Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (33 page)

The church of the Beloved Disciple had finally admitted that it could no longer go it alone, defending itself from attack only by means of its own informal intuitions and pentecostal resources, but had to accept some mechanism of human authority.
It needed more than the teaching of Jesus and the example of its Beloved Disciple. It needed the protection of the
Great Church and its shepherds, the nurturing
pastores
of whom Peter was representative.

There was a trade-off here. The
Johannine church, in accepting the protection of the Great Church, accepted its structures of authority and lost much of its freewheeling, Spirit-based pentecostalism. The Great Church, never so interested in theory as in practice, accepted the elaborate Christology and, after much debate, accepted alongside its own growing library of apostolic writings the peculiar literature of the church of the Beloved Disciple.

O
F
THE
MANY
ENIGMAS
of John’s Gospel nothing is more mysterious than the story that does not belong there. It interrupts the flow of John’s tightly stitched scheme of narration, and though, like many Johannine episodes, it gives a starring role to a woman, its supple Greek has all the characteristics of Luke’s pen:

This entire passage sounds like the Synoptics and could easily be slipped into Luke’s Gospel at 21:38, where it would make a perfect fit. It was, in fact, excised from Luke, after which it floated around the Christian churches without a proper home, till some scribe squeezed it into a manuscript of John, where he thought it might best belong. But why was it excised in the first place? Because the early Church did not forgive adultery (and other major sins) and did not wish to propagate the contradictory impression that the Lord forgave what the Church refused to forgive. The
Great Church quickly became far more interested in discipline and order than Jesus had ever shown himself to be. This excision is our first recorded instance of ecclesiastical censorship—only for the best reasons, of course (which is how censors
always justify themselves). The anarchic
Johannine church had had good reason for its reluctance to attach itself to the
Great Church, which it knew would clip its wings; and for all we know, it was a Johannine scribe who crammed the story of the aborted stoning into a copy of John’s Gospel, thus saving it for posterity.

The passage itself shows up the tyrannical mindlessness that tradition, custom, and authority can exercise within a society. The text of the
Torah that the scribes and
Pharisees cite to Jesus is Leviticus 20:10, which reads, “The man who commits adultery with his neighbor’s wife will be put to death, he and the woman.” Jesus, doodler in the dust and reader of hearts, knows the hard, unjust, and self-deceiving hearts he is dealing with. He does not bother to dispute the text with them, by which he could have asked the obvious question “How can you catch a woman
in the act
without managing to catch her male partner?” He goes straight to the heart of the matter: the bad conscience of each individual, the ultimate reason no one has the right to judge anyone else.

How marvelous that in the midst of John’s sometimes oppressive solemnities, the wry and smiling Jesus of the Synoptic gospels, the Jesus the apostles knew, the holy fool, still plays his holy game, winning his laughing victory over the stunned and stupid forces of evil. This is the same Jesus who tells us that hell is filled with those who turned their backs on the poor and needy—the very people they were meant to help—but that, no matter what the Church may have taught in the many periods of its long, eventful history, no matter what a given society may deem “sexual transgression,” hell is not filled with those who, for whatever reason, awoke in the wrong bed.

Nor does he condemn us.

As we look back over Christianity’s first hundred years—from the birth of Jesus in the reign of Caesar Augustus to the final editing of John’s Gospel (and the last of the New Testament letters) about the year 100—we see what seems an abnormally rapid-fire development. Jesus the Jewish prophet, who accepted the judgment of others that he was their
Messiah (and may even have promoted this identification), was executed by the Romans in a manner so hideous that his followers could never forget it. Their subsequent claim that “he is risen” did not fall upon deaf ears but convinced many; and their small Palestinian sect grew into a movement that spread like scattered seeds through the Roman world, taking root especially in urban centers with substantial Jewish populations.

The religion of these adherents, who came to be called “Christians,” appeared at first to be a somewhat kinky variety of Judaism but gradually grew away from
orthodox Jewish tenets, not so much in its ethical concerns, which remained focused on characteristically Jewish values of
justice,
mercy,
charity, and
brotherhood, but in its innovative theology, which took Jesus to be not only Messiah but Lord of the Universe who sits at God’s right hand. The closer the Christians came to deifying Jesus, the more they tended to alienate the Jews from whom they had sprung. The longer the Christians meditated on the events of Jesus’s life and death and their subsequent experiences of his “resurrection,” the higher he seemed to rise in the heavens, till they began to acclaim him not only “Savior of the World” but “God’s Only Son,” whose sufferings had redeemed us from sin and whose resurrection held out the promise of our own.

The writings these Christians began to collect—narrations
about Jesus and the first Christians, letters of exhortation and encouragement by early “apostolic” figures—gradually took on for them a sacred character, not unlike the character of the Jewish scriptures, the so-called
Hebrew Bible—which the Christians continued to revere and read aloud at their meetings (and interpret from their own idiosyncratic theological perspective). The new writings would over the succeeding centuries be gathered into a definitive collection, called the “
New Testament” and appended to the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures that they now called the “Old Testament.” The first five books of this New Testament—the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and Luke’s Acts—became for Christians the new Torah, as the apostolic letters became the new Prophets, with
Paul, the most important, at their head, just as
Isaiah stood at the head of the Hebrew Prophets. The New Testament, at about one-third the length of the Old, contains no equivalent of the Writings, the third-ranking part of the Hebrew Bible, though the
Book of Revelation, which closes the collection, is closely imitative of the apocalyptic Hebrew Prophecy of Daniel.

These books and letters of the New Testament are of varying quality and importance. Because they are the work of many hands, they exhibit some of the quirks and contradictions of the Old Testament, the story of whose composition spans more than a millennium and a half. But because they were written over a fifty-year period by two generations of authors, many of whom had some contact with one another, they also exhibit a marked consistency and even unity.

