4. Included in the recitation were Deut. 6:4–9; 11:2–21; Num. 15:37–41.
5. The Essenes were a Jewish monastic group; see my Jesus: A New Vision (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1987), 88.
6. According to Luke 3:23, he was “about thirty” when he began his ministry; according to John 8:57, Jesus was “not yet fifty.” Though not being fifty is consistent with being about thirty, the former is an odd way of saying the latter. On other grounds, the younger age is to be preferred; the tradition that Jesus was born in the last years of Herod the Great (d. 4 BCE) is reasonably strong. Thus, at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus was probably in his early to middle thirties. Pilate was the Roman governor of Judea from 26 to 36 CE. Jesus was probably crucified in 30 CE, so his ministry probably began a year or a bit more before that.
7. The writings of Josephus are one of our primary sources for first-century Jewish history. As a young man, Josephus was a Jewish general in the great war against Rome, which broke out in 66 CE. Captured by the Romans in Galilee early in the war, he spent most of the rest of his life (perhaps another thirty-five years) in Rome, where he wrote his multivolume Jewish Antiquities and History of the Jewish War as well as two more minor works. Though Josephus refers to John the Baptist, he apparently does not refer to the ministry of Jesus; the only direct reference is in a passage believed to be a Christian addition. The standard translation of Josephus is now the Loeb Classical Library edition, 9 vols., translated by H. St. J. Thackeray, R. Marcus, and A. Wikgrin (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958–65).
8. According to Mark 1:6, John wore “camel’s hair” (presumably a camel skin) and a leather girdle; for a similar description of Elijah, see 2 Kings 1:8. For a “hairy coat” as the mark of a prophet, see Zech. 13:4. For John as prophet, see Mark 11:32; Matt. 11:9; Luke 7:26.
9. Ritual immersion in water (both in Judaism and other cultures) can have two different meanings. When repeated frequently (as it was among the Essenes), it has the meaning of a washing or purification. When it is a once-only ritual (as it apparently was for John), it may also be a purification, but its primary meaning is as an initiation ritual that symbolizes and confers a new identity. “Once-only” baptism was also known in Judaism; when a Gentile converted to Judaism, he or she was baptized (and if male, circumcised as well). But it is important to remember that John’s baptism was intended for people who were already Jewish.
10. It is historically unlikely that John recognized Jesus at the time as an extraordinary or messianic figure. According to Mark, Luke, and Q (“Q” is a designation used by scholars to refer to material found in very similar form in both Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark; “Q” is thus presumed to be an early collection of traditions about Jesus that predates both Matthew and Luke and may be earlier even than Mark), there is no such recognition. The common image in Christian circles of John as primarily a forerunner of Jesus who self-consciously knew himself to be such and who recognized Jesus as “the coming one” is based on the Gospels of John and Matthew. According to John 1, the Baptist proclaims Jesus as the Lamb of God, Son of God, and even as one who preexisted him. But John’s Gospel cannot be taken historically. Matt. 3:14 reports a snippet of conversation between Jesus and John; John says, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” However, this (and Jesus’s response) is almost certainly an insertion by Matthew into the story. Apart from these historically suspect references in John and Matthew, there is no reason to think that John believed Jesus to be “the coming one” at an early stage of the ministry. John’s question from prison later in the ministry (“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” in Matt. 11:3 and Luke 7:19, and thus “Q” material) is therefore to be read as the dawning of curiosity or hope, not as the beginning of doubt.
11. According to Mark, the experience was private to Jesus. There is no indication that the crowd or John saw anything; and the “heavenly voice” in the next verse is addressed to Jesus alone (“You are . . .”). Matthew and Luke both change the text slightly, apparently making the experience of Jesus more public. According to Matthew, the voice declared Jesus’s identity to the crowd (3:17); according to Luke, the Spirit descended in “bodily form” (3:22). The fact that Mark presents it as an internal experience of Jesus does not thereby make it less real.
