The Essence of Jesus' Earthly Mission

Over the last couple weeks, I've been posting through the early mission of Jesus on social media. Here is the whole series in one place:

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1. Jesus' earthly ministry started out of the ministry of John the Baptist. God's kingdom was coming. Repent. Give your allegiance to God. Wash away your sins both individual and corporate.

This is a re-orientation away from ourselves to God, a greater than ourselves. It is a surrender to a kingdom with its command and control in heaven. It is in preparation for the restoration of God's people.

This is the earthly context of Jesus' mission.

2. Before Jesus took over where John the Baptist left off, he underwent a time of turmoil in a deserted place. Matthew and Luke tell us he was tempted to exploit his power, to exploit his privilege, and to take his authority before its time. Rather, it was God's will for him to wait, to serve, and to put others first.

3. After John the Baptist was arrested, Jesus publicly began to preach the message John had started. The time had come for the kingdom of God to arrive on earth. The proper response of Israel was individual and corporate repentance as well as faith in this good news of the kingdom's arrival. But while John preached in the south near Jerusalem, Jesus focused his preaching in the north, in Galilee.

4. Jesus did not focus on everyone in his earthly ministry. He focused on the north, on Galilee. He did not focus on the "healthy," those who were allegedly keeping the covenant and who were socially on track. He focused on the "lost sheep," those off track and unwell on every level.

In his "inaugural address" in Luke 4, he reads Isaiah 61 to single out the poor, the captive, the blind, and the oppressed as those on whom his mission was focusing.

John the Baptist had preached to the mainstream of Israel. Jesus was filling in the edges in the restoration of God's people.

5. One group of Israelites on the edges were the sick and the disabled. One major feature of Jesus' restoration ministry involved healing. This is something John the Baptist didn't do. Jesus had compassion on the sick, the lame, the blind, the deaf, and he healed them according to their faith.

He came not into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world might have life more abundant.

6. Another group on the edges of Israel were the demon possessed. They were a concrete reminder of Satan's temporary sway over the earth. But Jesus restored these afflicted individuals to wholeness by.casting the demons out.

Every demon Jesus expelled was the arrival of the kingdom of God to the earth, the restoration of God's kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.

7. Jesus' mission brought conflict. Some of it was jealousy. Why do you have this power, authority, and popularity and we don't? Why are you hanging around *those* people (and not pandering to us)?

Some was fear of the kingdom. Why are you stirring up the people?

Jesus also made the pretenders look bad. Hey, you're calling our motives into question! You're not following the rules we hide our motives behind!

8. Matthew gives us a glimpse of Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount. It has perhaps three key themes. One seems the coming reversal of the kingdom. Blessed are you who mourn now because the day of comfort is coming. Remember they persecuted the prophets too.

Don't worry about clothing or food. God will take care of you. Those who are pure of heart now, those who make peace now, those who are meek now will inherit the earth soon enough. The kingdom is coming.

The wise person builds their house upon the rock. As for those who are comforted now, God will scatter the proud in the imaginations of their hearts.

9. A second theme of the Sermon on the Mount set the record straight on Jesus and Scripture. They accused him of being loose on the Law -- meaning their traditions of interpretation. Jesus makes it clear that he did not come to nullify the Scriptures (like the Sabbath).

Rather the sum of the Law is to love one's neighbor. It's not just not murdering. Hatred breaks the Law. It's not just adultery. It's lust and divorce to commit adultery legally. It's not just keeping oaths. It's truthfulness in general. God calls for full love that goes beyond the ones we like. It's loving completely, loving everyone, including our enemies (Matt. 5:48). Love is the fulfillment of Scripture (Matt. 22).

That leads to the third theme of the Sermon. Those who might criticize Jesus for not keeping the details of the Law are guilty of not keeping the heart of the Law. They are pretenders. They keep the letter of the Law for show. But they don't keep the Law truly because they do not love their neighbors. They project their own guilt on others.

10. Jesus did not shun those with power or wealth who might repent too and long for the kingdom like his other followers. He was glad to eat at the house of a Zacchaeus or meet a Nicodemus at night. He had some wealthy wives who supported his mission.

But most of the Jerusalem leaders were against him. Luke especially highlights Jesus' condemnation of the rich who do nothing with the vast resources they have. The rich man in the parable does little to help those like the beggar Lazarus at their gate.

He has little time for the religious scholars and teachers of the Law, although he is glad to eat with them too. He indicts their pretense and goes about his mission without giving them much thought.

These all would be part of the reversal coming. "Woe to you who are well fed now, for you will go hungry."

11. Jesus did not engage the Romans. Famously, when asked about taxes, he asked for a Roman coin. After pointing out that Caesar's image was on the coin, he suggested it be given back to Caesar. "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's." In other words, the kingdom of this world is a different kingdom from our God's. Pay your taxes.

This is a "Christ against culture" approach. It is a separatist mindset, and the early church would follow. The gospel was for Roman governors like Sergius Paulus and Theophilus too, but Jesus did not engage the Roman world directly in his earthly ministry -- until it came to him.

Here we should point out two phases of Jesus' ministry. When he was on earth, he taught loving the enemy. "If [a Roman soldier] compels you to carry something one mile, carry it two." (Walter Wink has suggested this was a shaming technique of non-violent resistance.) Turn the other cheek (Wink would say shaming the other by forcing them to backhand you).

But God would bring justice to the Romans soon enough. God himself would do it. It was not for Jesus' disciples to do it. But Babylon would fall soon enough. God would do it. We remember that John of Patmos had been with Jesus, and his message of judgment for Rome was apocalyptic.

12. It was not until the very end of Jesus' earthly mission that he finally broached the question that had no doubt long been on his disciples' mind. "Who are people saying I am?" While people have been saying various things, Peter has the right answer: "You are the Messiah."

Jesus has kept such views quiet because the contemporary expectations of the Messiah would be counterproductive. They expect a conquering hero who will restore the kingdom to Israel then. That is rather the agenda for Christ's second coming.

No, at that time he was headed to Jerusalem to die. He rebukes Peter for only knowing half of the equation. Judas possibly tries to force God's hand, thinking God won't let Jesus lose to the leaders and the Romans. But unwittingly, he advances God's own plan.

Jesus dies on the cross for the sins of Israel and not only Israel. He dies for the sins of the whole world. It is the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. All the sacrifices before were not truly able to take away sins, and no sacrifice since is meaningful.

This was the one sacrifice for all time that did the deed for all time.

13. The disciples weren't expecting Jesus to die. Then when he had died, they weren't expecting him to come back to life. Their expectations were all off in their timing because, for them, it was all about the political restoration of Israel in their time (Acts 1:6).

Instead, Jesus is installed as Son of God in power with his resurrection from the dead (Rom. 1:3). God "superexalts" him as LORD after he humbled himself unto death (Phil. 2:9). God enthrones him as Lord and Messiah (Acts 2:36).

Now his disciples must take the good news of the kingdom to every people (Matt. 28:19). He has been training them throughout his earthly ministry. They have been his apprentices as fishers of people. He singled out twelve in particular to symbolize the restoration of Israel. He even sent them out on practice mission.

Now his followers must take the good news to the whole earth. It is natural that at first they thought the message was only for Jews. But the book of Acts shows the good news crossing boundary after unexpected boundary. First, it jumped language. Then, it broke barriers of purity. Then it fully expanded to the Gentiles.

And the Jesus who ascended to the skies will one day reappear and descend in the same way.

Jesus Remembered (10)

Dunn's summative work on Jesus appeared in the year of his retirement, 2003: Jesus Remembered. A couple years later a more concise version also appeared: A New Perspective on Jesus (2005)

Thus far in this series:
1. The Evidence for Jesus (1985)
2. Baptism in the Holy Spirit (1970)
3. Unity and Diversity in the New Testament (1977)
4. Christology in the Making (1980)
5. "Once more, ΠΙΣΤΙΣ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΥ" (1991)
6. The New Perspective on Paul (2005)
7. The Partings of the Ways (1991)
8. The Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon (1996)
9. The Theology of Paul the Apostle (1998)

1. It was completely fitting for Professor James D. G. Dunn to complete his writing career with a series of books proceeding through the history of earliest Christianity. Dunn did so, and two of those books will help us finish these "twelve days of Jimmy." The three volumes were:

• Jesus Remembered (2003) - on the historical Jesus
• Beginning from Jerusalem (2008) - focus on the book of Acts
• Neither Jew nor Greek (2015) - the rest of the New Testament

I felt like Jesus Remembered had to be on the list, although in general I enjoy the smaller summations that senior scholars like Dunn, Wright, and Barclay often produce in the wake of their larger tomes. I will spend more time in a moment on A New Perspective on Jesus.