In nothing is their unity so evident as in their portrayal of Jesus. Though he is presented in various lights and shadows, depending on the concerns, personality, and skill of each author, he exudes even under this treatment a remarkable consistency, so that we feel on finishing his story, whether it is told well or
badly, simply or extravagantly, that we know the man—and that in each telling he is identifiably the same man. This phenomenon of consistency beneath the differences makes Jesus a unique figure in world literature: never have so many writers managed to convey the same impression of the same human being over and over again. More than this, Jesus—what he says, what he does—is almost always comprehensible to the reader, who needs no introduction, no scholarly background, to penetrate the meaning of Jesus’s words and actions. The Sermon on the Mount, the Good Samaritan, the Washing of the Feet, the Empty Tomb: all these and many more gestures, instructions, and symbols are immediately intelligible not only to the simplest reader but even to the unlettered and the immature.

There is no other body of literature approaching its two thousandth birthday of which the same may be said. The works of the Hellenistic historians, the Roman poets, and even the rabbinic commentators of the same period require learned introductions and a mass of accompanying footnotes to be penetrated by a reader of the twenty-first century. To appreciate how singular the gospels are, one should also attempt to comprehend a work like Virgil’s
Aeneid
, written within a hundred years of the gospels but today requiring months of study of its cultural setting if one is to reach an elementary understanding of its meaning.

What especially makes the gospels—from a literary point of view—works like no others is that they are about a good human being. As every writer knows, such a creature is all but impossible to capture on the page, and there are exceedingly few figures in all literature who are both good and memorable. Yet the evangelists, who left no juvenilia behind them—no failed novels, rhythmless poems, or other early works by which we might judge their progress as writers—whose Greek was often odd or
imprecise, and who were not practiced writers of any sort, these four succeeded where almost all others have failed. To a writer’s eyes, this feat is a miracle just a little short of raising the dead.

In nothing do the evangelists succeed so unabashedly as in their depictions of Jesus’s
sufferings, their careful, step-by-step recountings of his arrest, interrogations, torture, humiliation before hostile crowds, condemnation, the public parade in which he is conscripted to carry the splintery instrument of his own death, his
crucifixion with spikes, his slow dying, displayed to all in his death agony. If, as the Roman centurion admits after he is dead, “This man was truly God’s son,” then the Father chose for this son of his a time to be born in which one might die by the most painful means that human beings have ever devised.

So intense was the suffering of Jesus before and during his crucifixion that the early Christians could not bring themselves to depict it. We have, almost from the very beginning of Christianity, Christian art—pictures that form a distinctively Christian message: in grave slabs as early as the first century we see the Church depicted as the saving ark of Noah, the Holy Spirit depicted as the descending dove of Acts, and figures of early Christians, both men and women, praying with uplifted hands, as Muslims still do today. In the catacombs, we find a crumbling mosaic of Christ as the Unconquered Sun (an image borrowed from ancient mythologies), a quickly daubed Good Shepherd, many portrayals of the Last Supper, even a tender fresco of the Madonna and Child. But nowhere is there a crucifixion scene. The first one ever will be carved in wood as one of many scenes from Jesus’s life—in a side door of the exquisite basilica of Santa Sabina, a Roman church of the fifth century that stands on the Aventine Hill. It will take the early Christians four centuries to bring themselves to portray the crucifixion of
their
Messiah. By the time they get around to it,
Augustine of Hippo lies dying, the barbarian hordes are overrunning the empire, and Patrick is in Gaul making his fateful travel plans to evangelize the Irish. By the time they get around to it, in other words, they are no longer early Christians; they are already on the verge of the Middle Ages. And still they are careful not to let this abomination occupy a central place in their churches.

This central fact of Jesus’s life, his grisly suffering and death, traumatized the first Christians; and even though it was the central reality they had to contend with, they could not look at it directly.
Crucifixion was the ultimate form of Roman humiliation; and to understand it properly, we have to imagine a grove of huge poles set up in a central thoroughfare, where any day as we pass by we may see fellow citizens pinned to the poles with great iron nails, pierced through their joints, ripped open and left to be drained of blood as if they were animal carcasses. Every day freshly crucified victims appear on the poles as the old victims expire and are carted off for burial. The crucified men, twisted, bloody torsos stripped for all to see, anti-Adonises, writhe and grimace most horribly in their pain. Delicate citizens pass by quickly with averted eyes, while the more sportive and cruel among us taunt the nailed men, in the same way that people today stand outside prisons to scream at criminals on their way to the gas chamber, the electric chair, the lethal injection—the way people always gathered eagerly in ages past to witness public executions. We spit on the pierced men and tell them how happy their pain makes us, how richly they deserve it, that our only wish is to see their dying last as long as possible.

Not only their clothes but what
John the Elder calls “the pride of life,” the rightful pride that every man (especially a man as young as Jesus, in his early thirties) takes in his own body and
bearing, has been stripped from these utterly naked men. The public, physical humiliation—beginning with the flogging of Jesus by Roman centurions, the mock crowning with thorns (which were pressed down into Jesus’s scalp), and all that followed—this was a trauma not only to Jesus’s followers but to Jesus, to his soul as well as his body. Lest he should miss out on even the worst psychological torment he could possibly experience, the Father himself—his
Abba
, whom Jesus always felt to be with him—withdrew his presence, forcing Jesus to cry out accusingly not long before his death in the words of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you deserted me?” (The great American biblical scholar
Raymond Brown used to remark that there is no human being who does not utter the words of this prayer sooner or later. But we, unlike Jesus, have good reason to expect God’s absence.) What could anyone add by way of further suffering?