Jesus: a new vision

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Jesus: a new vision Page 2

by Marcus J. Borg


  In their own experience, these Christians knew the living Christ as the light of the world who brought them out of darkness, as the bread of life who nourished them with spiritual food, as the vine whose life coursed through them, and as the way and the truth which brought them to new life. And thus John portrayed Jesus as all of these: as light, bread, vine, the way and the truth, God’s “Word” become flesh. The remarkable affirmations about Jesus in John’s gospel are a powerful testimony to the reality and character of the living Christ. Rather than being the self-proclamation of Jesus, they flow out of the post-Easter experience of the early church, and their truthfulness is testified to by the experience of Christians ever since. John’s gospel is “the spiritual gospel,” as was recognized already by the Christian writer Clement of Alexandria near the end of the second century; it speaks of the significance of Christ in the spiritual life of Christians.8

  What is true of John’s gospel is true of the popular image in general. Both are the product of projecting later Christian convictions, grounded in the experience of Christ through the centuries as a living divine reality, back into the period of the ministry itself. The risen living Christ does possess the qualities of divinity; he is “very God of very God,” one with the Father, and therefore everywhere-present, all-powerful, and all-knowing. But though these statements are true about the risen Christ, they are not true about the historical Jesus. Clearly, Jesus as a figure of history was not “omnipresent,” but was always in some particular place—in Nazareth, on the road, in Jerusalem, or elsewhere. Similarly, even though remarkable powers flowed through him, as we shall see later, he was not “omnipotent,” as even the gospels recognize.9 Neither should we suppose that he was “omniscient.” As a first-century Jew who learned what he knew in the context of his own culture and experience, presumably he shared many of the beliefs of his contemporaries, including beliefs about the world which we now think of as erroneous. The risen Christ, “seated at the right hand of God,” does share all of the qualities of God. But the historical Jesus did not.

  The projection of divine qualities back onto Jesus is very ancient. Not only can we see this to some extent in the New Testament itself, but it became especially prominent in what are known as the “apocryphal” gospels.10 There Jesus as an infant is already portrayed as having superhuman knowledge and power. From his crib, he points at the animals and makes them talk; on his journey into Egypt as a baby, he saves his parents from a dragon by killing it; as a five year old, he makes clay birds and then turns them into real birds. Clearly, what is happening here is that the experiential knowledge that the risen Christ is divine is unreflectively projected back onto the human Jesus.

  The tendency continues in the modern world. Some years back, a well-known evangelist suggested that Jesus would have been the world’s greatest athlete, and speculated about how quickly he could have run the mile. Behind this somewhat strange suggestion is the notion that Jesus was a divine being with superhuman powers. But the portrait of Jesus as a divine “superhero” has nothing to do with historical reality. Indeed, to the extent that the popular image sees Jesus as a divine being who merely seemed to be human, the popular image is not only nonhistorical but also was declared to be heretical by the early church.11

  In short, the image of the historical Jesus as a divine or semidivine being, who saw himself as the divine savior whose purpose was to die for the sins of the world, and whose message consisted of proclaiming that, is simply not historically true. Rather, it is the product of a blend produced by the early church—a blending of the church’s memory of Jesus with the church’s beliefs about the risen Christ. The former was seen through the window provided by the latter. They remembered Jesus with the “eye of faith,” that is, in the light of Easter and afterward.

  The blend was both natural and legitimate. It is what happens when a religious community looks back on its founder in light of their ongoing experience of him; and it is legitimate in that it speaks of what Christ is in the Christian life. Moreover, the image has nurtured the lives of millions of Christians over the centuries. However, if what is wanted is a reasonably clear image of the historical Jesus, then one must use a historical method which seeks to separate out the church’s later beliefs from the traditions about Jesus found in early Christian documents. If one wants historical answers to the questions of Jesus’ identity, mission, and message, one must first set aside the answers given by the popular image.

  All of this is old news to anybody who has attended seminary or divinity school in the mainstream churches. It is also familiar to most people who have taken a religion course in a nonsectarian college. Yet it is still news to many (and perhaps most) people in our culture and in the church. In part, this is simply because of the endurance which popular images possess. But it is also because mainstream biblical scholarship has not generated a persuasive alternative image of the historical Jesus. Instead, the image which has dominated New Testament scholarship throughout much of this century has made Jesus seem both strange and irrelevant.

  THE DOMINANT SCHOLARLY IMAGE OF JESUS

  The realization that the popular image is not historical led to the “quest for the historical Jesus” in biblical scholarship.12 If the historical Jesus did not proclaim himself as the Messiah and the Son of God, the divine savior who was to die for the sins of the world—if that was not his purpose and the content of his preaching—what then was he like, and what was his mission and message? Though the quest in the twentieth century produced a wide diversity of answers to these questions, two traits emerged as dominant emphases in mainstream scholarship.

