IntroductionDid you ever hear about the author Jesus of Nazareth? Some of the most famous men in the world of letters have not left us one single word from their own pen. Take, for instance, Socrates. He wrote nothing. It was his pupil Plato who took care of the writing in that learned fraternity. A most deplorable fact, I am tempted to say. For this super-genius of a disciple was, sadly enough, going to put sentences into his late teacher's mouth that I can hardly believe that good Socrates himself would have formulated that badly. But, then, what about Jesus? Did there not exist a publisher who could be depended upon to give out this writer's collected works, at least posthumously, in leather binding and gold edge "The collected works of Jesus!" I think I hear your hesitating voice. "How does this fit into the picture of the historical Jesus? Did Jesus write anything at all?" Most people never seem to think of the man of Nazareth as a known writer. But, just the same, there seems to be no doubt among his first biographers that He did write. "Well," you say, still a little skeptical, "this can hardly be an authorship that left any significant traces in the world. Did what Jesus wrote really make so little impact? Or why has it otherwise fallen so totally into oblivion? Did Jesus perhaps have certain difficulties getting through to His readers?" No. Far from it. The very few who managed to read the writing from the hand of Jesus probably never forgot it, so thoroughly were they shaken in the core of their being by the reading material submitted to them. All at once, they stood speechless, to all appearance paralyzed in body and soul. But why do you never hear eulogies about the literary production of Jesus today? The reason is very simple: The only thing we are entirely positive that He has produced of literary work was something He deliberately wrote upon a material of a most destructible kind. And then there was only one destiny possible for His modest manuscript. For the great multitude of potential readers, it was doomed to remain illegible, to crumble into nothingness. Jesus, you see, wrote His message in sand. A few minutes later, the writing was blotted out forever. What else could one expect, by the way? Could one imagine a material of lesser durability? Jesus himself warns us strongly against depending on sand, for a less stable foundation cannot be found. But why, then, did He write His impressive message in sand after all? Well, there is hardly a more suitable type of parchment to write on when the purpose is to give a specific man a glimpse of his own life history without having the secret betrayed to every prying Tom, Dick, and Harry. Jesus, you see, was the kind of author who had a predilection for calling back to people's minds certain dark spots in their past history. Snapshot biographies were manifestly one of His specialties an an original writer. And here is something we all know: A biography may turn out to be a rather embarrassing thing for the person concerned. You will probably understand this even better when the main theme of the biographical disclosures there on the sandy plains in Palestine is revealed. It happened to be a particularly delicate one, namely sex. What Jesus wrote in the sand was the old story about woman and man. I think we know a number of authors who have built up quite a name for themselves, making best-sellers just on this topic. Out world today is practically in the process of going down in a veritable deluge of daring sketches dealing with the relationship between the sexes. It may be a matter of dubious scandals or real masterpieces of pornographic art. The Greek word pornography means "a depiction of whores," if you can bear a direct translation of the original into English. Imagine what a blessing it would have been to the world if these modern writers were just as discrete and careful in their selection of writing material as Jesus of Nazareth was. Above all, it would be well for their own sakes in the future if their writings would be erased in that painless manner, just as the desert winds tend to erase the soft traces in the sand. But, alas, not quite so cheaply will they evade the responsibility of their literary heirloom. What a relief if would have been for many a writer--even those entirely outside the pornographic guild--if he, in his turn, had had the good luck of mistaking a strip of desert sand for a sheet of writing paper! Of course, you will never run any risk of winning the Nobel Prize in literature if you have the weird idea of creating your main literary productions in a sand pile. Under such circumstances, the glory of outstanding authorship is not very likely to come your way. It was this strangely fascinating allurement Schiller talked about, and so longingly yearned for, in this green youth. He called it "die Unsterblichkeit des Namens," "the immortality of the name." Could one imagine anything more piteously illusory than that? We can express it a little more in harmony with intelligible realism: a purely nominal immortality. There is nothing much to boast of in an immortality as phantomlike as that, is there? There is evidence enough that Jesus Christ had no use for such vanity. To Him, it was of no importance to assert Himself as the immortal one, one way or the other. His decision, on the contrary, was to die a painful death--not for His own sake, but for the sake of the other ones. And during His whole life on earth, one thing was quite remarkable: Jesus' specialty was to obliterate Himself. He practiced this attitude of humility consistently, whenever it could benefit others. This is the plain truth about the most self-erasing "Sand Author" of all times. It was mere tact and consideration and a desire to protect the reputation of other people that made Jesus write the message with His bare finger in the sand, instead of cutting the characters with a chisel into solid rock, as some would like to do in order to secure literary immortality. |