The book is 893 pages long, with five sections. The first recounts the quest for the historical Jesus up until the present, with its concomitant hermeneutical questions. The tail end of Dunn's career as a scholar saw the rise of postmodernism and a general turn away from the modernist, historical quest.

Dunn was sometimes criticized in his late career for not quite getting the postmodern critique. As you would guess, I am on the whole very sympathetic to his historical agenda even though I also accept the validity of alternative readings of texts. Although I suspect it loses me "friends" on both sides, I accept the validity both of a thoroughly historical approach to the biblical texts and a thoroughly canonical reading in the light of later orthodoxy. I would say that Dunn really only accepted the first while a lot of current scholarship pretends that the second is the same as the first, invoking Gadamer as an excuse (e.g., Stephen Fowl).

The second section then plots the well-trodden path from the Gospels back to Jesus. What are our sources? What are their relative values? What was the role of oral tradition? It is this component that I find most distinctive about Dunn's approach and that is the focus of his New Perspective on Jesus.

2. So in Part 3 we launch into the thick of the quest. This section deals with the mission of Jesus. Part 4 addresses Jesus' self-understanding, a theme that appeared throughout Dunn's work. Finally, Part 5 looks at the climax of Jesus' mission, extending into the resurrection.

I smile as Dunn includes the resurrection in his book on the historical Jesus. This is perfectly appropriate if you believe that Jesus did in fact rise from the dead in history! There have been plenty of scholars who have sharply divided the resurrection from the historical Jesus. The latter might be called the "Jesus of history" and the former the beginning of the "Christ of faith." Although he firmly believes in the historicity of the resurrection, even Tom Wright had one volume on the historical Jesus and a second on the Resurrection of the Son of God.

Yet it was completely in keeping with his historical orientation for Dunn to include the resurrection in his volume on the historical Jesus.

3. As magisterial as this treatment of Jesus is, I find more distinction in Dunn's smaller volume, A New Perspective on Jesus, particularly in its treatment of oral tradition. When you think of the form criticism stage of New Testament studies in the early nineteen hundreds it is hard for me not to shake my head at its failure to break free of a literary paradigm.

My sense is that Dunn had been significantly impacted by the thinking of Kenneth Bailey, who in 1991 wrote a piece on what he called "informal, controlled oral tradition." This concept derived extensively from Bailey's decades among oral cultures in more than one Middle Eastern society. The basic idea is that oral tradition in oral cultures tends to pass on faithfully core features of a story. However, the details tend to vary from telling to telling.

Like Bailey, Dunn found this concept deeply suggestive for analyzing the stories of the Gospels. One of the key insights, obvious though it is in retrospect, is that oral traditions about Jesus did not start after his resurrection. Oral traditions began before Jesus was crucified! Dunn relates this insight to what is often called "Q," the hypothetical sayings source on which Matthew and Luke are said to draw.

"The Q material first emerged in Galilee and was given its lasting shape there prior to Jesus' death in Jerusalem" (27). This is indeed a "new perspective" on the historical Jesus. Oral traditions about Jesus began immediately after Jesus said or did something. This seemingly obvious point seems notoriously absent from a century's worth of historical Jesus discussion.

So Dunn looks for the "characteristic Jesus." This approach is not as concerned with the question of tracing specific sayings of Jesus as with the features of Jesus' teaching and ministry that appear repeatedly in multiple layers of tradition. (It reminds me also of Dale Allison's 2010 approach in Constructing Jesus).

One of his final comments in regard to Q is appropriate: "If much of the shared Matthew and Luke material attests oral dependency rather than literary dependency, then the attempt to define the complete scope and limits of Q is doomed to failure" (122).
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Other books or compilations by Dunn mentioned thus far:
Jesus and the Spirit (1975)
Romans 1 and 2 (1988)
Jesus, Paul, and the Law (1990)
Jews and Christians (1992)
Galatians (1993)
The Theology of Paul's Letter to the Galatians (1993)
1 Corinthians (1995)
Paul and the Mosaic Law (1996)
Colossians/Philemon (1996)
Acts (1996)
Christ and the Spirit: Pneumatology (1997)
Christ and the Spirit: Christology (1998)
Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels (2011)

Twelve Days of Jimmy!

1. Yesterday, Professor James D. G. Dunn shuffled off this mortal coil. He was my doctoral advisor at the University of Durham from 1993-96. Those were the great years of my late twenties. Although I was on a budget, trying to say something intelligent in a dissertation, wrestling with issues of my faith, and longing for a life-long partner, they were great years. :-)

At the beginning of this year, I wrote a little about my England days, so you can find some memories of my interactions with "Jimmy" there. He and his wife Meta treated his former doctoral students a little like their own children and he followed our families as they grew. Many years at the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting there was a Dunn Reunion where we all got back together.

In my first years at Indiana Wesleyan, Jimmy connected me to adjunct some for Notre Dame. In those days I would occasionally send a hail Mary of an application to a research institution, and he and Loren Stuckenbruck were always willing to brush off the old reference for me. Jimmy was instrumental in getting me my first sabbatical in Tübingen in 2004, and of course it was he who connected me with St. John's College in Durham at the very beginning.

He once said that he and I had a similar faith pilgrimage. I took him to mean that he started out with a somewhat fundamentalist background and wrestled through its inadequacies toward a more historically grounded faith. He was very much a "modernist," although perhaps not quite as "chastened" a modernist as I like to think I am. He began in the more mathematically oriented field of economics and statistics, as I started off with chemistry. He thus had a quasi-scientific approach to interpretation, which is what attracted me to him as a scholar.

2. For the next 12 days, I thought I would pick a book a day of the great Jimmy Dunn and feature it. He had a way of approaching a question that I found deeply attractive. He truly tried to be objective. Of course none of us are completely, but some of us do much better job than others. He did better than most. You almost could not predict where he would come down on a question until after he had studied it and come to a conclusion in the light of the current evidence. I certainly don't feel that way about a whole lot of scholars today.

In light of the hope of resurrection, I want to start with The Evidence for Jesus. It was one of the first of his works that I encountered. In the early 90s, I was looking for historical arguments for the resurrection. I had come to the conclusion at Asbury that the resurrection was the cornerstone on which Christian faith rested. Perhaps I might nuance that today and say that the resurrection is the key historical datum in relation to Christian faith.

For example, you cannot prove the incarnation by way of history. Even if you could prove the virgin birth, that would not necessitate incarnation. Matthew and Luke do not mention the incarnation, and John does not mention the virgin birth. I do not think you can demonstrate the divinity of Christ by way of history. Even C. S. Lewis' "Lord, Liar, Lunatic" argument may come up just a little short of fully persuasive for reasons that may be clear by the twelfth day.

But you can show the historical plausibility of the resurrection. It still requires faith, to be sure--if you don't believe resurrections happen you will come up with a different explanation. But there is significant historical evidence in its favor. If you allow for the real possibility of resurrection, the resurrection of Jesus is very likely. And if the resurrection of Jesus happened, then it is very easy to believe that we shall also bear the image of that heavenly man (1 Cor. 15:49)!

3. The book, The Evidence for Jesus, came out in 1985. It illustrated Dunn's canny to ride the wave of educated popular interest. His books were more advanced than your average popular Christian book, but they appealed greatly to a certain educated, faith-filled, non-fundamentalist audience. Actually, it was always interesting to me how his work remained of great interest to "conservatives" even though it usually seemed to stand just across the border. Most of his doctoral students were people like me, coming from a conservative background. I should make clear that, when you take into account the full spectrum of scholarship, his actually is more on the "conservative" side.

I remember the Evangelical Theological Society asking him to speak once. I don't remember the subject. Perhaps it was on the new perspective on Paul. You had to sign a belief in inerrancy to participate, I guess. I remember him saying he just didn't look down while he was signing. But it showed that his voice was in demand even in circles a little more conservative than he was.

In 1984, there had been a series on British tele called Jesus: The Evidence. Apparently, they had some crazies on. For example, one of them argued that Jesus wasn't even a real person. That's not liberal. It's incompetent scholarship.

As I look over his response, I see comments that have been evident in my own teaching. For example, he quickly dispatches the idea that several decades between Jesus and the writing of the Gospels would automatically imply inaccuracy. "In societies where the spoken word was the chief means of communication... memories were better trained and almost certainly a good deal more retentive" (2).

However, his chapter on the historicity of the Gospels does not simply reinforce tradition. He also concludes--after very detailed comparisons of the Gospels--that the Gospels do not present the words of Jesus with "pedantic precision" (27). I will return to some of his later work in relation to the "historical Jesus" during these twelve days of Jimmy.

4. I must have read this book before I went to Durham, for my notes are in pen in cursive. I started taking notes in pencil in my books after a snide remark from fellow John's tutor Helen Fox. :-) I found the book persuasive on the historical evidence for Jesus' resurrection.

