Jesus: an Historian's Review of the Gospels

Quotations in bold type are from the book.

1. The Dawning Kingdom of God

Grant, like Maccoby, confirms that the Sadducees, rather than the Pharisees, are Quislings to the Roman Empire. The legalism we Christians associate with the Pharisees comes from their association with "the scribes" - the experts in Jewish law, who wrote all that Mishnah, I suppose.

The landscape was sprinkled with subversive prophets, both sacred and secular, and most of them cryptic - for safety's sake, possibly.

Jesus' death was brought on by his alienation from the main strands of Judaism - Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes and the Qumran types. It was his "uncompromising rigor" (what many fundamentalists would mistake for "integrity") that ultimately did him in.

"Every thought and saying of Jesus was directed and subordinated to one thing,…the realization of the kingdom of God on earth. It was customary for other devout Jews also to believe that this would happen. What made Jesus unique was his conviction that it had already started happening by his agency and under his guidance."

Well, now, that is a dangerous mixture. I bet Masada figures into it somewhere. It certainly has a whiff of Jonestown about it. I am trying to imagine what it must be like to live in such a prophecy-hungry world as that; for even as a fundamentalist I was always aware of the rationalist, endless, Armageddonless world outside "the gates," bent on its own hectic business. The roman world, oppressive as it was for Jews, was anything but rationalist.

"The Jews revered their ancient holy books with an all-engrossing, literal-minded reverence which makes such connections seem inevitable." Grant is referring to the idea (so common among conservative Christians in the United States) that the pronouncements of the Old Testament prophets are inerrant readings of the far future, bound to be fulfilled. What I need to do is to distance myself from this view - it is especially urgent since all of the interpretations I have come across have turned out to be wrong. In order to reclaim the Bible for my own use, I need to learn to read it with a relativist's eye. As my new friend Mac Morgan recently put it, "When scripture ceases to be inspirational, it loses its 'inspired' status."

Even when I thought of myself as fulfilling Bible prophecy (such as Isaiah 43:10-12), I took a fairly rationalist view of the matter. The roles to be played had been foreordained far in advance, I conceded; but who would fill them was left open to the interactions of history, free will, and chance. (This was, actually, pretty much the official JW way of sidestepping the free-will-vs.-divine-omniscience debate. Maybe it is not a bad way.) My tiny part in the fulfillment of prophecy, then, was something I lucked into, not something I'd been groomed for since time immemorial.

The trouble with insisting on inerrant prophecy applicable to the present and future is that it demands invention rather than objectivity. Said Justin Martyr, "We do this [record fulfillments] because with our own eyes we see these things having happened and happening as was prophesied," including examples that Grant says are fictitious. And "Augustine conceded that Jesus was not actually mentioned in the Old Testament, but added that he was obviously meant."

In other words, the Fundamentalist Christian idea that the whole point of the Old Testament is to bear witness to Jesus - is about two thousand years old, drat it.

What the Hebrews meant by "God's kingdom" was not a place, but God's power over the entire world and his pre-eminent claim on the loyalty of "all Jewish beings," only a very few of whom - the prophets, for instance - lived up to this claim. The First Commandment "is fulfilled imperfectly or not at all," and in this sense the Kingdom of God is "still to come." Which is why Jesus taught his followers to pray, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth…"

Regarding Daniel's defiance of Nebuchadnezzar actually being about Israel's struggles with Antiochus Epiphanes five hundred years earlier: Paul did say, in Hebrews 11, that the whole point of these stories was to inspire us to soldier on. When you must do the impossible, nothing is so heartening as the knowledge that it has been done before.

At least that's the theory. Living up to miracles, when you have been taught that doubt is not a sacrament, can be an intolerable burden.

Grant establishes, by dispensing with all the theological tortuousness that boils down to "He did not mean what He said," that Jesus' ministry was "founded on an error" - his belief that the apocalyptic remaking of the world by the kingdom of God was imminent.

If Jesus meant what he said just the way it reads, how can you assume that he was divine? How can anyone, taking thoroughgoing historical scholarship into account, remain a Christian - someone who ascribes salvation to Jesus the so-called Christ?

So when Jesus declared that "the kingdom of God is among you," he was referring to his own ministry - and the Jews as a whole were not impressed.

Grant puts his finger on one of the reasons I became disenchanted with Christianity: "It was a Jewish belief that 'all thy works should be for the sake of God.' But Jesus cast this requirement into more vivid focus by relating it exclusively to the endeavor to secure admission to God's dawning kingdom…It is the major premise of every one of his moral injunctions." I had no objection to this as long as I could believe that any well-informed, good-hearted person could do it. But that way, for the distrustful heart, lies legalism. The "narrow gate" constricts asymptotically until no living being can pass through. This is the part of being single-minded, having a "simple eye," that nauseates me: all concerns must be reformulated in terms of getting into the Kingdom. "Let the dead bury their dead" - those weeping, bleeding forms are only animated corpses, solidified shadows: turn your back and "work out your salvation with fear and trembling."

Enough!

"Love your neighbor as yourself" is apparently not the pretty sentiment most people assume it is: "Because we have to sink our individuality in this community of the Kingdom, our self-love must be replaced by total love of all who are our companions in this all-important struggle." So even the parable of the Good Samaritan is not exempt from this exclusivist taint. We must commend Jesus, I suppose, for the then revolutionary conceit that "even a Samaritan" could be a companion of the kingdom of God, and might even be more "on the ball" than the most upright Jew. But it does not mean, as so many honest folk have interpreted it, that everyone in need is your neighbor.

"Love of other fellow-beings he emphasized continually," true enough, since "after all it was absurd that those who were associated in the great communal quest for the kingdom should have any barriers between them," but this is not what we now think of as "inclusiveness." Grant's formulation of "love your enemies and pray for those persecuting you" is: to hate your enemies is a sheer waste of time. "Why not avoid hostilities and embroilments which, beside the infinitely larger issue, are ultimately irrelevant and distracting?"

