Whitley Strieber's "new vision" of Jesus

Whitley Strieber is a one-of-a-kind thinker, and his book Jesus: A New Vision, published in January of this year, brings his unique approach to bear on the question of who Jesus is and what he did. It is a very exciting and stimulating book to read, full of surprising interpretations and insights. Unfortunately, in the end I don't think it really adds up to the coherent "new vision" of Jesus promised in the subtitle.

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Jesus the man

Strieber's foundational assumption is that Jesus was a man, and that everything he did is therefore within the range of human capabilities and would in principle be possible for others to do as well. This does not mean that Strieber tries to explain Jesus away as "just a man" in a secular way. He accepts many of the extraordinary things attributed to Jesus, including the resurrection -- but where a conventional Christian would see these as proof that Jesus was God incarnate, a sort of being fundamentally different from ourselves, Strieber sees them as proof that human beings have undreamed-of potential. Jesus did things no human being could do, says the conventional Christian, and therefore he was no mere human being but God. Jesus did things no human being could do, says Strieber -- and that proves that human beings can do such things after all.

This is broadly similar to my own assumption, that Jesus was a man who became divine, and that others may follow him and do what he did. He told his disciples on numerous occasions that they could be like him, even that they would work greater miracles than his own. The idea that Jesus was like Superman -- human in appearance but actually fundamentally different in origin and nature -- is incorrect. Jesus was not a God disguised as a man; nor did he have (as per classical theology) "two natures," human and divine; rather, he was and is living proof that human nature and divine nature are one and the same -- that "now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be" (1 John 3:2).

Strieber doesn't go this far. As I will discuss below, he holds onto the idea of an impersonal monotheistic God and therefore prefers to say that Jesus was not a god.

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Miracles

Strieber's approach to Jesus' miracles is a strange mixture of belief and secular explaining-away.

Jesus didn't literally turn water to wine because "that's impossible"; the story is symbolic. (By the way, Strieber reaches the same conclusion of Bruce Charlton, that the wedding at Cana was Jesus' own marriage to Mary Magdalene.) Most of his healings were probably just the placebo effect. When Jesus raised someone from the dead, what probably happened was that he revived a seemingly dead person with smelling salts, a trick he may have learned from the magicians in Egypt. Strieber accepts the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of James but goes Jefferson Bible on it -- "once the miracles attributed to him are stripped away," he says, it probably offers a pretty accurate account of his childhood.

Walking on water, though -- yeah, that probably really happened. There are many accounts of levitation, with multiple witnesses, in the historical record, and so gravity-defying miracles are credible. What Strieber does not mention -- he's trying to be Whitley the scholar here, not Whitley the weird-experience-haver -- is that he himself has experienced levitation and knows firsthand that it is real, and that that is his real reason for finding this particular miracle more credible than the others.

One reason for Strieber's seemingly inconsistent approach to miracles is his assumption that miracles are "not supernatural, but caused by natural forces that remain to this day little understood, but which [Jesus] did understand, at least well enough to make use of them." Jesus was not God, and his miracles are not proofs of his omnipotence. He didn't have the power to do anything, only some specific things, for specific reasons. Therefore, his working one miracle is in no way evidence that he could also have worked another, entirely different miracle.

For Strieber, Jesus' miracle fall into three categories: (1) those we can explain away, at least in principle (healings via placebo effect, smelling salts, etc.); (2) those we cannot yet explain away, but which are well enough attested that they probably did happen (walking on water, the resurrection); and (3) those which we can dismiss as "impossible" (turning water to wine, making clay sparrows come to life, etc.).

I guess I'm in broad sympathy with this approach, but I think Strieber is a little too quick to put things in the third category. As someone who has sometimes experienced six impossible things before breakfast, he really ought to be more willing to suspend judgment even on some of the less believable miracle stories.

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Hidden helpers

One interesting point Strieber raises is that Jesus seems in the Gospels to have had a group of people -- distinct from his disciples -- secretly helping him behind the scenes. He mentions, for example, that on Palm Sunday there was already a colt waiting for him to ride on, and someone had provided the people with palm branches in preparation for his entrance. Other mysterious figures -- the man in white who runs away in Mark, the woman who anoints him in Luke -- are also tentatively connected with this group. I made a similar speculation in my notes on John 1:

When John says, "he that sent me to baptize with water, the same said unto me . . . ," I wonder if he is describing a direct communication from God himself, or John had some human master or teacher out in the desert, lost to history, who gave him these instructions.

Strieber reaches no conclusions about who these people may have been, but it's an interesting hypothesis.

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The sacrificed god

Many (beginning with Frazer in The Golden Bough) have noted the parallels between Jesus' story and those of other "sacrificed gods" who rise from the dead, such as Osiris and Tammuz. Believers see this as God inspiring the pagans to create myths that foreshadowed Christ; skeptics see it as evidence that the story of Jesus is fake, cobbled together from myths and not from history. Strieber's own take is unusual.

