THE CHARACTERISTIC JESUS
From Atomistic Exegesis to Consistent Emphases
In these chapters I have been arguing that the quest of the historical Jesus has been largely unsuccessful because the earlier questers started from the wrong place, began with the wrong assumptions, and viewed the relevant data from the wrong perspective. In each case they forgot what should have been more obvious than it evidently has been and so lost the way almost from the beginning.
The first of these mistakes was to assume that faith was a hindrance to the quest, something that had to be stripped away if the quester was to gain a clear view of the historical Jesus. My response is that, on the contrary, the quest should start from the historical a priori that Jesus made a faith impact on his disciples, and that the only way to approach Jesus historically is to do so through that faith impact. In contrast to the older questers, the faith of the first disciples, not yet Easter faith, should not be stripped away, indeed cannot be stripped away, without throwing away the baby with the bathwater.
The second mistake has been to assume that the transmission of the Jesus tradition can be understood effectively only in literary terms, as a process of copying or editing earlier written sources. There has been a willing recognition on the part of most that the earliest Jesus tradition and earliest period of transmission of that tradition must have been oral in character. But there has been an almost complete failure to appreciate that such transmission could not have been like the literary process. There has been a consequent failure to take seriously the challenge to investigate how that tradition functioned in the oral period, and to ask whether the oral character of the earliest tradition could help us better understand the lasting and present form of the Jesus tradition. In contrast, it is my thesis that such an investigation can give us a clearer idea both of how the Jesus tradition first emerged and of its enduring character. That is, the character of the Synoptic Gospel tradition may have already been determined in large part during the oral period and before it was written down extensively in Mark and Q.
The third failure of previous quests has been the mistake of looking for a distinctive Jesus, distinctive in the sense of a Jesus different from his environment. This failure also has a twin aspect: first, the determination to find a non-Jewish Jesus; and second, the methodological assumption that the search should be directed toward identifying the particular saying or action that made Jesus stand out from his context most clearly.
Looking for the Non-Jewish Jesus
One of the most astonishing features of the quest of the historical Jesus has been the seeming determination of generation after generation of questers to discount or to strip away anything characteristically Jewish from the Jesus tradition. We can explain the underlying logic, even if we can never sympathize with it—the logic of traditional Christian anti-Semitism. As is well known, from the second century onward, perhaps we should say from the Epistle to the Hebrews onward, a consistent strand of Christian supersessionism has dominated Christian perception of the Jews.[1] This is the view that Christianity had superseded Israel, had drained from its Jewish heritage all that was of value, and had left Judaism as an empty husk. On this view Christianity was antithetical to Judaism; indeed, the first time the word “Christianity” appears, in Ignatius of Antioch, early in the second century, it is coined as an antithesis to “Judaism.”[2] Christianity, in other words, was early on perceived as not-Judaism, and Judaism as not-Christianity. The Jews, after all, had set themselves against the gospel and had rejected Christ; Judaism had thus set itself in opposition to Christianity. Worse still, the Jews had been responsible for Jesus’ death. The people themselves had accepted this bloodguilt: “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matt. 27:25); they were deicides, murderers of God. What Jesus said of Judas was true of them all: “It would have been better for that man not to have been born” (Mark 14:21, author’s translation). This was the underlying rationale behind the later persecutions and pogroms against the Jews in Christian Europe.
From this background emerged the governing instinct or assumption that Jesus himself cannot have been a Jew like that; he must have been different. And so we find as one of the most striking features of the quest repeated attempts to distance Jesus from his Jewish milieu. Susannah Heschel provides a penetrating analysis of this unsavory trend during the nineteenth century: “As Jewishness, Judaism represented a set of qualities associated with everything Christian theologians wished to reject and repudiate: false religiosity, immorality, legalism, hypocrisy, physicality, seductiveness, dishonesty, to name just a few.”[3] She observes that liberal theologians painted “as negative a picture as possible of first-century Judaism” in order “to elevate Jesus as a unique religious figure who stood in sharp opposition to his Jewish surroundings.”[4] A unique religious consciousness, unaffected by historical circumstances, in effect cut Jesus off from Judaism. Ernest Renan, for example, could write: “Fundamentally there was nothing Jewish about Jesus”; after visiting Jerusalem, Jesus “appears no more as a Jewish reformer, but as a destroyer of Judaism. . . . Jesus was no longer a Jew.”[5] And for Albrecht Ritschl, the chief theological spokesman for liberal Protestantism, Jesus’ “renunciation of Judaism and its law . . . became a sharp dividing line between his teachings and those of the Jews.”[6] Almost equally as striking is the fact that the great account of the liberal quest by Albert Schweitzer simply failed to take account of the substantial debate between Jewish and Christian scholarship on the theme of Jesus the Jew.[7] On this point the irony of liberalism is that it not only sought to “liberate” Jesus from the distorting layers of subsequent dogma, but it also sought to present Jesus as the one who “liberated” the quintessential spirit of religion from the “outmoded garb” of Jewish cult and myth.
