I. Jesus the Jew: Finding the Historical Jesus amidst a Jewish Context
From the time of his birth in Galilee, Jesus was culturally, religiously and ethnically a Jew. There are two immediate sources for this claim: the Jewish lineage drawn out in the opening verses of the Gospel of Matthew, and the numerous references, mainly in Matthew and Luke, to the Jewish activities in which he, first in the company of his parents, Mary and Joseph, and then on his own, took part. These activities, performed at his parents’ discretion, were all identifiably Jewish. He was circumcised eight days after his birth (Luke 2.21) and given the name Yeshua by his parents in accordance with the obligation of the ‘holy messenger’ – a common Jewish name at the time, meaning, ‘he will save his people from their sins’ (Matt. 1.21). After his birth, in obedience of the Law of Moses, Jesus and his parents presented themselves to God in the Jerusalem temple in order to undergo the traditional, post-birth re-purification (Luke 2.22). A sacrifice was offered for the young Jesus – a pair of doves and two young pigeons, which is a strong suggestion that his family was not wealthy by the day’s standards (Luke 2.22-24). Once having completed all the necessary performances of faithful worship in Jerusalem, Jesus and his parents returned to their home in Galilee and carried on according to the law (Luke 2.39).
The facts of Jesus’ childhood are largely uncertain, but some of the apocryphal gospels claim that Jesus received a normal Jewish education, meaning, chiefly, that he participated in the written and verbal study of Torah. By the age of 20, when he might have begun to seek a vocation, he was likely well-versed in Jewish scripture and law. At about age 30, two important events occurred, both of which are described in the gospels. The first is that Jesus ‘began his [ministry],’ which he carried on until his execution around 30 A.D. (Luke 3.23). The second is that Jesus reached the age at which it was customary for a Jewish father to publicly declare his son to be the inheritor of all that he had. As it is described in Luke, during his baptism, Jesus received a visitation from the ‘holy spirit’ and heard a voice from the parted sky, which declared, ‘You are my son; today I have become your father’ (Luke 3.22). Presumably, this event underscored the belief held by later Christians that Jesus was not just God’s son, but His chosen, favorite son; the one who would inherit all that He had.
In his observance of rituals, such as tithing, fasting and almsgiving, Jesus was unmistakably Jewish. Although he opposed the Pharisees’ excessive preoccupation with the trivial tithing of ‘mint and dill and cumin’ (Matt. 23.23), he argued that the crowds and his disciples should nonetheless do as the scribes and Pharisees said (but not precisely as they said because they were ‘all talk and no action’) (Matt. 23.3). Jesus said grace, or rather a blessing, before and after meals (Matt. 6.41; 26.26 & Luke 24.30), the object of which was not the food, but God; it was unimaginable that a Jew would exalt the object and not the creator.
Jesus’ ministry in Galilee, the period of his life most important to Christianity, was not just influenced by this Jewish upbringing; it was the natural continuation of it. The historical consensus is that he remained a devout Jew to his last moment of life, and he never wished his followers to part from their Jewish faith. The search for the historical Jesus is thus the same as probing the mannerisms, habits and behaviors that characterized his life – what his faith was, how he prayed, how he ate, what customs he practiced and what traditions he observed. Almost all of these mannerisms either reinforce his ‘Jewishness’ or repudiate the assertion that he had consciously sought to start a new religion. The question is, how precisely did that new religion, Christianity, begin?
Jesus’ sermons were composed of essentially Jewish themes, and since he was a preacher (or a rabbi), his chief intention must have been to propagate his version of Jewish faith. This included taking on the Pharisees, whose expression of faith he saw as wayward. But his sermons contained two other salient themes, both strongly rooted in Jewish theology and his own life, which made his message distinctly Jewish but also totally novel. Namely, he developed an eschatology, which he used as the linchpin of his campaign to get people to repent for their sins, and he began to call himself ‘king of the Jews,’ a title he likely adapted from the paternal declaration made to him by God during his baptism. These two sermonic developments only became truly important after his execution, when first the disciples and then the gospel writers began to see them as intertwined elements of his being. To be either the ‘king of Jews’ or the forecaster of an ‘end time’ gave him no special significance, but to have been both, and then to have been executed by men and raised again by his ‘father’ gave him a distinguishing significance.
