Jesus Lives!

15

Thirty years ago, the historical Jesus was dead. By 1975, it was clear that scholars had very little to say about him. If students were assigned anything to read on the subject, it was usually Gunther Bornkamm’s Jesus of Nazareth from the 1950s¹ or even Albert Schweitzer’s classic tome The Quest of the Historical Jesus, originally published in 1906.² The field of New Testament studies was flooded with redaction-critical studies on the Gospels, literary criticism and biblical theology. Then came the postmodern wave. Historical approaches to the Bible were washed up—even suspect.

Yet today the historical Jesus lives again. He has been resurrected in the pages of biblical scholarship. What happened? No one really knows. Was it simply the “historical Jesus hoopla” stirred up by Bob Funk and the Jesus Seminar? Or were there deeper issues at play in North American culture that served to attune people once again to questions of history, of roots?

Whatever the reason, the past 20 years have stocked our shelves with good books on Jesus. But what have they taught us? What do we now know—or think we know—about Jesus that we did not know before?

16

A New Question for a New Quest

In the 19th century, the first questers after the historical Jesus were animated by the need to explain the miracle-filled narratives about Jesus as rationally as possible. Possessed by the spirit of the Enlightenment, they asked, how could Jesus have walked on water, multiplied five loaves to feed thousands, or risen from the dead? Are there rational explanations for these things that ancients simply wouldn’t look for? The best of these rationalists, H.G. Paulus, offered solutions both simple and complex.³ Jesus only appeared to walk on water as he walked the shore shrouded in mist and darkness; the five thousand were fed when people were inspired by Jesus’ example to share what they had previously hoarded. His explanation of the resurrection involves a complex medical analysis of crucifixion and coma. Most scholars dismiss such explanations today for missing the point: Legends of the miraculous simply belonged to the profile of a divine hero. In the popular imagination, however, they linger still.

The mid-20th century witnessed what is often referred to as the “New Quest.” These seekers—Gunther Bornkamm, Ernst Käsemann, James M. Robinson, to name a few—drank from other wells. They asked, How was the church’s message about Jesus (understood existentially) anticipated in the preaching of Jesus himself? The New Quest was the product of “Kerygmatic Theology,” which understood the origins of Christianity to lie in the preaching (Greek kerygma) of the early church, and the response it evoked from those who heard their claims. Some kerygmatic theologians—Rudolf Bultmann, for example—argued that what Jesus himself might have said or done was interesting, but not crucial. It was the church’s claims about his death and resurrection that called for a response of faith. But the New Questers, many of whom had studied with Bultmann, raised the question: Must not the church’s preaching about Jesus have some connection to the preaching of Jesus himself? They began to ask about Jesus’ own preaching, and whether and how it anticipated the early church’s preaching about him. But the New Quest produced few readable lives of Jesus. Their interest in philosophy and theology overshadowed any historical interest, and the result was dense and theoretical. The movement was spent by the mid-1960s.

So, what is in our water?

The big question for the current generation of Jesus questers is, How did Jesus relate to his own social world?⁴

I strongly suspect that this rather obvious question has suddenly become central because we who do this work have serious questions about our own relevance to the world in which we live. We teach in seminaries of a church that is now culturally marginal, or in secular universities, where the Bible stands alongside other sacred literature competing for the tiny little space afforded religious studies in the modern university curriculum. Schweitzer suggested that when we peer down into the well of history, we see ourselves staring back. But this is what historians do. It is what they’re supposed to do. The past is relevant only when we can see ourselves in it, or it in ourselves. Maybe we are drawn to this figure from the past because we think he can tell us something useful about ourselves. And those who read Marcus Borg, Dominic Crossan and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza are obviously finding something useful as well. These generally are folk who have rediscovered in themselves a spiritual impulse, but have not found a place to nurture it in the mainstream of North American Christian evangelicalism. To them, Jesus is strangely appealing.

Part of the appeal of Jesus to writers and readers alike is, I suspect, his marginality. Whatever else scholars have said about Jesus and his social world, nearly all would agree that he was not a pivotal figure in it. John Meier’s tag “A Marginal Jew,” says it well enough. Jesus “was at most a blip on the radar screen” of his day.⁵ Yet, over time, he made a remarkable impact. There is hope in that story alone. But scholars today are seeing more in his story than this. Indeed, asking this question—how Jesus engaged his social world—has produced some widely acknowledged breakthroughs that modern readers ought to be aware of.

