(Yes, this is a 3,000 word essay about historical biblical criticism. So sue me. It's an important subject.)

Earlier this week I was teaching a class, the Lenten class that I've been struggling to keep up with all month long. This week I wanted to do something a little different, even if a bit odd, just to get and keep everyone's attention. Lent isn't the church's most fun-filled season; it's a time of introspection and atonement and, as such, teaching an enjoyable class about it is a bit of a challenge.

A concept that has always intrigued me, and which seems deeply useful for believers in a postmodern, pluralistic world is Keats's notion of negative capability. In a letter written in 1817, Keats attempted to explain the genius of Shakespeare by expressing a quality that the bard had in abundance; he described that quality as, "when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." In other words, Keats praised the ability to be comfortable in not-knowing, to be able to proceed in the creative act of living without certainty or conclusions.

I spent a moment describing Keats's epiphany, then told that class that we were going to engage in an exercise in negative capability ourselves. I had them write down one significant stumbling block to their faith, some aspect of Christianity or the Christian life about which they had pause, and share it with the class.

The responses were fascinating. One woman talked about her upbringing in a fundamentalist church, how she was led to believe that unless she did exactly as she was told she was going to Hell, how other church members pried incessantly into her personal life in order to ensure her purity. She was filled with resentment over this behavior--said behavior being the reason for her current membership in the rather more liberal United Methodist Chruch--and was still unable to reconcile it in her heart.

Another woman who, I discovered later, is considering going to seminary, described her anxiety over God's will for her, and how frightened she was that she wasn't measuring up, or doing the right thing. She also mentioned that she is engaged to a man who's a practicing Buddhist, and wondered aloud what her responsibilities as a Christian were vis-a-vis this relationship. (I gave her my cell number and told her to call me later--this is the kind of conversation God created me to have with someone.)

One man, in his sixties, expressed the kind of existential stumbling block that I had always assumed belonged in the purview of younger people. He talked about his desire to learn more about Scripture, but how this desire was countered by a fear of what he would find there; specifically, he found the Bible to be difficult and contradictory, and what he knew of modern biblical scholarship made him uncomfortable and filled him with doubt.

I wanted to say something caustic like, "Shit, you don't know the half of it, buddy," but I refrained.

I had them fold up their stumbling blocks and place them in an envelope marked "Stumbling Blocks" on one side, and "Negative Capability Enclosure" on the other (yes, I'm a dork). I explained to them that once they put their stumbling blocks in the envelope, they would remain there for 30 days, during which time, they would be protected by a high-energy field of negative capability. They were to go about their business for the next month as though these issues were already resolved, without resorting to reason or logic about how it was done, or what the outcome was. I alleged that such certainty within uncertainty might create space in their heads to move past such difficulties altogether. Who knows?

We'll see how it works out.

It occurred to me it might be helpful for us to examine the Bible and the Christian life in this way. Here's the problem: we in the West have inherited two clashing worldviews that create all kinds of anxiety in the modern mind. One the one side is the pre-modern religious worldview that contains Judaism and Christianity, whose views of history and progress are intimately entwined with the will of a complex and mysterious God, and on the other side is the modernist worldview that presupposes a cosmos run in strict Newtonian fashion in which effects always follow causes and there is a reasonable explanation for everything you can perceive; an explanation that does not involve the meddling of a supernatural deity.

Reading the Bible, especially the Gospels, presents all manner of difficulty for the modern reader for this very reason. We want to believe in the divinity and holy purpose of Christ, we want to acknowledge the miraculous healings and resurrection, we want to take on faith that Jesus was the conduit through which God exercised God's particular will within the sphere of human events. But at the same time we also want to believe that we live in a rational universe that starkly contradicts such irruptions into the framework of time and space. Modern historical theologians have performed all sorts of logical contortions in order to resolve this duality, falling into one of two basic jumbled camps: either a) all this stuff happened just like it says and there's no point questioning it so we just have to take it at face value, or b) some of this stuff didn't really happen the way it is described and it was punched up by early Christians to add weight to the story. For instance, regarding Paul's flash of light and heavenly voice during his conversion on the road to Damascus, theologian Paul Tillich dismissively says, "That's just the way they told stories back then."

