Christ
There are few topics in Christian theology that better illustrate the inadequacies of historical criticism than Christology. Christian scholars have long attempted to interpret the New Testament—even through the ascetic methods of modern historical criticism—to render a fully orthodox account of Christ, but those attempts are at best strained. The truth is that if read by the normal rules of modern historical criticism, the documents of the New Testament do not contain fully orthodox doctrines of the nature of Christ. Only by moving beyond historical criticism can we arrive at orthodox Christology.1
By “orthodox” I mean doctrines about Jesus that affirm, at least, the declarations of Nicea and Chalcedon. The first of these is that of the trinity: the teaching that “God” is one being in three “persons”: the father, the son, and the holy spirit. Kathryn Tanner formulates a good summation of the traditional understanding, which she rightly considers noncontroversial: “I assume, for example, that the persons of the trinity are distinct from one another not just in their actions with reference to the world but in and of themselves; that they are perfectly equal to one another in divinity, and that, for all their differences, they are perfectly one, utterly inseparable, for instance, in both their being and action.”2 The combination of the confession of the (1) “equal” divinity of (2) three distinct persons who are yet (3) united as “one God” constitutes orthodox trinitarian doctrine as normally understood.
Nowhere in the New Testament, judged by the criteria of historical criticism, do we find this combination. We do find many references to “God” and “Jesus” and “Christ,” but the precise relationship among these terms—or “persons”—is often unclear. Scholars who confidently read the New Testament writings as teaching any kind of doctrine of the trinity as it came to be known in later Christian orthodoxy may have good theological reasons for doing so, but they are not, in that activity, practicing good historical criticism.
It is not just that the trinity is nowhere explicitly affirmed in the New Testament; there are texts that seem to contradict the doctrine, again, read through the lens of historical criticism. The Gospel of Mark, for example, certainly thinks of Jesus as the “Messiah” and the “son of man.”3 But it is unclear whether the author of the second Gospel considered Jesus to be “god.” The Gospel does use the term “son of god” for Jesus.4 The centurion at Jesus’s crucifixion, noting how Jesus died, speaks of him as “God’s son,” but it is unclear what that would have meant to an ancient audience. The translation could be, “Surely this was a son of a god.” But in the ancient world, even that need not mean the son was also “god” himself.5 It certainly would not necessarily mean that the son was a divine being in the full sense the highest god was. In spite of modern apologists who make arguments such as, “Just as the son of an elephant is an elephant, so the son of god must also be god,” ancient persons would not have seen things that way.6 This is made clear even within the Bible itself. Several texts speak of human beings as “sons of God” without ascribing true divine status to them or at least without ascribing the kind of divine status Christians later attribute to Jesus Christ.7 Moreover, in Mark 10:18, as we saw in the previous chapter, Jesus seems to be denying divine status for himself. It is quite possible to read the Gospel of Mark—if done without later Christian assumptions—and take Jesus in Mark to be a human but not divine figure.
Although Paul certainly believes Jesus is divine in some sense, he seems not to accord to Jesus complete divine equality with God the father. He can speak of “Christ” and “God” as two different persons in a hierarchical relationship. When Paul in 1 Cor 11:3 offers something of an equation—Christ is the head of man, man is the head of woman, God is the head of Christ—we must assume subordinate relations in each case. The parallelism doesn’t work otherwise. Christ is no more “equal” to “God” than “man” is to “Christ.” The same seems to be assumed later in 1 Cor 15:24–28: “God” temporarily put “all things” under subjection to Christ, who, after subjecting “all things” to himself, then puts everything again under subjection to God, including himself.
Some texts of the New Testament do accept the divinity of Jesus, but they seem not all to agree about when Jesus became divine. Some early Christians believed that Jesus was a mere human at his birth, but that he was “adopted” as God’s son sometime later. According to what may be the “original reading” of Luke 3:22—“You are my son, the beloved; today I have begotten you”—Jesus is begotten by God at his baptism.8 According to some other early Christians, apparently, Jesus became God’s son only at his resurrection, as reflected in passages in Acts. In one sermon delivered by Peter in Acts, God “made” Jesus “Lord and Messiah” at some point (Acts 2:36). In a later sermon of Paul in Acts, one statement suggests that God adopted Jesus as his son at the resurrection (13:32–33). Paul himself seems to betray knowledge of such a Christology in one of his letters. In Rom 1:4, Paul says that God “designated” Jesus as son of God “by resurrection from the dead.”9 The most normal meaning of the Greek would be that God made Jesus his son by means of the resurrection, in the way a priest or pope or other authority “made” someone a king or queen—at the time of the declaration or coronation. That this terminology is recited by Paul is significant, since Paul himself seems to believe that Jesus was God’s son already in some preexisting state (see Phil 2:5–11). I take it that Paul is here quoting a formula about Christ he has encountered elsewhere.10 At any rate, one can cite New Testament texts that, on their face, do not teach a very orthodox Christology, and certainly not trinitarian.
It will be my contention in this chapter, however, that we need not become bad historians in order to be good theologians. Even if the New Testament authors were not familiar with the doctrine of the trinity as it became defined in the great councils and creeds, we may take the liberty of reading the New Testament theologically (rather than historically) as teaching trinitarian theology.
As is the case for most of us today, so also we can see from ancient sources that early Christians developed orthodox doctrines not out of abstract ideas but out of needs prompted by Christian practices and liturgy.11 We may not have full trinitarian doctrine at the end of the Gospel of Matthew, but we can see already there that Christians were baptizing people “in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit” (Matt 28:19). We may have another hint at the role of the three in baptism in 1 John 5:6–9: “This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood. And the spirit is the one that testifies, for the spirit is the truth. There are three that testify: the spirit and the water and the blood, and these three agree. If we receive human testimony, the testimony of God is greater; for this is the testimony of God that he has testified to his son.”
The three also occur in situations of prayer and doxology, as at the beginning of 1 Peter: “To the exiles of the Dispersion . . . , who have been chosen and destined by God the father and sanctified by the spirit to be obedient to Jesus Christ and to be sprinkled with his blood” (1:1–2). Paul supplies a benediction at the end of his difficult or (probably) “tearful” letter (2 Cor 10–13; for likely references to this letter, see 2 Cor 2:4; 7:8): “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the holy spirit be with all of you” (2 Cor 13:13). Incidentally, 2 Cor 13:13 is the only benediction in Paul’s letters in which all three “persons” are named (if we take “holy spirit” here to be a “person,” which is debatable; see the next chapter, “Spirit”). Much more commonly Paul names only God the father and Jesus in such contexts.
Once all three become important for prayer or liturgy, some attempt has to be made to understand their relation to one another. Once Jesus begins to be worshipped along with “God,” which apparently happened not very long after his death, some account of why he deserved worship had to be given. The “higher” Christology of later Christianity and the trinitarian proposals of the nature of God grew not out of nitpicky philosophical debates but out of the actual liturgical practices of churches: if Christians were going to include Jesus and the holy spirit in worship and prayer, some account of their status vis-à-vis one another and of their divinity had to be given. And that had to be done in a way that could preserve, at least in the minds of Christians, the belief in “one God” they also valued.
What Jesus Is Not
Before getting to “what Jesus is,” it may help to point out popular claims made for Jesus that are, in my view, at least theologically naïve and suspect, if not downright wrong. For example, many people like to say that Jesus was no doubt a “Great Moral Teacher”; here we are often talking about well-meaning non-Christians who wish to say something “nice” about Jesus without affirming Christian doctrines. I will address below what uses for theology we may and may not derive from “the historical Jesus,” but even if we stick with the Jesus portrayed in our four Gospels it is hard to see why people so blandly claim that Jesus was what most of them would consider a “Great Moral Teacher.” True, in some contexts Jesus taught a supreme ethic of love (Mark 12:28–34, and par.). But Jesus teaches much else in the Gospels. He pulls his disciples away from their families and households (there are many examples but see esp. Mark 1:16–20 and par.). He orders a man to follow him immediately, telling him not even to bury his father, an abandonment of loyalty to family almost unimaginable in ancient cultures (Matt 8:21–22; Luke 9:59–60). Would a “Great Moral Teacher” attempt to outlaw divorce for any situation?12
In all four Gospels Jesus commits some kind of violent action in the temple, overturning tables, driving people out (Mark 11:15–19, and par.). Most modern readers don’t realize how radical such behavior would have been. In order for the Jewish sacrificial cult to take place, the business of buying and selling offerings was simply necessary. And for Jews to buy sacrificial materials, they had to change the different forms of money they may have been carrying from far away. Jesus’s action could be seen as a violent demonstration against the entire temple cult (as I will later argue that it was, historically constructed). To mention other radical aspects of his message, the Jesus of the Gospels advocates the overturning of all social hierarchies: the last must be first, and the first last. If someone went around today teaching and acting the way Jesus does in the Gospels, most people would want him arrested. They wouldn’t call him a Great Moral Teacher.
Terry Eagleton drives the point home well: “Jesus, unlike most responsible American citizens, appears to do no work, and is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. He is presented as homeless, propertyless, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinsfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the Establishment, and a scourge of the rich and powerful.” And about the kind of “morality” Jesus preached, Eagleton concludes, “The morality Jesus preaches is reckless, extravagant, improvident, over-the-top, a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling block to real estate agents: forgive your enemies, give away your cloak as well as your coat, turn the other cheek, love those who insult you, walk the extra mile, take no thought for tomorrow.”13 Christians certainly cannot be content to judge Jesus merely as a Great Moral Teacher, but even for others to do so betrays an ignorance of the actual texts or, more likely, an ideological misconstrual of them.
When he was running for president of the United States, George W. Bush was asked who his favorite philosopher was. I’m sure many conservatives, including conservative Christians, were pleased when he answered, “Jesus Christ.” Bush certainly did not understand any more than most people how inappropriate the answer was, bordering on heresy. But, to contravene the assumptions of many people, Jesus was not a philosopher, and Christianity is not, rightly interpreted, a philosophy, as I argued more fully in the chapter “Knowledge” above. In the Gospels Jesus is presented as a prophet, in fact, as an apocalyptic Jewish prophet preaching and awaiting the imminent inbreaking of the Kingdom of God. Jesus is also a healer, an exorcist, a teacher, a rabbi, a miracle worker. But he is not a philosopher. For one thing, he is not presented as having much formal education, if any, which is probably historically correct.
Moreover, while he does teach people how to live their lives, Jesus doesn’t have a particular “program” in mind for that. He does not teach the kinds of things ancient philosophers were famous for, such as rigorous self-control over eating and sex or the nurturing of self-sufficiency and the avoidance of any kind of dependence on other human beings. Jesus doesn’t teach what ancient philosophers did about divine beings: that it was impossible for them to be angry or harm human beings.14 Jesus does not speculate on the material nature of the world or things within it. He doesn’t lecture on arithmetic, mathematics, music, art, science—any of the topics one encounters among ancient philosophers.
And just as we should not look to Jesus for answers to ancient philosophical questions, so we should not expect from Jesus answers to the typical questions modern philosophers ask, such as: What is the nature of matter? How does language mean? Is mathematics true just because it works for some ends or purposes or because it corresponds in some metaphysical way to the very nature of nature? Are there laws of nature and, if so, what are they? There are legitimate questions people may have about the world, life, and human prospering, and modern philosophers raise them, but Jesus does not answer them. Jesus was and is not a philosopher in either the ancient sense or the modern.
Finally on this topic, I insist that another common notion about the identity of Jesus is wrong: Jesus is not the “founder of Christianity.” This can certainly be demonstrated for “the historical Jesus.” No properly constructed “historical Jesus” will present Jesus as intentionally “founding” a “new religion.” The development of what we now may consider a religion separate from and alongside Judaism comes some time after the death of Jesus—and the precise time that happened is completely debatable. Though the Gospel of Matthew (and only Matthew among the Gospels) does have Jesus speaking of building his “church” (Matt 16:18), it would be a mistake, both historically and theologically, to consider Jesus mainly as the founder of Christianity. Theologically it is dangerous because Jesus is the central figure of veneration in Christianity, the second person of the trinity, God incarnate—not merely the founder of a religion.15 Moving beyond these mistaken notions about who or what Jesus is, we may read the New Testament for more adequate ideas.
Some Christians through the ages have found it to be something of an embarrassment that the church has four different Gospels, four different portraits of Jesus. It is an interesting historical question as to why what later came to be called catholic Christianity, and mainly in the second century, decided to retain four different Gospels rather than choosing just one. Attempts were made early on, particularly in the second century by Tatian in his Diatessaron, to blend the four different accounts into one. Christians have tried many times to “harmonize” the four Gospels into one account, as more conservative Christians continue to do. But rather than harmonizing the Gospels or choosing one as offering our “favorite” portrait of Jesus, we should see the variety as presenting opportunities for theology rather than an embarrassing diversity and contradiction.
In premodern Christianity people often tried to “explain away” any apparent discrepancies among the four Gospels. In “modernist” scholarship, more liberal scholars sometimes even highlight the differences, sometimes thereby insisting that the Gospels tell us much more about the people who wrote and read them in their original “communities” than about Jesus. In a “postmodern” Christian context, however, we may well use the variety of presentations of Jesus as raw material for more creative Christology. I believe we can legitimately read the four Gospels to present four different Jesuses that need no harmonization but that each offer an account that is “true” in its own way. Each of them, though different and even perhaps contradictory, is true in a sense.
