For I, the Son of Man, will come in the glory of my Father with his angels and will judge all people according to their deeds. And I assure you that some of you standing here right now will not die before you see me, the Son of Man, coming in my Kingdom. (Matthew 16: 27-28)
This statement and others led early Christians to believe that the second coming was imminent; Jesus, they thought, would return to claim his kingdom in their lifetime. But years passed, and eventually all those Christians not fed to the lions, crucified, or set ablaze to light the streets of Rome succumbed to old age. It was then that the followers of Jesus surmised that perhaps he was enjoying a little joke at their expense. Satan may have whispered in their ears that Jesus’ failure to reappear as he predicted proved that the self-proclaimed Son of Man had made a tragic mistake in a moment of hubris. Yet, resisting temptation and faithful to dogma, medieval Christians knew that Jesus had indeed risen from the dead, that he will eventually return, and that he never makes mistakes. So they concluded that at least one of those men who so many years ago had listened to Jesus speak must still be very much alive. And from this marriage between revealed truth and logic was born the legend of Ahasver, the Wandering Jew, who, unable to die, still roams the earth today, waiting for the problems in the Middle East to get truly out of hand.
Now, most modern Christians, their faith corroded by secular science, balk at the idea that somewhere out there lives a Jew so old that he spends the week before his birthday putting candles on his cake. And they have engaged in all manners of sophistry to resolve the above conundrum by other means.
Most commonly, they try to identify the “coming” of Jesus into his “Kingdom” with an event known as the Transfiguration. The Transfiguration occurred when Jesus took Peter, James, and John onto a mountain and “as the men watched, Jesus’ appearance changed so that his face shone like the sun, and his clothing became dazzling white.” (Matthew 17: 2) I suspect Christians undertake this interpretive maneuver so they can place the second coming and the Apocalypse well into the future; thus they allow themselves the orthodox pleasure of reading their most inspirational fiction. I’m speaking, of course, about the Left Behind series by Timothy LaHaye and Jeremy B. Jenkins. Set during the End Times, LaHaye describes Left Behind as the “first fictional portrayal of events that is true to the literal interpretation of Bible prophecy.” And it has a serious didactic intent:
These books [says LaHaye] heighten readers’ awareness of the coming of the Lord and encourage them to live in that anticipation. The books make people aware of the dangers of being outside of grace when the Lord appears.
This series features a clutch of Christian heroes on an uplifting romp through an utterly devastated landscape while billions of people die. It has warmed the cockles of many faithful readers and led numerous souls to Christ. Thus far, the series consists of sixteen novels (seven of which reached #1 on American bestseller lists) with over 65 million copies sold. Yet, unfortunately for the premise of the series (and getting back to reality), identifying the Transfiguration with Jesus’ prediction in Matthew 16: 27-28 requires a Clintonesque understanding of the malleability of language. I ask you: in what way is “[coming] in the glory of my Father with his angels … [and judging] all people according to their deeds” the same as “face [shining] like the sun … and clothing [becoming] dazzling white?”!
But there are also many Christians who aren’t members of the LaHaye/ Jenkins fan club and they try to resolve the conundrum in another way. They label themselves Preterists and maintain that most or all (depending on whether they are partial or full Preterists) of the biblical prophesies occurred during the first century, during or around the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. (While preterism is orthodox, full preterism verges awfully close to heresy.) Preterists argue that Jesus himself predicted his imminent return, and that, based on passages like the following, this should be clear to all but the most clouded intellects:
[Jesus to his disciples as he sends them off to preach the Good News:] I assure you that I, the Son of Man, will return before you have reached all the towns of Israel. (Matthew 10: 23)
[Referring to prophesies he made about the end of the world had his return] … when you see the events I’ve described beginning to happen, you can know his [the Son of Man’s] return is very near, right at the door. I assure you, this generation will not pass from the scene before all these things appear. (Matthew 24: 33-34)But the problem Preterists face is that many of the predictions associated with the second coming simply never happened: the Jews were not gathered from all the countries and brought back to Jerusalem (Matthew 24: 31) – they were scattered and killed; the kingdom of Israel was not restored (Acts 1: 6; Luke 1: 31-32) – Jerusalem was destroyed and there was no kingdom at all; Christ in his glorious return was not seen by everyone (Matthew 24: 25-30; Revelation 1: 7) – he wasn’t seen by anybody. These problems pertain only to prophesies in the New Testament; if one considers Old Testament prophesies associated with the second coming of Christ, the inconsistencies are even greater.
Still, there’s no reason for despair; we need only hearken to the past. For if we accept the existence of Ahasver, the Wandering Jew, we can eat our cake and have it too. Moreover, Ahasver’s existence is verified by numerous eye-witnesses in many different places and at many different times, starting around 1228 when an Armenian Bishop told the monks of St. Albans that he had seen the sorry bugger in Armenia. Others saw him in Italy, also during the 13th century. After the Reformation sightings were rather frequent: Hamburg (1547); Spain (1575); Vienna (1599); Luebeck (1601); Prague (1602); Luebeck (1603); Bavaria (1604); Ypres (1623); Brussels (1640) Leipzig (1642); Paris (1644); Sweden (1652); Stamford (1658); Astrakhan (1672); Zabkowice Slaskie (1676); Munich (1721); Altbach (1766); Brussels (1774); Newcastle (1790). There are indeed far more witnesses attesting to the reality of the Wandering Jew than that of the resurrected Christ. Not only has Ahasver never died, he may very well have been one of Christ’s disciples – “the disciple he loved.” Perhaps charged with the task of preaching to towns in western Judea, he might have been kidnapped by nefarious Pharisees and sold to a Greek fishmonger as a slave, which would explain why those towns have not yet heard the Good News and why Jesus has never been able to return.
Ahasver's last known sighting was in 1868, when he visited a Mormon in Salt Lake City, Utah. This means that at some point he must have crossed the Atlantic, maybe as a refugee during the Napoleonic Wars. There have been no sightings since, but I strongly suspect that he now calls himself Clyde Lott and lives Canton, Mississippi. Ahasver-cum-Lott is getting tired of wandering the earth. Recently he has been breeding red heifers for export to Israel in an effort to bring biblical prophesy back on track. No doubt he reads the Left Behind novels in his spare time.
P.S. My first meaningful encounter with Ahasver occurred when I read Stefan Heym's The Wandering Jew (1984). The novel alternates (chapter by chapter) between accounts of Ahasver's relationship with an ambitious Lutheran minister during the Reformation and his relationship with professor at the Institute for Scientific Atheism in the German Democratic Republic. It is a wonderful book -- well worth reading. I wish I still had it.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment