Like Any Other Book

``The books of the bible should be read like any other book'' a Victorian modernist once said. He was wrong. You would not be reading this, if it was just about some Palestinian guru, whose thoughts had been preserved in a Dead Sea Scroll---and I certainly would not have written about him. Nevertheless there is much to learn from what he said. Hostile criticism is valuable. Cicero used to study his opponent's brief as carefully as his own. He would learn not only what arguments he had to meet, but more significantly still, what points his opponent was silently conceding. We, too, can learn much from our critics---reports of Jesus being questioned about his relationship with the Father, and being met by increasing incredulity from the Jews, ending with the gibe ``We were not born of fornication πορνεiας (porneias)'' (John 8:41). A sceptic might dismiss it as just a casual insult---```You bastard''---but they later (v.48) go on ``Say we not well, that thou art a Samaritan?'' Earlier (6:42) they had argued that Jesus could not be the Messiah, because he came from Galilee, and was the son of Joseph, and ``we know his father and mother''; and later (7:27) critics from Jerusalem make the same point, ``we know where he comes from'' .It was not just a casual insult. Jesus' parentage was something that could be thrown in his teeth around 30 AD. Though he was known to be legally the son of Joseph, doubts about his actual paternity were current. Modern critics discount as ``infancy narratives'' the accounts given in Matthew and Luke, and invite us to suppose that they were made up long after the event. but the taunts directed at Jesus during his lifetime make that supposition implausible.The ``from Galilee'' criticism is repeated in John 7:41-42, where it is argued that Jesus cannot be the Messiah, since he comes from Galilee, whereas the Messiah was prophesied to be of the seed of David, and to come from Bethlehem. This, on the face of it, is just another criticism, of no special significance. But if readers knew that Jesus was in fact born in Bethlehem, they would appreciate the irony of its being argued against him that he was not.1 The glare of post-Resurrection light obliterates all the shadows cast by the different perspectives and aspirations of Jesus' contemporaries in his earthly days. We are left with a one-dimensional picture of events moving to their pre-ordained end, with God as the only agent. But that leaves us wondering why He did things in that way, and in attempting to find answers we are led to implausible (and unChristian) doctrines of punishment. Better to go along with the critics, and to approach the Fourth Gospel as we might approach any other book, looking at the text and the ambience with a critical eye, and seeing what we can discover about the author, his intended readership, his general purpose in writing, and what he took for granted.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Benedict XVI, the former Pope, Canon Anthony Harvey, and Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, for insights that have entirely altered my understanding of New Testament scholarship. Benedict XVI, in his book Jesus of Nazareth, cited French sociological research which explains how St John had inside knowledge of Temple affairs, and could get St Peter admitted to the palace of the High Priest (John 18:15).2 In Is Scripture Still Holy? Anthony Harvey

1 See below, p.62 Doubleday, 2007. See further below p.4.

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discussed recent archaeological evidence which proves St Luke's veracity.3 In places he visited with St Paul he gives officials their correct titles, which are not to be found in any literary source, and could be known by St Luke only if he had actually been there. St Luke may have sometimes made mistakes, but he gives a truthful account in his Gospel and The Acts. Rowan Williams made me aware of the ambiguity in the word Ιο)υδαiοi (Ioudaioi) in (Matthew 27:25), which has always been translated as Jews, but in that context means only Judaeans, the inhabitants of Judea in the South as opposed to the inhabitants of Israel in the North. Professor Graham Davies has patiently answered many questions, and helped me understand the exact sense of the Hebrew and Aramaic words that lie behind the Greek of the Gospels. Behind the sources of my understanding lie the labours of many New Testament scholars, on whose shoulders I have been able to stand, and to whom I acknowledge my distant debt with gratitude.

Nomenclature This is an unreverent, not an irreverent, read. The Apostles, Evangelists and other Saints are acknowledged to be such, and have St prefixed to their names, but the texts are referred to simply as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, etc., in accordance with common practice. There have been several different texts of the Fourth Gospel, arguably issued by different editors. In order not pre-judge contentious issues, different titles are assigned to each edition. There must have been an original text, possibly chronologically arranged, of chapters 1-20, written by the Fourth Evangelist, succeeded by a version arranged thematically, also written by the Fourth Evangelist. To this version an epilogue (John 21:1-23) was added, arguably by the hand of the Fourth Evangelist. the next verse, (21:24) is evidently by someone else, and vouches for the reliability of what had already been written, as also the concluding verse (21:25). These texts will be called: Original, Thematic, Epilogue and Final.

ContentsChapter 1 The Fourth GospelS 1.1 TextS 1.2 Closest FriendS 1.3 Inside Information S 1.4 Mrs ZeberdeeS 1.5 Yes ButChapter 2 The Fourth Gospel-and the ThirdS 2.2 Samaritans S 2.3 TheophilusS 2.4 Dates and Tenses S 2.5 St Luke and St JohnChapter 3 The Galilean Gospels S 3.1 Synoptic Problems S 3.2 Crumbs Under the TableS 3.2 St MatthewChapter 4 Blasphemy?S 4.1 Confrontation S 4.2 A Non-Incarnational ApproachS 4.3 Show DownS4.4 BarabbasChapter 5 In Defence of Pontius PilateChapter 6 The Lord's PrayerChapter 7 Satan, Sin and Anti-SemitismChapter 8 The Koran

3 See below, pp.8,9.

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Chapter 1 The Fourth Gospel

S 1.1 The Text S 1.2 Jesus' Closest Friend S 1.3 Inside Information S 1.4 Mrs Zebedee S 1.5 Yes But

The Text

The text we have is evidently not the first edition. There must have been an earlier edition which ended with chapter 20, because the last two verses (John 20:30-31) are an ending which could not have been written if there was more to come; and there are other indications in the text of its not being the first edition. In the account of the crucifixion when the soldier pierced Jesus' side, there is inserted a note that this is an eye-witness account (John 19:35), which breaks the sequence of (John 9:34) and (John19:36), and cannot have been part of an original text, but must have been a marginal note written on an earlier document. In a later edition it would have been possible to append chapter 21 as a Postscript, to round off previous themes or resolve questions that had recently arisen; and there is a similar marginal note in the Postscript (John 21:24b), as well as two others reminding the reader that Nicodemus was the one who came by night (John 7:50 and 19:39). The last two verses of chapter 21 (John 21:23-24) read like an external attestation of the reliability of all that has gone before. They cannot have been written by the Fourth Evangelist. He would have removed the marginal references, which are all unnecessary, and in one case (John 19:35) interrupt the flow of the text. But if he did not write the last two verses of chapter 21, did he write any of it? Again, the other marginal notes do not fit. The marginal note at (John 19:35) clearly breaks the sequence of (John 19:34) and (John 19:36), and cannot have been part of an original text. On the face of it, the Postscript could all have been an addition by a later author. It is a possibility, but again, the other marginal notes do not fit. (John 6:4b) A feast of the Jews (John 6:6) This he said to test him (John 6:71) Judas Iscariot (John 7 :39) The Holy Spirit not yet come (John 7: 50) Nicodemus (John 2:4b) Judas Iscariot (John 12:16-17) Disciples did not understand (John 12:33) What death he should die (John 9:35) Eye-Witness (John 19:39) Nicodemus (John 21:24) Eye-Witness. They read like a student's annotations, as he read the text, to help him remember who the different people were. A later editor who was adding the Postscript in a new edition of the Fourth Gospel, would have cut them out; and since the Postscript fits in with the Fourth Gospel's line on St Peter,4 it is better to group chapter 21 (apart from the last two verses) with the rest of the Fourth Gospel, and to regard (John 21:24-25) as alone being a final addition, The author of these last two verses did not notice and remove the insertions. Why? He was working with his own copy of the text, which he had had since his first student days. It was the copy he had always had, and now was commending the text to the public. In modern terms, he was a student of the Fourth Evangelist, who on his own initiative took up cudgels to defend his master's magnum opus at a time when eye-witnesses were dying off, and it was important to emphasize its reliability. Richard Bauckham suggests that it was John the Presbyter who was the disciple of St John the Apostle and Evangelist.5 That would have enhanced his standing, and have led to his being regarded as Presbyter. It would also explain why the two letters attributed to him were placed

4 See below, pp.9,105 Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA, 2006

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together with the First Epistle of St John, which is evidently from the pen of the Fourth Evangelist; unlike the other epistles, there is no internal evidence in II John and III John that the writer was called John. He is simply the `Presbyter’. The Early Church took it that he was called `John’, which is best explained by the supposition that he was. The Fourth Evangelist must have been an eyewitness of some of the events he recorded. He was clearly not St Peter. The other gospels identify St Peter, and the sons of Zebedee, St James and St John, as the inner three. St James was killed by Herod (Acts 12:2) in the early days of the church. Only St John, the other son of Zebedee fills the bill. But in the Fourth Gospel, apart from the Postscript, there is no mention of the sons of Zebedee. The author seems to be deliberately not identifying himself. Why? The Fourth Evangelist was giving a thematic account of Jesus’ thought rather than a full account of his deeds and words. The other Evangelists had occasion to relate what the sons of Zebedee were doing, but the Fourth Evangelist had no reason to write about himself, and the fact that he did not is in turn no reason to doubt that he was indeed the younger son of Zebedee.

Although there is no mention of the sons of Zebedee in the main body of the Fourth Gospel, there is in the Postscript, and this has led some commentators, and Bauckham among them, to argue that Lazarus,6 and John the Presbyter were at the Last Supper. But if Lazarus had been asked to look after Jesus' mother, his sisters would have been asked too, and if John the Presbyter had been, he surely would have said so in his two letters.

Jesus' Closest Friend

The Postscript identifies the Fourth Evangelist as ``the disciple whom Jesus loved''; who was at the Last Supper, and was asked by St Peter to ask Jesus who it was that was going to betray him (13:23-25). The standard translation of <on )hγ'απα (o )Ihvo^uς (hon egapa ho Iesous) as `the disciple whom Jesus loved' is unfortunate, since `loved' in contemporary English can have erotic overtones which are absent in )hγ'απα (egapa).

Inside Information

The Fourth Evangelist had inside contacts with High Priest Establishment. He knew about Nicodemus coming by night (John 3:1ff.), and of his standing up for Jesus against the Pharisees (7:50-52) and providing a hundred pounds of myrrh and aloes for his burial (19:39).He could get St Peter into the High Priest's court yard (18:15). He knew what was said to twist Pilate's arm (19:12b). The argument used ``If you release this man, you are not not Caesar's friend; anyone who makes himself a king is against Caesar'' Ε`αν τουτον α) )απολυσης, ο)υκ ε~ί φίλος το~υ Κα’iσαρος, πας (ο βασίλεα (εαυτον ποίϖ )αντίλεγεί το Καiσαρi (Ean touton apoluseis, ouk ei philos Kaisaros: pas ho basilea heauton poion antilegei to Kaisari) is so bad that it must have been actually used. For in fact the Romans were very ready to rule through client kings, such as Herod. If the Fourth Evangelist had been making up the incident, he would have put into the mouth of the Jews a more plausible argument. He must have had inside information about their actual argument, as also of Pilate's refusal to alter the superscription (19:21-22).

6 J.Phillips, The Disciple Whom Jesus Loved

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St John the son of Zebedee was a fisherman. While it is quite easy to accept that a fisherman could become, like St Peter, a fisher of men, it has seemed less likely that a fisherman could have come to have the deep understanding manifest in the Fourth Gospel. But this is to bring false assumptions to bear. For St John the son of Zebedee was not a poor man. When they heard the call, St James and St John left their father in the boat with the hired servants (Mark 1:20). Zebedee was a man of substance, and his sons were not necessarily poor and uneducated.7 And they may have had a line to the ecclesiastical establishment. Pope Benedict XVI, in his book Jesus of Nazareth, cites some French sociological research that indicates that leading citizens were sometime called upon to perform duties in the Temple. They were, so to speak, lay canons, who would take turns to be ``in residence'', as residentiary canons do in English cathedrals today. If Zebedee were a lay canon of the Temple, it would explain how his son was in the know about what was going on there. Against this, English readers may cite Acts 4:13 ``when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, . . '' But the Greek words, ]ανθρϖποί )αγρ’αμματοί ε)ίσΙ κα’ί ` ίδί^ϖταί (anthropoi agrammatoi eisi kai idiotai) do not have to mean this. ]αγραμματοί (agrammatoi) is literally `unlettered' or `letterless' although it could mean `illiterate', it could equally well mean `unqualified', in modern parlance, without letters after their names. Similarly, )ίδί^ϖταί (idiotai) need not mean `idiotic', but merely `private', that is `non-public', `without public accreditation'8 What St Peter and St John lacked were certain scribal skills and qualifications. (Much earlier the Jews had expressed surprise at Jesus’ knowing letters, γραμματα (gramtama), not having been properly trained (John 7:15).) The scribes had mastered the art of quoting texts and giving full references for every quotation. They were qualified to give an opinion. Our age, too, is obsessed with qualifications. Although everyone is free to opinionate, little notice is taken, unless the author has a degree and has mastered ``the literature'' and has plentiful footnotes. St Peter and St John may have been effective public speakers, but they had not given any footnote references and were not graduates. Some may have recognised St John as the son of Zebedee, but a wayward son, who had dropped out, and pushed off to follow a hippy icon. It is quite reasonable, therefore, to suppose that St John, the son of Zebedee, could have had the inside information which the Fourth Evangelist evidently had. Zebedee may have been, as it were, a member of a city livery company with connections to the ecclesiastical authorities. Someone whose father is a Merchant Taylor in contemporary Britain is likely to be well educated, though not necessarily in Holy Orders or in possession of a Doctorate. The identification of the Fourth Evangelist with St John the son of Zebedee, who, admittedly, was not trained in Rabbinical studies and not authorised to expound the law, makes good sense.

Mrs Zebedee---and funding

St Matthew (20:20f.) was hard on Mrs Zebeedee. He casts her in the role of pushy parent who barges in and demands a favour of Jesus, and when he asks what she wants, it is that in the coming kingdom her two sons shall have positions of pre-eminence, with seats on either side of Jesus. St Mark's report of the same incident (Mark 10:35ff.) leaves her out altogether, and has it that St Matthew and St John themselves take the initiative. This is borne out by the rest of St Matthew's account. Jesus does not answer Mrs Zebedee, but questions St Matthew and St John, and is gentle in his treatment of them, not telling them off for their presumption, but indicating

7 It should be noted that Jesus' closest disciple, to whom he entrusted the care of his mother (John 19:26,27) had his own quarters.

8 The NEB has `untrained laymen'.

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what true discipleship might cost, and finally saying that it was not in his gift to award honours in the kingdom of God. The other ten take it badly, and only then does Jesus explain the reversal of values that he was instituting. The resentment of the ten may have been building up. There is a hint that the two Zebedees were generally rather loud mouthed in (Mark 3:17), where Jesus named them Boanerges, the sons of thunder. They may have been in charge of the finances---certainly they seem to have been in charge of the booking arrangements---when the disciples arrived at the Samaritan village which would not accommodate travellers to Jerusalem, and they thought to call down on it fire from heaven (Luke 9:53-56). Although the Twelve and the Seventy on some occasions were to carry no money (Matthew 10:10; Mark 6:8; Luke 9:3,10:)4, they evidently did on the journey to Jerusalem, and at Jacob's Well. St James and St John may have been able to contribute funds from the Zebedee resources, and may have led them to demand some special recognition. Perhaps it was after this that the common purse was put into the keeping of Judas Iscariot---a sensible move to defuse tensions among the Twelve. Such tensions would also explain the Fourth Evangelist's reticence about himself and his brother. On four occasions St John plays a part in the narrative, and has to be referred to. On the first occasion he is just another disciple who is known to the High Priest and is able to get St Peter admitted to the High Priest's hall (John 18:15). At the Last Supper he leaned on Jesus' breast, and said ``Lord, which is he that betrayeth thee?``(John 21:20). On the Cross he commends his mother to St John's care (John 19:26) And finally at the discovery of the empty tomb, when he outran St Peter, he is again described as.``the disciple whom Jesus loved'' τον μαθ`ητον (ον )ηγ’απα (ο (Ιησο~υς (ton matheten hon egapa ho Iesous) ``the disciple whom Jesus loved'' in the conventional translation; though the Greek is μαθητον [ον )ηγ’απα (ο )Iησο~υς (ton allon matheten hon philei ho Iesous). Here the sense may be the same, though we should not assume that the terms are always used interchangeably.9 In writing his gospel St John had occasionally to refer to himself, but he wanted to avoid exacerbating ancient antagonisms.

