Religion_Christianity_Jesus

The history of the life, work, and death of Jesus of Nazareth reveals nothing of the worldwide movement to which he gave rise. He lived and taught in a remote area on the periphery of the Roman Empire. His life was of short duration, and knowledge of it remained hidden from most of his contemporary world. None of the sources of his life and work can be traced to Jesus himself; he did not leave a single known written word. Also, there are no contemporary accounts written of his life and death. What can be established about the historical Jesus depends almost without exception on Christian traditions, especially on the material used in the composition of the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, which reflect the outlook of the later church and its faith in Jesus.

Non-Christian sources are meagre and contribute nothing to the history of Jesus that is not already known from the Christian tradition. The mention of Jesus' execution in the Annals of the Roman historian Tacitus (XV, 44), written about AD 110, is, nevertheless, worthy of note. In his account of the persecution of Christians under the emperor Nero, which was occasioned by the burning of Rome (AD 64), the Emperor, in order to rid himself of suspicion, blamed the fire on the so-called Christians, who were already hated among the people. Tacitus writes in explanation: "The name is derived from Christ, whom the procurator Pontius Pilate had executed in the reign of Tiberius." The "temporarily suppressed pernicious superstition" to which Jesus had given rise in Judaea soon afterward had spread as far as Rome. Tacitus does not speak of Jesus but, rather, of Christ (originally the religious title "Messiah," but used very early among Christians outside Palestine as a proper name for Jesus). The passage only affords proof of the ignominious end (crucifixion) of Jesus as the founder of a religious movement and illustrates the common opinion of that movement in Rome. An enquiry of the governor of Asia Minor, Pliny the Younger, in his letter to the emperor Trajan (c. AD 111) about how he should act in regard to the Christians (Epistle 10, 96ff.) comes from the same period. Christians are again described as adherents of a crude superstition, who sang hymns to Christ "as to a god." Nothing is said of his earthly life, and the factual information in the letter undoubtedly stems from Christians.

Another Roman historian, Suetonius, remarked in his life of the emperor Claudius (Vita Claudii 25:4; after AD 100): "He [Claudius] expelled the Jews, who had on the instigation of Chrestus continually been causing disturbances, from Rome." This may refer to turmoils occasioned among the Jews of Rome by the intrusion of Christianity into their midst. But the information must have reached the author in a completely garbled form or was understood by him quite wrongly to mean that this "Chrestus" had at that time appeared in Rome as a Jewish agitator. Claudius' edict of expulsion (AD 49) is also mentioned in Acts 18:2.

Josephus, the Jewish historian at the court of Domitian who has depicted the history of his people and the events of the Jewish-Roman war (66-70), only incidentally remarks about the stoning in AD 62 of "James, the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ . . ." (Antiquities XX, 200). He understandably uses the proper name "Jesus" first (for as a Jew he knows that "Christ" is a translation of "Messiah"), but he adds, though qualified by a derogatory "so-called," the second name that was familiar in Rome. (Some scholars have suggested, however, that this reference was a later Christian insertion.) Scholars also have questioned the authenticity of a second passage in the same work, known as the "Testimony of Flavius" (XVIII, 63ff.), which is generally thought to contain at least some statements, apparently later insertions, that summarize Christian teaching about Jesus.

In the Talmud, a compendium of Jewish law, lore, and commentary, only a few statements of the rabbis (Jewish religious teachers) of the 1st and 2nd centuries come into consideration. Containing mostly polemics or Jewish apologetics, they reveal an acquaintance with the Christian tradition but include several divergent legendary motifs as well. The picture of Jesus offered in these writings may be summarized as follows: born the (according to some interpretations, illegitimate) son of a man called Panther, Jesus (Hebrew: Yeshu) worked magic, ridiculed the wise, seduced and stirred up the people, gathered five disciples about him, and was hanged (crucified) on the eve of the Passover. The Toledot Yeshu ("Life of Jesus"), an embellished collection of such assertions, circulated among Jews during the Middle Ages in several versions.

