LIKE THE OLDER BIBLICAL TRADITIONS that they refer to and draw on, the Gospels present Jesus’ teaching in a story relating his words and deeds. And since their stories are shaped by historical and religious traditions both from and about him, they share a similar narrative obligation: Whatever they claim about his activities and their venue, the evangelists must close on Jerusalem, at Passover, with the cross. Traditions before that point—what Jesus did and said where, to whom, in what circumstances—vary, as we shall see, from Gospel to Gospel; traditions after that point—Who saw what at the tomb? To whom (one woman? several women? Peter?) and in what place (Galilee? Emmaus? Jerusalem?) did the Risen Christ first appear?—likewise diverge. But Jesus’ crucifixion is the cardinal point that all these Gospels share.
I want to start from this point and move both backward and forward; backward to a reconstruction of Jesus’ mission and message; forward to a reconstruction of the earliest movement that formed in his name. In so doing, I am making a commitment to a position that the material itself can only support but not actually establish, namely, that we can draw causal and explanatory connections between what Jesus taught, why and how he died, and why and how the earliest Christian movement took the shapes it did.
Such a connected trajectory can be and has been challenged. Some scholars have argued that Jesus taught one thing (to love God and one another, for example), but was killed for another (priestly resentment, or Roman oppressiveness). Understanding his teaching, on this construction, sheds little light on why he died but does open up a road into Christianity’s ethnically inclusive future (loving others means loving Gentiles).
Other scholars identify Jesus’ message as some kind of social reform: Jesus, they say, a champion of social equality that he enacted especially through meals shared with all comers, taught against the sexual, political, and religious power hierarchies of his society. He accordingly fought against purity rules themselves (which operate by drawing distinctions between persons) and therefore especially opposed the priestly rulers in the Jerusalem Temple, in this view literally a monument to hierarchy.
The strength of this interpretation is its immediate linking of Jesus’ teachings in the Galilee to subsequent events in Jerusalem. It thereby accounts for the traditions of priestly involvement in Jesus’ death: How could the priests tolerate such a challenge to their authority? But it breaks any connection at the next two points on our trajectory, explaining neither why Pilate would have involved himself as he did (with an ugly public execution), nor what Jesus’ teaching has to do with the earliest stratum of Christian material we have, namely, the letters of Paul (which evince no trace of any such social program).
Those who take certain strata of Q as the core historical material for Jesus argue even more strenuously and overtly against such causal linkages. Other gospel sayings and stories, as well as traditions in Paul, they urge, actually give the measure of distortion and loss of authentic Jesus material which, again on the evidence of Q, consisted chiefly of witty and culturally subversive sayings (as opposed to, for instance, teachings about the coming Kingdom of God) with nothing of Jerusalem or the cross. This Q-Jesus dies by misadventure, as such teaching has little to do with the Temple or with Rome. And the rest of subsequent Christianity, arising as it does around the proclamation of a crucified, raised, and returning Messiah, likewise has little to do with the Cynic-like figure who stands, obscured, at its beginnings.
All of these reconstructions syncopate links in the chain of ancient evidence for the origins of Christianity. In so doing, they emphasize the contingent or accidental quality of history familiar to all of us in our own lives. Intending one thing, we often end up with another. Our lives work out in ways that we neither anticipate nor plan. Events are not necessarily results caused by particular actions. What seems like causality is often just the rational webbing thrown out over the past by our own retrospection. In real life, often, things just happen.
Our individual experience of the truth of this perspective on life should not, however, persuade us of its usefulness when doing history. History is different from personal retrospection. The latter is individual, subjective, private, in many ways untestable: Its realm is memory. History, on the other hand, is social. It is public. Through debate, appeals to data, judgments about coherence and plausibility, history is in some sense testable. It is in its obligations to both evidence and testability that history as a discipline is scientific. Its relation to memory is thus different from that which memory shares with personal recollection, because history’s realm is shared, public knowledge.
Thus, though we join here in the effort to retrieve an individual, Jesus of Nazareth, from his obscured past, since we do history, we necessarily seek to retrieve as well his culture, his religion, his social reality—the lived context of law, custom, practice, and attitudes surveyed before. Though the unique starting point of a new religious movement, Jesus would not have been Jesus without all the others standing around him and after him: his followers, his antagonists, pilgrims to and residents of Jerusalem, the Romans, Jews in the Diaspora, and, eventually, Gentiles. We cannot explain and understand him without likewise explaining and understanding them.
Again, the task is neither easy nor simple. The most direct evidence is complicated and therefore difficult to use, because it is late: The Gospels, as we have seen, are a stratigraphic record of various interpretations of Jesus, not reports of what he actually did and said. But unless what he did and said had made sense to his own contemporaries, we would have no object of study at all: Without his immediate followers, we would know nothing about Jesus, nor—since it is upon them that the existence of Christianity ultimately depends—would we have historical reason to care.
It is on this ground—the public coherence of his message to his own contemporaries—that we as historians gain our purchase on the confusing evidence of Jesus’ past. Of the three points on our trajectory that I maintain are causally linked—his mission; his death; his subsequent movement—our evidence is best for the latter two. We know, if we can know anything, that Jesus died on a cross, hence in a context where Roman concerns about sedition must have figured significantly. And we know that his immediate followers, who were not likewise executed, began a mission soon involving Greek-speaking Jews of the Diaspora and extending, very early, to Gentiles as well. As the movement develops its data increase, until we arrive at Paul’s letters and, later, the Gospels.
I propose, then, that we begin our first cycle of investigation in reverse, moving “backward” from our most secure data. Our historically latest point, the mission to Gentiles in the Diaspora, provides our chronologically earliest evidence, Paul’s letters. In an attempt to isolate traditions in Paul’s letters that he seems to share with the Gospels, we will pay particular attention to those traditions that he claims to have inherited: These will help us begin to build a trajectory backward.
The Gospel evidence cuts two ways. Since the evangelists wrote post-70 C.E., hence after Paul’s lifetime, they testify in one sense to the sort of movement Christianity became in the period after the destruction of the Temple. But since they set their stories in the earliest period, Jesus’ mission to Israel, they must inherit some aspects of their stories—characters, events, teachings—from the past. Where traditions in the Gospels (written c. 75–90 C.E.) seem similar to or supportive of themes in Paul’s letters (written c. 50–60)—especially those that he identifies as traditions that he inherited from other Christians whose activity predates his own—we can gain, I shall argue, a glimpse into the earlier stages of the Jesus movement. And if any of these data match information about early Judaism from independent Jewish sources—Josephus’ histories, for example; or the Dead Sea Scrolls; or various other intertestamental writings—then they can help to identify those aspects of earliest Christianity that may trace back to the lifetime and mission of Jesus himself.
Beginning our investigation with Paul means beginning with a contemporary of Jesus and his first followers. Though he did not compose the letters preserved in the New Testament until midcentury, information from Paul stands a good generation earlier than our next earliest source, the Gospel of Mark.
But “early” does not mean, in terms of evidence for Jesus, “most direct.” For one thing, Paul’s involvement in the movement came only after Jesus’ death and, in a sense, because of it: Paul’s point of contact is his response, at first negative and then positive, to the proclamation of the Resurrection (on this, especially Gal 1 and 1 Cor 15). Also, though Paul presumably knew many of Jesus’ original followers, including and especially Peter, he had differences with them on important matters of principle. Thus, at some points, in other words, what he says represents something other than what Jesus’ earliest followers were saying. And, finally, Paul occasionally insisted that the source of his gospel was not human—not the original apostles, and certainly not Jesus of Nazareth himself—but divine: What he had, Paul says, he had by revelation (Gal 1:12–22). Persuasive and even impressive as this last point may have been to an ancient audience, it rightly makes modern ones, in pursuit of the Jesus of history, mildly anxious: How much of what Paul says can actually be consonant with what Jesus might have taught, especially if he disagrees so pointedly with those who had known “Jesus according to the flesh”?
Paul’s strongest assertions of his independence from Jesus’ original followers come in his letter to the Galatians, where he argues vociferously for his own views on an issue—what observances non-Jewish followers of Jesus owe to Jewish law—that had never surfaced in the course of Jesus’ own mission, since Jesus spoke primarily if not exclusively to fellow Jews. Elsewhere, with different issues in view, Paul insists equally strongly on his dependable knowledge of earlier Jesus traditions. Let’s begin by reviewing his letters in their (probable) chronological order of composition, to see what of this we can glean.
THE FIRST LETTER to the Thessalonians, from our vantage point as historians, is very early evidence indeed, composed in the late forties or early fifties of the first century. But the letter itself conveys how late things already seemed to Paul’s gentile audience. Having “turned to God from idols to serve a living and true God,” they awaited “his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who rescues us from the wrath to come” (1:9–10). But these gentile Christians in Thessalonica had already waited longer than they had expected to. Evidently surprised that some of their number had died before Christ’s return, they pressed Paul to know more clearly when this would be. These are the issues Paul deals with in chapters 4 and 5 of this letter, and for which, in 4:15, he invokes “the word of the Lord,” that is, Jesus (cf. 4:1).
These two chapters give us a glimpse into the lively apocalyptic expectation of both Paul and this community. Their teaching corresponds in content and even in phrasing with traditions that occur a generation or so later in the synoptic Gospels. For instance, citing “the word of the Lord,” Paul describes Jesus’ glorious and imminent return:
For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words. (1 Thes 4:13–18)
Paul attributes his description of events at the Second Coming to a teaching of “the Lord.” On the authority of that saying, he tells of Christ’s impending descent from heaven. In the language of military engagement (“cry of command”; the archangel’s “call”; God’s “trumpet”), Paul then describes the resurrection of the dead, as well as the relocation “in the air” of “we who are alive.”
Elsewhere in his letters, though without the invocation of the Lord’s authority he gives here, Paul details this scenario further. (I shall italicize those items that he specifically repeats.) Thus in 1 Corinthians 15, after arguing that Christ’s resurrection and the (future) resurrection of the dead are intrinsically linked, Paul continues:
For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming [Parousia, meaning “Second Coming”] those who belong to Christ. Then comes the End, when he delivers the Kingdom to God the father after destroying every rule and every authority and every power. For he must rule until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy is Death.
(15:22–26)
Paul goes on from this passage to entangle himself in various moral exhortations. Several verses later, then, he returns to this theme, describing what the body of the raised dead will be like. “Sown” in the earth the way a seed is, as a physical or natural body, it will be raised a “spiritual body” (vv. 42–48). Whatever that might be, it is certainly not flesh and blood, which, says Paul, “cannot inherit the Kingdom of God” (v. 50). And more than the dead: The flesh of the living, too, will be likewise transformed. “We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will rise imperishable, and we shall all be changed” (vv. 51–52). Further, in a later letter, Philippians, we find a more concise description: “Our commonwealth is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power which enables him even to subject all things to himself” (3:20–21).
From Paul’s core teaching on “the Lord’s” authority about the sequence and substance of Endtime events, we have been able, by briefly canvasing his other letters, to thicken his description. It runs something like this: The Endtime, which Paul also identifies as the establishment of God’s kingdom, will be inaugurated by the return from heaven of the raised and glorious Christ. He will descend to the noise of celestial battle to defeat the enemies of God: rules, authorities, powers, and finally even Death. The followers of Christ will also participate, both the quick and the dead. The dead will rise in special, nonphysical “flesh” to join the living (who are likewise transformed), so that their bodies, in the Kingdom, will correspond to that glorious body in which Christ himself was raised from the dead.
A further point to emphasize: According to Paul, the Second Coming is not infinitely distant. He expects to witness the Parousia himself (“we who are alive”). The Thessalonians’ discomfiture at the death of some of their members in advance of Christ’s return gives the measure of their time frame: They were surprised that these deaths had preceded the End, so soon did they expect Christ’s glorious advent.
Indeed, the nearness of the End is a frequent Pauline theme. He sounds it repeatedly, and in many contexts. Unmarried Corinthians should stay as they are, he urges, “in view of the impending distress”—the travails, that is, before the establishment of God’s kingdom (1 Cor 7:26. The travails are reminiscent of the “wrath” from which the Son delivers his faithful, 1 Thes 1:10 above). “The appointed time has grown very short.… The form of this world is passing away” (vv. 29, 31). It is upon us, he tells his congregation, that “the end of the ages has come” (10:11). And even in his final letter, Romans, Paul repeats his belief with undiminished conviction. Until the Son returns, all creation “groans in travail” (Rom 8:22). Nonetheless, Paul asserts—a decade, perhaps, after his correspondence to Thessalonica; more than two, perhaps, since his joining the movement—that “salvation is nearer to us than when we first believed. The night is far gone; the day is at hand” (13:11–12).
Yet in Thessalonians, his earliest extant letter, Paul had gone on to qualify what he had just said about Christ’s advent:
But as to the times and seasons, brethren, you have no need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves know well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When people say, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as travail comes upon a woman with child, and there will be no escape. But you are not in darkness, brethren, for that day to surprise you like a thief.
(1 Thes 5:1–4)
Paul knows the End will be soon; he even has a fairly clear idea of the sequence of final events. Yet he cautions that believers cannot know its precise timetable in advance: Like the proverbial thief in the night, the End will come as a sudden surprise.
What in the later Gospels confirms or conforms to this earlier teaching which, Paul claims, itself goes back to Jesus? Let’s look first at Mark, our next earliest source. (Q may represent earlier traditions; but since it appears solely in post-Markan documents—namely Matthew, Luke, and a later and noncanonical gospel, Thomas—we cannot know.) Like the other three New Testament evangelists, Mark begins his story about the public mission of Jesus with John the Baptizer. Immersing penitents—presumably Jews—coming to him by the river Jordan from Judea and Jerusalem, John also immerses Jesus, who arrives from Nazareth in Galilee, to the north. As he comes back out of the water, Jesus hears a voice from heaven (the trope indicates God) proclaiming him “beloved Son” (cf. 1 Thes 1:10, where Paul designates Jesus God’s son). Thereafter, following John’s arrest, Jesus begins his own mission in the Galilee, proclaiming, “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has drawn near. Repent, and believe in the good news”—the good news, that is, of the Kingdom’s closeness. Like Paul, though twenty years later, Mark’s Jesus heralds the approaching Kingdom. Unlike Paul, Mark’s Jesus neither defines nor describes it. We have to read further in Mark’s story to find out what he means. Mark is a while in getting to a description and explanation of what he (and, in his story, Jesus) means by God’s kingdom. At first, through a mix of narrative description and teaching material, Mark simply trails his main character from Capernaum through the synagogues of the Galilee, where he performs exorcisms and healings on the Sabbath. Those in the synagogue exclaim at Jesus’ “new teaching” (1:27), but again, Mark does not say what this is. The themes of God’s kingdom and Jesus’ sonship seem to disappear.
As the healings and exorcisms accrue, the atmosphere becomes charged with antagonism: Scribes and Pharisees grow hostile, and the latter even plot Jesus’ death (3:6). Mark’s Jesus does not again return to the theme of God’s kingdom until he begins teaching in parables (that is, symbolic stories), likening the Kingdom to the way seed grows (4:1–34). The image this story evokes is very unlike the public, cosmic drama Paul had described. And we note another odd contrast to Paul’s letter. Paul had spoken freely of Jesus as God’s Son. In Mark’s story of Jesus’ mission, oddly, only demons or unclean spirits declaim this identity: “And whenever the unclean spirits beheld him, they fell down before him and cried out, ‘You are the Son of God!’ ” (3:11; cf. 5:7, and 1:24, “the Holy One of God”). When Jesus speaks of himself as Son, he only does so obliquely, in the third person; and he calls himself the Son of Man (2:10).
Nevertheless, at two very dramatic moments in his story, Mark does present Jesus as speaking of the Kingdom in a way more reminiscent of Paul’s. The first comes in 8:38–9:1. Here Mark presents a highly charged dialogue with Peter, during which (and for reasons utterly unexplained in the text) Peter identifies Jesus as “the Christ” (8:29). From this identification, Jesus goes on immediately to give a detailed prediction of his Passion, again couched indirectly in terms of the Son of Man (8:31). Mark’s Jesus says:
“Whoever is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of him will the Son of Man also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” And he said to them, “Truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come in power.”
The italicized verses relay content similar to Paul’s: God’s Son will arrive with angels, and he will arrive soon—within the lifetime of the generation addressed by Jesus—to establish the Kingdom. But when? How can one know?
At several points in Mark’s story, different characters—Pharisees at 8:11–13; Peter, James, John, and Andrew from among his disciples at 13:3–4—ask Jesus for or about “a sign.” And at various points in this Gospel, Jesus had lamented his own generation: “Why does this generation seek a sign? Truly, I say to you, no sign shall be given to this generation,” in evident reproach to some Pharisees (8:112). “O faithless generation! How long am I able to be with you? How long am I able to bear with you?” to a crowd asking for a cure (9:19; cf. the sinners and adulterers referred to above, 8:38). Nonetheless, he says, some from among his generation will live to see the Kingdom (9:1).
Once in Jerusalem just before Passover, however, Mark’s Jesus fills in his prophecy in much greater detail. And he links the coming Kingdom, again tied to the lifetime of his own generation (13:30), to a sign—a specific, empirical, unmistakable public event: the destruction of the Temple. This is a crucially important passage for understanding the apocalyptic expectations of Mark and his post-70 community, and we will examine it in some detail. I give it here at length, italicizing those items that conform to those apocalyptic themes already identified in Paul:
And as he came out of the Temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!” And Jesus said to him, “Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down.” And as he sat down on the Mount of Olives opposite the Temple, Peter and James and John and Andrew asked him privately, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign when these things are all to be accomplished?” And Jesus began to say to them, “Take heed that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray. And when you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed, for the End is not yet. For nation will rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places, there will be famines; this is but the beginning of the birth-pangs.
“But take heed to yourselves; for they will deliver you up to councils, and you will be beaten in synagogues, and you will stand before governors and kings for my sake, to bear testimony before them. And the gospel must first be preached among the nations [Gk. ethné; Heb. goyim].… You will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But he who endures to the end will be saved.
“But when you see the abomination of desolation set up where it ought not be (let the reader understand), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.… For in those days there will be such tribulation as has not been seen from the beginning of the creation which God created until now, and never will be. And if the Lord had not shortened the days, no human being would be saved; but for the sake of the elect whom he chose, he shortened the days. And then if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or ‘Look, there he is!’ do not believe it. False Christs and false prophets will arise and show signs and wonders, to lead astray, if possible, the elect. But take heed; I have told you all things beforehand.
“But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And then he will send out angels, and gather his elect from the four winds.…
“From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he [i.e., the Son] is near, at the very gates. Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away before all these things are accomplished. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
“But of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Take heed. Watch.… What I say to you I say to all: Watch.”
The cascade of apocalyptic images in this passage both recalls Paul’s teaching and helps us to locate these ideas in broader contemporary Jewish tradition—as well, I shall argue, in first-century Jewish history. Mark, too, identifies travails, social as well as celestial, as marking the onset of the End. The End is on the way: The Lord, he says, has already shortened the days (v. 20); its arrival is predicted for the lifetime of those hearing the prediction (v. 30). And the Son again returns on clouds, in glory, with angels; again he gathers up those who are his (v. 26).
But Jesus’ speech in Mark is also, unlike Paul’s, self-consciously literary. Mark calls upon “the one reading” to understand the allusion he has just made when invoking the “abomination of desolation.” Mark here refers his first-century audience to the Book of Daniel (13:14), a prophetic text now in both the Jewish and the Christian canons. The book’s title refers to the historical Daniel, a Jew who had lived during the Judean captivity in Babylon in the sixth century B.C.E. (he is mentioned in Ez 14:14 and 28:3). But the author of this prophetic book only writes in the name of this earlier figure; in fact, he actually lived centuries later, during the second century B.C.E., when he described, in heavily symbolic language, political events in and around Jerusalem in the 160s. This pseudonymity was a common technique in the ancient world: The borrowed antiquity of false authorship enhanced the authority of a text.