Yes But

The Fourth Evangelist had certain readers in mind. Among them were the disciples of John the Baptist. In the middle of his Prologue, as he tells of the light that the darkness cannot overcome, because it is the true light that lights every man that comes into the world, he breaks off to tell us about the Baptist, who was sent from God, but was not the true light, only a witness to it. He returns to the Baptist (John 1:15), and most of chapter one is about his teaching and testimony. Later he tells us that Jesus returned to the area, and his disciples had some dispute with the Baptist's disciples about purifying, which led to a further endorsement of Jesus by the Baptist (John 3:22-36). There seems to have been almost a baptizing competition between the Baptist's disciples and those of Jesus (which Jesus himself did not join in). which led to Jesus withdrawing again into Galilee (4:1-3). And finally, escaping from Jerusalem, he went back to where the Baptist had first baptized, and ``many resorted to him on account of the miracles he had performed'' (10:40-42). The Fourth Evangelist is clearly anxious to re-assure his readers that Jesus had a very high opinion of the Baptist, and took care not to compete with him or belittle him, but that the Baptist himself was insistent on the even higher status of Jesus. The Fourth Evangelist manifests a similar ``Yes, but'' attitude towards St Peter. St Peter is the undisputed leader, but it was his brother Andrew, who had already become a disciple, that brought St Peter in (1:37-42), It was Jesus' closest disciple who was asked by St Peter to find out who the

9 See below pp.9-10.

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traitor was (13:23-24), and on hearing the news of the empty tomb St Peter was outrun by that other disciple, who looked into the tomb and saw the grave clothes, though it was St Peter who first went in to make sure that the Lord was risen (20:3-8). St Peter was the man of action, who was the first to go in and do things, and inspired others to get things done, but it was someone else who was closest to the mind of Jesus, and could best tell us how Jesus understood himself and his mission.The Fourth Evangelist returns to the theme in the Postscript. In the second episode, 21:15-24. Jesus questions St Peter three times: The first time he asks Σίμων )Iώανου, )αγαπα~ίς με πλεο~ioν τυo'ϖν? (Simon Ioanou, agapais me pleion touton?) to which St St Peter replies Na'i, K'urie: v`u o^ ίδας (o τί φίλϖ vε. (Nai, Kurie: su oidas hoti philo se.) whereupon Jesus says B'ovke t`a )α ρν 'iα μου (Boske ta arnia mou.) Jesus then says a second time Σίμων )Iώανου, )αγαπα~ίς με πλεο~ioν τυo'ϖν? (Simon Ioanou, agapais me?) to which St Peter replies Na'i, K'urie: v`u o^idas [oti fil~w ve (Nai, Kurie: su oidas hoti philo se.) whereupon Jesus says B'ovke t`a )α ρν'iα μου (Boske ta probata mou.) Jesus says a third time Σίμων )Iώανου, φίλε~iς με? (Simon Ioanou, phileis me?). St Peter was upset because he asked him the third time Φiλε~iς με (phileis me.), and said him Κυτ' ίε: π’αντα v`u o^ ίδας : v`u o^ ίδας (o τί γίγν’ϖσκείs: (οτί φίλϖ vε. (Kurie: panta su oidas: su gignoskies hoti philo se.) whereupon Jesus says B'ovke t`a πr'oβατα μου} (Boske ta probata mou.), and then goes on to speak of St Peter's death. The two words )αΥπ~_αίς (agapais ) and φίλε~iς (phileis) are both translated into English as `lovest' or `love', and many commentators follow Lightfoot,10 and say that they are completely interchangeable. This defies belief. Although they can both be used interchangeably, say of David and Jonathan, St Peter's being upset by the change of word in the third question indicates that he sensed a change of meaning. Wescott recognised this, but was controverted by Bauer and Lagrange, who cite other passages where the words are used interchangeably.11 But that misses the point. Although the two words can be used of the same situation, their range of use does not entirely overlap. Aristotle discusses φίλ ~ία (philia), friendship, in books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics. Although ideally it is a lasting meeting of minds, two people can be φίλοι (philoi) without there being any long-term further commitment,12 whereas Plato uses )αΥπϖ (agapo) of a dominating commitment to a purpose. Jesus asks St Peter the first time whether he ranks number one in St Peter's priorities, and St Peter replies that he is a partner, a fellow worker, in The Enterprise. Jesus repeats the question, and gets the same, slightly low-key, response, and so on the third occasion comes down to St Peter's level, before, as previously, instructing St Peter to feed Jesus' flock. The thrice repeated injunction is a new commission. Hitherto St Peter had been the man of action, the effective fisher of men, bringing in people, and getting them to adopt a new attitude and be disciples of the Lord; now he was to be not just a fisher of men and recalls the final commissioning of St Peter to be the chief of the Church in the absence of Jesus himself. At the same time it indicates once again the limitations of St Peter's discipleship; although a leader, he did not have the intimate deep understanding of Jesus that his closest friend had. Besides the ministry of leadership there was another ministry of meditation and exposition, which %was also important, and was made manifest in the Fourth Gospel. Jesus foretells the martyrdom of St Peter as part of his discipleship, and then (21:20-23), St Peter, turning and seeing Jesus' closest friend, asks whether that fate awaits him too, and is told to mind his own business. This passage raises questions about the date of the Postscript. Apart from it, the most natural date would be in the mid-60s AD, shortly after St Peter's martyrdom. But a later date can be argued for, when the longevity of Jesus' closest friend

10 R.H.Lightfoot, {St John's Gospel, ed. C.F.Evans, Oxford, 1956, p.343.11 The Gospel according to St John, London, 92; ed. C.K. Barret, 1978, Philadelphia; W.Bauer, Das Johannes

Evangeliun}, 2nd ed. 1935, M.J.Lagrange, {L'E'vangile selon Saint Jean, 1928. 12 See VIII:3, especially 1156a29ff.

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was fuelling expectation of an imminent Second Coming before he died. It could be so. But the thrust of the Postscript is about St Peter. If the point had been to calm expectations of an imminent Second Coming, there would be little point in the threefold questions, or St Peter's episcopal commission. It seems more reasonable to date all of Chapter 21, except the last two verses (21:24-25), to the aftermath of St Peter's martyrdom.

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Chapter 2 The Fourth Gospel---and the Third

S 2.1 The Samaritans S 2.2 Theophilus S 2.3 Dates and Sources S 2.4 St Luke and St John S 2.5 Crumbs Under the Table S 2.6 St Matthew

The Samaritans

One of the insults hurled at Jesus was ``(John 8:48) ``Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil (AV), '', ``Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan, and that you are possessed? (NB)''. Jesus did not share the Jews' contempt for the Samaritans. He had conversed with one at Jacob's Well, while his disciples were buying provisions in the Samaritan village, where they would stay for two days. The only other mention of Samaritans in the New Testament is in the parable of the Good Samaritan in St Luke's gospel. (10:30-37). Could here be a link? Could St Luke have learned of Jesus' anti-anti-Samaritan position from St John while interviewing St Mary? But why did not St John tell it himself in his gospel? He does not report Jesus' parables. Instead, he has lengthy monologues expressing Jesus' understanding of his own role and mission.

Theophilus

That there should be a connection should not surprise us. In his blurb for his gospel, St St Luke cites as a strong point of his book that he had sought out eye witnesses. The importance of this claim has been played down by commentators, who make out that the address to Theophilus is formulaic and not to be taken seriously. The short answer is that a document may be formulaic and still be telling the truth. If I receive a letter beginning ``Dear Sir'' and ending ``I have the honour to be your obedient servant'', I can still believe that when the writer says that he has received my letter of the 17th ult, it is true that he did get the letter I wrote last month on the 17th. But scholars still have doubts about Theophilus. Who was he? Theophilus was a name that had been in current use for several centuries. There could have been someone of that name in St Luke's circle, who asked St Luke for a well researched account of this new movement. But the name `Theophilus' means `God Lover', and could have been St Luke's description of his intended reader, someone who, in George Eliot's phrase was ``serious about metaphysics''. In that case it would be an epistle to Dear Reader, giving the gist of the work and why it had been written. This seems a very natural interpretation. But it is open to the objection that it was common form to have such a preface at the beginning of a book---particularly of medical treatises--- without its having any serious import. Might not the medical practitioner---St Paul's dear doctor Lucas---have done the same? The answer, surely, must be No. Some authors might put ``The Truth about the Sargasso Sea'' on a piece of pulp fiction, but not St Luke. He had been a companion of St Paul on his travels, and had with him run many risks and endured many hardships. In his letters St Paul is unstinting in his endorsement of St Luke's reliability. The sceptic is faced with a hard choice.

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Either St Paul was completely mistaken, and St Luke's Christianity was a sham, and he did not really put himself out to preach the gospel, or he meant what he said in the opening verses of the gospel. If the latter, then his gospel and its sequel, The Acts of the Apostles were a well-researched accounts of Jesus and the early church. St Luke might still have been wrong on particular points. Modern historians, with much greater facilities for finding out the truth, still make mistakes. So far as his gospel is concerned, we have no way of checking whether he has got his facts right; what happened in an obscure corner of Palestine was not much noticed or recorded by Roman writers. But in the second part of the Acts (chs.13-28) -we are in a wider world, and some checks are possible. St Luke survives them well. He shows good knowledge of places, institutions and titles---in one case he has been vindicated by recently discovered inscription, showing that a description he used was correct despite not occurring in any literary sources.13

Difficulties remain in reconciling some of the things St Luke says with some of the things St Paul says. On some of these points, St Luke may have got it wrong. But he was trying to tell the truth, and was trying to tell it accurately )ακρίβϖς (akribos), and in order to do so had questioned eye witnesses. The most important eye-witness St Luke needed to question was St Mary.14 Alone of the evangelists he gives a long account, clearly not surmised, of her role leading up to the birth of Jesus, and in his childhood. The things that St Mary kept and pondered in her heart could not have been known to anyone else unless St Mary herself had revealed them. St Luke must have interviewed her---who from the crucifixion onwards was living in St John's lodgings. St John fled Jerusalem after the martyrdom of St Stephen, and tradition has it that he ended up at Ephesus. But wherever he was, it would have been possible for St Luke to go to him and question St Mary about the early life of Jesus; and then also to talk to St John. In any case he would have needed to question St John about the incident (recorded in Luke 9:53-56) of St James and St John wanting to call down fire on the Samaritan village that did not accept bookings for travellers on their way to Jerusalem. Only St James or St John could have told him what Jesus had said to them, and St James had been killed before St Luke arrived on the scene. Such conversations would explain the evident alterations in the text of the Fourth Gospel as we now have it.15; if St Luke was in process of providing a fully researched one, St John might have thought that chronological accuracy was sufficiently catered for, and that what was needed from him was something which only he could provide, an inside account of Jesus' own thinking about his ministry.

Dates and Sources

The timing of St Luke's interviews with St Mary points to a relatively early date for the writing of the Third and Fourth gospels. If we accept the commonly held view that Jesus was born around BC 4, she must have been born around BC 21, since she was a teenager when the angel Gabriel came to visit her around BC 5. She would have been at least 68 in AD 50. Admittedly, she might have lived into a ripe old age, but though tradition has it that she died at Ephesus, it does not suggest that

13 Anthony Harvey Is Scripture Still Holy? Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2012. ch.2, esp. pp.21-23.14 This was suggested by Father M.É.Boissard of the École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem. His final thoughts are available at: Comment Luc a remanié l'evangile de Jean (CRB 51), Paris, J. Gabalda, 200115 See below, pp..

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she had an unusually long life. In any case St Luke could not have counted on it when he was gathering material for his gospel. It would not have been sensible to put off going to see St Mary, if she was pushing seventy. He might have interviewed her at some date earlier than AD 50, but would not, after that date, have waited any longer. St John, then, might have been writing the first edition of his gospel in the 40s, some fifteen years after the Crucifixion, second edition in the 50s, and then, after St Peter's death in the 60s, added a postscript (John 21:1-24, or perhaps only 21:15-24), partly to commemorate St Peter's being commissioned to be a pastor of the Christian flock, and partly also to disabuse the Church of the idea that he, St John, was going to stay alive until the Second Coming. These dates are much earlier than those currently accepted by New Testament scholars, but often their arguments depend on an assumption, natural to the scholarly world of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, in which each work had a definitive publication date, after which it would be studied by other scholars one of whom might then publish a new work taking full account of the older one, while putting forward his own conclusions. But this schema no longer applies in our world of pre-prints and early drafts transmitted by E-mail; and similarly in the First Century there was no definitive publication by means of the printing press, but much copying with opportunities of emendation and alteration. The lengthy periods of gestation postulated by proponents of the ``Synoptic Problem''16 were not required, nor some definite sequence of composition and publication. St Matthew and St Luke need not have seen a published copy of St Mark’s gospel; they and St Mark may have made use of a floating stock of anecdotes about Jesus and reports of his sayings, which were being used by converts who had not known Jesus in the flesh, but wanted to pass on to others the Good News they themselves had heard. Such a schema puts very little constraint on actual dates. Handbooks for preachers would have been required from the time of the first mission to Judea and Samaria (Acts ch.8). Gospels or proto-gospels could have emerged any time after that. There are, however, other arguments for assigning late dates for the writing of the Third and Fourth Gospels. Many New Testament scholars hold that St Luke must have written after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70., because the prophecy attributed to Jesus (Luke 21:20-24) refers to that event. If we had independent evidence for a late date, we might read that verse as a prophecy that had come true, but on its own this interpretation has little cogency. It is not necessary as an explanation of the language Jesus used, and it does not fit the actual circumstances of the event. The language used was often used in the Old Testament, and would have been quite natural in the doom-laden atmosphere of Palestine in the late 20s And if St Luke had been writing with the fall of Jerusalem in mind, he would not have stressed the importance of sudden flight, which was impossible by the time the Romans had surrounded Jerusalem, and not needing to be sudden at earlier stages in the war. It is argued that the use of the word )απο συναγ ογος (aposynagogos ) indicates that the Fourth Gospel was written for readers around AD 100, who were members of a tight community, that was experiencing exclusion and excommunication. But the first two occasions (9:22 and 12:42) where hearers do not come out as believers because they are afraid of being put out of the synagogues, are occasions where the reason given fits naturally into the narrative. The third, (16:2) comes from the farewell discourse, and could have been formulated with the benefit of hindsight. If there were other evidence for a late date, it would corroborate it, but on its own carries little weight. It is also argued that the gospel addresses problems and controversies that arose only at the end of the First Century. But thinkers often think in advance of their time. Often a deep thinker worries about an issue which only later becomes a public controversy. The point becomes clearer if we consider the palaeographic dispute about the Rylands Papyrus. The Rylands Library Papyrus P52 is a Greek papyrus fragment discovered in

16 See below p. 14

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Egypt in 1920 and now at the John Rylands Library, Manchester. Although it has no more than 114 legible letters, it must come from a substantial codex book, as it is written on both sides in a generously scaled script, with John 18:31-33 on one side and John 18:37-38 on the other. Palaeographers date the fragment to the early second century, which would suggest that the gospel was in general circulation then and had been written some time before. Against this it can be argued that the copyist might have formed his style as a young man, but had continued to write in the same way throughout a long life extending until the middle of the Second Century. It could be so. But what it shows is that arguments from style, though suggestive, are chronologically imprecise. They do not provide hard evidence for dates, though they may corroborate conclusions reached on other grounds. The conventional wisdom that the gospels were written long after the events they describe---St Luke's gospel in the last quarter of the First Century, and St John's around AD 100 or even later---is not supported by cogent argument. It could be correct. We do not know. All we can safely infer from the texts as we have them is that there must have been a common stock of writings: some of which St Mark used, and St Matthew and St Luke too, possibly via St Mark, but possibly independently; and others which St Mark did not use, though St Matthew and St Luke did.

St Luke and St John

St John radically revised the Fourth Gospel, to make it less chronological and more thematic. more thematic If that was due to St Luke, its date must have been much earlier than is currently supposed, and its purpose must be re-examined. Most New Testament scholars hold that St Luke must have written after the fall of Jerusalem in 70AD., because the prophecy he attributes to Jesus (21:20-24*) refers to that event. Indeed if we had independent evidence for a late date, we might read that verse as a prophecy that had come true, but on its own such an interpretation has little cogency: it is not necessary as an explanation of the language Jesus used, and it does not fit the actual circumstances of the event; the language used was often used in the Old Testament, and would have been quite natural in the doom-laden atmosphere of Palestine in the late twenties AD; and if St Luke had been writing with the fall of Jerusalem in mind, he would not have stressed the importance of sudden flight, which was impossible by the time the Romans had surrounded Jerusalem, and not needing to be sudden at earlier stages in the war. It is currently supposed that St Luke must have written his Gospel after having read St Mark, and that ten or more years must be allowed for this tohave happened. But that is to import into the First Century AD the scholarly practices of the Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century West. There are close textual similarities between St Luke and St Mark and St Matthew, which clearly are due to some common source. But it did not have to be that St Mark had ``published'' a definitive edition of his work, which was then studied and re-edited by St Luke. It could equally well have been that there was a corpus of written texts for the use of those preaching the Gospel in the time when the Apostles were Acting themselves and through their first followers. We do not know. All we have are the texts. We can glean valuable information and illumination from a close textual comparison of them, but should be wary of hard and fast chronological conclusions. St Luke prefaces his gospel and the Acts with a dedication to Theophilus, in which he explains why he is writing and the methods he has employed. In modern terms these are blurbs, a brief account of the book, its contents and its genre. Many questions have been raised. Who was Theophilus? Was the dedication an empty formality? Was it an accurate account of the scope and purpose of the work? Did it indicate that a third volume was intended? The name `Theophilus'

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means `God Lover', and could have been St Luke's description of his intended reader, some one who, in George Eliot's phrase was ``serious about metaphysics. In that case it would be an epistle to Dear Reader, giving the gist of the work and why it had been written. This is not a necessary conclusion. Theophilus was a name that had been in current use for several centuries. There could have been someone of that name in St Luke's circle, who asked St Luke for a well researched account of this new movement. In either case the preface is self-explanatory. There are several accounts of Jesus floating around, but there is room for another, a history that has been carefully researched and aiming to come up to contemporary standards of reputable historical research. This seems quite straightforward, but has been questioned by New Testament scholars. The language is high flown and formulaic; there are many other examples in contemporary writings; in particular, in some medical treatises. St Luke was a doctor, and my well have copied from them, which would explain the un-Lucan language. which is just part of a literary tradition, and for that reason not to be taken seriously. But that does not detract from the veracity of the message. It claims that the work is historically accurate, that it is not an advertisement or a public relations exercise, and that is not a work of fiction designed to amuse, titivate, or captivate the reader. This claim is either sincere or insincere. That it is insincere is highly implausible, given what else we know about St Luke. He accompanied St Paul on some of his journeys, and St Paul refers to ``Dear Dr Lucas'' as a trustworthy companion in adversity. If St Luke had been capable of putting out a bogus description of what he was doing, he would not have endured the discomforts and dangers he evidently did. Only an incorrigible sceptic can doubt the sincerity of what St Luke says in (1:1-4). Of course, he may have got it wrong; or his sources they may have misremembered what they reported. But sometimes we can check. Anthony Harvey cites recent archaeological evidence bearing out the accuracy of some of the details St Luke gives (Anthony Harvey, Is Scripture Still Holy?, Cambridge, 2012, pp.22-23), Again, this is not to say that he is infallible. Modern reputable historical works can still contain errors. But just as they are substantially correct, so St Luke's gospel is likely to be substantially correct and worthy of our credence. St Luke carried out his own investigations, seeking eye witnesses and talking to them to find out exactly what happened. In particular he reports what St Mary the mother of Jesus did, and the sayings she kept in her heart (2:51). He must, therefore have talked to her, either in Jerusalem or at Ephesus, if that was where she lived in later life. St Mary was a girl engaged to be married when the Angel Gabriel came to see her. That suggests she was a teenager then, and at the time of Jesus' birth in BC4; so she would have been born around BC20, and would have been 70 in 50 AD. She might have lived a bit longer, but St Luke cannot have interviewed her much later than 50 AD, which argues for his having written his gospel much earlier than the 70s or later posited by many scholars. If St Luke and St John were in contact around 50 AD, we should look for indications of their influence on each other. Both note that Jesus had such presence that even lynching mobsters would give way to him (Luke 4:30, John 8:59 and 19:39). Both stress the importance of eye witnesses, St Luke in his preface 1:2 α)υτ οπταi (autoptai} (a word, used by Herodotus and Plato, but not elsewhere in the NT} and in John at 19:35 and 21:24, which St Matthew and St Mark do not---though they were in another sense coming forward as witnesses to the message Jesus had proclaimed. St John (8:48) reports insults hurled at Jesus was ``Say we not well that thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil'' (AV)', ``Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan, and that you are possessed?(NB)''. Jesus did not share the Jews' contempt for the Samaritans. He had conversed with one at Jacob's Well, while his disciples were buying provisions in the Samaritan village, where they would stay for two days. Although one would have to go through Samaria in order to go up to