Turning the other cheek only makes sense if injustice is soon to be done away with anyway. All social ethics get submerged in the urgent, desperate quest for one's own salvation. Which defeats the whole purpose. To quote William December Starr, "Of what use is heaven if I must sell my soul to gain entrance?"

On this subject, I suspect it is only misinterpretation that has saved Christianity from itself.

2. What Were the Miracles?

The world of the gospels is a time and place when the conventional wisdom is that "healing power is secured by touching the healer or his garments; where resident healing power flows as a substance from one to another, and where healing potency is a commodity transferable to assistants; where saliva is applied to tongues and eyes, where the touch or grasp of the healer's hand, the supreme instrument of power, effects immediate cure…" Healing power crackles about Jesus like an electrical charge.

Jesus' exorcisms were apparently stripped-down versions of established Jewish ritual. In fact the exorcism stories have echoes in the traditions of other religions (but Grant does not go into specifics here).

Jewish tradition cast a reverential glamor around miraculous healing generally, as you can see from Isaiah 61, which Jesus quoted in his first sermon at Nazareth (Luke 2). But here again, Jesus subordinates human compassion to the urgency of the approaching kingdom. Powerful works were not only signs of the coming kingdom but part of its actual outworking in the lives of men. So when Jesus says, "Believe my works if not my words," he means: The Kingdom is here, it is real, whether you like it or not. When he says to someone he has healed, "Go, your faith has saved you," he is not referring to the faith that makes psychosomatic healing possible, but the faith that Jesus himself is the cornerstone of divine justice.

Grant repeatedly draws our attention to Jesus' supposed orders to keep his messiahship a secret. But why, in the light of spectacular miracles and widespread preaching? It explains the lack of response in a way that lets both Israel and Jesus off the hook. An obvious interpolation.

So did these miracles actually happen? The stories are probably as reliable as anything attributed to a modern evangelist. In those days the Impossible occupied a much smaller territory. Besides, the important thing was not whether they happened but what they meant.

What about those loaves and fishes, then? The evangelists link this story to Elijah's miracle of the oil and flour, and then there is all that "bread of life" and eucharistic symbolism that hovers around the figure of Jesus himself.

And then there's the interpretation Mark Belletini taught me, which also explains why the gospelers were careful to record two different versions:

The reason there are two versions of this story is that it is actually a jab at two different groups of people.

In one version, Jesus offers five fresh, whole loaves to five thousand people. These were standard rabbinical symbols for the entire population of Israel. In this version there are twelve baskets of leftovers, or rather, "crumbs." This is a dig at the Twelve Apostles, probably by pro-Paulists, Gentiles.

In the other version there are seven loaves, standing for the seven laws given to Noah which were binding on the entire human race. The four thousand fed in this version stand for the four directions, to illustrate that Jesus' saving power takes in the entire world. In this version the seven baskets of crumbs are a dig at seven widely known deacons of the early church.

So I am disinclined to believe this one. So were the disciples themselves, says Grant, "for they had not understood the incident of the loaves; their minds were closed. In other words, there had been no miracle to see. This reported miraculous act took place in the spiritual sphere alone [if at all]. What took place was some sort of non-miraculous edifying gesture." Grant thinks this is true of all the nature miracles. It is possible, in fact, probable, that the miracle stories we have were all originally presented as parables. The cursing of the fig tree, a miracle story in Mark and Matthew, retains its parable form in Luke.

Paul sneered, much later, "The Jews look for signs and the Greeks look for wisdom." But the Jews merely meant "show us your chops." Why, then, did Jesus say No? (Matthew 12:38, 39) Perhaps this is an apostolic cover-up too; or maybe there is something in it - "Jesus may conceivably have said things to discourage people from regarding him as just another wonder-worker. There were quite enough alleged wonder-workers already." He was possibly more concerned with what the wonders meant than with their plausibility.

3. Change of Heart

So precisely how, then, was one to get in through "the narrow gate"? "Repent and turn around," he said. The Greek word is metanoia, which literally means "turn on your heel" in the opposite direction. This idea was hardly unique to Jesus; the Old Testament is full of it. It was absolutely central to the teaching of Jesus' mentor, John the Baptist.

Baptisms and other ritual ablutions were common enough in Israel. John's innovation was to make it a symbol of repentance - of a permanent conversion experience. Logically, this meant that one baptism was enough; this, too, was new.

In the first century, John had a following as active and reverential as Jesus did - in fact, John gave Jesus serious competition as a cultic prophet, as can be seen from the traces of rivalry left in Acts of the Apostles and the ambiguous nature of the (re-edited) conversation at Jesus' baptism.

John is portrayed as being ambivalent about Jesus: at one point he is the Lamb of God, and later he wants to know if Jesus is the Messiah after all. The latter, says Grant, is probably authentic.

So Jesus underwent John's baptism, "in token of repentance for the forgiveness of sins," which is enough to make has of the doctrine of Jesus' sinlessness that developed after his death. It does, however, dovetail neatly with his own view of himself: "Why do you call me 'good?' There is none that is good except one, God."

The connection between repentance and forgiveness is obvious to an ex-Christian, but it was not so to the Jewish thinkers of Jesus' time. Grant does not elaborate on this; frankly, I don't believe it, not from a biblical, historical, or - especially - an ethical perspective. If forgiveness is offered to the unrepentant, you'd better watch your back! (Of course, to me forgiveness means reconciliation, not merely the foregoing of punishment or revenge.)

