Jesus of Nazareth and the Early Church

Roman and Jewish historians writing at the end of the first century indepen­dently attest the existence ofjesus and derive the Christian movement from him, but their meagre notices contribute no information not already available from Christian documents.

Our oldest material is the genuine letters of Paul, written in the fifties, twenty or so years after the crucifixion ofjesus. Much can be gleaned from them concerning the structure and internal conflicts of Gentile Christian congregations established by then in the main urban centres of the eastern Mediterranean and in Rome. But as letters, they often deal with local, ephemeral issues, and so tell us very little about the origins of the movement as such. And composed by a Greek-speaking convert from Judaism, who had not known Jesus personally and whose relations with those who had were not always harmonious, they distort our perception of the nature of Christianity if read in isolation.

The New Testament Gospels appear to give detailed, connected biographies of Jesus’ public career and fate, and in one case, Luke’s, the account continues into a second volume tracing the earliest missionary expansion of the Church. However, the Gospels and Acts are documents of religious propaganda. Their general aim is to inspire and confirm the faith, and they blur the sequence of events with frequent anach­ronisms, reading later beliefs, especially about the person ofjesus, back into the narrative. This is particularly the case with the Gospel ofjohn. A further complication arises from the fact that the other three Gospels, the Synoptics, are in some way interrelated as texts, Mark’s usually being considered the oldest. And comparisons between them reveal extensive editorial alterations of detail and emphasis.

The general picture ofjesus which emerges from a critical reading of the Gospels is, however, reasonably consistent and histori­cally credible. He was an Aramaic-speaking Galilean, of rural rather than urbanised Hellenistic culture, an amateur teacher not a professional scribe. Despite similarities between facets of his teaching and that of Pharisaic and Essene sectarianism, he seems to have aligned himself with the common people, with the ‘poor’ and ‘sinners’, rather than the pious. He was renowned as a healer and exorcist, like others we know of from the period, such as Rabbi Haninah ben Dosa. After a short period of prominence in Galilee and later in Judea, he was accused and executed by the Roman method of crucifixion as a pretender to messianic kingship.

Other more detailed facts about his life and thought can be deduced with some degree of probability. He was associated with the figure ofjohn the Baptist, a latter-day prophet of doom, who summoned the nation to signify its corporate penitence in a ceremony of ritual washing— later to be adopted by the Church as a Christian sacrament. Jesus responded to this summons himself, though he did not preach baptism as part of his own programme. The lifestyles of the two were markedly different (Matt. 11:18f), but they were categorised together, at least by Herod Antipas (Mark 6:14) who discerned perhaps in Jesus’ rejection of divorce (I Cor.

The movement initiated by Jesus was located not in the desert retreats favoured by John, but in small towns and villages. He attracted to himself a circle of followers. Remarkably for a religious teacher of the time, it included a number of women (Luke 8:2f). The group, like the Pharisees, seems to have been held together by its common meals and table-fellowship, but unlike them it was characterised by its openness to all, not by exclusivist scrupulosity in the observance of food laws. The disciples lacked any constitutional structure, special training in exegesis of Scripture, distinctive rites or forms of prayer (cf. Luke 11 :lfif, where the Lord’s Prayer follows a standard synagogue pattern). They were not a definable sect. An inner group, the ‘twelve’ were itinerant like their leader, and shared in his activities of preaching and healing. Although the tradition is somewhat hazy about the exact list of their names, the admission that one of them, Judas Iskariot, later betrayed him, authenticates the historicity of the ‘twelve’. The number is probably symbolic, recalling the patriarchs or perhaps the twelve elders who assisted Moses, but their appointment had to do not with present function but with a future role (Matt.

The miracle stories, which occupy the largest por­tion of the Gospel accounts, were once neglected by scholarship in its search for the Jesus of history; they were treated as late legendary accretions, conforming him to the type of a Hellenistic wonder worker. More recently, however, they have been given closer attention, as similarities with other Palestinian charismatic healers have been pointed out. The high incidence among them of exorcisms is noteworthy, and is consistent with the wide­spread popular interest in demonology during the period. While the Evangel­ists draw theological conclusions from the miracles, regarding the final inbreaking of God’s reign or the status of Jesus, it is unclear whether he did so himself. He did not regard his own activity in this field as unique (cf. Mark 9:38f and Matt. 12:27). They were apparently not a point of issue at his trial, although a much later Jewish tradition claims that he was condemned as a sorcerer. Paul could write as though miracles formed no part of the gospel of Jesus (1 Cor. 1:22).

