up?
Radicals, revolutionaries and Tony Blair all lay claim to Christ. Peter Stanford asks who’s right
Seated before a stage built to resemble a giant Christmas crib, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on Saturday December 4 opened the millennium celebrations in the town of Bethlehem, where tradition has it that Christ was born. A band played the Palestinian national anthem in Manger Square to launch the festivities which will reach their climax on New Year’s Eve, when, to the accompaniment of choirs from Kenya, Cuba, Russia and Portugal, 2 000 doves of peace will be released into the night sky. It is an image that will be broadcast around the world to rival in significance the passing of midnight at Greenwich, the millennium’s ground zero.
Bethlehem’s claim to be the spiritual centre of the millennium is not unchallenged – for it is by no means certain Jesus was born there. Mark’s gospel has his birthplace in Nazareth, while many historians suggest he was a native of Sepphoris, then the largest town in Galilee.
For a figure who has exerted such a powerful influence on civilisation, Jesus as a historical figure remains remarkably elusive. While Christ’s is ostensibly the best-known life in the world, he comes across in the New Testament as curiously two-dimensional, portrayed in terms of his good deeds and homilies rather than personality. These are at best second-hand documents, written at least 30 years after his death. Jesus, almost alone of those who have influenced our world, put nothing down on paper.
And now, as the third millennium beckons, the number of those staking ownership of Jesus as the embodiment of their particular ideology is multiplying. They include the 30-million Christian fundamentalists in the United States; Pope John Paul II with his claims to a God-given right to dictate personal morality; British Prime Minister Tony Blair with his talk of Christian socialism as a Third Way; and popular political movements in places as diverse as East Timor and Brazil where the Christ of the gospels is foremost a rebel struggling for liberation.
And in the postmodern mix and match – fuelled as much by art, theatre, film and agitprop as by modern archaeology and radical theology – we are presented with portrayals unsupportable by any evidence. They include gay Jesus, married Jesus, Christ as a woman and the veggie Messiah. Now, as the celebration of his notional birthdate is approaching rapidly, would the real Jesus please step forward?
The annexation of the figure of Jesus and his teachings has been going on from the start of Christian history, when St Paul and St Peter took what they said was the message of a prophet named Jesus and turned a Jewish sect into something universal and enduring.
But Paul’s letters contribute very little to a biographical sense of Jesus or his words. Only two passages give information about the historical Jesus. Paul concentrated on drawing from Jewish, Greek and Near Eastern sources a moral and religious code that was to carry Jesus’s name and be branded by the potent symbol of his dying figure on the cross. Other gospel writers – whose outpourings postdate many of Paul’s letters – also played fast and loose with the figure of Jesus. Mark was the first to try to rectify the absence of an account of Christ’s life around 60 AD.
His version, which began with Jesus being dipped in the river by John the Baptist, is to the point; Matthew, who copied much from Mark, adds a back story – probably fanciful – of Bethlehem and the manger to fit his subject into the genealogical line of Jewish leaders stretching back to Abraham and David. And Matthew puts words into Jesus’s mouth to match the prophecies of the Old Testament.
Luke continued this process, with a little more poetic lan. And in 100 AD, John brought into the story new poignant episodes, from a wedding feast at Cana to his special relationship with Mary Magdalene as symbolised by their encounter outside the tomb. What they agree on, however, is that Jesus died and rose from the dead three days later. Paul claimed to have seen the risen Christ. This is the key fact in Christian history. Yet, while the crucifixion can be checked against secular sources – Tacitus and Pliny, or the Jewish Josephus – the resurrection comes without any independent verification.
The storm that greeted the former bishop of Durham’s efforts in the 1980s to deal with this anomaly by explaining it as a symbolic event illustrated how sacrosanct a literal, if technically unsustainable, belief in the resurrection has become for Christianity. For, while mainstream churches sneer at the fundamentalists who insist that every word of the Bible is true, the Catholic and Protestant establishments still insist some of the Good Book must be taken as read.
But marginalising the former bishop and ridiculing the fundamentalists is no longer enough to maintain this church monopoly. For we have seen an explosion of academic exploration around the historical figure of Jesus that has left his reputation bruised and battered.
It has been fuelled by two discoveries. In 1945, Egyptian farmers at Nag Hammadi on the banks of the Nile unearthed a first- century papyrus text, known as the gospel of Thomas, which claims to collect Jesus’s sayings. Then, two years later, a Bedouin shepherd boy at Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea stumbled on scrolls in a cave that record the life and times of an ascetic Jewish sect at the time of Jesus.
It took many years for full access to these finds to be granted, but by 1992, Australian Barbara Thiering – who had spent 20 years studying the Dead Sea scrolls – claimed to have discovered a cipher to detect their meaning and thereby scupper any idea of a bodily resurrection.
In her bestseller Jesus the Man she wrote of how at the crucifixion Jesus was given a potion whereby, although he seemed to die, he simply lost consciousness. He was later revived, settled down with Mary Magdalene and lived to a ripe old age trading on having risen from the dead.
Another scroll ”expert”, US Professor Robert Eisenman, used the same documents in 1997 to push another theory – that Jesus’s younger brother James, his anointed successor, was tricked out of his inheritance by Paul and Peter, who betrayed Jesus’s Jewishness to turn his legacy into a multiracial multinational.
But from Nag Hammadi has come a potentially more fruitful approach. The gospel of Thomas concentrates on what it says are Jesus’s words. There is no mention of virgin births or resurrections, but an insistence on making this world a better place, warnings against wealth and a comfortable life, and the suggestion that heaven is to be found in the here and now, not the hereafter. Jesus becomes less the crucified and risen Lord and more an inspiring spiritual master with a timeless message for humanity.
But if Jesus is to rise again out of the mire of historical controversy, denominational interpretations and disputes about a bodily resurrection, the approach of the gospel of Thomas has obvious appeal. Although a secular world may be turning its back on religion, there is evidence that the search for spiritual sustenance continues with all the intensity it once generated in houses of God. It will be difficult for organised Christianity to take on board this privatisation of Jesus. To have endured 2 000 years is its proudest boast and is presented as evidence its claims must be true. Millennium celebrations can only re-emphasise that trend, but they might also prompt a reassessment of what is divisive and may be no longer sustainable.
The mainstream churches are fighting a losing battle to use the New Testament to shore up their own and Jesus’s authority. A recent seminar by a group of US Bible scholars graded the sections of the gospels red, pink or black on the basis of whether they were historically justified, possible or an obvious fabrication. There was not a single red passage in John – only 18% even made it to pink.
Peter Stanford’s The She-Pope, an investigation of the medieval legend of Pope Joan, is published in paperback by Arrow
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