The disciples conjured up the messianic vision of Jesus, not just as a dead eschatologist, preacher and self-proclaimed cultural leader, but as the ‘Anointed,’ ‘Lord’ and ‘Son of God’ – all Jewish titles. This gave them warrant to “persuade others to put their faith in Jesus,” and to affirm, whether by will or unconscious devotion, their newfound faith in the divine son rather than the ‘holy father’ (Sanders 13-14). The split between Judaism and Christianity became visible with this affirmation: Judaism was a faith in the father and Christianity a devotion to the son. Roughly at this point, the historical Jesus ceased to be as important to devout followers of his message, primarily because his execution and the subsequent witnessing of him by several of the disciples provided the very impetus for worshipping him. The initial Christian community, in fact, was built upon the shared expectation that Jesus was the messiah who “would return to found the kingdom” (Sanders 10). As later historians would reveal, though, this messianic idea was Jewish, or at least infused with Jewish symbolism, thus illuminating the paradox of early Christianity that it was devoted to an anointed Jew, shaped by Jewish tradition and yet remarkably not Jewish.
This paradox is softened when this first Christian praying community is recognized as the result of the two thematic developments within the sermons of Jesus (eschatology and self-proclamation), both of which were traceable to his understanding of Jewish scripture and his encounters, whether real or symbolic, with his god. The process of reconstructing the mortal man of Jesus, who had no idea about his eventual fate or the ramifications of his ministry, depends on seeing his execution as a starting point, and tracing his life backward to his early childhood. What must be gleaned from this investigation is that Jesus was a standard Jew of his time in almost every sense, but that by the particular combination of having certain complaints with Judaism as it was commonly practiced and seeing himself as separate from (and superior to) the community of worshippers, he inadvertently inspired a new way of considering God and morality. Ironically, he might not have been a willing adherent to the new religion that was based on his life and death, which is a testament to the firm roots of his Jewish faith and a reminder that his historical self is inexorably bound up in that faith.
II. What Did Jesus See as His Role in Life?
Since its earliest cohesive form, the Christian faith has been built upon two central attitudes – that Jesus is the resurrected son of God who will return eventually to lift up his people, and that conducting one’s life by the moral code which Jesus professed, is the formal way of declaring one’s assent to the first attitude. Historically, Christian worship has been founded on the ‘high Christological view of Jesus’ – that he was not merely a man who roamed the Galilean countryside, spoke in parables and broke bread at Passover, but a supernatural messiah (Peters). In fact, this notion that Jesus was “100 per cent human and 100 per cent divine” is the initiating proposition of Christianity, on which all other feelings about him depend (Sanders 134). This circumstance presents certain difficulties to the historian trying to understand who Jesus was as a man. The activities of Jesus’ life, especially those of his last few years, are related in detail in the gospels, and indeed demand a great deal of attention from devout Christians, but the shortcoming of Christian faith, at least from the historian’s point-of-view, is that it ignores all the most interesting questions about Jesus the man. Christians venerate the death of the mortal Jesus as senseless and prophetic and the resurrection as divine, but are apathetic to what Jesus may have thought about himself, what he may have considered his objectives, and lastly, what he may have thought, if anything, about his eventual fate.
These questions are not easy to answer, and if one considers that Jesus did no writing of which anyone is aware, answering these questions verges on impossible. But there is abundant information in the gospels about his activities and sayings, and in absence of a personal diary, those things are known to provide great insight into a person’s thoughts. First, a brief glance backwards towards John the Baptist gives strong indication that Jesus was seen as a healer, though he was apparently not proud of this. The ministry of John, which influenced Jesus, has correctly been seen as ‘reformatory’ – that is, John’s ministry was an attempt to reform Israel by calling for ‘baptism and a change of heart that [would lead] to forgiveness of sins,’ calling on people to repent and return to the faith of their father Abraham (Mark 1.4). Baptism was an integral part of John’s strategy to facilitate this restoration of goodness, but he quickly yielded to Jesus, the ‘more powerful one who would succeed [him]’ (Mark 1.7). Jesus’ first acts, by comparison, were not of reform but of healing: an exorcism in Capernaum, the alleviation of the fever of Simon’s mother-in-law and the healing of a leper. Jesus seemed dissatisfied with this role however, comporting himself with either brazenness or downright rudeness whenever called to the charge.
