Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear! From out of the past come the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver! The Lone Ranger rides again!
—Introduction to The Lone Ranger radio show, 1933–1956
Jesus is the ultimate man alone—preaching, healing, heroically prophesying, bestowing grace and love, but always at a remove. Or so Christians think. Jesus has no real need of people, which is lucky, since everyone in his life proves to be unreliable. He has no teachers, no mentors, no true comrades. He has no lover. He lives in company, but he suffers alone. When he speaks to Mary of Magdala after his Resurrection, it is to say, “Do not hold me.” Jesus is the beau ideal of modern individualism—and this is another reason his thoroughgoing participation in Israel is forgotten.
If Jesus had no need of fellowship, what need could he have of fellow Jews? This marked individualism has stamped, also, a certain kind of stoic human masculinity. Real men stand alone, and if they are seen to suffer, it is in radical isolation. Jesus is the paradigmatic male, rising above adversity and tribulation—surpassing it by sheer force of will. It helped in his case that his will was tethered to eternity.
Who was Christ actually? A fully integrated person, yet could Jesus have come into himself except as a member of a people—except in relationship to others? Ironically, even contemporary Jesus scholarship seeks a historical Jesus who stands “behind” the impressions of others—behind and alone. Thus, historians seek to debunk as less authentic those exact characteristics that friends and followers of Jesus reported of him, that he shared with others, and that allowed him to become who he was. Many Jesus historians assume, that is, that the mythical Jesus “behind” the texts, whether the Gospels or the epistles, is a solitary figure whom those texts, refracted through memory or mythmaking, distort. The historians’ holy grail is an uninterpreted Jesus: can such a figure really exist?1
For our purposes, it must be emphasized that the hyper-individualism of modernity is another obstacle to an authentic sense of the Jewishness of Jesus—and therefore of his deep humanness. As a first-century male, was he really so independent? Seeing Jesus as an avatar of solitude attributes to him more than a lifestyle. It is also a moral stance. How can compassion, or love in any form, be understood as ethically central if the greatest virtue of human existence is high-minded endurance alone?
We are twenty-first-century people considering a first-century man, but our perceptions, whether knowingly or not, are inevitably colored by the seventeenth-century’s hyper-elevation of the individual above the community.
The mythical “I” of Descartes was the solitary self cut off from all certainty except that arising from its own thinking. This absolutizing of one’s own consciousness effectively relativized everything else, which led not only to a philosophical worldview centered solely on the perceiving self, but to an economy—laissez-faire capitalism—that girded the planet with structures of selfishness. In keeping with the preoccupation of this book, though, the major point here is that modern individualism, too, was called radically into question by the Holocaust, a crime abetted, at least in part, by the broad culture of amoral self-interest that marks modernity.
Ironically, the diabolical twist the Nazis brought to this question involved the total obliteration of individual identity as Jews and others were routinely deprived of all particularity, herded in masses, reduced to numbers, forced to wear badges that obscured all marks of personality but membership in the despised group. Meanwhile, those outside the targeted circle, retreating into what set them apart, found it possible as individuals not to care. The cult of the bystander was born. Jews were outside every community of concern—decidedly including the Church—even as every community of concern continually shrank. The Nazis sought to eliminate a targeted collective by shoring up the radical self-interest of individuals who, for survival’s sake, embraced a totalizing solitude apart from all collectives, with perhaps the family—the self writ as large as it could be—being the single exception.
Multiple accounts of survival under Nazi occupation suggest how all forms of commonwealth were undermined by gnawing dread. Distrust was general. People passing one another in the streets of Europe made no contact, not even with their eyes. No one was untouched by what the Nazis did. It takes nothing from the particular responsibility of the war criminals to acknowledge that their demonic regime compromised all who were oppressed by it. This is what totalitarian systems do, and the German version implicated an entire continent in the breakdown of human solidarity. This destruction of individual identity in the course of the destruction of the group, by means of a fascist cultivation of a broader self-centeredness, was part of what led, after the war, to the corrective reaction that followed—a stalwart calling into question of the solipsism to which European culture had been reduced.
Against the lone-wolf assumptions of modernity, the idea that human life is essentially the life of relationship was recovered in the post-Holocaust period in part through a reignited and broad interest in the work of a Jew named Martin Buber. Born in Vienna in 1878, the same year that Germany’s first anti-Semitic political party was founded, Buber was driven out of Germany as an adult, survived the war in Jerusalem, and came into his broadest influence as a postwar religious thinker confronting the moral meaning of what he called “the eclipse of God.”2 Buber did not directly take up the Holocaust as his subject, but this profoundly religious man’s new preoccupation with the modern absence of God speaks volumes about that catastrophe’s effect. Indeed, Buber can be understood to have been carrying to its next stage the inquiry about “religionlessness” that Bonhoeffer had begun but never pursued. No “Death of God” thinker, Buber was nevertheless one of those who dared to take the measure of the collapse of traditional God talk and faith.
But it was Buber’s 1923 masterpiece, I and Thou, that once more broke the surface with power, taking on fresh significance after the war. That classic was now read in the wholly new context of shadows thrown by the chimneys. The Jewish Holocaust scholar Richard Rubenstein wrote, “Within Buber’s thought, one can interpret the Holocaust as the most radical extension of the domain of I-It.”3 And indeed, that was how many read Buber in the late 1940s and 1950s. His elevation of relationship over isolation—solidary over solitary, in Albert Camus’s formulation4—became a defining counterpoint for postwar existentialism. “All real living,” Buber wrote, “is meeting.” One consequence of this emphasis is the recognition that “the fundamental reality of human existence is to be found not in conceptual abstractions, but in concrete human relationships.”5 Not in “I think, therefore I am,” but in “How are you?” But for Buber, the human encounter points beyond itself, which is its grandeur, for only by meeting fellow humans can a person meet God—“the eternal Thou.”
