Who Do Men Say That I'm Not?
a sermon preached by the Rev Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island,
Easter Sunday April 20, 2003
READING: Mark 14: 32-52
***
[Extemporaneous Introduction]
My first job, during my second incarnation as a graduate student, was as the Teaching Assistant for Marcus Borg, who is someone some of you may have actually heard of, since he is something of a celebrity as well as an excellent scholar. Marc is the Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University, one of the founding members of the Jesus Seminar [explain], as well as the author of several best-selling popular books about the historical Jesus, all of which, both as a former bookseller as well as Marc’s former teaching assistant, I can highly recommend.
My duties as a Teaching Assistant were not particularly difficult; essentially I was responsible for correcting all the student papers, and occasionally covering Marc’s classes whenever he was off being interviewed on the "Today" show. And in the process I managed to pick up a lot of interesting information about the most recent developments in the academic discipline of historical Jesus scholarship, which is what I thought I would talk about today.
I do have a couple of caveats however. This morning’s sermon is even more “intellectually stimulating” than normal; and while you probably won’t need to take notes, you might want to pay a little closer attention than usual. Likewise, it does contain a certain amount of Adult Content. And there WILL be an opportunity for Q & A after the service.
And I thought I’d start with a question of my own, which may seem trivial to you, or maybe even a little silly, but I think it's important to ask, and that is: why would anyone be interested in trying to study the historical Jesus in the first place? What more can we possibly know about Jesus that isn't already contained in the Bible; isn't the Gospel story good enough as it is? The problem comes when you really start to scrutinize the Scriptures, and realize that it all doesn't all fit together nearly as neatly as one might hope.
I don't think I need to belabor this point, because it is readily apparent to anyone who spends time with the material — but the Gospels don't always agree with one another, and sometimes these disagreements are anything but subtle. This is not necessarily a huge problem in and of itself, since most ancient historical sources have similar problems; but when we begin to compare what we know about Jesus from the Gospels to what we know about his time and culture from other historical sources, all sorts of other questions start to emerge as well.
Essentially, the closer one looks, the less reliable the Gospels appear — they have all been "shaped" by later writers in order to create a compelling portrait of the "Christ of Faith," which may or may not resemble the historical Jesus himself. Thus much of the modern inspiration (and by modern I mean since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century) — the modern inspiration for research about the “Jesus of History” has been an attempt to "scientifically" strip away the "patina" of superstition and subsequent traditions of faith about "Jesus Christ" in order to get back to the historical truth about Jesus of Nazareth.
The basic assumption behind this process is that the "historical" Jesus is somehow the "real" Jesus, and that if we could just weed-out all the non-historical nonsense, we would be left with the "pure" Christianity that Jesus himself intended his followers to practice. The Jefferson Bible is superb example of this kind of effort — an attempt to get rid of all of the narrative inconsistencies, supernatural miracles, and the like which the Enlightened mind found so unbelievable, and to distill the essence of the authentic moral and ethical teachings of Jesus himself.
Of course, this methodology had problems of its own as well. Just as you might expect, when the liberal Protestant Biblical scholars of the 19th-century set out in search of the historical Jesus, what they found was a Jesus who sounded an awful lot like a 19th century liberal Protestant Biblical scholar.
Now at this point, I would like to make two very important observations. The first is that the difficulty which even academic scholars have in pinning down the historical Jesus is not necessarily a bad thing, provided we recognize it for what it is. Often we set out in search of the historical Jesus, and end up discovering a reflection of ourselves… yet this is precisely the power of the Gospel throughout history: the ability of the STORY of Jesus of Nazareth, whoever he may have "truly" been historically, to challenge our fundamental assumptions about what is important in our lives, and to compel us to look at our lives and ourselves in a new way.
And this brings me to my second point, which is that rather than looking at Christian faith as a declension, or corruption over time, of a perfect, "original" religion of Jesus, we might just as easily view Christianity as a product of historical "evolution," which has developed and improved over time as generation after generation has wrestled in turn with the challenges posed in the distant past by its historical "founder," an obscure and shadowy figure about whom we actually know very little.
