The Existence of Jesus

In my last post I wrote:

“The great moment of humanity’s fate was not the apple-story Fall, but the primordial moment in which God decided of Adam, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone’—when the element of ‘alone’ reflected the dispositions of Adam, not the dispositions of the Creator who for eons has lamented a broken communion with the man and his progeny.”

Against this I placed a description of Adam’s savior:

“This is the Jesus who could never stop moving toward God, who could never stop reaching out toward God, who could never stop yearning for God.  Between us and Jesus, of course (as between us and God) is a chasm.  Across the chasm come the dwindling strains of the screams and of the laughter, all of which—even together with every breath of Jesus—were bought for us at an inestimable price.”

Jesus could never be alone in the universe of God—even in the totality of totalities of God.  Adam (and his offspring) could be alone.  Jesus is the Adam who cannot be without God.  Jesus is the Adam who cannot exist—who cannot be conceived to exist—without God.

In his incarnation, Jesus—the eternal Son of God—was a man like any other, except in the aspect of humanity’s alienation from God.  It is a fool’s errand to attempt to pick out the particulars of how Jesus’ divinity would have informed him as a man, or have affected his ability to do things as a man, or have colored and defined his expression of himself to his fellow humans.  When “God” and when “man”?  When “God-like” and when “human”?  It suffices to say that he was a man, and it ought to suffice, to observe that untying the mysteries of his “dual” nature is no more to be achieved than untying the mystery of God’s existence itself.

Indeed, it might be more apt to observe that the mortal human, created in the image of God and yet capable of desecrating that image, is the one with a “dual” nature.  Adam lacked nothing when he was created—the horrible mystery is why Adam (and all of us) could find existence in God’s Creation to be an unfulfilling state.  (This, by the way, can clean up any concern about God in Genesis described as creating them “male” and “female” in his image.  There is no reason to imagine that Eve was created less pristinely than Adam and—like Adam—her first narrative description has to do with a proclivity to find something lacking in existence.)

As I wrote above, it is a fool’s errand to attempt to pick out the particulars of how Jesus’ divinity would have informed him as a man, or have affected his ability to do things as a man, or have colored and defined his expression of himself to his fellow humans.  This is no small consideration.  The depictions of Jesus in the Gospels dance back and forth, for example, between Jesus being described as knowing all that was in the minds of people around him, and Jesus being described as asking honest questions and reacting to the answers as though he had to digest them in real time.  Such things are puzzles only to commentators who insist on pulling apart mysteries, and all that is to be found within is more mystery.

No one has to read three-quarters of the way through the Bible, arriving at last at what we generally call the “New Testament,” to be confronted by such mysteries.  Does God need to ask Adam where he is?  Does God have such a body as to enjoy “the cool of the day?”  Could Adam have imagined that he could evade God’s gaze?  Such things are stories, meant to illustrate truths, and it is conceit indeed to imagine that we can grasp more than a fraction of those truths in any event.  In the gospels we are confronted by stories.  Sometimes we like to call them “accounts”—as though that altered the fact that we are presented merely with ideas, and—like the limited viewpoints of stories—such ideas are in essence merely voices thrown against ineffable mysteries, voices the echoes of which are the moments when we think we have a greater understanding, to be followed hard upon by other moments when the illumination—was it real or not?—fades from us.

What is really lamentable about our attempts to understand the mysteries of religion is our tendency to try to answer the wrong types of questions.  No casual reader of Church history has to be told of the incredibly virulent disputes about the Incarnation.  That the general answer arrived at after centuries is that the incarnate Jesus was “all God and all man” is scarcely surprising—in that (apart from it being a truth understandable to us when we are exhausted from postulating otherwise), it is so general an answer as to swamp other, more particularistic, contentions.

But what have we achieved when we declare that the incarnate Jesus was “all God and all man,” when we apply such an idea so as to undercut the manifest import of gospel stories?  I am thinking most particularly of Jesus’ cry of despair on the Cross.  “All God and all man” at that point means little if Jesus is thought to be suffering all the pains of a mortal, yet denied by our analysis one of the greatest pains of death—the pain of uncertainty that must always attend a mortal’s limited understanding.  It is contended sometimes that Jesus was simply praying from the psalms—an unprovable contention that would scarcely explain why such a Jesus, possessed at that moment of a divinely-unquestioning human comportment, would choose to burden untold generations with such a choice among so many in the psalms.

