as a nationalist aspiration and confined to the Jewish people or a much more comprehensive phenomenon. Stauffert argues that “Jesus is much less a child of his time and of his people than has hitherto been widely thought.” Indeed, stressing his uniqueness allows him to further add that Jesus is “without parallel – in history, not only the history of Palestine.”65 It is within such a tradition that a hermeneutics of the gospels will attempt to follow and contribute, now, to a renewed consideration of how Jesus shows himself to be without parallel and without precedent, characterized by an “unmistakable otherness.”66 Jesus may have been perceived as a prophet, yet he “surpassed all his predecessors inasmuch as what his ministry was ushering in was greater than all that had happened hitherto. ←27 | 28→He could not therefore be appropriately described as simply this or that figure of the past redivivus or as their successor, nor did he fully match up to any one of the current expectations of contemporary Judaism.”67 Jesus cannot emerge from out of tradition since he conceives himself as not only prior to any foundational patriarch much less monarchical, but as prior to the word bringing creation into being. “The novelty represented by Jesus can no longer be described by recalling anything similar in history.”68
Here is the fundamental argument to follow, and to stress Breech’s remarkable assertion as all others who provide us with an assessment of a unique human being. Jesus cannot be understood according to history. He is in his self-conception, not historical. He conceives of himself as unprecedented precisely because he is anterior to being, affirms himself as prior to all creation and therefore not determined by historical actuality – whether scriptural, or temporal. The following hermeneutic interpretation of the gospels of Jesus will attempt to radically disassociate him from any milieu; to define Jesus ethnically or philosophically (as Jewish, as a Hellenist) fails to consider him from a transcendence completely immanent – and when he utters such statements (or rather, is reported to have said such and such) the oral reports and the written documents are a testimony to the struggle of representing him. He cannot be represented; one can only approximate, from the limits of our consciousness, his self-understanding.
Despite their dependence on a three-part tradition, the gospel writers nevertheless have intimations of Jesus’ being. He discloses truths about human existence for the first time and make it possible to recognize how limitations are not inherent ontologically but have been established in the world of history. Schillebeeckx believes finitude and secularity are fundamentally related. The revelations of the gospels of Jesus make possible the recognition of the finitude of the human world; not its end or finality, but its limits. Only the experience of revelation can begin the inter-related processes of altering the finite. “Revelation takes place in a long process of events, experiences, and interpretation.”69 Bultmann writes that revelation is “the experience in which one is raptured from the things of everyday ←28 | 29→life and one’s own limitations.”70 The limitations are not personal, reducible to an individual; they have been imposed from what humanity has “missed,” as the sin at the heart of being, a radical incompleteness sometimes denied though never fully concealed. Jesus’ revelations are a direct confrontation with what has been missed, neglected, and forsaken from humanity and now restores, for the first time, the demand to recover all that is still possible to actualize.
In his discussion of what constitutes a “Christian philosophy” (his quotes) Jean-Luc Marion relates hermeneutics to the uniqueness of revelation. “Christ exercises a hermeneutic on the world and its wisdom. But he accomplishes it only because of an entirely different characteristic: its radical newness, its unsurpassable innovation… His revelation introduced realities and phenomena into the world that never had been seen or known before him.”71 A hermeneutics of the gospels, then, has one primary responsibility and motivation: if both Catholic and Protestant thinkers recognize revelation to be the beginning of the ability to overcome finite limitations, then all interpretation will be motivated by this fundamental necessity. Jesus becomes the confrontation between revelation, from out of himself, and finitude as the limit of being.
Since “the word is the only possible means of revelation,”72 it is now time to turn to the gospels and interpret how Jesus reveals the possibility, for the first time, of at least recognizing the burdens of our human limitations and find the re-source, in his life, to overcome them. Jesus’ authority is precisely the resources he has in himself to give to others. “Far from reflecting pre-existing social relations, the cross and the resurrection give birth to new horizons.”73 The cross and the resurrection may be the culmination of Jesus’ life as he ruptures old horizons; its beginning extends back to two relations – Jesus as the word and how it leads to the virgin birth. One final note, on Bultmann’s demythology:
We must ask whether the eschatological preaching and the
mythological sayings as a whole contain a still deeper meaning
←29 | 30→
which is concealed under the cover of mythology. If that is so,
let us abandon the mythological conceptions precisely because
we want to retain their deeper meaning. This method of interpretation
of the New Testament which tries to recover deeper meaning behind
the mythological conceptions I call de-mythologizing – an unsatisfactory
word, to be sure. Its aim is not to eliminate the mythological statements
but to interpret them. It is a method of hermeneutics.74
If Bultmann’s project of hermeneutic de-mythologizing continues to be relevant and essential in the interpretation of the gospels, one of the tasks is the attempt to “uncover” a deeper meaning – one, for example, where any hint at “the kingdom of God” is treated with the same necessary hesitation as the thought of an ineffable divine, forcing the human imagination to extend beyond mere alternatives to history and to conceive an entirely other order of being. The gospels should consistently defy our assumptions and presuppositions; so when we invoke “the kingdom of God,” such an event and subsequent situation can in no way be compared to any human expectation – for example, of an altered political world. Such an anticipation reveals our human aspirations; and though they may be understandable, and perhaps even necessary in a world of the most atrocious violence and caused by our own excesses and fragility, to close off ourselves at the limit of our imagination negates whatever may still be possible for Jesus to reveal in the world and to transform it absolutely at the ontological level. What remains to be disclosed, and from the very place (and time) when Jesus conceives of himself – “before Abraham was, I am” – he represents the dynamic possibility of a time prior to history that has been fatally missed, hence the idea of sin as hamartia, not a flaw or a moral transgression reducible to a thought or an act, but a condition of being that has restrained itself within an imposed finitude, a determination Jesus now exposes not as some irreducible condition of the human (much less a biological or anthropological) but as the very creation from out of limited historical actuality. Jesus “overcomes” the world as he bequeaths, to us and all future generations, the work to accomplish, one that has to return, again and again, to think and reflect on the meanings of the gospels – and, for now, with
