A Conversation with
Norman Mailer and Dr. Christopher M. Leighton
 Norman Mailer is certainly not the first novelist to leap over almost two thousand years of history and attempt to land inside the story of Jesus. Nor is he the first Jew to do so. Mailer’s latest novel, "The Gospel According to the Son," beckons readers into territory strangely familiar. There are recognizable landmarks from start to finish, but I found the well-known signs pointed in strange directions, making it easy to become disoriented. Puzzled and intrigued by this novel, I finally yielded to the impulse to interview Mr. Mailer.
CL: I am enormously interested in your new novel, The Gospel According to the Son, precisely because it lies on the boundaries - the boundaries of theology and literature, the boundaries of the sacred and profane. It is also situated at that intersection where the Jewish and Christian traditions converge. There is so much going on here that deserves careful reflection and scrutiny.
First, I'm intrigued with the very title of the work, The Gospel According to the Son. I associate a gospel with a specific genre of literature that is driven by a theological agenda. While there is a fair amount of debate about what exactly constitutes a gospel, it entails a sacred story that tries to shape a community and to instill a shared theological vision. And, I usually don't think of most contemporary writers attempting to work through such a genre. Is there a theological passion underlying your novel?
NM: Well, yes I think there is. But by your explanation, I would say that Tolstoy to a great degree was a gospel writer. And in that sense, all proportions capped at a more modest level, I think I've been trying to do that all my writing life. Now the gospel in my case keeps shifting, and it's not a word I would have used for many, many years. Yes, I do think there is a religious agenda in the book. You know I've had this notion for decades that the only way that I can feel comfortably religious, and I do believe in God, is to conceive of God as not all powerful. And I'd say if there is a gospel in this book, it's that.
CL: Aren’t there numerous other characters in the Bible besides Jesus that you might have chosen to make this same point?
NM: Well, in fact, it's not even a comfortable form for those ideas of course. After all, you know the book ends up irritating a great many people because it stays too close to the gospels, and it irritates a great many others because it departs from them at the end. I've been thinking a long time about why I structured the book this way. What impelled me to do it? What were my motives? One usually doesn't know one's motives when one writes a book.
Well, you don't want to, in a way, because it gets in the way. The moment you decide you're writing a book for a purpose then the purpose takes over and paralyzes often some more interesting possibilities. So I generally prefer to write a book in a motivational fog. It's enough that I'm writing the book. I don't question why I'm writing it. Then afterward I begin to ponder the question. I've thought more about this book than any other book I've written because it was so fickle, so out of character for me.
In anticipation of our talk, I started thinking, "Well why don't you try just once to define a little better what you were up to." As I've been thinking about it, it's occurred to me that actually what is interesting to me about the book is that I have very, very little knowledge - for a reasonably sophisticated, civilized, cultivated author, like five hundred of us in America - I really had relatively little knowledge of Christian theology. I had a much more developed sense of Jewish theology, though I'm not at all a devout orthodox Jew. I don't think I've been - this is not to brag or apologize - I don't think I've been in a synagogue in twenty years. On the other hand, I always think of myself as being absolutely attached to Jewish questions. Over the years I've spent a lot of time in various Jewish studies on my own. I studied Hebrew at one point unsuccessfully. I studied Jewish Yiddish at one point unsuccessfully. I've read an awful lot of Judaica compared with how much I've read of Christian theology. Years ago I read Graetz' History of the Jews in five volumes, which is the great nineteenth century history that was done. I really think his is the best because it's so private and particular. He's so passionate, and he's unwittingly very humorous. Great popes come through who were cruel to the Jews, and he dismisses them with the stroke of a pen. Some evil bastards come along, and he adores them because they were so nice to the Jews. It's a wonderful sort of.... It gives you a notion of what history is all about.
W hat occurred to me when I read the gospels a couple of years ago is, "here I am, I'm a typical Jew, which is that I know a lot about my tradition and feel a lot about being Jewish. " And I know so little about these gospels that I'm really reading them in a virtual state of innocence. I've been familiar with the lines. I've been familiar with the theory. I've heard many conversations about Christianity, but finally I had no basic experience in the reading of the gospels. And I was struck with several interesting paradoxes. On the one hand, here is a wonderful story. On the other hand, this has gotten me in a lot of trouble, but I repeat it, the gospels vary between the most beautiful, illuminated and exalted writing and some terribly pedestrian writing. It just stands out that the evangelists kept the good lines from earlier people or from Jesus himself. So I had very little interest in the historical Jesus, or in the reality or even the unreality of the gospels. What I was fascinated with as a Jew is the fact that Jesus is Jewish. This struck me as incredibly important. Indeed, if you're going to make a pantheon of the ten greatest Jews, the only argument would be, "Is he the first, or is he not?"