At the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, Wilhelm Bousset, in his little book on Jesus, well illustrates the twin aspects of the liberal quest—the idealization of the Christian’s Jesus set starkly over against the vilification of his opponents and of the religion they represented.
The bitterest enemies of Jesus, and the true antipodes to all that he stood for, were the Scribes. However closely he resembled them in the outward forms of his activity, in the spirit of it he and they were at opposite poles. On the one hand was the artificiality of a hair-splitting and barren erudition, on the other the fresh directness of the layman and the son of the people; here was the product of long generations of misrepresentation and distortion, there was simplicity, plainness, and freedom; here a clinging to the petty and the insignificant, a burrowing in the dust, there a constant dwelling upon the essential and a great inward sense of reality; here the refinement of casuistry, formula- and phrase-mongering, there the straightforwardness, severity, and pitilessness of the preacher of repentance; here a language which was scarcely to be understood, there the inborn power of the mighty orator; here the letter of the law and there the living God. It was like the meeting of water and fire.[8]
Rudolf Bultmann’s reaction to his liberal teachers included his own recognition that so far as NT theology was concerned, the proclamation of Jesus did indeed belong under the heading of “Judaism.”[9] But his insistence was even stronger that faith had nothing to do with history, that therefore we need know nothing of this Jesus, and that the only thing that matters is an existential encounter with the kerygmatic Christ. Consequently, the outcome was not so very different: faith in the kerygmatic Christ was a quantum leap away from anything that might be shown to be true of the Jewish Jesus. And although the generation following Bultmann began to move away from his existentialism, they continued to regard the Judaism of Jesus’ day with a jaundiced eye. Nothing shows this more clearly in German theology than the commonplace description of Second Temple Judaism as Spätjudentum (late Judaism)[10]—even though they well knew, of course, that Judaism continued to thrive and still flourishes to the present day. The logic again is clear, the assumption still that of Christian supersessionism: that Judaism’s only function and purpose was to prepare for the coming of Christ and of Christianity; when Christ came, that marked the end of Judaism; the generation of Jesus’ time was “late Judaism,” the last Judaism. So too, with an astonishing insensitivity in the post-Holocaust period, it was not uncommon, even among prominent German theologians, to speak of Jesus doing away with Judaism or bringing Judaism to an end.[11]
In the renewed quest of the post-Bultmann era, most of the debate centered on the question of criteria, criteria that would enable the quester to determine whether any particular saying derived from Jesus himself. We will return to this subject in the next section. Here we simply need to note that the principal criterion, dissimilarity, tried to make a virtue out of what second questers perceived as a necessity, by reconstructing their picture of Jesus out of what distinguished Jesus from his historical context and set him over against his Jewish milieu. And the neoliberal quest of Dominic Crossan and Burton Mack differs from the old liberal quest at this point only by its argument that the influence of hellenization, which in Harnack’s view marked out the difference of the early church from Jesus, is already found in Jesus’ own teaching; despite the acknowledgment of Jesus’ Jewishness, the tendency is to play up the similarities between Jesus’ teaching with Hellenistic culture and the differences from his native Jewish culture.[12] In other words, the Jewishness of Jesus still remains an embarrassment to far too many attempting to take part in the quest.
