In the beverage marketing wars being waged throughout the world, Coca-Cola is faced with a huge number of significant competitors. First of all, its major competitor in the cola category is PepsiCo. In the soft drink category generally, there are other beverages—“uncolas,” such as 7Up; cherry-flavored drinks such as Dr. Pepper; orange- and grape-flavored soft drinks; root beer; and local soft drinks. Sports beverages include Gatorade and other products. In the water category are bottled waters and many types of flavored waters. The alcohol category includes beer, wine, coolers, and hard liquors. All of these liquids compete for a “share” of the consumer’s throat.
Imagine if Coca-Cola displaced all of these competitors in one fell swoop. That would constitute the marketing coup of all time.
That is exactly what Proto-Orthodox Christianity pulled off in the fourth century. It replaced all other brands of Christianity—the Ebionites, Arians, Marcionites, Nestorians, Monophysites, Bardaisanites, and Gnostics, among many others. Most importantly, it was a permanent victory. These noncon-forming movements were suppressed and eventually died out, or else they found footholds outside the Roman Empire. They did not regroup to formulate a “comeback” strategy. Christianity also closed down the schools of Greek philosophy—the Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics, Pythagoreans, Skeptics, Epicureans, and Hedonists whose ancient centers dotted the Mediterranean world. Some of these teachers went into exile, outside the Roman Empire to the east. Gone, too, were the vast temple complexes of the ancient mystery religions—Isis, Dionysus, Mithras, and myriad others. Every major competitor was eradicated by the new Christianity blessed by the Roman emperor Constantine and his bishops at Nicea. The power of these orthodox leaders— backed by Roman imperial might—won the day. In 380, under Emperor Theodosius, it and it alone became the official state religion of the Roman world … except for one competitor: Judaism.
What Christianity achieved in the post-Constantine fourth-century era represented the marketing victory of all times. It is especially ironic that a movement that started off as a radical challenge to the Pax Romana succeeded in becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire. This testifies to the remarkable transformation early Christianity underwent at the hands of the leaders of the Christ cult.
This new religion likely would not have succeeded so brilliantly without the Christification process. The church promoted a message rooted in the power of the Christ to confer eternal life on humanity, coupled with an ethical framework that did not include the hard work demanded by the Torah. An ancient ancestry with links through the Jesus Movement to Judaism gave it the advantage of antiquity and venerability. Christ was confidently asserted to be the Messiah without anyone really taking the time to match reality with the posted job specifications. Situated advantageously between Judaism on the one hand and the mystery religions on the other, Proto-Orthodoxy had the religious positioning that clearly represented the winning marketing formula. Within three hundred years of Jesus’ death, one form of Christianity—Proto-Orthodoxy, as we have called it—became the official religion of the empire.
But the victory came at a tremendous price. Simply put, the teachings of Jesus himself were smothered by the religion of Paul.
This book has been written for the ordinary reader curious about how Jesus became Christian. In examining writings from the first one hundred years of early Christianity, I have put forward the Jesus Cover-Up Thesis. There are several legs to this point of view. For one thing, it contends that the early church engaged in a switch, that is, that Paul’s religion became substituted for the religion of Jesus. What we have today in Christianity is largely Paulinity, a religion about the Gentile Christ that covers over the message of the Jewish Jesus of history. Second, it involved a hostile differentiation, with scathing attacks by the Proto-Orthodox on anything Jewish. Third, the cover-up resulted in the entrenchment of anti-Semitism, directed against Judaism and the Jewish people.
While building on contemporary scholarship, the Jesus Cover-Up Thesis represents my take on what the early church accomplished. Going forward, we need to recover the humanity and Jewishness of Jesus at the popular level, not just in academia. This means returning to the original Jewish teacher and Messiah claimant, stripped of all the Christifying elements that have camouflaged this towering figure of history. While scholars may acknowledge these facets of Jesus’ life, such historical details have not permeated the consciousness of ordinary people. They still regard Jesus as the divine Gentile and picture him through the Christ figure of Paul. Some readers may bristle at attempts to depict Jesus as less than fully divine. The image of Jesus as a heavenly being has had remarkable sticking power in the popular consciousness. But it’s a position that loses much that is of value.
