AuthorTalk Book Interview
Ken Evers-Hood
The Irrational Jesus; Leading the Fully Human Church
Ron Way:
Hello, everyone. This is your host, Ron Way, for Author Talk and Rising Light Media Group. Today, I have the great pleasure of introducing you to a new author to me. His name is Ken Evers-Hood, and he has written a fascinating new book entitled The Irrational Jesus. There's also a subtitle, but we'll get to that in a minute. Ken graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and earned his doctorate from Duke Divinity School. He's currently a pastor at Tualatin. I pronounced that right, didn't I, Ken?
Evers-Hood:
Yes, you did.
Ron Way:
It's a Presbyterian church near Portland, Oregon. Welcome, Ken, to Author Talk. I'm glad that you could join me today.
Evers-Hood:
Thanks so much, Ron. Great to be here.
Ron Way:
Before we jump into your book, Ken, take a moment to tell us, all of us that are listening, a little bit about yourself. Take us on a short trip down the path that's led you to this point in your life.
Evers-Hood:
Absolutely. I felt a call to ministry when I was an undergraduate in the University of Texas at Austin, where I met my wife, and we wound up going to Princeton. I thought I would be interested in academics and teaching and what not, but I love people. I started out in new church development outside of Austin, and then I've been a pastor for gosh, I've been here at Tualitin for 14 years. We've got three amazing kids and that's me in a small nutshell.
Ron Way:
What did you do before? Did you come right out of divinity and go into pastoring?
Evers-Hood:
I went right out, yeah.
Ron Way:
You couldn't get a job, huh? [Laughter]
Evers-Hood:
They always say that you're supposed to know what you're doing when you're a new church developer, and it was the first thing I did. I knew nothing, and I found that very helpful. We knew how to make mistakes and we made them gloriously and that church, Presbyterian Church of Lake Travis is thriving today.
Ron Way:
That's great. You got from the East Coast to the West Coast. How did that happen?
Evers-Hood:
You know, we had our first child, William Chester. He goes by Ches, and we were away from family. My folks were in Dallas/Fort Worth and her folks lived out here on the West Coast. We thought, well we need to be close to them. The decision between Dallas/Fort Worth and Portland, Oregon, Ron that was not a hard one to make.
Ron Way:
No, that's a no brainer. [Laughter]
Evers-Hood:
Yeah.
Ron Way:
I get that. It's a beautiful, beautiful place to live. When you started ministering, did you start out as an assistant minister? How did that work for you in your own career?
Evers-Hood:
Yeah, no I just started right out in New Church Development. My job was to start a congregation and we had a handful of people in the hills of Austin. We wound up learning together and they gave me an incredible start in ministry. When I came out here, I'm a pastor of a mid-sized congregation and a lot of my learning isn't just at this church, but I served on our larger presbytery board and worked with pastors and churches in conflict, and that's where a lot of the work in this book came from. I was working with folks trying to learn how to be together.
Ron Way:
Yes, I read that in your book. It's a great book for anyone in a church, because every church has conflicts. You have the people that are the big donors that tend to hold sway, and on many occasions, you are afraid to ruffle their feathers, but if you don't take into account the average bloke in the congregation, you run into trouble. You wrote about that.
Evers-Hood:
Yeah, that's right. I would say the impetus for this book for me and my research at Duke, it came from being a pastor and loving theology. I was a classics major and studied Greek and Latin and I love all of that but I also discovered a really huge disjunct between the theological work that I did and then working with real human beings, Ron. They're very different, and part of how I got hooked up into working with Dan Arielli at Duke is he's a behavioral economist. What they do is they take these beautiful economic models of how people should behave and then Dan does these clever experiments to see if people, real people, actually behave that way, and of course we don't.
I thought that's precisely what I experience in the church. We have these beautiful theological ideas or models of how we should behave but every pastor knows, or anybody who's sat on a church board knows, real human beings are very different, and often predictably so. So that's the good news.
Ron Way:
Well that leads me to the subtitle of your book. You said, and the first question I have because as I mention to you when we were prepping for this, my prime interest is in the historical Jesus which I love to study and the early years of Christianity, our formative years. You had some fascinating observations for me. You had mentioned that Jesus and I'm going to quote, "had a limited ability to see the future. He had physical limitations and a remarkable lack of self-interest. In his full humanity Jesus is limited by time and place, by imperfect information," and for me this is a powerful concept because we tend to mush that over, which does the Jesus that really walked and started this whole change in mankind’s consciousness, a disservice.
You quote one of my favorite authors who I've had on this show a couple of times as a guest, Amy Jill Levine, and she writes, and I'm going to quote her and then I'm going to quote your book.
"Jesus of Nazareth dressed like a Jew, prayed like a Jew, instructed other Jews on how best to live according to the commandments given by God to Moses, taught like a Jew, argued like a Jew with other Jews and died like thousands of other Jews on a Roman cross." Now may I quote from your own book?
Evers-Hood:
Absolutely.
Ron Way:
Here we go. "To give us a clear outline of where we're headed, irrationality in Jesus' life falls into four major categories: the presence of a strong emotion in Jesus' life, the limited knowledge Jesus possesses, the mistakes Jesus makes in the Gospels and the adaptive behaviors Jesus employs that are consistent with the actions behavioral theorists would expect of human subjects in cognitive limitations." I want to take these one at a time if you'll allow me. Would that be all right?
Evers-Hood:
You bet.
Ron Way:
Okay.
Evers-Hood:
Absolutely.
Ron Way:
Let's talk about Jesus' strong emotions and even anger.
Evers-Hood:
Absolutely Ron. You know as a Presbyterian, I'm actually a pretty orthodox guy. I believe in Chalcedon and the Council there that said Jesus is fully divine and fully human. I think we do a great job on the divinity and we've done a pretty terrible job, historically on the humanity. The powerful emotion that Jesus experiences, you know the cover of the book has Giotto's depiction of Jesus cleansing the temple. The reason I picked Giotto, he was early Renaissance and he shows Jesus with emotion. He's ticked off looking, Ron, which if you look in past depictions, he looks, really happy and kind of passive. There's no emotion at all. I think it's absurd to think that Jesus when he cleansed the temple did so in some sort of impassive way. He felt rage and righteous indignation. When he healed people ...
Ron Way:
Can I mention one thing? On that point, it just ticked a memory. I belong to Westar Institute, which is made up of a couple of hundred biblical scholars. I sat on the Board for about ten years before I got tired of non-profits. As a minister, you're stuck with them. I wasn't. [Laughter] I left that job. But the first times I went to one of their meetings, and there were maybe 40 to 50 scholars sitting around tables. They had all their research papers and they were expounding on their theories about the historical Jesus, which was all wonderful, but they got to this exact story, the temple cleansing, and as they started talking it was so pacific, it was academic, it was so clinical, so clean.
Honest to God, I wanted to just stand up without any notice, walk up to the nearest table which they had papers and books and their coffee cups, and just flip the tables over and walk out of the room, because they were postulating that if Jesus had done that he couldn't have gotten 20 feet before the temple guards would have arrested him. My point was, yes, he could have done that, he really could have plowed through the area in a rage. He was infuriated, and he flipped everything in his path head over heels. It caused such a commotion; birds flying, lambs bleating, and he could have just walked right out of the peristyle of the temple, and no one would have stopped him. It's the shock value. You're talking about those emotions that he had and you're absolutely right. Especially some of the Catholic pictures of him looking up to heaven and he's so sweet, you know?
Evers-Hood:
Right. Yeah, and I think that portrays what I call practical Docetism, where nobody that I know believes in Docetism, that Jesus isn't really human, he just seems to be. We say that we don't believe that, but practically almost everybody I know is a practical Docetist. They don't take Jesus' humanity seriously enough.
Ron Way:
That's right. You know it's a hypothetical, or perhaps people that that theoretically he was human—oh but he is divine too. Yet, how can that be? He was a real human being, or he would have been a God. If he was God at that moment—and we aren't—so what good would it have done us? We couldn't emulate the man-God.
Evers-Hood:
Exactly. You know, go on with the emotion, it isn't just the righteous indignation. When he heals, it's one of my favorite words in Greek. Often it gets translated as moved with pity, which I think is a pretty weak translation but splagchnizomai. Splagchnizomai, it's a Homeric word. It's an ancient word. It means to be moved in your bowels. Moved in your guts. When he sees somebody that is in need of healing, it isn't just this robotic action of kindness. He's moved in this deep human way.
Then everybody's favorite shortest verse they say, when Lazarus dies, and Mary says, ‘Lord had you been here our brother wouldn't have died,’ and Jesus wept. He weeps. Certainly in the Garden of Gethsemane, there is just this powerful affliction of emotion and the cry of dereliction on the cross. I've actually heard some people say, well you know it's just the beginning of a psalm that ends really nicely. I'm like, come on. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!’
Ron Way:
There you go. That is ...
Evers-Hood:
Just cry it out.
