Jesus, we hardly knew ye

One of the more ironic stories of the Bible (and the Bible has lots of irony) was in this past Sunday’s lectionary reading from Mark. In it Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” It seems like such a modern question, echoing our constant concern for appearance and others’ opinion of us.

After hearing various responses, Jesus then puts the question directly to his disciples and Peter makes his famous declaration, “You are the messiah.” The story is oddly ambiguous, however. In Mark’s version (the earliest of the gospels), Jesus responds by telling the disciples to say nothing about this. (He does not, actually, even affirm Peter’s verdict.) Luke pretty much copies Mark. Matthew, however, puts a ringing endorsement of Peter on Jesus’ lips, saying that Peter did not figure this out on his own but it was a revelation from God himself.

Who was/is Jesus? The confusion is present right from the start, as the gospel writers clearly realized. This truth is now readily acknowledged by biblical scholars and church historians. Officially, at least, churches try to maintain that Jesus has an essentially singular and consistent identity but it’s a tough stance to defend. It doesn’t take much effort to see that the New Testament is largely a collection of polemical writings arguing with each other, or with opponents off stage, about the nature and meaning of Jesus. It’s hard to imagine how the Jesus of the synoptic gospels and the Jesus of John were inspired by a single person. And the Jesus(es) of the gospels seems virtually unknown to the New Testament’s earliest writer, Paul.

Moving from the biblical period into the first centuries of the church, the divisions became deeper and more numerous. When the empire decided Christianity would be the new glue to hold itself together, it demanded that the church acquire a more unified doctrine and self-understanding. The result was a series of majority-vote decisions by assembled bishops. Many of the meetings were highly contentious and sizable dissenting minorities left unpersuaded that their viewpoints were in error. They tended to be concentrated in the Near East and North Africa, and subsequent persecutions and heavy-handed attempts at enforcing doctrinal unity left them demoralized and ripe for the Islamic tidal wave that swept in a short time later.

The official Jesus promoted by the church is Jesus the Savior, Lord of Heaven and Earth. This Jesus arrives like Superman from a world beyond to fight the forces of evil and rescue humans of good will. The comparisons were hardly hidden in the movies starring the late Christopher Reeve. The story line included his mysterious arrival as an infant, a god-like father (played by Marlon Brando who keeps speaking to him sotto voce), adoptive human parents, battles with evil, frequent experiences of being misunderstood and rejected, and even death and resurrection with a return to his heavenly home planet in between.

The movies demonstrate what Jesus as Savior has become: a cartoon figure or matinee hero. Jesus has even been turned into a toy action figure, alongside G.I. Joe. And for adults, heilsgeschichte, the church’s dramatic story of salvation, has become farce. For this is the only thing you can do with a character and a story that have become irrelevant or, to say the same thing, boring.

Who was Jesus? That, of course, is the modern question, for it asks not about an object of faith but a person of history. After two centuries of study and analysis, the main thing to say is that we know a whole lot less about him than we thought we did. There is simply not much evidence to draw from. It is now doubted that any of the New Testament writers ever actually knew him. Jesus himself left no written record. And being the obscure Galilean the gospels admit him to be, it’s totally unsurprising that there is no contemporary corroboration of his existence. Nor is it surprising, then, that some scholars now argue that Jesus, in fact, did not actually exist. Or that others say he is a composite of ancient characters, real and mythical. Or that there are those who, while not convinced of this, nonetheless concede the possibility.

Who is Jesus in the biblical record? Here the problem is not lack of material but, as biblical scholar Robert Price demonstrates in Deconstructing Jesus, an embarrassment of riches. We have too many Jesuses, Price says. As a result, the church and its theologians have been able to spin out new Jesuses like car makers design new models. For most of the church’s life these were Jesuses of proclamation but in the modern era scholars began creating “biographies” of Jesus in trying to create the Jesus of history.

Albert Schweitzer is the one who exposed this charade when he published The Quest of the Historical Jesus in 1906. Why, he asked, did each theologian’s Jesus look so much like, well, that theologian? The answer was that the abundance of Jesus material allowed each of them to pick what they liked and produce a character that said and did the things they approved of. The irony is that in his conclusion, Schweitzer confirms his own theory by constructing a Jesus he likes. Not long after, though, he dropped theology to become a doctor and headed off to Africa. In the century since Schweitzer’s book, biblical scholars and theologians have continued trying to assemble a definitive Jesus figure but each time end up only reconfirming Schweitzer’s judgment.

Who was Jesus? Without some dramatic Dead Sea Scrolls type discovery, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we simply will never know. Who was the Jesus of the early church’s proclamation? Studying the New Testament harder will never bring all of its Jesus figures into focus. The ongoing extra-biblical research into the early church and the religious life of the ancient world is making Jesus only murkier. Or, more positively, it is revealing a far greater diversity of understandings of Jesus than had ever been imagined.

Rather than seeing all this as a problem, however, there is actually a great opportunity here. Unfortunately, Jesus as savior is rapidly becoming the only Jesus many know. It is, of course, the Jesus promoted by evangelicalism but it is also still clung to by virtually all of the more moderate churches, as well. However much these churches might deny it, they still see Jesus as their meal ticket. He and the salvation he has to give are the candy to get people into their pews. Even as the diminished power of such an image becomes obvious, churches are reluctant to let it go since it’s all they’ve known.

Yet that is what they need to do. The obvious question for Jesus the savior has become unanswerable for modern people: Saved from what, for what? The stick of hell is no longer taken seriously and the carrot of heaven has become a distant blur. As modern study has demonstrated, however, Jesus is a much richer and more complex figure than this. Yet Jesus the savior crowds all this out and takes over any room he enters.

So, as the late Robert Funk says in Honest to Jesus,it’s time to give Jesus a demotion. “He deserves it.” It’s time to get Jesus out of heaven and off his throne. The universe doesn’t need a lord, king or savior. As his earthly representative and embassy, the church may feel suddenly irrelevant. Too bad. If it has a role, it can only be to tell the story of the Jesus who had no place to lay his head, who travelled not on angels’ wings but by foot or on a donkey, who sought no political power but died like a criminal, a victim of injustice.

In short, Jesus needs to be rediscovered as the compassionate, inspiring, challenging, and infuriating character the gospels present him to be. A human Jesus still has something to say to our now distant world. A Jesus reigning in heaven is only of interest to religious and art historians. Only by keeping Jesus in the past can he be of any value to us in the present.