Many historians of Christianity are convinced that along with the preaching of the kingdom, the historical figure of Jesus functioned as a talented healer. Most believe this implicitly as the figures of famous travelling physicians abounded in all ages and in most places on the planet. Schweitzer saw his mission in Lambarene as Christ’s calling, i.e. central to his view of Jesus as not just a preacher but an activist par excellence for a benevolent God. The late Morton Smith argued fervently (Jesus the Magician) that Jesus’ fame as a healing magician was that which assured him of his post-mortem following. Steven Davies (Jesus the Healer), went a step further, portraying Jesus as essentially a pre-modern psychotherapist, utilizing his own experience of the Spirit possession as a tool of his trade.
I do not believe that the historical Jesus was a healer. My objection to that idea is twofold. Paul, in his discourse on gifts in 1 Cr 12, sees healing as one of a number of gifts of the Spirit, which proceeds from the risen Lord. It appears that Paul was quite blunt about his differences with other strands of the nascent Jesus traditions in matters of the messianic kingdom , the crucifixion, resurrection from the dead, tongue speaking, work ethic, lapsing morals, table manners, and the like, but no word from him about rival claims regarding successful cures in the name of the “other Jesus”. I find it hard to credit that if a number of other apostles went around exorcising demons and curing all manner of disease by laying on hands wholesale under a different gospel, that Paul would not have used the word pharmakeia more than once in the Galatians.
It would also have been very difficult for Jesus to do healing miracles for whole cities (Mk 1:32), and somehow manage to miss on the enduring respect and bonding that would have naturally flowed from his sustained successes. For this and other reasons I prefer to read the Markan Jesus crowds as symbolic hyperboles of the growth of Mark’s own community transposed back symbolically to Jesus own historical time frame. A far-reaching fame assumes implicitly his patients collectively were ungrateful monsters who could not return his love and generosity as people of all times and places naturally will do when they receive relief from pain and suffering. If Jesus was preceded to Jerusalem by his reputation as a great healer, his death is not explicable. Inversely, if Jesus received his reward, and still referred to his contemporaries as a ‘faithless generation’, then something is not working right in the scenario. Reading the situation by the logic of Thomas A.Harris P-A-C therapy : if Jesus was Ok and the people he was helping were not Ok, a whiff of paranoia will linger about the stage props. The objection that Jesus believed himself an prophet of the last days only exacerbates the problem. The end of the world did not materialize.
In a nutshell, this is then the basis of my scepticism. If the historical Jesus had a track record as a healer then Paul would have had to acknowledge his track record as a healer – one way or another. And the cures would have been remembered in ways different than the first narrative gospel portrays them. Mark speaks of them only in riddles.
The Spirit as Manifestation of Manic Excitement
As I began to show in my previous essay (Mark’s Recursive Gospel), the writing is an allegory of the travail of Pauline Spirit of the risen Lord on earth, which begins with the revelation of the Sonship to (actually, in) Jesus of Nazareth on his baptism. From then on Jesus is not only a human but also the Spirit of the heavenly Christ as taught by Paul , who has come to, and was empowered on, earth. Jesus then has a double identity, with the spirit overshadowing (if not obliterating) the historical man of flesh and blood. The Markan community is not yet a Christian church, but a society of Christ mystics (and a group of supporters), who themselves become individually entered into periodically by the Spirit, lifted into dizzying heights of euphoric glory where they receive revelations and empowerment, only to be brought down and humbled by the Lord, in often horrendous bouts of agitated, depressive psychosis, which they experience as a torture of annihilation. After Paul, they liken the disassembly of the Spirit to the cross on which Jesus of the Nazarenes expired along with the grafted Spirit. The ministry of Jesus of Nazareth is built on a mystical cycle, in which the Spirit appears suddenly, easily dominates everyone and everything, then begins to doubt itself, then is overpowered and captured by the profane reality to be finally mocked, tortured and annihilated on the cross. This underlying allegorical cycle coincides with typical stages of a manic episode (see Goodwin-Jamison, Manic Depressive Illness, Oxford U. Press, 1990, p.77).
For our purposes here, let us define the Spirit as the internal experience of altered consciousness which suggests to the excited subject an alien entity or an emanation thereof. This apprehended entity, in the early stages of manic intoxication, validates perceptions, and manipulates abstract objects outside of an orderly process of cognition. It is probable but not yet proven by neuro-physiological research that significant inversions of hemispheric dominance are triggered during some forms of severe manic excitation and sponsor the subjective ‘reality’ of a separate entity engaging in the proximity of or within the individual. It is in the nature of the disorder that a confrontation ensues between the former cognitive, verbal self and the newly constructed Spirit when the latter’s suggested delusionary schemes fail cognitive testing. In the increasingly dysphoric and chaotic communication with the Spirit, that will be now defied as an impostor, the subject feels persecuted and eventually, often through severe terror attacks, recaptures most of the former stasis of self. This would be the normal, desirable outcome of an episode of mania.
There are roughly four functions of the Spirit in the gospel of Mark. By far the most prominent and important, is the glorious affirmation of the subject which converts depression and releases the sufferer from the bonds of physical ailments and mental anguish. Second, the Spirit is said to be Holy, as it is believed unconditionally by Mark’s community that it represents the obverse of a destructive demonic agency. It is recognized and deferred to as such by demons themselves, who being ‘demons’ are dumb and without the insight of wisdom. But they, paradoxically, are the only characters who in the story know the nature of Jesus. They are forbidden to speak by Jesus, as they are antagonists. Their silencing confirms Jesus’ divine status and mission. The Spirit also is the gnosis itself, which in Mark, is earned by faith (4:11-12) in the Spirit’s purpose, - to spread the word of God. In Mark, faith cannot exist without gnosis. They are two inseparable aspects of the kerygma.
The Role of Humour In Mark
Now to the controversial part of my theory, the fourth function: On the successive parsing of the text and as I was finding more and more pointers to bipolar challenge in the author's habits of expression, I was being drawn closer to the element of the absurd in Mark. This was not just irony, I thought.
As I was scanning the gospel for clues, I was puzzled by the Jesus’ command to the leper not to speak of the cure (1:40-45), but only to show himself as cleansed to the priest. I could not make sense of the cured man’s defiance and the result of his ‘speaking freely’ of Jesus prowess as a healer resulting in Jesus having to take cover in the bush. This was outrageous yarn, but one that I had seen before in modern prose. I could not quite remember in who, though. No, not Vonnegut ! He was brilliant and crazy as a bedbug, but he was brutally forthright: nothing in his writing was hidden or coded. It was not Chesterton either though he was close: perhaps one cannot quite be a happy glutton and a mystic at the same time. I knew I had seen elsewhere the constant Markan talking past the point, his perverse preaching of nonsense, yet a gripping and mesmerizing incantation, free from rules of logic and a meaningful discourse, yet through all the humbug pointing at something very deep, a malady at the soul’s darkest corner , which consumes life in […what, already ?] . I convinced myself that Mark was a convulsive, a haunted genius like Dostoyevsky. But who was his modern twin ? As I was passing to the cure of the paralytic, I almost had him. I read:
And they came, bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men. And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him; and when they had made an opening, they let down the pallet on which the paralytic lay. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, "My son, your sins are forgiven."
I chuckled and then it struck like a bolt of lightning ! Of course, this is Mark’s therapy for [Angst] and his cosmic literary twin, Franz Kafka. Through these absurd exaggerations, and foolish self-contradictions, the forging of failed fantasies as the fulfilment of a divine plan, claptrap about a god who nobody listens to, about a god who is defied by everyone, a god who will not be acknowledged when he descends among the pitiful creatures of flesh to do good and answer their prayers, a god who is senselessly accused on earth of being the superman that he is and they have all been waiting for to deliver them and who for this must be nailed by them to crude carpentry. This is madness : a cathartic release and breaking free from the paralysing grip of helplessness, the silencing of the whispers of the devil who appears as reasoned sanity that insists there will be no relief from the approaching stench of death that comes after the last drop of the bitter drink in the cup of meaningless existence.
I grabbed The Trial from the shelf. Yes, yes: here it is, the yearning of the soul to be loved, recognized, to have the undivided attention of Grace. It would do anything for a chance to be in the presence of Grace ! But there is the deadening sense of one’s inadequacy, the sense one cannot reach it, or when standing before it, the fear of being judged as wicked, weak and unworthy. In a key scene of Kafka’s hero K. attends the first session of the court of inquiry that is to look into his case. He was summoned to appear before the Magistrate on Sunday. Sunday is the time of rest for everyone but the persecuted. (I am pointing this out for the learned exegets to consider the issue of the unreasonably extended working hours of the Sanhedrin.) After a frantic search for the hall of the Court (which is situated among ordinary apartments in a residential building), K. is shown into the Court hall through a laundry room:
K. felt as though he was entering a meeting hall. A crowd of people of all shapes and ages – they did not seem to bother about the newcomer – filled a middle-sized room with two windows, which just below the roof was surrounded by a gallery, also quite packed where the people were able to stand only in a bent posture with their heads and backs knocking against the ceiling…some had brought cushions with them to keep their heads from getting bruised.
Not very many people find Franz Kafka’s nihilistic melodramas funny. I earned a reputation of a weirdo at university when my roommate’s girlfriend caught me rolling around in a Lazyboy with Kafka’s Short Stories in my hand gasping for breath over the Sermon from the Cage by the Hunger Artist. “You think Kafka’s funny ?”. She was incredulous. I told her “as you can see - to some people, yes”. The word got around.
