The Case for God (17 page)

Jesus’s unusual conception and birth were by no means the chief ways in which the first Christians expressed their sense of his divine sonship. Paul believed that he was “designated” the “son of God” at his resurrection.
³⁷
Mark thought he received his commission at his baptism, like the ancient kings of Israel, who had been “adopted” by Yahweh at their coronation. He even quotes the ancient coronation psalm.
³⁸
On another occasion, when Jesus took three of his disciples up a high mountain, the gospels show him being “anointed” as a prophet. He was “transfigured” before them, his face and garments shining like the sun; the disciples saw him speaking with Moses and Elijah while a heavenly voice, quoting the same hymn, declared, “This is my Son, the Beloved; he enjoys my favor.”
³⁹

Yet did not Jesus constantly insist that his followers acknowledge his divine status—almost as a condition of discipleship?
⁴⁰
In the gospels we continually hear him berating his disciples for their lack of “faith” and praising the “faith” of gentiles, who seem to understand him better than his fellow Jews. Those who beg him for healing are required to have “faith” before he can work a miracle, and some pray:
“Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.”
⁴¹
We do not find this preoccupation with “belief” in the other major traditions. Why did Jesus set such store by it? The simple answer is that he did not. The word translated as “faith” in the New Testament is the Greek
pistis
(verbal form:
pisteuo)
, which means “trust; loyalty; engagement; commitment.”
⁴²
Jesus was not asking people to “believe” in his divinity, because he was making no such claim. He was asking for commitment. He wanted disciples who would engage with his mission, give all they had to the poor, feed the hungry, refuse to be hampered by family ties, abandon their pride, lay aside their self-importance and sense of entitlement, live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and trust in the God who was their father. They must spread the good news of the Kingdom to everyone in Israel—even the prostitutes and tax collectors—and live compassionate lives, not confining their benevolence to the respectable and conventionally virtuous. Such
pistis
could move mountains and unleash unsuspected human potential.
⁴³

When the New Testament was translated from Greek into Latin by Saint Jerome (c. 342–420),
pistis
became
fides
(“loyalty”).
Fides
had no verbal form, so for
pisteuo
Jerome used the Latin verb
credo
, a word that derived from
cor do
, “I give my heart.” He did not think of using
opinor
(“I hold an opinion”). When the Bible was translated into English,
credo
and
pisteuo
became “I believe” in the King James version (1611). But the word “belief” has since changed its meaning. In Middle English,
bileven
meant “to prize; to value; to hold dear.” It was related to the German
belieben
(“to love”),
liebe
(“beloved”), and the Latin
libido
. So “belief” originally meant “loyalty to a person to whom one is bound in promise or duty.”
⁴⁴
When Chaucer’s knight begged his patron to “accepte my bileve,” he meant “accept my fealty, my loyalty.”
⁴⁵
In Shakespeare’s
All’s Well That Ends Well
, which was probably written around 1603, shortly before the publication of the King James Bible, the young nobleman Bertram is urged to “believe not thy disdain”: he must not entertain his contempt for lowborn Helena and allow it to take deep root in his heart.
⁴⁶
During the late seventeenth century, however, as our concept of knowledge became more theoretical, the word “belief” started to be used to describe an intellectual assent to a hypothetical—and often dubious— proposition. Scientists and philosophers were the first to use it in this
sense, but in religious contexts the Latin
credere
and the English “belief” both retained their original connotations well into the nineteenth century.

It is in this context, perhaps, that we should discuss the vexed question of Jesus’s miracles. Since the Enlightenment, when empirical verification became important in the substantiation of any “belief,” many people—Christians and atheists alike—have assumed that Jesus performed these miracles to prove his divinity. But in the ancient world, “miracles” were quite commonplace and, however remarkable and significant, were not thought to indicate that the miracle worker was in any way superhuman.
⁴⁷
There were so many unseen forces for which the science of the day could not account that it seemed quite reasonable to assume that spirits affected human life, and Greeks routinely consulted a god rather than a doctor. Indeed, given the state of medicine before the modern period, this was probably a safer and more prudent option. Some people had a special ability to manipulate the malign powers that were thought to cause disease, and Jews in particular were known to be skilled healers. In the ninth century BCE, the prophets Elijah and Elisha had both performed miracles similar to Jesus’s, but nobody ever suggested that they were gods.

