Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (12 page)
Read Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) Online
Authors: Thomas Cahill
In traditional sermons, Mary is presented as a shy child-bride, espoused but not yet living with her husband, mystified and trembling before the unheard-of responsibility she is being asked to take on. But I read her reactions, especially her words of challenge to the angel (however one translates them), to be down-to-earth and peasant-sensible, almost an exasperated “Get serious.” She was indeed a girl—no more than fourteen or so—but she was a smart Jewish girl. Like
Abraham,
Moses, and so many of the great figures of Jewish tradition, she argues with God (here represented by his messenger), objecting to God’s unfortunate lack of realism, but in the end she responds as they did:
Here I am.
She doesn’t see this unexpected turn of events as unalloyed good fortune but rather seems to have some premonition of what it will cost her. At the same time, she doesn’t tremble, even once. Like
Job, who uttered the famous words “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away: Blessed be the Name of the Lord,” she is more resigned than anything else.
Her mood seems to shift somewhat by the time she comes to visit her pregnant cousin
Elizabeth in the Judean hills, for it is to Elizabeth that Mary speaks her Magnificat, the most muscular poem of celebration in all of ancient literature:
My soul extols the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior
,
because he has acknowledged his servant’s humiliation.
Look: from now on will all ages call me happy
because the Almighty One (holy his Name) has done great things for me!
His mercy falls on every generation that fears him.
With his powerful arm he has routed the proud of heart.
He has pulled the princes from their thrones and exalted the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.
He has come to help his servant Israel, remembering his mercy
,
in accordance with the promise he made to our fathers
—
to Abraham and his seed forever.
Mary’s “humility” in this poem is hardly the humility of the meek and unassuming. This is a larger-than-life song of triumph, thanking God for righting all wrongs by making a definitive choice in favor of the powerless over the powerful. No one knows it yet, but the poor, the hungry, and the humiliated have won!—and this unknown fourteen-year-old is their unexpected representative.
If it is unlikely that Mary was a poet, it is even more unlikely that she wrote this poem, full of literary allusions to Samuel, Isaiah, Habakkuk, Genesis, Job, and the Psalms. The
Magnificat is either Luke’s own composition or, more likely, a song in circulation among first-century Christians. It sounds very like the songs of the Anawim (or the Poor in Spirit), yet another Jewish movement of this time that emphasized that the poor and dispossessed were God’s real friends, rather than those who paraded around in the trappings of wealth and power. To emphasize their point, the Anawim dressed shabbily (though they came from education and affluence), befriended the actual poor, and lived among them. But there is no reason to think that Luke has given Mary lines that are at odds with what her own sentiments were known to be. Rather, a common practice among ancient biographers was to put on the lips of a historical character an expression of the sort of sentiments he or she was known to harbor—even if they had no record of the character’s actual words at a particularly crucial moment. (Thus did Tacitus give speech to his Celtic commentator.) One needn’t be a Freudian to spot the aggression implicit in Mary’s words: my Son will triumph, reversing all our previous humiliations; our whole People will be exalted in him—and I will be seen as the source of it all.
However one may receive the news of Mary’s virginity and miraculous
parthenogenesis,
17
there can be little doubt that she was not the Ever-Virgin of subsequent popular piety (a piety later raised by the Greek church to the level of doctrine). The gospels mention that Jesus had “brothers and sisters,” who were not (despite the best efforts of apologists) “cousins.” At any rate, the case for Mary’s supposed “perpetual virginity” required, as the fathers of the Eastern church understood these matters,
that her hymen not be broken in giving birth—since an unbroken hymen is what makes a virgin a virgin. This realization led them to the conclusion that Baby Jesus had appeared suddenly in his mother’s arms without ever having passed through the birth canal. Just about the only people who have been able to swallow this one are males sequestered in desert monasteries at an early age without the opportunity to ever witness an actual birth, whether animal or human. The rest of us are left to wonder what happened to the placenta, which kills a woman if it remains in the uterus: did it conveniently disappear, or was it also delivered into Mary’s arms, making for a rather messy miracle? Jesus, who in his teaching referred explicitly to the terrible pain endured by women in labor, no doubt had his information from witnessing his mother’s subsequent pregnancies and labors—and could hardly imagine her an exception to the ordinary human lot.
