A few months ago, a big controversy blew up over an interview in which a Fox News reporter repeatedly asked a Muslim scholar why he had written a book about Jesus, as if this were the most utterly baffling thing! His response was basically "because I'm a scholar of religion and because Jesus is an interesting religious figure," which most people seemed to think should have been good enough.
All this talk got me interested in the book this guy wrote, which I read some reviews of and which sounded like a pretty middle-of-the-road book about "the historical Jesus." And it got me thinking about the value of the historical Jesus for Christians; what can thinking about and reading about the historical Jesus do for us?
What does "the historical Jesus" even mean?
It's basically the answer to a BIG problem Christians don't think about too often, either because it's too scary or because it seems irrelevant to us. The problem is this: Christianity is a religion. It focuses on worshiping Jesus as God and celebrating his death and resurrection.
But, if you think about it, there's a HUGE question to be asked about this religion: did the historical person, Jesus—who lived and breathed and taught and healed in first-century Palestine—intend to start a religion? If so, how do we know? If not, what were his intentions? It all boils down to this: who exactly was Jesus, what did he want, and what was it like in the world he lived in?
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| Was Jesus white? Did he have a beard? Was he constantly glowing? We may never know. |
Why should anyone care?
A minority of Christians think and read about the historical Jesus, but most of us avoid this question. Some of us just don't care, basically saying "Christianity is what we have now. It doesn't matter exactly happened back in Jesus' day. What matters is my faith today." But many of us are genuinely afraid of what we might discover about the historical Jesus. What if we find evidence that Christianity just doesn't make sense? That Jesus wasn't who we thought he was, and our religion is just...silly?
These are things that can keep Christians away, but refusing to look at the historical Jesus is a little intellectually dishonest. We're essentially saying saying that the truth doesn't matter.
What's more, though, if we avoid these big questions about the historical Jesus, we risk missing out on answers that can enrich and help our faith.
But James, I'm not a Christian.
So, what, the person whose life started the world's most practiced religion is totally irrelevant to you? There are literally billions of people currently affiliated with this guy, and tons more who were formally associated with this guy (RIP dead people). If thinking about who he really was a little bit seems completely boring and worthless to you, you need to grow a little curiosity, man. Is all I'm saying.
Okay, prove it. Prove that this is interesting and important.
Word. I'll try.
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| Real talk: Jesus' heart got up to some wacky stuff in its day. |
Topic: How could Jesus be the Messiah?
A big problem that comes up a lot for Christians is that Jesus was not the Messiah the Jews expected. I've actually heard this occasionally from Jewish friends: "James, Jesus just doesn't fit the profile for the Jewish Messiah."
Putting aside for now the question of what modern Jews expect from a Messiah, let's talk about the Jews of the Jesus' time, the first century CE. The Jews of Jesus' day were expecting a descendant of king David to come to Jerusalem, defeat the Romans, and set up a kingdom of God on earth. This is what we learn in church, and this is what has long been believed in scholarly circles.
So Jesus failed to come through on most of that. He didn't defeat the Romans, he didn't set up a new kingdom: nothing. Let's set those issues aside for the moment; I may come back to them in another post, because they're interesting. The biggest problem with Jesus being the Messiah is actually that Christians believe he was God. Not only that, but we even believe that Jesus himself thought he was God and that he even claimed to be God. Everyone knows the Jews were, are, and always will be absolute monotheists. The Jews of Jesus' day only believed in one God, and he wasn't some person who walked around and talked to people, but an all-powerful cosmological figure! So it's a big problem for Christians to think that Jesus told people he was God. Wouldn't his fellow Jews just have called him crazy? Why would anyone follow this guy? It all sounds made up and weird.
There are two traditional approaches to this specific problem with the historical Jesus, which I'll call "the problem of the divine Messiah."
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| Would God really flash the sign of the horns in a portrait? There's no way God is into metal. Therefore Jesus isn't God. QED. |
THE PROBLEM OF THE DIVINE MESSIAH
The Skeptical Approach:
Skeptics and scholars often resolve this problem by saying that Jesus never claimed to be God. They say that Jesus' divinity and claims to be divine were invented by later Christians.
What's missing in this approach is a compelling historical reason for Christians to have come up with the idea that Jesus was God on their own. Without a supernatural event like the Resurrection (which a skeptic would naturally exclude), Christians don't seem to have had any reason to come up with the notion that Jesus was God. It would have been sheer madness for them to have imagined it on their own. And an argument that ends up implying that early Christians were all simply crazy is not particularly satisfying.
The Christian Approach:
Christians have generally said something like "God doesn't play by human rules! Just because the Jews of Jesus' day weren't expecting it, doesn't mean that Jesus couldn't have been God."
What's missing in the Christian approach is a compelling non-religious reason to buy this answer. If you're not starting from a place where you know God exists and can do amazing things, there isn't any reason to buy the idea that God just thought up a crazy, unexpected scheme to come to earth and die. And while it's okay to only have religious reasons to believe religious ideas, it is undeniably helpful and powerful to have logical, historical information that backs up your religious beliefs.
So both approaches leave something to be desired.
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The Historical Jesus Approach:
I want to talk about two scholars, one Jewish, one Christian, who, in looking at the historical Jesus and his context, have come up with some much more compelling responses to the problem of the divine Messiah.
(1) Daniel Boyarin: The Idea of the Messiah in the 1st Century
One sneaky and excellent way to tackle this problem is to question the basic premise. Daniel Boyarin, in his book The Jewish Gospels, argues that it's just not true that the Jews of Jesus' day weren't expecting a divine Messiah.
