Secondhand religion as religious conventional wisdom is not bad. It can and does produce good. The Spirit of God can and does work through it. Indeed, secondhand religion can be a sacrament of the sacred. But it is not the same as firsthand religion. The experience of the sacred shatters and transforms secondhand religion.
This distinction also helps us to understand the dialogue and conflict within ancient Israel’s wisdom tradition. Israel’s conventional wisdom, as seen in the cumulative effect of the book of Proverbs, is secondhand religion: religion as an orderly set of teachings about how things are and how things go. The alternative voice of Israel’s wisdom—the wisdom of Job and Ecclesiastes—is grounded in the experience of God.
The conflict within Israel’s wisdom tradition is one of two major conflicts within the Hebrew Bible. The other we have already seen: the conflict between the imperial theology of Egypt and exodus theology, between the royal theology of Israel’s monarchy and the message of Israel’s prophets. The New Testament, to which we now turn, continues the story of these conflicts. It does not resolve them, however; if anything, it intensifies them. It also names the central tensions and conflicts that run through subsequent Christian history.
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THE NEW TESTAMENT
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8
Reading the Gospels Again
We now move from the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament. There is far more continuity between the two than the later division between Judaism and Christianity suggests. Not only is the Hebrew Bible part of the Christian Bible, but it was the sacred scripture for Jesus, his followers, the early Christian movement, and the authors of the New Testament.
For all of them—Jesus and those who followed and wrote about him—the Hebrew Bible provided the language of the sacred imagination, that place within the psyche in which images of God, the God-world relationship, and the God-human relationship reside. They referred to the Hebrew Bible frequently, sometimes by quoting it but more often by alluding to its stories and texts dealing with Israel’s past. They grew up with the Hebrew Bible and throughout their lives lived within the symbolic universe constituted by its words, images, and stories. It shaped their identity and their vision, their sense of who they were and their way of seeing, as individuals and as a community.
Though I will follow common practice and use the phrases “early Christianity” and “the early Christian movement,” it is not clear historically when we should begin using the words “Christian” and “Christianity,” if we mean by that a religion distinct from Judaism. Jesus and his early followers were all Jewish and saw themselves as doing something within Judaism, not as founding a religion separate from Judaism. Paul did not regard himself as converting to a new religion, but saw himself as a Jew all of his life. Most (and perhaps all) of the authors of the New Testament were Jewish. The word “Christianity” does not occur in the New Testament.1
Yet a “parting of the ways” began to become visible near the end of the first century.2 Several factors accounted for the division: Gentile converts who did not become Jewish, a growing concern within Judaism to exclude Jews who saw Jesus as the messiah, and Roman perceptions of the Christian movement as a new religion separate from Judaism. But we should not see the emerging division as a complete divorce or imagine that Gentiles soon dominated the movement. A recent study suggests that the majority of Christians were still Jewish in origin as late as the middle of the third century.3
Judaism and early Christianity were “Rebecca’s children,” twin offspring of Israel’s ancestors Rebecca and Isaac, to use the Jewish scholar Alan Segal’s apt phrase.4
Though Rebecca’s twins were fraternal and not identical, they did have the same mother. Thus we understand the New Testament best when we see it within the world of first-century Judaism, including the way that world was shaped by the Hebrew Bible. And we understand early Christianity best when we see it as a way of being Jewish.
The Historical Transition
From Ecclesiastes, the latest of the wisdom books in the Hebrew Bible, we move forward in time about three centuries. The Jewish people regained their national independence in 164 BCE after a heroic war of revolt against the Hellenistic Empire of Antiochus Epiphanes. The book of Daniel, the latest book in the Hebrew Bible, was written shortly before the revolt. The books of the Maccabees, Jewish documents in the Christian Apocrypha but not in the Hebrew Bible, tell the story of the revolt and its aftermath.
Independence lasted only a century, however. In 63 BCE, the Jewish homeland was incorporated into the Roman Empire. Roman imperial control was administered for a while by “client kings” appointed by Rome. The most famous of these was Herod the Great, who became king in 37 BCE. At his death in 4 BCE, his kingdom was divided into three parts ruled by his sons. In 6 CE, one part—Judea—came under direct Roman rule through prefects, or governors, sent from Rome. The most famous of these was Pontius Pilate, prefect from 26 to 36 CE.
During these centuries, the great majority of Jews did not live in the Jewish homeland itself, but in the “Diaspora,” a term referring to Jewish communities outside of Palestine. Estimates vary, but perhaps as many as eighty percent or more lived in the Diaspora. The number of Jews living in the homeland at that time is commonly estimated at about one million, whereas four to six million lived in the Diaspora.5 Some were descendants of Jews who had not returned from exile; others had emigrated more recently. Most Jews living in the Diaspora were urban, and they and their synagogues provided the primary network for Christian growth well into the third century.
