Jesus

Judaean preacher

• Born: c. 6 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Bethlehem, Judaea (now in Palestine)
• Died: 30 c.e.
• Place of death: Jerusalem (now in Israel)

As the basis for a religious faith that has attracted many millions of adherents, Jesus’ life and teachings have exerted an enormous influence on Western civilization.

Early Life

Though his name is recognized by millions and his birthday is celebrated as a holiday across the Christian world, the early life of the man now known by the Greek version of his Hebrew name, Jesus Christ (JEE-zuhs KRIST) is shrouded in obscurity. Neither the day nor the year of his birth can be fixed with certainty. Some scholars think that Bethlehem was identified as the place of his birth merely to make his life conform to old prophecies. Objective study of his life is complicated by the fact that many people believe him to be the Son of God, as indicated by the appellation Christ, Greek for the Hebrew Messiah, or “anointed one.”

The earliest Christian writer whose works are extant, the Apostle Paul (d. 64 c.e.), makes no reference to the historical life of Jesus, aside from quoting a few of his sayings. Although the near-contemporary historians Flavius Josephus and Tacitus mention him, they say little of substance. The four canonical Gospels are not, strictly speaking, biographies of Jesus. They were written as aids to memorizing his teachings or as arguments in favor of his divinity; they do not purport to be complete accounts (John 20:30). The earliest of them, attributed to Mark (c. 70 c.e.), begins with the story of Jesus’ baptism by John in the river Jordan. The two attributed to Matthew (80 c.e.?) and Luke (90 c.e.?) add a story about Jesus teaching in the Temple when he was twelve and give differing accounts of his birth and genealogy. John’s Gospel (100 c.e.?) is a reflective memoir, differing in chronology and in its portrayal of Jesus as a Hellenistic teacher rather than a Jewish rabbi. Other gospels, not included in the New Testament, attempted to fill the gap in Christians’ knowledge about Jesus’ early life by concocting fantastic stories. There are no other historical sources for the study of his life.

Matthew and Luke agree that Herod the Great was king of Judaea at Jesus’ birth. Herod died in 4 b.c.e. Since, in Matthew 2, he is reported to have slaughtered male children under the age of two in an effort to kill the infant Jesus, scholars conclude that Jesus may have been born as early as 6 b.c.e. (The error in calculation was made by a sixth century monk, who compared all the then-available chronological data to determine the time of Jesus’ birth.) The date of December 25 was selected by the bishop of Rome in the late fourth century. Having a Christian festival at that time of year enabled the Church to distract its members from popular pagan festivals that occurred then. Before that time, Jesus’ nativity was celebrated at various times of the year, if at all.

Jesus grew up in Galilee, where Greek influences were stronger than in the southern territory of Judaea. Though his native language was Aramaic, which is related to Hebrew, he would have had to know Greek to conduct any business. His father, Joseph, is usually described as a carpenter. The Greek word actually means something more like “builder” or “general contractor.”

Life’s Work

The Jews of Galilee were less conservative than those of Judaea. Rabbinic traditions and regulations were challenged in the north by a greater interest in the prophetic side of Judaism. Jesus, while not trained as a rabbi, seems to have been familiar with the standard methods of argument. He engaged in debates over interpretation of Scripture where appropriate (Mark 12:13-34) but sometimes sidestepped hairsplitting questions (Luke 10:25-37). At some points, though, he showed flashes of originality. He is never recorded as basing his teaching on the opinions of earlier rabbis—the accepted technique of the day—but taught instead on his own authority (Matt. 7:29). Parables (story-comparisons) seem to have been the foundation of his teaching technique (Mark 4:33).

Judaism was a diverse religion in the early first century c.e. Flavius Josephus describes three sects, or schools, flourishing at that time: the liberal and popular Pharisees, the aristocratic and conservative Sadducees, and the monastic Essenes. The Pharisees were further subdivided into the school of Shammai, which urged resistance to Roman rule, and that of Hillel, which counseled accommodation. There were also radical fringe groups such as the Zealots, who hoped to provoke a confrontation with the Romans that would lead to divine intervention and the foundation of a new kingdom of Israel.