I'm pretty sure that it was from this book that I took the arguments I have given ever sense when I get to 1 Corinthians 15 in any New Testament Survey or when I am presenting arguments for the existence of God in an introductory philosophy class. It is a two pronged argument.

First, there is the empty tomb. Dunn goes through the accounts. He puts them side by side and shows their tensions. He does not shrink back from showing what is there. But in looking at the report of the guards in Matthew 28, he concludes, "the emptiness of the tomb was not a point of controversy, only the explanation of why it was empty" (67). I have made this point as well. The only evidence we have of disagreement on the resurrection from that period assumes that the tomb was empty.

Similarly, Dunn notes that "women were probably regarded as unreliable witnesses in first-century Judaism, simply because they were women" (65). Another point I have regularly made. If you were going to make up an empty tomb, would you have women as your first and key witnesses?

The second prong in the argument are the eyewitness accounts. People would not normally conclude that someone has risen from the dead when they find an empty tomb. Such a conclusion, Dunn suggests "is without any real precedent" (73).

He does, however, draw a debated conclusion on the nature of Jesus' resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15. "Paul's understanding of the resurrection body as a spiritual body strictly speaking does not require an empty grave" (75). I'm not sure I find that conclusion the most natural way of reading Paul.

The number of separate resurrection appearances is quite remarkable. If this were a trial, "the counsel for Christianity would want to argue that such a sequence requires a starting event of sufficient significance to explain what followed" (60). We might add here that our traditions suggest that many of these witnesses were willing to die for what they believed they had seen. The core of these traditions seem very likely (e.g., the martyrdoms of Stephen, James, Paul, and Peter).

5. And so we look for the hope of resurrection, including the resurrection of Jimmy Dunn. We want to know "the power of Christ's resurrection, becoming like him in his death, if somehow we might attain to the resurrection of the dead" (Philippians 3:10-11).

Jesus choosing people over the Law

I tweeted/made a Facebook post a couple days ago: "Jesus consistently chose people over the Law." Most agreed and at the moment there are 71 either likes or loves of the post on Facebook with 4 shares.

1. Of course there was some push-back, perhaps from three directions. First, there are those who ideologically over-emphasize continuity between the testaments. To me there is some inability to read the biblical texts in context here. For example, someone is so used to Hebrews that they think Leviticus would have had no problem with it. As one colleague once told me: "I think if the author of Leviticus were to read Hebrews, he would say, 'Of course.'" I think this is highly unlikely and reflects some inability to hear Leviticus on its own historical terms. Leviticus itself gives us no reason to think that its system of atonement was inadequate or insufficient in any way as a system. For a thousand years Jews thought the Levitical system was in fact the system God installed for all time.

So a certain degree of contextual unreflectivity is involved when we cannot see how startling a Gospel of John or Ephesians or Hebrews would have been to many Jews when they were hot off the press. This group wishes to say, "The New Testament is simply showing us what was in reality the actual meaning of the Old Testament from the start."

2. A second group are those who are sympathetic with what we might call the "Jewish roots" movement, for lack of a better word. This is a somewhat sectarian Christian movement (one that could become a cult over time), frequently involving Messianic Jews. If the first group says, "The Old Testament meant what the New Testament says," the second group says, "The New Testament means what the Old Testament says." So the discontinuities between the testaments are not fully appreciated again, but in deference to the Old Testament.

The tendency here is to miss the fact that Paul and other New Testament Christians like John did in fact disregard parts of the Jewish Law. Romans 14 and Colossians 2 imply that Gentiles need not keep the Jewish Sabbath (even though it is one of the 10 commandments). Jesus and Paul clearly did not think the food laws were binding on Gentile Christians. Paul in effect did not expect Gentile believers to keep any part of the Jewish Law that was "Jew-specific" or a "boundary" law.

By the way, I heard about another sectarian movement last week in Indiana (another cult waiting to happen). It reminds me of Marcion. It dismisses those parts of the New Testament that it thinks were not written for Gentiles. It is, in effect, a "Paul only" movement. It ignores the Gospels, for example. A contention point is the fact that Colossians 4 seems to indicate that Luke was a Gentile. Basically, it's a rubbish movement.

3. A third group that pushed back perhaps discerned the reason I posted in the first place. A legalistic strand within Christian America, including my own holiness background, has more in common with the mindset of the biblical Pharisees than with Jesus or Paul. I believe Jesus would approve DACA without a moment's hesitation. I believe this is the true Christian position. If Jesus sat loosely to the Jewish Law, imagine how loosely he would sit to the immigration laws of some random country.

I do believe that the rule of law is important in general in that it preserves in structural form the fundamental principle of "loving your neighbor as yourself." However, not all civil laws are created equal. We should obey the laws of our land in general in keeping with Romans 13. But this is not an absolute (cf. Acts 4). And there are various options with regard to the consequences of law-breaking.

4. In any case, I was asked for examples of Jesus putting people over the Law. Here is an annotated list.

Mark
Mark was written for Gentiles (sorry, "Paul-only" idiots in Logansport). So we might not be too surprised if it is not worried about Jesus appearing to be a scrupulous Law-keeper.

a. In Mark 2, Jesus does not respond to the Pharisees, "My disciples aren't breaking the Law by plucking grain on the Sabbath." His response is in effect, "Didn't David break the Law when his fighting men were hungry?" (2:26). In other words, he wasn't concerned about showing that he was a Law-keeper and accepted the assumption of law-breaking.

b. Of course he ignored the traditions of the elders several times. Eating with sinners (Mark 2 again) and thus making himself unclean, healing on the Sabbath (Mark 3), and letting his disciples eat without washing their hands (Mark 7). We easily dismiss these as "that's just the tradition of the elders," but it would not have felt so easy to dismiss at the time. This would have been experienced as Jesus sitting very loosely to the Jewish Law.

c. Mark interprets Jesus to declare all foods clean in Mark 7:19. Let's just say that this would have been a surprise to Leviticus. Very shocking at the time! Even many Christians experienced this as a flagrant disregard for the Scriptures. See Galatians 2.

Matthew
Unlike Mark, Matthew probably was written primarily with Jewish Christians in view. Matthew doesn't mention that Jesus declared all foods clean when telling about the incident in Mark 7 (cf. Matt. 15). So Matthew does seem concerned to show continuity between Jesus and the Law. However, when it comes to individual instruction in the Law, there is discontinuity:

d. Jesus' fulfilled understanding of the Law in Matthew 5 modified and is in tension with parts of the Law. The Law allows divorce for any reason. Jesus prohibits it, possibly because it is a form of legalized adultery and thus is abusive toward wives.

e. The Law says to keep vows (third commandment). Jesus says not to make vows.

f. The Law says to show no pity but "an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth." Jesus countermands this rule for individuals.

Luke
g. The Parable of the Good Samaritan, as I understand it, suggest that the Levite and the priest were inappropriate in letting their concerns for purity trump the need to help a person in need.

John
The Gospel of John is a highly symbolic presentation of Jesus, a Message version, if you would. Its author seems to see in Jesus a deeper reality that supercedes practice of the Jewish Law. It also seems to be for a primarily Gentile audience.

h. In John 10:34, Jesus calls the Law, "your Law," suggesting that the Jewish Law is not "his" Law in some way. This is probably a paraphrase of sorts, but it shows the degree to which John separates Jesus from Judaism.

i. The symbolism of Jesus turning water for purification into wine in John 2 may symbolize that Jesus' blood replaces the Levitical purification system. We might say fulfills. Leviticus probably wouldn't see it that way.

j. Jesus suggests to the woman at the well in John 4 that it is not necessary to worship God in Jerusalem. We might say gets at the true reality. Deuteronomy probably wouldn't see it that way.

k. John 8 probably wasn't in the initial manuscript of John, but in the story of the woman caught in adultery, Jesus works against enacting the punishment in the Law for a person caught in adultery.

5. My personal sense is that Jesus was not a scrupulous Law-observer. I'm not suggesting that he was a flagrant Jewish-Law breaker. I'm saying that the trajectory we pick up in the Gospels is of someone who was repeatedly criticized for not being careful in his attention to the Law. Such a trajectory would help explain both Paul's initial resistance to the Jesus movement and the character his Christianity took once he became a Jesus-follower.

Request Wednesdays: The Gospels and Politics

Last week was the first of "All Request Wednesdays." This week's question comes from Seth Cotton. How do different ways of reading the Gospels end up with different perspectives on politics? I hope that's the question you were asking. :-)

1. Albert Schweitzer pointed out a century ago that even top Jesus scholars generally create Jesus in their own image. There is diverse enough material in the Gospels, there is enough critical ambiguity that you can make Jesus into the person you want him to be.

