Incarnation

...I am not a proseletyzer who passes out tracts to try to recruit people to any of my beliefs, especially political or religious, but the next time some condescending, cut-rate Christian-basher with a subscription to Psychology Today asks me how a person like me (with a B.A...

...Mr...

...Price is not only one of our most distinguished novelists (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Kate Vaiden) but also has translated Bible stories from the Greek for his book A Palpable God, and in this essay does his own translations of the text he elucidates...

...a curious act of piracy...

...can in this advanced year of Our Gross National Product 1990 believe in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, I am going to read him or her aloud the essay in this book by Reynolds Price on "The Gospel According to Saint John...

...Through his knowledge as a translator and his instinct as a fiction writer, Price believes (with C.S...

...Hecht's eloquent protest, and his'personal experience of anti-Semitic fallout from the Gospels, is crucial for Christians to hear...

...Incarnation excitingly exemplifies the power of the word and the immediacy of faith in our own lives and work in the world today...

...Lewis) that the Gospel of John was written by an eyewitness: "Hovering just at the edge of each event, or caught in its center, is the powerful sense of a pair of human eyes, so fixed in a lover's rapt attention as to vanish nearly from our reading minds and leave us face to face with the act and the moving bodies...

...After that, I would not be able to resist reading further from the soul-shaking prose of Annie Dillard's magnificent response to the Book of Luke when she tells us that "All of the Gospels are unprecedented, unequaled, singular texts...

...It is the mainstay of my life and work...

...Lewis...

...She includes some of an own memorable poetry in her essay responding to the book of Jude that ends with this personal testimony: "It is the tension between bitterness and joy that I first perceived in Hebrew melodies and later learned from Christian writers to try to capture in English...

...Alfred Corn, the poet who edited this book with imagination and perception, enhances its value by including some Jewish as well as Christian writers to comment on the books of the New Testament...

...Grace Schulman is a poet and translator who also contributed an essay to Congregation: Contemporary Writers Read the Jewish Bible, the book which preceded and served as a model for this volume...

...In a narrative line so powerful and clean as to seem as inevitable and memorable as music, Price concludes that "...with every relevant manuscript discovery of the past century, we come closer to understanding that, once we concede the nearly intolerable premise of John's theology, nothing in his book is past the scope of a watchful, sensitive man of his time-certainly nothing past the narrative reach of a man who stood, to the end of his long life, as the single pupil in a group of twelve who could be called Beloved...

...The Pulitzer Prize poet Anthony Hecht reminds us that "It is impossible to be a Jew of my generation without being keenly aware of anti-Semitism, and sensitivity on this point alone has invited a study of Christian doctrine...

...Dillard grew up to take it seriously, to believe that Christ's washing of the disciples' feet-"the dirty toes"- means that it's all right to be human, that "God knows we are human, and full of evil, all of us, and we are his people anyway, and the sheep of his pasture...

...Its grand-scale, vivid, and shifting tableaux call all in doubt...

...These and many other smug intellectual ideologues who believe Jesus Christ to be a "crutch" for psychologically needy people will be shocked to see the views expressed in Incarnation by some of our most respected contemporary writers...

...Annie Dillard here calls doubt into doubt, scoffing at the safe, Sunday-school teaching of "this scandalous document" which adults tried to use as a kind of tranquilizing agent: "By dipping us children in the Bible so often they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce as charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels...

...In no other book our culture owns can we see a clearer graph of that need, that tall enormous radiant arc-fragile creatures made by God's hand, hurled into space, then caught at last by a man in some ways like ourselves, through the ark of God...

...Luke is a piece torn from wilderness...

...Schulman is "a Jew whose mentors (from Julian of Norwich to Gerard Manley Hopkins) were devoted Christians who wrote in English...

...Many of these well-known novelists and poets are schooled in the latest biblical scholarship-as well as the latest cultural fashions-and in writing their personal reactions to the books of the New Testament, some of them present the most lucid, lyric, and convincing testimonies of Christian faith I have ever encountered, from St Augustine to C.S...

...With the availability of uncluttered new translations, attentive to the rapt storytelling of the Greek, we can meet John's knowledge face-to-face...

...When I ventured to suggest to these "post-Christians" (as they called themselves) that theirs was but one interpretation of the story, I was reprimanded for being out of tune with the latest biblical scholarship agreed on by enlightened people of all faiths...

...He forcefully attacks the "mistaken and self-serving Christian commonplace...that makes the New Testament the gospel of love and the Old Testament the book of law...

...Bizarre as it is in so many parts, he says in the clearest voice we have the sentence mankind craves from stories-The Maker of all things loves and wants me...

...Not all the contributors express the kind of singing praise and faith we hear from Price and Dillard...

...It is a blur of power, violent in its theological and narrative heat, abrupt and inexplicable...

...from Columbia, no less...

...Their advertised "new look" at Jesus was set up to prove through carefully preselected scriptural analysis that Jesus was a great moral teacher but nothing more than that...

...the rest of the story, including the Resurrection, was wishful myth tacked on later for recruitment through the ages of innocents such as myself to a self-serving Christianity whose rites are quaintly outmoded and whose spirit is moribund...

...It is a book that will make a difference...

...Just as important, though, are those who wrestle with difficult texts and honestly confess, for instance, the "dismay" of novelist John Hersey, who finds in Revelation "the total negation of the hopeful words of the Gospel...

...It shatters and jolts...

...These writers are really going for it...

...Dan Wakef ield Four years ago I attended a seminar on "The Life of Jesus" conducted by three Jungian analysts and their own disciples...

...I got up breathless and tingling from reading Price and Dillard, and was, at the very least, engrossed in all of these pieces that include John Updike on Matthew, Mary Gordon on Mark, Larry Woiwode on Acts, Amy Clampitt on Thessalonians, and Frederick Buechner on Corinthians...