4
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History or Theological Symbolism?
Few biblical scholars doubt that the gospels and Acts contain narratives that are written as if historical, but which are theological stories describing events in what could be called a poetic or symbolic mode of expression. Scholars are divided as to which of the events that are described in the gospels represent actual history, and which might be these parable-like passages that tell us what Jesus means to the Church in a symbolic way. This is highly relevant to the narratives that concern Mary.
The New Testament writers were more interested in confirming the faith of present and future generations than providing historical accuracy. They used theological symbolism to describe the realities of faith. This does not mean that the history of Jesus’ ministry and the pre-gospel Church is impossible to recover, but historical research into the world behind the text is difficult, limited in what it can achieve, and requires careful sifting. To say this is not to go beyond what most of the mainstream Christian Churches themselves believe.
For many centuries, and into the early modern period, most Christians simply accepted the texts at face value. Unless it was absolutely clear that the text presented a story (as with Jesus’ parables), then it happened in history, even if at the same time it expressed theological symbolism and/or it was intended to give moral guidance. It would not have been possible until relatively recently, except perhaps to a very few sophisticated thinkers, to believe that a narrative describing the actions of Jesus was a story created by the early Christians to present a theological view. However, even as far back as Origen in the third century, it was admitted that some events described in the Bible were impossible from a historical point of view.1 Therefore, it was better to read these things allegorically or metaphorically. Eventually, from the eighteenth century, the time known as the Enlightenment, the stories of the Bible began to be subjected to a sustained critique that categorized certain parts of the Bible as legendary or mythological.
It would have to be conceded that the process of identifying myth in the Bible can lead to an unravelling in which everything is reduced to nothing but an enchanting story. For this reason, some Christians have responded defensively by arguing that the Bible has to be accepted in every detail as historical fact, and so there are the infamous calculations of the age of the Earth using the Bible, and the refusal to accept the theory of evolution and the existence of dinosaurs. This is what is known as ‘fundamentalism’, a term originally used by Christians in the late nineteenth century who wanted to protect the Bible and their faith from doubt and critique. For many Christians, believing that everything narrated in the gospels actually happened in history is important to their faith. The belief that God is actively involved in human history, and entered the human world in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, goes along with the acceptance that many wonderful events occurred as a consequence.
However, other Christians continued to regard the Bible as God’s word while at the same time accepting the findings of modern science; for them, certain stories could be seen as symbolic representations of the journey of faith rather than historical events. This has characterized what is known as the ‘liberal’ Christian tradition from the eighteenth century. Liberal Christians argue that people in the early Church imagined what Jesus might have said or did in the context of their faith and their experience of what they believed to be the Holy Spirit, sent by the risen Jesus into the Church. Consequently, in the New Testament, important truths of Christian theology are sometimes expressed in story form. The narratives of the gospels might also include experiences of the risen Jesus in apparitions or inspirations; these experiences would then be described in forms that make them appear as if they occurred in Jesus’ earthly ministry.
For example: did Jesus walk on water (Matt. 14.22–33; Mark 6.45–52; John 6.16–21)? Clearly, this has theological meaning, in that Jesus is seen as having divine power; it recalls that God created the heavens and the Earth by controlling the ‘waters’ (Gen. 1.1–10) and then again parted the waters during the Exodus (Ex. 14). It could, of course, be symbolic and historical at the same time, as it could be argued that Jesus did this as a sign of his divine power as a real event in history. Jesus undertook symbolic acts to show us who he was, how we should relate to him, and how we should live. This has been the normal way of reading passages about miracles for many centuries.
Against this, some Christians in the modern age have felt that this contradicts the humanity of Jesus: humans cannot walk on water. According to Christian theology, Jesus was fully human and fully divine at the same time. Just as his humanity does not compromise or reduce his divinity, nor does his divinity call into question his humanity. As Paul wrote:
Christ Jesus who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.
