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May. 27th, 2008 02:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tree_and_leafHave thus far completely failed to find my motivation for writing a paper presenting my thesis for the graduate seminar. It shouldn't even be that difficult, but I just don't want to. Aargh!
Instead, I find myself mentally arguing with Jack Miles' Christ - a crisis in the life of God, which I'm half way through. It has a number of interesting ideas, but is flawed in a number of ways - most gravely by the fact that if you say you're going to produce a life of Christ by reading the NT 'as literature', then it's disingenuous to ignore its genre characteristics and to suggest, for example, that the long monologues in John prove that Jesus wandered about talking to himself and pointedly not engaging with those around him. Another problem is that the author seems to generally assume that the Jesus of the Gospels was totally omniscient and knew not only everything about those he came into contact with, but also, on a move by move basis, exactly what was going to happen. I don't think this works - not if you take the claim that Jesus was a true human being, because the human mind is limited and would shut down or go completely haywire if presented with that much data; I also don't buy the idea that Jesus knew his future in a clear, precise way. Admittedly trying to imagine the consciousness of someone who is both the eternal Word of God and an ordinary human being is both slightly presumptuous and extremely liable to driving one to lie down in a darkened room with a splitting headache, but I agree with Sayers: it simply doesn't work, in the sense of making a plausible story, to have Jesus going about with a mental checklist ("To do today: heal leper; argue with Saducees; pick treacherous bastard as disciple so as to be able to damn him later; buy milk.")
But I'm not sure if Miles really means to imply that, because he argued earlier on that the incident where Christ stays behind in the temple to argue theology and his parents lose him shows Jesus as (a) conscious of his divinity (and frighteningly clever), but also (b) with a very childish and naive understanding both of what being the Son of God means in practice, and how other people react to that. There is indeed a very childlike logic to Jesus' apparent bafflement that Mary and Joseph didn't know he'd be 'in his Father's house' (and it reminds me, in a way, of a lot of conversations I've had with Cub Scouts, who can't understand why things that are obvious to them aren't obvious to grown ups!)
The other big problem is that Miles seems to have abandoned Trinitarian theology (probably because he regards it as a later imposition); but again, the story doesn't work as a story if you confuse the Father and the Son (the Spirit, as usual, gets ignored almost entirely, but I expect He or She is used to that by now...). I mean, if you take the miracles of healing and exorcism at face value, then it's rather inconsistent to insist that the voice which said at the Transfiguration 'This is my Son; listen to Him' was Jesus' own. It doesn't help that Miles seems to have decided that Jesus is fairly unlikable; he certainly portrays him as rather inhuman, for instance remarking that Jesus seems to have picked the disciples at random, because God's love for humans is general and indifferent. Quite how Miles intends to deal with S John, I can't imagine - but it's rather bad theology, too.
On the other hand - I seem to be focusing on the negatives here, but it is a very thought-provoking experiment in reading the Gospels, and I'm very much enjoying it, even if my reactions tend to the 'yes, but'; and it has sharpened my perception of a lot of little details of the narratives.
Instead, I find myself mentally arguing with Jack Miles' Christ - a crisis in the life of God, which I'm half way through. It has a number of interesting ideas, but is flawed in a number of ways - most gravely by the fact that if you say you're going to produce a life of Christ by reading the NT 'as literature', then it's disingenuous to ignore its genre characteristics and to suggest, for example, that the long monologues in John prove that Jesus wandered about talking to himself and pointedly not engaging with those around him. Another problem is that the author seems to generally assume that the Jesus of the Gospels was totally omniscient and knew not only everything about those he came into contact with, but also, on a move by move basis, exactly what was going to happen. I don't think this works - not if you take the claim that Jesus was a true human being, because the human mind is limited and would shut down or go completely haywire if presented with that much data; I also don't buy the idea that Jesus knew his future in a clear, precise way. Admittedly trying to imagine the consciousness of someone who is both the eternal Word of God and an ordinary human being is both slightly presumptuous and extremely liable to driving one to lie down in a darkened room with a splitting headache, but I agree with Sayers: it simply doesn't work, in the sense of making a plausible story, to have Jesus going about with a mental checklist ("To do today: heal leper; argue with Saducees; pick treacherous bastard as disciple so as to be able to damn him later; buy milk.")
But I'm not sure if Miles really means to imply that, because he argued earlier on that the incident where Christ stays behind in the temple to argue theology and his parents lose him shows Jesus as (a) conscious of his divinity (and frighteningly clever), but also (b) with a very childish and naive understanding both of what being the Son of God means in practice, and how other people react to that. There is indeed a very childlike logic to Jesus' apparent bafflement that Mary and Joseph didn't know he'd be 'in his Father's house' (and it reminds me, in a way, of a lot of conversations I've had with Cub Scouts, who can't understand why things that are obvious to them aren't obvious to grown ups!)
The other big problem is that Miles seems to have abandoned Trinitarian theology (probably because he regards it as a later imposition); but again, the story doesn't work as a story if you confuse the Father and the Son (the Spirit, as usual, gets ignored almost entirely, but I expect He or She is used to that by now...). I mean, if you take the miracles of healing and exorcism at face value, then it's rather inconsistent to insist that the voice which said at the Transfiguration 'This is my Son; listen to Him' was Jesus' own. It doesn't help that Miles seems to have decided that Jesus is fairly unlikable; he certainly portrays him as rather inhuman, for instance remarking that Jesus seems to have picked the disciples at random, because God's love for humans is general and indifferent. Quite how Miles intends to deal with S John, I can't imagine - but it's rather bad theology, too.
On the other hand - I seem to be focusing on the negatives here, but it is a very thought-provoking experiment in reading the Gospels, and I'm very much enjoying it, even if my reactions tend to the 'yes, but'; and it has sharpened my perception of a lot of little details of the narratives.