Preface

The life and teachings of Jesus continue to inspire and benefit the
world to which he gave them. Differences of interpre­tation may shroud them in fog, waves of doubt and denial may surge over them, but they reassert their presence, even when we do not see “the Rock Christ” fully revealed in clear air and across a calm sea. Jesus said, “Heaven and earth may pass away, but my words will not pass away,” and his promise has stood the test of time.

We find ourselves in a world yearning once more for in­creased spirituality and moral guidance, goals about which Jesus spoke as an expert in their nature and the means of attaining them. What, then, it may be asked, can the present book contrib­ute to clarity and calmness in our view of him?

The evidence we have about Jesus comes almost entirely from the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Other early sources, Christian, Gnostic, Jewish and Roman, contribute almost nothing except background, invaluable as they sometimes are for that purpose. In so saying and in interpreting the evidence from all the sources I do not speak from mental inertia or personal opinion but from the principles of responsible textual criticism, linguistics and historiography as they are generally understood today. I have, however, sought to be fair in repre­senting widely held views with which I differ, so that readers may make their own judgments in disputed matters. What Thomas Russell has said about judicial decisions applies here. He de­fined true discernment as the ability to listen for the truth, and cited Solomon’s prayer, “Give Thy servant, therefore, a heart with skill to listen.” It is my hope, then, that readers will find my work to be both unbiased and ecumenical.

In the last chapter of this volume I explain more fully the principles of analysis which I espouse, and where I stand with respect to others who similarly espouse them but with whom I differ. I think it likely that the more readers already know about these principles the more important it is for them to read that chapter before reading the rest of the book. For others, the following summary of my position may be all they will wish to read, at least at first.

I have concluded that the Gospels were written to provide correct accounts of Jesus’ life and work from which readers could learn how to live as he did, healing the sick, rousing the dead, cleansing lepers, throwing out demons, just as he had taught his apostles to do. I have also concluded that the Gospels are gener­ally accurate, and that their honest mistakes and disagreements do not obscure the historical facts they present in any essential way nor do they obscure in any way at all the principles of life which Jesus taught and illustrated. As for Jesus’ principles of life not being obscured, which many readers will doubt, I can only say, read on. The matter of the Gospels’ mistakes and disagreements in historical matters deserves an additional note at once. I have concluded that the Gospels are independent witnesses to the life of Jesus, each a selection from the facts or supposed facts known to the author. Therefore, information found in only one Gospel is not necessarily incorrect, but when two give information that contradicts information in a third, the third must be wrong. When two give contradictory information not found in the others, I can usually see no way to decide between them and say so.

Even when all the Gospels agree about Jesus’ life the infor­mation they provide may be contradicted by information from outside. Some of this outside information is to be found in other records of events in Jesus’ lifetime, but most of it is to be found in our own experience. On the whole, I have concluded, the Gospels give us a fair presentation of facts recorded elsewhere. As for present day experience, many people feel it contradicts numerous events recorded by the Gospels, which are at best fictional and at worst misleading. But more and more investigators are instead making room in the halls of science and medicine for Jesus as the Gospels depict him. For the daily experience of those familiar with spiritual heal­ing affirms and constantly reaffirms that the narratives tell the plain truth and give sure guidance to human yearnings.

The word “spiritual” has more than one meaning, of course. What do I mean in this book, then, when I use the term “spiritual healing”? The kind of spiritual healing I refer to is the practical application in human life of what has been called the true idealism found in Jesus’ words as recorded in the Gospels. Fundamental to all forms of philosophical idealism is the concept that the material uni­verse is unreal. Various philosophers, idealist or otherwise, have also maintained that evil is unreal. The idealism of which I speak tells us that reality consists of a wholly good and self-existent Mind and its ideas, a Mind whose universal presence necessarily excludes evil. It also tells us that the goodness of this Mind expresses itself in the present experience of all who trust it, so that what seem to be material limitations and outright evil begin to disappear from their lives and trust ripens into under­standing and convincing proofs. Because this way of thinking is still, however, completely strange to many people, I have set it out more fully at the beginning of Chapter III.

