Jesus’ Second Millennium: A New Gospel

Editor’s note: In a riveting exercise in biblical scholarship and storytelling, Reynolds Price translated the Greek texts of Mark and John, then wrote his own narrative in Three Gospels (1996). We asked Price, a prolific novelist (Kate Vaiden, the trilogy A Great Circle, Roxanna Slade and the forthcoming children’s novel A Perfect Friend), to take another look at episodes in Jesus’ life and craft a new Gospel based on the historical evidence and his reading of the Bible. He adds a chapter in which his erudition and imagination take a leap into an unexplored moment after Christ’s Resurrection.

The memory of any stretch of years eventually resolves to a list of names, and one of the useful ways of recalling the past two millenniums is by listing the people who acquired great power. Muhammad, Catherine the Great, Marx, Gandhi, Hitler, Roosevelt, Stalin and Mao come quickly to mind. There’s no question that each of those figures changed the lives of millions and evoked responses from worship through hatred.

It would require much exotic calculation, however, to deny that the single most powerful figure–not merely in these two millenniums but in all human history–has been Jesus of Nazareth. Not only is the prevalent system of denoting the years based on an erroneous 6th century calculation of the date of his birth, but a serious argument can be made that no one else’s life has proved remotely as powerful and enduring as that of Jesus. It’s an astonishing conclusion in light of the fact that Jesus was a man who lived a short life in a rural backwater of the Roman Empire, who died in agony as a convicted criminal, and who may never have intended so much as a small portion of the effects worked in his name.

Who was Jesus then? And how can we learn more about him?

We have little that might be called history concerning the man. There is a meager handful of unrevealing allusions to his existence in early Roman and Jewish sources. The recently recovered remains of a modest house in Capernaum give strong signs of being Peter’s residence, which was apparently Jesus’ Galilean headquarters. Ongoing excavations in Galilee clarify the picture of the small-town world in which he learned the builder’s trade and acquired his deep knowledge of the Jewish scriptures. Modern studies have confirmed the good possibility that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem covers the site of his execution and burial. And five years ago, the apparent tomb and bones of the high priest Caiaphas, who presided at Jesus’ inquest, were discovered by accident. No doubt future discoveries will continue to increase understanding of that provincial ethos, and there is always the chance that something truly sensational may be found: a complete 1st century manuscript Gospel, the travel notes of an actual disciple or a memorandum from some quailing pupil of the dead rabbi on the Sabbath during which he lay in the tomb.

There was initial hope that the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 would throw light on the roots of Christianity. There was speculation that perhaps John the Baptist and even Jesus himself were members of the sect or closely related to it. The scrolls have already contributed to a fuller understanding of the textual history of Jewish scripture and the realities of 1st century Judaism–especially its variety of apocalyptic hopes and the absence of anything that might be called orthodoxy. However, they have shed no direct light on Jesus. The Nag Hammadi manuscripts, discovered by Egyptian farmers in 1945, also proved of interest chiefly to students of the swarm of theologies that proliferated in early Christianity. The chance that they contain reliable historical information about Jesus is slender, though they hint tantalizingly that Jesus may have been more liberal in his views of women and sexuality than later church fathers allowed.

Our only substantial biographical sources are the New Testament Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, brief documents written in colloquial Greek late in the generation of those who knew Jesus first- or secondhand. By the end of the 2nd century, these four had become the basic canonical texts of the mainline Christianity of Rome and the Middle East.

A curious reader can also find survivors in several modern editions of New Testament Apocrypha (from the Greek apokruphos, “hidden”)–scraps of other Gospels, letters, apocalypses, acts of the apostles and other figures related to Jesus. Some of them offer occasionally striking, even comic, moments. There are numerous stories about the young Jesus, for instance–a sometimes amusing, sometimes dangerous superchild playmate. And there may be actual moments of history in the mostly fictional tales of the acts of John the Beloved, Peter, Paul and others.

