Jesus
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
I - Birth, Childhood, Youth
II - Baptism, Temptation, and the Apostles
III - The Danger of the Miracles
IV - What Jesus Taught and Why
V - Poetry and Parables, Questions and Silence
VI - Encounters: Men, Women, Children, the Aged
VII - Jesus’s New Ten Commandments
VIII - Jesus’s Trial and Crucifixion
IX - The Resurrection and the Birth of Christianity
Further Reading
Index
ALSO BY PAUL JOHNSON
Churchill
Heroes: From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar
to Churchill and de Gaulle
Creators: From Chaucer and Dürer to Picasso and Disney
George Washington: The Founding Father
Napoleon: A Penguin Life
A History of the American People
The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830
Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties
Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky
A History of the Jews
A History of Christianity
PAUL JOHNSON
VIKING
VIKING
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First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Paul Johnson, 2010
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Johnson, Paul, 1928-
Jesus : a biography from a believer / Paul Johnson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-19766-0
1. Jesus Christ—Biography. I. Title.
BT301.3.J64 2010
232.9’01—dc22
[B] 2009047214
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To my mother,
Anne Johnson,
who first taught me about Jesus
INTRODUCTION
Man and God
JESUS OF NAZARETH WAS, in terms of his influence, the most important human being in history. He is also the most written about and discussed. The earliest surviving document dealing with him, St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, was circulated (that is, copied and published) in the fifties of the first century AD, about twenty years after his death. By then, biographies of him written in the Aramaic tongue he normally spoke were circulating, but these have since disappeared. Within half a century of his death, however, four biographies, written in Greek, had been published, and all have come down to us. By the end of the century, forty-five authentic documents about him had appeared, and these have also survived. Since then, first documents, then entire books about him have been published in growing quantity, and in all languages. Today, there are over one hundred thousand printed biographies of Jesus in English alone, and many more monographs. More than one hundred were issued in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
The religion which commemorates Jesus’s teachings, death, and Resurrection was well established in half a dozen countries by AD 50. His followers were already known as “Christians,” a term joyfully adopted by the faithful, even though it was coined in Antioch, a city notorious for its slang neologisms. The number of Christians has increased ever since, and is now about 1.25 billion. Although static or declining in some parts of the world, Christianity is growing in Asia and Latin America, and especially in Africa. The first Christian place of worship dates from about AD 50, and the now nearly one million chapels, churches, basilicas, abbeys, and cathedrals include many of the largest, most remarkable, and beautiful buildings ever erected: indeed, the influence of Christianity has been perhaps the single biggest factor in the development of architecture over the last two millennia. The image of Jesus is the most favored subject matter in painting and sculpture, and the Christian influence is similarly predominant in poetry, music, and all the other arts, except photography, the cinema, and the electronic media, though even in these Christ’s likeness is common. In many ways—and in cultural and moral respects especially—Jesus’s life, and the faith it created, are the central events in the history of humanity, around which all revolves not only today but, I foresee, in the future.
So far we have considered the influence of Jesus as man. But the reason he has been so important as a man is not merely his human nature and personality, or his actions, but the fact, which all Christians have believed as I believe, that he was and is God, too. The unique event of someone both God and man appearing on earth is the essence of Christianity. What is the explanation for this singular phenomenon? It is a mystery, as are so many of the fundamental questions which face us in life, and we can only conjecture. How to make humans worthy of existing alongside their Creator? The answer is provided in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
Since God is omniscient and omnipresent, we must assume that this scheme of salvation, and this ultimate human consequence, was prefigured in the creation of time and space, and that therefore God was, ab initio, Trinitarian in nature, monotheistic but also three in one: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Why was the salvation process made operative in 4 BC with the birth of Jesus and not sooner or later? Since God exists outside space and time, which are mere ephemeral devices to enable humanity to evolve and be tested, then saved, the question (natural though it seems to me) is nugatory. It is also futile for us to inquire into the nature of Jesus and God, and his preexistence from the beginning, since that is unknowable, let alone the future, which is still hidden from us.
