Christmas in Alexandria

A. N. Wilson

The Foreigner: A Search for the First Century Jesus Desmond Stewart (Hamish Hamilton pp. 181, £9.95) There are two sorts of biography which 1 justify endless rewritings and reinterpretations. One is of lives, such as Oscar Wilde's or Queen Victoria's, of which we know everything. The other is of lives, such as Shakespeare's, of which we know almost nothing. In the one case, devoted readers enjoy an endless rehearsal of facts which they already know. In the other, since there are almost no facts to be known, biographers have a freer hand and can produce stories of their own making.

The life of Christ falls firmly into this second category. None of His contemporaries thought to write His biography. All the personal idiosyncrasies which satisfy readers of conventional biographies are absent. We do not know what He looked like, whether He was short or tall; whether He had a deep voice or a high voice; what He liked to eat; who His childhood friends were; where or how He was educated. It has been calculated that if all the events in the Gospels were strung together, they would not cover a period longer than three weeks: a negligible space of time, even in so short a life.

The earliest Christian documents are the epistles of St Paul. The oldest of these, the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, written only 20 years after the Crucifixion, displays a staggering indifference to the details of Christ's earthly life. It warns members of the church to be prepared for Christ's imminent return to earth. It appears that the apostle expected the Second Coming to take place before most of the Thessalonians had died. The Coming would be heralded by the shout of angels. The Lord would be seen hovering in the clouds. The dead in Christ would be whisked from their graves to meet Him, followed by those who had not yet died.

Writing to the Corinthians a few years later, St Paul betrays the same biographical indifference, but he does allow two very significant passages of narrative to interrupt the strange blend of mysticism and ecclesiastical controversy which characterises his epistolary manner. In the first place, he records that the night before Christ died, He took bread and wine and instituted the Holy Communion. In the second place, that He died 'for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures'. This surprising event was witnessed, according to the apostle, not only be Cephas, but also by the Twelve, and then by 500 people, most of whom were still alive when the letter was written.

These, then, are the earliest evidences that we have to go on. They tell us nothing about Christ's life and personality. Merely, that His followers believed Him to be alive, and to have founded an institution (the Church) whose function was to celebrate the Eucharist until the Second Coming. Theology came first; 'human interest' came later.

Most scholars agree that the Gospels were written rather later than St Paul's epistles. They embody a substantial amount of Christ's teaching, and accounts of His miracles. But since they were all written by persons who shared St Paul's belief that Christ died to save sinners, they are all predominantly concerned with Christ's Passion and Death. Accounts of His trial differ in the various evangelical accounts, and New Testament scholars all disagree about the extent to which the trialnarratives are realistic. They are not written up like modern court-room cases. There is considerable room for doubt about what, precisely, He was charged with, how the trial was conducted and why, if He was condemned (as the Synoptic Gospels aver) by the Jews for blasphemy, He should have been executed by the Romans in the manner reserved for common criminals.

Historically, then, there is very little to go on. This never troubled the generality of Christians for the first 18 hundred years after St Paul wrote his impenetrable letters, since, like St Paul and the Thessalonians, the Christian world believed that God had come down to earth in human form, died on a Cross to save the human race from its sins, and would come again, sooner or later, to judge the living and the dead.

It was really only when people came to doubt it all that the flood of fanciful biographies started to appear. Strauss's Life of Jesus was the most important of these early attempts. George Eliot translated it from the German in 1846, tearfully losing the last vestiges of her simple evangelical faith as she went along. Disregarding all the evidence of those who had known Christ, or been His near contemporaries, the book wrote about Him simply as a man, a great and good teacher whose miserably brief life had been obscured by later encrustations of theology. Ernest Renan's Vie de Jesus (1863) had the same effect on French audiences as Strauss had had on the Germans and the English. Renan's sweet-natured account regrets that Christ never. married St Mary Magdalen, and attributes the idea of the resurrection to her musings in the Garden where He was buried, and her romantic sense of His presence from beyond the grave like the af flicted heroine of some 19th-century novel. Renan does not know what to make of the 500 witnesses, or how they came to be persuaded that Mary Magdalen's fancy was literally true, and so he leaves them out.

Renan's Vie de Jesus ran through hundreds of editions, infuriating the French clergy and consoling millions of readers with his attractive presentation of the Founder of Christianity. Sensitive to landscape, intensely religious while being unable to believe in the religion of His boyhood, chastely fond of women, and devoted to his mother, the Lord appears to have been remarkably like Renan himself.

Since the 19th century, Lives of Jesus have poured from the presses, some friendly, some hostile; some Christian, some Jewish; some benignly agnostic; most influenced by the work of Renan; some drawing on the much older spiritual tradition of an Imitatio Christi. The less they knew, the more certain they became of what He had been like.

Desmond Stewart, the biographer of Theodor Herzel and of T. E. Lawrence, and a life-long expert on Turkish and Middle-Eastern affairs, chose, for his last book, to make 'A search for the First Century Jesus'. His untimely death has meant that it is a posthumous work. Like everything he wrote, it is well-informed, well-constructed and intelligent. He was well-read not only in the turgid pages of modern biblical criticism, but also in its crankier by-ways. He had a good knowledge of Greek. And he was also profoundly steeped in the spiritual riches of Christ's words: 'If all the things he had done were written down, the fourth gospel concludes, the world itself could not store the books so written. As history proceeds down its highway of crime, Jesus points upward to a knowledge which frees the self. In the darkest night he is hidden, not extinguished .' . . . The book, then, deserves very serious consideration, and is a worthy memorial to the sincerity of its author.