The current scholarly interest in the Jesus of History reflects some of this evolutionary understanding. It is not so much an attempt to find "the answers" in the past as it is to gain greater understanding of that past, and thus greater clarification of the real questions that concern us in the here and now. It is an attempt to liberate us from our "Sunday School" portraits of Jesus, in order that we might encounter the tradition in the full intensity of its power, and not just in a way that has been sanitized for children, or for the support of a religious status quo.
So, what are contemporary New Testament scholars saying about the historical Jesus, and just how different is he from the comfortable and familiar Jesus Christ of our childhoods?
Perhaps the most fundamental thing we should understand about Jesus of Nazareth is that he was first and foremost a first century Jewish peasant, whose life bore very little resemblance to that of an "enlightened," educated and affluent member of the modern American middle class. He probably didn’t have long blonde hair and pale blue eyes (like you see in those pictures so popular in some churches), but he may have had tattoos -- and I’ll have more to say about that later.
Rather than being born of a virgin, some scholars (most notably Jane Schaberg) have pointed to evidence which suggests that Mary may very well have been a prostitute, or a victim of rape, and her child the illegitimate offspring of a Roman soldier named Pantera, who was only later adopted by the Joseph of the Gospels and raised as a carpenter's son. Carpentry, by the way, was not a well-paid, journeyman occupation as it is today — it was essentially a role filled by peasants who had in some way lost their land (probably through excessive taxation or debt), and thus were compelled to support themselves by selling their labor in an economy where labor was cheap.
Jesus almost certainly had younger brothers and sisters, one of whom (his brother James) became an important Christian leader in his own right. Some scholars have even suggested that Jesus may well have been functionally illiterate (although personally I doubt this), while others have suggested that he may have been multi-cultural: which is to say, educated in his youth in Egypt, and familiar with the more popular aspects of the Greek philosophical tradition as well. Galilee was anything but a cultural backwater; rather, it was something of a cultural crossroads, cosmopolitan in nature, and with a prosperous trading and agricultural economy. But whatever his level of education, he was certainly well-versed in the oral traditions of his culture, and sensitive to the theological nuances of his own time.
The possibility that Jesus was familiar with popular Greek philosophy comes through in the most common emerging understanding of Jesus' brief public ministry, which scholars like Burton Mack characterize as that of an itinerant teacher of subversive wisdom, not unlike that of similarly itinerant Cynic philosophers, who essentially lived a life of voluntary poverty and homelessness in order to be able to criticize and ridicule whomever they pleased without worrying too much about the repercussions of their behavior.
When we begin to look closely at the sayings of Jesus, and particularly at those which scholars have identified as the earliest layers of the Jesus tradition, we discover that they have that same sharp edge so common among the classical Cynical philosophers. Take for example the teaching about rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's — which is essentially a call to disengage from the economic system of a colonial oppressor, and to live a life of itinerant poverty.
The parable of the mustard seed likewise takes on a whole new dimension when one realizes that mustard was considered a weed in New Testament times, a plant which was difficult to eradicate, and which gave shelter to parasitic birds who fed upon agricultural crops.
Or consider the edict to turn the other cheek, or, more accurately, as it is written in Gospel of Matthew: "if someone strikes you on the right cheek, offer the other as well," -- a passage which the members of the Jesus Seminar have identified, with a 92% consensus, as the one saying which they most strongly feel goes directly back to the original words of Jesus himself. If you are a peasant, and a member of the wealthy ruling elite strikes you on the right cheek, that means they've struck you with the back of their hand. Turning the other cheek is not so much an act of submission, but one of defiance; you have suddenly placed your attacker in the very uncomfortable position of being forced to strike you with his fist, which not only escalates the level of violence, but also fundamentally changes the status of your relationship as well. One strikes a subordinate with the back of the hand. But one only strikes an equal with their fist. [Shirt off your back/Walking the extra mile]
But beyond this subversive wisdom, there is a second dimension of Jesus' public ministry that has proven even more problematic to moderns, and that is his role as a mystic and a healer, or a "spirit person," as Marcus Borg sometimes characterizes him in his books. The reason that moderns are uncomfortable with this role is that we aren't really sure what to do about the supernatural miracles; our tendency is to want to discount them, give them rational, naturalistic explanations or in some way convert them to allegories and dismiss them in that way.
