From
The March 2003 St John's Eagle
“Reading the Gospels" - By John Harcourt
During
my undergraduate years (1939 1943), Father Robert Casey served as Professor
of Religion and also as assistant priest at St. Stephen's Church, Rhode
Island's premier Anglo Catholic parish, nestled into a corner of the
Brown University campus. A brilliant, tormented man, Father Casey was
an enigma to us students. We simply could not understand how his high
church piety cohered with a radically critical, even destructive, approach
to the Bible. Later, I would learn that this mix is not uncommon among
Anglicans.
One Good
Friday, I heard him lecture in the Student Union. Carefully, he summarized
the accounts of the trial of Jesus provided by the Gospel writers. After
the arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, Mark and Matthew categorically
state "Then all the disciples forsook him and fled" (Mk. 14:50
Matt. 26:56). To be sure, peter "followed him at a distance",
but remained outside in the courtyard of the high priest; after his
threefold denial, he left the scene and wept bitterly. Meanwhile, the
trial proceeded inside the palace of the high priest, and all four evangelists
give versions of this judicial interrogation.
At this
point, Father Casey paused dramatically. "The disciples had fled;
Peter remained outside for a while, then disappeared into the night.
Then who could have provided the information as to what the high priest
asked and what Jesus had answered?"
That moment
forever transformed my understanding of the gospels. Contrary to what
I had been taught, the evangelists' words were not simple factual statements,
to be accepted unquestioningly at face value. It was legitimate to ask
questions like "Who were the witnesses?"; the usual rules
of evidence applied even here. Critical evaluation of the available
data, stressed in all my other university courses, extended also to
Holy Writ!
What then
of the prior events in the garden? If the disciples were all sound asleep,
who could give a report on Jesus' agony, on what he did and said? And
at the crucifixion itself, Mark and Matthew imply that the disciples
had fled behind locked doors, that only a group of women remained "looking
on from afar." Who could have heard what, if anything, Jesus said
from the cross?
Mark, the
earliest evangelist, turned to Psalm 22 for "My God, my God, why
hast thou forsaken me?" And after that, provided, quite realistically,.
A loud, inarticulate howl of pain. Matthew in substance repeats Mark's
account, but Luke, clearly unhappy with so bleak an ending, rejects
Mark and provides three different (more appropriate?) "last words."
John, whose Jesus seems so often to be an inhabitant from another world
briefly and circumspectly visiting this evil plant, offers three still
different words from the
cross. Two of them sound rather like Socrates calmly discoursing with
his followers after drinking the hemlock or like Hollywood's Spartacus
gravely counseling his wife from the cross.
Both John and Hollywood ignore the physiology of crucifixion (as does
virtually all Christian art):
"Cramps
started in the muscles of the forearms and then Spread into the whole
upper body, the abdomen, the legs. With this enormous burden on the
heart, the pulse was inevitably slowed and the blood carried less
and less oxygen to the lungs so that the victim slowly suffocated.
Poisoned by waste matter that the heart was no longer Strong enough
to eliminate, the muscles were affected by Spasms that caused excruciating
pain."
Frederick Buechner, The Faces of Jesus
It might
prove instructive, in our Good Friday services of the Last Words, to
start with John and then move back through Luke to Mark's cry of dereliction
and that final shriek of unendurable pain.
Who was
there? Who saw, who heard, who told whom? How did the information get
transmitted in those decades before anything was written down? These
are perhaps unanswerable questions, yet they must be asked. By doing
so, we shall be approaching the gospel narratives with the seriousness
that they deserve.
This, I
think, is what Robert Casey was trying to shock us into understanding.
Professor
Harourt is the Charles A. Dana Professor of
English English Emeritus at Ithaca College.
