Continuatum a parte prima.
In the last piece, I presented a very general portrait of the historical Jesus summarizing a good deal of contemporary scholarship in four assertions: Jesus existed; he was a Jew; he was an apocalyptic and social prophet; and he was crucified by the Romans. To these I appended a fifth: Jesus’ followers believed that he was raised from the dead and exalted to heaven, a complex couple of assertions that in an ancient context could refer to many different kinds of postmortem corporeal immortalization. The historian need not believe, and cannot by historical means demonstrate, the veracity of this report; but that the disciples believed themselves to have experienced these truths, and that such experiences motivated them to continue his movement after his death and to double-down on messianic assertions about Jesus’ significance, seems more historically probable than the idea that they either fabricated his resurrection or his postmortem messianic identity, given the historical facts about how Jews felt about both things. That, too, is not a historical argument for the resurrection having happened; merely an acknowledgement that the belief in the resurrection is more likely to stem from some kind of experience, however real or illusory, than from self-aware mythopoiesis.
One thing I did not spell out in that piece was that belief in the resurrection implied to Jesus’ followers that the imminence of the eschaton which Jesus preached had now been demonstrated. Jesus’ resurrection was the “firstfruits” of the eschatological resurrection (1 Cor 15:20-23), and he would preside over the general resurrection itself (Rom 1:1-4); his ascension to heaven meant that he had already, for Paul, taken the position of cosmic lordship that eventually all the universe would confess (Phil 2:6-11). The first generations of Jesus’ followers continued to believe, as he had and John before him, that the end of the world as conceived by a variety of Jewish prophetic and apocalyptic traditions was imminent.
It is worth underlining the pluralism of that statement. Jesus’ first followers did not necessarily share a common eschatology or assessment of who he was within that eschatology. The perceived fact of his doxosis, his “glorification,” was the basis for any and all speculation on his person, role, and future activity now that he had been thus elevated. Some Jews who believed in Jesus may have seen in him nothing more than a paradigmatic prophet of Israel who, like other such prophets such as Enoch, Moses, and Elijah, had been glorified after death to heavenly existence. Many Early Jews believed in such translations for the famous patriarchs, prophets, and righteous people of ancient Israel; to some ears the proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension may only have suggested that he, too, had attained to their exalted status and now held similar prominence as a pivotal sage of Israel. (To my knowledge, Amy-Jill Levine is the only person to have made this argument in print.) Greeks and Romans believed similar things of their own divine men, the heroes and demigods of mythic and legendary history, as well as of certain sages of the more recent past (like Homer or Plato, both deemed gods in popular religion and philosophy). Some Jews, like Paul, believed that the exalted Jesus would return as a Davidic messiah, and spoke of him both as christos, Christ or Anointed, as well as in the language of Greco-Roman ideal kingship to that effect. Others, more inclined towards a certain brand of apocalyptic speculation about cosmos and heaven, may have thought of Jesus as having assumed the role of an angelic being, indeed, the premier angelic being, the subordinate divine agent of God in creation and providence, who would oversee the final judgment, of which the heavenly Son of Man was an iteration. And some may have combined these and other paradigms; both Paul and the author of the Gospel of John, for example, present Jesus as messianic king and subordinate divine being, while John adds Jesus’ status as prophet to these (it is not an important Christological category for Paul). But the point is that not all members of the earliest Jesus Movement shared a common assessment of who or what they were there for: honor for and confidence in Jesus could take many forms in the sect of first-century Judaism devoted to him.
The situation is more complex when one also considers the Greco-Roman theater of Jesus’ reception. As is obvious both from the “ex-pagan pagans” (this is Paula Fredriksen’s term) that joined the Jesus Movement as well as the pagan critics of Early Christianity, for the most part, non-Jews had a mix of Jewish and non-Jewish categories for trying to understand Jesus, further diversifying the picture of his reception. For non-Jews familiar with Judaism, Jesus’ presentation in Jewish terms, as a Jewish prophet, messiah, or angelic figure, would have been comprehensible; for non-Jews unfamiliar the closest categories were those mentioned from Greco-Roman religion and mythology to which Jesus most closely skewed. I do not mean to give the impression of a divide between “Judaism” and “Hellenism” other than a purely fictive one existing in the minds of some Jews and non-Jews, then and now. All Judaism after Alexander the Great was Hellenized; and Judaism had been a core ingredient in the cultural mosaic of the Hellenized Near East for three centuries by the time that Jesus was born. Insofar as Jesus was presented as a Jewish anything by his Jewish followers, he was already also being portrayed in Hellenic ways (not least since as far as we can tell the earliest New Testament texts were written in Greek); when he was being portrayed to a Hellenic audience in ways evocative of Greco-Roman cultural values, he was not for that reason any less Jewish.
