Hearing the traditional Easter Gospel reading (John 20) always reminds me of Graham Greene’s reaction to it – that it is reportage, a factual account of something that was presumably experienced by the writer.
“I remember again in St John’s Gospel,” Greene wrote to his friend, the Spanish priest Fr Leopold Duran, author of the best book about him, Graham Greene: Friend and Brother, “the run between Peter and John towards the tomb, Peter leading the way until he lost breath and then the younger man arriving first and seeing the linen clothes but afraid to go in – it’s like reportage.”
The interesting thing is that Greene was making his observation not as a Catholic convert but as a writer – and a writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and therefore someone especially well qualified to tell the difference between them. The man who spoke of reportage was himself a reporter.
Was it the case that writers like Greene had a different take on the Gospels from that of scholars and theologians? It was this thought that inspired me some years ago to compile an anthology of writers’ reactions to the New Testament and Jesus Christ, eventually published under the title Jesus: Authors Take Sides (1999).
To someone like me, brought up by Christian parents and educated at Christian schools with a daily act of worship, the Bible story was very familiar. So familiar that I know many of the best-known passages by heart. I therefore tried to focus on writers, not necessarily believers, who came to the story as adults, reacting to it without the influence of parents or teachers.
It was GK Chesterton, converted to Christianity in his twenties, who asked his readers to imagine they were reading the Gospels as newspaper stories. “We would find them puzzling and terrifying,” he says, “just as the Christ of the Gospels might seem actually more strange and terrible than the Christ of the Church”. “In some ways it is a very strange story,” he concluded.
The word “strange” was echoed by a number of writers. The poet Stevie Smith, famous for “Not Waving but Drowning”, refers to the “strange parables”. The Catholic Herald’s Alice Thomas Ellis wrote that “The pagan gods were pitifully dull and predictable in comparison with His strangeness.”
Writers’ reactions to the person of Jesus Christ as portrayed in the Gospels reflect that sense of strangeness, though there is frustration about the gaps in the narrative: the lack of personal details, for example.
Henry Miller finds Jesus appealing because “he didn’t even own a toothbrush”. DH Lawrence feels that he should have had a wife. But George Bernard Shaw felt there was something “more dignified in the bachelordom of Jesus than the spectacle of Mahomet lying distracted on the floor of his harem while his wives stormed and squabbled and henpecked around him”.
Interestingly, I found no writer, even among the non-believers like Shaw, who maintained that the story was “all made up”, as any common or garden atheist will tell you. Nor did anyone seek to explain the Gospel story as some sort of beautiful poetic “myth” which was not intended to be taken literally.
Anyone hoping to take comfort in such an interpretation is more likely to find it in the writings of progressive theologians or the sermons of renegade Cof E bishops.
It was Graham Greene, to revert to my starting point, who in his letter to Fr Duran thanked the Belgian theologian Edward Schillebeeckx – who had written of the Resurrection as “a kind of symbolic statement of the spiritual impression which the apostles experienced after the Crucifixion” – for restoring his faith in the authenticity of St John’s reportage.
“I am against the condemnation of Fr Schillebeeckx,” Greene wrote, “for he has communicated belief to at least one Catholic.”
Richard Ingrams is a former editor of Private Eye and The Oldie
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