The Gospel of Matthew has sometimes ironically been read as the most “anti-Jewish” Gospel. After all, it alone contains the sentence purportedly shouted by “the Jews” at Jesus’s trial, “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matt 27:25). In Matthew, Jesus conducts several arguments with Pharisees, as he does in all the Gospels. But Matthew contains by far the most outright, and outrageous, condemnations of the Pharisees. It is greatly due to Matthew that English dictionaries list “hypocrite” as one definition for “Pharisee,” even though the historical Pharisees were certainly no more hypocritical than any other people. The Pharisees were simply one (what we would call “religious” as well as “political”) “party” among several in Palestine in the first century.16 We can think of them as the precursors of the Jewish rabbis represented in the Mishnah and the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds. The fact that “Pharisee” became synonymous with “hypocrite” in later languages owes much, I would argue, to the influence of the Gospel of Matthew, especially chapter 23.17
The “antitheses” of the Sermon on the Mount, moreover, have often been read by Christians as Jesus’s rejection of the Law of Moses and proposal of his own new law. But when Jesus says, “You have heard, ‘You shall not murder,’” he does not then allow murder. He rather proceeds to include even being angry as forbidden. He is not rejecting the law of Moses but intensifying its requirements (Matt 5:21–26). In the next paragraph he does not reject the commandment against adultery in order to allow adultery; rather he teaches that even “lusting” after a woman breaks the commandment against adultery (5:27–30). In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is not setting aside the law of Moses and offering “another” law that is easier to fulfill. He is in fact making the laws of Moses more difficult to keep by intensifying and internalizing them. For Matthew’s Jesus, not only “swearing falsely” is forbidden; swearing at all is (5:33–37).
Scholars in the past few decades have emphasized just how “Jewish” the Gospel of Matthew actually is. True, this is the only Gospel that presents Jesus precisely as “founding” a “church” (Matt 16:18). Much of Matt 18:15–35 reads like constitutional rules for the conduct of the later church; the word “church” (ἐκκλησία) occurs in Matthew on the lips of Jesus three times—quite anachronistically. None of the other canonical Gospels mentions it. So in spite of my claim above that it is a mistake, both historically and theologically, to see Jesus as “the founder of the new religion of Christianity,” Matthew does portray Jesus as the founder of a “church.”
But it is a Jewish church. In Matthew, Jesus never teaches that his followers need not follow the Mosaic Law. He in fact insists they must do so: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 5:17–20; NRSV). It is clear that by exceeding the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus in Matthew means the righteousness taught by the law of Moses.
That this was the understanding of the author of the Gospel is shown by comparing how he edits the Gospel of Mark, which is one of his sources for Jesus’s words and deeds. In a dispute with “the Pharisees and scribes” over hand washing, Mark tells a story in which Jesus teaches that certain Jewish traditions or requirements are not applicable to his followers. But then the author adds his own commentary, “Thus he declared all foods clean” (Mark 7:19). Matthew borrows the story from Mark but edits out that comment. In Matthew, the entire controversy is not over a commandment of the law of Moses at all but only over certain Jewish “traditions” (Matt 15:1–20). For Matthew, the story narrates a disagreement about how to interpret the Jewish law. In Matthew, Jesus never gets rid of Jewish dietary rules.
It may strike Christians as odd, but the first Gospel of our New Testament teaches that all followers of Jesus must keep all aspects of the Jewish law. The Gospel does end with Jesus commanding that his gospel be taken to gentiles (“the nations”; Matt 28:19). So the author of the Gospel obviously had in mind a church that included gentile along with Jewish believers. But we have no reason but to assume he expected those gentile converts to keep the law of Moses. He must have expected them to keep the Sabbath and to keep kosher food laws, at least as understood by himself, and for their males to be circumcised. The Jesus of the Gospel of Matthew is fully Jewish and law-abiding, teaching that all his followers will also adhere to the law of the Jews, at least as interpreted by himself.18
This is one case where I have left behind any postmodernist method of textual interpretation and adhered strictly to historical-critical readings. Indeed, reading Matthew by concentrating on its likely meaning in its original context rather than through the lens of later Christian orthodoxy is precisely what enables us to see just how Jewish the first Gospel is. But that in itself may supply useful theological fodder. Many Christians are nowadays working hard to free the church and Christians from our anti-Semitic past and current prejudices. As Matthew has been used against Jews in the “blood guilt” charges from ancient to modern times (“Let his blood be on us and on our children!”), so it is now time to recover just how Jewish our first Gospel is and how Jewish Jesus is in it. I do not believe we ought thereby to attempt to put into practice its program of a Torah-abiding form of Christianity. Other parts of the New Testament, along with Christian doctrine and tradition, must also influence our Christian expectation of how we relate to the law of Moses and Judaism of our own day. But it would do us good to imagine ourselves as disciples of a fully Jewish Jesus. We must overcome centuries of Christian anti-Semitism and Christian supersessionism in relation to Judaism. By reminding ourselves that we venerate a Jewish teacher, we can never again join in oppressing and harming Jews or Judaism.
We may read the Gospel of Mark as portraying a very different Jesus. Jesus in Mark does not teach his followers to obey the law of Moses. Jesus in Mark, in fact, does not come across as a very good teacher at all. Regularly, people seem to miss Jesus’s meaning entirely. The only figures who seem correctly to identify Jesus, at least at the beginning and in much of the narrative, are possessed people or the demons possessing them. The first character who correctly calls Jesus “the holy one of God” is “an unclean spirit” (Mark 1:24). Jesus regularly expresses frustration at the confusion and misunderstanding of people, including his closest disciples, while demons and crazy people alone seem to “get it” (see 6:51–52; 8:17–21; 5:19–20; but the theme occurs several times). And Jesus doesn’t seem to help out much in Mark.
Most Christians assume that Jesus taught in parables in order to help “common people” understand his “great moral teaching.” But Mark tells a completely different story. In fact, in Mark, Jesus explains that he teaches in parables so that people won’t understand. When he is asked about his parables, Jesus explains that the “secret” he brings he will explain to his inner circle of disciples, but for “those outside,” the parables are given so that they will not “perceive,” will not “understand”: “so that they may not turn again and be forgiven” (4:11–12). And even after Jesus offers an interpretation of his parable (which interpretation, incidentally, isn’t very clear in its meaning), the rest of the Gospel repeatedly insists that even his “inner circle” keeps getting it wrong.
It is no wonder, then, that Mark’s Gospel ends with a complete puzzle. Unlike the “longer endings” of Mark that are usually included after Mark 16:8, often in brackets and with footnotes explaining that these endings are not likely part of the “original Gospel,” Mark actually ends with an absence. We are told that certain women make it to Jesus’s tomb and find it empty. They are told by a “young man” (who may or may not be meant as an angel) to tell the other disciples that Jesus has been raised and that they should travel to Galilee, where Jesus will appear to them. But no one, at the end of this Gospel, actually sees the risen Jesus. Furthermore, we are told that the women do not pass along the message. Are we to assume that the disciples somehow got the message later? Did Jesus appear to them at all? Did they even know to go to Galilee? The Gospel ends with the women afraid, too afraid apparently to say anything to the disciples, and running away. The Gospel of Mark ends not with a Jesus who is present after his death, but a Jesus who is absent—appropriate for the Jesus who spent most of this Gospel posing puzzles and ordering people to be silent.
The Jesus of Mark is therefore the silent, puzzling, even absent Jesus. But this is also true to our own experience of Jesus. In our lives we are sometimes frustrated by the absence of Jesus, at least as we sometimes experience it. Jesus as we know him is not always clear in instruction, is not always present in a “felt” way. Even when we affirm by faith belief in Jesus’s presence, we may actually struggle with an experience of his absence. The Gospel of Mark prepares us for such experiences. We, like the women, run away from the empty tomb in fear rather than always in confidence. Jesus in Mark is a mystery and, in the end, absent. We must continually be trying to get ourselves to Galilee.
The Gospel of Luke presents still another portrait of Jesus. Most Christians, reflecting themes familiar from Paul, Mark, Hebrews, and several other New Testament books, can hardly think of the execution of Jesus without thinking of it as a “sacrifice” for sins, as a redeeming death. Perhaps surprisingly for many people, the author of Luke and Acts does not seem to consider Jesus’s death to be a sacrifice. There is no “atonement” to speak of in Luke–Acts. Mark 10:45 (“For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”) is taken up by Matthew (Matt 20:28) but not by Luke. We might take the tearing of the temple veil that Mark has occurring right when Jesus dies as suggesting that Jesus’s death is the sacrifice that now allows entrance for all people into the “holy of holies” (Mark 15:38). If so, it may be significant that Luke moves that detail to a time before Jesus dies, and then Luke presents Jesus not as dying in desperation but as willing his own death: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). In fact, the death of Jesus is never depicted in Luke or Acts as a sacrifice or atoning ransom.
The closest Luke–Acts comes to interpreting Jesus’s death as sacrifice or atonement is perhaps when Jesus, at the Last Supper, speaks of the bread as his body “given for you” and the wine as “this cup that is poured out for you” as “the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:19–20). But those words can be interpreted in several ways without bringing in any notion of a sacrificial death.19
Another passage in most Bibles that could be taken as alluding to Jesus’s death as a sacrifice is Luke 22:43–44, the famous scene depicting Jesus in the garden agonizing over his impending suffering to the point of sweating “like great drops of blood.” But the verses are, I believe, a later scribal interpolation. Apparently, some later Christian scribes didn’t find the calm, composed Jesus of Luke’s garden scene as compelling as the groaning, pleading, suffering Jesus of the same scene in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew (Matt 26: 36–46; Mark 13:32–42). So someone added the verses to Luke’s scene, making it harmonize better with the other Gospels.20 Once we recognize the passage as an interpolation, its contrast to the presentation of Jesus’s death in the rest of Luke and Acts becomes even sharper.
Luke’s preferred way to portray Jesus’s death is as a prophet martyred by his own people because of his message. Indeed, Luke’s Christology centers on Jesus as prophet and martyr. Several prophets in Luke and Acts follow the model of Jesus himself. The first is John the Baptist, hailed as a prophet even before the birth of Jesus (Luke 1:76). In his first sermon in Luke, Jesus claims the mantle of the great prophets Elijah and Elisha (4:16–30). Other Jews call Jesus a “great prophet” (7:16), and Jesus claims the designation when he insists he is going to Jerusalem “because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside Jerusalem” (13:33).
In Acts, key disciples are also shown to be prophets. Stephen, by tradition the “first Christian martyr,” aligns himself with the prophet Jesus, who is a latter-day version of the prophet Moses (Acts 7:35–43, 52). Throughout Acts, Paul is also depicted as a prophet. In all these cases the prophet preaches first to the Jews but upon being rejected by them goes to the “other nations” and eventually is killed (or so we may expect for Paul at the end of Acts). Jesus is the greatest prophet but is also a model for his followers.
One of the most central themes of Jesus’s prophecy in Luke is the reversal of the economic hierarchy of society. Mary’s song at the beginning of the Gospel, the “Magnificat,” predicts the scattering of the proud, the humbling of the powerful, the lifting up of the lowly, filling the bellies of the poor but sending the rich “empty away” (1:51–53). Whereas Jesus in Matthew says “blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matt 5:3), in Luke Jesus says simply, “Blessed are the poor” (Luke 6:20; see also 21). To his version of the beatitudes Luke adds “woes” directed against the rich (6:24–25). From his humble beginnings in a stable to his burial in a borrowed grave, Jesus in Luke is the prophet who preaches hope to the poor, social status reversal, and woes to the rich—and is killed because of his message. This is another Christology offered by our Gospels, different from Matthew’s and Mark’s but certainly relevant for Christians today.
Finally, with the Fourth Gospel we meet a Jesus closest to the Christology of the later creeds, a Jesus who seems fully divine, preexistent before his incarnation, fully incarnated in the flesh, and “equal” to the father (see especially John 1:1–18; 5:18). The father turns over the role of judge to the son (5:22), though Jesus later insists that he did not come to judge but to save the cosmos (12:47). At any rate, both the son and the father deserve equal honor (5:23). Jesus and the father are “one” (10:30; 17:21, 23).
In spite of being clear about his own divine status, however, Jesus in the Gospel of John often comes across as a riddler and a tease and as even pushing away those who would believe in him. Instead of answering Nicodemus’s questions in anything like a straightforward manner, Jesus seems to pose riddles to him (John 3:1–21). One of the most famous is Jesus’s saying that one must be “born again” / “from above” (3:3). The Greek can be taken in either sense, and in spite of Nicodemus’s pleadings Jesus makes no attempt to clarify what he means. But this kind of thing happens repeatedly in John’s Gospel. A dialogue between Jesus and a crowd, for instance, will begin with the people apparently wanting to understand and in some cases already “believing” in Jesus (see 8:31), only to be frustrated by Jesus’s comments and accusations. “Dialogues” end up in confrontations in which the crowd tries to kill Jesus (8:31–59; see also 6:25–71). Rather than making it easier for people to believe in him, Jesus in the Fourth Gospel seems intentionally to push people away and make it impossible for them to accept him. The Gospel is full of such confrontations and riddles.21 So in the Gospel of John we have a much more “orthodox” Jesus Christ that should better fit later creeds and Christian theology, yet simultaneously a Jesus who seems to push us away. Can we use that Christology for our own imaginations also? We probably have ourselves experienced the “high” Christ of Nicea and Chalcedon as not always as accessible as we would expect or like. That too is Christ.
Historical Criticism and a Subordinate Christ
Throughout this section on the four Gospels I have mostly limited myself to what can be observed about Jesus in the Gospels when using purely historical-critical readings. My purpose is twofold: (1) to demonstrate how historical criticism can render good, orthodox readings of the Bible, and (2) to avoid the kind of harmonization of the different Gospels that often accompanies more “theological” readings of them. Yet I maintain my insistence, made repeatedly throughout this book, that Christians need not feel always constrained by modernist, historical-critical methods or conclusions. Indeed, I’ve argued that the New Testament, read historically rather than theologically, will not render Christologies that are sufficiently orthodox. We may certainly end up with a Christology that appears subordinationist, that is, that presents a Christ who is a subordinate being in relationship to “God.” My point is that historical-critical readings are perfectly legitimate in their place, but sometimes historical readings must be submitted to theological critique.
