THE circumstances we have outlined, which used, perhaps, to be more familiar to previous generations of Christians than they are today, have an obvious bearing on the understanding of the life of Jesus, and must be allowed their full weight in any attempt to comprehend him. We have seen what strange imaginings had gripped the Jewish people at this time, the time Jesus came into the world, fed by those who interpreted the Scriptures to them. According to many preachers, the eleventh hour had come, the Last Times had begun, the Kingdom of God was at hand. The world was on the eve of Wrath and Judgement. The Messiah would appear.
Christianity affirms that Jesus was this Messiah, whose advent fulfilled the prophecies, but singularly fails to concentrate on the implications as the effective means of becoming better acquainted with his character and activities. The Messiahship of Jesus is asserted, and then side-stepped in order to disclose him in a light more congenial to Hellenic rather than Jewish concepts. Quite commonly, for instance, quite apart from the claim that Jesus was God, the view is expressed that the Jews of the time of Jesus were expecting a Warrior Messiah, one who would win military victories over the enemies of Israel, and in this way accomplish the deliverance. The Jews rejected Jesus because he was a man of peace, who represented the love of God.
But what authority is there for such a view? Had this been the contemporary opinion of those who studied the Scriptures, certainly Jesus could never have thought of himself as the Messiah. But in fact in references to the Messiah up to the time of Jesus the conception of a Warrior Messiah does not appear. Among the peasantry of Palestine many did entertain such a notion, because conditions were so bad that violence seemed to offer the natural remedy. Living under alien domination, oppressed and ill-used, who is to blame them if they did? To the desperate the niceties of prophecy mattered little. Anyone would serve as Messiah, whether descended from David or not, if he was bold, courageous, a leader of men. There were plenty of people with little to lose, who were ready for any adventure which promised food and drink, and the destruction of the enemies, and who often quite sincerely would believe themselves to be fighting the battles of God. Such people over a thousand years later joined the Crusades. But we must not judge the Messianic Hope by such as they. Those who took things into their own hands, the violent ones, who resorted to militancy, were strongly criticised and denounced by the Pharisees, who were the chief spiritual instructors of the masses.
Of the Branch of David for whom pious Jews waited it was written: ‘With righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked.’1 The sharp two-edged sword of the Messiah would be no physical weapon, but justice and righteousness.
Dating from the first century B.C. we have an exposition of the kind of Messiah who was expected, based on the passage from Isaiah just quoted.
‘And a righteous king and taught of God is he that reigneth over them: and there shall be no iniquity in his days in their midst, for all shall be holy and their king is the Lord Messiah. For he shall not put his trust in horse and rider and bow, nor shall he multiply unto himself gold and silver for war, nor by ships shall he gather confidence for the day of battle . . . For he shall smite the earth with the word of his mouth even for evermore . . . He himself also is pure from sin, so that he may rule a mighty people, and rebuke princes and overthrow sinners by the might of his word. And he shall not faint all his days, because he leaneth upon his God: for God shall cause him to be mighty through the spirit of holiness, and wise through the counsel of understanding, with might and righteousness.’2
The Son of David who was to come would be holy and just, ‘the Messiah of righteousness’, as he is called in the Dead Sea Scrolls, living in close communion with God and obedient to his will. It is by the word of truth that he will convict and defeat his adversaries.
That the Messiah should have such a character fully accords with what we have brought out about the nature of the Messianic Hope. The goal was the universal rule of God acknowledged by all men, when war, strife and wickedness should cease. To reach that goal it was required that Israel should be ‘a kingdom of priests and a holy nation’. How much more must the Messiah, who would come in God's name, be the perfect Israelite? To him would apply the words of the Psalmist: ‘Thou lovest righteousness, and hatest wickedness: therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows. . . Then said I, Lo I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me, I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea thy law is within my heart.’3
This was the likeness to which the Messiah was expected to conform, and this is what Christians should have been taught. It was said of him:
‘And he shall gather together a holy people, whom he shall lead in righteousness: and shall judge the tribes of the people that hath been sanctified by the Lord his God. And he shall not suffer iniquity to lodge in their midst; and none that knoweth wickedness shall dwell with him. For he shall take knowledge of them that they be all sons of their God, and shall divide them upon the earth according to their tribes . . . He shall judge the nations and the peoples with the wisdom of his righteousness. Selah.’4
These things were expounded to the people in the synagogues by preachers who mainly belonged to the fraternity of the Pharisees. But not all the messianic mysteries were public property. The extreme pietists who delved into such matters largely kept their knowledge to themselves, setting down some of their ideas in books only disclosed to the initiated. To supplement our knowledge we have to ferret out information to the extent that we have access to the internal literature of these groups, some of it, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, only recently available. Much material that would assist us has long been lost or destroyed, and we still know all too little about the tenets and distinguishing features of the groups in question.
