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Another Problem with Calling Jesus the Messiah
I have been arguing that most Jews rejected Christian claims about Jesus because Jesus was just the *opposite* of what the messiah was expected to be. The messiah was to be a figure of grandeur and power who would overthrow God’s enemies and set up a new kingdom on earth in which God’s will would prevail. Jesus was and did none of that. He was a lower-class peasant who was arrested, humiliated, tortured, and executed. He didn’t destroy God’s enemies. He was crushed by them. Paul is the first Jewish persecutor of the Christians that we know by name; there is really no doubt that he was bent on wiping out the followers of Jesus – since he himself says so (and says so to his own shame [Gal 1:13); he did not gain any glory for this rather despicable past) (despicable in both his eyes and the eyes of the Christians). Presumably his reasons for hating and opposing the followers of Jesus were comparable to those of other Jewish persecutors. But Paul gives us […]
Tags: Galatians, Jesus, messiah, Paul
November 9, 2015
Jesus, the Messiah, and the Resurrection
I have been talking about the early Christian understandings of Jesus as the messiah – not just the messiah, but the “crucified messiah,” a concept that would have seemed not just unusual or bizarre to most Jewish ears in the first century, but absolutely mind-boggling and self-contradictory. I’ve been arguing that it was precisely the contradictory nature of the claim that led almost all Jews to reject the Christian claims about Jesus. Several readers have asked me whether I think Jesus understood himself to be the messiah. Probably those who know a *little* bit about my work and my general views of things would think that my answer would be Absolutely Not. But those who know a *lot* about my views will know that the answer is Yes Indeed. I think Jesus did consider himself the messiah. But not the to-be-crucified-messiah. The key to understanding Jesus’ view of himself is to recognize what he *meant* by considering himself the messiah. I will get to that in a later post. For now I want to give […]
Tags: Christ, historical jesus, messiah, resurrection
November 11, 2015
How Do We Know What Jesus Said About Himself?
Do we know what Jesus said about himself? Yesterday I started my two-prong argument for why Jesus probably considered himself the messiah. The first prong is that Jesus must have been called the messiah during his lifetime, or it makes no sense that he would be called messiah after his death. Even if there were Jews who believed that Jesus was raised from the dead after he was crucified (as indeed there were! Otherwise we wouldn’t have Christianity), the resurrection of a dead person would never lead anyone to say “Ah, he’s the messiah!”. No one expected the messiah to be a resurrected person. So Jesus was being called the messiah before his death. Otherwise, we can’t make sense of the fact that he was called the messiah after his (believed-in) resurrection. Do We Know What Jesus Said About Himself? Several readers have pointed out that this does not mean that Jesus *himself* thought of himself as the messiah. It simply means that some of his followers did. That is absolutely right. I couldn’t agree […]
Tags: historical jesus, messiah
November 12, 2015
Readers’ Mailbag November 13, 2015
It is time for the weekly Readers’ Mailbag. I am keeping a list of questions readers have asked, and I add to it all the time. If you have a question you are eager to hear me answer in a couple of paragraphs or so, simply ask! One convenient way to do so is simply to make a comment/question on this post. Here are three questions for today. QUESTION: The Wikipedia entry on the gospel of the Nasorenes mentions your work on the similarities between it and the Gospel of Matthew, could you briefly tell me what this is about? RESPONSE: There are three Gospels that are frequently called the “Jewish-Christian Gospels,” because they were – according to the writings of the church fathers – used by Christians who self-identified as being, also, Jewish (e.g., by keeping the Jewish law and, possibly, insisting that to be a follower of Jesus a male had to be circumcised and males and females needed to keep the Sabbath, observe kosher food laws, and so on). We do […]
- Christian Apocrypha
- Heresy and Orthodoxy
- History of Christianity (100-300CE)
- Public Forum
- Reader’s Questions
Tags: Atonement, blood sacrifice, Gospel of the Ebionites, non-canonical gospels, Peter, Rome
November 13, 2015
