This bold and well-argued theory rescues the message and person of Jesus from the literalist absurdities of contemporary fundamentalism and recovers the social and ethical significance of what Jesus called the "kingdom of God." In making its case, the book leads the reader through the basics of modern Scripture scholarship, as well as the the development of christology within first-century Christianity. An excellent bibliography and an abundance of end-notes provide resources for further research on these and related topics.

Contents

1. Liberal Protestantism and the Jesus of History (1800-1900) (p. 10)

2. Rudolf Bultmann and the Christ of Faith (1920-1950)(p. 18)

3. The New Quest for the Historical Jesus (1950 to Today) (p. 23)

1. The End of the World (p. 33)

2. The Making of a Prophet (p. 49)

3. The Kingdom of God (p. 57)

4. God's Word at Work (p. 70)

5. Rejection and Death (p. 77)

Simon's Experience

1. The Myth of Easter (p. 95)

2. The Birth of Christianity (p. 101)

3. An Early Formula of Faith (p. 110)

4. The Denial of Jesus (p. 119)

1. Easter According to Mark (p. 131)

2. An Earlier Legend (p. 135)

3. What Really Happened (p. 147)

4. An Apocalyptic Messenger (p. 156)

5. The Meaning of Easter (p. 163)

1. The Apocalyptic Judge (p. 183)

2. The Reigning Lord and Christ (p. 192)

3. The Divine Son of God (p. 206)

Appendix: Notes on Rabbinical Literature(p. 229)

Selected Bibliography (p. 275)
 
 

Today at the dawn ofher third millennium, the Christian church is undergoing a theological crisis in what she thinks and believes about Jesus of Nazareth.

The crisis grows out of a fact now freely admitted by both Protestant and Catholic theologians and exegetes: that as far as can be discerned from the available historical data, Jesus of Nazareth did not think he was divine, did not assert any of the messianic claims that the New Testament attributes to him, and went to his death without intending to found a new religion called "Christianity." That is, the theological crisis has to do with the prima facie discrepancy between what Jesus of Nazareth apparently thought he was (a special but very human prophet) and what mainline Christian believers now take him to be (the divine Son of God, consubstantial with the Father and the Holy Spirit).[1]

The apparent difference between the "Jesus of history" and the "Christ of faith" is not a new problem in Christianity. Since the last century liberal Protestant scholars like Adolf von Harnack and agnostics like Ernest Renan have tried to strip away what they thought were

the church's divinizing embellishments of Jesus of Nazareth so as to arrive at the "real" (that is, the human) prophet of Nazareth.

More recently Roman Catholic exegetes and theologians have joined the discussion.[2] With the encouragement of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, Catholic scholars now teach that the Gospels are not accurate "histories" of Jesus but religious testimonies produced by the second and third generations of Christians, whose faith that Jesus was their savior colored their memory of his days on earth.[3] Thus, even though all Catholic biblical scholars believe that Jesus is God, they do not necessarily maintain that Jesus himself thought he was the divine Son of God, who had existed from all eternity as the Second Person of the Trinity.[4]

Just as the question of discontinuity between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith is not a new problem, so too solutions to it have long been available in Christian teaching. Today, however, those solutions and the presuppositions on which they rest are being called into question.

Did Jesus actually think that he was the divine Son of God? Christian theologians have traditionally answered this question by asserting that their savior, insofar as he was both God and man, was quite literally of two minds about himself. Relying on a complex distinction that ancient Hellenistic philosophy made between "nature" and "person" (or "rational hypostasis"), these theologians claim that Jesus, even though he was only one person, did have both a human and a divine nature, joined in "hypostatic union." Each of the two natures, they say, had a corresponding intellect, finite in the one case, infinite in the other. And therefore, even if in his human self-understanding Jesus was not aware of his own nature as God, in his divine mind he did know who and what he really was. And he chose to reveal his identity gradually and indirectly, in ways that believers came to fully comprehend only after Jesus' death and resurrection.[5]

How, then, do believers know that the Jesus of history is Christ and God? Some Christians assert that faith is a higher form of cognition than empirical, historical knowledge and therefore that Christian believers have a deeper insight into who Jesus really was than do nonbelievers. According to this thesis, historical research gives us only the "historiographical Jesus"—that is, only those aspects of him that are

available via historico-critical method—but it cannot show us the authentic, divine Jesus of history, who actually lived and preached two millennia ago. To arrive at that real Jesus, so the theory goes, one must have faith; and unlike the scientific historian, the believing Christian supposedly knows that Jesus really was the Son of God, even if the historical evidence does not show that.

But this solution does not work. Faith provides the believer with no more data about who Jesus of Nazareth "really" was than does normal historical experience. There exists no revealed body of supernatural information that is given over to the Christian faithful while being kept hidden from nonbelievers. Christians have at their disposal only the same public evidence about Jesus that everyone else has—but they interpret the data differently. That is, Christianity is a "hermeneusis," or interpretation. Its beliefs and doctrines are but one of many possible and equally valid ways of understanding the universally available empirical data about Jesus of Nazareth. Christians may claim that their faith is based on revelation, but as far as one can tell empirically, such revelation is a name for the historically relative and culturally determined hermeneutical process in which Christians, confronting the humanly available information about Jesus of Nazareth, choose to interpret him as their savior, who reigns with God in heaven.

Despite these attempts at solving the problem, the critical fact remains: At the root of Christianity there lies the difference between how Jesus apparently understood himself while he was alive—as the eschatological prophet—and how the church came to interpret him within a half century of his death: as the divine Son of God.

Does this difference constitute a discrepancy, an incompatibility between the evidence of history and the claims of faith? On the one hand, no one can scientifically prove (and no believer would want to) that Jesus actually was the divine savior that Christianity eventually took him to be. On the other hand, it can be established with a high degree of historical certitude that the early church did not create her christological understanding of Jesus out of absolutely nothing, but rather based it on the earliest believers' firsthand impressions of Jesus' dramatically prophetic comportment. That is, Jesus spoke and acted with an extraordinary authority that he attributed to God, who was working through him. His disciples interpreted this authority as evidence

that Jesus was God's final prophet, sent to prepare Israel for the end of time. Thus early christologies, which interpreted Jesus first as the Son of Man and eventually as Christ and God (see [Part Three]), were an extension and enhancement of what Simon Peter and the original disciples believed that Jesus had been, whether or not that belief corresponded to what Jesus actually thought of himself and (if this were knowable) who he ontologically was.

It is perhaps impossible and arguably unnecessary for Christianity to show any inevitable connection between Jesus' evaluation of himself when he was alive and Simon Peter's evaluation of Jesus both before and after the prophet's death. Christianity begins not with Jesus but with Simon Peter, and it maintains itself throughout history by staying in continuity with that first believer. Christianity essentially is its sense of history, its unique claim of historical continuity—but the continuum is with Peter and the first disciples rather than directly with Jesus. That is the meaning of the Catholic dictum Ubi Petrus, ibi ecclesia: Christianity is present wherever someone traces his or her faith back to that of Simon and the first believers. Those who choose to preserve continuity, in one way or another, with Simon Peter's evaluation of the prophet from Galilee can rightly lay claim to the title "Christian." Ultimately, Jesus' understanding of himself is not essential to Christianity. But Peter's is.
 
 

The gap that contemporary Christian exegetes have confirmed between the historical evidence about Jesus and the claims of faith about him is potentially salutary and illuminating. For one thing, this difference, once it is acknowledged, offers believers and nonbelievers alike an opportunity to reevaluate Christianity at its roots, not so as to destroy it out of hand or to salvage it at all costs, but in order to discover what Christianity intends to be about, to probe what it may have missed about Jesus, and to ask what kind of future lies ahead for it.

The present book is that kind of investigation, carried out along the border between the findings of empirical history and the questions that inspire faith. Working along that border, I take the devil's part, the role of advocatus diaboli; that is, I adopt the viewpoint of the historian, not that of the believer. I take the word "history" in the context of

the original Greek verb that underlies it: historein, to search and inquire, using only the light of natural, empirical reason. My purpose is to bring the findings of modern historical and biblical research to bear on three questions that are central to the theological crisis in contemporary Christianity:

[PART ONE] What Jesus preached about the kingdom of God.

[PART TWO] How belief in his resurrection evolved

[PART THREE] How the earliest christologies developed in the first half century after Jesus' death

At the heart of this theological crisis there lies a revolution in biblical studies—specifically, the emergence of historical-critical method—that began over a century ago and now dominates both Catholic and Protestant exegesis. The employment of the historical-critical method in scriptural research has often led to extraordinary shifts in the church's understanding of biblical texts; and since the testimony of the Bible is a major stone in the foundation of Christian faith, such shifts are bound to have repercussions in the theological edifice built on that foundation.

Therefore, we must preface our threefold study of Jesus, the resurrection, and the origins of christology with an overview of how the revolution in New Testament exegesis came about and what its major conclusions are. That is the task of the sections that immediately follow. Then, throughout the remainder of the book, I shall be drawing upon those conclusions—the results of contemporary (and quite orthodox) Christian exegesis—even though I shall be offering my own fundamentally variant interpretations of those conclusions. That is, I depend upon (and hope to show that I am faithful to) the scientifically controllable results of modern biblical scholarship; but then I go beyond that scholarship, by using its scientific results as data for my own theories.

Although Catholic scholars are relative latecomers to the revolution in biblical exegesis (their Protestant counterparts have been at it for almost 150 years), higher criticism of the New Testament is now the common activity and common property of both Protestants and Catholics. We turn now to the origins and development of that revolution.

