September/October 1998
One of the most well-known figures on the world stage during the last ten years, and certainly the most photographed woman, was Diana, Princess of Wales. She was surrounded by praise and affection on the one hand, and by moral criticism on the other, especially from the royal family and the tabloid press. While Diana was enjoying a holiday in Paris in the company of her newfound love, The Sunday Times of London published a full page article psychoanalyzing her. It carried the double-entendre headline "Diana on the Couch." The first edition had just left the printing press when the news came through of her tragic death. The Times immediately withdrew, from all later editions, the whole section of the paper in which the article appeared.
The British public were completely stunned by the news. There was a massive, spontaneous outpouring of grief such as had never been seen before. Even though her brother, at her funeral, warned mourners not to turn Diana into a saint, she was nevertheless glorified for months to come as the central figure of a modern tragic fairy tale. On the anniversary of her death journalists gathered at all the sites associated with Diana, expecting similar crowds as before. They came, but only in small numbers.
What is more, some influential voices, including a former Archbishop of Canterbury, began again to speak in critical terms of Diana. The deconstruction of Diana had begun and her humanity was being recovered from the fairy tale. It is analogous to the topic we are about to discuss.
Whereas the glorification of the tragic Diana, followed by its deconstruction, took place in the space of only one year, the process of the glorification of Jesus as the Christ figure and its subsequent deconstruction has taken place over a space of two thousand years.
How did Jesus become Christ?
In 1974 a Roman Catholic scholar called Peter deRosa published a book called Jesus Who Became Christ. (Incidentally, not long before that, Peter deRosa, after an impressive academic career, had been dismissed as Vice-Principal of Corpus Christi College, London. That was a college for training Catholic teachers, which the Catholic Church closed down because it was becoming too radical.) We shall start with the question Peter deRosa set out to answer—How did Jesus become Christ?—for it is the first part of the answer to the question of how Jesus became God.
There are two ways of understanding this question and there is a rather subtle but extremely important difference between the two. It is a difference that is far too little understood. We may call the two ways the objective approach and the subjective approach.
I shall illustrate this difference first by reference to the question: "How did Mrs. Jenny Shipley become the Prime Minister of New Zealand?"
The objective answer to that question goes something like this. First Jenny was chosen by the ruling National Party to contest the Parliamentary seat of Ashburton. Then she was elected as the Member of Parliament for Ashburton. The next step was when she was chosen by Prime Minister Jim Bolger to be a Cabinet Minister. Her ability enabled her to work herself up the Cabinet pecking order. Then, while Jim Bolger was overseas, she gathered sufficient support from her fellow members of the ruling party to present the Prime Minister, on his return, with a fait accompli for a take-over coup. But she was still not yet Prime Minister. By mutual agreement Jim Bolger was given about a month's grace to put his affairs in order, as it were, before she was finally sworn in as Prime Minister. This, then, is the objective account of how Jenny Shipley became Prime Minister.
What would be the subjective account? Subjective accounts vary from person to person, just because they are subjective. There is no one single answer and I shall give two extreme examples.
In the minds of her strongest detractors the subjective account could be like this, "Jenny Shipley is Prime Minister in name only, having got there by devious means. She is simply a caretaker of the Prime Minister's office until the next election. She has not won a general election as leader, and does not have a mandate from the people of New Zealand to be their Prime Minister, as did her predecessors."
On the other hand, the subjective approach from her strongest supporters could be something like this, "Jenny Shipley is so cut out for the job of Prime Minister that, once she entered Parliament, her rise to the top was inevitable. She has really been Prime Minister in waiting from the beginning. Indeed, she has shown such skill in the office that it is clear she was born to be Prime Minister."
The difference between the objective answer and the various subjective answers to the question is this: The objective answer refers to events which happened to Jenny Shipley, events which are open to historical investigation. The subjective answers, on the other hand, are value judgments made by people. They are not open to historical investigation except the confirmation that some people have made to these judgments. They vary from person to person, though each particular answer may be shared by others.
With this difference in mind let us turn to the question of how Jesus became Christ for, unfortunately there has been, and still is, real confusion here. It soon becomes clear that the answer to this question has a great deal more in common with the subjective answers to Jenny Shipley's prime ministership than with the objective answer. There was no political office of Messiahship to which Jesus was appointed at a certain point in time, an event open to public and religiously neutral confirmation. On the contrary, it is only Christians who have ever claimed Jesus to be the Christ.
So, in asking how Jesus became the Christ, are we concerned with an objective answer or with a subjective answer? I intend now to show that the Christian proclamation of Jesus as the Christ originated as a subjective evaluation on the part of some people. Later generations, however, interpreted the subjective affirmations as objective events and lost the distinction between the subjective and the objective. This can be clearly illustrated from the biblical data.
When did Jesus become Christ?
If we turn to the New Testament records looking for the historical evidence of the objective process by which Jesus became the Christ, then what we find are subjective judgments or proclamations which simply sound as if they are objective. The conclusion that they are subjective is confirmed by the fact that there are several of them at different points in the New Testament and they are different from each other. Here are the most important ones:
After his death
In Acts in a speech put into the mouth of Peter we find these words (2:22–36):
"Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs which God did through him in your midst . . . you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless man . . . This Jesus God raised up, and of that we are all witnesses . . . Let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified."
