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Part One:
A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE
Around the year 107, the
Christian bishop of Antioch made a last, doleful journey. Under military escort Ignatius travelled by land from Antioch to
Rome, where in its brutal arena he was to die a martyr's death. Along the way he wrote to several Christian communities.
To the Trallians he said: "Close
your ears then if anyone preaches to you without speaking of Jesus Christ. Christ was of David's line. He was the son of Mary;
he was really born, ate and drank, was really persecuted under Pontius Pilate, was really crucified....He was also truly raised
from the dead."
But there is something very curious
about the occurrence of such ideas in Ignatius' letters. Let's leave the Gospels aside for now, except to say that there is
no good reason to date any of them before the late first century, and look at the remaining corpus of surviving Christian
writings to Ignatius' time.
The above chart includes the
genuine letters of Paul, written in the 50s; letters written later in the first century under his name: Colossians, Ephesians,
2 Thessalonians; and the three Pastorals (1 & 2 Timothy & Titus) dated to the second century; other New Testament
epistles: James, Hebrews, Jude, 1 & 2 Peter, 1, 2 & 3 John; and Revelation. Also included are non-canonical writings:
1 Clement, the Didache (later called The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles), the letters of Ignatius, and the Epistle of Barnabas.
The dates of many of these documents, all originally written in Greek, are difficult to fix and are here only approximate.
Several times in his letters
Ignatius stresses his belief in Jesus as the son of Mary, as a man who had lived at the time of Herod, who had suffered and
died under Pontius Pilate. Every Christian would agree that these are essential elements of the Gospel story, along with the
portrayal of Jesus as an ethical teacher, as a worker of miracles, an apocalyptic preacher of the coming Kingdom of God. And
yet when we step outside those Gospels into the much more rarefied atmosphere of the first century epistles, we encounter
a huge puzzle.
Before Ignatius, not a single
reference to Pontius Pilate, Jesus' executioner, is to be found. Ignatius is also the first to mention Mary; Joseph, Jesus'
father, nowhere appears. The earliest reference to Jesus as any kind of a teacher comes in 1 Clement, just before Ignatius,
who himself seems curiously unaware of any of Jesus' teachings. To find the first indication of Jesus as a miracle worker,
we must move beyond Ignatius to the Epistle of Barnabas. Other notable elements of the Gospel story are equally hard to find.
This strange silence on the Gospel
Jesus which pervades almost a century of Christian correspondence cries out for explanation. It cannot be dismissed as some
inconsequential quirk, or by the blithe observation made by New Testament scholarship that early Christian writers "show no
interest" in the earthly life of Jesus. Something is going on here. In Part One, we are going to take a close look at this
"Conspiracy of Silence" to which Paul and every other Christian writer of the first century seems to be a party.
Christianity was allegedly born
within Judaism, whose basic theological tenet was: God is One. The ultimate blasphemy for a Jew would have been to associate
any man with God. Yet what did those first Christians do? They seemingly took someone regarded as a crucified criminal and
turned him into the Son of God and Savior of the world. They gave him titles and roles formerly reserved for God alone. They
made him pre-existent: sharing divinity with God in heaven before the world was made. Nor was this something that evolved
over time. All this highly spiritual and mythological thinking is the very earliest expression we find about Jesus.
And yet there is a resounding
silence in Paul and the other first century writers. We might call it "The Missing Equation." Nowhere does anyone state that
this Son of God and Savior, this cosmic Christ they are all talking about, was the man Jesus of Nazareth, recently put to
death in Judea. Nowhere is there any defence of this outlandish, blasphemous proposition, the first necessary element (presumably)
in the Christian message: that a recent man was God.
Such a defence would have been
required even for gentile listeners. The Greeks and Romans had their own religious philosophies (to be looked at in greater
detail in Part Two), which included the idea of a divine Son, of an intermediary between God and the world, but such spiritual
concepts had never been equated with a human being.
By contrast, look at the Acts
of the Apostles, which a number of critical scholars (John Knox, J. T. Townsend, Burton Mack, J. C. O'Neill) judge was written
well into the second century. (See Reader Feedback Set 17.) In chapter 2, Peter is represented as speaking to the Jews like this: "Men of Israel, hear
my words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God..." And he goes on to preach about this Jesus, whom "God has made
both Lord and Christ."
Here is the equation missing
in the first century epistles. It starts with the human Jesus and declares him to have been divine or made divine. Paul and
other early writers, however, seem to speak solely of a divine Christ. He is the starting point, a kind of given, and is never
identified with a recent human being. Spiritual beliefs are stated about this divine Christ and Son of God. Paul believes
in a Son of God, not that anyone was the Son of God.
1 Corinthians 8:6, for example,
says: "For us there is one God, the Father, from whom all being comes; and there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all
things came to be and we through him." In the same letter, Paul recites the gospel he preached (15:3-4): "That Christ died
for our sins according to the scriptures; that he was buried; that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures."
Why would the equation of this divine Savior with the recent Jesus of Nazareth not be a necessary and natural part of at least
some of the faith declarations or even simple arguments and discussions we find in all the first century epistles? It is notably
missing in 1 Corinthians 1:18f, where Paul is defending God's wisdom and the apparent folly of Christian doctrine, yet he
feels no necessity to include a defence of the folly that a human being has been elevated to divinity. I will leave the reader
to peruse other passages, such as Philippians 2:6-11, Colossians 1:15-20, the first chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews,
and so on, and to ask where is the recent Jesus of Nazareth in all this, the man who had supposedly walked the very earth
which these writers too had trod, in many cases within their own lifetimes.
Consider another great silence:
on the teachings of Jesus. The first century epistles regularly give moral maxims, sayings, admonitions, which in the Gospels
are spoken by Jesus, without ever attributing them to him. The well-known "Love Your Neighbor," originally from Leviticus,
is quoted in James, the Didache, and three times in Paul, yet none of them points out that Jesus had made this a centerpiece
of his own teaching. Both Paul (1 Thessalonians 4:9) and the writer of 1 John even attribute such love commands to God, not
Jesus!
When Hebrews talks of the "voice"
of Christ today (1:2f, 2:11, 3:7, 10:5), why is it all from the Old Testament? When Paul, in Romans 8:26, says that "we do
not know how we are to pray," does this mean he is unaware that Jesus taught the Lord's Prayer to his disciples? When the
writer of 1 Peter urges, "do not repay wrong with wrong, but retaliate with blessing," has he forgotten Jesus' "turn the other
cheek"? Romans 12 and 13 is a litany of Christian ethics, as is the Epistle of James and parts of the "Two Ways" instruction
in the Didache and Epistle of Barnabas; but though many of these precepts correspond to Jesus' Gospel teachings, not a single
glance is made in his direction. Such examples could be multiplied by the dozen.
In passing, it must be noted
that those "words of the Lord" which Paul puts forward as guides to certain practices in his Christian communities (1 Corinthians
7:10 and 9:14) are not from any record of earthly pronouncements by Jesus. It is a recognized feature of the early Christian
movement that charismatic preachers like Paul believed themselves to be in direct communication with the spiritual Christ
in heaven, receiving from him instruction and inspiration. (See R. Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition, p.127;
Burton Mack, A Myth of Innocence, p.87, n.7; Werner Kelber, The Oral and the Written Gospel, p.206.)
Christianity and certain Jewish
sects believed that the end of the world and the establishment of God's Kingdom was at hand. Paul tells his readers: "the
time we live in will not last long," and "you know the Day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night." But can Paul be truly
unaware that Jesus himself had made almost identical apocalyptic predictions, as recorded in passages like Mark 13:30 and
Matthew 24:42? He shows no sign of it. He and others seem similarly ignorant of Jesus' stance in regard to the cleanness of
foods, on the question of keeping the whole of the Jewish Law, on the issue of preaching to the gentiles, even in situations
where they are engaged in bitter debate over such issues.
Nor is there any reference in
the epistles to Jesus as the Son of Man, despite the fact that the Gospels are full of this favorite self-designation of Jesus.
This apocalyptic figure, taken from the Book of Daniel (7:13), appears in a cluster of Christian and Jewish sectarian documents
in the latter first century, including the Gospels, where Jesus declares himself to be the one who will arrive at the End-time
on the clouds of heaven to judge the world and establish the Kingdom. It seems inconceivable that Paul, with all his preoccupation
about the imminent End (see 1 Thessalonians 4:15-18, for example) would either be unaware of Jesus' declared role as the Son
of Man, or choose to ignore it.
But the silence extends beyond
individual pronouncements to Jesus' ministry as a whole, and it is nowhere more startling than in Romans 10. Paul is anxious
to show that the Jews have no excuse for failing to believe in Christ and gaining salvation, for they have heard the good
news about him from appointed messengers like Paul himself. And he contrasts the unresponsive Jews with the gentiles who welcomed
it. But surely Paul has left out the glaringly obvious. For the Jews—or at least some of them—had supposedly rejected
that message from the very lips of Jesus himself, whereas the gentiles had believed second-hand. In verse 18 Paul asks dramatically:
"But can it be they never heard it (i.e., the message)?" How could he fail to highlight his countrymen's spurning of Jesus'
very own person? Yet all he refers to are apostles like himself who have "preached to the ends of the earth."
Then in Romans 11, Paul goes
on to compound this silence by describing the extent of Israel's rejection, wherein he quotes Elijah's words from 1 Kings
about the Jews' alleged habit (a largely unfounded myth) of killing their own prophets. Yet Paul fails to add to this record
the culminating atrocity of the killing of the Son of God himself. (For 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16, see Part Two.)
