Eirons and Alazons, Fools and Demons.
There is a French word that doesn’t have an exact English equivalent,
though the range of meanings in English and French come so close as to overlap
often in interesting ways. The word is attrape, and it contains that shared
root term trap designating a tool or
a trick to capture animals…or fools. One
of its senses is also perfidy that
tricky manoeuvre to distract the prey and mystify a situation so as to cause
the unwary, innocent, naïve or trusting victim to fall into a snare. Whereas in English we speak of entrapment as a means of luring a
suspected criminal into a place where he or she is off guard, made to feel
safe, and so led into a situation where he or she enters into a criminal
conspiracy that otherwise would be eschewed—and hence there is now a sense that
this is so unfair as to be a reason why the person should not be charged with a
crime, because the intention to a felony was only roused by a police officer
and not by the natural tendency in the victim.
Yet there are times, to be sure, when it is legal to trick a criminal
into revealing himself, such as inviting him to come and collect a reward or
other sought-after prize and thus putting aside his disguise and walking out of
his hiding place. These two latter forms
of entrapment are what the French call (since
the early seventeenth century) attrape-nigaud,
the entrapment of a fool, wherein nigaud derives
from the character of Nicodème or Nicodemus.
The New Testament passage in which this character appears is one of the
most important in Protestant Christianity and is redolent with expressions that
are deeply ingrained in the hearts of believers. However, to a Jew, the narrative and speeches
are filled with negative connotations.
The passage occurs in the Fourth Gospel, John 3:1-21. I will cite the passage section
by section with my comments inserted between.
1 Now there
came a man of the Pharisees whose name was Nicodemus, a member of the council.
2 He came to Jesus at night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a
teacher who has come from God. For no one could do the miraculous signs that
you do unless God were with him.”
The Pharisees were a collection of sages, scribes and other scholars
known as Perushim, those set apart
from the rest of the community by their devotion to the Law of Moses, that is,
the study of the Torah and its growing body of commentaries and discussions
that would eventually be known as the Talmud.
Within Christian discourse, Pharisee takes on a pejorative sense, that
of a hypocrite, self-righteousness, and misuse of the letter of the law. The council referred to here is the Sanhedrin,
a legislative body and a debating chamber, which ruled in the Land of Israel
but with less powers than that of the monarchy, the priesthood and, later, the
resident occupying Roman authorities.
When Nicodemus comes to Jesus, it is at night, a somewhat questionable
time for any official visitation, and the words he speaks make sense only if
taken as ironical or perhaps even sarcastic in one. Calling Jesus a rabbi is partly
anachronistic, since there were no formal titles as such, but only possible as
a synonym for teacher. This kind of
hyperbolic speech seems to be an unctuous attempt by the Pharisee to ingratiate
himself with the so-called teacher-of-righteousness, to lure him into exposing
himself for the charlatan the Jews presumably take him to be. He describes the words and actions of the man
he is confronting in such a way that he expects Jesus either to affirm the
truth of what he says, which would be taken as a confession of his blasphemies,
or to deny them and thus to reject the stories of his messianic behaviour.
3 Jesus replied, “I tell you the solemn truth, unless a person is born
from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
Typical of John’s Gospel, with its hieratic discourses rather than the
more demotic and parabolic language found in the three other Syncretic Gospels,
Jesus makes a pronouncement based on a “solemn oath,” a statement that stands
above ordinary conversational speech.
Rather than confessing or denying the rumours of his preaching, this
so-called rabbi speaks in riddles: that if anyone were to claim to be what is
spoken of him, it could only be if he were divinely appointed. The subjunctive thoughts stand outside of the
practical, worldly expectations of a messiah in the Jewish sense.
4 Nicodemus
said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? He cannot enter his
mother’s womb and be born a second time, can he?”
Nicodemus seems
to walk right into the trap. As
supposedly typical of a Pharisee, he asks his own question that shows he does
not grasp the hieratic and mystical message of Jesus’s statement. His standards are those of common sense and
the logic of the real world. Insofar as
the Perushim were proto-rabbis,
interpreters of the Law, and commentators and preachers whose methods were
based on involved, convoluted and witty interpretations of the sacred texts,
Nicodemus must be either a caricature generated by much later anti-Jewish
propaganda or a foolish player in a morality play, without intellectual depth
or historical context.
5 Jesus answered, “I tell you the solemn truth, unless a person is born
of water and spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 What is born of the
flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not be amazed
that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ 8 The wind blows wherever it
wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and
where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
The reply of Jesus
extends itself into a crafted liturgical homily. It is an elevated statement of the new
radical scheme of Christian salvation in the style of Pauline theology. It concerns access into a new purified life
through both the waters of baptism, that is, under the auspices of a
hierarchical church, and spirit or the incoming of grace to the person who has
faith in the operations of a new kind of spiritual force in the world. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the
rabbinical Jewish notions of the gift of the Law at Sinai, the entering into a
horizontal contract between human beings and God, with God himself making
himself subject to the Law, and with the requirements of intellectual
preparation to study, learn and debate that law in order for it to be applied
justly in this world. Jesus here is made
to preach a new relationship between individual persons and the hierarchical
mysteries of the other world beyond this one.
Truth is a mysterious event sent into this world to those who do not ask
where and how it is constructed but believe in its powerful efficacy.
9 Nicodemus
replied, “How can these things be?”
Nicodemus can
make no sense of what Jesus has just told him.
It is beyond human experience, outside the parameters of the Law, and mere
gibberish. For while the Hebrew Bible
speaks of miracles and archaic rituals which have become endowed with religious
value, the current circumstances in the world call for knowledge of history,
science, and logic, including rhetoric and poetics.