Jesus’ sudden appearance in the “fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius” (Luke 3:1), or 29 c.e., when he was “about thirty years of age” (Luke 3:23), fit in with the general mood of discontent that prevailed in Judaea at the time. His message that “the kingdom of God is at hand” found a receptive audience. The eschatological tone was interpreted by some as an announcement of the overthrow of Roman hegemony. Even Jesus’ closest disciples did not easily give up their hope for a reestablishment of the Davidic kingship (Acts 1:6).

Jesus does not, however, seem to have envisioned himself as a political revolutionary. His aim appears to have been to reform Judaism, which had become so weighted down with minute requirements that even the most scrupulous Jews had difficulty adhering to the Torah. Jesus accused the Pharisees of imposing their own restrictions on top of the commandments of the Torah (Luke 11:46) and of neglecting what he called “the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith” (Matt. 23:23). Such utterances link Jesus with Old Testament prophets such as Amos (Amos 5:21-24), Jeremiah (Jer. 31:31-34), and Micah (Mic. 6:7-8), who criticized the legalism of Judaism in their day and urged that obedience to the law be a matter of inner motivation, not observance of external rituals.

Such a view was thus not a new creation of Jesus. Even his most familiar injunction, to love one’s neighbor as oneself, was a quotation of Leviticus 19:18. In general, his teaching can be classed under three headings: criticism of the normative Judaism of his day (for example, Matt. 23), proposal of a new, interiorized ethic (Matt. 5-7, the Sermon on the Mount), and expectations of the imminence of the kingdom of God (Mark 13).

In addition to his teaching, the accounts of his life contain miracle stories, in which Jesus purportedly heals people with various infirmities or demonstrates his power over nature by calming storms and walking on water. The Gospels conclude with the greatest of the miracle stories, the account of Jesus’ resurrection, which Paul saw as the proof of his divinity (Rom. 1:4). The other apostles also made it the center of their preaching (Acts 2:22-36).

These miracle stories are probably the major point of dispute between those who accept the divinity of Jesus and those who do not. Even those who find his ethical teachings attractive sometimes find it difficult to accept the supernatural accounts that surround them. The scientific orientation that has undergirded Western education since the mid-nineteenth century has produced an outlook on the world that makes the miracle stories seem more akin to fairy tales.

In the first century c.e., however, people were eager to believe stories of the supernatural. In Petronius Arbiter’s Satyricon (first century c.e.), one of the characters tells a werewolf story. At the end, a listener says, “I believe every word of it” and goes on to tell a ghost story of his own. Suetonius, biographer of the first century Roman emperors, recounts as fact a story that Vespasian healed two men in Egypt in the presence of a large audience. The philosopher and mystic Apollonius of Tyana, a contemporary of Jesus, was credited with healing, resurrecting the dead, and having his birth accompanied by supernatural signs.

A major difficulty with the Gospel miracles is the inconsistency of various versions of some of the stories. For example, in Matthew 14:22-33, when Jesus walks across the waves to his disciples’ boat, Peter steps out of the craft and takes a few steps before, becoming fearful, he starts to sink. Mark 6:45-51 and John 6:17-21, however, make no mention of Peter’s aquatic stroll. John’s is the only version that says that as soon as Jesus got into the boat, it reached the other shore.

Perhaps too much attention is devoted to the miracle stories, distracting from the more central issues of Jesus’ teaching. The Gospels record his reluctance to perform miracles (Mark 8:12) because the crowds paid more attention to them than to his teachings.

Recovering Jesus’ own sense of his purpose is difficult because all the documents relating to him were produced by people who believed him to be divine. Modern scholarship has concentrated on probing under the layers of interpretation that his followers added to the story in consequence of their claim that he was resurrected (see John 12:16). Jesus seems to have seen himself as a final messenger to the Jews. He claimed to have greater authority than the prophets, just as a king’s son has greater authority than his servants (Mark 12:1-11).

His message was essentially a warning that the Jews had exalted ritual observance of God’s law to the point that they had lost sight of its moral implications. His criticism was directed especially against the Pharisees and scribes. They reacted predictably, by plotting to silence the troublemaker. With the collusion of one of Jesus’ followers, Judas Iscariot, they seized him in a garden on the outskirts of Jerusalem.

