The Quest for the Historical Jesus

            

My quest for the historical Jesus has been an attempt to make sense of this strange, wonderful religion in which I have been raised.  But before I go any further, let me put all of my cards on the table.  The son of an Episcopal clergyman and his theologian wife, so needless to say a baptized Christian, I have married a beautiful Jewish woman.  Together my wife Jennifer and I are raising our two daughters in the Jewish tradition, and I have been blessed with a firsthand appreciation for the depth and light of the Jewish faith.  And the primary spiritual practice in my everyday life is Buddhist sitting meditation.  I like to think that I am practicing Buddhism in order to be a better Christian.  Put another way, the Episcopal Church has not lost a Christian, instead it has gained a Buddhist.  This postmodern tableau is, quite simply, religion in the 21^st century.  Whatever your comfort level with religion as collage, the Episcopal Church must continue to build in the flexibility necessary to meet the spiritual needs of people for whom the possible avenues of faith are virtually infinite.

           

So, the historical Jesus.  In many ways Christianity asks more from its believers than any other major world religion.  The virgin birth, God walking the Earth as a man, and, of course, the resurrection, each of these is mind blowing enough in its own right.  Put them together and you have a landscape of events that leaves the post-Enlightenment western individual with few choices:  maintain a safe remove by labeling the Gospel stories as “myth”, chuck the whole religion as absurd, or choose to believe precisely because it is all so unbelievable. 

 

The quest for the historical Jesus, then, is an attempt to save Christianity by providing it some much needed ballast.  Imagine Christianity as a hot air balloon.  The beauty of Christianity as a mystery religion, with the feeding of the five thousand, water into wine, walking on water, and, of course, the salvation of human kind via the resurrection, is really what Christianity is all about.  But this stuff is all lighter than air and threatens to float away into the postmodern ether without something more substantial to hold it all down.  The quest for the historical Jesus, boiled down to its essence, is nothing other than the emphatic insistence that Jesus of Nazareth actually walked the Earth.  Without this fundamental grounding of Christianity, with the quest as rational pilot suspended in a basket beneath the hot air balloon of those mysterious Gospels, it would all just float away.

 

In this context, it matters little which Jesus historian you read, or which theories you find most credible, as the act of engaging in the quest for the historical Jesus is an end unto itself.  But most of the fun to be had on the quest is in immersing one’s self in the material, wrestling with the implications of each possibility, and coming out the other side with a position one is willing to stake one’s faith on.  A perfect jumping off point for a freshly minted “quester” is The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visons, coauthored by Marcus J. Borg and N. T. Wright, the leading lights, respectively, of liberal and conservative Jesus scholarship.  In this work, Borg and Wright engage in a gentlemanly butting of heads regarding the central mysteries of the historical Jesus.  Among the topics up for debate is Jesus’ resurrection.  The effect of reading Wright and Borg consecutively is psychedelic, as their contrasting analyses distort the reader’s perceptions as she attempts to bend her mind around these ultimately irreconcilable Easter gestalts.  A closer look at both is necessary to determine which fork in the path leads to hallucination, and which to enlightenment.

 

Wright, first up to bat in the text, insists upon a corporeal resurrection.  Jesus is resurrected in the flesh:  “What the early church insisted about Jesus was that he had been well and truly physically dead and was now well and truly physically alive.” (p. 116)  But this simple equation is complicated by Wright’s next move, the assertion that the resurrection “is, rather, the transformation of the existing body into a new mode of physicality.” (p.120)  Wright postulates his theory of a “transformed physicality” in opposition to the translation offered by some of Jesus’ resurrected body as a “spiritual body”.  However, Wright is completely unable to elucidate what exactly this transformed physicality consists of, other than that it is “still concrete and physical” (p. 120) and that it is assuredly not a “spiritual body.”  I am left with the impression that Wright would be more than happy if the only “transformed physicality” to be found on the resurrected Jesus was the addition of a vestigial third nipple, thereby affixing Jesus’ bodily stamp of approval to Wright’s theory as if it were the Shroud of Turin.