Jesus likely saw healing as a superficial undertaking compared to what he felt was his true calling. Superman was getting fed up with having to be Clark Kent all the time. If this is true, it helps to explain his otherwise out-of-place proclamation to the people of Galilee: “‘The time is up: God’s imperial rule is closing in. Change your ways, and put your trust in the good news’” (Mark 1.14-15). The Mark gospel gives no explanation for the fact that this intrepid statement of eschatology is rather brashly inserted between various stories of Jesus’ healing encounters, well before he had undertaken the more polemical part of his ministry. This announcement, after all, has nothing to do with healing but a great deal to do with a reformatory predilection (nearly mistakable for John’s).
Another clue that helps to explain this incongruity is to be found in Jesus’ conversation with his disciples in Caesarea Philippi. Jesus asks, “‘What are people saying about the son of Adam?” The disciples reply that some have confused him with ‘John the Baptist.’ Jesus asks Simon and Peter, “What about you, what do you think I am?” to which they respond, “You are the Anointed, the son of the living God!” Jesus ‘congratulates’ them for this answer, providing some implication that he had begun to see himself as standing in the reformatory tradition of John and a stronger implication that he had begun to see himself as having a divine purpose, not just a celebrity reputation for his magical doctoring skills (Matt 16.13-17). Directly after this conversation, Jesus reveals to his disciples that he is destined to ‘go to Jerusalem, and suffer a great deal at the hands of the elders and ranking priests and scholars, and be killed and, on the third day, be raised’ (Matt. 16.21) – clearly not a mere wish to travel to the city for the humdrum observance of the Passover holiday, but rather to fulfill a sort of pre-ordained plan.
There is little evidence that Jesus really planned for events to proceed in this way, and even less that he spoke about it to anyone; scholars have all but come to the consensus that the gospel authors redacted this part of Jesus’ story to make it fit with Jewish messianic prophecy. But there is rather strong evidence that Jesus was preaching an eschatological message, forgiving people’s sins on his own authority (rather than referring them to God, as John did and as was customary in Jewish worship) and calling himself ‘king of the Jews’. These things had probably gotten him in minor trouble with the Pharisees in the past, and so it is plausible that he was expecting a confrontation of grander proportions in Jerusalem, perhaps of his own making.
In the meantime, his energies seem to have been squarely focused on these troublesome Pharisees, who had become the controlling party in Jewish life and to a certain extent had “eliticized” Jewish worship. (Matt. 23 is devoted in entirety to Jesus’ polemical campaign against these grand ‘impostors’). Why did Jesus harbor such strong resentment for the Pharisees? Quite plainly, they were elites and he was anything but. He was a man of humble, provincial background, an itinerant preacher. This gave him a fondness for the immediacy and almightiness of God, the merit of egalitarian worship, the equal ability of all believers to commune with God without intermediaries, and the ‘autonomy’ of the believer (Callahan). This also made him a natural objector to an elitist bureaucracy that would ‘slam the door of Heaven’s domain in people’s faces’ (Matt. 23.13) and steal away the prerogative of the individual to conduct meaningful prayer.
Both a “holy non-conformist” and radical polemicist, Jesus had a class issue with the Pharisees, in short, which he concealed beneath the mantle of worship values objections (Rowland). He saw himself as the head of a common man’s revolt to take back the religion and culture from this controlling party. The huge audiences he drew to his sermons must have emboldened him that it was his charge – and his alone – to confront the Pharisees. The embrace of this charge inspired two changes in his disposition: he began to reject his status as a lowly healer, and in his sermons, he began to imply a unique relationship between himself and God, inasmuch as he began to accept, implicitly or explicitly, the various exalted titles given to him by his disciples (Peters, in The Monotheists).