Jesus’ own provocative Kingdom message needs to be examined again, as a radical social alternative not only to the Pax Romana but to any society marred by arrogance, self-righteousness, and self-centeredness. His challenge to follow the path of higher righteousness requires observation and not neglect. In other words, we should endeavor to focus again on the message, not the messenger, to visualize him as his earliest followers did, as a rabbi who painted a vision of a better world and who dared us to live in an enhanced manner.
We should also imagine that the writings of Paul and Luke/Acts miraculously disappear from the pages of the New Testament—exactly the opposite of what Marcion would have wished. Some readers may find this unsettling, for these writings make up a good percentage of the New Testament. However, there are good reasons why these attempts to remake the religion should be set aside. Recovering Jesus demands that we jump over Paul and the Christifiers, back to the gospels, and through them to the words that appear to reflect what the Jesus of the 20s likely said to the audiences of his time. This means moving Paul’s distinctive religion off its privileged place of honor where it has stood for many centuries.
We should adopt as a sound interpretive principle “as James, so Jesus”— that is, that the best way of trying to grasp the Jesus of history is through his brother James, how he and his group and his successors understood the movement. That has the effect of privileging James, the Jesus Movement, and the Ebionites, a move long overdue. They saw him as human, Jewish, a teacher, and a potential Messiah. When beliefs stray from these attributes of Jesus, we begin to enter Christifier territory.
The Christifiers’ rewriting the religion of Jesus as the Christ is not a new phenomenon with respect to biblical and related writings. There is a history of biblical rewriting. The later book of Chronicles in the Old Testament, for instance, rewrote the earlier account of King David in 2 Samuel. This document whitewashed many of David’s character flaws. The Book of Jubilees from the second century B.C. rewrote the story of Abraham we find in the biblical book of Genesis in order to heighten Abraham’s monotheism. It is in that work that we find the delightful story of how the youthful Abraham smashed the idols in his father’s factory, asserting that these material objects have no substance. Several works from the Dead Sea Scroll community also reworked materials from Genesis as well as decoding the words of the prophets to suit their own time and situation. The attempt by Luke/Acts to rewrite early Christian origins is another example of this tendency to make history fit the circumstances of the day.
In the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation was fought to bypass centuries of church tradition and go directly back to the message of the Bible. Sola scriptura (“scripture alone”) was the rallying cry as reformers sought to appreciate anew the perspective of the writers of the New Testament, uncontaminated by the decisions of church councils and the philosophizing of the medieval scholastics. There, within the pages of holy writ, it was hoped, the true and authentic message of Jesus and the early church would come into sharp focus.
The intervening four hundred years, however, have witnessed a remarkable flurry of new insights into the biblical writings themselves. Today we have a better sense of when and where these were composed. How the canon of the New Testament was formed is also better understood. We are now aware of the shaping hand of the Proto-Orthodox faction in deciding which texts to include—and exclude—and the political objectives, both ecclesiastical as well as imperial, this selection reinforced. The New Testament is the creature of this group within the early church, not the other way around, as the Protestant Reformers thought. The authority of the present composition rests on the authority of the Orthodox bishops—St. Athanasius in 367 proclaiming its definitive structure and other leaders who concurred with Athanasius’s selection. These are polemical documents that reflect one—but only one—way of being Christian.
For the person interested in how early Christianity developed, we now have access to dozens of writings that were left out of the official canon of the New Testament. For instance, the many Gnostic documents recently discovered augment our knowledge of early Christianity. We are now better able to identify the issues and controversies that divided the fledgling Christian communities around the Mediterranean. Moreover, with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we now know more of the pressing political and religious concerns within first-century Judaism, when the Jesus Movement came to light. All these factors give us a better basis upon which to understand the texts of the New Testament than had the reformers of the sixteenth century.
