Jesus (7 page)

T
HE
FIRST MIRACULOUS STORY
in this book is a good place to ask a question that will arise frequently during our pilgrimage into the life of Jesus: Did this really happen? To begin to answer that, let's look at how the Gospels were composed.

There were several distinct stages to the writing of the Gospels.
¹⁴
First was Jesus's actual public ministry. Next came the “oral tradition,” when the story of Jesus of Nazareth would have been passed orally from person to person. During this period, there would have been little need for a written record. Jesus's disciples, followers, and other eyewitnesses were still around to offer firsthand, and undoubtedly vivid, accounts of their encounters with Jesus. Indeed, they were probably bursting with enthusiasm and eager to respond when people asked, “What did he say?” “What did he do?” “What was he like?” For some episodes there would have been multiple witnesses; for others, a handful; for a few, just one.
¹⁵
But there is no need for books when you have eyewitnesses. In any event, most of the early disciples were likely illiterate.

By the way, even at this early stage, you can already see the likelihood that differences would arise among the various oral traditions. First of all, not every eyewitness would describe an event in precisely the same way. Each would stress one thing or another, depending on what struck him or her as important. Also, as the Scripture scholar N. T. Wright has pointed out, since Jesus was an itinerant preacher, he probably would have said the same things over and over, but would have said them in slightly different ways to different audiences. “Local variations would no doubt abound.”
¹⁶
So already we can see some variations creeping into the story of Jesus at this early stage, which helps to answer the question of why the Gospels don't always agree with one another.

As those original witnesses died (and it became clear that Jesus would not, as some expected, return soon), the next stage began. This required the editorial work of those who compiled the Gospels for the early church, generally known as the “evangelists,” Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. (“Gospel” is an Old English derivation of “good news.” “Evangelist” is from the Greek
euangelion
, “good news” or “good message.”) Over time the church settled on these four books as the approved, or “canonical,” Gospels because of their wide use, theological orthodoxy, and association with the apostles.
¹⁷

Each evangelist wrote for a slightly different audience and therefore stressed different parts of the story, leaving out what another writer would deem important or adding passages that another writer would consider less significant. During the editing process, these authors also inserted various comments and emendations, for the purposes of explanation or exhortation, that may not have been found in the original stories or texts. An author like Luke, for example, felt it necessary to explain some Jewish religious practices that might have been unfamiliar to his readers. Someone like Matthew, who wrote for a largely Jewish audience, did not.

Three of the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—are deeply intertwined. Although there are competing theories about how they are connected, it is clear that they are. Most scholars posit Mark's Gospel as coming first, with the evangelist writing to a non-Jewish community around
AD
70. Matthew's Gospel, written around 85 or 90 and addressed to a primarily Jewish audience, is an expanded and revised version of Mark, supplemented with other stories, including, for example, the narratives about the birth of Jesus. Luke, though most likely a Gentile (or non-Jew), nonetheless knew something about Jewish traditions when he wrote his Gospel roughly around the same time as Matthew; he also drew on Mark, and also supplemented his narrative with other stories. Both Matthew and Luke also relied heavily on an independent source of sayings—nicknamed “Q” by scholars after the German
Quelle
, meaning “source.”

While Matthew, Mark, and Luke carefully edited their books to address specific communities of readers, their Gospels are so similar that they are referred to as the Synoptic Gospels, because they include numerous passages that can be looked at together (Greek
synopsis
, “view together”).

The Gospel of John, written somewhat later, most likely for Christians in the eastern Mediterranean area in the late first century, is markedly different from the Synoptics. John's narrative introduces several well-known characters who do not even appear in the other three Gospels, including Nicodemus, the man born blind, the Samaritan woman, and Lazarus. Few of the episodes of Jesus's public ministry recorded in John mirror those in the Synoptics.

Jesus
himself
seems different in the Gospel of John. No longer the earthy spinner of homespun parables or the down-to-earth carpenter at home with Galilean fishermen, John's Jesus often can seem like an omniscient sage who speaks solemnly, even oracularly: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”
¹⁸
To me, the Jesus of John can seem more divine than human. As Joseph A. Fitzmyer, SJ, a New Testament scholar, writes, “What a picture of Jesus we would have, if we had only the Fourth Gospel! Would we know much about the humanity of Jesus?”
¹⁹

Daniel J. Harrington, SJ, my professor of New Testament at Boston College, used to tell our class that the New Testament provides us with “a general outline of Jesus's life.” We could, he said, imagine the evangelists sitting at their desks before various scraps of paper on which were written parables and proverbs, discussions with the disciples and debates with religious leaders, as well as healing stories and other miracles. Gathering them together, they would stress one thing and omit another in order to provide a complete story.

But not
entirely
complete—or one designed for scrupulous accuracy. That's not to say that the Gospels aren't true or accurate. Rather, careful readers will discover some continuity problems. Overall, the Gospels agree with one another on both story and sequence. This is often the case with the Synoptics, where Jesus's words are often repeated verbatim and his actions are nearly identical. When Jesus calls a tax collector named Levi (or Matthew), he utters the same words in all three Synoptic Gospels: “Follow me.”
²⁰

But in some places, the evangelists—who were not what we consider today to be professional historians—do not agree on important details. Jesus makes only
one
journey to Jerusalem in the Synoptic Gospels, while he makes several in John. The story of Jesus's birth in the Gospel of Matthew describes Mary and Joseph as living in Bethlehem, fleeing to Egypt, and then moving for the first time to Nazareth, while Luke has the two living
originally
in Nazareth, traveling to Bethlehem in time for the birth, and
then
returning home again. Mark and John have nothing of such traditions. In some Gospel passages Jesus offers his parables without explanation, despite the seeming inability of the disciples to understand. In others, he explains things to help them understand. (“The seed is the word of God.”
²¹
) In one telling of the Beatitudes, Jesus says, “Blessed are you who are poor.” In another, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
²²
More crucially, some of the Resurrection stories are substantially different. In some accounts, the Risen Christ appears as a material being; in others he can apparently walk through walls.

