Daniel E Wolf
Used to be, when we had kids at home, if something got lost – like, say, the TV remote – we could always blame them. Just one of the many benefits of having kids, right? But now… well, you know. “Have you checked the bottom of the yarn pile beside the couch, Dear?”
All’s I’m sayin’.
When we meet Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full-grown man. He comes down from Galilee, meets John, an ascetic desert hermit who lives on locusts and wild honey, and is baptized by him in the River Jordan. If one thing seems nearly certain to the people who read and study the Gospels for a living, it’s that this really happened: John the Baptizer (as some like to call him, to give a better sense of the original Greek’s flat-footed active form) baptized Jesus. They believe it because it seems so unlikely, so at odds with the idea that Jesus always played the star in his own show: Why would anyone have said it if it weren’t true? This curious criterion governs historical criticism of Gospel texts: The more improbable or “difficult” an episode or remark is, the likelier it is to be a true record, on the assumption that you would edit out all the weird stuff if you could, and keep it in only because the tradition is so strong that it can’t plausibly be excluded. If Jesus says something nice, then someone is probably saying it for him. If he says something nasty, then probably he really did.
So then, the scholars argue, the author of Mark, whoever he was (the familiar names conventionally attached to each Gospel come later) added the famous statement of divine favor, descending directly from the heavens as they opened. But what does the voice say? In Mark, the voice says, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased,” seeming to inform a Jesus who doesn’t yet know that this is so. But some early versions of Luke have the voice quoting Psalm 2: “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.” Only in Matthew does it announce Jesus’ divinity to the world as though it were an ancient, fixed agreement, not a new act. In Mark, for that matter, the two miraculous engines that push the story forward at the start and pull it toward Heaven at the end – the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection – make no appearance at all. The story begins with Jesus’ adult baptism with no hint of a special circumstance at his birth, and there is actually some grumbling by Jesus about his family (“Only in his home town, among his relatives and in his own house, is a prophet without honor,” he complains). It ends with a cry of desolation as he is executed, and then an enigmatic and empty tomb. (It’s left to the Roman centurion to recognize him as the Son of God after he is dead, while the verses in Mark that show him risen were apparently added later.)
The intractable complexities of fact produce the inevitable ambiguities of faith. The more one knows, the less one knows. Was Jesus a carpenter, or even a carpenter’s son? The Greek word tekto¯n, long taken to mean “carpenter,” could mean something closer to a stone-worker or a day laborer. (One thinks of the similar shadings of a word like “printer,” which could refer to Ben Franklin or to his dogsbody.) If a carpenter, then presumably he was an artisan. If a stone-worker, then presumably he spent his early years as a laborer, schlepping from Nazareth to the grand Greco-Roman city of Sepphoris nearby to help build its walls and perhaps visit its theater and agora. And what of the term “Son of Man,” which he uses again and again in Mark, mysteriously? “The Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” As Diarmaid MacCulloch points out in his new, immensely ambitious and absorbing history, “Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years” (Viking; $45), the phrase, which occurs in the Gospels “virtually exclusively in the reported words of Jesus,” certainly isn’t at all the same as the later “Son of God,” and may merely be Aramaic for “folks like us.”
Belief remains a bounce, faith a leap. Still, the appetite for historical study of the New Testament remains a publishing constant and a popular craze. Book after book – this year, ten in one month alone – appears, seeking the Truth. Paul Johnson has a sound believer’s life, “Jesus: A Biography from a Believer,” while Paul Verhoeven, the director of “Basic Instinct,” has a new skeptical-scholar’s book, “Jesus of Nazareth” (Seven Stories; $23.95). Verhoeven turns out to be a member of the Jesus Seminar, a collection mostly of scholars devoted to reconstructing the historical Jesus, and much of what he has to say is shrewd and learned. (An odd pull persists between box-office and Biblical study. A few years ago, another big action-film director and producer, James Cameron, put himself at the center of a documentary called “The Lost Tomb of Jesus.”)
What the amateur reader wants, given the thickets of uncertainty that surround the garden, is not what the passionate polemicists want – not so much a verdict on whether Jesus was nasty or nice as a sense of what, if anything, was new in his preaching. Was the cult that changed the world a product of Paul’s evangelism and imperial circumstance and the military embrace of one miracle-mystery cult among many such around? Or was there really something new, something unheard of, that can help explain the scale of what happened later? Did the rise of Christendom take place because historical plates were moving with a poor martyred prophet caught between, or did one small pebble of parable and preaching start the avalanche that ended the antique world?
Ever since serious scholarly study of the Gospels began in the nineteenth century, its moods have ranged from the frankly skeptical – including a “mythicist” position that the story is entirely made up – to the credulous, with some archeologists still holding that it is all pretty reliable, and tombs and traces can be found if you study the texts hard enough. The current scholarly tone is, judging from the new books, realist but pessimistic. While accepting a historical Jesus, the scholarship also tends to suggest that the search for him is a little like the search for the historical Sherlock Holmes: There were intellectual-minded detectives around, and Conan Doyle had one in mind in the eighteen-eighties, but the really interesting bits – Watson, Irene Adler, Moriarty, and the Reichenbach Falls – were, even if they all had remote real-life sources, shaped by the needs of storytelling, not by traces of truth. Holmes dies because heroes must, and returns from the dead, like Jesus, because the audience demanded it. (The view that the search for the historical Jesus is like the search for the historical Superman – that there’s nothing there but a hopeful story and a girlfriend with an alliterative name – has by now been marginalized from the seminaries to the Internet. The scholar Earl Doherty defends it on his Web site with grace and tenacity.)
