Editorial note: Originally, this post appeared with more extended comments on the conflict in Israel and Gaza. In response to critiques from a couple of readers, I have reassessed the rhetorical purpose of this piece and elided those comments.
Last week, I issued APD’s first ever retraction of an article on Paul and messianism, following up on an article about Jesus’s particular brand of messianism. In both articles, I engaged in a thought experiment around what’s sometimes called the Zealot hypothesis, which has popped up off and on in historical Jesus studies since the birth of the “first quest” under Reimarus and was sensationalized in 2013 with the publication of Reza Aslan’s (poorly argued) book on the topic.
The scholar I chose to work with, instead, was Dale B. Martin, whom I’ll call the most serious recent expositor of a Jesus with zealotic intention of some kind. Martin argued in a piece for The Journal for the Study of the New Testament some time ago that Jesus in Jerusalem for his final Passover was “armed but not dangerous,” that is, expecting to join apocalyptic violence that would imminently break out in Jerusalem. Martin’s position has not won consensus—Paula Fredriksen in particular has responded to it here—but it has raised interesting questions for several of his interlocutors, including folks like Dale Allison, who, though unconvinced by Martin’s take, have conceded that some of the details Martin is drawn to are not satisfactorily explained in standard historical work (e.g., why are the disciples armed? Mk 14:47). My thought experiment was something like this: if this were right about who Jesus was historically, what should we do about it theologically? Are there theological categories that could salvage even a failed revolutionary Jesus? My argument was that there were.
Now, as it happens, I don’t actually buy the zealot hypothesis. I’m not sure how clear I made the fact in the two articles I wrote on it, but I agree that, in general, if Jesus had been a brigand leading a revolt, it’s unlikely that his followers would have been able to keep operating as a community for so long in Jerusalem and elsewhere by the Roman authorities. The Romans made many mistakes in their provincial government of the empire’s peripheries, and I am generally resistant to the idea that theirs was an infallibly lubricated machine of imperial government; but even if there’s a temptation in modern discourse to assume that they were always flawless administrators, they were, in fact, generally competent punishers of revolt. If Jesus were a known revolutionary, leading an open revolt, then it is conceivable that the Romans would have missed certain of Jesus’s followers, who could plausibly have survived in secret for quite awhile long after his death, but it is not conceivable that anyone could have operated openly in Jesus’s name for four decades afterwards, and with his own brother as the leader of the community to boot. That Jesus must have attracted the interest of revolutionaries as a popular figure of first-century Judea, who also accrued messianic interest from a variety of social classes (peasants, Pharisaic “upper-middle-class” folks, the fear of priestly aristocrats, etc.) is a given; that is different from whether Jesus himself knowingly led a revolutionary movement. As Paula Fredriksen has argued, this is probably why Jesus was crucified but his followers weren’t: Pilate must have known that the attention Jesus was attracting wasn’t part of his own public message, and/or that Jesus had done nothing explicitly revolutionary in the course of his ministry (though Jesus is, and this is important to observe, crucified among the lēstai).
So, I don’t buy the zealot Jesus on the ground of our evidence, even if I’m willing to engage in a thought experiment about him. I do, however, acknowledge that the historical Jesus was, by all standard academic accounts current in the field, an apocalyptic prophet, one who believed the Kingdom of God—coding for him the restoration of Israel, that is, a reconstitution of Judah and the return of the exiles, the purification of the Temple and its cult, provision, and, yes, a messianic ruler, the Son of Man—was coming imminently, and, therefore, insofar as he was an apocalyptic prophet, that the historical Jesus was in fact comfortable with all kinds of divine violence that would be exacted on God’s enemies in the imminent eschaton.1 So was Paul, who did not know Jesus personally but whose faith in Jesus as Israel’s messiah includes a violent eschatological scenario in which the returning Jesus is, at his parousia, God’s agent executing both wrathful justice and merciful salvation, already on offer in the present to those gentiles who will repent and embrace allegiance to Jesus. Jesus and Paul and, we can probably assume, James and Peter believed that Jesus’s imminent return would involve violent tribulation followed by metamorphosis of the world order.