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Jerusalem from Galilee, St Mark makes no mention of Samaria or Samaritans and St Matthew only once (10:5), where he reports Jesus as instructing the apostles not to take the road to the gentile lands, and not to enter any Samaritan town.. St Luke, by contrast, not only recounts the parable of the Good Samaritan (10:30-37), but tells us (9:53-56) that when and St John wanted to call down fire from heaven on the villagers of one Samaritan village who would not accommodate their party, he rebuked them, and just went on to another, presumably Samaritan, village, and that of the ten lepers Jesus healed the only one to come back and thank him was a Samaritan (17:15-19). Again in the Acts, St Luke couples Samaria with Judaea in Jesus' final instructions to the Apostles (1:8), and with Judaea and Galilee when the Church there was able to build up its strength in a period of peace (9:31). He gives a full account of the time when Christians had to flee from persecution in Jerusalem, and found refuge in Samaria, where Philip conducted a successful mission, with a follow-up by St John and St Peter, who was successful in facing down Simon, the would-be money-maker (8:1-25). The disparity between St Matthew's and St Luke's account of the part played in Jesus' ministry is due in part to their different interests and different intended readerships. St Matthew, writing for Jewish Christians, focuses on Jesus' first concern, which was for the lost sheep of the house of Israel, St Luke for the wider world of the gentiles. But the Samaritans were not gentiles, and the many times he goes out of his way to mention them suggests that he had had guidance from St John about Jesus’ actual attitude

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15 Chapter 3 The Galilean Gospels

S 3.1 The Synoptic ProblemS 3.2 Crumbs Under the Table S 3.3 Matthew

The Synoptic Problem

The first three, ``Galilean'' gospels have much in common. Often the wording of particular passages is so similar as to leave no doubt that they emanate from the same source. It is therefore often assumed that St Mark wrote his gospel first, and St Matthew and St Luke had read it, and used it as a basis for their own work St Matthew and St Luke have a lot in common which is not in St Mark, and it is supposed by some scholars that there was a source, Q. that they used. It is supposed by others that St Luke used St Matthew (or vice versa), or that St Matthew was first, and St Mark did a boiled down version for a gentile readership. In each case it is assumed that a period of ten years or so would have elapsed between the publication of one gospel, and the subsequent publication of another which had been partly based on it, and that each Evangelist had in front of him definitive copies of the texts he was using. The great weakness is Q. If there were such a source, it is hard to understand why no record of it survives. It is argued that there was no need, since it had been incorporated in St Matthew and St Luke. But whereas it would be easy for some individual anecdotes or sayings to be lost, or, like (John 7:53-8:11) and (John 21:1-14), to float inappropriately into into an existing text, it is implausible that a text known to St Matthew and St Luke was not known to those who read them.

Rather than a single text there may have beeen a number of ``sermonettes'' used by the newly converted Christians who in Herod's great persecution (Acts 8:1b and Acts 8:4) fled from Jerusalem to places in Judaea and Samaria. St Matthew, St Mark and St Luke could have drawn on them in writing their gospels. If St Matthew and St Mark were both using a common pool of stories about Jesus, and reports of his sayings, each was making his selection from the same stock, and rephrasing it, if necessary, to fit in with the needs of his intended readers, and the general themes he was presenting. St Matthew was writing for Jewish Christians, perhaps in Antioch, St Mark for gentile ones. The difference comes out clearly in their differing acounts of Jesus' conversation with the Syro-Phoenician woman. St Matthew describes her as a local Canaanite, seeking help for her daughter and getting no response at first, Jesus' line being that his mission was to Jews only, Ο)υκ αποσταλην εί μη είζ τα προβατα τα απολϖλοτα οίκου Ισραελ (Ouk apestalen ei me eis ta probata apololota oikou Israel.) My mission is only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel St Matthew here is repeating, word for word, Jesus' earlier instruction to the Twelve, that they were not to go into the way of the Gentiles or any town of the Samaritans, but to go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. (Matthew 10:6). But the woman's persistence and repartee pays off, and when Jesus explains that it is not meet to take the children's bread and cast it to the dogs, she counters with the dog's being allowed to eat the crumbs that fall from their masters'. table; and Jesus relents, and the daughter is healed. But it is a minimal concession. Whereas non-Jews were rigorously excluded when the Twelve were sent out on their mission, now they are allowed in,

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Q: A document invented in the 19th Century to explain similarities between Matthew and Luke

but only as second-class citizens. Dogs they were, and dogs they still are, though now allowed to St Mark's account is significantly different. The woman is described specifically as a gentile, as Syro-Phoenician, and Jesus states his priorities as chronological, not hierarchical. The Good News was preached to the Jews first, and it was the Syro-Phoenician woman's repartee that brought him to realise that gentiles, as well as Jews, were proper objects of his ministry---a full ministry---not a subordinate one. And he then departs through the region of Decapolis, a Greek name, underlining the gentile ambience of his expanded mission.

For both St Matthew and St Mark the incident plays a key role in Jesus' development of his own understanding of his own role, and what he had to do. But St St Luke makes no mention of it. For him the crucial step in not Jesus' realisation that his ministry extended to the gentiles---he takes that for granted---but the recognition of thst fact by the young Church, expressed in the resolution reached under the chairmanship of James, the first bishop of Jerusalem (Acts 15, 13-29). The different perspectives of St Matthew and St Luke are shown in the different genealogies of Jesus that they give. St Matthew's gospel begins with the ``book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham'' (AV), ``A table of the descent of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham'' (NEB). He starts with Abraham, and Abraham begat Isaac, and Isaac begat Jacob . . Starting with the core identity od the Jewish nation, St Matthew shows that Jesus is legally a Jew, a son of Abraham, and a potential Messiah, a son of David. St Luke's genealogy is the other way round. It starts not with the Jews, but with with Jesus, the supposed son of Joseph, (the son) of Heli, of Matthat, of Levi . . ., of David, . . , of Abraham, . ., of Adam, of God, thus working back to the whole human race, who are all in a sense children of God. St Luke's account is neater---avoiding wearisome repetition--- than St Matthew's, and differs in details. However, it does not really fit in with the natural flow of his narrative. Jesus, having just been apprised of his God-given role, goes off to the desert to think things out. There is no need for further credentials; and the imprecision of ``about thirty years of age'' sits ill with the claim to accuracy in his address to Theophilus. Could it be that St Luke is correcting St Matthew? If so, St Matthew's gospel, at least in an early version, must have been available. Although it is wrong to insist that the later Evangelists must have been able to peruse the published works of the earlier ones, they may have been able to. It could be that St Matthew's really was the first gospel to be written, making use of a common stock of written accounts of Jesus' words and deeds which St Mark and St Luke also usedWe cannot be sure; all we can safely do is to compare St Luke's with St Matthew's gospel, noting not only the similarities, but equally carefully, the differences.

Crumbs Under the Table

If St Matthew and St Mark were both using a common pool of stories about Jesus, and reports of his sayings, each was making his selection from the same stock, and rephrasing it, if necessary, to fit in with the needs of his intended readers, and the general themes he was presenting. St Matthew was writing for Jewish Christians, perhaps in Antioch, St Mark for gentile ones. The difference comes out clearly in their differing accounts of Jesus' conversation with the Syro-Phoenician woman. St

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Matthew and Mark Is Matthew an expanded version of Mark? Or is Mark a slimmed down version of Matthew?

Matthew describes her as a local Canaanite, seeking help for her daughter and getting no response at first, Jesus' line being that his mission was to Jews only, Ο)υκ αποσταλην εί μη είζ τα προβατα τα απολϖλοτα οίκου Ισραελ (Ouk apestalen ei me eis ta probata apololota oikou Israel) ``My mission is only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’’ St Matthew here is repeating, word for word, Jesus' earlier instruction to the Twelve, ``that they were not to go into the way of the Gentiles or town of the Samaritans, but to go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’’. (10:6). But the woman's persistence and repartee pays off, and when Jesus explains that it is not meet to take the children's bread and cast it to the dogs, she counters with the dog's being allowed to eat the crumbs that fall from their masters'. table; and Jesus relents, and the daughter is healed. But it is a minimal concession. Whereas non-Jews were rigorously excluded when the Twelve were sent out on their mission, now they are allowed in, but only as second-class citizens. Dogs they were, and dogs they still are, though now allowed to have some crumbs. St Mark's account is significantly different. The woman is described specifically as a gentile, as Syro-Phoenician, and Jesus states his priorities as chronological, not hierarchical. The Good News was preached to the Jews first, and it was the Syro-Phoenician woman's repartee that brought him to realise that gentiles, as well as Jews, were proper objects of his ministry---a full ministry---not a subordinate one. And he then departs through the region of Decapolis (a Greek name, underlining the gentile ambience of his expanded mission). For both St Matthew and St Mark the incident plays a key role in Jesus' development of his own understanding of his own role and what he had to do. But St Luke makes no mention of it. For him the crucial step in not Jesus' realisation that his ministry extended to the gentiles---he takes that for granted---but the recognition of that fact by the young Church, expressed in the resolution reached under the chairmanship of James, the first bishop of Jerusalem (Acts 15:13-29). The different perspectives of St Matthew and St Luke are shown in the different genealogies of Jesus that they give. St Matthew's gospel begins with the book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham'' (AV), ``A table of the descent of Jesus Christ, son of David, son of Abraham'' (NEB). He starts with Abraham, and Abraham begat Isaac, and Isaac begat Jacob . . Starting with the core identity of the Jewish nation, St Matthew shows that Jesus is legally a Jew, a son of Abraham, and a potential Messiah, a son of David. St Luke's genealogy is the other way round. It starts not with the Jews, but with with Jesus, the supposed son of Joseph, (the son) of Heli, of Matthat, of Levi . . ., of David, . . , of Abraham, . ., of Adam, of God, thus working back to the whole human race, who are all in a sense children of God. St Luke's account is neater---avoiding wearisome repetition--- than St Matthew's, and differs in details. It also does not really fit in with the natural flow of his narrative. Jesus, having just been apprised of his God-given role, goes off to the desert to think things out. There is no need for further credentials; and the imprecision of ``about thirty years of age'' sits ill with the claim to accuracy in his address to Theophilus. Could it be that St Luke is correcting St Matthew? If so, St Matthew's gospel, at least in an early version, must have been available. Although it is wrong to assume that the later Evangelists must have been able to peruse the published works of the earlier ones, nevertheless it is a possibility. It could be that St Matthew's really was the first gospel to be written, making use of a common stock of written accounts of Jesus' words and deeds which St Mark and St Luke also used. It could be, but need not be, so. All we can safely do is to compare St Luke's with St Matthew's gospel, noting not only the similarities, but equally carefully, the differences.

St Matthew

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St Matthew comes across vividly. He writes in a punchy style. A disproportionate number of proverbial quotes from the Bible come from him. In the {\it Oxford Dictionary of Quotations\/}, 6th. ed. Oxford, 2004, there are 170 from St Matthew, 15 from St Mark, 94 from St Luke, and 88 from St John; about 40%, compared with 4%, 24%, and 22%. It is St Matthew's, not St Luke's, version of the Lord's Prayer, that has become the standard liturgical one. Much of St Matthew's gospel has the same tone as the Semitic Wisdom literature. There are many antithetical one-liners. It may be that St Matthew is closer to Aramaic originals than St Mark or St Luke. And it could be that Augustine is right, that the traditional order is correct, and that his was the first gospel to circulate. St Matthew's account of some of the words of Jesus jar with his account of the deeds. Jesus' deeds are moved by compassion, but many of his sayings are fiercely condemnatory. . Again and again he sees people suffering, and wants to help them. It is part of his mission, which we can see as a psycho-somatic one, to tell people to change their attitude, so as to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, which engenders not only escape from psychological hang-ups, but relief from bodily infirmities too. It needs only a word or a gesture from him to accomplish this, and not from him only. The harvest is ready, and the Twelve are commissioned as additional harvesters, and are also effective in preaching the good news and healing the sick: it is the message, not the messenger, that does the trick. And the object is simply to help those in need, who often are told to keep quiet about their cure, and not to say who helped them. Jesus is not trying, as he is in St John's gospel, to produce evidence to convince people of his standing. When some Secretaries and Pharisees ask for a sign σεμε'ιον (semeion), he says no sign shall be given them (12:38-39). The message is self-authenticating. If the hearer does not recognise this, and respond of his own free wiill, he cannot have got the fresh attitude called for; to be browbeaten into accepting it on account of accompanying miracles, is not to accept it at all. Not everyone did accept, on first hearing it, the message in its pristine purity. For many of those sick in body some further word or gesture was required in order to unlock the healing power of Good News. And others again did not accept it at all, or only less than whole-heartedly. Hence the condemnations and the antithetical passages about peace and the sword. The Kingdom of Heaven was a Kingdom of peace, and those who entered it would find peace and refreshment of their souls: but there was a choice, whether or not to adopt the new outlook whole-heartedly, and this choice was momentous, and had consequences. There was a difference between those who chose to enter the Kingdom and those who did not. It could not be otherwise. And the difference went deep. It could divide son against father, brother against brother. And those who made the negative choice were the authors of their own exclusion, Woe unto you, Chorazin and Bethsaida, you had your chance and you missed it. You are in a worse position than Sodom (11:20-24). When the Twelve were commissioned, it was anticipated that some blessings of peace would be nugatory, and that in such cases the peace would be returned to the apostle (10:11); but though sometimes it would be necessary to move on to another village, they would not have been to all of them before the Coming of the Son of Man. Jesus, then, at this stage expected the period of preaching the Good News to be short, with only a few failures to get the message accepted. But as more resistance was encountered, the tone sharpened. To modern ears the fate foretold to rejectionists seems wrong---the intrinsic penalty of self-exclusion seems appropriate rather than any extrinsic devastation by fire raining down from above, and commentators suggest that St Matthew had an unnecessary predilection for retribution. But it

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should be noted that St James and St John thought it appropriate to call down fire on the village which refused accommodate travellers on their way to Jerusalem (Luke 9:53-56).17

17 See above, p.7

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Chapter 4 Blasphemy?

S 4.1 Confrontation S 4.2 A Non-Incarnational Approach S 4.3 Show Down S 4.4 Barabbas

Confrontation

St John's approach is confrontational. He is putting the ecclesiastical establishment and the Pharisees on the spot, presenting them with conclusive evidence, which they cannot deny, of Jesus' divine mission, and demanding that they accept it. His target is narrow. He does not address the ``scribes'', i.e. the secretaries, nor the Sadducees. He is talking to the top drawer, and the Sadducees, though a wealthy and cohesive group, were outsiders. In St John's view there were good reasons why Jesus should be welcomed by the establishment and the energetic and effective Pharisees; and indeed, a substantial number were prepared to take his claims seriously. But many Pharisees were extremely judgemental, and took exception to Jesus' having cured a blind man on the Sabbath day. Jesus knew that their objection was footling, but the only warrant he could give for not being bound by the Mosaic law---as they interpreted it---was that he had God's authorisation. His mission was a divine mission, and he was the accredited agent of his father here on earth. But this raised the ante. If it was accepted, there was no alternative to coming out as one of Jesus' disciples, and risking being excommunicated by hard-line Pharisees: and if it was not accepted, Jesus was guilty of blasphemy. Gradually opinion began to coalesce around the latter position. Jesus tried not to force the issue. In John 10:36, he avoids affirming that he is the Son of God, only putting the phrase into a questions asked of his opponents. Similarly when directly questioned by the High Priest and required to answer, he only says that the High Priest has formulated that title (Matthew 26:63). In his own affirmations he always calls himself the Son of Man. But implicitly he is driven into making a greater claim, presenting his readers with a stark choice. In this he resembles St Paul, though with the important difference, that whereas St Paul preaches liberation, St John preaches light and life. The light has come into the world, and each person has a choice, either to be guided by it, or to reject it. Those who choose darkness are condemned by their own free choice. They are the children of darkness, and the truth is not in them. It is a black-and-white message, giving rise to sharp contrasts, and shows Jesus polarizing opinion, and engaged in bitter disputes. Almost at the outset of his ministry he goes up to Jerusalem, and drives out from the Temple the money-changers, and those who sold oxen, sheep and doves. It is a provocative act, and the Jews naturally ask for his credentials. Three answers are given: the testimony of the Baptist, the evidence of the miracles and self-authenticating truth of what he was saying. The Baptist was sent from God, and was accepted by many as a reliable witness. He had repeatedly said that he was not the Messiah, but that Jesus was. That was warrant enough for those who were the followers of the Baptist, or had been touched by his teaching. But there were many others, and for them St John points to the miracles Jesus did as evidence of divine endorsement. He enumerates the turning of water into wine (2:1-11) and the healing of the centurion's son (4:46-54); and they were followed by the healing of the cripple at Bethesda (5:2-9), the feeding of the five thousand (6:1-15) and the healing of the blind man (9:1-7).

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These were not only proofs of Jesus' divine power, but indications of the nature of his ministry---that it was not just a physical healing ministry, but that life and light was being brought to all.

A Non-Incarnational Approach

It is illuminating to subject the Fourth Gospel to a reading contrary to the intention of the Fourth Evangelist, and read it as a non-incarnational tract, about an Ens Realissimum with no theological overtones. The Prologue would begin:

``The fundamental principle is Reason: Reason is an attribute of Ultimate Reality; indeed, it is identical with it. Everything happens on account of it, and without it no event would occur. Reason includes life, and it illuminates darkness without being absorbed by it. Reason constitutes real enlightenment, and enlightens human beings, and irradiates the universe. It is in the universe, and it is on account of reason that the universe exists, but the universe cannot recognise it. But to those who can take it on board it gives power to become rational beings, which is not a matter of genetics, or bodily instincts, or human contrivance, but is the gift of Reason.''

