The Presence of Eternity. The Gifford Lectures of 1955. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1957, 60.
63 Breech, James. The Silence of Jesus: The Authentic Voice of the Historical Man. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983, 218. He adds: “Jesus might be more complex and original than commonly supposed.”
64 Sanders, E. P. Jesus and Judaism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985.
65 Stauffer, Ethelbert. Jesus and his Story. London: SCM Press, 1960, 11, 125.
66 Bornkamm, Günther. Jesus of Nazareth. Tr. Irene and Fraser McLuskey, with James M. Robinson. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1960, 56.
67 Wedderburn, Alexander J. M. Jesus and the Historians. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010, 294.
68 Moltmann, Jürgen. The Crucified God: 40th Anniversary Edition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015, 151.
69 Schillebeeckx, Edward. Interim Report on the Books of Jesus and Christ. New York: Crossroad, 1981, 12.
70 Bultmann, Rudolf. What is Theology? Ed. Eberhard Jüngel and Klaus W. Müller. Tr. Roy A. Harrisville. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997, 88.
71 Marion, Jean-Luc. The Visible and the Revealed. Tr. by Christina M. Gschwandtner. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, 71.
72 Achtemeier, Paul John. An Introduction to the New Hermeneutic. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1969, 96. He adds: “The new hermeneutic must provide the existential questions that will allow the text to function as what it is, i.e., as a linguistic response to, and illumination of, existence,” 98.
73 Thiselton, Anthony C. New Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1992, 7.
74 Bultmann, Rudolf. Jesus Christ and Mythology. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958, 18.
The gospel writers open their accounts of the life of Jesus, his biography75 (however incomplete and fragmentary) with different beginnings, with an origin each of them believes to be decisive for the events to follow as they lead to a culmination neither expected nor foreseen. Jesus begins as the pre-creation logos in John, after his baptism of regeneration in Mark, and with two versions of the virgin birth in Matthew and Luke, all four of them complementary and with Jesus coming into the world as an inauguration and leading to a subsequent history for all people who become more than any particularity related to their origin. Girard’s argument is succinct as it is compelling. “In order not to betray Christ’s revelation, one must always keep all four Gospels in mind at once.”76 At once: without simply relying on comparison, the inter-relation of the three Synoptics, or the uniqueness attributed to John in order to single him out (or worse, to separate him) the revelations of Jesus are inseparable from his words and his acts. But when the writers of the gospels are attempting to portray Jesus according to specific needs, for their immediate communities, or in developing the “good news,” they are also relating him back to a three-part tradition in Jewish history – the patriarchal, the monarchical, and the prophetic as irreproachable foundations, even when, in the case of Matthew and Luke, they present the extraordinary origin of his life with a virgin woman who conceives him through a divine impregnation with the Holy Spirit. The virgin birth has no precedence; scripture cannot anticipate Jesus. Equally if not more noticeable: when the gospels begin to reach their conclusion, neither Jesus’ death nor his resurrection could be imagined for those who anticipated a Messiah or a king. From the moment of his death, all references to prophetic predictions are abandoned; relations to the past are severed. The virgin birth and the resurrection are instances of a double-relation: Jesus was prior to all inceptions and all culminations.
His consciousness cannot be determined by time or history.
The genealogies in Matthew and Luke are also incommensurable with Jesus’ advent, from a virgin (and that means without a pater, without paternity, with no ←31 | 32→antecedents) and as a first-born the letter to the Hebrews unequivocally defines as “without father, without mother, without genealogy” (Heb. 7:3). N.T. Wright believes that “the gospels are biographies,”77 as long as the reader also recognizes ensuing problems in such a bios. The nativity stories are both divided by opposing representations of Jesus who announces himself repeatedly to be “the son of man” while at the same time restraining his individuality by a relying on a past history that has effectively prepared for his coming. The writers of the virgin birth are under considerable strain and cannot fully realize the implications of their sources or their editorializing. Jesus cannot be an outcome. Matthew and Luke are so intent on preserving his multi-layered descent to a historical beginning that they cannot see how the virgin birth and “the son of man” (the only title he gives himself) are absolutely related. We are not concerned at all with the supposed “discrepancy in details in the two infancy narratives”78 as the incommensurability between Jesus’ virgin birth and his genealogy. The reader must therefore be deliberate and attentive to every biographical moment; long-held assumptions can be at least temporarily suspended. In existence, Jesus may have been born in the nativity stories; his presence, however, becomes all the more remarkable not when the prophets are relied upon to give him authority but, on the contrary, when his period as a minister completely informs the reader about the unique meaning of the events surrounding his birth. His revelations are immediate; his appearance in the world initiates a series of events whose consequences will only be recognized much later, for example, when the days preceding Passover also become a commentary on the night of both anguish and liberation from Egyptian captivity at the time of Moses and the Israelites.
Rather than pointing out some inherent contradiction or implausibility in any of the beginnings provided by the accounts of the virgin birth in the gospels of Matthew and Luke – each of them, according to the historian motivated by the verification of events, cannot be true, that is, factual – the two gospels will be read comprehensively in order to stress, always, their inter-relatedness and their fundamental importance as a totality. An attempt will be made to present not so much one beginning as two inaugurations that are decisive for leading the reader towards biographical events that are specific, chronological, and ultimately teleological, an end without closure or finality – from the virgin births of Matthew ←32 | 33→and Luke as they lead to being “the son of man,” a first-born, moreover, who transforms his body and blood such that it will be infinitely internalized and capable of renewing the whole of humanity.
Jesus’ allegorical body as bread and the Passover sacrifice of an animal will confront each other on the eve of his own death.
A certain relationship will be interminable between the gospels’ narratives and their interpretation
