The Telling: Considering Jesus of Nazareth Part Two

 from Jesus of Nazareth, 1977

In a part of Jesus of Nazareth, which works for the movie and works for thinking of the Gospel in one’s personal life, Peter is blustering about his complaining wife and saying, “I told her I’d be back when it was fishing season. I’d be back in a few months.” Matthew turns to Peter sagely and says, “Don’t lie to her. You’ll never go back. You’ll never get drunk, you’ll never fish again.” Zeferelli’s vaguely homoerotic and deeply irresponsible portrait of a Jesus who tells his disciples to let the dead bury their dead and apparently their wives and children to hang out with each other and him is actually part of the religious iconography aof Jesus movies. It’s a very Catholic fantasy, and the Catholic church has very often called men into its service at the great pain, abandonment and suffering of women and children. As stated before, this portrait of thirteen men snuggled with each other is also very homosexual. But aside from if it is moral, is it true? Saint Paul himself notes that Peter and the other apostles traveled with their wives and children. Protestants love this revelation because it supports Protestant ministry models, but it’s also just practical and true. After all, though Jesus was peripatetic, many people were, and though he does travel a lot, he does not travel to the ends of the earth, just to the ends of Palestine, and then only once it seems. Most of what Jesus does is circle the Sea of Galilee, and lest you be deceived by the word “Sea” it is a fresh water lake also called the Lake of Gennesaret. I do not know if the disciples traveled with their wives in the early days, but certainly they didn’t abandon them. Peter does not stop fishing and it is doubtful he stops drinking. He’s always fishing. Even later on at the end of the Gospel of John, that’s how Jesus finds him.

And while we’re still up north and around the Sea or Lake of Galilee or Gennesaret, one last thing: Just what is a Gadarene? I’ve looked it up and the answer in confusing. The Gadarenes are Gerasenes, or they aren’t. They live in the Ten Cities. Or they don’t. Their realm is modern day Jordan. Or it isn’t.  They are culturally and racially Greek—which accounts for the pig farms—or they aren’t. Once again it doesn’t do to think of different groups of people the way we do in the twenty first century or look for the same signifiers.  And when it comes to religions and peoples which are very distinct now, they may not have been so in the past. When we get to the people of Judea, called in John the Jews, these are the people who are, so to speak “properly Jews” in the heartland of the religion. Things are more diffuse in Galilee. I am imagining the Gadarenes are even more so. A Jewish comic once said of himself, describing his lack of practice or religiosity by saying. “I’m not really a Jew. I’m Jew…ish.” It is possible that the Gadarenes, like the Samaritans and like many other people in the surrounds might have said the same thing.

That’s an odd thing as well. Though there is some notion of the Church beginning in Jerusalem and some Gospel accounts have Jesus saying “stay here in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit comes,” that’s really just a dangerous idea if we are to believe anything about the crucifixion and the way Jesus was received in Judea. Jesus says to the women after his resurrection that he will appear to his brothers in Galilee, and later, in John, this is exactly where he appears. Living under a worldwide quarantine, it is hard to believe that twelve disciples growing into one hundred twenty were locked in an upper room hiding from Jewish authorities for forty days. It is not entirely impossible, though, to think that if they had traveled down for Passover, they might travel down, again, for Shavuot, that is: Pentecost, and that things might have begun not in Jerusalem, but in Galilee., safely away from the authorities who had killed Jesus. Is it possible that the Holy Spirit that appeared on Pentecost had a little help, that the fearful and small group of Judean followers were boosted by multilingual and thriving Galileans?

Whatever Jesus faced in Galilee it was his home, and it was Jerusalem which is represented as the place of danger. It is the place of his birth where Herod nearly slew him, and the place of his execution.  From his standpoint it is hard to believe that the Jerusalem church was ever the center of Christianity, though Acts tells us it was, for a time at least.