Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (16 page)

So Jesus was convinced of his special mission to preach a message from God which centred on an imminent transformation of the world, yet he spoke of himself with deliberate irony and ambiguity, and used a delicate humour that is revealed in the content of some of his sayings. He spoke of his special place in a divine plan, looked forward to a last judgement in which he would play a leading part, yet also saw that the way to this final conclusion might result in suffering and death both for himself and for his followers. He made crowds laugh. He shocked or excited them with irreverent comments on authority; so he caricatured rival religious teachers 'straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel'. He produced outrageous inversions of normality - 'Leave the dead to bury their own dead,' Jesus said to a man who wanted to postpone becoming his disciple in order to see to his father's funeral.
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This saying is clearly authentic, since Gospel writers felt bound to preserve it even though it outrages every pious norm of the ancient world and a universal human instinct; moreover, Christianity has stonily ignored the command throughout its subsequent history. Jesus puzzled people with references which apparently needed spelling out in private even to his closest followers.
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He had power: around him, as with many charismatic leaders over the centuries, there gathered stories of exceptional healings, miracles of providing food and drink, even raising apparent corpses from the dead. For a large part of Christian history, these miracles have provided much of the fascination of Jesus for those drawn to his story, though for three centuries they have increasingly aroused unease or intellectual conflict for Christians formed by the Enlightenment of the West.

Still, Jesus was a Jew immersed in the traditions that constituted the identity of his fellow Jews. He is recorded as taking a cavalier attitude to the Jewish Law or obeying its demands in ways which seem capricious, which caused anxious debate for generations about how far Christians should imitate him, and which are still puzzling after much very sophisticated modern analysis of the mixture. Maybe the answer is that Jesus did not care a great deal about being consistent on the issue, given his concentration on the imminent coming of the kingdom, in which all laws would be made anew. So he was not especially worried about special observance of the Jewish weekly holy day (the Sabbath), or various rules for ritual purity, but he cared a great deal about oaths, in particular about an agreement to enter marriage. In this respect Jesus was more hard line than regular Jewish practice embodied in the Law of Moses - too hard line indeed for the Church's later comfort. We can tell that an absolute prohibition of divorce was one of his foundation principles, since Jesus's posthumous Apostle and interpreter Paul of Tarsus (see pp. 97-102) went out of his way to contradict the unconditional 'commandment from the Lord' on this matter, and one of the Gospel writers similarly nervously modified the 'no divorce' command to allow for the circumstance of adultery.
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CRUCIFIXION AND RESURRECTION

Certainly Jesus cared profoundly about the Temple in Jerusalem. His intense feelings about it made him predict its destruction, and apparently his own ability to rebuild it in three days. He provoked a disturbance in it, protesting at what he saw as its misuse for commerce and profit, and it was the goal of his last fatal public appearances. Then he was arrested in Jerusalem, put on trial and executed along with two common criminals on a hill outside the city, by the ghastly Roman custom of crucifixion. It is a sequence of events - the 'Passion', so called from the Latin verb to suffer,
pateor
- which forms the dramatic culmination of the Gospels' account of his public ministry. There is indeed more high drama in the Passion than in the accounts of Jesus's subsequent resurrection and renewed appearances to his disciples. At the beginning of that story of humiliation, torture and death, on the night that he was betrayed to Temple and Roman authorities, is the account of his 'last supper' with the Twelve. On that occasion, not merely the Synoptic Gospels but also Paul of Tarsus, in a reminiscence of the actual earthly life of Jesus very rare in Paul's writings, record that he took bread and wine, broke the bread, gave thanks and gave them to his disciples. It was a meal taken amid the Jewish festival of the Passover, the joyful season when the Jews remembered their liberation from Egypt (see pp. 51-2). Indeed, perhaps the group was celebrating the Passover meal itself.