The American scholar Bart Ehrman has been explaining the scholars’ truths for more than a decade now in a series of sincere, quiet, and successful books. Ehrman is one of those best-selling authors like Richard Dawkins and Robert Ludlum and Peter Mayle, who write the same book over and over, but the basic template is so good that the new version is always worth reading. In his latest installment, “Jesus, Interrupted” (HarperOne; $15.99), Ehrman once again shares with his readers the not entirely good news he found a quarter century ago when, after a fundamentalist youth, he went to graduate school: that all the Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death; that all were written in Greek, which Jesus and the apostles didn’t speak and couldn’t write (if they could read and write at all); and that they were written as testaments of faith, not chronicles of biography, shaped to fit a prophecy rather than report a profile.
The odd absences in Mark are matched by the unreal presences in the other Gospels. The beautiful Nativity story in Luke, for instance, in which a Roman census forces the Holy Family to go back to its ancestral city of Bethlehem, is an obvious invention, since there was no Empire-wide census at that moment, and no sane Roman bureaucrat would have dreamed of ordering people back to be counted in cities that their families had left hundreds of years before. The author of Luke, whoever he might have been, invented Bethlehem in order to put Jesus in David’s city. James Tabor, a professor of religious studies, in his 2006 book “The Jesus Dynasty,” takes surprisingly seriously the old Jewish idea that Jesus was known as the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier named Pantera, as well attested a tradition as any, occurring in Jewish texts of the second century, in which a Jesus ben Pantera makes several appearances, and the name is merely descriptive, not derogatory. Tabor has even found, however improbably, a tombstone in Germany for a Roman soldier from Syria-Palestine named Pantera.
What seems a simple historical truth is that all the Gospels were written after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in the First Jewish-Roman War, in 70 C.E. – a catastrophe so large that it left the entire Jesus movement in a crisis that we can dimly imagine if we think of Jewish attitudes before and after the Holocaust: The scale of the tragedy leads us to see catastrophe as having been built into the circumstance. As L. Michael White’s “Scripting Jesus: The Gospels in Rewrite” (HarperOne; $28.99) explains in daunting scholarly detail, even Mark – which, coming first, might seem to be closest to the truth – was probably written in the ruins of the Temple and spiritually shaped to its desolate moment. Mark’s essential point, he explains, is about secrecy: Jesus keeps telling people to be quiet about his miracles and confides only to an inner circle of disciples. With the Temple gone, White says, it was necessary to persuade people that the grotesque political failure of Jesus’ messianism wasn’t a real failure. Mark invents the idea that Jesus’ secret was not that he was the “Davidic” messiah, the Arthur-like returning king, but that he was someone even bigger: The Son of God, whose return would signify the end of time and the birth of the Kingdom of God. The literary critic Frank Kermode, in “The Genesis of Secrecy” (1979), a pioneering attempt to read Mark seriously as poetic literature, made a similar point, though his is less historical than interpretative. Kermode considers Mark to be, as the French would say, a text that reads itself: The secret it contains is that its central figure is keeping a secret that we can never really get. It is an intentionally open-ended story, prematurely closed, a mystery without a single solution.
Even if we make allowances for Mark’s cryptic tracery, the human traits of his Jesus are evident: Intelligence, short temper, and an ironic, dueling wit. What seems new about Jesus is not his piety or divine detachment but the humanity of his irritability and impatience. He’s no Buddha. He gets annoyed at the stupidity of his followers, their inability to grasp an obvious point. “Do you have eyes but fail to see?” he asks the hapless disciples. The fine English actor Alec McCowen used to do a one-man show in which he recited Mark, complete, and his Jesus came alive instantly as a familiar human type – the Gandhi-Malcolm-Martin kind of charismatic leader of an oppressed people, with a character that clicks into focus as you begin to dramatize it. He’s verbally spry and even a little shifty. He likes defiant, enigmatic paradoxes and pregnant parables that never quite close, perhaps by design. A story about a vineyard whose ungrateful husbandmen keep killing the servants sent to them is an anti-establishment, even an anti-clerical story, but it isn’t so obvious as to get him in trouble. The suspicious priests keep trying to catch him out in a declaration of anti-Roman sentiment: Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar or not, they ask – that is, do you recognize Roman authority or don’t you? He has a penny brought out, sees the picture of the emperor on it, and, shrugging, says to give to the state everything that rightly belongs to the state. The brilliance of that famous crack is that Jesus turns the question back on the questioner in mock-innocence. Why, you give the king the king’s things and God God’s. Of course, this leaves open the real question: What is Caesar’s and what is God’s? It’s a tautology designed to evade self-incrimination.