So among scholars, pictures of Jesus generally coalesce into two basic types--the apocalyptic Jesus and Jesus the sage. The first picture of Jesus, which is currently the dominant one, sees Jesus as a preacher of "end times" or at least a radical in-breaking of God into history. The second sees Jesus more as a Solomon type who went around spreading wisdom.

In our current political climate, there are a number of popular portrayals of Jesus, some of which overlap: 1) Jesus the pacifist, 2) Jesus the liberal, 3) Jesus the in-your-face, anti-government type, 4) Jesus the in-your-face, anti-sin type. Some are used more to serve Democratic types and others more Republican types.

2. How do these relate to critical theories (part of the initial question)? In their own way, the Gospels themselves emphasize different aspects of Jesus and so suited different "political" purposes originally.

• Matthew is the "anti-Pharisee" Gospel, one of whose original purposes may have been to make it clear that the post-70 Pharisees were not the true heirs of Israel.
• Luke is the "good news to the poor" Gospel, which is hardest on the wealthy.
• John is the "in your face" Gospel, meant to lead to faith in Christ.
• Mark accentuates the limitations of the disciples and the human struggles of Jesus.

3. So it's not too hard to see which Gospels will be the favorites of those with different political agendas. Jesus' anti-Pharisee rhetoric in Matthew 23 or Jesus' hyper-clarity in John has easily served those who want an "in-your-face" Jesus.

So all you need to do is identify the type of person you want to condemn with the Pharisees or Jerusalem leaders. Do you want to resist education? Then accentuate Jesus against the Pharisees. Do you hate the government? Emphasize Jesus kicking money changers out of the temple or Jesus smarting off to Pilate.

Luke will be the favorite of the hippie Jesus. Jesus condemns the rich and emphasizes "good news for the poor" (Luke 4:18). Matthew 5 is the favorite for the pacifist, where Jesus says to turn the other cheek.

So there's something for everyone. Since all these Gospels are Scripture, you might argue that in themselves they give legitimacy to all the different political approaches at particular places and times.

4. Is it hopeless? I don't think it is. But only because of the scholarship of the last century and a half.

• John does bring some unique historical insights, but it is a highly symbolic Gospel. It's goals are much more theological than historical. We look to the Synoptics for more of the feel and tone of Jesus in history.
• Once we know the theological and political thrust of each Gospel, we can try to triangulate back to the original Jesus feel.
• So sparring with Pharisees was probably not a dominant aspect of Jesus' ministry. And Jesus did not come to Jerusalem prepared to take over by force. His message seems to have been, "God will take care of the Romans."
• Luke-Acts may remove Jesus' words on the poor and the rich to some degree from their context in Israel. It was especially the poor of Israel to whom he gave hope.

My own sense of Jesus is that all of these dimensions capture elements of Jesus' earthly ministry. He came across as a prophet who, like John the Baptist, preached that the kingdom of God was arriving in history. His "social justice" dimension resulted from an emphasis on the fact that this good news was for everyone, not just the upper crust. This could lead to anti-establishment overtones because the leadership excluded so many of the marginalized from Israel. He did not emphasize law-observance, in my opinion, for such a focus in itself tended to marginalize the everyday Israelite.

5. I started a Jesus novel last week because of this problem of interpretation, even before Seth posed this week's question. And of course if you want to know my general conclusions, you can always check out my two books on Jesus (also in Kindle).

Jesus the Pharisee Fighter?

It is well known that people who like Jesus usually make him into whatever picture of him they like. So was Jesus a hippie type or a Pharisee fighter? Did Jesus keep silent when he was attacked and accused or did he stick it to the man?

Jesus' earthly mission (see also a more detailed version):

1. Jesus preached the kingdom of God.
"The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!" (Mark 1:15)

The good news was the kingdom of God, the coming reign of God to the earth. God had let the Romans rule, but was going to restore Israel if it would repent and believe in God (and his Messiah). What did Israel need to repent of? "Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness." (Matt. 23:23)

2. Jesus' exorcisms prepared the way.
"But if I drive out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you."(Luke 11:20).

For whatever reason, God had allowed Satan to run rampant on the earth. Jesus exorcist ministry was Jesus cleaning house in preparation for the arrival of the kingdom of God.

3. Jesus wanted everyone to be a part.
"The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor." (Luke 4:18)

Jesus did not focus on the religious leaders in his ministry. At least initially, he referred to individuals like the Pharisees as "healthy" and indicated he did not come to minister to them (cf. Mark 2:17--"It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.") Jesus focused on tax collectors (who abused the people monetarily for their own gain) and sinners.

4. Jesus taught love of one's enemies.
"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." (Matt. 5:43-44)

Although some people like to celebrate Jesus telling off religious leaders. This was not the centerpiece of his message and in some cases may reflect especially the contexts of the Gospel writers. But Jesus did not go looking for conflict. It came to him. Those who emphasize Jesus telling people off are telling more about their own psychology than about Jesus. When Jesus stood before the government, he said nothing. (Mark 15:4-5)

5. Secretly, Jesus knew he was the Messiah.
"The Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many." (Mark 14:45)

Jesus kept his messianic identity somewhat of a secret. It's not until he's on his way to Jerusalem at the very end that he reveals this fact to his disciples (Mark 8:29-30). He did not preach himself much at all when he was on earth and only really mentioned his death at the end.
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Jesus would find no welcome in most American churches. He would be labeled a liberal and a socialist, a wimp who was anti-American. He rejected the "Bible-believing" fundamentalism of his day (e.g., Mark 2:23-28).

Wright on Third Quest

Pushing myself on the harder writing again today...
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In 1988, the feature that [N. T.] Wright found common to this third quest [for the historical Jesus] was a focus on history. [1]  We have to place his sense of this common ground against the backdrop of the era of Barth and Bultmann, when history was de-emphasized in deference to theology [2] and against the so called "New Quest" in which the criterion of dissimilarity reigned supreme.  The criterion of dissimilarity looked for sayings of Jesus that neither fit well within the Jewish context of Palestine nor a later context of Christian faith. Such sayings would surely derive authentically from Jesus, since no one would be motivated to make such a saying up or misdirect an existing one. While this reasoning is sound, the collection of such sayings surely would not give us a picture of Jesus that is anything like he likely was. [3]

Wright himself would later argue for a criterion of "double similarity." [4]  That is to say, we would expect to find both authentic sayings and events in the life of Jesus somewhere on a trajectory from Jesus' Jewish context to the faith of the earliest church that issued from his life. While Wright thus emphasized the return to history in his initial analysis of the resurgence of Jesus research at the time, that surge would include significant attention to Jesus against the backdrop of his Jewish context, as the title of Vermes' book indicates. [5] A. E. Harvey, another "quester" that Wright featured, wrote of the "constraints" of history, namely, that for Jesus to communicate to his audiences, "he had to speak a language they could understand, perform actions they would find intelligible, and conduct his life and undergo his death in a manner of which they could make some sense." [6]

James Dunn in fact considers the work of Sanders a more appropriate place to begin speaking of a third quest for the historical Jesus.  "If traditional New Testament scholarship had misrepresented the Judaism with which Paul had to do, how much more was it necessary for Jesus' relationship to his ancestral Judaism to be reassessed. [7]  In this regard, it is not surprising to find that Sanders himself wrote an analysis of the historical Jesus in the decade after his book on Paul, nor to find that Wright includes his work among those of the third quest. [8]...

[1] He says of Geza Vermes writing as a historian: "that is the major distinguishing mark of all the 'Third Quest' authors" (Interpretation, 381).

[2] A situation in which we more or less find ourselves again at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

[3] For a critique of the criterion of dissimilarity, see "Saving the Quest from the Criterion of Dissimilarity: History and Plausibility," in Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne, eds. (London: T & T Clark, 2012), 115-31.

[4] Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996) 132.

[5] In his magnum opus on the historical Jesus, James Dunn highlights the way in which late nineteenth century questers tried to distance Jesus from his Jewishness. Ernst Renan, for example, wrote that, "Fundamentally there was nothing Jewish about Jesus," quoted in Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 86. Later in that section, Dunn writes, "In the history of Jesus research nothing has evidenced the flight from history more devastatingly than the persistent refusal to give any significance to the Jewishness of Jesus" (88).

[6] A. E. Harvey, Jesus and the Constraints of History (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1982), 7*.

[7] Jesus Remembered, 89.

[8] Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985).  Wright's analysis of Sanders in this regard is found in Interpretation, 391-96.

Quests for the Historical Jesus

Here's a very brief overview of the quests for the historical Jesus.  Some "questers" have recently balked at the idea of three quests as an artificial imposition on history. No doubt there is some truth to their push back, but here is the standard schtick.

The (First) Quest for the Historical Jesus
With the Enlightenment and the rise of historical consciousness in the 1800s, the gospels were looked at in a new way by some. For example, someone who didn't believe in miracles in the 1700s or early 1800s might accept the basics of a biblical story but reinterpret it. One person suggested that it wasn't that Jesus multiplied loaves and fishes but that when the crowds saw the generosity of the little boy, they decided to share their food as well. Someone else suggested that Jesus was only mostly dead after the crucifixion, thus trying to explain his resurrection appearances.

