Since indeed many people have tried to draw up an account of the things fulfilled in our midst as transmitted to us by those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning and became servants of the word, I thought that I also, having followed it all from the first, would write it down for you correctly. - Luke 1:1-3
SOURCE: Peter Occhiogrosso, The Joy of Sects
(New York: Image, Doubleday; Copyright © 1994 Peter Occhiogrosso, Jon Winokur, and Reid Boates)
The opening of the Gospel according to Luke lays out two of the major problems confronting anyone who wants to approach the teachings of Jesus directly through scripture rather than through the filters of Christian theology. For openers, Luke tells us that "many people" have written their accounts of the Jesus teachings. Yet not one of them contains all the relevant information - as evidenced by the fact that four separate Gospel accounts are included in the New Testament, selected from the "many" that were circulating among Christians in Luke's day. And more to the point, the accounts were based on data "transmitted...by those who were eyewitnesses," meaning that we are dealing with thirdhand information at best. The idea that the Gospel accounts were themselves written by eyewitnesses was disproven authoritatively by 19th-century biblical scholars. So what's a poor Bible reader to do?
The first move might be to examine the current state of a branch of biblical scholarship that endeavors to find out precisely which of the sayings and deeds attributed to Jesus in the Gospels he actually said or did. This search for the historical Jesus has challenged some of Christianity's most cherished traditions. Yet the challengers, for the most part, have not been atheists eager to disprove Christ's existence but active Christian believers including clergy, theologians, and highly respected biblical scholars. The welter of new speculations about the historical Jesus is enough to confuse anyone raised on traditional Christian teachings and may give the interested non-Christian pause over whom to believe.
Within the past three decades, Jesus has been cast by various scholars as everything from a social revolutionary, magician, or Essene ascetic to an apocalyptic prophet or a disciple of Rabbi Hillel. Some of the theorizing may seem farfetched, but based on the evidence presented, the underlying argument - that much of the language of the Gospels is the creative invention of their authors and assorted intrusive scribes rather than the actual words and deeds of Jesus - is often difficult to dispute. The early Christian church that took shape after the death of Jesus developed theological agendas of its own that at times went contrary to or were not supported by the existing Gospel texts, so words and deeds were inserted or deleted to fit those agendas. The changes often created other problems of continuity or contradiction, either between different authors writing without knowledge of each other or in the same author trying to juggle too many nonhistorical assertions.
Biblical scholars start with the contradictions and improbabilities and work backward to deduce what the original sources, now missing, may have said concerning Jesus. Their deductions have led them to question the beloved Christmas stories (which appear in only two of the four Gospels, in contradictory accounts) and much of the passion drama, and in the process to cast doubt on some of the time-honored traditions of Christianity. Most historical Jesus scholars insist that their work does not contradict basic Christian believe but only clarifies certain elements of that belief. Even in the midst of the wide-ranging disagreement over the Gospel narratives, most Christians continue to accept the divine nature of Jesus and the ultimate truth of the Gospels. But in order to understand the radical nature of the new scholarship, we should know the story of Jesus as it is presented in the four Gospels, which make up just under half of the New Testament on which the Christian tradition is based.
The modern name Jesus is derived from the Greek version (Iesous) of the Aramaic name Yeshua or Yeshu, shortened forms of the Hebrew Yehoshua (Joshua). The name was then so common that the appellations Jesus of Nazareth and later Jesus the Christ - from the Greek Christos ("Anointed One") - were necessary to distinguish him from other 1st-century Jesuses. However, nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus refer to himself as the Christ.
After Jesus is born in Bethlehem, almost nothing is heard of him until he is baptized in the river Jordan by John the Baptist some 30 years later. (Speculation is rife about where Jesus may have gone and what teachings other than traditional Judaism he may have studied during this unrecorded period in his life.) Little is known about John except that he came from a sect of Morning Bathers or Baptists, one of several Jewish communities that offered baptism as a form of forgiveness for sins prior to an expected end to historic time. "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand," he preached. John's apocalypticism and his focus on purification by water may reflect an Essene past. He was later executed by Herod Antipas. On being baptized by John, Jesus sees "the Spirit descending on him like a dove" and hears a heavenly voice proclaiming, "This is my beloved Son."
Immediately after this experience, Jesus goes alone into the desert for 40 days, where he fasts and is "tempted by the devil." The cumulative effect of his spiritual experience in the Jordan River and his time meditating in the wilderness propels him back into Galilee to begin his ministry. Calling four local fishermen (among the lowest occupations of the day), he goes to the town of Capernaum by the Sea of Galilee, where he starts healing and teaching. Two things immediately set him apart from other teachers in the minds of the people there. He teaches "as one who [has] authority, and not as the scribes" (i.e., speaking from his own spiritual experience, not merely interpreting canon law), and he heals people of maladies ranging from demonic possession to blindness and paralysis.
