Good (Scholarly) News for Christians: Daniel Boyarin

In the Gospels Jesus several times tells his disciples that once they reach Jerusalem he is destined to be arrested and die at the hands of the priests and scribes. For decades, scholars working on the "historical Jesus" have sought to convince Christians that these instances of Jesus predicting his own passion most likely never occurred. Clearly, so the argument goes, they were formulated to address the scandal of Jesus' crucifixion after the fact; they were words put in Jesus' mouth by the Gospel writers to make it seem that arrest and death were part of Jesus' plan all along--when, as we all know, such couldn't have been the case.

On this and other issues, Daniel Boyarin's The Jewish Gospels is good scholarly news for Christians. Boyarin, one of the world's leading scholars of Talmud, makes it clear on historical grounds that Jesus' assertions that the Christ is destined to suffer are by no means unthinkable in the context of Second Temple Judaism. Further, Jesus' description of himself as the awaited "Son of Man," implying he is both Messiah and a divine incarnation, should not be seen as a fictional element added to the story by later Gentile Christians. As Boyarin shows, the designation "Son of Man" can best be clarified through careful reading of Jewish scripture, in particular the book of Daniel. It is Boyarin's view that the Gospels, especially Mark, may very well be offering an historically reliable portrait of what Jesus said about himself. He shows that Jesus' words and self-understanding as we find them in Mark make perfect sense in the context of certain contemporary strands of Jewish reading of scripture. They are not a foreign invention foisted upon Jesus' life and teachings after the fact.

Many Christians will think this is insignificant because they already accept the Gospels as "gospel truth." I would say Boyarin's book is good news for Christians because here we have one of the very best scholars in this field, a man who identifies himself as an orthodox Jew no less, coming out boldly and saying that the "historical Jesus" and the Jesus we find in the New Testament, in certain fundamentals, might very well be the same man. If Boyarin is right in this argument (or perhaps I should say: if he convinces some in the scholarly community) the upshot is nothing less than a great leap forward for the historical reliability of the Gospels. Gone will be the days when it is argued that the Jesus we find in the New Testament could not have been the actual Jesus. That the Jesus Christians worship is a fictional character created by Paul and Platonizing Greeks. Boyarin places Jesus' mission in a solid historical context; wielding Occam's razor, he cuts through entrenched misreadings of key passages in Mark, offering a clearer, more sensible sense.

Which brings me, rather late, to something else Boyarin accomplishes. He shows us the steps by which Christianity and Judaism each willfully alienated itself from its other, each disavowing, step by step, the beliefs they shared, so that finally, with the passing of centuries, it became almost impossible to imagine that there was a time when most Christians considered themselves also Jews, and many Jews believed in the Messiah Jesus. The Jewish Gospels is strong medicine for each side of the religious divide, and it may eventually have repercussions for how the two religions understand their differences. Boyarin is to be commended for laying out what his scholarly labors have revealed. Certainly others before him have noted some of the elements of his hard-hitting argument, but their voices were not so well placed to be heard, or the time was not suited to listen. Hopefully there will be a wider engagement with this brilliant little book: a wrestling not just engaged by scholars, but by believing Jews and Christians as well.

I will close with a couple sentences from Boyarin's Epilogue in order to suggest some of the range of this book (issues I haven't touched on in this brief review):

If the interpretations offered here hold water, then the New Testament is much more deeply embedded within Second Temple Jewish life and thought than many have imagined, even--and this I emphasize again--in the very moments that we take to be most characteristically Christian as opposed to Jewish: the notion of a Redeemer who himself will be both God and man, and the notion that this Redeemer would suffer and die as part of the salvational process. At least some of these ideas, the Father/Son godhead and the suffering savior, have deep roots in the Hebrew Bible as well and may be among some of the most ancient ideas about God and the world that the Israelite people ever held. (157-8)

Check Boyarin's The Jewish Gospels at Amazon.