David Strauss changed the rules of the game (1835). He categorized these Jesus stories as "myths" and suggested the feeding of the 5000 never happened at all and that the resurrection didn't happen at all. In effect, this launched a "quest for the historical Jesus," an attempt to determine what really happened and what didn't. Since John was so different from the Synoptics, it was quickly thought not to offer much to the quest. Then in the late 1800s when it became accepted that Matthew and Luke drew on Mark, they were thought not to offer much to the quest except for their "Q" material. Then when William Wrede suggested that even Mark invented parts of the story (1901)--like demons talking--the quest seemed to hit a dead end.

The first quest is usually said to have ended with Albert Schweitzer who wrote up all the material above (1906). Schweitzer's portrait of Jesus was that of an apocalyptic prophet whom, he thought, ended feeling like God had failed him.

No Quest
The first half of the twentieth century is often described as a time of no quest for the historical Jesus. Usually Rudolph Bultmann is pointed to, along with Karl Barth, as individuals who shifted the question away from the historical Jesus and toward the theological Jesus. For Bultmann, the Christ of faith was valid even if the Jesus of history didn't match (and Bultmann thought it was obvious that he didn't). Of course for Barth the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith were more or less the same, although he had no time for those preoccupied with proving it (he rejected the entire line of thought). Martin Kähler also wrote a famous book denying that there was any difference between the "so called historical Jesus" and the "historic, biblical Christ."

New Quest
In the late 1950s, one of Bultmann's students, Ernst Käsemann, opened the door for a "new quest for the historical Jesus." Over the next few years, some very minimalistic criteria developed.

• The criterion of dissimilarity--if something Jesus said is not something that either a Jew or a Christian would say, Jesus probably said it.
• The criterion of multiple attestation--if some saying appears in multiple layers of Jesus tradition (e.g., Mark, Q, John, the Gospel of Thomas) then it is more likely historical.
• The criterion of coherence--if a saying fits with things you derived from the above, Jesus might have said it.
• The criterion of embarrassment--the followers of Jesus would not have invented something they would have found embarrassing
• The Aramaic criterion--if a saying is easily translatable back into Aramaic, it enhances the likelihood that Jesus said it.

These criteria didn't cull much fruit. Edward Schillebeeckx wrote a 700 page book with very little he could say was clearly historical.

Third Quest
In 1977, E. P. Sanders' study, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, came out. It surveyed all the Jewish literature from around the time of Christ and showed that the stereotypes of Judaism passed down from Luther and the Reformers through the time of the Holocaust had given us a significantly skewed view of Judaism. The Jewishness not only of Paul but of Jesus himself began to be taken seriously by scholars. By the 80s, all sorts of common sense observations were emerging.

For example, why had the "new quest" focused almost entirely on Jesus' sayings? After all, you can make a saying mean a whole lot of things. Events were surely more helpful to focus on, what A. E. Harvey called the "constraints" of history. The dissimilarity argument also made little sense. Jesus was a Jew and Christianity came from him. You would expect most of what he said to fit on a trajectory from Judaism to Christianity (what N. T. Wright calls "double similarity").

Almost every one of the new quest criteria has a major flaw or qualification to be made. Basically, the historical study of Jesus has been a lot more faith-friendly in the last couple decades. John Meier's multi-volume study, James Dunn's Jesus Remembered, N. T. Wright's Jesus and the Victory of God, are all magisterial studies from individuals of faith.

Dunn has argued that oral traditions about Jesus would have started long before he was even crucified, an obvious model that surprisingly had eluded earlier questers. Dale Allison's Constructing Jesus has again common sensically argued that those who focused on specific sayings were missing the obvious--if there are a lot of instances of Jesus doing or saying similar types of things, those likely indicate that Jesus was remembered as doing and saying those sorts of things.

After a slough of Jesus books in the 90s, the field is probably pretty tired of questing. Nevertheless, you can be sure that in a few years, there will be some new angle and yet another quest...

Jesus' Devotions on Palm Sunday

I'm working on a devotional for Passion Week with Wesleyan Publishing and was looking at Psalm 118, the passage those laying down palms quote on Palm Sunday.  118:26 says, "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord" (NIV2011).  Of course it's impossible to know for sure, but the thought occurred to me, "What if this psalm was on Jesus' mind that day?"  Or to put it more creatively, "What if Jesus read this psalm for his devotions that Sunday morning?"

First, I think Jesus would have associated this psalm with David and of course Jesus knew himself to be the Son of David.  The overall thrust of the psalm is thus God's vindication of David despite significant opposition.  How powerful the words of 118:6: "The LORD is with me; I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?"  What about 118:9: "It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in princes"?

Are these words that Jesus had in mind as he marched into Jerusalem, the one destined to be king?  "They swarmed around me like bees."  And of course the gospels quote 118:22, "The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone."

I think it is quite possible that Jesus had well planned out Palm Sunday.  He arranged for the colt to evoke Zechariah 9:9.  Just perhaps it was arranged for people to quote Psalm 118:26.  And his course that day played out the path from Psalm 118:19 to 27: "Open for me the gates of the righteous... With boughs in hand, join in the festal procession up to the horns of the altar." So Jesus enters Jerusalem and proceeds to the temple.

"The LORD has done it this very day; let us rejoice and be glad."

Jesus and Memory

There's quite a bit being done right now, it seems, incorporating the findings of memory research in relation to Jesus.  I know Dale Allison dips into this.  James Dunn does.

A fascinating piece of this discussion is how the memory tends to mix the past and the present together when we recall events from the past that are similar to events in the present.  Without realizing it, we color the past with the present.

Let me give what I think is an example from contemporary politics.  After years and years in the Senate, Dick Lugar was beaten in the Republican primary this year by Richard Mourdock. What's amazing to me is to hear Republicans saying that Lugar went liberal.  If anything, Lugar was moving conservative to try to stay competitive in his party.  If someone with Reagan's exact positions were to run for office right now, he would be voted out like Lugar, I believe.

What's happened, in my opinion, is that Republican memory of Reagan has retained a basic sense of his positions (deregulation, trickle down, strong military) but mixed those memories with what those positions mean today in a Tea Party climate, which has pushed some of those concepts in a more starkly libertarian direction.  So the memory of Reagan is mixed with current categories.

This has fascinating implications when it comes to Jesus. On the one hand, there are those for whom exact memory of Jesus is part of the deal, those who link truthfulness to precise historicity.  Without getting into it, I think this misses out on a real richness to the text, that this approach actually flattens out a three-dimensional text and impoverishes it.

I generally see the theological dimension of the gospel presentations as intentional.  But memory research does raise the question of whether, on the level of oral traditions behind the gospels, there are mixtures of Jesus as he was precisely in history with the issues of the early church as it passed along Jesus tradition.  Did the oral traditions of Matthew, for example, mix some of its contemporary struggle with Pharisees with Jesus tradition where Jesus conflicted with more generic religious leaders?  Did Jesus' call to his disciples to be willing to suffer for him get mixed later with the cross, so that the oral tradition remembers him saying to take up their cross?

Perhaps this is part of how the Spirit applies Scripture to our lives all the time, mixing our current circumstances, without us even realizing it, with the words of the biblical texts.  It's at least something interesting to think about...

Jesus, Criteria, and the the Demise of Authenticity

I had a chance to pop over to Dayton yesterday to catch the main day of a mini-conference over the traditional criteria for discerning the historical Jesus...

It was connected to a collection of essays edited by Anthony LeDonne and Chris Keith.  I went because it was only a couple hours away, I wanted to catch up with the subject, and there were a lot of interesting people and friends involved--former students, former teachers, fellow Dunnites, Fulbright acquaintances, notorious bloggers, acquaintances from United Theological Seminary, etc...

The point of the essays--and the conference--was to capture in one place the problems with the traditional criteria for discerning the historical Jesus among the Gospel materials. Missing from the conference was Scot McKnight, whose essay I took basically to say that any quest by an individual for the historical Jesus simply creates a speculative narrative. So he argues that we should just stick to the biblical narratives.

The other presenters systematically dismantled the traditional criteria:

Semitic original: Loren Stuckenbruck indicated that after a number of years in the past trying to uncover a likely Aramaic original behind the Gospel texts, you just can't identify one with any degree of certainty.  The linguistic situation is just too messy.  Even the Aramaic in Mark does not prove Mark is earlier in itself.  And Matthew seems to "semitize" Mark's Greek sometimes.