Buber’s work was controversial, with some reading him as abandoning the mediating function of religion for a direct mystical encounter with God.6 Jews worried about the Law; Christians about the Sacraments. But they missed a crucial point. The biblical religion is emphatic in asserting that God’s covenant is with the collective, and individuals find their meaning only within that collective: Buber takes such mediation for granted. The almost explosive reemergence of Buber’s early book after the war shows how the centrality of relatedness he emphasized was revalorized. Far from diminishing the ancient tradition, Buber was retrieving for an unprecedented circumstance the meaning of covenant—whether “Old” or “New,” for Jews and Christians alike. The language of the words “I and Thou” brought the sacredness of relationship back to the forefront of awareness. Therefore, “I and Thou” was a pivot, also, in the transformed perceptions of, like so much else, Jesus Christ—a lone ranger no more.
Modern individualism, then, but also an incipient postwar correction to it, are the bifocal lenses through which we see the first century. Christians might have long thought of Jesus as an isolated figure, yet the Gospels show him as essentially social—quintessentially personal—both in how he spent his days (eating, teaching, healing, with only exceptional times in solitary retreat) and in his purpose (establishing a movement marked by sharing, compassion—God’s “Kingdom” was never seen more clearly than at the table over bread and wine). He depended on local hospitality, led a large group, and deployed them to imitate his work and sayings. The meaning of Jesus, in the movement of his life, was defined by his relationships and shaped by his interactions.
It is not too much to say that Jesus, from infancy forward, came into his “selfhood” through his relations with others—beginning with the smile he surely had from his mother. This has been potentially true of every human who ever lived, even if the word “self” comes to the modern ear with implications unknown to ancients. Indeed, scholars tell us that there was no word in ancient Latin or Greek for “self” as it is understood in contemporary usage. But something like the modern meaning was conveyed by Greek words like “autos” and “nous,” and the Delphic oracle surely spoke to the ages with its exhortation “Know thyself.” Indeed, philosophy begins in the quest for just such knowledge—the self-awareness that undergirds all behavior, all choice, and the moral consciousness on which every religious impulse stands. But to the ancients, such purposeful interiority, however described, was arrived at by means of bodily encounters through which the soul became whole. And the ancients, even without the encouragement of Buber, took those encounters as an opening to encounters with the deity.7
Two of the Gospels, Matthew and Luke, begin, as if attuned to modern psychology and language theory, with Jesus’ intimate relationship with his mother: their exchange of smiles, the babble opening to words, responsiveness to unconditional regard, for which infants—we would say now—are genetically programmed. The quality of Mary’s nurturing of her son, the precondition of his growth in “wisdom and in stature,”8 shows itself in the life he led. Mary’s mothering of the babe rightly informs the great icon of the Western imagination—Madonna and child—and is enough to explain why she is venerated.
But for purposes of our rediscovery of Christ, the better starting point is proposed by the Gospels of John and Mark, from both of which the Madonna and child are absent. Instead these texts bring the story of Jesus into immediate focus not with nativity, but with his adult meeting of the character named John the Baptist. Jesus’ bond with John, and then the tension between them, forms, we will see, the core of what makes faith matter. Our starting point is the recognition that the entire drama of Mark, in particular, is incited by the meeting of these two: “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.” Jesus came into his identity not by himself, but, first, by encountering John, in whose presence, Mark says, Jesus saw “the heavens opened.” He heard God’s voice declaring, “Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased.”9 In meeting the Thou of John, Jesus met the eternal Thou of God. What was that? Because the story comes to us encrusted with piety—a Bible story—we can hardly hear of this epiphany as something occurring in the life of a normal human being. Instead this encounter with the Holy One is remembered as the start of what set Jesus apart from the rest of us.
But is that right? Humans are set apart from other sentient beings by the act of knowing. That capacity depends on utterly material circumstances, like chemical interactions in the brain and the wiring of neurons, yet it opens into the immaterial world of consciousness. We are set apart from other animals, which share the capacity for some kind of knowledge, by our knowledge that we know. Dogs are aware, but humans are self-aware. That, too, opens into an even more expansive immateriality. This double knowing—knowing that we know—points beyond itself to an experience for which there are no intellectual or linguistic categories, but which humans have nevertheless constantly stretched to express. Brain cells may generate this realm of mind, but they fall far short of explaining it. The mind by definition leaps from gray matter to enlightenment.
The exquisite subtlety of human consciousness, in other words, can account for everything but itself. Following, in effect, a three-stage movement, knowing opens into knowing that we know, which can open, in turn, into knowing that we are known. Consciousness leans toward some kind of—what to call it?—primal consciousness that includes all consciousness in itself. Religion puts the name of God on that transcendent knower, whom Jesus recognized as “Father.”
From this point of the story on, Jesus, a Galilean nobody no longer, will preach that everyone is known in this way, held in just such unconditional positive regard—and that everyone has the right to call God “Father.” As others would hear this life-changing—history-changing—good news from Jesus, Jesus heard it from the unlikely John. What Jesus would become to those who later followed him, that is, John the Baptist was to him.
“In those days” is the biblical word package that points only vaguely to a crease in time. In this case, the opening phrase deflects attention away from whatever mundane stuff of life had defined Jesus’ “coming from Galilee,” as the texts puts it, and being “baptized by John.” There is no historically reliable information about what led Jesus to John, or about how long the two were together. The assumption Christians make is that the encounter was brief, and almost staged. It’s as if John were standing on the shady side of an oasis when Jesus happened by. John is a Jewish preacher, effectively rallying his listeners to a life of repentance. But now a sudden inspiration comes over John and he is moved, almost against his will, to yield his own messianic ambition in favor of this stranger. A veteran actor who’d signed on as the leading man is ambushed by the director, and abruptly relegated to the role of sidekick, when a more obscure matinee-idol-to-be comes along. A star is born.