The Jews for the most part have never gone near the gospels, because that is the place where all the trouble started for them. And so I thought I really ought to tell this story. Now, looking back on it, I think it wouldn't be at all bad for a great many of my fellow Jews to have the same experience I had, which is how interesting and moving and profound a story this is. And how full it is of novelistic ambiguities and depths that we can't plumb and so forth. And, on the other hand, I thought there are so many Christians out there who are probably analogous to the kind of Jew I am -- which is they had a considerable amount of church when they were young, they've left the church, they're not interested but they too might enjoy going through the story again. There's a no man's land surrounding the gospels that I can fill, precisely because I don't know a great deal about Christian theology. This was probably my motive for writing this novel.
CL: I encounter some Jewish readers, and I'm sure I'll encounter many more, who wonder what one of the preeminent writers - who clearly identifies himself as a Jew - is doing making Jesus so believable. They are scandalized that, in a sense, you opened the door to making an assimilationist move; that in a sense is what you are doing by reclaiming the Jewishness of Jesus in the way that you do.
NM: Well, I'm not interested in having Jews concur. That's not my aim. But what I do feel is that it's immensely important for western civilization to fulfill the promise of the hyphen in Judeo-Christian. Unless our concept of spirituality deepens immensely in the next century, I'm not at all certain that we're going to make it. The destructive tendencies in human nature are not necessarily any less than they ever were, and in fact, with the greater power we have technologically, we could ruin the whole thing in so many different ways. It's terrifying. And, global capitalism doesn't exactly relax me. You know there's an old dictum of Marx's that money leaches out everything else in sight. Of course, that's very close to what Jesus was teaching. Global capitalism to me represents precisely that principle: that money prevails. So, given all that, there has to be a rapprochement between Jews and Christians. But it won't work on the old terms. It won't work on the premise that we Jews are simply victims. "Oh, we've been unfairly accused of killing Christ" and so forth and so on. The fact of the matter is, if Christ existed - and I suspect he did - it's very hard to believe that all this was made up and believed in without any objective reality there. If the real story, the historic story, is anything at all like the story that has come down to us through the gospels, then almost certainly Christ was killed by a collaboration between the Roman establishment and the Jewish establishment. I don't know if that's something that the Jews have to still feel guilty or uneasy about. Establishments are always killing their own.
CL: Well, again, this raises the questions about the peculiar nature of the gospels. A polemic is built into the gospels, and one of the ways in which the theological agenda of the church is established is through an effort to discredit her evangelical competitors. This verbal attack redounds on the Jewish tradition. In other words, to make sure there is space cleared for the emergence of this alternative way of being in relationship to God, a sharp assault is directed against Jesus' compatriots. The Pharisees in particular get a bad rap. Now I understand that your literary task is not to recontextualize in historical terms exactly what went on, but I am unsettled that you recapitulate the familiar anti-Jewish polemics that have plagued western culture for so many centuries. This is most conspicuous in your characterization of the Pharisees as legalistic, spiritually vacuous and, in the last analysis even murderous.
NM: Well, no. I don't think I picture them as murderers. I picture them as no more murderous than any government that ever executes some of its own people. In other words, they are exercising one of the functions of government at that point. No, I don't see them as individually murderous, but....
CL: The grandeur of the very tradition out of which Jesus emerged is nonetheless obscured. I'm convinced that had there not been a Pharisaic movement, Jesus himself would have been unimaginable. He stands precisely on traditions enshrined by the Pharisees. The aptitude for innovation and self-criticism and the democratizing of the religious experience–these creative dynamics comprise what Ellis Rivkin calls "the hidden revolution." The creativity of the Pharisees makes them of huge importance, not only for the development of the church but for the emergence of rabbinic Judaism. It seems to me that one of the real challenges for Christians and Jews is to reconceptualize their origins. I think that this recovery of our beginnings is necessary if Christians and Jews are going to forge a new relationship. There is no escaping the imperative to reappraise the enduring perceptions among Christians of the Jewish tradition that crystallize in the New Testament.