The fact that we really don't know what happened during Jesus's lifetime, if Jesus said and did anything even remotely like what is preserved in the New Testament or even, really, if there was such a person at all, modern Jesus scholars have done all sorts of crazy things to get at the "historical Jesus," whoever he may be, and see what we can know about him. I can summarize a number of books' response to the question by saying, "Not a whole hell of a lot."

Most scholars agree that yes, there probably was some guy named Jesus who preached and taught and healed sometime around the third decade of the first century C.E. Who this person actually was, and what he really believed about himself are matters upon which there is very little concensus. He was, perhaps a simple, unassuming hasid whose teachings were blown way out of proportion by a guilt-ridden genius named Paul (A N. Wilson), or he was indeed the son of God who functioned as social prophet and deliberately manipulated Jewish ideas like, "Son of Man" and "messiah" in order to radically subvert Jewish idealogy (N.T. Wright), or he was a brilliant teacher whose mythos sprang up organically among his post-easter following (Marcus Borg), or, as many believe, he was more or less what the Gospels say he was.

I do not know which of these approaches, if any, is the correct one. I know that the New Testament, taken at face value, is nearly incomprehensible. As A.N. Wilson writes, I think quite correctly, that "anyone so ignorant, or so innocent, as to open the New Testament in the hope of finding a neutral historical source will be knocked back by a hurricane. Open it, and you will find a Pandora's box of personal challenges and ethical commands. By the end, the last thing you are worrying about is whether it is true, because you yourself have become a character in the story."

Here's the thing about the Bible: it is not a history book, as much as we would like it to be one sometimes. The Gospel writers knew nothing of modern historiography, had no access to modern information sources, and had no Englightenment criteria of reason or Newtonian naturalism to fall back on. They lived in a world that was subsumed by the supernatural. That's just how it was back then.

Beginning with historiography (which is simply a fancy way of saying "how historians approach doing history"), we must understand that there was no such thing in the first century. There were few research tools to be had. And most importantly, each of the Gospels projects a distinctly Jewish concept of history, which is that all of history is a record of the interplay between God and humankind. For instance, to a modern observer, Pharaoh's truculence in the face of the Hebrews' demands for release even in the face of destructive plagues, we would chalk up to pride or bullheadedness, or some other psychological factor. Not so for the Torah writers. In their minds, the Pharaoh's hard-heartedness was caused by the direct will of God, as was everything else. In their view, all of history becomes a teaching story. This worldview is eagerly adopted by the Gospel writers. So it is that the goal of the Gospel writer is not to present an unbiased history containing just the facts, leaving out the inherent morality of the events. Such an idea would have been not just absurd, but inconceivable to a first-century Jew writing about a man he believed to be the Messiah.

Historically speaking, the Gospels are a real mess. Luke dates Jesus's birth as occurring during the reign of Herod, when Quirinus was governor of Syria. This all sounds neatly historical until we point out that Herod's reign was not contemporary with Quirinius's government of Syria. Also, the census that Luke refers to is not mentioned at all in Roman history and of the one census that we do have record of (taking place about 4 C.E., several years after Jesus's birth) there is no provision that men are to return to their ancestral homeland.

Now. We know all of these things because we have compiled and examined ancient narratives which are readily available in book and on microfiche, etc. A first-century Christian writing a history of a persecuted heretical Jewish sect could not simply stroll into the library and look this stuff up. He had to rely on what he was told, and we all know how reliable hearsay is. The sources for the Gospel writers were people who had either actually witnessed these events or people who knew people who witnessed them. It is, of course, speculated that the authors of Matthew and Luke had the Gospel of Mark to rely on, but that merely pushes back the problem. Because Jesus was not considerate enough (or perhaps too wise) to write in any medium more permanent than dust, we have none of his original work. We have only the recollections of some Jewish fishermen and tax collectors and others who did not exactly comprise the intellectual elite of the Roman empire or Judaism at the time.

