The Jew Jesus Christ, the Nazarene
Kevin Charles Perkins: "The Nazarene"
SOURCE: Norman F. Cantor: The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews
(New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. - Copyright © 1994 by Norman F. Cantor)
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Not inappropriately, since the emergence of historical science in the early nineteenth century, no subject has received closer attention than the life of the Jew Jesus Christ (meaning the Messiah, the King), the Nazarene, and the origins of the Christian Church. Until the 1930s scholars believed that a historical account fo the life of Jesus could be written and tried to do so. From about 1935 to 1965 the skeptical view of the German new Testament schola Rudolf Bultmann was dominant. He said that the four Gospels ("good news") account of Jesus' life, almost the only existing sources, were midrash, a pastiche of Jewish legends applied to a holy man, and no verifiable circumstantial historical account could be constructed of the course of Jesus' life, although, as a devout Lutheran, Bultmann did not doubt the actual existence of Jesus.
The past quarter-century has seen a general move back to trying to write the life of Jesus, "the marginal Jew", as a recent liberal Catholic scholar, John Meier, called him.
Bultmann had a point. Jesus died in or around the year A.D. 30, at the age of thirty-three. The four Gospels of Mark, Luke, Matthew, and John appear to have been written between A.D. 70 and 100. They all almost certainly were written outside Palestine, in such places as Antioch, Alexandria, and rome. Luke makes elementary errors in Palestinian geography and likely never visited the country, although he ended up as a traveling companion and secretary to Saint Paul. Mark and Luke were very likely Gentiles, and John, writing round A.D. 100 in a discourse heavily conditioned by Neoplatonic philosophy, certainly was. Matthew probably was too, although because of his circumstantial familiarity with Jewish law, some critics think he may have been a Jewish Christian. That Matthew hates the Pharisees and the Jewish populace in general so vehemently can support either ethnic ascription of him.
These characteristics of the Christian Gospels are not strongly conducive to belief in their historicity. Nineteenth-century scholars tried to countervail this implausibility by claiming that the so-called synoptic Gospels - Mark, Luke, and Matthew - all drew from a more contemporary now vanished source, coded Q (for Quelle, "source" in German). This is mere speculation. More important is that we have here four accounts of Jesus' life written not only at least one generation removed from him and written in the Diaspora and probably by Gentiles, but written after two events that affected the later Christian view of Jesus were known: The Temple was destroyed and the miniscule Nazarene community was left as the only competitor with the Pharisees in the Jewish community; and the rabbis had not responded in any positive way to Jesus. They simply ignored claims that he was somehow the Messiah and regarded his followers as minim (heretics).
Contemporary Pharisaic disdain for the Christian sect accounts for the ferocity with which the Gospels, especially Matthew, the longest and most circumstantial life, turn upon the Pharisees and make them - and through them the whole Jewish community - responsible for Jesus' death: His "blood", says Matthew, is on their hands. Nearly all Christian writers today, even officially the Catholic Church since 1965, believe this accusation to be wrong. The Gospels' ascriptions of guilt for Jesus' death to the Pharisees are either due to a misunderstanding or are more likely libels concocted for later first-century purposes during Christian competition with the rabbinical successors of the Pharisees.
The Gospels were written in the last three decades of the first century, when rabbinical Judaism was the only competitor in the Jewish world against the ambitious new christian Church. It was evident at the time that the rabbis would make no concessions to the Christians or recognize the existence of Jesus as even a latter-day prophet. The authors of the Gospels took their revenge on the implacably hostile rabbis by portraying their Pharisaic predecessors in the time of Jesus as primarily responsible for his deaty. The Pharisees were held to be the primary Christ killers. The blood of the Lord was on their hands.
It is a common literary device to rewrite history and make your current opponents responsible for earlier alleged crimes. The consequences for Jewish history of this particular retroactive literary campaign, however, were not merely intellectual. The Gospels became the central texts in the Christian New Testament - their new Bible, with the authority of divine inspiration.
