What are we to make of all this?

There has been a belated but very interesting discussion between me and friend-of-the-blog Mike Taylor in the comments on the series of posts on Mark’s Gospel I published back in 2020.

Our disagreement concerns something I had rather taken for granted as the scholarly consensus: that “Mark” was a storyteller who compiled and shaped an oral tradition of Jesus stories into a literary work, and that “Matthew” and “Luke” used his text as a source. Mike takes a more traditional view, that all four Gospels depend on eyewitness testimony. They are not necessarily “infallible” or “inerrant”; but when Matthew alters Mark, he is doing so to make the narrative more consistent with how he personally remembered it, not to improve the story or bring it into line with his theological views.

I wrote:

“I think the point of disagreement here is that I am more or less convinced by the liberal scholarly consensus that the synoptic writers were primarily story tellers: working from an already existing collection of stories and assembling them and reworking them into the books we now call 'gospels'. They were less interested in reporting 'what actually happened' than in making sure the readers understood who Jesus was and why he was important. And where their understandings differ, they tell the stories differently.”

Mike responded by quoting the following passage in full.

“Another point is that on that view you would have to regard the accounts of the Man as being legends. Now, as a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing. They are not artistic enough to be legends. From an imaginative point of view they are clumsy, they don’t work up to things properly. Most of the life of Jesus is totally unknown to us, as is the life of anyone else who lived at that time, and no people building up a legend would allow that to be so. Apart from bits of the Platonic dialogues, there are no conversations that I know of in ancient literature like the Fourth Gospel. There is nothing, even in modern literature, until about a hundred years ago when the realistic novel came into existence. In the story of the woman taken in adultery we are told Christ bent down and scribbled in the dust with His finger. Nothing comes of this. No one has ever based any doctrine on it. And the art of inventing little irrelevant details to make an imaginary scene more convincing is a purely modern art. Surely the only explanation of this passage is that the thing really happened? The author put it in simply because he had seen it.”

I am sure we can all identify this as coming from CS Lewis’s 1950 essay “What Are We To Make of Jesus Christ.”

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“What Are We To Make of Jesus Christ?” can be found, alongside other examples of CS Lewis’s journalism, in a Walter Hooper anthology entitled God In The Dock, where it sits between a little sermon about judging others which first appeared in an Anglican periodical (“The Trouble With X”) and a learned debate with philosopher CEM Joad from a Jesuit journal. (“The Pains of Animals”).

But it was originally published in a book called Asking Them Questions. (The title refers to the story of the boy Jesus in the temple.)

It’s a rather charming idea: a Scottish clergyman named Ronald Selby Wright handed out slips of paper to the boys in his local youth club and invited them to write down any questions they could think of about Christianity. He was surprised (although he probably shouldn’t have been) that the boys came up with fairly deep, theological questions about Satan and the Trinity, where he had expected practical inquiries about faith and conduct. So he had the idea of sending the questions to bishops, philosophers and prominent Christians and making a book of the answers. The questions seem very much the sort of thing teenaged boys might ask. “Does the idea of original sin mean that even a wee baby is sinful?” “How can God be love? I always thought He was a person.” Wright comes across as slightly patronising. “A telegraph messenger asked ‘What was Christ’s position as God if he prayed to God’, an apprentice plumber about the Second Coming…” but he clearly means well.

So “What are we to make of Jesus Christ?” is a subject that Lewis had been asked to speak on, not one that he had chosen for himself—which explains why he begins by saying that it is a silly question! The essay is specifically directed at intelligent, but relatively uneducated teenagers. So it should be approached differently from, for example, "Fern Seed and Elephants" which makes some similar points but is addressed to candidates for ordination.