The evidence for Jesus’s apocalypticism is there in the beginning, middle, and end of what we know about Jesus. First, we know that Jesus’s public ministry begins with his baptism by and association with John the Baptizer, who was obviously an apocalyptic prophet expecting an imminent eschaton. As Ehrman describes, “There can be little doubt that Jesus went out into the wilderness to be baptized by this prophet. But why would he go? Since nobody compelled him, he must have gone to John, instead of to someone else, because he agreed with John’s message. Jesus did not join the Pharisees, who emphasized the scrupulous observance of the Torah, or align himself with the Sadducees, who focused on the worship of God through the Temple cult, or associate with the Essenes, who formed monastic communities to maintain their own ritual purity, or subscribe to the teachings of the ‘fourth philosophy,’ which advocated a violent rejection of Roman domination. He associated with an apocalyptic prophet in the wilderness who anticipated the imminent end of the age.”2 Likewise, “After Jesus’s death, those who believed in him established communities of followers throughout the Mediterranean. We have a good idea what these Christians believed, because some of them have left us writings. What is striking is that these earliest writings are imbued with apocalyptic thinking. The earliest Christians were Jews who believed that they were living at the end of the age and that Jesus himself was to return from heaven as a cosmic judge of the earth, to punish those who opposed God and to reward the faithful (see, e.g., 1 Thess. 4:13-18; 1 Cor 15:51-57—writings from our earliest Christian author, Paul). The church that emerged in Jesus’ wake was apocalyptic.”3 These facts, taken together with the logia attributed to Jesus in Paul, Mark, Q, M, and L, all collectively testify to the idea that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet. Moreover, read against this backdrop, we can see an explicit attempt to backpedal, soften, mitigate, or transform the nature of Jesus’s apocalypticism in later New Testament texts, like Luke, John, and the Deutero-Paulines, likely written in later generations when Jesus’s predicted parousia as Son of Man had failed to happen and when the emergent communities of Jesus followers were increasingly facing a non-Jewish Greco-Roman world and beginning in some places to separate from the wider Jewish community (a process that would take several centuries to be definitively concluded).
So, it seems to me that the overwhelming weight of the evidence favors the apocalyptic Jesus, such that anyone who would deny Jesus the apocalyptic prophet is engaging in some degree of willful ignorance or obfuscation of our data. And this also means that Jesus was, insofar as he was an apocalyptic prophet agitating for the restoration of Israel, what we might refer to as a “nationalist” in the broad sense. He is very clear in the Synoptic tradition that his focus is on “the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” that his interest is the restoration of Israel, and that the gentiles who come into contact with Jesus are evaluated basically on their level of sympathization and/or deference. He calls a Syrophoenician woman who approaches him to heal her daughter a “dog” (Matt 15:26). He praises a centurion that is a patron of the Jewish nation (Matt 8:5-13), but part of the point is to underline that even this gentile seemingly understands Jesus when his own people don’t; so too the centurion at the cross in Mark (Mk 15:39). Jesus is a Jewish apocalyptic prophet whose primary concern is the Jewish future, and for whom the fates of all other peoples are oriented around the Jewish future.
Take two closely connected sayings attributed to Jesus in Matthew as an example of this. In Matthew 19:28, Jesus says that in the future the Son of Man will sit on his throne of glory and the apostles will sit on twelve thrones too, judging the twelve tribes of (a presumably restored) Israel. But then, in Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus again talks about what will happen when the Son of Man, whom he also calls “the king,” will sit on his throne of glory: the nations will be gathered before him, and they will be separated into sheep and goats. The reader should at this point recall this section in Parables of Enoch, 1 Enoch 61:6ff, where the “Chosen One” is seated upon “the throne of glory,” he judges first the righteous, and then “the kings and the mighty and the exalted and those who possess the land” (62:1), who stand before the throne, do obeisance and confess the Chosen One/Son of Man, but are nevertheless condemned to go away from the presence of God and the Son of Man to punishment (62:9-12), while the righteous and the chosen are saved and given a garment of glory to wear (62:13-16). The punishment of the rich and the mighty happens in “the flame of the torment of Sheol” (63:10-12). The reader should also recall the Animal Apocalypse of 1 Enoch 85-90. In the Animal Apocalypse, all of humanity are allegorically represented by different kinds of animals, where the “sheep” are the Jewish people and the other nations are represented by other kinds of animals; “good” gentiles are white bulls. In the judgment scene (90:20-38), “a throne” is constructed and “the Lord of the sheep” sits on it, and books are opened with the deeds of angels and humans. Wicked angels are sent “to the place of judgment, and they threw them into an abyss; and it was full of fire, and it was burning and was full of pillars of fire. And those seventy shepherds”—the angelic rulers of the seventy nations—“were judged and found to be sinners, and they were thrown into that fiery abyss” (90:25). So, too, are sinful sheep—Jews (90:26-27). Then, the “old house”—the previous Temple—is destroyed and “a new house, larger and higher than that first one,” is built on the site (90:28-29). “All the sheep”—all Israel—are gathered into it, and then all the other animals—all the other nations of the world—do obeisance to the sheep and become subservient to them. The sword given to the sheep is sealed away (90:34), and then there is a new “white bull” who is born, and the animals become obedient to it, “until all their species were changed, and they all became white cattle. And the firs tone became <leader> among them (and that <leader> was a large animal), and there were large black horns on its head. And the Lord of the sheep rejoiced over it and over all the cattle” (90:37-38).