The Gospel picture of the Pharisees' responsibility for Jesus' death was taken up into Catholic teaching and was in itself responsible for the death and persecution of millions of Jews in the next two millennia. Repudiated by the reforming Vatican Council II in 1965 at the urging of liberal Catholic biblical scholars and theologians such as Father Hans Küng, it is no longer the official teaching of the Roman Church. But it still lingers in the Christian popular culture in places like Poland, the Ukraine, and the American Midwest and South. Would the authors of the Gospels have been appalled by the holocaust consequences of their literary device of Pharisees as villains? Probably not. They were very angry and hateful toward the implacable rabbis.
If any group of Jews was in part actually responsible for Jesus' death, it would be the Sadducees. They would have been most disturbed by his criticism of the Temple priests and they, not the Pharisees, controlled the Sanhedrin, the Jewish high court, which - or a subcommittee of which (the accounts are confused) - turned jesus over to the Roman authorities as a subversive. But as even Catholic scholars acknowledge today, crucifixion was a dreaded Roman punishment for enemies of the state, certainly not a Jewish punishment for blasphemy. If Jesus had been condemned by the Sanhedrin or members thereof, it could only have been for blasphemy, not subversion, which was a Roman crime, and the execution would have been by stoning, not crucifixion.
The Gospels go to dramatic lengths to blame the Jews and let the Romans off the hook - an obvious public relations ploy in the late first century A.D. when the Christian Church had been rejected by the Jewish community and had to seek its future exclusively among the Gentiles, and needed tolerance from the Roman authorities. The inept and cruel Roman governor Pontius Pilate (so condemned even by a contemporary, Philo of Alexandria) is whitewashed in the gospel story. he doesn't want to condemn and execute Jesus, they say. he mysteriously offers a Jewish crowd a choice unknown to Roman law. Theycan free either Jesus or another condemned prisoner, Barabbas, "a robber". The Jews say, "Give us Barabbas." Efforts have been made to give plausibility to this fanciful story by suggesting that Barabbas ws a member of the Zealot underground, sometimes called robbers in contemporary accounts.
If there is history rather than a series of romantic screenplays in the Gospels (everyone interested in the life of Jesus should see the film of Matthew's Gospel made by the Italian Communist director, Pier Pasolini - the only good film ever made about a Jewish religious leader), the substratum of truth comes down to this.
Jesus the Jew was born the son of a carpenter, Joseph, in Nazareth, a small hill town in Galilee (it is still there) about twenty miles west of Lake Kinneret, or the Sea of Galilee. His mother Miriam (Mary), of like humble stock, had several other children, including James, an elder brother. Jesus inherited his popular mission from a cousin, John the Baptist. John was an itinerant preacher and holy man affiliated with the Essenes and the Qumran community who specialized in the ancient Hebrew cleansing rite of immersion in water. He somehow annoyed King Herod, who executed him. jesus simply took up John's mission - it ran in the family - widened John's message, and did more faith healing. Jesus grew up a charismatic preacher and faith healer. he gained a handful of local disciples, especially from among the poor fishermen on Lake Kinneret.
The leader of this small group was the fisherman Simon Bar Yonah, whom Jesus later rewarded with the nickname (in Aramaic) Cephas (steadfast, "rock"; in Greek, "Peter"). If you go now to dine at one of the splendid resport hostels in Tiberias on Lake Kinneret, the menu will appropriately feature Saint Peter's fish, a kind of scrawny sea bass.
Jesus never separated himself from the Jewish community or rejected the Law. To the end of his life, he was an observant Jew. At times he may have criticized the priests as to formalistic and materialistic, but so did many other Jews. he saw himself giving the Law a deeper ethical content, making it more meaningful in the lives of ordinary people, not disavowing it in any way:
Do not suppose that I have come to abolish the Law and the Prophets: I did not come to abolish but to complete.... Anyone who keeps the Law and teaches other s so will stand high in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Jesus began to refer to himself as the Son of Man, an obscure term mentioned in the Book of Daniel, which may have come to signify the Messiah. jesus was an observant Jew but preached a radical eithic in which material wealth was held to threaten morality, in which the poor and wretched would inherit the earth. It was a kind of extreme backwater amplification of the voluntarist ethics taught in Jerusalem by the liberal Pharisaic school of Hillel. Many other such backwoods oddball preachers and faith healers wandered around in Judea. Jesus was far from singular.
