Jesus: a new vision

by Marcus J. Borg

  Classic among these are the feeding stories, already considered, and the stories of Jesus stilling the storm and walking on the water. In an important sense, neither of the sea stories concerns the public ministry of Jesus; rather, only his inner group of followers is present. In both stories, they are in a boat, at night, distressed and frightened; in both, Jesus comes to them, the winds cease, and the sea is calmed.

  Central to these stories is “the sea,” an image which reverberates with rich resonances of meaning in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew word for “sea,” derived from the name of the evil god in the Babylonian creation story, carried connotations of evil, a mysterious and threatening force opposed to God. Accordingly, when the ancient Hebrews wanted to stress God’s power and authority, they spoke of the divine mastery over the sea. The authors of the psalms exclaimed, “The sea is his, for he made it!” and “Thou dost rule the raging of the sea; when its waves rise, thou stillest them.”39 According to the book of Job, it was God who “shut in the sea with doors” and said to it, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed.”40

  The plight of the disciples and their cry for help echo another passage from the psalms which describes people in a storm at sea:

  The stormy wind lifted up the waves of the sea. They mounted up to heaven, they went down to the depths. Their courage melted away in their evil plight; they reeled and staggered like drunken men, and were at their wits’ end. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress; he made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed.41

  These connections to language and imagery that were part of the early church’s religious-literary tradition suggest that the story is to be understood within that larger framework.

  Putting all of these elements together, the narrative makes several points. The picture of Jesus stilling the storm makes the claim that he shares in the power and authority of God; that which was said of God in the Old Testament is now said of Jesus. Moreover, like the Lord of the Psalm narrative, he responds to his followers’ cry of distress when the forces of evil and chaos threaten to overwhelm them. Finally, a boat was one of the images for the early church, perhaps by the time Mark’s narrative was written. If Mark was making use of this image, then the narrative portrays Jesus as the Lord of the church who saves his people when they turn to him for help in distress. The cry of the disciples is the church’s cry, “Save, Lord; we are perishing,”42 and the words of Jesus to the disciples are addressed to the church: “Take heart, it is I, have no fear.”43 In short, the purpose of the narrative may be symbolic rather than historical. Moreover, it is no less true for being symbolic; indeed, its truth is verified in the experience of Christians ever since, quite apart from the historical verdict about whether the story describes an actual incident one night on the Sea of Galilee.

  Symbolic elements similarly point to a meaning beyond historical reporting in the other “spectacular” narratives. The most sensational of the resuscitation stories, the raising of Lazarus, is in John’s gospel which, as we have noted, is viewed by scholars as not primarily historical in nature.44 Of the two synoptic resuscitations, one seems not to have been an actual one, but a “revival” of a person mistakenly thought to be dead, a mistake relatively common prior to modern methods of diagnosis. To the wailing people gathered around the bed of Jairus’s daughter, Jesus said, “Why do you make a tumult and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.”45 Whatever one makes of the historicity behind these stories, the accounts have a symbolic edge; namely, the “raising of the dead” was associated with the coming of the “new age” and the Messiah. Thus the accounts may be expressing symbolically the conviction that the new age and the Messiah had come.

  Finally, there is another power, rather strange, which Jesus spoke of, even though no story is told of his actually using this power: immunity to poisonous serpents. “Behold, I have given you authority to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing shall hurt you.”46

  Interestingly, the same power was reported of another Jewish holy man, Hanina ben Dosa. While he was praying, “A poisonous snake bit him, but he did not interrupt his prayer.” Later, the onlookers found the snake dead at the opening of its hole and exclaimed, “Woe to the man bitten by a snake, but woe to the snake which bites Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa.”47 According to the book of Acts, the apostle Paul enjoyed a similar immunity.48 Clearly, the “power” links Jesus once again to the charismatic stream of Judaism. But are the words about power over serpents to be understood literally or symbolically, perhaps pointing beyond themselves to power over Satan; or, given the story of the tempter in the Garden of Eden taking the form of a serpent, to power over sin?

  Thus, about all of these stories of “other powers,” a clear historical judgment is impossible. Moreover, one cannot overcome the historical uncertainty through an act of faith. An account cannot be made historically true by believing it to be so. For example, I may choose to believe that George Washington actually threw a silver dollar across the Potomac, but my belief has nothing to do with whether he actually did; he may or may not have.49 The same is true with the historical question about whether Jesus actually did these things. Believing that he did so has nothing to do with whether he actually did. One cannot solve the historical question by faith or belief. In short, the mighty deeds of Jesus other than his exorcisms and healings must remain in a “historical suspense account.”50

  Though one must be uncertain about these stories as part of the history of Jesus, their meanings as part of the church’s story of Jesus are clear. Using imagery rich with associations in that time, the stories affirm that the living Christ of the early church’s experience was (and for Christians, still is) one who, sharing in the power of God, delivered them from peril and evil, nourished them in the wilderness, and brought life out of death.