They were overly optimistic that the message of Jesus would shine forth, freed from the clutter and complications of medieval theology. We are now familiar with many of the problems involved in the quest for the Jesus of history—that he wrote nothing and that the sources are later, representing third- or fourth-generation Christian writings. They are also inconsistent in their depiction of Jesus, and both Matthew and Luke take it upon themselves to “correct” Mark, making additions and deletions to suit their own agendas.
But the major problem in unearthing the message of Jesus of the 20s lies elsewhere. It has to do with the effects of Paul and the Christification process engaged in by early leaders of Proto-Orthodoxy as they gravitated toward the Gentile savior message. They battled with the Jesus Movement and the Ebionites while denigrating everything Jewish about Jesus and denouncing Judaism vehemently. We have seen how they did that, decade after decade, in a vocal and vicious manner. The gospels themselves were written after Paul, and, to some extent, they too show evidence of Christification, especially the Gospel of John with its emphasis on the “I am” statements not found in any other characterization of Jesus. So the problem in trying to uncover the historical Jesus lies not just in church tradition within the postbiblical period. The Christification layering process is to be found within the pages of the New Testament itself, with Paul’s Christ superimposed on the Jesus of history. That means that as we read the gospels, judgments have to be made along the way concerning what might reflect what Jesus himself actually could have said and did, versus what authors forty to eighty years later wanted him to have said.
We catch glimpses of the authentic Jesus here and there in the gospels. In the sayings of the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, we see Jesus advancing teachings that challenge his audience to a higher excellence in living, based on Torah but exceeding its usual demands. The parables, moreover, propel us into a new dimension, to grasp what life could be outside the parameters of the Pax Romana. We see there, too, an idea of what God’s sovereign rule over all humanity might look like, and we can become fascinated by its possibilities: a new life for all, built on caring and compassion, but not neglectful of the duties of Torah.
We do not know enough to speculate about Jesus’ daily routine—where he lived, what he ate for breakfast, who cooked, how he planned the day’s itinerary, the round of daily prayers, his interactions with local synagogue authorities, the decisions he made, or the sessions he must have held with his closest associates like a rabbi with devoted disciples. Was he vulnerable to the critical reactions of other people? Did rejection bother him? Did he experience stress, regrets, moods, uncertainty, anxiety, dread, fear, and joy? It is even more difficult to get inside the mind of Jesus. What set him off on the path opposing Roman rule? How much of Israel’s ancient writings did he know, and how did he become familiar with them? Did he read Hebrew as well as speak Aramaic (and, possibly, Greek)? Did he “buy into” the dream-myth of Israel, that wonderful expectation of a future king who would change the world? Did he envisage himself fulfilling that role, or did he think God would act unilaterally in establishing the new world order?
As fully human, did Jesus experience our range of emotions? Did he have hopes, ambitions, dreams, and disappointments? Was he, in all ways, human? If we think of Jesus as divine, then all is known and Jesus moves through history, towering over life’s perplexities and complexities like a being above the fray. In that view, the problems we confront on a daily basis were not his. Everything is preordained, simple, clear—and ever so removed from our world. The price tag of seeing Jesus as divine is that we cannot identify with him, nor he with us, for we do not share the same situation, the same lot in life.
Did he struggle to control his passions? Did he, quite frankly, “lose it” when he attacked the currency converters in the Temple who were pursuing a legitimate business? Did he experience sexual feelings and passions the way we do? Were his temptations in the wilderness at the beginning of his mission handled as easily as the gospels depict? Or were they real temptations? Was it a real interior battle such as we might experience over the right direction for our life? Did he experience doubts and hesitations on the Mount of Olives east of Jerusalem just prior to his betrayal? Did he really sense what might be coming? Did he have qualms, with so much of his mission left undone?
