Gospels in the Classroom

040

Every other spring for the last dozen years I have taught an undergraduate course:

English 361
The Bible as Literature: New Testament
Spring Semester. 3 hrs

In teaching this course, I have discovered that the best thing that could happen to the New Testament has happened to it. Within the university, at least, the New Testament has become simply another “great book.” Though the text may have suffered a loss in religious status, it no longer has to carry the immense load of belief and commitment and guilt with which it was once burdened.

Having been raised a Christian, and a Catholic, I consider this a kind of liberation. I no longer have to search the Gospels for scenes in which Jesus creates the papacy or “institutes” the sacraments—holy matrimony, for instance, by his appearance at the wedding in Cana. And the college students themselves have changed. When I began teaching in the Midwest more than 40 years ago, Protestants came to class with a good grasp of the gospel narrative and the Old Testament stories it assumes. Catholic 041students were less informed, but could be counted on for passages generally read at mass. Today, only the fundamentalists are familiar with anything in the Bible. But as the children of parents who have deliberately resisted the influence of modern American culture and science, they cannot honestly engage in historical study of what they take to be an inerrant, timeless text.

On dropping my course, one student said to me, “Mr. Beeching, I just can’t stand listening to you.”

“That’s odd,” I said. “Mrs. Beeching has the same problem.”

He meant, of course, that he could not stand to hear the New Testament discussed as an anthology of Hellenistic writings, as literature.

In addition, students have recently appeared who are innocent of Christianity. That is why they take the course; they have “always heard of it.” After a recent lecture, one of these youngsters asked me, “Who is this fellow, Paul? Some kind of preacher?”

It is for such a mixed classroom, then, that I try to put together what I believe is known about the New Testament, describing how today’s educated person should sensibly read this text. Such a reading is always subject to the “state of the art,” and therefore I remind my students from time to time that even as I talk someone digging in the sands south of Cairo may be happening upon an ancient, brown bit of papyrus that will blow us all out of our opinions, if not our minds. I also insist that a sensible reading of the New Testament does not make the old religious questions go away or seem trivial—quite the reverse.

I begin by passing around my copy of the third edition (1975) of the Greek text designed for translators and first published in 1965 by the United Bible Societies. The book surprises my students with two new notions: that the New Testament was written in Greek and that it requires frequent, new and more accurate editions. I especially call their attention to the following from its introduction:

By means of the letters A, B, C, and D, enclosed within “braces” { } at the beginning of each set of textual variants, the committee has sought to indicate the relative degree of certainty, arrived at on the basis of internal considerations as well as of external evidence, for the reading adopted as the text. The Letter A signifies that the text is virtually certain, while B indicates that there is some degree of doubt. The letter C means that there is a considerable degree of doubt whether the text or the apparatus contains the superior reading, while D shows that there is a very high degree of doubt concerning the reading selected for the text.

Some students are also surprised to learn that, contrary to the impression preachers have left upon them, the New Testament was a product of the Church, rather than the reverse; that its 27 documents were composed from the 50s to about the 140s of the Common Era; and that therefore during the formative period of Christianity there was no New Testament—our precise table of contents not being recorded before 367 C.E.

I begin with Mark rather than Paul, because a growing number of students do not know even the story of Christianity; yet by some sort of osmosis, perhaps, even these students think of the Gospels as historical accounts. Convincing them that Mark should be read as a pastoral document intended to preserve and strengthen a reader’s faith can be difficult. I leave the speculations of the Jesus Seminar to the reserve shelf—for the skeptical—but all the students must understand that Mark’s gospel, composed outside of Palestine some 40 years after the crucifixion, is a gentile re-creation in Greek of remembered or invented moments in the life of Jesus.

With these preliminaries over, we set about reading Mark, which means, as is the case with all other great books, understanding his “literary conventions.” One of the most important of these is point of view. Does Mark address us directly as a real or imaginary eye-witness—“I then heard Jesus say…”—or does he speak in the third person—“Then Jesus said…”? Students learn that the third-person point of view is used everywhere in the Synoptics (except for the opening of Luke’s gospel).^a And though students may not have thought about it, the third-person point of view has certain complexities. It is one thing for an evangelist to write “Jesus said” when Jesus is talking to others in an observable situation. It is quite another to write “Jesus said” when Jesus is explicitly described as being alone. Who heard him? The disparity is even more marked when the evangelists report that “Jesus thought” such and such. To whom did Jesus subsequently confide his thoughts?

Clearly ancient writers made decisions, consciously or not, about whether to describe only observed (or observable) speeches and events or, as in the case of the evangelists, to adopt the so-called omniscient point of view. In the latter, an author knows everything pertaining to the tale. He can render the speech of characters even when they are soliloquizing; he can enter into their minds to describe their motives and feelings; he can even 042editorialize by interpreting these thoughts for us.

