SESIONES DE APRENDIZAJE
DESPUÉS DE LA LECTURA.
Like many scholars and artists before him, Ricci recognizes that the Gospels are not
constructed according to chronology or causality. Also like them, he turns this recognition into a license to wrench the Gospel mosaic pieces from their narrative structures and to rearrange them according to whatever new grid he chooses. Not surprisingly, when such pieces are placed into a new narrative context, they often take on very different meanings.
We have already seen when discussing the "pink" passages that this technique is typical in Ricci's narrative. Let us now examine one very important tile found in the Gospels that Ricci appropriates and uses as a bedrock piece for his new fictional Jesus and discuss how its new narrative context affects the Christological portrait in Testament.
The integral piece that Ricci lifts from the Gospels and places within a completely different context is that of Jesus' unorthodox conception. Both of the canonical infancy narratives relate how Jesus' mother Mary became pregnant out of wedlock and not by her future husband Joseph (Matt 1:18-25; Luke 1:26-38). The Gospel context in which this information is placed is that of a larger narrative that paints Jesus as the Son of God. In that story, Mary's unorthodox
pregnancy is used as a piece of evidence to further prove Jesus' identity as the Son of God, the Messiah. This same information when used in Testament, however, instead of pointing
towards Jesus' divine sonship serves to confirm his identity as a bastard. While Mary becomes pregnant out of wedlock in Ricci's narrative just as she does in the Gospel versions, the
paternity of her child in Testament is far from divine. There Jesus is the bastard son of a Roman soldier and as such is forever barred from the Israelite assembly.
101 In the novel, Jesus' bastardry haunts him for his entire life and becomes the psychological key to explaining Jesus' person and ministry. Jesus' inclusive ministry that extends the kingdom of God to outsiders, such as pagans, lepers, and women, is tied to his own exclusion from Israel. Each of the four witnesses notices the way in which Jesus identifies with the socially marginalized although only two of them know the truth—that Jesus more than
identifies with them but is actually one of them.146 Ricci does an excellent job offering human explanations for Jesus’ character formation, and his bastardry is by far the most essential key to unlocking his complicated psyche and to explaining his ministry.
In the end, however, Ricci's Jesus ironically turns out to look very much like the Gospel Jesus because of his concern for including outcasts and for expanding the kingdom of God. Yet the character motivation for doing so is precisely opposite what we see in the Gospels. There, Jesus' central identity as the Son of God motivates him to draw all people into his Father's kingdom. In the novel, Jesus' central identity as a bastard and thus an outcast from Israel's kingdom motivates him to be more compassionate and to include others into "his god's special kingdom" (330). By placing just one key piece from the Gospel mosaic—Jesus' unorthodox conception—into a new narrative context, Ricci both transforms the person of Jesus but at the same time ironically produces one who, like his Gospel counterpart, makes a part of his central message the inclusion of outsiders into the kingdom of God.
146 Here are a couple of examples of how Jesus' own exclusion connected him with the marginalized:
Judas: “I thought I understood something in him then, though I could not quite have expressed it, that indeed he was like the lepers in some way, or even Rakiil, all those who were marked, though he had a prince’s bearing and the looks of one” (60).
Mary: “So I heard how he accepted pagans among his followers, and rejected circumcision and the law, yet still proclaimed the one God. All this, I thought, must come from the knowledge of his own bastardy and his exclusion from God’s assembly, such that he sought all means to make a place for the outcast and thus justify himself” (296).
102 5. Conclusion
Postmodern works often not only question traditional historical assumptions but also the notion of any absolute historical truth. They are able to cast doubt on the authority of
traditional authoritative texts by emphazing the role of interpretation and narrative within them. Texts that claim any absolute truth are looked upon with suspicion and are often thought to be the products of the powerful elite used to justify their positions by creating a particular version of history.
Ricci and his novel are products of both postmodernity and modernity. From the former, Ricci draws a skepticism of authoritative texts and of historical truth, both of which the
Gospels claim to be. From the latter, he has developed an assumption as to what in reality can and cannot exist, and thus, according to such a modern view, the miraculous simply is not possible and must be explained in some other manner.
By starting from this position, Ricci sets out to challenge the accuracy of the Gospels’ testimonies, particularly regarding their interpretations and claims regarding history. The means by which he subverts their testimonies are threefold. On one level, he calls into question the Gospel narratives by providing counter-narratives that contort or explicitly contradict the evangelists’ testimonies regarding specific events and sayings.
On the second level, he ties the least reliable narrator's testimony with those of the "later" evangelists. Since Mary Magdalene was the only one of the four witnesses who by the end of the novel is said to still be a part of the early Christian community, it can be assumed that her unreliable, credulous, and emotional views are the ones that have the greatest effect upon the evangelists' writings. This implicit link does little to bolster faith in the Gospels when the reader, following the cues of the novel and actualizing the reading pact, makes the connection between them and Magdalene's rewrite.
