A Gateway to the Research of the Jesus Seminar
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Mahlon H. Smith There are not two Jesuses -- Christianity’s
claims regarding Jesus have never depended solely
"Why do you call
me ‘Lord, Lord’ and do not do what I tell you?"
1.1. Dialectic.
Every dialog has at least two sides. In the case of Jesus studies that can
be multiplied by a factor of 1010. Yet the
fundamental issue has always been the question of the
relationship of the pre-crucified Jesus to everything that developed
thereafter. From the first claims of his resurrection there has been a
dogmatic insistence on continuity: the Jesus who died is the person
who has been raised. It is his name, his achievement, his
triumph that continues to be affirmed and celebrated by all who claim to be
his spiritual heirs. Yet, again from the first, there has been just as
strong an emphasis on discontinuity. Resurrection always involves
transformation (1 Cor 15:35-50): the Jesus that was raised no longer
appears as he once did. Thus, there is a fundamental historical
dialectic built into all discussion of Jesus. He has gone from rags to
riches, from poverty to power, from mortality to immortality. Not only for
those who believe in him, but in the actual social and cultural history of
the world. 1.2. Viewpoint. Due
to the assertion that this is one and the same person, reflections on both
conditions belong to a single area of studies. That is why books on the
historical Jesus in libraries that use the Library of Congress system may be
found shelved under “christology” rather than “history.” That arrangement
reflects the fact that for the past 1970 years most of what has been written
about Jesus presupposes that what actually happened during his fleshly
existence was only a passing phase and that what really matters is the
status of his person for all time. The historical before has been
viewed as a mere prelude to the eternal ever after -- except for
those few studies that have concluded that the historical Jesus has
absolutely no lasting significance. 1.3. Redirection. My
proposal is that it is high time for the historical dialectic of christology
to be reversed. It is time to interpret both the person of Jesus and his
eternal significance for history primarily in terms of what he actually said
and did before he was crucified rather than how he came to be viewed
thereafter. Since this calls for a redirection of two millennia of
theological reflection and debate, the fundamental question is: why? To
make a case for the need to rethink fundamental assumptions one has to show
where and why the discussion got off track. My suggestion is that that
point of deviation occurred so close to the foundation of Christian
reflection that a christology that is truly indebted to Jesus himself is
possible only if its basic presuppositions are restructured from the ground
up, or else the whole superstructure is destined to collapse. (a) Valuable Mistakes.
While there is much that has been said or written about Jesus in the past
that was a mistake (including many of my own pronouncements), as a
historian I do not believe that we benefit by simply consigning those
mistakes to oblivion or by censoring those who made them. For without
awareness of the outcome of any experiment, one is apt to repeat the
problems of prior history. The only way to recover the historical Jesus’
viewpoint is to distinguish it from that of those who thought him worth
remembering. The inadequacies of the visions of others have the value of
alerting us to avoid potential problems in our own perceptions. The
inadequacies of our own proposals will have the value of pointing out to
others -- and hopefully to ourselves -- what still needs repair. The sole
alternative is to stop talking about Jesus altogether. (b)
Fidelity. Since silence is not likely to stop others from continuing
to debate the issue of Jesus’ status within and beyond all history, I enter
this discussion as one who thinks that true fidelity to Jesus is of utmost
importance, not just to me personally but to all who invoke his name
or claim him to be ‘lord.’ Before suggesting what we need to do
to achieve this fidelity in describing Jesus, however, we have to
recognize what we need to undo.
2.1. Historical persona. It
has become a commonplace to categorize Christianity as a ‘historical
religion’ because of its preoccupation with the person known to history as
Jesus Christ. Many of the fundamental claims of Christian theology stand or
fall on the issue of Jesus’ historical existence and its significance for
other humans throughout history. Yet, as any student of the history of
Christianity knows, Jesus himself has not always been interpreted
primarily as a historical person, conditioned by and interacting
with a unique confluence of verifiable cultural circumstances. While the
impact that the figure of Jesus made upon subsequent human history is
undeniable, attention to the eternal theological significance of what
happened to him has overshadowed the significance of anything he said or
did within his lifetime or even his historical persona itself --
i.e., the characteristic traits of a concrete individual that enable him to be distinguished from all others. (a) From storytelling to
research. From a very early date, to be sure, stories about Jesus played
an important role in shaping the Christian imagination. But storytelling is
not itself history./3/
Since prehistoric times there have been story-tellers adept
at presenting vivid and even gripping tales involving the interaction of
completely fictional characters in situations that never actually happened.
Classic myths and modern fantasies from Homer to Star Wars have amply
demonstrated the ability of a good story to capture the imaginations of
millions and even shape whole cultures. Such stories presuppose the power of
some super-human Force. The forces that shape history, on the other hand,
are often far less dramatic or uplifting; and an accurate reading usually
requires painstaking research. The primary role of historical research is to
constrain rather than entertain flights of the human imagination, to keep
one’s mind firmly planted on solid ground rather than send it to venture
across a wine-dark sea or prepare it for a leap of faith into hyper-space. (b) From passive to passing creation.
Fictional heroes like Odysseus or Luke Skywalker are passive creations, shaped by the active
imaginations of story-teller and audience. Historical figures, on the other
hand, have a creative role in shaping their own stories by altering
the world that others would have imagined without them. It is the direction
and duration of this creative energy that is crucial. A truly historical
person, no matter how important, is always a passing force in the inevitable
kaleidoscopic transformations that the space-time continuum imposes upon the
social development of the human species. The things that s/he said or did
may impact the minds and lives of millions for aeons thereafter. Yet that
person’s creative role ends with a last breath. And that chapter in
history is usually closed with interment. So, if Jesus is to be regarded as
a real historical person, then his creative contribution to human history
has to be limited to the impact of his interaction with others between birth
and death, both on them and on subsequent generations. The fact that Jesus’
burial was never the final chapter in the story told by his
supporters is a clear sign that his life has been interpreted in a dimension
other than history. 2.2. Problematic logic. In accepting Paul’s use of
botanical germination as an analogy to explain the kerygmatic claim of
Jesus’ resurrection to scientifically sophisticated Greeks (1 Cor 15:36-37),
Dominic Crossan recently wrote: From seed to grain is a combination
of something absolutely the
same and yet totally different. So too with resurrection. It is the
same Jesus, the one and only historical Jesus of the late 20s in his
Jewish homeland, but now untrammeled by time and place, language
and proximity. It is the one and only Jesus, absolutely the same, absolutely
different./4/ While these lines are powerful
inspirational rhetoric, they are problematic in logic and deficient in
historical analysis. For historical entities are always
trammeled by time and place. Yet, like the Pauline metaphor that inspired
it, Crossan’s description of resurrection above provides an excellent
illustration of Jesus’ early metamorphosis into a person beyond any
historical process within this world. (a) Individuality and generation.
Like Paul’s grains of wheat, all humans
everywhere share certain common generic traits; yet each
historical individual is distinguishable from all others of its
genus at least by its appearance at a different point in the
space-time continuum. The historical Jesus, moreover, is -- or
rather was -- an individual rather than a genus; and individuals
always display characteristics that differentiate them from
other members of their own family. Distinctive aspects of this
individual’s life and death planted seeds that germinated in the
minds and lives of other individuals whose personal traits and
biographies remained historically distinguishable from his own. No
matter how perfectly those seeds -- both word and deed -- preserved
the unique DNA of Jesus’ persona, it was not the same
historical individual who was generated in those who digested
and developed them. (b) Tracing
distinctive traits. Paul is quite correct in stressing that what was
sown -- by Jesus as by any other historical person -- is not identical
with what was produced in the community that proclaimed his resurrection.
The “one and only historical Jesus of the late 20s” died and (perhaps)
was buried in his “Jewish homeland.” The Jesus who was subsequently raised
in the imaginations and activity of his comrades and later admirers bore
features that are not traceable to the genetic code and spirit of the
person whose name they celebrated. That is precisely why the quest of the
historical Jesus always has to focus on separating the characteristic
seeds that were sown by this particular Palestinian Jew prior to Passover in
30 CE from all that sprouted later and elsewhere. Whether the genetic
mutations between the historical Jesus and the persona projected by
subsequent christology are extensive enough to constitute a “fatal flaw” for
Christian claims of historical continuity depends entirely on whether that
christology is attuned to instructions generated by Jesus himself. 2.3. Praise as forgetfulness. From earliest days the tendency of partisans to celebrate
Jesus projected glorified images that were not only larger than one human
life but transcended the spatial and temporal limits that circumscribe every
human existence. Christian preachers and writers put no historical reins
upon their rhetoric exalting Jesus’ reputation and role in the history of
the cosmos./5/ Since there were no surviving
portraits of Jesus by disinterested contemporary observers, throughout
subsequent history it has been primarily this enthusiastic poetry of
praise invoked in communal worship that has formed the impressions of Jesus
in the minds of most of those who never knew him in the flesh.
Difficult features of the historical Galilean’s life that were not regarded
as worthy of praise or worship were generally overlooked and soon all but
forgotten. (a) Cosmic ruler or construction worker.
Unfortunately, such unqualified praise of Jesus has
historically contributed as much to social oppression as to justice.
Primitive Christian celebration of Jesus’ paradoxical exaltation to cosmic
primacy created the awesome image of Christ the king: a victorious warrior
who ruthlessly subdues all enemies./6/
Rather than serve as originally intended, as an icon for
championship of those who had no other champions, this representation of
Jesus has inspired Christian leaders -- ecclesiastical as well as secular --
to devote themselves to waging wars of conquest: from crusades against the
“infidel” to subjugation, conversion and exploitation of “heathen” native
populations around the globe, to contemporary blood feuds between fellow
Christians. Overlooked, if not completely lost, in all of this devotion was
the paradoxical wisdom of the unemployed construction-worker who, though
himself a victim of military oppression, counseled fellow Israelites: “Love
your enemies” (Matt 5:44//Luke 6:27,35). (1) Psychology of devotion.
