Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age. James Carroll

the twentieth century’s two world wars, in which more than one hundred million died, led in Europe to a Continental repudiation of narrow nationalism and a broad rejection of war as an instrument of political power—the foundational principles of the European Union.

      Savage war generates, in reaction, new ideas. This principle undergirds the line of thinking here—that the Roman War against the Jews prompted radical shifts in the religious imagination of Jews. The shifts were taken as revelations from God. But this was the pattern established in the religious DNA of Israel by the Babylonian War, which, as we saw, generated the essential character of Jewish religion in the first place. In the centuries after Babylon, Israel found itself under one heel after another, a succession of oppressors—Persians, Greeks, and Hellenized Egyptians—against whom Jews launched no significant resistance. But then came the Greco-Syrian Seleucids and the next Jewish war, the so-called Maccabean Revolt (167–160 B.C.E.), resulting in the next shift in the religious imagination of Jews.

      Again, the war produced wartime literature, indeed a new genre of it—the so-called apocalyptic, epitomized by the book of Daniel.⁴⁴ The author of that text, an unnamed pious Jew writing in Aramaic, presented a wildly imaginative rendering of otherworldly dreads, hopes, and expectations—redemptive interpretations of his present tribulations. In Daniel, six stories set during the Babylonian Captivity, centuries before the book was written, describe the ways in which Jews faithfully clung to their identity as God’s people during that previous Jewish war. Then, in four ecstatic visions, the coming triumph of the “saints” is promised. Daniel is full of dreamlike fancies and horrors, an almost psychedelic hallucination, with figures flying through the air, men surviving a fiery furnace, the man Daniel surviving lions because “God sent his angel and shut the lions’ mouths”⁴⁵—visions so exotic as themselves to require deciphering by angels. The book of Daniel was sparked by an expression of enraged reaction to the Seleucid desecration of, yes, the Temple—“the abomination that makes desolate.”⁴⁶

      But at bottom, the apocalyptic vision was a mode of turning pure destruction into creative transformation. “And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time; but at that time your people shall be delivered . . . and many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake.”⁴⁷ Bracing and consoling a people who, when violence flared, inevitably found themselves endangered and beleaguered, the apocalyptic vision insisted that transcendent intervention was about to occur, changing a broken and suffering world into a realm of peace and joy, with Israel at its center. “Go your way till the end; and you shall rest, and shall stand in your allotted place at the end of the days.”⁴⁸ Violence would be redeemed by God’s act, and hopeless military odds would be reversed by God’s direct interruption of history. The vision was both realistic—acknowledging present violence—and hopeful, in that it insisted that the violence would not be vindicated in the end. The book of Daniel, usually dated to about 160 B.C.E., is the classic work of Jewish apocalypticism, searing the imagination of Israel across each of the two centuries before and after Jesus. Josephus, calling the figure Daniel “one of the greatest of the prophets,” said the book was hugely influential among Jews in that era.⁴⁹ No surprise, therefore, that Jesus’ core meaning was constructed out of materials drawn from this work. We will see more of this.

      The portrait of Jesus Christ given in the Gospels grows as much out of the stresses of war as did the already defining texts of Jewish religious understanding, from Jeremiah to Daniel. Nowhere is that clearer than in the Gospel of Mark, which is reliably dated by scholars, as noted, to about the year 70—a time when, after more than two years of Roman rampage throughout Palestine, all hell broke loose in Jerusalem. Mark is the main source of, and template for, the later Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Mark’s rendering of Jesus, and its proclamation of his meaning as the “Christ,” are the central pillars of the Christian imagination. Yet Mark is rarely read in the context of the war raging outside the cell in which it was composed—an omission we found unthinkable in the case of Bonhoeffer’s letters from prison. A foregrounding eye on the Roman War against the Jews must change the Christian reading.

      The point to emphasize is that the author of Mark was writing as the legion’s phalanxes closed in on Jerusalem, setting up the ring of crucifixes around the Temple Mount and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Jews.⁵⁰ If in the Gospel of Mark, to start with the largest point, Jesus is portrayed as obsessed with the traumas of the End Time, it may be because, as an apocalyptic messianic figure, that was indeed the main note of his preaching when he was alive. The early sources on which the author of Mark drew seem to have emphatically interpreted Jesus within the Jewish apocalyptic genre, especially Daniel, whether that interpretation began with Jesus himself or with those who came after him.

      Yet however much Mark drew on the visions of Daniel, his text could not be more different. While Jesus describes in vivid detail scenes right out of an apocalyptic End Time, he is shown doing so without a hint of hallucination—not “vision,” but dead-on description. The Gospel is starkly realistic, striking for its spare, objective reportage. Taking seriously the context out of which this text emerged leads inexorably to the thought that Jesus was rendered by Mark as obsessed with End Time traumas not only—or even mainly—because of literary influences from preexistent Jewish apocalyptic genres like Daniel, but because the catastrophic End Time seemed at hand as Mark’s story was told. The Roman assault of 70, that is, could well have felt, to those who experienced it, like the end of the world.

Mark’s Apocalypse

      Chapter 13 of Mark is the heart of it, and what Jesus is shown offering at great length there can be read, in fact, as an almost literal description of what was happening to the people for whom Mark was written. Horrors—not hallucination. The chapter begins with verses already referred to, the “great buildings” of the Temple thrown down, “not one stone left upon another.” In fact, the Roman destruction of the Temple was by fire, not block-by-block demolition, but that takes nothing from the trauma Jesus describes. The ruination of the Holy of Holies is the point, and the factual destruction of the Temple in 70 is the historical background for the poignant advice that Jesus is shown offering to his frightened disciples, less to those in front of him than to his followers a generation later: “Take heed that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray.”

      Here we have reference to those war-generated disputes between and among Jews, with Zealots not hesitating to kill those they regarded as collaborators or as cowards. Self-anointed Messiahs appeared in abundance during the mayhem, and if you were not with them, they were against you. In the dominant Christian memory, these verses of antagonism are read as if the assaults are coming from “Jews” attacking the followers of Jesus as such, but the assaults at issue actually—that is, when Mark is written—come from two directions: from warrior Jews attacking Jews not as Jesus people, but as rejecters of the anti-Roman rebellion; and, always, assaults coming indiscriminately from Romans, who were crucifying five hundred Jews every day.⁵¹

      Listen to Jesus, forewarning: “For they will deliver you up to councils; and you will be beaten in synagogues . . . Brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But he who endures to the end will be saved.”⁵²

      Unlike other Gospels, Mark does not offer any account of the origins of Jesus, but is satisfied simply to announce his arrival “from Nazareth of Galilee.”⁵³ Recall that the Roman War against the Jews began in Galilee, a rocky, mountainous region difficult to subdue. In 67 and 68, some sixty thousand legionaries killed and enslaved something like 100,000 Jews, mostly in Galilee, before moving on to the siege of Jerusalem. Scholars are divided as to where Mark was written, and to whom it was addressed. One ancient tradition locates both the author and the readership in Rome, with the Gospel taken as an account reflecting the views and experiences of Jesus’ favored apostle, Peter, whose intimate friend “Mark” was taken to be.⁵⁴ That tradition nicely serves the primordial purpose of elevating Peter as the Church’s mythic first leader, as if something like the papacy already existed.