Who is Jesus?

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Who is Jesus? For two thousand years most Christians have had a ready answer to that question - the Son of God, God made flesh, the Messiah, the Chosen One of God. However since the late 18th Century the question has become complicated by the application of historical analysis to the Gospels and the "discovery" that the Gospels are NOT merely biography about Jesus. Gospels are quite literally "Good News" written with a specific message and audience in mind. Historical analysis requires asking questions that are more difficult than the writers intended, like who said what and used what document as their source. Such enquiry has led to a lot of scepticism about the traditional picture of chosen apostles writing the direct words of Jesus down.

EARLY CHRISTIAN WRITINGS

Reading the Gospels should cause scepticism about the traditional view - we have three Gospels that cover much of the same story and much of the same material. Jesus' public life probably covered three years, and yet oddly the total of his words in the four Gospels would make up a couple of hours of lecturing. If the Gospels were all independent of each other then one could expect a lot more to have been recorded about Jesus and of what he said. Instead we have Luke and Matthew seemingly using Mark as the skeleton of their tales, adding sayings from some other source common to both, and John using totally different words of Jesus, but seemingly following Mark's rendering of the crucifixion account. For this reason most scholars believe the Gospel writers came long after Jesus died, and used a few documents that they found acceptable. Most believe that the writers were not eye-witnesses who could rely on memory or personal notes, but authors who used later documents that were in circulation amongst the early Christian communities.

Sources

In my brief summary I have mentioned the sources the Gospellers might have used - chiefly Mark, and a source common to Luke and Matthew, called Q by many scholars. These are not uncontested amongst scholars, but much of the work for the general public discusses these. Titles like The Five Gospels, the Lost Gospel and so on are all talking about Q, which is said to be a "sayings gospel" or simple collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, composed perhaps around 50 AD. Q represents a whole generation of reflection and teaching by Prophets in Jesus' name, it is said. Many of the sayings related to judgement against unbelievers in Q (and elsewhere) are said to have come from "inspired" prophets who roamed the country-side preaching and living the Gospel, and occasionally rejected by various groups who then became targets of "divine wrath". Jesus didn't really talk about judgement, according to a number of scholars, so the "end of the world" message attributed to him comes from elsewhere - probably influential disciples who had followed John the Baptist, who most agree was an "end of the world" prophet.

Another example of scholarly scepticism relates to the resurrection of Jesus. Most argue that the early apostles experienced a "risen Christ" as a kind of fear and grief induced collective hallucination, and this inspired them to live as Jesus taught, and so for them he was "alive". The resurrection accounts in the Gospels do differ in quite a number of ways, which provides good reasons for scepticism. Take the story of the two disciples on the Emmaus road who encounter a stranger who talks with them, and proves from Scripture, that Jesus had to die and be raised again. Scholars varyingly interpret this as meaning that early Christian scribes through their Scripture study were led to faith and understanding of why Jesus had died. He had been seen as God's Chosen One, so when he was killed this caused a lot of confusion - what social scientists call "cognitive dissonance". So the scribes searched the Bible for understanding and found a lot of prophecies that seemingly talk of the Chosen One suffering. Such a conclusion and resolution of the question of "why did he die" would have been seen as being of the Holy Spirit, and the Risen Jesus, who had been identified with the Spirit.

Crossan has six basic presuppositions...

1. The Priority of Mark - that is Mark preceded Luke, Matthew and John, and was used independently by all three.
2. The existence of the Q Gospel - and its independence from Mark.
3. The independence and dependence of John - by which he means that John used a lot of sayings and miracle stories unique to him, but he also used structure and some events in Mark.
4. The independence of Thomas - which allows Crossan to compare and contrast with Q and Mark. Thomas is a sayings gospel like Q but written with a bias towards Jewish mystical asceticism.
5. The independence of the Didache - which is "church manual" that many believe is roughly contemporary with Q and Mark.
6. The existence of the Cross Gospel - a hypothetical source that was combined with the Synoptic account of Jesus' death and resurrection to produce the Gospel of Peter. The Cross Gospel may have been written as early as 41 CE.

[NB: by independence or dependence Crossan means demonstrable literary relationship, or not, between two documents. Both maybe similar in a broad sense because they come from one "source" - Jesus - but when two works agree in structure and turns of phrase irrelevant to the message then they are likely to be dependent.]

By comparing all the passion-resurrection narratives of the Synoptics and John, he finds that they all derive from Mark with variant endings depending on the author's bias and intent. A glaring case is the seeming double ending of John which has an episode with the Risen Jesus installing Peter as the head of the Church - quite clearly written after the rest of the narrative, perhaps inserted to boost Peter. What the dependence means is that the passion-resurrection sequence has one source = Mark. And the original ending of Mark has no resurrection appearances of Jesus.

To retrieve more information Crossan turns to the Cross Gospel, which gives a rather different account of the events involving Jesus' trial, crucifixion and resurrection - hence the two sources disagree. To Crossan this is not unexpected - basically he believes that the disciples ran off and left Jesus to be executed, so no one knew what actually happened. Except perhaps for the women who mourned Jesus at the Cross. To Crossan the resurrection appearances were about establishing authority amongst the apostles and disciples, and not "real" events or accounts of hallucinations. To explore his argument further read his work. He develops it across several books - The Historical Jesus, Jesus: a Revolutionary Biography, Who Killed Jesus? and The Birth of Christianity. All are well argued even if you disagree with his conclusions.