The "first irremovable wedge between Jesus and his fellow Jews" was his claim that he could actually forgive sins, a role previous thinkers and prophets had reserved for God. But, as he himself said, how is that any more bizarre than miraculous healing? The Jews, like some Fundamentalist Christians today, attributed illness to human sinfulness, either directly or generally, an idea that would eventually blossom into the ugly, plausible doctrine of original sin. So this is why Jesus accompanied healings by a pronouncement that the patient's sins were forgiven - the one proved the other, and furthermore proved the patient's faith in Jesus as the foundation of the encroaching Kingdom of God, and his (the patient's) worthiness to be a part of it.

What the hell's wrong with ordinary human compassion? Why wouldn't that be enough?

Those who have any respect for Jesus at all are most keenly attracted by "his repeatedly expressed willingness to address his preaching to sinners and to associate with them himself, to seek them out and deliberately extend to them his personal welcome and hospitality: delinquents, social outcasts, down-and-outs." But these people were only fit associates so far as they were open to "repentance and to accepting Jesus as the Agent of the kingdom of God. How far from the modern UU concept of "the inherent worth and dignity of every person"! It is, however, an improvement on the Jewish idea that "one should not consort with people liable to be a source of personal defilement, not to speak of the obvious danger that their manner of life would prove to be contagious." This idea, wherever it appears, is almost always carried to extremes of bigotry and parochialism. I suspect the danger is (except in the most extreme cases) overstated. "Bad company spoils good morals," sure enough! - and a prig is as dangerous as a prostitute.

And yet I can't turn loose of the Prodigal Son story altogether. But it is almost impossible to do right if you set limits on it - which, unfortunately, is the easiest way to do it. And Grant argues that this is the way Jesus forgave - conditionally, only those who could slip through "the narrow gate" - the ever-narrowing gate. But reading these parables, I wonder if Jesus wasn't a little better than he meant to be? Better than the church meant him to be? Revolution, though, was not in his stars. He was the inheritor of the Bible proverb that says God is against those who call for change (or so says the Bible translation I am most familiar with; maybe that is actually a mistranslation!). (Maybe it's time for a new generation of Bible redactors!)

"It is perfectly true that Jesus did elsewhere emphasize, amid the painful facts of Palestinian poverty, that lack of material means was not disqualification or might even be a positive advantage for admission tot the kingdom on the grounds, as we have seen, that poor men were exempted from their wealthy fellow-citizens' temptations." To which I counterpoise, without comment, this quotation from My Beautiful Laundrette: "[Our home country] has been sodomized by religion, which interferes with the making of money."

Grant says that we have Luke to credit for the gospels' ringing declarations in support of the wretched of the earth, but that Jesus himself was most concerned with "the poor in spirit [who] realize their abject helplessness, and therefore rely wholly on the aid which [Jesus], on behalf of God, will lavish upon him." It ain't so, folks. Pardon me, I need to go kill something.

4. The Galilean

In trying to decipher what Jesus' daily life must have been like, Grant leans on the gospels and the dictionary to conclude that Jesus the tekton's son was "a man of substance and "of good family." This differs from Maccoby's conception of him as a poor artisan slipping from sharecropping to homelessness. Not having studied the period on any depth, I cannot judge which is more likely.

So anyway, Jesus was born in Nazareth, or Capernaum. Or Cana. Somewhere in Galilee - certainly not in Bethlehem.

Galilee had only been Jewish for a couple of hundred years, and the population was still half pagan. The Jews of Galilee were, from the "mainline" standpoint, rather kooky - they were, by comparison, sloppy about ritual obligations and had a fanatic streak. Not an impressive background. But "in spite of their reputed religious unsoundness the Jews of Galilee retained all the ardour characteristic of converts: and this produced a rich crop of Galilean sages, before, during and after the lifetime of Jesus." Hence, eventually, the Matthean warning not to listen to anyone else. Grant trots out an example from the following generation: Hanina ben Dosa, a healer who "was believed to have been commended by a heavenly voice who proclaimed him, in the hearing of demons, the Son of God."

Jesus was, then, "a Galilean country saint who avoided or castigated the cosmopolitan places that turned a deaf ear to him" (Capernaum, Bethsaida, Chorazin - Tiberias, provincial capital, got no mention).

"The Gospels," says Grant, "are curiously reticent about Jesus' inner attitudes and states of mind and heart…He was very far removed from the 'gentle Jesus meek and mild' whose emasculate representations were so greatly admired in the 19^th century. The whole concept arises from a total misunderstanding of his doctrines of 'turning the other cheek' and universal tolerance and love, which were not founded on mildness but motivated by the total irrelevance of worldly contentions in the face of the need to prepare for God's kingdom." Succeeding generations have improved enormously on Jesus' intentions. It is pointless for him to look down on those who "love [their] brothers and relatives only", for after redefining brotherhood and family, that is precisely what he did.

5. Prophet and Teacher

The New Testament calls Jesus "Prophet, Teacher, Messiah (Christ), Son of Man, Son of God." What did each of these titles mean in the first century? Well, a real sure-enough heir of the Old Testament prophets would be something to see: a fearless, blunt-spoken champion of the oppressed - or, at least, of "true religion" - with miraculous special effects. There was even a prophecy in Deuteronomy that seemed to apply. A prophetic movement made the first-century Jewish establishment nervous, since "it tended to diminish their own authority and lead to treasonable movements"; and now we know why John the Baptist bought the farm. John having been a prophet, and Jesus a disciple of his, it was natural that Jesus should be thought to be a prophet - whether true or false.

But did you ever notice that Jesus is never quoted as saying "Thus saith the Lord," a phrase liberally sprinkled throughout the prophetic books of the Old Testament? For whereas the old prophets told of a future kingdom of God, Jesus believed that he was inaugurating it in his own time - and saw himself as a fulfillment of prophecy rather than as a source of new ones.

