THE HISTORICIZED
JESUS?
CHRIST EVOLVING
he mainstream of critical New Testament scholarship today embraces a
theory of the evolution of Christology that strikingly parallels the
ancient christological doctrine of Adoptionism. Ancient Adoptionists, including the Jewish-Christian Ebionites, believed that Jesus was a natural
man, completely human and mortal, not an incarnate god or demigod. As
recognition and reward of a life of righteousness and a ministry of costly faithfulness culminating in martyrdom, Jesus was exalted to the rank of Messiah
and royal son of God, a kind of honorary divinity like that predicated of the
ancient kings of Judah who also were called Messiah and son of God (Ps. 2:2,
7). Few Christian scholars would embrace this notion as their own personal
creed; they do not believe this is what actually happened to Jesus. But most
would say that the development of Christian thought about Jesus was in a
sense "adoptionistic" in that the whole process began with a historical
prophet named Jesus who did not claim godhood in the manner of some demagogues ancient and modern, but was nonetheless later magnified by his
admirers to such a degree that shortly he was believed to have been an incarnation of the very Godhead.' Into this theological mix there entered all
manner of Hellenistic mythemes as well as philosophical concepts (such as the
Philonic doctrine of the Logos).
Such an opinion about the history of belief in Jesus was once itself a con troversial and heretical view, since the sheer recognition of a development in Christology was seen to undermine that Christology. As Nietzsche and Foucault have shown, the delineation of a history, a "genealogy" of thought, is itself a deconstruction of that thought, since it shows any belief to be the product of a process of human fashioning, not a full-blown fact of nature (or of revelation). But scholars, to their great credit, found that their zeal for understanding the text and the history of Christianity was greater than any loyalty to an ecclesiastical party line.' They stuck to their guns, and the view I have just outlined has become something like critical orthodoxy. One may suspect that another reason for the eventual triumph of the "adoptionistic," evolutionary theory of christological origins was that it was at least not as disturbing as an even more radical view, the pure Christ-Myth theory: that there had never been a historical Jesus at the root of the full-blown mythical Christology. According to the Christ-Myth theorists, Jesus had first been regarded in the manner of an ancient Olympian god; he had supposedly once visited the earth and died and been raised from the dead, like Hercules and Asclepios. The imagined incarnation, death, and resurrection would have occurred in the hazy zone of mythic time, as Paul Veyne describes it in Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths?3 not in the historical time of chronologies and dates. Hercules was not popularly imagined to have existed in the same sort of past as Pericles. Neither, at first, was Jesus. It was only subsequently, says the Christ-Myth theory, that the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus was rendered historical, datable, a piece of recent worldly history. Christianity, then, would have begun with a "high" Christology, but with no historical grounding (hence one might call it "docetic"), whereas the "adoptionistic" theory of mainstream scholars holds that Christians first held a "low" Christology, placing Jesus on our level, not God's, only later yielding to a process of mythification of the historical man Jesus of Nazareth. The choice is between a historical Jesus mythicized and a mythic Jesus historicized. Are there grounds for preferring one to the other? I would like to explore that question in the present chapter. First, I will consider the possibility that there was a historical Jesus who was rapidly glorified to mythic heights. I will appeal to historical analogies usually overlooked, arguing that the whole notion is by no means implausible, though whether the gospel data are best interpreted this way is a separate question.
LUBAVITCHERS AND NAZOREANS
I believe we can postulate a scenario of development from a mortal, a Jewish rabbi, to the status of a god underlying the Gospel of John. It will be helpful to compare the stages and factions involved in the hypothesized process with analogous factors in the recent case of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson and the Lubavitcher movement in Hasidic Judaism. First, let us presuppose a historical Jesus pictured as a rabbi with halachic opinions sufficiently distinctive to have made him the center of a formal or informal school after his death. We would then be able to place the traditions culminating in the Gospel of John among the Jesus partisans in what Burton Mack calls the Synagogue Reform Movement. Like Rabbi Schneerson, it would have been Jesus' charisma of holiness and piety, as well as his persuasive wisdom and legal rulings that led his disciples to identify him with the coming Messiah. Perhaps like Lubavitcher sectarians, they did not believe their master had already risen from the dead, but expected that he soon would, at the general resurrection of the just, when he would inherit his due messianic dignity. From this initial period of Johannine faith (as I will call the religion of the movement that ultimately produced the Gospel of John) we have the echo that some were willing to admit that Jesus was "a teacher sent from God, for no one can do the signs that you do unless God is with him" (John 3:2). These "signs," or signifying miracles, might have functioned as what Gerd Theissen calls "rule miracles." This means Jesus might have been believed to have settled matters of scribal debate by resort to miracles (as in Mark 2:8-12). God must be on his side. As Jacob Neusner has shown, the later mainstream of rabbis shied away from the notion that points of Torah or doctrine might be settled by signs and portents." Consider the following Mishnaic anecdote, set amid the halachic debates among the rabbis at Yavneh after the fall of Jerusalem. Rabbi Eliezer is firm in his insistence on his opinion in the face of a united front of his fellow scribes, whose consensus, as in Islam, must decide the question.
On that day, Rabbi Eliezer replied with every legal argument in the world, but the rabbis would not accept them. Thereupon, he said to them, "If the halachah is on my side, let that carob tree show it." The carob suddenly uprooted itself and flew through the air one hundred cubits. They said to him, "No bringing of proof from a carob tree!" He said to them, "If the halachah is on my side, then may that stream of water show it!" The stream of water turned around and flowed backward. They said to him, "No bringing of proof from streams of water!" He turned and said to them, "If the halachah is on my side, may the walls of the house of study we are in show it!" The walls of the house of study leaned inward as if about to fall. Rabbi Jehoshua rebuked the walls, saying to them, "If the sages battle each other over halachah, why do you interfere?" They did not fall out of honor for Rabbi Jehoshua, nor did they straighten up out of honor for Rabbi Eliezer; they continue crookedly standing to this day. Again Eliezer said to them, "If the halachah is on my side, let Heaven show it!" A voice from Heaven cried out, "What do the rest of you have against Rabbi Eliezer? The halachah is on his side in everything!" Rabbi Yehoshua leaped to his feet and quoted [Deut. 30:12), "It is not in heaven.' " What did Yehoshua mean by saying, "It is not in heaven'?" Rabbi Yeremiah explained, "Since the Torah has already been given from Mount Sinai, we do not pay heed any longer to a heavenly voice. You yourself, 0 Lord, wrote in the Torah given at Mount Sinai, `Turn aside after the multitude.' " Later Rabbi Nathan happened to see the Prophet Elijah. He asked him, "What did the Holy One, Blessed be he, do when we did not pay heed to any of Rabbi Eliezer's miraculous proofs, or the heavenly voice?" Elijah replied, "What did he do! God said, 'My sons have defeated me! My sons have defeated me!' " (Baba Mezia 59b)'
Does this cast doubt on the likelihood that Christian Jews could have made any headway by making such appeals, to Jesus' rule miracles? No; it is entirely possible that Christian claims helped turn the rabbis in the direction they took. Note that Eliezer does what Jesus tells the disciples they can do in Luke 17:6, "If you had faith as a grain of mustard seed, you would say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea!' and it would obey you." Eliezer also duplicated the feat promised by the messiah Theudas, that, like Joshua, he would make the Jordan turn round so his followers might cross dryshod (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews XX, V, 1). Similarly, Eliezer performed a version of the miracle promised by the Egyptian messiah mentioned by Luke (Acts 21:38) and Josephus (Antiquities XX, IX, 6), who told his followers he would, again like Joshua, cause the walls of Jerusalem to fall down like those of Jericho.
From some of the healing stories in the Gospel of John (5:8-10; 9:13-14 ff) we might deduce that, as in the Synoptics, Jesus' rulings on what types of action were permissible on the Sabbath were rather liberal and offended some. It is interesting that, though legal appeal to miracles carried no weight in emerging rabbinism, a more liberal, Hillelite view of many issues, such as Jesus is shown advocating in the gospels, became the mainstream. And this is something worth remembering in what follows.
At this early stage, the Johannine Christians would have had a strong sense of group identity, and that would have included their heritage as Jews, as members of the synagogue. Their reformist activities, pursuing their halachic agenda, signify both a strong subgroup identity and a strong sense of belonging to the larger synagogue identity. Rather than splitting off, which would mean a higher valuation of subgroup identity, they sought to influence a larger group for which they still felt proprietary responsibility. And yet, to use Mary Douglas's terms, the Johannine group would also have been considered "low grid," i.e., governed by a fairly loose set of codes, rules,
.6 The walls between them and other groups were not very high or thick. Movement between the Johannine Jewish Christians and outsiders was still readily possible. They did not regard those without loyalty to Jesus as unbelievers or "the unsaved." Nor would they have been regarded as heretics or apostates by those not of their number. All would have seen themselves and their rivals as good Jews, even if out-of-step.
Not surprisingly, the same situation exists in the Lubavitcher movement. The demographics are different in one sense, since the believers in Rabbi Schneerson's messiahship form the majority of Lubavitch. But a diversity of belief does exist in this single movement of pious hasidim who credit one another as good Jews and can tolerate a difference of opinion on even so large a matter as the messianic claim. Despite outsiders' predictions that upon the Rebbe's death the movement would fragment, it has not happened, though trouble has begun to brew with increasing tensions, sometimes actual fistfights, between Schneerson messianists and other Lubavitchers. And there have already been minor offshoots. If history is repeating itself, the Lubavitcher movement would seem to be in the transitional state Christianity was in just before the split between Jews and Christians.
We find another relevant parallel in the situation of Rabbi Akiba, who endorsed Simon bar-Kochba as Messiah about a century after Jesus. Even though history judged him to have been in error, his reputation as one of the very greatest rabbis was not much tarnished. And while his hopes for messianic redemption were still alive, he presumably did not write off fellow Jews who had their doubts about Simon; rather he must have imagined they would be mildly chagrined and pleasantly surprised once Simon bar-Kochba had ushered in the Kingdom of God. And though the Johannine faction must have cherished their own Jesus-derived halachah, since their halachah were more liberal it is not they who would have felt themselves separated from other Jews. It is usually the stricter party that wants separation, and it is thus no surprise that the Johannine Christians might have eventually found themselves on the receiving end of excommunication.
But that seems not to be what happened. As I mentioned above, the positions ascribed to Jesus in the Gospel of John, centering on "healing by incantation" (as it is called in the Mishnah), appear to be in harmony with the positions taken in the Mishnah: Only the paid medical practice of professional physicians was forbidden on the Sabbath, and that only when life was not at stake. And the same is true on other halachic issues advocated by Jesus in the Synoptic gospels. Thus, Jesus' practice could not have been that controversial among the scribes as it seems in retrospect in the gospels, distorted by later Jewish vs. Christian rancor. Either that, or Jesus' liberality must have been part of a general liberal-leaning movement in scribalism which eventually prevailed, as Harvey Falk argues in Jesus the Pharisee.' Either way, it must not have been the legal interpretations of the Johannine group that finally got them excommunicated. What then was it?
The more similar two religious groups or subgroups are, the more accentuated their remaining differences become, even should those differences be fairly trivial. If the Christian claims for Jesus are the wedge of separation, we should expect that the claims for Jesus will become more and more contro versial. Jesus will grow closer and closer to godhood. The more elevated his status, the greater the alienation between Jews and Christians, and in turn, the status of Jesus will climb yet higher. Accordingly, when the halachic issues are no longer paramount, the leftover issue is that of Jesus himself. What about that business about him as Messiah? Two new subgroups would have emerged at this point. The character Nicodemus represents those inclined to accept the halachic positions of the Johannine faction ("Rabbi, we know you are a teacher sent from God. No man can do the signs you do unless God is with him," John 3:2), but they are wary of messianic claims made on Jesus' behalf. The Nicodemus types would find their modern-day counterparts in one faction of Lubavitchers. Menachem Brodt, spokesman for the Lubavitcher organization Israel Habad, refers to the late Rabbi Schneerson as simply "the rebbe," not as the Messiah. He asked reporter Herb Keinon, "Why do you make the connection between the rebbe and the Moshiah? First and foremost he is the rebbe." Some are not so outspoken. Keinon says that the smallest of four factions in the movement is that which "believe[s] the rebbe was a great man, but no Messiah."8
Joseph of Arimathea ("being a disciple of Jesus, but in secret, for fear of the Jews," John 19:38), on the other hand, represents those in the synagogue who do accept Jesus as Messiah but fear to say so publicly as these claims become more controversial. These, too, have their counterpart in the Lubavitcher movement because of the similar group dynamics, but the shoe is on the other foot given the demographics, since most of the movement accepts the messiahship of Rabbi Schneerson, unlike the Johannine party which existed as a minority within synagogue Judaism. One prominent hasidic leader who would not allow reporter Keinon to use his name, bemoaned, "I sit at Habad gatherings, and hear people talk about the rebbe being the Moshiah, and just keep quiet. What am I going to do, argue with them? It is difficult to fight the flow." Keinon says this man believes that "many who say Schneerson will be resurrected and revealed as the Messiah do not really believe it. `Many times people utter slogans, because they feel they must, or because of pressure from the community they are a part of, even though they don't really believe them.' "9 John's Nicodemus-types felt the same pressure, only, given that they were in the minority in a group that did not affirm Jesus' messianic identity, it was their messianic faith, not the lack of it, that they felt pressure to keep secret.
The Gospel of John contains stories designed to encourage both subgroups to go all the way to public confession of Jesus as Messiah. In John chapter 3, Nicodemus no sooner makes his affirmation of faith in Jesus as a divinely commissioned teacher than the Johannine Jesus brings him up short, sweeping his confession aside contemptuously, demanding the rebirth of baptism ("Amen, amen, I say to you: unless a man be born from above he cannot see the Kingdom of God," 3:3). We think of John the Baptist's blistering rejoinder to those complacently religious who naively imagined themselves his supporters, yet remained on the sidelines, crisp and dry, smiling on the poor sinners who emerged dripping from the Jordan: "Do not begin saying to yourselves, We have Abraham as our father,' for I tell you, God can raise up children to Abraham from these stones" if that's all he wants (Matt. 3:9).
The man born blind and healed by Jesus at the Pool of Siloam in John chapter 9 is upheld as the example for the Joseph of Arimathea types. Despite threats of excommunication from the synagogue (9:22; cf. 16:2, "They will make you outcasts from the synagogue"), they are encouraged to take a stand. In the face of opposition, itself perhaps sparked by increasingly strong claims for Jesus, the Johannine group had strengthened their distinctive group identity, their allegiance to Jesus taking precedence over their loyalty to the synagogue (now that push had come to shove), and their grid factor had risen: Faith in Jesus as Messiah had become paramount. It is the shibboleth required of "believers," the saved." "Unless you believe that I am he, you will die in your sins" (John 8:24). In the same way, in October 1997 one group of Lubavitcher rabbis issued a legal ruling requiring all Jews to accept Rabbi Schneerson as Messiah.'° By contrast, David Berger, Orthodox rabbi and president of the Association for Jewish Studies, opined that "belief in the rebbe as Messiah is sufficient to exclude someone from Orthodox Judaism.""
It is only once the Johannine Christians had been excommunicated from the synagogue that they developed their doctrine of Jesus as the true vine of Israel (John 15:1 ff), the true Hanukkah light (8:12), the true door through which the flock enters the divine presence (10:7 if., cf. Psalm 100), the wine that deepens the empty water jars of Jewish ritual (John 2:1-11), and so forth. Such metaphors denote the separation of devout Jews from the Jewish community. They exactly parallel the piety-in-exile of the Dead Sea Scrolls sect, priests who repudiated the Jerusalem temple because of what they perceived as the ritual laxness of the temple establishment. For these sectarian separatists the true sacrifices to God were prayer and piety offered from a sincere heart. Such sentiments, which rightly strike the modern reader as a spiritualizing advance over actual animal sacrifice, were nonetheless born as virtue of necessity. The Johannine "spiritualization" of Judaism originated in the same way: a sour grapes theology. Deprived of the rituals and sacraments of the Jewish community, they created spiritualized counterparts. Thus free of the theological restraint of Judaism, Christology could rise higher and higher, to measure the widening gap between the Johannine sect and Judaism, partly due to new, non-Jewish influences hitherto shunned.
As elsewhere in the New Testament, the decisive break between a Christian faction and its Jewish parent quickly led to a redirection of evangelistic outreach to groups traditionally outside Jewish religious boundaries. We observe the same process loud and clear with the Jewish-Christian Matthean community (compare Matt. 10:5-6 with Matt. 28:19-20 and Matt. 21:43) and in Acts 13:46 ("It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken to you first; since you repudiate it, and judge yourself unworthy of eternal life, behold, we are turning to the Gentiles"); 18:6 ("Your blood be on your own heads! I am clean. From now on I shall go to the Gentiles"); and 28:28 ("Let it be known to you therefore, that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles, and they will listen"). Romans chapter 11 deals at length with the same issue. Even so, the Johannine sect turned to both Gentiles (John 10:16: "1 have other sheep that are not of this fold; I must bring them also and they shall hear my voice; and they shall become one flock with one shepherd.") and Samaritans (John chapter 4, in which the mission to the Samaritans is read back into the time of Jesus, for purposes of dominical authorization). These groups were ritually unclean in the eyes of Jews, as the Gospel of John itself makes clear ("For Jews and Samaritans do not use the same dishes in common," John 4:9), and this onus of impurity would have passed to the Johannine sect which was now willing to deal with them. They were shunned all the more as a result. The famous Johannine texts about God's love for the whole world (e.g., John 3:16) would stem from this period, the point being the same as in Rom. 3:29: "Or is God the God of Jews only? Or is he not the God of the Gentiles too?"
My guess is that it was this contact with Gentiles and Samaritans that resulted in the assimilation of theological and mythological themes from these traditions, both as Johannine missionaries accommodated their message to the categories of their hearers and as Samaritan and pagan converts brought favorite beliefs and mythemes, even unwittingly, into their new religion. Thus in the Gospel of John Jesus repeats the water-to-wine miracle of Dionysus (2:1-11) and describes himself, like Dionysus, as the life-giving grapevine (15:1-10). (Of course the Synoptics bear many of the same traces of Dionysus influence: Jesus' blood is wine, his flesh bread, since he is a Dionysian corn king.) Thus also in John's Gospel Jesus is explicitly and overtly identified with the Samaritan Taheb, their counterpart to the Jewish, Davidic Messiah (John 4:25-26). It seems to me that John's debates between Jesus and those who falsely value their descent from Abraham reflect the struggles in Romans and Galatians over who is the true seed of Abraham: Jews or Christian Gentiles. Like Mark, John's Gospel also disparages the brothers of Jesus (7:5), probably because of their opposition to, or interference in, the Gentile mission (cf. Gal. 2:11-14 ff; Acts 11:1-3). Of course, this opposition from the Heirs of Jesus or Pillars of Jerusalem might have stemmed from their fear of the very syncretism that resulted in Johannine Christianity.
The same fears, and the same alarm at the reality once it appeared, must also have led to the falling away of a group from within the Johannine move ment itself. Many found the assimilation, e.g., of the Mystery Religion sacrament of divine flesh and blood, outrageous to Jewish sensibilities, including theirs. And as we might expect, the more controversial this sacrament became among the Johannine sectarians themselves, the more exaggerated it became in importance, just as Jesus' own messianic role was the more magnified the more it became a bone of contention between Jews and Johannine Christians. The result is that the eucharist became needful for salvation. Speaking to Jews who are ostensibly his followers, Jesus requires the eucharist for salvation (John 6:53: "Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you"). This denotes a higher grid requirement within the Johannine community, and a further weeding-out process, as well as a fortress mentality. Significantly, while the theological grid had remained low, open to the invasion of foreign mythemes, the sacramental grid was raised. This makes sense, since the controversial sacrament was itself a major piece of such syncretic assimilation, and it is no surprise that such an innovation would be defended to the hilt in direct proportion to the controversy it generated. Such is human nature.
Those within the Johannine community who could not brook the new influences packed up and left (for Judaism? for another Johannine or other Christian faction?). They were bade good riddance by their erstwhile compatriots. The heavenly Father must never have truly drawn them to him anyway ("No one can come to me unless the Father draw him," John 6:44). They were never really members of Jesus' flock anyway, and were thus incapable of hearing his voice (John 10:26-27). These developments led to the next stage, where God was pictured no longer as loving the world but as sending his son to redeem his elect out of the world. The sectarian walls were rising.
As Jerome H. Neyrey argues in a fascinating yet sadly neglected monograph" from which the present analysis has drawn much inspiration, the Johannine elevation of Jesus to a status of "equal to God" (John 5:18) represents a full and intentional severance from Judaism. Christianity had by this token become a new and separate religion. We read in the Gospel of John Gnostic-like sneers at Jewish rituals, pedigrees, and scriptures ("your law," John 10:34).
To cross-reference the Lubavitchers once more, it is striking to read that Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch, who broke with the Lubavitch sect to found his own Liozner Hasidic movement, felt the need to split with the parent body once he saw signs that some were deifying Rabbi Schneerson. "Lubavitch has gone off course. You have a situation where kids at one of the central schools, Ohalei Torah, are kissing the rebbe's picture. This is not Judaism, but the beginning of a new religion. At one point we had to stand up and say that something is terribly wrong."" He decided to pack up and leave his Habad neighborhood "when my daughter, who was six at the time, came home and asked me if the rebbe is God. I thought to myself this is going off course, and it is time to get out." In January 1998 David Berger, an Orthodox rabbi, charged that for the Lubavitch mainstream, "The Lubavitcher rebbe is becoming God." He pointed to Lubavitch writings calling Rabbi Schneerson the "Essence and Being of God enclothed in a body, omniscient and omnipotent." Another proclaimed of the rebbe that "his entire essence is divinity alone."" Sure enough, Berger then called for the excommunication of any Lubavitchers who espoused such views.
When the figurehead of a movement becomes God, it means he has become the object of faith of a whole new self-contained communal and symbolic world in which his adherents live. A savior Christology implied redemption of the world, what H. Richard Niebuhr called a "Christ transforming Culture" model," but a creator-God Christology means the public world has been abandoned for a sheltered sectarian subworld ("If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; old things have passed away. Behold, new things have come," 2 Cor. 5:17). The community has retreated to radical isolation, loving neither the world nor the things in the world (1 John 2:15). Wayne Meeks made this point well in his monograph, "The Man from Heaven in Johannine Sectarianism."" The elevation of Jesus to the status of a God come down from heaven ("You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world; I am not of this world," John 8:23) denoted a community fundamentally alienated from the world they knew. Though Meeks does not appeal to the parallel, his sketch of the Johannine sect mentality rings all the more true for its similarity in this respect to today's flying saucer religions who avidly look for otherworldly deliverance at the Parousia of the Mother Ship, most notably the extinct Heaven's Gate sect." The same sort of image, saviors from space, denotes the same social sectarian dynamic. J. L. Houlden shows how Johannine ethics (in 1 John) smacks of the worst kind of sectarian infighting, despite its (selective) talk of love."
At this stage, rituals ironically became less important since, as Neyrey reasons, they hadn't guaranteed true faith (i.e., didn't prevent dropouts). Or, more generally, the rituals (like baptism, though probably not the Eucharist) were held in common by two groups who found occasion to differ over other matters. Thus rituals were taken for granted, stopped functioning as the shibboleth, and receded in importance. The new shibboleth was doctrinal. "Unless you believe that I Am. . ." (John 8:24). Accordingly, "spiritual" language predominates. This is probably why, in John chapter 6, after it has been made inescapably clear that one must partake of the sacramental flesh and blood of Jesus, we are suddenly taken aback to read, "It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words which I have spoken to you are spirit and are life" (John 6:63). I take this comment to be an interpolation made at this stage, to devaluate the sacraments in favor of correct belief.
Coincident with this further spiritualization there emerged yet another new phase in the evolution of the Johannine movement and its Christology. Itinerant Johannine prophets (of whom we read in the Johannine Epistles: "Many false prophets have gone out into the world," 1 John 4:1), speaking, as they suppose, by the afflatus of the Paraclete (John 16:12-13), were receiving new Gnostic and docetic revelations, denying "that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh" (1 John 4:2). These new teachings tended toward the concomitant emphases on the only apparent reality of the fleshly form of Jesus and the need for ascetical mortification of the flesh by the Christian. In both cases "the flesh counts for nothing." As Stevan L. Davies'9 has seen, the apocryphal Acts of John enshrines the legendary aretalogies of these docetic, ascetic Johannine itinerants, and the mini-gospel contained in this document ("John's Preaching of the Gospel") is the most explicitly docetic account of the life and death of Jesus in all surviving Christian texts. In it we read that Jesus left no footprints in the sand, appeared differently to different people at the same moment, only pretended to eat, was alternately intangible or hard as steel, and appeared to John in a cave on the Mount of Olives during the crucifixion, denying his identity with the form on the cross!
JOHANNINE DOCETISM
We are close to such a phantom Jesus at numerous points in the Gospel of John. As soon as we are assured in the prologue that "the Word was made flesh" the assertion is qualified: He only "pitched his tent among us" (John 1:14), leaving the same impression as Charles Wesley's implicitly docetic Christmas carol "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing": "Veiled in flesh the Godhead see." In John chapter 4, we are told it is antidocetic for John to show Jesus tired, parched, and hungry (4:6-8), yet as soon as his disciples return with food and urge him to partake, he refuses: "I have food to eat that you know not of. ... My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish his work" (4:32, 34). Hold that burger! At the grave of Lazarus, Jesus appears to be moved by the human tragedy of death, weeping with fellow-feeling (11:35-36). But, no, he knows Lazarus will be back momentarily, so it is all a sham. The charade is only made more gross when Jesus prays before he works the miracle, noting aloud that the prayer itself is but a stage whisper, as someone has said, for the benefit of the crowd ("Father, I thank you that you heard me. And I knew that you hear me always, but I said it because of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me," 11:41-42). The Moonies call it "heavenly deception," but we could just as easily call it Docetism. Jesus' arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane is sheer farce, too. At a single word from Jesus, and that a double entendre discernible only by the Christian reader, the arresting party falls flat like a bunch of bowling pins. They get up, brush themselves off, and proceed as if nothing has happened! The point is precisely the same as in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana, in a scene in which Apollonius awaits his trial before Domitian, where his disciple expects he will be martyred. No, Apollonius reassures his disciple Damis,
"... no one is going to kill us." "And who," said Damis, "is so invulnerable as that? But will you ever be liberated?" "So far as it rests with the verdict of the court," said Apollonius, "I shall be set at liberty this day, but so far as depends on my own will, now and here." And with these words he took his leg out of the fetters and remarked to Damis: "Here is proof positive to you of my freedom, so cheer up." Damis says that it was then for the first time that he really and truly understood the nature of Apollonius, to wit, that it was divine and superhuman, for without any sacrifice,-and how in prison could he have offered any?-and without a single prayer, without even a word, he quietly laughed at the fetters, and then inserted his leg in them afresh, and behaved like a prisoner once more." (IV:44, Loeb)
Docetism, no? On the cross Jesus cries out to be relieved of thirst-not because he is actually thirsty, but simply to fulfill scripture (19:28). Raised from the dead, Jesus invites Thomas to probe his wounds, surely a piece of antidocetic polemic-but then Thomas doesn't! Merely seeing the Risen Lord overwhelms him. Jesus tells the adoring Magdalene. "Touch me not, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brethren and say to them, `I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God'" (John 20:17). Randel Helms20 suggests that the scene is based on a similar leavetaking in the Book of Tobit, where the angel Raphael is poised to return to God in heaven and explains, "Even though you watched me eat and drink, I did not really do so; what you were seeing was a vision. So now get up off the ground and praise God. Behold, I am about to ascend to him who sent me" (Tob. 12:19-20). In the Bible, angels, being pure spirits, cannot eat (cf. Judges 13:15-20). If the author of the corresponding passage in John did indeed have this passage in mind, as seems likely, then Jesus' command, "Touch me not," is probably meant to denote his intangibility. Again, Docetism.
There are passages in the Gospel of John that "realize" eschatology, that is, that teach that no literal, physical resurrection or final judgment is to be expected, contrary to popular opinion. "Amen, amen, I say to you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life. Amen, amen, I say to you, an hour is coming and now is when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and those who hear shall live" (John 5:24-25) "Jesus said to her, 'Your brother shall rise again.' Martha said to him, 'I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.' Jesus said to her, 'I am the resurrec tion and the life; he who believes in me shall live even though he die, and he who lives and believes in me shall never die' " (11:23-26). "Judas, not Iscariot, said to him, 'Lord, what has happened that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?' Jesus answered and said to him, 'If anyone loves me he will keep my word; and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our abode with him' " (14:22-23). This deliteralization, or spiritualization, of the traditional future expectation is one of the major characteristics of Gnosticism. These Johannine texts must stem from the schismatic Gnosticizing Johannine faction. Bultmann is no doubt correct in seeing passages like John 5:28: "Do not marvel at this, for an hour is coming in which all who are in the tombs shall hear his voice and shall come forth, those who did the good to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil to a resurrection of judgment," as later corrections by the more conservative faction.
Returning to our primary concern, the evolving Christology of the Johannine movement, we may observe how the more conservative faction for whom the exaltation of Jesus to the Godhead was a dangerous abomination left their polemical traces in the Gospel of John, too. These are texts which still give Chalcedonian theologians headaches today. The first is John 12:44, "He who believes in me believes not in me but in him who sent me." The point seems to be to reopen a space between Jesus and God, collapsed by the Jesus-deifying faction. The second is John 14:28, "You heard that I said to you, 'I go away, and I will come to you.' If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I go to the Father, for the Father is greater than I." The third is a correction added to John 14:7-10: "'If you had known me, you would have known my Father; from now on you know him and have seen him.' Philip said to him, 'Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.' Jesus said to him, 'Have I been with you so long, Philip, and still you do not know me? He who has seen me has seen the Father' " (verses 7-9). Up to this point, the text delivers the most powerful christological statement in the New Testament, the absolute identification of the Father with the Son (later stigmatized as a heresy called Patripassianism, implying that the Father suffered on the cross). This was the affirmation of the Johannine Christians who made Jesus "equal to God," and meant it. But the more christologically modest faction emended their copy of the gospel with this equivocating addition, "Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?" (verse 10). Readers wishing to glorify Jesus today still read verse 10 as something of a come-down, a disappointment after the much stronger statement of verses 7-9.
I suggest that each faction along this path of historical evolution and mitosis of the Johannine community had its own copy of the Gospel of John. As each new stage emerged, additions were made by each faction to update the text and accommodate it to the current orthodoxy. When, as presumably happened, a copy containing the distinctive themes of one faction came into the hands of a rival faction (for instance, when a scribe switched sides, taking his copy with him), it would receive theological corrections in the margins, which would then be inserted right into the text during the next copying. Finally, once all these debates were dead and forgotten, an eclectic text was produced, harmonizing all the texts the scribes could find. The same thing happened with 1 John which, as a result, juxtaposes Gnostic perfectionism (3:5-10; 5:18) and Catholic antiperfectionism (1:7-10; 5:16-17) side by side.
But Johannine Christology had not done evolving, as we can see when we consult other texts belonging to the Gnostic faction of the Johannine movement, such as the Apocryphon of John, which is even now extant in various manuscript forms reflecting the redactions of various scribes. When the editors of The Nag Hammadi Library conflated all three different manuscripts of the Apocryphon of John, they were doing something like I imagine ancient scribes did when they produced our extant, conflated versions of the Gospel of John and 1 John. And in the Apocryphon of John we encounter full-blown Gnosticism, including the belief that the solid earth was created not by the heavenly Father, nor even by his Son the Logos, but by an inferior being called the Demiurge. Christ is a higher entity than the Demiurge, and his mission in descending into this sublunar world was to enlighten the Gnostic elect as to their alien origin and otherworldly destiny in the Pleroma of light. Here, as Hans Jonas discussed in his The Gnostic Religion," the alienation of the Gnostic sectarian is radical and complete; he wants nothing more than to escape this vale of tears. This radical world-negation is perfectly mirrored in the full-blown Gnostic Christology. Jesus has become not merely "equal to God," but now actually greater than God! That is, greater and higher than the creator. Again, the magnification of Christology has proceeded conjointly with the increasing self-definition by self-isolation of the factions of the Johannine movement. Obviously, we do not know how Christology developed. We can only draw inferences from the (admittedly ambiguous) evidence. But I believe the scenario I have sketched here, based on the work of various scholars, shows the general plausibility of what I have dubbed "adop- tionistic" theories of the growth of Christian belief about Jesus, assuming he was a genuine historical figure. It may have happened this way.
