, but this is also, as I conceive, a deliberate technique. That circumstantial quality is clearly the reason why a distinguished scholar like Bishop Lightfoot could write a hundred years ago that the narrative bears on its face the credentials of its authenticity. It may seem to, especially when assisted by the believers wish that it might be so. Only, what do scholars do with such miracles when they attribute this Gospel to a doddering Apostle who had once witnessed these things and spent years and years in meditation to bring out their spiritual significance? They explain them away as pious lies inspired by benevolence to illustrate a doctine. We found traces of this even in so cultured a man of letters as John Erskine, whose Human Life of Jesus we considered earlier. Or consider again the strange presumption of eyewitness authority in Graves and Podros Nazarene Gospel Restored, Graves as a learned, witty poet and Joshua Podro, a profound Jewish scholar. Graves is one for whom the life of Jesus is well-attested, and these two treat the tale of Lazarus (who is authentically rechristened Eliezer) as a story factual, reliable, and remembered in detail. They treat the story this way, I should say, cooperatively as joint authors, but it is rather Graves who is famous for eccentric theories. For Robert Graves, then, Lazarus was truly dead and Jesus did come to Bethany and converse with the sisters, the stone was rolled away from the tomb and Jesus did call for Lazarus in a loud voice: all just as remembered and preserved for posterity until (as I imagine it) Mr. Robert Graves nudged Podro in the ribs and said, Hold, fellow! Are we going to believe it? It is this sort of absurdity into which the good Bishops theory crumbles when everything else is taken for fact but the miracle denied, and really, it is this sort of learned Tomfoolery which makes The Nazarene Gospel Restored a book everywhere learned, curious and interesting, and most peculiar. A sort of positivism is at fault here, an

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inability to value what is given in a myth, and a positivism of this sort is today the wisdom of the vulgar. I think of a Hollywood film where a Jesus who is never quite the master of his powers and who never knows quite what may happen stoops to a dark burial hole to fiddle around until suddenly the naked arm of Lazarus, like the swoop of a hawks talon, reaches out to grab him and almost pulls him in. The unintended comedy of a scene like that is traceable to philosophy. Its the positivism of the man in the street, and the same in a filmmaker unconscious of his travesty as in your fundamentalist Protestant and your workaday Catholic. Robert Graves, our positive-poet, blunders into comedy and literary outrage because he conceives the tale of Lazarus (or Eliezer) as a history in which the very details are real. A bowdlerization he would protest in Shakespeare he perpetrates upon the Gospels without awareness of shame, so in his Gospel Restored, Jesus magnificent word, I Am the Resurrection and the Life, reduces to a chat about the resurrection. So too when Jesus stands before the open cave having failed to awaken Lazarus, he must turn to Martha and say, Hes dead.

LAZARUS A USEFUL SYMBOL V.

Once brought forth from the cave of an Evangelists imagination, Lazarus has a life of his own. I am Lazarus, come from the dead Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all... As the Reader may recall, TS Eliot in one of his poems ascribes this to a certain J. Arthur Prufrock, who can only imagine himself for once in his life speaking like that, and understanding these words symbolically, of course. It is a thought he rejects, however, because it would have been too embarrassing after the cups, the marmalade, the tea/ among the porcelain, too embarrassing in that polite society, If one, settling a pillow by her head, Should say, That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all. It is only a brief moment that Lazarus enjoys in a longish poem, yet when he announces himself in the imagination of this ageing coxcomb, we feel ourselves addressed because it is really the poet who lifts the mask to his face; but is it the Lazarus we know from the Gospel? Eliot would stand

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his looming figure over against a heedless society with a promise of momentous tidings. His sudden presence is enough to give the message, of course, but its interesting to notice that The Love Song of J. Arthur Prufrock was published in 1917. How efficiently does Lazarus serve this poem in two brief lines! Our lives must not be trivial, great things may burst upon us. I feel no impulse to complain of a poets use of this symbol as I do of Robert Gravess well-meaning degradation of the Gospel of John in the name of history or fact. Eliots is an appropriation of the symbol to which he gives another meaning; but this is a very different thing from a disfigurement of the original tale and a denial of the original meaning. Symbols may have a life of their own, then, and we use them to express the deeper meanings and evoke the deeper thoughts. If we suppose in reference to Eliots poem, however, that Lazarus was a man of Bethany who lived once and knew Jesus, he is then no longer a mere symbol for Prufrock, who must have made a very different sort of remark to the imaginary woman on her couch: PRUFROCK: Oh, these endless teas! (Indicating an empty saucer). Left-over crumbs on a porcelain plate! Shouldnt there be more to life than this? WOMAN: But Arthur, theres your tennis. (Yawning, as she taps her lovely mouth). PRUFROCK: No no. I am thinking of something quite different. Take the case of a Lazarus, for instance. WOMAN: Who, now? The one who was raised from the dead? PRUFROCK: That Lazarus, yes. Dont you suppose he asked something more of life after coming back like that? Something... tremendous which is lacking in ours? WOMAN: (With a sigh). Well, I suppose he knew of things we might like to know, of course, but Arthur, we must wait. Nothing comes of this exchange. A supposedly historical Lazarus can only tease the curiosity of this foppish Prufrock, who would never think of delivering any momentous tidings and in the greatness of his spirit looming above a society of trifles. He can only imagine himself doing that before running away from his own imagination. It is nonetheless because Lazarus carries a meaning for Prufrock that the symbol arises, but unfortunately, only to remind him of a life confined to surfaces. Conceived as a man who lived once (and thus misunderstood) Lazarus eludes us, remaining at best a curiosity or a freakish exception.

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What, then, of the deeper aspects of this Symbol? Already we have seen him as a sort of mummy, which is to say, a dead man hampered by his bindings and wrapped about the face. We knew him as one lying in the grave: Your brother will rise again... I know that he will rise again in the Resurrection... Where have you laid him? Nevertheless, he does actually rise up in his grave and walk. If I say, then, that Lazarus appears to me to be a relic of a much older god displaced by Jesus, its not because I find a clue to this in the Gospel: it is because his Symbol reminds me of an age-old phallic deity, a veritable stench of a god (and one who is called a filth in an old Egyptian text) but likewise a god of annual Resurrections and a man-god, so described by Sir Wallis Budge: I am thinking, then, of Osiris, the Phallus of Ra. And of course we are suddenly reminded of our friend, John Allegro, by these explicit reminders.

OSIRIS CORRELATION: LAZARUS VI.

Our poor groping human Lazarus may seem too slight a peg on which to hang a reminder of an Egyptian god. We find in the Gospel no hint of divinity associated with Lazarus apart from Jesus. As a man unmistakably dead who illustrates the truth of Jesus words, his role in the play, so to speak, is so distinctly a part of the Evangelists aim that we may suppose him to be Johns own invention rather than a piece of tradition that had escaped the Synoptic nets. He appears in the tale as a townsman of Bethany living with two sisters; and one of these women, the preferred sister, Mary, pours out a costly ointment which fills the house with its fragrance, much in contrast to the earlier stench of the tomb mentioned by the other sister. If I do not say that Lazarus is Osiris, then (and I do not) it is yet a curious fact that Osiris is brother of two sisters, Isis and Nephthys, one of whom, the beloved Isis, is associated with a marvelous perfume which she is able to impart to others. I make no great thing of this parallel except to note the bare fact of it. A contrast between the stench of the tomb and the perfume of the gods appears elsewhere in Egyptian mythology, and with other gods. The odor of the Horus-eye is on thee! say the priests to King Pepi II in a ritual of the tomb.24

24. JH Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (Harper Torchbook, p. 79.)

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At most, then, Lazarus is a relic of a god displaced, a souvenir of the Egyptian imagination that an Evangelist has transferred to a human being subject to Jesus. Only, of course, we mustnt identify the walking corpse of the Gospel with Osiris, Lord of the Underworld, but is there no vestige of the older god in Lazarus mummy-like resurrection? For example, I mention the Sed feast which Professor Breasted calls probably the oldest feast of which any trace has been preserved in Egypt when the king assumed the costume and insignia of Osiris, and undoubtedly impersonated him. We may emphasize that he assumed the (royal) costume and insignia of Osiris because to suppose that a Pharoah could be wrapped like a mummy in a play is unseemly and absurd. No more does a Pope when washing the feet of a chosen few in imitation of Christ lay aside his garments and wrap in a towel as Jesus did. We must allow its magnificence to the Egyptian imagination when Breasted tells us that One of the ceremonies of this (Sed) feast symbolized the resurrection of Osiris, for in the end the deceased Pharoah became Osiris and enjoyed... the same felicity in the hereafter which had been accorded the dead god. (p. 39.) We have another curious parallel in the comparative passivity of the two figures because Osiris is unable to revive himself. His one vitality lay in the regenerative function. We have, for instance, carved in basrelief the gods sarcophagus out of which his phallus impressively protrudes. Above it hovers Isis in the form of a hawk, and thus does she beget a son, Horus, by whom, or by the famous Eye of Horus, the god is revived. Although vandals have defaced the phallus of the god, it is yet quite distinct and the entire sculpture is done with the beautiful skill of the Egyptians. It is Breasted who stresses the passivity of this god of the dead when he writes: Osiris is in function passive. Rarely does he become an active agent on behalf of the dead... It is the services of OTHERS on behalf of Osiris (not BY Osiris) which the dead (as Osiris) enjoys. (164) How different is the Christ of the Fourth Gospel who of his own accord lays down his life and has power to take it up again. (John 10,17.) If Osiris speaks in the language of this Gospel, he is reduced to saying: Because I am brought to life, ye shall live also. Now the faded parallels which I suggest here are doubtless too far-fetched to make of Lazarus a deliberate surrogate of the Egyptian god, nor do I claim as much, but have we no reminders here? Is structure nothing? We have in any case so far described:

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(a) A brother and two sisters, one of them associated with a costly perfume in contrast to the stench of the tomb. (Osiris has also a brother by whom he is slain).25 (b) An enacted resurrection scene, one a royal liturgy and the other, a literary composition. (I dont mean that John knew of the Sed feast what we know is only that the more primitive religious hankering is always for depiction. One acts out the myth portrayed, and Johns depicted scene is not less dramatic and visual for its taking a literary form). (c) A shared passivity. If Osiriss generative powers are able to beget a son to restore him, he is nevertheless unable to raise himself. Implicitly, we have also (d) a parallel between Osiris and Christ, of whom we may say that as far as the Fourth Gospel goes, both are gods. However, we have already placed this Jesus in a polar relationship to Lazarus, who represents a dark and negative pole because he is repulsive to think of as a corpse already putrid. To bring out the implied scheme, we have something like the following structure here: OSIRIS A mummy A filth (one mention only) Raised from the dead Brother of two sisters Perfume of Isis OSIRIS A god resurrected Celebrated annually Yet polluted and dismembered LAZARUS A mummy-type A stench Raised from the dead Brother of two sisters Perfume of Mary JESUS A god resurrected Celebrated annually Pure and uncorrupted

In this scheme Osiris has no single correlative, and Jesus and Lazarus divide the archetype between them. Osiris is a traveler. At one stage his floating casket migrates to

25. Although not a strict parallel, it is worth mentioning that Jesus has delayed his journey for two days in order that Lazarus may die. Moreover, the Jews plot to kill Lazarus after his resurrection.

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Byblos, which I take for a Phoenician city north of Tyre and Sidon, where Isis discovers him inside a wooden pillar (a pillar!) Later on, he is dismembered by the evil Set and his pieces scattered about, and these have to be gathered before the god can be buried. His phallus, which is so important to this myth, is found to have been swallowed by a fish called Oxyrhynchus resembling the American pike. As his pieces were scattered far and wide, so too his religion came to pervade the Roman world in the cult of Isis, wherein he is sometimes called Serapis by blending the names of Osiris and Apis, a bull-god of Memphis. We neednt attribute a scholars deep knowledge of Egyptian religion to our cosmopolitan Evangelist, yet certainly an Egyptian influence was in the air he breathed wherever it was that he breathed this air, whether Ephesus or Alexandria or somewhere in Syria. Quite what he knew in detail of this cult we cannot say and yet his Lazarus reminds us of a god who had been buried as a mummy if only because his wrappings are those of a mummy who has risen from the dead. According to JH Breasted in his Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt Osiris began as the god of the Nile and was essentially the Nile river just as an Egyptian priest had maintained centuries ago, a priest named Chaeremon as cited by Dupuis. It was the annual fertility made possible by the overflowing Nile, and of course its annual recession, which gave Osiris his primary character. Professor Breasted finds amid all his varieties that he represents the principle of life, whether as a fertilizing river or in spring vegetation or as Lord of the Underworld. He is a sympathetic god because of his annual fate and because tender relationships are found in his family. Breasted looks on these tender feelings as evidently the earliest yet known to find a religious expression. Nor could so popular a god be confined to the realm of the dead. In an Egypt whose official religion was a solar cult, Osiris must ascend to the sky, there to be integrated somehow with the sun-god Ra as well as the priests could manage it, and with a thousand inconsistencies. It is in this solar realm, at last, that he is described as the Phallus of Ra. He is called that in the Book of the Dead once only (as far as I know) and once also described as a filth (or possibly as the excrement of Osiris). Few and confusing as these references are here they are! Missing from the scheme above, however, and even rather conspicuously is the phallic aspect of Osiris, which is so prominent in his myth and which of course we have emphasized. For not only is this

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gods dismembered phallus needed for his resurrection, but it was even prominent in his cult, which (at least in one locale) used to celebrate a festival devoted to the phallic emblem. Why is it missing from our scheme, then? Because we must assign just this phallic aspect somehow to the Gospel correlation. Otherwise our comparison loses its point and we may seem to be verging on obscenity for its entertainment value. But even Professor John Allegro is not to be accused of that. His assault on the Christian sensibility was a type of violence, but how many could recognize this in a society in which that sensibility has fairly dwindled away? Allegro, I think, had arrived at a realistic estimate of churchianity and was frankly fed up, but for all his distortions and smears he wasnt unserious, and he remains therefore important say rather, his case remains important by virtue of that ominous book, The Sacred Mushroom & the Cross. It is the most important of his works and deeds. Whatever his motives or faults, he cast prudence aside and did an aboutface in his personal faith to bring Jesus into certain ancient phallic associations by effectively although not literally denying his historical existence except in the form of a phallic mushroom. The horrid implication was that Christianity had arisen from drug-induced revelations in an orgiastic cult. This is strictly nonsense and shows the warping of a scholarly mind. One might almost call his case a sort of transitory insanity and yet I do not think he was insane. Now regrettably deceased, he was a scholar of indisputable gifts prior to his breakdown, and the aberration of such a book as this needs to be accounted for. I am not attracted to the biographical task, but as an interpreter of religion I see him as a mind overwhelmed and perhaps to some extent resentful. Wrong or wrongheaded as I believe his results were, it wasnt wholly inappropriate in the setting of the times (and of our times) for this exasperated man to dig up certain primitive obscenities wherewith to challenge or refute a great religion in decline, and in such awful decline as to disturb those few perceiving among us who may care for veracity more than for respectability and position. This was his achievement, and in that respect it was bizarrely successful. We can no more ignore this ancient obscenity, once it is brought into view, than we can swallow Nietzsches myth of Gods death with complacency.

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Without delay we assign the phallic role to Lazarus and thereby complete our thought, which has the value of distinctness. Remember, please, that we have seen the tale of Lazarus as a fiction because it can be nothing else. Johns treatment is in its way intensely realistic, but the result is a story that cannot be tampered with. As a fiction, then, the story gives us a fictitious Jesus also, and the scheme we have proposed above is based frankly on the symbolic aspect of all these figures: (a) Jesus and Lazarus stand in a polar relationship, symbolically. (b) A correlation with Osiris is described because a reminiscence of the god is discernible in the Lazarus figure. (c) Jesus and Lazarus divide the (Osiris) archetype between them, insofar as such a changeable god may express an underlying principle. (d) No connection could be found between Osiris and the Gospel pair in one essential trait, leaving the scheme incomplete. Unless a phallic connection is found, or made, the scheme is of no help. Our Fourth Gospel, then, knows nothing of ancient phallic cults and is untainted by obscenity. It is we who have made the connection. What is it, then, that has driven us beyond the biblical tale? Was it John Allegro, who awakened the imago of such a god in his Sacred Mushroom & the Cross and tried to fasten it on Jesus? Or is it not rather that, on broader grounds, the phallic connection is asking to be made? Certainly, we have given Allegro his role and responded to his error. I have been careful to say that he shies away from outright denial of the historical Jesus in the book which is his masterpiece, but in a lesser book published around that time called, The End of a Road, (Dial Press NY 1971) he declares that the Jesus, like the Dionysus of the related Bacchic religion, is but a personification of the sacred fungus, the smeared or anointed, the Christ, the phallic representative of the ancient fertility god Yahweh/Zeus. (p.42) This is surely plain enough, and I believe it is wrong. In specifics he is wrong, but is he altogether wrong in reviving the archaic phallic deities in connection with our religion? And our times? Now John Allegro is not the source of any insight contained in this essay. He has been useful to our theme because his mere example has made it easier for me to introduce the phallic role ascribed above, and because he was conspicuous and timely. As for Lazarus, then, it is surely his own mummified figure which invites the phallic connection, given

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the archaic reversions of the age I mean, if it should ever occur to us to make such a bizarre assignment. This is understandably difficult and I appreciate beforehand any Readers reluctance to follow me in this. A further difficulty lies in the naming of Osiris in connection with one of our Gospels. Osiris is foreign to the Bible, and I am well aware that a mention of this gods name flies against all our habits. I have no wish to foist absurdities upon the Reader and in using this comparison at all, I have only asked that Lazarus bear the weight of a shadow: it is the mere shadow of Osiris passing by out of sight. But let us review once more the point of comparison of a figure like Lazarus to the phallic Osiris among Egyptian gods. Among his several roles Osiris is the mummy-god in the Egyptian pantheon. Is there another such? I do not think so. It is true that he has other forms, as we have just reviewed. A god out of whose body wheat may be growing and who becomes Lord of the Underworld is a god of many stages and guises, and yet it is Osiris as a mummy-god with whom the pharaohs came in time to be identified after death when they themselves became mummies. Although originally worshiped in a solar cult, the pharaohs came at last to join with Osiris in hopes of rising to a life beyond. According to Breasted, it is in connection with the Osiris cult that we find the earliest of the Passion plays in which the death and resurrection of the god was enacted. Now of all the figures in the Gospels it is only Lazarus who comes before us bound and hampered in his wrappings after being dead. It is his one moment, really. Even alive he is effectively a mummy, and we see only his emerging when he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes; and his face was bound with a napkin. Can this image represent the shadow of a phallic deity? Surely, the intrusions of a John Allegro or the (possible) reminiscence of an Osirian resurrection are not enough to establish any such identity if the Lazarus figure itself is not the prime magnet. I have used these examples and devices to illustrate a meaning, but something else is prior to these illustrations and basic here. That something else, to use the word again with its heavy significance, is ARCHETYPE. For the moment I am reduced to assertion and can only say, Lazarus is phallic by the nature of the Symbol, although I am hard-pressed to explain why this is so. He is, as I conceive him, a walking mummy, and his resurrection is archaic. Certain

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old fantasies would have him float out of his cave, and this could be argued. In any case, he is hampered by his wrappings, as the words of Jesus show, and as a mummy revived, he is the depiction of an archaic wonder. Such a resurrection is anciently phallic. It is even a kind of phallic festival transmuted. Why this is so remains to be shown by example.

AKWANSHI, A MYTH IN STONE: LAZARUS VIII.

Erich Neumanns Origins and History of Consciousness gives us the following lines taken from the Book of the Dead: Who then is this? It is Osiris or (as others say) Ra is his name (or) it is the Phallus of Ra, wherewith he was united to himself. Who then is this? It is Osiris; or (as others say) it is his dead body or (as others say) it is his filth. (My italics.)26 Despite the differences between a strange old god of the Hellenistic world and the human brother of two sisters in Johns Gospel, we might fairly compare the dead and stinking body of Lazarus to the dead gods filth, which I suppose refers to the bodys decay. But then what? It is surely no reason for dragging the Phallus of Ra into the comparison because that has to do only with Osiris, who for a moment is imagined in such a form. It is a moment in the recitation of a liturgy when, in a word, Osiris is suddenly all phallus. And it is only the idea of such a phallic being which is in comparison here. Only, what do we mean by calling a god a phallic being? We surely go beyond a mere display of the mummy-gods phallus here, such as we described above. Rather, we must mean to equate the human figure of Osiris with the phallus, somehow, and even to merge them in thought. Had we no reason for doing so, it would be an irrational procedure. The very idea of such a merger seems inconceivable except that on the very evidence it has often been conceived, as we shall see. Evidently, the phallic being represents an Archetype, or as we might also call it, a transcendental Symbol. Why it exists at all is impossible to know, but on the very evidence it is lodged out of sight in the human psyche, being a primitive vestige of no more concern to us, ordinarily, than the vermiform appendix except for its being sometimes awakened or inflamed. And of course as it goes without saying, expressed. This is
26. Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Bollingen Series XLII, Princeton University Press 1954, p. 236.)

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simply the idea that a phallus may represent a king, or a god, or a Self. Now I propose to introduce in evidence a type of phallic stones from the Dark Continent, and very primitive stones supposed to represent dead kings or phallic gods. As visibly as any symbol could, they show that this idea has been expressed in stone. We do have this idea referred once to Osiris in the text cited above, and with the Readers patience, I propose to look for the same connection in the figure of Lazarus. The Symbol which we take him for must be phallic inherently. Our scheme is merely artificial if the archaic connection is not there in the first place, no matter how deep-buried or forgotten. In this respect, nothing is drawn directly from Osiris except a comparison. Everything rests on Lazarus directly. Either we perceive him in his role as a darkly phallic myth, or else our scheme is lost. For we seem to have painted ourselves into a corner if we are not to appeal to the bare intuition. And what good is that? Intuitions may, indeed, be true or even astonishingly true, and I think we do mostly believe this. A valid intuition is no whim. It may furnish us with knowledge beyond our ken, but our intuitions have no rational status and we cannot give them as a reason for anything beyond an appeal to our feelings. So how to uncover the archetype in Lazarus? Reason itself our much-vaunted Reason! would be a mistaken way to proceed here. Argument cannot suffice us where demonstration is called for, evidence is called for. We proceed by way of example.

AKWANSHI II.
A most potent expression of the idea we consider and for our purposes decisive are those groups of phallic stones called Akwanshi. These incredible stones, which are undoubtedly sacred, are to be found in the forests and villages of the Cross River Valley of Nigeria. They have been well-studied and excellently photographed in Philip Allisons African Stone Sculpture, and I hardly know where else, in what other book on African sculpture, to find such an impressive array of them. Mr. Allison, who had a career in Africa, credits Frobenius (1913) with the (European) discovery of these phallic stones based on the remark of a black African dock-worker in Hamburg who said with reference to Nigeria, In my country is every old-time man big stone. For the stones are often somewhat voluminous as they sway forth out of the ground, fairly life-size in the impressive specimens although there are smaller stones among them. Despite their varying styles they are

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recognizably, awesomely phallic, and I should think that any normal man might look on them with gratitude and fascination. Allison takes the name Akwanshi to mean dead person in the ground. They represent, in fact, dead Kings, as he reports. As aforesaid, Philip Allison had a long experience in Africa and writes of these matters with exactness and authority, and not as the tour guides. Clearly, the Akwanshi are gods or men (old-time man big stone) because they are often engraved with the stylized bearded faces and bodies of kings. I note as a stylized feature, for instance, that they tend to have laddered cheeks, whatever that may signify. Commonly enough, there is a protruding boss at the navel, very stout. In light of the researches of William Robertson Smith in other spheres, I feel justified in believing that these kings or gods (for the primitive king is a god) are truly fathers of the tribe, founders and social members of it. They are not, as it were, separable curiosities, and they would not be confined to the past. As these marvelous photographs illustrate, the Akwanshi are sometimes decorated, apparently with grass wrappings, or else chalked. In effect, they are worshiped because involved in sacred rites. The name has more recently been questioned by Ekpo Eyo, who would limit Akwanshi to the smaller uncarved stones among them. The larger phallic stones he calls Atal, believing that they represent known legendary figures. This seems a type of Euhemerism, which will not allow the gods to be gods: they were men first, as perhaps these Akwanshi were once really meant to be, which would put them in the category of the pharaohs rather than of an Osiris who began as the Nile and only became a man (in appearance a man) in course of time. As they stand now, mute objects amid disrupted tribes, these stones are hardly monuments of remembered persons because of their obliterating phallic quality and the stylized engravings, but are they any less mementoes of phallic gods and tokens of resurrection for as long as they are standing? My bias shows as philosophical: I am equally opposed to R. Gordon Wassons designation of Amanita muscaria as the food of the gods. There are 29 such groups of stones, according to Philip Allison, although sometimes individuals are found. Their style varies somewhat between different groups in the Cross River valley, and a census of the stones gives their total number at 295. Commonly, they are organized in a circle, which reminds me of the knobbed six-foot (wooden) posts organized in a

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circle by the American Indians, around which they are shown to be dancing in one of the drawings of the Colonial artist, John White. This mere fact, of a circle of headed posts in the village, suggests the archetypal. In an exhibition of Oceanic art sponsored some years ago by Ithaca College (NY) I saw an island totem pole from which a surprisingly large carven phallus arose, a reticulated carving flat as a plank but very distinctly formed in the rise of the erection. In the fretwork was the crouching image of a man. And there, too, quite as unmistakably as in the Akwanshi, is your archetypal image, by which of course we mean only the expression of the archetype whose out-of-reachedness (the very quality which makes us call it transcendental) prevents a scientific knowledge of its nature. As between the American Indians dancing in a circle around their big knobbed posts, and the South Sea islanders conceiving of a man inside a phallus, and the primitive Africans of Nigeria, we have distinctive analogies to a common idea: it is the idea of a phallus containing a man, or of a man who is a phallus. The Akwanshi are possibly later on the scale of European historical time than the Gospels themselves, but that is no objection to their primitive character. European history is not the calendar by which the whole world moves. Can anyone doubt, for instance, that in many an Indian village or on many a dusty road in Afghanistan we may find the very garb and the very practices of biblical times? Think only of long-skirted women bringing pitchers to the village well, whence they will carry the water away on their heads. And so here in the Cross River valley where, untouched by Europe for many long centuries and unacquainted with Arab culture or Egyptian art, lived a tribal folk who have kept their own primitive worships intact to our own good fortune, I may say. For we have now presented in the stones called Akwanshi (or else Atal) the most vivid imaginable evidence for the irrational union of Phallus and Man: the very Phallus being figured in its own shape, yet incised with the features of dead men in the ground who give a human character. There is a passage in the Bible where such a phallic being might once have made appearance in a very old tale according to Professor John Allegro. And here, I think, he may be right, depending on which version of the ancient text is right. Allegro was a specialist in biblical Hebrew, and such as it is, text and tale are plainly before us. The episode concerns Sauls visit to the witch of Endor when as

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the embattled king he sought her out in hopes of raising the ghost of the Prophet Samuel for counsel. In Allegros own words (p. 173): ... the witch was eventually prevailed upon to disturb Samuel at his rest. What do you see? asks Saul. I see God (Elohim) coming out of the ground, she replies. What does he look like? questions her client. Like an erection (so the ancient versions) wearing a robe. Whereupon Saul recognized the dead Samuels ghost... So the ancient versions? Rudolf Kittels Biblia Hebraica supports with a question mark the possible reading Allegro has chosen, but he may nonetheless be right. In the usual text, the witch has seen an ish zaken (an old man) oleh which means coming up, mounting up, arising. And she sees him wearing a robe. But there is evidence that the ancient versions Allegro appeals to have used another wording instead of ish zaken, and by substituting an ish zakuph arising (on the basis of old texts whose interpretation is left to the specialist) we get man seen as an erection arising. Zakuph means erect, most distinctly, and as a noun it may designate an erection. In support of his claim for ancient versions Allegro cites the Septuagints translation here as orthion, which means that the witch saw a man straight up, going upwards, upright, or standing, and not that she saw an old man. And from this one would infer a Hebrew zakuph. He cites also an old Latin version corresponding to the Greek word straight, and besides these two he cites a Syriac version also. Obviously, Allegros quiver is full. A recent translation of the verses in I Samuel 28 given by P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., in the Anchor Bible commentary reads as follows: v. 13 Do not be afraid! the king said to her. What do you see? I see a god, she told him, coming up from the earth! v. 14 What is his appearance? he asked her. An erect man is coming up, she said, and he is wrapped in a robe. Do we find the least concession here to Allegros possibility, of which Kyle McCarter was surely aware? Right or wrong, Allegros translation is professionally up to the mark, and if he happens to be right, we have a biblical evocation of the Akwanshi archetype. I mean, if Samuel did so appear to the witch in the story-tellers original idea, and covered with a mantle, we have a presumption that he might not have been raised from the dead otherwise. Resurrection and phallus are associated in the Osiris

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myth and conjoined in the Akwanshi. If Allegros restoration of the ancient Hebrew text is right and his translation sound, we have a reminiscence of that same conjunction here.

AKWANSHI III.
In a book whose aim it is to probe the origins of war in our societys mental condition, Black Ship to Hell, Brigid Brophy conceives of a sort of phallic resurrection: When the father triumphs over death, he is really triumphing over castration. His resurrection is the renewal of his generative powers... The dead lie down they cannot move or raise themselves just as the quiescent sexual organ lies down... when the organ re-asserts its sexual power it does so by rising again. Brigid Brophy is insofar a Freudian intellectual, a writer of recognized literary gifts who is working at a high level of consciousness when the association of phallus and resurrection presents itself to her imagination. Psychiatry, however, goes beyond such a conscious fantasy as hers, interesting as that may be, into a deeper and more terrible fact described in its literature. For in minds broken by madness we find an evidence of the very archetype parading which goes beyond a simple phallic comparison like that above to the fundamental idea of phallic being. For this is an idea which is known to occur in schizophrenia, showing that the locus of the archetype is not in stones or learned books but is within us, and always capable (so it seems) of being summoned to life. A simple proof of this is that schizophrenics have been known to think of themselves as phallic beings in the very sense described above. With no commitment to a theory of archetypes that I know of, the American psychiatrist, Dr. Bertram Lewin, has described the peculiar syndrome. He makes the observation that the phallic delusion seems to occur especially in those who feel themselves being eaten. A strange association! And it reminds me of Geza Roheims theory that schizophrenia originates in an oral trauma. Suffice it, the bare allusion: I only report the fact that Dr. Lewin has known of patients who, in our context, may think of themselves as a sort of living Akwanshi, or in the Freudian terms of Brigid Brophy, who might conceive of themselves as the re-assertive sexual organ because of its renewable and astonishing vitality. Now schizophrenia, as we know, is a disease very deeply studied but not yet well understood. Even its causes are not understood, but we

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do understand that the schizophrenic is a desperate mind. In case of the phallic being idea, which implies those same archaic vestiges and primitive modes of functioning in the unconscious which Jung wrote of and Freud acknowledged, it may be that his very desperation awakens the archetype for all that I know to the contrary. It was certainly interesting to me to read Dr. Adolph Storch on this disease. I have no local access to his book which I read very carefully twice many years ago, but the impression which remains is that he would regard schizophrenia as a sort of failed religious strategy. Our yet unfinished task invites us respecting Lazarus. Do we know that his figure has ever anywhere attracted an association to the inconceivable Phallic Man? We do know it, in fact, and we have a clear evidence of this strange identity in a work of art which is at once unconscious and inspired.

LEONID ANDREYEVS Lazarus: LAZARUS IX.

Like many a Russian tale, say one by Chekhov or Turgenev, Andreyevs story has no plot device and does not depend on contrivance. We look for that sort of thing in O. Henry but the Russian artist depends for his interest on our humanity. It is his theme which fascinates and our pleasure in reading him is not to be deferred to a surprise ending. In the case of the tale under consideration, our interest lies in the bloated figure of Lazarus and his stolid person as the author describes him. We see a reflection of the Gospel in his appearance at a festive table after three days and nights in the mysterious thraldom of death, but Andreyev makes no effort to retell the biblical story and gives us a different Lazarus, instead.27 A whiff of good old-fashioned Russian nihilism haunts the tale to assist the imagination, but our focus is on a Lazarus once beloved who has become a man of dreadful aspect; and it is here that our inspired Russian has described all unconsciously his gruesome version of the archetype. In Lazarus, as he invites us to imagine him: the restoration had not been complete; ...death had left upon his face and body the effect of an artists unfinished sketch seen
27. Andreyevs Lazarus may be found in The Seven that were Hanged & Other Stories, Modern Library paperback, 1958.

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through a thin glass. On his temples, under his eyes, and in the hollow of his cheek lay a thick, earthy blue. His fingers were blue, too, and under his nails, which had grown long in the grave, the blue had turned livid. Here and there on his lips and body the skin, blistered in the grave, had burst open and left reddish glistening cracks, as if covered with a thin glassy slime. And he had grown exceedingly stout. His body was horribly bloated and suggested the fetid, damp smell of putrefaction. It is a measure of the artists success that he has brought forth his symbol in its wrapping, much as the witch of Endor raised SamuelElohim from the ground in his robe. Without this it would be unacceptable: these very disguises allow us to approach this revenant of an ancient god, whereas if Andreyev had been conscious of playing with a phallic symbol, the effect of his story would have been one of cleverness instead of truth, and its deep mystery would have been frittered away. Of course, it is difficult to unmask such a symbol it was not easy to discover it because any associated detail, if exposed too frankly, becomes comical and slightly indecent. So I merely allude to certain aspects of the phallic nature by isolating a few words of the paragraph quoted above, which occurs at the outset of the story and sets its tone: * a thick earthy blue * fingers were blue * nails which had grown long in the grave * burst open * glistening ...as if covered with a thin, glassy slime * he had grown exceedingly stout... horribly bloated * fetid, damp smell of putrefaction We are caught up at once in our fascination with his dreadful aspect. Here at the outset is a masterly fusion of his mortal disintegration and the first appearance of a phallic being. It is a triumph of artistic inspiration. At first, however, the awful condition of this Lazarus is overlooked or explained away. His friends rejoice with feasting and musicians as he himself is seated passively, although arrayed like a bridegroom! His garments (were) gorgeous and festive, glittering with gold, bloody red and purple...(but) someone recklessly lifted the veil... and uncovered the truth in its ugly nakedness.

