Jesus of Nazareth
Page 45
A Song of the Logos
The gospel text that does this most urgently is the beginning of the Fourth Gospel, its so-called Prologue. That text speaks simply of the logos, the Word in which God has fully expressed the divine self—and the Johannine Prologue is referring to Jesus Christ. Nearly everything is said of this logos that was said also of preexistent Wisdom in Judaism:
The logos was present with God at the beginning, as a mediator of creation when the world was made. The logos came to Israel as to its own property, its inheritance. It took up its dwelling there—literally, “pitched its tent.” It is absolutely clear that all this is presented according to the same model in which creation’s Wisdom speaks of itself in Proverbs 8 and Sirach 24.
But there are three differences: Wisdom, in Proverbs 8 and Sirach 24, speaks in the first person, while John 1 tells its story in a hymnic third person until, beginning in verse 14, the hymn shifts to the confessional “we” of the community. The second difference is that in contrast to creation’s Wisdom, the logos is not made welcome by all Israel. “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him” (John 1:11). The third and decisive difference is that, in contrast to creation’s Wisdom, it is not said of the logos that it was created. The logos was with God “in the beginning.” Everything was created through the logos, but the logos was not created.
Passages about John the Baptizer have been inserted into the logos hymn in the Fourth Gospel. If we omit them, the text reads:
In the beginning was the
logos,
and the
logos
was with God,
and the
logos
was God.
It was in the beginning with God.
Everything came into being through him,
and without him not one thing came to be
that has come to be.
He was the life in it [i.e., what has come to be],
and the life was the light of humanity.
And the light shone in the darkness,
but the darkness did not comprehend it. […]
It was the true light
that enlightens every human being—
[the light] that comes into the world.
He was in the world,
and the world came into being through him,
but the world did not recognize him.
He came to what was his own,
but his own did not accept him.
But to those who did accept him
he gave power to become children of God,
those who believe in his Name,
who have been begotten not of blood [of parents]
and not of the will of the flesh
and not of the will of a man,
but of God.
And the
logos
became flesh
and took up its dwelling among us,
and we have seen his glory,
the glory of the only-begotten of the Father,
full of grace and truth. […]
For of his fullness we have all received,
grace following upon grace.
For the Law
was given through Moses,
grace and truth
have come through Jesus Christ.
No one has ever seen God.
The only-begotten, who is God
and rests in the bosom of the Father,
he has borne witness. (John 1:1-18)
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This speaks explicitly of Jesus’ divinity: “The logos was God” (1:1; cf. 1:18), but this divine predicate is embedded in an idea that at the time was deeply rooted in Judaism, that of Wisdom’s preexistence. Those who say that all this would have been impossible in Jewish-Christian communities have to contend with these texts, and they cannot argue that such statements must be placed very late.
A Song of the Kyrios
Clearly against such a position is the so-called hymn in Philippians 2:6-11, in which the Jewish pattern of exaltation, that is, the eschatological view, and preexistence-Christology, the protological view, are combined. Thus the world of ideas behind the Philippians hymn is also entirely Jewish and feeds on the Old Testament.
The letter to the Philippians was probably written around the year 55 CE, but the hymn it quotes is still older. Between the Philippians hymn and the death of Jesus lay perhaps twenty years. In this hymn Christ is not called God, but he is called kyrios. The whole hymn points toward that confession:
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father. (Phil 2:9-11)
Here Jesus is clearly on the same level with God. How so? The last part of the hymn clearly alludes to a text from Isaiah 45:23: “To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.” In Isaiah it is God who speaks; it is before God that one day every knee shall bend. When the hymn alludes to this statement from Isaiah, Jesus is set in place of God, but in the sense that when every knee bends before Jesus, then God the Father is thereby glorified.
It should also be noted that in the Septuagint, that is, the Greek translation of the Bible, kyrios, LORD, is used to replace YHWH, in accordance with the precept that the tetragrammaton, YHWH, is not to be spoken aloud; it is replaced by Hebrew adonaj (= LORD). When Jesus here, against the background of the Septuagint, is publicly acknowledged and called upon as Lord, this says that in this Jesus, God himself has become tangible, visible, audible. He is the eternal and conclusive presence of God in whom and through whom all creatures adore God.
A Jewish Way of Thinking and Nothing Else
Result: in the texts so briefly discussed here (Acts 2:36; Matt 28:18; Rom 1:3-4; John 1:1-18; Phil 2:6-11), despite the christological novelty, everything is formulated in Old Testament-Jewish forms of thought. And all these texts except John 1:1-18 are very old. They all say, on either the eschatological or the protological level, that Jesus is the final word and conclusive action of God, definitive of creation, definitive of all history. He is the Lord. In him God has fully uttered God’s own self. This conviction lays the groundwork for the confession “Jesus: true human and true God.”