Jesus and Politics

One is the realization that Jesus’ world was not divided neatly into sacred and secular spheres. Religion and politics went hand in hand in the ancient world. The emperor was the “Son of God” and “Savior,” the empire was the gods’ will, the divinely ordered destiny of the Roman people. The high priests in Jerusalem were both religious and political figures. To engage Jesus’ world at all was to engage it both religiously and politically.

No one has pressed this point more adamantly than Richard Horsley.⁶ But Horsley argues that Jesus did 20not engage his world as a political operative, that is, working from the top down. Rather, he inspired a social revolution, from the bottom up, that aimed to restore a measure of human dignity and community in the face of imperial forces of oppression. Jesus was not a Zealot, advocating open rebellion against Rome and its retainers among the Jerusalem elite. That would be an anachronism. Jesus, rather, lies further down the spiral of violence of a peasant rebellion, at the point where resistance first begins to assert itself. Horsley’s 1960s Marxism seems always to lurk in the background, but he makes a point that just about everyone embraces now, at least in part: Jesus’ execution on a Roman cross was neither a mistake, nor an accident. The Roman prefect, Pilate, knew exactly what he was doing. Jesus’ words and deeds undermined the essential structures of his world.

Jesus and Judaism

The death of Jesus raises an issue that has long plagued the historian: the relationship between Jesus and Judaism. Because the sources assign so much responsibility for the death of Jesus to the Jews, there has been a tendency over centuries to see Jesus’ relationship to Judaism as fundamentally hostile: The Jews rejected him because 21he rejected them. Most thoughtful scholars today see this as fundamentally wrong-headed. This is no doubt partly due to a post-Shoah wariness of latent anti-Semitism embedded in our scholarship. But historical work, done for the most part since the 1950s, has also contributed to this trend by calling into question just about every aspect of the story of Jesus’ trial and execution—thus the great hue and cry from scholars in response to Mel Gibson’s naively historicizing film, The Passion of the Christ.

With the charge “the Jews killed Jesus” taken from the table, space was created to rethink the actual relationship between Jesus and Judaism. The first significant effort along these lines was Geza Vermes’s 1973 volume, Jesus the Jew.⁷ Vermes, an Eastern European Jew who converted for a brief period to Roman Catholicism, intended to show that Jesus was thoroughly Jewish in his teaching. In doing this, he hoped to counter some of the traditional Christian anti-Semitism he experienced in the pre-Vatican II church. In the 1980s E.P. Sanders wrote what would become the next landmark in this development, Jesus and Judaism.⁸ In Sanders’s understanding, Jesus is still a rancorous figure who engaged aspects of his (Jewish) culture critically. But with a little shift in perspective, one could now see that he did so not as an outsider taking leave of his people to join the Christian throng, but as a Jew who understood his critique in terms of Judaism itself. According to Sanders, Jesus is best understood within the tradition of Jewish restoration theology, which hoped for an heir to David’s throne who would throw off foreign rule, gather in the dispersed people of Israel and restore the Temple to glory and greatness. The details of this theory are disputed, but not the larger point that Jesus spoke from within Judaism rather than against it.⁹

Jesus and Hellenism

At the same time scholars have been rethinking Jesus’ relationship to the Greek and Roman (Hellenistic) world. The stage for this development was set by Martin Hengel’s magisterial work, Judaism and Hellenism,¹⁰ in which he showed that Palestine was so thoroughly Hellenized by the first century that one can no longer draw neat lines of division between the “Jewish” and “Hellenistic” worlds. Even “Palestinian” Judaism was in a measure “Hellenistic” Judaism. Since Hengel’s work, excavations in places like Sepphoris and Caesarea Philippi in the Galilee have only served to strengthen his thesis. Even in smaller and more remote places, the remains of Hellenistic culture are clearly in evidence.

The implications of this for our understanding of Jesus have been rather remarkable. Before Hengel, it was common to dismiss as late and inauthentic anything in the Jesus tradition that seemed too Hellenistic to imagine it coming from Jewish Palestine. Now this 22criterion has been all but scrapped, opening an entirely new line of questioning. Did Jesus know anything of Hellenistic philosophy? Might he have ever seen a Greek tragedy? How did he regard the Roman imperial cult?