This threshold moment in what is read as a God-written drama moves Jesus out of the anonymity of his life as a carpenter’s son in Nazareth and into the “public ministry” that would efficiently set him on the perilous road to Jerusalem. Thus, John makes his appearance in this, the Gospel of Mark’s first scene, already in a decidedly supporting role. Indeed, even the lines given John to speak emphasize his subsidiarity, since the showstopping words “Behold, the Lamb of God” originate not with him but with Isaiah, who spoke of the lamb led to the slaughter.10 John’s function as the lowly herald of the elevated Jesus is made crystal clear: “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”11
But this account is all too sparse, and, given the importance of John in relationship to Jesus, it cries out for elaboration. In Mark, Jesus moves promptly on from the encounter: “The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.” Only a single verse further on, Jesus is shown returning from his undescribed sojourn in the wild, but the entrance is very much on cue. And the cue is what happened to the Baptist: “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled.’”12 The prophet’s arrest was the punctuation of the fulfillment Jesus announced. Though John the Baptist’s tragic fate as a victim of the sadistic Herod—John will be beheaded—is soon passingly referred to in flashback, John disappears from the narrative.
It is not enough to have a figure of this significance—the one in whose presence Jesus first sees God—cross so briefly into and out of the story. John the Baptist has haunted the Christian imagination, but from the margin: he marks the end of the Old Testament, not the beginning of the New. Yet undergirding the symbolic—and theological—function of this eccentric man was a real person, and historians find in him a decisive clue to the meaning of the one whose sandal he pointed to. We can know with certainty almost nothing about the life of Jesus, or his associations, before his arrival on the Gospel scene as a man of about thirty, but we owe it to a full grasp of his humanness to exercise an act of informed imagination, measuring what we conjure against what scholars call the criterion of plausibility.
Historians tell us now that John the Baptist was a great and well-known figure of the time. Josephus, whose chronicles we have cited in relation to the war, took John’s fame for granted. He gave John a climactic role in the story of the downfall of Herod Antipas, Rome’s puppet ruler of Galilee and Perea, the region to the east of the Jordan River, down to the Dead Sea:
Antipas had married the daughter of Aretas, the King of Petra. On a journey to Rome Antipas had stayed with a half-brother “Herod,” the son of King Herod and his wife, the daughter of Simon the high priest. While there, Antipas had fallen in love with his half-brother’s wife, Herodias. Herodias agreed to marry Antipas after his return from Rome on condition he divorced the daughter of Aretas. Before Antipas’ return from Rome, the daughter of Aretas realized what was happening and fled back to her father. As a result Aretas invaded Antipas’ territory. Antipas’ army was defeated which some Jews saw as divine vengeance for Antipas’ execution of John the Baptist. Antipas is stated to have executed John because he feared John’s teachings could lead to unrest.13
As the reader knows, twentieth-century New Testament scholarship was transformed with the discoveries by archaeologists—and shepherds—of ancient papyri rolled into earthenware jars and squirreled away in caves, most momentously including the already referred to Dead Sea Scrolls, found in 1947.14 These texts laid bare the ideologies, cults, and commitments of numerous Jewish sects actively expressing opposition around the time of Jesus to Roman occupation and to the Hellenized corruptions of the collaborating rulers, like John’s antagonist, Herod. The Qumran community had withdrawn into the cave-ridden hills above the Dead Sea, embracing precisely the kind of radical asceticism the Gospels associate with John the Baptist. He was no rogue apocalyptist, a solitary voice in the wilderness, in other words; rather, he was typical of a broad Jewish counterculture on the lookout for ways to separate from the inhuman—and blasphemous—milieu of occupation.
This charismatic figure’s pronounced message of repentance falls on the modern ear as a familiar species of religious preaching, but John’s proclamation involved, in context, a profoundly political campaign. It helps to recall again that the modern distinction between religion and politics—and the modern impulse to wall religion off from the rest of life—was unknown in the ancient world. There was no such thing as “religion,” in fact—only life lived under the sovereignty of God. For Jews, it was God’s sovereignty that was at stake in various political alignments, which is why forced submission to foreign power was always problematic. Without a full sense of the dispiriting effect of Roman oppression, that is, contemporary readers of the Gospel simply cannot appreciate John the Baptist’s appeal.
The Baptist’s stern repudiation of physical pleasure—he punished himself by wearing a hair shirt and eating wild locusts—comes to modern Christians as a spiritualized puritanism, but it was more than that. In Galilee and Judea, Roman agents, together with a collaborating aristocracy and cooperative petty landowners, all under the protective watch of Herod’s henchmen—and Roman legions at the ready—operated a vast mechanism of economic exploitation, benefiting a small minority at the expense of everyone else. Imperial colonialism always squeezes treasure and blood out of those whom it dispossesses, and the chokehold on the people of Palestine in the time of Jesus was particularly savage. Peasants were thrown off land, laborers were deprived of work, artisans went unrewarded—or, if they did find employment, it was at slave wages, and even that pittance was harshly taxed. Patterns of ordinary family cohesion were disrupted, with old people badly cared for, the young deprived of hope. Many people were made destitute and homeless, and there were few, if any, prospects for betterment. Within recent memory, those who had openly protested such conditions had been efficiently—brutally—dealt with. It was to such a demoralized population that John’s message of personal change by means of religious awakening rang with power: Your repentance will bring about the intervention of God!
There is every reason to assume that Jesus, raised in a village in Galilee that offered scant prospects for work, meaning, or respect, came of age looking for an alternative way of life. Nazareth was less than four miles from Sepphoris, a city that had been violently subdued by Roman legions around the time of Jesus’ birth and lavishly transformed into a regional showplace of Hellenized style and taste. The likes of Nazareth villagers had been tossed out of Sepphoris and were not welcomed back. For a young Orthodox Jew growing up in a disenfranchised backwater close enough to whiff the ungodly aromas of affluence, but also to feel the threat of the garrison, Sepphoris would have been a goad. The bite of Greco-Roman social exclusion and emphatic manifestations of relative economic disadvantage were constant insults. No to all of this! The restless refusal to accept unjust things as they are that marks most young men as they come of age is plausibly what drove Jesus south, into the Jordan Valley.15
Historians accept as factual gospel characterizations of Jesus as itinerant, possessing nothing, effectively a beggar—probably, as we saw, an illiterate one at that. Perhaps he chose such a state of radical dispossession, but it is equally conceivable that, as a Galilean nobody, he was poor and vagrant without any choice in the matter. Historians accept that he had numerous siblings: why not picture Jesus as a young man who left home because his mouth was just one too many at a table where there was rarely enough food? In his early twenties, why wouldn’t he have been drawn to the tough-minded Jordan Valley figure whose repudiations of material comfort amounted to a transforming embrace of the impoverishment to which most were condemned in any case?