The totality of the mise-en-scène, as Luke unfolds it, forbids our ascribing to Mary anything but a very down-to-earth character. Between the angelic entrances and exits, he gives us Mary and Joseph trudging along the road to
Bethlehem, unable to get out from under a most inopportune tax problem (though tax problems are never opportune):
Now it happened that at this time Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the whole Roman world [for the sake of more accurate taxation]. This census, which was the first, was made while Quirinius was governor of Syria, and everyone went to be registered, each to his own town. So Joseph set out from the town of
Nazareth in
Galilee for
Judea, to David’s town called
Bethlehem, since he was of David’s House and lineage, in order to be registered, along with Mary, who was pledged to him in marriage and who was already expecting a child. Now it happened that, while they were there, the time came for her delivery, and she gave birth to a son, her firstborn. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the living-space.
18
Mary and Joseph are not relegated to a romantic stable “because there was no room for them in the inn,” the old, inaccurate translation. What is far more likely is that they were relegated to an unused room, originally set up for domestic cattle, because there was no room for them in the crowded family quarters of Joseph’s poor Bethlehem relations, who could no doubt count to nine and may have relegated them to the worst room because they disapproved of such an embarrassing pregnancy. First, the tax man descends at the worst possible moment, forcing a most untimely journey; then you end up on your sister-in-law’s uncomfortable old pullout; then, believe it or not, the contractions begin.
What we have here, it seems to me, is a picture of Jesus’s parents bearing up under the very oppressions that their son will later rail against: political in
justice—the grand and arbitrary gestures, made in flagrant disregard for the deep concerns of ordinary human beings (who cut no figure on the world’s stage), that so
facilely issue forth from Caesar and all his presumptuous ilk—as well as petty, person-to-person stinginess, the low-level withholding of generosity that can make such a burden of daily life. At its profoundest, our celebration of
Christmas, which continues to maintain such an inexplicable hold on our whole culture, is not “good news” about material acquisitions (as everything from department stores to television commercials proclaims to us): it is, rather, a dramatization of the simple triumphs of common humanity, in which joy at a baby’s birth can overcome the most grievous official oppressions, and even the pedestrian aggravations, of ordinary life. “When a woman is in labor,” the adult Jesus will remind us in John’s Gospel, “she suffers all the pain that is necessary to this experience. But then her baby is born; and the intensity of her sufferings is wiped from her memory—because of the joy she possesses in having brought a new human being into the world.”
The Mary of the gospels is a tough little survivor, who keeps on coming. Given her high expectations for her firstborn, she is bitterly disappointed at the way he actually turns out. When he comes home to preach in the small-town Nazareth synagogue, the audience is exceedingly unimpressed, and she must endure the shame of her neighbors’ rejection of her pride and joy. (“Where did this guy get all this stuff? … Isn’t this the carpenter, Mary’s son?”) The unexpected strangeness of Jesus’s teaching finally prompts Mary to round up Jesus’s brothers and set off to bring him home from his travels for a good rest (and maybe a little chicken soup). He is plainly, as they say to one another, “out of his mind.” Here is this child, who was supposed to pull the princes from their thrones and restore the fortunes of Israel, talking about loving the enemy and turning the other cheek. Mary, with her keen sense of retributive
justice, had been
counting on something with more testosterone in it. But it is also this same Mary who, when Jesus is completely disgraced and undergoing the ultimate public degradation—naked, nailed to a pole, and bleeding to death—sticks by him (though
Simon Peter,
Matthew, and similar supporters are nowhere to be seen), even if it means keeping company with some of her son’s more unconventional friends, like that tramp from Magdala. In the iconographic tradition, Mary is shown as the one who cradled Jesus’s dead body after it was taken down from the cross. In Michelangelo’s best-known
Pietà
, she is depicted as a virginal girl, but larger than her son’s corpse, and her nurturing breasts are emphasized. All this to move the viewer to
pietà
(pity), because for the son the mother was always young and vibrant, and for the mother this was always her little boy.