The Beginnings of modern biblical exegesis go back to the birth of "historical consciousness" at the dawn of the nineteenth century; and the first stage in the Protestant development of that exegesis is roughly coextensive with what George Steiner has called "the summer of 1815-1915"—the century of bourgeois liberalism.[6]

Just as Newton's revolution in physics and Kant's in philosophy helped the eighteenth century to invent "nature" as the correlate of Enlightenment reason, so likewise the political revolutions in America and France and the enthronement of Hegelian philosophy in Germany contributed to the nineteenth century's invention of "history" as the correlate of bourgeois will. [..]

By the second half of the nineteenth century critical exegetes were virtually in agreement that, contrary to the traditional view, the Gospels were not written as neutral historical records of Jesus' words and deeds and that they offered no access to his inner thoughts or psychology. Rather, even if they preserve some historical recollection of Jesus, they more directly reflect the highly developed beliefs of Christian communities forty to sixty years after his death. Often enough, the critics showed, sentences that the Gospels put in Jesus' mouth (such as his claims to be Christ or the divine Son of God) had never been spoken by him but were invented by later believers.

Over the years New Testament critics have managed to identify at least three types of early Christian communities—two of them made up of Jews and one of Gentiles—each of which had its relatively distinct christology.[9] First came the Aramaic-speaking Palestinian Jews who were the earliest "Christians" (we should say more accurately: adherents of the "Jesus-movement" within Judaism). They took Jesus

to be the eschatological prophet, God's final and authoritative spokesman, who (1) had proclaimed the dawning kingdom of God, (2) had been vindicated by God after he died by being miraculously taken to heaven, and (3) had been designated to be the future apocalyptic judge who would appear at the imminent end of the world. Although these Aramaic-speaking Jewish believers saw Jesus as the prophet of God, they did not consider him to be ontologically divine. Nor did they think that he already was the messiah (Christ). Rather, they thought that he was only the messiah-designate and that he would come into his full power only at the end of time.

Secondly, there were the Greek-speaking Jews of Palestine and the Diaspora (for example, Syria) who had come to believe in Jesus and who were the first to be actually called "Christians" (Acts 6:1, 8:1, 11:26). As the parousia (Jesus' return to earth from heaven) continued to be delayed, these Hellenistic Jewish Christians began to stress not that Jesus would become the Christ at the end of time but that he already was the Christ and was currently reigning in heaven.

Thirdly, Greek-speaking Gentiles eventually converted to Christianity, beginning around 40 C.E., and they held that Jesus was the Son of God in the full divine sense: He had preexisted as God before his human incarnation, had been the true, if concealed, God-man during his life on earth, and after his death had been exalted to heaven and was currently reigning there.
[..]

In the nineteenth century exegetes had developed the science of "source

criticism," the study of the literary relation between the relatively similar Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (the "synoptic" Gospels). As the name suggests, source criticism attempted to ferret out the literary origins of the Gospels, and by the 1860s it had succeeded in determining two things.[12]

First, by isolating the gospel verses that Matthew and Luke had borrowed from Mark (and by finding none that Mark had borrowed from them), source critics were able to establish that Mark's Gospel was the first one to be written (it is currently dated at ca. 70 C.E.) and that Matthew and Luke had used it as the principal written source of their own Gospels, which appeared about fifteen years later. Second, by isolating gospel verses that were common to Matthew and Luke but absent from Mark, the exegetes proposed the "two-source" hypothesis: that besides Mark there had been another, earlier source of gospel material, a collection composed mostly of sayings attributed to Jesus, which went back to the early Aramaic-speaking Christian communities of Palestine. This second source came to be known as "Q," which abbreviates the German word Quelle ("source"). Today, despite some disagreement about the exact contents of the Q-document, virtually all New Testament scholars accept the Q-hypothesis. However, the nineteenth-century theory of two sources—Q and Mark—has since been refined and expanded into the "four-source" theory (see accompanying chart), which postulates two other oral sources to account for materials that are unique to Matthew and to Luke.[13]

By the end of World War I the liberals' reconstruction of Jesus, which for some years had been on shaky theological and exegetical grounds, came entirely unglued. [..] After the war Protestant scholars began inventing sharper exegetical tools for probing the historical development of the Christian Scriptures and, in the eyes of many, for whittling away at the divinity of Jesus.

In the area of New Testament research, the watershed between liberal Protestant exegesis and what came after it can be dated to 1919-1921, the years in which Karl Ludwig Schmidt (1891-1956), Martin Dibelius (1883-1947), and Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) published groundbreaking works in the new area of biblical science called "form criticism."[21]

The source critics of the previous century had focused only on the written sources of the Gospels; and in postulating the Q-document and establishing the historical priority of Mark's Gospel among the Synoptics, they had gone as far back into early Christian history as they could. But with "form criticism" the focus shifted from the literary relationships among the Synoptic Gospels to the preliterary history of the material upon which those Gospels drew. Whereas source criticism goes back only to the period around 50C.E., when the oral Aramaic Q was presumably written out in a Greek translation, form criticism traces the verses of the Gospels and of the hypothetical Q-document back to the period of their oral genesis and transmission between 30 and 50 C.E. (see chart).

One of the presuppositions of form criticism is that each Synoptic Gospel is like a mosaic composed of individual tesserae or a necklace made up of separate pearls strung together. Each Gospel is a creative compilation of earlier units of material (called "pericopes") which the church generated after Jesus died. These pericopes circulated in oral form as independent and self-contained sayings and stories before they were committed to writing (some of them in the Greek Q) and eventually organized into the Gospels. Form critics study the origins and development of the individual units, and they attempt to identify the particular forms those units take: for example, polemical or didactic sayings, proverbs, apocalyptic prophesies, community regulations, parables, miracle stories, and the like.[22] Some pericopes may well embody historical recollections of what Jesus said and did, whereas others contain words and deeds that the church, in retrospect, invented and attributed to him. In any case, at each stage of their reception and transmission these pericopes, according to the form critics, were freely adapted and creatively shaped by the Christian communities to fit their own particular needs, such as catechetics, liturgy, apologetics, and controversy with outsiders.[23]

[..]

Since the end of World War II New Testament scholarship has undergone important developments both in critical method and in theological reflection. For one thing, while the method of form criticism continues to be used with some revisions by contemporary exegetes, it has been complemented since the late forties by "redaction criticism" (in German, Redaktionsgeschichte, "redaction history"), which attempts to sort out the differing theological conceptions that guided the four evangelists in reshaping earlier oral material into their written Gospels.[25]

But more important, some of the theological conclusions that Bultmann built upon form criticism have been called into question since World War II. In the early fifties a number of Protestant exegetes (among them, Ernst Käsemann, Günter Bornkamm, Hans Conzelmann, Gerhard Ebeling, and Ernst Fuchs, some of whom are former students of Bultmann's) argued that it was indeed possible, with the aid of exegetical criticism, to get behind the christological proclamations of the early church and to catch a glimpse not only of the actual words and deeds of the historical Jesus but also of the way he understood

himself during his lifetime. With claims such as these it seemed that New Testament exegetes were coming around full circle. First, nineteenth-century liberalism had destroyed the divine Christ of faith and invented a humanitarian Jesus of history; then Bultmann virtually destroyed the Jesus of history and invented an existential Christ of faith; and now the "Post-Bultmannians" were advocating a "new quest for the historical Jesus." But the "new" quest has almost nothing in common with the nineteenth-century one. The Post-Bultmannians, for example, agree with Bultmann on a number of points: that there is no possibility of discovering an "uninterpreted Jesus of Nazareth," a Jesus untouched by Christian faith; that we cannot reconstruct Jesus' inner psychology and thoughts; that Christianity cannot do away with christology; that the post-Easter Christian community is (in large measure, at least) the seedbed of the Jesus-tradition; that faith cannot be reduced to history or reason and that sola historia cannot replace the Lutheran position of sola fide. [26]

But on the other hand, these new exegetes also take their distance from Bultmann. They point out that the historical recollections of Jesus found in the pericopes offer much more historical information about the prophet than Bultmann admits and that this information does have some significance for faith. They argue, for example, that the authority that Jesus demonstrated in his words and deeds reveals, if not Jesus' inner psychology, at least his publicly enacted understanding of himself as a prophet.

Most important of all, the Post-Bultmannians deny that there is an unbridgeable chasm between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. Or, to put the matter positively and more accurately, they hold that there is a continuity between the meaning that the disciples attributed to Jesus during his life and the meaning they attributed to him after his death. In other words, the Post-Bultmannians do not see New Testament christology as a post-Easter invention on the part of the church but as a spelling out of the implicit christological claims that the disciples discerned in the authoritative words and deeds of Jesus during his lifetime. These exegetes point out that, after Easter, the disciples believed that it was Jesus—not some "X" but the Jesus they had known—who was the Christ. They claim that to deny this continuity of meaning, as Bultmann does, is to risk reducing Christianity to a modern myth with some generalized existential import.

Underlying and supporting these new theological positions are new, or at least revised, methods of scientific exegesis. Within form criticism, the Post-Bultmannians make use of at least four criteria for determining whether elements of the gospel material are authentically historical, that is, traceable to Jesus himself. First, the criterion of dissimilarity allows the exegete to attribute to Jesus at least those sayings which can be shown to be probably unique to him insofar as they are notably dissimilar from sayings that are provably typical of either the early church or ancient Judaism. Secondly, the criterion of coherence allows these exegetes to attribute to Jesus those sayings that are coherent with the material that has already been established to be "unique because dissimilar." Thirdly, the criterion of multiple attestation permits the exegete, within limits, to attribute to Jesus those deeds or kinds of behavior which are attested in all or many of the distinct gospel sources (for example, Mark and Q). Finally, according to the criterion of language and environment, any authentic saying of Jesus would have to reflect Aramaic speech and, in general, the cultural patterns of early Palestine—although it is possible that such characteristics might reflect only the earliest Palestinian churches.[27]

What, then, have the post-Bultmannian exegetes discovered about the historical Jesus by applying these criteria to the gospel material? Negatively, they have established that Jesus did not express his self-understanding in any christological titles—certainly not in the so-called higher titles (such as "God," or "Lord" in the full divine sense) and not even in the so-called lower titles (for example, "messiah," "[messianic eschatological] prophet," and "Son of Man"). On the positive side, what Jesus thought of himself can be seen indirectly and implicitly in the authoritative way he spoke and acted—for example, the way he bent the Law by eating with sinners and outcasts, or the way he declared that the kingdom of God was dawning in his words and deeds. In Jesus' assertion of his authority the scholars find the attitude of a prophet who seemed convinced that his word was God's word and that his will was at one with his Father's. They interpret this as an implicit claim to a unique relation with God—but only that and no more.