To glance at one of the most interesting remains, there are a few surviving speeches of Jesus from the Gospel of the Hebrews and a post-Resurrection appearance from the same source that have the ring of authenticity. “Now the Lord…went to James [his brother] and appeared to him. For James had taken an oath that he would not eat bread…till that hour when he saw him risen from the dead…The Lord said, ‘Bring a table and bread’…He took bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to James the Just and said to him, ‘My brother, eat your bread, for the Son of Man is risen from those who sleep.'”

And a single text from Nag Hammadi–the Gospel of Thomas–has proved to be of widespread interest. Thomas offers no narrative report on Jesus or comment on his career, but it does offer a collection of isolated sayings. Many are versions of sayings already available in the four canonical Gospels. A few others are so striking as to be perhaps genuine. For instance, in Thomas, Jesus says, “He who is near me is near fire, but he who is far from me is far from the kingdom” and “Split the wood and I am there; lift up the stone and you will find me there.” Both have that fresh air of authority that rises from his better-known sayings.

Other Apocryphal fragments like the Gospel of Peter, and even the widely publicized and still suspect fragment from the Secret Gospel of Mark, may also contain scraps of genuine memory, but lacking complete originals, we have only the shakiest grounds for assessing their reliability. The disappointing fact seems to be that most of the surviving New Testament Apocrypha arose in legitimate attempts to comprehend realities about which the canonical Gospels are mute, and any dogged attempt to read them is apt to leave the reader with one prime reaction–those 2nd and 3rd century Christian editors who decided on the final contents of the New Testament were, above all else, superb literary critics.

And so we have the four Gospels. It has been fashionable among New Testament scholars for most of the 20th century to say that the Gospels are not what they claim to be: brief biographies. Yet their special claim would seem to be the preservation of reliable accounts of the career, teaching, death and resurrection of one extraordinary man. Many modern scholars, however, have tended to see them as propaganda, as campaign biographies–documents that contain fragments of actual history, but history so shaped and transformed by faith as to require caution in the reader who seeks firm fact.

Yet a fair-minded reader, with a normal human capacity for storytelling, might well consume all four Gospels in a night and conclude that their individual accounts bear enough relation to one another to suggest that they spring from a common event. Their internal differences are occasionally extreme, and their views of the nature of Jesus range from Mark’s affirmation that he was the “beloved Son of God” to John’s flat claim that Jesus was the Word, that eternal aspect of God who created the world and who has a continuing interest in the life of worldly creatures–ourselves above all. Nonetheless, the four together make a strong case for the urgency with which Jesus’ early followers longed to preserve trustworthy records of a supremely important life, one lived in a particular place and time.

In the face of all contradictions and confusions then, our reader might be asked to return to Mark, not only the oldest but the clearest Gospel, and to deduce the full story it means to tell. In its brevity and speed–some 12,000 words in English, a mere pamphlet–Mark implies a far more complicated process of human growth than its outline specifies.

If our reader happens to have spent his or her life, as I have, writing fictional and nonfictional stories of his own, he may soon find himself mulling his deductions from Mark and the other Gospels and producing a usefully expanded narrative. It will not, of course, be a narrative for which one can begin to claim spiritual, doctrinal or historical authority, but since restrained imagination–as it thinks its way into the lives of others–remains our strongest means of human understanding and compassion, such an expansion seems an honest reaction to the Gospels’ limited provisions. My attempt is always to open more and more dark corners of a story to human possibility.

In lieu of inventing a whole life of Jesus, I’ll choose a few pregnant situations: the first from Matthew and Luke, the others largely from Mark–and then I’ll examine them imaginatively but responsibly, adding a few glancing notes on my sources. It is, after all, a process with which Jesus himself would have been familiar–Haggadah and Midrash being traditional, and often narrative, expansions of Hebrew scripture.

THE START

The Apocryphal Protogospel of James says the angel Gabriel first spoke to Miriam by the well. The suggestion that Jesus’ childhood may have been dogged by the accusation of bastardy is perhaps implicit in his townspeople’s question in Mark 6, “Isn’t this Mary’s son?” To be called one’s mother’s son, as opposed to one’s father’s, was often an implication of bastardy, or at least a sign that one’s paternity was unknown, whether divine or not. Early opponents likewise suggested that Miriam had conceived Jesus with a Roman soldier, Panthera. His childhood may well have been clouded by questions about his paternity. –R.P.

