Marcus Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary, HarperSanFrancisco, 2006, 343 pages.
This is a book which should have begun with its epilogue. It is at the end that Marcus Borg makes clear what is at stake for a twenty-first century treatment of the historical Jesus and why it matters. You don’t have to be a devout Christian, nor the least bit conversant in all the religious jargon, to grasp the importance of a book like this. But those who have no acquaintance with the nuts and bolts of basic Christian thinking are unlikely to wait until the final section to discover the rationale. And this is unfortunate, because the conversation has gained urgency. Today, powerful groups are making claims in the name of Jesus—claims which are moving us to the brink of extinction. For those of us who want to bequeath to our children a decent world, we may have no choice but to say “No” to Jesus, or at least to a particular version of Jesus. We cannot afford to be complacent about the activities of those who think it honourable to be instruments of an apocalypse. If we are to oppose these activities, then we must begin by educating ourselves about how the Jesus story has been manipulated – which claims are plausible, and which are sheer nonsense. And, as Borg makes clear, there are many which are nonsense.
Borg’s writing falls within the genre which Albert Schweitzer laid down a century ago when he published The Quest of the Historical Jesus. There, Schweitzer summarized all the historical scholarship that had preceded him, and established a footing for the twentieth century quest to begin. This turned out to be a great gift because, by the middle of the twentieth century, the quest had gathered new life with the discovery and translation of documents at Qumran and Nag Hammadi. These have given us more material to refine our view of the life and times of Jesus.
The genre is problematic. Is it history? Is it theology? Or a mix? If we weight our thinking in favour of one discipline or the other, how useful will it be in answering the extremists who use Jesus to achieve pragmatic goals? If we lean towards history, as Borg often does, then—so the argument goes—we can demonstrate that the historical Jesus lived in a way that can’t possibly speak to today’s highly polarized debates about American imperial aspirations and public school curriculum in Kansas and stem cell research. If we restrict our examination of Jesus to a first century peasant living on the margins of the Roman empire, then we can easily limit his teachings and meaning to that context while looking for better tools to deal with the many crises which were unimaginable in that world.
But there is a problem with history: it’s—well—all in the past. I don’t mean to sound cute. It’s simply that, of all the academic disciplines, history has proven least receptive to recent intellectual developments. Part of the reason for this lies in the nature of history itself. Because we don’t have time machines, first-hand observation is impossible. This rules out modern scientific method as an approach to understanding historical events. If I want to know whether a balloon contains helium, I let it go and watch it rise or fall. But there is no such hands-on approach to doing history. Apart from strict empiricism, the only other scientific approach I can use is statistical modeling. So, for example, if I’m a farmer and want to know the soil composition of a field, I don’t test the entire field; instead, I take samples at regular intervals and then make assumptions about soil composition based on the probability that the soil near the sample site is identical to the soil actually sampled. But how do I apply the same approach in the historical field? How do I “sample” an event? How do I “dig” around an event to produce a model of what likely occurred? And when those events happened 2,000 years ago, our picture blurs. Our conjecture becomes extremely unreliable.
Borg acknowledges the limitations which his quest faces, and he does his best to compensate. So, for example, he gives us a sense of the times by painting a general picture of life in first century Nazareth. He presents something of the political climate—the Jewish peasantry ruled by harsh client kings who were ruled, in turn, by a distant Rome. He presents the suffering which would have been typical of subsistence farmers, fishermen, and labourers with limited skills. He also offers a sense of the cultural milieu of the day by reflecting on the Roman subjugation, and the painful echoes within Israel’s history of subjugation at the hands of the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and earlier still, the Egyptians. From this broad picture, Borg is able to offer a convincing statement of what life was probably like for Jesus. His approach is reminiscent of another creative history, The Unredeemed Captive, in which John Demos recreates for us the world of seventeenth century New England, with particular attention to the native point of view. The challenge, much like the challenge of recreating life from the Jewish peasant point of view, is that he must portray a people whose culture is predominantly illiterate/oral, and so has left behind little record of itself. There is much which can be inferred and much which can be extrapolated, but for those who prefer a strict empiricism, the vagueness of this approach may be discomfiting.