NM: Well, I'll confess that I knew very little about the Pharisees when I started writing the book, and I don't know a great deal more now. But, taking it on the terms of the gospels themselves, and I assure you that the sense of distortion was not absent from me. Luke, for example, is a very good example of someone who is so filled with hatred for the Jews that I found much of Luke very hard to accept head on. I didn't trust his motives. But I think the cutting edge is here: how does one bring Christians to recognize that there is more to the Jewish half of the argument that they've accepted. I think that using your approach, which is to make people recognize that there was much more to the Pharisees than they've ever understood, is going to be very difficult. Your method consists of approaching people about faith and telling them that they have to adapt their faith to fit a historical likelihood. And that's almost impossible for most people. My feeling was that the best approach - I could be wrong about this - was to emphasize a very Jewish Jesus. This would move and affect them much more than any attempt to argue about the historical reality. This was my premise. Like all premises, one could be wrong on that.
It started with an interesting episode way back in Arkansas, about twelve years ago. I was there with my wife, who comes from a Baptist family, and her father invited me to come to church. I said, "Well sure, yes, I think I'd like to go." So I went, and the people and, they were very excited that someone was Jewish in their adult Sunday school, their Bible class on Sunday. They assumed that I would have an insight that they wouldn't have - particularly since we were reading the Old Testament that day - because I was of the root. I thought about that a lot afterward. I thought, let them encounter the profound Jewishness of Jesus. That might even accomplish more than any other approach to it.
Now as I said, it's only a premise, and I could be dead wrong on it. A profound change in attitude won’t necessarily occur by restoring the dignity of the Pharisees and insisting that they were not really deserving of blame. If indeed the events are historically true, and Jesus was crucified, then I think there's no doubt of collaboration between the high priests and Pilate.
CL: Well, the rehabilitation of the historical image of Second Temple Judaism may not capture the imagination of most readers or change many hearts. The contours of the original story may prove unalterable. Yet, I wonder how you, as a writer of a gospel, sort out the conflicting responsibilities of your profession. Do the aesthetic demands of composing a gripping story take precedence over the responsibility to present a historically reliable portrait, especially in light of the devastation already worked in the name of the "new and improved" covenant? You take imaginative liberties in describing Jesus as bedeviled with doubt and suffering from a lack in knowledge and power. You also take some innovative turns in projecting an image of God as profoundly limited. So why not go the distance? Doesn’t the story benefit from a more historically nuanced and therefore more ambiguous description of Jesus’ opponents?
Furthermore, aren’t we left with a problem? By profiling the Jewishness of Jesus, do you end up advocating that Christians recognize and reconstitute their own tradition as a form of Judaism?
NM: No, no.
CL: How then does Jesus depart from what it means to be Jewish? What are the critical junctures that signal a break? Where does he veer away or separate himself from the tradition?
NM: Well, after all for the Jews, God was nothing if not absolutely awesome. So, I think the most profound break is actually an existential one, which is Jesus saying, "I'm intimate. I may be awesome to some of you, but you can approach me with great intimacy. You will receive my love. You will receive my compassion. You will experience a tenderness you've never known before. That is what I offer. What I offer is the best side of ourselves as human beings. Now that's not particularly present in the Jewish religion. It wasn't then, and it still isn't to this day. I mean the Jews believe in compassion. They believe in all the Christian virtues, but they believe in them in a different way. If they believe in anything, they believe in the Shekhinah, which is the divine female principle. But generally speaking, what they believe is that God is essentially remote, immensely powerful, and awesome. God has laid down rules that one can follow and if one follows those rules, one can have a reasonable and a decent life. And living decently has an importance beyond description. Don't try to explain it further. Don't try to analyze it in terms of a heaven, a hell, a this or a that. Lead your life this way. This is the way it was given. I mean they're more fundamental, really, than the fundamentalists. And I think that Christianity is altogether different.
CL: But the Jesus that you portray is not somebody who self-consciously departs from this tradition.
NM: Well I just felt that he was living existentially. I treated him finally as a decent young man and a fine carpenter whom at the age of thirty that he is the son of God. He realizes that he has much to do about it. And then he goes out, and he learns as he goes. My idea was that he became larger as he proceeded. The question of how much he was Jewish just really didn't enter his mind. He was Jewish. His horror was that most Jews were not following him. Nonetheless, all his initial followers were Jewish. So it wasn't a matter of his departing from Judaism. I think he saw his work as an illumination of Judaism, as an intensification of it. Because he was not a theologian, he didn't see himself departing from what he had been given so much as that he had had revelations. After all, saints and visionaries are rarely theologians at the same time.
