What can we believe today about Jesus?
A talk given by the Dean of Wells in the Education Room of Wells Cathedral on January 26th 2014
What can we say about Jesus today? This question has to be answered on at least two levels. The first level is that of history. What can we say certainly about Jesus that is demonstrable and proven by reputable historical sources? The second is what can we say about Jesus from the experience of faith?
The answer to neither question is not as simple as it might seem. There is little historical evidence about Jesus that comes from sources external to the Bible. The Roman historian Tacitus in 112 AD writes of Christians ‘The founder of this sect,Christus, was given the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate; suppressed for the moment, the detestable superstition broke out again, not only in Judea where the evil originated, but also in the city (Rome) to which everything horrible and shameful flows and where it grows.’ Suetonius writing 10 years later is equally critical saying that the emperor Claudius ‘expelled from Rome the Jews who were constantly rioting at the instigation of a certain Chrestus.’
Another view comes from the writings of Flavius Josephus a Jewish rabbi, scholar and military commander. Josephus wrote two major works ‘The Jewish War’ and ‘The Jewish Antiquities’ that give considerable insight into life in Palestine in the second half of the first century especially at the time of the Jewish revolt and the destruction of Jerusalem. However they have very few references to the events described in the gospels.
In fact there are three short sections of direct relevance in ‘The Jewish Antiquities’. One seems to describe the death of James, the brother of Jesus; another talks of the arrest, imprisonment and death of John the Baptist; and the one that is most directly about Jesus runs:
‘Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day. (Flavius Josephus: Antiquities of the Jews)
That may sound like music to Christian ears. However it is suspected that this section of the Antiquities, often known as the ‘Testimonium Flavium’ may be, at least in part, a later Christian interpolation from the third century. It certainly resembles closely, not so much a Jewish understanding of Jesus, as an early Christian confession of faith in him.
There are more critical Jewish reports about Jesus in the Babylonian Talmud such as the following: ‘On the eve of Passover they hanged Yeshu and the herald went before him forty days saying, “Yeshu is going forth to be stoned in that he hath practiced sorcery and beguiled and led astray Israel. Let everyone knowing ought in his defence come and plead for him,” But they found naught in his defence and hanged him on the eve of Passover.’
This leaves us with the four gospels (and some later apocryphal gospels) and in a moment I want to explore what we can learn about Jesus from the gospels.
But it is important to stress we don’t only know of Jesus from published historical evidence, we also learn about Jesus from the experience of faith and from the life of the church. Christians proclaim that Jesus was crucified, buried, was raised from the dead on the third day and by the power of the Spirit of God is still alive and at work amongst his people today. So, to know Jesus, we also have to take seriously the experience of the early church, and especially the writings of St Paul. The early church found Jesus to be still guiding their life and actions. We also have to respect and learn from the experience of those Christians called saints, who down the centuries have lived with an intense focus upon the person of Jesus and the kingdom of God, and who have displayed different aspects of his way to the culture of their time. In the later part of this talk I want to illustrate this more fully.
The gospels and their writing
What is a gospel? Gospel means simply the good news of God, and the good news that God’s reign has drawn near. Mark opens his gospel not with the story of Jesus’ birth but with John the Baptist preparing the way. Jesus is baptized by John and then in Chapter 1 v 14 we find this programmatic statement about his ministry ‘Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’
So the first thing to say about the gospels is that that they were not written as biographies of Jesus but as proclamations of the grace of God, of the immediacy of the good news. The four gospels are all different, written by different people, at different times, to different audiences and with different emphases. Yet there are parts that are similar within them. Most obviously there is a movement in all four towards Jerusalem, a growing opposition to Jesus by the priests and Pharisees, and stories of Jesus’ passion and death that also involve the Roman occupying authorities. In all four gospels there is the belief that this death was not the end.
And yet, if you look in detail you will find that the timings and the order of events differs even amongst the passion narratives, and if you look at the stories of the resurrection appearances you will see that in each gospel they are quite different. We are looking at Jesus through four different lenses.
The majority of scholars believe that Mark was the first of the gospels to be written down, probably between 65 and 75 AD, so some 30 – 40 years after the death of Jesus. Although Mark is the earliest gospel it is not the earliest work in the New Testament. This distinction goes to some of the letters of Paul that were probably written between 50 and 60 AD.