103 On a third level, Ricci undermines the very notion of testimony by framing all of his own witnesses, Mary Magdalene in particular, as unreliable narrators. By discrediting its own witnesses, Testament successfully undermines faith in testimony in general and in the Gospels in particular. It does so, however, at the cost of reflexively undermining its own narrative since the reader is left questioning whether these testimonies offer the truth and whether there is ever any real truth to be found or only interpretation. In this manner, Testament could be a poster novel for postmodernity. Ricci likely sees the undermining of his own witnesses as worthwhile so that his readers may make the comparison between his witnesses and the Gospel evangelists and accept the point that just as Ricci’s witnesses were wont at times to invent so too were the evangelists. If testimony in general should be doubted, then why should anyone trust the Gospels in particular?
Yet the doubt that Ricci attempts to create is not the same as disproof, and in order for skepticism to be true to its aims, it must turn back and question even itself and the doubt that it has engendered. Ordinarily throughout the novel, the idea of critiquing the novel's own
skeptical position does not occur. There is one occasion, however, when one of Ricci's narrators does just this. Right after discounting the resurrection myth circulating about Jesus, Simon of Gergesa becomes skeptical about his own skepticism and says, “For all I know, it might have happened that way—wasn’t I there myself when Jesus brought Elazar [Lazarus] back, who’d been dead as a stone” (453). Such an admission of the uncertainty of his own doubt is an admirable, if infrequent, one on Ricci's part.
By dismantling the credibility of the Gospels and by foregrounding the role that interpretation obviously plays in any telling of history, Ricci presents himself as a heroic liberator whose keen objective and unbiased skills of deduction have aided in freeing Jesus' life from superstition and theological bias. While Ricci presents his aim as solely that of
104 neutral and are influenced by an undeclared anti-religious agenda. Far from being free of the distorting suppositions of religious belief that he attacks, Ricci's account is influenced by his own views on the nature of reality and what is possible, which are as contestable as the views he seeks to call into question.
Ricci also fails to recognize that an admission of the likely inclusion of imaginative or interpretative elements within the Gospels does not automatically discredit their ability to function as reliable testimonies. A proper understanding of the Gospels within their literary genre of ancient biographies explains how inventive interpretation can coincide with reliable testimony: the aim of these biographies is to testify to the person and character of Jesus by providing a portrait that is a faithful representation of the person's character not by providing a video recording or a literal transcript of each event. Thus, even fiction is a possible medium to be used when painting a truthful portrait of Jesus so long as its colors remain faithful to his character and person. Ricci acknowledges no distinction between actuality and reality and makes an uncritical equation of the two that prevents his understanding of the Gospels as iconic representations of the real Jesus.
When seen from an alternative perspective, many of the critiques that Ricci makes of the Gospels appear as strengths. For example, the characteristics used to cast Mary Magdalene as an unreliable narrator and which are implicitly applied to the evangelists as well may be viewed from another angle as validations of her testimony. Is not love a way of knowing that allows the lover to understand the beloved in a manner not possible for those outside the relationship? Some things have to be experienced firsthand in order for them to be
understood.147 While Mary Magdalene is derogatively characterized as credulous, perhaps it is
147 Even Judas discusses the necessity of experiential knowing for truly understanding Jesus’ teachings: “But many of Yeshua’s notions, I came to learn, were not the sort that could be reduced to simple principles; rather they had to be felt, as it were, and lived out, so that it was only the experience of them that could bring you to
105 simply that she possesses faith, and is faith not another way of knowing that is possible only as one takes that Kierkegaardean leap and enters into belief? Finally, although Mary Magdalene may be young, was it not Jesus himself who said that we each must become children in order to enter the kingdom of God?
Even Testament leaves open the possibility of an affirmative answer to these questions. Immediately after discrediting Mary Magdalene because of her worship of Jesus and her credulous nature, Jesus’ mother momentarily suspends her skepticism and remarks:
Yet it was true that when she spoke of my son the wonder I heard in her voice was not so different from what I myself had felt, that sense of a doorway Yeshua stood before, to some new understanding. Except that she had passed through it, and saw things in a different light, and who was I to say that the miracle she had witnessed had not occurred, for those who had eyes to see it (314).148
148 Judas says something similar when he reflects on Simon’s faith, love, and understanding of Jesus: “So the others could not accept me, because I reduced to merely a man the great notion that Yeshua was to them, the notion of their own betterment and redemption. I had understood this in an instant when Kephas had come and made his greetings, and I’d seen how he ached with emotion at Yeshua’s return and with the things he wished to say to him but held himself back on my account. And though I had never held Kephas to be a man of great intelligence, I wondered now if he did not see Yeshua more clearly than I did, because he understood him with his heart, while I had always striven to find the argument that would defeat him” (111-112).
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