What would have made John irresistible, though, was the sure certitude with which he promised an imminent overturning of the conditions of oppression, an intervention by the God of Israel, whose great deeds in behalf of His chosen people constituted the core of Jewish memory. What God had done in the past, God was about to do again. By means of his symbolic ritual with water, the Baptist offered those who heeded him a way of taking action now for the sake of this future expectation. By accepting baptism at the hands of John, therefore, the young Jesus did far more than enact a ritual. We conjecture here, but with plausibility: he joined a movement. Jesus grew in “wisdom and stature,” as a committed disciple not of an over-the-hill movie star, but of the most charismatic Jew of the age.
To gain such fame, and to draw a following significant enough to be noted by Josephus, John would necessarily have been actively preaching for a substantial period of time. His community could well have had the cohesion, structure, and solidity scholars now know to associate with Qumran. Certainly, with the symbolic use of baptismal water, John’s movement had its ritualized cult, probably showing the influence of the Qumran ascetics for whom washing was a sacred purification. There is no reason not to imagine that Jesus regarded John as a mentor, and even that Jesus served as an assistant to John. It is plausible, given the Gospel hints of the strong bond between them, that Jesus became one of John’s intimate inner circle. From John, then, Jesus would have learned the ways of preaching that depended on the application of Torah to the current plight of Israel. Jesus at twenty-two, twenty-five, twenty-eight: this life could well have been the life of Jesus for most of a decade.16
The first thing to say about Jesus’ relationship to John, in other words, is that Jesus, far from going through the motions of a scripted prelude to his own drama, was personally drawn to John as the solution to his own problem of absolute dispossession and the despair that threatened to come of it. John enabled Jesus to embrace his first idea of himself. John, therefore, was a source of meaning for Jesus. And the meaning was structured around John’s preaching of the apocalypse.
We have seen how the Jewish air in that period was pumped full of End Time expectation. The rather desperate hope that mundane experience was soon to be interrupted by a divine intervention for the sake of restoring the ancient sovereignty of Israel should itself be taken as a signal of the failure of what might be called normal hope for a better life. The point is that, because of Rome, normal hope was impossible. Jews looked instead to the stories of their past, which—as told annually at Passover, weekly in Sabbath ritual and daily by Torah observance—amounted to a history of salvation. If God could stay the hand of Pharaoh, why not that of Caesar? If God could raise up a David once, why not again? So apocalyptic expectation could seem reasonable and realistic—a fulfillment of the promise that, so the collective tradition said, had again and again been vindicated. Given Rome’s omnipotence, an expectation of God’s intervention was the only alternative to the suicide of rebellion or the complicity of resignation.
Twenty-first-century people find talk of an apocalyptic end of history crackpot, but it was not unusual in the ancient world—and not just among Jews. World-ending combat between forces of light and dark was a Mesopotamian idea before it was biblical, and Hellenistic thought was rife with apocalyptic myth. From oracles and sibyls all over the Mediterranean, prophecies of what we might call millennial expectation were common in Jesus’ time. The word “millennial” is a clue, pointing to the decisive succession of epochs broken into thousand-year increments. Contemporary people mistakenly assume that the thousand-year motif originates with a calendar that starts at the birth of Jesus, with mad millennial fevers peaking after one thousand years in Europe’s medieval dances of death and the Crusades; or, in the last decades of the next millennium, in the Thousand-Year Reich of Hitler. But the millennial idea is more complex—and ubiquitous—than the calendar sparked by Jesus. Virgil, for example, in the Aeneid, describes how the majority of mortals, after death, enjoy the “blessed field of Elysium, but after a thousand years” are summoned by the gods to return into the prison of their bodies.17 The mechanism of cyclical time, too, revolves around the number 1,000.
Postmodern sophisticates of the North Atlantic nations may look back askance at primitives in the grip of one kind of millennial fever or another, yet we did not, despite such condescension, hesitate to stock up on water and cash ahead of the so-called Y2K phenomenon of the year 2000. That that much-dreaded computer glitch amounted, in the end, to nothing laid bare its subliminal irrationality. What began as a two-digit anomaly attached to the internal clocks of machines had blossomed into a full-blown metaphor for all that humans fear. A short time later came the 9/11 attacks, in 2001, a televised tower of Babel, the sky endlessly falling. The wild disproportion that marked the catastrophic American responses to that Al Qaeda attack cannot be understood apart from the primal human mind-set that fits the destruction of cities, whether New York or Jerusalem, into apocalyptic narratives. Americans, too, caught millennial fever. The United States embarked on the explicitly religious project of ending evil, and its leading thinkers spoke of the end of history.18 More broadly, “the war to end all wars,” a perennial dream of the liberal democracies, is a secular version of millennial End Time fulfillment.