The disciple of Reason would find much to commend in the Baptist's insistence that a fresh approach was vital, though commenting that more needed to be said about what commitment to Reason involved. A rational examination of established institutions and existing attitudes, would lead to a radical critique, and violent disputes and disagreements. All this makes sense---and shows what is lacking. Reason can inspire respect, wonder and commitment, but one can feel lonely as one wanders through Plato's world of Forms. The Ultimate Reality which John portrays is not an impersonal Ens Realissimum but a personal God; not just a distant Parmenidean Deity, but a God with a human face, a God embodied in Jesus. Embodiment---the Greek σαρξ (sarx), flesh---implies, as well as a voice, ears, and most tellingly, vulnerability. The Deity does not merely exist, contemplating, as Aristotle supposed, his own excellence, but inspired the prophets to tell us what we should do, and has given us in Jesus the authoritative exposition of the Divine will. The communication is not just a one-way instruction, as with the Old Testament prophets, but a two-way involvement: God took up residence among us, sharing our life, and listening to our aspirations and complaints. Bodies are not only active, the means whereby we do things, but passive, the object of other peoples' activities, for better or for worse. It can be for worse. In Jesus' case it was.

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He was killed---something that could not happen to a disembodied messenger of divine truth. The Fourth Gospel tries to make sense of this, and the Church in succeeding generations has struggled to work out a coherent account of what the Fourth Gospel is trying to say. A blinkered unreverent reading will certainly not succeed. But its very narrowness of approach can throw into sharp relief what more there is to be found.

Show Down

St John preaches a gospel of truth, and identifies God with reason, but his God is not just the God of the philosophers, but the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a personal God, capable of inspiring not only awe and reverence, but love, and capable of loving us in return. Jesus' message is self-authenticating not only becuse it is true, but because it comes from God, whose spokesman he is. The message he is proclaiming is not of his own devising, but comes with the authority of a God whose heart goes out to us as a father's does to his children. As the accredited representative of a fatherly God, Jesus claims the attention and allegiance of his hearers to what the Father has vouchsafed to him. Whereas St Matthew portrays Jesus as being nudged by the obduracy of the the Pharisees' rigid sabbatarianism into claiming a divine authority greater than that of the Mosaic law, John portrays Jesus as himself increasingly insisting on the intrinsic authenticity of what he was saying, on the grounds that it comes not just from him, but from his father. In spite of his disavowals, this was tantamount to a claim to be the Son of God. It was more than the Jews could stomach, and inevitably led to a final show-down. But Jesus there were repeatedly disavowed the title, and referes to himself as the Son of Man. The ascription `Son of God' is by others: John the Baptist (John 1:34), Nathaniel (John 1:49), the Devil (Matthew 4:3, Luke 4:3, 4:9), the unclean spirits at Gadara and elsewhere (Matthew 8:29, Luke 8:28; Mark 3:1, Luke 4:41), St Peter after Jesus walked on the water, (Matthew 14:33), St Peter after many disciples deserted (John 6:69); or in a question Say ye . . ``Thou blasphemest . . ''? (John 10:36) When the ecclesiastical authorities captured Jesus, and wanted to convict him of blasphemy, they could not find any witnesses, and the High Priest had to adjure Jesus to answer (Matthew 26:63; Mark 14:611; Luke 22:20). Jesus was then forced to make explicit what had been implicit in his actions and his understanding of his relationship to the Father, that he was indeed the Son of God. And the high priest rent his clothes, and handed him over to Pilate to be killed.

Barabbas

Origen, in the early Third Century AD, noticed after he had moved to Palestine, that the local copies of the Gospel read `Jesus Barabbas' whereas in Alexandria they had all simply read `Barabbas'. It was incongruous, he thought, for the sacred name of `Jesus' to be given to a criminal, and concluded that the correct reading was just `Barabbas'. Christians throughout the Gentile world would have thought the same, but the first readers of Matthew's gospel were Jewish Christians, who would have known of others called `Jesus' besides Jesus of Nazareth. Texts of Matthew circulating in Palestine had preserved an original reading that Gentiles found incongruous. ` Ιησουν Βαραββαν (Iesoun Barabban) ' is generally accepted now as the correct reading of Matthew 27:17. But `τoν λεγoμενoν (ton legomenon)’? Clearly `τoν λεγoμενoν Βαραββαν (ton legomenon Barraban)’ would

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nicely balance `τoν λεγoμενoν Χρίστoν (ton legomenon Christon)’, but that consideration alone would not be enough to make the Bezae Cantabridgensis carry weight against all the other witnesses. There is, however, a floating `τoν λεγoμενoν (ton legomenon)’ adrift in St Mark's account. Mark 15:7 reads `ην δε o λεγoμενoς Βαραββας δεδεμενος (en de ho legomenos Barabbas dedemenos)’. The Authorised Version translated this as `there was one named Barabbas', The New English Bible as `the man known as Barabbas', but `o λεγoμενoς (ho legomenos)’18has usually the sense of `so called' rather than simply `called'. St Mark's source, like St Matthew's, must have spoken of a `Ιησουν τoν λεγoμενoν Βαραββαν (Iesoun ton legomenon Barraban)’. But who was `Jesus said to be Barabbas'? `Barabbas' could be a proper name---it turns up in Syria later in the First Century. But in Hebrew and Aramaic `Bar' means `son of'. Although `Barabbas' could mean `son of Rabbi', or perhaps `son of Rahab', it would, most naturally, mean `Son of the Father'. Ordinarily, that would be an impossible designation---everyone is his father's son; but in the context of the High Priest’s question, there was a Jesus said to be the Father's Son. Along with `Amen', `Abbas' is one of the few Aramaic words that survives in the Greek-language writings of the Evangelists and St Paul. Addressing God as `Father' was clearly something that people regarded as one of Jesus's most characteristic utterances. In the context of Jesus’ appearance before the High Priest and trial by Pilate Jesus said-to-be the Bar Abbas' and `Jesus said-to-be the Messiah' were one and the same man. Jesus Bar-Abbas, the Son of the Father, was crucified. But the final verdict was given by the centurion: ``Truly, this man was the Son of God’’19

18 I owe these references to my former colleague, Dr N.J.Richardson, who points to Matthew 10:2 and John 20:24 as supporting evidence.

19 Matthew 27:54b and Mark 15 39b

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Chapter 5 In Defence of Pontius Pilate 

 Pontius Pilate was not a good man. The accounts given by Philo and Josephus establish that. And Jesus' questioners told him of the occasion when he mixed the blood of Galileans with their sacrifices (St Luke 13:1). And it was Pontius Pilate who finally gave the order for Jesus to be crucified. But if we read the accounts carefully, we can see that he was not all bad, but a flawed but a flawed character failing to live up to standards he himself recognised. The accounts given in the four gospels show that Pilate realised that Jesus was innocent, and wanted to release him, in the end he gave way to the Jewish authorities, and crucified him. But they do not give a coherent picture of the questions facing the Roman Governor, or his responses to them. Early on Good Friday his morning leisure was interrupted by a delegation from the Sanhedrin and finally he gave orders for Jesus to be crucified by Roman soldiers. What happened in between? Pilate was not best pleased at being interrupted at an ungodly hour by a bunch of ecclesiastics wanting him to kill someone, and was unready to accede to their demand. On discovering that the man was from Galilee, and so under Herod's jurisdiction, he packed him off to Herod to deal with him (Luke 23:7). And again when Herod returned Jesus to Pilate, Pilate called together the ecclesiastical and secular authorities, and insisted that he had found no fault in Jesus, and would release him after disciplining him for being a nuisance, whereupon they demanded, according to all four gospels, the release of Barabbas in accordance with an established custom. But there is no other evidence of such a custom. It runs counter to Roman practice; Festus (Acts 25:16) says that it is not the Roman custom to give up as a favour χαρίζεσθαί (charizesthai) anyone to be killed, and the tone suggests an equal reluctance to curry favour the other way. Moreover, if there were custom to accede to popular demand, why did Pilate, who wanted to release Jesus, raise the matter then, when the Sanhedrin was wanting him to crucify him? And why only two prisoners, when there were also two robbers due to be crucified the next day? In the preliminary hearing before the Sanhedrin, Jesus eventually had said that he was The Son of God. That was, in the view of the Sanhedrin blasphemy, and deserved the penalty of death. But though the Romans allowed the Jewish authorities some jurisdiction, it did not extend to the death penalty, which only the Roman Governor could impose. So they had sent a delegation to Pilate, handing over Jesus for execution, saying he was a criminal who deserved to die (John 18:29).. Pilate naturally did not accept that, and asked for definite charges. They therefore had to make definite accusations: Jesus had committed blasphemy, and Jesus had claimed to be King of the Jews. Pilate was not interested in Jewish squabbles and was unimpressed with the charge of blasphemy; which certainly was no justification for disturbing the Governor out of hours. But he could not ignore the charge that Jesus had seditiously declared himself King of the Jews in opposition to Rome. This was a charge the Roman Governor must take cognizance of, and one that might merit the death penalty. It was, however, unsupported by any evidence---contrary to what the Sanhedrin's delegation had alleged, that Jesus had told the Jews not to pay taxes to Caesar (Luke, 23:2), he had a few days earlier specifically refused to do that (Luke 20:21-26). Pilate questioned Jesus about his being King of the Jews, and again came to the conclusion that he had done nothing worthy of death. There was no substantial evidence against the man on either charge; case dismissed---but give the Sanhedrin's delegation the choice of on which charge. ``Shall I disclaim jurisdiction on the blasphemy charge, which will leave you free to proceed against him, and punish him, though not by

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death, according to your own laws? or shall acquit him on the insurrection charge, which will bring the whole business to a conclusive end?'' Pilate questioned him about his being King of the Jews, and came to the conclusion thathe had done nothing worthy of death. Pilate questioned Jesus---in private according to StJohn.(18:33), in the face of his accusers according to St Matthew (27:11-12) and St Mark (15:2-3); either way, Pilate asked him whether he was the King of the Jews (St Matthew 27:11, St Mark 15:2, St Luke 23:3, St John, 18:34). To this charge Jesus initially made no definite plea: according to St Matthew (27:12), St Mark (15:2), St Luke 23:3) He simply said ``You say <that I am>''.; in St John's account of the private interview, Jesus asked Pilate whether he was making the accusation himself, or had based it on hear-say (St John 18:34), and then explains the nature of his kingship. St Matthew (27:12-14) and St Mark (15:4-5) report him as, to the surprise of Pilate, keeping silent in the face of the allegations made against him. The accounts read awkwardly, but if we view them in a formal legal context they make sense. Jesus was accused before Pilate of claiming to be King of the Jews. He could not enter a plea of Not Guilty without denying his mission; but nor could he simply plead Guilty without thereby conceding the Jewish authorities' case against him. He needed to clarify the question, which, according to St John (18:36-37); he did. But Pilate did not need to have a formal plea entered. It was evident that Jesus, even if he had claimed to be The Christos, The King of the Jews, posed no threat to Roman rule. The trumped up charges against him did not hold water. There was no substantial evidence against the man: case dismissed. What happened next? The accounts differ. St Luke (23:8-12) says that in the uproar, the Jewish authorities said that Jesus had started his mischief-making in Galilee, whereupon Pilate remitted the case to Herod. This may not have been meant kindly. It may have been just a way of getting quit of a troublesome business by passing it on to another authority. But there is no reason to suppose that Herod did not take it well, as a recognition of his status as well as giving him the opportunity to satisfy his curiosity. The fact that the other evangelists make no mention of it does not show that St Luke was wrong. It provides the most plausible setting for Jesus being arrayed in purple, and struck by soldiers.

St Luke then has Pilate summoning the Jewish authorities again, and proposing to release Jesus with a beating, whereupon the Jewish authorities demand the release of Barabbas instead. The other evangelists recount the Barabbas incident immediately after Pilate dismisses the case.

The Barabbas story, as recounted, make no sense. There is no other evidence for there being a custom or releasing a prisoner at the time of the Passover, and it runs counter to Roman practice to allow such a custom. If there were such a custom, it would naturally be for the Governor to decide whom to release, in which case Pilate could simply have exercised the customary prerogative in favour of Jesus: there would be no point, if he waned to release Jesus, in asking those clamouring for Jesus' crucifixion, whom he should release; and similarly if the custom was that the Jewish authorities could say who was to be released.

Some early texts of St Matthew, however, provide a clue to the puzzle.20 They record Pilate as saying ``Whom do you want me to release to you? Jesus Barabbas? or Jesus, said-to-be (legomenon) Christ? (St Matthew 27:17). St Mark' (15:7) prefixes `Barabbas' with the same word legomenos, which gives some support to the suggestion that Pilate's original question was ``Whom do you want me to release to you? Ιησουν τoν λεγoμενoν Βαραββαν Jesus said-to-be (legomenon) Barabbas? or Ιησουν λεγoμενoν Χρίστoν Jesus, said-to-be (legomenon) Christ? '' Pilate was

20 See above p.21

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offering them a Hobson's choice. ``There are two charges against this man: blasphemy and insurrection. Blasphemy is not a crime under Roman law, though it may be under yours, and I cannot try him on that charge. Insurrection is a crime, and I have heard your case against him, and it just does not stand up. Shall I release Jesus, said-to-be Christ? If so, that is the end of the matter. He has been tried, and found Not Guilty. Or shall I release said-to-be (legomenon) Barabbas? As far as I am concerned, you may then try him under your law and punish him, though not with death.'' Thus there was no Barabbas, but just Jesus under two different descripti0ons. Pilate's pronunciation of Aramaic may have been poor, or the bystanders may have been unable to hear, or may have missed the point. All that they could make out was that Pilate had offered a choice, and the Jewish authorities were bent on having Jesus crucified, and must have opted for the alternative.

Matthew (27:26), Mark (15:15) and John (19:1) all say that Jesus was actually flogged. It could be so, but it fits awkwardly into the natural sequence of events. . It could be that the soldiers acted on their own initiative, and having between given to crucify, thought to have some fun first (Matthew 27:27-31 and Mark 15:16-20). But Roman soldiers were disciplined, and accustomed to doing exactly what they were told. And both (Matthew 27:26) and (Mark 15:15). say that it was Pilate who ordered the flogging. But although Pilate had in the end yielded to the Jewish authorities, and reluctantly ordered Jesus to be crucified, there was no reason then to add a flogging to the horrible death that was going to be imposed. Less implausible is John's account (19:1-5) that in the face of the uproar after he had offered the Barabbas choice, Pilate decided to have Jesus flogged, as (Luke 23:16) testifies, in the hope that that will be enough to pacify the Jewish authorities. But Luke's account is more plausible: Pilate said to the Jewish authorities ``I will let him go, having disciplined him'', but failed to pacify them with that offer. If he had actually given the order and it had been carried out, he would have been not easily pushed to increasing the sentence. He gave short shrift to the demand that he amend the title on the cross to read ``He said I am the King of the Jews''. If he had already sentenced Jesus to be chastised, a demand that the sentence be added to would have invited the response o γεγραφα, γεγραφα (ho geographa, gegrapha) ``what I have written, I have written''. The threat to tell Caesar would be empty if Jesus had in fact been punished. Luke's account is easier to accept. The soldiers who mocked and ill-used Jesus were Herod's. Herod, perhaps disappointed at not being granted a miracle, could safely send back to Pilate Jesus dressed up as a King. Pilate's later suggestion, as he parleyed with the Jewish authorities of flogging Jesus became an accomplished fact in the accounts of the other evangelists. Jesus had been mocked and buffeted, and Pilate had said he would have him chastised, but the mocking and buffeting was done by Herod's soldiers, and Pilate's tentative order was not carried into effect. In the end Pilate buckled. St John says that the Jews shouted ``If you let this man go, you are not Caesar's friend: everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar''. (John 19:12) . St John may be right: he often had inside information about the Jewish authorities. And since the threat was singularly inept---it was standard Roman practice to make use of client kings, Herod being an obvious example---it may well reflect what was actually said, rather than be an intelligent reconstruction. Although the actual words missed the mark, the substance was all too credible: ``We shall tell on you.'' Modern readers easily convict Pilate of failing to do his duty and govern justly. But Judea was not a British colony under British principles of administration. A much closer parallel would be the Soviet Union in Stalin's last days. Tiberius was going mad, and very ready to execute any public servant he suspected of disloyalty. Delation, however baseless, could prove fatal. And delation of Pilate would not be entirely unfounded. Pilate had been a bad governor. Having let Jesus go scot-free would not be the only charge. Together with evidence of previous savagery it could me made into a faceable case. If Pilate had already punished Jesus, he could stand

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by and defend his decision, but in a negotiation about what he was going to do so, the Jewish authorities could focus on the proposed release, and construe it as a letting off. Once he had offered the Barabbas choice, Pilate had weakened his position by attempting to placate. It is difficult to be fair to Pilate. He failed the final test. But it was a test that only heroes could come through unscathed. How many of us would have risked Stalin's displeasure by insisting on justice for a trouble-maker from Estonia or Uzbekistan? Pilate did at least try. He could have tried more effectively. A stronger Governor would have had no truck with Jesus' accusers. ``I find no fault in him. Case dismissed.'' It was because he was weak that the Jewish authorities felt able to push him. And it was because he was bad that they had more ammunition than the single case in issue. Tiberius might be mad, but every governor would on occasion have had some single decision questioned. Pilate tried, but did not try effectively, through his own weakness and own bad character. But his his situation was dire, and deserves our sympathy, and he did try and is entitled to some measure of exculpation. What if Pilate had risen to the occasion, and refused to order Jesus' crucifixion? For the New Testament writers, writing after the event, the Crucifixion was an unalterable datum, which could not have been otherwise. Jesus is portrayed as going up to Jerusalem to meet an inevitable end, with Judas Iscariot and Pilate cast in supporting roles for the Great Drama. But Judas and Pilate were not automatons programmed simply to do what they in fact did: they could have done otherwise. Judas could have stayed with the disciples, and gone to Gethsemane with them: Pilate could have heard the charge and dismissed he case summarily. What then? If Judas had not told the Jewish authorities where Jesus was to be found, they could still have arrested him in the next few days. The could have arrested him in the Temple---there might have been a minor uproar, but the Temple Police could have bundled him out of the public area before his supporters could stop them; or their spies could have followed him and reported where he was staying. Judas was a dispensable actor in the Drama of our Salvation. So too was Pilate. If he had not ordered it, Jesus would not have been crucified. But he would have died all the same. The Jewish authorities would have got him, as they got Stephen a few weeks later. Instead of the Cross, the symbol of Christ's religion would have been a stone. Jesus had to have it out with the Jewish authorities. He was the Messiah, and had to stand by that claim, and set it against the worldly ideal of a temporal king that contemporary Judaism had espoused. The two ideals had to come into the open, and were not compatible. If the worldly one used force to down the heavenly one, so be it. Jesus was ready to suffer in his own person the worst the world could devise. Only in this way could he fully identify with all the human beings who live in the world and suffer the grievous afflictions inflicted on them by the world 

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Chapter 6 The Lord’s Prayer 

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen(Many versions add:For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever,)

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Aramaic

Avvon d-bish-maiya, nith-qaddash shim-mukh.Tih-teh mal-chootukh. Nih-weh ‡iw-yanukh:ei-chana d'bish-maiya: ap b'ar-ah.Haw lan lakh-ma d'soonqa-nan yoo-mana.O'shwooq lan kho-bein:ei-chana d'ap kh'nan shwiq-qan l'khaya-ween.Oo'la te-ellan l'niss-yoona:il-la pa‡-‡an min beesha.Mid-til de-di-lukh hai mal-chootaoo khai-la oo tush-bookh-tal'alam al-mein. Aa-meen.

