Jesus: a new vision

by Marcus J. Borg

  52. Jeremiah 7:4.

  53. For this section and development of the “ideology of resistance” surrounding the temple, see Borg, Conflict, Holiness and Politics, 163-170.

  54. Luke 13:34-35 = Matthew 23:37-39. Jeremiah used virtually the same language; see Jeremiah 12:7. Ezekiel had a vision of the divine presence leaving the temple (11:22-23); thus, to those who would say, “God dwells on Zion; Zion and Jerusalem shall be safe,” Ezekiel could say, “But I saw God leave.”

  55. Luke 21:20, 23b-24. For the scholarly debate regarding the authenticity of this and similar passages, see Borg, Conflict, Holiness and Politics, 184-190.

  56. Luke 19:42-44. See also chapter 9, page 173. The phrase “cast up a bank about you” refers to the typical military strategy for laying siege to a walled city. To keep supplies out of the city and to provide protection for itself, the attacking army would build its own wall around the city.

  57. Mark 13:1-2; see also Luke 19:44. The phrase provides the title for Lloyd Gaston’s excellent technical study of the “political” dimension of Jesus’ ministry: No Stone on Another (Leiden: Brill, 1970).

  58. Luke 21:21; see also Mark 13:14.

  59. Other texts referring to the destruction of Jerusalem or the imminence of war in addition to ones already cited include Luke 17:31-36 (invasion; the instructions to flee with haste make little sense if one interprets these verses as referring to the end of the world); Luke 23:28-31 (warning about what will happen when the country is filled with rebellion); Luke 13:1-5 (see note 66 below); Mark 13:14-18 (desecration of the temple); Matthew 26:52 (those who take the sword will perish by it; though applied to an individual in its Matthean context, it may also have had a collective application); and, as we shall see in chapter 9, Mark 11:15-17 (the “cleansing” of the temple). See also the accusation that Jesus said he would destroy the temple and build another (Mark 14:58, 15:29; cf. John 2:19, Acts 6:14). See Borg, Conflict, Holiness and Politics, 177-195.

  60. Luke 13:32. The Herod referred to here is Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great and ruler of Galilee. On “fox” as a term of contempt, see H. W. Hoehner, Herod Antipas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 220-221, 343-347.

  61. Mark 10:42-43; compare Luke 22:25-26.

  62. See, for example, Mark 14:61, Matthew 26:64, Luke 22:67; Mark 15:2, 5; Luke 23:9.

  63. Mark 13:11; Matthew 10:19-20, Luke 12:11-12 and 21:12-15.

  64. The only possible exception is Mark, which may have been written as early as A.D. 65 (the war began in A.D. 66).

  65. Mark 1:15. As Mark’s advance summary of Jesus’ mission it indicates what Mark thought was most central. The usual translation (“The time is fulfilled”) perhaps suggests too much of a prediction-fulfillment understanding, as if it meant “This is the time when the ‘predictions’ of the Old Testament are being fulfilled.”

  66. See Luke 13:1-5, one of the few times when Jesus is reported to have used the word “repent.” Some people brought news of a Roman atrocity to Jesus: Pilate had killed some Galileans while they were sacrificing in Jerusalem. Jesus responded, “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish,” added a story of people killed in Jerusalem by a falling tower, perhaps in an act of resistance against the Romans. The text, part of a sequence beginning with the urgency of the present time and concluding with the unfruitful fig tree (Luke 12:54-13:9), suggests that the threat was contingent and the call to repentance collective: the whole country, Galilee and Jerusalem, was headed for destruction by the Romans unless they repented. See Borg, Conflict, Holiness and Politics, 191-193.

  67. Matthew 11:5 = Luke 7:22.

  68. Isaiah 29:18-19, and 35:5-6.

  1. The phrase is from Luke 9:51. Though the exact year of Jesus’ death is uncertain, 30 is most likely; next most likely is 33. Given that he was probably born shortly before 4 B.C., he was in his mid-thirties.

