How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (15 page)

Or consider another saying, from Mark 8:38. Pay close attention to the wording: “Whoever is ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of that one will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” Now, anyone who already thinks that Jesus is the Son of Man may casually assume that here he is talking about himself—whoever is ashamed of Jesus, Jesus will be ashamed of him (that is, he will judge him) when he comes from heaven. But that’s not actually what the saying says. Instead, it says that if anyone is ashamed of Jesus, of that person the Son of Man will be ashamed when
he
comes from heaven. Nothing in this saying makes you think that Jesus is talking about himself. A reader who thinks Jesus is talking about himself as the Son of Man has brought that understanding to the text, not taken it from the text.

This is probably not the way an early Christian would have made up a saying about the Son of Man. You can imagine someone inventing a saying in which it is crystal clear that Jesus is talking about himself: “If you do this to me, then I, the Son of Man, will do that to you.” But it is less likely that a Christian would make up a saying that seems to differentiate between Jesus and the Son of Man. This means the saying is more likely authentic.

My second example is from one of my favorite passages of the entire Bible, the story of the last judgment of the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:31–46; this is from M). We are told that the Son of Man has come in judgment on the earth, in the presence of the angels, and he sits on his throne. He gathers all people before him and separates them “as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats” (25:32). The “sheep” are on his right side and the “goats” on his left. He speaks first to the sheep and welcomes them to the kingdom of God that has been prepared especially for them. And why are they allowed to enter this glorious kingdom? “Because I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me” (25:35–36). The righteous are taken aback and don’t understand: they have never done these things for him—in fact they have never even seen him before. The judge tells them, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (25:40). He then speaks to the “goats” and sends them away to the “eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (25:41), and he tells them why. They didn’t feed him when he was hungry, give him a drink when he was thirsty, welcome him as a stranger, clothe him when he was naked, visit him when he was sick and in prison. They too don’t understand—they have never seen him before either, so how could they have refused to help him? And to them he says, “Truly, I say, to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me” (25:45). And so we are told that the sinners go off to eternal punishment and the righteous off to eternal life.

It is a spectacular passage. And it almost certainly is something very close to what Jesus actually said. And why? Because it is not at all what the early Christians thought about how a person gains eternal life. The early Christian church taught that a person is rewarded with salvation by believing in the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Apostle Paul, for example, was quite adamant that people could not earn their salvation by doing the things the law required them to do, or in fact by doing anything at all. If that were possible, there would have been no reason for Christ to have died (see, for example, Gal. 2:15–16, 21). Even in Matthew’s Gospel the focus of attention is on the salvation that Jesus brings by his death and resurrection. In this saying of Jesus, however, people gain eternal life not because they have believed in Christ (they have never even seen or heard of the Son of Man), but because they have done good things for people in need. This is not a saying that early Christians invented. It embodies the views of Jesus. The Son of Man will judge the earth, and those who have helped others in need will be the ones who will be rewarded with eternal life.

My third example of a saying that almost certainly passes the criterion of dissimilarity is an apocalyptic saying that will be important for our discussion later in this chapter. In a saying preserved for us in Q, Jesus tells his twelve disciples that in the “age to come, when the Son of Man is seated upon his glorious throne, you also will sit upon twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matt. 19:28; see Luke 22:30). It doesn’t take much reflection to see why this is something that Jesus is likely to have said—that it was not put on his lips by his later followers after his death. After Jesus died, everyone knew that he had been betrayed by one of his own followers, Judas Iscariot. (That really did happen: it is independently attested all over the map, and it passes the criterion of dissimilarity. Who would make up a story that Jesus had such little influence over his own followers?) But to whom is Jesus speaking in this saying? To all the Twelve (meaning the twelve disciples). Including Judas Iscariot. He is telling them that they all, Judas included, will be rulers in the future kingdom of God. No Christian would make up a saying that indicated that the betrayer of Jesus, Judas Iscariot himself, would be enthroned as a ruler in the future kingdom. Since a Christian would not have made the saying up, it almost certainly goes back to the historical Jesus.

The combination of all these arguments I have mustered have persuaded the majority of critical scholars of the New Testament for more than a century that Jesus is best understood to have proclaimed an apocalyptic message. The final argument that I give now is, in my judgment, the most convincing of them all. It is so good that I wish I had come up with it myself.
⁷
The argument is that we know with relative certainty how Jesus began his ministry, and we know with equal certainty what happened in its aftermath. The only thing connecting the beginning and the end is the middle—the ministry and proclamation of Jesus himself.

Let me explain. I earlier pointed out that we have good evidence—independent attestation and dissimilarity—of how Jesus began his public life—by being baptized by John the Baptist. And who was John the Baptist? A fiery, apocalyptic preacher proclaiming that the end of the age was coming very soon and that people needed to repent in preparation for it. John’s words are best recorded for us in a statement found in the Q document, delivered to the crowds: “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruits worthy of repentance. . . . Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Luke 3:7–9). This is a thoroughly apocalyptic message. Wrath is coming. People need to prepare (by “bearing good fruit”). And if they don’t? They will be cut down like a tree and tossed into the fire. When will this happen? It is ready to start at any moment: the ax is already at the root of the tree, and the chopping is ready to begin.

Jesus associated with John the Baptist at the outset of his ministry. Most scholars think Jesus started out as a disciple or follower of John before he broke off on his own. Jesus of course had lots of religious options to him in the religiously diversified world of first-century Judaism—he could have joined the Pharisees, for example, or moved to Jerusalem to focus on the worship in the temple, or joined up with some other religious leader. But he chose to associate with an apocalyptic preacher of coming destruction. It must have been because he agreed with his message. Jesus started out his ministry as an apocalypticist.

