In the current thread I’m trying to establish that Jesus believed he was the messiah.  I have pointed out that his followers would not have considered him the messiah because they believed he had been raised from the dead (since the messiah was not supposed to die and rise again) unless they had already considered him the messiah prior to his death.  But that, of course, does not mean that Jesus *himself* thought he was the messiah.  And so we have to look for evidence from Jesus’ life that indicates that this is what he thought about himself, and my argument is going to be that there are several pieces of evidence that strongly suggest it is, of which my plan is to stress two.

As background, in my previous post, I laid out the world view that Jesus himself almost certainly subscribed to, a view that scholars have called Jewish apocalypticism.  I need to develop these thoughts a bit in this post; and the next;  after that I’ll lay out in (very) summary fashion what I think we can say with relative certainty about the basic features of Jesus’ teaching; and I will then, once all that is completed, point to specific reasons for thinking that Jesus’ considered himself the messiah.

It is obviously one thing to say that apocalypticism was a common world view in Jesus’ day and another to say that Jesus himself subscribed to it.  But that has nonetheless been the view among most critical scholars, as I indicated yesterday, since the great work of Albert Schweitzer.  Schweitzer is best known today for his humanitarian efforts as a medical missionary in Africa.  He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952.

But before all that, he was a professor of philosophy and theology in Strassbourg, who wrote arguably the most important book on Jesus in the twentieth century, The Quest of the Historical Jesus.  This book is still available in a lively English translation and I strongly urge anyone interested in New Testament studies and the historical Jesus to read it.  It is brilliant.  In it Schweitzer discusses all (virtually *all*) the scholars who had attempted to reconstruct the life of the historical Jesus from the very beginning – Hermann Samuel Reimarus’s work on the “Aims of Jesus” that appeared in 1774-78 – down to his own time (his book was published in 1906).

In his survey he eviscerates most of the scholars whose work he summarizes, pointing out with rapier-like wit and perceptive analysis why and where they failed.  One failing that almost (but not quite all) of them had is that they failed to recognize the centrality of apocalyptic thought in the teachings of Jesus.  For Schweitzer this was the heart and soul of Jesus’ proclamation.  Jesus believed that he was living at the end of time and that God was soon going to intervene in the course of history to overthrow the forces of evil and set up a good kingdom on earth.  Jesus thought that he himself would be central to that cataclysmic event, soon to transpire, as he would be God’s messiah.  The end of history as he knew it was to happen soon, in a matter of months.

But Jesus was mistaken about that.  God did not intervene; the kingdom did not come; and at his death Jesus realized he had made a mistake.

Schweitzer was not a Christian in the traditional understanding of the term.  He did not believe that Jesus was correct in his proclamation of the coming kingdom, and Jesus did not rise from the dead.  But in another sense Schweitzer was one of the great Christians of modern times: he gave up a highly valued career as a university professor (a high-status occupation in Europe at the time!) and concert organist in order to follow what he understood as the example of Jesus, who gave himself completely over to the cause of helping others, even to the point of the ultimate self-sacrifice.

In any event, Schweitzer’s Quest popularized the view that Jesus was an apocalypticist, and as I have said, this became the standard critical view in Europe and the U.S., among scholars devoted to exploring such things – even if such views did not widely make it into the public arena until relatively recent times.

This view for Schweitzer was predicated on the facts that it was a widely held understanding of things in Jesus’ day and that the earliest Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, portray Jesus as delivering some such proclamation.

Since Schweitzer’s day, both considerations have received ample and abundant collaboration.  For one thing, since then the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered.  This is a large collection of writings produced by Jews living at about the same time and about the same place as Jesus, and lo and behold, they are filled with apocalyptic expectations and are deeply rooted in apocalyptic views.  Jesus himself does not appear in the scrolls, and there is nothing Christian in them.  They are Jewish, through and through.  But they embody just the kinds of apocalyptic orientation found in the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament.

Scholars today talk not only about the three Synoptic Gospels, but also their sources (as they did, in fact, in Schweitzer’s day as well).  It is striking that apocalyptic teachings are found on Jesus lips in all layers of our tradition:  they are found in our earliest Gospel, Mark.  Read chapter 13!  And Mark’s summary of Jesus’ teaching in 1:15 is thoroughly apocalyptic: the end of this current age is at hand, the Kingdom of God is soon to arrive, people need to repent in preparation for it.

Such sayings are also found in the source common to Matthew and Luke commonly called Q.  They can be found in the material unique to Matthew, from the source(s) scholars call M.  They are present as well in the material unique to Luke, from the source(s) scholars call L.  In other words, they are at every layer of our Synoptic traditions.  (I give lots of examples in my fuller treatment of this matter in my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium.)

When you arrange the Gospels chronologically, it is striking that the apocalyptic preaching so prominent in Mark and Q later begins to fade (Luke’s Gospel), then to disappear (John’s Gospel), and then to be opposed (the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas).  Why is that?  Because the expected end of the age never arrived, the Kingdom never came.  And so Jesus’ teaching was modified over the course of time, to accommodate the new situation the Christian story-tellers found themselves in.

The earliest traditions are unified, however: Jesus proclaimed an apocalyptic message.  In my next post I’ll give one other compelling reason for thinking that Jesus must have been principally an apocalypticist, before laying out – possible in just one post! – what I think the core of Jesus’ teaching must have been.  I will then be in a position to argue that he saw himself as the messiah.