Jesus came from Galilee in northern Palestine, where there was a tradition of devout men
(hasidim
) who were miracle workers.
⁴⁸
In the middle of the first century BCE, the prayers of Honi the Circle Drawer had brought a severe drought to an end, and shortly before the destruction of the temple, Hanina ben Dosa was able, like Jesus, to cure a patient without even visiting his bedside. But nobody, least of all the
hasidim
themselves, thought that they were anything other than ordinary human beings. Jesus probably presented himself as a
hasid
in this tradition, and he seems to have been a particularly skilled exorcist. People suffering from epilepsy or mental illnesses for which there was no other cure naturally consulted exorcists, some of whom may have been able to effect an improvement in diseases that had a strong psychosomatic component. But like Honi, Jesus made it clear that he owed his miracles to the “powers”
(dunamis
) of God that worked through him and insisted that anybody who trusted God sufficiently would be able to do still greater things.
⁴⁹

Far from these miracles being central to the gospel, the evangelists
seem rather ambivalent about them. Mark tells us that even though the fame of these marvels spread far and wide, Jesus regularly asked people to keep quiet about their cure;
⁵⁰
Matthew tends to play down the miracles, using them simply to show how Jesus fulfilled ancient prophecy,
⁵¹
while for Luke, the miracles merely showed that Jesus was “a great prophet” like Elijah.
⁵²
The evangelists knew that, despite these signs and wonders, Jesus had not won many followers during his lifetime. The miracles had
not
inspired “faith;” people who witnessed them agreed that Jesus was a “son of God” but were not prepared to disrupt their lives and commit themselves wholeheartedly to his mission—any more than they had been willing to sell all they had and follow Honi the Circle Drawer.

Even the inner circle of apostles lacked
pistis
. They made no comment at all when Jesus fed a crowd of five thousand people with a few loaves and fishes; and when they saw him walking on water, Mark tells us, they were “utterly and completely dumbfounded … their minds were closed.”
⁵³
Matthew relates that the disciples did indeed bow down before him after this miracle, crying: “Truly, you are the Son of God,”
⁵⁴
but in no time at all Jesus had to rebuke them for their lack of faith.
⁵⁵
The miracle stories probably reflect the disciples’ understanding of these events
after
the resurrection apparitions. With hindsight, they could see that God had already been working through Jesus to usher in the Kingdom, when God would vanquish the demons that caused suffering, sickness, and death and trample the destructive powers of chaos underfoot.
⁵⁶
They did not think that Jesus was God, so did not argue that these miracles proved his divinity. But after the resurrection they were convinced that like any person of
pistis
, Jesus had been able to call upon God’s
dunamis
when he stilled the storm at sea and walked on the windswept waters.

The rabbis knew that miracles proved nothing. One day, during the early years at Yavneh, Rabbi Eliezer was engaged in a fierce argument about a legal ruling
(halakah
) arising from the Torah. When his colleagues refused to accept his opinion, he asked God to prove his point with a series of miracles. A carob tree moved four hundred cubits of its own accord, water in a nearby canal flowed backward, and the walls of the house of studies caved in, as if on the point of collapse.
But the rabbis remained unconvinced and seemed somewhat disapproving of this divine extravaganza. In desperation, Rabbi Eliezer asked for a
bat qol
, a heavenly voice, to support his case, and obligingly a celestial voice cried, “What have you against Rabbi Eliezer? The
halakah
is always as he says.” Unimpressed, Rabbi Joshua simply quoted God’s own Torah back to him: “It is not in heaven.”
⁵⁷
The Torah was no longer the property of heaven; it had descended to earth on Mount Sinai and was now enshrined in the heart of every Jew. So “we pay no attention to a
bat qol
,“ he concluded firmly. It was said that when God heard this, he laughed and said, “My children have conquered me.” They had grown up. Instead of meekly accepting opinions foisted on them from above, they were thinking for themselves.
⁵⁸