In other words, the "new quest" for the historical Jesus has discovered something more than Bultmann thought could be found, and something different from what the liberal quest thought it had discovered.

It has found a Jesus who acts like an eschatological prophet with a sense of authority derived from his special relation to God. No doubt he did preach (to put it minimally) "the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man," as the liberals thought, but he did so in a number of ways the liberals overlooked. For one thing, there is an irreducible eschatological element to his preaching about the kingdom of God; for another, he preached the kingdom in a uniquely self-referential way: by acting as if he himself were the locus (if not the focus) of the dawning of that reign of God.

[9] The threefold distinction of early Christian communities was long in developing and continues to undergo refinements. Heitmüller's article "Zum Problem Paulus und Jesus" (1912) marked a major breakthrough in identifying Hellenistic Christians as the first group "to grasp the kernel of universalism that lay in Jesus' preaching" (329) and "to break through the particularist and nationalistic limitations connected with it" (332). Hahn, The Titles of Jesus in Christology, has made a major contribution to the study of early Palestinian Christianity and Hellenistic Jewish Christianity, in part by showing the overlapping between the two groups. See also Hengel, Between Jesus and Paul, 32-44, as well as the further specifications in Pesch, Gerhart, and Schilling, " 'Hellenisten' und Hebräer: Zu Apg 9,29 und 6,1." (See Riches's suggestion that the "enthusiastic church" of the Hellenistic Jewish Christians "[preserved] the more radical teaching of Jesus and arguably [was] more receptive to it than the Jerusalem community itself," Jesus and the Transformation of Judaism, 60.) On the overlapping of Hellenistic and Palestinian culture before Jesus, see Bickerman, From Ezra to the Last of the Maccabees.

In Brown and Meier, Antioch and Rome, 1-9, Brown distinguishes four groups of Jewish Christians and their Gentile converts: (1) strongly conservative: those (of the Pharisee sect) who insisted on full compliance with Mosaic Law, including circumcision; (2) moderately conservative: those, like James and the early Peter, who insisted that their Gentile converts observe some Jewish laws but need not be circumcised; (3) liberals: those, like Paul, who required of their converts neither circumcision nor observance of Jewish food laws; and (4) radicals: those who not only did not require circumcision or observance of food laws but also "saw no abiding significance in Jewish cult and feasts" (6).

[13] The chronological priority of Mark, which had been suggested since the late eighteenth century, was systematically argued by Karl Lachmann in his "De ordine narrationum in evangeliis synopticis" in Theologische Studien und Kritiken, 8 (1835), 570-590. The hypothesis of the "Q-document" (although without that name) apparently was first postulated either by Johann David Michaelis (1717-1791) in Introduction to the New Testament, 1793-1801, or by Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Über die drey ersten Evangelien, in Allgemeine Bibliothek der biblischen Literatur, Leipzig, (1794), 5:759-996. (See M. Devisch, "La source dite des Logia et ses problèmes.") The Q-hypothesis was strongly advanced in terms of verbal concordances, doublets, and common sequences of pericopes by Christian Hermann Weiss, Die evangelische Geschichte kritisch und philosophisch bearbeitet, two volumes, Leipzig: Breitkopf and Harrel, 1838. Twenty-five years later Heinrich Julius Holtzmann carefully verified the two-source theory in Die synoptischen Evangelien: Ihr Ursprung und geschichtlicher Charakter, Leipzig: Engemann, 1863. (See Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, 88, 121-136, 203ff.) The four-source theory was advanced in its first and imperfect form by B. H. Streeter, The Four Gospels, in 1924.

T. W. Manson notably advanced the research on the Q-material (without, however, sufficient attention to form criticism) in Major, Manson, and Wright, The Mission and Message of Jesus, 1937, Part II of which Manson republished as The Sayings of Jesus, 1949; see also Manson, The Teaching of Jesus. In 1959 Heinz-Eduard Tödt (The Son of Man in the Synoptic Tradition) showed that the Q-document was not a mere "manual of instruction in the Christian life" (thus T. W. Manson) but a collection of texts with strong theological and christological preoccupations. On Q, see also James M. Robinson, "LOGOI SOPHON: On the Gattung of Q," in Robinson and Koester, Trajectories Through Early Christianity, 71-113, and Schillebeeckx, Jesus, 100-102. Farmer has challenged both the Q-hypothesis and the priority of Mark and has reproposed the priority of Matthew (The Synoptic Problem, 1963). Some of the documents of the (continuing) debate for and against the Q-hypothesis and the priority of Mark are found in Bellinzoni, The Two-Source Hypothesis. Bellinzoni, while not necessarily endorsing the two-source hypothesis, [continued...]

In popular Christian teaching, Jesus often comes across as a divine visitor to our planet, a supernatural being who dropped into history disguised as a Jewish carpenter, performed some miracles, died on a cross to expiate sins, and miraculously departed again for the other world.

In official Church teaching this view of Jesus as a god who merely pretended to be human is a heresy, and the seriousness of the error is not mitigated by the fact that multitudes of the faithful, from catechists to cardinals, firmly believe and teach it. In earlier forms the heresy was called "Docetism" (from the Greek verb dokei, "he only seems to be"), and it has been condemned many times for maintaining, in effect, that Jesus merely appeared to be a human being but actually was not, that this heavenly savior merely "wore" flesh like a garment while he went about his divine task of redeeming the world. Church condemnations notwithstanding, this heresy continues to thrive in contemporary Christianity and remains one of the more common forms of christology in popular Roman Catholicism.[1]

But even in its official, orthodox form, Christianity tends to overlook

the fact that, exceptional though he proved to be, Jesus was a young Jewish man of his times, as mortal and fallible as anyone before or after him. Whether this Galilean carpenter was also God is a matter of some debate. But no serious person doubts that he in fact lived as a human being in a certain place and at a certain time. Which means that one way to make sense of who he was and what he was about is to "materialize" him, to pull him out of his mythical eternity and reinsert him into the historical situation that shaped his mind and his message.

Jesus lived his brief and tragic life (from about 5 B.C.E. to 30 C.E.) at a time when Judaism was undergoing dramatic transformations in its social and political structures, and attempting to interpret Jesus in abstraction from that context would be like trying to make sense out of Dante without referring to medieval Florence. Therefore we begin the present chapter, which is devoted to understanding Jesus' message of the "kingdom of God," with some remarks on the historical development of Israel and, in particular, on the eschatological mood of the times.

The years during which Jesus preached—probably 28-30 C.E.—were moments of relative calm at the eye of a political hurricane. Two hundred years earlier, the Maccabee brothers had revolted against Syrian domination of Judea, and after a long struggle, the Jewish people had won a brief hiatus of independence from foreign domination (142-63 B.C.E.). Those years of political freedom ended with Pompey's conquest of Palestine, and thereafter the country lived under the cloud of an uneasy Pax Romana that held until 66 C.E. In that year Jewish revolutionaries, called Zealots, rebelled against the empire; but Roman legions led by Titus crushed the insurrection and destroyed the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E. In 135 C.E. a second Jewish revolt against Rome ended with the razing of the Holy City.[2]

Those three hundred turbulent years, framed at both ends by violent revolutions, mark one of the most creative eras in Western religious and intellectual history, not only because they reshaped Judaism and launched Christianity, but also because they delivered to the West the notion of eschatology (the idea of an end to time), which, through various transformations from millenarianism. to Marxism, has profoundly influenced the Western concept of history.

What interests us about this axial period are the changes it engendered in Jewish religious consciousness just before and during Jesus' lifetime. One of the major accomplishments of the period was a radical shift in the Jewish conception of history and the emergence of an intense and pervasive expectation of "the end of the world." This eschatological mood dominated Jesus' lifetime and affected how people heard his message. Let us see how it came about.

The Jewish prophets who flourished before the Babylonian Exile (586-538 B.C.E.) had no clear doctrine of an end of time and certainly no hope that God would one day destroy the world. Rather, the uniqueness of the prophets' message lay in their insistence that history was the arena of God's salvation of Israel.[3]

Unlike many other religions, which located the manifestations of the divine in the mythical dawn of time or in the eternal cycles of nature, pre-exilic Judaism proclaimed that the realm of human action was the place where God revealed himself. Yahweh was a God of history who intervened on Israel's behalf through such concrete events as the Exodus, the conquest of Palestine, and the establishment of the Davidic kingdom. Israel's God was a political activist who established her rulers, toppled her enemies, and passed historical judgment on her good and bad actions. Long before Christians discovered Marx, the prophets preached a form of "liberation theology": faith as cooperation with God's intention to effect worldly justice, and peace for mankind. Prophetism was an act of faith in the God of history.

Before the exile the Jews saw time as neither linear nor cyclical, neither teleological nor eschatological, but as epiphantic, the medium of God's revelation to and salvific presence with Israel. This faith that God was directing history (along with the later belief, derived from it, that he had created the world) prevented traditional Judaism from looking ahead to an apocalyptic end of history followed by a suprahistorical "new heaven and new earth." The classical prophets of the seventh and eighth centuries B.C.E. were neither pessimistic about history's

course nor optimistic about transcending it, for theirs was a historical rather than an otherworldly hope. When Israel was beset by political and social sufferings, the prophets promised salvation not as a second life in the hereafter but as a temporal restoration of the nation under a future Davidic king. Salvation was not an escape from time through resurrection of the body or immortality of the soul, but a triumph within time in the form of peaceful social existence in a theocratic state.

But all that changed with conquest of the kingdom of Judah by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 B.C.E. and the subsequent exile in Babylon. When the Jewish people began returning to Palestine in 538 B.C.E. after a half century in captivity, they were allowed only limited political autonomy under Persian rule and, later, under Greek and Syrian domination. Deprived of her Davidic leaders and major prophets, Israel began to find her spiritual anchorage less in Yahweh's direction of her national history than in the revealed words of Scripture. But now the Bible was read not so much as an account of the gesta dei, God'sinterventions in Israel's past as a promise of further epiphanies to come. Rather, the emphasis was on the Law, which they thought had been given by God in the past and remained ever valid for the present, seemingly without the need of God's further interventions in time. This shift from history to hermeneutics, from faith in God's direction of history to scrupulous interpretation of legal codes, provided Israel with a tidier, if less dramatic, world.

For the next three and a half centuries Israel was a kingless theocracy governed by a timeless Law. Around 400 B.C.E., under the high priest Ezra ("a scribe skilled in the law of Moses," Ezra 7:6),[4] the five books of the Pentateuch, called the Torah, or Law, were edited in their final form and became the religious and legal constitution of the Jewish people.[5] Henceforth the guides of Israel would no longer be the prophets, who in pre-exilic times had called for fidelity to God's workings in history, and certainly not the Davidic kings, who were no more. Rather, her political and religious leaders would be the priests of the rebuilt Temple, the rabbis of the local synagogues, and in particular the scribes, the theological lawyers who delivered the casuistic and devotional embellishments on the Law that would eventually evolve into the Talmud.[6]

The Law, the index of Israel's fidelity to the Lord, became a complicated body of codes.[7] It was divided into the Written Law, or Torah (torah she-biktab), whichGod had delivered to Moses—that is, the Ten Commandments plus the myriad supplementary prescriptions found throughout the Pentateuch—and the Oral Law, or "Sayings of the Fathers," the hundreds of legal principles and devotional or ethical interpretations that were generated by the scribes from the fourth century B.C.E. onward as guiding rules for faithful Jews and that eventually became codified as the Mishnah and the Gemara.

The purpose of the casuistic Oral Law was, as the scribes put it, to "build a fence around the Torah,"[8] a bulwark of detailed codes which, if properly observed, would guarantee that the scrupulous believer could not have violated the Written Law. (Wearing a false tooth, for example, might constitute carrying a heavy burden and thus violate the commandment of Sabbath rest, whereas pulling a mule from a pit might not.[9]) This elaborate "second Pentateuch," combined with the already elaborate set of forty-one laws found in the Covenant Code (Exodus 20:23-23:33), plus the seventy-eight laws of the Deuteronomic Code (Deuteronomy, chapters 12-26), and the strict regulation of sex, feasts, and sacrifices in the Holiness Code (Leviticus, chapters 17-26), often gave the impression of a jurisprudential nightmare. And the laws kept growing until, according to one tradition: "Six hundred and thirteen commandments were communicated to Moses, three hundred and sixty-five prohibitions, corresponding to the number of days in the solar year, and two hundred and forty-eight positive precepts, corresponding to the number of the members of man's body"[10]—these hundreds of statutes at the service of defining the ten rather simple commandments revealed to Israel through Moses.

Moreover, by the time of Jesus Judaism was divided by sectarian debates over the question of which Law was to be observed. The conservative and aristocratic Sadducees were rigid literalists who observed only the ancient Written Law, whereas the fervent lay sect of the Pharisees, who were aligned with the scribes, were considered "liberals" because they not only followed the ancient Torah but also observed and developed the more recent Oral Law with its scrupulous attention to everyday life. The Pharisees of Jesus' day, who were greatly respected by the ordinary people, were in turn divided into the

strict constructionists of the Shammai school and the more flexible adherents of the Hillel school. When we read in Mark's Gospel that the Pharisees approached Jesus with a question about the grounds for a legal divorce (10:1-12), we are witnessing an effort to get him to take a side in the debate between these two Pharisaic sects. The attempt, in fact, was unsuccessful, and as we shall see, much of the radical newness of Jesus' message consisted in his proclamation of a nonlegalistic relation to God.

In short, the period during and after the exile witnessed a major transformation in consciousness within Israel: a shift from history to hermeneutics, from a prophetic engagement with political events to a clerical exegesis of the Law. A historical contrast suggests itself here. The classical Greeks, in their confrontations with the Persian Empire from the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C.E. through the conquests of Alexander 150 years later, were led in a sense from religion to history, from mythical scripture (in their case, Homer) to political action. At roughly the same time Israel, reeling from her defeat by Babylon and humbled by her subjection to Persia, retreated from history to Scripture, from political action to religious legalism. As these two very different cultures collided with the empires of the Middle East, their paths took opposite directions. Greece, feeling its historical power, pushed beyond itself and became the worldwide cultural force of Hellenism. Israel, feeling its political impotence, turned within and became, for the first time, an institutionalized "religion."

Along with this post-exilic emphasis on the Law there went a transformation in the Jewish conception of Yahweh and his relation to his chosen people. Before the captivity in Babylon, Israel envisioned God's salvation as a future restoration of the glorious past under a new Davidic king. But after the exile, when Yahweh seemed to have fled to the higher heavens, leaving priests and scribes in his wake, the earlier hope for this-worldly theocratic restoration began to fade. Yahweh came to be seen less as the national deity who had intervened and would intervene again in Israel's political history, and more as an Oriental despot who ruled the entire universe, including the Gentile

nations, from the distant and impersonal heights of metaphysical transcendence. From those heavens he governed the world no longer by direct historical intervention as in the past, but by the ministrations of angelic mediators who, like the eternal Law, mediated his presence to mankind.

Israel's retreat from history took a dramatic step in the second century B.C.E. with the emergence of the radically new idea of eschatology, the doctrine of the end of the world. At the beginning of the Maccabean revolt, when Israel's fate seemed to be at its lowest point, pious Jews began to hope not for a new divine intervention within history but for a catastrophic end to history, when God would stop the trajectory of Israel's decline by destroying this sinful world and creating a new, supratemporal realm where the just would find their eternal reward.[11]

This eschatology, or doctrine of the end of time, found literary expression in the imaginative and very popular genre of apocalypse, in which pseudonymous authors spun out fanciful predictions of the coming end of the world and dramatic descriptions of the aftermath. Apocalyptic eschatology spelled the end of the prophets' hope for a future revival of the past and replaced it with mythical hopes for a cosmic cataclysm followed by the eternal olam ha-ba, the "new age to come." If prophetism had been an act of faith in God's workings in history, apocalyptism was an act of despair.[12]

This recasting of Yahweh as apocalyptic destroyer was strongly influenced by the Zoroastrian religion that the Israelites had encountered during the Babylonian Exile. Zoroaster (ca. 630-550 B.C.E.) had taught that the world was the scene of a dramatic cosmic struggle between the forces of Good and Evil, led by the gods Ormazd and Ahriman. But this conflict was not to continue forever because, according to Zoroastrianism, history was not endless but finite and in fact dualistic, divided between the present age of darkness and the coming age of light. Time was devolving through four (or in some accounts seven) progressively worsening periods toward an eschatological cataclysm when Good would finally annihilate Evil and the just would receive their otherworldly reward in an age of eternal bliss. Zoroastrianism's profound pessimism about present history was thus answered by its eschatological optimism about a future eternity.

As Israel's political fortunes faded and as such Zoroastrian ideas as

these took hold, Judaism shifted the focus of its religious hopes from the arena of the national and historical to that of the eschatological and cosmic, from political salvation in some future time to preternatural survival in an afterlife. This radical change can be seen in late Judaism's adoption of notions like the fall of Adam from paradisal grace at the beginning of time, the workings of Satan and other demons in the present age, and the Last judgment and the resurrection at the end of history—all of which Christianity was to take over and turn into dogmas. But the clearest sign of this absorption of Persian ideas can be found in the eschatological visions of history that surfaced in apocalyptic literature during the two centuries before Jesus began to preach.

One such apocalyptic work was the Book of Daniel, composed around 165B.C.E. during the Maccabean revolt against the oppressive Seleucid dynasty. The tyrannical King Antiochus IV, who ruled Palestine (175-03 B.C.E.) from Syria, had undertaken to force Hellenistic religion and culture on his Jewish subjects. He deposed the legitimate high priest, forbad ritual sacrifice and circumcision, plundered the Temple treasury, and, most shocking of all, set up the "Abomination of Desolation" (Daniel 11:31),an altar to Olympian Zeus, within the Temple precinct.

The Book of Daniel was written by an anonymous author in the second century B.C.E.; but in a way typical of apocalyptic works, the book purported to have been composed some four centuries earlier by a prophet named Daniel, and pretended to predict the catastrophic events that in fact were happening in the author's own lifetime. The work interpreted these events as "eschatological woes," a time of sufferings and troubles "such as never has been since there was a nation" (12:1). According to God's hidden plan, these woes marked the final stage before the destruction of the old and godless world and the final triumph of divine justice.

