IV. Who or What Was Jesus?
A. Jesus' Self-Identifications in the Gospels
As Messiah/Son of Man: Mk.2:10;8:30 (with restriction); Lk.4:14-22; 19:9; 24:25-27,
...who must suffer: Mk.8:31;9:31-32;10:33-34; Mt.20:17-19; Lk.18:31-34.
As Son of God: Mt.4:7;11:25-27;16:16=Lk.10:21-22.
B. Others' Identifications of Jesus in the Gospels
As one possessed: Mk.2:18 and parr.; Jn.7:20; 8:48-53; 10:20-21
As John the Baptist, Elijah, one of prophets: Mk.8:28; Mt.16:13; Lk.9:18-19; the Baptist: Mt.14:1-2 (Herod); "son of God": Mt.8:29 (demons); "Holy One of God (Lk.4:34); prophet (the people):Mt.21:11.
As Messiah/Son of Man: Mk.8:27-30; Mt.16:16 (Peter)
As Son of God: Mt.27:54 (centurion); Rom.1:4 (Paul); Jn.1:14,18.
As pre-existent: Col.1:16-17 (Paul);Jn.1:1-2.
C. The NT Identification of Jesus: Christology
Brown, An Introduction to New Testament Christology, 1994: 3-4) "In its most literal sense "Christology...discusses how Jesus came to be called the Messiah or Christ and what was meant by that designation....Low Christology covers the evaluation of him in terms that do not necessarily include divinity, e.g. Messiah, Rabbi, Prophet, High Priest, Savior, Master...High Christology covers the evaluations of Jesus that include an aspect of divinity, e.g. Lord, Son of God, God...There are a wide range of conceivable possibilities in understanding the degree or manner of Jesus' divinity. As to degree, theoretically Jesus could be seen as divine but as lesser than other divine figures who are not human, e.g., than the angels, who were known in the OT as "sons of God," Or Jesus could be deemed equal in divinity to "the one true God" who sent him (see Jn. 17:3). As to the manner, theoretically Jesus could have been a man who was deified at a point in his career --"made divine," for instance, at his baptism, when the Spirit of God descended upon him, or at his resurrection when God elevated him to heaven. Or he could have been divine all through his life in the sense that he was conceived as a divine being without a human father. Or he could have been a deity before he took flesh. And even in that last possibility, he could have been brought into being by God the Father as the first born of all creation (see Col. 1:15), or he could have been uncreated and with the Father forever. Classical or orthodox Christian faith, articulated in the 4th century, tells us that Jesus as Son of God was equal to God the Father in all things and existed from all eternity. But it does not tell us how many 1st Century NT authors, if any, had reached that precision."
Kuschel 1992: 22: "In the year 30 by our reckoning a young Jew dies in Jerusalem --condemned on the authority of the Roman emperor, crying aloud in the agonizing death of a criminal on the cross. If we follow the account of Mark, he dies with a feeling of having been abandoned by God, his God. A good fifty years later it will be said of this Nazarene that he is "the image of the invisible God," that "all things were created in him" --"in heaven and upon earth, visible and invisible, thrones and dominations, powers and authorities."..."
"We go yet further. Around 300 years later (in 325 AD), by virtue of the same Roman authority, in the emperor's summer palace in Nicea, not far from the capital Constantinople, a church assembly attended by around 300 bishops asserts of this Jew that he is of the "nature" of God the Father, "God of God, Light of Light, True God of True God." He is "begotten, not made", "of one substance with the Father" and through him all things in heaven and on earth were made. At the same time all those who say "there was a time when he was not" or "he did not exist before he was begotten," or "he came into being from nothing" are threatened with exclusion from the Catholic Church."
"And yet again, a good sixty years later, a subsequent assembly of the church held in Constantinople (in 381 AD) would add that he was "born of the Father before all time," before finally, another seventy years later, the universal Council of Chalcedon (451 AD) would coin the famous formula "true God, true man, and say of this Christ: The selfsame consubstantial with the Father, according to the Godhead, the same consubstantial with us according to the manhood...before all time he was begotten of the Father as to his Godhead, but in the last days the selfsame, for us and for our salvation, was born of Mary, the Virgin, the Mother of God, as to his manhood"."
"On the one hand a criminal's death on the cross and on the other the confession of him as Son of God and of being one substance with God; on the one hand the existence of a Jew in the province of Galilee in his time and on the other in his pre-existence in God's eternity. How is it possible to believe that?"
1. The Nicene Creed (325 AD
We believe in one God, the Father All-sovereign, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible;
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of the Father before all the ages, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father, through whom all things were made; who for us men and for our salvation came down from the heavens, and was made flesh of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man, and was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried, and rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures, and ascended into the heavens, and sits on the right hand of the Father, and comes again with glory to judge living and dead, of whose kingdom there shall be no end;
And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and the Life-giver, that proceeds from the Father, who with Father and Son is worshipped together and glorified together, who spoke through the prophets;
In one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church;
We acknowledge one baptism unto remission of sins. We look for a resurrection of the dead, and the Life of the age to come.
