Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (25 page)

However that may be, Luke is preeminently the evangelist of God’s mercy to sinners; and his gospel is the one that dramatizes most believably Paul’s insistence to the Romans that “God’s love for us is shown in that,
while we were still sinners
, Christ died for us.” Like the father of a prodigal child and like Jesus forgiving the executioners who drove the nails into his hands and feet, God does not wait for our repentance; he loves us
anyway.

Luke is, in Dante’s words,
“il scriba della gentilezza di Cristo,”
“the scribe of the kindness of Christ.” Luke’s portrait of Jesus is the one that has had the most effect on the West; it is, in fact, Luke’s Christ that has made an indelible impression on the world’s imagination. From
“Jesu dulcis,”
the “sweet Jesus” of
Bernard of Clairvaux, to the “fairest Lord Jesus” of popular hymnody, from the merciful motets of Bach to the solemnly compassionate face sketched over and over by Rembrandt, the
face that Jesus turns toward us is the face that Luke, with reverent devotion and superior craft, was able to show us, a face of mildness and love, a Jesus who almost seems to observe our follies with an affectionate twinkle in his eye.

It is this face that millions, even billions, of dying men and women have hoped to see at the last, as they have hoped to hear spoken to them the words recorded only by this “beloved physician” of souls: “I tell you solemnly: today you shall be with me in Paradise.”

We have already seen that, during the course of the history of New Testament interpretation, Mary Magdalene’s identity was confused with both that of Mary the sister of Martha and that of the prostitute who wept over Jesus’s feet. We know little of the historical Mary Magdalene, save that she hailed from the Judean town of Magdala, that she was one of Jesus’s closest disciples and probably an “apostle,” that (with other women) she followed Jesus to his cross, and that she was among the first to view the empty tomb. She may also have been the first recipient of an apparition of Jesus following his
resurrection and the first to spread the news that “he is risen.” This favor gave her in ancient Christian tradition the unique title of
Apostola Apostolorum
, “the Apostles’ Apostle.” She seems to have been a woman of substance and unconventional, for Luke tells us that she was one of “many women” who traveled with Jesus and his male disciples in an age and place where the mixing of the sexes was unheard of and that these unusual women “provided for [everyone] out of their own means”—that is, bankrolled
the operation. Luke also provides us the baffling factoids that the women “had been cured of evil spirits and diseases” and that Mary, in particular, was one “from whom seven demons had been expelled,” presumably thanks to an
exorcism performed by Jesus.

With the
miracles of Jesus the
New Testament presents the modern reader with a conundrum so tangled that we may just about despair of making any sense of it. We admire Jesus’s ideals (even if in a part of our mind we find them unrealistic) and his moral teachings (even if a part of our ego recoils from them). Having read our way through the dark works of the Eastern European fantasists from Kafka to Kundera, we are no longer so quick as we might once have been to dismiss the
Book of Revelation as a grand expression of paranoia. Having lived through a time of state-sponsored terrors of unbelievable proportions, we no longer find Paul’s antipolitics so peculiar. Living daily in a new economic order of Winner Take All, we may even begin to see the point of Luke’s targeting the fundamental injustice of riches, of haves and have-nots. But stopping storms, curing blindness and leprosy, exorcising demons, raising the dead—come on. We either consign these marvels to the realm of fairy tales and the superstitions of prescientific peoples or take the more moderate view that there “may be something there”—a substrate of incidents that originally made perfectly good scientific sense but to which marvelous explanations were later appended. Couldn’t Jesus’s stopping of the storm on the Lake of Galilee have been just a coincidence: he said “cease” and, lucky for him, the storm just happened to end? Couldn’t the feeding of the multitude of five thousand with five loaves and two fish be a simple case of inflation (of the numbers of people involved) and deflation
(of the amount of food available) that occurred over time in the repeated telling of the story? Couldn’t the supposed cures have been of hysterical, rather than real, illnesses? Could Jesus simply have been a clever magician who resorted to tricks, perhaps with the complicity of his closest disciples, in order to enlarge his gullible following?

The hypothesis of Jesus the Magician is actually pretty weak, since none of the miracles recounted in the gospels is explicable by this hypothesis alone. One needs to make additional assumptions—the disciples had heaps of food hidden in a nearby cave in preparation for the multiplication “miracle,” the people raised weren’t really dead, the “lepers” were wearing leper makeup from a Martin Scorsese film—that require either sleight of hand beyond the powers of even the most accomplished prestidigitator or a level of credulity that cannot be posited even of children. Beyond this, we must bear in mind that the witnesses
knew
the people whose ailments were cured, even knew those raised from the dead—which would make a pretended “cure” much more difficult to effect than would be the case nowadays in, say, the tent of a televangelist.

