<<At first only a few Jews accepted Jesus.>>
Can I ask you exactly what you are meaning here, Emile?
Jesus was a Jewish rabbi. Christianity as a separate religion came much later, as his followers banded together, led mostly by early Christian women who kept his name alive. Christianity itself as something more than a Jewish sect evolved gradually as the followers of Jesus did not accept Abraham as their Father, and drifted away.
This argument within Judaism, which took place over several hundred years, is reflected in the New Testament, as its writers became more and more angry with the Jews. This prejudice against the Jews as institutionalized in Christian thought and belief was a primary reason the Holocaust was allowed to happen. Anyway, here is an excerpt about the Rabbi Jesus from the PBS Frontline special:
The study of the place of Jesus in the history of
human culture must begin with the New Testament,
on which all subsequent representations have been
based. But the presentation of Jesus in the New
Testament is itself a representation, resembling a set
of paintings more than a photograph.
In the decades between the time of the ministry of Jesus and the composition
of the various Gospels the memory of what Jesus had said and done
circulated in the form of an oral tradition. The apostle Paul, writing to the
congregation at Corinth in about A.D. 55 (twenty years or so after the life of
Jesus), reminded them that during his visit a few years before, probably in
the early fifties, he had orally "delivered to you as of first importance what I
also received" still earlier, thus perhaps in the forties, concerning the death
and resurrection of Jesus (1 Cor. 15:1-7) and the institution of the Lord's
Supper (1 Cor. 11:23-26). Chronologically and even logically, therefore,
there was a tradition of the church before there was a New Testament, or
any book of the New Testament. By the time the materials of the oral
tradition found their way into written form, they had passed through the life
and experience of the church, which laid claim to the presence of the Holy
Spirit of God. It was to the action of that Spirit that Christians would
attribute the composition of the books of the "New Testament," as they
began to call it, and before that of the "Old Testament," as they began to
describe the Hebrew Bible.
It is obvious--and yet, to judge by the tragedies of later history, not at all
obvious-- that Jesus was a Jew, so that the first attempts to understand his
message took place within the context of Judaism. The New Testament was
written in Greek, but the language Jesus and his disciples usually spoke
seems to have been Aramaic, a Semitic tongue related to Hebrew but not
identical with it. Aramaic words and phrases are scattered throughout the
Gospels and other early Christian books, reflecting the language in which
various sayings and liturgical formulas had been repeated before the
transition to Greek became complete. These include such familiar words as
Hosanna, as well as the cry of dereliction of Jesus on the cross, Eloi, Eloi,
lama sabachthani? (Mark 15:34)--"My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?" (which in the Hebrew of Psalm 22 was Eli, Eli, lama
azavtani?). Alongside Immanuel, "God with us"--the Hebrew title given
to the child in the prophecy of Isaiah (7:14) and applied by Matthew (1:23)
to Jesus, but not used to address him except in such apostrophes as the
medieval antiphon Veni, Veni, Immanuel that forms the epigraph to this
chapter--four Aramaic words appear as titles for Jesus: Rabbi, or teacher;
Amen, or prophet; Messias, or Christ; and Mar, or Lord.
The most neutral and least controversial of these words is probably Rabbi,
along with the related Rabbouni. Except for two passages, the Gospels
apply the Aramaic word only to Jesus; and if we conclude that the title
"teacher" or "master" (didaskalos in Greek) was intended as a translation of
that Aramaic name, it seems safe to say that it was as Rabbi that Jesus was
known and addressed. Yet the Gospels seem to accentuate the differences,
rather than the similarities, between Jesus and the other rabbis. As the
scholarly study of the Judaism of his time has progressed, however, both the
similarities and the differences have become clearer.
Luke tells us (4:16-30) that after his baptism and temptation by the devil, he
"came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up; and he went to the
synagogue, as his custom was, on the sabbath day. And he stood up to
read." Following the customary rabbinical pattern, he took up a scroll of the
Hebrew Bible, read it, presumably provided an Aramaic
translation-paraphrase of the text, and then commented on it. The words he
read were from Isaiah 61:1-2: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because
he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to
proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at
liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the
Lord." But instead of doing what a rabbi would normally do, apply the text
to the hearers by comparing and contrasting earlier interpretations, he
declared: "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." Although
the initial reaction to this audacious declaration was said to be wonderment
"at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth," his further
explanation produced the opposite reaction, and everyone was "filled with
wrath."
