Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

The Real Jesus

(Reprinted from the issue of December 16, 2004)

’Tis the season for the newsmagazines to do their stuff: cover stories correcting the Gospels with the Latest Thinking about “the historical Jesus,” minus all those miracles and supernatural superfluities.

If you wonder why anyone worshiped the allegedly historical Jesus, well, that seems to be the whole idea.

These articles are written on the principle implied in a recent letter to The New York Times by a clergyman (whether Catholic or some sort of Protestant was left unspecified) to the effect that Jesus said nothing about homosexuality. Well, how do we know?

First, the Gospels don’t pretend to record everything Jesus said and did; St. John says that would require more books than the world could hold. Second, there was perhaps no need to mention some topics on which there was already general agreement: cannibalism, ax murders, and sodomy, for example. Expecting the Gospels to yield a special teaching on every crime and vice is taking the maxim sola Scriptura to lengths Luther never dreamed of.

If you want a historical Jesus who is really historical — that is, recognizable in every known detail, apart from His miraculous powers, yet not at all denying or belittling them — I know of no better treatment of Him than the chapter “Son of Man, Son of God” in the great Catholic historian Henri Daniel-Rops’s Jesus and His Times (1954). It reminds me of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s remark, “Our Lord’s personality was His greatest miracle.”

Daniel-Rops focuses on the supreme sanity of Christ: His perfect readiness for every occasion, every challenge; His sudden, often fierce wit; His natural authority over others, and their ready obedience to Him; His unfailing realism about human nature, combined with divine insight; the absence of eccentricity in the “perfect balance” of His character; His unexpected moments of tenderness as well as indignation; His supreme gift for memorable eloquence and metaphor; His absolute refusal to compromise even His sternest teachings, combined with a readiness to forgive; the strange magnetism that every reader of the Gospels feels.

The cunning enemies who ceaselessly tried to outwit Him never succeeded; they managed to trap Him only when He was ready to fulfill His mission. The moment was always His to command.

The real historical Jesus is a passionate man, fully alive, not an abstraction. He is often impulsive, but His impulsive responses, whether compassionate, ironic, or angry, are always profoundly right, even if they mystify His immediate audience; He never has to regret or qualify them. Even His outbursts are impossible to improve on, or even to emulate.

“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” This might sound like an extravagant boast — one that Plato and Aristotle never dared to make — but we can put it still more strongly than He did: Even His most hot-headed words have not passed away. What has any human being said, during the last two millennia, that supersedes anything Jesus ever said? The most gorgeous eloquence of Shakespeare and Milton seems merely flashy by comparison.

As Daniel-Rops observes, such a portrait of a perfect character could never have been dreamed up by a simple, unschooled writer, or even by the greatest novelist. Yet four simple writers produced four portraits, from differing materials, of a man who is recognizably the same amazing figure in all four accounts. Every skeptical attempt to reduce this figure to a merely “historical” — that is, ordinarily human — figure has failed.

The scholars, historians, and journalists, including nominal Christians, can keep searching for their historical Jesus, but they won’t find Him, for the simple reason that He never existed. They make the fatal assumption that their historical Jesus must have been the real Jesus. The short answer to that was made by one who knew the real Jesus personally: “My Lord and my God!”
 
Say It Ain’t So, Barry!

Right after the baseball season ended, I wrote a column marveling at Barry Bonds’s amazing batting statistics. I didn’t mention the widespread suspicion that he owed them to illicit steroid use, because I thought these drugs enhanced strength, but not bat speed. How could an athlete 40 years old quicken his reflexes so markedly? So I gave Bonds the benefit of doubt.

Well, dozens of readers have set me straight, and now the story is front-page news everywhere. Steroids do indeed make wondrous changes in response time, which is why they are popular among sprinters. And Bonds has admitted using them, though he insists he didn’t realize the drugs he took were steroids. Nobody believes him. It’s as if Dr. Jekyll were to claim he didn’t notice Mr. Hyde staring back at him in the mirror.

This is one of the most disturbing stories to come out of the sports world in years. Steroid use is clearly immoral: It’s destructive to the user’s health, possibly fatal in the long run. But because it does enhance performance in the short run, it’s tempting to the athlete — and puts pressure on his competitors to do likewise.

Bonds is more than a special case. He has shattered so many season records as to dwarf most of the great hitters of the past, and he’s well on the way to shattering the remaining lifetime records as well: Babe Ruth’s 714 home runs and then Henry Aaron’s 755 are within easy reach now. Neither of these legendary sluggers used performance-enhancing drugs, as far as we know. On the contrary, Ruth set his records while ingesting fabulous quantities of performance-impeding substances, ranging from hot dogs to bourbon. (Maybe the record books should put asterisks beside his numbers.) Bonds will go down in baseball history as the game’s most perverse figure: the anti-Ruth.

Major League Baseball is finally addressing the issue; even the players’ union is cooperating in establishing guidelines. Still, great damage has already been done. MLB has canceled its plans to highlight Bonds’s quest for the ultimate records over the next two years. Such is the notoriety he has achieved that few fans will be in a mood to celebrate when he reaches the pinnacle. It will be a tragic moment for the game, marking the debasement of the (former?) national pastime. Not since the Chicago White Sox threw the 1919 World Series has there been such a scandal.
 
Does the Constitution Provide for This?

As if all this weren’t bad enough, politicians are threatening to get into the act. Sen. John McCain — who else? — says he will introduce anti-steroid legislation if baseball doesn’t clean up its act. It’s not clear which provision of the U.S. Constitution authorizes the federal government to exercise power over sports; presumably the Commerce Clause, which has been used to justify federal control over anything that can by any stretch of language be called “interstate commerce.” Not that this would be a novelty.

Reaching for glory, Bonds has instead ensured that his memory will be a permanent stain on American life.


SOBRAN’S will deal further with the myth of the historical Jesus. If you have not seen my monthly newsletter yet, give my office a call at 800-513-5053 and request a free sample, or better yet, subscribe for two years for just $85. New subscribers get two gifts with their subscription. More details can be found at the Subscription page of my website.

Already a subscriber? Consider a gift subscription for a priest, friend, or relative.

Joseph Sobran