Like John, there is little doubt that Jesus was preaching primarily about eschatology (the imminent arrival or the current presence of God’s kingdom) and the forgiveness of sins. Both themes reinforced the notion that faith was not to be found in a temple managed by scholar elites in a distant city, but right here and right now. The Pharisees had no clout, he argued, for the people of Israel ‘have only one father’ (God) and ‘only one instructor, the Anointed’ (Matt. 23.9-10). Jesus’ motive was conservation. He was trying to enliven, rejuvenate and preserve the sanctity of the old faith and it is almost certain, therefore, that he was not trying to institute a new faith. In this analysis, he appears as an impassioned and conservative reformer with a particular predilection for polemical discourse. This is by no means an all-encompassing picture, primarily because it leaves out the later, high-Christology appeals to Christ the deity. But if Jesus is to be considered man first and deity second in the historical quest, then his mortal aspirations must take precedence over divine claims to him and by him.
III. Christology and Eschatology: Two Paths to the Historical Jesus
The life of Jesus is a construction of various sources in the New Testament, and it is on these sources that historians focus their questions about his mortal and personal nature. The best-attested fact offered by these sources is that on a Thursday afternoon in about the year 30 A.D., just hours before Passover was to begin, Jesus was executed by the Roman authorities at the behest of the Jewish priesthood in Jerusalem: “he was convicted of having claimed to be ‘king of the Jews’ – a political title” (Sanders 1). This is the seminal event in the Christian tradition because it marks the chronological end of the “historical Jesus” and the beginning of the “Christ of history” – the divine entity and object of worship for Christians (Peters, in The Monotheists). The event also encompasses the great paradox of Christianity that while awful, Jesus’ execution was the necessary precursor to his resurrection and the only way his eternal self could have been witnessed by his disciples. Ostensibly, the suggestion that he was seen by his disciples in a recognizable form days after his execution confirms for Christians that he ascended to heaven to either take up or rejoin company with God, his father.
How this happened is shrouded in uncertainty, precisely because it is a matter of faith and not history, not able to be approached through investigative methods. The notions of what transpired after he died are, ironically, the only part of his personal portrait left out of the gospels. Such is the interpretive basis of the Christian faith: for the figure to which the faith is dedicated, there is no explication of that figure’s divinity or non-divinity in the scripture. This can be attributed to the fact that the gospel authors, writing between 30 and 70 years after Jesus’ death, had not yet developed a ‘high Christology’, or a sense that beyond being a man from Nazareth, he had reached “some degree, and eventually the highest degree, of divinity” (Peters, in The Monotheists). Christology is necessarily a post-crucifixion state-of-mind experienced by the followers of Jesus. This is evident in just the linguistic formulation of the word: ‘Christology’ is derived from ‘Christ’ (from the Greek ‘Christós’, meaning, ‘The Anointed One’), a title accorded to him only after his death on the cross (during his life, he was simply ‘Jesus of Nazareth’).
The death of Jesus prompted the gospel authors to clarify the dualism of his figure, an uneasy line between man and deity. His unexplained death, unexplainable disappearance and unsubstantiated rebirth afforded these authors a chance to write a lucid explanation, whether factual or not, of what happened to him and why. These authors wrote not as devout Christians, who would have exhibited a very high Christology, but as Jews whose curiosity was piqued by the bizarre circumstances and who were determined to fit him into a Jewish messianic legend, according him Jewish titles of “Messiah, Son of Man and Son of God” (Peters, in The Monotheists). Mark and Matthew, in particular, and Luke to a lesser degree, chose to configure his mortal life as the prophetic prequel to his divine ascension, rather than the ascension as the accidental result of his death. In doing so, they called a particular focus to – and, in certain places, dramatization of – the eschatological matter of Jesus’ message. Eschatology refers to the belief in the fast approach of an end time or apocalypse.
