The Jesus of Hellenistic History :...

It may be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the average churchgoer to enter into the realm of historical-literary biblical studies.

The territory is quite unfamiliar. Important critical research findings seem to stop short of the church doors--in a society that otherwise prides itself on ready access to information.

But even the person in the pew aware of the scholarly pursuit of the historical Jesus might regard the first three authors above as preposterous revisionists:

Jane Schaberg says that the Nativity accounts in Matthew and Luke really tried to explain away a tradition about the illegitimate birth of Jesus and did not intend to describe a miraculous virginal conception, despite the unanimous understanding of the latter by the early churches.

John Dominic Crossan argues that the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, discovered in 1886 and previously dismissed as a 2nd-Century rewrite of the 1st-Century Gospels, was instead an early resource for all four New Testament Gospels in their stories of Jesus’ trial, crucifixion and resurrection.

Burton L. Mack says the pioneering Gospel of Mark is more a work of fiction than ever before suspected, including the stories of Judas the betrayer and the Last Supper. Mack said Mark marvelously combined into one dramatic, apocalyptic story the images from “the Christ cult” and various Jesus movements whose social situations determined how they celebrated their founder-teacher. The historical Jesus was more likely a Cynic philosopher than, for instance, a Jewish reformer, Mack says.

Though certainly provocative, all three theories are plausible in their strongest points when placed in the context of recent studies.

These authors primarily attempt here to “peel back” the layers of religious imagination and literary invention (an honorable practice in that era) rather than concentrate on the more elusive core, the historical Jesus. There was a 40-year interval between Jesus’ death and the post-AD 70 appearance of the Gospel of Mark, a work that shaped all subsequent Christian ideas about “the life of Jesus.”

Each book is a significant achievement. But, by way of warning, the range of arguments and sources called upon by Schaberg, Crossan and Mack may prove daunting to the untrained reader.

It will take efforts such as “Many Things in Parables,” by the bishop-elect of the Los Angeles Episcopal Diocese, to hope that parishioners can be drawn to the scholarly frontiers. Frederick Houk Borsch was dean of the chapel and professor of religion at Princeton University when he was elected a bishop in January.

Borsch bridges the scholar-layman gap by describing legitimate ambiguities in parable interpretation, citing versions in a valuable apocryphal source (the Gospel of Thomas) and suggesting that each Gospel alters the parables a bit.

“There is a marked tendency by the evangelists to add detail of an allegorizing character or otherwise to interpret the parables in a manner useful for fitting the narratives into their views of God’s plan in history,” Borsch says.

He does not say directly whether these stories were told by Jesus himself. But, in fact, Borsch’s choices of 18 parables have nearly all been rated “red” (authentic) and “pink” (probably authentic, or something very similar) in the unprecedented balloting process used by the Jesus Seminar, a group of 125 biblical scholars (40-50 frequently participating), evaluating all sayings attributed to Jesus.

Providing a measure of consensus for mainstream churches and scholars alike, the seminar’s Polebridge Press in Sonoma will publish its results on 33 Jesus parables this fall and climax its work in 1990 by publishing “Five Gospels” (including Thomas) with Jesus’ likeliest authentic words printed in red and pink.

Seminar members, which include Mack and Crossan, also have agreed in voting that Jesus did not preach an apocalyptic message; nor speak of the coming Son of Man; nor see himself as the Messiah, or Christ. Members were divided on whether he regarded himself as a prophet.

Every saying associated with the Passion and Resurrection was regarded inauthentic, the product of early church reflections on the meaning of Jesus’ death. The Jewish trial was deemed a fabrication, and members found little was historically reliable other than Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate at Passover.

That context aids in assessing the book by Mack, professor of New Testament studies at the School of Theology at Claremont and the Claremont Graduate School.

Mack twits colleagues who still feel that the belief in Jesus’ resurrection or certain Jesus teachings electrified the Jesus followers into a dynamic movement. The Claremont scholar said that sense of drama comes from the Gospel of Mark, not from historical reminiscence.

