The Real Jesus

To do so it is necessary to take ourselves back to the times in which Christianity came into being. it is fundamentally important to appreciate how easy it was, in the Gentile world at least, for an ordinary man to be beleived to be a god. At least as early as the reign of Tiberius, who was Jesus' contemporary, Roman Emperors worked hard to cultivate a divine image, just as kings and pharaohs had done for centuries before them. It was commonplce for artists and sculptors to be commissioned to portray the Emperor as Zeus/Jupiter or Heracles, and the Emperor's image on legionary standards was an object of worship for the army. When Tiberius' newphew Germanicus died, a beautiful cameo was made of the youth being received into the heavenly pantheon, with the former Emperor Augustus among the gods. That such deification could be accorded to living men is evident from the accounts in Acts of Paul and Barnabas healing a cripple in the Asia Minor town of Lystra, in Lycaonia:

A man sat there (in Lystra) who had never walked in his life, because his feet were crippled from birth; and as he listened to Paul preaching, he managed to catch his eye. Seeing that the man had the faith to be cured, Paul said in a loud voice, 'Get to your feet - stand up' and the cripple jumped up and began to walk. When the crowd saw what Paul had done they shoulded in the language of Lycaonia 'These people are gods who have come down to us disguised as men.' They addressed Barnabas as Zeus, and since Paul was the principal speaker, they called him Hermes. The priests of Zeus-outisde-the-Gate, proposing that all the people should offer sacrifice with them, brought garlanded oxen to the gates. When the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard what was happening, they tore their clothes and rushed into the crowd, shouting 'Freidns, what do you think you are doing? We are only human beings like you....' Even this speech, however, was scarcely enough to stop the crowd offering them sacrifice. (Acts 14:8-18)

From all that we know of Jesus, is it possible that he regarded himself as God? The gospels' answer is clear. In the Mark gospel, the most consistent in conveying Jesus' humanity, a man is represented as running up to Jesus and addressing him with the words 'Good master'. Jesus' response is a firm rebuke: 'Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone' (Mark 10:18). Even in the John gospel, the one most inclined to make Jesus divine, he is reported as stating quite categorically, 'the Father is greater than I' (John 14:28), which should have been enough to spike the Alexandrian guns at Nicaea.

If Jesus had wanted to institute a formula for the religion he taught, there is one moment, described in Mark's gospel, when he had the perfect opportunity to do so. A scribe is reported as having asked him: 'Which is the first of all the commandments?' It was an occasion to which Jesus could have imparted one of his characteristic twists, bringing in something new, something involving himself, if he wished us to believe that he was a member of a Trinity, on an equal footing with God the Father. Instead he unhesitatingly looked to his traditional Jewish roots:

This is the first: Listen Israel, the Lord our God is the one Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. (Mark 12:29, 30)

Let these words of mine remain in your heart and in your soul; fasten them on your hand as a sign and on your forehead as a circlet. teach them to your children and say over to them, whether at rest in your house or walking abroad, at your lying down or at your rising. Write them on the doorposts of your house, and on your gates, so that you and your children may live long in the land that God swore to your fathers he would give them for as long as there is a sky above the earth.

If Jesus remained so fundamentally loyal to Judaism, how is he to be viewed by modern Jews, once all the wrong thinking and persecutions of the years following Constantine the Great are swept aside? One of the most fascinating of recent developments among Jewish writers and scholars, and not a few rabbis, has been the new interest in who Jesus was, and whether he may have been merely a nabi/hasid of a particularly exceptional kind.

More than fifty years ago the Jewish writer Joseph Klausner concluded his book Jesus of Nazareth with the words:

In his ethical code there is a sublimity, distinctiveness and originality in form unparalleled in any other Hebrew ethical code; neither is there any parallel to the remarkable art of his parables.

Today Dr Geza Vermes goes even further, describing Jesus unequivocally as 'an unsurpassed master of the art of laying bare the inmost core of spiritual truth', and acknowledging that he was a healer 'head and shoulders' above other hasidim such as Hanina Ben Dosa. He speaks admiringly of how:

...he took his stand among the pariahs of his world, those despised by the respectable. Sinners were his table-companions and the ostracised tax-collectors and prostitutes his friends.

Another vital point to consider is the modern Christian view of Jesus in relation to Nicaea. Ever since the German theologians first began to chip away some of the old fallacies surrounding the interpretation of Jesus' life and teaching, there has been, in some quarters at least, a tendency to ignore the areas of uncertainty. When the ideas of Strauss began to take root, and Charles Darwin unleashed his origin of Species, the reaction of the contemporary Pope, Pius IX, was to condemn rationalism and proclaim himself and all future Popes infallible. Under Pius' successor, Leo XIII, a more moderate wind below; Catholics were encouraged to adapt to new discoveries, and in response there emerged the so-called Modernist movement, comprising Catholics prepared to view the New Testament as critically as some Protestants had done. Leading figures in this movement were the English jesuit Father George Tyrrell and the French scholar-priest Alfred Loisy. But when, in 1903, Leo was succeeeded by the altogether more reactionary Pope Pius X the relatively liberal outlook was crushed underfoot. Loisy's books were immediately banned to all Catholics. Four years later all Modernist thinking as condemned in formal decrees and encyclicals, and when, inevitably, Loisy and Tyrrell independently published protests, Tyrrell's in the form of letters to The Times, both were excommunicated. Tyrrell, who died two years later, was not even allowed Catholic burial, receiving interment instead in the Anglican churchyard at Storrington, West Susses. So that no-one should lapse in future, Pius brought in a special Anti-Modernist oath. Today, in the wake of Vatican II and with a Pope as charismatic as John Paul II, it might appear that we live in more liberal and enlightened times. But appearances cn be deceptive, as demonstrated in the case of Edward Schillebeeckx.

