Meeting the Messiah: 2 – Rendel Harris's christology

Rendel Harris (1852 – 1941) is largely forgotten these days. Some Quakers know of him because of the room named after him at Woodbrooke, the Quaker Study Centre, where his bust proudly surveys the room that bears his name, and because of the interpretation board on the walls in the main corridor which tells of his being its first Director of Studies. To Irene Pickard he was far more.

One of the problems in un-packaging her archive was to come to an understanding of her relationship with Dr J Rendel Harris, both at a personal level and as an influence on her spiritual and intellectual development. 

She worked as his secretary for over a twelve years, moving into his home after the death of his wife, becoming his general factotum as well as his private secretary. Even though he explicitly instructed that no biography about him should be written, she did just that in her retirement, privately publishing her Memories of J. Rendel Harris (1979).

She says of him, quoting and echoing W E Wilson's words:

The Doctor's academic many-sidedness is not half of the tale. A wonderful personality, full of humour, delighting in the society of all sorts of persons, a saint and mystic, utterly approachable. A man of immovable principles and strong prejudices. Delighting in fighting for great moral causes, yet charitable to opponents, and a personal friend of some whose principles he detested. Filled, even in old age, with the joy of living, radiating the love of Christ. To talk with him was stimulating, to enjoy his friendship was an education, to be his pupil for years was a privilege for which one can never be thankful enough.

For Irene, Rendel Harris functioned as a latter day John the Baptist, preparing the way for her immersion into Jung's vision of what the function of religion was and how it worked on the deep mind. She may not have been receptive to Jung's radical and challenging ideas without the preparation she received by being intimately exposed to Rendel Harris's thoughts and reflections on how Christianity evolved, and how its teachings might be understood – he was, according to Irene, particularly inspiring and adept at hermeneutics, the craft of understanding the relationship between a text and its reader. 

Rendel Harris also laid the foundation to her evolving understanding of Quakerism and Christianity, moving her on from her somewhat evangelical and literalist beginnings, as much by example as by any direct teaching. She was not his pupil, but, as his personal secretary she was very much looking over his shoulder and witnessing his mind at work. She would have typed up all of his later works and correspondence.

Coming to an understanding of Rendel Harris's beliefs about Christianity was very much an essential stepping stone in exploring Irene's archive. It was also a another step in my somewhat reluctant confrontation with some of the fundamentals of Christianity: the veracity of its foundational stories. Like it or not, researching materials like those in Irene's archive has consequences for one's own beliefs because it confronts your own prejudices and limitations by expanding the range and depth of information that underlie your opinions; it exposes you to different ways of thinking; it opens new vistas to the mind. You are necessarily affected by what you research.

Rendel Harris was a radical thinker for his age. As a scholar, he came to realise that Christianity had evolved, initially in a Jewish context, but with the addition of something new:

So long then, as nascent Christianity is making its way in a Jewish environment, it does so as a sect of Judaism, accepting the whole of the inspired Jewish documents, and re-interpreting them in the light of what it holds to be a larger revelation. The Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity: Rendel Harris, 1919

He appears to have thought that it then evolved on through the convolutions of the early Church, until it reached a much more defined and stable state in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, when the creeds were created, and the early Christian texts were codified to form the New Testament, and then added to agreed versions of those Jewish books which formed the Old Testament, with, in the eyes of the Church, the teachings of the New superseding those of the Old.

He strongly suspected that the writers of the four Gospels used note books full of proof texts, traces of which survived in some of the ancient documents recently discovered in his time: his two volumes on Testimonies published in 1917 and 1920 suggested such traces. He thought that the proof texts were drawn from oral and written traditions about the life and teaching of Jesus, as well as from the Jewish scriptures. Their disappearance being much like the disappearance of an artist's cartoon or an architect's drawings when the finished work is complete.

He also accepted the scholastic arguments that Mark's Gospel was the primary Gospel, that is it was written before the others. This took him to a realisation of the importance of a discovery with which he was intimately involved – that of the Sinaitic palimpsest. The version of St Mark's Gospel in the palimpsest was both older and shorter than the canonical version, ending with the discovery of the empty tomb, and lacking the verses about the resurrection and ascension.

As a Quaker, Rendel Harris was at ease with the notion of the inward light, 'that of God in everyone' from which revelation sprang: a charismatic living presence within each and every person, if only they had the steadfast patience to wait upon it. As George Fox is reported to have said:

'The Scriptures were the prophets’ words and Christ’s and the apostles’ words, and what as they spoke they enjoyed and possessed and had it from the Lord’. And said, ‘Then what had any to do with the Scriptures, but as they came to the Spirit that gave them forth. …'   Margaret Fell, 1694

According to Fox, even Christ's words came from that inward wellspring: a radical thought that did not sit well with the orthodox belief in the Trinity, which asserted that Jesus was one with God from the beginning of time (that is identical with God). Fox's claim led to accusation that the Quakers denied the Trinity and were thus heretics, justifying much of the persecution they suffered.

Rendel Harris thought he understood what had happened. If St Mark's is the most authentic account, then the man Jesus had become infused with the wisdom of God at the moment of his baptism, which is where St Mark starts, so we should not wonder that there is no trace of Jesus after he was laid in the 'sepulchre hewn out of rock' with no resurrection and ascension, as is the case in the version of St Mark found on the palimpsest. Christ was that wisdom, accessible to all and universal, not the person Jesus. Testimony to its pre-existence and universality was to be found in other ancient wisdom writings. The emergent Christian churches of the late Roman Empire had welded it onto the man Jesus, rather than understanding its universality. The man Jesus simply exemplified its wonderful depth and brilliance more fully. He was the paradigm, the vehicle through which it was best exhibited. 