When it comes to subordination, there are some statements about Christ and the father that may retain the sound of hierarchy. The problem with Paul’s subordinationist statement in 1 Cor 11:3 is not that he says that the father may in some sense be the “head” of Christ. We could interpret such a statement as saying nothing more offensive to orthodoxy than that Christ is “begotten of the father,” and not the other way around. Or that Christ is “obedient” to the father. The problem with Paul’s statement is that Paul uses the term “God” for what most innocent readers would take to be a different being, and superior to, “Christ.” Paul doesn’t say “the father is head of the son,” which may indeed be orthodox. He says rather “God” (in the entirety of the Godhead?) is “head” of “Christ,” as if they are two different beings. That would be an unorthodox interpretation of the passage. Theological critique must trump historical criticism.22
Yet our liturgical language does seem to require some kind of “subordination.” The New Testament does speak of the son as being “sent by” the father (e.g., John 5:36–38; see also 3:17; the theme recurs often in John). Jesus is “obedient” to the father and sometimes simply to “God” (Phil 2:8).23 The son “submits” or “is subjected” to the father (1 Cor 15:28). The beginning of the Epistle of Jude poses a cosmic hierarchy: God the father, Jesus Christ, and then the brothers of Jesus, James and Jude. We may take these passages as depicting perhaps some kind of “economic” submission of the Son to the Father—“economic” because it is an expression of the internal workings of the trinity done for the purposes of our salvation, but not thereby implying difference in being or essence among the three persons.
Thus, for example, John 1:18 states, “No one has ever seen God” but then proceeds to a rather confusing next statement: “It is God the only son, who is close to the father’s heart, who had made him known.” Though this is only one possible translation, it is a possibility (and there are other manuscripts that read simply, “It is the only son . . . ,” not explicitly here calling “the son” “God”). The passage seems to imply some kind of ranking of hierarchy: Is the father unseeable because of superiority and therefore needs the son for mediation of knowledge of the father? The Fourth Gospel wants to make the son and the father “equals,” but by nonetheless still using the labels “father” and “son” the Gospel cannot completely dispel a hierarchy of knowledge implicated in the hierarchy of familial statuses.
Yet Christian orthodoxy need not get rid of all such hierarchical language, whether in the Bible or otherwise. The so-called Creed of Athanasius, often called by its first words in Latin Quicunque vult, states that Christ is “equal to the Father, as touching his Godhead; and inferior to the Father, as touching his Manhood.”24 That is one way of dealing with such language. What Christian orthodoxy wants to avoid is taking Jesus to be some kind of “God Jr.” or some kind of inferior divine being. Christians need to be able to defend both our worship of Jesus but also our insistence that we believe in “one God.” Therefore, we can admit no “demigods” or beings that exist somehow “between” divinity and the universe.
As Tanner explains, Jesus cannot be a “creature elevated to a divine level, nor divine principle of a lesser sort. These other possibilities are ruled out just [because] there simply is nothing in between God and creatures—no lesser divinities on the way to being creatures, no creatures that are themselves something approaching God. One has to be either one or the other, because creatures and God are all that the world divides into.”25 In another formulation from Tanner: “Jesus therefore mediates divinity and humanity because he unites both and not because he is something in between” (157). The combination of rigorous historical readings coupled with theological critique allows us to navigate the New Testament texts without using “bad” historical exegesis or ending up with “bad” theology.
The Suffering God
One reason it is important for Christians to be able to claim that Jesus is fully God and not some kind of junior deity, super angel, or secondary god, as I said above, is because we worship him and yet do not consider ourselves polytheists or idolaters. Another reason is because a robust divine Christology allows us to say things about God we might have difficulty otherwise claiming, for instance, that our God is a God who suffers, even to the point of pain and death.
I noted above that the author of Luke and Acts prefers to depict the death of Jesus as the voluntary, noble death of a martyr, and that author rigorously plays down the suffering of Jesus. There are a few exceptions. The very beginning of Acts does mention Jesus’s “suffering”: “After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs” (Acts 1:3). But this is the barest of mentions. Repeatedly, Acts stresses the resurrection of Jesus over his death; the disciples are “witnesses” to the “resurrection” (1:22; 2:32). God “foreknew” that Jesus would be killed, but he is not really presented as the one who engineered it (2:23–36). The author admits that Jesus did “suffer,” but it was as a “prophet,” blame goes squarely on “the Jews,” and God immediately overturns their action by vindicating Jesus in the resurrection (3:13–26; see also 10:39–43; 13:28–39).
The author of Acts does include a reference to Isa 53:7–8: Jesus is a “sheep . . . led to the slaughter,” but there is no explicit language making his death a sacrifice for sins; the emphasis, again, is on Jesus’s willing submission to an unjust death (8:32–33). Acts 17:3 notes that “it was necessary for the Messiah to suffer and to rise from the dead,” but again what is lacking is the reason for that “necessity” and any reference to sacrificial atonement. The one place in Luke and Acts that seems to hint at the idea is Acts 20:28: God “obtained” the “church of God . . . with the blood of his own son.” I am tempted to suggest that this may be one of those instances when the author of Luke–Acts is drawing on a source: it seems to express a theological notion that he doesn’t really “own.”26 At any rate, we don’t get the idea from Luke and Acts that Jesus is a God who suffered or that his death is a sacrifice “for us.”
But the theology is present in many other New Testament documents. I have already noted it in Mark, especially in his dramatic portrayal of the tearing of the curtain in the temple just at Jesus’s death. Paul likewise, who reflects other interesting similarities to the Gospel of Mark, thinks of Jesus’s crucifixion as a suffering sacrifice. God put Christ forward “as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood” (Rom 3:25).27 Jesus “was handed over to death for our trespasses” (Rom 4:25). According to Gal 3:13, Christ became a “curse for us” in order to “redeem” us from the “curse of the law.” These are only a few examples I could mention from many in Paul’s letters.
According to the Letter to the Hebrews, Jesus is both the high priest who performs the sacrifice but also the sacrifice itself (7:26–27; 9:11–14). Jesus “tasted death for everyone” (2:9); his death effects “purification for sins” (1:3); by his death he destroyed “the one who has the power of death” and freed those enslaved by fear of death (2:14–15). The interpretation of Jesus’s suffering as necessary for salvation and as making possible the redemption of human beings from sin pervades Hebrews (see also 2:17; 5:7–9; 9:15, 22, 26; 10:10, 12, 19–22; 12:24; 13:12).
The First Letter of Peter shares the theology. This document may indeed reveal influence from Paul’s letters and theology; its Christology is similar to Paul’s. Note how this formulation could easily have come from Paul’s pen: “For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit” (1 Pet 3:18). To cite a New Testament author much different in style and theology from Paul, we have John, the author of Revelation, which repeatedly emphasizes the suffering and death of Jesus and his followers: the bloody Lamb leading his bloody, prophetic, slaves and martyrs (see Rev 5:6, 12; 7:14; 14:1–5; 19:2, 13).
Thus we’ve already encountered different theological interpretations of Jesus’s death available from the New Testament, and we’ve barely scratched the surface: Jesus’s death as substitutionary atonement; as ransom; as example for the sufferings of his followers; as enabling a reconciliation between God and an estranged people. Later theologians offered others. As Alister McGrath points out, Gregory the Great and Rufinus of Aquileia interpreted the crucifixion as a “trick,” “hook,” or “trap” God laid to catch the devil unawares.28
I believe we have no need to settle on one “right” theory of the meaning of the death of Jesus. I also believe that all of them pose problems and are not completely acceptable. We today may find certain older explanations of Jesus’s death to be less than satisfying and perhaps even unacceptable. When Augustine, for instance, interprets the crucifixion as the “true sacrifice . . . by which the principalities and powers lawfully detained us to pay the penalty,” we may rightly balk at the mythological ideas there involved, as if personal, cosmic evil powers had the legitimacy to force God’s hand and with justice demand a divine payment.29 We may not want to allow such “legitimacy” to evil.
But this just points up the problem with all “theories of the atonement” and attempts at adequate “explanations” of Jesus’s death. As Tanner argues, we must test all “theories” of Jesus’s death by the values of theology and ethics we believe we have learned from the gospel. As she puts it, “The cross saves, not as a vicarious punishment or an atoning sacrifice or satisfaction of God’s honor or as a perfectly obedient act—all those accounts of the cross that have become problematic for contemporary persons, especially since the lessons of white feminist, womanist, and liberation theology. The cross saves because in it sin and death have been assumed by the one, the Word, who cannot be conquered by them.”30 I like to remember a comment made once by George Lindbeck when I was a teaching assistant for one of his theology courses at Yale Divinity School. We were attempting to come up with good questions for the final examination. Lindbeck remarked, in his wry way, that he had always thought a good final exam question might be, “Explain why all theories of the atonement are offensive to pious ears.” Indeed.
Finally on this topic, I want to stress that popular ideas about Christianity and Jesus’s death have often wrongly focused too much on the aspect of humiliation endured by Jesus. Many people, not just Friedrich Nietzsche, have made the mistake of assuming that the gospel teaches some kind of abstract principle of value in humility in itself, as an end in itself. But that is not the role of humility in the New Testament. The Gospel of Mark, surely, emphasizes the necessity of suffering, both for Jesus and for his followers, but the suffering inevitably is to be followed by “glory” and celebration. As Paul writes, “We also boast in our suffering, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Rom 5:3–5, NRSV). We are united with Christ in his death in order to be united in his resurrection (6:5–11; see also 8:18). Paul says he became weak in order to share in the blessings of the gospel (1 Cor 9:22–23). The Corinthians share in sufferings and will share in consolation (2 Cor 1:7). Momentary affliction is followed by “weight of glory” (2 Cor 4:17). The famous section in Philippians, sometimes called the Christ Hymn, portrays Christ as “emptying himself,” the “kenosis,” to invoke the Greek word. He moves down, even to a shameful death in crucifixion. But the move down leads to a move up to glory (Phil 2:5–11). According to Hebrews, which does stress Jesus’s humbling himself, Jesus achieved glory and honor through “the suffering of death” (Heb 2:9). Nowhere in the New Testament is humility, much less self-humiliation, taught as an abstract virtue in itself. It is a means to an end of salvation and even “fame,” the more common translation of the term usually translated “glory,” δόξα. Again to quote Tanner, humiliation is not an ultimate or final good but a “means to elevation.” “The Son humbles himself, Jesus humbles himself, to be with us in the lowliness of our suffering and need, in order to save us from it, not to engrave that lowliness into the world as its final good.”31
In the ancient world the emphasis on the suffering and death of Christ led to debates about “patripassianism,” the idea not only that Jesus the son “suffered and died” but also that God the father did. To ancient philosophers, it was ridiculous to say that God could suffer. It was probably never seen as a problem to less educated people, as there were many myths of gods suffering and dying in ancient cultures. “Suffering” was assumed by philosophers to imply change and dense materiality, and to the kind of Platonism assumed by ancient philosophers—the time when church fathers were defending Christianity against non-Christian philosophical disdain and criticism—the apparently Christian idea that God had suffered and died, especially on a cross, seemed coarse, vulgar, uneducated, and literally impossible. In defense against this sort of anti-Christian attack, Christians condemned beliefs that God the father suffered and died as a heresy, labeling it “patripassianism.”32
I can see the problems feared in the idea that the very Godhead, including God the Father, shared in the suffering of Jesus. That could be taken to do damage to doctrines I examined in the previous chapter, where I stressed the transcendence of God. If saying that all of God, the Godhead, the entire trinity, which would therefore include God the Father, “died” is taken to mean that the transcendent God has after all been caught in the universe as one more being in and of the universe, then the idea of “God dying” could lead to identifying the ineffable God with something in the universe.
But I don’t believe we modern (or postmodern) Christians are nearly as concerned as ancient intellectuals about the ancient philosophical worry that only “matter” can change, that God cannot change at all, and that saying God “died” would be the same as making the impossible claim that God “changed” in some way. Thus several theologians in the twentieth century were indeed willing to talk about the Christian God, the God revealed in Jesus, as a God who died, in complete solidarity with the crucified Jesus and with us, who will also die.33 At any rate, I do believe we must affirm the complete and full divinity of Jesus Christ, and hence we must see Jesus’s death as portraying the “crucified God,” the “God who died,” united with us in our most human weakness and vulnerability.34
Jesus, the Human God
Whereas the last chapter focused in part on the distance between God and the universe—the transcendence of God, the fact that God is “wholly other” from what we are, God is “not us”—in this chapter we have the opportunity to focus on the opposite fact, but one that is just as true. By confessing faith in the incarnation, that Jesus Christ as God took on flesh, became human flesh, we may stress the nearness of God to us. Christians sometimes do not take a robust enough view of the incarnation.35 Too often we tend to emphasize the divinity of Christ at the expense of his humanity or, on the other hand, think of Jesus so much as a person “just like us” that we have difficulty thinking of him as “truly God.” The doctrine of the incarnation is one of the things, along with the trinity, that makes Christianity seem so wrong and even irrational to many Jews and Muslims. Islam in particular emphasizes the transcendence of God. To most Muslims, God is so totally “other” than creation or human beings that it is ridiculous to believe in a human being actually being God. But with the doctrine of the incarnation, Christians get to have it both ways: God is certainly transcendent and utterly “other” than the universe, but in the person of Jesus Christ we believe in a human being who is also divine.
As Paul put it, Christ is the “icon of God” (2 Cor 4:4). The word “icon” here (εἰκών) is usually translated as “image.” Christ is the “image of God.” And that would be a translation less susceptible to anachronism. But it may also be helpful to engage in a bit of creative anachronism and think of the role of icons in later Eastern Orthodox churches. To Orthodox Christians, icons are not mere illustrations; they are not “pictures.” They are sacred images that have some kind of participation in the archetype represented. To venerate an icon, therefore, is not to worship the picture or materials but to show proper veneration to the person represented. Icons are something like sacraments in materiality: they participate in what they represent and communicate the sacredness to the believer. Thus, taking Paul’s “icon” in that way, we have him teaching that Christ is the “icon of God,” the making present of God. Jesus is the “seeable God.”
In another piece of creative exegesis, we may take the ubiquitous title for Jesus in the Gospels, “son of man,” as emphasizing Jesus’s humanity and therefore the incarnation. It is unlikely that the original authors intended “son of man” to be a reference to incarnation. More likely the title recalled for them the same phrase from Daniel (Dan 7:13). Often in the Gospels “son of man” occurs in contexts emphasizing the eschatological role Jesus is expected to play in the “end times,” such as judge or leader of heavenly armies. The Gospel writers more likely had in mind that eschatological figure when they designate Jesus, or, more precisely, have Jesus designate himself, “son of man.” That need not stop us postmodern Christians, however, from reading the title as communicating to us Jesus’s radical incarnation in human flesh.