The discovery of the Scrolls has turned scholarly attention again to the ancient references to the various Jewish and related sects and to those relics of them which have survived. Research in this field has now become one of the most promising developments for the illumination of Christian Origins. Here we can only touch on some aspects which have a bearing on the Messianic Hope and its interpretation by Jesus, and relate to the region in which he lived.
It used to be customary to think of Jesus as brought up in a Judaism which answered roughly to that of the second century A.D. and derived from that of the Pharisees, and which was much the same all over Palestine. This view is no longer tenable, though on the basis of it we have had a book by Robert Aron, entitled Jesus of Nazareth: The Hidden Years, which while colourful is largely erroneous. Certain scholars long ago apprehended from the rabbinical literature that the people of the north and south did not see eye to eye on many things. It was possible even to detect in Primitive Christianity the clash of Galilean and Jerusalem traditions. But only lately has it become appreciated that northern Palestine down to the time of Jesus had retained many features of the old religion of Israel, when it was separate from Judah, and this not only among the Samaritans.
In Galilee those who were of Hebrew stock could be called Jews in that they served the God of Israel, but they differed in many ways from the Judeans. Their Aramean speech was hard to follow because they slurred the gutturals, and in their customs and religious observances they were distinguished in a number of respects from the southerners. The Galileans were proud, independent and somewhat puritanical, more resentful of alien domination and infringements of their liberty. They were to be found in the forefront of the resistance movement to the Romans and to the Jewish authorities subservient to them. When the imperial capitation tax was levied on the Jews in A.D. 6–7, it was the rebel Judas of Galilee who raised again the battle-cry ‘No Ruler but God’. It was with these stubborn, hardy and intensely patriotic folk that Jesus, himself a Galilean, had to deal.
In the spiritual sphere the Pharisees were not nearly so well entrenched in Galilee as they were in Judea. They had a following in the north because of their piety and because they represented themselves as the People's Party, but they had an uphill struggle to contend with the Galilean way of life. The Gospels indicate that to meet the challenge of the teaching of Jesus the local Pharisees found themselves in need of the help of experts from Jerusalem.5 That the Galileans and Judeans were still affected by age-old antagonistic feelings is brought out by the Gospel of John. At Jerusalem there was opposition to the idea that the Prophet or the Messiah could possibly come from Galilee, and Jesus was taunted with being a demon-possessed Samaritan.6 On the other hand his Galilean followers remonstrated with him for wanting to return to Judea where ‘the Jews of late sought to stone thee’.7 We are so familiar with the application of the term Jew to all persons of Jewish faith that we may not realise that in the New Testament the name is sometimes used in the narrower sense to mean Judeans, the inhabitants of Judea, compared with Galileans or Samaritans.
We have also to think of Galilee as part of a region in which sectarian communities flourished. Some of these, like the Rechabites and Kenites, had an ancient tribal history. The area in which they functioned was in the proximity of the Sea of Galilee, in the Decapolis, Gilead and Bashan, the Gaulan and Hauran, and towards Lebanon and Damascus.
The Damascus Document among the Dead Sea Scrolls tells how in the early history of the Community ‘the Penitents of Israel went forth out of the land of Judea and sojourned in the land of Damascus’. There they entered into the New Covenant spoken of by Jeremiah the prophet, undertaking to separate themselves from all unrighteousness, not to rob the poor, the widow and the orphan, to distinguish between clean and unclean, sacred and profane, to keep the Sabbath strictly, also the festivals and the Day of Atonement, to love each one his brother as himself, and to care for the poor, the needy and the stranger. This indication of locality should be taken much more seriously and literally. Those who followed the restored Mosaism did not all gravitate towards Qumran. We have every reason to believe that many remained in the northern districts we have mentioned and founded settlements there. These ‘Elect of Israel’ of the Latter Days would encounter many kindred spirits in northern Palestine among groups carrying on the old ascetic Nazirite way of life, abstaining from animal food and intoxicants. The term Essean-Essene appears to have come from the northern Aramaic word Chasya (Greek Hosios) meaning Saint. It would seem that we have to treat the term as generic, covering a variety of loosely related groups. For the people ‘the Saints’ were the Jewish eclectic bodies, who also bore or were given descriptive names according to their affiliations or characteristics.
