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Simulating Jesus
Can the different pictures of Jesus in the New Testament be reconciled? Or are they simply simulations, the products of a virtual Gospel? Simulating Jesus argues that the gospels do not represent four versions of one Jesus story but rather four distinct narrative simulacra, each of which is named "Jesus". The book explores the theory and evidence justifying this claim and discusses its practical and theological consequences. The simulations of Jesus in each of the gospels are analysed and placed alongside Jesus simulacra elsewhere in the Bible and contemporary popular culture. Simulating Jesus offers a radical understanding of Scripture that will be of interest to students and scholars of biblical studies.
258 pages, Paperback
First published July 31, 2011
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October 24, 2014
Simulating Jesus is an engaging and provocative book that stems from one fundamental supposition: “despite interesting similarities between the four gospels’ stories and their Jesuses, neither the stories nor the characters in them are the same. Important differences and even contradictions appear between these stories, and therefore they cannot all be true and they all cannot refer to the same person named Jesus. Instead, the name of Jesus serves as a hook in each story on which it hangs diverse predicates, and as a result each of these Jesuses is a distinct reality effect. These four Jesuses are four distinct simulacra or virtual beings, the ideological products of the reader’s attempts to decode the texts” (p. 187).
The book is arranged in three parts. In Part One (“Virtual Bible, Virtual Gospel”), Aichele lays the theoretical groundwork for the various reading experiments that follow in the remainder of the book. He begins by tackling the biblical canon, which “obscures and replaces the component texts themselves with something else, a signified or at least a signifying potential that far surpasses any of the included texts. This is the virtuality of the Bible … The virtual Bible is the dream of coherence and identity that the canon seeks to realize” (p. 12). The success of this intertextual mechanism is always precarious and never guaranteed by any particular presentation of collection,and therefore requires a great deal of supplementation. Ultimately, the virtual Bible “does not convey a universal, apostolic message, but it has itself become the message” (p.20). In chapter 2, Aichele further builds his theoretical framework by turning his attention to simulations of Jesus and to “the virtual gospel.” “Each gospel creates a referential illusion or reality effect,” writes Aichele. Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes, he explains that “the effect of the real arises when codes of denotation dominate the reading of a text” (p. 31). Borrowing from Gilles Deleuze, Aichele describes the Jesuses produced by the gospels as simulacra. The resemblance and identity among these simulacra “form a pattern of repetition and difference that creates the reality effect … The simulacrum is the effect which produces reality by simulating it, the afterlife that generates its precursor” (p. 32). The name (“Jesus” in this case) plays an important role in these processes insofar as it joins various signifying elements, saturates the narrative function, creates a subject, and makes the text more “readerly," i.e., transparent. The canon, in turn, extends “the name from one virtuality or world to one or more other, and distinctions between the reality effects of the different narratives are blurred or eliminated” (p. 39), ultimately creating a “virtual gospel.”
Part Two (“Four Jesuses”) offers readings of each of the canonical gospels’ Jesus simulacra: Matthew’s Jesus vis-à-vis Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 film, Il vangelo secondo Matteo; Mark’s Jesus vis-à-vis the language of “children” and “kingdom” in that gospel; Luke’s Jesus in relation to the two fathers associated with that simulacrum; and John’s writing Jesus. Finally, in the four chapters that make up the third section (“Canonical Reality Effects”), Aichele attempts to “‘reverse the polarity,’ as it were, to explore how the semiotic effects of canon and the virtuality of the Bible encourage the reader to ignore these and other differences of the gospels’ Jesus simulacra and produce instead, both from and against those differences, the single simulacrum of Jesus Christ” (p. 141). He does this in relation to various aspects or implications of the synoptic problem, for example Mark and “Minority Report” (both the story written by Philip K. Dick and the film directed by Steven Spielberg); Q and minor agreements against Mark vis-à-vis fantasy; thecombined effect of Luke and John in producing the “Gospel of Jesus Christ” of institutionalized orthodoxy; and finally the “gospel” simulacrum generated in and through the letters of Paul, together with the control exerted by the canon.
*This review was excerpted from the one I published in The Bible and Critical Theory 8 (2012). To read the review in its entirety, please visit https://www.academia.edu/2179341/Geor....
The book is arranged in three parts. In Part One (“Virtual Bible, Virtual Gospel”), Aichele lays the theoretical groundwork for the various reading experiments that follow in the remainder of the book. He begins by tackling the biblical canon, which “obscures and replaces the component texts themselves with something else, a signified or at least a signifying potential that far surpasses any of the included texts. This is the virtuality of the Bible … The virtual Bible is the dream of coherence and identity that the canon seeks to realize” (p. 12). The success of this intertextual mechanism is always precarious and never guaranteed by any particular presentation of collection,and therefore requires a great deal of supplementation. Ultimately, the virtual Bible “does not convey a universal, apostolic message, but it has itself become the message” (p.20). In chapter 2, Aichele further builds his theoretical framework by turning his attention to simulations of Jesus and to “the virtual gospel.” “Each gospel creates a referential illusion or reality effect,” writes Aichele. Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes, he explains that “the effect of the real arises when codes of denotation dominate the reading of a text” (p. 31). Borrowing from Gilles Deleuze, Aichele describes the Jesuses produced by the gospels as simulacra. The resemblance and identity among these simulacra “form a pattern of repetition and difference that creates the reality effect … The simulacrum is the effect which produces reality by simulating it, the afterlife that generates its precursor” (p. 32). The name (“Jesus” in this case) plays an important role in these processes insofar as it joins various signifying elements, saturates the narrative function, creates a subject, and makes the text more “readerly," i.e., transparent. The canon, in turn, extends “the name from one virtuality or world to one or more other, and distinctions between the reality effects of the different narratives are blurred or eliminated” (p. 39), ultimately creating a “virtual gospel.”
Part Two (“Four Jesuses”) offers readings of each of the canonical gospels’ Jesus simulacra: Matthew’s Jesus vis-à-vis Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 film, Il vangelo secondo Matteo; Mark’s Jesus vis-à-vis the language of “children” and “kingdom” in that gospel; Luke’s Jesus in relation to the two fathers associated with that simulacrum; and John’s writing Jesus. Finally, in the four chapters that make up the third section (“Canonical Reality Effects”), Aichele attempts to “‘reverse the polarity,’ as it were, to explore how the semiotic effects of canon and the virtuality of the Bible encourage the reader to ignore these and other differences of the gospels’ Jesus simulacra and produce instead, both from and against those differences, the single simulacrum of Jesus Christ” (p. 141). He does this in relation to various aspects or implications of the synoptic problem, for example Mark and “Minority Report” (both the story written by Philip K. Dick and the film directed by Steven Spielberg); Q and minor agreements against Mark vis-à-vis fantasy; thecombined effect of Luke and John in producing the “Gospel of Jesus Christ” of institutionalized orthodoxy; and finally the “gospel” simulacrum generated in and through the letters of Paul, together with the control exerted by the canon.
*This review was excerpted from the one I published in The Bible and Critical Theory 8 (2012). To read the review in its entirety, please visit https://www.academia.edu/2179341/Geor....
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