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Jesus
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Jesus, also called Jesus Christ, Jesus of Galilee, or Jesus of Nazareth, (born c. 6–4 bce, Bethlehem—died c. 30 ce, Jerusalem), religious leader revered in Christianity, one of the world’s major religions. He is regarded by most Christians as the Incarnation of God. The history of Christian reflection on the teachings and nature of Jesus is examined in the article Christology.
Name and title
Ancient Jews usually had only one name, and, when greater specificity was needed, it was customary to add the father’s name or the place of origin. Thus, in his lifetime Jesus was called Jesus son of Joseph (Luke 4:22; John 1:45, 6:42), Jesus of Nazareth (Acts 10:38), or Jesus the Nazarene (Mark 1:24; Luke 24:19). After his death he came to be called Jesus Christ. Christ was not originally a name but a title derived from the Greek word christos, which translates the Hebrew term meshiah (Messiah), meaning “the anointed one.” This title indicates that Jesus’ followers believed him to be the anointed son of King David, whom some Jews expected to restore the fortunes of Israel. Passages such as Acts of the Apostles 2:36 show that some early Christian writers knew that the Christ was properly a title, but in many passages of the New Testament, including those in the letters of the Apostle Paul, the name and title are combined and used together as Jesus’ name: Jesus Christ or Christ Jesus (Romans 1:1; 3:24). Paul sometimes simply used Christ as Jesus’ name (e.g., Romans 5:6).
Summary of Jesus’ life
Although born in Bethlehem, according to Matthew and Luke, Jesus was a Galilean from Nazareth, a village near Sepphoris, one of the two major cities of Galilee (Tiberias was the other). He was born to Joseph and Mary sometime between 6 bce and shortly before the death of Herod the Great (Matthew 2; Luke 1:5) in 4 bce. According to Matthew and Luke, however, Joseph was only legally his father. They report that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived and that she “was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 1:18; cf. Luke 1:35). Joseph is said to have been a carpenter (Matthew 13:55)—that is, a craftsman who worked with his hands—and, according to Mark 6:3, Jesus also became a carpenter.
Luke (2:41–52) states that Jesus as a youth was precociously learned, but there is no other evidence of his childhood or early life. As a young adult, he went to be baptized by the prophet John the Baptist and shortly thereafter became an itinerant preacher and healer (Mark 1:2–28). In his mid-30s Jesus had a short public career, lasting perhaps less than one year, during which he attracted considerable attention. Sometime between 29 and 33 ce—possibly 30 ce—he went to observe Passover in Jerusalem, where his entrance, according to the Gospels, was triumphant and infused with eschatological significance. While there he was arrested, tried, and executed. His disciples became convinced that he rose from the dead and appeared to them. They converted others to belief in him, which eventually led to a new religion, Christianity.
Jewish Palestine at the time of Jesus
The political situation
Palestine in Jesus’ day was part of the Roman Empire, which controlled its various territories in a number of ways. In the East (eastern Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt), territories were governed either by kings who were “friends and allies” of Rome (often called “client” kings or, more disparagingly, “puppet” kings) or by governors supported by a Roman army. When Jesus was born, all of Jewish Palestine—as well as some of the neighbouring Gentile areas—was ruled by Rome’s able “friend and ally” Herod the Great. For Rome, Palestine was important not in itself but because it lay between Syria and Egypt, two of Rome’s most valuable possessions. Rome had legions in both countries but not in Palestine. Roman imperial policy required that Palestine be loyal and peaceful so that it did not undermine Rome’s larger interests. That end was achieved for a long time by permitting Herod to remain king of Judaea (37–4 bce) and allowing him a free hand in governing his kingdom, as long as the requirements of stability and loyalty were met.
When Herod died shortly after Jesus’ birth, his kingdom was divided into five parts. Most of the Gentile areas were separated from the Jewish areas, which were split between two of Herod’s sons, Herod Archelaus, who received Judaea and Idumaea (as well as Samaria, which was non-Jewish), and Herod Antipas, who received Galilee and Peraea. (In the New Testament, Antipas is somewhat confusingly called Herod, as in Luke 23:6–12; apparently the sons of Herod took his name, just as the successors of Julius Caesar were commonly called Caesar.) Both sons were given lesser titles than king: Archelaus was ethnarch, and Antipas was tetrarch. The non-Jewish areas (except Samaria) were assigned to a third son, Philip, to Herod’s sister Salome, or to the province of Syria. The emperor Augustus deposed the unsatisfactory Archelaus in 6 ce, however, and transformed Judaea, Idumaea, and Samaria from a client kingdom into an “imperial province.” Accordingly, he sent a prefect to govern this province. That minor Roman aristocrat (later called a procurator) was supported by a small Roman army of approximately 3,000 men. The soldiers, however, came not from Italy but from nearby Gentile cities, especially Caesarea and Sebaste; presumably, the officers were from Italy. During Jesus’ public career, the Roman prefect was Pontius Pilate (ruled 26–36 ce).
Although nominally in charge of Judaea, Samaria, and Idumaea, the prefect did not govern his area directly. Instead, he relied on local leaders. The prefect and his small army lived in the predominantly Gentile city Caesarea, on the Mediterranean coast, about two days’ march from Jerusalem. They came to Jerusalem only to ensure peace during the pilgrimage festivals—Passover, Weeks (Shabuoth), and Booths (Sukkoth)—when large crowds and patriotic themes sometimes combined to spark unrest or uprisings. On a day-to-day basis Jerusalem was governed by the high priest. Assisted by a council, he had the difficult task of mediating between the remote Roman prefect and the local populace, which was hostile toward pagans and wanted to be free of foreign interference. His political responsibility was to maintain order and to see that tribute was paid. Caiaphas, the high priest during Jesus’ adulthood, held the office from about 18 to 36 ce, longer than anyone else during the Roman period, indicating that he was a successful and reliable diplomat. Since he and Pilate were in power together for 10 years, they must have collaborated successfully.
Thus, at the time of Jesus’ public career, Galilee was governed by the tetrarch Antipas, who was sovereign within his own domain, provided that he remained loyal to Rome and maintained peace and stability within his borders. Judaea (including Jerusalem) was nominally governed by Pilate, but the actual daily rule of Jerusalem was in the hands of Caiaphas and his council.
Relations between Jewish areas and nearby Gentile areas
Galilee and Judaea, the principal Jewish areas of Palestine, were surrounded by Gentile territories (i.e., Caesarea, Dora, and Ptolemais on the Mediterranean coast; Caesarea Philippi north of Galilee; and Hippus and Gadara east of Galilee). There also were two inland Gentile cities on the west side of the Jordan River near Galilee (Scythopolis and Sebaste). The proximity of Gentile and Jewish areas meant that there was some interchange between them, including trade, which explains why Antipas had telōnēs—often translated as “tax collectors” but more accurately rendered as “customs officers”—in the villages on his side of the Sea of Galilee. There also was some exchange of populations: some Jews lived in Gentile cities, such as Scythopolis, and some Gentiles lived in at least one of the Jewish cities, Tiberias. Jewish merchants and traders could probably speak some Greek, but the primary language of Palestinian Jews was Aramaic (a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew). On the other hand, the Jews resisted paganism and excluded temples for the worship of the gods of Greece and Rome from their cities, along with the Greek educational institutions the ephebeia and gymnasion, gladiatorial contests, and other buildings or institutions typical of Gentile areas. Because Jewish-Gentile relations in the land that the Jews considered their own were often uneasy, Jewish areas were usually governed separately from Gentile areas. The reign of Herod the Great was the exception to that rule, but even he treated the Jewish and the Gentile parts of his kingdom differently, fostering Greco-Roman culture in Gentile sectors but introducing only very minor aspects of it in Jewish areas.
In the 1st century Rome showed no interest in making the Jews in Palestine and other parts of the empire conform to common Greco-Roman culture. A series of decrees by Julius Caesar, Augustus, the Roman Senate, and various city councils permitted Jews to keep their own customs, even when they were antithetical to Greco-Roman culture. For example, in respect for Jewish observance of the Sabbath, Rome exempted Jews from conscription in Rome’s armies. Neither did Rome colonize Jewish Palestine. Augustus established colonies elsewhere (in southern France, Spain, North Africa, and Asia Minor), but prior to the First Jewish Revolt (66–74 ce) Rome established no colonies in Jewish Palestine. Few individual Gentiles from abroad would have been attracted to live in Jewish cities, where they would have been cut off from their customary worship and cultural activities. The Gentiles who lived in Tiberias and other Jewish cities were probably natives of nearby Gentile cities, and many were Syrians, who could probably speak both Aramaic and Greek.
Economic conditions
Most people in the ancient world produced food, clothing, or both and could afford few luxuries. Most Palestinian Jewish farmers and herdsmen, however, earned enough to support their families, pay their taxes, offer sacrifices during one or more annual festivals, and let their land lie fallow in the sabbatical years, when cultivation was prohibited. Galilee in particular was relatively prosperous, since the land and climate permitted abundant harvests and supported many sheep. Although it is doubtful that Galilee was as affluent in the 1st century as it was during the late Roman and Byzantine periods, archaeological remains from the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries nevertheless confirm the plausibility of 1st-century references to the region’s prosperity. There were, of course, landless people, but the Herodian dynasty was careful to organize large public works projects that employed thousands of men. Desperate poverty was present too but never reached a socially dangerous level. At the other end of the economic spectrum, few if any Palestinian Jews had the vast fortunes that successful merchants in port cities could accumulate. However, there were Jewish aristocrats with large estates and grand houses, and the merchants who served the Temple (supplying, for example, incense and fabric) could become very prosperous. The gap between rich and poor in Palestine was obvious and distressing to the poor, but, compared with that of the rest of the world, it was not especially wide.
The Jewish religion in the 1st century
Judaism, as the Jewish religion came to be known in the 1st century ce, was based on ancient Israelite religion, shorn of many of its Canaanite characteristics but with the addition of important features from Babylonia and Persia. The Jews differed from other people in the ancient world because they believed that there was only one God. Like other people, they worshipped their God with animal sacrifices offered at a temple, but, unlike others, they had only one temple, which was in Jerusalem. The sanctuary of the Jewish temple had two rooms, as did many of the other temples in the ancient world, but the second room of the Jewish temple was empty. There was no idol representing the God of Israel. The Jews also believed that they had been specially chosen by the one God of the universe to serve him and obey his laws. Although set apart from other people, they believed God called on them to be a “light to the Gentiles” and lead them to accept the God of Israel as the only God.
An important part of Jewish Scripture was the Torah, or Pentateuch, comprising five books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) that were believed to have been given to Moses by God. For Jews and their spiritual descendants, those books contain God’s law, which covers many aspects of ordinary life: it requires that males be circumcised, regulates diet, mandates days of rest for humans and animals alike (Sabbaths and festival days), requires pilgrimage and sacrifice, stipulates recompense and atonement following transgression, and specifies impurities and required purification before entry to the Temple. Moreover, it provides both rules and principles for the treatment of other people: for example, calling for the use of honest weights and measures in trade and for “love” (that is, upright treatment) of both fellow Jews and foreigners (Leviticus 19). The laws governing worship (sacrifice, purification, admission to the Temple, and the like) were similar to the religious laws of other people in the ancient world. Judaism was different because in most other cultures divine law covered only such topics, but in Judaism it regulated not only worship but also daily life and made every aspect of life a matter of divine concern.
Since both faith and practice were based firmly on the five books of Moses modified slightly over time, they were shared by Jews all over the world, from Mesopotamia to Italy and beyond. The common features of Jewish faith and practice are reflected in the decrees from various parts of the ancient world that allowed Jews to preserve their own traditions, including monotheism, rest and assembly on the Sabbath, support of the Temple, and dietary laws. There were, naturally, variations on each main theme. In Jewish Palestine, for example, there were three small but important religious parties that differed from each other in several ways: the Pharisees (numbering about 6,000 at the time of Herod), Essenes (about 4,000), and Sadducees (“a few men,” according to Flavius Josephus, in The Antiquities of the Jews 18.17). A largely lay group that had the reputation of being the most-precise interpreters of the law, the Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead. They also relied on the nonbiblical “traditions of the fathers,” some of which made the law stricter while others relaxed it. The Essenes were a more-radical sect, with extremely strict rules. One branch of the group lived at Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea and produced the Dead Sea Scrolls. At some point in their history the Essenes were probably a priestly sect (the Zadokite priests are major figures in some of the documents from Qumran); however, the composition of their membership at the time of Jesus is unclear. Many aristocratic priests, as well as some prominent laymen, were Sadducees. They rejected the Pharisaic “traditions of the fathers” and maintained some old-fashioned theological opinions. Most famously, they denied resurrection, which had recently entered Jewish thought from Persia and which was accepted by most Jews in the 1st century.
Most Jews based their faith and practice on the five books of Moses (slightly modified by the passage of time) and rejected the extreme positions of the three parties. The Pharisees were respected for their piety and learning, and they may have exercised substantial influence on belief and practice. The Essenes were a fringe group, and those who lived at Qumran had dropped out of mainstream Judaism. Their interpretation of the Bible led them to reject the priests and the Temple as they existed in Jerusalem, and they looked forward to the time when they could seize control of the Holy City. To the degree that any of these parties had power, however, it belonged to the Sadducees. More precisely, the aristocratic priests and a few prominent laymen had power and authority in Jerusalem; of the aristocrats who belonged to one of the parties, most were Sadducees. According to the Acts of the Apostles (5:17), those who were around the high priest Caiaphas were Sadducees, which recalls the evidence of the Jewish priestly aristocrat, historian, and Pharisee Josephus.
