The Massacre of Innocence Part Four

Finally, I must address the most lamentable aspect of the Infancy Narrative of Matthew:  What the story does to defame the God of its pages.

Of course, I do not intend to minimize the described horrors of the Massacre of the Innocents—or of the ancient blood-soaked roads to Egypt, or to Galilee, or inevitably to Rome.  Or of the horrors of the blood-spattered David, or Herod, or whomever.  I will not even pretend that evil or pain or any bad thing can ultimately be thought of as entirely independent of the God who made all.

But I also do not have to pretend that the merest scrap of reputable evidence supports the historicity of Herod’s massacre.  Maybe it never even happened at all, or maybe it did happen—in the final analysis (more’s the pity) it made no difference either way.  It was the warning of a dream, not the tragedy of Bethlehem, that at last sent Joseph to the town of Nazareth so that his reputed son might be called “a Nazarene.”  (No one’s ever really been able to figure that last phrase out, so I’ll not trouble about it.)

The Infancy Narrative does not even need to be in Matthew at all.  If the Bible reader needs some critical mass of “signs,” then surely signs of the type wherein Jesus eases suffering would be preferable to Herod’s cruelty.  It is not as though the Gospel accounts are intended to be exhaustive; John concludes with not one but two references to the notion that much of Jesus’ doings are unrecorded.

(It must surely be of note that introductions and conclusions—or sometimes their absence or multiplicity—are such an issue in Gospel scholarship.  The credulous notion is such that the Gospels should arise and subside almost seamlessly in the larger Bible “story,” differing internally only insofar as they represent the fruits of individual accounts by distinct, sincere eyewitnesses, writing perhaps with different audiences in mind.  Instead we have the complete opposite—shared stories, sometimes even shared phrasings, arranged with greater or lesser artistry, with the efforts of the artists most obvious when the Gospels lurch at the start or stumble to a close.)

And while we’re on the subject of things written or not written, there is the small matter of Jesus in John 7, misleading his “brethren” about whether he was going to the feast of tabernacles.  Certain source texts can be mined to ostensibly justify translating John 7 as saying that Jesus was not going to the feast “yet,” but no translator has been able to wish away the fact that Jesus is described as going there secretly.  Perhaps a word or two more (or less) from the Gospel writers might have made Jesus look better.

I know I am talking about small things, but it has been the nature of humans—Gospel-writers and other people—to make much of small things.  Let the notion at hand be the power of God, and two thousand years of debate about the particular capacities of the Son of God will ensue.  Let the Son of God curse a fig tree to withering, and two thousand years of debate about the justice of Jesus—or of the Gospels--will ensue.

And then there are small matters like the Massacre of the Innocents—though of course a reasonable person flinches at using the word “small.”  (Do not, however, underestimate the capacity of humans to be unreasonable; there are actually serious Bible scholars, confronted with the fact that Herod’s massacre apparently passed unnoticed to history, who have lowered themselves to producing the lowest possible demographic estimates of the expected mortality total.)

The Massacre of the Innocents was a horrible thing—need it have ever happened?  One might ask (to the extent to which we will accept that God had a real role in a real story) if God could not, in his omnipotence, have maneuvered the wise men in some other way?  Could not God have given the doomed children a life like anyone else?

To ask questions like those, however, merely places the issue in the realm of larger questions about the nature of God.  Does not God doom all his creatures to die?

Jews and Christians are often taken to task for the actions of God in their Scriptures.  To use an example I have touched on before: the Fall of Jericho, in which Rahab and “all her kindred” were spared.  The episode is part of the Conquest, which—rightly or wrongly—has now become part of the history of genocide.

How much more would Jews and Christians prefer the story to be one in which Jericho was smitten with a (well-deserved) natural disaster, with the Israelites poised on the horizon to selflessly rush to the rescue of those who might be saved!  Heck, maybe we could even dispense with the “well-deserved” part.

While such an amended Jericho story might better suit modern sensibilities (to say nothing of modern political expedience), the underlying religious question remains: Does not God doom all his creatures to die?  A dead two-year-old or dead seventy-year-old under the rubble of the wall is just as dead in any scenario.

It is not the kindest thing, to say that people are going to die in any event; nor is it all that kind to God (for we—for our part—have no shortage of capacity to offend him) to recall that neither Death nor anything else escapes his power.  God feeds the birds of the air, and not a sparrow falls to earth but that God wills it.  Terrible to say it, and more terrible not to believe it.