Popular Judaism of the day also believed in "The Master of Righteousness," "an exceptional teacher who would play a vital part in the emergence of the Kingdom of God," one who had flawless discernment and received divine revelations. The Qumran community actually was founded by someone who was awarded this title, which was passed on to hand-picked successors for a good long while; but eventually "The Master of Righteousness" got to be associated with the "end times" ushering in the kingdom of God. The gospelers refer to Jesus as a "teacher over fifty times; even his enemies regard him as a gifted teacher. He certainly could tell a mean parable.

And yet he did not act like a respectable Jewish spiritual teacher. His association with "sinners" and women meant that, for conservatives anyway, he was not "a role model." For his time, Jesus was a champion of women. He did not, as was the custom by this time, thank God that he had not been born a woman. He associated with and taught them freely - if they were Jewish - and certainly did not scruple to accept material support from them (Paul was much more chary about this last point, one of the few things I still admire about him).

Reading through Jesus' parables, you will find striking similes, arresting turns of phrase, and many of the elements of Hebrew poetry. But you won't find pages and pages of learned citations - that was the kind of thing the scribes specialized in. "He spoke with authority" - the authority of one who is sure of a special role in God's purpose - "and not as their scribes," who were mainly sure of their duty to get the facts right. Was Jesus' self-confidence faith - or megalomania?

And yet the New Testament does not record so very much of what Jesus taught. "Paul was amazingly ignorant of Jesus' teaching. Mark, too, knew or said surprisingly little about it, evidently regarding it as an inadequate testimony to Jesus' greatness." Matthew and Luke are the source of just about all we know of what Jesus taught.

As we know, Jesus taught in parables, which means mostly teaching stories, but also "proverbs; dark, enigmatic utterances; [and] mystic, prophetic intimations." His parables by and large resemble those of the rabbis - even unto themes in many cases - but his are for the most part more vivid, says Grant - and rather than being aids to explain the teaching, they are the teaching. No long, droning exegesis follows - as is too common in even lay religious literature today. In some cases (for instance, the parable of the sower) the early church thought that was too bad, and ventured to supply explanation. Possibly contrary to Jesus' own intent, for he did say "Those who have ears, let them hear." He wanted his hearers to think, on the theory that knowledge is better retained if it is hard-won (often, but not always, the case). To the Jewish teachers, a good parable needed to bear some resemblance to a riddle. Come to think of it, the same is true in Buddhism, as far as I know.

6. Messiah: Son of Man: Son of God

What did these titles mean to Jesus? By his day the term Messiah did indeed "refer to the long-awaited Saviour whose advent to introduce the kingdom of God the Jews had long been awaiting," (even to an individual redeemer as Christians still understand this term; whereas the Jews at first - as I believe they do now - understood it to refer to a successful communal effort at liberation). The air of Palestine was redolent of Messianic hope, and it condensed into prophets political and religious.

John the Baptist seems to have been one of the more impressive ones. His disciples were sure that he was the Messiah. In fact, this tradition persisted for centuries. The idea of Messiah as a superhuman, transcendent figure whose powers reach far beyond the human sphere developed gradually throughout the first century as the prospect of liberation by ordinary human means began to seem more and more unlikely. It, too, was current by Jesus' time, and afterwards, in the pages of the gospels, got mixed up with the expectation of a political/military savior of earthly Israel.

Jesus did not, apparently, consider himself such a liberator, which would explain why John the Baptist asked him if he was "the one who is to come," or somebody else. Jesus was not shaping up as a conqueror of any recognizable kind. A perilous business, anyhow, under Roman rule; and the landscape was too thickly strewn with would-be conquerors already.

Then did he believe himself to be a "supernatural figure who would bring in the kingdom by some miraculous heavenly act?" He never said so. Even when Pilate asked him, point-blank, he waffled. No, he was not "king of the Jews"; he had some other, equally important, place in the kingdom of God (so he though) - and it would have been pointless trying to explain it to a pagan. Or even to the high priests, because his sense of his mission apparently did not fall into either messianic category. "Son of Man" is the one title Jesus consistently applied to himself. The gospelers, like the early church, did not know what to make of it, but it has some powerful though somewhat mysterious Old Testament associations: "In the prophecies of Ezekiel it means simply 'a human being,' a man in his weakness and insignificance. In Psalm 8 it means man weak and insignificant but destined for authority second only to that of God. In Psalm 80 it denotes Israel, made strong out of weakness. In the visions of Daniel of four beasts which symbolized successive despotic powers, comes one like a Son of man symbolizing [corporately] the saints of the Most High to whom God is about to entrust his judgment and kingdom." Which of these did Jesus mean? All of them; he needed the elbow room.

Grant thinks that the "Son of Man" in Luke 12:8 and Mark 8:38 is not Jesus, but someone else. It so sharply contradicts the general Church assurance that Jesus would be the visitant that it must be authentic." But I don't see any contradiction at all.

It is not likely that Jesus ever called himself "the Son of God." Though the phrase occurs often in the gospels, it is placed in Jesus mouth on but one occasion - when he is talking about something that is beyond his powers (Matt. 15:24; Mark 7:27; Matthew 10:5; John 4:9). The first generation of Christians believed that Jesus became Son of God fairly late in life - at his baptism, or was it his resurrection? They seem to have not known about the Annunciation and what followed, or given it short shrift. The Old Testament is full of references to God being the father of all Israel, but already by the time of the kings the idea was that "some are more sons of God than others." An unavoidable distinction, really - all societies betray disparities in levels of spirituality, piety and power.