2. The Definition of Chalcedon (451 AD
(Council of Chalcedon, Actio V. Mansi, vii. 116)
Therefore, following the holy Fathers, we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in Godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body; of one substance (homoousios) with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood; like us in all respects, apart from sin; as regards his Godhead, begotten of the Father before the ages, but yet as regards his manhood begotten, for us men and for our salvation, of Mary the Virgin, the God-bearer (Theotokos), one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, recognized in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, the distinction of natures in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence (hypostasis), not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ; even as the prophets from earliest times spoke of him, and Lord Jesus Christ himself taught us, and the creed of the Fathers has handed down to us.
D. Some Modern Hypotheses
1. Political Agitator/Insurrectionist
"Jesus did not die because of an idea but because of things he did and said."
Stephen Neill & Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1988: 380: "...If it is to be suggested that we place Jesus in his first century context, that option that springs readily to many minds (and has done so regularly for at least two centuries) is that he was really a Jewish revolutionary. The best known representative of this view in recent times has been S. G. F. Brandon. In his book Jesus and the Zealots (1967), he argued three points. First, Jesus was a revolutionary sympathizer, who even condoned the use of violence where necessary (witness the fact that he was crucified by the occupying forces as a Messianic pretender and that the disciples were armed at the Last Supper). Second, the Church whitewashed Jesus' memory in order to save their own skins, inventing a very different message to preach to the world. Third, the writings of Josephus have blackened the character of the 'zealots,' the Jewish freedom-fighters during the Jewish War of A.D. 66-70, so that we do not now recognize them as potential close associates of Jesus. The two portraits have been pushed apart by the biases of the Church and Josephus respectively."
2. The Social Reformer
Stephen Neill & Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1988: 388: "In explaining why most scholars (except for the Brandon school) have ignored the political dimensions of Jesus' ministry, Borg 1984 (Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus) sets the scene in Palestine in the first century. It was a time of conflict: the conflict between rich and poor, between Rome and the Jews, between different responses with in Judaism to the crisis the nation faced, different programs for what it meant to be a loyal [?authentic?] Jew at that time...Jesus' work is to be seen firmly in the context of hope, and the self-understanding of Israel. All over Israel, not just in a few pro-zealot strongholds, there was anti-Roman feeling and potential resistance, fanned by Pilate's inept handling of the situation. Jews rallied to the banners of the Torah and the temple and saw holiness as their obligation in the face of the gentile pollution of the land. This holiness had to be worked out in social and political terms. Different ideas of what it really meant in practice to be a loyal Jew [p. 389] led to various groups offering different practical solutions, marking the society with internal divisions that would be accentuated still further in A.D. 66-70 and leading inexorably to a confrontation with, and resistance towards, Rome."
"Into this situation came Jesus. He proclaimed, and enacted, a different message. True holiness is not exclusive but inclusive: the true imitatio Dei is not 'be holy, for I am holy but 'be merciful as your Heavenly Father is merciful' (Lk. 6:36). Faced with the Roman (or other) oppression, one must turn the other cheek, go the second mile: Israel is the light of the world, inaugurating a new way of being the people of God, a way which will involve loving acceptance of the outside r (acted out in Jesus' eating with notorious sinners and 'outsiders'). Jesus' conflict with the Pharisees --which Borg, unlike some recent writers, accepts as thoroughly historical-- did not consist of his claiming to have the true sort of piety as oppose d to the wrong sort, but of a conflict between alterative programs: 'because of the central role which religion still played in structuring the social world, it was a hermeneutical battle with historical-political consequences of which both Jesus and his opponents seemed to be aware.' Hence the significance of Jesus' attack upon the Sabbath, not as a symbol of legalistic piety but as symbol of the idolatry of Israel's national identity, the Sabbath being the one of the three marks of Jewish identity in the world." [n. The other two, of course, being the food laws and circumcision.] "It is interesting in the light of the common Form-critical assumption read its concerns back into the stories about Jesus, that circumcision, which we know to have been a major issue in the early Church, is nowhere discussed in the Gospels."
3. The Sage of Galilee
Funk et al., The Five Gospels [= The Jesus Seminar]
<p. 4> "John the Baptist, not Jesus, was the chief advocate of an impending cataclysm, a view that Jesus' first disciples had acquired from the Baptist movement. Jesus himself rejected that mentality in its crass form, quit the ascetic desert, an d returned to urban Galilee. He took up eating and drinking and consorting with toll collectors and sinners, and developed a different point of view, expressed in the major parables and root metaphors for God's imperial rule, as the kingdom of God has now come to be known. The liberation of the non-eschatological Jesus of the aphorisms and the parables from Schweitzer's eschatological Jesus is (a)...pillar of contemporary scholarship."