Although the vast majority of Jews did not belong to a party, the study of these parties reveals the substantial variety within the general framework of Judaism. Another indicator of this variety was the diversity of Jewish leaders. Among them were charismatic healers and miracle workers, such as Honi the Circle Drawer and Hanina ben Dosa; hermitlike sages, such as Bannus; eschatological prophets, such as John the Baptist; would-be messianic prophets, such as Theudas and the Egyptian; and apocalyptic visionaries, represented by the pseudepigraphal First Book of Enoch.
Most Jews had some form of future hope. In general, they expected God to intervene in history and to restore Israel to a state of peace, freedom, and prosperity. Not all Jews expected God to send a son of David as messiah to overthrow the Romans, though some did. The Qumran sect believed that there would be a great war against Rome, that the sect would emerge victorious, and that the main blows would be struck by the angel Michael and finally by God himself. Notably, a messiah plays no role in this war of liberation. Some Jews were ready at any moment to take up arms against Rome, thinking that if they started the fight, God would intervene on their side. Others were quietists, hoping for divine deliverance without having a more-specific vision of the future but entirely unwilling to fight. Whatever their specific expectations, very few Palestinian Jews were completely satisfied with the governments of Antipas, Pilate, and Caiaphas. As God’s chosen people, the Jews felt they should be free both of foreign domination and of ambitious worldly leaders.
In the final analysis, variety and commonality are equally important to the understanding of Palestinian Judaism in Jesus’ day. Jews agreed on many basic aspects of their religion and way of life, and they agreed that they did not want to surrender their covenant with God to accept the lure of pagan culture, but, when it came to details, they could disagree with one another violently. Since God cared about every aspect of life, competing groups and leaders often saw themselves as representing the side of God against his adversaries.
Sources for the life of Jesus
The only substantial sources for the life and message of Jesus are the Gospels of the New Testament, the earliest of which was Mark (written 60–80 ce), followed by Matthew, Luke, and John (75–90 ce). Some additional evidence can be found in the letters of Paul, which were written beginning in 50 ce and are the earliest surviving Christian texts. There are, however, other sources that may have further information. Noncanonical sources, especially the apocryphal gospels, contain many sayings attributed to Jesus, as well as stories about him that are occasionally held to be “authentic.” Among these apocrypha is the Gospel of Judas, a gnostic text of the 2nd century ce that portrays Judas as an important collaborator of Jesus and not his betrayer. Another important text, the mid-2nd-century-ce Gospel of Thomas, has attracted much attention. A “sayings” gospel (114 sayings attributed to Jesus, without narrative), it is grounded in gnosticism, the philosophical and religious movement of the 2nd century ce that stressed the redemptive power of esoteric knowledge acquired by divine revelation. For Thomas, salvation consists of self-knowledge, and baptism results in restoration to the primordial state—man and woman in one person, like Adam before the creation of Eve (saying 23). Spiritual reversion to that state meant that nakedness need not result in shame. One passage (saying 37) allows it to be suspected that the early Christian followers of the Gospel of Thomas took off their garments and trampled on them as part of their baptismal initiation. There are a few connections between this worldview and that of Paul and the Gospel According to John, but the overall theology of the Gospel of Thomas is so far removed from the teaching of Jesus as found in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke—in which Jewish eschatology is central—that it is not considered a major source for the study of Jesus. It is, of course, possible or even likely that individual sayings in Thomas or other apocryphal gospels originated with Jesus, but it is unlikely that noncanonical sources can contribute much to the portrait of the historical Jesus. As in the case of the Gospel of Thomas, the traditions found in other apocryphal gospels are often completely unlike the evidence of the canonical gospels and are embedded in documents that are generally believed to be unreliable.
There are a few references to Jesus in 1st-century Roman and Jewish sources. Documents indicate that within a few years of Jesus’ death, Romans were aware that someone named Chrestus (a slight misspelling of Christus) had been responsible for disturbances in the Jewish community in Rome (Suetonius, The Life of the Deified Claudius 25.4). Twenty years later, according to Tacitus, Christians in Rome were prominent enough to be persecuted by Nero, and it was known that they were devoted to Christus, whom Pilate had executed (Annals 15.44). This knowledge of Jesus, however, was dependent on familiarity with early Christianity and does not provide independent evidence about Jesus. Josephus wrote a paragraph about Jesus (The Antiquities of the Jews 18.63ff.)—as he did about Theudas, the Egyptian, and other charismatic leaders (History of the Jewish War 2.258–263; The Antiquities of the Jews 20.97–99, 167–172)—but it has been heavily revised by Christian scribes, and Josephus’s original remarks cannot be discerned.
The letters of Paul contain reliable but meagre evidence. Their main theme, that Jesus was crucified and raised from the dead, is especially prominent in 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul evokes an early tradition about Jesus’ death and subsequent appearances to his followers. The Crucifixion and Resurrection were accepted by all first-generation Christians. Paul also quotes a few of Jesus’ sayings: the prohibition of divorce and remarriage (1 Corinthians 7:10–11), the words over the bread and cup at Jesus’ Last Supper (1 Corinthians 11:23–25), and a prediction of the imminent arrival of the Saviour from heaven (1 Thessalonians 4:15–17).
Fuller information about Jesus is found in the Gospels of the New Testament, though those are not of equal value in reconstructing his life and teaching. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke agree so closely with one another that they can be studied together in parallel columns in a work called a synopsis and are hence called the Synoptic Gospels. John, however, is so different that it cannot be reconciled with the Synoptics except in very general ways (e.g., Jesus lived in Palestine, taught, healed, was crucified and raised). In the Synoptics Jesus’ public career appears to have lasted less than one year, since only one Passover is mentioned, but in John three Passovers occur, implying a ministry of more than two years. In all four Gospels Jesus performs miracles, especially healings, but, while exorcisms are prevalent in the Synoptics, there are none in John. The greatest differences, though, appear in the methods and content of Jesus’ teaching. In the Synoptic Gospels he speaks about the kingdom of God in short aphorisms and parables, making use of similes and figures of speech, many drawn from agricultural and village life. He seldom refers to himself, and, when asked for a “sign” to prove his authority, he refuses (Mark 8:11–12). In John, on the other hand, Jesus employs long metaphorical discourses, in which he himself is the main subject. His miracles are described as “signs” that support the authenticity of his claims.
Scholars have unanimously chosen the Synoptic Gospels’ version of Jesus’ teaching. The verdict on the miracles is the same, though less firmly held: in all probability Jesus was known as an exorcist, which resulted in the charge that he cast out demons by the prince of demons (Mark 3:22–27). The choice between the narrative outline of the Synoptics and that of John is less clear. Besides presenting a longer ministry than do the other Gospels, John also describes several trips to Jerusalem. Only one is mentioned in the Synoptics. Both outlines are plausible, but a ministry of more than two years leaves more questions unanswered than does one of a few months. It is generally accepted that Jesus and his disciples were itinerant, that they traveled around Galilee and its immediate environs and that Jesus taught and healed in various towns and villages as well as in the countryside and on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. But where did they spend their winters? Who supported them? None of the Gospels explains how they lived (though Luke 8:1–3 alludes to some female supporters), but the omission is even more glaring in John, where the longer ministry presumes the need for winter quarters, though none are mentioned. That and other considerations are not decisive, but the brief career of the Synoptic Gospels is slightly to be preferred.
The Synoptic Gospels, then, are the primary sources for knowledge of the historical Jesus. They are not, however, the equivalent of an academic biography of a recent historical figure. Instead, the Synoptic Gospels are theological documents that provide information the authors regarded as necessary for the religious development of the Christian communities in which they worked. The details of Jesus’ daily life are almost entirely lacking, as are such important features as his education, travel, and other developmental experiences. The characters on the whole are “flat”: emotions, motives, and personalities are seldom mentioned. There are nevertheless a few exceptions that show how little is actually known: Peter wavers (Matthew 14:28–31; Mark 14:66–72), James and John ask for preferential treatment in the coming kingdom (Mark 10:35–40), and Pilate anguishes over the decision to execute Jesus (Matthew 27:15–23; Luke 23:2–25). On the other hand, the Pharisees and scribes periodically challenge Jesus and then disappear, with little indication of what, from their point of view, they hoped to accomplish. Even Jesus is a rather flat character in the Gospels. He is sometimes angry and sometimes compassionate (Mark 3:5; 6:34, respectively), but one can say little more. This is a frustrating aspect of the Gospels. The situation is different with regard to Paul, whose letters are extant and self-revelatory. The force of his personality is in the letters, but the force of Jesus’ personality must be found somewhere behind the Gospels.
The Gospels comprise brief self-contained passages, or pericopēs (from the Greek word meaning “cut around”), relating to Jesus. Further study reveals that the authors of the Synoptic Gospels moved the pericopes around, altering the contexts to suit their own editorial policies—for example, by arranging the pericopes according to subject matter. In chapters 8 and 9, Matthew collects 10 healing pericopes, with a few other passages interspersed. Mark and Luke contain most of those passages, but their arrangements are different. Matthew put all those healings in one place, whereas Mark and Luke scattered them but in different ways. Since the authors of the Gospels rearranged the material to suit their own needs, it must be assumed that earlier Christian teachers had also organized stories about Jesus didactically. That means that the sequence of events in Jesus’ ministry is unknown.
Moreover, the Evangelists and other early Christian teachers also shaped the material about Jesus. During the course of transmission, the factual narrative elements that surrounded each saying or event were stripped away, leaving only a central unit, which was applied to various situations by the addition of new introductions and conclusions. For example, both Matthew and Luke relate the Parable of the Lost Sheep. In Matthew 18:12–14, the parable is told to the disciples, and the meaning is that they, like the shepherd, should go in search of the lost. In Luke 15:4–7 the same story is directed at the Pharisees, this time to instruct them not to grumble because Jesus has attracted repentant sinners. Both applications of the parable were useful homiletically and were therefore preserved. The context in which Jesus originally used the parable, however, is unknown. Another example is the saying “love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44). Homiletically, it may be applied to numerous circumstances, which makes it very useful for sermons and teaching. Historically, however, it is not known to whom Jesus referred when he spoke those words. The lack of firm knowledge of original context makes the precise interpretation of individual passages difficult.
Further, not all the sayings and deeds in the Synoptic Gospels are reports of things that Jesus actually said and did. Believing that Jesus ascended into heaven, the early Christians spoke to him in prayer and sometimes he answered (2 Corinthians 12:8–9; cf. 1 Corinthians 2:13). Those early Christians did not distinguish between “the historical Jesus” and “the heavenly Lord” as firmly as most modern people do, and some sayings heard in prayer almost certainly ended up in the Gospels as sayings uttered by Jesus during his lifetime.
Since both the original context of Jesus’ sayings and deeds and those passages in the Gospels that go back to the historical Jesus are unknown, there are substantial difficulties in attempting to reconstruct the Jesus of history. Of these two difficulties, the lack of immediate context is the more serious. It must be admitted that, on many points, precision and nuance in describing the teaching and ministry of Jesus cannot be achieved.
There are, however, tests of authenticity that make it possible to acquire good general information about Jesus’ teachings. One of the most important of these is “multiple attestation”: a passage that appears in two or more independent sources is likely to be authentic. A prime example is the prohibition of divorce, which appears in the letters of Paul and in two different forms in the Synoptic Gospels. The short form, which is focused on remarriage after divorce, is found in Matthew 5:31–32 and Luke 16:18. The long form, which is more absolute in prohibiting divorce, appears in Matthew 19:1–12 and Mark 10:1–12. Paul’s version (1 Corinthians 7:10–11) agrees most closely with the short form. Because of that excellent attestation, it is almost indisputable that Jesus opposed divorce and especially remarriage after divorce, though study of the five passages does not reveal precisely what he said.
A second test is “against the grain of the Gospels”: a passage that seems to be contrary to one of the main themes or views expressed in one or more Gospels is likely to be authentic because the early Christians were not likely to have created material with which they disagreed. Matthew’s depiction of John the Baptist is a good example. The author apparently found it to be embarrassing that Jesus received John’s baptism of repentance (why would Jesus have needed it?). Thus, he has John protest against the baptism and claim that Jesus should instead baptize him (Matthew 3:13–17; this objection is not in Mark or Luke). Those verses in Matthew assume that John recognized Jesus as being greater than he, but Matthew later shows John, in prison, sending a message to ask Jesus whether he was “the one who is to come” (Matthew 11:2–6). Those passages make it virtually certain that John baptized Jesus and highly probable that John asked Jesus who he was. John’s protest against baptizing Jesus appears to be Matthew’s creation. In keeping those passages while, in effect, arguing against them, Matthew validates the authenticity of the tradition that John baptized Jesus and later enquired about his true identity.
