Bible Books

044

A Map Through the Minefield

The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide

Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz translated by John Bowden
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996) 642 pp., $65.00

Scholars have long attempted to penetrate the narratives, metaphors, symbols and theology of the Gospels in order to weave an account of the life, teachings and work of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. Because the sources are relatively sparse and difficult to interpret, and because the interests, intellectual assumptions, methodological approaches and cultural views of the writers differ sharply from one another, the Jesus of one book often bears little resemblance to another, much to the consternation of the public.

In response, Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz have set “out to present the way in which scholars study Jesus—not only the results they arrive at but also the process by which they acquire their knowledge.” Their comprehensive approach requires considerable patience; finally, however, after 612 pages they make their point! But the effort is worth it. Theissen, one of the most influential and original social historians of the New Testament, and Merz, his former student, have provided a survey of international research and an approach that drives readers to examine the difficult issues. They give some tentative solutions, but more importantly, they furnish a map through the minefield of modern historical scholarship on Jesus.

The Historical Jesus considers the ancient sources on the life of Jesus; the historical, religious, chronological, geographical and social framework for a study of Jesus; the activity and preaching of Jesus as a charismatic (his social relationships), prophet (of the kingdom of God), healer (his miracles), poet (his parables) and teacher of ethics and law; and finally the Passion and Easter experience of Jesus and his followers.

Theissen and Merz rely on canonical and noncanonical sources and accept the hypothetical pre-gospel sayings source known as “Q”^a as “certainly the most important [source] for reconstructing the teaching of Jesus.” They also conclude from the Gospel of Thomas (a first- or second-century collection of Jesus’ Wisdom and prophetic sayings, including some with a Gnostic tendency)^b that Jesus did not use Christological titles for himself and that he led an itinerant charismatic movement (a fundamental thesis of Theissen’s earlier work on the Jesus movement). Ancient non-Christian sources offer no new information, but they do confirm that Jesus lived, that James was his brother, that Jesus died a violent death, worked miracles and taught, and that people applied titles to him. Contrary to skeptics who doubt that we can reconstruct the historical Jesus, Theissen stresses the reliability and sophistication of modern historical methods and “the sociological continuity between Jesus and earliest Christianity,” since both Jesus and his earliest followers were wandering charismatics.

The Historical Jesus also elucidates the Palestinian world of Jesus and his activities within, and his relationships with, this world. Galilee was “a Jewish enclave” oriented to the Temple. Though relatively peaceful, it was nevertheless plagued by political, social and economic tensions between rural folk and urbanites in Hellenistic cities. The 045Aramaic-speaking Jesus was an itinerant preacher among the Jews of the Galilean countryside; his movement was both a renewal movement (the Pharisees formed another) and a political movement with potentially explosive messianic hopes for a charismatic liberator. We can know about Jesus, Theissen and Merz write, by analyzing his relationships with his mentor, John the Baptist, his disciples, the people (the authors include a special section on women) and his opponents. Within this social context, Jesus functioned as a “charismatic who performed miracles with a message of salvation for the poor and marginalized” and passed on his charisma to his disciples.

Jesus used the kingdom of God as a symbol of his message of salvation. The kingdom of God, according to Theissen, synthesizes all the tensions in Jesus’ teaching. It exists in both the present and the future and is concerned with both salvation and judgment, and with divine initiative and human effort. God is both active and mediated (for example, by the Son of Man). The kingdom of God is both political (it includes Gentiles) and religious (it extends beyond death). It is led by rulers, yet it is for all.

Theissen and Merz’s treatment of Jesus’ death provides a historically plausible alternative to the older, anti-Jewish claim that the Jews killed Jesus and the more recent counterclaim that the Jews had nothing to do with Jesus’ death. The appropriate historical question is not about guilt for Jesus’ death, but responsibility for Jesus’ execution. That responsibility lay primarily with the Romans, who distrusted Jesus because of political concerns. However, they were galvanized by Jerusalem’s local aristocracy, who were offended by Jesus’ anti-Temple prophecy and considered him a false prophet. Jesus was no Zealot revolutionary, but he did contribute to his fate by his actions, especially his risky trip to Jerusalem. A fuller picture is that Jesus “became a victim of structural conflicts between city and country, Jews and Romans, people and aristocracy.”

The German authors of this guide are especially sensitive to the long Christian anti-Jewish theological tradition and to Christian anti-Semitism. They call for a change in how Christianity understands itself. Historically and theologically, Jesus belongs to Judaism. Jews believed in him, but he also became the foundation of Christianity. Thus, Jesus belongs to two religions. Both faiths share the themes of life in dialogue with the one and only God and of ethical responsibility for the world and society. A Christianity that follows in the footsteps of Jesus is concerned with both these things and can remain true to itself only if it remains true to its Jewish roots, if it perceives its social responsibility and if it understands the Jesus tradition as a chance to continue the dialogue with God.

God: Stories

Edited by C. Michael Curtis
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998) 416 pp., $30.00 (hardback), $14.00 (paperback)

The Catholic novelist and short-story writer Flannery O’Connor told a college audience in 1963, “We live in an unbelieving age, but one which is markedly and lopsidedly spiritual.” O’Connor’s words seem no less true today than they were in the volatile ’60s. Ours is a society that is force-fed secularism, and yet, in our confusing, violent and immodest times, we are ever searching for spiritual strength and reassurance.