It was during this decade in the second century B.C.E. that the religious and cultural struggle between cosmopolitan Hellenism and ancestral Jewish traditions reached a crisis. According to the First Book of the Maccabees, a near-contemporary history, certain Jews in Jerusalem desired to adopt Greek culture. They pushed to build a gymnasium, a cultural center for the study of athletics, literature, music, and philosophy; and some even endured surgery to remove the signs of circumcision. (Activities in the gymnasium were often conducted in the nude, and circumcision was viewed as a mutilation by the Greeks; 1 Mc 1:11–15). The cultural civil war that erupted turned quickly to actual combat once Antiochus Epiphanes, the Seleucid Greek ruler of this fragment of Alexander the Great’s former territory, weighed in on the side of the Hellenists. First supporting the assimilationist position, then mandating it, Antiochus eventually ended by erecting an altar to Olympian Zeus in the Temple of the Jews’ own high god in Jerusalem. The country, led by the priestly Hasmonean family under Judah Maccabee, erupted in open revolt. They routed the extreme Hellenists and purified and rededicated the Temple, celebrating its renewal in an annual festival thereafter. (This is the historical base of the modern celebration of Hanukkah; cf. John 10:22, when Jesus celebrates this holiday in Jerusalem.)
But the image of the “abomination of desolation” entered the bloodstream of Jewish apocalyptic tradition through the Book of Daniel, whose author associated Antiochus’ profanation of the altar with the coming End of Days. Wars and desolation mark the introduction of the abominations (Dn 9:27, 11:31), “and there shall be a time of trouble such as never has been” (12:1). But eventually God will vindicate the righteous, raising them from the dead to everlasting life (12:2). When, asks the prophet, shall these things be accomplished? The text replies, When its words become known. “You, Daniel, shut up the words [of this prophecy] and seal the book until the time of the End” (12:4). The very act of reading, or hearing, the Book of Daniel thus “activates” its own prophecy.
It is this, when evoking the abomination of desolation, that Mark asks his reader to understand: the sign has been given that marks the beginning of the End (Mk 13:14). In “Daniel’s” text, this had corresponded to Antiochus’ altar, erected more than two centuries before Mark wrote. But what did it mean for Mark?
Here we have to read the passage attentively, and consider as well what we know of Mark’s own period, for which we have other sources: Josephus’ two histories, The Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities; Book 5 of the Roman Tacitus’ History; and Legatio ad Gaium, midcentury, from Philo of Alexandria. The decades between Jesus’ time and Mark’s had seen increasing unrest and friction between Judea and its Roman overseers, often over the issue of introducing unacceptable religious images into Jerusalem. The region and the city were often unlucky in Rome’s choice of prefects—on this Philo, Josephus, and Tacitus all agree, interestingly singling out Pontius Pilate (26–36 C.E.) as one of the worst provocateurs. Jews in Jerusalem had protested, sometimes violently, against real or imagined insults to their ancestral religious prerogatives. As the decades of direct Roman supervision wore on, charismatic religious figures predicting imminent redemption had gathered huge crowds and, cut down with their followers, been brutally suppressed; crowds in pilgrim-swollen Jerusalem had turned to riot; and finally the Temple itself, after a three-year standoff between the empire and Jewish rebels, was burned, torn down, utterly destroyed.
Mark 13, speaking the language of Jewish apocalyptic, lies on top of this historical terrain. Scholars variously match the figures and events he conjures to the ones discernible in the historical record. The audience of Mark’s Gospel, shortly post-70, would have seen or known what Mark’s narrative audience hears “prophesied,” ostensibly c. 30: wars, rumors of wars, false messiahs, false prophets, social turmoil. And the apocalyptic image par excellence, the abomination of desolation, resonates precisely with two securely attested events. The first is the emperor Caligula’s failed attempt, in 40–41 C.E., to introduce a cultic statue with his own features into Jerusalem’s Temple—an episode that would have touched off massive Jewish protests. The second was a consequence of Titus’ victory itself. The triumphant army at the finale of the siege would have carried its military standards onto the ruined Temple Mount. These standards served soldiers as a sort of mobile cultic altar.
Jesus’ soliloquy in Mark’s text thus ties all these religiously portentous events into a specifically Christian concern: knowing the time of the Parousia, the reappearance from heaven of Jesus Christ as the triumphant Son of Man. “When will this be, and what will be the sign when these things are all to be accomplished?” ask some apostles after Jesus predicts the Temple’s destruction. In so doing, they set up Jesus’ apocalyptic discourse. He answers by detailing what must come first: false christs, wars, famine, persecution of those loyal to him, and the preaching of the gospel to Gentiles. (Note: this gentile mission did not get under way until some time after Jesus’ execution. Mark demonstrates here the way his predictions have a double time frame: the narrative audience, Jesus’ generation, c. 30; and the actual audience, Mark’s, after 70.)
After these events come the abomination, which the understanding reader knows must mean the End; after these comes the Temple’s total destruction (“no stone upon another”); after these, then—since the Lord has already shortened the days—will come the End, and the return of the Redeemer. Mark, in short, sees time stereoscopically. From the perspective of those around Jesus, “the faithless and adulterous generation,” no sign had been given. But from the perspective of his own generation—a faithful generation who had witnessed to Christ before councils and governors, who had withstood the allurements of “false christs and false prophets” working signs and wonders, and who had preached the gospel to the Gentiles—the great and unmistakable sign of Christ’s Second Coming had been given: the destruction of the Temple. The End, Mark thus knew, really was at hand; and some from Jesus’ own generation were still alive to see it (13:30; cf. 9:1).
But Mark, like Paul, finally closes his apocalyptic discourse on a note of caution: Though the time is at hand, it cannot with greater clarity be known. One must remain discerning and alert: “Watch” (13:33, 37). In the two later Gospels that depend on him, Matthew and Luke, this counsel is preserved in a Q-saying that, again like Paul, invokes the proverbial nocturnal thief: “Watch, therefore, for you do not know what day your Lord is coming. But know this, that if the householder had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have watched …” (Mt 24:43//Lk 12:39).
As time stretched on and history continued, this apocalyptic refrain in traditions about the Kingdom grows comparatively muted in the later Gospels. Q-sayings, or other traditions specific only to Matthew or Luke, speak of the Kingdom in various ways, some of which emphasize a present, nonapocalyptic quality. And where the two other Synoptics reproduce substantial sections of the Markan Apocalypse, they feel free to alter or delete parts of Jesus’ speech. One of Matthew’s alterations, however, interestingly picks up a vivid detail that we saw in Paul: the sound of the celestial trumpet. When the Son of Man returns in glory, says Matthew’s Jesus, he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call” (Mt 24:31). And Matthew and Luke repeat a Q-tradition that conforms to Mark’s outlook: When teaching his followers, Jesus instructs them to pray, “Thy Kingdom come” (Mt 7:10//Lk 11:2, the Lord’s Prayer).
But other changes soften Mark’s urgency. Whereas in Mark’s Gospel the Lord had already shortened the days till the End, in Matthew that still lies in the future (“For the sake of the elect, those days will be shortened,” 24:22), and Luke drops the passage entirely. Indeed, Luke’s Jesus even preaches specifically against the kind of kingdom that Mark’s Jesus, and Paul before him, had heralded. “Because he was near Jerusalem, and because they supposed that the Kingdom of God was to appear immediately, he proceeded to tell them a parable” (Lk 19:11); “Take heed that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name saying, ‘The time is at hand!’ Do not go after them” (21:8). This sits oddly with Jesus’ very first line in Mark: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand!” (Mk 1:15), which is possibly why Luke dropped it from his Gospel (cf. Lk 4:15). The Kingdom, urges Luke’s Jesus, is a present reality, not a future event: “Behold, the Kingdom of God is in the midst of you” (17:20).
The Gospel of John, another source for our investigative efforts, cannot help us much here. John’s presentation of Jesus’ character and teachings is utterly different from that of the Synoptics, and his own highly characteristic theology dominates much in the speeches his Jesus gives. The Kingdom of God, a major theme in the teaching of the synoptic Gospels (where the word or phrase appears a total of 123 times), is hardly in evidence in John (who gives it 5 times). And the Synoptics’ temporal eschatology—“Now” and “Then,” or, as with Mark especially, “Now” and “Soon”—gives way in John to moral and metaphysical eschatology, an absolutizing of abiding oppositions: Light and Dark, Above and Below, Upper World and Lower World, “of God” and “not of God.” On this aspect of Jesus’ teaching, John’s points of contact with both Paul and with the synoptic tradition are minimal.
Predictions of an imminent End generally tend in one of two directions: Either they age gracelessly, or interpreters contrive to have them stay forever young. We see evidence of these tendencies in another New Testament writing, the Second Epistle of Peter. Written in Greek at the end of the first or beginning of the second century, this pseudonymous letter openly acknowledges the Parousia’s belatedness and offers an explanation for its delay.
You must understand this, that scoffers will come in the last days with their scoffing, following their own passions and saying, “Where is the promise of his [Christ’s] Coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things have continued as they were from the beginning of creation”…. Do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise, but is forebearing toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.
(2 Pt 3:3–9)
Deliberately echoing Paul, whose letters this author knows (3:15–16), “Peter” then adds: “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire” (3:10).
“Peter” in his way repudiated the obvious meaning of the Gospel proclamation of the Second Coming by arguing for a vastly expanded view of time: Each of God’s days is like 365,000 of ours. This is why, he could then explain, the End was late: It only seemed late. His Christian contemporary John of Patmos, on the contrary, stimulated perhaps by the outbreak of local persecutions, inferred from current events that ancient prophecies were falling due. Creating a pastiche of images from Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and various Christian traditions, he insisted that the End was indeed at hand: “The time is near.” “Behold,” says the revealing angel, speaking on behalf of the Lord God and the Lamb (that is, Christ), “behold, I am coming soon” (Rv 1:3, 22:7).
Christian apocalyptic prophecy would go on to have a long, continuous, and tumultuous career. As our own era moves to the year 2000, we hear its noisy enthusiasts still. But in the ancient canon we can trace its “official” diminution as the tradition itself perdures and changes. Within the New Testament, along the antiapocalyptic gradient, we see a rough inverse correspondence: The later the writing, the lower its level of commitment to an imminent Apocalypse; the earlier the writing (i.e., Mark and, before him, Paul) the higher. Can we ride this trajectory backward into the documentary void that surrounds the historical Jesus? I think so. But we need more evidence, first, before making the case.
PAUL WAS a contemporary of Jesus’ original followers, and in his letters he provides glimpses of his dealings with them. In Galatians, he specifically names Peter (“Cephas”), James (Jesus’ brother), and John: Interestingly, they have all relocated from their home region, Galilee, to Jerusalem—a fact we shall have to consider later on (Gal 1:18, 2:9; cf. Mk 16:7 and Mt 28:7–20, where they are last seen in the Galilee). And though in Galatians, Paul insists on the authority of his own gospel and so deliberately emphasizes his independence from this original group, in 1 Corinthians he speaks otherwise. Invoking precisely the authority of their witness and his place in the apostolic chain of transmission, he shores up his own teaching on the resurrection of the dead and coming of the Kingdom:
For I delivered to you … what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures; that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren … then to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all … he appeared also to me.
(1 COR 15:3–7)
Paul seems to name three distinct groups here: the Twelve, the brethren, and the apostles. The “brethren” may refer to that group who had received Jesus’ message but did not as a matter of course travel with him: The masculine plural noun, adelphoi, encompasses grammatically and thus can attest socially to a mixed group of women and men both. The later Gospels reflect this sort of social organization in the group that formed around Jesus in his lifetime. Some wandered with him; others—among whom women, settled in villages—received and cared for the itinerants. These, then, are perhaps the “more than five hundred” brethren of Paul’s account.
Apostoloi is the Greek word for envoys or messengers, and Paul routinely so designated himself (“Paul an apostle of Christ Jesus”). These followers of Jesus would have worked on the road, disseminating the gospel message to others after Jesus’ death and even, according to the evangelists’ stories, before.
And then there are “the Twelve.” Who were they? What did they do? The Gospels provide more detail. Mark relates a story that he sets at the start of Jesus’ mission after his baptism and the forty-day retreat in the wilderness. Back in the Galilee, walking along the Kinnerit (the large inland lake referred to in Gospel stories as the “Sea of Galilee” or “Sea of Tiberias”), Jesus calls his first followers. These are the fishermen Simon (that is, Simon Peter, the “Cephas” of Paul’s letter), his brother Andrew, and two sons of Zebedee, James and John (1:16–20). At a later point, this group expands to “the Twelve” (3:14), whom Jesus eventually commissions to travel two by two to expand his own mission. These men also are to exorcise unclean spirits, heal the sick, and preach repentance (6:7–13). These twelve, Mark says, are apostoloi (6:30). Whether they are identical with Jesus’ “students” or “followers” (Gk. mathētai, Latin discipuli, “disciples”) Mark leaves unclear (cf. v. 35). But whatever the vagaries of these designations, “the Twelve” themselves are clearly a core group. Jesus had specifically appointed them (3:14). It is they who share Jesus’ final Passover meal with him in Jerusalem, and they to whom he gives the commemorative teaching, “this [bread] is my body,” the wine “my blood of the covenant” (14:17–24).
Matthew, Luke, and John all echo these traditions. Matthew, too, names “Simon who is called Peter,” Andrew, James, and John as comprising Jesus’ initial following (4:18–22); later, he simply refers to “the Twelve” and repeats Mark’s list of their names: Besides the initial four, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, Matthew, another James (“son of Adelphas”), Thaddaeus, Simon the Cananaean, and “Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him” (10:1–4; cf. Mk 3:13–19). Luke edits Mark differently, dropping Andrew and moving the call of Peter, James, and John well into Jesus’ mission in Galilee (5:5–11). From a larger, unspecified number of disciples Jesus designates twelve “whom he called apostles”: These are Peter, now with his brother Andrew; James and John; Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, and Thomas; James, son of Adelphas; Simon the Zealot; Judas, son of James; and Judas Iscariot (6:13–16; cf. Acts 1:13): Though coincident, Luke’s list of names does not exactly match Matthew’s. At some point thereafter, Jesus appoints seventy others to travel two by two and commissions them to heal and preach (Lk 10:1–12). John’s version, too, is different. Andrew, originally a disciple of John the Baptizer, decides to follow Jesus and subsequently brings along his brother Peter (1:40–43); thereafter, returning to the Galilee, Jesus calls Philip, who in turn calls Nathanael. The fourth evangelist never relates any further details about Jesus’ filling out this group, though he does refer to “the Twelve” (6:71, 20:24).
Finally, these later Gospels depict the post-Resurrection Christ as charging his core group to continue and even enlarge his mission, taking the gospel to the Diaspora and thus to Gentiles (“the nations”) as well as Jews. Matthew’s Jesus, when he had sent out the Twelve from the Galilee, specifically limited their mission to Jews. “These twelve Jesus sent out, charging them, ‘Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And preach as you go, saying the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand’ ” (Mt 10:5–7; cf. 15:24). It is the Risen Christ, appearing to them again in the Galilee, who alters this charge. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (28:16). Mark had implied as much, but since his Gospel ends with the empty tomb, not the Risen Christ, he folded this new mission field back into the lifetime of Jesus. Thus Jesus during his apocalyptic soliloquy in Jerusalem explains to Peter, Andrew, James, and John that the Temple will be destroyed and the Son will return only after the gospel has been “preached to all the nations” (Mk 13:10). Luke’s Risen Christ, appearing in Jerusalem, also commands an international mission, claiming that such had been prophesied in Jewish scripture. “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem” (24:45–46; cf. Acts 1:1–8. The charge is, again, to this core group (v. 33).
On the evidence of Paul’s letters—thus within twenty years of Jesus’ death and well before these Gospels were written—we already see a wide-flung network of Christian communities in Damascus, Antioch, other cities in Asia Minor, and Rome. Their members, some of whom Paul names when closing his letters, seem energetically committed to the work of spreading “the gospel” (e.g., Rom 16:1–16; 1 Cor 16:10–20). Some in these communities are Gentiles, not Jews (e.g., Titus, Gal 2:3), though these ekklēshi are found in cities with significant Jewish populations. Peter himself, one of the original group who apparently settled in Jerusalem (Gal 1:18), also ventured out into the Greek-speaking Diaspora, certainly as far as Antioch (Gal 2:11), perhaps as far as Corinth (1 Cor 1:12), perhaps beyond—the ancient evidence runs out there. And whatever the Galilean roots of this movement, it had clearly relocated to, and directed its mission from, Jerusalem (Gal 1:18–2:12).
The familiarity of all these data—that Jesus had apostles and a core group of twelve; that they spread his mission in the Jewish homeland and later, after his execution, took it into the Diaspora; that the central community, comprising many of his original followers, stayed in Jerusalem—should not dull us to their historical import, and thus to our obligation to explain them. They in fact reveal much that is unusual about the movement.
It is true, for example, that teachers in antiquity, whether pagan or Jewish, routinely gathered “students” or “disciples.” Schools of philosophers in the Greco-Roman world established themselves in this way, as in the Jewish world a rabbi’s teachings would be preserved, repeated, and reinterpreted by his students. The Gospels allude to the disciples of the Pharisees, and of John the Baptizer. Josephus speaks of Jewish teachers in the prerabbinic period whose students acted on their instruction. Two he names, Judas and Matthaias, “unrivalled interpreters of the ancestral laws,” taught against a huge golden eagle that Herod the Great had placed over the great gate of the Temple: As a result, some of their students tore it down (Herod executed them all; BJ 1.651–5; AJ 17.149–67).
But Jesus seems to have commissioned disciples to travel for the specific purpose of spreading his particular message. On the evidence of the Synoptics, he and his core group of twelve traveled widely throughout the villages of the Galilee, east to Transjordan, north near the coastline, south through Samaria, and in Jerusalem. According to John, Jesus taught repeatedly in Jerusalem, particularly in and around the Temple during the pilgrimage holidays. He charges those he commissioned to spread the gospel exactly as he had, indeed to enact before others what he had enacted before them: healings and exorcisms coupled with the announcement of the Kingdom’s advent. Yet Jesus seems to operate at cross-purposes, sending disciples out on the road while demanding that they be ill prepared for long-term travel. Teach for free, he tells them; and travel absolutely without provisions, “for the laborer deserves his food”—in other words, depend on those you teach to feed you. (Years later, in the Diaspora, the mission was evidently still trying to operate on these terms. Paul repeats this teaching, on the authority of “the Lord,” who “commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living from the gospel,” 1 Cor 9:14. It seems that, as the mission spread and time wore on, this arrangement caused some resentment; Paul points out to the Corinthians that, despite this entitlement, he has never demanded provision from them, v. 15.) Do not take money with you, Jesus instructs his disciples, nor a change of clothes; travel without a bag, staff, or sandals; announce the coming of the Kingdom, exorcise demons, and heal (Mt 10:5–42; cf. Lk 9:1–6). This combination of impractical missionary etiquette and principled itinerancy needs to be explained.
We might do so, paradoxically, by first considering other, more firmly established aspects of the early Christian movement that also need to be explained—for example, the fact that the early movement after Jesus’ death spread out from territorial Israel to the Diaspora, where it also embraced Gentiles. To be sure, by midcentury, debate had broken out between members of the movement over the terms under which Gentiles might join—this is the central issue of Paul’s letter to the Galatians—but evidently no one denied that they could be and should be included. During Jesus’ lifetime, Gentiles scarcely figured at all in his mission: How, then, and why so soon after his death does the Jesus movement come to see the Gentiles’ inclusion as a natural extension of itself?
Another fact: The movement, almost immediately after Jesus’ death, settled in Jerusalem. Why? If Jesus’ message had conformed essentially to the peculiarities of Galilean society—if he spoke to its grinding rural peasant poverty, to land reform and radical sharing, or to a social program of radical egalitarianism; or if he taught an ethic of compassion pitched against the distinctions of purity that regulated access to Temple and even table, as some scholars have recently argued—then this relocation is all but impossible to explain. Why Jerusalem, if the peasants are back in Galilee? Why Jerusalem, where the prestige, antiquity, and centrality of the Temple would work directly against the principled opposition to purity that some scholars see in Jesus’ message?
And, finally, there is the very odd fact that this early evidence—Paul and Mark overtly; Matthew and Luke more guardedly—proclaims and affirms that the Kingdom is coming, even as time drags on. How is this possible? Why would Paul, years after the Thessalonians had already grown alarmed at the Kingdom’s delay, assert that he was even more confident “than when we first believed” that it was at hand (Rom 13:11)? Why would Mark, twenty years further along, assert the same thing? Why would Matthew and Luke, despite their lengthening perspective, also both repeat Mark’s Jesus saying, “This generation will not pass away before all these things take place” (Mk 13:31//Mt 24:34//Lk 21:32)? Those who argue that Jesus himself was non- or even antiapocalyptic explain these later stages as a misrepresentation of his teaching. But then we need to ask: Why would the later tradition repeat something already seen not to be true? Why invent a tradition that would already be an embarrassment?