12. See also Isa. 64:1 for the image of a “tear” or “rent” in the heavens: “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down . . .”
13. See Jesus: A New Vision, 31.
14. Such travel is found elsewhere in the Bible. Ezekiel, for example, reports, “The Spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven, and brought me in visions of God to Jerusalem” (8:3; see 11:1–2). For Elijah’s travels “in the Spirit,” see 1 Kings 18:12; cf. 2 Kings 2:11–12, 16. In the New Testament, see Acts 8:39–40. J. R. Michaels comments: “Jesus’s journeys to the Holy City and to the high mountain belong in the same category as the journeys of Ezekiel” (Servant and Son [Atlanta: John Knox, 1981], 50). The phenomenon is widely reported in traditional cultures. See, e.g., John Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1961), and the books of Carlos Castaneda; even if Don Juan is regarded as a fictional character, as some have argued, his portrait is based on solid anthropological research. Such journeyings probably involve what are sometimes called “out-of-body” experiences.
15. Stephen Larsen, The Shaman’s Doorway (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 61–66. See also a section entitled “The Road of Trials” in Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces (Cleveland: World, 1956), 97–109. On shamanism more generally, see Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (New York: Pantheon, 1964); and W. A. Lessa and E. Z. Vogt, Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 381–412.
16. The vision at his baptism may well have been his “call story” (the Old Testament prophets apparently thought it important to tell such stories), and the temptation narrative seems to have a teaching function in addition to reporting an experience.
17. This occurs very frequently in the book of Acts, and the whole of the book of Revelation is presented as a series of visions.
18. The difference between communion with God and union with God is subtle and perhaps not important. Both are mystical states, and both are known in the Jewish-Christian tradition. In union with God, all sense of separateness (including the awareness of being a separate self) momentarily disappears and one experiences only God; in communion with God, a sense of relationship remains. Communion is typically associated with Western mysticism and union with Eastern mysticism, though the contrast is not as sharp as the typical association suggests. See Peter Berger, ed., The Other Side of God (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1981). For the “polarity” within Judaism, see esp. the essay by Michael Fishbane, “Israel and the Mothers,” 28–47. For communion mysticism in the East, see the most popular form of Hinduism, bhakti.
19. From the Mishnah, Ber. 5.1; see A. Büchler, Types of Jewish Palestinian Piety (New York: KTAV, 1968; first published in 1922), 106–7.
20. For a history of Jewish mysticism reaching back to the time of Jesus and earlier, see esp. the work of Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1946), and Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition, 2nd ed. (Hoboken: KTAV, 1965). A connection between apocalypticism and visions of or journeys into another world is increasingly affirmed in studies of Jewish apocalyptic. See, e.g., John J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1984), which speaks of two strands of tradition in Jewish apocalypses, one visionary and one involving otherworldly journeys.
21. For an excellent summary of Jesus and prayer, including bibliography, see Donald Goergen, The Mission and Ministry of Jesus (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1986), 129–45. Goergen’s book arrived too late to be incorporated significantly into the present book, but I highly recommend it as one of the best recent works on the historical Jesus.
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p; 22. Luke emphasizes the role of prayer in Jesus’s life more than the other evangelists do; in addition to 6:12, see 3:21; 5:16; 9:18; 9:28–29; 11:1. However, the picture is not due simply to Lucan redaction, as is clear from the references to Jesus’s prayer life in the other Gospels.
23. Though this is the only occurrence of the Aramaic Abba in the Gospels (which were written in Greek), it may lie behind the unadorned “Father” in Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer (11:2). A consensus of scholarship affirms its authenticity. That it was also part of the prayer life of first-century Christians is indicated by the appearance of the word in Rom. 8:15 and Gal. 4:6, remarkable in letters composed in Greek for Greek-speaking audiences. It is reasonable to assume that early Christian usage derived from Jesus’s own practice. The classic study of Abba is J. Jeremias, The Prayers of Jesus (Naperville, IL: Allenson, 1967), though Jeremias overemphasizes its distinctiveness, arguing that it was unique to Jesus (an argument perhaps motivated by theological considerations).