Among the bolder strokes in recent Jesus studies is Burton Mack’s comparison of Jesus’ words and ways to the quintessential counter-cultural philosophical school of the day, Cynicism.¹¹ Cynics’ counter-cultural stance could sometimes take on rather bizarre forms—defecating or masturbating in public, for example. So placing Jesus among their ken did not sit well with many. But such extremes were not typical of the lot, and the parallels between the more common street philosophers and the Jesus movement are not easily dismissed. Particularly compelling to Mack is the sort of “cunning intelligence” exhibited by Jesus in the many controversy stories collected around him, cast in the form of chriae, or useful anecdotes, a literary convention of Greek and Roman philosophical schools. A good example is the story of how Jesus addressed the issue of paying taxes (Mark 12:13–17, and parallels). Opponents try to trap Jesus with the question of whether one should pay the tribute. If he answers yes, the people will despise him; if he says no, the Romans will arrest him. So Jesus responds with a question of his own: “Whose image is on the coin?” When his opponents answer, “Caesar’s,” he responds in a way that springs the trap on them: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” Now the decision is theirs to make—they must show their cards. It might have occurred to more than a few in the crowd that Jesus has just said something rather cheeky for a peasant in the Roman Empire: Caesar is not God. Such nimbleness of mind in the service of biting cultural critique was especially prized among the Cynics. And for centuries, Cynics and Christians found an affinity in their common counter-cultural stance and unconventional lifestyle.¹²

Whether Jesus’ message can be characterized meaningfully as Cynic remains in dispute. But what should no longer be disputed is the fact that Jesus could well have encountered a Cynic or two in the towns and villages of the Galilee, as well as many other manifestations of Hellenistic culture and thought. The world that produced Jesus is no longer seen as a cultural backwater of simple peasants and shepherds. The 23Jewish culture of the Galilee was probably much more cosmopolitan than scholars a generation ago could have imagined.

Jesus and Women

Another question scholars a generation ago would never have asked is about Jesus’ relationship to women. It is obviously the modern context of feminism that fuels this interest, but that doesn’t make it illegitimate. All our questions are our questions; nothing comes from the past without coaxing. So, even though the Jesus tradition does not have a lot to say about the status and role of women, the latest quest has asked to see what little there is.

For years the first and last word on this was Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her.¹³ Schüssler Fiorenza reasons that Jesus’ concept of a new basileia (“kingdom,” “empire”) in which all—including the poor, the unclean, sinners and prostitutes—were welcome, would have included women in a new way as well. The evidence for this is sprinkled throughout the Jesus tradition: the healing of the woman with the flow of blood and Jairus’ daughter (Mark 5:25–34), the disabled woman of Luke 13:10–17, the statement that prostitutes enter the basileia before scholars (Matthew 21:31), the woman whose tears washed Jesus’ feet (Luke 7:36–50), to take a few examples. In short, in a world in which women’s status was generally diminished, in the discipleship of equals that formed around Jesus, women, along with other persons of diminished status, found a new level of acceptance and importance.

While Schüssler Fiorenza’s work has risen to the level of near-classic, others have been a little less sanguine with its line of thought. Judith Plaskow and others, for example, have wondered whether Jesus’ enlightened view of women has been won at a cost to Jews, whose supposed patriarchalism stands as the foil over against which Jesus’ anti-patriarchal message can be made out.¹⁴ Feminists have cautioned against the quest for a feminist myth of origins and the need to trace all things good back to Jesus himself. Most recently Kathleen Corley has argued that there were indeed many women in the followership of Jesus, but they might have been there for a variety of reasons.¹⁵ Nowhere does Jesus seem to voice any special concern for issues of gender. It is clear that Jesus kept company with women; it is not yet clear what this actually means.

Jesus and Anthropology

Some of the mystery surrounding this and other issues still at play derives from our relatively shallow understanding of the way ancient people actually thought. How did they think about gender, bodies, disease, pollution, food, private and public space, the sacred and 24the profane? More and more, scholars are realizing how essential such things are to the everyday construction of reality and the negotiation of human relationships. Welcome to the world of cultural anthropology.

About 25 years ago a small group of scholars, including Bruce Malina, Jack Elliott and Jerome Neyrey, among others, began introducing categories like honor and shame, and the clean and the unclean into the world of biblical studies.¹⁶ Their question was: How did ancient peasants think? To date only Malina has written directly about Jesus,¹⁷ but their influence has been deeply felt in the newest quest. Jesus scholars now routinely refer to the likes of Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz or Gerhard Lenski in trying to understand how the things Jesus said and did might have been received in his own cultural context. What would it mean for Jesus to dine with a leper, cast out a demon, or advocate disrespect for one’s family? Is the parable of the mustard seed just about little things growing bigger, or is it significant that mustard was considered a weed, an unclean plant? Is “sinner” merely a moral category, or might the company of sinners place one in a liminal space? Such questions are only now beginning to enrich our understanding of how Jesus engaged his social world at a very basic human level.