Sometimes these differences reflect the different intentions of the evangelists. Luke, for example, evinces a great deal of concern for the poor in his Gospel (and so may have chosen to write “you who are poor” rather than “the poor in spirit”). But at other times the reasons behind the differences in the Gospels are not as easy to understand.

So what did Jesus really do? What did he really say? Based on the four Gospels, most of the time we are able to tell. But, occasionally, it's difficult to determine with absolute precision.

The various presentations of the events in the New Testament, then, can sometimes be difficult to “harmonize,” even for the devout Christian. So it's important to use one's faith
and
reason when reading Scripture, in order to understand the story, its context, and its meaning the best we can. The evangelists won't agree at all times because of the different resources at their disposal, the particular needs of their communities, and what they felt was most important. None of them, by the way, thought that talking about Jesus's childhood or young adulthood was important—as modern-day biographies their works would be poorly reviewed! But they weren't writing a biography or a history; they were writing a religious document to help people understand and believe in Jesus Christ.

B
UT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN
, even assuming the varying intentions of the writers, the Gospels are hard to
believe
? For me, that's not been an issue, but as we begin our pilgrimage into Jesus's life we need to look at belief and disbelief. And the story of the Annunciation is a good place to start. How did it happen? If you were there, what would you have seen?

Was the Annunciation at all like the various artistic interpretations? Was the angel a winged creature, as in a Botticelli painting, clad in a rose-colored gown, gently grasping a lily, and kneeling at the feet of Mary, whose whole body withdraws from the encounter?

Was it like the movies, as in Franco Zeffirelli's 1977 TV miniseries
Jesus of Nazareth
, where we see the angel appearing as a shaft of light, but we hear only the startled Mary's side of the conversation?

Was it like what we experience in our prayer? Once on retreat I prayed with this passage, and as the angel walked over the dry ground of Nazareth, I imagined grass growing in his footprints. He entered Mary's house, grasped her hand, and told her the news. Mary paused for a long while before answering the angel, thinking deliberately. Despite her fear, she was able to say yes, because she thought not only of the difficult things that might come her way, but also of the good. She trusted that God would be good to her and then joyfully rushed to her cousin Elizabeth to say, “I'm going to have a baby!”

The sources of this Gospel passage are difficult to pin down. For one thing, only Mary could have been the source of the story of her meeting with the angel. John Meier says this in
A Marginal Jew:
“While Mary might theoretically be the ultimate source for some traditions in the Infancy Narratives, grave problems beset the claim that she is the direct source of any narrative as it now stands. To begin with, Mary cannot be the source for all the infancy traditions in both Matthew and Luke; for, as we shall see, Matthew and Luke diverge from or even contradict each other on certain key points.”
²³

In other words, if Mary were the source, why didn't Matthew include the story of her angelic encounter in his narrative of Jesus's birth? The Gospel of Matthew focuses instead on Joseph, who receives the news of Mary's birth in a dream.

Why this divergence? Matthew may have highlighted Joseph because of his desire to emphasize Jesus's connection to King David—which comes through Joseph. Another possibility for the divergence was suggested to me by the New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine, author of
The Misunderstood Jew
, a study of Jesus's Jewish roots: Matthew's Gospel tells us that Joseph's father is named Jacob. Matthew's Joseph is a dreamer of dreams, just like the earlier Joseph, the son of another Jacob, from the Book of Genesis. By focusing on Joseph, Matthew may have wanted to show Jesus's symbolic connections to the history of Israel.

Perhaps both accounts are accurate: Mary was visited by an angel, and Joseph learned of it in a dream.

Perhaps, then, Luke got the story of the Annunciation exactly right, having heard the story from Mary or from someone who heard it from her. After all, Mary was alive during her son's public ministry and presumably for some time after the early Christian community began. Why couldn't she have passed along the story?

Perhaps it happened differently, say, in a dream. Again, why not? Or perhaps the story of the angel was the only way that Mary could communicate an otherwise unexplainable encounter with the divine. Often people have to resort to metaphors to describe a dramatic encounter with God: “It was like a dream, but I was awake.” “It seemed as if I heard God's voice, but not exactly.” “It was like feeling the words, but they were as clear as anything I've ever heard.” Mystical experiences are hard to verbalize.

Joseph Fitzmyer answers our question bluntly: “What really happened? We shall never know.”
²⁴
We do not have direct access to Mary's experience. And never will—except through what Luke tells us.

After meditating on this passage for many years, I have come to believe that either Mary met Gabriel precisely as the passage describes or she had a unique encounter with the divine that could be expressed only in terms of a heavenly messenger—an understanding based on the Jewish tradition of angels. Her experience, which she “treasured” and “pondered” in her heart, as Luke says later, was communicated to the disciples after the death and resurrection of her son, when it could be more fully appreciated.
²⁵
The story was passed orally from person to person, but especially treasured by the community for which Luke wrote, and so he included it in his Gospel.

But is it possible to believe that this event could have happened just as Luke describes it?

Let me be clear:
yes.
God can do anything. If God can create the universe from nothing, then causing a young woman to become pregnant in a miraculous way seems a small thing. The modern mind may have a hard time believing in the miraculous, but such belief lies at the heart of the Gospels. Unless you want to follow Thomas Jefferson and scissor out whatever makes you uncomfortable or forces you out of the realm of what you consider possible, then you are invited to believe in changing water into wine, healing the sick, and raising the dead. A miraculous pregnancy is not beyond God.