At age thirty, what did he imagine his world would be like thirty years later? If we were conducting an interview with Jesus in his prime, how would he have answered that question? Did he think the future he projected in the parables would be realized within his lifetime? What role did he himself think he’d play? To what extent did his associates—the disciples—share in this vision? How did they spend their days—plying their trades, studying, debating biblical texts, plotting against Rome, listening to a wonderful vision of the coming Kingdom of God, and organizing routines of daily life?
And what of his family, what role did they play—Mary, his mother; Joseph, his father; his four brothers; his sisters; and his cousin John the Baptist? Did they engage in his enterprise and to what extent? And what was the role of his close associate, Mary Magdalene—the follower who, along with several other wealthy women, funded his mission, who went to Jerusalem on his last trip there, who stood vigil with him throughout the hours of his crucifixion, and who went to the tomb on the first day of the week and witnessed it empty?
A work that opens up many of the details of Jesus’ human life is James Tabor’s The Jesus Dynasty. This intriguing book represents an important contribution to recovering what we can now know about the man—his ancestors, his immediate family, and his successors—all set against the complex Jewish and Roman politics of the era. Recognizing that there are many things about Jesus we cannot ever know, Tabor argues for an initial joint baptizing mission between John the Baptist and Jesus “the Baptist.” As Tabor reconstructs the scenario, John worked in the North while, early on in his career, Jesus and his disciples operated in Judea, in the South. Their joint campaign was exceptionally ambitious: “Jesus had become a full partner with John the Baptizer and their plan was to arouse the entire country and shake the establishment, both political and religious, during the coming summer and fall months of A.D. 27.”1 In doing this, Jesus and John the Baptist were functioning in many ways like the dual Messiahs expected by the Dead Sea Scroll community—a priestly one (John the Baptist) and a political one (Jesus). The arrest of John the Baptist by Herod Antipas threw this joint enterprise into disarray, and Jesus had to reenvisage his mission.
By careful detective work, Tabor also unveils the prominent role Jesus’ brothers exercised within his inner core of disciples. As he writes, “This is perhaps the best-kept secret in the entire New Testament. Jesus’ own brothers were among the so-called Twelve Apostles.”2 This represents a startling finding, for early Christian texts tended to cover over the involvement of Jesus’ family in his mission. This was due to the desire of the Christifiers to downplay the role of James and the Jesus Movement in favor of Paul’s religion; James would have none of the Christ cult beliefs and practices.
Tabor’s argument is interesting. He splices together several key strands with the gospel accounts. Joseph, the husband of Mary, disappears from the narrative very early on: he just isn’t mentioned. Jesus has several brothers— James, Jude, and Simon being three. Interestingly, these are also the names of three of Jesus’ disciples. Tabor hypothesizes that Mary married a second time. After Joseph died, his brother Alphaeus (Clophas) married her. Together they had several children—James, Jude and Simon among them.3 Hence these three—James, Jude, Simon—would be Jesus’ half-brothers as well as being, very likely, members of his inner core group, the twelve disciples.
If Tabor is correct, then truly Jesus’ mission was a family business, with his brothers and cousin all playing a major role.
As a human figure, Jesus becomes more accessible to us as a role model struggling with his own path in life as well as the relationship of belief in God to social and political systems of the day. He struggled to convince people of his vision of the Kingdom of God on earth, with foreign rule and evil swept away. We see him engaging the world’s superpower of the time, rousing people to awareness and action. A struggling human meeting challenges and overcoming crises is more easily related to than a divine being who does not feel the contradictions and limitations of the human condition and for whom everything is presumed to be easy. Hopes, dreams, ambitions, successes, and failure— all these are the fabric of being human, but not of divinity, for whom all is known and all is possible.