The assertion that the first Jewish-Christian communities honored Jesus only as a simple rabbi, a teacher of wisdom, or a prophet, and that it was only Greek thought, rooted in Gentile-Christian communities, that divinized Jesus’ person, is therefore inaccurate fore and aft. The same truth is illustrated by the titles given to Jesus: Messiah, Son of Man, Son of God, and Lord. All of them are Jewish; they come from the Old Testament or at least have their basis there. Also important in this regard would be a close examination of the early Christian interpretation of Psalm 110:1 (“The LORD says to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand’”) and Psalm 2:7 (“You are my son; today I have begotten you”). It would show how accurately the formulations of early Christology could be developed out of Old Testament-Jewish texts.
Incidentally, the statement in Psalm 2:7, “You are my son; today I have begotten you,” very probably assumes an ancient component of Israelite family law: when a son was born in Israel the father took him on his knee and spoke this very formula (Gen 30:3; 50:23; Ps 22:11). Only thus was the child acknowledged as a legitimate son. Adoption of a child from outside the family or even of an adult was only a special case of this common practice. Normally it was one’s own child, but even so it had to be legally acknowledged, affirmed, and legitimated. In this precise sense in the earliest Christian exaltation Christology Jesus, who was already Son of God, was publicly legitimated as God’s Son and installed in his rightful position.
This should make it clear that New Testament Christology is Jewish. From the very beginning the apostles
and disciples and, after them, Jewish-Christian prophets and teachers sought to grasp who Jesus was. They attempted to express the overwhelming experience they had of Jesus, during his lifetime and then in the Easter appearances, in the existing Jewish categories available to them. Unless we are completely deceived, it seems that the insight that the formation of early Christology was an internal process within Judaism and not a Hellenization of Christianity is gaining more and more ground. Thus, for example, Gerd Theissen writes in his book The Religion of the Earliest Churches:
The deification of Jesus did not contradict the Jewish sign world, but consistently “built up” and “fulfilled” it. Those who enthroned Jesus at the right hand of God were not Gentiles but Jews; and they did this in the awareness not of forsaking their Jewish monotheism but rather of consummating it.
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This insight represents a crucial scholarly advance over the liberal positions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The question, however, remains, and Theissen’s words about the “deification of Jesus” and his “enthronement” by Christians make it all the more urgent: was the Christology of the first communities and the early church based on Jesus’ own claim and awareness of his sovereignty? Or is that Christology pure ideology, that is, was it simply imposed on the real Jesus after Easter?
The latter appears to be Theissen’s opinion. He speaks of “experiences of dissonance,” by which he means that Jesus’ disciples and the first communities could only overcome the horrible contradiction between the hopes Jesus had awakened, “between the expectations of a charismatic surrounded with a messianic aura” and his shameful and painful failure on the cross by assigning him an infinitely higher status than that they had originally attributed to him. They had to “enthrone” him at the right hand of God; they had to “deify” him; they had to give him a central place: the rank of the universal redeemer.12
It certainly makes good sense to illuminate the psychological and sociological structure of processes in the history of theology. But Theissen’s overall description can only lead ordinary readers to a serious misunderstanding. Or is he really convinced that Jesus was simply a charismatic, a prophet, a healer, a poet, a teacher, a founder of a cult, and a martyr,13 and that early Christology was a “deification” theologically as well?
This should make it clear, once again, why this chapter had to treat Jesus’ sovereign claim so extensively. Everything depends, after all, on the question of the claim Jesus himself advanced and what the eyewitnesses at the time observed him to be. At a later time, 1 John 1:1 reflects what a profound and fundamental experience this represented: “We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the logos of life.”
The Fundamental Experience of the First Witnesses
But in what did that experience consist? What was it that the first witnesses saw and heard? It makes sense at this point to summarize briefly what we already said in chapter 19.
Jesus spoke as one who stood in the place of God. Jesus did not speak like a prophet who hands on a word received from God. Nor did he speak like a precursor who points to one greater who is coming after him but instead as one who speaks with sovereign authority. We may remember especially the very frequent authoritative “I” in Jesus’ words, and also his cries of woe over the cities that rejected him. Judgment will be measured by a decision for or against him.
Jesus acted like one who stands in God’s stead. According to the theology of Ezekiel, God himself will gather his people (Ezek 36:24). Jesus began the gathering of Israel by authoritatively, in a symbolic act, installing and sending forth twelve men as representatives of eschatological Israel. According to the theology of the book of Isaiah, in the now-dawning time of salvation God will heal his people (Isa 57:18-19), bind up their wounds (30:26); then no one in Israel will again say, “I am sick” (33:24). The whole people will see what the hand of God is accomplishing in their midst (29:23). Jesus’ appearance was accompanied from the very beginning by healing miracles. He cured the blind, the lame, the lepers, and the possessed among the people of God. In Mark 2:7 the scribes quite correctly ask, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” But evidently Jesus assured people that their sins were forgiven (cf. Mark 2:5; Luke 7:47), and in consequence he entered into community with sinners (Mark 2:13-17; Luke 19:1-10). Here again he acts as if he stood in the place of God.
