I was never attracted to the New Testament. My teachers were too theological for my liking. My enthusiasm was first focused on the Hebrew Old Testament, and afterwards on the then newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls which have kept me busy throughout my whole academic life. My doctoral dissertation discussed the historical framework of Qumran and was published in French in 1953.2 A translation of the Scrolls into English followed in 1962;3 the original booklet of 250 pages has grown over the years into a volume of close to 700 pages.4 The Scrolls led me to a study of ancient Jewish Bible interpretation, and there for the first time I had to pay serious attention to the treatment of the Old Testament in the New.5 From the mid-1960s I found myself involved in a 20-year-long collective labour aimed at revising, enlarging and rewriting a nineteenth-century modern classic, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ by Emil Schürer.6 After completing the first of the three volumes of this gigantic monument, I decided to take a little time off, relax and enjoy myself by using the historical knowledge freshly gained for a new approach to the Gospel account of Jesus. To be more precise, I wanted to plunge the New Testament into the sea of the Judaism of its age in order to discover what the figure of Jesus might look like when perceived, not through the distorting lens of 2,000 years of evolving Christian belief and theology, but through the eyes, ears and mentality of Jesus’ own Jewish contemporaries. Out of this endeavour emerged in 1973 Jesus the Jew,7 intended to describe what kind of person Jesus was. The book made an impact and was followed at ten yearly intervals by Jesus and the World of Judaism,8 sketching the message of the Gospels, and The Religion of Jesus the Jew,9 a full-scale endeavour to portray Jesus as a religious man.
The Changing Faces of Jesus10 has much in common with and often relies on the trilogy which preceded it, yet it also greatly differs from it. The approach is broader: instead of depending only on the first three Gospels which are considered closest to historical reality, it investigates also the Gospel of John, the letters of Paul and the rest of the New Testament. Moreover, it is addressed to a wider readership and in particular has a different scenario. In the trilogy the inquiry was essentially historical; here it is both literary and historical. The purpose of The Changing Faces of Jesus is to sketch four different portraits in the various levels of New Testament literature before trying to guess the fifth one lying beneath the earliest layer of Gospel tradition.
The arrangement of the portraits follows their degree of sophistication rather than a strictly chronological line. I begin with the Gospel of John, the Everest of New Testament Christology, a Gospel which happens to be not only the most advanced, but also the latest New Testament representation of Christ, dating to the opening years of the second century CE. John fundamentally departs from the earlier Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke in its religious outlook. Its story telling, too, has little in common with the Synoptics with the exception of the section leading to the crucifixion and death of Jesus. John’s Gospel largely ignores Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom of God, and replaces the pithy proverbs and vivid, God-centred parables of the Jesus of the Synoptics with long, rambling speeches in which Jesus continuously reflects on himself. In the Fourth Gospel we encounter not a real, flesh and blood Galilean charismatic, but a stranger from heaven, temporarily exiled on earth, who is longing to return to his celestial home. The 252 brilliantly chosen Greek words of the Prologue offer a pellucid abstract of John’s Gospel, the summit of New Testament theology. The eternal and divine Word of God, who took part in the creation of the world, became incarnate in time to reveal to men the face of the invisible God.
The Johannine portrait of Jesus foreshadows and epitomizes later Christianity, as we know it. The great doctrinal controversies of the church in the first millennium of its history mostly revolved around ideas first mooted in the Fourth Gospel. The orthodox doctrine relating to Christology – the one person and two natures of Jesus Christ – and to the Holy Trinity, all spring from the spiritual Gospel of John. John is the father of the theology of eastern Christianity.
Here ends my synopsis of the first two chapters of the Changing Faces, dealing with John. The next two are devoted to the high peaks of the teaching of St Paul.
The letters of Paul chronologically precede John by half a century, but from the point of view of doctrinal development stand only a little below him. As is well known, Paul is held by many to be the true founder of the church and the chief inspiration of the atonement-redemption theology of western Christianity. Closing his eyes to the earthly Jesus whom he never met, and about whom he had nothing original to report, Paul’s gaze was fixed on Christ, the universal Saviour of both Jews and of non-Jews. This superhuman, but not quite divine Christ, reminiscent of the heroes of the mystery religions then so popular in the Graeco-Roman world, played the ultimate lead part in a cosmic drama of redemption. Adam, the first man, left death and sinfulness to posterity, but the last Adam (Jesus Christ) brought to all forgiveness, life and salvation. Paul’s astonishing success in the non-Jewish world, contrasted with the failure of the early Christian mission among Jews, was itself part of this mystery play. The Second Coming of Jesus, fervently expected by Paul and the primitive church, could not happen – he thought – before the gospel had reached all the Gentile nations. He also imagined that its progress among the heathen would kindle the jealousy of the Jews who would not suffer passively the takeover of their spiritual patrimony by non-Jews. And once the Jews decided to enter the race, they would advance by leaps and bounds and soon catch up with, and overtake the leaders. Thus the whole of mankind, both Jews and Gentiles, would enjoy the salvation mediated through Christ.
Paul believed that he himself was commissioned by God to preach Christ to all the nations on the eastern and northern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, starting with Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece. He then planned to travel to Rome and convert Italy, and finally rush to Spain. No doubt, it was in Spain, at the westernmost extremity of the inhabited universe, that Paul expected to hear the trumpet signalling the day of Christ’s return, hailed by the mixed alleluia chorus of Gentiles and Jews.
As is often the case with beautiful dreams, they end before their climax is reached. Paul never arrived in Spain. Jews and Christians are still divided, and two millennia have passed without the Second Coming. But Christianity still endures, and this is largely due to the spiritual vision of Jesus sketched by the odd-man-out among the apostles who never saw him in the flesh.
This takes us to the third portrait of Jesus, the one contained in the first half of the Acts of the Apostles: the Jesus seen and preached by Palestinian Jewish Christianity. It is far distant from John’s mystical vision of the divine Christ and from Paul’s mystery drama of salvation. The Jesus of the Acts is a Galilean charismatic character, elevated by God to the dignity of Lord and Messiah after raising him from the dead. Instead of considering Jesus as God or a temporary expatriate from heaven, according to the Acts (2.22), Peter qualifies him in his first christological statement proclaimed to a crowd in Jerusalem as ‘a man attested . . . by God with mighty works and wonders and signs’, that is to say a Jewish prophet.
Stepping further back, at least as far as the nature of the tradition transmitted by them is concerned, we encounter in chapter 6 the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. He is depicted as still living and moving along the dusty and rocky paths of rural Galilee and comes onstage as an itinerant healer, exorcist and preacher, admired by the simple folk, the sick and the social outcasts – the sinners, the prostitutes and the tax-collectors – but cause of scandal and annoyance to the petit bourgeois village scribes and synagogue presidents. His sympathizers venerated him as a miracle-working prophet and from an early stage, though apparently without