In view of this embarrassment, it is a refreshing feature of the other main strand of current inquiry into the life and teaching of Jesus that it takes its start from the very point of embarrassment—Jesus the Jew. Indeed, my own preference is to limit the title “the third quest of the historical Jesus” to the quest for Jesus the Jew.[13] The prospects for such a (third) quest have also been considerably improved by the fresh insights into the character of Second Temple Judaism that have been granted to scholarship during the past fifty years. Here the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has pride of place. More than anything else the scrolls have broken open the idea of a monolithic, monochrome Judaism, particularly as set over against the distinctiveness of newly emerging Christianity. It has now become possible to envisage Jesus, as also “the sect of the Nazarenes,”[14] within the diversity of late Second Temple Judaism in a way that was hardly thinkable before. This breakthrough has been accompanied and reinforced by other important developments—particularly the breakdown of the previously quite sharp distinction between Judaism and Hellenism,[15] the recognition that the portrayals of rabbinic Judaism in Mishnah and Talmud may not simply be projected backward into the first century,[16] the renewed interest in the rich range of apocryphal and pseudepigraphical Jewish literature as further testimony to the diversity of Second Temple Judaism,[17] and the increasing sophistication in evaluating the steadily mounting archaeological data from the Israel (particularly Galilee) of Jesus’ time.[18] In short, it is no exaggeration to say that scholarship is in a stronger position than ever before to sketch a clearer and sharper picture of Judaism in the land of Israel at the time of Jesus and as the context of Jesus’ ministry. And, as Nils Dahl observed forty years ago: “Everything that enlarges our knowledge of this environment of Jesus (Palestinian Judaism) indirectly extends our knowledge of the historical Jesus himself.”[19]
This third quest allows us to shift the goal of our search from the distinctive and different Jesus to the characteristic Jesus. The quest for a Jesus who is different from Judaism has led us down some dubious roads and into some very unsavory places. To look for a Jesus who was brought up in Galilee and carried through most of his mission there, and yet who distanced himself fundamentally from the practice and beliefs of his fellow Galilean Jews, was always bound to end up with a rather odd Jesus. But a Jesus who was brought up in Galilee and who could evidently empathize with typical Galilean Jews suggests rather that the Jewishness of Jesus is a valid and viable starting point for the quest, rather than something to be stripped away or shied away from. We should, of course, not go to the opposite extreme of assuming that Jesus would be characteristically Jewish through and through. Those who have pioneered this new way of looking at Jesus, particularly Geza Vermes and Ed Sanders, are open to criticism at this precise point—that they have minimized the tensions between Jesus and the Pharisees in particular.[20] Jesus appears to be such a good Jew that his denunciation by the high priestly party and execution become something of a puzzle. In closing the gap between Jesus and Judaism, such scholars open up the other gap, the one between Jesus and the Christianity which followed.[21]
Nevertheless, looking at Jesus within the context of the Judaism of his time remains a more plausible line of search than starting with the intent of wrenching him out from that context. By noting what the characteristics are of Jewish practice and belief, we can infer, unless we have indications to the contrary, that Jesus shared these characteristics. A basic list would include the fact that he was circumcised, that he was brought up to say the Shema, to respect the Torah, to attend the synagogue, to observe the Sabbath. In addition, Sanders has offered a list of what he describes as “almost indisputable facts” about Jesus: that his mission mainly operated round the towns and villages of Galilee; that the main emphasis of his preaching was the kingdom of God; that he characteristically taught in aphorisms and parables; and so on.[22] Here again, what emerges is a picture of the characteristic Jesus.
This is a theme I will want to develop in the final section of this chapter, but at this point let me move on to my second main critique of the earlier quest.
Turning Pyramids Upside Down
If the first mistake of the earlier quests has been to search for a non-Jewish Jesus, the second mistake has been to make success dependent on identifying some key saying or action whose historicity can be demonstrated with high probability, and which then becomes the base round which other material coheres and on which a reconstruction of the historical Jesus’ mission can be attempted.
This has become a feature of the quest as it was renewed by Bultmann’s pupils. It can be summed up as the quest for criteria, criteria in particular by means of which any specific saying of Jesus can be recognized to have derived from Jesus. The assumption is still the one criticized in the previous chapters, that the only option for the quester is to attempt to burrow through the layers of tradition that intervene between Jesus’ mission and the Synoptic tradition. The assumption is still that these layers reflect primarily the subsequent faith of the early churches, that between each layer there is, as it were, an often-impenetrable mortar of post-Easter faith. The assumption is still that the original layer consisted only of isolated units and individual forms. The only hope, then, is to find places where the mortar is thin or weak and where a determined effort can succeed in pushing through it, eventually to arrive at the earliest form of some individual saying, which can then be attributed to Jesus.