Revelation did not mean that every word of scripture had to be accepted verbatim,
⁵⁹
and midrash was unconcerned about the original intention of the biblical author. Because the word of God was infinite, a text proved its divine origin by being productive of fresh meaning. Every time a Jew exposed himself to the ancient text, the words could mean something different. By the 80s and 90s, the rabbis were beginning to persuade their fellow Jews that this—rather than Christianity—was the authentic way for Israel to go forward. It was Rabbi Akiva who perfected this innovative style of midrash. It was said that his fame had reached heaven and that, intrigued, Moses decided to come down to earth and attend one of his classes. He sat in the eighth row behind the other students and discovered, to his embarrassment, that he could not understand a word of Akiva’s exposition of the Torah that had been revealed to
him
, Moses, on Mount Sinai. “My sons have surpassed me,” Moses reflected ruefully, like any proud parent, as he made his way back to heaven.
⁶⁰
Another rabbi put it more succinctly: “Matters that had not been revealed to Moses were disclosed to Rabbi Akiva and his generation.”
⁶¹
Some people thought that Rabbi Akiva went too far, but his method carried the day because it kept scripture open. A modern scholar may feel that midrash violates the integrity of the original, but this kind of textual “bricolage” was a creative method of moving a tradition forward at a time when new material was harder to get hold of and people had to work with what they had.

The rabbis believed that the Sinai revelation had not been God’s
last word to humanity but just the beginning. Scripture was not a finished product; its potential had to be brought out by human ingenuity, in the same way as people had learned to extract flour from wheat and linen from flax.
⁶²
Revelation was an ongoing process that continued from one generation to another.
⁶³
A text that could not speak to the present was dead, and the exegete had a duty to revive it. The rabbis used to link together verses that originally had no connection with one another in a “chain”
(horoz
) that, in this new combination, meant something entirely different.
⁶⁴
They would sometimes alter a word in the text, creating a pun by substituting a single letter that entirely changed the original meaning, telling their pupils, “Don’t read
this …
but
that.”
⁶⁵
They did not intend the emendation to be permanent; like any teacher in antiquity, they were mainly concerned with speaking directly to the needs of a particular group of students. They were happy to interpret a text in a way that bore no relation to the original, so that the Song of Songs, a profane love song sung in taverns that did not even mention God, became an allegory of Yahweh’s love for his people.

Midrash was not a solitary exercise; rather, like the Socratic dialogue, it was a joint enterprise. The rabbis had retained the ancient reverence for oral communication and in the early days at Yavneh did not commit their traditions to writing but learned them by heart. Graduates of the academy were called
tannaim
, “repeaters,” because they recited the Torah aloud and developed their midrash together in conversation. The House of Studies was not like a hushed modern library but was noisy with clamorous debate. As the political situation deteriorated in Palestine, however, the rabbis decided that they needed a written record of these discussions, and between 135 and 160 they compiled an entirely new scripture, which they called the Mishnah, an anthology of the oral teachings collected at Yavneh. The Mishnah was deliberately constructed as a replica of the lost temple, its six sections
(sederim
) supporting the literary edifice like pillars.
⁶⁶
By studying the laws and ordinances now tragically rendered obsolete, students could still honor the divine Presence in the post-temple world.

It had been one thing for the early Pharisees to base their lives on an imaginary temple when Herod’s temple was still a fully functioning reality, but quite another when it had been reduced to a pile of
charred rubble. In the Mishnah, the rabbis amassed thousands of new rulings that regulated the lives of Jews down to the smallest detail to help them become aware of the Shekhinah’s continued presence in their midst. They had no interest in “beliefs” but focused on practical behavior. If all Jews were to live as if they were priests serving the Holy of Holies, how should they deal with gentiles? How could each household observe the purity laws? What was the role of women in the home that was now a temple? The rabbis would never have been able to persuade the people to accept this formidable body of law had it not yielded a satisfying spirituality.