The oldest New Testament writings, the genuine letters of Paul (written in the 50s of the 1st century), contain little information about the life of Jesus. Paul, the Apostle, who had not known Jesus personally (II Cor. 5:16), shows no interest in Jesus' biography. At the centre of Paul's thought and proclamation there stands only the theologically important significance of the death, Resurrection, exaltation, and Second Coming of Jesus Christ, contained in numerous short doctrinal and creedal formulas. These formulas the Apostle himself occasionally characterizes as being the tradition that he has received and handed on (I Cor. 11:23ff.; 15:3ff.) or they are in other ways indicated as a given tradition (Rom. 1:3ff.; Phil. 2:6-11).

The most important sources for the life of Jesus are the Synoptic (parallel view of sources) Gospels: Mark, Matthew, and Luke. The Gospel According to John, the Fourth Gospel, assumes a special position. Though it offers some parallels to the other three, and though the independent traditions in it may in individual cases have historical kernels, the tradition in John shows that the gospel has reached an advanced theological state. Because a theological conception has been incorporated in the account to such an extent, this Gospel cannot be directly used as a historical source. It is also the latest of the Gospels, written about AD 100.

That the gospel literature was capable of developing in very different directions is also shown by the extracanonical tradition about Jesus, which is preserved in fragmentary form in quotations by the early Church Fathers and in other sources and which is marked by legendary features and tendencies. The Coptic Gospel of Thomas (written in the 2nd century by Gnostic Christians; i.e., heretical believers in esoteric, dualistic doctrines), which was found in 1945 in Naj' Hammadi (Egypt), is an example of such extracanonical literature. It contains 114 sayings of Jesus loosely strung together, which have some points of contact with the sayings of Jesus in the canonical Gospels. But this Gospel has no earthly, historical contours in its account of Jesus (e.g., no accounts of the Passion and Easter). As a bearer of heavenly revelation in this Gospel, Jesus instructs the esoteric circle of his disciples about the foreign world of matter that they must renounce in order to participate in the imperishable, transcendent world of light from which they originate. The Gospel of Thomas, thus, is of no use as a source for the historical Jesus.

The Synoptic Gospels were originally anonymous. According to questionable 2nd-century tradition, they were written by the immediate disciples of Jesus or companions of the oldest Apostles. Most probably the Gospels were composed between AD 70 and 100. That they were written at such a relatively late time does not detract from their historical significance, however, because an older, oral tradition is collected in them and has left its traces everywhere. The character and structure of the individual traditions are incorporated into the Gospels, which definitely do not have a historical or biographical interest in facts, circumstances, and the course of events. They do not reproduce the story of Jesus as such but, instead, recount history interpreted from the viewpoint of the Christian faith. What Jesus says, does, and suffers is interpreted as the fulfillment of the Old Testament promises, and his story is slanted toward his end (the Passion and the Resurrection), his significance as the divine Saviour, and his Second Coming. In other words, the Gospel texts do not intend to describe the Jesus of the past but rather to proclaim who he is for all ages of time. These perspectives of the post-Easter church to which the writers belong and for which their reports are intended must continually be taken into consideration.

A comparison of the first three canonical Gospels reveals a strange blending of agreements and differences. Mark, Matthew, and Luke contain, by and large, the same traditional material. Some parts, however, are to be found only in Matthew and Luke, and a considerable amount of material is peculiar only to Matthew or only to Luke (and a small amount to Mark, as well). According to almost all critical biblical scholars, Mark, the shortest Gospel, is viewed as the oldest--not Matthew, as was earlier assumed--and served as the main literary source for the other two. They also believe that the material common to Matthew and Luke comes from a second source (called Q, from the German Quelle, "source"). This second source (Q) consisted almost exclusively of sayings (logia) of Jesus and contained no Passion or Easter tradition and is therefore known among scholars as the logia, or sayings, source.

Investigation of the Gospels by German biblical scholars such as Karl Ludwig Schmidt, Martin Dibelius, and Rudolf Bultmann--who developed what is known as form criticism, the study of the origin and development of the traditions in the Gospels--has shown that the basic stock of the tradition consisted of numerous small, self-contained units (single sayings, parables, debates, anecdotes, and miracle stories), originally without any relation to each other, and mostly without any interest in dates, places, or historical circumstances. It was the Gospel writers (or some earlier collectors) who first joined these individual pieces together editorially, forming a kind of "discourse" out of sayings and groups of sayings and, through linking individual scenes, creating the impression of a connected chain of events. They used a very modest set of tools for this; e.g., short introductory and connecting phrases, stereotyped, generalizing indications of time ("next," "a few days later"), and frequently repeated, indefinite indications of place (mountain, field, road, house, lake). These editorial turns of phrase are, as a rule, easy to sever from their context and are employed very differently by the separate Gospel writers.

In methodically distinguishing and separating traditional and editorial features, form criticism of the Gospels has apparently dissolved the presuppositions for a historically sound, connected life of Jesus, which scholars have again and again attempted to write in the course of the last 200 years. But such an analysis was only a first step of research into the older material itself. Popular oral tradition, to which the Synoptic material belongs, makes use of fixed forms appropriate in each case to the contents, so as to be easily fixed in the memory. The tradition about Jesus offers many examples of this: prophetic sayings, the Beatitudes, pronouncements of woe, wisdom sayings similar to proverbs, legal sayings, church rules, dialogues, and others. In a corresponding way, many miracles of Jesus are narrated by means of motifs and other features also known from reports of other miracle workers. From this one perceives that this tradition is interested not so much in what was historically unique as in what was typical. Thus, with regard to the Gospels, it has to be considered that their tradition was formed and collected from the point of view of the faith of the post-Easter church, under the influence of its ideas and ways of thought and in close connection with its vital interests and the ways in which its life found expression. When interpreting the texts, scholars must therefore be concerned with the question of their setting in life (Sitz im Leben) in the church as well.

Politically, the small Jewish nation in Jesus' time was rent and impotent. Always situated in an area of tension between the great empires of the ancient world (e.g., Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, and Syria) as they struggled with each other and succeeded one another, it had already lost its political independence since the time of the Babylonian Exile (586-538 BC) and had come under changing foreign domination: in the Hellenistic period, first under the Egyptian Ptolemaic dynasty (3rd century BC) and then under the Syrian Seleucid dynasty (2nd century BC), and, finally, until its ultimate overthrow (AD 70), under the Romans, who continued to rule the area. Only for a short interim was there a Jewish kingdom. The Maccabees, a priestly family, reigned after their revolt (167-142 BC) against Antiochus IV (Epiphanes) and other Seleucid (Syrian) kings. Their rule, however, came to an end as a result of internal disintegration and violent struggles for the throne.

Initially courted by the rival parties, the Roman general Pompey marched into Palestine, capturing Jerusalem in 63 BC, and reduced the Jewish territory to Judaea, without the coastal cities and the confederacy of towns of the Decapolis (central Transjordan). Several other smaller regions--e.g., inland Galilee of the northern province around Lake Gennesaret and Peraea, east of the Dead Sea--were left to the Jews. By exploiting the threat to the Roman Empire from the Parthians and by adapting himself skillfully to the changing power situations after the murder of Julius Caesar (44 BC), the clever and adroit Herod I (reigned 37-4 BC) managed with the help of the Romans to become "king of the Jews" and to extend the Jewish state over almost all of Palestine again. His regime was decidedly progressive. He promoted Hellenization (i.e., emphasizing Greek culture) by modern building projects, the founding of towns, and in other ways. But he also attempted to win the favour of the Jews, above all by rebuilding Solomon's Temple in ostentatious form and on an enormous scale. It was begun in 20 BC but was not finally completed until AD 64, a few years before its destruction in AD 70 by Titus, who became emperor of Rome nine years later.

Though the Jews demanded of the Romans the abolition of Herodian rule after his death, the Romans divided the land up among the sons of Herod the Great. The most important and largest part, Judaea, with Jerusalem, Samaria, southern Judaea, and Idumaea, was granted to Archelaus, who was deposed by AD 6. His area was integrated into the Roman administration under a governor (procurator), who controlled military, taxation, and judicial affairs. As was their custom, the Romans allowed the Jews to practice their religion and to exercise restricted powers of administration and jurisdiction. Some of the procurators, however, did not hold themselves strictly to these principles. Pontius Pilate, who is designated in an inscription found in 1961 as praefectus Judaeae, ruled (AD 26-36) ruthlessly and with bursts of cruelty. He was dismissed for this reason. The reigns of Herod's other two sons were of rather longer duration: Philip (4 BC-AD 34) ruled as tetrarch of the non-Jewish region northeast of Lake Gennesaret, and Herod Antipas (4 BC-AD 39) served as ruler of Galilee and the remote Peraea.

As far as Jesus' story is concerned, the conditions in Galilee, the land of his origin and his ministry, are of paramount importance. Thoroughly changed in character by the settlement of foreign colonists, although again in the process of being re-Judaized, Galilee was held in contempt by the Judaeans. Though the land's culture and civilization were in large measure Hellenistic, especially at the court of Herod Antipas, in individual towns and among the owners of large estates, the Jewish population, which spoke Aramaic, lived with its own, largely unaffected religious traditions. At the time of Jesus, Galilee was known as a seat of Jewish resistance to Rome.

Information about political conditions in Palestine at the time of Jesus is found mainly in non-biblical sources, especially in Josephus. Only a few details are mentioned in the Gospels. Such information is nevertheless significant as background for the story of Jesus, even if it does not contribute much to an understanding of his teaching. The attitude of the Jewish people to the foreign rule of the Romans was not uniform. There were conformists, especially among the priestly aristocracy in Jerusalem, and there were those who exhibited concealed and open resistance.

In the reports of the Synoptic Gospels, the Pharisees serve almost entirely to exemplify his opponents. They are incensed by his preaching and behaviour, spy on him, press from the very beginning to have him done away with, and are, conversely, themselves attacked by him most fiercely as being self-righteous hypocrites. Debates with the Pharisees without doubt played an important role in Jesus' life. From the Gospels there has developed a crude popular view that "Pharisee" is synonymous with "self-righteous hypocrite." The New Testament sources, however, are to be used with discretion in this respect for the following reasons: (1) the later narrators were in large measure no longer conversant with the historical circumstances, especially because they were themselves outside the region of Palestine. As a rule, the Pharisees are introduced as a collective quantity in the Gospels but, in reality, were not a unified group. There are also sporadic references in the Synoptic tradition to the fact that Jesus maintained table fellowship with Pharisees (Luke 7:36; 11:37; 14:1). It is also worthy of note that they play no part in the Passion tradition (with the exception of the later legend in Matt. 27:62ff. about the Pharisees' requesting a guard at Jesus' tomb). (2) A Synoptic comparison reveals the tendency to give Jesus' opponents more concrete form, but in a schematic way. In the later texts, the Pharisees are frequently introduced as the constant foil for Jesus, whereas the older tradition speaks of Jesus' opponents in an indefinite way. (3) Matthew, especially, reflects the sharpened conflicts between Jews and Christians in the period after the destruction of Jerusalem (AD 70), when a theologically narrower brand of Pharisaism was finally asserting itself in the course of the religious reconstitution of Judaism. This later picture dominates the Talmudic tradition, but it may not be projected back into the time of Jesus.

Originating in the time of the Maccabees (or earlier, according to some scholars), the movement of the Pharisees (i.e., the "separated ones") formed itself into a religious association composed chiefly of laymen from varied classes and callings. Its aim was strict adherence to the Torah (Law) in even the most remote areas of daily life, in order to realize the true Israel of God. This especially included the scrupulous observance of the individual ritual commandments for the practice of prayer and fasting, cultic purity, and the avoidance of all contact with the cultically unclean, whether that be lawless persons, sinners, corpses, animals, or unclean utensils. In the Pharisees' piety there was also to be found an eager longing for the future world of God, a doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, and a hope in the promised Davidic Messiah, who would establish his rule in Jerusalem and destroy the power of the heathen.