And indeed, I believe we should emphasize the “radical” nature of the Christian confession of the incarnation. Some church fathers resisted talking about “the Word” as itself fully becoming “flesh.” They taught that the truly divine second person of the trinity, the “Word,” did “take on” flesh, but they were sometimes uncomfortable fully embracing the idea that the Word actually became flesh, to the extent that one could say that the Word was actually crucified, suffered, and died. The Word perhaps “took on” humanity, but it was the human aspect of Jesus that suffered, not the divine aspect.36 It seems they wanted to confess that Jesus truly suffered and died, but they were afraid of lapsing into the “patripassianism” mentioned above. The “Godhead” could not suffer and could not be flesh. The father did not take on flesh. So the aspect of Jesus Christ that was as fully divine as the father could not itself have experienced human ignorance or growth or suffering.
I think it better to live with the Christian paradox that Jesus really is a crucified God. Jesus is fully God and fully human, in spite of the fact that we sometimes cannot get our heads completely around that combination. But to confess the radical doctrine of the incarnation, we should confess that Jesus is the visible God, the seeable God, the God who willingly experienced human precarious existence, ignorance, frustration, anxiety, pain, and death. Jesus is the God who is like us. The God in whom we participate. The divinity we will eventually become, though by adoption not nature. Jesus is the son of God by essence and very nature. We are children of God by adoption and grace.
But in every other way except sin, Jesus is as human as we are. If we think of Jesus as simply some kind of “superman,” as ancient Greeks thought a very special person might be a “divine man” (θεῖος ἀνήρ), a kind of different breed of being, we err on the other side of the doctrine of the incarnation. We must remind ourselves that Jesus shared our human nature in every way apart from sin. Jesus’s humanity must be understood as being just like our humanity. He may differ from us in his divine nature but not in his human nature. The definition of Chalcedon says this by using the same Greek word, ὁμοούσιος, to describe both Christ’s “consubstantial” sharing with God of the being of God and his “consubstantial” sharing with human beings of the being of humans. Just as Christ is “consubstantial” (homoousios) with the Father with respect to divinity, he is “consubstantial” with us in his humanity. His humanity cannot be different from ours, except for lacking sin.
In spite of the fact that this kind of theological complexity certainly was not familiar to the authors of the New Testament documents, we may use them to think about God’s incarnation for our theology. Besides so many of the “son of man” passages in the Gospels (“The son of man has no place to lay his head,” Matt 8:20, and par.), the Gospels provide many other passages useful for teaching the humanity of Jesus. In fact, although the Fourth Gospel goes much further than the other three in portraying Jesus as divine, even as “equal” to the father, it also has no compunction about depicting a Jesus who is very human indeed. John highlights the close, loving relationship Jesus has with certain followers, the most obvious one being the unnamed “beloved disciple.” In fact, because of one passage that describes the close, emotional relationship Jesus has with the sisters Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus, some have suggested that the author is providing an obvious indication that the beloved disciple is Lazarus himself.
The scene begins by noting that Lazarus has fallen ill, and the sisters send a message to Jesus: “Lord, he whom you love is ill” (John 11:3).37 Jesus delays, even though, as the narrator says, “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus” (11:5). After Jesus arrives and finds a dead and buried Lazarus, we are told that Mary came out to see him, and then there is this description: “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved” (11:33). After Jesus asks where they had placed the body, we have the famously shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept.”38 When Jesus comes to the tomb the narrator adds another detail, saying that Jesus was “again greatly disturbed” (11:38).
The story ends happily, as Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead and restores him to his sisters. But the portrait of Jesus is remarkably human, even as it shows he has divine powers. The Greek words here translated as “greatly disturbed” (11:33 and 38: ἐμβριάομαι) and “deeply moved” (33: ταράσσω) have many meanings. The first is a word that combines the preposition “in” with a word deriving from the Greek word for “nose,” and it can refer to horses “snorting with rage.”39 It can also refer to human indignation, and it can mean “censure.” The latter word, ταράσσω, can mean any kind of violent stirring up, whether literal or figurative. For both of these words there is at least the possibility that they invoke anger or indignity as much as grieving. In any case, both words show Jesus being extremely upset, certainly because of his sympathy for the grief of others and apparently in experiencing grief himself. This God is human enough to suffer and weep, and this, again, from the Gospel most concerned to depict Jesus as divine.
Another curiosity about the Gospel of John is its suggestion that Jesus is absent from the church after his departure at the end of the Gospel. John 13–17 contains a long speech by Jesus, interspersed at times by dialogue with his closest disciples, often called Jesus’s Farewell Discourse. The speech does read at times like a “testament,” a genre in which a famous character gives his last words and instructions to sons, family, or followers. Not far into the speech Jesus says, “Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, ‘Where I am going, you cannot come’” (John 13:33, NRSV). In contrast to Jesus’s departing words in Matthew, “I am with you always” (Matt 28:20), Jesus in John insists that he will be absent from the church after his departure.
Jesus seems so serious about his absence that he promises a substitute for himself, in another detail unique to John’s Gospel. He says he will send them “another Advocate,” or, in what is a transliteration of the Greek, the “Paraclete” (παράκλητος; 14:16). Jesus promises that that figure, rather than Jesus himself, will “be with you forever.” The Greek term is made up of the Greek word for “someone called” (κλητός) combined with a preposition meaning “to the side” (παρά): someone called to one’s side as an aid or advocate. The English “advocate” is almost a transliteration of the equivalent words in Latin: ad + vocatus. Though it is not immediately clear, “the Advocate” seems to be John’s special term for the holy spirit (see 14:26). In fact, the next verse says, “This is the spirit of truth” (14:17). The Paraclete or Advocate is precisely like a lawyer representing the disciples to God or representing Jesus to the disciples in his absence.
Jesus promises that his absence will not be permanent: “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you” (14:18). He seems to say he will be absent for a while but then return: “In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (14:19–20; NRSV, emphasis added). I highlight the words “on that day” because Jesus’s meaning is otherwise not obvious: Jesus is not saying he will be “with” the disciples also in some sense after his departure; he is rather promising merely that he will return some “day” in the future. Thus he repeats the point a bit later: “These things I have said to you while remaining with you. But the Paraclete, the holy spirit, which the father will send in my name, that one will teach you everything and remind you about everything I said to you” (14:25–26). Later, in a long prayer that closes the Farewell Discourse, Jesus returns to the theme of his absence. He speaks of his absence from “the world” although his disciples are still “in the world” (17:11). Jesus speaks of a time when he is with the Father, but his disciples are still, in a way, trapped “in the world,” which for the Gospel of John is indeed a hostile place.
I have stressed this theme of Jesus’s absence from the church because it runs counter to much Christian teaching and liturgy that prefers to emphasize the presence of Jesus with the church. To Paul, remember, the church is the very body of Christ, as I will explore more fully in the chapter below on ecclesiology. As counterintuitive to Christian sensibilities as the idea is, I believe reflecting on the absence of Jesus, as I did also above in my discussion of Mark, may be theologically useful. It makes sense of our own experiences in which we do not immediately experience the presence of God or Jesus in our prayers or devotions.
Most great Christian mystics have complained about the experience of desertion and loneliness even when, perhaps especially when, they are seeking some feeling of the presence of Jesus in their meditations. Bernard of Clairvaux admits to his fellow monks, “Men with an urge to frequent prayer will have experience of what I say. Often enough when we approach the altar to pray our hearts are dry and lukewarm.”40 A biographer attempts to imagine how Julian of Norwich may have experienced it: “Julian wanted to free her heart to love Christ. To learn true contrition. To feel and not just speak her prayers. Yet, if she was truthful, she still meditated on Christ’s passion and felt cold. Barren. Dry. A thousand questions pricked her. Perhaps she did not understand what the friars meant by feelings. Perhaps she had not yet discovered Christ’s true compassion. In the flickering wax light, the ‘minde’ of the Passion still seemed far away.”41
The theme of the mystic bemoaning the absent Christ, missing the feeling of God’s presence, is so common as to be stereotypical if not, by now, banal. But it does capture common experiences of believers. It is fitting to find it in the Fourth Gospel: the absence of Jesus. As Rowan Williams notes, reflecting on the fact that, according to the Gospel of John, the resurrected Jesus says both “do not touch me” and “touch me here” (see John 20:17, 27), the resurrection frees Jesus from the limitations of space and time—and from our “projections and expectations.” Jesus is “not here.”42
We may begin from the incarnation, the radical notion that God became fully human, to speak about other doctrines. Take, for example, the way we Christians should think about creation, about nature itself, the natural world. The fact that Christ as fully God took on human flesh means that divinity took on nature. God became creation in Jesus Christ. This does not mean the degradation of divinity; it means the raising up of creation to divine status. We may imagine that the doctrine of the incarnation makes of nature a sacrament: a physical, visible sign of the invisible grace of God. All creation, all our visible and invisible world, communicates to us divine grace and the presence of God in Christ. A better theological motivation for caring for the earth and everything in it can scarcely be found. A better motivation for marveling at our surroundings can hardly be imagined.
We may also take the incarnation as inspiration for thinking about soteriology, the doctrine of salvation. McGrath explains what he calls “one of the most controversial aspects” of the theology of Karl Barth: his application of radical incarnation to the salvation of human beings. As McGrath explains, summarizing Barth, the incarnation does not change anything about the relationship between God and human beings. It just discloses an already existing reality: “This point is confirmed by Barth’s tendency towards a doctrine of universal salvation. Christ makes known the unilateral triumph of grace. It appears impossible for human beings to avoid being saved, whether they know it or not, whether they wish to be saved or not.”43 McGrath emphasizes the role of the incarnation, coupled with predestination, in soteriology: “Despite all appearances to the contrary, humanity cannot be condemned. In the end, grace will triumph, even over open unbelief. Barth’s doctrine of predestination eliminates the possibility of the rejection of humanity. In that Christ has borne the penalty and pain of rejection by God, this can never again become the portion of humanity. Taken together with his characteristic emphasis upon the ‘triumph of grace,’ Barth’s doctrine of predestination points to the universal restoration and salvation of humanity—a position which has occasioned a degree of criticism from others who would otherwise be sympathetic to his general position.”44 To many Christians, especially more conservative ones, this may sound impossibly radical, but it is a sensible extension of the doctrine of the incarnation. Rather than lowering divinity to the level of humanity, the incarnation raises humanity to the level of God. The incarnation makes the human divine. In the end, Christianity is not at all a rejection of “humanism” but its highest form.
Jesus in Hell
One statement about Christ, found in scripture as well as in credal formulations, offers an excellent opportunity for demonstrating the difference between historical interpretations and theological ones—and between historical truths and mythological ones (yes, “true myths” as opposed to false myths). According to 1 Pet 3:18–20, Jesus “was put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit.” The author continues to say that Jesus, in the spirit, “went and preached to those spirits in prison” (3:19). The passage is none too clear about what event this refers to.45 Even who these “spirits in prison” are is not clear, though the next verse implies that they are the persons (or angels? “sons of god” from Genesis 6?) who rebelled against God in the time of Noah. A bit later in the epistle the author again brings up “the living and the dead” as all having to account for their deeds: “That is why the gospel was preached to the dead, so that they might be judged on the one hand in a human way in the flesh, but also in a divine way in the spirit” (4:6).46
These verses seem to have provided the inspiration for the later Christian belief that Jesus, after his death but before his resurrection in the flesh, entered into hell, hades, or whatever the “place of the dead” was assumed to be and preached the gospel to the dead souls there, enabling those who had existed prior to the coming of Christ on earth to accept the gospel and have a chance at salvation. (See also Acts 2:31.) This was taken as the scriptural warrant for Christ’s “harrowing of hell” that became such a popular theme of later literature and art.
The idea occurs in the so-called Creed of Athanasius, or Quicunque Vult: Christ “suffered for our salvation, descended into hell, rose again the third day from the dead” (trans. Book of Common Prayer). It is now perhaps most encountered by Christians in the Apostles’ Creed: Christ “suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into hell.” The implication from both creeds is that it was after his burial but before his resurrection that Jesus, perhaps only in “the spirit,” entered hell. The creeds do not say that the purpose of his visit was to preach to the dead or save righteous souls, but that has been the story as found in literature and art for centuries.
What do Christians think they are confessing when they say these words—for Anglicans and Episcopalians, perhaps each day at Morning and Evening Prayer? Does anyone believe anymore that Jesus’s soul or spirit actually left his grave and somehow physically journeyed to hades?47 Does anyone actually still believe, as people certainly did in the ancient world, that hell is a region under our feet, in the physical earth, to which Jesus could have traveled simply by “going down”? No modern, Western person really believes such things anymore. But if those who confess this do not “believe” it in any kind of historical or scientific or physical or literal way, what does it mean to believe it at all?
Jesus’s descent into hell is a great example of a myth. It cannot be accepted as true in the same way a scientific or historical “fact” is true. The question therefore becomes one of whether it is a true myth or a false myth. It would be a false myth if we took it as a literal lesson in geography or history. But is there a way we may interpret it as a true myth?
I have always found the confession that Jesus descended into hell to express a valuable truth about the gospel. I take the words as indicating that we must remind ourselves, in our darkest of moods and depressions, that there is no place in the universe where Jesus cannot find us and save us. There is no place—whether in death, depression, sickness, even nonexistence—where God in Christ cannot reach us. There is no place we can imagine where love cannot reach. And we may need to remind ourselves that this is true, given to us by a true myth, not only for ourselves but also for those we love. Our dead are not thereby bereft of the presence, comfort, and love of God. As Paul put it, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38–39, NRSV). This is an excellent example of when theological interpretation must save a fact from the dustbin of outdated historical meanings. Though not historically or scientifically true, the confession may still be theologically (or mythologically) true. There is no place we can imagine that is offlimits to Christ.
