Jesus Before Christianity PDF

# Jesus Before Christianity ## Chapter 1: A New Perspective - Many people venerate the name of Jesus but few understand him. - His words have been twisted and turned to mean everything, anything and nothing. - Jesus has been more frequently honored and worshipped for what he did not mean than for...

# Jesus Before Christianity ## Chapter 1: A New Perspective - Many people venerate the name of Jesus but few understand him. - His words have been twisted and turned to mean everything, anything and nothing. - Jesus has been more frequently honored and worshipped for what he did not mean than for what he did mean. - The supreme irony is that some of the things he opposed most strongly in the world of his time were resurrected, preached, and spread more widely throughout the world-in his name. - Jesus cannot be fully identified with Christianity. He was much more than the founder of one of the world's great religions. - He stands above Christianity as the judge of all it has done in his name. - Jesus belongs to all humanity. - Jesus was an historical person who had some very strong convictions himself-he was willing to die for them. - To understand Jesus we must have some kind of vantage-point or perspective. - Our age is characterized by problems that threaten the survival of humankind. - We live in a world capable of destroying itself at the push of a button. - The first real awareness of this came with the bomb. - The growing awareness of what was at stake made us feel more and more uneasy and insecure. - Protest, pop, drugs, long hair, and hippies were all symptoms of the unease generated by the bomb. - Today the fear of nuclear war seems to have abated. - We now find ourselves faced with new threats which will destroy us more certainly and inevitably than a nuclear war: the population explosion, the diminishing of our natural resources and food supplies, the pollution of our environment and the escalation of violence. - It seems difficult enough to persuade people to curtail their present excesses in order to secure their own future; it would be far more difficult to ask them to do so for the sake of others, and well-nigh impossible to persuade them to make all the necessary sacrifices for the sake of the billions who have not yet been born. - On the other hand, it is equally true that the world abounds in women and men of goodwill who appreciate the problems, are deeply concerned and would do anything to help. - We are up against the impersonal forces of a system that has its own momentum and its own dynamics. - We have built up an all-inclusive political and economic system that is not only counter-productive-it has brought us to the brink of disaster-but it has also become our master. Nobody seems to be able to change it. - The system was not designed to cope with a population explosion. - From an economic point of view, the system produces both wealth and poverty at the same time. The rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. The more the poor nations try to measure up to the standards of development and economic growth demanded by the system, the poorer and more underdeveloped they become. - Our present situation has become too horrible to contemplate-let alone the future. - The system was not designed to solve such problems. - The system is a monster which devours people for the sake of its profits. - Quite apart from the institutional violence of injustice, oppression and exploitation, we are now witnessing the multiplication of military governments throughout the world. - Many of those who are trying to fight the system have resorted to violence or are threatening to do so. - If something really drastic cannot be done about all the other problems (population, poverty, pollution, wastage, inflation and diminishing resources), the system will lead us into a "spiral of violence," as Helder Camara calls it, which will rapidly include us all in an act of mutual destruction. - Organized religion has been of very little help in this crisis. Sometimes it has tended to make matters worse. - The one redeeming feature of this moment in our history, its one redeeming feature, is that it can force us to be honest. - The person who has faced the present world crisis becomes impatient with those who continue to get excited about trivial and irrelevant problems, those who seem to be fiddling while Rome burns. The prospect of an unparalleled catastrophe can have a very sobering effect upon us. - Now it so happens, as I hope to show, that Jesus of Nazareth faced basically the same problem-even if it was on a much smaller scale. - Jesus lived in an age when it seemed that the world was about to come to an end. - It was in view of this catastrophe, as we shall see, and in terms of his own understanding of it, that Jesus set out on his mission. - With an unparalleled leap of creative imagination, this man saw a way out, and indeed more than a way out he saw the way to total liberation and fulfillment for humankind. - We are faced with the same terrifying prospects. - We dare not presume that he has all the answers and that we know what those answers are. - Our situation is so critical that we dare not leave any stone unturned in our search for a way out. - Our present historical circumstances have quite unexpectedly provided us with a new perspective on Jesus of Nazareth. ## Chapter 2: The Prophecy of John the Baptist - The four gospels are not biographies and were never intended to be. Their purpose was to show how Jesus could be relevant to people who lived outside Palestine a generation or two after