But for all this we should finally consider that Jesus spoke and acted not only as someone who stood in God’s stead. He acted eschatologically, that is, conclusively. This end-time-conclusive or eschatological character is evident especially in the claim that the decision about his own person would become salvation or judgment for those who decide. We may refer once more to Luke 12:8-9: “And I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before others, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God; but whoever denies me before others will be denied before the angels of God.” Jesus’ disciples and the first witnesses heard this claim; they saw, and they internalized it. It was their fundamental experience of Jesus. The church has preserved that fundamental experience, protected it against misinterpretation, and in the process has plumbed and reflected on it more and more deeply. It is true that in subsequent centuries this was done also with the aid of Greek concepts, but the church used those concepts precisely in order to hold fast to the confession of the first witnesses.14
The Dilemma
In closing, let me once again clarify the point at issue. The question was: was the Christology of the first communities and the early church based on a sovereign claim by Jesus himself? Or is this Christology pure ideology, that is, was it placed like a golden cloak over the real Jesus after Easter?
Historical criticism here stands before a parting of the ways that may lead in very different directions. If it posits that the biblical God exists, acts in the world, and does so through human beings, it also posits that there could be a pure “present,” a presence in the world—perhaps even to an extent that is unimaginable and absolutely unheard of—and then it can at least accept Jesus’ claim as a claim and not attempt to use historical criticism to weaken it or eliminate it entirely.
But if historical criticism does not accept that God can act radically as present in the world it will regard the irritating claim of Jesus as historically improbable and explain the corresponding texts from the early church as later “community constructions” or as myths arising in the minds of early Christian teachers. Or it will describe Jesus as the true image of the human and humanity that God wanted to put before our eyes. And so on. There are countless possibilities for accommodating the image of Jesus painted by the gospels to one’s own desires and imaginings.
The hermeneutics of the Enlightenment, which became dominant in eighteenth-century Europe, is still deeply rooted in many people’s heads, including those of Christians. The Enlightenment posited that what does not correspond to reality as it is always and everywhere to be found cannot be historical. There are sages, there are prophets, there are great teachers, and therefore Jesus can have been all those things. But he cannot have been what the Christian creed says about him, because that is not found anywhere else in history. Thus the texts of the gospels that furnish material for an examination of the question of the real Jesus must be subjected to a process of reduction.
Those who work with this Enlightenment premise are faced with a dilemma: what is historical determines our primary category of decision, which tells us from the beginning what can be historical. Only what has existed always and everywhere in the world can be historical. Everything that does not match this self-created preliminary conception is not historical.
An adequate theology does not bow to such prior conceptions because it posits that God acts in the world, indeed, that God can be present in the world in a way that is irritatingly unique and therefore can surpass all previous experience. Jesus was confronted even in his own lifetime with
the prior conceptions of many of his contemporaries who knew for certain how God would act and how God had to act if God did act. Because they knew all that for certain, they rejected Jesus. But Jesus found others who saw what was happening through him and who he was. He could say to them:
Blessed are the eyes that see what you see! For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it. (Luke 10:23-24 // Matt 13:16-17)
Chapter 21
The Reign of God: Utopia?
I spoke of Jesus’ proclamation of the reign of God at the beginning of this book (chap. 2). But that subject then continued like a scarlet thread through every chapter. It was for the reign of God that Jesus lived. For its sake he gave his all. He spoke of nothing else. It was for that end that he began to gather Israel. Nevertheless, his own person was inextricably linked to the reign of God. He spoke as one who stands in the place of God. The mystery of his person is precisely the interweaving of “God alone” and “but I say to you.” Anyone who dissolves that tension abandons the opportunity even to approach an understanding of Jesus.
But if we try to maintain the tension, at some point the question inevitably arises: what became of Jesus’ preaching of the reign of God? It is true that an imponderable multitude of Christians throughout the world believe him to be the eternal Word of God, the Son of God, true God. But the reign of God he announced: did it come? Has the world changed for the better? Has the beatitude pronounced over the poor been fulfilled? Have the hungry been filled? Have the demons been banished from society? Can the lame walk and the blind see? Have his disciples received their hundred brothers and hundred sisters already in this world? Or was what Jesus announced nothing but a utopia? What he wanted was undoubtedly revolutionary. It was also shockingly beautiful and profoundly moving—but was it not just a utopia? And doesn’t that mean that his sovereign claim is also dead?
The Notion of Utopia