Edward Schillebeeckx is a mild-mannered scholarly Belgian Catholic of the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, who has produced some prodigiously long and closely reasoned studies in which he has merely suggested that the nature of the divinity invested in Jesis at Nicaea has perhaps been over-stressed at the expense of his Jewish humanity. On Saturday, 15 December 1979, Schillebeeckx was summoned to appear before Rome's Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, the Vatican department which in 1633 put Galileo on trial for arguing that the earth revolved around the sun. To his astonishment, as if in a scene from the Middle Ages, Schillebeeckx found himself politely but menacingly on trial for his orthodoxy, complete with the unheralded appearance as 'prosecutor' of a man who, only a month before, had accused him of totally denying Jesus' divinity. In a separate part of the same building Cardinal Franjo Seper, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, signed a declaration ending the career of the Roman Catholic Hans Küng for having questioned the idea of papal infallability. Of such present-day auto-da-fés the most recent, and perhaps the most ironic, has been that of Archbishop Emmanuel Millingo, from Lusaka, Zambia, in March 1983. Archbishop Millingo's crime? Conducting demonstrably successful healings and excrocisms, just like those maligned Gnostics - and the founder of his faith two thousand years ago. Dealing with mashawe, the African word for mental stress, was reported to be the Archbishop's specialty. Regrettably, in July 1983, Millingo was obliged to resign.

It is to be acknowledged that one of the least known yet most commendable of the reforms brought about by Vatican II was the exoneration of present-day Jews from any culpability for Jesus' death, effectively erasing the last four words of the Matthew gospel's 'His blood be on us and on our children.' Yet even this, due to internecine Council wranglings, is less of a reform than it might first appear to be. Present-day Jews can only consider themselves innocent of 'deicide' if they dissociate themselves from the 'wicked generation' of the time of Jesus. As Jewish scholar Hyam Maccoby has remarked with great justice:

That so-called 'wicked generation' was in fact one of the greatest generations in Jewish religious history: the age of the Tannaim, of Hillel and Shammai, Johanan ben Zakkai and Gamaliel was an age in Jewish development corresponding to that of the Church fathers in Christianity. To dissociate themselves from this generation would be, for Jews, to dissociate themselves from Judaism.

It is in Jesus, and Jesus alone, that there is nothing of self to be seen, but solely the ultimate, unconditional love of God. It is as he emptied himself utterly of himself that he became the carrier of the 'name which is above every name'.

He said, 'There was a good man who owned a vineyard. He leased it to tenant farmers so that they might work it and he might collect the produce from them. He sent his servant so that the tenants might give him the produce of the vineyard. They seized his servant and beat him, all but killing him. The servant went back and told his master. The master said 'Perhaps [they] did not recognize [him].' He sent another servant. The tenants beat up that one as well. then the owner sent his son and said, 'Perhaps they will show respect to my son.' Because the tenants knew it was he who was the heir to the vineyard, they seized him and killed him. Let him who has ears hear.

To me he was one of the greatest teachers humanity has ever had. To his believers he was God's only begotten son. Could the fact that I do or do not accept this beolieve have any more or less influence in my life? Is all the grandeur of his teaching and his doctrine to be forbidden to me? I cannot believe so....My interpretation...is that in Jesus' own life is the key to his nearness to God; that he expressed, as no other could, the spirit and will of God. It is in this sense that I see and recognize him as the son of God.

There is only one way of finally resolving this great dilemma: a preparedness on the part of all to recognize that in the case of Jesus, perhaps uniquely, there is no formula, no one view of him that can adequately explain or encompass him. In the course of this book we have examined Jesus the Jew, the countryman, the unconventional teacher, the exorcist and healer, the hypnotist, the victim of the Sadducees, and the mysterious Jesus of the resurrection. There is much, much more we have barely touched on, just as the author of John felt obliged to conclude:

There were many other things that Jesus did; if all were written down, the world itself, I suppose, would not hold all the books that would have to be written. (John 21:25)

There are as many different responses to Jesus Christ as there are different fingerprints....To reduce any living faith to a set of definitions and propositions one is bound to distort it. Attempts to produce creeds are inevitably divisive or compromising. Eusebius of Caesarea signed the creed of Nicaea for the sake of church unity, but he was clearly embarassed about it. What we need is not new creeds, but a new openness which will allow manifold ways of responding and elucidating tat response.