Similarly, in the final judgment prophesied by the Matthean Jesus, some of the nations are sheep and some of them are goats. The sheep are those who have performed admirable works of corporal mercy to “the least of these,” whom the Son of Man clarifies are the poor, the hungry, the naked, the imprisoned, and the sick. If the historical Jesus uttered this prophecy, the context of the vision, given the apocalyptic background, almost certainly clarifies that “the least of these” for him, at least, were fellow Jews: poor Jews, suffering Jews, and unlike the sinful both among the nations and among his own people, whom Jesus, in good prophetic fashion, associates with the rich and the mighty. As the prophecy exists in Matthew, this is probably still the best way to read the text, given that Matthew certainly continues to think there is a strict distinction between Israel and the gentiles and probably even believes that gentile Jesus-followers need to become fully obedient to the Torah (read Matt 5:17-20 together with 21:1-3 and then turn to the great commission in 28:19: Jesus clearly thinks that the whole Torah is binding, Pharisaic halakha is legitimate, and that the nations are to be discipled in all the things which Jesus has commanded, including, logically, Torah observance). But in later ages, the Matthean Jesus’s prophecy of the final judgment easily lends itself to a more general interpretation: final judgment is according to works done on behalf of the poor.
This leaves us with a Jesus who is very much invested in his own nation’s future and evaluates other peoples on the basis of their relationship to his. I acknowledge that to be uncomfortable for even the most lenient Christian, and even for many Christian scholars, but there it is: the historical Jesus was a prophet to his own people, for his own people, and for whom there is a clear order of world citizenship in God’s designs. Jesus seems to have been open to gentile sympathizers with Judaism and in that sense he is not an advocate of final exclusion for the nations, which makes him a moderate in his context on what Matthew Thiessen has called “the gentile problem.” Given that most of the people subsequently interested in Jesus are not first-century Jews (or, frankly, Jews) and therefore might find that problematic, it is understandable that I have gotten some pushback from readers and friends on embracing this vision of who Jesus was. As Bart Ehrman puts it, “very few people who devote their lives to studying the historical Jesus actually want to find a Jesus who is completely removed from our own time. What people want—especially when dealing with such potentially dry matters as history and such potentially inflammatory matters as religion—is relevance. If Jesus was completely a man of his own time, with a worldview and a message totally out of sync with our own materialist, postcolonialist, secular-humanist, or whatever-ist society, then he may be an interesting historical figure, but he’s scarcely relevant (or so it’s commonly thought) to the issues and concerns people need to confront today.”4 Scholars are not immune to this temptation: “it’s no wonder that some scholars—who are human after all, want to make Jesus into something else—a proto-feminist, for example, or a Neo-Marxist, or a countercultural Cynic.”5 I would add to this list scholars with theological investments in Jesus, who want to make Jesus less a victim of history and more its master, by retrojecting into his own preaching, mission, and expectation the entirety of the events of Easter and the rise of early Christianity. N.T. Wright’s somewhat tortured exegesis of Jesus’s use of Daniel 7:9-14 and the use of that passage, together with its Enochic echoes, in the Gospels comes to mind here: theologically motivated to justify the kerygmatic Jesus’s death, resurrection, and ascension as fully in line with what Jesus himself desired, Wright somewhat intentionally misreads the direct text of Jesus’s own prophecies about the Kingdom and elects to ignore his own very first-century Jewish nationalism. But I think this is to force a theologoumenon about Jesus backwards into the historical portrait of Jesus that the data support, which serves neither history nor theology.