Jesus' death. - We today are no more in need of a biography than that first generation or any other generation of Christians. - We need a book about Jesus that will show us what he might mean to us today in our situation. - We can enable Jesus to come to life again for us today only by going back behind the four gospels to discover for ourselves what Jesus had to offer to the people of Palestine in his time. - We don't need a biography but we do need to know the historical truth about Jesus. - If we make full use of the information available about the contemporary situation, we shall be able to uncover a great deal of historical information about Jesus. - The Romans colonized Palestine in 63 B.C.E. After the death of Herod the Great in 4 B.C.E, his kingdom was divided up amongst his three sons. Herod Archelaus was given Judaea and Samaria. - The epoch began with a rebellion. The issue was taxation. - The Romans had begun to take a census of the population and to draw up an inventory of the resources of the country, for the purpose of taxation. - The Jews objected on religious grounds and rose up in rebellion. - The leader of this rebellion was a man named Judas the Galilean, who founded a religiously inspired movement of freedom fighters. - The Romans soon checked this first uprising and then as a warning crucified no fewer than two thousand of the rebels. The movement continued. - The Zealots, the underground movement, sometimes breaking up into factions and sometimes joining up with some newly formed group like the Sicarii, who specialized in assassinations. - For sixty years they continued to harass the Roman army of occupation with sporadic uprisings and occasional guerilla warfare. - Then, in 66 C.E., about thirty years after Jesus' death, with mounting popular support they overthrew the Romans and took over the government of the country. - But four years later a very powerful army was sent out from Rome to destroy them. It was a merciless massacre. - The Zealots held out against the Romans from their mountain fortress of Masada until 73 C.E., when nearly a thousand of them chose to commit suicide rather than submit to Rome. - The Jews believed that they were God's chosen nation, that God was King, their only Lord and Master, and that their land and resources belonged to God alone. To have accepted the Romans as their masters would have been an act of unfaithfulness to God. - The Zealots were faithful Jews, zealous for the law and for the sovereignty and kingship of God. - The Pharisees had no quarrel with the Zealots on this score. Six thousand Pharisees refused to sign the oath of allegiance to Caesar. - Most of the Pharisees did not feel impelled to take up arms against the Romans, presumably because the odds were so heavily loaded against them. - Their principal concern was the reform of Israel itself. - The Pharisees paid their taxes to Rome under protest but then separated themselves off from everyone who was not faithful to the law and the traditions, in order to form closed communities, the faithful remnant of Israel. - Their morality was legalistic and bourgeois, a matter of reward and punishment. - God loved and rewarded those who kept the law and hated and punished those who did not. - The Pharisees believed in an after-life, in the resurrection of the dead and in a future Messiah whom God would send to liberate them from the Romans. - The Essenes went very much further than the Pharisees in their striving for perfection. - Many of them separated themselves completely from society and went to live a celibate and ascetic life in camps in the desert. - They were even more concerned than the Pharisees about ritual impurity and contamination by the wicked and unclean world. - The Essenes rejected everyone who did not belong to their "sect." - The priestly regime in the Temple was regarded as corrupt. - All outsiders were to be hated as the "sons of darkness". - Love and respect were reserved for the members of their group-the "sons of light". - Their strict separation and rigorous discipline must be understood as their response to the belief that the end of the world was near. - They were preparing for the coming of the Messiah (or perhaps two Messiahs) and for the great war in which they, as the "sons of light" would destroy the "sons of darkness", the armies of Satan. - The Essenes were therefore just as warlike as the Zealots but for them the time was not yet ripe. - In the midst of these outbursts of exceptional religious fervor, the Sadducees were the conservatives. They clung to the most ancient Hebrew traditions and rejected all novelties of belief and ritual. - The after-life and the resurrection of the dead were regarded as novelties. - Rewards and punishments were to be found in this life. - The Sadducees collaborated with the Romans and endeavored to maintain the status quo. - The Sadducees were mostly members of the wealthy aristocracy: the chief priests and elders. The chief priests not only offered sacrifices like other priests, they were also responsible for the organization and administration of the Temple. - The elders were the lay nobility, the old aristocratic families who owned most of the land. - The Sadducee party would also have included some scribes or rabbis although most of these were Pharisees, who were theologians, lawyers and teachers but they were not priests. - In the gospels the Sadducees are frequently referred to as "the chief priests, elders and scribes" or as "the leaders of the people." They were the ruling, upper class. - Mention should also be made of a small group of anonymous writers who indulged