Current at 19 June 1999
While it may be argued that this may have produced generally satisfactory outcomes, one effect of this re-orientation was to direct the spotlight onto Jesus himself, something that now seems quite contrary to what was quite plainly Jesus' basic attitude.
And so it may be fairly said, when asking what is the relationship between Jesus and Christianity, that the historical Jesus left the party before it even started.
This has resulted in, not only multiple "portraits" of Jesus but also in a sort of credibility gap for those whose faith is linked directly to there having been an historical Jesus.
This paper identifies some of the more significant "portraits", and suggests how we might draw better portraits of Jesus based on the ideas of writers such as John Spong and the fellows of The Jesus Seminar.
Although this paper is offered publically, it is essentially a private reflection which seeks to discover, to my own satisfaction, what might be of value in that part of the Christian tradition which makes the explicit and implicit claim that it is informed by the memory and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
Is this merely another "Jesus Quest paper"? Yes. But it is part of my Quest, and you are welcome to read it.
Where possible I have tried to acknowledge those whose works I have quoted from. To that end this paper is supplied with a a large number of endnotes. But I must acknowledge especially the small book by James Stuart titled The Many Faces of Christ from which I took the notion of "portraits" of Jesus. I must also acknowledge the many casual phrases which have originated with James Veitch. (see Bibliography) who is (at the time of writing) the only New Zealand Fellow of The Jesus Seminar.
Noel Cheer, June 1999
At the end of its second millennium, Christianity has a problem. For all practical purposes, the knowledge that anybody can claim to have about Jesus comes almost entirely from the New Testament. Other sources, such as the Creeds(1) are ultimately derived from the New Testament record.
The New Testament portrays itself as a record of the sayings, actions, death and resurrection of Jesus. It also discusses the actions and motives of his followers and his enemies. At some points it also claims that God intervenes in the drama. Even in these times when Christianity has lost much of its former power to shape society, there are many institutions and individuals whose lives are strongly influenced by a belief that the record is substantially accurate.
If one believes "that religious truth is somehow objective, revealed, unchangeable, eternal and divine"(2) then one is likely to treat the Bible as though it were an historical record. To do so is to ignore the findings of a great number of Biblical scholars and to indulge in "naturalistic literalism", often called "fundamentalism".
But if we "treat a religion [or rather a "religious tradition"] as a mythology, a large body of stories",(3) or as kerygma (proclamation) then we are free to question the New Testament. Not only are we free to, but (if we are being honest), obliged to separate what is spiritually wholesome from what is not and to take responsibility for who and what we value, reverence, worship and commit to.
Concerned people of faith who align themselves with the Christian tradition are obliged to seek the truth, to be, in the title of a popular book, Honest to Jesus.
Those who are not Christian but who feel a need to "scratch the religious itch" may find much of value in some aspects of the Christian tradition but may not make the attempt unless they feel free from the "take it in its entirety" compulsion of institutionalised Christianity.
This paper takes the viewpoint that, to non-Christians as well as to Christians, the fact that many people mistakenly take the New Testament record to be historically accurate should be regarded as a matter of considerable importance. Many important social consequences flow from such belief.(4)
The paper ends with suggestions as to how we might proceed from that realisation.
It is worth reminding ourselves that it is important to keep before us a distinction between "Jesus" and "Christ" that was originally made by the eighteenth century writer, David Strauss (1808-1874), when he distinguished between "the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith."
But "Christ/Messiah" is not a name, despite the Apostle Paul using it as though it were. It is a title, an affirmation that the person referred to is "God's Anointed". The history and range of applications of this title are beyond the scope of this paper but is well documented in The Many Faces of Christ. An expanded summary of the term Messiah also appears in the Appendix to this paper.
It should be recognised that although "Jesus" and "Christ" are often interchanged indiscriminantly in everyday speech, there are occasions when it is important to maintain a distinction—if only to profit by the "dialectic between a historically read Jesus and a theologically read Christ",(6) something which this paper is not much inclined to do.
Even a casual reading by someone new to the Christian story shows that many different but overlapping "Jesuses" or "Christs" appear in the New Testament and in the later Christian tradition. The characters develop something like this:
To sustain the argument of this paper it will be necessary to consider only the following:
The New Testament is believed by many to contain the authentic words of Jesus of Nazareth who was acclaimed by his followers, both then and now, as "Christ/Messiah". But even a cursory reading shows considerable lack of agreement(9) or corroboration between the several authors.(10)
Such are the findings of the ongoing debates about the authenticity of what is attributed to Jesus in the New Testament that, to an increasing number of people, it may be that whatever directions Christianity takes in future,(11) such directions may no longer include a confident assertion that the words of Jesus, and the appropriate implications of such words, are captured and displayed in the New Testament—despite the implied assertion that they are.
As John Spong asked: "Is there a Jesus to meet beyond the interpretive framework of the first century?"(12) Christians may need to proceed, not "like a mighty army" but more like humble explorers with maps that are acknowledged to be inadequate.
It just may be that postmodernism and its claim that we should treat with suspicion all "grand narratives"—those tidy sets of viewpoints that invite us to see that all reality is explained by them—has an important message for Christianity. This option will be explored below.
Faith, in the sense of a trustworthy set of perceptions by which to shape one's life, need not depend on a thorough knowledge of the historical Jesus. Nor is it usually appropriate that faith be expressed as a series of propositions, a practice which perpetuates the tired old confusion between belief in and belief that. It is possible to point to many people whose lives were and are inspired by what to an outside observer is plainly a fiction. It is probably true that much of what even "non-religious" people place their trust in ("believe") is to a large extent mythical.
But, inasmuch as faith can be informed by history, may it not also be misinformed by pseudo-history? As we shall discuss below, a mis-remembered or mis-reported(13) Jesus would at least need to be recognised as such.
Much of our western culture still shows signs of having been shaped by an appeal to the supposed words and deeds of an historical figure: Jesus of Nazareth. His words are regarded as normative for those wishing to live a correct life. Today a large percentage of (mostly Protestant) Christians live by precepts such as "Jesus said" or "the Bible says". If he (or it) did not in fact say these things, then a vital anchor is lost for many people and an alternative may need to be found.
If it could be shown that the historical Jesus recommended behaviour that we today would find repugnant, then his status as an object of veneration would become problematic. Therefore, it is important to be aware that harmful attitudes, for which support from Jesus's ministry is claimed, still lurk at least on the periphery of society. Such attitudes include: antisemitism; homophobia and racism.(14) To feel empowered to "disconnect" the memory of Jesus from such attitudes could be seen as an advantage. A literal reading of the New Testament does not give the reader this power.
The other appeal which has shaped western civilization is that made to an authority said to have been granted by Jesus and handed down via the Church. This is known, at least in western Christianity, as the "Apostolic succession", which was (at least notionally) continuous from the first to the 15th century and has continued in Roman Catholicism until the present day.(15) In this claim lies a mandate granted from a supernatural realm which is to operate in and over the mundane realm. In principle, at least, it must have authority over the rule of law and the democratic processes.
The current state of scholarship suggests that those who see this inherited authority in this light are mistaken.(16)
If the assumption of inherited authority initiated by Jesus can be shown to have been an error or, as is more likely, that it derives from the early Christian church assuming authority and writing-back its origins into the mouth of Jesus, then a serious reassessment of the development of historical Christianity, by Christians, is in order. This paper asserts that that is the case.
From time-to-time, interest in the historical Jesus—as an entity prior to and, to various degrees, underpinning the Christ of Faith—has become such that the general public and sometimes even the traditional Christian churches have been drawn into debate.
Research into the biographical details of Jesus is generally regarded as having been undertaken in a series of "Quests" starting with Albert Schweitzer almost 100 years ago. The word "Quests" comes from the English title of Schweitzer's book The Quest For The Historical Jesus. The findings of of these Quests have received mixed receptions(17) because, if there is a general conclusion it is that we know much less about the historical Jesus than is commonly supposed.
The following is an overview of the Quests. More details appear in the Appendix.
As the founder of The Jesus Seminar, Robert Funk put it,
"The quest of the historical Jesus is an effort to emancipate the Galilean sage from the tangle of Christian overlay that obscures, to some extent, what Jesus was and what he said, to distinguish the religion of Jesus from the religion about Jesus."(18)The purpose of the Quests is to discover the Jesus before the time, as Robert Fuller(19) wrote, "The proclaimer became the proclaimed."