In view of this religious situation, it is difficult to arrive at a uniform judgment on Jesus' relation to the Pharisees. Points of contact in matters of teaching definitely are present; e.g., in the expectation of the resurrection of the dead, which they hold in common (Mark 12:25-27). Again, there are critical statements about formalized and hypocritical piety in Jewish Talmudic tradition, and not just in sayings of Jesus. It would therefore be unjust to judge all Pharisees to be alike. Obviously, many sayings of Jesus have parallels in Rabbinic tradition. Nevertheless, there is no question that Jesus rejected their claim to righteousness and their ideal of representing the true Israel, that he characterized their "tradition of the elders" as human tradition in contrast to the commandment of God, and that, through his attitude to tax collectors and sinners, he must have given them offense. Because of such opinions of Jesus, they probably would have influenced the people against Jesus. That certainly need not mean, however, that the Pharisees, who were politically anything but dominant, aimed at Jesus' crucifixion from the start (contrary to what is said; Mark 3:6).

A party of quite another kind was that of the Sadducees, who belonged to the Jerusalem priestly caste. They carried much less authority among the people than the Pharisees. As a theologically conservative school, they differed from the latter also in their rejection of the additional "traditions" and the new doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. Because of the Sadducees' hierarchical tradition and their readiness to adapt themselves to the current political conditions, their influence in Jesus' time, before the destruction of the Temple, is not to be underestimated. Besides the Pharisees and the elders of the people, they had a decisive voice in the supreme religious and judicial authority, the Sanhedrin. A close relation probably existed between them and the Roman rulers. They did not, however, survive the catastrophic outcome of the war and the end of the Temple (AD 70).

The scribes are frequently mentioned in the Gospels. In later Judaism, which, since the time of Ezra (5th century BC), was committed to the Mosaic Law, they formed a most respected class of the teachers. Corresponding to the normative significance of the Law for all religious, moral, social, and legal questions of Jewish life, the scribe was a combination of theologian and lawyer. Social origin and membership of a particular party played no role in this group. In Jesus' time, there were, apart from Pharisees and priests, also Sadducees and Zealots among the scribes. They were not paid as a professional class but, instead, had to find their own living. As scribes, they had to expound the Torah and give directives for daily life. Those who had undergone the long and careful training in their schools were accorded the status of scribe, wore the long robe of the scholar (Mark 12:38), were respectfully addressed as "rabbi" (Matt. 23:7), and were allowed to sit in a place of honour in the synagogue. Jesus, like the scribes, sat to teach (Matt. 5:1; Luke 4:20), engaged in debate, gave his opinion on the diverging doctrinal propositions of particular schools (Matt. 19:3ff.), and gathered disciples about him. The stereotyped way in which, particularly in Matthew, Pharisees and scribes are grouped together reflects the conditions obtaining at the time of the Gospel-writers, in which it was the Pharisees who controlled the instruction in the synagogues exclusively. But earlier, in the time of Jesus, the scribes were a more motley group. Also, it is not allowable to conclude from the fact that Jesus is frequently addressed as "rabbi" and "teacher" that he himself was a member of this profession.

The involvement of the religiopolitical movement of the Zealots, a revolutionary group, in the historical development of Palestine was disastrous to the nation. No longer contented with the passive resistance of the Pharisees, out of whose ranks they certainly gained many adherents, the Zealots took the ideal of a theocracy and zeal for the Law extremely seriously. The first outbreak of their activities occurred in AD 6, when the Syrian legate Quirinius ordered the population in Judaea to register. This aroused indignation and was the signal for an insurrectionist movement, which confined itself initially to scattered individual acts of revolt but soon expanded, took military form, and finally instigated the First Jewish Revolt (AD 66-70). Biblical and nonbiblical sources name Judas, a Galilean scribe from Gamala, as founder of the Zealots. Like him, other fanatical messianic prophets also found significant followings. In Jesus' time, the conflict had not yet reached its zenith. The Zealots carried out sudden raids on the Roman occupation forces and conducted a guerrilla war from their hiding places in the wilderness. The Romans correspondingly held the land under strict control, reinforced their troops in Jerusalem at the times of the Jewish festivals, when great crowds of pilgrims gathered in the city, and took drastic and ruthless action if they anticipated sedition. This situation illuminates the events leading to Jesus' death. The Zealots' goals were political and, primarily, religious: the realization of a Jewish theocracy, the rule of the promised Messiah, and the destruction of the heathen regime.