The death of Jesus became inextricably linked in the minds first of the witnesses, then of the later Church, with the lamb killed for a blood-soaked sacrifice in the Passover ceremonies. Jesus spoke of the bread of the supper as his body and the wine as his blood. A rich mixture of thought associations with death, sacrifice and thanksgiving for deliverance from disaster has flowed from that evening meal, into the supper drama which Christians have made the centre of their worship and have called the Eucharist. That is still the everyday Greek word for 'thanks'. There is endless and probably irresolvable debate about how this ritual meal might have related to pre-Christian Jewish worship customs and ritual thanksgivings. What is clear is that there was nothing quite like it in previous tradition. From the earliest time of its institution, it involved a recital of the words of Jesus which ordered his followers to do it in remembrance of him, and it was done as a re-enactment of that 'last supper' which Jesus had shared with his Twelve before his arrest.
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The power and mystery of the Eucharist, linking the crucified Saviour to those who break bread and drink wine ever afterwards, has provoked intense devotion, gratitude and joy among Christians, yet also deep anger and bitterness when they argue about what it means.

These Passion narratives are probably the earliest continuous material in the Gospels, a set of stories first formulated for public recital in the various communities which compiled their own accounts of his life, sufferings and resurrection. Unlike the two infancy narratives, their details have much circumstantial overlap and feel like real events, but in their present shape they are also designed to make sense of something which came to be a real problem for the later Church. The Romans killed Jesus, however much the Temple establishment, in fury and fear at the nature of his preaching, had prompted them to do so. Jesus had said nothing more outrageous about the religion of the Jews than other wild representatives of Judaism had proclaimed either before him or in his own time. His was not a theological but a political threat to the fragile stability of the region. Non-Jews killed a potential Jewish leader, as they had killed the Maccabean heroes long before. This was emphasized by the title inextricably associated with the stories of Jesus's last hours and said to have been affixed to his cross: 'King of the Jews'. Like 'Son of Man', this was not a title for which the later Christian Church found any use and so its survival in the tradition is all the more instructive. That 'King of the Jews' phrase is an inescapable repeated refrain through the Passion narratives, even despite the embarrassment which it was to cause Christians in the fraught political situation which emerged a few decades after that death on the Cross.

Most Christians did not want to be enemies of the Roman Empire and they soon sought to play down the role of the Romans in the story. So the Passion narratives shifted the blame on to the Jewish authorities, and the local representative of Roman authority - a coarse-grained soldier called Pontius Pilate - was portrayed as inquisitive and bewildered, cross-questioning the seditious prisoner before him as if Jesus were an equal and making every effort to get him off the hook. The evangelist John pictured the Jews as being forced by legal circumstance to hand over a man condemned for blasphemy to the Roman authorities if they were to secure the death sentence for him which they ardently sought.
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That is implausible, considering that three decades later the Jerusalem High Priest was directly responsible for the execution of Jesus's brother James, then leader of the Christians in Jerusalem. Additionally, the evangelist Matthew shifted blame for Jesus's death (with satisfying drama, though without any legal force) to the Jewish crowds, who in his narrative roared out, 'His blood be on us, and on our children!'
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The Christian Church has drawn much out of Matthew's literary decision. It would have been better for the moral health of Christianity if the blame had stayed with Pilate.

If that lingering and humiliating death on the Cross had been the end of the story, then the tale of Jesus would have remained embedded in Judaism. Jesus might have made it into the history books, even inspired a new departure in Jewish faith, but there would have been little likelihood of a separated or wider religion. Jesus's public ministry had been to Jews; otherwise he made some forays into the territory of their despised cousins the Samaritans and Mark and Matthew once record him straying out of this Judaic world, into 'the region of Tyre and Sidon', where he met his match in wit with a Greek-speaking 'Canaanite' woman desperate for him to cure her mentally disturbed daughter.
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Jesus spoke Aramaic as his first language. As the encounter with the Canaanite woman seems to indicate, and is in any case to be expected, he could speak marketplace Greek when he needed to, but that knowledge has left no trace even where one might expect it, in the filtered versions of his story in the Greek New Testament. Jesus left no writings - in fact the only record of his writing is of some doodles in the dirt as a diversion in a tricky situation, and we have no idea what might have been read in them on that day which saved the life of a woman taken in adultery.
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What the Gospels tell us happened after the Crucifixion was the ultimate good news: Jesus came back to human life after three days in the tomb. Somehow a criminal's death and defeat on the Cross, 'Good Friday', as Christians came to call it, were transformed by his followers into a triumph of life over death, and the Passion narratives ended with the story of Easter Resurrection. This Resurrection is not a matter which historians can authenticate; it is a different sort of truth, or statement about truth. It is the most troubling, difficult affirmation in Christianity, but over twenty centuries Christians have thought it central to their faith. Easter is the earliest Christian festival, and it was for its celebration that the Passion narratives were created by the first Christians.

Belief in the truth of the Resurrection story and in Jesus's power to overcome death has made Christians act over twenty centuries in the most heroic, joyful, beautiful and terrible ways. And the fact that Christianity's Jesus is the resurrected Christ makes a vital point about the misfit between the Jesus whose teachings we have excavated and the Church which came after him. It mattered much less to the first Christ-followers after the Resurrection what Jesus had said than what he did and was doing now, and who he was (or whom people thought him to be). And as he emerged in the first Christian writings, they now thought him to be a Greek
Christos
, not a Jewish Messiah - even though Greek-speakers beyond the Jewish milieu hardly understood what a
Christos
was, and quickly assumed that it was some sort of personal name.
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Historians might take comfort from the fact that nowhere in the New Testament is there a description of the Resurrection: it was beyond the capacity or the intention of the writers to describe it, and all they described were its effects. The New Testament is thus a literature with a blank at its centre; yet this blank is also its intense focus.

The beginning of the long Christian conversation lies in the chorus of assertions in the writings of the New Testament that after Jesus's death his tomb was found empty. He repeatedly appeared to those who had known him, in ways which confused and contradicted the laws of physics: he showed witnesses that he could be touched and felt and could be watched eating grilled fish, but he also appeared and disappeared regardless of doors or any normal means of exit and entrance. Many who at first found such claims absurd when others made them are reported as having being convinced when they had the same experience. Luke's Gospel ends with one of the most apparently naturalistic-sounding and circumstantial of these encounters: a conversation between a stranger and two former disciples, Peter and Cleopas, on the road from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus. It was only later, over a meal in Emmaus, that Peter and Cleopas recognized Jesus for who he was.
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The seventeenth-century Italian artist Caravaggio, in two of his most disturbing and exciting paintings, projected the astonishment and delight of that encounter into an ordinary room in his own time, but he also made it clear that this was a story with as many echoes as the stories in the infancy narratives (see Plate 18).

The most casual viewer of Caravaggio's paintings can see what the artist recognized in the biblical narrative: the meal of recognition at Emmaus is transparently the Church's breaking of bread and wine, echoing the Last Supper or Eucharist of the Passion narratives. All Eucharists are celebrations of the man resurrected from the dead, who meets his disciples at a most unlikely time and place, just as he did at Emmaus, which was among the most unlikely of settings for such an encounter. For one dimension of the story is that Emmaus may not have been a real place near Jerusalem at all in first-century Judaea. Two centuries before, it certainly had been a real place: the site of the first victory of the Maccabean heroes over the enemies of Israel, where 'all the Gentiles will know that there is one who redeems and saves Israel'.
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In terms of the Gospel story, Emmaus was beyond time, but it was the natural setting for the disciples to meet the one who had eclipsed the sufferings of the Maccabees in order to redeem the new Israel before the face of all people.

After some time (the accounts are contradictory, implying either a few days or forty) Jesus removed his presence from his disciples - was taken up or carried into Heaven, as two of the Gospel writers put it. Later Christians commonly called this departure the Ascension, and on occasion its final last moment has been portrayed endearingly literally in Christian art, when all that can be seen are Christ's feet disappearing into a cloud.
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Historians are never going to make sense of these reports, unless like some of those who first heard them they choose to regard them as simply ludicrous. Nevertheless they can hardly fail to note the extraordinary galvanizing energy of those who spread the story after their experience of Resurrection and Ascension, and they can reconstruct something of the resulting birth of the Christian Church, even if the story can never be more than fragmentary. Whether through some mass delusion, some colossal act of wishful thinking, or through witness to a power or force beyond any definition known to Western historical analysis, those who had known Jesus in life and had felt the shattering disappointment of his death proclaimed that he lived still, that he loved them still, and that he was to return to earth from the Heaven which he had now entered, to love and save from destruction all who acknowledged him as Lord.
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