(Phil. 2.6–8)
As scholarship now better understands the ways in which gospel stories were used to describe symbolically what Christians believe, it is suggested that we can dispense with the difficulty of trying to believe impossible things. The very most that can be believed, according to this view, is that people after the resurrection saw the risen Christ walking on the water; it did not happen in his lifetime.
Conservative Christians might find this indigestible. They ask, quite justifiably, what happens if we unravel all the stories about Jesus and regard them as mere symbolism? What about the resurrection? Does this mean that Jesus was not really raised and that the resurrection was a story that helps us understand that Jesus’ message will always be with us? Very few Christians would want to go this far. Clearly, there needs to be some limit to categorizing material in the New Testament as pure myth, even for Christians who embrace this approach. Paul also wrote: ‘If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins’ (1 Cor. 15.17). There has to be an indisputable core of belief. It is probably best expressed in the Creed, in summary: it is objectively true that God exists as Trinity; that Jesus is the Incarnation of God, the second person of the Trinity; and that God raised Jesus from the dead and by doing so raised humanity from the state of sin and alienation from God. The details of how God exists as Trinity and raised Jesus might have to remain a mystery, only tentatively articulated in centuries of theology and doctrine in diverse forms. The fact that it is the case, however, is the core of Christian belief.
Symbolic stories such as Jesus walking on the water describe in narrative form the objective reality of the Incarnation. Limiting this to metaphor means we have to accept that, in history, Jesus of Nazareth was unable to walk on water. The advantage of seeing the story in this way is that Jesus, unable to walk on water, must have done other things that are symbolically described in the walking on water scene. His divine power was shown, not in walking on water, but in bringing hope to those who had lost it and building communities which included those previously excluded. This is a human Jesus that we can emulate: we can do those things too, but we cannot walk on water. After all, in John we read that: ‘Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father’ (John 14.12). Believers cannot do greater works than Jesus if walking on water is the standard.
We could extend this to other examples. Did Jesus raise the dead (Jairus’ daughter, Mark 5.21–43; the widow’s son at Nain, Luke 7.11–17; Lazarus, John 11)? Is this not a symbolic way of saying that Jesus saves us from the death that is sin and despair? It is not only Jesus but also the early disciples who have this power (for example, Peter’s raising of Dorcas in Acts 9.36–43). In fact, Jesus instructs his disciples to raise the dead (Matt. 10.8). It is clear that Christians cannot do this now. Must we then assume that this power ebbed away from the Church at an early point? Or does it make more sense to suggest that bringing people to faith in resurrection is well described by saying that they have been ‘raised from the dead’? Once again, this does not mean that we need to question the objective reality of resurrection as the final destination of human existence and its implication that our lives will not end in meaninglessness and nothingness.
Folk Tradition and the Characters of the New Testament
Most modern scholars assume that there was a middle stage between the events of Jesus’ lifetime and the writing of the gospels. This was a period of oral tradition, handed down through the first generations of Christian believers. The question as to how far Christian oral tradition faithfully preserved real memories and how much it created new stories is open to the interpretation of biblical scholars and can never be fully resolved.
One the one hand, the conservative position is that: in a largely illiterate culture, handing down information orally is actually quite secure because people develop very good memories, and there will have been many people alive right from the death of Jesus to the writing of the gospels whose witness will have been regarded as very important. On the other hand, the more critical position suggests that: the rapid growth of the Church through a wide area in the Mediterranean region made it impossible to discern what was historical; competing and evolving beliefs and practices shaped the development of the traditions in quite diverse ways. Probably the best answer to this is somewhere between the two, to reject the two extremes, that is, it is neither all eyewitness memories nor is it all something that was made up later.
Oral tradition is akin to folk culture, in that sets of stories are circulated that define the beliefs and boundaries of a community. Despite presuppositions about it as being simplistic and non-intellectual, folk culture is often quite sophisticated; it expresses deeply held beliefs, guidelines, and other elements of folklore in traditional legends and myths that are profound and complex. Folk culture is full of fascinating stories which have meanings: they have been invented by highly intelligent thinkers rather than simple-minded people with a surfeit of imagination! The use of story to describe actual events and social forces is ancient, and it is very effective. Yet it can mislead the person who is inclined to be too literalist.