ALI AND ALLAH
In the Islamic figure of Ali, cousin and adopted son of the Prophet Muhammad, we have a striking parallel to the Christian Jesus. Matti Moosa bemoans the fact that "Ali became so mythologized that, in many of the anecdotes about him or attributed to him, it is difficult to separate the real Ali from the legendary one."22 This mythologization occurred with amazing rapidity, begin ping already within the very lifetime of Ali and included the notion that Ali was Allah himself incarnate upon earth. It was not long before, under Persian influence, the doctrine of the Ghulat sect of the Nusayri (also called the Alawi, the sect to which Syrian President Hafez Assad belongs) made Ali the ultimate Godhead, the creator of the world. The mythology of Ali has undergone many permutations, including Trinitarianism, Docetism, and the equation of Ali with both the sun and the moon by different factions! And yet there is no particular reason to deny, even to question the historical existence of Ali. One would have to disregard the whole bloody mess of the succession to the Caliphate, in which Ali ascended to the throne following the death of the previous Caliph Uthman, assassinated by partisans of Ali, who believed he should have been the immediate successor of Muhammad. The same tendency toward deification expressed itself in the identification of Ali's martyr son, the Imam Hussein, as the creative Logos of God. In fact, it seems to me we are never far from such idolatrous hero-worship when we meet the standard Jewish veneration formula; "James the just, [for example,] on whose account heaven and earth were created" (Gospel of Thomas, saying 12). The motivation for the rapid deification of Ali is not far to seek. Ali was of course the fountainhead of the whole Shi'ite movement. As the Shi'ite movement became separated more and more widely from the Sunni mainstream, Ali's own status, like the standard of sectarian battle, was raised higher and higher, precisely as I have suggested we can trace in the case of Johannine Christology.
CHRISTIAN MOSAIC
It must be asked whether we do not have in the case of Jesus just the same sort of historical linkage in secular affairs as we do in the case of Ali, for is not the death of Jesus intertwined with the history and with historical figures of his time, even as Ali's was with Muhammad, Uthman, and the history of the Caliphate? At first glance, we do indeed. But I think there is less than meets the eye, that the linkage of Jesus with the setting of first-century Roman Palestine is more apparent than real. I will try to demonstrate this by a comparison of the events of the gospel Passion with striking historical parallels from contemporary documents which I deem the likely sources of the political coloring of the Passion story.
I suggest that the whole business of Jesus entering Jerusalem as a messianic "king of the Jews" and then being crucified as a messianic pretender is a subsequent layer of reinterpretation, a rewriting of the Jesus story. First, allow me a running start. Burton Mack, John Dominic Crossan, Robert Funk, Marcus Borg, James Breech, and many other scholars today reject the gospel depiction of Jesus heralding the imminent end of the age. All the material in the gospels that gives that impression seems to be secondary. In other words, Jesus himself spoke of the Kingdom of God in much the same terms as the Cynics or even the later rabbis did: God's kingdom was simply God's rules for living a wise and righteous life. Only later, at a time of crisis, did Jesus' partisans start preaching, in his name, an apocalyptic disaster scenario. As Mack and other Q scholars suggest, this crisis may have been nothing else than their frustration at a large-scale rejection of their message.
But, as Mack also notes, Mark seems to have mixed the events of the death of Jesus with those of the fall of the city in 70 C.E.Z3 In this way Mark was able to make the fall of Jerusalem the divine punishment for the execution of Jesus. I think he is on to something here but does not pursue it nearly far enough. Crossan sees a few inches beyond Mack, but he doesn't know what to make of it either. What Crossan does see is that certain episodes of the Passion story of Jesus reflect other episodes found in the contemporary Jewish writers Josephus and Philo. We have already seen that Philo describes how, in order to mock the petty kingship of Herod Agrippa, the Alexandrian rowdies prepared a mock reception for him as he was passing through the city on his way home from receiving the crown from Caligula. Here is another glance at the story.
There was a certain madman named Carabbas ... this man spent all his days and nights naked in the roads, minding neither cold nor heat, the sport of idle children and wanton youths; and they, driving the poor wretch as far as the public gymnasium, and setting him up there on high that he might be seen by everybody, flattened out a leaf of papyrus and put it on his head instead of a diadem, and clothed the rest of his body with a common door mat instead of a cloak and instead of a sceptre they put in his hand a small stick of the native papyrus which they found lying by the wayside and gave it to him; and when, like actors in theatrical spectacles, he had received all the insignia of public authority; and had been addressed and adorned like a king, the young men bearing sticks on their shoulders stood on each side of him instead of spear-carriers, in imitation of the bodyguards of the king, and then others came up, some as if to salute him, and others making as though they wished to plead their causes before him, and others pretending to wish to consult with him about the affairs of the state. Then from the multitude of those who were standing around there arose a wonderful shout of men calling out Maris; and this is the name by which it is said that they call the kings among the Syrians; for they knew that Agrippa was by birth a Syrian, and also that he was possessed of a great district of Syria of which he was the sovereign. (Flaccus 36-39)2`
Crossan allows that the strikingly similar mockery of Jesus as king of the Jews by the Roman soldiers might be a fictive borrowing of this well-known tale. The same goes for the tale of another local madman, Jesus ben-Ananias, whom Josephus describes as prophesying the doom of Jerusalem four years before the war with Rome.
One Jeshua son of Ananias, a very ordinary yokel, came to the feast at which every Jew is expected to set up a tabernacle for God. As he stood in the temple he suddenly began to shout, "A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice against Jerusalem and the Sanctuary, a voice against bridegrooms and brides [cf. Luke 17:26-27, "As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be in the days of the Son of Man. They ate, they drank, they married, they were given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all"], a voice against the whole people." Day and night he uttered this cry as he went through all the streets. Some of the more prominent citizens, very annoyed at these ominous words, laid hold of the fellow and beat him savagely. Without saying a word in his own defense or for the private information of his persecutors, he persisted in shouting the same warning as before. The Jewish authorities, rightly concluding that some supernatural power was responsible for the man's behavior, took him before the Roman procurator. [cf. Luke 23:1, "Then the whole company of them rose and brought him before Pilate." ) There, scourged till his flesh hung in ribbons [cf. Mark 15:15; John 19:1], he neither begged for mercy nor shed a tear [cf. Mark 14:61, "But he was silent and made no answer."], but lowering his voice to the most mournful of tones answered every blow with "Woe to Jerusalem!" [cf. Luke 13:34-35, "0 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! ... Behold, your house is forsaken.") When Albinus-for that was the procurator's name-demanded to know who he was, where he came from and why he uttered such cries, he made no reply whatever to the questions [cf. John 19:9, "He entered the Praetorium again and said to Jesus, 'Where are you from?' But Jesus gave him no answer.") but endlessly repeated his lament over the City, till Albinus decided he was a madman and released him [cf. Luke 23:22b, "I will therefore chastise him and release him."]. All the time till the war broke out he never approached another citizen or was seen in conversation, but daily as if he had learned a prayer by heart he recited his lament: "Woe to Jerusalem!" Those who daily cursed him he never cursed [cf. Luke 6:28a, "Bless those who curse you."); those who gave him food he never thanked [cf. Luke 10:7b, "For the laborer deserves his wages."]; his only response to anyone was that dismal foreboding. His voice was heard most of all at the feasts [cf. John 2:13 ff; 5:1 ff; 6:4 ff; 7:2 ff; 37; 10:22-23 ff; 11:55-56]. For seven years and five months he went on ceaselessly, his voice as strong as ever and his vigour unabated, till during the siege after seeing the fulfillment of his foreboding he was silenced. He was going round on the wall uttering his piercing cry: "Woe again to the City, the people, and the Sanctuary!" [cf. Luke 21:20-21, "But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are inside the city depart, and let not those who are out in the country enter it; for these are days of vengeance, to fulfill all that is written.... For great distress shall be upon the earth and wrath upon this people ... and Jerusalem shall be trodden down by the Gentiles ..."] and as he added a last word: "Woe to me also!" a stone shot from an engine struck him, killing him instantly. Thus he uttered those same forebodings to the very end. (The Jewish War, VI, V, 3. G.A. Williamson trans.)
But this is only the beginning. We can parallel Jesus' triumphal entry into the city and cleansing of the temple with that of revolutionary messiah Simon bar-Giora, welcomed into the temple by the priests because he had promised to exterminate the faction of Joseph of Gischala, who had occupied the sacred precinct. They were "brigands," "bandits," as guerrillas were called; thus Joseph's mission was to "cleanse" the temple, which had become a "den of thieves." These phrases, familiar from the gospels, make more natural sense in the context Josephus describes and thus probably originated there.
In order to overthrow John they voted to admit Simon, and olive-branch in hand [Mark 11:8: "And many spread their garments on the road, and others spread leafy branches which they had cut from the fields."] to bring in a second tyrant to be their master. The resolution was carried out, and they sent the high priest, Matthias, to implore Simon to enter-the man they so greatly feared! The invitation was supported by those citizens who were trying to escape the Zealots and were anxious about their homes and property. He in his lordly way expressed his willingness to be their master, and entered with the air of one who intended to sweep the Zealots out of the City, acclaimed by the citizens as deliverer and protector [cf. Luke 19:38, "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!" j. (Ibid., V, IX, 11)
Eventually surrendering to the Romans, Simon was taken to Rome and displayed in the triumphal procession, finally to be executed as would-be king of the Jews after suffering abuse by his Roman guards [cf. Mark 15:16-201. He wasn't crucified, true, but then this portion of the Jesus story recalls Plutarch's account of the death of Cleomenes, the revolutionary king of Sparta, exiled because of his land-reform policies. He was caught fomenting egalitarian revolution in Alexandria, too. Knowing their time was short, most of his compatriots took their own lives.
Fanteus walked over them as they lay, and pricked every one with his dagger, to try whether any was alive [cf. John 19:33-34a, "but when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear ..."]; when he pricked Cleomenes' ankle, and saw him turn upon his back, he kissed him, sat down by him, and when he was quite dead, covered up the body, and then killed himself over it.... Ptolemy, as soon as an account of the action was brought him, gave order that Cleomenes's body should be flayed and hung up [cf. Mark 15:15b, "and having scourged Jesus, he delivered him up to be crucified.").... A few days later, those that watched the hanging body of Cleomenes saw a large snake winding about his head and covering his face, so that no bird of prey would fly at it [cf. Mark 15:33, 38, "And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole earth until the ninth hour.... And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom."]. This made the king superstitiously afraid [cf. Mark 15:44; John 19:8, "When Pilate heard these words he was the more afraid.") and set the women upon several expiations [cf. Mark 16:1-2, "Mary Magdalene, and Mary of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week they went to the tomb."], as if he had been some extraordinary being, and one beloved by the gods, that had been slain. And the Alexandrians made processions to the place and gave Cleomenes the title of hero, and son of the gods [cf. Mark 15:39, "And when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, 'Truly this man was the son of God!' "I ... (Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Cleomenes. Dryden trans.)"