 

Wright’s insistence on a bodily resurrection privileges Wright’s apparent fantasy of living in an impossible reality.  In his classic work Merely Christian, none other than C. S. Lewis, Wright’s conservative forerunner, explained that God is bound by the rules of logic that govern existence in God’s creation, and that this necessary limitation in no way detracts from God’s glory or dominion.  Even God, then, must play by the rules if the “game” is to have any meaning.  Wright, ignoring Lewis with his insistence on a bodily resurrection, would discard the rules that frame creation.  His is the classic mistake of fundamentalism; by insisting that Jesus’ resurrection conform to his set of doctrinal priorities, Wright negates the very possibility of a really existing world for Jesus to save.  “Well and truly” dead bodies return, irrevocably, to ashes and dust.  Such is the price of admission to creation.  By refusing to pay this price, Wright loses his grip on reality and any possible insight into how the resurrection is, for lack of a better term, really real.

 

Fortunately, Borg’s chapter on the resurrection comes after Wright’s in the text.  Post Wright, the relief one feels in the encounter with the basic sanity of Borg’s stance, “I see the empty tomb and whatever happened to the corpse of Jesus as ultimately irrelevant to the truth of Easter” (p. 130), is akin to being told that your loved one is going to pull through a difficult emergency surgery.  Such is the strength of Borg’s reassuring grip pulling us back from the abyss of Wright’s astonishing literalism. 

 

Borg expertly contrasts resurrection with resuscitation, though his endorsement of resurrection as “entry into a new kind of existence” (p. 131) may at first glance appear in danger of veering towards Wright’s “transformed physicality”.  But Borg steers a steady course towards something potentially far more transformational than Wright’s Zombie-Christ.  Borg’s most important step is in framing the resurrection “beyond the categories of space and time” (p. 131), in doing so he sagely takes us beyond the realm of the physical body.  Wright’s greatest failure is a failure of the imagination, as he is unable to envision a resurrection that does not hinge on a simplistic undoing of human mortality.  It is Borg who takes the real leap of faith by elevating his conception of the resurrection beyond the obvious.  As always, God works in mysterious ways, and there is not even the hint of mystery in Wright’s clockwork universe.

 

Borg’s reading of the risen Christ’s appearance on the road to Emmaus is a synopsis of how one can experience the resurrection story from a place of sanity, which is the necessary clearing in mental and spiritual space for the experience of Jesus’ saving grace:  “Most centrally, the story makes the claim that the risen Christ journeys with us, whether we know that or not, realize that or not, even as it also affirms that there are moments of recognition in which we do realize that.” (p. 134)  In comprehending the “post-Easter Jesus as an experiential reality” (p. 135), Borg maintains the link with really existing creation necessary for Christianity to attain to its healing mission, a healing necessary due in part to what Borg calls “the establishment of a new set of requirements” (p. 141) found in Christian doctrinal requirements.  This new set of requirements would bind us bind us to Wright’s resurrection narrative, which would be like living in a mirage.

 

Having fenced with Borg and Wright, I am compelled to reveal the ground from which I currently encounter the resurrection story.  In doing so I do not propose a definitive final answer as to what occurred on the third day; when it comes to the resurrection I adhere strictly to the maxim Zen mind, beginner’s mind (the Christo-centric are referred to Thomas Merton’s Zen and the Birds of Appetite).  Instead, my kaleidoscopic relationship with the resurrection is simply an example of the spiritual adventure awaiting the enthusiastic “quester”. 

To build my own bridge to the resurrection I turned to the least likely of sources, the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan.  One of Lacan’s greatest contributions to the psychoanalytic understanding of the psyche was his concept of the human subject.  Understanding that the ego is ultimately a necessary fiction, Lacan found the subject always obscured behind the ego, but at the same time constantly speaking through the ego.  This motif of simultaneous presence and absence bears an uncanny resemblance to how we human subjects encounter God.  In his brilliant explication of Lacanian theory, Lacan, Lionel Bailly includes this insight into the nature of the subject:  “(T)he subject could exist whether or not the person is alive.  This is not just a philosophical fancy: it has clinical relevance, as one may see how a dead child or a past patriarch may still act like a Subject within the dynamics of a family.” (p. 67)

 

When I was a child my family traveled every summer to a beach cottage owned by my paternal grandmother and her siblings.  In the cottage was an ancient chair, timeworn but given pride of place.  The chair was always referred to as “Darling’s chair”, in reference to the family matriarch who had ruled uncompromisingly for decades from that chair.  Darling’s body had been in the ground for an equal number of decades, but her subject, represented by “Darling’s chair”, continued to organize the dynamics of my father’s side of the family. 

 

Now I must ask you, if Darling’s subject was potent enough to rule from her chair for decades after her death, then what might Jesus Christ’s subject, present in the cross, be capable of?