The Apocalyptic Context for Jesus’ View of the Messiah
In this thread I am trying to argue that Jesus understood himself to be the messiah. So far I have made one of my two main arguments, with the understanding that *both* arguments have to be considered in order to have a compelling case. So the first prong doesn’t prove much on its own. But in combination with the second argument, it makes a strong case. The first argument is that Jesus’ followers would not have understood him as the messiah after his death (as they did) unless they believed him to be the messiah before his death – even if they came to believe he had been raised from the dead, that would not have made them think he was the messiah. I’ve explained why in my previous post. The second second involves showing that it was not only the disciples who understood Jesus to be the messiah before his death, but that Jesus himself did. This is even harder to show, but I think there is really compelling evidence. There are two major […]
Tags: apocalypticism, historical jesus, Second Temple Judaism
November 15, 2015
Albert Schweitzer and the Apocalyptic Jesus
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 […]
Tags: Albert Schweitzer, apocalypticism, historical jesus
November 16, 2015
The Baptism of Jesus as an Apocalyptic Event
Over the years scholars have adduced lots of reasons for thinking that Jesus – like many others in his day – was a Jewish apocalypticist, one who thought that the world was controlled by forces of evil but that God was very soon going to intervene to overthrow everything and everyone opposed to him in order to set up a good kingdom here on earth. As I pointed out in my previous post, this is the view found in Jesus’ teachings in Mark (e.g., ch. 13), in Q (the source used by Matthew and Luke for many of their sayings), in M (Matthew’s special source[s]), and in L (Luke’s special source[s]). There is another very good argument for thinking that Jesus must have subscribed to some kind of apocalyptic view (I’ll lay out what his exact views apparently were in a future post). In fact, this argument is so good that I wish I had thought of it myself! But alas, credit goes to others. The argument, as I usually phrase it, is that “the […]
Tags: apocalypticism, baptism of Jesus
November 18, 2015
The Beginning and End as Keys to the Middle
In my last post I showed why it is so widely acknowledged that Jesus began his ministry by associating with John the Baptist, an apocalyptic preacher of coming doom. The reason that matters for our purposes in this thread is that it shows that Jesus chose, of his own free will, to join an apocalyptic movement at the very beginning of his public ministry. That certainly demonstrates that Jesus started out his public life as a fervent advocate of a Jewish apocalyptic message. He too must have been expecting the judgment of God soon to appear in which those aligned against God would be destroyed and those who sided with God would be rewarded. That in itself does not show, however, that Jesus’ own proclamation, after he got started, was apocalyptic. Maybe he changed his mind! Maybe he decided John was wrong! Maybe he went his own direction! There are two arguments against the idea that he changed. The first is one I have already recounted several posts ago: apocalyptic sayings are significantly attributed to […]
Tags: apocalypticism, historical jesus, Paul
November 19, 2015
Readers’ Mailbag November 20, 2015
It is time for my weekly Readers’ Mailbag. I will be dealing with two questions this time. If you have questions, about anything at all related to the historical Jesus, the New Testament, the history of early Christianity, or anything else that I may have a remote chance of knowing something about, please ask! You can either respond with a comment/question to this post, or send me an email, or comment on any other post! QUESTION: An off-topic request: what are the five most puzzling questions about the historical Jesus you would love to see resolved in your lifetime? RESPONSE: Ah, this is a tough one. It is made particularly difficult by two competing phenomena. The first is that most scholars of the historical Jesus are pretty convinced that their views about what he said and did are on the money. So in that sense, what is there that can be answered that hasn’t been? The other is the unpleasant reality that in fact we know very few things for certain about Jesus – […]
Tags: Gospel of Mark, historical jesus, Joel Marcus, Paul
November 20, 2015
The Teaching of Jesus