  2. Most notably by Albert Schweitzer in his two books about Jesus at the beginning of this century (see chapter 1, pages 11-12). According to Schweitzer, Jesus believed that his mission was to bear the woes of the end-time (the “messianic woes”) on behalf of the many; that is, he would suffer instead of others. Thus Jesus went to Jerusalem in order to get killed, and much of his activity in the final week of his life deliberately provoked the authorities to take action against him. Though Schweitzer’s account sounds bizarre, it is not that different from what is implied by those who assume that the whole purpose of Jesus’ mission was to die on the cross: for them also, Jesus went to Jerusalem in order to be killed. He went there not only knowing that his death would be the result, but his death was also his purpose for going there.

  3. This “foreboding” is actually expressed as a certainty in the passages known as “predictions of the passion” (see Mark 8:31, 9:31, 10:33-34), but these are generally seen by scholars as creations of the church after Easter; from that vantage point, the outcome of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem was seen as its providential foreordained purpose. However, even without the passion predictions, there is reason to believe that Jesus anticipated that the likely result of his final appeal would be death, and that he went to Jerusalem in full awareness of that likelihood; see Luke 13:31-33.

  4. Luke 13:33.

  5. Luke 13:34. The “I” of this passage is the divine “I”; that is, as in the case of the classical prophets of Israel, Jesus here speaks in the name of God.

  6. Luke 19:41-44.

  7. Mark 11:1-10; parallels in Matthew 21:1-9, Luke 19:28-38; John reports the episode somewhat differently in 12:12-19.

  8. Zechariah 9:9-10. Verse nine speaks of the king of peace mounted on a donkey, and verse 10 of the banishing of the war horse and other instruments of war from Jerusalem. The connection to Zechariah is implicit in Mark and explicit in Matthew 21:4-5 (also in John 12:15). Interestingly, Matthew apparently misread the passage in Zechariah as referring to two animals and thus added a second animal to the account, creating the rather improbable picture of Jesus riding two animals at the same time (see Matthew 21:7, plus the references to two animals throughout his narrative).

  9. Did Jesus also intend with this act to make a veiled or implicit claim to be the king of peace, thus approaching making a messianic claim? We cannot rule out the possibility; however, there is no clear evidence that Jesus applied the metaphor of “king” to himself in other texts generally accepted as authentic.

  10. It consisted of the “raised platform” built by Herod, an irregular rectangle of approximately 1500 feet by 1000 feet.

  11. Its interior dimensions were approximately 105 feet long, 35 feet wide, and 52 feet high. The interior was divided into two main parts, the most sacred “holy of holies” (a perfect cube of 35 feet), plus a larger area for priests and Levites. That the temple building itself with its “holy of holies” was a residence for the divine and not a place of public worship is indicated by its most common name: “The house of the Lord.” Worship did not occur in it, but around it.

  12. Scholars sometimes refer to the “court of the Gentiles,” but the designation is modern, not ancient. Though Gentiles were permitted in some areas of the temple platform, there was no court specially designated or named for them.

  13. See Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 312. Klausner’s book, now sixty years old, is still very valuable. E. F. Scott calls the temple incident the crisis in the life of Jesus in his book bearing the same title: The Crisis in the Life of Jesus (New York: 1952).

  14. As, for example, S. G. F. Brandon depicts it in his portrait of Jesus as a sympathizer with the liberation movement; see his Jesus and the Zealots, 331-334. Other scholars have occasionally argued the same point.

  15. Mark 11:15-17, with parallels in Matthew 21:12-13 and Luke 19:45-46; see also John 2:13-22. Mark (along with Matthew and Luke) places the incident in the last week of Jesus’ life; John places it near the beginning of the ministry. The synoptic placement is historically much more likely. For the whole incident and a more detailed inter
pretation, see Borg, Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teaching of Jesus (New York and Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press, 1984), 171-176.

  16. Isaiah 56:7.

  17. Not only were the merchants providing a necessary service, given the ethos of the time, but profits were rigidly controlled and did not go into private purses but into the temple fund. See Borg, Conflict, Holiness and Politics, 174, 176, and 348, note 62.

  18. Jeremiah 7:11, in the context of Jeremiah’s “temple sermon,” where he ridiculed those who said, “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.”

  19. Mark “surrounds” his account of the action in the temple with the puzzling story of the cursing of the fig tree (Mark 11:12-14, 20-25). If we take it as a historical narrative reporting something Jesus actually did, there are a number of problems. It seems out of character for Jesus; we are told that it was not the season for figs; and there is the question of whether any person can cause a fig tree to wither and die by cursing it. However, setting aside the historical question, as a narrative the account makes sense as a prophetic act: that is, the withering of the unfruitful fig tree symbolized what was happening to Jerusalem.

