put into place across the years after Jesus died. That some from outside the world of Israel—called Gentiles—may have been responsive to what they knew of Jesus, and may have been brought into this process, did not take away from its Jewish character. All newcomers to the Jesus movement, whether Gentile or Jew, would have been initiated into its meaning and purpose precisely by participating in such narrative reflection and reenactment. What began as memory and interpretation became proclamation, catechesis, and instruction. Gospel.
In the form it took in the Gospel of Mark, the story builds toward, and is centered upon, the Passion narrative: the distinctive and supremely well-shaped account of Jesus’ confrontation with authority in the Temple; the plot by his enemies to arrest him; the betrayal by Judas; the anguished intensification of suspense at the Last Supper, and in the garden of Gethsemane afterward; the failure of his friends; the arrest, trials, torture, and death of Jesus. That dispiriting death, above all, was the inciting incident of the Jesus movement, and finding a hopeful interpretation for it—ultimately known as the Resurrection—was the first challenge.
That the entire Passion drama is enacted through the hours of the Passover cycle of fast, vigil, sacrifice (literally, the slaughter of lambs), meal, and remembrance is the great clue to Mark’s purpose. With the Last Supper clearly defined as a Passover meal, scholars now conjecture that this earliest Gospel itself began as a narrative recounting the Passover liturgy as conducted by Jesus people in the formative years of the movement. They would have done this to show how Passover, Israel’s constitutive event, took on new meaning because of Jesus; or, perhaps better, how Passover’s meaning survived, especially after the Roman War put Israel’s very existence at risk. Jews were entering once again into their founding liberation—Exodus—but as an adaptation by Jews who saw in Jesus, the paschal lamb, a signal that the liberation now had an explicit meaning for them. The ancient ritual brackets of the blessings of bread and wine took on fresh resonance, the seed of the bread-and-wine Eucharistic liturgy. When the Jesus Jews gathered together for their paschal observance, that is, the story of Jesus, culminating in his death at Passover a few or many years before, would have formed the content of their worship at Passover now. Jesus is Jewish. But so is the shape of the story told about him.2
But even scholars who mostly assume that “Jesus,” and even the Jesus texts, were Jewish, take for granted that “Christ” was not. Claims made for Jesus by his followers after his death and Resurrection, that is, immediately cut him off from Jewish meaning, especially once he was proclaimed to be “divine.” Supposedly, given the radical otherness of Yahweh, there was no place in the Jewish vision of the created cosmos for any “divine” reality or activity. That Jesus could be the preexisting Word of God—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”3—was held to be inconceivable in Jewish categories, as were claims that God could be “incarnate” in Jesus: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”4 This not only led to the rejection of Jesus as a blasphemer by those of his Jewish contemporaries portrayed as hearing him make such claims for himself—“Why do we still need witnesses? You have heard his blasphemy!”5—but has erected the defining barricade between Christians and Jews to this day. Contemporary Jews are too polite to put it this way, but ordinary Christian divinity claims for Jesus amount to idolatry.
Some mainstream Christian scholars, aware of the importance of fully locating Jesus in his human—and therefore Jewish—milieu, informed by post-Enlightenment critiques of anthropocentric assumptions, and aware of contemporary encounters with other religious views that undermine Christian uniqueness, have gotten around these disqualifying problems by finding in the historical research little or no textual evidence for the assertion that either Jesus himself or his first followers understood him as a divine figure. Jesus never claimed to be God. He did not think of himself as God. Obviously, this is vastly more important than most head-of-a-pin scholarly debates. Whether Jesus was “God,” and knew himself to be, is the hinge on which all of Christian history turns—the past, of course, but, even more decisively, the future. Will any recognizably Christian religion survive if a straightforward belief in the divinity of Jesus is jettisoned? This question could shatter the Church. But I raise it as one who could himself be shattered. In a way, it is the problem with which this book is reckoning. We saw the question earlier, and we will see it again—and again.
Jesus might have been a charismatic figure, a historically unique personality, or even the Jewish Messiah, in the understanding of historians and theologians who now debunk his divinity; but, they insist, he was not put forward as God. Deleting Christ’s divinity from Christian understanding requires nothing less than, as one scholar put it, “a hermeneutical critique of Christological totalization, and a religious critique of Christological idolatry.”6 This move away from traditional affirmations helps with the contemporary queasiness one finds in numerous academic settings about what’s called “high Christology,” the set of beliefs—the doctrinal school—that elevates Jesus to equality with God. It soothes the queasiness to be able to say that Jesus himself, and his early followers, had little or no truck with such claims. In simple terms, Jesus was a Unitarian.
So emphasis in the skeptical scholarship is given, for example, to the fact that Jesus often called himself “Son of Man”—more than sixty times in the Gospels. Rarely, if ever, did he refer to himself as “Son of God.” Those titles—one centered on “man,” the other on “God”—are taken as defining the difference between low Christology and high. Speaking generally, the former emphasizes the humanity of Jesus, while the latter emphasizes his divinity. The low preference of much recent historical Jesus scholarship offers a way of protecting the historical (Jewish) Jesus from the mystical (ultimately Aryan) Christ. Thus, low Christology scholars emphasize that the Greek term rendered in English as “Son of Man” is better translated as “the human being.” Indeed, some contemporary versions of the New Testament offer that phrase in translation—as if Jesus was decidedly affirming his simple humanity by so referring to himself. The fathers of the Church understood “Son of Man” in just this way—as an affirmation of humanness.7
Much is made, in this argument, of the climax in Mark when the high priest asks Jesus, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?” Jesus replies in the affirmative but immediately, as it were, corrects the high priest’s title mistake: “And Jesus said, ‘I am; and you will see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.’ ”8 When, in the Gospel of Luke, the interrogator puts to Jesus the question “Are you the Son of God, then?” he pointedly refuses to accept the title, replying instead, “You say that I am.”9
As the Jesus movement spread across the Mediterranean region in its first decades, so the reasoning goes, the relatively narrow worldview of the Palestinian villagers, and even of the Jerusalem urbanites who first embraced the movement, was challenged and expanded by encounters with Greek thought, which had strongly influenced Diaspora Judaism. This so-called Hellenization was especially important as ideas about Jesus developed, with the introduction of Greek philosophical categories infused with God talk and divinity claims. High Christology was the native language of the Hellenized Jesus movement.
We will presently look more closely at the question of whether these sharp distinctions between “Hebrew” and “Greek” classifications do justice to ancient understandings: what did Jews and Greeks actually mean by “God” anyway? The point for us here is to note how a contemporary near consensus has developed among Jesus experts that ideas about Jesus underwent a more radical shift the farther they traveled from Palestine.
Historical Jesus scholars show how a Galilean Jew, with his followers on the move, morphed into a supra-historical cosmic figure more at home in a Greek milieu than a Hebrew one. Metaphysics trumped metaphor, and soon enough the human Jesus was lost in the divine Savior. Jews and Christians, who disagreed about so much else, agreed from then on that high Christology—Christ is God—destroyed any tie to the Jewishness of “Jesus Christ.” Jews derided “Christ” as idolatry, while Christians celebrated “Christ’s” distance from
