Free Essays - Religion Essays

Evaluate the role of Jesus as a Jew and as a founder of a new religion.

The purpose of this essay is to examine what has remained an enigma for scholars of religion and believers alike since the eighteenth century. The problem is that Jesus comes to us across over two thousand years of history during which many ideas have been formulated with regard to Jesus’ identity.

All those raised in the Christian faith will be familiar with the Jesus who is the Messiah; of his infancy, life and the Easter story. These ‘truths’ have been held and passed on from one generation to another since the story began.

However, since the Age of Reason, the world of innocent belief was turned on its head and all that mattered was examined in minute detail under the microscope including the Gospel story. What is evolving out of the heated debate that has issued forth is a distinct division of humanity’s understanding of the identity of Jesus. In terms of what the earliest German scholars in the debate defined as the difference between ‘historisch’, the historical Jesus as opposed to the historic ‘geschichtlich’ Christ. This distinction was made by M Kahler in 1964. (1)

I shall attempt to show with the help of biblical scholarship how these arguments have helped to bring us to an increased understanding of the dichotomy of the Personhood of Jesus and in so doing peel away the layers of history to better understand the Jesus of the first century CE.

I shall confine myself to basic details as a topic of this size warrants a dissertation as opposed to an essay of such length.

The Jesus of faith that we can glimpse through the canonical gospels is the man who we pledge our belief in through the Creeds (2). Jesus was, and indeed, is God made man. He was born after a spiritual union between Mary, a Virgin, and God. His was the infancy described in Matthew’s Gospel of our childhood. He grew up and after a period of time in the desert and his baptism by John the Baptist started three years illustrating the wrongdoings of the Jews in their approach to their interpretation of God’s teaching for them (3). His primary purpose it seemed was to emphasise the eschatology of the times alongside many other would-be messiahs. He emphasised that the fundamental commandment was to love on another.

However, as the Gospels show, Jews remained stubborn: the Pharisees retained their adherence to ritual; the Sanhedrin stuck rigidly to the Temple and their allegiance to the Romans; the Zealots desperate for an earthly Messiah clutched and grabbed at each passing ‘messiah’ to test the latest ones validity to the claim. When all was going well Jesus had followers. When Jesus performed miracles he had believers. When Jesus told parables, he had listeners.

Jesus’ penultimate moment seemed to be his triumphal entrance into Jerusalem. Here was the Messiah; at long last God had listened to the Jews pleas (4).
However, Jesus went wrong. He overstepped the mark and overthrew the moneychangers’ stalls in the Temple. This was a key point. However, as Jesus was God he knew what he was doing and inevitably it happened (5).

After the special Passover meal Jesus surrendered to the Temple guards in the Garden of Gethsemane. His followers were already tiring – they could not stay awake during his hour of pleading with God. After suffering his trials he is crucified and dies. The end of the earthly Jesus? No. Three days later he rises again to the amazement of all (6).

As the story of Jesus’ resurrection spread around Jerusalem this had the effect of gradually attracting not only the Jews who listened but many who had not watched to know more of this Jesus. The story spread like wildfire. So much so that for nearly two and a half centuries the Romans themselves ferociously attacked this new breed of Jew the Christian, until in the third century their emperor Constantine saw the efficacy of converting himself to Christianity in order to get more soldiers for his cause.

My approach may seem almost blasphemous to the lay Christian reader.

However, this story is not taken literally by all today except for a few as it would have been in the pre-Enlightenment era. Why was this story absorbed so readily? In my opinion – three reasons:

Firstly, until the Age of Reason the Church had a very strong foothold in the imagination of all. Very few people could read old languages and Bibles were either written in Greek or Latin. Such knowledge was restricted to the Church and you accepted absolutely what you were told. Roman Catholics were still largely in this vein until Vatican II as late as 1965.