Jesus’ morality has a brash, side-wise indifference to conventional ideas of goodness. His pet style blends the epigrammatic with the enigmatic. When he makes that complaint about the prophet having no honor in his own home town, or says exasperatedly that there is no point in lighting a candle unless you intend to put it in a candlestick, his voice carries a disdain for the props of piety that still feels startling. And so with the tale of the boy who wastes his inheritance but gets a feast from his father, while his dutiful brother doesn’t; or the one about the weeping whore who is worthier than her good, prim onlookers; or about the passionate Mary who is better than her hardworking sister Martha. There is a wild gaiety about Jesus’ moral teachings that still leaps off the page. He is informal in a new way, too, that remains unusual among prophets. MacCulloch points out that he continually addresses God as “Abba,” Father, or even Dad, and that the expression translated in the King James Version as a solemn “Verily I say unto you” is actually a quirky Aramaic throat-clearer, like Dr. Johnson’s “Depend upon it, Sir.”
Some of the sayings do have, in their contempt for material prosperity, the ring of Greek Cynic philosophy, but there is also something neither quite Greek nor quite Jewish about Jesus’ morality that makes it fresh and strange even now. Is there a more miraculous scene in ancient literature than the one in John where Jesus absent-mindedly writes on the ground while his fellow-Jews try to entrap him into approving the stoning of an adulteress, only to ask, wide-eyed, if it wouldn’t be a good idea for the honor of throwing the first stone to be given to the man in the mob who hasn’t sinned himself? Is there a more compressed and charming religious exhortation than the one in the Gospel of Thomas in which Jesus merrily recommends to his disciples, “Be passersby”? Too much fussing about place and home and ritual, and even about where, exactly, you’re going to live, is unnecessary: Be wanderers, dharma bums.
This social radicalism still shines through – not a programmatic radicalism of national revolution but one of Kerouac-like satori-seeking-on-the-road. And the social radicalism is highly social. The sharpest opposition in the Gospels, the scholar and former priest John Dominic Crossan points out in his illuminating books – “The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant” is the best known – is between John the Faster and Jesus the Feaster. Jesus eats and drinks with whores and highwaymen, turns water into wine, and, finally, in one way or another, establishes a mystical union at a feast through its humble instruments of bread and wine.
The table is his altar in every sense. Crossan, the co-founder of the Jesus Seminar, makes a persuasive case that Jesus’ fressing was perhaps the most radical element in his life – that his table manners pointed the way to his heavenly morals. Crossan sees Jesus living within a Mediterranean Jewish peasant culture, a culture of clan and cohort, in which who eats with whom defines who stands where and why. So the way Jesus repeatedly violates the rules on eating, on “commensality,” would have shocked his contemporaries. He dines with people of a different social rank, which would have shocked most Romans, and with people of different tribal allegiance, which would have shocked most Jews. The most forceful of his sayings, still shocking to any pious Jew or Muslim, is “What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him unclean, but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him unclean.” Jesus isn’t a hedonist or an epicurean, but he clearly isn’t an ascetic, either: He feeds the multitudes rather than instructing them how to go without. He’s interested in saving people living normal lives, buying and selling what they can, rather than in retreating into the company of those who have already arrived at a moral conclusion about themselves.
To a modern reader, the relaxed egalitarianism of the open road and the open table can seem undermined by the other part of Jesus’ message, a violent and even vengeful prediction of a final judgment and a large-scale damnation. In Mark, Jesus is both a fierce apocalyptic prophet who is preaching the death of the world – he says categorically that the end is near – and a wise philosophical teacher who professes love for his neighbor and supplies advice for living. If the end is near, why give so much sage counsel? If human life is nearly over, why preach in such detail the right way to live? One argument is that a later, perhaps “unpersonified” body of Hellenized wisdom literature was tacked on to an earlier account of a Jewish messianic prophet. Since both kinds of literature – apocalyptic hysterics and stoic sayings – can be found all over the period, perhaps they were merely wrenched together.
And yet a single figure who “projects” two personae at the same time, or in close sequence, one dark and one dreamy, is a commonplace among charismatic prophets. That’s what a charismatic prophet is: Someone whose aura of personal conviction manages to reconcile a hard doctrine with a humane manner. The leaders of the African-American community before the civil-rights era, for instance, had to be both prophets and political agitators to an oppressed and persecuted people in a way not unlike that of the real Jesus (and all the other forgotten zealots and rabbis whom the first-century Jewish historian Josephus names and sighs over). They, too, tended to oscillate between the comforting and the catastrophic. Malcolm X was the very model of a modern apocalyptic prophet-politician, unambiguously preaching violence and a doctrine of millennial revenge, all fueled by a set of cult beliefs – a hovering U.F.O., a strange racial myth. But Malcolm was also a community builder, a moral reformer (genuinely distraught over the sexual sins of his leader), who refused to carry weapons, and who ended, within the constraints of his faith, as some kind of universalist. When he was martyred, he was called a prophet of hate; within three decades of his death – about the time that separates the Gospels from Jesus – he could be the cover subject of a liberal humanist magazine like this one. One can even see how martyrdom and “beatification” draws out more personal detail, almost perfectly on schedule: Alex Haley, Malcolm’s Paul, is long on doctrine and short on details; thirty years on, Spike Lee, his Mark, has a full role for a wife and children, and a universalist message that manages to blend Malcolm into Mandela. (As if to prove this point, just the other week came news of suppressed chapters of Haley’s “Autobiography,” which, according to Malcolm’s daughter, “showed too much of my father’s humanity.”)
