The Case for God

by Karen Armstrong

  The Christians got organized more quickly. The first of the four canonical gospels was written either shortly before or immediately after the destruction. We know very little about the historical Jesus, since all our information comes from the texts of the New Testament, which were not primarily concerned with factual accuracy. He seems to have been a charismatic healer and a man of ahimsa who told his followers to love their enemies.15 Like other prophets at this time, he preached the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God, a new world order in which the mighty would be cast down and the lowly exalted, the righteous dead would rise from their tombs, and the whole world would worship the God of Israel.

  Jesus does not seem to have attracted a large following during his lifetime. But that changed in about 30 CE when—for reasons that are not entirely clear—he was crucified by the Romans. His disciples had visions that convinced them that he had been raised by God from the dead in advance of the Last Days; he was the messhiach (Greek: christos), the “anointed one” who would soon return in glory to establish the Kingdom.16 The first Christians prepared for this great event by living a dedicated Jewish life, holding all property in common, and giving generously to the poor.17 They had no intention of founding a new religion but observed the Torah, worshipped in the temple, and kept the dietary laws.18 Like the Pharisees, they regarded the Golden Rule as central to Judaism.19 They continued to think about God in the traditional Jewish way and, like the rabbis, experienced the Holy Spirit, the immanent presence of God, as a tangible, empowering, and electrifying force.20 Christian missionaries preached the “gospel” or “good news” in such marginal regions of Palestine as Samaria and Gaza, and established congregations in the Diaspora to ensure that all Jews, even “sinners,” were prepared for the Kingdom.21 They also took the highly unusual step of admitting non-Jews into their community. Some of the prophets had predicted that in the Last Days the foreign nations would share Israel’s triumph and would voluntarily throw away their idols.22 When the Christians discovered that they were attracting gentile converts, many of them already sympathetic to Judaism, this confirmed them in their belief that the old order was indeed passing away.23

  One of the most forceful champions of this view was Paul, a Greek-speaking Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia, who joined the Christian movement some three years after Jesus’s death. Paul’s letters to his converts, written during the 50s and 60s, are the earliest extant Christian writings and show that the Christians had already started to engage in a radically inventive exegesis of the Torah and the Prophets to demonstrate that Jesus was the culmination of Jewish history. Paul was convinced that his mixed congregations of Jews and gentiles were the first fruits of the new Israel. These were astonishing claims. There was nothing in the scriptures to suggest that a future redeemer would be crucified and rise from the dead, and many found the idea utterly scandalous.24 After the disaster of 70, Christians saw the destruction of the temple as an apokalypsis, a “revelation” of a terrifying truth. The old Israel was dead. The catastrophe had been predicted by Daniel,25 and the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah had criticized the cult and insisted that God wanted the temple to be a house of prayer for all peoples.26 Now in the new Israel Jews must encounter the Shekhinah, the divine presence formerly enshrined in the Holy of Holies, in the person of Jesus, the christos.27

  The twenty-seven books of the New Testament, completed by the middle of the second century, represented a heroic effort to rebuild a shattered tradition. Like the rabbis, the Christians used midrashic techniques to enable Jews to move forward.28 The authors of the four gospels later attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were Jewish Christians who wrote in Greek, read the Bible in its Greek translation, and lived in the Hellenistic cities of the Near East.29 Mark was written in about 70; Matthew and Luke in the 80s; and John in the late 90s. The gospels were not biographies in our sense but should, rather, be seen as commentaries on the Hebrew Bible. Like Paul, the evangelists searched the scriptures to find any mention of a christos— be it a king, prophet, or priest—who had been “anointed” in the past by God for a special mission and was now seen to be a coded prediction of Jesus. They believed that Jesus’s life and death had been foretold in the four servant songs, and some even thought that he was the Word and Wisdom of God, who had descended to earth in human form.