The mothers of firstborn sons who go on to do great things are often of the Mary variety, pushing their kid to do what he doesn’t want to do (like the miracle at Cana),
19
expressing withering dissatisfaction on inappropriate occasions, but being there when all is lost. Jesus was a man and he had a human psyche, a psyche formed largely by his mother’s extraordinary nurture. However much he, as a reflective adult, modified her attitudes and diluted her prejudices, much of his instinctive outlook was formed by this fierce, unbending woman, so that in many ways Jesus’s worldview is already spelled out in the Magnificat, the most obvious model for which was
Hannah’s triumphant song (more than a thousand years earlier) on the birth of her son, the prophet
Samuel. But then, everybody has a mother.
1
The Greek prefix
eu
-, meaning “good,” becomes in Latin
ev-.
The Greek stem
aggel
- becomes the Latin
angel
- (and direct source of the English
angel
). The Greek ending
-os
and the Latin ending
us
indicate a (male) person; the Greek ending
-ion
and the Latin
-ium
indicate a thing. Thus,
aggelos
and
angelus
mean “messenger,” while
euaggelion
and
evangelium
mean “good message,” this last giving us such English words as
evangelize
and
evangelist.
2
Armageddon, though it has entered many languages as the site of the final battle between good and evil, appears in the Bible but once: in the final book, Revelation. It means “the mountain of Megiddo.” Though Megiddo in northwestern Palestine was a crossroads in ancient times and the scene of many battles, there is no mountain there, so we must take the term, as I have here, as broadly symbolic.
3
Baptism
means “immersion.” Lustral bathing was a common practice not only among Jews, for whom it was chiefly a purification after sex or contact with a corpse, but also among Greeks, Romans, and many other peoples, who associated it with release from ritual sin (that is, sin incurred by transgressing some taboo) and new health or wholeness.
4
The Hebrew patronymic
ben
becomes
bin
in Arabic and
bar
in Aramaic.
5
John Dominic Crossan, the leading proponent of the theory that Jesus was a peasant revolutionary, is a reputable scholar, if rather on the edge. Jesus as a sage (of one cultural variety or another) was widely proposed earlier in the century (by Albert Schweitzer, for instance) but has now fallen somewhat out of fashion. The fantasy about Jesus coming down from the cross etc. has been most recently proposed by an Australian writer named Barbara Thiering. Her theory rests on a reading of the tiny scraps of papyrus (many containing a single character or less, only one a full word—
kai
, meaning “and” in Greek) found in Cave 7 at the Dead Sea. These “documents” are so uninterpretable that they might as well be tea leaves. The theory that only a minority of Jesus’s sayings can safely be attributed to him is proposed by the Jesus Seminar, a self-appointed California group of scholars and others (such as Hollywood movie directors) who meet occasionally to vote (!) on such matters.
6
The names of the four evangelists (or gospel writers), Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are also used of their work, so that phrases like “in Matthew” or “the original Matthew” should normally be taken as referring to Matthew’s Gospel, not directly to the author himself.
7
The evangelists use several terms to describe the followers of Jesus. The “crowds” that run after him are not quite followers, but exhibit the fickleness and fascination with novelty that we expect of crowds. The “disciples” are all those who take the new teaching seriously. The “apostles” (from the Greek
apostolos
, meaning “envoy”) are designated spokesmen and -women. “The Twelve” are Jesus’s inner circle, made up of the five apostles already named—Simon Peter, Andrew, James, John, and Matthew (Levi)—plus seven more, including Thomas the Doubter and Judas, Jesus’s eventual betrayer.