So, if Jesus himself was an apocalyptic prophet who was only tactically pacifistic and envisioned a violent end-time scenario that centered on his own people and their national fortunes, where can we find an authentic root for Christianity’s adherence to teachings of universal love and ethical cosmopolitanism? Paul, perhaps?
It’s a long and venerable tradition of reading Paul that sees Jesus himself as having been fully within Judaism but Paul as breaking with Judaism to become the founder of Christianity, by turns popular or unpopular among scholars, theologians, clergy, and laity for the same reasons that the Jewish and apocalyptic Jesus waxes and wanes with popularity: scholarship reflects society, and society scholarship. But I think this way of reading Paul is wrong. I stand with the tradition of scholarship variously called the “Radical New Perspective” or “Paul Within Judaism” school (or schule) that sees the Paul of the seven authentic epistles as a practicing Jew from the beginning to the end of his life, including after he met Jesus, and who understood his mission and role, as Thiessen has described it, as “the Messiah’s herald to the nations,” summoning the gentiles to abandon their idolatry and immorality and turn to the worship of the Jewish God, obedience to the Jewish messiah, Jesus, and the embrace of a Jew-ish lifestyle (without full ritual circumcision or conversion).6 That is to say, I agree with Thiessen, Fredriksen, Mark Nanos, and others who suggest that Paul was an “ethnic essentialist,” for whom humanity was unalterably divided into two categories, Israel and the nations, with three classes: the righteous, sinners, and the beneficiaries of eschatological mercy from God offered through the martyric death of Jesus.7 For Paul, righteous gentiles who embraced the gospel received Christ’s pneuma just like Jewish followers of Jesus, and so had no need of full conversion; as I’ve written previously, I think Paul disagreed with Peter and James in this regard, who countenanced the legitimacy of Paul’s mission to the gentiles and the category of a righteous gentile who became obedient to Jesus, but who did not go the full Pauline mile of considering such people to have thereby become actual (pneumatic) children of Abraham.8
To some degree, Paul’s universalism of scope must certainly have been a function of his Diasporic upbringing and cosmopolitan perspective, even as it was also, he insisted, the content of an apocalyptic revelation from heaven. Yet Paul still explicitly believes that Jesus is a Davidic messiah who will return to do traditionally Davidic things at the eschaton, functioning as God’s agent of wrath on the wicked (gods and humans alike) and mercy (on the righteous and the repentant; see, e.g., 1 Thess 4:13-18 and 1 Cor 15:20ff, as cited above by Ehrman; see also Rom 1:4, where Jesus’s Davidic role is fulfilled at the general resurrection). Paul is comfortable with a degree of allegorization and cosmological eschatology that separates him somewhat from Jesus and probably also from James and Peter—I am not convinced, for example, despite Paul’s mention in Romans 11 that the “Redeemer will come forth from Zion,” implying Paul’s belief that Jerusalem will be the site of the parousia, that Paul believed in any earthly Kingdom, but rather that the resurrected righteous, inhabiting pneumatic or angelic bodies, would assume celestial stations in the heavens—and we should not assume that Paul’s Diasporic, Pharisaic halakha and theology are indicative of what James was teaching the Jerusalem community (classically described in Acts 2:42) or of what Peter was teaching in Diaspora synagogues (being the apostle, as Paul puts it, to the circumcision). Yet the deeper interests of all of these people are continuous with those of Jesus: the restoration of Israel, God’s final reckoning/reconciliation with the nations in the course of restoring Israel, and the renovatio mundi, particularly as they, being first-century Jews of diverse backgrounds and inclinations, were habituated to find them prefigured in the Mosaic Torah and the Prophets. They may disagree on details, but not on skopos.