Jesus' authoritative teachings and healings make him the talk of Palestine, and he is mobbed by poor, afflicted peasants seeking cures. At the same time, he begins to attract the attentions of the authorities, including the Jewish scribes, or canon lawyers, who find his inner-centered spirituality threatening to the outward power of their rituals and religious hierarchy. They accuse him of consorting with "tax collectors and sinners." Tax collectors, Jews who collaborated with the Romans and paid a fee for the right to extort as much tax money as they could from fellow Jews, were viewed as vile traitors by their Jewish contemporaries. For Jesus to teach and eat with them, along with women, especially prostitutes, was a sign of how radical and potentially dangerous to the Jewish establishment his ministry was. To the Romans, who held the ultimate power as the occupying force in the region, he presented the more immediate threat of fomenting rebellion among the peasantry, a common occurrence in that day.
Jesus takes on more followers, 12 men and a number of "women who had been healed of demons and infirmities." The most prominent of these is Mary Magdalene, "from whom seven demons had gone out." Jesus teaches in parables, metaphorical stories couched in immediate terms familiar to the rural peasants, farmers, and artisans who make up much of his following, sometimes explaining their meaning in private to his disciples. These common folk, known as am ha'aretz ("people of the land") have been referred to by one scholar as "a kingdom of nobodies" and by another as "outcasts and sinners for whom the law was too much." Their eager response to Jesus may have given the religious establishment concern that he was leading away their flocks.
Jesus' teaching in the Gospels draws heavily on existing Judaic precepts, although his emphases are unique. Concern for one's neighbor, or fellow human being, was already an essential aspect of Judaism, extending even to strangers. "Leviticus 19:34 has it, "The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the Land of Egypt." But Jesus stretches the definition further, telling one of his most famous parables about a Samaritan - one of a mixed race living between Galilee and Judea who were especially loathed by the Jews after some Samaritans had desecrated the Temple early in the life of Jesus. The Good Samaritan helps a stranger who has been robbed, beaten, and left for dead, after a priest and a Levite (a member of a dynastic priestly family) each avoided the bloodied stranger rather than risk becoming ritually unclean.
Forgiveness also plays a large part in the teachings - not forgiveness of sins by God so much as forgiveness of oneself and others. When the disciple Peter asks if he should forgive his brother for sinning against him, "as many as seven times," Jesus answers, "Not seven times, but seventy times seven" (Matt. 18:21-22). He also advises that if you are about to make an offering in the Temple, "and you remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift on the floor and go; first make up with your brother, then go make your offering" (Matt. 5:23-24).
Jesus often speaks about the Kingdom of God, a phrase that appears to indicate a state of inner being rather than either a heavenly afterlife or earthly freedom from Roman rule. He likens the kingdom to a mustard seed, "which is smaller than any other seed; but when it is sown, it grows up and becomes the largest of shrubs," and to a merchant looking for pearls who has found a "pearl of great price, and he went and sold everything he had and bought it." The last image seems obvious, yet it leaves the listener wondering what the merchant is supposed to do with his expensive pearl. If he keeps it, he's out of business. In this sense, the Kingdom of God transcends rationality.
Similarly, Jesus says that "unless you return and become like children, you cannot enter the kingdom of God" (Matt. 18:3), implying a simplicity and spontaneity at odds with the blind following of religious ritual or, for that matter, devotion to worldly possessions.
It is clear from the questions and statements of some of his followers that they expect the Kingdom of God to be an apocalyptic kingdom, one that will come with great tribulation and result in the destruction of the world ruled by Romans and the simultaneous creation of a new one ruled by God. yet any hope that Jesus will lead a political or military rebellion would be at odds wit his attitude of nonresistance: "Do not resist one who is evil," he says. "But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if anyone would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well" (Matt. 5:39-40).
Jesus apparently accepts the then current Judaic worldview that a Messiah will appear to lead Jews in the approaching apocalypse, and he may have been for a time a disciple of John the Baptist, preaching, like John, "The kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the good news." But after his baptism and meditative withdrawal to the desert, Jesus appears to shift his emphasis from a distant, vengeful Lord who would destroy the wicked to a fatherly God willing to forgive any who ask Him. (At one point, in Mark 14:36, he calls God "Abba," an intimate local term equivalent to "Papa," later picked up by St. Paul in Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6.) Furthermore, Jesus often describes the immediacy of a kingdom that is already available to anyone on earth, man or woman, Jew or Gentile, slave or free, as long as they make themselves "like little children" and learn to recognize its presence within them. This should not be construed to mean that Jesus shows contempt for the religion of Judaism. Despite the fact that he sometimes questions those who observe the letter of the law but not its spirit (contrary to strict Jewish law, for example, he heals on the Sabbath), for the most part he observes the law and rituals.