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What vivid clues these are! Someone has approached him to ask what it was like to be There and caring nothing for the questioner and his foolish curiosity, the apathetic Lazarus does not respond, but the guests are struck, then, with the realization that he had been dead for three days and they await his answer. A second time the questioner asks and his heart sinks, but there is no response. On the table, as if forgotten by Lazarus, lay his livid blue hand, and all eyes were riveted upon it, as though expecting the desired answer from that hand. Downcast and fearful, as if impelled to know this bridegrooms secret, the questioner puts his question yet a third time; but now the apathy and silence of this exceedingly stout... horribly bloated figure is borne in upon the guests. When his livid hand moves slightly, they sigh and lift their eyes, but the festivity dies away. Even the music stops. Why? Given the meaning of his strange appearance on our terms (because it is our Symbol we interpret) we have drawn very near to an ancient tabu against lifting the veil, as if a fearful old god had been revived and were in danger of declaring himself. Not the phallus, then, but the intrusion of the phallic monster is ugly. Suppressed, these archaic demigods may not emerge again except obscenely, whence the tabu. Those who look too closely on Lazarus or peer into his vacant eyes fall into a mournful apathy, droop dully and pine away. The void of eternity has overcome them. And here is a sign that Andreyevs consciousness is taken up by a Russian nihilism, against which he offers the service of his art in protest. It is a curious fact that the appearance of this monstrous being is related to the myth of Gods death, albeit implicitly as a universal darkness which issues from the gaze of Lazarus: ...and this darkness enveloped the whole universe. It was dispelled neither by the sun, nor by the moon, nor by the stars, but embraced the earth like a mother, and clothed it in a boundless, black veil... The death of God is well represented by the extinction of the sun and by an infinity which is nothing but an endless waste, and I suppose the thought of these rhetorical horrors, in themselves no doubt terrible for those who dream such dreams, might have been meant to send a chill up the spine, but Andreyev doesnt terrify. He succeeds only in fascinating the reader, and at last it is Lazarus who is consumed by desert and the night in a groping pursuit of a setting sun which will rise again.

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For there is nothing to be done with this revived and terrible Lazarus except to get rid of him. From afar the world is fascinated, because of course he has become the object of a morbid curiosity, but woe to those who would approach him! One after another his friends abandon him until one night even his caring sister Martha leaves. A wind rises, a door bangs back and forth, and Lazarus does not stir. His second life is as nothing for him. He can only exist, like that livid hand of his which lay upon the table as if he had forgotten it. Devoid of animation, of joy, of hope, of friends, he is a Sign. The encroaching desert creeps to his dwelling to emphasize the sterility of this lonely bridegroom, for it is only the heedless and innocent children who carry him food. But this mere mention of a daily offering of food, besides the thoughtfulness implied, resembles also a service to idols. Although abandoned at home by those who cannot endure his presence, Lazarus fame has spread elsewhere and the story is taken up with his baleful influence. A Roman sculptor in quest of an unearthly beauty visits him to spend the night and goes home blighted. Eventually Augustus Caesar summons him to Rome, and it is during his voyage to Italy on the saddest and most gorgeous ship that was ever mirrored in the azure waves that a subtle erotic image occurs when aboard the silent ship, the water seemed to moan as it parted before the short, curved prow. But why this erotic note? The contrast is ironic. No such image of consummation is associated with Lazarus except for the wedding dress which henceforth he lives in. We are reminded here of the twin rails on which Andreyevs symbol rides. One is that of the ugly bridegroom amid a sterile desert because there is never a thought of a bride; but a second rail, as we might say, is simply that of archaic myth, so that here the erotic reference is embedded in myth. It is the water of the sea which answers to the bride. Arrived in Italy, Lazarus is taken to Rome amid the pomp of a great festive procession, and we are here recalled to the old obscene processions in which a giant phallus was displayed. It is another proof that Andreyevs figure requires its supporting myth. Furthermore, when Lazarus is presented to Caesar, and very reluctantly on the part of his attendants, expert painters, barbers and artists were secured, and they worked on Lazarus head the whole night.

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We compare the old practice of adorning idols with paints and perfumes and royal trappings. I have read of an idol in Egypt that was daily anointed with oil and reclothed. Even in this business of redoing Lazarus head there is a sort of blind veneration of the awful figure because there is something superhuman about him. We hardly dare call him a human being without remembering the other side of him. When Caesar interrogates him: Why did you not salute me when you entered? Lazarus answered indifferently, I did not know it was necessary. You are a Christian? No. After confronting him, Caesar discovers the disguised horror of this Being who has been given an amiable and stout appearance with cosmetics and paints, still clad in his wedding dress! Afflicted at night with a sense of his doom, thanks to this interview, he has Lazarus eyes burned out and sends him home. Now the Specter returns to his desert, where it had been his habit of an evening to follow the setting sun. Once again, eye-sockets seeking the light and arms outspread, a silhouette against the red sky, he stumbles out into the desert toward the setting sun, but from this last venturing into wilderness and night he never returns. Now as aforesaid, it was by an unconscious inspiration that this passionate Russian artist could arrive at his Lazarus and the many subtle clues to his corrupt and strangely phallic identity. Had he the least thought of exploiting a phallic being, or of working in a thinly-veiled erotic imagery this artist who was by no means afraid of sex he must have betrayed himself somewhere by a naughty word or at the very least, by a stroke of audacity, like a Joyce or an Updike, writers who delight in their audacity. There is nothing of that quality here. Andreyev is a deeply innocent writer but possessed by his dream, and it is only we who have understood his Lazarus as a reflection of the archetype. An archaic reversion is depicted here, and just such an archaic reversion as Dr. Adolf Storch explored in the minds of schizophrenics. Fortunately for ourselves and for the case in hand, what the insane can give us only in their madness, an artist may give us in his works, but shaped and made intelligible or beautiful. It is interesting to see the resourcefulness of unconscious invention in furnishing those environmental supports, as reference or replica, which Andreyevs phallic being requires, lest such an anomalous figure find himself out of place in his own story. Thus his Lazarus having

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known the chill of death sits in a broiling sun which beat down mercilessly upon all living things (until) even the scorpions, convulsed with a mad desire to sting, hid under the stones. (Yet) he sat motionless in the burning rays, lifting high his blue face and shaggy, wild beard. The curve of a scorpions tale, convulsed with a mad desire to sting, is reminiscent of the short, curved prow of the sailing vessel furrowing through the bridal sea. Something, even, of this curve is suggested in the sculptors greeting, You are as fat as a barrel, which adds its own further dimensions. The scorpions sting is in its tail, as is the honeybees, and twice Andreyev mentions bees; once when describing the freshly-arriving guests who burst into stormy exclamations, and buzzed around the house... like so many bees. Too remote? Certainly, for any conscious effect this is too remote, and yet it adds its honey to the erotic theme. As for stinging (compare pricking and needling) I do happen to remember a line of poetry from many years ago in which the poet wrote: Set to my skin/ the stinging bees of love. This falls short of Yeatss clay and wattles cottage in a bee-loud glade, but on the point in question there it is.28 Or take for a final example of these further hints and allusions Augustus Caesars words to Lazarus: Like a caterpillar on the fields, you are gnawing away at the full seed of joy, exuding the slime of despair and sorrow. Where the phallic image combines with the full seed of joy and the exuded slime recalls an earlier mention of reddish glistening cracks, as if covered with a thin glassy slime. So much, then, for an evidence from Leonid Andreyev to show that a Lazarus derived from the Bible, despite his transformation, may be cast in this archaic phallic role. Of all the persons in the Gospels, it is he who has attracted the archaic phallic projection, thus showing that he can. And I do not know of another such case. Moreover, there seems to be a certain fittingness to it simply by virtue of his (archaic) resurrection.

28. Its too remote and a mere pun, but I take a certain delight here in beestings (one word, also spelled biestings) from the Anglosaxon. Its the first thickish milk given by a cow after calving.

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Our consideration of this evidence rests literally on the quoted words of the story, although certainly Andreyevs own tale is innocent of all these motives; and if our treatment has suffered a trace of obscenity, it is because an unveiling of the Symbol has required that. From the tremendous Akwanshi stones of Nigeria to the phallic aspects of Osiris to this fascinating Russian tale, we have traced a common underlying form, which is that of the man-phallus (or phallic god). And we have reminded ourselves, thanks to Dr. Bertram Lewin, of the fantasy of the insane mind in which just such a phallic identity may recur as an image of the Self. Now this underlying and traceable form I take for evidence of an Archetype which is otherwise out of reach and whose existence we can only posit on the basis of its varying yet somehow also common expressions, but the bearing of this Archetype on ourselves has yet to be shown; and this is the last step to be taken in our treatment of Lazarus. Or should I say, in our getting rid of him, as even the Gospel is eager to do. It is an expression of the underlying archetype where we might least expect to find it in a story by the eminently respectable (ex-patriate) American artist, Henry James, and it is altogether pertinent to our theme. Short of dropping things in a heap of confusions, Jamess story is the handiest illustration I can think of to show the meaning of it all, especially in its bearing on ourselves. We have only to consider, once more, its very language and its metaphors to relate all these pieces. We can even relate ourselves to the fantasy of the schizophrenic or to the Lazarus of Leonid Andreyev by the aid of Henry Jamess surprising story, which for this reason alone, of course, is very much worth our while. For we are dealing with a myth in treating of Lazarus, and we are probing the sort of reality the myth conveys.

JAMESS JOLLY CORNER: LAZARUS X.29

In this complex story an elderly American gentleman, Spencer Brydon, returns to New York City after a lifetime abroad to take a particular interest in a corner house of four storeys the Jolly Corner where the old silver-plated knobs of the several mahogany doors... suggested the pressure of the palms of the dead. In this ample vacant

29. I have used Clifton Fadimans selection in The Short Stories of Henry James (NY: The Modern Library, 1948.)

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house had he spent the holidays of his overschooled youth, and there his family had remained for many years. So with an old friend, a Miss Staverton, he broaches his question as they are shown about by a Mrs. Muldoon, who looks after the place by day. What if, like his dead brothers, hed stayed on in a businesslike way instead of making a life for himself elsewhere out of his own choices? Money is not the sole object: what might he have made of himself? The question is haunting, and Spencer Brydon will come alone at night from his club or hotel almost expecting to meet some strange figure, some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house. It is this strange figure which will assume the form of his alter ego, although not at first because the earliest intimations of it are of something vaguely daunting. He imagines himself opening a door into a room shuttered and void, and yet so coming, with a great suppressed start, on some quite erect confronting presence, something planted in the middle of the place and facing him through the dusk. We think of John Allegros ish zakuph, the quite erect confronting presence of Samuel in his robe when summoned by the Witch of Endor. Even at the climax of his quest, Spencer Brydon senses the presence of something all unnatural and dreadful... a figure which stood... as still as some image erect in a niche or as some black-vizored sentinel guarding a treasure. A suggestion of antiquity is in the air, and if nothing about this quite erect confronting presence is as highly-colored as Andreyevs florid Lazarus, at least the hard-faced houses... had begun to look livid in the dim dawn. More than just ghosts (which he talks of with his friend) or witchery (great blank rooms... absolute vacancy reigned... nothing but Mrs. Muldoons broomstick, in a corner) when he and Miss Staverton have emerged to the comparatively harsh actuality of the Avenue... (it reminds him) of the assault of the outer light of the Desert on the traveler emerging from an Egyptian tomb. But Brydon cannot give up his queer solitary quest, and he listens for all the old baffled forsworn possibilities when going about with his candle by night. To Alice Staverton he will say: Its only a question of what fantastic, yet perfectly possible, development of my own nature I maynt have missed. It comes

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over me that I had then a strange alter ego deep down somewhere within me, as the full-blown flower is in the small tight bud... I believe in the flower, (she replies.) I believe it would have been quite splendid, quite huge and monstrous. Monstrous above all! her visitor echoed; and I imagine, by the same stroke, quite hideous and offensive. Even if we disregard an unconscious phallic allusion in the small tight bud which has grown into something quite splendid, quite huge and monstrous, it is verily the same note which Andreyev has struck in his Lazarus except that Spencer Brydon is in quest of a monstrous possibility, as he conceives his alter ego. A deep secrecy shrouds this private quest. Mrs. Muldoon doesnt discover the packet of candles hidden away in a built-in drawer. Shes not one to be craping up to thim top storeys in the ayvil hours and leaves at dusk, but even Alice Staverton doesnt know, can only dream of the extent of his morbid obsession. As for anyone else, let them suppose as they may. Let them believe that he leaves his club to go to his hotel, or vice versa, instead of sneaking away nights to his jolly corner. He wants nobody to know of his queer prowling, which he knows must seem absurd, and by balancing club off hotel, he finds it easy to hide under a false impression: Everything, everything conspired and promoted; there was truly even in the strain of his experience something that glossed over, something that salved and simplified, all the rest of consciousness. The point is psychological here, yet in the very imagery describing that something of a personal easement about this haunting of an empty house when he could let himself go, the something that glosses over, salves and simplifies his consciousness reminds us curiously of the thin glassy slime of Andreyevs bloated figure, where deaths visible traces on him were like an artists unfinished sketch seen through a thin glass. Of course, it is easy to leap at the seeming absurdity of a phallic strain in Jamess hero where no such theme is struggling into the light, but even the barest of hints is a hint, for the human mind is very subtle. When Spencer Brydon likens himself to some monstrous stealthy cat he takes a monstrosity upon himself which is otherwise projected on his Double. Furthermore, he is the one who conspicuously uses his single

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eye-glass and not his alter ego. One-eyedness is a well-known phallic clue, and I believe an example of this may be found in Joyces Ulysses, to mention no other. Spencer Brydon even shares with Lazarus a common theme of death and resurrection, and I say this knowing full well that Jamess imagination is no longer biblically determined. Like his famous brother William, he understands this whole experience as somehow psychic and occult; so I dont imply that Henry James had Lazarus in mind. No more was he thinking of Osiris when the harsh actuality of the Avenue struck Spencer Brydon on coming out of doors like the outer light of the Desert on the traveller emerging from an Egyptian tomb. James was supremely conscious of his meaning in this story which was written late in life because Spencer Brydon represents himself, Henry James, an ex-patriate American literary artist who as the superbly intelligent grandson of an Albany (NY) millionaire might more sensibly have pursued a career in business or at very least in one of the established professions. It is therefore an event in his own undisclosed experience he is writing of. James has had his own experience of the momentous encounter. One night, as the story goes on: Hes there, at the top, and waiting (Spencer Brydon exclaims.) His wrath, his menaced interest, now balances with his dread because the monstrous alter ego has been hunted until he has turned. Cold fear comes over him, then sweat breaks out. He is conscious of a duplication of consciousness. Remarkably enough, the final awakening of this monstrous presence (Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human) comes only with Spencer Brydons resumption of his campaign after a diplomatic drop, a calculated absence of three nights. Now then, three nights: and we may think of the three days and three nights of the Sign of Jonah, because in any case we have in the mere mention of a three nights absence the characteristic lacuna, after which the specter arises. Without a lacuna there is no resurrection. Any such event is a numinous event, and James is fully conscious of its dreadful nature. The nearness of the specter produces an immense revulsion in Spencer Brydon. High upstairs he finds a door closed since his former visitation, the matter probably of a quarter of an hour before. It is a discovery to make a mans eyes bulge. Ah this time at last they were, the two, the opposed projections

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of him, in presence; and this time, as much as one would, the question of danger loomed. Were he to open the door all the hunger of his prime need might have been met, his high curiosity crowned, his unrest assuaged but he cannot open the door and stands there, close to the thin partition by which revelation was denied him. Under the importunity of the event and for reasons rigid and sublime he decides that any conceivable meeting between the two must be injurious to both, which nicely suits the polarity involved (just as we do not bring the poles of a magnet together). The terror of such a possible encounter is immense and Spencer Brydon knew yes, as he had never known anything that, should he see the door open, it would all too abjectly be the end of him... It would send him straight about to the window he had left open, and by that window, be long ladder and dangling rope as absent as they would, he saw himself uncontrollably insanely fatally take his way to the street. Accordingly, he retreats, gives up his quest and full of dread and caution prepares to make his way deep downstairs. Only now it is the specter who doesnt give him up and when at last our hero manages to reach the bottom floor, it is to find a penumbra, dense and dark in which the fearful specter gathers to reveal himself in his planted stillness, his vivid truth. A deep paradox qualifies the revelation because this alter ego is at once himself, and yet emphatically not himself. What he sees is a very rich gentleman covering his face with his hands, on one of which two fingers are missing. We note his queer actuality of evening-dress, of dangling double eyeglass, of gleaming silk lappet and white linen, of pearl button and gold watch-guard and polished shoe. No portrait by a great modern master could have presented him with more intensity... When suddenly the vivid apparition drops his hands to show his face, it is a horror. ...that face... It was unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility... the presence before him was a presence, the horror within him a horror... Such an identity fitted his at no point, made its alternative monstrous. ...the face of a stranger... whoever he might be, evil, odious, blatant, vulgar... Earlier, when he first became aware of the presence of something all

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unnatural and dreadful, he understood that to advance upon (it) was the condition for him either of liberation or of supreme defeat, and with trepidation and discretion he advanced. Now to his infinite horror, it is the specter which advances aggressively, and Spencer Brydon swoons his deathly swoon. It is a tremendous hours-long swoon, and something more than a swoon, until in bright daylight he awakens with his head in Alice Stavertons lap. (She had, of course, met the housekeeper and gained entrance). What he most took in... was that Alice Staverton had for a long unspeakable moment not doubted he was dead. It must have been that I was... Yes, I can only have died. You brought me literally to life. Where was he for all those hours? Out there in my strange darkness where was it, what was it? Except as a momentary death, he cannot understand the depth and the duration of his swoon. The story is very deep. Jamess hero had summoned courage enough to face the evil and degraded aspect of himself and affirm his own choice of his own life. Evidently there will be something monstrous in ones encounter with the Double if Spencer Brydons alter ego has consisted in just those aspects of a possible life which the higher self sloughs off. Clearly, also, the higher self is chosen. As a result of his courage Spencer Brydon is resurrected to a new life. He now embodies the vitality of the alter ego without its monstrous distortions. It is an aspect of the phallic image now united to himself when he comes to life with his head in Alice Stavertons lap.

WHAT ALL THIS CAN MEAN: LAZARUS XI.

I believe we have dislodged Professor Allegros Amanita muscaria by proposing the figure of Lazarus for a phallic connection in the Gospels, should any be required. Others may well believe that none is required, and I concede to them willingly that no such thing as a phallic Being is to be found in the Fourth Gospel. A phallic archetype lodged somehow in the human make-up haunts the figure of Lazarus: this is all that I claim. John Allegro was probably the most formidable of recent critics to deny the life of Jesus, despite the wild turn of his argument, and in

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The Sacred Mushroom & the Cross he spoke effectively to a period of sex and drugs, a demoralized period in a disorderly time our own period, perhaps almost seeming to offer in his theory a remedy or a permission. In answering him on the point I have indicated a few seeming links between a god like Osiris and a Lazarus emerging from his cave. The mere action of a dead man coming forth on his feet is like that of a Samuel-Elohim appearing for the moment as an ish zakuph. We have compared this to the Book of the Dead which speaks of Osiris as the phallus of Ra, and we considered the tremendous Akwanshi stones. Mention was also made of Dr. Bertram Lewins report of the phallic Self idea sometimes found in schizophrenics. It is therefore possible to seek the phallic aspect of a Lazarus in his whole body on the strength of his active role. We have made a polarity of Lazarus and Jesus, opposed though they are, because every comparison must bring out a contrast between them, but as I have earlier remarked, Lazarus completes the Symbol of Christ by standing at an opposite extreme. He is unable to raise himself and lies putrid in the grave until Jesus calls him forth. Yet by virtue of his being raised from the dead, he partakes of the miraculous and may be said to hold his treasure in an earthen vessel. He is surely meant to be compared with Jesus as the Resurrected Son of God, although we must ask ourselves if in his role as a symbol he doesnt serve as a magnet to attract to his negative pole what the positive force of Christ can only repel. Not only is Lazarus ominous, therefore, but he is also disgusting. The Scottish authority, William Robertson Smith, writes: In the language of physics, sanctity is a polar force, it both attracts and repels. Of course, he is thinking along different lines, but we have an illustration of this polarity in the deliberate pairing of Jesus and Lazarus. The complete Symbol is a polarity involving good and evil, life and death, attraction and repulsion. Despite the fiction which the Fourth Evangelist employs or invents here, the Raising of Lazarus belongs to the Gospel. Lazarus is also a link which places the Symbol of Christ in its necessary past because Jesus is not a myth sprung up out of nowhere or come down from Heaven. And thanks to Leonid Andreyev, we have seen just how far these archaic aspects may be taken. The Russian tale is satisfying, as if it resolved something deeply within ourselves, because really it is a bridge to the archetype. The mere figure of Lazarus, the mere fiction, attracts the phallic archetype, which is not to say that the Evangelist has intended Lazarus as a phallic being. It is only our

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interpretation which can make that connection, but we do acknowledge the biblical derivation of Andreyevs figure as, by contrast, we can find no conceivable such derivation for Allegros fantastic mushroom. As for the Henry James story, it has shown us a quality of horror and revulsion in Spencer Brydons encounter with his alter ego which we can associate with Andreyevs Lazarus. Each tale describes an artists intuition of a monstrosity which bears or may bear on a Self. This is plain enough in James, and was it not fascinating to notice the many clues to an archetype of which he was unconscious? Both tales repudiate the monstrous figure. Andreyev sends Lazarus into a barren desert, and Spencer Brydon triumphs over death by facing up to his ghost. William Blake has written a prophetic epitaph for the Lazarus I have imagined: Each Man is in his Spectres power Untill the arrival of that hour, When his Humanity awake And cast his own Spectre into the Lake. Blake knew whereof he wrote so succinctly, just as Henry James did, but the experience is rare and seems an event unique to a life when it comes should it come. Blake is biblical but (I think) hardly Christian. James isnt Christian at all. Despite its lack of a definitely biblical connection, his Jolly Corner best reveals the experience wrapped up in the unreachable Archetype.

PART FIVE THE GOSPEL RECAST

Several times have I mentioned the Fourth Gospel, mostly in passing, to remark its distinctiveness. In the Wedding at Cana Jesus produces wine without a word of command or a gesture of any sort. The event is a Sign: the transformation of the water comes after his mother (= the Old Religion) tells him, They have no wine. Or we saw how John has removed the Cleansing of the Temple from Passover week, the last of Jesus life, to place it near the beginning. Or we noticed his embarrassment over a Sign of Jonah in which the vomiting out of a runaway prophet becomes a prophecy of the Resurrection. In that same connection the Evangelist obliterates a fact of tradition in the form of a Semitic name, Simon bar-Jonah, which he changes to Simon, Son of John.

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What is really at issue for the Fourth Evangelist is an entire recasting of the Gospel that transforms the person of Jesus. We have just done examining the tale of Lazarus as a deliberate myth. Of course, in some sense the Synoptics have also recast the underlying traditions, but there is a quality of legend about those earlier Gospels whereas we no longer find legends of that sort in John. Instead, we have myths outright and very bold fictions. This author is no longer assembling tales into a lumpy Gospel like Marks. The Fourth Evangelist seeks only the completeness of his Symbol. A series of piecemeal contributions, such as the curing of yet another Bartimaeus or the raising from her sickbed of yet another daughter and these things kept as a matter of record could only detract from the force of his own tremendous myth. The Signs, instead, are reduced in number and greatly expanded by techniques of story-telling and verisimilitude. Instead of adding anecdotes he adds detail. This final Evangelist is intent on creating a more satisfactory myth. He isnt satisfied with the earlier Gospels because he has mastered deeper themes. When Matthew writes of the church, for instance, as the only Evangelist even to use the word, he thinks of its rules and its authority. One might aspire to be a member in good standing in such an organization as that, but in Johns fellowship of the Spirit one feels at home. More than the others, he seeks to achieve the realization of Jesus in the sacred community. His is the Gospel of the Mystic Soul for whom the Father and the Son are an indwelling consolation. It is also, ironically, the Gospel of love despite its animosity toward the Jews. Appropriately, this final Gospel opens with a hymn: In the Beginning was the Word (=Logos) And the Word was with God, And the Word was God. And so forth mysteriously and gloriously because the Heavenly Logos is a lesser divinity, sharing in the very quality of God. In the Synoptic Gospels the Son of Man could be expected in the clouds for Judgment, but there was never a thought that he had anything to do with the creation of the world, whereas the Logos is declared to be the instrument of creation. Coming into a world he had made and to which (it is implied) he has imparted a sort of indwelling Reason, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Nevertheless, this pre-existent Logos now appearing in the person of Jesus is met with rejection:

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He came unto his own, and his own received him not; but to all who received him, who believed in his Name, he gave power to become children of God. An elevated worship of Jesus has developed in the Great Congregation for which this Gospel has been composed. It was evidently a Mother Church bent on extending its influence widely and succeeding in that aim. We beheld his glory, the author dares to say, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1,14.) If taken literally, this would make our Evangelist an eye-witness of the life to be described: so far does this Gospel dare to go when advancing its claim. Or these words might have been uttered once by a Christian prophet in a moment of inspiration or invented by a poet who composed the hymn, as if by merely uttering such a wish you could almost taste its fulfillment. A serious claim of history is of course very distinctly intended, despite its mythical form. After this opening, all mention of the Logos ceases henceforth, and that is rather strange. Why was it introduced if it has no bearing on the life to be described? Its disappearance suggests that a mystical poem already in use has been borrowed for an opening chord. Conceived as a unity, this Gospel was nevertheless not written ex nihilo but composed or re-composed out of available materials. Woven into the prologue, the hymn of the Logos casts its glow over a Gospel in which Jesus under a veil of flesh and blood is uniquely the Son of God. Hence the paradox of Jesus in this Gospel. Lifeless, he bleeds on the cross at the thrust of a spear; but he has come into this world from a Heaven beyond, and having now returned there, he continues to speak from Heaven. It is a subtle effect and very shrewdly built up until we reach certain unique farewell discourses in which he speaks most intimately in his prayers and to his disciples and to us, because every direct thing that he says in this Gospel can be taken to heart. It is designed for that. Johns is the Gospel of the spoken Word: it is meant to be read aloud, its full effect requiring that. It is the most impressive liturgical Gospel.

INSIGHT & DISCOVERY

The Fourth Gospel I first truly understood as a young Lutheran pastor in the Pennsylvania town of Altoona whose cobblestone streets and steep neighborhoods were like a village in a fairy-tale. Quaintly huddled houses up and down the hills were painted against the sooty

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atmosphere in solid reds, deep yellows, outright browns. It was another view of the world I got there, and once before dawn outside our parsonage, going for a solitary walk uphill, I was seized by a sense of the mystery of things. It was a moment quickly gone, but it brought home to me a sense of the uncanny, as if there was nothing anywhere that could not present its tangible mystery. And there was something wonderful about this knowledge. As to the Fourth Gospel, it was quite a different matter but nonetheless an event in my life, a moment of understanding which burst on me in our tidy brick parsonage living room where I sat recuperating from a pile-up of sicknesses. A common flu neglected had passed into pneumonia (which I was unaware I had) and then to meningitis after a drive to Lancaster for interviews. I woke up stiff and disabled next morning but saved by the swift action of my wife and by Dr. Julius Bloom, a physician of repute in that city who came to my home before calling an ambulance. Recuperating afterwards, I was weak, absurdly weak, and rose from my couch to float tiptoe across the room now and then before retreating to sit down. All I could do was sit and read. The Fourth Gospel was for me at that time an enigma and a bother. I was undisturbed by Mark and the Synoptics because I could think of them (then) as merely legendary, not doubting that an actual tradition of Jesus lay behind the particular tales. True enough, that I was disappointed in the supposed revelation when once the ministry had thrust me into the daily endeavor. Even in the Sayings of Jesus I could find no gleam of revelation, as when he says in the Sermon on the Mount: Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. How was that a revelation when it might have been said by my own Uncle Bill? And yet I wasnt in reaction against the Synoptics, which I was still hopeful of, whereas I had begun to dislike the Gospel of John. So I took up James Moffatts racy translation and began to read it through. A good three times running I must have read it through, straining to isolate the nub of my dislike. When insight came I was appalled. It was, of course, my own thought which had appalled me. What made for such a quake of insight in my weakness was my appreciation of this Evangelists technique, which involves a good deal of hypnotic repetition. He creates a persona for Jesus which he manipulates to great effect (because the thing is masterfully done). Certainly, we must say of this great Evangelist that he is not above the use of artifice and imagination in creating his illusion. A deliberate

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repetitiveness is characteristic and seems, at times, contrived to bewilder the reader or even slightly to annoy him. I have always the impression when reading John that he means to keep the reader a little off balance so as to make an opening for his peculiar insinuations. Now it may be naive of me, but it is the impression. This Evangelist knows what it means to be among the masters of a cult. And yet this Gospel exists to serve the believers who come to it for the very thing it offers, and offers so effectively that some sort of radical faith on the Evangelists part may be presupposed. I dont say that John is insincere but only that he is unscrupulous. Faith implies a disposition to take these things to heart, and given that sort of willingness, the substance of Jesus discourse goes beyond any trick of manipulation in addressing the worshipers needs.

ENIGMA OF AUTHORSHIP
We find that the Fourth Gospel is often very satisfying to a believer who likes to have his devotion kindled, or at least perhaps I should say to a wise pastor who likes to stir his peoples tender feelings. It was designed for that because it seeks to encourage us and make us believers and to kindle our love for those in the fellowship. Unfortunately (and we do not discuss the history of these dissensions) it is deeply marred by its hatred of those Jews in the story who reject Jesus claims, which go beyond anything he might say of himself in the Synoptics. It would be unthinkable in the Gospel of Matthew for Jesus to say openly before the Pharisees, I am the Light of the world, although we seem to be half-way there when in the Sermon on the Mount he tells his disciples, You are the salt of the earth... You are the light of the world. Of all the Gospels, then, this last authentic Gospel is the least satisfactory to a historian. For one thing, its Jesus is presented through the medium of the authors personality, although it was perhaps inevitable that something like this must happen, given a deep mind and a strong personality intent on recasting the old traditions. For in the larger world of John they required to be recast: they were becoming obsolete and would be seen as provincial in the thriving cities of the Hellenistic world. We have mentioned already Johns abandonment of the whole demoniac scheme. It is Jesus in this Gospel who is insulted by the accusation that he has a demon; and in a grand conception it is Satan who must enter the heart of Judas Iscariot, whereas to make a demoniac of him would be absurd.

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The revisions in this Gospel extend to the basic ideas. The Kingdom of God, for instance, which so dominates the Synoptic Teaching is mentioned only once or twice whereas ideas fundamental to the Persian religion or the Zoroastrian, ideas of Light, Truth, and Life, are now essential to John. Refurbished myths of Judgment and Eternal Life are also to be found among his innovations. This is a highly sophisticated Gospel. Its myth is far advanced from our perspective, but in his own world John has begun to demythologize. No more than Mark, however, had he a personal acquaintance with Jesus, or any fuller knowledge of his life as far as we can tell, despite the Gospels pretense that it rests on eyewitness authority. I must qualify these remarks, however, by allowing that our sense of a strong personality at work may be only an illusion, although a very strong one. A careful study of this Gospel has led to a belief which is now very common among the scholars that certain large sections of it have only been sewn together. A redactor, so-called, is supposed to have joined a narrative of Signs and wonders with a half-Gnostic farewell discourse which was independently composed. It may be so, but notice how this theory imitates the two source theory about Matthew and Luke which shows how these intermediate Evangelists have joined together Marks narrative of the Messianic secret with the Sayings of Q. Be that as it may, a basic historical frame is kept of a Jesus who comes from Nazareth and is crucified under Pontius Pilate, and within this familiar frame we feel an overall unity in the Fourth Gospel. Our old pastors used to compare John to a seamless robe in describing its quality, borrowing that image from Johns account of the Passion, but the modern investigator discovers seams in the robe, and many an authority finds that the Gospel has been somewhere disarranged, almost as if an early scribe had dropped its pages on the floor. Considering how this Gospel is put together, then, it may be the case that we have here the regional effect of another cult in a different locale. And nobody knows to this day where the Gospel was written. An ancient tradition tells us that it was composed in Ephesus by the Elder John, or even by the disciple of that name, which is possible on historical grounds but incredible with respect to what it has to say of Jesus. For my part whenever I have read this Fourth Gospel over a period of fifty years, I seem feel the force of a ruling personality. Its author belongs to that enduring element in the myth of religion which aspires to dominion, and he uses Jesus in the guise of a Revealer, a

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Shepherd who cares for his flock, a self-declaiming Son of God, a Doer of unheard-of wonders who appeals to these wonders as a ground for belief. I think nothing shows the manipulation of Jesus like this Gospel. It is this which makes him unscrupulous, although he justifies himself by implicit claims of inspiration. (One has to read between the lines for this, but I think he intends that). And I think we must concede him a sort of awesome, deep, desperate sincerity because he has thrown in his lot heart and soul with a community of believers. Sink or swim: we are all in this together! If we take his Gospel seriously at face value throughout, John will appear to us as a strangely truculent Converted Jew, but I am afraid that Dr. Bultmann has rolled over in his grave just now, as I wrote this sentence. If a single great mind is responsible for this Gospel, we may think of him as a great man unknown. It is possible. A genuine inspiration is here, somewhat troubled by adversity; also narrative genius mixed in with lesser stuff; a thinking in symbols; a depth of faith; seriousness, poignancy and as I say, rash hatred of the Jews. (We bear in mind that this Gospel was very early opposed by certain Christians in Asia Minor). Its shortcomings include a stuffy atmosphere, a tendency to drone, a tiresome obviousness, and the aforesaid disorders. What is it that can explain its hypnotic potency, then? I fall back on what I said above when many years ago it seemed to me that Johns befuddlements were a deliberate technique. In Moffatts translation, the one I read at the moment of insight, the text has been reorganized and yet the sense came strongly home to me that John meant to disconcert the readers mind so that the illusion he seeks to create would take.