These are only a few examples of tests that may confirm the authenticity of passages in the Gospels. In many cases, however, the criteria do not apply: many passages neither meet nor fail the tests. Grouping passages into categories—probable, improbable, possible but unconfirmed—is a useful exercise but does not go very far toward determining a realistic portrayal of Jesus as a historical figure. More is needed than just the minute study of the Gospels, though that is an essential task.
The context of Jesus’ career
Good historical information about Jesus can be acquired by establishing the overall context of his public ministry. As noted earlier, he began his career by being baptized by John, an eschatological prophet, and an understanding of eschatology is pivotal to interpreting Jesus’ world. Although eschatology is the doctrine of last things, the Jews who anticipated future redemption did not expect the end of the world. Instead, they thought that God would intervene in human history and make the world perfect: that is, the Jews would live in the Holy Land free of foreign domination and in peace and prosperity. Many Jews, including John, expected final judgment to precede this golden age, and he taught that people should repent in view of its imminence (Matthew 3:1–12; Luke 3:3–9). Since Jesus accepted John’s baptism, he must have agreed with this message, at least in part. After Jesus’ death and Resurrection, his followers believed that he would soon return to bring in the kingdom of God. The clearest expression of this belief is offered by Paul, whose earliest letter indicates that the Lord will return before most of the people then alive die (1 Thessalonians 4:13–18). If Jesus began his career by being baptized by an eschatological prophet and if after his Crucifixion his followers expected him to return to save them (1 Thessalonians 1:9–10; 1 Corinthians 15:20–28), it is highly probable that he himself shared the basic views of Jewish eschatology.
Many aspects of Jesus’ career support the view that he expected divine intervention. One of the most common beliefs of Jewish eschatology was that God would restore the Twelve Tribes of Israel, including the Ten Lost Tribes. That Jesus shared this view is indicated by his call of 12 disciples, who apparently represented the 12 tribes (Matthew 19:28). Moreover, he proclaimed the arrival of the kingdom of God; he predicted the destruction of the Temple (Mark 13:2) and possibly its rebuilding “without hands” (Mark 14:58); he entered Jerusalem on a donkey, symbolizing his kingship (Mark 11:4–8; Matthew 21:1–11; see Zechariah 9:9 for the symbol); and he had a final meal with his disciples in which he said that he would “drink no more of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it in the new kingdom of God” (Mark 14:25). It is no surprise that after his death his disciples formed a small community that expected Jesus to return and inaugurate a kingdom in which the world would be transformed.
In this light, Jesus can be seen as an eschatological prophet, grouped historically in the same general category as John the Baptist and a few other 1st-century Jewish prophets, such as Theudas. Like John, Jesus believed in the coming judgment, but he stressed inclusion more than condemnation and welcomed “customs officers and sinners” in the coming kingdom of God (Matthew 11:18–19; 21:31–32). Moreover, his teaching was rich and multifaceted and was not limited to eschatological expectation.
Main aspects of Jesus’ teaching
The kingdom of God
While the Gospels agree that Jesus proclaimed the eschatological kingdom of God, they offer different versions of his view of that kingdom. One is that the kingdom of God exists in heaven and that individuals may enter it upon death (Mark 9:47). Since God’s power is in some respects omnipresent, Jesus may have seen “the kingdom,” in the sense of God’s presence, as being especially evident in his own words and deeds. The parable that the kingdom is like yeast that gradually leavens the entire loaf (Matthew 13:33) indicates that Jesus may have understood the kingdom of God to be beginning in the present. These other ways of viewing the kingdom do not, however, dominate the teaching of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. Statements about the heavenly kingdom, or the kingdom as partially present on earth, do not negate the eschatological nature of Jesus’ message. The essence of his teaching is that the kingdom would come to earth in its full power and glory, at which time God’s will would be done “on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). Jesus died before heaven came down to earth, and this, coupled with the Resurrection appearances, led his followers to expect him to return in the near future, ushering in the kingdom and ruling in God’s stead.
Jesus himself apparently anticipated the arrival of a heavenly figure whom he called “the Son of Man,” who would come on clouds of glory and gather the elect. The Hebrew Bible laid the foundation for this teaching in two ways. First, several prophets expected “the day of the Lord,” when the wicked would be punished or destroyed and the good would be spared, though the emphasis was on punishment (Amos 5:12–20; Zephaniah 1; Joel 1:15; 2:1; Obadiah verse 15). Second, Daniel 7 describes various kingdoms that are represented by four fantastic beasts, all of which are destroyed. Then, according to Daniel, the Son of Man, representing the people of Israel, ascends to God and receives “dominion and glory and kingship” (Daniel 7:14), after which Israel is to reign supreme (7:27). These passages seem to have led Jesus to depict the arrival of the Son of Man from heaven as initiating the coming judgment and the redemption of Israel. The theme appears in numerous passages in the Synoptic Gospels (see Tables 2, 3, 4, and 5).
| Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. |
| You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour. |
| For as the lightning comes from the east and flashes as far as the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.... 37For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. 38For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, 39and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will be the coming of the Son of Man. |
| For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day.... 26Just as it was in the days of Noah, so too it will be in the days of the Son of Man. 27They were eating and drinking, and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed all of them.... 30[I]t will be like that on the day that the Son of Man is revealed. |
| For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. 28Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom. |
| Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels. 9.1And he said to them, Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power. |
| Those who are ashamed of me and of my words, of them the Son of Man will be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. 27But truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God. |
| Immediately after the suffering of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken. 30Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see "the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven" with power and great glory. 31And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other. |
| But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, 25and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. 26Then they will see "the Son of Man coming in clouds" with power and glory. 27Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven. |
| There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. 26People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. 27Then they will see "the Son of Man coming in a cloud" with power and great glory. 28Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near. |
Paul’s depiction of the coming kingdom also merits consideration (italics indicate the closest agreements with the passages in the Gospels):
For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air. (1 Thessalonians 4:15–17)
Paul changed “the Son of Man” to “the Lord.” It is not known whether Jesus intended to refer to himself or to another figure when he used the term Son of Man in this context (he did refer to himself as a Son of Man in the sense of “a human being,” as in Matthew 8:20). By Paul’s time, however, Christians made no such distinction and interpreted the heavenly Son of Man as the risen Jesus.
Jesus’ belief that the Son of Man would soon arrive to usher in the kingdom is confirmed as authentic by multiple attestation. It is also “against the grain” of the Gospel According to Luke, since the author tended to downplay eschatology (e.g., Luke 17:21 and Acts, written by the same author). Moreover, Paul, whose letters are earlier than the Gospels, thought that most people then living would still be alive at the time of Jesus’ return, whereas the Synoptic Gospels state that “some standing here will not taste death.” The change from “most” to “some” probably demonstrates that the expectation was beginning to fade when the Gospels were written.
Inclusion in the kingdom
Several passages indicate that following Jesus was highly desirable for those who wished to be included in the coming kingdom. Jesus called on some people to give up everything in order to follow him (Mark 1:16–20; 10:17–31) and promised that their reward would be great in heaven. It cannot be said, however, that Jesus viewed personal loyalty as a prerequisite for inclusion in the kingdom. Often he simply urged all to fix their attention on the kingdom, not on material possessions (Matthew 6:19–21; 6:25–34; Luke 12:13–21). The majority of his teaching in the Synoptic Gospels is about God and the value of returning to him. Thus, in one parable the “prodigal son” returns to “the father,” presumably representing God (Luke 15:11–32).
Perhaps faith in God and treating other people with love (Matthew 25:34–40) would suffice for entry into the kingdom. This seems to be indicated by the study of children, the childlike, the poor, the meek, the lowly, and the sinners, whom Jesus especially called and favoured. “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs” (Mark 10:14). In the coming kingdom, moreover, the last would be first (Mark 10:31); those who held the chief positions in the present world would be demoted (Luke 14:7–11); those who gave up everything and followed Jesus would receive “a hundred-fold” (Mark 10:30); and sinners, exemplified by the customs officers and prostitutes, also would be included in the kingdom (Matthew 21:31). The Beatitudes, drawn from the Sermon on the Mount, particularly stress Jesus’ concern for the poor and the meek who will be blessed (Luke 6:20; Matthew 5:3–5). This emphasis probably rests in part on his sympathy for those of his own socioeconomic class or below it. Significantly, Jesus and his disciples were not themselves from the very bottom of society. His father worked with his hands, but he was not destitute, and some of Jesus’ disciples were from families who owned fishing boats and houses (Mark 1:19, 29). They were not rich, but they also were not day labourers, beggars, or homeless, all of whom were the focus of Jesus’ sympathy.
His message had a social dimension in two respects. He thought that in the kingdom there would be social relationships, not a collection of disembodied spirits floating on the clouds. He also believed that the disadvantaged of the present world would be in some sense or other advantaged in the new age (Matthew 5:3–11; Luke 6:20–23). It is possible that the promise of houses and lands in Matthew 19:29 and Mark 10:29–30 is metaphorical, but it is also possible that Jesus envisaged a future society in which property would still count, though it would be redistributed.
Jesus’ appeal to sinners, according to Luke 5:32, meant that he called them to repent, but neither Matthew 9:13 nor Mark 2:17 mentions the word repentance. Most likely, Jesus’ message was more radical than a simple call for repentance, a proposition with which everyone would have agreed. He wanted sinners to accept him and his message, and he promised inclusion in the kingdom if they did so. This acceptance doubtless included moral reformation, but Jesus probably did not mean that they had to conform precisely to the standards of righteous Jewish society, which demanded repayment of money or goods obtained dishonestly, the addition of one-fifth as a fine, and the presentation of a guilt-offering in the Temple (Leviticus 6:1–7). Instead, Jesus called people to follow him and to be like his disciples. He evidently expected more people to be like him (accepting sinners, loving even enemies) than to join the small band that followed him. Although Jesus specifically called several followers, he seems not to have viewed personal faith in and commitment to him as absolute necessities (though faith in him became the standard requirement of early Christianity).
Whether he made this particular requirement or not, Jesus certainly attached great importance to his own mission and person. The Christian preoccupation with titles (did he think that he was the Messiah, Son of God, heavenly Son of Man, son of David, or king?) obscures the issue. Jesus sometimes called himself the Son of Man, though perhaps not meaning the heavenly Son of Man, and according to two passages he indirectly accepted the epithets Messiah (or Christ) and Son of God (Matthew 16:16; Mark 14:61–62). In both cases, however, the parallel passages (Mark 8:29; Luke 9:20; 22:67–70; Matthew 26:63–64) are less strongly affirmative. In any case, Jesus apparently did not make an issue of titles. He called people to follow him and to devote themselves entirely to God, not to accord him a particular appellation. If he was preoccupied with titles, the evidence is so scant that it cannot be known what those titles meant to him or others. If, however, this uncertain evidence is overlooked, a clearer picture of his self-conception emerges: Jesus thought that he was God’s last emissary, that he and his disciples would rule in the coming kingdom, and that people who accepted his message would be included in it. He may also have believed that inclusion in the kingdom would be granted to those who loved their neighbours and were meek and lowly of heart.
The relation of Jesus’ teaching to the Jewish law
Jewish law is the focus of many passages in the Gospels. According to one set, especially prominent in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7), Jesus admonished his followers to observe the law unwaveringly (Matthew 5:17–48). According to another set, he did not adhere strictly to the law himself and even transgressed current opinions about some aspects of it, especially the Sabbath (e.g., Mark 3:1–5). It is conceivable that both were true, that he was extremely strict about marriage and divorce (Matthew 5:31–32; Mark 10:2–12) but less stringent about the Sabbath. The study of Jesus and the law is, like any other study of law, highly technical. In general, the legal disputes in the Gospels fall within the parameters of those of 1st-century Judaism. Some opposed minor healing on the Sabbath (such as Jesus is depicted as performing), but others permitted it. Similarly, the Sadducees regarded the Pharisees’ observance of the Sabbath as too lax. There also were many disagreements in 1st-century Judaism about purity. While some Jews washed their hands before eating (Mark 7:5), others did not; however, this conflict was not nearly as serious as that between the Shammaites and the Hillelites (the two main parties within Pharisaism) over menstrual purity. It is noteworthy that Jesus did not oppose the purity laws. On the contrary, according to Mark 1:40–44, he accepted the Mosaic laws on the purification of lepers (Leviticus 14).
In one statement in the Gospels, however, Jesus apparently opposed Jewish law as universally understood. Jews agreed not to eat carnivores, rodents, insects, and weasels, as well as pork and shellfish (Leviticus 11; Deuteronomy 14), and the last two prohibitions set them apart from other people. According to Mark 7:19, Jesus “declared all foods clean.” If he did so, Jesus directly opposed the law of God as given to Moses. This seems to be only Mark’s inference, however, and is not in the parallel passage in Matthew 15. More importantly, Peter seems to have first learned of this after Jesus’ death, by means of a heavenly revelation (Acts 10:9–16). Perhaps Jesus did not, then, directly oppose any aspect of the sacred law.
He probably did, however, have legal disputes in which he defended himself by quoting scriptural precedent, which implies that he did not set himself against the law (Mark 2:23–28). His willingness to make his own decisions regarding the law was probably viewed with suspicion. Ordinarily, legal debates were between competing camps or schools, and individuals who decided how to observe laws were deemed troublemakers. That is, Jesus was autonomous; he interpreted the law according to his own rules and decided how to defend himself when criticized. He was by no means the only person in ancient Judaism who struck out on his own, acting in accord with his own perception of God’s will, and so he was not uniquely troubling in this respect, but such behaviour might nevertheless be suspicious.
