Bible Books
012
Jesus: A New Vision
Marcus Borg
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987) 216 pp., $16.95
Professor Borg advocates a new image of Jesus: a person filled with the Spirit who sought to transform the social world of his people. In presenting this image, Borg makes use of two organizing principles: Spirit and culture. His notion of Spirit is informed not only by the biblical tradition, but also by social, scientific and history-of-religions studies of ecstatic or paranormal experiences. His notion of the relation of spirit and culture is shaped by H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic Christ and Culture. In his presentation of Jesus, Borg makes use of four social types: healer, sage, prophet and founder of a renewal or revitalization movement.
Borg argues that Jesus stood in the ecstatic, mystical tradition of biblical and Jewish religion, comparable to the traditional images of Moses, Elijah, the writing prophets of Israel, and the charismatic rabbis, Honi the circle-drawer and Hanina ben Dosa. Exorcisms and healings performed by Jesus are taken to be historically credible and indicative of Jesus’ spiritual power.
In discussing Jesus’ relation to culture, Borg portrays him as both radical and subversive: He called his people to center themselves in God, rather than in the triple snare of wealth, honor and religion. The way taught by Jesus was a metaphorical death followed by new life issuing from a new heart.
As the leader of a revitalization movement and a prophet, Jesus challenged the dominant politics of holiness and called instead for a politics of compassion. In the place of a politics that divided between pure and impure, Jew and gentile, observant and unobservant, male and female, righteous and sinner, Jesus lived out of and called for an experience of Spirit that relativized social distinctions and supported the way of peace rather than violence. Jesus was killed because he sought, in the name and power of the Spirit, the transformation of his own culture and threatened its conventioned wisdom and structures of power.
This new vision of Jesus is a challenge for moderns to consider the Spirit to be real, to discover a dimension beyond the visible world that is charged with a power whose ultimate quality is compassion. Finally, the life of Jesus challenges Christians to live on the boundary between Spirit and culture: to make the Christian community an alternative culture and to live a life of the Spirit not only as individuals but in community.
This is the most successful attempt since Gunter Bornkamm’s Jesus to present on a popular level an account of Jesus based on contemporary scholarship. Borg is able to show how Jesus the parabler and aphorist could be the same person as Jesus the healer and exorcist. He is right to point out that, not only skeptical scholars of the academy, but also many churches, are ignoring the charismatic and extraordinary elements in the life of Jesus and in the growth of the early Church. To ignore these elements distorts the historical record and impoverishes modern spiritual life.
The major weakness of the book is that it eliminates the eschatological dimension (relating to the fulfillment of God’s promises) from the life and teaching of Jesus. Eliminating this dimension distorts the record just as much as ignoring the healings and exorcisms. It is clear why Borg feels justified in doing so. The reason is that he is operating with an outdated and simplistic notion of eschatology. He thinks that to say that Jesus was an eschatological prophet means that he believed the world was going to end in his own time and that he called people to repent before it was too late. (p. 11). Perhaps this is what scholars at the turn of the century thought about eschatology in relation to Jesus, but it certainly does not represent the current interpretation of eschatological and apocalyptic texts. Only a few texts actually depict the dissolution of the created world. Even in those cases one could debate whether this language was meant literally. In other words, eschatology has a broader and richer range of meaning and significance than the simple belief in the end of the physical world.
So the erosion of the consensus, that Jesus expected the end of the world in his generation, does not necessarily imply the erosion of the image of Jesus as an eschatological prophet, as Borg claims (p. 14). Further, it is a logical fallacy to say that, if Jesus did not expect the imminent end of the world, then the Kingdom of God in his teaching must have a non-eschatological meaning (p. 14).
Borg is quite right to take seriously the evidence for charismatic Judaism, namely, the stories in rabbinic literature about Rabbi Honi and Rabbi Hanina. But there is a glaring omission in his failure to take into account the evidence for ecstatic and mystical experience in apocalyptic literature. Unfortunately, Borg perpetuates the old scholarly bias regarding the admirable prophets and the degenerate apocalypticists.
Another weakness of the book is the 017confusion between what Borg calls the conventional wisdom of Jesus’ culture and the “politics of holiness.” Borg claims that the “politics of holiness” was responsible, in large part, for the Jewish conflict with Rome (p. 93). He also claims that all the renewal movements of Jesus’ time connected holiness and resistance. Indeed, he says that this connection was made by the culture as a whole (p. 139). These remarks oversimplify the relation between religious ideas and historical events and obscure the differences among the various Jewish groups. Borg also claims that the “politics of holiness” played a role in causing Jesus’ death. It is clear how the “conventional wisdom” of the time led to Jesus’ death. It is not clear what role was played by the “politics of holiness,” especially since Borg admits that the Pharisees, who were the primary advocates of such politics, had little or nothing to do with it.
Although I differ with this book in some rather substantial ways, I find it a step in the right direction and a helpful book for a general audience. It is helpful because it is a marvelously lucid synthesis of much recent work on Jesus and because it relates the results of historical research to the contemporary situation. With regard to ongoing scholarly work on Jesus, it moves in the right direction by taking Jesus’ life into account, as well as his teaching.
Jesus: A New Vision
Marcus Borg
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987) 216 pp., $16.95
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