I’ve just changed what the disciples call Jesus in these plays from “master” to “rabbi”. It feels even weirder than I suspected it might when I got this idea, but that’s exactly why I’m going to stick with it!<\/p>\n
The name of Jesus has been a tricky thing. You’ll already have noticed nobody ever calls him “Jesus” in the dialogue, but use the Hebrew equivalent, “Joshua” instead. The reason I do this is that there’s no way to say the name Jesus without conjuring a host of religious associations, and that’s the last thing I want to do in the Wineskin Project, so I went with a name that’s completely neutral, but which he might actually have been called by.<\/p>\n
This wasn’t a big change, seeing as how very few people in the gospel accounts ever use his name directly, but then came the problem of what they actually do mostly call him: Lord. Now there’s a word that carries religious associations! Up until now, I dealt with this by using the word “master” instead. It conveys the same relationship, while sounding more neutral. However, I was never quite satisfied with it, simply because it’s not a modern word. Nobody calls anybody “master” these days. (And it even has some seriously politically incorrect connotations.)<\/p>\n
However, it was the only solution I could think of – until this week when I heard Mary Magdalene call Jesus “Rabboni” in the story of Easter morning. “Rabbi” conveys the right relationship just like Lord or master did, is a title that people did in fact use for Jesus a few times in the gospels, and is a totally modern word. And it has the added bonus of reminding us of Jesus’ cultural context. (An advantage of “Joshua” as well, by the way.) And\u00a0I did in fact have Joanna calling him that already. My idea was that she wasn’t quite as ready as the others to call him “master”. (Plus, there was that pesky PC issue that would have been worse if a woman called him that.)<\/p>\n
So “rabbi” it is. Now that I’ve made the change, however, I have to say that it really sounds strange to my ears. Sprinkled a few times in the plays in just a couple of people’s mouths, it was fine, but now it really sticks out. However, I think this is a good thing. The really strange thing is that “Lord” or “master”\u00a0didn’t<\/em> stick out! So I think that in this matter, the Wineskin Project can further its mission to disturb our assumptions and lazy mental habits around the reading of the Gospels, and to create a more immediate and theologically neutral experience of these far off events.<\/p>\n I suspect my ears will get more used to “rabbi” with time, but what I wonder is: how that might affect my gut feelings about who and what Jesus was?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"