A person named Jesus
A Man Called Jesus is a historical novel by Gérald Messadié about the life of Jesus Christ .
Emergence
Messadié, French and, according to the publisher's text, a devout Catholic, was born in 1931. He published his first novel when he was twenty . According to the publisher, ten years of research preceded the novel “A man named Jesus”. Messadié claims to have consulted the current tradition for the novel, as well as the Apocrypha , e. B. the Gospel of Thomas or the Protevangelium of James , the Dead Sea Scrolls and then new archaeological findings.
content
Messadié depicts the life of Jesus in the genre of the historical novel. The novel is divided into two parts ("The years in anonymity" and "The years in public") and an afterword, as well as two maps (of Israel and Jerusalem) .
It first describes in detail how a criminal is crucified on Golgotha by Roman soldiers, a common punishment for felons in the Roman Empire. Then it is told how the envoy of the Roman emperor, Metellus, meets the cunning king Herod.
Then follows the representation of Mary and Joseph. Joseph is 85 years old and seems bitter and angry, almost offended, when he has to take care of the pregnant, 16-year-old Maria, and actually doesn't want to have much to do with the child Jesus . Maria is portrayed as a somewhat dumb, simple woman. Jesus does not know from the beginning who he really is and what his destiny is, but only gradually finds his way into his destiny.
After Joseph's death, he left Capernaum and his father's carpentry and went out into the world without a specific goal. He sees a student of a magician healing a blind boy. Thereupon Jesus looks for this magician named Dositheus, from whom Jesus hopes that he will be the Messiah ; but when he finds him and his followers, Jesus realizes that these people are not the right circle for him. Jesus is now on his way to Qumran to visit the sect of the Essenes there . There he meets his cousin Jokanaan again, who becomes his teacher. Jesus goes through the novitiate, which lasts 24 months. After 20 months it becomes clear from signs that Jesus is likely the Messiah. The Essenes cannot accept these signs and are suddenly uncertain and negative about Jesus. Jesus decides to leave Qumran, especially since the Essenes only seem to live towards the end of the world and are no longer interested in life. Jesus then goes on a journey, which he u. a. leads to Antioch , where he works his first miracle by healing a sick boy. Jesus traveled to Egypt, Cappadocia, Byzantium, the Pontus, Macedonia, the Ctesiphon on the Tigris and Crete and lived among the massagers in the steppe. These long journeys serve the purpose of fathoming the illusions of the world, as he later explains to Jokanaan.
The second part of the novel "The Years in Public" begins with the return of Jesus from Crete to Israel. He is looking for his cousin Jokanaan, who has meanwhile also left Qumran and lives as a hermit with twelve disciples on the Jordan. There he preaches the impending end of the world and baptizes believers in order to wash them away from their sins. When he sees Jesus, Jokanaan explains to those present that he sees Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus is uncomfortable with this. During the night Jokanaan explains to Jesus why he sees him as the Messiah, even if Jesus himself is not yet aware of it. Jesus then goes to Bethany, but is immediately recognized as who Jokanaan called the Messiah. People think of him as the Messiah. Andrew and then his brother Simon are the first two to join him as disciples. Phillipus follows as the third disciple. Together with them, he visits his mother and siblings in Bethlehem. There one already has news of his encounter with Jokanaan and receives him as a prophet.
After Natanael has joined them as the fourth disciple, they go to Samaria. To the astonishment of his disciples, Jesus does not reject the brothers and the bread from Samaria like the other Jews do. Here Jesus teaches his disciples that the devil, like God, rules over a part of the spiritual world and is therefore eternal. Consequently God would not be able to triumph over the devil and there would be the devil until the end of time. But in his boundless mercy, God will forgive the devil at the end of time. They would then merge into an undivided One and the time that was only the field of their disagreement would cease to be.
As a result, Thomas joins as a disciple. In Capernaum, other men offer themselves to Jesus as disciples. Jesus chooses different ones until he has 14 disciples. With the 14 he goes to Jerusalem in the temple, where he drives the traders out of the temple. The rulers were just waiting for Jesus to come to Jerusalem, where he is not so well known. The story comes to a head. Jesus, who neither asserts nor excludes that he is the Messiah, is slowly growing into his role.
The miracles that Jesus performed are presented as medical and alchemical applications that were modern for the time and that Jesus got to know on his travels. However, this does not apply to Jesus walking on the stormy Sea of Galilee, here Jesus hovers over the water in the novel. In the novel, the ability to hover is not only attributed to Jesus, but also to the sleeping Jokanaan.