Modern historical writing quite rightly prohibits the use of such omniscience, though you may have occasionally run into a writer of juvenile works or of historical fiction who is capable of saying, “Feeling a sudden sense of determination, Lincoln thought, ‘I must free the slaves.’” But the Synoptic Gospels revel in it. When a woman who wishes to be cured touches Jesus’ garment, Mark tells us, “Jesus, aware that power had gone out of him, turned round in the crowd and asked, ‘Who touched my clothes?’” (Mark 5:30). In Matthew, the narrator relates a conversation between Jesus and the devil, though the two of them are supposedly isolated on a “very high mountain” (Matthew 4:5–8). In all three Synoptics we overhear what are presented as Jesus’ exact words as he prays alone in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matthew 26:39, 42, 44; Mark 14:35–36, 39; Luke 22:41–44). In Mark, after Jesus has said that “nothing that goes from outside into a man can defile him,” the author editorializes, “Thus he declared all foods clean” (Mark 7:19–20).

Some students will insist, of course, that divine inspiration dictated this material, but then we are left with the problem of why divine inspiration came in various and sometimes contradictory ways and in different Greek styles, reflecting not only different theologies but different levels of education. The more sensible assumption is that the authors are using literary conventions nowadays limited to fiction.

Narrative technique apart, how accurate are these reports of Jesus’ preaching? Classical and Hellenistic authors, including the evangelists, clearly had no access to stenographers or tape recorders. Thucydides, a contemporary of the characters he wrote about, mentions the problem in a famous passage of his History of the Peloponnesian War (1:22):

Some speeches I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said.

This means, I take it, that passages of dialogue in Scripture must also be read as reconstructions of the kind of thing a character said or might have said, not as magically accurate transcriptions of actual speech.

Then there is the problem of the original readers. In the opening pages of Mark, Jesus appears at the Jordan as a common woodworker from the obscure village of Nazareth. But clearly the first readers in about 70 C.E. already knew who he was—why else would they have read or listened to this document? From the first line, the narrative depends on our knowing that Jesus is a superior being. (On the odd chance that we are pagans who have picked up a Gideon Bible in a motel somewhere and do not recognize him, the epithet “Son of God” may have been added by a later hand. The phrase is missing in Codex Sinaiticus and other ancient manuscripts.)

The evangelists, like the Greek dramatists before them, take advantage of the readers’ knowledge to produce dramatic irony. When Oedipus first steps on stage to tell the people of Thebes that he is committed to finding the murderer of Laius—“I mean to leave nothing untried. With god’s help, our health shall be secured, or our ruin”—everyone in the theater knows which end he will secure. In Hamlet, even while Bernardo and Francisco, early on in the play, discuss the recent events in Denmark, we already know about the ghost and Hamlet’s destiny; we even know who will lie dead at the end of the show.

The characters in each of these narratives—including the character Jesus—do not possess such superior knowledge. When Mark’s Jesus is about to cure the bleeding woman, he first turns to the crowd and asks, “Who touched my clothes?” Jesus doesn’t know. But, through the courtesy of the omniscient author, the reader does. If he didn’t, the little scene would fall completely flat. This “ignorance” of Jesus can be very important. Without it he could not sincerely pray in the Garden of Gethsemane that the cup of suffering pass from him. Conversely, the reader must not be ignorant. To grasp the poignancy of the scene, we must know that the cup will not pass from the Lord.

In fact, the modern reader—including some of my students—may actually know more than each evangelist appears to know and must make a serious effort to repress this additional, sometimes contradictory, information. Such “knowledge” can be a very real problem in the classroom. While reading Mark, students have to suppress whatever they know about the birth and childhood of Jesus, about which the author says nothing. When they read Matthew’s infancy story, moreover, my students have to suppress their knowledge of both additional details from Luke’s gospel—for instance, that John the Baptist is Jesus’ relative, and that Mary and Joseph must travel to Bethlehem—and its odd omissions, such as Herod’s persecution, the appearance of the magi and the flight to Egypt. And when 043reading Luke, they have to forget what they read in Matthew. They even have the problem of reading two versions of the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9b–13; Luke 11:2b–4).

All these are matters of literary convention. To ask the gospel narrator, “To whom did Jesus report his thoughts and prayers so that they became available?”—a question Celsus asked around 170 C.E.—is foolish. The Synoptic Gospels employ techniques that we today associate with fiction and that are wholly different from modern “real reporting.” But that does not mean that the scene in Gethsemane, or any other New Testament event, didn’t happen. The text simply doesn’t answer that question.

Apart from these details of point of view, Hellenistic New Testament writings present a natural world quite foreign to my students. First-century Palestine is witness to events nowadays held to be impossible. Indeed it would be disastrous, I point out, if having read the New Testament, we were to continue holding some of its notions about the cosmos. At Jesus’ baptism, for instance, the heavens “break open.” The writer says this because he believes that the sky is still that same old blue, solid-wall “firmament” it was in Adam’s day—with windows in it for the rain. In a similar way, these writers think that demons cause disease, light goes out from the eye to capture the objects of sight, dead people (or their “shades”) can appear as Jesus’ conversationalists, dreams foretell the future, and so on.