THIS GOSPELS AUTHORITY

We cannot simply write this Gospel off, whoever the Evangelist was. There is too much against that. Johns bold transformation of a Jesus-tradition that reminds us of the Synoptics is successful on its own terms. A legendary process which had already been fixed in writings, most of them now lost, and some of them, probably, wild and spurious beyond our imagining, has here been taken over by a man of intellect. It is the method of the written Gospel which he recasts, preserving the original myth (or kerygma) in an adaptation suited to another world. What is great about the Fourth Gospel is its powerful Expression, which arises from a greater depth of mind. You may see this by comparing

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Lukes Gospel, which we praise for its literary finesse and where you will find various literary motives and some pretty pieces, but no such depth of mind as we find in John. Even the myths in Luke are shallower than Johns. Has faith no right to express itself without being liable to the charge of unreality? No one complains of music that someone has composed it or of poetry that someone has made it up. And few of us would deny the life of Buddha just because an Oriental artist has made a royal figure of him, endowed with a vast halo and seated on a lotusthrone. How far may expression go along artistic lines when handling, or transforming, matter of history? We want the reality conveyed, but we love the Expression. I do sometimes wonder to what extent a residue of fundamentalism may prevent our appreciation of the Fourth Gospels claim on history within the sevenfold veils of its mystical faith and Oriental extravagance. It may be that John did not compose a history in our sense of the word, or even in the manner of Josephus or Herodotus, but its claim on history has made his Gospel important. The sublimest expression of mystical thought cannot satisfy if it fails to convey a sense of reality. It is a question to be asked, therefore: Just what is the real content of this writing? And this we can hardly evaluate without a grasp of the authors design. True enough, that he is tremendously original, innovative, inventive and fictitious in his sweeping methods, but is he only that? For like his predecessors the Evangelist purports to be giving us a genuine history of the man Jesus. And that is just our problem. I think we must concede to this author his own belief that the myth he tells of happened, but we do find it hard to understand quite the nature of his belief. In some strange sense he believes in a myth he is creating, but he is not a man to take himself literally at all points or even, possibly, at very many points. John, at last, is the Symbolist that Professor William Benjamin Smith thought all the Evangelists deliberately were, but he is also on our view (as Professor Smith did not concede) the serious historian of a miracle. John believes in the Fact, and we misread him if we take lightly his claim that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. This is the radiant essence of his belief. We might make a stab at defining his aim by comparing Joseph Conrads famous statement of his aim as a novelist: My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel it is, before

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all, to make you see. That and no more, and it is everything. Is the Fourth Gospel a novel? Because this looks almost like a statement of the Evangelists purpose. He is aware of the worshipers desire to know Jesus more intimately. His religion promises that: why should it not deliver? Mindful of the believers hankering to experience, if possible, a little bit more, he writes to serve this deeper aim. After Jesus has entered Jerusalem, certain Greeks that came up to worship at the feast approach one of the disciples, Philip, a man without a role in the Synoptics, to say: Sir, we would see Jesus. The primitive theme revolves and is transformed. Recall from Mark how Simon told Jesus, Everyone is searching for you! Mark treats the matter realistically and sends Jesus away among the villages of Galilee but John veers upward. The question of these worshiping Greeks leads directly into one of the elevated passages in the Johannine Discourses of Jesus: The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit... Now is the Judgment of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out, and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself. Here speaks a Jesus drawn from the Evangelists own faith rather than from any record of the past.

THE STORY UPENDED

As in the earliest Gospel, the Baptists appearance is the beginning of the story proper, yet everything is changed about to accommodate this different atmosphere and the story is much modified. Gone is the thundering desert prophet denouncing a generation of vipers; gone, any mention of his baptism of repentance and along with it any message of a Kingdom of Heaven at hand. Now the Baptist openly and repeatedly subordinates himself to the Messiah and points him out to his own disciples. Although he is made to say, I saw the Spirit come down from Heaven like a dove, and it remained on him, we are not told that he baptized Jesus. An awkwardness which had embarrassed Matthew does not appear at all in John. Instead, when the Baptist sees Jesus coming toward him he says: Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!

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On his first described sight of Jesus he makes open announcement of sacrifice and reconciliation. The complete myth is implied, which only his death has accomplished; and the announcement receives a double emphasis when next day again (and I abridge): John was standing with two of his disciples; and he looked at Jesus as he walked, and said, Behold, the Lamb of God! The two disciples followed Jesus who turned and said to them, What do you seek? And they said to him, Rabbi, where are you staying? He said to them, Come and see. (1,35.) How different is this version of the opening tale! And yet a common theme is struck. We may recall yet once again how at the beginning of Marks Gospel Peter spoke for everyone when he sought out Jesus. Here the theme is echoed when Jesus asks the two disciples: What do you seek? Far from being casual utterances which the memory of the early church had preserved, Peters simple statement in Mark and Jesus artless question in John are contrived by the Evangelists themselves. Each of these unknown composers points to his Gospels deep theme at the outset. The Fourth Evangelist extends this to an invitation: Come and see. And in a deliberate emphasis Philip almost at once repeats the invitation verbatim, speaking to Nathanael. So in Johns Gospel the disciples of the Baptist know at once who Jesus is and what he means, and at once they spread the Word; but see how this renovated myth turns the Gospel of Mark upside down! After Jesus has invited Johns disciples to come along we read: So they went and saw where he was staying, and spent the rest of the day with him. It was then about four in the afternoon. One of the two who followed Jesus after hearing what John said was Andrew, Simon Peters brother. The first thing he did was to find his brother Simon. He said to him, We have found the Messiah (and) he brought Simon to Jesus, who looked him in the face and said, You are Simon, son of John. You shall be called Cephas (that is, Peter, the Rock). (1,39. NEB) This is a wonderful verisimilitude, but it gives the lie to an earlier tradition or visa versa. What happens to Peters Confession if Andrew, the insignificant brother, informs him of the Christ on the strength of John the Baptists revelation? Andrew being originally a disciple of Johns (and nothing said about this pair of brothers called away to be fishers of men.) The entire structure of the Markan story is collapsed. Is it the same

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story, then? In respect of these fundamental aspects, our answer must be No. It is my own belief, however, that John has understood Mark better than Matthew and Luke have understood him. He has understood his shrewdness and his deeper intent, and he has seen how the whole presentation of this Gospel might be done in a manner more satisfactory to himself and better adapted to a later environment. Before this Gospel was written down, Jesus had already become a sort of god. The further enhancing of his figure in John is one more step, a crucial step, in the enhancements of tradition. What remains as a lingering perplexity is the strange persistence of tradition, which somehow resists the most drastic changes. Certainly, it is given to no man, and to no one event, to change traditions. Peter may no longer make his inspired Confession here or Jesus declare, Upon this Rock! But the primitive name Simon bar-Jonah, although defaced in that form, survives as Peter: Petros: Cephas: the cognomen given Simon (in the legend) at the time of his Confession. John boldly reduces Peters role in the opening scenes which are described with verisimilitude, but he cannot get rid of a name (Kepha in the Aramaic) so radically associated with Simon the fisherman.

MARKING THE CONTRAST

Plainly, the Fourth Gospel stands in contrast to a tradition represented by Mark and Q, which are thought to furnish the basic Synoptic stuff. And the Synoptic Gospels we have everywhere assumed to be earlier simply because for the greater part of two centuries past, this has been the usual scholarly belief. Can John, originating somewhere in a great Hellenistic city such as Ephesus or Alexandria or Antioch, represent a wholly independent tradition? Something outlying or isolated? Are we to think that he was unacquainted with the Synoptics? Its most unlikely; the more so because he has read Mark so discerningly, as it seems to me. The difference in quality is deliberate. Johns Gospel represents a plowed-under tradition which he subverted for his own reasons, and successfully, because this mystical Gospel despite its flaws has become the most important of the four, religiously. But he failed to displace the other Gospels, as he intended. Certainly, he never wrote to supplement Mark, as both Matthew and Luke have supplemented the earliest Gospel by incorporating Q. No: John wrote his

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Gospel to sink Mark out of sight among people who were familiar with the Synoptic tradition. His aim was to make the earliest Gospel obsolete. It belongs to the strategy of this subtle Evangelist, however, that he must pay his respects to the very tradition he subverts: and he must do this to obtain any hearing at all. Briefly, then, let us consider the matter. Mark is a traditional document or else it is nothing. As such, he is witness to traditions of a Galilean Jesus who as a teacher and healer and wonder-worker once journeyed to Jerusalem to be crucified, after which, for so the traditions tell us, he was raised from the dead. We see immediately we always have how this transparently legendary Gospel of Jesus could be historical, for there is nothing to be said against the basic structure. A strange prophetic figure crucified: what is unhistorical about that, with respect I mean to the assumptions it rests on? But that much of Marks history John has retained. Now it goes without saying that even this earliest of our Gospels cannot be as early as the lost traditions it rests on, and we know that Mark is not quite true to these earlier traditions because the unfolding of his story depends on a Messianic secret which we take to be his own device. That is, we take it that way generally but without prejudice to Christs intention in the Messianic Entry. An earlier tradition is showing beneath the surface of his tale like the washed-out ink of a palimpsest, and what it seems to show is that Jesus makes no claim to be Messiah. It is Mark, therefore, who portrays him as a Christ with a secret. Johns disabling of the Markan tale is, therefore, not a crucial argument against him, but then what of Q? What of those Teachings once assembled by Matthew in the Hebrew tongue, the supposed original Teachings of Jesus which would have been gathered as Logia after they had been variously and miscellaneously translated into Greek? Sea sponges, I have read, represent in miniature a sort of giant colony, and if a living sponge is ground down artificially, its elements are said to be able to reassemble themselves into a different sponge. If so, then Matthews Hebrew version of the Teachings was reassembled along the lines of a sea sponge always on the assumption that he made his collection at all. But we actually have Q, and there is no mistaking the authenticity of these Teachings. They are among the solidest evidence that we have of the life in dispute, even granting that a supposed document containing

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these Teachings has not been seen by a single researcher. Its bare existence is a deduction, and we posit various stages through which the Teachings must pass before ever the first word is written. And what do we mean by a primary oral stage? Exactly what is primary? Ultimately, was he a Teacher? in contrast to a rousing prophet of a Kingdom impending? Yet on the hypothesis, and since we have the famous Teachings, the basic three-fold scheme is very simple: (a) We have one ancient testimony to Matthews collection in the Hebrew tongue. This is ascribed to a Bishop Papias of Asia Minor by a historian writing early in the 4th century. It may be dubious, but in fact it is there. (b) We posit a lost Greek document which may represent somebody elses collection of Teachings ascribed to Jesus and gathered we know not how. (c) Our scholars have reconstructed this document by comparing Matthew and Luke. We have then a distinct body of Teachings shared in a peculiar way by two Evangelists writing independently of one another, and we know well enough how they treat a written source because we see this clearly in their common use of Mark. Strikingly, and even wonderfully, a document of Jesus-sayings like that described as Q was found in the dry climate of Egypt in 1945 marvelously preserved. It is a late document called The Gospel of Thomas and very Gnostic in its temper, but it resembles Q, which it is not, in being a collection of Jesus supposed Teachings, some of which we find in our own Gospels plus others besides, and a few of which are rather strange. Story content is lacking. Here, then, is an archaeological document in proof that such documents existed as, first, the German scholars were describing in the Quelle or Redenquelle, as aforesaid (= Sayings Source). Thus Q is a very genuine evidence: these are authentic Teachings which only just fall short of historical proof. No one who reads the Beatitudes or the Lords Prayer can fail to ascribe them to the influence one might almost say, of a singular mind, but that would be hasty. We should rather ascribe them to a remarkable inspiration whose human source our Synoptics trace to a describable Jesus. However, this fact of Q represents a prime difficulty about the Fourth Gospel because the very Teachings are grossly absent from John. More than simply ignoring them, the Fourth Evangelist has replaced them extensively by vastly different Teachings uttered in a different style,

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and by a series of conversations which in the case of the Woman at the Well or Jesus conversation with Pontius Pilate we know to be imaginary. Conversation of this sort is lacking in the Synoptic tradition but so plentiful in John that Goodspeed the brilliant Goodspeed! compares this Gospel to a type of Hellenistic dialogue. Such is the contrast; and for an intelligent reader who makes the comparison, it is bewildering. No doubt it is possible to overestimate the supposed uniqueness of these Synoptic Teachings, speaking historically, because they are clearly Jewish teachings characteristic of an age, although of a rare quality, to be sure. And it is in their quality that we must seek for their uniqueness, as we find the uniqueness of Shakespeare in Shakespeare and not in the Elizabethan style. Were it otherwise if these logia within our Gospels did not express a genuine strand in Jewish faith it would have been impossible for Rabbi (Dr). Leo Baeck to write his deep study of The Gospel as a Document of the History of the Jewish Faith basing on the Synoptic Gospels and excluding John. Now the absence of Q from John reminds us ironically that these same Teachings are absent also from Mark, who is among the Synoptics. What did the earliest Evangelist think of them? Was he thinking of Q when echoing a petition of the Lords Prayer about forgiveness? All we know is that Mark wasnt felt to be incompatible with Q, as the later Synoptics bear witness. Whether the Fourth Gospel is incompatible the Reader may judge when we see what Jesus says there. I believe that Mark wrote to supplement the Teachings because of all that Q leaves out of the early Christian preaching or kerygma. Our mistake in the matter is to imagine that Mark is a disciple of Jesus who must be hanging on his words: he is not. Mark is a believer, and he misses that more developed Gospel which is absent from Q (=Jesus did not teach the Gospel which was later preached about him: a veritable axiom and even a commonplace). This is surely why he dares to have even Jesus suggest that later Gospel when he foreshadows the voluntary death of the Son of Man or speaks of his Resurrection after three days following Peters Confession.

ANOTHER JESUS
Now the Johannine Jesus differs from the one in Mark above all else, as we imply, because he is forever revealing himself. Gone now is the Messianic secret:

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This, the first of his Signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory; and his disciples believed in him. (2,11.) Only the blindness of his opponents can preserve the divine incognito, only their darkened minds keep them from understanding what he says, and yet it must be confessed that he is not always plain. Enigma, deception and insult are found in his mouth because he misleads his brothers about a visit to Jerusalem (John 7,8) or says to the Jews, with whom he is quarreling: It is my Father who shows me honor. You say he is your God, yet you have never come to know him. But I know him. If I say I do not know him, I will be a liar like yourselves. (John 8,54. Goodspeed) Everywhere he speaks in accents foreign to the Synoptics. Often, he will make grandiose claims deliberately to call attention to himself and demand belief whereas, for instance, the Synoptic Jesus would hush the very disciples. The effective result is to give us another Jesus, a Number Two. I am reminded of the principle of Ku Chieh-kang, who is quoted by Arthur Waley in his translation of the Analects: One Confucius at a time. Consider Jesus conversation with a certain Nicodemus, an old Pharisee who visits him by night and is told that we must be born anew... born of the Spirit, which greatly perplexes him. It is often the case in John that those who inquire of Jesus are reduced to simple-mindedness. Can a man be born when he is old? asks Nicodemus, whereupon Jesus describes a Spirit which moves like the wind: You do not know whence it comes or whither it goes. The very words prepare a theme because in this Gospel we do not know whence Jesus comes or whither he goes. He has a kind of habit of appearing or disappearing unexpectedly. Applied to Spirit, however, these words introduce a doctrine of grace which is foreign to the Synoptics where Jesus preachments are addressed to us more simply, as for instance when he says: Enter ye in at the strait gate, for broad is the way that leadeth to destruction. We can act on these words if we choose, whereas in John something else must happen to us first because: Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God. The teaching is difficult and the old Pharisee does not understand. Step by step, the words of Jesus as he expounds his mystical doctrine pass into the authors own words until he has very plainly taken over the discourse, as when Jesus says:

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If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe how can you believe if I tell you Heavenly things? No one has ascended into Heaven but he who descended from Heaven, the Son of Man. (John 3,13.) Clearly, then, we have in the Fourth Gospel a most unsecret Messiah. A series of revealing I AM sayings has been woven into the texture of this Gospel, seven in number: I AM (says Jesus betimes) the Bread of life (6,48) the Light of the world (8,12) the Door of the sheepfold (10,7) the Good Shepherd (10,14) the Resurrection and the Life (11,25) the Way, the Truth and the Life (14,6) I Am the True Vine (and you are the branches: 15,1 ff.) Once he says in controversy with the Jews, Before Abraham was, I AM, thereby associating himself with the supposed Name of God most intimately, and for saying this, the Jews take up stones against him. (John 8,58.) Twice in John they attempt to stone Jesus although we find nowhere a hint of such a fiction in the Synoptics. There is a kind of human unreality about the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel despite the singular opinion of Professor William Benjamin Smith that he is more fully humanized here and better furnished with human sentiment compared to the demigod which Professor Smith would find in Mark, but this is a judgment that is wrong on both counts. Even JM Robertson, who claimed Smith as a colleague in the Negative argument, could not accept his opinion on that. I find (and so did Santayana find) that Marks virile portrait is convincing despite his array of wonders, but of course we must allow that the quality of virility may be owing to the mind and art of the primitive Evangelist.

PRESENCE
Johns focus is the living Christ. He means to bring his Jesus before us without a sense that he is confined to the past, or that his very deeds are drifting ever further away. Yet there is nothing lacking in this Evangelists sense of the past. In no sense does he cancel the history of Jesus or doubt of a singular Incarnation in a human life. He shows very plainly that this life is over and done. The work of Christ is an achieved

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fact. Symbolically, Jesus will say on the cross: It is finished. And yet there is something always on-going, the work of Redemption is unfinished, so really it is the Evangelist who takes on himself the continuing work of Revelation, which is to us, of course, very strange. There is a word of Pauls or pseudo-Pauls in Colossians (a disputed Epistle) where he writes, or else an impostor writes with an extraordinary presumption: I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christs afflictions for the sake of his Body, that is, the Church. (Colossians 1,24.) Translation of the verb in question here (what is lacking) is difficult, and the most readable of the Catholic translations takes an edge off this: It makes me happy to be suffering for you now, and in my own body to make up all the hardships that have still to be undergone by Christ for the sake of his Body, the Church. (New Jerusalem Bible.) We are not concerned with Paul just now, and I only cite this evidence of a certain early boldness in apostles, prophets and teachers, generally, who carry on a living work of Christ, whether by suffering in his behalf or speaking in his Voice or giving revelations in his Name. The Fourth Evangelist, whose psychology as a writer we must assume to resemble our own, implies or even believes that he is inspired. It is a desperate belief. He would represent his audacious Gospel as a labor of faith grounded in Jesus own activity and in his given words but yet words which the Evangelist supplies in order to express his idea. I cannot accept the Fourth Gospel on this basis, but it must be conceded that its Jesus promises a continuing inspiration. Professor Raymond Stamm once of Gettysburg Seminary was very strong on this point of a continuing Redemption in Johns Gospel. Old Dr. Stamm when I knew him was a middling sort of scholar (I am none) and he didnt understand my sharp doubts of this Gospel as a pastor. Ardent and desirous in his own belief, he impressed on me the continuing Revelation in John. But these are rather negative thoughts about the Evangelists attitude and his methods which are difficult for us, and strange. So let us come to the effective Presence in this Gospel which, in some strange way, the Evangelist has imparted to his Christ. Certainly, the Evangelist is a very solid Somebody-or-other. And there is something in his Gospel I say it as a matter of long experience which is rather tremendously solid.

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What is it? Although this Jesus is presented in his Nearness by Johns commanding literary techniques, he is not to be sought in the pages of a book. For the Evangelist clearly intends that his reality is to be sought in a fellowship of the Spirit to which a unique Revelation has been given. I dont mean to be saying that he is not to be sought in the soul because John is mystic enough to encourage that, and certainly his Gospel is addressed to our inwardness. But Jesus is always faith-received, and the faith is to be nourished and supported by a community of believers. Mystic or no, John would never suggest that we can hope for a genuine experience of the living Christ, as it were, alone. We must belong heart and soul to the community of a Spirit already referred to in the Nicodemus conversation and which is, at last, personified and given the dignity of a title when Jesus promises to send his disciples the Parakletos. This word signifies a Comforter or Advocate (or more strictly, one who is called to our side: called to help). The vital conception owes much to the Jews, who were by now transforming their Shekinah into just such a holy Presence or Nearness. Originally, the Shekinah had been a Cloud by day and a Fire by night guiding the Israelites in the wilderness. but under any name, Shekinah, Paraclete, or Holy Ghost, or even Wisdom, it is an indwelling Spirit of God given to the Chosen People. (That is the form of the myth). And so the People are the (ideal) receptacle: the People are the Temple. Josiah Royce has drawn from this ancient idea his own myth of the Beloved Community. Its a potent idea, and in its different forms it belongs to the heart of the Jewish and Christian faiths, but here we are to notice a contrast to the anti-Jewish sentiment in this Gospel, which makes its mysterious author all the more difficult to explain. For without that spiritual community at his own living core, Johns famous mysticism, socalled, would be an empty thing, as mysticism mostly is. Without this community of Friends (for here the disciples are called friends) this Jesus would have no earthly dwelling. As a matter of technique, then, John ascribes the glory of the Heavenly Christ to the Jesus of the past because he means to set a living Jesus within that community. A creative imagination is overruling here, and inspiration from within. It is not the historical Jesus he describes otherwise than in reference to the believed-in Fact. Albert Schweitzers problem does not concern him.

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At the very outset of his Gospel (as we have seen) the Fourth Evangelist veils his deep promise in a casual exchange between Jesus and a pair of the Baptists disciples: What do you seek? Rabbi, where are you staying? Come and see. It was another Jesus who made his appearance as a prophet according to the Synoptics where he took the initiative in calling disciples: Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men. In John he tells his first followers: You will see Heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. Gone from the Fourth Gospel is any call for repentance because of a Judgment about to burst upon the world. Already has the Fourth Evangelist begun to demythologize, although for John also Jesus will come again in a manner not too disconcerting as he tells his disciples during the Last Supper: In my Fathers house are many mansions. I go to prepare a place for you and... I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am, there ye may be also. (14,2.) These are deep-lying continuities. Outright rupture is avoided, but the various facts reported by the early traditions have little value for John, whose Gospel may be read as the report of an immense transformation. Where is Jesus for us? Because in John, as I have said, it is only in the fellowship of the Spirit that his Jesus is to be found. Otherwise we have nothing: Where is he? his neighbors ask a man who was cured of his blindness by the man called Jesus. I do not know, he replies. (9,12) It is our situation the Evangelist has in mind in devising this imaginary dialogue; we are born blind unless we are born of the Spirit. Afterwards, Jesus finds the man: Do you believe in the Son of Man? And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him? You have seen him, and it is he who speaks to you. Lord, I believe. You have seen him! And so his reality is attested to us. Notice that it is Jesus who finds the Man Born Blind, not the other way around. All the

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initiative lies with him, however much the worshiper desires his Nearness. You will seek me and you will not find me (says Jesus.) Where I am you cannot come. (7,34) You are from below, I am from above. You are of this world, I am not of this world. (8.23) There is a good deal of this sort of thing in the Fourth Gospel, all of it designed to correspond to a believers experience, which is of course one of disappointment, suffering, bereavement and hope. Early or late, here or there, Jesus appears unexpectedly, but he cannot be brought by our prayers and would not respond if our calamity were on the scale of Jobs. We saw how he delayed before going to the sisters of Lazarus because the Evangelist understands as we all do the postponements of faith. Initially, his promise is to show us Jesus, but he gradually withdraws this promise as the Gospel develops, stressing instead that Jesus has been seen. The various Signs are used in Johns Gospel deliberately as reasons for belief, and the Evangelist works them into his emphasis on seeing. An interesting exchange occurs between Jesus and an official from Capernaum who, having heard that he was nearby in Cana, begged him to come down and heal his son, who lay at the point of death. Jesus speaks, then the official: Unless you see Signs and wonders you will not believe. Sir, come down before my child dies. It is a beautiful technique. We are taken at once by the fathers importunity, which we feel to be convincing, but notice the irrelevancy of Jesus own words which the father brushes aside. No offense is given, however, because he wasnt asking for a Sign, nor was he promising to believe if one had been given. The man is asking for help, whereas Jesus reproof (which is of course directed to the reader) simply states the authors theme. Then the Sign is given with a promise: Go, your son will live, and on arriving home the man is told that the fever broke yesterday at one in the afternoon (NEB), the very hour of Jesus promise, whereupon the official and all his household believe. Thus we find in the Evangelists very endeavor to bring home a realization of this Heavenly Jesus a real argument for the Negative critic. His Jesus has become the Evangelists mouthpiece and, in effect, his own creation, although technically this is no prejudice to the possible fact of

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that life. We have nowhere discovered that the ancient oral traditions which were later preserved in these Gospel gatherings were empty imaginings and could be written off as fantasy and make-believe. What we do see, and with John most especially, is that the themes of faith are imposed on the very traditions. Johns is a Jesus who serves a living faith and who must work his initiatives on us. Just as he found the Man Born Blind after curing him and withdrawing, so did he find the Paralytic of Bethesda afterward. The man had been ill for thirty-eight years, and in raising him up, John prepares for the Raising of Lazarus. First there is Jesus command: Rise, take up your pallet and walk. And then, after finding the man in the Temple: See, you are well! Sin no more... But after this characteristic attestation of a seen wonder, the Evangelist associates the voice of Jesus with the Resurrection of the dead; and we remember that he cried with a loud voice to bring Lazarus out of the tomb. At bottom, John is introducing the very theme of the living Voice of Jesus who says here, among many other things: Truly, truly, I say to you, the hour is coming, and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. (5,25.) It is we who are meant to take these words to heart. In contrast to the Messianic secret, Johns is the Gospel of the manifest Christ, and the author is not shy of his theme. Once Jesus own brothers taunt him about this as the Feast of Tabernacles nears: Leave here and go to (Jerusalem) that your disciples may see the works you are doing. For no man works in secret if he seeks to be known openly. If you do these things, show yourself to the world. (7,2.) A typical Johannine contrast but a rather crude irony because showing himself to the world is the very thing he has been doing all along. Jesus answers in part: Go to the feast yourselves; I am not going up to the feast, for my time has not yet fully come. So saying, the Evangelist writes, he remained in Galilee. But after his brothers had gone up to the feast, then he also went up, not publicly but in private. (7,9.) Naturally, the folk in Jerusalem are looking for Jesus. Where is he? they ask, repeating the question which had been asked of the Man Born Blind; and when Jesus appears suddenly teaching in the

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Temple the Jews marveled at it... Here he is, speaking openly! They might very fairly have asked him: Rabbi, when did you come here? because that again, a question of location, Presence, place that was the very question, had we paused for it, of the Five Thousand miraculously fed after he had withdrawn from them and they began to look for him and found him on the other side of the lake. (6,25.) Those at the Temple now speculate aloud: We know where this man comes from; and when the Christ appears, no one will know where he comes from. Jesus reply is a challenge: You know me, and you know where I come from? It is not to be thought, but once again we round upon the primitive Markan theme. Jesus neighbors in his own country also thought that they knew him, even naming his brothers. What, of course, they did not know in Mark was that he was the Holy One of God, as the demoniac in the synagogue at Capernaum had already earlier exclaimed.

SYNOPTIC ANTICIPATIONS OF JOHNS TECHNIQUE

Already in the Sayings Source as our scholars have restored it, we find a lofty declaration about the seeing and hearing of certain undesignated things: Blessed are the eyes which see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it. (Luke 10,23 Matthew 13,16.) This was said to the disciples privately, as Luke explains and Matthews setting implies. Question is, what does it mean? In one of my first sermons as a student vicar I preached on this text when meeting my loyal congregation in a boxy stucco house where we assembled for worship. My sermon was carefully memorized but what I remember of it now is a sudden flaring on my part in which I reproached a world at large for not believing these things. I had naively assumed that the blessed reality Jesus speaks of was available in church, thereby confounding the mere tokens of faith, such as these quoted words are, with the inner gift which faith lays hold of. Already in Q we find a foreshadowing of the Fourth Evangelist, who so often invites his reader to an imaginary seeing and hearing of Jesus. Where does the difference lie? Partly in the privacy of the moment. The Johannine Christ might almost have uttered a saying like the one here quoted in the streets of Jerusalem, whereas our Synoptists

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have retained the Messianic secret and place the disciples privilege more definitely in the past. But there is another side to this matter in the Redenquelle when Jesus cautions the faithful not to be taken in by false appearances, or in fact, not to be taken in by any appearances at all: If anyone says to you (in those days) Lo, here is the Christ! or There he is! do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will arise and show great signs and wonders... So if they say to you, Lo, he is in the wilderness, do not go out; if they say, Lo, he is in the inner rooms, do not believe it. (Matthew 24,23. Luke 17,22.) A Christ who appears is rejected in favor of a Christ who is not to be seen. The same disciples who were praised for being in the presence of Jesus are now told that they are not to look for his presence in those days. But of course! It is the nature of history that things pass away. However, what is at issue here for readers and hearers is that the tangible, visible grounds of the disciples security in the faith are withdrawn. The disciples themselves are sealed off in a sphere of unapproachable authority. They have seen what we cannot see. One believes in a Christ that someone else has seen on someone elses say-so. The Christ who has already come, although unknown to us, overrides an appeal to evidence. Elsewhere in the Synoptics we learn that John the Baptist has sent to Jesus for a confirmation in his belief: Now when John heard in prison about the deeds of the Christ, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another? And Jesus answered them, Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, etc. (Matthew 11,2.) Originally, John had warned that the One to come would bring his winnowing fork in hand to thresh the wheat of Israel and burn the chaff with unquenchable fire. Why now, after being imprisoned for his fiery alarms, does he send his question to such a man as Jesus? Although conceivable as a piece of history, the Baptists inquiry asks for the Messiah on terms unlike those he once preached. (The answer given is a cryptic Messianic affirmation based on key verses in Isaiah 35). After this visit Jesus speaks to the crowds about John. Notice

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the continuing emphasis on seeing: What did you go out into the wilderness to behold? A reed shaken by the wind? Why then did you go out? to see a man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, those who wear soft raiment are in kings houses. Why then did you go out? To see a prophet? (Matthew 11,7. Luke 7,24.) Jesus may well have spoken these emphatic words, and yet this is an appeal to the Baptists fame. Jesus is unnecessary to the logic of it. His role is only to remind us of a prophet who is taken as the Messiahs forerunner, Elijah who is to come. The mere reminder suffices as proof that the Messiah must have come, even if a Jesus is unknown. The fact is, then, that John was convincing as a herald of the Kingdom. A dependency on rumor, if it were only that, could not satisfy an Evangelist whose readers are members of a Jesus-cult which rests on faith and (as we say) sacraments, but what has he to offer them except his own belief in a tradition whose folkish character he understands? (The leaders of the Jews, for instance, understood a teachers use of fable). This is why we find an endeavor to realize Jesus which extends from the Gothic artistry of Mark to the sophistical methods of the Fourth Evangelist. Belief is uppermost, and a discriminating understanding of history or a serious and careful assessment of fact takes second place. The common endeavor is to bring Jesus home to the readers perception and grasp. It is this which has required the Evangelists art and his inventions, which go beyond the simpler fictions to be found in a received tradition, and of course it is just this aspect of the Gospels which makes us ask, How real is this Jesus? Or how real is any of it? Without enlarging the point, I believe that a serious and believing presentation of the Gospel (notwithstanding the myth) never deals with anything that is simply unreal. After his reminder of Christs Messianic wonders Matthew (11,25) presses on toward a deeper realization when Jesus thanks the Heavenly Father that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. What things? What are these hidden things? We misunderstand Jesus prayer if we take these things in reference to any particular things at all because the implication is that everything is hidden from the wise and prudent, everything having to do with Jesus or with faith in Christ. And the

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old preachers understood this very well whenever they quoted these words. You must believe as a babe because it is only unto babes that these things can be revealed. Then comes a tremendous declaration on the part of Jesus: All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Matthew has fitted this passage in very successfully. We feel no contrast in his Gospel between this elevated claim and the Jesus of the Parables or of the Sermon on the Mount, or the ecstatic Jesus hailing Simon barJonah. Nevertheless, we must call this compact statement, as the scholars do, Johannine. For it really has just that character, and it might have been lifted almost word for word from the Fourth Gospel (which in fact does not contain it) because the myth is really open here. Lastly, then, having cast his veil aside, Jesus utters a familiar invitation: Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matthew 11,28.) Although unique to this Gospel among the canonical Four, the familiar words of Jesus echo a passage in an earlier book called Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Jesus, Son of Sirach, which was written in the times between the Testaments, Old and New. It is Wisdom herself, called Sophia in Greek and personified, who speaks the word of invitation there: Come to me, you who are untaught, And pass the night in the house of instruction. Come unto me! This is the first of the Apocryphal words which have influenced the Saying in Matthew. Others follow when Jesus Sirach continues, speaking in Sophias behalf: Get her for yourselves without money, Put your neck under her yoke, And let your soul receive instruction. She is to be found close by. See with your own eyes that I have worked but little,

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And yet found myself much repose. (Ecclesiasticus 51,23. 30) We pass beyond the purely Johannine tone in Jesus famous invitation except for the device itself, of so directly addressing the reader. And I think we must say in fairness to the Gospels that the appealing quality of Jesus invitation surpasses the passage in Ecclesiasticus from which so much of it has been drawn; and drawn by whom? For its possible that the Evangelist has composed these words, whose purpose seems designedly liturgical. A deeper thought is this. Sophia, a goddess, speaks in the book called Jesus, Son of Sirach. And Jesus speaks in words which echo hers. Baruch Spinoza, the excommunicated Jewish philosopher, is notable for his high appreciation of Jesus, whom he compares to Wisdom. Had he possibly these two passages in mind when describing Jesus in terms of Wisdom? And if these were the sources of his comparison, did Spinoza, a modern mind, really credit the human existence of Jesus? Or did he look upon him look on the Symbol thus benignly because he could take it for a Symbol without offending his Jewish soul. Spinoza was very learned in Medieval Jewish lore. He would not have cared for the Fourth Gospel at all. It would be very interesting to know more definitely, as I do not pretend to know, if the great name of Spinoza could be added to the list of those who have believed that Jesus never lived.