  INCREASING HISTORICAL SKEPTICISM

  First, there was an increasing historical skepticism about whether we can know the answers to these questions with any degree of probability. To some extent, this skepticism flowed out of the increasingly meticulous study of the origins of the gospels, especially form criticism and redaction criticism.

  This century’s scholarship has made it clear that not only John but also the synoptic gospels reflect the experience and beliefs of the early church. Form criticism, emerging after World War I, studied the way the traditions about Jesus were shaped during the three or more decades that they circulated in oral form before being written down. Redaction criticism, developing largely after World War II, analyzed Matthew, Mark, and Luke as individual documents, as well as carefully comparing how each handled individual texts. Correctly treating the gospels as the products of particular authors writing for particular communities, redaction criticism focused attention upon the meaning intended by the gospel writers themselves, and not upon the history behind the gospel.

  Together with form criticism, redaction criticism has made it even more clear that every story and word of Jesus has been shaped by the eyes and hands of the early church. By making us more aware of the ways the gospel writers and the early Christians before them during the oral period shaped their material in accord with their own needs and purposes, form and redaction critics have also made us more aware of the difficulties involved in using gospel texts as sources of information about the historical Jesus.

  The historical skepticism ignited by the careful study of the texts has been fueled by the multiplicity of diverse portraits of Jesus constructed by scholars, ranging from a fairly traditional understanding of Jesus as the servant and Son of God to Jesus as a political revolutionary, or as one who expected the immediate end of the world, or as the center of a mushroom cult.13 These widely divergent portraits, all claiming to be based on the use of an objective historical method, have reinforced the notion that we really cannot know much about Jesus at all, and the corollary notion that it is possible to construct almost any portrait of Jesus one wishes. Prudent scholars thus tended to avoid the quest for the historical Jesus; indeed, the middle portion of this century is commonly described in the history of scholarship as the period of “no quest.”14 All that we can know directly, it was affirmed, is the Christ proclaimed in the preaching (or
kerygma)15 of the early church. All attempts to go behind the kerygma involve one in highly subjective speculation. Obtaining knowledge of the historical Jesus thus was seen as both exceedingly difficult and theologically irrelevant.

  THE IMAGE ITSELF: JESUS AS ESCHATOLOGICAL PROPHET

  This strong mood of historical skepticism was accompanied (somewhat inconsistently) by a near consensus concerning what little can (and cannot) be known about Jesus. Despite the diversity of portraits, there was considerable unanimity within the scholarly mainstream. Its answers to the three questions of Jesus’ identity, message, and mission together comprise an image of Jesus which became almost taken for granted in much of scholarship over the past sixty years.

  Regarding Jesus’ own sense of identity, the growing historical skepticism produced a consensus. Whether Jesus thought of himself as having any special exalted identity—as “Messiah” or “the Son of God”—we cannot know because of the very nature of the documents. When we do find such statements in the gospels (and they are few in our earliest sources), the careful historian (even if he or she is also a Christian) must suspect them as the post-Easter perspective of Jesus’ followers projected back into the ministry. They may well be theologically true—that is, statements which appropriately describe what Jesus had become in the life of the post-Easter church—but they may not be taken as historically accurate statements of what was said during the ministry itself. So also with the statements (again, relatively few in our earliest sources) speaking of “dying for the sins of the world” as Jesus’ purpose or intention. Thus the image of the historical Jesus as the divine savior who knew himself to be such, and whose mission was to complete that purpose, disappears. How Jesus thought of himself and his purpose must be inferred from his message, not from statements which speak directly of who he was.

  According to the consensus, from such an examination of Jesus’ message and mission we may surmise that he was an “eschatological prophet” or perhaps even “the eschatological prophet.” The phrase needs some unpacking. Eschatology is that branch of theology which concerns the “end time”—the end of the world, last judgment, and the dawning of the everlasting kingdom. An eschatological prophet is one who announces the end. There is some evidence that some in the Jewish tradition near the time of Jesus anticipated such a prophet, “one like unto Moses” or perhaps even greater than Moses, who would appear immediately before the end of time. To say that Jesus was the eschatological prophet is to say that he saw himself as the prophet of the end who proclaimed the end of the world in his own time and the urgency of repentance before it was too late. That was the core of his message and mission.

  The consensus image of Jesus as eschatological prophet was grounded in the claim that the “Kingdom of God” was at the center of Jesus’ own message. So Mark describes Jesus’ mission in his advance summary at the beginning of his gospel: “The Kingdom of God is at hand, therefore repent!”16 However, the consensus image also depends upon a particular interpretation of the phrase “Kingdom of God,” namely that “Kingdom of God” is to be understood eschatologically as referring to the “final” Kingdom which would bring an end to earthly history as we know it, the “end of the world.”