Ron Way:
Absolutely. Absolute despair, because if he didn't, he wouldn't know what we're like to suffer, would he?
Evers-Hood:
I think that's absolutely right.
Ron Way:
Let's go on. Next, Jesus had limited knowledge. Oh, we're in trouble here. Come on, talk to me.
Evers-Hood:
Well you know, limited knowledge. There are some small ways that you see that, like when the woman with the hemorrhage reaches out and touches him and he says "Who touched me?" And the disciples say how can we know, I mean that to me, we can allow for someone to not know something small like that, but to me what's fascinating is when they ask him about the kingdom. When is the kingdom going to come? His response, he's consistent on this and I have no idea how [inaudible 00:12:39] who predict the end stay in business because he's consistent. He says, nobody, not even the Son of Man knows the time or the day. He doesn't say, ‘hey, I know it. I'm just not telling you.’ He doesn't know it. To not know, to me that's a massive amount of ignorance for Jesus and something that I think we should take seriously.
Ron Way:
Absolutely. I mean people think that if he is the messiah, of course he knew, but that isn't what the New Testament says. That isn't what the Gospels say. They're reporting stories they've heard and they wouldn't put it in there if they thought it was bad, because they try to make Jesus look good whenever they can. It's just the way it was.
Evers-Hood:
Right. Right. Tacked on to that, to me is the mistakes that he appears to make. I think of, when I present this to groups, particularly church people, this is where people get the most nervous. Along with his limited knowledge, Jesus makes, he makes mistakes. There's a time when the Pharisees accuse him of breaking the Sabbath and he likens himself to David. He said in the days of Abiathar, when Abiathar was priest, but the problem is, Abiathar wasn't priest. It's actually Ahimelech. Now, it is possible that some sleepy monk, when he was transcribing that, he made an error, but there's not textual evidence for that at all. To me the clear reading is that Jesus just confused the names. I think that's okay.
Ron Way:
Well I'll tell you another one that you have in your book that's always been a favorite on many levels, and it confounds many Christians, it is the story in Mark about the conversation that Jesus had with the woman in Tyre, who was a Gentile. That's a non-Jew folks, like you and me probably. A couple of things roll around in our minds when we hear this. Most Christians are just like the woman. We're Gentiles, and Jesus teaches love to all. Why would he refer to the woman as a dog, which is really an insult, who didn't deserve any scraps from his table and he says that his healing, his wisdom, his teaching was reserved only for his kind. Jews. That story is explained away by many Christians, and I've heard many different explanations. You've heard more. It's still uncomfortable. It shows a very human man changing his mind. Talk to us about that.
Evers-Hood:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah Ron, there's no other story for me that really highlights Jesus' full humanity than that. You know as I read it as a pastor, he's trying to go on vacation.
Ron Way:
You're right.
Evers-Hood:
He's tired, you know.
Ron Way:
Correct.
Evers-Hood:
I like to go to the beach, but Jesus goes to Syria. Why not? Yeah, when he's there, this woman breaks in on him. There's something that behavioralists call decision fatigue. We know that throughout the day as we become more and more tired we become more conservative in our judgements. There's an amazing Israeli parole board study where about 70% of the releasing of prisoners occurs before noon. We'd like to think of people as being objective, especially judges, but the reality is, it's when in the morning we're at our best. Well Jesus was not at his best, right? He's on vacation. He's tired and here this woman barges in and he spits an epithet at her, “dog.”
Now, there are some people who will say things like well they used [Greek 00:16:31] which is the diminutive. It’s just some puppy, so maybe he's being cute. I think that's absurd. I think he's being rude. I think he's being racist. I think what he's saying is awful because he's tired and in his full humanity, he makes mistakes. What's amazing about the story is the woman of course comes right back at him and says, "Oh but sir even the dogs under the table get the scraps," and he says, "For saying that, your daughter has been made well." What I think is remarkable about Jesus isn't that he makes the mistake. He does that, but it's that when she comes back at him, he's able to own the mistake and then change his mind. I think that's redeeming.
Ron Way:
Listen, here’s another interesting thing. If we were alive during his lifetime, we would have to realize, he really did come to the Israelites. He didn't come for the Gentiles. He was speaking the language of and to the Jews, his people. It's like Amy Jill said (where I quoted her in the earlier), he spoke like a Jew. He spoke just to Jews, primarily because that's who he came to speak to. It wasn't until much later, which is kind of a segue for me, because believe it or not, we've gone through three quarters of our time. It's goes by that fast, but I want you to talk about another favorite character of mine, and that's the Apostle Paul. Because in part of your book, you talk about the formative years of Christianity and the Apostle Paul, and you spend some time talking about Paul the tentmaker in Corinth, and you talk about the games and how we should look at Paul and his teachings. I found that fascinating. I never read that before, so give us a history lesson.