The gospels show Pontius Pilate as being desperate to get Jesus released, but as eventually caving in to the threats of the crowd who say they will report him to Caesar if he does not execute the false Messiah Jesus (John 19:12). This seems quite odd to scholars, hardly characteristic of the Pilate known to history as a Jew-baiting tyrant. In fact it sounds like it might be a garbled version of another story Josephus tells on Pilate. It seems the procurator had been informed of a planned rally on Mount Gerizim in Samaria. The Samaritan messiah
bade them get together upon Mount Gerizim, which is by them looked upon as the most holy of all mountains, and assured them that, when they were come thither, he would show them those sacred vessels which were laid under that place, because Moses put them there. So they came thither armed, and thought the discourse of the man probable; and as they abode at a certain village, which was called Tirathaba, they got the rest together to them, and desired to go up the mountain in a great multitude together; but Pilate prevented their going up, by seizing upon the roads with a great band of horsemen and footmen, that fell upon these that were gotten together in the village, and when it came to an action, some of them they slew, and others of them they put to flight, and took a great many alive, the principal of whom, and also the most potentate of those that fled away, Pilate ordered to be slain.
But when this tumult was appeased, the Samaritan senate sent an embassy to Vitellius, a man that had been consul, and who was now president of Syria, and accused Pilate of the murder of those that were killed; for that they did not go to Tirathaba in order to revolt from the Romans, but to escape the violence of Pilate. So Vitellius sent Marcellus, a friend of his, to take care of the affairs of Judea, and ordered Pilate to go to Rome, to answer before the emperor to the accusations of the Jews. So Pilate, when he had tarried ten years in Judea, made haste to Rome, and this in obedience to the orders of Vitellius, which he durst not contradict. (Antiquities of the Jews, XVIII, IV:1-2.Whiston trans.)
Here are most of the elements in the gospels' Pilate episode, only they are reshuffled. Or have the gospels reshuffled the pieces of an original historical account in which Pilate cruelly crushed a peaceful messiah, was reported by the survivors, and found he had Caesar's ire to face?
JOSHUA MESSIAHS
In Acts 5:35-39, Luke has Rabban Gamaliel lump Jesus together with Judas of Galilee and Theudas the Magician, both revolutionary prophets or messiahs mentioned by Josephus. Theudas had promised his followers that, like the Old Testament "Jesus" (Joshua), he would part the Jordan River.
Now it came to pass, while Fadus was procurator of Judea, that a certain magician, whose name was Theudas, persuaded a great part of the people to take their effects with them, and to follow him to the river Jordan; for he told them he was a prophet, and that he would, by his own command, divide the river, and afford them an easy passage over it; and many were deluded by his words. However, Fadus did not permit them to make any advantage of his wild attempt, but sent a troop of horsemen out against them; who, falling upon them unexpectedly, slew many of them, and took many of them alive. They also took Theudas alive, and cut off his head, and carried it to Jerusalem. (Ibid., XX, V, 1)
Similarly, Claudius Lysias asks Paul in Acts 21:38 if he is not the notorious Egyptian prophet who organized an army out in the desert some time ago. Josephus mentions this failed messiah, too. The Egyptian had promised he would cause the walls of Jerusalem to fall down like Joshua did the walls of Jericho.
And now these impostors and deceivers persuaded the multitude to follow them into the wilderness, and pretended that they would exhibit manifest wonders and signs, that should be performed by the providence of God. And many that were prevailed on by them suffered the punishments of their folly; for Felix brought them back, and then punished them. Moreover, there came out of Egypt about this time to Jerusalem, one that said he was a prophet, and advised the multitude of the common people to go along with him to the Mount of Olives as it was called, which lay over against the city, and at the distance of five furlongs. He said farther, that he would show them from hence, how, at his command, the walls of Jerusalem would fall down; and he promised them that he would procure them an entrance to the city through those walls, when they were fallen down. Now when Felix was informed of these things, he ordered his soldiers to take their weapons, and came against them with a great number of horsemen and footmen, from Jerusalem, and attacked the Egyptian and the people that were with him. He also slew four hundred of them, and took two hundred alive. But the Egyptian himself escaped out of the fight, but did not appear any more. (Ibid., XX, IX, 6)
A few scholars have noted the odd "coincidence" that both Theudas and the Egyptian sought to repeat the ancient feats of Joshua leading his people into the promised land. If they were trying to substantiate their messianic claims by aping Joshua, wouldn't this mean there was some currently available category like a "Joshua Messiah," a "Jesus Christ"? ("Joshua" and "Jesus" are variant forms of the same name.) It seems there was. Samaritans made a great deal of the Deut. 18:18-22 prophecy of the eventual advent of a "Prophet like Moses," and some Samaritan sectarians believed that the Samaritan mage Dositheus (whom the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies make a disciple of John the Baptist who lost out to Simon Magus in a squabble for leadership of the sect after John's death) was the Messiah. Other Samaritans claimed that the future prophetic Messiah was Moses' immediate successor, Joshua. What did they mean by this? As Kippenberg has suggested, the Joshua identification may have intended to stymie any speculation about the identity of a future Messiah and thus nip in the bud any new and dangerous messianic movements.26 The point would have been the same as when Rabbi Hillel asserted that all messianic prophecies were already fulfilled in the righteous King Hezekiah, so that no future Messiah ought to be expected ("Israel has no Messiah because they already consumed him in the days of Hezekiah," B. Sanhedrin 98b, 99a). But Hillel's quip backfired: Some concluded, apparently on the basis of it, that Hezekiah would come again as Messiah at the end of the age!27 In the same way, it seems that Dositheus' disciples applied the Deuteronomy prophecy to their master and understood him as the Old Testament Joshua come again!" And apparently Theudas and the Egyptian made the same claim for themselves, as their Joshua-like messianic programs suggest.'9 Thus, for some Jews and Samaritans, to be Messiah was to be Joshua. To be Christ was to be Jesus.
Luke, the author of Acts 5:35-39, knows it would have been natural for people to confuse Jesus with other infamous figures connected with revolt against Rome. Even more revealing is the warning of Mark's apocalyptic dis course, attributed to Jesus, in chapter 13. He has Jesus warn the readers of the gospel (this is explicit: "Let the reader understand," verse 14) not to confuse Jesus with various prophets and messiahs connected with the fall of Jerusalem (Mark 13:6, 21). No, they are different, though there is a real danger of not being able to keep one's messiahs straight ("... so as to deceive, if possible, even the elect," Mark 13:22). In plain speech, it seems to me, Mark is letting on that various early Jesus believers unwittingly confused Jesus with people like Jesus ben-Ananias, Simon bar-Giora, Carabbas, "Joshua Messiahs" Theudas and the Egyptian, Jesus ben-Sapphiah the bandit chief, Jesus barAbbas the insurrectionist, Elymas bar-Jesus the sorcerer, Jesus Justus, and the martyred Samaritan messiah. The war was over: Mark did not fear that his readers might take up arms against Rome under the leadership of Menahem or Simon. That was in the past. So what sort of confusion might he still fear? Precisely that his readers should have amalgamated features from different heroic but martyred messiahs and prophets together with Jesus, polluting his story with elements from a generation later when messiahs swarmed the land. Such confusion must have been proceeding apace, or there would be no occasion for Mark to warn against it, having Jesus warn against it beforehand. And yet it was far too late; Mark's own story already presupposed a great amount of such conflation.
So I am saying that, insofar as the Jesus movement only later repainted Jesus as an apocalyptic figure, this would most likely have included repainting him as a messianic king entering Jerusalem triumphantly, clearing the temple, being mocked as a pretended king, condemned by an intimidated Pilate, crucified as king of the Jews, and shown by portents at the cross to be the Son of God. All this is quite possibly the result of confusing Jesus with the exciting events of Jewish revolt against Rome. Indeed, as Mack says, Mark had already collapsed the generation separating Jesus from the fall of the city. And if this is anywhere near the mark, then we would have to suppose that the pre-70 C.E. community of the Pillars had understood the absent Jesus in quite a different way, not as a slain king, but perhaps as a hidden Imam, as I have suggested in my earlier speculations about James the just as the Door of Jesus. But we must raise even more searching questions.
EUHEMERISM
The so-called Apostles' Creed treats almost entirely of invisible, metaphysical matters, supposed events that sound like myths, divine creations and incarnations, a virgin birth, a descent into the inferno, and so on. The sole historical peg upon which it attempts to hang the life of the savior Jesus is his crucifixion in the time of Pontius Pilate. Yet I have just suggested that the con nection of Jesus with Pilate may be based on the same sort of garbled speculations that led Luke to connect the birth of Jesus with both Herod the Great and Quirinius' census. Jesus' connection with the Roman governor Pilate on one end of his biography need be no more historical than his connection with the Roman governor Quirinius on the other. Even greater doubt is thrown on the matter by the parallel tradition, still extant but just barely, that Jesus was executed under Herod Antipas! The Gospel of Peter has Herod consult with Pilate but see to the execution himself. And, as Alfred Loisy noted long ago, Luke seems to have had access to a version of the Passion in which it was Herod who had Jesus killed, not Pilate." This becomes evident when one examines Luke's cumbersome and improbable sequence involving Jesus being tried before Pilate, then Herod Antipas, then Pilate again. No one has ever come up with a plausible reason for Pilate remanding Jesus to Antipas, as Luke has him do. Once Jesus gets to Herod's court, it is Herod's troops who mock him, not Pilate's as in the other gospels, implying that Luke was trying to harmonize the Markan Pilate-Passion with another set in Herod's court and had to choose between mockings. The most flagrant mark of indelicate editing is Herod's acquittal of Jesus-then sending him back to Pilate! It is clear Luke must have had one Passion story in front of him, Mark's, in which Pilate ordered Jesus' execution, and another, like that in the Gospel of Peter, in which it was Herod Antipas who condemned him. To use both, he had to change Herod's verdict from guilty to innocent (otherwise, as in the Gospel of Peter, he must have Herod send him to the cross). But instead of having Herod let Jesus go in peace, as an acquittal surely would demand, he has Herod send Jesus back to Pilate-for what? And if Pilate awaited Herod's verdict, why did he not let him go, too, since Herod had acquitted Jesus? Luke has too many cooks in the kitchen, and the stew is spoiled.
But the key question is, if Jesus was known to have been crucified quite recently in dramatic public circumstances, at the behest either of Pilate or of Herod, how on earth could uncertainty over who killed him ever have arisen? If either Herod or Pilate had recently executed him, how could any belief about the involvement of the other have come about? But, on the other hand, if both were merely educated guesses as to who killed Jesus, we can easily see how the confusion arose.
And there is even more confusion over the date of Jesus' death. As G. R. S. Mead" pointed out long ago, there is a persistent Jewish tradition to the effect that Jesus died about 100 B.C.E., in the time not of Pontius Pilate, but of Alexander Jannaeus and his widow Queen Salome. This version makes Jesus a "heretical" disciple of Joshua ben Perechiah (just as many critical scholars make Jesus a dissenting disciple of John the Baptist). It is attested in both the Talmud and in the Toledoth Jeschu, the Jewish gospel satire, which as Hugh J. Schonfield convincingly showed, must have been based on an apocryphal Jewish-Christian gospel from no later than the second century C.E.32
Christ-Myth theorists from Arthur Drews to George A. Wells have remarked how 1 Cor. 2:8 and Col. 2:13-15 attribute the death of Jesus to no earthly agents but rather to supramundane spiritual entities. Wells and others went on to argue that at some point Christians took to trying to locate the death of their savior in the historical past, finally fixing upon the reign of Pilate, a notorious villain." To have done so would have entailed no risk of Roman disfavor, since as we have seen Pilate was disgraced in the eyes of the Romans. Choosing him would in fact be a way of currying favor with Rome, much as Josephus sought to do by pleading that it was not Rome per se but only the occasional rotten Roman apple that created trouble with Jews.
