WHO DO YOU SAY I AM? Learning about the so-called historical Jesus is important and can be helpful But the "real" Jesus-the Jesus who nourishes-is only accessible through faith
Beeck, Frans Jozef van
WHO DO YOU SAY I AM? Coming to know Jesus Frans Jozef van Beech On the church's great tradition, issues regarding Jesus are never just that-issues regarding Jesus. Issues regarding Jesus have...
...All of this he did with an astonishing, authoritative freedom-suggestive of an original sense of mis-sion...
...To Jews and Christians alike, God's intimate presence becomes a matter of common experience through witness-es...
...what counts is whether his example and philosophy are still relevant today...
...The word profusion in the title is no exaggeration...
...He assured known sinners of God's forgiveness and mercy, and did not avoid table fellowship with them as well as many others...
...And they worshiped him as the Son of God, in life, in death, in the New Life...
...It creates history...
...I have also picked up a whole body of information about nuts...
...Basically, what matters are myth and meaning, John tells me...
...Issues regarding Jesus have always been whol-ly inseparable from faith in the One God, faith-ful and true...
...It uses a cookbook in hopes of doing botany...
...In this way, Jesus revealed a God who is "for us" (Rom...
...And if the Bible's "real" meaning is a matter of scholarly opin-ion, why believe...
...what remained of Christianity was only the histori-cal record of Jesus' own religion...
...roots, tubers, bulbs, carrots, and beets...
...But what the reconstructionists invariably end up doing is projecting onto their "historical" Jesus their own (mostly unstated) prejudgments, agendas, and opin-ions...
...and he is the expiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the whole world" (1 John 2:1-2...
...Peter answered he was the Messiah (Mark 8:29...
...Some interesting stuff has emerged, but the picture of Jesus it presents is long on fancy, short on taste, and shorter on nourishment...
...Remember, some of the Old Testament writings we Christians call "historical books"- Joshua, Judges, 1-2 Samuel, and 1-2 Kings-are called "the Former Prophets" by the Jews, to this day...
...To pick up that art, you must agree to be part of a living, faith-guided, authoritative tradition of Bible reading (especially in the liturgy) and of reliable bib-lical interpretation...
...As a Christian, therefore, you have to learn how to in-terpret passages that look like history in the light of your present experience of the Spirit...
...Jesus left no writings and we have no direct eyewitness accounts of his actions and speeches...
...What good would it be to believe in the Word made flesh if nothing historical were known or could be known about him...
...at his arrest in Gethsemane, where he endured great anguish at the prospect of the inevitable, the others fled...
...By telling me, be-lieve everything, they prevented me from believing anything, and I did not know where to stop...
...Please do not think from such omissions and inclusions that the au-thor thinks the point you would have liked to see (or not to see) in print is unimportant (or indubitable), or (worse) that he completely disagrees with you, or, for that matter, with the Great Christian Tradition or the magisterium...
...all we can go by is what first-century people who believed in him have to say...
...all kinds of cabbages...
...It would be boring as well, except, perhaps, for a few intriguing details...
...He tells me that the Bible is full of imaginary stuff that never occurred...
...besides, it perfectly agreed with his own agen-da: to develop a truly natural, reasonable religion...
...Some women friends, who had followed him and taken care of some of his needs, fol-lowed his sufferings at a distance...
...Yet the self-emancipators usually imply-not al-ways consciously-that the only form of faith available in the Christian churches today is the mindless faith they them-selves have rejected or at least qualified beyond recognition...
...The Messiah...
...Now suppose I were asked to write a strictly factual piece about Jesus of Nazareth for Who Is Who in Religion in the First Century...
...But I say, if you can't count on any historical truth at all, why bother...
...Fortunately, it values freedom of religion...
...He has been called the Son of God not really affected by suffering...
...That he insisted on taking his message to Jerusalem did not help him either, especially after entering the city in ragtag prophetic style...
...8:31), "reconciling the world to himself, not holding their sins against them" (2 Cor...
...Christian faith, after all, is also cre-ative...
...For all the noise the Jesus Seminar is mak-ing, it cannot be faulted for trying...
...In reality it is a library, written and edited in the course of about 1,400 years...
...Faith in Christ alive originates in what has been called, from the earliest tra-dition on, his Resurrection...
...Choose your own Jesus (oth-erwise he just might choose you...
...A few days later, he gently as well as prophetically accepted an extravagant gesture of love from a woman friend (she washed his feet with expensive perfume and dried them with her hair), interpreting it as an anticipation of his burial...