The development of folk tradition in early Christianity can lead us to ask questions about the history behind the traditions of the disciples such as: did Jesus really refer to Peter as ‘Satan’ because he refused to accept that Jesus needed to die, and did Peter deny Jesus? Was there someone called Judas Iscariot who betrayed him? We can identify two ways in which stories about biblical figures can be understood:
1. They are based on actual memories about a particular person who was regarded as a witness to the ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus
It is difficult to establish the earliest traditions with certainty. Peter was certainly a historical figure in the Church, as is confirmed by mention of him as a missionary to the Jews by Paul in Galatians 2.7–8. It is supposed that he is the same person as Cephas given that John 1.42 states this; both names mean ‘rock’, the first in Greek, the second in Aramaic. (Despite this, the identification of the two has been disputed in both the early and modern Church but that is not something we can cover in this book.) Under one name or the other he appears in Paul’s letters six times in Galatians 1–2 and four times in 1 Corinthians. But beyond the fact that Peter was a leader in the early Church and an important apostle, according to Paul the first to witness the resurrection (1 Cor. 15.5), it is only the gospels and Acts that contain details of what he did in the ministry of Jesus and afterwards. The gospels and Acts are unlike the epistles in that they contain narratives, which may in some cases include legendary material. So, we cannot be sure how much of this detail is historical.
As for Judas, there is no detail about him outside the gospels and Acts. We learn in Matthew 27.3–5 and Acts 1.15–20 that he took his life either shortly before or after the crucifixion. In the former, he hanged himself, in the latter, he fell to his death, but in both, the bribe that he received (‘thirty pieces of silver’ only in Matthew, unspecified elsewhere) was used to buy the ‘Field of Blood’. The famous kiss by which he identified Jesus is mentioned in the synoptic gospels, but not in John. So we might suspect that the original tradition read something along these lines: Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane and received a bribe for doing so which was used to buy land which Christians referred to as the ‘Field of Blood’, but Judas died before he could enjoy the gains he had made. But this does not prove the historicity of this tradition.
2. The person is a representative figure who illustrates the actions or attitudes of people living before the writing of the gospels at the very beginning of the Church, and who acts as a role model for Christians reading the gospels in later generations
The traditions about Peter and Judas Iscariot can easily be understood in these terms, in which the stories about them are representational: they refer to Christians or potential Christians in the days of the early Church, those who found the idea of a crucified Messiah a ‘stumbling block’ (as Paul writes in 1 Cor. 1.23), or who denied Christ or betrayed other Christians at a time of persecution. Of course, in the gospel story, Peter eventually came to understand the truth and to follow Jesus without concern for his own safety, and so in that respect he is a positive role model, unlike Judas Iscariot. Judas’ first name means ‘Jew’, and therefore perhaps he represented Jews who did not accept Christ and who, from a Christian point of view, betrayed the Messiah sent by the God whom they claimed to worship. Nevertheless, we should not overstate the connotations of this name, as there are other Judases in the New Testament who did not betray Jesus.
Other gospel characters – for example, ‘doubting Thomas’, the power-seeking sons of Zebedee, James and John, the woman who anointed Jesus and understood that he was destined to die, Martha and Mary with the one working and the other learning, Mary Magdalene who was healed of seven demons – all of these too were intended by the gospel writers as role models for Christians, and they have continued to fulfil this role. It is not easy to uncover the actual biographies behind this.
One way of seeing how biblical scholarship regards the gospels is to compare them to what we know in the modern world as the ‘biopic’, a life story dramatized on film. A good biopic will ensure that the main outlines of the biography are as accurate as possible in line with what can be documented historically. But the biopic has two other aspects: first, where facts are not known or unclear, the writer has the licence to fill in the pieces. Second, the biopic has to work dramatically, which might mean the rearranging of some events in the person’s life or putting in dialogue where there is no record of what was actually said. We would evaluate a biopic by asking: does it present the person in such a way that we get a clear and accurate sense of what the person stood for, strove for, and meant to others? Does it inform the viewer in an educational way so that we know more about the life than when we started?
