Jesus: A Biography From a Believer.

Table of Contents

 

 

ALSO BY PAUL JOHNSON

 

VIKING

VIKING

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First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Paul Johnson, 2010

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Johnson, Paul, 1928-

Jesus : a biography from a believer / Paul Johnson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN : 978-1-101-19766-0

1. Jesus Christ—Biography. I. Title.
BT301.3.J64 2010
232.9’01—dc22
[B] 2009047214

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J
ESUS OF NAZARETH WAS, in terms of his influence, the most important human being in history. He is also the most written about and discussed. The earliest surviving document dealing with him, St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, was circulated (that is, copied and published) in the fifties of the first century AD, about twenty years after his death. By then, biographies of him written in the Aramaic tongue he normally spoke were circulating, but these have since disappeared. Within half a century of his death, however, four biographies, written in Greek, had been published, and all have come down to us. By the end of the century, forty-five authentic documents about him had appeared, and these have also survived. Since then, first documents, then entire books about him have been published in growing quantity, and in all languages. Today, there are over one hundred thousand printed biographies of Jesus in English alone, and many more monographs. More than one hundred were issued in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

The religion which commemorates Jesus’s teachings, death, and Resurrection was well established in half a dozen countries by AD 50. His followers were already known as “Christians,” a term joyfully adopted by the faithful, even though it was coined in Antioch, a city notorious for its slang neologisms. The number of Christians has increased ever since, and is now about 1.25 billion. Although static or declining in some parts of the world, Christianity is growing in Asia and Latin America, and especially in Africa. The first Christian place of worship dates from about AD 50, and the now nearly one million chapels, churches, basilicas, abbeys, and cathedrals include many of the largest, most remarkable, and beautiful buildings ever erected: indeed, the influence of Christianity has been perhaps the single biggest factor in the development of architecture over the last two millennia. The image of Jesus is the most favored subject matter in painting and sculpture, and the Christian influence is similarly predominant in poetry, music, and all the other arts, except photography, the cinema, and the electronic media, though even in these Christ’s likeness is common. In many ways—and in cultural and moral respects especially—Jesus’s life, and the faith it created, are the central events in the history of humanity, around which all revolves not only today but, I foresee, in the future.

So far we have considered the influence of Jesus as man. But the reason he has been so important as a man is not merely his human nature and personality, or his actions, but the fact, which all Christians have believed as I believe, that he was and is God, too. The unique event of someone both God and man appearing on earth is the essence of Christianity. What is the explanation for this singular phenomenon? It is a mystery, as are so many of the fundamental questions which face us in life, and we can only conjecture. How to make humans worthy of existing alongside their Creator? The answer is provided in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

Since God is omniscient and omnipresent, we must assume that this scheme of salvation, and this ultimate human consequence, was prefigured in the creation of time and space, and that therefore God was, ab initio, Trinitarian in nature, monotheistic but also three in one: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Why was the salvation process made operative in 4 BC with the birth of Jesus and not sooner or later? Since God exists outside space and time, which are mere ephemeral devices to enable humanity to evolve and be tested, then saved, the question (natural though it seems to me) is nugatory. It is also futile for us to inquire into the nature of Jesus and God, and his preexistence from the beginning, since that is unknowable, let alone the future, which is still hidden from us.

What we can do, however, is write about Jesus the man, during his life in which, in the words of St. John, he “dwelt among us . . . full of grace and truth” (1:14). His life has been written more often than that of any other human being, with infinite variations of detail, employing vast resources of scholarship, and often controversially, not to say acrimoniously. Scholarship, like everything else, is subject to fashion, and it was the fashion, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for some to deny that Jesus existed. No serious scholar holds that view now, and it is hard to see how it ever took hold, for the evidence of Jesus’s existence is abundant. Roman secular writers much closer to his time, such as Pliny, Tacitus, and Suetonius, took it for granted, as did the accurate and conscientious Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the generation after Jesus’s death. Moreover, unlike the overwhelming majority of famous figures in antiquity, whose existence has never been questioned, Jesus was the subject of four biographies, one written by an eyewitness, the others transcripts of verbal accounts by eyewitnesses, all made public within thirty to forty years of his death, and all agreeing in essentials. They are confirmed in many details by contemporary letters circulated by Jesus’s followers.

The problem with writing the life of Jesus the man is not so much the paucity of sources as their abundance, and the difficulty in reaching behind the written text to the full meaning of sayings and episodes which need to be explained afresh to each generation. There is the further problem of presenting to readers, two millennia later, the personality of a man so extraordinary and protean, passionate yet deliberative, straightforward and subtle, full of authority and even, at times, stern, yet also infinitely kind, understanding, forgiving, and loving, so dazzling in his excellences that those close to him had no hesitation in accepting his divinity. Yet it is one of the glories of Christianity that writers of all periods have felt it possible to venture their own portraits of the man.

The sketch that follows, broad of brush and yet pointillist on occasion, reflects many years of reading and historical study. Apart from references to the Gospel texts (all in the King James Version), I do not cite my authorities, though I am prepared to defend all my assertions, if challenged, by documentation. My objects have been clarity and brevity, and my desire is to convey the joy and nourishment I receive in following Jesus’s footsteps and pondering his words.

T
HE WORLD INTO WHICH Jesus was born was harsh, cruel, violent, and unstable. It was also materialistic and increasingly wealthy. The great fact of geopolitics was Rome and its possessions, in the process of transforming itself from a republic into an empire. It now occupied the shores of the entire Mediterranean, from which one of its great men, Pompey, had driven all the pirates which once infested it, using ruthless methods of brutality, torture, and large-scale public executions. As a result, trade was expanding fast and many cities and individuals doubled their riches in the generation before Jesus was born.

Rome, pushing inland from the Mediterranean, now occupied all of Italy and Spain, as well as Greece and Egypt, and what we call Turkey. Between 50 and 60 million people now came under its laws. Fifty years before Jesus was born, Julius Caesar had added the whole of Gaul (modern France) to Roman territory, and he had even carried out two reconnaissances to Britain, though it was not conquered until fifteen years after Jesus’s death. The expanding empire was based upon muscle power rather than technology, thanks to about 15 million slaves, who constituted one-third of the population in the towns, and whose life was summed up by Aristotle in four words: “work, punishment, and food.” The cost of two years’ food bought a skilled slave. Though neither scientists nor technicians, the Romans were lawyers and builders. Their laws were uniform throughout the civilized world and enforced with horrific severity, the instrument of justice being the crucifix on which malefactors were nailed and left to die. The Romans made superb roads, and they had discovered the virtues of cement, which, when mixed with agglomerates, constituted concrete. The Roman Empire was built on concrete: it enabled the Romans to create immense aqueducts to bring fresh water to their cities, as well as to erect huge public buildings. Rome had not produced a culture as splendid as that of Greece. Most of the statues which adorned its cities were copies of Greek models, and it had nothing so fine as the Athens Parthenon to show. But the Forum in Rome was already spectacular in its grandeur, and the city’s Pantheon, being built in Jesus’s lifetime, was revolutionary in its enclosure of vast space. Rome had a growing literature, too. Its national poet, Virgil, died fifteen years before Jesus was born, and its greatest lyricist, Horace, four years before. But Ovid, its love poet, was still alive, aged thirty-nine in 4 BC. Livy completed his great history of Rome when Jesus was a teenager. Seneca, a dramatist and philosopher, was born in the same year as Jesus. The great marble sculpture known as
Laocoön and His Sons,
now in the Vatican Museums, was created in his childhood.