To recapitulate: We know that Jesus did have an inner core of followers; in Galatians, Paul names some of “those who were apostles before me”; in 1 Corinthians he speaks specifically of “the Twelve.” After the Crucifixion, these people traveled to spread the gospel even into the Diaspora, where they welcomed Gentiles in as well (Paul’s letters; Acts; Tacitus; Josephus). The movement did relocate to Jerusalem (Paul; Acts), where it remained at least until the years preceding the revolt. And written sources well after Jesus’ lifetime continued to attribute to him a teaching that the Kingdom of God was at hand.
All of these facts can be brought together under the umbrella of Jewish apocalyptic expectation. A strand within traditional Jewish apocalyptic thought anticipated the Gentiles’ turning to the God of Israel as one of the events at the End of Days. (We will examine the sources for this tradition in detail later in this chapter.) Such traditions routinely featured Jerusalem as the center of the Kingdom. God’s Redemption radiates out from Zion; exiled Israel and newly pious Gentiles come to Jerusalem, to worship at God’s house. And the redeemed Israel would include more than those Jews currently living in the Diaspora. It would include as well those who, centuries earlier, had been lost: not just the two tribes, Judah and Benjamin, which had survived the Babylonian Captivity in the sixth century B.C.E., but also the ten lost tribes of the Northern Kingdom that had been swallowed up by Assyria after 722 B.C.E.
These themes appear variously in different intertestamental writings, but all can be found in the classical and authoritative source from which their authors, Paul, and the evangelists all drew: the prophet Isaiah. At the End, foresees the prophet, the mountain of God’s house will be raised as the highest mountain and will draw all the nations (Heb. goyim) to it, to the worship of the God of Jacob (Is 2:2–4). And God will work a still greater miracle. “There will be a highway from Assyria for the remnant which is left of his people, as there was for Israel when they came out of Egypt” (11:16). “In that day the Lord will extend his hand … to recover the remnant which is left of his people, from Assyria, from Egypt, from Pathros, from Ethiopia.… He will raise an ensign for the nations, and will assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth” (11:11–12). At the End, God will restore Israel to the Land—all Israel. All twelve tribes.
More: At this time “there shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse” (v. 1). God will establish a son of David’s house as the eschatological king. This Davidic king will preside not only over the twelve tribes of the restored Israel, but also over the nations: “Him shall the nations seek” (v. 10). At the End, God will make a feast for all peoples; all humankind will converge at the Temple, in the city, Jerusalem (25:6, and often).
How does consideration of Jewish apocalyptic tradition help in evaluating this data? It makes visible both the internal importance of the Gentile mission to the earliest Christian movement, especially as time wore on, and the internal logic of this (ostensibly Galilean) movement’s relocating permanently to Jerusalem. Gentiles turning from idols to God would have made sense to these Jewish apostles, since this event was one of those foretold for the Endtime in apocalyptic tradition. Whatever the ultimate social trauma these Gentile adherents eventually occasioned, the basic fact of their allegiance to the movement confirmed the movement’s own message: that the Kingdom was indeed at hand. This is perhaps why, even decades after Jesus had first pronounced it, both Paul and, even later, Mark could with conviction repeat his prophecy.
It also accounts for what might otherwise seem like an odd choice for headquarters: Jerusalem. If the church chose to relocate, why not go someplace more sensible (especially in view of its vigorous penetration of the Diaspora) with easy access to sea travel, like Caesarea? Why indeed not stay in the Galilee, near the important overland routes? Why Jerusalem? Because Jerusalem stands at the heart of this ancient redemptive myth. “The word of the Lord goes forth from Jerusalem” (Is 2:4).
What then of the New Testament’s traditions about “the Twelve”? Were it not for Paul’s witness, we might be tempted to question the group’s actual existence. After all, the list of their names varies from Gospel to Gospel, which itself indicates shaky information. And the concept itself is too conveniently metaphorical: To the degree that Christian tradition will eventually conceive itself as the New Israel, these men might simply stand as ciphers for the twelve “new tribes” of the church.
However, considered otherwise, these slippages in this tradition might argue in fact for its historical authenticity. For example, even though all four evangelical narratives, in light of the betrayal by Judas Iscariot, drop the total number of the core group from twelve to eleven before the death of Jesus, the number “twelve” itself still remains the symbolic touchstone. Hence Matthew speaks of a post-Resurrection (thus, logically, postbetrayal) moment when “the Twelve” will play a role in the coming Kingdom: “When the Son of Man shall sit on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (19:28). Paul, as we have seen, also speaks of the Twelve as a post-Resurrection group. (Some ancient copyists, aware of this problem, “corrected” 1 Cor 15:3 to read “the eleven.”) That the number twelve is insisted upon despite the awkwardness of retaining it may be construed as the strength of the early tradition. In light of the betrayal, the number twelve would have to go back before the Crucifixion; if so, then perhaps to Jesus himself.
To what end? Here we have to retrieve one of our observable facts, that later tradition continues to attribute to Jesus an already disconfirmed prophecy; and one of our interpretive conjectures, that much of our scattered evidence can be coherently brought together by an appeal to broader Jewish apocalyptic tradition.
To the New Testament evidence first. Moving backward along a trajectory from later text to earlier text to, finally, Jesus himself, we might hypothesize a gradient of increasing apocalyptic intensity. Matthew and Luke had Jesus proclaim the coming Kingdom, though they both defined “kingdom” in nonapocalyptic as well as apocalyptic ways, and they linked the Kingdom to Jesus’ glorious Second Coming. In this they follow Mark, whose Jesus proclaimed the coming Kingdom, conceived apocalypticly: That is, the Kingdom was an event that would happen or a stage that would arrive, not a state that somehow existed concurrent with normal reality. This Kingdom would arrive within the lifetime of Mark’s generation, at the edges of the lifetime of Jesus’. And it would begin with the return of the triumphant Son.
Mark’s tone of confident immediacy matches that of Paul, a generation earlier. Paul, too, had proclaimed the imminent return of the Son, the resurrection of the dead, and the establishment of the Kingdom within his own lifetime. Paul said that he inherited this tradition: He has it as a “saying of the Lord” (1 Thes 4:13; the passage is cited in full on this page). Might not some version of this teaching go back through those who were apostles before Paul to the teaching of Jesus himself? Jesus’ messianic, triumphant appearance as the vindicated, militant Son most easily coheres, it is true, with post-Crucifixion developments. It compensates for the disappointment of Jesus’ crucifixion and clearly stands as a specifically Christian embellishment on earlier Jewish traditions of Messiah and Kingdom.
But the Kingdom itself, the belief that it is coming, that it will particularly manifest in Jerusalem, that it will involve the restored nation of Israel as well as Gentiles who have renounced their idolatry—all these beliefs predate Jesus’ death by centuries and are also found variously in other Jewish writings roughly contemporary with him (some Pseudepigrapha; the Dead Sea Scrolls). Predicting his own Second Coming may indeed be historically implausible. Preaching the good news of the coming Kingdom of God, not at all.
Here, then, is our historical purchase on traditions concerning the Twelve. Symbolically the number recalls the plenum of Israel. By Jesus’ day, ten of those twelve tribes had long since ceased to exist. If, nonetheless, Jesus did commission a core group of twelve disciples, and saw them as spreading the good news of God’s coming kingdom, then he, too, was thinking symbolically. If he sent them out on the road deliberately, consciously underprepared for sustained travel, then perhaps this gives the index of his expectation: The Kingdom was coming soon; their underpreparedness embodied their conviction.
And if Jesus indeed taught that ultimately these twelve would judge the twelve tribes, then he was thinking eschatologically. To assemble the twelve tribes so many centuries after the Assyrian conquest would take a miracle. But that, I think, is what Jesus was expecting.
NOT MUCH in their respective depictions of Jesus overlaps between Paul’s letters and the Gospels. If all we had were the Epistles, we would know precious little about Jesus of Nazareth: not where or whom he taught, little about his activities and his teaching, scarcely anything about the circumstances of his death—precisely that information that the evangelists are concerned to relate. Paul’s burning commitment focused not on the past but rather on the near future; his gospel proclaims the coming or returning Christ, whose Resurrection signaled the imminent redemption and transformation of the world (Rom 8:19 ff.).
It is with some surprise then that we see reflected in Paul and Mark virtually identical versions of an ethical teaching that both attribute to the historical Jesus. In his letter to the gentile community at Corinth, working through a lengthy exhortation to moral behavior, Paul finally turns to matters “about which you [i.e., the community] wrote,” specifically on sexual discipline (1 Cor 7). Paul first advises a temperate and periodic sexual abstinence within marriage. (Had his congregation, more absolutist, pushed for more?) Marriage partners have mutual conjugal rights, and extremes of abstinence might lead to sexual temptation: “Do not refuse one another except perhaps for a season, that you might devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, lest Satan tempt you through lack of self-control.” Total abstinence from sexual activity, Paul readily admits, is the higher path; but it is not for everybody. “I say this by way of concession, not of command. I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own gift from God, one of one kind and one of another” (1 Cor 7:1–7). Those not married or no longer married should remain as they are, with the same proviso: If passion tempts, wed (vv. 8–9). And then:
To the married I give charge, not I but the Lord, that the wife should not separate from the husband (but if she does, let her remain single or else be reconciled to her husband)—and that the husband should not divorce his wife.
(1 Cor 7:10–11)
Some twenty years later, Mark anchored a longer version of this same teaching in a story about Jesus’ mission:
And he left there [i.e., Capernaum in Galilee] and went to the region of Judea and beyond the Jordan, and crowds gathered to him. And again, as his custom was, he taught them. And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to put her away.” But Jesus said to them, “For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’ [Gn 1:27, 2:24]. So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together let no man put asunder.” And in the house the disciples asked him about this matter. And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
(Mk 10:1–11)
The message is the same in both sources: No divorce, period.
Luke later repeated Mark’s version of Jesus’ instruction, though he shifted emphasis slightly: “Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery; and he who marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery” (Lk 16:18). Perhaps this last phrase is a Q-version, because Matthew in his turn alters Mark’s meaning and phrase in the same way. Matthew repeats this teaching twice, in two different settings: the Sermon on the Mount, in the Galilee; and his recapitulation of Mark’s whole scene, during the mission in Judea. Both times, he adds a significant modification: “I say to you, that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the grounds of unchastity (Gk. porneia), makes her an adulteress; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery” (5:31–32); “I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another commits adultery” (19:9).
The more extreme version of this prohibition is doubtless the earlier one: Matthew alone of these four sources permits the exception. Yet his narrative extension of this story—an M-tradition, a unit unique to his Gospel—sounds a note that brings us back to a central theme in Paul. Matthew’s Jesus in this passage goes on to endorse celibacy in view of the coming Kingdom:
The disciples said, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is not expedient to marry.” But he said to them, “Not all men can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.”
(Mt 19:10–12)
This verse would have a long and scandalizing effect in subsequent Greco-Roman Christianity when some men, gripped by their enthused dedication to its ethic of moral perfectionism, voluntarily had themselves castrated. Justin Martyr in his Apology (c. 150) approvingly relates the story of a young man’s petition to the governor for permission to have himself castrated. A century later, Origen of Alexandria’s great reputation for chastity was belittled by rumors that he, too, had interpreted literally this injunction given in Matthew. In context, however, this teaching seems to relate not to surgical procedures but to ethical resolve: The voluntary forswearing of sexual activity was an index of commitment to the Kingdom.
In 1 Corinthians 7, Paul continues in this vein. In verses 12–16, he addresses the issue of “mixed” marriages—marriages, that is, between Christian Gentiles who as part of this movement have at least in principle forsworn their native religious practices and worship solely the God of Israel (cf. 1 Cor 5:11), and pagan Gentiles who still worship traditional gods. This is a circumstance specific to the Diaspora mission, and Paul’s prefatory remark—“To the rest I say, not the Lord”—names only himself as his authority. Those in mixed marriages should stay in them, just as generally “everyone should remain in the state in which he was called” (v. 20). But clearly, Paul repeats—this time from the instance of unmarried men vis-à-vis their “virgins”—the preferred state is celibacy. What is truly important is staying focused on the imminent redemption in Christ:
Now concerning the virgins, I have no command of the Lord, but I give my opinion as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy. I think that in view of the impending distress it is well for a person to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek to be free. Are you free from a wife? Do not seek marriage. But if you marry, you do not sin, and if the virgin marries, she does not sin. Yet those who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you that. I mean, brethren, the appointed time has grown very short.… The form of this world is passing away.
(1 Cor 7:25–31)
We see this same combination of sexual austerity and moral commitment to preparedness in the face of coming redemption in another ancient Jewish apocalyptically minded community: the Essenes. The first-century writers Pliny the Elder, Philo, and Josephus all comment on this community’s custom of celibacy, and this behavior seems of a piece with other aspects of their perfectionist ethics. They also disallowed private property, holding all things in common; they shared common meals; out of piety, they rejected taking oaths—man should not need to call on God to secure his word. Some Essenes, Josephus mentions (and this has been confirmed by the Damascus Document, one of the codes for communal behavior discovered at Qumran), also married and had children. This social reality afforded another opportunity where their teachings resembled those of Jesus: Essenes, too, were absolutists on the issue of forbidding divorce.
The Essenes in the perspective of these three outsiders seem a sort of philosophical school, which is indeed the word—haerisis—that Josephus’ Greek text gives (Vita 2). The community’s own long-buried library, however, provides a clearer view of how it saw itself: as the true Israel, uniquely instructed by their master, the Teacher of Righteousness, to understand the meaning of God’s revelation. “Sons of light,” they lived in the final days, at the very edge of time before God redeemed his people; and their whole way of life was dedicated to preparing for the coming Kingdom of God.
Very direct connections between the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Christian writings, or between the two communities that they represent, cannot and indeed should not be drawn. The Scrolls are the lush literature of highly educated, priestly, separatist, mostly Hebrew- and Aramaic-speaking Judean sectarians. Much of their literary production was for internal consumption. Their library was vast in size and scope: It has yielded, in whole or in part, ancient Hebrew manuscripts of virtually every book in the Jewish Bible, as well as commentaries on these. This library attests to the profound literacy and learning of this sect; the intensive development of the halakah of purity that we see in the commentaries, to its specifically priestly origins.
The movement around Jesus, by contrast, was lay, not priestly, both in his lifetime and later. (This probably accounts for its indifference to intensification of purity rules: more on this below.) Nor in its beginnings was it traditionally erudite or even in any important sense literate (though in Paul’s letters we see both his Pharisaic education in his scriptural expertise and his Greek cultural literacy). Its literature—by the time we begin to have one, arguably post-70 (Paul wrote letters, not treatises)—was lightweight by comparison with the Scrolls: spare and mobile, exclusively Greek, missionary in intent and effect, built for the road.
All the more striking, then, is the sensibility shared by the Essenes and the early Christians in their respective ethical traditions. Both prohibited divorce, both repudiated the taking of oaths (Mt 5:33–37), both promoted an ideal of celibacy (seen, on the Christian side, in Paul and in Matthew, cited above; and in the combined narrative depictions of Jesus himself as an unmarried adult male), both idealized the renunciation of personal property for members of the community (“Go, sell all you have, give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me,” Mk 10:21 and parr.). And both groups—the Essenes while it still stood; the Christians after it was destroyed—had complicated and critical relations with the Temple.
An overarching framework of apocalyptic conviction, further, unites both. In the specifically apocalyptic texts of the Qumran community such as the War Scroll and the Messianic Rule, we see variations on the themes of final battle, angelic armies, the overthrow of Satan, and the coming of a variety of messianic figures—a priestly messiah (cf. the image of Jesus in the New Testament’s Epistle to the Hebrews), a Davidic warrior messiah (cf. New Testament descriptions of the Son’s activities at the Parousia in the Gospels and Paul), a prophet-messiah. These last items of course particularly resonate within primitive Christian tradition. Meschiach—christos in Greek—is so early and so forcefully ascribed to Jesus that it comes to function less as a title than simply as his name: Jesus Christ, not Jesus the Christ.
From this apocalyptic promontory in first-century Judaism, then, we can survey and evaluate those ethical traditions imputed to Jesus in the Gospel material and reflected also in Paul. Several strong themes appear in the didactic passages of the Gospels. Jesus is drawn especially to the poor, whose very poverty enriches them spiritually (Mt 5:3–12; cf. Lk 6:20–23); indeed, as we have just seen, he enjoins care of the poor and an ethic of voluntary poverty on his followers. Jesus puts membership in and obligations to his group above normal ties to family and property (much material here: Mt 8:21 f.//Lk 9:59 f.; Mk 13:12 and parr.; Mt 10:34–39//Lk 12:51–53 and 14:26–27; cf. Mk 3:31–35 and parr., where Jesus repudiates his own family). Evil is to be met with nonresistance; the enemy loved rather than hated (Mt 5:38–6:4//Lk 6:27–36). Yet alongside this ethic of perfectionism is also a message of divine leniency. Sinners need not fear exclusion from the Kingdom: Indeed, the most notorious among them, toll collectors (renowned for living by graft, thus overtaxing those under them) and prostitutes, if they follow Jesus, will precede even the priests into God’s kingdom (Mt 21:31). And according to evangelical depiction, Jesus did not demonstrate his authority to teach through traditional erudition or textual expertise. He thereby “astonished” his listeners, because he taught “as one who had authority” (which is to say, on his own authority), “and not like the scribes” (who would typically present their interpretations by appeal to authoritative teachers or texts: “Rabbi X said in the name of Rabbi Y.” Mk 1:22 and parr.).
What of all this ethical instruction in the New Testament texts might trace back to the very earliest movement? Quite a bit, I think. The evidence of Paul, independent of and converging on this later Gospel material, implies a common source: primitive Christian tradition, and so perhaps Jesus himself. Paul repeats, as we have seen, specific teachings on such issues as divorce, celibacy, and the subordination of normal family relations to preparations for the coming redemption. Persecutors, Paul likewise says, should be blessed, vengeance eschewed, injustice tolerated, taxes to governing authorities paid (Rom 12:9–13:14; cf. 1 Cor 6:7; on the last point—taxes—see also Mk 12:14–17 and parr.: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”). And the poor back in Jerusalem are the special responsibility of his gentile communities, who on this account should give cheerfully to their support (1 Cor 16:1–3; 2 Cor 9; Gal 2:10; Rom 15:25–29).
Other first-century Palestinian Jews, as we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls, thought similarly on these topics. And as with these others, so with Jesus: The fervent conviction that redemption was at hand served as incentive for the intensification and extension of the teachings of Torah. The Dead Sea sect, as we might expect of a priestly group, extended and intensified especially the rules of purity. Jesus also, if we can judge by some synoptic passages and from the Q material surviving in the Sermon on the Mount, extended and intensified the Torah’s commands. But—as we should expect of the lay leader of a lay movement—he focused on those given to all Israel, the Ten Commandments, and he concentrated on the moral aspects of these. Thus Torah condemns murder; Jesus, even anger (Ex 20:13; Dt 5:17; Mt 5:22). Torah condemns adultery; Jesus, even the feeling of lust (Ex 20:14; Dt 5:18; Mt 5:28). Torah condemns swearing falsely, taking God’s name in vain; Jesus, swearing itself (Ex 20:7; Lv 19:12; Mt 5:34). And when a scribe asks, “Which commandment is first of all?” Jesus replies by referring to those commands directed to the entire people: Deuteronomy (the first line of the Sh’ma) and Leviticus: “The first is, ‘Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is One. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.’ And the second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these” (Mk 12:28–31 and parr.).
Here we must pause to consider what Jesus’ ethical teaching can tell us more generally about his attitude toward the Law. It should be noted that his teaching in the Sermon on the Mount is not presented as an alternative to Torah, despite the way we might hear Matthew’s rhetoric (“You have heard it said.… But I say.…”). Jesus here does what the later rabbis will term “building a fence around the Torah”; that is, he prescribes rules of behavior that extend the prohibition, thus ensuring that the biblical command cannot be broken. Someone who will not permit himself even anger is that much less likely to commit murder. Someone who does not allow himself even unexpressed desire—“lust in the heart”—is that much less likely to actually commit adultery, and so on. So, too, with his teaching on divorce. Jesus by forbidding divorce is not speaking “against Torah,” because the Torah does not mandate divorce, but simply permits it. Jesus’ teaching, rather, reinforces marriage—perhaps, as with Paul, in view of the short time remaining until the Kingdom comes.
