The Story of Jesus. Roy A. Harrisville

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СКАЧАТЬ to sit (Mark 6:39) could allude to Western, Roman practice of celebrating the Supper at Passover, a springtime, April festival. Could the ancient church’s celebration have fathered the feeding narrative? Or, is the assumption of a community creation trajected back into the life and career of Jesus too heavy a burden for that community to bear? There is more: Mark 8:17–21 and Matthew 16:7–10 record the disciples’ neglecting bread for their trip to the other side of Gailee, and Jesus’ remonstrance at their having tripped over a dietary minim when infinitely more was at stake. Jesus says, “when I broke the five loaves for the five thousand how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect. . .and the seven for the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you collect?” (Mark 8:19–20), and to their answers replies, “do you not yet understand?” (Mark 8:21). Is this scene intended to furnish an allegorical interpretation of the feedings? To these questions John would respond with a robust denial. For this evangelist the feeding is a “sign,” the third after Cana (John 2:1–11), and the healing of the official’s son (John 4:46–54). That is, it is a tangible, palpable event calculated to point beyond itself to Jesus’ significance and power. Without that tangibility, there would be no sign, and nothing beyond it to which to point. Of course, whatever it was to which that tangible event was intended to point could be skewed, misinterpreted. And the crowd missed the point. It hailed Jesus as “the prophet who is to come into the world” and rushed to make him king (John 6:14–15). But the sign, the tangible event needed to be there for the point to be missed.

      The narrative of Jesus’ walking on the water (Mark 6:45–52; Matt. 14:22–33; John 6:16–21) has led to innumerable contortions on the part of interpreters. One reckons on a wooden plank on which Jesus was balancing; another on an optical illusion of the disciples who imagined Jesus walking on the water when he was actually walking along the shore; still another opines that in ancient times Palestine experienced periods of cold which would have frozen the water close to the shore of Gennesaret, so that Jesus was walking on ice floes. Or again, another attempts to explain the event against the background of altered states of consciousness on the part of the eyewitnesses. For those who spurn such notions as hostile to the intention of the texts, there is always the expedient of appealing to Graeco-Roman parallels, according to which divine men walk by foot on the sea, a scene allegedly replicated by the evangelists intent on accenting the epiphany.48 The scene is especially vulnerable with those who oppose the transcendent or the religious, among whom naturalists and biologists may be the most ardent. Since the Enlightenment scientists have been wary of assigning to the divine what cannot be grasped by reason, since the reasonable or rational as essence of the human is taken to be the essence of the divine as well. Whether or not in appeal to Augustine’s insistence on curbing biblical answers to cosmological questions, or to Galileo’s notion of God’s “two books,” one of faith, and the other of nature, a host of interpreters, many with scientific backgrounds, have opted for a separation of the structures of the observable world and the interpretation of those structures from the perspective of faith. In other words, while the meteorologist could assign Jesus’ quieting of the storm to the prevailing winds round and about Galilee, the believer could acknowledge the event as a divine interference, with neither invading the other’s territory. The truce achieved by this separation is uneasy. “Enthralled” by the “luminous figure of the Nazarene,” a figure “too colossal for the pen of phrasemongers,”49 Albert Einstein stated that conflict between science and religion occurred when religion insisted on the absolute truthfulness of everything recorded in the Bible, or when science attempted to arrive at fundamental judgments with respect to values and ends. And since he believed the principal source of the conflict lay in the concept of a personal God, obviously that concept had to be abandoned for the conflict to be resolved. And there’s the rub. For, this person, this Nazarene is confessed as God, the one by whom the worlds all came to be, with power to turn the structures of the observable world on their head, to perform what to reason is a violation of the natural and rational, to do the impossible, the unbelievable. And as for reason, hailed as essence of the divine as well as of the human, as for that insistence on the superiority of scientific rationality with its claim to objective reality, it is as pious and “religious” a view as insistence on the existence of a personal God. All of which means that there is as much warrant for faith as for that of scientific rationality. William Blake’s argument respecting art may be stretched to apply also to science or faith:

      If perceptive Organs vary; Objects of Perception seem to vary; If the Perceptive Organs close: their Objects seem to close also.50

      In the face of inevitable resistance, the expectations and preconceptions on which all seeing depends and which I bring to this narrative have to do with Christ’s lordship over creation, readily admitting the story’s judgment on that much vaunted “objectivity,” its challenge to any current or prevailing world-view, and its announcement of the new over against what has given thousands comfort and ease: the impenetrable and unassailable continuum of cause and effect.

      In Matthew 17:24–27, after the disciples have reached Capernaum, Peter is met by temple tax collectors who ask whether or not his teacher pays the tax (Greek: didrachma). Peter acknowledges that he does. At home, Jesus asks him from whom the kings of the earth receive tribute, from their children or from others. Peter answers, “from others.” “Then,” Jesus responds, “the children are free,” but adds that to avoid offence Peter should go to the sea, and in the mouth of the first fish he catches find a stater, enough to satisfy the payment for the two of them. The text raises questions. First, the English versions wrongly translate Peter’s interrogators as “collectors of the temple tax.” The original simply refers to tax collectors, either to those who collect the poll tax required of everyone, Jew or Gentile, or to collectors of the temple tax. But if the latter, the analogy to the “others” from whom the “kings of the earth take toll or tribute” breaks down, since the temple tax was required only of Jews. Second, the didrachma was a foreign, Greek silver coin. The stater, equal to two didrachmas, and which Peter was to retrieve from the fish’s mouth, had to be exchanged for the equivalent silver half shekel since foreign coin was tabu in the temple. Taken alone, the narrative seems haphazard, that is, until linked to the passion prediction which immediately precedes. There, Jesus predicts that the Son of Man will be betrayed, killed, and rise again on the third day. Thus, interpreted in the light of what precedes, our narrative reads that Jesus, Son of Man (the self-reference is obvious), is free of legal obligation but nevertheless takes it on to prevent giving offense.51

      Initiators and followers of the School of the History of Religions have rushed to accent the similarity between pagan myuthology and the Cana miracle in John 2:1–11; seen it as a “parade example of the penetration of hellenistic miracle tradition into the Jesus tradition.”52 One recalls the temple of Dionysus the wine-god, located not too far distant from Cana, at which the priests on the eve of the god’s yearly festival, roughly corresponding to Christian celebration of Epiphany, locked three empty crocks in a sealed building and presented them on the next day full of wine. Another comments that in Judaism wine serves as metaphor for the joys of the time of salvation. Still another suggests that Jesus’ participation in a wedding at Cana developed into the narrative of a miracle, in this case, outdoing the feat of Dionysus, or Bacchus, his Roman counterpart, with twice as many crocks, each holding twenty to thirty gallons. But all this may be missing the subtelties for tripping on the obvious. Why, for example, does the evangelist first note Jesus’ mother’s invitation to the wedding, and that of Jesus and the disciples as if an afterthought: “Jesus and his disciples had also been invited” (John 2:2)? What to make of Jesus’ seemingly coarse rebuff to his mother’s announcement that the supply of wine is exhausted: “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me?” (John 2:4) , together with the remark that his “hour” has not yet come? Incidentally or no, this is the first of seven instances in which I reference is made to Jesus’ “hour.” In 7:30 the Evangelist writes of Jesus’ enemies inability to lay hands on him because “his hour had not yet come.” In 8:20, following Jesus’ teaching in the temple, the Evangelist writes again that no one arrested him, because his hour had not yet come.” In 12:23, Greeks who have come to Jerusalem for the festival, approach Philip and ask to see Jesus, who after being informed of it, says “the hour has come for the Son of Man to СКАЧАТЬ