When we think of Jesus as a "spiritual" person, we want to understand him perhaps in analogy to St. Francis of Assisi: someone with a rich devotional life who communed with nature and loved little animals. The problem is, this image doesn't really match up with what we know about life in New Testament times at all. Jesus was probably much less a mystic than he was a magician — someone who saw himself and who was seen by others as evoking supernatural powers in order to perform exorcisms and other miraculous healings.
It's important to understand that our modern view of magic is very different how it would have been understood in ancient times. We tend to think of magic as "sleight of hand" — a form of trickery which can fool the foolish, but which always has a rational explanation. This was simply not the case in the ancient world, where magic would have been understood as something which is obviously "real," but which was considered both dangerous and evil to dabble with.
When we look objectively at the miracles recorded in the New Testament, we discover obvious parallels with reports of exorcisms performed by other first century Hellenistic magicians, as well as a certain similarity to the spells and rituals recorded in the Egyptian Magical Papyri, which were essentially instructions for aspiring magicians willing to run the risks of attempting to manipulate demons and other supernatural powers.
This is where the tattoos come in.
Like the amnesiac character in the movie “Memento,” Egyptian exorcists commonly tattooed their magical spells on their bodies, so that they wouldn’t forget them when they found themselves face to face with a supernatural demon. So if the historical Jesus was himself a representative of this tradition, he may very well have been covered with them.
There's one last thing I want to bring up this morning, and I think I'd also like to introduce it by way of a question, which is this: Have any of you ever wondered about this young man dressed in only a linen cloth that we heard about in this morning's reading? Who is this guy? He shows up only in the Gospel of Mark, and then only in this one particular spot, where he really does nothing to further the narrative, but instead just sort of sticks out in the text like, well — a naked man running down the street in the middle of the night.
Commentators have speculated about these two verses for centuries, and nobody has ever been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation. But in 1958 at the monastery of Mar Saba near Jerusalem, a scholar by the name of Morton Smith ( Harvard Ph.D. ; later a tenured professor at Columbia) discovered a fragment of a previously unknown letter written by the second century Christian bishop Clement of Alexandria which may throw some light on this passage.
This is real "Raiders of the Lost Ark" stuff, or at least as close as it gets in "real" academia, so you might want to hold on to your seats for a minute. In this letter, which was very controversial when Smith first discovered it, but is now generally considered genuine (at least by most Clementine scholars), Clement quotes an additional 15 verses from the Gospel of Mark which do not appear in the version of the gospel as we know it today. The first fragment, which is the longer of the two, comes in the 10th chapter of Mark between verse 34 and verse 35, and it goes like this:
***And they come into Bethany, and this woman was there whose brother had died. She knelt down in front of Jesus and says to him, "Son of David, have mercy on me." But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus got angry and went with her into the garden where the tomb was. Just then a loud voice was heard from inside the tomb. Then Jesus went up and rolled the stone away from the entrance to the tomb. He went right in where the young man was, stuck out his hand, grabbed him by the hand, and raised him up. The young man looked at Jesus, loved him, and began to beg him to be with him. Then they left the tomb and went into the young man's house (Incidentally, he was rich.) Six days later Jesus gave him an order; and when evening had come, the young man went to him, dressed in only a linen cloth. He spent that night with him, because Jesus taught him the mystery of God's domain. From there, Jesus got up and returned to the other side of the Jordan.***
The second passage is much shorter; it comes in verse 45 of this same chapter, between the phrase "then they come to Jericho" and the phrase "as he was leaving Jericho," and goes like this:
***The sister of the young man whom Jesus loved was there, along with his mother and Salome, but Jesus refused to see them.***
Now before we start speculating too much about how these verses ought to be interpreted (and how embarrassing it might prove to homophobic Fundamentalists if they actually mean what some scholars have suggested they appear to mean), I just want to say a couple of things. The first is that even if we decide that these 15 verses do, in fact, legitimately belong in the Gospel of Mark, that doesn't necessarily mean that they accurately reflect the historical Jesus, any more than we can say with confidence that the rest of the gospel can or should be read strictly as history either. They are historical evidence, but they are not history per se, and this is a distinction which we must always keep in mind.