Secondly, the need for our own personal Messiah. The evolution of society had been tumultuous for the common man; to have someone who would mediate for him in his hour of misery to God helped him cope with his lot. He was like the peasant Jew of the first century. The difference being that the first century Jew had no intermediary.

Thirdly, I draw upon psychology. As Carl Jung described in his Man and His Symbols (7) mankind retains a collective unconscious within his mammalian brain. Certain symbolic figures within ancient story patterns help mankind to order information given to them in a way that makes sense for them. The symbol of the martyr is repeated constantly in ancient mythology.

In order to understand the importance of this, it is necessary to know that in the Mediterranean world at the time of Jesus and for many years after there was a synthesis of mythic stories being passed round and converted into folklore to suit the needs of various societies.

Such stories include the archetypal myth which exists in Jewish folklore of the suffering and vindication of the innocent righteous one. Examples in biblical stories include; Joseph in Genesis right back to the pagan story of Ahigar.

In this myth the righteous man is falsely accused, he is condemned to die, is ultimately rescued and placed in a higher position of favour. In later literature the vindication comes after death as belief in life after death evolves in the Jewish psyche (8).

As Crossan states:
            ‘… a story pattern – the great persecution – vindication theme with its emphasis
On the communal rather than the individual persecution and on corporal rather than personal vindication.’ (9).

Note the effect knowledge of this myth and the effect hearing of Jesus’ resurrection will have had on the Jews in Jesus’ time. They will have been motivated in their fight against Roman suppression. For many, this was the proof of Jesus’ Messiahship.

Crossan goes on to emphasise that this myth would have been relied on more heavily during the times of Christian persecution by the Romans at a time they probably had nothing written to refer to – or , indeed, it was not safe to have anything to refer too.

It would have been important, too, that after the destruction of the Temple and the split between the followers of James and the Jewish Christians, the split Pauline communities would have been spread amongst the Diaspora. It seems to me there was some basis in a real ‘Jesus’ figure but it is at this point when his new movement is growing, when its survival is vital, that the mythic layers are likely to have been added to his basic life story. In other words it was necessary to politicise – to make the story acceptable to a given audience Jewish or Gentile, perhaps the earliest form of spin-doctoring we see in politics today.

It would now not be politically appropriate for Jesus to be conceived of as a Jew let alone a reactionary. Jesus was made to serve the purpose of the writers and seen to be an adversary of his own religion. His vindication was therefore now in the psyche of Gentile and Jew alike.

The combination of political need and the story in the collective unconscious is a very powerful one. The need to inculcate with Romans around the Mediterranean after the destruction of the Temple was vital. What better way than to use myth once more? Mithraism was very popular with Romans during the first century CE. Mithras was the son of the sun; sent to earth to rescue mankind. In the second century BCE Mithras even shared the same birthday as Jesus on 25th December. He was born in a cave and was attended by shepherds.

Mithras sacrifices himself but on his last day shares a supper with his 12 followers. The meal consists of bread and wine which represent his body and blood. He too is buried in a tomb but rises again three days later (10).

A similar dichotomy can be seen with the Dionysian and Osiris myths with the addition of Zeus visiting Persephone (a father God and virgin mother); the Nativity icons of the star and the three Magi are included Augustus, the first emperor was considered a saviour of the human race. He, too, had a Father God and was born of a virgin (11).
The cacophony of leitmotifs that can be compared to Jesus of the Gospel and of faith prove to me that first century CE myth making was used as an established method of story telling in order to:-

• To enhance the credibility of the individual in question that is, Jesus, as Augustus, was also enhanced.
• Enforce in the minds of the general populace the ‘specialness’ of the individual that has been talked of.
• To validate politically and socially the ‘new special’ person that is being talked of. Augustus was a ‘new’ emperor – this was a new way of ‘doing things’ as Jesus, too, was ‘new’ to many Gentile listeners and his way of ‘doing things’ were also seen as ‘new’.