Such a process of hypothetical historicizing of a god hitherto imagined as living in the vague past would certainly not be without precedent. I find it ironic that in his book Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? Paul Veyne34 both scoffs at those who deny the historical existence of Jesus and at the same time implicitly enhances the argument of Christ-Myth theorists. He describes how thinkers of Greek and Roman antiquity, including Diodorus, Cicero, Livy, Pausanias, and Strabo, approached mythic figures such as Theseus, Herakles, Odysseus, Minos, Dionysus, Castor, and Pollux: They readily dismissed the supernatural tales of their heroes' divine paternity and miraculous feats but doggedly assumed there must have been a historical core that had been subsequently mythologized. Their task as historians was to distill the history from the myth and to place the great figures where they must have occurred on the historical time-chart. Herodotus, for instance, tried to determine just when Herakles lived, though he could not quite manage to reconcile the conflicting "information" he derived from Egyptian, Greek, Phoenician, and other sources." The whole approach earned the name of Euhemerism, from Euhemerus who originated it. The idea was to assume that all ancient gods were glorified ancestors or historical culture heroes. Though no mundane, "secular" information about them survived, it had to be assumed that a genuine historical figure lay at the root of the myths.
Unless I am mistaken, this seems to be the approach of the questors for a historical Jesus. Though the gospel story of Jesus matches the pattern of the Mythic Hero Archetype in every detail, with nothing left over, Christian scholars, among whose number we must surely count even Bultmann, simply assume there must have been a historical Jesus at the root of the thing, and this even if, a la Bultmann, we cannot come near to specifying what it was. But just as important, it seems equally to have been the guiding assumption of Christians at some stage of reflection when they felt some need to nail down the earthly appearance of Jesus in, to them, recent history. The Jewish and Jewish-Christian dating of Jesus about 100 B.C.E. may represent one attempt at fixing such a date, the more common Herod Antipas and/or Pontius Pilate date representing another, evidently that of Gentile Christians of some stripe and of a later time.
New Testament scholars are quite accustomed to the basic logic here, only they have not applied it so broadly as the Christ-Myth theorists. For instance, many would agree with Charles Talbert36 and Elaine Pagels37 that the spiritual, visionary resurrection of Jesus affirmed by earlier Christians (1 Cor. 15:43-50; 1 Pet. 3:18-19) gave way to "historicized," flesh-and-blood resurrection stories such as we find in Matt. 28:9; Luke 24:36-43; John 20:24-29; Acts 10:40-41) due to an effort by emerging catholic Christianity to combat Gnostics who claimed still to receive visionary apparitions of the Risen One replete with new and "heretical" teachings, of which Gnostic texts like the Pistis Sophia are full. To concretize the nature of the appearances as those of a physical individual, albeit a resurrected one, was to imply a manageable, "canonical" number of them. The same logic underlay the later attempt to delimit the number and character of writings in the New Testament canon. Both were attempts to co-opt and control revelation claims.
Again, many New Testament scholars would agree thus far. Christ-Myth theorists like Drews and Wells make but one natural step farther in the direction thus indicated. The need to concretize and thus to define and control Christian thinking and practice had earlier led to the historicizing of the Jesus figure itself, the result being an earthly "life of Jesus," something the Gnostics never quite accepted, with their docetic Christology, even once they had assimilated the basic Markan story-plot. The more of an earthly establishment Christianity became, the more it felt the need to point to "bur founder," a divine figure who had once laid down the law, the canon law, to the exclusion of Gnostic daydreams and hallucinations."
But where, pray tell, had Mark derived his Jesus story line? From the facts? Here we have another case where accepted critical axioms in gospel studies would seem to have much more radical implications than even the most supposedly skeptical critics themselves seem to have realized. One of Bultmann's early colleagues in form criticism of the gospels, Karl Ludwig Schmidt, broke important new ground by, in a sense, pointing out the obvious, namely that the order of events in the gospels is arbitrary.39 Already in Mark most episodes have no narrative logic interconnecting them, but rather are merely taped together by means of Mark's favorite connective adverb "immediately," as if to say "Next he did this.... Next he went there." The artificiality is evident, for instance, in 2:32 through 3:6, where Mark has grouped anecdotes together topically, for example, Sabbath controversies, or in 9:33-50, a sequence of largely unrelated sayings strung together by the mnemonic device of catchwords. Mark had simply created a schematic framework for his presentation of a great number of hitherto independent stories and sayings which had previously circulated by word of mouth ("oral tradition") one by one. Each story or saying (and many of the stories built up to sayings as their punchline) served a particular purpose, for example, to lay down the Christian law about fasting, prayer, exorcism, church discipline, healing tips or formulae, miracle-mongering propaganda. And these original uses can still be detected despite Mark's working them all up into a story. Indeed, form-criticism was all about reisolating these units from their gospel contexts and figuring out what purpose each must once have served.
In one way, this discovery eased the burden of apologists for gospel accuracy, for it immediately became clear that none of the gospel writers was much interested in chronological sequence. If Matthew and Luke felt free to change the order of events and sayings as they found them in Mark, the exegete could stop barking up the wrong tree, trying to defend the evangelists according to a standard of accuracy they were not even trying to meet. Did John have Jesus cleanse the temple at the commencement of his ministry, while the other gospels placed the event at the close of his public activity? No matter: The difference was merely a rhetorical one, and one might even make homiletical hay of the difference.
After Schmidt, scholars ostensibly recognized that the plot outline of Mark was the evangelist's own creation, a more or less arbitrary string along which to arrange the pearls. This did not, however, stop many or most of them from continuing to take the Markan sequence for granted as an outline of at least the public ministry of Jesus: a "Galilean Spring" of popular acceptance, followed by a cross-shadowed last journey to Jerusalem to face bitter conflict from the establishment, then death. If one did take the form-critical insight seriously, that the Markan plot is but a frame device to showcase a number of originally independent anecdotes and sayings, one might be inclined at the very least to skepticism like Bultmann's: One might give up any idea of writing a biography, however rudimentary, of Jesus. One might, in other words, assume that the events of the life of Jesus, their interconnection both with one another and with outside events and influences, is forever lost to us. Had he served an Essene novitiate? Possibly, not unlikely, but pure speculation. Had he learned Cynic philosophy in nearby Sepphoris? Who knows!
But one's agnosticism might go a good deal further to the conclusion that the very idea of an earthly, itinerant ministry of Jesus as teacher, healer, and exorcist, was a product of Mark's framing device. As the Russian Formalist critic Boris Tomashevsky observed, "The protagonist ... is the result of the formation of the story material into a plot. On the one hand, he is a means of stringing motifs together; and on the other, he embodies the motivation that connects the motifs."40 Tomashevsky might almost have had Mark himself in mind! Was Jesus an itinerant? There is no reason to think so. It is the impression created by the choice of placing anecdotes side by side in nar rative form. Bruno Bauer once argued that Mark had himself created the Jesus character out of whole cloth. I am saying that it may well be that Mark took preexisting traditions of miracles and wise sayings, some or all of them already attributed to the Christian savior, Jesus, and from them created the idea of a "historical Jesus."
TRUTHS AND TRUISMS
Where did these pre-Markan materials come from? Many of the sayings may have come from anywhere. Bultmann, T. W. Manson, Arthur Drews,41 and others long ago demonstrated how a huge number of the sayings and parables attributed to Jesus in the Synoptic gospels are even verbally paralleled among the voluminous aphorisms of the rabbis in the Mishnah, as well as among Cynic and Stoic philosophers. Here are several rabbinic parallels.
I should be surprised if there were anyone in this generation who would accept correction. If one says to a man, "Remove the spelk from your eye," he will reply, "Remove the beam from yours." (Rabbi Tarphon, ca. 100 C.E.; cf. Matt. 7:3-5)
A Jew who has much knowledge of the Law and many good works is like a man who lays stone foundations for his house and builds thereon with sun-dried brick. Though floods may come the house is not affected because its foundations are sound. But the man who has much knowledge of the Law and no good works is like a man who lays foundations of sun-dried brick and builds thereon with stone. If only a small flood comes the house collapses because the foundations are not sound. (Rabbi Elijah ben Abuya, ca. 120 c.E.; cf. Matt. 7:24-27)42
No bird perishes without God-how much less a man! (Rabbi Simeon ben Jochai, ca. 150 c.E.; cf. Matt. 10:29-31)
Whoever has bread in his basket and asks "What shall I eat tomorrow?" is none other than those of little faith. (Rabbi Eleazer, 1st century, Sotah 48b; cf. Matt. 5:3 1)
When thou hast mercy upon thy fellow, thou hast one to have mercy on thee; but if thou hast not mercy upon thy fellow, thou hast none to have mercy upon thee. (Tanchuma; cf. Matt. 7:1-2)
He who hates his neighbor, to he belongs to the shedders of blood. (Eliezer, ca. 90 c.E.; cf. Matt. 5:22)
He who looks at a woman with desire is as one who has criminal intercourse with her. (Kalla par. 1; cf. Matt. 5:28)
The yea of the righteous is a yea; their no is a no. (Rabbi Huna; cf. Matt. 5:37)
There were two chambers in the Temple: one the Chamber of Secrets, the other the Chamber of Utensils. Into the Chamber of Secrets the devout used to put their gifts in secret and the poor of good family received support therefrom in secret. (Shekalim 5, 6; cf. Matt. 6:2-4)
It is enough for the servant to be like his master. (Common Jewish proverb; cf. Matt. 10:25)
Whoever gives a piece of bread to a righteous man, it is as though he had fulfilled the whole Law. (Genesis Rabbah on Gen. 23:18; Matt. 10:41-42)
Turn in to me, ye unlearned, And lodge in my house of instruction. How long will ye lack these things? And how long shall your soul be so athirst? I open my mouth and speak of her, Acquire wisdom for yourselves with money. Bring your necks under her yoke, And her burden let your soul bear; She is nigh unto them that seek her, And he that is intent upon her findeth her. Behold with your eyes that I laboured but little therein, And abundance of peace have I found.
