CHAPTER XXIII
SCAURUS ON SOME OF THE MIRACLES
“And now,” continued Scaurus, “I will tell you how the vision of the City of Truth and Justice, conjured up for me by that dear old dreamer Hermas, vanished into thin air. I intended to have spoken first about some of the miracles; but I will come back to them afterwards. For the present, turn over your Mark till you come nearly to the middle, and you will find a story about an act of healing at a distance. I have heard a Greek doctor tell stories of a man’s being influenced by the death of a twin brother at a distance. He invented the word telepatheia to express it. Well, I will invent an analogous word for healing at a distance—teliatreia. However, it is not from the miraculous point of view that I wish to discuss the story, but simply as a question of morality.
“It contains these words, ‘It is not fit to take the children’s bread and to cast it unto the dogs.’ Who says this? Jesus. To whom? To a poor woman, called ‘Greek, Syrophœnician by extraction.’ What is her offence? She has been asking Jesus to cast an evil spirit out of her daughter. Now what do you think of that? The Greeks, of old, affected to call all non-Greeks barbarians. But would their philosophers, would Socrates, or gruff Diogenes, or any respectable Greek philosopher, say such a thing to any non-Greek woman? I admit that Jesus ultimately granted this poor creature’s request. But that was only because she answered with the tact and patience of a Penelope, acquiescing in the epithet ‘dogs’ and replying, ‘Yea, Lord, yet even the dogs beneath the table eat of the crumbs of the children.’ Had it not been for her almost superhuman gentleness, she would have retired rejected, gaining from her petition nothing but the reproach of ‘dog.’ I write bitterly. I confess I felt bitter when I saw so noble and sublime a character as that of this Jewish prophet apparently degraded and polluted by an indelible taint of national uncharitableness.”
I was beginning to investigate the passage, when my eyes fell on a note that Scaurus had appended at the bottom of the column. “Since writing this, I have looked into the passage again, to see whether I could have been misled. And I notice that Luke omits the whole narrative. Also, while Mark represents the woman as coming to Jesus and ‘asking him’ to heal the child, Matthew represents the disciples as coming to Jesus and ‘asking him’ to send her away. I should like to be able to believe that the woman was really a Jewess turned Gentile, that the disciples tried to drive the woman away, calling themselves ‘the children’ and her ‘the dog,’ that Jesus replied, as in Matthew, ‘It was precisely these lost degraded ones that I was sent to restore.’ In order to obtain this meaning, the changes of the text would not be very great. But I fear this cannot be maintained.”
I caught at Scaurus’s explanation, and was sorry that he himself did not hold to it. For I was more troubled by this objection of his than by anything else that he had said; and I thought long over it. Finally, I came to the conclusion that Scaurus was nearly right; that this woman, though called “a Syrophœnician by extraction,” was a Jewess (as Barnabas the Jew is called “a Cyprian by extraction”) and that she had fallen away into Greek idolatry and an evil life, so that Jesus—being, like Paul, all things to all men and women—was on this one occasion cruel in word in order to be kind in deed, stimulating her to better things. This agreed with Paul’s use of the word “dogs,” which assuredly he would not have applied except to “evil-doers.” If, however, it should be demonstrated that the woman was not a Jewess, and not leading an impure life, and that Jesus (not the disciples) used these words to her, then I should still believe in the kindness of Jesus, although these words were apparently unkind. No one would suspect cruelty, in a man habitually kind, except on very strong evidence. Here the evidence was not strong. The witnesses were two, not three; and the two narratives disagreed in important details. This was the conclusion to which I then came.
If Scaurus had read the epistles before the gospels, approaching the latter with some feeling of Christ’s constraining “love,” he could hardly have stumbled (so I thought and so I think still) at this single narrative. Jesus did not call the centurion a “dog.” Jesus had also supported the law of kindness against the law of the sabbath. He had said that “that which goes into the mouth” does not defile a man. He had eaten and drunk with publicans and sinners. How was it possible that a prophet of such broad and lofty views as these could call a poor afflicted woman a “dog” simply because she was not a Jewess? I longed to be near my old friend and to appeal to his common sense and justice, and I felt sure that I should have convinced him. Even if Jesus bade the missionaries at first go only to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” that seemed to me quite consistent with a purpose that in the end the gospel should be proclaimed to all nations.
In another narrative, which had caused me difficulty of the same kind, Scaurus gave me help. It is not in Mark. But I will set it down here because it bears on kindness. Matthew and Luke represented a disciple as asking to be allowed, before following Christ, to “bury” his father, and as not being allowed. “As to this,” said Scaurus, “I have no doubt that the man meant, ‘Suffer me to wait at home till I have seen my aged father into the grave and have duly buried him.’ Similarly Esau says, in effect, ‘My father will die before long. I will wait till I have mourned for him before killing Jacob.’ So, in Latin, we say ‘I have buried them all,’ meaning ‘I have survived and buried all my relations.’ My rabbi confirms me in this view. Christ always defends nature and natural affection against man’s conventions, so that it seems to me absurd to suppose that he would enjoin anything really inhuman.”
Scaurus next proceeded to attack the miraculous part of Mark’s narrative. Mark, he said, considering the smallness of his gospel, describes many more miracles, relatively, than Matthew and Luke. “As to miracles,” said he, “I am ready to believe in anything, miraculous or non-miraculous, on sufficient evidence. But the evidence about Mark’s miracles leads me to two conclusions. Some of them occurred but were not miraculous. The rest, although they were honestly supposed to have occurred, did not occur.