Ethics
Along with his teachings on the kingdom and the law, Jesus advocated ethical purity. He demanded complete devotion to God, putting it ahead of devotion to self and even to family (Mark 3:31–35; Matthew 10:35–37), and taught that people should give up everything in order to obtain what was most precious (Matthew 13:44–46). According to Matthew 5:21–26 and 5:27–30, Jesus also held that observance of the law should be not only external but internal: hatred and lust, as well as murder and adultery, are wrong. The Jesus of Matthew in particular is a moral perfectionist (5:17–48). This fits quite well with the proclamation of the eschatological kingdom of God because Jesus believed, as fellow moral perfectionist Paul did, that divine intervention was near at hand, and therefore people had to be “blameless” for only a short time (1 Thessalonians 5:23). The difficulty with perfectionism in a continuing society is evident in later traditions regarding divorce. Paul quoted Jesus’ prohibition of it but then proceeded to make an exception—that if a Christian was married to an unbeliever, and the unbeliever wished a divorce, the Christian should agree to it—which he explicitly said was his own opinion, not the Lord’s (1 Corinthians 7:10–16). Similarly, Matthew depicts the disciples as responding to Jesus’ prohibition by proposing that if divorce is impossible it is better to avoid marriage (Matthew 19:10). The impossibility of being perfect during a full lifetime leads some modern interpreters to propose that Jesus intended these admonitions to be only an ideal, not a requirement. It is more likely, however, that Jesus the eschatological prophet regarded perfection as quite possible during the short period before the arrival of the Son of Man.
Miracles
A prophet and teacher of ethics, Jesus was also a healer and miracle worker. In the 1st century, healers and miracle workers were fairly well known, though not precisely common, and were not considered to be superhuman beings. Jesus himself granted that others were capable of performing miracles, such as exorcisms, regardless of whether they followed him (Matthew 12:27; Mark 9:38–41; 6:7). Thus, the significance of this very important aspect of his life is frequently misunderstood. In Jesus’ time, it was accepted that people could heal and perform nature miracles, such as causing rain. The question was, by what power, or spirit, they did so. Some of Jesus’ opponents accused him of casting out demons by the prince of demons (Mark 3:19–22; Matthew 12:24; Luke 11:15). He countered that he did so by the spirit of God (Matthew 12:28; Luke 11:20). Obviously, many people disagreed, but this was the issue in Jesus’ lifetime—not whether he, like a few others, could perform miracles, but by what power he did so. In his own day, miracles were proof neither of divinity nor of messiahship, and, at most, they might be used to validate an individual’s message or way of life.
Controversy and danger in Galilee
Crowds and autonomy
Jesus’ reputation as healer had one very important historical consequence: he attracted crowds, as the early chapters of Mark (e.g., 1:28, 45; 2:2) reveal. By doing so Jesus could spread his message to more people, but he also ran the risk of attracting those whose interest in him was purely selfish and who came hoping for cures only. Moreover, crowds were politically dangerous. One of the reasons Herod Antipas executed John the Baptist was because he drew such large crowds that Antipas feared an uprising (Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews 18.116–119).
Although Jesus’ message was not necessarily socially dangerous, the revolutionary implications of its promise of future reversal of status may have made some a little uneasy, and Jesus’ promise to sinners might have been irritating to the scrupulous. Still, without crowds these aspects of his message would not have mattered very much. He did not strike at the heart of the Jewish religion as such: he did not deny the election of Abraham and the requirement of circumcision; nor did he denounce Moses and the law. Nevertheless, during his Galilean ministry some people regarded him with hostility and suspicion, partly because of the crowds and partly because of his autonomy. It was impossible to know what someone who was autonomous might do next, and this could be dangerous, especially if he had a following.
Scribes and Pharisees of Jesus
In the 1st century, scribes and Pharisees were two largely distinct groups, though presumably some scribes were Pharisees. Scribes had knowledge of the law and could draft legal documents (contracts for marriage, divorce, loans, inheritance, mortgages, the sale of land, and the like). Every village had at least one scribe. Pharisees were members of a party that believed in resurrection and in following legal traditions that were ascribed not to the Bible but to “the traditions of the fathers.” Like the scribes, they were also well-known legal experts: hence the partial overlap of membership of the two groups. It appears from subsequent rabbinic traditions, however, that most Pharisees were small landowners and traders, not professional scribes.
In Mark’s view, Jesus’ main adversaries in Galilee were scribes, but, according to Matthew, they were Pharisees. These apparently conflicting views are readily reconciled: men knowledgeable about Jewish law and tradition would have scrutinized Jesus carefully, and it is likely that both scribes and Pharisees challenged his behaviour and teaching, as the Gospels indicate (e.g., Mark 2:6, 16; 3:22; Matthew 9:11; 12:2). According to one passage, the Pharisees (along with the Herodians, Mark adds) planned to destroy Jesus (Matthew 12:14; Mark 3:6). If the report of this plot is accurate, however, it seems that nothing came of it, since the Pharisees did not play a significant role in the events that led to Jesus’ death. Mark and Luke assign them no role, while Matthew mentions them only once (Matthew 27:62).
Some people in Galilee may have distrusted Jesus, and legal experts probably challenged his interpretation of the law, but he was never charged formally with a serious legal offense, and opposition in Galilee did not lead to his death. Mortal danger faced Jesus only after he went to Jerusalem for what turned out to be the last time.
Jesus’ last week
About the year 30 ce Jesus and his disciples went to Jerusalem from Galilee to observe Passover. Presumably they went a week early, as did tens of thousands of other Jews (perhaps as many as 200,000 or 300,000), in order to be cleansed of “corpse-impurity,” in accordance with Numbers 9:10–12 and 19:1–22. The Gospels do not mention purification, but they do place Jesus near the Temple in the days preceding Passover. He entered Jerusalem on a donkey, perhaps intending to recall Zechariah 9:9, which Matthew (21:5) quotes: “your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey.” This touched off a demonstration by his followers, who hailed Jesus as either “Son of David” (Matthew 21:9) or as “the one who comes in the name of the Lord” (Mark 11:9). Matthew speaks of “crowds,” which suggests that many people were involved, but the demonstration was probably fairly small. Jerusalem at Passover was dangerous; it was well known to both Caiaphas, who governed the city, and Pilate, the prefect to whom the high priest was responsible, that the festivals were likely times of uprisings. Pilate’s troops patrolled the roofs of the porticoes of the Temple. A large demonstration would probably have led to Jesus’ immediate arrest, but, because he lived for several more days, it is likely that the crowd was relatively small.
Jesus spent some time teaching and debating (Mark 12) and also told his disciples that the Temple would be destroyed (Mark 13:1–2). On one of the days of purification prior to the Passover sacrifice and meal, he performed his most dramatic symbolic action. He entered the part of the temple precincts where worshipers exchanged coins to pay the annual temple tax of two drachmas or bought pigeons to sacrifice for inadvertent transgressions of the law and as purificatory offerings after childbirth. Jesus turned over some of the tables (Mark 11:15–17), which led “the chief priests and the scribes” (“and the principal men of the people,” Luke adds) to plan to have him executed (Mark 11:18; Luke 19:47; cf. Mark 14:1–2).
Later the disciples found a room for the Passover meal, and one of them bought an animal and sacrificed it in the Temple (Mark 14:12–16; verse 16 states simply, “they prepared the passover”). Judas Iscariot, however, one of the 12, betrayed Jesus to the authorities. At the meal, Jesus blessed the bread and wine, designating the bread “my body” and the wine “my blood of the covenant” (Mark 14:22–25) or “the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20 and 1 Corinthians 11:25). He also stated that he would not drink wine again until he drank it with the disciples in the kingdom (Matthew 26:29).
After supper, Jesus took his disciples to the Mount of Olives to pray. While he was there, Judas led armed men sent by the chief priests to arrest him (Mark 14:43–52). They took Jesus to Caiaphas, who had gathered some of his councillors (called collectively the Sanhedrin). Jesus was first accused of threatening to destroy the Temple, but this charge was not substantiated. Caiaphas then asked him if he was “the Christ, the Son of God.” According to Mark (14:61–62), Jesus said “yes” and then predicted the arrival of the Son of Man. According to Matthew (26:63–64), he said, “You say so, but [emphasis added] I tell you that you will see the Son of Man,” apparently implying the answer was no. According to Luke he was more ambiguous: “If I tell you, you will not believe” and “You say that I am” (22:67–70). (Some scholars believe that the New International Version misrepresents Jesus’ answer in Matthew and Luke.)
Whatever the answer, Caiaphas evidently had already decided that Jesus had to die. He cried “blasphemy” and rent his own garments, a dramatic sign of mourning that the Hebrew Bible prohibits the high priest from making (Leviticus 21:10). The gesture was effective, and the councillors agreed that Jesus should be sent to Pilate with the recommendation to execute him.
It is doubtful that the titles Messiah and Son of God were actually the issue because there was no set meaning for either in 1st-century Judaism. As Mark, reprised by Matthew and Luke, presents the scene, when the attempt to have Jesus executed for threatening the Temple failed, Caiaphas simply declared whatever Jesus said (about which we must remain uncertain) to be blasphemy. This may be what convinced the council to recommend Jesus’ execution. It appears, however, that the charges against Jesus that Caiaphas transmitted to Pilate (Mark 15:1–2, 26) may have included the accusation that Jesus claimed to be “king of the Jews.”
Although Pilate did not care about the fine points of Jewish law or Jesus’ alleged blasphemy, most likely he saw Jesus as a potential troublemaker and therefore ordered his execution. The Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John ascribe a rather good character to Pilate and show him as troubled over the decision but yielding to Jewish insistence (Matthew 27:11–26; Luke 21:1–25; John 18:28–40). In Luke, for example, Pilate states three times that he finds no fault with Jesus. This passage suggests that the early church, faced with making its way in the Roman Empire, did not wish its leader to be thought of as being truly guilty in Roman eyes. From other evidence Pilate is known to have been callous, cruel, and given to wanton executions (Philo, On the Embassy to Gaius, 300–302). He was finally dismissed from office for executing a group of Samaritans (Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews, 18.85–89), and he probably sent Jesus to his death without anguishing over the decision.
Crucified as would-be “king of the Jews” (Mark 15:26 and parallels Matthew 27:37; Luke 23:38; John 19:19), Jesus also was taunted on the cross as the one who would destroy and rebuild the Temple (Mark 15:29). These two charges help to explain the decision to execute him. Jesus’ minor assault on the Temple and prediction of its destruction seem to be what led to his arrest. His own thinking was almost certainly that God would destroy the Temple as part of the new kingdom, perhaps rebuilding it himself (Mark 14:58). The Temple Scroll from Qumran has a similar expectation. Caiaphas and his advisers probably understood Jesus well enough: they knew that he was a prophet, not a demolition expert, and that his disciples could not damage the Temple seriously even if they were allowed to attack its walls with picks and sledges. But someone who spoke about the Temple’s destruction, and who turned over tables in its precincts, was clearly dangerous. These were inflammatory acts in a city that, at festival time, was prone to uprisings that could lead to the death of many thousands of Jews. Caiaphas probably had the thought that John 11:50 attributes to him, that “it is better to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” The high priest, under Roman rule, was responsible for keeping the peace, and he and his advisers acted accordingly.
The accusation that Jesus claimed to be “king of the Jews” was also sufficient to account for his execution. There is no direct evidence that Jesus ever said, “I am the king,” but his preaching on “the kingdom of God” was inflammatory. This phrase could have been interpreted several ways, but it certainly did not mean that Rome would continue to govern Judaea. Many people resented Roman rule, and Rome was quick to dispatch those who became too vocal in their opposition. Nevertheless, Pilate did not think that Jesus and his followers constituted a military threat. Had he thought so, he would have had the disciples, too, executed, either at the time or when they returned to Jerusalem to take up their new mission. Instead, the prefect limited his actions to their charismatic leader and turned Jesus over to his soldiers for execution. They took him and two thieves outside Jerusalem and crucified them.
Although Caiaphas did not think that Jesus could actually destroy the Temple, and Pilate did not believe that he could organize a serious revolt, inflammatory speech was a problem. Moreover, Jesus had a following, the city was packed with pilgrims who were celebrating the exodus from Egypt and Israel’s liberation from foreign bondage, and Jesus had committed a small act of violence in the sacred precincts. He was dangerous, and his execution is perfectly understandable in this historical context; that is, he was executed for being what he was, an eschatological prophet. Caiaphas and his councillors fulfilled their mandate to keep the peace and suppress any signs of an uprising. Pilate presumably acted from similar motives. It is unlikely that the responsible parties lost much sleep over their decision; they were doing their duty.
Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom and his apparent threats against the Temple were based on his view that the kingdom was at hand and that he and his disciples would soon feast in it. It is possible that even to the end he expected divine intervention because among his last words was the cry “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34).