There has been emerging ever clearer evidence that in the Galilean region an ancient Israelitish type of religion persisted in the time of Jesus, defying Judean efforts to obliterate it. To an extent we have to think of him in the context of that northern faith which so strongly coloured and influenced those communities of ‘the Saints’ which were spread across this area, and which gave rise to some expressions of Messianism with which he was acquainted.8 The Gospels identify him with the small Galilean town of Nazareth; but the name he bears, Jesus the Nazorean, has northern sectarian implications. United with the fact that he was of Davidic descent, the prophetic intimations could be seen to be fulfilled in him which spoke of the Messiah as the sprout (nezer) from the root of Jesse.9
In the north the messianic doctrine of the Righteous King could join hands with the idea of a Suffering Just One and the conception of the Messiah as the ideal Israelite, the Son of Man. In the book of Daniel, as we have seen (above p. 26), the Saints who are to possess the kingdom are already likened to a Son of Man. These Elect of the Last Times regarded themselves as performing an atoning work by their sufferings. In the Community Rule from Qumran it is said of the leaders of the Council.
‘They shall preserve the Faith in the land with steadfastness and meekness, and shall atone for sin by the practice of justice and by suffering the sorrows of affliction . . . And they shall be an agreeable offering, atoning for the land and determining the judgement of wickedness, and there shall be no more iniquity.’10
Since the Messiah was to be the Branch of Righteousness, the holy one who would bring iniquity to an end and reign over a redeemed people, it was not difficult to move from the Son of Man (collective) to the Messiah as the Son of Man (singular), from the Elect Ones of Israel to the Elect One. If the Saints could achieve an atoning work by their sufferings, how much more the Messiah himself. For Jesus, especially with his northern associations, this emerged clearly, and governed the character of his messianic mission. His blood would seal the New Covenant spoken of by Jeremiah, and must be shed for many for the remission of sins.11 In other words attributed to him, ‘Ought not the Messiah to have suffered these things, and then enter into his glory (as king)?’12
We can say, therefore, that at the time when Jesus lived not only was there a widespread expectation that the Messiah would shortly reveal himself, but also that in some of the current thinking about ‘he that should come’ there was nothing inconsistent with the way in which Jesus understood the functions of the Messiah.
In approaching the historical Jesus no question of his deity arises, since before the paganising of Jewish belief in the development of Christianity no authority identified the Messiah with the Logos, the eternal Word of God, or conceived the Messiah to be an incarnation of God. The very term, the Anointed One, indicates a call to office. It was not the title of an aspect of the Godhead. We do not have to entertain at all the notion that Jesus or any other claimant to be the Messiah in Palestine at this period could suppose himself for one moment to be divine. In the early history of Christianity it can be sufficiently seen how the doctrine arose out of the impact of the Gospel on the Gentile world, and in the circumstances was almost inevitable.13 There are plenty of instances still today of Christianity in many lands being coloured by the polytheistic faiths the Church has conquered and absorbed. Our concern must be to overcome this barrier to our comprehension of Jesus, and reaching back to the core of Christianity to deal only with the requirements of the messiahship as he would have known them.
What, then, of the term Son of God? The Messiah was not directly so-called; yet he could be thought of as having a filial relationship to God without any idea among Jews that such a description implied deity, and this could happen in so far as the Messiah appeared as the representative Israelite and as the preordained King of Israel.14 Sonship of God meant something quite different to the Jewish mind than to the Gentile mind.
The right understanding of Jesus commences with the realisation that he identified himself with the fulfilment of the Messianic Hope. Only on this basis do the traditions about him become wholly intelligible. He was no charlatan, wilfully and deliberately misleading his people, well knowing that his posing as the Messiah was fraudulent. There is not the slightest suspicion of pretence on his part. On the contrary, no one could be more sure of his vocation than was Jesus, and not even the threat of imminent death by the horrible torture of crucifixion could make him deny his messiahship.
We have to accept the absolute sincerity of Jesus. But this does not require us to think of him as omniscient and infallible. It is possible to hold that the Messianic Hope was not only a justifiable but indeed an inspired conception, and yet in many respects the predictions and expectations of the interpreters of the Scriptures could be quite wrong. It is one thing to see visions and dream dreams, and quite another when it is demanded that such visions and dreams be acted out on the plane of history in all their apocalyptic grandeur. How could Jesus soberly imagine that this could and would be accomplished? He could do so because he was a Jew, belonging to a people whose history, as they read it, was a record of miracles wrought on their behalf and who believed in greater miracles to come. But what Jesus anticipated would happen was no more likely to be correct than that of any other interpreter of the prophetic legends. During his lifetime he could to an astonishing extent because of his personal qualities enact and obtain compliance with the messianic scheme as he apprehended it. But he had no control over what lay beyond, and in much that he anticipated he was mistaken. The Church had to face before very long the acute problem of the postponement of his expectations, and dealt with it rather lamely and unconvincingly by largely spiritualising them. The dogma of his deity did not allow it to be admitted that he had been in error.