The original forms ofjesus’ teaching and its distinc­tive content have been the subject of continuous debate among scholars for over a century, and little can be asserted with any certainty. He committed nothing to writing. His methods of teaching were informal, brief wisdom or prophetic sayings and vivid analogies and example stories (the parables). These would not have been as accurately memorised by his followers as the legal judgements of the scribes were. The practice of the later Church of expounding them in the context of preaching—a practice which underlies the more connected form of Jesus’ discourses in the Gospel of John—raises the question of how far the thinking of early Christian communities has sup­pressed, modified or added to the thought ofjesus himself. Nevertheless, certain emphases recur with sufficient frequency in different settings, and are expressed so strikingly that they ought probably to be considered authentic.

Jesus proclaimed the imminent coming of a new age, when God’s sovereign rule would again be powerfully established (Mark 9:1). By repentance and faith, the Kingdom could already be entered and celebrated in advance. Condemnation at the coming judgement could be avoided by decisive action in the present (Matt. 11:20-4). This future hope is often described in language derived from the tradition of Jewish apocalyptic, but whether its reference was to the literal end of the world within one generation, or to an earthly restoration of Israelite theocracy, or to a spiritual order of reality, or by turns to all three, is hotly disputed by modern scholars. Even when full allowance has been made for changes of perspective intro­duced by the Church later, none of these referents can be altogether excluded. For the Kingdom is never defined in the teaching of Jesus; it is evoked parabolically in a variety of verbally inconsistent images: its coming is both with signs (Mark 13:7) and without signs (Luke 17:20), its suddenness can be pictured negatively as a thief (Matt. 24:43) and positively as a bridegroom (Matt. 25:6). The Kingdom image conveys the idea of both corporate solidar­ity and personal allegiance. It is national but not xenophobic, universal without being merely inward and spiritual.

The nearness of the Kingdom corresponds to the emphasis in Jesus’ teaching on the nearness of God, and the immediacy of knowledge of his will. Torah, the Law of God, is to be received not through scholarly study but by intuitive grasp of its essence (Matt. 7:12). Later rivalry and mutual suspicion between the Church and the Synagogue is clearly reflected in the Gospels, especially Matthew’s, where the scribes and Pharisees are placed under blanket condemnation as evasive and hypocritical casuists (Matt. 23). In many respects, however, Jesus was very close to the scribes in their understanding of Torah (Mark 12:34). He remained within the accepted bounds of Torah-obedience.

Did a particular view of his own status form part of Jesus’ message? Certainly the person of Christ was the central motif of early Christian preaching, and the confessional titles, Son of God and Lord, may well have been read back into the tradition at certain points. But whereas teaching onjesus’ person is explicit in the Gospel ofjohn, in the other Gospels it is often more a matter of implication. Thus our question needs to be phrased in a more general way: how did Jesus conceive of his relation to the coming of God’s Kingdom? Obviously the answer we give will depend on what the latter is taken to mean. Starting from the three main possibilities noted above, we could say that Jesus saw himself as a herald, preparing for the End ofhistory, and determining in advance the outcome of future judgement through the responses people made to his preaching; or that he saw himself as Messiah-designate, destined by faithful endurance of suffering to reign with his followers in a restored Israel on earth; or again that he saw himself as the bringer of God’s Kingdom, and its embodiment in the present. Or indeed elements of all three self-understandings may be authentic.

The implications ofjesus’ attitude to the Law should also be noted. For he delivered his message on his own authority, and expressed it in a highly personal way in poetic stories and sayings. He did not base his appeal on the generally accepted source of authoritative knowledge, the Scriptures. Some scholars have detected in the irregular Aramaic con­struction ‘Amen I say to you...’ evidence for a peculiar assumption of authority on Jesus’ part.

It has also been argued that Jesus’ frequent references to the fatherhood of God, and his use of the Aramaic word Abba in address­ing him, imply a specially intimate sense of filial consciousness. But examples of a similarly homely piety can be adduced from certain contem­porary spiritual masters, and the actual evidence for Abba is not extensive (Mark 14:36). Nevertheless, father-child imagery is firmly rooted in the tradition (e.g. Matt. 11:25-7), and although Jesus probably did not intend it to be applied exclusively to his own relation to God, it prepared the ground for post-Easter developments.