  20. Mark 11:27-33; see also chapter 3, page 47.

  21. Mark 11:18; so also, apparently, Luke 19:47.

  22. In what follows, I have basically followed Mark’s account without supposing that Mark’s primary purpose was historical reporting. Certainly, Mark is not comprehensive in his account of Jesus’ final week; no doubt Jesus said much more than reported in Mark’s relatively few stories. What Mark does report seems wholly appropriate; it is what we would expect on grounds of historical probability. It is difficult to know whether this appropriateness stems from Mark’s fine sense of narrative judgment, or from fairly accurate (even if stylized and condensed) historical memory.

  23. Mark 12:13-27, see also chapter 7, page 138. Note that opposition by the Pharisees was not unanimous; see the story of the appreciative Pharisee who was “not far from the Kingdom of God” in Mark 12:28-34.

  24. Mark 12:38-40. The reference to scribes who devour widows’ houses implies a process of legal (that is, legitimated by the Torah) appropriation of property. See also the subsequent passage about the poor widow (12:41-44).

  25. Mark 12:1-9; see also chapter 8, page 157.

  26. Many of the threats to Jerusalem are located by the gospel writers in the last week of Jesus’ life; besides Luke 19:41-44, see the implicit threat in Mark 12:9, and explicit threats in Mark 13:2, 13:14, and Luke 21:20-24.

  27. Mark 14:22-25, with parallels in Matthew 26:26-29 and Luke 22:17-19 (or 20); the earliest reference is in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26. For the “new covenant” of Jeremiah, see Jeremiah 31:31-34. It is difficult to make any historical judgment about the details of the “last supper,” including the words actually spoken by Jesus, simply because the remembrance and celebration of it were so central in the worship of the early church. Thus the details of the story have been affected by the liturgical practice of the church. That Jesus held such a final meal does seem historically likely, however.

  28. Mark 14:32-52, Matthew 26:36-56, and Luke 22:40-53.

  29. See, for example, the use of Psalm 22 (the psalm of “the righteous sufferer”) in Mark 15:24, 29, and 34; for the darkness at midday in Mark 15:33, see Amos 8:9, Jeremiah 15:9, Isaiah 50:3; the tearing of the temple curtain in Mark 15:38 is to be understood as the opening up of access to the holy of holies (the presence of God) through the death of Jesus.

  30. The diminishing of Roman responsibility and the heightening of Jewish responsibility can be seen especially in Matthew. Found only in Matthew are Pilate’s wife’s dream, which disclosed to her that Jesus was a “righteous man” (27:19); Pilate’s washing his hands of “this man’s blood” (27:24); and the cry of all the people (the Jewish crowd), “His blood be on us and our children!” (27:25). Tragically, Matthew’s effort to save the early Christians from the charge of being a seditious group within the Roman Empire had the unwitting and unintended effect of providing a “proof text” justifying Christian persecution of Jews throughout much of Western history. It is one of the terrible ironies of history that Jews have been regularly persecuted in the name of a Jew whose primary concern was their well-being. Blindness was not the special prerogative of Jesus’ historical opponents.

  31. The following account is dependent upon the scholarly work of many others, even though it does not directly reflect any single scholarly reconstruction. Though it is my own assessment of historical probability, it does not deviate from what may fairly be called a scholarly consensus, however tenuous the consensus is at some points.

  32. For summary statements of the harshness of his rule, see the first century Jewish author Philo, Legatio 302, and modern authors W. R. Wilson, The Execution of Jesus (New York: Scribner, 1970), 18-22; and H. Cohn, The Trial and Death of Jesus (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 7-17.

  33. According to Jewish law, the high priest was to serve for life. However, the Romans took over the right of appointment and replaced high priests whenever they chose (the criterion presumably being their ability to cooperate with the Romans). In the fifty-two years from A.D. 15 to the outbreak of the great war, there were seventeen different high priests; fifteen of them served a total of twenty-two years. The other two served thirty years, with Caiaphas’s eighteen years being the longest. Presumably he had learned how to work very well with the Romans.