The trial of Jesus has been a subject of much controversy as to its legality and the exact charges involved. The Romans normally left local matters in the hands of provincial officials, and the Sanhedrin had the right to try cases involving Jewish law. They do not seem to have had the power to condemn a prisoner to death. They found Jesus guilty of violating religious laws, especially those against blasphemy, but before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, they accused him of treason.

Pilate had been governor of Judaea for about three years at that time. According to Josephus, he had difficulty getting along with the Jews from the day of his arrival. His insensitivity to their religious traditions was a major part of the problem. His decision to crucify Jesus may have been made out of genuine concern that the man was a threat to the social order, but it was probably an effort to mollify the Jews, who had already complained to the emperor about him.

Within a few days of his death, Jesus’ disciples were claiming that he had risen from the dead. Whatever one may think of that assertion, the disciples’ belief in it had a remarkable effect on them. From a dispirited band of fishermen and peasants who had begun to scatter back to their homes, they were transformed into a fellowship of believers willing to undergo any difficulty or torment to proclaim their faith (Luke 24:13-35). Not even threats from the religious authorities of the day could silence them (Acts 5:27-32).

Significance

If his goal was to reform Judaism, Jesus can hardly be judged successful. The Pharisees resisted his initial efforts and refused to recognize his followers as loyal Jews. Driven out of the synagogues, they founded a new faith that emphasized the spiritual values of Jesus’ teachings. Jesus’ assertion of the importance of love of God and of one’s neighbors—even one’s enemies—and the shunning of ceremonialism and class distinctions were not original but resulted from his stress on long-neglected facets of Jewish scripture. His is the Judaism of the prophets, not of the Torah and the Talmud.

However one may regard the claims made about his divinity, Jesus’ impact on Western culture has been too profound to ignore. His teaching introduced an element of humaneness that even the Greeks and Romans found remarkable. Unlike their pagan neighbors, Christians did not procure abortions or abandon unwanted children after birth. They cared for their sick, and during plagues they cared for the sick and dying pagans who had been dumped in the streets. They did not seek vengeance on those who wronged them. Several pagan writers of the first four centuries, including Aulus Cornelius Celsus, Porphyry, and the Emperor Julian (sometimes called Julian the Apostate), grudgingly admired the despised Christians and urged pagans to live up to the Christian standards of charity and philanthropy.

In summary, then, Jesus’ teachings laid the groundwork for the Western world’s system of morality, however imperfectly it has been observed. If Socrates gave definition to the Western intellect, Jesus implanted in it a conscience.

Bibliography

Bornkamm, Gunther. Jesus of Nazareth. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973. The book that reopened the question of how much can be known about the historical Jesus after a half century of pessimism engendered by Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus (see below).

Bowker, John. Jesus and the Pharisees. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Comparison of the teachings of Jesus with those of the Pharisaic schools of his day. Bowker concludes that the content of much of Jesus’ message was not new, but his interpretation of it was.

Grant, Michael. Jesus: An Historian’s Review of the Gospels. New York: Collier Books, 1992. A moderate, scholarly review of the problems related to using the Gospels as historical sources.

Habermas, Gary R. The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ. Joplin, Mo.: College Press, 1996. Assessment of the historical facts surrounding the life of Jesus refutes those scholars who say Christ did not exist.

Jeremias, Joachim. The Parables of Jesus. Rev. ed. New York: Scribner, 1973. Regards the parables as the most accurately preserved part of the material relating to Jesus. Discusses principles and problems of interpretation, then analyzes the parables under subject headings.

Radin, Max. The Trial of Jesus of Nazareth. Delanco, N.J.: Notable Trials Library, 2001. Discusses the problem of evidence that makes the study of Jesus’ trial so problematic. The Gospels cannot be studied as if they were legal transcripts; the biases of their authors must be understood first.

Robinson, James McConkey. A New Quest of the Historical Jesus and Other Essays. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983. Survey of the debate over the question of how much one can know about the historical Jesus on the basis of the Gospels. Robinson suggests that it is possible to learn something about his life if one uses the sources advisedly.

Schweitzer, Albert. The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Edited by John Bowden. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001. Originally published in German in 1906, this study surveys nineteenth century attempts at writing a biography of Jesus and concludes that, because of the nature of the sources, it is an impossible task.

Van Voorst, Robert E. Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2000. Evaluates evidence outside the Scripture for the life and teachings of Jesus. Includes bibliography and indexes.