Evers-Hood:
Absolutely. I think it's pretty famous that Paul's known as a tentmaker, but people had homes. They had domai in Roman Corinth. They knew how to do that, so why on Earth was he building tents, making tents? The games, the athletic games were an enormous part of the ancient world and the Isthmian Games which occurred in the isthmus of Corinth, they were held every two years after the Olympic Games. So just like we have the Summer Olympics and then two years later the Winter Olympics, they had the Olympic Olympics and then two years later the Isthmian Games. That's where Paul made tents.
The language of gaming and gamefulness, it infiltrates Paul's words. He talks about running the race. He talks about disciples being like athletes that are playing according to the rules. Where I go into it, one of the things that behavioralists do is use games to show how we are predictably irrational. The game that I use with Paul particularly is called the Prisoner's Dilemma, and it's a game where it would be best if both participants would cooperate with each other, but there's a temptation to defect. Now the rational way to play that game, and you can learn more in the book about this, but John Nash, who wrote, A Beautiful Mind, said that the rational way to play is to never cooperate with your partner. Always defect.
Fortunately, when we study real human beings, irrational human beings, we cooperate all the time. What I think happens with Paul as he's developing churches that are in a kind of Prisoner's Dilemma where Paul is wanting to shape them in a way that's incredibly counter-cultural for the day, and then the folks in there, while they do want to be in these churches, there are times when they want to push back. For instance, takes the Lord's table for example. Paul is envisioning an incredibly counter cultural meal where poor and wealthy followers of Jesus come together and enjoy the same food and of course what happens is the wealthy defect.
Ron Way:
And Christians and Jews were being kept separate as well, because of Kosher rules that Paul so much.
Evers-Hood:
Yeah, and right, Christians and Jews. Well, particularly wealthy and poor I think is really striking, because the wealthy show up. They eat all the food. They drink all the wine and then when the poor are able to finally get off work and arrive, all they find are fat drunk Christians. It's not pretty. That's why Paul says, when you eat and drink like that you eat and drink to your destruction. It's not a moral judgment about some sort of personal sin. It's this corporate sin of the people defecting against them.
I know, I'm going on a little bit, but there was a guy, Robert Axlerod, who studied the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma. The strategy, the pattern that was the most successful, he thought it would be mean and long and difficult. It actually was the kindest and the simplest. It's called tit-for-tat, and it means you are always starting with trust. You're always wanting to cooperate, but then it's tough. You will push back when somebody pushes back against you. But then it always moves to forgiveness, and it's entirely consistent. I would say if anything, Paul is consistent about, it is this pattern of he's often trusting, he's developing these communities. Then he's leaving. Then when they defect he pushes back. He writes angry letters. In Galatians he omits the thanksgiving section. He can push back, but then he's often exhibiting forgiveness and then he's doing this consistently throughout his life and I think that's why the church, the early church thrived and flourished.
Ron Way:
Absolutely. we owe our Christianity today to Paul. If it wasn't for Paul, we probably wouldn't have what we have today, because after the Roman war there was very few of the early Christians, certainly not in Jerusalem. They would have been killed or hauled off into slavery.
Evers-Hood:
And Gentiles like you and me, we wouldn't be talking about this.
Ron Way:
No. Not at all. And, Ken, I have to be the bearer of bad news.
Evers-Hood:
Yup.
Ron Way:
We've run out, we've completely run out of time, but you can see now that everyone listening will have to buy your book and finish your story for themselves.
Evers-Hood:
Awesome.
Ron Way:
Yeah. Folks, Ken Evers-Hood's book is not just about Jesus but about all Christian life within the church and it's a wonderful story about how we look at Jesus, how we look at our fellow members of our congregations. It's a story about getting along. The book is named, The Irrational Jesus: Leading the Fully Human Church.
I want to take this time Ken to thank you so much for being on AuthorTalk, for being our guest. I had a ball speaking to you today and I wish you all the luck in the world.
Evers-Hood:
Ron thank you. It was a pleasure.
Ron Way:
While you're on the Author Talk website listening to this, all you have to do is click on the cover of the book next to the interview that you're listening to and it will take you straight to the publisher where you can order Ken's book. Ken I hope they order it by the hundreds.
Evers-Hood:
Me too Ron!
Ron Way:
For now, this is your host Ron Way wishing you all the best. Until we meet again, I remain faithfully yours.