This is a recurring feature of
Paul's letters: he totally ignores Jesus' recent career and places the focus of revelation and salvation entirely upon the
missionary movement of which he is the prominent member (as he sees it). The pseudo-Pauline letters do this, too.
Read passages like Romans 16:25-27,
Colossians 1:25-27, Ephesians 3:5-10 and ask yourself where is Jesus' role in disclosing God's long-hidden secret and plan
for salvation? Why, in 2 Corinthians 5:18, is it Paul who has been given the ministry of reconciliation between man and God,
and not Jesus in his ministry? (The cryptic and ubiquitous little phrase "in / through Christ" which Paul often inserts in
passages like this hardly encompasses such a meaning, and I will be talking about what it does mean in Part Two.)
Paul's view of the present period
leading up to the end of the world seems to take no account of the recent activity of Jesus on earth. He gives us no "interregnum,"
no period between Christ's death and resurrection, and his future Coming. Passages in Romans 8 (18-25) and 13 (11-12), and
especially 2 Corinthians 6:2 ("Now [referring to his own work] has the day of deliverance dawned"), envision no impingement
of Jesus' recent career on the progression from the old age to the new; rather, it is Paul's own present activity which is
an integral part of this process. Nor does he ever address the question which would have reflected popular expectation: Why
did the actual coming of the Messiah not in itself produce the arrival of the Kingdom? In the epistles, Christ's anticipated
Coming at the End-time is never spoken of as a "return" or second Coming; the impression conveyed is that this will be his
first appearance in person on earth. (For Hebrews 9:28, see Epilogue of Supplementary Article No. 9: A Sacrifice in Heaven.)
No first century epistle mentions
that Jesus performed miracles. In some cases the silence is striking. Both Colossians and Ephesians view Jesus as the Savior
whose death has rescued mankind from the demonic powers who were believed to pervade the world, causing sin, disease and misfortune.
But not even in these letters is there any mention of the healing miracles that the Gospels are full of, those exorcisms which
would have shown that Jesus had conquered such demons even while he was on earth.
In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul is
anxious to convince his readers that humans can be resurrected from the dead. Why then does he not point to any traditions
that Jesus himself had raised several people from the dead? Where is Lazarus?
In several letters Paul deals
with accusations by certain unnamed rivals that he is not a legitimate apostle. Even Peter and James dispute his authority
to do certain things. Can we believe that in such situations no one would ever have used the argument that Paul had not been
an actual follower of Jesus, whereas others had? Paul never discusses the point. In fact, he claims (1 Cor. 9:1 and 15:8)
that he has "seen" the Lord, just as Peter and everyone else have. This is an obvious reference to visions, one of the standard
modes of religious revelation in this period. And as Paul's "seeing" of the Lord is acknowledged to have been a visionary
one, his comparison of himself with the other apostles suggests that their contact with Jesus was of the same nature: through
visions.
And how could Paul, in Galatians
2:6, dismiss with such disdain those who had been the very followers of Jesus himself on earth? But in granting them no special
status he is not alone. The word "disciple(s)" does not appear in the epistles, and concept of "apostle" in early Christian
writings is a broad one, meaning simply a preacher of the message (i.e., the "gospel") about the Christ. It never applies
to a select group of Twelve who supposedly possessed special authority arising from their apostleship to Jesus while he was
on earth. (It is far from clear what "the Twelve" in 1 Corinthians 15:5 refers to, since Paul lists Peter and "the apostles"
separately. The term appears nowhere else in the epistles.)
Nor is there any concept of apostolic
tradition in the first century writers, no idea of teachings or authority passed on in a chain going back to the original
Apostles and Jesus himself. Instead, everything is from the Spirit, meaning direct revelation from God, with each group claiming
that the Spirit they have received is the genuine one and reflects the true gospel. This is the basis of Paul's claim against
his rivals in 2 Corinthians 11:4. The writer of 1 John, in his declaration (4:1f) that the Son of God has come in the flesh,
draws on no apostolic tradition, on no historical record, but must claim validity for his own Spirit, as opposed to the Satan-inspired
false spirit of the dissidents. In chapter 5, he declares that it is God's testimony through the Spirit which produces faith
in the Son, not several decades of Christian preaching going back to Jesus himself. How could this writer in the community
of John, which later produced the Fourth Gospel, say (5:11) that it is God who has revealed eternal life, and ignore all those
memorable sayings of Jesus like "I am the resurrection and the life" which that Gospel so richly records?
As for Jesus' great appointment
of Peter as the "rock" upon which his church is to be built, no one in the first century (including the writers of 1 and 2
Peter) ever quotes it or uses it in the frequent debates over authority.
The agency of all recent activity
seems to be God, not Jesus. Paul speaks of "the gospel of God," "God's message". It is God appealing and calling to the Christian
believer. 2 Corinthians 5:18 tells us that "from first to last this has been the work of God" (New English Bible translation).
In Romans 1:19 the void is startling. Paul declares: "All that may be known of God by men...God himself has disclosed to them."
Did Jesus not disclose God, were God's attributes not visible in Jesus? How could any Christian—as so many do—express
himself in this fashion?
A few secondary omissions also
deserve mention. No first century epistle, even when discussing Christian baptism, ever mentions either Jesus' own baptism
or the figure of John the Baptist. Paul has much to say about the meaning of baptism (as in Romans 1:1-6), but he never compares
its elements with Jesus' own experience by the Jordan. 1 Clement 17:1 speaks of those who heralded the Messiah's coming, but
includes only Elijah, Elisha and Ezekiel. The arch-betrayer Judas never appears, not even in a passage like Hebrews 12:15
where the author, in cautioning against the poisonous member in the community's midst, offers the figure of Esau as an example,
who "sold his inheritance for a single meal." Surely selling the Son of God for thirty pieces of silver would have been a
far more dramatic comparison!
Hebrews also contains (9:20f)
a stunning silence on Jesus' establishment of the Christian Eucharist. The writer is comparing the old covenant with the new,
but not even the quoted words of Moses at the former's inauguration: "this is the blood of the covenant which God has enjoined
upon you," can entice him to mention that Jesus had established the new covenant at a Last Supper, using almost identical
words, as Mark 14:24 and parallels record. He goes further in chapter 13 when he adamantly declares that Christians do not
eat a sacrificial meal. The Didache 9 presents a eucharist which is solely a thanksgiving meal to God, with no sacramental
significance and no establishment by Jesus.
This leaves us with 1 Corinthians
11:23-26, Paul's declaration about Jesus' words at what he calls the Lord's Supper. I will address this in Part Two, as well
as a few spots in various epistles which seem to come ambiguously close to referring to a life for Christ.
I have done little more than
scratch the surface of this "Conspiracy of Silence" found in the first century epistles. But I'd like to conclude by looking
at one glaring omission which no one, to my knowledge, has yet remarked on.
Where are the holy places?
In all the Christian writers
of the first century, in all the devotion they display about Christ and the new faith, not one of them expresses the slightest
desire to see the birthplace of Jesus, to visit Nazareth his home town, the sites of his preaching, the upper room where he
held his Last Supper, the tomb: where he was buried and rose from the dead. These places are never mentioned. Most of all,
there is not a hint of pilgrimage to Calvary itself, where humanity's salvation was consummated. How could such a place not
have been turned into a shrine?
Even Paul, this man so emotional,
so full of insecurities, who declares (Philippians 3:10) that "all I care for is to know Christ, to experience the power of
his resurrection, to share in his sufferings," even he seems immune to the lure of such places. Three years were to pass following
his conversion before he made even a short visit to Jerusalem. And this—so he tells us in Galatians—was merely
to "get to know" Peter; he was not to return there for another 14 years.
Is it conceivable that Paul would
not have wanted to run to the hill of Calvary, to prostrate himself on the sacred ground that bore the blood of his slain
Lord? Surely he would have shared such an intense emotional experience with his readers. Would he not have been drawn to the
Gethsemane garden, where Jesus was reported to have passed through the horror and the self-doubts that Paul himself had known?
Would he not have gloried in standing before the empty tomb, the guarantee of his own resurrection? Is there indeed, in this
wide land so recently filled with the presence of the Son of God, any holy place at all, any spot of ground where that presence
still lingers, hallowed by the step, touch or word of Jesus of Nazareth? Neither Paul nor any other first century letter writer
breathes a whisper of any such thing.
Nor do they breathe a word about
relics associated with Jesus. Where are his clothes, the things he used in everyday life, the things he touched? Can we believe
that items associated with him in his life on earth would not have been preserved, valued, clamored for among believers, just
as things like this were produced and prized all through the Middle Ages? Why is it only in the fourth century that pieces
of the "true cross" begin to surface?
New Testament scholars are quick
to maintain that the "argument from silence" is an invalid one, but it surely becomes powerful when the silence is so pervasive,
so perplexing. Why would writer after writer fail consistently to mention the very man who was the founder of their faith,
the teacher of their ethics, the incarnation of the divine Christ they worshiped and looked to for salvation? Why would every
Christian writer, in the highly polemical atmosphere during those early decades of the spread of the faith, fail to avail
himself of the support for his position offered by the very words and deeds of the Son of God himself while he was on earth?
What could possibly explain this puzzling, maddening, universal silence?
That question I will try to answer
in Part Two: "Who Was Christ Jesus?"
Part Two:
WHO WAS CHRIST JESUS?
In Part One, I probed the
mysterious silence about Jesus of Nazareth which lies at the heart of earliest Christianity. Neither his miracles nor his
apocalyptic preaching, not the places or details of his birth, ministry or death, not his parents, his prosecutor, his herald,
his betrayer, are ever mentioned by the first century Christian letter writers, and the ethical teachings which resemble his
as recorded in the Gospels are never attributed to him. I called it, ironically, "A Conspiracy of Silence."
