The Figure of Jesus
Yeshua



SOURCE: Schalom Ben-Chorin (Jared S. Klein and Max Reinhart, transl. and ed.), Brother Jesus: The Nazarene through Jewish Eyes
(Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press; Translation copyright © 2001 by the University of Georgia Press)


The author of the Gospel of John concludes with a personal note that might well be appended to every new reexamination of the life of Jesus: "But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I supose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written" (21:25).

Since the time this statement was made, innumerable books about jesus of Nazareth have in fact been written in the attempt to reconcile the contradictions between the synoptic writers (Matthew, Mark, Luke) and John, beginning with the earliest gospel harmonies and continuing all the way down to the nineteenth-century reconstructions of a quasi-historical Jesus.

Christians of all denominations, but also Marxists and other opponents of Christianity, have offered their respective versions of Jesus. Only in the twentieth century, however, have Jewish scholars been able to bring their own focus to the figure of Jesus. The reason for this is obvious. So long as ecclesiastical authorities threatened to censure any representation that deviated from dogma, it was impossible for Jewish scholars to stake out a position for their own point of view.

In the nineteenth century, when liberal Protestantism freed theology from, on the one hand, the bonds of he Inquisition and, on the other, the bonds of protestant orthodoxy, the first tentative steps toward this Jewish contribution were made. The motivation of these jewish scholars was primarily apologetic in nature and concerned with demonstrating that the Jews were not guilty of killing Jesus. Such efforts continue into our own times. We think, for example, of Paul Winter's book On the Trial of Jesus (1961).

Whereas in the nineteenth century much energy and learning were applied to the discovery of the historical jesus, today few scholars re inclined to deal with this question any further. One of the leading experts on the life of Jesus, the New Testament scholar Ernst Käsemann, has remarked,
In writing a life of Jesus, we could not dispense with some account of his exterior and interior development. But we know nothing at all about the latter and next to nothing about the former, save only the way which led from Galilee to Jerusalem, from the preaching of the God who is near to us to the hatred of official Judaism and execution by the Romans. Only an uncontrolled imagination could have the self-confidence to weave out of these pitiful threads the fabric of a history in which cause and effect could be determined in detail.
Although Käsemann and ther disciples of Rudolf Bultmann are careful not to appear overly pessimistic in this regard, in fact they are interested not so much in the historical jesus as in the kerygma: the risen Lord proclaimed by the original Christian community. For Bultmann and his followers the sitz im leben, the cultural and historical context, is precisely the preaching, not the actual event; events are no longer considered to be reconstructible. These scholars base their premises on the undeniable fact that the gospels do not represent a historical report but attest only to the missionary purpose of the risen Lord, the savior of Israel and the world. In academic circles it is commonly held today that missionary documents of this type cannot yield a valid historical picture. The element of the picture are of course lacking, since it was not the intention of the New Testament authors to provide a historical report. The few sources we do have beyond the New Testament are, if anything, even less useful for historical evaluation.

The apocryphal gospels, for example, certainly have no historical value, even where they preserve a statement of Jesus here and there that has an authentic ring to it. The few passages in the Talmud and the Midrash that may refer to Jesus (these have been compiled by Joseph Klausner in his Jesus of Nazareth) are likewise of little historical value, since they grew out of the polemic with the early Christian community. For example, the following is one of the few citations from the Talmud in which Jesus is referred to by name:
Only then he ['Onkelos] went off and conjured up Jesus and asked him, "What is the most imortant thing in this world?" Jesus said to him, "Israel." 'Onkelos asked, "And if I join their ranks?" Jesus said, "Seek their well-being. Do not seek their harm. Whoever lays a hand on them does the same thing as if he were to lay a hand on the apple of [God's] eye." 'Onkelos asked Jesus, "And what is his punishment." Jesus said to him, "Boiling excrement." As a baraitha says, "Whoever mocks the words of the wise is punished with boiling excrement. - Come and see how different are Israel's mockers from the prophets of the nations of the world." [Babylonian Talmud, Gittin 57a]
As this example shows, many utterances made about jesus have not the slghtest historical worth. Some of these statements in the Talmud are apologetic. For example, it is said that forty days after the condemnation of Jesus a herald went before him and urged everyone to present something in his defense, but no such witness could be found [Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 43a]. In this we can perhaps hear an echo of Peter's denial; clearly, however, no useful historical evidence is transmitted even here, because no such process of exoneration is mentioned anywhere else in Jewish law.

