Jesus, continued:
"The grotesquely sadistic apparatus on which he died is the most powerful symbol of our culture. A man who lives in Russia says he sees him in his bathroom every night. Just last year, a woman in Memphis found his face inside a sliced potato. Type his name into your internet search engine and you will find millions of web-pages. He has inspired paintings and sculptures, cathedrals and poems, country songs and oratorios, movies and rock operas. Has anyone else ever lived whose very name is both prayer and curse?
We can't say for sure just when he was born, though it almost certainly was not exactly 2,000 years ago. It seems likely, though by no means certain, that he was brought up in Nazareth. According to Mark's gospel, he had four brothers. We know hardly anything of his early life--the gospels of John and Mark agree in having no story at all of h is birth, childhood or adolescence. (Neither, incidentally, do they mention his mother's virginity.) Matthew and Luke do little to fill in the biographical picture; when they do offer facts, it is striking how starkly they contradict each other (for example, in their differing accounts of Jesus's genealogy), leading any objective reader to conclude that at least one of them is inventing. Then there's the troubling matter of what their accounts choose to include and leave out; the flight to Egypt is found only in Matthew and the miraculous precocity of Jesus in the temple appears only in Luke. Make any statement you like about him and corroborative evidence is thin on the ground." |