THE SPEAKING CHRIST AN EARLY PRACTICE

To imagine that Jesus gave his invitation on some historical occasion makes little sense. To whom was he speaking when he said, Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden? The invitation in Matthew is spoken to a world at large. Its effectiveness doesnt depend on Jesus having said it once but on our having imagined him saying it once and for all. Matthews use of this technique is rather slight compared with its development in John, yet clearly such utterances as these were designed to be read aloud by the leader of an assembled Christian group to make the voice of Jesus come alive. In the Odes of Solomon, so-called, an early Christian document Jesus says openly although not by name (he is unnamed in the Odes):

30. The Complete Bible, An American Translation. University of Chicago Press, 1951. Goodspeed has translated also the Old Testament Apocrypha in this translation.

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For I have risen and stand by them And speak through their mouth. Bultmann quotes these words in a footnote which tells of earlier scholars, Hermann von Soden (1892) and Hermann Gunkel (1913) who were aware of the practice. Gunkel says, One can suppose that not a few sayings, which have come down to us in the New Testament as utterances of Jesus, were originally spoken by such inspired men in the name of Christ. An English pioneer is J. Rendel Harris whose translation of the Odes beautifully brings out the cultic practice. Where the intention is thus transparent, the thought of a prophets unscrupulousness when inventing such words for his Lord can hardly arise as a moral objection. The very practice is set openly within a common agreement to have it done this way. The people were eager to imagine such words as these on the strength of a given faith, and to hear them again and again. So too with the Fourth Gospel. What we see as unscrupulousness on the part of John (or what I did as a young pastor) has grown out of a common disposition on the part of leaders and worshipers to realize Jesus and his Presence as intensely as possible. They wanted to imagine these things, and after the preaching of the Kingdom had died away, the endeavor to realize Jesus became a new focus for the new religion. Thus the Fourth Gospel is based on traditions which have themselves begun to be myths. Yet in this Gospels individual quality, it is clearly the heart-felt work of a master spirit who contributes of his best to the Jesus persona. I use the Latin persona deliberately because the animating spirit of this Gospel and the Voice which speaks through the mask is the wise authors own. We may well believe that a historical Jesus lies behind this impressive tale, thanks to the Synoptic tradition and our understanding of Q. It is nonetheless clear that in the Fourth Gospel, at last, the methods employed and the imaginations resorted to have made of this Christ a living myth. And Johns is a myth fed by two springs. The actual story is derived from certain prior historical events, somewhat like a historical novel. The revelation is derived from his own mystical faith learned first in some Jewish school and as unshakably deep as the child in the man. Nevertheless, he does not repeat the lessons of the past. His expression of faith is an inspiration welling up from within and his invention goes beyond any merely legendary decoration to the creation of a Symbol. John is a mystic, foremost of all New Testament writers; and the only

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mystic, compared even with Paul. Empty yet rich; desperate yet consoling; passionate, hateful, loving, decided; he is able to summon up the mightiest imaginations. We must say of this Evangelist that his faith is not the credulous belief of those for whom he writes. He is not an ignoramus, nor is his understanding rudimentary and crude. He is an artist-philosopher in respect of his gifts and a psychologist before the age of psychology. Essentially, his faith is derived from the faith of Israel, and he is also a passionate, biassed, rigid mystic rigid in his conviction, therefore, because mysticism as such is volatile and elusive. As a creative mind John is no mere transmitter of things over and done, when he has Jesus say: These things I have spoken to you, while I am still with you. But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. (And also this:) I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears, he will speak... (John 14,25f. and 16,13.) This is Johns own excuse. It is almost half a prayer. The author stands in place of a Jesus who utters his promises and encouragements to the listening cult.

PART SIX WEEK OF THE PASSOVER

The festival during which Jesus was crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem has imparted its meaning to the memorials by which the multitudes of Christians annually observe the sacred season. For now it is Jesus who has become our Passover in the estimation of believers. He is the Lamb of God, as John the Baptist calls him at his first appearance in the Fourth Gospel: Passover being centered in the sacrifice of an unblemished Spring lamb whose bones may not be broken and whose flesh must be eaten up with nothing saved over. It is because of this association with a Jewish holiday that Jesus last week is memorialized in an annual liturgy, beginning with Palm Sunday, so that the seasonal observance of his death and Resurrection should be determined not at

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all by the date on which it happened (for this date is unknown) but like the Passover itself by the first full moon of Spring. We see at once very readily that the astrological dating of an annual liturgy whose supposed prototype in a real event cannot be dated historically plays into the Negative argument, and the more so because this same liturgy mourns the death of the god and in the deepest of symbols partakes of his body before celebrating his Resurrection with rejoicings. The liturgical embodiment of a gods annual dying and his Resurrection (for it is only as the Son of God that Jesus can have been raised from the dead) this fact of a liturgical form reminds us that an annual death and resurrection of a highly favored god was observed in sacred rites throughout the ancient Near East. Where this began, or in what primitive rite, we can scarcely imagine because in various places the god is differently named, whether as Osiris or Serapis, as he came to be called in the Hellenistic cult of Isis, or Tammuz, for whom the women of Jerusalem used sometime to mourn outside the Temple, or Adonis or Attis or Dionysis. Only within the last ten years have I learned to my own great surprise that Baal, of all gods, may be added to this list. A god portrayed in the image of a man and whose title, Baal, means simply Lord, a god denounced by the Hebrew prophets a god of resurrections! The addition of Baal to this Near Eastern list comes of discoveries made in 1929-1930 near Ras Shamra in excavations of the ancient city of Ugarit where we find the French archaeologists have found liturgies remarking on the death of Baal in the dry season, when even the streams dry up. The Ugaritic Baal is particularly associated with thunders as in Psalm 29, a veritable hymn to the Storm god and so described in the New Jerusalem Bible. The Psalm celebrates not only Jahwehs fearful voice and rushing winds but also his destructive lightning, and it culminates in his triumph as he is seated upon the floods. Scholars believe that this Psalm has been borrowed for Jahweh from the cult of Baal. With returning rains the Ugaritic liturgy proclaims: Baal lives! What appears to be the case is that the death of Jesus during the Passover season has been merged with the Passover sacrifice, while at the same time his death is linked to his Resurrection and, in that respect, assimilated to the Mediterranean death and resurrection gods. First the Lamb of God is slain and then he rises from the dead! Oh, yes, to bring these two things fully together is too incongruous, and yet some such merging of different myths is presupposed. Otherwise, how it can be

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that a Passover lamb, which was required of old to be eaten up entirely overnight how it can be that such a lamb should rise from the dead? Charles Franois Dupuis would explain this by his theory of a Sun myth underlying all these resurrection gods. At the time of the Spring equinox (and thus also of the Spring lamb) the death of the god is mourned and his resurrection celebrated.

JESUS FINAL DAYS

The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem, although very skimpily described in Marks Gospel, would have been the enactment of a Messianic symbol based on the prophecy of Zechariah. It was no unmeaning celebration. Shortly afterward, whether that same day or next, Jesus cleansed the Temple. Such, I say, is the records own claim of fact, even if it be exaggerated or perchance unfounded. The Jewish authorities are disturbed by this intruder but they dont arrest him for fear of riot (Mark 14,2). An invincible popularity protects him in these public acts when Jerusalem is thronged. Now these may certainly be facts and so intended by the legends, but they are mixed with anecdotes which fail as history and have no bearing on the theme. It is surely out of place to have Jesus appealing to the baptism of John after the Temple authorities have challenged his disorderly action. Was it from Heaven or from men? he demands of the priests. And we are asked to believe that they are afraid to answer him for fear of the people. However genuine the Cleansing, an act which has within the Gospel good claim to be authentic, this defense is artificial and is followed by a Parable of the Vineyard which belongs in the same category as the Cursing of the Fig Tree. It is a late Christian invention the covert effect of which is to blame Israel for the execution of the Son of God. So this early Jerusalem material is mixed and, overall, adds up to only so much filler. Questions arise, disputes, and Jesus triumphs over all. When certain flattering Pharisees and Herodians put a dangerous question: Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not? he replies, Why put me to the test? Bring me a denarius and let me look at it... Whose likeness and inscription is this? Caesars. Render to Caesar the things that are Caesars, and to God the things that are Gods. (Mark 12,13.) It is a reasonable compromise and artfully told. Or again when confuting Sadducees, strict students of the Torah who denied the

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resurrection of the dead, which is of course unmentioned in the Books of Moses, Jesus uses a rabbinic logic when applying a text from Exodus, then adds: He is not God of the dead but of the living. There is a quality of authenticity in some of this controversy, therefore. What else should Jesus sound like except a rabbi or a Jewish prophet? Only, we must be careful to avoid the error of supposing that we can settle matters of fact in describing that sort of authenticity, which gives us no more than a basis for belief.

THE GREAT COMMANDMENT

Very good, certainly, is the Markan handling of the Great Commandment but does it belong to a history of Jesus last days? A scribe has put an innocent question, namely, Which commandment is the first of all? As we know, the Great Commandment is the well-known Love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself. Following Jesus recitation of it the scribe says, You are right, Teacher. You have truly said that (God) is One and there is none other but he, and to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength, and to love ones neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices. The scribal enthusiasm brings forth a handsome compliment from Jesus in return: You are not far from the Kingdom of God. No trace of Gospel as such, no hint of kerygma is found here but it seems authentic. It is the earliest Evangelist, we recall, who excels in the occasional utterance. Matthew omits the compliment to the scribe, which is a distinct loss artistically and for that matter, ethically. For him it is a lawyer of the Pharisees who puts the question to test him, and that might show the Evangelists awareness that the tale needs an internal connection to its surrounding drama. No issue follows on Jesus apt reply in Matthew since it answers to their own belief, and Matthew has him add the words: On these two commandments depend all the Law and the prophets. Matthews is a more traditional and Jewish valuation of the Law. It is he who makes Jesus declare in the Sermon on the Mount: Think not that I am come to destroy the Law or the prophets... Till Heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in nowise pass from the Law, till all be fulfilled. So why does he omit the scribes compliment and Jesus handsome reply? No doubt he discerns in this flourish a story-tellers

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embellishment. He knows how Mark handles his traditions and regards the handsome words of Jesus, which so contribute to the realism of his account, as a Markan device. Matthew prefers a tradition, even a meager one, to a story-tellers inventiveness. His Gospel is preeminently a teaching Gospel and its author a scribe, a defender of the Law. Realism, and realistic detail, are no concern of the First Evangelists. But it is Luke who has dealt most resourcefully with his traditions here when he removes the Great Commandment from its Jerusalem setting. Fearlessly, he turns the story upside down to make the lawyer give the Great Commandment instead of Jesus. And yet his motive is transparent. First the lawyer will put a tempting question, Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? What is written in the Law? Christ replies. How to you read? Follows the lawyers recitation of the Great Commandment and Jesus says, This do and thou shalt live. Only, the lawyer cannot leave it there. Having failed to pick a quarrel after just reciting love thy neighbor, he detains him with another question: And who is my neighbor? Jesus replies by telling the Parable of the Good Samaritan which is found only in Luke and this is clearly the reason why Luke has turned Marks version of the Great Commandment upside down. What shall we say of this parable apart from its fame? I believe that Lukes three great parables, this one and the Prodigal Son and (the only Jewish of the three) that of the Rich Man and Lazarus are Christian compositions written with a story-tellers care. Certainly, an exchange which deprives Jesus of his rabbinic summation of the Law and ends with the Good Samaritan makes him more of a Christian. Of the famous Lukan three it is the least effective parable and its strong beginning Luke softens in a way that Mark would have taken a virile advantage of. For if ever a flash of Jesus anger was called for, it must have been in response to this lawyers unserious and cynical question. Jesus first words thrust the act of violence before the mind with implicit challenge: A man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho fell among robbers who stripped him and beat him and left him half dead how would you respond if you came on a man like that, even though an utter stranger? We have only imagined the added challenge which I give here, but a universal answer to it if I could put my finger on the passage we find already in Mencius three or four centuries before Christ. The Confucian sage insists that our instinctive human response to seeing someone badly hurt or in distress is to help them, which is as much as to say that the Good Samaritan is

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potentially Everyman. When Luke will turn his parable so that a priest and a Levite pass by the half-dead traveler on the other side of the road before a good Samaritan arrives, he slams at human nature disfigured or repressed in these officials. As an argument the parable is falsely weighted, then, even if a double aspect of human nature is truly shown here.

MARKS REALISM
In only five pages Mark has told of the Entry into Jerusalem and given a distinct impression of those first triumphant days if we accept these tales as belonging to that final week. A writer far below the greatest minds in his ability, he is an unselfconscious artist like those who have chiseled out the carvings of our Gothic cathedrals, and as Michaelangelo or Bach or Shakespeare or Tolstoy are likewise unselfconscious. There is no trace of egotism or self-display in Mark, no deliberate brilliancy. Everything is homely and solid and to the point, and for the most part well-made. Everywhere the folk soul speaks in this earliest Gospel which nonetheless reveals the character of the artist who made it, which is another Gothic aspect of this primitive Gospel as Ruskin defines the Gothic style. Apart from mere realism what of claimed fact in these Jerusalem legends? I see claimed fact in three things so far: (a) The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem. This is a Messianic gesture intended by Jesus if it happened at all. (b) Cleansing of the Temple. A high prophetic deed or an act of disorder. It would disturb the Roman and Jewish authorities. (c) Jesus habit of retiring at night to the village of Bethany nearby. All is devoted to a Jesus who, although miraculous, is yet as solidly human as the Evangelist can make him to be. Marks is a Jesus who is not perceived by his fellows as the kyrios within the story which he tells. Although he uses the actual word, kyrios, when persons are speaking to Jesus, it is in the sense of master or sir and is so translated by the excellent Goodspeed. Nowhere does the earliest Evangelist slip into the mistake of himself calling Jesus Lord as Luke does several times when indulging his faith. Mark intends to give us, so to speak, an actual Messiah in his depiction of a Galilean Son of Man, one who did actually live and who is placed solidly and memorably within his times. This is no meandering deity scattering wonders about a fabled countryside who

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enters Jerusalem to work a miracle of death and Resurrection even if a myth of ransom, death and Resurrection is basic to the meaning of the tale. It is the kyrios Iesous whose cult the Evangelist serves, and he does once anticipate the emerging Lord Jesus near the end: As Jesus taught in the Temple he said, How can the scribes say that the Christ is the Son of David? David himself, inspired by the Holy Spirit, declared, The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand till I put thy enemies under thy feet. David himself calls him Lord; so how is he his son? (Mark 12,35.) David himself calls him Lord! It is someone in the early fellowship who first devised this tale after lighting on that Psalm with sudden insight. Mark will have found it ready-made in the traditions of a cult whose more exalted kyrios has displaced a merely human Son of David. It seems remarkable that a sense of the man, Jesus, should have survived as it has in a myth whose on-going transformation would lift him to the Heavens. We must concede, then, that for all Marks shrewd realism he serves that larger myth. Jesus is well on the way to being transformed. In the words of the Nicene Creed he will become the kyrios-Messiah whose humanity is lifted out of the realm of mere creatures except for a half-way association with our flesh, thanks to the Virgin. He is become: ...one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made; who for us men and for our salvation came down from Heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary and was made man... In these quoted words the myth, although never to be clarified logically, has reached its full expression.

LAST-MINUTE ESCHATOLOGY
Mark divides the Jerusalem period the period of a week into three sections culminating in the Passion of Christ. After Jesus triumphal Entry and before the onset of the Passion he inserts a sermon given privately to four disciples concerning the Signs of the End, namely, the tribulations which are to precede the awesome coming of the Son of Man.

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It is good old-fashioned eschatology, the same which the Fourth Evangelist has outgrown, and its presence in Marks Gospel reminds us that these early Christians were prepared to suffer and that this Gospel was written, in part, to encourage them. The sermon is unique enough to deserve a name of its own and the professors have given it one. They call it (or else call portions of it) the Little Apocalypse thus bringing to mind the great Apocalypse of St. John the Divine, a writing whose disastrous imaginations George Bernard Shaw with his quite usual heroic honesty compared to the ravings of a drug addict. That can be said of it. Against this, the Book of Revelation was a favorite of Emily Dickinsons, a highly gifted New England recluse and poet whose many-sided imagination reminds us of Poe sometimes except that she never dwells on corruption and is never depraved. Revelation is a book of myths to jar the poet in us, yes, but it is nonetheless grotesque. We melt before a Jesus who says: Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to him and will sup with him, and he with me. (Revelation 3,20.) But we shudder before a Christ whose face is as the sun, who holds in his right hand seven stars and from whose mouth issues a sword. (The Book of Revelation, I may say, yielded a surprising cache of material to Charles Franois Dupuis in his endeavor to derive religion from astrology). Apocalyptic of any sort belongs to another world, and if the Little Apocalypse in Mark doesnt quite resemble the Apocalypse of John, yet it has its own tremendous quality and is here placed in Jesus mouth: When you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be, then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. Let him who is on the housetop not go down, nor enter his house, to take anything away; and let him who is in the field not turn back to take his mantle. And alas for those who are with child and for those who give suck in those days! Pray that it may not happen in winter. For in those days there will be such tribulation as has not been from the beginning of the creation which God created until now, and never will be (again). (Mark 13,14.) I call that tremendous, but its awesome quality depends on the extent to which we may believe it. Only, the placement of this sermon in the middle of Passover week raises a question. Why here, if its placement belongs to Marks composition? What has any of it to do with the Passion of Christ? Apart from this sermon we find only a trace of apocalyptic in

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those final days when Jesus makes answer to the High Priests urgent question: Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed? I am; and you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven. (14,61.) That, briefly, is Apocalypse. Which of Jesus disciples was there to hear it? Fundamentalists appeal to men like Nicodemus or Joseph of Arimathea who are associated with the Sanhedrin for this piece of eyewitness testimony if by a stretch it could be called that. So did Jesus for a fact give this sermon to a chosen Four on the Mount of Olives? Did he predict that the wonderful stones of the Temple would be cast down as happened some forty years later? Or does the Markan apocalypse fit into the authors scheme in some deeper sense which is not readily apparent? Between Jesus and his opponents there is no quarrel about apocalyptic that week and in his public teaching no mention of it. The very sermon is so far out of sight that its private hidden. Did it really occur, then? This Markan sermon strikes me as a conglomeration of left-overs. These are but remnants of an unsatisfied apocalyptic dream, one whose promises were unfulfilled but which continued to nag at the early Christians, and to attract them. We are so used to seeing in the Person of Jesus the Be-all and the End-all of this religion that we forget his earlier role as one who carried forward the message of the Baptist. We know that the first Christians were fairly expecting the End of the world at any time. A tale of death and Resurrection could not at first satisfy the Jewish imagination of a Day of the Lord. Jesus Resurrection appears, if mysteriously, within a world to which it does not belong, but the apocalyptic imagination awaited a convulsion of the whole world. The Little Apocalypse does summarize the old eschatology, the old belief and its hopes and fears. The curious chapter serves his composition like a curtain drawn across the scene. Before that sermon Jesus triumphs in Jerusalem. Afterward comes the Anointing of this lowly Christ, then followed by the treachery of Judas Iscariot, the Last Supper, Gethsemane, trials, crucifixion it is the story of the Passion.

THE PASSION BEGINS

We have arrived at the sacred core of the earliest Gospel, and scholars tell us that we have now an embedded early document of special historical value which the Evangelist has absorbed. If they are right in believing this, then our Gospels have preserved two crucial early

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documents by absorbing them, documents otherwise lost. The first of these is Q, our Sayings Source, which is embedded in Matthew and Luke. The Markan Passion narrative, comprising chapters 14 and 15 of this little book, would be the other lost document or be the substance of it as Mark has recast it. Taken in the forms in which we have them, these posited documents seem a quaint witness to a remarkable life. Unlike the rest of Marks Gospel, which is somewhat miscellaneous, the Passion account is consecutive. One thing follows another in the unfolding logic of events. Even so, Marks handling of his material is characteristic. The nameless womans Anointing of Jesus separates the plotting of the priests and scribes for his arrest (not during the feast, lest there be a tumult of the people) from Judas Iscariots offer to betray him for money. Mark loves to divide his tales this way as we saw most recently when he separated the Withering of the Fig Tree from its Cursing. It seems an evidence of technique when the perfidy of Judas follows an Anointing which prepares for the sacrifice of this lowly Messiah and we are doubly prepared for what is to come. There is no suspense in this tale because the death of Christ is ordained.

PREPARATIONS FOR THE LAST SUPPER

On the day of the sacrifice of the lamb the disciples ask, Where will you have us go and prepare for you to eat the Passover? Jesus replies: Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you; follow him, and wherever he enters, say to the householder, The Teacher says, Where is my guest room, where I am to eat the Passover with my disciples? And he will show you a large upper room furnished and ready; there prepare for us. (Mark 14,13.) Its a slight action considered in itself. Where shall we eat this Passover? The tale which describes it is skimpy and inconsistent, but alas it is evidence or such evidence as we find in these Gospels. Scholars disagree rather tremendously about its meaning. A place has been prepared for the supper before the disciples ask Jesus, Where will you have us go and prepare for you to eat the Passover? It would have been their role as disciples to make these preparations, only in this case a place for the Supper has already been chosen and Jesus own disciples are unaware of that. When read as history, these occasional words of Jesus have led to suspicions of an undiscovered plot. Mark has surely nothing

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of the sort in mind. Come now, is the man already waiting by the Jerusalem gate with his jug between his knees? waiting, as the story plainly says, until a disciple happens to put the question to Jesus? The story is another Markan double because it echoes an earlier sending of a pair of disciples to fetch a colt on which no one had ever sat and which they would find immediately on entering a village. As to the sense of the words that a man carrying a jar of water will meet you, (RSV) we read that the disciples went to the city and found it as he had told them. Goodspeed and Moffatt, two gallant, learned scholars, give us in another wording what Mark has intended in the overall consideration: You will meet a man carrying a pitcher of water, Goodspeed translates. Or You will meet a man carrying a water jar. (Moffatt) Here is our parallel to the disciples earlier finding of a colt when they entered a village. All happens as Jesus has foreseen. Pitiable though it be, Christs death is not an accident or tragic: he has foreseen it and will drink the cup which the Father has given. These tales of his clairvoyance, or more appropriately, of his foreknowledge emphasize Christs willingness to die for a ransom. Judass betrayal is also known of and its consequence foreseen. Such tales are useful to Mark in helping him flesh out the skimpiness of his traditions, and they will also suggest that in this period of Christs submission his miraculous power has not disappeared.

THE LAST SUPPER I.

Having found everything as Jesus foretold, the disciples prepared the Passover. And when it was evening he came with the Twelve. No householder makes his appearance. Nothing is said of an upper room. We are simply placed at the table where Jesus at once foretells his betrayal. The scene is a nugget written out with a perfect economy and ending with a solemn affirmation of prophecy fulfilled: The Son of Man goes as it is written of him. Can we doubt that the mere generality of Jesus announcement, One of you will betray me, or the generality implied in his saying, Woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed can we doubt, I say, that this manner of speaking reaches beyond the mere traitor, who is unnamed, to embrace readers and auditors? For the little scene as written has been designed for the worshiper who is thus encouraged to ask himself that exemplary question: Is it I? A certain tenderness in the scene might seem to be the effect of

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high art if that did not involve a misconception. In fact, it is doubtful whether any art could arouse such a response by means so spare. The literary fact is that no such tenderness could be awakened nor any such intimacy without an adequate expression. This announcement of betrayal is much too brief to explain those sacred associations which seem to spring up in us here. All is posited on a prior inwardness, a devotion already given. The disciples have responded in the very pattern of an ideal loyalty and love which has been stricken by the thought of a betrayal as if that mere word had already carried the full measure of the horror to come. From the announcement of his betrayal, a tender scene, we pass to the act of Jesus which is supposed to be the origin of the communion rite: As they were eating, he took bread and blessed and broke it, and gave it to them and said, Take; this is my body. And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly, I say to you, I shall not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the Kingdom of God. (Mark 14,22.) Considered apart from the rest, the scene is a little ceremony. Jesus takes bread from the table to bless it and break it, and this broken bread he calls his body, which the disciples are bidden to eat. So likewise the Passover cup: he calls it my blood of the Covenant and bids the disciples to drink of it. Symbolically, then, Jesus is eaten during the same meal in which a Passover lamb is consumed. Thus do his disciples, who partake also of this blood of the Covenant renew an old covenant, but whoever heard of a Teacher offering his body in the form of broken bread which his disciples are required to eat? Not to say that Mark is quite hung up on the symbol because his Jesus goes on to say: I shall not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the Kingdom of God. In Marks Gospel as we have it, then, the blood of the Covenant has not ceased to be fruit of the vine. The whole business is rather astonishing. A rabbi, a prophet, a Great Teacher of humanity offers his body to be eaten under the aspect of bread, and yet an ancient and familiar custom has taught us that the words spoken by Jesus belong to him uniquely. As for the disciples, their role is one of a wordless compliance because we read that when Jesus took the cup, he gave it to them and they drank of it. That is all we are

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told of their response to so singular a gesture. A page ago we noticed a moment of intimacy in an earlier scene of the Last Supper when after revealing that one of his disciples would betray him they asked him one after another, Is it I? No such tender interaction is apparent here. An intimacy which is missing from the scene has already been transferred to the rite of communion. So were the disciples taken aback by this act or left to wonder about a thing so strange? We do not know. Does his symbolic breaking of the bread touch them with its announcement of a Master who is to be broken in death? We are not told that. Are they consoled by the gift which is implied? Jesus refers to his blood of the Covenant. Do they know what he means by that? The little story tells us only of what Jesus did and nothing else assuming that he did it at all. As for the fruit of the vine which he will drink again in the Kingdom of God but never again with his disciples before Kingdom come, this might reflect an earlier tradition about the Last Supper which Mark has blended with his sacramental account. It goes nicely with the theory of eschatology. Jesus reminds his disciples very plausibly of the Messianic banquet which is coming, and except for a lingering difficulty about a historical teacher who is supposed to know beforehand that he will never again drink the fruit of the vine this side of Paradise, it might be considered. Jesus speaks very calmly of the death he announces by this act, and we cannot easily explain his serenity and resignation.

THE LAST SUPPER II.

Now of course it is possible, speaking historically, that Jesus never said those remarkable words about my body (and) my blood of the Covenant, which is poured out for many. Dr. Joseph Klausner, whose great study of Jesus was written originally in Hebrew, denies openly that he can have spoken them although he accepts the Passover meal as historical. And given the simple humanity of Jesus as a premise, why not? Klausner had received the Ph.D. degree from Heidelberg where he must surely have imbibed the German higher criticism for which, on his human side, Jesus is very solidly a Jewish rabbi of his times, or a prophet, a remarkable man, no doubt, but sharing fully in the ancient Jewish life and thought. It is the old question of Zeitgebundenheit. A Jewish teacher of those days would not have said, Eat this broken bread which is my body. But what is there to object to if this Gospel tale actually reports a Passover meal as Jesus last?

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Against such a sturdy belief as Dr. Klausners there is no honest refutation. He has not arrived at this by methods and techniques. Instead, it represents the ripened wisdom of all his knowledge and his thought when he discovers in this tale a fact which the Gospel traditions have preserved, and our response is to say, It is possible, and not least because we havent peeled away the incredible aspect of an impossible story in order to provide an imaginary substitute. But are we really willing, then, say in the name of history and of reason, to strip from Jesus these most arresting words as the Roman soldiers stripped his garments from him for the crucifixion? We feel that his uniqueness is diminished if we take them away. They belong to him just as his famous soliloquy belongs to Prince Hamlet or his Ninety-five Theses to Dr. Martin Luther. Something is lost of the integrity of the figure without them. On Dr. Klausners common-sense procedures when drawing facts from ancient texts, we get a Jewish rabbi who is celebrating the Passover with his disciples before his arrest in the Garden. There is nothing very special about such a Passover meal, given date and place and rabbi and disciples, all of which is drawn from the Gospel we have corrected. The rescued fact is a commonplace. We must have expected it of such a Teacher but we have lost something of the quality which makes Jesus Jesus I keep stressing this and not just another Teacher. We have passed from the very thing the story gives us to a general fact which certifies the Jewishness of the Teacher: but this is a fact, generally, of which our Synoptic Gospels leave us in no doubt. For even Luke with his Gentile emphases is at pains to tell us that he was circumcised on the eighth day. So here we revive a distinction which is everywhere implicit in our theme. It is the contrast between the Express Jesus of the Gospels and the posited figure of history, the so-called and confessedly obscure historical Jesus. There are several possible views we might take of the Last Supper and this is a contrast which embraces them all. Beyond question, it is the Express Jesus of the Gospels to whom these words belong and to whom we are referring when we affirm this. Bear it in mind, please, because there is a very peculiar authority we ascribe to the Express Jesus, and because there is another sort of Jesus who haunts our inquiry like a shadow, namely, the historical Jesus. He may really have existed, of course, as one or another scholar has described him, as Bultmann or Schweitzer or Ernest Renan have described him, and each a little differently; but as far as I can make out, he exists only as a concept,

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and a rather odd sort of concept, too. For the historical Jesus is a posited historical figure whose very delineation is obscure from the outset. He is forever being drawn anew from the Gospels, and yet the reliability of these Gospels is constantly being questioned or challenged or denied. Could we grasp this distinction lucidly, which comes down to a question of reference, we should understand the Negative argument in all its scope, and what it is the Gospels give us, and what they mean. If the commonsense approach of Joseph Klausner permits the sturdy affirmation of a fact in this learned Jewish mind, very different is the approach of the Negative critic. Initially, the Negative critic seizes on those strangely attractive words of Jesus which are the focus of our difficulty. No less than Dr. Klausner he disbelieves that a historical Jesus will have said them. It is too improbable or even fantastic that a Teacher should have asked his disciples in such a symbol to eat his body, but for the Negative critic there is no fact of history here, no Last Supper which is a simple Passover meal. It is simply a tale which shows how Jesus has established the rite of communion. So take a philosopher like Professor Arthur Drews. On his own grounds he must classify the Last Supper among those myths which are invented to explain rituals already existing. Men turn to such myths to account for the existence of a thing, or of a rite, by showing the first act of the god by which it was created. It is ironic, then, that the rite itself should be a sort of enacted myth, but this is not a thing to be denied. Grant that we are nowhere near dismissing these Gospels as evidence of fact, yet certainly the act which Mark portrays is on our own terms a symbol. I repeat this: the act is a symbol but the common people do not want a symbol. They never heard of it! This is the Body! It is the Blood of the covenant! As the Catholic Church has understood, the common man will not allow the veil of mystery to be lifted. It is this mystery which gives its sacred value to the rite. A superstitious literal-mindedness about this even Luther could not free himself of although acknowledging like any Calvinist that the ritual bread is also bread, the wine also wine. The Roman doctrine had technically denied that of the sacrament, the bread remaining bread only as it presents itself to our senses: in appearance, then.

THE LAST SUPPER III.