But that is not the same as choosing to believe in a terrible God, or choosing to spread belief in such a God.  And so we come to the end of the blood-soaked road to Nazareth.  Joseph takes his family there, because a dream tells him to, according to “Matthew.”  “Luke”—it is no surprise—tells a different story.  In Luke, Joseph starts out in Nazareth.  Neither story needs any dead little boys, and Luke apparently never dreamt of such an unforgettable thing, though Luke does not refrain from making a claim to “having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first” (Luke 1:3, KJV).

I would be inclined to describe the massacre not merely as an unforgettable thing, but also as a pivotal thing (for such it would seem, by the conventions of storytelling) except that, as we have seen, it was not pivotal.  Why, oh why, then did Matthew say it occurred?

“Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying,

“In Rama there was a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not” (2:17-18).

So there we have it.  The author of the introduction to Matthew was too busy writing a story about the fulfillment of prophecy to remember why a person should write a story about the fulfillment of prophecy.  I will leave it to Bible scholars to explain what a stretch the “Rachel” connection is at any rate.  I will confine myself to statements a layperson might make, to the extent that such statements are commensurate with a lay believer’s understanding:

God—the God who made a world of reasonable people to understand him and embrace the teachings of his son—will confine himself to reasons for issuing prophecy.  That’s what prophecies are—things happen because of reasons, even reasons known only to the sovereign mind and will of God.

God will prophesy horrible things.  God will threaten horrible results if people do horrible things.  God will even prophesy horrible results if people do NOT do horrible things.  But God is not a horrible God.  God will not engineer horrible things simply to fulfill prophecies.  The author of the flimsy introduction to Matthew forgot that.

The Massacre of Innocence Part Three

There remains a type of consideration I touched on from the concubine’s story in Judges, which I have not yet applied to Matthew’s Infancy Narrative.  In Judges a town is slaughtered, and all are killed but marriageable virgins.  In Matthew a town (with its surroundings) suffers the slaughter of infants “from two years old and under” (2:16, KJV).  The consideration is the same: “How?”

“How,” I asked in regard to Judges, “did the Israelites know they were getting virgins?”—which I contend is a quite lively question, if the story is to be given serious thought.  Then again, if there is a shred of truth to the story, one can well imagine that a young maid of sufficient liveliness herself would serve for “virgin”—after all, the story is supposed to be a story of blood-curdling horror, and if it happened in reality it happened with reality’s messiness.

History, as told in Christendom, has wrapped itself around the pathos of the Massacre of the Innocents.  And history, it must be said, has presented no shortage of episodes like the slaughter ordered by Herod.  Soldiers in some circumstances will butcher the most obviously innocent while in the service of the most obviously guilty.  Yet Matthew presents no narrative of the town authorities being convened in some orderly fashion; the story, if it is to be believed, can be appended with no extra-biblical trappings—especially if such trappings would operate against the perpetrator’s—Herod’s—best interest.

So the story is how we have it: Herod’s soldiers descend upon Bethlehem and perform their infamous deed.  They slaughter without warning, without explanation, without delay.  That is the story and—when not engaged in apologetics—Christianity tells just that story:

“Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men” (2:16).

How?  That is to say, how did the soldiers know their victims were “from two years old and under”?  Did they “diligently enquire” of the parents, of the town authorities, or of the municipal records?  Mongol conquerors, if the stories are to be believed, augmented their populations by sparing among their captives all those whose height did not reach a wagon’s axle.  Could not Matthew have provided a comparable, believable criterion by which Herod’s victims were sorted?

(To be fair, at least it appears that Matthew intended—quite logically—to limit Herod’s victims to males; the KJV choice of “children” is not supported generally by other translations.  Perhaps the King James translators could not keep their minds away from Matthew’s subsequent linking of the slaughter to “Rachel weeping for her children.”)

The massacre “story” (that is, the generally-remembered account shared, particularly at Yuletide, for two millennia) is one of shocking, bewildering cruelty—with all the terror and misery we would understandably attach to it.  The actual, recorded story presented in Matthew (if ever there had been any truth to it) is a story told to square up a theological position.  It is not an account of an event; it was never intended to be.  The “Massacre of the Innocents” is not an episode in the life of Jesus; it is an episode in the life of the collected canon.

