“There are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written”—these are the last words of the Gospel “according to John.” John’s Gospel does tell us a good deal over its twenty-one chapters about what Jesus may have done in his three decades of earthly life, as do its three companion Gospels. Nevertheless, Christians have always wondered what is missing from the Bible record. What can be recovered of the real Jesus and his circumstances? As the Evangelist John implies, the question can never be adequately answered in this sublunary world, though more fragments of forgotten early Christian texts may yet emerge from the sands of Egypt or other corners of Africa or west Asia.
John’s Gospel is the most resonantly mysterious of the four Gospels that the Church (by an equally mysterious process) came to recognize as “canonical”: authoritative on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ (“Anointed One,” or Messiah). I have known John’s Gospel all my life, first hearing it in childhood read aloud in church. Through seven decades of attending Christmas services, I have looked forward to hearing a passage from the very beginning of the Gospel: a reading of this great prose-poem usually forms the culmination of that hugely successful nineteenth-century Anglican liturgical invention, the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.
“John Chapter One” begins with a hymn to the Word who is also Jesus: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”—words that echo the stories of the world’s Creation at the start of the Book of Genesis. In John’s Gospel you don’t visit Bethlehem or a manger, meet angels or shepherds, but contemplate heaven and earth: a cosmic Word who is God comes to dwell among us as a human being, born of a young woman named Mary in the first century in what is today Palestine. John gives us the clearest statement we have of this central Christian mystery (absurdity in any conventional human sense)—what Christians have come to call the doctrine of the Incarnation, Word made Flesh.
Hearing or reading this so often, I ponder the various conclusions it offers. First, that opening sentence—“In the beginning was the Word”—effectively counters the idea common in Christian circles that the Bible is “the Word of God.” Often this notion goes hand in hand with an assumption that “the Word of God” can deliver crisp, clear answers for clobbering any unfortunate person who arouses the speaker’s disapproval. But John the Evangelist is clear that the Bible is not the Word of God; Jesus is the Word of God. It says so in the Bible, you see—John’s Gospel, chapter one. You can’t have two Words of God. That’s a liberating thought, which frees one to ask what the Bible actually is.
Within the covers of a Bible (“bible-black,” as Dylan Thomas said of a moonless night in Llareggub) are gathered assorted units of text commonly referred to as “books” (biblia in Greek, libri in Latin): the Book of Exodus, Book of Revelation, and so on. Straightaway that usage provides another clarification: the Bible as a whole is not a book, for it is not called biblos or liber. It is “books,” using a subtly different word whose difference contains a vital message. In Greek, the first literary language of Christianity, biblia or “Bible” is in the plural. That word had been used by Greek-speaking Jews long before Jesus to describe their sacred writings: the Hebrew Bible, or Scripture.
Biblia originally referred to scrolls, because individual “books”—or a collection of shorter books from the Hebrew Bible—each occupied separate scrolls of papyrus or vellum (and in Jewish public liturgy the first five books still do). Greek-speaking Christians, a majority of whom were previously Greek-speaking Jews, borrowed the word biblia from the tradition they knew, amid much else. But these Christian congregations modified the use of biblia to describe their double Christian collection: both the Hebrew Scripture (reorganized as their “Old Testament”) and their own freshly minted texts about Jesus (“New Testament”).
In the New Testament we find Gospels and letters (or Epistles) from a variety of writers, plus two outliers: a historical novel known as the Acts of the Apostles and a majestic vision of the End Time now styled the Book of Revelation. The word biblia passed into the Latin language unaltered, even though Christians quickly replaced the sacred scrolls with bundles of short strips of papyrus or vellum, bound side by side like a modern book. This codex was apparently a Christian innovation, though now we take it for granted as any physical copy of a text.
Already we are multiplying words about the Word, more readily to encounter Jesus and understand his place in the Bible. In Latin, capitalized Biblia doesn’t look nearly as plural as in Greek; it could easily be mistaken for a singular Latin noun, grammatically feminine in the first declension. That’s where trouble started: mistaking the collection of “books/scrolls” for a single book. It is true that in mainstream Latin, conventionally Biblia went on being treated grammatically as a neuter noun in the plural, but later versions of Latin that became early versions of Mediterranean European languages such as French or Italian might treat Biblia as a singular noun, a thing called a “book.”
