Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age. James Carroll

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СКАЧАТЬ texts of Jewish religious understanding, from Jeremiah to Daniel. Nowhere is that clearer than in the Gospel of Mark, which is reliably dated by scholars, as noted, to about the year 70—a time when, after more than two years of Roman rampage throughout Palestine, all hell broke loose in Jerusalem. Mark is the main source of, and template for, the later Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Mark’s rendering of Jesus, and its proclamation of his meaning as the “Christ,” are the central pillars of the Christian imagination. Yet Mark is rarely read in the context of the war raging outside the cell in which it was composed—an omission we found unthinkable in the case of Bonhoeffer’s letters from prison. A foregrounding eye on the Roman War against the Jews must change the Christian reading.

      The point to emphasize is that the author of Mark was writing as the legion’s phalanxes closed in on Jerusalem, setting up the ring of crucifixes around the Temple Mount and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Jews.⁵⁰ If in the Gospel of Mark, to start with the largest point, Jesus is portrayed as obsessed with the traumas of the End Time, it may be because, as an apocalyptic messianic figure, that was indeed the main note of his preaching when he was alive. The early sources on which the author of Mark drew seem to have emphatically interpreted Jesus within the Jewish apocalyptic genre, especially Daniel, whether that interpretation began with Jesus himself or with those who came after him.

      Yet however much Mark drew on the visions of Daniel, his text could not be more different. While Jesus describes in vivid detail scenes right out of an apocalyptic End Time, he is shown doing so without a hint of hallucination—not “vision,” but dead-on description. The Gospel is starkly realistic, striking for its spare, objective reportage. Taking seriously the context out of which this text emerged leads inexorably to the thought that Jesus was rendered by Mark as obsessed with End Time traumas not only—or even mainly—because of literary influences from preexistent Jewish apocalyptic genres like Daniel, but because the catastrophic End Time seemed at hand as Mark’s story was told. The Roman assault of 70, that is, could well have felt, to those who experienced it, like the end of the world.

Mark’s Apocalypse

      Chapter 13 of Mark is the heart of it, and what Jesus is shown offering at great length there can be read, in fact, as an almost literal description of what was happening to the people for whom Mark was written. Horrors—not hallucination. The chapter begins with verses already referred to, the “great buildings” of the Temple thrown down, “not one stone left upon another.” In fact, the Roman destruction of the Temple was by fire, not block-by-block demolition, but that takes nothing from the trauma Jesus describes. The ruination of the Holy of Holies is the point, and the factual destruction of the Temple in 70 is the historical background for the poignant advice that Jesus is shown offering to his frightened disciples, less to those in front of him than to his followers a generation later: “Take heed that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray.”

      Here we have reference to those war-generated disputes between and among Jews, with Zealots not hesitating to kill those they regarded as collaborators or as cowards. Self-anointed Messiahs appeared in abundance during the mayhem, and if you were not with them, they were against you. In the dominant Christian memory, these verses of antagonism are read as if the assaults are coming from “Jews” attacking the followers of Jesus as such, but the assaults at issue actually—that is, when Mark is written—come from two directions: from warrior Jews attacking Jews not as Jesus people, but as rejecters of the anti-Roman rebellion; and, always, assaults coming indiscriminately from Romans, who were crucifying five hundred Jews every day.⁵¹

      Listen to Jesus, forewarning: “For they will deliver you up to councils; and you will be beaten in synagogues . . . Brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But he who endures to the end will be saved.”⁵²

      Unlike other Gospels, Mark does not offer any account of the origins of Jesus, but is satisfied simply to announce his arrival “from Nazareth of Galilee.”⁵³ Recall that the Roman War against the Jews began in Galilee, a rocky, mountainous region difficult to subdue. In 67 and 68, some sixty thousand legionaries killed and enslaved something like 100,000 Jews, mostly in Galilee, before moving on to the siege of Jerusalem. Scholars are divided as to where Mark was written, and to whom it was addressed. One ancient tradition locates both the author and the readership in Rome, with the Gospel taken as an account reflecting the views and experiences of Jesus’ favored apostle, Peter, whose intimate friend “Mark” was taken to be.⁵⁴ That tradition nicely serves the primordial purpose of elevating Peter as the Church’s mythic first leader, as if something like the papacy already existed. But the tradition does not address the contradiction embedded in Mark’s overwhelmingly negative portrayal of Peter, which alone is enough to cast doubt on the idea that the Gospel represents Peter’s point of view. We will see more of this below.

      But, in fact, the author of Mark is necessarily anonymous, and the community for whom the text was written is uncertain.⁵⁵ The Gospel was written in Greek, but internal evidence suggests that the writer was a Palestinian Jew whose first language was Aramaic. He was probably a resident of Jerusalem. Reading the texts in the light of what was befalling Jerusalem just then, it makes sense that those being addressed were actively involved in the trauma. If one assumes that they were Jesus people clustered in Galilee, at remove from the defense of Jerusalem but still at the mercy of Roman forces as well as roving bands of Jewish Zealots, the vividness of Jesus’ description of trouble takes on a compelling edge. For those people were, above all, in the tormented thick of the complications that went with both the Roman assault and the vengeful punishment inflicted on noncombatant Jews by fellow Jews engaged in the fight.

      “Alas for those who are with child and for those who give suck in those days!” Jesus laments. “For in those days there will be such tribulation as has not been from the beginning of the creation which God created until now.”⁵⁶

      If the Gospel of Mark represented the point of view of Peter, it is exceedingly unlikely that it would have portrayed Peter as it does. While effectively pictured as the one on whom Jesus most depended, Peter is also rendered as vain, buffoonish, impulsive, sadly lacking in courage. Peter is honored to have been given his special name by Jesus: “Simon whom he surnamed Peter.”⁵⁷ But the resounding affirmation that accompanies that name change in the later text Matthew—“You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church”⁵⁸—is nowhere in evidence in Mark. Peter, with James and John, is the special witness of the Transfiguration: “and there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, and they were talking to Jesus.” But Mark’s Peter is immediately shown to misunderstand the meaning of this fleeting epiphany, for he responds by saying, “Master . . . let us make three booths, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” The author of Mark comments, “For he did not know what to say, for they were exceedingly afraid.”⁵⁹

      It falls to Peter to answer the momentous question posed by Jesus: “ ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Peter answered him, ‘You are the Christ.’ ” But no sooner has the apostle put this astounding understanding into words than he mortally offends Jesus, who has just forecast what is coming, for Jesus is soon to face suffering and persecution. Peter, who will have none of such tribulation, either denying it or wanting distance from it, “took him, and began to rebuke him. But turning and seeing his disciples, he [ Jesus] rebuked Peter, and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are not on the side of God, but of men.’ ”⁶⁰

      Then, in the thick of the suffering Peter wanted nothing to do with, he is, again with James and John, privileged, nevertheless, to be invited by Jesus to share in the moment of greatest anguish: “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death,” Jesus confides, an extraordinary admission. He asks the three to “watch” with him, but then, “he came and found them sleeping, and he said СКАЧАТЬ