According to the gospels, Jesus’ eschatology functioned as a prompt for spiritual purification and redemption of sins, a kind of reminder to be prepared for the oncoming ‘kingdom of God’. The gospels indicate that this was an instrumental part of Jesus’ ministry, that with graceful imagery he told people of the bliss and potential danger of the end time: ‘When the time comes, Heaven’s imperial rule will be like ten maidens who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom’ (Matt. 25.1); “‘The time is up: God’s imperial rule is closing in. Change your ways, and put your trust in the good news’” (Mark 1.14-15). Jesus was not just predicting the coming of God’s kingdom or the spontaneous appearance of the heavens in the known world. His views about fate, of both the societal and personal sorts, were heavily informed by the Jewish emphasis on “widespread hope for future [and] decisive change – whether of an earthly or an otherworldly character” (Sanders 123, in Future or Realized Eschatology?).
Scholars trace eschatology and Christology through the scripture to the historical Jesus, and in doing so, discover that both themes tell a great deal about those who wrote about him, but a little less about Jesus himself. Jesus’ rendition of eschatology, as described in the gospels, was not a fiery, world-collapsing explosion, but something far more docile, a natural extension of his overall moral message. His notion of the ‘end time’ was likely tantamount to a new era in Israel in which the faith was being rejuvenated and restored to the truly faithful in spite of temple elites’ attempts to seize the faith into a bureaucracy. Jesus likely saw himself as responsible for catalyzing this movement. As he saw it, the kingdom of God was present precisely because of his work.
This was probably the extent of the historical Jesus’ eschatological outlook, but the gospels seem to have made an addendum to it: Jesus planned to die and rise again, and he announced these plans. If this is historically accurate, which is highly contested, then his plan came to fruition so perfectly that it almost seems absurd. A more practical view is that the gospel authors, in their joint effort to fit Jesus into the Jewish messianic story and lineage, applied the divine, post-death feeling about Jesus to his mortal, pre-death personality in order to make it seem as though nothing uncontrollable had happened to him, that everything was pre-ordained by God and prophecy, and that he was fully cognizant of his fate and its ramifications all along. This redaction represents the earliest traces of a high Christology in that only a believer in the supernatural Jesus Christ would be invested in the pure, unadulterated divinity of his life and death. But in any event, Christianity had not yet come into existence, so what looks now like a Christological redaction was more likely a pious Jewish redaction at the time.
The Gospel of Matthew paints a particularly neat coalescence of Christology and eschatology that is worth noting. When Peter, the disciple, begs Jesus not to follow through with his plot to be killed in Jerusalem, Jesus lashes out at him, saying, “Get out of my sight, you Satan, you. You are dangerous to me because you are not thinking in God’s terms, but in human terms” (Matt. 16.23). Jesus has already made clear his “destiny,” which one must assume was devised by God. When Jesus implores Peter to stop thinking in “human terms”, he seems to take on an air of non-humanness. He has reached a state of total concert with God, to the point that he is keenly aware of the destiny He has chosen for him and is intent on fulfilling that destiny. What is rather convenient for Matthew and the Christian tradition, though, is that the certain consequence of this destiny is Jesus’ death, rebirth and subsequent Christological promotion to the ranks of the divine. At the same time, the admonishment of Peter contains bits of eschatological language: God is exerting his will in the world, neither He nor His will can be defied, He is signaling a new era of faith.
Historically speaking, eschatology ends with a change in the faith and Christology begins with a change in the faith. The latter picks up where the former leaves off, the former is indicative of a worldview that emerged in Jesus’ sermons, while the latter “charts and measures the trajectory of the historical Jesus into the Christ of history” (Peters, in The Monotheists). Just a few years after Jesus’ death, Paul of Tarsus, perhaps the first “Christian” apostle, began his missionary campaign to the Gentiles in the East, which, to the dismay of many fellow “Jewish Christians,” exhibited a coinciding high Christology and high eschatology (Peters, in The Monotheists & Paul as a Preacher of Christianity). Paul, like Jesus, was fully Jewish, but his message, perhaps unbeknownst to him, was distinctive from anything to be found in the Jewish tradition – an indication that the small cult dedicated to Jesus (the “Jewish Christians”) had moved outside the bounds of Judaism.
Mack Lannahan 