John Carroll’s The Existential Jesus, first issued in Australia in 2007 but not available from an American publisher until this year, feeds mainly on the Gospel of Mark, chews especially hard on Jesus’ statement, “I am,” when he’s walking on the water, and treats John’s Gospel as a side dish. The menu features some surprises:
Did you know, for example, that Mark opens his Gospel with the words, “In the beginning was the Story”? (Never mind that it is John’s Gospel which opens with those words if you allow “Story” to be a legitimate translation of logos.)
Did you know that since Mark’s Story, which was in the beginning, has to do with the purely human Jesus rather than with God, the Hebrew Bible’s account of creation by God has to be scrapped in that “Jesus replaces God”? (Never mind that Jesus—yes, Mark’s Jesus—says, “But from the beginning of creation, God made them male and female,” and attributes knowledge of the day and hour of his return exclusively to God the Father, so that not even Jesus himself knows.)
Did you know that Mark’s Jesus wasn’t interested in morals? (Never mind that he said fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries, covetings, deceit, and sensuality [among other things] defile a human being.)
Did you know that up on a mountain after feeding the five thousand Jesus met himself, not God? (Never mind that he went up the mountain “to pray.”)
Did you know that the Markan Jesus’ mission ended with a focus on himself alone? (Never mind his saying on the eve of crucifixion, “This is my blood of the covenant which is being shed on behalf of many.”)
Did you know that in Gethsemane Mark’s Jesus did not pray to God above—for no longer did he trust his god —but groaningly uttered a curse in anticipation of his nonexistence? (Never mind “Abba! Father! … not what I will; rather, what you [will].”)
Did you know that according to Mark’s Gospel Jesus never claimed to be the Christ? (Never mind his answer, “I am,” when asked, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?”)
Did you know that in this Gospel Jesus’ using “the son of man” as a self-designation meant he was no more than an ordinary human being? (Never mind that he told his judges they would see him as the son of man “sitting at the right hand of the Power [God] and coming with the clouds of heaven [the Deity’s mode of transport]” and told his disciples he will come as the son of man “with great power and glory,” “send out angels,” and “gather together his chosen ones” from everywhere.)
Did you know that in Mark’s Gospel Jesus’ cry of dereliction was not a direct and personal call “to some power up above”—for Jesus had finally come to disbelieve there is a god—but was “a cry against existence”? (Never mind “My God, my God …”)
Did you know that the Gospel of Mark closes with “no resurrection from the dead” on Jesus’ part? (Never mind that the women at the empty tomb were told, “He has risen.”)
Well, now you know, thanks to John Carroll. According to him this Jesus, existentially baked and basted by the evangelist Mark, is supposed to appeal to the palates of contemporary nonchurchgoers and thereby recapture Jesus’ importance for Western culture, an importance frittered away by the increasingly irrelevant church in her maintenance of tired old Christian doctrines, the denial of which “Mark’s existential Jesus would approve.” One might think to the contrary that churches have lost their relevance, where they have lost it, because of jettisoning those doctrines. But Mark’s purportedly existential Jesus is the Jesus Carroll owns for himself, a Jesus who is “solitary,” “individual-centered,” and “antitribal,” a noncommunitarian example of “free[dom] … from the yoke of human collectivity.” Ironically, Carroll is a sociologist at La Trobe University in Australia. His very profession deals with the human collectivity he decries.
Drawing on a knowledge of classical Greek (as evident, incidentally, in his spelling a Greek verb for “I know” gignosko instead of ginosko, its spelling in the New Testament), Carroll provides his own translations of much of Mark—and also of John, which he considers a profoundly perceptive reworking of Mark. Interspersed with the translations are Carroll’s interpretations. He doesn’t concern himself with the historical Jesus, about whom he thinks “we [‘of course’] know virtually nothing.” He concerns himself rather with Mark’s and John’s mythic Jesuses—that is, their timeless, archetypal stories about Jesus—and repeatedly draws comparisons with Greek myths (Homer’s The Iliad, for example). Somewhat oddly, he interlaces Greek mythology with the Jewish midrashic technique of reconfiguring a text, especially a narrative, to make it currently relevant. Yet other literature, such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Melville’s Billy Budd, and famous paintings also come in for comparison. Though uncited by name, the movie Dead Man Walking and Albert Schweitzer’s portrayal of Jesus as a mysterious stranger seem to hover in the background.
Oh how Carroll himself reconfigures Mark’s and John’s stories to make them what is currently tasteworthy in his opinion! But he presents his reconfigurations as midrashes on Mark’s and John’s midrashes, and as midrashes that carry forward the intentions of Mark and John in their midrashes. To take but one example, the reconfiguring of the centurion’s exclamation at the foot of the cross, “Truly this man was the Son of God,” to read, “Truly this man was the mystery,” counts as Carroll’s midrash on Mark’s midrash. But Carroll presents this and other such reconfigurations of his as true to Mark’s intention, to Mark’s portrayal of an existential Jesus.