Ancient imagination, speaking generally, assumed that time was a flow of cycles, an eternal return reflected among Egyptians in the tidal flow of the Nile, and among Greeks in the repetitive transits of heavenly bodies. Human experience was taken to endlessly redouble on itself, and to be, therefore, headed nowhere. In Plato’s Republic, for example, Socrates relates the legend of Er, a story about the cyclical fate of souls turning on the “spindle of necessity,” forever coming and going through oblivion and forgetfulness. In the Aeneid, as noted, Virgil reports the same dynamic at work in the underworld, where souls are “suspended upon the winds . . . washed through with flooding waters . . . until time comes round.” It is then that souls, having drunk from the river of forgetfulness, are sent back to “the prison of their bodies” to begin the futile sojourn once again. Human happiness can be had only by way of contemplative withdrawal from agon, for struggle in a world defined by cycles is pointless.19
The Bible, from its creation story forward, proposes something very different—a linear conception of time that actually has a beginning: “In the beginning, God . . .”20 If time starts, then time ends. The past is never repeated in the future. The future is the locus of fulfillment, so in the present, fulfillment is by design elusive. Experience is a flow from event to consequence, with moral events defined by human choice. This flow is called history, and while humans are actors in it, they are not characters in a play scripted by God. Their agency is decisive, which makes history purposeful. Meaning comes not from escaping history, but from engaging it. We live in a limited, conditional world. There is no escape from it—or from the “prison of the body.” To be alive to this structure of time is to be ever on the lookout for its conclusion. Yet the conclusion of history, while ultimately an act of its Creator, depends in part on human struggle toward that conclusion—which is the point of responsible engagement. Agon is not to be escaped, but taken on.
But this very structure of experience is revelatory, for humans quickly learn that to find the meaning of anything in time requires an appeal to, or a gift from, something timeless. Only what is outside of time can fully account for what occurs within it. That paradox, rooted in the very structure of consciousness we touched on earlier, is inevitably unsettling. The present moment inevitably leans toward a future moment, as it breaks in. That “leaning toward” defines the posture of human awareness. Restlessness, therefore, is not to be regretted, but marshaled. Humans live toward. Religion speaks of this in the language of apocalyptic longing. This apocalyptic instinct is not crackpot, but normal.
The biblical view of history, still speaking generally, was epochal, with epochs understood by analogies drawn from Scripture, including the stories of individual covenants—Adam, Noah, etc.—we looked at earlier. Here we see the foundational, pre-Christian character of millennial thinking—a biblical adaptation of the common fixation on the number 1,000. One common scheme, for example, understood each of the six days of creation as corresponding to a period of one thousand years, the sum of epochs equating to the completed span of history: at six thousand years, time’s up. If the biblical genealogy—all those Hebrew Scripture “begats”—suggests an arithmetic that puts the creation of Adam at more than five millennia before the time of Jesus,21 then the End Time could indeed be understood by Jesus’ contemporaries as somehow nigh. Among the scribes and interpreters of oracles, such a calculation could have had the authority of what passed for science.
We have already noted, with Daniel Boyarin, that the book of Daniel had all-trumping currency in the period just before, during, and after the lifetime of Jesus. Daniel gave interpreters the images and language with which to transform demoralization and defeat into the glorious prospect of restoration. Indeed, scholars like Boyarin, analyzing the manuscripts found in the Dead Sea caves, have recognized that, among that community of Jewish Zealots—with whom John the Baptist could well have been associated—the book of Daniel was key. Dozens of Daniel fragments were uncovered in those scrolls, suggesting that the book ranked in the Qumran library with the Psalms, Isaiah, and the Pentateuch.22 And Daniel, above all other texts, was taken to propose an eschatological time frame that had immediate relevance. Indeed, Daniel was read as the angel Gabriel’s End Time announcement:
So he came near where I stood; and when he came, I was frightened and fell upon my face. But he said to me, “Understand, O son of man, that the vision is for the time of the end.” As he was speaking to me, I fell into a deep sleep with my face to the ground; but he touched me and set me on my feet. He said, “Behold, I will make known to you what shall be at the latter end of the indignation; for it pertains to the appointed time of the end. As for the ram which you saw with the two horns, these are the kings of Media and Persia. And the he-goat is the king of Greece; and the great horn between his eyes is the first king. As for the horn that was broken, in place of which four others arose, four kingdoms shall arise from his nation, but not with his power. And at the latter end of their rule, when the transgressors have reached their full measure, a king of bold countenance, one who understands riddles, shall arise. His power shall be great, and he shall cause fearful destruction, and shall succeed in what he does, and destroy mighty men and the people of the saints. By his cunning he shall make deceit prosper under his hand, and in his own mind he shall magnify himself. Without warning he shall destroy many; and he shall even rise up against the Prince of princes; but, by no human hand, he shall be broken. The vision of the evenings and the mornings which has been told is true.”23
This vision is explicitly addressed by Gabriel to the “Son of Man,” with whom Jesus was eventually identified, and with whom, at some point, Jesus might have identified himself. The epochs of history are plain enough here—the division of time into eras ruled by four kingdoms, including the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and, marking the end of this progression, the Romans. “When the transgressors have reached their full measure”: There is the tolling of the bell. And if Rome was not at the full measure of its iniquity in the time of John the Baptist, when would it be?
• • •
Jesus certainly took for granted the cosmology of his time—and the time of his cosmology. Yet because he, too, was defined by the limits of the human condition, his growth in wisdom and stature was a characteristically human matter of trial and error; of mistakes made and learned from; of ideas embraced and discarded; and of the moral lapses that would have made real the need for repentance that brought him to John.
But plausibly assuming him to have been in John’s company for a considerable period of time, years perhaps, he surely would have confronted the problem that apocalyptic expectation always eventually generates. John preached the vision of “the evening and the morning,” but its being true assumed a dawn that refused to come. John’s vision was for a time of the End, but the End kept postponing itself. The apocalyptic problem that would later bedevil the followers of Jesus must have first bedeviled John.
Jesus broke with John.24 We do not know why, but the failure of an apocalyptic calendar would explain that turn in the story as well as anything. After what we are presuming to have been a considerable period, after an enormous investment of hope, after the onset of gnawing disappointment, Jesus moved on from the Jordan Valley commune. But this would have been no mere matter of impatience. More important, Jesus would have experienced a transformation in his belief about, in the phrase he read in Daniel, the rising of “a king of bold countenance, one who understands riddles.” The riddle was time,25 and Jesus probably left John because he adjusted what time meant.