Ken Evers-Hood
The Irrational Jesus; Leading the Fully Human Church
Ron Way:
Hello, everyone. This is your host, Ron Way, for Author Talk and Rising Light Media Group. Today, I have the great pleasure of introducing you to a new author to me. His name is Ken Evers-Hood, and he has written a fascinating new book entitled The Irrational Jesus. There's also a subtitle, but we'll get to that in a minute. Ken graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and earned his doctorate from Duke Divinity School. He's currently a pastor at Tualatin. I pronounced that right, didn't I, Ken?
Evers-Hood:
Yes, you did.
Ron Way:
It's a Presbyterian church near Portland, Oregon. Welcome, Ken, to Author Talk. I'm glad that you could join me today.
Evers-Hood:
Thanks so much, Ron. Great to be here.
Ron Way:
Before we jump into your book, Ken, take a moment to tell us, all of us that are listening, a little bit about yourself. Take us on a short trip down the path that's led you to this point in your life.
Evers-Hood:
Absolutely. I felt a call to ministry when I was an undergraduate in the University of Texas at Austin, where I met my wife, and we wound up going to Princeton. I thought I would be interested in academics and teaching and what not, but I love people. I started out in new church development outside of Austin, and then I've been a pastor for gosh, I've been here at Tualitin for 14 years. We've got three amazing kids and that's me in a small nutshell.
Ron Way:
What did you do before? Did you come right out of divinity and go into pastoring?
Evers-Hood:
I went right out, yeah.
Ron Way:
You couldn't get a job, huh? [Laughter]
Evers-Hood:
They always say that you're supposed to know what you're doing when you're a new church developer, and it was the first thing I did. I knew nothing, and I found that very helpful. We knew how to make mistakes and we made them gloriously and that church, Presbyterian Church of Lake Travis is thriving today.
Ron Way:
That's great. You got from the East Coast to the West Coast. How did that happen?
Evers-Hood:
You know, we had our first child, William Chester. He goes by Ches, and we were away from family. My folks were in Dallas/Fort Worth and her folks lived out here on the West Coast. We thought, well we need to be close to them. The decision between Dallas/Fort Worth and Portland, Oregon, Ron that was not a hard one to make.
Ron Way:
No, that's a no brainer. [Laughter]
Evers-Hood:
Yeah.
Ron Way:
I get that. It's a beautiful, beautiful place to live. When you started ministering, did you start out as an assistant minister? How did that work for you in your own career?
Evers-Hood:
Yeah, no I just started right out in New Church Development. My job was to start a congregation and we had a handful of people in the hills of Austin. We wound up learning together and they gave me an incredible start in ministry. When I came out here, I'm a pastor of a mid-sized congregation and a lot of my learning isn't just at this church, but I served on our larger presbytery board and worked with pastors and churches in conflict, and that's where a lot of the work in this book came from. I was working with folks trying to learn how to be together.
Ron Way:
Yes, I read that in your book. It's a great book for anyone in a church, because every church has conflicts. You have the people that are the big donors that tend to hold sway, and on many occasions, you are afraid to ruffle their feathers, but if you don't take into account the average bloke in the congregation, you run into trouble. You wrote about that.
Evers-Hood:
Yeah, that's right. I would say the impetus for this book for me and my research at Duke, it came from being a pastor and loving theology. I was a classics major and studied Greek and Latin and I love all of that but I also discovered a really huge disjunct between the theological work that I did and then working with real human beings, Ron. They're very different, and part of how I got hooked up into working with Dan Arielli at Duke is he's a behavioral economist. What they do is they take these beautiful economic models of how people should behave and then Dan does these clever experiments to see if people, real people, actually behave that way, and of course we don't.
I thought that's precisely what I experience in the church. We have these beautiful theological ideas or models of how we should behave but every pastor knows, or anybody who's sat on a church board knows, real human beings are very different, and often predictably so. So that's the good news.
Ron Way:
Well that leads me to the subtitle of your book. You said, and the first question I have because as I mention to you when we were prepping for this, my prime interest is in the historical Jesus which I love to study and the early years of Christianity, our formative years. You had some fascinating observations for me. You had mentioned that Jesus and I'm going to quote, "had a limited ability to see the future. He had physical limitations and a remarkable lack of self-interest. In his full humanity Jesus is limited by time and place, by imperfect information," and for me this is a powerful concept because we tend to mush that over, which does the Jesus that really walked and started this whole change in mankind’s consciousness, a disservice.