Max Brod writes in his biography of Kafka that Franz thought of his novels as private literature which was for his intimate circle only. He told Max – his best friend - that the stories and novels had no meaning to anyone who did not know him personally. He asked Max to destroy the manuscripts after he died. Brod relates how during his private readings from his exquisite and morbid imagination Franz occasionally broke down laughing, and as others joined, tears were streaming down his cheeks.
Like Kafka, Mark knows the limits of the intellect because he knows the big helpless babe that lives inside the skull next to it. But Mark’s manic defense is stronger than Franz’es; it will break Paul’s injunction on telling stories about the paradoxical abasement of God in human existence. He will summon the courage to write up Jesus Christ, not him crucified but him inter faeces et urinam natus - the Jesus that Paul did not want to know anything about ! Mark will rewrite Paul’s gospel as a narrative that would shame God if he were to deny it is true. The story has to be absurd to be believed. If God wants to exist as a human, he will have to agree to be dissed, mocked and killed for no other reason than that he was born and must die! If one does not see raucous comedy in that, then one’s Christ will be an empty, pathetic peddling of salvation to the humourless.
Like Paul, Mark knew that his ecstatic experiences were his credentials. He knew the polymorphous, perverse nature of his illness from the inside, but he found the gut to wrestle with the arbitrary madness of God. Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him. The disobedience of those Mark’s Jesus cured or the witnesses of the cures to Jesus injunctions not to speak (1:43, 5:43, 7:36), is in reality a stubborn defiance of God. These are hilarious, self-pointing allusions to what psychiatrists today call pressure of speech . Mark more or less gives away his playfulness in 7:36 :
And he charged them to tell no one; but the more he charged them, the more zealously they proclaimed it.
But of course, they could not obey Jesus because they acted under gross compulsions brought about by the state of mind in which their made his acquiantance. It's the kind of humour that I heard once from this terrific character rolling around the stage in a wheelchair in a Montreal comedy show: 'Not that I am complaining, dear God, but I always wanted to be a standup comedian !'
The Health Benefits of Mania
In Mark’s idiom the cures Jesus performs are allegories of the known beneficial health effects of a sudden mood conversion (from depression to manic states), ones we may safely assume were observable in antiquity by those who had the challenge and those around the sufferers who either were fearful of them, or amused by them or – much less frequently - believed either in the divine status the sufferers claimed for themselves, or in the reality of their connections to the highest places. The latter issued from those sufferers whose delusional schemes were more sophisticated intellectually, and thus better managed and calibrated to their social standing.
I will argue in my writing that the original Jesus-professing communities were formed around a hard core of intelligent manics (pneumatics, ecstatics) who had a measure of insight into their condition and were able to control the more debilitating effects of the ailment by a form of communal therapy. Like the earliest Christians, the apocalyptic communities that preceded them, i.e. the Qumran and the James the Just congregation in Jerusalem (I will explain that one later) were formed with similar aims - to usher the elect visionaries into a messianic kingdom that will confirm their glorious visions. My focus will be on Paul and Mark, the founders of the two textual genres that shaped the early Christian movement, which was not yet a coherent religion but allied and competing communal networks by and (primarily) for people who were going individually through difficult personal challenges.
The idea that madness (generically called ‘mania’) had beneficial effects and in fact that we humans are lucky to have different forms of it around was known well before the break of the ages. Socrates is quoted in Plato’s Phaedrus to the effect that some of our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness. He distinguished four beneficial manias: prophetic (patron is Apollo), telestic or ritual (Dionysius), poetic (the Muses), and erotic (Aphrodite). By the time of Paul and Mark, the highly educated people of Mediterranean antiquity had a fairly sophisticated, rational view of mental illness, but were not yet quite able to isolate physical from mental illness. Cicero, ahead of his time, actually did separate them (as morbi animi vs morbi corporis in the Tusculan Disputations) but old ideas persisted and he made no impression on the medical profession of his day and century. Old ideas faded away slowly. Hippocrates described epilepsy as an organic disease of the brain in 5th century BCE. It did not displace the popular notion of epileptic fits as attacks by a god. Both mania and depression were described medically but were thought of as separate disease until Aretaeus of Cappadocia (1st or 2nd century CE) showed they are sometimes a manifestation and phases of the same disorder. At any rate, even if medical view of the mood disturbances existed, it would not have made a large impact on popular image of the problems. The traditional belief complexes proved themselves much more resistant to new information than is the case in our own times.
The word ‘mania’ occurs only once in the New Testament, in the response of Festus to Paul’s rambling testimony of Christ (Acts 26:24).( The governor ascribes the madness of the sage to his great learning, so as not to offend). To which, Paul answers, ‘I am not mad (μαινομαι) most excellent Festus but I am speaking the sober truth’. Paul would have been convincing if this encounter happened, for I assume he would have looked sober and in possession of his faculties during that encounter. And this would have convinced Festus and Aggrippa of his harmlessness. The great secret of Paul success lied in the metamorphic nature of the illness, and his uncanny ability to control to a degree some of its debilitating effects, and thereby mesmerize his audience of people similarly affected with his Cosmic scheme. The common elements of their suffering, its periodic disappearance, and its sudden conversions into periods of explosive, unfettered joy and grandeur in Paul and his fellow prisoners of Christ, mystified also a group of well-wishers and God-fearers socializing with them who were convinced that these men and women were the chosen ones of God.
The healing by these saints who had Christ in them, likely began with requests for their 'laying hands' on the outer group members who witnessed the bizzare and frightening displays of ecstasy, followed by a return of the saints to their senses. The stories of miraculous cures then spread and the communities grew.
That Paul refused to be ashamed of Christ i.e. by the humiliating external view of his own bipolar challenge, was a great inspiration to Mark. Robert Price observes (in the Incredible Shrinking Son Of Man) the parabolic nature of the Markan healings. He asks smartly: ‘what are we to make of the fact that Jesus healing miracles fall well within the range of known somatization disorders, presumably susceptible to psychosomatic healings ? Does it mean that , having modern medical analogies, they do not rest simply upon myth and fiction ? If there had not been some kind of a reality check, wouldn’t the scope of Jesus’ miracle stories be much wider than it is ?’ The answer I believe is, yes ! If Paul and Mark were just the ordinary, garden variety of lunatics, they would have appropriated the manic glory for themselves, as was and is the fashion, because manics will be manics (and that only), until their demons are bound and their houses are plundered. Evidently that did not happen with a fourth-century physician Menecrates who thought himself Zeus. The demon was not bound in Al-Hakim, the millennium Fatimid caliph, crazed by the ‘command of God’ in his title, which had him order Christians to wear millstones around their necks and dishonest merchants in Cairo anally raped in public by a slave with a huge penis, on whom he bestowed the title “the machine of sodomitic punishment” (Joseph A. Massad, Desiring Arabs, U. of Chicago, 2007, ff. 303). Ron L. Hubbard, the father of Scientology, had a demon who knew of Mark’s plundered house. ‘Do you think you might be mad’ he was asked in an interview. ‘Oh yes’, said he, ‘the only one who does not believe himself mad is the madman’. Nothing , the sage said, seems nobler to the devil than his humble service to the devil.
Jesus’ cures are a limited license because they are the things that the Spirit actually does; real cures that the mania, so despised by others, actually brings to the sufferer. Anyone who observed florid manics will be immediately struck by the enormous amount of physical energy they are capable of generating. Anyone who wrestled with them knows, they are veritable God's dynamos. And their bodies really are being “healed” by the strange excitement. Eczemas and other skin conditions (which were conflated with Hansen’s disease as ‘leprosy’ (lepra) in antiquity) disappear on short order, as many of them are simply physical manifestations of depression. The revved up cardio-vascular output takes care of many ailments, even serious medical conditions which may have been present for years. There is also a tendency in manics to wander around (so called ‘fugues’), which takes them out of environments which may have caused, or contributed to, their poor health. Another well-known effect of manic excitement, is that the subjects experience a greatly elevated threshold of pain. This is the ‘authority to tread on serpents and scorpions’ that Jesus confers on his disciples (in Luke 10:19). The later annex to Mark records the picking up snakes and immunity from drinking ‘any deadly thing’ (Mk 16:18) based on the manic experience of disappearing pain and greatly improved immune system. Naturally, there is a little bit of license about the 'any deadly thing', that one may drink, but it is not altogether a tall tale either, as the difficulty with putting down the shamanic Rasputin with just potassium cyanide well illustrated. In ordinary bipolars, being distracted by the Spirit, means above all that they are no longer consumed by minor aches and ailments, which are imaginary, or real but out of proportion to the severity of the underlying physical problems.
The uncanny resistance of manics to pain was a well-known fact in antiquity, which among other things, tempted authorities go into extremes in their curiousity to find out the limit of endurance that would make a furiosus come to his senses. Josephus recounts the bloody scourging of Jesus ben Ananus by Albinus (Wars 6.5.3), in which the prisoner’s ‘bones were laid bare’. And, ‘yet he did not make any supplication for himself or shed any tears but,…at every stroke of the whip his answer was, ‘Woe, woe to Jerusalem’’.