I have been providing necessary background to the question of whether Jesus could have considered himself the messiah, and have done so by trying to situate him in the world of first century Jewish apocalyptic thinking. We now need to move to a summary of Jesus’ teaching given that apocalyptic framework. We could obviously have a year-long thread on the topic of what it was Jesus taught during his itinerant preaching ministry. Many people have written very long books on the subject – and the books just keep comin’ out. If you want a more extended discussion of my views on the matter, you can see my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. I include bibliography of other works to consult. For my money, among the best and most influential have been John Meier, E. P. Sanders, Dale Allison, and Paula Fredriksen – all of whom agree that Jesus is best understood as an apocalyptic preacher. Here let me summarize under several rubrics what I think we can say with reasonable reliability about […]
Tags: apocalypticism
November 24, 2015
The SBL and the Blog
I just finished spending five days at my annual professional meeting, the Society of Biblical Literature, this year in Atlanta. This is a very large conference, probably about 6,000 people here for it – not to mention another 6,000 here for the American Academy of Religion conference that is held jointly with it. For both conferences this is a chance for professional academics in their various fields of religious studies (New Testament, Hebrew Bible, early Christianity, early Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Religion and Culture, Religion in the Americas and so forth and so on – lots and lots of fields) to come together, attend academic papers on various topics (dozens of papers read by scholars all at the same time throughout the convention center), have meetings for various organizations, talk to editors, browse through the enormous book display hall where publishers in the field display all the recent books, and so on. This is not a conference for lay-people interested in the topics: it is heavy duty scholarship. But for experts in biblical studies, it is […]
Tags: biblical studies, blogs
Thanksgiving Reflections 2015
I would like to pause in my other blogging pursuits to reflect a bit on the holiday that is now upon us. Like, I suppose, a lot of people, there are a number of holidays that I one time enjoyed very much but am now almost completely indifferent to. For me those would include Halloween (it’s just not that much fun for me without having kids or any real connection with kids), Fourth of July (I’m always in England on the occasion, and giving the nature of the holiday and what it remembers, well, that kind of puts a damper on it) (I don’t want this to be misconstrued: I love being an American – with all the enormous problems experienced by and caused by Americans – but the business with firecrackers and fireworks and so on just has nothing much for me these days), and Easter (which I do not observe, as an agnostic; although it can be a time of reflection for me on the awesome claims of the Christian message). There are […]
Tags: food, football, Thanksgiving
November 25, 2015
Readers’ Mailbag November 27, 2015
I hope everyone had a fulfilling (and fillingful) Thanksgiving! Now it is time to answer some questions I have received over the past couple of weeks, in short rapid-fire order. If you have a question you would like me to address, please ask it in a comment to this post. I am keeping a list and deal with the questions, weekly, more or less in the order in which I receive them. And I’m running low on questions! So ask away! QUESTION: Why do you think Jesus remained single his whole life? Could that have been part of the reason he was seen as a divine being? Ordinary people marry, not highly esteemed divine beings? RESPONSE: That’s an interesting hypothesis, but I don’t think it is “it.” Let me start with the necessary preliminary: I do indeed think that Jesus was, in fact, unmarried. People have disputed that (most notably that inestimable authority on ancient Christianity, Dan Brown, in the Da Vinci Code!) but the evidence is very strong. I have dealt […]
Tags: Jesus, marriage, Paul, textual criticism, visions
November 28, 2015
Misquoting Jesus Interview C-SPAN
Here’s an old interview, way back in October 15, 2006, on my book, “Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why.” The Interview was done in Bryant Park in New York City during the New York Times Great Read in the park, with C-SPAN2 Book TV. (Ten years ago now! See what a Spring Chicken I look??? Ah to be young again….) Please adjust gear icon for pseudo high-definition.
