Eyre Lines

Homebrewed Christianity has a podcast interview with Dennis MacDonald, who is talking about “mythologising Jesus”. It is well worth a listen; MacDonald has written a book examining the dependence in the Gospels on the Homeric epics and on Virgil (which were, in the Roman Empire of the first century, the pinnacle of literature – the Shakespeare and Dickens of the day, you might say). The thesis is that, in putting forward the importance of Jesus, the authors used figures from Greek and Roman myth, often slightly adjusting them to show how Jesus was greater than the heroes of the Iliad and the Oddesey.

This made me remember a post of mine from 2013, in which I talked about the meanings of “Logos”. I reference Philo of Alexandria there (as I am convinced that the writer of the Fourth Gospel was riffing off Philo’s ideas about Logos); the article on Philo in the Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy lists the meanings Philo arrived at for “Logos”. As you will see from the link, Philo found twelve meanings in “Logos”, from the utterance of God through God’s first-born son to God him or her self. Philo was, there, equating Logos with the traditions relating to Wisdom in the Hebrew Scriptures, and adding a little of his own. The writer of the Fourth Gospel then made a linkage between Jesus and Logos – “and the Logos was made flesh and dwelt among us”, thus loading onto Jesus the entire load of meaning of Philo’s conception of Logos, and thus also the entire load of meaning of Jewish concepts of Wisdom.

As MacDonald also comments, the writers of the Synoptic Gospels were keen to establish Jesus as superior to Biblical figures, notably Elijah and Moses; various stories in the gospels thus echo and improve on stories of Elijah and Moses, and, as MacDonald’s book now establishes, also Odessyus and Aeneas. Aeneas is particularly significant as being the founder of Rome in the Roman myth of creation. Simultaneously, Paul and other new Testament writers were drawing parallels between Jesus and the Roman Emperors who, from Augustus onwards, were titled “son of God”, “God” and “Saviour”, and lifting up Jesus to be superior to the Emperors in a strikingly subversive move.

I look at all this, and wonder whether the charismatic itinerant Jewish preacher and healer who was the historical Jesus can actually bear the weight of all of this symbolism. Certainly, loading all of this onto someone who was crucified by the Romans as a dangerous subversive and thus died in a particularly ignominious way, calculated to erase the identity of the crucified, is in and of itself a massively subversive move. I think this is probably faithful to the spirit of the itinerant preacher – whatever the mythicists may say (and MacDonald’s book is going to add strength to some of their arguments), I think we can say with some confidence not only that Jesus preached and healed, but that his preferred preaching style was the use of parables and those parables were generally subversive. Certainly John Dominic Crossan makes a fine case for this in his excellent “The Power of Parable”.

It is, of course, a feature of hero-worship that the hero becomes seen as better in every way than the actual person who is being idolised (and my use of that word indicates that I see a possible problem of idolatry in our view of Jesus), and certainly Jesus was seen as a hero by his followers. His death then cut the ground out from underneath most conceptions of heroes available at the time, but his status in the eyes of his followers grew instead of diminishing, and became more subversive in the process. The hero who dies heroically was not a new concept, but the hero who has more power when dead than he did when alive – that was revolutionary (or at least it was until Constantine adopted the Church, and the Church became Constantinian…).

Can he bear the load, though? The mythicists think not, and those of us with modernist and materialist leanings might well agree. My own worry is that in the process of loading onto Jesus so much symbolism, we have achieved contradictions – it has been the playground of theologians for 2000 years to try to square the circle of “wholly God and wholly man” and to determine whether there was in that combination one essence or two, one will or two, whether the status was given, assumed or pre-existent.

But then, is that not just an example of us, perhaps, loading too much onto the concept of God him or her self? The philosophical theologians, practising “natural theology” rather than “Biblical theology” have imposed on God all the excessive qualities of omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, omnibenevolence – and the list goes on. Charles Hartshorne certainly tilted at some of the “omnis” in “Omniscience and other Theological Mistakes”.  Perhaps we should keep in mind, first and foremost, that Jesus was a particular (although very special) man who lived in a particular time and place, and that God is something which mystics claim to experience (as I do myself) but report that what they say of God is universally inadequate?