Must we therefore resign ourselves to the thought that a life of Jesus can be created only from fantasy, as so many novelists, among them Jewish ones, have sought to do?

I emphatically reject this. "I hate, as something vile, any unrestrained fabilization; and any poetic license that lacks strict reasoning would seem to me inartistic and destructive nonsense. For what remarkable people these are! What seriousness of purpose they have! What eternal significance for human history we find here!" It was the great Jewish poet Franz Werfel who attached this confession to his drama Paulus unter den Juden (Paul among the Jews). Anything of a purely fantastic quality was entirely unacceptable to him.

Several books of the fantastic kind have been written since about the mid-1950s. One is by the French jew Robert Aron, Jesus of Nazareth: The Hidden Years, who creates ex nihilo the childhood and youth of Jesus. There is also the popular book by Joel Carmichael, The Death of Jesus, which makes Jesus of Nazareth into one of the leaders of the Jewish resistance forces - a thesis that had already been proposed decades earlier by the Viennese Jewish historian Robert Eisler. If Carmichael is still considered an original thinker, it is owing only to the public's forgetfulness. Pure fantasy as well is Robert Graves's book King Jesus, which makes jesus into the son of Herod. Such "theses" always cause a stir but do not serve to uncomvera genuinely historical picture of Jesus.

According to a saying of Jesus, all sins but that against the Holy Sprit may be forgiven (Matt. 12:31; Mark 3:29). Like many of his sayings, this one is susceptible to multiple interpetations. The simple and obvious sense of the word seems to me to be the right one here: namely, that any arbitrary reinterpretation of sacred tradition is a sin against the Spirit and cannot be forgiven.

For me, the New Testament is certainly not holy scripture in the canonical sense. Nevertheless, I agree with Rabbi Leo Baeck ("Gospel") that it is a document that belongs to the history of Jewish faith and preserves much of relevance to the salvation of Israel. Accordingly, I find it unjustifiable to alter the figure of Jesus in any arbitrary fashion, just as it seems wrong to me to make an Egyptian of Moses, as Sigmund Freud did in his late work Moses and Monotheism (1939).

What may perhaps be forgiven a genius like Freud, however, is unpardonable for many other authors who deal all too capriciously with biblical figures. This holds true as much for non-Jewish as for Jewish authors. One thinks, for instance, of Ethelbert Stauffer. Stauffer maintains that a sharp contrdiction existed between the (positive) teachings of Jesus and the (negative) teachings of the Torah and projects this Marcionite tendency against Judaism onto the figure of Jesus (Jesus and His Story, 75-78).

What middle ground can we discern, then, between an unverifiable historical position, on the one hand, and theological-literary fantasy on the other? Intuition.

Intuition and fantasy are not identical. Intuition, as I understand it, grows out of a lifelong familiarity with the text and allows it to be interpreted subjectively. Subjectively, to be sure, but not in an unbridled fashion.

Intuitive interpretation proceeds from a deep kindred empathy with jesus within the Jewish world in which he lived, taught, and suffered.

The loyal collaborator of Theodor Herzl in the early period of Zionism, Max Nordau, wrote in 1899 to Father Hyacinthus Loyson, "Jesus is the soul of our soul as he is the flesh of our flesh. Who should want, therefore, to exclude him from the Jewish people? St. peter remains the only Jew to say of this descendant of David , 'I do not know the man'" (Matt. 26:72).

It was Martin Buber who made the famous comment about his "brother Jesus" in his book Two Types of Faith:
From my youth onwards I have found in Jesus my great brother. That Christianity has regarded and does regard him as God and Savior has always appeared to me a fact of the highest importance which, for his sake and my own, I must endeavor to understand.... My own fraternally open relationship to him has grown ever stronger and clearer, and today I see hiim more strongly and clearly than ever before. I am more than ever certain that a great place belongs to him in Israel's history of faith and that this place cannot be described by any of the usual categories. (12-13)
Buber's confession defines my own position. Jesus is for me an eternal brother - not only my human brother but my Jewish brother. I sense his brotherly hand clasping mine and asking me to follow him. It is not the hand of the Messiah, this hand marked by a wound; it is certainly no divine hand. It is rather a human hand, in whose lines the deepest sorrow is inscribed.