I think that there is another way to look at it, which is that Jesus was re-creating these earlier passions, using the same theory of sympathetic magic that had inspired the would-be messiahs who had come before him to recreate the Moses entry into the Land of Canaan. Having seen that this method had failed, he was attempting another.

Strieber elaborates on this at great length, explaining how Jesus "goaded the Romans into executing him" and deliberately did it in such a way as to echo various myths about "scapegoat gods," even when this had little to do with fulfilling the messianic prophecies of Judaism.

Strieber is not clear on what purpose this served -- or if indeed it served any purpose at all. He describes it as another instance of the same sort of "sympathetic magic" that had failed in the past. Did Jesus' resurrection somehow depend on enacting this mythological drama? Was it done to ensure that his story would resonate with the Greeks and Romans and be remembered? Strieber never really reaches a conclusion here; he merely proposes that Jesus was consciously attempting to be a second Adonis as well as a second Moses and David.

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The resurrection

Strieber discusses the Shroud of Turin extensively, seeing it as very strong evidence that Jesus' corpse was transformed in a blast of radiant energy into -- something else. 

When there is proper testing of the Shroud, what we are almost certain to find is that Jesus turned into a version of himself made of light. He may have appeared human to those who saw him, but he was no longer an organic being. What happened was that a rare energetic event occurred that projected him back into the world for a time.

This misses the whole point of the resurrection, which is that it was a resurrection of the body. There's nothing revolutionary about people living on after death as spirits or "beings of light," but the resurrected Jesus made a point of demonstrating that he had a body of flesh and bone. Strieber's weird non-explanation, that he "may have appeared human" because "a rare energetic event occurred" (what?), does not make it clear how Jesus' post-resurrection appearances were anything other than ordinary "ghost" apparitions. Ghosts, whatever they are, are commonplace and were accepted as such in the ancient world; appearances of the ghost of Jesus would not have led to the belief that a dead man had come back to life.

Strieber says that Jesus showed that resurrection is possible for all of us but isn't clear on how. At times he seems to suggest that we can find the key to resurrection by further scientific examination of the Shroud of Turin. At others, he says we can transcend death by "following the Jesus path" -- meaning, uh, living by the Beatitudes or something. At any rate, he doesn't think we need to actually follow Jesus or believe in him; the book's closing sentence is, "Belief or faith or none, it does not matter: Jesus is there." How he got that message from the Gospels is anyone's guess!

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God

Focusing on the burst of radiant energy evident in the Shroud of Turin, and on Jesus' appearance to Saul of Tarsus as a blinding light, Strieber connects these with other "incidents of light" such as the burning bush, the Transfiguration, and so on.

I think that there was a consciousness with high intelligence behind the resurrection event and all the other incidents of light that I have discussed. . . . I think that part of the message of the Shroud is that, by following the Jesus path, we all have the potential to enter the same state of light that he did.

Basically, he identifies this conscious light with God -- or rather, with his typical hedging, "a higher entity that, for want of a better word, we might as well call God." In what seems to me to be a remarkably obtuse misreading of the message of Jesus, he says that this God is entirely unlike a human being and that we need to stop anthropomorphizing it.

This conscious energy -- this light -- is concerned about us or it would not intervene in our lives. . . . But how can we relate to a consciousness that does not have a nature that we can understand or even a form that we can detect? . . . We have never in all our history had a concept of god that is not sentimentalized in some way like the vague idea of "God the Father," or personalized like the old gods of the Romans and the Egyptians. There is every reason now for that to change.

Strieber somehow fails to notice that the "idea of God the Father," far from being some "vague" and "sentimentalized" holdover from the infancy of our species, is in fact one of the central, and most revolutionary messages of Jesus. Even the notoriously skeptical Jesus Seminar (which Strieber references with depressing credulity) lists Jesus' calling God "Father" as one of his most undeniably authentic teachings. And this was a radical new doctrine, not a traditional Jewish idea. Jesus called us not to abandon anthropomorphism but to take it seriously. The vague idea which we really need to move beyond is the Hellenized view of God as an abstraction "that does not have a nature that we can understand."

When Saul asked the blinding light, "Who art thou, Lord?" the answer was, "I am Jesus whom thou persecutest" (Acts 9:5). If, as Strieber says, the "conscious energy" behind these "incidents of light" is to be identified with God, then Jesus had become God without ceasing to be Jesus, without ceasing to have a human nature. 

Moved by this experience, Paul was later to preach:

Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device. And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent (Acts 17:29-30).

We are the offspring of God, and therefore God is not like unto gold or silver or stone. What is he like, then? Like us. The impersonal, "non-sentimentalized" God promoted by Strieber is just another example of the ignorance that God winked at in the past, but which is no longer so excusable now that Jesus has come.

As so often, William Blake put it best: "God appears, and God is Light, to those poor souls who dwell in Night; but does a Human Form display to those who dwell in realms of Day."