24. See Vermes, Jesus the Jew, 210–13.
25. Even by quite conservative scholars, Luke 4:18–30 is commonly attributed to Luke and categorized as “inauthentic” (i.e., not among the actual words of Jesus). To a large extent, this is because the placement of the sermon is so obviously the product of Luke’s compositional work: these verses replace Mark’s account of Jesus’s “inaugural address” (Mark 1:15: “The kingdom of God has come near”). Moreover, the verses identify one of Luke’s central themes: Luke stresses the presence of the Spirit in Jesus more than the other Gospels do. Thus it seems to be Luke’s advance summary of who Jesus was and the thrust of his ministry. However, the possibility remains that Jesus did use these words with reference to himself at some other time in his ministry (perhaps even in the context of a synagogue reading—there is nothing improbable about the scene); though Luke is responsible for inserting the story at this point in the narrative, it is not necessarily created by Luke. Moreover, even if Luke did create the story, it aptly describes what we have seen to be true on other grounds. Whether Luke was reporting or creating tradition, he has seen well.
26. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958; first published in German in 1917), esp. 155–59. Otto writes, “The point is that the ‘holy man’ or the ‘prophet’ is from the outset, as regards the experience of the circle of his devotees, something more than a ‘mere man.’ He is the being of wonder and mystery, who somehow or other is felt to belong to the higher order of things, to the side of the numen itself. It is not that he himself teaches that he is such, but that he is experienced as such” (158, italics added). See also Otto’s The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man, trans. F. V. Filson and B. L. Woolf (London: Lutterworth, 1938), esp. 162–69, 333–76.
27. As Otto puts it, in “these few masterly and pregnant words,” Mark states “with supreme simplicity and force the immediate impression of the numinous that issued from Jesus” (The Idea of the Holy, 158; italics added).
28. On Gevurah, see E. E. Urbach, The Sages (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1975), 80–96; for his interpretation of this verse, see 85–86.
29. The Greek text means literally, “He is out of himself,” that is, ecstatic, a nonordinary state often characteristic of holy men, easily mistaken as dementia.
30. The narrative, in which Jesus puts his opponents in a dilemma, is also an excellent example of Jesus’s skillful repartee in debate.
31. Matthew has “Spirit of God” (12:28); Luke has “finger of God” (11:20); however, the two expressions are synonymous.
32. On “Amen,” see Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology (New York: Scribner, 1971), 35–36. According to his tables, it appears thirteen times in Mark, nine times in Q, nine times in Matthew only, and three times in Luke, as well as twenty-five times in John. Thus all strata of the Gospel tradition attest to it.
33. See the six antithetical statements found in the Sermon on the Mount, Matt. 5:21–22, 27–28, 31–32, 33–34, 38–39, 43–44. Some scholars accept the antithetical formulation of only the first, second, and fourth as authentic (e.g., Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition [New York: Harper & Row, 1963], 134–36). For a defense of the antithetical form as original to all six, see Jeremias, New Testament Theology, 251–53.
34. See also the call of Levi in Mark 2:13–14.
35. See Martin Hengel, The Charismatic Leader and His Followers (New York: Crossroad, 1981; originally published in German in 1968). Hengel finds Matt. 8:21–22 especially illuminating and notes that it echoes the call of Elisha by Elijah in 1 Kings 19:19–21.
36. For a superb and passionate exposition of prophetic consciousness (including the prophet as one who knew God), see Abraham Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), esp. vol. 1.
37. See also Matt. 17:1–8; Luke 9:28–36. Matthew calls the experience a vision.
38. Moses and Elijah are significant not because they represent “the law and the prophets,” as is often stated in commentaries, for they were not symbolic of the law and prophets in the time of Jesus. Rather, they were the two great holy men of the Jewish scriptures.