Yet not everyone forgot the proper usage. In the seventh century CE, the newly converted northern Europeans whom we now call Anglo-Saxons devised new technical words for their new religion in their own language, which was remote from Latin. They showed considerable sophistication and linguistic awareness in their efforts. Their Old English translation of Biblia kept the plural meaning, as biblioðece: that’s easily recognized as the word still surviving in other modern European languages, now meaning “library” or “bookshop.” The Bible is not a book but “books.” As in musical polyphony, books contain many different voices; Biblia is a babble about divinity. In its Christian version, it opens into a conversation about God, who is a plurality: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
This conclusion lies behind both Elaine Pagels’s and James Tabor’s recent books. Pagels’s Miracles and Wonder, latest in a long career of scholarship on early Christianity, is a thoughtful and useful study of Jesus as divine being and exemplary human at the focus of Christian devotion. She considers evidence in both canonical biblical books and a variety of slightly later devotional texts, written further into the second century CE. Some among these earned a disapproving description as “gnostic,” referring to their tendency to claim some privileged gnosis, or sacred knowledge. Pagels has devoted much of her scholarly career to assessing and expounding gnostic Christianity; gnostics appear once more in Miracles and Wonder, as she seeks out what an authentic Jesus might be like behind the conversations of texts both canonical and beyond the canon.
She makes clear that there are many problems even within the New Testament. It is all written in Greek, whereas Jesus primarily spoke Aramaic and conducted his brief public ministry in that language. Its contents range in date between about 50 CE and 120 CE, thus postdating Jesus’s own death around 33 CE. Most of them, the four Gospels included, also postdate one of the greatest traumas in Jewish history, the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by Roman armies under Titus in 70 CE. Christianity and its parent, Judaism, then increasingly went their own ways and remodeled their identities in reaction to this radical break in religious continuity. Modern Judaism is as much a creation of the crisis in 70 CE as is Christianity.
Many undercurrents in New Testament texts spiral away from Jesus’s own life and message, and are shaped by later arguments about the resurrected Savior and his relationship to the God of the Hebrew Scripture. We may also glimpse arguments from Jesus’s own time decorously reframed for devotional purposes. Returning to my youthful experience of hearing the first chapter of John’s Gospel, one of these conflicts was obvious to me as a child, long before I had any exposure to modern biblical criticism. I reveled in hearing the sonority of the opening passage—“In the beginning was the Word…”—but then felt a certain disappointment a few verses later in a sudden descent from the cosmic to everyday history: “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.”
This character was evidently the contemporary of Jesus known as John the Baptist. John the Gospel writer (a different John) put the Baptist in his place: “He was not the light, but came to bear witness to the light.” Having interpolated this into the rhythms of the great hymn on the Word, the Gospel writer returns to sublimity: “The true light that enlightens every man was coming into the world.” And yet soon enough there is a further deflating parenthesis: “(John bore witness to him, and cried, ‘This was he of whom I said, “He who comes after me ranks before me, for he was before me.”’)” Such verbal complications look like annoyed editorial annotations in the margin of a manuscript that at some stage crept into the text when it was recopied. They strongly suggest a rebuke to those who had given John the Baptist a greater authority than the Evangelist or even than Jesus himself.
Jesus is recorded in the Gospels as having been baptized by John, a ceremony that was clearly John’s specialty and had little previous precedent in Judaism. This baptism of Jesus suggests that John’s religious campaign came first. Jesus may have started as something of a rival to the Baptist, given the vigorous assertions of Jesus’s superiority to John found in all four Gospels. So now we hear a consequence of the tension. It is one of countless such examples of half-hidden dialogues and subtexts within the bible-black covers of Holy Scripture.
Scholars from a Western Christian or Enlightenment background have spent a quarter-millennium peering through the filters of the four Gospels and earlier textual material contained in the seven or eight genuine Epistles of Paul of Tarsus, to look for a “real” Jesus and an “authentic” version of what he actually said. It has been perhaps the most thoroughgoing and sophisticated analysis of any texts in the history of human thought. Many Christians still find this scholarly activity distressing and destructive, but after all that sifting, we have a reasonable notion of what Jesus preached: an urgent message about the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God overturning the present way of the world.
Naturally we are inclined to ask what was new or original in what Jesus said, but that question may be misguided and distort what was important in his teaching. Not only were there a good many wandering teachers like Jesus in that period, but maybe it was precisely the ideas he shared with his contemporaries and predecessors that were most significant at the time and first won him a hearing through their familiarity. One of Jesus’s central commands is a commonplace of ancient philosophy, indeed a conclusion at which most world religions eventually arrive: “Whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them”—what has come to be known as the Golden Rule (Matthew 7:12, and compare Luke 6:31).