By the first century, the Jews would have thought the title "son of God" appropriate for any sage who seemed to have God's special favor. It is likely that Jesus did not view himself as the only "son of God"; after all he taught his disciples to pray to "Our Father." Given all the re-editing that the gospels have undergone, though, it is no longer possible to ascertain what Jesus meant by calling himself a son of God - "But," says Grant, "we must attempt a more positive estimate…Today the term is repeated parrot-fashion in religious instruction without reflecting on its intensity and strangeness."

7. Failure in Galilee

So Jesus took al the holy titles that were flying about and redefined them. This was shocking - but why? Well, how do you feel when someone claims to receive a mission directly from God? Especially a mission that seems to you dubious, cater-corner to what you know of God's purpose?

What lay on the other side of this spiritual tug-of-war in Jesus' day?

First of all, there were the Pharisees, or "separated ones," although they preferred to call themselves Haberim, "equals," thank you very much (say, I hear an echo of the Yiddish chaver, "brother. I am beginning to like the Pharisees.)

The Pharisees went on as they began - as progressives. They began 200 years or so before Jesus, when the Maccabees decided it would be only fitting for the King of Israel to be High Priest as well. The Pharisees were, however, neither political activists nor did they expect God to turn the world upside down. They were in love with the law of their God and believed it answered every situation - but they also believed in reinterpretation. This made oral tradition and midrash not only possible, but essential.

Grant quotes Haim Cohen:

"They studied the word of the Torah and indulged in continuous contemplation of the right, in an insistent search for the ethical life. They possessed a wide reputation for piety, tolerance, wisdom. This reputation closed the Pharisees with enormous power, used with remarkable self-restraint. They were loath to impose punishment for crime, and when compelled by evidence to do so, inclined towards leniency. They treated one another with great affection, and were generally mild and temperate towards opponents. They despised present luxury, and sought instead to deserve future bliss. They realistically appraised the paradox of man's consciousness of freedom, and of circumstances beyond his control, such as heredity and education, weighting his decisions.

"For generation after generation, this remarkable group, disciples of the prophets, laboured, studied, and taught in Jerusalem." Pharisee leaders, though not political activists, and mostly middle class, "often championed the cause of ordinary people and the oppressed."

Admittedly, they were susceptible to the kind of puritanical legalism we now associate with the word "Pharisee," and which in turn can lead to complacency and hypocrisy - but as usual, it all sprang from a desire to err on the side of caution in doing God's will.

Although the Pharisee-run synagogues were centers of religious education, it was the "scribes" - the "doctors of the law" who provided the grist for the legalistic tendency of Pharasaism; "preservers, scrutinizers, above all teachers of the law." And interpreters in even the most literal sense, since Biblical Hebrew had fallen into disuse. These were unpaid laymen, whose formidable knowledge was making them a force to be reckoned with in Judaea.

The hostility between the Christians and the Pharisees probably dates back no further than the failed Jewish revolt against Rome in the generation after Jesus died - at which time the Church was making strenuous efforts to distinguish itself from the Jews, to get on the Romans' good side.

Some scribes and Pharisees, at least, sympathized with Jesus, as we can see from the book of Luke and Jesus spoke approvingly of some of them.

Even when Jesus appears to flout Jewish law, he is more obedient to it than those unfamiliar with it might realize. That famous cure on the sabbath, which is said to have so scandalized the Pharisees, was accomplished, not by "work," which was forbidden, but by "words" which were not; it had already been worked out in Jewish law.

However, Jesus did say "I have come not to abolish [the Law and the Prophets], but to complete." In other words, the Law, while essential, was not enough. The prospect of modification per se was not repugnant to the Pharisees; it was this Messiah thing that stuck in their craw. "For, whenever he spoke of the Law and of ethics, he was characteristically thinking of them as wholly subordinate to his own all-important installation of the Kingdom of God, which superseded the law. 'Until John [the Baptist], it was the Law and the prophets: since then there is the good news of the Kingdom of God.' (Luke 16:16)" "He spoke as one having authority, and not as their scribes," who were careful to get every citation right; and they marveled - at his barefaced chutzpah, probably. But "that is why, for example, his comments on the controversial regulations regarding the sabbath, or divorce, or diet, provide nothing sensational. They were intended merely as useful working rules,…but entirely secondary to his overriding preoccupation with the kingdom."

For all their commonalities, the strife between Jesus on the one hand and the scribes and Pharisees on the other is real; there Is no war so bitter as a civil war. Grant believes that he probably did make those nasty remarks the gospels attribute to him, and they probably did object to Jesus claiming a special relationship with God that no one else had. It was his claiming power to forgive sins that was the last straw. True, the term "Son of God" had been in use as an honorific for sages before this, but the way the disciples used it for Jesus creeped them out; "he claimed equality with God (John 15:18; 19:7; [Grant says John 8:50 is spurious but doesn't comment further on it]).

"A later Jewish writer summed up their protests by saying: 'It is not permitted to say: "The Holy One - blessed be he - has a son."'" To claim a genetic relationship to God was only a hair's-breadth away from claiming to be God.

Grant says that it was these criticism that Jesus was reacting to when he called them "vipers" and said they were "subject to Gehenna." Yet he most often took them to task for "hypocrisy," because "it annulled the whole intention of the almighty, blinded a man to his own failings, making it impossible for him to experience the repentance, the total change of heart, which was needed before he could be admitted to God's kingdom." This vituperation amounted to a declaration of war. So of course the Pharisees moved to put an end to his mission (but probably not to his life), which is what Jesus must have been referring to when he said, "Ever since the coming of John the Baptist the kingdom of God is being subjected to violence and violent men are maltreating it" (Matthew 11:132; Luke 16:16).

Jesus sought not to form a new religion but to turn the Jews afresh to God through himself. He was most emphatically not looking for Gentile disciples, as his reply to the Syrophoenician woman with the demonized daughter makes clear.

