Faces of Jesus
Alan Brien
Jesus Now Malachi Martin (Collins U.25). Jesus Who Became Christ Peter De Rosa (Collins £3.50) Did Jesus Exist? G. A. Wells (Elek 0.80) Reviewing books about Jesus would keep one full-time weekly book critic in work for fortyeight weeks a year, every year. Each author seems to feel free to elect his own particular (or sometimes not-too-particular) Jesus, usually by an odd coincidence, quite closely resembling an ideal version of himself, Malachi Martin, an Irish Jesuit formerly a close aide to Pope John XXIII gives a long list of them in Jesus Now.
Jesus Caesar ("the first really great Jesus figure in history ... every clergyman who is committed to power is serving Jesus Caesar-); Jesus Torquemada ("alive and only too well. . . in his name decry everyone else as erroneous, outmoded, dangerous, noxious, diseased, prejudiced"); Jesus Jew and Jesus Muslim, Jesus Apollo ("Jesus emptied of whatever is divine and filled with nature, Beautiful Nature, with harmony, algid symmetry, and com0ness—) and Jesus Good-fellow ("He aims to please. He's comfortable. Like old shoes"); Jesus Jehovah's Witness, Jesus Christian Scientist, Jesus Jesusite ("It's all simple. Only one truth — Jesus loves you"); Jesus Yogi: ("In the beginning — and before that — there was Nothing of the All. And All was all of the Nothing. The Nothing was the nothing of the All. And it was over all, And under all. And through all. And nothing was all. Stupendous
tranquility!"); Jesus Bleeding Lord ("So Tribal. So anthropological ... his sufferings become the justification for any paranoia which demands the death of those we do not like"); Jesus the Mystic Gun, Jesus Black, Jesus Femina ("Jesus was a feminist, If he was not he didn't come from God") and Jesus Gay ("Jesus had a disciple, the only one among the twelve — the youngest and, as far as we know, the only unmarried one, John the Divine, 'Whom Jesus loved' and 'who lay on Jesus' breast' at the Last Supper"), It's an exhilarating tour de force of sustained irony, very funny and often very angry and sometimes very sympathetic, backed up later by much serious and thoughtful analysis. Malachi Martin rejects all sectarian, narcissistic versions of Jesus and yet opts for the Jesus Self, changeless and timeless inside us all who "did not come in order to depart, and need not come again because he never went away." But might not his Jesus also be added by a new editor to a later edition? For sceptical laymen cannot help wondering if so many Jesuses are only possible; not because there is so much about him in the New Testament, but because there is so little, and that often ambiguous, conflicting, built up layer by layer from varying sources and traditions.
Mr Martin considered it impossible for any rational, scientific investigator today to deny the historical existence of Jesus. But he appears to regard any proof or disproof, if such were possible, as irrelevant to his knowledge of Christ Now. And after citing the evidence, he admits it is sparse and concludes "on the basis of those data, there will be no explaining of .what happened and no understanding of Jesus." Peter De Rosa homes in on a similar verdict from a different angle. He accepts as common ground, what almost all scholars now agree is certain, that the Gospels cannot be regarded as even pretending to be factual biographies, written by eye witnesses. They are work or propaganda in the original meaning, proclamation of faith. They do not lead up to the crucifixion, they derive from the resurrection. Their message is that Christ crucified is alive. They are, in a word, themselves a form of parable, using as their theme a real man..
Mr De Rosa brilliantly harmonises many of the apparent paradoxes and inconsistencies, and what many consider impossibilities, to be found in the four gospels. Or rather he avoids the need for harmony by interpreting them as poetic metaphors, rhetorical images, flights of fantasy which are beyond truth or falsehood because they speak the language of the imagination. He is not afraid of the word "myth" without which, as he points out, there could be no religion. The New Testament is myth, in his view, because it expresses a reality which can only be made comprehensible by being embodied in symbols. Mr De Rosa relies on the scholarship of thelogians rather archaeologists, of philosophers not historians. He is not afraid to jettison Many traditional approaches to the understanding of Jesus. "It is reasonable to ask: since we no longer avail ourselves of mediaeval science, why should we be afraid of dispensing altogether with mediaeval systems of theology? Theology is not an independent discipline but part of a close-knit fabric — social, political, ideological, scientific — of any particular age. If we do not feel compelled to copy mediaeval politics, mediaeval drainage-systems and mediaeval means of locomotion, why should we think it worthwhile to feed our minds on mediaeval theology and devotion?" It's a pity he does not carry this argument further, and I wonder why he does not investigate the discoveries of scholars, such as Professor Brandon or Paul Winter, who see the Christian doctrine as a living, changing ideology, influenced by the growth of the Church, the relations between Romans and Jews, the trauma of the destruction of Jerusalem — all of which have a direct, and critical, influence on the content of the New Testament.
Malachi Martin cites his evidence for the existence of Jesus on earth at a certain time, living the life of a man. And many non-believers in the divinity of Jesus as the Christ, the son of God, support him. Some are Jewish scholars, , orthodox and agnostic equally, who regard ' Jesus as a freedom fighter, an enemy of the Roman tyranny, whitewashed by Christian apologists to curry favour with Caesar and lay the blame for deicide upon the Jews. But others 'are atheists, Marxists or Freudians, adding more entries to Malachi Martin's list — Jesus Monomaniac, or Jesus Leninist-Maoist. Professor Wells makes long, but devastating work, of Mr Martin's case.
It is not an easy work to read, almost impossible to summarise, so determined is the Professor never to advance a step in his thesis without wiping out every possible pocket of resistance behind his lines, continually meeting objections to his own objections to his opponents' objections before they are even launched. Though his own field is German, he is certainly the most professional of all amateur Christologists I have read, deploying a wide knowledge of specialist literature on pagan, Jewish and Christian backgrounds. His major objection to the historical Jesus is ithe almost total silence of Paul in his Epistles (the earliest of all our sources) about any founder of the religion except a semi-divine immortal, unsecured to any place in recent time.
Lke everyone who writes about Jesus as a man, he has to pick and choose what he will trust and what he will reject, usually on the basis of highly technical interpretations, but sometimes simply on a hunch. It may be difficult to prove a negative, but then you don't have to. It is sufficient to disprove a positive, and wait for the next one. The argument frotil silence can never be complete but some silences are defeaning. And Professor Wells's achievement it to demonstrate just how much really isn't there when you come to look for it.
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