As the Bacchae knew, we always tear our Gods to bits, and eat the bits we like. Still, a real, unchangeable difference does exist between what might be called storytelling truths and statement-making truths – between what makes credible, if sweeping, sense in a story and what’s required for a close-knit metaphysical argument. Certain kinds of truths are convincing only in a narrative. The idea, for instance, that the ring of power should be given to two undersized amateurs to throw into a volcano at the very center of the enemy’s camp makes sound and sober sense, of a kind, in Tolkien, but you would never expect to find it as a premise at the Middle Earth Military Academy. Anyone watching Hamlet will find his behavior completely understandable – O.K., I buy it; he’s toying with his uncle – though any critic thinking about it afterward will reflect that this behavior is a little nuts.
In Mark, Jesus’ divinity unfolds without quite making sense intellectually, and without ever needing to. It has the hypnotic flow of dramatic movement. The story is one of self-discovery: He doesn’t know who he is and then he begins to think he does and then he doubts and in pain and glory he dies and is known. The story works. But, as a proposition under scrutiny, it makes intolerable demands on logic. If Jesus is truly one with God, in what sense could he suffer doubt, fear, exasperation, pain, horror, and so on? So we get the Jesus rendered in the Book of John, who doesn’t. But if he doesn’t suffer doubt, fear, exasperation, pain, and horror, in what sense is his death a sacrifice rather than just a theatrical enactment? A lamb whose throat is not cut and does not bleed is not really much of an offering.
None of this is very troubling if one has a pagan idea of divinity: The Son of God might then be half human and half divine, suffering and triumphing and working out his heroic destiny in the half-mortal way of Hercules, for instance. But that’s ruled out by the full weight of the Jewish idea of divinity – omnipresent and omniscient, knowing all and seeing all. If God he was – not some Hindu-ish avatar or offspring of God, but actually one with God – then God once was born and had dirty diapers and took naps. The longer you think about it, the more astounding, or absurd, it becomes. To be really believed at all, it can only be told again.
So the long history of the early Church councils that tried to make the tales into a theology is, in a way, a history of coming out of the movie confused, and turning to someone else to ask what just happened. This is the subject of Philip Jenkins’s “Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years” (HarperOne; $26.99). Jenkins explains what was at stake in the seemingly wacky wars over the Arian heresy – the question of whether Jesus the Son shared an essence with God the Father or merely a substance – which consumed the Western world through the second and third centuries. Was Jesus one with God in the sense that, say, Sean Connery is one with Daniel Craig, different faces of a single role, or in the sense that James Bond is one with Ian Fleming, each so dependent on the other that one cannot talk about the creation apart from its author? The passion with which people argued over apparently trivial word choices was, Jenkins explains, not a sign that they were specially sensitive to theology. People argued that way because they were part of social institutions – cities, schools, clans, networks – in which words are banners and pennants: Who pledged to whom was inseparable from who said what in what words. It wasn’t that they really cared about the conceptual difference between the claim that Jesus and the Father were homoousian (same in essence) and the claim that the two were homoiousian (same in substance); they cared about whether the Homoousians or the Homoiousians were going to run the Church.
The effort to seal off the inspiration from the intolerance, nice Jesus from nasty Jesus, is very old. Jefferson compiled his own New Testament, with the ethical teachings left in and the miracles and damnations left out – and that familiar, outraged sense of the ugly duplicity of the Christian heritage is at the heart of Philip Pullman’s new plaint against it, “The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ” (Canongate; $24), in which the two aspects are neatly divided into twins borne by Mary. The wise Jesus is brother to the shrewd Christ. One leads to the nice Jewish boy, the other to Paul’s scary punitive God. Pullman, a writer of great skill and feeling, as he has shown in his magical children’s fantasies, feels the betrayal of Jesus by his brother Christ as a fundamental betrayal of humanity. He wants us to forget Christ and return to Jesus alone, to surrender miracles for morals. Pullman’s book, however, is not narrowly polemical; he also retells the parables and acts with a lucid simplicity that strips away the Pauline barnacles. His real achievement is to translate Jesus’ sayings into a simple, almost childlike English that would seem to have much of the sound we are told is present in the artless original Greek: “Those who make peace between enemies, those who solve bitter disputes – they will be blessed. . . . But beware, and remember what I tell you: there are some who will be cursed, who will never inherit the Kingdom of God. D’you want to know who they are? Here goes: Those who are rich will be cursed.”