Lewis rose to national prominence as a result of his BBC radio broadcasts, and during the war he had a kind of ministry giving lectures about faith at RAF bases. Although he was not a theologian or a Bible scholar, he believed he had the knack of translating difficult religious ideas into the vernacular of ordinary people. It must be said that not all the contributors to Asking Them Questions have this skill. One Rev. AE Taylor, responding to a question about the childhood of Jesus (“He can’t have been much fun and if He were an ordinary Boy he must have sinned, mustn’t He?”) says that the idea that Jesus wouldn’t have experienced normal adolescent temptations “seems to me to be a relic of the Docetist heresy.”

If you are explaining quantum physics or natural selection to young people in five pages, you can’t be expected to give them a full understanding of what contemporary scientists actually believe. (Is it still the case that protons and neutrons whizz round an atomic nucleus like planets round the sun until year eleven?) But it is important to play fair. A poor analogy, or an analogy pressed too far could leave your students with the sense that scientists are not to be trusted.

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CS Lewis’s essay appears in the third volume of Asking Them Questions which was published in 1950; as it happens, the same year as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The earlier Narnia books were exercises in defamiliarisation. Lewis wanted to tell a story that was like the story of the Passion and the Resurrection, so that children would be able to experience emotionally what the story meant. “Better felt than telt” as the Scots say.

I think “What Are We To Make of Jesus Christ” is doing something similar. Lewis presents Jesus to the teenagers as someone strange, alien, compelling, attractive, even frightening. He wants to get past the dusty formulas (“...and in His only Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord”) and uncover the surprising heart of the Christian message.

And he does that kind of thing better than anyone else. The purely evangelistic passages brilliantly tip-toe past the sleeping dragons of habitual piety.

“If you had gone to Socrates and asked, 'Are you Zeus?' he would have laughed at you. If you had gone to Mohammed and asked, 'Are you Allah?' he would first have rent his clothes and then cut your head off.”

The point is made with great power and wit (regardless of whether or not you agree with it.) Lewis pointedly refrains from quoting directly from the English Bible, preferring pithy paraphrases of his own. In the final paragraph of the essay, he puts a series of statements about Christ’s identity alongside each other: it’s among the best bits of religious writing he ever published:

“Others say, 'This is the truth about the Universe. This is the way you ought to go,' but He says, 'I am the Truth, and the Way, and the Life.' He says, 'No man can reach absolute reality, except through Me. Try to retain your own life and you will be inevitably ruined. Give yourself away and you will be saved.’…”

Is it just me, or does this paraphrase come out sounding something like the gnostic Jesus of the apocryphal Thomas gospel?

In one or two cases, Lewis could be accused of “pressing” the text. In Mark’s Gospel, the High Priest asks Jesus “Art thou the Christ, the Son of the Blessed” to which Jesus replies “I am: and ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven.” (Matthew and Luke make Jesus a smidgeon more equivocal: the former has “Thou has said” and the latter has “You say that I am.”) It is intrinsically unlikely that a Jewish high priest understood “son of the blessed” in any Christian theological sense: he must have been asking Jesus if he was the expected Jewish Messiah.

But Lewis has subtly reworked the passage:

“The moment at which the High Priest said to Him, 'Who are you?’ 'I am the Anointed, the Son of the uncreated God, and you shall see Me appearing at the end of all history as the judge of the Universe.”

Again, Jesus did not quite say “I am begotten of the One God, before Abraham was, I am”. This conflates something which John says that Jesus said (John 8:58) with something John says about him. [John 1 14&18, John 3 16&18.)  

I am also very slightly troubled that Lewis say unequivocally that Jesus “went around saying to people ‘I forgive you your sins’”. What he said, to the disabled man and to the woman with the flask of perfume was “Your sins are forgiven”.

But I think all this is forgivable overstatement. Lewis might well have said that he was attempting to create an oil painting rather than a photograph: something more like Holman Hunt’s Light of the World — or, indeed, like his own Aslan—than any historical reconstruction.