So, too, are disappointments, and Jesus must have experienced many. The execution of his cousin, John the Baptist, must have been a crushing blow— they shared the same hope and vision. There were villages that rejected his message and were inhospitable. There was betrayal by Judas, one of his own core of disciples. Perhaps there was also bewilderment. During his last week in Jerusalem, he staged a dramatic entrance into the city, riding on a lowly animal and then attacking the currency converters in the Temple. What was this all about? What did he think would happen? Did he imagine that the masses of people there to celebrate Passover would spontaneously rise up in support of his cause? Or did he harbor the belief that God would suddenly appear to intervene in human history, transform the Temple, and evict the Romans from power? What are we to make of that final cry upon the cross—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Was that a recognition, as he was dying, that the world was not going to be transformed the way he had anticipated? If so, then that, too, is something with which we can identify—dashed hopes, a vision smashed, or a marvelous plan postponed.
And yet that vision survives, as one that challenges each generation to ponder anew the contrast between what is and what might be if only people responded and God acted.
A human Jesus. This is not a modern invention. It is the original Jesus. That was precisely how his earliest followers—including his brother—understood him. It is only Paul, the Christifiers, and their successors who thought otherwise.
Who are the most famous Jews of all time? When asked this question, people typically start with the Bible—Abraham, some suggest, with others adding in Moses and David. Then, skipping over three thousand years of history, they might come up with such suggestions as Madonna (the pop star Madonna, that is), while a few might add Golda Meir, David Ben-Gurion, or Albert Einstein.
Some might eventually say, “Well, of course, Jesus was Jewish, as was Mary, his mother. Oh, and also Mary Magdalene.” Others, then, sensing the drift, might add, “And, yes, all of his original twelve disciples were Jewish… and his brothers… and John the Baptist.” These responses, however, are not typically the ones first uttered, coming only after a long pause during which people rack their minds wondering what the correct answers are. These results are not unexpected. For the most part, the people who populate the New Testament just aren’t thought of as Jewish. This is ironic. Of all the Jewish males who ever lived, Jesus was by far the most influential. Of all the Jewish women of history, probably Mary the mother of Jesus has had the greatest impact on people. Indeed, the most common Christian prayer uttered on a daily basis throughout the contemporary world is likely the intercessory prayer to the Jewish Mary (“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death”), followed closely by the Lord’s Prayer.
Christians today who honor Jesus, Mary, and the other figures of the New Testament writings do not think of them as Jewish. Similarly, Jews today, who do not honor them, also do not think of them as Jewish. They reside in a curious ethnic no-man’s-land.
The Jewishness of Jesus lies on the remote margins of Christian imagination, if it exists at all. This is not just a matter of picturing him in our minds as a Jewish rabbi—being circumcised, participating in Jewish prayers, observing the annual round of festivals, studying the Torah, engaging his disciples in discussion and debate, arguing the law with other Jewish leaders, going to the Temple, observing Passover, following the dietary laws, and keeping the Sabbath. All that is integral, of course, to the Jewishness of Jesus and was what he did.
We miss a lot if we do not think of Jesus as Jewish. For one thing, the radical political import of Jesus’ mission does not emerge—his taking on mighty Rome and its much-touted Pax Romana. The forcefulness of his challenge becomes obscured if we do not place him in the context of his culture and his world. The resilience of this message draws on the depths of Jewish expectations and hopes, that God would one day alter the world for the better. Without an understanding of that expectation, we are ill equipped to appreciate the resonance his message created within the society of the time.
Jesus’ message was a much more powerful affront to the foreign rulers than any other Jewish groups mustered, notwithstanding the ambitions of the uncompromising Essenes and militant Zealots. For those who yearned for an end to Roman rule, this represented a different strategic option than that presented by any other group. The Sadducees had opted for accommodation with the Romans; the Pharisees taught; the Essenes separated; the Zealots fought; John the Baptist urged a rededication to Torah; and Paul encouraged assimilation. Only Jesus had the imagination to pose an alternative to Rome and Hellenization: anticipate, prepare for, and participate in the Kingdom of God that was soon to be established on earth.