If one thing seems clear from all the scholarship, though, it’s that Paul’s divine Christ came first, and Jesus the wise rabbi came later. This fixed, steady two-ness at the heart of the Christian story can’t be wished away by liberal hope any more than it could be resolved by theological hair-splitting. Its intractability is part of the intoxication of belief. It can be amputated, mystically married, revealed as a fraud, or worshiped as the greatest of mysteries. The two go on, and their two-ness is what distinguishes the faith and gives it its discursive dynamism. All faiths have fights, but, as MacCulloch shows at intricate, thousand-page length, few have so many super-subtle shadings of dogma: wine or blood, flesh or wafer, one God in three spirits or three Gods in one; a song of children, stables, psalms, parables, and peacemakers, on the one hand, a threnody of suffering, nails, wild dogs, and damnation and risen God, on the other. The two spin around each other throughout history – the remote Pantocrator of Byzantium giving way to the suffering man of the Renaissance, and on and on.
It is typical of this conundrum that, in the past century, the best Christian poet, W. H. Auden, and the greatest anti-Christian polemicist, William Empson, were exact contemporaries, close friends, and, as slovenly social types, almost perfectly interchangeable Englishmen. Auden chose Christianity for the absolute democracy of its vision – there is, in it, “neither Jew nor German, East nor West, boy nor girl, smart nor dumb, boss nor worker.” Empson, in the same period, beginning in the fatal nineteen-forties, became the most articulate critic of a morality reduced “to keeping the taboos imposed by an infinite malignity,” in which the reintroduction of human sacrifice as a sacred principle left the believer with “no sense either of personal honor or of the public good.” (In this case, though, where Auden saw a nice Christ, Empson saw a nasty Jesus.)
Beyond the words, we still hear that cry. The Passion is still the point. In Mark, Jesus’ arrest and execution feels persuasively less preordained and willed than accidental and horrific. Jesus seems to have an intimation of the circumstance he has found himself in – leading a rebellion against Rome that is not really a rebellion, yet doesn’t really leave any possibility of retreat – and some corner of his soul wants no part of it: “Abba, Father, everything is possible for you. Take away this cup from me.” Mel Gibson was roughed up for roughing up Jesus, in his “Passion of the Christ,” but, though Gibson can fairly be accused of fanaticism, he can’t be accused of unfairness: in the long history of human cruelty, crucifixion, practiced as a mass punishment by the Romans, was uniquely horrible. The victim was stripped, in order to be deprived of dignity, then paraded, then whipped bloody, and then left to die as slowly as possible in as public a manner as conceivable. (In a sign of just how brutal it was, Josephus tells us that he begged the Roman rulers for three of his friends to be taken off the cross after they had spent hours on it; one lived.) The victim’s legs were broken to bring death in a blaze of pain. And the corpse was generally left to be eaten by wild dogs. It was terrifying and ever-present.
Verhoeven, citing Crossan, offers an opening scene for a Jesus bio-pic which neatly underlines this point. He imagines a man being nailed to a cross, cries of agony, two companion crosses in view, and then we crane out to see two hundred crosses and two hundred victims: we are at the beginning of the story, the mass execution of Jewish rebels in 4 B.C., not the end. This was the Roman death waiting for rebels from the outset, and Jesus knew it. Jesus’ cry of desolation—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” – though primly edited out or explained as an apropos quotation from the Psalms by later evangelists, pierces us even now from the pages of Mark, across all the centuries and Church comforts. The shock and pity of failure still resonates.
One thing, at least, the cry assures: The Jesus faith begins with a failure of faith. His father let him down, and the promise wasn’t kept. “Some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God,” Jesus announced; but none of them did. Jesus, and Paul following him, says unambiguously that whatever is coming is coming soon – that the end is very, very near. It wasn’t, and the whole of what follows is built on an apology for what went wrong. The seemingly modern waiver, “Well, I know he said that, but he didn’t really mean it quite the way it sounded,” is built right into the foundation of the cult. The sublime symbolic turn – or the retreat to metaphor, if you prefer – begins with the first words of the faith. If the Kingdom of God proved elusive, he must have meant that the Kingdom of God was inside, or outside, or above, or yet to come, anything other than what the words seem so plainly to have meant.
The argument is the reality, and the absence of certainty the certainty. Authority and fear can circumscribe the argument, or congeal it, but can’t end it. In the beginning was the word: in the beginning, and in the middle, and right there at the close, Word without end, Amen. The impulse of orthodoxy has always been to suppress the wrangling as a sign of weakness; the impulse of more modern theology is to embrace it as a sign of life. The deeper question is whether the uncertainty at the center mimics the plurality of possibilities essential to liberal debate, as the more open-minded theologians like to believe, or is an antique mystery in a story open only as the tomb is open, with a mystery left inside, never to be entirely explored or explained. With so many words over so long a time, perhaps passersby can still hear tones inaudible to the more passionate participants. Somebody seems to have hoped so, once. ♦
If you have read even one tenth of the many works Gopnik references in his gallivanting above then you’re a far better man than I am. Hell, if you made it this far down in the post then I stand on my chair and applaud you. About all I can claim to have read for myself is Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – but the greatest of these (IMHO) is definitely Mark. Beyond that, I leave it to you, gentle readers, to sift out the wheat from the chaff; to melt down and burn away the dross, leaving only liquid gold. Good luck with all that.
