Who is Jesus (A1)

Who is Jesus (Alpha 1)

What follows is a first draft of what I might add to the first of the Alpha course talks, were we to present a progressive/liberal/radical view alongside the conservative/traditional one. It isn’t yet footnoted.

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My friend and myself differ vastly on a lot of things. He/she is telling you about a narrative, a story, which can be extracted from the great work of world literature we call “The Bible” which makes sense to him/her and which had brought him/her to a personal relationship with God. By “God” I mean something which may or may not be completely different from the picture you’ve formed over the years to date. If you have misgivings about this, I’d encourage you to set them on one side for later.

I am also going to be telling you a story, or a set of stories, which can be extracted from the same book, and which make sense to me. Our story arcs are very different in places and very similar in others.

Both of them end up with the two of us each attesting to our own personal relationship with God and following of Jesus Christ, and we gain a meaning for our lives and a transformation of those lives from this relationship; we are one in Christ, even if some of our thoughts about why that might be differ. We are therefore one in fellowship with each other, and would like to be able to welcome you into fellowship with us, even if you are as different from both of us as we are from each other.

Let me set a scene, and I’ll do this according to the majority view of historical scholarship. Historical scholarship is critical of ancient documents and looks for outside confirmation, particularly where there is likely to be a motive behind writing something. It discounts any mention of supernatural events on the basis that these almost certainly do not happen these days and there is evidence in ancient times that people saw reality in a magical way and told stories involving magic in order to convey meaning, even about historical people who were alive at the time.

There is indeed extremely strong evidence that between about 4 BC and about 30 AD there lived in Palestine a Jewish man called “Yeshua”, or “Joshua” or, in Greek, Iesos, in Latin Jesus.  At this time the Jews were a conquered people living under the then Roman Empire; for a while in the last two centuries BC they had been independent, but before that had been subject to other empires, most recently the Seleucid Empire, which was Greek-speaking, one of the fragments into which the huge Greek empire of Alexander the Great had fallen on his death. Much, much earlier, they had been independent  (as what became two kingdoms, Israel and Judah) after carving out a nation among the Canaanite (read “Palestinian”) people; they had developed their own religion, which unlike those around them worshipped one God only; they were His chosen people, favoured by him.

In the interim, they had been displaced from their homeland almost totally once, by the Babylonian Empire, and spread around neighbouring countries, so there were Jewish communities all over the Eastern Mediterranean and in Mesapotamia. Many had been assimilated into the cultures they lived in, but the remainder had developed an understanding of their relationship with God which set them apart from others and kept them pure, “holy” by a large set of religious rules. There were 613 basic rules, of which we know 10 as the “Ten Commandments”. These were “The Law” for the Jews.

The Jewish historian Josephus gives us information about the preceding years; there had been many small resistance movements led by people many of whom were hailed by their followers as “Messiah”, which for the Jews meant someone who would deliver them from foreign oppression, bring the scattered people back together in Israel and usher in world peace under which Jews would be the favoured nation again and looked up to to lead others in worship of the One God. Several of these had been put down with extreme violence by the Romans, and the followers had dispersed, disappointed that their Messiah had not come.

Then came Jesus. The best reconstruction of him by historians from among the stories told about him is that he was, as Lewis puts it, a great moral teacher; he was a healer, a teacher and a charismatic leader who gathered a following around him of devoted adherents who, naturally, hailed him as “Messiah” and expected him to restore Israel.

Then disaster struck again, as it had to so many similar Jewish folk leaders previously; the Roman governor Pontius Pilate arrested him and executed him by crucifixion, a barbarous method of punishment used by the Romans for those most despised by them, the lowest criminals and enemies of the state.

But then something truly amazing happened; instead of dispersing and, perhaps, plotting and waiting for the next leader to come along, some of his followers experienced his continuing presence with them in some way (there are many opinions as to what actually happened, and for my purposes it is not important which of them is actually fact). A body of oral stories started circulating. A man we know as Paul, who had never met him, had an experience of his presence, converted and began to spread word of him in what is now modern Syria, Turkey and Greece. And by thirty years after his death (at the most, it could have been somewhat earlier) he had enough followers as far away as Rome itself for Roman writers to write about disturbances caused by “Jews who followed Chrestus”. His followers kept growing, too, and today there are over 2.2 billion people who, in one way or another, follow him.

At this point historians part company with the story my friend tells. The earliest Christian writer was Paul . From internal evidence, scholars believe that the next writing was the gospel of Mark, some of which may have been written down sometime around 70 AD, possibly a little earlier, probably a little later. Then came Matthew (perhaps 10 years later in its original form) and Luke (later yet) and finally John. None of them are thought by mainstream historical-critical scholars to have been written by the apostles with whose names they are connected in Christian tradition, none of them were written early enough to have been written by eyewitnesses, all of them wrote in Greek, not in the Hebrew or Aramaic which you would expect from Jesus’ actual close followers if they were able to write, which is dubious. In fact, there is a quotation by Papias, bishop of Hieraconpolis in Asia Minor, quoted by the later church historian Eusebius, indicating that Papias, who was probably writing within 10 years of 100 CE, knew of the gospels of Mark and Matthew, but those he knew were not what we now see, which is narrative gospels; Mark was a set of notes of sermons said to have been delivered by Peter, Matthew was a set of sayings written in Aramaic, so not a narrative. If a bishop who is thought to have known Polycarp well and to have heard the apostle John preach did not know of the current form of either of these, it is overwhelmingly likely that the current form dates from later than he was writing (it is of course a small chance that it existed but he wasn’t aware of it). The current form may well be significantly later, possibly well into the second century.