… Indeed we may say boldly, that Christianity as a dogmatic system is founded on two things: firstly, the identification of Jesus with the wisdom of God, and second, the description of Christ as identified with wisdom in terms borrowed from the Sapiential literature. The Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity

Or, as he is reported in Irene's Memories to have said:

‘There is no suggestion nor fragment of evidence that we might, by excavating a thousand years, unearth an ecclesiastical Christ. He, at all events, is the dream and creation of a later age.’

It is interesting that Rendel Harris's Testimonies have been republished in 2011. Those works are still considered relevant to biblical studies as demonstrated by Alessandro Falcetta's paper on The Testimony Research of James Rendel Harris.

Rendel Harris's view of the Jewish nature of the first stages of the evolution of Christianity would be very much in accord with the views of such modern biblical scholars as Bart D Ehrman, Reza Aslan and Gésa Vermes, as would his view that the 'ecclesiastical Christ' being an artifice of later ages; although they have gone much further in developing both the understanding of Jesus as a Jew teaching Judaism to Jews, and of the evolution of Trinitarian Christianity.

The debates about the Sinaitic palimpsest and the problem posed for Christianity by the missing verses still continues.

Sinaitic Palimpsest again

I must thank Richard Pickvance (The Friend 29 October) once more for his correction. 

Oh dear. David Lockyer’s letter (15 October) contains an endlessly repeated factoid. Constantine I did not establish Christianity as the official religion of the Roman empire. He simply stopped the persecution of Christians.

Christianity progressed (not without some setbacks) and several more emperors came and went before Theodosius I made Nicene Christianity the state religion. It is the difference between the Edict of Milan in 313 and the Edict of Thessalonica in 380.

Richard Pickvance

Mea culpa: I over simplified and repeated a 'factoid'* (as he termed it) in place of a much more complicated truth. However, Constantine did give the religion a degree of prominence and privilege in the Empire and was instrumental in encouraging the definition of an emerging Christian orthodoxy, even on occasions enforcing it; a version of Christianity that Rendel Harris referred to as containing 'an ecclesiastical Christ' who was very much a product of that later age.

The edifice of theology constructed by the emerging 'state' church of the Empire was what Rendel Harris felt had obscured the inspiring clarity of the original message: a clarity that spoke to one's inward condition as a guiding light. Prominent among those theological layerings obscuring the light was the concept of the incarnate divinity of Christ.

In Origin of the Doctrine of the Trinity he suggested that the divinity actually rested on the identification of Christ with the Divine Wisdom who was with God in the creation, not, as the Church taught, as a physical incarnation. That is why Rendel Harris was not perturbed by the discovery that the Sinaitic Palimpsest version of St Mark lacked both the resurrection and ascension. For Rendel Harris those omissions confirmed the gap that had grown between the 'ecclesiastical Christ' and the original.

*An item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact. (Oxford Languages)

D.Lockyer

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Irene Pickard, whose archive is the basis of Jung, The Quakers and Hitler, was Rendel Harris' personal secretary and would have typed the texts of all of his later works, including the Origins; an experience which readied her for engaging with Jung's ideas about the evolution of religions as projections of developments deep within the collective psyche.

Lost in translation

from Lost in translation? James Gordon digs deep into Matthew’s Gospel:  James Gordon The Friend, 26th August:

I have checked over twenty different translations of these passages into English (easy to do these days with the internet), and in every case the words διὰ τοὺς ἐκλεκτοὺς (dia tous eklektous) are translated ‘for the sake of the [elect/chosen]’. Wycliffe has ‘for the chosen’, and the Latin Vulgate, which Catholics rely on to this day, has ‘propter electos’, where the preposition means ‘because of’. We need to be clear. Jerome (author of the Vulgate in the fourth century CE) was using the Greek that we have, which is the nearest we have to an original (scholars think Matthew and possibly Mark may go back to Aramaic originals but, if so, they are lost).

 

Letter to The Friend, 10th September, 2021  

Lost in translation?

In his article James Gordon (27 August) says that the Aramaic originals of the gospels are lost.

Not so lost! In fact found through the work of a Quaker scholar along with others, in ancient Syriac text; a text often used by Western Aramaic speakers.

J Rendel Harris, later to become the first director of studies at Woodbrooke, was in the habit of taking his vacations exploring for ancient documents in Egypt. He made several major discoveries at the Orthodox monastery on Mount Sinai. He advised the twin sisters, Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, of the existence of many other ancient documents at the monastery and provided them with letters of introduction. During their stay at the monastery they discovered what is known as the Sinaitic Palimpsest of Saint Catherine’s Monastery, the oldest known version of the Gospels. The following year, Rendel Harris accompanied the sisters and others to Mount Sinai to painstakingly copy the retrieved texts.

Shockingly this earliest version of the Gospel of Mark – itself believed to be the oldest of the gospels – was shorter than the versions we have now, ending with the discovery of the empty grave, rather than with the resurrection and ascension.

As Rendel Harris himself put it: ‘There is no suggestion nor fragment of evidence that we might, by excavating a thousand years, unearth an ecclesiastical Christ. He, at all events, is the dream and creation of a later age.’

David Lockyer