For nearly two thousand years, people have been seeking to understand Jesus and his teachings. Spiritual concerns were the usual motivation, but more recently the quest has taken on a coldly historical tinge. Philosophers, novelists, academics and journalists have expended great energy trying to imagine and interpret the flesh-and-blood prophet, seeming to defy through their efforts St. Paul’s admonition to “set your affections on things above, not on things of the earth.”
Certainly there is great value in having an accurate account of so influential a figure. But the arguments over who he was, what he was like and what really happened to him have on occasion grown so strident that the casual reader is lost without an overview of current thought. In this age of provocation comes The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus (Free Press, 1998; $26), a surprising, measured and well-written book by journalist Charlotte Allen. Hers is not another attempt to paint some definitive portrait of Jesus, but rather a look at the way others have painted him. Allen, ’65, examines how, through the years, “the deists found a deist” in Christ, “the Romantics a Romantic, the existentialists an existentialist, and the [Marxist] liberationists a Jesus of class struggle. Supposedly equipped with the latest critical and historical tools, the ‘scientific’ quest for the historical Jesus has always devolved into theology, ideology and even autobiography.”
Allen’s book is a lucid history of how Jesus has become the standard-bearer for so many varied campaigns. It also tells a story of considerable pathos. We see the Christ figure barnacled with political and philosophical agendas, and we begin to feel sorry for the guy. Perhaps unintentionally, Allen humanizes Jesus where others, trying desperately to do so, have failed.
The Human Christ moves briskly and roams widely. Allen examines Isaac Newton’s influential New Testament scholarship. Then, a few pages later, she’s off on a lively discussion of Cecil B. DeMille’s Biblical epics: “Five years after his King of Kings, DeMille filmed a knock-off of Quo Vadis called The Sign of the Cross, which featured crocodiles devouring naked maidens, lions devouring Christians, the empress Poppaea (played by Claudette Colbert) bathing in asses’ milk, and an attempted lesbian seduction.” Allen manages to entertain while making a serious point about society and about the power of Jesus -- as a concept -- to intrude where he is either unexpected or unwelcome. DeMille’s picture helped usher in the Hays Code, which ensured “decency” in American movies. Ours may be a secular state, but unless you want censorship laws, you’d better not make racy Bible pictures.
Allen expertly tours the exterior political landscape -- how Jesus has been used to forward causes -- but she excels when examining the minds of men as they contemplate Christ. She helped me see why, for example, the fictional saviors created by Ernest Renan and, a century later, by Nikos Kazantzakis seem more human than those molded or dissected by theologians. “Kazanzakis’s Last Temptation of Christ . . . was Renan’s Life of Jesus for the 20th century,” she explains. “In calling his novel a distillation of the ‘essence’ of Jesus, Kazantzakis believed he had conveyed what the evangelists would have written had they not been in thrall to the Christian church.”
Allen deals evenhandedly with other contemporary Jesus seekers, examining their interpretations and biases even as she acknowledges that her own thinking may have been influenced by her Catholic upbringing. She scans the Jesus Seminarians and writes respectfully of the Dead Sea Scrolls scholars. She doesn’t even slam the controversial scholar Barbara Thiering (who argues that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, had three children and was later divorced). It soon becomes clear that she has been saving up her contempt for John M. Allegro, an Englishman who in 1970 published The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (“a true collector’s item,” she writes, “for aficionados of the search for the historical Jesus”). Allegro theorized that Jesus was not a man but a mass hallucination brought on by a species of mushroom. The fungus, Allen explains, was supposedly central to Near Eastern “drug and fertility cults, including Judaism and Christianity, which involved ritualistic copulation and the shedding of menstrual blood in the fields to ensure an abundant harvest.” Allen dismisses Allegro as “outrageous.”
The good news, Allen says, is that each new fad in Jesus research quickly becomes dated. “The output of the New Hermeneutics movement of the 1960s is hardly illuminating today. The latest array of ‘New Quest’ Jesuses -- the Cynic sage, the shaman, the ‘spirit person,’ the wisdom teacher -- will undoubtedly look touchingly quaint within a generation or two. The Jesus of liberation theology is fading fast, as Pentecostalism, not Marxism, rides the religious waves in Latin America.” As for deconstructionism, Allen notes acidly, “It is already past noon for deconstruction elsewhere in academia.”
What we will be left with tomorrow is, of course, Jesus -- difficult, inscrutable Jesus. They throw things at him that will not stick. They throw him at things, and he bounces off. What remains for each of us is our own, personal, nonhistorical Jesus: someone we either cannot believe in, or in whom we must believe. St. Paul once said that as an apostle he was “all things to all men.” Charlotte Allen explains why the same is true of Jesus.
Robert Sullivan is an assistant managing editor of Life and co-author of Who Do You Say That I Am? and Blessed Art Thou Among Women.