Tags: C-Span, Misquoting Jesus
November 13, 2016
Gift Memberships to the Blog, 2015
We have already moved passed Thanksgiving again. Hard to believe. For the occasion, I want to open up a holiday giving option that can help out people who really want to be on the blog but cannot afford the membership fees. As many of you know, for the past couple of years, thanks to a number of generous donors, we pulled this off in a big way. It has happened in two stages. It started off when two anonymous donors proposed that they provide some funds to pay for memberships for a few people who wanted to be on the blog but because of personal circumstances, could not afford the membership fees. I put out the offer on my Facebook page, asking if anyone was in that boat, and within twenty minutes I had thirty requests –all from people who were eager to join but simply did not have the means to do so otherwise. I had to shut down the offer nearly as soon as I made it. This made me suspect that […]
November 29, 2015
Jesus’ Claim to Be the Messiah
I’m afraid I have been sidetracked from my thread within a thread within a thread, but now want to get back to it. This particular sub-sub-thread is about whether Jesus considered himself to be the Jewish messiah. My view is that Yes he did. But he meant something very specific by that, and it is not what most people (Christians and non-Christians) today mean by it. Recall what I have tried to show thus far. There were various expectations of what the messiah would be like among Jews of Jesus’ day – a political ruler over Israel, a great priest who ruled God’s people through God’s law, a cosmic judge of the earth who would destroy God’s enemies in a cataclysmic act of judgment. All these views had one thing in common: the future messiah would be a figure of grandeur and might who would come with the authority and power of God. And who was Jesus? For most people of his day, Jesus was just the opposite – an itinerant Jewish preacher from […]
November 30, 2015
Judas and the Messianic Secret
Yesterday I gave one reason for thinking that Jesus considered himself the future messiah: he almost certainly told his twelve disciples that they would be future rulers in the coming kingdom. It is hard to imagine how they could be twelve rulers in a kingdom if he himself was not the one over them, as the ultimate ruler, the king. Jesus understood the coming kingdom in an apocalyptic sense: it would be brought in by a cataclysmic act of God in which the forces of evil were destroyed prior to the utopian rulership appeared. And Jesus would be the king. In *that* sense, he was to be the future messiah. I’ll give a second reason for thinking this in my next post. For now I want to show how this understanding of Jesus’ view of himself makes sense of one other very puzzling datum, the betrayal of Judas. I don’t think there can be much doubt that Jesus really was handed over to the authorities by one of his own followers, Judas Iscariot. Some people […]
Tags: Judas Iscariot, Messianic secret
December 1, 2015
Jesus Death as King of the Jews
I now can mount a second argument for why Jesus almost certainly called himself the messiah during his lifetime. Remember: by that I do not mean that Jesus wanted to lead a military rebellion against the Romans to establish himself as king. On the contrary, I think Jesus was not a supporter of a “military solution.” Jesus was an apocalypticist who believed that God himself would take action and do what was needed – overthrow the evil ruling authorities in a cataclysmic show of power and destroy all that was opposed to himself, and so bring in a good, utopian kingdom on earth. And Jesus would be made the king. I don’t need here to give the extensive reasons for thinking that Jesus held to this kind of apocalyptic view in general – I’ve talked about it at length both in a number of my books and on the blog. The question here is the more narrow one: did Jesus think he would be the king of the coming kingdom? I have given one strong […]
Tags: historical jesus, king of the jews, messiah
December 2, 2015
Readers’ Mailbag December 4, 2015
It is time for my weekly Readers’ Mailbag. I can’t answer these questions by devoting long threads to them – even though they each deserve a thread; but I can give quick responses, and hope that will be enough for now. If you have a question you would like me to address in the future, please attach it as a comment to this post. QUESTION: It is not surprising that Jesus was an apocalyptic end-of-times messiah figure, because we have such people at least once each generation (often leading their people to disappointment if not disaster). Any thoughts on why this is such a persistent theme, even though every previous apocalypticist has been wrong? RESPONSE: Yes, a lot of my students think that the end of the world will happen sometime in their own lifetimes, that we are living at the end of time, that things taking place in our world are happening in fulfillment of Scripture, that these are the last days proclaimed by the prophets. And why wouldn’t they […]
Tags: apocalypticism, John the Baptist, textual criticism
December 4, 2015
Many Thanks and One More Chance!
Many, many thanks to everyone who has so generously donated blog memberships to people who otherwise cannot afford them. The outpouring of support has been gratifying, as in the past two years. You donors will be making some people very happy. Last year (2014) we gathered in just over 70 free memberships, which, when I put them on offer, got snapped up quickly. In each case I asked the person to explain their situation, and many of them were heart-rending. (Those who simply wanted a freebie I turned down, obviously.) This year, thanks to many generous members of the blog, we have had just over 50 memberships donated. If anyone wants still to make a donation to get us up to our levels in past years, I am more than happy to accept them. Just send me an email to that effect, indicating how many you would want to donate (anywhere from one to 100,000 would be gratefully accepted), at $25 per donation, and then click the DONATE link on the home page. Again, many thanks […]
December 6, 2015