So, Jesus may not have been a zealot, but I think reading him in context means understanding that the distance between what he wanted and what they wanted (and “the zealots” are more complicated than that name suggests) was smaller than the gulf that probably existed between the methods each were willing to employ to get it. I cannot think that Jesus would have attracted any attention at all in first-century Galilee and Judea—in the midst of a land that had been successively conquered by Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, with a brief interlude of independence under two oft-hated dynasties, and which during Jesus’s lifetime was experiencing an ongoing devastation of relations with its Roman patrons that would only worsen after Jesus’s life—if his Kingdom of God was something wholly unintelligible to their lives, wholly anomalous to the kinds of things they wanted and believed would change their lives for the better. I cannot see massive excitement for Jesus, or for John the Baptist for that matter, emerging purely out of the promise of a new program of practices of community, or out of vague sentiments for a future religion that would not only not benefit the people to whom Jesus preached it but would in fact mean the detriment of their immediate and distant descendants. Jesus is in these respects very much unlike people such as Siddharta Gautama or Laozi, insofar as while Jesus, like them, has plenty of critique for the existing systems of his day and the religious leadership of his people, Jesus is not seeking to overturn the basic religious allegiance of his people itself. Jesus is a prophet of Jewish renewal and reform, sure, but he is thoroughly, identifiably Jewish from beginning to end, and the primary topics of his apocalypticism are the forthcoming advent of the Son of Man, the restoration of Israel as a polity, and the realignment of the nations around Israel as the Kingdom of God. This also describes Paul.
Now, that’s history. The historical Jesus contains many of the seeds of later Christology: the grounds on which Jesus’s own followers and later generations felt that he was the eschatological prophet, king, and celestial high priest, the incarnation of a divine being (God’s prime angel, Wisdom, the Logos, etc.), and even the second hypostasis of the Trinity, in whom divinity and humanity are fully united “without confusion, change, separation, or division.” The Second Temple Jewish paradigms and profiles applied to Jesus—messiah, Son of Man, Son of God, Lord—all ground the later Christological confessions, and insofar as they credibly have something to do with the self-consciousness of the historical Jesus and the beliefs of the original community of his followers we can paint a trajectory from the first century to Nicaea and Chalcedon, provided we do not make the mistake (and it is a mistake) of reading Nicaea and Chalcedon backwards into the New Testament while functioning as historians. Theology is not history: it does not accomplish the same thing, and it need not play by the same rules. Respecting historical method for the way it allows us to reconstruct the context of the New Testament, theology is free to reuse the scriptural texts for new purposes as often as it likes, and that’s how first-century messianism around Jesus becomes Christology proper. Likewise, the first-century nationalism of Jesus gives way in Early Christian history to a thoroughgoing universalism. Not all at once, and not all positively, we might add: for one thing, Jesus’s vision of a restored nation remained a live option in Early Christian eschatology through to the end of the second century, the crucial change in Justin Martyr and Irenaeus being that gentile Christians, not Jews, would inherit the messianic kingdom in Jerusalem. Origen of Alexandria in the early third century popularized the allegorical approach to this prophetic tradition which revised such promises as those of the cosmic ascent of the righteous after death in their immediate resurrection, which arguably becomes the standard way of thinking about the path of the soul back to God in Greek theology, the caveat being that the more literal import of the apocalyptic language coexisted in late antiquity with the allegorical reading at all levels of Christian discourse. More to the point, though, an allegorized eschaton of originally Jewish nationalist aspiration left open the possibility of a newly Christianized Roman Empire to simply invent its own universalist-national apocalyptic tradition, seeing the growth and extent of its empire as a key, necessary step in God’s plan to consummate history. If there is no earthly millennium with Christ returning to reign, so Eusebius thought, then Constantine’s kingdom is free to be that millennium. Islam’s own apocalyptic model of imperialism largely borrowed from the New Roman example. And the losers in this arrangement were of course the Jews themselves (and the Samaritans, for that matter), who had to make do with the best their Abrahamic rulers could or would afford them in the way of tolerance and support for their internal community building and tradition formation, which was often not much.
All of this brings me, meanderingly, to the situation of Jews, Christians, and Muslims together in modernity. I should probably have begun with the caveat in the posts I mention at the outset of this entry that I in no way think the historical aims of either Jesus or Paul can or should be determinative for anyone today. Historical Jesus studies are not determinative for theology, and so they’re not determinative for political theology, either. I especially do not think that, for example, the historical Jesus’s desire for Jewish liberation under Roman rule translates fluidly to the situation of the modern Israel-Gaza War, nor that the interests of the historical Jesus should be determinative for how modern people navigate the conflict.