Having said that, one is bound to add that, like all other lives of Jesus, it is, of necessity, wildly speculative, a strange blend of astonishing credulity and needless scepticism. His book is called The Foreigner, taking a clue from some fourthcentury Coptic texts which refer to Him as the allogenes (of another race). Stewart was sceptical about the Virgin Birth, but he believed that the story of Mary and Joseph's betrothal in St Matthew's gospel contains a germ of historical truth. Mary was indeed pregnant, though Levantine and Greek tradition which loved such stories as Zeus choosing the mortal Semele as his mate, subsequently dignified her youthful indiscretion into a tale of parthenogenesis. St Joseph remains 'a just man' in Stewart's story, and desires to put her away privily. The whole idea of the birth in Bethlehem is rejected by Stewart. He thinks St Matthew invented it to make it fit the prophecies of the Old • Testament. But the Flight into Egypt he not only believes, but makes central to his whole story.

The Christ of his story is a Foreigner indeed. Born in Egypt, He almost certainly lived and mixed with the cultivated, in tellectual, citified Jews of Alexandria. Here he was almost certainly called Jesus and not Joshua; just as his mother had the Romanised name of Maria, not (as she would have been called in Galilee) Miriam.

Perhaps even at this early stage he was also nicknamed Christ or Chrestos. 'This was as common a practice among first-century Jews as it is for a Levi who has westernised his name to Lewis also to be known by some gentile nickname such as Chuck'. In later life, Chrestos (what a mercy they didn't call Him Chuck) remembered Egypt with nostalgia. When he said 'Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid', He was remembering the great flaring Pharos lighting the channel in to the Alexandrian harbour. A further hint that He was not of Galileean stock comes when we contemplate that there is no evidence of anyone having mocked Him for the way He spoke. `If Jesus had spoken an Aramaic as uncouth to Judaeans as Glaswegian English to Londoners his enemies would surely have used it against him'. So, he was a well-spoken man. There are plenty of well-spoken carpenters about, of course. (I once heard a very snobbish sermon which insisted that in first-century Palestine, carpenters belonged to 'what we would call the professional or upper-middle classes'). But that hardly affects Stewart's thesis, because he accepts Geza Vermes's speculation that Christ was not a carpenter at all. Greek tekton renders Aramaic naggar, a word which is used in the Talmud to designate a learned or cultivated man.

The cultivated young Chrestos grew to manhood. In telling the story of the Prodigal Son He almost certainly was drawing on His own experiences of adolescent guilt. If He had felt Himself to be sinless, why should He have sought cleansing at the hands of John the Baptist? The ordeal of temptation continued even afterwards, in the wilderness.

The idea of Christ's public ministry got going at the marriage feast of Cana. Being a foreigner, He did not realise that He should have brought a wedding present. He played the amusing joke of giving them jars of their own water, and they were already so drunk that they thought it was wine. An unnamed guest at the party was so impressed that he decided to become one of Christ's disciples. St Peter couldn't get to the wedding because he was at home nursing his sick mother-in-law.

This is a very good example of Stewart's imaginative method. 'The wedding took place four days after Jesus had met Peter', we are told. But we read of St Peter's sick mother-in-law in St Mark, and of the miracle at Cana in St John. It is hard to see how such an exact chronology can be inferred from a collation of two quite separate works. In fact, of course, none of the Gospels are narratives. They are designed to instruct the faithful; they are as much works of theology as the epistles of St Paul; and they are not meant to provide the sort of narrative flow which we would expect from a modern biography.

What of Christ's teachings? Central, in Stewart's view, is the image of the Bread of Life, the corn which must fall into the ground and die, but which, in dying, gives birth to new life. Once again, we look to Egypt for the explanation. When Christ said 'my flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink indeed', he was thinking of the Egyptian corn-deities, with their plentitudes of life-giving symbolism. 'The notion that the corn was Osiris was common to Egyptians while a similar notion attached itself to Demeter and Persephone in Hellas itself'. Christ's claims for Himself were misunderstood by the literalist Jews of Jerusalem who had not received the advantage of His Hellenised education, and it was this fact which made Him fall foul of the authorities.

The end is simply told. The evangelists wanted to link Christ's death to the notion of the Paschal Lamb, and so they pretended that the Crucifixion happened at Passover time. In Stewart's version, it happened in high summer. The body was taken down from the Cross and buried, but the Jews, fearing that miraculous claims would be made by the disciples, stole the corpse and cremated it. A faint memory of this survives in the assertion, in the apostle's creed, that Christ descended into Hell, by which we understand the flames of the crem. For the first Christians, the absence of the cadaver made it easier to absorb Chrestos's mystical sense that Death could not destroy us. Like the corn, He is replanted and reborn. Like the great Sun revered in His native Egypt, He rises again with each dawn.

There is no doubting Stewart's powers of intelligence and imagination. His book is, moreover, extremely readable, and, in its gentle seriousness, rather moving. But his Chrestos is a figure concocted from shreds and hints and remains less real that the central figure of St Matthew's gospel. If Christ had been a Hellenised Jew born in Egypt, it seems odd that no one mentioned it before.

Meanwhile, even as we go. to press, Christmas cribs are being set up all over the world. Almost no paid-up New Testament scholar believes in the Virgin Birth, and most, with maddening perversity, doubt whether Christ was born in Bethlehem. But the eyes of the world, most of them not those of theologians, still turn back, un comprehendingly, to the figures in the Stable. In spite of what the clergymen tell them, the majority of Christians still strain their ears, like the Thessalonians, for angelvoices.