And in the ancient context of the Jesus Movement, it was also impossible to control the cascading echoes of Jesus’ significance in the wider culture, so as to ensure a single narrative prevailed. Paul tells us that he received his gospel from others before him (1 Cor 15:1-4) and that he conferred with Peter in Jerusalem (Gal 1:18), where these two and James enjoyed fellowship and mutual recognition. Minimally, Paul was able to coordinate his beliefs and efforts with his apostolic seniors in Peter and James; but who could ensure that Jews and non-Jews believing in Jesus and scattered throughout the Diaspora would keep to a common confession? No instruments of communion existed that could produce uniformity across so vast a geographic distance and cultural diversity as the spread of the Jesus Movement in the first century achieved, and such instruments would not exist for centuries to come. Individual leaders of the Movement, some who had known Jesus during his lifetime and others who had not, moved through different social and institutional networks in different Mediterranean cities to found their communities, and only afterwards did these communities coordinate with one another to identify what they shared in common and what was useful or important or deviant about what they did not. These small societies—and, indeed, the Jesus Movement would have been a marginal cult in the first century, no more than a few tens of thousands at most in an empire of sixty million, which boasted around six million Jews in total; it is for this reason that Pliny the Younger, first pagan to mention Christianity in passing in one of his letters, referred to it as a superstitio, a socially malign exotic cult attractive to a small number of the gullible peasantry (see RL Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them)—were inequitably blessed with resources financial and cultural. Some of them likely enjoyed access to well-to-do and tolerant synagogues and libraries, public and private, and enjoyed some among their membership with the academic training to develop their faith from deep reading of the Jewish Scriptures (in Greek translation) and with reference to the Hellenic intellectual tradition. Paul was such a leader, clearly trained in and knowledgeable both about the Greek Scriptures and their interpretation as well as the general points of popular Greek physics and metaphysics in the first century; he possibly quotes pagan authors on occasion, suggesting that he enjoyed a classical paideia. Not every community could boast a leader of that acumen. Certainly, if Simon Peter is to be taken as the founder of any ancient Christian community, then his preaching is likely to have been intellectually crude in the extreme, as a former Galilean fisherman. Indeed, consider that the attribution of the Gospel of Mark, the roughest and most poorly written Greek of the Gospels, to John Mark, Peter’s interpreter, as a digest of his public preaching, true or not, could only suggest that Peter’s own account of Jesus as he shared it would not have sounded rhetorically sophisticated to educated ears. Nor is it the case that an easy dividing line could be drawn between these two sorts of apostles, the more educated members seeing things one way, the less another: Paul and Peter appear agreed apart from the Antioch incident of Galatians 2 (which Peter is likely to have won; Paul, after all, does not say that he did), and both with James, where Diaspora Jews like Barnabas and Apollos, more similar to Paul’s own background, seem to be his rivals and divided in vision. If the teachers were not always agreed, neither were their students.
I begin with this extended set of comments merely to make the point that when speaking of the “kerygmatic Jesus,” it must be frankly admitted that the apostolic kerygma, or “proclamation,” was inherently pluralistic from its earliest days. People who talked about Jesus had certain common or widespread appreciations of him: as a teacher of wisdom, a prophet, as a or the messiah, as having been or become an otherworldly being of some kind; but while there may have been some common formula, such as the one Paul gives in 1 Cor 15:1-4–Christ died, Christ was buried, Christ rose, Christ was seen, etc.—there was not a singular interpretation of that formula. When trying to discern what the first followers of Jesus proclaimed about him, then, we can only speak in pluralistic terms.
There are three primary items that appear in the kerygmatic portraits of Jesus in Paul and the Gospels. The first and most fundamental is that Jesus is christos, “Christ” or “messiah,” the “anointed one”; the other two, derived from this, are that Jesus is Son of God and Lord. The word is a “political idiom” (to borrow Matthew Novenson’s excellent nomenclature) from ancient Israel and Judah that assumed variegated significance in the late Second Temple period. Not all Early Jews believed in or cared about messiahs; those who did were not necessarily interested in the same kind of messiah. The messiahs that appear in Early Jewish literature are human and extrahuman, some angelic, some divine; some are prophetic figures, some are priests and cultic reformers, some are warriors and kings, some are eschatological judges and rulers; some arise from within the Jewish people, others come or are revealed from heaven. Some of these literary messiahs express an obvious dissatisfaction with the publicly available messiahs, the Jerusalem high priesthood and the local kings, first the Hasmoneans and then the Herods. Understanding first-century messiah language requires some awareness of the history of these two Judean institutions.
After the exile of the Oniads in the lead-up to the Antiochene persecution and the Maccabean Revolt, many Jews believed that the priesthood and the Temple cult had been corrupted. The priests were messiahs in the literal sense, the high priest especially: they were inaugurated into their service by anointing, and where the biblical monarchy had been defunct since 586 BCE, the Temple and its priesthood had been reconstituted in 516 and assumed the central position in Early Jewish life and consciousness since then. For Jews across the Diaspora, if there was anyone who could be claimed as a common symbol of their people, the high priest (kohen hagadol) was likely to be that person, especially on Yom Kippur, the one day of year when he could enter the Holy of Holies in the Temple and emerge in full liturgical garb, wearing the crown bearing God’s Name and giving the theatrical sense of his own deification on this day (Sir 50:1-12). But it was publicly known that the high priesthood was an office bought and sold under Seleucid rule. The Hasmoneans ruled both as high priests and as kings, neither of which offices they could claim a biblical right to; Herod tended to select the high priest for reasons of political and economic calculus. Many Jews, even those who did not feel that the worship had been completely abominated as the Essenes did, did not find the office fully trustworthy or reliable and looked forward to eventual cultic renewal.