Despite Crossan’s statement cited in the epigraph to this
paper, even from the beginnings of Christianity it has not been
the historical man Jesus who really attracted the devotion of
most fervent partisans./7/ It has rather been
the aura of a super-historical colossus who transcends time: the
right hand agent of the Creator who from the very beginning ruled all
creation and at whose feet the whole human species is destined to bow in
the end. From the Pauline Christ hymns to the Orthodox Pantocrator
to Michaelangelo’s Last Judgment and Handel’s Messiah this
awe-inspiring Christ so dominated the rhetoric and artistic expressions
of Christian worship that it is little wonder that only a dozen years
ago the religion editor of TIME magazine concluded his condescending
dismissal of current historical Jesus scholarship with these words: ...believers do care about
the historical Jesus and urgently want him to square with the figure
they know through faith. They are not likely to be stirred by the
less-than-robust Jesuses resulting from higher
criticism... Even a clearer, more traditional Jesus of history
is inadequate if he does not evoke spiritual awe./8/ While the logic of these lines
is easily faulted, their insight
into the psychology of popular devotion is (unfortunately) very
perceptive. The quest for personal inspiration often has a
determining effect upon what people are prepared to recognize as
true. True believers always want their hero to manifest those
qualities that they themselves regard as robust. Hence, we all
have a hard time accepting historical evidence that an
individual we idolize -- be it a preacher, a teacher, a star or
a president -- does not quite square with the figure we first
believed him (or her) to be. So, if the Jesus of history fails
to fit one’s a priori model of a worthy leader -- not to
mention a savior --, there are two easy courses of
action. One can always ignore or deny those historical
discrepancies and continue to proclaim him to be the person one
always believed he was; or one can recognize his inadequacies
and look for another who would be a closer match. But in either
case it is an ahistorical image that drives one’s quest,
like a vision of the elusive Holy Grail, whose existence can be
believed but never demonstrated. (2) Modified ideals. There is, of course, another
possible reaction to the discovery that one’s hero has clay
feet. But it is more difficult, since it involves placing
loyalty to a concrete historical person above adherence to an
abstract ideal. That is to modify one’s ideal model to fit the
characteristics of the person to whom one is devoted. This is
easier to do with someone one has come to know and trust.
Parents do it all the time with their children. To some extent
this is what early Christians did in the face of the inescapable
facts that Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee and was crucified
in Jerusalem. Though for many Jews this was enough evidence
that Jesus was not the hero they sought, for some these
discrepancies from traditional heroic models could not destroy
their faith in him./9/ Similarly,
for modern scholars who have devoted their lives to Jesus
research, the discovery that there is no firm evidence that the historical Jesus
claimed to be either the Messiah or the unique Son of God or
that he literally was born of a virgin or walked on water has
not lessened but, paradoxically, only intensified interest in
getting to know him better./10/
To that extent, at least, Crossan is correct
in claiming that both before and after Easter the historical
Jesus is one and the same. But for others, whose interest in
Jesus rests primarily on such extraordinary claims and stories,
and who have not been gripped by the voice and logic of the
historical man himself, these discoveries can be so threatening
that they are quick to berate and even seek to silence anyone
who questions the historical accuracy of the web of propaganda
woven by two millennia of Christian devotion and public
relations./11/
(3) Accepting historical parameters.
The reaction from Christian conservatives to Crossan’s own massive historical study subtitled The
Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant proves that the figure that most
people still envision when they use the name “Jesus” does not really
preserve the peculiar features of this Jewish peasant from an
insignificant hamlet in Roman occupied Galilee./12/
They do not think of him as a construction worker, known to contemporaries
as Yeshu bar Yosef, who lived most of his life in secular obscurity
until he caused a brief public stir as a vagabond in the wake of the
execution of the real hero of the Jewish masses: a baptizing social
reformer named Yohanan./13/
Nor is it yet generally recognized that Roman authorities made a
public spectacle of his execution as a terrifying warning to other Jews
who might also have thoughts of disturbing the status quo. Though traces of
such parameters for this man’s life have survived in first-century texts we
call “gospels,” those who describe themselves as “evangelicals” generally
have trouble accepting them as historical fact. While there can be no
question that such self-styled conservatism is committed to continuing
Jesus’ incarnation ever afterward, it is questionable whether it is
really the actual details of the incarnation of this historical person
that it is concerned to perpetuate.
(b) Buried facts.
Until rather recently the mundane markers of
Jesus’ historical existence have been buried in the collective Christian
unconscious and even deliberately obscured by the inevitable tendency of
those who have admired -- or at least been fascinated by -- Jesus to
idealize his image and inflate its universal importance. Less than a
quarter century after Jesus was crucified, Paul -- the missionary who
probably did more to spread and promote Jesus’ reputation than anyone else
in the first century (1) Deification and poetic license.
Yet, the impulse to venerate Jesus was so contagious in
Hellenistic culture, where tales of gods appearing in human form and heroes
being deified were commonplace, that it was relatively easy for early
Christians to ignore the historical Jesus completely. In 112
CE,
just a generation after Mark, former Christians in Asia Minor confessed to
the Roman governor, Pliny, that they used to gather to sing “a hymn to
Christ as to a god.”/16/
Several of the oldest surviving Christian hymns, in fact, are so focused on
describing Jesus’ eternal status as equivalent to that of the supreme Deity
that virtually no attention is given to any historic detail of his existence
other than his birth and death./17/
And even these were often described by Christian writers
with such poetic license that the harsh historical circumstances of these
events is seldom evident. (2) Incarnation or distortion.
Thus, far from representing the person of Jesus as historical incarnation
of the Jewish God of justice, as Crossan
suggests, such glorification of his eternal cosmic status actually replaced
recollection of practically all of the distinctive features of this
particular man with contemplation of a disembodied and ethnically neutered
primordial Power. With the sole exception of references to crucifixion
practically all of the classical liturgical language used to celebrate Jesus
is drawn from traditional theological sources written long before his birth
and, thus, could have been composed even if such a historical person had
never existed. Moreover, the fact that soon after the crucifixion Jesus’
death was represented as a traditional Jewish ritual slaughter of a
sacrificial lamb rather than as characteristically Roman torture of a
political offender tended to distort historical recollection of events and
keep pious Christian minds from raising embarrassing questions about the
actual historical circumstances that precipitated his execution. As a
consequence, for almost two millennia most Christians have
confidently viewed Jews in general as enemies of the God represented by
Jesus./18/ 2.4. Philosophical controversy. By the beginning of the second century even the
abstract concepts of classic Greek philosophy had been pressed into service by Hellenized
Christians to proclaim the divinity of Jesus. Whether the author of the
gospel of John was himself indebted to Philo of Alexandria’s use of the
Platonized stoic notion of a personified Logos that was a “son of
God” (υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ) and a “second god” (δευτερὸς θέος) is
debatable./19/ But it is certain that many
generations of philosophically trained Christian teachers, from the martyred
Samaritan Justin (ca. 100-165
CE) on, interpreted the claims for Jesus in
the Fourth Gospel -- and the synoptics -- in terms of Hellenic philosophy
rather than the socio-linguistic matrix in which they were composed. Not
only did that further divert attention from the original legacy of Jesus, it
plunged Christian communities into more than five centuries of conflict over
abstract definitions of the “nature” (φύσις) of his persona,
with an almost endless string of councils convoked by church leaders to
condemn each others’ declarations of faith as heretical. Throughout all of
this, those who posed as champions of the “true faith” simply ignored the
ironic wisdom of the Galilean carpenter who mused: “You see the sliver in
your friend’s eye, but you don’t see the timber in your own eye. When you
take the timber out of your own eye, then you will see well enough to remove
the sliver from your friend’s eye” (Thom 26:1-2)./20/ (a) The Word’s words.
The incarnate Logos mysticism of the Fourth Gospel stressed preserving the words (λόγοι) of
Jesus./21/
It is therefore ironic that the transcendent Word christology of
second century Christian philosophy became the vehicle for
relativizing the historical Jesus’ own sayings. For, once he was
identified as the eternal divine Logos, Christians tended to find
Christ anywhere in Israel’s scriptures, which were regarded not as a
collection of compositions written over hundreds of years by
different historical individuals but as a single work composed by
the personified Word of God./22/
Words ascribed to Moses or any prophet were read as if they
were the words of the same transcendent author who was identified as
Jesus. But this dehistoricizing tendency of universal Logos
christology did not end there. For, since the Logos was
viewed as the author of all things (John 1:3), he was
regarded as capable of speaking -- however faintly -- through any
rational human being. In effect, virtually any true statement could
be regarded as a saying of Christ./23/
While the words of the historical Jesus were still
treasured, they could be homogenized with those of Socrates (i.e.,
Plato) and other sages and the logical processes of any Christian author’s
own mind. Thus, the uniqueness of the voice of that Galilean construction
worker-turned-itinerant and the distinctive logic of the sayings that he
had uttered were reduced to a momentary phase in the revelation of pure
logic to which anyone had immediate access. (b) Definitions beyond Reason.
The second irony of the legacy of
transcendent Logos christology is that, while Jesus was viewed as the
ultimate author of universal truth, his own persona was neither
identified nor defined primarily by the words that took form on the flesh of
his own lips. Rather, the structure of classical Greek logic and definitions
of Aristotelian metaphysics were seized to analyze the personified Logos
himself, both in his primal relationship to the supreme Deity and in his own
incarnate existence. Instead of being treated as the creative author of
eternal Truth, Christ became a passive object, described and dissected by
human authors, who invoked the influence of every political institution
available -- secular as well as ecclesiastical -- to insure that their own
original definitions of Jesus’ status both within and beyond all history
would triumph over those composed by their competitors. In effect, rather
than being treated as a real historical persona, who creatively
altered the way others viewed and interacted with their world, or even as
the common universal Logos active to some degree in anyone -- even
those who are regarded as atheists /24/--,
Jesus Christ himself became the ultimate cosmic puzzle,
the solution to which fewer and fewer rational beings could agree on. (1) Categorical confusion.
A third irony of this long debate is that the logical formulations that triumphed --
at least penultimately -- present paradoxical definitions that are beyond common human reason:
a God who is three personae (ὑποστάσεις) in one being (οὖσια)
and a historical Jesus who is one persona (ὑπόστασις)
with two distinct natures (φύσεις). Even professional biblical
scholars and theologians need a crash course in Aristotle’s
Categories just to begin to try to understand such affirmations./25/
Adding to the confusion is the fact that even as defined by Aristotle
the central terms (οὖσια and ὑπόστασις) were ambiguous,
permitting conflicting connotations in their use in creeds that became
the normative definitions of Christian orthodoxy./26/ To
make matters worse, the use of this terminology to define the person of
Jesus in the creed adopted at the council of Chalcedon violated a
fundamental tenet of the Aristotelian metaphysical grammar on which it
was dependent: the principle that individuals are identified by their
nature, but without the individual that nature cannot exist./27/
Thus, the idea of a single person with two
completely distinct natures “without confusion, without change,
without division, without separation” is an absolute paradox: an
incomprehensible mystery, a philosophical freak totally unlike any other
being in the universe./28/
Thus, far from clarifying popular understanding of Jesus’ place in the
cosmic order, the philosophical terms invoked by church fathers simply
contributed to mystification and further controversy. (2) Logical gap.
