Jesus

by James Martin

  10. Zerwick, Grammatical Analysis of the Greek New Testament, 171.

  11. Meier, Marginal Jew, 1:205–8.

  12. Lk 8:28.

  13. Some scholars suggest this difference between Zechariah and Mary: Zechariah asks for understanding, while Mary is simply wondering how her pregnancy will happen. Or perhaps as an elder and a priest educated in the faith, Zechariah was expected to demonstrate more faith.

  14. This process is elaborated in Meier’s book A Marginal Jew, 1:41–48. The idea of the multistage development of the Gospels is supported by nearly all New Testament scholars.

  15. Other ancillary figures, like Simon of Cyrene, who helped to carry Jesus’s cross, could have also provided eyewitness accounts.

  16. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 170.

  17. Harrington, Jesus, 7. Traditionally, Mark was seen as relying heavily on Peter’s testimony, Luke was associated with Paul, and John was associated with the “Beloved Disciple” mentioned in that Gospel.

  18. Jn 14:6.

  19. Fitzmyer, Christological Catechism, 8.

  20. Mt 9:9; Mk 2:14; Lk 5:27.

  21. Mt 13:18–23; Mk 4:13–20; Lk 8:11–15.

  22. Lk 6:20; Mt 5:3.

  23. Meier, Marginal Jew, 1:210.

  24. Fitzmyer, Gospel According to Luke, I–IX, 335.

  25. Lk 2:19.

  26. Mt 14:13–21; Mk 6:30–44; Lk 9: 10–17; Jn 6:1–14. Possibly there were more than five thousand—Matthew adds “besides women and children.”

  Chapter Three: Bethlehem

  1. Murphy-O’Connor, Holy Land, 477.

  2. Some sources say Luke may have gotten a fact wrong: the census is supposed to have occurred in AD 6, but Quirinius began his governorship in AD 7. Other scholars conclude that Luke is accurate. In his massive book The Birth of the Messiah, Raymond E. Brown, SS, includes an extensive discussion on the question (547–55) and casts doubt on the historicity of a Roman census at that time.

  3. According to Donahue and Harrington, “The term prōtotokos does not demand more than one child” (Gospel of Luke, 50).

  4. Herod had a record for murder, having slaughtered his father-in-law, his mother-in-law, his first wife, and two of his sons; and he was about to murder a third.

  5. Murphy-O’Connor, Holy Land, 230.

  6. Jn 6:35.

  7. Raymond Brown in The Birth of the Messiah offers a lengthy explanation of the significance of kataluma and the competing theories about where, precisely, Jesus was born (668–672). The word will appear again in Luke’s Gospel near the close of Jesus’s earthly life: the Last Supper takes place in a kataluma (22:11). Also, the use of the word manger reminds us that Jesus is destined to provide, and become, food.

  8. Johnson, Gospel of Luke, 50.

  9. Brown, Birth of the Messiah, 419.

  10. Von Speyr, Book of All Saints, 27.

  11. Mt 1:18–24.

  12. Gn 28:10–22.

  13. Gn 37:5–11; 40:1–23; 41:1–36.

  14. Von Speyr, Book of All Saints, 27.

  15. Luke’s Gospel will later report a meeting between Mary and Joseph and a devout man named Simeon, who foretells Jesus’s future and tells Mary, “a sword will pierce your own soul too” (Lk 2:25–35).

  16. Mk 6:3.

  Chapter Four: Nazareth

  1. Murphy-O’Connor, Holy Land, 427.

  2. Lk 2:48–49.

  3. Some of the “apocryphal gospels,” that is, gospels not ultimately accepted by the universal church (and in general written later than the four canonical Gospels), include stories about Jesus’s childhood and adolescence, as if to satisfy believers’ natural curiosity about this time in his life. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, for example, written in the second century AD, focuses specifically on Jesus’s childhood.

  4. David Neuhaus, SJ, our Jesuit friend in Jerusalem, told me later that the walled-in property was once run by the Poor Clare sisters, but that a portion of the property had been given over to a community of a branch of the Little Brothers of Jesus and to a school for special-needs children.