How appropriate and timely, then, that C. Michael Curtis, the fiction editor of the Atlantic, should assemble this anthology of 25 short stories about the spiritual life. Scan the table of contents, and you will find some of the greatest story writers of our century—John Updike, Eudora Welty, William Trevor, Bernard Malamud and James Joyce, to name just a few—wrestling with the idea of God.

In some of these stories, man’s relationship with God is stiflingly austere; to 046live piously, one must renounce even the simple pleasures of everyday life. The narrator of Elizabeth Spencer’s understated gem, “A Christian Education,” recalls his childhood in rural Mississippi, where it is considered sinful to venture downtown on Sundays: The town’s drugstore, barbershop and filling station remain defiantly open on the Christian Sabbath. But when his parents are away at a funeral one Sunday, the narrator skips Sunday school and accompanies his grandfather, who seldom goes to church, on an excursion downtown, where he enjoys a sinful strawberry ice cream cone, “a thing too wondrous actually to have eaten.” This amounts to religious treason, for Spencer’s Mississippi Christians stand in opposition to St. Augustine’s belief that the physical, sensual world is invested with the presence of the divine. Rather, piety means a firm repudiation of the objects of that world, even something as seemingly harmless as an ice cream cone.

In “God’s Typhoon,” by John Hersey, the presence of God is palpable in the phenomena of the natural world, particularly, for the story’s narrator, in the arboretum belonging to the Reverend Doctor Josephus P. Wynam. The story is set in wartime China, on the coast of the North China Sea, in an enclave protected by American and British troops. The narrator, a boy during the war, attends Dr. Wynam’s “interminable sermons,” in which the reverend portrays a vengeful God who is “suspicious and angry.” But in the arboretum—that “exquisite little forest” of evergreens, firs and cedars—the narrator feels the religious rapture missing from Dr. Wynam’s sermons.

At the story’s climax, a devastating typhoon destroys the Edenic garden and kills Dr. Wynam. The narrator observes with wonderment as the storm ravages a cottage: “[It] was ripped off in pieces, and huge sheets of metal and scraps of wood and branches of trees and a million fragments of everything rose and revolved and fell, until another house was hit, and after that…” The narrator’s paratactic syntax, which we find in much biblical poetry, infuses this natural disaster with an element of the divine. Sure enough, amid the swirling winds and the violent rainfall, the narrator hears a “roar that sounded…just like Dr. Wynam’s rage.”

Philip Roth’s perfectly crafted “Defender of the Faith” shows that God can be used, manipulated even, by those who wish to persevere in an alien and hostile world. The story, set in an Army camp in 1940s Missouri, is told by Sergeant Nathan Marx, an American Jew who has seen combat in Germany, a man whose hardened exterior, shaped by rigid military protocol, is at odds with the Jewish soul it conceals. Marx’s nemesis is a 19-year-old New York Jew, Private Sheldon Grossbart, who lies, cheats and manipulates—all in the name of Judaism—refusing to assimilate and remaining determined to carve out an easier existence for himself at the camp. Grossbart’s cunning brings out in Marx—a defender of Army protocol as much as the young private claims to be a defender of the Jewish faith—a certain vindictiveness: the power to himself manipulate, to exact revenge.

The clergy are well represented in this collection, perhaps most memorably in the person of Father Leo, in Tobias Wolff’s “The Missing Person.” Convinced “that as a priest he would be necessary to people,” Father Leo becomes the chaplain at a crumbling convent in Washington State, a place with old pipes, warped window frames and a cracked foundation. (The deterioration of 047the building’s physical exterior signifies the spiritual ruin prevalent inside.) But here, Father Leo is virtually ignored and of no spiritual use to anyone. He eventually finds his way to the decadent streets of Las Vegas, where, abandoned and angry, he ends up comforting a lonely, sunburned woman desperate for companionship. Here, in the unlikeliest of places, Father Leo actually fulfills his calling. Las Vegas becomes, in Wolff’s artful hands, a metaphor for the world itself, a world in which events are predetermined and in which man must come to terms with the inevitability of fate. “This is a terrible place,” Father Leo says of Sin City. “It’s dangerous, and everything is set up so you can’t win.”

The disjunction between the ideal and the real is even more poignant in John Updike’s heartbreaking “Made in Heaven.” Brad Schaeffer—wealthy, successful, married to the shy and uncertain Jeanette Henderson—faithfully attends church with his wife, not because he seeks spiritual salvation, but because he enjoys his place among an upscale Episcopalian congregation, among “the ruddy men with their blue blazers and ever-fresh haircuts, the sleek Episcopalian women with their furs in winter and in summer their wide pastel garden hats that showed the backs of their necks when they bowed their heads.”

But after a long and seemingly happy life, Brad is shocked to hear Jeanette’s deathbed confession: that she has long since given up her faith, that she did so when he married her and took her away from her own church, her own independent religious life. He feels Jeanette’s confession as a stinging betrayal, which shatters what he has always thought to be a picture-postcard existence. In the story’s final pages, Brad discovers that his life has been hollow, empty and wasted. He is like Orpheus, who feels the presence of his beloved trailing behind him through the underworld, only to see her receding from him forever. Only Brad’s realization is even more devastating: Unlike Eurydice, Jeanette has never been by her lover’s side at all.

Nearly all of this volume’s stories—which span tragedy, comedy and philosophical inquiry—are rife with wisdom and narrative skill. But ultimately, this book is not so much about God as it is about man’s struggle to comprehend the divine. As Flannery O’Connor said, “Pain is pain, joy is joy, love is love, and these human conditions are stronger than any mere religious belief.”

A Map Through the Minefield

The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide