Jesus: a new vision

by Marcus J. Borg

  6. The phrase comes from Huston Smith, Forgotten Truth; see also his Beyond the Post-Modern Mind (New York: Crossroad, 1982). Other scholars have developed the same basic understanding, but I find Smith’s phrase “primordial tradition,” as well as his exposition of the notion, to be especially illuminating and helpful.

  7. See, for example, Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1959; originally published in French in 1956); and Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958; first published in German in 1917), who introduced the term “numinous” as a way of speaking of the “holy,” understood not as a moral term meaning righteous or pure but as a designation for the overpowering mystery (the mysterium tremendum) that is experienced in extraordinary moments.

  8. In addition to the works by Smith, Eliade, and Otto already referred to, see William James’s classic study The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Macmillan, 1961; originally published in 1902). James finds the origin of belief in an “unseen” world in the experience of “religious geniuses” who experience firsthand the realities of which religion speaks, and carefully distinguishes this primal experience from what he calls “secondhand” religion, the beliefs that people acquire through tradition; see especially 24-25, though the distinction remains important throughout his book.

  9. To use Eliade’s terms for a moment, the two worlds intersect in “theophanies” (manifestations of God) and “hierophanies” (manifestations of the holy). Otto speaks of experiences of the numinous (that is, of the holy or numen, a Latin term for “God”), which underlies phenomena.

  10. For example, the temple at Delphi in Greece was seen as the “navel of the earth,” the axis mundi connecting the two worlds; for other examples, see Eliade, Sacred and Profane, 32-47.

  11. This is what the notion of God as creator has become in much of the modern world. Beginning with the deists of the seventeenth century, the concept of God began to function primarily as an intellectual hypothesis to account for the origin of everything. In cultural retrospect, this development may be seen as part of the process whereby Western intellectual culture weaned itself (or “fell,” depending upon one’s point of view) from a religious worldview to a secular worldview.

  12. Neither the Old or New Testament uses abstractions such as omnipresence or transcendence, but the notion is clearly present. Classic Old Testament texts which point to the omnipresence of God are Psalm 139:7-10, 1 Kings 8:27, Isaiah 6:3 (“the whole earth is full of his glory”). The notion of the immanent Logos at the beginning of John’s gospel points in the same direction, as do the words attributed approvingly by Luke to Paul in Acts 17:28: “In God we live and move and have our being.” God is not elsewhere”; we live in God.

  13. See Smith, Forgotten Truth, 21: The “higher levels (of the primordial tradition) are not literally elsewhere; they are removed only in the sense of being inaccesible to ordinary consciousness.” Or, to paraphrase William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, we are separated from this other world only by the filmiest screens of consciousness; see especially 305, 331, 335, 401.

  14. Genesis 28:17. For other experiences of the patriarchs involving contact with the other world, see, for example, Genesis 12:7-9, 15:1-17, 17:1-2, 18:1-33, 26:23-25, 32:22-31.

  15. Revelation 4:1. The author of the book tells us that he received this vision while he was “in the Spirit” (1:10), presumably a state of nonordinary consciousness in which he momentarily “saw” into the other world. Revelation, part of the New Testament, is of course not in the Hebrew Bible, but it reflects the same worldview.

  16. Exodus 34:29-35.

  17. See especially Exodus 32:7-14 and Numbers 14:13-19.

  18. Though most of the Pentateuch concerns Moses, only a few chapters in the books of Kings speak of this ninth-century prophet: 1 Kings 17-19, 21;2 Kings 1-2.

  19. Isaiah 6:1-4.

  20. Isaiah 6:6-7.

  21. Ezekiel 1:1.

  22. Ezekiel 11:5, Isaiah 61:1

  23. Almost all of the Spirit-filled mediators mentioned in the Hebrew Bible are men. No doubt this is because the religion of ancient Israel was dominated by men. “Official” religious positions such as priest, prophet, and sage were restricted to men and, so far as we know, all of the biblical authors were men. Given this, it is noteworthy that the tradition does mention two charismatic women by name: Deborah the judge and Hulda the prophet. So also in other cultures dominated by patriarchy, though religious functionaries may have been male, the Spirit seems to show no gender preference.

  24. For this whole section on Jewish “holy men” at the time of Jesus, see especially Vermes, Jesus the Jew, 65-78, 206-213. Also relevant are E. E. Urbach, The Sages (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1975), volume 1, 97-123; and, earlier, A. Büchler, Types of Jewish Palestinian Piety (New York: KTAV, 1968; first published in 1922), 87-107, 196-252.

  25. From the Babylonian Talmud: B. Taan. 24b, B. Ber. 17b, B. Hul. 86a, all cited by Vermes, Jesus the Jew, 206. Vermes also notes that Rabbi Meir was called “Meir my son.”

  26. From the Mishnah, M. Taan. 3.8, cited by Vermes, Jesus the Jew, 209.

  27. Besides being known as people whose concentration in prayer was great and as mediators of divine power, they shared a number of other characteristics. Vermes notes that they were relatively detached from possessions, perhaps because the other world had a reality compared to which the preoccupations of this world seemed trivial. They were also suspected of being inadequately concerned about the laws of their tradition (like many before and since whose awareness of the other realm is direct and experiential). Finally, though not restricted to Galilee, they seem to have been largely a Galilean phenomenon. Hanina, for example, was from a town in Galilee about ten miles from Nazareth.

  28. 2 Corinthians 12:2-4. See also 1 Corinthians 12-14, where Paul speaks about the “gifts of the Spirit,” some of which clearly involve direct relationship to the world of Spirit.

  29. It is described three times in the book of Acts: 9:1-8, 22:6-11, 26:12-18.

  30. In a poll which I have taken in both university and church settings for about ten years, 90 percent of the participants regularly reply to stories of paranormal phenomena such as walking on burning coals in South Asia and Polynesia with, “It violates my sense of what is possible.” Their sense of what is possible flows from the modern one-dimensional understanding of reality, in which everything must be explicable by chains of cause and effect within the material world, simply because that is the only world that we see as “real.”

  31. Rudolf Bultmann’s proposal for “demythologizing” the New Testament is a case in point. Recognizing that the New Testament writers often use the language of a three-story universe (heaven as “up,” hell as “down,” earth in the “middle”), Bultmann rightly stresses that such language is not to be taken literally (heaven is not really “up,” and so forth). When the early Christians spoke of Jesus ascending into heaven or descending into hell, they could not have been describing a literal up-and-down motion through space. But, as Bultmann continues, it becomes clear that demythologizing involves not only a deliteralizing of the three-story universe, but also a collapse of the world of Spirit itself. That, too, does not conform to the modern worldview. See especially his essay, “New Testament and Mythology,” in H. W. Bartsch, Kerygma and Myth (New York: Harper & Row, 1961; originally published in German in 1941), 1-16.

  32. For a useful summary, see Smith, Forgotten Truth, 96-117. See also Ian Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 273-316; and Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (Berkeley: Shambhala, 1975).

  33. The historical and anthropological evidence is very strong. Not only are there frequent accounts of subjectively entering the other world, but paranormal happenings in this world are also reported. Paranormal healings are overwhelmingly attested in both the ancient and modern world. Clairvoyance is also quite well-authenticated, and even something as bizarre as levitation
is reasonably well-grounded.

  1. Two of the gospels, Mark and John, say nothing at all about Jesus before the ministry, not even about his birth. Matthew and Luke do include accounts of his birth and early childhood, though in somewhat different form from each other (see Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2). Moreover, the accounts contain many symbolic elements (for the meaning of the word symbolic, see chapter 4, pages 59-60). Symbolic elements can be based on actual historical occurrence, but how much is historical we can no longer know. For a compact treatment of the birth stories, see W. Barnes Tatum, In Quest of Jesus (Atlanta: John Knox, 1982), 108-112; for a full treatment, see Raymond Brown’s authoritative The Birth of the Messiah (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1977).

  2. See Mark 6:3, Matthew 13:55, and Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 21-22.

  3. Torah in Hebrew means “divine teaching or instruction” and is most commonly translated “law.” It has a range of meanings, sometimes referring to the first five books of the Bible (or “Pentateuch”), as in the phrase, “the law and the prophets.” It can also refer to the 613 specific written laws contained in the Pentateuch, or, more broadly, to those laws plus the “oral law” which expands the written laws. To be trained in the Torah refers both to being familiar with the content of the law as well as with the methods of interpretation and argumentation.

  4. Deuteronomy 6:4-5; included in the recitation were Deuteronomy 6:4-9, 11:2-21, and Numbers 15:37-41.

  5. The Essenes were a Jewish monastic group; see chapter 5.

  6. According to Luke 3:23, he was “about thirty” when he began his ministry; according to John 8:57, Jesus was “not yet fifty.” Though not being fifty is consistent with being about thirty, the former is an odd way of saying the latter. On other grounds, the younger age is to be preferred; the tradition that Jesus was born in the last years of Herod the Great (died in 4 B.C.) is reasonably strong. Thus, at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus was probably in his early to mid-thirties. Pilate was the Roman governor of Judea from A.D. 26 to 36; Jesus was probably crucified in A.D. 30, with his ministry beginning a year or a bit more before.

  7. The writings of Josephus are one of our primary sources for first-century Jewish history. As a young man, Josephus was a Jewish general in the great war against Rome, which broke out in A.D. 66. Captured by the Romans in Galilee early in the war, he spent most of the rest of his life (perhaps another thirty-five years) in Rome, where he wrote his multivolumed Jewish Antiquities and History of the Jewish War, as well as two more minor works. Though Josephus refers to John the Baptist, he apparently does not refer to the ministry of Jesus; the only direct reference is in a passage which is believed to be a Christian addition. The standard translation of Josephus is now the Loeb Classical Library edition, nine volumes, translated by H. St. J. Thackeray, R. Marcus, and A. Wikgrin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958-1965).

  8. According to Mark 1:6, John wore “camel hair” (presumably a camel skin) and a leather girdle; for a similar description of Elijah, see 2 Kings 1:8. For a “hairy coat” as the mark of a prophet, see Zechariah 13:4. For John as prophet, see Mark 11:32, Matthew 11:9 = Luke 7:26.

  9. Mark 1:4-6, Matthew 3:7-10 = Luke 3:7-9. Ritual immersion in water (both in Judaism and other cultures) can have two different meanings. When repeated frequently (as it was among the Essenes), it has the meaning of a washing or purification. When it is a once-only ritual (as it apparently was for John) it may also be a purification, but its primary meaning is as an initiation ritual which symbolizes and confers a new identity. “Once-only” baptism was also known in Judaism; when a Gentile converted to Judaism, he or she was baptized (and if male, circumcised as well). But it is important to remember that John’s baptism was intended for people who were already Jewish.

  10. It is historically unlikely that John recognized Jesus at the time as an extraordinary or Messianic figure. According to Mark, Luke, and Q (“Q” is a designation used by scholars to refer to material found in very similar form in both Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark; “Q” is thus presumed to be an early collection of traditions about Jesus that predates both Matthew and Luke, and which may be earlier even than Mark), there is no such recognition. The common image in Christian circles of John as primarily a forerunner of Jesus who self-consciously knew himself to be such, and who recognized Jesus as “the coming one,” is based on the gospels of John and Matthew. According to John 1, the Baptist proclaims Jesus as the Lamb of God, Son of God, even as one who preexisted him. But John’s gospel cannot be taken historically, as already noted. Matthew 3:14 reports a snippet of conversation between Jesus and John; John says, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” However, this (and Jesus’ response) is almost certainly an insertion by Matthew into the story. Apart from these historically suspect references in John and Matthew, there is no reason to think that John believed Jesus to be “the coming one” at an early stage of the ministry. John’s question from prison later in the ministry (“Are you he who is to come or shall we look for another?” Matthew 11:3 = Luke 7:19, and thus “Q” material), is therefore to be read as the dawning of curiosity or hope, not as the beginning of doubt.