But if these silences mean anything
(and it is impossible to accept the common scholarly rationalization that they reflect a universal "lack of interest" in the
earthly life of Jesus by the first three generations of the Christian movement), then they ought to present their own integral
picture. Can we derive from them a coherent, uniform concept of what earliest Christianity really was and what it believed
in? Who was Paul's "Christ Jesus" if he was not the Jesus of Nazareth of the later Gospels?
First, we must understand the
era to understand its ideas. After Alexander the Great conquered half the known earth in the late 4th century BCE, Greek language
and culture (called Hellenism) inundated the whole eastern Mediterranean world; even the Jews, who always resisted assimilation,
were not immune to its influence. Alexander's empire soon fragmented into warring mini-empires and eventually Rome rolled
east and imposed its own absolute rule.
It was a troubled, often pessimistic
time. Stoics, Epicureans, Platonists and others offered new moral and intellectual ways of coping with life and the unpredictable
world. Understanding the ultimate Deity and establishing personal ethics were central concerns of all these movements. Wandering
philosophers became a kind of popular clergy, frequenting the marketplace and people's homes. Healing gods, Oriental mysticism,
a whole paraphernalia of magic and astrology were added to the pot to cope with another dimension to the world's distress:
the vast panoply of unseen spirits and demons and forces of fate which were now believed to pervade the very atmosphere men
and women moved in, harassing and crippling their lives. The buzzword was personal "salvation." And for the growing number
who believed it could not be achieved in the world, it became salvation from the world. Redeeming the individual grew
into a Hellenistic industry.
Many looked upon the Jews as
providing a high moral and monotheistic standard, and gentiles flocked to Judaism in varying degrees of conversion. But even
here there were strong currents of pessimism. For centuries the Jews as a nation had looked for salvation from a long succession
of conquerors, until many had become convinced that only violent divine intervention would bring about the establishment of
God's Kingdom and their own destined elevation to dominion over the nations of the earth. Such views were held by a mosaic
of sectarian groups, each regarding itself as an elect, which flourished on the fringes of "mainstream" Judaism (Temple and
Pharisees). Christianity in its early manifestations belonged to this melange of sects, comprised of a mix of gentiles and
Jews, driven by an intense apocalyptic expectation of the coming end or transformation of the world.
Among both Jew and pagan there
was a slide away from rationalism and a turning to personal revelation as the only source for knowledge about God and the
ways to salvation. Mysticism, visionary inspiration, marvellous spiritual practices, became the seedbed of new faiths and
sects. And no one possessed a richer hothouse for all this than the Jews, in their unparalleled collection of sacred writings,
from whose pages could be lifted newly-perceived truths about God and ultimate realities.
Onto such a stage in the middle
decades of the first century, into what one scholar has called "a seething mass of sects and salvation cults" (John Dillon,
The Middle Platonists, p.396) stepped the apostles of a new movement. In Galatians 1:16 Paul says: "God chose to reveal
his Son in me, and through me to preach him to the gentiles." Paul claims he is the instrument of God's revelation. He preaches
the Son, the newly-disclosed means of salvation offered to Jew and gentile alike. But is this Son a recent historical man?
Has he been revealed to the world through his own life and ministry? No, for as we saw in Part One, neither Paul nor any other
early Christian letter writer presents us with such an idea.
Rather, the Son is a spiritual
concept, just as God himself is, and every other deity of the day. None of them are founded on historical figures. The existence
of this divine Son has hitherto been unknown; he has been a secret, a "mystery" hidden with God in heaven (e.g., Romans 16:25-27,
Colossians 2:2). Information about this Son has been imbedded in scripture. Only in this final age has God himself (through
his Spirit) inspired apostles like Paul to learn—from scripture and visionary experiences—about his Son and what
he had done for humanity's salvation. And this Son was soon to arrive from heaven, at the imminent end of the present world.
If we remove Gospel associations
from our minds, we find that this is exactly what Paul and the others are telling us. God is revealing Christ (as in the Galatians
quote above), apostles inspired by God's Spirit are preaching him, believers are responding through faith. Ephesians 3:4-5
shows us the main elements of the new drama. "The mystery about Christ, which in former generations was not revealed to men
[not even by Jesus himself, apparently], is now disclosed to dedicated apostles and prophets through the Spirit [by divine
revelation]." God's Spirit, the divine power which inspires men like Paul, is the engine of the new revelation. All knowledge
comes through this Spirit, with no suggestion that anything has been received from an historical Jesus and his ministry. (Part
One dealt with Paul's few "words of the Lord", perceived communications from the spiritual Christ in heaven.)
The words of the first century
writers never speak of Jesus' arrival or life on earth. Rather, they speak of his revelation, of his manifestation by God.
1 Peter 1:20 says: "Predestined from the foundation of the world, (Christ) was manifested for your sake in these last times."
Here the writer uses the Greek word "phaneroo", meaning to manifest or reveal. Romans 3:25 says: "God set him forth
(Christ Jesus) as a means of atonement by his blood, effective through faith." Here Paul uses a verb which, in this context,
means "to declare publicly," reveal to public light. God is revealing Christ and the atonement he has made available to those
who believe. Other passages, like Romans 16:25-27, Colossians 1:26 and 2:2, Titus 1:2-3, contain similar statements about
the current unveiling of long-hidden divine secrets, and the careful eye that reads them can see that no room has been made
for any recent life and work of Jesus.
It is God and scripture which
Paul regards as the source of his inspiration and knowledge. Look at Romans 1:1-4. Paul has been called into the service of
preaching the gospel. And note how this gospel is described. First it was announced beforehand in scripture by God's prophets.
It is the gospel, Paul's message about the Christ, that has been announced in scripture, not Christ's life itself. Second,
that gospel is not any that Jesus preached; rather, it is God's gospel, and it is about his Son. Again, all this is the language
of revelation. Data like that in verses 3 and 4 of Romans 1 (to be addressed later) are part of what is being revealed, and
this information has been found in scripture, which God's Spirit has inspired men like Paul to read in a new, "correct" way.
Compare 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, which points squarely to scripture as the source of Paul's doctrines about the Christ. (The
phrase "according to the scriptures," while traditionally interpreted as meaning 'in fulfillment of the scriptures,' can instead
entail the meaning of 'as the scriptures tell us' or 'as we learn from the scriptures.')
Paul and other Christian preachers
are offering salvation, but it is through a Christ who is a spiritual channel to God and one who has performed a redemptive
act (the "atonement by his blood") in a mythical setting. We will look at both the medium and the act in a moment, but that
act is not part of what has happened in the present time. Rather, the present is when the benefits available from this act
are being revealed and applied: the forgiveness of sin and the guarantee of resurrection, "effective through faith" in the
gospel. All this is the universal manner of expression in first century Christian epistles, and even beyond; one that ignores
any recent career of Jesus and focuses all attention on those appointed to carry God's newly-disclosed message. *
* * *
At
the core of that message lies the Son. Christianity was in the process of creating for the Western world the ultimate, lasting
reflection of the central religious concept of the Hellenistic age. This we must now consider.
Monotheism was the possession
not only of the Jews, but of much of Greek philosophy. Ancient thinking had arrived at an ultimate high God who had created
and governed the universe. But a problem had to be faced. As such a God was made ever more lofty, more perfect, he also became
more transcendent. Any form of contact with the inferior world of matter was deemed inappropriate and indeed impossible, and
so the idea arose that any relationship between God and the world had to take place through some form of intermediary.
The Greek solution was the Logos,
a kind of subsidiary god or divine force, an emanation of the Deity. In the most influential school of thinking, Platonism,
the Logos was the image of God in perceivable form and a model for creation. He revealed the otherwise inaccessible, ultimate
God, and through him—or it, since the Logos was more an abstract than a personal being—God acted upon the world.
We know of Hellenistic religious sects based on the Logos. (See the little Address to the Greeks, originally attributed
to Justin Martyr.)
The Jewish God never became quite
so inaccessible, but knowledge of him and of his Law was thought to have been brought to the world by a part of himself called
"Wisdom." This figure (it was a 'she') evolved almost into a divine being herself, an agent of creation and salvation with
her own myths about coming to earth—though not in any physical incarnation. (See Proverbs 1 and 8-9, Baruch 3-4, Ecclesiasticus
24 and The Wisdom of Solomon.) In fact, many parts of the ancient world seem to have developed the concept of an intermediary
divine figure coming to earth to bring knowledge and salvation, but details of such myths, especially for pre-Christian periods,
are sketchy and much debated.
Out of this rich soil of ideas
arose Christianity, a product of both Jewish and Greek philosophy. Its concept of Jesus the "Son" grew out of ideas like personified
Wisdom (with a sex change), leavened with the Greek Logos, and amalgamated with the more personal and human figure of traditional
Messiah expectation. Christianity made its Christ (the Greek word for Messiah) into a heavenly figure who could be related
to, though he is intimately tied to God himself. Unlike Wisdom or the Logos, however, the Christian Savior was envisioned
to have undergone self-sacrifice.
We can now gain a clearer understanding
of Paul's Christ Jesus and the sphere of his activity. The pseudo-Pauline 2 Timothy tells us (1:9) that God (!) has saved
us through his grace, "which was given to us in Christ Jesus in eternal times."
There are two key phrases here.