We touched on this earlier, how an evolved thinking on apocalyptic expectation—whether within the solitary mind of Jesus or in the collective mind of the Jesus people later—defined the Christian movement from early on. This evolution amounted to a shift from a future longed for to a present to be responsible for. We saw how this shift defined a difference between the early Mark and the later Gospels, but that recast understanding can be said with significant plausibility to have begun in the tension between Jesus and John the Baptist. Precisely how that tension is defined, and to what extent Jesus clung to some kind of conviction that God would break into time-and-space reality to end Israel’s dispossession, are unsettled questions, but there can be no doubt that John, with his fevered apocalypticism, stands in the Gospel as the foil in contrast to whom Jesus came into his own. Who was Jesus? He was not John the Baptist. He was not a Zealot.
John Dominic Crossan suggests that Jesus had embraced John’s expectation of God’s imminent intervention in history but moved on from that way of thinking. Instead of speaking of God as imminent apocalypse, Jesus began to proclaim God as already present.26 That meant, as one scholar interprets Crossan, that “the Kingdom of God is not apocalyptic and social, but a challenge to individuals to lead a responsible, simple, radical life.”27 Other scholars, like John P. Meier, see in Jesus not a rejection of John’s teaching but an adjustment in it.28 But if the Gospels reliably report anything of these two figures, it is that there was dramatic conflict between them—conflict played out, presumably, every time Jesus donned a robe that was soft to the skin; or sat down to eat fruit and bread, drink good wine; every time he gave his warm attention to sinners; and every time he refused the role of judging moralist. In these and other ways—in deeds enacted more than in doctrines proclaimed—Jesus set his clock as much to the present as to any future; cocked his eye as much on earth as on heaven. It would be anachronistic to see, in such worldly preference of the byways and banquets of towns and villages over the unspoiled wilderness of John’s self-denying retreat, a choice of “secular” over “sacred.” The ancient world had its boundaries between holy and profane, boundaries carefully observed by Jews like Jesus, but our idea of secularity would have meant nothing to them.
Nevertheless, people of our so-called Secular Age, seeking Bonhoeffer’s “religionless Christianity” and struggling to affirm the holiness of ordinary experience, are right to recognize in Jesus, unlike many shamans, priests, and preachers of old, a sanctifying regard for what, in our categories, has nothing to do with religion. There is ample testimony in the Gospels to tell us that it was characteristic of the historical Jesus to see God in the kindly touch, the risen bread, the fallen sparrow, the fight for justice. Asceticism was not necessary for holiness.
Crossan suggests that Jesus began to live this way only after the death of John the Baptist, but the Gospels themselves suggest that Jesus’ abandonment of John came while John was alive, and that it included a harsh denigration of his former mentor as lesser than the “least” of Jesus’ own followers.29 Various New Testament texts make it plain that the Jesus people and John’s remnant movement continued to regard one another as competitors.30 Need it be emphasized again that this tension existed within a wholly Jewish context, and has nothing to do with a later conflict between “Christians” and “the Jews”?
After John was arrested by Herod, and after Jesus had come into a certain reputation of his own, the imprisoned John is said to have sent a pair of his followers to put the loaded question to Jesus: “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” Presumably, this question had importance for John because his own prospects were so bleak. Whatever his ambitions for his own movement had been, they were surely dashed by his experience now as a man on death row, with the executioner leering outside his cell. It is hard not to read an edge of panic into the question Was I wrong about you?
Jesus is shown answering directly, but not in the way John or his followers could have expected. Jesus might still have somehow expected God’s saving intervention and, as Boyarin suggests, might have begun to understand himself as a Son of Man figure charged with ushering in that intervening presence of God. But his answer to John’s disciples suggests that, for him, the intervention had taken on an altogether different meaning. A meaning that, alas for John, implied John’s doom.
In effect, Jesus said, Yes, I am the one who is to come—here right in front of you, but look, look: “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them.”31 To the modern ear, this sounds like a litany of “miracles,” as if Jesus is claiming status as a worker of wonders. As we saw earlier, wonder workers were ubiquitous in the ancient world—figures whose deeds were interpreted, within that distant cosmos of meaning, as somehow “miraculous.” Jesus can be understood—might have been understood—as such a charismatic person. But that was not at all the point of this definitive response to John’s question. Rather, Jesus was citing a text that would have been well known to John and his disciples, and, as we have seen again and again in this inquiry, the text was the point.
Jesus was identifying himself with the prophet Isaiah, whose own identification in those very words would have been known to every Jew: “The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted.”32 By invoking Isaiah in this way, Jesus was wrapping himself in the mantle of a justice-obsessed prophet, one whose preoccupation was less with the future, however imminent, than with the present condition of an oppressed and beleaguered people. Jesus had set out to make plain the distance between the injustice bedeviling almost all the people of Galilee and Judea and the call to justice that forms the heart of the Torah. That is what the Spirit of the Lord upon him meant. Jesus concluded his answer to John with this cryptic postscript: “And blessed is he who takes no offense at me.”
Offense was in the air between John and Jesus. It was everywhere around them, and how could it not have been? Jesus called John “a prophet, and more than a prophet,”33 but he himself invoked the greatest prophet of Israel to distinguish himself from John. Ironically, the word “prophet,” in contemporary usage, is associated with the capacity to see beyond today, a knack for prediction, an obsession with tomorrow. Yet the prophet’s true métier is the present, not the future. So with Jesus.
The tension between future and present defines the human condition, even if, in varied cultures across spans of history, conceptions of time within which present and future are understood have differed. It behooves us to constantly remember all that separates us from the ancient world and its meanings. As just noted, our divide between sacred and secular did not exist. Whatever distinctions were drawn between myth and fact are not the distinctions we draw, and the same is true of our contrast between faith and reason. Interpreters who forget the difference between postmodern assumptions and ancient ones are bound to fail. Nevertheless, whatever framework of meaning structured Jesus’ thinking about time, a certain perennial set of experiences can be assumed. Human tragedy, of its essence, consists in the denigration of what is in the name of what is to come. The prophets of Israel were those who called that skewed schema into question. “Real generosity toward the future,” as Camus famously put it, “lies in giving all to the present.”