Contrariwise, some central sayings of Jesus proved awkward; later generations of Christians have tended to ignore them even when they felt obliged to preserve them. Thus “Leave the dead to bury their own dead” (Luke 9:60) has been contradicted by subsequent Christian practice, even before the catacombs in Rome filled up with early Christian tombs. Particularly embarrassing is Jesus’s blanket prohibition of divorce (Mark 10:11–12 and Luke 16:18). The divorce prohibition was already a problem for Paul of Tarsus, who quoted it in order to modify it (I Corinthians 7:10–11 and 7:15), and some decades later the Evangelist Matthew nervously edited it to include a provision for divorce in the case of a wife’s infidelity (Matthew 19:9). Over centuries Christian Churches have varied considerably in permitting or absolutely forbidding divorce: it is a major fault line between Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism. Jesus also thought it important to condemn hypocrites and hypocrisy (Mark 7:6; Matthew 23:27–28)—unlike homosexuality, a subject that now so agitates Christianity but that he never once mentions. Yet Christian powers have never put hypocrites to death for their hypocrisy, in contrast to burning at the stake “sodomites” caught in same-sex practices in medieval Europe and its worldwide offshoots, a persecution of gay people that continues in many countries at the present day.
Pagels positions her discussion of Jesus amid this tangle of New Testament survivals and modifications of his discourses. The quality of her analysis is well summarized in her final chapter:
My own experience as a historian has made me cautious. We do not know which episodes were made up, and which might be based on actual or visionary experiences. Furthermore, I have shown that some scenes that sound like invention are written as metaphor.
This frees readers of Scripture from the intellectual difficulties and indeed intellectual dishonesty that comes from assuming the Bible is the seamless and infallible Word of God. Pagels dismisses the notion that one can recover “what Jesus really meant” or that he always spoke consistently. Accordingly, we can try to do with integrity what the Church has in practice always done over two millennia: renew and reinterpret the messages found in Scripture to strengthen the faithful in their devotion. That is what has kept the Christian good news alive.
Nowhere is this principle more important than in interpreting two accounts of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem and his infancy, found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Pagels treats these “Infancy Narratives” with imagination and sensitivity. Much in them is familiar even to occasional churchgoers as the Bible stories loved best through regular rehearsal in candlelit services or school Nativity plays. To cast a critical eye on these accounts is to enter Christian discussion of perhaps the most charged and sensitive subject in human experience: our notions of sex and sexuality. In the 1980s Jane Schaberg, a biblical scholar who conscientiously scrutinized the texts of the Infancy Narratives, was not only harassed and cold-shouldered by some of her academic colleagues but had her car firebombed in the university parking lot. She had committed the faux pas of suggesting that the Gospel accounts were shaped by the reality that Jesus was Mary’s child conceived in illegitimacy. Joseph, Mary’s betrothed husband, accepted the child into his family because he decided that it was the loving thing to do. Jesus was from the beginning an outsider.
I return to my own experiences of Christmas Nine Lessons and Carols services that contained John’s very different Gospel account of the coming of Jesus; they also wove together the Infancy Narratives of Matthew and Luke when reading fragments of their texts. The familiarity of these Christmas stories on such occasions is deceptive. When the fragments are restored to their places in their respective Gospels, it quickly becomes apparent how little overlap there is in the various incidents recorded in Matthew and Luke, including the elaborate linear genealogies of Jesus’s ancestors that form part of them. The fact that the genealogies are so different has always puzzled later Christian commentators, with much consequent busy effort to reconcile them. Both genealogies end in a feature that makes no sense either for a family tree or for conventional accounts of the Incarnation: their genealogical goal is Joseph, who on any reading of the stories in the Infancy Narratives cannot be Jesus’s biological father. Both genealogies rather lamely make that clear. Luke speaks of Jesus as “the son (as was supposed) of Joseph” (Luke 3:23). Matthew tells us that Joseph “knew [Mary] not” (that is, did not consummate their marriage) “until she had borne a son”—that is, Jesus (Matthew 1:25).