Jesus and Eschatology

Amid these very new questions there are still some very old questions about Jesus that simply refuse to die. One is the question of Jesus’ eschatology. “Eschatology” itself has become a rather complicated word to use. Must it refer to specific end-time scenarios such as one finds in Mark 13, where Jesus describes to his disciples what will happen at the end of time, or in the Book of Revelation? Or might it be used to describe any utopian vision or hope for change? How did Jesus think his world might change?

At the turn of the last century, Albert Schweitzer wrote his now-famous book describing Jesus as a prophet of apocalyptic doom, who believed his world was about to end and that he himself was somehow involved in its destruction (see “The Search Begins”).¹⁸ At the same time, Schweitzer chastised a parade of 19th-century Jesus questers who, blinded by their own modern prejudices, had failed to appreciate this obvious fact. Since then few have dared risk Schweitzer’s censure and argue otherwise. Until now.

In 1986 Marcus Borg opened the issue again with “A Temperate Case for a Non-Eschatological Jesus.”¹⁹ 25Borg pointed out that many, if not most, scholars had come to regard Jesus’ apocalyptic references to the “Son of Man” (Mark 13:26 for example) as inauthentic. Without these sayings, there was no longer any reason to regard Jesus’ statements about the “Kingdom of God” as referring to an apocalyptic event expected in the near future. The Kingdom of God statements themselves do not say anything of the kind. Rather, Jesus’ use of the Kingdom of God ought to be understood, said Borg, as Norman Perrin understood it: as a tensive symbol. That is, the phrase Kingdom of God was meant to invoke a mythic idea from the Jewish tradition, the idea of God ruling with compassion and justice. It did not refer to a specific event, but was meant to evoke a response, a kind of yearning and hope for a more just and compassionate world.

Borg, it turns out, was not alone in harboring doubts about the old consensus. In that 1986 essay Borg also reported the results of a poll he had taken, asking participants in the Society of Biblical Literature Historical Jesus Section whether they still held to the older apocalyptic consensus. Two-thirds replied that they did not. In a similar poll taken among fellows of the Jesus Seminar, three-fourths replied “no.” In a 1995 essay I tried to explain why so many had made this shift.²⁰ In addition to the inauthenticity of the Son of Man sayings, which had in fact led many “New Questers” of a generation ago also to reject the apocalyptic hypothesis, I listed new developments in the study of Q,^a where the apocalyptic elements are generally regarded as late, and the Gospel of Thomas,^b in which one finds many synoptic-like sayings (sayings like those found in Matthew, Mark and Luke), but without any of the apocalyptic hue that has traditionally colored them in our imagination. More importantly, perhaps, are developments in the study of the parables of Jesus. For most of the last century, parable scholars had been coming to the firm conclusion that the allegorization of Jesus’ parables was a late development not original to Jesus himself. Jesus’ parables were spoken originally as metaphors for the Kingdom, a way of fleshing out this tensive symbol in real-world scenarios. They were not originally allegorical depictions of the end times, as some of them became in the hands of later gospel writers.

Borg’s “Temperate Case” did not sit well with everyone, however, and responses began to appear, some downright intemperate. He and those who agreed with him were accused of “modernizing” Jesus, and even of being anti-Jewish. The assumption was that Judaism in the first century was so completely apocalyptic that one could not reasonably imagine a Jew who was not. To question Jesus’ apocalyptic credentials was therefore to question his very Jewishness. Soon, however, the nonsense and name-calling gave way to cooler heads, and carefully reasoned studies began to appear that challenged the new thinking. One was Dale Allison’s Jesus of Nazareth, Millenarian Prophet.²¹ In addition to countering the arguments of Borg and others, Allison’s case was built around a matter of interpretation. He argued that so much of the Jesus tradition (the parables, for example) can be understood in multiple ways, one really must have an interpretive framework to serve as a guide. He suggested that if Jesus was baptized by an eschatological prophet (John), and if so many of his followers had eschatological expectations after his death, and if so many Jews around him held such eschatological expectations, it is only reasonable to conclude that Jesus probably entertained such expectations too.

The debate rages on, with strong arguments on both sides. It will not be settled easily, because the sources themselves can be made to support either point of view. Perhaps we are having trouble settling this question because Jesus himself had trouble settling it, even in his own mind. As a follower of John the Baptist, he probably did hold to certain apocalyptic expectations at one time. But as one who eventually broke from John, he probably also entertained doubts. The question is, were those doubts ever settled? It may be that the Jesus tradition is divided on this issue, because Jesus—a truly human Jesus—wavered on it. Perhaps he invoked the mythic image of God’s reign without really knowing how in fact it could become a reality.