What does all of this have to do with the historical Jesus and Christology? Namely this: the ethical tradition of Jesus and Paul as an apocalyptic prophet is obviously transformed somewhat in the formation of Classical Christianity, in ways that exclude the authenticity of a desire for a violent apocalyptic sequence to bring about national and cosmic reversals of fortune today. Jesus may have wished this as a member of an oppressed nation in his rhetoric; but as far as we can tell he never acted on it with organized violence. Paul may have wished this as a somewhat more comfortable member of a shared demographic, but he, too, spent the better part of his life a divinatory eccentric leading communities of the Jesus Movement and encouraging his unique brand of Judaism-for-gentiles in those communities rather than fomenting revolution. But in light of the parousia’s failure, what survived from these profiles is not their expectation of eschatological violence (though that endured in other ways), but rather their ethics of solidarity. In context, Jesus’s ethics of solidarity are for Jews within Jewish communities; Paul’s ethics of solidarity seek to extend that circle of concern to encompass repentant gentiles. When these traditions were first received by early Christian communities in the second century, the circle of solidarity became the local Christian collegium and the poor of the Greco-Roman polis; as Christianity reframed itself a philosophical school, a mystery cult, and then an imperial Church, the theoretical extent of that solidarity became the entire oikoumenē. Jesus himself may not have been a pacifist in the abstract, but tactically, and may have advocated love of (personal, not military) enemies and non-resistance as appropriate for the synagogue communities he preached to; but when his words were read and preached in subsequent generations to newer and larger crowds, these become transformative words laying out the ethics of solidarity as the content of love.
This is the moral core of Christianity, its defining contribution to world religions at the level of karma rather than of bhakti or jñana. That Jesus himself did not intend his words in this way (and maybe did not even speak exactly the words which we get in the Gospels, which are more likely to be the vox ipsa than the verba ipsissima) is an important fact of history, one that theology must engage with, but it is not in fact determinative for theology. Theology is free to traverse the lands history dare not go to, though it should always heed history’s voice in the going: that the contingent meaning of Christ’s life is best read in the context of a century of Jewish struggle for liberation from Roman rule, and therefore Jewish nationalism, does not negate the idea that the ultimate meaning of his life is something else. Likewise for his words: we should begin with the beginning of what these words likely meant when Jesus first spoke them or something like them, but that is not their final meaning. Just as a resurrection body of spirit is the flower that grows from the seed of flesh, so theology from history.
It is not that Christianity is immune to ethical abuse for this expanded moral vision; far from it, if the history of Christianity is any indication, given the normative compromise of ethical standards that Christ in the Gospels and Paul in his letters expects. In fairness, this is to some extent because theirs is an ethics of the end of the world: celibacy and no-divorce, non-resistance, leaving your family and selling all your stuff, and so forth is all well and good if the world is getting ready to end or change dramatically, but as a litany of antinomian, countercultural, apocalyptic, and messianic movements in the Western world from antiquity to the present have demonstrated, such movements rarely make it past the reef of transition from charisma to institution without shipwreck. Christianity itself barely did, and in fact probably only kept its soul because it was able to siphon off its most radical apocalypticism into the monastic tradition as an alternative way of life. Christianity could be called, not wrongly, a “Mahayana” version of the Jesus Movement: more “secular” in the sense of worldly, more broadly syncretistic, more open to compromise than its “Theravāda” origins. Nor should we make the mistake of falling into the other fallacy that Jews and Judaism are particularist while Christianity is universalist: in many ways what Christianity does is to take the Jewish conviction of the human being as the image of God and to universalize its consequences in open mission to the Greco-Roman world, in ways that Jews also have historically practiced in their own efforts of tzedakah and tikkun; so too Islam. When I say that the ethics of solidarity in love are the moral core of Christianity, I don’t suggest that they don’t also exist elsewhere. I merely observe that in theory, at least, Christianity suggests that the Sermon on the Plain or the Sermon on the Mount is the appropriate moral blueprint for a universal community, in a way that even the historical Jesus himself is unlikely to have held. And this has in fact contributed many essential elements to the Western discourse of rights, law, and social obligation that we cannot easily ignore.
The ethical expansion of the Jesus Movement in Christianity matters to this discussion because the danger in what I originally wrote was the potential misuse of my thought experiment around a zealotic Jesus to support violence. Let me be unequivocally clear: I condemn that chain of reasoning in the strongest possible terms. Christian nationalism of the sort that thinks Christ may be employed in the service of a nation-state or an empire is illegitimate in kind, not merely degree. Of course, it is an invalid move with long precedent. Christians have often used Jesus to support violence, their own or someone else’s, and it has always been an uncomfortable irony that a man executed as an enemy of the state should be invoked in its defense. I once said this to a table of Catholic theology teachers at the Catholic private school I taught at, to the nod and smile of one of the five, the other four deeply disagreeing. (One, at least, smiled that I took the view in question, though he did not concur with it.) The conversation was sparked because at that morning’s Mass an elderly monk had decided to preach on the moral superiority of pacifism. I’ll never forget observing that the one theology PhD at the table was coldly pro-war as a justified method of resolving such things. I condemn his beliefs, too.