The convictions Jesus had, as we must appreciate, rested on the oracular treatment of the Old Testament. The Jewish circles in which he moved were accustomed to applying the text of the sacred books not only to the messianic figures, but to other individuals concerned in the Cosmic Drama, and in general to the circumstances of what they believed to be the Last Times. Abundant illustrations of this kind of prophetic exegesis are furnished by the Dead Sea Scrolls and the apocalyptic literature. The Bible had secrets to yield which could be extracted by the right methods for the guidance and instruction of the Elect of the End of the Days.
Christianity got going when the followers of Jesus started to proclaim that in him the Messiah had come, and sought to prove this in the only way which would carry conviction, by demonstrating from the Scriptures that all that had befallen him had been foretold. There is now every reason to believe that the first written presentation of the gospel took the form of a compendium of such Biblical Testimonies, a work which in its various recensions underlies the canonical Gospels, and whose influence can be discerned on other parts of the New Testament and on much of the patristic literature.15 We have evidence that some accounts of the activities of Jesus became coloured and elaborated by prophecies which it was deemed appropriate to identify with them. But the picture we have of the immediate and spontaneous association of prophecies with the experiences of Jesus argues strongly that his disciples were not initiating the process, but continuing one they had acquired from him.
The Gospels insist that Jesus had some foreknowledge of his fate which he had derived from the Scriptures. Significantly, he began to communicate this information only after he had elicited from Peter at Caesarea-Philippi the affirmation that he was the Messiah. ‘From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day.’16 He declared this on the ground that these things were written concerning the Messiah.17
If Jesus exhibited such foreknowledge this would be nothing extraordinary if he had had access to some of the literature of ‘the Saints’, as seems to be indicated by his familiarity with the idea of a Suffering Just One and with a Son of Man christology. Josephus tells us of the Essenes: ‘There are some among them who profess to foretell the future, being versed from their early years in holy books . . . and oracular utterances of prophets.’18 In his writings he gives instances of their powers, and no doubt many in such circles did acquire remarkable insight and capacity for seership as a result of their training.
Believing himself to be the Messiah, it would not be surprising if Jesus should have sought to learn from ‘the Saints’ as much as he could of what was required of him and what would befall him. There is no novelty in the view that he believed it to be incumbent on him to fulfil the messianic predictions. The early Christians delighted to pursue the quest for such fulfilments in his life to the extent that, with the help of the Greek Bible, they could uncover allusions in the most unlikely texts, and even create incidents to conform with supposed prophetic necessities. Ephraem the Syrian, in the fourth century, declaims: ‘Come hither thou troop of prophets, ye interpreters of verities. See ye the King hath not turned aside from the path ye trod out for him!’19 But it is needful to emphasise that neither before nor since Jesus has there been anyone whose experiences from first to last have been so pin-pointed as tallying with what were held to be prophetic intimations concerning the Messiah. The nearest comparison available to us is that of the Teacher of Righteousness of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is only recently, since this discovery, that we have become fully aware that before the time of Jesus the Old Testament was being interpreted oracularly in the same way as we find in the New Testament.
The logical deductions from this vital piece of information were partly seen even before the evidence derived from the Scrolls. We may take as an example the inquiry conducted by Sir Edwyn Hoskyns and Noel Davey, published in 1931, from which we may quote two brief excerpts.20
‘Jesus acted as He did act and said what He did say because He was consciously fulfilling a necessity imposed upon Him by God through the demands of the Old Testament. He died in Jerusalem, not because the Jews hounded Him thither and did Him to death, but because He was persuaded that, as Messiah, He must journey to Jerusalem in order to be rejected and to die.’
‘The Historian is dealing in the end with an historical Figure fully conscious of a task which had to be done, and fully conscious also that the only future which mattered for men and women depended upon what He said and did, and finally upon His death. This conscious purpose gave a clear unity to His words and actions, so that the actions interpret the words and the words the actions.’
