Jesus by A.N. Wilson
London: Pimlico, 2003 (first published 1992) ISBN: 0712606971
I bought this book under the impression that it was a biography of Jesus. In a way it is, but it is also a book about the impossibility of such a biography, about what we can guess about the historical Jesus and how, in A.N. Wilson's view, the Church has created a religious Jesus that the actual Jesus would have abhorred.
Wilson explains firstly how Paul pretty much single-handedly created the Jesus of the Cross- the Son of God that we know and worship now. Then he goes on to explain what the Gospels were, how they weren't written as history but as religious texts to support the development of the early Church. In Mark especially, we see a text written by someone justifying the Church, and positioning it as a friend of Rome and an enemy of the Jews.
However that may be, we can begin to see through the fog of history and glimpse the "real" Jesus through careful textual investigation. How is this done? By various means: in Mark for example, Wilson points out passages where it is clear that the author is relaying a story which he doesn't understand - these parts of the Gospel we can surmise come from an earlier tradition. In a similar vein, we can search through the sayings of Jesus and track potential interpolations: if the Greek of the Gospels doesn't make sense in Aramaic (the language of Jesus), it may be a later interpolation.
We can look to the things we can surmise what Jesus actually said and the things he is reported to have done to try and get a sense of him. Firstly he never claimed to be the Son of God. He seemed, in the sayings that Wilson thinks may be authentic, to be emphasising an individual relationship with God rather than suggesting a creation of an institutional church with rules and laws. The Church we know now is a creation of the people that survived Jesus, not of the man himself.
Wilson also claims that the only way to make sense of Holy Week is to assume that Jesus was somehow connected to Jewish rebellion. We know through other sources that Jews were in constant ruction - prophets and rebels abounded during this time Jesus was active. Wilson points to the facts of Holy Week, where Jesus acquires a donkey colt on which to ride into town (in fulfillment of prophecy), and has a room to meet already organized (Wilson casts doubt on whether there was a Last Supper - John, the only Gospel that can be shown to have eyewitness accounts of what happened, doesn't mention a meal), as showing that the had a network of acquaintances in Jerusalem that went beyond his Disciples, acquaintances who were prepared to work for him.
Whether Jesus was actively engaged in rebellion against Rome, or whether he was caught up in a rebellion that was not his can't be known, but Wilson thinks that Jesus ended his life on the Cross thinking that his mission, his message, and his life had ended in failure.
Jesus is a book of opinions and surmises, but Wilson shows the reader how he makes the surmises and why he has the opinions, all the while explaining his sources (there are good notes and a decent bibliography in the edition I read). The mystery of Jesus' actual life will never be fully deciphered, but in Jesus, Wilson has built a possible life, all the while explaining why we have ended up with the Jesus of the Church that we have now.
Really well written, I can recommend Jesus as a great read.
No comments:
Post a Comment