The situation is more complicated in terms of how Early Jews felt about their kings. Early in the Second Temple period, the possibility of the reestablishment of the Davidic royal house as a vassal of the Persian Empire was presented with the satrapy of Zerubbabel over Yehud, but this does not seem to have come to fruition, and we do not know what happened to him. Jews seem to have been mostly tolerant of rule by foreign powers provided that ancestral Jewish customs were respected; by contrast, Jews were frequently dissatisfied with the two indigenous monarchies to have succeeded in the later Hellenistic and early Roman periods, the Hasmoneans and the Herods. When a dynastic dispute arose between Aristobulus II and Hyrcanus from 67-63 BCE, Gn. Pompey the Great settled the dispute by answering a separate Judean delegation requesting the restoration of Judean autonomia, “self-rule,” as opposed to the Hasmonean monarchy; hence Judea became part of the new Roman province of Syria. The autonomous arrangement was not to last: Herod, the Idumaean son of Hyrcanus’ general Antipater, would be proclaimed King of the Jews by the Roman Senate in 40 BCE, and take command of the region in 37. Herod was a brutally effective and brilliant ruler, but he was not a winsome populist: his obeisance to Augustus, importing Greek and Roman culture to Judea in the form of trade and numerous building projects, most magnificent of which was easily the renovated Jerusalem Temple, gratified Rome but came at the cost of peasant labor, lives, and livelihoods in the form of conscription and taxes. Yet Herod was arguably, from the worldly perspective, the most successful Jew(ish) king to have ever reigned; the dissatisfaction that his subjects had with him suggests that, not unlike the Deuteronomist’s reports about the Northern Kingdom’s attitude towards Solomon in the aftermath of his death, the needs and interests of elites and common people were polarizing under Hasmonean, Herodian, and then Roman rule.
It is notable that when Herod died, a delegation went to Rome asking yet again for direct Roman rule and autonomy of the region; Augustus elected instead to honor Herod’s will and carve his territory among his children. It is fascinating to wonder how different the history of the next century in the region might have been had Augustus honored the people’s request. Herod Archelaus, the son to whom went Jerusalem and Judea, was an ineffective ruler and Augustus exiled him in 6 CE (the year, recall, that Quirinius was governor of Syria and that Luke mistakenly thinks Jesus was born). Herod Antipas, his brother, was more effective, maintaining his rule over Galilee from his father’s death in 4 BCE until his exile and death in 39 CE, while Philip, their brother, was more successful than either, ruling the Decapolis until his own death in 34. When Archelaus was deposed, again rather than graft the region into the same administrative body as Syria, Rome chose to put it under the direct rule of a military prefect, of which there were many until and again after the brief attempt to restore a united client kingdom under Herod Agrippa (r. 41-44 CE). Of these, the most effective, brutal, bloody, and horrific was Pontius Pilate, who served from 26-36 CE, and whose tenure can fairly be said to mark a turn for the worse in the overall relationship between Rome and Judea, one that would ultimately go on to precipitate the disastrous First Jewish-Roman War of 66-73 CE.
To talk of either a priestly or a royal messiah, whether a human being or an angel from heaven, during this period was minimally a form of political protest to these affairs, and especially to the sitting powers. “Messiah” was an indigenous Jewish way of talking, especially, about kings, and particularly insurrectionists who would become kings when they were not obviously destined for the crown. As Novenson observes, this is already the way anointing language tends to be used in the Hebrew Bible: David is anointed, while Saul is still king (1 Sam 16); Solomon is anointed, while everyone else is proclaiming his brother Adonijah king (1 Kgs 1:38-50). To say “so-and-so is messiah!” is effectively to proclaim a revolution; in Greco-Roman terms, it could only be brigandry (Grk: leisteia), which is how Josephus talks about would-be messiahs and kings of the period, and there were many of them. In 6 CE, when Archelaus was deposed, Judah the Galilean started a revolt that was put down by the Romans, as were several others. Indeed, Luke’s misremembered date of 6 CE for Jesus’ birth may well be an attempt to connect him to the volatile events of that year, which more probably Jesus witnessed as a twelve-year old child, when otherwise, Luke tells us, he was “growing in wisdom and stature, and favor with God and men” (Lk 2:52).