That distinguishes me, the Jew, from the Christian, yet it is the same hand that stirs both of us. It is the hand of a great and faithful witness in Israel, His believe, his unconditional belief, his simple trust in God the Father, his willingness to humble himself completely before the will of God - that is the attitude of which jesus is the supreme example, the attitude that can join us, Jew and Christian, together. The belief of Jesus unifies us, but the belief in Jesus divides us.

The belief of Jesus as expressed in his Sermon on the Mount, in his parables of the fatherhood of God and his kingdom, and in the prayer that Jesus teaches his disciples, the Our Father, unifies us.

The belief in Jesus as the Messiah, as the second person of a trinity nowhere attested in the New Testament, as the sole Just One who takes upon himself the vicarious suffering for sins, necessarily distinguishes us, divides us. This is entirely foreign to the Jewish insight into Jesus that we wish to describe here. Today there are important streams in modern evangelical theology whose views more and more approximate the view of Jesus presented here. One thinks, for example, of the New Testament scholar Herbert Braun who, in his book Jesus of Nazareth: The Man and His Time, defines Christian discipleship as the attempt to believe with Jesus and as Jesus, not primarily in Jesus. After centuries of a Christology that has sacrificed the human side of Jesus more and more to his divine nature, attempts are being made today to see the person Jesus, the human being Jesus. Nevertheless, the prevailing tendency is still to view Jesus as the mediator, divested of his bodily nature. For example, in her book Christ the Representative: An Essay in Theology after the Death of God, Dorothee Sölle maintains that today belief is possible only representatively through Jesus. But this is not a realistic view of the Jew Jesus - not merely a Jew but the quintessential Jew, to whom representational faith was entirely alien.

The Jewish person's relationship to Jesus must be essentialy different from that of the Christian - though Jesus comes to Jews with an immediacy, to be sure, only after we have rediscovered the true features of the Jewish man from Nazareth under the painted overlay of Christian iconology. Layer after layer must be removed in order to penetrate to the original countenance of Jesus. but this countenance and this form do not stand in an empty space; they must be examined within the context of the Palestinian Judaism contemporary to him. any other viewpoint fails to see the true nature of Jesus.

My own path in life has led me closer and closer to Jesus, though only as a result of personally undertaking to recover Jesus' picture from the Christian overpainting. My path to the land of Jeus, the land of Israel, and to the city of his passion, the city of Jerusalem - where I have lived since the mid-1930s - led me out of Catholic Bavaria. There I had encountered the Crucified one in churches and chapels, on little field crosses and in the Holy Savior nooks of farmhouses - an image that impressed itself painfully on me as Jewish child. I have always found so much in this land of Israel, in this city of Jerusalem, and so much in Judaism, even in our own day, that lent to the reports of the Gospel a burning actuality that is always within me. Jesus is certainly a central figure of the Jewish past and the history of Jewish faith. But he is simultaneously a piece of our present and our future, no different from the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, who have for us more than merely historical relevance.

This view furthermore binds me to the many Christians for whom Jesus is the "One who has come", the Christians for whom Jesus is both the centerpiece of their live and, ultimately, the Coming one. The New Testament closes with the words of the Maran'atha (The Lord has come): "Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!" (Rev. 22:20). This Coming One interpreted messianically, however, is for me, a Jew, not what Jesus is. I also believe, moreover, that Jesus did not think of himself as the Messiah, even if here and there the presentiment of a messianic calling, as an unresolved question of his own existence, may have broken through.

The intimacy with which we wish to examine the figure of Jesus allows the messiahship of Jesus to remain a valid question. It is not my intention here, however, to address the apotheosis of Jesus. Rather, I share the sentiment expressed by Goethe in his late poetic cycle Westöstlicher Divan:
Jesus fühlte rein und dachte
Nur den Einene Gott im Stillen;
Wer ihn selbst zum Gotte machte
Kränckte seinen hieligen Willen.