The self-designation which occurs most frequently in the Gospels, and has a strong claim to be treated as historical, absent as it is from the doctrinal vocabulary of the later Church, is the Son of Man. The phrase is awkward in Greek, and must represent a Semitic original. Depend­ing on what background for it is presupposed, many different interpreta­tions are offered. It could reflect the standard Hebrew poetic expression for Man (cf. Ps. 8:4), or echo God’s address to a prophet like Ezekiel, or be a visionary, symbolic representation of the redeemed community, the saints of Daniel 7:13ff. (This passage of Daniel was later interpreted in Judaism to refer to an individual heavenly figure, God’s viceregent in the age to come, but the date of this development cannot be ascertained with certainty.) Recently, a more popular idiomatic background for ‘son of man’ has been proposed. In Aramaic, a speaker might refer to himself in this oblique, generalising way in certain contexts, out of modesty, hesitation or gentle self-mockery. Unless whole categories of the Son of Man sayings in the Gospels are to be rejected, it is necessary to allow for more than one sense in the expression on the lips of Jesus. But if so, the juxtaposition of its different nuances, solidarity with humankind, destiny to prophetic suffering and hope for the vindication of Israel and God’s visitation in judgement and grace, is highly evocative, and it was but a short step for the gospel tradition to run these together into a unified concept. However, it should be emphasised that this was a Christian innovation; ‘the Son of Man’ was not a messianic title in pre-Christian Judaism and was not an explicit claim to particular status on Jesus’ part.

The account given so far of the mission of Jesus makes its connection to the circumstances and manner of his death very problematic. Why should such a person have been thought worthy of such a punishment? While each of the Gospels tells roughly the same story of the Passion, they differ on many of the vital historical details: the extent ofjewish involvement, the attitude of the Roman prefect, the wording of the charges, the relevance and temporal relation to his arrest of incidents like the cleansing of the Temple. With these and many other points in doubt, it is not surprising that some very radical reconstructions of the history have been offered, most persistently that which presents Jesus as a violent revolutionary, justly con­demned by the Romans to crucifixion, and the Gospels, therefore, as elabo­rate fictions to cover the truth.

In dealing with a complex historical problem such as the reasons for Jesus’ death, it may be false to assume that all parties to the affair must have acted rationally and in full cognisance of all the relevant facts, so that their motives are open to scientific analysis. The modem historian is predisposed to finding momentous issues at stake here. To have to admit that the death ofjesus was a minor miscarriage ofjustice and in a sense a chapter of accidents is aesthetically unsatisfying, but may be truer to the facts and, incidentally, to one of the ways Christians have traditionally understood the Cross as scandalous in its very particularity. Nevertheless, the Jewish and Roman trials, as recorded in the Gospels, are not implausible in broad outline as they stand. The High Priest and his circle examined Jesus on his attitude to the Temple, and they may have been willing to entertain false accusations concerning his violent prophecies against it. They would also have wanted to learn more ofjesus’ attitude towards Messiahship, for if he were reluctant to disclaim the title, they could safely transfer the case to Pilate, confident that he would be convicted for sedition and given a deterrent sentence. Since the early Church was to find little use for the title ‘Christ’ (Greek christos, equivalent of Messiah) and quickly reduced it to an alternative proper name for Jesus, its origin must be traced back to what was said ofjesus by some in his lifetime, which he was unable or unwilling to refute at the end.

Jesus’ mission was a response to the first-century crisis. He managed to integrate fragmented elements of Israel’s life and faith, not in a theological system, but in a practical synthesis, which lasted—in its original form—only as long as he was present himself to embody it. The event which transformed Jesus’ response into an organised movement and eventually into a religion distinct from Judaism was the proclamation of his resurrection from the dead. The proclamation may itself be called an event, for it occurred suddenly and decisively. It did not result from a gradual process of theological reflection on the completed life ofjesus; nor did it resolve the enigma of a crucified Messiah. It was rather the starting point for a completely new way of understanding him. Historical criticism is unable to determine any other sense in which the resurrection of Jesus might be called an event. The objectivity of reported visions of the risen Christ, or the veracity and significance of the empty tomb, remain problematic.

The framework in which the message of the resur­rection was interpreted was that of Jewish apocalyptic. His followers believed that Jesus had been raised not to continued earthly existence, but to the life of the age to come. In the light of this conviction, the apocalyptic dimension ofjesus’ own preaching was given special emphasis, almost at first to the point of eclipsing its other aspects. In particular, the expectation that God was about to intervene for judgement and salvation became concen­trated on the hope for the imminent return ofjesus himself‘on the clouds’ at his Parousia (Greek equivalent of coming, presence). But at the same time, the resurrection message had the effect of partially realising eschatological expectations. The End-time conditions (as already envisaged in Judaism)— the conquest of sin and death, the demonstration of God’s righteousness, the conversion of the Gentiles, the gift of the Spirit and sonship—must already be available through him to others. Those who were thus incorporated into Jesus became a new, eschatological Israel, for which the apocalyptic term was ‘the saints’. Earliest Christianity apparently drew no sharp distinction between the risen Christ and the community. Similarly, it did not distinguish between the risen one and the Spirit of God which he bestowed. Thus, its new understanding ofjesus based on his resurrection involved from the first an exalted view of the nature both of the Church and of the person of Christ. And it is these ideas which were rapidly and explicitly worked out in the writings of early Christianity and which were the chief causes of its divergence from Jewish tradition.