In the immediately preceding example, Mark’s scribe goes on to say, “You are right, teacher; you have truly said that he (God) is one, and there is no other but he; and to love him with all the heart, and all the understanding, and all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than whole burnt offerings and sacrifices” (Mk 12:32–33). The correct knowledge of God and love of God and neighbor is more important, Mark implies, than the Temple cult mandated in Torah. This teaching sits in the middle of Mark’s description of events in and around Jesus’ entry into and sojourn in Jerusalem for Passover, events that at least imply Jesus’ antagonism to the Temple. For example, when he goes up to the Temple the week before Passover, Jesus curses a fruitless fig tree (“May no one ever eat fruit from you again!” 11:14). Mark uses this act as a kind of commentary on what Jesus does next: “Cleansing” the Temple, he overturns the tables of the money changers and chairs of pigeon sellers, condemning getting and spending in the Temple courtyard (vv. 15–17). Then, passing by the tree the next morning, his disciples see that it had “withered away to its roots” (v. 20). Finally, in the chapter following this dialogue, Jesus predicts the Temple’s utter destruction. “Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down” (13:2). The accusation that Jesus threatened to destroy the Temple weaves in and out of the scenes of his trial and crucifixion (14:58, 15:29). The impression is overwhelming: Mark’s Jesus repudiates traditional Temple worship.
Earlier Markan passages also present and develop a general theme of Jesus’ opposition to traditional practice during his mission in the Galilee. Scribes and/or Pharisees dispute with Jesus over other aspects of Jewish piety: healings on the Sabbath (2:1–12, 3:1–6); dining in questionable company (the proverbial tax collectors and sinners, 2:15 f.); not fasting when the disciples of the Pharisees and of John the Baptist fast (2:18–20); sitting loose of Sabbath observance (2:23–28). In a single, highly fraught episode related in chapter 7, Mark presents Jesus disputing with Pharisees over washing—that is, purifying—hands before eating, over tithes and oath-taking, and finally, according to Mark’s editorial gloss, over the very principle of clean and unclean foods (7:1–23).
These controversies heat Jesus’ opponents to homicidal rage. After a healing on the Sabbath, “the Pharisees went out, and held counsel with the Herodians against him, on how to destroy him” (3:6). Mark foreshadows Jesus’ fate through the device of the Passion predictions, wherein Jesus, describing with precision the events to unwind in Jerusalem, names his opponents, representatives of “traditional” Judaism: elders, chief priests, scribes (8:31; see also 9:31, 10:33). In this way Mark ties Jesus’ teachings in the Galilee to his fate in Jerusalem: Jesus died, Mark suggests, because of hostility to his teaching and acting against certain traditional interpretations of Torah and Temple.
Mark’s Jesus thus can be read as standing against the Judaism of his time, represented on the one hand by his scribal and Pharisaic opponents (particularly in the Galilee), and on the other by the Temple and its priests (particularly in Jerusalem). So powerful is this impression, and so powerfully reinforced by the way that Christianity in fact developed—as a Gentile movement after Jesus’ lifetime and, indeed, as a post-Temple movement well after Mark’s—that it is easy to read the evangelist as, in these instances, historically reliable: These episodes attest to Jesus’ true hostility, not just toward certain practices, but toward the Law itself.
But it was Paul, not Jesus, who insisted on freedom from (most of) the mandates of Torah, and this made good sense in light of his audience. Paul spoke not to Jews but to Gentiles, whom no stream of Jewish tradition ever regarded as responsible to and for Torah. Their elective observances were exactly that: optional. Should a Gentile convert to Judaism—if male, receiving circumcision—then he, like the born Jew, “is bound to keep the whole Law” (Gal 5:3), the peculiar sign, as Paul states in Romans, of Israel’s election (9:4). But even Paul nowhere argues that Jews in principle were free to drop Torah. To do so would have put him outside the entire idea of the Biblical covenant that he in fact invokes when accounting for Jesus’ role in salvation (e.g., Rom 15:1–12. We will shortly examine this passage in some detail). What Paul, midcentury, said to Gentiles makes no sense as a message that Jesus, some twenty years earlier, would have said to fellow Jews.
The prima facie unlikelihood of a Jesus so removed from his own social and religious context is compounded by a further historical fact: If Jesus during his own lifetime had abrogated the Law, evidently neither his own disciples nor Paul himself knew. On the evidence, again, of the Gospels and Paul, Jesus’ earliest followers continued to keep the Sabbath. This alone accounts for the lag between Jesus’ burial before Friday evening and the women’s discovery of the tomb only on Sunday morning. Luke makes this explicit: Returning from the tomb early Friday evening, “on the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment” (Lk 23:56).
After Jesus’ death, the early church in Jerusalem continued to worship in the Temple (Lk 24:53; Acts 2:46, 3:1); in the Diaspora, they moved within synagogue communities (cf. 2 Cor 11:24; Acts passim). The kosher status of food and drink continued to be of lively importance not only to the Jewish members of the movement (Gal 2:11–12), but also to its Gentiles, whose concerns on this score Paul had to address (1 Cor 8:1–13; Rom 14:2–4 and passim). And Paul himself, his so-called Law-free mission to Gentiles notwithstanding, praised precisely those aspects of traditional Judaism that Mark’s Jesus supposedly condemned: the presence of God in the Temple (Gk. doxa, the “glory” of divine presence at the altar), the covenants, the giving of the Law on Sinai, and the mandated cult of sacrifices and offerings (Gk. latreia, translated weakly into English as “worship”). These, Paul states, number among the privileges that God had given to his “sons,” Israel (Rom 9:4).
This is not to say that Jesus did not dispute with other Jews over the correct way to be Jewish. As our brief survey of Second Temple Judaism has shown, few things are so antecedently plausible, even probable: This is what Jews did. By comparison with what some of the Qumran texts and later rabbinic literature have to say about the Jerusalem priesthood, or what the houses of Hillel and Shammai, debating points of Pharisaic interpretation, occasionally say about each other, what passes between the scribes and Jesus is fairly mild. Further, the very fact of argument implies the opposite of rejection or indifference. Argument here implies mutual involvement, common concern, shared values, religious passion. If one party or the other had thought the issues unimportant, there would have been no fight. But even Mark’s Jesus, responding with the Sh’ma and Leviticus to the scribe, does not say, “And you can forget the rest of the Torah,” or, “Love God and neighbor, then, and skip the offerings.” He says, rather, “No other commandment is greater than these.” All are great or important; none is greater or more important.
Mark shapes these controversy traditions polemically, to provide the greatest contrast between Jesus and his challengers. The scribes and Pharisees fuss over imagined Sabbath infringements (in fact, none is actually presented; it is the tone of Jesus’ activity that offends), oblivious to the splendid healings; miffed by a question and a miracle, they plot his murder. In their anxiety to ensure universal conformity to their own standards of observance, they follow Jesus everywhere, watching his house to see whom he eats with and how (Mk 2:13–17 and parr.), patrolling grainfields on the Sabbath hoping to catch him out (2:23–24), checking to see whether his disciples first wash their hands before eating (7:2). This is polemical caricature, not realistic portraiture. As such, we can scarcely use it directly for realistic reconstructions of the past. The first step, rather, is to identify Mark’s polemical hobbyhorses, and then try to correct for these when reading what he has to say.
For example: Consider the long and contrived controversy story given in Mark 7. In protesting that Jesus’ disciples do not purify their hands before eating, Mark’s Pharisees in effect complain that Jesus’ disciples are not Pharisees (since such a purification practice seems to have characterized specifically this group). Should this surprise them? As we noted in our earlier survey, even taking Josephus’s number of six thousand Pharisees in the first century, they would have constituted at the most 1.2 percent of the total population of Palestine. Didn’t they know that they were a small minority, and that their customs were hardly universal? Jesus’ teaching that what comes out of a man defiles him—“evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness”—not what goes into him (7:14–23), is reasonably uncontroversial. Jesus in this passage overstates his case to make his point, prioritizing the moral pollution of sin over levitical pollution from external defilement. He is hardly endorsing the consumption of shellfish and pork here. It is Mark’s heavy-handed gloss—“thus he declared all foods clean” (v. 19b)—that flamboyantly relates Jesus’ teaching in this passage to the biblically mandated food laws.
Mark’s gloss intrudes in this passage. Stylistically, it is the equivalent of a film actor’s stepping out of character and narrative action and, speaking directly into the camera, addressing the viewing audience (“Now watch this part closely!”). The addition makes Mark’s point, not his main character’s (cf. Matthew’s retelling, 15:1–20). And finally, we must take into account the controversy in Antioch, years after this supposed encounter between Jesus and the Pharisees, when Peter, the men sent from James, and Paul disputed about mixed Gentile-Jewish meals taken in community (Gal 2:11–13). If Jesus during his mission had already nullified the laws of kashrut, this argument never could have happened.
Mark dismisses the concerns of Jesus’ opponents—Shabbat, food, tithing, Temple offerings, purity—as the “traditions of men.” To these he opposes what Jesus ostensibly propounds as “the commandment of God” (7:8). The strong rhetoric masks the fact that these laws are biblical and, as such, the common concern of all religious Jews: It is God in the Torah, not the Pharisees in their interpretations of it, who commanded these observances.
Indeed, running like an undercurrent in Mark’s narrative, obscured by the immediacy of his polemical concerns, is Jesus the traditionally religious Jew. He frequents synagogues on the Sabbath, certainly a normatively pious practice. The ill grab ahold of “the fringe of his garment” (6:56); the term, kraspedon in Greek, translates the Hebrew tzitzit. These fringes are not decorative but ritual. God had instructed Moses on them in a passage in Numbers that was incorporated into the Sh’ma. “Speak to the people of Israel and bid them to make tassels on the corners of their garments throughout their generations … to look upon and to remember all the commandments of the Lord, to do them” (Nm 15:38–39). Pious Jews would (and do) wear these; if Jesus did, too, it would be small surprise. Mark’s Jesus celebrates Passover in Jerusalem, with its special mandated evening meal. In brief, and Mark’s conscious efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, Jesus appears even in this Gospel as a recognizably observant Jew.
Mark’s polemical position, picked up to a greater or lesser extent by the other evangelists (and, alas, by centuries of New Testament scholars), urges that ethical concerns override or oppose halakic (“ritual”) concerns. In considering this position, we must realize, first, that Mark writes after 70 C.E., in a period when many of the cultic purity laws were simply moot, because the Temple was no more. Few things could be safer than having his main character, whose prediction of the Temple’s destruction he dramatically showcased in his Gospel, proclaim that Temple ritual was not essential to true piety.
But this dichotomy of “ethical” vs. “ritual” is itself intrinsically anachronistic. It is a modern distinction, resting on the perceived externality (hence moral superficiality) of ritual in favor of (implicitly more authentic) ethics. But people in antiquity did not distinguish these behaviors in these terms. In broader Greco-Roman culture, ethics as such—self-conscious reflection on right behavior—was the concern of the philosopher. Cult rules and revealed ritual—what the gods told to men in dreams, visions, traditional stories, visitations—correspond roughly to what we think of as “religion.” But when Paul urges his Gentiles to behave in a way consistent with his gospel, he forbids them (for instance) not only to drink to excess or to fornicate (“ethical” behavior), but also, equally adamantly, to have anything to do with the worship of idols (“ritual” behavior). For a Jew, both ethics and ritual stand on the same continuum, because both are equally the revealed will of God. (Remember Leviticus 19.)
This polemic can distract us from noticing an actual, practical aspect of this ethical instruction in the Gospels and Paul, an aspect that coheres with the foreshortened time frame of vivid apocalyptic expectation. I speak of its sheer impracticality. No normal society could long run according to the principles of the Sermon on the Mount. Total passive nonresistance to evil—indeed, compliance with injustice (Mt 5:38–48//Lk 6:27–36)—and an absolute refusal to judge (Mt 7:1–2//Lk 6:37–38) would simply lead to the exploitation of those abiding by such rules by those who do not. Voluntary poverty ultimately only increases the absolute numbers of the poor. Not worrying about tomorrow—a principled refusal to plan—can be disastrous: Lilies of the field live one kind of life, but humans another.
And as we see already from Matthew’s emendation, society, in the long run, cannot tolerate an absolute prohibition of divorce. To live by their stringent codes, the Essenes formed their own society, withdrawn from the rest of the world. Much later Christianity, acting on some of these injunctions to poverty and sexual abstinence, of necessity did much the same, variously institutionalizing monasticism and the practice of celibacy, collecting those who would live out their religious commitment in this way into their own settlements.
But the earliest followers of Jesus did not retreat into separate communities and did not establish institutions. Why not? Because these early Christians, and Jesus before them, did not expect a long run. The Kingdom was at hand. In the intense and idealized ethics of this new community we see literally embodied, through the way they led their own lives, their utter commitment to this view. Perhaps, too, they viewed their own behavior as a proleptic enactment of eschatological society, bringing into the present what life would be like in the Kingdom.
CONVOCATIONS OF the Gentile ekklēsia in Corinth must have been quite a scene. Paul’s letter gives us a glimpse: divisiveness and competition (“I belong to Paul!” “I belong to Cephas!” 1 Cor 1:12); disputes about whether one could eat food previously offered to idols—some thought yes, others no, still others felt morally queasy (8:1–13); refusal to share food at the community eucharistic meal (“Don’t you have your own houses to eat in?” 11:22). So bad was their behavior, Paul heatedly warns, “that is why some of you are weak and ill, and some have died” (11:30). Some members, secure in the wisdom revealed to them, continued in old behaviors even after baptism, drinking to excess, fornicating, thieving, worshiping the old gods (“Do not even eat with such a one!” 5:11). While some prophesied, others overflowed with unintelligible charismatic speech, glossolalia (“If the whole group assembles and all speak in tongues and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are mad?” 14:23).
Their failings and confusions notwithstanding, these Gentiles, Paul maintained, had been filled with God’s spirit. Inspired, they were likewise empowered:
To each one is given the manifestation of the spirit for the common good. To one is given through the spirit the utterance of wisdom, to another the utterance of knowledge according to the spirit, to another faith by the same spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one spirit, to another working of miracles [literally, “works of powers”], to another prophecy, to another the ability to discern between spirits.
(1 Cor 12:6–10)
The spirit had come to these Gentiles through baptism, said Paul, thereby incorporating them into the “body of Christ” whose individual members they were (12:13). And it is this spirit, from God, through Christ, that enabled them to perform these charismatic acts.
In Matthew’s Gospel, perhaps forty years after Paul’s letter, we find a similar collocation of actions attributed to later followers of Jesus. Interestingly, these actions do not attest to their membership in the true community. Quite the opposite: In this episode, toward the close of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew’s Jesus warns of what he is going to say to certain Christians, charismatic deeds notwithstanding, when he encounters them at the final judgment:
Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name? And cast out demons in your name? And do mighty works in your name?” And then I will declare to them, “I never knew you; depart from me, you evil doers.”
(Mt 7:21–23)
The power to heal, prophesy, and do miracles is not self-authenticating, as it might seem from the passage in Paul. Here Matthew says, rather, that this power—which he, or his Jesus, does not dispute (the passage does not run, “Lord, did we not do mighty works in your name?” “No; you thought you did, but you really didn’t”)—settles nothing. The person’s religious or spiritual status must rest on other criteria.
The scribes in Mark’s Gospel had thought similarly about Jesus (Mk 3:22–27. When Matthew repeats and edits the same story, the “scribes” become “Pharisees”; Luke simply says “some,” Mt 12:22–37; Lk 11:14–23). According to Mark, Jesus had been traveling throughout the Galilee casting out demons; healing the feverish, the possessed, and those suffering from various diseases; curing a leper, a paralytic, and a man with a withered hand; and finally appointing “twelve” to preach and cast out demons in their turn (3:14–15). The scribes were unimpressed. “By the prince of demons [Beelzebub] he casts out demons” (cf. Jn 8:48, 8:52, 10:20, where Jesus’ audience simply assumes that “he has a demon”). Again, no dispute arises about whether Jesus works these cures and exorcisms—indeed, the scribes’ statement acknowledges that he does. But their challenge means that having such powers, in and of itself, establishes nothing more.
I mention these passages to make a larger point about the way that New Testament authors viewed miracles. Such occurrences are extraordinary yet, at the same time, not unusual in the sense of unprecedented or unique. Nor do they in and of themselves say anything about the person performing them. More than just Jesus, certainly, can work them. Paul’s Gentiles can, according to his first-hand testimony. Paul himself can and does, thus (in his view) establishing his authority as an apostle (“signs, wonders, and mighty works,” 2 Cor 12:12; his apostleship to the Gentiles wrought in “word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Holy Spirit,” Rom 15:19). The Gospel traditions develop their portrait of Jesus, most centrally and importantly, as an exorcist, healer, prophet, and author of mighty works or signs; but such powers are also attributed to his disciples (Mk 6:13), to those who do not follow him but simply cast out demons in his name (Mk 9:38), and even to those followers whom Jesus, at the End, will repudiate (Mt 7:21–23). In their efforts to deceive the elect, false christs and false prophets also “will show signs and wonders” (Mk 13:22). And Jesus in Matthew’s retelling of the “Beelzebub” controversy imputes successful exorcisms to the “sons of the Pharisees” as well (Mt 12:27).
When we turn to broader streams of evidence—various pagan traditions; other Jewish writings—we again find reports of miracles and miracle workers, healers and exorcists. Ancients would “incubate”—that is, sleep in at a cult site—in order to receive visions of or favors from a god. We have evidence of this practice from the cult of Asclepius, the god of healing. His worshipers, receiving cures, left a record of his miracles in inscriptions around his shrine. So also the pagan holy man Apollonius of Tyana had numerous miracles attributed to him: spectacular healings, exorcisms, even once raising someone from the dead. And in the Greek Magical Papyri—books for professionals consulted for cures and different kinds of help (in love or in betting on races, for example)—we can read recipes for conjuring demonic aid to achieve some of these ends. If these practices were not thought to be effective, if the miraculous and the wonderful were thought not to happen, we would not have so much ancient evidence that they did.
Biblical and extrabiblical tradition, on the Jewish side, also speak of powerful prayer, miraculous cures, signs, and wonders. Scripture relates the deeds of prophet Elijah and his younger protégé, Elisha: Elijah, for example, raised a widow’s son from the dead (1 Kgs 17:17–24). Elisha, too, raised a child from the dead (2 Kgs 4:18–37) and cured the foreign general Naaman of leprosy, specifically on his authority as a prophet: “Let him now come to me, that he may know that there is a prophet in Israel” (5:1–27). He also blessed a widow’s jar of oil, so that it “filled many vessels” (4:1–7), and later fed one hundred men from only a few loaves: “they ate, and had some left” (4:42–44). Such miraculous acts echo in the Gospels’ stories about Jesus.
Josephus and later rabbinic texts also speak of wonder-workers. Some, such as Honi the Circle-Drawer (“Onias” in Josephus) and his grandson Hanan had reputations as rainmakers, and thus commanded nature. A certain Eleazar (so Josephus, giving an eyewitness account) expelled demons from those possessed, while Hanina ben Dosa worked cures from a distance. (Interestingly, later rabbinic sources associated some of these men specifically with the Galilee.) References to such activity remain in Essene literature also. In their retelling of Genesis, the Genesis Apocryphon, Abram drives an evil spirit, responsible for sickness, from Pharaoh and his men. The Prayer of Nabonidus, a Scrolls fragment, connects sin and sickness, health and forgiveness of sin, when King Nabonidus tells how he was “afflicted with an evil ulcer for seven years.… and a gazer [exorcist?] pardoned my sins. He was a Jew.” And in The Jewish War and Antiquities, Josephus speaks of charismatic leaders who gathered followings while promising to work great signs: One Theudas promised to part the Jordan River; another Jew, from Egypt, to collapse the walls of Jerusalem by his command; others, to perform marvels out in the desert. My point is not whether these men did or did not work these miracles, but rather—as the great numbers of their followers attests—that their contemporaries clearly thought they could. And, finally, Josephus refers to Jesus of Nazareth as such a wonderworker: He was, says Josephus, a “wise man” who performed “startling deeds” (AJ 18.63).