The Massacre could have been left out of the Gospel of Matthew, though admittedly prying that story out of the book would also require the elimination of the part where the Three Stooges from the East parade into Herod’s court, announcing their intention to search out and pay homage to a helpless babe whom the legendarily-murderous Herod would doubtless fear as a usurper.

That means we would also have to get along without the part where Moe, Larry, and Curly are warned in a dream not to report to Herod—and they apparently cannot imagine any reason to report the dream to Joseph, who might be inclined to believe it, given his willingness to be persuaded by a dream to marry a pregnant virgin (1:20-22).  No, we have to wait for Joseph to be warned in his own dream to flee to Egypt (2:13).

So presently Herod dies.  Joseph, according to Matthew, is told in a dream to leave Egypt and “go into the land of Israel,” and then, “being warned of God in a dream, he turned aside into the parts of Galilee” (2:19-22).

We, and our mightily-strained credulity, have to go through all this to get to a place where Jesus is established as a “son” of David from Bethlehem, the “city of David.”  Luke, in his equally-strained narrative, tells us that Joseph had at the outset traveled “unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem” because “he was of the house and lineage of David” (Luke 2:4).

The Infancy Narrative of Matthew asks nothing more of us, in regard to Jesus’ origins, than does Luke: that Jesus (in some way or other) is “of the house and lineage of David.”  The genealogy that Matthew presents is presumably in support of that claim.  It is worth noting that said genealogy puts twenty-seven generations from David to Jesus.  (Matthew counts two fourteens, but that is a small matter; many commentators contend that quite a few generations of worthies were edited out.)

The stretch of Jesus’ genealogy from David to the Captivity is basically just the king-list, and the stretch from the Captivity to Jesus is—no surprise—otherwise unattested.  No one would expect that Joseph of Nazareth would have any better documentation than any other ordinary Jew of the era.  Would his lineage have been reckoned all that special at any rate?  After all, is “of the house and lineage of David” all that exclusive a claim, especially considering that “Beth-lehem-judah” was by definition a city of David’s tribe, one of the few tribes that had remained relatively intact?

All those effectively-anonymous generations after the Captivity could prove little more than Joseph’s participation in a vast, swirling, and occasionally redundant gene pool, to say nothing of the fact that “of the house and lineage of David” could apply to the progeny of any number of princely younger sons over a dozen royal generations.  And no one would contend that poor documentation or questionable legitimacy would have abated Herod’s proclivity for suspecting usurpers—any Jewish boy was a latent threat to the Idumean Herod.

So, in a twisted sense, Herod’s intent could scarcely be entirely unfulfilled.  In view of Matthew’s criteria, the drivers of the wise men’s train would need to have taken care not to run over any “sons of David” on the Bethlehem road.  If the grisly soldiers had no more discipline or order than to hack about themselves at random, they still might easily have assassinated three or four dozen “sons of David.”

I have asked repeatedly, “How?”  I could have asked more generally, “How is any of this believable?”  Of course, to be fair, there are answers.  To frame a refutation to just one of my snide observations, it might be postulated that the wise men were assured in their warning dream that their logical first concern—the safety of the Holy Family—was already being attended to.  Perhaps they were told that Joseph was going to get a dream of his own.  Perhaps.

But “perhaps” does not serve in all circumstances, even when divine intervention is thought to be in play.  Sure, when the supernatural is invoked, pigs can fly (or, in the case of the Gergesenes, plummet.)  But the power of God is not the central theme in the Infancy Narrative; the power of God (“is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham”) appears abruptly with the Baptist, who himself appears abruptly.  One might almost think—I’m being snide again—that the Baptist starts a completely different document by a completely different author with a completely different notion of messiahship.

So what is wrong with the Infancy Narrative?  After all, it might have happened, though it might be sort of unbelievable.  But that is the most important reason to object to its unlikely nature: It is not unlikely in the service of a spiritual or theological point—it is unlikely even in the service of the manifest intention of making Jesus’ messiahship seem likely.  Even lowly John the Baptist needs no introduction.  The Son of God does not need to be introduced as the adopted son of Joseph of Nazareth.

And so we must proceed presently to the heart of the issue: Not why the Infancy Narrative is wrong, but rather the wrong it has done.