The peculiarity of Matthew’s and Luke’s genealogies—their biological pointlessness—is a clue to how and why they evolved. They share a purpose in linking Jesus as Messiah to the ancient hero King David, via Joseph, even if Jesus himself is the Son of God. That links with the other shared feature in Matthew’s and Luke’s infancy stories: they place Jesus’s birth in “the city of David,” Bethlehem, where the prophet Samuel had discovered David, the founder of his royal dynasty. Yet everywhere else in the Gospels, as well as in the Acts of the Apostles, Jesus is described as coming from the villages of Nazareth or Capernaum in Galilee, a long way from Bethlehem. In fact, not even Matthew and Luke mention Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem outside their Infancy Narratives and, as Pagels observes, the only other reference to Bethlehem in the rest of the New Testament acknowledges skepticism. John’s Gospel describes an argument about whether or not Jesus was the Messiah; scoffers pointed out that Jesus was from Nazareth, but the ancient Hebrew prophet Micah had foretold the birth of the Messiah in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2; John 7:40–43).
Luke solves this geographical difficulty by claiming that Joseph and Mary had been forced to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem by a Roman imperial tax decree (Luke 2:1–5). This meant that everyone must return to their birth city to be enrolled: so to the City of David the couple must return, on genealogical grounds. What sounds at first like a historical detail in fact reveals how unhistorical the Infancy Narratives are, quite apart from the angels, heavenly choirs, magi, Star in the East. A well-attested Roman imperial census did indeed happen: it was the first real taste of how direct Roman rule would affect Judaea, and therefore long remembered as traumatic. Yet this census did not take place until 6 CE, far too late for any possible birth date for Jesus—and there is no other evidence anywhere of a universal imperial tax levy at this time. More importantly, it would be absurd for Roman officials to consider a thousand-year-old claim to Davidic kinship as relevant to their filing systems; whereas to pious Christian readers of the two Davidic Gospel genealogies converging on Joseph, it would make perfect devotional sense.
The Infancy Narratives are thus not history as we understand it today, but are nevertheless admirably prophetic descriptions of what has happened in Christian history. A child in southwest Asia whose birth, by any reckoning, fell outside conventional family patterns took on a cosmic significance that has brought him allegiance worldwide. Those who worshiped at the manger in Bethlehem ranged from illiterate teenagers in marginal occupations to scholars of ancient wisdom; between them they have confounded the efforts of the rulers of this world to destroy him or co-opt him—just as the Infancy Narratives tell us. That is a two-millennium-long tale transcending attendant sheep, shepherds, camels, or astrologers in the palace of wicked King Herod. Moreover, the Infancy Narratives remind us that birth is women’s business, not men’s: women bear babies, in pain and in joy. In the coming two millennia, we may be liberated to listen to women’s accounts of the Incarnation beyond the two thousand years of noise from male theological voices.
Pagels’s fruitful treatment of the Infancy Narratives, even though they are myths, can be pushed further if we explore how the New Testament deals with Jesus’s earthly family. Putting together Matthew 13:55, Mark 6:3, and some versions of Mark 3:32, we find that Jesus had at least four brothers and two sisters, raising questions about Mary as Perpetual Virgin. Biblical commentators have shown much ingenuity over the centuries explaining away these siblings. Indeed, “family” creates problems throughout the Gospels. Those who turn the Bible into the Word of God often further distort it by making Christianity a religion of family; so “Christian family life” is another misleading and anachronistic phrase much used in modern Church circles.
The reality of the biblical text is that family values are far from being Jesus’s main concern. In one saying, echoed from Mark’s Gospel by Matthew and Luke, he speaks of the extravagant reward for those who leave home and family for the sake of what is variously described as the Kingdom of God, the Gospel, or Jesus himself (Mark 10:29–30, Matthew 19:29–30, and Luke 18:29–30). This repudiation of family may reflect conflicts about authority in early Christian congregations—should family members or inspired friends of Jesus lead the Church?—but it is all of a piece with Jesus’s urgent insistence that the world is rushing toward its imminent end. He speaks shockingly of bringing not “peace, but a sword,” a saying in Matthew spelled out in pitiless relational detail in Luke (Matthew 10:34; Luke 12:52–53):
Henceforth in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three;…father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against her mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law, and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.
These are not comforting words for those seeking to make Christianity the religion of the settled modern nuclear family. Jesus often seems positively dismissive of his biological family, including his mother: when Mary and his brothers and sisters came to one of his public events asking to speak to him, he pointed to the disciples around him as his mother and siblings (Mark 3:31–35; Matthew 12:46–50; Luke 8:19–21). Jesus’s snub to his visiting family extends to an unexpectedly combative tone in some of the New Testament’s scanty references to Mary beyond the two Infancy Narratives. Luke records Jesus’s direct put-down of both Mary and an overenthusiastic female follower who had cried, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that you sucked!” Jesus retorted: “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!”