There have been many attempts to identify the criteria that give most hope of attaining this goal. The most famous was the one already referred to, the criterion or criteria of dissimilarity. Norman Perrin defined this criterion most clearly: “The earliest form of a saying we can reach may be regarded as authentic if it can be shown to be dissimilar to characteristic emphases both of ancient Judaism and of the early Church.”[23] The point was not that only sayings that satisfied this criterion should be recognized as authentic, but rather that such sayings will be the only ones we can know to be genuine.[24] Perrin backed up this first criterion with a second, “the criterion of coherence”: “material from the earliest strata of the tradition may be accepted as authentic if it can be shown to cohere with material established as authentic by means of the criterion of dissimilarity.”[25] And with some hesitation he added a third, “the criterion of multiple attestation”: “authentic material which is attested in all, or most, of the sources which can be discerned behind the synoptic gospels.”[26]
As the discussion of criteria broadened out beyond the confines of the new quest properly so called, other criteria have been offered, not necessarily as alternatives, but in addition. For example, Joachim Jeremias in effect offered the criterion of characteristic style traceable back to Aramaic forms;[27] John P. Meier has given some prominence to “the criterion of embarrassment”;[28] and Gerd Theissen (with Dagmar Winter) presses the criterion of historical plausibility.[29] But the criterion of dissimilarity still impresses many questers because it offers the most credible results: if a unit of tradition shows no influence from the Judaism of the time and no influence of post-Easter faith, then it can be attributed to Jesus himself with confidence as the most plausible explanation for its presence in the Jesus tradition.
It is not so much that I object to the logic of this. What I object to here, rather, is that it makes so much of what can be said about Jesus to depend on a single saying or small group of sayings. Likewise, the criterion of embarrassment gives premium value to any oddball saying within the Jesus tradition. And although Sanders is very conscious of the dangers, he then proceeds to make much of his own reconstruction dependent on his own entry point into the Jesus tradition, that is, his interpretation of the “cleansing of the Temple.”[30] In all this there is a danger of inverting the pyramid: of trying to build up a portrayal and understanding of Jesus on the basis of sometimes a single verse, a narrow base and a top-heavy conclusion, the former probably too small to sustain the latter. No wonder so many pictures of the historical Jesus come crashing down after a time!
So, for example, Ernst Käsemann began the second quest for the historical Jesus by identifying “the distinctive element in the mission of Jesus” as the authority claimed by Jesus for his teaching over against Moses, as attested in the antitheses of Matt. 5.[31] Günther Bornkamm found the distinguishing feature in the note of eschatological fulfillment in Jesus’ proclamation.[32] On the basis of Mark 9:1, Werner Kümmel felt able to conclude that a distinctive feature of Jesus’ teaching was his expectation that the coming of the kingdom was imminent.[33] Heinz Schürmann found that the Lord’s Prayer for the kingdom to come (Matt. 6:10//Luke 11:2) is the surest way into Jesus’ understanding of the kingdom.[34] More typical has been the confidence that Matt. 12:28//Luke 11:20 provides a sure entry into Jesus’ understanding of the kingdom as already present.[35] The disputes as to which of the Son of Man sayings in the Gospels are “original” and “authentic” are legion.[36] As already noted, the Jesus Seminar finds the hallmark feature of Jesus’ teaching in his aphoristic sayings. Examples could be multiplied.