  This was not simply a clever exercise in public relations. Jews had long realized that all religious discourse was basically interpretive. They had always looked for new meaning in the ancient texts during a crisis, and the basic methodology of Christian pesher (“deciphering”) exegesis, which had also been practiced by the Qumran sectarians, was not unlike Greek “bricolage” or rabbinical midrash. Above all, it was a spiritual exercise. Luke has shown the way it may have worked in his story of a numinous encounter on the road to Emmaus.30 Three days after Jesus’s crucifixion, two of his disciples had been walking sadly from Jerusalem to the nearby village of Emmaus and had fallen in with a stranger who asked them why they were so despondent. They explained what had happened to Jesus, the man they thought had been the messiah. The stranger gently rebuked them: Did they not realize that the scriptures had foretold that the christos would suffer before attaining his glory? Starting with Moses, he began to expound “the full message” of the prophets, and later the disciples recalled how their hearts had “burned” within them when he had “opened” the scriptures to them in this way. When they arrived at their destination, they begged the stranger to dine with them, and it was only when he blessed the bread that they realized it was Jesus himself, but that their “eyes had been held” from recognizing him.

  Like the rabbis, the Christians gathered “in twos and threes” to decipher the old texts. As they conversed together, the scriptures would “open” and bring them fresh insight. This illumination might last only a moment—just as Jesus had vanished as soon as the disciples had recognized him—but the act of bringing hitherto unconnected texts together to form an unexpected harmony gave them intimations of the coincidentia oppositorum that had characterized the temple experience. Apparent contradictions locked together in the luminous “wholeness” of shalom. The stranger had a crucial role. In Luke’s congregation Jews and gentiles were discovering that, like Abraham at Mamre, when they reached out to the “other,” they experienced the divine. The story also shows how the early Christians understood Jesus’s resurrection. They did not have a simplistic notion of his corpse walking out of the tomb. Henceforth, as Paul had made clear, they would no longer know Jesus “in the flesh” but would find him in one another, in scripture, and in the ritual meals they ate together.

  Jesus was acquiring mythical and symbolic status, but like any mythos, this would make no sense unless it was put into practice. In his letter to his converts in Philippi in Asia Minor, Paul quoted a hymn already well-known to the Christian communities, which shows that from this very early date (c. 54–57) Christians saw Jesus’s life as a kenosis, a humble “self-emptying.”31 Although, like all human beings, Jesus was the image of God, he did not cling to this high dignity,

  But emptied himself [heauton ekenosen]

  To assume the condition of a slave. …

  And was humbler yet, even to accepting death, death on a cross.

  Because of this humiliating descent, God had raised him high and given him the supreme title kyrios (“lord”), “to the glory of God the Father.” This text is often quoted to show that Christians saw Jesus as the incarnate son of God from the very beginning, but Paul was not giving the Philippians a lesson in Christian doctrine. He had introduced the hymn to them with a moral instruction: “In your minds, you must be the same as Christ Jesus.”

  There must be no competition among you, no conceit; but everybody is to be self-effacing. Always consider the other person to be better than yourself, so that nobody thinks of his own interests first, but everybody thinks of other people’s interests instead.32

  Unless they imitated Jesus’s kenosis in the smallest details of their own live
s, they would not understand the mythos of the lord Jesus. Like all great religious teaching, Christian doctrine would always be a miqra that would make sense only when translated into a ritual, meditative, or ethical program.

  When he gave Jesus the title “lord,” Paul did not mean that he was God. The careful wording of the hymn made it clear that there was a distinction between the kyrios and God. Even though Paul and the evangelists all called Jesus the “son of God,” they were not making divine claims for him. They would have been quite shocked by this idea. For Jews, a “son of God” was a perfectly normal human being who had been raised to special intimacy with God and had been given a divine mandate. Prophets, kings, and priests had all been called “sons of God;” indeed, the scriptures saw all Israelites as the “sons of God” in this sense.33 In the gospels, Jesus called God his “father,” but he made it clear that God was the father of his disciples too.34