The second thing is that these expurgated passages from Mark’s gospel are strongly reminiscent of both the “Beloved Disciple” and the Lazarus story in the Gospel of John, and also the narratives of the Easter resurrection and the empty tomb. But they may in fact simply represent something as innocuous as a secret Christian baptismal rite previously not linked explicitly to Jesus, but which would help to explain both the naked young man in the Garden at Gethsemane, and also possibly the young man waiting at the tomb on Easter morning after the crucifixion, whom many scholars have previously tended to interpret as an angel.
The possibility that Jesus taught in secret as well as in public, and practiced a private ritual of baptism during which individuals were personally initiated into the mysteries of the kingdom, has all sorts of ramifications for the study of the historical Jesus, as well as for our understanding of the meaning of Easter. But for some reason this earthshaking possibility for a radical reinterpretation of Christ’s Easter resurrection is not nearly so controversial as the insinuation that the historical Jesus may very well have made a practice of spending the night with naked young men whom he loved.
But setting aside all this speculation for the time being, there is one additional point I would like to make about these passages. It has long been a common practice for those of us on the liberal wing of Christendom, who often find reason to be critical of more conservative, reactionary expressions of Christian Faith, to speculate about what Jesus himself would think if he did, in fact, ever return to earth and could see with his own eyes what had been made of his church.
What Would Jesus Think? From St. Francis to Dostoyevsky to Lenny Bruce, it is a common critical motif: to contrast the excesses of organized religion to the simplicity of a personal experience of religious faith. There have even been some who have questioned whether Jesus ever really intended to start a church at all. Yet a church did spring up, inspired by his memory and grounded in his name, and over time we have all collected quite a bit of furniture to go with our faith.
Yet even from its earliest days, this "Jesus Movement" was anything but a unified whole. By the time of Clement of Alexandria in the second century AD, the practice of Christianity ranged from solitary hermits who lived in the desert and whipped themselves in penance for even the thought of sins of the flesh, to groups like the Carpocratians, whom Clement was writing against, who essentially observed the Eucharist as a type of semi-public orgy, in the belief that the power of the Holy Spirit prevented them from acting sinfully regardless of how licentiously they behaved.
And it seems to me that the real miracle of Christianity is how well we have done at preserving the real "truth" of Christian Faith despite the extremes that the tradition itself makes possible. Separated from our own time by centuries of cultural difference and forgotten events, the historical Jesus will always be something of an enigma to us: perhaps not only stranger than we know, but stranger than we CAN know. Yet despite this strangeness, there remains something about him which transcends strict historicity, and reveals itself to us in an on-going way that is strangely both intimate and familiar.
My former professor, Marcus Borg, once told me that he thought the real problem with Unitarians is that, like the Fundamentalists we so freely and frequently criticize, we tend to read the Bible too literally. We take it at face value, rarely looking beneath the surface of the text, and then we superficially reject it, rather than wrestling with the subtle complexities of the scripture. We distinguish too sharply between “fact” and “myth,” embracing the former and dismissing the latter, and thus missing out on the profoundly important truths contained within the metaphor.
