The Gospel of the Beloved Discipline
Block, Ed Jr.
LIKE ONE OF US? Ed Block, Jr. s if imitating the length of the texts from which it borrows part of its title, The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple is a short book. Its conception is...
...The book reaches something of a climax in Jesus' encounter with the Roman prefect, Pilatus...
...But authentic in what sense...
...Ed Block, Jr., teaches English at Marquette University in Milwaukee...
...A bit later Jesus says, "I trust only those who know they are empty of God...
...Jesus says, "I do not have the power to straighten your legs," but, when she replies, "You have a greater power, rabbi," Jesus can only stand silent...
...Miryam and her baby escape the slaughter of the innocents because a soldier pantomimes hacking them to death...
...Another comes when Jesus meets a paralytic woman...
...On this journey, the narrative continues to raise questions about who Jesus thought he was...
...The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple, recorded in ninety-five "chapters" of varying length, is this account...
...But it is she who tells him that he has a thirst he'll never satisfy...
...Coming out of the desert, Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman...
...Neither can anyone else," he says...
...A blind man, claiming to see more than the sighted, reverses a typical evangelist's theme...
...Commonweal 2 5 May 22, 1998...
...Does this portrayal of Jesus and his followers as a ragged band of outcasts highlight Jesus' love for the poor...
...The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple has little to do with mystery and almost everything to do with tenuousness...
...Commonweal 2 4 May 22, 1998 Jesus and his small band of followers proceed toward Jerusalem...
...Whoever she is, her Gospel makes for a fascinating--and troubling--read...
...The jacket blurb claims that this gospel rings with authenticity...
...Miryam is an odd child who hears voices...
...Its conception is simple, and clever...
...The final chapter finds the Samaritan woman with Miryam at the foot of the cross...
...He is not dead,' Miryam said....'I hear him singing.' The Samaritan studied his face in the starlight...
...His Gospel may incline readers to see the canonical Gospels in a different light...
...He also hears voices...
...Yosef is very young...
...Later Jesus meets with an insurrectionist band...
...The woman also has the last word: "When you didn't touch me, I saw that you too have a need for healing...
...The technique is a standard postmodern one: radical defamiliarization...
...An insight lies buffed here, but Jesus' denials contradict what ancient Christian, Jewish, and pagan sources all agree upon: that Jesus did extraordinary things, not easily explained by human means...
...Thoughts were little more than scrambled sound . . . . So the secret names [of God] returned, cried out by a voice to whom no speaker belonged...
...The four evangelists learned---or hit upon by lucky accident--a common narrative trick...
...This gospel begins with its own infancy narrative...
...However, Jesus' conversation with the insurrectionists sounds more like pop anthropolitical cleverness than the words of an itinerant Jewish mystic...
...The beloved disciple" is a Samaritan woman, perhaps the unforgettable Samaritan woman of John's Gospel...
...A more troubling question might be: How much do the four Gospels merely reflect the all-too-human desire to find in an unusual person, a morethan-human power and meaning...
...The book's inevitable denouement is Jesus' death, but it ends short of the Resurrection...
...He and his cousin Yohanon play together...
...This portrayal of Jesus reminds me of the line from Joan Osborne's song, "What if God was one of us, just a slob like one of us...
...The wonders are always there before we come to them...
...Like his mother, Jesus is an odd and dreamy boy, who sometimes wanders off by himself...
...Overall, this "inside" look at the "forty days in the desert" reduces rather than opens Jesus' experience...
...External narrative is often more mysterious than stream of consciousness...
...Jesus wanders into the hill country where he meditates, listens to the parables of rabbis, and is taken for a madman...
...Again and again Jesus asserts that he cannot perform wonders...
...This is another of the numerous reversals of familiar Gospel details...
...Showing her their account of Jesus' life, they prompt her to recall the events herself...
...Jesus also has "mystical" experiences...
...Jesus is apprenticed to his father Yosef, who builds "great houses for merchants, Roman officials, and priests," but after he sees Yosef beat an old slave, Jesus leaves home with back wages but no inheritance...
...There are also surprising stories of "talents" and new interpretations of the creation story...
...This is the first of several such encounters, which remind the reader that the first century was a time of political upheaval...
...In an interesting Nietzschean twist, Jesus tells a rich man unable to give up his vanity to practice it boldly...
...Perhaps that is the picture of Jesus which our post-modern age desires...
...First he doesn't see a chameleon but sees and is seen by a raven with a dot of light in its eye...
...He meets Yohanon at a river, and when Jesus falls in, Yohanon pries the hand loose from the rock to which Jesus clings...
...Followers of Jesus of Nazareth approach an old woman who was also a follower...
...Do Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John give us a sanitized picture of Jesus' life and times...
...Praising Carse's Breakfast at the Victory: The Mysticism of Ordinary Experience in these pages (October 20,1995), Lawrence Cunningham credits Carse with catching "the changeableness of human existence" and "the mystery of human love and the tenuous hold we have on time...
...Again, however, Jesus' silence in the face of accusations seems a blank silence...
...His open mouth, black with flies, sounded with the hum of their feast....Not until dawn did she notice the raven, motionless, holding her in its gaze, close enough that she could see the dot of light in its eye...
...Throughout The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple the reader finds strange echoes of the canonical Gospels...
...James Carse is professor emeritus of religious history at New York University...
Vol. 125 • May 1998 • No. 10
