“Who, then, did the deed? The Romans, more generally? Jesus was strung up by Roman soldiers following Roman orders according to Roman law in a Roman province. But who’s ever heard of such a nebulous murderer? Are we to accept theologically that the Son of God was murdered by the nameless servants of a long-vanished empire to appease a squabbling local tribe? If that’s the case, no wonder no one can remember who did it.
“Ah! But of course: It was Jews who murdered Jesus! That’s a familiar refrain, is it not? A group of manipulative Jewish elders, in collusion with the Roman authorities, conspired to get rid of a troublesome fellow Jew. (And we remembered to hate Jews but not Italians — how did that happen? The shame of it!) But if it was Jews who were responsible, which ones? What were their names? We have Caiaphas, the high priest. Any others? None who is named. And really, like Judas, like Pilate, Caiaphas was an accessory. Jews could not openly kill a Jew — remember the Ten Commandments? Caiaphas had to find others who would do it. So he and his fellow elders whipped up the crowd, and it’s the crowd that decided matters against Jesus. With them lies the true, practical guilt. If the crowd had cried for Jesus’ release and Barabbas’s crucifixion, Pilate would have obliged, Caiaphas would have been stymied, and Judas would have had to return his blood money.
“There we seem to have it, then: It was a crowd that was responsible for the murder of Jesus of Nazareth. To put it in exact terms, a crowd framed by mostly anonymous officials, manipulated by mostly anonymous elders, wished him dead, and then anonymous soldiers actually killed him. But it started with a crowd, and is there anything more anonymous than a crowd? Is a crowd not, by definition, anonymous? From this assessment, it’s clear: These guilty Jews, these guilty Romans — they are straw men, red herrings, in the best tradition of Agatha Christie. No wonder the common brutish mind thinks it’s the Jew next door who murdered Jesus — that’s more concrete. But in theological actuality, it was Anonymous who killed Jesus of Nazareth. And who is Anonymous?”
Maria stops. After some seconds of silence, Eusebio realizes with a start that his wife is waiting for him to answer the question.
“Oh! I’m not sure. I’ve never—”
“Anonymous is you, is me, is all of us. We murdered Jesus of Nazareth. We are the crowd. We are Anonymous. It is not the guilt of Jews that goes down through history, it is the guilt of all of us. But how quick we are to forget that. We don’t like guilt, do we? We prefer to hide it, to forget it, to twist it and present it in a better light, to pass it on to others. And so, because of our aversion to guilt, we strain to remember who killed the victim in the Gospels, as we strain to remember who killed the victim in an Agatha Christie murder mystery.
“And at the end of it, is that not the plainest way to describe the life of Jesus, as a Murder Mystery? A life was taken, the victim completely innocent. Who did it? Who had the motive and the opportunity? What happened to the body? What did it all mean? An exceptional detective was needed to solve the crime, and he came along, some years after the murder, the Hercule Poirot of the first century: Paul of Tarsus. Christianity starts with Paul. The earliest Christian documents are his letters. With them we have the story of Jesus, years before the life of Jesus of the Gospels. Paul vowed to get to the bottom of the Jesus affair. Using his grey cells, he sleuthed about, listening to testimony, poring over the record of events, gathering clues, studying every detail. He had a big break in the case in the form of a vision on the road to Damascus. And at the end of his investigation he drew the only conclusion possible. Then he preached and he wrote, and Jesus went from being a failed Messiah to the resurrected Son of God who takes on our burden of sins. Paul closed the case on Jesus of Nazareth. And just as the resolution of the crime in an Agatha Christie brings on a sort of glee, and the reader is struck by her amazing ingenuity, so the resurrection of Jesus and its meaning induces a powerful glee in the Christian — more: a lasting joy — and the Christian thanks God for His amazing ingenuity, as well as His boundless compassion. Because the resurrection of Jesus to wash away our sins is the only possible solution to the problem as understood by Paul, the problem of a loving God unexpectedly put to death who then resurrects. Hercule Poirot would heartily approve of the logic of Paul’s solution.
“The world of the Gospels is stark. There is much suffering in it, suffering of the body, suffering of the soul. It is a world of moral extremes in which the good are purely good and the evil insistently evil. Agatha Christie’s world is equally stark. Who among us lives a life so beset by murders as Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple? And behind these murders, so much conniving evil! Our world is not like that, is it? Most of us know neither so much good nor so much evil. We sail a tempered middle. And yet murders happen, sometimes on a large scale, do they not? The Great War ended not so long ago. Next door the Spaniards are killing each other with abandon. And now there are insistent rumours of another war across our continent. The symbolic crime of our century is the murder, Eusebio. Anonymous is still very much with us. That tempered middle we sail is an illusion. Our world is stark too, but we hide in a shelter built of luck and closed eyes. What will you do when your luck runs out, when your eyes are ripped open?
“The sad fact is that there are no natural deaths, despite what doctors say. Every death is felt by someone as a murder, as the unjust taking of a loved being. And even the luckiest of us will encounter at least one murder in our lives: our own. It is our fate. We all live a murder mystery of which we are the victim.
“The only modern genre that plays on the same high moral register as the Gospels is the lowly regarded murder mystery. If we set the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie atop the Gospels and shine a light through, we see correspondence and congruence, agreement and equivalence. We find matching patterns and narrative similarities. They are maps of the same city, parables of the same existence. They glow with the same moral transparency. And so the explanation for why Agatha Christie is the most popular author in the history of the world. Her appeal is as wide and her dissemination as great as the Bible’s, because she is a modern apostle, a female one — about time, after two thousand years of men blathering on. And this new apostle answers the same questions Jesus answered: What are we to do with death? Because murder mysteries are always resolved in the end, the mystery neatly dispelled. We must do the same with death in our lives: resolve it, give it meaning, put it into context, however hard that might be.
“And yet Agatha Christie and the Gospels are different in a key way. We no longer live in an age of prophecy and miracle. We no longer have Jesus among us the way the people of the Gospels did. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are narratives of presence. Agatha Christie’s are gospels of absence. They are modern gospels for a modern people, a people more suspicious, less willing to believe. And so Jesus is present only in fragments, in traces, cloaked and masked, obscured and hidden. But look — he’s right there in her last name. Mainly, though, he hovers, he whispers.”
A smile creeps across Maria Lozora’s face as she watches for his reaction. He smiles back but stays silent. If he is honest, it is jarring to hear Jesus Christ and Agatha Christie, the apostle Paul and Hercule Poirot so closely matched. The Pope in Rome will not be pleased to hear that he has a serious rival in the form of a forty-eight-year-old woman from Torquay, England, the author of many highly engaging entertainments.