In each case, however, it would be possible to collect a longer list of those who question each of the claims. For every scholar who builds his inverted pyramid on this saying or that, this passage or that, there are many more scholars who are trying to push the pyramid off its all-too-narrow base. In other words, there is an obvious danger in making one’s objective the identification of a sure original and authentic item of the Jesus tradition, with a view to building round it as the outer walls of a castle would in olden days be built round the inner keep. The danger is that the inner keep is itself liable to be undermined by the maze of other tunnels dug through the mass of the Jesus tradition, or that onslaughts on the keep itself ensure that the outer walls are never very effective. Or, to change the metaphor again, the danger is that the enterprise will be caught in the swamp of endless dispute about the value of this saying or that, a swamp into which many questers wander only to find themselves bogged down in multiplying hypotheses and unable to move forward with any confidence. As Sanders put it: the view “that a sufficiently careful exegesis of the sayings material will lead to ‘a correct decision,’ has led many a New Testament scholar into a quagmire from which he has never emerged.”[37] Or, to vary the metaphor yet again, in adaptation of Albert Schweitzer’s famous image,[38] the complexity of the Jesus tradition timetable means that the questers often find themselves stopped at intermediate stations with a forward connection no longer guaranteed and little hope that a through train will follow in due course.
In the face of such despondency my suggestion is that we should take the wise comment of Leander Keck as pointing the way forward: “Instead of the distinctive Jesus we ought rather to seek the characteristic Jesus.”[39] Let us give up the quest for that which distinguished Jesus from his context and seek instead the characteristic Jesus, both that which was characteristic of Jesus as a Jew and that which is characteristic of the Jesus tradition as it now stands.
The Characteristic Jesus
If the theses being argued in these chapters are correct, then what we are looking at in the Jesus tradition, and what we are looking for through the Jesus tradition, is one whose mission was remembered for a number of features, each illustrated by stories and teaching, performed in the disciple circles and church gatherings, though not yet (properly speaking) “documented” (the literary paradigm). H. Strasburger has put the claim more boldly than I would:
The very abundance of historical inconsistencies speaks in favour of an . . . untidy, but certainly developed oral tradition whose honest basic effort at the beginnings of the formation of tradition was apparently to preserve as precise as possible a memory of Jesus, his teaching and proclamation, that is, to give a true and historical witness. And precisely this unique, unfalsifiable overall impression has undoubtedly been preserved in the canonical gospels . . . no matter how many details in the accounts may still, and perhaps forever, remain disputable.[40]
If that is overbold, a concern nevertheless to identify the “overall impression” rather than the specific detail, the characteristic rather than the different Jesus, indicates a viable broad-brush criterion for the would-be quester, to which appeal should be made before turning to particular detail. The criterion is this: any feature that is characteristic within the Jesus tradition, even if only relatively distinctive of the Jesus tradition, is most likely to go back to Jesus,[41] that is, to reflect the original impact made by Jesus’ teaching and actions on several at least of his first disciples. The logic is straightforward: if a feature is characteristic within and relatively distinctive of the Jesus tradition (in comparison with other Jewish traditions), then the most obvious explanation of its presence in the Jesus tradition is that it reflects the abiding impression that Jesus made on at least many of his first followers, an impact that first drew them into and constituted their community with other disciples, and which was celebrated (together with the kerygmatic traditions of cross and resurrection) in the gatherings of the first churches through the first generation of Christianity.
This will not mean, of course, that every item in a characteristic motif can be traced back to something heard or witnessed by Jesus’ first disciples. The more characteristic a motif, the more likely it is to have been elaborated and extended. But equally, the more characteristic a motif is, the less likely it is to have been first inserted into the Jesus tradition some years after the tradition had begun to circulate and be celebrated in oral mode. The more characteristic a feature is across the various strands of the Jesus tradition, the more likely it is that the feature reflects the impact Jesus made on his disciples rather than the inspiration of some unknown disciple operating in Galilee or Jerusalem or Antioch. The point is that such an impression of Jesus gained by observing such characteristic features of the Jesus tradition is not dependent on any one or any particular saying. It is precisely the impression made by the motif that indicates the overall impression made by Jesus, that this was the sort of thing he said and did, that he spoke and acted in this way frequently or regularly.
It is not difficult to illustrate the effectiveness of this way of proceeding in the quest; most of the illustrations that follow are ones that I have elaborated at some length in Jesus Remembered.