Dale Allison gave a fun autobiography on his quest, how he eventually abandoned all the criteria and changed his method several times.  His last (or so he says) contribution has incorporated recent studies on how memory works.  But the most interesting thing is his sense that we should not be trying to weigh individual sayings or stories but categories of sayings or events.  It's not so important that we be able to prove that Jesus said one specific saying or did one specific thing.  What is more significant is that we have lots of sayings and events that show Jesus doing something, like helping the poor or getting into conflict with religious leaders.  It's a different kind of multiple attestation.

Coherence: Anthony LeDonne showed how Norm Perrin's version of coherence was really a subset of Bultmann's criterion of dissimilarity.  After you have determined what is likely by its dissimilarity to Judaism or Christianity, you can consider original sayings that cohere to it.  Since dissimilarity is problematic (see below), Perrin's version of coherence was also problematic.

LeDonne had more sympathy for John Meier's version of coherence.  If you can determine that some aspect of Jesus in general is likely to be historical, then other similar sayings or events are quite possibly historic as well.  But LeDonne makes it clear that memory shapes everything. There's no route around the layers between us and Jesus. We can only try to look through them. Coherence of the sort Allison now practices may point us toward the kinds of things Jesus did but it does not prove an individual saying.

Embarrassment: Rafael Rodriguez talked about this criteria and made it clear that you can always find alternative scenarios in which some saying or event might not have been embarrassing initially. So perhaps the best known example is Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist.  When Jesus is the superior, why would someone invent him being baptized by an inferior?

But alternative scenarios are possible. What if, for example, it improved Jesus' status at one point to associate him with John the Baptist and only later his status in the tradition grew so great that his baptism needed to be explained. (For those listening into this conversation, I don't think many question that Jesus was baptized by John. This is a question of historical method.)

Dissimilarity: Dagmar Winter suggested decades ago that it was ridiculous to consider dissimilarity from Judaism and Christianity an appropriate criterion for discerning the historical Jesus. We now talk about double similarity, that Jesus fits exactly between Judaism and Christianity, that the most plausible   Jesus is one on in a path between Jesus' historical context and the Jesus movement that resulted. LeDonne suggested that anti-Semitism played a role in this criterion, the distancing of Jesus from his Jewish background.

Multiple Attestation: Mark Goodacre was an appropriate person to speak on this one, given his rejection of Q.  Without Q, the supposed layers of independent sources tends to collapse.  The bottom line is that when it is quite possible these authors knew of each other's writings, the sources cease to be fully independent.

There was some question of whether the discussion might throw the baby (Jesus) out with the bath water (a Grathianism). I personally think of it more of a correction than a complete abandonment.  I will continue to use these sorts of factors in historical discussion. They are just far from foolproof in terms of historical method.  And maybe John Byron will get Scot McKnight into some conference on the historical Jesus and Christian theology.

Judgment of Israel (5)

... continued from last year. ;-)
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Some have suggested that Jesus' action in the temple meant to enact its coming destruction symbolically. [1]  No doubt at least looking back many Christians understood it this way.  The Synoptic gospels remember Jesus predicting the temple's destruction.  Whether it was entirely clear to them at the time is another question.

The key passage here is Jesus' "end times" sermon in Mark 13, Matthew 24, and Luke 21.  These gospels all present Jesus' teaching on coming judgment in the context of the Jerusalem temple and a prediction that its stones will all be torn down (e.g., Mark 13:2). Jesus begins to tell of a coming distress and then of the coming of the Son of Man.

The first part of the sermon is about a distress that is coming on Israel.  Given the way Mark introduces this teaching, we know that it involves the destruction of the temple.  In fact, Luke 21:20 paraphrases Jesus' teaching to make it clear that the destruction of Jerusalem is the desecration Jesus is predicting.  The way Mark puts it is much more ambiguous: "when you see 'the abomination that causes desolation' standing where it does not belong" (Mark 13:14).

So there may be some element of hindsight in the way the gospels present Jesus' teaching here. The sermon itself does not actually mention the temple's destruction--only its desecration is implied. [2]  The Jerusalem Christians in Acts worship in the temple without much of a sense of its impending doom, and Paul's enigmatic teaching in 2 Thessalonians 2 only speaks of a man of lawlessness setting himself up in the temple as god (2:4).

The second part of the sermon concerns the coming of the Son of Man and presumably the final judgment (e.g., Mark 13:24-31).  We know now--as the early Christians came to know--that there is a significant gap of time between the first and the second part of the sermon.  The temple in Jerusalem was destroyed in AD70, but we still wait for Christ's return. Luke in particular seems to bring out this distinction in the way he paraphrases the teaching.  He speaks of a "times of the Gentiles" that intervenes (Luke 21:24).

How should we as Christians today appropriate this teaching? ...

[1] E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism...


[2] So John Kloppenborg, "Evocatio Deorum and ***) JBL.

Jesus Begins 2

... continued from yesterday.
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John was baptizing people, dipping Jews in the river Jordan to symbolize the washing of their sins.  I would have heard the message: we Jews need to prepare ourselves for what is coming.  We need to clean ourselves to be ready or else we'll be swept up in the judgment along with everyone else.

Such ritual washings were of course a normal part of Jewish life.  There were miqvaot around Jerusalem, for example at the temple.  You purified yourself before offering sacrifices.  The Essenes at the Dead Sea had a miqveh at each entrance to their camp.  You walked down one side unclean and came up the other clean.  If I had seen John as an onlooker, I probably would have pegged him to be an Essene of some sort.

What was different about John's baptism is that he wasn't dipping people as usual.  His baptism wasn't something you did each year or each month.  This was a preparation for a one time event, the coming judgment of God on the world in preparation for the restoration of Israel, God's coming kingdom.

Part of that message was a new king, a new "Son of David" to resume ruling Israel just like the kings of old.  This "anointed one" or messiah (Christ in Greek) was an intimate part of the restored kingdom.  It may take a little doing to get into the heads of the people alongside the Jordan and what they were expecting in a messiah because not everyone was.

First, the people by the river were not expecting the messiah to be divine in the normal sense of that word.  True, there were Old Testament texts that referred to kings like Solomon as the "Son of God" (2 Sam. 7:14) and other texts that used very exalted language of the kings of Judah on various occasions (e.g., Ps. 2:7; 45:6-7; 89:27; 110:1).  But no one took these verses to mean that the king was literally a god or that the messiah would be a god.  They took it poetically.

It was perhaps the Essenes who first starting expecting God to anoint some special people in the process of restoring Israel.  Some of their key documents look forward to two "messiahs," two anointed ones.  One would be the new king of Israel.  The other would be the new priest of Israel.  But the group called the Sadducees weren't necessarily looking for a new king.  For them, Israel had done just fine with the high priest basically in charge for five hundred years.

As for the rest of Israel, from time to time revolutionaries would crop up, probably with hopes of turning out to be the new "anointed one" of Israel.  Acts mentions some of them. [1]  A book called Psalms of Solomon, especially chapter 17, very strongly hopes for a messiah to come and destroy the Romans. [2] But we really can't say how prevalent the expectation of a messiah was at the time John baptized.  Obviously he believed that a king was coming.

And here it is important to recognize that the Jews at the time of Jesus largely didn't read the verses of prophecy you might have learned in Sunday School the way we do.  The New Testament authors, by and large, read the Old Testament "spiritually" rather than for what the words originally meant.  It was only after the fact that Christians saw most of these Old Testament verses the way we do now.  In other words, it was not at all obvious to everyone either that a messiah was coming and certainly not that he would come in the way Christians now believe Jesus did...

[1] E.g., Acts 5:36-37; 21:38.

[2] It was written not long after the Romans defiled the temple and took over Israel in 63BC.

When Jesus was baptized...

So following from Sunday, I start the book over.  Thanks to everyone for things I had missed or needed to be sure to cover under other headings!
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We don't know the exact year. Luke 3:1 says it was the 15th year of the Roman emperor Tiberius, around the year AD29. John "the baptizer" started baptizing people in the river Jordan just a few miles east of Jerusalem.  Of course dating things is really complicated in the ancient world, so this is not a slam dunk.

Tiberius was the second Roman emperor (AD14-37), after Augustus (31BC-AD14).  You probably remember that Augustus was emperor when Jesus was born.  You've probably heard the verse at least at Christmas, "In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken" (Luke 2:1).  Our best guess is that Jesus was born sometime around 6-4BC because Matthew 2 says Herod (the Great) was still king, and Herod the Great died in 4BC.

That means that Jesus would be about thirty, maybe a little older, when he showed up at the Jordan River to be baptized by John (Luke 3:23; cf. John 8:57).  It is a little irritating not to know these things for certain, but that's just the way it is with the evidence we have.  People can get really angry when you mention uncertainty about things they've seen in every Christmas play since childhood. But the gospels do not always say exactly the same thing when it comes to minor details, so we just can't know for sure on some of these questions. We just have to deal with it.

What was John doing out there in the middle of nowhere, baptizing?  Jesus presumably came all the way from Galilee to see him, to participate.  It’s about a three day journey.  Jesus must have agreed with most or all of what John was saying to go through and get baptized by him.

The gospels tell us that John the Baptist was preaching a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (e.g., Mark 1:4).  The Jewish historian Josephus, as we would expect, presents John’s message in more general terms.  John was urging the crowds to become more virtuous. [1]

It's hard for us to get into the heads of John or the crowds.  We've heard so much in church and other places.  What would we have thought if we had been in those crowds who came to see John and maybe get baptized?

I think we would have heard something distinctly political both in John's message and symbolic action of baptism.  It is no coincidence that a new Herod, Herod Antipas, arrested John and eventually beheaded him.  He was no fool.

For example, where was John baptizing?  He was baptizing on the east side of the Jordan River, right around the place where Joshua had led Israel to occupy the land.  In the light of the rest of John's message, it was all too easy to see that John was preparing Israel for its restoration as a free kingdom.

The goal of repentance was to get the hearts of Israel ready for the return of God's kingdom on earth in Israel.  It is again no coincidence that the gospels remember John in the light of Old Testament passages like Isaiah 40:1-3.  While New Testament authors do not always read the Old Testament in context, the context of Isaiah fits John's message very well indeed: "a voice of one calling in the wilderness, 'Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him'" (Mark 1:3, quoting Isaiah 40:3).

The original context of Isaiah 40 was the return of Israel from captivity in Babylon.  Babylon had destroyed Jerusalem and taken many Israelites back as slaves.  But in 538BC, a new conquering king--Cyrus, king of Persia (cf. Isa. 45:1)--let those Jews who wanted to return go.  Isaiah 40 originally was about making a straight line through the desert home to Jerusalem from Babylon.  Flatten the hills, lift up the valleys, and straighten out any crooked roads because we're going home! [2]

So if we were there with John by the Jordan, I think we would have heard similar overtones in what he was doing.  In a sense, Israel is still in exile.  The Romans are in control.  These texts in Isaiah point toward Israel regaining its independence and being restored (cf. Acts 1:6).

John probably also criticized the current leadership of Jerusalem.  His message of repentance was a message of hope for those who participated.  But it was a message of judgment for everyone else, including the current leaders in Jerusalem and people like Herod Antipas.  For them it was a message of impending doom...

[1] Antiquities 18.5.2.

[2] Accordingly, in its original context, the Lord Isaiah has in mind is Yahweh, the LORD, rather than a king.  However, as we will see, it was perfectly legitimate for the New Testament authors to read the Old Testament in a "spiritual" way that differed from the original meaning.

Parables of the Kingdom 2

... continued from yesterday.
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Given the fact that these parables have traveled from Jesus through decades of Jesus-followers to the individual gospel writers, it is not surprising sometimes to find a "layered-ness" to them.  For example, it is no coincidence that parables involving money and women stand out in Luke, because these are some of its emphases.  It is not surprising to find more pronounced parables about judgment in Matthew, because Matthew specializes among the gospels in weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth.

Similarly, it is not surprising that we do not always pick up on the "political" overtones Jesus' parables probably had originally in terms of Israel as a "nation." In the next volume, I will argue that all four of the gospels in their current form likely date to after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70, so it is no surprise if we have to dig a little to hear them as the Galilean peasants on the countryside would have.  The gospels were written to present Jesus to their audiences and so understandably focus on Jesus' ministry in terms that apply most to their communities of faith in the late first century.

For Luke, this was the "times of the Gentiles" (cf. Luke 21:24).  For Matthew, this was the time when the mission had shifted to all the nations (cf. Matt. 28:19).  By contrast, Jesus' primary focus on earth was surely on Israel and the Jews (cf. Matt. 10:5-6), and even then only on a subset of Israel. [1] The last chapter showed how likely it was that the restoration of Israel politically was part of John the Baptist's message, and it is not hard to find hints of this dynamic in the gospels even as they now stand (e.g., Matt. 19:28).

Originally, Jesus' audiences would not have distinguished the kingdom of God from the kingdom of re-established Israel, and it would have been understood undoubtedly as a kingdom to come on earth.  In the period after Easter, it no doubt was clear to Jesus-followers that only those who accepted Jesus as the messiah would be part of this kingdom.  Nevertheless, even Paul argues that the vast majority of Israel would eventually come to have this faith (cf. Rom. 11:25-32).

These observations remind us of how differently we read the Bible than its first audiences would have heard them.  We tend to think of the church as something completely separate from Israel as a nation.  Similarly, over the centuries Christians have tended to think more in terms of heaven and hell than in terms of a coming kingdom on earth.  Recent days have seen a movement to recognize that the Bible primarily teaches about eternity on a restored earth after a resurrection of our bodies. [2]

And there is an increasing recognition that Christianity did not become a separate religion from Judaism perhaps until after all the books of the New Testament were written, [3] with some arguing they were not completely distinct even in the early 300s. [4] In the thinking of the New Testament, Gentiles were added to the kingdom of (true) Israel.  Christianity was not some new religion, and Gentiles who converted to Christianity saw themselves converting to a form of Judaism.  It was not until around AD200 that the Gentile Christian Tertullian made his famous comments about Christianity being a "third race," neither Jewish or Gentile. [5]

The point is that we can usually read Jesus' parables in more than one way.  Originally, they had much to say to the Galilean Jews who came to hear him from the surrounding villages.  Yet the gospel writers also "translated" them in ways that spoke to increasingly Gentile audiences in the late first century.  And the way the gospels have sometimes generalized them has also helped us to hear truths that apply directly to us even today...

[1] The "lost sheep" of Israel, and even then, primarily the lost sheep in Galilee.

[2] E.g., N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008) and Joel B. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008).  Wright and Green may at times overstate their case, but their fundamental argument seems beyond reasonable doubt.

[3] Cf. James D. G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways: Between Christianity and Judaism and Their Significance for the Character of Christianity, 2nd ed. (London: SCM, 2011).

[4] Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed, The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007); also Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2006).

[5] To the Gentiles 1.8.

Parables of the Kingdom 1

It has been October 6 since I posted on Jesus and the kingdom.  I had been writing on "The Essential Jesus" before getting quite distracted.  I now want to resume blogging about Jesus from now till the time he returns... or until I finish or am otherwise distracted ;-)
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Parables of the Kingdom
Mark has this to say about the way Jesus taught the crowds that followed him: "he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples" (4:34, NRSV).  It goes against the way most of us think about parables, but Jesus tells his disciples that his parables are meant to be something like riddles to the crowds, "in order that 'they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand'" (4:12, NRSV).  These stories, that some use as an illustration of how clearly Jesus taught, sometimes had the effect of confusing, of distinguishing those who had faith from those who did not.

Now this way of looking at Jesus' parables fits especially with one of the special themes of Mark--the hiddenness of who Jesus was and the misunderstanding of his followers.  Luke does not treat Jesus' parables in this way.  The second Jesus volume in this series will explore unique features in each gospel like these.  What I take away from Mark for now is that Jesus' followers--including his disciples--may have looked back at his teaching in hindsight with a somewhat different understanding than they had when he was on earth. Looking back, his parables may have looked somewhat like riddles that they could only really understand now.

Mark tells us that these parables or riddles were the main way Jesus spoke publicly. [1]  The kinds of parables Jesus told are exactly the kinds of stories that fit an agricultural world: stories about seeds, farming, day laborers, feasts, muggers, not to mention economic and religious pressures from "outsiders."  The parables in the gospels range from very short stories to one line comparisons (called similes). [2]  Sometimes the same basic parable varies a little from gospel to gospel, a fact worth a quick moment of reflection.

It is true that Jesus likely retold the same parable on more than one occasion and that he may very well have varied them himself from time to time.  However, this fact does not likely account for all the variation among the gospels for two reasons.  First, these stories were likely told and retold from the moment Jesus shared them. [3] It seems almost certain that the gospel writers were not bothered by the sorts of minor variations that come from oral tradition. It is simply wrong to demand they follow modern expectations about how to do "investigative reporting."

A second factor is that they also felt free to edit their sources themselves in order to emphasize certain things. [4] They were oriented around the message.  They were not antiquarians whose main goal was to make sure they told it exactly how it happened or to get the quotes exactly as they were originally said.  The gospels are more like The Message than the King James Version.  Detailed comparisons of the gospels demonstrate this fact over and over again beyond any reasonable doubt.

We cannot critique them for their focus on the message rather than on precise historical reconstruction.  That is our problem and our hang-up, not theirs.  They were not in error to do so. We are in error if we insist that our standard is the only correct standard!

...