That there was an historical figure identified as "Jesus of Nazareth" is not widely contested(20) but what is vigorously disputed is just how much of the New Testament accurately describes him and faithfully reproduces what he said. Today most scholars agree that there are errors and contradictions in and between the canonical(21) gospels, but wide differences of opinion exist as to what degree and to what effect.
This paper joins with the many people who concern themselves with matters of authenticity in regard to the historical person of Jesus, both "inside" and "outside" Christianity. The matter is regarded as important for many reasons, some of which are theological and some of which are academic.
But there is also a point of view which suggests that recovering Jesus' actual words is of little importance because it is the ongoing encounter with the "Christ of Faith" that is really important.(22) Earlier this century academic interest in the historical Jesus was "suppressed ... for the better part of five decades (1920-1970)" by the neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann.(23) This point of view might even be extended to suggest that, even if it could be shown that Jesus never existed, the Christ of Faith persists, guiding and illuminating the lives of those who trust in him.
The possibility of a Christ of Faith not grounded in a Jesus of History has enormous implications, not the least of which is that there need not have actually been an historical Jesus. Be that as it may, it is the contention of this paper that the Jesus referred to today, the "Official Jesus", is only minimally grounded in the Jesus of History and such references as are made to that figure largely misrepresent him. But whether or not the grounding is desirable or necessary can be set to one side against the commonsense observation that, as mentioned above, large numbers of people shape the expression of their faith in terms which invoke an historical figure.
Wilfred Cantwell Smith sees it like this:
" ... the Jesus of History is rather a shadowy figure; the Christ of faith has been historically real."(24)
We turn now to briefly examine The Jesus of History. Even among those who regard themselves as scholars, opinions as to the historical accuracy of the Jesus of the New Testament grade all the way from "total and literal" to "totally fabricated". This paper takes the view that there almost certainly was an historical Jesus but that objective data about him and what he said has not survived in the way that it is assumed to have, by the public at large.
In recent years a group of scholars, building on earlier work, gathered together under the name of "The Jesus Seminar" and set themselves the task of determining, as much as was possible, what were the actual words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth in whose name the path of faith named "Christianity" was to develop.(25)
These findings are not wholly accepted in theological circles. Some scholars dissent on the grounds that the Jesus Seminar depends on circumstantial evidence and probability in order to assign degrees of authenticity. A simple example is that they do not accept long speeches by Jesus on the grounds that they could not have survived as orally-transmitted memories for the more than forty years before they were written down. In many of the findings, the range of opinion varies—even among the Jesus Seminar scholars themselves.
Their scholarship has two attractive characteristics: it is undertaken without any desire to support an already-established set of beliefs. But perhaps even more important is their claim or admission that all of their findings are provisional: anything may be overturned by better evidence.
However, the scholarship that they have already undertaken, and still are undertaking, is of the appropriate kind for our purposes because their findings, published principally in The Five Gospels and Honest To Jesus more or less agree with the broad concensus first articulated by Albert Schweitzer, nearly a century ago, that there is simply not sufficient data upon which to describe in any comprehensive way, the "historical Jesus". Even many people who disagree with The Jesus Seminar agree with Schweitzer at least to this extent.
A major shift in opinion (away from Schweitzer) on the part of the Jesus Seminar (and they are not alone in this view) is that, in spite of a number of passages that appear to say so, Jesus was not an eschatological prophet.(26) That is, his vision of the Kingdom of God did not depend upon a cataclysmic end-time in the near future.
A consequence of this finding is the need to ask whether Jesus' view of ethics was, as Schweitzer(27) has it, an "interim ethic"—an incomplete ethical system to be superceded as soon as the Kingdom of God arrives.(28)
If Jesus was not preaching an interim ethic, then what kind of ethic was he recommending, explicity or implicitly?
The Jesus Seminar's minimalist sketch of the historical Jesus might provide the beginning of an answer: that Jesus was not concerned with overturning the existing ethical norms—although he moved the emphasis from the appearance of piety to the living of it.
As The Jesus Seminar's Robert Funk wrote: "God's domain was for Jesus something already present. ... The kingdom represents an unbrokered relationship to God: temple and priest are obsolete."(29) The "earliest portraits portray Jesus as a teacher of wisdom, a sage."(30) He employs "rhetorical strategies"(31) and "pointed irony and subversive parable".(32) Don Cupitt observes that "Jesus is the most Jewish of Jews in his ability to mock ironically the very religious system to which he is so utterly dedicated, even to the extent of caricaturing God as an indolent judge or an absentee landlord"(33) and that Jesus employed "deliberate iconoclastic transgressions as a creative religious act."(34)
Such sayings as are thought to be close to Jesus' actual words (at least by The Jesus Seminar) are often satirical reflections on the status quo (e.g. The parable of The Good Samaritan) which frequently cause a degree of confusion or ambiguity in the minds of his listeners.
It is possible that his lifestyle in general and his public demeanour in particular was similar to that of a Greek cynic.(35)
Crossan characterises Jesus as "a peasant Jewish Cynic" whose "work was among the farms and villages of Lower Galilee". "He was neither broker nor mediator [of or with God] but ... the announcer that neither [broker nor mediator] should exist between humanity and divinity or between humanity and itself." "He announced ... the brokerless kingdom of God."(36)
There is little more about the Jesus of History that we can say with confidence other than that his passion was directed to a mode of living that he referred to as The Kingdom of God which was immediately at hand: no waiting, no gatekeepers, no admission ticket—except one's whole self.
As we shall see, the paucity of dependable historical data has not proved an obstacle to the writers of the Gospels nor to the Apostle Paul. As we shall see, they went on to build their own "Jesuses" and "Christs". Neither did it inhibit the growth of institutional Christianity which was an unrivalled world power from the 4th to the 9th century, and a significant presence until the middle of the 20th century.
That Jesus was crucified by the occupying Roman forces as a potential focus for rebellion(38) is widely agreed. His followers fled, mostly to Galilee.
Jesus had written nothing nor had he commanded that anything be written down. He preached and lived a new worldview, the Kingdom of God. For at least three decades, what was remembered of his sayings was circulated by word of mouth—in the "Oral Tradition".
In the weeks and months after the crucifixion, confidence slowly returned to his followers and they recollected what he had said and how he had challenged their prejudices and the conventional piety and wisdom of the day. John Spong explains their turnaround in confidence as the development of a thought form (and literary genre) called "midrash". "Midrash is the Jewish way of saying that everything to be venerated in the present must somehow be connected with a sacred moment in the past."(39) They had come to deeply respect this man who had pointed to a mode of living so spiritually rich that he could call it "God's domain". But they had now to contend with the ugly fact that he had been killed. In their searching the scriptures for explanation they discovered the "suffering servant" in Isaiah 53. "Here they found a messiah who achieved God's purposes through weakness, not power."(40) Although we can infer that this was how his followers came to explain what had happened, the later Christian tradition was to regard this (and other) passage as predicting aspects of Jesus' life.(41)
Despite Jesus' denial of the status, many of his followers in the period soon after his death looked upon him as God's Anointed, Messiah, Christos. The memory of Jesus had been restored. The resurrection had happened, not to Jesus but to his disciples.
We move to what may seem like another planet to meet the "Cosmic Christ" of the Apostle Paul. In the decade from 50CE to 60CE, the Apostle Paul was writing to churches that he had set up in Asia Minor and on the Greek mainland. He mostly refers to "Jesus Christ", using "Christ" more in the manner of a name than as a title.(42) Paul gives us almost no clues about the historical Jesus because he had little interest in that kind of detail and made only scant attempts to link up with those who had known Jesus firsthand.