Well folks, I’m both sorry and happy to say it: There’s good news and there’s bad news. That glass of red wine you’ve been drinking for its supposed health benefits? Well, turns out, it’s both half full and half empty. Oh, and – here on Good Friday, a good-news-bad-news kind of holiday if ever there was one – that Anselmian substitutionary theory of atonement you’ve been counting on all these years? Yeah, that too may have a hole or two.
A new study, here reviews over 40 years worth of research into the health effects of human alcohol consumption. It conclusively shows that moderate drinking protects you from… not a goddamn thing. Sorry to be so blunt. But there you have it. How in the hell could we have got it so wrong for so long? Well, it’s worth reading the review. It points out for starters that much of this research was funded by the brewing/distilling industry.
But beyond that, in a methodological nutshell: Many people in many studies who were teetotalers for other-than-religious reasons are people who had to give up drinking because of non-alcohol-related health concerns. For example: A guy getting chemo for prostate cancer quits drinking because it interferes with the drugs he’s taking to treat his condition. I don’t have to tell you this poor fellow is more at risk of dying than the guy without cancer. So the folks in the extreme no-alcohol end of the drinking distribution fare more poorly health-wise over the long haul right alongside the heavy drinkers, who of course tend to die more often because of liver cirrhosis and traffic accidents.
It turns out that moderate drinkers tend to be moderate about a whole range of activities: Everything from diet and exercise to their non-type-A approach to love, work, and recreation. Being driven to extremes is bad for you in all kinds of different ways, while moderation’s inherently protective all across the board. One or two glasses of wine with dinner only appears to prevent heart attacks and strokes. It’s actually NOT the antioxidants in fermented-fruit-of-the-vine that makes this so. But rather, it’s because moderate drinking is associated with being wealthier, less obese, and having better dental care. That’s right, you heard me: The Wonders of Modern Dentistry.
So anyway, I guess you can see all this in one of a couple of ways. One way, the half-empty way, is to say, “Aww hell, I shoulda had a V-8 (with vodka). And while you’re at it, pour me another.” The other way, the half-full way, is to say, “Hey, moderation’s a great way to live. I think I’ll stick with it.” Whichever way you choose is entirely up to you. As for me? Well, pour me a glass of that Pinot Noir. But only one, and make it a small one. Thanks.
Alright, who was Anselm, what is “atonement,” and what exactly is being substituted for what here on Good Friday? In a nutshell: Anselm was a monk in the Middle Ages whose ideas about the significance and mechanism of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross were later picked up and popularized by the great Catholic theologian St. Thomas Aquinas. Atonement? That’s how sins get cancelled, and how debts end up paid-in-full, making God and man “at one.” And “substitutionary?” Aye, therein lies the rub, as Shakespeare once famously said.
Anselm held that the death of the God-human (Christ) on the cross was the only rationally intelligible way in which sinful humankind could be reconciled with God. Atonement is made possible through Christ, by whose infinite merits humanity is purified in an act of cooperative satisfaction of a perfect (also angry) God. For Anselm, satisfaction functions as an alternative to punishment….”
Much MUCH more is available at Wikipedia, here. The holes I mentioned before? Well, it has to do with the “God-being-pissed-off” part. At the root of it lies the inherent contradiction of “theodicy,” defined in the Oxford dictionary as “the vindication of divine goodness and providence in view of the existence of evil.” To boil it down: An all-good God who is also all-powerful can only allow evil to exist in a world in which He is either a) not all-good, or b) not all-powerful. Anything less compromises one or more of the three basic terms of our initial proposition about how divinity and humanity are related.
So, substitutionary atonement is a kind of theological loophole that allows us to maintain the basic Trinity of terminology above by having God come down from heaven to take on particular human historical form (Jesus of Nazareth), pay the price of sin Himself by sacrificially dying on Calvary’s cross, thereby satisfying all divine power/goodness requirements with a kind of cosmic switcheroo. I won’t even get into Occam’s Razor (the philosophical principle which states that the simplest explanation is usually the best one) because Anselmian logic is so convoluted – not to say counter-intuitive, ahem – well, let’s just say that thinking about it too long or too hard might just drive some folks to drink. And if there is one thing we know for sure after the last 40 years of research it’s that drinking too much is definitely bad for you. My guess, it’s probably not good for God either, but that’s just a guess.
Anyway, that’s all the good and bad news I can abide for one day: Happy Good Friday, y’all! You know, when you think about it for even half a second, that’s the kind of double-talk (Say WHAT? Happy Crucifixion Day? What part of that, exactly, is “good” – at least for those of us not into Anselmian S&M?) that might make a medieval monk blush. Except of course for good old Martin Luther: “Sin on boldly!” Yep. He really did say that. I kid you not.
Sunny, sunnier, sunniest: A brief photo essay.
On the West Sac levee.
Kitsch from Old El Paso pottery.
A little tongue-in-cheek to close things out.
Thanks, Papa H.
We’ve all seen it happen: A car crash in the opposite lanes of a divided highway inevitably slows down traffic in both directions because we just can’t seem to look away. Not only that, but we need to stare as long as possible: Is there blood? A tow truck? Paramedics? The jaws of life? It’s only human nature of course. But it’s not like we’re gonna jump out of our car and perform CPR – right? More like: Whew, I’m sure glad it wasn’t me. Hey, honey, what’s for dinner?
