|
Spring
Books Search for 'real' Jesus opens door to divine
JESUS: THE
EVIDENCE The Latest Research and Discoveries By Ian
Wilson HarperSanFrancisco, 206 pages, cloth,
$27.50 |
THE ORIGINAL
JESUS By Tom Wright William B. Eerdmans, 160 pages, cloth,
$20 |
By JUDITH BROMBERG
"Just who was Jesus? And to what extent was he, is he God's son?
... These questions were potent enough causes of squabbling among the Nicea
delegates back in the year 325 AD. But they remain every bit as difficult and
controversial to this very day" (Wilson).
"Just who was Jesus?" is the question grounding two brand new
books -- Jesus: The Evidence by Ian Wilson and The Original Jesus
by Tom Wright.
Interest in the historical Jesus is currently high, from the Jesus
Seminar, making news from time to time about what Jesus apparently did or did
not actually say, to recent cover stories in major periodicals. Still,
questions abound. As Wright says, "Just what should anyone believe about
Jesus?" and "How can the death of a man 2,000 years ago, in another culture and
another place, be relevant for me at this end of the 20th century?"
Wilson's book, which addresses these questions and many more, is a
revision of his 1984 bestseller by the same title. Wright's volume grew out of
a collaboration with the BBC on a recent sequence of programs on Jesus. Wilson
employs painstaking scholarship, offering data and reasoned analysis in writing
his fascinating and eminently readable Jesus: The Evidence. Even so,
sometimes the answers that come up are simply, "We don't know for sure."
Wright's The Original Jesus, equally well-written, is more
a cultural analysis of some of the stories by and about Jesus that sheds new
light on the familiar tales. Wright is more willing to be definitive in some of
his conclusions, his position being: Yes, we do know, but for the sake of this
volume, you'll have to take my word for it. He acknowledges in his preface the
need to "explain things in more detail," and to this end directs us to some
other works of his as well as an abundance of additional sources.
Both writers readily acknowledge their Christian faith, but Wilson
writes principally as a historian, not sidestepping messy questions and
answers, whereas Wright speaks more as the pastor that he is as dean of
Lichfield Cathedral in Staffordshire, England. Both books are gorgeously
presented, richly illustrated and visually pleasing as well as intellectually
stimulating.
Both writers employ archaeological, cultural and supporting
evidence, not the least of which is the Jewish historian and contemporary of
Jesus, Josephus, whose Antiquities confirms nothing less than the actual
existence of Jesus and the small "cult" of followers that bore his name.
And how did this "cult" develop? What was it that caused people to
believe in him, to follow him and eventually to even die for him? Both writers
conclude that at the very least Jesus must have been on some political fringe
to explain certain events, one of which was the triumphal ride into Jerusalem.
The Jews, under Roman occupation at this time, were desperate for a public
hero. Nothing short of a political rally would have explained those crowds and
adulation that day. Wright gives the political theory more play than Wilson and
supposes that because Jesus spent so much time in the hills around Galilee,
known hangouts for guerrillas in the Jewish warfare against the Romans, that he
wanted, intended even, to be identified with these leftists. He goes on to
unpack several parables in this light to suggest that Jesus used political
rabble-rousing as a metaphor for the spiritual anarchy he was about to unleash
-- nothing short of a new and radically different way of thinking about and
living one's life.
While acknowledging the political potential in Jesus' public life,
Wilson leans more to the miracles to explain his notoriety. But what about
those healings? "Hypnosis!" Wilson suggests, might go a long way to explain
what was happening, and he examines several "miracles" from this hypothesis
even to the extent of suggesting that Jesus had such charisma and power of
persuasion that he could make a crowd of inebriates believe they were drinking
fine wine. If this is true, you have to admire Jesus' chutzpah in pulling this
one off.
So, if the miracles can be extenuated as hypnosis, what about that
most highly charged aspect of Jesus' personhood, his divinity?
When asked the question, "Can you, as a historian, say Jesus is
God?" Tom Wright (he's the churchman, remember) responds that it is a good
question, but just not the right question. It assumes, he says, "that we know
who God is, and we don't." But, he is quick to add, "We can discover God by
looking at Jesus. At the heart of the Christian faith is the view not that
Jesus is more or less like God, but that that being we refer to as 'God' was
and is fully present and fully discoverable in and as Jesus of Nazareth."
On the same God question, Wilson, typically of the style of his
entire book, takes us down a path littered with all the reasons Jesus was
probably not God, even including Jesus' own disclaimers, but then gradually
Wilson bends that road and reasoning so that we effectively travel Wilson's own
path from agnosticism to belief. He sums it up this way: "In a way still beyond
human understanding, two thousand years ago some of God was made flesh in
(Jesus) and shone through him and spoke through him ... and because he was such
a perfect vessel of God, on death, he did not die as other humankind, but
passed through that so illusory barrier to become the open door to the divine
and to the eternal values of truth and love."
Of all the questions swirling around Jesus -- the virginity of his
mother, possible siblings, environment of his upbringing, his sense of mission,
political methodologies and his rising from the dead -- one fact remains
incontrovertible: that however much or little can be pieced together, however
many questions remain unanswerable, Jesus, after 2,000 years, is still the most
"influential individual there has ever been in all history." And to the
ever-present question from the gospels to Wilson and Wright, "Who do you say
that I am?" -- speaking for myself, I say, after reading these two wonderful
books, that Jesus must have been one fascinating guy, one whom I wish I had
known in the flesh.
Judith Bromberg is a frequent contributor of book reviews
in NCR.
National Catholic Reporter, February 7,
1997
|
|