When Jesus preaches in Nain, the rabbi wants to forbid him to preach from the stairs of the synagogue. Jesus refuses because the synagogue does not belong to the rabbi but to God. The rabbi is unsure how to deal with the alleged Messiah and reports the case to the high priest Annas in Jerusalem. There they are already informed about Jesus and are planning how to take him and Jonakaan out of circulation. Jonakaan is then arrested for publicly denouncing Herod's marriage to his own brother's wife.
The disciples of Jesus are shown with individual features. Because of the radicalism of his teaching, according to which he claims preference over father and mother, Jesus is abandoned by his disciples Bartolomäus and Andrew. The others go out two at a time, at Jesus' command, to preach and baptize.
Jesus has now become popular with the whole people. At first he grows unconsciously, then with growing awareness and ultimately with great clarity into the role of the Messiah. His behavior towards his disciples, the political intrigues that are knitted around Pilate, Herod and the high priests, are further subjects of the novel. For most of the book, they advise on how to respond to the coming of the Messiah and how to kill Jesus. Procula, Pilate's wife, is kind to Jesus and asks her husband to spare Jesus. The author describes the arrest, torture, crucifixion and death of Jesus very briefly, namely only on 21 of around 750 pages. Jesus is sentenced to death by the majority of the Sanhedrin , the religious council of the Jews. Since the Jews had to leave the blood justice to the Romans, it is not possible for them to crucify Jesus himself. Therefore they transfer Jesus to the governor Pontius Pilate. He offers Jesus to admit that he is of Davidic tribe; then he would make Jesus King of the Province of Judea. A political move with which Pilate wants to turn Jesus into a new Herod and remove the Jewish council he hated. But Jesus refuses.
Pilate initially intends to take Jesus off the cross after the crucifixion and before his death in order to humiliate the Sanhedrin. He gives instructions not to break Jesus' shins under any circumstances and not to prick his heart with a lance. Nevertheless, the lance stabbed by mistake. When Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus asked Pilate for the body of Jesus, it was unclear whether Jesus was still alive or - more likely - already dead. Pilate granted the two Jesus followers from the Sanhedrin their request. When the two of them take Jesus off the cross after five hours, they find that Jesus' body is still warm. But they bury Jesus in the rock tomb so that the soldiers and other bystanders do not notice anything. Immediately after the burial, the high priest Caiaphas had Jewish soldiers in the temple come to guard the rock tomb.
Joseph and Nicodemus, who have now been able to discuss what happened in peace, decide to return to the grave, since they suspect that Jesus might still be alive. After likely bribing the temple soldiers, they enter the tomb and find that Jesus is indeed still alive. The temple guards are near mad with fear when it is determined that Jesus is alive. The day after, they can only report that they saw the risen Jesus. The next day, on the Sabbath, news of the empty tomb in Jerusalem spreads like wildfire. Members of the Sanhedrin worry that they crucified the true Messiah after Jesus rose from the dead.
The last chapter describes how Jesus, who now calls himself Immanuel, is on the way to Capernaum . There his disciples go fishing. When Immanuel helps the unsuccessful fishers to get a big catch, they recognize Jesus; so did Thomas, who put his hand in the wound of Jesus. Then Jesus moves on without his disciples - eastwards.
In the afterword, Messadié emphasizes that Emmaus, the place where some of the disciples saw Jesus again for the first time, is on the way to Joppa, a port city. Jesus probably embarked abroad, perhaps to Asia.
criticism
The theologian and German scholar Georg Langenhorst criticizes: “Jesus as a flawlessly beautiful, mysteriously powerful, universally popular young man - the (...) conjured image is well known to us: from numerous sweet Jesus paintings of the 19th century in the style of Nazarenism , but also from pious ones Jesus films of our time; (...) in one word: kitsch . (...) made according to a simple, deliberately one-dimensional knitting pattern: an authorial narrator , who knows everything and reports everything, has one narrative thread strictly in his hand and describes his one-line plot, which appears to be presented as history. "
expenditure
- Gerald Messadié: A person named Jesus. Roman ("L'homme qui devint Dieu"). Knauer Taschenbuchverlag, 2006, ISBN 978-3-426-63471-4 (EA Munich 1989).
- Gerald Messadié: L'homme qui devint Dieu . Laffont, Paris 1988/91, ISBN 2-221-05597-7 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Georg Langenhorst: "JESUS: NIEMANDWIE ER!" - On the ongoing topicality of Jesus as a literary figure , pp. 3–4, on www.theologie-und-literatur.de , accessed on August 15, 2016