Did he personally think of himself as the Messiah of Israel, or was that a hope confined just to his later followers who made grand claims about him? We cannot be sure, and the texts appear to ascribe some messianic aspirations to Jesus himself, as King of the Jews. If we do not place him within his Jewish context, then we miss out on the powerful emotions created by these messianic anticipations. We have reviewed the expectations for being a Messiah very carefully—the Davidic ruler over Israel and catalyst for world transformation, ushering in, with God’s power, an era of universal peace. If we do not have this criterion firmly in place, then we become susceptible to another description, that of Paul’s Christ figure—a different model altogether and, as we have shown, one that derives not from a Jewish context but a foreign Gentile environment.
In addition, if we do not see Jesus, his mother, his brothers, his disciples, and Mary Magdalene as Jewish, then we are more apt to fall prey to the virus of anti-Semitism. Any vilification of Judaism and of the Jewish people represents an attack on these figures of the faith who in their day operated well within the confines of the Jewish family. They were not initiators of a new religion, and they were never, ever Christians. They remained Jewish throughout their lives. These individuals were, however, the victims of the Christifiers who remade the image of Jesus into a Gentile God, stripping him of his Jewish identity and humanity, with powerful consequences that still reverberate today.
Rediscovering the Jewish Jesus should help Christians participate in endeavors to combat contemporary anti-Semitism, whatever its source and whatever form it takes, whether personal, religious, or national. This includes all attacks on the Jewish people, the legitimacy of Judaism, and the right of the Jewish homeland to exist.
Jesus’ message was straightforward: keep Torah and plan for the Kingdom of God. Both require action. The practice of Torah requires daily choices, control of attitudes and right behavior, aligning oneself with a pattern of life presented in the books of the Torah and endorsed by Jesus in an extended fashion. The parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14—30) praises those who made use of what they had been given. The individual who hid his coin was rebuffed. This parable of the Kingdom shows us the need to use all of one’s resources imaginatively, much as Esther and Judith did before when they were faced with difficult circumstances. The parable of the Great Judgment (Matthew 25:31—46) validates those who actively respond to the needs of others—welcoming strangers, clothing the naked, and taking care of the sick. They are the ones who will inherit eternal life.
In these astounding parables, the message of the Kingdom of God has nothing to do with an elaborate infrastructure of belief about a Christ figure, worship of Jesus as divine, baptism, communion, belonging to one true church, or assent to creedal statements that precisely affirm the correct Trinitarian formula thrashed out by a committee of select bishops in the fourth century. That superstructure simply does not exist in Jesus’ message. It was the creation of the later Christifiers.
As a good Jewish rabbi, Jesus taught his followers a prayer. Matthew embeds this within the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:9—13). Nowhere does one draw closer to the teachings of Jesus than in this prayer, for the themes it articulates points to what was central in his thought. It is a threefold prayer, similar in structure to the central Jewish prayer, the Amidah, to which it bears other similarities—praise, petitions, thanksgiving.
The Lord’s Prayer begins with an address: “Our Father in heaven.” This opening phrase clearly identifies to whom the prayer is being addressed: God our Father. This positions everyone as children of God. We are all sons of God or daughters of God. All humanity has a common parentage.
The prayer continues with the sanctification of God’s name: “Hallowed be your name.” This praise requires some decoding. We need to recognize two things: first of all, the word name stands for God. Even today many devout Jews use the phrase HaShem (the name) when praying to God so as not to say the divine name or to presume undue familiarity with the omnipotent creator and infinite ruler of the universe. We also need to recognize that the ancient English word hallowed means “holy.” So this phrase in contemporary English might be better rendered, “Holy are you, O God.” It’s an important statement, for it calls upon the person praying to recognize the utter difference between humanity and God: only God is holy.