8
This sentence, which is the Sixth Commandment, is found first in Exodus 20:13 in the narration of God’s giving of the Commandments to Moses and the Chosen People at Mount Sinai. Whenever a passage from the New Testament contains a quotation from the so-called Old Testament, that quotation is set in italics. For readers who wish to pursue such quotations to their original source,
The New Jerusalem Bible
(New York, 1985) provides complete marginal citations that unfortunately cannot be reproduced here.
9
Gehenna—in the prophetic literature it is called “the Valley of Hinnom”—was a hideous place south of Jerusalem where Canaanites once made holocausts of living children to the god Moloch and where pyres were kept burning for this purpose. Jesus uses it as an image of the ultimate horror.
10
The phrase that I have translated “unless the marriage is already spoiled” is often called “the exception clause”; it may refer to marriage within an illicit degree of kinship or to marital infidelity, in which case it would be better translated as “except in the case of her adultery.”
11
The idea that “only God is good” and human beings are evil was a commonplace not just among the Jews but throughout the ancient world. Polytheistic societies tended to imagine that only their far-off high god was truly good. “Thou shalt not defraud” is not actually one of the Ten Commandments, but Jesus cites the scriptures loosely and with the confidence of one who views the Hebrew texts as family documents—as does the entire rabbinical tradition.
12
The remains of Simon Peter’s modest home may still be seen at Capernaum.
13
Usually translated “privy” or “sewer,” the word that Matthew chooses is
aphedron
, Macedonian slang that would have sounded barbarous to Greek ears. Jesus was not bashful about referring to bodily functions, even if his translators are.
14
The picture of Jesus actually reading “from the scroll” of the scriptures comes not from Mark or Matthew but from Luke (4:16–22). This has led some scholars to wonder if Luke, whose gospel is probably later than Mark’s and may be slightly later than Matthew’s, has wrongly assumed that Jesus was literate. But the preponderance of the evidence suggests strongly that Jesus could read Hebrew and was extensively educated in the Jewish scriptures.
15
Popular opinion among Israeli Jews is more ambiguous than among American Jews. Though observant, Orthodox Jews number no more than twenty percent or so of the Israeli Jewish population, the rest (“secular,” or nonobservant) tend to the opinion that only the Orthodox way represents “real” religion and that the Conservative and Reform movements are forms of self-deception. But the mental gymnastics of these secular Jews—who defend the Orthodox way as the only one while steadfastly refraining from it themselves—suggest an ambiguity born of Israeli history, rather than a considered, logical position.
16
“The Kingdom of God” is Mark’s phrase; Matthew, more alert to Jewish sensitivities about “the Name” and therefore less willing to seem to speak casually of “God,” uses instead “the Kingdom of Heaven,” obviously with the same intent as the less polished, more spontaneous Mark. This is a good example of how the two evangelists differ from each other.
17
Parthenogenesis
(literally, “virginal conception”), or reproduction from an unfertilized ovum, is not unknown in nature, though scientists tell us it is impossible in the higher forms of life, such as mammals. But it is probably no more impossible than the exaltation of the humble.
18
Luke does not use here
pandocheion
, the Greek word for “inn,” which he
does
use in the parable of the Good Samaritan, but
kataluma
, which means a “room (occupied by human beings).” Many contemporary scholars have questioned whether Jesus was born in Bethlehem, as both Matthew and Luke have it, or whether this is an assumption these two evangelists made because one of the Messianic prophecies (Micah 5:1) so predicts. But the questions about Bethlehem hardly constitute proof that Jesus was not born there.
19
During the wedding reception at Cana, Mary asks Jesus, who has not yet declared himself publicly, to do something about the fact that the hosts have run out of wine. Jesus objects to her noodging (“Woman, my Time has not yet come”), but in the end he acts spectacularly to head off the bridal couple’s embarrassment (John 2:1–11).