It can be seen then that the Gospels were written as story, not as simple biographical accounts. Story was the main device in the first century Mediterranean world of passing on information. This concept of storytelling in its first century perspective starts to illuminate some of the layers the early church probably put over any original real Jesus that may have existed. Symbolic language may well also have been used to protect storytellers from the dangers the new Christians faced in an alien world. So, this is the Jesus of Faith but what about the ‘original’ Jesus. Again, I can only briefly outline some arguments put forward for the purpose of brevity.

The debate among biblical scholars has evolved in three stages: the initial quest to find who Jesus actually was; an interval when despair seems to set in, followed by a frantic renewal of the Quest as the Nag Hammadi library is discovered.

David Hume’s An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (12) set the ball rolling when he started to criticise the idea of miracles. It could no longer be blindly accepted that miracles can happen. Various interpretations have since been added on the idea of miracles here but details can be found in the Bibliography.

There seems to be the idea that miracles were added later to the Gospels by the Early Church to add credence to Jesus as God. Some scholars continue to refute that miracles could happen whilst others retain an open mind. However, the Babylonian Talmud, a Jewish document with sources of the time has written:

Yeshua of Nazareth… is going forth to be stoned…practiced sorcery and beguiled and led astray Israel… and hanged him on the Eve of Passover’ (13).

It seems unlikely that this document could have been tampered with by Christians. Therefore, something unaccountable happened there is little doubt.  It remains that even today; it is not possible to fully explain away the events of the time. As a result of Hume’s questioning miracles, Reimarus researched at length and came up with a lengthy document. (14)

His analysis was that the absolute historicity of the Gospel seems unlikely. He believed that Jesus did not actually predict his death but had designs on becoming an earthly Messiah. Does this then frame Jesus as a revolutionary? A Zealot maybe? He believed that the triumphal entry into Jerusalem together with the inscription on the Cross, shows that Jesus believed he was a Messiah. I personally do not think Jesus had designs on messiahship. I think he was fundamentally a Jew who was gifted in religious interpretation and in a spirit of the surrounding eschatology he sought to ‘save’ Jews by suggesting a return to the original laws of Moses. This gained credence at the time in the light of the surrounding eschatology. The multiplicity of Laws that hedged the Ten Commandments together with the Temple method of sacrificial religion made God inaccessible to the common man. This had been highlighted by the Pharisees and in this regard Jesus shows elements of agreement with them.

In this respect Jesus was a saviour, an intermediary, of the sort he was to become for later Christians.

David Strauss wrote a 2 volume book in 1837(15). In summary, his approach was to accept the gospels as predominantly mythical and not historical fact:

‘…the main literary and theological point of the gospel accounts is the supernatural identity of Jesus. The work is mythological and therefore the correct approach to the Gospels is through myth. The Gospels represent religious truth not historical truth…(16).

For Marx and Engels, his counterparts, they were happy to accept that Jesus never existed at all (17).

Holtzmann in 1863 believed that Mark’s Gospel was the earliest and the Q source (18) (as it became known) had law material from which the Jesus of history could be gleaned.

There seemed to be evolving a dawning consciousness at this point in the western society’s psyche that a symbol upon which they had relied heavily may not actually exist. William Wrede in 1871 considered that Mark too was essentially theological as opposed to historical (19).

Schweitzer (1906) challenged Wrede. He insisted that the texts must be viewed from the first century world including the eschatology. He admits that capturing the true character of an historical Jesus seems beyond reach (20).

The early fervour to establish an historical Jesus slowly moved into a new era of vague disbelief of a real Jesus at all and that the only way he existed was through myth.
Rudolf Bultmann (1934) writes:

‘…In my opinion we can sum up what can be known of the life and personality of Jesus as simply nothing but a relationship of history and myth…(21)’

He later explained that Jesus’ views had no prominent place in the gospels which had been added to in layers over the years (22).

Biblical scholarship dried up concerning the historical Jesus with the view that he was either unknowable from lack of evidence or that what evidence there was had been tampered with such as that of Josephus who was meant to have been an independent witness.