Suppose that Jesus did break bread and call it his body, and suppose, too, as Mark would have it, that after blessing the common cup,

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the wine of Passover, and they all drank of it he said, This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Is this the voice of the Beatitudes or of the prophet come into Galilee following his baptism by John? Surely, if Jesus said these things we must make a new sort of allowance for this man. What falls to the ground here when the story is taken literally is the mere conception of him as a rabbi. We lose the mere prophet. We lose the Great Teacher of humanity. Who can imagine a Confucius instituting such a rite? No Teacher speaks this way. These words depend for all their honest meaning on his voluntary death. At very least we have here a man of unique imagination and self-regard, a holy figure rather than a wise. We come close to Albert Schweitzers idea of a Jesus seeking martyrdom, but the difficulty is to know on strictly historical grounds whether he can have spoken these words which are at once so distinctive and so hard to accept. An easy solution is to deny them. For implicitly it is the cult god who would invite us here saying, Eat of my body, and be partakers of a New Covenant in my blood because I am one who has died and risen from the dead, and you may become a part of all that by accepting these tokens in good faith. A few great names and others of distinction have accepted the words of Jesus as historically his own, or so they inform us. Mixing the great and the less great I name four of them as David Strauss, Ernest Renan, once again Albert Schweitzer and then who for a fourth? Since our question rests on a radical doubt we look for minds that have suffered because of that doubt and I revive the name of an American humanist, Paul Elmer More, a gifted classicist and literary figure who will even say: (As to the historical authenticity of the Holy Supper)... an unprejudiced study of the documents must lead to the conclusion that we have records, correct in essentials while varying, as would be expected, in details, of an actual event. That is to say, it is a simple fact of history that Jesus supped with a group of chosen disciples in Jerusalem just before his trial and crucifixion, and that under the shadow of the coming tragedy he did break bread and give the cup with the solemn words of the Institution.31

31. The Catholic Faith (Princeton 1931 p. 125.)

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But this goes too far. It would be very difficult to accuse Joseph Klausner of revealing a prejudice when denying that Jesus can have spoken the solemn words of the Institution simply because he conceives him historically as a believable rabbi. If anything, Professor Mores statement may betray his own uneasiness in defending the solemn words. And yet it is a courage in the man that he chooses to defend them. Albert Schweitzer also takes the sacramental words as literally spoken by Jesus in a mysterious Gleichniswort which the disciples are not supposed to understand, and this in an early survey of scholarly opinion. Rashly enough he is very young to be among the great he condemns the earlier treatments, one and all, for having failed to understand the Last Supper in the light of eschatology, which is already at this early time his ruling principle (and I translate as follows:) As death draws near, and because with his death the Kingdom will come, Jesus rises to the triumphant height of those days on the lake shore. At that time he had celebrated a foretaste of the Messianic banquet with the faithful; now he rises at the end of that final earthly meal and hands out the ceremonial food and drink to his disciples while disclosing in a lofty tone, after the cup is returned to him, that this is to be their last such earthly meal because they would shortly be reunited at the banquet in the Fathers Kingdom. Two words in particular hint of the significance of his Passion. The bread and wine which he is handing out in this anticipation are for him his Body and his Blood because he is to bring about the Messianic banquet by his deep surrender to a sacrificial death. The saying was but darkly apprehended, nor was it meant for his disciples. It was not supposed to make anything clear to them because it was a sort of Parable that bore on his secret.** **In der Nahe des Todes richtet sich Jesus zu derselben sieghaften Grsse auf, wie in den Tagen am Seestrand: denn mit dem Tod kommt das Reich. Damals hatte er mit den Glubigen die Vorfeier des messianischen Mahles gehalten; so erhebt er sich jetzt am Ende der letzten irdischen Mahlzeit und teilt den Jngern feierlich Speise und Trank aus, indem er sie mit erhobener Stimme, nachdem der Becher zu ihm zurckgekehrt ist, darauf hinweist, dass dieses das letzte irdische Mahl gewesen ist, weil sie in Balde zum Mahl in des Vaters Reich vereinigt sein werden. Zwei entsprechende Gleichnisworte deuten das Leidensgeheimnis an. Fr ihn sind Brot und Wein, die er ihnen bei der Vorfeier darreich, sein Leib und sein Blut, weil er durch

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die Hingabe in den Tod das messianische Mahl herauffhrt. Das Gleichniswort blieb den Jngern dunkel. Es war auch nicht auf sie berechnet, es sollte ihnen nichts verdeutlichen denn es war ein Geheimnisgleichnis. Although the position taken is defensible, the scholars of Germany werent much impressed by his early book and paid little attention to it. The great names here are those of David Strauss and Ernest Renan. In his Life of Jesus Critically Examined DF Strauss has put the matter succinctly: To the writers of the Gospels, the bread in the commemorative supper was the Body of Christ: but had they been asked, whether the bread were transmuted, they would have denied it; had they been spoken to of a partaking of the Body with and under the form of bread, they would not have understood it; had it been inferred that consequently the bread merely signified the body, they would not have been satisfied.32 This puts the matter in a nutshell. Can we really go beyond it? One thing only needs a further comment here. It is where he says, To the writers of the Gospels. He doesnt say, to Jesus or even to the disciples. When he adds that we can hardly... doubt the institution of the ritual Supper by Jesus... in opposition to the testimony of Paul, we may suspect him of a prudent tact in wishing to avoid an outright doubt. Among these German scholars that would not have gone unnoticed. That leaves us, finally, the great name of Ernest Renan, whose book is still in print. He is the most interesting case among these scholars because of his peculiar aim in attempting to write this history, for which he had great gifts and a literary genius unsurpassed in all this realm of high scholarship. As a matter of course, his sincerity has been questioned. He was a historian of great subtlety and discretion. There is much of the poet in Renan and something of the novelist. His tendency toward beautiful sentiment is held against him. John Erskine dislikes Renan for making the life of Jesus questionable a strange complaint! Renan ascribes the Words of Institution to Jesus without hesitation and defends them as an Oriental metaphor which Western minds are not accustomed to receive in the spirit intended. We may recognize a variant of Strausss idea here as quoted above. In the result

32. Quoted from the Sigler Press Edition 1994, p. 632.

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it comes down to the same thing. For Jesus to have said in a striking metaphor: This is my Body, means frankly for Renan as it does for David Strauss: it is his Body. The question for the Western mind is: What meaning has that striking Oriental metaphor for us? But even this is not the most important thing about Renan. In originality he is preceded by Strauss, and yet he goes beyond him in the triumphant composition of his famous book. Never underestimate the importance of a real literary achievement. Strausss book belongs to the literature of scholarship, Renans to the literature of the world. And it rests on a more distinct decision in this matter because inevitably one has to choose. Renan has seen clearly that we dont obtain a significant result or even find our way to an interesting position without proceeding along the lines of a chosen possibility. And he seems the most serene in his choice among these four. It might be said against him, I suppose, that his chosen possibility was after all acceptable in Catholic France for whose citizens he was writing, but he is nonetheless lucid and decided in pursuit of his aim. It is implicit in the labors of Renan that he wishes to conceive the Jesus of history as a human being, recognizably of old, who in his character and deeds is compatible with our well-developed religious idea.

THE FOURTH GOSPELS DIFFERENT VERSION: LAST SUPPER

The Fourth Evangelist has recast the account of the Last Supper. Had he a better tradition than the spare accounts we have found in our earlier Gospels? Surely not although many a pious scholar prefers to believe that. Long since have we found in this last of the authentic Gospels (as determined by the early Catholic Church) another sort of Jesus having a different bearing, another style, another Teaching: it is a very lofty Jesus who spends much time in Jerusalem. Nevertheless, the divergence does not amount to an outright clash or a crass substitution. A man of deep mind and rigid faith, the author avoids that and he tells his story well. Where are the contrasts here? (a) The Last Supper is not a Passover meal in this Gospel. John has moved the event one day forward with the result that Jesus, the Lamb of God, will be crucified when the Passover lamb is slain. And for another result, the discrepancy in dating has made it impossible for scholars to date the crucifixion. We do not know, exactly, when Jesus died. (b) In this different Last Supper Jesus nowhere breaks bread to call it his Body and says nothing of a Covenant in the shedding of his Blood. That

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ritual aspect of the myth was implicit in chapter 6 (as we saw) where Jesus tells the Jews: He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. (John 6,54.) (c) Instead of offering these tokens of Body and Covenant Jesus performs another eloquent gesture when during supper he rises to lay aside his outer garments: Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples feet, and to wipe them with the towel with which he was girded. This gesture borrows something of Marys recent anointing of the feet of Jesus with a costly ointment and wiping it off with her hair. Unfortunately, the silent eloquence is spoiled a little for the careful reader by an exchange between Jesus and Peter of which I quote only the dialogue: Peter: Lord, do you wash my feet? Jesus: What I am doing you do not know now, but afterward you will understand. Peter: You shall never wash my feet. Jesus: If I do not wash you, you have no part in me. Peter: Lord, not my feet only but also my hands and my head. Jesus: He who has bathed does not need to wash, except for his feet, but he is clean all over; and you are clean, but not all of you. This is pious nonsense but it cant have been written by the author of the discourses which follow. If the foolish words are omitted, the tale reads very well. d) The Fourth Evangelist uses the Last Supper as a setting for the impressive discourses which follow, discourses at once intimate and mystical but of which the Synoptics know nothing at all. These discourses transform the entire Supper, which has become a focus of Christian devotion. Nothing in the Gospels nothing in all the Bible approaches the depth of Christian devotion here. (e) A final point of contrast bears on the question of witness. How do we know of these things which are soon to be described or the impending trials of Jesus which take place behind closed doors? In the naive art of the Synoptics these final scenes are told without an indication of how we might have learned such things, but the Fourth Evangelist is not quite so naive. He is aware of the difficulty and will suggest a possible witness. After Jesus had predicted his betrayal, then, according to John, the disciples looked at one another.

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Now there was leaning on Jesus bosom one of his disciples whom Jesus loved. (John 13,23.) That is, whom he especially loved; and this will prove to be a triumphant conception. Peter, now, must ask the beloved disciple to find out who it is, and the Lord replies: It is he to whom I shall give this morsel when I have dipped it. When he gives the sop to Judas Satan enters into the traitor and he is sent out into the night on his errand. The other disciples are not privy to this exchange and do not understand. The disciple whom Jesus loved is nowhere named in this Gospel which will claim for him a special role. Earlier we saw how at the opening of the Fourth Gospel Peter is deprived of his primacy when Andrew tells him (from the Baptist!), We have found the Christ! Now in the concluding portions it will be a nameless disciple, described as beloved, who displaces Peter from his preeminence. It is he, for instance, who will get Peter into the High Priests house because he is known to the High Priest, but how has that come about? One ancient speculation is that he was on such terms that he could enter the court of the High Priest along with Jesus because he was used to selling him fish, but this is absurd. A fish-monger with privileges? FC Burkitts wiser suggestion is that this disciple had been a Sadducee before being won to the message of Jesus and this at least answers to the dignity required. But Professor Burkitt is deceived by the Evangelists cunning. An unnamed disciple has no claim to be vested in the dignity of a Sadducee and, in truth, no claim on fact. Yet he is wrought mysteriously into the texture of this Gospel right to the end and by an ancient tradition he is identified with the disciple John and even confounded with the author of the Gospel. In truth, however, we have no idea who wrote this Gospel, any more than we do of when or where it was written. Its own witness to itself bears the signature of a powerful spirit. An artist of rare accomplishment, a psychologist undeceived by the facade of humanity, he is above all a believer in the Jewish faith of old as it had come to expression in the Idea of Christ. This is the crucial Idea for the Fourth Evangelist and he gives it his all.

GETHSEMANE
The nighttime arrest of Jesus at a place called Gethsemane does not seem improbable or unhistorical. After the supper and the singing of a hymn (the chanting of the second part of the Hallel) Jesus and his band go out to the Mount of Olives where he foretells the desertion of his own disciples, citing prophecy: I will strike the shepherd and the sheep

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of the flock will be scattered. (Zechariah 13,7) We do not pause to inquire whether or not this prophecy is appropriate here. It belongs to Marks story and probably to his traditions. It chimes with the event and that suffices the faithful. Peter at once declares his loyalty even if the others should fall away and draws from Jesus a famous reply: Verily, I say unto thee, before the cock crows twice, thou shalt deny me thrice. And we see, of course, the legendary aspects here. Arrived at Gethsemane he tells his disciples, Sit here while I go yonder and pray all except the favored three, Peter, James and John, who go a little farther with him. He tells them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death: tarry ye here, and watch, or in the art nouveau translation of Edgar Goodspeed: My heart is almost breaking. You must stay here and keep watch. Then he goes a little farther on, falls on his face and prays: Abba! (=Father) Remove this cup from me! Yet not what I will but what thou wilt. And the disciples fall asleep! Three times they fall asleep while he wrestles in prayer, three times he must rouse them (The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.) Then the traitor arrives with his crowd. Judas had arranged a signal whereby to identify his Master whom he approaches to kiss and Jesus is taken. Luke adds the poignant words, Judas, betrayest thou the Son of Man with a kiss? but, of course, all the scene is poignant and legendary. A follower standing by draws a sword to smite the servant of the High Priest and cut off his ear before the disciples escape and Luke will have him heal that ear whereas in Matthews Gospel Jesus speaks the famous words, Put up again thy sword into its place, for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. After which the disciples forsake him and flee. Such is the story of Jesus arrest in the Synoptics, and a story well-told; but it is just its dramatic effectiveness which raises the doubt. Here is a Jesus so amply forewarned of events to come that he is suffering in an agony of prayer beforehand. Luke even compares his sweat to great drops of blood. And those words in particular, Let this cup pass, surely refer us to the cup of communion in which, as all Marks readers knew, we participate in the sorrows of Christ. So the nighttime arrest of Jesus at Gethsemane (the word means oil press) is not of itself implausible, but it is very clear that legend has shaped the telling. We bring an alien interest to the Gospel when we ask

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of any part of it for an original historical version. What original version? For Mark the original version is just the story that he tells us, and he will judge his success by the wise assemblage and right telling of these traditions of the Son of Man, a telling which has to commend itself to the other leaders of that cult. Were we to ask him point blank, Sir, how do you know these things? he could only be astonished at a deficiency in our understanding which he would feel at once to be beyond his power to explain. Our mere question would not suffice to awaken this Evangelist to a difficulty. A curious incident follows the arrest which is told of only in Marks Gospel when a young man with nothing but a linen cloth about his body who is following the apprehended Christ is seized and leaves his garment behind to run away naked. Is it Marks own portrait in cameo? Or is it not simply the fact as it occurred, which is reason enough for its being told of? But Mark is an inventive story-teller. Young Joseph in Egypt fled away naked when Potiphars wife seized his garment and he left it in her clutches, for a prototype. Or prophecy could be a motive here and if so, Alfred Loisy is on the right track when quoting from Amos,: The stoutest of heart among the warriors shall flee away naked on that day. (Amos 2,16. JM Powis Smith in The Complete Bible). Whatever else they are, these Gospels first and last are a complete symbol, and my motive is to discover that symbol, which means, to understand it. Here is a case where a young mans escape presents us with a wealth of suggestion. And we must reckon also with the placement of this episode in Jesus Passion tale. Near the beginning of a foreseen ordeal, the incident of the linen cloth has brought to mind ideas of youth, vitality, nakedness, escape. We know that Mark is enamored of his double structures, and the parallel which is explicit here is of a youth wrapped only in linen and a Jesus wrapped in linen for his burial. As anticipating Resurrection we may press this parallel too far, but the resources of a concentrated art, such as this Gospel is, are often marvelous beyond the makers knowing. No image survives of Jesus Resurrection in this earliest Gospel. Instead, we have this.

THE GARDEN OF MEETING IN JOHN

Already within the Synoptics the traditions of the Passion narrative sprout and diverge. Matthews fine saying about perishing with the sword is missing from Luke where, instead, and quite to the contrary Jesus after supper says, Let him who has no sword sell his mantle and

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buy one. (Luke 22,36.) Two swords are found then and he says, It is enough. No word of reproach is spoken concerning its use to inflict a wound, and as aforesaid Luke solves the difficulty about the slave of the High Priest by having Jesus cure him with a touch. Also, without mentioning any names he specifies that it was the slaves right ear, I think myself because it chimes once more with prophecy: Woe to my worthless shepherd, who deserts the flock! May the sword smite his arm and his right eye! (Zechariah 11,17.) Yes, of course, it is remote, but we must bear in mind that this worthless shepherd (namely, the High Priest) is the same that Jesus has mentioned earlier when quoting Zechariah in reference to himself: Strike the shepherd, that the sheep may be scattered. (Zechariah 13,7.) As ever, it is the Fourth Evangelist who freely recasts the tale, putting the scene of Jesus arrest in a garden beyond the Kidron valley. This place is not called Gethsemane and Jesus is not in agony here nor does he pray to be spared what must come. All that would be out of keeping with Johns elevated Christ who has throughout looked forward to his death serenely. Hence, the garden to which he has taken his disciples is simply a place where he is accustomed to meet them. When the soldiers and Temple officers with lanterns and torches and weapons appear, Jesus goes forth to meet them asking, Whom do you seek? And they reply, Jesus the Nazorean. At once he says, I am he, and they draw back and fall to the ground. It is an impressive moment if we read this as Scripture. Then a second time he asks them, Whom do you seek? It is of course the Evangelists leitmotif which reappears in this double, and we met it long since in the Gospel of John. Once again, then, the soldiers answer, Jesus the Nazorean, and he says, I told you that I am he, so if you seek me, let these men go. Nothing is said of their forsaking him or having to flee although Jesus had earlier foretold Peters denial, a different sort of forsaking which is yet to come. It is now that Peter draws his sword (Peter!) and cuts off the right ear of the High Priests slave, who is given the name of Malchus. These names embellish the Synoptic account with just that sort of verisimilitude which gains its credit, useful in fiction, from the naming of persons. John borrows the right ear, seemingly, from the Third Evangelist, but he wisely abstains from Lukes sentimental healing. Seeming also to borrow from

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Matthew, he has Jesus say, Put your sword into its sheath. Shall I not drink the cup which the Father has given me? At last a mention of the cup! It is the least reminder of the Gethsemane prayer. Now he is seized and bound and led away. What about that name, Jesus the Nazorean? The usual translations give Jesus of Nazareth here whereas the Greek gives Jesus the Nazorean or in a few ancient manuscripts, Jesus the Nazarene. Our difficulty (as Alfred Loisy has pointed out) is that we cannot derive Nazorean from Nazareth linguistically. Might this name refer, then, to early followers of the Baptist? Or was Jesus a member of a sect of Nazoreans who have left no other trace in history?

JESUS BEFORE THE SANHEDRIN

After his arrest, so the Markan story goes, Jesus is taken to the High Priests house where he is brought before the Sanhedrin that night, examined in a hasty trial and as hastily condemned. Witnesses are sought in course of this trial to testify against him but their testimony cannot be made to agree. A single piece of that false testimony is cited by Mark: We heard him say, I will destroy this Temple that is made with hands and in three days build another, not made with hands. (Mark 14,58) This distorted metaphor is almost a copy of Jesus words near the beginning of Johns Gospel when he challenges the Jews saying, Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up. (2,19.) John would use the words to replace the Sign of Jonah with something less embarrassing, but the saying is a piece of early tradition which arose afterwards when the Resurrection could be described in a metaphor referring to a Temple destroyed, as it was destroyed during the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD. This is the plain meaning of a rather homely forecast which the Evangelists would mostly ascribe to Jesus except for Luke who associates it with the first Christian martyr, Stephen, in Acts 6,14. Thus the only false charge quoted by Mark is a piece of late Christian testimony deliberately mangled, which makes his knowing readers smile. Matthew follows Mark in repeating the false accusation but he will have it that on this point two witnesses agree because he is mindful of Mosaic Law which says, No person shall be put to death on the testimony of one witness. (Numbers 35.30.) The little correction is a scribal touch in this most Jewish of the Evangelists. Matthews source for

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this change is not a better knowledge of the fact but a better knowledge of the Jewish Law. The tradition invents itself as it goes along and makes a neat little correction. Before his accusers (except in Luke) Jesus stands silent and makes no defence. It is an impressive silence to which a prophecy might have borne its witness: He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. (Isaiah 53,7.) Since Jesus will not condescend to reply to false accusation, the High Priest puts the question directly: Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed? and he replies, I am. It is a simple and direct avowal, the force of which is stronger in the Greek (Ego eimi) than in our ordinary English idiom. Liturgically, it is a supreme moment, but more importantly for us, it is the culmination of Marks Messianic secrecy theme, and that is its real meaning here. It is the climax of Jesus stand before the High Priest when at long last, and for the first time publicly, he acknowledges himself to be the Christ. That is the one acknowledgement he has never openly made and has forbidden even the demons to testify in his behalf. Now he comes out with it before the High Priest of the old religion out of which Christ himself has sprung. It is a moment to compare with Jesus response at Peters Confession and a deliberate Markan double. Then he had accepted Peters designation implicitly when charging his disciples to tell no one about him. Here the Messianic secret is cast aside. I am, he says in answer to the High Priests question. It is as much as to say, I am the Christ. Instead, however, he speaks of a time, evidently near at hand, when they will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven. Is he really speaking of himself? Might this be embedded usage which has somehow survived in the traditions to show us a Jesus who spoke of the Son of Man as someone else? That might seem historical but in Mark, at least, the thing is plain. Nor does the High Priest miss the reference. He tears his mantle, You have heard his blasphemy! What is your decision? They condemn him to death. And some began to spit on him, and to cover his face, and to strike him, saying to him, Prophesy! And the guards received him with blows. (Mark 14,65.)

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Matthew has taken something away from the effect of Jesus open avowal as the sole ground of his condemnation, and he did it when owing to his scruple about the Mosaic Law he made two witnesses agree. For this and other reasons in Matthew and Luke, I think these later Synoptists dont fully appreciate Marks wiser handling of the secrecy theme. They inherit it from Mark because of their copying, which is sometimes rather passive, but now and again they miss his point. Remember, then, what the Messianic Secret signifies. Either we trace it back to Jesus (with Albert Schweitzer) or else we ascribe it to Mark (with William Wrede) while finding in it, either way, impressive early evidence of a period when Jesus was not thought of as Messiah and had not been remembered that way. Deep questions have been raised against this trial as described because it goes against the Jewish practice to assemble the Sanhedrin like this at night. (JM Robertson scoffs at the idea of fetching witnesses at nighttime). Moreover, it violates the Sanhedrins own laws to hold trial and pass a capital judgment all in one session. An overnight wait was required before the death sentence could be passed according to the historian Guignebert, who is an authority on the customs of the Jews. Only a very extraordinary crisis could account for such extraordinary measures if these things ever happened as described. On the Negative side, these tales might reveal the ignorance of Christs own disciples of the details of these events, especially as Jesus might have been examined and his death determined behind closed doors.

VARIATIONS IN LUKE: first Jewish trial

Some scholars believe that Marks tale of the Passion reflects an older document which his Gospel has absorbed. If true, it would mean that in the Passion tale we may be close to the events described. Only, in this sense of the word we are referring to that portion of Mark which follows the Little Apocalypse. Its not surprising that the calamity of Jesus final days would be an earliest focus in the recollections of his followers, but is it true, then, as Martin Dibelius claims, that the Passion story is narrated by all four Evangelists with a striking agreement never attained elsewhere?33 For we already know that Johns Gospel presents a striking contrast to the Synoptics when closely compared. In fact, it is only large agreements

33. From Tradition to Gospel (NY: Charles Scribners Sons, p. 179.)

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that this Evangelist has aimed at in his recasting the myth, and it would be just as fair to Professor Dibelius to say that despite manifest discrepancies between them in the Passion story, all Four Gospels can be used effectively during Lent and Holy Week, thanks to a large convergence between them in the impression they give of Jesus last days. I have pointed out that Luke drops the one false accusation brought against Jesus before the Sanhedrin to use it later on against the martyr Stephen, who is accused of saying that Jesus the Nazorean would destroy this holy place. We should also notice that he puts off this first trial until Good Friday morning, which leaves him nothing much to say about Jesus confinement overnight except to tell that he was mocked and struck and variously reviled by those who held him. Why was he? Why this uncalled-for abuse following his mere arrest? Luke fails to give a reason for this treatment which in Matthew and Mark comes only after Jesus Messianic acknowledgements and, of course, in consequence of that. Truth is, it was unnecessary to say anything at all about Thursday night except that Luke is conscious of having displaced a nighttime trial. His morning session is not a new and different trial, a second session as which it might be defensible; the described interview at the heart of it is the same and its result is the same condemnation minus the beatings which have already occurred. We do notice, of course, that Jesus silence in face of false witness must disappear when the false witnesses are suppressed, yet Luke appreciates its dramatic value and its high importance in recalling prophecy. He reserves that silence for a later scene in which Christ is brought before Herod, the tetrarch of Galilee. This Herod, the same who had arrested the Baptist, figures in no other account of the Passion, so that Jesus extraordinary appearance before him on this overcrowded Friday is one of which the other Evangelists have nothing to say. And its not the High Priest who particularly examines him here but rather the whole Sanhedrin which comes at once to the question: If you are the Christ, tell us! Nor does Jesus reply in the affirmative, as in Matthew and Mark. Instead, he dares to scorn them: If I tell you, you will not believe; and if I ask you, you will not answer. (Luke 22,67.) It isnt their rudeness that he means to reprove by these words, although that impression is commonly given by our modern translations except for the priceless and literal RSV quoted here. Striving for realism, the

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modern translators would mostly bend this text toward seeming fact when they make Jesus say (by inserting a word), If I ask you questions, you will not reply. It is not a question of questions here, of give-and-take or fairness. Only one question is before them and well does our Evangelist know it: Art thou the Christ? A sense of the impressiveness of Jesus presence enters in and the intimation is that these elders and priests, even as they sit before him in judgment, wouldnt or couldnt answer their own question. His words are meant as vindication, after which he claims that the Son of Man shall be seated at the right hand of the Power of God (Luke 22,69) and they all cry out together, Are you the Son of God, then? As in Matthew when answering, You have said so, Jesus replies, You say that I am. They have not said so. They do not say that he is. These quaint answers are unsatisfactory and have puzzled even the translators, so its not a question here of Greek idiom but of a peculiarity or a deliberate enigma. The Jesus of our story (not the historical Jesus, of course) seems almost to mean that because they have pronounced the mere words, Son of God, they have somehow affirmed the answer without intending it and forgive me but there is a hint of smugness in the primitive imagination which has conceived such a scene. In any case, the gathered Sanhedrin (astoundingly) condemns the Son of God. They cry in one voice, What further testimony do we need? We have heard it ourselves from his own lips. And this concluding notice of further testimony is the one lingering trace of the banished witnesses in Lukes revision. Now they rise up and take him to Pilate. But one more thing remains to be said. We have not yet told of Peters Denial in connection with all of this except for citing Jesus eloquent prediction: Before the cock crows twice, thou shalt deny me thrice. In all four Gospels this famous denial interlocks somehow with Jesus being dragged before the Jews, and in Lukes version it comes just after his being brought to the High Priests house. Peter has followed behind and sits at a fire in the court yard where, first by one, then by another he is recognized as one of them, a Galilean and disciple of Jesus. Each time he denies it and the third time, even as he speaks, the cock crows! Whereupon Jesus (the Lord) turns and looks at Peter, which brings everything to mind. Peter goes out and weeps bitterly. Now this turning of Jesus at the very moment of Peters denial, or even the implication that Jesus and Peter were in sight of one another at this time these touches are Lukes own invention. Directly afterward

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we read of Jesus being mocked and beaten by those who held him: Prophesy! Who is it that struck you? It is a touching moment and effectively arranged. Had Jesus been taken before the Sanhedrin or gone indoors to face the High Priest, he could not have given the silent admonishment of that timely look, but where is fact in these fictitious alterations? And what shall we say of Lukes attitude toward fact here? We know that he used Marks Gospel but he cant have regarded Mark as offering more than a possible version of what had occurred. Luke dares to give a different version and yet his own tale suffers from its inconsistency, which suggests that he did not have a better source to go on. His tale is treated as a tale and rearranged to suit the story-tellers liking.

VARIATIONS IN JOHN
In the Fourth Gospel Jesus is seized and bound before being led away to an old High Priest. The Synoptics do not mention these bonds nor this particular High Priest because first Jesus is taken to Annas rather than Caiaphas, whose name Matthew had introduced. It is an evidence of the authors greater assurance in his handling of contemporary fact that he should bring in a High Priest who had been removed from that office years ago, to be followed by a series of Roman appointments. Caiaphas, then, who was High Priest that year, happened also to be his son-in-law, and evidently Annas had retained a certain standing in the Jewish system. Overall, it seems a point in favor of the Gospels that collectively they should manage to bring their myth if this were only a myth so definitely in connection to known history, and yet of course we have also learned to prize this Fourth Evangelists verisimilitude. Peter has followed Jesus after his arrest along with another disciple who being known to the High Priest could enter his courtyard. We have already described the unnamed companion of Peters as the beloved disciple. It is he who speaks to the maid at the door to let Peter into the courtyard and set the scene for his three-fold denial. Implicitly, he is also the source for these informations. Now then, a maid as a doorkeeper in such a tumult? She must be yielding to allow the beloved disciple his entry, I suppose, and she recognizes Peter as a disciple. He denies it and goes over to warm himself at a charcoal fire where he is recognized again and denies it a second time in the same words: I am not. Finally, a relative of the man whose ear he had cut off asks if he had not seen him in the garden! He

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denies it a third time and the cock crows. Elsewhere the High Priests questioning of Jesus, which is not to be understood as taking place in sight of Peter, takes a very different turn. Nothing will be said of the Christ in this examination. It would be contrary to the open revelation which is made of Jesus in this Gospel to make his self-disclosure now a basis for judgment. Nor has he opportunity to speak of the Son of Man coming with the clouds of Heaven. That vivid imagination belongs to a primitive idea of Judgment Day which John has replaced, as we noted once before, by having Jesus say: Now is the Judgment of this world, now shall the Ruler of this world be cast out; and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself. (John 12,31.) It is too much to speak of a Jewish trial in John. There is no trial. There are no false witnesses: none are required. And the Sanhedrin is not to be found. Our Fourth Evangelist, again with greater skill, evades the whole difficulty of the improbable gathering of the Sanhedrin at such a time because that august body had effectively condemned Jesus after the Raising of Lazarus. (John 11,49.) So Annas will question him now about his teaching and his disciples, and Jesus says in reply, I have spoken openly to the world... words which might serve as a motto for the way in which the farewell discourses and prayers are designed to involve us. I have said nothing secretly. Why ask me? Ask those who have heard me. They know what I said. This is an insolent answer if we conceive of Jesus historically as a bound prisoner and a man in trouble, but the real audacity here is the Evangelists. We must not forget his cunning. Johns verisimilitude gives us no literary photography. He speaks to the mind and his focus is on Jesus words replying to the High Priest but laying claim to the believers assent. One of the servants strikes him: Is that how you answer the High Priest? Jesus makes a short defense of his answer and is sent on to Caiaphas, still bound. John has learned from his predecessors. We have in the haughty reply a hint of Lukes defiant Jesus when he says to the Sanhedrin, If I tell you, you will not believe me. That may have given him a clue. And we have in the shocking blow received a blow delivered by the hand, John says, and I suppose to the face the same effective proof of a bodily presence which Mark achieves by his skillful use of Jesus touch or by his saying that Jesus own people went out to

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take charge of him. Psychologically, it is convincing, yet the same technique is available to any novelist. Johns impressiveness is that of a story well-told. Nevertheless, he has nothing to tell of Jesus in the house of Caiaphas from which, early in the morning, he is taken to the Roman praetorium. John doesnt openly contradict the Synoptic version of a Jesus tried before Caiaphas in recasting his tale. Rather, he wins acceptance by a more subtle accommodation.

CHRIST BEFORE PILATE I

Our Gospels are agreed that after the priests and elders had done examining Jesus they handed him over to Pontius Pilate, and once again it is the Fourth Evangelist who surpasses the others in his storytelling here. He is the deepest mind of the four, but in fairness we must ask ourselves if the last of our Gospels to be written can bring us closer to the scene? Rather has he preserved the history of these events in the manner of an artists mural. The inspiration behind our Gospels is unfathomable and seems to trace to Jesus, but the narrative rests on the Evangelists own conceptions and imaginations, inevitably. We revert to the earliest and most rudimentary Gospel to get our bearings here. Marks account of a trial before Pilate is given in only half a dozen fundamental lines. When Jesus is brought to him early Friday morning he asks at once, Are you the King of the Jews? and Jesus replies, Thou hast said. Or in a literal translation even more simply: You say. It is the only word exchanged between them, after which the priests accuse Jesus of many things. Have you no answer to make? Pilate asks. See how many charges they bring against you. But Jesus makes no reply and Pilate is set to wondering about him, and that is all. No decision has been reached, no sentence passed. Instead, a wavering indecision on Pilates part will appear in his dealings with the crowd. The interview has struck its single spark. Can it surprise us on historical grounds that Mark has nothing more to tell? The disciples had run away. How could they know what had occurred? It was necessary for Mark to shift his scene here, and yet he suffers an abruption and his tale gets all mixed up. Any pretence of a trial of Jesus is simply dropped, but his tale is so rudimentary that most of it is left to our imagination and its underlying chaos is masked by the tale of Barabbas, to which we are now introduced. First we are told of Pilates

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annual pardon when he used to release any one prisoner at the Passover feast. Barabbas was such a prisoner, a rebel who had committed murder in the insurrection. Now a crowd comes up but let me quote the text: And the crowd came up and began to ask Pilate to do as he was wont to do for them. And he answered them, Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews? (Mark 15,8.) Mark has changed the subject but this is chaotic storytelling. We have jumped to Pilates sudden appearance before a crowd of petitioners which is allowed to disrupt a judicial proceeding, but what is this crowd? Are they supposed to be the crowd of Jesus accusers? Or have they followed these accusers to learn the disposition of the case? Suddenly they are pressing forward to demand an irrelevant favor I mean, irrelevant to the case in hand. They have come out of nowhere to request the annual pardon, and it is very strange that they should know anything about a King of the Jews, but interruption and all, they serve Pilates convenience. It was out of envy that the chief priests had delivered up Jesus and in the crowds importunity he sees a chance to let him go. Instead, the crowd refuses. The priests have stirred them up to ask for Barabbas instead, we know not how or when or why. For why would these insinuating priests chance it with Pontius Pilate to seek the release of a murderous insurrectionist? Yet Roman law and order will acquiesce in just that daring choice as Pilate turns over his unfinished trial to this importunate mob. With an entire lack of authority, of personal resource and self-respect, he asks them: Then what shall I do with the man whom you call the King of the Jews? And they cried out again, Crucify him. And Pilate said to them, Why, what evil has he done? But they shouted all the more, Crucify him. (15,11.) It is unreal. A Roman governor notorious for his cruelty now reasons in vain with a clamoring mob to whom he yields a two-edged judgment. Not only will he crucify an innocent Jesus but further to appease them he will release a rebel who is dangerous to the Roman authority. How ironic that the unreality of his behavior might yet attest the historical reality of the basic event. The Evangelist cannot escape the tradition of Pilates condemnation, yet being mindful of persecution, he has no wish to offend the Roman masters. Better that blame should be made to fall on the Jews!