(Sirach 51:23-27; cf. Matt. 11:28-30)
If two sit together and words of Torah (are spoken} between them the Shekinah rests between them.... (Rabbi Hananiah ben Teradion, died 135, Aboth 3, 2; cf. Matt. 18:20)
Like a king who invited his servants to a feast and did not specify a time for them. The astute ones among them adorned themselves and sat at the gate of the palace. They said, "There is no lack in the palace" (so the feast could start any time). The foolish ones among them went to their work. They said, "There is no feast without preparation" [thus, there is still time to spare}. Suddenly the king asked for his servants. The astute ones among them came into his presence as they were, adorned; and the foolish ones among them came into his presence as they were, dirty. The king was pleased with the astute ones and angry with the foolish ones. He said, "Let these who adorned themselves for the feast sit down and eat and drink. Let those who did not adorn themselves for the feast stand and look on." (Johannan ben Zakkai, Shabb. 153a; cf. Matt. 22:1-3a, 11-13)
God does not give greatness to a man till he has proved him in a small matter: only then he promotes him to a great post. Two were proved and found faithful, and God promoted them to greatness. He tested David with the sheep ... and God said, Thou wast faithful with the sheep; I will give thee my sheep that thou shouldst feed them. And so with Moses, who fed his father-in-law's sheep. To him God said the same. (cf. Matt. 25:14-29)
He that learns from the young, to what is he like? To one that eats unripe grapes and drinks wine from his winepress. And he that learns from the aged, to what is he like? To one that eats ripe grapes and drinks old wine. Look not on the jar but on what is in it; there may be a new jar that is full of old wine and an old one in which is not even new wine. (Rabbi Jose ben Judah of Kefar ha-Babli, Aboth 4.20; cf. Mark 2:21-22)
A scholar whose inward (thoughts) do not correspond to his outward (profession) is no scholar. (Raba, died 352 c.E.; cf. Matt. 23:2-4)
Stay two or three seats below thy place and sit until they say to thee, "Go up." Do not begin by going up because they may say to thee, "Go down." It is better that they should say to thee, "Go up, go up" than that they should say to thee, "Go down, go down." (Rabbi Simeon ben Azzai, died. 110 C.E., Leviticus Rabbah 1; cf. Luke 14:7-11)
Rabbi Abahu argues that God gives a higher place to repentant sinners than to the completely righteous. (end of third century c.E.; cf. Luke 15:7)
When a man loses a piece of gold, he lights many lamps in order to seek it. If a man takes all this trouble for the sake of temporal things, how much the more should he when there is a question of treasures that keep their worth in the world to come? (Midrash Schir hashirim 3, 2; cf. Luke 15:8)
It is to be compared to the son of a king who had removed from his father for the distance of a hundred days' journey. His friends said to him, "Return unto your father," whereupon he rejoined, "I cannot." Then his father sent a message to him, "Travel as much as it is in thy power, and I will come unto you the rest of the way." And so the Holy one, blessed be he, said 'Return unto me, and I will return unto you.' " (Mal. 3:7) (P.R., 184 band 185a; cf. Luke 15:11 ff)43
Two godly men lived in Ashkelon. They ate together, drank together, and studied in the Law together. One of them died and kindness was not shown to him [no one attended the funeral]. Bar-Majan, a tax-collector, died, and the whole city stopped to show him kindness. The [surviving] pious man began to complain; he said, "Alas that no evil comes upon the haters of Israel." In a dream he saw a vision, and one said to him: "Do not despise the children of your Lord. The one had committed one sin and departed in it [which is why he had died unremembered]; and the other had performed one good deed and departed in it [i.e., the well-attended funeral was all the reward he was due]." He had arranged a banquet for the city councilors, but they did not come. So he gave orders that the poor should come and eat it, so that the food should not be wasted. After some days that godly man saw the godly one, his companion, walking in gardens and parks beside springs of water (i.e., in heaven). And he saw bar-Majan, the publican, stretching out his tongue on the edge of a river; he was seeking to reach the water, and he could not [just like Tantalus in Hades]. (Talmud of Jerusalem, Hagigah, II, 77d; cf. Luke 14:16-24; 16:19-31)
To whom shall I liken Rabbi Bon, son of Chaija? To a king that hath hired laborers, among whom was one of great power. This man did the king summon to himself, and held speech with him. And when the night fell, the hired labourers came to receive their hire. But the king gave to the favoured laborer the same hire which he had given unto others. Then they murmured and said, "We have laboured the whole day, and this man hath labored but two hours, yet there is given unto him the same wages that we have received." And the king sent them away, saying: "This man hath done more in two hours than ye have done during the whole of the day." Even so hath the Rabbi Bon done more in the study of the Law in the twenty-eight years of his life than another would have done who had lived in a hundred years. (Beracoth. 5.3c; cf. Matt. 20:1-16)
My fathers stored in a place which can be tampered with, but I have stored in a place that cannot be tampered with. (Baba bathra I la; cf. Matt. 6:21)
In my whole lifetime I have not seen a deer engaged in gathering fruits, a lion carrying burdens, or a fox as a shopkeeper, yet they are sustained without trouble, though they were created only to serve me, whereas I was created to serve my Maker. Now, if these, who were created to serve me are sustained without trouble, how much more should I be sustained without trouble, I who was created to serve my Maker! (Kidushin. 82b; cf. Matt. 6:26)
Hast thou ever seen a bird or a beast of the forest that must secure its food by work? God feeds them, and they need no effort to obtain their nourishment. Yet the beast has a mind only to serve man. He, however, knows his higher vocation-namely to serve God; does it become him, then, to care only for his bodily wants? (Kidushin 4, Halach 14; cf. Matt. 6:30-33)
Fret not over tomorrow's trouble, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth, and peradventure tomorrow he is no more; thus he shall be found grieving over a world that is not his. (Sanh. 100b; cf. Matt. 6:34)
He who calls down judgment on his neighbor is himself punished first. (Rosch hasch. 16b, second century c.E.; cf. Matt. 7:1-2)
Our rabbis taught: He who judges his neighbor in the scale of merit is himself judged favorably (Shah. 127b; cf. Matt. 7:1-2)
When he knocks, the door is opened for him. (R. Bannajah, ca 200 C.E.; Cf. Matt. 7:7)
God says of the Israelites: "To me they are upright as doves, but to the nations they are wise as serpents," (Judah ben Simon in Midrash on Canticles. 2:14 (101 a); cf. Matt. 10:16)
The Sabbath is given over to you, not you to the Sabbath. (frequently in the rabbis; cf. Mark 2:37)
Is a light of any sort of use save in a dark place? (Mek. 60a; cf. Mark 4:21)
A young man deserves praise when he becomes like the children. (Tanchuma 36, 4; cf. Matt. 18:2-4)
Whoever humbles himself for love of the Law, the same will be reckoned among the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. (Baha Mezia 84, 2; cf. Matt. 18:2-4 )
Are you from Pombeditha, where they can drive an elephant through the eye of a needle? (Baha Mezia 38, 2; cf. Matt. 19:23)
Do I not number the hair of every creature? (Pesikta 18, 4; cf. Matt. 10:30)
Thou shalt not hate, not even internally. (Menachot, 18; cf. Matt. 5:22)
Love him that punisheth thee. (Derech Erez Sutha, c. 9; cf. Matt. 5:43-44) Be rather among the persecuted than among the persecutors. (Baba Mezia, 93; cf. Matt. 5:10)
If any man demand thy donkey, give him the saddle also. (Baba Kama, 27; cf. Matt. 5:40-42)
A muleteer drove twelve span before him, all laden with wine. One of them strayed into the yard of a Gentile. Then the driver left the others and sought the one that had broken loose. Asked how he had ventured to leave the others for the sake of one, he answered: "The others remained on the public road, where there was no danger of any man stealing my property, as he would know that he was observed by so many." So it was with the other children of Jacob [than Joseph]. They remained under the eye of their father, and were moreover older than Joseph. He, however, was left to himself in his youth. Hence the Scripture says that God took special care of him. (Genesis Rabba, 86, 84, 3; cf. Matt. 18:12-14; Luke 15:3-7)
A king had appointed two overseers. One he chose as master of the treasure; the other he put in charge of the straw-store. After a time the latter fell under suspicion of unfaithfulness. Nevertheless he complained that he was not promoted to the post of master of the treasure. Then was he asked, in astonishment at his words: "Fool, thou hast incurred suspicion in charge of the stores of straw: how couldst thou be trusted with the treasure?" {Jalkut Simeon 1, 81,1; cf. Luke 16:1-12)
Bultmann noted that in such cases where the saying attributed in the gospels to Jesus closely parallels a rabbinic saying, great doubt must arise as to whether they really go back to Jesus. Likewise with texts in which Jesus is made to quote Old Testament scripture. Why? Bultmann points out that no one ever remembers the Great Man quoting someone else. It is his own quotes that are memorable. It is likely, however, that cliche sayings and truisms will be attributed to a Great Man for want of remembering who did actually say them. Of course, as Jacob Neusner has eloquently argued, the same holds true for Mishnaic sayings attributed to this or that famous rabbi.' None can be relied upon for biographical purposes.
HERO STORIES
As for the gospel stories, as distinct from the sayings, Randel Helms45 and Thomas L. Brodie46 have shown how story after story in the gospels has been based, sometimes verbatim, on similar stories from the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint. For instance, the stilling of the storm (Mark 4:35-41) was rewritten from the similar story of Jonah. The resurrection of the son of the widow of Nain (Luke 7:11-17) seems to be another version of Elisha's raising of the Shunnamite's son in 2 Kings 4:32-37. The story of Jesus' appointment of the Twelve, followed by his refusal to receive his mother and brothers (Mark 3:13-21, 31-35), seems to be a negative rewriting of the story of Moses receiving his father-in-law Jethro and his family, followed by his appointment of the Seventy elders (Exod. 18).
In this connection Earl Doherty" has taken a second look at New Testament claims that such-and-such happened "according to the scriptures" (1 Cor. 15:3-4) or "in order that the scriptures might be fulfilled" (Matt. 1:22-23; 2:5-6,15,17-18, 23). His conclusion is that, contrary to the conventional wisdom which presupposes a historical Jesus, these formulae denote not attempts to find prooftexts for known events in the life of Jesus, but rather midrashic fictions based on scripture passages. We usually imagine that the question in the minds of the early Christians was, "How do we know the Messiah was supposed to die for sins and rise from the dead, as Jesus in fact did? Because scripture, read the right way, predicted he would." But Doherty argues forcefully that they may instead have been thinking, "What happened to Jesus? He must have died for sins and risen from the dead, because scripture, read the right way, says he did." This approach certainly comports with the otherwise astonishing fact that even the account of the crucifixion itself is a patchwork quilt of (mostly unacknowledged) scripture citations rather than historical reportage. It is common knowledge that Mark's crucifixion account corresponds verbally with selected lines from Psalm 22, but believers imagine that this is because Mark was seeking to show how closely the events corresponded to their prophetic predictions. However there is no reference in Mark's story to prophetic prediction. It is left to the reader to discover that "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" is the opening line of Psalm 22, and so on. Similarly, when Matthew feels inclined to expand the mockery of Jesus' enemies at the foot of the cross (Matt. 27:43), he supplements it not with memories or historical research, but with more scripture quotes, this time from Wisd. of Sol. 2:16-18. Elsewhere Matthew has created whole features in his version of the Passion out of the text of the prophet Zechariah. How did he "know" Judas received the sum of thirty silver shekels? He found it in Zech. 11:12b ("And they weighed out as my wages thirty shekels of silver"). How did he "know" Judas returned this money, throwing it to the temple treasury floor? He derived the "fact" from the Syriac version of Zech. 11:13 ("Then Yahve told me, 'Cast it into the treasury' "). How did he "know" the priests took this money and bought a potter's field with it? The Hebrew version of the same verse, Zech. 11:13 ("Then Yahve told me, 'Cast it to the potter' "), told him so. How did he "know" Judas hanged himself? Well, Matthew reasoned, if it was good enough for Ahithophel (2 Sam. 17:23), who betrayed David, it would be good enough for Judas, Jesus' betrayer.