Behind the confrontations between Jesus as Rabbi and the representatives of
the rabbinical tradition, the affinities are nevertheless clearly discernible in the
forms in which his teachings appear in the Gospels. One of the most familiar
is the question and answer, with the question often phrased as a teaser. A
woman had seven husbands (in series, not in parallel): whose wife will she be
in the life to come (Matt. 22:23-33)? Is it lawful for a devout Jew to pay
taxes to the Roman authorities (Matt. 22:15-22)? What must I do to inherit
eternal life (Mark 10:17-22)? Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven
(Matt. 18:1-6)? The one who puts the question acts as a straight man,
setting up the opportunity for Rabbi Jesus to drive home the point, often by
standing the question on its head.
To the writers of the New Testament, however, the most typical form of the
teachings of Jesus was the parable: "He said nothing to them without a
parable" (Matt. 13:34). But the Greek word parabole was taken from the
Septuagint, the Jewish translation of their Bible into Greek. Thus here, too,
the evangelists' accounts of Jesus as a teller of parables make sense only in
the setting of his Jewish background. Interpreting his parables on the basis of
that setting alters conventional explanations of his comparisons between the
kingdom of God and incidents from human life. Thus the point of the parable
of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32), better called the parable of the elder
brother, is in the closing words of the father to the elder brother, who stands
for the people of Israel: "Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is
yours. It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was
dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found." The historic covenant between
God and Israel was permanent, and it was into this covenant that other
peoples, too, were now being introduced.
The oscillation between describing the role of Jesus as Rabbi and attributing
to him a new and unique authority made additional titles necessary. One such
was Prophet, as in the acclamation on Palm Sunday (Matt. 21:11),''This is
the prophet Jesus from Nazareth of Galilee." Probably the most intriguing
version of it is once again in Aramaic (Rev. 3:14): "The words of the Amen,
the faithful and true witness." The word Amen was the formula of affirmation
to end a prayer, as in the farewell charge of Moses to the people of Israel,
where each verse concludes (Deut. 27:l4-26): "And all the people shall say,
'Amen.'" In the New Testament an extension of the meaning of Amen
becomes evident in the Sermon on the Mount: Amen lego hymin, "Truly, I
say to you." Some seventy-five times throughout the four Gospels Amen
introduces an authoritative pronouncement by Jesus. As the one who had the
authority to make such pronouncements, Jesus was the Prophet. The word
prophet here means chiefly not one who foretells, although the sayings of
Jesus do contain many predictions, but one who is authorized to speak on
behalf of Another and to tell forth. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is
quoted as asserting (Matt. 5:17-18): "Think not that I have come to abolish
the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them.
For truly [amen], I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, not an iota,
not a dot, will pass from the law until all is accomplished." That affirmation of
the permanent validity of the law of Moses is followed by a series of specific
quotations from the law, each introduced with the formula "You have heard
that it was said to the men of old"; each such quotation is then followed by a
commentary opening with the magisterial formula "But I say to you" (Matt.
5:21-48). The commentary is an intensification of the commandment, to
include not only its outward observance but the inward spirit and motivation
of the heart. All these commentaries are an elaboration of the warning that
the righteousness of the followers of Jesus must exceed that of those who
followed other doctors of the law (Matt. 5:20).
The conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount confirms the special status of
Jesus as not only Rabbi but Prophet (Matt. 7:28-8:1): "And when Jesus
finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he
taught them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes. When he
came down from the mountain, great crowds followed him." Then there
come several miracle stories. The New Testament does not attribute the
power of performing miracles only to Jesus and his followers (Matt. 12:27),
but it does cite the miracles as substantiation of his standing as
Rabbi-Prophet. That identification of Jesus was a means both of affirming his
continuity with the prophets of Israel and of asserting his superiority to them
as the Prophet whose coming they had predicted and to whose authority
they had been prepared to yield. In Deut. 18:15-22, God tells Moses, and
through him the people, that he "will raise up for them a prophet like me from
among you," to whom the people are to pay heed. In its biblical context, this
is the authorization of Joshua as the legitimate successor of Moses, but in the
New Testament and in later Christian writers, the prophet to come is taken
to be Jesus-Joshua. He is portrayed as the one Prophet in whom the
teaching of Moses was fulfilled and yet superseded, the one Rabbi who both
satisfied the law of Moses and transcended it; for "the law was given through
Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ" (John 1:17). To describe
such a revelation of grace and truth, the categories of Rabbi and Prophet
were necessary but not sufficient. Therefore later anti-Muslim Christian
apologists would find Islam's identification of Jesus as a great prophet and
forerunner to Muhammad to be inadequate and hence inaccurate, so that the
potential of the figure of Jesus the Prophet as a meeting ground between
Christians and Muslims has never been fully realized.