In the slit-eyed world of a country village, the boy’s mother Miriam conceived him mysteriously. Promised in marriage to Yosef the builder, she found herself pregnant without explanation–she had known no man, not intimately. Steeped in the malice of small-town talk, she knew not to tell the story she believed–God’s archangel Gabriel had visited her at the village well one early-spring morning as she lifted her jar to climb back home.

He had looked very much like an actual man, a lot like her elder brother Amos, who had been her favorite but had died in agony with a breathing demon–tuberculosis–when she was nine. The angel had Amos’ startling eyes, a light brown, but his voice plainly said, “I’m Gabriel, from God, to ask if you’ll agree to let him make on you his only son.”

When she hesitated, assuming that this was some evil joke, the voice spoke again: “You’re free to refuse, and I’m free to tell you that should you accept, your life will last much longer than most, and long years of it will feel like no pain other humans know, not even your mother with the demon that ate her breast like bread.”

But before he finished that, she looked well past him–the rim of the skyline back of his shoulders–and there was an odd cloud forming itself in the shape of a dark bird rushing toward her. She met the angel’s eyes again, gave an awkward nod and said, “I’m Miriam. Let me be God’s slave.”

So the boy grew up–she called him Yeshu from his full name, Yeshua–in the same narrow town: one narrow lane, two rows of rock houses, sealed with mud and roofed with branches daubed with mud, and each house full of the mouths he could hear saying “Bastard, Miriam’s bastard boy, God’s big baby!” His mother’s story had leaked out somehow, likely through Yosef, who claimed that he had dreamed it but nonetheless married her, took in Yeshu and made other sons and daughters on her body. All of them grudged the favors their mother gave Yeshu as her eldest child; he was only half their brother.

By the time Yeshu grew to full manhood–the blacksmith in Yosef’s building concern and the best smith in Galilee–he was still called bastard in Nazareth whispers. He had never heard Yosef deny the charge, nor even his mother, who told him only, “They’re not completely right.” So when he entered his 30th year, still single because he felt polluted, he left town to take baptism from his cousin John in the Jordan River well south of home. The main need licking at Yeshu’s heart was to find the father he had not yet known–and never quite would.

THE TEMPTATION

Matthew and Luke give detailed descriptions of the tempting offers that Satan made to Jesus in the desert. Since Mark mentions 40 days in the desert but gives no specifics, I’ve imagined that it was then that Jesus began to believe–from the content of his vision at baptism–that God was a gentler kind of father than he proved to be. –R.P.

Two months into his tour through Galilee, Jesus (to revert to his English name) managed to take his 12 best students and hide out with them for three long days. It was the first calm escape they had managed since his success as a healer and exorcist had kept them mobbed night and day by the helpless.

So as they sat around him on the hilltop, they looked toward the lake and the boats in which their fathers and brothers were hauling up the fish the students had abandoned when they ran off with Jesus.

Before anybody could feel real guilt and leave for home, Jesus freed them for the first time to ask any question. Till then he had been so busy telling them the news of God’s coming reign on Earth and their duties in it that they had barely had time to ask how long he would need their company.

Afraid of his answers, no one spoke at first. Then Simon Peter rushed in as if a door was slamming fast: “Sir, what’s the worst temptation you’ve known?”

Jesus laughed–Peter’s bluntness was a general source of laughter–and then he took a long wait to think. Finally, with his right hand, Jesus reached out and traced a plumb, straight line, perpendicular to the sky. Then he said, “Those 40 days I spent alone, starving by the Dead Sea, Satan himself showed up only three times. My worries were mainly snakes and rocks and no sign of water. But the final time I saw the Tempter, he came in the clothes and body of Joseph, the man who married my mother and raised me–not a bad man but hard on us all. Joseph had died just before I went to join the Baptist, and his last words to me were ‘Stay gone, fool!’ But though I watched him suck his last breath, here he came in the blazing noon with his mallet and saw, and this time he said, ‘Boy, you’re nothing but mine. You were always mine. It was just your mother, addled as ever, who tried to claim you were anything better than she and I could have built on our own.'” Jesus stopped as if his answer was finished.