The Resurrection
What happened next changed history in a way quite different from what Jesus seems to have anticipated. Some of his followers claimed to have seen him after his death. The details are uncertain, since the sources disagree on who saw him and where he was seen (the final sections of Matthew, Luke, and John; the beginning of Acts; and the list in Paul’s first Letter to the Corinthians, 15:5–8). According to Matthew, an angel showed the empty tomb to Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” and instructed them to tell the disciples to go to Galilee. While still in Jerusalem, the two Marys saw Jesus, who told them the same thing, and he appeared once more, to the disciples in Galilee. Matthew’s account is implied in Mark 14:28 and 16:7, though the Gospel of Mark does not have a resurrection story, ending instead with the empty tomb (Mark 16:8; translations print scribal additions in brackets). According to Luke, however, while the disciples remained in Jerusalem, the women (Mary Magdalene; Joanna; Mary, the mother of James; and “the other women”) found the empty tomb. “Two men in dazzling clothes” told them that Jesus had been raised. Later, Jesus appeared to two followers on the road to Emmaus (near Jerusalem), then to Peter, and later to the disciples. John (now including chapter 21, usually thought to be an appendix) mentions sightings in Galilee and Jerusalem. Acts provides a more extensive series of appearances than Luke, though written by the same author, but like it places all of these in or near Jerusalem. Paul’s list of people to whom Jesus appeared does not agree very closely with the other accounts (1 Corinthians 15:5–8).
Because of the uncertain evidence it is hard to say what really happened. Two points are important: the sources describe the resurrected Jesus as neither a resuscitated corpse, a badly wounded man staggering around, nor as a ghost. According to Luke, the first two disciples to see Jesus walked with him for several hours without recognizing him (24:13–32). Luke also reports that Jesus could disappear and reappear at will (24:31, 36). For Paul, the bodies of Christian believers will be transformed to be like the Lord’s, and the resurrection body will not be “flesh and blood” (1 Corinthians 15:42–53). According to these two authors, Jesus was substantially transformed, but he was not a ghost. Luke says this explicitly (24:37–39), and Paul insists on using the word body as part of the term spiritual body rather than spirit or ghost. Luke and Paul do not agree entirely, since Luke attributes “flesh and bones” to the risen Jesus (24:39). Luke’s account nevertheless requires a transformation. The authors, in other words, were trying to explain something for which they did not have a precise vocabulary, as Paul’s term spiritual body makes clear.
It is difficult to accuse these sources, or the first believers, of deliberate fraud. A plot to foster belief in the Resurrection would probably have resulted in a more consistent story. Instead, there seems to have been a competition: “I saw him,” “so did I,” “the women saw him first,” “no, I did; they didn’t see him at all,” and so on. Moreover, some of the witnesses of the Resurrection would give their lives for their belief. This also makes fraud unlikely.
The uncertainties are substantial, but, given the accounts in these sources, certainty is unobtainable. We may say of the disciples’ experiences of the Resurrection approximately what the sources allow us to say of the life and message of Jesus: we have fairly good general knowledge, though many details are uncertain or dubious.
E.P. SandersThe picture of Christ in the early church: The Apostles’ Creed
Even before the Gospels were written, Christians were reflecting upon the meaning of what Jesus had been and what he had said and done. It is a mistake, therefore, to suppose that such reflection is a later accretion upon the simple message of the Gospels. On the contrary, the early Christian communities were engaged in witness and worship from the very beginning. The forms of that witness and worship were also the forms of the narratives in the Gospel accounts. From this fact it follows that to understand the Gospel accounts regarding Jesus we must consider the faith of the early church regarding Christ. In this sense it is valid to maintain that there is no distinction between “the Jesus of history” and “the Christ of faith” and that the only way to get at the former is by the latter. Christology, the doctrine about Christ, is then as old as Christianity itself.
To comprehend the faith of the early church regarding Christ, we must turn to the writings of the New Testament, where that faith found embodiment. It was also embodied in brief confessions or creeds, but those have not been preserved for us complete in their original form. What we have are fragments of those confessions or creeds in various books of the New Testament, snatches from them in other early Christian documents, and later forms of them in Christian theology and liturgy. The so-called Apostles’ Creed is one such later form. It did not achieve its present form until quite late; just how late is a matter of controversy. But in its earliest ancestry it is very early indeed, perhaps dating back to the 1st century. And its confession regarding Christ is probably the earliest core around which later elaborations of it were composed. Allowing for such later elaboration, it may be said that in the Apostles’ Creed there is a convenient summary of what the early church believed about Christ amid all the variety of its expression and formulation. The creeds were a way for Christians to explain what they meant by their acts of worship. When they put “I believe” or “We believe” at the head of what they confessed about God and Christ, they meant that their declarations rested upon faith, not merely upon observation.
Preexistence
The statement “I believe” indicated that Christ was deserving of worship and faith and that he was therefore on a level with God. At an early date, possibly as early as the words of Paul in the second chapter of Philemon (verses 6–11), Christian theology began to distinguish three stages in the career of Jesus Christ: his preexistence with the Father before all things; his Incarnation and humiliation in “the days of His flesh” (Hebrews 5:7); and his glorification, beginning with the Resurrection and continuing forever.
Probably the most-celebrated statement of the preexistence of Christ is the opening verses of the Gospel According to John. There Christ is identified as the Incarnation of the Word (Logos) through which God made all things in the beginning, a Word existing in relation to God before the Creation. The sources of that doctrine have been sought in Greek philosophy, both early and late, as well as in the Jewish thought of Philo and of the Palestinian rabbis. Whatever its source, the doctrine of the Logos in John is distinctive by virtue of the fact that it identifies the Logos with a specific historical person. Other writings of the New Testament also illustrate the faith of the early Christians regarding the preexistence of Christ. The opening chapters of both Colossians and Hebrews speak of Christ as the preexistent one through whom all things were created, therefore as distinct from the created order of things in both time and preeminence. The preposition before in the first chapter of Colossians apparently refers to both his temporal priority and his superior dignity. Yet, before any theological reflection about the nature of that preexistence had been able to find terms and concepts, the early Christians were worshipping Christ as divine. The passage from Philemon mentioned above may be a quotation from a hymn used in such worship. Theological reflection told them that if this worship was legitimate, he must have existed with the Father “before all ages.”
Jesus Christ
By the time the text of the creed was established, Jesus Christ was the usual designation for the Saviour. Originally, of course, Jesus had been his given name, meaning “Yahweh saves” or “Yahweh will save” (Matthew 1:21), while Christ was the Greek translation of the title Messiah. Some passages of the New Testament still used Christ as a title (e.g., Luke 24:26; 2 John 7), but it is evident from Paul’s usage that the title became simply a proper name very early. Most of the Gentiles took it to be a proper name, and it was as “Christians” that the early believers were labelled (Acts 11:26). In the most precise language, the term “Jesus” was reserved for the earthly career of the Lord, but it seems from liturgical sources that it may actually have been endowed with greater solemnity than the name “Christ.” Within a few years after the beginnings of the Christian movement, the names Jesus, Christ, Jesus Christ, and Christ Jesus could be used almost interchangeably, as the textual variants in the New Testament indicate. Only in modern times has it become customary to distinguish sharply among them for the sake of drawing a line between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, and this only in certain circles. The theologians and people of many churches still use phrases like “the life of Christ,” because “Christ” is primarily a name. It is difficult to imagine how it could be otherwise when the Old Testament implications of the title have become a secondary consideration in its use—a process already evident within the New Testament.
God’s only Son
The declaration that Jesus Christ is the Son of God is one of the most universal in the New Testament, in which most of the books refer to him that way. The Gospels do not quote him as using the title for himself in so many words, although sayings like verse 27 of the 11th chapter of Matthew come close to it. There are some instances where the usage of the Gospels appears to echo the more-general implications of divine sonship in the Old Testament as a prerogative of Israel or of the true believer. Usually, however, it is evident that the Evangelists, like Paul, meant some special honour by the name. The Evangelists associated the honour with the story of Jesus’ baptism (Matthew 3:17) and Transfiguration (Matthew 17:5), Paul with the faith in the Resurrection (Romans 1:4). From that association some have argued that “Son of God” in the New Testament never referred to the preexistence of Christ. But it is clear in John and in Paul that this implication was not absent, even though it was not as prominent as it became soon thereafter. What made the implication of preexistence more prominent in later Christian use of the term Son of God was the clarification of the doctrine of the Trinity, where Son was the name for the eternal Second Person (Matthew 28:19). As the Gospels show, the application of the name Son of God to Jesus was offensive to the Jews, probably because it seemed to smack of Gentile polytheism. That also made it all too intelligible to the pagans, as early heresies indicate. Facing both the Jews and the Greeks, the apostolic church confessed that Jesus Christ was “God’s only Son”: the Son of God, in antithesis to Jewish claims that the eternal could have no sons; the only Son, in antithesis to Greek myths of divine procreation.
The Lord
As passages like the fourth verse of the first chapter of Romans show, the phrase “Jesus Christ our Lord” was one of the ways the apostolic church expressed its understanding of what he had been and done. Luke even put the title into the mouth of the Christmas angel (Luke 2:11). From the way the name “Lord” (Kyrios) was employed during the 1st century, it is possible to see several implications in the Christian use of it for Christ. The Christians meant that there were not many divine and lordly beings in the universe but only one Kyrios (1 Corinthians 8:5–6). They meant that the Roman Caesar was not the lord of all, as he was styled by his worshippers, but that only Christ was Lord (Revelation 17:14). And they meant that Yahweh, the covenant God of the Old Testament, whose name they pronounced as “Lord,” had come in Jesus Christ to establish the new covenant (Romans 10:12–13). Like “Son of God,” therefore, the name Kyrios was directed against both parts of the audience to which the primitive church addressed its proclamation. At times it stood particularly for the risen and glorified Christ (e.g., Acts 2:36), but in passages that echoed the Old Testament it was sometimes the preexistence that was being primarily emphasized (Matthew 22:44). Gradually, “our Lord,” like “Christ,” became a common way of speaking about Jesus Christ, even when the speaker did not intend to stress his lordship over the world.
Incarnation and humiliation of Jesus
Conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary
Earlier forms of the creed seem to have read: “Born of the Holy Spirit and of the Virgin Mary.” The primary affirmation of this article is that the Son of God, the Word, had become human or, as John’s Gospel put it, “flesh” (John 1:14). Preexistence and Incarnation presuppose each other in the Christian view of Jesus Christ. Hence, the New Testament assumed his preexistence when it talked about his becoming human, and, when it spoke of him as preexistent, it was ascribing that preexistence to him whom it was describing in the flesh. It may be that the reference to Mary in the creed was intended to stress primarily her function as the guarantee of Christ’s true humanity, but the creed also intended to teach the supernatural origin of that humanity. Although it is true that neither Paul nor John makes reference to it, the teaching about the virginal conception of Jesus, apparently based upon verse 14 of the seventh chapter of the Book of Isaiah, was sufficiently widespread in the 1st century to warrant inclusion in both Matthew and Luke as well as in creeds that date back to the 1st century. As it stands, the creedal statement is a paraphrase of verse 35 of the first chapter of Luke. In the New Testament the Holy Spirit was also involved in the baptism and the Resurrection of Jesus.
Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried
To a reader of the Gospels, the most-striking feature of the creed is probably its omission of that which occupied a major part of the Gospels, the story of Jesus’ life and teachings. In this respect there is a direct parallel between the creed and the Epistles of the New Testament, especially those of Paul. Judging by the amount of space they devoted to the Passion story, even the writers of the Gospels were apparently more interested in those few days of Jesus’ life than they were in anything else he had said or done. The reason for that was the faith underlying both the New Testament and the creed, that the events of Jesus’ Passion, death, and Resurrection were the events by which God had accomplished the salvation of human beings. The Gospels found their climax in those events, and the other material in them led up to those events. The Epistles applied those events to concrete situations in the early church.
From the way Paul could speak of the Cross (Philemon 2:6–11) and of “the night when he [Jesus] was betrayed” (1 Corinthians 11:23), it seems that before the Gospels came into existence the church commemorated the happenings associated with what came to be called Holy Week. Some of the earliest Christian art was a portrayal of those happenings, another indication of their importance in the cultic and devotional life of early Christianity. How did the Cross effect the salvation of human beings? The answers of the New Testament and the early church to this question involved a variety of metaphors: Christ offered himself as a sacrifice to God; his life was a ransom for many; his death made humankind alive; his suffering was an example to people when they must suffer; he was the Second Adam, creating a new humanity; his death shows people how much God loves them; and others. Every major Atonement theory of Christian theological history discussed below was anticipated by one or another of these metaphors. The New Testament employed them all to symbolize something that could be described only symbolically, that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them” (2 Corinthians 5:19).
He descended into hell
The phrase about the descent into hell was probably the last to be added to the creed. Its principal source in the New Testament was the description in the third chapter of the First Letter of Peter (verses 18–20) of Christ’s preaching to the spirits in prison. Originally, the descent into hell may have been identified with the death of Christ, when he entered the abode of the dead in the underworld. But in the time before it entered the creed, the descent was frequently taken to mean that Christ had gone to rescue the souls of the Old Testament faithful from the underworld, from what Western Catholic theology eventually called the limbo patrum. Among some of the Church Fathers the descent into hell had come to mean Christ’s declaration of his triumph over the powers of hell. Despite its subsequent growth in importance, however, the doctrine of the descent into hell apparently did not form an integral part of the apostolic preaching about Christ.