The final irony of the centuries long attempt to define Jesus in
terms of Aristotelian metaphysics and logic is that the categories
that classical Greek philosophy used to analyze reality proved to be
neither absolute nor eternal. In all but a few academic courses
required of philosophy majors, other ways of thinking and analyzing
reality have become the norm for most educated people. Thus, today
the gap between our perception of the universe in which we live and
the logic of classical christology has become so great that even
conservative theologians recognize that changes must be made
in the way we think and talk about Jesus./29/ A wide variety of new
experimental christologies have emerged within the past century./30/
But with few exceptions they have taken their point of departure from
previous models of Christian reflection about Jesus --
Chalcedonian two-nature christology, Logos-Wisdom christology, other
New Testament affirmations -- rather than from logic traceable to
the historical Jesus himself. Assessing the christological
achievements of the twentieth century in retrospect, one can say
that there has been a tremendous increase in clarity regarding the
complex historical origins and development of the terminology and
logic used to describe Jesus in biblical and patristic texts, as
well as promising attempts to find new significance and relevance
for some of these classic forms. Yet, the basic critical question is
not whether a revisionist christology can renew faith in
Jesus but whether it is any more faithful to the historical
Jesus than previous portraits of his persona. That is to ask:
is this christology an adequate reflection of both the words
and deeds that a neutral, critical historiography can demonstrate
are traceable to this particular historical person rather than to
someone else? (a) Appropriateness.
In concluding his careful study of the origin of the doctrine of the
incarnation, J. D. G. Dunn wrote: We cannot claim that Jesus believed
himself to be the incarnate Son of God; but we can claim
that the teaching to that effect as it came to expression in the
later first-century thought was, in the light of the whole
Christ-event, an appropriate reflection on and
elaboration of Jesus’ own sense of sonship and eschatological
mission./31/ The question of whether christological
reflection is appropriate or not all depends
on how one defines the whole “Christ-event.” If one means
simply Jesus’ transformative impact upon his immediate disciples --
those who knew him in the flesh -- and their own undying loyalty to
the cause to which he committed his life, then it was
entirely appropriate that they called him “Lord” even if he
never thought of himself in that way. If the historical
parameters of that “Christ-event” are extended to a generation of
Christian martyrs who, though they had never actually met the man
called Yeshu bar Yosef, were prepared to risk their own lives just
to live according to his egalitarian vision rather than submit to
the autocratic claims of Roman imperialism, then it was
indeed appropriate that they proclaimed him rather
than a Caligula or Nero or Domitian to be the unique “son of God”
even if Jesus never made such a claim for himself. But the
appropriateness of any claim always depends on the social and
historical context in which it is made. For human language is itself
a socio-historical phenomenon. No definition -- no matter how
time-honored -- is absolute. There is always a historical dialectic
built into the use of any words. In first-century Palestinian
Jewish culture where recognition of someone as God’s Anointed -- be
it a ruler, priest, preacher or teacher -- meant acceptance of the
authority of that individual’s leadership as normative, it made
sense for Jewish partisans of Jesus to proclaim him Messiah
rather than Antipas or Agrippa or Caiaphas or John the Baptist
or the sons of Judas of Gamala. Whenever contemporaries
demanded recognition of and submission to the absolute authority of
someone else, it was appropriate for early Christians to
appropriate the terminology that opponents used to describe that
individual in order to affirm their continuing loyalty to the
historical Jesus. But to perpetuate use of such terminology to
describe his persona IS historically appropriate only if
it is still in line with the type of person the
historical Jesus presented himself to be. (b) Commitment.
If one interprets the “Christ-event” to be the commitment of
generations of Christians to perpetuate the persona of the
real incarnate Jesus “ever afterward” (as Crossan stresses in the
passage cited in the epigraph to this paper) then determination of
what was or is appropriate depends entirely on whether one’s present
image of Jesus actually reflects what that historical person
actually said and did. It would be inappropriate to represent Jesus
as another Nero simply because like Nero he was proclaimed to be
filius Dei. It would be equally inappropriate to confuse Jesus
with Simon ben Koseba (alias bar Kochba) simply because both
men were claimed to be messianic sons of David. Commitment to a
particular historical individual -- in devotion just as in marriage
-- necessarily involves dedication to a persona with peculiar
traits that differentiate that individual from all others who may be
described in the same terms. For even in the post-modern world at
least one Aristotelian definition is still valid: no generic
description has any real existence apart from that of the concrete
individual of which it is predicated. Thus, genuine commitment to a
particular historical individual always requires not only faithful
recollection but critical research to insure that one’s impression
of that person is really accurate.
3.1. Historical Priority of the Word. Focus on the priority of the
historical Jesus for christological reflection is hardly a recent
phenomenon. The religious importance of the historical figure of Jesus has
been recognized in the Christian West at least since 1202
CE when a
twenty-year old native of Assisi named Giovanni di Pietro di Bernadone (alias
Francesco) first read the gospel of Matthew in his native Italian tongue.
Yet, in the mid-eighteenth century when H. S. Reimarus began to circulate a
draft of his research on the Intention of Jesus and his Teaching
among trusted colleagues, the idea of isolating the historical person
of Jesus from all traditional Christian descriptions of him was still a
revolutionary suggestion that was so explosive that he dared not publish it
in his own lifetime. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however,
several new studies of the historical Jesus appear each year, some of which
become instant best-sellers on the publishers charts. So, one would think
that there is hardly any need to emphasize the value and importance of such
research. Each major historical breakthrough in the interpretation of Jesus’
person has involved serious attention given to sayings ascribed to Jesus./32/
Still, the critical question debated today is the historical reliability or
even the hermeneutical wisdom of basing one’s image of Jesus primarily on
his own words. (a) Scholarly skepticism.
The double-edged fact that there is no known text that was written or
dictated by Jesus himself and that all extant documents that quote him were
penned a generation or more after his death by scribes who probably never
knew him personally makes most current scholars automatically cautious in
identifying Jesus as the direct author of any pronouncement ascribed
to him in the gospels./33/ A long period of oral
transmission inclines one to conclude that even those sayings that do go
back to Jesus himself are -- except for a few brief fragments -- at best
paraphrases of what he actually said. Add to that demonstrable evidence of
scribal revision of many sayings, uncertainty about whether any extant
koiné Greek aphorism translates a saying originally formulated in
Aramaic, and the suspicion that -- other than pure scribal fabrications --
few if any Jesus sayings have been recorded in the original context which
inspired them and one has a rather strong prima facie argument
against constructing a portrait of Jesus based primarily on the sayings
tradition. But in any historical research the truth of the situation is not
always as it first appears. (1) Distinctive logic.
Until quite recently historical research has always been dependent primarily
on verbal rather than visual representation. The primary advantage of
language, after all, is that it is able to focus attention on points that a
particular human mind considers important. Only in the case of fictional
scenarios is language able to preserve and convey all the information
relevant to interpretation of a given situation. But the logical structure
of language makes it possible to preserve and transmit in a relatively
stable form the distinctive observations and viewpoint of any person --
speakers as well as writers. That is particularly true of well-formed
aphoristic and anecdotal speech, as may be amply demonstrated by any
comparative study of poets, sages, or stand-up comics. While the exact
wording of an author’s saying may not always survive oral transmission
intact, expressions with striking logical structures can be shown to have
amazing durability. Even in oral discourse the peculiar traits of any
individual’s viewpoint and way of speaking are so identifiable that they may
be readily recognized by others and even mimicked by someone with a good
ear. The more so, if that speaker has distinguished her or his idiomatic
style and viewpoint from those developed by others. All historical evidence
indicates that the historical Jesus demonstrated a viewpoint and style that
distinguished him from his contemporaries: a style that was so
unconventional that it provoked controversy, a viewpoint that was so
socially radical that it cost him his life. Thus, the only question about
being able to identify Jesus’ voice in works written by his spiritual and
intellectual heirs is whether his logic can still be distinguished from
theirs. (2) Mimicry. Of course,
others may learn to echo any speaker or writer’s logic and adopt and develop
what was originally one individual’s distinctive point of view. That only
testifies to the power of language to preserve, persuade and propagate.
Perfect mimicry is theoretically possible. But in the real world few people
are perfect mimics. Dale Allison has proposed the hypothetical case of an
early Jewish Christian prophetess named Faustina who, speaking for the risen
Jesus, “authored all the non-redactional sayings in which Jesus
prophesies the future coming of the Son of Man.”/34/
Since Faustina “steeped
herself in the primitive Jesus tradition and liked to imitate it.... she
made Jesus’ style her own style.”/35/
Hence, these sayings became widely accepted in the earliest community as genuine
Jesus sayings. Allison is perfectly correct in maintaining that this
fiction is not “far-fetched.” Yet, he is mistaken in concluding that no
modern scholar could distinguish such apocalyptic logia from genuine sayings
of Jesus simply because no one after Faustina imitated her sayings. For the
criterion of distinctiveness -- or dissimilarity, as Allison prefers --
involves not just style but viewpoint. That is to say, an individual’s
characteristic speech is identified not merely by an idiosyncratic use of
idioms but by atypical observations and patterns of logic. Son of Man
sayings that can be distinguished as authored by the historical Jesus are
precisely those that (a) are not traceable to the influence of some other
identifiable source and (b) express observations that were not commonly held
by either the gospel writers themselves or the early Christian community.
The fact that the author of the coming Son of Man sayings was inspired by a
biblical text (Dan 7:14) that was not used by the historical Jesus --
as Allison admits, at least hypothetically --, makes such sayings traceable
to that source rather than to Jesus himself./36/
Thus, in creating the coming Son of Man predictions from patterns
not found in any genuine saying of Jesus, Allison’s fictional Faustina
proved that she had not made either the distinctive style or viewpoint of
the historical Jesus enough “her own” for her forgery to escape detection by
trained experts. But what if Faustina had created a perfect forgery
that was really indistinguishable from genuine Jesus sayings? Then, even
though that particular formula might not have come from the lips of
the historical Jesus himself, it still would be a faithful replica of his
own viewpoint and logic. Such mimicry is the ultimate tribute to any author
and, in Jesus’ case, would sow the seeds of a historically reliable christology. (c) Minimal consensus?
A common objection to basing one’s portrait of Jesus on his own words is that
there is so little scholarly consensus regarding what Jesus actually said.
In a work published in 1985 E. P. Sanders wrote: ...scholars have not and, in my judgment, will not agree
on the authenticity of the sayings material, either in whole or
in part. There are a few sayings on which there is wide consensus,
but hardly enough to allow a full depiction of Jesus./37/ It is an irony of history that
this judgment was published in the same year that the Jesus Seminar began
its work to test scholarly consensus regarding the whole corpus of sayings
attributed to Jesus in antiquity. While the Seminar has never
pretended to speak for the whole guild, its work has proven Sanders’
prediction wrong in at least two respects. (1) Critical residue.
The first phase of the Jesus Seminar’s research demonstrated a rather extensive scholarly
consensus regarding sayings that the historical Jesus probably did not
author. Fifty-seven per cent the 1544 items inventoried could not
attract enough support to be accepted into the Seminar’s data base,
including all of the verses identifying Jesus as the unique Son of
God which contributed to the classic patristic debates regarding his cosmic status./38/
Yet, in spite of such
thorough-going critical caution, ninety-one sayings were recognized by the
majority of Fellows as distinct enough in their logic to be accepted as
probable products of the mind of the historical Jesus rather than someone
else./39/ Ninety-one is more than just a few. Of
course, Sanders would be correct in insisting that even a corpus of
ninety-one sayings is not extensive enough to develop “a full
depiction of Jesus.”/40/
But it still represents a rather sizable residue from a
rigorous filtering process of logical formulations that are not likely to
have been constructed by any voice in the early Christian movement other
than that of Jesus himself. (2)Voice print.