...edible flowers and even tree barks-you name it...
...George Tyrrell (1861-1909) made this point by writ-ing that the Christ they see, across centuries of Catholic darkness, is nothing but their own liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well...
...3:14), Christians say their "Amen," to the glory of God (2 Cor...
...But I say, that's the easy way out of an obvious problem...
...the Fourth Gospel makes Jesus the witness par excellence: "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us...
...5:8...
...11:25-27...
...One thing, he says, is certain: You must read the Bible critically, and you have to go to the latest scholarship to know what the real story is...
...Many of Lessing's residually Christian and post-Christian contem-poraries implicitly shared his agenda...
...Christ's Resurrection is the origin of Christian worship and prayer, which inseparably links God and Jesus...
...some have maintained that in Jesus, the Word was indwelling a soulless human body (implying, of course, that Jesus had holiness in the bag and did not have any human choices to make...
...But then again, the Seminar also appears to rely a lot on self-advertisement and free publicity, which I as-sociate with entertainment...
...He was made out to be a wine-bibber, an eater, a friend of the wrong kind of people...
...I use the Oxford Study Bible, with the Apocrypha...
...Small wonder you have to learn how to read it, and every part of it, the way it is meant to be read...
...There are problems, though...
...A Brief Life of Jesus Now suppose I was asked to write a brief life of Jesus that was both historically responsible and I nourishment for faith...
...the Jerusalem Temple (read Yves Congar's The Mystery of the Temple...
...A dead Jesus leaves behind only shame and disappointed hopes (Luke 24:2...
...Now remember, the Bible ("The Book") only looks like a book...
...If the Bible doesn't literally mean what it says, what's the point...
...But this is where the problem starts...
...Herod, who had reason to worry, imagined he might be John the Baptist come back to life...
...In it, Judaism believes, Divine Wisdom herself takes delight in dwelling among God's people...
...Willingly taking responsibility for our sins, "he carried them in his body to the tree" (1 Pet...
...How about the Jesus Seminar and Its Findings...
...We yearn for a lost innocence, yet we are misguided in the pursuit of it...
...He still thought that calling yourself a Christian does not necessarily make you one...
...the various grains...
...the cairn erected by Jacob at Bethel...
...conversely, God is "blessed" as "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ" (2 Cor...
...1:3...
...Jesus has been called a man so full of the Spirit that he was equivalently God's Son...
...Take your pick...
...2:11...
...While it is feasible to knock a concise essay together, it would certainly miss the person of Jesus...
...They know that he lived in Palestine, lived for others, and was put to death by cru-cifixion and buried under Pontius Pilate...
...Not surprisingly, I have developed an in-terest in botany as well...
...3:14) means: "Never mind what I am, as long as I am with you...
...Ever so many peo-ple (including great souls like Mahatma Gandhi and Dag Hammarskjold) have found him humanly and religiously appealing...
...In the Jewish and Christian traditions, this God is utterly transcendent and holy, yet never remote, neutral, faceless, or equivalently absent...
...Now this reminds me of something...
...he offend-ed and scandalized many...
...Some considered him a potential trou-blemaker-a "king of the Jews...
...more dubiously, it aims at being both "liberal" and "evangelical...
...I am who I am" (Exod...
...Needless to say, I am not only a happy eater, and a healthy one to boot...
...Not only did he have little or no idea what I was talking about when I told him about what I know about plants...
...In the risen Christ, therefore, "we have an ad-vocate with the Father...
...Then there is the whole in-between range...
...Over time, Jesus has continued to invite a torrent of interpretations and projections...
...5:39) or turn against anyone in judgment (John 3:17...
...In other words, this approach commends the Christian faith by encouraging radical reconstructions of it...
...When the Baptist began his preaching and baptizing ministry about A.D...
...There always are...
...Now this historic significance of Jesus Christ is also what the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John as we have them are designed to proclaim...
...In our day, such reconstructions are frequently offered as the fruit of the latest findings of biblical scholarship...
...Now comes this young friend of mine, John, a former sem-inarian...
...the manna...
...He challenged the definitive authority of the Law...
...I was dead, and behold, I am the One alive for ever and ever" (Rev...
...The fact that he ventured to do all this in a socio-eco-nomic environment made unstable by factionalism and po-litical unrest made him politically suspect...
...some have declared him a fraud...
...He just smiled con-descendingly when he noticed I had my Vegetarian and Informed in my study, even though, of course, my kitchen is its real home...