You might think he has presented a reasonable scenario, or you might object that it sounds like a load of guess-work without foundation. However such a scenario has plentiful parallels amongst other "cultish" movements in which a founder dies, and is then exalted by his followers. The Hebrew Bible provides plentiful images for people trying to make sense of a Leader's death, and careful study of the Dead Sea Scrolls has produced parallels there as well. Let's explore those...

The Dead Sea Scrolls

In 1945 a cache of Hebrew Scriptures, commentaries, hymns and speculative works were found to the delight of the scholarly world, because these documents seemingly dated to near the time of Christ and provided a direct insight into his times. Prior to the scrolls historians had to depend on the contemporary sources of Philo Judaeus and Flavius Josephus for an understanding of Judaism in the time of Jesus - that's not a lot of material, and biased towards a distinctly pro-Greco-Roman perspective.

The Scrolls are a complicated collection which contain original works as well as "apocryphal" and "pseudepigraphal" works already known to scholars. In an important new study Michael Wise redates the Scrolls from their usual c.150 BCE to around the 70s-60s BCE, with some from about 30 BCE or later. He has written a book, The First Messiah, which contains a good measure of informed speculation about the main figure behind the Scrolls, the Teacher of Righteousness.

Many have speculated that the Teacher was Jesus, or John the Baptist, or James, brother of Jesus. In actual fact he was none of them, but very much like them. He led a movement of priests who sought God with all their hearts, and sought to live to a New Covenant. But their group was being persecuted, often with deadly force, creating a crisis situation. This created an environment needing a militant leader with real conviction, and through study of the Teacher's hymns and psalms found in the Scrolls we learn a lot about who he thought he was. Also works can be identified from after his death which exalt him to angelic status and above. He was the Voice of God, the Lord (Adonai), just like Jesus was to his disciples.

But when he died and eventually major prophecies he had made did not come to pass followers either did elaborate mental gymnastics to explain away his error, or else they left. But their scrolls lived on, probably copied and recopied by disaffected scribes who were the leaders of outcasts and radicals through out the time of Jesus. I would suggest, based on Crossan's analysis and Wise's parallels with the Teacher, that much the same happened with Jesus. A lot of similar language is used of Jesus, as used of the Teacher, but with the difference that we don't have anything Jesus wrote himself.

You might wonder how could so much fantasy material be written about the man and yet none of it is true. But in what sense is it false? In the centuries around? Jesus' life dozens of "fictional works" were propagated as restored works of ancient bible figures. One of the longest and wildest is the Book of Enoch, and it's quoted by the epistle writer Jude in the New Testament. You have to read early Church writers and see how seriously they took it to understand how intelligent people could heartily swallow spiritual fictions. A similar phenomena amongst evangelical Christians could be the popularity of Frank Paretti's Darkness series, which follows the adventures of angels fighting demons and so forth. Such works strike a chord and express a common perception about life's events - they are true for us.

Experiences

I'm not talking as an atheist nor someone who is spiritually blind. I have experienced things that shake a merely materialistic world-view, at least for me. I have seen angels and demons, heard demonic laughter, felt demonic heat, and battled demons in dreams - all rather standard stuff in a Paretti novel I guess or the Book of Enoch. So I believe people who say they have experienced the Risen Jesus, and to an extent envy them. But I am not willing to buy into just believing the whole package because I have experienced the Other World. There are good solid reasons for being sceptical about every story of miracle and fleshly resurrection, but that's not the resurrection that matters. St Paul in Ephesians, and elsewhere, talks of dying with Christ and being raised with Him - and that, to me, is the Resurrection in our lives now, the resurrection that matters.

John Crossan distinguishes between various modes of experience that believers probably had of the Risen Jesus - as empowerment in their lives, a continual sense of Presence, as the Spirit who guided their reflections on the Law and the Prophets, as a life-changing vision, and as the hoped for Avenger who would usher in the New Age. All these are valid experiences and they tell us now what many knew then, that we must experience the New Life with Jesus. A set of abstract and objective propositions about him is not enough to change our lives in the here-and-now.

Kingdom of God

Jesus preached a message about God's heavenly rule, which John the Baptist taught was about to be implemented by a final conflict, but Crossan has found evidence that Jesus parted ways with John the Baptist's message. So what was his preaching about the Kingdom? Crossan calls it "ethical eschatology" - we end the evil World by living the Kingdom-here-now. If this is what Jesus taught then how did he get associated with an end-of-the-world message?

Firstly, no one has proven that the Kingdom-here-now was Jesus' actual message. Crossan and scholars like him who dissociate Jesus from the "Kingdom-to-come" preaching have quite a lot of evidence against them since large parts of the Gospels are about coming Judgement, and the "Kingdom-to-come" is all through the epistles of Paul and other works of the time. But perhaps we can take another perspective on the Judgement - was it of "this world" in the sense of all the planet, or a Judgement against Israel? If the second, then we are fitting in with a major theme of the Hebrew prophets, of God's Judgement against Israel. Time and time again in the Gospels Jesus is portrayed as speaking against "this evil generation", meaning the people of Israel of his time. John and Jesus both called people to repentence before the "end" that they perceived being "at the door" - and I believe that the Gospel writers wrote in light of the Jewish War of 66-70 CE, which many related to the unjust death of James, Jesus' brother.

But after the War, as Gentiles became the Church, rather than the Jews, something happened - people no longer understood the prophecies of "the end times", which all New Testament writers agreed was in their time. Jesus (or a later prophet speaking for him) used a lot of fanciful language to describe the end, which the later Gentile Greco-Roman believers then took literally. So the tradition of the "Second Coming" arose, and remains today as a source of inspiration for paranoids and best-selling Christian novellists.

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