The healing of the paralytic in Capernaum and the narcoleptic Jairus daughter are examples of rapid remission of manic/depressive stupor. Her state before being raised by Jesus, would be a state of spiritual death as described by the Thanksgiving Hymn (1QH) at Qumran:
My spirit is imprisoned with the dead
for (my life) has reached the Pit;
my soul languishes (within me)
day and night without rest
But this state of almost total helplessness also bespeaks of the things at their worst before getting out of control on the other end. Emil Kraepelin observed "manic" stupor as often the phase of the illness which immediately precedes a switch into madcap cheer. The modern compendium Manic-Depressive Illness cited above prefers “depressive” stupor to describe the severe psychomotor inhibition which the patient exhibits during this period of deep mourning:
The patient, usually, is confined to bed, is mute, inactive and uncooperative. His bodily needs require attention in every way; he has to be fed, washed and bathed. Precautions have to be made to prevent the retention of faeces, urine and saliva. In some cases all attempts at movement are strongly resisted. In other cases the muscles are more flaccid, and the body and limbs can be molded into any position. On the surface it may seem as if there was a total absence of feeling and emotions, but that is often more apparent than real, for after recovery many patients give a vivid account of the distress they have experienced. The idea of death is believed by some to be almost universal in stupor reactions, and may be regarded as a form of expiation for the wickedness for which they hold themselves responsible…..(ibid., 40)
Jesus laying his hands on the deaf man with a speech impediment near Decapolis (Mk 7), is as I indicated one of the ecstatic stories, which had the function clearing the deck in roars of hearty laughter. Observe Mark’s taking the sufferer away from the multitude to perform his medical procedure “in private”. What would that accomplish, if other cures are public ? My take on it is that, by writing it like that (and in this case for an added effect, likely reciting it for a group) Mark wanted lay stress on the individual experience of the Spirit one-on-one. The description of Jesus expertly manipulating his charge, by plugging his ears (don’t listen to anyone but me !), spitting on him (so what of the outsiders who spit on you to make you feel worthless ?), and touching his tongue (transferring to him the utterance), would have the desired effect of making the initiated reader and hearer (!) of the gospel feel a special person, a Jesus’ intimate in the close circle of his eklektoi. By this sort of hyper-concretization of the Spirit as Jesus of Nazareth up close and personal, and the reader/hearer participating in (knowing thge mystery of) the tale, would have the healing effect of rebuilding the intelligent sufferer’s confidence in dealing with her challenges, internally and externally, by providing insight into her condition. The members of the community know the ‘reality’ of ‘Jesus’ and they are not thrown by Mark’s dissembling that is to fool or mock the faithless outsiders.
Unfortunately, this holier-and-smarter-than-thou attitude of Mark speaks also of his spiritual limits. It seems to have been a trait inherited from Paul as charismatic groups have a tendency to take on the personalities of their leaders. Mark’s gospel and parables within it were aimed to injure the Petrine rivals, and often unnecessarily so. The two-stage curing of the blind man in Bethsaida, is another blatant example of a mean trashing of the earthly Jesus disciples. In the narration, it comes after the second feeding of the multitude which the disciples do not get – yet again. (I believe Werner Kelber solved the mystery of the second feeding – it was not Mark’s mishandling his sources speaking of a single event). Mark devises a two-stage cure of a blind man, who after the first phase can only see ‘men’, who ‘look like trees, walking’. This ridicules the Petrines’ lack of spiritual insight, which of course has to be corrected by the proper medicine by Jesus as Pauline spirit.
In my reading of the battle of the gospels, this story infuriated Matthew, as he saw in it a brutish assault on his own traditions, and an exhibit of Pauline pompous gnostic arrogance. He would prove to Mark that that he and his mocking troopers own no monopoly on the Spirit and Jesus. The judge-not section of the Sermon, I read as Matthew’s focused attack on the Paulines’ false sense of superiority ( 1 Cr 2:15-16) in access to Christ through the Spirit. He bores into Mark for the Bethsaida two-step cure: ‘How wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam [is] in thine own eye?’ Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.' Matthew then delivers a killer of a blow to the followers of Paul who would preach Christ to the heirs of Peter and demand their submission : Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.. If Jesus did not say that in fact, he could not have said it any better. For verily, trample Mark’s pearls Matthew did, and brilliantly so.
My perspective assumes that the psychological touchpoints of the manic-depressive challenge have not changed in history. Most manics are both, genuinely convinced that they belong to an elite favoured by God or gods (or simply ‘superior’ if they are atheists), and in the same measure, accursed and abandoned by them or harassed by the devil, when they are low (or simply ‘done for’ or ‘emptied of purpose’ if atheists). The other thing to understand about this fairly common condition is that unlike other mental disorders, e.g. schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s, this one is not degenerative. When the manic excitement subsides, most often in a few weeks, the subject’s rational faculty returns, even if deeply affected by the experience of altered mentation. The subjects will realize as a rule after the first episode that they went off the deep end, and most will feel profoundly embarrassed about the way they carried on. At the same time, they are hooked on the intensity of the ecstatic highs and some are willing to pay any price to stay in the cycle. The first few months after the excitement subsides will be critical to establish the pattern of the subject’s response to the new challenge. The ancients did not have mood-control medication but they had brains just like ours. And our brains can be very resourceful when challenged in new and unusual ways.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Friday, July 16, 2010
Mark's Recursive Gospel
It has been noted by many that ideas in Mark’s narration have a strange quality to them. Paula Fredriksen, for example, believes the oddities of Mark’s expression are due to his lack of couth and education. Richard Carrier notes the gospeller’s bend on thwarting the expectations, both of the reader and the characters in his story. Ben Wetherington points to the inherent veiledness and indirectness in the Markan Jesus metaphorical speech. A related, interesting take on the strange feel of Mark’s logic and his testimony of Jesus, has been posted on CrossCurrents website. It comes from a Michigan professor George Aichele who sees in the gospel classical mythical elements that are processed by the reader’s belief or disbelief. But there is also something else in the earliest gospel, the professor says, an “inexplicable residuum…an irreducible, opaque remainder of the text [is] not finally consumed and absorbed along with the rest.” Mark seems to be as free of grammatical, propositional and story-telling rules as his Jesus was of gravity on the Sea of Galilee. Could the two liberties be related ?
The gospel stories self-validate and self-propagate athwart logic and meaning, and at times seem to veer off the deep end. I think professor Aichele’s is right: within the paradigm of the story, Jesus has unlimited authority and potential for doing good. Those attributes have certainly nothing unusual about them. When Jesus parries against the Pharisees who accuse him of effecting cures on behalf of the prince of devils this is strictly mythical business. The ‘house divided cannot stand’ is a clever riposte and one entirely predicated by Jesus being able to effect real, lasting cures, and not just hopes for them. The proposition that Jesus cannot –despite appearances – be an agent of a malicious entity, is sustained by belief in Jesus’ skills as a healer. Mind you, in real life, many gifted healers can perform remarkably well even though they are observed to be mentally ill. Wilhelm Reich, one of Freud’s star pupils, struggled with his manic-depressive demons since his twenties, but was successfully treating his patients even as his diary recorded the molesting of his dog by aliens. But that is not really important since Mark's story should be strictly believe-it-or-not. The same is true also about the occasional minor slip in logic. In one of them, 9:40, Jesus declares a rule of ‘who is not against us is for us’, in overruling his disciples and allowing someone who does not follow his group to cast out demons in his name. Unfortunately one cannot use the example given to formulate such a principle, as transparently the ‘not against us’ attitude in the incident is one ‘for us’ except that it was not authorized. But again, this minor glitch would fall within the explainable dimension and the belief/unbelief filtering process. This would not be an exhibit of opacity in Mark, if I understand professor Aichele correctly.
Jesus going into Jericho and coming out of there without incident in the same verse (10:46) would be. Morton Smith had an explanation for that one – a fragment of Secret Mark which records some action that took place there; alas, the letter of Clement to Theodore looks like a modern forgery to many experts. Luckily for my own theory, nothing is remembered also of Jesus’ visit to Bethany (11:11-12), ergo the question remains. If Mark was recording actual events which took place and were remembered what would be the purpose naming the locale of events without memories attaching to them ? Those are obscure intents. And there is more: people around Jesus can’t eat and it is taken as a clue by his family that it is Jesus who must be out of his mind and needs to be restrained. Clearly not an absorbable idea. To make things even more bizzare the canard that people around Jesus are so busy they can’t to feed themselves is advertised also in 6:31 and 8:1. When Jairus’ daughter rises from her death, Jesus orders casually that she be fed. Why would she not feed herself, if we dare to presume her happy to be alive again ? Further, the mourners in her house burst out laughing when Jesus minutes before offers that she is not dead but only sleeping. What’s with that ? And what’s with the throngs of people who physically converge on, and oppress, Jesus in the most unseemly fashion (2:4, 5:31), even threatening to crush him (3:9) ? Jesus tells his disciples in private to go by themselves to a secluded place to rest, but people from all over the place run there ahead of the party. The storyteller says there is one loaf of bread in the boat but the disciples (in the story he wrote) deny there is bread in the vessel – after arguing around it. Mark says Jesus said ‘what’s there to discuss ?’ Yeah, I suppose both have a point. Bartimaeus throws away his cloak when he is invited to join Jesus’ entourage. Obviously, that would be an important act to record for posterity. Jesus, after passing through Bethany of which he or Mark can't remember anything, curses a fig tree because it did not yield fruit to him a few weeks ahead of market. The mocking guards slap around Jesus cupping his eyes asking him to prophesy. What does that mean ? Well, Matthew explains that mystery, does he not ? He says the guards told Jesus to prophecy who hit him, i.e. to entertain them with a little vaticinium ex eventu. He even removes the captor’s hands from Jesus’ eyes to make it plain he sees no occult designs in Mark at all. Neither do I. These events or non-events, I will argue elsewhere were actually attempts by Mark to describe the uncanny inside of the spirit, that most of those to whom he wrote were as intimately familiar with as he was. But for now let us stick to the formal issues of all this strange stuff.