Most of the Twelve faced each other and nodded, not understanding of course but not asking.

Then Peter said, “Sir, what was wrong with that?”

Some of the others frowned; Judas sneered.

But Jesus grinned and answered him plainly, though on the bias: “Peter, aren’t we learning that God is my father?”

Peter said, “Sir, I’m wondering if you’re not wrong there, just in that one place.”

Judas was only the first man to spit and grind it in the dust.

THE TRANSFIGURATION

This experience of Jesus’ transfiguration is recounted similarly in the first three Gospels, but as usual Mark offers the convincing grain of an accurate report. I imagine that for the three disciples, as for Jesus, this was the moment when they each began to comprehend the interim tragedy through which they had to pass. –R.P.

The Twelve had seen Jesus heal the worst curses: madness, leprosy, epilepsy, blindness, paralysis, every other ailment and death itself. He had raised that synagogue president’s daughter from literal death, though he smiled and claimed she was maybe just asleep when he took her hand and said, “Lamb, come back.”

Not one of the Twelve had asked out loud if any chicanery might be involved. Some of them quietly checked around, weeks after certain healings, to see if they had lasted or whether the failure had been bought off and hauled out of sight. No evidence of that; Jesus clearly had no money to bribe anyone.

But still no hard talk of when God’s reign would break in and seat them on the thrones he had promised–rulers of all their people’s 12 tribes. So traces of defection were starting to show. Nobody left, though some turned lazy and mean to the crowds. Some let themselves go and looked like beggars, stinking and lousy. More than one was seen leading some needy woman up a bushy path for private instruction.

When they got near the middle of that full year, and Peter had told him he was God’s Messiah, Jesus took his three favorites and led them up the heights of Mount Hermon. While Peter, James and John were dozing in the thin air, they heard an uncanny voice say three times, “This is my son.” When they looked uphill, there was Jesus dressed in the purest white clothes and standing in the midst of Moses and Elijah, who were whispering to him. James and John were known for their tempers, Peter for his blunt excitements; but at first all three of them huddled together–strong, heavyset men–as if they were boys in the reach of a demon.

Moses and Elijah began to fade. And though his clothes and face were still shining unbearably, Jesus walked down toward the three. He was still not himself–not the man they had known–yet each of them privately came to believe what they would tell one another only after his death. When Jesus reached them, he held out his hands, still streaming light, and said, “We’ll never be gladder than this.” Then he quietly told them about the death he must soon undergo to bear and discharge the burden of all the debts of wrong that humankind had accumulated since Noah’s flood purged the world once before.

THE LAST SUPPER

The expansion here is only an attempt to imagine the baffled awe and fear of the disciples as they watched their teacher transforming before them into a sacrificial victim. The prospect of any reward for their loyalty was virtually gone. –R.P.

That awful last night in Jerusalem, Jesus insisted that he and the Twelve get through a Passover meal together. Even the women were there, in silence, and through the whole meal in the low, dark room, the general silence had been all but strangling. More than one of them thought of Jonah in the great fish–the curved belly of a killing monster tightening around them.

The whole stretch of days in Jerusalem had gone badly wrong–the ass that went lame while bearing him toward the “triumphal entry,” the vicious eyes and mouths around him through the Temple debates he sought so hungrily, and then his wild-eyed one-man assault on the money changers and lamb-and-dove merchants. Physically speaking, he’d done enough damage to last five minutes; but in terms of challenging the Temple mob, he’d laid the last straw on a big camel’s back.

They were out to kill him now; it was in every eye that looked his way. Even eleven of the Twelve had realized Judas was the squealer, the one who’d sold the secret news that Jesus of Nazareth was God’s Messiah–the coming King of the glorified Jews–and was here to proclaim it and greet the dawning of the reign he’d lead. And when Jesus took up the loaf and began to break pieces into a bowl, Judas got to his feet, hunched low and left the room.