[Jesus felt purely and thought
in his silence only on the one God;
whoever would turn Jesus himself into God
would distort his holy will.]
The question of the divinity of jesus cannot exist for the historican or for the Jew. Even the question of the messiaship of Jesus must be bracketed here, since it exists apart from historical knowledge and Jewish belief.

The messianic self-understanding of Jesus is quite another matter, however. Käsemann, in addressing the issue of whether Jesus considered himself to be the Messiah, says, "I personally am convinced that there can be no possible grounds for answering this question affirmatively. I consider all passages in which any kind of Messianic prediction occurs to be kerygma shaped by the community" (Essays, 43). I have nothing to add to this, because I too can find no evidence that Jesus proclaimed himself the Messiah. it is true that a messianic secret exists in Jesus, which suggests that he occasionally became conscious of some messianic mission; but he forbids his disciples to publicize proclamations of this kind (Luke 9:21), as he is probably waiting for the hour when his true being is revealed to himself, his disciples, and the world.

Jesus can, therefore, not be taken as the Messiah, even if messianic features in the image of Jesus are clearly transmitted to us. They are products of kerygmatic revisions of a later hand.

Since the nineteenth century a liberal theology, in Judaism as well as Christianity, has readily designated Jesus as a prophet. But this definition strikes me as untenable. jesus was no prophet, no navi', in the Old Testament sense of the word. What characterizes the navi' is his office as proclaimer. The navi' proclaims the utterance of Yahweh; he becomes the mouth of the deity. The character of the navi' is most clearly reflected in the story of the heathen seer Balaam, who can say only what God has placed in his mouth and who therefore must bless Israel, despite his intention of cursing the people (Num. 22-24).

The prophetic oration begins usually with formulas such as "Thus saith the Lord" or "Hear the Word of the Lord", or as charge to the prophets such as "Speak to the children of Israel", or as a self-expression such as "And the world of the Lord came to me and said...".

Introductory formulas of this sort are foreign to the speeches of Jesus. He speaks upon personal authority, without conveying the dicta of God.

The nature of the prophet encompasses the quality of the seer, documented in visions of a particular type, such as that of Isaiah (6:1), who sees the Lord sitting on high in the temple, or of Jeremiah (1:11), to whom God speaks from the blooming almond branch (here one might recognize a parallel in Jesus' parable of the fig tree), or in that of the entroned wagon of the prophed of the Exile, Ezekial (1). Visions of this kind are missing in Jesus.

Revivals of the dead are found in the oldest prophets, Elisha (2 Kings 4:8-37) and Elijah (1 Kings 17:17-24), as well as in Jesus; the Evangelists, however, emphasize a clearly qualitative difference. Whereas the old prophets pryed when they raised someone from the dead, Jesus simply commands Lazarus to come forth from the grave (John 11:1-44), or the daughter of Jairus to stand up and walk (Luke 8:40-56).

Prophetic traits in the Old Testament sense are lacking in Jesus. jesus appears rather to act in the manner of the contemporary teachers of the law, the Tannaim. The tannaitic element is documented in the fact that Jesus, like the contemporary experts in scriptural law, teaches in two ways typical of the period: through interpretation of given canonical texts, and through parables (meshalim).

It is true that he taught "powerfully" and interpreted publicly with the opening formula "But I say to you" give his exegesis its particular impact and nuance. And yet I find it misleading to insist that a rupture exists here with the tradition of Judaism, as Christian theologians up to the present day have done in the obvious attempt to isolate the figure of Jesus in order to arrive at the concept of the "exalted Lord".

Pharisaic Judaism at the time of Jesus was typified by the two great schools of Hillel and Shammai. The corpus of the Halakha, that body of religious law born from the interpretation of the Old Testament, especially of the commandments in the Pentateuch, acquired its definitive form in these two schools. The school of Hillel favored a milder, less stringent interpretation, which therefore found greater favor by virtue of its greater practicality; the school of Shammai took the path of stricter interpretation. Nevertheless, the decisions of both schools were considered to have the validity of "words of the living God".