The Jews have always been ambivalent about Gentile converts. Jesus, says Grant, had a distinctly pearls-before-swine attitude towards Gentiles - whether this was due to Jewish chauvinism or reluctance to delay the kingdom of God by setting up another ministry, Grant is not sure. (But more recent scholars, like Hyam Maccoby, think Jesus was a flat-out egalitarian of the most Klansman-scaring type.)

Eventually, he sent out his disciples to preach his message - another familiar practice of other Jewish prophets of the period - with this difference: the disciples of other sages were "bound to the Torah; whereas the disciples of Jesus were bound to him personally." Modern psychologists and students of religion judge this kind of personal fealty to be one of the marks of a "cult."

The Gospels gave conflicting reports of this first missionary trip [Mark 1:13; Luke 9:10; 10:11; Mark 9:18; 8:33; 14:66-72] These reflect a controversy in the early church about the role of the apostles. They were Jews; by the time the gospels were written a rift had arisen between the Jewish church in Jerusalem and the Gentile church elsewhere which Paul started - the dispute was worsened by the Jewish revolt against Rome, in which the Jewish Christians were thought to have been involved. The gospelers were pro-Gentile, and inclined to look down on anything associated with the Jerusalem church - and besides it was much easier to blame the apostles for the failure of the mission to the Jews than to blame Jesus himself. And fail they did. Jesus did not say "a prophet is without honor in his own country" for nothing.

It was because the Gentile church was by this time alienated from the Jerusalem church, long led by Jesus' brothers, that the gospels record their initial rejection of Jesus. Eventually all but a tiny core of loyalists had deserted him. "The Parable of the Sower, who sowed so much seed on useless soil, speaks of those who 'hear the word…but fail to understand it'; such people were the majority of his hearers, who had not responded to his central message… [in] the Parable of the Vineyard…the tenants behaved with brutal obstructiveness to their landlord…So the story which the gospels tell is the reverse of a success story." It was only when nearly everyone else had rejected him that Herod Antipas decided the time was ripe to move against him. Grant lays out a sketch of the first-century political situation such as you probably never got in Sunday School (certainly I never heard the like at any Kingdom Hall), even unto Christian connections in Herod's own household. It was, basically, Jesus' connections to John the Baptist, and John's location in or near rebel territory on the Nabataean [Arabian] frontier, that made Herod anxious. Certainly the landscape was rich in political rebels and subversives, but were Jesus and his disciples really among them? For instance, was "Simon the Zealot" a member of the ultra-nationalist party that began to attract attention in the generation after Jesus? Was "Simon bar Jonah, a.k.a. Simon Peter, really a barjonah -- a terrorist or outlaw? Grant thinks not; by the time the gospels were written, the church was trying to get on the Romans' good side, and would have called them something else if "Zealot" and "bar Jonah" had had only, or predominantly, those meanings. No, it is likely, that, as Jehovah's Witnesses and other pacifist sects would like to believe, that Jesus' earliest disciples left their prior political convictions "at the door," as "irrelevant" to the mission of Jesus.

8. Fatal Challenge in Jerusalem

It is very likely that Jesus actually did foresee his own death - as unmiraculously as Martin Luther King did. After all, by going to Jerusalem to preach, after Galilee became too hot for him, he was placing his head in the lion's mouth. "His belief in his duty to carry out God's purpose was so powerful that he would persevere with it even at the cost of his life. Scriptural backing was available. 'It is unthinkable for a prophet to meet his death anywhere but in Jerusalem.' …he did not want to die. But he went to Jerusalem in the knowledge that he was going to." For he was convinced that his death, much as he wished to avoid it, would prove to be a catalyst that would bring on the apocalyptic transformation of the world; partly because his fate would move people to the complete repentance necessary for salvation; but there was more to it than that. Jesus had in mind the "Suffering Servant" prophecies of Second Isaiah. The whole doctrine of suffering for others' sins is rooted here. It was very difficult to avoid getting this figure mixed up with the Messiah, as far as their connection with salvation was concerned; but it Jesus' own day that was not the prevailing view.

Obviously a lot of this was worked out after Jesus' death; but Grant once again trots out the argument that "in the first century, this tradition was too weird not to be authentic." Actually, I am getting a little tired of this argument. Every religion has doctrines and tradition that eventually get jettisoned when they prove embarrassing, as the "suffering servant" idea did in the early church; does that mean, for instance, (to take the case I am most familiar with) that the pyramidology of Charles Russell was proved true by the fact that Jehovah's Witnesses abandoned it later?

Well, anyway, Jesus was not the first Hebrew prophet to be martyred. As their successor and culminator, it seemed reasonable that he should share their occupational hazards - but the Bible contains only one record of a prophet being put to death: Zechariah the son of Jehoiada - not the famous one, but another, very minor prophet of the 9^th century BCE. Jewish legend, though, said that five of the most famous prophets had also been martyred; Jewish tradition was full of real martyrs from the Maccabees onward; and modern history has added far too many names to the list.

The apostles received this prospect with unmitigated incomprehension and dismay. "No wonder, then, that his supporters fell away." His imminent death was not in the tradition of the prophet-martyrs, but "We had been hoping that he was the man to liberate Israel." At the last moment even the apostles deserted him. No wonder Jesus said "he that is not for me is against me" - and Grant says the other version, "he that is not against me is for me" is an inauthentic, later addition.

And so we run up against Jesus' entry into Jerusalem. What happened? Did Jesus deliberately act out Zechariah's prophecy, or did the apostles invent the whole thing afterwards? "As he began to face his ordeal it was only to be expected that biblical references should be present in his mind and should to some extent govern his actions…[This particular prophetic pattern] provided the opportunity for a deliberate, ostentatious demonstration of his activity and purpose in installing the kingdom of God. And…it was a deliberate corrective to public opinion. For the whole point of Zechariah's prophecy is the peaceful and humble nature of the triumphant personage. … True, it may be doubted whether his attempt to convince people of this was successful, to judge from the welcoming cries and invocations to royal David with which some of them received him."