As the bread came around, followed by the wine, Jesus said only, “My body…my blood.” Good Jews that they were, a few nearly gagged at the thought of drinking blood, but no one refused. Practically speaking, he was already dead–they could almost see it–and everything from here on was only a sign, to keep in memory, everything but the craven fear that was already closing on them entirely.

IN THE GARDEN

The question about all three Gospel reports of Jesus’ agony in the garden is this: If the disciples fell asleep, who heard and remembered Jesus’ terrible prayer? My guess is only one of several practical possibilities. –R.P.

A half-hour later he’d led them back to the olive grove and the cave at Gethsemane where they’d been sleeping. Eight of them went straight in, dead beat, and stretched out on the floor near the oil press. But Jesus took Peter, James and John and pressed on a few yards into the dark grove. He asked the inner three to wait while he prayed. They were tired as the others, but they nodded that they’d wait, and he walked ahead some dozen paces to the oldest tree. It had half consumed one end of a table-shaped rock where he knelt.

They heard him say “Abba,” which was any child’s first name for Father. They’d heard him use it in private prayer a time or two, and John especially thought it was eerie and unbecoming. The God who was leading this man was no father tossing a child. By then Peter and James had dozed off, but John–being younger–managed to stay half awake through most of the prayer. He could hardly see Jesus, just flashes of his face when the moon broke clear, and then it was wrenched by an agony greater than the joy they’d seen when he came down toward them on Mount Hermon after his meeting with Moses and Elijah.

More than once John started to stand and go to him–whoever this despairing demon was, John could at least try the things he’d learned about demon expulsion. But then he’d catch a new glimpse of the face, and he’d stay where he was. Maybe this was no demon at all but the bitterest lesson Jesus must learn before the incomparably bitter cross–Jesus had told John more than once that a cross would stand near the end of his road. Now John heard one more thing, several times: “Let this cup pass. Abba, not this cup. But, sir, your will.” Appalling as the transaction was, even John was asleep before it ended.

What woke him fully was the Temple police, led toward them by Judas. Judas at least kissed Jesus with the standard student’s greeting, “Rabbi!” John and the other pupils ran like shot dogs.

THE RESURRECTION

Judas lasted on, entirely alone, through the Sabbath night and day after Jesus’ death. He’d stood on the ground not 10 yards from the cross and heard his teacher’s astounding final words–“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And he’d stayed for Jesus’ final hoarse shout a moment later. Then Judas had found his way to the house of another old pupil, one whom Jesus had been forced to send home when he caught him tampering with children for the second time–Hamer from Bethlehem.

Hamer had taken up his old life as a plasterer, and he lived with his toothless mother and a wife who loathed Judas the moment she knew he came from the old days–Hamer’s wild days with Jesus, not so long ago, maybe 16 months. Hamer shut her up fast, and she cooked them a decent meal. Afterward Hamer took Judas out to the edge of the village, a plateau aimed at the distant Dead Sea. He said to Judas, “You know Jesus told me, early on, that he was born here–it’s David’s town, remember? Said he was born in one of the caves right down here below us.”

Judas said, “He told people lots of things, Hamer.”

Hamer stood in silence for so long Judas was aching with the bitterness of what he’d accomplished. Then Hamer stepped back a long four strides and stared at Judas the best he could in the slim starshine. Finally he said, “I know he told me you’d be the death of him.”

Judas said, “Me? You’re lying to me.” He’d already established that Hamer knew nothing of Jesus’ arrest and speedy death, and Judas hadn’t told him.

Hamer said, “When he told me I’d have to leave, I fell down and begged him for a scrap of forgiveness, and he said, ‘Oh, son, I forgive you surely–I’ve forgiven Judas this far in advance. But you can’t work with me after today; the millstone of what you’ve done is around your neck, and the two of us are helpless to move it.'”

Judas said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. He had no reason to forgive me, ever.”

Hamer said, “That may be; I’m just telling you my memory.” With that he turned back slowly home.

Judas followed him, for lack of anywhere else to go. He lay down just inside Hamer’s door with the chill spring air all down his legs, but he slept no more than a few brief spasms of sweet shallow dreaming and a few high yips at the ends of nightmares.