  This eschatological understanding of Jesus and of the Kingdom of God had its origin primarily in the work of Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) at the beginning of this century.17 He is most familiar to us as a world-famed medical missionary, Nobel prize recipient, and a modern “saint.” But as a young man Schweitzer, prior to going to Africa, wrote two brilliant books that decisively shaped Jesus studies for the rest of the century.18 Calling attention to the element of crisis running throughout the gospels and the statements about the coming of the “Kingdom of God” and “the Son of man” who would bring all earthly history to a close, Schweitzer argued that Jesus expected these events in the immediate future and saw his death as playing a decisive role in bringing about the end. Jesus was mistaken; the end did not come, and he died perhaps realizing his mistake.19

  Though Schweitzer’s work initially created a sensation and still strikes many as outlandish when they first hear of it, his basic image of Jesus as eschatological prophet gradually became the consensus understanding among scholars. Stripped of some of its details, it became the dominant image in German New Testament scholarship and, through the influential role played by German scholarship, in much of North American scholarship.20 To be sure, scholars also recognized that Jesus spoke of the Kingdom as present and not only future, but the future imminent Kingdom continued to be emphasized. The image of Jesus as one who proclaimed the end of the world and the urgency of repentance remained.

  Especially indicative of the consensus is the treatment of Jesus by the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Küng. At the heart of his best-selling book On Being a Christian is a very lengthy section on the historical Jesus—about half of the book’s six hundred pages.21 Illustrative of the consensus precisely because he is not a New Testament scholar but a systematic theologian, Küng’s treatment is based upon his perception of the consensus of New Testament scholarship.22 Running throughout his account, thick with incisive insights and powerful phrases which catch some of the passion of the gospels themselves, is the picture of Jesus as one who expected the end of the world in his generation.

  Though the scholarly image of Jesus as eschatological prophet is known only in relatively narrow circles, it has had its effect upon the life of the church, primarily through the education provided to clergy. In addition to learning that the popular image is not historical, students in the seminaries of mainstream churches over the past several decades have basically learned two things about Jesus: one, we cannot know much about him; and two, what we can know is a bit shocking and largely irrelevant to the life of the church. The image of Jesus as mistakenly expecting the end of the world in his own time and calling people to repent because the end was near does not lend itself well to Christian preaching and teaching. Never have I heard a preacher say in a sermon, “The text tells us that Jesus expected the end of the world in his time; he was wrong, but let’s see what we can make of the text anyway.”

  As a consequence, among mainstream clergy there is often a strange silence about what Jesus was like as a historical figure. Christian preaching about Jesus is left to those who still think of the popular image as historical and who can therefore proclaim that image with confidence. When mainstream clergy do preach about Jesus, understandably they tend to emphasize the kerygma, the message of the early church about Jesus, and not Jesus himself. No wonder the popular image has remained so dominant, for Christians are typically not exposed to a persuasive and compelling alternative image.23 What is known is an unhistorical image, believed by some, disbelieved by others.

  Thus the two dominant currents of twentieth-century scholarship on Jesus—historical skepticism and eschatological emphasis—have made the historical Jesus seem irrelevant. There is a widespread impression that what the historical Jesus was like is not only difficult to know but also of no theological consequence—that is, of no significance for us today, whether we are in the church or outside it. Schweitzer said so explicitly, and much of subsequent New Testament scholarship has essentially agreed: the historical Jesus is irrelevant.24

  There is some truth to this position. Knowledge of the historical Jesus is not essential. Being a Christian does not require having accurate historical information. Generations of Christians, taking the gospel portraits at “face value” as historical accounts, have had incorrect historical beliefs about Jesus without harm to their faith or piety. Christianity does not consist primarily of having correct beliefs about the historical Jesus, but consists of having a relationship with the living Christ.

  Yet what the historical Jesus was like is not irrelevant to the Christian faith, even if historical knowledge about him is not essential, a sine qua non. There is a long tradition in the church that the lives of the saints are edifying, that is, instructive and informative for the Christian life.
At the very least, the historical Jesus should be significant for this reason. Surely what he was like as a historical figure is as interesting as the lives of St. Francis, or Gandhi, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In what ways Jesus is relevant is to a large extent the purpose of the rest of this book and the alternative image of Jesus which it describes.

  TOWARD A THIRD IMAGE

  Several developments in New Testament studies in recent years pave the way for a new historical image of Jesus. First, there are signs of major cracks in the scholarly image of Jesus as eschatological prophet. Significantly, the consensus regarding Jesus’ expectation of the end of the world has disappeared. The majority of scholars no longer thinks that Jesus expected the end of the world in his generation.25

  The erosion of the consensus has been due to several factors, including especially an emerging conviction that the “coming Son of man” sayings (which are the central foundation stones for saying that Jesus expected the immiment end of the world) are not authentic, that is, that they do not go back to Jesus but are the product of the early church.26 Moreover, if Jesus did not expect the imminent end of the world, then it follows that “Kingdom of God” must be given a meaning other than its eschatological one. The collapse of the consensus makes it possible to ask, “If Jesus was not an eschatological prophet whose mission and message were to proclaim the nearness of the end and issue the call to repentance, what then was he like and what was his purpose and proclamation?”

 

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