Consider again the Jewishness of Jesus. Within the Jesus tradition there is a consistent interest in typically Jewish concerns—what obedience to the Torah involves, how to observe the Sabbath, what counts as clean and unclean, attendance at synagogue, the purity of the temple.[42] It can scarcely be doubted that Jesus shared such concerns. What his attitude was on particular issues is open to debate and evidently was a matter of some debate among those responsible for rehearsing and passing on the Jesus tradition;[43] but that he himself was engaged with such issues during his mission is clear beyond reasonable doubt. In the same connection, Jesus is consistently shown as engaged in dialogue and dispute with Pharisees. Here we can see how the tradition has been elaborated, with Matthew in particular extending the motif of debate with Pharisees quite substantially.[44] But that is obviously the way to express the point: Matthew extended a motif already thoroughly integrated within the Jesus tradition; Jesus was well remembered for his spats with various Pharisees. Despite the anti-Jewishness of previous phases of the quest, the Jewishness of Jesus’ concerns is not in question.
Or again, it can hardly be doubted that Jesus spent much if not most of his mission in Galilee. The Synoptic tradition is so consistent on the point and the Galilean provenance of the Synoptic accounts so clear that it would be ludicrous to argue otherwise. It is not simply the fact that Jesus’ mission is clearly remembered as being carried out predominantly round the Sea of Galilee and its nearby villages. But Jesus’ parables in particular are shot through with agricultural references and echoes of what we know to have been the social situation in Galilee—wealthy estate owners, resentment over absentee landlords, exploitative stewards of estates, family feuds over inheritance, debt, day laborers, and so on.[45] To be sure, the Johannine account indicates a much more Jerusalem-centered mission, though even so three of the first four of John’s “signs” are located in Galilee. The resulting tensions between the Synoptics and John are unlikely ever to be satisfactorily resolved, but that does not change the overall impression that Jesus was a Galilean Jew whose mission was largely shaped by and focused on the circumstances of his Galilean homeland.
A third example is obviously Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom or royal rule of God. Here again, no one who takes the Synoptic tradition seriously could even begin to doubt that the kingdom of God was at the center of Jesus’ mission. That is, the royal rule of God was certainly a characteristic theme of his message, and as it happens was also fairly distinctive of Jesus’ preaching in comparison both with the Judaism of his own time and with the Christianity that followed.[46] At this point, too, the comparative scarcity of references to the kingdom in John’s version of Jesus’ mission remains something of a problem for the historian of the Jesus tradition,[47] but that fact hardly diminishes the overwhelming impression given by the Synoptic Gospels. Proclamation of God’s royal rule was one of the most characteristic features of Jesus’ mission. Consequently, it hardly matters that we cannot be sure whether, for example, Mark 1:15—“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news”—records accurately what Jesus actually said on entering Galilee or is Mark’s own summary of Jesus’ preaching. The point is that the motif is so well rooted in the Jesus tradition that a Markan summary is almost equally as effective in communicating the overall impression made by Jesus’ kingdom preaching.
Of course, students of the Gospels know that there are two strands in the Synoptic kingdom motif: the kingdom as future though imminent, and the kingdom as already present and active through Jesus’ ministry. They are also well aware that there has been a huge and long-lasting debate as to which of these two strands is the more “original.” This debate demonstrates more clearly than most others the futility of making conclusions regarding “the historical Jesus” depend on individual verses and what can be inferred from them. The fact is that both strands are well rooted in and run through the Synoptic tradition.[48] Both are characteristic of the Synoptic Jesus. How dare we exegetes and expositors insist on squeezing such diverse traditions into a single mold and on squeezing out what does not fit our own ideas of consistency and good sense? It is much more responsible for historians and exegetes to recognize that this double characteristic of the Jesus tradition is best explained as a double characteristic of Jesus’ own teaching and mission. The overall two-sided impact of Jesus remains clear, even if it remains unclear how the two sides were held together by Jesus and his first disciples.
