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Writer strips the Gospels to leave only Jesus' words
[Episcopal Life]THE WORDS OF JESUS
A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord
By Phyllis Tickle
Jossey-Bass/Wiley, $22.95, 208 pp.
When Phyllis Tickle accepts the challenge to sort through the sayings of Jesus in the four New Testament gospels, she is not prepared for what she finds. She thought she was prepared: after all, she is a scholar, a woman who studies about religion for her living. For two years, she teased apart the words of Jesus, the parts printed in red letters in some editions of the Bible, in order to reweave them into whole cloth.
The work begun in intellectual curiosity resulted in a wrestling match of Jacobean proportions. Tickle, founding editor of the religion department at Publishers Weekly, memoirist, and author of The Diving Hours series of prayer manuals, ended up "with new perceptions about what it is to be both Christian and a self at the same time." Profound.
The Words of Jesus falls into two parts. In "Reflections on the Words of Jesus," Tickle encourages readers of the second half, "The Words of Jesus," to "explore what the Sayings mean to them … [f]or it is in the engagement and the pondering and the discovery that faith finds its proper exercise." Tickle breaks the Sayings into five parts, including The Words of Public Teaching…of Private Instruction, and…of Post-Resurrection Encounters.
In her Reflections, she divulges how ordering the Sayings changed her "with soul-rattling epiphanies" about the endtimes, about Heaven and Hell. Given that information, one approaches the second half with more trepidation than curiosity, as in, "Whoa, Nelly, if Tickle, hardly a flibbertigibbet, can be so changed, what in God's name could happen to me?" But that's a good way to begin, guided by Tickle's suggestion to read but one or two Sayings at a time because, here, they are not buffered with word pillows. And then, see what happens.
An interview with Phyllis Tickle
Last month, Kimberley Winston interviewed Phyllis Tickle for Publishers Weekly's online newsletter Religion BookLine. Here are excerpts directly from that interview.
WINSTON: What do you gain by separating the words of Jesus from the rest of the Gospels?
TICKLE: When you take away the narrative and the contextual pacing you get power -- rata-tat-tat. It is almost like being in front of a machine gun. David Neff [editor of Christianity Today] speaks of it as being enraging. It's the pacing that is really hits you first. The more subtle thing that it takes a little while to perceive is that you've got an intellectual overlay especially since the Reformation or the Enlightenment.
Even though you are not conscious of it, there is this layer of "I am reading the words of Jesus in the book of John, therefore I am reading a summation of what Jesus said 70 years after the fact." Or, "I am reading Luke -- Oh he's the Gentile, so I am reading the Gentile take on what Jesus said." You filter. And when you get rid of the author, you have removed the filter.
There is a focus group at the Episcopal cathedral in Memphis that went through the manuscript and anger was one of the first things that surfaced for them. They kept saying, "He [Jesus] couldn't have said that. I never read that before." That's the power of it. It took them back to the original translations and they were, "My God, he did say this."
Some of them admitted they didn't like him very much because he ceases to be the caring shepherd and he becomes something very dramatic, something startling different from what we think he was. Whether you like him or not you understand why the crowd followed him. What this man is saying is so radical and so clean and clear it is really a shock. It just rocked me. All the emotions the focus group went through I went through too. I said, "This cannot be."
WINSTON: What do you lose?
TICKLE: You do lose the guru. You would never confuse this man with Mahatma Ghandi or the Prophet [Muhammad]. You lose any sense of the guru and you lose any sense of the sweet child, holy, meek and mild. You lose the stereotypes. This man is God incarnate. He claims it, he speaks it. It is as if Sinai is moving among us, speaking its own Torah with no Moses. It is Sinai on legs.
WINSTON: What did this process teach you about Jesus?
TICKLE: I came to hear him first instead of visualizing him. Another one of the preconceptions we bring -- one of the problems with Roman and Protestant Christianity is we have been willing to visualize and pictorialize the divinity. It distorts [the divinity], no question. If you come to this as a Roman Catholic or a Protestant, you have in your head a visual image of Jesus -- whatever it is, you've got one. You come to the words through a picture.
Now there is no picture. The voice is so overwhelming that it shatters all the pictures. The heard Jesus is inside you, not something outside you. I say in the reflections it is a great deal like being inside a room instead of outside it and seeing through a window what is going on in there. The second thing is his personality -- that he is this persona that is stark and, well, godly. He is not some wandering carpenter who went for a new job. All of that is gone. What you've got is what probably made the children of Israel cringe and say don't let us see this. Also, he says I have not come to destroy the law but to fulfill the law. He is an actualist, a biblical actualist, not a literalist. He condemns that. And he is not a metaphorist. He says this thing is what this thing is -- period.
WINSTON: How do you hope readers will use this book?
TICKLE: Very slowly. That is what the focus group discovered…There is a need to read one or two [pages] and put it back down. I hope they will read it with some sense of amazement. But slowly.