For example, in reading Paul you would not learn that Jesus taught in parables, that he was concerned with the lot of the socially and economically marginalised, that he criticised the Temple and its "system of religious brokerage". For Paul, Jesus was not relevant before Calvary.(43)
Paul depicts "Jesus as an almost mythical being whose earthly existence seems to be only the intermediate stage between pre-existence and exaltation."(44) "It was a subjective and mystical experience that made him describe Jesus as a sort of atmosphere in which 'we live and move and have our being.'"(45) "Jesus had become the source of Paul's religious experience: he was, therefore, talking about him in ways that some of his conteporaries might have talked about a god."(46) Paul never met Jesus and it seems unlikely that he encountered him even at a distance. The references to his meeting Christ Jesus point to the event on the road to Damascus which is referred to in Acts 9:3-9. This paper takes the view that this was an episode involving an interaction between the unconscious and conscious components of Paul's mind—in a dream-like state.(47)
Paul's portrait was that of Jesus as a "cosmic" Christ figure who enters history for a time and then leaves, in a manner similar to what would—some 50 years later—become part of the gospel of John.(48)
This is well articulated by A.N. Wilson:
"Christ, in the thought of Paul, is an almost indefinable concept. He is, of course, Jesus, the Crucified Savior. He is also the Holy bread, broken for his people and shared in the blood of his chalice. He is the presence of God in the world, and he has always been in the world. For even as the people of God followed Moses through the wilderness and received water from the rock, 'the rock was Christ' (1 Cor. 10:4). And Christ is both the sacrificial victim who saves his people, and the people themselves. They are fed by his body but, also, they are his body."(49)
Earl Doherty(50) sums up Paul's christology:
"When early writers like Paul speak of their "Christ Jesus", they do so in exclusively mythological terms. He is the divine Son in heaven, speaking through scripture, connected to the believer in mystical ways. Christ Jesus is the very substance of Godhead, pre-existent and the image of the Father. Through him God effected creation, and his sustaining power holds the universe together. Christ is also the cosmic redeemer who descended from heaven to undergo a sacrificial death (an earthly time and place is never stated) and was subsequently exalted and enthroned by God's side. Through this saving drama, Christ has subjugated the demon spirits of the air who harass humanity, he has brought the souls of the dead righteous out of Shoel, he has been given kingship over all supernatural and earthly powers, and he has reconciled an estranged universe to God. He has also been given divine titles formerly reserved for God."(51)
Paul's writings, together with the reverential recollections of Jesus among his former followers helped build a new entity: the Christ of Faith.
The Cosmic Christ also re-emerges as "Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last"(52) early in the second century in that ecstatic vision of John of Patmos: The Book of the Revelation.
But we return for the moment to a little after the middle of the first century, where another dimension to the identity of Jesus arose: The Jesuses of the Gospel Agendas. This paper takes the view that the evidence, on balance, shows that there was an historical Jesus, but that he left no written record of utterances that he intended to be remembered. It is even possible that Jesus spoke only for the moment in which he was speaking—he did not expect anything that he said to be memorialised as though he were some timeless oracle.(53)
Nevertheless many of his sayings were remembered (and perhaps mis-remembered) and transmitted orally. "The New Testament is nothing less than the deposit of that Jesus movement."(54)
While the Apostle Paul shows little interest in the historical Jesus, preferring to focus on a Christ figure of cosmic significance, the writers of the four canonical Gospels (in historical order Mark, Matthew, Luke, John) write what appear to be biographies and not only from different viewpoints (as widely dispersed commentators at a rugby match might) but with different intentions, or agendas—as if these commentators were writing for different age groups, or nationalities or for different kinds of news media.(55)
From the viewpoint of the twentieth century, it is worth observing that none of those agendas was to produce an objective history of the life, teachings and death of Jesus, in the sense that we expect such writings to be made today. There is ample evidence that narratives were skewed to focus attention on both the viewpoints of the individual gospel writers and also on the culminating episodes of crucifixion, resurrection, and later appearances.(56)
The scholarship of The Jesus Seminar et al (and reaching back at least to Schweitzer) points to the gospel writers who were promoting agendas that were peculiar to the events of the times that they lived in (temple destruction, Christianity diverging from Judaism, increasing persecution) and to the tensions inside and between the nascent Christian sects.
It now appears that fragments of Jesus' utterances were selected and adapted from the oral tradition. They were given a "spin" that he hadn't intended. Passages were copied and adapted from other gospel writers (canonical and otherwise) and made to conform to the polemical requirements of the individual writers and the groups that they were addressing.
Added to the individual emphases and agendas of the gospel writers is the seemingly trivial fact that the gospels were all written between 40 and 70 years after the events that they describe, placing a burden on the ability of Jesus' sayings to remain true.
Matthew "was concerned with the relation between Judaism and Christianity" (61) His gospel must be seen against the background of the Council of Jamnia of the year 90, in which Judaism regrouped after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Matthew's gospel is "the response of the [emerging Christian] Church to a refreshed and reborn Judaism."(62) The author "reflected a consuming interest in Israel as the chosen people and in Jesus as the embodiment of a new Israel."(63)
Although he borrowed extensively from Mark's gospel, he "altered Mark's text frequently to suit his agenda, his writing task, his audience, and his theological perspective."(64) Matthew places strong emphasis on the messiahship of Jesus sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel(65) : he writes of Jesus fulfilling Jewish scripture.(66) Jesus "is no longer a man of God but the God-man, the man in whom God is present in the world in a unique way."(67)
Matthew likes to heighten the miraculous, and embellish the resurrection story. He establishes Jesus' descent from David. He shows an interest in hell and gnashing teeth.(68)
Matthew wanted to make Christians aware of their Jewish heritage and then to have Jew and Gentile worship the Jewish God.(69) He attempts this by reinterpreting the covenant with Israel so as to include Christians(70) and he "divided his work into five books in a deliberate attempt to model the form of the five books of the Jewish Torah."(71) To complete the portrait, he "had Jesus use a rabbinical device of numbers in his teaching. [especially the use of "threes" and "sevens"].(72)
Luke was a gentile, or perhaps a hellenized Jew.(73) His gospel "is preoccupied with development [of Christianity] among the gentiles": "It was Luke's task to show that Christianity, far from being subversive, was a natural development within a recognised and respected Jewish tradition. ... Christianity ... had simply grown past the Jewish limits and had become a worldwide religion."(74)
He knew his political sensitivities: "Because Luke was arguing for official Roman recognition of the Christian movement, he treated Roman officials kindly in his narrative."(75)
Matthew and Luke looked, as it were, in opposite directions: Luke constructed a portrait of Jesus based on the Elijah tradition—an "outward looking Jewish prophetic tradition"—in contrast with Matthew's "new Moses" or inward looking tradition.(76)
"John made his appeal to those Jews who were torn between their faith in Jesus and their deep emotional desire not to leave Judaism. ... It suggested again and again that those who had Jesus would miss nothing of Judaism when they were expelled."(77) "We know that this material [which had been accumulating in the community] had the quality of a series of meditations far more than biography."(78)
Along with the "Cosmic Christ" of Paul we are now furthest from the Jesus of history but, in many respects, nearer to the Jesus Christ of today's Christian piety.(79)
So great are the differences between John and the other three canonical Gospels that the three are referred to, collectively, as the "Synoptic Gospels", that is "they can be seen together".
New dimensions, not hinted at in the other gospels, have been added. The Logos ("Word") doctrine (Jn 1) by analogy with Sophia—Wisdom.(80) appears only once in the entire gospel in a sort of hymn(81) and sets the scene for Jesus' pre-existence, as was described by Paul.(82)
The Jesus of John's gospel does not actively (nor, as in the synoptics, with any sense of urgency) proclaim the importance of the Kingdom of God. Instead, Jesus promotes himself. "The author of the Fourth Gospel took [the] story of the name of God [Ex 3:13] and made it another key to his interpretation of Jesus." "[Jesus] had claimed for himself ... the sacred name of God ['I Am'].(83)
The Jesus Seminar is a bit hesitant in linking Jesus' "I Am" statements directly to Ex 3:13ff, instead suggesting that this formula was widely known in the Graeco-Roman world as something a god would say.(84)
As for keeping a secret, the "I Am" statements are a flat contradiction of Mark's "secret Messiah" story.(85) Furthermore, in John's gospel, Messiahship is elevated into "the Way, the Truth and the Life". (Jn 14.6). "The power now resides in the name of Jesus".(86)
Before leaving the gospels, we must take a look at an issue that scholars are still divided on. Albert Schweitzer, in his Quest of the Historical Jesus published in 1906, reached the conclusion that Jesus both believed himself to be the Messiah and also that the end (eschaton) was near. So wedded was Schweitzer to this hypothesis that he paints Jesus' entry to Jerusalem as a sort of suicide mission, the aim of which was to precipitate the arrival of the Kingdom of God.(87)
Nowadays, the more commonly held view is that of Wrede, which Schweitzer dismissed,(88) that Jesus neither believed himself to be the Messiah nor was he an "eschatological prophet" and even less likely that he believed that his mission was to precipitate that end.