Glorification
The third day he rose again from the dead
The writers of the New Testament nowhere made the Resurrection of Christ a matter for argument but everywhere asserted it and assumed it. With it began that state in the history of Jesus Christ that was still continuing, his elevation to glory. They used it as a basis for three kinds of affirmations. The Resurrection of Christ was the way God bore witness to his son, “designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:4); this theme was also prominent in the Acts of the Apostles. The Resurrection was the basis for the Christian hope for life after death (1 Thessalonians 4:14), and Paul wrote that without it that hope was said to be baseless (1 Corinthians 15:12–20). The Resurrection of Christ was also the ground for admonitions to manifest a “newness of life” (Romans 6:4) and to “seek the things that are above” (Colossians 3:1). The writers of the New Testament themselves expressed no doubt that the Resurrection had really happened. But Paul’s discussion in 1 Corinthians shows that among those who heard the Christian message there was such doubt as well as efforts to rationalize the Resurrection. The differences among the Gospels, and between the Gospels and Paul, suggest that from the outset a variety of traditions existed regarding the details of the Resurrection. But such differences only serve to emphasize how universal the faith in the Resurrection was amid this variety of traditions.
He ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty
As indicated earlier, the narrative of the Ascension is peculiar to Luke-Acts, but other parts of the New Testament may refer to it. Such a reference may be made in the fourth chapter of the Letter to the Ephesians (verses 8–10). However, many interpreters hold that, for Paul, Resurrection was identical with Ascension. That, they maintain, is why he could speak of the appearance of the risen Christ to him in continuity with the appearances to others (1 Corinthians 15:5–8) despite the fact that, in the chronology of the creed, the Ascension intervened between them. Session at the right hand of the Father was apparently a Christian interpretation of the first verse of Psalm 110. It implied the elevation—or, as the doctrine of preexistence became clearer, the restoration—of Christ to a position of honour with God. Taken together, the Ascension and the session were a way of speaking about the presence of Christ with the Father during the interim between the Resurrection and the Second Advent. From the Ephesians passage it is evident that this way of speaking was by no means inconsistent with another Christian tenet, the belief that Christ was still present in and with his church. It was, in fact, the only way to state that tenet in harmony with the doctrine of the Resurrection.
From thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead
The creed concludes its Christological section with the doctrine of the Second Advent: the First Advent was a coming into the flesh, the Second Advent a coming in glory. Much controversy among modern scholars has been occasioned by the role of this doctrine in the early church. Those who maintain that Jesus erroneously expected the early end of the world have often interpreted Paul as the first of those who began the adjustment to a delay in the end, with John’s Gospel as a more-advanced stage of that adjustment. Those who hold that the imminence of the end was a continuing aspect of human history as Jesus saw it also maintain that this phrase of the creed was a statement of that imminence, without any timetable necessarily implied. From the New Testament it seems that both the hope of the Second Coming and a faith in the continuing presence of Christ belonged to the outlook of the apostolic church, and that seems to be what the creed meant. The phrase “the living and the dead” is a summary of passages on the Second Coming from several of Paul’s letters, particularly 1 Corinthians (15:51–52) and 1 Thessalonians (4:15–17).
In order to complete the confession of the creed regarding the glorification of Christ, the Nicene Creed added the phrase “of His kingdom there shall be no end.” That was a declaration that Christ’s return as judge would usher in the full exercise of his reign over the world. Such was the expectation of the apostolic church, based upon what it knew and believed about Jesus Christ.
The dogma of Christ in the ancient councils of Jesus
The main lines of orthodox Christian teaching about the person of Christ were set by the New Testament and the ancient creeds. But what was present there in a germinal form became a clear statement of Christian doctrine when it was formulated as dogma. In one way or another, the first four ecumenical councils were all concerned with the formulation of the dogma regarding the person of Christ—his relation to the Father and the relation of the divine and the human in Christ.
Such a formulation became necessary because teachings arose within the Christian community that seemed to threaten what the church believed and confessed about Christ. Both the dogma and the heretical teachings against which the dogma was directed are therefore part of the history of Jesus Christ.
The Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople
Early heresies
From the outset, Christianity has had to contend with those who misinterpreted the person and mission of Jesus. Both the New Testament and the early confessions of the church referred and replied to such misinterpretations. As the Christian movement gained adherents from the non-Jewish world, it had to explain Christ in the face of new challenges.
The misinterpretations touched both the question of his humanity and the matter of his deity. A concern to safeguard the true humanity of Jesus led some early Christians to teach that Jesus of Nazareth, an ordinary man, was adopted as the Son of God in the moment of his baptism or after his Resurrection; that heresy was called adoptionism. Gnostics and others wanted to protect him against involvement in the world of matter, which they regarded as essentially evil, and therefore taught that he had only an apparent, not-real body; they were called docetists. Most of the struggle over the person of Christ, however, dealt with the question of his relation to the Father. Some early views were so intent upon asserting his identity with the Father that the distinction of his person was lost, and he became merely a manifestation of the one God. Because of that idea of Christ as a “mode” of divine self-manifestation, proponents of that view were dubbed “modalists”; from an early supporter of the view it was called Sabellianism. Other interpretations of the person of Christ in relation to God went to the opposite extreme. They insisted so strenuously upon the distinctness of his person from that of the Father that they subordinated him to the Father. Many early exponents of the doctrine of the Logos were also subordinationists, so that the Logos idea itself became suspect in some quarters. What was needed was a framework of concepts with which to articulate the doctrine of Christ’s oneness with the Father and yet distinctness from the Father and thus to answer the question put forth by Adolf von Harnack:
Is the Divinity which has appeared on earth and reunited men with god identical with that supreme Divinity which governs heaven and earth, or is it a demigod?
Nicaea
That question forced itself upon the church through the teachings of Arius. He maintained that the Logos was the first of the creatures, called into being by God as the agent or instrument through which he was to make all things. Christ was thus less than God but more than a human being; he was divine, but he was not God. To meet the challenge of Arianism, which threatened to split the church, the newly converted emperor Constantine convoked in 325 the first ecumenical council of the Christian church at Nicaea. The private opinions of the attending bishops were anything but unanimous, but the opinion that carried the day was that espoused by the young presbyter Athanasius, who later became bishop of Alexandria. The Council of Nicaea determined that Christ was “begotten, not made,” that he was therefore not creature but creator. It also asserted that he was “of the same substance as the Father” (homoousios to patri). In this way it made clear its basic opposition to subordinationism, even though there could be, and were, quarrels about details. It was not equally clear how the position of Nicaea and of Athanasius differed from modalism. Athanasius asserted that it was not the Father or the Holy Spirit but only the Son who became incarnate as Jesus Christ. But in order to assert that, he needed a more-adequate terminology concerning the persons in the Holy Trinity. So the settlement at Nicaea regarding the person of Christ made necessary a fuller clarification of the doctrine of the Trinity, and that clarification in turn made possible a fuller statement of the doctrine of the person of Christ.
Constantinople
Nicaea did not put an end to the controversies but only gave the parties a new rallying point. Doctrinal debate was complicated by the rivalry among bishops and theologians as well as by the intrusion of imperial politics that had begun at Nicaea. Out of the post-Nicene controversies came that fuller statement of the doctrine of the Trinity which was needed to protect the Nicene formula against the charge of failing to distinguish adequately between the Father and the Son. Ratified at the Council of Constantinople in 381 but since lost, that statement apparently made official the terminology developed by the supporters of Nicene orthodoxy in the middle of the 4th century: one divine substance, three divine persons (mia ousia, treis hypostaseis). The three persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—were distinct from one another but were equal in their eternity and power. Now it was possible to teach, as Nicaea had, that Christ was “of the same substance as the Father” without arousing the suspicion of modalism. Although the doctrine seemed to make problematical the unity of God, it did provide an answer to the first of the two issues confronted by the church in its doctrine of the person of Christ—the issue of Christ’s relation to the Father. It then became necessary to clarify the second issue—the relation of the divine and the human within Christ.
The Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon
By excluding several extreme positions from the circle of orthodoxy, the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity in the 4th century determined the course of subsequent discussion about the person of Christ. It also provided the terminology for that discussion, since 5th-century theologians were able to describe the relation between the divine and the human Christ by analogy to the relation between the Father and the Son in the Trinity. The term that was found to express that relation in Christ was physis, “nature.” There were three divine persons in one divine essence; such was the outcome of the controversies in the 4th century. But there were also two natures, one of them divine and the other human, in the one person Jesus Christ. Over the relation between those two natures the theologians of the 5th century carried on their controversy.
The abstract questions with which they sometimes dealt in that controversy, some of them almost unintelligible to a modern mind, must not be permitted to obscure the fact that a basic issue of the Christian faith was at stake: How can Jesus Christ be said to partake of both identity with God and fellowship with humanity?
The parties
During the half century after the Council of Constantinople, several major points of emphasis developed in the doctrine of the person of Christ. Characteristically, these are usually defined by the episcopal see that espoused them. There was a way of talking about Christ that was characteristic of the see at Alexandria. It stressed the divine character of all that Jesus Christ had been and done, but its enemies accused it of absorbing the humanity of Christ in his divinity. The mode of thought and language employed at Antioch, on the other hand, emphasized the true humanity of Christ, but its opponents maintained that in so doing it had split Christ into two persons, each of whom maintained his individual selfhood while they acted in concert with each other. Western theology was not as abstract as either of those alternatives. Its central emphasis was a practical concern for human salvation and for as irenic a settlement of the conflict as was possible without sacrificing that concern. Even more than in the 4th century, considerations of imperial politics were always involved in conciliar actions, together with the fear in countries like Egypt that Constantinople might come to dominate them. Thus, a decision regarding the relation between the divine and the human in Christ could be simultaneously a decision regarding the political situation. Nevertheless, the settlements at which the councils of the 5th century arrived may be and are regarded as normative in the church long after their political setting has disappeared.
The conflict between Alexandria and Antioch came to a head when Nestorius, taking exception to the use of the title “Mother of God” or, more literally, “God-Bearer” (Theotokos) for the Virgin Mary, insisted that she was only “Christ-Bearer.” In that insistence, the Antiochian emphasis upon the distinction between the two natures in Christ made itself heard throughout the church. The Alexandrian theologians responded by charging that Nestorius was dividing the person of Christ, which they represented as so completely united that, in the famous phrase of Cyril, there was “one nature of the Logos which became incarnate.” By that he meant that there was only one nature, the divine, before the Incarnation but that after the Incarnation there were two natures indissolubly joined in one person; Christ’s human nature had never had an independent existence. There were times when Cyril appeared to be saying that there was “one nature of the incarnate Logos” even after the Incarnation, but his most-precise formulations avoided that language.
The Council of Ephesus in 431 was one in a series of gatherings called to settle this conflict, some by one party and some by the other. The actual settlement was not accomplished, however, until the Council of Chalcedon was convened in 451.
The settlement at Chalcedon
The basis of the settlement at Chalcedon was the Western understanding of the two natures in Christ, as formulated in the Tome of Pope Leo I of Rome. Chalcedon declared:
We all unanimously teach…one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, perfect in deity and perfect in humanity…in two natures, without being mixed, transmuted, divided, or separated. The distinction between the natures is by no means done away with through the union, but rather the identity of each nature is preserved and concurs into one person and being.
In that formula the valid emphases of both Alexandria and Antioch came to expression; both the unity of the person and the distinctness of the natures were affirmed. Therefore, the decision of the Council of Chalcedon has been the basic statement of the doctrine of the person of Christ for most of the church ever since. The Western church went on to give further attention to the doctrine of the work of Christ. In the Eastern church the Alexandrians and the Antiochians continued the controversies that had preceded Chalcedon, but they clashed now over the question of how to interpret Chalcedon. The controversy was an effort to clarify the interpretation of Chalcedon, with the result that the extremes of the Alexandrian position were condemned just as the Nestorian extreme of the Antiochian had been. The Alexandrian position was known in the Western church as the heresy of monophysitism, or the teaching that Jesus had only a divine nature, until the 20th century.
Emerging from all that theological discussion was an interpretation of the person of Christ that affirmed both his oneness with God and his oneness with humanity while still maintaining the oneness of his person. Interestingly, the liturgies of the church had maintained that interpretation at a time when the theologians of the church were still struggling for clarity, and the final solution was a scientifically precise restatement of what had been present germinally in the liturgical piety of the church. In the formula of Chalcedon that solution finally found the framework of concepts and of vocabulary that it needed to become intellectually consistent. In one sense, therefore, what Chalcedon formulated was what Christians had been believing from the beginning, but, in another sense, it represented a development from the earlier stages of Christian thought.
The interpretation of Christ in Western faith and thought
With the determination of the orthodox teaching of the church regarding the person of Christ, it still remained necessary to clarify the doctrine of the work of Christ. Although it had been principally in the East that the discussion of the former question was carried on—though with important additions from the West—it was the Western church that provided the most-detailed answers to the question, Granted that this is what Jesus Christ was, how are we to describe what it is that he did?