It is against this whole backdrop that the confession of Jesus as christos has to be assessed. As I have written before and in the last article, Jesus did not go around calling himself the messiah, and if he did privately think of himself as such, it seems to have been more connected to the apocalyptic Son of Man tradition than to the historical/prophetic aspirations for a monarchic Son of David. All of the New Testament authors, including Paul, make tremendous effort to link Jesus to David, though they have no common genealogy for doing so and do not have a common sense of what Jesus qua Davidic messiah has done or is going to do. How plausible is this? Ancient people frequently connected themselves genealogically to famous figures of the legendary and mythic past. Most monarchs claimed divine sonship (a fact that will be more relevant in the next post in the series). In the Greek world, an entire extended family, the Heraklidae, insisted on their physical descent from Zeus’ most famous son of that name. Julius Caesar publicly, and perhaps earnestly, claimed direct descent from Venus through Aeneas and his son, Iulus, whence the name of his family, the Iulii, and his own name, Iulius; to this day, an entire month is named for an ancient person who genuinely believed he was the descendant of a god and a demigod, and made it a core part of his public persona. In the Jewish tradition, claimants to descent from famous heroes of the biblical past is attested as early as the preexilic period and consistently thereafter. Rival priesthoods in the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah claimed descent from Moses and Aaron, respectively; the Davidic kings claimed descent from David and Solomon, who many if not most scholars would probably agree existed though what we can really know about them is effectively nothing (all of their material in 1-2 Samuel and 1 Kings is clearly legendary, more like Arthuriana than Thucydides, as Bart Ehrman observed recently). The Aaronids won the contest of priestly pedigree and, after the exile, continued to claim descent from both Aaron and Zadok; all priests claimed descent from Levi, as did all Levites (now a separate class), and all Jews claimed descent from the common biblical patriarchs like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. At least one person—Zerubbabel—was publicly thought to be a Davidide in the Second Temple period.
It does not matter if a single one of these claimed genealogies is true; it simply matters that ancient people often claimed such descent and at least postured that they could back it up as the grounds for their incumbency of a variety of public offices. It is not therefore de facto impossible or implausible that Jesus and/or his family claimed to be Davidides. Even their peasant status does not render this untenable: just as today, many lower and middle class people look back with pride on an earlier period of family history when their ancestral name was more respectable before the turning of Fortune’s Wheel, so presumably too in antiquity. In at least one case this is certainly true, since after their ouster the Zadokite priests could only bemoan their unjust denial of their birthright. Nothing really prevents Jesus’ family from being able to claim some kind of Davidic ancestry, and perhaps there were many families in Galilee, which was settled by zealous Jews under the Hasmoneans, who could claim similar backgrounds. Jesus’ family and other families like his may well have harbored common hopes for a future redeemer from among their ranks, breathed out in a prayerful sigh, perhaps, on a break from laying stone or carving wood.
But even so, the historical Jesus did not make any claimed Davidic ancestry a core part of his message. All of the people in the Gospels who describe Jesus as a Davidide are not Jesus. Jesus does use David on one occasion as a precedent for the activity of the “Son of Man” on the Sabbath, in a pericope where the identity of the Son of Man on Jesus’ lips (if Jesus spoke these words or words like them) is ambiguous (Matt 12:3; Lk 6:3). Jesus sometimes receives the acclamation, to be clear: in the Gospels, he does not reject those who call him “Son of David,” nor does he seem very perturbed by the Davidide associations appended to him at the Triumphal Entry. But when Jesus does directly address Davidic status, he appears to question its necessity as a messianic credential (Mk 12:35). Whatever David and David’s kingdom meant to Jesus, they seem to have been sublimated to other scriptural and messianic paradigms in his mind. Popular reception of him, his message, and his movement, both by sympathetic Jews and antipathic priests and Roman overlords, trended royal and Davidic; Jesus himself probably had a more complex understanding of his relationship to the Davidic covenant and its traditional oracles.