But if this contention is true, as it is hard to doubt, it means that before Jesus embarked upon his ministry he was equipped with knowledge of what had to happen obtained from previous messianic researches. His public activities lasted, perhaps, little more than a year. Their demands called for continual movement and engagement. Jesus was rarely alone and often weary to the point of utter exhaustion: he had no leisure for quiet study or the slow formation of ideas. There is no indication whatever that he was simply leaving things to chance, and had no inkling of what to expect. From first to last his actions are marked by the utmost purposefulness, and he speaks with an authority which made a profound impression on all who came in contact with him. He is revealed as a man who knows exactly what he is doing, and why. More than once in respect of his end he is reported to have said: ‘My hour is not yet come.’21
What we have adduced leads up to a crucial question. If Jesus believed that a series of experiences would happen to him in accordance with prophetic requirements, did he, as Hoskyns and Davey suggest, consciously proceed to speak and act in accordance with them? It rather looks as if these scholars realised the implications of what they were saying, and being orthodox Christians they shied away from them, for at the end of their book we read:
‘Thus far it might be argued that the evidence points to a strange human act of will by which Jesus determined to obey the will of God as He had extracted the knowledge of it from a persistent study of the Old Testament Scriptures. . . . But this is not the truth. No New Testament writer could think of Jesus as the Greeks thought of Prometheus. We must therefore conclude that Jesus Himself did not think of His Life and Death as a human achievement at all. Language descriptive of human heroism is entirely foreign to the New Testament. The Event of the Life and Death of Jesus was not thought of as a human act, but as an act of God wrought out in human flesh and blood, which is a very different matter.’22
This is not a conclusion on the plane of historical inquiry. It transfers judgement to the New Testament, whose views reflecting subsequent Christian opinion we are invited to endorse as the truth. If the evidence points to ‘a strange human act of will’ on the part of Jesus why should we be afraid to accept that as the truth? Why should we not conclude, historically, that, before his baptism by John, Jesus had succeeded in producing a kind of blueprint of the Messiah's mission with the prophetic requirements organised to show a progressive programme of events having their climax at Jerusalem when he would suffer at the hands of the authorities?
Here could be the explanation of much that is mysterious in the Gospel story. Reading the story in this messianic light could make it possible to know, much more clearly, accurately and decisively, the real Jesus. In making the attempt to do so we shall chiefly be concerned with the way in which he prepared for and carried out what he believed to be his messianic task, emphasising in particular to an extent not previously brought out the manner in which he sought to attain his objectives so as to compel circumstances to comply with what for him were the imperative requirements of the prophecies.
For the man who embarked on this formidable and fantastic undertaking this was no game he was playing. He was in deadly earnest. As he saw it in his own time and setting, with its strange obsessions, tremendous issues depended on the measure of his faithfulness to unalterable divine decrees. He had need of all those qualities of mind and character which had been promised to the Messiah to enable him to succeed.
1. Isa. xi. 4.
2. Psalms of Solomon, xvii. 35–42.
3. Ps. xlv. 7 xl. 7–8.
4. Psalms of Solomon, xvii. 28–31.
5. Mk. iii. 22, vii. 1.
6. Jn. vii. 40–3, 51–2, viii. 48.
7. Jn. xi. 7–8.
8. See Part Two, Chapter 2, North Palestinean Sectarians and Christian Origins.
9. Isa. xi. 1; Mt. ii. 23.
10. The Community Rule, viii. The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, Tr. Vermes.
11. Mt. xxvi. 28; Isa. liii. 11.
12. Lk. xxiv. 26, and see Part Two, Chapter 3, The Suffering Just One and the Son of Man.
13. See Part Two, Chapter 1, Messianism and the Development of Christianity.
14. Israel is called the Son of God, the Firstborn, the Only-begotten and Dearly Beloved One, and Solomon son of David and by interpretation the Messiah is brought into a filial relationship with God (see Part Two, Chapter 1). But this Sonship only meant close association in representing God and carrying out his will.
15. See Part Two, Chapter 4, Gospels in the Making.
16. Mt. xvi. 21. At intervals Jesus repeated his prediction (Mt. xvii. 22–3, xx. 17, xxvi. 2).
17. See Mk. ix. 12; Jn. v. 46; Mk. xiv. 21; Lk. xxiv. 44–7.
18. Josephus, Wars II. viii. 6.
19. Rhythm against the Jews, a Sermon delivered on Palm Sunday. We may cite here Stather Hunt, ‘It is significant that both ancient and modern scholars should, apparently quite independently, come to the same conclusion, that the Gospels are almost entirely testimony matter put into narrative form’ (Primitive Gospel Sources, p. 236).
20. The Riddle of the New Testament, pp. 160 and 250.
21. See Jn. ii. 4, vii. 6–8, xii. 27; Mk. xiv. 41.
22. The Riddle of the New Testament, p. 254.