Books
The most amazing tale
A. N. Wilson
Jesus: The Evidence Ian Wilson (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £10.95) Is Christianity True? Michael Arnheim (Duckworth £7.95)
These two highly enjoyable books have slightly different aims, but they share almost identical assumptions both about the nature of Christianity and about the more general question of what constitutes evidence. Ian Wilson, you will remember, is the Turin Shroud man. The aim of his book is to provide a text for a Channel 4 televi- sion series and, presumably, to make its author a lot of money. No harm in that. Many readers will be surprised that a man credulous enough to believe in the authen- ticity of the Shroud finds it necessary to re- ject nearly all the traditional Christian stories about Jesus. The aim of Professor Arnheim's crankier Duckworth book, by contrast, is to take a lot of pot-shots at the Founder of Christianity from an old- fashioned Jewish standpoint. Thus, both writers seem agreed that the truth or falsehood of Christianity must depend on the 'authenticity' of documentary evidence in the strange books written between 20 and 80 years after the events they describe for the liturgical consumption of Christian believers. I mean, Wilson and Arnheim think that the truth about Jesus can only be discovered when we have discovered the truth about the Gospels.
Oddly, neither author tells us what a Gospel is. Supposing you were the librarian at Alexandria in the second century AD. How would you classify the Gospel of Mark? In the philosophy section? Obvious- ly not. But surely not in history either, and certainly not in biography (pretending for the moment that such categories might exist in an ancient library). Years ago, the librarian at Nashdom Abbey was faced with a singular problem when someone pre- sented him with a copy of The Book of Common Prayer. He started a new section of the library called 'Comparative Religion'. It might be necessary to do the same if we were in the ancient library of Alexandria, with the same proviso that the document in question was meant for litur- gical use. The Gospels are not books of 'evidence'. They are stories framed about Jesus, in such a way as to make their teaching obvious. Many scholars accept the fact that they were originally meant to be sung, in snippets, just as they still are, Sun- day by Sunday, all over the Christian world. They are not necessarily going to
yield answers if we ask of these documents questions which it is only appropriate to ask of scientifically researched histories.
Ian Wilson starts off with a pleasantly il- lustrated account of how Constantin Tischendorf discovered a great cache of New Testament manuscripts in the monas- tery on Mount Sinai in 1844. He also slight- ly shakes one's confidence in his judgment by treating the (frankly, potty) theories of Dr Morton Smith of Columbia University, about the 'secret Gospel' of Mark, as if this were a sober and universally acceptable 'discovery' (Morton Smith believes that Christianity started off as a homosexual secret society and that the whole secret of the Gospel is to be found in the strange figure of the young man who flees naked from the Garden of Gethsemane.) Arnheim gets straight down to brass tacks and points out that Celsus (second century) rejected the doctrine of the Virgin Birth on the grounds of rabbinic tittle-tattle picked up from those who had known neither Jesus nor his mother. Ian Wilson also rejects the doctrine, largely on the authority of the 'historian and writer' Marina Warner, but he rejects, as Arnheim does not, the old chestnut about Christ's father being a Roman soldier called Panthera. It is now thought that the Gospel of Matthew might have been written as early as 50 AD, less than 20 years after the Crucifixion. That of Luke might have been within 30 years. These documents were certainly circulating among first-generation Christians, among whom there might have been those who knew the Lord, or his mother. But Arn- heim thinks that the 'evidence' of those who lived a hundred years later and knew neither of them is stronger.