But many of Jesus' later followers attributed that point of view to him: after all his teacher, John the Baptist, held these views. But, irrespective of what Jesus or his followers thought, the world persisted long after the first generation of Jesus' followers.
In addition to all of the foregoing, there is further scope for inaccuracies in the texts that we have inherited in that 175 years elapsed between the time of Jesus to the date of the first surviving copies of the gospels.(89)
We turn now to the most enduring Jesus: the "Official Jesus". Today the commonly-held view of mainline Christian churches and especially the minority "evangelical" and "fundamentalist" denominations, is that our knowledge of Jesus is drawn from the several compatible "portraits" of him that make up the New Testament. That is only partly true. It is the contention of this paper:
Any careful reading of the accounts of Jesus in the New Testament will show that it is not objectively possible to merge the multiple versions of Jesus in the gospels into a coherent picture which would unambiguously describe one person. But readers of the Bible (clergy and lay) frequently make the attempt and assume that they have succeeded.
This paper dismisses the option of Biblical literalism on the grounds that it lacks adequate evidence. Instead we will consider these options:
The reader might ask "why bother?".
We might compare what we are attempting with the action of someone who has bought a second-hand item of furniture which is covered in multiple layers of inappropriate paint. But, through the flaking paint, can be glimpsed isolated patches of the original wood, wood that looks better to the 20th century eye than the gaudy paint ever might have. It appears that paint-stripper could be in order. For "flaking paint", we might read "Christian tradition" and for "paint stripper" we read "undoctrinal scholarly investigation". This will lead us to explore how we might recover some of the "original" Jesus and his vision of "the Kingdom of God".
We will use two "tools": the first is the findings of The Jesus Seminar in respect of the New Testament record which were discussed in Part 1. That was the "de-construction" phase.
For "re-construction" we will call on the perceptions of various literary and philosophical techniques collectively referred to as "postmodernism".
This paper takes the view that the 20th century phenomenon of "postmodernism" may offer a new way for Christians and non-Christians to re-evaluate the little we know of Jesus by freeing us from the traditional requirement to take the Bible as a coherent set of texts. That is to say that we can look for "nuggets" of value even while not accepting the package in its entirety. Postmodernists are scavengers. This, we submit, is a "religious" attitude although we concede that it runs counter to the intention of those who constructed the Christian Bible and of most who promote it today. Nevertheless it is the honest option for many of us.
Throughout all of the western world and much of the industrialised rest of the world the last decade has brought a bewildering rate of change. This is especially true in the business and academic environments. In retrospect, much of it can now be seen as "management churn", that is, changes of business or policy direction done, not with certain knowledge that the change would bring improvements, but in response to a current untenable situation.
One of the oft-repeated wisecracks coming from those who felt themselves to be victims of such changes was: "if you think you know what's going on here, then you don't really understand".
The claims made by philosophical postmodernism are a bit like that witticism in that they deny that there exists a stable substrate or background or point of reference by which to locate an idea, a process, a philosophical viewpoint, a religious doctrine. All ideas are cast adrift on a limitless ocean and their positions are defined only by reference to each other and not to any coastline.
A theme which appears over and over in the works of Don Cupitt is that we are "making all this up as we go along"—that we gather together fragments of dependable knowledge, conjecture, gut-feelings and just plain guesses—and we assemble them into what we call "our world". We usually become so impressed with what we have built—and we are taught to revere what our forebears built—that we take them to be "real".
It would be fair to say that, for many within the several autonomous "Sea of Faith" networks in multiple countries, their theology approximates this point of view and is to this extent at least, postmodern.
Stimulated by Don Cupitt's seminal television series and later book The Sea of Faith, these discussion groups(92) and Internet correspondents explore human existence illuminated by religious ideas which are considered to be entirely of human origin.
In the sense that postmodernists employ the terms, "pre-modern", "modern", and "postmodern", we live in a "modern" age(93) in which remnants of the "pre-modern" are still in evidence and in which elements of "postmodernity" are increasingly making themselves felt.
To look closer at this justification, and how we might react to it, it is necessary to look a bit closer at the subject of "truth".(95)
One of the major themes that separates the postmodern from what went before is to use the word "truth" in other than the strictly logical sense.
To the consternation of many philosophers, there exist, in everyday speech, multiple uses of the term "truth". Some permit us to say that something is true in a "religious" sense when it may not be in a literal sense.
This paper proposes that we adopt a simple distinction which will, without too many protests from purists, allow our case to proceed.(96)
So, if I say, "today is Tuesday" then we can easily and unambiguously test the truth of this statement. Computers operate in this way, so too do lawyers, most of the time.
It involves expressions of human experience which might well be fictional but which, by empathy, produce in the reader or hearer a recognition that "this is how things are, or should be".
While we would prefer to be inspired by a person's charisma to adopt the "truth" of, for example, a political opinion, we have all had experiences of people "stronger" than ourselves inflicting their opinions on us with such confident authority that we have adopted their preferences as "the truth" solely on their demonstrated authority. Much of our experience of "growing up" concerns our personal re-evaluation of such "truths".
Many writers on matters of faith point out that the nature of religious faith is "not merely an intellectual assent to some proposition but [rather] a vital, personal commitment engaging the whole ... [person] ..."(99)
Because we are dealing with the whole person—hopes, fears, loves, hates, joys, expectations, disappointments and self-image and not just the rational subset, then what counts as "truth" in the religious context cannot be confined to the first, "propositional", kind but must in large part be of this second, "existential", kind.
But this is a relatively new idea. For most of its history, the truth of Christianity was taken to be as literal as today's scientific facts.
To see truth as only "logical" places on it a restriction—what is counted as "true" is true for every person and at all times—and frequently backed up by coercion and inquisition.
It is not difficult to insist on universality for our physical world because, at least at levels above that of quantum physics, it has repeatedly been demonstrated to be true in the "first" sense. But, in aspects of our human existence, we live comfortably with notions of subjective and localised "truth", much to the annoyance of philosophers.
The Enlightenment, although often hostile to religious certitude, took over without question from traditional Christianity the notion that we all should think alike, that there was "one truth" to which we should all agree: that we should all be "on the same page".(100) So, the "modern" view of truth is like the "premodern" in that everyone is required to subscribe to the same version of it. While this undoubtedly lead to "tidier" societies—"Mussolini made the trains run on time"—it did so at the expense of personal religious freedom.
Although they may be quarrelsome bedfellows, today's mainstream churches, and the mainstream scientific and educational institutes, all support this "modern", regimented, Enlightenment notion of the "truth". They may vigorously disagree as to its content, but they are thematically adjacent to each other(101) in that they believe in a body of reliable knowledge (religious or scientific) to which everyone ought to subscribe. They can even coexist, as in the imaginative use by Creationists of "scientific" discoveries.
By way of contrast, those who claim that such certainty doesn't fit in with the evidence of our senses, or of our experience, say that we have gone past the "modern" view—that we are "post"-modern. They say that the very concept of universality is "put into question".(102)
With that realisation, we can justly describe the "Official Jesus" as a fiction—but the question to which we will soon turn is this: "is the "Official Jesus" a life-enhancing fiction?"
Postmodern thinkers are often called "ironists". This is how the American philosopher, Richard Rorty(104) describes ironists. He says that they "are never quite able to take themselves seriously because [they] are always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change, always aware of the contingency and fragility of their final vocabularies, and thus of themselves." There is no "metavocabulary" which guarantees that an ironist's own ... vocabulary is more sound than any other." In other words they are able to step outside the frame of what they presently believe to be the case and allow for the possibility that a better explanation may yet be available. Scientists are supposed to be ironists by nature, and for this reason.(105)
Postmodern ironists also agree that things are changing in a bewildering way. It is not just a question that "things fall apart, the centre cannot hold"(106) The postmodern view is that there are no centres, but it does acknowledge that we invent them from time to time. A mundane example is that there is no "centre" to the surface of the earth. Places just relate to each other. Even the notion of "self" has moved from being a solid sort of thing, like a billiard ball, and is now better thought of as "relationship".
They would also say that there is an everyday, non-philosophical meaning of the word "truth" which points to values and attitudes that are socially constructed. Postmodernists who are optimistic about human affairs know that we are making up this world as we go along, and they are getting on with the job.
What then might Jesus mean for us now?