I review these sources for two reasons. The first is to make the point that people in antiquity, unlike most people today, evidently had little difficulty either perceiving certain events as miraculous or attributing what we think of as supernatural powers to human beings. While miracles and healing were not common occurrences (if they were, they would not be mentioned as attesting to power), they were common enough so that the simple ability to perform such deeds was not seen in itself as establishing the wonder-worker’s authority. The second point refines this one, and relates it specifically to Jesus: His ability to work miracles might enhance his status but could not of itself establish it.
Jumping from Paul’s testimony of the charismatic deeds worked by his Gentiles-in-Christ to those traditions about Jesus himself, we note that Jesus as exorcist, healer (even to the point of raising the dead), and miracle worker is one of the strongest, most ubiquitous, and most variously attested depictions in the Gospels. All strata of this material—Mark, John, M-traditions, L-traditions, and Q—make this claim. This sort of independent multiple attestation supports arguments for the antiquity of a given tradition, implying that its source must lie prior to its later, manifold expressions, perhaps in the mission of Jesus himself. Such reasoning establishes only that traditions about Jesus’ working miracles are early: They cannot answer the question—a modern concern, not evidently an ancient one—whether he actually did them.
Did Jesus of Nazareth, then, perform miracles? Here I as a historian have to weigh the testimony of tradition against what I think is possible in principle. I do not believe that God occasionally suspends the operation of what Hume called “natural law.” What I think Jesus might possibly have done, in other words, must conform to what I think is possible in any case. (Those who have no trouble accepting these miracle accounts as reliably, factually descriptive may skip this paragraph and the next. They should also be aware, however, that Jesus, on the evidence, was hardly unique in performing such acts.) So, to answer my own question: Yes, I think that Jesus probably did perform deeds that contemporaries viewed as miracles. Those I have least trouble imagining his working conform to those also named by Paul: healings and exorcisms. Modern culture, too, is familiar with charismatic cures worked by suggestion. Our explanations differ from those given in ancient sources—where we use the language of psychosomatic disease and suggestion, people in antiquity spoke of demons and special powers—but the phenomenon observed seems identical.
An ability to work cures, further, coheres with another datum from Jesus’ mission: He had a popular following, which such an ability helps to account for (see Mark 1:23–28, 32, 39, 45: “But he [a former leper] went out and began to talk freely about it [i.e., Jesus’ curing him of leprosy], and to spread the news, so that Jesus could no longer openly enter a town … and people came to him from every quarter”). To take as much as I can as historical, I would also include the Synoptics’ stories about Jesus raising the dead within this category. I think of “death” in these instances as something like coma: These instances would represent an extreme type of healing. But such healing abilities, in an age of so many healers and miracle workers, would confer no unique distinction upon Jesus: Again as we see in the Gospels themselves, the same ability is imputed to other contemporaries. The Gospels use this material, rather, to make a particular point about Jesus, as we shall shortly see. The miracles in and of themselves are not the point.
The other wonders attributed to Jesus—walking on water (Mk 6:45–52//Jn 6:16–21); calming the storm (Mk 4:35–41 and parr.); causing a miraculous catch of fish (Lk 5:1–11; Jn 21:1–14); withering a fig tree with a curse (Mk 11:12–14, 20–21); changing water into wine (Jn 2:1–11); feeding a multitude (Mk 6:32–44)—cannot be rationalized so readily. I see them function in the tradition more as ways of proclaiming Jesus’ power than as reports of remembered events. Within this category I would include the raising of Lazarus, found solely in John’s Gospel. That Gospel insists that Lazarus had been dead for four days, and that the corpse already stank (11:17, 39). The whole incident pronounces the evangelist’s theological message about Jesus. “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” this Jesus tells Lazarus’s grieving sister; “who believes in me, though he die, yet he shall live” (v. 25). As this Gospel’s Jesus himself remarks, when hearing the news of his friend’s extremity, “This illness is not unto death; it is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified by means of it” (v. 4), which is precisely how this story in this Gospel works.
The synoptic Gospels themselves put Jesus’ wonderworking within the larger framework of his prophetic authority: Miracles demonstrate Jesus’ authority to announce the coming of the Kingdom. Responding to an inquiry from John the Baptizer (“Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?”), Jesus, according to this Q-tradition, says to John’s disciples, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have the good news preached to them,” and he goes on to speak about the Kingdom (Mt 11:2–24//Lk 7:18–35). The miracles speak to the power of God breaking into the present, in advance of the Kingdom’s full arrival.
Here the evangelical interpretation of Jesus’ miracles provides a glimpse into the way that Jesus of Nazareth himself might have understood them; for both they and he stand within the larger context of Jewish views on power and prophecy, the authority to announce God’s message.
The miracles should not be regarded in isolation, then, but together with Jesus’ moral message and his call to prepare for the coming Kingdom. Miracles would not demonstrate his personal power, but rather—as with the wonder-workers of Talmudic lore—his intimacy with God, the true source of such power. Miracles as deed reinforce the authority of word: They enhance and support Jesus’ reputation as authoritative prophet of the Kingdom. “If it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Mt 12:28//Lk 11:20). The miracles are the medium; but the Kingdom is the message.
Our speculation here about Jesus’ own view of his miracles returns us by another road to our earlier observation about his perfectionist ethics, and also to our point of origin in this cycle of research, namely, the diaspora mission and the letters of Paul. Christian eschatology as such, as distinct from its matrix, Jewish eschatology, expresses at its earliest and most vibrantly apocalyptic strata—Paul and Mark—the paradox of “Now” vs. “Not yet.” Paul’s Kingdom—with the Son’s Parousia, the defeat of death, the resurrection of the dead, and transformation of the living—lay just over the historical horizon; and until those things are accomplished, he insists, the Kingdom has not arrived. Yet within the ekklēsia, the turning of the ages is in some sense realized. The Spirit has been poured forth, so that Gentiles-in-Christ have already renounced their idols and acknowledged “the living and true God”; already they, too, can work charismatic deeds of power. Spiritually if not physically, redemption has already been won, because Christ, “the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” has already been raised from the dead (1 Cor 15:20; cf. 2:14–16, 3:16, chaps. 12–14; Gal 4:3–9; Rom 8:10–17, etc.).
So, too, with what we can discern of the movement around Jesus. He spoke of a Kingdom still to come; yet the measure of his authority as its spokesman was broadcast in the defeat of evil, sickness, and death already actualized in his own mission through his exorcisms and healing miracles. Those who accepted him and his message of impending salvation—the restoration of Israel and the redemption of the world—were in a privileged position: they could prepare for the event they knew was coming by living according to the intensified, internalized precepts of Torah that Jesus preached, forswearing not just sin (murder, adultery) but the very emotions that precede sinning (anger, lust); returning good for evil (Mt 5:17–48); perhaps—if they would imitate Jesus himself—forswearing the false security of property, embracing poverty, living on the road, taking to others the message of the Kingdom (Mk 6:7–13, specifically of the Twelve; cf. 9:42–47, 10:17–22, the rich man; Lk 10:9–11, the commission to the Seventy).
The perfectionist ethical teachings and the miracles, then, are all of a piece, both in Jesus’ own mission, and even twenty years after his execution, in the Diaspora, with Paul’s Gentiles. Both together attest to the nearness—now but not yet—of the Kingdom.
COMMUNITY ETIQUETTE was lacking in Corinth. Among his many complaints about their deportment, Paul names the Corinthians’ fractiousness and rudeness: Rather than a communal event, the meal taken together by the ekklēsia was closer to a free-for-all. “When you eat together, it is not the Lord’s supper that you eat. For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal, and one is hungry and another is drunk!” (1 Cor 11:21). To recall them to their purpose, Paul reminds them of the origins of this practice: Jesus himself.
For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night he was handed over took bread, and having given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
(1 Cor 11:23–26)
Paul anticipates here by some twenty years a tradition that we find, later, in Mark. I italicize the particular elements they have in common:
And as they were eating, he took bread, and he blessed it and broke it, and gave it to them and said, “This is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly I say to you, I shall not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the Kingdom of God.”
(Mk 14:22–25)
In the Gospel narrative, Jesus celebrates the Passover meal together with the Twelve (though Mark does not actually depict a seder). Shortly thereafter, Judas Iscariot, who had arranged to betray Jesus to the priests (14:10–11), leads a crowd to Gethsemane to ambush Jesus after the meal (vv. 43 ff.). The preceding Passion predictions have prepared the reader for these events: betrayal and death in Jerusalem.
Paul’s version, by comparison, has none of this narrative context (though in deference to the Judas story, modern translations give the verb he uses in 11:23, paredidoto, “handed over,” as “betrayed”). Yet the “words of commission” in both versions presuppose that (1) Jesus anticipated his own impending death and (2) interpreted it himself as a kind of expiatory sacrifice (his body “for you”; his blood “poured out for many”). Finally, Paul, in his version, and Jesus in Mark’s, tie the commemorative meal into the coming Kingdom: The Corinthians are to keep the meal as a way to “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes”—that is, comes again; Mark’s Jesus will not drink wine again until “I drink it new in the Kingdom of God.”
What historically might stand behind this tradition? Both versions attest, first, to the celebration of a common meal, in anticipation of the Kingdom, as an early and prominent feature of primitive Christianity. Sayings of Jesus elsewhere in the Gospels likewise speak of the Kingdom as a banquet (e.g., Mt 8:11). The idea is further attested in Judaism contemporary with Jesus. The Essenes, too, predicted such a feast, to be presided over by the priest and the Messiah; and they observed a communal meal in anticipation of this Endtime “messianic banquet.” Later Jewish apocalyptic texts—Baruch, Enoch, the Apocalypse of Elijah—speak both of a superabundance of food at the End and of dining with the Messiah. Had Jesus himself, perhaps at his final Passover in Jerusalem, likewise spoken of the impending Kingdom, he may have enacted such a feast with his twelve disciples, whose company symbolized the restored, eschatological Israel.
It is the details of the eucharistic formula, however, that engage speculation. We know, again from Paul, that Jesus’ followers early on saw his death as in some sense vicarious and expiatory (“Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,” 1 Cor 15:3). We must wait until we consider, in more detail, events surrounding Jesus’ last week in Jerusalem before we can gauge the plausibility of Jesus himself being the source of this idea in Christian tradition. But the coincidence of our two earliest witnesses, Paul and Mark, demonstrates at the very minimum that this formula, and the practice of this communal meal, was very early on regarded by these communities as a teaching of Jesus himself.
“CHRISTOS,” the Greek translation of the Hebrew meshiach or “messiah” (“anointed”), is Christianity’s designation of choice for Jesus. The word is so firmly established in the tradition so early on that, by the time we have Paul’s letters, “Christ” functions most simply as Jesus’ name. In other words, the understanding of Jesus as Messiah did not originate with Paul, but was inherited by him. To reconstruct its prehistory, then, we need to consider the following questions:
What was the meaning of the term in this period?
When was it attached to Jesus of Nazareth?
Why?
The Hebrew Bible is the fundamental source for the term meshiach, though the word itself occurs there only thirty-nine times. Most usually it designates the current ruler of the Jewish kingdom whose assumption of office was marked by anointing with oil (e.g., 2 Sm 5:3; 1 Kgs 1:39; Ps 89:20). In a few cases, “anointed one” refers to the holder of priestly office (e.g., Lv 4:3, 5, 16), and anointing could evidently figure in the investiture of prophets (1 Kgs 19:16; cf. Is 61:1). But at one point the entire people of Israel is called “God’s anointed” (Ps 105:15; 1 Chr 16:22); and, more surprisingly, Isaiah uses the term to designate the Persian ruler Cyrus, who defeated Babylon and permitted the Jews exiled there to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple (Is 45:1; cf. 2 Chr 36:23).
This free use notwithstanding, the prime historical referent of this term was the warrior king David. In Jewish tradition, David appears as the ruler who especially loved God (authorship of the Psalms is attributed to him) and who in turn was especially loved by God. For this reason God promised eternal sovereignty to the kings of his line:
The Lord declares to you that the Lord will make you a house. When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be my son. When he commits iniquity, I will punish him with the rod of men, with the stripes of the sons of men; but I will not take my steadfast love from him, as I took it from Saul whom I put away from before you. And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever.
(2 Sm 7:11–17)
But it was precisely when royal power was torn from the kings of David’s line, when God’s house was destroyed and the people of Israel driven off the land, that this promise was reaffirmed in prophetic oracles. In the wake of the fall of the north to Assyria (722 B.C.E.), and the capture of Jerusalem and exile in Babylon under Nebuchadnezzar (586 B.C.E.), Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel confirm the hope of a future, idealized kingdom. Thus Isaiah 11 anticipates a “shoot coming forth from the stump of Jesse,” David’s father. This “shoot” is a future monarch whose reign will be marked by righteousness and peace (extending even to the animal kingdom, vv. 6–8), when “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord” and the outcasts of Israel reassembled; even the Gentiles will seek this messianic king (11:1–15).
“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous branch,” prophesied Jeremiah, “and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land” (Jer 23:5). Amplifying this promise later in his book, Jeremiah continues: “Thus says the Lord: David shall never lack a man to sit on the throne of the house of Israel”; he goes on to compare the certainty of this promise with the certainty of Creation itself (Jer 33:17–22).
To Ezekiel, God swears that he will establish “over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them … and be their shepherd. And I, the Lord, will be their God” (Ez 34:23). Surveying the Dry Bones (“Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel,” 37:11), the prophet receives God’s promise of resurrection and restoration: “I will open your graves and raise you from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you home into the land of Israel” (37:12). Further, at that point God will “set up over them one shepherd, my servant David” who will be their king (v. 24). Israel will then dwell in the land forever, always under the Davidic prince. God will restore his sanctuary, the Temple, and establish with his people an everlasting covenant of peace. And with the restoration of his sanctuary even the Gentiles will acknowledge “that I the Lord sanctify Israel” (vv. 25–28).
These prophetic promises were spoken in the teeth of brutal disconfirmation of the covenant: defeat, destruction, exile. The prophets’ invocation of the ultimate Davidic king served to affirm God’s general and continuing commitment to Israel and to his covenant promises. Israel was broken, but its brokenness was temporary: God would redeem.
And, in fact, the Exile did come to an end. In the closing decades of the sixth century B.C.E. (c. 538–510), with their defeat of Babylon, the Persians permitted the exiles to return to Judea and rebuild their city and temple. But the days of a native monarchy were over. Under the Persians, leadership ultimately devolved to the high priests, who governed from Jerusalem while serving as the intermediary between their own people and the empire. This ruling priest was (or was considered to be) a Zadokite, that is, a descendant of the ancient house of Zadok, whose historical prominence was intertwined with that of the Davidic monarchy: the biblical Zadok had endorsed Solomon as David’s heir and anointed him king (1 Kgs 1:28–45). Long after Persian power waned, this form of government persisted. After Alexander the Great conquered Persia, Jerusalem’s high priests mediated variously between the Greek Ptolemies of Egypt and the Greek Seleucids of Syria, and so the situation continued until the outbreak of the Maccabaean revolt (167 B.C.E.).
The cultural civil war that led to the revolt expressed a split within the Zadokite family itself. In 175 B.C.E., Jason, brother of the current high priest, bought the office for himself by bribing the Seleucid ruler Antiochus, whose permission he sought to turn Jerusalem into a Hellenistic city (hence the gymnasium mentioned in 1 Mc 1:14; cf. 2 Mc 4:7–22, on Jason). Various Zadokites divided their political loyalties between the perennially warring Ptolemies and Seleucids; but most endorsed, to one degree or another, the cultural and religious Hellenization of Jewish life. The priestly family of the Hasmoneans who took charge of the revolt ultimately led the forces opposed to radical Hellenization to victory. In recognition of their power and authority in Judea, Seleucid monarchs thereafter appointed one of their number to the office of high priest. Later (in the 140s or 130s), as political autonomy increased, the Hasmonean high priest assumed the role and even the title “king.”
Should Jews worship foreign gods as well as their own? Ignore biblical laws on food, sacrifice, Sabbath? Cease—or disguise the marks of—circumcision (1 Mc 1:14f., 43–49)? The success of the revolt answered all these questions with a clear “No.” Extreme Hellenization was out, and the Law of Moses, however variously interpreted, would be the law of the land.
But the political independence established by the Hasmoneans, together with the post-Seleucid freedom of practice, complicated, for some Jews, precisely this issue of interpreting and living the Law. The problem was exacerbated and in a sense exemplified by the Hasmoneans themselves: High priests but not Zadokites; kings, eventually, but clearly not of the house of David (who had been a layman); they lacked the correct biblical pedigree for either job, and this troubled some Jews. Others simply preferred the older form of government as under Persia or the Greeks: a high priest (whose position, in comparison to the Hasmonean consolidation of royal and priestly offices, was relatively unpolitical) serving under an empire remote from and uninterested in the day-to-day life of the country. For some, in brief, the new order chafed.
Politically (and thus religiously), matters continued to grow ever more complicated. Israel became increasingly drawn into pan-Mediterranean politics, which naturally affected both the government and, accordingly, the Temple. Tangled up in the civil wars marking Rome’s transition from republic to empire, Jerusalem was besieged and the Temple’s inner sanctum violated by the Roman general Pompey (63 B.C.E.). Then Hasmonean rule ceded to Herod the Great (37–4 B.C.E.), a third-generation convert to Judaism. Unable to serve as high priest himself, Herod used the position as a blatantly political appointment, assigning (and later assassinating) his Hasmonean brother-in-law to the office, and later bringing in foreign nobodies completely beholden to him to fill the position temporarily. (Traditionally, it had been a life appointment.) When he died, Augustus as executor of Herod’s will divided the country between his three surviving sons: Archelaus took Judea and Samaria; Antipas, the Galilee and Perea (on the east bank of the Jordan); Philip, parts of Transjordan. Archelaus proved controversial, and in 6 C.E., partly at the request of some Judeans, Augustus sent him into exile and brought Judea directly under Roman authority. Herod’s other two sons retained their lands and their autonomy as client kings.
The prefects in Judea kept the peace with varying degrees of success, while high priests continued to come and go, now mostly at the pleasure of Rome. The war against the empire in 66–73 C.E. devastated Jerusalem and Judea; and the final, unsuccessful revolt in 132–135 C.E. led by Bar Kokhba (designated messiah by no less a religious authority than Rabbi Akiva) sealed the political and military desuetude of the country. The people and the religion would continue; but kingship, priesthood, Temple—those religious-political ideas and issues that had so charged the Hellenistic and Hasmonean period—were, by the changed realities of rabbinic times, transposed into a new key.
The Hasmoneans’ biblically irregular execution of high priestly office and restoration of the monarchy, coupled with a contentious freedom of religious practice, had incubated the various religious parties—Sadducees, Essenes, Pharisees—enumerated by Josephus. They also contributed to the highly charged apocalyptic convictions that gave the intertestamental period its mutagenic religious intensity.
Stimulated by this climate, the messianic paradigms of earlier scriptural tradition altered, grew, proliferated. In the Qumran library alone, alongside the more familiar image of the royal Davidic messiah, the future warrior/prince of peace, we also find other messianic figures. The messiah also appears as the perfect priest. Or he might be the eschatological prophet, who will teach righteousness and interpret Torah correctly at the End of Days. Moses himself had foreseen his coming: “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethren. Him you shall heed, just as you desired of the Lord your God.… And the Lord said to me: ‘I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brethren, and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him” (Dt 18:15–18). In an even more radical divergence from earlier types, the Scrolls also speak of a messianic figure (angelic? human? the text is fragmentary) enthroned in the heavens as final redeemer.
These figures from Qumran encode critiques of circumstances specific to the aftermath of the Maccabaean revolt. The insistence on a Davidic messiah bespeaks a negative response to the non-Davidic Hasmonean kingship; the notion of an Endtime priestly messiah, dissatisfaction with the current running of the Temple; the division of messianic authority between priest and king (“Aaron and Israel,” as the Scrolls have it), a criticism of the Hasmonean combination of the two offices. That the texts of a single community exhibit such a striking variety of these messianic figures gives a good indication of the degree of interpretive diversity that apocalyptic hope could accommodate generally. And when we broaden our perspective to take in some of the various apocryphal and pseudonymous revelations circulating in this period between Judah Maccabee and Bar Kokhba—Daniel, 2 Esdras, 1 Enoch, who spoke of a coming Son of Man; 2 Baruch and the Psalms of Solomon, of a kingly messiah; the Assumption of Moses, of the final Kingdom but no messiah at all—we see that none of the details of the coming cosmic drama were fixed. What mattered was the final triumph of Good over Evil, in universalized fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel.
