The New Testament as Orphan Story: Part 2

It is one of the seeming paradoxes of modern Western culture that never before have there been so many stories told, and never before have we taken stories less seriously. Of course, in some sense, the economic law of supply and demand explains this. When supply increases but demand stays fixed, the price goes down. The more stories told, the less value they have. To change the metaphor, it’s like the nutritional content of food were to drop the more you ate. You would keep eating, trying to sate your hunger, only to make it worse. Eventually, you would starve to death despite having a full belly.

Alongside these quantitative problems, we also have a big qualitative problem around stories these days. On the one hand, there are an essentially infinite number of fictional stories created, which are products of imagination. On the other hand, we have “news stories” that are nominally based in reality but which are distorted by the fact that the news is always subject to political pressures which inevitably turn it into propaganda. Of the infinite number of stories to choose from, we can decide between those which are imaginary and those which are fake.

The division between fact and fiction that we take for granted is in very large part the product of attitudes towards the Bible. For the best part of a millennium, the Bible in general and the gospel story in particular provided stories that Westerners had faith in irrespective of concerns around factual truth. What began to happen, however, was that the story was interpreted according to the factual point of view. That is, scholars realised that the Bible was not simply mythical (faith-based) in nature but recounted events that actually occurred. The emphasis of understanding changed from one that required faith to one that required intellect. This change occurred firstly among the educated elites of society.

From there, the intellectual approach put all the parts of the story that didn’t make sense into a bucket called “myth” and kept the rest as “fact”. That schism is now embedded in Western culture, and we unconsciously take it for granted that anything “mythical” is somehow not real. Furthermore, this intellectualised understanding negates any initiatory value that the stories might have. The task is not to become like the great figures of history, to imitate them, but to understand them intellectually.

There are actually very good reasons why this came to happen in relation to the Christian faith in the modern West. We’ll look at those in next week’s post. This post will address the schism between fact and fiction as it relates to the story of Jesus. What we will see is that the life of Jesus follows the exact pattern of the Orphan Story template that we outlined in last week’s post. It’s not a question of there being a difference between fact and fiction, reality and myth. The myth is based in fact. The story actually happened that way (for the most part).

The first thing we need to be clear about is the order of events. The gospel story was originally communicated orally. It was a story told by the disciples of Jesus in the aftermath of his death based on their firsthand experience. Only after several decades was the story first written down, and it took centuries for the New Testament to be gradually compiled into the unified text that we now know.

The more crucial point to make is that the core events related in the New Testament really did happen. We can argue about the miracles that Jesus performed, the resurrection, or the theological interpretation of it all, but there is solid historical evidence to prove that the main points of the story are factually grounded. There was a man called Jesus who began preaching and calling himself the Christ or Messiah. A number of disciples followed Jesus in these beliefs. After Jesus’ death, the same disciples continued his teachings. This is the exact pattern that we associated with the Orphan Story in last week’s post. It is about the transmission of culture from an Elder to an Orphan, from one generation to the next. Viewed anthropologically, the New Testament tells us the story of how a new belief system came into being and was transmitted.

Of course, that belief system did not come out of nowhere. On the contrary, the gospel story places Jesus and the disciples firmly within the Jewish tradition. Thus, the book of Matthew begins by listing the generations going all the way back to Abraham and showing where Jesus fits into that history. Meanwhile, regular reference is made in the story to how the life of Jesus fulfils various prophecies outlined by the prophets of the Old Testament. The story of Jesus takes place in a very well-defined and understood socio-cultural context.

What is implied in the story, although never really made overt, is that the Jewish community into which Jesus was born was under significant stress. Jewish society was under the thumb of the Roman imperial state, which had been turning the screw in a political and economic sense for several decades. This had created a number of schisms. There were various groups that wanted to take up arms against the Romans. There were collaborators such as Herod who curried favour with the imperial power. Meanwhile, there were groups such as the Essenes who wanted to forget about it all and retreat into mysticism.

Remembering back to last week’s post, we saw that exactly this kind of socio-cultural battle is implied by the structure of the Orphan Story and manifests in the difference between the Elder and the Shadow Elder. What the New Testament gives us is the story of the arrival of a new kind of Elder (Jesus) who goes into battle against the Shadow Elders of the status quo, which include the Pharisees and Sadducees as well as the Roman imperial state. The disciples are therefore the archetypal Orphans who are not just receiving initiation into a belief structure but are placing themselves in opposition to the status quo, just as Jesus is.

But that leads to the realisation that, although the gospel story is primarily concerned with Jesus, the New Testament as a whole is really about the disciples and their journey through initiation as they take up the battle against the Shadow Elders of the status quo. This actually makes perfect sense because it was not Jesus who wrote the story. He never wrote anything down. It was the disciples who told the story. Therefore, the story is told from their point of view, and since they were in the position of the Orphan receiving initiation from the Elder, it follows logically that they would write an Orphan Story.

Let’s recall the structure of the Orphan Story from last week. These are the primary elements:-

1.     The hero is separated from his parents (becoming an archetypal Orphan)
2.     The hero hears news of the Elder or the institution to which the Elder is associated
3.     The hero meets the Elder, who offers them initiation
4.     Initiation commences, including induction into the institution led by the Elder
5.     A Shadow Elder tries to subvert the initiation
6.     There is a struggle between the hero, the Elder and the Shadow Elder
7.     The Elder dies or goes missing (usually sacrificing themselves for the hero)
8.     The hero faces the Shadow Elder alone

We can now walk through each of these elements one-by-one as they relate to the New Testament. Remember, we are now placing the disciples in the role of “hero” because the New Testament as a whole is about them.