The Massacre of Innocence Part Two

I promised a return to a short stretch of road in the concubine’s murder story, and here it is: the road between Bethlehem (of Judaea) and Jerusalem.  In the concubine’s story (Judges 19:1-21:25), her master the Levite departs with her (while she is still alive) from Bethlehem in the “afternoon,” as “the day draweth toward evening” (or so says his father-in-law, wishing him to stay.)  But, instead:

“…the man would not tarry that night, but he rose up and departed, and came over against Jebus, which is Jerusalem….And when they were by Jebus, the day was far spent” (KJV).  Not wishing to spend the night in a city of (as yet unconquered) pagans, the Levite travels on to an Israelite town:

“And they passed on and went their way; and the sun went down upon them when they were by Gibeah, which belongeth to Benjamin”—co-religionists of the Levite, some of whom promptly set to raping his young concubine to death.

I present this geography lesson not as an idle exercise, nor even to throw a disparaging light on the author of the story from Judges (but really, “Beth-lehem-judah” must be six miles—as the crow flies, no less—from Jerusalem, and Gibeah another four—surely too much for the longest afternoon; in setting up the story of the girl’s murder, the author was clearly making it up as he went along.)

I present this geography lesson because of the indisputable kernel of fact that it reveals: Bethlehem and Jerusalem are in the same neck of the woods.  Their proximity might be judged greater or lesser for various purposes, but for the purposes of deciding if this or that can be discarded from the Bible—at least an authoritative Bible—the implication cannot be denied: Either the concubine story has to go, or Matthew’s Infancy Narrative has to go, or perhaps both.

The early Christians who knew anything about Judea knew that Bethlehem and Jerusalem are near neighbors, even if those Christians got their geography from Judges.  When we read the story of the Massacre of the Innocents there is no hint that Herod was compelled to send swift messengers to rouse some distant garrison to do the horrid deed.

Here is the story from Matthew, a story that—if judged to be spurious—must bring down the rest of the Infancy Narrative:

“Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.

“Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying,

“In Rama there was a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not” (Matthew 3:16-18).

And so this sad story has a detachment of soldiers march the few miles to commit the atrocity “in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof”.  If those “coasts” extended a mere mile or two along the road to Jerusalem, one might well imagine the author of Judges describing the screams and wails as echoing in the very courtyards of the Temple.

The existence and the safety of roads were crucial to the economy and society of the Holy Land; few things would define the efficacy of Herod’s despotic reign more than would the regularity of travel, though even in the shadow of his capital the security of the few rough roads was a constant concern.

And of course those roads were used, in Jesus’ time and in the decades afterwards, by persons who knew how important travel was in Israel and always had been.  And they could imagine travel as an element of the lives of their forefathers—or, to return to Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus—foremothers.  Matthew saw fit to mention Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba:

There were only so many ways to get from one place to another in biblical times.  Tamar, playing (literally) the harlot, was informed, “Behold thy father in law goeth up to Timnath to shear his sheep” (Genesis 38:13).  She knew just where to wait for him on the way.

Rahab was the harlot of Jericho, who lived in the house of the famous wall and who sheltered the Israelite soldiers sent as spies (Joshua 2:1-21).  It would not be hard to imagine a soldier of Herod’s, assigned for some time to Bethlehem, sneaking away from his post for a night’s visit to a prostitute in Jerusalem.

A working man might have left Jerusalem at first light and still have expended a good day’s work in a field near Bethlehem, remaining for the night on the threshing floor—though he could scarcely have expected such a night as was enjoyed by Jesus’ foremother Ruth and her (literal) intended Boaz—in the neighborhood of Bethlehem, no less (Ruth 3:1-18).

And as for Bathsheba, spied out and lorded over by King David (2 Samuel 11:1-27): Herod, were he so inclined, might have left Jerusalem in the morning to hunt, spied some comely maiden in the “coasts” of Bethlehem, given necessary orders to swift mounted lieutenants, and have inspected her—bathed and perfumed—by the waning sunlight in his palace chambers.

I dwell so on the proximity of Bethlehem to Jerusalem because it must figure in the believability of Matthew’s Infancy Narrative, and also—we will shortly see—because I must contend that the narrative is not merely unbelievable, but actually inimical to Jesus’ ministry.

First, the unbelievability.  The “wise men” (mind-numbingly obtuse in the ways of ancient politics) show up at Herod’s court saying “Where is he that is born King of the Jews?”  (I suppose that two thousand years of Christian mercy ought to have made us blush at the very thought of subjecting to serious analysis this output of one called “Matthew,” but nonetheless here we are.)