Doctrines of the person and work of Christ
The medieval development
The most-representative spokesman of the Western church on that question, as on most others, was St. Augustine. His deep understanding of the meaning of human sin was matched by his detailed attention to the meaning of divine grace. Central to that attention was his emphasis upon the humanity of Jesus Christ as humanity’s assurance of salvation, an emphasis to which he gave voice in a variety of ways. The humanity of Christ showed how God elevated the humble; it was the link between the physical nature of human beings and the spiritual nature of God; it was the sacrifice which the human race offered to God; it was the foundation of a new humanity, recreated in Christ as the old humanity had been created in Adam—in these and other ways Augustine sought to describe the importance of the Incarnation for human redemption. By combining this stress upon the humanity of Christ as the Saviour with a doctrine of the Trinity that was orthodox but nevertheless highly creative and original, St. Augustine put his mark indelibly upon Western piety and theology, which, in Anselm and in the reformers, sought further for adequate language in which to describe God’s deed of reconciliation in Jesus Christ.
During the formative centuries of Christian dogma, there had been many ways of describing that reconciliation, most of them having some precedent in biblical speech. One of the most-prominent pictures of the reconciliation was that connected with the biblical metaphor of ransom: Satan held the human race captive in its sin and corruptibility, and the death of Christ was the ransom paid to the Devil as the price for setting humanity free. A related metaphor was that of the victory of Christ: Christ entered into mortal combat with Satan for the human race, and the winner was to be lord; although the Crucifixion appeared to be Christ’s capitulation to the enemy, his Resurrection broke the power of the Devil and gave the victory to Christ, granting to humankind the gift of immortality. From the Old Testament and the Epistle to the Hebrews came the image of Christ as the sacrificial victim who was offered up to God as a means of stilling the divine anger. From the sacrament of penance came the idea, most fully developed by St. Anselm, that the death of Christ was a vicarious satisfaction rendered for humankind. Like the New Testament, the Church Fathers could admonish their hearers to learn from the death of Christ how to suffer patiently. They could also point to the suffering and death of Christ as the supreme illustration of how much God loves humanity. As in the New Testament, therefore, so in the tradition of the church there were many figures of speech to represent the miracle of the reunion between human beings and God effected in the God-man Christ Jesus.
Common to all these figures of speech was the desire to do two things simultaneously: to emphasize that the reunion was an act of God and to safeguard the participation of humanity in that act. Some theories were so “objective” in their emphasis upon the divine initiative that humanity seemed to be almost a pawn in the transaction between God in Christ and the Devil. Other theories so “subjectively” concentrated their attention upon human involvement and response that the full scope of the redemption could vanish from sight. It was in Anselm of Canterbury that Western Christendom found a theologian who could bring together elements from many theories into one doctrine of the Atonement, summarized in his book, Cur Deus homo? According to that doctrine, sin was a violation of the honour of God. God offered human beings life if they rendered satisfaction for that violation, but the longer a person lived, the worse the situation became. Only a life that was truly human and yet had infinite worth would have been enough to give such a satisfaction to the violated honour of God on behalf of the entire human race. Such a life was that of Jesus Christ, whom the mercy of God sent as a means of satisfying the justice of God. Because he was a true human being, his life and death could be valid for all human beings, and, because he was true God, his life and death could be valid for all of humanity. By accepting the fruits of his life and death, humankind could receive the benefits of his satisfaction. With some relatively minor alterations, Anselm’s doctrine of the Atonement passed over into the theology of the Latin church, forming the basis of both Roman Catholic and orthodox Protestant ideas of the work of Christ. It owed its acceptance to many factors, not the least of them being the way it squared with the liturgy and art of the West. The crucifix has become the traditional symbol of Christ in the Western church, reinforcing and being reinforced by the satisfaction theory of the Atonement.
Scholastic theology, therefore, did not modify traditional ways of speaking about either the person or the work of Christ as sharply as it did, for example, some of the ways the Church Fathers had spoken about the presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. The major contribution of the Scholastic period to the Christian conception of Jesus Christ appears to lie in the way it managed to combine theological and mystical elements. Alongside the growth of Christological dogma and sometimes in apparent competition with it was the development of a view of Christ that sought personal union with him rather than accurate concepts about him. Such a view of Christ appeared occasionally in the writings of Augustine, but it was in men like Bernard of Clairvaux that it attained both its fullest expression and its most-adequate harmonization with the dogmatic view. The relation between the divine and the human natures in Christ, as formulated in ancient dogma, provided the mystic with the ladder needed to ascend through the human Jesus to the eternal Son of God and through him to a mystical union with the Holy Trinity; that had been anticipated in the mystical theology of some of the Greek Fathers. At the same time the dogma saved mysticism from the pantheistic excesses to which it might otherwise have gone, for the doctrine of the two natures meant that the humanity of the Lord was not an expendable element in Christian piety, mystical or not, but its indispensable presupposition and the continuing object of its adoration, in union with his deity. As a matter of fact, another contribution of the medieval development was the increased emphasis of St. Francis of Assisi and his followers upon the human life of Jesus. Those brotherhoods cultivated a more practical and ethical version of mystical devotion, to be distinguished from speculative and contemplative mysticism. Their theme became the imitation of Christ in a life of humility and obedience. With it came a new appreciation of that true humanity of Christ, which the dogma had indeed affirmed but which theologians had been in danger of reducing to a mere dogmatic concept. As Henry Thode and others have suggested, this new appreciation is reflected in the way painters like Giotto began to portray Jesus, in contrast to their Western predecessors and especially the stylized picture of Christ in Byzantine icon painting.
The Reformation and classical Protestantism
The attitude of the reformers toward traditional conceptions of the person and work of Christ was conservative. Insisting for both religious and political reasons that they were orthodox, they altered little in the Christological dogma. Martin Luther and John Calvin gave the dogma a new meaning when they related it to their doctrine of justification by grace through faith. Because of his interpretation of sin as the captivity of the will, Luther also revived the patristic metaphor of the Atonement as the victory of Christ; it is characteristic of him that he wrote hymns for both Christmas and Easter but not for Lent. The new attention to the Bible that came with the Reformation created interest in the earthly life of Jesus, while the Reformation idea of “grace alone” and of the sovereignty of God even in his grace made the deity of Christ a matter of continuing importance.
In the ideas about the Lord’s Supper set forth by Huldrych Zwingli, Luther thought he saw a threat to the orthodox doctrine of Christ, and he denounced those doctrines vehemently. As that controversy progressed, Luther interpreted the ancient dogma of the two natures to mean that the omnipresence of the divine nature was communicated to the human nature of Christ and that therefore Christ as both God and human being was present everywhere and at all times. Although he repudiated both Luther’s and Zwingli’s theories, Calvin was persuaded that the ancient Christological dogma was true to the biblical witness, and he permitted no deviation from it. All this is evidence for the significance that “Jesus Christ, true God begotten of the Father from eternity, and also true man, born of the Virgin Mary,” to use Luther’s formula, had in the faith and theology of all the reformers.
At one point the theology of the reformers did serve to bring together several facets of the biblical and the patristic descriptions of Jesus Christ. That was the doctrine of the threefold office of Christ, systematized by Calvin and developed more fully in Protestant orthodoxy: Christ as prophet, priest, and king. Each of these symbolized the fulfillment of the Old Testament and represented one aspect of the church’s continuing life. Christ as prophet fulfilled and elevated the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament while continuing to fulfill his prophetic office in the ministry of the Word. Christ as priest brought to an end the sacrificial system of the Old Testament by being both the priest and the victim, while he continues to function as intercessor with and for the church. Christ as king was the royal figure to whom the Old Testament had pointed while exercising his rule among men now through those whom he has appointed. In each of the three, Protestants differed from one another according to their theological, ethical, or liturgical positions. But the threefold office enabled Protestant theology to take into account the complexity of the biblical and patristic pictures of Christ as no oversimplified theory was able to do, and it is probably the chief contribution of the reformers to the theological formulation of the doctrine of the person and work of Christ.
The debate over Christology in modern Christian thought
Few Protestant theologians in the middle of the 20th century were willing to endorse the ancient dogma of the two natures in Christ as unconditionally as the reformers had done, for between the Reformation and modern theology there intervened a debate over Christology that altered the perspective of most Protestant denominations and theologians. By the 20th century there was a wider gap between the theology of the reformers and that of many modern Protestants than there had been between the theology of the reformers and that of their Roman Catholic opponents.
Origins of the debate
The earliest criticism of orthodox dogma came in the age of the Reformation, not from the reformers but from the “left wing of the Reformation,” from Michael Servetus (1511?–53) and the Socinians. That criticism was directed against the presence of nonbiblical concepts and terms in the dogma, and it was intent upon safeguarding the true humanity of Jesus as a moral example. There were many inconsistencies in that criticism, such as the willingness of Servetus to call Jesus “Son of God” and the Socinian custom of addressing prayer and worship to him. But it illustrates the tendency, which became more evident in the Enlightenment, to use the Reformation protest against Catholicism as a basis for a protest against orthodox dogma as well. Although that tendency did not gain much support in the 16th century because of the orthodoxy of the reformers, later criticism of orthodox Christology was able to wield the “Protestant principle” against the dogma of the two natures on the grounds that this was a consistent application of what the reformers had done. Among the ranks of the Protestant laity, the hymnody and the catechetical instruction of the Protestant churches assured continuing support for the orthodox dogma. Indeed, the doctrine of the Atonement by the vicarious satisfaction of Christ’s death has seldom been expressed as amply as it was in the hymns and catechisms of both the Lutheran and the Reformed churches. During the period of Pietism in the Protestant churches, that loyalty to orthodox teaching was combined with a growing emphasis upon the humanity of Jesus, also expressed in the hymnody of the time.
When theologians began to criticize orthodox ideas of the person and work of Christ, therefore, they met with opposition from the common people. Albert Schweitzer dates the development of a critical attitude from the work of H.S. Reimarus (1694–1768), but Reimarus was representative of the way the Enlightenment treated the traditional view of Jesus. The books of the Bible were to be studied just as other books are, and the life of Jesus was to be drawn from them by critically sifting and weighing the evidence of the Gospels. The Enlightenment thus initiated the modern interest in the life of Jesus, with its detailed attention to the problem of the relative credibility of the Gospel records. It has been suggested by some historians that the principal target of Enlightenment criticism was not the dogma of the two natures but the doctrine of the vicarious Atonement. The leaders of Enlightenment thought did not make a sudden break with traditional ideas but gave up belief in miracles, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and the Second Advent only gradually. Their principal importance for the history of the doctrine of Christ consists in the fact that they made the historical study of the sources for the life of Jesus an indispensable element of any Christology.
The 19th century
Although the Enlightenment of the 18th century was the beginning of the break with orthodox teachings about Jesus Christ, it was only in the 19th century that the break attracted wide support among theologians and scholars in many parts of Christendom—even, for a while, among the modernists of the Roman Catholic Church. Two works of the 19th century were especially influential in their rejection of orthodox Christology: one was the Life of Jesus, first published in 1835 by David Friedrich Strauss, and the other, bearing the same title, was first published by Ernest Renan in 1863. Strauss’s work paid more attention to the growth of Christian ideas—he called them “myths”—about Jesus as the basis for the picture presented in the Gospels, while Renan attempted to account for Jesus’ career by a study of his inner psychological life in relation to his environment. Both works achieved wide circulation and were translated into other languages, including English. They took up the Enlightenment contention that the sources for the life of Jesus were to be studied as other sources are, and what they constructed on the basis of the sources was a type of biography in the modern sense of the word. In addition to Strauss and Renan, the 19th century saw the publication of a plethora of books about the life and teachings of Jesus. Each new hypothesis regarding the problem of the Synoptic Gospels implied a reconstruction of the life and message of Jesus.
The fundamental assumption for most of that work on the life and teachings of Jesus was a distinction between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith.” Another favourite way of putting the distinction was to speak of the religion “of” Jesus in antithesis to the religion “about” Jesus. This implied that Jesus was a human being like other human beings but with a heightened awareness of the presence and power of God. Then the dogma of the church had mistaken that awareness for a metaphysical statement that Jesus was the Son of God and had thus distorted the original simplicity of his message. Some critics went so far as to question the very historicity of Jesus, but even those who did not go that far questioned the historicity of some of the sayings and deeds attributed to Jesus in the Gospels.
In part that effort grew out of the general concern of 19th-century scholarship with the problem of history, but it also reflected the religious and ethical assumptions of the theologians. Many of them were influenced by the moral theories of Kant in their estimate of what was permanent about the teachings of Jesus and by the historical theories of Hegel in the way they related the original message of Jesus to the Christian interpretations of that message by later generations of Christians. The ideas of evolution and of natural causality associated with the science of the 19th century also played a part through the naturalistic explanations of the biblical miracles. And the historians of dogma, climaxing in Adolf von Harnack (1851–1931), used their demonstration of the dependence of ancient Christology upon non-Christian sources for its concepts and terminology to reinforce their claim that Christianity had to get back from the Christ of dogma to the “essence of Christianity” in the teachings of Jesus about the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.