"Jesus' followers did not grasp the subtleties of his position and reverted, once Jesus was not there to remind them, to the view that they had learned from John the Baptist. As a consequence of this reversion, and in the aura of the emerging view of Jesus as a cult figure analogous to others in the Hellenistic mystery religions, the gospel writers overlaid the traditions of sayings and parables with their own "memories" of Jesus. They constructed their memories out of common lore, drawn in large part from the Greek Bible, the message of John the Baptist, and their own emerging convictions about Jesus as the expected Messiah --the Anointed. The Jesus of the Gospels is an imaginative theological construct, into which has been woven traces of that enigmatic sage of Nazareth --traces that cry out for recognition and liberation from the grip of those whose faith overpowered their memories. A search for the authentic words of Jesus is a search for the forgotten Jesus."
John P. Meier, The Marginal Jew, 1.117 dismisses, however, those who see Jesus as "a tweedy poetaster who spent his time spinning out parables and Japanese koans, a literary aesthete who toyed with first century deconstructionism, or a bland Jesus who simply told people to look to the lilies of the field --such a Jesus would threaten no one, just as the university professors who create him threaten no one."
4. The Eschatological Prophet
J. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism: 237-238: "(What sort of figure was Jesus?) I think that Hengel's case is persuasive. Hengel (The Charismatic Leader and His Followers, 1981: 20 ff.) compares Jesus to leaders of "prophetic-charismatic movements of an eschatological stamp," and he settles on the term "eschatological charismatic" as best giving Jesus' type (e.g. 44, 48, 63, 68). It does not lie outside the scope of such a person to teach, and Hengel points to Josephus' description of Judas of Galilee as a sophistes (23 ff.). Besides Judas, the others who are the closest to Jesus, and whose names we have, are Theudas and the Egyptian (20-24)..."
"Jesus, however, he argues, is not to be understood entirely within the limits of the type. He is best described by the category "eschatological charismatic" though he goes "far beyond anything that can be adduced as prophetic prototypes or parallels f rom the field of OT and from the NT period." (p. 68) Hengel is apparently ready to follow Fuchs in speaking of Jesus as standing in God's stead, and he adds:
He shatters the power of the evil one, invites sinners to the messianic banquet, makes his claim that his message is the nearness of salvation and of God's judgment as binding without reserve on all Israel, including the Holy City and the Temple (p. 68 .
"This claim is unique. It is a "unique, underivable claim to authority grounded in God Himself." (p. 69)
Quite certainly Jesus was a "teacher" comparable with the later rabbinical experts in the law, and he was a great deal more than a prophet. Even within the categorization we have preferred, of an "eschatological charismatic," he remains in the last resort incommensurable, and so basically confounds every attempt to fit him into categories suggested by the phenomenology or sociology of religion." (p. 69)
E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism: "Let me lay things out in what I regard as the order of probability (regarding Jesus and the kingdom):
1. Jesus taught about the kingdom (unquestionable)
2. He depicted the kingdom in metaphorical terms, including that of a banquet (almost beyond the shadow of doubt)
3. His disciples never expected the kingdom to be a political one, brought about by the aid of arms, but rather to depend on the future act of God (almost beyond the shadow of doubt)
4. The upcoming kingdom was symbolized by three gestures, only one of them publicly dramatic:
a. The Temple (certain)
b. The Supper (almost certain)
c. The Entry (probable [?])
5. Jesus gave himself and his disciples a role in the kingdom. His own role was superior to theirs, and his role could be summarized as "king" (almost certain). This may have led to discussions of him as "Messiah" in his lifetime (possible), but in any event, this was the title given him after the resurrection (certain)."
Some Recent Surveys of NT Scholarship
Marcus J. Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship. Valley Forge: Trinity Books International, 1994
James H. Charlesworth (ed.), Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
James H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Messiah. Developments in Earliest Judaism and Christianity. Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1992.
Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evens (eds.), Studying the Historical Jesus: Evaluations of the State of Modern Research. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994.
Eldon Jay Epp and George W. MacRae, The New Testament and Its Modern Interpreters. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989.
Craig A. Evans, Life of Jesus Research: An Annotated Bibliography. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989. [Z8455.E94]
Craig A. Evans, "Life-of-Jesus Research and the Eclipse of Mythology," Theological Studies 54 (1993), 3-36.
Joseph Fitzmyer, "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament after Forty Years," Revue de Qumran 49-52 (1988), 609-620.
Werner Georg Kümmel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of its Problems, Translated from the German edition of 1970 by S. McL. Gilmour and H. C. Kee. Nashville: Abingdon Press 1972.
H. K. McArthur, The Quest Through the Centuries: The Search for the Historical Jesus. Phila.: Fortress Press, 1966 [BT303.2.M28]
John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew. Rethinking the Historical Jesus 1. The Roots of the Problem and the Person. New York: Doubleday, 1992.
Stephen Neill and Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861-1986. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stephen Patterson et al. (eds.), The Search for Jesus: Modern Scholarship Looks at the Gospels. Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archeological Society, 1994.
John Riches, A Century of New Testament Study. Valley Forge: Trinity Press international, 1993.
R. Scroggs, "The Sociological Interpretation of the New Testament: the present state of research," New Testament Studies 26 (1980), 164-179.
Robert H. Stein, The Synoptic Problem. An Introduction. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1987.
Michael J. Wilkins and J. P. Moreland (eds.), Jesus Under Fire. Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1995.