Of course, the gospels are more than biopics, as they are faith statements meant not just to represent who Jesus was but to bring new people into faith in him as the risen Messiah and Son of God, living still in the Church through the Holy Spirit. However, what can be said of biopics can also be applied to the gospels. They present the meaning of Christ and the summation of his mission for future generations, but they are not historically accurate except in the bare outlines: he was a Jew from Galilee, who attracted followers and preached about the Kingdom of God. He went to Jerusalem for festivals as any Jew would do and, on one of these occasions, he was crucified by the Roman garrison under the leadership of Pontius Pilate. His followers claimed that he rose from the dead and that he is therefore the Messiah and Son of God, indeed they came to believe that he was God. We will attempt to fill in more details as we go along. One of the facts we can be confident about, because it is so well attested, is that Jesus’ mother was called Mary, or ‘Mariam’ in Aramaic, a name derived from the Hebrew original, ‘Miriam’.2
The Churches and Fundamentalism
Acceptance of the symbolic but not always historical nature of some biblical texts is not confined to the liberal Christian tradition. It may be surprising to learn that this approach is also accepted to a considerable extent in the mainstream Churches, even the Roman Catholic and Orthodox. There too it is an established principle that we need to understand the genre of the biblical text and that, in some cases, texts were never intended to be read as historical facts. What is much more important for these Churches is that the Bible is understood as God’s word, but they also accept that God’s word was articulated by human beings writing in diverse historical contexts. Jewish cultural tradition, with its poetry and folklore, needs to be taken into account when interpreting a text. Scripture has also to be read as canon, in other words relating the various parts to the Bible as a whole and not taking passages out of context.
These principles were articulated in brief by the Roman Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s in the document Dei Verbum. A more recent Roman Catholic document analysed biblical study at greater length. This was The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, prepared by the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1993 with a preface by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. It explored various approaches to the Bible, including those by liberal Protestants, feminists, and liberation theologians. While, unsurprisingly, it provided a critique of these approaches, more unexpected was that its strongest attack was on fundamentalism:
[Fundamentalism] refuses to admit that the inspired word of God has been expressed in human language and that this word has been expressed, under divine inspiration, by human authors possessed of limited capacities and resources. For this reason, it tends to treat the biblical text as if it had been dictated word for word by the Spirit. It fails to recognize that the word of God has been formulated in language and expression conditioned by various periods. It pays no attention to the literary forms and to the human ways of thinking to be found in the biblical texts, many of which are the result of a process extending over long periods of time and bearing the mark of very diverse historical situations.
Fundamentalism also places undue stress upon the inerrancy of certain details in the biblical texts, especially in what concerns historical events or supposedly scientific truth. It often historicizes material which from the start never claimed to be historical. It considers historical everything that is reported or recounted with verbs in the past tense, failing to take the necessary account of the possibility of symbolic or figurative meaning.
(§I F)
The Catholic Church went on to reiterate that the literal sense of a text need not mean that it happened historically:
The literal sense is not to be confused with the ‘literalist’ sense to which fundamentalists are attached… When it is a question of a story, the literal sense does not necessarily imply belief that the facts recounted actually took place, for a story need not belong to the genre of history but be instead a work of imaginative fiction.
(§II B1)
This seems very reasonable guidance. The Roman Catholic, and Orthodox Churches too, accept that not everything in the Bible can be read as occurring exactly as it was written. Did God create vegetation before the sun? Could Eve have been created from Adam’s rib? Was Methuselah really 969 when he died? Could the ark actually have taken on board two of each species? Did Joshua cause the sun to stand still? The Bible needs to be interpreted, and it contains metaphor, symbolism, and poetry as well as history. But, at the same time, the Churches would always insist that the Bible is nevertheless God’s word and it therefore presents truth. The point is to know how to interpret that truth.