Hallowed Be Thy Name

Rowan Williams says"Hallowed be thy name" is one of those phrases that's most strange to us, isn't it? But I want to see it against the background of the Old Testament's idea that the name of God is something in itself immensely beautiful and powerful. The name of God is God's word, God's presence. And to ask that God's name be hallowed, that God's name be looked upon as holy, is to ask that in the world people will understand the presence of God among them with awe and reverence, and will not use the name or the idea of God as a kind of weapon to put other people down, or as a sort of magic to make themselves feel safe. But rather approach the idea of God, the name of God, the word of God, with the veneration and humility that's demanded. In the Jewish texts of Jesus' own day, the commandment about not taking God's name in the vain, from the Ten Commandments, is often understood as uniting the name of God with a curse - using the name of God as a kind of magic word - and that's to trivialise the name of God, it's to bring it down to our level, to try and make God a tool for our purposes. So "Hallowed be thy name" means: understand what you're talking about when you're talking about God, this is serious, this is the most wonderful and frightening reality that we could imagine, more wonderful and frightening that we can imagine.21

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

Lidddell and Scott give επίουσiον as not occurring elsewhere in Greek; επί can be translated as `above’ and ουσiον as `what exists’ ; επίουσiον is bread above what exists normally, better than ordinary bread. Modern readers understand ``Bread'' in a minimal sense. Bread and water, constitute the bare necessities of life, just enough to live on, and no more. We suppose that Jesus was telling us to ask for the minimal sustenance that would support life. But the word Jesus used, ἄρτον (arton), denotes up-market wheat bread in contrast to μᾶζα (maza), the much less appetising barley bread, which would indeed constitute a sub-standard daily diet, and is the opposite of the super-standard diet of high-quality bread that we are being told to ask for.

21 Rt Rev. Lord Williams of Oystermouth, Reflections on BBC 2009-08-06

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What we should like to have is a piece of cake---a treat---and that is what Jesus told his followers to ask for. Contrary to the much quoted rule, jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today, Jesus is telling us to concentrate on today, and focus our thoughts on what we want today, and not let our enjoyment of today be spoilt by worrying about the past or the future, what excuses we should tender, or what we should wear. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof: no point in adding to it---ask God to make the most of today as it comes.

Lead us not into Temptation

καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς The word εἰσενέγκῃς (eisenegkes) does not occur in classical Greek.; its components suggest a sense of being carried, willy-nilly, into being tried and tested. ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν (kai me eisenegkes hemas eis peirasmon), which is the last clause of St Luke's version and to many modern ears suggests chocolates and sex---things that are are naughty but nice. That was not what Jesus wanted his followers to be spared. The Greek word πειρασμόν (peirasmon) has the sense of test. It is a formal trial: in our culture a monitoring or an examination. We are to ask not to have to have to justify ourselves, not to be put on the spot today. It is something we sometimes do have to do. On occasion we may have to give an account of what we have done or failed to have done, or of what we have said, or even of what we have thought. There was a Greek word εὐθῦνη (euthune) for the procedure whereby officials were called account for their tenure of office. It was an exacting, and often unpleasant, experience---something we could reasonably ask to be spared, as a schoolboy might now wish that today there would be no exams, and phrase his version:Heavenly Father, Holy God, My your plans work out here on Earth as they do in Heaven. Please may we have decent grub today, And, please, overlook my wrongdoing in the same way as I have overlooked the wrongdoing of others. And no exams, please, And nothing really terrible to happen. Amen But deliver us

There is only a difference of accent between αλλ`α (all`a) `but’ and `αλλα (`alla) `and’. The earliest manuscripts were written in capitals, and do not show accents.The natural reading is: And another thing---Deliver us from evil

Deliver us from evil

In the last clause in St Matthew's version αλλα ρυσας απο του πονηρου (alla rhusai hemas apo tou ponerou ) ``But deliver us from evil'', the word `evil' could be construed either in a personal sense---the evil one---or an impersonal sense. Translations and scholars are divided over whether tou ponerou refers to evil in general or the Devil in particular. The original Greek, as well as the Latin version, could be either neuter (evil in general) or masculine (the evil one). In his temptation in the wilderness, Jesus rebuked the Devil (Matthew 4:7, Luke 4:12), and on other occasions sometimes spoke of a personal embodiment of evil;---``Get thee behind me, Satan’’ (Matthew 16:23, Mark 8:33, Luke 4:8) In Matthew 12:22-30 Jesus refers to both Satan and Beelzebub in a controversy with the Pharisees who were claiming that his healing of those possessed was due to his

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being the agent of Satan and Beelzebub, to which in each case Jesus points out that a house divided against itself must fall. These usages are not enough to prove that Jesus believed in a personal Devil After all we often talk of Justice holding the scales, and have statues of her outside the Courts of Justice without believing she is a real person. 22

The Prayer as Jesus meant it: we should beginOur FatherWho art in HeavenHoly be thy name.Thy kingdom comeThy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Like Jesus, we should address God as Father, with intimacy, but also great reverence and respect . We then turn to our own concerns Give us a treat today And forgive our wrongdoing, as we have forgiven the wrongdoing of othersAnd do not put us on the spotBut free us from evil

and end with the traditional doxologyFor thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory for ever and ever, Amen

The schoolboy's short version: Please give me decent grub today, no exams, and keep me safe from anything really bad.

22 Note also The Sermon the Mount, (John 17:15) and (2 Thessalonians 3:3), where the term is used to refer to general evil.

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Chapter 7 Satan, Sin and Anti-Semitism

On returning from church, Calvin Cool1dge was asked `What was the sermon about?' `Sin'`What did he say about it?'He was against it'

It is difficult to believe in the absolute depravity of the human race as one surveys the congregation coming out of church on a Sunday morning. A few peccadilloes perhaps, but not many sins of commission; not many of omission either, if a reasonable recognition of what was feasible is made. The way Christianity keeps harping on sin makes its doctrines not just implausible, but unintelligible to modern man. Stories about women and snakes in the Garden of Eden have been shown to be untrue by modern science, and anyhow do not explain anything. So it is thought, but wrongly. Genesis has not been refuted by geology, but, rather, Darwin has revealed the true origins of original sin. Human beings are the top predators, and top predators compete for territory, scarce resources and mates. They stake out territories, and ward off rivals: Although many men are not actual sinners, but fairly well-behaved, the innate tendency is towards aggressive self-aggrandisement. Our natural tendency is to compete, to outdo our rivals. And that is Original Sin:

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Why do they keep going on about sins? Sins are what we don't do.' (Remark overheard during a conference at the Ecumenical Institute Bossey, Switzerland}

``I reckon I'll be all right---I have paid my Trade Union dues, and kept my bowels regular (remark made by a workman in Portsmouth to a priest in early 20th century)

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Chapter 8 The Koran

In the aftermath of the Resurrection, the Second Coming was thought to be imminent, and there was no call to plan ahead, or establish a daily routine. The only petition was Maranatha, O! Come quickly. Once the Second Coming did not come quickly, the life of the believer had to settle down into an orderly rhythm. Rules for day-to-day conduct are formulated and the practice of religion becomes a cult. Hence the rules at the beginning of the Koran. In the Koran there are 114 suras (chapters). The 6th sura ``Guide us to the straight path'' expresses the need we have for day-to-day guidance on what a loyal adherent should do, in preparation for the future life that is to come, and the instruction is re-iterated in the 7th sura ``the path of those you have blessed, those who incur no anger and who have not gone astray.’’ We have moved from the Christian belief in Christ to a prudent practice for those who seek safety while living their earthly life.

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Appendix

Hell

I was pleasantly surprised at the warm welcome I got when I died.

The trumpet sounded, and the pearly gates swung open, and St Peter with his notebook waved me in. He asked a few questions, which I was well able to answer. I had done well in my earthly life, and could point to a string of achievements which should stand me in good stead. should I have to give an account of myself. In addition to many honours and awards, I had made a decent pile for my heirs to inherit.

Altogether I was justifiably confident that on he day of judgement I should acquit my self thoroughly well.

St Peter agreed with me and ushered me in. At the Reception Desk I was greeted respectfully by a flunkey, who handed me my keys, and called another flunkey to show me to my suite. It was luxurious---spotlessly clean, and there was a drinks cupboard stocked with cocktails. Would I like to order dinner straight way, or would I prefer to go down to the dining room, and choose at leisure?

I was tired, and decided to have a bath first, I had a couple of drinks while the flunkey ran the bath for me, and felt much better in consequence. In due course I went down to the dining room, and had an excellent dinner, then watched a TV programme until I felt ready for bed. As I put on my pyjamas, I noticed that a double bed had been prepared for me, and it was indicated that if I wished, a partner would be available to ensure a satisfying night. And it was indeed a satisfying night. I woke refreshed, full of vim, and after breakfast had a session in the gymnasium, getting up an appetite for lunch, which again was excellent. And so the days passed, with every slight inclination immediately gratified. ``Perhaps I should like to broaden my experience,and experiment with deviant sexual activities. it could be arranged.'' I tried it, but it did not really titillate my jaded palate. It began to pall. I became exasperated at the sameyness of it all; an unending sequence of tomorrows, with no point to them all. . At last I could contain myself no longer, and blurted out ``For heaven's sake, this is intolerable. I might as well be in Hell''

``Where else did you think you were?''

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36

Black Cap

It was a ghastly business. All had seemed to be set fair and normal. Yes, he had been caught again, but three month's hospitality at Her Majexty's expense wasn't too bad a prospect. He had tried to stay out of trouble, and had confined himself to careful shop-lifting, and helping himself to unconsidered trifles, but his luck had not held, and he had not noticed a CCT camera in his Tesco; and then when the police took him to his flat, they found a lot of his pickings, which he could not plausibly account for. But three months was the tariff, and that should have been all right; but then the geezer turned nasty, and put on the black cap, and cited some high-faluting nonsence from a statute of James the Third, and said that because prison had evidently failed to make me mend my ways, there was no point in trying any further to reform me, and I should be got out of the way. I could not believe my ears as the words came out `` . . . and there be hanged by the neck, until he be dead. And may the Lord have mercy on his soul''. ``Amen'' said the Clerk of the Court and the Chaplain. ``You're lucky'' continued the Clerk; ``Judge Armstrong is merciful and kind. He has directed that you shall be dispatched by the quick drop. The original statute would have you being strung up in public, and slowly strangled with a crow of onlookers gawping at you.

But first a few questions: you don't happen to have any noblemen among your ancestors? It would be awkward if you did, becausse then we should have to use a silken rope, and it is very difficult to get a good knot. Hemp is much better. It makes a big knot which goes under the ear, and does the job perfectly. It will all be over before you can say Robert Burns.'' ``How do you know?'' I screamed. ``It might cause excruciating pain'' ``There have been no complaints. ''

``The next queestion is what religious solace you would like. It does not have to be Church of Scotland. The Roman Catholic Church offers complete forgiveness and remission, but you have to believe a lot to get it, and there is not much time to get all the believing done, even if you start right now. The Piskies are much easier to satisfy---you don'r have to believe anything you don't think is true---but that's really too soft an option for a grown man who is going to meet his Maker on the morrow. The Church of Scotland is not only the patriotic choice, but the Best Buy---it notes all your sins, and you have to admit responsibility for them, and your willingness to accept punishment; but then you are let off, thanks to the Cross.''

``And next we must weigh you and measure you, so that we can calculate the drop, and make you a coffin to fit. It all depends on the weight how much the drop should be: enough to do the job, but not so much that it breaks the skin---it is wrong to shed blood. And we have to get your height right too for your shroud and coffin---we add on a couple of inches, to allow for the gap between your head and your body. We used to make the coffin of elm, but when elm was no longer availalbe, oak was deemed too expensive, and nowadays we use chipboard as part of the economy drive.. We have had to economize on breakfast as well: in the old days executions were at

37

9 am, and the prisoner had a good breakfast first; but that was waste of good food, and now we have executions before breakfast time---8 am usually. So you wake up, and two of us, one on either side, come to escort you to the gallows in case you find walking difficult. We then put the noose round your neck, and make sure the knot is under your ear, and a hood over your head, so that you don't see us cutting three strings; one of them does not have any effect, in order that no onr of those involved need be sure that he had a hand in the prisoner's death; just two release the trap door under your feet to let you drop, and it will all be over and done with.''

As an eight o'clock deadline means an early start for us, we should really be paid over-time; but the economy drive has ruled that out, and instead, we are allowed to knock off early in the afternoon, which suits me quite well, as I shall be able to get some gardening done. Altogether, the arrangements are fine.

``But it is all wrong: I do not want to be cleared out of the way; I do not want to die. Life, in spite of imprisonments and other inconveniences, is still good, and worth hanging onto, rather than just being hanged and got out of the way. Couldn't I have just one more chance? I really will try to go straight, and earn an honest living, with no more cheating and stealing. Please let me see Judge Armstrong again, and ask him to reconsider his sentence.''

Judge Armstrong was a kind and merciful man: `Very , then,' he said, `and mind you, let me nver see you in Court again''. I breathed a hug sigh of reief; ``Thank you.'' I gasped, as I stumbled out.

Judge Armstrong breathed a sigh of relief too, and turned to the minister, the warders and the officials ``Thank you: it worked''.

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39

THE UNIVERSITY SERMON

Preached in the. University Church of St. Mary the Virgin

at 10.15am on Sunday 26 November 1978

by J.R. Lucas, MA

Fellow of Merton College

The Sin of Pride

University sermons have to be preached. Left to myself, although I might have picked on my mIt is meet and right that pride and humility should be the two human characteristics on which odesty as something I should share with you, I should have given the pre-eminence to other among my sins than pride. My greed, my sloth, my avarice or, in this salacious age my lust, are subjects on which I could tell you much that might interest you. Pride lacks immediate appeal. We are not sure what it is, or whether it is a bad thing, when we think of it in purely individual terms. But when we consider it collectively, we can see that it is, together with humility, something Oxford is peculiarly well qualified to preach on. We all of us are proud of our university. We were proud, and our schoolmasters were proud, when we first got our places here. We are, dons and undergraduates alike, proud of our colleges, each grateful that good fortune has brought him to the best college in Oxford, and anxious that everyone else should secretly acknowledge it to be the best. Our parents were proud when we took our degrees, and although we profess to be unconcerned with classes, we are deeply content to record our firsts when occasion requires us to do so, or have our contemporaries allude to them as opportunity offers. We are studious, as dons, not to pull rank, safe in the knowledge that others will do it for us, and that we shall receive the deference due to a fellow of an Oxford college. In an age that is egalitarian in theory but elitist at heart, Oxford men have benefited greatly, as other forms of social eminence have been eroded, leaving a clear field for our own claims to public esteem, which are, if not entirely unchallenged, still generally allowed. Oxford is, as we like to be told by outsiders, a centre of excellence, and a lot of the resplendence rubs off on us, not altogether undeservedly. It is, as we corporately admit on Commemoration Sunday, largely due to our having entered into other men's labours. But it is not only that we have much to be thankful for: it is also, as is our theme today, that we have much to be pleased about.

The traditional response to pride is to denounce and deny: to denounce the sin and to deny the facts on which it feeds. It is the sin of pride on which I am bidden to preach, and preachers are supposed to be against sin. If people are complacent, it is reasonable, and from the security of a pulpit would indeed be tempting, to puncture their self-esteem by pointing out the many respects in which we are not as good as we think we are, and the many ways in which Cambridge, Harvard, or even Redbrick, do things better than Oxford. But I shall neither denounce nor deny. It is partly a matter

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of our times, partly of style. The cruder manifestations of pride, blatant self-assertiveness, the superbia of the Romans, a bloody-minded determination to get one's own way just because it is one's own, are not very evident in contemporary Oxford. To preach against them would be to miss the target, in much the same way as if I were to preach against drunkenness. Ours is a sophisticated society, and our vices are sophisticated too: we abhor crudity, and our sins are as subtle as our arguments. To denounce these would be inappropriate, and in any case the age of denunciatory prose is past, and here in Oxford it would be foolish to condemn when to praise faintly is much more effective. Our ears are hardened to moral imperatives. The result of being told not to do something is not that we do not do it, but that we do not allow ourselves to recognise that we are doing it: and this, for reasons I shall come to later, is peculiarly so in the case of pride. Nor is it much good to encourage people to deny or suppress the facts. There was a preacher once who preached a good sermon, and was told so by one of the congregation; whereupon he said, "So the devil told me as I left the pulpit". Many Christians have thought it their duty to pretend that they are worse than they are and to make out they have not really done the good things that they have done. So, too, at Oxford we are good at self-depreciation. We do not blow our own trumpet; we put on an air of attentiveness as bores give us a piece of their own mind; and we affect a certain hesitation of speech which gives an impression, although entirely false, of a pleasing diffidence about the correctness of our own opinions. Humility is, indeed, one of our strong points. But the grace of humility that we practise, important though it is as a social grace, does not go very deep. Life runs more smoothly if we say, ‘I may be wrong’ instead of `I know I am right’, but in an academic community where we are often instructing the young, we often will know that we are right, and often will have to act on that assumption in the course of subsequent conversation, and hope that our opponent will be able, with our help, to see for himself the folly of his own views. We are constantly having to discriminate between opinions: we are often, as tutors or examiners or referees or reviewers, having to assess academic ability. I should be failing in my duty if I did not subject my own work to critical scrutiny, and not let it go for publication until I reckoned it was up to scratch. Whatever verbal professions we make, we cannot believe whole-heartedly in the wrongness of our views, nor can we avoid comparing our own performance with that of others; and although often we shall come to recognise that we have been wrong, and often have occasion to admit that a colleague's work is better than our own, we shall inevitably sometimes have it proved beyond reasonable doubt that we are right, and that by the going standards we have done well; and if we still fight off conceit by tightening up the standards by which we ought to be judged, and muse on the thought that even the scintillations of the most brilliant of our colleagues are, sub specie aeternitatis, but flashes in the dark, we shall be brought up short when we encounter the effortless inferiority of the non-Oxford man, and be left, where we began, with our well-grounded corporate estimation that Oxford is, all things being taken into consideration, not bad.