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The story is a dramatic fable as JM Robertson insists when assigning it to ritual re-enactment and pageant or sacred drama. The outrageous contrast between an innocent Jesus and a Barabbas is just what the extreme quality of Jesus requires for its final emphasis. Altogether the contrast is too extreme deliberately. It is a flash of lightning on the presence of Christ in the world: it is a wicked world. As history our story is only melodrama, but as myth it is true.

CHRIST BEFORE PILATE: II.

Matthews version of the trial scene is almost twice as long as Marks, yet Pilate comes at once to his question, the same question; Jesus replies, Thou hast said (=You say), the same answer. Then the many accusations and Pilates further question, Jesus remaining silent through it all so that Pilate wonders greatly. Before describing this interview, however, he tells of the pathetic end of Judas Iscariot who after Jesus was condemned repented and went back to the Temple with his thirty pieces of silver, the price of his betrayal. Although a trial hasnt yet been shown, by taking its outcome for granted Matthew gives a larger impression to his scene. Judas declares remorsefully, I have sinned in betraying innocent blood, but the priests and elders reply, What is that to us? After refusing his return of blood money Judas flings it down and goes out to hang himself. I must say something about prophecy as the Gospels conceive of it here. In Zechariah 11 the prophet receives thirty shekels of silver after serving a symbolic term as the shepherd of a flock doomed to be slain, and on receiving his wage the Lord tells him to cast it into the treasury. So I took the thirty shekels of silver and cast them into the treasury in the house of the Lord. So great is the Jewish regard for Scripture that its merest phrases have prophetic value. What matters for Matthew is only that Judass flinging the money down, and money in the same amount, chimes with Zechariah. No more than ourselves does he pretend that Zechariahs action is a forecast of Judass action which might have been understood beforehand by an interpreter. What matters is the mere vibration of that iron string in the traitors legendary deed. We thus witness the tragedy of Judas Iscariot before Jesus is brought before Pilate, who then takes the initiative when asking the crowd (and I give here a version found in some ancient authorities): Whom do you want me to release for you? Jesus Barabbas or Jesus who is called the Christ?

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This tremendous and wonderful contrast gains all the more if we bear in mind JM Robertsons point, that Bar-Abbas really means, Son of the Father, which increases his suspicions of the fictitious nature of the scene. And in a further amplification of the scene (all this without giving us one inch more than Mark could give of the supposed interview the actual trial) Matthew adds the tale of Pilates wife who in the midst of all this sent word to her husband saying, Have nothing to do with that righteous man, for I have suffered much over him today in a dream. Matthew is a believer in dreams and this warning prepares for his masterstroke, unique to his Gospel, in which Pilate washes his hands of the affair. For when he sees that he cannot reason with the crowd but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd saying, I am innocent of this mans blood; see to it yourselves. And all the people answered, His blood be on us and on our children! (27,24.) What a piece of devastating effectiveness and of fiction! For the people have wished a curse upon themselves, as the tale goes, and it is very strange to find this in the most Jewish of our Gospels. We must remember that these documents, so often redacted, are never altogether the work of one mind. This improbable curse points to a time later by many decades than the scenes described when the conflicts between Christians and Jews had become acute. To make it clear, then, what the present author believes: the Jews did not reject a Jesus who was one of their own. Later on they rejected claims which were made about him as a crucified Messiah, a rejection which led to much bitterness. Pilates famous gesture, according to Professor Guignebert, is a characteristic Jewish gesture, and his words, according to the professor, fairly echo those of King David on learning of the assassination of Abner: I and my kingdom are forever guiltless before the Lord for the blood of Abner... May it fall upon the head of Joab and upon all his fathers house... (II Sam. 3,28) The professors conviction is that the episode is invented and even half borrowed from a biblical prototype. We have seen this sort of thing ourselves elsewhere, as when Mark has borrowed from a biblical prototype when telling of the man with the withered hand.

CHRIST BEFORE PILATE III.

Luke can tell us no more about the trial before Pilate than we

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already know from Matthew and Mark, but he does embroider and invent to fill out the scene. First he quotes Jesus accusers who say, We found this man perverting our nation, and forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar, and saying that he himself is Christ a King. Pilates question arises from the accusation, as was implicit before, but it is the same question as before, exactly, and Jesus makes the same reply: You say. Pilate reaches a decision quickly and tells the chief priests and the multitudes: I find no crime in this man. But that only leads to a clamor about Jesus stirring up the people everywhere and as far away as Galilee, mention of which gives Pilate his out. For when he learns that Jesus is a Galilean, he sends him forthwith to Herod Antipas who is in Jerusalem for the feast. This is an unexpected turn in the Passion story and, among the canonical four, unique to Lukes Gospel. (It will turn up again in a spurious Gospel of Peter later on). Almost certainly, then, the thing is a Lukan invention which makes of his Good Friday scheme an impossibly crowded day. After all, this is the Evangelist who had postponed the meeting of the Sanhedrin until the morning hours. That comes first, and after that business is done, Pilate must examine Jesus before sending him off to Herod, wherever Herod may happen to be, there to interrupt whatever it is that Herod might be doing. Any one of these three events might very well take up a morning and yet Luke will have Jesus already crucified about the sixth hour around noon. As the story goes, Herod is glad to see a man about whom he has heard so many things. He would have liked to see a miracle (some sign done by him) and pries him with many questions, but Jesus makes no answer. The priests and scribes standing by accuse him vehemently but all in vain until Herod and his soldiers begin to make sport of him. Jesus is arrayed in gorgeous apparel and sent back to Pilate a fourth event in Lukes overcrowded Friday morning! The Roman magistrate must call together the chief priests and the rulers and the people, and when they reassemble he tells of his examination of the man, says frankly that he did not find him guilty of any of their charges against him, informs them that Herod likewise found in him nothing deserving death and declares that he will chastise Jesus and release him. Out of nowhere, then, in response to this unexpected offer of release comes the cry of the crowd: Away with this man, and release to us Barabbas! But Luke has made no preparation for this outburst. Who is Barabbas? The Evangelist tacks on a passing explanation, but we have

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no idea what has stirred the crowd to such a peculiar choice. Where does the idea of this choice come from? Up to now in the Lukan narrative we were dealing with Jesus. That such a peculiar demand would occur to the crowd, or that a Barabbas yet unmentioned should be released at all on grounds of Pilates willingness to release another man baffles the mind unless we assume a prior knowledge of Barabbas among his readers. It is an incoherency within his tale which the Evangelist has stumbled into by his drastic recasting of Mark when inserting his own invention about Herods role in the trial of Christ. This brings us to a fundamental point. For it clearly doesnt matter much to the churchs traditions that Luke has concocted an impossible tale. The appeal is to our protest against the wrongness of such a condemnation. The appeal is immensely to the imagination. That we are shown the wrongness of it all, over and over, is what counts. Piece by piece Lukes tale is effective in making this appeal.

THE MAN OF SORROWS I.

In Marks Gospel Pilate releases Barabbas to satisfy the crowd and Jesus he hands over to be crucified, but first he will have him scourged. Twice, then, Jesus is beaten following a verdict of condemnation, and first when the guards received him with blows. Now in connection with Pilates reluctant verdict he is scourged. Quite what is meant by this scourging our skimpy records do not tell us if these are records. Was scourging a technical procedure preceding crucifixion? If so, it would have been administered with special whips and numbered strokes. Afterward the beaten and disabled victim would be taken to his place of execution, probably in a cart. To be scourged is no light punishment. It would destroy all resistance and leave its victim limp. If something like this is meant by a supposed tradition that Mark is drawing on, his story veers off in another direction. For when he writes that having scourged Jesus (Pilate) delivered him to be crucified, he winds up the episode. We ought next to go to the scene of crucifixion, but instead of that Mark inserts a tale of a very different character. Now the soldiers lead Jesus away inside the palace to make a mockery of him and nothing more is said about the scourging. Do we presuppose it? Do we imagine that after a lashing which must leave its victim enervated and strengthless, he could be borrowed for an hour of brutal sport during which all Roman discipline is cast aside as the soldiers

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become a mob? Mark in his extravagance will call together the whole battalion to dress Jesus in a purple cloak, the color of royalty, in ironic token of the accusation under which he is condemned. The soldiers plait a crown of thorns and thrust it on his head and spit on him and hail him as King of the Jews, even kneeling before him. Jesus is struck on the head with a reed which in Matthews Gospel is first placed in his hand as a scepter, but where is any scourging here? It is another tale. After this mockery they strip away the purple robe and put his own clothes on him and lead him away to be crucified. Does it greatly affect us, I would ask, this tale of the soldiers abuse of the Christ? the tale itself, I mean. For as a rule we are not moved to pity and wonder on the strength of an anecdote and Marks tale is very short. Yet undeniably there is something moving in the contemplation of these scenes and a tenderness within which mourns the death of Christ. Why is that? It is not the anecdote which moves us but the use which is made of it. Our virtuoso literary critic, JM Robertson, has considered this deficiency in the various anecdotes of the Passion because for the most part they are much too sketchy to account for the great tide of Christian sentiment, and yet there that sentiment is and we share in it, many of us. So for Robertson these sketchy tales fairly reduce to stage directions for the enactment of a play which would bring all of this to life (we mentioned this a while back). Of course, for our Negative critic it is then possible to reduce the historical Passion to a mere play, but his insight is nonetheless keen: his feeling that the brevity does not explain the sentiment and barely carries the tale. At the same time one has to concede that in its very density and compression, the Gospel tale is effectively told. Marks artistry is not to be underestimated and to call these scenes mere stage directions goes a little too far. Even given ancient pageant-like parades, in some of which the very gods are lugged around on carts, it is enough that the liturgical usage of the tale develops that enduring sentiment. That is where its value lies. What is presupposed is a fellowship sharing in certain sacred intimacies and resting on its traditions, but a fellowship of mutual encouragements and remembrances which make these biblical imaginations effective until at last, out of habit mostly, the mere anecdote seems to account for it all. We have not, of course, refuted Mr. Robertson in saying this and certainly there is something of stage-craft in this mockery of a pathetic king. There are reasons for saying so. The tale in Mark is not conceived

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as a history based on ascertained fact. It is conceived as a dramatic imagination based on traditions. In what wardrobe, after all, have these soldiers found a purple cloak? And from what convenient thorn-bush did someone braid that crown of thorns? A dry reed is used for rod and scepter. Does Pilate keep dry reeds about the palace? There are reasons for doubting the fact behind the tale in the very accoutrements, reed, robe, and crown of thorns which so perfectly answer to the unique charge they mock and which is, of course, the ruling imagination here. Suddenly, it is all too appropriate and too convenient. An incident is known to history, one such incident, in which a certain Karabas was dressed up as a mock king in the city of Alexandria. He was some sort of idiot paraded about to mock the visit of Herod Agrippa, a Jewish king whom we know from the Book of Acts. (The event is reported by Philo of Alexandria.) What does the mockery of a visiting king show us in this connection except that the public satire of a king, which we associate with ancient festival, was a widely known idea which could be borrowed for another use? As a conceivable source for our Gospel tale there is a temptation, to which Mr. Robertson succumbed, to rest ones case on the echo of a name: Karabas-Barabbas. More broadly, then, these ideas of satire could occur to the multitude anywhere in its rioting and festival disorders. Even if a sitting king were targeted this way he must do nothing to quell it. The sheer grotesqueness of it all deflects the revolutionary impulse. We concede the possibility, then, that if Jesus had come to be thought of as a Messianic pretender (which is just what Pilates question meant) he would inevitably have that role in the impending Kingdom of God and he might very well in his humiliation and failure been mocked as a King.

THE MAN OF SORROWS II.

Jesus is nowhere called the Man of Sorrows in our Gospels although details associated with that old prophetic idea have been borrowed for the Passion of Christ. It is a fact which counts heavily for the Negative argument. In Isaiah 53 (where the Man of Sorrows appears only this once in the Bible) he belongs already to the past as well as to the future. Already he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. He was oppressed, the prophet writes, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth. But who is he? The poet writes as if everybody distantly knows of him, or

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ought to know of him, yet he remains nameless. The event of his life is over and done: he was cut off out of the land of the living... and they made his grave with the wicked, and with a rich man in his death. Where? When? Later on, Jesus is seen to be prefigured here. Belief in Christ involves belief in prophecy. Remember how Jonah has prefigured the death and Resurrection of Christ in Matthews Gospel. Evidently, something similar happens here and yet there is a difference. Jonahs being swallowed up and then cast forth may well prefigure the supernatural career of Christ, but Jesus cannot be Jonah (the thought is absurd). Whereas in course of time he becomes the Man of Sorrows. He borrows his features and undergoes a similar rejection, receives a similar contempt although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. Christians often see only the prefigured Christ in the chapter of Isaiah in which the Man of Sorrows, or in strict translation the Man of Pains appears but this is to overlook the dark (if also fictitious) individuality of the Man of Pains. Not Isaiah but an unknown poet of the Babylonian Captivity is the author of portions of the Book of Isaiah beginning with chapter 40. It is this unknown poet who is the author of Isaiah 53. We know nothing of his life or doings. We call him a prophet by virtue of his poetry which was attached to the Isaiah scroll. Isaiah had foreseen a doom for his people except for a remnant who should survive, and this unknown poet writes from within that catastrophe. His poems describe a Suffering Servant. A people despoiled and captive, Israel languished in Babylon whither the cream of the crop had been deported. It is impressive to see what courage and faith this poet could summon when composing his tender encouragements and his lofty prophecies. The Man of Pains, then, is conceived to represent Israel in its suffering and near extinction. For the Servant is Israel itself, and yet (for this is poetry) the Man of Pains redeems Israel: he is, insofar, a being apart. It is to his own people that the poet is speaking when he writes: Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities, The chastisement of our peace was upon him; And with his stripes we are healed.

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The representative quality of this Man of Pains is that of an imagined person: he asks to be realized. And we remind ourselves that this is the view of his vorchristliche Jesus taken by William Benjamin Smith, who took the Son of Man to mean Israel symbolically. There are features in the sufferings of the Man of Pains, and more than features, values which have been transferred to Jesus. If the Man of Pains is symbolic, can Jesus then be real? Certainly, his own story has been shaped in retrospect upon this solemn chapter, and this much we may concede to Professor Arthur Drews who wants to rest a corner of the Negative argument on it. Jesus did not have to exist to give us the figure of our Gospels (the argument goes) because Isaiah had already invented him. It is the fourth of the so-called Servant Poems from which the verses quoted above are taken. (Isaiah 53,4.) The bearing of this on the meaning of Jesus crucifixion, which these words call to mind, seems almost uncanny to those of us who were brought up in the Christian doctrine, but that is largely a matter of habit, and this same unnoticed habit may well have been at work in Professor Arthur Drews. For when Drews suggests that practically the whole of sacrificial Christianity could have been drawn from these later chapters of Isaiah, he simply inverts the Christian belief in prophecy. And his habit, I mean to say, assures him of the essential identity of the two things. In fact, Isaiah 53 when carefully read is no sort of program for the life or teachings of Jesus but instead a vital source for Christian doctrine. Is it possible to do what Drews has done when discrediting the life of Jesus as a fact of history? Unquestionably, there are elements of derivation here when the suffering Christ is described in terms borrowed from the Man of Pains. Yet a deep distinction is asking to be made here which Drews has failed to make. It is the difference between derivation and appropriation. Strictly speaking, the hypothesis of derivation does not require an intervening history. The poem suffices of itself and Jesus is its illustration: just copy him down! As such a copy he lacks any substance derived from the spirituality and faith of Israel during the intervening centuries. Although taken from a historical poem, he lacks the dimension of history as Jesus does not. During that same span of centuries when the Servant poems became a part of the religious heritage of Israel, another influence appeared, as we have seen, in Daniels myth of the Heavenly Man, or in his actual designation, one like a Son of Man (who appeared before the

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Ancient of Days). These are two quite different imaginations. Of themselves considered as imaginations they do not and cannot consort. No more can Keatss vision of the rustic goddess Autumn in his ode consort with Shelleys Spirit of Night, who is also a goddess. Keats brings his goddess to mind like a long-haired American girl without makeup and wearing a long dress: Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half-reapd furrow sound asleep, Drowsd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers... Shelleys poem is an invocation of his goddess, declamatory, visionary: Swiftly walk oer the western wave, Spirit of Night! Out of the misty eastern cave, Where all the long and lone daylight, Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear, Which make thee terrible and dear, Swift be thy flight! Different imaginations of different minds do not combine. Keatss beautiful Autumn (the beauty in our own minds, chiefly) doesnt dwell in a misty eastern cave or weave dreams of joy and fear. Shelleys goddess (Wrap thy form in a mantle gray, Star-inwrought) could never be found in the sweet timelessness of deep autumn: ...sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cider-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. How does a paper Jesus derived from the Man of Pains, a figure who actually dies, combine with Daniels immortal Heavenly Man? On what possible grounds can such a mismatch occur in the mere imagination? What could bridge them? For unlike the Heavenly Man who in coming before the Ancient of Days belongs to the heavenly sphere and is immortal, the Man of Pains has suffered a human past. His promise is only that he shall see the fruit of the travail of his soul and be satisfied

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because the Lord will divide him a portion with the great. There are giant incompatibilities here if we regard these mere imaginings. But on a theory of appropriation we have a Third Something, a Jesus whose substance as a man of history, a doer, a prophet, a teacher, a martyr embraces these mere possibilities in all the complexity of named places and persons known to history and definite times: of Galilee, the Baptist, Jerusalem, Passover, Pontius Pilate. For the appropriation of Daniels vision we have Jesus warnings of the Son of Man to come and for Isaiah 53 his crucifixion under Pontius Pilate, which brings the solemn verses to the minds of his disciples. Appropriation integrates these disparities in a person having his own qualities. Not to say that in Jesus these disparities cease to exist. They do not. It is the human density of his public career which can bring (or his disciples bring) these incompatibles together. It is the result of the disciples faith that Jesus can be described as the Servant who was wounded for our transgressions and then presented as the Son of Man who will come in the clouds. But were even these statements mere empty imaginations on their part, lacking an integrating central figure, nothing could hold them together. One would have a sense of their emptiness. Arthur Drews is not entirely wrong. Detail taken from Isaiah 53 has undoubtedly shaped the invention, as it also interprets, the accounts of the Passion of Christ. Yet compared with a hypothesis of derivation which makes a paper copy of Jesus, the appropriation of many Scriptures to a man who is seen as fulfilling them is the larger historical idea.

CHRIST BEFORE PILATE IN JOHN

According to the Fourth Gospel Jesus is taken first to the old High Priest Annas. Then he is led bound to Caiaphas house where nothing happens that we are told of, and in the morning he is taken to Pilate. It was after the Raising of Lazarus and in Jesus absence that the Sanhedrin had earlier condemned him. Any notion of a Jewish trial here is only the echo in our minds of the Synoptic tradition. But John will magnify the interview with Pilate when Jesus is taken to the praetorium. It is early in the morning on the day of Preparation for the Passover, and the Jews will not defile themselves by entering in, so that Pilate has to come out to them. This is a realistic detail which may reflect only the Evangelists artful storytelling. The appearance before Pilate is Johns own opportunity for the dramatic presentation of his Christ, and I mean of course his presentation to the

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world. Who else in all these Gospels can warrant the public fact of Jesus better than the Procurator of Judea, the procurer of taxes, the Roman governor himself? It is he as I have said before who is remembered in the Creed. Pilate is reluctant to take on this prisoner and treats it as a matter of small importance but the Jews prevail, and when he summons Jesus in the praetorium he asks, Are you the King of the Jews? A dialogue ensues a rare thing in the Gospels during which Jesus initial nonanswer verges once again on insolence (he is fearless before authority). This brings from Pilate a flash of scornful anger and it is then that Jesus says, My Kingdom is not of this world. The famous declaration recasts his early Synoptic preaching when he had warned of a Kingdom at hand, yet a curious deference to the Synoptic tradition is visible here. For as in Mark and the others where Jesus had replied, You say, to Pilates question, here when the Roman asks again: So you are a king? Jesus replies, You say that I am a king. Which he does not. Then Jesus says, For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice. As for Pilates famous reply, I quote the opening of one of Francis Bacons Essays: What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and did not stay for an answer. Bacon calls him jesting. We might rather call him nowadays cynical. But Pilate has already determined that Jesus is no criminal despite his lofty manner, and he goes forth to ask the crowd if they will not have him release this King of the Jews according to their custom, and they cry for Barabbas instead. It is all very brief. We saw in Mark how the impression of a trial was shifted to the business of Barabbas and the crowd, so little did the earliest Evangelist know of any interview with Pilate, but here Barabbas is reduced to a passing mention because John knows how to invent: he knows how to develop the scene. So Pilate has Jesus scourged now. It is an adroit timing. In Luke he had merely offered to have him scourged and released whereas John makes something of it. See the issue here as bearing on his purpose because for John it is a question how best to present this Christ. After the scourging, when Pilate brings him forth to show his belief in Christs innocence, we are being diverted by a story-tellers devices. For the authors deep purpose is not to show the Romans belief in his innocence by exhibiting a beaten man: it is to show Jesus at all as a humiliated and degraded King.

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From beginning to end this Fourth Evangelist aims to bring Jesus home to us with an unsurpassable intimacy and force of sentiment, hence also this Gospels frequent appeals for our belief. The Christ in John is to be made audible and visible and solid enough to be struck by the High Priests attendant, yet he is also a brother to the believers, a friend to his friends, an ever-living Jesus who is to become a deep inner presence. That is Johns aim and achievement in a Christian world which very largely accepts him. Is it a wonder that this Gospel is immortal despite its flaws and its hatred of the Jews? For if we judge it apart from this hatred (if we can) it remains a supreme religious creation. Nor can it be judged merely as literal because it transcends the literal. Thats why in antiquity it was called pneumatikos: the Spiritual Gospel.

THE MAN OF SORROWS IN THE FOURTH GOSPEL

Jesus has been scourged and mocked. He is dressed in a purple robe. A crown of thorns has been placed upon his head. Now Pilate presents him to the crowd. How shall we think of this sorrowful presentation? It is missing from the earlier Gospels. Is it not, then, a supreme conception which only this Evangelist has arrived at? It was originally Mark who had substituted the mockery of Christ and his crown of thorns for a scourging, but done out of sight of the crowd. It was Luke who brought Jesus into the presence of a king, Herod Antipas, to be mocked and then arrayed in gorgeous apparel. John combines and modifies these ideas. Ignoring Herod altogether he brings the chastised and humiliated Christ into Pilates very presence in order to present him to the crowd. So we notice here once more a development of the myth within our very Gospels. The earliest of our Evangelists has presented the humiliation of Christ effectively to the reader. Although the Fourth Evangelist cannot do more than that, yet in his richer conception he seems to do more by presenting the Man of Sorrows publicly to the world: Ecce homo! It is an inspiration. John has focused his sighting of the reality of the man on that image, which he presents with a three-fold Behold! His technique is worth a careful look. Pilate announces to the crowd, Behold, I bring him forth to you, that ye may know that I find no fault in him. (The New English Bible does this nicely: Here he is, I am bringing him out...) We have in this the presence of the Man of Sorrows as one dressed in the tatters of divinity.

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Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, Behold, the man! Now logically it makes no sense for Pilate to have said (RSV) Behold, I am bringing him out to you that you may know that I find no crime in him. How does a presentation of the chastised Christ show that? Can such a public exhibition demonstrate Pilates belief in his innocence? But the Evangelist is counting on the presumption of innocence here. He knows beforehand that his reader accepts this and, ever the master of his technique, goes on to repeat the thing he means to emphasize: Here is the man! as the famous presentation may be given in a modern translation which gives the force of the Greek. There is no dwelling on the pathos of it. On sight of Jesus the cry goes up, Crucify! crucify!, and when Pilate resists this he is told by an argumentative crowd that Jesus deserves to die because he has made himself the Son of God. Historically, this is inconceivable: it belongs entirely to Johns self-glorifying and self-revealing Messiah. And the Roman is made even more afraid by this charge. Such implausibles the reader accepts as a believer, but Johns technique of verisimilitude does not otherwise desert him. The upshot is yet another interview with Jesus in which he makes no answer to the question, Where are you from? When Pilate comes forth yet a third time to appeal to the crowd he has Jesus brought out, takes his place on the seat of judgment as if to announce a final decision and says, Behold, your King! He is met with an uproar, a cry for crucifixion but the uproar does not here concern us. We have focused on the way in which this Evangelist has achieved such a result in his Man of Sorrows. Convinced of his humanity and believing him to be the Messiah, he has used those earlier Gospels with imagination (and possibly, too, the devices of ancient cults) to give his readers the impression of that reality, not just as one receding into the past but as a Presence. There is another way of handling the translation here which was done by James Moffatt a hundred years ago. A Scottish Presbyterian scholar, Moffatt was followed in this innovation (largely) by Americas Goodspeed and I quote from the latter: And Pilate went out again and said to the Jews, See! I will bring him out to you, to show you that I can find nothing to charge him with. So Jesus came out, still wearing the wreath of thorns and the purple coat. And Pilate said to them, Here is the man!

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And then presently, after all else fails following that second interview: He brought Jesus out and had him sit in the judges seat in the place they call the Stone Platform, or in Hebrew, Gabbatha. It was the day of Preparation for the Passover, and it was about noon. And Pilate said to the Jews, There is your King! Tremendous, and yet laden with a deliberate religious overtone. It is curious that the Greek would allow either translation here so that whether it was Pilate who sat on the judgment seat or Jesus who was made to sit there depends on the sequence of verbs (he brought out... he sat). There is no he in the Greek: he-sat is all one word and the he indicated by a change in the form of the verb. The force of the passage is wonderfully brought out by Goodspeeds rendering: See!... Here is the man!... There is your King! It is Johns achievement to have secured an emphatic presence but it remains an inspiration rather than in strictness a historical report. His adding the Hebrew word Gabbatha as the place of the judgment seat is a fine touch. It is a word become solemn and even ominous in the Lenten services of liturgical churches.

THE CRUCIFIXION I.
In our earliest Gospel when Jesus is taken out to be crucified a passer-by, a man fresh from the country, one Simon of Cyrene, is laid under service and made to carry his cross. It is strange that we should happen to know his name, but even his sons are assumed to be known to Marks readers or at least to a few of them, and he mentions in passing Alexander and Rufus. Beyond this Greet Rufus, elect in the kyrios, Paul writes in his Epistle to the Romans. Are we so close to the facts, then? Subsequently, these men all disappear. Of Simon we know ever so briefly his own name, his place of origin, the names of two sons and the place, Golgotha, to which he must carry the cross. And that is all we ever know of him or of Alexander and Rufus except for our supposing that they became Christian after Simons service to Jesus. Otherwise, the mention of Simons sons is too naive, for why should we care to be told who they were when our focus is on Jesus crucifixion? This sort of diversionary aside is an old storytellers device, as is the seeming naivete and piling up of names. Liars, too, are masters of these devices. It is only the transient impression that Mark has cared for.

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He has meant to connect us closer to the scene by inventing a legend of his own. Once at Golgotha, we find nothing in the first half dozen lines to suggest a point of view. There is no suggestion here of witness. It is all at first impersonal fact and offered as a kind of common knowledge. The story is sparely told, the bare essentials are given. We must certainly admire in these few lines (from Mark 15) the Evangelists restraint or that of his tradition. The crucifixion is not described: the bare fact is asserted. We find no trace of an endeavor to arouse emotion or to go beyond the facts reported: And they bring him unto the place Golgotha, which is, being interpreted, The place of a skull. And they offered him wine mingled with myrrh: but he received it not. And they crucify him, and part his garments among them, casting lots upon them, what each should take. And it was the third hour, and they crucified him. And the superscription of his accusation was written over, THE KING OF THE JEWS. And with him they crucify two robbers; one on his right hand, and one on his left. (RV.) The quality of fact here is suddenly very different. Instead of a single fact which wanders off into irrelevant detail we have a rudimentary whole; instead of transient fact, the enduring record. These few brief lines stand alone in their completeness. Had we nothing else to go on, they give a statement of the whole event. There is no description here to speak of. It is what the facts convey that stirs our imagination. Yet even this most primitive account shows certain borrowings from Scripture. There is evidence of derivation in some of these details: I looked for pity, but there was none; And for comforters, but I found none... And for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink. (Psalm 65,21) They divided my garments among them, And for my raiment they cast lots. (Psalm 22,18) So there are echoes of the prophets and the Psalms in what the Gospels tell of Jesus death. Moreover, we find borrowings from the later traditions which have been read back into the remembered event of which possibly only the bare fact of it was known. It is borrowings of this Christian matter which blended with prophecy furnish the mockery of those who pass by: Aha! say the scorners as they wag their heads, You

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who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself and come down from the cross. No less artificial is the derision offered by the chief priests and scribes. To think of it, chief priests and scribes taunting Jesus at the cross! It is a Gothic imagination. They say, He saved others; himself he cannot save. Let Christ the King of Israel descend now from the cross, that we may see and believe. Even the robbers who are crucified with Jesus join in the common abuse: it means that they were disappointed at the limits of this Saviors help. It is the same disappointment that a Christian must learn to accept. After the mockery of Jesus, we come to a third brief section of Marks report. It stands equally with the first as something primitive and fundamental. It stands also very deeply within the myth. To my mind the crucifixion of Jesus as presented fact speaks from within the very myth which may reflect only a long immersion in the Lenten liturgy, I suppose. Mark says: When the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole earth until the ninth hour. Goodspeed translates: At noon darkness spread over the whole country and lasted until 3:00 oclock in the afternoon. It is tremendous and it is myth, but the Gospels do not argue the case: they state. To look behind the legend for an eclipse of the sun is simply wrong-headed, whereas the astrological hypothesis of Charles Franois Dupuis and Count Volney, quaint though it be, is much to the point. In his dying agony the Christ recalls the wasting sun before its seasonal renewal, as in his Resurrection he rises on the Day of the Sun. In this respect has Christ replaced the sun myth by appropriation, the more advanced myth swallowing up the earlier until it disappears. It is absurd to deny that frank myth has been an aspect of the Gospels appeal. At the ninth hour Jesus cries with a loud voice, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? Before this he has said nothing as the crucified, nor has he been shown in an action except for refusing the wine mingled with myrrh. More attention has been paid to what happened to his garments than to him, but now he cries out just before dying, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? As we know, these are the opening words of the twenty-second Psalm except that Mark has given them in Jesus native Aramaic rather than in Hebrew which would have given the form, Eli, Eli, lama

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azavtani. On hearing this cry some of the by-standers say, He is calling for Elijah! Others rush to give him vinegar in a soaking sponge which is lifted to his lips on a reed while some of the first say, Wait! Let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down. This uncanny juxtaposition of trifling misunderstandings and busyness following the cry of a supreme desolation is almost beyond invention. It is as real as truth and as true as Shakespeare, but yet it might have been imagined as far as the argument goes, although to suppose that Jesus would not have cried out in those desolate words simply because they were written in a psalm pushes the Negative very hard. After the offered vinegar Jesus cries out with a loud voice and dies. At that moment the curtain of the temple is torn from top to bottom. It was that which had separated off the Holy of Holies into which none dared enter save the High Priest, and he but seldom. A centurion standing by is made to say at Jesus expiration, Truly, this man was a son of God! Like the mockery of those passing-by, this is a reflection of Christian testimony. Such is the tale which our earliest Gospel has given. The perspective is Christian throughout. Behind it all there may have been a common knowledge about a public event, but we are not as close to that event as our story would pretend. It should also be borne in mind that this sparely-told story could never have created the great internal fact of Christ which has arisen within us (if it has) thanks to our sincere participation in liturgy and public worship. We may affirm with confidence that Jesus died by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate, while as for the invented detail or the mythical setting, these are the terms which convey to us what the death of Christ has signified for the faithful.

THE CRUCIFIXION II.