The yips would wake Hamer, and he’d say, “You’re safe. Now go on and sleep.”

But at the excruciating instant of dawn, when he heard Hamer’s wife say “No” but yield all the same to Hamer’s body and start breathing fast, Judas rose in deep silence, tied on his sandals and left for good. He knew his destination.

Where Hamer had told him Jesus was born, there’d been a dead tree–a bare black snag above the cave. Judas had gripped it, even then, and chinned himself once; it was still firmly anchored. So just as the sun broke free of the hills and swept the fringes of Bethlehem, Judas Iscariot reached the tree again.

He’d grabbed a stout piece of rope from Hamer’s, and he set straight to work. Throwing the rope up and over the strong limb, he started trying to recall the right knot–he mustn’t fail at this too. But with all his years of studying scripture, he’d lost the knotting skills of his childhood on his father’s scratch farm (Judas was the only one of the Twelve from outside the fishing villages of Galilee).

Maybe five minutes passed–he was sweating anyhow–when a man’s voice spoke from close behind him. “Need any help?”

Judas lurched around, thinking the voice was too familiar. But the face was indescribably changed; Jesus’ old fire and wit were gone. This man looked not remotely childish but utterly new, just born at sunrise, this April Sunday. So Judas said, “All the help I need–thanks anyhow–would be for you to leave.”

The man almost seemed to leave for a moment; his image faded on Judas’ eyes. Then he was back and stronger still. His face had the calm that Judas had spent a whole life hunting. The man nudged Judas lightly aside, then reached up and tied the appropriate knot.

Judas somehow watched the man’s broad hands and still didn’t notice.

But when the man finished, he raised both hands toward Judas and said, “Jude, go to your father now; he’ll need you for the planting. The others won’t harm you; I’ll warn them off.” The man’s upright hands were pierced with deep wounds, just below the palms.

Judas’ mind clenched down to the size of a pebble in his skull. But still he studied the new face for any further sign that this was Jesus, keeping his promise.

The strange head began to nod, signing Yes, and slowly a kind of mist around the eyes began clearing. Finally the voice said, “I’ve come to you first.”

Judas never thought of fleeing. The one choice left apparently was to beg his teacher’s pardon and then use the rope. So he asked the final question of all: “You’re Jesus, aren’t you?”

The head nodded Yes, though the eyes and mouth were entirely calm.

Judas said, “If you pardon me, help me leave then.” He reached up and seized the rope in both hands. He’d need to climb the tree to make it work.

The man said, “I’ll lift you.” He did that with no strain at all, and he stood in reach of Judas’ arms till the last breath failed, but Judas never once reached toward him.

That last invention is built on a claim in the Protogospel of James that Jesus was born in a cave in Bethlehem, and on a hint from the apostle Paul, who mentions that the risen Jesus appeared “to the Twelve,” not the Eleven. None of the canonical Gospels, however, follow Paul’s lead; yet the variety of their Resurrection stories is both convincing and unnerving. Most of them have a grainy credibility; at least one (Matthew’s) seems generic and manufactured. Paul’s account, in I Corinthians 15, was written some 25 years after Jesus’ death and precedes Mark by perhaps a decade.

Even with the completion of the four canonical Gospels, Paul’s interpretation of the Resurrection remains the fullest–in the silently cataclysmic event of Jesus’ return to life, God the Father ratified and glorified the Son’s chosen path and the redemptive agony to which Jesus had consented in his horrific death. Finally Paul asserts what seems, to many Christians and non-Christians alike, the hardest and truest test of all: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is empty, and your faith is empty.”

It is on such passionate belief that the existence of Christianity and its success as a world religion has depended. Without some such conviction, how else might a core of terrified cowards and brave women be so emboldened to spread the news of their teacher’s salvation to a hostile world? There was no real money in it for them, no great power or glamour, only centuries of persecution. The still astonishing fact is that they believed their teacher had died and then returned, not in a vision but in a credible body, to urge them outward. What more has any person ever known about him?

