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100 pages

English

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Encouraging the reading of the Bible as literature rather than doctrine, the four central gospels are presented here in the beauty of the Authorised King James Version, with four fresh, modern introductions. The revelatory essays, by A.N. Wilson, Nick Cave, Richard Holloway and Blake Morrison, were commissioned for the groundbreaking Pocket Canons series. They offer piercing, moving and highly personal responses to the most influential story of the last two thousand years: the life of Jesus Christ. Including:A.N. Wilson on The Gospel According to MatthewNick Cave on The Gospel According to MarkRichard Holloway on The Gospel According to LukeBlake Morrison on The Gospel According to Johnand the Authorised King James Version of all four Gospels

Sujets

New Testament

Philosophie et théologie

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Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	01 avril 2010
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781847679048
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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a note about the pocket canon series
When an old friend rang me out of the blue in the summer of 1997, I had no idea that the call was going to set a ball rolling that still hasn’t stopped. Matt Darby had two simple questions that he wanted me to answer: had anyone ever published the Bible in its constituent parts and if not, why not?
I was immediately intrigued by the questions. It was clear even to me with my scant knowledge of its publishing history that the Bible was not one book but a series of books. And yes, the Bible’s daunting length only added to its inaccessibility. And yes, the publishers of the Bible tended to make their editions look as unappealing as possible. But however we jazzed the Good Book up would anyone actually buy such editions? Matt thought so and his evangelical fervour for the project was infectious.
Having recently persuaded someone famous (the rapper Ice T) to introduce an old text (Iceberg Slim’s memoir, Pimp ) in order to bring it to a new audience, I had seen the impact that such unholy alliances can make and dropped this idea into the mix. Why don’t we commission introductions from a diverse and interesting group of people? From people? From people who don’t have a religious drum to beat. Fifteen hundred words. Make them personal not prescriptive. This will help us enormously when we publish the series and make people want to buy our editions. Won’t it?
This discussion about the Bible’s format and how the individual books could be re-presented to a modern audience in a modern way was to be the first of many. By the time we launched the series, fifteen months later, it had blossomed into something beautiful, not least because of Angus Hyland’s award-winning and stunning jacket designs but also because we had persuaded twelve good men and women to write introductions and they had excelled themselves. We licensed our editions around the world. The series generated an enormous amount of press ink and radio chatter. We sold a lot of copies and we were doing God’s work.
Or were we? Paul Slenert, self-appointed leader of the ‘Jesus is Alive ministry’, took umbrage at our hijacking of his Bible and tried to do everything in his power to stop the series being published. He tried to take us to court on a charge of blasphemy and when this failed he proceeded to send letters to every parish in the UK, warning them about the series and urging them to write and ask me personally to withdraw the series. I must have received over 2000 letters in teh following month, half of which simply regurgitated his outrage and repeated his belief that we would burn in hell. The other half were letters of support, encouraging us to ignore this deluded fool and saying that the Pocket Canons were the best thing to happen to the Bible in decades. It was fascinating to witness these diametrically opposed reactions and a fine reminder of how the Bible is still used to justify extremely dubious and dangerous attitudes (the Christian Right in America have since taken such abuse to new levels).
The Bible is, above all, a work of literature and we approached people who we felt would read it as such. It was in response to the King James version that they wrote the introductions that follow and the range of ideas expressed and experiences recounted is broader than any church that I know of. Some of the pieces are extremely personal but all of them are heartfelt and the wonderful array seems to me to epitomise what the whole project was about – celebrating language, encouraging dialogue and respecting the individual.