With the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1947 a whole new life force dripped into the question the summary of which can be made in the words of Marcus Borg (1987) one of the New Quest scholars(as they came to be known):

            We can sketch a fairly full and historically defensible portrait of Jesus (23)’

The two key recent scholars though for me have been EP Sanders (1985) and Geza Vermes (1974) (24) both have emphasised the Jewish ness of Jesus, which in 1974 was shocking news. Jesus had been depicted as almost Aryan in features for many years in Western Christianity in pictures. This, again, reflects on the politics of religion in that for nearly 2000 years Christianity was anti-Semitic to the Jews because they were guilty of deicide. This culminated as we all know in the Holocaust.

To see Jesus today as a Jew completes the picture. He can be viewed as a completely immersed Jew in the eschatological realities of his time, with an Israelite heritage, committed to the Jewish law.

It is in the politicisation of characters in history, our heroes, that it becomes necessary to add layers which cloud our reality causing us to commit deeds not worthy of humankind, if the layers had not been added; would we all be Jewish, or Pagan? It can be agreed that these layers were necessary for the survival of the Jewish Christian sect.

A dichotomy remains between the Jesus of faith and the historical Jesus but Jesus has been able to pass his message to his followers through the praxis of interpretation. With the increased understanding of this dichotomy I suspect however that the layman is still not ready for the shock because the appeal of myth still rings true today.

Footnotes

1. M. Kahler Carl E Braaten trans (1964)  So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ  Fortress Philadelphia US
2. Mc Grath A E: (1997) An Introduction to Christianity Blackwell Oxford
3. John 4:12ff
4. John 12:12 ff
5. Luke 19:45 ff
6. John 20
7. Jung Carl: (1978) Man and His Symbols Macmillan USA
8. Freke Timothy and Gandy Peter: (1999) The Jesus Mysteries: Was the ‘Original Jesus’ a Pagan God? Harmony Location unknown
9. Crossan JD: (1998) The Birth of Christianity: Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus Harper Collins San Francisco
10. Laeuchli Samuel: (1967) Mithraism in Ostra: Mystery Religions and Christianity in the Ancient Port of Rome Northwestern University
11. Gordon Richard: (1996) Image and Value in the Greco-Roman World Varionum
12. Hume David: (1955) An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding: An Abstract Macmillan USA chapter 10 On Miracles
13. Babylonian Talmud: Tractate Sanhedrin 43a
14. An update of Reimarus’ argument can be found in CH Talbert: (1970) Reimarus: Fragments Scholar’s Press
15. Strauss David: (1972) The Life of Jesus Critically Examined Fortress Press USA
16. Strauss David: (1972) The Life of Jesus Critically Examined
17. Drew A: (1910) The Christ Myth Prometheus UK
18. Holtzmann H: (1863) Die Synoptischen Evangelien Ihr Ursprung und Geschlischtlicher Charakter Leipzig Engelmann
19. Wrede W: (1871) The Messianic Sect James Clarke Cambridge/London
20. Schweitzer A: (1964) The Quest for the Historical Jesus Macmillan New York
21. Bultmann R: (1934) Jesus and the Word Scribners and Sons New York
22. Bultmann R: (1969) Faith and Understanding Harper and Row New York
23. Borg M: (1987) Jesus: A NewVision Harper and Row San Francisco
24. Sanders EP: (1985) Jesus and Judaism SCM Philadelphia Fortress London and Vermes Geza: (1974) Jesus The Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospel Macmillan New York

