Lately I’ve been reading books of New Testament scholarship, something I haven’t done in quite a while. I plowed through two books by renegade scholar Hyam Maccoby, Jesus the Pharisee and The Mythmaker. I also read S.G.F. Brandon’s Jesus and the Zealots and am halfway through his Fall of Jerusalem. Since both of these writers are out of the mainstream, I tried to obtain some balance by reading Jesus the Jew, by Geza Vermes.
I find this whole subject very interesting, and I’ve come to certain tentative conclusions about it. But before I go on, I should point out that Jesus, as a historical figure, is someone who can be interpreted in almost any imaginable way. People tend to see in Jesus what they want to see. Marxists see him as a proto-Marxist, ecologists see him as a proto-ecologist, feminists see him as a proto-feminist, and college professors see him as a hip dude who enjoyed rapping with his disciples in the best tradition of student-friendly academics. It’s unlikely that any of these interpretations is correct.
To get closer to the historical reality, we need to look at the context in which Jesus operated. Judea in his day was under enemy occupation. Haunted by memories of past greatness as an independent theocratic kingdom, Judea had been crushed under the Roman boot. The Romans appointed the high priests who carried out the Temple sacrifices in Jerusalem, the central cultic practice of Judaism at the time. The Romans imposed high taxes collected by the hated “publicans,” who were free to use any form of extortion and violence to wring as much money as possible from their victims. The fact that Rome was a pagan state with a deified emperor only heightened Jewish resentment. The Jews had always regarded themselves as the special people of the one and only God, Yahweh; to be subordinated to a ruthless imperial power that celebrated a mere mortal as a deity and required taxes in tribute to him was intolerable.
As a result, revolutionary movements thrived throughout the first century A.D., leading up to the disastrous revolt of AD 66 – 70, when the population of Judea tried to overthrow their Roman masters, only to be decisively defeated. In the aftermath, the Jerusalem Temple was profaned and destroyed, thousands of Jews were crucified, and many more were forcibly deported, scattered throughout the Empire so that they could no longer band together and cause trouble. Now that Temple sacrifice was no longer possible, the religion itself had to be reinvented; it became a movement based on intensive study of the Torah under the guidance of learned rabbis, in which animal sacrifice no longer played a role.
Prior to all this, numerous would-be messiahs sprang up in Judea, promising deliverance from the hated Romans. The word “messiah” is Hebrew for “anointed,” and because the anointment was the key feature of the coronation of Jewish kings, the term became synonymous with “king.” Naturally, anyone who declared himself the Messiah – i.e., the King of the Jews – was setting himself in direct opposition to Caesar, and was therefore seen by the Romans as guilty of sedition. Some of these self-proclaimed messiahs tried to organize military action against the Romans, while others depended on a divine miracle that they expected momentarily. Whatever the specifics of their program, they were invariably hunted down by Roman authorities, to be killed or (rarely) driven into exile.
Besides declaring himself the rightful King of the Jewish people, a Messiah might also demonstrate his bona fides through prophecy and miracles. Though the Messiah was understood to be a mortal man, he was seen as having been specially appointed by God with a divine mission, so it was not surprising that he might possess unusual powers of healing, exorcism, and prophecy. The Jewish historian Josephus, a turncoat who ended up as a client of the Roman emperor Vespasian, despised these rebels as “wonder-workers” – charlatans, magicians – who got ordinary people all worked up over nothing and helped bring about Judea’s humiliating defeat in A.D. 70.
These would-be messiahs did not operate in a vacuum, of course. Rumblings of discontent were increasingly widespread throughout Judea, especially – it would seem – in Galilee, where they took the form of clandestine popular resistance. The Zealots, whom Josephus denigrated as “bandits,” were the best known revolutionary party. Fiercely nationalistic, the Zealots recruited followers who aimed at the overthrow of Rome, while harassing and murdering Jews who were seen as collaborationists with the regime. In some cases, Zealots committed public assassinations at crowded festivals, using small daggers concealed in their clothing. For this reason, the Romans came to know them as sicarii, or “dagger-men.”
In short, the situation in Judea was a hotbed of unrest that periodically flared up into open rebellion, only to be ruthlessly stamped out by Roman troops.
Where does Jesus fit into this picture? Both Maccoby and Brandon argue that he probably matched the general pattern of other messianic pretenders of the period. Most likely, he gained popularity by assuring people that the end of Roman rule was at hand, that a new day was soon to dawn, and that Israel would be restored to its former glory, with the hereditary Throne of David once again occupied by one of God’s chosen kings. His immediate inspiration appears to have been John the Baptizer, who preached the message that the Kingdom of God was at hand and that the Jewish people should repent – that is, should purify themselves so as to be worthy of God’s favor. Though the expression “Kingdom of God” has been much debated, it probably referred to an earthly kingdom, a theocracy along the lines of the semi-legendary kingdom of David and Solomon. The concern of John – and almost certainly of Jesus also – was not individual salvation in an afterlife, but the salvation of the holy Davidic kingdom on earth. John apparently did not claim to be the Messiah himself, but only the prophet announcing the imminent appearance of the Messiah. It is possible that Jesus’ ministry began the same way, but that at some later point he became convinced that he actually was the Messiah. Or perhaps he never did believe this, and the role of Messiah was assigned to him only by his more ardent followers. (A certain reluctance on the part of Jesus to accept Messiah-hood is indicated by a story of how the people wished to crown him King but he refused, and also by his repeated requests for secrecy on the part of his inner circle.)
After some time preaching in Galilee (a center of revolutionary activity, where anti-Roman agitators could count on local support), Jesus and his core disciples risked entering the more dangerous territory of Jerusalem, where the Romans, in conjunction with their collaborators among the Jewish priesthood, maintained much firmer control. Maccoby believes they arrived in the autumn for the Feast of Tabernacles, while Brandon is content to accept the biblical version that they arrived in the spring, just prior to the Passover. In any event, Jerusalem was apparently meant to be the scene of Jesus’ ultimate triumph. Here, in the heart of Judea, where stood the Temple itself, Jesus hoped to help bring about the miraculous overthrow of the Romans and the restoration of the Davidic kingdom.
His attack on the money-changers in the Temple courtyard appears to have been a key step in his campaign to purify the Temple and set the stage for divine intervention. Brandon argues convincingly that Jesus did far more than simply overturn a few tables, an action that would have been quickly stopped by the Temple police; instead, Jesus probably entered the Temple with a large group of followers and incited a melee that the police were unable to control. He may have intended to actually seize control of the Temple and use it as his base of operations. Seizure of the Temple would have greatly magnified his status and electrified the population of Jerusalem, who would remember that the successful revolt of the Maccabees against the Seleucid Empire climaxed with the rededication of the Temple. In any event, the dramatic effort apparently failed, and Jesus and his supporters were driven out of the Temple and into the hills, where they hid from the authorities. By this point, both the Temple priesthood and the Roman governor would have been committed to the arrest and execution of Jesus and his inner circle.
Maccoby and Brandon differ on exactly what happened next. Maccoby believes that Jesus intended to bring about divine intervention in a night of intensive prayer on the Mount of Olives outside Jerusalem, in fulfillment of biblical prophecy. This is Maccoby’s interpretation of the famous Agony of Gethsemane account in the Gospels, where Jesus is pictured as praying so intensely that sweat drips from his forehead like blood. Brandon thinks that Jesus and his followers were simply hiding and trying to regroup, perhaps in preparation for leaving the area altogether and retreating into the desert. In any case, they were discovered by Roman troops. The Gospel accounts indicate, in a muted fashion, that the apostles attempted to put up resistance. How much of a struggle ensued is impossible to say, but, in the end, Jesus was arrested, while apparently most or all of his close followers managed to escape.
Neither Maccoby nor Brandon gives any credence to the famous story of Jesus’ trial before Pilate. It was certainly not the custom of Roman governors to conduct public trials; such a practice would have only invited mob violence. Nor was it their practice to give the crowd an opportunity to vote on the release of a particular prisoner during a religious festival. Nor is there any reason to believe that Pilate ever had the least interest in Jesus’ psychology, theology, or even his basic guilt or innocence. By all other accounts, Pilate was an extremely ruthless procurator with little or no regard for the lives of his Jewish subjects. Most likely, he condemned Jesus to death without so much as a hearing. Jesus was just one more nuisance the governor had to deal with in his busy schedule, and the execution of yet another rebellious Jew would not have cost him a moment’s thought.
One detail of the Pilate story that may well be correct, however, is that the titulus (inscription) on Jesus’ cross read “King of the Jews.” This was almost certainly the crime of which he was convicted and for which he was executed. Again, styling oneself as king was tantamount to declaring direct opposition to Caesar, and was therefore a capital offense.
What we get from all this is a rather different picture of Jesus than the one promoted in the Gospels, which were written decades after the events and were aimed at a predominantly Gentile (non-Jewish) audience. The Gospels take great pains to downplay any political activity on Jesus’ part and to exculpate the Romans as much as possible for his execution, even making Pilate a conflicted and sympathetic figure. Instead they lay all the blame on the Jews, going so far as to have the Jewish crowd improbably assembled for Jesus’ public trial declare that they willingly take his blood on themselves and their children – a passage that has been used ever since to justify anti-Semitic pogroms. The polemical approach taken by the Gospels reflects their Sitz im Leben (situation in life), i.e., their historical context. By the time they were written, the Christian church had broken with the Jewish community, and relations between Christians and Jews were extremely hostile. Christianity had become an almost exclusively Gentile movement, and it would have been impolitic to lay any emphasis on the role of Rome in crucifying the Savior of mankind. It would have been equally impolitic to present Jesus as a Jewish revolutionary seeking to overthrow the Roman empire, when the Christians were eager to discourage the political persecution of their movement.
The question naturally arises, though, that if Jesus’ historical career was that of a would-be Messiah with mixed political and religious motives, who came up against the Roman state and was executed for sedition, then how did he come to be seen as the hero of a predominantly Gentile movement, celebrated as an apolitical pacifist whose purposes were far larger than the restoration of the kingdom of David?
Both Maccoby and Brandon agree that two key historical developments were responsible. First, there was the destruction of the Temple and the humiliating defeat of the Jewish people in A.D. 70, which seems to put an end to the Jerusalem church and what might be called the “Jewish Christian wing” of the movement. Second, there was the teaching of St. Paul.
Paul apparently began as a devout Jew, raised in a Hellenistic environment (reportedly the city of Tarsus), but while near Damascus, he experienced a mystical revelation in which the figure of Jesus appeared to him. This revelation changed his life and ultimately changed the entire direction of Christianity. Paul became convinced that he had been appointed to carry the message of Jesus – as he understood it through direct revelation – to the Gentiles. In his letters, which were written decades before the Gospels and represent the earliest extant Christian documents, he boasts that his knowledge did not come from knowing Jesus in the flesh or from talking with people who had known him, but rather from mystical communion with the resurrected Christ. Although Paul made efforts to tailor his brand of Christianity to Jewish Christian traditions when possible, his overall approach represented a radical departure. In his mind, Jesus was not the Messiah in the traditional Jewish sense – a mortal man appointed to restore the Israelite kingdom – but the incarnation of God himself, an aspect of God that preexisted his earthly life and may have preexisted the universe as such. The purpose of this God-man was to ensure the salvation of individual souls, much in the way that the Hellenistic mystery religions apparently promised personal immortality to those who underwent their initiation ceremony. (I say “apparently” because the details of the mystery religions’ ceremonies were kept secret and can only be inferred. But it seems likely from occasional remarks that have been preserved, for instance in the writings of Plutarch and Apuleius, that personal immortality was the focus of these rites.)