In attempting to apply a postmodernist analysis to the multiple and muddled portraits of Jesus that we have inherited, we can start with the fact that we can catch only glimpses of the Jesus of History in the gospels.
Such traces of the historical Jesus as appear in the Gospels (and to an even lesser extent in the writings of Paul) are not as genuine as they might appear. In other words, the gospels are not biographies in any sense at all.
And any Jesus that is not the Jesus of History is someone's invention.
It might be a good invention, it might be like Paul's Cosmic Christ—a brilliant
fabrication that was tangential to its original, but it must not be thought of
as binding on people of the 20th century.
Furthermore, a disappointingly small amount of what might be regarded as
truly factual may be uncovered, inferred, or deduced—but
only by submitting the text to careful and expert scrutiny.
The canon was closed in the 4th century C.E. and thereafter (with some
exceptions not relevant to our discussion) the list of books to comprise the New
Testament was finalised. We might note in passing two significant facts about
the process of fixing a canon. First: the very process invests the material with
a spurious homogeneity. If we find contradictions, the very fact that the items
reside in the same canon recommends that we attempt to reconcile the
contradictions instead of seeing them for what they are. Second: there was no
simple mechanism to purge material that was later discredited.
As discussed in detail in Part 1, the multiple "Jesuses" found in the
canonical gospels are products of the agendas of Paul and the gospel writers,
many reflecting the evolving structure and immediate concerns of the early
church. They employed Jesus (and without his consent) to say what they honestly
believed needed to be said. It is up to us to assess whether these stories
embody spiritual or existential "truths" worthy of their adoption by us.
To compound the error, and inspired by the canonical status of the biblical
writings, these Jesuses are uncritically conflated into a single "Jesus" by many
Christians (including clergy): in other words they have assembled the "Official
Jesus" out of defective fragments.
Far from being a figure who has come into our world from outside time and
space, we now know that the "Official Jesus" is a cultural construct built by
contending forces, most of which we would today describe as "political".
Furthermore a standardised "Jesus" was doomed from the start for several (but
two principal) reasons:
Theological activity of the last two centuries has brought us part of the
way: the very process of "translating", "adapting", "applying" the record of
Jesus (as much as can be discovered) is a "postmodern" procedure—one that is
prepared to step outside the Christian metanarrative and to fossick among the
rubble, separating the fact from the fiction, the biography from the
hagiography, the original agenda of Jesus from agendas that he was called,
unwittingly, to subscribe to by those whose written words were allowed to
survive the process of the canonisation of scripture.
Although a comprehensive word-perfect "Historical Jesus" is a lost cause, we
might even yet rescue something worthwhile from the nearly 20 centuries of
devotion that this figure has attracted. What remains valuable is not so much
what Jesus might have said, but how he lived and acted. Since he made no
provision to have written down what he said, we might assume that he did not
regard his utterances as oracles worth preserving. We might go on to suggest
that utterances that were memorable were so because they tied in
with how he actually lived and the kind of living that he pointed towards.
In order to re-evaluate Jesus from a postmodernist perspective:
We Have Lost Our Innocence
The expression "the cat is out
of the bag" is used to refer to a state of affairs that is irreversible. Other
images are employed: the scrambling of an egg; the toothpaste out of the tube;
loss of virginity (literally and metaphorically). What we are concerned with
here is an irreversible loss of innocence.(107)
We can be confident that our scholars equip us to say that we know the following:
All such portraits are human creations in just the same way that a poem or a painting is a human creation "and religion resembles art in being a human creative activity whereby a certain quality of life is produced."(108) With the rise of Freudian (and more especially Jungian) psychology, we have evidence (admittedly anecdotal and highly subjective) that "revelation" comes, not from out there but rather from down there, from the author's unconscious mind. (Jung extends this to an inherited set of propensities to visualise which he refers to as the "Collective Unconscious".) Even the claims for the Muslim Q'ran to have been a supernatural revelation are, hesitantly, being put to the test of western form-criticism.(109)
It may be fair to compare the nearly twenty centuries of Christianity with an art gallery containing many portraits of Jesus. They range from the Pantocrator glaring down from Heaven in an Orthodox church to the dazed victim of circumstances in "Jesus Christ Superstar". Viewers can choose which Jesus they will accept and the nature of their response to it.(110)
Or invent a better one.
But to do this we would have to move on from being merely "modern" to being "post-modern" because we would be stepping outside the Christian framework and making a choice(111) rather than staying with, and being bound by, the current tastes of one's traditional religious ethos.
Of considerable importance for our thesis is the acknowledgement that a portrait does not need to be literally true in order to be existentially true.
To deliberately paint one's own personal portrait of Jesus is, arguably, what saints and mystics have been doing for nearly 20 centuries: to own a portrait of Jesus through which they can see God—however "God" is construed.
The gospel portraits of Jesus have informed the spiritual consciousness of the West for nearly 20 centuries. Between them, but not in any coherent way, these Jesuses have encompassed such a wide range of subject matter that just about everything that every human soul might desire (in love or in malice) can be found there. But now there's a difference: we know that these portraits were fictions and that they had as much to do with the circumstances in which they arose as they had to do with the man upon whom they are based.
But the acids of post-modernity have proved corrosive on the "Official Jesus". He has become incredible, even distasteful, in an age informed by Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, Freud and Jung. But, as modern scholarship seems to be suggesting, the paint-stripper has revealed that he was on to something thoroughly worthwhile: a view of humankind that included all—and especially the weak, vulnerable and marginalised—in the same ethical and spiritual ethos: the "Kingdom of God".
It is only by taking personal responsibility for how to implement that perception in a 20th century lifestyle that we—whether Christian or not—can feel free to paint a new and subjective portrait of our own.(114) It is only by going beyond the dogmatic certainties (which, for the most part, were major errors) of the Official Jesus that a better mentor might emerge. It is also possible that people who have until now found Christianity unattractive, might reconsider the invitation to subscribe to God's Kingdom, inspired by a man nearly 20 centuries ago who spoke so passionately of it.
But whether what results can, or should, be called "Christianity" is a matter yet to be decided. Even the name "Christianity" must now seem strange in the light of the non-messianic status of Jesus.
My own view is that to persist with a literal reading of the Bible in the face of the "loss of innocence" discussed earlier would be dishonest—what Sartre referred to as "bad faith". But it is still my opinion that the fragmentary knowledge of Jesus can provide the basis for a better myth by which to orient our lives. It may be impossible to deliberately create a new myth, but if I were to make the attempt I would start with the following:
The reader is invited to do likewise—or differently—as faith commands.