There is, in addition to the (very nearly) insurmountable difficulty of establishing the practical mechanics for such sham miracles, an invidious precondition to such a theory: Jesus himself must be shown to have been a sham, hoodwinking multitudes for his own questionable purposes. Though it is possible to imagine someone like Machiavelli descending to such trickery (or, more likely, advising someone else to try it), it is downright impossible to square such motivation with the man who is presented to us in the gospels. What is far more likely is that these stories accrued to
Jesus in the course of the development of the oral tradition and that by the time the evangelists came along there were already set “wonder stories,” meant to prove that Jesus was the promised Messiah.

A careful analysis of the texts of the gospels, however, has convinced many scripture scholars that several, perhaps even a majority, of the basic miracle stories go back to the most primitive layer of the oral tradition—that is, to the testimony of the original eyewitnesses. One of these scholars is
John Meier, whose multivolume study of the “historical Jesus,”
A Marginal Jew
, still in progress, devotes more than five hundred pages to the miracles of Jesus—a more exhaustive analysis than, I think, has ever been attempted before. Meier is careful to distinguish between what is historically knowable and what is “metahistorical.” The miracles—if they could have occurred—he classifies as “metahistorical” because they are, of their very nature, beyond anything that can be proved to have happened. Meier’s modest conclusion is simply that “the statement that Jesus acted as and was viewed as an exorcist and healer during his public ministry has as much historical corroboration as almost any other statement we can make about the Jesus of history.”

We seem to be faced here with a kind of irreducible historical mystery. We may grant that Mary Magdalene was not possessed, perhaps only the victim of a particularly vicious form of schizophrenia, symbolized by “seven devils,” and that the “possessed boy” of Mark’s Gospel was really an epileptic. We may grant that the “lepers” of the gospels had psoriasis or eczema or any of a variety of virulent skin diseases that ancient peoples had not the medical knowledge to distinguish from authentic leprosy. We can, according to Meier, claim
that Jesus walking on the water never happened but is only a
theologoumenon
, a symbolic epiphany of Jesus who appears to us in the dark—that is, in our worst hour—to say: “It is I [or ‘Here I am’ or even the Hebrew God’s ‘I am’], so don’t be afraid.” But we cannot, it would appear, brush aside the miracles of healing as old wives’ tales. The people who witnessed them believed they had occurred. At least some of the people, like Mary Magdalene, who experienced them found in this extraordinary attention reason to devote themselves permanently to Jesus’s mission. To have been rendered sane or healthy or living once more must, after all, have struck the individual so cured as an overwhelming proof of God’s personal care—a miracle for
me.

These inexplicable phenomena were viewed by Jesus and his followers as proofs of the coming of God’s Kingdom. They were, in their eyes, the fulfillment of the Isaian prophecies that the Anointed One would cast out all the
evils that infect our world—disease and death, among them—and effect such a peace in nature that even “the lion shall lie down with the lamb.” If the “mark of the
Beast” signals hatred and destruction, the most salient mark of the
Messiah is that he comforts and heals. When the followers of
John the Baptizer come to Jesus on behalf of John, who has been imprisoned by
Herod Antipas, they ask: “Are you the One-Who-Is-to-Come, or should we be looking for someone else?” Jesus replies, borrowing
Isaiah’s very words: “Go and let John know what you have seen and heard:
the blind coming to sight, cripples
walking, lepers cleansed,
the deaf hearing, the dead raised, and the Good News brought to the poor.
Happy indeed is anyone who is not alienated by what I do.” This saying of Jesus, reported in identical passages of Matthew and Luke,
clearly goes back to
Q, the lost collection of Jesus’s sayings that must have preceded these gospels by three or four decades.

In the final analysis, the modern problem with miracles is little different from what the ancient one would have been. If one believes in a God who heals, then healing in itself—whether of the quotidian kind or of an uncommon and spectacular sort—will hardly seem inconceivable or out of reach. If one cannot conceive of such a God—of an ultimate Goodness at the heart of the universe—miracles are, both intellectually and emotionally, off limits. In speaking of the medically inexplicable cures that have been occurring for a century and a half at the French shrine of Lourdes, John LaFarge, son of the American painter of the same name and a man who dedicated his life to peace and reconciliation, remarked cogently: “For those who believe in God, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not, no explanation is possible.”