Apostle

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by Tom Bissell


  “The Son of God,” Jesus’s most significant and difficult-to-comprehend title, would have been conceptually familiar to many living in the Roman Empire; the halls of paganism were crowded with God-sired demi-deities.*2 As a title for a human being, however, “the Son of God” does not occur in pre-Christian sources, with the exception of two highly obscure passages in the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of which reads, “The Son of God he shall be said to be, and the Son of the Most High they shall call him.” (The identity of the “he” here appears to be an unnamed and presumably Jewish king.) As belief in Jesus Christ developed, Christian thinking seems to have incorporated a number of phrases and divine honorifics already in circulation among pagan Romans. An Ephesian inscription, for instance, refers to Julius Caesar as “god made manifest”; another emperor’s birthday was referred to as “good news.” In the Gospel According to John, Thomas says to Jesus, “My Lord and my God!” which resembles an imperial formulation used to describe Domitian: “Dominus et deus noster,” or “Our Lord and God.” However, as Martin Hengel writes, Christians might have regarded this language as “a negative stimulus” rather than some kind of titular model to pursue.

  Christianity seems to have begun relatively modestly, as a sectarian Jewish personality cult founded upon Jesus. A larger, more spiritually inclusive version of that personality cult, founded upon Jesus Christ, emerged from within a framework of missionary outreach led by Paul. (Most Christians, of course, would argue that the latter cult began to form on the day of Jesus’s resurrection, if not sooner.) Safe assumptions to make about the historical Jesus include his baptism by John, his large popular following, his reputation for miracle performance, his wont to speak parabolically, his preaching of a coming kingdom, his belief that he was somehow an envoy or prophet of God, and his familiarity with at least some Jewish scripture. It also seems reasonable to assume that at some point in his career, Jesus attracted the notice of the Temple and Roman authorities and was condemned to death, which greatly astonished and disappointed his followers, who nevertheless continued to preach, at least for a time, something similar to what he had preached. Our inability to determine much more than that about the historical Jesus moved the twentieth-century German scholar Rudolf Bultmann to famously declare the impossibility of ever encountering the historical Jesus. Those who go looking for Jesus mostly just find some version of themselves. The Jesus story, as a story, can be understood in a few ways. One way is to accept that it all happened, but this necessitates an additional acceptance that the known laws of the universe were put on hold during a brief period in first-century Palestine and the only people who noticed were Christians.

  III.

  A difficulty in figuring out how the earliest Christians understood Jesus is the paucity of surviving texts. The gospels, Acts, and epistles survive only because they tell us what Christians of later centuries agreed to be true. Of all the Christian texts mentioned within surviving second-century sources, only 15 percent of them are partially or completely extant. What these lost works might have contained is as irrecoverable as the life and times of the historical Jesus. In this light, what is most remarkable about the Christian texts that do survive is the variety of ideas they contain about Jesus’s divinity, ideations of which we can see float in and out of focus within all four gospels. A few of these Christological notions blossomed into types of “heresy”—a word that originally meant only “choice”—which Irenaeus and others would later energetically condemn.

  As the scholar Bart D. Ehrman demonstrates in his fascinating textual study The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, the first genuine battle over the meaning of Jesus Christ did not take place in the gospel writers’ minds; instead, it took place on the battlefield of the text, as scribes and copyists made tactical changes to highly contested passages. That early Christians were aware of the problem of textual corruption is evident in the New Testament itself: Revelation promises that God will visit upon anyone who meddles with the text “the plagues described in this book.” Ehrman, however, argues that many of the corruptions made to early New Testament texts were inserted not by scribes attempting to change the meaning of a text but by scribes wishing to make clearer what they believed the texts said. In texts that date from the second and third centuries—the period in which the Christology of Jesus was least settled—many scribal changes swarmed around passages with Christological implications.