This diversity of messianic figures and their function should not obscure the prime importance of the Davidic messiah. Messianic expectation was not universal; but those who chose to speculate in this vein had, in the classical prophetic texts and later apocalyptic interpretations of them, a readily available body of tradition to draw on. The Messiah son of David is the best and most widely attested figure, cutting across sectarian as well as temporal lines: We can trace him from the classical Jewish biblical histories and prophets through the multitudinous intertestamental texts just reviewed on into rabbinic prayers and benedictions. His role in history’s final drama was clear. “See, Lord, and raise up for them their king, the son of David,” prayed the author of the pseudonymous Psalms of Solomon sometime in the first century B.C.E., “at the time that you have knowledge of [i.e., the Endtime], and gird him with strength, so he may smash those who rule without justice” (17:23). Executing judgment, defeating the enemies of God, reigning over a restored Israel, establishing unending peace, this eschatological prince epitomized the military prowess, valor, and virtues of his royal ancestor, the warrior king David.
All the more mysterious, then, that earliest Christian tradition would choose this figure as a way to express and proclaim the religious identity of Jesus of Nazareth.
Paul typically identifies Jesus as “Christ”: the term occurs more than 140 times in the seven letters of his extant correspondence. Since he writes to already established communities, Paul nowhere offers an elementary, catechetical explanation for his or the tradition’s use of the word—the sort of “since Jesus did thus-and-so, he must be the Christ” instruction that we find in the later Gospels. Only in his last letter, to the community at Rome, do we find two fleeting but formal declarations of Jesus’ identity that link him with the broader, biblically based redemptive myth. The first occurs as Paul introduces himself:
Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh, and designated Son of God in power according to the spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.
(Rom 1:1–4)
The second appears in a cento of biblical quotations from Psalms, Deuteronomy, and Isaiah as Paul moves into the closing of his letter. He again invokes Jesus’ coming as the fulfillment of biblical promises, “for whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (15:4). These promises, he says, had always had in view a double goal: the redemption of Israel (“Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God’s truthfulness in confirming the promises to the patriarchs”) and of the nations (“in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy,” v. 8). Naming Isaiah, Paul then adds: “ ‘The root of Jesse shall come, he who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him shall the Gentiles hope’ ” (Is 11:10 LXX).
These allusions are brief but pregnant with biblical significance. In his opening sentence, for example, Paul names Jesus as the physical descendant of David and thus David’s “son.” But Paul also introduces Jesus first of all as God’s Son. This idea of sonship—that the king (thus “son of David”) is also in some sense God’s Son—pertains, as we have already seen, to ancient Jewish traditions of kingship. God when speaking through the prophet Nathan to David had promised sovereignty to David’s house, saying of the future ruler, “I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me” (2 Sm 7:14; the full passage is quoted above, this page). The kinship language expresses the abiding bond of affection between God and king.
But, in light of the metaphysical claims that later, trinitarian Christianity will make for Jesus, we should note here that this biblical tradition also affirms the king’s earthly, physical paternity: The descent from David as human father is precisely the point of God’s promise of permanence to his royal line. “Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever” (7:17). David as messiah and, therefore, God’s son, appears similarly in Psalm 89: “I have found David, my servant, with my holy oil I have anointed him; … He shall cry to me, ‘You are my Father’ ” (89:20, 26). So also Psalm 2, the so-called Enthronement Psalm: “You are my son; today I have begotten you” (v. 7).
“Son of God,” in other words, is an ancient phrase native to Jewish tradition for designating the human messiah. Such a phrase signals the intimate relationship between God and the designate. It is also used in the Bible for other close relationships between God and select beings. Angels, prophets, particularly just or righteous men, the entire nation of Israel (as Paul at Rom 9:4)—all could properly be called “son(s) of God.” Used of a figure of David’s house, the phrase indicates a monarch. Transposed into an apocalyptic key, the phrase indicates the final eschatological king.
Paul gives no explanation for his identifying Jesus as such a royal figure—“Christ” (that is, Messiah) “descended from David.” However, no matter what Paul’s reasons are for identifying Jesus in this way, the Resurrection is not one of them. Jesus’ resurrection designates a special sonship—“son of God in power”—but not the Davidic one, which Paul distinguished earlier as depending on physical descent (“according to the flesh”). Paul states here what scholars know from their study of broader Jewish tradition, namely, that the Judaism preceding and contemporary with ancient Christianity knew no tradition of a resurrected messiah, and thus nothing of a dying messiah. Where an “anointed one” does die—in Daniel 9:26, for instance, “after sixty-two weeks, the messiah will be cut off and be no more”—he is a human political figure. But he is not, ipso facto, the final eschatological Redeemer-King.
The only hint of Paul’s reason for viewing Jesus as the Davidic Messiah comes in chapter 15, when he refers explicitly to Isaiah 11:10, the “root of Jesse” ruling over and bringing hope to the Gentiles (15:12). To see the point he is making more clearly, we must step back to view it within its larger context: Jewish speculations on the role of the Gentiles in the final days.
Such speculations form an element within more general Jewish apocalyptic hopes. These hopes express the fundamental biblical conviction that God is good, that he works in history, and that he is true to his promises. The fundamental promise—which Paul alluded to in Romans 15:8—goes back to the calling of Abraham, which in the tradition’s view was the beginning of the Jewish people:
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go out from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and curse him who curses you, and through you shall all the families of the earth be blessed.”
(Gn 12:1–3)
The story of Abraham thus begins with God’s pledge that the Land of Israel awaits Abraham and his family, and that their unique relationship will benefit all humankind. God later makes other pronouncements to Abraham. His descendants will be enslaved in a foreign land, but God will redeem them from slavery and bring them to their promised home (15:12–20). Abraham and his family must walk before God and be blameless (17:1), sealing their covenant in the flesh with circumcision (17:10–13), keeping God’s ways by doing righteousness and justice (18:19). The pledge of the Land repeats throughout the rest of the Genesis, recurring in God’s dealings with Isaac and Jacob; invoked by Joseph, dying in Egypt, in the book’s closing lines:
And Joseph said to his brothers, “I am about to die; but God will visit you and bring you up out of this land to the land which he swore to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”
(Gn 50:24)
From Genesis 12, with God’s call to Abraham, to the close of Deuteronomy, with Moses dying as the twelve tribes prepare to cross over the Jordan, the entire Torah tells this story of how God made good on his promise of the Land—“the land which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, ‘I will give it to your descendants’ ” (Dt 34:4). The final collapse of the northern Jewish kingdom to Assyria in 722 B.C.E., and the fall of the south to Nebuchadnezzar in 568 B.C.E., must be viewed within this perspective. Exile from the Land was a traumatic disconfirmation of God’s promise, of his covenant, of Israel’s election as God’s people.
It was the genius of the prophets that made it otherwise. Out of all the families of the earth, they urged, God had chosen Israel alone to know and serve him: “Only you [Israel] have I chosen from among all the nations.” Israel’s suffering and exile thus actually expressed God’s continuing commitment: “Therefore I will punish you for your sins” (Am 3:2). Suffering was punishment, and punishment was not rejection. God used calamity to call Israel to repentance. By rededication to fulfilling her covenant obligations—ritual, moral, economic, as the modern mind parses them—by returning to Torah, Israel would also return to the Land. “Zion will be redeemed by justice, and those in her who repent, by righteousness” (Is 1:27). God is just and merciful; his love is steadfast; his word unchanging; his promises, therefore, sure—or, as Paul put it in Romans, “The gifts and the call of God are irrevocable” (11:29).
In the prophets’ view, the confrontation of Babylon and Jerusalem embodied in historical idiom the two poles of a spiritual and moral reality: exile and return, slavery and redemption, sin and repentance, repentance and forgiveness. Later generations, traumatized in their turn by the cultural and religious confusions of the Greek and Roman periods, looked to this prophetic tradition. They amplified its urgency and universalized its claims: Prophecy became apocalyptic eschatology. The assured redemption no longer lies simply in the future. That future impinges on the present: It is imminent, and one can know its approach by reading the signs of the times.
And the surest sign was how bad things had become. If Hellenizing priests controlled the Temple; if a foreign idol stood at the altar of God; if Jews apostatized and idols polluted the Land; if the high priesthood were torn from the house of Zadok; if everything, in brief, were as terrible as it could be, then surely God was about to intervene. How bad things were or what exactly “bad” was depended, of course, on one’s particular viewpoint: What was terrible for an alienated Zadokite priest might seem just fine to a Maccabaean partisan. In brief, the particular situation or event stimulating the apocalyptic response varied from person to person and community to community. But common to all was the mentality of urgency, coupled with intense religious conviction: The worse things got, the better they were about to become. God—just, good, almighty—would not let history drift indefinitely.
Thus what in the prophets was to be a historical event in the life of the people of Israel—the return to the Land and restoration of the Kingdom—became in its apocalyptic mode what God would bring about at the End of Days, changing the nature of historical reality itself. Both the preceding extent of evil and the final extent of good wax universal, as Israel’s redemption from Babylon and return to the Land expand to a huge scale: the cosmic defeat of evil, the ingathering of the entire people (living and dead), and the universal worship of the God of Israel. As Israel returns from the lands of her dispersion, she will be escorted by the nations to Zion: “In those days ten men from the nations of every tongue shall take hold of the robe of a Jew, saying, ‘Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you’ ” (Zec 8:23). Both the city and God’s house will be rebuilt in splendor, “for all generations for ever, just as the prophets said of it,” wrote Tobit, an apocryphon of the second century B.C.E. “Then all the Gentiles will turn to fear the Lord God in truth and will bury their idols” (Tb 14:5–6).
Here, then, is the clue to understanding Paul’s view of Jesus as the Davidic Christ. That in the final days, to effect Israel’s redemption, God would send his Messiah, the branch of Jesse, was not, as we have seen, a universally held Jewish belief; but, clearly, Paul and the other members of the Christian movement were among those Jews who did hold it. And that in the final days God would turn the gentile nations from their false gods to his own worship was not the only apocalyptic role assigned the Gentiles. We also find less generous speculations (many also in Isaiah): The unrighteous nations would be destroyed, their cities desolate (Is 54:3); their wealth would flow into Jerusalem (45:14); the kings of the Gentiles would bow down to Israel (49:6); the nations would lick the dust at Israel’s feet. But it is the inclusive tradition anticipating gentile participation in Israel’s final redemption that sounds increasingly in intertestamental writings, in later synagogue prayers, and in rabbinic discussion. And, clearly, this is the tradition shaping the convictions and activities of the earliest Jewish Christians—James, John, Peter, Barnabas, and most especially Paul (see Gal 2).
If we consider the place of Gentiles in antiquity’s diaspora synagogue communities, we see more clearly the impact of this apocalyptic notion on Christian gentile life. Interested outsiders had long been accommodated by the synagogue and would continue to be for centuries after this period. Such Gentiles were free to assume as much or as little of Jewish practice as they wished, while continuing in their ancestral practices. This open attitude was consistent with the religious ecumenicalism that marked pagan culture generally. For the Jews’ part, encouraging the interest and even the admiration of the host gentile majority simply made good sense. Further, since Jewish tradition regarded keeping Torah as the defining privilege of Israel, the synagogue would have little reason to impose its own standard of monotheism on these neighbors. If Gentiles in the Diaspora chose to join with Jews in worship of Israel’s God, they were free to, just as in Jerusalem they were free to fund offerings at the Temple. Abundant literary and inscriptional evidence reveals considerable Gentile-Jewish interaction. And, much to the annoyance of later Christian bishops, gentile Christians well into the fourth century and after continued what their pagan ancestors had begun, frequenting synagogues and keeping Jewish fast or feast days as they would.
Conversion to Judaism, which entailed circumcision for men, was another matter entirely. A Gentile who chose to become a Jew would thereby take upon himself the obligation to observe Torah. “Every man who receives circumcision,” as Paul wrote in Galatians, “is bound to keep the whole Law” (5:3). Conversion accordingly meant ceasing traditional pagan worship altogether, thus cutting oneself out of the social and religious fabric of the ancient city. This was a serious and consequential step. Virtually all civic activities involved sacrifices. Failure to participate in the cults of the city and of the empire (which mandated homage to the emperor and to the genius of Rome) could easily result in at least resentment, if not actual criminal charges. An exclusive allegiance to the Jewish god would therefore necessarily affect aspects of the convert’s life well beyond what we as moderns (and particularly Americans, given our legally protected distinction between church and state) think of as “religious.”
Born Jews had to negotiate exemptions from the cults of majority culture, and these exemptions were written into the laws of the cities where they lived. Their religious exclusivism angered some pagan writers, who considered it “atheist,” the derogatory term describing refusal to worship the gods. Commenting resentfully on Jewish “atheism,” these writers particularly reproached those (former) Gentiles who had converted to Judaism: Such conversions seemed a form of sedition, a rank disloyalty to and betrayal of one’s own people, country, ancestors, and gods.
This resentment highlights the oddness of the idea of conversion in antiquity. What we now think of as “religion” had a clear genealogical nexus then: People worshiped the gods native to them. To undergo a rite that would turn a pagan into a Jew would make as little sense to most ancient pagans as would a modern person’s undergoing a ritual by which she would somehow be transformed from being, say, actually, culturally English to actually, culturally Italian. A modern can convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism but still be English; or she can legally change her citizenship, trading in her U.K. passport for an Italian one, but still be Anglican. Our distinction of legal and cultural nationality, or religious versus cultural status, is not native to antiquity. To “become” a Jew meant to become part of another people or nation, somehow to undo one’s own past.
Photograph of the synagogue at Sardis
“From early generations Moses has had in every city those who preach him, for he is read every sabbath in the synagogues” (Acts 15:21). In the ancient world, “synagogue” might mean simply a “gathering” or congregation, not necessarily a building. But in the cities of the Diaspora, Jews sometimes erected large and stately public buildings to serve as a gathering place for their community. Interested Gentiles might drop by at will. The fourth-century remains of the synagogue at Sardis (in modern Turkey) attest to a wealthy and well-integrated Jewish community whose public building stood in the heart of their city, in the same structure as the marketplace and the baths. The floor of the synagogue runs along the entire lower edge of the structure.
Absent conversion, however, no such change in religious allegiance seems to have been demanded or expected by these diaspora synagogue communities: Sympathetic Gentiles could and most often did remain pagans. Further, diaspora Jews themselves do not seem to have promoted missions as such to these Gentiles: Given the religious social fabric of the ancient city, and pagan resentment at Jewish cultic exclusiveness, such a mission, had diaspora Jews ever conceived it, might very well have jeopardized the well-being of their own community, a minority in whatever city they lived.
Consider then, within this context, what Paul is telling his Gentiles. He urges them to worship only the God of Israel. “You have learned from us,” he tells the Christian Gentiles of Thessalonica, “how you ought to live and to please God,” now that they have “turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God” (1:9). The Corinthians must completely renounce idolatry; anyone still indulging must be put out of the community (1 Cor 5:1–13). Even if they know that “ ‘idols have no real existence’ and that ‘there is no God but one’ ” (Paul, quoting them, 8:4), eating meat from an animal sacrificed to idols puts some members at risk: “Weak in conscience,” they might slip back through this old cultic activity to thinking that such gods really exist (8:7–12). Better then that they not eat meat at all (v. 13)—in effect, completely absenting themselves from civic ritual. Again and again Paul repeats his point: “Shun the worship of idols” (10:14; see the entire chap.).
But this is not to say that these Gentiles should become Jews: This is the whole point of Paul’s argument in his letter to the Galatians. They need not convert—indeed, Paul argues heatedly, they should not convert, because God in Christ had saved them graciously, without the works of the Law. It is enough, says Paul, that Gentiles-in-Christ love one another and repudiate the “works of the flesh.” (Paul then lists the usual condemned behaviors: fornication, impurity, idolatry, drunkenness, and so on: “I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the Kingdom of God,” Gal 5:14, 19–21). In sum, according to Paul, Gentiles-in-Christ should repudiate their traditional worship and commit exclusively to the God of Israel. They should hold themselves aloof from the social and religious holy days of their city and native culture. And they should not become Jews.
No precedent in normal synagogue practice explains his demands. They are drawn, rather, from various Jewish apocalyptic traditions. Paul urges his Gentiles to precisely that behavior that other Jews who thought about such things would have anticipated only once the Kingdom came. We find the theme of the Endtime pilgrimage of Gentiles to Zion already in the classical prophets. Thus Isaiah:
It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of
the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and shall be raised above the hills.
And all the nations shall flow to it,
and many peoples shall come and say,
“Come, let us go to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways,
and that we may walk in his paths.”
(Is 2:2–3)
This theme develops into the expectation that Gentiles at the End will make an exclusive allegiance to God and repudiate their idols. “At that time I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech,” says God through the prophet Zephaniah (seventh century B.C.E.?), “that all of them may call upon the Lord and serve his with one accord” (Zep 3:9). Turning to God in the final days, Gentiles “will bury their idols,” prophesies Tobit (Tb 14:6; second century B.C.E.). Journeying to the Temple, contemplating the Law of the Most High God, these Gentiles will see idols destroyed by flames (Sibylline Oracle 3.616, 716; mid–second century B.C.E.). And we see this theme repeated later in a synagogue prayer, the Alenu: When God finally reveals himself in glory “all humankind” (Heb. kol benei basar, “all the sons of flesh”) will turn from their idols to worship the Lord. And we see this theme, mid–first century C.E., in Paul.
Pagan culture and the sort of moral, sexual, and religious behavior it tolerated (or in Paul’s view, produced) were not topics of general Jewish enthusiasm. Paul fully shared the views of his fellow religionists on this topic, as his roiling condemnation of pagan culture shows:
Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to uncleanness, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, blessed forever, Amen!… God gave them up to a base mind and improper conduct.
The inscription at Aphrodisias
This third-century Jewish inscription from Aphrodisias (in modern Turkey) provides an intriguing glimpse into the nature of Gentile-Jewish interactions in the Diaspora. In its list of names (perhaps commemorating donors), it gives inter alia fifty-four theosebeis or “God-fearers,” pagans who chose also to worship the God of Israel. Nine of these were listed as members of the city council, which means that as part of their civic office they would have been responsible for presiding over public sacrifices to their traditional gods, for example, when convening sessions of the council. Evidently their public religious activity inhibited neither their interest in the God of Israel nor the Jewish community’s recognition of that interest.
They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God; insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents. Foolish. Faithless. Heartless. Ruthless. (Rom 1:22–31)
Thus the Apostle to the Gentiles! To Paul, the fact that his Gentiles-in-Christ were able to renounce their idols and the behaviors that Jews associated with idolatry must have seemed like a miracle, and that is precisely what he says. Their turning to God, their embrace of idealized Jewish ethics—sexual modesty, monogamy, support of the poor, and so on—is the measure, he says, of God’s spirit, or Christ’s spirit, working in them (Rom 8:9, and frequently elsewhere; Gal 4:6). Christian Gentiles, for Paul, embody in their new behavior the proof that the Kingdom was indeed about to dawn, that the Messiah truly had in fact come, and was about to come again.
But herein lay the awkwardness, too. For though the Messiah had already come, he still needed to return to complete the work of redemption. In this brief in-between, from the Resurrection to the Parousia, Paul’s Gentiles, empowered by the spirit, were to live as if they were already in the messianic age. In terms of life within the ekklēsia, this was so: There the Spirit was poured forth, believers prophesied and spoke in tongues; people healed and worked mighty signs; they had, through Christ, received adoption and become children of God. But the larger world still ran as it had before, unaware that in Paul’s view it seemed to be passing away.
Here, then, we see most clearly the measure and the consequences of Paul’s foreshortened perspective on time. By insisting both that they not convert to Judaism (thus maintaining their public and legal status as pagans) and that they nonetheless not worship the gods (a protected right only of Jews), Paul walked these Gentiles-in-Christ into a social and religious no-man’s-land. In the time before the Parousia, they literally had no place to be. And in the long run, their position would prove untenable: It is precisely this Gentile group who fall victim to anti-Christian persecutions in the long centuries until the conversion, in 312, of Constantine. But Paul, again, did not expect a long run. The Messiah had not only come already; he was coming again. Soon. His Gentiles were for Paul exactly the proof of this.
