Phantasmagoria Three

The gospels tell of Jesus being crucified and then being raised again.  There are notions of there being sufficient "evidences" of Jesus' resurrection, and then there are notions of such "evidences" being lacking (if not impossible or--which is just as bad--unfalsifiable.)  Many people holding either view think of themselves as reasonable and responsible.

I am not about to make it any easier, and this is bound up with my emphasis on a "phantasmagoria."  One camp may think that the only reasonable explanation for the creation of the New Testament and for the history of the early Church was an actual Resurrection.  The other camp may think that human artifices--from unconscious grief hallucination all the way to deliberate falsification--are sufficient explanations for the Resurrection Myth.

But is it not undeniable that the notion of resurrection (or, more simply, "raising the dead") was commonplace in the New Testament milieu?  I don't mention this to bolster either aforementioned camp, but rather to bring attention to the fact that the camps arguing about the possibility of the resurrection of Jesus are arguing instead about the possibility of the substance or not of the canonical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus.

Jesus is supposed to have risen from the dead.  Rising from the dead means coming out of the grave.  It was virtually a given in the first-century Levant that people rose from the dead.  Jesus distributes the power to raise the dead to his followers, and he displays the power himself.  It was half-expected by some that he would essentially display that power in real time, climbing down from the cross.

When Jesus did die, it was--as we are told continually--a shocking and grief-inducing experience for his followers.  To believers, the despairing responses of the disciples are explained by their woeful incomprehension of Jesus' message--a bit of a stretch, since Jesus did not make his anticipated fate at all unclear.

To many sceptics, the shock and grief experienced by the disciples is enough to explain the disciples' conjuring of visions and messages from their departed leader.  In any event, the shock and grief are taken--by both camps, I will note--in concert with an untroubled acceptance of the supposedly unsurprising paralysis of the disciples.

Why such paralysis?  Weren't the disciples old hands at raising the dead?  If Matthew is to be believed, many tombs were opened at the death of Jesus.  It would seem almost impious for the believers not to have implored their Savior to rise as well.  Or if the disciples had hesitated to impose on their Master directly, would not the same shock-and-grief otherwise described have animated their inner or unconscious thoughts, perhaps to outward effect?

In short, both believers and sceptics have decided that the question at hand is whether Jesus caused his own resurrection.  As an intellectual exercise, of course, that is not the only discussable option.  Did the believers blame themselves for being unable to raise Jesus?  It might be contended that the disciples would think themselves presumptuous if they attempted to raise their Savior, but they were presumptuous enough--sad to say--to entertain the notion that their Savior had been defeated.

I mention these considerations because it seems to me that we are capable of a lamentable tendency to describe in searing terms the emotions of people in this or other similar situations, and simultaneously we are capable of blithely attributing to the participants the assimilation of some quite clear-cut philosophical positions.  Apparently the bereaved disciples had arrived at a compact to the effect that the only resurrection that might apply to Jesus would be a resurrection he himself effected.

This is folly.  The disciples were not merely shocked and grief-stricken.  If they were people at all like us, they were frantic.  They had not experienced merely a tragedy.  The hideously unnecessary sufferings of the two criminals would have been a tragedy.  What the disciples witnessed was a phantasmagoria.

Phantasmagoria Two

Much is made in the study of the Bible about the "recapitulation of themes"--as though it might only be understood about recurring narrated themes that they are presented so in order to help us understand.  One might be reminded of the "spirit of Elijah" and how it is described in the Old Testament as a precursor of the end of the age.  Then John the Baptist comes along (bearing scant external resemblance to the Elijah prophecy) and Jesus says that John is an embodiment of the spirit of the prophet.  In truth, one might only conclude that the substance of John's message is enough to validate his connection to Elijah.  The "spirit of Elijah" is a spirit of self-denying expectation of the messiah.  The recapitulation of the prophecy of the spirit of Elijah is a description of a recurring (waxing and waning) devotion of the people.  The appearance of the spirit of Elijah is something that is always happening.

Similarly, the theme of Jesus suffering temptation is not shown at first in the desert and then at last in Gethsemane in order merely to seal a theme in the minds of readers.  It is said of the Temptations that they are concluded with Satan going away and waiting to assail Jesus again at some opportune moment.  That statement cannot be taken literally, since the humanity of Jesus would be a farce if Jesus were not subject--as are we all--with temptation at every turn.  The temptation of Jesus never ended.