| Date | Religion | Politics |
|---|---|---|
| 10-5 B.C.E. | Saul (later the apostle Paul) born at Tarsus | |
| 8-4 B.C.E. | Jesus born | |
| 14 C.E. | Caesar Augustus died (after ruling for 58 years | |
| 26-36 | Pilate governor of Judea. | |
| 29 (30?) | Jesus executed | |
| 34 | Saul, a Jew born in Tarsus of Celicia, a Roman province in Asia Minor (i.e.,modern Southeast Turkey) who had trained to be Pharisee, became a follower of Jesus Christ after initially persecuting early followers. This is due partly to an experience on the road to Damascus. He later used his Roman name Paul. | |
| 35 | Pilate ordered the massacre of conservative Jews and was called to Rome to explain his actions.He died a violent death in Rome. | |
| 36 | Stephen was murdered. Paul became known to the Jesus movement. | |
| 37 | Caligula succeeded Tiberius as emperor. | |
| 39? | Paul privately conferred with Peter and James in Jerusalem. | |
| 41 | Caligula assassinated and succeeded by Claudius. | |
| 45-49 | Major travels by Paul. | |
| 48-49 | Paul conferred in Jerusalem witth leaders of the Jesus movement. Many matters were left unresolved. | |
| 49 | Claudius banished Jewish followers of "Chrestos" from Rome. | |
| 50 | Paul and Peter met in Antioch, more differences of opinion emerge. | |
| 50-60 | Sayings Gospel Q | |
| 50-67 | Gospel of Thomas in circulation. | |
| 50-52 | Major travels by Paul. Settled in Corinth for 18 months. | |
| 51 | First writings of the New Testament, by Paul were begun: I Thessalonians | |
| 53 | Paul spent this year in Antioch | |
| 54-56? | Paul settled in Ephesus for 2 1/2 years. | |
| 54-68 | Nero is emperor. | |
| 55 | I Corinthians | |
| 57-58 | Paul in Corinth where he wrote the Epistle to the Romans—his "gospel". | |
| 58? | Paul's last journey to Jerusalem. | |
| 61-63 | Paul under house arrest in Rome. | |
| 62 | James, brother of Jesus killed in a fracas on the Mount of Olives. | |
| 64 | Rome burned. Christians persecuted. | |
| 64 | Peter and Paul executed in Rome under Nero the Emperor. Alternative rumors suggest that Paul escaped and went to Spain. | |
| 68 | Nero committed suicide. Succeeded by Vespasian. | |
| 68-80 | Mark's Gospel | |
| 69 | The Year of Four Emperors (civil war) | |
| 70 | Rome destroyed Jerusalam, its temple and Israel as a nation. | |
| 73-74 | Fall of Masada. | |
| 75 | Mark's Gospel in circulation. | |
| 79 | Vesuvius erupts, burying Pompeii | |
| 79-81 | Titus was emperor. | |
| 80- | Letters of the Pauline school circulate | |
| 81-96 | Domitian was emperor. | |
| 90 | Matthew's Gospel | |
| 90 | Jewish Council of Jamnia formed the Jewish Canon of the Scriptures and excluded Christians from synagogues. | |
| 95 | Luke's Gospel | |
| 95 | The Book of the Revelation | |
| 96-98 | Nerva emperor | |
| 100-120 | John's Gospel in its current form | |
| 100-120 | The Book of Acts | |
| 100-120 | The Gospel of Peter and Acts | |
| 117-138 | Hadrian emperor | |
| 125-150 | The New Testament Canon was closed. | |
| 135 | Bar Cochba revolt. | |
| 325 | Constantine called the first ecumenical council at Nicaea. | |
| 451 | The Council of Chalcedon fixed the view that Jesus was partly human and partly divine.That is still the "official" view. |
Lloyd Geering in Jesus Reconsidered pp8-10 traces the controversy from Reimarus (about 1774), via Strauss (1835) to Schweitzer and summarises their findings. A similar chronology appears in The Five Gospels pages 2 to 5.
The following is a more detailed account. It is an endnote called "Earlier
Quests for the Historical Jesus" by Donald A. Wells, Ph.D. from an essay
originally developed and delivered as a Sunday Service presentation for the
Rogue Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Ashland, Oregon, on June 23,
1996.
Herman Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768). He wrote a 4,000 page
manuscript titled The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples. It was published
posthumously by Gotthold Lessing in 1774. His major points were: (a) We should
draw an absolute distinction between all the writings of the disciples and
apostles, and what Jesus might have said. (b) We must assume that Jesus spoke as
a Jew so that only Jewish meanings are appropriate. (c) He performed no
miracles. (d) His notion of the Kingdom of God was the messianic expectation of
Jews at the time.
Karl Friedrich Bahrdt (1741-1792) wrote a
fictitious life of Jesus.
David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874). In
1835 he published a two volume life of Jesus, revised in 1839, and again in
1864. He concluded that (a) None of the gospel writers was a witness of the
events they discussed so that their words rested on mere hearsay. (b) Every
story prior to Jesus' baptism is a fabrication. (c) The story of Jesus calling
twelve disciples is not historical. (d) None of the miracles happened. (e) The
gospel of John is a complete fabrication.
Bruno Bauer (1809-1882)
wrote a life of Jesus in which he concluded (a) Matthew and Luke copied from
Mark and added nothing new to the story. Thus Jesus life rests on one person who
was not a witness and, hence, must be considered to be unreliable. (b) The
gospel of John contains no historical material at all. (c) The birth stories are
literary inventions. (d) The Jews did not expect a Messiah and Jesus did not
claim to be one.
Ernest Renan (1823-1892). His Life of Jesus
appeared in 1863 and his life of Jesus followed the unhistorical gospel of John
which prompted Albert Schweitzer to comment "There is scarcely any other work on
the subject which so abounds in lapses of bad taste . . . It is Christian art in
the worst sense of the term . . . There is insincerity in the book from
beginning to end."
Heinrich Julius Holtzmann wrote The Synoptic
Gospels in 1863 and concluded: "Is it possible to describe the historical
figure of the one from whom Christianity derives its very name and existence in
such a way as to satisfy all just claims of scrupulous historical critical
investigation?" His answer was a resounding, "no."
Martin Kahler In
1896 he published The So Called Historical Jesus and The Historic
Biblical Christ.. In it he concluded that a biography of Jesus was
impossible. "I regard the entire Life of Jesus movement as a blind alley."
Albert Schweitzer published his The Quest of the
Historical Jesus in 1906 and concluded (a) The quest has been a dismal
failure. (b) There is no history of Jesus that can be discovered. (c) He said
about his own book: "In the last resort this book can only express the
misgivings about the historical Jesus as depicted by modern theology. There is
nothing more negative than the results of the critical study of the life of
Jesus."
Rudolf Bultmann wrote Jesus and His Word in 1920 and
concluded (a) The Christian proclamation (kerygma) will never be confirmed by
historical investigation. (b) Since the message is in the myth, the gospel of
John is the preferred one. (c) The historical quest is impossible, irrelevant,
and illegitimate. "I do think that we can know almost nothing concerning the
life and personality of Jesus." Bultmann thought that this was a happy
conclusion. In his book The New Testament and Mythology Bultmann
concluded: "The Christian life does not consist in developing the individual
personality, in the improvement of society, or in making the world a better
place. The Christian life means turning away from the world."
Dietrich
Bonhoeffer His book, Christ the Center, (1960) concluded that the
attempt of liberal theology to distinguish the synoptic Jesus from the Pauline
Christ is historically and dogmatically doomed to failure. If we did find an
historical Jesus this would prove that the long history of Christian faith had
been an illusion."
Karl Barth agreed with Bonhoeffer that there is
nothing in historical investigation that could add anything to faith. At most,
such analysis might tell us what others thought Jesus was like.
Typical dictionary meanings attached to the word 'believe' fall into two
groups. One group, Conjecture, talks of a 'hard-nosed' assessment of the
situation. It depends on concepts of probability. The other group, Trust
requires that the person doing the believing places trust in the words or
actions or future behaviour of someone else. It goes well beyond a 'hard-nosed'
assessment because such data are not available. It is a surrender to the
trustworthiness of another.
In common speech, when the word belief (or
believe) is used, it is almost always the case that the speaker means 'belief
that'. The speaker is stating an opinion that such-and-such is the case.
Furthermore, whether or not it is the case may or may not be a matter of
importance to the speaker. This use of 'belief' is about the probability that
what a proposition asserts is the case is in fact the case. A discussion about
'believing that' is rarely a religious discussion although the reverse is often
the case—many fruitless debates arise in religious contexts in which the
existence of God— believing that God exists—becomes the major proposition.
By way of contrast, in some situations the implied word is 'in'. The speaker
takes for granted that 'such-and-such' does exist and is now going on to declare
that, in some sense, it is a matter of importance that this is so. Existence is
not at issue, trustworthiness—whether of what is being proclaimer or of the
proclaimer, or both—is.
The status of "Messiah" means and meant different things to different groups
of people at differnt times. This is a broad overview:
¶Kingship under
Yahweh The earliest concept as seen in I Sam 10:1 (and in the royal Psalms
2,20,21,45,72,89,110,132) —a physical anointing, with oil. "He is promised to
rule over the whole earth as a vice-gerent of Yahweh himself (Ps2:8) ... an
empirical figure, never an eschatological one." Foundations
of New Testament Christology p23&24
¶Ideal Kingship
Isaiah 7:10-16, 9:1-7, 11:1-9 talk of kings, "anointed ones", living up to the
reputation of David. This last passage talks of "a shoot from the stump of
Jesse", that is a descendant of King David which became important in
Christianity. Foundations
of New Testament Christology p24
¶Suffering Servant Isaiah
53. This argues a theme of greatness through sacrificial suffering and has
become blended into Christian thinking. R.H. Fuller suggests (Foundations
of New Testament Christology p108) that Jesus identifies himself with
passages in Is.42,35,61 and 53.
¶Apocalyptic Son of Man "Until
[Jesus'] programme had been fulfilled, "Messiah" could only suggest the
traditional Jewish national-political king [in the David mould] ... the church
could either continue to reject the whole concept, as Jesus had done, or ...
christianize it. It chose the latter course. ... Jesus is now made to accept the
title Christos, but only as an equivalent to the future apocalyptic Son of Man."