It is in Paul’s descriptions of Jesus’ Second Coming that we see, finally, the strength of traditional Jewish expectations about the role and function of the Davidic Messiah. Jesus’ first appearance had not been messianic, and Paul knew it. He even emphasized it: Paul preached “Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to the Gentiles”; God had deliberately chosen to work through “what is foolish and weak.” But divine foolishness was wiser than the wisdom of the world; divine weakness stronger than human strength. Through Christ’s cross, God worked redemption (1 Cor 1:18–31).
But that redemption, Paul equally insisted, would not be fully, publicly realized until the Parousia. Only at that point would redemption be manifest. To the sound of trumpets and the war cry of angels (1 Thes 4:16), the returning Son would destroy God’s enemies (1 Cor 15:24–28), assemble the quick and the dead (1 Thes 4:16 f.; 1 Cor 15:23, 42, 51–52; Phil 3:21; Rom 11:15), and gather in scattered Israel (Rom 11:12 full inclusion of Israel, 11:26 all Israel saved). When Christ came again, said Paul, he would come the way the royal Messiah was supposed to come: in power.
Paul’s vision of Jesus as the Davidic Messiah thus corresponded intimately both with his understanding of his own calling and with his views on the surprising way in which God was realizing his biblical promises to Israel. God, Paul said, had set him apart even before he was born for the purpose of calling the Gentiles through his Son (Gal 1:15–16). Paul claimed that even the pillars of the Jerusalem community who had known Jesus according to the flesh—Peter, James, John—had recognized him as the apostle to the Gentiles par excellence (2:7–9). He held that the interim between Christ’s resurrection and his Parousia corresponded roughly to the length of his own mission: As soon as he had reached “the full number of the Gentiles,” the final events could unwind (Rom 11:25; cf. vv. 11–24). Jesus was the Christ, the root of Jesse foreseen by Isaiah, whom the Gentiles would seek (15:12). Paul did his part to bring them in. And as far as he was concerned, by midcentury he had done nearly all there was to do. “From Jerusalem as far round as Illyricum I have fully preached the gospel of Christ.… I no longer have any room for work in these regions” (Rom 15:19, 23).
Paul was not the only Jewish apostle to go to Gentiles in this first generation, though it is easy to come away from his letters with that impression. Peter himself had gotten involved; there was Barnabas and, in Antioch, “the rest of the Jews” (Gal 2:11–13). Somebody had gotten to Rome before Paul had, because he writes ahead to that ekklēsia, largely if not totally Gentile, by way of introduction. He closes the letter by sending greetings to the apostles (“fellow workers in Christ Jesus”) already there: Some among them were Jews (Rom 16:1–16.) Did these others, too, construct Jesus’ Davidic messiahship around this idea of the eschatological turning of the Gentiles?
We can’t know, of course, because Paul’s letters are the only evidence we have from this generation. But if this group were the first to identify Jesus as Messiah for this reason, then the designation would back only as far as the diaspora mission, the earliest point at which significant numbers of Gentiles became involved. Before it spread to the Diaspora, on the evidence of the Gospels, the movement had been confined for the most part to the villages of the Galilee and to Jerusalem. Gentile participation had been negligible.
Paul’s list of witnesses to the resurrected Christ suggests, however, the designation’s origin in pre-Diaspora days. Christ “appeared first to Cephas, then to the Twelve, then to almost five hundred …” (1 Cor 15:5–6). But if Jesus as Christ dates to the Resurrection events—however we chose to interpret them—we still have no understanding of the reason for the claim. Nothing in pre-Christian Judaism anticipated a resurrected Messiah. Whence, then, this identification, already well established by the time that Paul, c. 33, joins the movement?
The fact that Jesus died on a Roman cross pushes the point of origin for this messianic designation back from the diaspora mission, back from the Resurrection, back into his own lifetime. The essential meaning of “messiah” coheres well with Jesus’ manner of death. A royal title long before it acquired its eschatological significance, “messiah son of David” indicates, at the very least, a king of Israel—a political claim that any competent Roman colonial governor would want to discourage. The favored Roman means of discouraging sedition was crucifixion. The way Jesus died is our surest evidence that a claim for his Davidic messiahship dates from his lifetime, not after. Did he claim this title for himself? Did others so acclaim him? Why? To address these questions, we must turn to the Gospels.
IN WAYS DIFFERENT than Paul’s letters, the Gospels also move us both closer to the historical Jesus and farther away. Closer because, whatever the vicissitudes of the various traditions that the Gospels preserve, at least some of these must ultimately trace back to Jesus’ original followers—either that, or the Gospels tell us absolutely nothing about the historical Jesus at all. His earliest followers are the necessary middle links in the chain between Jesus and these later stories about him.
But they also move us farther away because, unlike Paul’s letters, the Gospels are composite documents. Their period of formation stretches forward from the oral inheritance of the earliest disciples to the evangelists’ own time, a gap of some forty to seventy years. In this interim, events of tremendous consequence had unwound. First, the Christian movement itself had evolved into a distinctive sect within Judaism, and so taken its place in the fractious debates that characterize intersectarian relations in this period. (Hence, for example, the high polemic against Pharisaic Jews that marks all these stories.) Second, as they increasingly lived on the Diaspora side of the linguistic frontier between Aramaic and Greek, these Jews and their Gentile adherents looked to the Scriptures in their Greek translation, the Septuagint, rather than the Hebrew, as their biblical authority. (Whence, for example, Matthew and Luke’s nativity stories, where Mary’s virginity rests on the parthenos of Is 7:14 LXX.) And, finally, Israel had fought, and lost, the war with Rome.
Each of the four evangelical narratives ostensibly describing the mission of Jesus thus actually offers us a mix of material from the full stretch of these years: inherited sayings and stories from and about Jesus; contemporary polemics against other Jews; biographical “facts” about Jesus mined from various readings of the Septuagint; convictions—mined from the same quarry—about the religious significance of the Temple and its destruction; creative theological interpretations of Jesus as Christ, Son of God, Son of Man. The Gospels can no more be approached directly for information about the historical Jesus than a “historical” film by Oliver Stone, for example, can be approached directly for information about JFK, Nixon, or the war in Vietnam. Both genres present a mix of fact, reasonable conjecture, creative filling in of holes, and flat-out fiction. As historians, we have to sort through.
The evangelists, all later than Paul, wrote from within a tradition that already proclaimed Jesus as Christ. I propose that we read their stories to see how they present that claim, and then test how well their presentations can fit credibly into Jesus’ lifetime.
We begin, again, with Mark. One of the great curiosities of this Gospel, noted earlier, is its reticence precisely on the issue of Jesus’ identity. Commanding silence from those who recognize him, forbidding those he cures to speak of it, Mark’s Jesus never names himself Messiah, and but for one dramatic exception, never clearly accepts the title either. Mark’s designation of choice for Jesus is, rather, the Son of Man. The Son of Man will suffer rejection and death in his First Coming, Jesus teaches, but will soon return, vindicated and glorious, at his Second Coming. In other words, it is through his use of this term “Son of Man,” and not “messiah,” that Mark articulates his Christian convictions about Jesus. He weaves these into his narrative about Jesus, a theological retelling of known elements of his mission—miracles and exorcisms, itinerant preaching about the Kingdom of God, disputations with other Jews, death in Jerusalem by crucifixion—in terms of Jesus’ actions as suffering Son of Man.
Where and how does the term christos figure in all of this? Messianic terms—Christ, Son of David, king of Israel—appear only seven times in Mark’s Gospel. The first simply opens his story: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ” (1:1). The next occurrence, highly dramatic, occurs when Jesus himself abruptly demands an answer to a question he has never addressed: “Who do men say I am?” (8:27). His disciples respond, John the Baptist, Elijah, one of the prophets. Jesus presses them further: What do they think? Peter answers, simply, “You are the Christ” (8:29).
It is instructive to read Mark’s scene here, 8:27–33, in tandem with Matthew’s revision of it, Matthew 16:13–23. Matthew clears up the confusion Mark leaves in his wake. Where Mark’s Jesus persistently speaks of the Son of Man in the third person, leaving the reader to infer an identity, Matthew makes the identification explicit: His Jesus, posing the same questions to his disciples, uses “Son of Man” interchangeably with “I” (16:13, 15). Still more helpful, where Mark’s Jesus had responded to Peter’s identifying him with a demand for silence (“And he charged them to tell no one about him,” v. 30), Matthew’s bursts out in approval at his answer (“Blessed are you, Simon bar Jonah!” vv. 17–19). Only after this does Jesus ask for silence, phrased by Matthew in such a way that no doubt remains that Jesus accepts the designation (“Then he strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ,” v. 20).
| Mark 8:27–33 | Matthew 16:13–23 |
| And Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do men say that I am?” And they told him, “John the Baptist, and others say, Elijah; and others one of the prophets.” And he asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Christ.” | Now when Jesus came into the district if Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do men say the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, and others say Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter replied, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” |
| And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon bar Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter [Gk. Petros], and on this rock [Gk. petra] I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Then he strictly charged the disciples to tell no one that he was the Christ. | |
| And he charged them to tell no one about him. And he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly. | From that time, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. |
| And Peter took him, and began to rebuke him. But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter, and said, “Get thee behind me, Satan! For you are not on the side of God, but of men.” |
And Peter took him and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you!” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men.” |
Matthew, by carefully editing Mark, brought greater clarity to this scene, the dialogue between Jesus and Peter outside of Caesarea Philippi. Matthew makes unambiguous Jesus’ acceptance of Peter’s answer (“You are the Christ”): Matthew adds “Son of the living God,” and then a long passage where Jesus praises Peter and confers authority on him. He likewise clarifies the reason Peter rebukes Jesus (he is prompted by concern; in Mark, by comparison, the reason is not clear). Further, Matthew drops Mark’s confusing reference to the other disciples (“But turning and seeing his disciples, he rebuked Peter …”), having his Jesus simply reprimand him.
In Mark’s passage, by comparison, questions linger. Without acknowledging Peter’s answer, demanding the disciples’ silence, Mark’s Jesus abruptly goes on to teach about the suffering Son of Man (8:31 f.). Peter then rebukes Jesus (Mark isn’t clear why) and Jesus rebukes Peter as Satan (Why? Evidently because the disciples overheard Peter rebuking him, v. 33). Again, Matthew smooths this out. He provides Peter with a clear and laudable motive for rebuking Jesus—“God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you” (16:22)—and removes Mark’s confusing one for Jesus’ rebuke of Peter (v. 23).
The point here is not to ponder whether it is Mark or Matthew who gives the more plausible depiction of a conversation between Jesus and Peter. We have absolutely no way of knowing whether anything like such a conversation ever took place, in Aramaic, some forty to sixty years earlier. Matthew’s version smooths over rough spots in Mark’s so precisely that good editing, rather than more reliable historical tradition, seems the likely reason for his greater clarity. This dialogue in Matthew’s Gospel accords with one of his strongest themes, namely, that Jesus is the Messiah from the house of David. Mark on the same issue is more complex.
Mark uses messianic terminology more straightforwardly in the three episodes that follow. Preaching in Capernaum, his Jesus says, “Whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose his reward” (9:41). Next, on their way up to Jerusalem through Jericho, Jesus and his disciples together with a “great multitude” (other pilgrims also going to the city for Passover) pass by the blind beggar Bartimaeus, who abruptly addresses Jesus as “Son of David” (10:47, 48—the second time over rebukes to silence from the crowd). Jesus cures his blindness, presumably in acknowledgment of his address to him (“Go your way; your faith has made you well,” 10:52). And finally, as the crowd approaches Jerusalem, Jesus seems almost to provoke a messianic incident by riding a colt into the city (another scene that Matthew’s editing will clarify, 21:2–11). The crowd responds by spreading their garments before him, waving leafy branches, and crying out, “Hosanna! Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is coming. Hosanna in the highest!” (11:10).
His apparent approval of these Davidic designations notwithstanding, Mark’s Jesus challenges the traditions they are based on:
As Jesus taught in the temple, he said, “How can the scribes say that the Christ is the son of David? David himself, inspired by the holy spirit, declared:
‘The Lord said to my Lord,
Sit at my right hand,
till I put your enemies under your feet.’
“David himself calls him ‘Lord’; so how is he his son?”
Mark here refers to Psalm 110:1 LXX. His Jesus uses it to teach the superiority of the Messiah to David. David, in the spirit, calls the (future) Messiah “Lord”—by implication, his superior, and therefore not his “son.” We do well here to recall that Mark, unlike the later two Synoptics, has no birth story providing Jesus with a link to Bethlehem. His Jesus is, without apology, a Galilean: Jesus of Nazareth. In this context—with no reason in the narrative, in other words, for the reader to associate Jesus with David’s house—Mark’s Jesus seems to refute as unnecessary the Davidic pedigree of the Messiah. This passage subtly asserts Jesus’ messianic status despite his not being David’s “son.” Mark’s Jesus cites David himself to make his case.
The next time this Gospel explicitly identifies Jesus as Christ is at the moment of highest drama at his night trial before the Sanhedrin. The high priest finally demands to know, “Are you the Christ, the son of the Blessed?” For once, Jesus’ reticence—or Mark’s—completely disappears, and he responds with a simple and powerful affirmation: “I am.” But Jesus immediately goes on to qualify this statement, speaking in terms of the apocalyptic Son of Man: “And you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power [God] and coming with the clouds of heaven” (14:61–62; cf. 13:26). The high priest pronounces this blasphemy, and the council condemns Jesus to death. Convening again once more at dawn, they lead Jesus, bound, to Pilate.
Throughout the rest of the Passion—the dialogue with Pilate, the roaring mob, the Crucifixion—this royal designation repeats consistently and ironically. Pilate (unprompted in the narrative) asks, “Are you the King of the Jews?” and Jesus answers evasively, “You have said so” (15:2). Pilate then asks the hostile mob, appearing out of nowhere, if they want him to release “the King of the Jews” (v. 9). No. “Then what shall I do with the man whom you call the King of the Jews?” (Odd—they haven’t; v. 12). The crowd demands his crucifixion. Roman soldiers then proceed to mock Jesus—“Hail, King of the Jews!” (v. 18)—and they crucify him under an inscription of the crime he was charged with: “The King of the Jews” (v. 26). Mocked further by the two robbers hanging with him, by passersby, and finally by the chief priests (“Let the Christ, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross, that we may see and believe!” v. 32), Jesus finally dies.
The theme of Jesus’ messianic identity appears in Mark in complex ways. Mark shapes his narrative around his project of redefining “messiah” to conform to his convictions about Jesus of Nazareth, whom he knew had been crucified and whom he expected to return. Thus after Peter’s confession (“You are the Christ,” 8:29) Jesus goes on to speak of the suffering Son of Man; and after the high priest’s query (“Are you the Christ?” 14:61), Jesus affirms his identity and then speaks further in terms of the glorious and returning Son of Man. This presentation of Messiah as suffering-and-vindicated Son of Man expresses Mark’s own theological creativity as a Christian. By contrast, at other points in his story he presents Davidic messiahship in a more traditionally Jewish—hence arguably pre-Christian—way. These cluster specifically around events in Jerusalem. Jesus parades into the city before Passover like a king (11:7–10); and he is executed by Pilate as if he had, indeed, claimed to be one (15:2–26).
In John’s Gospel, as in Mark’s, we also find this interesting combination of a seeming disavowal of traditional Davidic dimensions of messiahship with an insistence, ironically and especially stressed in the hearing before Pilate, that Jesus is, indeed, the royal Messiah, King of the Jews. In the very first chapter of this Gospel, Jesus’ titles accrue rapidly: John the Baptizer and eventually his own disciples identify him as Lamb of God (1:29, 35), Son of God (v. 34), “the Messiah (which means Christ)” (v. 41). Finally, dramatically, Nathaneal proclaims, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” (v. 49).
Yet John seems at pains to repudiate any traditional connection to David, especially via Bethlehem. He emphasizes that Jesus comes from Nazareth. The Ioudaioi (“Jews” or “Judeans”)—unknowing, sometimes hostile crowds, usually in Jerusalem, who function rhetorically as a kind of chorus to emphasize aspects of Jesus’ teachings—are incapable of knowing who Jesus is in part because of their attachment to this Davidic tradition. John seems to argue for the sort of disavowal we also saw in Mark’s use of Psalm 110 LXX. Thus while Jesus teaches in the Temple during the Feast of Tabernacles, some people in Jerusalem ask, “Can it be that the authorities really know that this is the Christ? Yet we know where this man comes from; and when the Christ appears, no one will know where he comes from” (7:26–27). On the last day of this weeklong feast, some assert that Jesus is the Christ, but others respond,
“Is the Christ to come from Galilee? Has not the scripture said that the Christ is descended from David, and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David was?” So there was a division among the people over him.
(Jn 7:41–43)
As the final events begin to unwind in Jerusalem, John’s promotion of this title grows stronger. Pilgrims parade Jesus into the city, crying out, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel!” (12:13), and John specifically refers this scene to Zechariah 9:9: “Daughter of Zion, your King is coming.” Jesus’ kingly status dominates John’s presentation of his audience with Pilate: The words “king” or “kingship” appear fifteen times within twenty-eight verses. Roman soldiers crown Jesus with thorns and place a purple robe on him, hailing him as King of the Jews (19:2–5), and thus, also, Pilate presents him to the people: “Behold your king!… Shall I crucify your king?” (vv. 14–15). The prefect composes the titulus himself—“Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”—in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, broadcasting the message as it were in three linguistic frequencies (vv. 19–20). The joke, of course, is actually on Jesus’ mocking tormentors, for John’s readers know what the characters in his story do not: Jesus is the Messiah, he is the King of the Jews (cf. 1:49).
Unlike John, Matthew and Luke both clearly draw on Mark; unlike both Mark and John and similar to each other, the two later Synoptics are at pains to affirm that Jesus is exactly the fulfillment of traditional expectation, the Davidic Messiah. Both avail themselves of the messianic future that Mark had created for Jesus when he combined (as Paul had before him) the coming of the Kingdom with the return of the Son of Man, who would then do messiah-like things—end the period of travails, gather in the elect, and so on. But by using the Septuagint for biographical information about him, these later Gospel writers also provided Jesus with a messianic past. Even at his First Coming, they each argue, Jesus of Nazareth was, demonstratively, the Messiah son of David, and thus the realization of Israel’s ancient hope of redemption.
In sharp contrast to the other two Gospels, which each begin their stories with John the Baptizer, these later Synoptics both open with elaborate birth stories (Mt 2:1–23; Lk 2:1–39). These tie Jesus the Galilean to the messianically correct natal town in Judea: Bethlehem. “And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who will govern my people Israel” (Mi 5:2, cited in Mt 2:6 as a prophetic proof-text). Both offer genealogies tracing Jesus’ lineage back, through Joseph, to King David (Mt 1:1–16; Lk 3:23–39). In their respective accounts of the nativity, Matthew through his introduction of the foreign magi, Luke through Simeon’s recognition of the infant Jesus in the Temple, both foreshadow the inclusion of Gentiles in the Christian movement—a fact of history by the time each writes, c. 90. This theme picks up the prophetic idea of the nations turning to the eschatological “root of Jesse” heralded in Isaiah and invoked at the close of his letter to the Romans by Paul: “The root of Jesse shall come; … in him shall the Gentiles hope” (Is 11:10 LXX; Rom 15:12). “Where is he who has been born king of the Jews?” ask Matthew’s wise men (Mt 2:2). “Mine eyes have seen your salvation,” Luke’s aged Simeon prays to God, “which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples; a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel” (Lk 2:31–32).
But Matthew and Luke explicitly postpone any inkling of a Gentile mission until after the Resurrection. Matthew’s Jesus goes so far as to positively prohibit any efforts with Gentiles during his lifetime (“Go nowhere among the Gentiles … but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” 10:5–6; cf. 15:24; cf. the Gospel’s finale, 28:19). Luke’s story, a two-volume work, has more room: his apostles do not actually go to Gentiles until well into the Diaspora at Antioch (Acts 11:20). Neither Matthew nor Luke, then, can use the Gentiles’ reception of the gospel, as Paul had, as proof of Jesus’ status as Christ: it falls outside the time frame of their stories about his mission. Yet they both want to promote Jesus’ identity as Davidic Messiah during his mission. They must find other ways to make their case.
Though the details differ between them, their strategy is the same. Matthew and Luke both conform—and occasionally create—incidents in the life of Jesus of Nazareth to particular readings of the Septuagint. This technique gives a deep biblical resonance to their stories. The evangelists, and sometimes the characters in their stories, can then proclaim Jesus as Christ on the basis of this matching-up of ancient prophecy to biographical incident.