But that Jesus was acclaimed as messiah in his own lifetime by at least some people seems all but unavoidably true. Given that Jesus did not make his own messianic identity a core part of his message, did nothing especially Davidic (i.e., fought no battles or wars of liberation), and was also savagely murdered by an empire as a criminal of the state, there is no reason that anyone would have come to conclude Jesus was a or the messiah after his lifetime. Even belief in Jesus’ resurrection and exaltation does not a messiah make him: ancient Jews believed that other patriarchs and prophets of their past had been similarly glorified or translated, without describing them as messiahs. There is, again, a perfectly conceivable contrafactual history in which the Jesus Movement simply proclaimed Jesus as a glorified prophet like Moses—an eschatological role he fits much more plausibly, and even appreciably, than that of a Davidic messiah. This implies that the claim of Jesus’ messianic kingship was already being made, if not by him, then for him while he was still alive; hence, too, the charge of the titulus Christi. Jesus’ popularity and apocalyptic urgency made him a prime candidate for hopes that he himself did not explicitly invoke; this, too, often happens with charismatic leaders. In only that case would Jesus’ glorification serve as some vindication for a specifically royal, messianic identity. Jesus’ first followers were aware that their position about his identity was counterintuitive to Jews, not all of whom cared about messiahs anyway, just as they were aware that the proclamation of a crucified man as cosmic emperor was the stuff of Aristophanic comedy to non-Jews (“a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Greeks”). And for what it is worth, their rhetorical position was sometimes smartly qualified. Paul at least is quite clear that “Christ” is a proleptic honorific of Jesus’: Jesus is messias designatus, and will only really be messiah in the complete sense at the eschaton when he returns to fulfill messianic prophecy, especially regarding the resurrection of the dead (anastasis nekrōn, in the plural, Rom 1:1-4; this is Fredriksen’s point). Pinchas Lapide, famously, took it to be an acceptable formula of reconciliation between Jews and Christians to think that Jesus had been a true prophet raised from the dead by God and exalted to heavenly status to bring about the obedience of the gentiles, but could not be confessed as messiah by Jews unless or until he returned to finish the job; while that formula stretches the limits of what most premodern or modern Jews have been willing to consider (and is much less than what most Christians would probably demand), it is fascinating that his position comes so close to Paul’s own. The Evangelists, in their own way, insert Jesus’ messianic identity into his own biography, but each of them qualifies its meaning considerably. Mark’s messianism is wired through the traditions of the Isaianic Servant which he applies to Jesus to explain the nature of his ministry and the character of his death; Matthew subordinates Davidic messianism to the presentation of Jesus as a New Moses, and Luke does the same, though he presents Jesus more like a New Elijah or a New Elisha, as a miracle-working prophet of social justice. In each of these Synoptic Gospels, too, the imminence of the eschaton is delayed to account for their own experience of the failure of Jesus to return as Paul and the earlier generations had looked forward to. John’s messianic Jesus is an otherworldly savior whose eschaton is already so inaugurated as to be all but realized in the communal life of his followers. While John makes a couple of passing references to the messianic parousia of Jesus, one earnestly wonders what function it serves in his scheme.
Paul and the Gospels speak of Jesus as the Christ, the Jewish messiah. It is not obvious that all of his earliest followers did. Some of Jesus’ early followers may have believed him to be a messiah, perhaps either a prophetic messiah or a royal messiah who would be joined by a priestly messiah (John the Baptizer?). In some Jewish eschatological schemes, the Davidic messiah seems to inaugurate a transformation of the cosmos in which life as we know it ceases and assumes a new form; in others, he merely brings about a restoration of the biblical golden age of Judah and Israel. In this case, it seems likely that the messiah’s job is to restart the Davidic lineage, and therefore, perhaps, some followers of Jesus really did take him to have renewed the dynasty, perhaps now to be assumed by his brother James (whose shadow looms large in the New Testament, implying a larger history that we can only partially reconstruct). During Jesus’ own lifetime those who hoped he would resurrect the monarchy (himself included?) probably expected that he would raise sons to succeed him after his reign. There is yet another contrafactual history to consider, in which we would write not of Jesus of Nazareth, Messiah and cosmic Lord, but of King Jesus I, client of Rome, renewer of the Davidic line.
At any rate, as the movement grew, Jesus absorbed the messianic paradigms not originally appended to him. With Jesus’ status as an eschatological prophet as the original basis, and the Davidic messiah association coming during his own lifetime and solidifying afterwards, some followers of Jesus also began speaking about him as a priestly messiah. Jesus was not a kohen; he never entered the Temple building itself, much less the Holy of Holies. Nor was he a Levite, such that he ever served in the Temple as a liturgical assistant or acolyte. But Jewish followers of Jesus could draw on two other precedents for speaking about him and his movement in priestly categories. First, Jewish Scripture retains the historical memory that prior to the centralization and codification of the priestly ordo, David and the Davidide kings performed priestly functions in the Jerusalem cult, for which they looked to ancient priest-kings like Melchizedek as justification (Gen 14). Kings of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world, because they were generally believed to be partly divine, were also generally regarded as priests, even if only honorifically (though this also frequently came with real sacerdotal prerogatives). Mesopotamian and Egyptian kings held these honors, for which reason Alexander the Great and Hellenistic monarchs did as well. Julius Caesar and his adopted son, Augustus, were famously both pontifex maximus, the supreme priesthood of Ancient Rome. The separation of powers that occurred in Jewish tradition between king and priests was gradual and incomplete until the exile, when the Davidic monarchy was lost and the high priesthood largely assumed its liturgical functions in the Temple cult. The Hebrew Bible is also somewhat edited, though imperfectly, with a view towards mitigating the presence of sacral, divine kingship in ancient Israel and Judah, a practice that some authors think on favorably and others find problematic. The New Testament’s use of Psalm 110:1-4, which mentions Melchizedek and the priesthood of his order—that is, the priesthood of the Davidic sacral kings—seems to revitalize some of that material in application to Jesus. But among non-Jewish followers of Jesus, this relatively unique sense in which he could be taken as a priestly messiah is likely to have been mostly irrelevant: more relevant would be the expectation of kings and emperors as high priests of their respective spheres of society, such that if Jesus is heavenly king and cosmic lord, then he is also, logically, the supreme high priest of the universe mediating between God and everything else. (Again, there is no Judaism/Hellenism divide; there are only echo chambers of successful and unsuccessful allusions rippling back and forth within and across permeable cultural barriers.)