There will always be disagreement as to how much can be considered imaginative and symbolic instead of being historically factual. The Catholic Church, among others, would probably draw the line around certain texts (especially in the gospels which have pre-eminence in the Catholic Church) that more liberal interpreters would see as limited to the metaphorical or providing role models in narrative form. It is possible to regard the majority if not all of the gospels as having been constructed by people living decades after Christ, who did not know him and who wrote material that they felt would help the spread the gospel. Yet the Church bases doctrine on certain sections, and those passages therefore remain sacrosanct. Elsewhere in The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, it is reported that scientific methods can cause concern among believers when they feel that interpreters have adopted ‘positions contrary to the faith of the church on matters of great importance such as the virginal conception of Jesus and his miracles, and even his resurrection and divinity’ (Introduction A).
Myth and Truth
This brings us to the question as to how myth – which can be defined as stories about the supernatural which are metaphorical but which should not be understood as historical – can also be truth. In terms of Christian theology, mythical elements are stories which convey the truth of the Christian understanding of God and the relationship between God and humanity in a metaphorical way. Symbols and stories tell the truth of God better than dogmatic theology ever could.
It is possible to find a middle place between reducing the Bible stories to complete fantasies, on the one hand, and insisting on them being history against all reason and evidence, on the other. It is not unreasonable to think that a gospel narrative is a mythical story (or legend), rather than history, but that what it says about Jesus and Mary tells us the truth in a symbolic form about who they were, what they did and, most importantly, what their lives mean for Christians today and for generations to come. Jesus really is the Saviour, whether or not he was tempted by Satan in the desert for forty days or walked on water. Mary really was the one who nurtured the Messiah and Son of God, whether or not there was an angel who told her that she would conceive while still a virgin.
We can ask whether myths and legends appropriately describe the person or situation they are describing. If I told you that, at the birth of Martin Luther King, the spirits of many African American slaves were heard singing spirituals, you would probably not think that actually happened, as no one at the time of his birth would have known that Martin Luther King would go on to be the inspirational leader that history remembers him for being. If I told you that he tore apart the chains of an unjustly condemned prisoner with his bare hands, you might doubt that too. However, you might think that these stories were fitting, as they describe in poetic form the aspirations of generations of African Americans for equality and freedom being partially realized in the Civil Rights Movement. Therefore, a criterion we can employ to evaluate material which is mythical and metaphorical is to ask whether it describes historical facts appropriately in poetic or symbolic forms.
Stories about important people within a religious belief system are hagiographical; they are texts which present someone in such a way as to demonstrate their holiness and to recommend them and their message to people in general. Hagiographical stories are understood on different levels, and some believers prefer to regard them as historical events so that they retain their force. For those who do not, believing that the content of the story represents a poetic but appropriate way of describing history means that it is quite possible to continue to derive meaning and inspiration from its retelling. In Christianity and other religions, retelling often occurs in a liturgical or worship setting. Symbolism and metaphor are, in other words, alternative ways of recounting history.
Therefore, a reading that understands the whole narrative as purely fictional and bearing no resemblance to history is not properly a Christian one. The meaning of the lives of Jesus and other prominent figures in the gospels, represented through story and parable, is for future generations of believers; this therefore represents truth, even if conveyed through the means of theologically based legends derived from prophetic fulfilment which may not be historically precise. Therefore, for example, the story of the Holy Family fleeing from Palestine into Egypt because of the murderous intentions of Herod (Matt. 2.3–18) does convey the danger that the fledgeling Church faced from antagonistic authorities, and it continues to inspire people to acts of hospitality for refugees and asylum seekers. The narrative in which we find the tax-gatherer Zacchaeus hiding in the tree, being prepared to pay back everything and more to those whom he has overcharged (Luke 19.1–10), does represent the spirit of the teaching of Jesus and it still provokes us to consider what we might owe to the poor in our society. Whether or not they represent historical events, these passages express the truth about who Jesus is and where we may find him in the world of today.
