The Story of Jesus. Roy A. Harrisville

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СКАЧАТЬ . ..a supernatural being informed his mother the child she was to conceive would not be a mere mortal but would be divine. He was born miraculously. . ..As an adult he left home and went on an itinerant preaching ministry, urging his listeners to live. . .for what is spiritual. He gathered a number of disciples. . .who became convinced that his teachings were divinely inspired. . .in no small part because he himself was divine. He proved it to them by doing many miracles, healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead. But at the end of his life he roused opposition, and his enemies delivered him over to the Roman authorities for judgment. Still, after he left this world, he returned to meet his followers in order to convince them that he was not really dead but lived on in the heavenly realm. Later some of his followers wrote books about him.37

      First of all, the historicity of the life and career of the Appollonius depends upon the amount of trust placed in his principal biographer, Philostratus the Elder (ca.170—c.247). According to recent research, the discourses which Philostratus professes to copy from Damis, an acolyte and companion of Appollonius, may or may not be genuine. Second, though the possibility that the Jesus-tradition is dependent on that of Appollonius is out of the question, the reverse is not. In such a society as Rome, which had abandoned its traditional gods for deities of the east, assigning divinity with all its trappings to a celebrated figure from Cappadocia, whether or not in competition with Jesus of Nazareth, would scarcely represent a departure from usual habit. Lastly, to cite G. K. Chesterton, in contrast to the great thinkers of antiquity who had very little to do except to walk and talk,

      . . .the life of Jesus went as swift and straight as a thunderbolt. . ..Something had to be done. It emphatically would not have been done, if Jesus had walked about the world forever doing nothing except tell the truth. . .The primary thing that he was going to do was to die. . ..He may be met as if straying in strange places, or stopped on the way for discussion or dispute; but his face is set towards the mountain city.”38

      It is no secret that for over a hundred and fifty years the majority of Bible interpreters has denied the genuineness of the healing miracles reported of Jesus, to the point that anyone with an opposite view risks a sacrificium intelligentiae. To great extent what has largely motivated the great 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 СКАЧАТЬ