First, the term "in Christ" (or sometimes "through Christ") which Paul and others use over a hundred times throughout the
epistles: it can hardly bear on its slender back the sweeping meaning some scholars try to give it, namely as a kind of compact
reference to Jesus' life, ministry, death and resurrection. Check its use in other passages, like Ephesians 1:4, 2 Corinthians
3:14, and especially Titus 3:6: "(God) sent down the Spirit upon us plentifully through Jesus Christ our Savior."
Such references do not speak
of the recent physical presence of Jesus of Nazareth on earth. Instead, Christ—the divine, heavenly Son—is now
present on earth, in a mystical sense, embodied in the new faith movement and interacting with his believers. Like Wisdom
and the Logos, he is the spiritual medium ("in" or "through Christ") through which God is revealing himself and doing his
work in the world. "In Christ" can also refer to the mystical union which Paul envisions between the believer and Christ,
as in 2 Corinthians 5:17.
But where and when had this intermediary
Son performed the redeeming act itself?
Christ's self-sacrificing death
was located "in times eternal," or "before the beginning of time" (pro chronon aionion). This is the second key phrase
in 2 Timothy 1:9 and elsewhere. What is presently being revealed is something that had already taken place outside the normal
realm of time and space. This could be envisioned as either in the primordial time of myth, or, as current Platonic philosophy
would have put it, in the higher eternal world of ideas, of which this earthly world, with its ever-changing matter and evolving
time, is only a transient, imperfect copy (more on this later). The benefits of Christ's redemptive act lay in the present,
through God's revelation of it in the new missionary movement, but the act itself had taken place in a higher world of divine
realities, in a timeless order, not on earth or in history. It had all happened in the sphere of God, it was all part of his
"mystery." The blood sacrifice, even seeming biographical details like Romans 1:3-4, belong in this dimension. *
* * *
Such
ideas are, to us, strange and even alien, but they were an integral part of the mythological thinking of the ancient world.
To obtain a better insight into them, we will draw a comparison between Christianity and another prominent religious expression
of the Graeco-Roman world of its time. It will also help us to understand the evolution of the idea of Christ's sacrificial
redemption (though this will not be fully answered until Part Three.)
By the first century CE the Empire
had several popular salvation cults known as the "mysteries," each with its own savior god or goddess, such as Osiris, Attis
and Mithras. There has been a seesaw debate over when these cults became fully formed and how much they may have influenced
Christian ideas, but the root versions of the Greek mysteries go back to those of Eleusis (near Athens) and of the Greek god
Dionysos, in the first half of the first millennium BCE. At the very least we can say that Christianity in many of its aspects
was a Jewish-oriented expression of this widespread religious phenomenon.
Each of these savior gods had
in some way overcome death, or performed some act whose effects guaranteed for the initiate a happy afterlife. Christianity's
savior god, Christ Jesus, had undergone death and been resurrected as a redeeming act (1 Corinthians 15:3-4), giving promising
of resurrection and eternal life to the believer. This guarantee involved another feature of ancient world thinking, closely
related to Platonism: the idea that things and events on earth had their parallels in heaven; this included divine figures
who served as paradigms for earthly human counterparts. What the former underwent in the spiritual realm reflected the experiences
and determined the destinies of those who were linked to them on earth. For example, the original "one like a son of man"
in Daniel's vision (7:13-14) received power and dominion over the earth from God, and this guaranteed that his human counterpart,
the saints or elect of Israel, were destined to receive these things when God's Kingdom was established on earth. Christianity's
Son, too, was a paradigm: Christ's experiences of suffering and death mirrored those of humans, but his exaltation would similarly
be paralleled by their own exaltation. As Romans 6:5 declares: "We shall be united with Christ in a resurrection like his."
Savior gods also conferred certain
benefits in the present world. They provided protection from the demon spirits and fates; Christ's devotees, too, claimed
this for him (see Colossians and Ephesians). Rites of initiation in the mysteries, which included types of baptism, conferred
rebirth and brought the initiate into a special relationship with the god or goddess. In Paul's baptism, the convert died
to his present life and rose to a new one; of this new state, Paul says: "We are in Christ and Christ is in us."
Some of the savior gods had instituted
sacraments: Mithras, after slaying the bull as a salvific blood sacrifice, had dined with the sun god, and this supper became
the Mithraic cultic meal, similar to elements of the Christian Eucharist. Here, then, is the meaning of 1 Corinthians 11:23-26.
Paul is not referring to any historical Last Supper, but rather to the origin myth attached to the Christian sacred meal (at
least in Paul's circle). The words are probably Paul's personal version of things, since he clearly identifies it as revealed
knowledge, "from the Lord," not passed-on tradition through apostolic channels. The spiritual Christ himself, in a mythical
time and place (including "at night"), had established this Supper and spoken the words about his body and blood that gave
the meal its present meaning. The frequent translation "arrested" or "betrayed" in verse 23 is governed by the later Gospel
story. The literal meaning of the Greek word is "to hand over" or "deliver up," a term commonly used in the context of martyrdom;
it has no trouble fitting the context of myth. It can hardly mean "betrayed" in Romans 8:32 where God is the agent, or in
Ephesians 5:2 where Jesus surrenders himself.
All this is not to say that there
could be no differences between the ideas and rituals of the mysteries and those of Christianity, if only because they arose
from different cultural milieus. The Greeks, for example, had no desire to be resurrected in the flesh; they generally found
the idea repugnant, and salvation after death was a question of the pure soul freeing itself from the impurity of matter and
rejoining the divine in the eternal world. There was no need for their gods to be resurrected in the same way Jesus was. However,
it should be noted that earliest Christianity conceived of Jesus only as raised in the spirit, exalted to heaven immediately
after death (eg, Philippians 2:9, 1 Peter 3:18, Hebrews 10:12, etc.). A bodily sojourn on earth with the Apostles came only
with the Gospels. Indeed, the whole Easter event as the Gospels portray it is missing from the first century epistles.
But how could all this redeeming
activity by savior gods, in both the mysteries and Christianity, be thought of as taking place "in the world," or even "in
flesh," yet not at a specific historical time and location? This, of course, is the nature of myth, but it depends on certain
views of the world held by the ancients.
One of these saw no rigid distinction
between the natural and the supernatural. The two blended into one another. The earth was but one layer of a tiered system
that progressed from base matter where humans lived to the purely spirit level where God dwelled. The spheres between the
two contained other parts of the "world," populated by classes of angels, spirits and demons. This view was especially prevalent
in Jewish apocalyptic thought, which saw various figures and activities involved in the coming end of the world as located
in these layers above the earth.
Nor did time function the same
way at all levels. In the 4th century the Roman philosopher Sallustius put his view this way: "All of this did not happen
at any one time, but always is so...the story of Attis represents an eternal cosmic process, not an isolated event of the
past."
Here we have crossed over into
a somewhat different line of thinking from the continuous layered universe just described. The way Sallustius put things is
essentially Platonic: what is perceived by contemplation and revelation on earth is only an imperfect reflection of eternal
truths and spiritual processes in the upper world of ultimate reality. Various early Christian writers show different blendings
of the Platonic and layered universes, and all of it was constructed over the ancient foundation of a more primitive myth-making
view, one found around the world. This view placed divine figures and processes in a dim, primordial past: here the gods had
planned and established things which gave meaning to present-day beliefs and practices, and from this "sacred past" humans
drew benefits and even redemption. All these ideas contributed to the myths of the era in which Christianity was born.
For the average pagan and Jew,
the bulk of the workings of the universe went on in the vast unseen spiritual realm (the "genuine" part of the universe) which
began at the lowest level of the "air" and extended ever upward through the various layers of heaven. Here a savior god like
Mithras could slay a bull, Attis could be castrated, and Christ could be hung on a tree by "the god of that world," meaning
Satan (see the Ascension of Isaiah 9:14). The plainest interpretation of the Epistle to the Hebrews 9:11-14 is that Christ's
sacrifice took place in a non-earthly setting and a spiritual time; 8:4 virtually tells us that he had never been on earth.
Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:44-49 and elsewhere can speak of Christ as "man" (anthropos), but he is the ideal, heavenly
man (a widespread type of idea in the ancient world, including Philo: see Supplementary Article No. 8: Christ as "Man"), whose spiritual "body" provides the prototype for the heavenly body Christians will receive
at their resurrection. For minds like Paul's, such higher world counterparts had as real an existence as the flesh and blood
human beings around them on earth.
It is in much the same sense
that Paul, in Romans 1 and Galatians 4, declares Christ to have been "of David's stock," born under the Law. The source of
such statements is scripture, not historical tradition. The sacred writings were seen as providing a picture of the spiritual
world, the realities in heaven. Since the spiritual Christ was now identified with the Messiah, all scriptural passages presumed
to be about the Messiah had to be applied to him, even if understood in a mythical or Platonic sense. Several references predicted
that the Messiah would be descended from David: thus Romans 1:3 (and elsewhere). Note that 1:2 points unequivocally to scripture
as the source of this doctrine. (As does 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 for the source of Jesus' death and resurrection.) Isaiah 7:14,
to give another example, supposedly spoke of the Messiah as born of a young woman, and so Paul in Galatians 4:4 tells us that
Christ was "born of woman". (Note that he never gives the name of Mary, or anything about this "woman." Nor does he identify
the time or place of this "birth".) The mysteries may not have had the same range of sacred writings to supply their own details,
but the savior god myths contained equally human-like elements which were understood entirely in a mythical setting. Dionysos
too had been born in a cave of a woman.