There are two questions worth posing to Borg:
First, even if we accept a fuzzy approach to doing history, do we have a valid conception of what it means to do history? At last, it seems, historians are catching up to the theorists in other disciplines and are asking all the difficult meta-questions that threaten to undermine the very reason for their existence. Perhaps not surprisingly, these questions are not coming from the West, but from post–colonial thinkers who at last are free to draw upon possibilities that have been available (but ignored) for centuries. So we have Indian historian, Ashis Nandy, writing, in History and Theory in 1995, about the Ramjanmabhumi movement in India which saw devotees destroy a mosque in the city of Ayodhya in 1992. The mosque was supposed to have been built upon the ruins of a temple (previously destroyed by Muslims) which marked the birthplace of Lord Rama, one of the incarnations of Vishnu. In the recriminations and justifications which followed, the many voices seemed to shift in and out of varying perspectives on time. Interestingly, one debate was firmly grounded in Western historicity—did the mosque, in fact, stand on the real birthplace of Rama? One could just as easily have been debating the historical truth of the virgin birth at Bethlehem. But this particular debate was an aberration. Nandy notes: “Traditional India not only lacks the Enlightenment’s concept of history; it is doubtful that it finds objective, hard history a reliable, ethical, or reasonable way of constructing the past. The construction of time in South Asia may or may not be cyclical, but it is rarely linear or unidirectional. … Time in much of South Asia is an open–ended enterprise.” In such a conception of time, myth tells as much truth as scientific historical investigation.
One could object that comments from an Indian theorist have nothing to do with life in first century Palestine. Or, one could go further and argue, as Thomas Cahill did in The Gift of the Jews, that the West’s decidedly linear conception of history comes from a source which it shares with Jesus. To this, I have three answers:
1) Linearity, as a continuous causal chain, is a notion that comes from an altogether different Galilean. An accurate measurement of linear time was unnecessary until Galileo began to experiment with falling bodies. This laid the foundation for a Newtonian account of the universe which held that given the present state of the universe, we should be able to trace our way back through time to an accurate representation of any prior state. It is from these pioneers of Western science, and not from ancient Israel, that we take our understanding of time.
2) We have little record of life in ancient Israel. For the reason of continuous subjugation, noted above, Israel never had much control over the telling of its own story. In fact, by the time of Jesus, the principal record keepers were the highly rational and exceptionally linear Romans. And Romans had no regard for what Jewish peasants did or did not think about time.
3) Nandy’s comments may be valid irrespective of cultural context. The lesson we learn from Nandy is that our own linear conception of time is as culturally conditioned as any other and it offers little assurance about our grasp of reality.
Perhaps, then, what it means to do history need have little to do with an accurate presentation of events as they “really” unfolded. Instead, it may have more to do with story-telling, the transmission of culture, and the affirmation of personal and collective identity.
This leads to my second question. Is it possible to ignore Jesus as a historical figure and still find valuable meaning in the Jesus story? While Borg claims to be involved in the quest for the historical Jesus—certainly the quest for the historical sayings of Jesus—nevertheless, he does enough hedging that I begin to suspect he holds far more in common with Nandy than with Schweitzer. For example, he draws a distinction between taking documents literally and taking them factually. It is a commonplace among liberals to accuse fundamentalists of reading things literally. And yet, as Borg points out, that is the only way we can read many texts such as parables. Instead, we should be concerned with people who read factually, for they are implicitly making historical claims that are baseless.
More telling is how Borg applies his history to the Jesus sayings. For example, he considers the parable of the generous landlord: day labourers start work in a vineyard at different times during the day, yet at the end of the day, the owner pays them all the same wage. Traditionally, the landlord has been understood as representing God, and his treatment of the labourers is supposed to tell us something about the nature of God. But Borg invites us to listen with the ears of a peasant in first century Palestine. Here, doing history in a meaningful way does not require us to ask whether certain events did or did not happen, but rather, to ask how people lived and how they responded to their conditions. In this instance, perhaps the audience would have understood things differently. Perhaps this story was a reproach of wealthy landowners:
“They get our land”—often through foreclosure on debt—“and turn us into tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and day laborers. Then they try to get by with as few workers as possible, and that’s why they don’t hire more in the morning. Then when they need more, they accuse those of us who haven’t been hired yet of being lazy.” … “Then they pay everybody the same wage, barely enough for survival, and expect to be seen as good-hearted, generous people. Talk about arrogance!”
By this approach, a clear-sighted historical presentation serves, not to tell us what really happened, but to illuminate fresh ways to think about who we are and how we should live our lives in the here-and-now.