A Radical Process of Division
But at this very point another objection arises, and we dare not evade it: I quoted Romano Guardini’s question: who will protect Jesus from us? Who will preserve him from the “cunning… of our own ego,” which does everything to avoid really following Jesus? And his answer was: the encounter with Jesus must not be left to subjective religious experience; a place is appointed for Jesus, one that is built in such a way that he can be rightly seen and listened to—and that place is the church.
Lovely, and quite right! But is it so simple, “the church”? Have there not been some totally different interpretations of Jesus within the church itself, interpretations that were mutually exclusive? We only have to think of the great christological battles that led to the councils of Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451).
But to review the lengthy history of christological interpretation carried out in the major councils of the ancient church would, in our context, take far too much time and be too complicated. Let me simplify things. Instead of looking at the great christological confrontations in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries, let us look at the pictures of Jesus produced by the so-called infancy gospels.
In the “Infancy Gospel of Thomas,”10 for example, we read how the boy Jesus is playing at the ford of a brook; he diverts the flowing water into small pools and then, by his mere word, makes the muddy brew “clean.” Jesus is practicing, so to speak, for his later activity. The son of a scribe is standing near; he takes a branch and lets the water Jesus had gathered flow out again. How does little Jesus react?
When Jesus saw what he had done he was enraged and said to him: “You insolent, godless dunderhead, what harm did the pools and the water do to you? See, now you also shall wither like a tree and shall bear neither leaves nor fruit.” And immediately that lad withered up completely; and Jesus departed and went into Joseph’s house. But the parents of him that was withered took him away, bewailing his youth, and brought him to Joseph and reproached him: “What a child you have, who does such things.” (2.2-3)
This writing, which originated in the second century CE, goes on in the same vein. Not only does it lack narrative skill and good taste, its Christology is also pathetic. A miracle child does whatever comes to mind and so shows himself to be a child of God.
There can be no question but that this gospel has its own image of Jesus, and a pretty miserable one. No doubt it was written with good intentions. It wanted to illustrate Jesus’ divinity, his wisdom and miraculous power. As a result, it circulated widely in the ancient church. The Greek original was translated into Latin, Syriac, Georgian, Ethiopic, and Church Slavonic. Apparently it was favorite reading for many Christians, or people liked to tell the legends collected in it.
And this was only one part of the much larger production of gospels and sayings of the Lord. We have a great number of other gospels and revelatory writings, preserved entire or at least in fragments—for ex ample, a Gospel of Peter; a Gospel of Thomas; a Gospel of Philip; an Infancy Gospel of James; various acts of the apostles, such as the Acts of Andrew and the Acts of John; as well as an Apocalypse of Peter, an Apocalypse of Paul, an Apocalypse of Thomas, and many other apocalyptic writings.
Certainly some of these were abstruse compositions that promised secret knowledge and could be rapidly dismissed. Others contained Docetic and Gnostic heresies, against which the church was in any case struggling to defend itself. But many of these writings certainly addressed the thoughts and feelings of the Christians of the time, especially their religious curiosity. Only against the background of all these so-called apocrypha can we discern the true quality of the New Testament, and above all the power of discernment exercised by those who created it. They had an inerrant instinct for the authentic Jesus tradition going back to the apostles.
This is the crucial point: the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and similar creations may have been widely read and popular in the ancient church; they may even have borne the names of apostles; but they were not acknowledged as apostolic writings. And that means that they were not accepted into the canon of the New Testament. The theological significance of that nonacceptance should not be underestimated. In principle, what happened here was a radical process of division—altogether comparable to the process of division that was taking place in the great christological discourses of the first councils.
This immense process of considering and choosing, of distinction and division, but above all the deliberate selection and assembly of the writings ultimately chosen as the canon of the New Testament was an “ecclesial” process. We could even call it “authorial activity,” because the result was the composition, the authoring, of the one book that is the New Testament, which is more than a bundle of randomly associated writings.11
Obviously the authors of this process were concrete persons, often even clergy or others commissioned by the church in some fashion. But they were supported by all those among the people of God who believed with their whole being and who for that very reason possessed the gift of discernment. Without the faith instinct of the many, without the sensus fidelium, the process of coming-to-be of the New Testament as the final, concluding book of the Bible would have been impossible. What would have happened without this ultimate critical process of discernment is evident in the apocrypha, which over long stretches are bizarre, confused, and unhistorical. A constant rereading of the immense apocryphal Jesus literature from the ancient church is urgently needed, because only that can show us how unique and precious are the gospels of the New Testament canon.
Faith as Recognition
What does all that mean for a book about Jesus? It shows that for a scholar who works theologically it cannot be a question of reconstructing a “historical Jesus” against the New Testament and its interpretation of the figure of Jesus. Any theologian who does that exalts herself or himself above the first witnesses and the church and thus abandons any chance of understanding Jesus.