Matthew and Luke were written perhaps 15 - 20 years later between 80 and 90 AD. They both take material that is in Mark’s gospel and develop it – often expanding it – in different ways. Matthew and Luke also contain stories that arespecific to each of them, such as the Sermon on the Mount to Matthew and a number of parables and discourses in Luke between Chapter 9 v 51 and Chapter 18 v 14. There is very little that is common to both Matthew and Luke that is not included in Mark. Many scholars suggest the passages common to Matthew and Luke but not in Mark show a dependence on another source, or sources, a document that is undiscovered but is often called Q. Q stands for the German word Quelle that means source. Because of this common family of materials and because they seem to tell a story about Jesus these first three gospels are called the ‘Synoptic’ gospels. Synoptic literally means ‘seen together’ and the texts are often set out in parallel for comparison between the gospels.
The gospel of John reads as a different kind of book. It also has a passion narrative and stories about the resurrection. It has stories about Jesus but they often run into lengthy meditations about his person, his calling and the nature of his relationship with God the Father. The gospel begins with a theological prologue, the classic Christmas reading, an opening that is quite unlike any passage in the synoptic gospels. It has a quasi-philosophical tone and is written in more polished Greek than the other gospels. There is a lot of dispute amongst scholars both about its date of composition and about how far it draws on the other gospels, and especially upon Mark. The majority of scholars think that it was written by the end of the first century AD.
So if the gospels were written some 40 – 60 years after the death of Jesus we cannot expect them to have word perfect accounts of what Jesus said. What we can believe is that they contain stories that were connected to Jesus as understood by the early church, shaped by oral tradition and retold in different contexts. There are methods that scholars use to judge the likelihood of sayings having come from Jesus. Is it a difficult saying that has not been softened in the retelling? Can it not be explained in the context of Judaism or the life of the early church? Do several independent accounts bear witness to it? Is it coherent with other words thought to be from Jesus? These are rough criteria, and can only tell us, at most, what is earlier material in the tradition, not whether it came from the mouth of Jesus himself.
We are left with two possibilities. The first is looking at the understandings that the different gospel writers had of the life and teaching of Jesus, and secondly, from them, trying to sketch out what a recent writer has called an historical approximation of the life of Jesus.
Looking first at each gospel writer what are their particular emphases?
The four gospels
Mark’s gospel is about the good news of Jesus Christ. This good news is presented both as a narrative about Jesus and as a challenge to the hearers.Mark does this not by Jesus making big claims about himself, as we find in John’s gospel, but by Jesus challenging men and women to become disciples. Morna Hooker writes ‘his every action is characterized by authority; though he does not teach about himself, his teaching challenges men and women with a choice between believing him and rejecting him. In Jesus Mark’s readers are confronted by the kingdom of God in action, and they must decide for or against him.’ Mark’s gospel is dominated by the story of Jesus’ passion and scholars have wondered whether this was because the church he was writing for was facing persecution, or whether he emphasized suffering because like the Corinthian church, his audience was inclined to forget that salvation and the cross were intimately linked. Mark shows a concern for the Gentile world, but he is also rooted in Judaism, a Judaism that he was willing to reinterpret on issues like the Jewish food laws. He saw the events of Jesus’ life and death as the decisive moment of history when the heavens and earth were shaken. Chapter 13, the apocalyptic chapter, was perhaps written with the events of the destruction of Jerusalem fresh in mind. Mark portrays the disciples as slow to understand what Jesus is about.
Matthew’s gospel is more a document of and for the church. It is concerned with the problems and situation of the church as it gradually defined itself as separate from Judaism. Perrin says that ‘Like all the men of the middle period of new testament Christianity, Matthew wrestles with the problems of the delay of the parousia (the fullness of God in the messianic age) and the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. But he faces the latter problem in the context of a dialogue with the Judaism developed at Jamnia, which was facing the same problem’. Like the Pharisees he turns again to the Hebrew scriptures and seeks to interpret them in the present situation to show that God is still with his people. There are similarities between Matthew’s gospel and the developing Talmudic literature. Matthew wants to portray Jesus as a teacher, as we see above all in the sermon on the Mount. Matthew is also concerned for the mission of the church to all the gentile world. The gospel ends with the commission to make disciples of all nations. Whilst rooted in Judaism Matthew portrays the gospel as a call to take the Jewish revelation out into the Hellenistic world.