"Born of woman" is a lot like
another phrase used almost universally of the activities of Christ: "in flesh" (en sarki, kata sarka). It may
actually mean little more than "in the sphere of the flesh" or "in relation to the flesh." In his divine form and habitat
a god could not suffer, and so he had to take on some semblance to humanity (eg, Philippians 2:8, Romans 8:3); his saving
act had to be a "blood" sacrifice (e.g., Hebrews 9:22) because the ancient world saw this as the basic means of communion
between man and Deity; and it all had to be done within humanity's territory. But the latter could still be within those lower
spiritual dimensions above the earth which acted upon the material world. And in fact this is precisely what Paul reveals.
In 1 Corinthians 2:8 he tells us who crucified Jesus. Is it Pilate, the Romans, the Jews? No, it is "the rulers of this age
(who) crucified the Lord of glory." Many scholars agree that he is referring not to temporal rulers but to the spirit and
demonic forces—"powers and authorities" was the standard term— which inhabited the lower celestial spheres, part
of the territory of "flesh." (See Paul Ellingworth, A Translator's Handbook for 1 Corinthians, p.46: "A majority of
scholars think that supernatural powers are intended here." These include S. G. F. Brandon, C. K. Barrett, Jean Hering, Paula
Fredriksen, S. D. F. Salmond, and it also included Ignatius and Marcion.) Colossians 2:15 can hardly refer to any historical
event on Calvary.
It was in such spiritual, mythological
dimensions that Paul's Christ Jesus had been 'taken on a body' (cf. Hebrews 10:5) and performed his act of redemption. Such
was the timeless secret which God had hidden for long ages and only recently revealed to visionaries like Paul. And it was
all to be discovered in scripture, or at least in the new way of reading it. It is very difficult for us to get our minds
around this kind of "mythical thinking," because in our scientific and literal age we simply have no equivalent. This is perhaps
the major stumbling block to an understanding and acceptance of the Jesus-as-myth theory. (For a comprehensive discussion
of this area, including a detailed examination of passages like Romans 1:1-4 and Galatians 4:4-6, see Supplementary Article
No. 8, Christ as "Man".) * *
* *
There
are a few passages in the epistles which seem to speak of a recent coming of Christ, as in Galatians 3 and 4. But in 3:23
and 25 Paul stresses it is "faith" that has arrived in the present, while verse 24, despite a common misleading translation
(as in the NEB), is literally "leading us to Christ," which can mean to faith in him. In 3:19, it is the gentiles who belong
to Christ (verse 29) that are in mind. In any event, references to the sending or coming of Christ should be taken in the
sense of the present-day revelation of Christ by God. (In the case of Galatians 4:4-6, verse 6 specifies that it is the "spirit"
of the Son that has been sent into the hearts of believers.) Early Christians saw the spiritual Christ as having arrived in
a real way, active in the world and speaking through themselves. This is certainly the sense of passages like 1 John 5:20,
"We know that the Son of God is come," and Hebrews 9:11 and 26.
And probably Ephesians 2:17,
which is especially interesting: "And coming, he (Christ) announced the good news..." But what was the content of that news?
Instead of taking the opportunity to refer to some of Jesus' Gospel teachings, the writer quotes Isaiah. All the first century
documents, as well as some later ones like the Epistle of Barnabas, show that the only source of information about Jesus was
scripture. 1 Peter 2:22-23, with its description of Christ's exemplary sufferings, simply summarizes parts of Isaiah 53. (Cf.
1 Clement 16.) Scripture is not the prophecy of the Christ event, but its embodiment. The Son inhabits the spiritual world
of the scriptures, God's window on the unseen true reality.
The reference to Pontius Pilate
in 1 Timothy 6:13 comes in a set of "Pastoral" epistles which are almost universally judged by critical scholars to be a product
of the second century, and not by Paul. Mention of Pilate could therefore be a reflection of the developing idea of an historical
Jesus. It may be contemporary with or a little later than Ignatius, who is the first writer outside the Gospels to maintain
that Jesus died under Pilate. However, this passing reference is also a possible candidate for interpolation (later insertion).
More than one scholar has pointed out that there are problems in its fit with the context, and there are many indications
within the Pastorals that they are still dealing with a non-historical Christ. (See the Appendix to Supplementary Article
No. 3: Who Crucified Jesus? for an examination of the dating of the Pastorals and the question of 1 Timothy 6:13.)
Another, more obvious interpolation
is 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16, the only reference to the Jews' guilt in killing Jesus to be found in Paul or anywhere else in
the New Testament epistles. The great majority of critical scholars agree that it comes from a later time because it contains
an unmistakable allusion to the destruction of Jerusalem (a later event), and because it is foreign to the way Paul elsewhere
expresses himself toward his countrymen. (On this question, see Who Crucified Jesus? and Reader Feedback Set 19.)
Finally, from Galatians 1:19
comes the tradition that James was the sibling of Jesus, whereas the phrase "brother of the Lord" could instead refer to James'
pre-eminent position as head of the Jerusalem brotherhood. Apostles everywhere (e.g., Sosthenes in 1 Corinthians 1:1) were
called "brother," and the 500 who received a vision of the spiritual Christ in 1 Corinthians 15:6 were hardly all related
to Jesus. The phrase in Philippians 1:14, "brothers in the Lord," is a strong indication of what sort of meaning the Galatians
phrase entails. On the other hand, it is not impossible that the phrase began as a marginal gloss, subsequently inserted into
the text. Some later copyist, perhaps when a second century Pauline corpus was being formed and after James' sibling relationship
to the new historical Jesus had been established, may have wished to ensure that the reader would realize that Paul was referring
to James the Just and not James the Gospel apostle. (For a fuller discussion of this verse, see Reader Feedback Set 3.)
Before proceeding to the
Gospels in Part Three, one question must be answered. Where and how did Christianity begin? The traditional view, of course,
is that it began in Jerusalem among the Twelve Apostles in response to Jesus' death and resurrection. But this is untenable,
and not just because of a lack of any historical Jesus.
Within a handful of years of
Jesus' supposed death, we find Christian communities all over the eastern Mediterranean, their founders unknown. Rome had
Jewish Christians no later than the 40s, and a later churchman ("Ambrosiaster" in the 4th century) remarked that the Romans
had believed in Christ even without benefit of preaching by the Apostles. Paul could not possibly account for all the Christian
centers across the Empire; many were in existence before he got there. Nor does he convey much sense of a vigorous and widespread
missionary activity on the part of the Jerusalem circle around Peter and James. (That comes only with Acts.)
A form of Christian faith later
declared heretical, Gnosticism, preceded the establishment of orthodox beliefs and churches in whole areas like northern Syria
and Egypt. Indeed, the sheer variety of Christian expression and competitiveness in the first century, as revealed in documents
both inside and outside the New Testament, is inexplicable if it all proceeded from a single missionary movement beginning
from a single source. We find a profusion of radically different rituals, doctrines and interpretations of Jesus and his redeeming
role; some even have a Jesus who does not undergo death and resurrection.
Paul meets rivals at every turn
who are interfering with his work, whose views he is trying to combat. The "false apostles" he rails against in 2 Corinthians
10 and 11 are "proclaiming another Jesus" and they are certainly not from Peter's group (See Supplementary Article No. 1:
Apollos of Alexandria and the Early Christian Apostolate). Where do they all come from and where do they get their ideas?
The answer seems inevitable:
Christianity was born in a thousand places, in the broad fertile soil of Hellenistic Judaism. It sprang up in many independent
communities and sects, expressing itself in a great variety of doctrines. We see this variety in everything from Paul to the
writings of the so-called community of John, from the unique Epistle to the Hebrews to non-canonical documents like the Odes
of Solomon and a profusion of gnostic texts. It was all an expression of the new religious philosophy of the Son, and it generated
an apostolic movement fueled by visionary inspiration and a study of scripture, impelled by the conviction that God's Kingdom
was at hand. "Jesus"
(Yeshua) is a Hebrew name meaning Savior, strictly speaking "Yahweh Saves." At the beginning of Christianity it refers not
to the name of a human individual but (like the term Logos) to a concept: a divine, spiritual figure who is the mediator of
God's salvation. "Christ," the Greek translation of the Hebrew "Messiah," is also a concept, meaning the Anointed One of God
(though enriched by much additional connotation). In certain sectarian circles across the Empire, which included both Jews
and gentiles, these names would have enjoyed a broad range of usage. Belief in some form of spiritual Anointed Savior—Christ
Jesus—was in the air. Paul and the Jerusalem brotherhood were simply one strand of this widespread phenomenon, although
an important and eventually very influential one. Later, in a myth-making process of its own, this group of missionaries would
come to be regarded as the whole movement's point of origin. Part Three will show how many diverse strands were drawn together
by the Jesus of Nazareth who first came to life in the Gospels.
Part Three:
THE EVOLUTION OF JESUS OF NAZARETH
To move from the New Testament epistles to the Gospels is to enter a completely different world. In Parts One
and Two, I pointed out that virtually every element of the Gospel biography of Jesus of Nazareth is missing from the epistles,
and that Paul and other early writers present us only with a divine, spiritual Christ in heaven, one revealed by God through
inspiration and scripture. Their Jesus is never identified with a recent historical man. Like the savior gods of the Greek
mystery cults, Paul's Christ had performed his redeeming act in a mythical arena. Thus, when we open the Gospels we are unprepared
for the flesh and blood figure who lives and speaks on their pages, one who walked the sands of Palestine and died on Calvary in the days of Herod and Pontius Pilate.