In the Jewish homeland itself, the first century was a restive and violent time. The violence took several forms. There was the institutional and structural violence of Herodian and Roman rule, including economic and taxation policies that deprived more and more Jewish peasants of their ancestral landholdings and drove them into severe poverty, turning many into landless artisans, tenant farmers, or day-laborers and some into beggars. There was the violence of social bandits, groups of Jews who attacked and robbed Romans and the wealthy of their own people. (These social bandits were more than just gangs of bandits; the latter would have been simply outlaws, whereas the former were more like Robin Hood many centuries later.)
There was also the violence of armed revolutionary movements. In 4 BCE, when Herod the Great died, armed revolts broke out in most parts of his kingdom, including Galilee. Roman reprisal was quick and brutal. Sepphoris, the capital of Galilee (and only four miles from Nazareth), was burned to the ground, and many of the survivors were sold into slavery. Revolutionary violence simmered throughout much of the first century CE, culminating in the catastrophic war of revolt against Rome in 66. The Romans brutally reconquered the Jewish homeland and destroyed Jerusalem and the temple in 70. With the destruction of the temple, Jewish sacrificial worship ceased. The temple was never rebuilt, and Judaism changed forever.
An Introduction to the New Testament
Most of the twenty-seven documents that eventually became the New Testament were written between 50 CE and the end of the first century, although a few were written from the early to middle second century.6 Whereas the Hebrew Bible was written over a period of around eight hundred years and is the literature of a nation, the New Testament was written in one hundred years or less and is the literature of a sectarian movement numbering only a few thousand people. A recent estimate suggests that there were only about two thousand Christians in the year 60, by which time Paul’s genuine letters had been written. By the year 100, when most of the New Testament had been written, there were only 7,500 Christians.7 It is an impressive literary production from such a small group.
It is common to refer to these documents as the twenty-seven “books” of the New Testament, and I will sometimes follow this convention. But to call them “books” is somewhat misleading. Many of them are very short. (Two are only a page long, for example, and the longest are only about forty pages in most
English translations.)8 Moreover, a “book” in the modern sense of the term is written for a general public not known personally to the author.9 But all of the New Testament documents were written to persons or communities personally known to the authors.
These documents fall into four categories. The largest category is letters or epistles (twenty-one, thirteen of them attributed to Paul). The next largest category is gospels (four). The last two categories are represented by one book each: an apocalypse (the Revelation or Apocalypse of John), and a history of the movement (the Acts of the Apostles, or simply Acts).
An Introduction to the Gospels10
Among these documents, the four gospels are foundational, even though they are not the earliest writings in the New Testament. All of the genuine letters of Paul were written earlier, and much of the rest of the New Testament was written about the same time as the gospels.
They are foundational because they tell the story of Jesus. Just as the story of the exodus is ancient Israel’s primal narrative, so the gospels are the early Christian movement’s primal narratives in both senses of the word: “foundational” and “of first importance.”
Jesus lived in the first third of the first century. Born around 4 BCE, he was executed by the Romans around the year 30 CE. The gospels were written in the last third of the first century, between approximately 65 and 100 CE. The earliest is almost certainly Mark, and the latest is probably John. Though we call the gospels Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we are not sure who wrote any of them. The author of Mark did not begin his gospel by writing “The Gospel according to Mark” at the top. Names were not assigned to these writings until sometime in the second century. For us they are anonymous documents, but presumably their authors were known in the communities for which they wrote.11
Although scholarly debate about their more particular literary form continues, the gospels are at a very general level “public biographies”: accounts of the public life—the message and activity—of Jesus. They show little interest in his personal life before his public activity began. Two (Mark and John) do not even mention Jesus’ early years. The other two (Matthew and Luke) have birth stories, and Luke has a story about Jesus at age twelve, but that’s all.12
Like the historical narratives of the Bible generally, the gospels are the product of a developing tradition, containing earlier and later layers of material and combining history remembered and history metaphorized. They preserve the Jesus movement’s memory of Jesus and use the language of metaphor and metaphorical narrative to speak about what Jesus had become in their experience, thought, and devotion in the decades after his death.
As developing traditions combining historical memory and metaphorical narrative, they can be read in two different ways. On the one hand, as virtually our only source of information about the historical Jesus, they can be read for the sake of reconstructing a sketch of what Jesus of Nazareth was like as a figure of history. On the other hand, they can be read as late-first-century documents that tell us about Christian perceptions and convictions about Jesus some forty to seventy years after his death.