The prophet might have emphasized the coming of a saving act of God, but that emphasis itself was enough to transform present perceptions. The present was the point. The transformation that mattered occurred within history, not in some End Time afterlife. Whatever the future implications of a longed-for “Day of the Lord,” the prophet’s role, in widely varying circumstances, was always to remind the people that they were already and still the elect of God, and that their one duty was to act like it. Not “then,” but “now.”
Justice! The prophet’s obsession was always with the structure of injustice imposed upon the people, even if the people had somehow become complicit in the injustice—from Hosea, for whom Pharaoh epitomized oppression, to Isaiah and Amos, who denounced the subjugation coming from Assyria, to Jeremiah, who railed against impositions by Babylonians, to Zechariah, who typified a prophetic counter to the Persian empire. And note that the context within which each prophet operated was war—just as the context within which Jesus lived was war; and as the context within which, a generation later, the Gospels and Rabbinic Judaism came into being was war. The Christian memory, shaped by the war-making empire that overtook it, deletes that fact, and we have seen to what effect.
Rome’s war making was the necessary and sufficient cause from start to finish: from John the Baptist’s cry in the wilderness to Jesus’ preaching of God’s kingdom to the Jesus movement’s shaping of memory, meaning, and scripture into Gospel. That Rome’s occupation of Palestine should have drawn a prophet’s critique was firmly within the tradition of Israel, and prophetic literature was consistently wartime literature. In line with that tradition, prudently veiled denunciations of the oppressor were always paired with an explicit call for Israel’s renewed observance of the commandments of God, for Torah was the opposite of war. Yes, John the Baptist was a prophet, and so, picking up the mantle, was Jesus, and all of this was the measure of their prophetic meaning.
Yet John and Jesus were prophets whose horizons pointed in opposite directions. The tension between John the Baptist and Jesus is the promised key to understanding the actual Christ, the renewal of his meaning that defines the purpose of this book. That tension, understood in terms of temporality—now versus “someday”—can be understood equally in terms of geography: the opposition between the “wilderness” of the Jordan Valley to which ascetics like John withdrew, on the one hand, and, on the other, the villages of Galilee, to which a man trying to make a difference in the actual lives of villagers returned.
The message Jesus carried was stark, dramatic, and clear: God’s power is addressed to the here and now, and while it is decidedly in favor of the poor, it remains permanently on offer to all. While John was imprisoned, that is, Jesus had struck out on his own, making real the munificence of God through his ministry of healing and curing—however such activity occurred, or was said to have occurred. Salvation, in the way Jesus presented it, is the present experience of humane living, decent behavior, and a physical wholeness that reflects the moral wholeness of compassion and love. Attitude is everything.
But in this tension between Jesus and John the Baptist, we detect an even deeper epiphany, the clearest signal yet of the self-understanding Jesus had come to. The revelation comes from an exquisitely composed juxtaposition given in the Gospel of Luke. There Jesus’ response to the question from John the Baptist, recounted in chapter 7, repeated the fabled citation from Isaiah that he had cited in a different context in chapter 4 of the same Gospel. In the earlier verses, Jesus had already publicly claimed Isaiah’s “good news to the poor” as his personal watchword, and then, replying to John, he repeated it—almost exactly. And that “almost” is the point.
When Jesus, having broken with the Baptist’s movement, “returned from the Jordan” to Galilee, in Luke’s telling, he went straightaway to his hometown, Nazareth. In a kind of coming-out, Jesus presented himself at the synagogue, presumably the holy place in which he had long received Torah instruction, become a bar mitzvah, and come of age as an observant Jew. He took his place at the bimah. Here is the text from Luke 4:
And there was given to him the book of the prophet Isaiah. He opened the book and found the place where it was written, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” And he closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”34
But look: In this reading at Nazareth, Jesus not only measured himself against the call to preach good news to the poor; he associated himself with a mission to “proclaim release to the captives” and “set at liberty those who are oppressed”—notes of his prophetic vocation that, in a later passage citing precisely the same text of Isaiah, as recounted in Luke 7, he omitted. In his response to the imprisoned John, that is, Jesus made no mention of release from prison. No mention of liberation.
Let’s assume for a moment that the narrative’s report of the exchange between Jesus and John’s disciples is historical. “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” John would have known the text from Isaiah very well. He might have known that Jesus was already using it as a kind of overture, claiming to be its fulfillment. One imagines John in his cell, stridently interrogating the messengers: But did he not mention the prisoners? Was there no promise of liberty to captives? John, that is, from his prison cell, would have efficiently grasped the significance of Jesus’ redaction of Isaiah.
What sort of messiah are you? was John’s question. And here was the clear answer: Not the sort who can free you from Herod’s dungeon. I am not a messiah who will lead an army, storming Herod’s fortress—not even to rescue you, dear friend. Nor am I a messiah who will work magic, causing the locks on your cell to fall open. No to violence. No to miracles. If Jesus could have rescued John, he would have. But he could not do it.
When it comes to the bounded human condition, the ultimate limitation is prison, the very essence of restricted space and time. That is why incarceration universally succeeds as punishment. Jesus, however much he “fulfilled the scripture,” was as much at the mercy of that limit as any person, and that limit informed his answer to John. It is impossible not to take this moment as one of enormous revelation, comparable to the moment, also defined by John the Baptist, when the skies parted and the Father was heard speaking from above. The heavens opened, but the prison bars stayed closed. Jesus could not offer to John a physical liberation.
It is well known of Jesus—and essential—that he was a figure of radical nonviolence in a hyper-violent world. Indeed, because violence was such a given then, and because it so defined the entire milieu in which Jesus lived, his rejection of violence is not equivalent to the pacifism of modern times, much less something softer. “This was not,” write Richard A. Horsley and Neil Asher Silberman, “mere pacifism or meekness, but the first step in the reconciliation and renewal of the People of Israel.”35 That Jesus differs from Gandhi (as Rome differed from the British Empire) does not mean, however, that the essence of their witness is not equivalent—both morally and politically. The point for us is that, in relationship to John the Baptist came the beginning of Jesus’ rejection of brute force—no matter the justification. Here is what makes Jesus the Prince of Peace. All that Jesus could offer to John was the invitation to change his attitude about his circumstance. All that Jesus could offer to anyone was a new way of thinking—the way of thinking he himself had come to.