The kerygmatic presentation of Jesus as Christ is the basis for his Christian confession as Son of God and Lord, which are integral to the apostolic kerygma in both Jewish and Hellenic hearings of the empire. I will discuss these titles more thoroughly in the third and fourth entries of the series, respectively, by way of introduction to the dogmatic Jesus and the cosmopolitan Jesus. With what space remains, instead, I would prefer to reflect on what it can mean for Jesus to be messiah to modern Christians, in conversation with other Abrahamic messianists or potential messianists, especially Jews and Muslims.
The royal sense of Jesus’ messianism was still a live interpretive category for Christians until the end of the fourth century; and insofar as Christians have always believed that Jesus was installed in heaven as king, to some degree messianism remains integral to Christianity. But a few things are clear about the ultimate fate of messianism in premodern Christianity. First, “Christ” ceased to be an honorific meaning “messiah” and carrying the connotations of eschatological Jewish renewal in diverse portraiture that that word conveys. This does not appear to have happened, as older scholarship asserted, in the first generations: second and third century Christians are still aware that Christ means messiah, as are some fourth century Christians. And here I am just speaking of those who speak Greek or Latin: Christians in the Coptic, Syriac, and Ethiopic worlds appear to have retained a sense of messiah as Jewish sacral king in application to Jesus for far longer, perhaps due to linguistic difference, in the context of a very different engagement with Judaism, perhaps in a social environment where there was no temptation to transfer messianic dreams of world peace to the Christianized Roman Emperor. But by the time the conciliar tradition is underway in earnest, it is clear that “Christ” functions as a substitutionary onomastic for “Jesus,” such that Christology ceases to be a species of messianism and becomes instead a philosophical clarification of the person, nature(s), and work of Christ. If any such memory of “Christ” as messiah lingered powerfully in Christianity, it is more likely to have been in the liturgy than in official theology: the chrismation of the newly baptized was frequently explained in mystagogy as entry into the three officia of Christ as prophet, priest, and king. Second, as early as Origen of Alexandria, literal hope for the fulfillment of biblical and apocalyptic prophecies of eschatological renewal, even when they appeared in the New Testament writings, came to be chided as intellectually indefensible and embarrassing for serious Christian theology (Origen, De Principiis II.11). The causes Origen had for thinking so are not hard to find when one considers his context. For roughly a century, Christianity had been transitioning its social status from that of a Roman collegium, an illicit and inconsistently tolerated social club or fraternity often accused of superstition and impiety (which brought cosmic threat to the empire through potentially angering or alienating the gods), to that of a mystery religion in private and a philosophical school in public. While many pagan critics of Christianity respected the virtue Christians encouraged, they found many Christian beliefs to be silly and incredible, intellectually unsound even when they were convergent with normative religion and philosophy in the empire at large. One of the vulnerable points of that criticism to pagan and Christian eyes was precisely Christian investment (though imbalanced, on the pagan and Jewish assessment) in Jewish Scripture. Origen and his heirs (the entire theological tradition afterwards, to specify) may well have felt that literalistic belief in a Jewish messiah who would do traditionally Jewish messianic things in the future made Christianity unnecessarily vulnerable, and that if another exegesis could be reasonably found, it should be employed.
Modern Christians, living in the wake of centuries of Christian persecution of Jews and the accumulated consequences of habitual Christian antisemitism in post-Christian Europe the form of the Shoah, and inspired by modern biblical studies, often want to reclaim Jesus as a specifically Jewish messiah. They rightly point out that Jesus and his followers were fully at home in first-century Judaism and that the foundations of messianic belief in Jesus are Jewish, even if not all Jews then or since agreed with the specific calculus by which Jesus’ original followers came to believe in him as messiah. Those Jews who still do believe in an individual, Davidic messiah and who have in the past have traditionally rejected Jesus, if not in reaction to Christian persecution of Jews, then on the grounds of a simple and unmalicious observation: Jesus did not do, and still has not done, the things claimed for a Davidic messiah in Jewish biblical and extrabiblical texts. Furthermore, Jews living after 1948 have another point to bring up in discussion with Christians: where the same Church Fathers who disputed literalistic readings of Jewish messianism in the New Testament asserted the permanent exile of Jews from Jerusalem and the impossibility of their resettlement, more Jews now live in Israel-Palestine than lived in the entire Roman Empire at the time of Jesus. The premodern Christian claims were always exaggerated, of course, because there continued to be Jews in Judea and Galilee continuously with non-Jews down to the modern period; but again, in an attempt to repent of previous anti-Jewish and anti-messianic rhetoric, Christians have found ways of accommodating and celebrating Jewish return to the holy land as compatible with Christian faith in ways that would have shocked and distressed the Fathers themselves. (Christians have also, rightly, taken up the cause of justice for Palestinians who have suffered at the hands of the Israeli government; support for a Jewish homeland and Palestinian self-determination and flourishing need not, for either Jews or Christians, be opposed.)
