Inspired
AudacityReviving the gospel genre
An interview with James Carse
by Richard Marranca and Dorothy Orme
James Carse is Professor Emeritus of Religious History and Literature at New York University. His recent book, The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple (Harper San Francisco, 1999), is an attempt to revive the genre of gospel writing. Neither a novel about Jesus, such as those by Kazantzakis and Norman Mailer, nor a harmonization of the traditional gospels, like those of Leo Tolstoy and Reynolds Price, the work aspires to be a somewhat piecemeal narrative of the life and teachings of Jesus, by one of his disciples --in this case a Samaritan woman.
Could you give us a little background on your latest book
The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple?
I started years ago retelling classic stories and myths from the Gospels, actually even making up stories in the tradition of the midrash, the Jewish method of interpreting one story by telling another, making a rather free interpretation of classical religious texts. Then all of a sudden I realized I had quite a collection of material from the Gospels, or rather, a kind of alternative version of the Gospels. I realized, too, that for a long time I've had questions on the role of the canon in Christianity. In 325 (C.E.)Constantine established at the Council of Nicaea a canon which put a stop to the writing of gospels. Up to that time, there had been a lot of gospels. I thought that gave a kind of imperial quality to Christianity. It let Christians think that there is an absolute truth. It encouraged the kind of extremism with Christians that we have seen too often in history. Gospel-writing was an early Christian tradition; there may have been as many as 200 gospels written in the first several Christian centuries. So I thought, good, I'll resume the tradition, the old practice of writing gospels. So all of that came together, the tradition of writing gospels, my uneasiness with the canon, and my interest in midrashic interpretation of the Gospel. It evolved in a rather nice way.
Did this happen by chance?
Yes. I'm always happiest when things appear, when I discover something in the process of writing. I like to be involved in writing projects that are in a way beyond me. I like to start something I'm not really sure about or I'm not sure I can finish, so that in the process of writing, the book takes a form I never could have imagined, and this book is definitely of that character. You could say, in other terminology, it was inspired by the Holy Spirit! (laughter) But anyway, that's the process I like to follow. It means that books come slowly, but I'm much happier with it.
At the time that your book depicts, were there
hundreds of gospels?
We have fragments of about 35 gospels, only one of which is complete, the Gospel of Thomas. After the Second World War a collection of these gospels was uncovered in the sands of Egypt. How many others lie undiscovered is anyone's guess. It may overstate it to say there were hundreds but certainly there were scores. It is important to note here that gospel is a literary form unique to Christianity. It makes sense for many reasons to resume writing them.
In your Gospel, Christ comes into being as a teacher much more accidentally than in the official gospels.
There's even strong evidence in the New Testament that he might have developed that way himself. Scholars largely agree that Jesus had no consciousness of himself as the Messiah. Only once or twice, in very odd ways, does he say he is, in the canonical gospels. If he really had thought he was the Messiah, he would have said it a lot more often and the gospels would have reported his having said it more often. So I'm following the tradition that Jesus really didn't understand what was happening in his own life. And I take it a step further. That is, he understands that he doesn't understand what's happening. He knows that things are more mysterious than any single mind can grasp, so that becomes part of this teaching.
In your Gospel, and in the tradition, Christ starts out questioning the other rabbis, and soon other people start to follow him, not by his design, but by pure chance. People came to him, not because he performed miracles, but because they can see the suffering all around, and also because he needed to heal himself.
They all saw a vulnerability in him, an insight into things that was astonishing to them, so they followed him spontaneously, without knowing exactly what he was teaching. They were drawn by his person, as much as by his teaching, which is also the picture found in the canonical gospels.
So one of the things you point out is the struggle. That's not
really in the gospels that much, the struggles.
There's some of it. In the Gospel of Mark, there's constant conflict between Jesus and his disciples. They not only don't get it, but they positively annoy him. But the canonical gospels don't have much in the way of the development of Jesus' own character and self-understanding. They present it after he's arrived at it. I wanted to have a more developmental, evolutionary view of the way Jesus comes to his ministry. After all, it's a very brief ministry. From the canonical gospels, it could have been either one year or three years. They don't agree on the amount of time. So I made it one year, which seems to me to be reasonable. Just one year of public life -- quite a year! There had to be something about him that attracted attention. It must have been really quite dramatic to be remembered that way after simply one year of ministry.
Who was responsible for Jesus'
execution?
You know, there is one thing I want to stress in this gospel. A disturbing element of the New Testament and of the Christian tradition has to do with the culpability of the Jews in crucifying Jesus. In the New Testament, there's a lot of vagueness here. Who actually executed Jesus? The Jews or the Romans? The New Testament account is incomplete, though as we know, Christians over history have held the Jews responsible. It's extremely unlikely the Jews would have executed Jesus -- he broke no law requiring such action.
All of Rome's subject peoples were prohibited from using capital punishment. Rome reserved that punishment for itself alone. So now the question arises, if the Jews could not have done it, if the Romans had not permitted them to do it, then what Roman laws could Jesus have violated to lead to something as extreme as capital punishment?
From the canonical gospels we can't see any Roman laws that would have caused that kind of punishment. In writing this, I wanted to show two things. One, that his ministry was not in contrast or conflict with the Jews; it was itself a Jewish ministry. He was a Jew through and through. Also, there must have been something he had done that struck them as really dangerous to the Romans. That's why, in this book, it seemed to me to be necessary to show Pilate as someone who understood what Jesus was up to, and that he was dangerous. He was dangerous because he was a teacher of peace. He was not teaching insurrection against Rome, which only justifies its harsh role. He was teaching a kind of indifference to Rome. Let Rome die in your hearts, he taught. And Pilate was smart enough to know that this was the kind of thing that would eventually bring Rome down. So that was the reason he not only had him executed, but had him executed, as it were, illegally, innocently, so that his followers would be tempted to rise up and oppose Rome and therefore justify Rome for putting them down.
One of the things you get across in this book is that you wanted to open up the tradition of gospel-writing again, because the story's not finished. And the woman, the Samaritan, in whose voice the gospel is set, recognizes that the story is incomplete.
Right. It's an unfinished story. Not only is the Gospel an unfinished story, which is one of the assumptions of this book, but a lot of the stories in my book have the quality of open possibilities, rather than defining, narrowing, limiting things.