And the fact remains that the substance of Jesus’ teaching is the basis on which many Christians establish their faith. Its piercing good sense, imaginative eloquence, the breathtaking stringency of his ethical demands and his simultaneous patience and compassion are crucial to the intimacy that so many establish with this long gone man. The promises he makes in the Gospel of John, in the resonant (and quite literal) King James translation, have strengthened endangered men and women from the terrors of Roman martyrdom till today–“Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you…that where I am, there ye may be also.”

At heart, the ethical teachings of Jesus are not markedly different from those of the earlier Jewish prophets, above all Isaiah. Jesus’ emphasis on acceptance and mercy is especially strong, even to the point of demanding that his followers not resist evil. He insists that the unrepentant outlaws of the world will enter the reign of God before the righteous. Yet he demands that his hearers be “perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” His sense of the imminence of God’s reign, and the change of heart it demands, is expressed in earlier Hebrew scripture, but only Jesus expects to administer the reign.

Whatever Jesus’ final expectation, that reign did not arrive in his lifetime or in the lives of his earliest companions. Yet a majority of his followers continue to expect it. In the face of so long an uncertainty, how has his following not only endured but grown so hugely through two millenniums? And what can be expected of his long potent holding power over human imagination and hope in the near and distant future? If benign Christian institutions and the capacity to believe in a God who loves his creation should weaken fatally, if the artistic inspiration of the figure of Jesus should wane–as it has in some of the West today–are the existential promises of his teaching sufficient to maintain a world faith? What else has he to offer a ferociously diverse but rapidly shrinking planet?

As any believer might point out, there is the chance that Jesus was right. Perhaps he was what he claimed to be–the Son of God, the Messiah of Israel. Since his Resurrection, he has become–in the minds of billions–a transnational Messiah who continues to care for individual humans and to save them from internal and external evil.

I am one who believes himself a direct recipient of such care. Fifteen years ago, as I was about to undergo five weeks of withering radiation for a 10-in.-long cancer inside my spinal cord, I found myself–an outlaw Christian who had, and has, no active tie with a church–transported, thoroughly awake, to another entirely credible time and place. I was lying on the shore of the Lake of Galilee with Jesus’ disciples asleep around me.

Then Jesus came forward and silently indicated that I should follow him into the lake. Waist deep in the water, I felt him pour handfuls down the long fresh scar on my back–the relic of unsuccessful surgery a month before. Jesus suddenly told me, “Your sins are forgiven.” Appalled by my dire physical outlook, I thought ungratefully, “That’s the last thing I need”; so I asked him, “Am I also cured?” He said, “That too.” Then, as though I’d forced his hand, he turned and climbed ashore with me well behind him.

Despite succeeding years of more successful but unavoidably devastating surgeries, permanent paralysis of my legs and a nonstop assault of spinal pain, I’ve experienced no similar encounter. That fact tends to validate, for me, an objective core to the experience. If I manufactured one visionary self-consolation, why wouldn’t I have repeated that solace in ensuing years of even worse trouble? In any case, to the surprise of my doctors, I’ve survived without apparent return of the cancer, and my life is more rewarding and productive than before that washing in Galilee. My lifelong sense that Jesus of Nazareth stood in a unique and redeeming relation to the Creator of this universe at least has intensified, though I have felt no right to claim intimacy with him. As for so many others, he has never seemed less than mysterious, and my experience of his overwhelming but oddly businesslike healing and the memory of the unstinting mercy in his grave face and eyes are indelible.

Yet a person who shares Jesus’ belief in himself may feel what I cannot–that one must accept his final instruction to the disciples at the end of Matthew: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go then and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and see, I am with you all the days to the end of the age.”

Given the gleaming confidence of those words, and in light of the appalling failings of Jesus’ followers, that last command goes on contributing heavily to the evils of national and religious warfare, institutional and individual hatred, imperialism and enslavement–and all in the name of a teacher who, to our knowledge, never refused a single person who approached him honestly. Yet alongside that havoc, and in the same two millenniums, Jesus’ meaning has resulted in the most far-reaching movements of mercy, tolerance and human freedom and in the high-water marks of Western art. His words in Matthew 11 still extend their old welcome–“Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.” Such a deep-rooted promise seems unlikely to relent.