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In so far as the essay is apologetic rather than evangelical, it is largely a restatement of our old friend the Trilemma. You remember how it goes: we know that Lucy doesn’t tell lies; we know that Lucy isn’t crazy; so logically there must really be a fairy tale kingdom hidden in Prof Kirke’s wardrobe. I think the death blow was struck to this argument by AN Wilson who wrote in his 1990 biography of Lewis that it can’t possibly be that simple. If it were, the world would be neatly divided into an overwhelming majority of Christians and a tiny minority of spiritual flat-earthers too wicked or stupid or obstinate to accept the obvious.

My position hasn’t really changed. As long as we are talking about “Jesus”, the character in the Gospels, then “he was a fine fellow who said some jolly good things that we should all take a lot of notice of” is simply off the table. There are ancient writings about Jesus other than the Biblical ones. They say that Jesus only appeared to be human (the “docetist” heresy that Rev Taylor was concerned about) or that he was temporarily possessed by a divine spirit or that he was the son of a totally different God. But no-one in the ancient world seems to have had the view that he was a good teacher and nothing more. 

In this essay, Lewis presents the argument in a rather more measured way than he did in Christianity. Nearly everyone agrees that Jesus's moral teaching is sensible and impressive; but his statements about himself are extreme and megalomaniacal ("next to whom Hitler was the most sane and modest of men"). So you have to chose between what Lewis called "the Christian hypothesis"--that Jesus was what he claimed to be--or else declare him to be a madman ("on a level with someone who thinks he is a poached egg") or an actual demon. 

But what if there were another option? What if Jesus never said any of those things? Lewis goes on to address this question. If you are a fan of alliteration, you might want to say that he is expanding the “lunatic, liar or Lord” trilemma into a quadrilemma: “lunatic, legend, liar or Lord”

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And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery
and when they had set her in the midst they say unto him

"Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act
Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned
But what sayest thou?"
This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him.

But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground...
So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them
"He that is without sin among you

let him first cast a stone at her"
And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.
And they which heard it they went out one by one...
beginning at the eldest, even unto the last

And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.
When Jesus had lifted up himself
And saw none but the woman
he said unto her
"Woman, where are those thine accusers?
Hath no man condemned thee?"
She said,"No man, Lord."
And Jesus said unto her
"Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more"

John 8: 3-11

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It is fairly ironic that Lewis should take the story of the woman taken in adultery as his demonstration that the New Testament stories must be historically accurate. The Good News Bible prints the story in [square brackets]. The New International Version prints it between two paragraph rules. The New English Bible puts it on a page by itself after the rest of John’s Gospel, labelled “An incident in the temple”.

This is because the oldest extant texts of John (from the second and third centuries) omit the story altogether. We don’t have it in a manuscript before the fifth century. And even then it is what folksingers would call a “floating” passage: it turns up in different places in different documents. Sometimes it is not in John’s Gospel at all, but in Luke’s, just after Jesus has finished preaching in the temple at the end of his public ministry. And sometimes it is placed at the end of John, or of Luke. As an appendix, of doubtful authenticity? Or as a story which sums up everything that has gone before? “Go and do not sin again” would be a good note to go out on. 

What happened? Did some scribes redact the passage because the implications were simply too shocking? Augustine thought that men deleted it because they thought it would encourage their wives to cheat on them. On the other hand, perhaps it was an oral tradition that eventually got incorporated into the canon because it is such a compelling story?

The fourth century historian Eusebius says that a late first century writer named Papias said that there was a story about Jesus pardoning an adulteress in a now-lost book called the Gospel of the Hebrews—which scholars think was probably a more Jewish version of Matthew.

It’s complicated.

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I have the following problems with CS Lewis’s treatment of the material.

1: The text says “Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground….And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground.”

I do not know Greek and rely on dictionaries and concordances for this sort of thing. But it seems that on the first occasion, the word for “wrote” is katagráfo; on the second it is simply grafo. Strong’s concordance tells me that in the ancient world katagrafo sometimes meant “to write down an accusation”; in modern Greek it seems to mean something like “registered”. Lewis chooses to say that Jesus “scribbled”. Talking about the same passage in the lecture to theology students, he goes with “doodled”. These are not necessarily wrong: I understand kata to be an intensifier, so a possible translation could be “he very wrote”. But Lewis has chosen words which fit his thesis.