Foundations
of New Testament Christology pp159-160 " ... the Christian
writers—notably Paul and John—proposed the most daring developments of these
Jewish themes. ... it basically expressed the belief that the Messiah, long
expected in some form or other by the Jews, had now arrived. What they asked
followers to believe—far beyond the vague Jewish idea about a leader who would
be like a new King David—was that God had, as it were, suspended natural laws
and given the whole world a new conception of human existence ... [that] Jesus
had risen from the dead after three days and ascended to heaven." (The
Springs of Jewish Life p166-167.)
¶Ongoing Jewish
Expectations "The Messianic hope came, in the two or three centuries before
Jesus, to be firmly built into the masonary of Jewish life and expectation:
predictions about the timescale varied, but it was central to the Jewish myth of
history, and their perception of their own place in the divine plan."(The Long
Search p183) "If the rabbis talked about the Messiah only in [a]
folkloristic way, it was because there was no firm doctrine on the subject. It
was the halakhah, the Law, that one had to be precise about; [but] the
Messiah belonged to the realm of haggadah, storytelling and moralising
with no sense of precision needed." (The
Springs of Jewish Life p73.)
" ... in the Jewish visionary
documents, the Messiah is never conceived as coming quietly, a man of peace, to
lead mankind toward a golden age. All accounts are centered, as in Daniel, on
the background of sin and desolation that precedes—and in this case also
follows—him." (The
Springs of Jewish Life p74.)
"The Jews of the time [the Bar Kochba
revolt of 132-135 C.E.] had long dreamed of being rescued by a messiah,
which is Hebrew for anointed. The word always went back in significance
to the days of glory, when David had been anointed king. (The
Springs of Jewish Life p147.)
"In the apocalyptic year of 1666, a
Jewish Messiah [Shabbetai Zevi] declared that redemption was at hand and was
accepted ecstatically by Jews all over the world. ... Throughout Jewish history,
there had been many Messianic claims but none had attracted such massive
support. It became dangerous for Jews who had their reservations about Shabbetai
to speak out. [He was arrested in Istanbul and] the Sultan gave him the choice
of conversion to Islam or death: Shabbetai chose Islam ... was immediately
released ... given an imperial pension and died an apparently loyal Muslim on
September 17, 1676." (A History
of God pp375-377 passim)
Atheist Priest? Don Cupitt and
Christianity Scott Cowdell, SCM Press 1988
A
Background To The Long Search, Ninian Smart, BBC 1977
Belief and History, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, University
Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1977
The Birth of
Jesus: History or Myth?, James Veitch, St Andrews Trust for the Study of
Religion and Society, Wellington, NZ 1997 ISBN 0-9598011-8-9
Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks The Birth of Jesus,
John Shelby Spong, HarperCollins, 1992
A Call For A New
Reformation, John Spong at
this site.
Does Society Need Religion?, Lloyd
Geering, St Andrews Trust for the Study of Religion and Society, Wellington, NZ
1998 ISBN 0-9583645-2-4
Ethics in the New Testament,
Jack T. Sanders, SCM Press, 197?
Existence, Being and
God, Eugene Thomas Long,Paragon House Publishers, NY, 1985
The First Three Gospels William Barclay, SCM Paperbacks
1966
The Five Gospels Robert Funk, Roy Hoover and The
Jesus Seminar, Polebridge Press and Macmillan 1993.
The
Fontana Postmodernism Reader, ed. Walter Truett Anderson, Fontana Press 1996
The Foundations of New Testament Christology, R.H.
Fuller, Collins, The Fontana Library, 1965/1976
The
Historical Figure of Jesus, E. P. Sanders, Penguin 1993
The Historical Jesus, John Dominic Crossan,
HarperSanFrancisco, 1992
The Historical Jesus: A
Comprehensive Guide, Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, translated by John
Bowden. SCM Press 1988
A History of Christianity,
Paul Johnson, Penguin Books 1976/1978
Honest To Jesus
Robert Funk, Polebridge Press and Hodder and Stoughton, 1996
Jesus of Galilee, Myth and Reality, James Veitch, Colcom
Press, New Zealand, 1994
Jesus Reconsidered Lloyd
Geering, St Andrews on The Terrace, Wellington, 1983
Jesus The Jew Geza Vermes, Collins 1973
The Lost Gospel Q Marcus Borg et al Ulysses
Press, Berkeley, CA, 1996
The Leap of Reason Don
Cupitt, SCM Press 1985
The Many Faces of Christ,
James Stuart, St Andrews on The Terrace, Wellington, 1998
The Myth of God Incarnate, ed. John Hick, SCM Press 1977
The Mystery of the Kingdom of God, Albert Schweitzer,
A & C Black Ltd, London, 1925
Out of My Life and
Thought, Albert Schweitzer, Mentor
Paths of
Faith, John A Hutchison, 3rd edn, McGraw-Hill, 1981
Paul: The Mind of The Apostle, W.W. Norton, London 1997
The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of
its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, Albert Schweitzer. (1906)
Rescuing The Bible from Fundamentalism, John Shelby
Spong, HarperSanFrancisco 1991
Readings in Christian
Thought, ed. Hugh T. Kerr, Abingdon Press, Nashville, New York 1966
Resurrection: Myth or Reality, John Spong,
HarperSanFrancisco 1994
The Sea of Faith, Don Cupitt,
BBC London 1984
The Springs of Jewish Life, Chaim
Raphael, Chatto&Windus, The Hogarth Press, London 1982
Tomorrow's God, Lloyd Geering, Bridget Williams Books,
Wellington 1994
What Is A Story? Don Cupitt, SCM
Press 1991.
Why Christianity Must Change Or Die John
Spong
(1) As Geza Vermes in Jesus The
Jew pp15-16 has observed, the Creeds tell us little about the earthly
life of Jesus and, furthermore "[f]or its historical anchor, the [Nicene] Creed
relies, not on Jesus of Nazareth himself, but on the second-rate and notoriously
cruel Roman civil servant, Pontius Pilate."
(2) Don Cupitt,
What
Is A Story? p101
(3) Don Cupitt, What Is A
Story? p102
(4) both "good" and "bad". From the
selfless giving of dedicated missionaries to the suicidal communities such as
Waco, Texas.
(5) Resurrection:
Myth or Realityp133
(6) The
Historical Jesus p423
(7) The Many
Faces of Christ p24.
(8) Jesus
Reconsidered p7.
(9) for example, see Resurrection:
Myth or Reality pp101-105. The context here is burial and resurrection.
(10) Of whom we may only reliably identify the Apostle
Paul. It is quite commonly held among liberal Protestant scholars that none of
the Gospels nor the Book of the Revelation was written by the person named as
their authors and also that some of the letters attributed to Paul were not
written by him. Robert Funk in Honest To
Jesus p35, observes that the apostle "Paul enjoys popularity among
Protestants in large measure because he is the counterweight to, and critic of,
[the disciple] Peter, whom the later Roman tradition designated the first pope."
(11) see Why
Christianity Must Change Or Die
(12) Rescuing
The Bible From Fundamentalism p143
(13) this option
should put to bed the silly comment by C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity
Fontana Books 1952/1955): "A man who was merely a man and said the sort of
things Jesus said would not be [reduced to merely] a great moral teacher. He
would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached
egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell." The "mis-reported" option seems by
far the most preferable but was not anticipated by Lewis.
(14) "Taken literally this Gospel [John] has fed the dark side of
religious bigotry [antisemitism] more than any other part of Christian
Scriptures." Rescuing
The Bible From Fundamentalism pp188-189
(15) "the
understanding that the Roman Church derives its teaching authority from the
commission given by Jesus to the Apostles as contained in the New Testament ("He
who hears you hears me"). But whereas the response of the hearers of the
Apostles was faith, the response of the Roman Catholic is expected to go beyond
faith. The Apostles were presumed to speak to those who did not yet believe,
whereas the Roman Catholic Church imposes its teaching authority only upon its
members." Encyclopaedia Brittanica
(16) Islam goes
even further when it requires its laws to be derived from the Q'ran.
(17) For example: "It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that
historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it
history, to do autobiography and call it biography." The
Historical Jesus p.xxviii
(18) Honest To
Jesus page 31. See also ibid p11 "they [the early Jesus movement]
turned the iconclast into an icon."