So my Easter message to all of you this morning is simply this: Stop worrying so much about whether or not Easter really happened, and let it happen, right now, in your own lives. Celebrate the rebirth of New Life in this season, and the opportunity for change, and healing, and spiritual growth which the “subversive wisdom” of the Gospel promises to us all, if only we are willing to trust that Creative Power that gives us life, and gives life meaning.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island,
Easter Sunday April 20, 2003
READING: Mark 14: 32-52
***
[Extemporaneous Introduction]
My first job, during my second incarnation as a graduate student, was as the Teaching Assistant for Marcus Borg, who is someone some of you may have actually heard of, since he is something of a celebrity as well as an excellent scholar. Marc is the Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University, one of the founding members of the Jesus Seminar [explain], as well as the author of several best-selling popular books about the historical Jesus, all of which, both as a former bookseller as well as Marc’s former teaching assistant, I can highly recommend.
My duties as a Teaching Assistant were not particularly difficult; essentially I was responsible for correcting all the student papers, and occasionally covering Marc’s classes whenever he was off being interviewed on the "Today" show. And in the process I managed to pick up a lot of interesting information about the most recent developments in the academic discipline of historical Jesus scholarship, which is what I thought I would talk about today.
I do have a couple of caveats however. This morning’s sermon is even more “intellectually stimulating” than normal; and while you probably won’t need to take notes, you might want to pay a little closer attention than usual. Likewise, it does contain a certain amount of Adult Content. And there WILL be an opportunity for Q & A after the service.
And I thought I’d start with a question of my own, which may seem trivial to you, or maybe even a little silly, but I think it's important to ask, and that is: why would anyone be interested in trying to study the historical Jesus in the first place? What more can we possibly know about Jesus that isn't already contained in the Bible; isn't the Gospel story good enough as it is? The problem comes when you really start to scrutinize the Scriptures, and realize that it all doesn't all fit together nearly as neatly as one might hope.
I don't think I need to belabor this point, because it is readily apparent to anyone who spends time with the material — but the Gospels don't always agree with one another, and sometimes these disagreements are anything but subtle. This is not necessarily a huge problem in and of itself, since most ancient historical sources have similar problems; but when we begin to compare what we know about Jesus from the Gospels to what we know about his time and culture from other historical sources, all sorts of other questions start to emerge as well.
Essentially, the closer one looks, the less reliable the Gospels appear — they have all been "shaped" by later writers in order to create a compelling portrait of the "Christ of Faith," which may or may not resemble the historical Jesus himself. Thus much of the modern inspiration (and by modern I mean since the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century) — the modern inspiration for research about the “Jesus of History” has been an attempt to "scientifically" strip away the "patina" of superstition and subsequent traditions of faith about "Jesus Christ" in order to get back to the historical truth about Jesus of Nazareth.
The basic assumption behind this process is that the "historical" Jesus is somehow the "real" Jesus, and that if we could just weed-out all the non-historical nonsense, we would be left with the "pure" Christianity that Jesus himself intended his followers to practice. The Jefferson Bible is superb example of this kind of effort — an attempt to get rid of all of the narrative inconsistencies, supernatural miracles, and the like which the Enlightened mind found so unbelievable, and to distill the essence of the authentic moral and ethical teachings of Jesus himself.
Of course, this methodology had problems of its own as well. Just as you might expect, when the liberal Protestant Biblical scholars of the 19th-century set out in search of the historical Jesus, what they found was a Jesus who sounded an awful lot like a 19th century liberal Protestant Biblical scholar.
Now at this point, I would like to make two very important observations. The first is that the difficulty which even academic scholars have in pinning down the historical Jesus is not necessarily a bad thing, provided we recognize it for what it is. Often we set out in search of the historical Jesus, and end up discovering a reflection of ourselves… yet this is precisely the power of the Gospel throughout history: the ability of the STORY of Jesus of Nazareth, whoever he may have "truly" been historically, to challenge our fundamental assumptions about what is important in our lives, and to compel us to look at our lives and ourselves in a new way.
And this brings me to my second point, which is that rather than looking at Christian faith as a declension, or corruption over time, of a perfect, "original" religion of Jesus, we might just as easily view Christianity as a product of historical "evolution," which has developed and improved over time as generation after generation has wrestled in turn with the challenges posed in the distant past by its historical "founder," an obscure and shadowy figure about whom we actually know very little.