  Some of the most prominent competing Christologies within the early days of Christianity were what we now call Adoptionism (which envisioned an entirely human Jesus in whom Christ temporarily dwelled), Docetism (which envisioned an entirely divine Christ whose humanity as Jesus was a calculated illusion, from the Greek verb dokein, “to seem”), and Modalism (which envisioned a Jesus who was not the Son of God but fully, patriarchally God), though none describe merely one type of Christian or Christianish thinking.

  The Adoptionist view of Jesus’s divinity is probably the most fascinating. The Gospel According to Mark carries the strongest whiff of Adoptionism—its original draft might have been explicitly Adoptionist; according to Irenaeus, those “who separate Jesus from the Christ” used Mark’s gospel solely—which helps explain why it was the least frequently copied gospel by ancient scribes. For many Adoptionist Christians, Jesus became Jesus Christ at the moment he was baptized by John. Mark’s gospel suggestively opens with this scene, telling us that as Jesus emerges from the water of the Jordan, “he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased.’ ” Mark contains none of Matthew’s or Luke’s legendary nativity material,*3 much less John’s postulation that Jesus existed at the dawn of creation. From an Adoptionist Christian perspective, Mark’s gospel, purposefully or not, was highly complementary to their beliefs.

  Matthew’s and Luke’s portrayals of the baptism of Jesus contain their own peculiarities. Matthew’s Spirit, for instance, is said to have “alighted” on Jesus, which possibly deemphasizes Mark’s implication that Jesus’s contact with the Spirit had any absorptive quality. Some of the earliest copies of Luke, on the other hand, contain the most overtly Adoptionist language in the entire New Testament. In these early variants of Luke, the voice that calls down from Heaven tells Jesus, “You are my Son, today I have begotten you.” With this language, Luke is citing Psalm 2:7, though the Greek Septuagint version rather than the original Hebrew. In doing so, however, he opened up his gospel to a boldly Adoptionist interpretation.*4 Rest assured, Christian scribes quickly took care of the problem, and the language eventually disappeared in later Luke manuscripts. The presence of Adoptionist ideas in the earliest copies of both Mark and Luke indicates that Adoptionism was not necessarily a Christological heresy so much as a Christological first draft.

  Given what we know about early Christianity, this makes a certain amount of sense. For the Gentiles to whom Paul appealed, the Son of God was a powerful, startling thing to imagine floating unseen among them. For Jewish Christians living in Palestine under the increasingly heavy yoke of Roman power from the 40s on, the Son of God had seditionist, attention-getting insinuations many of them would likely have wanted to avoid. By all evidence, the Jewish Christian Jesus fit into established cultural traditions. The titles “Son of Man,”*5 “Lord,”*6 and “Rabbi”*7 were all products of Jewish traditions, two of which titles were not explicitly divine. “Lord” had traditional insinuations of divinity, but only when used in an absolute way, which is not necessarily how it was always applied to Jesus. (Only Matthew uses the phrase “the Lord” [ho kurios] with regard to Jesus and does so only once. In first-century Koine Greek, kurios could also mean “sir.”) A Davidic Messiah who had come to wield the authority of God was not necessarily the Son of God. Even if he were so conceptualized, “Son of God” probably meant something very different in first-century Palestine than it did in the doxological pressure cooker of fifth-century Byzantium.

  IV.


  One of the most riveting scenes in the Passion tradition, which is found in some form in all four gospels, has Jesus praying in Gethsemane right before his arrest—the sole instance in which the gospel writers endeavor to portray the inner life of their subject.

  That the historical Jesus prayed there can be little doubt. However, the very notion of orthodox Christianity’s Jesus praying challenges the most diligent and searching Christian explanation. The author of the Gospel According to John, whose Jesus is least ambiguously divine, understood the difficulty here; he never depicts Jesus praying, not even while dying on the cross. If Jesus was one of three omniscient beings within God incarnate, to whom exactly would he pray? To what possible purpose could he pray? Here is Origen’s valiant attempt to justify the inexplicable prayers of Jesus: “Now if Jesus prays and does so not in vain, since He gets what He asks for in prayer when He might not have done so apart from prayer, which of us would neglect to pray?”