Matthew follows Mark very closely in his account, tells how Simon of Cyrene was made to carry the cross, and how when they came to Golgotha Jesus refused the wine mingled with gall after tasting it, how the cross was posted with its King of the Jews, how the passers-by wagging their heads reviled him and challenged him to come down from the cross, and how the two crucified robbers also reviled him. It is mostly a copy but Matthew is not entirely passive. He tells that the soldiers, after dividing his garments, sat down and kept watch over him there and in a double of his own, he will post this same armed guard over Jesus tomb. To the mockery of the by-standers he contributes an accusation that Jesus said, I am the Son of God. Marks naivete in

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naming Simons sons he avoids, and he doesnt write partly in the present tense. The moment of crucifixion he passes over entirely, writing instead, When they had crucified him. As in Mark he tells of a darkness which covered the land for the last three hours, and he saves the cry of desolation on the cross, being the only other Evangelist to record that. After Jesus dies and the veil of the Temple is rent he adds to the myth of the darkened earth an earthquake. Rocks were rent, tombs were opened: And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his Resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many. (Matthew 27,52.) It is fantastic and yet, if we were reading fiction, this same imagination might please us as an omen of the meaning of the death of Christ. There is an inconsistency in the story inasmuch as the awakened dead must lie in their opened tombs (or memorials) until Jesus has risen on Easter morning, and this suggests that Matthew strained to fit the story in. Our Evangelist is not a thinker but a man of imagination and faith. That which belongs to the End Time has here ruptured the envelope of history for an ominous Sign. Luke knows nothing of Matthews earthquake and the risen saints, but his embellishments are more extensive and more sentimental. Simon of Cyrene must bear the cross but on his way to the Place of the Skull whose Hebrew name this Evangelist omits Jesus turns to speak to the women bewailing him: Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. For behold, the days are coming in which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the breasts that never gave suck. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us, and to the hills, Cover us. For if they do these things in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry? (Luke 23,28. RV.) Tremendous words and very frightening if taken seriously, but they belong to Lukes own inspiration or to an unknown Christian prophet whose document he has at hand. The weeping for Jerusalem is prophetic: its historic destruction is implied. Jesus addressing the daughters of Jerusalem recalls a womens custom of bewailing the sorrowful fate of Jephthas daughter, who was slain for a foolish fathers vow. To prophesy a blessing on the barren womb reverses the common

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sentiment ironically and to great effect, and the cry to the mountains and the hills (Fall on us! Cover us!) is taken from the prophet Hosea. The words about the green tree and the dry are expressed with a lapidary originality and nicely placed here, yet even this contrast is foreshadowed in an oracle of Ezekiels. Luke has altered the mood of the crucifixion. The soldiers cast lots for his garments, the by-standers mock and the soldiers also, Luke inventively adds, when they offer the vinegar. We have the raillery of one of the criminals who is here made to say: Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us! This is raillery? or is it not rather a prayer that is uttered in vain. The other malefactor rebukes him to say, This man has done nothing wrong and he asks Jesus to remember him when he comes in his Kingdom and Jesus replies, Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise. Lukes device of having the malefactors speak draws from Jesus one of the Seven Last Words, of which only one, the cry of desolation, was given in Mark and Matthew. Ironically, the Penitent Thief has not voiced the Christian faith more truly than the malefactor whose desperation is rebuked. Raillery and rebuke are set equally in Christian terms, but with a difference between them which the Evangelists tale is designed to bring out. The first of these malefactors implores the Christ to save him then and there, or as our preachers say, on earth. The second asks for the possible: Remember me when thou comest in thy Kingdom! Jesus words in reply are in contrast to his earlier warning of a Kingdom of God at hand, a message never given quite urgently by Luke who has already muted the old eschatology: in Johns Gospel it will be barely a memory. Nor does Luke preserve the desolation of the cross. Jesus stark cry is barely hinted of when he cries out with a loud voice to pray, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit, before breathing his last. A new and gentler inspiration has found expression in Luke, whose Gospel is prized in part for that reason. Not history but hagiography is what we have here: it is what Luke had also before him when looking over his various sources, including of course the Gospel of Mark.

THE CRUCIFIXION III.

Luke has achieved a certain poignancy in the crucifixion scene and John has Luke before him, but the Fourth Evangelist is rarely poignant even where he is tender. It would violate his aim to attach us to his Jesus by a bond of sympathy. Symbolically, I may add in this

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connection for it just this moment has occurred to me it is interesting that when the Fourth Evangelist tells us, and he alone, that Jesus was pierced by a spear, this thrust comes only after he is dead. Now in this final and revised account when Jesus is led out to Golgotha he carries the cross by himself: John says so expressly. Once arrived: And they crucified him and with him others two on this side and that side and Jesus in the middle. (John 19,18 in literal translation.) We know nothing of what these others may have done nor have they any further role to play. In five or six lines John has brought us to Golgotha and crucifixion with only the image of Jesus bearing his cross. At once the Evangelist turns his attention to the wrangling of Pilate and the Jews over the placard on the cross which Pilate has caused to be written in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. It reads: Jesus the Nazoraios, the King of the Jews. (John 19,19.) In these words we are brought to a reflection of sorts after having stepped back from the immediate scene, a reflection of the Christian idea. But is Pilate at Golgotha? Not at all. The Jews have read this placard at the scene: that merely tells us what it says. John is describing the complaint of the Jewish priests, no doubt earlier made, at his calling Jesus King of the Jews, to which Pontius Pilate has replied, What I have written, I have written. These words are famous because of all they gather from their setting. It is a sort of prophecy, an involuntary proclamation to the world that Christ is King. Pilates utterance is akin to that of Caiaphas in the Sanhedrin (John 11,51) when he rebuked their collective uncertainty: it was better for them, he said, that one man should die for the people than that a whole nation should perish. The Evangelist will show how even the enemies of Christ step unwittingly along the path which God has marked out for them. It is a reminder to us that the entire scene involving Pontius Pilate is a fiction, but by dragging his name into the crucifixion story John has achieved a sense of continuity and unity beyond that of the Synoptic tradition. After this initial wrangling, which replaces any mockery of Jesus at the cross, we are brought back to the crucifixion. At once our attention is turned to the soldiers gambling for Jesus garments, one of which is a seamless robe (or tunic). The prophetic psalm of which this act is a fulfillment John quotes: it is Psalm 22 which opens with the cry of

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desolation which he does not quote. Like Luke, the Fourth Evangelist suppresses the desolation of the scene, but he is brave enough to quote the prophetic psalm. At long last, then, after the division of the garments, we shall be brought into the presence of the crucified: we are finally there. But the scene is surely imaginary and late. John spurns to have his crucified King discoursing with a Penitent Thief. Instead and no half measures here! he brings the mother of Jesus to the foot of the cross to receive a final word from him. We have remarked before that she is nowhere named in this Gospel, but her sister, Mary, the wife of Clopas, is named: she is there also with Mary Magdalene, and standing nearby, the disciple whom he loved. This sudden flocking of persons around a saint or hero in his crucial hours is a legendary motif. We find examples of this in the worlds paintings. But the only hint of any such gathering in the Synoptic tradition is Marks mentioning that Mary Magdalene and another Mary (the mother of James and Joses) were among the Galilean women who had watched these things from afar. This sudden assemblage at the cross, then, is Johns own invention. Strange to say I dont go into this two of the women present are named Mary besides the mother of Jesus who isnt named at all. Has John a reason, then, for his refusal to name the mother of Jesus? And why this blurring of a focus on the name of Mary? A puzzle of some sort hangs on this but I cannot resolve it. Jesus, then, seeing his mother near the beloved disciple, says to her, Woman, behold your son! And then to the disciple: Behold your mother! The woman does not question; the disciple does not ask. We are far from any consideration of Jesus agony in these serene commands, and from that hour the disciple took her to his own home. What does it signify? This is no mere sidelight on Jesus thoughtfulness as a son; there is too much in the Gospel against that, but John is an Evangelist for whom events themselves may be symbols (remember the Wedding at Cana). She, therefore, whom Jesus will not even address as mother (she is woman) is symbolic, not of course because she didnt live but because of all that she is made to carry. The unnamed disciple whom Jesus loved is to acknowledge his mother; and she in turn, who was formed heart and soul by the Old Religion, must accept her newfound son. This transaction is no reflection of an anti-Jewish hatred. The Old Religion is superseded in the sacrifice of the Lamb of God (as the Evangelist believes) but it cannot be forgotten or neglected. The imagery

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of his faith is drawn from the ancestral religion whose very prophecies are fulfilled in the event which he would present to us. Thus the Christ of the Fourth Gospel is not to be portrayed as the hapless victim of a human crime. His is a voluntary sacrifice, as we have said before: For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it again. Then further, once more: And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto myself. These are grandiose words. They stand entirely alone among the Evangelists as an interpretation of the crucifixion, and they introduce a sublimity, or say simply, a mood which is foreign to the coarser realism of Mark and far superior to Lukes sentimental touches. Religiously, they have proved to be triumphant. John has thrown the garment of his faith over the other accounts and has changed their meaning for us. After his sole action in bringing mother and disciple together, Jesus says, I thirst. It is the least concession to any realism in Johns description of the scene, yet even this fulfills a Scripture. A spongeful of sour wine is held to Jesus mouth. After that he makes quiet announcement saying, It is finished, bows his head and gives up the ghost. It is over very quickly. Whats missing here? Nothing is said, for instance, of the darkening of the earth for those three solemn hours but that of course is a myth. The earth does not quake and the Temple veil is not rent but that is legendary. The absence of these primitive features might seem, if anything, a gain in reality, and so I used to take it myself. But there is no hint of Jesus agony on the cross, no cry of desolation before he dies. What is missing in Johns studied verisimilitude, although it pass for reality, is just the quality of reality. His evasion of the horror of the crucifixion tells against him. Something of this unreality he compensates by a final incident in which the legs of the malefactors are broken to hasten their death. At last, a reminder of the violence of this hideous death. The bodies must not be allowed to hang on the Sabbath which begins at nightfall. Jesus is spared the breaking of his legs when he is found to be already dead. It is here that he is pierced by a spear, supposedly in fulfillment of another prophecy. Blood and water issue from his side but who can read this

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symbol now? A familiar mistake is to make of this detail a fact of history. So taken, it becomes an artificial medical problem or a miracle. Where does the water come from? Are we really to think of sacrifice and baptism in this connection? Apart from that, John has contrived to show us how the intact frame of the dead Christ compares with the Passover lamb which was slain on that same day and whose bones, also, must not be broken. Let us not blind ourselves to the Evangelists aim, which is everywhere overruling. John has no more knowledge of the crucifixion than Mark had. Both are separated from the event by tradition and each is intent on furnishing the worshiping cult with a portrayal of the life and death of the risen Christ. Never have the Evangelists supposed that they were writing only about a man of the past. Behind the Jesus they describe, and whose humanity they stress, there stands ever in mind a miraculous Christ in whom they mysteriously share a new life as they await a new creation.

DEPOSITION AND BURIAL

After Christ had breathed his last (says Mark) a centurion standing there exclaimed: Truly, this man was a son of God! It is a realistic detail that this centurions impulsive homage was awakened at the moment Christ expired, but the point to be established is that Christ had breathed his last: it is a testimony to the final moment lest a Robert Graves arise to say that in his Resurrection Jesus had only awakened from a swoon. If disciples had been present at the scene, Mark must have mentioned them because earlier he wrote that they all forsook him and fled at Gethsemane. However, there are several women among his followers looking on from afar, three of whom the Evangelist names, as we noticed a moment ago. It is this naming of the women which stands in contrast to the disciples absence. Afterwards, and because it is the eve of the Sabbath, a certain Joseph of Arimathea, a most improbable disciple, approaches Pilate to ask for the body of Jesus. Pilate marvels to think that Jesus can be dead so soon and sends for a centurion to verify the fact he, no doubt, who had supervised the crucifixion. Now does Pilate care so much to verify this vile death that he will summon a witness and condescend to wait around for his arrival? Our story is a fiction and makes of Joseph of Arimathea a respected member of the Sanhedrin. He must have a

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certain standing, of course, before a Pilate would receive him. A Galilean fisherman could never do that. The fugitive character with whom we may compare this Joseph of Arimathea is Simon of Cyrene. Each comes out of nowhere to do his part and then disappears forever. Simon of Cyrene, fresh from the countryside, brings us closer to the scene in the sense of intimate acquaintance. Joseph of Arimathea, besides obtaining audience with Pilate, takes care of Jesus body which must otherwise be thrown away. It is he who takes Jesus down from the cross and wraps him in a new linen shroud to be laid in a rock-hewn tomb, but a tomb new enough to be unused and spacious enough for the action which must take place inside its chambers. It is a most uncommon grave for one who dies a martyrs death and whose own disciples have fled to safety. The story rides upon its motives here and almost writes itself. Mark handles the deposition from the cross in a participial phrase, taking him down. Yet masterpieces have been painted of this scene, and I might say a word about that to make a point. The painters art lends itself to elaborate compositions as well as to mythic scenes, and I can almost imagine the limp body of Christ being handed down without having the pictures before me. In the molding of the features, the stricken attitudes of the participants, and by the use of color, the painting will express a sentiment. It is otherwise with sculpture, whose instruments are chisel and stone. I have never seen a sculpture of the deposition: imagine sculpting a ladder! Yet in Michaelangelos Pieta we have in polished marble a pair of figures, Christ and the Virgin, which express a quality of mourning beyond all words and tears, and even somehow serene. It is a sacred art. The body of her beautiful son is lying limp across his mothers ample lap; she is larger than her son. It was a stroke of genius on the sculptors part to give her this necessary proportion here, and she is as shrouded in her richly folded garments as he is almost naked in her lap. Nothing I know of in all the world can make the Catholic sentiment as beautiful as this. How do we come on Michaelangelo, then, so suddenly here, and why those others I allude to like Fra Angelico and Rogier van der Weyden? It is to illustrate once more the value of the religious expression and the means employed. Religion is the myth of God. Its deepest expression is highly imaginative, yet what person of sense will reject the Deposition of a van der Weyden for showing us a scene that

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never was? Or who will complain of Michaelangelo for giving us a thing that never could have been except in the artwork itself? We must have the Expression. Something fundamental has come to expression in the great works of religious art, as also in a Palestrina or a Bach or a Handels Messiah. It is of course telling that we have had no great Christian art in the Twentieth Century. It is even a reason for going back to the crudely Gothic artistry of the Gospel of Mark, as we have done so often here.

THE EMPTY TOMB

The earliest Gospel tells of Jesus rising from the dead: it does that, and yet it doesnt show him anywhere alive or tell us of his doings afterwards except for a promise that he will appear. The disciples themselves do not reappear in the story. Instead, a young man in white tells three women who have entered the tomb: Ye seek Jesus the Nazarene, the crucified. He is risen. He is not here. See the place where they laid him. (Literal translation). The young man is an angel who understands the mission of the women before they speak. After demonstrating that the tomb is empty he gives instructions which these women are to pass on to the disciples and Peter. The women flee in consternation and say nothing to anyone because they are afraid. The tale is unresolved. Abruptly the Gospel ends. Too much is left hanging here, and the scholars are mostly agreed that the ending of this ancient Gospel has been lost or else suppressed. For how could its ending very well be lost when the Gospel itself has survived the well-intentioned depredations of its rivals? Both Matthew and Luke are inconceivable without Marks earlier work, which they were evidently written to displace. Marks survival, then, I must ascribe to his gift for story-telling, and to the sense he conveys of connection to these early traditions, and to the fundamental importance of his scheme. I sometimes compare the Gospel of Mark in my mind with the Bayeux tapestry on which the Norman conquest is displayed on a long strip of linen. The tapestry is 231 feet long and twenty inches high, a unique pictorial history set out in panels. Somewhat like a comic book but inexpressibly more beautiful and clean (I mean, clean in conception) it is explained in Latin with letters elegantly drawn. Like Mark it is an imaginative history, although Mark is full of myths and as far as I know the tapestry is not. Both works have been done by highly gifted artists who are nonetheless naive. The mens heads in the tapestry, for

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instance, tend to be flat, but the horses are superb, as are the costumes and weaponry and tools, the ships and towers and tables and kings and what-not all. It is authentically of the period of its composition a thousand years ago. The drawings which one artist made were in turn embroidered in colored wools, possibly by whole nunneries of women if Bishop Odo, half-brother of William the Conqueror, commissioned this work, as is believed. The story ends, says my Britannica (1952) with the flight of the English from the Battle of Hastings, although the actual end of the strip has perished. The ending is lost of this beautiful work. How very strange! Professor BW Bacon, once at Yale, has somewhere suggested that Marks ending may have been suppressed because of a (supposed) crudeness in its portrayal of the Resurrection. That cannot be right. For even if the church did quash this ending, it was not on account of any crudeness but because it undercuts the later legends. Its retaining an earlier tradition was inconvenient. In particular, it was in Lukes own interest to deflect that earlier tradition. In Marks tale, which gives the basic Synoptic pattern, three women have come to the tomb first thing Easter Sunday morning to anoint the dead body. They are Mary Magdalene, another Mary who is called the mother of James the younger and Joses, and one Salome: the same three who had watched the crucifixion from afar. The Marys had also seen where the body was laid. Do we know these women? Not at all. We have never heard of them before (in this Gospel) but now Mark has need of them to bridge a gap between the crucifixion and the empty tomb because disciples are not available, having fled to safety. I must say, this grouping of three unheard-of women is more than a little suspicious. Mark is fond of triads of various types and some of which, as here, are little more than groups of names. We have: Zebedee and his sons, James and John. Apart from the bare mention of his name Zebedee doesnt figure in the action. With Simon Peter these two brothers form the triad of Jesus favorite disciples who are really the only ones to act. There is another sort of triad involving Jairus and his daughter and the Woman with an Issue of Blood. (Peter, James and John, by the way, had witnessed her raising).

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Jesus Transfiguration on the mount represents a double triad: a transfigured Christ with Moses and Elijah, and in a lower sphere, Peter, James and John. After the Transfiguration on the way to Jerusalem Jesus forecast of his suffering and his Resurrection after three days is given three times. I think that one might fairly speak of a dramatic triad in the choice offered by Pontius Pilate between Jesus and Barabbas. Simon of Cyrene, who carried the cross, is mentioned with his sons, Alexander and Rufus. We never heard of any of them before. We know nothing of his sons. It is a triad of names. Jesus is crucified between two thieves: that is a triad. He is also mocked for having said, supposedly, that he would destroy the Temple and build it in three days. Then from the sixth to the ninth hour darkness covers the land: three hours. We come at last to the three named women who are looking on from afar. As we know nothing of them from the tale, they count as a triad of names, but we understand their uses in bridging a gap, and we see the likelihood of fictitious invention. A naive author who is allowed to introduce names like this gets by very easily. This is not where the early tradition lies: the fiction is only a frame. It is in the words of the young man in white that the nugget of an earlier tradition is to be found: But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, as he told you. (Mark 16,7.) These angelic tidings now constitute a Markan double by repeating what Jesus had told his disciples on the way to the Mount of Olives: You will all fall away, for it is written: I will strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered. But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee. (Mark 14,28.) Schweitzer is among the scholars who would take these words literally, supposing them to be historical. He imagines that Jesus here, planning for his Resurrection, thinks to lead his disciples back to Galilee by walking in front of them on the analogy of his walking before them on the way to Jerusalem when the disciples hung back and were afraid (10,32). Even conceding Schweitzers grounds, the thought is absurd. Are we to imagine that a man recently crucified is to be seen three days later

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walking his disciples back to Galilee as they follow along behind him? A positive misunderstanding of ancient Scripture is nowhere greater even in a Robert Graves. Christs quoted words are myth outright. This is kerygma placed in the mouth of Jesus. What do the words really tell us? in a promise repeated by the young man in white: He is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, as he told you. When we bring these utterances together, they tell us that the disciples will see the risen Jesus in Galilee. This contradicts the later tales of how Jesus appeared to his disciples in Jerusalem on Easter Sunday. What need to send them off to Galilee? The stubbornness of an early tradition works its effect on a tale set within a different frame, the Empty Tomb until a Luke comes along to set that tradition aside.

LUKES VARIATION EXAMINED & CONTRADICTED

Lukes version of the Empty Tomb, in revising Mark, subverts that earliest tradition. Not that he cares to show his hand openly in this because he is careful to mention Galilee in the angelic message, which seems almost to echo Marks account although, in fact, he is replacing it. That the first appearance of the risen Christ came to Cephas in Galilee is inconvenient for Luke who means to introduce his Easter Sunday appearances in Jerusalem. The words of the young man dressed in a white robe he recasts entirely after first doubling the messenger. Now he becomes two men in dazzling apparel and they begin by saying beautifully: Why seek ye the living among the dead? A sound old commentary on Luke by Alfred Plummer cites a passage from Isaiah in which we have the words of the angels question in that same order but where they carry a different meaning. What matters for Luke is only that the words should chime. In the Greek the key words are: seek living dead, and in that order. I will quote Isaiahs passage from the Revised Standard Version first: And when they say to you, Consult the mediums and the wizards who chirp and mutter, should not a people consult their God? Should they consult (ie, seek out) the dead on behalf of the living? Luke gives: Ti zeteite ton zonta meta ton nekron And Isaiah in the Septuagint: Ti ekzetousin peri ton zonton tous nekrous.

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The angels question to the women thus vibrates to Isaiahs verse for Luke and other leaders of the Jesus cult who can ignore a colorless tradition that Peter first saw Christ alive in Galilee. Historically, it is a point of importance. The very Cephas (Rock) who first acknowledged Jesus as the Christ is also first to receive his vision of the risen Jesus. No legend survives of that appearance (although the Sign of Jonah survives in Matthew, and the primitive name, Simon bar-Jonah.) Who can guess what devastations were endured in the disciples retreat to Galilee, if that be fact? Who can say with confidence that the story could even be told? What remains of that tradition is the foremost fact: Peter is the foremost Apostle. On the evidence that survives Cephas is the founder of the Resurrection faith. Decisive in this matter and older than any of the legends of the Gospels is the testimony of the Apostle Paul, whose formula in a fixed recitation we find in I Corinthians 15. Let me extract only the skeletal facts and repeat them: For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that: (a) Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, (b) that he was buried, (c) that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures... (d) and that he appeared to Cephas, (e) then to the twelve. Pauls Corinthian Letters were written possibly some fifteen years before the earliest of our Gospels. He says nothing of when Jesus appeared to Cephas and never a word about Galilee, but only that he appeared to Cephas first. It is the Markan nugget which gives us Galilee as the place of that Resurrection appearance, a tradition kept by Matthew.

MATTHEWS VERSION
Matthews Resurrection angel is a blaze of lightning seated atop the stone he has rolled away. The two Marys have come out to the tomb: they have come to see it. Matthew makes no mention of (Marks) aromatic spices because the tomb has been sealed. Armed guards are lying unconscious on the ground. Unfortunately, every one of these changes is bad. Soldiers at a sealed tomb is an extravagance. As for the dazzling angel and his earthquake a quake which serves to knock the soldiers out it

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overshoots the mark, with a consequent loss in genuine dramatic power. The classic youth of Mark, a simple white garment thrown about his body, will tell the three women: Behold, the place where they laid him! and we have seen it ourselves. Matthew does follow Mark in preserving his nugget of tradition and reserves the appearance of Jesus to a mountain in Galilee. It hasnt occurred to the First Evangelist to replace that, but inconsistently he lets Jesus meet the women who are rushing back to the disciples in fear and great joy. Jesus says, Hail! and the women fall and take hold of his feet. It is a curious detail, but from what John Allegro has to say about the Ish zaquph I might suppose that their taking hold of the Lords feet was proof that his appearance was no apparition, no mere spirit. This encounter is, of course, very brief and Matthew uses it to have Jesus say, Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brethren to go to Galilee, and there they will see me. The Galilean Resurrection in Matthew is briefly told: Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted. (28,16.) Nothing more in the way of scene. Resurrection cannot mean for Matthew that stories ought to be told about the risen Jesus. He therefore omits them. Jesus has only one true Word to speak in his Resurrection and this is the word of mission: All power is given unto me in Heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things, whatsoever I have commanded you. And lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. A Christian faith still acquainted with its Jewish roots speaks here. What else was Israels calling except to teach all nations? What else is baptism but a cleansing renewal for those admitted to the Kingdom? What else is observance except Religion itself? And what else has Christ now become except the Son of God raised from the dead who can say, with a marvelous intimacy of relationship and in words of deep encouragement: Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world? This is a great faith which has arisen from the believed-in Jesus. One could fairly say that Matthew has compressed the whole meaning of Jesus Resurrection into this strange and triumphant renewal of Israels mission as a light to the Gentiles and a Servant to the world.

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Lukes tale of two disciples who meet the risen Jesus unawares is no ordinary legend. The disciples, who are at first unnamed, engage in conversation with a Jesus who is a stranger to them. One of the men is never to be identified, despite his singular experience. The other, a certain Cleopas whom we have never heard of before, wasnt one of the Twelve. Altogether, the circumstances of this unique event are obscure, and it happens out of the way on the road to Emmaus. At a final moment Jesus reveals himself and disappears. Where else have we a tale like this in our Synoptics? A tale passed down in the Oral Tradition has the quality of thrift: it is reduced to essentials and types. Like a worn coin it has passed through many hands, but it must also be vital, like the rude bulb of a garden perennial. Lukes is the contrivance of a literary man whose motives are apparent. It was devised by the Evangelist himself and is the first of our Easter Sunday tales. Two sorrowing disciples have set out on foot for a village some seven miles away. The journey is long, Jesus falls in beside them like a stranger and when he inquires of their conversation, they briefly stop. Then Cleopas speaks: Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know what has happened there lately? What things? They tell him of Jesus of Nazareth... a prophet mighty in deed and word. They are reciting things which Jesus has no need to hear and which the reader is presumed to understand. Abruptly, Jesus replies to the tale of their sorrows and disappointments: O foolish men, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory? Beginning with Moses (which is to say, the Pentateuch) he explained to them the passages all through the Scriptures that referred to himself. Here is no simple reference to Isaiah 53 and one or two Psalms. It is meant comprehensively although Luke cant afford to give examples it would take too long explaining them. Several examples of these peculiar interpretations may be found in Justin Martyrs Dialogue with Trypho, and two fantastic examples of Pauls own use of Moses may be found in I Corinthians 10,1-5 and Galatians 4,21-31. The Jewish-Christian imagination was very resourceful in its application of prophecy.

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There are reasons for this awkward passage in Luke. We began with a pair of non-entities who set out to Emmaus for no assignable purpose. Cleopas, when his name is later given, proves to be one of those fugitive characters who exists for this one moment only. He and his shadowy companion have had a lesser role in the previous story than, say, Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herods steward in fact, no role at all. They serve Luke for a peg on which to hang a story that no one else has heard of. Jesus identity is veiled because otherwise their conversation would have been impossible, and that conversation, not the appearance of the risen Jesus, is the real point. Its form is that of catechesis and its substance is the Apostolic preaching or kerygma. Luke is nearing the end of his Gospel. He must prepare his readers for the transition from the simpler teachings of Jesus to the Apostolic kerygma, of which we have a sample, for instance, in Peters sermon in Acts, chapter two. It is essential to kerygma that the life and death of Jesus, and his Resurrection, be connected to prophecy and its latter-day fulfillment. Any Scriptures which are supposed to be actual prophecies of Jesus Luke with implicit confidence leaves up to the teachers and prophets of the new community. The disciples arrive at Emmaus and Jesus, still unrecognized, makes to go on when they say, Stay with us for it is toward evening and the day is now far spent. He consents to stay and they set out a meal. Jesus takes bread and blesses and breaks it and their eyes are opened. No sooner do they recognize the Lord than he vanishes. Lukes oblique reference to communion is deliberate. It gives his tale its convincingness as a symbol of Christs Real Presence in the sacrament. Our story becomes a parable, although Luke might wish it counted for more than that as for ordinary believers it does. I have seen a beautiful old Italian painting of The Supper at Emmaus (1596 1598) by Caravaggio whose heightened sense of realism and use of tenebrism, or sharply contrasted effects of light and shadow became an influence, to quote the words of a recent Britannica which goes on to say: Scorning the traditional idealized interpretations, he took his models from the streets and painted them realistically. Exactly, because it is the contrast of light and shadow together with his models who are taken from the very streets by which Caravaggio makes his portrayal of the supper so intensely real.

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Nevertheless, it is an aspect of the Lukan tale that Jesus from a wonderworker has in his Resurrection become a magical being who can appear among us in disguise and vanish in a moment.

LUKES JERUSALEM RESURRECTION SCENES

The two disciples at Emmaus depart for Jerusalem forthwith. They say, Did not our hearts burn within us... while he opened to us the Scriptures? (Luke 24,32.) On arrival they find the disciples gathered together and before they can speak they are told, The Lord has risen indeed and has appeared to Simon. At last, if only in passing, Luke offers this slight deference to the tradition of Cephas priority but with no mention of Galilee. As they were speaking together Jesus himself stood among them. It is very well put: stood among them! It makes of a mere appearance something very solid and yet in their fright they took him for a spirit, and once again Luke loses the thread here. The risen Jesus says: Why are you troubled, and why do questionings rise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Handle me and see, for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have. To prove that it is he, the risen Jesus offers himself to their hands!, a transcendent being in their midst submitting to be poked and squeezed to prove that he is flesh and bones. The disciples disbelieve for joy, notwithstanding that moments ago they had assured the two returning from Emmaus of the Lords appearance to Simon. (As for Simon, where is he if the two returning disciples had found the Eleven gathered together?) Jesus first offered proof is not enough. He asks if they have anything to eat. They give him a piece of broiled fish and he eats it before them. Luke has stumbled badly here, not least because these proofs are all in vain. They prove nothing to us. Yet after eating his fish Jesus will say: These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Impressive, because this opens the way to the Johannine theme: These are my words which I spoke to you, while I was still with you. The kerygmatic theme is then reiterated succinctly and again Jesus opens their minds to understand the Scriptures. Afterward, he leads them out

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to Bethany, lifts up his arms in blessing and parts from them. It isnt suggested at all that he vanishes out of their sight. Luke is supposedly the author of Acts, and if he had already the scheme of that book in mind, Jesus parting from his disciples in Bethany merges psychologically with his Ascension to Heaven in the first chapter of Acts when he is lifted up in a cloud which takes him out of their sight. There it will be claimed that he had appeared to them alive with many proofs during forty days. The cloud is a sign of the Son of Man who is one day to come on the clouds of the sky, and the forty days remind us of Israels forty years in the wilderness and of Jesus temptation in the desert. Strictly speaking, as of course the reader understands, a consideration of these Resurrection tales doesnt belong to our theme and yet, in a fortunate inconsistency, it belongs very much to our treatment. The Gospels pass from the life of Jesus to his Resurrection in much the same story-telling style. Events are tied to believable social settings and it would be fair to speak here of legends of the Resurrection, which as a faith is rooted in the transcendental and, historically, in myth.

THE RISEN JESUS & MARY MAGDALENE (in John)

Clearly, John is founded on the Synoptic tradition, but he merges this with a Gnostic strain to achieve a greater intimacy. The result is a transformation of the Gospel in this narrative form. His lofty Jesus has undergone a metamorphosis which makes of him a different being. In every human encounter he asserts an irresistible ascendancy. Compare Lukes risen Jesus who must lead his disciples to Bethany before parting from them. John has no need of Lukes ascending cloud because for him the Resurrection of Jesus is already joined to the Ascension of Christ. In his first appearance Jesus sends word to his disciples to say: I am ascending. Consider, then, how this Evangelist opens his Resurrection tale. (I have made a composite translation here, blending the New English Bible and Goodspeed): On the day after the Sabbath, while it was still dark, Mary of Magdala came to the tomb. She saw that the stone had been moved away from the entrance and ran to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them: They have taken the Lord out of his tomb and we do not know where they have laid him. So Peter and the other disciple went

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out and started for the tomb. They both ran, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter and reached the tomb first. He peered in and saw the linen wrappings there, but did not enter... A perfectly natural depiction of the opening event if given the Empty Tomb as fact. Characteristically, the Evangelist has designated those who participate in the first crucial social event. Gone is the young man in white as well as Matthews dazzling angel and the stricken soldiers at the tomb. Gone, too, are Marks three women or the several women of Lukes Gospel except for the merest of hints: We, says Mary Magdalene, do not know where they have laid him. This is a little specimen of Johns connection to an earlier legend which he cannot simply discard. And yet he has no use for the other women in this realistic treatment. Their numbers would require a sort of hubbub, a touch of hysteria even would demand a more elaborate scene. By narrowing to just these three he achieves his focus on the human interest aspect of the tale with which we identify. So it is definitely an artistic decision when he ignores those first angelic announcements in the Synoptics (and the whole earlier tradition they stand for) and tells of a pair of disciples running side by side until Peter lags behind and the younger arrives to stoop and peer inside. And there the linen wrappings are lying! Peter on coming up does enter the tomb and sees the wrappings, sees even the napkin which had been over his head, not lying with the wrappings but rolled together in a place by itself. (John 20,7. NEB) Superior artistry but almost certainly fiction, the point being that such nice details cannot have passed down through forty years and more of Oral Tradition. We have been placed for a moment in the immediate scene, and yet those warrants of written Scripture upon which the validity of Jesus Resurrection is made to rest must come. John writes of these exploring disciples: Until then they had not understood the Scriptures which showed that he must rise from the dead. The two disciples then go home, Mary stays at the tomb weeping, and now at last two angels in white appear in the tomb a first hint that John has taken his theme from Lukes Gospel. Very calmly, the angels establish the absence of the body of Jesus from the place where he had lain. The Evangelist describes them as sitting one at the head, one at the feet of where the body was. Nor do these messengers repeat the wonderful question in Luke: Why seek ye the living among the dead? Johns own tremendous aim is in keeping with his theme.

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The angels ask her simply, Woman, why are you weeping? and she answers as a grieving woman might to any pair of strangers: They have taken my Lord away, and I do not know where they have laid him. Yet once again we have the great Johannine theme: our Lord, the Risen Christ, not here and we dont know where to find him. With this reply Mary turns away to see a Jesus standing there unrecognized. What a clever adaptation of the Lukan incognito, but only very briefly. Jesus repeats the question of the angels, who are dismissed from the tale. His presence absorbs or abolishes theirs. Woman, why are you weeping? Who is it you are looking for? Again and again John is thematic, yet all of it is as natural as a womans conversation with a gardener because thats who she thinks Jesus is when she says, Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away. She will take him away (a first faint glimmering Pieta). Jesus then speaks only her name: Mary! She turns to him and says in Hebrew, Rabboni! and then Jesus again: Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God. No mere angel but Jesus himself gives a message for the disciples, and we note the intimacy of brotherhood and fellowship implied in the words. The entire scene could not have been more perfectly written and perhaps it is because John is no mere writer (although he may have been a writer as showing this much skill). In the background is a sacramental cult which the Evangelist serves with his great myth.