Certainly, not everyone expressed the same
confidence in the historical reliability of every saying in the Jesus
Seminar data base. But since unanimity on any issue is so rare in human
history, it is totally unrealistic to make that a requirement for making
historically sound judgments. The point is that these particular
ninety-one sayings were able to survive the collegial historical
skepticism of scholars who methodically doubted that Jesus himself
formulated most of the sayings that have been attributed to him, while
those sayings that have provided a basis for classical christological
reflection did not. So, if one is interested in identifying the
voice print of the historical Jesus, it is only reasonable that one look
for it first in the former group of sayings instead of the latter,
unless one can still find cogent reasons for tracing the latter
sayings to Jesus himself and the former to some other identifiable voice
in the early Christian tradition. To insist on basing one’s
christological reflections on statements that others made about Jesus
rather than on the things that he himself is most likely to have said
would be a supreme act of hubris. For it would presuppose that others
understood him better than he understood himself. And that is
inconsistent with any theological or historical theory of
incarnation./41/ (d) Not just words.
Sanders proposed another reason for not basing one’s portrait of
the historical Jesus primarily on his sayings: Secondly, when the study of Jesus is equated
with the study of his sayings, there is the unspoken assumption that what he really was,
was a teacher./42/ The logic of this
objection is flawed, unless one assumes that teachers are the only
ones who say anything; in which case, everyone who speaks is a
teacher. Those who assume that Jesus was really a teacher will
inevitably focus on what he said; but the reverse is not necessarily
the case. Yet, Sanders is not the only recent scholar to conclude
that excessive emphasis placed upon the importance of the sayings of
Jesus is apt to give a distorted picture of his real historical
persona. The paradigm of Jesus the Teacher is still a prevalent
enough residue of nineteenth century liberal Protestant christology
that other scholars with divergent views of Jesus have recently
expressed sentiments similar to those of Sanders./43/
Even Dominic Crossan, who arguably has done more than any
scholar in the past half century to advance understanding of the sayings of Jesus,
writes in his latest book: The earthly Jesus was
not just a thinker with ideas but a rebel with a cause. He
was a Jewish peasant with an attitude, and he claimed
that his attitude was that of the Jewish God. But it was,
he said, in his life and in ones like it that the kingdom of God
was revealed, that the Jewish God of justice and righteousness
was incarnated in a world of injustice and unrighteousness. The
kingdom of God was never just about words and ideas, aphorisms and
parables, sayings and dialogues. It was about a way of life. And
that means it was about a body of flesh and blood./44/ It is hard to disagree with such
a powerful piece of rhetoric; but again it needs unpacking.
There is hardly a scholar today who would argue that the
historical Jesus was concerned just about words or deny
that he was really concerned with a way of life, even though
those points have often been lost sight of in christological
controversies across the centuries. But it is just as
incontestable that Jesus spoke about the kingdom of God
and described the way of life it entails in words as well as
actions. Without his words no one would have ever
guessed that Jesus’ way of life had anything to do with God’s
kingdom. Those who actually lived with him and whom he invited
to share in his way of life might have learned more about
him from his gestures and deeds than from his words. But anyone
who has not actually encountered Jesus in his living flesh can
gain insight into what this historical individual was really
about only -- or at least, primarily --
through the medium of words: both his words and those of
others. Others may have faithfully described Jesus’
deeds and way of life. But they necessarily did so from their
own viewpoint rather than his. Since the historical Jesus can
be identified as a rebel in his practice, his real
attitude and concerns are accessible only though his own words.
That is particularly true of any claim that he himself
may have made about the relation of his way of life to the realm
of God. Thus, fidelity to the historical persona of
Jesus and continuing his practice is necessarily
dependent on heeding his words and then doing what Jesus’ own
logic implies./45/ A final objection to basing christology primarily
on words that are traceable to the historical Jesus is that the corpus of
genuine sayings of Jesus does not say much directly about
Jesus himself. But that in itself speaks volumes. The
historical Jesus was not recalled to be prone to speak about
his own person, despite the evidence of all our earliest
sources that his fans spent a lot of time speaking highly
about him./46/
This indicates that Jesus did not put himself at the top of
his agenda or at the center of his own concerns. His focus
was eccentric rather than solipsistic. That is a
practice of the historical Jesus that deserves
serious attention in any accurate description of his persona.
Our only access to Jesus’ self-image is as an indirect reflection in sayings that
directed attention away from himself. Yet that reflection is clear enough
to act as a corrective to abuse of classic christological
claims about Jesus’ cosmic status. (a) Lord?
In a world that presupposes hierarchical social
structures, it makes sense for people to express their
respect for and allegiance to someone by addressing that
person as a social superior: “My lord,” “Master,” “Sir(e),”
“Madam(e).” Today in modern egalitarian democracies these
conventional patterns of address have become little more
than courteous formalities -- except in the sphere of
religion, where time-honored titles are treated as if they
were Plato’s eternal ideas. Under the Roman imperium
early Christians made a powerful statement of social and
political resistance with their paradoxical proclamation
that a homeless construction-worker who had been crucified
by imperial forces was now “the Lord” (Philp 2:8-11).
Unfortunately, however, that paradox was lost sight of when
Christians themselves came to political power, if not
before. For centuries, proclamation of the lordship of
Jesus Christ has been both the battle cry and banner of
Christian triumphalism. But if fidelity to Jesus is what is
really desired, it has to be asked whether Jesus himself
envisioned a world order in which he was “lord.”
Several sayings suggest that the most probable answer to
that question is: probably not. (1) Kingless kingdom.
The language of hierarchy and social
subservience is part of the baggage that Jesus inherited
from a cultural environment that he, like any other
historical individual, neither invented nor chose.
Absolute rulers called “king,” “emperor” or a wide range of
other titles that expressed the idea of totalitarian control
were an accepted political fact of life in the ancient Near
East. The rule -- not just the reign -- of kings was the
rule rather than the exception. Emerging within that world
early Israel had established a constitution that was a noble
social experiment: a society with no single human ruler.
Israelites’ independence from subjugation to surrounding
kingdoms was to be guaranteed by the principle that they
recognize no one as “lord” except the power
that had liberated them from servitude to Egypt, an empire
which -- in legend at least -- had been a model of
totalitarian power with a king who was worshipped as a
divine incarnation. Early Israel’s dialectical resistance
to such a social system was embedded in refusal to represent
its “god” in the form of any human or other creature.
Instead of an idol, the artifact originally at the center of
its worship represented an empty throne. While neither that
social experiment nor Israelite independence was eventually
able to withstand external or internal pressures, regular
ritual reminders imbedded in the minds of at least some
Israelites an idealized memory of a system in which there
was no king, no master, no lord except
that invisible power, or “god,” that liberates people from
subjection to any social hierarchy. Jesus’
pronouncements about God’s kingdom being the property
of paupers (πτώχοι) and pre-schoolers (παιδία)
presuppose precisely such a social system./47/ (2) Beggars opera.
To call πτώχοι (lit. “beggars”) “fortunate” (μακάριος) is an absolute
contradiction in terms in a world where at least some are
wealthy. But the obverse side of that makarism is Jesus’
pronouncement that a camel can squeeze through a needle’s
eye more easily than a wealthy person can get into God’s
“kingdom” (βασιλεία)./48/
Crossan has called this a “kingdom of nobodies.”/49/
It is perhaps more accurately styled a society of have-nots.
If the imperium of God is the treasure or precious gem that one
must sell everything to possess,/50/
then only those who have literally nothing can ever hope to possess
it. In a society where everyone is a beggar, no one is
superior to anyone else. The only “Lord” is the benign
Providence that gives every creature its daily “bread.”/51/
That is a role Jesus never claimed for himself.
Rather than pose as anyone’s “lord,” Jesus identified himself with the
homeless./52/
Like them he did not even have a place to sleep, much less a
throne. Still, he reminds his fellow Jewish peasants who
bear the burden of imperial and temple taxes that it is
their good fortune that the God of their tradition is
one who frees people from slavery to wealth,/53/
yet feeds and clothes them as he does the least of the wild
creatures./54/ A world where everyone is a hobo but no
one need worry where the next meal is coming from is truly a
beggar’s opera. Its basic plot is that the only prince
is the pauper. In such a “kingdom” everyone is equal and
free; and any tramp is king of the road. Gospel
narratives indicate that Jesus put this way of life
into practice. So, historically speaking, the only people
who would be in an appropriate social position to call
him “lord” would be those few who, barefoot, penniless,
and without provisions abandon(ed) all their property to
follow his lead./55/
Anyone who
imagines him to display a different persona after
Easter -- one with royal possessions and power -- is (or was)
worshipping a different Jesus, an unhistorical hypostasis. (3) Autocracy vs. autonomy.
The basic connotation of the concept of βασιλεία (“kingdom”) is the office
and authority of a βασίλευς (“king”): i.e., one who
is in absolute control of a particular social situation./56/
No imperium extends any further than its emperor’s
ability “to command” (imperare). That is why
nations in antiquity had no recognized fixed territorial
boundaries. Anyone who exercised enough autonomous
authority could at any time challenge the autocratic
claims of the strongest of kings and establish his (or,
at least in a few cases, her) own “kingdom.” It made
no sense in antiquity for someone to recognize a
“kingdom” where someone was not currently
in control. Thus, ancient Israelites could maintain
their independence from domination by human despots only
by insisting that their “god” -- the power that set them
free of domination by other humans -- was still
the real “king” even in situations where others
temporarily asserted suzerainty. The prophetic
“visions” of the majesty of YHWH enthroned on high were
formulated for specific political situations in which
foreign tyrants -- Assyria’s Tiglath-Pilesar in the case
of Isaiah; Babylon’s Nebuchadrezzar in the case of
Ezekiel -- threatened to compromise or crush Jewish
cultural and political independence./57/
Current affairs might not provide
visible evidence of YHWH’s dominion. But even for the
most devout Yahwist, a “god” whose current “kingdom” was
only "in heaven" would be neither really King nor
truly God. YHWH’s “kingdom” was still effective
on earth, incarnate in anyone who maintained a fifth
column resistance to the autocratic claims of current
tyrants who tried to enslave the Jewish spirit and make
Jews abandon or forget their ideal of freedom. (4) Unsupervised kindergarten.