Of course that does not mean that no scholar who works purely in the history of religions may study Jesus. Nor does it mean that such a scholar could not say a great deal about Jesus that is illuminating. But if a scholar in the field of the history of religion uses her or his methods cleanly, it will be clear at some point that she or he has reached a limit. That limit, that boundary, runs precisely where the interpretation of Jesus in faith begins. Why?
Faith always includes knowledge; it includes recognition. Certainly this is not the kind of knowledge or recognition that can make the thing it considers an “object,” standing over against it in distanced fashion and analyzing it impartially. In the natural sciences that kind of knowledge is fundamental and indeed indispensable. But there is another kind of human knowledge that occurs only in personal encounter. It responds to the other, surrenders itself to the other, and adopts the other’s view of reality. In theology this kind of knowledge is called “faith.”
Faith is true knowledge, true recognition, but a recognition of a different kind from that which analyzes, that is, literally, “dissolves.” Encountering another as a person definitely does not mean “dissolving” that person, taking him or her apart psychologically and thus seizing power over the other, but seeing the other in her or his difference, even strangeness. Whoever wants to truly recognize another as a person must expect to encounter the unexpected and be led into a new world of which one previously had no idea—a world whose strangeness fascinates but also frightens.
The student of religions who uses refined methods and so approaches Jesus “critically” will at some time arrive at a point at which she or he recognizes “critically” that one must abandon the usual standards of criticism and surrender to the different nature of this so very different person in order to do him justice.
Precisely here lies the point, or the boundary, where historical criticism also arrives by itself, where it must surrender its normal standards. It is only a very limited sector within the possibilities of human knowledge. The most important thin
gs in human life, such as affection, love, fidelity, and devotion, are based on a different kind of knowledge. As soon as historical criticism arrives at this boundary and honestly admits it, it points beyond itself. And that is, in fact, its greatest and loveliest possibility. It is precisely at this point that it is most appropriate.
So a purely historical approach to Jesus, or one undertaken entirely in terms of the study of religions, is possible. But it has its limitations. This book gratefully makes use of the primarily historical studies of many biblical scholars. Beyond that, it has not the least hesitation in critically reconstructing the original meaning of Jesus’ words and parables. A good deal of this book will be reconstruction. But I am convinced that in doing so I have no need to proceed against the knowledge of Jesus that belonged to the first witnesses or against the faith in Christ of the early communities.
Tensions within the Jesus Tradition
I am certainly aware that the theologians of the early church brought the Jesus tradition up to date and interpreted it in terms of their own historical situation. I am also aware, of course, that the gospels (like the traditions that preceded them) spoke of Jesus from very different perspectives. But in doing so they were not falsifying Jesus; they were formulating the unfathomable mystery of his life in deeper and deeper ways. It is, in fact, just this fruitful tension between the oldest layers of interpretation in the gospel tradition and newer layers that were added later that makes it possible for us really to understand Jesus.
To mention another example besides the interpretation of the “day in Capernaum,” we find in John’s gospel, clearly the latest of the four, a passage in which Jesus says to Philip, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?” (John 14:9-10). Jesus certainly never talked like that. This is meditative reflection on a claim that is present in Jesus constantly and wherever anything is said about him, though in other rhetorical genres and forms of discourse, but much more reservedly. And yet the language of the Johannine Jesus touches precisely what Jesus was. The two levels of tradition, the Synoptic and the Johannine, must not be set off against one another. We must not make the oldest interpretation a monopoly, because it is only the whole body of layers of interpretation that, in their unity, bring out the picture of the real Jesus.
In this book the weight will certainly lie on the oldest texts, that is, the oldest layers of meaning available to us. I will not explicate the Christology of the Gospel of John, but I will attempt to extract Jesus’ claim and (to a degree) his self-understanding from the earliest possible texts. But this is not done against later Christologies; it is done with them and under their guidance. I am writing not as a student of religions but as a theologian. Nor am I putting up an “iron curtain” with watchtowers and barbed wire between words of Jesus that are certainly authentic and others whose authenticity cannot be demonstrated with the same assurance. Such drawing of boundaries, which is carried out among biblical scholars with an immense expenditure of intelligence and acuity, have a little whiff of silliness. Anyone who has thought about the oscillation between “fact and interpretation” can understand why in this book I will not constantly ask, to the point of exhaustion, whether Jesus really uttered a particular saying in precisely this form.
Pope Benedict XVI once summarized my concerns in this first chapter as follows: The Jesus of the gospels is “the only real historical Jesus.”12
Chapter 2
The Proclamation of the Reign of God
If we want to talk about Jesus—what he wanted, and who he was—we must speak first and above all about the reign of God. The expression “reign of God” is less familiar than “kingdom of God,” the phrase used most commonly in biblical translations, including the New Revised Standard Version. Martin Luther, in his epochal translation of the Bible into German in 1545, rendered the corresponding Greek expression as “kingdom of God [Gottesreich],” and that has remained the usual reading.