This is one of the reasons that I will refer to the Crucifixion as a "phantasmagoria."  This has nothing to do with idea that the Crucifixion is "ahistorical" (that is, that it cannot be shown to have happened) but rather that it is "atemporal" (that is, that any notion of its attachment to time--or even to space--is immaterial.)  Jesus--as a human being subject to temptation as all of us--was constantly in the desert with the devil.  Jesus--as a human being always carrying the cross that he assigns to all of us--was constantly being crucified.

So also with the notion that the life--particularly the Passion--of Jesus is a recapitulation of the early Genesis themes.  To link Eden with Gethsemane can provide abundant fodder for sermons, but the truth of humanity under judgment is not understood as bracketed by the two gardens.  Rather, it is understood as constant interaction of human with (and within) the conditions of Genesis, as Jesus so often reminds us.

Another Genesis reference will provide the best illustration.  God says to Cain, "if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door."  The only intelligible interpretation of the passage is to the effect that straying from the proper path will lead to a burgeoning of innumerable other improper paths.  It is not to be missed that Cain in punished with the prospect of spending all his days as a rootless and ill-sustained wanderer (and it is the prospect, not the outcome, that is the punishment, for God does not prevent Cain from founding a city.)  For Cain, as for all immersed in sin, time and place are torments and continual concerns.  That is why worldly and corrupt religion looks to recurring themes as benchmarks of eager anticipation.  This or that theme is going to crop up to take away the sting of some regret or of some self-judgment.

The righteous, however, are unburdened by time and space, and are predisposed to discern the themes of God always and everywhere.  At least--time and space mean nothing to Jesus, and only by remembering this can we understand his ministry.

Running a Test

aaaimRunning a Test

Running a test.

Phantasmagoria One

Then there is that business about the ostensible evidence for the Resurrection.  It is perhaps worthy of note that none of the canonical gospels describes anyone actually seeing the Resurrection itself--an unfortunate omission for any apologist who has ever set out to rebut the Swoon Theory.  The reader--on that score--is left free to imagine disciples (presumably able and not-recently-tortured disciples) heaving the stone aside and helping Jesus to his feet.  "But, no!" says the apologist, "The testimony of the Gospels makes it plain that the injuries done to Jesus must have been nothing less than fatal."

And so the Son of God, fully divine, through whom everything was made, calmer of seas, driver-out of devils, raiser of the dead--even this Jesus could not survive a surprisingly brief crucifixion?  This same Jesus who cannot survive a surprisingly brief crucifixion is, however, apparently capable of effecting his own resurrection.  Yet would not the same desired outcomes (a Jesus shown to possess divine power and a Jesus alive after having been determinedly executed) be arrived at in either scenario?

Obviously, the emphasis in (the surviving versions of) the gospels, and in the centuries that followed, has never really been about the historicity of Jesus or the historicity of his overcoming the grave.  It would be as nothing for someone to dig up a dead Jesus' body or an empty Jesus' tomb--considering how common was Jesus' name and how typical has been the case that tombs of that age have been plundered.

No, the matter at hand has always been the propagation of the gospel stories (parsed out into their physically unprovable particulars) and nothing has degraded those stories--or laid them more open to ridicule--than trying to prove them.  One might be reminded of Schliemann, scratching about where any competent ethnographer would have expected to find an ancient settlement of some description, and then choosing to describe his discovery as "Troy."  As someone has pointed out, the Troy for which Schliemann was searching was in ancient books and nowhere else, regardless of what he dug out of the sand.

Similarly, the story of the Resurrection--even to the most sober observer--is a phantasmagoria.  It is, as we will see, meant to be a phantasmagoria, and it is all the more profitably viewed as it is viewed by the most sober of observers.

Children and Childish People

Our adulthood is just glorified adolescence.  We never reach the endpoint of our development, and this is never more apparent than when we try to pontificate about the great truths of existence.  Take "perfection," for example, when we try to assert that our ability to understand perfection implies that--despite our own imperfection--we are able to conceptualize "perfection," and so therefore (as the reasoning goes) the only way we might hold a concept of perfection is if that concept was handed to us from above.

