In Very Many Ways He's Just One More
Tillich speaks of the religious reality per se, but one can apply the same principle to Jesus and religious evaluations of him, as Carl Michaelson does: "When the early church wanted to talk about Jesus of Nazareth, what did it do? It borrowed myths from everywhere. That was a big mistake."21 Why? Because to say Jesus is the "son of God" is to put him in the same general classification as Perseus, Theseus, Hercules, Pythagoras. To make him the "Messiah" is to make him merely one more candidate for the job of nationalistic deliverer of Judea; to say he is a dying and rising savior is just to build him a shrine alongside those of Attis, Adonis, Tammuz, and Osiris. There was no dearth of supposed sons of God, messiahs ("You Jews produce messiahs by the sackful!"), and dying saviors in the Greco-Roman world. Whatever uniqueness Jesus may have had was not highlighted but rather obscured by defining him in terms of these ancient religious categories. You hear him described with one of these categories and you say, "Oh, another one of those. Right, gotcha." What happened to any idea that Jesus had anything distinctive to say?
The early Christians tried to safeguard the uniqueness of Jesus by saying all the other sons of God, messiahs, and dying gods were fakes, Satanic counterfeits, and that Jesus was the only real one. Just like a commercial I heard on TV tonight while searching for one of the books I have quoted: "Don't believe any of those phony bunko psychic hotlines you see advertised on TV. There's only one genuine one--ours!" Hey, I've got news for you: if you shut down all the other psychic 900 numbers, you've still got nothing left but fakes. What the early Christians did not see was that even if they eliminated all the competing name brand sons of God, messiahs and saviors, if they cornered the religious market, as they eventually did, they had still reduced Jesus to the conventional stereotypes represented by all these categories they had applied to Jesus. The categories defined Jesus; Jesus had no chance of redefining them, or religion in general. And Jesus of Nazareth was lost, absorbed in familiar mythic-religious categories one could easily take for granted. And pious Christians are still taking him for granted, like a comfortable teddy bear, like a convenient ventriloquist dummy to mouth their own opinions in a King James accent. Jesus has become habitualized. We can no longer see him, because we think we have him all figured out. I don't need to stop and try to figure out how to tie my shoes. I can do it automatically by now. John the Baptizer said he was unworthy to tie Jesus' shoelaces. We have made Jesus as predictable and ignorable as tying our own laces.
These considerations, Michaelson said (and as Dietrich Bonhoeffer had already pointed out some two decades earlier in a letter written in a Nazi death row cell), explain why Rudolf Bultmann thought it necessary for us to "demythologize" the gospels to get at the distinctive element of Jesus ("If you strip away the myth from the man, you will see..."). And this is precisely why the common believer takes such umbrage at theologians and Bible scholars like Bultmann and like today's Jesus Seminar who do try to strip away the myths (at least to interpret them in modern terms).
Why is it important to strip away the myths? Theologically, it is to take away a grand excuse Christians have given themselves to ignore the perilous, radical ethical demands of Jesus. Turn the other cheek? Give your riches to the poor? Not me, pal! It is quite convenient, as Max Scheler pointed out,22 to say that such things are impossible for mere human beings, that Jesus was able to live like this only because he was really God. And because he did it, and then died to save us from the penalty of our miserable, mediocre existences, we can sit back and breathe a sigh of relief. Not only did he take away our sin, but he took away our responsibility too. As Bonhoeffer called it,23 that's "cheap grace."
For these or other reasons, orthodox Christianity has always given lip service to the notion of Jesus' genuine and full humanity while silently putting the thumb on the divine side of the scales. They wanted Jesus to be basically, primarily God. Thus the official creed which makes Jesus a divine person with a human nature. The humanity turns out to be a sham. It is to stop playing these evasive and logic-twisting games that many theologians and historians, both within and without the churches, have tried to "strip away the myth from the man." They wanted to take an unflinching look at Jesus and his demands. They suggested trying to redo "Christology from below," that is, to reformulate our views of Jesus from the standpoint (insofar as we may be able to imagine it) occupied by Jesus' contemporaries, both followers and opponents.
In this attempt to get a fresh look at Jesus, Jesus' humanity must be given priority, not his supposed divinity. Why? Because Jesus must have been perceived as man, albeit a remarkable one, not as a haloed demigod striding the earth. If Peter, Andrew, James, John and the others came to faith in Jesus, they must have initially had faith in one they deemed a man. Only gradually, after much hindsight reflection, could they have come to deem him God. John's Gospel makes this quite clear (John 2:22; 16:12-13; 20:9). Otherwise it is senseless to speak of a gradual coming to faith, such as the gospels describe. If Jesus had been something like Superman or Hercules, what room could there be for a single instant's doubt? And, by the same token, how could anyone not have believed in him? There remained sufficient of ambiguity, plenty of it, for faith in Jesus to be a real risk, a leap of faith. There is no faith where you have pat and evident certainty about something.
Just the Same as Anyone I Know
We can draw two inferences from all this. First, you have to do what Tim Rice admitted he did: to look at Jesus as a man, not as God. You're going to have to choose between the superhuman and therefore inhuman Jesus (well played, i.e., robotically, by Max von Sydow in The Greatest Story Ever Told) or the human Jesus. In the former case, you explain Jesus and what he did simply appealing to the sovereign will of God. Jesus did not have to think over his priorities, his beliefs, his strategies. He just went to the cross in the same way an equation reaches its sum, impassively, thoughtlessly, inevitably. In the latter case, Jesus would have been motivated by fears and ideals, would have struggled over important decisions, been the sort of person we can all identify with. His sacrifice, like that of Gandhi or Dr. King, would be all the more noble and poignant because it would have been genuine and costly and avoidable though not avoided.
Martin Kähler, in a book called The So-called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ, rejected any attempt to make Jesus understandable in human psychological or historical terms. He said that such an explicable and accountable Jesus was simply not the Jesus Christ of Christian faith who was the Son of God and did nothing but the will of God. In short, he opted for the myth, not the man. Rice, like today's revisionist historians and theologians, has chosen the man. And yet it is possible to start from the New Testament gospel texts and reach either conclusion, since the gospels are mixtures of history and myth. Most of the time, I think, we see the mythic Jesus, the son of God, messiah, rising god Jesus (the one Kähler wanted) in the pages of the gospels, but occasionally we see an echo of something else, of someone else: a human Jesus. And these passages are the ones Tim Rice has chosen as his starting point. These are the places where Jesus is shown speaking or acting with uncertainty, ignorance, irritability, or petulance. There are five important passages.
The first is the scene of the anointing of Jesus in Bethany, where Mary the sister of the resurrected Lazarus pours expensive balm on Jesus to show him special honor and Judas raises a ruckus over this extravagance, while Jesus defends her action in seemingly self-serving terms (John 12:1-8). The second is the unsuccessful visit of Jesus to his home town Nazareth; he gets a distinctly chilly reception and is astonished at their lack of faith, which inhibits his ability to heal any of them. It occurs first in Mark 6:1-6. The later gospel writers found this portrayal disturbing enough to rewrite the story in various ways, omitting both the element of Jesus being taken by surprise and that of his being rendered incapable of healing (see Matthew 26:6-13; Luke 7:36-50; John 12:1-8). This, by the way, is a good example of redaction criticism, a method I will