Jesus Searching and Finding

This is part of a series I was doing (until interrupted) on Jesus Searching. It was a precursor for my reviews of N.T. Wright and E.P. Sanders, who I think seek to answer some of my objections here.

Can a biography of Jesus be written? Certainly it has been tried, but to no one's real satisfaction. Every Jesus scholar I've encountered tweaks his predecessor's view. I suppose in that regard scholarship is hardly different from the rest of us. 80% of Americans have their own personal Jesus, or so Gallup tells us. Even atheists are all nuanced in their acknowledgment of Jesus, who he was, what he meant. Jesus literature is as diverse as we are, and in the end I am convinced that Jesus is a concave mirror reflecting the light we would see in or out of ourselves.

In that regard, I suspect we may not be all that different from Jesus' contemporaries who themselves reflected tremendous diversity once the significance of Jesus was explained to them. I say "explained to them" because we possess no document that was actually written by a contemporary comrade of Jesus. We do have the writings of the converted Apostle Paul, and the liar Josephus who assured himself Roman salvation by proclaiming Vespasian the Messiah. Neither are quite contemporary.

I am forever grateful to David Hume and his argument against miracles, pointing to what should be self evident: super-natural phenomenon cannot interpret its own significance, much less its own theology. Somebody has to narrate it, and explain it. A miracle is at the mercy of the interpreter. One can say "Jesus rose from the dead." That could be a natural fact, let science and history work it out. But the moment you argue for its significance we are no longer in the realm of the occurrence, but of an interpretation of which there are so very many. How much human genius and effort has been put into this endeavor of interpretation over the centuries? It is a staggering thought.


Most Christians will disagree with me when I suggest that even the New Testament itself is too interpretively diverse to be contained by anything but a fiercely motivated literary hegemony; the kind of force that arose in Constantine and the council of Nicaea, that evolved into the historical truth of Christian power for over one thousand years, which began to subside during the reformation when it could be questioned. Thus today we witness a nearly total meltdown of orthodoxy as tradition lapses in our Democracies, and post modern relativism's reveal a Bible unable to consistently stand for anything other than the subjective view of the reader.

What distinguishes miracles from natural phenomenon? Could it be our sanction? Gravity exists whether I acknowledge it or not, but does Jesus? Christian miracles are hyper-sensitive to human approval, so unlike the natural awe inspiring power of Yahweh in the earliest writings (The book of J) of the Old testament who will be where he will be, and will not be where he won't. In a sense, early Hebrew writing is more scientific, and closer to the spirit of Hume, then is the Gospel of John for instance, recounting not only a (supposed) fact of Jesus' Resurrection, but a decree for others to believe in it. The New Testament as I read it is generally very anxious for a sanction from others. It is not self contained, but focused completely on the endorsement of otherness. In truth it tells others sometimes to take or leave it, but then I suspect there would be no miracle if all of us left it.

"Blessed are those who have not seen and believe..." John tells an anxious audience not too unlike Doubting Thomas, confronted with the delay of the "Parousia" the second coming of Jesus. I am speculating here, as elsewhere, since I am not a Bible Scholar. Even so this late verse, added (some scholars tell us) by some other redactor, seeks to calm an anxiety I often sense in the New Testament's total commitment to the immediate second coming.

2000 years later I can only ponder the peculiar power of interpretation and how necessary it has become, in order to justify an endless array of human disappointment over Jesus' failure to arrive. "Failure" is strong, but what else can it be without a strong theology that could turn it into victory? Nietzsche is the best I've read because he sensed the dangerous power of interpretation, as systems of cruelties, upon which we all suffered--indeed they could create memory but at a price. The memory I am left with is 2000 years of Christian rule and now decline. His cure, he acknowledged through a brutal self honesty was interpretive, leaving him in a hall of mirrors he never fully could manage.

The Miracle of Jesus' resurrecting is another kind of hall of mirrors that is easily managed it seems. Only the resurrected Jesus could in fact distinguish the object from the numerous reflections, and he is not here. I suspect that is why 80% of us have our own Jesus. We can approach Nietzsche but we shy away from his madness. We cannot approach Jesus, yet he is ours and can belong to any of us. This is its own kind of madness perhaps, but there are worse things.