So Jesus marked time teaching in the Temple, maybe only a week. The Temple was controlled by the Sadducees - conservatives, landed aristocrats from whose ranks the priests came. They were quislings, too. Grant says this is all the trustworthy information we have on them, "because all surviving sources are unfriendly." They were "sola scriptura" types, rejecting commentary, meticulous about ritual, and distrustful of scriptural reinterpretation. "Ethical teaching, likewise, did not interest them a great deal," which sets off alarm bells in my mind, thank you very much!

The Sadducees found Jesus far more objectionable than the scribes and Pharisees did; after all, they had considerable investment in the status quo, which impressed Jesus not at all.

Jesus' attitude toward the Sadducees survives in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The two who neglect to help the victim are 1) a priest and 2) a Levite - the priestly clan in charge of the actual temple ritual. (Jesus was not actually keen on the Samaritans, tough; he told his disciples to stay out of Samaria).

Now Jesus, knowing he has absolutely nothing left to lose, "cleanses" the temple - not necessarily because it had become a "den of robbers" - the conformity to Jeremiah is awfully suspicious - nor for the Gentiles' sake - the "house of prayer for all peoples" phrase is pasted in from Zechariah, says Grant, although the Bible Gateway places it in Jeremiah and Isaiah. Grant believes that Jesus' previous apathy toward Gentiles makes it unlikely that Jesus cleansed out profiteers in an excess of egalitarian zeal. No, he was apparently just bent on thoroughly desecularizing the place, an essential housekeeping task before the Kingdom dawned. And it was a challenge to the Sadducee establishment.

Having decided that compromise would vitiate the installation of God's Kingdom even if it kept him alive, Jesus plunged on to his catalytic end. The End

"The tale told by the Gospels of his last days is vivid and circumstantial. But they are also frequently at variance with one another."

It is probable, though grant thinks it is not certain, that Jesus did not say of the bread and wine, "This is my body…this is my blood" - Paul's testimony notwithstanding. It is too churchy and not at all Jewish; but it seems not at all unlikely that there was some talk about what Jesus' imminent death would do for Israel.

How could the apostles hear Jesus prayers in Gethsemane if they were asleep? Well, maybe they were only mentally asleep. Or maybe this was just another Gentile dig at the Jewish apostles, written years later. In any case, the bitter anguish and terror Jesus expresses in these accounts are utterly believable. And how much at odds they are with the view of Jesus as the perfect, perfectly faithful, flawlessly spiritual son of God! "Theologians unwilling to accept imperfections in Jesus have rejected such admissions of distress."

No wonder Jesus hasn't spoken to me for years; the man has been buried under two thousand years of holy special effects. Christianity seems to do them so badly, too.

The Sanhedrin had in ancient times been the "Supreme Court" of Israel; in Jesus' day its job was to advise the Roman overlords, as well as to uphold Jewish law. They had two grave charges against him: that he had threatened to destroy the temple - consider how the Jews reacted when the Romans actually did so - and that he had claimed to be the son of God. The first charge collapsed and he did not quite say yea or nay to the other, which, in that time and place, amounted to self-incrimination. All these claims had been made before, by men who lived to tell the tale - but they had not, like Jesus, claimed the ability to forgive sins. This amounted to blasphemy, a capital crime.

So they handed him over to Pilate (it is not now certain whether they were powerless, or merely to prudent, to carry out the execution themselves), who at first could not see that Jesus had done anything so very bad. "For the Roman governors were not by any means willing to enforce the capital penalty for Jewish theological offenses - which they regarded as irrelevant to their function of maintaining imperial law and order," so the charges against Jesus had to be recast in political terms. It was enough to explain that he had claimed to be the Messiah, which, among other things, meant "King of the Jews." There was no need to mention to Pilate that Jesus had already expressly denied being this kind of political liberator.

They accused him of advocating tax-dodging, too - which, Grant says, is contradicted by the story of the Tribute Penny - which Robert Price says is much too similar to an old rabbinical story to be historical.

Pilate tried to pass the buck, if the record can be believed. History shows him to have been masterful, nay, ruthless - not the sort of person who would be inclined to let Jesus off. It is possible that much of this part of the story was added after the fact to distance Christianity from the rebel Jews, and to show Christians that their docility was not entirely unappreciated.

What about "Barabbas, the thief and robber," whose release the Jews demanded in Jesus' stead? Well, for someone as heartless as Pilate to release a prisoner annually is uncharacteristic - and quite undocumented, too. And "Barabbas" - "Jesus Barabbas," in some versions of Matthew - means "Jesus, son of the father" - why, I see a human parallel to the scapegoat ritual outlined in the Old Testament. Besides, the Jews have nothing to do in this scene except look bad. They get to "strain out the gnat while swallowing the camel," to accept a bad Jesus instead of a good one. It's a nasty little tarbrush of a story.

"All that can be said is that [Jesus] died a miserable and horrible death, the death of a failure." And yet the miraculous details embroidered onto his life and death kept his disciples together and eventually changed the course of history. There are, after all, people in places his best-educated contemporaries never heard of, who think this man was God.

9. From Disaster to Triumph

But how did this happen?

Grant goes on to discuss the empty tomb, saying that the church "would never have concocted such a statement on its own account, the statement that this most solemn and fateful of all discoveries was made by women, including a woman with an immoral record, at that" - referring to Mary Magdalene; but the tradition of her "immorality" only goes back to the Middle Ages.

The only plausible datum in the Resurrection accounts is that "They have taken his body and we do not know where it is." How bitter it would have been for them to face the fact that their beloved Rabbi had been denied even a decent burial! (Some scholars think that the entire tomb story is probably unhistorical, for the Roman government would not have given up the body of a criminal, but would have dissolved it in quicklime instead.)