You have heard that it was said to our forefathers, "You shall not kill; and whoever kills is liable to judgment." But I tell you that anyone who hates his brother is liable to judgment....You have heard that it was said, "You shall not commit adultery." But I say to you that everyone that looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart....You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I tell you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father in heaven; for he makes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust. (Matthew 5:21ff)This may be the essence of Jesus' development in Mosaic law: taking an already revolutionary concept of ethical concern for one's fellow beings and the sanctity of human life and extending it to an internal ethics beyond the simple rationality of the law. Moses forbade unjustified physical and civil violence; Jesus says that we must not be violent even in thought or feelings toward others. "As far as we now know," writes one contemporary scholar, "no other Jew, or Jewish group, drew that extreme inference from the relevant ethical passages in the Old Testament."
Jesus sends his disciples out in pairs at one point as many as 72 individuals, to heal and teach, advising them to depend on the hospitality of those they heal. "Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals, nor two tunics," he tells them. "Whatever house you enter, eat what is set before you; heal the sick in it and say to them, 'The kingdom of God has come upon you'" (Mark 6:8-10). This teaching of what one scholar has called "open commensality," sharing meals and lodging with strangers of any race, religion, or gender in an egalitarian fashion, goes against the grain of Jewish ritual purity and dietary restrictions. Likewise, Jesus scolds his disciples for telling someone to stop healing in his name because the man is not an authorized disciple. "Don't stop him," Jesus says. "Whoever isn't against us is for us."
In the course of his itinerant teaching, Jesus heals lepers, paralytics, demonaics, the blind, deaf, dumb, and otherwise infirm, raises some from the dead, and on two occasions miraculously feeds four or five thousand by multiplying a few loaves and fishes. He also calms a storm on the Sea of Galilee and walks on the water. But what seems to threaten the religious establishment more than his works is his open questioning of certain rigorist aspects of the law. He is constantly being challenged by the religious lawyers known as scribes (whose job was to interpret and clarify the tangled web of Jewish law) and by the sect of Pharisees, who try to find ways to trap Jesus into committing some offense that will allow them to eliminate him legally. Jesus in turn shows up the flaws inherent in observing the letter of the law and openly chides the wealthy, more conservative Sadducees.
As it turns out, Jesus gives both the religious establishment and the Roman occupying force more than enough cause to do him in. He arrives in Jerusalem near the long religious festival of Passover, when the population of the great city normally swelled from around 20,000 to as many as 180,000 because of the great influx of Jews from all over the kingdom to present their sacrifices at the Temple. Because they all used different currencies, they had to exchange their money for Temple money with which to buy sacrificial birds and animals. Apparently outraged by the commerce going on in the Temple area, Jesus "cleanses" the Temple, overturning the tables of the money changers and chasing out the men who sell pigeons for sacrifice, saying, "It is written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer,' but you have made it a den of thieves" (Matt. 21:13).
His actions not only disturb the Temple priests but also alarm the Roman authorities, constantly on the alert for charismatic leaders capable of inciting the peasants to revolt against Roman rule. Jesus holds a Passover seder with his disciples, following which one of them, Judas Iscariot, betrays him to the Jewish authorities, who arrest him and bring him before their tribunal (probably the Sanhedrin, though not mentioned by name). They in turn hand him over to the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, who, despite saying that he finds nothing dangerous or illegal in Jesus' words or actions, accedes to the demands of the crowd to have him executed and sentences Jesus to crucifixion. Jesus dies on the cross; although crucifixion often lasts several days, he is pronounced dead after only a few hours. He is taken down because, with the Sabbath approaching, Jewish law requires that his body be laid in a tomb.
When some of his women followers, including his mother and Mary Magdalene, arrive at the tomb two days later, they are informed by a "young man in a white robe" that Jesus has "risen." Known as the Resurrection, this even becomes the cornerstone of Christian dogma, proving the divinity of Jesus. In some Gospel accounts, Jesus later appears to his disciples in human form, preaches briefly, and after 40 days on earth ascends bodily into heaven.