The 20th century and beyond
At the beginning of the 20th century the most-influential authorities on the New Testament were engaged in the quest for the essence of Christianity and for the Jesus of history. But that quest led in the early decades of the 20th century to a revolutionary conclusion regarding the teachings of Jesus—namely, that he had expected the end of the age to come shortly after his death and that his teachings as laid down in the Gospels were an “interim ethic,” intended for the messianic community in the brief span of time still remaining before the end. The effort to apply those teachings in modern life was criticized as a dangerous modernization. This thesis of the “consistent eschatology” in Jesus’ message was espoused by Johannes von Weiss (1863–1914) and gained wide circulation through the writings of Albert Schweitzer.
The years surrounding World War I also saw the development of a new theory regarding the composition of the Gospels. Because of its origin, that theory is usually called “form criticism” (German Formgeschichte). It stressed the forms of the Gospel narratives—parables, sayings, miracle stories, Passion accounts, and so on—as an indication of the oral tradition in the Christian community out of which the narratives came. Whereas the attention of earlier scholars had been concentrated on the authenticity of Jesus’ teachings as transmitted in the Gospels, this new theory was less confident of being able to separate the authentic from the later elements in the Gospel records, though various proponents of it did suggest criteria by which such a separation might be guided. The studies of form criticism made a life of Jesus in the old biographical sense impossible, just as consistent eschatology had declared impossible the codification of a universal ethic from the teachings of Jesus. Some adherents of form criticism espoused an extreme skepticism regarding any historical knowledge of Jesus’ life at all, but the work of scholars such as Martin Dibelius and even Rudolf Bultmann showed that such skepticism was not warranted by the conclusions of this study.
Influenced by those trends in New Testament study, Protestant theology by the middle of the 20th century was engaged in a reinterpretation of the Christology of the early church. Some Protestant churches continued to repeat the formulas of ancient dogma, but even there the critical study of the New Testament documents was beginning to call those formulas into question. The struggles of the evangelical churches in Germany under Adolf Hitler caused some theologians to realize anew the power of the ancient dogma of the person of Christ to sustain faith, and some of them were inclined to treat the dogma with less severity. But even they acknowledged that the formulation of that dogma in static categories of person, essence, and nature was inadequate to the biblical emphasis upon actions and events rather than upon states of being. Karl Barth for the Reformed tradition, Lionel Thornton for the Anglican tradition, and Karl Heim for the Lutheran tradition were instances of theologians trying to reinterpret classical Christology. While yielding nothing of their loyalty to the dogma of the church, Roman Catholic theologians like Karl Adam were also endeavouring to state that dogma in a form that was meaningful to modern men and women.
The doctrine of the work of Christ was receiving less attention than the doctrine of Christ’s person. In much of Protestantism, the concentration of the 19th century upon the teachings of Jesus had made it difficult to speak of more than the prophetic office. The priestly office received least attention of all. Therefore, despite the support accorded to efforts like that of Gustaf Aulén to reinterpret the metaphor of the Atonement as Christ’s victory over his enemies, Protestant theology in the middle of the 20th century was still searching for a doctrine of the Atonement to match its newly won insights into the doctrine of the person of Christ. By the end of the 20th century, theologians such as Rita Nakashima Brock were rejecting the doctrine of the Atonement altogether. Some scholars, such as those of the Jesus Seminar (e.g., John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg), rejected most of the traditional portrayals of Jesus, focusing more on the social dimensions of Jesus’ ministry.
In a curious way, therefore, the figure of Jesus Christ has become both a unitive and divisive element in Christendom. All Christians are united in their loyalty to him, even though they express their loyalty in a variety of doctrinal and liturgical ways. But doctrine and liturgy also divide Christian communions from one another. It has not been the official statements about Christ that have differed widely among most communions. What has become a sharp point of division is the amount of historical and critical inquiry that is permitted where the person of Christ is involved. Despite their official statements and confessions, most Protestant denominations had indicated by the second half of the 20th century that they would tolerate such inquiry, differ though they did in prescribing how far it would be permitted to go. On the other hand, the exclusion of modernism by the Roman Catholic Church in 1907–10 drew definite limits beyond which the theological use of the methods of critical inquiry was heretical. Within those limits, however, Roman Catholic biblical scholars were engaging in considerable critical literary study, at the same time that critical Protestant theologians were becoming more sympathetic to traditional Christological formulas.
Jaroslav Jan Pelikan The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica-
Hippolyte TaineFrench critic and historian -
Alfred-Victor, count de VignyFrench author -
Jean Le Rond d’AlembertFrench mathematician and philosopher -
VoltaireFrench philosopher and author
Ernest Renan
- Born:
- February 28, 1823 France
- Subjects Of Study:
- Jesus Judaism history of early Christianity rationalism religion
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Ernest Renan, in full Joseph-Ernest Renan, (born February 28, 1823, Tréguier, France—died October 2, 1892, Paris), French philosopher, historian, and scholar of religion, a leader of the school of critical philosophy in France.
Early career
Renan was educated at the ecclesiastical college in his native town of Tréguier. He began training for the priesthood, and in 1838 he was offered a scholarship at the seminary of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet. He later went on to the seminary of Saint-Sulpice, where he soon underwent a crisis of faith that finally led him, reluctantly, to leave the Roman Catholic Church in 1845. In his view, the church’s teachings were incompatible with the findings of historical criticism, but he kept a quasi-Christian faith in God.
Early works
For Renan, the February revolution of 1848 in France and other parts of Europe was a religion in the making. Sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes critical, he participated in the revolution’s messianic expectations and carried this ambiguous attitude over into L’Avenir de la science (1890; The Future of Science). The main theme of this work is the importance of the history of religious origins, which he regarded as a human science having equal value to the sciences of nature. Though he was now somewhat anticlerical, the French government sent him in 1849 to Italy, where the papacy was still politically important, to help classify manuscripts previously inaccessible to French scholars.
Renan returned to Paris in 1850 to live with his sister, Henriette, on her savings and the small salary attached to his own post at the Bibliothèque Nationale. He began to make a name for himself with his doctoral thesis, Averroès et l’Averroïsme (1852; “Averroës and Averroism”), concerning the thought of that medieval Muslim philosopher. He continued his scholarly writings with two collections of essays, Études d’histoire religieuse (1857; Studies of Religious History) and Essais de morale et de critique (1859; “Moral and Critical Essays”), first written for the Revue des Deux Mondes and the Journal des Débats. The Études inculcated into a middle-class public the insight and sensitivity of the historical, humanistic approach to religion. Many of the Essais denounce the materialism and intolerance of the Second Empire (1852–70) in the name of Renan’s aristocratic ideal: intellectuals, acting as “bastions of the spirit,” must, he affirms, resist tyranny by intellectual and spiritual refinement.
In 1856 Renan married Cornélie Scheffer, niece of the painter Ary Scheffer. In October 1860 Renan was entrusted with an archaeological mission to Lebanon. The Phoenician inscriptions that he discovered were published in his Mission de Phénicie (1864–74; “Phoenician Expedition”). They were later included in the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum (“Corpus of Semitic Inscriptions”), which he helped to bring out through the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. But archaeology was not his main interest. In April 1861, with his wife and sister, he visited the Holy Land in search of materials and inspiration concerning a life of Jesus that he was bent on writing. He finished a first draft of it in Lebanon but at tragic cost, for Henriette died of malaria at ʿAmshīt on September 24, 1861, while he himself fell desperately ill.
Religious controversies
Renan had counted on the writing of his life of Jesus to secure election to the chair of Hebrew at the Collège de France. He was elected, before the book was ready, on January 11, 1862. But in his opening lecture, on February 21, he referred to Jesus in the words of Jacques Bossuet, a French bishop and historian of the 17th and 18th centuries, as “an incomparable man.” Though this was, in his eyes, the highest praise one could bestow on a man, it was not sufficient for the clericals, who took advantage of its implied atheism and the uproar caused by the lecture to have Renan suspended. Contemptuously refusing an appointment to the Bibliothèque Imperiale (June 1864), Renan decided to live by his pen for the next few years. He had to wait until 1870, however, before the chair was restored to him. He was thus pushed into opposition to the church but had already begun to frequent such dissident salons as that of Princess Mathilde, niece of Napoleon Bonaparte, and to associate with such literary notables as Gustave Flaubert, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Hippolyte Taine, and the Goncourt brothers.
When the Vie de Jésus (Life of Jesus) did appear in 1863, it was virulently denounced by the church. Though not Renan’s best historical work, it can still claim the attention of present-day readers because it presents a “mythical” account of the making of Christianity by the popular imagination and thus has a place, like his other historical works, in the literature of messianism. After a journey in Asia Minor in 1864–65 with his wife, he published Les Apôtres (1866; The Apostles) and Saint Paul (1869), to follow the Vie de Jésus as parts of a series, Histoire des origines du christianisme (The History of the Origins of Christianity). Both these volumes, containing brilliant descriptions of how Christianity spread among the rootless proletariat of the cities of Asia Minor, illustrate his preoccupation with a question, Would the intellectuals of the 19th century lead the masses toward a new enlightenment?
Interest in politics
Renan began to interest himself increasingly in politics. In 1869, at the beginning of the “liberal” phase of the Second Empire, he stood unsuccessfully for Parliament. In the same year he defended constitutional monarchy in an article, “La Monarchie constitutionnelle en France” (“Constitutional Monarchy in France”). Thus far he was a liberal. In the same spirit he tried, during the Franco-German War of 1870–71, to work across frontiers: he corresponded with David Friedrich Strauss, a German theologian, and tried to persuade the Prussian crown prince (later German emperor as Frederick III) to stop the war. But the bitterness of France’s defeat and his anger with democracy caused him to become authoritarian. Thus, La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (1871), concerning intellectual and moral reform, argues that France, to achieve national regeneration, must follow the example set by Prussia after the Battle of Jena in 1806. By taking his advice, however, France would have become the sort of clerical monarchy that Renan soon found he did not want. He had to resign himself to accepting the Third Republic (1870–1940), but he withdrew from public life. Though he continued to travel zestfully all over Europe, visiting surviving Bonapartists, such as Prince Jérôme Napoléon, his life became more and more identified with his writings. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1878.
Later writings of Ernest Renan
Renan’s ironical yet imaginative vision of the “festival of the universe” found expression in L’Antéchrist (1873; The Antichrist, 1896; vol. 4 of the Histoire des origines), with its satirical portrait of Nero and its apocalyptic atmosphere—replete with expectations of a cataclysmic consummation of history—assuredly the most impressive of his historical narratives. The “festival of the universe” provides a visionary end to the Dialogues et fragments philosophiques (1876; Philosophical Dialogues and Fragments, 1899). In the first of these, however, Renan is more ironically skeptical about the hidden God than he had been. In fact, the Epicureanism of his later years masks an anxiety about death and the hereafter. His more superficial side is illustrated in the “philosophic dramas” (collected edition 1888), which trace his acceptance of the Republic, especially Caliban (written 1877) and L’Eau de jouvence (written 1879; “The Water of Youth”). In the former, the aristocracy (Prospero and Ariel) loses to democracy (Caliban) because alchemical spells (traditional sanctions) are powerless against a people infected by positivism; scientific power politics would be an effective answer, but this is out of the question because in practice it would mean a clerical monarchy.
As to the remaining volumes of the Histoire des origines, if Renan’s Epicureanism is hard to find in Les Évangiles (1877; The Gospels, 1889), it is present in L’Église chrétienne (1879; “The Christian Church”) in the portrait of the Roman emperor Hadrian, but in Marc-Aurèle (1882; Marcus Aurelius, 1904), the study of Marcus Aurelius, again a self-portrait, it is dominated by the author’s preoccupation with death. Since 1876 Renan had been working on his memoirs, Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse (1883; Recollections of My Youth, 1883), in which he reconstructs his life so as to show that he was predestined to become a prêtre manqué (failed priest) and that, in spite of heavy odds, his wager on the hidden God had paid off in terms of happiness.
In the Souvenirs Renan is too serene for some tastes, though his irony keeps his complacency in check. In L’Ecclésiaste (1882; “Ecclesiastes”) and two articles on Amiel (1884), he is above all an ironist combatting the Pharisees (religious legalists). On the other hand, in some of his speeches at the Académie Française, on Claude Bernard, a French physiologist (1879), and Paul-Émile Littré, a French philologist (1882), he reveals his anguish in moments of doubt. Thus, he manifests a baffling variety of characteristics, but the moral heart of the man is to be found in one of the later dramas, Le Prêtre de Némi (1885; “The Priest of Némi”), and above all in his Histoire du peuple d’Israël (1887–93; History of the People of Israel, 1888–96). For him, the history of Jewish messianism bore witness to man’s capacity for faith when the odds are against him. Thus, it revived his own faith. He could therefore hope that, though Judaism would disappear, the dreams of its prophets would one day come true, so that “without a compensatory Heaven justice will really exist on earth.” Having exhausted himself in an effort to finish the work, he died shortly after its completion in 1892.
With his leanings toward liberalism and authoritarianism in politics and faith and skepticism in religion, Renan embodied the contradictions of the middle class of his time. Politically, his influence after his death was far-reaching, on nationalists, such as Maurice Barrès and Charles Maurras, on republicans, such as Anatole France and Georges Clemenceau. He succeeded in assuaging one of the great anxieties of his time, the antagonism between science and religion, but he very much felt this anxiety.
Harold W. Wardman The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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