Luke’s gospel is linked to the Acts of the Apostles as two parts of one continuous story about God’s action to bring salvation to his people, and to the whole known world through the person of Jesus and the life of the early church. On the surface, at least, the gospel presents itself as an historicalaccount written for a particular person, Theophilus, about whom we know nothing but the name. Like Matthew,Luke is adjusting to the delay in the parousia and the continued life of the early church. Luke/ Acts can be read as an apologia for Jesus’ life and, in the Acts of the Apostles, as a triumphal account of the spread of that faith into the gentile world.
Luke’s gospel has particular interests that we will probably recognise. It underlines the activity of the Spirit both in the life of Jesus and in the early church; it speaks of repentance and forgiveness in the stories it tells of Jesus such as the prodigal son; it is interested in wealth and poverty; in lowliness and greatness; it offers a range of different titles for Jesus – prophet, the Christ, the Lord, Son of man, Son of God. The gospel of Luke contains some of the most moving stories about Jesus, the birth stories of the shepherds, the Good Samaritan, the resurrection appearance on the road to Emmaus and has shaped the church’s understanding of the liturgical year.
John, as I suggested earlier comes it seems from a different world. It is a more obviously carefully composed text that can be divided into five different sections. The prologue and testimony to Jesus in the first chapter; the signs of Jesus that go from Chapter 2 – 12; the farewell discourses addressed to the church from chapters 13 – 17; the passion narrative followed by the Resurrection in chapters 18 – 20; and the appearance of the risen Jesus in Galilee in Chapter 21. We find in the text action or dramatic scenes combined with long monologues or dialogues. We are asked to reflect upon the nature of Jesus’ power, and upon the revelation of God’s glory. John picks up universal themes of light and darkness, truth and falsehood, life and death, faith and unbelief and dwells upon them. The opponents throughout the gospel are the Jews, and John has been seen as one of most anti-semitic of the New Testament writings.There are persistent sacramental echoes in discourses about water and about the bread of life, as well as in the symbolism of the Jewish festivals. Jesus is the revelation of God the Father, and even in the passion appears to have control over, or detachment from, the events that are unfolding around him. Again the gospel comes from the interface between Jewish and Greek culture, perhaps from a Jewish community living in a Greek city such as Ephesus. No one knows for sure, at least at present.
We continue to read and study the stories of each gospel because it is by their difference and their nuances that they fill out the description of what it means to live in the way of faith, as a follower of Jesus. Our knowledge is incomplete and, as I suggested in my talk on the Bible, we are still learning as our experience of life meets the texts that we read.
However, sometimes it is good to step back and to look at the overall shape of Jesus’ ministry without pretending that we know the exact details of what happened or that there aren’t aspects of his life that we would like to know more about. So I want for a moment to suggest an outline of what Jesus was like, whilst recognising that my view is bound to be partial and incorrect. In this idea of an historical approximation I have borrowed hugely from a recent Spanish writer called Jose Pagola.
An approximation to a life
The first thing we can say is that we know nothing about his birth, persuasive as the nativity play versions of Jesus may seem to be. These are later constructions by Matthew and Luke to illustrate a variety of points about Jesus’ links to the Jewish tradition, about the divine nature of his birth, about his message being for the nations, and about the call to worship Jesus both in his infancy, and as an adult.
What we can say is that Jesus was born into the world of a Galilean village peasant community. Nazareth was a small hillside village that would have been poor, with people scratching a living from the fields. It was not even a town like Capernaum or Sepphoris where there was a variety of occupations and a greater spread of wealth. The villagers would have known the power of landlords and the tax system and would have seen the brutality of the Roman occupiers. They were at a distance from Jerusalem, if they visited the temple it would be a major event in their lives. But the world was changing, and although rural Galilee was a backwater, it was not far from a major trading route that brought goods to the ports on the Mediterranean. Greek and Roman civilisations, and the shifting powers to the East, were the backdrop to Jesus and the rise of the early church