The first way of reading focuses on “the historical Jesus”: the Jesus of the early layers of the developing tradition behind or beneath the surface level of the gospels. The second way focuses on “the canonical Jesus”: the Jesus we encounter on the surface level of the gospels in their present form. We do not need to choose between these two ways of reading the gospels. Both are legitimate and useful.13
But we do need to be clear about when we are doing one and when we are doing the other. When we do not distinguish between the historical Jesus and the canonical Jesus, confusion results, and we risk losing both. When what the gospels say about the canonical Jesus is taken as historical reporting about Jesus of Nazareth, as both natural literalism and conscious literalism do, Jesus becomes an unreal human being, and we lose track of the utterly remarkable person he was. Anybody who can multiply loaves, walk on water, still storms, change water into wine, raise the dead (including someone who has been dead four days), and call down twelve legions of angels from heaven is not a credible human being. He is not one of us.
Moreover, when what is said about the canonical Jesus is taken literally and historically, we lose track of the rich metaphorical meanings of the gospel texts. The gospels become factual reports about past happenings rather than metaphorical narratives of present significance. But when we are clear about the distinction between the historical Jesus and the canonical Jesus, we get both. And both matter.
Most of my previous books on Jesus have focused on the historical Jesus.14 In radical shorthand, I see the pre-Easter Jesus as a Jewish mystic, healer, teacher of unconventional wisdom, social prophet, and renewal-movement initiator. Thus I see him as standing in continuity with the following strands of the Hebrew Bible:
The experiential stream of the tradition that emphasizes the firsthand experience of the sacred
The exodus and prophetic strands of the tradition, with their emphasis upon social justice and critique of and liberation from domination systems
The critique of conventional wisdom in the subversive wisdom of Israel as represented by Ecclesiastes and Job
The affirmation of an alternative social vision and vision of community that flows out of the above
I also see Jesus, in radical shorthand, as the Christian messiah. I think it most likely that the perception of him as messiah (and Son of God, and so forth) emerged among his followers after and because of Easter. By “Easter,” I mean the experience among his followers of Jesus as a living reality after his death, and the conviction that God had exalted him to be both messiah and Lord. This Jesus—the canonical Jesus—is the Jesus we meet on the pages of the New Testament.
In this chapter I focus on the canonical Jesus. My purpose is to illustrate how to read the gospels in their present form as the primal narratives of the early Christian movement. I will introduce each gospel and then comment more extensively on selected texts. I will emphasize reading the gospels as metaphorical narratives, incorporating a historical approach that adds to the metaphorical meanings of gospel texts in their late-first-century settings.
The Gospels as Thematic Constructions
As documents written in the last third of the first century in different Christian communities, the gospels are thematic constructions, each with its own distinctive themes, purpose, and emphasis. As I introduce each, I will not seek to be comprehensive; rather, I will simply highlight its thematic construction.
As I do so, I will integrate the inaugural scene of Jesus’ public activity in each, to show how the author has constructed it to crystallize his vision of what Jesus was most centrally about. By “inaugural scene” I mean the first public words or public deed attributed to Jesus. In each case, the inaugural address or inaugural deed functions as a thematic introduction. Thus it is an aperture through which we are given an advance glimpse of the evangelist’s perception of Jesus and his significance.
I begin with the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They are known as “the synoptics” because they are similar enough to be seen together (as the root of the word “synoptic” suggests). The reason for their similarity: they have written sources in common. Matthew and Luke both used the gospel of Mark, incorporating most of Mark’s material as well as his narrative structure of the public activity of Jesus: a period of teaching and healing in Galilee in the north of the country followed by a journey south to Jerusalem and death, all occurring within one year. Matthew and Luke also used an early collection of Jesus’ teachings known as “Q.” Their use of Mark and Q accounts for the family similarity of the synoptic gospels. The gospel of John, as we will see, is very different.
Mark
The gospel of Mark was written around 70 CE, the year that Jerusalem and the temple were reconquered and destroyed by the Roman Empire as the Jewish war of revolt led to its virtually inevitable climax. That event casts its shadow on the gospel, either because it
had recently happened or because it was soon to happen; in fact, Mark has aptly been referred to as “a wartime gospel.”15
Apocalyptic Eschatology We see the impact of the war and its climax especially in the thirteenth chapter of Mark, called “the little apocalypse.” (An apocalypse commonly deals with “the end,” and the “big apocalypse” is, of course, the book of Revelation.) The chapter begins with a warning of the temple’s destruction. As the disciples look at the temple, one exclaims, “Look, teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” The Jesus of Mark then says to him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”16
The disciples ask when this will happen and what the sign will be that the time is near. As the little apocalypse continues, the Jesus of Mark speaks of false messiahs, wars and rumors of war, nation rising against nation, persecution and betrayal, and finally says, “When you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be—let the reader understand—then those in Judea must flee to the mountains.” The phrase “desolating sacrilege” echoes the book of Daniel, where that wording refers to a previous foreign empire taking over the temple and there offering sacrifice to a foreign god.17 In Mark, the phrase refers to what has just happened (or is soon to happen) to the temple, an event that Mark says will be followed by suffering “such as has not been from the beginning of creation.”
Reading the Bible again for the First Time Page 18