In the briefest of terms: Mark has raised a set of mythical props within his storyboard and then allowed the characters in it, including Jesus, to challenge them in order to defeat their rebellion and thus re-enforce his hypnotic narration of a mystery. Not certain you follow what I am saying ? Ok, let us play it out: imagine the family of Vivian, Lady of the Lake, appearing on the scene at the moment of her imprisoning Merlin in the tower she conjured up around him. They wave their hands and scream over one another: “Hello, please excuse us, …no, please, no tower, no way Vivian can do that sort of thing,…please excuse her;....you are right,... she is not an architect, not an engineer ...no, she cannot be ... not yet the twentieth century...…yes, quite right,... she is out of her mind”. That sort of intervention would surely look ‘veiled’ if Merlin at the same time was struggling to break into the tower’s armory. See what I mean ? This would not be the same kind of challenge offered by an antagonist to Harry Potter flying a broom in aerial combats around Hogwarth. This is not a challenge to a hero within the myth, but a challenge to the myth itself baked right into the myth.
Ok, let me then, before passing on to the gospel’s circular design, get back to the hypnotic suggestion of Jesus walking on the sea. It is my favourite example of Mark’s application of the re-referencing technique, seen in many places of the narrative: the disciples in an unsteady boat see Jesus passing by and think it is a ghost. Mark, a staunch Paulinist, mocks here the Jesus idolatry of the original Petrine tradition which refused to accept the cross, and venerated Jesus as a man of flesh and blood who was sent to them as the prophet of the coming messianic kingdom. So when the disciples scream in fear at the sight of Jesus as the Spirit strolling on water, “Jesus” changes his mind and levitates towards the distressed crew to reassure them that he is no Pauline ghost, and announces : “It is I; have no fear”. I can imagine Mark’s friends convulsing in laughter when reading this elaborate lampooning of Petrine miracle-mongering and their disdain for Pauline pneumaticism. Mark’s Jesus confirms Paul (1 Cr 1:23, Mk 8:12) in saying ‘no sign’ will be given, and he is not contradicting himself if one reads the story the way it is proposed here. There are no miracles in Mark - the paradoxical events are the allegorically rendered artifacts of altered consciousness and cognitive gaps brough about as the effect of pneuma. Even Matthew was evidently impressed by Mark’s cleverness if he returned it by ridiculing Pauline church’s high horse of being Christ’s imitators in showing that Peter ('flesh and blood' as they are) tried it on the sea and it did not work.
The core purpose of Mark’s gospel
Mark’s Pauline mantle would be doubted in most exegetical circles and a number of reasons would be given for it. For example a number of Markan scholars believe that Mark, unlike Paul, was an adoptionist. I don’t think it was as clear-cut as that. Paul saw himself if not quite pre-existent, then definitely pre-destined for his mission, which was activated in medias res (Gal 1:15) as he gave up on material things and pleasures of this world. So, if the disciples of Paul were to be his imitators, as he was of Christ, then the prefiguring of the role of God’s servant and receiving a commission on it in mid-life would not be a contradiction to a Pauline.
But there are other elements of Mark that do not quite square with Paul’s outlook. The son of man does not figure in Paul’s writing, and undoubtedly originates in the Palestinian traditions which Paul purposely ignored. Neither is the central message of Mark’s Jesus, as I perceive it: repentance. Again, in my view of Paul and his saints, they repented by swearing to a puritanical orgiastic fantasy of themselves individually nailed to a piece of wood, which was not how the Palestinian tradents understood metanoia. Paul did not like to baptize because he was not into making people feel clean by rituals; he was sent to preach the gospel. He preached his gospel to a select audience of those who were mature and wise. The ideas and social graces of Mark’s Jesus are sometimes clearly estranged from Paul’s agenda. Mark's idea of the risen Lord socializing with publicans and sinners would have probably made Paul go glossolalic.
This is what I think happened in a nutshell. The war of 66-70 added Nazarene (Nazorean) exiles to the Jewish communities in the near Diaspora. Bitter squabbles and finger-pointing arose among Jewish factions and their Pauline Gentile auxiliaries, over the catastrophe of the loss of the Temple as the central symbol of Jewish identity. It was a three-way struggle between the Phariseic-dominated mainstream, the Nazarene sectaries and Paul’s churches. The Paulines had the advantage of independence from the Temple as the religious hub, as Paul tried but failed to gain access to it through James’ poor saints in Jerusalem. By all indications, he went alone, and his following built, and prided itself in, a separate, self-sustained base. In contrast, the Nazarenes – assumed a minority in the Jewish communities – were the ones worst off by far. They found themselves cut off from the rabbinical Jews who blamed their messianic obsessions for the mayhem, and from the Pauline swarms, which held them in contempt as the deniers of the cross and the perverters of Christ’s gospel, who received their comeuppance. Doubtless, they found it hard to proselytize in the proximity of either of their rivals. In this situation many were re-considering the proposition the Jesus himself was the Proclaimed as Paul taught and not just a proclaimer as Jesus saw himself.
In the other camp, after Paul was gone, his taboo on the ‘historical Jesus’ (1 Cr 2:2, 2 Cr 5:16) rapidly lost its lure. Yes, naturally some of the things that would have irked and offended Paul, the lore of letting the dead bury their dead, or the son of man who has nowhere to lay his head, or the birds in the air whom our heavenly Father feeds with no effort required, the yoke that was light, or kids who hate their parents, would still remain beyond pale with Paul’s followers . But the natural human curiosity about the earthly career of the man who Paul taught visited them as the ineffable heavenly Spirit in their ecstasies, would have come sooner or later. And, they too had something to gain from uniting into a single church. Paul considered the followers his workmanship in the Lord, and the proof of seeing him. So an extended believer base meant Paul was right again and confirmed they did not just see things.
I believe this is how Mark came to be written. Behind his gospel was an original idea of uniting the two views of Jesus : the Nazarenes’ proclaimer of the coming son of man (not himself) and Paul’s Christ, which remained separated by the antagonism of Paul and the Nazarenes. It was masterfully conceived as a story of Jesus empowered by Pauline spirit, from its appearance at the Jordan to its extinguishment on the cross, in the death of Jesus the Nazarene. Throughout the gospel Jesus has a dual identity, which is at once advertised and at once hidden to those who do not understand what the presence of the spirit means or feels like. He speaks of the heavenly kingdom; they think it is coming to earth. Peter idolizes him as the Messiah but Jesus does not want anyone to know until he is dead.
This is again a hugely misapprehended smart-alecking of Mark: Jesus doesn’t want it known publicly that he is Messiah for a very simple reason: it has to be Paul (and his gospel allegorized by Mark) who will be first to proclaim Jesus as the Christ ! That is why an obscure entity called many censures Bartimaeus who calls Jesus 'Son of David' and not the disciples, who of course rebel against the gospel. Mark's irony here is in that the appellation comes from someone who is blind, spiritually blind to be sure. Mark rejects the Davidic descent of Jesus. First, the idea is lampooned in the story of a blind beggar, and then Jesus himself rejects Christ's Davidic line in a clever use of Psalm 110:1 in 12:36-37. His target would not be just the "scribes" but those Jewish Petrine exiles, who competing with Paul for converts, claim the Davidic descent the Nazarene Jesus. (I believe the idea of Jesus as a Davidic king 'kata sarka' is un-Pauline, and Rom 1:3, a later insert).
The reason many Markan scholars since Wrede have struggled to get a handle on the messianic secret is that they allow themselves be hypnotized by two suggestions. One is the Markan mystery mongering . Two, they have allowed themselves to be talked by the patristics into the dogma that "crucified/resurrected Christ" was the lingua franca of the church since Jerusalem. But Mark mischievously lets Jesus talk to the exterior of the story, re-referencing himself from the distance of forty years later (as in the example of Vivian I gave above) building the passion plot around the pig-headed refusal of the Nazarenes to accept the cross of Christ. To the disciples inside the story, Mark's Jesus says the son of man must die and be resurrected and Peter is upset because he wants him to be a different Messiah - the king on the throne of Israel. The future “pillars” don’t get the transfiguration on the mountain as the glory of the risen Lord (2 Cr 3:18 And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed (μεταμορφούμεθα) into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.). They reject Paul’s Jerusalem above, resisting the idea when it comes from the mouth of Jesus they know, and do not recognize his metamorphosis as the post-mortem spiritual transformation. It scares them, as it scared them on the lake and as the missing corpse will scare the women at the loop of the gospel. Leaving the mountain, the three can’t figure out what the resurrection from the dead is about (cf. 1 Cr 15:12-19) even though it was just demonstrated to them. They cling on to the hope of a messianic kingdom on earth which so enraged Jesus who evidently read the whole chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians, if you get my meaning. The Zebedees could not be talked out of that idea: they wanted some of that Herod’s palace seating for private use after Jesus’ coup d’etat.
Mark’s gospel terms are harsh: he offers to the Petrine Nazarenes, in the proverbial wilderness, three propositions. One: you will repent and accept the cross of Christ as taught by Paul; two, you will accept the spiritual nature of Christ as taught by Paul and his resurrection (!!); and three, you will accept that there is but a single gospel (as per Gal 1:7-8) lest you be damned. In the three core verses 4:10-12, the gospel purpose and structure is laid out (KJV):
And when he was alone, they that were about him with the twelve asked of him the parable.
On the principles shown, this is how the koan reads: When Jesus was alone, those who had access to him through the Spirit (from outside of the local time and place), i.e. not the Twelve (!), asked him about the sower parable.
And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all [these] things are done in parables:
It is to you, the true faith of the sower ( 2Cr 9:9-10, 1 Cr 3:6), that the mysteries of the kingdom are revealed, to those on the outside, ἐν παραβολαῖς τὰ πάντα γίνεται - everything, i.e. the entire gospel, is made up out of (undecipherable) parables. In other words, the entire gospel is an allegory.
That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time (μήποτε) they should be converted, and [their] sins should be forgiven them.