Thus Matthew interprets Jesus’ healings and exorcisms in prophetic perspective, specifically quoting Isaiah: “He took our infirmities and bore our diseases” (Mt 8:17; Is 53:4). Characters in the Gospel simply address Jesus as “Son of David,” an appellation he never denies (Mt 10:27). They infer his messianic status from the fact that he cures (“And all the people were amazed and said, ‘Can this be the Son of David?’ ” Mt 12:23). Presumably because she knows of his healing powers, even a Canaanite, unprompted, recognizes him: “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David!” (15:22; no such address appears in Matthew’s source, Mk 7:24–30). For the same reason—his curing the blind and the lame in the Temple—even children cry out, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” (21:14–15). His disciples know that Jesus is “the Christ,” an identification that he approvingly accepts (16:13–20; cf. 20:30–31). And Matthew edits Mark’s version of the triumphal entry by explicitly quoting Isaiah 62:11 and Zechariah 9:9, identifying Jesus as Zion’s prophesied king (cf. Jn 12:15):
Tell the daughter of Zion,
Behold, your king is coming to you,
humble, and mounted on an ass,
and on a colt, the foal of an ass.
Determined to depict Jesus fulfilling these prophetic visions to the letter, Matthew resolutely presents him as riding on two animals, both an ass and a colt, at the same time (21:7). The crowds of Passover pilgrims who parade him into Jerusalem praise Jesus as the Messiah: “Hosanna to the Son of David!” (v. 9), and he assents to their acclaim, to the irritation of the chief priests and scribes (vv. 14–17). Following Mark, Matthew’s Jesus tells the Pharisees that the Messiah is greater than David; he is David’s Lord, not his son (22:41–46). In light of Matthew’s framing of the nativity story, the passage here does not refute the importance of Davidic descent, but rather simply asserts the superiority of the Messiah.
Matthew’s Gospel, in brief, has Jesus recognized and proclaimed the Messiah son of David in his own lifetime. His Jesus approves of and embraces this designation publicly. The tension between hiddenness and revelation that shapes the irony and suspense of his source, Mark, disappears: Matthew has written the “messianic secret” out of his story. In so doing, he also achieves a nice interpretive sleight of hand. The biographical particulars of Jesus’ life, in Matthew’s accounting, provide a narrative definition of the term “messiah.” The prophets, argues the evangelist, had foretold a messiah coming who would do what Jesus did; therefore Jesus is the Messiah.
The familiarity of Matthew’s story should not mask his creativity here, or his accomplishment. Through his depiction of the mission of Jesus, Matthew gives new, precisely Christian definition to the term “messiah,” while presenting it as deeply traditional. Hence his strategy of composition, matching prophetic verse to biographical event. The phrase “this took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet” repeats constantly, verbally highlighting and dramatizing the entire text. Matthew thus ties the life of Jesus intimately into Israel’s ancient history of salvation.
With different details, and with an appropriation of the Septuagint equally deep though more subtle, Luke’s Gospel makes a similar point: His Jesus, too, is recognized as the Messiah Son of David in his lifetime. The angel Gabriel speaks to Mary saying that the child she will conceive, the Son of God, will sit on “the throne of his father David, and reign over the house of Jacob forever” (1:32–33). Later the priest Zechariah, father of John the Baptist in Luke’s story, blesses God for having “raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant, David” (1:69). At Jesus’ birth, angels announce to shepherds “to you is born this day in the city of David a savior who is Christ the Lord” (2:11). Simeon praises him as “the Lord’s Christ” (2:26 ff.). And Luke later repeats Mark’s story of the blind man at Jericho who asks for healing by addressing Jesus as “son of David” (18:35–43). Once the post-Resurrection mission is under way, Jesus’ disciples routinely preach that he was “the Christ” (e.g., Acts 3:19–21, 5:42, 17:3, 18:5, 28).
Further—and utterly unlike Mark, his source, and Matthew, his contemporary—Luke integrates Jerusalem profoundly into the preaching of the Gospel. Herald angels notwithstanding, Jerusalem, not Bethlehem (a village in any case), was the “city of David,” hymned as such in psalms and prophets. Luke thus opens his story not by the banks of the Jordan, as did Mark, but in Jerusalem, at the altar of the Temple (1:9). It is to the Temple that Jesus’ parents bring the new baby in the weeks after his birth, and where he is first recognized as Savior (2:22). There Anna the prophetess speaks in terms of “the redemption of Jerusalem” (v. 38). Jesus’ family, pious observant Jews, go to the city “every year at the feast of Passover” (v. 41); and the young Jesus, teaching in the Temple, refers to it as “my father’s house” (v. 49).
Luke also locates Jesus’ post-Resurrection appearances in and around Jerusalem, rather than in the Galilee (as Mark and Matthew; Lk 24:34–52). The disciples, having seen the Risen Christ, praise God at the Temple, where they continue worshiping as the movement itself develops (Lk 24:53; Acts 3:1). The earliest community relocates to Jerusalem permanently (2:12), and for the rest of his story, Jerusalem serves as the site of the mother church. For Luke, redemption literally comes out of Zion. His clear emphasis on the city is his original way of weaving the earlier traditions of the Messiah son of David into his presentation of Jesus.
But Luke also uses another messianic idea to articulate the biblical dimension of Jesus’ mission: not just the king-messiah, but the prophet-messiah. Dramatically, right at the beginning of his preaching in the Galilee, Jesus enters the synagogue at Nazareth on the Sabbath “as was his custom.” Handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah, Jesus reads:
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, the recovering of sight to the blind,
To set at liberty those who are oppressed,
To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.
(Is 61:1, 2, 58:6)
Jesus then refers the passage to himself and immediately invokes two scriptural episodes—Elijah and the widow from Sidon; Elisha and Naaman the Syrian—when Gentiles, rather than Israelites, had received the benefit of a prophet’s powers (Lk 4:14–27). By so crafting this scene, Luke combines this non-Davidic idea, the prophet-messiah, with the (ultimately Davidic-messianic) theme of Gentile inclusion.
John and Matthew also identify Jesus as a prophet. For the fourth evangelist, this is a major theme, often appearing in tandem with kingly notions of messiah. Thus at 6:14 we find Jesus hailed by crowds as “the prophet who is to come into the world,” and immediately thereafter going into hiding “perceiving that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king” (v. 15). Conflating Davidic traditions of messiahship with prophetic ones, other characters in John’s story protest that, because he is from Nazareth and not Bethlehem, Jesus cannot be a prophet: “search [the scriptures] and you will find that no prophet is to rise from Galilee” (Jn 7:52). But the powerful and great “signs” that Jesus does justifies his identification as a prophet (9:17). In sum, while John makes much broader claims for Jesus and his true theological status than do the other Gospel writers, the evangelist clearly approves of “prophet” as one of the suitable designations.
Matthew invokes this theme more rarely than John, but dramatically nonetheless. Just after Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem for Passover, toward the end of the Gospel, the pilgrims who have just hailed Jesus as “Son of David” explain to the crowds in the city, “This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee” (Mt 21:10–11). The chief priests fear to move against him openly because “when they tried to arrest him, they feared the multitudes, because they held him to be a prophet” (v. 46). In comparison to Matthew, Luke, however, really emphasizes this theme, by placing this prophet-messiah quotation from Isaiah in such a dramatic episode right at the beginning of his story. He further draws attention to the idea’s importance by having Jesus, not the crowds around him, name himself a prophet. So also when using the Q-source lament over Jerusalem—“Jerusalem! Jerusalem! killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you!”—Luke’s Jesus adds, “It cannot be that a prophet should perish away from Jerusalem” (13:33–34; cf. Mt 23:37–39). And this is how his followers identify him too (24:19).
Finally, by statement rather than by story, Luke simply asserts that the Messiah was always supposed to suffer and die exactly as Jesus had. This teaching comes dramatically at the very close of Luke’s Gospel, made explicit by the Risen Christ himself:
“These are my words which I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead.”
(Lk 24:45)
What historical sense can we make of the Gospels’ presentation of Jesus as the Messiah? We might note as a general tendency that the earlier the Gospel, the less prominent this theme seems to be; or, making the same observation in reverse, the more these evangelical traditions about Jesus develop, the more prominent this theme becomes. And as this theme moves to the foreground, the more distortion, in two directions, that we find. Either biographical particulars of Jesus’ past are made to fit the biblical paradigm, or the original meaning of the term, “messiah”/christos, is stretched to fit biographical particulars of his life. In the first instance, we have the creation of the Bethlehem birth stories; in the second, the identification of certain activities from the biographical tradition (healings and exorcisms, for example; and, ultimately, crucifixion) with scriptural characteristics of “messiah”—the speech of Luke’s Risen Christ, above, being the most succinct and extreme example.
Still, all these evangelists do is tell a story that fills in the claim made already midcentury by Paul: that Jesus was the son of David kata sarka—“according to the flesh,” that is, by physical descent (Rom 1:3). Where they clearly redefine “messiah” to bring it into line with their religious convictions about Jesus (as in the quotation from Luke just above: the Messiah is someone who suffers, dies, and rises after three days), we may justifiably credit their own theological creativity, and/or the traditions shaping the commitments of their late first-century Greek-speaking communities. Where the concept even as they present it nonetheless coheres with other, independent data from the period around the lifetime of Jesus (c. 6 B.C.E.–C. 30 C.E.), we may find some purchase for further historical investigation.
A prime datum is Jesus’ crucifixion itself. Coupled especially with his offense, written on the titulus over the cross—“the inscription of the charge against him read, ‘The King of the Jews’ ” (Mk 15:26 and parr.)—this execution coheres precisely with known Roman responses to a subject’s claim to autonomy, in territorial Israel or anywhere else. Here Josephus provides our best evidence specifically for Judea. In 6 C.E., Varus, the Roman legate of Syria, crucified two thousand rebels as part of his effort to pacify the rebellious Jewish countryside (BJ 2.76; AJ 17.297). James and Simon, sons of the Galilean rebel Judah, were crucified c. 46–48 C.E. by the procurator Tiberius Alexander (AJ 20.102). Under Cumanus, a later Judean governor (48–c. 52), a murderous skirmish between Samaritans and some Galilean pilgrims passing through Samaria on their way to Jerusalem for a festival escalated into a round of crucifixions once the tumult threatened to spread (BJ 2.241; AJ 20.130). The Roman historian Tacitus, who also speaks of this event, mentions specifically the fear that the initial incident might have ignited armed rebellion engulfing all of the Galilee and Samaria (Annals 12.54). Finally, in the violent convulsions just preceding the outbreak of the war in 66 C.E., the procurator Florus responded to provocations in Jerusalem by rounding up many citizens, even those of high Roman rank, and first scourging and then crucifying them (BJ 2.306–8). And intermittently throughout the siege, Titus’s soldiers nailed captured Jews to crosses visible to those watching from the city, “hoping that the sight would terrify the rest into surrender” (BJ 5.290). Jews caught in desperate forays outside the walls as the siege heaved to a close—“every day five hundred, sometimes even more, fell into his hands”—were tortured, scourged, and “finally crucified in view of the wall:” Titus hoped
that the sight of it would perhaps induce the Jews to surrender in order to avoid the same fate. The soldiers themselves through rage and bitterness nailed up their victims in various attitudes as a grim joke until, owing to the vast numbers there was no room for crosses, and no crosses for the bodies.
(Josephus, BJ 5.450)
Thus the titulus on the cross and the repeated imputation of messianic kingship that runs throughout all the narratives of Jesus’ hearing before Pilate fit well into this context that Josephus provides. As with these other Jews, so with Jesus: Crucifixion broadcast Rome’s zero-tolerance policy toward a perceived threat of sedition. We must return to consider the issue of Rome and sedition later, because certain anomalies complicate Jesus’ case. Here, however, it can serve as a point of departure for understanding that other, nonkingly messianic idea attached to Jesus: the title or role of “prophet.” Once more, we turn to Josephus.
In the period before the war, charismatic popular leaders appeared, gathering crowds and promising to work signs: They claimed, says Josephus, to be prophets. Thus under the procuratorship of Fadus (c. 44–46 C.E.), the prophet Theudas led a large following to the Jordan, which he said would part at his command (AJ 20.97–98). Under Felix (52–59 C.E.), prophets arose—“deceivers and imposters” in Josephus’ view—who agitated Jerusalem by “fostering revolutionary changes” under “false claims” of divine inspiration. Attracting large crowds, these prophets led their followers out into the desert to receive from God “tokens of deliverance” (BJ 2.259; cf. AJ 20.168). Another who “gained for himself the reputation of a prophet,” a Jew from Egypt, led a multitude to converge on Jerusalem: At his command, he promised, the walls of the city would collapse (AJ 20.170; BJ 2.261–63).
These various prophetic figures share three important characteristics. The first is that they all evidently construed and constructed their missions from ancient biblical episodes harking back to the foundational history of the Jewish people. Theudas’ parting the Jordan recalls God’s parting the waters for Israel to leave Egypt and, more proximately, Joshua leading the tribes across the river and into the promised Land (Ex. 14:16 ff.; Jos 3:13–14). Wandering in the desert awaiting deliverance recalls the period of the liberation from Egypt, the giving of Torah on Sinai. And the miraculous collapse of Jerusalem’s walls would recapitulate a similar miracle: the fall of Jericho’s, where Israel entered into the Land (Jos 6:20).
Second, common to these men is their popularity. Josephus speaks of “multitudes” and “crowds” of followers, and sometimes gives swollen numbers—thirty thousand came to the Egyptian, he claims (BJ 2.262; Acts 21:38 gives four thousand). In Josephus’ retrospect these men seemed clearly “imposters” and “false prophets”; in evangelical retrospect, perhaps, too. “False prophets will arise,” warns Matthew’s Jesus in his apocalyptic discourse, “and show great signs.… They shall say to you, ‘Behold, he [i.e., the Christ] is in the wilderness,’ ” (Mt 24:24 ff.). To many of their contemporaries, however, on the evidence of their committed response, the message of these prophets was compelling, their promise sure. The times were such that not only did men with such conviction in their own message appear, but they also drew many who were prepared to believe them.
Third, these men and their movements all met with the same response from Rome: immediate, definitive repression. Troops dispatched after Theudas slaughtered many of his followers and brought his head back to Jerusalem. Felix saw in the crowds streaming out to the desert “but a preliminary to insurrection,” and dealt with them accordingly: Cavalry and heavy infantry put them down. Most of the Egyptian’s followers met the same fate: slaughter by heavy infantry.
These prophets were manifestly speaking to religious hopes, not practical insurrection; their followers were civilians, not guerrillas preparing to combat Roman force. What need for arms anyway, since God was about to step in? Yet Rome deposed them nonetheless. It took a dim view of crowds massing around charismatic native leaders and would have little patience distinguishing apocalyptic hope from seditious action.
No ruler in antiquity looked kindly on unsanctioned mass gatherings of their subjects: Given the steep social- and power-pyramid of ancient society, such gatherings could easily seem—and perhaps become—threats to those in power. A pertinent example here is John the Baptizer. The Gospels present John as Jesus’ herald, a sort of Elijah figure to Jesus’ Messiah. Preaching an apocalyptic message of repentance and coming wrath, John receives penitents by the Jordan. Matthew transposes Jesus’ message to John: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” (Mt 3:2; cf. Mk 1:15). All four evangelists depict John as a popular figure with disciples of his own and many hearers: “all the country of Judea and all the people of Jerusalem,” says Mark (1:5); “multitudes,” says Luke (3:7, 10). He was beheaded by the Jewish ruler of the Galilee, Herod Antipas, Mark claims, for offending Antipas by criticizing his marriage to his niece (Mk 6:14–29).
Josephus tells the story differently. Narrating Antipas’s defeat in 39 C.E. by his eastern neighbor and former father-in-law, the Nabatean king Aretas, Josephus “flashes back” to the year c. 28, to John.
To some of the Jews, the destruction of Herod’s army [in 39] seemed to be divine vengeance, and certainly a just vengeance, for his treatment of John, surnamed the Baptizer. For Herod had put him to death, though he was a good man, and had exhorted the Jews to lead righteous lives, to practice justice toward their fellows and piety toward God, and so doing to join in baptism [that is, immersion]. In his view this was a necessary preliminary if baptism was to be acceptable to God … as a consecration of the body implying that the soul had already been cleansed by right behavior. When others too joined the crowds around him, because they were aroused to the highest degree by his words, Herod became alarmed. Eloquence that had so great an effect on people might lead to some form of sedition, for they looked as if they would be guided by John in everything they did. Herod decided that it would be much better to strike first and be rid of him before his work led to an uprising.… John was brought in chains to the stronghold Machaeras … and there put to death. But the Jews were of the opinion that the army was destroyed to avenge John, since God wished to inflict harm on Herod.
(Josephus, AJ 18.116–19)
Certain differences distinguish the case of John the Baptizer from the other prophetic figures in Judea. One big difference is their location. Jerusalem and the Judean desert, where the signs prophets gathered their followers, were immediately under Roman jurisdiction. John worked and roamed “in the wilderness” of the rocky desert next to the Jordan River before it spills into the Dead Sea. He immersed people coming to him on both sides of the river, the western bank in Judea, the eastern bank in the region of Perea, part of the Jewish Antipas’ territory. The other prophets promised to deliver “signs”—divinely wrought mighty works—while John seems to have limited himself to a call to moral reform and bodily purification, a prophetic mission of a different sort.
Further, John’s mission seems to have been established for some time, and the people who received his message, both disciples and others, evidently came and went. But the other prophets Josephus describes massed and mobilized large followings at one time in anticipation of a spectacular miraculous event. We may suppose that the level of nervous energy, disruptive anticipation, and popular enthusiasm was much higher among the latter group.
Finally, Herod Antipas arrested John, withdrew him to an isolated prison, and beheaded him there—a relatively quiet and orderly execution, again attesting to an absence of a single huge assembly of followers. The signs prophets and their followers, by contrast, were the targets of decisive Roman military actions, and many more than the leaders suffered. From the latter cases, then, we can infer that a prophet’s hearers, massed all at one time, called forth a much stronger and more destructive response from those in power. But fear of sedition, stimulated by the leader’s popularity—as with John—seems common to the response of both Rome and Antipas. A popular following would not endear a prophetic figure to any ruling authority.
WE BEGAN OUR EFFORT to understand why Paul would call Jesus the Messiah son of David by surveying the term’s range of meanings in the period between the Maccabees and the Mishnah, roughly 200 B.C.E. to 200 C.E. The cultural and political confusions of the Hellenistic period stimulated a number of various conceptions of the role: We saw that “messiah” might be imagined as a pure priest, as a final eschatological prophet, and, perhaps, as a heavenly nonhuman redeemer figure. But the most widespread meaning of the term harkened back to its biblical source: The Messiah was the Son of David, the eschatological warrior, the prince of peace.
Paul himself indicates his reasons for ascribing this title to Jesus only in his letter to the Romans. In that context, Paul seems to name the Gentiles’ turning through Christ to worship the God of Israel as the eschatological event confirming Jesus’ status as (Davidic) Messiah. Hence his closing this letter with the quotation from Isaiah, “The root of Jesse shall come, he who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him shall the Gentiles hope” (Is 11:10 LXX; Rom 15:12). But the Gentile mission was a post-Resurrection phenomenon. Its eventual successes cannot account for the original apostles’ proclamation of Jesus as Christ, nor for Paul’s initial acceptance, c. 33, of their claim. And on the evidence of Jesus’ crucifixion alone we may infer that, at least just shortly before his death, Jesus either claimed this title for himself or others claimed it for him, and in a way public enough that Rome got involved. The Gospels’ evidence itself, however, provides no clear view of these events, in part because their narratives are so theologically freighted with specifically Christian revisions of the term christos, matching it to various particulars, fictive and factual, of Jesus’ life.
Three questions opened this cycle of inquiry: What were the various meanings of the term “messiah” in this period? When was the term used of Jesus? Why? We have examined the New Testament sources’ own reasons for this identification and so have a sense of why and how these Christians between c. 50 and c. 100 thought that Jesus was the Christ.
But we need to push back earlier in time to the period of Jesus’ own life and mission. This means leaving Paul behind as our guide and plunging into the historical territory of Jesus himself: early first-century Judea and Galilee. “Christ” was ascribed to Jesus at some point during his mission. Our two questions remain: When? Why?