39. See Jesus: A New Vision, 10–11.
40. For examples of it referring to Israel as a whole, see Hos. 11:1, Exod. 4:22–23; for examples referring to the king of Israel in particular, see Ps. 2:7, 2 Sam. 7:14.
41. This is an important point. To use a very mundane example, George Washington is legitimately referred to as “the father of his country” even though he presumably did not think of himself in those terms. Similarly, from a Christian point of view, Jesus is legitimately spoken of as the Messiah, even if he did not think of himself as such.
CHAPTER 5: Reclaiming Mysticism
1. Stephen Larsen, The Shaman’s Doorway (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 66.
2. One of the most comprehensive and yet compact descriptions of mystical experience is William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Macmillan, 1961; originally published in 1902), 299–336, esp. 299–301. James stresses the noetic quality, as does the title of Andrew Greeley’s Ecstasy: A Way of Knowing (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974).
3. The difference between union and communion mysticism is difficult to explain. In mystical experience, the subject-object distinction of ordinary awareness disappears. For union mystics, everything becomes subject or, perhaps more accurately, everything becomes one (or “not two”) beyond the subject-object distinction. For communion mystics, the subject-object distinction disappears, but it is not replaced by undifferentiated oneness. Instead, what might be called a subject-subject relationship emerges: knowing and being known by.
4. Called “Galilean charismatics” in Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 206–13.
5. Gershom Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition, 2nd ed. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1965), 23–27.
6. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1961), 40–79. In addition to dating Jewish mysticism prior to the current era, Scholem notes its connection to apocalyptic thought (40–43, 73) and Pharisaic circles (41–42), its use of fasting and special postures of prayer (49–50), and its association with miraculous powers (50–51). David Suter connects the parables of Enoch, which he dates in the middle first century CE, to the Hekhaloth tradition (Tradition and Composition in the Parables of Enoch [Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1979], 14–23). Martin Hengel traces the special revelations of Hasidic apocalyptic to mystical experiences (Jews, Greeks and Barbarians [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980], 124). See also Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1974), 1:207. Jacob Neusner approvingly reports M. Smith’s claim that mystical elements developed within Judaism in the pre-Christian Hellenistic period (Early Rabbinic Judaism [Leiden: Brill, 1975], 142) and notes that we must suppose that Jewish gnosticism existed prior to 70 CE (148).
7. See Abraham Heschel’s exposition of daath elohim, �
�knowing God,” in The Prophets, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 57–60. Though Heschel avoids using the term “mysticism” in this context, daath elohim is a direct knowing of God, not a knowing about God.
8. The term may also lie behind the unadorned “father” in Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer (11:2). That it was an important part of the prayer life of first-century Christians is indicated by its appearance in Rom. 8:15 and Gal. 4:6, documents composed in Greek for Greek-speaking audiences. It is reasonable to conclude that early Christian usage derived from Jesus’s own use of the term. The classic study is Joachim Jeremias, The Prayers of Jesus (Naperville, IL: Allenson, 1967), though he overstates the case for uniqueness. For parallels in texts about Jewish Spirit persons, see Vermes, Jesus the Jew, 210–13.
9. “Q” is a designation used by scholars to refer to material found in very similar form in both Matthew and Luke, but not in Mark; “Q” is thus presumed to be an early collection of traditions about Jesus that predates both Matthew and Luke and may be earlier even than Mark.
10. Though the saying’s credentials as Q material are excellent, scholars tend to attribute it to the early Christian community instead of to Jesus, reading it as asserting the unique sonship of Jesus, a conviction clearly held by the post-Easter community. For a rehearsal of the arguments for and against authenticity, see James D. G. Dunn, Jesus and the Spirit (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1975), 27–34. Yet its language and content are at home in a pre-Easter Palestinian milieu (see esp. Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology [New York: Scribner, 1971], 56–61); and other Jewish charismatic men spoke of themselves as “son” in a sense that distinguished them from other Jews who were also called “sons” (see Vermes, Jesus the Jew, 209).
11. Jeremias, New Testament Theology, 58.
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