Repent ! Paraphrasing Isaiah 6:9, Mark demands through Jesus that the Petrines accept the gospel of the cross, and become faithful, as the pre-condition of their entering the kingdom !
The story unfolds to its inevitable conclusion and culminates in Jesus’ passion, as he predicts it (vaticinium ex eventu). Peter and the disciples run away as prophecied, and hush up the cross so as not to be persecuted for it (Gal 6:12). Jesus is captured by men, tried and condemned twice to be crucified: first, by the Sanhedrin offended by Jesus’ paradoxal self-proclamation and then by a bemused Gentile governor who thinks it is folly to crucify a harmless furiosus, but gives in to the mob to fulfill both ends of 1 Cr 1:23.
The Function of the Empty Tomb in Mark
Even though the view is growing within the NT scholarly community that the abrupt ending at 16:8 is indeed what Mark intended, the meaning of the scene eludes the traditional exegesis. This would be the final example of obscurity in the gospel of Mark. I have outlined a reading of Mark here in which the gospel is open-ended . In the malleable design of the narrative and its recursive structure, this ending has the function of the loop’s end. As one of the humourous definitions of recursion says:
Recursion
If you still don’t get it, see ‘Recursion’.
In this intuitive paralogic, the meaning of the process is not spelled out but suggested by circumlocution. To get ‘Recursion’ you have to loop a few times through the definition, until you gain the insight that recursion itself is looping through the definition.
In an analogy with Mark’s gospel, the Markan insider would have grasped the scene’s import at once, as it stands as the second milestone in the prophecy of Isaiah [sic] which is fulfilled in a two-stage baptismal process. The scripture (of Paul’s Romans !) would explain what the neaniskos was doing in the empty tomb prior to the arrival of the women: Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his (Rom 6:3-4). The community would understand the spiritual pun of the missing body of the Nazarene Jesus. A reference to the “scripture” would yield Paul’s 1 Cr 12:27: Now you are the body of Christ (σωμα Χριστου) and individually members of it. Paul’s church was in the mythical Galilee where Jesus was to meet his disciples. The empty tomb fully supports Mark’s narrative design. It is the third instance of Jesus resurrectional transfiguration (the previous ones being on the lake, and on the mount).
I believe the bizzare ending of verse 16:8 in the majority of the manuscript was fully intended. The conjunction γαρ (for) which strangely ends the whole gospel was likely to be "shared" as a connector to verse 1:2. (which likely was the first verse of Urmark) . In this manner, on the second pass, the messenger of "Isaiah" refers to both, John the Baptist and the young man in the tomb, who as I said is most likely self-referencing Mark.
The scene is cleverly set up by the request by Joseph of Arimathea to Pilate to give him the body of Jesus. This would be the again one of the exhilarating misunderstandings in the story: the noble Sanhedrin member who himself expected the coming of the kingdom of God (ος… αυτος ην προσδεχομενος την βασιλειαν του θεου), desired the body of Jesus (το σωμα του Ιησου) . This formula suggests that Joseph really wanted the ecstatic ‘body’ of Jesus which for the Nazarenes signified the imminent coming of God’s kingdom to Israel (alluded to in Acts 2:2-4). But Pilate (15:44) figures the request to mean that Joseph (Αριμαθαια, I am persuaded by professor Paul Nadim Tarazi, stands for Har-rimmat(h)aim , Hebrew for 'mount of decay') wants Jesus’ corpse ( πτωμα). The empty tomb mystery is then predicated by the punning of σωμα and πτωμα, i.e. that which Joseph wanted (and did not get) is now in Galilee.
Plausibly, the young man in the tomb discovered by the women is Mark himself, indicating that he too ran in the terror on the night of the Spirit's capture(likely alluding to Amos 2:15) .
He later repented and received his vision. The women running away from the Pauline baptist and messenger and not telling anything to anyone, assure that it is through Mark’s text that the gospel gets out. This, I believe was the idea behind the Messianic Secret. The disciples (or their followers) may not proclaim the gospel of Jesus passion, his death and his rising. It will be Paul and then Mark through his allegory.
The gospel of Mark then is a cycle between the two baptisms - that into the life of the Spirit (i.e. John the Baptist) and that into its death (i.e. Paul/Mark's) in the tomb. The reader gets out of cycle when he or she captured the full allegorical meaning of Mark's gospel. The newness of life that Jesus experienced at baptism, will have been fulfilled by those initiated into his death.
Unlike the Pauline spiritualists, someone reading Mark in search for meaning without understanding the community, its ways and spirit nomenclature, would be left bewildered by the ending. The Petrine sages who were sent the script were no doubt intrigued. Mark’s narrative gnosticism* looked formidable. After some early fumbling (the interpolated 1 Cr 15:3-11 ?) they found a way to deal with Mark’s offer. The cross of Messiah, yes, but Davidic Messiah; the gnostic supremacy of Paul – no way; single gospel ? you are dreaming, if you think it is going to be yours: the magic circle of gnosis between the baptism of John and the baptism of Paul in Mark’s allegory will have to be broken. The genius who found a solution to the challenge of Mark became known to us as Matthew.
*/ The term is used by Jan Wojcik in the Road to Emmaus to describe Luke's gospel
The gospel stories self-validate and self-propagate athwart logic and meaning, and at times seem to veer off the deep end. I think professor Aichele’s is right: within the paradigm of the story, Jesus has unlimited authority and potential for doing good. Those attributes have certainly nothing unusual about them. When Jesus parries against the Pharisees who accuse him of effecting cures on behalf of the prince of devils this is strictly mythical business. The ‘house divided cannot stand’ is a clever riposte and one entirely predicated by Jesus being able to effect real, lasting cures, and not just hopes for them. The proposition that Jesus cannot –despite appearances – be an agent of a malicious entity, is sustained by belief in Jesus’ skills as a healer. Mind you, in real life, many gifted healers can perform remarkably well even though they are observed to be mentally ill. Wilhelm Reich, one of Freud’s star pupils, struggled with his manic-depressive demons since his twenties, but was successfully treating his patients even as his diary recorded the molesting of his dog by aliens. But that is not really important since Mark's story should be strictly believe-it-or-not. The same is true also about the occasional minor slip in logic. In one of them, 9:40, Jesus declares a rule of ‘who is not against us is for us’, in overruling his disciples and allowing someone who does not follow his group to cast out demons in his name. Unfortunately one cannot use the example given to formulate such a principle, as transparently the ‘not against us’ attitude in the incident is one ‘for us’ except that it was not authorized. But again, this minor glitch would fall within the explainable dimension and the belief/unbelief filtering process. This would not be an exhibit of opacity in Mark, if I understand professor Aichele correctly.
Jesus going into Jericho and coming out of there without incident in the same verse (10:46) would be. Morton Smith had an explanation for that one – a fragment of Secret Mark which records some action that took place there; alas, the letter of Clement to Theodore looks like a modern forgery to many experts. Luckily for my own theory, nothing is remembered also of Jesus’ visit to Bethany (11:11-12), ergo the question remains. If Mark was recording actual events which took place and were remembered what would be the purpose naming the locale of events without memories attaching to them ? Those are obscure intents. And there is more: people around Jesus can’t eat and it is taken as a clue by his family that it is Jesus who must be out of his mind and needs to be restrained. Clearly not an absorbable idea. To make things even more bizzare the canard that people around Jesus are so busy they can’t to feed themselves is advertised also in 6:31 and 8:1. When Jairus’ daughter rises from her death, Jesus orders casually that she be fed. Why would she not feed herself, if we dare to presume her happy to be alive again ? Further, the mourners in her house burst out laughing when Jesus minutes before offers that she is not dead but only sleeping. What’s with that ? And what’s with the throngs of people who physically converge on, and oppress, Jesus in the most unseemly fashion (2:4, 5:31), even threatening to crush him (3:9) ? Jesus tells his disciples in private to go by themselves to a secluded place to rest, but people from all over the place run there ahead of the party. The storyteller says there is one loaf of bread in the boat but the disciples (in the story he wrote) deny there is bread in the vessel – after arguing around it. Mark says Jesus said ‘what’s there to discuss ?’ Yeah, I suppose both have a point. Bartimaeus throws away his cloak when he is invited to join Jesus’ entourage. Obviously, that would be an important act to record for posterity. Jesus, after passing through Bethany of which he or Mark can't remember anything, curses a fig tree because it did not yield fruit to him a few weeks ahead of market. The mocking guards slap around Jesus cupping his eyes asking him to prophesy. What does that mean ? Well, Matthew explains that mystery, does he not ? He says the guards told Jesus to prophecy who hit him, i.e. to entertain them with a little vaticinium ex eventu. He even removes the captor’s hands from Jesus’ eyes to make it plain he sees no occult designs in Mark at all. Neither do I. These events or non-events, I will argue elsewhere were actually attempts by Mark to describe the uncanny inside of the spirit, that most of those to whom he wrote were as intimately familiar with as he was. But for now let us stick to the formal issues of all this strange stuff.
In the briefest of terms: Mark has raised a set of mythical props within his storyboard and then allowed the characters in it, including Jesus, to challenge them in order to defeat their rebellion and thus re-enforce his hypnotic narration of a mystery. Not certain you follow what I am saying ? Ok, let us play it out: imagine the family of Vivian, Lady of the Lake, appearing on the scene at the moment of her imprisoning Merlin in the tower she conjured up around him. They wave their hands and scream over one another: “Hello, please excuse us, …no, please, no tower, no way Vivian can do that sort of thing,…please excuse her;....you are right,... she is not an architect, not an engineer ...no, she cannot be ... not yet the twentieth century...…yes, quite right,... she is out of her mind”. That sort of intervention would surely look ‘veiled’ if Merlin at the same time was struggling to break into the tower’s armory. See what I mean ? This would not be the same kind of challenge offered by an antagonist to Harry Potter flying a broom in aerial combats around Hogwarth. This is not a challenge to a hero within the myth, but a challenge to the myth itself baked right into the myth.