The Resurrection of Christ
One of the central and often perceived as indispensable confessions of Christianity is a belief in the resurrection of Jesus. The Nicene Creed says simply that “the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures.” The Apostles’ Creed likewise contents itself with saying merely that Jesus “rose again from the dead” on the third day after his death. Many Christians, both individuals and various church bodies, have gone further to insist on the necessity for orthodoxy of belief in the resurrection of the “body” or of the “flesh.” This was forcefully argued by church fathers, of whom Tertullian is an obvious example.48 The Articles of Religion adopted in 1801 by the Episcopal Church in the United States say that in his resurrection Jesus “took again his body, with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of Man’s nature; wherewith he ascended into Heaven” (Article IV). Various Roman Catholic statements and catechisms as well as confessions and statements of Protestant churches and organizations likewise affirm the resurrection of the flesh, the very flesh and blood that was buried.49
But what would it mean for modern or postmodern Christians to make such confessions? It is hard for us to accept quite literally and historically that Jesus rose in the very same flesh and blood from the tomb or ground and then zoomed up into space, where he sits now with that same physical, flesh, blood, and bones body. Where exactly is this spatial and physical “heaven”? If it is physical, why have scientists not found it? Why does Jesus’s physical, flesh-and-blood body not show up in the by-now fairly extensive scientific visual and physical searches of the cosmos? Remember that according to the premodern doctrines, it must be a body precisely like the one that was buried and precisely like ours, at least to the extent of being flesh and blood or “physical.” A postmodern Christian confession of the resurrection of Jesus will probably take a more theological rather than scientific, literal, or historical shape. The location of Jesus’s flesh-and-blood body physically present somewhere in the universe, which is precisely what the ancient Christians meant when they insisted on the doctrine, poses a problem that demands theological interpretation for modern Christians.
One of the places to begin such a reinterpretation is actually with the very first surviving witness to the resurrected Jesus, the Apostle Paul. Paul not only gives the earliest testimony to the resurrection but also is the only person whose “eyewitness” testimony to the risen Jesus survives. Most critical scholars doubt that any of the Gospels were actually written by people who were disciples of Jesus during his lifetime. None of those authors, therefore, can claim to have seen the risen Lord. Critical scholars also don’t believe Simon Peter was actually the author of the letters written in his name, or that Jude was actually written by Judas the brother of Jesus, or that the Epistle of James was written by Jesus’s brother. We do accept the historical authenticity, though, of seven letters of Paul.50 And one of those letters is 1 Corinthians, where Paul says more about the nature of the resurrected body than he does anywhere else.
Paul begins his discussion by passing along a list of people who claimed to have seen the risen Jesus (1 Cor 15:1–7), and the list seems intended to express chronological order: Jesus appeared to Cephas (Peter), then to the twelve, then to more than five hundred “brothers” at the same time (I assume the Greek is not intended to exclude women), then to Jacob (James), then to “all the apostles,” and finally to Paul himself. (Note that at this time in the history of the church “the apostles” are not equated with “the twelve.”)
Paul considers his experience of seeing Jesus after his death, however we may later imagine the nature of that experience, to be exactly the same as that experienced by the others. We commonly imagine that the first disciples saw the actual risen flesh-and-blood body of Jesus, as some of the Gospels indeed insist, but that Paul saw “a vision,” and he did so many years after the earthly appearances of the risen Lord had ceased. This is how the Acts of the Apostles presents Paul’s experience (Acts 9:1–9; 22:4–16; 26:9–18; though we should not take Acts as being historically reliable). But that is not how Paul describes it. Indeed, it is absolutely necessary to his argument, both here and in Gal 1:12 and 16, that his “seeing” of the risen Jesus is precisely the same phenomenon as that experienced by all others who claimed to have seen Jesus’s body. Whatever Paul “saw” was exactly the same as what they “saw,” at least in Paul’s mind.
But how does Paul describe the nature of that resurrected body? To answer that question we must also admit that Paul’s argument assumes that the nature of Jesus’s resurrected body is the same as the expected resurrected bodies of his followers. Paul argues that those who deny the future resurrection of believers, indeed, a corporeal resurrection, must themselves have no hope of a future existence after their own deaths: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith in vain” (15:14); “If the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised” (15:16). However Paul describes the nature of the expected bodies of Jesus’s followers must also therefore be how Paul envisions the resurrected body of Jesus.
And that is not as “flesh and blood.” English translations have caused much confusion about the text and Paul’s arguments in 1 Cor 15.51 First, the actual composition of the resurrected body, that is, what kind of “matter” it is composed of, is different from the preresurrected body. Continuing an analogy to seeds and grain he began earlier, Paul explains, “What is sown in mortality, is raised in immortality; what is sown in dishonor, is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power” (15:42–44). The translation of the next several words is a bit more controversial. The NRSV renders them, “It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. . . . But it is not the spiritual that is first, but the physical, and then the spiritual” (15:44–46).
The problems with the translation are in the terms “physical” and “spiritual,” leading many modern readers to assume Paul is contrasting a “physical” body with a body that is not “physical” but somehow “spiritual,” and they read that as “not made of matter.” The “spiritual body” is taken to be “immaterial.” But the word here translated as “physical” is not some form of the Greek word that could reasonably be taken to refer to “matter” or “nature” (φύσις, φυσικός). The word is one normally translated as “soul” or “life” or as related in some way to “living” (ψυχή, ψυχικός). And the word rendered here as “spiritual” would not have meant in Paul’s day what later Christians and philosophers would call “immaterial substance,” which later theologians took to be the nature of the Christian “soul” or “spirit.” The word is πνευματικός, related to the word πνεῦμα, which is indeed usually translated “spirit” but when taken as referring to a substance would not have meant something not made of “matter” or something that was not “physical.”
Pneuma in Paul’s day was taken to be material indeed. It was normally thought of as a thin, invisible kind of stuff. In medicine, science, and philosophy it was taken to be a very rarified form of air or fire. We might imagine that ancient intellectuals thought of it the way we think of oxygen: invisible perhaps but certainly “matter” and “physical.” Pneuma was what the mind used to communicate with the body’s extremities. It raced through the body to tell the limbs what to do, which way to move. It raced from the limbs to the brain to enable touch, sensation, and pain. It was a very fast, very energetic, very powerful material substance.
Uneducated people may not have had such sophisticated ideas, but they also would have thought of pneuma as something like air or wind, thus enabling the pun on “spirit” and “wind” in John 3:5–8: the same word, pneuma, is translated in most English versions as wind in one place and spirit in another. Moreover, pneuma was thought of as a “higher” form of matter. It naturally wanted to rise, like helium or other gases lighter than thicker or denser air. Thus pneuma could be considered the “stuff of the heavens,” sometimes instead of and sometimes along with, another substance of ancient thought: ether.
When Paul says the preresurrected body is a psychikos body he probably means it is a body that is “merely alive,” a body that has the substance and nature that enable life (a normal meaning of ψυχή), that is, a “living body” rather than a dead body. He contrasts that with a body that is not merely living but also composed of the highest matter of the universe, at least in his cosmology. The “heavenly bodies” Paul mentions in 15:40–41 are assumed, therefore, to be composed of the substance of pneuma, in contrast to the “earthly bodies” composed of “flesh” but enlivened with psychê (15:39). As there is a descending hierarchy in Paul’s list of different kinds of “flesh”—human, animals, birds, and fish (15:39)—so there is a hierarchy assumed in his list of “heavenly bodies” composed of pneuma (though whether this is a properly ordered list is not certain since the sun would normally be taken as “superior” to the moon): sun, moon, and stars of different levels of “glory” (15:41).
Paul later returns to his allusion to the difference between the body of Adam and that of the resurrected Christ. The former is earthy, made of dirt and dust, but Jesus’s resurrected body is no longer “dusty” or “earthy,” it is heavenly (15:46–47). Paul is talking here not just about status but also about material composition: as Adam’s body was made of earthly matter, Christ’s resurrected body is no longer composed of earthly matter but of “heavenly” matter. Then Paul arrives at a sentence that reads something like a punch line: “This is what I am saying, brothers: flesh and blood is not capable of inheriting the kingdom of God, nor does what is mortal inherit immortality” (15:50).
Paul is saying that the resurrected body of Christ was as different from his preresurrected body as a flower is from a seed. Not only is its appearance different; its very material substance is different—and superior. The flesh-and-blood body of Jesus before his resurrection was transformed into the pneumatic body of resurrection, a body whose flesh and blood have been transformed into pneuma. Paul then moves from his explanation of the body of the risen Jesus to explain that believers’ bodies will also be transformed, in the resurrection if they die but suddenly even if they are living at the parousia: “We will not all sleep [Paul’s euphemism for death], but we all will be transformed, in a moment, in the blink of an eye, at the last trumpet” (15:51–52).
This exegesis of the nature of the future resurrected bodies of believers has significance therefore with regard to what Paul thought he saw when he claims to have seen the resurrected body of Jesus—remembering that he believes his experience and what he saw was in no way different from what the other disciples had seen before him. He did not see the flesh-and-blood body of Jesus as it had been laid in a tomb. The body of Jesus he saw would be as different from his flesh-and-blood body as a flower is from a seed. It may not have been recognizable even to those who had known Jesus before his death. It may have looked entirely different. Paul had not known Jesus “in the flesh,” so he would have had no way to reflect on the differences of the “before” and the “after” body of Jesus’s resurrection.
Note that Paul never gives any indication that he knew anything about stories of the empty tomb. I think he would have assumed there was no need for someone to roll away a stone so Jesus’s body could exit. If Jesus’s body was at that time transformed into pneumatic substance, it could have easily passed through stone walls or doors, as easily as we imagine radio waves moving through the walls of buildings. This also means, though, that Paul would not have been able to imagine Jesus’s resurrected body eating and drinking or being able to be touched by the finger of Thomas or held by Mary, unless by some additional miracle. And we should remember that Paul’s is the earliest account we have of someone claiming to have seen the risen body of Jesus, and his is the only firsthand account we possess. The resurrected body of Jesus according to Paul, our earliest testimony and only surviving “eyewitness,” doesn’t fit with the later empty tomb and appearance stories of the Gospels.
But also of great importance is that the Gospel accounts do not agree with one another. Some Christian scholars are at pains to insist not only that the resurrection of Christ refers to something that “happened” in the past. They insist that it can be defended as a “historical fact.”52 The resurrection is not, to them, merely a theological confession, it is “history.” And they extend their argument to the empty tomb: the empty tomb is not a theological, hortatory literary interpretation of the ancient belief in the resurrection but can be called a historical event.
In my view, their position makes two serious mistakes. In the first place, it makes the common error of confusing history with the past. What many scholars are doing when they say that the resurrection was a historical event is simply expressing their belief that “it really happened,” that “it is an event in the past.” There is nothing wrong with using the word “history” in everyday talk as referring to the past, but it brings with it problems when brought into more philosophical or technical discussion about the nature of history and historiography. Several philosophers of history have helpfully pointed out that, in order to be more precise with our claims, we should reserve the word “history” for accounts of the past produced by historians.53 After all, a history of the Civil War is neither the same as the Civil War nor a “reconstruction” of the Civil War, which would take the full four years or so the Civil War lasted. In fact, a history of the Civil War is not even a reconstruction at all, but a construction, something produced by a modern scholar or amateur. A history of the Civil War is a verbal account of the Civil War that is the result of at least one human being making countless choices about what to include and therefore what to exclude.
Moreover, the past does not exist. It is not some place a scholar can visit in order to collect data, or pieces of the past, that can then be transferred to the present and reconstructed. Many modern people cannot seem to get their heads around the very demonstrable fact that the past radically does not exist—at least for any of us. In other words, even if we imagine light rays emitted from persons or events in the past still zooming through space at the speed of light, there’s no way historians could also zoom through space faster than the speed of light to be able to view them, at least as far as we know (taking contemporary physicists at their word). “History” refers to verbal artifacts created by human beings that are meant to convey some kind of “meaning” of past events, but they are not those events themselves, and they can never exhaust the entire “meaning” we may imagine for those events. So saying the resurrection of Jesus is “historical” is not saying merely that it “occurred in the past.” It is claiming that modern historians, using the commonly acknowledged tools and criteria of modern historiography, can demonstrate that the resurrection of Jesus or, say, the empty tomb stories, should be accepted as “historical” by other professional historians, even those who are not Christian.
And that brings us to the second mistake. I argue that reasonable historians, viewing the data we have available in our sources, will agree that those sources are so problematic as historical sources that the historical value of their accounts must be denied. That is to say, the literary witnesses to the empty tomb taken as they are should convince any reputable historian that the empty tomb stories provide no historical data whatsoever. The Gospels themselves bear witness against the “historicity” of the empty tomb stories because of their very contradictions of one another.
We have no eyewitnesses at all of the empty tomb. Even if we admit Paul as a personal witness to the resurrection of Jesus, by all accounts he never saw the empty tomb. And none of the Gospels was written by an eyewitness. So the only “witnesses” to the empty tomb we have at all are secondary, tertiary, or even further removed. Furthermore, as I will demonstrate briefly here, the four accounts we have from our four canonical Gospels disagree with one another on almost all details. In fact, the only thing they agree on is that Jesus was raised. Paul shows no knowledge of an “empty tomb” at all. They differ on (1) who saw Jesus or any events; (2) what they saw; (3) where they saw it; (4) when they saw it; and (5) what Jesus looked like, that is, what the nature of the body was.
Who
According to Paul’s list, which he apparently received from other believers before him, Peter was the first witness. Also significant is the absence of any named women on the list. Our earliest Gospel, Mark, has no resurrection appearances of Jesus at all. Three women, Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James, and Salome discover the empty tomb and see a “young man” in the tomb itself, but they do not see Jesus. Though the young man instructs the women to tell the disciples “and Peter” to go to Galilee, where they will see Jesus, we are told that the women in fact did not tell the disciples. We have no reason to believe they later did or that the disciples later saw Jesus, whether in Galilee or elsewhere. Matthew follows Mark but with some changes: he calls one woman simply “the other Mary” and does not mention Salome (Matt 28:1); the women actually meet Jesus on the way back (28:9); and they apparently pass along the message because Matthew ends with a meeting between Jesus and “the eleven” in Galilee (Matt 28:16).
