Hit the Ground Running

When I was in college at UC Santa Barbara, I heard of the Bible as Lit. professor. He started each semester by throwing the Bible on the floor. "See?" he said, "It's just a book."

I didn't get around to taking his class, only because I didn't think I'd care for the theatrics, though many people took it and were impressed.

Instead, I've taught Bible as Literature for many years and had many students of many persuasions. The ones I've liked best have been the ones who were willing to listen to new ideas, or to respect "the other side," i.e., the critical, literary-interpretive side, as opposed to the faith side.

I was remarking to a class once that we have virtually no objective information about Jesus--what we think we know about the historical figure (if, indeed, he was a historical figure) we have to extrapolate from hints and cross-references gospel by gospel, keeping in mind that each gospel was written as an individual entity for its own audience, even when the writers of the gospels attributed to Luke and Matthew may have had the gospel attributed to Mark right in front of them to copy nearly word for word.

A woman, a Catholic who had learned her lessons well from a priest and who had insisted on the literal and historical truth of every word in every gospel (regardless of the inconsistencies), raised her hand and reminded me that scholars forget about Jesus' sacred mother, Mary, who was alive to provide the information conveyed by the gospel writers. I had to pause a moment to digest this.

I finally pointed out that there is not a single shred of evidence to suggest that the gospel writers consulted with Mary on their varied accounts of Jesus' life and ministry. (The student apparently didn't remember the passage where Jesus outright rejects his family, who have come to see him.)

And where had she gotten her information?

From her friend, the priest. Where had he gotten his? I would like to know.

And this reminds me of another story: a Hindu friend insisted once that the "missing years" in Jesus' life had been passed in India, where he learned the lessons of that culture and brought them back into his Jewish culture. I heard this before I had much knowledge of Biblical matters and found it tremendously exciting to think that, at its source, Christianity might be a blend of cultures that lie outside the Judeo-Christian realm.

As I began to teach the course, I kept my eye out for some scholarly work that would develop this aspect of Jesus' life. Finally, a student mentioned a book that told the history of Jesus in India, and I jumped at the chance to verify what I had heard from my Hindu friend. I bought the book and discovered, to my chagrin, that it was not a scholarly book at all, but an act of the creative imagination, a "what-if" poem of some kind, speculating about Jesus in India during those lost years.

Since then, I have run across another book--very interesting, but entirely circumstantial--about Jesus having been sent to Egypt (there is the gospel detail about Jesus' family fleeing with him to Egypt to avoid Herod's persecution), where he was trained as a Buddhist monk. What's interesting about the book is its documentation of the extent to which Buddhism had spread throughout the ancient near east by the time of Jesus. But, as I say, the "evidence" is all circumstantial. There is nothing definite that enables one to connect Jesus to Buddhism, whatever the books showing philosophic parallels might suggest.

Is there a final conclusion? Jesus was probably a historical figure, but we can't tell for certain what he said, and what writers with agendas related to their own historical circumstances scripted for him. The same with the Biblical God--God is a character in a narrative. He represents various political/ideological/philosophic propositions, depending on which book one reads. The God of Job, for example, is nothing like the God proposed to us in the gospels, or by Christian tradition. This is only one example, but it must suggest why so many Christian websites are perplexed about the place of the Hebrew Bible ("Old Testament") in Christian thinking. Many passages are plain embarrassments.