Ok, let me then, before passing on to the gospel’s circular design, get back to the hypnotic suggestion of Jesus walking on the sea. It is my favourite example of Mark’s application of the re-referencing technique, seen in many places of the narrative: the disciples in an unsteady boat see Jesus passing by and think it is a ghost. Mark, a staunch Paulinist, mocks here the Jesus idolatry of the original Petrine tradition which refused to accept the cross, and venerated Jesus as a man of flesh and blood who was sent to them as the prophet of the coming messianic kingdom. So when the disciples scream in fear at the sight of Jesus as the Spirit strolling on water, “Jesus” changes his mind and levitates towards the distressed crew to reassure them that he is no Pauline ghost, and announces : “It is I; have no fear”. I can imagine Mark’s friends convulsing in laughter when reading this elaborate lampooning of Petrine miracle-mongering and their disdain for Pauline pneumaticism. Mark’s Jesus confirms Paul (1 Cr 1:23, Mk 8:12) in saying ‘no sign’ will be given, and he is not contradicting himself if one reads the story the way it is proposed here. There are no miracles in Mark - the paradoxical events are the allegorically rendered artifacts of altered consciousness and cognitive gaps brough about as the effect of pneuma. Even Matthew was evidently impressed by Mark’s cleverness if he returned it by ridiculing Pauline church’s high horse of being Christ’s imitators in showing that Peter ('flesh and blood' as they are) tried it on the sea and it did not work.
The core purpose of Mark’s gospel
Mark’s Pauline mantle would be doubted in most exegetical circles and a number of reasons would be given for it. For example a number of Markan scholars believe that Mark, unlike Paul, was an adoptionist. I don’t think it was as clear-cut as that. Paul saw himself if not quite pre-existent, then definitely pre-destined for his mission, which was activated in medias res (Gal 1:15) as he gave up on material things and pleasures of this world. So, if the disciples of Paul were to be his imitators, as he was of Christ, then the prefiguring of the role of God’s servant and receiving a commission on it in mid-life would not be a contradiction to a Pauline.
But there are other elements of Mark that do not quite square with Paul’s outlook. The son of man does not figure in Paul’s writing, and undoubtedly originates in the Palestinian traditions which Paul purposely ignored. Neither is the central message of Mark’s Jesus, as I perceive it: repentance. Again, in my view of Paul and his saints, they repented by swearing to a puritanical orgiastic fantasy of themselves individually nailed to a piece of wood, which was not how the Palestinian tradents understood metanoia. Paul did not like to baptize because he was not into making people feel clean by rituals; he was sent to preach the gospel. He preached his gospel to a select audience of those who were mature and wise. The ideas and social graces of Mark’s Jesus are sometimes clearly estranged from Paul’s agenda. Mark's idea of the risen Lord socializing with publicans and sinners would have probably made Paul go glossolalic.
This is what I think happened in a nutshell. The war of 66-70 added Nazarene (Nazorean) exiles to the Jewish communities in the near Diaspora. Bitter squabbles and finger-pointing arose among Jewish factions and their Pauline Gentile auxiliaries, over the catastrophe of the loss of the Temple as the central symbol of Jewish identity. It was a three-way struggle between the Phariseic-dominated mainstream, the Nazarene sectaries and Paul’s churches. The Paulines had the advantage of independence from the Temple as the religious hub, as Paul tried but failed to gain access to it through James’ poor saints in Jerusalem. By all indications, he went alone, and his following built, and prided itself in, a separate, self-sustained base. In contrast, the Nazarenes – assumed a minority in the Jewish communities – were the ones worst off by far. They found themselves cut off from the rabbinical Jews who blamed their messianic obsessions for the mayhem, and from the Pauline swarms, which held them in contempt as the deniers of the cross and the perverters of Christ’s gospel, who received their comeuppance. Doubtless, they found it hard to proselytize in the proximity of either of their rivals. In this situation many were re-considering the proposition the Jesus himself was the Proclaimed as Paul taught and not just a proclaimer as Jesus saw himself.
In the other camp, after Paul was gone, his taboo on the ‘historical Jesus’ (1 Cr 2:2, 2 Cr 5:16) rapidly lost its lure. Yes, naturally some of the things that would have irked and offended Paul, the lore of letting the dead bury their dead, or the son of man who has nowhere to lay his head, or the birds in the air whom our heavenly Father feeds with no effort required, the yoke that was light, or kids who hate their parents, would still remain beyond pale with Paul’s followers . But the natural human curiosity about the earthly career of the man who Paul taught visited them as the ineffable heavenly Spirit in their ecstasies, would have come sooner or later. And, they too had something to gain from uniting into a single church. Paul considered the followers his workmanship in the Lord, and the proof of seeing him. So an extended believer base meant Paul was right again and confirmed they did not just see things.
I believe this is how Mark came to be written. Behind his gospel was an original idea of uniting the two views of Jesus : the Nazarenes’ proclaimer of the coming son of man (not himself) and Paul’s Christ, which remained separated by the antagonism of Paul and the Nazarenes. It was masterfully conceived as a story of Jesus empowered by Pauline spirit, from its appearance at the Jordan to its extinguishment on the cross, in the death of Jesus the Nazarene. Throughout the gospel Jesus has a dual identity, which is at once advertised and at once hidden to those who do not understand what the presence of the spirit means or feels like. He speaks of the heavenly kingdom; they think it is coming to earth. Peter idolizes him as the Messiah but Jesus does not want anyone to know until he is dead.
This is again a hugely misapprehended smart-alecking of Mark: Jesus doesn’t want it known publicly that he is Messiah for a very simple reason: it has to be Paul (and his gospel allegorized by Mark) who will be first to proclaim Jesus as the Christ ! That is why an obscure entity called many censures Bartimaeus who calls Jesus 'Son of David' and not the disciples, who of course rebel against the gospel. Mark's irony here is in that the appellation comes from someone who is blind, spiritually blind to be sure. Mark rejects the Davidic descent of Jesus. First, the idea is lampooned in the story of a blind beggar, and then Jesus himself rejects Christ's Davidic line in a clever use of Psalm 110:1 in 12:36-37. His target would not be just the "scribes" but those Jewish Petrine exiles, who competing with Paul for converts, claim the Davidic descent the Nazarene Jesus. (I believe the idea of Jesus as a Davidic king 'kata sarka' is un-Pauline, and Rom 1:3, a later insert).
The reason many Markan scholars since Wrede have struggled to get a handle on the messianic secret is that they allow themselves be hypnotized by two suggestions. One is the Markan mystery mongering . Two, they have allowed themselves to be talked by the patristics into the dogma that "crucified/resurrected Christ" was the lingua franca of the church since Jerusalem. But Mark mischievously lets Jesus talk to the exterior of the story, re-referencing himself from the distance of forty years later (as in the example of Vivian I gave above) building the passion plot around the pig-headed refusal of the Nazarenes to accept the cross of Christ. To the disciples inside the story, Mark's Jesus says the son of man must die and be resurrected and Peter is upset because he wants him to be a different Messiah - the king on the throne of Israel. The future “pillars” don’t get the transfiguration on the mountain as the glory of the risen Lord (2 Cr 3:18 And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed (μεταμορφούμεθα) into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.). They reject Paul’s Jerusalem above, resisting the idea when it comes from the mouth of Jesus they know, and do not recognize his metamorphosis as the post-mortem spiritual transformation. It scares them, as it scared them on the lake and as the missing corpse will scare the women at the loop of the gospel. Leaving the mountain, the three can’t figure out what the resurrection from the dead is about (cf. 1 Cr 15:12-19) even though it was just demonstrated to them. They cling on to the hope of a messianic kingdom on earth which so enraged Jesus who evidently read the whole chapter 15 of 1 Corinthians, if you get my meaning. The Zebedees could not be talked out of that idea: they wanted some of that Herod’s palace seating for private use after Jesus’ coup d’etat.
Mark’s gospel terms are harsh: he offers to the Petrine Nazarenes, in the proverbial wilderness, three propositions. One: you will repent and accept the cross of Christ as taught by Paul; two, you will accept the spiritual nature of Christ as taught by Paul and his resurrection (!!); and three, you will accept that there is but a single gospel (as per Gal 1:7-8) lest you be damned. In the three core verses 4:10-12, the gospel purpose and structure is laid out (KJV):
And when he was alone, they that were about him with the twelve asked of him the parable.
On the principles shown, this is how the koan reads: When Jesus was alone, those who had access to him through the Spirit (from outside of the local time and place), i.e. not the Twelve (!), asked him about the sower parable.
And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all [these] things are done in parables:
It is to you, the true faith of the sower ( 2Cr 9:9-10, 1 Cr 3:6), that the mysteries of the kingdom are revealed, to those on the outside, ἐν παραβολαῖς τὰ πάντα γίνεται - everything, i.e. the entire gospel, is made up out of (undecipherable) parables. In other words, the entire gospel is an allegory.
That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time (μήποτε) they should be converted, and [their] sins should be forgiven them.
Repent ! Paraphrasing Isaiah 6:9, Mark demands through Jesus that the Petrines accept the gospel of the cross, and become faithful, as the pre-condition of their entering the kingdom !