Most disturbing to my classes are the demons; for all the evangelists assume that demons are fairly common in Palestine. Were they? The question is beside the point. Mark’s characters, like Shakespeare’s, think there are demons and have a regular way to get rid them. If the demons know your name, they will almost always refer to it, since this gives them power over you. To exorcise them, you must counter with the name of some greater spiritual power. Some unknown fellow apparently once used Jesus’ name in an exorcism: “John said to him, ‘Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.’ But Jesus said, ‘Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me’” (Mark 9:38–39).

Yet gospel demons can be peculiar. Some are more difficult to deal with than others and require prayer and fasting; others are strong in one locality, weak in another. Oddly enough, people don’t seem very perturbed by these evil spirits, perhaps because they are not very powerful. Jesus handles them so easily that they lose dramatic value.

The whole worldview of the New Testament—including the sudden cures of the lame, deaf and blind, the multiplication of food stuffs, the walking on water and the raising of people from the dead—makes the gospel story very hard to teach. Yet the evangelists clearly delight in its “powerful acts,” as did other writers of popular literature in the Hellenistic period. In Antiquities of the Jews 8.2.5, Josephus says that he himself witnessed a certain Eleazar casting out demons by a method of exorcism that had been given to Solomon by God himself—while Vespasian watched! In the same work, Josephus tells the story of a rainmaker, Onias (14.2.1). The Talmud has a wonder-worker named Hanina ben Dosa, who performed a miracle at a distance—as Jesus does for the servant of the centurion (Matthew 8:13). Empedocles of Sicily (c. 493–433 B.C.E.) is said to have performed wondrous cures, and Apollonius of Tyana, in the first century C.E., made a whole career of wonder-working, specializing in exorcisms. The same marvels fill today’s tabloid newsracks.

But in addition there is a “scholarly” problem. New Testament writers, along with their Jewish contemporaries, feel free to wrench any passage they wish from the Hebrew Bible or the Septuagint^b (choosing whichever suits their fancy) to suggest the idea of prophecy fulfilled. They even seem willing to misquote sacred Scripture to make their point. This habit can produce complexities. For Mark’s gospel to work, for instance, you must believe that Isaiah 40:3 (quoted, in a slightly distorted form, in Mark 1:2–3^c) correctly predicted that a stranger named John would come out of the desert to prepare the way for Jesus. It will then come as something of a surprise to learn in the first chapter of Luke that John is a near relative, well known to Jesus’ family.

Even when they recognize that the Gospels use fictional conventions, transmit invented speech, project a primitive cosmos and impressionistically cite scripture, some of my students ignore the conclusion that 054necessarily follows: Any truth that arises from this “good news” concerning Jesus, Son of God, will be found in the narrative’s overall design; while the historicity of its details must stand or fall on other grounds. Something like the events of the synoptic story may have happened; indeed, Jesus’ last year may have corresponded almost point for point to what is said in Mark. But the narrative conventions and world outlook of the gospel prohibit our using it as a historical record of that year.

It is therefore quite legitimate for students to ask, “Did Jesus really exist? Was he a divine being? Did he found a religion?” But the narratives we are studying cannot answer such questions. This idea, a commonplace of modern scholarship, is difficult, disturbing and, for some, still blasphemous. But I see no honest way of avoiding it if we are to read the New Testament sensibly. In any case, the failure of so many attempts to translate the New Testament into meaningful and generally accepted religious doctrine suggests—at the very least—that Christian thinkers have not yet found a comfortable way of reading Scripture in the light of both scholarship and their traditional theological positions. It may well be that in the present state of the art this is simply not possible.

If that is so, would it not be better if even churchmen simply taught the texts historically and critically? Even religious people—perhaps especially religious people—should read the New Testament sensibly. Today, those who believe that the New Testament contains the word of God must, if they are informed, make their leap of faith from this same sort of reading. The believer must assume, that is, that God made use of Mark and the Q source and saw to it that Matthew and Luke combined and rewrote these documents in different ways, and so on.^d Difficult as such an assumption may be, I have no quarrel with it. Indeed one can argue sensibly that in order to put value into our world we all make such leaps to an absolute—whether from this particular set of religious writings or from other intellectual or emotional platforms.

Yet the question remains: Is the New Testament a better or a worse book for this kind of reading? Each student will have his or her own answer. Personally, I think it is much better—more complex, more interesting, more moving, more honest.

This article was adapted from the author’s book Awkward Reverence: Reading the New Testament Today (New York: Continuum, 1997).

Every other spring for the last dozen years I have taught an undergraduate course:

English 361The Bible as Literature: New TestamentSpring Semester. 3 hrs