According to Luke, several other women are present. In addition to Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James, Luke mentions Joanna and “other women” (Luke 24:10). They see the empty tomb but not Jesus. In Luke’s account they do tell the other disciples. Peter is the first of the men to see the empty tomb (24:12), but he does not at that time see Jesus. Next, Luke narrates the episode of the “journey to Emmaus,” during which Jesus appears to two disciples, one of whom is named Cleopas (24:13–32). After realizing it was Jesus speaking with them, they return to Jerusalem and report to “the eleven and their companions” (24:33) and are informed that in the meantime Jesus has also appeared to Peter (24:34). While they are talking, Jesus appears among them all (24:36). Jesus leads the group to Bethany and immediately ascends into heaven (24:50–51). The beginning of Acts tells a rather different story: after his resurrection, Jesus appears to many of his followers, even “staying” with them for a full period of forty days (Acts 1:3).
The Gospel of John has Mary Magdalene as the first to see the empty tomb, and she tells Peter and the beloved disciple. The latter two, after seeing the tomb, return home without seeing Jesus (John 20:1–10). While at the tomb Mary sees two angels and then sees Jesus, mistaking him for the gardener (20:14–16). Jesus lets himself be known to Mary and tells her to announce the resurrection to the disciples, which she does (20:18). That same evening Jesus appears to his disciples, except for Thomas, in a locked room in Jerusalem (20:19). Jesus then reappears to them one week later, with Thomas this time present (20:26). In what scholars sometimes treat as an epilogue to the main body of John’s Gospel, Jesus appears in Galilee sometime later to Simon Peter, Thomas “the twin,” Nathaniel, the sons of Zebedee, James and John, and “two others of his disciples” (21).
What
The accounts differ in their details, in some cases a great deal. According to Mark, the women see one “young man” inside the tomb, “sitting on the right side,” who may or may not be intended to be an angel (Mark 16:5). According to Matthew, there is an earthquake, a descending angel who rolls away the stone, and a command by Jesus to tell the eleven to meet him in Galilee (28). According to Luke, the women see “two men in dazzling clothes” (24:10). Several details from Luke and Acts are unique to them: the Emmaus story and Jesus eating fish in the presence of his disciples, apparently to prove he is not a “ghost” (24:39). Jesus’s forty-day stay in Jerusalem is unique to Acts. His ascension at Bethany is unique to Luke (Luke 24:50–51), and his ascension from Mount Olivet is unique to Acts (1:12). There is no explicit ascension in Matthew, but if the reader is supposed to imagine one, it must be in Galilee. The detail that the disciples are instructed by “two men” after the ascension is also unique to Acts (1:10–11).
The details of what people saw are different again in John. According to John, Mary sees two angels in the tomb, and they are sitting at the head and foot of the slab (20:11–12). The very presence of “the beloved disciple” is unique to John. The “footrace” between Peter and the beloved disciple (20:4) is only in John. Other details peculiar to John are Mary mistaking Jesus for the gardener; her dialogue then with Jesus; Jesus’s appearance that night to the disciples in a locked room, without Thomas; Jesus appearing a week later, including the “doubting Thomas” incident; the later appearances on the shore of the lake of Galilee, including an account of their fishing, a fishing miracle, and a breakfast provided for them by Jesus (21:9–13); and finally Jesus’s dialogue with Simon Peter (21:15–22). Indeed, John 21 is replete with details and narratives unique to the Gospel of John.
According to Mark, no one saw the resurrected Jesus anywhere, though we may take from the young man’s instructions that Jesus intended to appear to the disciples later in Galilee. Matthew apparently follows Mark, but he adds an appearance of Jesus to the women in Jerusalem and then an appearance later in Galilee, but apparently only to “the eleven” (Matt 28:16). According to Luke and Acts, all appearances of Jesus after his death took place in Jerusalem and its environs; none at all took place in Galilee, at least if the narrative is supposed to imply that the disciples obeyed Jesus’s explicit instructions (Acts 1:4). According to John, Jesus appeared to several disciples twice in Jerusalem, and then sometime later to a select few male disciples beside the lake in Galilee. The author of John 21 tells us that this last appearance was the “third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead” (21:14, NRSV), which would be accurate if we take the already narrated appearances in Jerusalem to constitute, in the author’s mind, the only other appearances of Jesus to the disciples (not counting the first appearance to Mary apart from “the disciples”). Especially significant in all this is the direct contradiction between Luke–Acts and Matthew: according to the former, Jesus’s appearances were in Jerusalem and not in Galilee; according to the latter, Jesus’s sole appearance to the eleven took place in Galilee and not in Jerusalem.
When
According to Paul’s understanding, the appearances of the resurrected body of Jesus took place over at least a few years’ time. He gives the indication that the first was “on the third day” after Jesus’s burial (1 Cor 15:4). And he counts Jesus’s appearance to himself as the last of his list (15:8). If we estimate that Paul’s experience of Jesus’s appearance—and probably make that also the time of his “call” to be an apostle (Gal 1:15–16)—occurred around four or so years after the death of Jesus, as most scholars reckon, we are faced with the fact that Paul thought the resurrection appearances of Jesus went on over a few years’ period of time. He apparently believed that Jesus appeared here and there and now and then from just after Jesus’s death until his final appearance to Paul.
According to Mark’s narrative, no appearances took place at all. If we are to assume that the author wants his readers to assume that a meeting later in Galilee actually took place, then the first time anyone saw the risen Jesus would not have been on the first day of the week but at some point after the disciples had time to travel to Galilee. Indeed, that is apparently what Matthew assumed: only the women saw Jesus on the first day; the eleven did not see him until they had traveled from Jerusalem to Galilee. According to estimates, walking distance from Jerusalem to Galilee would be about sixty-eight miles. That trip would almost certainly take a few days, maybe four. That would mean that, in Mark’s assumptions, no one at all saw Jesus on the Sunday of his resurrection; they saw him only days later, in Galilee. According to Matthew, no one but the women saw Jesus on the first day, and the others did not see him until days later, in Galilee.
Luke and John are completely different in chronology from Mark and Matthew. As noted above, the resurrection appearances at the end of Luke seem to take place all at one time, namely, the same day and evening after the resurrection itself (see Luke 24:13, 33, 36). Even the walk to Bethany and the ascension there are narrated as if they happen at that same time (24:50). In Acts, that one day and evening period is expanded to a very explicit “forty days” (Acts 1:3). In John, one appearance happens first to Mary, then “that evening” to the disciples, then “one week later” to the disciples plus Thomas, and a third appearance to “disciples” some time later (weeks? months? years?) at the Sea of Galilee (John 21).
What Jesus Looked Like
The different accounts of the resurrected body of Jesus also do not agree about what Jesus looked like, what kind of body he bore. According to Paul, Jesus was embodied, but it was a body composed of pneuma, not flesh and blood. We don’t really know what Paul “saw.” Was it a gaseous-looking simulacrum of a “flesh-and-blood” body? It was probably a bright, luminous body, since Paul compares the resurrected body with the sun, moon, and stars. But one thing seems certain about Paul’s notion of Jesus’s resurrected body: it need have looked no more like his flesh-and-blood body than a flower looks like a seed.
There is no resurrected body on the scene in Mark’s Gospel, but in both Luke and John we encounter “misrecognition scenes,” scenes in which people at first do not recognize Jesus even though they had seen him as little as thirty-six to forty-eight hours before.54 The two disciples walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus spend the entire trip without recognizing Jesus. They come to believe the man is Jesus only when he blesses and breaks the bread—and immediately vanishes (Luke 24:31).
In John 20:14–16, Mary Magdalene mistakes Jesus for the gardener until he speaks to her a second time, this time calling her by name. In John 21:4, Jesus appears by the Sea of Galilee (“Tiberias,” in John’s text) to several of his closest male disciples, and they don’t recognize him. Later, even when Jesus is serving them a breakfast of broiled fish on shore, the text implies that Jesus doesn’t look like himself. The narrator says, “Now none of the disciples dared to ask him, ‘Who are you?’ because they knew it was the Lord” (21:12). The statement makes no sense if Jesus was recognizable by normal means of observation. It again implies that Jesus’s resurrected body didn’t look like his preresurrected body—and this is true even though Luke insists that Jesus’s resurrected body is “flesh and blood” (Luke 24:39–43), and John depicts Jesus’s resurrected body as retaining the marks of the crucifixion (John 20:20, 27).
Admittedly, in the case of Luke 24:31 we are led to believe, perhaps, that the disciples’ inability to recognize Jesus immediately is due to some kind of miracle because the narrator adds in the next verse, “Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him” (24:32). But this sounds like a bit of editorializing added to explain why close disciples had not initially been able to recognize a strange figure as actually Jesus himself. It attempts to explain away known traditions that Jesus, in at least some of his resurrection appearances, had not looked like Jesus as his disciples had previously known him. At any rate, we have firm traditions embedded in the text and implied in Paul’s account that the resurrected body of Jesus, at least in some early accounts, did not resemble in appearance his preresurrection body. The accounts do not agree on what Jesus’s resurrected body looked like.
The four accounts of the empty tomb and Paul’s account of Jesus’s appearance to him disagree about everything except that Jesus was raised. All other details differ: who saw him, where, when, what else they saw, and what the body looked like. If we put five “witnesses” to an event in different rooms and asked them what happened, and the only thing they agreed on is that it happened, but they give different details about who, what, when, and where, we would have no reason to trust their testimony about what happened. There is no good reason to accept the historicity of the empty tomb narratives. They count against one another by their contradictions and differences.
We can imagine how the different stories developed over time, growing in details and narrative elements. Written, let’s say, some time around the year 50, Paul’s account is the earliest and leanest, containing just his claim to have seen the risen Jesus a few years after the death and a list of other followers who are said to have seen him at some time in some place but no details of when or where. The earliest Gospel, Mark, written circa 70, has even less than Paul when it comes to people actually seeing Jesus. Mark mentions only an announcement that he has risen, but he does have an empty tomb, a new detail when compared to Paul.
If both Matthew and Luke knew Mark’s account but did not know one another’s, as most scholars believe to be the case, we can imagine why they differ so strikingly from one another, both embellishing Mark’s account but in contradictory directions. Matthew has a bit more “information” than Mark or Paul, and the Gospel of Luke still more. Acts, which must have been written after Luke, adds forty days and more story. And finally, John has more again. In fact, if we assume that John knew the Synoptics or at least their traditions, his text could be read as an attempt to harmonize the Synoptic accounts with addition of some new materials. This growth in detail and “information” is precisely what we would expect in the development of religious stories and legends. I believe any unbiased, reputable historian must chalk up all the empty tomb stories to later invention and legend. In fact, Mark could have invented the empty tomb, and the other writers could have simply taken it from him, with their own embellishments, which is why they differ so much from one another. The empty tomb stories, in the end, have no claim to historicity.
Where Was the Tomb?
Another fact that works against the historicity of the empty tomb stories is that we hear nothing at all in early Christianity about any knowledge of where the tomb was located until the fourth century.55 It was not uncommon in the ancient world for the tomb of a venerated person also to be venerated. People even customarily had memorial meetings and meals—picnics!—at the tombs of family members or people they held in honor. But we see nothing in the New Testament or anywhere else in early Christian literature that indicates that early followers of Jesus visited his tomb. We know from Acts as well as Paul’s letters that there was an ongoing community of followers of Jesus in Jerusalem for many years after his death, probably until the outbreak of the war with Rome in 66 or so. Did they never visit the tomb site?
It is quite possible—I believe probable—that the body of Jesus was never buried or, if it was, in a mass or unmarked grave.56 Part of the intended punishment of crucifixion, certainly in the intentions of the Romans, was to deprive the condemned of a proper burial. The body was left on the cross to be devoured by carrion or was thrown away in a mass grave. But even if we imagine that the corpse of Jesus was buried, we have no reason to believe his followers or family knew where that was. If the early followers of Jesus knew where his tomb had been, why did they not, as far as we know, ever meet there? Use it as a gathering place around Easter? Venerate it in any way? It seems it would have been a great place for an Easter sunrise service—if they had known where it was.
This is historical evidence that has been too quickly dismissed in debates about the empty tomb.57 Yet given the common custom of tomb veneration in the ancient Mediterranean, including among Jews, the absence of any indication of veneration of Jesus’s tomb by Christians until the fourth century is good evidence that the early disciples didn’t know where the tomb was. That would have been consistent with what we know about ancient crucifixion. It is historically much more likely that the body of Jesus was not buried, or, if it was, the disciples didn’t know where. The absence of knowledge of the whereabouts of Jesus’s tomb among the earliest Christians is one more piece of evidence, added to all the mutual contradictions of the narratives, that the empty tomb stories provide us with no history whatsoever.
What historians can affirm, I believe, is that at least Paul and some other disciples of Jesus sincerely believed they saw him sometime, somewhere after his death. What exactly they saw is not ascertainable by historical methods. And I don’t believe it is necessary to establish that for the purposes of a confession of faith in the resurrection. What is necessary is simply to believe that whatever those disciples experienced was caused by God. One may assume they saw something indeed. Even skeptical historians may imagine some disciples experienced a vision, or saw a figure from a distance they took to be Jesus, or saw a play of light they later decided was the body of Jesus. It is not necessary, for faith or history, to settle the question of what they actually experienced. Historians may content themselves with any number of guesses or none at all. Christian faith necessitates only the belief that whatever they experienced, God caused it. The introduction of God into the story, however, means we have moved out of history and into faith.
This kind of faith in the resurrection is no more or less than the kind of faith we have in God at all. To say that God “caused” the resurrection experiences of some of the earliest disciples requires no more belief in “the miraculous” or “the supernatural” (that most anachronistic of categories when applied to ancient beliefs) than to say that God is the cause of the universe. Both statements are confessions of faith, not of history or science. And one is no more or no less unbelievable than the other.
Moreover, the way we imagine the resurrection “experiences” to have occurred—was it a resuscitation of a flesh-and-blood body? a visionary experience? a mass hallucination? the miraculous transformation and resurrection of a “pneumatic body”?—is in the end inessential for Christian faith. To confess that God caused the resurrection of Jesus need not demand belief that it happened in any particular physical way. This is akin to confessing that God created the universe without needing to choose or specify any particular scientific theory of how the universe came to be. Christians, for example, need not “believe in” a Ptolemaic universe or Newtonian mechanism or Einsteinian physics or quantum mechanics. Christians need not decide, as part of Christian faith, whether the big bang theory is “how it really happened.” Christians need not reject evolutionary biology as an account of how species came to exist in order still to believe that God created them. All we need to confess is that “God did it.” How God did it is, for faith, inessential.