  The synoptic gospel writers were as puzzled as anyone when it came to Jesus’s prayers. In Mark, Jesus’s grief at what he faces at Gethsemane is most pronounced: “And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. He said, ‘Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me.’ ” Mark’s Jesus even claims to be “deeply grieved.” Matthew’s version of the scene is virtually identical. John includes the trip to Gethsemane (which goes unnamed) but does not bother with depicting Jesus at prayer. He does include language about a cup but frames it as something Jesus says to Peter, who has just finished hacking the ear off one of Jesus’s aggressors: “Put your sword back in its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me?” Mark’s rendering of the scene, with its frank depiction of Jesus as doubtful and scared, becomes, in John’s hands, a rhetorical question with an obvious answer. Clearly something has happened to the Christian understanding of Jesus between these two gospels.

  Luke’s version of the scene may have something to tell us about the intervening stages between Mark’s and John’s Jesus. Of all the gospels, Luke’s Jesus prays the most frequently, and this typically occurs at some crucial point in Luke’s story. Yet throughout his gospel, Luke, like John, portrays a Jesus in firm control of his fate. During his prayer in Gethsemane, Luke’s Jesus does not appear to suffer much doubt at all: “Then he withdrew from them about a stone’s throw, knelt down [recall that Mark’s Jesus throws himself to the ground], and prayed. ‘Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.’ ” In the next passage, however, Jesus succumbs to Markan anguish: “Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became great drops of blood falling on the ground.” This is one of the more troubled passages in the New Testament, with scholars evenly divided as to whether it is original to Luke or a later scribal addition. In any number of ways, it is a strange passage, particularly in its assumption that an angel could give Jesus, who is supposed to be God, strength.

  Ehrman believes the passage is a later addition for several reasons. It undermines the controlled, fate-accepting Jesus that Luke largely endeavors to portray elsewhere; it contains language found nowhere else in Luke or Acts; it expresses an idea—Jesus being humanly capable of sweating (even if what he sweated was blood)—that later proved helpful in combating Docetist Christians who argued against Jesus’s having a literal body. Perspired blood finally has no place in any of the other texts that present us with a tempted Jesus.

  In the Letter to the Hebrews, we see an altogether different angle on the tradition that Jesus was, in some manner, tested. One of the key points the letter’s unknown author*8 makes is that Jesus Christ is the perfect high priest, for in him “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.” The mention of Jesus’s having been “tested” has almost nothing linguistically in common with the gospels’ depiction of the prayer at Gethsemane, but it appears to confirm the apparently widely familiar tradition of a Jesus who momentarily questioned his fate.

  Thankfully, Hebrews goes much further in its approach of Jesus. In this sense, it may be the most sophisticated, interesting, and coherent work in the New Testament on the issue of Jesus Christ. Among New Testament works, only the Gospel According to John rivals its thermospherically high Christology. Nowhere else does a New Testament author argue so passionately that the figure of Jesus Christ has effectively displaced Hebrew scripture. The homely wandering Jesus of the synoptic gospels is nowhere apparent in Hebrews; neither is Paul’s soaring, spiritual, somewhat fragmentary Jesus. The Jesus of Hebrews is the “appointed heir of all things,” the vessel through which God has chosen to speak to the ancestors of Abraham and Moses. He is a new high priest, “according to the order of Melchizedek, rather than one according to the order of Aaron.” The Levitical priests of Aaron’s order inherited their priesthood “through a legal requirement,” the author of Hebrews argues, but Jesus, like Melchizedek, “holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues forever.”