What we can do, however, is write about Jesus the man, during his life in which, in the words of St. John, he “dwelt among us . . . full of grace and truth” (1:14). His life has been written more often than that of any other human being, with infinite variations of detail
, employing vast resources of scholarship, and often controversially, not to say acrimoniously. Scholarship, like everything else, is subject to fashion, and it was the fashion, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for some to deny that Jesus existed. No serious scholar holds that view now, and it is hard to see how it ever took hold, for the evidence of Jesus’s existence is abundant. Roman secular writers much closer to his time, such as Pliny, Tacitus, and Suetonius, took it for granted, as did the accurate and conscientious Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the generation after Jesus’s death. Moreover, unlike the overwhelming majority of famous figures in antiquity, whose existence has never been questioned, Jesus was the subject of four biographies, one written by an eyewitness, the others transcripts of verbal accounts by eyewitnesses, all made public within thirty to forty years of his death, and all agreeing in essentials. They are confirmed in many details by contemporary letters circulated by Jesus’s followers.
The problem with writing the life of Jesus the man is not so much the paucity of sources as their abundance, and the difficulty in reaching behind the written text to the full meaning of sayings and episodes which need to be explained afresh to each generation. There is the further problem of presenting to readers, two millennia later, the personality of a man so extraordinary and protean, passionate yet deliberative, straightforward and subtle, full of authority and even, at times, stern, yet also infinitely kind, understanding, forgiving, and loving, so dazzling in his excellences that those close to him had no hesitation in accepting his divinity. Yet it is one of the glories of Christianity that writers of all periods have felt it possible to venture their own portraits of the man.
The sketch that follows, broad of brush and yet pointillist on occasion, reflects many years of reading and historical study. Apart from references to the Gospel texts (all in the King James Version), I do not cite my authorities, though I am prepared to defend all my assertions, if challenged, by documentation. My objects have been clarity and brevity, and my desire is to convey the joy and nourishment I receive in following Jesus’s footsteps and pondering his words.
I
Birth, Childhood, Youth
THE WORLD INTO WHICH Jesus was born was harsh, cruel, violent, and unstable. It was also materialistic and increasingly wealthy. The great fact of geopolitics was Rome and its possessions, in the process of transforming itself from a republic into an empire. It now occupied the shores of the entire Mediterranean, from which one of its great men, Pompey, had driven all the pirates which once infested it, using ruthless methods of brutality, torture, and large-scale public executions. As a result, trade was expanding fast and many cities and individuals doubled their riches in the generation before Jesus was born.
Rome, pushing inland from the Mediterranean, now occupied all of Italy and Spain, as well as Greece and Egypt, and what we call Turkey. Between 50 and 60 million people now came under its laws. Fifty years before Jesus was born, Julius Caesar had added the whole of Gaul (modern France) to Roman territory, and he had even carried out two reconnaissances to Britain, though it was not conquered until fifteen years after Jesus’s death. The expanding empire was based upon muscle power rather than technology, thanks to about 15 million slaves, who constituted one-third of the population in the towns, and whose life was summed up by Aristotle in four words: “work, punishment, and food.” The cost of two years’ food bought a skilled slave. Though neither scientists nor technicians, the Romans were lawyers and builders. Their laws were uniform throughout the civilized world and enforced with horrific severity, the instrument of justice being the crucifix on which malefactors were nailed and left to die. The Romans made superb roads, and they had discovered the virtues of cement, which, when mixed with agglomerates, constituted concrete. The Roman Empire was built on concrete: it enabled the Romans to create immense aqueducts to bring fresh water to their cities, as well as to erect huge public buildings. Rome had not produced a culture as splendid as that of Greece. Most of the statues which adorned its cities were copies of Greek models, and it had nothing so fine as the Athens Parthenon to show. But the Forum in Rome was already spectacular in its grandeur, and the city’s Pantheon, being built in Jesus’s lifetime, was revolutionary in its enclosure of vast space. Rome had a growing literature, too. Its national poet, Virgil, died fifteen years before Jesus was born, and its greatest lyricist, Horace, four years before. But Ovid, its love poet, was still alive, aged thirty-nine in 4 BC. Livy completed his great history of Rome when Jesus was a teenager. Seneca, a dramatist and philosopher, was born in the same year as Jesus. The great marble sculpture known as Laocoön and His Sons, now in the Vatican Museums, was created in his childhood.