Primary Sources
Babylonian Talmud: Tractate: Sanhedrin 43a
Bible Revised Standard Version.
Secondary Sources
Books
Borg MJ: (1987) Jesus: A New Vision Harper Row San Francisco
Borg MJ: (1994) Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith Harper Row San Francisco
Bultmann R: (1958) Jesus Christ and Mythology  Scribners and Sons New York
Bultmann R: (1958) Jesus and the Word Scribners and Sons New York
Bultmann R: (1969) Faith and Understanding Harper and Row New York
Cantor Norman F: (1994) The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews Harcourt Brace New York
Charlesworth James H: (1992) ‘the Fantasy of Superiority: Rethinking our Universalist Claims in Overcoming Fear Between Jews and Christians Crossroad New York
Crossan JD: (1991) The Historical Jesus: The Life of A Mediterranean Jewish Peasant Harcourt San Francisco
Crossan JD: (1998) Discovering What Happened in the Years Immediately After the Execution of Jesus Harcourt San Francisco
Drews A: (1910) The Christ Myth Unwin London
Duling Dennis C/Perrin Norman: (1994) The New Testament: Proclamation and Parenesis: Myth and History Harcourt Brace Fort Worth
Evans C Stephen: (1996) The Historical Christ and the Christ of Faith: The Incarnational Narrative as History Clarendon Press Oxford
Freke Timothy and Gandy Peter: (1999) The Jesus Mysteries: Was the ‘original Jesus’ A Pagan God? Harmony
Funk RW, RH Hoover and the Jesus Seminar: (1993) The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus Macmillan New York
Gordon Richard: (1996) Image and Value in the Greco-Roman World Varionum
Holtzmann H: (1863) Die Synoptischen Evangelien Ihr Ursprung und geschichtlicher Charakter Engelmann Leipzig
Hume D: (1955) An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding: An Abstract Macmillan USA
Jung C: (1978) Man and His Symbols Macmillan USA
Kahler M: (1964) The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ Philadelphia Fortress Press
Laelichli S: (1967) Mithraism in Ostia: Mystery Religions and Christianity in the Ancient Port of Rome Northwestern University
McGrath A: (1997) An Introduction to Christianity Blackwell Oxford
Meier JP: (1991) A Marginal Jew: Returning the Historical Jesus Volume One The Roots of the Problem and the Person Doubleday New York
Pelikan Jaroslav: (1997) The Illustrated Jesus Through the Centuries University Press Yale
Rowland C: (1985) Christian Origins SPCK London
Sanders EP: (1985) Jesus and Judaism SCM Philadelphia Fortress London
Sanders EP: (1993) The Historical Figure of Jesus Penguin London
Schillebeeckx E: (1979) Jesus: An Experiment in Christology Collins New York
Schweitzer A: (1961) The Quest For the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede Macmillan New York
Stanton GN: (1989) The Gospels and Jesus OUP Oxford
Strauss D: (1972) The Life of Jesus Critically Examined SCM London
Talbert CH: (    ) Reimarus:Fragments Scholar’s Press
Vermes Geza: (1974) Jesus The Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospel Macmillan New York
Vermes Geza: (1984) Jesus and the World of Judaism Philadelphia Fortress
Wrede W: (1871) The Messianic Sect James Clarke Cambridge/London
Journals
Cairns J(1981) ‘A Reappraisal of Bultmann’s Theology’ Religious Studies 17 (1981) 469-85
Se Nys MJ: ‘Myth and Interpretation: Bultmann Revisited’ International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11 (1980) 27-41
Doherty Earl: ‘The Jesus Puzzle: Was there No Historical Jesus?’ Journal of Higher Criticism Fall 1997
Evans Craig A: ‘Life of Jesus Research and the Eclipse of Mythology’ Theological Studies March 1993
Meier John P:’The Historical Jesus-Rethinking Some Concepts Theological Studies 51 (1990) 3-24
Stanford P: ‘Geza Vermes: A Child of His Time The Independent 19/12/2003
Wright NT: ‘An Interview: Galilean Rabbi or Universal Lord’ Christian History August 1998

Please note: All of the essays in the "Free Essays" section were written by students and then submitted to us to display and help others. Thanks to all the students who have submitted their essays to us. You should not hand in our essays as your own. We do not condone plagiarism!