The Nazarene by Sholem Asch

 Asch (1880 – 1957) was a Polish-Jewish, dramatist, and essayist in the Yiddish language who settled in the United States. I was introduced to his writings in his novel, The Prophet. I've always been attracted to the Old Testament and the way it describes the development of faith in the people of God. The revelation of God to the Israelites is intricately entwined with their very earthy and natural relationship with creation. The development of humanity through the centuries has had the effect of pulling us away from the natural world. Our work lives and our play lives are being drawn into a world of high-tech effects, rapid changes and into a world of video fantasy. I look at my being drawn into biblical worlds as a yearning to return to the experience of the natural. Longing for connection between my mind and my body to the natural world around me, connecting me to the Earth, plants, animals and my fellow human beings; connecting all of God's creation to our past and lighting my imagination to a picture of the road that humanity took to be where we are today. This is the draw I feel to the Biblical world.

Asch has written a number of novels that depict the Jewish and early Christian world. One of his more controversial novels is The Nazarene is one I’m currently reading. His fellow Jews were not all happy about his depiction of Jesus. He tells the story of Jesus through a narrator who is transported to Israel during Jesus's life by a mystic Pan Viadomsky. The novel is divided into three sections each one having a different point of view from which to experience Jesus's life. Part one of the novel provides a picture of Palestine through the eyes of Cornelius, a military governor of Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate. Part two depicts Jesus’s world through the eyes of Judas Iscariot. Part three through the life of Joseph, the son of a sheep herder who desired to have one of his sons become a student of the Torah. At the age of 13 his father took him to a Rabbi Nicodemus to begin his education.

The book could be considered to be three novels: the book is 698 pages in length. The beauty of the writing however carries the reader through the stories effortlessly. The author has a way of putting flesh and mentality on the biblical characters he's portraying. I hope to do several posts on some of the text from the third part that I found particularly appealing.

I’ll start with the narrator's description of one aspect of the culture in Judea during the time of the Herods.

“Thus Greek and Roman went hand-in-hand. And it was a powerful alliance. All the measures taken by our Rabbis to halt the advance of this demoralization were vain; the poison spread through thousand secret channels into the heart of Jewish life. It affected the daily conduct of the Jews; it was manifest in the meals they prepared, their clothing, their headdress and their choice of ornaments. But there was something deeper: a change in the attitude toward the body. This was, among many Jews, no longer regarded primarily as the vessel the soul, but as an intrinsic treasure, a gift of God to man. The influence of the Greeks crept into our language, too, and the Aramaic dialect of Jerusalem began to sprout Greek words.

But it must not be thought that this influence was wholly one-sided. Many Greeks, observing at close range the pious modesty of Jewish life at its best, learning for the first time the nature of the Jewish faith, with its central concept of the single and living God, were deeply affected in turn. They were moved by the lyric expression of the desire for life beyond death, and they meditated on the universal hope which was embodied in the Messianic idea. The Greek mood of fatality was disturbed, the Greek mind set in motion among unaccustomed thoughts by the measureless devotion of the Jew to his God, by the voluntary acceptance of the strong discipline, by the tragic struggle against the temporal and the destructive, springing from deep faith in the divine and the timeless. It was as though a cold Greek statue had ceased to stand in moveless indifference, but had been touched with spirit, so that the lines trembled and the original harmony was disrupted. There was something extraordinary in the juxtaposition of Greek and Jew; two hostile worlds felt an inner longing for each other. They were like the complementary halves of a single being which had long regarded each other as enemies, and which now, brought into intimate contact on the soil of Judea, were beginning to discover in the midst of warfare a unifying principle.

The song of that contact between the two worlds was heard in its most harmonious form in the house of Joseph Arimathea.“

I'll close this post with a prayer from part two of the book. It is typical of prayers that preceding sections of part two describing Jesus’ world through the eyes of Judas Iscariot.

“Blessed art thou, O father in heaven, that thou hast chosen our portion that we may serve thee, and that thou hast not made us as the peoples of the world into idolaters which bow down and worship the work of their hands. Have compassion, father in heaven, on thy creatures and open their eyes, so all of them may see that thou alone art king of all the worlds, and that there is none beside thee."