I do not hesistate to declare that I see in Jesus of Nazareth a third authority, whose views are to be placed alongside with those of Hillel and Shammai. It is not easy, however, to define Jesus' interpretation of the law. Jesus interpets the law at times mildly, like Hillel, and at other times harshly, like Shammai. And yet I believe that we can recognize in Jesus' interpretation a clear tendency toward the internalization of the law, whereby love constitutes the decisive and motivating element.

In the school of Hillel in particular, to which we owe the Golden Rule, likewise found in the New Testament (Matt. 7:12), brotherly love is central. The Haggada, the body of talmudic legend, tells of a heathen man who wished to be introduced to Judaism within the period of time in which a person could stand on one foot. The furious Shammai chased the questioner out of the house, whereas the patient Hillel explained to him the law of brotherly love, noting that all else was only commentary and that he could now proceed to learn (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbath 31a).

This reply could very well come from jesus, yet he expresses the commandment of love more radically than does Hillel. Indeed, the radical quality of this love often turns into a radical hatred, particularly self-hatred. The statement in John 12:25, "Those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life," appears to me typical only of Jesus' manner of teaching.

We know nothing about any teacher of Jesus, unlike Paul, for example, whose teacher was said to be Rabbi Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). It was probably the intention of the authors of the New Testament to represent Jesus as the Inspired One, who stood in need of no earthly teacher. On the other hand, it is probable that Jesus was not a talmid chakham, "scholarly student", but knew only the Hebrew Bible and interpreted it in his own way.

There is, however, a talmudic tradition according to which Yehoshua' Ben-Perachia is presented as the teacher of Jesus (Babylonian Talmud, Sota 47a). The historical reliability of the reference in the Talmud - as well as in a baraitha - to this alleged teacher was never given serious credence by historians. But as related statement exists that on reflection has the force of credibility: namely, in a baraitha that reads "Let the left hand push away, the right hand draw near; not as Elisha, who pushed aside Gechazi with both hands, and not as Yehoshua' Ben-Perachia, who pushed aside Jesus the Nazarene with both hands" (cf. Klausner, Jesus, 24-26).

This may be echosed in Matthew 6:3: "Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing." Might this relate to an answer that Jesus made to his teacher Yehoshua' Ben-Perachia? Further passages in the Talmud (e.g., Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 107b) indicate that Jesus, together with his teacher, fled to Egypt, which may be connected to the flight into Egypt recorded in Matthew 2:13-15. Yet the talmudic source places the flight of Jesus and his teacher in the time of King Alexander Jannaeus, who reigned from 103 to 76 B.C.E. here, obviously, Alexander Jannaeus and Herod are reversed. The bases of the supposed controversy between Jesus and his teacher are very unclear in the versions of this legend that have been handed down to us. One of the later versions suggests that it was because Jesus subscribed to magic (an negative interpretation of the miracles of Jesus) that his teacher had a falling-out with him.

The evidence is so unreliable, however, that we must admit to knowing nothing about the teachers and education of Jesus.

Given this predicament, the question arises whether Jesus may have belonged to one of the currents, groups, or parties of his time. Although these groupings undeniably possess political character as well, they must be defined primarily in terms of their origin and, especially, as schools in the broader sense.

They were divided into two major feuding parties: the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The Pharisees were the party of those learned in the scriptural law. In the New Testament the designations "Pharisees" and "scribes" are used interchangeably to designate the same group. Historically, the Pharisees, a group characterized by quasi-democratic principles, were responsible for the institution of the synagogue, which represented a democratic expression of the ritual at once opposed to and complementing the temple cult; the latter had a sacramental character and was administered by two casts, the priests (kohanim) and the Levites.

The Pharisees themselves created the type of the talmid chakham and traced their intellectual lineage back to Ezra, the leading force in the reconstruction of Judaism following the return from the Babylonian Exile. In the New Testament the Pharisees appear in a distorted light because of their conflict with Jesus and his disciples. The later polemics between the original Christian community and the synagogue are likewise reflected in this controversy.