OTHER RESURRECTION SCENES IN THE FOURTH GOSPEL

We have asked ourselves, Did Jesus live?, but we do not ask ourselves, Did he rise from the dead? The first question pertains to ordinary matter of fact, the other to faith. We have asked if these mythladen traditions and biographical documents do not convey to us a crucial life-history of this Jesus of whom they tell such an illuminating tale and whose very Teachings they claim to supply, but any sense of affirmation here falls short of a religious faith. The Christian faith is tied to its own affirmation of fact, however gritty and mundane. And yet, just as the bare fact does not amount to faith, so here the mundane aspect of the Christian affirmation does not and cannot result in historical knowledge. Those who would rest their

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faith on demonstrated fact, as so often the Gospels pretend to, ask the impossible. The Resurrection of Christ is not knowledge. Nor was it ever an event contained in the world, although the legends contradict this by placing it within a worldly environment. Speaking historically, Christs Resurrection is to be placed among the myths. Scientifically, it is out of reach. Philosophically, it is a Transcendental Idea. Only to religious faith can the Resurrection of Christ be the first appearance in this world of the New Creation or the Risen Jesus be the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. Resurrection is impalpable. Our consideration of it lifts the mind beyond any history which we might seek and beyond any world which we can discover. Faith goes beyond the commonplace to receive the experienced miracle. Seen in its immediacy, the world itself is radically miraculous. As in Lukes version, so in this Fourth and final Gospel the risen Jesus appears among his disciples who are gathered behind closed doors. Yet the differences are crucial. Here when Jesus came and stood among them John mentions that the doors were closed for fear of the Jews. This is one of those deliberate swerves that a wise exegesis will take into account when handling miracles. The mere thought of the possibility (however unlikely) serves just that little bit to reduce the shock of Christs implausible appearance which the reader is nonetheless expecting. In a further contrast Jesus accepts the disciples fright on their terms in Luke (Why are you troubled, and why do questionings rise in your hearts?). When Johns risen Christ comes to stand among them he says, Peace be unto you. He shows them his hands and his side, and the disciples are glad when they see the Lord. He shows them and it suffices, avoiding Lukes array of proofs, and then Johns Christ confers the Holy Ghost: Peace be unto you. As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you. And when he had said this, he breathed on them and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost. Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained. (20,21.) See how much he achieves in these laden compressions. There is no expectation of tongues as of flame descending upon the disciples foreheads as in (Lukes) Book of Acts. The breath of Christ imparts the Spirit: it is a gesture which has been taken up in ancient liturgy. The

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earlier legend is here converged on but superseded as Jesus at once commissions his disciples. Ecclesiastical ambitions appear in the extraordinary claim that the disciples have power to forgive sins or retain them. Here is evidence of lateness and churchly pretension. Could Jesus, if once he lived, have taught such a thing or conferred such a power on his disciples? And yet a doctrine of the sacraments depends on this belief. Matthew places similar words in Jesus mouth when he gives Peter the Keys of the Kingdom after Peters Confession. In the Fourth Gospel John transfers the ecclesiastical power to what is left of the Twelve although Judas is missing and Thomas is absent. Now it is surely by the authors design that Thomas has missed the demonstrations of Christ given when he came and stood among the gathered disciples. These were demonstrations of sight and word and breath Touch me not Jesus had said to Mary Magdalene, and here too among the disciples is no distinct touch. The challenge set by Luke must nonetheless be met. The Third Evangelist has offered tangible proofs of Resurrection and the Fourth Evangelist must meet his challenge to make himself equal to his predecessor. When Thomas returns to the fellowship and the others say, We have seen the Lord, he expresses his disbelief with a vehemence that stops just short of oath-taking: Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe. (John 20,25.) Extraordinary, and from the viewpoint of literature masterful. John has, if anything, intensified the physical challenge. And he focuses the disciples misgivings only on Doubting Thomas who, in a set of Gospels notable for their doubles, is called the Twin (or in the King James Version, Didymus, which is the Greek for twin.) Eight days later the disciples are again in the house. Thomas is with them, the doors are closed, Jesus comes to stand among them and says: Peace be with you. And then he speaks to Thomas directly: Put your finger here and see my hands; and put out your hand and place it in my side. Do not be faithless but believing! And again it is extraordinary! Luke hasnt made it clear that Jesus demonstration of hands and feet was meant for an indication of his wounds, whereas the Fourth Gospel (and the only one to speak of a Roman spear piercing Jesus side) focuses with entire frankness on the

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wounds, even implying a very considerable wound: Reach hither thy hand and thrust it into my side! Jesus commands in the sturdy old King James. And we are not told that it happened. Instead, Thomass defiant unbelief collapses. And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God. Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou has believed. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. (John 20,28.) Words of unspeakable moment and force for anyone brought up in church. And here the Fourth Gospel reaches its true ending except for an urgent resum compressed into a sentence. That sentence will be given below. A final chapter was added to this Gospel (the scholars have assured us) by a different hand the evidence being in its different style. I could myself believe on the strength of the English version that the doubled ending was a deliberate device of the authors own. In any case this remarkable final Gospel, which has given us another Jesus, comes to us with a doubled ending.

JOHNS MYSTERIOUS LAST CHAPTER

At the end of chapter twenty this great mystical Gospel closes with a distinct period: Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name. That writes finis to the Gospel quite plainly, and yet another Resurrection scene is tacked onto that before the Gospel is rounded off by another similar ending, except that now at the very end a stupendous claim is added in plain reference to the beloved disciple: This is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things, and who has written these things; and we know that his testimony is true. (John 21,24.) So it looks as if the twenty-first chapter of John represents an Evangelists after-thought, but this is misleading. Scholars well versed in Greek tell us that the literary style of this final chapter is suddenly different. It is a fact which we, who are confined to English, mustnt underestimate, as we easily may.

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A consideration of the tale will show its incompatibility with Jesus earlier appearance to his disciples when he said, As the Father has sent me, even so I send you, and breathed on them the Holy Spirit. For suddenly the disciples are at such loose ends that several of them, along with Nathanael, have gone out fishing and labored all the night through without any luck. Now a band of disciples who have been sent forth under inspiration to carry on the Redeemers work would not spend the night futilely fishing and then fail to recognize the Redeemer in his reappearance, as happens in this final tale. So then, our several disciples have gone out fishing. They are a mixed group because Nathanael was never one of the Twelve. (His mention imitates the Fourth Evangelists introduction of that name). At daybreak Jesus appears on the beach unrecognized. Children, have you any fish? No. Cast the net on the right side of the boat and you will find some. And they do, at once making a catch too big to haul in. Then that disciple whom Jesus loved says to Peter, It is the Lord! (This imitates the Johannine motif which takes the edge off Peters primacy). The meaning of the huge haul of fishes is obvious if we compare Lukes Draft of Fishes, which occurred when Jesus first called the Four. The story is an imitation of that. Why are they fishing at night? Anglers, I know, may sometimes use lanterns to attract their fish, but here it is a case that Jesus appears at break of day to keep the Easter reference when he rose at dawn. On recognizing Jesus, Simon Peter, who is stripped for work, puts his clothes on and leaps into the sea. It is a curiously awkward idea to have him do this unnatural thing or should we rather be thinking of Christian baptismal candidates who, far from stripping naked to be baptized, must put on gowns before they step into the water? Then the thought would be that when a catechumen wraps himself in his baptismal gown, he is like Peter going to Jesus on a farther shore. Or for another possibility, this absurdity may imitate the legend-makers technique of providing a diversion from the main action to deflect somewhat our natural incredulity. Otherwise, I can think of no reason to explain the absurdity of a fishermans wrapping up before he jumps into the water for a swim. All of my Readers who are swimmers well know how a wet garment impedes us in the swimming.

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On land, as now appears when all have come ashore, Jesus has prepared a charcoal fire with fish lying on it, and bread. He asks them to bring some of the fish which they have caught and invites them to breakfast. And still there is something of a veil over this mysterious Christ: None of the disciples durst ask him, Who art thou?, knowing that it was the Lord. (KJV) A reader who has followed Johns text carefully throughout knows how often Jesus appears and disappears, how unexpected is his presence, how mysterious his coming and going the motif is deeply Johannine (and I do think it a good expression of the transcendental aspect of the Resurrection. We are not to imagine an ordinary fishermens breakfast on the beach). John II, as we might call this fabricator, remarks that this is the third time that Jesus showed himself to his disciples. Unless we discount his Easter appearance to Mary Magdalene, we know this to be incorrect. Exegetes typically put this sort of thing down to the Apostles extreme old age when fondly remembering events and yet forgetful of detail. The remark precedes a triple question put to Peter in which the Lord asks him: Simon, son of John, do you love me? After each of Peters assurances, whose triple form recalls his threefold denial, Jesus will say: Feed my lambs... Feed my sheep. And then, possibly, Peters martyrdom is foretold: When you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go. The prophecy is followed in the course of the tale by the command: Follow me... Follow thou me! Peter turns, apparently he and Jesus have been strolling side by side, and saw following them the disciple whom Jesus loved, who had lain close to his breast at the supper. He asks a curious question here: Lord, what about this man? What about the question itself? It seems an excuse for Jesus enigmatic reply which plays into the last bit of mystification in which John II would involve us: If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? Follow me! And then John II goes simply overboard: The saying spread abroad among the brethren that this disciple was not to die. (We doubt this). Yet Jesus did not say to him that he was not to die but, if it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? How utterly tiresome, this pedantic mystification and pseudo-exactitude! And how pathetically effective in giving simple minds something to think about!

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Demolished at last by the technique of this Gospel and nearing its very last words, we may be prepared to accept this without further ado. Or we may not. For those words about the disciple who is bearing witness to these things, and who has written these things require to be judged in their own truth. They must call forth from us our own decision about them. Luke, who dared to assert that he had consulted those who had been eye-witnesses and ministers of the Word, made no such tremendous claim for his Gospel as this. As for Marks Gospel, it is only an old ecclesiastical tradition that would assign the substance of it to Peters preaching, which the Evangelist is supposed to have heard as his assistant and translator and written down, so to speak, all out of order. Although this Fourth Gospel is of all the authentic Gospels most distant from the life of Jesus, this contrived appendix makes for it the boldest claim of all.

CONCLUSION DOGMATA I. (Or, Opinions firmly held.)

Have we answered our question, at last: Did Jesus live? Or was it ever our aim to give an ANSWER to this question one more answer, one more opinion? To pull an Ace of Hearts out of my sleeve at the last minute or else, perhaps, an Ace of Spades would be a cheat. Our question has been genuine, and the Negative argument remains a point of view. A simple yes or no does not suffice us because a vote cast either way cannot satisfy our longing for distinctness and resolution. Why is that? It is because our question is somehow larger than the question. Somewhere else the answer lies to a question which our theme has only suggested. If we take these same Gospels, as I do, for an evidence of that life, it counts only as a statement of belief. The man as such who lived once is tremendously obscure. He has been caught up and transformed by the myth which has embraced him and has insofar become a part of that myth in the setting of a known history and a definite time. It is the time of the Herods and of the Baptist and of Pontius Pilate. The pressing question in historical perspective is one of reference. Who is it or what is it we mean to identify by the name, Jesus? The Gospels themselves give us two different versions of Christ. In which of these versions or in what

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particulars of word and deed do we profess to find the reality of his figure? For a modern interpreter it is almost a duty to try to extract a historical Jesus from his myth and present him as a winsome human being, a man of kindly impulse spreading encouragements, bolstering faith, and filled with insights Hebrew insights. It cannot be done. Jesus life was fused with myth as events occurred and the myth arose. Our Gospel Jesus is not a man in plain view who is more or less decorated by his legends and by the attribution of his unusual powers. The man is out of sight. A sort of rumor has replaced him. Marks virile Jesus was conceived by the Evangelist when presenting his traditions. Johns Jesus when taken simply as a human being is unreal. As for those many modern writers who thought they had extracted a human Jesus from his myths, if the results are sympathetic they reflect the authors own ideals. Its nothing to object to, of course, but we mustnt take it for fact. I remember the pleasure I took as a seminarian in reading Upton Sinclairs novel in which Jesus figures as a little humpback. It did not offend me. Much more deeply was I captivated by Ernest Renans Life of Jesus as an intern, and during that same year read Fosdicks book, The Man From Nazareth (and see in Fosdicks title his answer to the Negative critics: it was an old-fashioned paper Pocketbook with Rembrandts Jesus on its yellow cover). At first, too, I much liked John Erskines Human Life of Jesus because he writes so beautifully. It is a very readable entertainment. Such inoffensive depictions of Jesus have been thrown up in a numberless variety and in proof that Jesus has remained a myth. He is Jesus, Man of Genius for J. Middleton Murry but a hero for young Albert Schweitzer, who thus aspired to sweep all romantic conceptions aside with his own romantic and overstrenuous ideal. Nietzsche once in his endlessly shimmering thought borrowed the idea of idiot from Fyodor Dostoevskys novel to apply it to Jesus. Of course, the Russian author had given it a special meaning and Nietzsches idea is intriguing but whimsical. He veers to extremes. Harnack somewhere remarks that Jesus was not an ecstatic by way of a negative definition, and few there be who were ever as learned in this history as Adolf Harnack, but just the other day I chanced on a passage in G. Stanley Hall in which he finds that Jesus was more or less erethic (i.e., hypersensitive, excitable, irritable), more habitually in a state of exaltation or second breath. And this state, if not ecstasy in the

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clinical sense is inebriation with great ideas in Platos sense. No less than Albert Schweitzer does the learned Dr. Hall believe that we have found the new key by which psychology is now able to unlock the very secret soul of Jesus himself, which has never been understood before. If only it werent a different key in every other hand unlocking such a multitude of doors! Not infrequently, the popular depictions of Jesus are apt to be shallow or even contemptible, and I say to this, Enough of Jesus-trash! Its not a simple question of assailing fundamentalism because the Jesus of suburban America is often quite as unreal, as fake, as the vapid portraits of him hung in American living rooms. Liberal Protestants speak of Jesus as a Great Teacher and good man where is he? Good how? This is in nowise clear to us from a reading of the Gospels. Good because he cast out demons, then? Or because he rebuked the Pharisees? Or is it not really because as a demi-god he scattered his benevolent miracles amid the crowds? Now of course, in his Great Teacher role he has at least the solidity of the Teachings to support him, yet JM Robertsons pointed question (which I have quoted once before) What doctrine? remains in force. We have the authentic document Q in which men of eminent learning like Adolf Harnack and Karl Jaspers have found deepest meanings in the merest lines. We have also those fine literary parables in Luke of the Good Samaritan, the Rich Man and Lazarus, and the Prodigal Son. They dont jibe with the simple parables in Matthew and its only the Rich Man and Lazarus which is even authentically Jewish. Nor does it cease to be true that your parable is an easy way to invent traditions. It does reduce the authenticity of Mark that he has set the Teachings aside to put the kerygma in Jesus mouth, and no one can explain to us how the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount can have spoken like the Jesus of John, most especially in his farewell discourses. Also, I find nothing of the uttered Teachings of Jesus in Pauls Epistles. A self-appointed Apostle who served a far-flung sacramental cult, he reduced his Gospel of grace to the death and Resurrection of the Son of God in whom we may be joined (by faith) in newness of life. Any distinctive vision of Jesus the Great Teacher disappears from this varied assemblage and we obtain our Great Teacher at the expense of the Testament. What we seek in conclusion now are definite results and I propose to give them here as well as I can. It would be foolish to conclude our study in futility, vagueness and frustration. Are affirmations

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to be made? Then let us make them. Are denials called for? Then let us deny. My impression is that we have examined the substance of the Gospels more extensively than other books on the subject, pro or con. Typically, these books are taken up with argument whereas we have mostly pressed the Gospels against the question. Statements to the contrary of the Negative view I have sometimes made in a moment of weakness, but they dont constitute a refutation except in the impressive case of John Allegro. Not argument, then, but the material itself has been our concern.

DOGMATA II.
Nowhere have I said that we cannot know Jesus at all. It would be false to my own belief to leave that impression. Yet if anything can yield an evidence of this vanished life, it must be these same Gospels themselves whence our difficulty, because it is too apparent that the canonical Gospels are a fusion of history and myth. Invaluable documents though they be, the deep interest of the Evangelists lies in myths and in faith, but a faith realized in Christs prophetic fulfillments. We do not know the man of history, as such. We havent the least idea what he looked like. The various aspects of his person, his habits and inclinations, his likings, his customs, his daily behavior the Gospels ignore. We have no solid knowledge, even, of his social manner in dealing with others. We have not a single passage out of his life which is truly consecutive and we know nothing of his village tours, except for the Evangelists constant assurances that he made them. (And of course this traveling aspect of his life yields to the Negative argument for his existence as rumor). In most tales an honest environment is missing. We see him in his world but we never seem to see him in his place. All focus is on word and deed. Jesus in the synagogue? Yes, in Luke we have mention of the scroll and of Jesus seating himself before speaking. That hardly constitutes environment, and generally the play takes place on an empty stage with perhaps a bare wooden table and two or three chairs. There are nonetheless a couple of things to be noticed here. (a) The Gospels tell his story in the large, giving out the main external facts of his life as they bear on history. (b) Also, we have a veritably incomparable array of incidents and Teachings to convey, as our Gospels so distinctively do convey, a Jesus who resembles only Jesus. So much depends on the perspective we bring to these Gospels apropos our theme! What is the difficulty in believing that after John was

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arrested Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the Kingdom? Or what is the real objection to the tradition (although skimpily preserved) that at the end of a singular career Jesus entered Jerusalem in a Messianic gesture? The sole Negative objection to the gesture rests on its being prefigured in prophecy. The tradition or else the Evangelists may have got the idea from prophecy. As Jesus or his disciples also may. You can say, We dont know that it happened. Of course we dont know: it is a thing I have insisted on. Do we know anything better to the contrary? You can say, The Teachings dont give a hint of such a thing. No, indeed. The famous Teachings dont even give the crucifixion of Christ in Adolf Harnacks determination of Q. Shall we deny the crucifixion then? My point on this is that the statement is made by the tale of the Entry along with the report of an associated Cleansing of the Temple. Remove these acts and you remove the Roman incentive for the execution of a rabbi who is otherwise a teacher, which is not to deny that the proclamation of the Kingdom may have been a factor also. And beyond the fact of statements made, not in the tales but by them, the troubling documents exist. They are much too jagged, rugged, incoherent even to pass as smooth forgeries. Their bare existence and the credit they have always won is a not inconsiderable fact. Outside the Gospels what do we find of Jesus history? Hardly anything at all. We find confession of faith in his divine role as one crucified and raised from the dead. It is in the Four Gospels that the substance of the life has been preserved. Arthur Drews is right that we find no life of Christ in Paul. We find in Galatians (if this be Paul) that God sent forth his Son born of a woman and born under the Law. As much as to say when subtracting the myth that he was born a human being and a Jew. Then in Romans: who was descended from David according to the flesh. At best that counts as a statement of belief. Then finally the Apostles recitation of the Last Supper ritual formula in Corinthians. This does not add up to a life. Pontius Pilate, for instance, is unmentioned by Paul except in the so-called Pastoral Epistles which are commonly judged to be spurious.

DOGMATA III.
Our Gospels are histories notwithstanding the myth. Even the Fourth Gospel is in some deep sense a history despite its remoteness from the event of Jesus life, its transfigured Messiah, its dense atmosphere especially in the farewell discourses, and its deliberate fictions. Remove the Synoptics entirely, yet John sets forth the basic facts which have a

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way of perpetuating themselves from Jesus Baptism (although its not even described) to Pontius Pilate. The reality of history persists in its transmutations. Yet even when regarded as histories, the Gospels are documents of a faith based on traditions which have attested this life. They take their character from a myth for which they serve as instruments of teaching and propaganda. They are frank to illustrate this myth, and their authors were unconstrained by any strict requirement of fidelity to fact this is too obvious. In its essence, this is a Jewish-Hellenistic myth and we dont know quite how it originated. We do know that it first grew into in its Hellenistic garb before it had shed, or even cared to shed the Jewish character of its Lord. What an indication of primitive fact! For in its deepest import, the Gospel is the message of an Israel renewed if only in the scattered seed and first sprouting. Of course, that same visionary renewal, which is experienced only within the fellowships, requires such a transformation of Jewish customs and offers such a laxity of grace (if I may say so) that the Israel of old stands on the verge of rejection and the Gospel is thrown open to the world. At first the myth is protean. It has no single character and no one abiding form. In its earliest days it was variously conceived and different views of Jesus were held among his followers. The process of rationalizing the myth had necessarily to come and began very early. Among its first steps was a development in the teachings of the sponsoring communities. But we must also reckon with a development in the story itself which comes then to be translated into liturgy and rites. At this point the myth is overwhelming, it is a flood. It is adjusted to the seasons of the year and there you have the frankest sort of mythical development. A calendar of sacred commemorations is appointed as church officials arise. Astrology makes its entrance not least in the seasons and the calendar. Customs of great antiquity are sometimes altered and live on in disguise. The Jewish Pentecost furnishes the date of the Christian Pentecost, as if the date itself must not be given up. Aspects of the Passover survive in the ritual of Communion or the designation, Lamb of God. With no intention of flippancy I might almost cite Shakespeares playful lines: ...Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. History and myth interwoven change and live on.

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The early rise of church officials is, for me, a problem. How so soon? If Jesus is a simple prophet who sends his Twelve Apostles forth with scant provisions, whence bishops so suddenly? How the early authority of Jerusalem for a movement which began in Galilee? Or why in Matthew already the Evangelists preposterous declaration (because it is surely his own) that these ragamuffin theologians are given power to open or close the gates of Heaven? For with officialdom comes power, status and control, and the associated ills and evils. If theology is interpretation of the myth, church doctrine represents control. Rivalries arise within the Christian groups, opponents are overcome or banished, eccentric individuals are made to toe the line. Doctrines on the chief points develop through a series of councils into dogmas which give expression to a universal faith. And herewith the tragedy of the Christian past. For it may be doubted whether the religion could have survived without this development, the same which has led to the Catholic and Orthodox churches, but it cannot be doubted that a fostering and protective dogma under strict official control is inimical to the freedom of the spirit and to its finest expressions. You cannot have spirit without freedom. For myself I find the Gospel when taken as a set of doctrines incredible and rudimentary. Nor do I find in myself any wish to believe on these grounds although Jesus has remained a sacred figure for me. Is that nothing more than life-long habit? It seems to go beyond that and touch a certain dread which I associate with the sacred dimension: what Rudolf Otto has called the numinous. I think it is because a kind of dread belongs to the realm of the sacred. DOGMATA IV. During his long farewell to the disciples at the Last Supper, the elevated Jesus of the Fourth Gospel tells them: I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth is come, he will guide you into all truth. I, too, have left many things unsaid, and I must pray for the Spirit of truth and his guidance in bringing this book to its end.

I. My own argument
The argument has been fairly presented, I think. Up hill and down dale, it has been my own argument too. Our study of the Gospels touches on the origin of Christianity in the life of a man who, although fully and beautifully illuminated in Gospel legend, is otherwise obscure to

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history. We have looked in the Gospels for a Jesus who is a founder or at least an instigator in the rise of a great myth only to find him very largely a product of that myth. And if the word myth is disturbing, you may substitute the word faith here: it will work just as well. Then in some sense, conclusively, Jesus is not a fact of history although it is fair enough to speak of a historians Jesus. It is because the historians conception rests on purely religious documents of questionable value we accept his or her belief in the matter as one qualified for that. What is the grand fact we associate with Jesus? A religion preached in his name, a peculiar Scripture set within an acknowledged faith, and a Church founded on Sacraments and traditions, and of course the crucifix, images, pictures: iconography. The grand fact is the total fact, the whole tradition. If Jesus be historical, as I affirm, he is a man remembered by the faith he inspired. A wish to have him apart from that faith and know him as he was is bred of doubt. It may be a very reasonable doubt, but it reflects a desire on our part to read in history the story of a Revelation. We seem to have persuaded ourselves that we might believe with all our heart if only we could see Jesus more nearly. Already the tradition has understood this and the Evangelists from Mark to John have done what they could to make him real. I suppose it must be called a success on their part to make us feel that we have more than we do have and to forget that the man is obscure. The significance of Christ is expressed in what we have. More would not help because a greater knowledge of Jesus in his naturalness would leave us where we are in the matter of faith. For if Christ is not the supernatural being which the Gospels portray, where is his Revelation? History can give us no revelation except what our own experience provides, whereas the Idea of Christ in the Gospels is of a divine disclosure. The disjunction between Jesus real history as we imagine it and the subsequent tradition is a necessary disjunction from the viewpoint of the faith. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe, says Jesus in John. And Paul: Even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, we regard him thus no longer. Just what is this human point of view (kata sarka) of which he writes except the natural,

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the ordinary, the physical, the historical?34 For it was not in that one man known simply in his human nature that a religious value lay. Speaking philosophically, his value is to be sought in the faith he awakened as a life lived authentically in the presence of God.

II. The religious imagination

We are all by nature believers in the supernatural or the miraculous. I find that even scientists are superstitious, as I myself am, and all the more so after laying church doctrine aside. The poet in us looks for signs and often enough receives them, but the philosopher within stands off and says, You understand that all of this is imagination. I take signs gratefully when I receive them, yet afterwards discover a collaboration on my part, unnoticed at the time. The various enactments which we practice in our rituals have a living root in primitive magic which is no longer recognized as such or which, if recognized, does not disturb us. Magic achieves its goal by imitation and dramatic substitutes, and if we look on the matter thoughtfully, we may find imitation and dramatic substitutes in a bridal procession or a Fourth of July parade. We find the same thing in our seasonal pageants with costumed actors and rehearsed gestures, sometimes done by children. These pageants are never realistic. It is enough to watch the action or to imitate the great mythic event such as, for example, the birth of the Savior. It is real because we saw it happen. Liturgy is based on the same principle except that the symbol is a little more remote. The very sacraments convey potency and reality by substitutes and enactments. Where is the priest without his implements and gestures? Here is Christ, he promises as he displays the wafer or lays it on the tongue. Compare the cry of the crowd, as I mentioned earlier, when the man on his donkey rides out of the rural Polish chapel: There goes Christ! The experienced reality in such practices is not simply recovered in memory: it is created. It is conceived. Why ever suppose that imagination is less a door into reality than our ability to add up 2+2 or conceive an abstraction? In practice we accept the role of imagination. Has anyone a difficulty in seeing a gilded, glistening Buddha as in no sense a portrait of the man Gautama? And

34. Kata sarka is literally and correctly translated by the King James version: Yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more. II Corinthians 5,16.

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yet we welcome its splendid affirmation. It is the same with a life-sized wooden crucifix, its nearly naked Jesus painted in flesh tones, that I saw in Pennsylvania near the chancel of an Orthodox church when attending a wedding. However realistic the man on the cross in his graceful pose, this is simply a beautiful imagination recalling no scene ever seen.

III. Inner basis of religion: the archetype

So is religion on examination merely imaginary? It can be that. Or it can be imaginative access to reality, depending on our disposition. The image of Lazarus with its strange, wide-ranging associations connects to all its outlets from a fundamental archetype: that is the locus of your reality for such an imagination as this which bears on the image of the Self but of a self to be overcome or cast away. As a double of Christ in a darker resurrection from a state of decay Lazarus was able to reflect an influence from Osiris at a rather advanced stage or from the Akwanshi at a more primitive. As such an image, then, the very image of the phallic (and somewhat putrid) god in his resurrection, I would prefer to speak of a Lazarus archetype. That this archetype in all its potency lives on we saw to our satisfaction in Andreyevs tale of Lazarus, where the phallic imagery is almost conspicuous, as well as in Henry Jamess The Jolly Corner, where a covert phallic metaphor associates in a tale of selfdiscovery culminating in metaphors of death and resurrection. Who can dismiss this sort of thing as mere fantasy? Andreyevs powerful tale might be dismissed as a fantasy since ostensibly it is that, although it happens to be a fantasy involving an image of the Self, but Henry James with greater subtlety describes an experience which is altogether intelligible: no person of sense can dismiss these imaginations as unexpressive of reality. Now I recall the Lazarus archetype here to avoid collapsing the argument into abstractions. For the religious imagination, if it uses concepts at all, has borrowed them from philosophy or morality. It is in the imagination that the archetypes are reflected: it is the archetype which gives the religious imagination its reality. For the most ancient symbols of religion are no mere spume of dreams. They have come by inspiration and they point us to the hidden depths of psyche, and I hold that the greatest of present facts disclosing the unseen is depth of soul. It is the soul which has knowledge of God, not simply the intellect. What any man cares for is the experience of his own life, and yet it is just this passing experience, so dear to us, which gives to the present moment a sense of something beyond or a depth within. We may sound this depth

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but we can never reach it. We are never there, we are here. It is the religious imagination which sounds the depth. Properly speaking, the archetypes are not symbols or images but an array of powers. They belong to our human endowment although they are curiously and darkly out of reach, but they are nonetheless effective. Of course, they are not of themselves an experience. They structure experience. Thus (and I stick to the illustration while still avoiding mere abstraction) it was the archetype which enabled such genuine artists as Leonid Andreyev and Henry James to give an imaginative expression to the deepest experience. We misread these splendid tales if we take them for entertainments except in the sense that high art nourishes the soul. Evidently the archetypes function in the psyche like instinct in dogs and birds, and yet more than merely instinct. It is characteristic of the archetypes that crisis awakens them. The imaginations they inspire or the persons they project on become a focus of intensest caring. In the crises of our lives they provide a sort of guidance for the serious mind and the pure in heart. Clothed in symbols, they convey a revelation of numinous quality to receptive minds. Only, a revelation of that sort is nothing unless we act on it. Hence it follows that the archetypes engage us. Or more accurately, it is we who engage them all unconsciously as we seek for our truth or struggle to find a right way in our endeavors. So the region of the archetypes is in no sense an array of imaginations but an unimaginable dimension of formative powers. And when these powers engage us, we verge on the sacred interiors. We may therefore distinguish the historical value of Jesus, as I describe it above, from the value of Christ as archetypal, while of course recognizing that Jesus carries this value. I believe on good grounds that the Jesus of the Gospels, and no less the image of Buddha on different grounds, express the archetype of the Self. These vital myths engage us on the level of deepest experience. Speaking philosophically, the religious value of Christ is of a different order than a supposed life of Jesus. With no pretense of belief and no claim upon Christianity, I must acknowledge a validity in myth, and in the life of faith.

IV. Why Jesus matters

Speaking only for myself, I reach a three-fold result in respect to the Negative argument:

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(a) Myth. Jesus is a myth as we find him. The presented Jesus, the popular Jesus, is a myth. (b) The Negative argument can be carried through. That is its truth. Yet even when carried through, it is not entirely convincing. (c) The historical Jesus is to be looked for within the written Gospels as they stand, not in substitutes or replacements. Above all, the tales must be taken in their meaning. I reject the Jesus-wading exegesis which would explain the fable of his walking on water. We can never know what event, if any, lies behind a miracle or ever safely assume that Jesus is visible in these tales. A falsely natural idea of his person has become very familiar. We turn to the Gospels while allowing for exaggeration and mistakes to perceive a Jesus who is wise and good a friend of man. It is an illusion. In truth, we cannot see the man apart from his myth. It is characteristic of Jesus as the Gospels portray him to emphasize the inner fact and to place great emphasis on spirit and essence, sometimes in contrast to customs and traditions which may become very dear to us. This emphasis on the essential is a most attractive feature, but it falls short of the existential value of his death and Resurrection. As a merely human fact Jesus cannot serve as a model of the spiritual life. What we see in the Gospels shows that he is far from expressing a universal ideal. If, then, an affirmation of his life is crucial to the faith, it is to keep us from Gnosticism and unreality. As the Gospel offers itself a realized human fact is at the heart of its myth. Were it lacking, the mythic pattern of his death and Resurrection would be reduced to a metaphorical whimsy instead of its shaping the deepest experience. Archetypes do not coerce us: it is the quality of our experience and our own depth which will determine the value of the mythic pattern. The great Mystery of the Gospel and the believers participation in Christ require the bond which links to that genuine life. If the Gospel be taken as merely imaginary and Jesus himself a mere Symbol, it is all too unserious to claim our allegiance. It is a curious fact, then, that while a mere belief in Jesus historical existence is not yet Gospel faith, the very quality of that faith requires a belief in the man whose physical reality is so entirely out of reach. While yet, of course, the value of Christ is in his being realized anew.

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People suppose (and the common man always supposes) that religion must be definitely factual to be real, but the reality of religion consists in the realization of its ideals. It is an inner and a felt reality but not otherwise a present fact except as we live it. It is something we give ourselves into. The reality of what is sought is not lurking in the symbol or in the sacred text, for the text can only refer us to something else, the symbol can only remind us of what is stirring within. No more is the reality to be sought in bare fact because all is myth if we look for bare facts of divinity. The reality is to be sought in the realization, and it has often been said, and wisely said, that we cannot have this reality without taking the Way. A FINAL WORD Our traditions are passing through a caesura in the faith. Mere belief, especially of the ossified sort which is offered to us, may be an impediment. After spending eleven years in training for the Lutheran ministry, I was barely launched in that career before I discovered the deadness of our sterile formulas. As for the religion of sentiment which seems to flourish in the suburbs, it too easily degenerates and in its degenerate form is repulsive. Much of what passes for Christianity in our churches is very poor stuff. We do well to rid ourselves of Jesus-trash and cheap religion. The incision must be clean-cut; a clean break is imperative and may be costly. But the metaphor of caesura implies continuity after incision. It is simply our experience of things. What is old perishes. What is new arises from the old and has its root there. END

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