In light of all this, we see that the Gospels are not really biased or ahistorical in any way that we understand these terms. They were, and are, precisely what their authors intended them to be, as best they knew how to create them. Because their belief was so fervent, so real, and so urgent, they were willing to take some chances on the factual authenticity of what they wrote. John rearranges the history of the Gospel narrative not because he thinks that's the way it really happened, but because that's how he's chosen to tell his story. To John, the facts do not determine the truth; they are determined by the truth. Another way to look at this is to say simply that he is not a biographer of Jesus; he is an evangelist for the Christian faith. And the concepts of historicity and narrative factualness that we use as standards today simply hadn't been invented yet. Or to put it a better way, historicity and narrative factuality would have been conceived entirely differently by the Gospel writer than by you or me. I cannot stress enough how different these two worldviews are.

In order to receive the Gospels, therefore, as they were intended to be received, we must check some intellectual baggage at the door. We must do this, or else we are reading an entirely different book than the one that was written. This is where Keats's negative capability comes into play. In order to appreciate the Gospels, we must jettison long-held assumptions about what the world is and how it works. We must approach the Bible not as historians searching for clues, but as believers experiencing the Good News of Jesus Christ. Into the "Negative Capability Zone" go our thoughts such as "If Jesus had actually ascended literally he would have ended up in orbit, not in Heaven," and "It's highly unlikely that Jesus was actually born in Bethlehem," and so on. The factual nature of this stuff isn't at issue. It's just not the point.

So let's examine one of the more troubling passages in the New Testament from a historical standpoint. This is one that people love to point out as a curiosity to me. In Matthew, we have Jesus going off in the garden to pray. He asks for the cup to be taken from him while the disciples snore in the distance. When he returns, Jesus is immediately arrested and taken away by the soldiers. So the problem is this: how on earth does anyone know what it is that Jesus was saying while he prayed in the garden? If we accept the Gospel narrative, there was no moment during which he might have mentioned it to anyone. I suppose he might have recounted this memory whilst on the cross, but that seems to me a rather inventive answer.

So what's going on here? Did Jesus really say those things or did Matthew just make them up? The answer is that you're asking the wrong question. This is an evangelical narrative, not a history. There is nothing to attack, nothing to defend. What Jesus actually said or did not say is unknowable. It never occurred to anyone to write down an unbiased history of the life of Jesus, as we know such things. The evangelist equates evangelical narrative with biography. They are, to him, one and the same thing where Jesus is concerned. And so John is justified in referring to his Gospel as a true account of events, witnessed by one who saw them. To John, the religious sentiment and the dictates of faith are every bit as valid a perception as what is seen with the eyes and heard with the ears, if not moreso.

And this is really the crux of the matter. We modern Christians want to have the world both ways: we want a life that is dominated by our faith, but we also want to live in a modern, scientific universe where the dictates of faith don't really apply. This is just too much to ask of ourselves. Once you deconstruct a Bach melody and express it in mathematical terms, you have strayed far, far from the experiential beauty that is its entire reason for existing in the first place. There's nothing wrong with your mathematical expressions per se, they just aren't the point. So it is with miracles and biblical minutiae; we can hold them up to the light and compare them and cross-reference them all day long, but in doing so we have already stepped out of the circle of light that they describe. There's nothing wrong with doing this, but it's not the intended experience. It was never meant to respond to such probing and so the results thereof are unsatisfying.

I think sometimes that intellectual and liberal Christians are looking for an excuse to read the Gospels as fiction. I say, go for it. The way that we approach our fiction is much closer to what I believe the Gospel writers intended than the way we approach our history. Don't think of them as historical narratives at all. Think of them as poems written to describe something utterly beyond the power of the artist to describe. Think of them as love poems. Think of them as historical novels expressing a social and religious conviction that extends so far beyond the mundane facts of experience as to render them nearly meaningless.

But whatever else we do as modern Christians, I think the worst thing that we can do is push the Gospels to the back of our minds and pretend that they're not there. We cannot give ourselves to Christ if we're holding back some part of ourselves in shame of the illogic and inconsistency of the message regarding Christ. We need to celebrate the Bible for what it is: not wish that it were something else, or simply pretend that it is what it is not. Both reactions do it and ourselves a disservice.