It would be dishonest to deny, counter-productive to denounce. We need to take a more positive approach, and appreciate pride and understand the pressures towards it, so that then we may be in a

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position to appreciate also the price that it exacts. Let me, therefore, with all due modesty, propose an analysis of pride. Pride is concerned with the self: individually, each man with his own achievements, aspirations and reputation, corporately with our university's record, prospects and public image. Once we have become free, rational agents, we cannot but be concerned with what we have done, what we shall do, and how our performance measures up to public standards; indeed, each man individually ought on occasion to think about himself, his work and his performance, in much the same way as the officers of this university have a duty to be often thinking about the university's position and policies. It is no part of the Christian religion to deny this. Although some of the atheistic religions of the East, together with the scientific atheism of our own culture, do deny the ultimate existence or significance of the self, and tell me that if I am to follow them through, I must embark on the systematic elimination of "I", Christianity, along with the other forms of theism, is committed to taking the self seriously. If the ultimate reality of the universe is personal, it would be incoherent to explain away in impersonal terms myself and the other persons I know in my everyday life, or to deny their importance in the scheme of things. If matter were the only thing that really exists, or Nirvana the only goal worth attaining, then I should be right to regard my acquaintances and myself as being merely fortuitous concourses of atoms, merely complicated blobs of protoplasm, the result of a chance interplay of DNA molecules and the environment, and there would be no sense in striving to help them, or in seeking myself, to make the most of our lives. But if God exists, and the fundamental category of the universe is personal, we must take each person as being not merely the chance outcome of the evolutionary process but as being also an entity in his own right, and it will matter greatly what becomes of him. Men are often led to theism by coming to realise that only a view of the universe big enough to have room for God can have room for the self: and, conversely, no world view based on the existence of a personal God can discount the status or significance of any other personal being. And therefore Christianity is inescapably committed to taking the self seriously; and although there is also self-denial in the religion of the Cross, the Christian way is not primarily one of negation. I am to love my neigh- bour as myself. It would not be much good to my neighbour, if my attitude to myself were one not of love, but of hate. If God loves us, and we are to love one another, it follows that we also must be concerned with ourselves; and if God loves us, and like as a father pitieth his own children, is merciful unto us even in our failures and the things we do wrong, it follows too that He also rejoices when we do well, and, like an earthly parent, is proud when we are given our degrees or win our fellowships; and is proud, too, of this university, when it proves itself to be, as it should be, an institution that fosters beauty, generosity and good will, and a light that illuminates the truth and guides our feet into the way of knowledge.

And yet, and yet. There is a certain sense of strain in talking of the Almighty as feeling even paternal pride, and the account I have given, right though it may be in stressing the importance of the self, is altogether too easy and too cosy to be an adequate account of what even Bertrand Russell called the ego-centric predicament. In the story of the Garden of Eden, the discovery of the self was

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the beginning of sorrow and the origin of sin. Once we know ourselves as free, rational agents, knowing good and evil, and capable of choosing either, the question of "What shall we do?" becomes acute, and the problem of "How can we make good?" begins to haunt us, and leaves us no rest and no peace, unless we can find God, where alone there is an end of journeying and in whom alone our restless selves can find their peace. Adam and Eve, when they ate of the tree of knowledge knew that they were naked. Pascal and Dostoievski, when they were emancipated from the shackles of custom and habitual morality, knew that if all things were permitted, nothing was worth doing, and that the prospect of freedom was a life-time of tedium, in which all there is for me to do is to kill time until in the end time kills me. The self, though precious in the eyes of God, is in itself insufficient as an object of value. It is not enough to make an activity worthwhile that it happens to divert me, nor can any action be accounted an achievement solely by reason of its being an action of mine. If my pride feeds solely on the fact that I am what I am, and have done what I have done, it becomes an empty vanity; while if it seeks to rest its case on such independent merits as I or my achievements may possess, then it must recognise that the source of value is external to myself, and my relative unimportance in comparison with that. As I think through pride, I begin to see that it betokens a certain littleness of mind. That is why it was incongruous to speak of God feeling pride. He can and does share our joy in our achievements, and is gratified at our successes: but to speak of him taking pride in them would suggest that he was comparing them with those obtained by other gods' children, and drawing comfort from the comparison; it is to impute to the Almighty the limitations of our finite selves. And once I have seen how ungodlike pride is, it ceases to satisfy me even in my human estate, and instead of being puffed up by pride, I find myself somewhat deflated by it.

If we take the self seriously, we must think about ourselves, yet can never be content to be thinking only, or even much, about ourselves, but rather, shall always be impelled to think about something better, realising that there are better things to think about than ourselves. To think too much of oneself is not to commit a sin of an interesting hue of scarlet, but to be a bore, a grey man obsessed with a grey subject. The answer to me when I keep on harping on my own excellencies is not that what I say is false, but that it is irrelevant. Of course, I may think more highly of myself than I ought to think, and then it is open to my colleagues to point out the errors of facts and of judgment in my assessment of the situation. But even if I think of myself at just the right degree of altitude, and am guilty of no falsehood in my assessment of myself, I am still in danger, if I spend too long on that topic, of digressing from the main business of my life, which is the pursuit of truth and the sharing of knowledge. And so too, if I set my sights on success in Oxford, I doom myself to disappointment. Although many people come up to Oxford in order to get on in life, they will, if they are wise, in due course go down, because success in those terms is not what Oxford offers. If I stay in Oxford in order to get on, I shall get nowhere. As year succeeds year without my succeeding at all, I shall decline into that state of nervous irritability common among middle-aged dons who realise that they have missed the boat, and are now eating out their hearts by the quiet waters of

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futility. Fruitless to seek comfort then in the complacency that Oxford often also engenders. For if the question be put ``How good am I really?", the spiritually despairing response is as much the right answer as the socially complacent one. They are both right answers to the wrong question. For the raison d'être of the university is not to enable either me individually or us collectively to succeed in outdoing others, but to enable us all to seek truth and share knowledge together. It is only against that background that it makes sense to talk of success either individually or collectively, but once those goals of the intellectual life are in the picture, all questions of success, whether personal, or corporate, become purely peripheral. Just as it is a background assumption of all serious discussion and argument that we are, neither of us, concerned to maintain his own opinions simply because they are his own, and we both would rather exchange his own opinion for the true one than persist in believing one that was false, so it is the background assumption of the whole university that what we chiefly value is the dissemination of knowledge and the discovery of truth.

Devotion to truth is not peculiar to Christianity. There were many who sought truth before the coming of Christ, and there are many seekers in Oxford today who do not accept Christianity but who would accept the philosophy of life I have just outlined. Indeed, we may say that the working philosophy of the academic is still very much that of Plato, and engenders an attitude of intellectual humility, which is very often to be observed among academics, and which could well be taken as an adequate prophylactic against the sin of pride. And it might reasonably be asked then whether there was anything specifically Christian to be said about the self, or whether Christianity was anything more than baptized Platonism, adding emotional fervour to a purely rational insight into the nature of the case. To this question, our answer should be that Christianity is baptized Platonism, but is more also. For the Christian, God is the truth, as well as the way and the life, the search after truth is a form of worship, often for many of us in Oxford, more real than anything that goes on in church buildings. But Christian teaching extends over the whole of life, and not only academic life, and is a complete way, and not only a special vocation. It also penetrates deeper, and plumbs to the depth of our being. And for this reason it not only enjoins us to take the self seriously, but enables us to come to terms with the self. We have to think about ourselves on occasion, but when we do so we see ourselves in the right perspective. This means that when we do have to think about our-selves, we can do it reasonably dispassionately. Many people, especially in our own, irreligious age, find it very difficult to think about themselves, or acknowledge them-selves. For them it seems to follow, as it did for Plato, that since to be selfish is immoral, the way of morality is absolute selflessness, and that if I would be truly good I must eschew the use of the words 'I' and 'mine' altogether, and either lose my identity in that of a collective or impersonal whole, or abdicate all responsibility and power of making decisions. Although much that passes for religion, in our own age as in the time of Jesus, is based on hatred of oneself, we should see this as a pathological state of mind, not a religious one. History is witness to the impossibility of thus banishing the self, and the unwisdom of the attempt. We easily think ourselves to be selfless organs of an impersonal ideal, and often

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succeed in forswearing the more obvious signs of self-aggrandisment: but since we have to make decisions, and have to make up our minds what we are going to do, we cannot escape from our position as originators of action; although we may forgo wealth or luxury or fame, we still are self-assertive in our exercise of power and influence, but blind ourselves to that fact, believing that it is only zeal for the greater good that animates our actions. Particularly if we have often heard pride preached against or selfishness slated, we are prompted by our pride to deny our pride and not to see the part that self-esteem plays in determining our course of action. We deceive ourselves all the more easily because it is ourselves that the deception is about and for the sake of some high ideal that it is undertaken, and we are naturally ready to believe that it is only on a matter of principle that we take our stand. Or else, seeing self-assertiveness in any stand, we lose all courage of all convictions. In the troubled years of the student movement it was very noticeable how senior members of this and other universities felt inhibited from standing up for anything. "Who am I", the faculty member would ask himself, "to tell anyone anything?", and his inability to give a rational account of himself was reflected in a general failure of nerve. But Christianity, because it teaches me not to set too much store by myself, enables roe not to be too downcast at the account I have to give of my own self. It is a poor thing, I admit, but my own. And I can live with it, because of the different view of what is really important that the Christian message conveys. It conveys an insight and an assertion: the insight that the important thing in the good life is not doing well but loving and being loved; and the assertion that we are in fact loved, loved by God, the ultimate reality in the universe, apart from, often in spite of, and always antecedently to, anything we do.

And therefore, although it matters what we do, and we ought to give thought to what we do, why we do it, and what will come of it, our failures are not fatal. And this applies in the academic life too. It does matter what I think. It matters that I should think well, teach well, write well, even that I should examine well, review well, write references well, sit on committees well; and I ought regularly, although only occasionally, to reflect on my performance, seek to better it where it is sub-standard, and consider how my talents should be put to best use in the years that remain to me. But I should not be unduly cast down by my inadequacies and failures, nor set much store by what seems to be success. For that is not the point of a university. The point of a university being to seek truth and share knowledge to-ether, what is important is not a nicely calculated assessment of academic merit, our own or other people's, but the opportunities it affords for entering into the knowledge of other men, acquiring new knowledge for ourselves, and passing on know-ledge to others; for insights, intimations of truth, and intellectual friendship; for libraries and laboratories, lectures and tutorials, common rooms and conversations, the Bodleian catalogue and the University Press. If those are our values, we need neither deny our own existence nor be downcast at our own feeble showing - at the fact that, as the former Rector of Exeter put it when he preached on pride four years ago, we ``have not come off", - ``because our dominant concern is not with ourselves, and in so far as we do think about ourselves, our response will be one of gratitude for those good things we have been able to receive or achieve, rather than repine at the littleness of our own contribution.

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We have come full circle. We started with Oxford, which we were proud of, proud to belong to, proud of ourselves for belonging to it: we end with the university, which in its universal commitment to truth makes the prowess of any particular place or any particular person irrelevant to the issues that deserve our main attention and concern. And in following through the triumph of truth over self-centredness, we have been following out Our Lord's own teaching as recorded by St. John (7: I6b-l8) which includes my statutory text for this sermon, when he rebuked the Jews who were commenting on the alpha quality of his performance, and said that it was not to be thought of as his, intended to enhance his own reputation, but as God's, intended only to be true, with no taint of self-assertiveness in it. And equally for us hearers and learners, we learn to recognise the truth and distinguish it from clever self-assertion inasmuch as we abate our pride and subject our wills to the discipline of something other than ourself, making for truth, whom we call God, and to whom be all honour, power, dominion and might, henceforth and for ever. Amen.

 

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SERMON

Preached before the University of Oxford, at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, on Sunday, November 7th, 1971

by J. R. Lucas, Fellow of Merton

I take my text from Iris Murdoch, towards the end of her novel, The Bell. "But what did, from his former life, remain to him was the Mass ... The Mass remained, not consoling, not uplifting, but in some way factual ... It simply existed as a kind of pure reality separate from the weaving of his own thoughts" (p. 309 Penguin), where the hero, Michael, is losing all faith in God, and is finding that nothing matters very much.

But the Mass remains, in some way factual, it exists, as a kind of pure reality. In some way factual, as a kind of pure reality. Iris Murdoch is very cautious in qualifying her words. Christians have found it extraordinarily difficult to devise words to say what they want to say about their rite. Although the Holy Eucharist has been, to outside observers, the most distinctive characteristic of the Christian religion from Pliny the Younger until Miss Murdoch, and to those within its fellow-ship, the most central and sustaining part of the Christian life, yet it has also been a chief cause of dissension and focus of disunity between the warring sects of Christ's divided body. The reason why many loyal Anglicans today cannot welcome union with our fellow Christians in the Methodist Church is that they do not believe the Lord's Supper can be celebrated except by a priest episcopally ordained in the Apostolic Succession. The reason why we cannot kneel at the same altar as our fellow Christians in the Church of Rome is that they are obliged to talk of a sacrifice in terms which do not ring entirely true to Anglican ears, and believe that God's presence can best be expressed by the doctrine of Transubstantiation, whereas we hold, in the words of the 39 Articles that Transubstantiation "cannot be proved by Holy Writ, is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions."

Few Roman Catholics would deny that there have been superstitious practices associated with the Blessed Sacrament: but if they were to enquire what alternative doctrine the Church of England had to put forward, they could justly complain that although we are very clear about what we do not believe, we are cautious to the point of obscurity about what we do believe. For the most part we have been content to echo Queen Elizabeth I:

'Twas God the word that spake it,

He took the bread and brake it,

And what the word did make it That I believe, and take it.'

The attitude of the Church of England has been one of loyalty rather than belief. We have gone to the Early Service because Christ told us to, and we think we ought to do His bidding in ritual liturgy, as well as workaday life. It has been a service, a leitourgia more than anything else, with a corresponding unclarity about how else what we were doing was to be described. For the last four centuries our Eucharistic Theology has been "if not Transubstantiation then what?"

I do not think we have been entirely wrong to be so uncertain in our belief. The Holy Spirit has been guiding us into this region of truth by not letting us accept good answers to bad questions, in order that we might ultimately learn not to ask those questions but attempt to frame better. And

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although all our questions will be too crude, and all the analogies inadequate, that I shall draw from the homely, if not particularly humble, circumstances of our Oxford life, yet I think we ought to ask fresh questions, even at the risk of giving wrong answers, both as a working out of the doctrine of the Incarnation, and as an escape from the frozen attitudes of ancient quarrels, which often have rested on assumptions we ought not to have made. If the question is asked whether the Mass is factual or not, there is a profound truth in saying that it is in some way factual. But merely to ask this question is to beg many others. Facts are not the simple things plain men take them to be, nor are they at all worthy to be worshipped. Reality is even more misleading. If any one asks us we cannot deny the reality of the Mass or that there is a Real Presence of God at the Eucharist. Not even the most extreme Protestant professes a doctrine of the Real Absence. But the word 'real' was made up by the philosophers from res, a thing, and has never lost its thingly overtones. Things not only exist in their own right independently of us, but also are what we can manipulate for our own purposes. In their attempt to assure us that God was indeed with us at the Holy Communion, and not merely that we had subjective impressions of His presence then, the Schoolmen made out the consecrated elements to be so thing-like that they could be carted around and exposed, like talismans or secret weapons at the time of battle. In talking about God we are constantly needing to use, and are constantly tempted to misuse, the language of things. God, like a thing, is independent of us, stable and reliable, a Rock which endures from one generation to another, on which we can stand and in which we can shelter. But God, unlike a thing, can never be merely used, because He is a person and more than any of our contrivings can control.

If we, as theists, believe that the universe is fundamentally personal in character it follows that our ultimate understanding will not be in terms of things, which occupy space and may or may not possess certain properties, but of persons, who characteristically do things. Action, not substance, will be our most important category of thought. It is a truth too long neglected by philosophers. Since the time of Descartes, philosophers have taken a very inactive view of the mind, and have shut themselves up in their rooms, cogitating hard and wondering whether they have a sufficiently clear and distinct idea of the external world to be justified in believing that it exists.

But we do not learn much about either ourselves or the world, unless we abandon inactivity, and try and do things. We learn by trial and error, failure and success and our starting-point for understanding our own essential nature should be not cogito, ergo sum as Descartes thought, but rather ego ergo ago, I, therefore I act. Christians are bidden to be doers of the word and not cogitators only. Action has the further, logical advantage in being a much less exclusive category than sub-stance. An action can be correctly described in many different ways, as raising one's arms, shaking somebody else's hand, making up a quarrel, and carrying out a Christian duty. These descriptions do not exclude one another, in the way that if we describe a substance as pure sodium chloride we exclude the possibility of its being also described as calcium carbonate. And so, too, the Eucharist, if we regard it as an action, can be described in many different ways without their being inherently incompatible with one another. If we say that we are making a memorial of Christ's most precious death, we are not thereby precluded from saying also that the minister, as alter Christus is presiding at the heavenly banquet, or that the priest, on behalf of the whole Church, is offering up the sacrifice of the Mass.