Hrabal's Sublime Trashman

It may be common for a reader to experience the protagonist of the novel he is reading as a kind of refracted version of him- or herself. But this doesn't often happen to me. Nonetheless, it is precisely the feeling I get, strong to the point of uncanny, in reading Bohumil Hrabal's 1977 novel Too Loud a Solitude. It's not that his narrator's life story really matches mine. Rather, it's something more direct. I come a hair's breadth from feeling that this narrator is me. I am Hanta--seated on the other side of a tarnished mirror.

There's something naive about such an assertion, I know. Flaubert may have said, "Emma Bovary, c'est moi," but Flaubert was the writer who brought Emma forth, giving birth, if we're to follow the logic, to himself. But me, I'm not the Czech novelist Hrabal--as writer, I'm a flea in comparison to him--yet his character Hanta is precisely me muddling forward in somewhat different circumstances. Hrabal's tale has grabbed me where I live: not far from the basement, regardless of the floor I may be on.

Willingly I acknowledge, with Hanta, who spends his days compacting wastepaper and proscribed books in a Prague cellar, that I've a subterranean imagination, which doesn't mean I dream only chthonic dreams, but that I dream best when there is stone or clay or soil around me. This link to earth has been defined as typically Capricorn: mining, archeology, alchemy, grave-digging, grave-robbing--all are Capricorn pursuits, and my birth fell mid-January.

But in his spare and beautiful novel, moving with such a light touch, Hrabal has linked the tactile and terrestrial things I so cling to with that other thing I love: books, especially those on the verge of disappearing through the neglect of modern societies. Hrabal's society, the one he satirized, was Leninist communism; mine would be Facebook-era capitalism. Still, for old books the results in both societies are similar: our most precious insights, preserved in our cultures' written traditions, are silenced. Either they are censored and pulped, as in Hrabal's communist Prague, or they are effectively dead, as in my own screen-mediated US.

Manning his noisy compactor with its red and green buttons, a machine that allows him to watch the books and paper as they're crushed, Hanta discovers how to make artwork out of the "garbage". He not only rescues precious books from destruction, surreptitiously taking them home with him, but carefully arranges things in the compactor's drum so that the resultant bales will come out as he intends: each wrapped in Van Gogh's Sunflowers say; or, frequently, featuring German philosophical works opened to key passages. Hanta, we learn, is an avid reader of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Novalis.

There is a touching dialectic in this novel between Jesus and Lao-Tze, between the great German Romantics and trash, between individual erotic memory and the grind of work. Hrabal manages the motifs and visions that make up Hanta's life with a musical precision. There are similarities to magical realism here, but Hrabal's balancing of the visionary and the everyday shows a surer hand than much of the work described as such. Here follows a fine and characteristic passage from the book's final pages. Hanta is in a Prague pub:

Suddenly the door opened and in stomped a giant reeking of the river, and before anyone knew what was happening, he had grabbed a chair, smashed it in two, and chased the terrified customers into a corner. The three youngsters pressed against the wall like periwinkles in the rain, but at the very last moment, when the man had picked up half a chair in each hand and seemed ready for the kill, he burst into song, and after conducting himself in "Gray Dove, Where Have You Been?" he flung aside the halves of the chair, paid the waiter for the damage, and, turning to the still-shaking customers, said, "Gentlemen, I am the hangman's assistant," whereupon he left, pensive and miserable. Perhaps he was the one who, last year at the Holesovice slaughterhouse, put a knife to my neck, shoved me into a corner, took out a slip of paper, and read me a poem celebrating the beauties of the countryside at Ricany, then apologized, saying he hadn't found any other way of getting people to listen to his verse.

Kundera, at some point, praised Hrabal as his country's best writer. I've ordered two more of Hrabal's novels, though I don't expect to be struck so hard as I've been by this beautiful long prose poem. Hanta grabs my ear like no narrator I've read in recent years. I will look up this book's translator too, Michael Henry Heim, who has given Hrabal's novel in a stark and sinewy prose to be envied. Too Loud a Solitude is a great find.

