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

Law to be kept? Given such a context, it can now be seen that Jesus in conflict with fellow Jews over just such questions was not anomalous, but typical. If he was a rebel, it was for the cause of his people. His participation in intra-Jewish disputation—arguing with Pharisees, for example, over what was permitted on the Sabbath—underscored his integrity as a defender of Israel, not its opponent. The Christian mistake—mine—has been to miss that context of intra-Jewish tension. Even today, what is more Jewish than the argument over what it is to be a faithful Jew?

      In other words, the post-Holocaust task, deriving from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s rudimentary insight, is to make the Jewishness of Jesus the first lens through which to view him. This means, perhaps, putting aside for a time—and this is rarely done—the viewfinders of the four Gospels, all of which are usually read to locate the heart of his conflict with “the Jews” in his rejection of Jewish cult and Law. Our view of Jesus must come into focus around a new organizing principle: nothing we say or believe about “Christ actually” can be allowed to exclude the authenticity of his profound and permanent participation in the life of Israel.

      Twice a day, Jesus pronounced the Shema.³⁸ Every Sabbath, he read the Torah—or, if he was illiterate,³⁹ was present for its reading. He believed that God’s Torah was given to God’s people, Am, to be brought to life in God’s land, aretz.⁴⁰ As regularly as he breathed in oxygen, he took in God’s saving history. At least once a year, at Passover, his attention turned to the Temple in Jerusalem, for the burnt offerings of animals while Psalms were sung. He observed purity and revered the Temple. And if, as most Jesus historians still assume, he enacted a “cleansing” demonstration of some kind there, it was less likely an attack on the purity system of the Temple, as the story is usually read, than a defense of it. We will see more of that.

      Jesus must not be imagined, in sum, as a pretend Jew, any more than he can be regarded as having been a pretend human being. If he preached the good news of love; of the trustworthiness of God, who is like a father; of the Kingdom of God⁴¹ present here and now, he did so from within Judaism, not against it. He preached not a New Testament God (of love) in opposition to an Old Testament God (of judgment),⁴² but one God: the God of Israel, pure and simple.

      But for Christians to actually accommodate such an adjustment in their view of Jesus, they would first have to confront the indictment of their own most sacred tradition that is made explicit in the catastrophe of Christian anti-Semitism. Here is why the extensive postwar revisions by scholars—historians and theologians both—have had so little impact on the minds of ordinary Christians. Here is why, in the Catholic context, the theological transformation conceived at Vatican II was all but stillborn.⁴³ This failure to reckon with an essential Christian failure about the Jews, for that matter, is at least part of why the spirit bled from mainstream Protestant denominations in the decades after the failure showed itself. And it is why the only form of Christian belief to actually grow in these years—evangelical fundamentalism—is a faith dedicated to the restoration of the very biblical literalism that put “Christ killer” Jews at risk in the first place. To actually change their understanding of Jesus Christ, that is, Christians would have to far more fully confront the Church’s own ancient and ongoing betrayal of Jesus, the one that makes such change necessary.

      It is curious that Christians should find it so difficult to imagine that both ordinary members and consecrated leaders of the Protestant and Catholic churches alike should have grievously let their Lord down in the twentieth century’s Nazi era, since the Gospels emphasize that, in the first century, the entire inner circle of Jesus’ followers abandoned him in his hour of need. Over time, the ubiquity of such failure by “the faithful” was de-emphasized to the point of being forgotten as the Church developed its mechanisms of self-canonization. But, because of sand thrown by history, those mechanisms are stuck.

      The history in question, of course, includes not just failures of the followers of Jesus, early and late, but also the counterbalancing glories of sustained intellectual inquiry. That project—faith seeking understanding—steadily promoted new levels of human wisdom, but ultimately, with the coming of rationalism at the time of the Enlightenment, it also undermined traditional notions of nature and the supernatural, a development that had to affect understandings of Jesus. So this book, about belief in the Secular Age—like any work on the topic—has necessarily been provoked by challenges arising from science, but that is not its primary stimulus. Far more gravely, this reflection aims to reckon, for the sake of faith, with the tragic compulsions of human behavior.

      There are, to be sure, intellectual obstacles to traditional faith, but many otherwise “modern” believers have accommodated those, if only by leaving critical reflection and historical-mindedness outside when they pass through the door of the church. Yet in the twenty-first century, ethical obstacles to belief have become increasingly difficult to ignore. Moral anarchy has shown itself in sanctuary after sanctuary, whether one considers the descent of strains of Eastern Orthodox religion into Islamophobic brute nationalism (think of the recent Balkans wars, in which genocidal attacks on Bosnian Muslims by Orthodox Serbs were religiously justified); or the ongoing Roman Catholic blasphemy of a power structure protecting priestly child abusers instead of their abused victims; or the evangelical Protestant embrace in America of know-nothing bigotry against immigrants. Whatever Christ is preached by such churches, what Christ can actually be seen through them?

      But perhaps the palpable readiness of the faithful to confront this dark character of Christian religion—and abandon it in droves⁴⁴—does indeed flow, if only unconsciously, from the prior moral trauma that initiated this period of accountability. Bonhoeffer’s death-row recognition was simple, and may yet prove timeless: if Jesus had been remembered across most of two thousand years as the Jew he was, the history of those millennia—and their climax in the crimes of the Thousand-Year Reich—would be very different.

      Our search for a believable Jesus necessarily assumes a fresh encounter with the Gospels and the epistles of Paul. Our reading will be informed by a firm grasp of the historical forces to which those writings were responses. Roman violence against Jews overwhelmingly generated those forces, and we will see how. It’s enough here to note that all the writers of the New Testament sought to give their readers the message—and the figure—they sorely needed, just at the time of their writing. The Gospel themes of suffering endured, violence rejected, failure forgiven, and discipleship maintained were directly addressed to the conditions that would surely have defined the experience just then of those who clung to the memory of Jesus. Archetypical were Peter, who, by betraying Jesus, became the exemplar of the forgiven one; Paul, who invented a transforming understanding of Jesus; and “Mark,” the first and paradigmatic Gospel writer. We will see how all of the first Jesus interpreters, working in the second of our three time frames, presented with remarkable freedom the oral and written material that had come to them across the years since the life and death of Jesus. And we will take special note of how this remembering, interpreting, and, finally, writing were all tied to “the Scriptures,” which, of course, meant for those early Jesus people the Hebrew Scriptures.

      We will take for granted the largely invented character of the narrative that came of all of this, how it was shaped from various elements, only one of which had a connection to what we might call the historical record. Against the assumption of most Christians today, the Gospel writers aimed less at facticity than meaning. We twenty-first-century readers of sacred texts about Jesus could usefully take this interpretive and presentational freedom as license for our own interpretations, even if by now Paul, “Mark,” and the others are to us what they were not to themselves—which is Bible.

      Many of the questions asked by modern believers—and many of the notes of faith dismissed by modern skeptics—lose their bite when it is acknowledged that they were neither questions nor notes of faith for Jesus and his first interpreters. For example, our contemporary way of seeing is bifocal, based on the supposition that all reality is oppositional. To see a thing wholly, for us, is to see its foil, too. Existentially, this can be understood as generated by Descartes: isolated self against all else. Socially and politically, the pattern is associated with Hegel: thesis against antithesis. Our minds are constantly slicing perception, and joining its halves, whether explicitly or not, with the hyphen word “versus”: religion