We now know with some certainty that much of the Gospel language was created by the four Evangelists, or authors of the Gospels, in the course of stringing together the sayings of Jesus; their accounts were sometimes changed or embroidered by early Christian scribes who copied the manuscripts. These additions and deletions usually served the purposes of the Evangelists or scribes. For instance, the accounts of the passion and death of Jesus are relatively sympathetic to the Roman authorities while painting the Jewish religious establishment as primarily responsible for the crucifixion. History reveals that the Christians during the time the Gospels were composed (c. 70 to 120) were at odds with the Jewish community. The break between church and synagogue was probably official by 85 or so, and the early church was persecuted by the Jewish establishment. But Romans held the real power in both the Near East and Rome, where large Christian communities had formed, and Christians who were already under attack by Romans were not eager to alienate them further. So the Jewish scribes, Sadducees, and Pharisees were depicted as blundering hypocrites. clinging to the letter of the law when they weren't viciously plotting ways to have Jesus prosecuted. Pilate, by contrast, comes off as a just and sagacious Roman whose hands are tied by the demands of the Jewish authorities. However, St. Paul himself was a Pharisee, and Jesus embraced many of their liberal attitudes, whereas history shows Pilate to have been anything but wise and good. The Gospel story that Pilate offered to release to the crowd either Jesus or a criminal named Barabbas and that the crows, stirred up by the "chief priests," asked for Barabbas, is most likely a pious fable meant to incriminate the Jews even further. "His blood be on us and on our children!" Matthew has the mob scream, a line that would be used to justify the ruthless slaughter of Jews for the next two millennia.
Jesus' teachings were probably closer to the Pharisees' than to those of any other Jewish sect of his day; when he said "The Sabbath is made for man, and not man for the Sabbath," he was referring to a Pharisaic template for adjusting the law to modern times. Still, he couldn't be identified completely with any sect, which led to problems for those trying to pigeonhole him even in his own day. "For John [the Baptist] was an ascetic," Jesus says wryly in Matthew 11, "and they said, 'He has a demon'; the son of Man [i.e., Jesus] came eating and drinking and they say, 'Look at this wine-drinking glutton who's friendly with tax-collectors and godless people.'"
In some cases, details may have been added to the narrative to fulfill certain Old Testament prophecies, often leading to inconsistencies or worse. For instance, Matthew's account of Jesus' triumphant entry into Jerusalem prior to his arrest quotes the book of Zechariah (9:9): "Behold, your king is coming to you, humble and mounted on an ass, and on a colt, the foal of an ass." So Matthew has the disciples bring a colt and an ass to Jesus, and he apparently rides on both of them simultaneously, quite a dexterous feat for a carpenter's son.
One unquestionable asset of the new research has been to illuminate the social context in which Jesus appeared, which helps in grasping the full impact of his teachings at the time. His extension, or "fulfillment," of the law often had radical implications that are not always clear today. For instance, his teaching against divorce (except possibly on the grounds of adultery) contravened customs of the day, which allowed men to sue for divorce for any reason at all. Rabbi Hillel, for example, whom some historians credit with having influenced Jesus' compassion teachings, held that a man could divorce a woman just for burning his dinner. And with the exception of the Qumran sect, husbands would not be violating their own marriage by sleeping with another woman, whereas a wife who slept with any other man was liable to death by stoning. Women were not permitted to sue for divorce, and when they were divorced by their husbands, they were often left destitute. To insist that divorce was against the law of God was a compassionate service to women and a threat to the male-dominated social structure. (Jewish law allowing the divorce of a woman against her will was changed in the 10th century by Rabbi Gershom of Germany.)
As much as Jesus' worldview and teachings reflect the Jewish tradition of his time, we have to acknowledge the points where his ideas were virtually unprecedented - and this was especially the case regarding women, marriage, and adultery. One of the times when Jesus most memorably contradicted the law was in his defense of the woman caught in adultery. Although the earliest Gospel manuscripts do not have this story, and its authenticity is doubtful enough to be relegated to a footnote in the Revised Standard Edition of the Bible, it catches the resonance of Jesus' teaching so completely that it is hard to overlook and may reflect an oral tradition dating back to the time of Jesus. Jewish law called for both man and woman caught in adultery to be stoned to death (Deut. 22:22), but since biblical times the law had been changed so that men escaped punishment. When the scribes bring the adulterous woman before Jesus and ask his opinion of the law, he challenges them with a line that leaves them speechless and has become a paradigm of compassionate fairness even among nonbelievers: "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to thrown a stone at her." After her accusers leave, he asks the woman, "Has no one condemned you?" When she answers no, he adds, "Neither do I condemn you."