In the lecture to ordinands, he says that the passage is an example of the New Testament’s use of “pictures”. I think this is very telling. Lewis has read the story very closely and mediated on it. He has used his imagination to envisage the scene, which is just what a devotional reader, as opposed to a scholar, might be expected to do. He has pictured a slightly embarrassed Jesus doodling to defuse the situation. And he has unconsciously projected that picture back onto the text itself.

Gen means "earth" or "land" or occasionally "soil". Some translations say that Jesus wrote in the dust or on the earth: but the majority go with on the ground.

2: Tom Jones was published in 1749. Pamela was published in 1736. Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders were written in 1722 and 1719. The Canterbury Tales was written around 1400, and is full of things like “Ful smale ypulled were hire browes two" and “This Nicholas was risen for to pisse". The idea that realistic fiction didn’t exist before 1850 is risible.

3: The preservation of a particular detail doesn’t tell us anything about whether a memory, an oral tradition, or a folk-tale is accurate in any other respect. Everyone knows that Queen Victoria was not amused; everyone knows that Alfred burned the cakes: hardly anyone remembers the particular narrative context that those snippets occurred in.

In my book on Mark, I used the example of my grandmother and the elephant. The incident was told to me as true; but if I told it to my grandchildren, it would take the form of a story: “One day, when Queen Victoria was still on the throne, my granny, who was about six years old at the time, heard a knock on the door. What do you think she saw when her mother opened it…?” The tale—or if you like, the meme— would contain a great deal of actual information: that there were travelling circuses in Cornwall at the turn of the twentieth century; that even well-to-do-houses in the country had pumps rather than running water; that a little girl knew what an elephant was even though she had never seen one. But was my granny six or ten or fourteen at the time of the incident? Did the house have a bell or a knocker or did the circus man call out politely that his elephant needed a drink? I have no idea.

I forget who it was who said that the only thing we can confidently say about the historical Jesus is that he used to begin sentences with “Verily, verily.” For all we know, “Jesus used to scribble in the dirt before he answered questions” was a well-known fact that the author of John happened to make use of.

4: “No-one has ever based any doctrine” on the incident. Well, it depends what you mean by doctrine. If you mean credal statement or dogma, then this is entirely correct: in fact, very little of the New Testament has given rise to doctrines in that sense. (“I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic church, the walking on the water, the writing in the dust, and the life everlasting”.) But if by “doctrine” you mean didache, teaching (“they were astonished at his doctrine") then yes, preachers and expositors have indeed derived teaching from the incident.

The two most common interpretations have been:

A: Jesus wrote down the specific sins of those present. This would fit well with the suggestion that  katagrapho means "write an accusation". It is pure speculation, but it is speculation which goes back to St Jerome.

B: “Thou shalt not commit adultery” is one of the Ten Commandments, and the Ten Commandments were written by the finger of God. (Exodus 31:18; Deuteronomy 9:10) So by writing on the ground with his finger Jesus is identifying himself with the Author of the law which has been broken. He is, in fact, telling the pharisees not to quote the deep magic to him, because he was there when it was written. And it could be taken to mean that the Torah is written in dust, not on stone: that it is a temporary thing that can be amended.

Which one do you believe? Your answer affects the wider meaning of the story. If you go with the first version, then Jesus is shaming these particular pharisees into letting this particular woman off,  but making no wider judgement on the use of the death penalty for victimless sex offences. He is saying no more than “Are you really going to kill this lady, considering what I heard about you and Lydia on Tuesday night?”

If you choose the second one, you are getting much closer to saying that the commandment against adultery no longer applies. Or at any rate, that there are no longer any secular or this-worldly punishments for breaking it. The Ten Commandments is more guidelines than rules.