The prayer then continues with five petitions. The first two focus on our responsibilities toward God and recognize God’s agenda for humanity. The most important petition is uttered first and it has to do with the Kingdom message: “Your kingdom come.” This reflects the priority that Jesus places upon this teaching. It is followed by a second petition having to do with making God’s will manifest on earth as it already is in heaven: “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” What Jesus means by “God’s will” is carefully indicated throughout the Sermon on the Mount. The will of God encompasses the path of higher righteousness, the call to excellence in living, and the blessedness achievable through the attitudes and actions expressed in the beginning portion of the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes—showing mercy, being hungry for righteousness, being eager for spiritual nourishment, and striving to make peace among people and parties in conflict. The prayer makes it clear that the sphere of our actions is terrestrial: “on earth.” In uttering these petitions, Jesus asks us to recognize that we have a role to play, working in conjunction with God, to help establish his Kingdom by aligning ourselves with his agenda and establishing the conditions within which the Kingdom will flourish. It is not a prayer that leaves everything up to God: it represents a partnership arrangement, as befits a covenantal relationship. It offers an immense opportunity for humanity—and responsibility—to work to further God’s purposes within the sphere of our domain, the world we inhabit. It is emphatically not a petition to flee the world, to avoid the situations with which we are confronted or to abandon current responsibilities toward the world by seeking refuge in an afterlife.
The next segment of the prayer turns to the human agenda. The third petition represents an omnibus prayer for having all one’s needs accommodated: “Give us this day our daily bread” —whatever needs are required to get through the day, material, emotional, or spiritual. This petition presupposes confidence in God, that he will provide, and it encompasses a wide territory—whatever we require for life and living. It is wider than just food, which is a metaphor for sustenance. All needs are summed up in this petition—our need for spiritual growth, emotional development, intellectual maturity, and physical requirements are all combined, as well as the hope for salvation or redemption. It calls upon God to provide all these. Nowhere is this clearer than in the desire for eternal life: restoring the dead to life is the prerogative of God, when and how he sees fit. That, too, is part of our needs.
A fourth petition asks for forgiveness but places a condition on our receiving forgiveness, namely, that we have forgiven others: “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Again, there is much that we have to do to be part of God’s Kingdom. It recognizes that we will fail in our tasks, as, indeed, others will fail. But it provides for an act of individual will to recreate life so that we are not perpetually imprisoned by victimization to past misdeeds and misfortunes, whether ours or those of others. It is what allows us to move on in life, forgiving and being forgiven, not being stuck because of some incident in the past. In this petition, the person praying recognizes the need to take the first step, to forgive, in order personally to be forgiven.
Finally, there is a fifth plea to be able to avoid periods of dreadful testing and the power of evil: “And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.” This refers to times when our inner resources, our spiritual and emotional state and physical abilities, can be stretched to the limit. Help us avoid despair, desperation, and despondency—all the things that remove us from vibrant participation in God’s Kingdom and deprive us of the ability to think not only of ourselves, but also of others. It again presupposes confidence that we can trust God to act on our behalf, however he sees fit.
Matthew ends the prayer here. It is short and to the point, encapsulating Jesus’ teaching in a succinct fashion. The usual prayer, as it is said today by many, ends with a third section acknowledging God’s power and purpose: “For thine is the Kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.”
This powerful prayer highlights what Matthew has emphasized about the teachings of Jesus in his gospel. It is noteworthy for what it includes—and excludes. It focuses succinctly on two agendas—God’s and ours—and it places priority on the Kingdom message and doing God’s will. It encapsulates what Jesus encouraged his followers to believe and do.
Furthermore, it is directed not to Jesus, but to God. It is not said “through Jesus” or “in Jesus’ name,” however much that has become enshrined in later Christian practice. Like the Amidah, a longer prayer with more petitions, this one is addressed directly to God, not through an intermediary. As it makes clear, only God can fulfill the petitions expressed in this prayer.
A valiant Jewish challenger to Rome’s imperial power. A potential Jewish Messiah. A teacher with great insight. That was how Jesus’ earliest followers in Jerusalem viewed him—Jewish, as they were. This is not a modern invention. It was the original view of Jesus.