Likewise, a confession that God raised Jesus from the dead needs no particular historical or physical explanation of how it happened. We need not believe that the empty tomb stories are “historical fact,” or that the resurrected body was what we, in everyday language, would call a flesh-and-blood body, or that it all happened “on the third day.” We need not even believe, I argue, that what the earliest believers “saw” was the physical, fleshly body of Jesus.58 All we need to confess, in my opinion, is that whatever they experienced, which is forever inaccessible to us as history or science, was caused by God. And that confession cannot be submitted to the analysis of history precisely because God cannot be historically analyzed.
Certainly historians may affirm that at least a few disciples of Jesus thought they saw him after his death. Indeed, we may posit that experience to be the earliest possible historical beginning of Christianity. What caused Christianity, to be as simplistic as we may allow ourselves to be only for the moment, was the shock that occurred when someone—we don’t know for certain who—first came to realize that a person he or she had thought was a prophet, maybe even the Messiah, had been crucified but had then been raised from the dead. The fact of Jesus of Nazareth was nothing truly exceptional. There were many such prophets and teachers, even healers and miracle workers, in the world at the time. The fact that Jesus was executed was nothing exceptional. Anyone should have seen that coming. But then someone, we don’t know who, saw “him” later alive. That shock was the beginning of Christianity.59
Christians who believe that their faith in the resurrection of Jesus must be propped up by modern historiography are putting their faith in the wrong place. Christians’ faith is rightly not in modern historiography, but in God. The difference between a non-Christian account of the claims of our texts and a Christian one is simply that the Christian is willing to give God credit for whatever happened.60
What is more important to Christian theology than “what exactly happened” or “what physically they experienced” is what a confession of the resurrection means theologically and experientially for Christians. And that is not hard to discern. When we Christians confess faith in the resurrection of Jesus we are insisting that God did in fact vindicate the prophet Jesus as God’s son and Messiah. In spite of the fact that Jews did not expect a messiah who would suffer and certainly not one who would be humiliated by Roman torture and crucifixion, God did actually prove them all wrong: this crucified Jewish apocalyptic prophet was in fact, in spite of all appearances, the Messiah. And even more, he was the son of God. And even more, he was and is fully divine, the second person of the trinity, the intercessor between God the father and all of humanity and the entire universe.
To confess faith in the resurrection is a confession of faith in the gift of life after death, though we may have no idea of the exact nature of that life. Is it some kind of consciousness? Or perhaps it is simply the faith that we will rest eternally in the goodness and peace of God? But to confess the resurrection also affects our current lives. By confessing the resurrection, we insist also that we will live our lives as if death is not the last word, as if pain and evil cannot be the denouement of the story, as if death even for us is not an evil or a disaster but simply part of God’s gracious will for us and for our loved ones. When we Christians confess the resurrection of Christ—which for us includes a confession also in human resurrection—we affirm that we live our lives constantly moving beyond a very natural fear of death into a confidence of living. We may accept death as a natural event for us and our loved ones precisely because we recognize it as part of the goodness of a world created and sustained by a loving God. Confessing faith in the resurrection of Christ means we live believing that God is still with us through all and that even the deaths of our friends, our families, and ourselves need not be the disaster we fear but part of the life we celebrate. Our natural deaths are not the last word. There is no threat from modern historiography or science that can take away that faith. It is not to be accepted because it is “a historical fact.” It is to be repeatedly affirmed because it is a way of life.
The Historical Jesus
Debates about the historical Jesus have roiled scholars and churches for centuries now, at least from the publication by Gotthold E. Lessing of the “Fragments” of Hermann Samuel Reimarus from 1774 to 1778.61 One part of these debates has been over the relevance of the historical Jesus with regard to Christian faith or theology. In popular talk one often hears the historical Jesus called the real Jesus or the authentic Jesus or some such terminology that ontologically elevates the Jesus constructed by modern historical methods over the Jesus of creeds, confessions, scripture, or piety. Other scholars have argued just as vociferously that the historical Jesus is a modern construction with probably little in common with the actual “Jesus of Nazareth” as he existed in the first part of the first century. Still others argue that the Jesus important for Christian theology is the Jesus Christ of faith, the Gospels, or the creeds and confessions. Are Christian confessions dependent on the establishment of the historical Jesus? Should modern or postmodern Christian theology be ruled by the results of modern historiography in its version of Jesus of Nazareth? If Christian faith or theology is not completely dependent on the historical Jesus, may Christians use aspects of historical Jesus research nonetheless to inform theological interpretations of Jesus?
I side with those who insist that the “real” Jesus for Christians who wish to remain in a relation of orthodoxy to Christian tradition and confession is Jesus Christ as interpreted through scripture and Christian tradition, including history of doctrine, the main creeds, and churches’ confessions. The historical Jesus is a construction made by modern scholars who are attempting to use criteria derived from modern historiography. That construction of Jesus must reject any claim for Jesus of Nazareth that modern historians would be unwilling in principle to make about other historical persons. The historical Jesus cannot, therefore, be considered divine or someone who acted in ways not commonly understood as generically possible for other human beings. Since I have been attempting throughout this book to remain faithful to the primary doctrines of orthodox Christianity as I understand them, I insist that the historical Jesus cannot be determinative for Christology.
Yet I disagree with those scholars and Christians who argue that the historical Jesus is and must be completely irrelevant in any theology about Christ.62 As I insist that we theologians are perfectly in our rights to use any and all resources for the “doing” of theology, so we may have access to modern constructions of the historical Jesus to inform our theology. We are perfectly within our rights to appropriate insights for theology from the “natural” sciences, history, social sciences, and philosophy. Though much modern rhetoric has depicted culture as something in opposition to Christ and to be avoided in speaking of Christian truths, I have argued that culture is everywhere human beings are. We can no more avoid being influenced by culture than we can avoid thinking or speaking. And though some particular philosophy may provide dangers for interpreting Christianity, if we have been exposed to any philosophical notions or tropes in any way, we can scarcely avoid being influenced by philosophy. Traditional rhetoric invoking some kind of pure Christian thought cleansed of any taint of philosophy or culture is false and misleading.63
Thus I find that even the historical Jesus may furnish tools or inspiration with which to think theologically about Jesus Christ. Elsewhere, for example, I have argued that the historical Jesus, properly constructed, was not at all a “family man.”64 By all evidence, Jesus of Nazareth was never married, he left his own family behind and did not receive them when they may have attempted a visit, he called his followers away from their own families, probably even telling a man to neglect what was at that time a central assumed duty owed by a son to his parents, namely, proper burial and mourning (Mark 3:33–35 and par.; Luke 9:59–60 and par.). In sayings that may well be historical, again because they are shocking and fly in the face of values of Jesus’s contemporaries, Jesus teaches that, if possible, people should be “eunuchs” and that in the resurrection they will be “like angels,” probably meaning that they will experience no need or desire for marriage (Matt 19:12; Mark 12:25; Matt 22:30). Celibacy may have been taught by the historical Jesus as the only or at least the “higher” virtue. By all the evidence, in any case, the historical Jesus was no promoter of “traditional family values,” either those of the modern nuclear family or the ancient extended household.
Another modern Christian bias against which a construction of the historical Jesus may be brought, although in this case it occupies a minority position among Christian theologians and ethicists, is Jesus’s relationship to revolution and violence. For some Christians, again, only a minority certainly in the United States, a universal, abstract principle of pacifism and nonviolence is taken to be practically the sine qua non of the Christian gospel. For such Christians the gospel sometimes seems to cease being a narrative about God’s work in Christ and becomes a container for a commitment to nonviolence in the absolute.65
I am not at all opposed to pacifism. I even believe that contemporary American Christians probably should be pacifists given the ready resort to warfare and violence so regularly undertaken by their government. Both conservative and liberal Americans far too quickly advocate violent responses as ultimately the only answer to both domestic and foreign problems. The huge military forces sapping desperately needed resources, the largest incarcerated population in the world, the power of organizations promoting possession and use of guns of unimaginable powers of destruction—faced with all that, American Christians would do well to advocate nonviolence more than most of them do. But still, making some abstract principle of nonviolence the one indispensable message of the gospel is, again, to practice idolatry. It also turns the narrative structure of the gospel into one abstract “principle.”
And the historical Jesus may be used to make that point. People have tended to read the Jesus of the Gospels as something of a pacifist or at least as not advocating armed rebellion against the Romans or the Jewish priestly hierarchy. I agree that the Gospels go out of their way to depict just such a Jesus. But I believe there is more than sufficient evidence that the historical Jesus had his disciples arm themselves and that he led them to Jerusalem at Passover intending either to await or to provoke a battle between, on the one side, the Romans and their high-class Jewish clients and, on the other, Jesus, his disciples, and an angelic army. Perhaps the historical Jesus thought he was the “messiah” who would lead the armies of right. Or perhaps he thought of himself as a mere precursor to the Messiah. At any rate, the texts contain historical evidence that Jesus’s disciples were armed in Jerusalem.
After all, our earliest account of the arrest of Jesus, from the Gospel of Mark, does not say that only one or two of his disciples were armed at his arrest. If all we had was that Gospel, we would assume that all of his disciples accompanying him that night were armed, and with swords at that. Furthermore, all our Gospel authors attempt to play down the fact that they were armed or that there was any intention of violent revolt by Jesus and his disciples against the Jerusalem authorities. Much evidence from our Gospels and other parts of the New Testament suggests that Jesus had his disciples arm themselves for their trip to Jerusalem and that he and they expected to join in an angelic and messianic overthrow of the Romans and their high priestly client-rulers in Judea.66
This “historical Jesus” is a construction, one made by a modern scholar using recognized historiographical methods and criteria. I repeat, no historical Jesus, however constructed, is the real Jesus. And I argue that modern (or postmodern) Christian theology need not feel it must accept any “historical Jesus” or use it as a foundation for faith or doctrine. But imagining a historical Jesus who is not a strict pacifist may remind us that no single principle provides the content of the gospel. In fact, a principle of nonviolence cannot be found, as far as I know, in the ancient world. It is a modern invention. For all ancient Christianity I know about, some assumption of violence was very much retained. Sometimes a “strategic” adoption of nonviolence was advocated, but it always, as far as we know from our sources, functioned as a deferral of violence to the future or to divine prerogative. Christians did not mount open rebellion against Rome, but only because they expected God to destroy Rome in his good time. The earliest Christians didn’t build armies because they trusted that Christ would return with his own army, which would necessarily be far superior to anything they could have built.
I believe we may use this historical Jesus to remind ourselves that however much we may value ethical stances of nonviolence or pacifism, we must not make the mistake of taking that principle or any principle to be the meaning of the gospel. Nothing is the gospel except the gospel, even though we are constantly trying to figure out what that means and what the gospel precisely is. Although I do not believe the historical Jesus is necessary for Christian faith, I insist that it may indeed be used as a resource for Christian theology, just as all other products of science, nature, history, and culture may be used as theological resources. We cannot tell the holy spirit what it cannot use to teach us. We cannot limit what God will use for revelation.
There is much more that could be included in a chapter on Christology. One topic I have not broached here is the important one about the centrality of Christ for Christian reading of the Old Testament. I’m firmly convinced not only that we Christians “may” read the Old Testament through the lens of Christ but also that we must do so at least occasionally if we are to find in the Old Testament useful and orthodox theology. I agree with other scholars who make the same point, such as Todd Billings: “Christians do not receive the Old Testament as a generic ‘word of God’ to be received apart from Christ; it is because of Christ that Christians read the Old Testament as Scripture at all. . . . Israel’s Scripture is not ‘someone else’s mail’ for gentile believers, but it is the Old Testament inextricably connected to the New Testament because it bears witness to Jesus Christ.”67
I hasten to add that this is only a Christian way to read “Israel’s Scripture.” We must still guard against Christian imperialism or supersessionism. We must remind ourselves that Jews rightly read their scripture without recourse to Christ, and we must respect their readings of those scriptures that we still hope to share with them. But I would still insist that we Christians are quite within our rights to believe that what counts simply as text or even scripture for our Jewish sisters and brothers is the “Old Testament” of Christian Bibles and that those texts are patient, in a Christian context, of Christological readings.
That is only one topic in Christology I have left unexamined in this chapter. There are many others, including some I have not and perhaps cannot think of. As I said in the introduction about theology in general, so also Christology is always an ongoing, never ceasing activity for Christians. As Hans Frei said long ago, “The task of the redescription of Jesus will remain unfinished as long as history lasts.”68
Orthodoxy allows us Christians to have our cake and eat it too: we insist that we are justified in worshipping Jesus, in seeing Jesus as God, and yet as retaining our belief in “one God.” What may be contradiction to the critics of Christianity, even irrationality, is nonetheless what we confess. Jesus is what we think with or about when we want to think about God as a person with whom we can relate as a person. If we think of God as a friend, brother, comrade, we use Jesus. Jesus is God the manual laborer, a fisherman, a talker, a storyteller. Jesus is God we can imagine having a drink with, a dinner companion, a sharer of a train car. Jesus is God if God could be our brother. Jesus is God if God could be our friend. Jesus is God if God could be, dare I say it, our lover. Bernard of Clairvaux certainly dared to think so. Jesus is God fully incarnate, embodied.
Jesus is the radically human God—a version and vision of God unthinkable in many philosophies, theologies, and religions, but a version of God demanded by orthodox Christianity.
Notes
1. “The dogma as such [i.e., the eternal deity of Christ] is not to be found in the biblical texts. The dogma is an interpretation. But we can convince ourselves that it is a good and relevant interpretation of these texts. We thus accept it.” Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, p. 415.
2. Tanner, Christ the Key, 148.
3. Notably in what may be taken as a climax of the Gospel at Mark 8:29. “Son of Man” occurs many times in Mark, as in the other Gospels.