Or as I wrote of Jesus in the last post but one:

“When his mortal mind was burdened—and in the horrifying instance violently beset—with the human-intellect-defying question of God’s justice, he cried out, ‘Why have you forsaken me?’  For Jesus—reckoned to have set aside his divinity for this episode—to have understood as a man the totality of what was happening to him, would have been as unnatural for him as it would have been for him to be able to hang there and suffer as a man until the crack of doom.”

And yet we seem to be perennially unable to shake the imagery of “all God and all man” as being “man on the outside and God on the inside.”  I am thinking of the debate about the “historicity” of Jesus, wherein it is claimed by some (often leaving the idea of the supernatural aside) that the Jesus of the early Church must have been based on a real figure, while it is claimed by others that the early Church believed first in an otherworldly crucifixion—a supernatural rather than earthly phenomenon—that was only later imagined to have occurred on Earth to a real man.

In one mode of analysis, it might be granted that each side (the “historicist” and the “mythicist”) has its points, but that question itself is tangential to another, which we are unlikely to notice.  If it is maintained that Jesus could not have failed to know always of the justice of God (that is, if Jesus’ cry of despair was mere display) or even if it is maintained that Jesus could not have failed to know the names of every member of every first-century Amazonian tribe—he’s “all God,” after all—what then is the distinction between a “supernatural” crucifixion and an “earthly” one?

That is—and I am addressing the question as it would exist for believers—if the humanity of Jesus did not permeate his existence in the Incarnation, so as to extend even to his most basic thoughts during the Crucifixion and otherwise, what point then is there in attempting to defend the existence of an historical Jesus versus a “supernatural” myth?  In every substance of belief—if not in the eyes of an unsympathetic secular “world”—a Jesus existing and suffering on a supernatural plane would differ in no discernable respect from an always-encyclopedically-right-thinking (and therefore in no respect doubting) flesh-and-blood Jesus hanging on a real Cross.  This never-doubting Jesus (whose divinity could not by definition be confined to a physical plane) would be simply a supernatural entity before whom was being paraded the tangible trappings of a series of events.  Calling such a supernatural procession “real” in the historical sense would be to claim for that Crucifixion no more substance than the Crucifixion as described by the mythicists.

The incarnate Jesus was divine.  How that might work out in particulars does not seem likely to be understandable to us this side of the grave.  In trying to work out how we should address the Gospels—and therefore our limited understanding of the Incarnation—it makes all the difference, whether we view humanity’s predicament as one stemming from the “Fall” (so-called) or—as I maintain—as a predicament stemming from Adam's original estrangement from God.  In the former conceptualization, that of the “Fall,” the operative notion is the sin of transgression, and therefore we try to look at the Gospels in terms of who was right and who was wrong—a somewhat problematic quest in the service of a Savior who counsels us against passing judgment.  Moreover, there are times when Jesus accords to the tantalizingly-described “Son of Man” prerogatives that frustrate (to say the least) any attempts to define Jesus’ acts as “right or wrong” according to some set of rules.

In the latter conceptualization—conceiving of humanity’s separation from God as being an ineffable mystery—“sinlessness” (if we could even hope to get our minds around all its permutations) is subservient to affinity.  Jesus, being divine, was never separated from God.  Of course, in a generalized mode of analysis, it might be said that Adam never had to be separated from God.  What was paramount, of course, in the case of Adam was his tendency to direct his attentions elsewhere, to look—unsurprisingly, we would say—for a counterpart to himself in the creaturely realm.  To call that “sinful” would be a stretching of our understanding of the word, and much less might we understand why Adam was created as he was by a God who loved him.

God loved Jesus as a man in the world, and God loved Adam as a man in the world.  We can analyze Jesus and Adam in terms of sinfulness, and we can analyze Jesus and Adam in terms of merit.  Or we can analyze the humanity shared by them in terms of the great element that the Scriptures declares to separate them in the narrative—the element of affinity with God.  Adam lost that affinity in the paradise of the Garden.  Jesus retained that affinity in the agonies of the Cross.  The Garden, for Adam, was not without its toil.  The Cross, for Jesus, was short-lived enough to surprise Pilate.  None of that matters—any more than do our puerile declarations about righteousness—in the face of the question of affinity with our Maker.