...The home of the Gospels, along with the other New Testament writings and indeed the entire Jewish Bible, is the Christian community meeting, not the study (although you can profitably take them there, too...
...There is so much to Our Lord Jesus Christ that this little essay couldn't possibly contain everything- not even all the essentials...
...If you can't count on historical accuracy, he says, why be-lieve...
...That same night, he was betrayed by one of the Twelve...
...assorted spinaches, artichokes, peppers, and endives...
...The source of all Christian speaking and thinking about the historical Jesus is faith in Jesus alive and present...
...Israel's history, in other words, is to be read as spiritually significant history, meant to enable Jews as well as Christians to make sense of their faith lives now...
...The climate in which these radical reconstructions thrive is a surfeit of undiscerning dogmatism...
...he has been depicted as God dressed up in what appeared to be a human person...
...Interestingly, while the Jesus Seminar creates lots of discussion (though often curiously uninformed), it gives little or no rise to prayer or conversion...
...Now there is plenty of historical stuff in the Bible, but none of it is in there just because it is histor-ical...
...Put to this test (Matt...
...for faith purposes, what actually happened is no big deal...
...lettuces...
...In Jesus through the Centuries, Jaroslav Pelikan has shown the range of what Christians have made of him...
...In his view, it had gotten caught between the wrangling papists and Protestants to the point where it had died the death of a thou-sand senseless disputes...
...4:1-11), Jesus clung to God, whom he called Abba-"Father dear" (Mark 14:36...
...For the nations at large, these witnesses are the natu-rally discernible manifestations of God's provident care: sun, rain, seasons, plants for food and shelter, animals for company and food...
...He came back to the church, though, and he is now considering a real, old-fashioned Catholic seminary...
...He not only taught a new, unprecedented, urgent offer of sal-vation, but also embodied it (largely implicitly) in his very per-son...
...For his part, Jesus is professed as Lord "to the glory of God the Father" (Phil...
...To some questions there simply are no satisfactory answers...
...The Letter to the Hebrews features Jesus as the apex of a long line ("a cloud") of witnesses in Israel (11:1-12...
...Issues regarding Jesus are never just issues regarding the Jesus of the past...
...Lessing was honest enough to state that he regarded the Christian faith as dead...
...Nor could it possibly resolve every doubt...
...The search for the historical Jesus as separate from faith in the living Christ started well over two centuries ago, with an intellectual move made by the German thinker Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81...
...Still, they have much to say about the historic significance of the present life of Jesus, the crucified and risen Christ-the source and center of Christian faith in God...
...Lessing found this religion admirable...
...More dramatic witnesses are persons: Israel's prophets, singers, and sages, with Moses and Elijah, David, and Solomon as their respective prototypes...
...he did not seem to re-gard it as legitimate knowledge at all...
...What I would rather do is write a piece on what people around Jesus thought of him...
...A Piece of Advice We live in a world of religious and theological distrust...
...Maybe the Seminar is of interest to the religiously disenchanted-to the many who wish to give Christianity a quasi-informed good-by...
...Now suppose I am an intelligent vegetarian in possession of an exceptionally fine cookbook entitled Vegetarian and Informed: The Profusion of Plants as Sound and Savory Nourish-ment...
...The most penetrating witness to God's presence became the Torah-God's Law...
...From the introductions to each book or collection of letters or what have you, I have learned a great deal about biblical history-nothing like what I know about plants, mind you, but a fair amount...
...Which Is Home to Which...
...He's got lots to learn...
...29, Jesus joined the crowd and sought bap-tism in the Jordan, showing a solidarity with sinners that was to startle early Christians, who firmly believed he was sin-less...
...The living God is intimately present to every creature, es-pecially to human beings...
...12:2), and who leads them on the path of long suffering he trod himself, to where he lives now and forever-"to the throne of mercy" (Heb...
...Miserably, he turned out to be altogether too much to take...
...Impertinent question: Who is putting up the money for the project...
...I read the Bible reg-ularly, especially the Gospels...
...in doing so, he was will-ing to set aside accepted forms of socio-religious discrimination...
...When Jesus asked his question, "Who do you say I am...
...I would decline...
...What is worth knowing about plants, he told me, is found in botany books and related texts in physiolo-gy, period...
...Some priest he'll be some day, that Joe...
...Jesus may well have been a totally fascinating teacher or a countryside philosopher or a prophet who came to a sorry end...
...There is much of interest there...
...No wonder he awakened long-cherished Jewish hopes...