The current scholarly interest in the Jesus of History reflects some of this evolutionary understanding. It is not so much an attempt to find "the answers" in the past as it is to gain greater understanding of that past, and thus greater clarification of the real questions that concern us in the here and now. It is an attempt to liberate us from our "Sunday School" portraits of Jesus, in order that we might encounter the tradition in the full intensity of its power, and not just in a way that has been sanitized for children, or for the support of a religious status quo.
So, what are contemporary New Testament scholars saying about the historical Jesus, and just how different is he from the comfortable and familiar Jesus Christ of our childhoods?
Perhaps the most fundamental thing we should understand about Jesus of Nazareth is that he was first and foremost a first century Jewish peasant, whose life bore very little resemblance to that of an "enlightened," educated and affluent member of the modern American middle class. He probably didn’t have long blonde hair and pale blue eyes (like you see in those pictures so popular in some churches), but he may have had tattoos -- and I’ll have more to say about that later.
Rather than being born of a virgin, some scholars (most notably Jane Schaberg) have pointed to evidence which suggests that Mary may very well have been a prostitute, or a victim of rape, and her child the illegitimate offspring of a Roman soldier named Pantera, who was only later adopted by the Joseph of the Gospels and raised as a carpenter's son. Carpentry, by the way, was not a well-paid, journeyman occupation as it is today — it was essentially a role filled by peasants who had in some way lost their land (probably through excessive taxation or debt), and thus were compelled to support themselves by selling their labor in an economy where labor was cheap.
Jesus almost certainly had younger brothers and sisters, one of whom (his brother James) became an important Christian leader in his own right. Some scholars have even suggested that Jesus may well have been functionally illiterate (although personally I doubt this), while others have suggested that he may have been multi-cultural: which is to say, educated in his youth in Egypt, and familiar with the more popular aspects of the Greek philosophical tradition as well. Galilee was anything but a cultural backwater; rather, it was something of a cultural crossroads, cosmopolitan in nature, and with a prosperous trading and agricultural economy. But whatever his level of education, he was certainly well-versed in the oral traditions of his culture, and sensitive to the theological nuances of his own time.
The possibility that Jesus was familiar with popular Greek philosophy comes through in the most common emerging understanding of Jesus' brief public ministry, which scholars like Burton Mack characterize as that of an itinerant teacher of subversive wisdom, not unlike that of similarly itinerant Cynic philosophers, who essentially lived a life of voluntary poverty and homelessness in order to be able to criticize and ridicule whomever they pleased without worrying too much about the repercussions of their behavior.
When we begin to look closely at the sayings of Jesus, and particularly at those which scholars have identified as the earliest layers of the Jesus tradition, we discover that they have that same sharp edge so common among the classical Cynical philosophers. Take for example the teaching about rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's — which is essentially a call to disengage from the economic system of a colonial oppressor, and to live a life of itinerant poverty.
The parable of the mustard seed likewise takes on a whole new dimension when one realizes that mustard was considered a weed in New Testament times, a plant which was difficult to eradicate, and which gave shelter to parasitic birds who fed upon agricultural crops.
Or consider the edict to turn the other cheek, or, more accurately, as it is written in Gospel of Matthew: "if someone strikes you on the right cheek, offer the other as well," -- a passage which the members of the Jesus Seminar have identified, with a 92% consensus, as the one saying which they most strongly feel goes directly back to the original words of Jesus himself. If you are a peasant, and a member of the wealthy ruling elite strikes you on the right cheek, that means they've struck you with the back of their hand. Turning the other cheek is not so much an act of submission, but one of defiance; you have suddenly placed your attacker in the very uncomfortable position of being forced to strike you with his fist, which not only escalates the level of violence, but also fundamentally changes the status of your relationship as well. One strikes a subordinate with the back of the hand. But one only strikes an equal with their fist. [Shirt off your back/Walking the extra mile]
But beyond this subversive wisdom, there is a second dimension of Jesus' public ministry that has proven even more problematic to moderns, and that is his role as a mystic and a healer, or a "spirit person," as Marcus Borg sometimes characterizes him in his books. The reason that moderns are uncomfortable with this role is that we aren't really sure what to do about the supernatural miracles; our tendency is to want to discount them, give them rational, naturalistic explanations or in some way convert them to allegories and dismiss them in that way.