CL: I think that one of the more compelling tensions in the novel revolves around the fact that the Jesus that you describe is racked with doubt. He struggles without resolution to differentiate when the devil is speaking and when God is speaking. There's a certain distrust he has of himself. And that distrust and doubt humanizes him.
NM: Well, I remember one review that I liked very much because I thought the positive and negative sides of the review were both very accurate. And the negative side was that I had very little sense of the divinity of Jesus. But, I did have a good sense of him as a man. And it was what I wanted. You know, I felt that to try to imagine what his religious transports were like would be presumptuous, much more presumptuous than writing in the first person.
CL: When you imaginatively relocate yourself into the world of the book, is Jesus the kind of character that you would have followed had he called you?
NM: You know, I don't know. I'm terribly set in my ways. I've never followed anyone. But of course this is another century, in another period, in another need. I've followed authors in my life, authors who have changed my life. I think if someone came along who was extraordinary and said things that I've begun to think about but had never quite been able to articulate for myself, and said them in a noble voice and was wonderful, yes I could see following someone like that, yes. Obviously there was something extraordinary about him, and that's the price that you pay for the writing in the first person. You can't go around saying, "Well, I knew I was wonderful."
CL: No, thankfully you avoid that. Well, I have no idea how this book will play out when I gather Christians and Jews together to read and study. I don't know what kinds of buttons your novel will push because it seems to me to blur some well-guarded boundaries. It may provide an opening for rethinking the relationship between Christians and Jews. I will keep you posted.
NM: I would appreciate that.
The puzzles that vexed me before the interview lingered long after I hung up the phone. Mailer wants to reintroduce Jesus to modern readers who are disaffected with institutionalized religion. He hopes to rattle the complacent--the secularists as well as the religionists--out of their dogmatic slumbers. A noble purpose that even the most pious, talented, and daring among us rarely achieve. No, it is not his intention nor his failure to realize the dream that leaves me troubled.
Perhaps what worries me is the notion of gospel that animates the novel. In Mailer I could hear the echo of Wallace Steven’s claim: "The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing other." Freed from the constraints of historical research and liberated from the canons of traditional interpretation, the reader can follow the lead of the writer, and both can yield to whatever creative impulses and literary urges seize the imagination. One can boldly go where no one has gone before.
Ironically, Mailer’s dream of engaging the religiously disaffected will most likely come to naught, precisely because these readers will find in Mailer’s Jesus the iconoclastic individualist they came looking for: a homeless, spiritual pilgrim like them whom they can afford to ignore without the fear or hope of any serious consequences. It is the devoted and inquiring Christian who may realize the elusive aspirations of the novelist. Those who balance the Bible in one hand and Mailer’s fiction in the other encounter conflicting images of Jesus, and these images compete for our attention and ultimately our loyalty. This is the problem and the opportunity that Mailer’s novel presents to readers who care deeply about their tradition. Is there enough weight and substance within Mailer’s image of Jesus to sustain the living memory of a Christian community? Where does this image direct our moral and theological vision? Mailer’s book invites readers to identify what is essential to the Christian story. What of the Christian gospel does he capture? What does he miss?
Mailer, of course, has little interest in the theological tasks of the Christian community, in this case the imperative to assess any literature that presents itself as a gospel. Yet, if Christians and Jews are willing to subject the book to an inquiry that engages the authoritative tradition in which they are grounded, Mailer may prompt both communities to explore their underlying religious assumptions. What, after all, happens to Christians and Jews who immerse themselves in a story of Jesus that is uprooted from its traditional theological and historical moorings? Is the Christian imagination liberated from dogmatic strictures that stunt new forms of engagement with their sacred story? Or, does this literary reconstruction of Jesus flatten the ambiguities of the Gospel and domesticate the theological mysteries that lie at the heart of this sacred story? Does Mailer’s account recover neglected dimensions of Jesus’ humanity, or does he trivialize Jesus, thereby creating an entirely forgettable character? The answers to these questions do not rest on Mailer, but on the community that risks the challenge of rereading its sacred stories.
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In Memory of Roy Eckardt and Paul van Buren
(b. Aug. 8, 1918 d. May 5, 1998; b. April 20, 1924 d. June 18, 1998)
It is difficult to remember a time when we did not know that there was new ground to break. Yet, we Christians have long remained oblivious to the legacy of Christian anti-Judaism and blind to the theological challenges of creatively engaging the Jewish tradition. The imperative to develop a critical aptitude that would enable us to see ourselves through the eyes of the other emerged with the daring scholarship of a precious few, and lamentably, two of them died this past spring.