Carroll also offers some interesting though curious readings. For instance, on the Mount of Transfiguration Peter “misreads” divinity in the cloud “profanely” as “looming rain” and therefore wants to build shelters from the rain, and this misreading anticipates the misdirection of his future into “building churches,” which as ethical institutions, “symbolized by the black cloud of dirty, drenching water from above,” serve no good end. For “the divinity in the black cloud is a dying god.” It might occur to someone that a cloud doesn’t drop dirty water. Or maybe Carroll has in mind acid rain. In any case, he has no use for churches or for the dying god of the Jews, whom he derisively calls their “external God,” or for their history and culture, which he declares “obsolete.” Regardless of intention, the undertone is disturbing.
At times Carroll’s imagination takes off, as when he says that in Gethsemane Jesus lapsed into unconsciousness, describes Golgotha as a “rocky waste where nothing grows,” and equates Legion, the unclean spirits exorcised by Jesus, with the young man inside Jesus’ tomb. After all, Legion had dwelt among tombs and displayed prodigious strength such as would be required for the young man to roll away the stone (if he did). The power that went out of Jesus when the woman with a flow of blood touched his robe—this power lodged in Legion and reappeared as the young man in the tomb and as Mark, the young man who fled naked from Gethsemane and later wrote the Gospel that we call his.
As for John’s Gospel, Carroll springs a surprise, given his unorthodoxy, by ascribing that Gospel to John the beloved disciple and son of Zebedee. But there is no surprise in Carroll’s subscribing to the distinction between agape as sacred love and philia as friendly or brotherly love, for this distinction has attained wide popularity. How sacred, though, is the agape-loving of darkness rather than light (John 3:19) and the agape-loving of men’s approval rather than God’s (John 12:43)? For that matter, how unsacredly friendly and brotherly is the Father’s philia-loving of the Son (John 5:20)and the Father’s philia-loving of believers in his Son(John 16:27)? Since in John’s account of the Last Supper only Judas Iscariot is given a morsel of bread, Carroll says “the story mocks the idea of a sacred community.” What then does he do with Jesus’ proceeding to tell the disciples to love one another as he has loved them? Carroll does nothing with it, because a community of reciprocal love mocks his notion of existential isolation.
According to him, the import of the Johannine Jesus’ telling Magdalene not to touch him is that “it’s time for [her] to find [her] own way, on [her] own,” that “she must summon up from within herself an Ithat suffices unto itself.” So this same Jesus’ saying that he himself is “the way” and that “no one comes to the Father except through [him]”(John 14:6)doesn’t apply to her? Space won’t allow further consideration of Carroll’s interpretation of the women who figure prominently in the Gospels, though it does bear mention that since Legion is many, he affirms that Magdalene too, like the young man in Jesus’ tomb, “is Legion sitting calmly clothed” (as if the legion of unclean spirits hadn’t left their host, entered a herd of swine, and accompanied them into the Sea of Galilee by the time their former host was sitting calm and clothed).
For Carroll the existential truth that I am means this: the I that I am doesn’t have to undergo any change, not even by way of moral reform. It suffices to know that I am, for this is all that’s to be known. Consequently, Carroll dislikes all those who assert, “I am x,” rather than a simple, “I am.” For as noted, the latter affirms the only truth you can be sure of, your own individual existence, whereas the former affirms an illusory identity. No wonder then that despite liking John’s midrash of Mark, as when Carroll happily cites the Johannine Jesus’ saying, “Before Abraham came into being, I am,” he skirts that same Jesus’ saying, “I am the bread of life,” “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” “I am the light of the world,” “I am the resurrection and the life,” “I am the way and the truth and the life” (and so on). And since atheistic existentialism like Carroll’s normally pits individual existence against objective essence, you wonder whether he isn’t confused when calling his existential Jesus “essential humanity” and “the quintessence of humanity, in its Platonic form or ideal.”
To Carroll: You’ve cherry-picked elements of Mark’s Gospel for your portrayal of an existential Jesus. But both flying in the face of many obviously contrary elements in this Gospel and shielding your readers from them, you have passed off your existential Jesus as Mark’s too. So the best I can do in defense of your scholarly integrity is to borrow from tennis star John McEnroe a statement he directed incredulously to 1981 Wimbledon umpire Edward James: “You cannot be serious!” Sorry, mate.
Robert H. Gundry is scholar-in-residence and professor emeritus at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. He is the author ofMark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross, published by Eerdmans in 1993.
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