Читать книгу The Drama of Jesus - Peter Milward - Страница 3

There’s no doubt about it. The life of Jesus is intensely dramatic. I doubt if there has been a more dramatic life in the history of man, whether in the real lives of Alexander and Julius Caesar or in the fictitious ones of Hamlet and King Lear. In the four gospels it has been told with dramatic intensity both in the narrative style of the first three and in the discursive style of the fourth. Shakespeare himself drew deep inspiration from these four sources, as appears in all his plays and particularly in his tragedies from Romeo and Juliet to King Lear.

During the Middle Ages the gospels provided abundant material for the religious drama of the time, and much of it has come down to us in the cycles of mystery plays, which are still enacted from time to time not without success. It is surprising, however, how little of this material is used in modern times, or if used, how little of its latent drama is realized. Few of the ambitious movies I’ve seen on the life of Jesus have been particularly impressive. At a showing of one I didn’t even care to return after the intermission, I found it so tedious. In my childhood I listened to Dorothy Sayers’ radio play The Man Born to be King、with Robert Speaight as Christ, but I wasn’t so thrilled by what I heard. Then there are the innumerable lives of Jesus retold in book form, but though I’ve read quite a number of them, I can’t say I’ve found them at all exciting.

Why is this? How can I explain this absence of a dramatic element in the retelling and reenactment of so vivid a drama as the life of Jesus? One reason that applies to many of the lives of Jesus may be the parading of a lot of unnecessary information. Too much scholarship, where even a little may be too much, weighs down the spirit of man and kills as surely as the letter does. Another reason is that after so many Christian centuries we’ve come to take too much for granted, if in an increasingly post-Christian world. Christian writers who approach this sacred subject fail to explore the human motives of the characters involved, least of all the central character of Jesus himself. I can’t help suspecting that, all unconsciously, they assume that, as Son of God, Jesus can have had no real human motives. So they fail to ask the necessary, even obvious, questions, such as may be obvious to outsiders but not to themselves.

Having said all this, I may be asked the obvious question myself, “Physician, why not cure yourself?” All I can say is that I’m no Shakespeare to retell the story of Jesus in dramatic form, nor am I a Dickens to retell it in narrative form, either. I’m just a university teacher of Japanese students, and from time to time I write books of essays, occasionally in dialogue form, for them to read. So the idea has occurred to me, Why not take advantage of my actual situation and present the life of Jesus in a series of conversations with Japanese students?

In this case, how am I to go about my task? To begin with, I must take nothing for granted. I must choose non-Christian students – most of my students are in any case non-Christian – who haven’t even read the Gospels for themselves, but only have that general knowledge of Christianity which most Japanese may be assumed to have nowadays. Then I will take them with me to a quiet seminar house outside Tokyo, where we can spend a week of uninterrupted discussions on the drama of Jesus. I will get them to ask me all the questions I need for this purpose, especially those which I have found from long experience naturally occur to the minds of such students. In particular, I will get them to ask the basic question, “Why?” so as to explore the reasons and motives hidden behind the gospel narrative. In this way, I think, the latent drama in that narrative will come out vividly enough, even without my using a dramatic or narrative form of writing.

The rest I must leave to my readers, to peruse these pages with a sympathetic imagination, so as to envisage the situation as I describe it – just as I in turn have tried to envisage the situation described in the gospels. Here they may even find a twofold drama – one involving myself and my five students, as we go through our discussions day by day, though I have reduced this dramatic element to a minimum, and the other involving Jesus and his disciples, as well as his enemies, which was the focus of our attention during our discussions. Finally, whatever conclusion they may reach after their perusal of these pages, I would urge them to return to the gospels, or at least two of them, that of Mark for his vivid dramatic style with emphasis on the actions of Jesus, and that of John for his looser discursive style with emphasis on the thoughts and motives in the heart of Jesus.

In conclusion, it only remains for me to say what Jesus himself said to his first disciples, “Come and see!”