But the key to this particular argument is that the aftermath of Jesus’s ministry was also apocalyptic in its orientation. What happened immediately after Jesus’s life? The Christian church started. His disciples started converting people to believe in him. And what did these early Christians believe? All of our evidence suggests that they too were apocalypticists. They thought that Jesus was soon to return from heaven in judgment on the earth. Our earliest Christian author, as I’ve pointed out, was Paul. He was thoroughly entrenched in apocalyptic thinking. He was so sure that the end was coming soon that he thought he himself would be alive when judgment day arrived (thus 1 Thess. 4:17; 1 Cor. 15:51–53).

Jesus began his ministry by associating with a fiery apocalyptic preacher, and in the wake of his death enthusiastically apocalyptic communities of followers emerged. The beginning was apocalyptic and the end was apocalyptic. How could the middle not be? If only the beginning were apocalyptic, one could argue that Jesus shifted away from John the Baptist’s apocalyptic message—which is why his followers did not subscribe to an apocalyptic view. But they did subscribe to such a view, so that doesn’t work. Or if only the end were apocalyptic, one could argue that Jesus himself did not hold such views but that his followers came to subscribe to them afterward, and so they read their views back onto his life. But in fact the beginning of Jesus’s ministry
was
heavily apocalyptic, so that doesn’t work either. Since Jesus associated with the Baptist at the beginning of his ministry and since apocalyptic communities sprang up in the wake of his ministry, the ministry itself must have been characterized by an apocalyptic proclamation of the imminent arrival of the Son of Man, who would judge the earth and bring in God’s good kingdom.

T
HROUGHOUT THIS DISCUSSION
I have been focusing on the character of Jesus’s message. I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, want to suggest that his message was all that mattered to the historical Jesus or all that matters to scholars trying to understand his life. But one could argue that the various deeds that Jesus is known to have performed, the various controversies that he was involved with, the various events that led up to his death—all of them make sense within an apocalyptic framework in particular, as fuller studies have shown.
⁸
My interest in this book, however, is on a theological/religious question of how (and when) Jesus came to be thought of as God. And my argument is that this is not what Jesus himself spent his days teaching and preaching during his public ministry. Quite the contrary, the burden of his message was an apocalyptic proclamation of coming destruction and salvation: he declared that the Son of Man would be coming on the clouds of heaven, very soon, in judgment on the earth, and people needed to prepare for this cataclysmic break in history, as a new kingdom would arrive in which the righteous would be vindicated and rewarded for remaining true to God and doing what God wanted them to do, even when it led to suffering.

But what about Jesus, the messenger himself? What was his role in that coming kingdom? The way I want to begin reflecting on this question is by considering what we know about what Jesus’s earliest followers said about him.

The single most common descriptive title that was applied to Jesus in the early years of the Christian movement was the term
Christ
. Sometimes I have to tell my students that Christ was not Jesus’s last name. Most people at the time Jesus lived, apart from the upper-crust Roman elite, did not have last names, so he was not Jesus Christ, born to Joseph and Mary Christ. Christ is a title and is, in fact, the Greek translation of the Hebrew word for messiah. Saying Jesus Christ means saying Jesus is the messiah.

There are reasons for thinking that some of Jesus’s followers thought of him as the messiah during his lifetime, not simply afterward. And there are further reasons for thinking that Jesus himself said he was the messiah. But to get to these reasons, we first have to examine briefly what the term
messiah
meant to first-century Palestinian Jews.

We know from various Jewish writings of a number of ways the term
messiah
could be understood.
⁹
To begin with, I should stress what I mentioned: the word
messiah
in Hebrew means “one who is anointed.” And
anointed
in this context always means something like “chosen and specially honored by God.” It usually carries with it the connotation “in order to fulfill God’s purposes and mediate his will on earth.” As we have seen,
1 Enoch
speaks of the Son of Man as the anointed one. This is a somewhat unusual interpretation of the term, in that it applies to the future cosmic judge of the earth; but it makes sense that some Jews would interpret it in this way. Who better could be described as God’s special chosen one than that divine, possibly angelic being who would come to destroy the forces of evil and to set up God’s kingdom? From
1 Enoch
we know that some Jews clearly did think of this future judge—whether he was called the Son of Man or something else—as God’s messiah.

More commonly, though, the term was used to refer not to a divine angelic being, but to a human being. We know from the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, that some Jews—especially those deeply committed to the ritual laws given in the Torah—had the idea that a future ruler of Israel would be a great and powerful priest; in the Dead Sea Scrolls this priestly ruler is understood to be a messiah. He would be anointed by God and would be an authoritative interpreter of scripture who would rule the people by explaining to them God’s laws and enforcing them as need be. This priestly interpretation of the term
messiah
also makes sense because in the Hebrew Bible priests were sometimes said to be anointed by God.

But a much more common understanding of the term did not involve an angelic judge of the earth or an authoritative priest, but a different kind of ruler. Again, as we have already seen: it was the king of Israel who was understood to be God’s “anointed one” par excellence. Saul was made the first king of Israel through a ritual ceremony of anointing (1 Sam. 10:1). So too the second king, the great David (1 Sam. 16:13). And so too the successors in his family line.

The key to this most widespread understanding of “messiah” is the promise that God is said to have made to David in 2 Samuel 7, as discussed earlier: he promised that he would “be a father” to the son of David, Solomon. In that sense, the king was the “son of God.” But a second thing God promised is just as significant, as he tells David: “Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever” (2 Sam. 7:16). This is about as plain as God could make it. David would always have a descendant on the throne. God promised.