Hagiography

Today we tend to accept the statements of medieval pilgrims without many problems; they describe the place where saint John celebrated the first Mass, where the Magi’s star appeared, where the cock crowed three times. All elements that, at least in Christian Europe, are familiar to everyone from a very young age. Indeed, each detail regarding holy places is the fruit of a centuries-long path, and is neither linear nor unambiguous: for example the Magi’s number, identities, religion, and even the duration of their journey, along with many other aspects regarding these figures and their role in the Gospel of Mark, and thus in Christianity, represent a complicated historiographical problem. Medieval pilgrims do not distinguish between canonical Gospels, Apocrypha, and legends. After five hundred years, at times it is impossible to recover the source of a given miracle regarding Christ or the Virgin. This does not mean, however, that it is useless to try; even partial and uncertain results can tell us a great deal. We have testimony to the fact that some pilgrims were learned and had rather precise ideas about holy places, and that they studied the sacred texts and their commentaries. But very often the legends and miracles that pilgrims write about are not in the Bible or in the writings of the Church fathers. As well as information for pilgrims and directions for the places that they ought to have visited (which we will come back to later), miracles and legends always depended on the choices that somebody made. This paper aims to show that even events considered out of history (and nature), as miracles, depend on cultural – sometimes political – factors related to Christian life in Holy Land.

In our own time, many fine works have endeavored to extricate the “historical” Jesus from the Gospelic context of church image and message. The results have been mostly snippets of insight stitched together to accomplish a patchwork portrait that is always impressionistic, and usually colored by the bias of its author. Recent “historical” theories that Jesus was a political rebel causing social disturbances, or was a religious revisionist discarding Torah law, once again fill the literary ether with intuitive fantasy rather than fact. As remarkable a claim as it may seem, my new book, A Documented Biography of Jesus Before Christianity (anticipated release, summer 2015) now presents a profoundly different Jesus than Christians or Jews have met before, trapped in a drama that should deeply move all of us. On the technical side, my method shares nothing with Bultmann’s two-source critical approach--or with the contrarian criteria establishing Geza Vermes’ “Jewish” Jesus. Rather, it depends on hypothesizing historicity of specific events excavated from beneath strata of Christianizing theology if their occurrence illuminates other hitherto obscure scriptural passages. I have labelled my approach, “The method of precipitous insight.” To wit: If an insight into an event in the Gospels is capable of dramatically clarifying thematic and linguistic uncertainties found elsewhere in the text, the insight, called “precipitous,” is elevated to the level of hypothesis. As hypothesis, it may be “tested” by its predicted consequences. If, for example, it links to other text, creating further pronounced insight, the exponential increase in clarity is likely an advance toward a unified theory. Finding the historical core in the Gospels’ “midrashim” The use of “lesson-legends” to amplify and interpret religious truths was a deeply-rooted literary technique of the ancient rabbis. Such legends embellished and dramatized episodes described in the Torah (giving them an extra aura of divine intention) and authoring them was a standard practice in Jesus’ era. The Hebrew name for them, midrashim, meant made-up stories which interpret the meaning of presumed actual events. In the early centuries of our era, such dramatic, theological enhancement through legends was never created from “whole cloth,” but consisted of fancifully embroidering events considered historical, with their imaginative elaboration built on the supposed actual occurrences. Therefore, one may say, a midrash always had at its core an event regarded by its author as historically true. Christianity’s most famous candidates include: Jesus being born from a virgin, his healing incurable diseases, turning water to wine; Jesus contemplating the adulteress brought before him for judgment, his temptation by satan on the Jerusalem precipice, walking on water, calming the storm, feeding thousands from a small basket of food, and giving Peter the keys to the coming Kingdom of God. Additionally, Jesus’ own words were often cloaked in interpretive “midrashic” embellishment, and they too must be the subject of close scrutiny and re-translation in order to unearth what he actually said, and reach the New Testament’s historical stratum. When, like oysters, the Christianizing shells are opened for inspection, the startling drama of Jesus’ life emerges as the “pearls” of history are strung together. The reader should be aware that midrashic analysis is not the same as searching out a natural explanation for seeming miracles. For example, others have suggested that the “miracle of feeding a multitude from a few loaves” may be explained by a storage facility for baked goods to which Jesus had access. Attempting to reduce the “miracles” to mundane episodes by guessing at “plausible explanations” is a false step obfuscating what actually occurred. To speculate in such a manner is to further gloss and conceal the interconnected sequence of unfolding occurrences, burying the actual history beneath the description. The midrashim, it should be stated, differ from parables--meshalim-- which do not have a historical core. Meshalim--are short stories with a lesson meant to interpret or explain a higher moral truth, generally embodied in a scriptural passage. They are familiar to us as the Gospels’ “parables.”

public lecture

The Bible, like other sacred texts, uses symbolic language to convey profound spiritual truths. Stories like the stilling of the tempest and the woman healed of a sickness can be interpreted as allegories for spiritual awakening and healing. Mountains symbolize elevated states of consciousness, where one can find inner guidance and peace. The Bible, particularly the gospels, is seen as a collection of allegories using symbolic language to reveal spiritual truths. These stories, like the nativity of Christ, describe interior experiences and spiritual attainments that can occur within every human being. A profound spiritual awakening, symbolized by the birth of the Christ nature, leads to a life of self-surrender, sacrificial love, and unity with God.

bob.wadholm.com

Which Mary