of Port Meadow or to the occasional college “eight” that rowed past with a repetitive crunch of oars hitting the water as a single stroke. I was too deep in thought to be distracted by any of that. I realized there was no way I could devote any further time, let alone the next couple of years, to, as they say, “learning more and more about less and less,” in trying to distill a thesis from the life and work of such a remarkable bigot. I am aware of the numerous attempts since then to whitewash this aspect of Chrysostom’s preaching—to “see it in context” or allow for this or that allegedly ameliorating factor. But the unvarnished truth is that he preached hatred against Jews on theologically based grounds, and it remains what it always was—a scandal.
The second, and by then unnecessary, confirmation of my decision to surrender the whole plan of doctoral studies on Chrysostom also came from my ever-deeper immersion in his thinking. In the kind of ironic twist that life at times confronts us with, it was gradually dawning upon me that Chrysostom’s approach to the Bible was in essence diametrically opposed not just to some of the Fathers whom I most admired in earliest Christianity (most notably Clement of Alexandria, followed by the great Origen, c.185–c.254 CE) but to my own deepest instincts. I was learning day by day that the greatest preacher of the early centuries was himself a rigid literalist as he expounded Holy Scripture. In fact, he was the key advocate for the entire Antiochene school of Bible exegesis based upon wholly literalist principles. In short, he was a fundamentalist roughly 1,500 years before the term was even coined! The more I was learning about theology in general, the less appeal this entire approach had for either my heart or my brain.
That Easter I attended a two-week special seminar in Switzerland held by the World Council of Churches. It was designed to immerse budding theologians of different denominations in the world of Eastern Orthodoxy, both the theology and the worship. The first week was spent hearing lectures and participating in discussion groups at Château de Bossy, the WCC’s unique conference centre by the lake, about fifteen miles from Geneva. From there we travelled by bus through glorious scenery to a Russian Orthodox monastery in the nineteenth arrondissement of Paris for Holy Week and Easter Day. Since I knew very little about the Orthodox churches, it was a mind-expanding experience of the first order. The choir of the monastery was made up of a group of Serbian men, and listening to them brought back memories of hearing the Don Cossacks singers at Massey Hall years before. The unaccompanied singing was powerful, haunting and beautiful at the same time.
The balance of my year of graduate studies at Oxford was spent in attending the odd lecture in the general field of New Testament and in pounding the books in the libraries to get up to speed on the latest scholarship with a view to eventually taking on the job of teaching at Wycliffe College.
On our return to Toronto, I still had to fulfill my commitment to pick up my ministry at St. Margaret’s-in-the-Pines for an additional year, as promised to Bishop Snell. At the college, the New Testament chair or professorship was now vacant and the principal, Rev. Dr. Leslie Hunt, was anxious to have me give at least one two-hour class a week while the rest of the faculty filled in the gaps as best they could. Since there were plenty of loose ends to be picked up in the parish due to my absence, and inasmuch as the teaching, with preparation and travel time included, meant a whole day at least downtown, I had a busy schedule indeed. As well, there seemed to be more demand for baptisms, weddings and funerals than ever before. And in the spring, our third child, Mary Catharine, was born and our family was complete.
In the late summer of 1964, the men of the parish helped us to move into our new quarters at the college with the aid of a large rented truck. Our lodging was to be an ancient, rambling two-storey apartment above some lecture rooms in the college itself. The living and dining rooms looked out upon the athletic wing of Hart House to the south and Queen’s Park, behind the Ontario Parliament buildings, to the east. The children loved the storybook nature of the place, with its high ceilings, numerous staircases and even a quaint former coal fireplace. Being in the heart of downtown Toronto and yet in the midst of such a park-like setting, with the university campus all around, was a major change from the rapidly expanding suburb of West Hill we had just left. They enjoyed it all to the hilt.
In many ways academic life suited my particular personality and training. I had always had a love of learning and an interest in communicating ideas to others. So I threw myself into the ongoing task of thoroughly updating my awareness of where Biblical studies were going and where they had been in the past. There were fresh lectures to prepare and graduate seminars as well. What interests me most looking back is the way in which my entire approach to the Bible in general and the New Testament in particular was changing as my knowledge increased. Serious questions, some of which have not yet been answered to my satisfaction, others of which came to fruition in the research leading up to The Pagan Christ, began to occupy more and more of my study time. To understand what was going on, one has to realize that the average person in the pew, never mind the average person in the street, hasn’t much more than a faint clue, if that, of just how incredibly complex the task of interpreting the Bible has become in the light of all that is now known. Take for example the Gospels. At first sight they seem to be simple, straightforward narratives. In its outline, the Jesus Story that they all tell is quite transparently set forth. But whole libraries could be composed of commentaries and a host of other books and dictionaries struggling to explicate their true nature and meaning.
The Gospels may appear to be biographies of a historical person who was also the “Son of God.” But looked at with discernment and in the clear light of day, it soon becomes very apparent that they are not like any other biographies ever written. In fact, they are not biographies at all; they are best described as a benign form of Christian propaganda. In other words, their aim is to convert others to the Christian faith. They have little or no concern for the five Ws of any normal historical narrative: who, why, what, where, when. None of the authors (or editors) of the Gospels is known for certain. Nor are their precise dates or places of origin. The earliest of the four, generally agreed to be Mark, has no birth story or reference to anything in Jesus’s life until John the Baptist comes out of the desert preaching and he is baptized by him. We know nothing about Jesus’s appearance, whether he was bearded or clean-shaven, short or tall, slim or chubby, with long or short hair, blue-eyed or brown. Absolutely nothing. To add to the confusion, the Gospels frequently contradict one another. For example, Matthew and Luke disagree over Jesus’s place of birth, and the Resurrection accounts differ markedly, as I have shown in Water into Wine.
I found it difficult at times, since the students were almost uniformly conservative in outlook—that’s why they came to Wycliffe in the first place—to raise these kinds of issues with them. For certain, the question of whether or not Jesus was a truly historical person was a cloud “no larger than a man’s hand” on my horizon at the time, so it was never mentioned at all. Some of the largest and growing questions in my mind were accordingly kept in pectore, as is said when the Pope wishes to keep secret the names of certain cardinals whom he has elevated until it is politically safe to reveal them. Nevertheless, the Form Critics (scholars who study the literary form of Scripture material) had to be dealt with. They had given evidence that many if not most of the Gospel stories had had a lengthy history outside the New Testament before being included, and that they conformed to certain recognized literary formulae, whether they were stories of miracles or brief anecdotes ending in a pithy saying. And there was much, much more. While expounding familiar texts in the classroom, I was privately busy with some more acute academic puzzles and difficulties of my own. They would be many years in the background of my thinking and research.
In the sixties, when I did most of my seminary teaching—apart from the lectures given on the theology and practice of mass media in the first half of the eighties at the Toronto School of Theology—one of the foremost themes in New Testament scholarship was the increasing interest in the alleged Jewishness of Jesus. I duly relayed this to the students in class, but at the same time there was a dimension of this development that it seemed nobody was addressing. I had no immediate answer myself, but the question niggled away on the fringes of my consciousness all the same. The problem was this: The scholars were (and today still