...At the heart of the Christian church stands Jesus present and alive on the ever-present strength ("in the Spirit") of the One True and Living God...
...the rescue of Joseph...
...Here it is: Jesus was a Galilean Jew from Nazareth, known as the son of Joseph and Mary, and a general mechanic by trade...
...1:18...
...Numerous mod-ern Christians feel an acute need to emancipate themselves from the oppression of fundamentalism, biblical literal-ism, anti-intellectualism, and authoritarianism: "They told me what to believe, but I don't buy it any more...
...Augustine put it as follows: "You are higher above me than my highest height, and deeper in me than my deepest depth...
...pods with seeds...
...He has been depicted as the personification of true natural religion, as the embodiment of human God-consciousness at its best, as the romantic idealist who demonstrated that hu-manity at its springtime best is already united with God...
...Conclusion: Speaking about Jesus only in the past tense is es-sentially deficient...
...Could he be the prophet Elijah...
...But context is not content...
...His central theme was the actuality of God's Kingship in Israel, conveyed by his choice of the Twelve...
...In Rousseau's Emile, the curate from Savoy explains that "having been born into a church which decides everything, which permits no doubt whatever, the rejection of one point caused me to reject everything else, and the impossibility of accepting so many absurd decisions also deprived me of those that were not...
...Not surprisingly, he was regarded as a wonderworker as well...
...In retrospect, the treatment meted out to Jesus, who had "done nothing wrong" (Luke 23:41), reveals what human be-ings have intuited across all cultures, namely, that our world is estranged from God's original purpose: "He came into his own, yet those who were his own did not welcome him" (John 1:11...
...He tells me that if the Bible is full of stuff that never happened you might as well forget it...
...History versus Nourishment Remarkably, most New Testament writings, many of them older than the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke as we have them, say little about the life of the historical Jesus...
...He did not make common cause with sin, nor even did he "resist the evil one" (Matt...
...Sentenced by Jewish au-thorities as a blasphemer, abandoned by almost all, desolate, and crucified by Roman soldiers as a traitor, he accepted the shame inflicted on him, and entrusted himself and his work to his dear Father's saving will...
...2:24...
...Consequently, Christians live "with their eyes fixed on Jesus, who sums up faith from start to finish" (Heb...
...3:5), and prepared to kill to save our lives, we human beings are hell-bent on judgment, and resolved to champion what we consider right by overpowering those weaker than ourselves, by discriminating against those we consider outsiders, and by justifying ourselves by claims to moral autonomy...
...Some of his own people tried to lock him up because he was thought to be out of his mind (Mark 3:21...
...There is no inside track to biblical truth, not even for biblical scholars...
...edible seaweeds...
...Instead, he deliberately took on, absorbed, and out-suffered the sinful violence inflicted on him and the shame of the cross-a form of execution reserved for foreign invaders, traitors, and slaves...
...he has been called a magician trained in Egypt...
...After all, this piece is only a start...
...Now John has a friend, Joe...
...My best clues to the meaning of what I read I find in the literary introductions and the footnotes, and, of course, from what I hear in church (when the homily is decent), in my Bible study group, and from prayer, especially the psalms and some of the New Testament hymns, embedded in the text of some of the Letters and in the Gospel of Luke...
...How about the historical Jesus...
...He has been cast in the role of the prophet of the imminent end of the world, of the healer whose mis-guided zeal cut short his own noble efforts at offering com-passion to the needy and the marginal, of the true leader of German Christians, of the true existentialist who acted freely out of authentic humanity alone and inspired oth-ers to do likewise, of a first-century cynic in the Palestinian mode, of a social zealot consistently taking the side of the poor and oppressed, of a revolutionary, of a universalistic Jewish teacher...
...Besides, even the fairest questions have agendas behind them, and often those agendas are hidden...
...There are other options...
...For Israel, privileged to know the liv-ing God, the main witnesses are memorials, buildings, events, and persons: the child born to Abraham and Sarah in their old age...
...they have their own limited "take" on the things they discuss...
...Lessing is only the first major representative of a mod-ern tradition whose constant theme is: "Christianity becomes a superior religion once you understand it reasonably and biblically...
...Accordingly, while the Gospel narratives (even John's) contain true rec-ollections of what Jesus typically (and even actually) did and said, their point is not historical accuracy, but encouragement to Christian worship, conduct, and teaching...
...It helps me put what I read in context...
...But surely this is untrue...
...the water from the rock...
...Besides, Joe is quite uptight, and he has an annoying habit of correcting everything I say about the faith...