Scholars are inching ever closer to understanding how and
when the Gospels were written. The names Mark, Matthew, Luke and John are accepted as later ascriptions; the real authors
are unknown. That "Mark" wrote first and was reworked by "Matthew" and "Luke," with other material added, is now an accepted
principle by a majority of scholars. Some of the problems which called Markan priority into question, such as those passages
in which Matthew and Luke agree in wording but differ from that of similar passages in Mark, have been solved by another telling
realization: that each of the canonical Gospels is the end result of an early history of writing and re-writing, including
additions and excisions. The Gospel of "John" is thought to have passed through several stages of construction. Thus, Matthew
and Luke, writing independently and probably unknown to each other, used an earlier edition (or editions) of Mark which would
have conformed to their agreements. The concept of a unified Gospel, let alone one produced by inspiration, is no longer tenable.
This picture of Gospel relationships is really quite astonishing.
Even John, in its narrative structure and passion story, is now considered by many scholars (see Robert Funk, Honest to
Jesus, p.239) to be based on Mark or some other Synoptic stage. Gone is the old pious view that the four Gospels are independent
and corroborating accounts. Instead, their strong similarities are the result of copying. This means that for the basic story
of Jesus' life and death we are dependent on a single source: whoever produced the first version of Mark. By rights, our sources
should be numerous. Christian missionaries, supposedly led by the Twelve Apostles, fanned out across the empire; oral transmission,
we are told, kept alive and constantly revitalized the story of Jesus' words and deeds. Written versions of that story should
have sprung up in many centres, truly independent and notably divergent. Yet when Matthew comes to write his own version of
Jesus' trial and crucifixion, all he can do is slavishly copy some document he has inherited, adding a few minor details of
his own, such as the guard at the tomb. Luke does little more.
We face the same question with Acts. Why did only one writer,
and that probably well into the second century (see Part One), decide to compose a history of the origin and growth of the
early church? No other writer so much as mentions Pentecost, that collective visitation of the Spirit to the apostles which,
according to Acts, started the whole missionary movement. But if instead this movement was a widespread diverse one, something
uncoordinated and competitive (as Paul's letters suggest), expressing a variety of doctrine within the broad religious inspiration
of the time, it is easier to understand how one group, seeking to impose the missing unity and give itself authority, could
create its own unique picture of Christianity's beginnings.
When were the Gospels—or their earliest versions—written?
Mark is usually dated by its "Little Apocalypse" in Chapter 13, which tells of great upheavals and the destruction of the
Temple, spoken as a prophecy by Jesus. This must, it is claimed, refer to the first Jewish War (66-70); thus Mark wrote
in its midst or shortly after. But even Mark is presumed to have drawn on source elements, and some think this Little Apocalypse
could originally have been a Jewish composition (with no reference to Jesus), one that Mark later borrowed and adapted. Or,
if Chapter 13 is by Mark, it could well have grown out of a later period, for other documents, like Revelation and some Jewish
apocalypses, show that vivid apocalyptic expectations persisted until at least the end of the century. In fact, 13:7 has Jesus
warning his listeners not to regard the End as imminent even when the winds of war arrive. Nothing in Mark should force us
to date him before the 90s.
The dates assigned to Matthew and Luke (and even John) are
influenced by the picture they present of "the parting of the ways" between Christianity and the wider Jewish establishment.
This is recognized as a later development following the Jewish War, one which the Gospels read back anachronistically into
the supposed time of Jesus. Luke has also abandoned the expectation of an imminent end of the world, placing him even later.
None of these factors are inconsistent with dates around the turn of the second century or somewhat later.
But equally important is attestation. When do the Gospels
start to show up in the wider record of Christian writings? If Mark is as early as 70, and all four had been written by 100,
why do none of the early Fathers—the author of 1 Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, the author of the Epistle of Barnabas—
writing between 90 and 130, quote or refer to any of them? How could Ignatius (around 107), so eager to convince his readers
that Jesus had indeed been born of Mary and died under Pilate, that he had truly been a human man who suffered, how could
he have failed to appeal to some Gospel account as verification of all this if he had known one?
Eusebius reports that in a now-lost work written around 125,
bishop Papias mentioned two pieces of writing by "Matthew" and "Mark." But even these cannot be equated with the canonical
Gospels, for Papias called the former "sayings of the Lord in Hebrew," and the description of the latter also sounds as if
it was not a narrative work. Moreover, it would seem that Papias had not possessed these documents himself, for he simply
relays information about them that was given to him by "the elder." He makes no comment of his own on such documents (in fact,
he continues to disparage written sources about the Lord), while Eusebius and other later commentators who quote from his
writings are silent about him discussing anything from the "Mark" and "Matthew" he mentions. All that Papias can tell us (relayed
through Eusebius) is that certain collections of sayings and anecdotes (probably miracle stories) were circulating in his
time, a not uncommon thing; the ones he speaks of were being attributed to a Jesus figure and reputed to be compiled by legendary
followers of him. What is most telling, on the other hand, is that even a quarter of the way into the second century, a bishop
of Asia Minor writing a book called The Sayings of the Lord Interpreted did not possess a copy of a single written
Gospel, nor included sayings of Jesus which are identified with those Gospels.
Only in Justin Martyr, writing in the 150s, do we find the
first identifiable quotations from some of the Gospels, though he calls them simply "memoirs of the Apostles," with no names.
And those quotations usually do not agree with the texts of the canonical versions we now have, showing that such documents
were still undergoing evolution and revision. Scholars such as Helmut Koester have concluded that earlier "allusions" to Gospel-like
material are likely floating traditions which themselves found their way into the written Gospels. (See Koester's Ancient
Christian Gospels and his earlier Synoptische Uberlieferung bei den apostolischen Vatern.) Is it conceivable that
the earliest account of Jesus' life and death could have been committed to writing as early as 70 (or even earlier, as some
would like to have it), and yet the broader Christian world took almost a century to receive copies of it?
If, on the other hand, the "biography" of Jesus of Nazareth
was something unusual which went against the grain of current knowledge and belief, one can understand how early versions
of the Gospels, written around the turn of the century, would have enjoyed only limited use and isolated reworking for at
least a generation. And especially if such compositions were originally intended as largely allegorical and instructive, symbolic
of the faith communities that produced them. It is also beginning to look as though Mark, Matthew and Luke originally came
from one group of linked communities in the area of Syria and northern Palestine.
As for Acts, written by the same author who wrote the final
version of Luke, there is no reference to it before the year 170—more than a century after the date often assigned to
it. Some, such as John Knox (Marcion and the New Testament, 77-106, 124), view Acts as a response by the church of
Rome in the mid-second century to the gnostic Marcion's view of things. The author of Acts drew on kernels of tradition about
the primitive Palestinian church, but these have been recast to fit the new plot line. There are huge discrepancies between
Acts and what Paul tells us in his letters. Scholarship has been forced to admit that much of Acts is sheer fabrication, from
the speeches to the great sea voyage, the latter modeled on similar features in Hellenistic romances. With its discrediting
as history, the true beginnings of Christianity fall into a murky shadow. *
* * *
The core of the historical Jesus precedes the Gospels and was born in the community or circles which produced
the document now called "Q" (for the German "Quelle," meaning "source"). No copy of Q has survived, but while a minority disagree,
the majority of New Testament scholars today are convinced that Q did exist, and that it can be reconstructed from the common
material found in Matthew and Luke which they did not get from Mark.
Q was not a narrative Gospel, but an organized collection
of sayings which included moral teachings, prophetic admonitions and controversy stories, plus a few miracles and other anecdotes.
It was the product of a Jewish (or Jewish imitating) sectarian movement located in Galilee which preached a coming Kingdom of God. Scholars have concluded that Q was
put together over time and in distinct stages. They have identified the earliest stratum (calling it Q1) as a set of sayings
on ethics and discipleship; these contained notably unconventional ideas. Many are found in Matthew's Sermon on the Mount:
the Beatitudes, turn the other cheek, love your enemies. A close similarity has been noted (see F. Gerald Downing, "Cynics
and Christians," NTS 1984, p.584-93; Burton Mack, A Myth of Innocence, p.67-9, 73-4) between these maxims and those
of the Greek philosophical school known as Cynicism, a counterculture movement of the time spread by wandering Cynic preachers.
(Mack has declared that Jesus was a Cynic-style sage, whose connection with things Jewish was rather tenuous.) Perhaps the
Q sect at its beginnings adopted a Greek source, with some recasting, one they saw as a suitable ethic for the kingdom they
were preaching. In any case, there is no need to impute such sayings to a Jesus; they seem more the product of a school or
lifestyle, formulated over time and hardly the sudden invention of a single mind.
This formative stage of Q scholars call "sapiential," for
it is essentially an instructional collection of the same genre as traditional "wisdom" books like Proverbs, though in this
case with a radical, counterculture content. Later indications (as in Luke 11:49) suggest that the words may have been regarded as spoken
by the personified Wisdom of God (see Part Two), and that the Q preachers saw themselves as her spokespersons.
The next stratum of Q (labeled Q2) has been styled "prophetic,"
apocalyptic. In these sayings the community is lashing out against the hostility and rejection it has received from the wider
establishment. In contrast to the mild, tolerant tone of Q1, Q2 contains vitriolic railings against the Pharisees, a calling
of heaven's judgment down on whole towns. The figure of the Son of Man enters, one who will arrive at the End-time to judge
the world in fire; he is probably the result of reflection on the figure in Daniel 7. Here we first find John the Baptist,
a kind of mentor or forerunner to the Q preachers. Dating the strata of Q is difficult, but I would suggest that this second
stage falls a little before the Jewish War.
There is good reason to conclude that even at this stage
there was no Jesus in the Q community's thinking. That is, the wisdom and prophetic sayings in their original form would have
contained no mention of a Jesus as speaker or source. They were pronouncements of the community itself and its traditional
teachings, seen as inspired by the Wisdom of God. For while Matthew and Luke often show a common wording or idea in a given
saying core, when they surround this with set-up lines and contexts involving Jesus, each evangelist offers something very
different. (Compare Luke 17:5-6 with Matthew 17:19-20). This indicates that Q had preserved nothing which associated the sayings
with a ministry of Jesus, a lack of interest in the source of the teaching which would be unusual and perplexing.