The messianic motif began to affect Jesus under pressure from his disciples. He may have had conversations with his doting mother that led him to fancy she was descended from the line of David - given David's popularity and the king's sexual activity, such fancy was not uncommon among ordinary people.
Jesus' little mission reached a point of such local celebrity that he felt impelled to try it out in the big league of jerusalem and went there with his disciples for the Passover festival. He made two grave tactical errors. First, he entered the holy city in noisy, triumphal fashion and gained the attention of the authorities. Then he went to the outer courtyard of the Temple where moneychangers (necessary for the country people who had come to purchase sacrifices by the Temple priesthood) were located and made a disturbance and denounced them for materialism. This brought him to the further attention of the Roman authorities and generated complaints by the Sadducee priests. Under the pressure of a threatening situation, Jesus revealed himself to Peter as the "Christ, the Son of God", but told Peter to keep the news to himself.
Rumors spread that the Roman soldiers were looking for Jesus and that he had been targeted as a subversive. Either at the Passover Seder or at a prequel sitting one evening before Passover (the Gospel accounts vary), Jesus presided over a Passover meal. Afterward he said that he wexpected to be arrested soon and, holding up a cup of wine and a piece of matzoh, told his disciples to remember these as symbols of his blood and body.
He also said that his disciples would deny and betray him, which indeed they proceeded to do when he was arrested and brought before the governer, Pilate, who pressured the exhausted and frightened Jesus into admitting that he had called himself king of the Jews. He was forthwith crucified for treason by the Roman governor.
Jesus had always been on good terms with two despised elements of the population - tax collectors and prostitutes. Three days after his death some of the latter went to the place where his body was laid out (now allegedly in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre) and found that the body was gone. His disciples came out of hiding, professed that the savior and Messiah had been among them, and that Jesus had been divinely privileged by bodily resurrection as in the legend of the prophet Elijah. The Nazarenes formed a little community who met together and celebrated Jesus' memory in thanksgiving (Eucharist) and taught his ultraliberal Pharisaic ethic.
The fact is that Jesus was a sweet soul and not a political revolutionary. In the final days of his life, he must have come to personalize Deutero-Isaiah's description of the "suffering servant" and to begin to think it applied not so much to the people of Israel as a whole but to himself as an individual. He himself was the "lamb of God" who had by divine will to suffer and die so that mankind might somehow be cleansed. If he saw this only murkily, it immediately became a fixation with his followers after his passion. They applied the 118th Psalm to Jesus, and he became not just a branch of the Tree of Jesse (House of David) but some kind of metaphysical savior: "I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the Lord. The Lord has chastised me sorely but he has not given me over to death."
The rabbis received the Nazarene brotherhood's perception of the meaning of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus with silent contempt. But there is something very Pharisaic about Jesus, and not just his echoing of Hillel's golden rule. The existential pessimism, the noble fatalism, the unflinching conviction that the mighty goyim will fall down and the meek Jews be lifted up ("The first shall be the last"; "Blessed are they who are persecuted for righteousness' sake for theirs in the kingdom of heaven"; "A little child shall lead them") - this downside/upside conviction lies at the center of the rabbinical-shaped Jewish temperament, and it is there with Jesus on the Cross.
His response to Pilate was at the same time evasive and provocative, bringing on the terrible punishment of ignominious crucifixion. jesus radiated the masochistic temperament that lies at the heart of Pharisaic consciousness: "Lord, why hast Thou forsaken me?", Lamah sabachthani, the Job-like cry of Jewish martyrs at the hands of the pogromists through the centuries - this too was Jesus' cry on the Cross.
When Jesus told his audience that he was bringing not peace but a sword he was speaking metaphorically; he meant he was shaking things up culturally. Left alone, Jesus would have come down clearly on the side of pacifism. But he was not left alone; he was swept up in events in a politically charged atmosphere. he was compelled to make provocative statements and perform symbolic acts, and the result was a tragedy. Such is an interpretation derived from a hundred and fifty years of intense scholarship and debate.
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