Although institutional Christianity later succeeded in returning women to inferior status, there is no evidence that Jesus was anything but comfortable with them. As with the Buddha, Jesus' most radical teachings were often misinterpreted or simply overlooked by some of those who came after him. Women did enjoy a relative equality of status and generosity of treatment in the early Christian church compared with their position in Judaism, but that was short-lived. Once the male clergy began to dominate church affairs by the middle of the 1st millennium, women were once again relegated to the level of subservient or even dangerous creatures, to be controlled at all costs. By the 13th century, cloistered life had become the norm for women's religious orders, and even today, the Roman Catholic Church does not allow women to be ordained as priests.
A number of scholars point to the poor reception Jesus received in his hometown of Nazareth when he came to heal and teach there (Mark 6:1-7), ascribing this to the supposition that he was known to have been born out of wedlock.
Jane Schaberg, in her feminist interpretation The Illegitimacy of Jesus, argues that "the New Testament Infancy Narratives incorporate the tradition of Jesus' illegitimate conception...that is most likely historical" But, she adds, the "process of gradual Christian erasure of the tradition" began in the Gospels in an "attempt to minimize the potential damage of the tradition," because within the patriarchal structure of Christianity "the illegitimate conception of Jesus was a scandal so deep, and origin so 'unfitting,' that it simply had to be repressed." More radical feminist scholars such as Mary Daly see Mary "portrayed/betrayed as Total Rape Victim - a pale derivative symbol disguising the conquered Goddess."
Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, in Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Birth of Jesus, postulates that Mary was "a sexually violated teen-age girl" and that the birth of Jesus was freighted with a "significant sense of scandal."
John P. Meier, a respected biblical scholar who is also a Roman Catholic priest, attacks these theories, saying that "son of Mary" refers merely to the fact that Joseph had died by the time Jesus began his ministry. Meier's approach to this and other questions about the virginal conception seems to be that if such claims cannot be proven, they cannot be authoritatively disproven, either. For instance, Meier downplays Jesus' unfavorable reception in Nazareth as the result of "small-town resentment and envy," adding, "there is no indication that this information conveys moral stain or scandal - just ordinariness." That is plausible; but if Joseph was not Jesus' biological father, the Nazarenes would have had no way of knowing that Jesus was actually the result of divine insemination and might have considered him illegitimate anyway.
Curiously, the Catholic feminist theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann cites the biological fatherhood of Joseph to counter what she considers the more injurious myth of Mary's virginal conception. She argues that the insistence on Mary's total virginity - both before and after the birth of Jesus - led the church to denigrate sexuality in general and the status of women in particular.
The miracles are more problematic. The context in which Jesus' miraculous cures took place is as significant as the cures themselves. The Jews of Palestine had been under Roman occupation for a century. The Jewish peasantry was dirt poor, with barely enough to eat, virtually no health care facilities, hospitals, asylums, doctors, or medicines. "When a healer appeared," writes the venerable Bible scholar Morton Smith, "a man who could perform miraculous cures and did so for nothing! - he was sure to be mobbed. In the crowds that swarmed around him desperate for cures, cures were sure to occur." Furthermore, healers were not uncommon in that time and place, and at least one, Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa, is considered to have been in the same class as Jesus. However, he cannot claim a billion and a half followers today.
Some scholars have made the further point that the numerous cases of demonic possession in Palestine may have resulted from years of colonial occupation, during which the spiritual and physical possession of their bodies by an all-powerful demon mirrored the possession of their land and lives by a stronger outside force. (These cases and those of the many paralytics brought before Jesus are reminiscent of the paralysis that afflicted Sigmund Freud's sexually abused or repressed clients in early-20th-century Vienna.) Jesus offered the possessed and otherwise afflicted a release from an overwhelming sense of colonial oppression by showing them the existence of a "kingdom of God" within themselves, more powerful than any exterior force. While accepting the validity of the healing miracles, some biblical analysts question the so-called natural miracles: walking on water, calming the storm, feeding thousands with a few loaves and fishes. One theory is that these accounts were originally part of Jesus' post-resurrection miracles, invented and placed late in the original texts to show his supernatural abilities, and for a variety of complicated reasons were moved to earlier positions in the Gospel narratives.
One part of the Gospel stories that is almost certainly based on historical fact is the general course Jesus followed through Palestine. Beginning his healings and teachings in the province of Galilee, a poor and partly Jewish region north of Judea, he worked in towns such as Cana, Capernaum (or Capharnaum), and others around the Sea of Galilee, swung farther north to Tyre and Sidon on the Mediterranean coast of Phoenicia, inland to Caesarea Philippi, and down through the Decapolis region between Galilee and Judea. As long as he stayed in the provinces, he was relatively safe from close scrutiny by the Roman authorities. Not until he chose to bring his ministry south to Jericho, Bethany, and Jerusalem, the capital of Judea, did he run afoul of the law.