Nor are the apocalyptic Son of Man sayings (about his future
coming) identified with Jesus, which is why, when they were later placed in his mouth, Jesus sounds as though he is talking
about someone else. When one examine's John the Baptist's prophecy at the opening of Q (Luke 3:16-17), about one who will
come "who is mightier than I," who will baptize with fire and separate the wheat from the chaff, we find no reference to a
Jesus or an enlightened teacher or prophet who is contemporary to John. Rather, this sounds like a prophecy of the coming
Son of Man, the apocalyptic judge, a prophecy put into John's mouth by the Q community.
Especially revealing is the saying now found in Luke 16:16:
"Until John (the Baptist) there was the law and the prophets (i.e., scripture); since then, there is the good news of the
Kingdom of God." This, like so much of Q, is acknowledged to be a product of the community's own experience and time (i.e.,
not going back to Jesus), and yet no reference to Jesus himself has been worked into this picture of the change from the old
to the new. Luke 11:49 also leaves out the Son of God when speaking of those whom Wisdom promised to send.
Leading specialists on Q, such as John Kloppenborg (The
Formation of Q), recognize that Q in its various stages has undergone considerable redaction (editing, adding and rearranging
material to create a unified whole with identifiable themes and theology). But their analysis of Q3, the stratum they call
the "final recension," does not go far enough. For only at this stage, I would argue, was an historical founder introduced,
a figure who was now perceived to have established the community. Certain past material would have been reworked and everything
attributed to this founder, including healing "miracles" which had been part of the activity of the Q preachers themselves.
For the teachings, possibly no more than a simple "Jesus said" was provided, which is why Matthew and Luke had to invent their
own settings. (This kind of skeletal addition is what we find in the gnostic Gospel of Thomas which is thought to have begun,
in its own early stratum of sayings, as an offshoot of an early stage of Q. For more on the Gospel of Thomas, see my book
review of J. D. Crossan's The Birth
of Christianity.) This new Jesus is positioned as superior to John, who now serves as his herald. At a slightly later
stage he is identified with the expected Son of Man. In the very latest layer of Q we find the stirrings of biography and
a tendency to divinize this Jesus. The Temptation story (Luke 4:1-13) belongs here.
How did such a founder formulate itself in the Q mind if
he had no historical antecedent? All sectarian societies tend to read the present back into the past; they personify their
own activities in great founding events and heroic progenitors. The very existence of the sayings collection, the product
of the evolving community, would have invited attribution to a specific originating and authoritative figure. Such a record
set in a glorified past is known as a "foundation document," a universal phenomenon of sectarian expression. (Figures such
as Confucius, Lao-Tsu, Lycurgus of Sparta, the medieval Swiss William Tell, as well as other obscure sectarian figures of
the ancient world, are examples of founder figures who have come to be regarded as likely non-existent.)
I also suspect that the existence of a rival sect claiming
John the Baptist as its founder may have induced the Q community to develop one of its own, one touted as superior to John.
It is certainly curious, in view of the picture presented by the Gospels, that there could ever have been a question in anyone's
mind as to who was the greater, Jesus or John, but Q3 has to address this very point, in the so-called Dialogue between Jesus
and John (Luke 7:18-35). This whole scene seems to have been constructed at a later stage of Q's development out of earlier
discrete units. One of its component sayings, about going out into the wilderness to see something, is found alone in the
Gospel of Thomas (No. 78), with no association to the setting or characters of Q's Dialogue. Other bare sayings in Thomas
are found in more complex, reworked form in Q. All of it speaks to the artificial development of Q's founding Jesus figure.
An additional explanation for the development of this founder
is suggested by Q itself. The figure of heavenly Wisdom (Sophia), once seen as working through the community, seems to have
evolved into the figure of her envoy, one who had begun the movement and spoken her sayings. Myths about Wisdom coming to
the world were longstanding in Jewish thought and would have played a role here. Luke 7:35 (the concluding line of the Dialogue) calls Jesus a child
of Wisdom, and Matthew in his use of Q reflects an evolving attitude toward Jesus as the very incarnation of Wisdom herself.
Several of Jesus' sayings in Q are recognized as recast Wisdom sayings.
Whether the Q community gave to this perceived founder the
name "Jesus" cannot be certain. At a late stage of Q, there may even have been some crossover influences from earliest Gospel
circles (of "Mark"). Uncovering such things is a conjectural business, as actual historical developments tend to be more subtle
and complex than any academic presentation of them on paper, especially 20 centuries after the fact. It is significant that
Q never uses the term Christ, for such a founder would not at this stage have been regarded as the Messiah. That role was
introduced by Mark.
The wise and subtle teaching of Q1, the apocalyptic thunderings
of doom of Q2, the End-time Son of Man, the "Son" who surfaces far on in Q's development, all constitute a bizarre mix, not
the least because they come in sequential layers. (If supposedly authentic, in what limbo were the Q2 sayings stored until
the community was ready for them? They surface nowhere else.) Only a later subsuming of all these disparate elements under
one artificial figure, at a stage when the community's past was sufficiently blurred (partly by the intervening upheavals
of the Jewish War), can explain the process.
But the most telling feature of the Q Jesus has proven to
be the most perplexing, for he seems to bear no relationship to Paul's. Scholars continue to puzzle over the fact that Q contains
no concept of a suffering Jesus, a divinity who has undergone death and resurrection as a redeeming act. Q can make the killing
of the prophets a central theme (e.g., Luke 11:49-51) and yet never refer to Jesus' own crucifixion! Its parables contain no hint of the murder of the
Son of God. About the resurrection, Q breathes not a whisper. Jesus makes no prophecies of his own death and rising, as he
does in other parts of the Gospels. Note that in a Q passage in Luke 17, the evangelist has to insert into Jesus' mouth a
prophecy of his own death (verse 25); it is not in Matthew's use of the same passage (24:23f). Most startling of all, the
Jesus of Q has no obvious significance for salvation. Apart from the benefits accruing from the teachings themselves, scholars
admit that there is no soteriology in Q, certainly nothing about an atoning death for sin. The "Son who knows the Father"
(Luke 10:22,
a late saying recast from an earlier Wisdom saying) functions as a mediator of God's revelation—simply personifying
what the Q community itself does. The Gospel of Thomas is similarly devoid of any reference to Jesus' death and resurrection.
If the founder of the sect had been murdered by the Jewish
leaders, if the whole Christian movement had begun out of his death and perceived rising from the grave, it is inconceivable
that Q would not have said so. In Luke 13:34-5, for example, Jesus is prophesying. Having just written that Jerusalem is the city that murders the
prophets sent to her, how could the Q compiler have resisted putting in a reference to the greatest murder of all? As for
the saying in Luke 14:27 about disciples "taking up their cross" and following Jesus, this is recognized as a Cynic-Stoic
expression, possibly of the Jewish Zealots as well, not a reference to Jesus' own cross. (See R. Bultmann, History of the
Synoptic Tradition, p.161; Burton Mack, The Lost Gospel, p.138-9; Robert Funk, Honest to Jesus, p.235.)
David Seeley ("Jesus' Death in Q," NTS 38, p.223f) summarizes the situation: "[N]ot one of the passages in which prophets
are mentioned refers to Jesus' death. Such a reference must be assumed." Seeley goes on to construct an argument based on
this assumption, which is a classic illustration of how too much of New Testament research has traditionally proceeded.
How is this radical divergence between Paul and Q explained?
It shows, say the scholars, the differing responses by different circles to the man Jesus of Nazareth. But they founder when
they try to rationalize how such a strange phenomenon could have been possible. Besides, the documents reveal many more "responses"
than just two. We are to believe that early Christianity was wildly schizophrenic. First Paul and other epistle writers abandoned
all interest in the earthly life and identity of Jesus, turning him into a cosmic Christ who created the world and redeemed
it by his death and resurrection. The Q community, along with that of the Gospel of Thomas, on the other hand, decided to
ignore that death and resurrection and preserve the earthly teaching Jesus, a preacher of the coming end of the world. Between
these two poles lie other incongruent conceptions. In the earliest layer of the Gospel of John, Jesus is the mythical Descending-Ascending
Redeemer from heaven who saves by being God's Revealer; later he is equated with the Greek Logos. Jesus is the heavenly High
Priest of the Epistle to the Hebrews, the non-suffering intermediary servant of the Didache, the mystical Wisdom-Messiah of
the Odes of Solomon. Paul hints at divergent groups in places like Corinth who "preach another Jesus." In the diverse strands of Gnosticism
Jesus (or Christ) is a mythical part of the heavenly pleroma of Godhead, sometimes a revealer akin to John's, sometimes surfacing
under other names like Derdekeas or the Third Illuminator. (The gnostic Jesus eventually interacted with more orthodox ideas
and absorbed the new historical figure into itself.) But all this out of a crucified criminal? Out of any human man?