You quote one of my favorite authors who I've had on this show a couple of times as a guest, Amy Jill Levine, and she writes, and I'm going to quote her and then I'm going to quote your book.
"Jesus of Nazareth dressed like a Jew, prayed like a Jew, instructed other Jews on how best to live according to the commandments given by God to Moses, taught like a Jew, argued like a Jew with other Jews and died like thousands of other Jews on a Roman cross." Now may I quote from your own book?
Evers-Hood:
Absolutely.
Ron Way:
Here we go. "To give us a clear outline of where we're headed, irrationality in Jesus' life falls into four major categories: the presence of a strong emotion in Jesus' life, the limited knowledge Jesus possesses, the mistakes Jesus makes in the Gospels and the adaptive behaviors Jesus employs that are consistent with the actions behavioral theorists would expect of human subjects in cognitive limitations." I want to take these one at a time if you'll allow me. Would that be all right?
Evers-Hood:
You bet.
Ron Way:
Okay.
Evers-Hood:
Absolutely.
Ron Way:
Let's talk about Jesus' strong emotions and even anger.
Evers-Hood:
Absolutely Ron. You know as a Presbyterian, I'm actually a pretty orthodox guy. I believe in Chalcedon and the Council there that said Jesus is fully divine and fully human. I think we do a great job on the divinity and we've done a pretty terrible job, historically on the humanity. The powerful emotion that Jesus experiences, you know the cover of the book has Giotto's depiction of Jesus cleansing the temple. The reason I picked Giotto, he was early Renaissance and he shows Jesus with emotion. He's ticked off looking, Ron, which if you look in past depictions, he looks, really happy and kind of passive. There's no emotion at all. I think it's absurd to think that Jesus when he cleansed the temple did so in some sort of impassive way. He felt rage and righteous indignation. When he healed people ...
Ron Way:
Can I mention one thing? On that point, it just ticked a memory. I belong to Westar Institute, which is made up of a couple of hundred biblical scholars. I sat on the Board for about ten years before I got tired of non-profits. As a minister, you're stuck with them. I wasn't. [Laughter] I left that job. But the first times I went to one of their meetings, and there were maybe 40 to 50 scholars sitting around tables. They had all their research papers and they were expounding on their theories about the historical Jesus, which was all wonderful, but they got to this exact story, the temple cleansing, and as they started talking it was so pacific, it was academic, it was so clinical, so clean.
Honest to God, I wanted to just stand up without any notice, walk up to the nearest table which they had papers and books and their coffee cups, and just flip the tables over and walk out of the room, because they were postulating that if Jesus had done that he couldn't have gotten 20 feet before the temple guards would have arrested him. My point was, yes, he could have done that, he really could have plowed through the area in a rage. He was infuriated, and he flipped everything in his path head over heels. It caused such a commotion; birds flying, lambs bleating, and he could have just walked right out of the peristyle of the temple, and no one would have stopped him. It's the shock value. You're talking about those emotions that he had and you're absolutely right. Especially some of the Catholic pictures of him looking up to heaven and he's so sweet, you know?
Evers-Hood:
Right. Yeah, and I think that portrays what I call practical Docetism, where nobody that I know believes in Docetism, that Jesus isn't really human, he just seems to be. We say that we don't believe that, but practically almost everybody I know is a practical Docetist. They don't take Jesus' humanity seriously enough.
Ron Way:
That's right. You know it's a hypothetical, or perhaps people that that theoretically he was human—oh but he is divine too. Yet, how can that be? He was a real human being, or he would have been a God. If he was God at that moment—and we aren't—so what good would it have done us? We couldn't emulate the man-God.
Evers-Hood:
Exactly. You know, go on with the emotion, it isn't just the righteous indignation. When he heals, it's one of my favorite words in Greek. Often it gets translated as moved with pity, which I think is a pretty weak translation but splagchnizomai. Splagchnizomai, it's a Homeric word. It's an ancient word. It means to be moved in your bowels. Moved in your guts. When he sees somebody that is in need of healing, it isn't just this robotic action of kindness. He's moved in this deep human way.
Then everybody's favorite shortest verse they say, when Lazarus dies, and Mary says, ‘Lord had you been here our brother wouldn't have died,’ and Jesus wept. He weeps. Certainly in the Garden of Gethsemane, there is just this powerful affliction of emotion and the cry of dereliction on the cross. I've actually heard some people say, well you know it's just the beginning of a psalm that ends really nicely. I'm like, come on. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!’
Ron Way:
There you go. That is ...
Evers-Hood:
Just cry it out.
Ron Way:
Absolutely. Absolute despair, because if he didn't, he wouldn't know what we're like to suffer, would he?
