Cult of the Dead by Kyle Smith

Author:Kyle Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780520345164
Publisher: University of California Press

A miracle is a cause of wonder, an event inexplicable through appeal to the natural order of things, and the first of Jesus’s signs at the beginning of his public ministry in the Galilee was a portent of what was to come. The Gospels describe Jesus as an especially able manipulator of water. He could turn it into wine, he could walk across it, he could calm it in a storm, and he could order his disciples to cast their nets into it and haul up a catch so teeming with fish that it nearly swamped their boat.

Jesus could also use water in the form of his own spit to make broken men whole. John tells the story of Jesus encountering a man who was born blind. Jesus “spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva.” Then, John says, Jesus “spread the mud on the man’s eyes, saying to him, ‘Go, wash in the pool of Siloam.’ Then he went and washed and came back able to see.” Mark relates a similar story about a man who was deaf and mute. Jesus took the man aside, “in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears.” Again, Jesus spat. This time he touched the man’s tongue “and said to him, ‘Ephphatha,’ ” Aramaic for “Be opened.” At once, the man’s “ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.”

The occasional quotation of an Aramaic word or phrase in Mark’s Gospel, which, like the rest of the New Testament, is written in Greek, is usually tied to a momentous event. The deaf man was healed with spit and ephphatha. Mark refers to the spot where Jesus was crucified as Golgotha, which he glosses as “the place of the skull.” And Jesus’s lamentation from the cross “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani” Mark renders as “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In another healing story in Mark, Jesus again speaks to someone privately in Aramaic. In this case, it is a young girl who is believed to have just died. After dismissing the crowd around the girl’s parents, Jesus leads them back into their house. Then he takes their daughter by the hand and says to her, “Talitha cum,” which Mark helpfully translates for his non-Aramaic-speaking audience as “Little girl, stand up!”

John’s Gospel takes things further. There we read that Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary, not only was dead when Jesus brought him back to life but “had been in the tomb four days.” As if to emphasize the point, Martha audibly comments on the stench of her brother’s putrefying corpse when Jesus tells his followers to “take away the stone” from the entrance to his tomb. Again, Jesus’s command is direct, though this time recorded in Greek: “Lazarus, come out!” he shouts into the depths of the cave.

According to the Gospels, Jesus’s ability to control both natural phenomena and death extended to the realm of the demons. Mark, Matthew, and Luke—whose works

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