A more sensible solution would be that all these expressions
of the idea of "Jesus" and "Christ" were separate distillations out of the concepts that were flowing in the religious currents
of the day (as outlined in Part Two). Scholars now admit that "the beginnings of Christianity were exceptionally diverse,
varied dramatically from region to region, and were dominated by individuals and groups whose practice and theology would
be denounced as 'heretical'. " (Ron Cameron summarizing Walter Bauer, The Future of Early Christianity, p.381.) It
is no longer possible to maintain that such diversity—so much of it uncoordinated and competitive—exploded overnight
out of one humble Jewish preacher and a single missionary movement. *
* * *
It was inevitable that these varying expressions would gravitate toward each other. Some time in the late
first century, within a predominantly gentile milieu probably in Syria, some Christian scholar or circle combined the community
and founder of Q with the mythical suffering Jesus of the Pauline type of Christ cult. Perhaps his community had a foot in
both camps, an expression of classic syncretism. The result was the Gospel of Mark. Its author seems to have worked from oral
or incomplete Q traditions, for his Gospel fails to include the great teachings of Jesus and prophetic pronouncements which
Matthew and Luke have inherited.
What did Mark do? He crafted a ministry which moved from
Galilee to Jerusalem, now the site of Jesus' death.
He virtually re-invented the Apostles out of early, now-legendary figures in the Christ movement; they served mostly instructional
purposes. He brought into the Jesus orbit all the figures and concepts floating about in the Christian air, like Son of God,
Messiah, Son of David, the apocalyptic Son of Man.
Most important of all, he had to craft the story of Jesus'
passion. Some suggest that Mark used an earlier, more primitive fashioning of Jesus' trial and execution, one John later used
as well. Others think that all the famous elements of our passion story are purely Markan inventions: the scene in Gethsemane, Judas the betrayer, the denial by Peter, the actual details
of Jesus' trial and crucifixion, the story of the empty tomb. Considering that no concrete evidence surfaces in the record
of any pre-Markan passion story, the second option is the most likely. We owe the most enduring tale Western culture has produced
to the literary genius of Mark.
Perhaps some "historicizing" of the spiritual Christ had
already taken place in Christian study and preaching activities, before Mark and unrelated to Q. A similar sectarian tendency
to create an idealized founding past as seen in Q may have operated in the circles of the cultic Christ. The Proclaimed was
evolving into the Proclaimer. Jesus the one being preached became Jesus doing the preaching, and the Gospels ultimately functioned
as the "foundation document" of Christianity as a whole. Some initial ideas in this direction, such as the name of Paul's
"woman" and the period of Jesus' life, found their way to Ignatius, even without a written Gospel, although this information
may have come to him as 'echoes' of the recently written Gospel of Mark. Ignatius and 1 John (probably written in the 90s)
show that many were objecting to the new, radical idea that "Jesus Christ has come in the flesh" (1 John 4:1f). And what was
the engine of this impulse, the source of the information about the new 'historical' Jesus? We can see it in the Gospels themselves:
the Jewish scriptures.
First, some general observations. Scholars have long recognized
that the Gospels are made up of smaller units of the type found in Q: individual sayings or clusters of sayings, miracle anecdotes,
controversy stories. They have been strung together like "beads on a string" with filler material added, narrative bits to
convey some kind of sequential impression: Jesus went here, then he went there. Someone comes into the picture and asks a
question so that Jesus can give the answer. It used to be thought that the separate units were reliable pieces of tradition
which had passed through oral transmission, many going back to Jesus himself, others formulated within the early church in
response to him. But gradually it was perceived that the evangelists had altered or fleshed out these units in ways which
served their own editorial and theological purposes; many they had simply written themselves. There can be no guarantee that
anything goes back to a Jesus.
As we saw in Q, many of the sayings were Hellenistic and
Jewish moral maxims and popular parables; some came from Jewish wisdom teaching. The controversy stories and discipleship
instructions reflected the situation of the later Christian communities. Paul's "words of the Lord" (see Part One) represent
a type of preaching common to early Christian prophets: inspired communications from the spiritual Christ in heaven. These
would have been preserved and eventually entered the Gospels as spoken by a historical Jesus. Collections of miracle stories
were common in the ancient world, attributed to famous philosophers and wonder workers, even to deities like the healing god
Asclepius and Isis. Christian prophets were often healers and wonder workers themselves, whose exploits would later be turned
into those of Jesus.
It is now recognized that the Gospels are thoroughly sectarian
writings. They were a response to the "life situation" of the groups which produced them, serving their needs. They created
a sacred past for the faith, one going back to divine establishment. They offered a bulwark against outside attack. They legitimated
the community's beliefs and sanctioned its practices. The burning issue, for example, of association and table fellowship,
whether Jew could mix with gentile, whether the ritually pure could eat meals with the impure, was solved by having Jesus
portrayed as condemning the Pharisees for their obsession over purity, as one who had consorted with outcasts and gentiles.
The issue of whether the Jewish Law still applied was addressed by having Jesus make rulings on it. And so on. It is easy
to see how such sectarian interests, when several different communities and times were involved, would lead to the many contradictions
we find in Jesus' actions and pronouncements between one Gospel and another.
Did the evangelists see themselves as writing history? Their
wholesale practice of altering earlier accounts, rearranging the details of Jesus' ministry, changing the very words of the
Lord himself, would suggest otherwise. It is now a maxim that the Gospels are faith documents; the evangelists had no concern
for historical research as we know it.
Rather, they were engaged in a type of "midrash." Midrash
was an ancient Jewish practice of interpreting and enlarging on individual or combinations of passages from the Bible to draw
out new meanings and relevance, to get beyond the surface words. One way to do this was to embody them in new stories with
present-day contexts. In the minds of the evangelists, the Gospels expounded new spiritual truths through a retelling of scripture.
So many New Testament elements are simply a reworking of stories recorded in the Old Testament. Jesus was cast in tales like
those of Moses, for example, presenting him as a new Moses for contemporary times. At the same time, in view of Q, it is quite
possible that writers like Mark regarded their work as something pointing to actual history, to a figure announced in scriptural
precedent. In any event, before long, such Gospels came to be looked upon as purely factual records, by gentiles who did not
understand their Jewish roots, and scripture came to be seen as the prophecy of such real "events" rather than their source.
Just as scripture had earlier provided a picture of the mythical
Christ of Paul, the same writings (using passages taken out of context and with no regard to their original meaning) now supplied
the setting and details of a recent earthly life of Jesus. Mark brought to a head an already fledgling process and added those
"biographical" elements he found in the Q traditions. Out of such components, with the Bible open before him, he fashioned
his story of Jesus' ministry and passion.
Jesus had to have performed miracles because this was expected
to happen in the days leading to the kingdom. Isaiah 35:5-6 said: "Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears
of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing for joy."
Thus, Jesus made the lame walk and the blind see. The Messiah
was even expected to raise the dead. The details of many of Jesus' miracle stories are modeled on the miracles performed by
Elijah and Elisha in 1 and 2 Kings.
Both Matthew and Luke place Jesus' birth at Bethlehem because the prophet Micah (5:2)
had declared that this would be the birthplace of the future ruler of Israel. After that, the two evangelists'
Nativity stories agree on virtually nothing. Scriptural midrash can be a very haphazard thing.
The Gospel account of Jesus' trial and death shows the heaviest
dependence on scripture. Virtually every element of Mark's passion story, beginning with Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, is based on a biblical passage.
Here are a few examples:
- The prophet Hosea (9:15): "For their evil deeds I will drive them from my house." Plus Zechariah
(14:21): "No trader will be seen in the house of the Lord." Jesus drives the money changers from the Temple.
- Psalm 42:5: "How deep I am sunk in misery, groaning in my distress." Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.
- Psalm 41:9:"Even the friend whom I trusted, who ate at my table, exults in my misfortune." The betrayal
by Judas. Conflict with the Jewish establishment would have provided strong motivation for coming up with the figure of Judas
to represent all hostile and unbelieving Jewry.
- Isaiah 53:12: "And he was numbered with the transgressors." Jesus is crucified between two thieves.
- Psalm 22:18: "They divided my garments among them, and for my raiments they cast
lots." The soldiers gamble for Jesus' clothes at the foot of the cross.
The desertion of the Apostles, the false accusations at Jesus' trial, the crown of thorns, the drink of
vinegar and gall, the darkness at noon: these and other details have their counterparts in the sacred writings.
The very idea that Jesus was crucified (including in the mythical phase of belief) would have come from passages like Isaiah
53:5: "He was pierced for our transgressions," and Psalm 22:16: "They have pierced my hands and my feet." The placing of Jesus'
death at the time of Herod and Pilate was partly a response to the opening verses of Psalm 2. (See J. D. Crossan, The Cross
That Spoke.)
But the story of Jesus resides in scripture more than in
an assortment of isolated passages. The overall concept of the Passion, Death and Resurrection has emerged out of a theme
embodied repeatedly in tales throughout the Hebrew Bible and related writings. This is the story modern scholars have characterized
as The Suffering and Vindication of the Innocent Righteous One. We find it in the story of Joseph in Genesis; in Isaiah 53
with its Suffering Servant; in Tobit, Esther, Daniel, 2 and 3 Maccabees, Susanna, the story of Ahiqar, the Wisdom of Solomon.
All tell a tale of a righteous man or woman falsely accused, who suffers, is convicted and condemned to death, rescued at
the last moment and raised to a high position; or, in the later literature, exalted after death. It is the tale of how the
Jews saw themselves: the pious persecuted by the powerful, the people of God subjugated by the godless. It was an image readily
absorbed by the Christian sect.
The story of Jesus follows this very pattern: bearing the true message of God, he suffered in faithful
silence, was convicted though innocent, ultimately to be vindicated and exalted to glory and God's presence. Jesus' redemptive
role was a paradigm for Jewish motifs of suffering and atonement and destined exaltation, brought into a potent mix with Hellenistic
Son (Logos) and savior god philosophies. Christianity emerged as a genuine synthesis of the leading religious ideas of the
ancient world, and it set the course of Western faith for the next two millennia.
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