Books Two visions, one meaningful Jesus
THE MEANING OF JESUS:
TWO VISIONS By Marcus J. Borg and N. T. Wright
HarperSanFrancisco, 288 pages, $24 |
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By GARY MacEOIN
When Pope Paul VI in January 1964 went to the Holy Land to meet
Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople, my wife and I were members of the
accompanying press corps.
We visited the places identified with the short life of Jesus. We
walked the streets of Bethlehem in search of an inn. In Capernaum we stood in
the ruins of the synagogue where Jesus had spoken with authority. In Nazareth
we relived the moment when he unrolled the scroll and, like any politician,
adapted Isaiahs words to formulate his own life project. We looked out on
the Sea of Galilee whose storms he had stilled with a word. We shared food on
the hillside near Bethsaida where five barley loaves and two fish sufficed to
assuage the hunger of more than 5,000. In old Jerusalem we retraced the Via
Crucis.
They were all places and events with which we had been familiar
from childhood, each given a context by homilies, by religion classes, by
history courses. We learned nothing new. But what we already knew had acquired
added meaning. It had come alive.
Reading The Meaning of Jesus has been a similar experience.
It has given deeper understanding to what I had long known. I now see Jesus
more clearly as a Jewish mystic, shaped by the traditions of Israels
heritage, one with a passion for social justice rooted in his own firsthand
observation as a member of a marginalized social class in a marginalized
village in Galilee.
Jesus did not attack Judaism. He attacked Jerusalem and the Temple
because they were the center of the ruling elites and thus the center of the
domination system.
He spoke harshly about wealth. In our discomfort with these
sayings we have often metaphorized them, as if they refer to spiritual poverty
and spiritual wealth, a process that can be traced back at least to
Matthews gospel. But initially they referred to real wealth and real
poverty. In that world, to be wealthy meant that one was among the ruling
elites. The sayings against wealth are thus part of Jesus criticism of
the dominant system.
Also meaningful for me is the authors understanding of the
centrality of the resurrection of Jesus. This political-religious
affirmation of the early Christians meant that the resurrection,
the great hope of Israel, had happened, but that it had happened in a way
that nobody had imagined (a single human being raised within the middle of
ongoing history) ... revealing Gods future as having already arrived in
the present. ... The resurrection of Jesus means that the present time is shot
through with great significance. What is done to the glory of God in the
present is genuinely building for Gods future.
The authors are established historical Jesus scholars, both well
within the mainstream of contemporary biblical criticism. Borg, Hundere
Distinguished Professor of Religion at Oregon State University and a member of
the Jesus Seminar, sees the gospels less as historical reports than as
documents in which history is metaphorized to reveal symbolic
meanings about Jesus life. For his friend Wright, formerly a professor at
Oxford University and now dean of Litchfield Cathedral in England, the actual
historical content is significantly higher.
The differences of emphasis are overshadowed by the ultimate unity
of vision. What we have is a broad area of basic agreement along the arc of
their overlapping spectrums. The result is a very meaningful Jesus.
Gary MacEoin may be reached at gmaceoin@cs.com
National Catholic Reporter, March 3,
2000
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