The situation in which the authors of the New Testament wrote did not allow an objective representation of the Pharisees, which explains their "bad press". In fact, the many positive traits of the Pharisees were suppressed in the New Testament in a polemical fashion. The Pharisees strove to sanctify all aspects of life, which in law and custom was to be subordinated to the revealed will of God. Nothing lay outside this sanctifying sphere: eating and drinking, work and rest, sexuality and hygeiene, clothing and hairstyle. Nothing was considered too trivial to be integrated with the service of God in the most profound reverence. Thus the Pharisees, whose high ethical conceptions are preserved in the collection of wisdom known as the Pirkei-'Avoth (Sayings of the Fathers), became the intellectual fathers of later Jewish orthodoxy. The Pharisees of the New Testament are mirrored in the reality and problems of modern Jewish orthodoxy. Deep seriousness, unconditional devotion to the law of God, minute attention to one's duty with regard to this law - these traits mark the descendants of the Pharisees even today. But we also witness in them the dangers of the degeneration of which the New Testament speaks almost exclusively. This degeneration is the result of being wrapped in an armor of 613 commandments and prohibitions and thereby losing the freedom necessary for the stirrings of living faith. The world of the Pharisees, like the world of contemporary Jewish orthodoxy, is a closed system, seamlessly knit together by a relentlessly consistent logic.

Faith, however, represents a kind of daring that must be retained in the freedom of love beyond all assurances. It is here, probably, that the antagonism arose between Jesus and the Pharisees. Even within the pharisaic school we find a tendency towards unconditional faith, expressed in the beautiful injunction "Be not as servants who serve for reward, but as those who serve out of love" (Pirkei-'Avoth 1.3). That point is emphatically made in a Haggada concerning the heretic 'Elisha' Ben-'Avuya, whom the problem of theodicy turned into one who denied heavenly justice. A heavenly voice says to him, "All creatures are forgiven except for 'Elisha' Ben-'Avuya." Thereupon Rabbi 'Akiva answers, "Blessed art thou, Ben-'Avuya. All creatures serve for reward: you, however, can now serve out of love."

If in light of the New Testament one faults the Pharisees' insistence upon punctilious adherence to justification by works, we should recall the words of Rabbi 'Akiva, preserved for us in the Babylonian Talmud (Kiddushin 40b): "So Rabbi Tarfon and the elders were gathered in the upper room of the house of Nitheza in Lod, and the question was raised, 'What is more important: doctrine or deed?' Rabbi 'Akiva answered, 'Doctrine.' Then all agreed unanimously that doctrine is superior because doctrine leads to deed."

Doctrine here means Torah. Viewed in this way, the religion of the deed, which is a hallmark of the Pharisee, may be properly understood.

The Pharisees were not beyond self-criticism. The Jerusalem Talmud (JT) says the following in Berakhoth 9.5:
There are seven kinds of Pharisees (perushim)...the shoulder Pharisee carries his good deeds on his shoulder [i.e., openly, before the whole world]; the gleaning Pharisee says, "Wait for me. I must fulfill the commandments [and have no time for you}; the balancing Pharisee pays off each debt [i.e., sin] by performing a commandment; the frugal Pharisee says, "From the little I have, what can I set aside for performing commandments?"]; the debtor Pharisee says, "Tell me what sin I have commited, and I will perform a commandment to offset it; the fearing Pharisee is like Job; the loving Pharisee is like Abraham.
The five negative types of Pharisees are clearly depicted in the New Testament, whereas the two positive types, those in the tradition of Job and Abraham, are visible hardly anywhere in the Gospels.

The most dangerous type of Pharisee, however - and it is on him that the light of the Gospels falls - is the "colored" Pharisee: that is, the hypocrite. We are warned of this type in the Babylonian Talmud (Sota 22b): "Fear neigher the Pharisees nor those who are not Pharisees but only the colored ones who seem like Pharisees, who do the works of Zimri and demand the reward of Phinehas." This passage alludes to Numbers 25:6-15, which narrates the incident surrounding the Israelite Zimri, who is involved in an unseemly relationship with the Midianite Cozbi and for that is killed by the zealot Phinehas. This criticism of the colored ones implies that they are hyprocritical moralists. They are outwardly zealous, but internally they lead unbridled lives.

Among the Pharisees themselves there is much vocal criticism, hardly outdone even by that of the Gospels. for example, Rabbi Yehoshua' says (Mishna, Sota 3.4), "The foolishly pious, the cunningly wicked, the pharisaical woman, and the fleshly mortifications of the Pharisees are ruining the world." A Pharisee himself says this!