Of course, such reasoning is childish, in that it conveniently accords to the reasoner an unquestioned capacity to understand "perfection."  Could not God create a race with a more refined understanding of perfection than we possess?  Could not God create such increasingly-refined races in an infinite progression, rendering with each step the immediately-preceding race benighted as far as this topic goes?  Would not the serially-surpassed races be exposed one-by-one as worshippers--not of God, but of their conceptions of God?

Such mistaken thinking is emblematic of adolescence.  Throwing off slavish adherence to the parentally-imposed worldview, the adolescent concocts a personalized one.  We might pretend that the adolescent has his or her "whole life" for the concoction, but in reality no one is more pressed for time than a young person.  Hence the adolescent tendency either to embrace bizarre worldviews or to embrace bizarrely unrealistic expectations of the fruits of established worldviews.  Hence the adolescent tendency to try to wish a reality into being--a tendency that finds its deepest refuge in untestable realms like religion.

It is extremely important for us to understand that the human race consists only of two types of people: children and childish people.  These two categories are reflected in Adam and Eve.  Even before the (thoroughly over-hyped) Fall, they were as children of a benevolent father.  They were fully capable of rebellion, such as in Adam's unfulfillment with communion with God, or Eve's disreputable conversation with the snake (which would have been sinful even if she had not tasted of the fruit.)

Even the text's description of Eve's motives is consistent with an early adolescent's stretching of wings.  Eve wanted to taste of the enticing fruit, and she wanted to acquire wisdom that she understood she did not possess.  The descriptions, courtesy of subsequent commentators, of Adam and Eve rising up in diabolical defiance of God, are not supported by Genesis.  They just acted like very young adults.  They were punished in the same way that very young adults are punished by God today--by being made subject to the physical, mental, and psychological traumas of adulthood.

The Jesus who admonishes us to be childlike also takes a matter-of-fact approach to Genesis.  The first narrative description of Eve as a mother (with all of its attendant agonies) comes with the Curses; the first mention of sexual desire comes with the Curses; the first mention of sex-based domination comes with the Curses; the first description of a sweating, straining Adam comes with the Curses.  Before the Fall, Adam and Eve had no shame before each other, and after the Fall come both Adam's naming of Eve as a mother, and the first narrative reference to the sex act.

Jesus takes it as a given that the redeemed state of humanity does not include marriage.  Can there be any reasonable doubt that the overriding physical manifestation of the Fall was puberty, and can we not as a species accept that the "death" inherent in the Edenic curses is the bittersweet reality of each generation ceding its life to the next?

The March of Misery

One thing of importance needs to be noted about the early Genesis narrative: it is not a human drama.  In one sense--in keeping with the teachings of Jesus--this is no surprise, since Jesus treats the conditions of mankind "in the beginning" as normative, not as the playing-out of individual characters' lives.  The only aspect of drama to the narrative is added by us later, and an honest appraisal of the narrative would entail an understanding that all we might attribute emotionally to the narrative is futility punctuated by despair.

From the creation of Adam to the curse upon Ham/Canaan (and the sequel to that curse in the Dispersal) the tendency of the narrative is unremittingly negative.  Leaving the obviously bad parts aside, even the good parts are bad.  Adam's initial delight with Eve is self-centered; their lack of shame arises from ignorance, not purity; their reprieve from physical death is accompanied by the deaths of innocent creatures.

The first recorded birth was a curse, and it led grindingly to Cain's seventy-seven-fold-vengeful descendant Lamech.  Even the birth of Seth to Eve was befouled by self-centeredness, as if one child might be swapped for another.  And this was the Seth with whom (anachronistically?) the use of "the name of the Lord" is associated--though it could never be less than tragic that the ineffable omnipresence of God is encapsulated by us in an uttered name, no matter how carefully chosen.

The best of Seth's descendants (the best of surmises about "the sons of God," unless they were fallen angels) were drawn down by lust, and the best of the best--Noah--drew down upon humanity the curses of oppression, slavery, and racism in a fit of diabolical vengeance.

There is only misery "in the beginning," when everything of substance is accounted for, and there is only the misery of self-denial ("losing one's life") to address the matter now.