Jesus
in magazine "Time" 
Is
he our Jesus?
- God, give
us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage
to change the things that should
be changed, and the
wisdom to distinguish one from the other.
- That Jesus was a man who lived and
preached in Palestine during the early first century, who gave rise to a
faith movement centered upon himself which would go on to become one of the
world’s great religions, might seem to be a fairly straightforward
proposition. The idea lies at the base of nearly 2000 years of Christian
belief and remains the starting point for almost all scholarly study of
Christian origins. And yet, accommodating such a simple assumption to the
documentary evidence is an exceedingly difficult task, a puzzle whose
solution has proven stubbornly, perplexingly, maddeningly elusive.
- Acts, as an historical witness to
Jesus or the beginnings of the Christian movement, cannot be relied upon.
The more recent tendency is to see Acts as a second century product,
probably of Roman provenance, highly tendentious and written for the purpose
of creating a picture of Christian origins traceable to a unified body of
apostles in Jerusalem who were followers of an historical Jesus. Much of it
is sheer fabrication, and highly incompatible with information found in the
letters of Paul. There is no attention for Acts prior to the 170s.
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- But there is another, simpler way of
regarding Paul’s sequence, one which helps us to define more closely his
concept of “heavenly man,” Christ is the heavenly man who will be
arriving on earth at the imminent End-time. The other pole of Paul’s
“historical” sequence lies in the future. This eschatological meaning
Paul points to in his use of the word “last” (eschaton), which he
interchanges with “second” (deuteros). In fact, Paul earlier in 1
Corinthians 15 does more than point, he spells it out for us. The action of
Christ in bringing resurrection to Christians lies not in the recent past,
but in the future, at the Parousia:
As in Adam all men die, so in
Christ all will be brought to life; but each in its proper order: Christ the
firstfruits [i.e., at his own resurrection, a mythical one] and afterwards, at
his coming [the Parousia], those who belong to Christ. [15:22-23]