Mack’s strongest arguments are in his demythologizing of Mark and suggestions of how different social groups contributed ideas about Jesus. For instance, a Hellenistic “Christ cult” ritually celebrates his death and resurrection and a synagogue reform movement, which eventually fails, has Jesus win arguments with the Pharisees, according to Mack.

“Each sectarian formation stemming from Jesus had found it necessary to claim that Jesus had laid the foundation for what the group had become,” he wrote.

Most scholars will want more evidence for Mack’s claim that the playful Cynic sage is the best model for the Jesus of history.

And Mack may also have slipped on imagining one movement behind the many miracle stories in Mark. Harvard’s Helmut Koester suggests that an editor inserted the miracle-laden 6:45-8:26 into the Gospel because Luke, otherwise relying on Mark’s narrative, “omits” it. That section has Jesus repeat his miraculous multiplication of fishes and loaves, and contains innumerable peculiarities--especially, several geographical errors. Except for those geographical mistakes, Mack might have situated the author in the favorably described Galilee, the predicted place for the Second Coming, but instead suggests southern Syria as the locale for Mark’s community.

It was Koester’s suggestion that parts of the Gospel of Peter were older than the New Testament Gospels that prompted the study by Crossan, who teaches at DePaul University.

Crossan’s title, “The Cross That Spoke,” refers to a scene in Peter following the descent by the resurrected Jesus to the dead in Sheol. A voice from heaven cries, “Thou has preached to them that sleep,” and from the cross was heard the answer, “Yea.”

Comparing Jewish and early Christian imagery, Crossan suggested that the cross represents “the holy ones of Israel,” righteous martyrs of old. The Gospel of Peter, Crossan said, insists that “the Passion is not just exclusive, personal and individual with Jesus but inclusive, communal and collective for both Jesus and the holy ones of Israel.” The Resurrection must also be collective and communal in meaning, he said, “or else the ancient promises of vindication and exaltation for those earlier martyrs remain unfulfilled.”

Parts of the Gospel of Peter--Joseph’s burial of Jesus’ body and the empty tomb visit by Mary Magdalene--are thought to be borrowed from Mark. But when Crossan proposes that many other features of Peter are more original than those in Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, it then becomes a chicken-or-the-egg-first argument. In the last analysis, he claims his hypothesis has fewer problems than the older theory that Peter was a conflation of the canonical Gospels.

As for Jesus birth stories in Matthew and Luke, Schaberg asserts that “neither evangelist intends to deny the tradition of Jesus’ illegitimacy.” Rabbinic lore suggested that Jesus was an illegitimate child, but those claims only start to appear in the 2nd Century, she notes.

Schaberg finds subtle allusions in both Nativity stories to Deuteronomy 22:23-27, which prescribes Jewish law dealing with a betrothed virgin raped in a city or in the country.

New Testament scholars have commented on the unusual listing of four women in Jesus’ genealogy in Matthew, usually characterizing them as odd marital unions (to prepare the reader for Joseph’s acceptance of the pregnant Mary). This is wrong, says Schaberg: Tamar’s union with Judah was not a marriage, and Matthew’s phrase “wife of Uriah” indicates that the Gospel author is thinking of Bathsheba’s adultery with David, not their later marriage.

“Mention of these four women is designed to lead Matthew’s reader to expect another, final story of a woman who becomes a social misfit in some way; is wronged or thwarted; who is party to a sexual act that places her in great danger; and whose story has an outcome that repairs the social fabric and ensures the birth of a child who is legitimate or legitimated,” wrote the author, who teaches religious studies at the Catholic-run University of Detroit.

Schaberg admits that her arguments, more detailed than this, are weakened by the fact that no known source interprets the infancy narratives the way she does.

Male scholars have said that if the story of Jesus’ birth was not about a supernatural event, then the alternative was a sin on Mary’s part.

Schaberg said that overlooked in the frequent virgin-or-seducer religious image of biblical women is the possibility that Mary was the victim of rape. If so, “the illegitimate conception turns out to be grace, not disgrace . . . ,” Schaberg says.