began to be linked to that of the Messiah, son of David. His beneficial charismatic actions were seen as representing the portents of the messianic age in which the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk and the lepers are cleansed. He was not a revolutionary, and entertained no political ambition. The main subject of his proclamation was the imminent arrival of a new regime, and he saw himself as the person entrusted by the Father, whom he loved and worshipped, to lead the Jews through the gate of repentance into the spiritual promised land. ‘Repent for the Kingdom of God is at hand!’
He fell foul of the high-priestly authorities in a politically unstable Jerusalem because he did the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time. The wrong thing was the disturbance which Jesus caused by overturning the stalls and tables of the merchants of sacrificial animals and the money-changers who sold the correct silver coins prescribed for gifts to the sanctuary. The wrong place was the Temple of Jerusalem where large crowds of locals and pilgrims foregathered and formed a potential hotbed for explosive revolutionary activity. And the days leading to Passover, the feast of Liberation and the expected date of the manifestation of the Messiah, was the worst possible time because at that very tense moment the nerves of the guardians of law and order reached breaking point. Hence the tragedy of Jesus. Seen as a potential threat to peace, he was arrested by the Jewish leaders who, however, preferred not to take the responsibility for his death on themselves and handed him over to the secular power. So Jesus was executed on a Roman cross by the notoriously cruel governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilate.
This portrait painted by the Synoptics of a charismatic, messianic healer, exorcist and preacher of God’s Kingdom is what one might call the gospel truth about Jesus. But this picture needs to be immersed into the real world of first-century Palestinian Judaism as it is known from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the works of the first century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus and the rest of post-biblical literature pre-rabbinic and rabbinic, works in which we encounter other prophetic-charismatic characters, albeit of lesser stature than Christ, such as Honi, Hanina ben Dosa or Jesus son of Ananias, with whom he can be compared. It is by looking through that prism that we may discover, concealed beneath the writings of Matthew, Mark and Luke, the shadowy face of the ‘real’ Jesus. I will not give away all the secrets of chapter 7 of The Changing Faces – you will have to read the book to discover them – but I will share with you my summation of the Jesus of history.
Here is the conclusion: the face of Jesus, truly human, wholly theocentric, passionately faith-inspired and under the imperative impulse of the here and now, impressed itself so deeply on the minds of his disciples that not even the shattering blow of the cross could arrest its continued real presence. It compelled them to carry on in his name their mission as healers, exorcists and preachers of the Kingdom of God. It was only a generation or two later, with the increasing delay of the Second Coming, that the image of the Jesus familiar from experience began to fade, covered over first by the theological and mystical dreamings of Paul and John, and afterwards by the dogmatic speculations of church-centred Gentile Christianity.
By the end of the first century, Christianity had lost sight of the real Jesus and of the original meaning of his message. Paul, John and their churches replaced him by the Christ of faith. The swiftness of the obliteration was due to a premature change in cultural perspective. Within decades the message of the historical Jesus was transferred from its Aramaic-Hebrew linguistic context, from its Galilean-Palestinian geographical setting, and its Jewish religious framework to the primarily Greek-speaking pagan Mediterranean world of classical cultural background. The change took place at too early a stage. The clay was still soft and malleable and could easily be moulded into any shape the potter cared to choose. As a result, the new church, by then mostly Gentile, soon lost awareness of being Jewish; indeed, it became progressively anti-Jewish.
Another twist exerted an adverse effect on the appeal of the Christian message to Palestinian and diaspora Jews. Jesus, the charismatic religious Jew, was metamorphosed into the transcendent object of the Christian faith. The Kingdom of God proclaimed by the fiery prophet from Nazareth did not mean much to the average new recruit from Alexandria, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth or Rome. During the second and third centuries, the leading teachers of the church, trained in Greek philosophy, such as Irenaeus of Lyons, Clement, Origen and Athanasius of Alexandria, substituted for the existential manifesto of Jesus advocating repentance and submission to God a programme steeped in metaphysical speculation on the nature and person of the incarnate Word of God and on the mutual tie between the divine persons of the Most Holy Trinity. They could proceed freely since by that time there was no longer any Jewish voice in Christendom to sound the alarm.
It is of course true that if Christianity had not taken root in the provinces of the Roman Empire, it would have remained an insignificant Jewish sect with no external appeal. So when the early church decided that non-Jews could be admitted into the fold, it was logical to attempt a ‘translation’ of the Christian message for the benefit of the non-Jewish world. This inculturation or acculturation is valid provided it does not lead to substantial distortion. To avoid such distortion, it is necessary that the process of adaptation remains in the hands of the representatives of the home culture (Judaism in the present case). However, in the case of Christianity the inculturation was handled by Gentiles who were only superficially acquainted with the Jewish religion of Jesus. As a result, within a relatively short period no Jew was able to find acceptable the new incultured doctrines of Jesus presented by the church. In fact, I think Jesus himself would have failed to acknowledge it as his own.
Thereafter the growing anti-Judaism of the church further distanced Christian culture from the world of Jesus. At the beginning of the fifth century Saint Jerome, the only Hebrew expert of Christendom, compared the sound made by Jewish synagogue worshippers to the grunting of pigs and the braying of donkeys.11 His contemporary, Saint John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople, referred to the synagogues of the Jewish Christ-killers as brothels, the citadel of the devil, and the abyss of perdition.12 Later Christian anti-Semites, Luther among them, had such models to imitate. It is worth recording that Julius Streicher, the editor of the notorious Nazi journal, Der Stürmer, claimed in his defence before the Allies’ tribunal that if he was guilty of anti-Semitism, so was Luther. His magazine simply repeated Luther’s slogans.
As is well known the age-old religious anti-Semitism continued largely unabated until after the Second World War. Yet it is to be recognized that the Protestant reformation in the sixteenth century caused a considerable sea change. The reformers, inspired by the spirit of the Renaissance, resurrected the Bible and proclaimed the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament the ultimate sources of divine revelation. So the Protestant scholars and Scripture-reading believers were brought closer to the biblical religion, and indirectly closer to Jesus. Still under the impact of the ideals of the Renaissance, Protestant New Testament scholars began to interest themselves in post-biblical Jewish literature. The seventeenth-century renowned Cambridge divine John Lightfoot recommended to Christians the study of rabbinic literature.13 The Talmud would be useful to them for a deeper understanding of the Gospels although it poisons the mind of the Jews!
The strange bed-fellowship of anti-Judaic attitude and expertise in Jewish studies continued in Christian circles until the middle of the last century. This is scandalously exemplified in the person of Gerhard Kittel, the editor of the classic ten-volume Theological Dictionary of the New Testament14 who was also a regular contributor to official German Nazi anti-Semitic publications. Only the realization of the horror of the Holocaust put this line of ‘scholarship’ beyond the pale.
By then New Testament criticism, begun in the eighteenth century, had made considerable progress and the discovery of many ancient Jewish documents, chief among them the Dead Sea Scrolls, further enriched the field of comparative study. Thus a new era opened in the quest for the original meaning of Christianity. During the last 30 years dozens of books on the historical Jesus began to sprout