Born into a world where Israelite ideals were difficult to maintain in the face
of the pervasiveness of Greek culture and Roman military
and economic imperialism, any Jew other than
Jesus might have mimicked and elaborated the ancient
prophetic descriptions of YHWH’s hierarchical heavenly
domain. And several did./58/
But there is no reliable evidence that
the historical Jesus chose this tact. Rather, he
paradoxically depicted God’s βασιλεία as the
possession of παιδία -- i.e., children under the
age of seven -- and insisted that only those who
mimicked παιδία had access to it./59/
Preachers and theologians have long
romanticized or allegorized this pronouncement. But no
one who has ever lived with a child in this age bracket
or tried to teach kindergarten could honestly maintain
that what Jesus really meant was that people should be
innocent or absolutely dependent or obedient or display
unqualified trust. If there is anything a pre-schooler,
whatever its culture, is not, it is all
of the above. So, if Jesus meant any of these, he chose
the wrong metaphor. Pre-schoolers are notoriously and
innately independent-minded and hard to control. That
is precisely why classic pedagogy stressed the need for
strict discipline./60/
But Jesus’ pronouncement leaves no
space in God’s basileia for any pedagogue other
than the benign Papa (Abba) who provides his
offspring’s daily nourishment and tolerates the bad
along with the good./61/
Instead of depicting this Parent as a
strict disciplinarian dedicated to reforming his
children, Jesus portrayed him as one who celebrates the
homecoming of the wayward child who had lost
everything he had given him./62/
Jesus, for his part, did not volunteer to act as
supervisor of such urchins. Instead of posing as a
teacher, Jesus thanked his Abba for revealing to
infants (νήπια) -- i.e., children
who are not ready for any instruction -- what
sages per se cannot see./63/
Infants are not passive subjects; they
demand attention and do what they -- not
any parents -- want. So, if the synoptic
anecdote that portrays Jesus as identifying himself as a
παιδίον is a Markan fiction, at least it is what
R. W. Funk terms a “true fiction”: a story that
accurately illustrates the logic and attitude of Jesus
himself./64/
The historical Jesus was a Jewish Peter Pan, who warned his
fellow homeless “boys” (and “girls”?) against acting
like educated -- supposedly grown-up -- scholars who
seek personal recognition and vie for places of honor
for themselves./65/
Thus, the only people who were (or are) in an
appropriate position to proclaim Jesus as their “master” (κύριος) and
themselves as his “students” (μάθηται)
would be those who follow(ed) his example of childish
autonomy, even if that meant defying parents and older
siblings/66/
and defaulting on the most basic honor
children owe their natural fathers: a decent burial./67/
Crossan is certainly correct, therefore, to characterize Jesus
as a “rebel with a cause.”/68/
For, far from demanding that others recognize him as
their master, Jesus encouraged youngsters to assert
their own autonomy vis-à-vis even domestic
autocratic hierarchy. He did not offer to save them
from the consequences. (5) Social liberation.
The only sense in which the historical Jesus was a liberator is that he urged
those whom society classified as helpless to stand
up and act on their own: to get off that stretcher
and, like any toddler, learn to walk even at the
risk of falling./69/
He did not ask people to fall at his feet but to
stand on their own: when slapped down, to defiantly turn the left cheek,
asserting their independence of anyone who tried to treat them as inferiors./70/
If sued for all they had,
to shame the creditor by volunteering to go naked./71/
Thus, Jesus devoted himself to the cause of radical social independence
rather than political and intellectual subservience to himself any more than to anyone else.
To call this Jesus “Lord” is the ultimate social irony. So, unless
this historical paradox is kept absolutely clear, this practice needs to be
abandoned. It has outlived its social usefulness. It served its historical
purpose as the early Christian cry of defiance against the inhumane exercise of
totalitarian power within the Roman imperium and occasionally elsewhere.
If one remains clear about the actual historical persona of Jesus,
then recognition of him as “lord” might still prove useful in convincing
some Christians to refrain from policies that stifle the independence of the
young and the homeless. But since Constantine, the proclamation that “Jesus is
Lord” has proven to be an ineffective safeguard against either social tyranny or
political aggression in policy issues in which nominally Christian leaders,
communities and institutions have become involved. It has not incarnated
social justice -- especially for Jews. Instead it has been turned into a
tool to deny social independence and free expression to Jesus’ own people and
others who have been regarded as “infidels” -- no matter how faithful they be to
their own perception of the truth -- simply because they stubbornly refuse to
recognize Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior. It is high time to stop
confusing our own logic with the Logos that governs the whole world or
even that of the historic Jesus himself. After seventeen hundred years, it is
finally time to recognize that this christological experiment has failed to
guarantee fidelity to the historical Jesus and is too easily open to
abuse. If there were an appropriate title or form of address for someone who
identified himself with beggars and pre-schoolers I would suggest its adoption.
Since I know of none, I propose that true fidelity to Jesus is best expressed by
following his practice of diverting attention away from him personally
and focusing instead on the social implications of what he told others to do. (b) Only Son?
The second fundamental corrective to classical christology required by attention to the genuine
words of Jesus himself is abandonment of the concept that Jesus was
absolutely unique. There was a time when, and a social context where,
it was entirely appropriate to proclaim a crucified unemployed Jewish
construction worker as the only genuine (μονόγενης) “son of God.”/72/
That was a time when political despots and mythological heroes
were regularly claimed to be “sons of god,” a social context in which his fresh
voice was overshadowed by the aura of Mosaic law and the appeal of Hermetic revelations.
In such a Sitz audiences needed the imprimatur of a divine bath qol
in order to pay any particular attention to what this vagabond from
an insignificant village in Galilee himself had to say./73/
But that was then, this is now.
Jesus is no longer an obscure person. More
has been written on him than on any other recognized authority before or
after; and few historical figures other than he are still seriously claimed
to be a “son of God.” In fact, millions regularly equate his name with that
of the supreme deity and regard him as fundamentally superior to every human
being who has ever lived. Even those who reject the idea that Jesus was
ontologically different from other humans, still infer that he saw himself
as morally superior to others and equated his own activity and his own
attitude with that of God himself. Witness: Crossan, in a passage already
quoted, wrote: He was a
Jewish peasant with an attitude, and he claimed that his attitude was
that of the Jewish God. But it was, he said, in his life and in ones
like it that the kingdom of God was revealed, that the Jewish God of
justice and righteousness was incarnated in a world of injustice and
unrighteousness./74/ So,
while the demon of Jesus’ “messianic consciousness” has been exorcised from
most current critical Jesus scholarship, it returns in guises that may in
the long run prove to be even more insidious. For if Jesus really
identified his own life as the criterion for measuring the mind and work of
God, then he was personally the author of the doctrine of the
incarnation and was indeed guilty of the highest hubris possible
within a truly Jewish worldview. (1) Jewish mindset.
Jewish tradition certainly had more than its share of
prophets who claimed to see and speak for YHWH himself and
even occasionally to demonstrate by gestures how that God would act. At
least one (Hosea) even gained insight into God’s behavior by analyzing his
own personal experience. But not even Moses would have presumed to claim
that the God of justice was himself “incarnated” and “revealed” through his
personal lifestyle. Rather, in the mind of the true Jew, it is absolutely
incumbent upon all humans -- even non-Jews -- to recognize the difference
between God’s standards of justice and their own personal behavior and to
confess publicly their own shortcomings. One of the most common petitions
in Jewish prayer is the plea for God to humble the proud; and, for
Jews, the public disgrace of anyone -- Jew as well gentile -- who presumed
to act as superior to other humans is the ultimate sign that their
God still lives and reigns. That is why the self-deprecating comment -- not
disparagement of others -- is the unpatented trade mark of Jewish humor.
Thus, it is timely to ask whether the historical Jesus really saw
himself as different from other humans or identified his own activity as a
unique revelation of the mind of God. If one bases one’s
judgment primarily on those sayings of Jesus that are most likely to be
genuine, then I suggest that the most probable answer to this question will
again have to be: probably not. (2) Our Father.
While it is virtually certain that Jesus called God “Father,”/75/
there is no reliable evidence
that he himself ever claimed that God was his father alone or suggested
that he personally enjoyed a special relationship with that divine Parent that
differentiated him from all others. Indeed, the most unique and distinctive
echo of Jesus’ concept of theological parenting -- i.e., use of the
Aramaic term Abba to address that primal Being on which the whole
universe depends -- was not an epithet that Christian tradition assigned
exclusively to Jesus. Rather, if Paul is to be trusted in this, from the
earliest days of Christian mission, that distinctive idiom was at the center of
the ritual of initiating others into the social movement that claimed to
take its cue from Jesus./76/
Recognition that the supreme Power could and should
be called by the name that any Semitic child used
dozens of times a day to address the paternal figure in its home is an idea that
historically is traceable to the inspiration of Jesus. But instead of patenting
it for his own benefit, it was an idea which he published as freeware on the
first-century’s version of the internet, so that anybody who wanted to
could make use of it. And, at least for a generation, many did, including
Greek-speaking gentiles from Asia Minor to Rome who may have never learned
another word of Aramaic. Members of that inter-ethnic long-distance fellowship
regularly and publicly referred to God as “our Father,” not “his
Father” -- i.e., the father of Jesus alone. While Paul, and probably
others among the first generation of Christian missionaries, understandably
deferred to Jesus the first-born’s rights of inheritance, Jesus was credited
with making them all co-heirs of the family estate./77/
It is hardly credible that such a concept could have developed so quickly after the
death of the historical Jesus, had he copyrighted the idea of divine sonship for
his use alone. Although invocation of “our Father” in the “Lord’s
prayer” recorded in Matthew and the Didache is demonstrably a communal
formulation that Jesus himself may never have uttered, that community’s regular
insistence that Jesus had taught it to pray thus is a clear sign that the first
Christians firmly believed that Jesus had authorized others to share the same
theological software that he had designed for himself. While that formula
may be a fabrication and, thus, the claim that Jesus taught it a complete
fiction, it reflects the logic of the concept he released for public use. (3) True Siblings.
Only in one saying traceable to Jesus is there any high degree of historical probability
that he referred to God as “my Father.”/78/
But the very logic of that aphorism excludes any idea that Jesus reserved
exclusive use of that form of reference for himself. For far from claiming that
he alone knew or obeyed this God, it asserts his readiness to recognize
anyone who does the will of his Abba as a true sibling. How they
might know his “Father” or discern what the paternal will might be is
left unsaid. But unlike gospel claims of exclusive sonship that are dubiously
ascribed to Jesus, this declaration does not infer that Jesus himself
needed to reveal his Father to others much less tell his siblings what his
Father wants them to do. Quite the contrary. The assertion that other
people perform the paternal will is given both rhetorical and logical priority.
It is the common family trait by which Jesus claims to identify his true kin.
Rather than make his own lifestyle the criterion for others to learn the will of
God, he makes the lifestyle of others, rather than biological kinship, the
criterion by which he is able to learn just who his real relatives
are. He identifies himself with them whether or not they identify themselves
with him. (4) Common experience.
The clearest indicator that Jesus did not claim his life, his
personal experience, to be a special revelation of God’s behavior is that
whenever he had to illustrate the kingdom of God to others he regularly
focused attention away from himself and on their own common experience.