Actions are non-exclusive in another way, too. The fact that an action is mine does not prevent it from being yours also, as when you ask me to do something for you. We say that Solomon built the Temple, or that William of Wykeham built Winchester, but do not mean to deny the labours of the many masons and craftsmen who fashioned the stones, and laid them one upon the other. They also

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built the temple, they also built Winchester. A man often acts through the willing cooperation of the others, and can be with them responsible for what is done. And so, too, what is done in Church not only can be described in many ways, but can be said to be done by many and sometimes different, people - by the congregation, by the priest, by the visible Church militant here on earth, by the whole Church, by Christ on the same night as He Was betrayed, by Christ now, risen, ascended and in glory.

In the Church of England the dominant understanding of ths Eucharist has been in terms of doing, a simple doing in obedience to Our Lord's command, a service, the Early Service, to which, in George Orwell's picture of England, old maids would bike through the mists of the autumn mornings. "Do this ... " He told us, and therefore we do it, beseeching God, in the words of the prayer book, to accept this our bounden duty and service, and in the uglier but more emphatic words of Series III "...as we follow his example and obey his command...Therefore, 0 heavenly Father, we do this... " And since we are doing this at Christ's command, He is doing it too. We are building up the life of the Church, and through our actions, the intentions of the Founder of Christianity are being put into effect, as those of other founders and master-builders have been. Even by the most secular of reckonings Jesus started something when He took the bread and wine, and shared it round. And a large part of what we feel as we go to Church each Sunday is that we are fellow-workers with Christ, in carrying out His injunctions, as we and our predecessors have done Sunday by Sunday, in a continuous succession, every single week, since Thursday, April 6th, 30.A.D., or whenever it was that the Last Supper actually took place.

The Eucharist is a doing, but it is not only that. Although it has been a merit of many loyal laymen in the Church of England to stress the note of simple obedience, it has also been a defect, in that it has played down the special characteristics of the Eucharist, and its place in the Christian life. If the Early Service is seen just as a service of the Church, there are other services equally suitable to be rendered to the Lord as well as many secular duties we believe we ought to discharge in accordance with His will. We do not obey well if we obey blindly, and if we are to do this in remembrance of Him, we must think afresh and try to understand what it is that we are doing. Let us therefore return with Iris Murdoch and observe a celebration, as it were, from the outside. Undoubtedly it is an activity, a social activity, not a manufacturing process. People are saying things, sometimes to one another, sometimes together. Something is being eaten, something drunk. Something is being given, and something given back, and the proceedings evidently mean something very significant to all concerned. These bare descriptions, not only doing, but doing together, saying, eating, drinking, giving, being given back, meaning, are the strands which Our Lord, and at His bidding, the Church have woven together in instituting the Eucharist. We cannot expound it as being merely an action, a corporate activity, a teach-in, a common meal, an offertory, a reception, or a symbolic rite, for it is more than all these. Nevertheless, it is these. These were features of the Last Supper, as they had been of the Passover in Ancient Israel, which enabled it to be what Our Lord intended it to be, and it is these features that have enabled the Eucharist to be the focus of the Church's corporate life on earth and the main way whereby the individual Christian can enter into a relationship with God.

The Last Supper was a meal. The sharing of a meal is the most fundamental sort of sharing for human beings. Many other values may be cherished by many men in common -a love of England, or of mediaeval architecture or of mathematical logic: but not every-one loves England or mediaeval architecture or mathematical logic, and any corporate activity centred on these as their focus of common concern would necessarily be select-ive and exclusive. But we all know that we need food and drink, and therefore all value food and drink. To offer a man a morsel or to give him

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a drink is a gesture that cannot but be taken as a token of good will; and to join in eating and drinking is to engage in a common activity which each man, however individualistic his standpoint, must regard as desirable and good. And although it is possible to satisfy one's bodily hunger in isolation, it is in another sense very unsatisfying to do so, and the solitary eater, like the solitary drinker, is an object of pity and compassion. Wherever possible we eat and drink in company, and only in company is either really satisfying.

We can understand the Eucharist in part as the Fellowship meal of the Church. Christians draw round the common table of the Church for much the same reasons and in something of the same spirit as members of a College Dine together in Hall. It both expresses and helps to build up a sense of community and a feeling of fellowship, a recognition that we because we cherish certain values in common therefore we want to maintain together a common life. Indeed, even when we are dran together by a shared sorrow, we still find it appropriate to express our fellow feeling by also eating and drinking together. The Last Supper was the funeral bakemeats for Our Lord's death, and the weekly Eucharist parallels in part the "year's mind", when we remember the departed, and in our sadness also rejoice. On such occasions it is natural and correct to ascribe the activity of those present to the influence of the deceased, and even to say that he brought about the things that they do. Merton College owes its existence to Walter of Merton and would not have existed but for him, and has, at least to some extent, been the embodiment of his spirit. We may also go further and say, more metaphorically? that the dead man still lives in the memory and activity of his friends, or the teacher in the minds of his pupils, or the founder in his foundation. This is not to claim immortality. Rather, it is once again to view human beings as, primarily, agents, and therefore to say that they are what they do, and hence also what they achieve through the agency of other men's actions. The spirit of Socrates lives in the intellectual friendships and philosophical discussions of his disciples, especially when they are all gathered together in his name, and doing the things he wanted them to do and had in his own time done himself. And so too the Christians, when they express their corporate solidarity by eating and drinking together, may also remember their master, and feel that he still lives in their common life.

But it is a very thin life. Jeremy Bentham hoped that the young men of University College, London, would continue to be convivial after his death and spare a kindly thought for him, but added the further provision that his corpse, which was to be embalmed and kept in University College, should attend these parties, so that he might be present in the flesh. It is a macabre idea, but expresses the sense of inadequacy of being there merely in spirit. If the Lord's Supper were merely a fellowship meal in which Christians looked back to the Passion and remembered Jesus Christ, it would be similarly inadequate: but the Lord's Supper is not merely a get-together of lime like-minded friends, because the Last Supper was not merely that. The disciples were not merely dining together, they were dining with God. And the Lord's Supper is not merely a commemoration dinner which we eat with other Christians to commemorate our departed Lord; it is also the Lord's because, in the light of the. Resurrection, He is present and we are dining with Him at His high table, as we look forward to the future and not only back to the past. It is the Lord Mayor's banquet, with the Lord Mayor present, and everyone celebrating his accession to power.

The future is very different from the past. We can keep on commemorating the same event, but we cannot keep on inaugurating the same era. I can only once come of age., a wedding can only once be celebrated, and the Second Coming, when it comes, will come only once. It follows that the celebration of the Eucharist which we, in accordance with our Lord's command, repeat day by day or week by week, cannot be exactly the inaugural banquet of Christ's accession. We can, in part, see

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in the Eucharist a foretaste of a greater banquet yet to come: we can liken it to the Queen's Accession service, a thanksgiving for Christ's triumph, which is still, and will continue to be, effective in our lives; but in order to get the full force of the immediate forward-looking aspect of the Eucharist we have to make a slightly sophisticated change of reference. Rather than think of it as the Lord Mayor's banquet, given by a particular Lord Mayor, we need to compare it with a more generalised celebration of inauguration. In our culture we should compare it with New Year parties. These can be repeated, and yet are indisputably oriented towards the future. As we see the New Year in, we do not suppose that 1972 will be an entirely new sort of existence in contrast to 1971: our celebration is not tied to the particularity of the year, but to the generality of the newness. And in the Eucharist we celebrate the fact that we are granted newness of life, not merely as a matter of secular fact, but in the life of the Spirit. Thanks to Christ's death and resurrection, we can go forward in confidence and look to the future in hope. A new possibility having been opened for us by Christ, we are realising it for ourselves every time we share the Lord's Supper with the brethren, and Ta men opiso epilanthanomenoi tois de emprosthen epecteinomenoi (cf Phil. 3, 13B), forgetting what is behind, reach out to that which lies ahead. The Eucharist is not merely a memorial of things long past, but is the expression of a doctrine of epectasis, and an effective implementation of it in our lives, a weekly New Day's party to celebrate the fact that by virtue of the Resurrection we shall always be finding new things to do, new things worth doing, new ways of making each his own contribution, new treasures still of countless price, new thoughts of God, new hopes of heaven. Not only Illic as Peter Abelard said, but equally Hic ex sabbato succedit sabbatum, Perpes laetitia sabbatizantium.

Although the Last Supper was a Supper, and some of the earliest celebrations of the Eucharist may have been real meals, there was from New Testament times on-wards a tendency to whittle down the meal to a purely symbolic form. Some of the reasons were practical. In addition to those of decorum given by St. Paul, a real meal is relatively costly, and the early Church did not have the odd two hundred denarii available to ensure that all should be filled. Banquets, although real, tend to be expensive and exclusive. If the poor are to be able to be filled with the good things from the Lord's Table, only nominal amounts of bread and wine can be handed out, which must act as tokens of what is being given us. But this attenuation of the Supper to the Eucharist both requires and automatically heightens a symbolic interpretation. Just because we are not getting very much to eat and drink, we are impelled to understand what we are doing as not being merely eating and drinking. There is a tension between different requirements. Unless the Lord's Supper is celebrated by our really eating food and really imbibing drink, we lose the basic principle that it is a good thing for every one who joins in: but unless we are prepared to sit loose to the satisfaction of our bodily hunger and thirst we may lose sight of the principle that it is something more than merely physical satisfaction.

In the Eucharist, especially in the congregational liturgies of England and America, we give, and are given. It is a natural instinct, and a very familiar one here in Oxford, where every don likes to make a contribution to his own subject. The harvest festival motif is powerful even in our own unspiritual age. It is natural, especially for laymen, whose vocation is to serve God by means of mundane activities in the secular world, to offer their work to God, not only to give thanks for material benefits, but because, especially in the modern world, only if we are sent out into the world in the power of His Spirit, can the tedium of everyday work be made endurable. After a week of repetition work at Cowley, or even of tutorials that are sometimes somewhat stodgy and of committee meetings that are less than totally inspiring, we offer our work to God, and ask Him to

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make it His because only so can it be worth doing and supportable. It is right to understand the Eucharist as a giving. But giving is peculiarly liable to the corruption of the human heart. It easily degenerates into trading or expands into presumption. If we are lawyers we may start thinking of the offertory as a quid pro quo, or like Cyprian, as a sort of court fee that has to be paid for the right of audience with the Almighty. And even where there is no element of payment, we may hesitate to assume that we are so much on a level with God that we can send him presents, and may say with David (I Chronicles, 29:14) "What am I, and what is my people, that we should be able to give willingly like this?" And hence many Christians have come to think that only God can be offered to God, since only Christ can speak for us in the heavenly places. But although we can see why people have been led to view the Eucharist in this light, we ought to be cautious in following them. It seems to presuppose a false doctrine of the Atonement, and has often obscured other more basic, Eucharistic truths. The Eucharist is a giving. We give bread and wine, we give time and thought, we dedicate our work, we dedicate ourselves. We can call it a sacrifice. But if we do we should understand it in terms of the definition which St. Augustine gives in the tenth book of The City of God. "A true sacrifice is any act that is done in order that we may cleave in holy union to God".

When the Reformers were trying to reformulate their understanding of the Eucharist, Luther stuck on the words Jesus actually used, "Hoc est corpus meum", and felt impelled to continue construing the Eucharist in terms of substance and things. But Jesus did not actually say "Hoc est corpus meum", nor even touto esti to soma mou. What words He actually used we cannot say for certain, since we do not know whether He would have spoken in Hebrew or in Aramaic at the Last Supper. But in either case, the words he used would not have carried the connotation of corporeal substance that the words “hoc est corpus meum” did for the Schoolmen, since the words that came over into Greek would often have been more reflexive pronouns, myself omauton in the Semitic original. If we continue to translate Our Lord's words as "This is my body" we must give 'body' the sense it has in the words 'everybody' 'somebody' 'anybody', rather than the sense it bears in a Coroner's

court; and at present it could be better rendered by the slang phrase "This is me", as said by an author pointing to a copy of his magnum opus, by an architect pointing to his masterpiece, a composer during a performance of his symphony, an Arnold or a Thring referring to his Rugby or his Uppingham.

When a person puts himself into his work or gives himself entirely to a cause or an institution, there is a sense both of achievement and of sacrifice. The work is what he has done and is the fulfilment of all his actions; but he has been able to accomplish it only at some cost. And so it was with Jesus Christ. In earthly terms the visible Church is Our Lord's achievement, and the fellowship of Christ's religion is centred on the communion of its members with one another and with God in the sacred sharing of the bread and wine. In this sense, Our Lord's words at the Last Supper, "This is me", were the literal truth. The Communion service is Christ's doing. But at a greater cost. Christ instituted the Lord's Supper, and we continue to celebrate it, only because He then gave Himself for us on the Cross, and was raised from the dead by the Father. He consecrated not only the bread, but the wine, and not only gave Himself in the Thring sense, but gave His life in the literal sense. Body, basar, bisri, may be understood in the sense of sacrifice; blood must be so understood. Christ's words mean not only that He is pouring His being into the Church constituted by the sharing of the Holy Communion, but that this can be so only because He is going to pour out His life on the Cross.

And this is the ultimate reason why Mass remains in some way factual, and simply exists as a kind of pure reality, separate from the weaving of our own thoughts. It is based on the fact of the

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Crucifixion and the reality of tho Resurrection. Not only are we doing what Our Lord commanded when He said "Do this ...", but it was in order that we should be able to commune with God and with one another that He came down from heaven, and each celebration of the Holy Communion is both an extension of Christ's achievement and a further expression of what it cost Him,

Et juges gratias de donis gratiae

Beata referet plebs tibi, Domine

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The Philosophical Background to Eucharistic Theology

A Chapter from Thinking about the Eucharist, London, 1972If a stranger were to attend a celebration of the Eucharist he would say that the people involved were doing something. They were saying things, sometimes to one another, sometimes together. Something was being eaten and something drunk. In some rites he might say further that something was being given, and something given back. And, if he were sensitive to atmosphere, he might add that the proceedings meant something very significant to all concerned.

These bare descriptions - doing, doing together, saying, eating, drinking, giving, being given back, meaning - are the strands which our Lord, and at his bidding the church, have woven together in instituting the Eucharist. We cannot expound it as being merely a performance, a corporate activity, a seminar, a common meal, an offertory, a reception, or a symbolic rite, for it is more than all these. Nevertheless it is these. These were features of the Last Supper, as they had been of the Passover in ancient Israel, which enabled it to be what our Lord intended it to be, and it is these features that have enabled the Lord's Supper, the Eucharist, the mass, the holy communion, and the early service to be the focus of the church's corporate life on earth and the main way whereby the individual Christian can enter into a relationship with God. They underlie, although they do not exhaust, all our thinking about the Eucharist.

In celebrating the Eucharist we do something. The logic of action is very different from the logic of things. Actions are not exclusive in the way that things are. We say that Solomon built the Temple, but do not thereby deny that many artificers and craftsmen built it too. Or to take a more modern example, when we say that Baden-Powell created the Boy Scout movement, we do not in the least belittle the dedicated work of many others who equally well could be said to have brought it into being. And so too the action of twentieth century men in celebrating the Eucharist neither excludes, nor is excluded by, its being also the action of our Lord Jesus Christ who on the night that he was betrayed said, `Do this . . .'.

Not only can different people do the same actions, but any action can be described in many different ways. I turn my finger, I twiddle the dial, I ring up my agent, I hatch a plot, I let the side down, I forward my own ambitions - all these may be apt descriptions of the same bodily behaviour. Which descriptions are right is often a matter of great controversy and cannot be settled by reference to overt behaviour alone. Actions are instinct with reasons. What we do depends on why we are doing it. And therefore how we describe an action will depend in part on what reasons we ascribe to the agent. There are often various different reasons for which we undertake some particular action, and so different descriptions may be given, all equally correct. It may be correct to describe the Eucharist as a commemoration of Christ's death: but it does not follow that it is not also a fellowship meal at which he himself is present.

The same bodily behaviour can be correctly described as different actions. It is also part of the logic of action that different patterns of bodily behaviour can be accounted the same action. I can buy a car by going into a shop, handing over money, and driving away; or by writing a letter; or by nodding at an auction. My bodily movements are far from being the same, but are in each case appropriate in their context to bring about the result I desire; and if the situation had been different, my movements would have been different, too if the auctioneer had not been looking straight at me, I would have waved my arm or shouted something. Actions are what cyberneticians call

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homoeostatic processes - the actual bodily behaviour depends on the situation in such a way as to bring about the desired state of affairs in spite of variation of the circumstances. And therefore when we describe a particular pattern of bodily behaviour as an action, we not only are describing what actually happened but are saying that if the conditions had been slightly different, an appropriately different pattern of bodily behaviour would have been manifested. That is to say, as soon as we talk of actions we are talking not only in the indicative mood, of what actually was or will be seen, but in the subjunctive mood too. Actions have a logical depth that things and events lack, and concern not only what appears on the surface and what can be recorded by the camera, but what might have been done or would have been done, had things been different.

The paradigm actions are those of an individual - what I do, what you do or what he does. But we also talk in the plural, of what we do and what they do, and it is a profound fact of the human condition that men are vitally concerned with the first person plural as much as with the first person singular. I identify. It matters to me what my children, my colleagues, my compatriots, do. I have views about what we ought to do, am proud of our achievements when we have done well, and am ashamed of our failures and mistakes and everything that we have done badly. I would not be myself if I were not, besides being an individual, also a member of many different communities and associations, whose well-being is part and parcel of my own individual well-being. How this is so, is a matter of philosophical dispute: but that it is so can scarcely be denied. And it is one of the tenets of Christianity that we are all members one of another, and that in the Eucharist we join in an activity which is essentially corporate. A corporate activity is not simply a number of individuals acting individually. If I go into a snack-bar and eat a meal, and you go into a snack-bar and eat a meal, it does not follow that we have had a meal together. It is not enough that we each do the same thing: what is essential is that each does whatever he does in the light, and on account, of the other's doings. It may be that we are all doing the same thing - as when we sing in unison together: or it may be that we are doing different things - as when we sing in harmony, or play football, or conduct research: but in either case I take the actions of others as my cue, and make my own contribution harmonize with what other people are doing. Their actions are the context in which I act, and we share the same purpose, even if our individual contributions to its realization need to be different. The essential condition is not that we all do the same individual actions, but that we all share the same concern, and are aware of one another acting from that concern. Since our knowledge of other people is never complete, we can achieve our corporate activity only by assuming certain roles. A team can be effective only if everyone can rely on one man being near the goal and another acting as centre- forward. In small groups the amount of role-playing may be fairly small, but in large groups it becomes paramount. Only the Queen can dissolve Parliament, only a jury can find a man guilty of murder, only a judge impose a penalty, only a university award a degree. From this flows a certain impersonality. Britain would still have been Britain and would still have won the war if I had never been born. The University of Oxford would have continued to exist and would have given substantially the same degrees if I had never been one of its examiners. It is part of the meaning of the word `community' that no one of us is logically indispensable: societies are in this sense, as the French call them, `societes anonymes'. The original meaning of the word `parson' was that of `role-player'; and the church has often found it necessary to distinguish between his representative and his individual character. We can join in the Eucharistic liturgy only because it is a ritual which assigns to us particular responses at particular times: and in joining in it, we act not only as individuals but as members of Christ's body dispersed over the face of the earth and down the ages.