So how do Christology and ethics give us a new way forward in eschatology, then, if the literal expectations of Jesus, his followers, and Paul are by now outmoded? I have no clear answer; only influences. I find myself simultaneously influenced both by the apocalyptic messianism of Jesus, which expects or hopes for divine intervention to bring peace, as well as the progressive messianism of (the best of) historic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which sees peace as a project we have to cultivate and work towards, not one we can simply depend on God to do for us. In some sense, neither of these approaches is complete in itself and, in some sense, both of them are necessary. Apocalyptic messianism is not a sustainable social model: when the messiah doesn’t come, when the golden age doesn’t arrive, one has to get on with the business of life and of trying to make life better, and that’s when progressive messianism steps in as more important. But the cost of the time it takes for the progressive dream to be realized—which is an asymptotic line, by the way—is nothing less than human lives. This is where the language of apocalypticism is an appropriate response to suffering, violence, and chaos; such things sometimes can only be visualized as cosmic monstrosities, which God must avenge himself on to restore order and provision to the world. (This is also where the more cyclical thinking of the dharmic traditions becomes a useful borrow: cycles and epicycles of progress and apocalypse on Fortune’s Wheel, or Time’s, spiraling and rhyming but free to veer and sway, is probably a more realistic way to think about history philosophically than either absolute linearity or absolute cyclicality.) We need both the opportunity to look up and hope that somewhere, God’s peace is already realized, from which we can channel some of it into the chaos of our world, and also the opportunity to look ahead and hope that, for however temporary it might prove to be, there will come another (or a first?) golden age, another innocence on the far side of experience for the world. May it come speedily and soon, and in our days.
On Jesus the apocalyptic prophet, the best resources I can offer are the original monograph by Albert Schweitzer setting the tone for modern historical Jesus studies, The Quest of the Historical Jesus in 1906; James Dunn, Jesus Remembered, Christianity in the Making Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); Bart Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); and virtually everything Dale Allison has written about Jesus, from Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998) to Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013). The apocalyptic Jesus is also the basic premise of the most authoritative modern biographies on Jesus, such as Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Birth of Christianity, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 2000).
Ehrman, Jesus, 138.
Ehrman, Jesus, 139.
Ehrman, Jesus, 127.
Ehrman, Jesus, 127.
See Thiessen, A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Nations (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2023). See also Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
I am using the language of “three classes” to summarize the argument of Gabriele Boccaccini, Paul’s Three Paths to Salvation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020).
See Thiessen, Paul and the Gentile Problem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
Thanks for this. I'm curious how you reconcile your claim that Paul is an "ethnic essentialist" with his eschatological vision wherein he seems to imagine that the elect will assume a fleshless form beyond ethnicity (as well as caste and sex) when they ascend into heavens. Fredricksen (I think she's following Stowers) gets around this by arguing that Paul imagines resurrected humans gathered around the renewed Jerusalem Temple with their ethnic distinctions intact (though somehow, their bodies are still pneumatic?). But you seem to reject this move.
Also, Paul seems to use his expectation of transformative resurrection and celestial ascent to deny the centrality of ethnic distinctions which he collocates with "terrestrial things" (a la Phil 3:17-21).
You still have Gal 5:2, which seems like the best evidence for a hard "two-track" model, and Paul definitely assumes that Torah-observant Jews are the norm, but he seems to ground his inclusion of the gentiles precisely on the rationale that those ethnic divisions are (eschatologically) transient.
Thank you for this thoughtful essay - especially on some creative, concrete ways of thinking about the differences between history and theology. That the historical Jesus wasn't or didn't espouse the theology of the Nicene Council seems obvious, but the implications of what this means sometimes need to be clarified. Christians seem to want to make sure their theological convictions match with what the historical Jesus and Paul taught, and your reflection makes clear this is much more complicated than simply coming up with a systematic theology that we think best reflects the 'clear teaching' of the scriptures. Thanks again for all your efforts - much appreciated.