When we think of Jesus as a "spiritual" person, we want to understand him perhaps in analogy to St. Francis of Assisi: someone with a rich devotional life who communed with nature and loved little animals. The problem is, this image doesn't really match up with what we know about life in New Testament times at all. Jesus was probably much less a mystic than he was a magician — someone who saw himself and who was seen by others as evoking supernatural powers in order to perform exorcisms and other miraculous healings.
It's important to understand that our modern view of magic is very different how it would have been understood in ancient times. We tend to think of magic as "sleight of hand" — a form of trickery which can fool the foolish, but which always has a rational explanation. This was simply not the case in the ancient world, where magic would have been understood as something which is obviously "real," but which was considered both dangerous and evil to dabble with.
When we look objectively at the miracles recorded in the New Testament, we discover obvious parallels with reports of exorcisms performed by other first century Hellenistic magicians, as well as a certain similarity to the spells and rituals recorded in the Egyptian Magical Papyri, which were essentially instructions for aspiring magicians willing to run the risks of attempting to manipulate demons and other supernatural powers.
This is where the tattoos come in.
Like the amnesiac character in the movie “Memento,” Egyptian exorcists commonly tattooed their magical spells on their bodies, so that they wouldn’t forget them when they found themselves face to face with a supernatural demon. So if the historical Jesus was himself a representative of this tradition, he may very well have been covered with them.
There's one last thing I want to bring up this morning, and I think I'd also like to introduce it by way of a question, which is this: Have any of you ever wondered about this young man dressed in only a linen cloth that we heard about in this morning's reading? Who is this guy? He shows up only in the Gospel of Mark, and then only in this one particular spot, where he really does nothing to further the narrative, but instead just sort of sticks out in the text like, well — a naked man running down the street in the middle of the night.
Commentators have speculated about these two verses for centuries, and nobody has ever been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation. But in 1958 at the monastery of Mar Saba near Jerusalem, a scholar by the name of Morton Smith ( Harvard Ph.D. ; later a tenured professor at Columbia) discovered a fragment of a previously unknown letter written by the second century Christian bishop Clement of Alexandria which may throw some light on this passage.
This is real "Raiders of the Lost Ark" stuff, or at least as close as it gets in "real" academia, so you might want to hold on to your seats for a minute. In this letter, which was very controversial when Smith first discovered it, but is now generally considered genuine (at least by most Clementine scholars), Clement quotes an additional 15 verses from the Gospel of Mark which do not appear in the version of the gospel as we know it today. The first fragment, which is the longer of the two, comes in the 10th chapter of Mark between verse 34 and verse 35, and it goes like this:
***And they come into Bethany, and this woman was there whose brother had died. She knelt down in front of Jesus and says to him, "Son of David, have mercy on me." But the disciples rebuked her. And Jesus got angry and went with her into the garden where the tomb was. Just then a loud voice was heard from inside the tomb. Then Jesus went up and rolled the stone away from the entrance to the tomb. He went right in where the young man was, stuck out his hand, grabbed him by the hand, and raised him up. The young man looked at Jesus, loved him, and began to beg him to be with him. Then they left the tomb and went into the young man's house (Incidentally, he was rich.) Six days later Jesus gave him an order; and when evening had come, the young man went to him, dressed in only a linen cloth. He spent that night with him, because Jesus taught him the mystery of God's domain. From there, Jesus got up and returned to the other side of the Jordan.***
The second passage is much shorter; it comes in verse 45 of this same chapter, between the phrase "then they come to Jericho" and the phrase "as he was leaving Jericho," and goes like this:
***The sister of the young man whom Jesus loved was there, along with his mother and Salome, but Jesus refused to see them.***
Now before we start speculating too much about how these verses ought to be interpreted (and how embarrassing it might prove to homophobic Fundamentalists if they actually mean what some scholars have suggested they appear to mean), I just want to say a couple of things. The first is that even if we decide that these 15 verses do, in fact, legitimately belong in the Gospel of Mark, that doesn't necessarily mean that they accurately reflect the historical Jesus, any more than we can say with confidence that the rest of the gospel can or should be read strictly as history either. They are historical evidence, but they are not history per se, and this is a distinction which we must always keep in mind.