In this light, it is probably not wrong to reckon Jesus among the Pharisees, albeith as part of an internal opposition movement within this largest Judaic group of his day. jesus imself talks like a pharisaic rabbi, although from a greater position of authority; his extraordinarily forceful manner of speaking is, however, most likely a product of the kerygmatic tradition. nevertheless, the authority with which the Pharisees themselves spoke should not be underestimated. They must be distinguished from their opponents, the Sadducees, who held firmly only to the written Torah, the Pentateuch, as well as to some later parts of the Old Testament. the Pharisees' consciousness of their own authority is exemplified by a legend that tells how the experts in scriptural law decided against a heavenly voice, justifying their decision upon Deuteronomy 30:12: "It [the Torah] is not in heaven." Thereupon a heavenly voice declares, "My children have defeated me."

One can reject this attitude of the Pharisees as theological bluster; one can also recognize in it, however, the "freedom of the glory of the children of God" proclaimed in the New Testament (Rom. 8:21). In any event, it is clear that the epxerts in scriptural law among the Pharisees themselves taught with an authority based on the belief that they, conscious of their succession from Moses, were the fully empowered bearers of revelation.

Jesus stands at an even greater distances from the Sadducees, also called "the high priests" in the New Testament - a false classification, since there was at any given time only one officiating high priest (kohen gadol, lit. "the great priest"). "The high priest" is probably meant to signify the party of the one high priest, his dynasty, and his intimate clique. He represented the leading stratum of the Sadducees, whose name tsedukim derives from that of the ruling dynasty of the house of Tsadok. In the New Testament as in the Talmud we can discern a major distinction between the Pharisees and the Sadducees: the Sadducees deny the resurrection of the dead (Acts 23:6-10). That explains their narrow focus on only the written Torah, the five books of Moses, which indeed never speak of the resurrection of the dead. This conception is documented much later, probably during or afer the Exile, and only very sparsely in the Old Testament (Isa. 25:8, 26:19; Ps. 49:15; Dan. 12:2). Even that most famous resurrection passage in Ezekiel 37 refers to the national resurrection of Israel, not to the individual resurrection of the dead.

The Sadducees laid greatest stress on the proper temple service and thus denied the laical element accentuated by the Pharisees. Socially, the Sadducees formed the aristocratic upper crust; Jesus, therefore, who stemmed from very humble origins, stood also in social opposition to them. The reason we know so much less about the Sadducees than about the Pharisees is that the Jewish traditional literature passed through pharisaic redaction. The Sadducees thus appear only in the reflection of their opponents, which is certainly distorted. Not until the beginning of the twentieth century, when Solomon Schechter discovered the so-called Damascus document in the Cairo Geniza (synagogue archives), did a text attributable to the Sadducees become available. Further, a portion of the papyrus rolls from Qumran may be ascribed to the tradition of the Sadducees. jesus has absolutely nothing in common with the Sadducees. He silences them much more easily (Matt. 22:34) than he does the Pharisees, who stand closer to him.

Concerning the Essenes, we formerly knew even less than we do about the Sadducees. But the papyrus rolls of Qumran, if they are ascribable to the Essene sect, help to clarify the picture of this monastic community at the time of Jesus. In the nineteenth century the tendency was to count Jesus among the Essenes, but that now appears to be incorrect, given that he did not share their abstinence and in no way rejected the enjoyment of wine.

There were obviously groups related to the Esenes, such as the 'Evionim (the poor) and the 'Anavim (the wretched), with whom Jesus felt an affinity, as we see particularly in his conversation with the rich young man and in the sharp paradox, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God" (mark 10:23). The blessing of the poor in the Sermon on the Mount belongs here as well, as we shall see. To what degree the chasidim (Hasideans), the particularly God-fearing group, and now also the Qumranians are to be considered as actual parties cannot yet be determined. they may simply have amounted to currents or splinter groups within larger groupings.