For Rabbi and Prophet yielded to two other categories, each of them
likewise expressed in an Aramaic word and then in its Greek translation:
Messias, the Aramaic form of "Messiah," translated into Greek as ho
Christos, "Christ," the Anointed One (John 1:41, 4:25); and Marana, "our
Lord," in the liturgical formula Maranatha, "Our Lord, come!" translated
into Greek as ho Kyrios (1 Cor. 16:22). The future belonged to these titles
and to the identification of him as the Son of God and second person of the
Trinity. But in the process of establishing themselves, Christ and Lord, as
well as even Rabbi and Prophet, often lost much of their Semitic content.
To the Christian disciples of the first century the conception of Jesus as
Rabbi was self-evident, to the Christian disciples of the second century it
was embarrassing, to the Christian disciples of the third century and beyond
it was obscure.
The beginnings of this de-Judaization of Christianity are visible already within
the New Testament. With Paul's decision to "turn to the Gentiles" (Acts
13:46) after having begun his preaching in the synagogues, and then with the
destruction of the temple in A.D. 70, the Christian movement increasingly
became Gentile rather than Jewish in its constituency and outlook. In that
setting the Jewish elements of the life of Jesus had to be explained to Gentile
readers (for example, John 2:6). The Acts of the Apostles can be read as a
tale of two cities: its first chapter, with Jesus and his disciples after the
resurrection, is set in Jerusalem; but its last chapter reaches its climax with
the final voyage of the apostle Paul, in the simple but pulse-quickening
sentence "And so we came to Rome."
Recently, scholars have not only put the picture of Jesus back into the setting
of first century Judaism; they have also rediscovered the Jewishness of the
New Testament, and particularly of Paul. His epistle to the Romans (9-11) is
the description of his struggle over the relation between church and
synagogue, concluding with the prediction and the promise: "And so all Israel
will be saved"--not, it should be noted, converted to Christianity, but saved,
because, in Paul's words, "as regards election they are beloved for the sake
of their forefathers. For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable" (Rom.
11:26-29). This reading of the mind of Paul in Romans gives special
significance to his many references to the name of Jesus Christ there: from
"descended from David according to the flesh... Jesus Christ our Lord" in
the first chapter, to "the preaching of Jesus Christ," which "is now disclosed
and through the prophetic writings is made known to all nations" in the final
sentence. Here Jesus Christ is, as Paul says of himself elsewhere, "of the
people of Israel..., a Hebrew born of Hebrews" (Phil. 3:5). The very issue of
universality, supposedly the distinction between Paul and Judaism, was, for
Paul, what made it necessary that Jesus be a Jew. For only through the
Jewishness of Jesus could the covenant of God with Israel, the gracious gifts
of God, and his irrevocable calling become available to all people in the
whole world, also to the Gentiles, who "were grafted in their place to share
the richness of the olive tree"--namely, the people of Israel (Rom. 11:17).
No one can consider the topic of Jesus as Rabbi and ignore the subsequent
history of the relation between the people to whom Jesus belonged and the
people who belong to Jesus. That relation runs like a red line through much
of the history of culture, and after the events of the twentieth century we
have a unique responsibility to be aware of it as we study the history of the
images of Jesus through the centuries. The question is easier to ask than it is
to answer, and it is easier to avoid than it is to ask at all. But ask it we must:
Would there have been such anti-Semitism, would there have been so many
pogroms, would there have been an Auschwitz, if every Christian church and
every Christian home had focused its devotion on images of Mary not only
as Mother of God and Queen of Heaven but also as the Jewish maiden and
the New Miriam, and on icons of Christ not only as the Cosmic Christ but
also as Rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of David, come to ransom a
captive Israel and a captive humanity?
from The Illustrated Jesus Through the Centuries by Jaroslav Pelikan
pbs.org |