  34. Mark 14:53-64, with parallels in Matthew 26:57-66 and Luke 22:66-71. For the distinction between the “religious council” (the bet din or boule) and the “political Sanhedrin,” and the latter as the private circle of advisers of the high priest, see especially Ellis Rivkin, What Crucified Jesus? (Nashville: Abingdon, 1984).

  35. See the account of the charges brought before Pilate in Luke 23:2: leading the nation astray, forbidding payment of tribute to Caesar, and claiming to be a messianic king. There is reason to think that Luke had an independent source for this material rather than freely creating it himself.

  36. According to Josephus, Antiquities 18:116-119. According to Mark, John was executed because of conniving among the women of Herod’s household (Mark 6:17-29); the two stories do not necessarily conflict. For the importance of John’s fate for understanding the arrest and execution of Jesus, see especially Rivkin, What Crucified Jesus?

  37. “Local charismatics” like Hanina ben Dosa and Honi the Righteous were suspected by the conventional sages of not paying enough attention to the law, but action was not taken against them (though it should be noted that Honi was executed because he refused to take the “right side” in a political dispute).

  38. Josephus, The Jewish War, 6.300-309.

  39. See chapter 4, page 64.

  40. John 11:47-53. For the fascinating suggestion that the account reflects a meeting of the council at which a death verdict was passed some time before Jesus’ final visit to Jerusalem, preserved with some accuracy by John even though overlaid with his own theology, see E. Bammel, “Ex illa itaque die consilium fecerunt…,” in The Trial of Jesus, edited by Bammel (London: SCM, 1970), 11-40.

  41. This is not to argue for a rigid social determinism, as if people’s perception is absolutely conditioned by social class; there were apparently at least two exceptions in the established class of Jesus’ day. The names of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, both members of the “council”—probably the religious council rather than the privy council of the high priest—are fairly well-grounded in the gospel tradition. Rather, I am making the rather obvious point that for most people most of the time, one’s place in the social world affects one’s perception.

  42. The contrast between the question of who killed Jesus versus what killed Jesus is the basis for the title of Rivkin’s book, What Crucified Jesus?

  43. Buber’s statement is very striking: “From my youth onwards I have found in Jesus my great brother. That Christianity has regarded and does regard him as God and Saviour has always appea
red to me a fact of the highest importance which, for his sake and my own, I must endeavour to understand…My own fraternally open relationship to him has grown ever stronger and clearer, and today I see him more strongly and clearly than ever before. I am more than ever certain that a great place belongs to him in Israel’s history of faith and that this place cannot be described by any of the usual categories.” Two Types of Faith (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 12-13.

  44. The story of the empty tomb, which suggests that something happened to the corpse of Jesus, is first found in Mark 16:1-8, and there it is described as if it were not generally known about: the women find the tomb empty, but then tell nobody anything about it. It is difficult to know whether or not to press this detail to imply that the story of the empty tomb entered the tradition at a rather late date; in any case, Mark’s account is odd. Moreover, it is important to remember that the truth of the resurrection is not dependent upon an empty tomb or a vanished corpse. Rather, the truth of the resurrection is grounded in the experience of Christ as a living reality beyond his death.

  1. I first encountered this insight in the arresting phrase with which Paul Van Buren encapsulized the historical Jesus: he was “a remarkably free man.” See his The Secular Meaning of the Gospel (New York: Macmillan, 1963).

  2. Exploring the nuances of meaning of this affirmation goes far beyond the limits and purpose of this concluding chapter. I am simply pointing out that the orthodox mainstream of Christian theology has consistently affirmed that Jesus even during his historical life was a “revelation” of God. His “divinity” is not to be assigned simply to his post-Easter risen life and his humanity to his historical life, as if he were “simply” human during the ministry and divine only afterward (as is suggested by “adoptionism” and radical forms of “kenoticism,” which are types of christological thinking inconsistent with the orthodoxy of the church). Thus what he was like in his historical life was in some sense a disclosure of God. For an excellent and accessible study of the church’s various understandings of Jesus as both human and divine, see John Baillie, God Was in Christ (New York: Scribner, 1948); for a study of the New Testament period, see John Knox, The Humanity and Divinity of Christ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967).