The thesis that Jesus belonged to the Zealots or founded a related movement was first advanced in the 18th century and has repeatedly been supported in recent times. The most important point in its favour is Jesus' execution on the cross, a punishment that only the Roman authorities could inflict and did frequently against rebels. There were two others executed in the same manner with Jesus, and they, like Barabbas, who was granted amnesty in Jesus' place (Mark 15:15), are referred to as "robbers" (Mark 15:27), a customary term for rebels at this time. This could indicate that, at that Passover time, when many Jews were in the city, a Zealot revolt had been planned and was bloodily suppressed but also that Jesus had actually been willing to play a leading part in it.

Jesus' messianic entry into Jerusalem and the cleansing of the Temple (Mark 11) are also interpreted along these lines, the latter being understood as an attack on the dominant priestly class that sympathized with the Romans. Some also see a connection with the fact that one of the disciples was carrying a weapon when Jesus was arrested in Gethsemane (Mark 14:47). The later Christian tradition has, it is claimed, for apologetic and theological reasons, altered the true historical state of affairs until it has become unrecognizable. But isolated hints have nonetheless been preserved in it; e.g., Jesus' critical sayings about that "fox" Herod (Luke 13:32) and the violent earthly rulers (Luke 22:25); similarly, the way he attracted Zealots, documented by the fact that among his disciples at least one, called Simon (Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13), was a Zealot.

There are, however, no sufficient reasons to support the hypothesis of Jesus belonging to the Zealots. The undeniable fact that he was crucified by the Romans as a political messianic pretender only proves that he was held to be a Zealot and was probably denounced as an enemy of the state, but not that he really was. The most important and decisive argument against the Zealotism assumption is found in Jesus' message of the dawning of the Kingdom of God, which belongs to the best established items in the tradition. It lacks any politico-nationalistic features and expressly says that God alone, and not any human activity, establishes his Kingdom (Mark 4:26-29) and offers his salvation to all without exception. If Jesus were directly or indirectly to be counted among the Zealots, this would mean at the same time that he must have fought to have the Law rigorously carried into effect and must have strictly avoided associating with sinners, especially with the tax collectors, who stood in the service of Rome. In the dialogue on paying tribute to Caesar (Mark 12:13-17), Jesus even expressly rejected rebellion against the Roman emperor, without thereby glorifying his regime.

Far removed from the above-mentioned religious groups were the sectarian, separatist Essenes, most probably identical with the sect of Qumran (near the northwest bank of the Dead Sea). The sensational discovery in 1947 of many of their original writings (the Dead Sea Scrolls) and the later excavations of their settlement have extended knowledge of the Jewry of those times to an extraordinary degree and have occasioned the suggestion that both John the Baptist and Jesus came from this sect or were, at the least, heavily dependent on their teaching. Important arguments, however, speak against this assumption. This sect had arisen, like the Pharisees, in the 2nd century BC out of a conflict with the official priesthood in Jerusalem but had nevertheless preserved the priestly traditions and, at the same time, developed a strongly ritualistic practice of the Law. Characteristics of the Qumran community are: its monastic seclusion from the outside world, including the rest of the Jews; the way it termed itself the "children of light" in contrast to the "children of darkness"; its rigid organization and discipline; and its apocalyptic expectations--centring on the intervention of God in history, along with dramatic and cataclysmic events--and other special features of its theology. Although the new texts found at the Dead Sea show numerous individual parallels to the Jesus tradition of the Gospels, there are already fundamental differences between the Qumran sect and John the Baptist. His eschatological (last times) message of repentance addressed to the nation as a whole fits in with the sect as little as does his unique kind of Baptism--which one underwent once and for all--with the Essenes' regular ritual washings. Nor does John's temporal and geographic proximity to the strictly esoteric Qumran sect justify asserting close relations between them. There also are diametrical differences between the views of the sect and the range of Jesus' ministry, his message of salvation, his understanding of God's will in a way free of all casuistry, and, especially, the radical character of his commandment of love and his fellowship with sinners and social outcasts.