A word or two more on the subject of physical, mental, emotional, moral, and spiritual health, and the light which the Gospels cast on them. According to the Gospels, what others have called “the uni­versal Mind” Jesus called Spirit and his and our Father. According to the Gospels, again, Jesus said that the Father knows our needs before we do and abundantly supplies them if we pray and live aright. Spiritual healing, as I use the term, comes about when we accept and apply what the Gospels tell us Jesus said about his Father and about how to pray and to live. It has given us a body of present-day experience in the destruction of evil and of material limitations sufficient to lead us back by inductive reasoning to the conclusion that the Gospels correctly represent both Jesus’ teaching and his wonderful works, even though some of those works are still unmatched. It both explains and corroborates the Gospels. And, to repeat, this body of experience is becoming more widely known and accepted, as indeed it should be considering that it has built up over more than a century and a quarter into many thousands of examples. My fami­ly’s share in it began about 1910; my own share extends to over eighty years and even then I have only begun to explore the limitless implications of the Gospel records.

 

This book includes a new translation of the Gospels in full, except as they duplicate one another, together with an equal amount of comment. I have followed the Greek text as it appears in the New Testament edited by Kurt Aland and his associates, the fourth revised edition of which was published in 1993 by the Bible Societies of the English-, Dutch- and German-speaking countries. In translating the Greek I have started fresh instead of following the practice of the King James translators, who copied from earlier translators what they felt they could not improve upon and so produced a literary monument. I have, like them, sought to put the reader in touch with the original as much as possible by translating literally, most noticeably in the tenses of verbs, but I have not followed the word order of the original so closely as they did, especially in translating speech, which I have tried to make sound natural to modern ears.

I have availed myself of the excellent practice of the Soncino edition of the Talmud in bracketing all sorts of explana­tory material into the translation, so as to produce what Jacob Neusner has called a “conversation” with the reader about the text. The King James translators put such material in a different type face (italics in modern editions), but seldom added more than was required for normal English sentences; an interesting example of a larger addition is their statement that once, before Jesus replied to some questioners, he “stooped down and wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.” Lastly, when my transla­tion is particularly controversial I have discussed it either in a separate paragraph or in a footnote. Other footnotes may discuss whole paragraphs of the text.

The Gospels tell us more of Jesus’ life than his work for mankind and its principles, and when they do so we may safely skip over notes and comments that distract from our enjoyment of the narrative. Some would say that we should always skip in this way if we have not read the texts before. But when the Gospels tell us Jesus’ rules for and practice of healing, healing of sickness, sin, death, stress, sorrow and lack, we must study the narratives if we are to avail ourselves of the benefits their writers intended us to receive from them. With them we must study the rest of the Bible as well as commentaries that illuminate and confirm the biblical texts. And for real understanding and mastery we must follow Jesus’ own demand that we practice what we have learned.

 

The work on the New Testament text reflected in this book has been generously supported by a series of grants from the Regents of the University of California administered by the Re­search Committee on the Los Angeles campus, from the IBM Cor­poration, the Committee for the International Exchange of Scholars, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I wish to express my thanks also to those who wrote letters of recommenda­tion to the granting agencies. I am very grateful for the support I have received. It testifies, however, only to my competence as a textual critic. It does not in any way either confirm or deny the adequacy of the picture of Jesus I have drawn here.

Equally important to me has been the help of those who were kind enough to read all or parts of my manuscript and suggest ways in which it might be made more effective in fulfilling its purpose: J. Thomas Boggs, C.S., Prof. Tony A. Freyer, Dean Robert Ryf, Prof. Ernest M. Scheuer, Barbara L. Staton, Prof. James F. Strange, Prof. Diane Treacy-Cole, and my dear wife Marion Dearing. It was my great hope that I might also have had the advice of Gertrude W. Eiseman, C.S., and Dr. S. Clement Leslie, who beside their knowledge of my subject, were concerned in their courses of life to draw Christians and Jews closer together. The English poetess Doris Peel also urged me once to write in the ecumen­ical spirit of a certain Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, an ecumen­icism that at first I thought impossible in my task, given the endless controversies over Jesus, but in the course of many rewritings gradually saw how to approach.

After I had written this book and then had had to put it aside for several years, I ran across in close succession a recent book and an article of past years in which love leavens scholarship: The Oxford Companion to the Bible, edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan, and “Jesus Christ,” by Jaroslav Pelikan, in the 1961 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Prof. Pelikan inculcates suspension of belief in scholarly theo­rizing with a geniality that warms the heart. In the last chapter of this book I acknowledge the kindness Prof. Metzger has shown me. The spirit of his Companion to the Bible is what I might have expected from him. I hope my own writing may as accurately represent points of view that differ from my own.

V. A. D.