“When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him.

“And when he had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born.

“And they said unto him, In Bethlehem of Judaea: for thus it is written by the prophet” (Matthew 2:3-5).

And still:

“Then Herod, when he had privily called the wise men, enquired of them diligently what time the star appeared.

“And he sent them to Bethlehem….” (Matthew 2:7-8)

So there we have it.  The “wise men” show up asking the single most momentous question that “all Jerusalem” could hear, and “all Jerusalem” hear it—and “all Jerusalem” know that the wrong answer to that question could bring the legions of Rome down upon them.

And “all Jerusalem” have access to the prophecy about Bethlehem of Judaea.

And “all Jerusalem” know where Bethlehem of Judaea is—a trip of part of a day or part of a night.  And Herod questions the wise men and sends them, as he believes, to Bethlehem.

So somehow we are supposed to visualize Herod in weeks or months of tormented unknowing, realizing at last that the wise men had duped him in not reporting back?

“Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.”

The story, as related by Matthew, is a masterpiece of implausibility.  How could Herod, through his minions, not have tracked the wise men to the very doorway of the Nativity?  His lieutenants’ only obstacle might have been crowds of common folk staring at the exotic travelers.  Many could have clung to the procession all the way, enjoying the shade of the beasts in the single day or enjoying the safety of the company in the single night.

It would be as plausible to concoct a horror-comedy about Al Capone at the height of his power, frustrated in some plan of his because a precious valuable or clue is to be buried in the coffin of some deceased rival kingpin.  Instead of sending people to see where the body is buried with great pomp, this fictional Capone waits a couple of months and then sends burly types to the well-known cemetery to dig up every grave with a tombstone less than two years old.

The trick to writing a horror-comedy is, I suppose, the proper balance of horror and comedy—otherwise one is liable to end up with neither.  In the Infancy Narrative of Matthew, the laughable nature of the un-laughable horror is bad enough, but the damage it has done in the intervening centuries is far worse.  We must turn next to that damage—wrought against the very substance of Jesus’ ministry.

The Massacre of Innocence Part One

I am going to use a strange approach to the start of the New Testament.

There is a particularly horrible story near the end of the Old Testament Book of Judges (19:1-21:25).  It concerns the fatal hours-long gang rape of a Levite’s concubine in a town of the tribe of Benjamin.  It is particularly horrible to read the particular horrors of this episode because of the landscape of ghastly brutalities that constitutes the bulk of the book—it is hard to know where one horror ends and the next begins.

The Levite apparently finds the situation unusually distressing (though not so much as to have prevented him from to tossing the girl to those who would rape her to death.)  The Levite hauls his dead concubine to his home in the territory of the tribe of Ephraim, dismembers her, and dispatches her portions across Israel—so that all of the tribes might consider the misdeed of the guilty men of Benjamin.  Upon receipt of the grisly missives:

“And it was so, that all that saw it said, There was no such deed done nor seen from the day that the children of Israel came up out of the land of Egypt unto this day” (19:30, KJV).  Of course, to modern readers—even the most conveniently gullible—the greater bulk of the Conquest appears to consist of “such” deeds.

And so, to address the particularly horrible evil that has arisen in their midst, the assembled Israelites—being refused the surrender of the culprits—slaughter everyone in the town in question.  Then, for good measure, they slaughter everyone in the towns encountered in the running battle—apparently the entire civilian population of the culprits’ tribe of Benjamin.  Then, for extra good measure, they slaughter everyone in a certain town of Israel that had not responded to the muster.

This extra-good-measure slaughter provides the extra good of the chance to procure wives from the town for the six hundred hiding Benjaminite soldiers still alive.  The Book of Judges has the entirety of Israel telling the dispatched contingent of their own men:

“Go and smite the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead with the edge of the sword, with the women and the children” (21:10).  (This statement is consistently rendered by the translators as referring flatly to “the children.”)

But the directions to the soldiers are not yet complete: “And this is the thing that ye shall do, Ye shall utterly destroy every male, and every woman that hath lain by man.” (21:11)  Apparently widows would not do.

So: “And they found among the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead four hundred young virgins, that had known no man by lying with any male, and they brought them unto the camp.” (21:12)  Apparently middle-aged virgins would not do.