The King James Bible, and practically no other English translation, says that the Pharisees left because they were “convicted by their consciences” which fits well with the first theory. But the majority of manuscripts don’t have that verse, and the majority of scholars think it is a scribal amendment. Did I mention that it was complicated?

5: But my really big problem is with Lewis's use of the word “legend”.

CS Lewis relatively often uses word-play in his essays, and there is nothing wrong with that. He begins “What Are We To Make of Jesus Christ?” by playing with the fact that you could take the question in two ways. In the passage in Grief Observed that I was talking about a few days ago, he rejects the idea of a cruel God on the grounds that a person who tormented kittens for the fun of it could not be imagined as the Creator. “He, make a universe? He couldn’t make a joke, or a bow, or an apology, or a friend”. Lewis’s point doesn’t depend on the ambiguity of the word “make”.

Suppose Jesus didn’t say the things that he is supposed to have said. Say, for example “His followers exaggerated the story, so the legend grew up that he had said them”. Well, in that case legends is what the Gospels would have to be. But from a literary standpoint, they are obviously not legends. And if they are not legends: they are reportage. (“Pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell.”) Q.E.D

Lewis has rather skilfully palmed his cards: casually dropping the word “legend” into one sentence (“the legend grew up”) and then putting it in italics at the beginning of the next paragraph (“on that view you would have to regard they accounts of the Man as being legends.”) And of course, if “legend” is a literary genre, Lewis has a perfectly good point. The Gospels are not very much like Homer or Malory or even the rhymes of Robin Hood. But that wasn’t the point we agreed to: we only agreed that if they weren't literally factual then they might be stories with an historical basis that had drifted some distance from the original facts. In Bristol, we have a local legend about a man who for years collected parking fees for a car-park that didn’t exist; in Scotland, there are legends about lakes inhabited by sea monsters; any Liverpool tour guide might report a local legend about John and Paul drinking in a particular pub. Those stories don't have the artistry and completeness of an Arthurian myth, either. 

If some of the Gospel stories are not reportage, certainly they must be something else: folk-tales, or rumours, or gnostic myths, or attempts to answer the “WWJD?” question in narrative form. Lewis was aware of Bultman, who thought that the New Testament preserved no information about the historical Jesus. The Gospels were entirely about the struggles and conflicts in the communities that produced them. Heck, you can buy kitsch prints of Jesus playing little league baseball on eBay. They don't purport to be photojournalism; but they aren’t legends either. (Neither are they lies or frauds, though they may be in terrible taste.) 

It's an astonishing thing to say about historical literature: that artistically developed texts may be fictional, but clumsy and haphazard ones are probably true.

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Eric Auerbach, who Lewis tells the theology students to read, talks of scriptural texts as having hermenuitic potential. They allow and invite preachers and thinkers and the pious to interpret them; to read things into them, to discover new meanings. I fear that an over-insistence on the literal, factual, journalistic accuracy of the texts risks emptying them of their meaning. 

I once heard an evangelical clergyman ask why we are told that the miraculous catch in the last chapter of John’s Gospel consisted of precisely one hundred and fifty three fish. 

“Because” he cried “It was the NUMBER THEY ACTUALLY CAUGHT!”

Well, okay: but why did John tell us that exact number—who, indeed, in the presence of  the risen Lord, bothered to count? And why pick out that particular fact, when there are other things in the story we would like to have known? (Are we to picture the resurrected Jesus walking along the shore collecting wood; or was the fire he was cooking on a miraculous creation?)

I have complained before about the kind of person who says that they love books, but who decries bad actors called “teachers” and “critics” who see literature as something more than a delivery-mechanism for vivid narratives.

You know the kind of thing:

What the Author wrote: "The curtains were blue.”

What the English Teacher thinks: "The blue curtains represent the character's immense depression and their lack of will to move forward….