Instead of claiming to have had a unique vision of what the divine realm is
really like, he compared it to the natural behavior of the most mundane
elements in the world of the poorest of peasants: the seed of a common weed
(mustard) and the stuff that produced everyday bread (leaven)./79/
These were things that they all
had seen but whose theological significance those other than Jesus were apt
to overlook. Intellectual historians may confidently identify these
observations as insights that originated with the historical Jesus. Yet,
there is no evidence that Jesus himself filed a claim to have
discovered these things first. Rather, he reminded unemployed people
worried about the basic necessities of life to think of what they already
knew and believed: that even wild birds could find food and untended
vegetation flowered and that, as humans, they held a more important place in
the cosmic plan./80/
He urged them to have the
courage to beg and the trust to accept what they received, by reminding them
of how they as parents treated their own children./81/
Thus, the criterion he
established for recognizing how their cosmic Papa acted, was not
his behavior, but theirs. It is this regular appeal to common mundane
experience in genuine Jesus sayings that proves that the historical Jesus
was no apocalypticist claiming to reveal an otherwise hidden God whom
others had not seen or could not otherwise recognize as active in their own
lives. Thus, if the doctrine of a divine incarnation recognized
primarily, if not exclusively, in the person and life of the historical
Jesus is fundamental to christology, the historical Jesus himself was not
the founder of Christianity.
(5) Generic dignity.
There are only two aphorisms in the data base of sayings that are traceable
to the voice of the historical Jesus that can be -- and indeed have been --
interpreted as claiming a special cosmic dignity for Jesus himself and a
special theological significance for his activity. But those
interpretations are possible only if one ignores the logical structure of
the dialectical contexts reported to have occasioned these comments.
The first of these is the declaration that “the son of Man is lord” (κύριος)
even of Shabbath./82/
Though the barbaric Greek idiom ὁ υἱος τοῦ ἀνθρώπου is traceable to
Jesus’ distinctive usage and was regularly understood by gospel writers to
be his unique form of indirect self-reference, the chreia for which
this particular aphorism serves as punch-line does not focus on the behavior
of Jesus himself but rather on that of his disciples. Their gathering
of food from the fields on the day of cosmic rest is identified as the
practice that provoked Pharisees to alert Jesus to a potential violation of
Torah. Thus, it is their lifestyle rather than his lifestyle that is
in question. While the chreia gives no indication that Jesus either
ordered or authorized his disciples’ pattern of behavior, he defends their
right to do what they have already done by appealing to the cosmic status
that the Creator accorded the human being per se. The sabbath was
designed for humans as a species (ὁ ἀνθρώπος). No interpretation
of the Genesis creation story could appeal to a more common Jewish belief.
It is this traditional Jewish premise of generic human dignity that provides
the logical basis for Jesus to expect even the most scrupulous Pharisees to
accept his conclusion that any human individual has God-given
authorization to decide how to act on the holiest of days. Jesus presents
this radical insight as an inherent generic right that any Jew as a Jew
should be able to grant to every human being, Jewish or not. Far from
making his own personal decisions the criterion for judging whether the
behavior of others measure up to standards set by God, Jesus was arguably
the first to defend the right of anyone to make their own independent
decisions on how they lived. Left unqualified, that may be a socially
dangerous principle./83/
But this declaration of absolute generic religious independence is evidence
that Jesus did not make his own lifestyle the standard for that of others.
Exclusivistic claims made for Jesus by later Christians have
consistently served to emend and obscure the logical implications of that
declaration./84/ (6) Divine index.
The one probably genuine Jesus saying that identifies direct divine
involvement in the activity of Jesus himself comes from the Q version
of the so-called “Beelzebul controversy.” Jesus replies thus to
critics' charges that he
performs exorcisms as an agent of the “prince of demons”: If I cast out demons by Beelzebul,
by whom do your sons cast them out? Both the dialectical
context and the rhetorical construction of this aphorism are central to
the correct interpretation of these words. Jesus does not go around
identifying his index finger with that of God himself; nor does he claim
that he personally has initiated God’s kingdom. Rather, in
response to a damning characterization of his behavior, Jesus presents
his critics with an option: either they can sustain their
contention that his behavior is alien in inspiration and, thereby,
alienate their own associates who are doing similar things; or
they can recognize his activity as a sign of the immanent suzerainty of
the true God. The initiative is theirs, not his. The question is who
do they think is really in charge of the present
situation: a demonic pagan Power or the God of Israel. Jesus makes no
claim here to have special power to zap demonic invaders in a
cosmic video game. On the contrary, he parallels his acts with those of
agents of his opponents. Instead of promoting his own reputation, he
asks his critics whether they are willing to insult the Power that
they claim to be supreme by excluding his (Jesus’) activity from
God’s sphere of effective influence -- i.e., his kingdom.
Israel’s fundamental theological affirmation leaves no room for
recognition of any other Prince other than YHWH. So, if others
are ready to recognize God’s suzerainty as they claim to, then
they should be prepared to accept Jesus’ activity -- however unorthodox
it may appear -- as an indication that their own God’s power still
prevails. Everything in this aphorism is conditional. That is
still the case when it comes to evaluating the ultimate cosmic status of
the historical Jesus. 3.3. Correcting the Creed Deconstruction of the misleading distortions of
classic christology is only the first step. The goal of a truly historical
christology is to reconstruct an image of Jesus that accurately describes
the actual person behind that name. The real historical Jesus was and always
will be a true Jew with characteristic chutzpah, one whom
latter day Jews might call ein wirkliche Mensch ("a true Human
being"). While he never would have thought to claim divinity for
himself, he took seriously the ancient Hebraic depiction of the human being
per se as created in the image of God with divine authorization to
take control of one's own life and the surrounding world. While other
Jews, including some of his own followers, interpreted this vision as
applying only, or at least chiefly, to a particular individual chosen by
God, Jesus himself saw this--correctly in my view--as the God-given destiny
of any member of the human species and he made it his mission to get
others to see themselves in that light, particularly those whom he found
oppressed and overwhelmed by the harsh circumstances of their lives. Instead
of shunning the unfortunate, he sought to raise their spirits by instilling
confidence, compassion and hope. For those who heeded or heed his
voice, he was and always will be as Dietrich Bonhoeffer described him: "the
Man for others."/86/
Commenting on his
sixth thesis for a new Reformation, R. W. Funk wrote:
Jesus pointed to something he called God’s domain, something he
did not create, something he did not control... instead of
looking to see what he saw, his devoted disciples tended to
stare at the pointing finger. Jesus himself should not be, must
not be, the object of faith. That would be to repeat the
idolatry of the first believers./87/ Give Jesus a demotion.
We must begin by giving Jesus a demotion.
He asked for it, he deserves it, we owe him nothing less./88/ I second both
points and call the question, with but one added comment: undoing the
exaltation and deification of Jesus would be finally to
do what he himself said. To take any person at his word is true
fidelity. /1/
Birth of Christianity, p. xxx.
/2/
Christology in the Making, 2nd ed., p. 254.
/3/
So too Crossan: “History is not the same as story. Even if all history is story,
not all story is history” (Birth of Christianity, p. 20).
/4/
Birth of Christianity, p. xxx-xxxi.
/5/
Cf. 1 Cor 15:20-28; Philip 2:5-10; Col 1:15-20; John 1:1-18; Heb 1:1-4.
/6/
E.g. 1 Cor 15:24-27; Rev 19:11-19.
/7/
Crossan’s argument is part of a study focused narrowly on the formative elements of Christianity at its
birth, which he defines as before Paul (Birth of
Christianity, p. xxi). Yet, he presents his point dialectically, as a
correction of Pauline christology. Therefore, I make my point
dialectically as a corrective, to prevent Crossan’s analysis from being read
as descriptive of the panorama of christology from Paul to the present.
/8/
R. N. Ostling, TIME (August 15, 1988), p. 42.
/9/
E.g., John 8:40-52; 1 Cor 2:22-25.
/10/
E.g., M. J. Borg (Meeting Jesus AGAIN for the First Time, pp. 1-17)
and R. W. Funk (Honest to Jesus, pp. 1-14).
/11/
I use “propaganda” in the politically neutral sense of its root Latin
denotation as in the Vatican’s congregation Propaganda Fidei: “what
is to be planted, prolonged or promoted.”
/12/
E.g., the noted christologist Gerald O’Collins, S.J. wrote: “John Dominic
Crossan offers a further example of such bad biblical scholarship, hyped up
into a marketing success... he ‘reconstructs’ Jesus as a Cynic peasant, akin
to a magician, who practiced free healing, common eating and radical
egalitarianism in the service of the kingdom of God” (Focus on Jesus, p. 10).
/13/
John’s superior social reputation among Jews over that of Jesus is attested
not only by Q (Matt 11:7-19//Luke 7:24-35) but by Josephus (Antiquities
18.117-119; cf. Into His Own, par. 37).
/15/
Cf. Mark 8:31-33;
9:4-6,
32;
10:35-38.
/16/
Cf. Pliny, Letter 96 (Kee, NT in Context, p. 44).
/17/
E.g., Philp 2:5-9; Col 1:15-20; Heb 1:2-4.
The pseudonymous early second-century “Letter of the Apostles" (Epistula
Apostolorum) provides an excellent example of this tendency to identify
Jesus as the supreme cosmic power from eternity: “We know this: our Lord and
Saviour Jesus Christ (is) God, Son of God who was sent from God, the ruler
of the entire world, the maker and creator of what is named with every name,
who is over all authority (as) Lord of lords and King of kings, the ruler of
the rulers, the heavenly one who is over the Cherubim and Seraphim and sits
at the right hand of the throne of the Father, who by his word commanded the
heavens and built the earth an all that is in it and bounded the sea that it
should not go beyond its boundaries, and (caused) deeps and springs to
bubble up and flow over the earth day and night; who established the sun,
moon, and stars in heaven and separated light from darkness; who commanded
hell and in the twinkling of an eye summons the rain for the wintertime, and
fog, frost and hail, and the days in their time; who shakes and makes firm;
who has created man according to his image and likeness; who spoke in
parables through the patriarchs and prophets and in truth through him whom
the apostles declared and the disciples touched....” (Ep.Ap. 3 from
Hennecke & Schneemelcher, NT Apocrypha vol. 1, p. 192).
/18/
E.g. 1 Thess 2:14-16;
Matt 27:20-25; John 8:39-47. The legacy of this
rhetoric even in the third Christian millennium is demonstrated by responses
to a nation-wide poll conducted by TIME and CNN after Albert Gore (a
Baptist) announced Joseph Lieberman (an Orthodox Jew) as his choice for his
vice-presidential running-mate. Asked whether they were concerned about “the
fact that Lieberman does not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God”
almost a quarter (24%) replied that they were “very concerned.”
Among those who identified themselves with the Christian right virtually
half (49%) chose this answer (TIME August 21, 2000, p. 27).