While my friend is right in saying there are far more fragments of early copies of the New Testament scriptures than of any other ancient writings, I must point out that the earliest of these we have dates from about 130 AD, 100 years after Jesus’ death, and there is plenty of room there for accounts to have developed. I must also point out that there are more variations in wording throughout those fragments than there are words in the new Testament; granted, the vast majority are insignificant to the overall sense of the books in there, but some are important. I also need to point out that from about 300 AD to about 1500 AD, Christian scripture was considered the most important writing in existence in the Western World and was preserved when other things were not, and that there were periods during that time when differing accounts were rooted out and destroyed based on what was the common understanding of the time – we thus lost many if not most of the Gnostic scriptures criticised by Eusebius and Irenaeus in the early days of the church. Even if scholars had not identified from textual analysis layers of rewriting in almost all of the New Testament, I would have been sceptical that what we now saw had not been substantially modified as Christian understandings developed – in fact, I am grateful that so much of the historical development can still be seen in what has survived for the historical scholars to get their teeth into – there have been at least two attempts, by Marcion and by Tatian, both in the second century, to simplify what we have; Marcion by discarding most of the books, Tatian by harmonising the four gospels into the “Diatesseron”. Had either succeded, we would not now have the wealth of material we actually do have.

Mark’s understanding was of a non-violent social revolutionary who was there to subvert Roman domination and rule. Matthew’s concept was of someone who had come to reform Judaism from the inside and institute a new and higher Law, that of compassion for all people, which took priority to but did not replace the Law of Moses. Luke’s understanding was of someone who had come to spread the word of the God of Judaism beyond the bounds of Judaism to gentiles as well as Jews. And John’s vision was a mystical one, of an all-conquering manifestation of God himself among us.

Much of what they all wrote was fiction from the point of view of the historical-critical scholar. There is previous fiction about, say, Alexander the Great, which ascribes to him a virgin birth and sonship to a god, and about Apollonius of Tyana, a famous healer, to whom many miracles are ascribed. Historians do not think these things actually happened either, but note that they were said because, in that culture, great men could do supernatural things and had supernatural origins.but they worked from an oral tradition and incorporated reports of sayings which we can be fairly confident Jesus actually said; the remainder was, in the way of storytelling in the ancient world, a mixture of fact and fiction designed to put forward their conception of the importance of Jesus Christ, whom they followed and adored. It was their witness. Whether fact or fiction, they believed it to be true, as it was for them.

Most of the quotations my friend has used, you will note, come from John, who had the highest concept of Jesus of any of the five writers (including Paul) I have mentioned. Apart from in John, note that none of the higher claims, such as Messiah or Son of God were actually put in the mouth of Jesus; it was what his followers were reported to have said about him. All of the gospel writers certainly thought that Jesus spoke for God (I would not disagree with that), which explains some of the quotations.

Those from John? Well, from my personal point of view, a mystic who felt completely at one with God and able to speak for Him could have said any of these things (and a very few mystics have) and not be either a liar, a charlatan or a madman. I am personally convinced from the prologue to the Fourth Gospel that the writer was himself a mystic, as was Philo of Alexandria, the Hellenised Jewish philosopher on whose thoughts about “Logos” or “The Word” the Fourth Gospel is to my mind clearly based. The writer could have said them himself, I do not doubt; I could say them. Neither of us WOULD say them, however, because people would not understand, and I think Jesus would have taken the same view – and, if he had not, people would not have understood and his life would have been cut short significantly earlier as a result! I therefore think that John was putting into Jesus’ mouth things which he knew to be true about what Jesus was. I don’t disagree with that.

So, what I am convinced is a fiction about Jesus (in that he didn’t actually say what John ascribes to him) is also a very deep TRUTH about Jesus. Fiction can be true.

I therefore have little time for Lewis’ attempt to bully us into accepting his false trichotomy of God, madman of devil; at the least you have to add “legend” and I would also add “mystic”. But I agree with Lewis that we cannot just dismiss Jesus as a great moral teacher. He was that, and a Jewish peasant of 1st century Palestine who died an ignominious and painful death and should have been quickly forgotten about.

But he was not. Within a very few years (perhaps not quite as little as three days) he had overcome that death and burst out from literal fact into mythic legend, which can never die, spreading word of him to the corners of the then known world (to the Mediterranean peoples) and to the vast majority of the people in it, and thereafter to the rest of the globe and to many many other peoples. The man became transformed into legend, into God. He lives in his billions of followers, if in no other way.

That, I suggest, is an authentic miracle, and one with which science and history find it very difficult to disagree.

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