The Book of Daniel envisaged history as rushing downhill toward its eschatological end, which the author was convinced would come in his own lifetime. For example, the book told of a dream that the sixth-century Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar supposedly had and that the prophet Daniel interpreted for him in terms of the succession of kingdoms (2:31-43). In the dream history was depicted as a giant

statue with the head made of gold (representing the kingdom of Babylon), the chest and arms of silver (the kingdom of the Medes), the belly and thighs of bronze (the kingdom of Persia), the legs of iron (the empire of Alexander), and the feet made partly of iron and partly of clay (the divided kingdom of the Seleucids in Syria and the Ptolemies in Egypt). In the dream

[a stone] smote the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces; then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold, all together were broken in pieces, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors. (2:34-35)

According to Daniel the duration of these eschatological woes was limited, and at the end of this period God himself would arrive as the cosmic judge to annihilate the kingdom of the beast and to "set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed" (2:44). The apocalyptic writer describes his vision of the imminent eschaton:

As I looked, thrones were placed, and one that was ancient of days took his seat. ... The court sat in judgment and the books were opened. ... And as I looked, the beast was slain, and its body destroyed and given over to be burned with fire. (7:9-11)

And behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him.

And to him was given dominion and glory and kingdom, so that all peoples, nations and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not be destroyed. (7:13-14)

At that hour, that Son of Man was given a name in the presence of the Lord of the Spirits, the Before-Time, even before the creation of the sun and the moon, before the creation of the stars, he was given a name in the presence of the Lord of the Spirits. ... He is the light of the gentiles and he will become the hope of those who are sick in their hearts. ... He became the Chosen One; he was concealed in the presence of the Lord of the Spirits prior to the creation of the world, and for eternity. And he has revealed the wisdom of the Lord of the Spirits to the righteous and the holy ones. (48:2-7a)

Moreover, along with these otherworldly hopes there also arose, for the first time in Judaism, the expectation of a resurrection of the dead and personal survival in an afterlife.[15] Earlier predictions of "resurrection" in the writings of the prophets had been only figurative and

metaphoric. For example, in the preapocalyptic Book of Ezechiel, which dates from the time of the exile, God promises Israel, "I will open your graves and raise you from them" (37:12).But this promised "resurrection" was merely a symbol of Israel's eventual return from the Babylonian Exile to the very concrete and this-worldly land of Palestine, as the continuation of the passage shows: "You shall live, and I will place you in your own land" (37:14).However, in the apocalyptic Book of Daniel resurrection was promised not as a metaphor for future political restoration but quite literally as the otherworldly reward of the just at the end of time:

And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. (Daniel 12:2)[16]

The historical event that most determined Judaism in the two centuries before Jesus was the successful Maccabean revolt (167-142B.C.E.) against Syrian domination of Palestine. Outraged by the sacrileges of King Antiochus IV, the brothers Judas, Jonathan, and Simon Maccabee each in turn led the struggle against Seleucid tyranny, until Simon finally won freedom for Palestine. The result was a brief parenthesis of Jewish self-rule that lasted until the Roman conquest of the land in 63 B.C.E. What is more, the establishment of the new kingdom led to a radical shift in the Jewish concept of the promised Davidic messiah.

The triumph of the Maccabees was their undoing. While all Jews

were happy to be a free people again, many of the more pious resented the fact that the new Hasmonean-Maccabean dynasty was not descended from King David. On religious grounds, therefore, this new regime could not be the kingdom promised by the prophets, and no Maccabee could be the true messiah. Not only that, but many found it intolerable that both Jonathan and Simon Maccabee had dared to make themselves high priests without being descended from the proper sacerdotal line of the ancient high priest Zadok (I Kings 1:26, 11 Samuel 8:17), whose family had held the office since the tenth century.[17] On two counts, therefore, Jonathan and Simon Maccabee were at fault. Neither Davidic nor Zadokite by descent, they seemed to be power-hungry interlopers in both the political and religious realms.

Opposition to the Maccabees ran high among their fellow Jews, and in particular the question of the proper bloodline of the high priesthood became the flashpoint of a religious revolt against the dynasty. One of the most important of the protesting groups was the devout lay sect of the Pharisees (Hebrew perushim, Aramaic perishayya, "Separated Ones"), who were later to figure so prominently in Jesus' ministry. They broke with the Hasmonean-Maccabean regime in 134 B.C.E. and proclaimed their hope for an ideal, non-Hasmonean king. This new messiah not only would be descended from David and therefore anointed as God's deputy but also—here was the radical shift—would have two new characteristics. First, he would be designated ruler of the entire world and not just of Israel; and second, he would arrive at the imminent end of the world. The messiah whom the Pharisees proclaimed was to be no longer a national king but a universal emperor, no longer a historical figure but an apocalyptic phenomenon.[18]

The absolute novelty of this idea of an eschatological emperor-messiah can be seen by contrasting it with earlier, more modest conceptions. Before the Babylonian Exile the term "messiah" ("anointed one") had none of the supernatural connotations that later generations of Jews and Christians would give it. Originally the word designated any Davidic king before the exile. He was a political and military leader, a man who lived in the flesh and was as mortal as any other human being. But Jews also believed that the king was the chosen agent

of God's will on earth, and as a sign of that election he was anointed with oil either by a prophet or by a priest (I Samuel 10:1, 16:13; 1 Kings 1:39). When the ruler was anointed (and so became "messiah"), he was constituted the adopted "Son of God." We see this, for example, in Psalm 2:7, where Yahweh says to the king on coronation day, "You are my son, today I have begotten you." The title "Son of God" did not indicate that the king was ontologically divine but only that he was God's special agent on earth. Even during the difficult years surrounding the Babylonian Exile, when prophets projected an ideal future messiah-king and named him "Wonderful Counselor, Almighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace" (Isaiah 9:6), the reference was to a mortal human being, the national political leader in his unique theocratic role as God's worldly deputy.

The messiah of the Pharisees, for all his uniqueness as a universal and eschatological ruler, did in fact absorb and continue some of the national-historical traits of the traditional messiah. In the popular imagination the traditional national king now tended to become an idealized, even mythologized, ruler who, while certainly Davidic in descent, would be not just one more king in that line but the final and universal sovereign who would bring about God's definitive reign throughout the entire world. But conversely, for all these "transcendent" qualities, this eschatological world-emperor was still seen as a human and historical king and not as a supernatural being who would descend from heaven. In other words, as much as the new savior's eschatological features drew on the otherworldly spirit of apocalypse, his specifically messianic role anchored him squarely in the earthly order. The point is that his messiahship now had both universal political scope (since he would have dominion over all nations, not just Israel) and definitive religious significance (since he would appear at the end of time).
 
 

The Pharisees' new concept of the messiah was only one of the changes in Judaism that resulted from religious opposition to the Hasmonean-Maccabean dynasty. Another came from a group that was spiritually even more radical and in fact the first sect to break with the regime: the Essenes. Led by a charismatic Zadokite priest of Jerusalem who is

known to us only as the Righteous Teacher, the Essenes were implacably set against the Hasmoneans' usurpation of the high priesthood. Around 142 B.C.E. they made a clean break with the Temple priesthood and trekked into the wilderness to found the monastic community of Qumran. This was the settlement whose eschatological doctrines and life-style came to light only in 1947with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.[19]

Like the Pharisees, the Essenes were eschatologists, but rooted as they were in a sacerdotal tradition, they looked forward to a priestly rather than a political messiah. They maintained that their leader, the Righteous Teacher, was not the awaited messiah-priest but only a living sign that the world had entered upon its last days. They expressed their belief in the imminence of the eschaton not only by their cultic communism and (for some members) religious celibacy but also by the eschatological meal of bread and wine that they celebrated, almost like a pre-Christian Eucharist, in anticipation of the coming messianic banquet.

The death of the Righteous Teacher around 115 B.C.E. fed the Qumran community's hope for the end of the world and the appearance of a priestly savior who would be anointed by God. This hope was both increased and transformed around 110 B.C.E. when large numbers of Pharisees, who were fleeing persecution by the Hasmoneans, flocked to the desert community and brought with them their expectation of a cosmic political messiah. As a result, in the decades before Jesus the Qumran community came to expect two eschatological messiahs, one a high priest descended from Aaron and the other a world-emperor descended from David. Scriptural grounds for this dual messiahship were educed from an obscure passage in the prophet Zechariah which mentioned "two anointed ones who stand by the Lord of the whole earth" (4:14).
 
 

As if this syncretistic doctrine of a messiah-priest and a messiah-emperor were not enough, yet another expectation swept through Judaism at this time: the hope for an eschatological prophet whowould appear shortly before the end of the world.[20] This popular idea grew up independent of Davidic messianism and took two distinct forms.

On the one hand there was the expectation of a nonnationalistic, nonmilitaristic messianic "prophet like Moses" who had been promised in the book of Deuteronomy. There Moses told the Israelites of a revelation he had had:

The Lord said to me:

"I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brethren, and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him." (18:15)

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the land with a curse. (4:5 = 3:23)

It was an apocalyptist's dream, frequently confusing but burning with hope and with heightened expectation that something momentous

was soon to happen. What is clear is this: If a sensitive and deeply religious Jewish man felt called to be a reformer of Israel, a prophet who would galvanize his people with hope that God was coming soon to save his chosen faithful, and if per impossible he could have picked the place and time of his birth so as to facilitate his mission, he could hardly have chosen a better place than Palestine around the year 3755 of the Jewish calendar.

The scene unfolded near the mouth of the Jordan River late one afternoon two millennia ago. According to today's calendar the year was 28 or 29 C.E.; according to Jewish reckoning, it was the 3788th year since the creation of the world.[21]

The place is an inhospitable wilderness, its barrenness relieved only by the muddy river, winding its way south to the Dead Sea. A crowd of men and women, simple people, are listening intently to a strange figure, wiry and ascetic, dressed in rough animal skins and rumored to subsist on nothing but the wild honey and locusts he finds in the desert. His name is John, and he is a pious Hasidic Jew preaching the impending judgment of God.[22] He calls for conversion, and his message is fraught with urgency:

Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. (Matthew 3:10)

whereas the Essenes invite their disciples to carry out their own ablutions, John himself performs the ritual washing on his followers and so earns the title "the Baptizer." His impact is tremendous. The Gospel says that multitudes went out into the desert to hear John's message and receive his baptism.

