Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time
and
Reading the Bible with a Better Understanding.
This is going to be a series of articles that will take a look at Jesus in a historical way and we will look deep into his culture and society. At other times we will take a look at the Bible and hopefully unravel some mysteries for you. At other times we will take a look at the history of Christians and look where Christians are today. And because Jesus was Jewish we will look at Jewish tradition and culture.
You can absolutely look at Jesus in a historical way and believe he walked on water, raised the dead, healed the very sick and stilled the ocean and more. And of course you can still pray to Jesus, but let us not forget to pray to God the way Jesus told us to; I do every day and sometimes many times a day. Come on here; most men spend hours watching sports and later showing off their knowledge of the games. Most women spend just as much time keeping up with fashions and or gardening and telling other women about their knowledge. Let us at least give God and Jesus the same time and openly talk about those spiritual powers.
In this series of articles you will never hear me say leave your church or take up a new religion. In fact, I encourage you to socialize within your church or temple. You will also never hear me say believe the Bible this way, or else. However, be aware of a church asking you to give too much to them. There are many good charities such as the Salvation Army, Good Will, your local food shelf, Red Cross, Habitat For Humanity and more. You can also personally get involved in helping people through these organizations and or your church or temple and other good charities.
If I do a good job here I am hoping you will open your mind and heart in a renewed spiritual way. I hope we can all become less selfish and find ourselves doing good things for others.
I am going to try and write something new every month for the next several years, God willing.
The Jewishness of Jesus
Jesus was deeply Jewish. It is important to emphasize this obvious fact. Not only was he Jewish by birth and socialization, but he remained a Jew all of his life. His Scripture was the Jewish Bible. He did not intend to establish a new religion, but saw himself as having a mission within Judaism. He spoke as a Jew to other Jews. His early followers were Jewish. All of the authors of the New Testament (with the possible exception of the author of Luke-Acts were Jewish.
The Adult Jesus: A Sketch
So what was the adult Jesus like? What did this person, born to Mary and Joseph, socialized in Nazareth, and disciple to John the Baptizer, become?
Answering this question involves us in the task of historical reconstruction, which may be understood as generating an image or gestalt that draws together into a cohesive whole the various elements of the tradition judge to be historical. The process is very much like a particular stage of detective work: after the evidence has been gathered, analyzed, and weighted, it has to be integrated into an overall hypothesis.
Doing this with the traditions about Jesus produces a sketchy, or construal or gestalt or image, of Jesus. I prefer these terms to picture or portrait, both of which suggests broad strokes - a clear outline sometimes without much precision of detail.
Scholars have been attempting this for over two hundred years in what Albert Schweitzer called "the quest for the historical Jesus." Throughout much of this century, as I indicated earlier, has been in eclipse, disparaged as historically impossible and theologically irrelevant; this period is referred to by historians of the discipline as the time of "no quest."
In the 1980's, however, in what has been called "a third quest for the historical Jesus.' a new era in Jesus research," and "a renaissance in Jesus scholarship," this has changed. Now scholars are more confident that we can, with a reasonable degree of probability, know something about the historical Jesus. In the judgment of many," a softly focused characterization" of the pre-Easter Jesus is possible.
Two Negative Claims
Before I turn to my sketch, it is important that I make two negative statements. The first, which counter a central element in the popular image of Jesus, is that the self-understanding and message of the pre-Easter Jesus were in all likelihood nonmessianic. By this I mean simply that we have no way of knowing whether Jesus thought of himself as the Messiah or as the Son of God in some special sense. According to the earliest layers of the developing gospel tradition, he said nothing about having such thoughts. They were not part of his own teaching. His message was not about believing in him. Rather, the pre-Easter Jesus consistently pointed away from himself to God. His message was theocentric, not christocentric - centered in God, not centered in a messianic proclamation about himself.
The second negative statement, which counters a widespread scholarly image of Jesus expected the supernatural coming of the Kingdom of God as world-ending event in his own generation. This growing scholarly consensus is a recent development. Over the last ten years, the image of Jesus as an eschatological prophet, which dominated scholarship through the middle third of this century, has become very much a minority position.
Four Positive Strokes
My own sketch of the pre-Easter Jesus consists of four broad strokes. It is based upon a typology of religious figures. My research and evaluation of the best Jesus scholarship convince me that Jesus had characteristics of several different types of religious personalities, and each stroke in my sketch identifies him with one of these types. Because I have developed this idea in considerable detail elsewhere I will present it here very compactly.
1. The historical Jesus was a spirit person, one of those figures in human history with an experiential awareness of the reality of God.
2. Jesus was a teacher of wisdom who regularly used the classic forms of wisdom speech (parables, and memorable short sayings known as aphorisms) to teach a subversive and alternative wisdom.
3. Jesus was a social prophet, similar to the classical prophets of ancient Israel. As such, he criticized the elites (economic, political, and religious) of his time, was an advocate of an alternative social vision, and was often in conflict with authorities.
4. Jesus was a movement founder who brought into being a Jewish renewal or revitalization movement that challenged and shattered the social boundaries of his day, a movement that eventually became the early Christian church.
These four strokes, taken in combination with the two negative statements made earlier, provide a sketch or profile of what the pre-East Jesus was like. Together, they enable us to constellate the traditions about him into a coherent whole. The outline is very skeletal, of course, and I wish to flesh it out. Without seeking to be comprehensive or developing them in detail, I want to describe some impressions of Jesus that have struck me over the years.
Jesus As Spirit Person and Mediator of The Sacred, Click Here for page two.
"There are only two ways to LIVE YOUR LIFE. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a MIRACLE." Albert Einstein
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