These are both positive developments in Christian thinking, but I am concerned that Christians sometimes miss that the Judaism with which they are primarily dialoguing about messiahs and prophecies of return to the holy land is a shrinking face of world Judaism and represents a minority of the world’s Jews. Most Jews on earth today live in either Israel or the United States; most of those in Israel who are religiously self-identifying are Orthodox, but most Israeli Jews are not religiously self-identifying, instead being secularized to different degrees; most of those in the United States are either apostate, secularized, or belong to one of the major progressive sects, the Reform and Conservative/Masorti movements, neither of which profess belief in an individual messiah as the Orthodox do. When those Jews do use messianic language, it is metaphorical; the messiah is more often a symbol for the world where God’s justice and mercy are realized rather than an individual, certainly not a king. That means most Jews on earth are not messianists in the classical sense, and certainly not apocalyptic messianists, looking for the establishment of a theocratic state based on the Torah with a Davidic monarch at its head.
Christians sometimes miss that by dialoguing exclusively with the Orthodox, which can lead to the misperception that the primary difference between Jews and Christians is the messiah’s identity. Between Jesus’ followers and other Jews in the first century that was certainly true, but today, it is not just that Jews do not believe Jesus is the messiah: most Jews do not believe in messiahs, full stop. Messiah is a largely vestigial category for modern Judaism: most Jewish children, even in a Jewish day school, cannot tell you what a messiah is and cannot fathom why anyone would be interested in having one, given Judaism’s strongly democratic and egalitarian spirit.
Where does that leave modern Christians seeking to reclaim the Jewish Jesus and Jesus Christ as a Jewish messiah, partly in repentance for sins of anti-Jewish rhetoric, activity, and precedent in the past? It does not need to depreciate the value of uncovering the original meaning of the confession that Jesus is messiah as I have described it above; without that starting place, we are liable to read into messianic language about Jesus precisely the kinds of socially and politically convenient meanings that have brought so much tragedy on Jesus’ own people in the past. But it can also perhaps open new avenues for dialogue between Jews and Christians on the reconceptualization of what messianism is and is good for. As early as the first century, Jesus’ followers were building on and rethinking what it meant that Jesus was messiah in light of the disappointment of apocalyptic hopes of imminent renewal of the world. In some ways, this led them back to Jesus as social prophet of Israel, proclaiming the ethical standards of the Torah in unyielding terms to his audiences. In the Greco-Roman world, this was arguably Christianity’s chief virtue and most biting critique of the pagan culture that otherwise resisted Christianity intellectually: Christians brought the Jewish humanism of its legal tradition, founded on the notion that every human being is in God’s image and likeness, and taken to the extreme by the exaltation of Jesus, a crucified slave, as messiah and cosmic lord, preached the radical, infinite value of every human being to a society built on the idea of natural inequality. For most Christians for most of history, Jesus’ status as Christ arguably retains its most messianic flavor in the ethics that the confession of Jesus as Christ enforced on former pagans. Medieval Jews as early as Maimonides recognized that Christianity must be praeparatio messianica, even if begrudgingly, for exactly this reason of the work it has done to bring ethical monotheism to the world. If Jesus is the royal, Davidic messiah, that is either hidden in heaven or reserved for the end, and it is only visible now in the fact that the gentiles obey him as their Moses. This is also, arguably, the most important significance Jesus or Isa in Arabic holds for Muslims. In the Quran, Jesus is the penultimate and second-most important prophet after Muhammad; he is also Israel’s masih, and while Islam likely began as a pan-Abrahamic restoration movement which probably expected Jesus to return as a messianic judge and king, and while some semblance of that apocalyptic eschatology is still normative for Sunni Muslims, the primary significance of Jesus’ messianic identity in the Quran and for most Muslims has inarguably been as prophet of the same ethical monotheism and islam (“submission”) as Muhammad himself. In one way, each of these are responses to Christianity critiquing Christological claims about Jesus; but in another, they converge somewhat with the direction of the New Testament’s own development of messianism away from imminent eschatology and towards a messianic Jesus who can be meaningful within ongoing history, especially as the final prophet of Israel and messenger to the nations. Hence the Lukan Jesus actively tells his disciples not to believe people who claim that the Kingdom of God is afoot in an imminent set of events, since it is rather “within you” (Lk 17:21).
