Among the most insistent as to Jesus’ identity and, consequently, the formation and development of the Christian church, no one perhaps has been more adamant than Vermes.
Returning to the upheaval caused by the migration of Christianity from
a Jewish milieu to pagan Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece and Rome –
there can be little doubt that if in one sense some continuity persisted, in
another, the uprooting was so thorough that as a source for the historical
understanding of Jesus of Nazareth, the reliability of the Gentile church,
together with all its literature, composed especially for it, can be ruled out.
In many respects, the Hebrew Bible, the Pseudepigrapha, the Qumran writings,
and the enormous body of rabbinic literature, are better equipped to illuminate
the original significance of words and deeds recorded in the gospels.49
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Bold, to be sure; without taking into consideration all his references, rabbinic literature (begun after Jesus’ death) is unlikely to adequately interpret the figure of Jesus. The variations of our sources, Hebrew and Greek, make any one tradition insufficient. Scholarship is polarized. “Palestinian Judaism in Jesus’ day was so Hellenized at all levels of society that it is no longer adequate to look at the Jesus tradition in the light of mainly Jewish sources. Rather, one must rely primarily on Greek sources to make sense of the Jesus material.”50 That Jesus scholarship is so divided on the question of culture indicates not so much a problem as the need, from the outset, to indicate one’s presuppositions and perspective. The Jewish and Hellenistic emphasis turns to the available sources as possible guides to interpretation; and though not without merit or relevance, once again the sources (used by the gospel writers) can in no way determine how Jesus conceived himself. Aune provides one momentary but still unsatisfying alternative. “The Christianity of the New Testament is a creative combination of Jewish and Hellenistic traditions transformed into a tertium quid, ‘a third something’): that is, a reality related to two known things but transcending both.”51 The difficulty of situating Jesus culturally become noticeable – at the beginning and ending of his study – in Barnett’s incompatible claims. “The history of the New Testament was a sacred history, fulfilling and ending all that had gone before in the sacred history of the Old Testament. As such, a New Testament history could not be conceived as a mere succession of haphazard events. God lay behind this history as the undergirded the history of the Old Testament.” Despite his initial position, with God intervening and “fulfilling and ending” his vision of history, Barnett adds: “key elements in Jesus’ teachings … cannot be accounted adequately by appeal to the religious culture of Judaism and Hellenism.”52 It has been accepted as a matter of course, as indisputable, that Jesus was influenced by already existing ideas; that he confronted prevailing norms was certainly an aspect of his life and teaching. His dialogues with members of the Jerusalem temple leadership – scribes, priests, elders, Pharisees – were relentless and marked, at times, by ←22 | 23→hostility and anger. Jesus made enemies; some despised him and long-hoped for his death. What remains to be interpreted are the ideas he expressed and how they were uttered for the first time and were without any antecedents. An anti-historicist hermeneutics – motivated, first of all, by suspicion, reflection, and recollection – must now turn to the gospels as narrative.
Jesus is present as logos.
Among the most vocal and also most impressive responders to the claims made by scholars within the tradition of the quest for the historical Jesus has been Luke Timothy Johnson. In one of a series of exchanges, “Learning the Human Jesus: Historical Criticism and Literary Criticism,”53 he argues for a reading of the Gospels as narratives and through a careful and literary engagement with its “full literary integrity.” In this way, “the Gospels are read literarily rather than historically.” The strength of Johnson’s argument lies in less considering an event in Jesus’ life or one of his sayings than what any one narrative description contributes to “the character of Jesus within the narrative.” Johnson has made it clear: the character of Jesus can be known. There are many moments when Jesus makes his human self known in his moods. Johnson has been consistent in this regard: “there is one aspect of Jesus’ humanity on which the New Testament witnesses remarkable unanimity, and that is Jesus’ character.”54
The reader respects the narratives as the medium of meaning regarding
Jesus and engages the Gospel narratives in the way that literary critics
engage other such narratives, with specific attention to the literary elements
of plot, character and theme… such a disciplined reading engages the human
Jesus as a literary character in the narratives written about him within fifty
to seventy years after his death. (168)
To add to Johnson’s argument for being able to access Jesus’ character – and all four gospels are in no way incompatible on his character – a further analysis will be attempted here: it is not only his character that can be assessed, but also his self-conception and what it means for anyone who begins to understand the purpose of his teaching. A hermeneutics of the gospels does not concern itself either with a method or with a theory; it presupposes, from the beginning, that ←23 | 24→understanding is an ontological condition, and one with a particularly dynamic ability when it is animated by the spirit – and the reader may choose to understand the word (for themselves) any way they like, as theological, existential, or both. To interpret and understand Jesus should, in principle and with sufficient commitment, lead not to the recognition of the gospels themselves as a “new creation,” but to the gospels as making possible a new creation, for an individual, for the whole world, from out of the revelations of Jesus. It is therefore necessary, prior to turning to his life and words, to establish how a hermeneutics, to be effective, will have to be revelatory and allow the reader to experience the possibility of becoming “regenerated,” ontologically changed.
Distinct from the insistence on the discipline of history and on restraining Jesus to a particular context, others have made quite different proposals; far from understanding him from his historical or cultural contexts, there have been unique calls to regard him as someone who is, according to von Balthasar, “the absolutely singular.” His presence “does not result from a combination or synthesis of Jewish and Hellenistic expectations. It is incapable of being expected.”55 In order to prepare for the hermeneutic responsibility of representing Jesus independently of history – he emerges in the world precisely to breach the limits of the historical, beginning with his virgin birth – some preliminary arguments are necessary. To understand Jesus historically (he was, reductively, a product of his place and time) fails to recognize him as an individual who conceived himself. Jesus raised himself, from childhood; he did not come into being by emulating others. Rather than confining him to the particularity of time and place,