The story unfolds to its inevitable conclusion and culminates in Jesus’ passion, as he predicts it (vaticinium ex eventu). Peter and the disciples run away as prophecied, and hush up the cross so as not to be persecuted for it (Gal 6:12). Jesus is captured by men, tried and condemned twice to be crucified: first, by the Sanhedrin offended by Jesus’ paradoxal self-proclamation and then by a bemused Gentile governor who thinks it is folly to crucify a harmless furiosus, but gives in to the mob to fulfill both ends of 1 Cr 1:23.
The Function of the Empty Tomb in Mark
Even though the view is growing within the NT scholarly community that the abrupt ending at 16:8 is indeed what Mark intended, the meaning of the scene eludes the traditional exegesis. This would be the final example of obscurity in the gospel of Mark. I have outlined a reading of Mark here in which the gospel is open-ended . In the malleable design of the narrative and its recursive structure, this ending has the function of the loop’s end. As one of the humourous definitions of recursion says:
Recursion
If you still don’t get it, see ‘Recursion’.
In this intuitive paralogic, the meaning of the process is not spelled out but suggested by circumlocution. To get ‘Recursion’ you have to loop a few times through the definition, until you gain the insight that recursion itself is looping through the definition.
In an analogy with Mark’s gospel, the Markan insider would have grasped the scene’s import at once, as it stands as the second milestone in the prophecy of Isaiah [sic] which is fulfilled in a two-stage baptismal process. The scripture (of Paul’s Romans !) would explain what the neaniskos was doing in the empty tomb prior to the arrival of the women: Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his (Rom 6:3-4). The community would understand the spiritual pun of the missing body of the Nazarene Jesus. A reference to the “scripture” would yield Paul’s 1 Cr 12:27: Now you are the body of Christ (σωμα Χριστου) and individually members of it. Paul’s church was in the mythical Galilee where Jesus was to meet his disciples. The empty tomb fully supports Mark’s narrative design. It is the third instance of Jesus resurrectional transfiguration (the previous ones being on the lake, and on the mount).
I believe the bizzare ending of verse 16:8 in the majority of the manuscript was fully intended. The conjunction γαρ (for) which strangely ends the whole gospel was likely to be "shared" as a connector to verse 1:2. (which likely was the first verse of Urmark) . In this manner, on the second pass, the messenger of "Isaiah" refers to both, John the Baptist and the young man in the tomb, who as I said is most likely self-referencing Mark.
The scene is cleverly set up by the request by Joseph of Arimathea to Pilate to give him the body of Jesus. This would be the again one of the exhilarating misunderstandings in the story: the noble Sanhedrin member who himself expected the coming of the kingdom of God (ος… αυτος ην προσδεχομενος την βασιλειαν του θεου), desired the body of Jesus (το σωμα του Ιησου) . This formula suggests that Joseph really wanted the ecstatic ‘body’ of Jesus which for the Nazarenes signified the imminent coming of God’s kingdom to Israel (alluded to in Acts 2:2-4). But Pilate (15:44) figures the request to mean that Joseph (Αριμαθαια, I am persuaded by professor Paul Nadim Tarazi, stands for Har-rimmat(h)aim , Hebrew for 'mount of decay') wants Jesus’ corpse ( πτωμα). The empty tomb mystery is then predicated by the punning of σωμα and πτωμα, i.e. that which Joseph wanted (and did not get) is now in Galilee.
Plausibly, the young man in the tomb discovered by the women is Mark himself, indicating that he too ran in the terror on the night of the Spirit's capture(likely alluding to Amos 2:15) .
He later repented and received his vision. The women running away from the Pauline baptist and messenger and not telling anything to anyone, assure that it is through Mark’s text that the gospel gets out. This, I believe was the idea behind the Messianic Secret. The disciples (or their followers) may not proclaim the gospel of Jesus passion, his death and his rising. It will be Paul and then Mark through his allegory.
The gospel of Mark then is a cycle between the two baptisms - that into the life of the Spirit (i.e. John the Baptist) and that into its death (i.e. Paul/Mark's) in the tomb. The reader gets out of cycle when he or she captured the full allegorical meaning of Mark's gospel. The newness of life that Jesus experienced at baptism, will have been fulfilled by those initiated into his death.
Unlike the Pauline spiritualists, someone reading Mark in search for meaning without understanding the community, its ways and spirit nomenclature, would be left bewildered by the ending. The Petrine sages who were sent the script were no doubt intrigued. Mark’s narrative gnosticism* looked formidable. After some early fumbling (the interpolated 1 Cr 15:3-11 ?) they found a way to deal with Mark’s offer. The cross of Messiah, yes, but Davidic Messiah; the gnostic supremacy of Paul – no way; single gospel ? you are dreaming, if you think it is going to be yours: the magic circle of gnosis between the baptism of John and the baptism of Paul in Mark’s allegory will have to be broken. The genius who found a solution to the challenge of Mark became known to us as Matthew.
*/ The term is used by Jan Wojcik in the Road to Emmaus to describe Luke's gospel
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Not Thinking Differently about Jesus
In one of the stories I cherish, Bertrand Russell recounts how, upon learning that J.S. Mill’s dictum Think differently ! had come to him in a dream, he realized that he too had a profound, recurring thought obtruding on him during his sleep. Except, when he woke up in the morning, he could not remember what it was. He resolved then to wake up the moment the idea struck again, and to that end he placed a notepad with a pencil on his night table. A few days later, he indeed found a scribbled note on the top sheet of paper when he woke up. It said: Petroleum pervades throughout.
The humorous anecdote illustrates a number of important points. First, it shows the difficulty with wanting something that cannot be had by just wanting it. Second, it tells us that we just don’t know what else lurks inside our skulls beyond the entity which we are asked refer to in the first person singular past the age of three, and vouch for legally after puberty. Third, and this is my own reading of the tricky Russell’s brainwave that spawned the anecdote, is that it hints at the impossibility of thinking differently. Maybe my wont here has to do with my high school teacher who had a way to make any punk in his charge look instantly stupid. Whenever we prefaced some idea by “I think” and he did not like what he heard, he retorted you think you think but in fact you do neither. He repeated this spiel often enough for us to get his point that there is difference between thinking and posturing.
So, to make my own point here, people often do not think when they want to seem like they do, and if someone claims the ability to think differently, the results will be likely disappointing. I will forego therefore the customary assurances that my Jesus inquiry is from an angle that has not been offered before. It would be silly, even if it were true.
Evidently, the idea that there is a mental health side to the New Testament creativity is not only not new at all but has been acknowledged by the gospels and epistles themselves, directly and indirectly. In the gospel of Mark, it is not just hostile opponents and a bemused Roman governor, but those closest to Jesus who see his new mantle of a prophet a sign of his being out of his mind. The view that Jesus was possessed by a destructive demon is acknowledged by all gospels, and Matthew (10:25) makes explicit the charge that those who follow Jesus are as much devil-possessed as their master. Only a handful of the epistles are credited by modern scholars to those in whose name they are written, and as these forgeries do not appear motivated by simple gain but extra large would-be moral concerns for humanity in the name of a loving deity, they do give rise to questions about the head space of their authors. And these are not trivial concerns. The pseudo-Pauline writer of 2 Thessalonians, goes as far as warning the recipients of his dispatch (2:2) against false writing purporting to be from us. This sort of “deep impersonation” with its implied knowledge of fraud is troubling. In 2 Peter, an epistle usually placed several generations after the gospel events, the author, who most assuredly is not Peter, forswears (1:16) he is not presenting the readers with cleverly devised fables when he gives his testimony of the majesty of the Lord’s transfiguration he personally witnessed on the mountain. The same problem of “knowing one’s lie” lurks here, and with yet another added twist. This pseudo-Peter goes as far as claiming that no prophecy of Scripture (of which he considers his testimony to be an example !) is a matter of one's own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. (1:20-21).
The difficulty with the religious or ideological mindset (as this of course is not a problem unique to the Christian objects of faith) is compounded by the conviction of the believers that no valid external view of it (them) exists, or even, can exist. Paul tells his followers that the spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no-one (1 Cr 2:15). This peculiar view had a way of propagating itself in later gospel writing. Mark’s Jesus while acknowledging that he (or the community he stands for - note that it is the followers of Jesus - not him - who get so worked up by Jesus they can’t eat, in 3:20) is looked upon as (an) ecstatic lunatic(s), and the Holy Spirit, but effects of frank mania, immediately proscribes such a view as absolutely unforgivable taboo worse than blaspheming God himself and one that requires eternal damnation ! (Mk 3:28-31) Mark’s Petrine editor and censor, we know as Matthew, considered it prudent to excise the concerns of Jesus’ family, while of course keeping the eschatological fatwa against badmouthing the spirit. Evidently, Matthew did not think the reader of his corrected gospel had the intellectual need to understand the origins of that particular idea.
It should come as no surprise then that if faith depends on the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, that even modern theology will find a way to deny that the NT texts can be penetrated and understood by independent, disinterested analysis. Here is a sample of a view that I have encountered personally in a number of forms and shapes. It comes from Hans Conzelmann who lamented in his Outline of the Theology of the NT back in 1968:
Attempts have been continually made to derive Paul’s theology from his experience. He himself declares that his gospel has been revealed to him. But in what sense is that to be understood ? We can get an answer only when we put the question in terms of the history of religions, not in psychological terms. For ‘inner experience’ explains nothing, it is an ‘x’ which itself needs to be explained. Attempted reconstructions of the experience are useless, as the sources are simply not there. Just as Paul has visions without making personal use of them (2 Cor 12), so he never speaks of the inner event of his conversion, but only of its theological content: his commission to preach the gospel to the Gentiles.