What is more, the blanket description of those to be killed along with the adult males was “the women and the children,” not “the women and the male children”—leading to the grimly unsurprising conclusion that the only type of person to be spared was the sort of sufficiently ripe sweet young stuff as might be expected to entice a cringing vanquished soldier out of the desert.  Apparently, no female children were to be allowed to mature unmolested until they were turned over to the rapist-husbands for whom the girls’ kinfolk had been murdered.

(Don’t worry; the six-hundred-vanquished-soldier-to-four-hundred-grief-stricken-terrified-tween-ager mismatch was duly rectified by an additional mass rape-abduction.)

At this point the objective observer—or at least one successfully fighting nausea—might ask a salient question: “How?”  Or that is: “How did the Israelites know they were getting virgins?”  Did the married girls proudly voice their status after they perceived the criterion for being spared?  Were the girls diagnostically raped by their captors (the old blood-on-the-sheets thing?) before they were handed over to the Benjaminites as virgins?  Did the Israelites consult marriage records in a massacre-racked semi-literate village of the rape-ridden second millennium B.C.?  “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” (21:25)  The whole thing is ludicrous; the entire episode survives scrutiny such as it does only because neither Judaism nor Christianity need scrupulously own the time before the kingdom.

I intend to use the foregoing to frame the proper approach to the infancy narrative of Matthew, and there is already plenty to make use of, but there is still to be mentioned a further connection between the concubine murder story and the infancy narrative—a connection that almost defies belief: the stories share the use of the same short stretch of road.

But first, inescapably: the author—or compiler—of Matthew tacks on to the front of the Gospel an account of Jesus’ origins that has been roundly assessed as contrived and convenient.  The genealogy with which it begins is scarcely worth bothering about, though the flailings of apologists in its defense (and that of its cousin in Luke) can be amusing.  Matthew’s version at least includes mention of four of Jesus’ foremothers—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba—giving rise to many a commentator’s musings.

Matthew’s version of the infancy of Jesus builds on the logic of Jesus being, in his incarnation, a product of the story of Israel—and so Matthew presents Jesus as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies.  For our purposes, the important thing is the tendency of a Jesus represented in prophecy as being a Jesus thought of as inevitable in the particulars of his ministry; Jesus is “conceived” in the narrative.  “Of course,” goes the prevailing logic, “Jesus was what he was and did what he did because it was so prophesied.”

The essential problem with Jesus being “conceived” through prophecy is that the core story of Jesus is one of his being “roused” in his experiences.  Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane really is asking to be released from his prophesied end—otherwise the unspeakable agony in the garden is reduced to a hideous shadow play.  For our part, the least we can do is to avoid fretting over who Joseph’s grandfather was.

And so we will return to considering the infancy narrative of Matthew, a consideration that would seem to be an example of such fretting—if not for one thing: no representation of Jesus ought to be countenance if it is a falsehood.  If the infancy narrative of Matthew cannot be dismissed on its (lack of) merits, then surely the only test of any Scripture’s authority is its inclusion in the received canon.

In Regard to the Theme of this Blog

The theme of this blog must consist of two interconnecting parts.

First, “roused, readied, reaped” describes a story-arc that follows the structure of the Gospels’ treatment of God’s relationship with his creation.  However, the Gospels are merely lenses that present this arc in a constrained focus; the wider focus of creaturely experience follows the same arc.  I contend that the roused-readied-reaped story-arc is not limited to the Gospels, nor is it the creation of the Gospels or their authors.

Now, “roused, readied, reaped” is what happens in a special way to the Gospels’ Jesus—in a perfect way, as I would like to develop in subsequent posts.  I cannot demand that the reader subscribe to that contention of Jesus’ perfection, but I can expect the reader to credit my frankness in having stated it as a premise of this blog.  And now, of course, I am going to say that we, and all Creation, partake of the same story-arc.  We are thrown into the realm of experience; we are seasoned by our exposure to it; we meet our ends bearing more-or-less fruit of greater-or-lesser quality.

The inestimable genius of the Gospels is the declaration that the peril to our souls is not the danger of failing to meet some standard, but rather the dangerous temptation of exempting ourselves from the story-arc.  None of us could escape being roused—for that is by definition the basis of our participation in life—but we can certainly resist being readied (by insisting on burying our experiences under dogmas), and we can certainly resist being reaped (by insisting on defining the standards by which we will be judged.)