  Today it is often assumed that when they told the story of Jesus’s virgin birth, the evangelists alleged that he was somehow impregnated by God in the womb of his mother and was a “son of God” in the same way as Dionysus, who was the son of Zeus by an earthly woman. But no Jewish reader would have understood the story in this way. There are a number of unusual conceptions in the Hebrew Bible: Isaac, for example, was born when his mother was ninety years old. A tale of this kind is regularly attached to an exceptional human being to show that the child had been marked out for greatness from the first instant of his life. The virgin birth is found only in Matthew and Luke—the other New Testament writers do not appear to have heard of it—but both trace Jesus’s lineage through Joseph, his natural father, in the normal way; Mark takes it for granted that Joseph was Jesus’s father and that he had brothers and sisters who were well known to the earliest Christian communities;35 like the other evangelists, he sees Jesus primarily as a prophet.36 Skeptics point derisively to the obvious discrepancies in the infancy narratives, but these were not supposed to be factual, and the final redactors felt no qualms about including such contradictory accounts. These stories are exercises in creative midrash, their object being to show that Jesus’s coming was foretold in the Hebrew scriptures. Placed at the beginning of these two gospels, they give the reader a foretaste of how each evangelist understood Jesus’s mission. Like the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament records a wide range of views rather than a single orthodox teaching. Matthew was anxious to show that Jesus was the christos of the gentiles as well as the Jews, so he has the Magi come from the Far East to worship at the crib. Luke, on the other hand, always stressed Jesus’s mission to the poor and marginalized, so in his gospel a group of shepherds are the first to hear the “good news” of his birth.

  Jesus’s unusual conception and birth were by no means the chief ways in which the first Christians expressed their sense of his divine sonship. Paul believed that he was “designated” the “son of God” at his resurrection.37 Mark thought he received his commission at his baptism, like the ancient kings of Israel, who had been “adopted” by Yahweh at their coronation. He even quotes the ancient coronation psalm.38 On another occasion, when Jesus took three of his disciples up a high mountain, the gospels show him being “anointed” as a prophet. He was “transfigured” before them, his face and garments shining like the sun; the disciples saw him speaking with Moses and Elijah while a heavenly voice, quoting the same hymn, declared, “This is my Son, the Beloved; he enjoys my favor.”39

  Yet did not Jesus constantly insist that his followers acknowledge his divine status—almost as a condition of discipleship? 40 In the gospels we continually hear him berating his disciples for their lack of “faith” and praising the “faith” of gentiles, who seem to understand him better than his fellow Jews. Those who beg him for healing are required to have “faith” before he can work a miracle, and some pray: “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.”41 We do not find this preoccupation with “belief” in the other major traditions. Why did Jesus set such store by it? The simple answer is that he did not. The word translated as “faith” in the New Testament is the Greek pistis (verbal form: pisteuo), which means “trust; loyalty; engagement; commitment.”42 Jesus was not asking people to “believe” in his divinity, because he was making no such claim. He was asking for commitment. He wanted disciples who would engage with his mission, give all they had to the poor, feed the hungry, refuse to be hampered by family ties, abandon their pride, lay aside their self-importance and sense of entitlement, live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and trust in the God who was their father. They must spread the good news of the Kingdom to everyone in Israel—even the prostitutes and tax collectors—and live compassionate lives, not confining their benevolence to the respectable and conventionally virtuous. Such pistis could move mountains and unleash unsuspected human potential.43

  When the New Testament was translated from Greek into Latin by Saint Jerome (c. 342–420), pistis became fides (“loyalty”). Fides had no verbal form, so for pisteuo Jerome used the Latin verb credo, a word that derived from cor do, “I give my heart.” He did not think of using opinor (“I hold an opinion”). When the Bible was translated into English, credo and pisteuo became “I believe” in the King James version (1611). But the word “belief” has since changed its meaning. In Middle English, bileven meant “to prize; to value; to hold dear.” It was related to the German belieben (“to love”), liebe (“beloved”), and the Latin libido. So “belief” originally meant “loyalty to a person to whom one is bound in promise or duty.”44 When Chaucer’s knight begged his patron to “accepte my bileve,” he meant “accept my fealty, my loyalty.”45 In Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, which was probably written around 1603, shortly before the publication of the King James Bible, the young nobleman Bertram is urged to “believe not thy disdain”: he must not entertain his contempt for lowborn Helena and allow it to take deep root in his heart.46 During the late seventeenth century, however, as our concept of knowledge became more theoretical, the word “belief” started to be used to describe an intellectual assent to a hypothetical—and often dubious— proposition. Scientists and philosophers were the first to use it in this sense, but in religious contexts the Latin credere and the English “belief” both retained their original connotations well into the nineteenth century.