4. See Mark 3:11; 5:7; see also 1:11; 9:7; 14:61; “son of god” occurs also in modern editions of Mark 1:1, but some ancient manuscripts lack the term in that verse, so its inclusion could be debated.
5. For a good, recent account of the various things “son of god” could have meant in the first century CE, see Peppard, Son of God.
6. I have been unable to find this statement in print. Perhaps it is in my head just from hearing the claim made by preachers and apologists in my fundamentalist youth.
7. See Matt 5:9, 45
8. See my fuller treatment of these passages in Martin, New Testament, 261–65.
9. I believe the NRSV translation “declared” to be a misleading one for the Greek ὁρισθέντος. It means to “mark off,” “ordain,” “designate,” whether speaking of a boundary or an office. It would be unusual to take it to mean simply to “declare” a state of affairs already long in existence.
10. See Martin, New Testament, 263–64; Ehrman, Orthodox Corruption, 56–57; Ehrman, How Jesus Became God, 218–25.
11. See the introduction above and the works there cited.
12. See Mark 10:1–12; Matt 19:3–9. For a full argument that Jesus here completely forbids divorce without exception, see Martin, Sex and the Single Savior, 125–47; for Jesus on family and household, see 103–24.
13. Eagleton, Reason, 10, 14.
14. See Martin, Inventing Superstition, for this as a universal among Greek and Roman philosophers.
15. See Williams, Resurrection, 74, for warning against seeing Jesus as the “founding martyr” of the church.
16. Pharisees seem to have lived also outside Palestine. Paul claims to be a Pharisee (or perhaps “was”? but he seems to be speaking of the present; see Phil 3:5), and he, for all we can tell from his letters, was a Greek-speaking Jew from the Diaspora. (I don’t believe we can accept as historical Acts’ account of Paul’s education in Jerusalem.)
17. The connection of “hypocrite” with “Pharisee” is found most thickly in Matthew 23, but it occurs elsewhere in the Gospel also.
18. For a fuller account of the Jewish context and reading of Matthew, see Martin, New Testament, 93–107.
19. Fitzmyer, in his commentary on Luke, insists that Jesus’s words here do contain “a sacrificial nuance,” but I am not convinced. Gospel of Luke, 1402. Since there is such a clear avoidance in the rest of Luke and Acts of interpreting Jesus’s death as a sacrifice, I believe that reading it into these verses is just harmonizing with other texts of the New Testament.
20. Discussion of this issue can be found in many commentaries. In my opinion the best arguments are in Ehrman and Plunkett, “Angel and the Agony,” and Ehrman, Orthodox Corruption, 220–27.
21. See a fuller exposition in Martin, New Testament, 159–65.
22. Often in the New Testament we find the term “God” used over against “Christ” or “the spirit” (to cite only a few of the many instances: Acts 7:55–56; 10:38–42; Rom 1:1, 8; 1 Cor 15:57; 2 Cor 2:21; 1 Peter 1:21). From a more strictly orthodox perspective, we Christian readers supply the knowledge that here “God” is standing in for “the Father.”
23. Hebrews 5:7–9: Jesus learned obedience through suffering; obedience to whom? Presumably, God.
24. See the Book of Common Prayer, 865, from which this translation is taken.
25. Tanner, Christ the Key, 156. I have altered the wording slightly after consultation with Tanner. The original says, “. . . ruled out just in case there simply is nothing. . . .” Tanner confirms that she meant, “just because there simply is nothing. . . .”
26. On the use of sources by the author of Luke–Acts, sources that seem to disagree somewhat with the theological tendencies of the rest of the books, see Martin, New Testament, 142–51.
27. As commentators and editors note, the term could be translated as “place of atonement,” but the death as atoning sacrifice is present in either case.
28. See McGrath, Theology, 85–86.
29. See ibid., 89, quoting Augustine, Festal Letter VII.
30. Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity, 29.
31. Ibid., 77.
32. The extent to which actual Christians taught that the Father also suffered is debatable; but at least some Christians accused others of the “heresy.”
33. A famous such study is Moltmann, Crucified God; see the discussion of the history of the problem, as well as the state of the question in twentieth-century German theology, in Jüngel, God as the Mystery; see also the discussion in McGrath, Making of Modern German Christology, 186–210.
34. See Keul, “Inkarnation,” 216–32. The incarnation renders God—in God’s very self—“woundable.” The German brings this out (Verwundbarkeit), as does the English when we remember its Latin etymology: subject to being wounded (vulnerare). In the incarnation, God joins the fragile world, including all the human beings throughout the strained world who are vulnerable to pain, hunger, thirst, and poverty.
35. For a robust, and complicated, treatment of various difficult doctrines centered around the incarnation, see Gerald O’Collins, Incarnation. O’Collins, for example, deals with complex debates surrounding the orthodox doctrines of the incarnation, such as what precisely is meant by insisting on Christ “pre-existing his incarnation” without implying that there could be a before and after for Christ’s personal, divine nature (15). I will not attempt in this chapter to address some of the most difficult problems in doctrines of the incarnation as found in late ancient and medieval theology. See also Crisp, “Incarnation,” 160–75. As Crisp notes, “Classical theologians were not unaware of the problems associated with claiming the timeless Son assumed temporal human nature” (169).
36. Beeley provides much discussion and several examples from the church fathers in his Unity of Christ, esp. 39, 134, 164, 193.
37. This statement is the reason some people give for taking this passage as indicating that Lazarus is not just a person Jesus loved but the “beloved disciple.” I accept that as a possibility but not as an exegetical certainty. The Greek used in 11:3 is not precisely like the Greek elsewhere when the author is referring to “the beloved disciple” (“the disciple whom Jesus loved”). In fact, the Greek of 11:3 could just as easily be translated, “Someone you love is ill.” Moreover, the phrase is placed on the lips of disciples, not of the narrator himself. When “love” is next mentioned, the narrator says that Jesus loved Martha, her sister, and Lazarus. If the narrator took Lazarus to be the “beloved disciple,” I’d expect his name to appear first here, not last. Nonetheless, I think it possible though unlikely that we are meant to take Lazarus to be the same “loved disciple” we find elsewhere in John.
38. KJV and RSV. NRSV: “Jesus began to weep.”
39. Thus one definition given by LSJ.
40. Sermon on the Song of Songs 9.5.7. Trans. Ilian Walsh, On the Song of Songs.
41. Frykholm, Julian of Norwich, 14–15.
42. Williams, Resurrection, 81–82.
43. McGrath, Making of Modern German Christology, 137. McGrath is commenting on Barth’s Church Dogmatics II/2, pp. 94–194. See further McGrath, “Barth als Aufk lärer?”; and Stock, Anthropologie der Verheissung, 44–61.
44. McGrath, Making, 138.
45. For a recent discussion of the exegetical possibilities of 1 Pet 3:18–20, see Helyer, The Life and Witness of Peter, 148–56. I do not accept most of Helyer’s conclusions, which are conservative and quite traditional, even to the extent of arguing that the historical Peter actually wrote the letter, but he does give references for different options, including some related to the interpretation of this passage.
46. These are my translations, and the Greek is a bit cryptic. The NRSV: “For this is the reason the gospel was proclaimed even to the dead, so that, though they had been judged in the flesh as everyone is judged, they might live in the spirit as God does.” That is a rather expanded, interpretive translation that may indeed reflect the intended meaning, but it is far from certain. The main point, it seems to me, is that the dead, along with the living, will be judged in a human manner “in the flesh” and before God “in spirit.”
47. Remember that for ancient Christians, at least in the first few centuries, the soul or spirit was thought of as what we would call a “physical” thing. That is, both were considered made up of very fine “matter” but were “physical” nonetheless. This is demonstrated more fully in the chapter below titled “Spirit.”
48. See esp. Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh.
49. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2d ed., §990 (p. 258).
50. For defenses of these general statements, see the various relevant chapters in Martin, New Testament.
51. For a larger contextualization of this topic in the ancient world and more supportive evidence for my thesis here, see Martin, Corinthian Body, 104–36.
52. See my references to and discussion of Ladd’s view in the introduction above.
53. See my discussion of this in Pedagogy, esp. 41–44, and the references there cited.
54. If Mary Magdalene was supposed to have seen Jesus’s body when it was placed in the tomb on Friday evening (Matt 27:61; Luke 23:55) and she was the first or one of the first to see him on Sunday morning (Matt 28:9; John 20:11–16), that would imply an interval of about thirty-six hours.
55. I have been unable to find any reference to the location of the presumed tomb of Jesus before the “discovery” of the tomb at the current site of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which took place in 325 or 326. According to an expert on that site, Biddle, “It is not known why the rock-cut tomb now covered by the Edicule was identified in 325/6 as the tomb in which the body of Jesus was laid in the early evening of the day of crucifixion.” Tomb of Christ, xi–xii; see also 19, 66. I take this to mean that, at least for Biddle, no testimony for the tomb, at least at this place, existed prior to this “identification.” Raymond Brown too uncritically supposed it was possible that some idea of the tomb’s location was known in the second century, but the evidence he cites doesn’t support him. See Brown, Death, 1282. Brown said that Melito of Sardis claims to have had the location pointed out to him on a visit to Jerusalem. Brown’s source is Harvey, “Melito and Jerusalem.” But Harvey gives no citations that have Melito being shown the place of the tomb, just the place of the crucifixion. Since they all assumed that the tomb was near the place of crucifixion (based on John 19:40, which certainly should not be accepted uncritically as historical), Melito may have assumed that the tomb was also “in the middle of the city,” as he says of the place of execution. But the passages cited do not have Melito saying he was shown the tomb site. They have him being shown the site of the crucifixion. See Melito of Sardis, On Pascha and Fragments, §§72, 93–94.
56. Several scholars agree that there was no veneration of the grave site because the disciples did not know where it was. They had no actual knowledge of it or of where Jesus’s body was placed. See Crossan, Historical Jesus, 395; and Crossan, Who Killed Jesus? 160–88; Lüdemann, Resurrection, 45; Carnley, Structure, 58; Wedderburn, Beyond, 64–65; Betz, “Zum Problem,” at 246. As early as 1958, Joachim Jeremias had remarked that it was “unthinkable” (undenkbar) that the early Christians would have let knowledge of the location of the tomb pass into oblivion had they possessed that knowledge to start with. See Jeremias, Heiligengräber, 145.
57. Perhaps the most extensive and vigorous defense of the historicity of the burial and empty tomb narratives is that of Craig, Assessing. Craig insists even that the lack of veneration of the tomb is evidence for the historicity of the empty tomb because, he insists, early Christians would have had no interest in an empty tomb. This is also the conclusion by Dunn, Evidence for Jesus, 67–68. That is simply disproven by pointing out that as soon as Christians thought they knew the location of the tomb, they immediately began venerating it, empty though it obviously was. Craig’s and Dunn’s arguments are easily refuted as bad historiography or none at all. Perhaps the most thorough refutation is publications by Lowder. See his “Historical Evidence”; a revised version appears as a chapter in Price and Lowder, eds., Empty Tomb.
58. I disagree, therefore, with Denys Turner, who argues (I think he is here explicating Thomas Aquinas) that the raised body must be “material” in precisely the same way as the preraised body: “If in effect you strip the raised body of Jesus of all those properties that belong to bodies as such, then your theology of resurrection in consequence entails the denial of the resurrection of the human person who is Jesus. Human bodies are material objects, and no two material objects can naturally occupy the same place at the same time as one another.” Turner, Thomas Aquinas, 247–48. Turner seems not to understand either ancient notions about “bodies”—that can be “matter” though not “flesh and blood”—or contemporary physics. Aquinas is arguing against his contemporary theologians who posited that a raised body likely could pass through stone walls. But, in spite of Turner’s (and Aquinas’s?) arguments, in the ancient world (and in the postmodern?) the raised body could be a pneumatic body that could, naturally, pass through other materials.
59. I should point out that stories about people seeing someone after his or her death were also not unusual in the ancient world. What made claims about Jesus’s resurrection and deification unacceptable to those Greeks and Romans who ridiculed such claims (and some did) was that it was being claimed for a lower-class, manual laboring Jew who had been crucified like a slave or rebel. It was Jesus’s status that would have challenged early Christians’ claims about his resurrection, not simply that he was seen after death. For comparisons of the early Christian stories about Jesus to other “translation fables” of antiquity, see Miller, Resurrection and Reception.
60. To quote Gorringe, interspersed with his own quotations of Barth: “We cannot establish the ‘how’ of the resurrection. It takes place in ‘sacred incomprehensibility.’ The proper response to it is confession. ‘We cannot try to go “behind” it, either behind the fact that it is given, or behind the way in which it is legitimate and possible for us to act in correspondence to this fact.’ Our response to the resurrection is to ‘act in correspondence with this fact.’” Gorringe, Karl Barth, 237 (Barth quotations from Church Dogmatics IV/2, p. 123).
61. The full publication of Reimarus’s manuscript came only in 1972: Reimarus, Apologie. For a selection and translation of some of the “Fragments,” see Reimarus, Fragments, ed. Talbert.
62. See the positions, for example, of Kähler and Bultmann discussed in the introduction above.
63. See Mary McClintock Fulkerson’s statements about “theology’s inevitable entanglement with other signifiers.” Theology is always “accommodated . . . to worldly media of communication.” Places of Redemption, 235.
64. What follows is a brief summary of chapters from my book Sex and the Single Savior, esp. 103–47.
65. I was struck, for example, with this tendency in the treatment of Bonhoeffer’s decision to join the plot to assassinate Hitler by Stephen Fowl and Gregory Jones, Reading in Communion, see esp. 157–59. They attribute what they take to be Bonhoeffer’s misreading of scripture—to allow a violent act in an extreme case rather than absolute pacifism—to the fact that, while in prison, he was not “reading” scripture within a Christian community. That seems to me to assume that “the meaning” of the gospel is the principle of pacifism rather than entertaining the idea that the narrative of the gospel may not provide always applicable abstract rules of behavior.
66. For the full historical treatment, see Martin, “Jesus in Jerusalem”; and Martin, “Response.”
67. Billings, Word of God, 168.
68. Frei, Types of Christian Theology, 146; see also DeHart, Trial of Witnesses, 147.