The early widespread belief in Jesus' resurrection "throws a remarkable retrospective light on Jesus' personality. It must have made, when he was alive, an overwhelmingly forceful impression on his followers if they believed that even his death, his violent humiliating criminal death, was unable to remove him for more than three days from the earth and from their presence."

Ah, but consider the time, place and audience: The poorest of the poor, the most brutalized subjects of a repressive regime. Such people are hungry for miracles. Such people will throw a mantle of authority over almost anybody - Huey Long, Father Coughlin, Mussolini, Oral Roberts. It is surprising what passes for "charisma" if you are hungry enough.

Not that I mean to denigrate Jesus, who, after all, meant beautifully - but I believe Grant underestimates the power of miracle- hunger.

Resurrection - a bodily resurrection to life on earth - goes tack to the book of Daniel, written about the second century BCE - but who would benefit? All Israelites, or just the righteous ones? Or maybe even all mankind? Or maybe it was a symbol for the resuscitation of a faltering community or nation? At any rate, the idea of a physical resurrection for individuals had been gaining ground in Jewish popular thought. Without the idea of the Resurrection, Christianity would have died a-borning. If Jesus was still alive and gone to heaven, he was still free to usher in the kingdom of God at any moment.

But we hear nothing - that is, nothing contemporary - of any redemptive value in Jesus' death until Paul gets into the act.

"A few years later, these two happenings, together with the Crucifixion hailed as redemptive which preceded them, completely dominated the confused, brilliant intellect of Paul," who "showed a startling lack of concern for the occurrences of Jesus' life and career….What concerned his purpose, instead, was the Crucifixion and subsequent paradoxical transformation of this miserable end into victory."

Preaching to non-Jews was another major change in direction. When this happened the Jewish law was abandoned for good and all.

But when Paul died the whole enterprise almost flickered out again.

However, when the Jews revolted against Rome (63-70 CE) and lost, the balance of power changed in the church. To be at all Jewish was a liability, just as being a polygamous Mormon was in the mid-19^th century, and for similar reasons.

And it was Gentile Christians, after the failed Jewish revolt, who wrote the Gospels - as is easily seen from their distorted picture of first-century Judaism. Grant gives several plausible reasons why the Gospel authors wrote under the names Matthew, Mark, Luke and John: 1) the security of anonymity; 2) "pious falsification," to attract favorable attention; 3) humility ("who am I to be writing a biography of Our Lord?")

As in all hagiographies, history came second. Anything that would not contribute to "faith that Jesus is the Christ, the son of God was left out. Of course chronology and historical background suffered.

Wit this in mind, Grant says it is still possible to reconstruct a historically accurate life of Jesus; this is one of the tasks of the Jesus Seminar. Some theologians believe that the historical facts are unimportant, that "Jesus is a catalyst whose continuous presence precipitates a crisis of faith in our hearts and forces us to make a decision for or against."

Actually, though, the gospels read very much like other historians of antiquity. "Herodotus himself, the 'father of History,' employed a composite pattern of incident and anecdote and legend not unlike that of the evangelists. And no one reading Livy with his close attention to portents, or Tacitus with his melodramatic set-pieces, can suppose that they felt themselves unduly restricted to unadulterated fact. Besides, such pagan historians usually wrote with a moralizing edifying bias which the evangelists would have applauded." Grant believes that the Gospels come off little worse than ancient secular historians with regard to truthfulness.

About this "Q" thing: it only means that an attempt has been made to reconstruct a source (Quelle in German) document from quotations of it in someone else's work. This is by no means an illegitimate endeavor; after all, Celsus is known today only by quotations in the work of other writers - mainly Christians refuting his opinions.

The reason modern scholars think that Mark was the first Gospel is that Matthew wand John cannibalized a lot of it.

However, there is another large heap of verses that Matthew and John have in common with each other - but not with Mark. Evidently they were quoting from a source, now lost, that consisted of or included a collection of the sayings of Jesus.

Well, there is not a single copy of "Q" in existence. You'd think some effort would have been made to preserve it. Maybe it was a body of oral tradition, like rabbinic literature was to begin with? But a lot of those shared quotes match word for word. Maybe at least part of it was written down before the gospels were?

Grant goes into a lot of description about the intent and probable sources of the four gospels as shown by stylistic differences, which I am too ignorant to summarize here.

It was only after the church had (more or less) settled upon the nature of Christ that they could look back on his human life and teachings with some degree of equanimity and profit. The idea of the dying and resurrected god was an old one in the ancient world (though foreign to Judaism). What a powerful attraction it must have been to prove that He had visited the earth only a few generations back! And then there was the heartbreaking selflessness of Jesus' ethical code, which shines much brighter when divorced (as it had to be) from his own assumption that the Kingdom would arrive at any moment. "The words and deeds ascribed to him seemed to retain their validity independently of that non-fulfillment; and they had practical effects on an extensive scale, for example in the development of social services. The excellence of these, said the Emperor Julian (yes, Julian the Apostate) explained why Jesus finally conquered the Roman Empire."

Here, on the last page of the last chapter, we come to the reason I believe that some few fragments of the Bible contain the genuine Word of God. Once divorced from millenialism and its sneaky prospect of immediate rescue by the divine "cavalry," Christian ethics as expressed by Jesus himself are an expression of frighteningly radical love. No wonder that Shaw could say that Christianity has never been tried (actually, I can't prove he ever did say this). But I wonder if we may not someday outgrow Jesus -- even the real Jesus, not the paint-and-plaster Jesus of the storybooks.

© 1996 Michaele Maurer
Created Sunday, September 1, 1996 by Michaele Maurer