But, without making a rigid principle of it, we should prefer the translation “reign of God,” or “rule of God,” not only because the Nazis talked about a “Reich/kingdom” whenever occasion offered, so that in German-speaking countries the word still arouses a certain disgust in many people, but above all because “reign” or “rule” better reflects the underlying biblical concept.
A Little Bit of Philology
Where we speak of “kingdom” or “reign” (German translations use “Reich” and French ones “royaume”), the Greek has basileia. This refers primarily to the status of a king, the king’s power, the king’s rule, and, by derivation then, the spatial realm within which the king reigns. In Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke every day, the Greek basileia reflects the word malkuta. And malkuta is first of all the “king’s rule or reign,” and only secondarily the extent of the king’s rule or a particular territory.
With Jesus the concept of “reign of God” has something utterly dynamic about it. The reign of God has an event-character. It is something that happens. It “comes” or “is coming.” For that reason also we should prefer the concept of the “reign of God.” But obviously the notion “kingdom of God” also reflects a certain aspect of the event, namely the realm within which God is establishing his rule. One can “go into” the basileia or “enter into” it (cf., e.g., Mark 9:47; 10:15).
So we have here a sample of philology. We actually need even more of it; it is simply unavoidable, because we still have that lovely saying a theologian once uttered, reflecting Matthew 19:24: “A camel cannot enter into theology’s heavenly kingdom without first passing through the eye of the needle that is philology.”
One more preliminary remark: in Israel the earliest time when people spoke of a “kingship of God” or “royal reign of God” was the monarchical period, that is, the time of David and Solomon.1 This already shows us that the concept of God’s royal reign had a relationship to actual society from the very beginning of its use: it would be a society in which God’s kingship would be visible. In the Bible this concept never referred to something purely internal or purely in a future life. That was often ignored in later times. But people should have known that a king without a people is no king at all but a figure in a museum.
There was, of course, a good reason why the concept of the reign of God was often understood in the church as something purely future: the evangelist Matthew speaks, with very few exceptions, of the “kingdom of heaven” instead of the “kingdom of God.” That led people astray into thinking of the kingdom of God as identical with heaven, a purely transcendent reality. But the Matthean kingdom of God is precisely not what the Bible calls “heaven.” In the Judaism of the time “the heavens” could be a polite circumlocution for “God.” People didn’t want to speak the word “God” all the time. So the “kingdom of heaven” is nothing other than the “kingdom of God,” and the kingdom of God is primarily and above all on earth.
One final observation: the abstraction “royal reign” (Hebrew malkuth) is relatively late. Originally people said, using a verb instead of an abstract noun, “God reigns as king.” But after the crisis of the exile this cultic statement about God’s eternal kingship slipped into a historical vortex, a historical dynamic. Now it could be said with much stronger emphasis that “The Lord becomes king.”
This means that God is now definitively establishing in history, and specifically in the present crisis in Israel, the kingship that was always his. God’s eternal royal reign is manifested in that God intervenes, redeems his people, and creates them anew. God becomes the judge and rescuer of his people—in that sense God demonstrates his rule and in that sense it can be said that God is becoming king.
So much for preliminary remarks! Now to the matter at hand.
The Preaching of the Baptizer
The word “eschatology” is familiar to everyone who is interested in theology
. Eschatology is often understood to mean “doctrine about the last things.” In classic Christian dogmatics eschatology deals with the death of the individual, judgment and purification after death, eternal blessedness—and ultimately the end of the world, its judgment, and the resurrection of the dead.
For a long time eschatology was the final tractate in dogmatics, concluding the whole subject. Consequently it had something distant, remote, and otherworldly about it. One felt as if it had very little to do with the present course of history. But when we talk about New Testament eschatology—and Jesus’ proclamation of the reign of God is pure eschatology—it is very different. Here the “last things,” that is, what will change and transform everything, happen not in the distant future but in the immediate days to come. These things are near; they are breathing down our necks.
This should make clear what we mean when we begin to talk about the eschatology of John the Baptizer, because with the Baptizer what eschatology means in the Bible leaps up before our eyes. If we understand the Baptizer’s preaching of the end time we will better comprehend what Jesus meant by the reign of God, because, as we have said, Jesus’ proclamation of the reign of God is pure eschatology.
So to begin with, the Baptizer’s real audience is not the individual but the people of God, Israel. Obviously the Baptizer also spoke to individuals, and obviously it is individuals who have to decide to turn their lives around. Obviously every individual must confess her or his sins and be baptized in the Jordan.
But this process in which every individual is involved is first and foremost about Israel. The Baptizer does not address humanity in general or sinners in general but the descendants of Abraham, the people of God. Israel has squandered its calling, and therefore God will now judge his people.2 The Baptizer says to the crowds who have come to him at the Jordan to be baptized: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham” (Luke 3:7-8).
Jesus of Nazareth Page 4