 Drs. Roy Eckardt and Paul van Buren were members of the original Christian Scholars Group on Judaism and the Jewish People, the premier Christian think tank in Jewish-Christian relations over the past twenty-five years, now sponsored by the ICJS. Both of them were profoundly committed to their respective Christian communities, and they saw their scholarship first and foremost in the service of the church. Roy studied extensively with H. Richard Neibuhr and James Parkes. He and his talented wife, Alice, went on to become outstanding professors at Lehigh University and more recently at Oxford. After his studies at Harvard, Paul pursued his doctoral work with Karl Barth in Basel before assuming his academic responsibilities at Temple University, and subsequently at Heidelberg and the Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem. Both published extensively, and their writings are now staples for anyone who dares to consider the impact of Christian-Jewish relations on contemporary theology.
Although the depth of their commitments and the rigor of their scholarship reflect their debts to their teachers, they pioneered new theological terrain that, thanks to them, we now take for granted. We depend mightily on their achievements. Their theological formulations may prove provisional, for their thinking was undergoing constant revision right to the end. Yet, the questions that they framed deliver an inescapable challenge to the Christian community. Their voices continue to remind us: the ethical character of the Christian life–not only how Christians treat one another but how they engage the Jewish people–will reveal the adequacy of the churches’ theological answers. Our task at the ICJS is to advance their daring in ways that render Christians and Jews more faithful to the best within and between their respective traditions.
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ICJS Welcomes New Jewish Scholar
David Fox Sandmel Joins the Staff
For the past four years, the ICJS has relied upon the guidance of an exceptional local rabbinate and the counsel of visiting scholars and educators to help chart its course. Yet, the organization has sorely missed the presence of a Jewish scholar who participates in the rough and tumble of the daily routine.  When Rabbi Shira Lander, the first rabbi to join the ICJS staff, left to pursue her doctorate, a void was created that could not be easily filled. How do you track down an individual who knows the borders between two complex traditions? Where do you find a person who speaks the peculiar languages of Jews and Christians? Where do you locate an accomplished scholar who is also an engaging educator? Can a person be found who can articulate the wisdom and beauty of Judaism to Christians, and whose knowledge of the Christian tradition enables him to provide Jews with a sense of the vitality and grandeur of Christianity? How do you discover individuals who stand firmly in their own tradition, but are willing to step onto the tight rope and juggle serious religious questions before diverse audiences?
The job requires a rare talent, and that talent is clearly evident in the person appointed as the next ICJS Jewish Scholar. David Fox Sandmel grew up in a family where Jewish and Christian scholars frequently converged around the dinner table. His father, the late Dr. Samuel Sandmel, traversed the field of Intertestimental Literature for many years at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio, and his pioneering contributions to the study of the New Testament have set a standard for subsequent generations of scholars, Jewish and Christian. David obviously drank deeply from the family well.
While his academic odyssey has carried him from Ohio State University back to the Hebrew Union College and finally onto the University of Pennsylvania, David has continued to examine the interplay of Judaism and Christianity. He is currently completing a dissertation that explores the ways that modern Jewish scholars have read and interpreted the birth of Christianity and the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism. This inquiry not only presupposes a thorough familiarity with the world of the New Testament, but a solid grasp of the contemporary scholarship on "the Partings of the Ways."
In addition to his scholarly credentials, David brings to the ICJS significant experience within the rabbinate. Upon graduating from Hebrew Union College, David served as the Director of Education at a large congregation in Cleveland, Ohio. He subsequently undertook the daunting challenge of founding a Reform congregation in Portland, Maine. Under his tutelage, the synagogue grew dramatically and evolved into a dynamic center for Jewish learning. After five years in Portland, David decided that the time to pursue his life-long dream of doctoral study was running out, and so the Sandmel family migrated south to Philadelphia.
While David completes this academic marathon, he will commute to Baltimore on a weekly basis and participate in a variety of our educational initiatives. Next year at this time, he hopes to be settled in Baltimore and functioning as the full-time Jewish scholar. We share the same dream. He looks forward to participating in an educational enterprise that will challenge him to translate scholarship so that it invigorates the larger community. He is clearly at home in the classroom, the board room, and the living room. The ICJS will provide him with opportunities to work with diverse audiences in diverse settings. We are delighted to welcome David, his wife Janet, and their two children to Baltimore, and we hope that you take advantage of occasions when you can see for yourselves the living treasure that has come to the ICJS.
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