  It is in this context, perhaps, that we should discuss the vexed question of Jesus’s miracles. Since the Enlightenment, when empirical verification became important in the substantiation of any “belief,” many people—Christians and atheists alike—have assumed that Jesus performed these miracles to prove his divinity. But in the ancient world, “miracles” were quite commonplace and, however remarkable and significant, were not thought to indicate that the miracle worker was in any way superhuman.47 There were so many unseen forces for which the science of the day could not account that it seemed quite reasonable to assume that spirits affected human life, and Greeks routinely consulted a god rather than a doctor. Indeed, given the state of medicine before the modern period, this was probably a safer and more prudent option. Some people had a special ability to manipulate the malign powers that were thought to cause disease, and Jews in particular were known to be skilled healers. In the ninth century BCE, the prophets Elijah and Elisha had both performed miracles similar to Jesus’s, but nobody ever suggested that they were gods.

  Jesus came from Galilee in northern Palestine, where there was a tradition of devout men (hasidim) who were miracle workers.48 In the middle of the first century BCE, the prayers of Honi the Circle Drawer had brought a severe drought to an end, and shortly before the destruction of the temple, Hanina ben Dosa was able, like Jesus, to cure a patient without even visiting his bedside. But nobody, least of all the hasidim themselves, thought that they were anything other than ordinary human beings. Jesus probably presented himself as a hasid in this tradition, and he seems to have been a particularly skilled exorcist. People suffering from epilepsy or mental illnesses for which there was no other cur
e naturally consulted exorcists, some of whom may have been able to effect an improvement in diseases that had a strong psychosomatic component. But like Honi, Jesus made it clear that he owed his miracles to the “powers” (dunamis) of God that worked through him and insisted that anybody who trusted God sufficiently would be able to do still greater things.49

  Far from these miracles being central to the gospel, the evangelists seem rather ambivalent about them. Mark tells us that even though the fame of these marvels spread far and wide, Jesus regularly asked people to keep quiet about their cure;50 Matthew tends to play down the miracles, using them simply to show how Jesus fulfilled ancient prophecy,51 while for Luke, the miracles merely showed that Jesus was “a great prophet” like Elijah.52 The evangelists knew that, despite these signs and wonders, Jesus had not won many followers during his lifetime. The miracles had not inspired “faith;” people who witnessed them agreed that Jesus was a “son of God” but were not prepared to disrupt their lives and commit themselves wholeheartedly to his mission—any more than they had been willing to sell all they had and follow Honi the Circle Drawer.

  Even the inner circle of apostles lacked pistis. They made no comment at all when Jesus fed a crowd of five thousand people with a few loaves and fishes; and when they saw him walking on water, Mark tells us, they were “utterly and completely dumbfounded … their minds were closed.”53 Matthew relates that the disciples did indeed bow down before him after this miracle, crying: “Truly, you are the Son of God,”54 but in no time at all Jesus had to rebuke them for their lack of faith.55 The miracle stories probably reflect the disciples’ understanding of these events after the resurrection apparitions. With hindsight, they could see that God had already been working through Jesus to usher in the Kingdom, when God would vanquish the demons that caused suffering, sickness, and death and trample the destructive powers of chaos underfoot.56 They did not think that Jesus was God, so did not argue that these miracles proved his divinity. But after the resurrection they were convinced that like any person of pistis, Jesus had been able to call upon God’s dunamis when he stilled the storm at sea and walked on the windswept waters.