Remnant Book Review

Continued...

of Jesus’s mother’s numerous clan was getting married, and it was then that Jesus told Mary, who had presented him with the problem of the guests having no wine, that "mine hour has not yet come." Still, he told the servants to fill "two or three firkins" (a "firkin" was 8 gallons) with water. Most know the rest.

Johnson emphasizes one point: Christ "...repeatedly rejected the mere role of a miracle worker as a human instrument of signs and wonders. Jesus makes it clear that it is preferable in God’s eyes that men show faith by listening to the holy truth, and by accepting and following it, rather than waiting for signs and miracles to convince them."

Yet, Johnson will list the "miracles" performed by Jesus, including "the greatest of Jesus’s miracles: the raising of Lazarus from the dead.'

But Johnson’s chapter is entitled "The Danger of Miracles," and with good reason, for in bringing these miracles to the attention of the public, "...the priests, the scribes, the Pharisees and other pious and orthodox Jews decided Jesus was a threat both to them personally and the Jewish community.

It was the miracles, and their obvious success and truth, which persuaded these men to put Jesus to death... ( emphasis mine) the real threat was Jesus’s teachings, which promised to overthrow all their traditional, ancient, exclusive and hieratic values."

Insisting that Jesus did not "preach," but "taught," wherever he went, Johnson notes this was the antithesis of then current religious beliefs, which had resulted in the development of "codes of law to preserve order," especially in the ancient Near East. These codes were initially necessary in the absence of legal bodies also to preserve the peace, so for at least two millennia, the Jewish religion had accepted their "religiouslegal" roots back to Abraham and Moses. Johnson: "In the process, God had become a very distant and frightening figure, but the law was an ever-present and weighty reality." Then this: "Jesus was a revolutionary who transformed the entire Judaic religious scheme into something quite different. It ceased to be a penal system of law and punishment...

and became an affair of the heart and an adventure of the spirit."

Jesus’s teaching made it abundantly clear that what really mattered was not in this world, "a mere episode in time and space," but the people in it, whose time on earth was limited. What mattered was to emerge from this life and become one with God in the next. Johnson repeats Jesus’s words regarding the faithful, who were "alien" to the world: "They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world," a sentence repeated in two Synoptic Gospels. In Jesus’s teachings and deeds, "No one before had, and no one since has, so confidently and warmly and indeed naturally opened his arms to the entire human race."

Much of the last half of the book is Johnson’s attempt to place Christ in the social setting he was to find himself: among men and women, especially the role of women who were as numerous - albeit not as prominent - as men.

"Women were put at the center of it (Christianity) alongside men, sharing equally in its duties and consolations.

Without Mary, an indispensable part of the Incarnation, his mission would not have been possible." Mark’s Gospel has a passage, unique in the literature of the ancient world: "They brought young children to him that he should touch them." To those who questioned or criticized that act, Jesus responded: "...Whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein".

No review of Johnson’s "sketch" would be complete without his insights into "Jesus’s Trial and Crucifixion," and "The Resurrection and the Birth of Christianity." Although much of what is included in these two chapters is already known, I, for one, did not know that Judas Iscariot was "the keeper of the funds used by the disciples." Or, why "Jesus’s warnings against betrayal did not alarm the eleven apostles more: for their lives were also at risk?' Johnson has no answer to this question.

The agony of the trial and the crucifixion at Golgotha, which means "the skull," are described from accounts in the Gospels, but Johnson does digress to repeat a question about the responsibility for Christ’s death. "Both Jews and Romans, in their different traditions, revered the law...But here they combined to enact a joint travesty, which has tolled through the centuries as the antithesis of law. It is hard to say who was more to blame for this huge evil: Caiaphas, the accuser, or Pilate, who had the power?"

Johnson concludes with a paean to St. Paul, who "made it his business to learn everything he could about Jesus and then to convey it, in systematic form, to the Greek-speaking Gentiles outside of Palestine." As mentioned at the beginning of this review, his letters are "the first Christian documents."

Johnson ends on a note of being not only a devoted Catholic, but a historian as well: "The Gospels are designed to be read and re-read. The oftener we do so, the deeper our understanding and the more we grasp their realism. They are the truth. What they tell us actually happened."

There are events in Johnson’s personal life that may raise questions about his religious faithfulness, but this is not the place for such a discussion. Let it be said that anyone who reads this book will be greatly impressed by the countless number of times you will be informed, as well as impressed, with Johnson’s writing style, a well-known quality in all of his books and works of history.

I can state that I learned a good deal about the life of Jesus after reading this book, and, truth be told, so will you. ■