The second thing is that these expurgated passages from Mark’s gospel are strongly reminiscent of both the “Beloved Disciple” and the Lazarus story in the Gospel of John, and also the narratives of the Easter resurrection and the empty tomb. But they may in fact simply represent something as innocuous as a secret Christian baptismal rite previously not linked explicitly to Jesus, but which would help to explain both the naked young man in the Garden at Gethsemane, and also possibly the young man waiting at the tomb on Easter morning after the crucifixion, whom many scholars have previously tended to interpret as an angel.
The possibility that Jesus taught in secret as well as in public, and practiced a private ritual of baptism during which individuals were personally initiated into the mysteries of the kingdom, has all sorts of ramifications for the study of the historical Jesus, as well as for our understanding of the meaning of Easter. But for some reason this earthshaking possibility for a radical reinterpretation of Christ’s Easter resurrection is not nearly so controversial as the insinuation that the historical Jesus may very well have made a practice of spending the night with naked young men whom he loved.
But setting aside all this speculation for the time being, there is one additional point I would like to make about these passages. It has long been a common practice for those of us on the liberal wing of Christendom, who often find reason to be critical of more conservative, reactionary expressions of Christian Faith, to speculate about what Jesus himself would think if he did, in fact, ever return to earth and could see with his own eyes what had been made of his church.
What Would Jesus Think? From St. Francis to Dostoyevsky to Lenny Bruce, it is a common critical motif: to contrast the excesses of organized religion to the simplicity of a personal experience of religious faith. There have even been some who have questioned whether Jesus ever really intended to start a church at all. Yet a church did spring up, inspired by his memory and grounded in his name, and over time we have all collected quite a bit of furniture to go with our faith.
Yet even from its earliest days, this "Jesus Movement" was anything but a unified whole. By the time of Clement of Alexandria in the second century AD, the practice of Christianity ranged from solitary hermits who lived in the desert and whipped themselves in penance for even the thought of sins of the flesh, to groups like the Carpocratians, whom Clement was writing against, who essentially observed the Eucharist as a type of semi-public orgy, in the belief that the power of the Holy Spirit prevented them from acting sinfully regardless of how licentiously they behaved.
And it seems to me that the real miracle of Christianity is how well we have done at preserving the real "truth" of Christian Faith despite the extremes that the tradition itself makes possible. Separated from our own time by centuries of cultural difference and forgotten events, the historical Jesus will always be something of an enigma to us: perhaps not only stranger than we know, but stranger than we CAN know. Yet despite this strangeness, there remains something about him which transcends strict historicity, and reveals itself to us in an on-going way that is strangely both intimate and familiar.
My former professor, Marcus Borg, once told me that he thought the real problem with Unitarians is that, like the Fundamentalists we so freely and frequently criticize, we tend to read the Bible too literally. We take it at face value, rarely looking beneath the surface of the text, and then we superficially reject it, rather than wrestling with the subtle complexities of the scripture. We distinguish too sharply between “fact” and “myth,” embracing the former and dismissing the latter, and thus missing out on the profoundly important truths contained within the metaphor.
So my Easter message to all of you this morning is simply this: Stop worrying so much about whether or not Easter really happened, and let it happen, right now, in your own lives. Celebrate the rebirth of New Life in this season, and the opportunity for change, and healing, and spiritual growth which the “subversive wisdom” of the Gospel promises to us all, if only we are willing to trust that Creative Power that gives us life, and gives life meaning.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 6:06 PM
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