• Step 1 – The hero is separated from his parents: we don’t see any direct mention of this in the gospel, but we can easily infer it from the fact that the disciples are already adults who have jobs such as fishermen and tax collectors. Therefore, they must have become independent of their parents.
• Step 2 – The hero hears news of the Elder: the beginning of the gospels sets up the origin story of Jesus and his initial miracle work. Jesus became a controversial figure in the region, and the disciples would almost certainly have known about him before meeting him in person.
• Step 3 – The hero meets the Elder, who offers initiation:The gospels show us this directly. For example, in Matthew 4:19, “Come, follow me…and I will make you fishers of men.”
• Step 4 – Initiation commences: The very next thing that happens is that we get the first round of teachings in the form of the parables. Shortly thereafter, we see that Jesus chooses the twelve primary apostles, presumably the foremost students among a larger group. It was these twelve that would receive the most intensive form of initiation.
• Step 5 – A Shadow Elder tries to subvert the initiation: Herod and Caiaphas are the primary Shadow Elders from the Jewish religious and political establishment. Pontius Pilate is the Shadow Elder of the Roman imperial state.
• Step 6 – There is a struggle between the hero, the Elder and the Shadow Elder: the gospel story is full of the challenges raised against Jesus by the Pharisees and Sadducees. There are various attempts to discredit him on theological issues. There is famous flipping of the tables in the temple, etc.
• Step 7 – The Elder dies or goes missing (usually sacrificing themselves for the hero): this is, of course, the most important part of the story, and the subsequent theology of Christianity is based on the idea that Jesus sacrificed himself not just for his followers but for all of humanity.
• Step 8 – The hero faces the Shadow Elder alone: the gospel story finishes with Jesus addressing the disciples and giving them instructions to continue the movement. The Book of Acts then describes the activities of the disciples as they fulfil their mission and become leaders. It also famously includes Paul’s Road-to-Damascus moment. The disciples continue the struggle against the combination of the Jewish religious authorities and the Roman imperial ones, with Paul facing an almost identical demise to Jesus in that he is accused of blasphemy and handed over to the Romans.

In summary, the New Testament is an Orphan Story which begins with Jesus’ offer of initiation, shows us the initiation, and then shows us the graduation of the disciples after the death of the Elder. But to reiterate the key point, nobody wrote this story. Nobody made it up. All of the elements just listed are as good as historical facts. That means the events unfolded in the form of the Orphan Story pattern. If nobody had ever told that story, it still would have existed in that form.

Jesus was an Elder who initiated a number of disciples into a belief system which they continued to observe after he died. That belief system involved challenging the Jewish religious authorities and the Roman imperial ones. This was not an intellectual exercise. Jesus had led by example, and the disciples followed that example. The evidence suggests that most of the disciples followed directly in his footsteps, meeting their death at the hands of the same authorities that had killed the master. The persecution of the Christians played no small role in the eventual rise of the religion. 

Of course, the story of Jesus is itself the primary vehicle by which Christianity has been able to win converts, and it seems no coincidence that this is because it was written as an Orphan Story from the point of view of the people who really were the Orphans in real life. The Orphan Stories of any culture are there to facilitate the initiation of the Orphans of society. In almost all cases, the stories exist alongside a ritual and educational framework. That is how Jesus taught the disciples. He didn’t just give them some theory to study; he had them walk alongside him on the path, and he also sent them off to begin their own work of spreading the faith. This kind of initiation operates via observation and imitation, just like a plumber learns the trade by observing their mentor at work.

Stories facilitate imitation by presenting an image to be copied. It’s clear that people carry out this kind of imitation quite unconsciously and without any kind of prompting. Think about any popular modern movie or TV show, and then think about how people mimic famous lines and scenes in real life. Stories present us with what we nowadays call “memes”, and it’s also clear from the internet that memes are used effortlessly and unconsciously by people to make sense of the world. That’s why so much money is poured into propaganda, since if you can implant a meme in somebody’s mind, you can get them to think in a way that benefits your cause.

This brings us back to the problem we mentioned at the start of the post, which is that we have gotten so used to this kind of manipulation that we have grown cynical about stories as vehicles for truth. A similar kind of cynicism began primarily in the 19th century around the New Testament, and a big part of the reason for that comes back to the concept of imitation. Jesus asked his disciples to imitate him. For perhaps centuries after his death, the nascent Christian church also initiated new members based on imitation. But it was at exactly the moment when the church was incorporated into the Roman state that the story began to contradict reality and imitation became selective.

What had begun as a factual account of real events started to get warped by political requirements. That was true in Roman times and became even more true with the ascent of the Catholic Church in the medieval period. The problem is one of imitation and its relationship to initiation. To say it again, Jesus had initiated the disciples by having them imitate him. But what could it mean for a medieval European peasant to imitate Jesus? And in the absence of imitation, what sort of initiation could really occur? That’s the problem we’ll talk about in next week’s post.