Thinking about Jesus: Report from a Work in Progress

This piece was originally published in the Cabrini Communicator.

When I started college, I ran into three kinds of people who talked to me about Jesus. One was David White, a Quaker with strong interests in Asian philosophy. He had done serious work on Indian systems of thought and mental discipline. He seemed to have a broad understanding of  what human life was about, what to do next, how to be unobviously good – rooted in old and converging traditions from three continents. His comment about Jesus: “Whatever he is, he is not a philosopher.”

A second influence came from a couple of competent New Testament scholars, who taught me what it is to be careful in interpreting a text. They made it clear that the New Testament scholarship enterprise was one honking beautiful thing, in which the research tools were well developed, the questions refined and processed by lots of very good minds. It seemed to me unlikely that I would, very soon, be able to make any contribution to this enterprise, and it seemed likely that a lifework would result in a footnote to a footnote somewhere.

The third influence came from some folks I might never have met, except that they seemed to be the only people around not mostly into sex, drugs, and rock and roll – none of which I was ready for, my freshman year at Macalester. This was the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, an evangelical group that put weight on a personal relationship with Jesus initiated in a moment of conversion, fueled by feelings derived heavily from Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Their message was that an intimate understanding of Jesus was: (1) what I needed; (2) all I needed; and (3) pretty easy to get, if I just wanted it enough.

This was the Protestant counterpart to what I had run into from Catholicism in my youth: the idea that there was some well understood way to salvation enshrined in the Vatican, passed out through mysterious spiritual and educational conduits to priests and nuns, and available in limited quantities to the spiritually dense people in the pews, who will do fine, the way pets do fine, if they were obedient, keep themselves clean, remember their place, and take in as much water as their little water glasses can hold.

These messages all converged to say: “Whatever you do, don’t think about Jesus.” The evangelicals said that the whole truth was simple, and not to be found by thinking. My home-town Catholics said the whole truth was complicated, secured in the monopoly pockets of semi-Martians, in the various holy orders. The historians said it was complicated, and that, to the extent it could be covered, they had it covered. And my old friend David White said that, whatever was there, it wasn’t interesting in the way philosophers were interesting – not a line of thought to be retraced.

The Catholic liberals I met later didn’t dispute the consensus. They understood Jesus as a mid-point in a line of anti-oppression prophets culminating in Karl Marx: the point is not to understand the world but to change it.  Jesus’ message is simple, has to be simple, as a foundation for simple people’s action against oppression.

Recently, I have had a chance to think a few hours a day, and I find myself wanting to think about Jesus, even though, for these various reasons, I’m not supposed to. It started out with noticing something. Dominic Crossan and his colleagues in the Jesus Seminar have emphasized that, with the sayings and stories of Jesus, there is usually good reason to believe that the moral was added later, that the oldest bit is a story or observation without much commentary. Looking over the list of these stripped down sayings and stories, I was struck with their similarity to remarks of early philosophers from whom we also have fragments and stories, without significant context. In particular, his stuff reminded me a lot of  Heraclitus, of Marcus Aurelius, and of the collection of paradoxes that constitutes the skeptical manuals of Sextus Empiricus.

Heraclitus is best known for a couple of sayings: ‘You can’t step in the same river twice,’ and ‘The upward and the downward way are one.’ These sayings are typically philosophical, so it is perhaps useful to look closely at them. The first says that something which we generally take as simple and uncontroversial is in fact plausibly seen as multiple and complex: as KFAI is a different station every hour, the Mississippi is a different river every second. New stuff comes in; old stuff goes out. What we call a thing is really a flow, a movement, an action. (Heracleitus thought about candle flames the same way.) Obviously, once one has grasped this fact, the questions press in: ‘How much other stuff that we think of as one is really also many?,’ and ‘Does it make some important difference if we start noticing the manyness in onenesses?’

The other remark goes in the opposite direction. Anybody who has ever pedaled a bike up to the youth hostel at the top of the hill in the evening, then glided down in the morning, can testify that the upward and the downward way are as different as any two things in human experience. Yet, we know, it’s the same road, the same stones, exactly. Two things that we take to be different can be reasonably seen as the same. Again, this presses the questions, ‘What else is like this?’ and ‘Does this singleness in doubleness matter?’

Philosophers love this kind of thing. They collect paradoxes and double-meanings and mistakes the way bug collectors collect bugs. For philosophers, this is a really intense and fairly autonomous interest. It doesn’t necessarily have to go anyplace or mean anything. More practical people want to know: what use is this? Can I make it part of my speech to my kids about why not to do drugs or to the sales team about approaching difficult clients, or can I incorporate it into a letter to the editor on the deceptive slowness of climate change? Where’s the sermon? Where’s the pep talk? Where’s the point? But philosophers find puzzles to be fun and revealing for their own sake, and they are slow to make messages out of them. They want to understand, or at least appreciate, human beings’ relationship to the world, what happens when people try to know the world or name the world, the exact ways that reality keeps slipping out of our grasp.

Some of what Jesus says fits Heracleitus’ models. The seeds all go to the same place; the seeds go to very different places.  The old woman gave the temple much less than the rich man gave; both gave huge amounts. Other sayings challenge  the common sense reading of a situation. The place next to the host is the best place at the banquet, is the worst place at the banquet (depending on what happens next). It is smart to build new barns after a good harvest; it is stupid to waste time building new barns, whatever the harvest.  One can bring most of the sayings of Jesus into some family of paradox and puzzle, casting them as some kind of warning that one’s initial way of thinking is not the only way of thinking, that human and natural reality resist our categories, play games with our intuitions, will not stay still.

Of course, in the editorial context of the gospels, all of these sayings get a moral point, and those points are generally what anyone sane would call: good advice. But how do we understand their earliest context? Do we really want to understand Jesus as the sort of person who was always moralizing, always admonishing, always on some kind of personal quest for justice? He might have been that way. We know good people who are that way. But it is also imaginable that lots of the stories we read as moral parables might have been originally introduced this way: “Isn’t it strange that…?” or “I just noticed that…” or “Doesn’t it bother anybody that…?” Maybe the philosophy comes first, and the heart follows.

We know that mathematical and philosophic prodigies (essentially, people obsessed with understanding relationships and structures) spring up in the strangest places, sometimes make enormous progress very early in their lives. Jesus might have been one of those.

Such a reading would not upend theology. It would shift our understanding of certain sayings and stories, interacting with every other line of thought we have available about the gospels.

I want to continue trying to work out this idea of Jesus as philosopher. I think it might have something to it. It matters to me because I am a philosopher, and it would be helpful to me to have that as a point of contact with Jesus. The more important point is that any of our experiences of ways of being human is relevant to our reading of sacred texts. People are complicated, and understanding any person is a matter of seeing many layers interacting. It is a life-long pursuit.

We can’t let ourselves get sucked into the idea that the story has to be simple, because we need answers, now, immediately, about everything important. To that, the universe says, “You’ve got to be kidding.”