Evers-Hood:
I think that's absolutely right.
Ron Way:
Let's go on. Next, Jesus had limited knowledge. Oh, we're in trouble here. Come on, talk to me.
Evers-Hood:
Well you know, limited knowledge. There are some small ways that you see that, like when the woman with the hemorrhage reaches out and touches him and he says "Who touched me?" And the disciples say how can we know, I mean that to me, we can allow for someone to not know something small like that, but to me what's fascinating is when they ask him about the kingdom. When is the kingdom going to come? His response, he's consistent on this and I have no idea how [inaudible 00:12:39] who predict the end stay in business because he's consistent. He says, nobody, not even the Son of Man knows the time or the day. He doesn't say, ‘hey, I know it. I'm just not telling you.’ He doesn't know it. To not know, to me that's a massive amount of ignorance for Jesus and something that I think we should take seriously.
Ron Way:
Absolutely. I mean people think that if he is the messiah, of course he knew, but that isn't what the New Testament says. That isn't what the Gospels say. They're reporting stories they've heard and they wouldn't put it in there if they thought it was bad, because they try to make Jesus look good whenever they can. It's just the way it was.
Evers-Hood:
Right. Right. Tacked on to that, to me is the mistakes that he appears to make. I think of, when I present this to groups, particularly church people, this is where people get the most nervous. Along with his limited knowledge, Jesus makes, he makes mistakes. There's a time when the Pharisees accuse him of breaking the Sabbath and he likens himself to David. He said in the days of Abiathar, when Abiathar was priest, but the problem is, Abiathar wasn't priest. It's actually Ahimelech. Now, it is possible that some sleepy monk, when he was transcribing that, he made an error, but there's not textual evidence for that at all. To me the clear reading is that Jesus just confused the names. I think that's okay.
Ron Way:
Well I'll tell you another one that you have in your book that's always been a favorite on many levels, and it confounds many Christians, it is the story in Mark about the conversation that Jesus had with the woman in Tyre, who was a Gentile. That's a non-Jew folks, like you and me probably. A couple of things roll around in our minds when we hear this. Most Christians are just like the woman. We're Gentiles, and Jesus teaches love to all. Why would he refer to the woman as a dog, which is really an insult, who didn't deserve any scraps from his table and he says that his healing, his wisdom, his teaching was reserved only for his kind. Jews. That story is explained away by many Christians, and I've heard many different explanations. You've heard more. It's still uncomfortable. It shows a very human man changing his mind. Talk to us about that.
Evers-Hood:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah Ron, there's no other story for me that really highlights Jesus' full humanity than that. You know as I read it as a pastor, he's trying to go on vacation.
Ron Way:
You're right.
Evers-Hood:
He's tired, you know.
Ron Way:
Correct.
Evers-Hood:
I like to go to the beach, but Jesus goes to Syria. Why not? Yeah, when he's there, this woman breaks in on him. There's something that behavioralists call decision fatigue. We know that throughout the day as we become more and more tired we become more conservative in our judgements. There's an amazing Israeli parole board study where about 70% of the releasing of prisoners occurs before noon. We'd like to think of people as being objective, especially judges, but the reality is, it's when in the morning we're at our best. Well Jesus was not at his best, right? He's on vacation. He's tired and here this woman barges in and he spits an epithet at her, “dog.”
Now, there are some people who will say things like well they used [Greek 00:16:31] which is the diminutive. It’s just some puppy, so maybe he's being cute. I think that's absurd. I think he's being rude. I think he's being racist. I think what he's saying is awful because he's tired and in his full humanity, he makes mistakes. What's amazing about the story is the woman of course comes right back at him and says, "Oh but sir even the dogs under the table get the scraps," and he says, "For saying that, your daughter has been made well." What I think is remarkable about Jesus isn't that he makes the mistake. He does that, but it's that when she comes back at him, he's able to own the mistake and then change his mind. I think that's redeeming.
Ron Way:
Listen, here’s another interesting thing. If we were alive during his lifetime, we would have to realize, he really did come to the Israelites. He didn't come for the Gentiles. He was speaking the language of and to the Jews, his people. It's like Amy Jill said (where I quoted her in the earlier), he spoke like a Jew. He spoke just to Jews, primarily because that's who he came to speak to. It wasn't until much later, which is kind of a segue for me, because believe it or not, we've gone through three quarters of our time. It's goes by that fast, but I want you to talk about another favorite character of mine, and that's the Apostle Paul. Because in part of your book, you talk about the formative years of Christianity and the Apostle Paul, and you spend some time talking about Paul the tentmaker in Corinth, and you talk about the games and how we should look at Paul and his teachings. I found that fascinating. I never read that before, so give us a history lesson.