/19/
J. D. G. Dunn is probably correct in concluding that “the
antecedents [of the Logos hymn] are mainly to be found in the
Wisdom tradition [of Hellenized Judaism] rather than in Philo” (Christology
in the Making, p. 242). But his denial that Philo regarded the
Logos as a personal intermediary distinct from God himself (p. 228)
and his contention that the “revolutionary significance” of John
1:14 is that it “marks...the transition from impersonal
personification to actual person” (p. 243) are questionable in
the light of these passages from Confusion of Tongues : “For [the Logos] is the eldest Son, whom the Father of all raised,
who elsewhere is named the First-born. And indeed, having been
begotten, he imitated the ways of the Father; and by looking at his
archetypal patterns, he formed the ideas” (63). “And if there is
anyone who indeed is not yet worthy to be called a son of God, let
him strive to be ordered [kosmeisthai] in relation to (God's)
First-born and eldest Messenger [angelos], the Word: that is
the multi-named Archangel (who was) at the beginning. For he is also
called "the Beginning" and the ‘Name of God’ and the ‘Word’ and the
‘Man after his Image’ and ‘Israel the Seer’” (143) [from “Philosophy
& Allegory” in my
Into His Own, par. 306-307]. Such rhetoric
does not represent the abstract allegorical interpretation of a
biblical story but rather the transformation of philosophical
concepts into a biblically based myth. It is precisely these
elements of a pre-existent mythic persona who can appear in
many guises that are absent from the Johannine Logos hymn.
/20/
The non-judgmental Thomasine form of this
aphorism was probably unknown to most Orthodox theologians. Yet, the more
scathing Q version (Matt 7:3-5//Luke 6:41-42) presents even clearer reason
for refraining from censoring minute flaws in the formulations of others.
/21/
“If anyone loves me, he will treasure my word (τὸν λόγον μοῦ) and my Father will love him and we will come
to him and make a home with him. One who does not love me
does not treasure my words (τοὺς λόγους μοῦ).
And the word (λόγος) that you hear is not mine but
the Father’s who sent me” (John 14:23-24).
/22/
Justin wrote to the Stoic emperors, Antoninus Pius and
Marcus Aurelius: “But when you hear the utterances of the
prophets spoken as it were personally, you must not suppose
that they are spoken by the inspired themselves, but by the
Divine Word who moves them. For sometimes He declares things
that are to come to pass, in the manner of one who foretells
the future; sometimes He speaks as from the person of God
the Lord and Father of all; sometimes as from the person
of Christ; sometimes as from the person of the people
answering the Lord or His Father, just as you can see even
in your own writers, one man being the writer of the
whole, but introducing the persons who converse” (First Apology 36; italics mine).
/23/
Justin wrote: “We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and
we have declared above that He is the Word of whom every race of men were
partakers; and those who lived reasonably (μετὰ λόγοῦ) are
Christians, even though they have been thought atheists” (First Apology
46). “For whatever either lawgivers or philosophers uttered well, they
elaborated by finding and contemplating some part of the Word [λόγος]...
For no one trusted in Socrates so as to die for this doctrine, but in
Christ, who was partially known even by Socrates (for He was and
is the Logic [λόγος] that is in every man,
and who foretold the things that were to come to pass both through the
prophets and in his own person....” (Second Apology 10; italics
mine).
/24/
So: Justin, First Apology 46 (cf. note 20 above).
/25/
J. McIntyre wrote: “It is important that
we should endeavour to grasp what Aristotle is saying [in Categoriae
5.2a.11-19]. The distinction he makes here becomes regulative...of the
definition of orthodox theology some seven hundred years after he made it,
and remained so...even until our time” (Shape of Christology, p. 87).
/26/
οὖσια (lit.: “being”) may mean
either “an individual entity” or an “essence” common to more than one entity
of the same species. So the critical term in the Nicene creed -- ὁμοούσιος
(“of the same being”) -- could be interpreted either as “of
the same essence” (in which case Father, Son and Spirit would have to be
conceived as three distinct entities with a common essence) or “of the same
entity” (in which case Father, Son and Spirit would have to be conceived as
three faces [προσώπα] of the same divine person). Such ambiguity
opened the formula to charges (by supporters of Arius) of heresy, since the
term ὁμοούσιος had figured in the condemnation of the
modalistic monarchianism of Sabellius a century earlier. The problem with
ὑπόστασις was that, though it had a technical connotation of “an
individual existence” in philosophical circles, its literal meaning was
“substance” (with secular connotations of “property” or “foundation”).
Further confusion was created by the fact that ὁμοούσιος was
translated as “consubstantial” in Latin versions of the creed.
/27/
Contrary to Plato’s conception of reality,
Aristotle contended that the real world is composed of individuals rather
than generic universals. Therefore, the reality of any idea is totally
dependent on its existence in concrete individuals: “Animal is predicated of
man, and therefore of individual man; for if there were no individual man of
whom it could be predicated it could not be predicated of man at
all....Everything is either predicated of primary substances [πρώτη οὖσιαι = individual
ὑπόστασεις] or present in them; and if these
last did not exist, it would be impossible for anything else to exist” (Categoriae
5.2a34ff cited in McIntyre, Shape of Christology, p. 88).
/28/
Since according to Aristotle’s definition
there is no nature apart from an individual (see n. 25 above), if Jesus did
not exist as an individual human being he could not be really human,
but if was a real human individual, then he could not be really God.
Conversely, if his real existence was divine, then he could not
really be human. By excluding the conception of any fusion of the
two natures in Christ, Chalcedon left it unclear just how Jesus was
to be understood as “perfectly” both divine and human. D. W. Odell-Scott
concludes: “At the center of orthodox Christian belief, at the heart of
Christian convictions, is an absurdity, a self-contradicting assertion, a
gap in the conceptual terrain, a fault which runs the breadth and length of
Christian theology, a hole or cut or lapse upon which christendom is built”
(Post-patriarchal Christology, p. 81).
/29/
In 1998 J. Macquarrie wrote: “The
christology worked out in patristic times attained a classic status, and
indeed is still the norm today. But since the eighteenth century at least,
that classic expression of the church’s belief about Jesus has made little
contact with the modern mind. It speaks the language and employs the
conceptuality of a former age....it is not liberating in the modern age, but
has become almost a barrier to understanding. So we in our time have to
look for ways of communicating faith that will speak to the mentality of our
contemporaries, just as the fathers of Chalcedon did in their time” (Christology
Revisited, pp. 11-12). The same year J. McIntyre wrote: “It will be my
main contention that classical christology has come under severe strain in
these new settings in which it has of late found itself and that a crisis
has begun to develop which can only be resolved by a radical reassessment of
the basic shape of this central doctrine of the Christian faith as
expressed today” (Shape of Christology, p. 5).
/30/
J. McIntyre proposes this typology for analyzing the theories of quite independent thinkers: (1) a psychological model (e.g., D. M. Baillie, God Was in Christ; L. Hodgson,
And Was Made Man; H. R. Mackintosh, The Person of Jesus Christ); (2) a revelation model (e.g., A. A. M. Fairweather, The Word as Truth; E. Brunner,
The Mediator; K. Barth, The Doctrine of the Word of God; (3) a process model (e.g., D. R. Griffin, A Process Christology; J. B. Cobb,
Christ in a Pluralistic Age and Encountering Jesus); N. Pittenger,
Word Incarnate and Christology Reconsidered; (4) neo-Chalcedonian (e.g., J. Macquarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought; G. O’Collins,
Christology). For inclusiveness this grid needs to be expanded to cover a wide variety of recent works
by adding at least two more types of christological reflection that emphasize its
socio-historical dimension: (5) a functional model (e.g., J. Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator; D. Edwards,
Jesus the Wisdom of God); and (6) intellectual history (e.g., W. Pannenburg, Jesus - God and Man; E. Schillebeeckx,
Jesus: An Experiment in Christology; J. D. G. Dunn, Christology in the Making).
/31/
Christology in the Making, p.254 (italics mine).
/32/
H. S. Reimarus wrote: “I found great cause to separate what the apostles say
in their own writings from that which Jesus himself actually said and
taught, for the apostles were themselves teachers and consequently present
their own views....” (“Concerning the Intention of Jesus,” p. 64).
/33/
Despite conflicting views of Jesus, few in the guild would disagree with
this statement by D. C. Allison: “Once we doubt, as all modern scholars do,
that the Jesus tradition gives us invariably accurate information,
unvarnished by exaggeration and legend, it is incumbent upon us to find some
way of sorting through the diverse traditions to divine what really goes
back to Jesus” (Jesus of Nazareth, p. 2).
/34/
Jesus of Nazareth, pp. 7-10; quotation at top of p. 8 (italics mine).
/36/
Jesus of Nazareth, p. 7-8. Even if Jesus himself spoke of a coming Son
of Man, it would not be distinctive, since it would only be an echo of a
biblical text (Dan 7) that was used by other Jews (e.g., 1 Enoch & 4 Ezra).
/38/
E.g., Matt 11:27//Luke 10:22,
Mark 14:61, John 3:16. The primary reasons
for not accepting such sayings as genuine Jesus sayings are that (a) they
are found only in one source and (b) except for the first, they are
indistinct from the christology of the author of that gospel.
/39/
Five Gospels, pp. 549-553.
/41/
The principle that someone else may understand you better than yourself is a
basic tenet of Freudian psychology that can be demonstrated in case after
case. But christology is not akin to psychoanalysis; and classical
theological reflection on Jesus hardly qualifies as a parallel to the
Oedipus theory.
/43/
E.g., Stevan Davies, Jesus the Healer.
/44/
Birth of Christianity, p. xxx (italics mine).
/45/
Jesus’ practice is the focus of liberation christology
(cf. J. Sobrino, Jesus the Liberator, p. 51).
/46/
It has been argued that this is a circular argument from silence: an artificial and potentially
false impression created by the fact that (a) the sayings preserved in the
Jesus tradition do not represent all that he actually said and (b)
those sayings in the gospels that do make claims about Jesus’ person
have been methodically excluded as inauthentic. Such an argument, however,
ignores the fact that the latter group of sayings were identified as
unreliable on the basis of theologically neutral historical criteria
-- i.e., lack of witnesses or corroborating evidence, affinity
to the language and viewpoint of the author of a Hellenistic Christian text
rather than the voice of a Galilean Jew, and above all contradiction
of logic inherent in statements credited to Jesus that are most probably
genuine. In reply to the first point, it needs to be stressed that any
historical judgment can only be made on the basis of extant evidence. What
someone might have said that was not reported is a matter of pure
speculation. To rest one’s case on that is really to argue from silence.
/47/
Luke 6:20//Thom 54 received a weighted average of 91% in the Jesus Seminar voting
(Five Gospels, pp. 549, 552). For a distribution of the votes see
FORUM 6/3-4, pp. 301, 315.
/48/
Matt 19:24//Mark 10:25//Luke 18:25 received a 67% weighted average (Five
Gospels, p. 550). Vote distribution in FORUM 6/3-4, p. 307.
/49/
Historical Jesus, p. 266ff.