  11. Mark 1:10. According to Mark, the experience was private to Jesus. There is no indication that the crowd or John saw anything; and the “heavenly voice” in the next verse is addressed to Jesus alone (“Thou art…”). Matthew and Luke both change the text slightly, apparently making the experience of Jesus more public. According to Matthew, the voice declared Jesus’ identity to the crowd (3:17); according to Luke, the Spirit descended in “bodily form” (3:22). But Mark presents it as an internal experience of Jesus; it is not thereby less real.

  12. See Ezekiel 1:1 and Isaiah 61:1. See also Isaiah 64:1 for the image of a “tear” or “rent” in the heavens: “O that thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down….”

  13. See chapter 2.

  14. Mark 1:13.

  15. Matthew 4:1-11 = Luke 4:1-13.

  16. Luke 4:5 = Matthew 4:8. Such travel is found elsewhere in the Bible. Ezekiel, for example, reports, “The Spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven, and brought me in visions of God to Jerusalem” (Ezekiel 8:3; see 11:1-2). For Elijah’s travels “in the Spirit,” see 1 Kings 18:12; cf. 2 Kings 2:11-12, 16. In the New Testament, see Acts 8:39-40. J. R. Michaels, Servant and Son (Atlanta: John Knox, 1981), 50, comments, “Jesus’ journeys to the Holy City and to the high mountain belong in the same category as the journeys of Ezekiel.” The phenomenon is widely reported in traditional cultures. See, for example, John Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), and the books of Carlos Casteneda; even if Don Juan is regarded as a fictional character, as some have argued, his portrait is based on solid anthropological research. Such journeyings probably involve what are sometimes called “out-of-body” experiences.

  17. Stephen Larsen, The Shaman’s Doorway (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 61-66. See also a section entitled “The Road of Trials” in Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces (Cleveland: World, 1956), 97-109. On shamanism more generally, see Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (New York: Pantheon, 1964); and W. A. Lessa and E. Z. Vogt, Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, third edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 381-412.

  18. Luke 10:17-18.

  19. The vision at his baptism may well have been his “call story” (the Old Testament prophets apparently thought it important to tell such stories), and the temptation narrative seems to have a teaching function in addition to reporting an experience.

  20. This occurs very frequently in the book of Acts, and the whole of the book of Revelation is presented as a series of visions.

  21. The difference between communion with God and union with God is subtle and perhaps not important. Both are mystical states, and both are known in the Jewish-Christian tradition. In union with God, all sense of separateness (including the awareness of being a separate self) momentaril
y disappears and one experiences only God; in communion with God, a sense of relationship remains. Communion is typically associated with Western mysticism and union with Eastern mysticism, though the contrast is not as sharp as the typical association suggests. See Peter Berger, ed., The Other Side of God (Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1981). For the “polarity” within Judaism, see especially the essay by Michael Fishbane, “Israel and the Mothers,” 28-47. For communion mysticism in the East, see the most popular form of Hinduism, bhakti.

  22. Mishnah Ber. 5.1; see A. Büchler, Types of Jewish Palestinian Piety (New York: KTAV, 1968; first published in 1922), 106-107.

  23. For a history of Jewish mysticism reaching back to the time of Jesus and earlier, see especially the work of Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1946), and Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition, 2d ed. (Hoboken: KTAV, 1965). A connection between apocalypticism and visions of or journeys into another world is increasingly affirmed in studies of Jewish apocalyptic. See, for example, John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1984), who speaks of two strands of tradition in Jewish apocalypses, one visionary and one involving otherworldly journeys.

  24. For an excellent summary of Jesus and prayer, including bibliography, see Donald Goergen, The Mission and Ministry of Jesus (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1986), 129-145. Goergen’s book arrived too late to be incorporated significantly into the present book, but I highly recommend it as one of the best recent works on the historical Jesus.