What the Author actually meant: "The curtains were f***ing blue.”

To which my answer is always: yes, very probably they were. But why of all the thousands of things he could have said about the house, did the author choose to pick on the colour of the curtains?

Jesus was around thirty years old; we usually assume that his ministry lasted about three years. (Why we assume that I am not quite sure.) John’s Gospel runs to maybe twenty pages. Like the schoolboy in Rev Wright’s youth club; we would love to know more about his childhood, or what he was doing in Nazareth during the decades between his twelfth and thirtieth birthdays. We would love it if some Dead Sea Scroll dropped us a factual crumb. But they never do: the apocryphas and the folklore traditions always have a didactic purpose. Jesus is a figure filled with meaning, not as an individual with a shoe size and a favourite breakfast. Even something modern like Christ in the Carpenter’s Shop, which was thought scandalously realistic in its day, is almost comically over-stuffed with significance. 

If the story of the writing in the dust is reportage from which no-one has or should derive didache, should we say the same thing about the passage as a whole? “Here’s a funny thing: there was this one time when he shamed some Pharisees into letting off a woman who’d be caught cheating.” I think there are people who would actually say that this is the case. What you need to know s John 3:16 and Romans 10:9: the rest is background information and material for sermon illustration.

But the author of John’s Gospel says directly that he selected his material for a specific didactic purpose. 

"And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book: But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name." [John 20 30-31]

I think you would be on shaky grounds if you said that he said the curtains were blue because blue happened to be the colour of the curtains.

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What does the story mean? Jerome’s theory about Jesus writing the pharisees sins (and in fact King James' interpolation about their consciences) tames the passage. The woman gets off in this case because her accusers happen to be hypocrites. A writer named Enoch Powell remarked that this tends to reduce Jesus to the level of an indulgent schoolmaster. “Well, I ought to whack you, but it’s a lovely day and my horse just came in at Newmarket, so be off with you, but remember smoking is still against the rules.”

But the alternative is that it means what it says: that only the sinless can condemn sin; but the one actually sinless person chooses not to. (Note, incidentally, that he does not say “neither do I condemn you on condition you accept Jesus Christ as your personal saviour”.) If the seventh commandment has been rescinded where does that leave the sixth. Or the eighth?

William Blake wrote a long, fragmentary poem celebrating a revolutionary Christ that he had largely conjured out of his own copious imagination. (“The vision of Christ that thou dost see is my vision’s greatest enemy!”) 

He sees the story as being about the abolition of moral law.

Good and Evil are no more!

Sinai’s trumpets cease to roar!

Cease, finger of God, to write!

The Heavens are not clean in Thy sight.

Thou art good, and Thou alone;

Nor may the sinner cast one stone.

To be good only, is to be

A God or else a Pharisee.

Blake was, I fully admit, as nutty as a fruitcake. But he is responding to something actually present in the story. I am quite sure that Enoch Powell was wrong when he said that Jesus was being ironic. And about several other things as well.

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A salesman has to really believe in his product. But we don't blame him too much for overhyping it: for saying that his portable electric grill is better than all the other portable electric grills on the market; and that owning such a device will make you healthier and happier than all the poor saps with an unbranded one. In 1940, when the survival of civilisation really was on the line, would we have blamed Winston Churchill if he sometimes went beyond the strict limits of factual accuracy in his speechmaking?

Right at the end of his life, CS Lewis was interviewed by a representative of the Billy Graham missionary organisation.

“Would you say that the aim of Christian writing, including your own writing, is to bring about an encounter of the reader with Jesus Christ?” he was asked.

“That is not my language” replied Lewis “Yet it is the purpose I have in view.”

If that was what he thought he was doing, I think we can forgive him if there were a few loose links in the chain of logic along the way.

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A religious joke

So, Jesus looks at them and says “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

And from the crowd comes a large rock, which strikes the woman squarely on the head.

Jesus sighs. “You just couldn’t stop yourself, Mother” he says.