The person who composed those words was declaring that it was by means of God's raising Jesus from the dead that Jesus became the Christ. In other words, on this view, the man Jesus became the Christ at some point after his death on the cross.
We should note in this and the following examples that we are not dealing with historical events open to public investigation by the historian. The events are specifically described as "acts of God." "This Jesus God raised up . . . God has made him both Lord and Christ." Anything judged by humans to be "an act of God" belongs to the category of a human judgment or interpretation and not to the category of historical event.
During his ministry
In Mark's Gospel, however, there is a story of Jesus at Caesarea Philippi in which he asked his disciples what people were saying about him and they gave a variety of answers. When Jesus asked Peter what he thought he received the reply, "You are the Christ." The writer of this narrative clearly believed that Jesus was already the Christ during his ministry and before his death and resurrection. The narrator further says that Jesus charged his disciples not to mention to anyone that he was the Christ. These references to secrecy in Mark's Gospel are known in modern scholarship as the Messianic Secret, after the title of a book written in 1901 by Wilhelm Wrede. He argued that the secret was a primitive invention to reconcile two accounts of how Jesus became the Messiah—the earlier account, that we have just seen reflected in Acts, and a slightly later account, that Jesus was already the Christ during his ministry.
At his baptism
The author of Mark's Gospel, writing at a time when all Christians accepted Jesus as Messiah, went even further, implying that it was at his baptism that Jesus became the Messiah. We read that when Jesus came out of the water he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit descended upon him like a dove and a voice came from heaven saying, "You are my beloved son; with you I am well pleased."
This story gave rise in early Christian theology to what was called the "adoption theory" of the "Person of Christ." In short, Jesus was born as an ordinary human being until God, at the time of his baptism by John, adopted him as his Son. This is why there are no birth stories in Mark. This view was eventually declared heretical though it continued to break out from time to time. It became heretical for the simple reason that the belief that Jesus became the Christ only at his baptism, still common when Mark was writing about 70 c.e., was soon to be overcome by further changes in the developing tradition.
When he was born
The birth stories of Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke clearly intend to imply that Jesus was the Christ from the time he was he born. Whereas Matthew tends to emphasize that Jesus was born to be the King of Jews, Luke is more explicit, putting this into the mouth of the angels, "for to you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour who is Christ the Lord."
A further difference between the birth stories of Luke and Matthew is that Matthew traced the genealogy of Jesus back to Abraham to indicate, as it were, that he was a faithful Jew and a true son of Abraham. But Luke, perhaps because he was a Gentile, traced the genealogy of Jesus back to Adam, both to show that he was truly representative of human kind but also to say that, being human, he was also the son of God, for Adam he referred to as the Son of God.
In tracing this progression backwards in time, from post-resurrection, to ministry, to baptism, to birth, we should note there is also a shift in emphasis in the terminology being used concerning Jesus. It is a shift from Messiahship to divinity, from the status of Christ to the status of the divine Son of God.
At creation
This progression backwards did not stop with the birth of Jesus. When we turn to the Fourth Gospel we find that the process we are discussing goes so far back in time that it is no longer a case of Jesus becoming the Christ. It has now become a case of the Christ becoming Jesus, the Christ being now referred to as the Logos or Word. The reason the Fourth Gospel has no birth story is that it starts the Gospel of Jesus Christ from creation. The one who was to become Jesus was there from the beginning. (It's a bit like saying that Jenny Shipley was divinely ordained to be Prime Minister from the beginning of time.)
In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God . . . all things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made . . . and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; and we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father . . . grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known . . . John 1:1 –18
Here, the issue of how Jesus became the Christ has been reversed into a different issue—how the Logos, or only begotten Son of God, became incarnate in human flesh as Jesus. Thus the question of how Jesus became God became turned round in the course of time into the question of how God became Jesus.
By the time of the Ecumenical Councils and the formulation of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity the basic Christian Gospel had gone through a remarkable change. It had started with the simple affirmation that Jesus was the Christ. It was now the affirmation of how the second person of the Holy Trinity had become incarnate in the man Jesus. In effect, therefore, Jesus was now believed to be incorporated into the Godhead.
How are these differences in subjective evaluation to be reconciled? If we read the Bible expecting it to be perfectly consistent, being all written on one level and by the same author (and that is how it used to be read by Christians until two hundred years ago), then the various "acts of God" we have just retraced—creation, incarnation, birth, baptism, ministry, resurrection—could all be taken as successive steps in the one process by which Jesus became the Christ, the Christ who now sits at the right hand of God, from which he will ultimately return to be our Judge.
From about two hundred years ago, and especially during the last 160 years, Christian scholars have begun to read the Bible historically. They found it is not written on one level nor by one author. It was composed by different people at different times and it reflects many differences of viewpoint. That is why it can now be seen to contain many inconsistencies and vast differences of viewpoint. In particular the traditional answer of how Jesus became the Christ has been replaced by a surprising variety of conflicting answers. What is even more revealing is that when we look at these answers in chronological order of composition, we find a quite fascinating process taking place. Within the space of about seventy years the chief "act of God" by which Jesus supposedly became the Christ has moved from after his death, back through his ministry, baptism, birth, to beyond the creation itself, as the final creedal term "begotten, not made" makes clear.