Written by an educated Greek, this book tells the story of a living protagonist, Jesus of Nazareth, says Piers Paul Read.
For all the wisdom, colour and drama in the books of the Old Testament, we get to know God incarnate only through the Gospels, and of the four Gospels the one that appeals most to me as a writer of history and reportage is that of my fellow-practitioner, St Luke. He was more like us in other ways – a Greek, not a Jew, and with a better and wider education than the other evangelists; a doctor with a measure of scientific knowledge, and an author with a cultivated style to appeal (it is thought) to Gentile converts to Christianity: it is not difficult for a modern reader to see him or herself as Theophilus to whom both Luke’s Gospel, and the Acts of the Apostles – which are traditionally associated with him – are addressed. Thus, when a sceptical friend or acquaintance shows an interest in the Catholic faith, I always advise them to read Luke’s Gospel – but not in an intelligent modern translation such as that of the 1966 Jerusalem Bible. Instead I ask them to read it as if it were a work of fiction and see what they make of the author’s protagonist, Jesus of Nazareth.
Of course, Jesus of Nazareth is not fictional: it was, I think, only in the 18th century when some sceptical philosophes said that there was no evidence that he had ever existed; in which case, said Jean Jacques-Rousseau, the evangelists were more extraordinary than Jesus – extraordinary because we have four different accounts of the same story written both by uneducated Jews and an educated Greek, Luke. In the 19th century biblical scholars conceded that Jesus certainly existed, but that he was not and did not claim to be divine. “That Jesus never dreamed of making himself pass for an incarnation of God, is a matter about which there can be no doubt,” wrote the French Ernst Renan in his Life of Jesus (1863). There are a number of scholars in the present day who claim that Christianity was invented by St Paul.
It might therefore be prudent to attach a “faith warning” in the style of a health warning when it comes to the work of biblical scholars: Thomas á Kempis had his doubts about their findings, and so too did Jesus himself: “I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children” (Luke 10:21). Meanwhile, the Surrealist author Julien Gracq – an agnostic – wrote after attending a lecture by a biblical scholar, that “for all his formidable learning, the scholar in question had simply no ear – he could not hear what should be so obvious to any sensitive reader – that, underlying the text of the Gospels there is a powerful and masterly unity of style, which derives from one unique and inimitable voice”.
In other words, Matthew might have been a Jew, and Luke a Greek, but the truth of the Gospels transcends their differences, speaking with a single voice – not that of the Quelle or source of the scholars, but that of the Holy Spirit. And if, wrote Gracq (quoted by Simon Leys in the Analects of Confucius), “modern scholars, progressive minded clerics and the docile public all surrender to this critical erosion of the Scriptures, the last group of defenders who obstinately maintain that there is a living Jesus at the central core of the Gospels, will be artists and creative writers for whom the psychological evidence of style carries much more weight than mere philological arguments”.
What distinguishes the Gospel of Luke from those of the other three Evangelists? “All his writings are filled with human interest, human sympathy, concern for the poor, chivalry for women,” we are told in John Coulson’s dictionary of saints. Some of the sayings he ascribes to Jesus make uncomfortable reading: “Alas for you who are rich: you are having your consolation now; you shall go hungry. Alas for you who laugh now; you shall mourn and weep” (Luke 6:24-25). But we also learn of Jesus’s compassion for the sick and his particular care for children and women. Luke names Joanna, wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, Susanna who provided for Jesus “out of their own resources” – and, of course Mary Magdalene. If the exquisite depiction of Mary’s chaste love of Jesus when she encounters him after his Resurrection is to be found in St John’s Gospel, the account of the Annunciation, the Visitation and the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem are given to us by St Luke – details of which, the modern journalist realises, the evangelist can only have learned from Our Lady herself.
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