Smith tells us that “the most frequent use of the terminology of the ‘unique’ within religious studies is in relation to Christianity.”56 Mack adds: “the fundamental persuasion is that Christianity appeared unexpectedly in human history, ←24 | 25→that it was (is) at core a brand new vision of human existence, and that, since this is so, only a startling moment could account for its emergence at the beginning.”57 More particularly for what follows, “the startling moment” must necessarily begin with the life of Jesus. If he accomplished anything at all, it was his example of being capable of offering a vision of the world, that is, human beings and the limits of history that could transcend tradition and thereby inaugurate a break in time that could not be eschatologically initiated by a principle outside itself. From out of himself Jesus creates the unforeseen, indeed, a revelation and an apokalypsis that cannot be reducible to an event (or a series of catastrophes) leading to a transitional end precisely because the occurrence happened first and foremost in individuals, those listening to him, certainly, and those – like Paul and Timothy – who ventured into the world and did nothing more than talk to people in small gatherings, in synagogues and homes, in markets and in open places.
Schleiermacher has a reminder from his 1819 Lectures on hermeneutics: the assumption that the gospel writers are products of their ages, and their language(s) – as the “historical school” he addresses believes – does not take into consideration how Jesus cannot be constrained by the same imposition. “The only danger in their reasoning is their tendency to overlook the power of Christianity to create new concepts and forms of expression; they tend to explain everything in light of available concepts and forms. To correct the historical style of interpretation one has to resist this one-sidedness.”58 More importantly, rather than thinking of Christianity, as a tradition, creating new concepts or new forms of expression, it is rather Jesus himself who first revealed them; and what the gospel writers then attempt to do in their account is to portray the full, the infinite, consequences of his revelations for a humanity now given the opportunity to actualize the world he makes possible. The reader’s hermeneutics has the task of reading the gospel accounts as strained; the gospel writers are attempting to reveal the infinite meaning of Jesus with ideas, sometime related to tradition, inadequate to their individual. If, as Schleiermacher tells us, the gospels created “new concepts” (if Jesus himself revealed the new ideas to be intended as transformative) once again his words must be heard as effectual.
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In addition to the historical Jesus, whether Jewish, Hellenistic, or some outcome of both, there have been a few who have presented him as independent of the cultural influences that would have determined the lives and thoughts of everyday people. “With Jesus,” Dunn writes, though still restrained by an obvious oscillation between tradition and the new, “we see the freshness of an original mind, a new spirit, taking up old categories and concepts, remoulding them, creating them afresh, using them in a wholly new way.”59 Hengel is more decisive. “Jesus stood outside any discernible teaching tradition of Judaism.”60 For his unprecedented individuality to be revealed from out of the four gospels, then, certain moments of his life will have to be understood as unique. Hamerton-Kelly draws attention to others as they listen to Jesus and the “astonishment of the onlookers and hearers who ask about the source of all this teaching, indicating that it is altogether new and unparalleled in their experience.”61 It cannot be emphasized enough how those listening to Jesus’ teaching realize it has no “parallels,” as Hamerton-Kelly emphasizes, and therefore cannot be compared to any prior teaching. Jesus can neither be anticipated by the past nor understood (as he understands himself) by appealing to a prior historical utterance; when Jesus repeats prophetic words verbatim from memory, it is more likely a gospel interpolation than authentic, as will be the words accumulated together as the Olivet discourse and the apparent but by no means self-evident eschatology of Mark 13.
For some, the quest for the historical Jesus, and in particular defining him according to a specific place and time (Jewish, Hellenistic, a combination of the two, or a Christian interpretation) fails to consider him not simply as unique, but as self-generating. Bultmann writes: “First there occur in history events which are new and decisive … Nothing is comparable with it.”62 To affirm the life of Jesus is incomparable also means he is unprecedented; no prior history ←26 | 27→(prophetic or otherwise) can lay claim to his appearance, his enduring presence. He cannot be anticipated since Jesus conceives of himself as being anterior to history, and certainly to the Jewish history initiated by the patriarch Abraham – a problem, parenthetically, the gospel writers most concerned with genealogy (Matthew and Luke) cannot realize; they cannot see the discrepancy between their narrative of the virgin birth and the extensive (and contrived) genealogy of Jesus and his descent. Jesus cannot be a descendant, or an heir; he is a “first-born.”
Recalling but three fundamental categories, Breech provocatively writes that “there is absolutely no basis for assuming that Jesus shared the cosmological, mythological, or religious ideas of his contemporaries.”63 Among one of the very few to make his assertion unequivocal, Breech has the merit of regarding Jesus without any necessary relationship to his “contemporaries” or to any of their beliefs and ideas; in other words, if Jesus’ ideas are independent of his contemporaries, they are also, more importantly, independent of any ideas from the past and from an inherited tradition – whether patriarchal, prophetic, or monarchical. When Breech further argues that “we cannot approach Jesus as a ‘historical personage’, assuming that his world-attitudes are totally circumscribed by the language and assumptions of a first-century Galilean,” here he makes a bold and appealing claim – one radically anti-historicist; if Jesus cannot be limited by history, he must certainly not be aligned (as Sanders does in Jesus and Judaism64) to an eschatological anticipation, whether narrowly understood as a nationalist aspiration and confined to the Jewish people or a much more comprehensive phenomenon. Stauffert argues that “Jesus is much less a child of his time and of his people than has hitherto been widely thought.” Indeed, stressing his uniqueness allows him to further add that Jesus is “without parallel – in history, not only the history of Palestine.”65 It is within such a tradition that a hermeneutics of the gospels will attempt to follow and contribute, now, to a renewed consideration of how Jesus shows himself to be without parallel and without precedent, characterized by an “unmistakable otherness.”66 Jesus may have been perceived as a prophet, yet he “surpassed all his predecessors inasmuch as what his ministry was ushering in was greater than all that had happened hitherto. ←27 | 28→He could not therefore be appropriately described as simply this or that figure of the past redivivus or as their successor, nor did he fully match up to any one of the current expectations of contemporary Judaism.”67 Jesus cannot emerge from out of tradition since he conceives himself as not only prior to any foundational patriarch much less monarchical, but as prior to the word bringing creation into being. “The novelty represented by Jesus can no longer be described by recalling anything similar in history.”68