Talking of Pilate in the Mersey Tunnel

A lift home from an esteemed colleague (EC), talking about sympathetic representations of the High Priest and his Council. These were good men doing what they could in the most difficult circumstances. I suppose they were decent men in the way that many politicians are decent men, but find themselves voting to attack Iraq (and I do not present myself as at any moral distance from decent men in whose shoes I have not had to stand). The BBC production of The Passion over Easter made me feel that Jesus of Nazareth really was in the circumstances an utterly dangerous embarrassment ... and please come back after Passover ... otherwise the Romans will come down on all of us with vicious reprisals ... I've also been reading James P Mackey's Christianity and Creation ... and so the point is, what? that even the best of men can descend to this, as EC says, that this is what they will do in these circumstances, the alternative vision is impossible, almost, perhaps, morally impossible, it belongs to the future (the presence of Christ is a visitation from there, he is an image, almost a mirage), which is hardly a way of absolving ourselves, but a condition of the possibility of our thinking that there is something from which we need to be absolved and these best of men are an image of us not of 'the Jews'. It belongs to 'the future' ('new earth, new heaven', not to be realised here), but is the standard by which we measure what we do, which is unavoidable as a response to force majeure. So Jesus of Nazareth is an image of what we are incapable of, of what cannot be incarnated, but whose incarnation we desire, though with all the cautious prevarication of our double-mindedness. In a way, the presence of Jesus, or the fact that it is he who is sacrificed, is hardly relevant, except that he is the image of the other possibility ('my kingdom is not of this world', from which, however, we are unable to detach ourselves, though we make a beginning just when we posit something beyond it), his presence presents and poignantly points the contrast. As I said in an earlier post, he hardly registers, can hardly register, with Pilate. Mackey does the detail of the Feuerbachian thesis in a way, in our myths we see the lineaments of our deepest impulses seeking expression in the form of the story in which we read ourselves, in which we see our conflicted and divided selves only because we see, we glimpse, what conflicts with what: that is the revelation - and can it really be that in some deep part of ourselves we would not return evil for evil, just as we would not wish evil to be returned, to use JM's favourite biblical phrase? Anyway I have just ordered his Jesus of Nazareth. Sometimes one needs to state something so that one can with time see what might be wrong with it, what its limitations are. That is the business of dialectic, we need a premiss ... or we cannot start our game. Creation stories also tell us about our own humanity, whatever they might reveal about gods, and the latter doesn't interest me much at all, though I found all that intriguing in JM's book. Here is a link to the opening of a review of it, though you need an Athens log-in to see the whole piece.