Jesus was a man, fully a human being. Some of the traditions about him suggest, as we have seen, someone who is superhuman, not confined to the usual boundaries of life as a human being. These are the stories that one suspects have much to tell us about what he meant to the early Church but do not establish anything historical. The most obvious examples are Jesus walking on water, calming the storm, feeding five thousand people with five loaves and two fish, and raising the dead back to life. These explain and encourage the Christian faith; they are true mythically as descriptions of what Jesus achieved and what he means to his believers, but not what he actually did in three-dimensional time and space. They suggest a post-resurrection, heavenly Jesus rather than a man among men. Other stories: his sermons, his advice to the disciples, his cleansing of the Temple, washing the disciples’ feet, and sharing the Last Supper do not contradict what we know of human beings, particularly remarkable human beings. Like the biopic, they may be embellished as to the detail and timing, but these narratives might well be based on actual historical events.
The gospels represent an early stage of the process by which the human lives of Jesus Christ and his associates were mythologized, that is, established in eternity in order to become available to all believers after them. Thus Jesus, it could be said, is eternally feeding the five thousand, healing the diseased, and sharing the bread and wine of salvation; these occur through the actions of present-day Christians (hopefully!), but they are still the actions of Christ as the head of his body which is the Church. He is eternally present on the cross, offering his body to future generations. The Catholic crucifix captures this belief; it is not accepted as an image in Protestantism yet, there too, the cross remains important and the benefits of Christ’s sacrifice remain eternally accessible. The early Church pictured a triumphant, risen Christ rather than an agonized figure on the cross; the crucifix that emerged in the medieval era was truer to historical reality. However, the original cross of Christ triumphant is closer to the process of mythologization that occurs with other aspects of the life of Christ as we read them in the gospels: Christ is larger than life in that he walks on water, raises Lazarus, and stills the storm. This is the heavenly Christ, the divine being, second person of the Trinity.
The Christian can connect to this Jesus across time and space. The Jesus in heaven and the Jesus during the Incarnation are one and the same person. Ways of describing the heavenly Jesus include mythical constructs which are accurate ways of articulating what the believer can expect to receive from Jesus. Jesus’ real-life actions did not include walking on water, but they were nonetheless wonderful and expressed symbolically through this parable, which shows us that Jesus rises above, and takes the believer above, all those things which can drown and suffocate us in life.
As the early Christian tradition developed outside the writings of the New Testament, the description of Christ’s mother included material which is unmistakeably mythology. The mother of Christ was described by the means of various theological associations in early Christian apocrypha,3 such as Wisdom (Odes of Solomon 19, Davidson’s translation), the Holy Spirit (Gospel of the Hebrews 3 quoted in Origen, Commentary on John 2.12.87), or an incarnation of the archangel Michael (as in the Gospel of the Hebrews 1, quoted in Cyril of Jerusalem, Discourse on Mary Theotokos 12).
Like Christ, Mary was regarded in Christian tradition as a historical person and mythological being at the same time. This was also the case with John the Baptist about whom it was asked whether he was a reincarnation of Elijah, Jeremiah, or one of the other prophets (Matt. 16.14; Mark 8.28; Luke 9.19). In the second century, in the Protevangelium or Infancy Gospel of James, there is the image of Mary as a pure young child taken to the Temple, where she is fed by angels. Even later, there were many accounts of her death with all the apostles gathered followed by her assumption into heaven. An important question that arises about Mary in the birth and infancy narratives is whether the description of her as a virgin mother also belongs to this category of mythology in which truth is conveyed in parables, that is, in symbolic stories with a theological purpose.
Notes
1 For helpful overviews of the history of biblical interpretation with examples, see Stephen and Martin Westerholm, Reading Sacred Scripture: Voices from the History of Biblical Interpretation; Richard Soulen, Sacred Scripture: A Short History of Interpretation; and Michael J. Gorman, Scripture: An Ecumenical Introduction to the Bible and its Interpretation.
2 Or ‘Maryam’, as it is spelled in European translations of the Qur’an. Other ancient versions of this name include ‘Mariamne’, the name of the queen who was Herod the Great’s wife.
3 The Christian apocrypha are those scripture-like Christian writings from the first few centuries of the Church which were not included in the New Testament.