A fourth obvious example is the son of man/Son of Man tradition in the Gospels.[49] Here again, the picture is clear beyond peradventure. The tradition that Jesus used the phrase “son of man” is so thoroughly rooted in the Gospel tradition, and so conspicuous by its relative disuse in the Judaism of Jesus’ day, as by its almost total absence from early Christian tradition elsewhere,[50] that on any sensible reckoning it can have originated only within the Jesus tradition. What is also striking is that the phrase appears so consistently on Jesus’ own lips. It is not an identifying label used by others: Is Jesus the Son of Man? It is not a confession used by his disciples: Jesus is the Son of Man. All that the tradition requires us to say—but it does require us to say it—is that Jesus himself used the phrase. Here again, this compelling deduction does not require us to argue that every son of man/Son of Man saying derived directly from Jesus. But the fact that any working over of the tradition worked within the tradition of a phrase used only by Jesus assuredly confirms that the original form of the tradition derived directly from and directly reflects Jesus’ own characteristic usage. On the basis of the data it is also possible to argue that the titular usage “the Son of Man” is in some/many cases at least a firming up of the Aramaic idiom, “the son of man,” that is, “someone,” “a man like me.” What is not credible as an explanation for the data is that the complete motif was initially inserted into the Jesus tradition at a post-Easter or later stage. That some scholars should continue to argue to that effect,[51] despite the overwhelming testimony of the data, is in my view an example of methodological perversity.
It is with regard to the son of man/Son of Man sayings that the tendency to set individual verses in antithesis to each other, and to use one to disqualify the other as evidence of Jesus’ own usage, has run amok. If Jesus spoke of the son of man in terms of his present activity, he evidently cannot also have spoken of the suffering Son of Man or of the coming Son of Man! If Jesus looked for vindication in or through the Son of Man, he cannot have used the phrase to describe his own mission![52] Here again, a twentieth-century logic has been imported into the debate, and atomistic exegesis has been used to fragment a complex but quite plausibly coherent motif. To be sure, there is scope for debating how a philological idiom (“son of man” = “man,” “one”) could cohere with reference to the vision of Dan. 7 (“one like a son of man” [RSV] coming on clouds to the Ancient of Days). The point here, however, is that both usages are well rooted in and quite well spread across the Jesus tradition. A search for the characteristic rather than the idiosyncratic Jesus suggests that we should try to make sense of both emphases within the son of man/Son of Man material before assigning one or the other to subsequent christological redaction.
The kingdom of God and the son of man/Son of Man traditions in the Synoptic Gospels provide the best examples of the case for and value of a search for the characteristic Jesus rather than the differently distinctive Jesus. The examples could easily be multiplied. It is clear, for instance, that Jesus was known as a highly successful exorcist: his success as an exorcist and his reputation as an exorcist are both clearly attested in the Jesus tradition; and more than one collection of Jesus’ teaching on the subject has been preserved within the Synoptic tradition.[53] Whatever might be made of particular instances of exorcism in Jesus’ mission, it can hardly be denied that he acted as an exorcist and healed people who were possessed. It would be odd indeed if a scholar accepted that Jesus acted as an exorcist but refused to accept that any of the actual accounts of Jesus’ exorcisms are based on sound memories of events in Jesus’ mission. It is equally self-evident, but in this case much less controversial, that Jesus was an effective teacher of aphoristic and parabolic wisdom. The characteristic Jesus was a parabolist, a mošēl, one who typically spoke in parables and pithy sayings (mĕšālîm).
More striking for its characteristic distinctiveness is Jesus’ use of the term “Amen.” The term is familiar in both Hebrew and Aramaic (ʾāmēn) and marks a strong solemn affirmation of what has been said, most typically in a formal liturgical context. And the Jesus tradition gives clear testimony that Jesus used the term consistently in his own teaching.[54] But he did so in a quite distinctive way. For whereas in regular usage “Amen” affirmed or endorsed the words of someone else, in the Jesus tradition the term is used without exception to introduce and endorse Jesus’ own words.[55] This quite unique usage can hardly be attributed to the early Christians; their own use of “Amen” was in accord with the traditional pattern.[56] Of course, once again, we can hardly exclude the likelihood that in performing the tradition the tradents/teachers extended the motif within the tradition. But neither can it be seriously doubted that the usage began with Jesus and was a characteristically distinctive feature of his own teaching style. Why else would the term have been retained throughout the Jesus tradition and in transliterated form? That must be one of the most secure conclusions capable of being derived from a serious engagement with the tradition-history of Jesus’ teaching. And an obvious corollary lies close to hand: that Jesus used this formula to call attention to what he was about to say and to give it added weight.