  For those of you at home, Melchizedek is a king in Genesis who presents Abraham with bread and wine and later turns up in Psalms as a priestly ruler whose prominence David appeals to after having conquered Jerusalem. The name appears to derive from that of a Phoenician deity and translates literally as “my king is Zedek.” Although the third-century Roman theologian Hippolytus recorded the existence of a Christian sect called the Melchizedekians (who apparently believed Jesus Christ was “the only image” of Melchizedek), it was not until the twentieth century, with the discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi literature, that Melchizedek’s prominence in Hebrews was better contextualized. He was on a lot of people’s minds around the first century, Jew and Christian alike. The Essenes possessed scrolls in which he was likened to the archangel Michael, a pre-Christian “mediator” between God and man, much as Paul argued Jesus was. Melchizedek, an obscure third-century Christian tract found at Nag Hammadi, portrays him as a “warrior” priest fated to return during the end of days. The author of Hebrews might have been appealing to Melchizedek, much as the psalmist’s David attempted to use Melchizedek, as a mystically unifying figure. (In modern times, Melchizedek has proved a figure of great interest within Mormon theology.)

  One of the most intellectually adventurous passages of Hebrews argues that Jesus was not only the perfect priest; he was also the perfect sacrifice. Before Jesus, priests entered the Temple to spill the blood of animals, thereby cleansing the slate of sinfulness between God and his chosen people. But this process never worked in the way God’s people wished it to. A sacrifice that had to be rendered again and again was imperfect—“a shadow of the true form” of what the ritual was intended to enact, “a reminder of sin year after year. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sin.” In Jesus, however, humankind encountered the perfect sacrifice: “just as it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that the judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.”

  Part of what makes Hebrews such a remarkable document is its assumed date of composition. Given the text’s focus on priestly legitimacy, and the fact that the traditional Jewish priesthood was exterminated following the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, the original basis for Hebrews might well have been written prior to 70. This somewhat belies the common belief that the later the composition date of a given New Testament text, the higher its Christology will probably be. (Paul’s letters are an admitted and crucial exception to this.) Hebrews could predate Mark and Matthew by as much as a decade, yet its view of Jesus’s divinity surpasses both.

  By the time the gospels were written, Jesus’s resurrection (at least in some form) was an established fact of Christian belief, but the explanation for what his
death accomplished proved more elusive. In the second and third centuries, Christian thinkers, many of whom had read and appreciated the Letter to the Hebrews and certain letters of Paul, developed further what is now called atonement theory, which has to do with the belief that Jesus’s shed blood redeemed earthly sinners by negating the original sin of Adam. Among the gospel writers, Luke seems to have explicitly rejected atonement theory as an explanation for Jesus’s death, for he chose to suppress Mark’s endorsements of primitive atonement theory whenever he came across them. The one exception is when Luke’s Jesus addresses the Twelve during the Last Supper: “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” The problem, yet again, is that this is most likely an interpolation inserted by a later scribe, for it is not found in many early copies of Luke and nowhere else does Luke show any leanings toward primitive atonement theory. Jesus’s innocence of the charges against him seems to be the always-decorum-minded Luke’s primary concern, not whether his spilled blood washed away terrestrial sin.

  The clearest demonstration of the uncertainty with which the gospel writers regarded Jesus’s death can be found in how they chose to portray his last words on the cross, which vary greatly. As many have pointed out, it should not have been terribly difficult to reach consensus on the last words uttered by a dying, beloved man, so Jesus’s “last words” were obviously viewed by the gospel writers as having theological rather than historical value. Indeed, almost everything the synoptic gospel writers depict Jesus as having said on the cross has roots in various psalms. After he is crucified, Mark and Matthew have Jesus speaking once (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). Luke has him speaking three times, once to God (“Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing”), once to the so-called good thief crucified beside him (“Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise”), and once again to God (“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit”). John, too, has him speaking three times, once to his mother and the Beloved Disciple (“Woman, here is your son,” and “Here is your mother”), and twice, with elegant bleakness, to, seemingly, himself (“I thirst,” and “It is finished”).

 

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