Rowan Williams on Dostoevsky

I've just finished the first chapter of Rowan Williams' book on Dostoevsky. I'm elated with the vigor of Williams' writing. He cuts right to the bone, tracing out a theological-critical approach that promises to show more of what drove the great novelist than any previous critic, including Bakhtin. I can see Williams is building on Bakhtin in a more direct and existential way. A quote on the Enlightenment sense of truth Dostoevsky refused to settle for:

To settle for "the truth" in the sense of that ensemble of finished propositions we can securely defend is one of the ways of removing ourselves from the narrative continuum of our lives; to opt for Christ in the face of this is to accept that we shall not arrive within history at a stage where there are no choices and no commitments to be made. The truth of defensible propositions, a truth demanding assent as if belief were caused by facts, generates a diminished view of what is human; it educates us in ignoring aspects of human narrative that we disapprove of or find impenetrable. Meaning comes by the exercise of freedom--but not any sort of exercise of freedom. By taking the step of loving attention in the mundane requirements of life together, something is disclosed. But that step is itself enabled by a prior disclosure, the presence of gratuity in and behind the phenomena of the world: of some unconditional love. The narrative of Christ sets that before us, and the concrete historical reality of Christ is what has communicated to human nature a capacity for reflecting or echoing love.

Williams is keenly aware that Enlightenment truth--or "scientific," factual truth about human beings--once it is accepted as definitive or cutting edge, tends to lead eventually to the violent purging of that which does not fit the theory. The last century amply demonstrated this potential in an overvalued or wrongly valued science, whether we look at Leninist communism or fascism. What Williams shows is how Dostoevsky developed a narrative strategy that subverts this even as it puts in narrative action the struggle of faith--a struggle that, by definition, is never finished.

The book is Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction.

Poets on the Edge

In the work of every great poet there is something the poet glimpses only partly, a shape of which he or she has an only partial awareness, but which in fact is the deepest meaning of the work. I mean here the poet as voyant or vates. In this sense it follows, of course, that a prose writer like Kafka may also be called a great poet. And Heidegger? And Heidegger, Dickinson, Rimbaud, Kafka--each engaged the work I mean.

Heretic Days: First Reactions

My new book Heretic Days is finally in print.

Canadian critic J.S. Porter writes of the book: "Heretic Days is grand theatre--a drama enacted in Eric Mader's subtle and playful mind. Mader queries, dramatizes, teases, mocks, pronounces, parodies, lunges, and finally burrows down into some the of the most intractable conundrums facing Christian seekers today. I know of no other writer who reads theology so deeply and so well. You come away from his work with a new understanding of play as sacrament. Think of this book as a stage onto which skip Tolstoy, St. Paul, the Gnostics, William Blake, Leonard Cohen, and, above all, Jesus, who makes many entrances and commands the most stage-time; think of it as Marionette Theatre where ideas come to play, parry with each other, bow, exit and re-enter with new masks and voices. In this play Mader keeps a directorial eye on his constant theme--Who was Jesus? How do we come to know him? What does he mean for our lives and, especially, what did he intend to mean?"

And I'm pleased to be labeled an "endlessly fascinating eccentric" by Bradley Winterton in his Taipei Times review. Winterton writes: "[U]npredictability is Mader's stock in trade. . . absolutely everything he puts his hand to is consequently very well worth reading, including this bizarre but intensely readable book." NB: Winterton's review is much appreciated, but I should note he wrongly characterizes me as a gnostic. Though I'd been long engaged in study and thinking about the recently uncovered gnostic texts (the Nag Hammadi codices) by the time this book was published I'd converted to Catholicism. And during the years of writing the pieces that make up the book, I considered myself a Christian, but one on the margins of orthodoxy.

The book is available in print and Kindle versions at Amazon.

Slavery and Resistance in Madison, Wisconsin

UW Madison's Van Hise Hall, where the jargon grows thick and the intrigues never end.
Barry Powell's A Land of Slaves is an academic murder mystery with a difference. Unlike many academic novels, it makes thoroughly enjoyable reading, suffering none of the stylistic fatigue one comes to expect from novels written by professors. Powell's unique style, a kind of jerky subdued lyricism, hard-boiled in a way that's hard to pin down, keeps one turning the pages. His sleuth Raymond Birch is not so much sleuthing as harried into putting the broken pieces of the story into place, meanwhile exposing the layers upon layers of lies that made for the life of now dead art historian Wally Wills. The portrait of Wills is both sad and hilarious: that such a character could conduct a successful decades-long career in the pinched milieu of a modern art history department is stuff enough to wonder at, though the tale, as narrated, doesn't really seem farfetched.