In a short space, one cannot go through both books point by point emphasising the oddly selective way in which they regard the question of 'evidence'. To judge from their bibliographies, they both regard as wholly authoritative the writings of the Jewish scholar Gaza Vermes, who, in such fascinating books as Jesus the Jew, has done so much to enhance our picture of the world in which Jesus must have moved. Both writers, however, the Christian Wilson and the Jewish atheist Arnheim, lack Vermes's ability to be dispassionate. They also lack his striking ability to see blazing through all the 'evidence' or lack of it, something wholly distinctive and ex- traordinary about the words of Jesus. Arn- heim tries the ancient trick of saying that all the best lines of Jesus are cribbed from the Old Testament, and that the bits he (or the Gospel writers) added are nonsense. In 84 Arheim's story, Tjheseusspewctaatsoran 1 4 Aaprrriol 1g9aArnheim's menace rightly condemned by the authori- ties, and crucified with good cause. Both Arnheim and Wilson attach enormous im- portance to the trial of Jesus and both point out that it could not possibly have hapPem
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ed in quite the manner described by the evangelists. Then, there is the empty tomb. On the dust-jacket of his Turin Shroud book, 1911 Wilson is described as an RC. He must be a very modern sort, because he seems to re- ject the Virgin Birth, the Trinity and all the authority of Popes and Councils, as well as the Nicene Creed. But he accepts that `the one incontrovertible aspect of this matter is that the belief that Jesus had risen from the grave, whatever its origin, caught on vell soon .after the crucifixion and spread like Arnheim doubts this. He thinks that the 'evidence' has been cooked, that the Resurrection is the biggest in a vill°'ie series of whopping lies, which range fr°111 the notion of Jesus being born in Bethlehem tfoiguhries,bkeniongwn as abpBpaerdfobrasa.wholly fictitious There you have it. If you want a beautiful illustrated account of the sort of evidence which can be got from papyri, textu criticism, archaeology and grammar con- cerning the Founder of Christianity, Y°, will find it in Wilson. If you Wairli something more entertaining, with a lot °A
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exclamation marks and a few quite 80' blasphemous jokes, buy Arnheims book.i which is cheaper but has no pictures. Burl you think that this has much bearing °11 Jesus, or our attitude to him, or the c°11, tinned existence of the Christian fall': think again. Go to church this Easter. : group of otherwise sane people will be Say' ing or singing the Nicene Creed. TheY not be doing so because their reading of the papyri differs from Messrs Wilson and Allad heim or because they have just hear something new from the carbon-dating ex- perts. Nor, however, are they kidding o themselves with pure gibberish. TheY 5,t the creed because of what hapPensrlifeh-e; One of their number, wearing funny ci°'„':ef which are vaguely reminiscent of a cour' d or senator in the ancient world, takes bre.% and breaks it and says some words- blesses a chalice, and he holds it up. Chlic, tian people have often referred to the.se 9_, tions as 'the holy mysteries', which .is the same as calling them puzzles or riddles_ They were going on last Easter, and ttneur Easter before. And to judge from a le1s_ which Saint Paul wrote to the loutish Chris- tians of Corinth, they were going on the than 20 years after the discovery of ey empty tomb. Modern Christians, when 1it `.0, perform these mysteries in Eng1 :his sometimes exclaim: 'When we eat 'our bread and drink this cup, we proclairtlY_,., death, Lord Jesus, until you corn This activity, and this series of be fact which relate directly to the unexplained _we of the empty tomb, and to the inescaP: in challenge of the reported words of Jesu 'on, come glo!)' his stories and sayings, have been golliggrst it would be fair to say, ever since the 1' Easter. In those intervening years, countless numbers of sane men and women, in a way which they would not always think proper to express in words, have been quite certain that Jesus was alive, and that they had .known him in the Breaking of Bread. This is the living tradition of Christianity. When the. tradition was already established, various people wrote 'gospels' for the instruction of the faithful. Some of these gospels were rejected by the Christian corn- triunity as being obviously fantastical. Others were retained, acquiring, over the Years, a reputation for infallibility which
e day would have to be rejected and discarded. That day dawned about 130 Years ago in Tubingen in Germany when People first started to investigate the biblical texts in a scholarly and dispas- sionate manner. Many Christians 'lost their faith' in the process, while others stupidly clung on to orthodoxies which were untrue, thereby bringing themselves and their faith into disrepute. It was left to a Jewish saint of 'the 20th century, who declined baptism even on her death-bed, to have enough faith to say that Christ likes us to prefer the truth to him who is the Truth; for he knows that if we pursue only the truth we shall not go far on our journey before falling into his arms.
Once this has been recognised as a very widespread human experience, a lot of the `evidence' provided by sceptical New Testa- ment scholars looks very different. Much of it seems dull. Some of it seems foolish.
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