  CONCLUSION

  In their historical context, the miracles of Jesus do not “prove” that he was divine. In the tradition in which he stood, including figures from its ancient past and persons contemporary with him, the healings and exorcisms reported of him were not unique. Yet though the historical study of the miracles results in the loss of their uniqueness, it produces a gain in their credibility. Contrary to the modern notion that such events are impossible, we must grant that the historical evidence that Jesus stood in the stream of Jewish charismatic healers is very strong.

  He was, in terms of cultural and historical impact, the most extraordinary figure in that tradition. Not only did he come out of such a stream, but others followed in his wake. According to the gospels, he commissioned his twelve disciples to be charismatic healers.51 His two most important first-century followers, Peter and Paul, were also charismatic holy men. Further removed in time, St. Francis of Assisi (1176-1226), often considered the most “Christlike” of subsequent Christians, was a mystic, visionary, and healer. Though foreign to our experience and way of thinking in the modern world, the world of spirits and God was, for Jesus and his predecessors and followers in the Jewish-Christian tradition, very real—not simply as an element of belief, but of experience.

  NOTES

  II. JESUS AND CULTURE

  5. The Social World of Jesus

  Though Jesus shared much in common with other Jewish charismatics of his time, he also differed from them in a number of ways. What distinguished him most—besides the extraordinary fact that he was crucified and became the central figure of what was to become a global religion—was his deep involvement with the sociopolitical life of his own people. For the most part, other Jewish charismatics remained local figures, living in a particular locality and occasionally receiving visitors from afar. But Jesus became a national figure who undertook a mission to his own people in the midst of a cultural crisis, climaxing in a final journey to Jerusalem, the very center of their cultural life. Because his own culture was so important to him, not just as background for his missi
on but as its focus, we need to devote this chapter to describing Jesus’ social world.

  The phrase social world has two nuances of meaning. It refers to the total social environment of a people at a particular time in their history, including such material conditions as the type of economy, level of technology, degree of urbanization, mixture of population, isolation from or exposure to foreign cultures, and so forth. Even more importantly, “social world” refers to the socially constructed reality of a people, that nonmaterial “canopy” of shared convictions which every human community erects and within which it lives, and which is sometimes known simply as “culture.” It is that world of shared ideas that makes each culture what it is. It consists of the shared beliefs, values, meanings, laws, customs, institutions, rituals, and so forth, by which the group orders and maintains its world.1 The “social world” of Jesus thus refers to the social world of Judaism within the total social environment of first-century Palestine.2

  That social world occupied a very small geographical space. Jewish Palestine comprised an area of about seven thousand square miles, slightly smaller than the state of Vermont. Politically, it had become part of the Roman empire in 63 B.C. and was governed by rulers appointed by Rome. Until the death in 4 B.C. of Herod the Great, the most famous of the “client” kings who owed their kingship to Rome, it was administered as a single political unit. After Herod’s death, it was divided into three units, each ruled by one of Herod’s sons. One of these units, Judea (which included Jerusalem), came under direct Roman rule in A.D. 6, administered by a series of Roman governors who replaced Herod’s son Archelaus.

  Palestine was still a largely agricultural and rural society, composed of towns and small villages, many no larger than hamlets, inhabited largely by farmers who walked each day to their fields. Most were small landholders, though larger estates were emerging. Farming centered around grain, vegetables, fruit, wine, oil, and dates, as well as sheep, cattle, and goats. There were a number of cities, many of them established by Herod the Great and his successors. The rural areas tended to be Jewish, whereas the urban areas (with the exception of Jerusalem) had more of a mixed population because of the influx of Gentiles during the time of the Herods. The “ways” of the rural areas were old and relatively unchanged, whereas the cities were becoming increasingly more cosmopolitan because of the Gentiles and their “ways.”

  Most importantly, it was a social world in crisis. Indeed, before the first century was over, the crisis had resulted in a catastrophic war with the Romans, climaxing in the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in A.D. 70. It was the worst calamity experienced by the Jewish people in ancient times, rivaled only by the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and the temple some six centuries earlier in 586 B.C. In order to understand the social world of Jesus, we need to examine the conventional wisdom which was at the heart of it, the crisis which convulsed it, and the politics of holiness which was the response to the crisis.

  THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM OF THE JEWISH SOCIAL WORLD

  At the heart of every social construction of reality is the “conventional wisdom” of that culture. Conventional wisdom consists of the widely shared central assumptions about life which together comprise a culture’s “dominant consciousness.” Most essentially, it consists of a picture of reality and a picture of how to live, a “worldview,” and an “ethos,” or way of life.3 Conventional wisdom is so basic to culture that one may speak of it as the fundamental component of culture, the “heart” of every culture. It is “what everybody knows,” convictions and ways of behavior so taken for granted as to be basically unquestioned.4

  As was generally the case in antiquity, much more so than now, the conventional wisdom of the first-century Jewish social world (as well as the social world itself) was grounded in sacred tradition. Its picture of reality was Israel’s version of the primordial tradition. At the summit of the world of Spirit was Yahweh (the sacred Hebrew name for God), the creator of heaven and earth. Yahweh had entered into a special relationship with the people of Israel, constituted preeminently by the covenant given through Moses at Mt. Sinai, and continuing throughout their history. Their Scripture created an ethos as well. It contained regulations for individual and group behavior, provided at least the embryo of political organization, and proclaimed both warnings and hopes generated by the people’s history. Its laws included not only “ritual” and “moral” laws, but also what we consider “secular” law: criminal law, civil law, household law, even tax law. Their sacred traditions constructed a comprehensive ethos or way of life.

  The ethos of the first-century Jewish social world is illuminated by several characteristics which conventional wisdom has in common cross-culturally. First, speaking of the “wise” way of life, it provided practical guidance for living that life. Its focal points were the concerns of everyday life in the ancient world: family, wealth, honor, and virtue, all shaped by a religious framework. Such guidance was provided in part by “folk wisdom.” Folk wisdom was typified by the book of Proverbs whose “wise sayings,” generally couched in pithy and memorable forms of expression, circulated widely in a preliterate population. They provided practical advice on everyday questions such as the right way to raise children, the wise use of money, the importance of friendship, the value of a good name; and they extolled the practical value of virtues such as honesty, hard work, moderation, and self-control.

  The primary source of conventional wisdom, however, was the Torah, the “law” of Israel. Most of it became part of the consciousness of individual Jews simply through the process of growing up within the culture. One learned the “way of Torah” by watching how people lived, as well as by hearing it read at synagogue services and on festivals. There also existed a special group of people who were the custodians and interpreters of the tradition. Known as “sages” (“teachers of wisdom”), they drew upon folk wisdom and, more centrally, the Torah itself.5 Its 613 written laws were interpreted and applied by the sages in a wisdom mode, that is, as specific and practical guidance for living the wise way. Israel’s conventional wisdom was thus largely “Torah wisdom.”

  Second, Jewish conventional wisdom (like conventional wisdom generally) saw reality as organized on the basis of rewards and punishments. Reality was “built” that way. Living the way of wisdom, the path of righteousness, brought blessing; following the way of folly or wickedness brought ruin and death. Some believed in rewards and punishments beyond this world, though there was not yet unanimity about this among the Jewish people.6 Most also believed that the path of conventional wisdom produced rewards in this world. The righteous would flourish and be blessed with children, a good name, possessions, and a long life. “Live right and all will go well,” is the message common to all systems of conventional wisdom, religious and secular, ancient and modern.7 It also contains a cruel corollary. If life does not go well, it is because one has failed in some way.

  Third, the conventional wisdom of the Jewish social world provided the primary source of identity. It did so by establishing boundaries. Its sacred tradition conferred a shared identity (“child of Abraham”) which distinguished Jews from Gentiles. It also conferred more particular social identities with well-defined expectations and limitations: landowner, priest, husband, wife, father, oldest son, rich, poor, noble, peasant, man, and woman.8 The different degrees of status associated with these categories produced a hierarchical order in the society. Moreover, these boundaries and hierarchies were quite rigid, firmly ingrained in the tradition (for example, the different roles given to men and to women, the different status accorded to oldest son and younger sons, the distinction between Jew and Gentile). Thus, to a large extent, both identity and social structure were “given” by conventional wisdom.

  One very important boundary and source of identity was, however, the product of behavior: the distinction between “righteous” and “wicked.” Some people, then as now, were simply more successful than others at living up to the standards of conventional w
isdom. Those who were successful were the “righteous,” those who fell short were the “wicked.” Such achievement was usually socially visible as well as internally felt. Thus an important dimension of identity was “conditional” or “earned,” dependent upon conforming to standards of conventional wisdom.9

  The world established by Jewish conventional wisdom was not only hallowed by sacred tradition but maintained by its observance in the texture of everyday life. Indeed, the ethos created by the mixture of folk wisdom and Torah wisdom might have remained relatively stable for several more centuries except for changes in the Mediterranean world over which the Jewish people had no control.

  TWO SOCIAL WORLDS IN COLLISION

  By the first century, two social worlds were in collision: the social world of Judaism and the social world composed of Hellenistic culture and Roman political power. The annexation of Palestine by Rome in 63 B.C. generated both political conflict and severe economic pressure.

  The Roman presence was very much felt, even while Rome ruled indirectly through client kings such as Herod the Great (37-4 B.C.). A Hellenizer and Romanizer in his policies, building projects, and resettlement of populations, Herod was generally despised by his Jewish subjects. At his death in 4 B.C., the brutal superiority of Roman military power was experienced directly when the Roman general Varus invaded the country to quell a Jewish revolt, ending with the mass crucifixion of two thousand Jewish rebels.