And the people were in expectation, and all men questioned in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the messiah. (Luke 3:15)

Jesus turned and saw them following, and he said to them, "What do you seek?" They said to him, "Rabbi, where do you dwell?" He said to them, "Come and see." They came and stayed with him that day, for it was about the tenth hour. (John 1:38-39)

The purpose of this chapter is not to produce a psychobiography of Jesus. The evidence for that is lacking. Rather, I am attempting, in part by means of an imaginative reconstruction, to relate the core of

historical facts that contemporary scholars have managed to establish about the life of Jesus and, in what immediately follows, about his relation to John the Baptist. Many years after Jesus died, his Christian followers would attempt to resolve the rivalry between their sect and John's by interpreting the Baptist as a forerunner of Jesus. Indeed, Luke in his Gospel devised a family relation between the two and arranged their conceptions in such a way that even before they were home John was a precursor of Jesus. Luke went so far as to have the prenatal Baptist "leap in the womb" at the presence of the unborn Jesus when their pregnant mothers met (1:36 and 44).

But that legend, like the inspiring but unhistorical story about the miraculous virginal conception of Jesus, is a theological interpretation created some decades after the death of Jesus to express Christianity's faith in his special status. In fact we know next to nothing about either John or Jesus before their meeting on the banks of the Jordan. But we can establish what they were about from then on, that is, in the scarce two years that both of them had left to live.

Where, then, did Jesus dwell? This question goes to the essence of his prophetic mission: what he taught, how he lived, who he thought he was. But Jesus' ideas, life-style, and self-understanding did not emerge from his consciousness ready-made. He developed them, as any human being does, in interaction with his environment and his contemporaries. To begin with, his encounter with John the Baptist had an important, if often overlooked, influence on Jesus' religious thinking, and so before taking up questions about his message (what he taught), his manner (how he lived), and the man himself (who he claimed to be), we shall begin by asking about his meeting with John at the Jordan.

Some might object that the following sketch of that meeting delves further into Jesus' psychology than the evidence will support—and that is true; others may claim that it does not portray Jesus for what he really was: an omniscient God who only "submitted" to John's teachings and baptism to set an example of how others should act—but that is not true. Whether his meeting with the Baptist planted the seed of Jesus' vocation as a prophet or whether he had already conceived his mission privately and merely came forward publicly with his baptism in the Jordan, we cannot know. But the best evidence

shows that the encounter with John was a spiritual awakening for Jesus. How, then, did it come about and what effect did it have?
 
 

Jesus most likely was born not in the southern town of Bethlehem but in Nazareth, a village in the northern province of Galilee, the first child of a carpenter named Joseph and his young wife, Miriam or Maria. When his father had him circumcised at the local synagogue, he named him after Moses' successor, Joshua, in Hebrew Yehoshua ("Yahweh helps"), which in those days was usually shortened to Yeshua or even to Yeshu, which is how he was popularly known. When he grew up he followed his father's woodworking trade, as no doubt his younger brothers, James, Judas, Simon, and Joses, also did (Mark 6:3).[24]

But as the fame of the Baptizer spread even to his obscure village, the young man Jesus, after his father had died, left Nazareth for the Jordan valley. There, like many others, he was profoundly gripped by John's grim message of doom and his call for repentance.[25] It was not enough, Jesus heard, to be a child of Abraham, a son of the Covenant sealed with circumcision. It did not suffice to obey the Law and honor Yahweh with one's lips. The heart had to change. When the respected Pharisees and Sadducees, the pillars of Judaism, came to the Jordan to hear what the Baptist was preaching, Jesus was struck by how John railed at them for their smugness:

You brood of vipers! Who has warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit that befits repentance, and do not presume to say to yourselves, "We have Abraham for our father." For I tell you that God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham! (Matthew 3:7-9)

the stage of world history with cosmic inevitability, it cuts to the inner core of the individual and demands personal decision.

To be sure, John often preached in eschatological terms. He spoke, for example, of "one who is coming" (he may have meant the "Son of Man," although he kept the reference vague), and he warned of eschatological fire.[26] But it was an eschatology without apocalyptic trappings, an existential crisis of imminent, definitive judgment with none of the wildly dramatic stage props of the apocalyptic scenario. The fire he spoke of was not a cosmic conflagration but a flame that sears to the heart of a person, enlivening the humble and damning the unrepentant:

I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, and I am not worthy even to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. (Matthew 3:11-12)

Jesus, we may imagine, was pierced to the heart. He repented and was baptized.

To accept John's message and enter his community meant to break in some degree with the prevailing religious orthodoxy. In John's day Judaism, like Christianity today, was in profound crisis, and the Baptist deepened the sense of uncertainty. By his time the brief parenthesis of freedom brought by the Maccabees (142-63 B.C.E.) had long since been closed, and Palestine was once again subject to foreign domination, this time under the Romans. So too the ancient form of faith in Yahweh

was gone. In place of the old hopes for renewal within history there now stood apocalyptic expectations of an end of the world; and instead of attentiveness to the prophets' call for justice there prevailed scrupulous observance of the Law. The two went hand in hand: Apocalypse promised Israel salvation at the cosmic level, and adherence to the Law guaranteed that she would make it through the coming judgment unscathed.
[..]

And Jesus followed in John's footsteps. It is probable that when he left John's inner circle, Jesus stayed in the south of Palestine for a period of time and continued to preach and baptize in imitation of his mentor. After his baptism beyond the Jordan, the Fourth Gospel says, "Jesus and his disciples went into the land of Judea; there he remained with them and baptized" (3:22). For a while, then, it seems there were at least two prophetic baptizers in the area.

But there was a different tone to Jesus' message, and in the Fourth Gospel we read that "Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John" (4:1). Nonetheless, the preaching of Jesus, whatever its difference from John's, continued some of the major themes of the Baptist: the reduction of apocalypse to its existential core, the condemnation of those who locked man's relation to God inside the narrow confines of the Law, and the call for justice and charity as the enactment of fidelity to God. In fact, Jesus began to catch the attention of the ever-wary Pharisees, who had already disapproved of John's antiestablishment preaching. Prudently Jesus decided, as the Gospel says, to leave for his native Galilee. Most likely only after the Baptist's death did Jesus begin his own (and very brief) mission independent of John's.

Being a prophet in those days was dangerous business, and both John and Jesus were soon to pay the price. Besides the disapproving Pharisees and Sadducees, there were two political powers in the country, both within a few miles of the Jordan, who watched the movements of these eschatological eccentrics with considerable disapproval.

In the south, at Jerusalem, was the notoriously stern and arrogant Roman prefect Pontius Pilate, who had arrived in Palestine in the Roman year 779(26 C.E.), just before John began his mission. Today he would probably, and correctly, be called an anti-Semite. His main jobs were to collect taxes and keep the public order as he put in his time in the provinces, awaiting a better assignment; but from the moment he arrived in the country he seemed never to miss a chance to offend pious Jews and in more than one instance to threaten and even murder them. Apocalyptic preachers, especially if they developed messianic delusions, were a threat to the empire and were better silenced. Jesus had no such pretensions, but when he met Pilate two years later, that would make no difference.

Pilate governed most of Palestine as a Roman province, but from the northern town of Tiberias on Lake Galilee Herod Antipas, a petty

Hasmonean prince and Roman vassal, controlled much of what was left, including Galilee and the trans-Jordan area where John often preached. Within a short while—either because he feared John's large following or because he was insulted by the prophet's criticism of his messy divorce and remarriage—Herod would have the Baptist imprisoned in the fortress of Machaerus east of the Dead Sea and soon thereafter murdered.

Luke's Gospel (23:1-25) says that when Jesus went on trial at the end of his brief career, both these rulers had the occasion to ask him who he was and where he dwelled. Like the two disciples who met Jesus late one afternoon at the Jordan, Pilate and Herod also got no answers, not even an invitation to "come and see." Herod laughed at him. The other one had him killed.[27]

After John was imprisoned, Jesus came north to the towns around Lake Galilee to start his own mission, and his message exploded on the scene with a sense of overwhelming urgency: The eschatological future had already begun!

The time is fulfilled,
God's reign is at hand!
Change your ways! (Mark 1:15)

The contrasting life-styles of the two prophets betrayed their very different messages, and the difference was not lost on the people. John scratched in the desert for locusts in order to remind his followers how bad things were and how few would be saved. But Jesus rarely passed up a good meal and a flask of wine, regardless of the company, as if

to say that the eschatological banquet was now being served and everyone, including sinners, was invited. His reputation began to suffer because, in spreading the good news to all, he kept company even with prostitutes and tax collectors (Mark 2:16). No doubt some wags enjoyed playing one prophet off against the other—the lyrical Jesus against the railing Baptist—so as not to have to listen to either one. Jesus shot back at them:

To what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market places and calling to their playmates [and mimicking the two prophets],
__ "When we piped, you wouldn't dance,

__ When we wailed, you wouldn't mourn."

For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, "He's possessed." I came eating and drinking, and they say, "Behold, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners." But wisdom is justified by her deeds. (Matthew 11:16-19)

The heart of Jesus' message is summarized in the strikingly simple name with which he addressed the divine: "Abba," the Aramaic word for "papa" (Mark 14:36). This familial usage, which underlies all Jesus' references to "the Father," was a shock to the then current idea of God.[29] Late Judaism tended to see Yahweh as a distant and almost impersonal Sovereign whose presence to mankind required the mediation of angels, the Law, and the complexities of religious ritual. But with the simple and intimate word "Abba," Jesus signaled that God was immediately and intimately present, not as a harsh judge but as a loving and generous father. His presence was a pure and unearned gift, and one could relate to him without fear. "Be not afraid," Jesus told his followers. "Do not be anxious about your life," "Do not worry."

Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? (Matthew 6:25-30)

Nor did one have to earn this Father's favor or bargain for his grace by scrupulously observing the minutiae of the Law. One simply had to call on him.

