“It says in the Gospels: ‘He did not speak to them except in parables.’ ”
“That’s right. The parable of the lost sheep, of the mustard seed, of the fig tree, of the yeast, of the sower, of the prodigal son, and so on. So many parables.”
Mutton with mustard sauce, with stewed figs and a glass of wine — so many edible parables, thinks Eusebio.
“A parable is an allegory in the form of a simple story. It is a suitcase that we must open and unpack to see its contents. And the single key that unlocks these suitcases, that opens them wide, is allegory.
“Finally, only one miracle stands true and literal, the pillar of our faith: his resurrection. Once that is clear, we can start making sense of all the stories told by Jesus and told about him. That is Christianity at heart: a single miracle surrounded and sustained by stories, like an island surrounded by the sea.”
Eusebio coughs a little. “You haven’t been sharing these insights with Father Cecilio, have you?”
Father Cecilio is their local priest — and the subject of much eye-rolling on Maria’s part. In her presence the poor man always looks like the chicken in the coop that hasn’t laid enough eggs.
“What, and have us excommunicated? That dimwit is the very hammer of literalism that insults my faith. He’s as dumb as an ox.”
“But he means well,” Eusebio suggests soothingly.
“As does an ox.”
“That’s all very interesting, what you’ve been saying.”
“I’m not finished. I was searching, if you remember? There’s a problem.”
“Yes, and you found a solution.”
“Oh, how my heart beats! I’ll drink now, if you sanitize that glass.”
Maria bends down and produces from the bag a bottle of red wine, which she places on the desk. Eusebio cracks a wide smile. “Maria, bless you!” He hurries to open the bottle. While it breathes, he washes the glass thoroughly.
“I don’t have another glass,” he says. “You drink from it and I’ll drink from the bottle.”
“That’s unseemly. We’ll share the glass.”
“All right.” He tips some of the elixir into the glass. It glows like a firefly. He licks his lips at the prospect of pouring it down his throat, but offers the glass to his wife. “You first, my angel.”
Maria takes a small, thoughtful sip. She closes her eyes as she considers its distilled effect on her. She purrs and opens her eyes. “It’s a good one.”
She passes him the glass. He takes a larger sip, grunts with pleasure, empties the glass in one go. “Oh! Indeed. Just a little more.” He half-fills the glass, perhaps a little more than half.
Maria has another sip. “That’ll be enough for me,” she says. “Happy New Year.”
“Sorry?”
“What’s the point of looking at a clock if you don’t notice the time? Look at the two hands. It’s midnight. We’re now in 1939.”
“You’re right. Happy New Year to you, my angel. May this year be a good one.”
He finishes off the glass and sits down again. Now it is his turn to glow like a firefly, and his mind flits about inconsequentially as his wife starts up again.
“Why would Jesus speak in parables? Why would he both tell stories and let himself be presented through stories? Why would Truth use the tools of fiction? Stories full of metaphors are by writers who play the language like a mandolin for our entertainment, novelists, poets, playwrights, and other crafters of inventions. Meanwhile, isn’t it extraordinary that there are no significant historical accounts of Jesus of Nazareth? A minor government official from Lisbon comes to Bragança, a tight little man with nothing to say, and it’s all over the papers, which end up in archives for the rest of time. Or you, your work, Eusebio. Someone does that ordinary thing of dying — and you write a report, you immortalize that ordinary mortal. Meanwhile, the Son of God comes to town, he travels around, he meets anyone and everyone, he impresses mightily, he is murdered—and no one writes about it? Of this great divine comet hitting the earth, the only impact is a swirl of oral tales?
“There are hundreds of documents from pagan authors from the first century of our Christian era. Jesus is not mentioned in a single one. No contemporary Roman figure — no official, no general, no administrator, no historian, no philosopher, no poet, no scientist, no merchant, no writer of any sort — mentions him. Not the least reference to him is to be found on any public inscription or in any surviving private correspondence. He left behind no birth record, no trial report, no death certificate. A century after his death — one hundred years! — there are only two pagan references to Jesus, one from Pliny the Younger, a Roman senator and writer, the other from Tacitus, a Roman historian. A letter and a few pages — that’s all from the zealous bureaucrats and the proud administrators of an empire whose next religion was founded on Jesus, whose capital would become the capital of his cult. The pagans didn’t notice the man who would transform them from Romans into Christians. That seems as unlikely as the French not noticing the French Revolution.
“If Jews of the day had more to say about Jesus, it’s been lost. There is nothing from any of the Pharisees who conspired against him, nothing from the Sanhedrin, the religious council that condemned him. The historian Josephus makes two brief references to Jesus, but many decades after his crucifixion. The entire historical record on Jesus of Nazareth from non-Christian sources fits into a handful of pages, and it’s all second hand. None of it tells us anything we don’t already know from Christian sources.
“No, no, no. The historical record is of no help. Our knowledge of the flesh-and-blood Jesus all comes down to four allegorists. Even more astonishing, these word minstrels never met Jesus. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, whoever they were, weren’t eyewitnesses. Like the Romans and Jews, they wrote about Jesus years after his passage on earth. They were inspired scribes who recorded and arranged oral tales that had been circulating for decades. Jesus has come to us, then, through old stories that survived mostly by word of mouth. What a casual, risky way of making one’s mark on history.
“Stranger still, it’s as if Jesus wanted it that way. Jews are obsessively literate. A Jew’s every finger is a pen. God merely speaks to the rest of us, while Jews get handed inscribed stone tablets. Yet here was an important Jew who preferred the wind to the written word. Who chose the eddying of oral tales over the recorded facts. Why this approach? Why not impose himself like the great military Messiah Jews were hoping for? Why storytelling over history-making?”
His wife has led him down one grand corridor after another. Now, Eusebio senses, they are about to enter the ballroom, with its vast dancing floor and glittering chandeliers and high windows.
“I think it’s because, once more, Jesus seeks to benefit us. A story is a wedding in which we listeners are the groom watching the bride coming up the aisle. It is together, in an act of imaginary consummation, that the story is born. This act wholly involves us, as any marriage would, and just as no marriage is exactly the same as another, so each of us interprets a story differently, feels for it differently. A story calls upon us as God calls upon us, as individuals—and we like that. Stories benefit the human mind. Jesus trod the earth with the calm assurance that he would stay with us and we would stay with him so long as he touched us through stories, so long as he left a fingerprint upon our startled imagination. And so he came not charging on a horse but quietly riding a story.
“Imagine, Eusebio, that you’ve been invited to a feast and a splendid table has been presented to you, with the finest wines and the most delicious food. You eat and you drink till you are full. Would you then turn to your host and ask about the barn animals you’ve eaten? You might, and you might get some information about these animals — but what does it compare to the feast you’ve just had? We must abandon this reductionist quest for the historical Jesus. He won’t be found, because that’s not where — that’s not how—he chose to make his mark. Jesus told stories and lived through stories. Our faith is faith in his story, and there is very little beyond that story-faith. The holy word is story, and story is the holy word.”