10 Jesus answered, “Are you the teacher of Israel and yet you don’t
understand these things? 11 I tell you the solemn truth, we speak about what we
know and testify about what we have seen, but you people do not accept our
testimony. 12 If I have told you people about earthly things and you don’t
believe, how will you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? 13 No one
has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven—the Son of
Man. 14 Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must
the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 so that everyone who believes in him may have
eternal life.”
But in this dramatic confrontation between the self-blinded and obstinate
Jew and the source of Christian salvation and truth, Nicodemus becomes
representative of ignorance and superstition, a literal-minded and
self-important fool who is here hoisted on his own petard. Claiming to be himself a reformer and
purifier of Jewish tradition, Jesus asks how the Pharisee can claim to be a
teacher of the Law if he does not understand the mysterious language just
spoken to him. Moreover, since it is so
patently evident to the new followers of Jesus—that is, of Paul—anyone who
cannot understand must be incredibly naïve, disingenuously stupid, or
demonically perverse. Ordinary
expressions, such as “the son of man”, ben
adom, which simply mean a human being, are ratcheted up a thousand fold to
grand mythical dimensions. An a
pre-Hebrew symbol, the serpent raised up as an apotropaic in the desert during
Exodus and argued over for its multitudinous allegorical significations, now
becomes a specific evidence of Jesus as the crucified and resurrected Christ,
the alpha and omega of universal meanings.
16 For this is
the way God loved the world: he gave his one and only Son that everyone who
believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not
send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world should be
saved through him. 18 The one who believes in him is not condemned. The one who
does not believe has been condemned already, because he has not believed in the
name of the one and only Son of God. 19 Now this is the basis for judging: that
the light has come into the world and people loved the darkness rather than the
light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For everyone who does evil deeds hates
the light and does not come to the light, so that their deeds will not be
exposed. 21 But the one who practices the truth comes to the light, so that it
may be plainly evident that his deeds have been done in God.
Nicodemus has no riposte to
any of this, or to the five verses which follow, each of them powerful core
statements of Christian belief. By
implication, however, Nicodemus and other unbelievers are condemned to eternal
darkness by their lack of faith. Instead
of entrapping Jesus, Nicodemus is himself entrapped. He disappears into the text and remains
thereafter forever silent, an idiot deprived of speech, shamed before the
world.
There is a somewhat similar situation that
develops when Paul allows himself to be invited into the Areopagetica to
address the gathering of Greek philosophers and legislators in Corinth. I have discussed this at length in my Festivals of Laughter, Blood and Justice
because the Christian missionary seems to be made a fool of by the wise men of
the ancient world, whereas the New Testament arranges its narrative so that
Paul entraps the Greeks into revealing their own pig-headed ignorance and
arrogance. Such intellectual entrapment
occurs in a variety of forms throughout ancient Greek and Latin literature, as
well as in Christian works, usually with the protagonist presenting himself or
viewed as the eiron, a person who
seems more foolish than he actually is, his anatagonists or interlocutors
taking the role of the alazon, a
boaster who believes himself to be wiser and more discerning than he is.
But it is in the Cynical tradition that we find
the paradigm of l’attrape-nigaud that
appears in Hebrew tradition. It can be
seen in the legend of Samson, set apart for great things by an angelic
directive, yet mostly acting the fool until the end of his life, at which
point, when blinded and shorn of hair, he is led into the great Temple of Dagon
in Gaza. The crowds have gathered in vast
numbers to see their ancient foe humiliated and tortured, above all mocked and
scorned, and yet, at the last moment, his power-granting locks grown back, he realizes
his divine mission and topples the pillars of the temple, destroying not only
himself but the throngs of alazonic fools who have come to laugh at him. The festival of laughter is thus turned into
a festival of blood and justice. In
another example, Esther or Hadassah is guided by her uncle Mordechai into
replacing the disgraced former queen Vashti who disobeyed her husband’s command
to show herself naked before all his powerful friends and courtiers. Keeping her true identity to herself and
pretending to be a docile female, Esther (Ishtar, the Star of the East) takes
advantage of her beauty to gain an audience with her husband; she uses cunning to
lure the arch enemy of the Jews, Haman, who has seduced King Achashverus into
issuing a decree for the destruction of all Jews in his empire. Hadassah (the secret one) entraps Haman, plays
on his pride and arrogance to expose him as a would-be seducer of the queen,
and has him hanged, with his own genocidal programme turned against all those
of his followers who were to carry out the emperor’s orders.
Just as Samson sacrifices himself to “bring
down the house” of idols around him and thus become a judge in Israel, so Esther
gives over her right to be a good Jewish wife at home to being a consort to a
stupid pagan husband in order to keep her people safe and prosperous.
Today we find alazonic journalists and
intellectuals in the west boasting of their moral superiority through hatred of
Jews and Israelis, at the same time as they allow themselves to be seduced by a
devious, duplicitous set of regimes—from Hamas in Gaza, Hizbullah in Lebanon,
Isis in Syria and Iraq, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, as well as a variety
of other analogous groups in Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. Ironically as they demonize Jews, they put
themselves more and more into the clutches of ideologies that despise them,
their liberalism, their tolerance and their compassion. They fool themselves into believing the one-sided
narrative and imagery of the Palestinian propaganda ministry, the UN Human
Rights Council, and similar purportedly well-intentioned organizations. They brush aside internal contradictions, lack
of coherence, and pure unreason to make their fatuous news reports and write
their self-righteous commentaries. They
stumble over the fallacies in their argument.
They blind themselves to a reality which threatens their well-being,
careers and lives, and put their faith in lies and hollow hopes. At some point they will wake up, but by then
it will be too late.
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