Paul, with his combined background of Jewish and Hellenistic influences and his unique personal genius, created a new and powerful religious synthesis. His work did not go unnoticed by the Jerusalem church. Though the Book of Acts, written decades later, does its best to whitewash any conflict between Paul and the core group of apostles in Jerusalem, who were led by Jesus’ own brother James, the letters written by Paul at the time make it clear that the two sides were often at odds. Paul was called to Jerusalem more than once to justify his unorthodox teaching; he often found rival apostles – presumably of the Jewish Christian type – preaching against his ideas and trying to win over his converts; and he was ultimately arrested and sent to Rome, where he may have met his death, as a result of a Jewish Christian plot hatched in Jerusalem. It seems clear, then, that Paul’s brand of Christianity met with intense resistance from the people who had actually known Jesus in real life and who were not impressed by Paul’s claims to have communed with Jesus beyond the grave. In one of his letters, Paul goes out of his way to say that he is not insane, presumably to counter an accusation being made by his enemies in the Jewish Christian movement. In another letter, he famously says he is “not ashamed of the gospel,” an odd circumlocution suggesting that his version of the gospel had a certain notoriety that he was seeking to overcome.
Furthermore, it appears that the efforts of the Jerusalem church were pretty successful in the short run. Brandon argues that the desultory condition of Paul’s letters, some of which exist only in pieced-together form, indicates that Paul fell out of favor for some considerable period of time. Ultimately, of course, his teachings did win out. The explanation, according to both Brandon and Maccoby, was that the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and the consequent destruction of the Jerusalem church left the field open for the Pauline sect to proselytize with minimal opposition. And since Pauline theology was far more congenial to Gentiles than the original Jewish Christian story, it gradually won out. When the Gospels and Acts came to be written (by Pauline Christians), the Jewish Christian origins of the movement were, to a large extent, suppressed.
In other words, what we have today is Pauline Christianity, which bears little resemblance to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, a Galilean apocalyptic preacher and revolutionary whose interests lay in the restoration of the Throne of David.
This leaves us with one other obvious question – namely, does this historical interpretation, if it is correct, invalidate Christianity as a religion?
If the historical Jesus did not teach the things that we are told he taught, if he did not see himself as the incarnation of God or the Savior of mankind, if he was not interested in reaching out to the Gentiles (as even some of the Gospel stories indicate), if he was in fact just one of many failed messianic candidates in a period of political unrest in ancient Judea … if he was, in short, not very much different from such dimly remembered figures as Theudas or Bar-Kochba (two other self-appointed messiahs who came to a bad end) … then is there any reason to regard the religion centered on him as meaningful or important?
I think there probably is. In fact, I think there may be more reason to take Christianity seriously when viewed in this light. Though Paul may have been libeled as insane by his rivals, he seems to have had an experience best described by the term “cosmic consciousness.” In one or more episodes of mystical transport, he seems to gotten in touch with some kind of higher power – whether we think of it as his own higher self, or God, or discarnate spirits, or the specific discarnate spirit of Jesus himself, or some other supranormal reality. And in this mode of transcendent insight, Paul experienced a kind of instantaneous and dizzying “data dump” that crowded his brain and haunted his thoughts for the rest of his life. His letters, read in this light, show us – not the careful logical reasoning of a trained rabbinical scholar – but the excited thought processes of someone whose understanding outstrips his language, someone who jumps from one big idea to another without filling in the necessary gaps, someone who thinks in terms of vast patterns and cosmic imagery rather than legalistic or casuistic details. In other words, we see the writings of someone whose entire life was reshaped and targeted in a new direction as the result of an overwhelming mystical revelation. Though he did his best to graft this revelatory material onto Judaism and the teachings of the Jerusalem church, he was only incidentally indebted to those sources. He was presenting something new, something that exploded the existing paradigm and offered an exciting new fusion of Judaism, Hellenism, Gnosticism, and personal mystical insight.
Seen in this way, Pauline Christianity becomes an exciting window into the higher reaches of transcendental revelation, and is arguably more interesting and more relevant to the modern world than the religious-political efforts of the historical Jesus. Paul himself seems to have felt this way, inasmuch as he showed little interest in the actual life of Jesus on earth, making few references to it in his letters. The historical Jesus did not interest him. His interest lay in the direct revelation(s) he had received.
It’s ironic to consider that what Albert Schweitzer called “the quest of the historical Jesus” – the massive, longtime, ongoing effort of New Testament scholars to determine the actual facts of Jesus of Nazareth’s life – may end in the realization that the historical Jesus is of no great importance, and that what really matters is the eternal spiritual reality accessed by a man who never knew Jesus in the flesh.
Recent Comments