Reynolds Price was one of this era’s most honest disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, learner of the teachings of those who knew the Lord best, and himself called by God to study, and know, those chosen fishermen-disciples who had followed and witnessed to the resurrected Christ. Those unlearned pupils called by the Redeemer Teacher, who were made teachable, and capable, by the power of the Holy Spirit and the astounding post-Resurrection appearances and Presence of Jesus, now Evangelists of God’s Self-revelation in Jesus the Galilean. They had written the Good News of the Gospel for all humankind, and they were Price’s unlettered, but nonetheless credentialed, and authoritative, teachers of the Truth entrusted to them.
John’s and Mark’s Gospels were Price’s primary sources, along with years of diligent biblical, literary, and historical research supporting his teaching and writing. Singularly qualified for the work he undertook, Price was James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University, a gifted linguist, author of thirty-five books, acclaimed novelist, student of history, scholar of biblical Greek, and masterful teacher of narrative writing, both nonfiction and fiction.
All those qualifications count. What counts more follows.
Stricken with spinal cancer at 51, Price experienced a miraculous meeting with the risen Christ, which galvanized his faith and claimed his gifts of language and intellect for God’s glory and purpose. An honest, courageous Price describes both the cancer and that miracle in his memoir, “A Whole New Life,” first published in 1982. One reviewer wrote, “Price writes sincerely and openly, without a trace of self-pity … a clear-eyed book that is as realistic as a sawed-off shotgun. It is wise, and humbling, and it bears reading before it is needed.”.
His theological work afterward, also realistic, humbling, and wise, was equally cataclysmic; published 14 years later, in 1996, it is entitled “Three Gospels.” There, he resolutely challenged the Jesus Seminar’s New Testament scholars, whose conclusions he called specious and “notorious.”
In Price’s riveting prose, his memoir is an extraordinary account of his faith in the “now appalling, now astonishing grace of God.” Suffering, blessed, Price recounts his morning meeting with Jesus the Christ, an event which he admits having himself questioned; still, “… I was never quite able for two consecutive days to destroy the unassailably physical core of that morning — the credible acts that I’d watched, felt and heard in what was an actual place on Earth, a place I’d visited and photographed.”
“…I was lying fully dressed in modern street clothes on a slope by a lake I knew at once. It was the big lake of Kinnereth, the Sea of Galilee, in the north of Israel—green Galilee, the scene of Jesus’ first teaching and healing…Still sleeping around me on the misty ground were a number of men in the tunics and cloaks of first-century Palestine. I soon understood with no sense of surprise that the men were Jesus’ twelve disciples and that he was nearby asleep among them …
Then one of the sleeping men woke and stood.
I saw it was Jesus, bound toward me…Again, I felt no shock or fear. All of this was normal human event; it was utterly clear to my normal eyes and was happening as surely as any event of my previous life. I lay and watched him walk on nearer. Jesus bent and silently beckoned me to follow. I knew to shuck off my trousers and jacket … We waded out into cool lake water 20 feet from shore till we stood waist-deep.
I was in my body but was also watching my body from slightly upward and behind. I could see the purple dye on my back, the long rectangle that boxed my thriving tumor.
Jesus silently took up handfuls of water and poured them over my head and back till water ran down my puckered scar. Then he spoke once — ‘Your sins are forgiven’ … (I will have more to say about Jesus’ words of forgiveness in a later column.)
I came on behind him, thinking in standard greedy fashion, ‘It’s not my sins I’m worried about.’ So to Jesus’ receding back, I had the gall to say “Am I also cured?’
He turned to face me, no sign of a smile, and finally said two words — ‘That, too.’ …
I followed him out and then, with no palpable seam in the texture of time and place, I was home again in my wide bed.”
Price lived 27 more years and died in 2011 of cancer at the age of 78. God had blessed in suffering, and granted Price a long life and his most productive work, recognized so, by him.
Thanks be to God.
Elizabeth Barnes is a native of Bladen County and now lives at White Lake. She taught Christian theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and at Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond. She is a member of Beard’s Chapel Baptist Church.