Ask and it will be given to you. ... What man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you, evil as you are, know how to give good things to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him. (Matthew 7:7, 9-11)

When you pray, say "Abba ... " (Luke 11:2)

The morality Jesus prescribed followed from the kingdom he proclaimed. Unlike Greek philosophy, Jesus' ethical teachings were not based on a metaphysical concept of human nature and were not ordered to a eudaemonic theory of self-fulfillment. [..]

In the concrete, this meant relativizing the Mosaic Law. Jesus, of course, was a pious Jew and therefore was far from intending to

abrogate the Law, which he too saw as an expression of God's abundant love for his people.[35] But he was also a pious Jewish prophet, and specifically one who was convinced that the eschatological line separating the present from the future was already being crossed: History was entering its promised denouement. The eschatological nearness of the Father seared through all mediations and established a radically new order that demanded an equally radical response. Thus Jesus attacked not so much the specific rules of the Law as the legalistic attitude that blinded people to the fact that the Law, like its divine author, was entirely at the service of mankind. For example, when the Pharisees criticized Jesus' disciples for violating the Sabbath by plucking and eating ears of corn as they walked through a field, the prophet retorted: "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath" (Mark 2:27). The Law, in short, was a gift from God, not a burden, and it should be bent in man's favor and even overridden when the need arose.[36]

Jesus did not engage directly in the then current dispute about whether the Law should be reduced to the simple Ten Commandments (the viewpoint of the Hellenistic Jews of the Diaspora) or should comprise the entire Torah and the commentaries of the scribes (as Palestinian Jewry generally held). Rather, with the authority of a prophet he cut through the theological complexities of that debate and pointed to the heart of what Judaism was about: revering God by loving one's neighbor.[37]

[..] When the Pharisees criticized him for eating with such sinners, Jesus, citing God's words to the prophet Hosea, responded with a maxim that summed

up not only the Jewish Law but his own eschatological ethics as well: "Go and learn what this means: 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice'" (Matthew 9:13).[38]

[..] On the one hand, it seems to be the case that Jesus, in conformity with the eschatological spirit of the times, did indeed preach that the kingdom lay in the immediate future but had not yet arrived. For example, he taught his disciples to pray: "Abba, may thy kingdom come!" But on the other hand, even if Jesus did expect an imminent and dramatic arrival of God among his people, he made no attempt to calculate the time of that coming, either in chronological or in apocalyptic terms. He refused to engage in predictions about its arrival, he never preached the dualism of "the age of darkness" followed by "the age to come," and he may not even have believed in a catastrophic end of the world. [..]

Jesus did not define the kingdom of God so much as he enacted it by the way he lived. [..]

There is no evidence that Jesus himself forgave sinners in his own name.[41] Rather, in keeping with his proclamation of the dawning of God's reign, he announced that it was the Father who was bestowing the eschatological gift of forgiveness in Jesus' presence. However, in retrospect the Church found in Jesus' prophetic authority and in his liberating words and actions the grounds for attributing to him the eschatological power of having absolved the repentant of their sins during his lifetime. What is clear is that his followers perceived in Jesus' table fellowship the direct presence of the Father, whose love

encompassed the rejected of society. The disciples saw in Jesus' eschatological etiquette a preview of who would be on the guest list at the Father's final banquet: "When you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind ... " (Luke 14:13).

After Jesus had died, his followers continued that memory in their own communal repasts and even in the Eucharistic feast. These later meals, which may have included the washing of feet in imitation of Jesus (cf. John 13:5), at one and the same time recalled Jesus' meals of liberatory fellowship and anticipated the definitive eschatological banquet when, reunited with Jesus, they would "drink of the fruit of the vine anew" and "eat bread in the kingdom of God" (cf. Mark 14:25 and Luke 14:15).
 
 

The parables that Jesus recounted, many of them at table, continued the theme of abundant eschatological forgiveness and spelled out the response of radical change that the Father's invitation required.[42] Palestine at that time was a culture of storytelling, and Jesus was a master of the art. [..]

The "signs and wonders" (Acts 2:22) that Jesus is reported to have worked have long been the subject of scholarly dispute, and it is fair to say that throughout much of Christian history their meaning has been misunderstood.[43] Generally these "miracles" have been interpreted apologetically as proofs that Jesus was divine and that his mission originated in heaven. This approach, which has been dominant in Christian teaching from Quadratus' "Apology to Hadrian" (ca. 125 C.E.)[44] to early in the present century, is attended by a number of intrinsic difficulties. For one thing, Saint Paul's epistles, which were written before the Gospels, mention no miracles at all. For another, exegetes have established that one of the earliest sources underlying the

Gospels reports only two such "wonders" worked by Jesus: a cure and an exorcism (Luke 7:1-10 and 11:14).[45]

But in the decades after Jesus' death Christian legends began to inflate both the quality and the number of the miracles. For example, in Mark's Gospel, written around 70, we find the ruler of a synagogue begging Jesus to lay his hands on his daughter, who "is at the point of death" (5:23), whereas in Matthew's Gospel, written some fifteen years later, the same man changes and heightens the diagnosis: "My daughter has just died" (9:18). Likewise, the number of cures increases. Mark's Gospel has Jesus simply "casting out demons" (1:39), whereas the parallel text in Matthew has him "healing every disease and every infirmity among the people" (4:23).

Eventually accounts of "nature miracles" began to appear: Jesus arranges the catch of an extraordinary number of fish, makes a fig tree dry up, walks on water, stills a storm, raises people from the dead, multiplies loaves and fishes to feed four thousand or even five thousand people, and apparently even makes a shekel appear in the mouth of a fish. These nature miracles are simply legends which arose among early Christians and which were projected backward, under the impact of faith, into the life of the historical Jesus. The motive may have been to make him appear at least the equal of the numerous miracle workers widely reported in the rabbinical and Hellenistic religious literature of the times.[46]

Another problem with the traditional approach to Jesus' "miracles" is that it misses the eschatological, and specifically the apocalyptic, context within which the stories of his signs and wonders grew up. Beginning some centuries before Jesus, popular Jewish apocalyptic literature elaborated tales about the fall of the sinful angels from heaven before the creation of the world and their subsequent conflict with human beings. These evil spirits were understood to have taken possession of some people, rendering them deaf and dumb and afflicting them with a variety of diseases. But believers saw in Jesus' eschatological words and deeds the definitive defeat of these cosmic powers of darkness. In the words of the Epistle to the Colossians, Jesus "disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them" (2:15).[47]

Jesus himself was a child of this apocalyptic picture of the world,

and he saw his own work in that context. For example, when speaking of his and his disciples' mission, he said, "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven" (Luke 10:18). There is no doubt that he gained a reputation in his lifetime as an exorcist and that he caused wonderment among the simple people around the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee. Regardless of the possible medical and psychosomatic explanations that can be given for the cures he is said to have effected, early Christian preaching preserved this memory: "He went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him" (Acts 10:38)—Jesus, they remembered, "did all things well" (Mark 7:3 7).

But the framework within which he gained this reputation was not that of the traditional Christian understanding of "miracles" as sovereignly divine interruptions of the laws of nature. The Bible depicts the universe not as a closed system of laws, the way modern science does, but as the arena in which God was enacting his will. Therefore, even phenomena such as cures by exorcism, which might well be explained by empirical causes, were seen by Jesus' contemporaries as signs of God's power.

Jesus' "miracles," whatever they might have been, get their sense from the apocalyptic belief that the end of time had arrived. There were plenty of exorcists in Palestine at the time of Jesus—perhaps including some of his own followers—and Jesus himself predicted more to come (Mark 13:22). But the point was not that these exorcists, or Jesus himself, were divine (in fact, some of them were considered to be working for the devil) but rather that the divine Father himself was making his eschatological appearance in Jesus' words and deeds and was conquering the powers of evil for the good of mankind. The focus was not on Jesus as a worker of "miracles" but on the arrival of God-for-man. "If it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you" (Matthew12:28).

However many or few exorcisms Jesus may have performed in his few months as a prophet, it is clear that he inspired in his followers the belief that the Father's eschatological reign had already begun. The wonders he worked were not appeals for faith in himself, regardless of how closely he identified himself with God's cause, but only for faith in the coming climax of history. His works were not proofs of

his own divinity or messiahship—claims he never made—but rather, like his meals and parables, were signs of the dawning of God's reign. If there was anything miraculous about Jesus, it all lay in the coming of the kingdom in which he and eventually his followers so earnestly believed. For all the prophetic authority with which he spoke and for all his conviction that his words and works were the instrument of God's final breakthrough in the Jewish community, Jesus remained only the locus, and never the focus, of the eschatological event.

Since we have no privileged access to Jesus' psychology, we must divine what he thought about himself from his public words and deeds. And there we find a man so totally absorbed in and identified with the cause of God-with-man that it would be true to say he was nothing other than that cause: Jesus was what he preached. Traditional Christianity, to be sure, goes further and claims that Jesus understood himself to be the very content of his own message, the kingdom of God incarnate; but that is an extrapolation from Jesus' life that Jesus' followers made in the years after he died.

We have seen how Jesus enacted the kingdom of God in his table fellowship, his parables, and his miracles. We now turn to the question of how he faced, and perhaps accepted, the disappointments of the last months of his mission, and even his death. We shall look as well at the question of how Jesus may have understood himself and his work as he approached the end of his days.

Jesus' mission in Galilee, independent of that of John the Baptist, lasted only a few months and initially met with enormous success. He drew great crowds and inspired amazement—"We never saw anything

like this!" the people exclaimed (Mark 2:12). But his relatives thought he was out of his mind and tried to drag him home (3:2-1).[48]

But it was not long before his popularity peaked, and enthusiasm for this extraordinary but eccentric man began to drop off in the north country. The Gospels give a clear impression that Jesus began to be rejected not only by the authorities of the religious establishment but by the common people as well. All four Gospels record Jesus' complaint that he felt spurned by his own people, and two Gospels hint that his wondrous powers waned in his own hometown.