Given a rising tide of devotion to Mary the Mother/Bearer of God over more than a millennium, Christians were not much inclined to explore that disturbing thought until the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. Protestant Reformers then identified Mary as chief culprit in the old Western Church’s cult of saintly intercession, which they regarded as perverting the Christian message, and they were infuriated by the claim that Mary was sinless. These theological considerations turned them toward a keenly literalist reappraisal of her presence in the Bible, in particular to rid her of Immaculate Conception. Many early Reformers shied away from thoroughgoing attacks on her traditional status, but very radical Reformation thinkers were bold enough gleefully to credit Mary with seven children, and often these brave souls would find themselves persecuted as “Anabaptists” (a word that had the resonance we might hear in “terrorists” nowadays) by Protestants and Roman Catholics alike.
Little that Pagels says will be unfamiliar to biblical scholars, and yet many nonspecialist readers will find her book a revelation. It is depressing how frequently clergy trained in academic reassessment of the Bible are scared to pass on to their congregations the breadth of what they know. Pagels’s book is full of insight and learning, even if one disagrees with particular conclusions; her Jesus is a radical and surprising figure reaching out to us in our own experience, viewed through the biblical text properly understood.
James Tabor’s much briefer study, The Lost Mary, illustrates how not to go about thinking innovatively about the Bible. He aims to “rediscover” Mary mother of Jesus out of the New Testament texts that rather minimally furnish us with glimpses of her: “the historical Mary—the real Mary.” The result is an unhappy mixture of genuine erudition, restatement of commonplaces, wishful thinking, and wild jumping to conclusions. The reader soon notices the proliferation of “must haves” or “would have beens” in the text, open-ended provisos that have a habit of turning into assertions of historical fact. The Mary whom Tabor wishes to rediscover is undoubtedly an attractive figure to modern readers, not least because her message challenges and defies oppressive worldly powers. In her own day, that meant standing up to the murderous Herodian dynasty of monarchs, equally murderous Roman colonialists, and collaborationist elite Jews. It is not difficult to make this cap fit on tyrants of the present day.
Tabor’s exposition of a revolutionary scriptural message that embraces Mary will be familiar to countless Christians who have long brooded on a hymn attributed to her in Luke’s Gospel. An angel reveals to Mary that she is to be the Bearer of God; she responds in joyful song. Western Christians call it the Magnificat: Mary magnifies God who “hath shewed strength with his arm…scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts…put down the mighty from their seat.” Maybe Mary composed this herself; more plausible is that the writers of Luke’s Gospel repurposed it from some ancient battle hymn of the Jews, possibly from the inspiring era of the Maccabees two centuries earlier, when Jewish heroes humiliatingly defeated the Seleucid monarchy, the great power of their day.
Yet Tabor presses his case for the radical Mary further than the Magnificat’s undoubtedly insurrectionist text; indeed, he has curiously little to say about the Magnificat itself. Instead, he portrays the Gospel writers as systematically suppressing a message he has newly found hiding in plain sight. To push his argument further, he indulges in his own irresponsible version of modern textual criticism. He notes the peculiarity of Luke’s and Matthew’s Gospels we have already observed: they introduce different family trees for Jesus. Tabor offers his own bold solution to this conundrum. He makes the arbitrary decision that of the two genealogies, Luke’s version is not the family tree of Jesus’s stepfather, Joseph, but of his mother, Mary.
There is no textual evidence for this apart from Tabor’s insertion of a few of his own words into the scriptural text to give his idea some superficial plausibility. He then feels liberated to declare the “enormous” implications: “Mary has a dual lineage, from both kings and priests—she is doubly royal.” Much enthusiastic assertion follows, confusingly tangled with Tabor’s standard scholarly observations that the Gospel narratives apparently seek to marginalize Jesus’s blood relatives, and that from the second century the Church radically reinterpreted Mary, deemphasizing her maternal sexuality and turning her into the Ever-Virgin Queen of Heaven. All this leads to his conclusion that Mary was the source of her son’s “revolutionary teachings.” Maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t: we simply don’t know. As a result, this book is not a helpful key to unlock new meaning in the fascinating mélange of texts from which Christians begin their journey with the risen Lord. They might rather turn to Pagels, or they could try going to church to make sense of it all.
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