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The Jesus of the Church and the Yeshua of Mikhail Bulgakov

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The Jesus of the Church and the Yeshua of Mikhail Bulgakov The Jesus of the Church and the Yeshua of Mikhail Bulgakov George Krugovoy* The Master had called his life's work a novel about Pilate. But whatever place the destiny of Pilate occupies within the novel as a whole, it is only in relation to Yeshua that the procurator's personal conflict and tragedy acquire their universal and existential significance. Yeshua is the metaphysical axis around which the universe of The Master and Margarita revolves. Consequently, the character of Yeshua is exceedingly complex in its genesis and, in its final literary form, assimilates more material from a larger number of diversified sources than any other personage. The first major source is the New Testament. In light of this text, Yeshua's personality appears to be profoundly Christian. Even Yeshua's "revolutionary" statement about the coercive nature of every form of political authority and the advent of the kingdom of truth and justice, where there will be no need for Caesars or any rulers,' represents Bulgakov's dramatization of St. Paul's statements.2 Pilate interprets Yeshua's statement as politically subversive and punishable by death according to the Roman lex laese majestatis. But its non-political nature is supported by Yeshua's denial that he had incited the populace to destroy the Yershalaim Temple: "I said, Hegemon, that the Temple of the old faith would fall and that a new temple of truth would arise" (441). * George Krugovoy, born in Kharkov, Ph.D. from the Philosophical Institute in Salzburg, Austria (1933). Taught at Syracuse, NYU, Princeton, Middlebury, Bryn Mawr. Presently, Professor of Russian at Swarthmore College. This article represents a chapter of a book on Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita currently being prepared for publication. 1 Mikhail Bulgakov, Master i Margarita in Romany (M.: Khud. lit., 1973), p. 447. Page references to this edition are subsequently given in the text. All translations are mine. 2 Cf. St. Paul's words: "Afterwards the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God and the Father, when he shall have brought to nought all principality and all authority and power" (1 Cor. 13:24). 201 The above passages correspond to Jesus' words: "My kingdom is not of this world" and "For this I was born and for that came I into the world; that I should give testimony to the Truth" (John 18:36-38). Both in the novel and in the Gospel, Pilate replies with his famous question: "What is truth?" (441). Similarly, part of the conversation between Yeshua and Pilate centers around the proverbial expression of life hanging by a hair, and Yeshua's retort (443) represents a literary paraphrase of Jesus' saying in the Gospels: "And you shall be hated by all men for my name's sake: but a hair of your head shall not perish" (Luke 21:17-18) and "Thou shouldst not have any power against me, unless it were given thee from above" (John 19:11). Yeshua's words on the cross (721) correspond to Jesus' words: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34).' According to Yeshua, cowardice is one of the most terrible vices (721, 735, 745) of contemporary mass societies. Yet it also reflects the numerous pronouncements of Jesus in the Gospels, the admonitions of the apostles, and the awesome warning of God in Revelation (Matt. 10:26, 14:27, 28:4; Mark 5:36, 6:50; Luke 12:4-7, 32; 1 Peter 3:14; 1 John 4:18; Rev. 2:10-11, 21:7-8). "Vfeshua's words read by Pilate in the Levii Matvei's parchment (744) may be associated with a passage in Revelation (22:1-2). Even the central tenet of Yeshua's doctrine — "there are no evil people in the world" (444) — can be traced to Dostoevsky's Christianity. Similar statements can be found in The Possessed and, without specific mention of Jesus, in The Brothers Karamazov.* The New Testament, however, is not the only source for Bulgakov's Yeshua who frequently deviates from the Jesus of the Gospels in terms of biography. Bulgakov has transformed the traditional ecclesiastical "biog- raphy" of Jesus, closely adhered to by Farrar, into a literary biography of Yeshua-Ha-Notsri. No less important is the fact that, by and large, Bulgakov ' Yeshua's execution includes the binding of his arms to the horizontal bar of the cross which represents a deviation from the Gospel account. The binding of arms, however, is attested by historical sources as a variation of the crucifixion ritual. Likewise, Pilate's definition of the execution as a "hanging from posts" (456) corresponds to the manner of speech of the times. The Talmud calls Yeshua-Ha-Notsri the "Hung" (See Frederic W. Farrar, The Life of Christ, rev. ed. (New York, 1894], p. 655). This agrees with the New Testament wording of Jesus's execution: "hung on the tree" (Acts 5:30, 10:39; Gal. 3:13). 