They [his townspeople] took offense at him. And Jesus said to them, "A prophet is honored everywhere except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house." And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands upon a few sick people and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief. (Mark 6:3-6; cf. Matthew 13:57f.)

And when they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they rose up and put him out of the city, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their city was built, that they might throw him down headlong. But passing through the midst of them, he went away. (4:28-30)

Then he begin to upbraid the cities where most of his mighty works had been done, because they did not repent. "Woe to you, Chorazin! woe to you, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you. And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You shall be brought down to Hades!" (Matthew 11:20-23)

Even his closest disciples were not spared his anger and disappointment.

Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes, do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? (Mark 8:17-18; also 6:52)

Now Herod the tetrarch heard of all that was done, and he was perplexed, because it was said by some that John had been raised from the dead, by some that Elijah had appeared, and by others that one of the old prophets had risen. Herod said, "John I beheaded. But who is this about whom I hear such things?" And he sought to see him. (9:7-9; cf. Mark 6:14-16)

At that very hour some Pharisees came, and said to him, "Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you." And he said to them, "Go and tell that fox, 'Behold, I cast out demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, and the third day I finish my course. But for today, tomorrow and the next day I must go on, since it would not be right that a prophet should die outside Jerusalem.'" (13:31-33)

eating with legally unclean people (Mark 2:16), bending the Sabbath tradition by healing on the day of rest (3:1-5), allowing his disciples to eat without first washing their hands (7:2ff.). Sometimes Jesus simply turned his back on them and went away (8:11), but at least once he lashed out at them:

Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, "This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men." You leave the commandment of God, and hold fast the tradition of men. (7:6-8)

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those who would enter to go in. ... Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men's bones. (23:13, 27)

Faced with rejection by both the common people and their religious leaders, Jesus apparently decided that his last chance lay in taking his failing mission to the heart of Israel, to the city of Jerusalem itself. In the spring of the Jewish year 3790, after his disciples had completed a missionary tour in the north in what may have been a last-ditch effort to rally faith in the kingdom, Jesus gathered an inner circle of friends and set off on his last pilgrimage to the Holy City for the Passover feast.

Perhaps at this point too he began to have presentiments of the fate

that awaited him. Matthew writes: "From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed" (16:21). For whatever the later Church may have added to this verse, it is not unlikely that Jesus was aware, to some degree, of what lay in store for him. He would have to be blind not to see that his reputation as a radical prophet had already preceded him. The congeries of political apprehension on the part of Herod and religious outrage on the part of the scribes and Pharisees spelled trouble for anyone announcing the eschatological "kingdom of God," especially at Passover in Roman-occupied Jerusalem. Jesus' predictions of his coming death, which are multiplied in the Gospels at this point, may well have a historical basis in his own words. It is possible that Jesus became convinced that "it would not be right for a prophet to die outside Jerusalem" (Luke 13:33).
 
 

Jesus never made his own status a special theme of his preaching, and he never turned himself into a second topic alongside the reign of God-with-men. Nonetheless, it is not unlikely that as his mission fell on hard days and as he sensed his death approaching, he became more reflective about his role in the coming of God's rule and even about his own personal status. Who did he think himself to be?[49]

In the tinderbox of occupied Palestine, it would have been sheer madness for Jesus to declare himself a Davidic "messiah," with the overtones of political liberation that this title bore; and in fact he never did. In any case, in the Jewish Scriptures the title "messiah" ("anointed one") does not refer to a divine person (even when he is called "Son of God") or to a spiritual redeemer who would expiate sins (even when, as with the expected Davidic messiah, he was called "savior").[50] Rather, the term designated a political and military king who would reestablish a theocratic nation-state at some point in history. In the century and a half before Jesus, this future king came to be seen in broader eschatological terms as the ruler of all nations (not just of Israel), whom God would appoint at the end of time. Nonetheless, the title "messiah" still kept its political overtones, and Jesus vehemently rejected any such designation as a provocation from Satan (Mark 8:33).

It is true that he counted at least one Zealot (anti-Roman revolutionary)

among his closest followers, and it is possible that this man and others once nurtured the futile hope that Jesus might prove to be a national liberator. Jesus not only rejected that role but also never designated himself as a "spiritual" messiah, an anointed prophet without political intentions, although it is quite possible that some of his followers saw him that way.

Nor did Jesus ever identify himself with the apocalyptic Son of Man who, according to the Book of Daniel, was to appear "on the clouds of heaven" at the last day. When Jesus used the phrase "son of man," bar nasha, with regard to himself (for example, "The son of man has nowhere to lay his head," Matthew 8:20), he was not referring to the awaited apocalyptic figure but was simply employing a common Palestinian-Aramaic circumlocution for the indexical pronoun "I," as if to say "I have no place to sleep." However (this is a matter of great dispute), he may have seen his own mission against the backdrop of the future apparition of this figure.[51]

What we can say with considerable certainty is that before he died, Jesus may have had intimations of being the long-awaited "eschatological prophet," God's definitive mouthpiece who was to arrive just before the coming of God himself. It is clear that Jesus saw himself as a prophet, and he certainly conceived his ministry in eschatological terms. But never did he actually declare himself to be the eschatological prophet, whether in the form of Elijah redivivus or as a new Moses.[52] Nonetheless, the title of (nonnationalistic-messianic) eschatological prophet was to be the first that his followers would bestow on Jesus after he had died. And given the authority with which he acted and taught, it is very likely that even during Jesus' lifetime his disciples thought he was this final prophet. Jesus enhanced that expectation when, at the end of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he triumphantly entered the city to the acclaim of the people and (whether on this final trip to Jerusalem or, as is possible, on an earlier one) drove the sellers and money changers from the Temple precinct.[53]
 
 

But Jesus' days as a prophet were numbered, and we may presume that he not only knew it but also prepared his disciples for the eventuality. The farewell dinner, or Last Supper, that he shared with them in

Jerusalem before he died crystallized Jesus' awareness of his approaching death and offered his closest followers the promise of continuing fellowship regardless of what was to come.

The actual date of the meal (see chart) is the subject of some dispute.[54a] All the Gospels agree that it took place, by current reckoning, on a Thursday evening some twenty hours before his death or, according to the Jewish way of reckoning days from dusk to dusk, on the same day he died. The Synoptics date it on the fifteenth day of the month of Nisan, that is, sometime after sundown on the first day of the Passover festival. However, John's Gospel places the Last Supper after sundown on the fourteenth of Nisan, the day before the feast, and dates Jesus' crucifixion to the day before the Passover feast, that is, the day when the paschal lambs were ritually slaughtered in the Temple (19:14). In any case, John's dating gave rise to a rich theology of Jesus' death as a sacrifice for sins and a Passover to new life. There is also disagreement about whether the meal was a Passover feast (as the Synoptic Gospels maintain) or not (John's position), and even about whether Jesus instituted a new liturgy, the Eucharist of sacred bread and wine, at the dinner.[54b]

But what is clear is that Jesus took the occasion of this farewell meal, whenever and however it took place, to express to his disciples his vivid awareness that he was about to die: "I shall not drink again of the fruit of the vine" (Mark 4:25). He assured them as well that despite rejection and failure, he remained unshaken in his confidence that the Father would vindicate his mission. Although the Gospels record no historical words of Jesus that show him conceiving of his death as a propitiatory sacrifice to save mankind from its sins, we are not amiss in seeing the Last Supper as Jesus' final interpretation of his life and imminent death in terms of the kingdom he had preached and the life-for-others he had led.

It is possible that Jesus had come to see his coming death as the inevitable price to be paid for living according to God's eschatological will. Other prophets had been rejected before him, and now it was his turn. His death, therefore, would be his final identification with the cause of the kingdom of God. This identification once again took the form of a meal of fellowship in which he invited his disciples to share the offer of salvation that was not merely promised in the future but

concretely offered in Jesus' own words and deeds, including his death. He shared with them—for the last time "until the kingdom of God comes" (Luke 22:18)—a cup of wine. In drinking it together they sealed their fellowship, as if to say that the reign of God was linked inextricably with what they had lived through with him, right up to the end. The kingdom of God-with-men was stronger than death.[55]

Later that night, as he prayed in the olive grove of Gethsemane just east of the city, Jesus was arrested by a delegation from the Sanhedrin, the supreme council of the religious establishment. What happened between then and his crucifixion is a matter of dispute. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing around 114 C.E.,reports simply that Jesus "was put to death by the Procurator [in fact, Prefect] Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius."[56] The Gospels, which at this point are particularly interlaced with anti-Jewish polemics, disagree among themselves on such matters as the nature and number of trials that Jesus underwent before his crucifixion, as well as the charges leveled against him and the responses Jesus gave to them. We are left with rough approximations of what happened.

The night on which he was arrested, Jesus either (1) was brought first to the former high priest Annas, who was the father-in-law of the current high priest, Caiaphas, and then to Caiaphas himself (John's Gospel); or (2) was brought to Caiaphas alone (Luke); or (3) was taken before the assembled Sanhedrin (Mark and Matthew). The Synoptic Gospels agree that whether or not Jesus underwent an official trial that night, he did undergo an interrogation by the Sanhedrin sometime the next morning before he was led off to Pontius Pilate. The Sanhedrin was composed of some seventy members, including the current and former high priests as well as laymen, scribes and lawyers. In Jesus' time it was dominated by the Sadducees rather than the Pharisees (in fact, the Pharisees tend to drop out of the picture as Jesus' death approaches), and it had juridical power over religious questions, probably backed up by the legal right to execute grave offenders by stoning.[57]

Whatever its specific form, legal or other