You can rest easy, folks: Nobody here was involved in a traffic mishap, nor even has witnessed one lately. And yet, quite close to home there was a spellbinding spectacle playing itself out recently on the pages of our Roxborough Park Foundation community web forum that was almost as titillating, and nearly as shameful as watching the aftermath of a car crash – at least for all of us looky-loos here in “The Park.” These are our neighbors. This is what happened. And for the life of us, we just can’t seem to look away.
Board Statement to Roxborough Park Foundation Homeowners
Today the Roxborough Park Foundation Board of Directors made the decision to terminate with immediate effect the employment of <name redacted>. Two additional maintenance employees have been placed on temporary administrative leave pending finalization of an independent report and Board review. These decisions were not hastily made. Rather they are based on information received during the course of an extensive investigation into an allegation of wrongdoing made by a former insider.
Towards the end of 2022, the Board received information that <name redacted> – and potentially others in the Maintenance Department – had been keeping money paid by recycling companies for the Foundation’s scrap metal rather than providing it to the Foundation as had been done in the past. In response, the Board obtained legal counsel, retained a private investigator to obtain information and conduct interviews, contacted and liaised with law enforcement, and had the Foundation’s finances reviewed. These efforts, conducted over a 4½ month period, revealed the following:
- Though the Foundation had previously received cash for its recycling that was deposited into its “miscellaneous income account” to cover Foundation expenses and reduce Homeowner assessments, those deposits were inconsistent and ceased in 2018.
- <Name redacted> reportedly told certain employees in maintenance to establish accounts in their own name and request cash instead of having checks made out to the Foundation for the metal dropped off from at least two recycling companies.
- Photographic evidence showed that the Foundation’s truck was used for the drop offs and that the Foundation’s logo was covered up. However, the truck’s USDOT number was not covered. This allowed Foundation ownership of the truck to be verified.
- Despite the limited time frame for record retention by the two recycling companies, the Foundation has obtained documentation showing that through March 23, 2023, cash was paid to certain Foundation maintenance employees in exchange for the Foundation’s scrap metal in the amount of $14,885.85, with $10,166.40 in the last 12 months. Nothing was provided to the Foundation.
Based on this information, the Board made the decision to terminate the employees it believed had, or should have had knowledge of, or were involved in, the improper diversion of cash payments for Foundation property. As stated, pending completion of this investigation, two further maintenance employees have been placed on temporary administrative leave. The Board has also determined to take these next steps:
(a) Holding meetings among all departments to reiterate the Foundation’s expectation that employees appropriately handle Foundation property, report potential wrongdoing, and otherwise uphold the standards the Foundation expects.(b) Having an accounting of all tools, equipment, and materials in the Maintenance Department performed.(c) Conducting a review of internal procedures, control, aspects of security, and reporting in order to provide more effective oversight.(d) Providing the results of the investigation to law enforcement to try to obtain restitution for the lost payments.
Yikes! Tempest in a Teapot or Thriller in the Making? You make the call. But either way, life here in “The Park” may never be the same. At least for one out-of-work maintenance guy <name redacted> with a big blemish on his employment record, it promises to be a Brave New World for sure. For me though, maybe not so much. After all, I’ve still gotta drop off my recycling this week, same as always. But one good thing about it: We’ve got plenty of local drama to keep our interest up. That’s gotta be worth something at least.
Stay tuned next week for the saga of the (proposed) Nordic Spa, and homeowner reaction to same: No re-zoning! Save our Rox! It promises to be a real barn-burner… if not exactly a car crash.
Just wondering how many of our readers really read? Notice I didn’t say, “how many can read.” Obviously you’re here, and you’re reading, so you can do it. But I mean really read, in the sense of not just reading news articles or humor posts, and not just reading stuff for work, but for pleasure. My wife is one of the world’s all-time great pleasure readers. Those of you who know her well can attest this is true. She used to keep track of all the books she read on Goodreads. One of our less-than-literary friends from Valley Swim Club happened to notice this fact once during a summer swim meet, and they thought she must be lying. I mean, c’mon, who reads that much? Well, she does. And she’s got the lapel pin to prove it.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a reader too. But not like that. She always has a couple of books going at once, while I only read a single book at a time. And her tastes are wide-ranging, while I’m pretty much just a one-genre guy: Noir. You can tell from my previous posts – here, and here, and here – who my favorite writers are and what kind of stories I like: If there’s not a dead body involved and some degree of uncertainty about how they got that way, then don’t even bother me with it. I mean, c’mon. Really.
All of this serves as prologue to a summary of the books I’ve been reading lately – thrillers all. So, without further ado…
Ian Rankin’s “Inspector Rebus” series is winding down. In the most recent offering, titled “A Heart Full of Headstones,” our favorite (and now semi-retired) Scottish sleuth is having trouble walking up steps to his second-floor flat due to end-stage COPD. Much more concerning, though, is the fact that he’s been arrested for the murder of his long-time nemesis, the notorious gangster “Big Ger” Gerald Cafferty, who – himself feeling the ill effects of old age and being confined to a wheelchair – nonetheless meets his earthly end by getting himself smothered with a pillow. Now facing serious jail time, Rebus has handed off all hard-core detecting duties to his friend and colleague, Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke.