Aside from being partial murder mystery, Powell's book can also count as academic satire. But again with a welcome difference. Protagonist Raymond Birch has far too much reality about him to be the mere straight man in another exposé of the excesses of theory. There aren't many passages here that directly satirize literary-academic cant. The few Powell offers are just enough to define the milieu.

One of these passages comes near the book's end. Beleaguered by academic infighting, still reeling from the unanswered questions of his best friend's death, Birch enters a darkened auditorium to listen to one of his peers deliver a paper at the international Oral Poetry conference. The speaker is already at the podium, mid-paper, and since Birch enters from the wrong door, a door abutting the stage, he quickly sits down in the front row:

"An impassionate person's passionate need to rebuild the text from within freed from authorial intention and reveling in the oceanic feminine that underlies the stiff (and stiffening) clarity of male cannibalistic gendered greed," the speaker, a elderly male, was saying.

Birch really wasn't feeling very well. He leaned his head forward on his knees and stared at the carpet. . . . [He] straightened up to gaze along the row of gilt chairs. He was startled to see that he was the only one sitting in the first ten rows. Nobody wanted to be too close to a speaker of this magnitude!

"While the modern scholar needs to make concessions," he was saying, "she or he has still to hang onto the hog or the hog is going to get lickety-split away down the path!"

"What is this shit anyway? What a croc of shit," Birch said under his breath but louder than he had intended.

Oh my God, what if somebody heard?

The mendacities of academia are legion, and here both the speaker and Birch are implicated (though the speaker is obviously implicated on many more levels than Birch). Birch is attending the conference to keep up appearances among colleagues set upon ousting him from his department. But he has a tic that comes with his feverish and introspective character: he occasionally thinks out loud. Such a tic can be a real problem for anyone trying to maneuver academic politics.

Luckily, as I say, Powell doesn't use up many pages in A Land of Slaves transcribing the slavish kinds of discourse now common in humanities. This shows a wise restraint on his part. Anyone who's been in these departments, after all, has already seen more than enough such obsequious pandering. Rather, the all-encompassing political correctitude of the academy is taken as background, and Powell's characters come to life in their often hopeless struggles to make careers on such a degraded stage.

As an alum of the university where the action is set (the University of Wisconsin-Madison) I can attest to Powell's skill at evoking environment. He's particularly good at describing the lakeside paths and neighborhoods and student union, as well as the oppressiveness of the building where the university's language departments are housed. There is also the 666 Club, which was in reality the 602 Club (is it still there?). I suspect A Land of Slaves is in large part a roman à clef, but since I'm not familiar with the classics and art departments there in recent years, I'm not sure who most of Powell's characters echo, or who they might be composites of. I'm pretty sure, however, about the models for Wally Wills and Raymond Birch. I believe Powell has taken events of the early 1990s and recast them in the late 2000s. The man Wally Wills is based on--I believe I sat in on some of his lectures on Greek vase painting in the 1980s. I've no idea however if the real scholar's death unwove anything like the tapestry of lies that Raymond Birch unweaves in the novel. And did I possibly, around 1986, take first semester classical Greek with the woman Audrey Winter is based on?

But these identifications are mostly beside the point. Powell's novel is a novel, and I think most readers, familiar or not with Madison, Wisconsin, will find it a fascinating portrait of pathological lying, art collecting, small-time drug dealing, lousy police work, and (of course) academic slavishness--besides finding it a compelling work of narrative, executed in a new narrative voice I'd be happy to hear more of. A Land of Slaves is available in print and Kindle versions at Amazon.

Dangerous

Teaching two 11-year-old girls the word "dangerous," I ask them to name some dangerous animals.

"You're a dangerous animal," says one.

"OK," I say. "Maybe. Can you name any other dangerous animals?"

"Your hair," the other girl says. And she explains that my hair and I are actually different animals, that my hair leaves my head at night and flies around the city following girls and feeding on moths.

"It's true," the first girl says then. "I saw it."