Jamie Byng Publisher
contents

a note about the pocket canon series

the gospel according to matthew
introduction by a.n. wilson

the gospel according to mark
introduction by nick cave

the gospel according to luke
introduction by richard holloway

the gospel according to john
introduction by blake morrison

About the Author
Copyright
introduction by a. n. wilson
You are holding in your hands a tiny book which has changed more human lives than The Communist Manifesto or Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams : a book which has shaped whole civilizations: a book which, for many people, has been not a gospel but The Gospel.
And you are bound to ask, because you are born out of time in a post-Christian age, into a world of newspapers and investigative reporting and science – ‘Is it true?’
Did a Virgin really conceive (1:23) and give birth to a boy-child in Bethlehem (2:1)? Did wise men, guided by a star, come to worship him (2:2)? Did he grow up to be able to walk on water (14:26), to perform miracles, to found the Church (16:26), to rise from the dead?
Stop, stop. Don’t ask. They are all questions which seem reasonable enough, but they will lead you into the most pointless, arid negativism. Your educated, scientific, modern mind will decide that no one ever walked on water; no Virgin ever conceived; that corpses do not come to life. And by rejecting this Gospel, you will reject one of the most disturbing and extraordinary books ever written; not, as you might think, on intelligent grounds, but because you (and I, alas) are too hemmed in by our imaginative limitations to see the sort of things this book is doing.
Before you apply to it the supposedly rational tests which you would apply to a newspaper report or a television documentary, imagine the chapters which describe the trial and Crucifixion of Christ set to music in Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion . Consider the millions of people who, for the last 1900 years have recited the prayer (6:9–13) which begins ‘Our Father’. Think of the old women in Stalin’s Russia, when the men were too cowardly to profess their loyalty to the Church, who stubbornly continued to chant the opening verses of the Sermon on the Mount in defiance of the kgb. ‘Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted’ (5:4).
This is a book, not of easily-dismissed fairy tales but of power and passion; more arresting, disturbing and truthful than most reading-matter which you could buy for the price of a magazine on a station bookstall or in the paperback store. This is the Gospel of Christ, in all its terribleness, its wonder, its awe-inspiring truth and its self-contradictions.
Nor should you think that the contradictory emotions which assail and trouble you as you read it – as trouble you they must – are all storms and tempest inside you . For this book itself was born out of conflict and struggle and contradiction.
Matthew’s Gospel reflects the tension which saw the new religion – what we call Christianity – being fashioned from the old – Judaism. It is by paradox an intensely Jewish, and an intensely anti-Jewish work – indeed it is the great Ur-text of anti-semitism. The historical Jesus is not to be found in this book, nor in any book. He eludes our search. Matthew’s Jesus is seen through the prism of a particular faith, of a particular group, somewhere in the Mediterranean world. Rome? 85–100 AD ?
By the time the book reached something like its present form (50 years after Jesus had left the scene?) Christianity was emerging as something which, if not distinct from Judaism, was at least repellent to most Jews. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (of circa 50 AD ) describes a rift between the first Christians of Asia Minor, converts of Paul, and the followers of Peter and James in Jerusalem who had known the earthly Jesus. It seems like an angry and irreconcilable quarrel. Paul, though, or because, a Jew, had decided that those who followed the Jewish Law ( Torah ), the Law given by God on Mount Sinai to his people, were living in bonds from which Christ came to set them free. For Peter and his friends, the dietary laws of Judaism, the requirement of circumcision, and so forth, were ‘not bonds but wings’; they were symbols of lives dedicated to God.
No compromise, surely, was possible, between these two ways? Either you circumcise your son or you don’t. Either it is sinful to eat pork, or it isn’t.
But to another generation, Matthew’s, the problems were different. The irreconcilables, rather than being fudged, are held together in self-contradiction. Peter and Paul, who in earlier New Testament texts were the leaders of opposing Ways, emerge in this text as co-partners (though, of course, Paul’s ideas, rather than his name, are what we find here).
It is Jesus himself, in this legendary reconstruction, who speaks lines which, in an earlier generation of Christianity, had been assigned to protagonists in the quarrel. On the one hand, with the followers of Paul, he wants to leave the synagogue. See chapter 12, a key moment, when the Pharisees accuse Jesus of breaking the Law by healing a man on the Sabbath. His reaction is to lead his people away from the mainstream of Jewry, but he does so, as Paul had done, by quoting the Jewish Scriptures. ‘I will put my spirit upon him, and he shall shew judgment to the Gentiles’ (12:18). On the other hand, Matthew’s Jesus is not simply a libertarian like Paul. He wishes to reassure the Jewish conservatives: ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil’ (5:17).
How is the miracle accomplished? It is done by seeing the new congregation or synagogue, or gathering-together of the Elect as the New Israel: the Church.
So Matthew constructs his book as a miniature Torah . Like Moses, Matthew’s Jesus goes up to a mountain (5:1) and delivers a New Law to his followers. At the end of the tale, in a gesture which could never have taken place in history but which is heavy with religious paradox, a pagan, Roman Governor performs a Jewish purification ritual – he washes his hands – to demonstrate his innocence of Christ’s murder. It is the Jewish mob who cry out, ‘His blood be on us, and on our children’ (27:25). A terrible text which would have profound consequences in Europe during the centuries that it penetrated the collective consciousness. It was not j