  5. Reed, HarperCollins Visual Guide to the New Testament, 57.

  6. Reed, HarperCollins Visual Guide to the New Testament, 54.

  7. Crossan and Reed, Excavating Jesus, 66.

  8. Johnson, Truly Our Sister, 143.

  9. Mt 13:55–56.

  10. Crossan and Reed, Excavating Jesus, 54.

  11. Magness, Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit, 110.

  12. Magness, Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit, 130.

  13. Crossan and Reed, Excavating Jesus, 54.

  14. Johnson, Truly Our Sister, 141.

  15. Amy-Jill Levine, interview.

  16. Crossan and Reed, Excavating Jesus, 54.

  17. Johnson, Truly Our Sister, 145.

  18. There is a lively debate among scholars over how poor Jesus was. Meier argues for someone in the “lower middle class” (Marginal Jew, 1:282), but Johnson believes that, although his poverty may not have been, as Meier notes, the grinding, degrading poverty of the slave, it is misleading to compare him to a member of the “lower middle class.” “The analogy does not work,” says Johnson, “because there was no middle class. The family of [Mary and Jesus] lived on the economic underside of a two-sided system” (Truly Our Sister, 148). In Excavating Jesus, Crossan and Reed write simply, “Jesus was a Jewish peasant” (52).

  19. Crossan and Reed, Excavating Jesus, 69.

  20. John R. Donahue, SJ, a New Testament scholar, told me, “Galilee was as Jewish as other parts of Palestine, but it was not dominated by the Temple in Jerusalem.” Jonathan Reed suggests that the phrase “Galilee of the Gentiles” refers to a region inhabited by Jews, but encircled by Gentiles (HarperCollins Visual Guide to the New Testament, 64).

  21. Reed, HarperCollins Visual Guide to the New Testament, 55.

  22. Magness, Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit, 16–31, 77–84, 85–96, 145–80. Some of these customs were also designed simply to promote basic cleanliness and health.

  23. Jn 1:46.

  24. Andrew Overman, “Who Were the First Urban Christians? Urbanization in Galilee in the First Century” (1988), quoted in Crossan, Historical Jesus, 19.

  25. Eric M. Meyers and James F. Strange, Archaeology, the Rabbis, and Early Christianity (1981), quoted in Crossan, Historical Jesus, 16.

  26. Crossan and Reed, Excavating Jesus, 152.

  27. Sanders, Historical Figure of Jesus, 12.

  28. Andrew Overman, “Who Were the First Urban Christians? Urbanization in Galilee in the First Century” (1988), quoted in Crossan, The Historical Jesus, 19.

  29. Crossan, Historical Jesus, 19.

  30. Chancey, Greco-Roman Culture and the Galilee of Jesus, 161.

  31. Mk 5:41; Mk 7:34; Mt 5:22; Mk 15:34.

  32. Mk 14:70.

  33. Meier, Marginal Jew, 1:276. Crossan and Reed, in Excavating Jesus, doubt this. “The best specific work on ancient literacy in the Jewish homeland concludes about a 3 percent literacy rate.” Someone from Jesus’s milieu, they maintain, would probably have been unable to read or write. But: “If Jesus was an illiterate peasant . . . that does not mean that he could not think, does not mean he did not know his tradition, and does not mean he did not teach. It just means he did not read” (64–66).

  34. Meier, Marginal Jew, 1:278.

  35. Meier, Marginal Jew, 1:276.

  36. Meier, Marginal Jew, 1:279. Again, Mk 6:3 speaks of Jesus as the brother—adelphos—of James and the others, and mentions Jesus’s adelphai, sisters. These could easily be the children from a first marriage of Joseph. Catholics and Orthodox believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary: she had no other children after Jesus. For some other Christian denominations the idea that Mary bore children after Jesus and that he had natural brothers and sisters does not pose a theological problem.

  37. Mt 13:1–9; Mk 4:1–9; Lk 8:4–8; Mt 13:31–32; Mk 4:30–32; Lk 13:18–19; Mt 13:24–30.

  38. Mk 6:3; Mt 13:55–56; Lk 4:22; Jn 6:42. Not all scholars agre
e with the idea that a tektōn was seen as an undignified career by Matthew, Luke, and John. Still, it is notable that only in Mark, the earliest Gospel, is the question posed in a way that so directly identifies Jesus by his profession: “Is this not the tektōn?”

  39. Johnson, Truly Our Sister, 147.

  40. Meier, Marginal Jew, 1:281.

  41. Mt 19:13–15; Mk 10:13–16; Lk 18:15–17.

  42. My book Between Heaven and Mirth (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2011) examines other indications in the Gospels of Jesus’s humor.

  43. For example, Mark’s Gospel calls James and John “Boanerges,” or “Sons of Thunder” (Mk 3:17), a nickname that may have been given to them by Jesus. Also, Daniel Harrington told me that he suspected that the name Jesus gives to Simon (Peter, from petrus, “rock”) not only indicates Peter as the “rock” on which Jesus builds the church, but also could be a playful comment about Peter’s sharp and “angular” personality. In other words, a nickname: Rocky.

  44. Mt 17:14–20.

  45. Mt 12:46–50; Mk 3:31–35; Lk 8:19–21.

  46. Meier, Marginal Jew, 1:332–45. Also, in The Jewish Annotated New Testament Levine and Brettler note that “rabbi,” originally meaning “my master,” “became at an uncertain date the term for one qualified to pronounce on matters of Jewish law and practice” (160).

  47. Meier, Marginal Jew, 1:332.

  48. Meier, Marginal Jew, 1:345.

  49. Jn 11:3.

  50. Mt 11:30.

  51. Lk 15:8–9.

  52. Mt 7:24–27; Lk 6:47–49.

  53. Lk 9:62.

  54. Mt 21:42; Mk 12:10–11; Lk 20:17.

  55. Mt 9:24; Jn 10:30; Lk 2:52.

  56. Mk 13:31–32.

  57. Mk 7:24–30.

  58. Jn 2:1–11.

  59. Sheed, To Know Christ Jesus, 127.

  60. On the other hand, John Donahue reminded me that Raymond Brown often emphasized that in the Gospel of John Jesus is “from above” and he speaks “a language from above” that we are not meant to understand. “So even some of the more ‘human statements,’ such as those from the Wedding Feast at Cana,” Father Donahue told me, “have a meaning ‘from above.’” In other words, this may not be a case of Jesus’s not yet understanding his vocation, but of our not understanding Jesus.

  61. Mt 8:2–3; Mk 1:40–41; Lk 5:12–13.

  62. Mt 26:39; Mk 14:36; Lk 22:42.

  63. Elizabeth A. Johnson, Consider Jesus, 42. There is more about the speculative question of Jesus’s self-consciousness and his understanding of his vocation in my book Becoming Who You Are (Mahwah, NJ: Hidden Spring, 2006). N. T. Wright, in Jesus and the Victory of God, summed up his approach to Jesus’s understanding of his vocation as follows: “[A]s part of his human vocation, grasped in faith, sustained in prayer, tested in confrontation, agonized over in further prayer and doubt, and implemented in action, he believed he had to do and be, for Israel and the world, that which according to scripture only YHWH himself could do and be” (653).

  64. Lohfink, Jesus of Nazareth, 10–11.

  65. Haughey, Housing Heaven’s Fire, 85.

  Chapter Five: Jordan

  1. Jn 1:28.

  2. Why was the Jordan River that sickly green color? Christiana Z. Peppard, a theology professor at Fordham University, who in her book Just Water explores the question of fresh water’s value from theological, ecological, and historical perspectives, told me: “Fertilizer and petrochemical effluent from agricultural runoff is a large part of the putrid state of the lower Jordan River, though the problem is also exacerbated by heavy water withdrawals from surface and shallow groundwater on both sides of the river—which means that there is less un-irrigated water to mix with or dilute the effluent. In some place, the river still receives sewage.”

  3. Ps 51:3.

  4. Mk 1:1–8; Lk 3:1–6.

  5. Meier, Marginal Jew, 1:168. In Jesus: A Historical Portrait, Daniel Harrington lists embarrassment along with several other criteria used by most scholars of the historical Jesus. They are: “when a tradition appears in several different sources (Last Supper); local Palestinian coloring (Aramaic words, Palestinian farming methods); embarrassment at what might reflect badly on Jesus (his reception of John’s ‘baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,’ see Mark 1:4); what led to Jesus’s death (the ‘cleansing of the Temple’); and coherence (what fits with what can be established by other criteria).” These criteria cannot tell us everything we would like to know about the Jesus of history, says Harrington, but they can tell us something (8–9).

  6. Though many New Testament scholars use “John the Baptizer,” to avoid any confusion with modern-day Baptists (not that there’s anything wrong with that), or “JBap,” which sounds more like a rapper’s name, I prefer the traditional “John the Baptist,” mainly because the name is so widely used.

  7. Mt 3:7–12.

  8. Mt 3:4.

  9. Mal 4:5.

  10. Lohfink, Jesus of Nazareth, 27.

  11. Jn 2:6.

  12. In The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3, Ben Meyer offers a juxtaposition of the ministries of John the Baptist and Jesus. While representing a new kind of prophet, the Baptist nonetheless “maintained the classic biblical structure of repentance: conversion first, communion [that is, inclusion in the group] second.” “The daring of Jesus’s initiative,” writes Meyer, “lay in its reversal of this structure: communion first, conversion second.” (“Jesus Christ,” 782). For example, Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners before preaching conversion. John Donahue summed up Meyer’s insight as follows in a conversation with me: “John preached that repentance and change of heart led to conversion; Jesus practiced a communion that leads to conversion.”

  13. Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 53. Harrington believes that Jesus’s seeking out of John and requesting his baptism “indicates some contact between the two in which John has the role of mentor.” Indeed, John’s reputation was so widespread that the early church took pains to distinguish between the Baptist’s ministry and that of Jesus.

  14. Lk 3:4, 16.

  15. In Mark and Luke, the word agapētos, usually translated as “beloved,” can also connote in this context “unique” or “only.”

  16. Moloney, Gospel of John, 59.

  17. Interestingly, John says to his disciples, about Jesus, “I myself did not know him” (Jn 1:33). This can mean either that John did not realize that Jesus was the Messiah until it was revealed to him, or that John literally did not know him despite the fact that the two were related. F. J. Sheed speculates in To Know Christ Jesus that John may have not known Jesus as an adult, because John had entered a religious community and “gone to the desert” early in his life (96). Most scholars today, however, believe Jesus and John had met, and that Jesus may have been a disciple of John’s for a time. So it is more likely that John (or at least the Gospel) is speaking of John not knowing Jesus as Messiah.

  18. Green, God’s Fool, 84.

  19. So does St. Paul, who wrote, “For our sake he [God] made him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). Another way of looking at Jesus’s baptism is that he acts as a kind of “representative” of all humankind.

  20. Scirghi, Everything Is Sacred, 50–51.

  21. Harrington, Gospel of Matthew, 62.

  22. “Thrust forth”: Marshall, Interlinear Greek-English New Testament, 138. “Hurled”: Sheed, To Know Christ Jesus, 98.

  23. Quoted in Crace, Quarantine, vii.

  24. Mt 4:1–11; Lk 4:1–12.

  25. Barclay, Mind of Jesus, 33.

  26. Merton, Seven Storey Mountain, 449.

  27. Scirghi, Everything Is Sacred, 41.

  Chapter Six: Rejection

  1. Crossan and Reed, Excavating Jesus, 64.

  2. Mk 7:24; Mt 14:13; Mt 14:23; Jn 6:15; Lk 5:16. In Jesus: A Historical Portrait, Harrington writes, “If you want to know what Luke regarded as the most important moments in Jesus’s life, look
at his mentions of Jesus at prayer” (47).

  3. Mt 9:20–22; Mk 5:25–34; Lk 8:43–48.

  4. Luke offers an edited version of Is 58:6 and 61:1–2, revising the text for his readers. Interestingly, in Luke’s account Jesus stops reading halfway through the passage from Isaiah, ending his proclamation at the words “the year of the Lord’s favor.” The next phrase would have been “and the day of vengeance of our God . . .”

  5. Levine, Misunderstood Jew, 57.

  6. John Meier calls the kingdom of God a “major component” of Jesus’s message (Marginal Jew, 2:237–39). The Scripture scholar Joachim Jeremias called the reign of God the central theme of Jesus’s preaching.

  7. Of course one could argue that the entire Old Testament is concerned with the idea of God as king, but the specific phrase “reign of God” seems to have originated with Jesus.

  8. Sanders, Historical Figure of Jesus, 170–78.

  9. Matthew’s Gospel also uses, at times, instead of “reign of God,” the phrase “reign of heaven” (basileian tōn ouranōn). Most scholars say that the two phrases are identical. Matthew, whose audience was more heavily Jewish than Mark’s and Luke’s, was probably trying to avoid the word “God,” which was considered too holy to be pronounced or even written. It is unclear which term—“reign of God” or “reign of heaven”—was used by Jesus, but it is significant that the earliest Gospel, Mark, uses “reign of God.”

  10. Another translation that is possible, given that the same phrase appears in the Acts 20:32 in another context, is “words of salvation.”

  11. 1 Kgs 17:8–16; 2 Kgs 5:1–4.

  12. In Greek, amēn legō humin: “Truly I tell you.”

  13. Harrington, Jesus, 16.

  14. This is a reference to the “Jubilee Year” (or “Sabbatical Year”) mentioned in the Book of Deuteronomy (15:1–7), in which every seventh year, debts were wiped away, and in Leviticus (25:8–12), which counts it as every fiftieth year. In general, it is a proclamation of a time of freedom.