/50/
Matt 13:44(//Thom 109:1-3) received a weighted average of 71%;
Matt
13:45-46//Thom 76:1-2, 68%. For vote distributions see FORUM 6/3-4, p. 305-6.
/51/
Matt 6:11(//Luke 11:3) received a weighted average of 60% (Five Gospels, p. 551).
Vote distribution in FORUM 6/3-4, p. 309.
/52/
Matt 8:20//Luke 9:58//Thom 86:1 was weighted 74% (Five Gospels, p. 550).
Vote distribution in FORUM 6/3-4, p. 304.
/53/
Matt 6:24a//Luke 16:13a//Thom 47:2 received a 72% weighted average; the part of
the aphorism that declares slavery to wealth (Mammon) incompatible
with service to God (Matt 6:24b//Luke 16:13b) was received a lower rating
(59%) largely because it has no parallel in Thomas and was thought by some
Fellows to be a hermeneutical addition by the author of Q. Nevertheless, it
is compatible with Jesus’ view of wealth in general. See Five Gospels,
p. 550. Vote distribution in FORUM 6/3-4, pp. 304-305.
/54/
The long aphoristic cluster on anxieties was divided into its logical components
for evaluation. The segments received the following weighted averages: /55/
The only parts of the missionary instructions the gospels ascribe to Jesus that received more than a
50% weighted average in the Jesus Seminar voting were the
injunctions to itinerants to stay at whatever house offered them
hospitality (Luke 10:7a) and to eat whatever they were served (Luke
10:8//Thom 14:4a). See Five Gospels, pp. 552-553. The Q form
of the injunction to travel light, without any possessions (Luke
9:3//Matt 10:10a), fell just shy of a probable rating (46%) because
of differences in the Matthean and Lukan versions. Yet it was still
well within the range of sayings that possibly contained ideas
formulated by the historical Jesus himself. For vote distributions
see FORUM 6/3-4, p. 314-315, 317.
/56/
Mark 10:14//Matt 19:14//Luke 18:16 received a 52% weighted average (Five
Gospels, p. 552). For vote distribution see FORUM 6/3-4, p. 315.
/58/
E.g., the authors of Daniel, 4 Ezra, the “parables” of 1 Enoch, and the
Christianized Apocalypse of John.
/59/
Mark 10:14//Matt 19:14//Luke 18:16 received a 52% weighted average in the Jesus
Seminar voting (Five Gospels, p. 552); Mark 10:15 and parallels (Matt
19:15//Luke 18:17 and the analogous aphorism in Matt 18:3) were rated just
less than probable (45%) but still high among the sayings in the Seminar’s
data base that reflect ideas in line with genuine sayings of Jesus. For
voting distributions see FORUM 6/3-4, p. 314, 318.
/60/
E.g., Prov 13:24, 22:15; Gal 4:1-2.
/61/
Matt 5:45 received a weighted average of 53% (Five Gospels, p. 552). For
vote distribution see FORUM 6/3-4, p. 313.
/62/
Luke 15:11-32 received a weighted average of 70% (Five Gospels, p. 550).
For vote distribution see FORUM 6/3-4, p. 305.
/63/
Luke 10:21//Matt 11:25-26 received a weighted average of only 36% when it was
first considered in 1989, which barely qualified for inclusion in the Jesus
Seminar data base of sayings that possibly contained elements traceable to
Jesus (see vote distribution in FORUM 6/3-4, p. 323). Its low rating
was largely due to the fact that it prefaces a christological statement that
was overwhelmingly regarded as a post-crucifixion formula (Luke 10:22//Matt
11:27). When it was pointed out (in 1997) that the christological appendix
contradicted the logic of the thanksgiving [see FORUM n.s.1/2 (Fall
1998) 462-463], the Seminar reconsidered the thanksgiving as an independent
aphorism and accepted it as probably traceable to Jesus himself.
/64/
Matt 18:1-5//Mark 9:33-37//Luke 9:46-48 (see Five Gospels, pp. 84f, 213f, 315).
/65/
Mark 12:38-39//Luke 8:16 received a weighted average of 61%;
Matt 23:5-7 received
a lower rating (53%) because, in integrating it into a long tirade against
Jewish teachers, that evangelist turned it from a warning into an indictment
(Five Gospels, p. 551). For vote distributions see FORUM
6/3-4, p. 308.
/66/
Luke 6:32 received a weighted average of 56%; other versions of this logion (Matt 12:8 and Thom
55:1-2) were rated lower because of editorial redaction that softened its
sharp edge (Five Gospels, p. 552). . For vote distributions see
FORUM 6/3-4, p. 312.
/67/
Matt 8:22//Luke 9:59-60 received a weighted average of 70% (Five Gospels,
p. 550). For vote distributions see FORUM 6/3-4, p. 305.
/68/
Birth of Christianity, p. xxx (quoted above; cf. n. 44).
/69/
The Jesus Seminar accepted the historicity of the core story behind synoptic and
Johannine accounts of Jesus’ cure of a cripple as probable (Mark 2:1-12 par
and John 5:1-9). The only common wording in these versions is Jesus’
instruction to the cripple. Since the only thing that Jesus does is tell the man to get up, this command must be considered part of that core. It
was not colored pink in the Acts of Jesus due to an editorial
decision to print all of Jesus’ words in stories about his deeds
in regular typeface (see Acts of Jesus, pp. 63-65, 382-383, 558,567).
/70/
The Jesus Seminar was virtually unanimous in accepting
Matt 5:39//Luke
6:29a as a genuine Jesus saying (92% weighted average; see Five Gospels,
p. 549). The Matthean form specifies a backhand slap to the right cheek -- a
traditional gesture for putting a social inferior into his/her place. There
were no black votes and few gray votes on either version (see vote
spread in FORUM 6/3-4, p. 301).
/71/
Matt 5:40 was ranked equal to
Matt 5:39 (see preceding note);
Luke 6:29b which
does not specify the context of debt collection was rated a bit lower (90%;
see FORUM 6/3-4, p. 301). Surrendering one’s cloak would
embarrass a creditor in a culture that took Deut 24:10-13 seriously. The
Lukan version probably emends this gesture for a non-Jewish social context.
/73/
While the voice from the cloud -- “This is my beloved son; listen to
him” (Mark 9:7 par) -- in the transfiguration story is pure fiction,
it is a true historical reflection of the tendency of even Jesus’ most
fervent fans to confuse his voice with those of
traditional authorities.
/74/
Birth of Christianity, p. xxx (italics mine). See n. 44 above for fuller quotation.
/75/
See my Excursus on “Abba, Father” (Forum n.s. 1/2, pp.
464-465). The use of simply “Father” in the Lukan version of the prayer
that Q ascribed to Jesus was judged traceable to Jesus by more than
three-quarters of the Jesus Seminar (77% weighted average; vote spread in
FORUM 6/3-4, p. 301).
/78/
The Seminar judged those versions of Jesus’ pronouncement regarding his true
relatives that refer to “my Father” (Matt 12:50//Thom 99:2) to be probably
closer to the original wording of this aphorism than those that have him
refer to “God” (Mark 3:35//Luke 8:21) since the core logic of this saying
involves the question of family relationships. For vote spread see FORUM
6/3-4, p. 309).
/79/
The parable of the leaven (Matt 13:33//Luke 13:20-21) received a weighted
average of 83%; the version of the mustard seed that realistically the plant
as a shrub (Thom 20:2-4//Mark 4:30-32) 76% (Five Gospels, pp.
549-550; for vote spread see FORUM 6/3-4, pp. 302-303).
/80/
See n. 54 above.
/81/
The comparison between a human father’s inclination and God’s in
Matt 7:9-11
received a 59% weighted average; the preceding injunction to beg & knock was
rated a bit lower (51%). Luke’s wording was judged less likely to be
original (Five Gospels, pp. 551-552; for vote spread see FORUM
6/3-4, p. 310, 314f).
/82/
Mark 2:27-28 received a 55% weighted average (Five Gospels, p. 552). The
Matthean and Lukan omission of the premise -- i.e., “the sabbath was created
for the human being not the human being for the sabbath” -- on which the son
of Man statement is based caused these versions to be rated lower. For vote
spread see FORUM 6/3-4, p. 313.
/83/
W. Wink wisely comments: “...it is not Jesus but the disciples who take on the
right to decide when the sabbath is being broken. Such sovereign freedom,
placed in the hands of the underclasses, inevitably strikes terror in the
hearts of those entrusted with the tranquility of society” (“The Son of Man,” p. 170).
/84/
Again Wink: “But when all authority is vested only in Jesus, what becomes of
the sovereign freedom that Jesus evoked in his disciples? What becomes of
deciding for ourselves what is right (Luke 12:57)? It is indeed awesome how
christology has been used to avoid the clear intent of Jesus!” (“The Son of Man,” p. 171).
/85/
Matt 12:27-28//Luke 11:19-20 received a 64% weighted average. For vote spread see
FORUM 6/3-4, p. 307.
/86/
In a proposed
"Outline for a Book," one of his last papers, Bonhoeffer
wrote: "Our relation to God is not a 'religious' relationship to the
highest, most powerful, and best Being imaginable — that is not authentic
transcendence — but our relation to God in a new life in “existence for
others”, through participation in the being of Jesus. The transcendental is
not infinite and unattainable tasks, but the neighbor who is within reach in
any given situation. God in human form — not, as in oriental religions, in
animal form, monstrous, chaotic, remote, and terrifying, nor in the
conceptual forms of the absolute, metaphysical, infinite, etc., nor yet in
the Greek divine-human form of “man in himself”, but “the man for others”,
and therefore the Crucified, the man who lives out of the transcendent" (Letters
and Papers from Prison, p. 381f).
WORKS CITED Allison, Dale. Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet.
Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, Letters
and Papers from Prison. Ed. Eberhard Bethge (enlarged edition).
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The Historical Jesus & the Heart of Contemporary Faith.
San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994. Crossan, John Dominic. The Birth of Christianity:
Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately after the Execution of Jesus.
San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998. _____. The Historical Jesus:
The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992. Dunn, James D. G. Christology in the Making:
A New Testament Inquiry into the Origins of the Doctrine of the Incarnation.
2nd edition. Grand Rapids MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1996. Funk, Robert W. Honest to Jesus:
Jesus for a New Millennium. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996. Funk, Robert W., Roy W. Hoover and the Jesus Seminar.
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The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1998. Hennecke, Edgar and Wilhelm Schneemelcher.
New Testament Apocrypha. Vol. 1 (Gospels and Related Writings).
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The First Apology. In Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1
[http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/ANF-01/anf01-46.htm]. _____.
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Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991. Ostling, Richard N., “Who Was Jesus?”
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FORUM
n.s. 1/2 (Fall 1998) 431-466. Wink, Walter, “The Son of Man: the Stone that Builders Rejected.”
Pp. 161-180 in The Once and Future Jesus. Ed. by the Jesus Seminar.
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