[1] On the parables, I want to suggest two books that I consider very helpful: Craig Blomberg, Interpreting the Parables (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1990) and Klyde Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008).  Older classics that are now less helpful include C. H. Dodd's, The Parables of the Kingdom (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1961) and Joachim Jeremias' The Parables of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1972 [1958]).

[2] In an earlier day, the German scholar Adolf Jülicher put some very strange restrictions on what Jesus could or could not have really said based on the form a parable might take (Die Gleichnisreden Jesu 2 vols. [Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1888, 1899]).  Famously, he thought a parable that really went back to Jesus could only have one point and certainly could not be in the form of an allegory, where the various elements of the story had some figurative significance.  Scholars now rightly recognize that these claims, which were strangely influential for almost a century, have little basis at all.

[3] This is a key insight from the work of Kenneth Bailey, Jesus through Middle Eastern Eyes (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008).  A nice overview of some of the implications is in James D. G. Dunn, A New Perspective on Jesus: What the Quest for the Historical Jesus Missed (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005).

[4] I will show why this is almost certainly the case in the second volume of this series.

The Coming Kingdom

Continued from yesterday and the day before...
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To a large extent, many of these questions are unanswerable.  We are plodding through them to get a sense of exactly what we are dealing with here, what the possibilities are and which are more and less likely.  As we continue this troublesome journey, we notice interestingly that Luke 21 has seriously toned down the immanent expectation of Mark 13.  For well over a century, most gospel experts have concluded that Luke likely used Mark as a major source when writing.  We can thus see Luke's mind at work in where he seems to edit Mark's text.

For example, if Mark and Matthew seem to blur the events surrounding the destruction of the temple with Christ's second coming, Luke has apparently edited Mark to focus almost exclusively on the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70.  So Mark 13:14 is somewhat ambiguous: "When you see the abomination of desolation standing where it should not be" (NASB).  After Luke's editing, it reads like this: "When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then recognize that her desolation is near" (Luke 21:20). [1] Luke has made it clearer that this event took place when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in AD70.

Similarly, Luke has apparently removed statements in Mark like 13:19: "in those days there will be suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now, no, and never will be" (NRSV; this verse should have followed Luke 21:23).  Luke also removes Mark 13:20: "if the Lord had not cut short those days, no one would be saved" (should also have appeared before Luke 21:24).  The effect is to limit the scope of catastrophe in Mark and Matthew.  Now we hear of the "times of the Gentiles" (Luke 21:24), a period during which the Gentiles will trample on Jerusalem in between the the time when the first part of the prophecy is fulfilled and when the kingdom will be restored to Israel at Christ's return (Acts 1:6). [2]

The impression we get is that we are not the first to wrestle with this question of when the kingdom of God will be here in full, when Christ will return to the earth to rule.  Already in Luke we see early Christians wrestling with what some call the "delay of the parousia," the fact that Jesus did not return to earth as soon as his first followers initially anticipated.  How did Jesus originally put it?  To what extent did Mark interpret it?  It seems impossible to answer these questions with any certainty from a historical perspective.

What we do have are the conclusions Christians have reached on these issues over the centuries. Does not the Holy Spirit come on the church at Pentecost?  Perhaps it is not what Mark himself had in mind, but does not the birth of the church through the Spirit constitute "that the kingdom of God has come in power" (9:1)?  Did not that generation see the destruction of Jerusalem and did not at least most of Mark 13 come true in their lifetimes?  What if the events of the second coming were "telescoped" into material about the destruction of the temple?

It is often said that when you look at things through a telescope, things that are far removed from each other may look right next to each other.  So it is often said of prophecy.  We also know from Jonah also that God reserves the right to "change his mind" on prophecy.  Predictions of destruction can be reversed because of human response--presumably, predictions of blessing can also.

We as Christians believe that Jesus inaugurated the rule of God on earth as it is in heaven.  The kingdom was starting on earth in his ministry.  We believe it came to earth spiritually with the pouring out of God's Spirit on the earth, beginning the age of the church, which has continued up until the present.  And we believe that the kingdom will become entirely literal when Christ returns to earth and sets up an eternal kingdom here.

This is a theological perspective on the kingdom.  It is the result of centuries-long Christian reflection on Jesus' words and the events that followed.  The earliest followers of Jesus probably did not have a full understanding of how God was playing it all out.  This is one of the blessings of having so many interpreters go before us.  We have inherited the answers God has bequeathed to the church through them... often when we did not even realize there was a question.

[1] The clarity of Luke's paraphrase here is one reason to conclude that Luke-Acts was written after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70.  The desolation of Jerusalem by armies is a massive interpretation of the ambiguous, "abomination that causes desolation standing where it should not be."

[2] The freedom with which Luke paraphrases Mark should not worry us.  All the evidence we have indicates that the New Testament authors felt free to paraphrase Scripture freely and interpretively, much as Eugene Peterson's paraphrase, The Message.  We should not be bothered that Luke is doing it to statements of Jesus, in effect altering historical statements.  Our sense of what is appropriate in history writing is simply not the same as theirs was.  Luke is giving an inspired interpretation of Jesus. 

What did Jesus know 3

For the first half of this section, see here.
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... The path that this line of questioning leads us down is a difficult one and not for the faint of heart.  Almost any answer we suggest seems to require adjustments to more comfortable positions, or at least to popular assumptions.  For example, there is the question of Jesus' knowledge.  We may tend to think of Jesus as knowing everything while he was on earth because he was God.  It would be easy to get this impression especially from reading John.

But Jesus himself in Mark explicitly indicates that he was not omniscient on earth. "But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" (13:32).  One way to conceptualize Jesus' earthly state in our Christian thinking is by way of Paul's comment that Jesus "emptied himself" in Philippians 2:7.  While Paul was not thinking of Jesus emptying himself of omniscience here, Christians have often read the verse in reference to Jesus emptying himself of many divine powers and privileges in his incarnation.  However we take it, the gospels clearly present the earthly Jesus as more limited in knowledge than God the Father.

Presumably, Jesus learned things the way we all do as children and adults.  Would we really imagine that he had fluent conversations in Aramaic with his mother as soon as he emerged from her womb?  Or did he announce to her at his one year old birthday that he was the pre-existent, second person of the Trinity?  In the middle of his ministry, would he have automatically understood a conversation with us in English or French, languages that did not yet exist?

It is both orthodox and biblical to suppose that Jesus learned and knew things much like the rest of us, with the exception of course that he had an unhindered connection with the Holy Spirit.  Even here, we can make a good argument that, in his full participation in humanity, Jesus played it by human rules.  Does not John 14:12 say that by the Spirit's power we can do even greater things than Jesus did while on earth?  A good argument can be made theologically that, by the Spirit's power, there is nothing Jesus did while he was on earth that we cannot also do--whether it be knowledge, power, or resistance of temptation.

So there is neither anything unbiblical nor unorthodox to suggest that Jesus may not have known his full mission from the very beginning.  When did he realize he was the messiah?  When did he realize he was divine?  When did he realize he was going to die for sins?  Could he himself not initially have foreseen how long the time would be between his death and second coming?

But was he ever mistaken in his thinking?  A partial understanding is one thing, but a wrong one?  Did he ever mistakenly tell his mother he left the camel by the synagogue when he had actually left it at the gate?  Since forgetfulness of this sort is not a sin, there is nothing unorthodox or unbiblical to suggest that Jesus made mental mistakes of this sort like any of us do.  Perfect memory and moral perfection have little to do with each other.

But now we get to potentially more problematic questions.  If Jesus' understanding of the coming kingdom developed, would God have allowed any partial understandings to end up in Scripture, anything that was less than "fully cooked"? [5] It is one thing to ask if it is possible that Jesus himself did not initially realize there would be two thousand years between his departure and return.  It is another to ask whether such a partial understanding would end up in Scripture.

Interestingly, we can imagine that many Christians will find it more difficult to imagine that a partial understanding would end up in Scripture than to imagine that Jesus himself might have had a partial understanding at some point. Is it possible that Matthew and Mark did not see that there would be a gap between the tribulations of the destruction of Jerusalem and the final return of Christ?  Is it even possible that they presented Jesus' words in a way that sounds like there would be less of a gap than Jesus himself presented the coming of the kingdom?

To a large extent, many of these questions are unanswerable.  We are plodding through them to get a sense of exactly what we are dealing with here, what the possibilities are and which are more or less likely.  As we continue this troublesome journey, we notice interestingly that Luke 21 has seriously toned down the immanent expectation of Mark 13...

[5] We do find some material in the Old Testament that is less than "fully cooked" on his way to full revelation.  Take for example this statement from Ecclesiastes 3:19-20: "For the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and humans have no advantage over the animals; for all is vanity. All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again."  This part of the Old Testament has no sense of a significant afterlife.  The idea of a progress of revelation between the testaments seems inevitable.  It is more difficult for us to allow for such things in the New Testament.