My guess is that Rankin will take a page from fellow noir novelist Michael Connelly, who reinvigorated his series by passing the baton from aging hero Harry Bosch to his young female protege, detective Renee Ballard. Stay tuned for the next Tartan Noir installment from Edinburgh to see if Rankin is able to pull off the same switcheroo.
I knew there was a good reason I love reading C.J. Box’s series about Wyoming game warden (and part-time detective) Joe Pickett. I mean aside from all the foreboding weather warnings and gorgeous Rocky Mountain scenery that is. Doing a little sleuthing of my own, I found out that Box and I were born in the same year and month, just a couple of weeks apart. No wonder I’m such a sucker for his brand of Carhartt Noir. But be advised: If you feel slightly less of a natal connection to the author than me, then you might have a harder time telling the plot of this latest one, titled “Storm Watch,” from the plots of any of the string of 20 previous Joe Pickett books he’s written. Yes, Joe’s 3 daughters are all grown up now. And yes, his mother-in-law now has a new rich beau who she’s likely to marry, then inherit from once he’s been summarily dispatched. And yes, Wyoming now has a new governor – but wait! The old governor may be making a comeback, so stay tuned.
Bottom line, and be forewarned: You’ll be hard-pressed to notice much of any difference between “Storm Watch,” and – say – “Dark Sky,” or “Stone Cold,” or “Cold Wind,” or “Below Zero.” Jeez, even the titles are all starting to blend together. But like a horseback trip up a steep mountain trail accompanied by an old familiar friend whose credo is “Always do the right thing,” you may find yourself comforted. Maybe you’ll find yourself dozing off in the saddle? Gotta be one or the other – or maybe both. You make the call.
Jane Smiley’s not known as a thriller-writer. She’s a Pulitzer Prize-winner, fercryingoutloud. But she knows how to write period pieces, and this is a fine one. It’s about a couple of hookers in gold-rush California. Monterey, to be exact. And when her protagonist, Eliza Ripple, discovers there’s a serial-killer in town picking off prostitutes one by one? Well folks, it’s off to the literary races.
Smiley’s dialogue in this slim little volume is deadpan, as befits the pre-Civil-War-era setting. And the descriptions of 1850’s coastal California are dead-center accurate, both historically and geographically speaking. As a bonus? The ending’s a big surprise. All in all, not bad as Petticoat Noir pieces go, and well worth a Goodreads entry in any case. Oh, and for those who were wondering? The title refers either to the “business” of prostitution, or to the “business” of just plain being a woman, take your pick. Or maybe better: Pick your poison.
In case you hadn’t figured it out yet, this one’s still on my desk. That means I haven’t finished reading it. It’s written by a relative newcomer, Ausma Khan. And her protagonist, Inaya Rahman, is also a newcomer to the area. Which area, I hear you ask? Well, that’s the thing that got me interested in this one in the first place: It’s exactly where I live. Not, “Colorado where I live,” nor even “Denver where I live,” but right here. The title (Blackwater Falls) is pure fiction, of course. But the street names (Titan Road), the neighborhoods (Castle Pines), the landmarks (Chatfield Reservoir), and even the buildings (the Lockheed Martin complex) – they’re all real, and really close by.
As you might expect from the main character’s name, our Pakistani-American hero wears a headscarf, so I guess one might be tempted to call this Hijab Noir? I can’t yet tell if the murder-in-a-mosque plot’s going to turn out to be believable or not. And obviously, because I’m still reading, I have no clue about the ending. But for now I’m thinking this woman must be one of my close-by neighbors – like, right next door. Hey, stranger things have happened. I mean, if C.J. Box and I were born in the same month and year, then absolutely anything’s possible.
Happy reading, y’all! What’s on your list? Whatever it is, try to get to it before lights out. Hey, it’s not called “noir” (i.e. “dark”) for nothing. And some of us are trying to get some shut-eye here.
Sixty-eight degrees and sunny this weekend: I got a sunburn. It was a great time to be outdoors no matter where you were. From the top of Chatfield Dam…
…to the top of Mt. Falcon.
Back east, although it was rainy and cold for the opening day of trout season, fishermen near Ralston had a pretty good run – or at least, so I’m told. Fish stories: You can believe whatever you like.
As for me, though I’m not a fisherman, I am working through my trust issues – one so-called fish at a time.
And though fishermen were also out in force along the South Platte, we probably shared the trail with many more equestrians than anglers.
Happy April Fools Day from the biggest fool of all. No, wait, I take it back: I run a distant second to William Henry Harrison, our 9th president. At the time of his inauguration on March 4, 1871 he was the oldest president ever to take office. A month later he was dead of pneumonia. Dang, I guess maybe he shoulda worn that coat after all?
The rest of today’s offerings consist of everything from maternal tranquilizer darts to true taco miracles to sage marital advice from Henry VIII. Enjoy! And may this April 1st find you perfectly whelmed – unlike our coatless 9th POTUS: May he rest in peace.
A wee bit of non-matrimonial history is here.