...the person of the king...
...Treating his enemies as neighbors even while suffering re-jection and death at their hands, he remained faithful to his mission as God's agent of salvation, determined to let nothing get lost, but rather to bring it home, alive forever, to God (see John 6:37-40...
...the scapegoat on whom God the Father, miserably caught between love and justice, had to take out his righteous wrath at sinful humanity...
...He forgets the nourishment part...
...Quite confusingly, however, his style implied an incomparable intimacy with God, in which he invited his followers to share (Matt...
...He, too, is a former Catholic seminarian, but he told me he got so fed up with the radi-cal stuff they taught him about the Bible in the seminary that he became a fundamentalist for a while...
...Now many of the biblical writings are prophetic-that is, they deliver messages about mystery and precepts for conduct in the context of historical narratives...
...as the teacher of that most noble morality: the primacy of love over justice and the infinite value of each individual human soul...
...Conclusion: You are pretty much on your own when you want to decide what any passage really means...
...Besides, authors are only authors...
...His person and ministry elicited faith, but not generally or for long...
...From the Gospels we know that some Pharisees thought he was in cahoots with the Prince of Evil...
...fruits with pips, stones, and countless tiny seeds...
...mushrooms of every shape...
...he met with misinterpretation and rebuff...
...The promised Son of David...
...Flannery O'Connor made Lessing's point with characteristic candor: "Unfortunately," she wrote, "the word Christian is no longer reliable...
...the Tent of Encounter in the desert...
...This "residually Christian" religiosity is the prevalent cli-mate in North American Christianity...
...When you have read this essay, you may find yourself wondering why the author has left out this or that point you consider es-sential or included one you consider debatable...
...Take your pick...
...neither are the words sound and sa-vory nourishment...
...1:20...
...Seminar, schmeminar...
...With everything he had and was, he called for total abandon to the living God and to God's new, mighty pres-ence now...
...They are just as nourishing as the cuisine I cherish, except that the nourishment is, well, spiritual...
...12:47...
...I am the first and the last, and the living One...
...For Lessing remembered there had been a normative Great Tra-dition...
...Accordingly, Lessing thought, the living Jesus Christ, once demonstrably present in the church by events and experiences of Spirit and Power, was a thing of the past...
...What would also be an interesting piece to write is an account of what people have made of Jesus over the past nine-teen or twenty centuries...
...He encountered people of every kind, in word and deed, in a bold, prophetic, at times even spectacular ministry of con-frontation as well as compassion...
...Jesus plainly provoked vig-orous responses...
...He began to go about from place to place, picking up followers as he went...
...So the myth of Jesus is the real truth, says John...
...He has a point, of course, but he is wrong...
...others thought the same, or figured he was Elijah, Jeremiah, or some other prophet...
...In the end, he met with his disciples for a last supper, at which he showed them in prophetic sign and symbol that he was still holding out for God's kingship and was willing to give himself over-the servant of God and their servant...
...5:19)-a God who "shows his love for us by having Christ die for us while we were still sinners" (Rom...
...First of all, finding out all we can about the historical Jesus is completely legitimate and very important...
...5:43-48...
...He forcefully showed his disapproval of some less worshipful Temple practices...
...There is one big difference, though, with Lessing's reasonable "superior" religion...
...But such residual dogmatism on their part makes these re-constructionists unreliable teachers...
...in so doing, he often defeated powers of evil...
...It has come to mean anybody with a golden heart...
...The home of cookbooks is the kitchen, not the study or the lab (although you can profitably take them there...
...At the request of influential friends (and astonishingly for a crucified criminal), he got a decent, if hasty, burial, just before sundown on the eve of the Jewish Passover, most probably on April 7 in the year A.D...
...Not surpris-ingly, therefore, the Gospels contain events and sayings that the various faith communities attributed to Jesus by hind-sight, inspired by faith...
...This form of reasoning and self-justification is well over two centuries old...
...Both the just and the unjust will repay evil with evil, and let the Holy and Just One be traded for a mur-derer (Acts 3:14...
...In the person of Jesus, Only-Begotten God, Temple and Torah Embodied, the Invisible God in person addresses the world (John 1:14...
...My friend Kevin teaches plant physiology...
...4:6...
...they are usually touted as stimulating and original-which they often enough are...
...And through Christ, "the Amen, the faithful and true witness" (Rev...
...Enslaved by "the knowledge of good and evil" (Gen...
Vol. 124 • June 1997 • No. 12