Landmarks

This period of ardent work has produced a number of tomes that will no doubt stand as our landmarks in the long history of the Jesus quest. John Meier’s three-volume oeuvre will no doubt count as a new standard in orthodox Catholic circles.²² N.T. Wright’s equally weighty trilogy²³ will certainly serve a similar function among conservative Protestants. Marcus Borg’s many books²⁴ will be remembered for the small—but still growing—reformation they have ignited in the liberal wing of main-line Protestantism. And perhaps none of these would have received the attention they warranted had it not been for the spark 48struck off the rocky flint of Robert W. Funk and the Jesus Seminar.²⁵

If there is one work, however, that captures all that is new in the latest quest and puts it to work to create a new and revolutionary portrait of Jesus, it is John Dominic Crossan’s The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant.²⁶ Crossan’s book is the quintessential Jesus portrait for this generation of scholarship. Not that everyone agrees with Crossan. Far from it. But his work embodies all that is new and distinctive about the latest quest. He understands that religion, politics and economy are of a piece in the culture of antiquity. He expends enormous energy working across disciplinary lines to understand that culture, drawing insights from cultural anthropology, archaeology and ancient history. His handling of the sources is thoroughly critical; he works across canonical lines to include the Gospel of Thomas and other early Christian texts. And the understanding of Jesus that emerges from his work is extraordinarily compelling.

Crossan tries to understand Jesus as a peasant who interacted primarily with other peasants. The problem Jesus addressed was their worthlessness and ultimate expendability to the empire that dominated their lives. To them he began to speak of a new empire, the Kingdom of God, in which the means to life were not brokered from the top down through the intricate systems of patronage that governed the imperial world. In the Kingdom of God, the means to life are offered freely, without brokerage or requirement, save one’s willingness to embrace the new empire and live out its reality. Jesus lived it out as a shaman, healing the demon-possessed, but without fee or expected reward. He would not broker his power. He also lived it out by experimenting with a kind of open table fellowship, in which all, even the unclean and undesirable, were welcome. Again, his Kingdom was brokerless. At one point Crossan describes Jesus as a “Jewish Cynic,” by which he means that Jesus was, like the Cynics, a caustic social critic and reformer. But unlike the Cynics, Jesus encouraged a drawing together of individuals around a common, diversely populated table, rather than the more typical Cynic goal of self-sufficiency. Crossan’s Jesus did not expect the end of the world. His eschatology was sapiential, rather than apocalyptic: With apocalyptic eschatology we are waiting for God to act; with sapiential eschatology, God is waiting for us to act.

From Crossan’s many essays and interviews it is clear that it is not only God who is waiting for us to act. Crossan is too. He is drawn to the Jesus quest out of strong sense of purpose. Funk, too, started the Jesus Seminar in an effort to make critical biblical scholarship relevant and purposeful once again. Horsley is not free of political inklings of a liberationist sort. And Schüssler Fiorenza clearly wears her feminism on her sleeve. Jesus scholarship has always been purpose-filled. Schweitzer thought Jesus was an apocalyptic fanatic, but still took what he perceived to be Jesus’ ethos of world-renunciation and service to others to heart. Remember, he left theology to study medicine, and then left Europe to live out his life in Lambarene, Gabon. It was Schweitzer who said that the study of the historical Jesus has been for theology a school for honesty. But it has also been a school for integrity, as scholars and their students return there again and again to seek from Jesus some higher purpose. Does this compromise the historical enterprise? Perhaps a little. But we all have our reasons for searching out the past. The search for wisdom and insight from one of history’s greatest religious figures seems reasonable enough. And so the quest for Jesus goes on, in our generation as before. “Time makes ancient good uncouth.” We must know for ourselves what Jesus would say to us, even if it is in our own imaginations. This is, after all, where history lives. It is where the historical Jesus lives today.

Thirty years ago, the historical Jesus was dead. By 1975, it was clear that scholars had very little to say about him. If students were assigned anything to read on the subject, it was usually Gunther Bornkamm’s Jesus of Nazareth from the 1950s1 or even Albert Schweitzer’s classic tome The Quest of the Historical Jesus, originally published in 1906.2 The field of New Testament studies was flooded with redaction-critical studies on the Gospels, literary criticism and biblical theology. Then came the postmodern wave. Historical approaches to the Bible were washed up—even suspect. Yet today the historical Jesus lives again. […]