End in Shame

Important considerations must be faced before one is to speak of "narratives" in the Gospels.  On the one hand, the Gospels scarcely make sense if they are to be taken as mere collections of sayings of Jesus and or listings of his deeds.  Unavoidably, there is a larger, more generalized "story" of the ministry of Jesus--a collective "biography" of Jesus.  The existence or not of this "biography" as "historical" is the province of students of religion, of the persons who will examine the outlines of the ostensible birth, notoriety, and death of Jesus as related in the Gospels (and in the admittedly scarce sources that might be considered contemporaneous.)

On the other hand, there is no warrant to assume that the Gospels respectively are representations of viewpoints understood as ranged about some communal mega-story of Jesus held by his followers.  This is one of the most insidious conceits of the bulk of orthodox, believing Christian schools of thought.  If the Gospels differ among themselves (as manifestly they do), conventional interpretations of these differing stories focus on interpretations of ostensible motivations of the authors in presenting "the Gospel" to various audiences.  One gospel is to the Jews, another to the Greeks, another to the larger world, another to Christians--and so on, as the commentators will have it.

Attached to the notion of the authors of the gospels presenting their versions to differing audiences is the notion that the authors themselves can be understood (or at least be postulated to be understood) as characterizable personalities themselves, and therefore conceptualized as members of their target audiences--Jew writing for Jews, gentile writing for gentiles, and so on.  These characterized personalities can then be understood as eyewitnesses (or the confidants of eyewitnesses) so that different emphases in the Gospels (and, more importantly, ostensible "contradictions" among the Gospels) can be understood and explained.  From this we get the fatuous (and interpretively malleable) notion that we are really reading the assiduous observations offered by "Matthew," "Mark," "Luke," and "John."

Of course, a step back from the fray of vigorous interpretation and a--metaphorical, at least--breath of fresh air will reveal the silliness of all this.  Commentators will bury themselves in postulation about the peregrinations of their imagined "eyewitnesses" so as to pronounce such things as a confidence that a gospel author interviewed the woman who was healed by touching the hem of Jesus' garment--for how else would the gospel author know that she had suffered so for twelve years and visited many physicians?  For that matter, how did the gospel authors know that Jesus bested the devil in the episode of The Temptations?  Surely, of course, Jesus could have related the latter story himself, though such a self-describing account coming from the lips of the silent-suffering prevalent figure of Jesus (for surely this is his overall characterization in the Gospels) would strike one as thoroughly odd.

Manifestly, the Gospels are presented as accounts from "omniscient" narrators, accounts that tell authoritative stories, not accounts that purport to be witnesses (and certainly not witnesses among a cohort of supportive yet idiosyncratic fellow witnesses.)  The gospel authors are relators of stories from the divine, not witnesses recounting stories about the "divine"--and I use quotation marks around this latter use of "divine" because such characterization is all that might be extracted from the testimony of witnesses.

The Gospel of John illustrates succinctly this silliness of the Gospels taken as eyewitness accounts.  This gospel, that ends with Jesus' searing rejoinder to Peter (about "the disciple whom Jesus loved"), "If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?  follow thou me," is then burdened in the surviving texts with the ham-handed addition:

Then went this saying abroad among the brethren, that that disciple should not die: yet Jesus said not unto him, He shall not die; but, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?  This is the disciple which testifieth of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his testimony is true.  And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.  Amen. (21:23-25)

In substance, the Gospel of John ends with "If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?  follow thou me" (v. 22)--and we will see in a moment just how this effectual ending is so important.  Meanwhile we must note how the ensuing verses 23-25 are both jarring and patently ridiculous.  A particular blend of quaintness and cringe-worthiness is embodied in that ancient protestation to the effect that a document (or a part thereof) cannot be a forgery, because it says right there in its own text that it is not a forgery.

The Gospels are stories.  They are meant to be taken as stories.  The Gospels are not collections of moments, and the Gospels are not mere facets of some presumed meta-Gospel "abroad among the brethren."  (On this latter score the author of the appendix to John is revealingly frank--the author of the appendix to John knows full well what balderdash people can collect among themselves.)  Accordingly, the perennial business of commentators interpreting the Gospels in light of each other is a fool's errand or worse, in that each Gospel's outline is rounded off thereby, and its impact diminished.  The reader will not be surprised that I will say that the most diluted and wasted impact of the Gospels in Christianity--a deficit attributable to the machinations of the commentators--is the impact of shame.

We have started already with John.  The ending of John is the shaming of Peter--albeit a shaming predicated on the notion that Peter is salvageable--and, taken squarely, the episode is harrowing.  The fishing in the sea of Tiberias, the casting of the net for fish, the hauling in of the great catch of fish, the counting of the fish, the eating of still more fish--all of this is as nothing, a great smelly nothing on the shore, as against Jesus' query of Peter, "lovest thou me more than these?"

Similarly ends the Gospel of Mark (the authoritative Gospel of Mark, though like John it is similarly burdened with an unsupportable appendix.)  The women are told to go and inform the brethren, yet to their shame they run away and fail to fulfill Jesus' command.

And before the final Great Commission in Matthew, the last actual narrative reference to "the eleven disciples" is "some doubted," even as "they saw him, and worshipped him."

And, to work backward from the ending of Luke, backward through the awkward--and downright "contradictory," as compared to the other Gospels--"tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem," backward from the last of seemingly innumerable revealings of how Jesus was prophesied of old, we arrive at an episode that is extremely revealing.  Jesus eats "a piece of a broiled fish, and of an honeycomb," but not before he puts all the disciples through a shaming identical to that of John's "Doubting Thomas."  (This is a perfect example of how a "meta-Gospel" conceptuality dilutes the Gospels' messages--Luke and John are independent stories, yet their artificial combining by the interpreters leaves poor Thomas as a particular and misleading focus of what should be taken as a generalized burden of shame among the disciples.)

This is how the Gospels end, in shame.  Yet I have scarcely even begun with the Gospel of John, to which I now intend to return.