Evers-Hood:
Absolutely. I think it's pretty famous that Paul's known as a tentmaker, but people had homes. They had domai in Roman Corinth. They knew how to do that, so why on Earth was he building tents, making tents? The games, the athletic games were an enormous part of the ancient world and the Isthmian Games which occurred in the isthmus of Corinth, they were held every two years after the Olympic Games. So just like we have the Summer Olympics and then two years later the Winter Olympics, they had the Olympic Olympics and then two years later the Isthmian Games. That's where Paul made tents.
The language of gaming and gamefulness, it infiltrates Paul's words. He talks about running the race. He talks about disciples being like athletes that are playing according to the rules. Where I go into it, one of the things that behavioralists do is use games to show how we are predictably irrational. The game that I use with Paul particularly is called the Prisoner's Dilemma, and it's a game where it would be best if both participants would cooperate with each other, but there's a temptation to defect. Now the rational way to play that game, and you can learn more in the book about this, but John Nash, who wrote, A Beautiful Mind, said that the rational way to play is to never cooperate with your partner. Always defect.
Fortunately, when we study real human beings, irrational human beings, we cooperate all the time. What I think happens with Paul as he's developing churches that are in a kind of Prisoner's Dilemma where Paul is wanting to shape them in a way that's incredibly counter-cultural for the day, and then the folks in there, while they do want to be in these churches, there are times when they want to push back. For instance, takes the Lord's table for example. Paul is envisioning an incredibly counter cultural meal where poor and wealthy followers of Jesus come together and enjoy the same food and of course what happens is the wealthy defect.
Ron Way:
And Christians and Jews were being kept separate as well, because of Kosher rules that Paul so much.
Evers-Hood:
Yeah, and right, Christians and Jews. Well, particularly wealthy and poor I think is really striking, because the wealthy show up. They eat all the food. They drink all the wine and then when the poor are able to finally get off work and arrive, all they find are fat drunk Christians. It's not pretty. That's why Paul says, when you eat and drink like that you eat and drink to your destruction. It's not a moral judgment about some sort of personal sin. It's this corporate sin of the people defecting against them.
I know, I'm going on a little bit, but there was a guy, Robert Axlerod, who studied the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma. The strategy, the pattern that was the most successful, he thought it would be mean and long and difficult. It actually was the kindest and the simplest. It's called tit-for-tat, and it means you are always starting with trust. You're always wanting to cooperate, but then it's tough. You will push back when somebody pushes back against you. But then it always moves to forgiveness, and it's entirely consistent. I would say if anything, Paul is consistent about, it is this pattern of he's often trusting, he's developing these communities. Then he's leaving. Then when they defect he pushes back. He writes angry letters. In Galatians he omits the thanksgiving section. He can push back, but then he's often exhibiting forgiveness and then he's doing this consistently throughout his life and I think that's why the church, the early church thrived and flourished.
Ron Way:
Absolutely. we owe our Christianity today to Paul. If it wasn't for Paul, we probably wouldn't have what we have today, because after the Roman war there was very few of the early Christians, certainly not in Jerusalem. They would have been killed or hauled off into slavery.
Evers-Hood:
And Gentiles like you and me, we wouldn't be talking about this.
Ron Way:
No. Not at all. And, Ken, I have to be the bearer of bad news.
Evers-Hood:
Yup.
Ron Way:
We've run out, we've completely run out of time, but you can see now that everyone listening will have to buy your book and finish your story for themselves.
Evers-Hood:
Awesome.
Ron Way:
Yeah. Folks, Ken Evers-Hood's book is not just about Jesus but about all Christian life within the church and it's a wonderful story about how we look at Jesus, how we look at our fellow members of our congregations. It's a story about getting along. The book is named, The Irrational Jesus: Leading the Fully Human Church.
I want to take this time Ken to thank you so much for being on AuthorTalk, for being our guest. I had a ball speaking to you today and I wish you all the luck in the world.
Evers-Hood:
Ron thank you. It was a pleasure.
Ron Way:
While you're on the Author Talk website listening to this, all you have to do is click on the cover of the book next to the interview that you're listening to and it will take you straight to the publisher where you can order Ken's book. Ken I hope they order it by the hundreds.
Evers-Hood:
Me too Ron!
Ron Way:
For now, this is your host Ron Way wishing you all the best. Until we meet again, I remain faithfully yours.