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The most sophisticated ritual we have is language. The celebration of the Lord's Supper has always been conjoined with the communication of the Good News, and would in itself be entirely unintelligible apart from the events recounted in the canon, the intuitions expressed, and the petitions made. Nevertheless, much of the ritual is more primitive, and perhaps more fundamental, than that of language, and it is helpful to leave consideration of the language used until later, and to view the Eucharist first as a corporate meal. For this it was, and is. For reasons given by St Paul, it early became a stylized meal in which the eating and drinking were attenuated to the very minimum, and in some parts of Christendom the cup was denied the laity. But always the bread has been broken and shared and eaten. And this in itself means a lot.

The sharing of a meal is the most fundamental sort of sharing for human beings because the need for food and drink is the one need we all share and are continually being made aware of. Many other values may be cherished by many men in common - a love of England, or of mediaeval architecture, or of mathematical logic: but not everyone loves England or mediaeval architecture or mathematical logic, and any corporate activity centred on these as their focus of common concern would necessarily be selective and exclusive. But we all know that we need food and drink and therefore all value food and drink, and regard them as good. To offer a man a morsel or to give him a drink is a gesture that cannot but be taken as a token of good will; and to join in eating and drinking is to engage in a common activity which each, however individualistic his standpoint, must regard as desirable and good. And although it is possible to satisfy one's bodily hunger in isolation, it is in another sense very unsatisfactory to so do, and the solitary eater, like the solitary drinker, is an object of pity and compassion. Wherever possible we eat and drink in company, and only in company is either really satisfying.

Ancient Israel, like the modern West, placed great emphasis on the nuclear family, father and mother and the young children like olive branches round the table. The Passover had something of the same significance that Christmas dinner has. The Last Supper, however, was eaten by a group of friends, and the Christian Eucharist generally has had the air more of a celebration of a peer-group than of a family. It is a more easily inclusive form of organization - a stranger invited to a Christmas dinner still feels awkward and something of an interloper, whereas there is no blood barrier to feeling at home in a college hall or at a regimental dinner. Since the gospel was universal, and any man might become a son of God by adoption of the Spirit, it was important not to emphasize too much the natural ties of blood relationships. Again, families are small, whereas the churches soon waxed large; large groups are much less closely knit than small ones; and in large- congregations, the holy communion is not so much a corporate activity as an individual one - and an individual one in which most individuals play a relatively passive part. Only if every householder were a priest could the Eucharist be entirely a family affair. And again, in the ancient world, as now, there were many people who had no family life but were not to be excluded from communion with God - slaves crept out in the early morning to celebrate the Eucharist while their masters were still asleep. The Eucharist was more a reunion dinner than a family one in the strict sense. It took up a long tradition in the Greek world. The Spartans had always eaten together, and occasional fellowship meals were common elsewhere. Epicurus left money in his will for memorial meals, much as many colleges now have feasts in commemoration of founders and benefactors. Even when we are drawn together by a shared sorrow, we still find it appropriate to express our fellow feeling by also eating and drinking together. The Last Supper was the funeral bake-meats for our Lord's death, and the weekly Eucharist parallels in part the `year's mind', when we remember the departed, and in our sadness also rejoice. On such occasions it is natural and correct to ascribe the activity of those

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present to the influence of the deceased, and even to say that he brought about the things that they do. Keble College owes its existence to John Keble, and would not have existed but for him, and has, to some extent, been the embodiment of his spirit. We may also go further and say, more metaphorically, that the dead man still lives in the memory and activity of his friends, or the teacher in the minds of his pupils, or the composer in his symphonies, or the founder in his foundation. This is not to claim immortality. Rather, it is to view human beings as, primarily, agents, and therefore to say that they are what they do, and, hence also, what they achieve through the agency of other men's actions. The spirit of Epicurus lives in the intellectual friendships and philosophical discussions of his disciples, especially when they are all gathered together in his name, and doing the things he wanted them to do and had in his own time done himself. And so too the Christians, when they express their corporate solidarity by eating and drinking together, may also remember their master, and feel that he still lives in their common life.

But it is a very thin life. Jeremy Bentham, like Epicurus, hoped that the young men of University College, London, would continue to be convivial after his death and spare a kindly thought for him, but added the further provision that his corpse, which was to be embalmed and kept in University College, should attend these parties, so that he might be present in the- flesh. It is a macabre idea, but expresses the sense of inadequacy of being there merely in spirit. If the Lord's Supper were merely a fellowship meal in which Christians looked back to the Passion and remembered Jesus Christ, it would be similarly inadequate: but the Lord's Supper is also the Lord's because, in the light of the resurrection, he is present, and we are supping with him, as we look as much forward to the future as back to the past. It is the Lord Mayor's banquet, with the Lord Mayor present, and everyone celebrating his accession to power.

The future is very different from the past. We can keep on commemorating the same event, but we cannot keep on inaugurating the same era. I can only once come of age, a wedding can only once be celebrated, and the Second Coming, when it comes, will come only once. It follows that the celebration of the Eucharist which we, in accordance with our Lord's command, repeat day by day or week by week, cannot be exactly the inaugural banquet of Christ's accession. We can, in part, see in the Eucharist a foretaste of a greater banquet yet to come: we can liken it to the Queen's Accession service, a thanksgiving for Christ's triumph, which is still, and will continue to be, effective in our lives; but in order to get the full force of the immediate forward-looking aspect of the Eucharist we have to make a slightly sophisticated change of reference. Rather than think of it as the Lord Mayor's banquet, given by a particular Lord Mayor, we need to compare it with a more generalized celebration of inauguration. In our culture we should compare it with New Year parties. These can be repeated, and yet are indisputably oriented towards the future. As we see the New Year in, we do not suppose that 1972 will be an entirely new sort of existence in contrast to 1971 : our celebration is not tied to the particularity of the year, but to the generality of the newness. And in the Eucharist we celebrate the fact that we are granted newness of life, not merely as a matter of secular fact, but in the life of the Spirit. Thanks to Christ's death and resurrection, we can go forward in confidence and look to the future in hope. A new possibility having been opened for us by Christ, we are realizing it for ourselves every time we share the Lord's Supper with the brethren, and ta men opiso epilanthanomenoi tois de emprosthen epekteinometha (cf. Phil. 3.13b), forgetting what is behind, reach out to that which lies ahead. The Eucharist is not merely a memorial of things long past, but is the expression of a doctrine of epektasis, and an effective implementation of it in our lives, a weekly New Day's party to celebrate the fact that by virtue of the resurrection we shall

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always be finding new things to do, new things worth doing, new ways of making each his own contribution, new treasures still of countless price, new thoughts of God, new hopes of heaven.

Although the Last Supper was a supper, and some of the earliest celebrations of the Eucharist may have been suppers too, there was from New Testament times onwards a tendency to whittle down the meal to a purely symbolic form. Some of the reasons were practical. In addition to those of decorum given by St Paul, a real meal is relatively costly, and the early church did not have the odd two hundred denarii available to ensure that all should be filled. Banquets, although real, tend to be expensive and exclusive. If the poor are to be able to be filled with the good things from the Lord's table, only nominal amounts of bread and wine can be handed out, which must act as tokens of what is being given us. But this attenuation of the supper to the Eucharist both requires and automatically heightens a symbolic interpretation. just because we are not getting very much to eat and drink, we are impelled to understand what we are doing as not being merely eating and drinking. One, not very satisfactory, explanation is the vitamin-pill model of lgnatius. It makes sense to describe the elements as pharmakon athanasias, `immortality pill', if taken in very small quantities, whereas it would be difficult to make out that an English Christmas dinner was `medicine'. We all feel the force of the homoeopathic argument that the tablets and the mixture are shown to be potent by reason of the fact that they have to be taken in very, very small doses. And once the Eucharist ceases to be a real meal, it is dangerously easy to apply a similar argument there.

There is a tension between different requirements. Unless the Lord's Supper is celebrated by our really eating food and really imbibing drink, we lose the basic principle that it is a good thing for every one who joins in: but unless we are prepared to sit loose to the satisfaction of our bodily hunger and thirst, we may lose sight of the principle that it is something more than merely physical satisfaction. Although we can emphasize some symbolic effect by acting counter to natural expectations, there is a perpetual danger that in so doing we may destroy the basis on which the whole symbolism rests. For this reason the current antithesis between the agape and the Eucharist is unfortunate. They are not so much opposed as having had different aspects emphasized. In a wedding reception a man with a weak digestion might eat only a morsel of wedding cake and drink only a sip of champagne for the toast; and if the bride's father was very poor, or there was great need for secrecy or speed, everyone would be content to do only this. Normally, however, we like to set the cutting of the cake and the drinking of the toast in a wider context of Jollification, and feel that there are better ways of expressing the overtones of the event than by having only very exiguous supplies of cats and drinks. We criticize the man who indulge . ties in them too freely, as St Paul did, as also the women who continue to chatter during the bridegroom's speech. The wedding reception is not merely a free meal. It is meant to mean something, and this is expressed by certain things being said and done at a certain time, and everyone should then attend and join in, and if need be, everything else could be stripped away, and we should be content with a bare cutting and distribution of cake and drinking of the toast. But this is the exceptional case, and draws its significance from the general context which most wedding receptions provide. Similarly in the Lord's Supper, the eating and drinking may be attenuated to a purely symbolic eating and drinking, without thereby losing its significance, but it does not have to be thus attenuated in order to secure its significance. A Eucharist does not have to be an agape, but an agape does not have to be not a Eucharist. There may be occasions when an agape is specially designed not to be a Eucharist e.g. to avoid difficulties about intercommunion - just as there might be a gathering after a wedding intended not to be a wedding reception - e.g. if one of the parties were a divorc‚ - and in either case this would be signalled by leaving out the traditional actions - no wedding-cake, no wine, no

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speeches, only tea and biscuits. But so great is the power of the underlying symbolism of eating and drinking in common that it is a precarious distinction that is being drawn, and very soon the tea-fight takes on the characteristics of a reception, and the agape becomes a Eucharist.

The Eucharist is not only a matter of eating and drinking, but of giving and of being given in return. We give bread and wine to God - particularly in the congregational liturgies of England and America - and in our turn we are given a morsel of bread to cat and a sip of wine to drink. It is easy to view the giving in each direction as symbolic: the people of God offer up the fruits of their labours, their work, and God gives us not merely the means of physical sustenance, but himself, his Spirit, to enliven and fortify us as we go forth into the world. This interpretation is natural and meaningful in the twentieth century, and valid so far as it goes. But Christ need not have died on the cross to institute a service of communal dedication and re-invigoration. Even in the fourth century it was felt to be inadequate. Who are we to presume to offer God gifts? To give and be given in return either suggests a mechanical or commercial transaction or else presumes a personal relationship already established which it is the point of the communion in part to secure for us. It is only because we have first been invited to share with Christ in God's banquet that we are on a footing to offer any contribution of our own. Giving, if it does not degenerate into trading, is in danger of becoming Pelagianism. The only really relevant self-giving in the Eucharist is that of Christ. But Christ gave himself for us and our salvation in a number of different ways: in coming down from heaven and becoming a man; in his life of ministry on earth; in founding a church; in dying on the cross; in his continual fellowship with men after the resurrection until the ascension; in sending the Holy Spirit; in his continuing fellowship with men in the Holy Spirit from Pentecost until now; and in his coming again at the Last Day to judge both the quick and the dead. And in as much as Christ had different reasons for doing any one of these, still further differences of description may be apt. The same difficulties about time and tense that occurred in the characterization of the fellowship meal will beset any description of the Eucharist as the self-giving of Christ. In the most obvious sense---in dying on the cross---Christ gave himself in the aorist tense, once, only once, and once for all. We may legitimately extend this to the perfect tense, in as much as the past event still has present effects, but cannot use the present tense to suggest that this self-giving could either be repeated or regarded as still occurring. In other, admittedly less obvious or less central, senses of self-giving, Christ can be said still to give or be giving himself, and the Eucharist can be intelligibly described in such terms. But there is still the difficulty, not present in the characterization of most actions, that self-giving is a reflexive concept, and that therefore, although we may imitate Christ's selfgiving by offering up our own work and lives, we cannot associate ourselves with Christ's self-giving as we can in carrying out his will in other ways. The Eucharist, regarded as the fulfilment of our Lord's command, can be both his action and ours: but we cannot offer up Christ to the Father as an act of self-giving in the primary sense. Only he could do that.

There are still senses in which we can describe the Eucharist in terms of self-giving. Quite apart from specifically Christian doctrines, any personal relationship involves each party giving himself in some degree to the other: and therefore it is built into any rite of holy communion that in it God gives himself to those who come to meet him. More specifically, Christians believe that they can be at one with God, only because Christ gave himself for us on the cross. For these reasons, various understandings of the Eucharist, although less natural than that in terms of a shared meal, are nonetheless valid. Their validity depends not on natural congruity, but on the fact that our Lord intended it, both because the Last Supper was (If we accept the synoptic chronology) a celebration of the Passover, and because it took place on the eve, and under the shadow, of the crucifixion, and,

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further, because of His teaching and example in his earthly ministry. The ways in which the modern Eucharist can properly be understood in terms of self-giving should be based, not on a priori argument, but on what we believe our Lord intended. It is a matter not of philosophy, but of New Testament scholarship.

The Eucharist is significant. It is meant to mean something. In it we approach God as a person, not only in word - by addressing prayers to him and listening to the Bible - but in all our actions and attitudes, which are intended to show forth our adoration for him and his love for us. But our words are inadequate and our actions may be misunderstood. Although Christians believe that God is personal, and that through Christ we can enter into some sort of personal relationship with him, we find it very difficult to give an account of this personal relationship - indeed, the word `personal' is itself open to criticism - and often we fall back on the terminology of legal or logical or causal relationships. Such metaphors are natural, and to many people helpful: but they can mislead, and when we come to talk about the Eucharist we often are tempted to press the wrong questions or to describe it in terms inappropriate to a living God who loves us and wants us to know him even as we are known. Equally with our actions, when we come to explain their significance we often describe them as symbolic, and obscurely feel that if they are symbolic, there must be a difference between what they are and what they mean. Symbols, we feel, are mere representations of something else for which they stand, in the same way as a picture symbolizes a scene it resembles while being essentially different from it. But this is a mistake. Although when I give a ring in marriage or hand over the keys to a new incumbent, I am not merely moving a piece of gold or iron but pledging my own future actions and authorizing another's, yet we cannot really contrast the bodily behaviour with an inner significance it resembles but also differs from. In these cases the symbolism is, indeed, a natural one, but in most others it is purely conventional - as when I sign a cheque or nod my head in an auction. Significance, therefore, should not be seen as being necessarily contrasted with reality, since it does not require natural resemblance or congruence, but can rest on any convention provided it is sufficiently widely understood. For this reason, once the doctrine of the Eucharist was established, the natural symbolism of eating and drinking could be supplemented---or even supplanted---by the traditional understanding of what the church was doing when it celebrated the Eucharist; and the intense Paschal associations introduced nuances of meaning and modes of interpretation far beyond the natural symbolism of a shared meal. The description of what he did is given in terms of what his action meant, and we cannot contrast what he `really' did with what it signified any more than I can contrast my signing a contract with some mysterious meaning of what I am doing. In actions, although not in things, the intention and the deed are inextricably bound up together, and from this it follows that we cannot talk of a bare deed apart from its intention, meaning or significance, and if those doing something intend it to mean something, then for them in that context it does. This is why many different understandings of the Eucharist ' are possible, and perhaps valid, and why many different practices have grown up. If one church believes the point of celebrating the Eucharist to be the commemoration of our Lord's death, then that is what they are doing when they celebrate the Eucharist, and if another believes it to be the vicarious offering by Christ's church of his passion to the Father, then that is what they are doing. Nevertheless, in spite of the great plasticity of meaning, not every interpretation is equally valid, nor every practice properly to be accounted eucharistic. The church rejects, transubstantiation because it makes a thing of God. The chemical or pharmacological model is bad, because it depersonalizes the holy communion. Chemical substances can be manipulated and misused. It is quite reasonable to take uranium 235 to the field of battle, and expose one's enemies to its power. It does not matter for the efficiency of the penicillin I am taking that I have a wholehearted acceptance

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of God's will for me. But God cannot be captured and localized in the host, and carted off to battle, and whosoever consumes the elements insincerely is not securing his own immortality but blaspheming. In a very different way, those who make of the Eucharist a mere memorial of a past event are implicitly denying the continuing power of the cross for the present, and the fact of the resurrection. Some interpretations and practices are to be rejected because they say too much and would support conclusions repugnant to the Spirit of Christ: others because they say too little and leave unsecured saving truths of the Christian life: and others yet again because what they say is inconsistent either with itself or with other truths we have more reason to be confident of.

Nevertheless, although not all understandings of the Eucharist are equally valid and some are to be rejected as altogether inadequate, we should be cautious in denying what we may regard as the erroneous opinions of others. The church has held differing opinions about New Testament scholarship, and what was in our Lord's mind when he instituted the Eucharist. We cannot simply take over accounts of the Eucharist based on what we regard as a misconception: but we should not automatically discard them as altogether mistaken. Christianity is a historical religion, and should treat with respect the various understandings of the Eucharist that have been reached by different parts of the church in the course of its history. Although they are not all of equal value, few are without any value at all. And where they go wrong is usually in being pushed too far to the exclusion of other insights. Rather than reject them altogether, we should be disposed to accept them for what they are worth, but see the limits within which they can be usefully applied, recognizing that we shall always need a number of different accounts of what we are doing when we celebrate the Eucharist, if we are to be faithful to the many different ways of understanding it which our Lord himself taught us.

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