On one level I can of course sympathize with the objection of the theologian . Theology and psychology are rivals. The theologian instinctively disdains attempts to explain away the mystery that is life and its purposes, the ambition of some grand theorists of human psyche. He or she senses that people who think (they think when they write) that way, either do not think very deeply about what they say or do not really know how to align feelings to ideas. Further, and therein I believe lies the crux of the matter, whatever one can say about the creativity and activism of Paul, Mark, the people around them, and the copycats they inspired later: they were challenged and responded with what they had, and whatever one’s opinion of the cultural selectors that favoured their cosmology, and social psychology over their competitors, here we are with them in our cultural baggage. One wise pastor said to me when we discussed my project, in the early days : I trust that you mean well. The thing that worries me is not much a world without God, but a world with an ersatz God. I told him that I was a theist at least in one respect: I take God as a warrant against knowing too much.
On the other hand, I hope the problems with a theological attitude that Conzelmann’s view illustrates, are immediately visible, and hopefully not only to non-faith. Does Paul’s experience really explain nothing ? Are the reconstructions of it really useless ? Do the secular (,or religiously not-committed,) view of Paul, or classing Paul’s visitations with known mental phenomena observed medically and psychologically, automatically derogate to Christianity ? I don’t think so. For one, I know that Conzelmann’s theological mentor, Rudolph Bultmann, openly discussed the delusional nature of some of the beliefs of Jesus if there were held by a real human. So, it would appear Conzelmann knew there are issues with the historical identity of Jesus, and to push theology out of harm’s way, he declared himself for the view that we can know nothing about Jesus, historically speaking. He could not say the same with Paul, since he had Paul in his face, historically speaking, so he declared himself for the view that we cannot know anything about Paul, psychologically speaking. The sources are simply not there. This sort of approach greatly distressed Paul Tillich who warned its cumulative effect would be empty theism. As theology locks itself inside its own hermetically sealed little world, it loses touch and relevance. The attitude reminds one so much of the wife of the bishop of Oxford, who on learning of the Darwin’s theory of our biological descent exclaimed: Let us pray it is not true, or if it is, that it does not become generally known.
But the reality is that we have Paul’s letters and they reveal quite a bit about Paul, not the theologian, not the saint, but the courageous human suffering periodically from a debilitating disorder who through creative genius that dissociated a part of his person into a mythical personna, laid the groundwork for the world’s most successful religion. There are direct and oblique references in Paul’s letters to his health and with the cognitive patterns in his theology which – read together – may create a psychological profile which is reasonably close to what we may know of him, a profile which optimally would be candid but respectful and compassionate, and therefore perhaps theologically useful, to some. As for the rest of the New Testament, the texts, contrary to conservative belief, present an interesting window on the social psychological makeup of the early Christians and may yet shed unexpected insights on the first communities and the development of their beliefs.
The humorous anecdote illustrates a number of important points. First, it shows the difficulty with wanting something that cannot be had by just wanting it. Second, it tells us that we just don’t know what else lurks inside our skulls beyond the entity which we are asked refer to in the first person singular past the age of three, and vouch for legally after puberty. Third, and this is my own reading of the tricky Russell’s brainwave that spawned the anecdote, is that it hints at the impossibility of thinking differently. Maybe my wont here has to do with my high school teacher who had a way to make any punk in his charge look instantly stupid. Whenever we prefaced some idea by “I think” and he did not like what he heard, he retorted you think you think but in fact you do neither. He repeated this spiel often enough for us to get his point that there is difference between thinking and posturing.
So, to make my own point here, people often do not think when they want to seem like they do, and if someone claims the ability to think differently, the results will be likely disappointing. I will forego therefore the customary assurances that my Jesus inquiry is from an angle that has not been offered before. It would be silly, even if it were true.
Evidently, the idea that there is a mental health side to the New Testament creativity is not only not new at all but has been acknowledged by the gospels and epistles themselves, directly and indirectly. In the gospel of Mark, it is not just hostile opponents and a bemused Roman governor, but those closest to Jesus who see his new mantle of a prophet a sign of his being out of his mind. The view that Jesus was possessed by a destructive demon is acknowledged by all gospels, and Matthew (10:25) makes explicit the charge that those who follow Jesus are as much devil-possessed as their master. Only a handful of the epistles are credited by modern scholars to those in whose name they are written, and as these forgeries do not appear motivated by simple gain but extra large would-be moral concerns for humanity in the name of a loving deity, they do give rise to questions about the head space of their authors. And these are not trivial concerns. The pseudo-Pauline writer of 2 Thessalonians, goes as far as warning the recipients of his dispatch (2:2) against false writing purporting to be from us. This sort of “deep impersonation” with its implied knowledge of fraud is troubling. In 2 Peter, an epistle usually placed several generations after the gospel events, the author, who most assuredly is not Peter, forswears (1:16) he is not presenting the readers with cleverly devised fables when he gives his testimony of the majesty of the Lord’s transfiguration he personally witnessed on the mountain. The same problem of “knowing one’s lie” lurks here, and with yet another added twist. This pseudo-Peter goes as far as claiming that no prophecy of Scripture (of which he considers his testimony to be an example !) is a matter of one's own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. (1:20-21).
The difficulty with the religious or ideological mindset (as this of course is not a problem unique to the Christian objects of faith) is compounded by the conviction of the believers that no valid external view of it (them) exists, or even, can exist. Paul tells his followers that the spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no-one (1 Cr 2:15). This peculiar view had a way of propagating itself in later gospel writing. Mark’s Jesus while acknowledging that he (or the community he stands for - note that it is the followers of Jesus - not him - who get so worked up by Jesus they can’t eat, in 3:20) is looked upon as (an) ecstatic lunatic(s), and the Holy Spirit, but effects of frank mania, immediately proscribes such a view as absolutely unforgivable taboo worse than blaspheming God himself and one that requires eternal damnation ! (Mk 3:28-31) Mark’s Petrine editor and censor, we know as Matthew, considered it prudent to excise the concerns of Jesus’ family, while of course keeping the eschatological fatwa against badmouthing the spirit. Evidently, Matthew did not think the reader of his corrected gospel had the intellectual need to understand the origins of that particular idea.
It should come as no surprise then that if faith depends on the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, that even modern theology will find a way to deny that the NT texts can be penetrated and understood by independent, disinterested analysis. Here is a sample of a view that I have encountered personally in a number of forms and shapes. It comes from Hans Conzelmann who lamented in his Outline of the Theology of the NT back in 1968:
Attempts have been continually made to derive Paul’s theology from his experience. He himself declares that his gospel has been revealed to him. But in what sense is that to be understood ? We can get an answer only when we put the question in terms of the history of religions, not in psychological terms. For ‘inner experience’ explains nothing, it is an ‘x’ which itself needs to be explained. Attempted reconstructions of the experience are useless, as the sources are simply not there. Just as Paul has visions without making personal use of them (2 Cor 12), so he never speaks of the inner event of his conversion, but only of its theological content: his commission to preach the gospel to the Gentiles.
On one level I can of course sympathize with the objection of the theologian . Theology and psychology are rivals. The theologian instinctively disdains attempts to explain away the mystery that is life and its purposes, the ambition of some grand theorists of human psyche. He or she senses that people who think (they think when they write) that way, either do not think very deeply about what they say or do not really know how to align feelings to ideas. Further, and therein I believe lies the crux of the matter, whatever one can say about the creativity and activism of Paul, Mark, the people around them, and the copycats they inspired later: they were challenged and responded with what they had, and whatever one’s opinion of the cultural selectors that favoured their cosmology, and social psychology over their competitors, here we are with them in our cultural baggage. One wise pastor said to me when we discussed my project, in the early days : I trust that you mean well. The thing that worries me is not much a world without God, but a world with an ersatz God. I told him that I was a theist at least in one respect: I take God as a warrant against knowing too much.
On the other hand, I hope the problems with a theological attitude that Conzelmann’s view illustrates, are immediately visible, and hopefully not only to non-faith. Does Paul’s experience really explain nothing ? Are the reconstructions of it really useless ? Do the secular (,or religiously not-committed,) view of Paul, or classing Paul’s visitations with known mental phenomena observed medically and psychologically, automatically derogate to Christianity ? I don’t think so. For one, I know that Conzelmann’s theological mentor, Rudolph Bultmann, openly discussed the delusional nature of some of the beliefs of Jesus if there were held by a real human. So, it would appear Conzelmann knew there are issues with the historical identity of Jesus, and to push theology out of harm’s way, he declared himself for the view that we can know nothing about Jesus, historically speaking. He could not say the same with Paul, since he had Paul in his face, historically speaking, so he declared himself for the view that we cannot know anything about Paul, psychologically speaking. The sources are simply not there. This sort of approach greatly distressed Paul Tillich who warned its cumulative effect would be empty theism. As theology locks itself inside its own hermetically sealed little world, it loses touch and relevance. The attitude reminds one so much of the wife of the bishop of Oxford, who on learning of the Darwin’s theory of our biological descent exclaimed: Let us pray it is not true, or if it is, that it does not become generally known.
But the reality is that we have Paul’s letters and they reveal quite a bit about Paul, not the theologian, not the saint, but the courageous human suffering periodically from a debilitating disorder who through creative genius that dissociated a part of his person into a mythical personna, laid the groundwork for the world’s most successful religion. There are direct and oblique references in Paul’s letters to his health and with the cognitive patterns in his theology which – read together – may create a psychological profile which is reasonably close to what we may know of him, a profile which optimally would be candid but respectful and compassionate, and therefore perhaps theologically useful, to some. As for the rest of the New Testament, the texts, contrary to conservative belief, present an interesting window on the social psychological makeup of the early Christians and may yet shed unexpected insights on the first communities and the development of their beliefs.
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