4 F.M. Dostoevskii, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7 (Moscow, 1957), 252; ibid., vol. 9 (1958), 547. A. Krasnov. on the contrary, associates Bulgakov's Yeshua with the Jesus of Leo Tolstoy (See A. Krasnov, "Khristos i Master," Grani, 72 [1969], p. 176). His opinion is shared by G. El'baum, Analiz iudeiskikh glav "Mastera i Margarity" M. Bulgakova (Ann Arbor Ardis, 1981), pp. 40-44; T.R.N. Edwards, Three Russian Writers and the Irrational. Zamiatin, Pilnyak and Bulgakov (Cambridge. 1982), p. 174; E. Proffer, Bulgakov. Life and Work (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1984), p. 549. 202 did not invent these literary "biographical" or "historical" facts, but drew them from a variety of sources. His Yeshua is a composite figure, a literary mosaic skillfully assembled from the New Testament, from New Testament apocrypha, and from secular biographies of Jesus that reflect nineteenth- century biblical scholarship. The most important among them are: Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (1835), by David Strauss and La Vie de Jesus (1863) by Ernest Renan. While Strauss' name comes up in the first chapter of the novel (429), Renan is not mentioned at all. It was, however, Renan's celebrated biography of Jesus which had become the major secular source for Bulgakov's literary biography of Yeshua, adding also the final touch to his picture of Yershalaim. Renan's statement about the ethnically and racially heterogeneous population of Galilee with the implication of die possible mixed parentage of Jesus' is reflected in Yeshua's reply to Pilate that his father might have been a Syrian (438). Bulgakov's Yeshua shares with Renan's J£sus4 a moral aversion for civil government and politics (447). Both Renan's J6sus and Bulgakov's Yeshua are not social but moral revolutionaries (439, 441, 434-4).7 The circumstances of Yeshua's arrest (446-7), a "judicial ambush" of a type practiced (according to the Talmud) in ancient Judea, are mentioned both by Farrar and Renan.1 In addition, Bulgakov knew about the existence of a ninth-century legend, according to which Jesus was betrayed by Judas in the city, from a book by Makkaveiskii.9 Renan's book also supplied Bulgakov with some bits of valuable information about Jerusalem. Renan's remark about Gethsemane as a "pleasure garden to the inhabitants of Jerusalem"10 emerged in the novel as a realistically well-motivated place to which Niza could lure the unsuspecting Judas and deliver him into the hands of murderers (730-1). The roof of the temple "covered with glittering plates of metal,"" was transformed by 5 E. Renan, Vie de Jisus, 19-e ed. (Paris, 1888), p. 23. Jesus' Syrian father is mentioned in a Talmudic source (A. Zerkalov, Evangelie Mikhaila Bulgakova [Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1984], p. 82). * E. Renan. p. 131. 7 Renan, pp. 124-5. * Farrar, p. 574; Renan, pp. 406-7. * N. Makkaveiskii, Arkheologiia istorii stradanii Gospoda Iisusa Khrista, in Trudy Kievskoi dukhovnoi akademii (TKDA), 1891, p. 231. On the illegality of Yeshua's anest. as described in Bulgakov's novel, from the viewpoint of the Jewish law, see A. Zerkalov, p. 111. 10 Renan, p. 352. " Renan, p. 355. 203 Bulgakov into the "golden scales of the dragon" (450, 715) with all the apocalyptic associations inherent in the image.13 Compared with Renan, the contribution of Strauss to Bulgakov's novel is much more limited. Strauss' contention that the Gospels' account of Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem on an ass was of no historic value," prompts Yeshua's reply to Pilate's question that he had entered the city on foot in the company of only one man — Levii Matvei (443). Renan, on the other hand, did not doubt the authenticity of this report in the Gospels.14 Following Strauss and Renan in rejecting both traditional versions of Judas' death (suicide and accident) as unhistorical," Bulgakov has Pilate order the murder of Judas, an act which the procurator then covers up by "leaking" a rumor about Judas' suicide (740, 746). Yet, despite all these unquestionable borrowings from Renan and Strauss, it is astonishing how little Bulgakov owes to them in his conception of Yeshua and the last hours of his life. It is evident that Bulgakov's efforts to recreate a realistic setting of the events serve altogether different intentions from those of Strauss and Renan.16 Both scholars had tried to eliminate from the Gospel's accounts all mythological and legendary elements in order to elucidate a personality of Jesus that is historical and free of mystical interpretation. By this process of demythologization they intended to arrive at the person of Jesus as a man. Bulgakov, on the contrary, employing techniques of literary defamiliarization, ostranenie, intended to arrive at an image of Yeshua as both man and God.17 This primary intention, quite close to that of Farrar, determined Bulgakov's choice of historical and biographi- cal facts.
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