Boyarin shows that there were actually many competing ideas about the Messiah in the first century CE. In order to prove, then, that the historical Jesus could have thought of himself and spoken of himself as God, we only need to know that some Jews of Jesus' day believed that the Messiah would be God.
In other words: if at least some Jews expected the Messiah to also be God, they might not have reacted to Jesus as completely crazy when he claimed to be both the Messiah and God. And early Christians, in turn, would not have had to come up with the idea out of thin air after Jesus' death, because it would already have been both a part of Jesus' ministry and the culture around them.
Boyarin spends several chapters giving the reader insight into 1st-century Jewish readings of Daniel 7, a text in which Daniel sees a vision of someone described as "an Ancient of Days" transfer his power and glory to someone who looked like a "Son of Man." Almost all first-century Jews took this chapter to be a picture of the relationship between God and the Messiah. And Boyarin argues persuasively that many of them would have interpreted it to mean that the Messiah would share not only God's power and glory, but also God's divinity.
Boyarin backs this idea up with analysis of a 1st-century Jewish text, 1 Enoch, in which someone called a Son of Man (= the Messiah) sits on God's throne and exercises God's authority:
"And he sat on the throne of his glory, and the sum of judgement was given unto the Son of Man, and he caused the sinners to pass away and be destroyed from off the face of the earth, and those who have led the world astray." (Enoch 69:27)In The Jewish Gospels, Daniel Boyarin shows that the problem of the divine Messiah is not actually a problem at all. He argues that it would have been totally possible for a Jew, like Jesus, in first-century Palestine to claim to be both the Messiah and God without all of his fellow Jews assuming he was simply insane. They might think he was a liar, a blasphemer, and someone intending to lead them astray, but only because they did not believe his claim, rather than that the claim itself was impossible.
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(2) NT Wright: Jesus as Divine Redeemer, New Temple
In his book, The Challenge of Jesus, NT Wright goes a step further than Boyarin: not only was it possible for someone to make a claim to be both God and Messiah, but it is extremely likely that Jesus thought of himself this way.
Wright starts by discussing an image that's all over the Hebrew Bible: after the exile of the Jewish people, God would return in person to Jerusalem and restore justice to his people. This idea can be found in a range of books, from Isaiah and Ezekiel to Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, all the way to Psalms.
The problem was, Wright says, that until this actually happened, the exile wasn't really done for the Jews; they had returned physically to Israel, yes, but they were still an oppressed, occupied people until God returned to Jerusalem. The spiritual exile, in which God had not yet restored them to their rightful place as God's beloved people, wasn't over yet. This was a terrible situation, and Jews prayed and hoped fervently for the end of this spiritual exile.
Wright then goes on to show how, on every step of his journey from Galilee to Jerusalem, Jesus saw himself and portrayed himself in the role of God returning to Jerusalem to wipe the slate clean and end Israel's exile, once and for all. One amazing example to me was the story of the prodigal son; I'll quote Wright here:
"Among the dozens of things people regularly and often rightly say about this parable, one thing is missed by virtually everybody, though I submit that it would have been blindingly obvious to most first-century Jewish listeners. A story about a scoundrel young son who goes off into a far pagan country and is then astonishingly welcomed back home is—of course!—the story of exile and restoration [that is, the son is a metaphor for the Jewish people]. And Jesus told the story to make the point that the return from exile was happening in and through his own work. The parable was not a general illustration of the timeless truth of God's forgiveness for the sinner, though of course it can be tranlsated into that. It was a sharp-edged context-specific message about what was happening in Jesus' ministry." (The Challenge of Jesus, 41-42)Jesus saw his own coming to Jerusalem as acting out God's ending the spiritual exile of his people. It makes sense to say that he saw himself and portrayed himself as God.
Wright also makes a powerful case for Jesus claiming God's authority and power for himself, through a discussion of the main symbols of God's power on earth (Temple, Torah) and the things God's character was thought to be composed of (Spirit, Glory, Wisdom). Jesus ends up claiming the power of each of these elements of God's power for himself.
To me, the most interesting of these was this: Jesus thought of himself as replacing the Temple, the primary symbol of God on earth in first-century Judaism. Wright shows that Jesus actually thought of himself as the new Temple. The most obvious one is this: the major function of the Temple in Judaism was that it was where you went to get your sins forgiven. Jesus, controversially, claimed the power to forgive sins for himself!
NT Wright shows us that Jesus had a well-thought-out theology of who he was and what he was sent to do. He shows that Jesus felt called to enact God's promise to return to Jerusalem and restore Israel to her rightful place, though in a way that Jews at his time did not expect. We can see ample evidence of this throughout the gospels if we look for it. I would encourage readers to check out The Challenge of Jesus for more persuasive arguments.
Conclusion:
The historical Jesus was someone who claimed to be God. This is true, and it doesn't mean that he, or his followers, were crazy. This is something to really think about, friends.
Jesus might or might not have set out with the intention of starting a new religion, but examining in detail who he was and what he did and thought need not be a scary proposition for those of us who practice the religion that came after him. In doing so, we can certainly learn something that will impact the way we live and think about our faith. I know examining this question and others about the historical Jesus through books like the The Jewish Gospels and The Challenge of Jesus has renewed and invigorated my faith, rather than weakening or killing it. What might it do to yours?
Sources:
Daniel Boyarin, The Jewish Gospels
NT Wright, The Challenge of Jesus
Photo Sources:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jezus_-_actor.JPG
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Le_Sacre_Coeur_de_Jesus_%28HS85-10-32787%29.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1135_Mosaikikone_mit_Christus_dem_Barmherzigen_Bodemuseum_anagoria.JPG
http://andyrossagency.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/jewishgospels.jpg
http://vialogue.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/challenge-of-jesus.jpg?w=594
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