This tendency to insist on dogmas and standards is, as the reader is no doubt aware, the source of many of Jesus’ conflicts with his enemies—and of the conflicts he sees playing out around him.  The roused-readied-reaped progression reaches its fruition only when the moral agents involved will have it so; otherwise there is only deadly futility and despair.  And “deadly” has its ever-present connotations in the Gospels as in much of religion.  There are as many “deaths” in spirituality as there are spiritual experiences.

So that is the first part of this blog’s theme: the “Roused, Readied, Reaped” of the title itself.  As the above was intended to show, however, the “readied-and-reaped” two-thirds of the title cannot each be coequal with the first third: “roused.”  The “roused” aspect is not similarly at the discretion of the moral agent in question; the “roused” aspect is that which is entwined with the very roots of a person’s being.  So this will be the second part of this blog’s theme.

We can try to make ourselves “readied” for salvation.  We can maintain that we believe this or that, and we can work on our minds so as to bend them into the shape of our desired beliefs.  We might simultaneously think that we cannot ultimately control what we think, but it is only the experience of undershooting in that regard that we register; in the final accounting we may find that we have often overshot in self-indoctrination, to our detriment.  We have decided how we will be “readied.”  And here it will perhaps suffice to say, given the fantastic constellation of proffered religious “salvations,” that we have also decided how we will be “reaped.”

But the business of being “roused” cannot be so easily transacted.  We are roused at each instance of the story-arc—instances tumbling one upon the other—and in these moments of responding to moments before conceptual moments have passed—in those pre-moments, as it were—we have revealed to us the unyielding substance of our souls.  It is for the sake of that soul-substance, not the substance of our doctrines, or of our hopes in various salvation-plans, that we are right to beg mercy from God.

We must ask that our responses to the moments of life spill forth rightly from the seat of an inner being only God can know and only God can tend—as God  would will.  Nothing figures more prominently in the Gospels than the necessity of the inmost self—the primal self, the infra-cognitive self—being predisposed to lunge for the light rather than the dark.

The ephemeral yet ever-poised primal nature of the soul exerts itself more often than we can consciously acknowledge; indeed it is that very self of which our pitiful consciousness pretends to be master—a pretense that sends us on the quest for wisdom beyond understanding when yet we have decided that what we find will subject itself to our capacity, as we imagine, to understand.

It is as though we thought that salvation came from some doctrine written upon our souls.  Make no mistake; I am not talking some glib wisdom about how the scribbling of doctrine will not bring forth life in a dead soul so decorated.  I am talking about a dead, stony soul within each of us that will not be enlivened if doctrine is scribbled upon it, or carved deep into it by learning; or by experience; or by submission to some religious authority.  Neither might our souls be enlivened by drenching them in tears.

Our souls are thus unyielding because they are our true selves.  If we—as we must—assign fundamental importance to the status of our souls, then we must reckon that the status of any surrounding or countervailing reality (no matter how “real” in some objective sense) is subject to change.

We can see this all-important nature of the soul’s status demonstrated in some of the Gospels’ most harrowing passages:

In John 8 Jesus disputes with certain of the Jews.  (By “certain” I refer to the company of speakers and all those present who gave overt assent—the text requires nothing more.)  The Jews take exception to a remark of Jesus, and say:

“We be Abraham’s seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free?” (KJV)

In his response, Jesus says, “I know that ye are Abraham’s seed; but ye seek to kill me, because my word hath no place in you.”

Before the exchange is over, Jesus has told the Jews—those contending with him in that place and at that moment: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do.”  (Some translations employ notions of “desire” or “preference” instead of “lust,” but the Greek does not lack connotations of passion.)

Jesus is describing what matters.  Theological niceties aside, being or not being a child of the devil is just about as bad as it gets.  Jesus is talking about the state of a soul wherein it lunges and lusts after the same things the devil does.  That the soul in question might at some point have been describable as a child of Abraham is a consideration that no longer exists.

To be roused—to respond without thinking—to moments as the devil would is, in reality, to be of the substance of the devil.  Jesus is not issuing a polemic, but a pronouncement.

Of course the concepts of God abroad among the crowd held that God is not only just but merciful as well, and the disputation, for Jesus’ part, does not conclude without him describing the grounds on which one might be restored as Abraham’s offspring:

“Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, and was glad.”