Finally, two other characteristic features of the Jesus tradition are worth noting, one because it is surprisingly neglected, and the other because it runs counter to a thesis at present widely influential. The first is the fact that the Jesus tradition is consistently presented as having a starting point in the mission of John the Baptist. This is attested not only in each of the four Gospels, but the collection of teaching material known as Q also begins with John the Baptist tradition, as do the summary presentations of the good news regarding Jesus in Acts (1:21–22; 10:37). What this suggests is that the Jesus tradition was always seen as having a narrative shape, as recalling a mission with a particular starting point. This in turn suggests that the Gospel shape of the Jesus story actually reflects the shape both of Jesus’ actual mission and of the earliest disciples’ rememberings of it.
Second, the motif of judgment on “this generation” is widely regarded as reflecting negative experiences in the later Christian mission and consequently as indicating redaction of the Q document.[57] But here again, the motif is widespread in the Synoptic tradition and relatively absent elsewhere, which surely indicates, yet once again, that this was a characteristic motif of Jesus’ own preaching and that it was recalled and retained within the Jesus tradition for the same reason.[58] What kind of idealization of “the historical Jesus” prevents us from concluding that Jesus also expressed some irritation at the negative response to his message?
To sum up, it is not difficult to build up a picture of the characteristic Jesus—a Jesus who began his mission from his encounter with John the Baptist; a Jew who operated within Galilee, within the framework of the Judaism of the period and in debate with others influential in shaping the Judaism of the period; a Jesus who characteristically proclaimed the royal rule of God both as coming to full effect soon and as already active through his ministry; a Jesus who regularly used the phrase “the son of man,” probably as a way of speaking of his own mission and of his expectations regarding its outcome; a Jesus who was a successful exorcist and knew it; a Jesus whose characteristic mode of teaching was in aphorisms and parables; a Jesus whose “Amen” idiom expressed a high evaluation of the importance of what he said; a Jesus who reacted strongly against the apathy and disdain that his message frequently encountered.
I could go on to amass further characteristics of the characteristic Jesus, but hopefully enough has already been said to indicate how substantial a portrayal can readily be achieved by simply directing our quest to the characteristic Jesus. I repeat, such a reconstruction does not guarantee the historical accuracy of recall of any particular saying or episode. But the method must certainly provide a much sounder basis for a historical reconstruction than one that depends on the evaluation of particular sayings and episodes. Not only so, but a recognition that a motif is firmly rooted within and across the Jesus tradition may be the decisive factor in deciding the witness-value of particular sayings and episodes. The presence of such a characteristic motif, in fact, begins to reverse the normal twentieth-century burden-of-proof argument. Where a particular saying or episode reflects such a characteristic motif, scholarship should be asking not “Why should it be attributed to Jesus?” but “Why should it not be attributed to Jesus?”
From these three chapters I therefore conclude: Remembering Jesus really means what it says, that the Jesus tradition was a way of remembering Jesus, showing how Jesus was remembered, and enabling us today still to share in these rememberings. My threefold thesis can be summed up simply. First, Jesus made an impact on those who became his first disciples, well before his death and resurrection. That impact was expressed in the first formulations of the Jesus tradition, formulations already stable before the influence of his death and resurrection was experienced. Second, the mode of oral performance and oral transmission of these formulations means that the force of that original impact continued to be expressed through them, notwithstanding or rather precisely because the performances were varied to suit different audiences and situations. As its lasting form still attests, the Jesus tradition was neither fixed nor static, but living in quality and effect. And third, the characteristic features running through and across the Jesus tradition give us a clear indication of the impression Jesus made on his disciples during his mission. As that doyen of British NT scholarship, C. H. Dodd, put it in his last significant book: “The first three gospels offer a body of sayings on the whole so consistent, so coherent, and withal so distinctive in manner, style and content, that no reasonable critic should doubt, whatever reservations he may have about individual sayings, that we find here reflected the thought of a single, unique teacher.”[59] The resulting picture of Jesus is not an objective description. There is no credible “historical Jesus” behind the Gospel portrayal different from the characteristic Jesus of the Synoptic tradition. There is no Galilean Jesus available to us other than the one who left such a strong impression in and through the Jesus tradition. But this assuredly is the historical Jesus that the Christian wants to encounter. And should the scholar and historian be content with anything less?