The Nazarene

For 19 centuries a story, crying to be told and retold, has haunted the hearts and minds of men: the story of Jesus. Its source material is seed-small: the four Gospels, the New Testament apocrypha, the histories of Josephus, the pseudepigrapha.* Yet its literature is enormous. In Chautauqua, N. Y., famed cultural and religious resort, an Aula Christi (Hall of Christ) contains some 2,000 biographies and critical studies of Him./- Not only scholars but novelists have been gripped by His story. Ernest Renan wrote a prettified Life of Christ which was almost fiction. Giovanni Papini, on & off a Roman Catholic, lavished Latin enthusiasm on Jesus. In The Brook Kerith, George Moore, in cadenced prose, had Jesus survive the crucifixion to spend the rest of a long life in retirement.

Latest writer to tell the old, old story is Sholem Asch, sad-eyed Polish-Jewish novelist (Three Cities), now in the U. S. Published this week is his long (698 pages) The Nazarene, November Book-of-the-Month.* As full of Hebraic fervor, and often as mournful, as a synagogue chant--it was written in Yiddish--The Nazarene brings ancient Palestine to life, offers the most extraordinary evocation of Jesus since Renan's. Yet Author Asch's viewpoint is so objective it should not offend Christian sensibilities.

Ingenious in structure, The Nazarene has not one but three viewpoints. Part of it is an account of Jesus' career as seen by the Roman Governor of Jerusalem, the Ciliarch (or Hegemon) Cornelius. Part is told by one Jochanan, pupil of Rabbi Nicodemon, who was sympathetic to Jesus without believing Him the Messiah. By Author Asch's device, the Roman and the Jew were reincarnated in modern Poland, the one a crabbed and Jew-hating scholar, the other a young Jewish translator. Their association results in a third part of the book: a long, emotional fragment of a "lost Gospel" which the scholar, without revealing how he got it, claims was written by Judas Iscariot.

Author Asch calls Judas "Judah IshKiriot," as he calls others by their Hebrew names: Rabbi Yeshua ben Joseph (Jesus), Miriam of Migdal (Mary Magdalene), Simon bar Jonah (Peter). It is Author Asch's thesis (as it has been of some Christian scholars) that Judas was so impatient for the salvation of mankind--"My soul is famished for the redemption," he said--that he betrayed Jesus to hurry the inevitable end.

Yeshua as seen by the Roman: "His body was lean and hungry-looking . . .strange pallor. . . . A young black beard, which mingled with the ritualistic ear-locks hanging down at either side." Less than two years later, when Yeshua stands before the Roman's superior, Pilate, the soldier notes: "On his graying--hair lay a wreath woven of thorns. . . . Little trickles of blood clotted the hair of his ear-locks, ran down his beard, and fell drop by drop onto his throat and naked body."

*Pseudonymous writings like the Book of Enoch and other early Eastern texts. Dr. Charles Francis Potter, Manhattan Humanist and Bible expert, has worked for years, will work for years more, on a psychological study of Jesus in which the pseudepigrapha will figure. Most authoritative collection of New Testament apocrypha: The Apocryphal New Testament, edited by M. R. James (Oxford University Press).

/-Most scholarly and influential modern studies: by Nathaniel Schmidt, William Sanday, G. Stanley Hall, Joseph Klausner (a Jew), Shirley Jackson Case, Charles Guignebert.

* Putnam (3$)

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