The Existential Jesus

The Existential Jesus



The Existential Jesus By John Carroll Scribe, 288pp, $35


MATTHEW LAMB
TheAustralian
March 10, 2007

NICK Cave has said he first read Mark because, of all the Gospels, it was the shortest. John Carroll in The Existential Jesus makes a case for the Gospel of Mark to be not only the biggest of the Gospels but perhaps also one of the biggest books of Western civilisation. This is a bold claim, but Carroll is not shy in making bold claims.



His first claim is this: "The Christian churches have comprehensively failed in their one central task: to retell their foundation story in a way that might speak to their times." This Jesus, Carroll argues, has been reduced to an abstract figure, an illustration of various hollow doctrines and laws. The result is that he is irrelevant to the everyday lives of people.



Carroll's second claim, in response to the first, is this: "Jesus is the core of Western Dreaming. His presence is vital to our civilisation and its individuals. He is known by his story." Against the abstract figure of Jesus, Carroll argues that it is through paying attention to the narrative structure of the Gospel of Mark, and to its underlying mythic substratum, that the importance of Jesus as an individual is to be found. His importance to us as individuals quickly follows.



Carroll's Jesus is therefore a figure for a post-church, secular society. This Jesus is "individual-centred and anti-tribal", outside of family and community, a figure in which "group traits and attachments have been stripped away". He is, as Carroll argues, an existential Jesus.



This retelling of the Jesus story is certainly compelling. Carroll offers us his own translation of the Gospel of Mark, accompanied by his always interesting commentary. But it also contains ambiguous claims that detract from its core concerns.



To reclaim Mark's Gospel from the churches, Carroll removes the story from its Judeo-Christian tradition and inserts it into the Greek tradition. From the opening verses of the Gospel, "Jewish history is made obsolete". And by its concluding verses, it presents an "anti-Christian ending", an anathema to traditional Christian churches. Yet Carroll constantly relies on the Jewish concept of midrash to justify his retelling of the Jesus story. But this concept refers only to reinterpreting such stories from within the limits of the same church teaching and scholarship Carroll rejects. Moreover, he relies heavily on the Christian notion of evil, which sets up a dualistic narrative structure, repeated in other parts of his story (insiders and outsiders, for example). But such dualism is very much a Judeo-Christian framework, absent in the Greek tradition (they preferred hubris).



Despite this, Carroll's commentary of Mark proceeds by linking most of the Jesus story to various Greek sources and ideas. He does this to elevate the importance of mythos in the narrative. His interpretations are convincing here, but this raises other problems: the more Mark is shown to be derivative of Greek sources, the less original this figure of Jesus appears to be. This is compounded by Carroll's retrospective reading of Renaissance and romantic conceptions of individuality back on to the Gospel, and his use of Freudian and Jungian concepts to justify pushing interpretations of the Gospel to suit his own ends.



A more ambiguous claim is Carroll's conception of an existential Jesus because the mythical figure presented is not existential at all but is, by Carroll's own repeated admissions, essential. It is by holding up this "Jesus essence" that Carroll bases his claim for the originality of Mark's Gospel.



The whole book is framed around a question of the "enigma of being". Carroll cites Martin Heidegger as leading the turn of philosophy back to being in the 20th century, but it is likelier Jean-Paul Sartre is Carroll's influence here. Yet the appellation of existential can apply to an individual only if their existence can be said to precede their essence. Carroll argues, however, that not only is the essence of Jesus his main focus, this focus is also based on the argument that Jesus is, indeed, the essence that precedes all our individual existences. Moreover, Heidegger famously criticised Sartre for dabbling in questions of existence and essence (regardless of which comes first), because such metaphysics (and, by extension, Carroll's theoretical framework) is still residing within the "oblivion of the truth of being".



Indeed, each of these ambiguous claims is associated with the theoretical framework Carroll calls on to justify his translation and interpretation of Mark.



But they detract from his core concern, which is to elevate the story itself, as a "self-contained numinous object", above such theoretical ballast. After all, it was the traditional churches' reliance on such hollow doctrines and laws that, Carroll claims, reduced Jesus to an abstract figure in the first place.



I happen to agree with Carroll's core concern and it is in this spirit that I offer these criticisms, not to dismiss his book but the better to focus on what is most interesting in it. And this is the concern with revitalising individuality in the contemporary world and doing so through the virtues of storytelling, as opposed to empty doctrine. It is interesting because it broadens the debate about Jesus beyond the restrictive framework of traditional church teachings and reminds us non-Christians that these stories are at the heart of our culture, too.



Most of all, Carroll's book is a rarity in Australian publishing in that despite its ambiguities, or perhaps because of them, it requires its readers to think. The Existential Jesus may not be the greatest story told but it is certainly one worth hearing.



Matthew Lamb is based in Dubai, where he is working on a PhD on Albert Camus.