I am not advocating, and I do not think that the New Testament authors would advocate, jettisoning the royal messianism of earliest hope in Jesus entirely. But Christians should squarely face that if Jesus is King Messiah, it is not in the way that the people who first invented that concept or applied it to Jesus thought it would be. Jesus as heavenly and/or eschatological king has willingly permitted both Jews and Christians, not to mention everyone else, to suffer two millennia of trauma without direct intervention. He was apparently uninvested in Christendom; it remains to be seen what will become of the Jewish nation-state project, not to mention the fate of every other politeia. There is more historical support for the Johannine Jesus’ statement that “my kingdom is not of this kosmos” (Jn 18:36), and for the Origenian notion that one might have to ascend beyond the realm of generation and decay to get there, than there is for either the Pauline notion of an imminent eschaton or for the Irenaean one of an intrahistorical messianic kingdom. Perhaps at length these two shall prove somehow unopposed; and much depends at any rate on how one understands prophecy, as prognostication or invocation, doom or dynamis. But while it is necessary always to hold open that possibility and to return to that first context of the meaning of Jesus as Christ, it should be obvious that no one alive today can earnestly hold that to mean the same thing it did in the 30s CE. Messianism and Christology evolve as a function of time like any other human discourse; this is only a problem for faith if we hold that there is in the past event of Jesus or his proclamation some totality of faith that has already been given and fully explained, and from which all subsequent development stands at threat of being nothing better than mild aberration. This has been a Pagan, Jewish, and Muslim critique of Christianity from antiquity to the present, that Jesus’ disciples have invented identities and meanings for him that he did not himself profess, and so Christianity is a corruption from the original Jesus Movement. In many ways, and certainly if Christians embrace a theory of revelation that works from the past forward, that critique is overpoweringly correct: no modern Christianity, its internal antiquity or consistency notwithstanding, is straightforwardly the selfsame religion of the apostles. The very idea that any substantial linkage exists between what the apostles preached and what modern Christian believes logically requires that the ultimate meaning of Jesus’ identity is still unfolding, in kerygma, dogma, and dialogue, and will only be fully manifest at the eschaton; at the level of history alone the radical discontinuity, diachronically and synchronically, of what Jesus’ followers have believed about him is what stands out in the record.
Does anything at present, though, render Christian belief in Jesus as messiah credible for the present? Questions like these are largely exercises in one’s premises and the conclusions that logically follow from them; they also depend to no small degree on temperaments that have nothing to do with logic. I can only offer what I find credible about Jesus’ messianic identity, presuming as my starting place my earnest belief in his postmortem glorification. History is largely the story of an elite few exploiting a great many and making the most basic and meaningful needs, desires, and experiences of human life all but impossible for the common person to enjoy. For the majority of his life Jesus’ obscurity effectively meant that he was a non-entity in wider society: a peasant without the rights of a Roman citizen or the protective wealth of an indigenous aristocrat, he struggled most of his life without any meaningful power to change the circumstances of the world. He was probably food insecure; he was probably malnourished most of the time. His celibacy reported in the Gospels is certainly a consequence of his apocalypticism, but one wonders if it was not also an unchosen circumstance of simple family, social, financial, or personal misfortune. Could Jesus have wanted marriage and not had access to a viable option? Could Jesus have been widowed? When he did achieve public notoriety, it was for consistently condemning wealthy, powerful people and religious authorities for hypocrisy and injustice. He was a man of the people; he actively spent time on the social margins, not in contradistinction to the Jewish values of his day, but precisely because he was following Jewish Tradition. Whatever powers he wielded, he wielded for them. He died an enemy of the state, convicted and killed of a crime of sedition that he did not commit. It is hard not to be a little in love with him, even if one does not believe. But believing as I do that God there is, I like to think that if God intervenes in history at all, it is for the sake of people like Jesus and not for the sake of people like Alexander or Caesar. If God raises the dead, I should hope it is for the just and the merciful, the righteous, prophets and teachers and good priests, servant-kings, the people who will advocate for history’s losers and judge its winners when called upon by God to do so. Jesus the messiah strikes me as much more attuned to the spirit of Israel’s tradition which sees its role as servant to God and to the world; the conquering monarch messiah, whether leveled against or applied to Jesus, strikes me as much more the revenge fantasy of the mundanely weak than the martyric witnesses of God’s oneness in the world (in all Abrahamic iterations of the concept). And as I believe also that Jesus’ resurrection is indeed credible—that is, that the apostolic experience of him alive from the dead is not reducible to mere wish fulfillment or mistake—I am left to conclude that the charge written against him is, in God’s good irony, offered now to the world as truth. Perhaps some future aspiring king will succeed where Bar-Kokhba failed; perhaps the true empire of the world (or worlds) is still to come. But Jesus’ messianic credibility is to be found here: where other messiahs past or future have sought power, Jesus seeks to speak the truth (Jn 18:37). And it is that notion of divine vindication of the weak, the exaltation of the lowly at the expense of the mighty, by the criteria of truth and love, that makes me open as well to the idea that in the humiliated form of the crucified Jesus, God has been revealed in human flesh.
Continuandum in parte tertia.
Awesome David - can’t wait for the next two installments. Hart put me on to you. By the way, have you written anything about the idea of divine inspiration of texts - particularly the scriptures? Would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks.
Quick question. "...the chrismation of the newly baptized was frequently explained in mystagogy as entry into the three officia of Christ as prophet, priest, and king...." Would you mind providing a source for this? I was always under the impression that the prophet/priest/king paradigm was modern.