Attitudes and Reactions to Jesus
Exorcist, healer and itinerant preacher, Jesus is portrayed by the Synoptists as a person towards whom his contemporaries rarely, if ever, remained indifferent. Their reactions were by no means always favourable, but on the other hand, they were not generally hostile either.
A small group of devotees, simple Galilean folk, joined him from the beginning – ‘after John had been arrested’99 – and became his travelling companions. The Twelve, an even smaller group, were later chosen to be his disciples par excellence.100 So impressed were they by his powerful personality that they left everything to follow him – work, possessions and family.101 Yet, heroic though they may have become after Jesus’ death, consecrating themselves wholeheartedly to the continuation of his lifework, they are not depicted in the Gospels as particularly quick at understanding the mind and preaching of their master while he was alive,102 or brave at the time of his ordeal, when they all deserted him.103 They remained in hiding, in fact, for nearly two months before their first reported reappearance in public.104
Among the Galilean crowds Jesus was a great success. Large groups formed and accompanied him when the rumour went round that he was on his way to heal the sick,105 or simply when he travelled.106 He preached to multitudes in Capernaum and by the lake-side,107 and soon acquired such a renown that he ‘could no longer show himself in any town, but stayed outside in the open country’.108
Although his fame apparently also aroused curiosity outside Galilee,109 he is not described as a welcome visitor in non-Jewish areas. The inhabitants of Gerasa requested him to leave their country,110 and as a Jew travelling to Jerusalem he is represented as a persona non grata in Samaria.111 As for Judea, only two cities are said by the Synoptic Gospels – which allude to no more than one brief journey to the southern province – to have surrounded Jesus with great numbers: Jericho112 and Jerusalem. In two out of three Marcan passages, however, the Jerusalem multitude is found in the precincts of the Temple, i.e. a place where immediately before Passover large groups of people would have gathered irrespective of whether Jesus was there or not.113 Mark’s third story, that of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, tells of ‘many’ carpeting the road with their cloaks,114 and the Matthean parallel refers to ‘crowds of people’.115 Luke, on the other hand, is positive, and this time presumably correct, in attributing the entire happy and noisy welcome, not to the Jerusalem crowd, but to ‘the whole company of his disciples’.116 Whichever way this story is interpreted, the evangelists clearly convey the impression that the popularity of Jesus in Judea and Jerusalem did not match that which he enjoyed in his own country.
Jesus and John the Baptist
The true relationship between Jesus and his associates, and the company led by John the Baptist, is more difficult to determine. The aim of the Gospel writers was, no doubt, to give an impression of friendship and mutual esteem, but their attempts smack of superficiality and closer scrutiny of the admittedly fragmentary evidence suggests that, at least on the level of their respective disciples, sentiments of rivalry between the two groups were not absent.
That Jesus went to be baptized by John is enough to prove the Baptist’s initial impact on him. Mark has little further to say on the matter except to draw a distinction between the two religious circles,117 and to report the curious belief, shared by the Tetrarch Herod and others, that Jesus was a kind of reincarnation of John, a John redivivus.118 Together with the other Synoptists, he also relates a polemic between Jesus and the chief priests, lawyers and elders regarding the origin, divine or human, of John’s baptism in which neither party openly discloses its mind.119
Matthew and Luke, in contrast to Mark, put into words John’s feelings towards Jesus, as well as those of Jesus towards the Baptist. At their first encounter, according to these two evangelists, John recognizes Jesus’ superiority.120 Later, when he is imprisoned, he is depicted as having despatched two of his pupils to ask for formal admission from Jesus that he was ‘the one who is to come’, or that some other person was still to be expected.121 Jesus, busy with healing, was unwilling to give a straight reply and his return message takes the form of a free quotation from various verses of Isaiah, all announcing cure and consolation.122
Jesus, for his part, proclaims John as the greatest in the long series of Israelite prophets, the one in whom the words of Malachi have come true, i.e. the returning Elijah, the precursor of the Messiah.123 At the same time, he is also reported to have said that though John may have been the greatest of men, ‘the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he’.124
It is on the interpretation of this remark by Jesus, and of the Baptist’s enquiry concerning Jesus’ role, that a correct assessment of the non-Marcan material concerning the two men depends.
For – supposing it to be historically conceivable that messengers were sent to Jesus by the imprisoned John, with the attendant implications of a rather enlightened jail administration under Herod Antipas, visiting hours, and an open line of communication with the outside world – what can be the meaning of ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to expect some other?’125 Since, it should be stressed, the question was put after the news of ‘what Christ was doing’ had reached the Baptist126 – who, according to Matthew, had acknowledged Jesus’ role when he baptized him – the words quoted are bound to express doubt: the Messiah is expected to do better than heal and exorcise, so if you are he, make haste and prove it. Jesus avoids the implied query, reasserts his healing mission, and indirectly reproaches those whose faith in him was small:
‘Happy is the man who does not find me a stumbling-block!’127
The apparent sting in the tail of Jesus’ praise of John – ‘the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he’ – has baffled many an interpreter. Some have seen in it a contrast between the future glory of the elect, and John’s greatness on earth. Others identify ‘the kingdom’ as the realm of the spirit resulting from the ministry of Jesus and belonging to a higher sphere than the world of the Baptist. Others still understand the phrase, ‘the least in the kingdom’, as a description of Jesus as the servant of God. The first two interpretations are too theological for serious consideration by a historian, but the third is plausible at least as far as its acceptance as a reference to Jesus is concerned. The Servant concept itself becomes less relevant when it is recalled that in Aramaic and Hebrew the phrase, ‘the least one’, ‘the smallest one’, can be used in the chronological sense to designate the youngest or last person in a series. In the belief of the evangelists, Jesus was God’s ultimate envoy, and although it is by no means sure that the words are his own, their significance is: John was very great, but I am greater.
If this explanation is right, it may be inferred that the disciples of Jesus unhesitatingly asserted their master’s pre-eminence over John. An echo to this mood of rivalry in the Gospels makes itself heard in the apostles’ attempt to silence an outsider who dared to cast out demons in Jesus’ name,128 as well as in the complaint of John’s followers, preserved only in the Fourth Gospel, that baptism by Jesus is improper and disrespectful towards their teacher.129
The conflict arising from Jesus’ admiration for the Baptist, and the jealousy of the two groups of disciples, is resolved in the compromise that John, recognized as the precursor, acknowledges the superiority of Jesus at the time of his baptism, or, better still, when they are both in their mothers’ wombs.130 Yet it is interesting to notice that, in contrast to this laboured insistence on the precedence of Jesus over John, Mark is satisfied with a straightforward presentation of Jesus as John’s successor, without discussing their relationship beyond the exegesis, by implication, of Isaiah 40: 3: ‘Prepare a road for the Lord through the wilderness, clear a highway across the desert for our God.’131