The Existential Jesus
Gary D. Bouma, Reviewer
March 30, 2007
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A fresh encounter with Mark's Gospel impresses with its unbiased approach.
JOHN CARROLL AND A group of colleagues have met regularly for years to read the Bible. No, this is not a Bible study group carefully applying given notes to unfamiliar text. The Existential Jesus has emerged from a deep and fresh encounter with the story of Jesus as told by Mark. Mark's Gospel is the least elaborate - no birth, only an empty tomb and the most roughly hewn - no softening of this at times raging, furious character.
Author John Carroll
Genre Spirituality/Religion
PublisherScribeRRP$35.0
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While some may be challenged by what Carroll meets in this encounter, his aim is not to deconstruct or confront. He appears to have no agenda other than retelling Mark's story as he has encountered and understood it. The book has no audience, no desire to convert, just to recount an authentic encounter with Mark's story of the Jesus who said "I am" and demanded of others, "Who am I?"
Carroll says he has never been a practising Christian but considers the Bible to be so formative of Western civilisation that, like Shakespeare, it rewards close study. He brings a well-grounded appreciation of textual interpretation using his version of the analytical technique "midrash" - a Jewish term that means "to draw out meaning" - and the expanding knowledge of the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth.
He does not bring the biases and learned habits of churchly biblical interpretation. This leaves him free to encounter freshly the power of Mark's story of Jesus. Mark's Jesus is in a sense the most pre-Christian of the gospels, least shaped by the agendas of the emerging church.
Rather than a text-by-text or chapter-by-chapter approach, Carroll discerns the gospel's themes and how its characters represent them in the unfolding drama. The disciples don't get the message. Only a few - the demoniac Mary Magdalene, the woman at the well - see Jesus for who he is. Judas sees and rejects.
Carroll retells the story and then presents Mark's picture of key characters - Mary Magdalene, Peter, Judas and Pilate. Each has their own elemental response to Jesus' "I am".
Carroll, I think rightly, sees Mark's Jesus as profoundly anti-institutional. Jesus rages against the temple cult, a huge religious industry linking religion and state in a profit-seeking, order-enforcing and grace-denying institution. Jesus takes the man with a withered hand out of the synagogue to heal him, the blind man is healed in private, and the temple needs cleansing. Such an attack would make him a target. The attack is as fresh now as ever.
A withering and declining institution is no more Christlike than a flourishing one. Those who sacrifice others on the altars of human institutions are still with us, as are those who take a critically reflective view of these institutions sensing the total otherness of the one to whom Jesus pointed and referred to as Father.
The complex interactions between Jesus' emerging clarity about who he is, his relationships with disciples, family and the small but critically revealing cast of characters in this story are teased out by Carroll using his own responses, those of artists, and contemporary commentaries. I found new insights into some usually less well known characters.
The existential Jesus is a person whose very being is such that an encounter with him clarifies the existence and flaws in the being of those engaged. Jesus is not a moraliser; he's a teacher and a healer of being. There is no Gnosticism here. The encounter is with pure being, not with esoteric teaching or purifying knowledge.
Carroll's clarity of Jesus' diagnosis of the evils of human institution is not balanced by the good they do or a consideration of the impossible contradiction of the human condition - doomed to create organisations for good, which have in them the seeds of their own undoing and evil.
While in Carroll's hand Mark's Jesus is complex, evolving and immensely engaging, he seems more ready to point the finger than to wrestle with embedded contradiction. To seek such nuancing is to have two feet planted on the slippery slope to the church's establishment.
Carroll's Jesus is rabidly anti-church and uses Peter - the disciple who builds churches - as his whipping boy. For a gospel written about AD70, this is a reach; there would have been raging arguments about the nature of this new movement within Judaism - was it a Jewish sect or a new, separate movement? How should it be structured? This gospel may have been written into this conflict to call people away from forms and structures. While this is a voice that is needed in every age, each age answers with, "yes, but".
The Gospels, like the great stories of the Hebrew Scriptures, recount the experiences of humans interacting with the creative source of all that is. Few who encounter them are untouched.
I was struck by the freshness of this encounter, the willingness to pursue what was found using the tools of textual analysis to unlock the themes, the courage to let the text speak and then, having unpacked it, to just let it be. Like Mark, Carroll leaves unanswered Jesus' question, "Who am I?"
An extract from Existential Jesus will run in A2 next Saturday.
Gary D. Bouma is professor of sociology at Monash University and author of Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the 21st Century, published by Cambridge University Press at $39.95.