 Visceral, fleshy response, even to something describable in the most esoteric religious terms, is what reveals the state of the soul.  Without an understanding of this premise, readings of the Gospels are futile.  For example, there is the story of the widow’s mite:

“And he said, Of a truth I say unto you, that this poor widow hath cast in more than they all: For all these have of their abundance cast in unto the offerings of God: but she of her penury hath cast in all the living that she had” (Luke 21:3-4).

I must admit that I never understood what good the widow was doing anybody by casting in “all the living that she had.”  Surely Jesus is not commending her for throwing herself upon charity or for throwing her life away.  Inasmuch as we must assume that her motives are commendable—for what else would be the purpose of the story?—then we must understand that Jesus is predicating the story of the widow on the importance of her upwelling desire to contribute to the cause of God—on the importance of what seizes her when she is roused to the challenges of her meager life.

So we are given the story of the widow.  Attributing to the story no more than seems reasonable, we can take it that a woman—born, living, and dying as a pious Jew, never having heard or sought the teachings of Jesus—can, on the basis of her soul’s proclivities, be reckoned righteous in the sight of God.  That the foregoing statement is a rather amateurish expression of liberal religion, I will not deny, but I hope to contribute something new to the discourse.

I hope to practice the habits—stereotypically associated with conservative commentators—of methodical Gospel interpretation, but I can scarcely see how the roused-readied-reaped story-arc could lead to an affirmation of conservative Christianity—or of Christianity at all.  As I will have to show, I don’t think that Christianity has gotten the Gospel stories wrong; I think that Christianity has looked into the Gospels and gotten the wrong stories.

In Regard to the Meaning of this Blog

One of the most lamentable aspects of conventional Bible interpretation is the practice of purporting to demonstrate that a particular “salvation economy” is rolled out across the landscape of the New Testament.  Even just the short span of the canonical Gospels contains such a number of varying statements and episodes that, by emphasizing or ignoring aggregations of them according to some set of criteria—or by subsuming aggregations of them under some other Scriptural elements taken to be normative—any number of a broad range of workings-out of salvation theory can be conjured.

The most notorious of these “salvation economies” is “faith alone.”  Innumerable careers of talented and industrious interpreters have been spent attempting to prove that a gospel of salvation by works is delusional and futile.  Moody’s The Ryrie Study Bible (KJV) reckons that the following verses can lie at the heart of a passage “on discipleship”:

“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?  Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works” (Matthew 16:25-26).

It is amazing that the plain meaning of a scriptural passage about salvation can be interpreted so as to refer to post-salvation “discipleship,” yet it is also drearily unsurprising.  It is unfortunate that the Gospels—and what is more, the Gospels under the shadow of the balance of the New Testament—can be construed as some one or another “story,” this story consisting of such elements and themes as the interpreter selects.

A layman like me cannot have a car radio tuned to Christian stations for very long without noticing the visceral energy with which preachers declare that this or that constitutes something like a “golden thread” through “all of Scripture.”  Few of such threads cannot be shown to be plucked out of an immensely more complicated fabric.

Therefore, it would not serve well, in light of the preceding, for this blog to attempt to provide another “golden thread” or to make contentions about the proper “story” to be seen in “all of Scripture.”

(Indeed, it would not be warranted to assume that an elucidation of the teachings of Jesus—if that be our goal—would necessarily involve, or be limited to, all the Bible or Bible-variants’ contents.  One might be reminded of the conjectures—before the hagiographers got to him—of Martin Luther about whether he might be required to discard the Letter of James.)

And so, if I am to contend that this blog has anything to offer, I must hope to provide something other than a story—or, to be more precise, less than a story.  I contend that the canonical Gospels—barring some scarcely-contested corruptions, errors, and interpolations—comprise not a story framework by which salvation through Jesus is presented, but comprise rather a narrative arc in which the ministry of Jesus is shown to be consonant with a primordial and inescapable proto-story of creaturely experience.

This universally present proto-story repeats endlessly, with endless variations and endless varieties of duration.  It is the basal experience the created being has with Creation; it is the infra-cognitive connection with the environment that provides the tangible experience through which a fleshed-out relationship with existence is gained; it is the coming-into-being of a consciousness that had being before it had consciousness.

It is the fleeting and ephemeral experience, endlessly to be grasped at, that Jesus describes:

“Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall in no wise enter therein” (Luke 18:17).

This is also, of course, the substance of the “roused” element of “Roused, Readied, Reaped”—though in practice, as we shall see, it might be more exhaustively rendered as “Roused, Readied, Reaped—Repeat.”