in a type of literature which we today call apocalyptic. They were seers or visionaries who believed that the secrets of God's plan for history and especially for the end of the world had been indirectly revealed to them. - These writers were possibly scribes who may have belonged to the Pharisee or Essene parties. - In the midst of all these religio-political movements and speculations there was one man who stood out as a sign of contradiction. - John the Baptist was different because he was a prophet, and indeed, like so many of his predecessors of old, a prophet of doom and destruction. - John was different from his contemporaries as any prophet ever was. While others looked forward to the "age to come" when the faithful of Israel would triumph over their enemies, John prophesied doom and destruction for Israel. - There had been no prophet in Israel for a very long time. Everyone was painfully aware of this, as all the literature of the period attests. - God was silent. All one could hear was "the echo of his voice". - This silence was broken by the voice of John the Baptist in the wilderness. - John's prophetic message was a simple one: God was angry with the people and planned to punish them. - God was about to intervene in history to condemn and destroy Israel. John pictured this destruction as a great forest fire before which the vipers flee (Mt 3:8 par). - God's fiery judgment upon Israel would be executed by a human being. John spoke of him as "the one who is to come". - A prophecy is not a prediction, it is a warning or a promise. The prophet warns Israel about God's judgment and promises God's salvation. Both the warning and the promise are conditional. - If Israel does not change, the consequences will be disastrous. - If Israel does change, there will be an abundance of blessings. - John addresses his warning and his appeal to all Israel. - They must not imagine that it is the Gentiles who are heading for destruction and that the children of Abraham will be spared because of their ancestry and race. - John appealed to sinners, prostitutes, tax collectors and soldiers as well as scribes and Pharisees (Lk 3:12, 14; Mt 21:32). - He even challenged the Jewish king or tetrarch, Herod Antipas (Mk 6:18 par; Lk 3:19). There is no question here of gathering together a remnant or founding a "sect." - The earlier prophets had expected Israel to change as a whole in the person of its king or leading men. - John, like the later prophets, expected each individual in Israel to repent and experience a personal change of heart. - John’s baptism was a sign of individual and personal repentance. - This baptism is said to have been for or toward (eis) the forgiveness of sins (Mk 1:4 parr). In the context, the forgiveness of sins would mean being spared from the future punishment. If the whole of Israel or perhaps the majority of the children of Abraham were to repent, God would cease to be angry and relent, so that the catastrophe would not take place at all. - It is not clear whether, if the catastrophe did take place, those who had been baptized would be spared as individuals or not. Everything depends upon what kind of catastrophe John had in mind. - It is also significant that the kind of change for which John appealed had nothing to do with ritual purity or petty details of sabbath observance; nor had it anything to do with not paying taxes to Gentiles. - John appealed for what we would call social morality. - Herod he criticized for divorcing his wife to marry the wife of his half-brother (another Herod) and for all his other crimes (Lk 3:19). - Josephus, the contemporary Jewish historian, maintains that Herod arrested John for political reasons. He was afraid that John would turn the people against him. - Herod could not afford to lose the support of his people especially in view of the political consequences of his re-marriage. - John was arrested and beheaded because he dared to speak out against Herod too. - John the Baptist was the only person in that society who impressed Jesus. Here was the voice of God warning the people of an impending disaster and calling for a change of heart in each and every individual. - Jesus may not have agreed with John in every detail. Later on Jesus' thinking is quite different. - The very fact of his baptism by John is conclusive proof of his acceptance of John's basic prophecy: Israel is heading for an unprecedented catastrophe. - Jesus immediately shows himself to be in basic disagreement with all those who reject John and his baptism: the Zealots, Pharisees Essenes, Sadducees, scribes and apocalyptic writers. - Jesus’ point of departure, then, was the impending judgment of Israel, an unprecedented catastrophe. - There is plenty of evidence to show that Jesus repeated this prophecy again and again throughout his life. - In fact in several of the texts which have come down to us, Jesus is far more explicit than John about what the impending disaster would entail. - The earlier prophets had expected Israel to change as a whole in the person of its king or leading men. - It was C. H. Dodd who first showed that these passages could not have been written after the event because they are modelled on the scriptural references to the first fall of Jerusalem in 586 B.C.E. - There can be no doubt that Jesus did prophesy the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. - The early Christians may have touched up his words a little but even this must have been done before the events of 70 C.E. - The very thought of it made Jesus weep (Lk 19:41) as it had made the prophet Jeremiah weep centuries before.