A limit to Christ’s power in a previously unknown saying of Jesus?

While I’m in an elegiac mood with regard to Brigham Young University’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative (METI), which I conceived and founded and for which I served for many years as director and editor-in-chief — see “Middle Eastern Texts Initiative moving to Brill” — I hope that you’ll indulge me by permitting me to celebrate, once more, the best line that we ever published in that project.

Al-Ghazālī (d. AD 1111) was one of the most significant figures in the history of Islamic thought, a legendarily brilliant philosophical theologian and legal thinker who spent most of his life in Iran and Iraq but who also sojourned for a significant period in Jerusalem.  Among its thirty volumes, METI published both his Incoherence of the Philosophers and his Niche of Lights.

We also, though, published an anthology of classical Islamic essays, including one of his, on the philosophy and practice of education.  In this essay, al-Ghazālī is talking about extremely poor students, and, in that context, he attributes the following remark to Jesus:

“Even though I managed to raise the dead, I have never been able to cure an idiot!”

(See al-Ghazālī, “O Son!,” trans. David C. Reisman, in Classical Foundations of Islamic Educational Thought, ed. Bradley J. Cook [Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2010], 103.)

Now, I’ll admit that my first inclination was to say that this alleged statement couldn’t possibly be authentic.  And that’s still probably correct.  But al-Ghazālī is entirely serious, and he plainly regards the saying as genuine.  Furthermore, his citation of it takes us back fully a thousand years or more, halfway to the time of Jesus.  So . . .

I have to confess that I rather like the idea that the Savior might have said such a thing.  It humanizes him a bit.  Surely, with all those long walks from Nazareth to Capernaum, and from Capernaum to Jericho, and from Jericho to Jerusalem, and from Jerusalem back up to Capernaum or Nazareth, it can’t all have been immortal sermons and solemn earnestness.  (Can it?  Maybe I’m just not fit for heaven.)  There must have been some small talk.  And I love the image of Jesus, trudging along with the disciples up and down those dusty, hilly paths, chatting with them, sharing warm memories and anecdotes and good-natured banter and the occasional joke.   At the end of a tough day, Jesus confides in his chief apostle: “You know what, Peter?  I can raise the dead, but I just can’t cure idiots.”  That’s oddly appealing to me.

If we believe that Jesus became fully human, though — and we do — that kind of wistful humanity almost seems part of the package.

Still, alas, the passage is probably bogus.  Sigh.