On the other hand, the Zealots, or Sicarians (the word derives from the short daggers [Latin sica] that they carried), constitute a well-defined group of political and messianic activitsts who "pressed for the end of time". They prepared themselves for armed resistance against Rome, and there may very well have been, in the circle of Jesus' disciples, representatives of this Jewish underground movement, especially the dark disciple Judas, who wanted to turn Jesus into the messianic claimant. As far as I can see, there is only one documented saying of Jesus that might associate him with these activists: "But now, the one who has a puse must take it, and likewise a bag. And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one" (Luke 22:36). Only two verses later (v. 38), however, this statement is considerably weakened: "They said, 'Lord, look, here are two sords.' He replied, 'It is enough.'"

We recall, on the other hand, Jesus' warning to Peter that whoever takes up the sword is killed by the sword (Matt. 26:52) - a saying that stnds in line with Hillel, who emphasized that the assassin is assassinated and every violent act repaid by a violent act. If Jesus was satisfied with the presence of only two swords, it is hard to understand why authors such as robert Eisler and Joel Carmichael have sought to redefined Jesus as belonging to the class of Zealot activists. It is true that no polemic against the Zealots is found in the New Testment, but neither is a polemic found against their rivals, the mild Essenes.

We may conclude that Jesus cannot be reckoned entirely to have belonged to any single group known to us, although it is to the Pharisees - as peculiar as that may sound - that he has the closest links.

Jesus must simply walk the path prescribed for him alone, and he calls out of his solitude to those who would follow him. I cannot agree with Käsemann that there is no discernible development in Jesus (Essays, 35). Albert Schweitzer long ago recognized an internal development in Jesus' personality occurring within the breif period of work between his thirtieth and thirty-third year of life.

I myself recognize three stages of development, or tragic disappointment, in the life of Jesus: eschatology, introversion, and passion. And thus, in the Jewish historical view, Jesus ends up a tragic failure. That does not, however, belittle his greatness, not even in terms of Jewish historical understanding. Rabbi 'Akiva himself, who considered Bar-Kokheva the Messiah, proved to be tragically wrong and ended up a martyr for his faith. Nevertheless, his tragic mistake did not rob him of any of his greatness within the Jewish folk consciousness. Quite to the contrary, the Jewish tradition explains this kind of error with the saying, "Out of love for Israel, God sometimes blinds the eyes of the wise."

Jesus of Nazareth was also such a tragic erring one whose eyes were blinded out of love for Israel.

The Jesus revealed to us in both exegesis and intuition (these do not exclude but condition each other) is a historical figure, even if not all details of his life can be historically validated. But for what personality who lived two thousand years ago could it be otherwise? The school that once insisted upon the unhistoricity of Jesus and sought to describe him in terms of an astral myth or the like may be assigned now to the definitive past. Rousseau already noted in the famous digression "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar" from his novel Emile that if the Gospels had been fabricated, their contrivers would have been greater than Jesus himself. In his book The Son of Mana man - notwithstanding the aura of apotheosis surrounding him.

German historians and theologians of the nineteenth century often fell under the suggestive power of a famous passage in Friedrich Schiller's "An die Freude (To Friends)":
Alles widerholt sich nur im Leben,
Ewig jung ist nur die Phantasie,
Was sich nie und nirgends hat begeben,
Das allein veraltet nie!

[Everything returns only in life,
only fantasy is forever young;
what never and nowhere existed,
that alone never grows old!]
But the fact that the happy and tragic mission of the life of Jesus has not grown old after two thousand years must not lead to the assumption that it is "only fantasy". Of these four lines of Schiller, the first is especially important: "Alles wiederholt sich nur im Leben." Prefigured in the life of Jesus was much that has been repeated in the lives of his followers. Fantasy and belief have extracted much from his life, transporting it from the sphere of secular history into the higher sphere of salvation history. But the sitz im leben, the real context of these episoldes in the historical report of Jesus, is unmistakable to Jewish eyes.

Jesus of Nazareth lived. He continues to live, not only in the church that rests on him - or, more precisely, in the many churches and denominations that claim him - but also in his Jewish people, whose martyrdom he embodies. Is not the suffering of Jesus, the Jesus scorned as he hangs dying on the cross, a likeness for his entire people who, tortured and bloodied, have been hanged time and again on the cross of anti-Semitism? And is the Easter message of the resurrection not a parable for postwar Israel, which has risen out of the abasement and disgrace of the darkest twelve years in its history to a new incarnation?



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