The cultural efflorescence of Jesus’s day was made possible by the stability imposed by Caesar’s heir, Octavian, who became Rome’s first emperor as Augustus Caesar, following the civil war. He died when Jesus was eighteen, but under his successor, Tiberius, Rome was so terrified of his Praetorian Guard that the emperor was able to live on the island of Capri, amid its pleasures, while his guard’s commander, Sejanus, kept all in peace. In what we now call Palestine, a similar calm prevailed at the time of Jesus’s birth, under the plutocratic tyranny of Herod the Great. For more than thirty years, this astute financier, who had made himself the richest individual in the entire empire, had by his subservience to the rulers of Rome (and by princely gifts) made himself master of the ancient kingdom of the Jews. He was the greatest builder of his age, creating a new port at Caesarea in Samaria, rebuilding and enlarging the Temple in Jerusalem, and building public baths, aqueducts, and what we would call shopping centers in half a dozen cities, as well as a ring of powerful fortresses, including the massive Antonia (named after Mark Antony) in Jerusalem, overlooking the Temple and his own enormous palace. He was a benefactor of the Jews on a colossal scale. But he was not popular among them. Only half Jewish by birth, and wholly Greek in his cultural tastes, he was regarded as heretical by the Jewish religious authorities for sponsoring Greek-style games, theaters, and music. He also had numerous wives and concubines, some of them Gentiles, and sired many children. Suspicious and cruel, he slaughtered over forty of his wives, children, and close relatives, often in circumstances of peculiar atrocity, for conspiracies, real or imaginary, against his rule and person. As his reign drew to a close—the last year of his life was the year of Jesus’s birth—his suspicions increased, and an atmosphere of paranoia prevailed at his court.
Yet Herod’s kingdom was prosperous, and Galilee, though regarded as wild and primitive by the sophisticated urban Jews of Jerusalem, was not backward economically. Galilean Jews ate well. There was an abundance of sheep, bred for wool as well as meat. The ubiquitous presence of sheep and shepherds is the background of Jesus’s life and the source of his most frequent images. Grain, grown in abundance, was cheap and exported through Caesarea. Bread, “the staff of life,” was eaten at all meals, and it, too, was a source of constant imagery for Jesus. Olive trees were plentiful, and a variety of olives, black, green, and white, was part of the daily fare and made into oil for cooking. There was a wide range of vegetables, salads, and spices. Wine was drunk at the principal meals.
Jews helped one another, and their communities ran privately organized welfare schemes for the sick, the infirm, and orphans. Needy widows were assisted. There were poor Jews, who received doles from their brethren, but most of those referred to in the Gospels as “the poor” or “beggars” were non-Jews, for all parts of Palestine were mixed-race societies, with immigrants, detribalized peasants, and nomads forming a large part of the population. Giving to “the poor” was part of the duty of every self-respecting Jew, and it, too, was part of the imagery of Jesus’s life.
Nazareth was a small Galilean town in 4 BC, home to many small workshops and craftsmen. One was Joseph, a carpenter, who believed himself descended from King David and could recite his pedigree. He was probably literate (in Aramaic, the vernacular, and sacred Hebrew), as were the majority of Je
ws. He had taken as his future bride a teenager, aged sixteen or so, called Mary, also from the house of David and very likely related to him. She lived behind or above his workshop but was still a virgin. Their marriage was to take place in the following year. She came from a respectable home, could read and write, cook, weave, and sew, and was preparing to be a diligent wife to a prosperous tradesman. She had a capacious memory, and many years later was to be a principal source for St. Luke, the Greek-speaking doctor whose Gospel deals most fully with Jesus’s birth and childhood.
All well-nurtured Jews read the scriptures, especially the Torah, which were the nation’s record of its history, its spiritual guide, and its book of prayer. Mary was thus occupied when the angel Gabriel appeared and, according to Luke (1 : 28-38), said to her: “Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.” This astonishing greeting troubled and puzzled her. But Gabriel said, “Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS.” The angel went on: “He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.”
We can be sure that Mary remembered these words exactly. She also recalled her first, anxious question—“How shall this be, since I am still a virgin?” (or, as she put it, “seeing I know not a man?”)—and the angel’s explicit reply: “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.”
To these dramatic words the angel added a personal note. Her cousin Elizabeth, he informed Mary, had also, in her old age, conceived a son, and was now six months pregnant. It was this startling piece of family news which finally brought home to Mary the reality of the angel’s message. She now submitted to her destiny in memorable words reflecting a proud humility: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.”