Other gospel stories, as we have seen, are so close to similar stories of the miracles wrought by Apollonius of Tyana, Pythagoras, Asclepius, Asclepiades the Physician, and others that we have to wonder whether in any or all such cases free-floating stories have been attached to all these heroic names at one time or another, much as the names of characters in jokes change in oral transmission. And this observation leads us to a concluding consideration. It is not only the miracle stories of the gospels that are parallel to the life stories of other heroes. In fact, as folklorist Alan Dundes has shown,48 the gospel life of Jesus corresponds in most particulars with the worldwide paradigm of the Mythic Hero Archetype as delineated by Lord Raglan, Otto Rank, and others. Drawn from comparative studies of Indo-European and Semitic hero legends, this pattern contains twenty-two typical, recurrent elements.49 Here is a list, highlighting those present in the story of Jesus:
1. mother is royal virgin
2. father is a king
3. father related to mother
4. unusual conception
5. hero reputed to be son of god
6. attempt to kill hero
7. hero spirited away
8. reared by foster parents in a far country
9. no details of childhood
10. goes to future kingdom
11. is victor over king
12. marries a princess (often daughter of predecessor)
13. becomes king
14. for a time he reigns uneventfully
15. he prescribes laws
16. later loss favor with gods or his subjects
17. driven from throne and city
18. meets with mysterious death
19. often at the top of a hill
20. his children, if any, do not succeed him
21. his body is not buried
22. nonetheless has one or more holy sepulchres
Jesus' mother Mary is a virgin, though not of royal descent unless one harmonizes the Lukan and Matthean genealogies to make one of them Mary's. Later apocrypha do make Mary Davidic. Joseph is of course "of the house of David," though not the reigning king-but that's just the point: The king is coming. There is no relation between Joseph and Mary. Jesus' conception is certainly irregular, miraculous. Jesus is the son of God, and he is immediately persecuted by the reigning king, Herod. In most hero legends, the persecutor is not only the king but the infant hero's father (as in the Oedipus story). This role has been split in Jesus' case: His earthly father, Joseph, is a royal heir, but not king, so there must also be a king to persecute him. Fleeing the persecution, the infant hero takes refuge in a far country, Egypt, though it is not foster parents who raise him, as usually in hero legends. (And yet Joseph and Mary may be understood as Jesus' foster parents in that his real father is God.) There are no details of Jesus' childhood in three of the gospels, and the one incident in Luke 2:41-52, where Jesus is displayed as a child prodigy, is itself a frequent mytheme in other hero tales not considered by Raglan. Jesus goes to Jerusalem to be acclaimed as king. He does not, however, take military power, so there is no contest with the old king (though one might see a parallel in Jesus' telling Pilate that he is the king of Truth, not of a worldly kingdom like Caesar's John 18:36-37). Nor does he marry, though he is said to be followed by loyal women, one of them related to royalty (Luke 8:3). Does Jesus have an "uneventful reign, prescribing laws"? Not literally, but the pattern fits anyway, since we see Jesus holding court, for the moment unchallenged, in the temple (Mark 11-12). Instead of binding laws, he issues teachings, parables, and prophecies, which are taken with legal force by his followers. But suddenly the once-ardent crowd of admirers turns ugly and demands his blood, whereupon Jesus is driven forth from the city and crucified, accompanied by supernatural portents, atop Mount Calvary, the hill of Golgotha. He is temporarily buried, but his body turns up missing, leaving an empty tomb, which would seem to be within legitimate variant-distance of the ideal legend type. The holy sepulchre remains a testimony to his resurrection. He has no offspring, but his brother succeeds him as head of his community.
Traditionally, Christ-Myth theorists have argued that one finds a purely mythic conception of Jesus in the epistles and that the life of Jesus the historical teacher and healer as we read it in the gospels is a later historicization. This may indeed be so, but it is important to recognize the obvious: The gospel story ofJesus is itself apparently mythic from first to last. In the gospels the degree of historicization is actually quite minimal, mainly consisting of the addition of the layer derived from contemporary messiahs and prophets, as outlined above. One does not need to repair to the epistles to find a mythic Jesus. The gospel story itself is already pure legend. What can we say of a supposed historical figure whose life story conforms virtually in every detail to the Mythic Hero Archetype, with nothing, no "secular" or mundane information, left over? As Dundes is careful to point out, it doesn't prove there was no historical Jesus, for it is not implausible that a genuine, historical individual might become so lionized, even so deified, that his life and career would be completely assimilated to the Mythic Hero Archetype.50 But if that happened, we could no longer be sure there had ever been a real person at the root of the whole thing. The stained glass would have become just too thick to peer through.
Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, Cyrus, King Arthur, and others have nearly suffered this fate. What keeps historians from dismissing them as mere myths, like Paul Bunyan, is that there is some residue. We know at least a bit of mundane information about them, perhaps quite a bit, that does not form part of any legend cycle. Or they are so intricately woven into the history of time that it is impossible to make sense of that history without them. But is this the case with Jesus? I fear it is not. The apparent links with Roman and Herodian figures is too loose, too doubtful for reasons I have already tried to explain. Thus it seems to me that Jesus must be categorized with other legendary founder figures including the Buddha, Krishna, and Lao-tzu. There may have been a real figure there, but there is simply no longer any way of being sure.
NOTES
1. Eg., Reginald H. Fuller, The Foundations of New Testament Christology (New York: Scribners, 1965); Maurice Casey, From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God: The Origins and Development of New Testament Christology (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991).
2. Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 4: "The sacrifices that the European philosopher is prepared to make to attain truth in and for itself [include the} sacrifice of religious faith......
3. Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 17-18.
4. Jacob Neusner, Why No Gospels in Talmudic Judaism? Brown Judaic Studies 135 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988).
5. Baba Mezia 59b, trans. David L. Dungan, in Sourcebook of Texts for the Comparative Study of the Gospels, ed. Dungan and David R. Cartlidge, 67-68.
6. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, pp. 54-64.
7. Harvey Falk,Jesus the Pharisee: A New Look at theJewishness ofJesus (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1985).
8. Herb Keinon, "Messiah When?"Jerusalem Post, August 30, 1997, p. 20.
9. Ibid.
10. "Lubavitchers Prepare to Answer Charge of Idolatry," The Forward, February 6, 1998, p. 14.
11. Ibid.
12. Jerome H. Neyrey, An Ideology of Revolt: John's Christology in Social-Science Perspective (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988).
13. "Lubavitchers Prepare," p. 2.
14. Ibid., p. 14.
15. H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951).
16. Wayne Meeks, "The Man from Heaven in johannine Sectarianism," journal of Biblical Literature 91 (1972): 44-72.
17. James R. Lewis, The Gods Have Landed: New Religions From Other Worlds (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
18. J. L. Houlden, Ethics in the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 35-41.
19. Stevan L. Davies, Revolt of the Widows: The Social World of the Apocryphal Acts (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press), pp. 30-3 1.
20. Randel Helms, Gospel Fictions (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1989), pp. 146-47.
21. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 2d ed (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), pp. 320-40.
22. Matti Moosa, Extremist Shi'ites: The Ghulat Sects (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press), 1988, p. xvi.
23. Burton L. Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), p. 282. Matthew's redaction carries the same tendency further. In Matt. 23:35, he adds the patronymic "son of Berachiah" to the name "Zechariah" from a Q saying, turning it into an (anachronistic) reference by Jesus back to Zechariah, son of Baruch, a victim of Jewish terrorists who had entered Jerusalem just before it fell to the Romans! (Josephus, The Jewish War IV, V, 4)
24. Philo, Flaccus 36-39, trans. C. D. Yonge, The Works of Philo (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1993).
25. Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. John Dryden, rev. ed. (New York: Modern Library, n.d.).
26. In Stanley Jerome Isser, The Dositheans: A Samaritan Sect in Late Antiquity. Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity, vol. 17. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), pp. 66, 130.
27. Raphael Patai, The Messiah Texts (New York: Avon Books, 1979), pp. 25-26.
28. A. D. Crown, "Some Traces of Heterodox Theology in the Samaritan Book of Joshua," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 50 (1967), pp. 178-98; in Isser, The Dositheans, p. 130.
29. Isser, The Dositheans, p. 129.
30. Alfred Loisy, The Origins of the New Testament, trans. L. P. Jacks (New York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 192.
31. G. R. S. Mead, Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.? (New Hyde Park: University Books, 1968).
32. Hugh J. Schonfield, According to the Hebrews (London: Duckworth, 1937).
33. George A. Wells, The Jesus of the Early Christians: A Study in Christian Origins (London: Pemberton Books, 1971), pp. 5-6, 92, 242-43, 310-11.
34. Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths? p. 106.
35. Ibid., pp. 1-2, 13-14, 53.
36. Charles L. Talbert, Luke and the Gnostics (New York: Abingdon, 1966), pp. 30-32.
37. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), pp. 3-27.
38. Arthur Drews, The Christ Myth, trans. C. Delisle Burns, 3rd ed. (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1998), pp. 271-72.
39. Karl Ludwig Schmidt, "Jesus Christ," in Twentieth Century Theology in the Making, 1 Themes of Biblical Theology, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan. Fontana Library of Theology and Philosophy (London: Fontana Books, 1969), pp. 93-120.
40. Tomashevsky, "Thematics," trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 90.
41. Rudolf Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition, trans. John Marsh, 2d ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1968); Drews, The Christ Myth; T. W. Manson, The Sayings ofJesus (London: SCM Press, 1948).
42. Manson's summary of the parable, p. 61.
43. In Solomon Schechter, Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology (New York: Macmillan Company, 1910), p. 327.
44. Jacob Neusner, In Search of Talmudic Biography: The Problem of the Attributed Saying. Brown Judaic Studies 70 (Chico: Scholars Press, 1984).
45. Helms, Gospel Fictions, 1988.
46. Thomas L. Brodie, "Luke the Literary Interpreter: Luke-Acts as a Systematic Rewriting and Updating of the Elijah-Elisha Narrative in 1 and 2 Kings." Ph.D. diss., Pontifica Universita S. Tommaso d'Aquino [Vatican], 1981; Thomas L. Brodie, "Reopening the Quest for Proto-Luke: The Systematic Use of judges 6-12 in Luke 16:1-18:8,"Journal of Higher Criticism 2, no. 1 (spring 1995): 68-101.
47. Earl Doherty, "The Jesus Puzzle," Journal of Higher Criticism 4, no. 2 (fall 1997): 68-102.
48. Alan Dundes, "The Hero Pattern and the Life of Jesus," in In Quest of the Hero, ed. Robert A. Segal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp., 179-223.
49. Ibid., p. 190.
<
Comentarios
Publicar un comentario