Having learned from John who he was in relation to God, that is, Jesus here learned who he was in relation to Rome. From one point of view, John’s peril had confronted Jesus with his own impotence. What must it have cost him to admit that, when push came to shove, he could do neither? And how could he not have been crushed at having so failed his mentor and friend? But from another point of view, wasn’t this the moment of Jesus’ reckoning with the different sort of mission that was his? Jesus would not resist violently for John. Therefore, he would not resist violently for himself. No to violence. And Jesus would not “pray” John out of prison. Whatever his “curing” amounted to, this was a definitive no to miracles. No miracle for John. No miracle for anyone.
As the story then unfolds, Herod sadistically decapitates John. That savage act—John’s head on a platter for Herod’s dancing daughter is one of the most grotesque scenes in the entire Bible—can be taken as the generating event of Jesus’ own mortal resistance to the tyranny of Rome and its puppet ruler. That there was an explicitly political meaning to John’s death could not have been more obvious, and certainly Jesus saw it. Here is the account of John’s death at the hands of Herod, as given by Josephus:
Herod had put [John] to death, though he was a good man and had exhorted the Jews to live righteous lives, to practice justice toward their fellows and piety toward God, and [in] so doing join him in baptism . . . When others joined the crowds about him, because they were aroused to the highest degree by his words, Herod became alarmed. Eloquence that had so great an effect on mankind might lead to some form of sedition, for it looked as if they would be guided by John in everything they did. Herod decided it would be much better to strike first before his work led to an uprising than to wait for an upheaval, get involved in a difficult situation, and see his mistake.36
Having learned from John’s life of being radically accepted by God here and now, Jesus learned from John’s death—because it commissioned him—that God’s acceptance meant there was nothing to fear in death, even in the tinderbox over which properly insecure petty tyrants ruled. Otherwise, Jesus would not have immediately37 embarked on the challenge that took him into the very cockpit of anti-Jewish Roman violence. “During the months preceding his final journey,” in the words of Horsley and Silberman, “Jesus initiated his movement of community renewal, dedicated to restoring reciprocity and cooperation in the spirit of the dawning of the Kingdom of God. Yet his movement of revival of village life could not become just another separatist movement, withdrawing from confrontation and seeking the shelter of obscurity in the backcountry valleys and remote mountainous areas of Galilee.”38 He had to take his message to where it could change Israel.
When word came to Jesus, a few chapters on in Luke, that Herod was out to get him, too, and that he should therefore flee, Jesus did not shrink. To those who warned him of Herod, he defiantly replied, “Go and tell that fox . . .” Note that Jesus here denigrates Herod by slapping on him the label of an unclean animal, an open challenge. He goes on to say, “Behold, I cast out demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, and the third day I finish my course. Nevertheless I must go on my way today and tomorrow and the day following; for it cannot be that a prophet should perish away from Jerusalem.”39
Jesus against Jerusalem: in Christian accounting, that is how the story of this progress is often told, with its culmination in a “righteous” assault on the Temple. Jesus is remembered as having moved against the city of Jews, not the garrison of Rome. Thus, while Israel’s ancient prophet tradition provides Christology with its dominant interpretive lens, the meaning of that tradition is twisted, as if Jerusalem were only the slayer of God’s prophets; as if Israel is ontologically programmed to reject God’s saving interventions, when the whole point of salvation history is that Israel, again and again, accepts those interventions. Indeed, Israel is defined by never forgetting them, and always looking out for God’s saving acts again. But this Israel is lost to a Christian amnesia. The witness of the prophets in whose line Jesus stands is thus reduced to the narrowest and most negative of readings, as if the quite admirable principle of self-criticism enshrined in the prophetic tradition were instead an unrelenting indictment. Prophets were self-critical Jews as Jews. To Christians, they came to be understood as outside critics of Jews against Jews.
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” Jesus is recalled lamenting, “killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you!”40 By the time Stephen, remembered as the first Christian martyr, preaches the Gospel, well after the death of Jesus, the accusation against “the Jews” has been honed: “Which of the prophets did not your fathers persecute?”41 As if the prophets were not themselves the fathers of Israel; were not themselves the most revered of its leaders.
Countering this classic instance of the anti-Jewish imagination, Jesus, precisely like his predecessors, was a prophet within, not against. His journey to Jerusalem—his aliyah—was made in love, even as he knew that, as the center of the Roman occupation, Jerusalem, for the likes of him, was fraught. And of course, to return to our initiating motif, all of this grief about and toward Jerusalem was sparked not by Jesus’ magical foresight, but by the Gospel’s post-destruction hindsight. Jerusalem was fraught for Jesus because, as horribly demonstrated in the year 70, it was fraught for every Jew who loved it.
Some scholars speculate that the Gospels were written to portray Jesus as a classical hero, like Achilles—courageously embarking on a course of action sure to lead to his death.42 But speculation yields to what is known from history: Jesus’ deliberate progress to Jerusalem was indeed chosen, and the significance of his journey would be clearer than ever forty years later. Jerusalem was where Jesus’ conflict with the force that murdered John the Baptist would be joined. Not “Jews,” but “that fox.” Yet from John’s beheading forward, Jesus saw death differently—that it does not overturn God’s love. That revelation, if anything, would have more relevance in 70 than it had in 30.
“Thou art my beloved Son.” Thou: the intimate form of address from God. Nothing could be more powerful, or more permanent, than that. Or more Jewish.43 Such belovedness would form the heart of Jesus’ program of resistance to Rome, the heart of the promise that would carry his movement forward into history—to the climax of the war with Rome, and beyond. Such belovedness was the revelation that would make Jesus the “Christ.” But the point is that Jesus did not come to it by himself. He came to it through John.