The Story of Jesus - Roy A. Harrisville

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chorus of scholars is the contention that the space-time continuum to which we are all subject does not allow for interruption on the part of the transcendent, that if God is at work in creation, it is through the means available in ordinary, everyday life. In the last century, this view was given large space in the interpretation of the so-called mythical world-view of the Bible. That is, the view that the biblical understanding of the universe as comprised of the heavenly, earthly, and nether worlds, with humans subject to sorties from one or the other, had not been “baptized,” but represented a relic of antiquity, not to be jettisoned, as per the nineteenth century liberal understanding, but as “cradle” of the New Testament message to be reinterpreted in terms of human self-understanding. The reinterpretation was ingenious, and the influence of its principal adherents extended throughout Europe and the United States. Now, this so-called “existential” understanding has more or less given way to an earlier wholesale dismissal of the miraculous, “cradle” or no. But however liberal or “existential” the persuasion reveals two flaws. The first is that the miracles of healing and related narratives are treated as isolatable data, strung together at the whim of the evangelists, and whose purpose may or may not be to indicate the principal’s magical and therapeutic powers. If we do not submit to this notion, there must be some factor imposed on the narratives which yields a unity beyond, if not counter to that of historical sequence. Luke, for one, gives the clue. In his account of Jesus’ exorcism of the mute demon, he writes that some said “He casts out demons by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons,” to which Jesus replies: “If it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you (Luke 11:15, 20). It is the kingdom of God brought by Jesus which serves the Gospel writers their organizing principle, their “paradigm” respecting material which without it appears disjointed and unconnected. To this paradigm of the kingdom all the narratives of exorcism and healing are bent and warped. In response to the philosopher David Hume, in the New Testament the miraculous is not made “the foundation of a system of religion.”39 Rather, it is in the service of the kingdom brought by Jesus by which its authors intend to evoke faith in their hearers/readers. Clearly, from the lists above, in themselves those narratives have little unity, but when seen in relation to the kingdom as organizing principle they become an integrated whole. The failure to distinguish the historical data from the proclamation they are meant to serve has led to regarding the miracle narratives as evidence of the Christian community’s attempt to meet the demands of its hearers for material at any cost. Only by its service to the kingdom brought by Jesus does Hume’s dictum regarding the miraculous apply:

      the Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without them. Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: and whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.40

      We are used to listing and interpreting events in historical sequence. In fact, we demand it in the name of reason. The Gospel writers themselves give some, albeit modest, attention to historical sequence. Mark, despite gathering his material in “blocks,” for example, clustering his narratives of the exorcisms within the so-called “Galilean” period, and, with only one exception (the healing of blind Bartimaeus, Mark 10:46) listing all his healing narratives ahead of Jesus’ triumphal entry, thus giving Papias of Hierapolis (AD 70–163) occasion to write in his Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord that he did not compose his Gospel “in order” (ouch en taxei) nevertheless strictly adheres to days and hours in his narrative of the passion. But the Gospel writers saw an alternative beyond the linear (or the cyclic) in the paradigmatic. In this purely formal respect they were not unlike their pagan counterparts. What gave to their paradigm its power to embrace what was disparate was the kingdom of God, whose bringer and guarantor they confessed as Messiah and Son of God.

      The second flaw in current irritation over the miraculous is that of the rigid conservatism on the part of biblical scholarship which resists the arrival of the new, of change and alteration, in favor of the status quo. Clearly, toward the end of the Old Testament the miraculous retreats in favor of the mighty word, finally in favor of that word at second hand, in Judaism called the Bat Qol, “daughter of the voice.” The words of the later prophets are substituted for the mighty acts of the former prophets, of Moses and Elijah. But with the coming of Jesus a new time phase has begun, a phase in which the redemptive activity of God breaking into human history is made both visible and audible. Mighty acts reappear, harnessed to his proclamation that in him God has drawn near in a way never to be supplanted or surpassed. Conservatism, love for the status quo, resistance to the new, to the affirmation that in Jesus of Nazareth the coming Kingdom of God has broken in, may lurk behind relegating the miracle narratives of the New Testament to the mythical and legendary, allowing a shred for the exorcisms.

      The Gospels, to say nothing of the remainder of the New Testament, are strewn with references to the new, to the “new teaching,” the “new covenant,” “new tongues,” the “new commandment,” etc. The evangelists are convinced that the nature of the world would have remained essentially unchanged if Christ had not brought in the kingdom. Through his proclamation the powers formerly holding the world in thrall must give way, and what was once shrouded in obscurity can now be grasped and understood. Let an atheist thinker put period to the argument:

      What is peculiarly new in the Christian mythos is this, that there is no imitation of resurrection gods from ancient time, rather that the resurrection and the life, as the totally novum of history, should have emerged just now. Only the dead-living Jesus disclosed to his followers the renewal of the inner man from day to day (2 Cor. 2:16), and sustained the Christians with the words of the new heaven and the new earth (Is. 26). Only the star that never appeared before, and showed the Magi the way to an event that never happened before, shed light on the novum of the apocalypticist regarding the new Jerusalem, and the totally revolutionary word of its capitol city: “Behold, I make all things new (Rev. 22:5). Finally, only through the Bible did such a public and pivotally emerging idea of the Incipit vita nova come into the world. The youthful source of the fable did not spring up since time out of mind in some distant space or remembered age-old legend of Osiris or Attis. Rather, it emerged quite by itself, a novum in time, as if there had been nothing really new before Jesus, only a yearning for it, only signs, only expectation. As a later mystic formulated it: “The unbegotten God becomes in time/ what he never was in all eternity” (Silesius, Cherubinische Wandersmann, TV 1).41

      The Nature Miracles

      The Synoptists record Jesus’ stilling of the storm (Mark 4:35–41; Matt. 8:23–27, and Luke 8:22–25), and all four evangelists record the feeding of the five thousand (Mark 6:30–44; Matt. 14:13–21; Luke 9:10–17; John 6:1–15). Mark, Matthew and John record the narrative of Jesus’ walking on the water (Mark 6:45–53; Matthew 11:22–34; John 6:15–21). Mark and Matthew record the feeding of the four thousand (Mark 8:1–10; Matt. 15:32–50, and Jesus’ cursing the fig tree (Mark 11:12–14; Matt. 21:18–22). Matthew alone records the miracle of the fish and the temple tax (Matt. 17:24–27), and John alone records the miracle at Cana (John 2:1–12). These seven nature miracles are outnumbered by the exorcisms and miracles of healing, to the effect that the Gospel writers appear hesitant to lard their records with reports of events contradicting the course of nature, Matthew and Luke having already done so to a maximum with their accounts of Jesus’ conception and birth. Hence the question as to whether these miracles can be legitimated as serving the same “paradigm” of the kingdom as do the exorcisms and healing narratives, or are to be jettisoned as reflecting the influence of pagan, Hellenistic legend on the Jesus-tradition and its transmission. Perhaps Jesus’ cursing the fig tree requires symbolic interpretation, urging the question whether the Messiah will find fruit among a people given a half millennium since the Exile to get ready for him, and perhaps his guiding a single fish out of multiple schools to Peter’s hook with the precise amount in its mouth of the tax from which he was exempt can be construed as metaphor.

      The narrative of Jesus’ stilling the storm (Mark 4: 35–41; Matthew 8:24–27; Luke 8:22–25) may appear to some as absurd as a purple cow.42 Others may believe the story is true simply because it appears

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