(19) in The
Foundations of New Testament Christology p142
(20)
A tidy summary of "thirteen objections made by historical scepticism" together
with "possible counter-arguments" appears in The
Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide pp91-118.
For someone who
vigorously casts considerable doubt on the existence of an historical Jesus
refer to: The Jesus Puzzle: Was There No Historical Jesus? by Earl
Doherty in the Journal of Higher Criticism, Fall 1997. "We are led to conclude
that the beginning of the Christian movement was not a response to any human
individual at one time and location. Christianity was born in a thousand places,
out of the fertile religious and philosophical soil of the time, expressing
faith in an intermediary Son who was a channel to God, providing knowledge, love
and salvation. It sprang up in many innovative minds like Paul's, among
independent communities and sects all over the empire, producing a variety of
forms and doctrines. Some of it tapped into traditional Jewish Messiah
expectation and apocalyptic sentiment, other expressions were tied to more
Platonic ways of thinking. Greek mystery concepts also fed into the volatile
mix. Many groups (though not all) adopted the term "Christ" for their divine
figure, as well as the name "Jesus", which in Hebrew has the meaning of
"Savior". Paul and the Jerusalem brotherhood around Peter and James were simply
one strand of this broad salvation movement, although an important and
ultimately very influential one. Later, in a mythmaking process of its own, the
Jerusalem circle with Paul as its satellite was adopted as the originating cell
of the whole Christian movement."
¶An argument that Jesus was invented by
the Christians after 70CE is set out in The
Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide pp122-124.
¶Those outside of
Christianity who are thought to have referred to an historical Jesus include:
Josephus (born AD37) in Antiquities XVIII 63f and Antiquities
XX.9.1.
Suetonius in Life of Claudius (XXv.4) and Life of Nero
(XV1.2).
Tacitus in 110CE writing in his Annals (XV.44.2-8)
Pliny writing c.110CE Letters X 96
Talmud: Babylonian Talmud
Sanhedrin 43a
¶Many of the above are challenged in the article by
Doherty
(21) For the purpose of this paper "those included
in the New Testament". A lengthy discussion appears in Honest To
Jesus pp103-104
(22) As in Käsemann's Essays on
New Testament Themes in which he speaks of "the impoverishment and
distortion of the Gospel which takes place whenever the question of the Jesus of
history is treated as decisive for theology and preaching".
W Cantwell Smith
(Belief
and History pp72-73 develops this theme.
(23) The Five
Gospels p3
(24) Belief
and History page 89
(25) "In assessing the
authenticity of the sayings of Jesus, the Jesus Seminar shouldered a burden of
proof: to accept as authentic only those sayings it could demonstrate to be
such. This methodological principle is inherent in the critical investigation of
the historicity of the gospels. The gospels were written decades after the time
of Jesus by people who worshipped him as a divine being and regarded him as the
spokesman for their own beliefs and ideals. Texts with such a blatant bias make
no claim to be objective reporting, and no critical historian would think of
simply assuming they were. This is plain common sense: historians should treat
textual material as historical evidence only if they can establish its
historicity." From Can the Historical Jesus be Made Safe for Orthodoxy? A
Critique of The Jesus Quest by Ben Witherington III , Robert J. Miller
Midway College JHC 4/1 (Spring 1997), 120-137.
(26) Their
reasoning is documented in Honest To
Jesus pp145-146
The matter of what various scholars have concluded
about Jesus' point of view in the matter of eschatology is complex. In The
Historical Jesus: a Comprehensive Guide the six pases of these
conclusions is listed as 1) Ritschl 1901: "the kingdom of God is a living
community" 2) Weiss 1892 and Schweitzer 1906?> "The kingdom is not yet here
but will soon arrive catastrophically 3) CH Dodd 1935: "all eschatological
expectations were fulfilled in [Jesus'] person" 4) Kämmel 1972?: a concensus of
2 and 3 5) Bultmann 1926: Jesus lived "inside" a myth that the world would soon
change 6) recent views, including a non-eschatological Jesus as in Crossan and
Borg and, but not mentioned, The Jesus seminar.
(27) The
Mystery of the Kingdom of God pp80-123 passim
(28) This is set out and defended in Jack Sanders' Ethics in
the New Testament p3ff.
(29) Honest To
Jesus p41
(30) Honest to
Jesus p143.
(31) Honest to
Jesus pp149-158
(32) Atheist
Priest? pxiii
(33) The Leap
of Reason p78
(34) New
Christian Ethics p123.
(35) "any member of a Greek
philosophical sect that flourished from the 4th century BC to well into
Christian times and was distinguished more for its unconventional way of life
than for any system of thought. Antisthenes, a disciple of Socrates, is
considered to be the founder of the movement, but Diogenes of Sinope was its
paradigm. He strove to destroy social conventions (including family life) as a
way of returning to a "natural" life. Toward this end he lived as a vagabond
pauper, slept in public buildings, and begged his food. He also advocated
shamelessness (performing actions that were harmful to no one but unconventional
in certain circumstances), outspokenness (to further his cause), and training in
austerity." Encyclopaedia Brittanica
Crossan (The
Historical Jesus p421) characterises the cynics as exhibiting "a way of
looking and dressing, of eating, livng, and relating that announced its contempt
for honor and shame, for patronage and clientage. They were hippies in a world
of Augustan yuppies."
(36) The
Historical Jesus p422 passim emphasis added
(37) "It is undeniable that Jesus was crucified as a Messianic
Pretender, a fact which is clinched by the title on the cross (Mk 15:26). (Foundations
of New Testament Christology p110)
Whether Jesus thought of himself
as the Messiah or as a candidate for becoming Messiah is another matter which is
further complicated by many factors.
One is prudence: "Messianic claims ...
were often treated as blasphemous by the Jewish leaders and as subversive
agitation by the Romans." (Paths of
Faith p365)
Another is that there have been different conceptions
of Messiah.
(38) " ... messianism was in the air, linked at
one end to the biblical prophecies and at the other to the sense of frustration
at the Roman occupation." (The
Springs of Jewish Life p107.)
(39) John Spong, Resurrection:
Myth or Reality p8.
See also his longer explanation in chapter 2 of
Born
of a Woman
(40) Resurrection:
Myth or Reality p139
(41) This is debated in The
Historical Jesus: a Comprehensive Guide pp106-108
(42) causing some (e.g. Honest To
Jesus p37) to quip that we ought to expect a Joseph Christ and a Mary
Christ also.
(43) This paragraph is based on an item
summarising a paper by Gregory Jenks (a Jesus Seminar Fellow) in the
Bulletin of the Sea of Faith in Australia of May 1999. At the time of
writing, the full paper was available at www.draytonanglican.org.au/paul.html
(44) The
Historical Jesus: a Comprehensive Guide p91
(45) A History
of God p103. A footnote identifies the quote as coming from Acts 17:28
and suggests that the words "were put on the lips of Paul by the author of Acts
and that the quotation probably came from Epimanides.
(46)
A
History of God pp105-106.
(47) "... dreams may
occur in sleep ...; in waking states where we find ourselves living out the
symbolic aspects of life; and in twilights states that are between the state of
sleeping and waking." Ira Progoff in Myths, Dreams and Religions p177 ed.
Joseph Campbell, Spring Publications, Texas 1970
(48) e.g.
"He [Jesus Christ] is the image of the invisible God; his is the primacy over
all created things. In him everything in heaven and earth was created ... And he
exists before everything ... He is, moreover, the head of the body, the church
... Through him God chose to reconcile the whole universe to himself ..." Col
1:15-20 (NEB)
James Veitch develops this in "Jesus of
Galilee p333: "[in the gospel of John,] Jesus was God in human form.
Paul had believed as much, but never wrote the life of Jesus to show how such
thinking could work out. ... The community of favourite companions of Jesus ...
took Paul's thinking and reworked the ideas into a Gospel."
(49) Paul: The
Mind of The Apostle p70
(50) in The Jesus
Puzzle: Was There No Historical Jesus? in the Journal of Higher Criticism,
Fall 1997.
(51) It should be pointed out that Doherty
offers this observation as part of his thesis that there was no
historical Jesus—a position that this paper does not support.
(52) Rev. 22:13
(53) The Jesus Seminar talks
of a wandering cynic, a sage.
(54) Rescuing
The Bible From Fundamentalism