The Historical Jesus and Israel
The historical personage, on Borg’s
interpretation was primarily a teacher, healer, social prophet and “Spirit
person” (p. 53), in many respects, the “liberal” Jesus of the late 19th
century. The categories Borg draws upon
to characterize the historical Jesus are based less on Jewish history and
Scripture per se “than cross-cultural study of types of religious personality”
(p. 60) which may be as applicable to Buddhism as Judaism or early
Christianity. The broader point that
Borg makes is that while the categories that he draws on “are not specifically
Jewish,” and neither is “the language…specifically biblical,” “the phenomena”
Borg describes, have roots in deep Jewish tradition (p. 60). On this interpretation, both Judaism and
Christianity may be viewed as “axial” religions in which their commonalities,
an overarching quest for the universal god, are considered more fundamentally important
than surface and not so surface differences (Armstrong, 2006). This includes rejection of “supernatural
theism” as a viable concept “for thinking about God’s relationship to the
world” (p. 62), as well as any scandal of particularity that God is most fully
(if not completely) revealed in a given religious “myth” or “metaphor.”
Thus on Borg’s interpretation,
Jesus’ primary vocation was that of “Jewish mystic” (p. 64). This was the fundamentally what Borg means
when he describes Jesus as a “spirit person,” terms he used interchangeably. Borg draws much on contemporary spirituality
in this depiction. Thus, with other mystics, Jesus “had decisive and…firsthand
experiences of the sacred” (p. 60). Such
“‘eyes closed’ mystical states” includes “ineffability that cannot be explained
“in ordinary language but only with the language of metaphor.” There is also a transient nature to such
experiences and also much “passivity” in that “they are received rather than
achieved.” In addition, they are “noetic”
in which there is a high level of certainty based on what is sometimes referred
to as conative or embodied knowledge which accompanies these experiences. These are not just “strong feelings” which are
crucial to mystical experience, but knowledge gained through experience that,
in some determinative way, requires undergoing to fully obtain. Borg’s final depiction is the category of the
“transformative,” in which the mystic is fundamentally changed as a result of
such undergoing (p. 61).
It is this spirit person that most
closely conforms to the Jesus as lived as disclosed to the extent possible, in
the sources and in the prevailing interpretations of modern biblical
scholarship when the New Testament overlay of Jesus as the Jewish Messiah are
peeled back. This Jesus was still Jewish
in every way, which provided the religious tradition that shaped the categories
of his mystical experience. Still, on
Borg’s interpretation, it is not clear the extent to which this Jewish
“peasant” possessed “scribal literacy” (p. 64) and therefore the capacity to
study the scriptures in depth as reflected in the midrashic depiction of Jesus
of the gospel writers. Even without such
literacy, Borg notes, given his interest, mission, and their general
availability, Jesus would have possessed a solid knowledge of the central
biblical narratives even if he lacked full capacity to cite chapter and
verse. On this respect, Borg would agree
with the New Testament characterization of Jesus as one who spoke with
authority, following in the pathway of his mentor, John the Baptist, to
establish a revitalization movement, based on the deepest calling of the
Prophets, the ushering in of the kingdom
of God Israel
Based on this interpretation in
which the Jesus of history and the Christ of the New Testament diverge in some
radical respects, the Jesus that Borg discerns was principally a “healer,
wisdom teacher, social prophet, and movement initiator” (p. 65). The scandalous question Borg indirectly puts
to more orthodox interpretations is, “had Jesus lived and taught for forty more
years as the Buddha did, what more might we be able to discern about his
purpose?” (p. 65). Thus, not only was
the cross a tragically inessential aspect of the life and death of Jesus of
Nazareth. Borg’s implicit message is
that neither is it the crucial event in our own interpretation and
appropriation of the wisdom and teaching of Jesus in our lives. The Jesus that Borg presents drew upon the
deepest images of the religious and political culture of his time for an
understanding of God, in a vision, which, of necessity, invariably transcended
finite time and place. It is in this respect that Borg views the New Testament
depiction of Jesus as categorically metaphorical.
Go and tell John what you hear and
see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and
the deaf here [sic], and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news
preached to them.”
Borg notes that such healing “points
to a time of deliverance” (p. 67), but bypasses the context in which Jesus
addresses John; namely, John’s question, “Are you the Coming One or do we look
for another?” (Matt 11:3). On this
reading, healings do have metaphorical significance symbolizing the breaking in
of the kingdom of
God Israel Israel
So what was Jesus up to? This is the question that Borg seeks to
answer in Chapter Four. As someone who
shattered “conventional wisdom,” Jesus provided “a new way of seeing,” “a new
way of centering” in which “he taught a path of transformation centered in the
sacred” (pp. 69, 70, italics removed where applicable). It was within this context of teacher that
Jesus defined his core mission as “social prophet” and “movement initiator.” As a social prophet, Jesus cast his lot with
the poor, the outcast the “marginalized.”
In this respect, borrowing categories from Old Testament scholar, Walter
Brueggemann, Jesus’ prophetic mission sought to counteract the “politics of
oppression” (Rome and Rome’s agents in Israel), the “economics of exploitation”
(against the power of the “urban ruling elites”), and the “religion of
legitmation” (particularly the Pharisees and Scribes in their pejorative gospel
depiction) (pp. 71-72). Jesus’ most fundamental mission, according to Borg,
was, in building on the legacy of John the Baptist, to proclaim the kingdom of
God through the vision of the inverted world in which the last ones now shall
later be first.
Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God Israel
He knew how to heal. He knew how to create memorable sayings and
stories; he had a metaphoric mind. He
knew that God was accessible to the marginalized because he was from the marginalized
himself. He knew that tradition and
convention were not sacred in themselves but, at best, pointers to and
mediators of the sacred and, at worst, a snare.
He knew an oppressive and exploitative social order that legitimated
itself in the name of God, and he knew this was not God’s will. And he knew all of this most foundationally
because he knew God (p. 76)
It was this law that Jesus
radically brought to prophetic culmination rather than abolished (Mt 5:17 ) through his healing, teaching,
and movement building, but ultimately through the agency of his own calling as Israel
According to Wright the belief in
the radical particularity and superiority of the living God revealed in and
through Israel temple Judaism
First and foremost Jesus was a
“first century Jewish prophet” (italics removed) (p. 33), a “second temple”
religious leader whose mission embodied the imagery of exile and return as
exhibited in the political and religious imagination of the period among a wide
array of groups. Among those seeking a
restoration of Israel Israel Rome
Thus, the second stroke to Wright’s
historical sketch. “Jesus was a first
century prophet [italics in original] announcing God’s kingdom” (p. 33). The pivotal point was the restoration
specifically to something pointed to in times of old, but never achieved, God’s
full indwelling within the nation of Israel Israel Israel kingdom of God
And I will uphold Your hand;
I will keep You and give You as a
covenant to the people,
As a light to the Gentiles,
To open blind eyes,
To bring out prisoners from the
prison,
To those who sit in darkness in the
prison house.
I am the Lord, that is My name;
And My glory I will not give to
another,
Nor My praise to graven images (Isa42:
6-8)
This was
the light that shone through Israel
Jesus’ understanding of God
embodied the ineffable, transient, noetic, and transformative dimensions of
spiritual reality as Borg described.
Yet, for Jesus such experiences that Borg identified were manifestations
of the presence of God revealed in Israel Israel
As Wright notes, one could draw on the
categories Borg uses in his depiction of Jesus to get a handle on what he was
up to. Without specificity, which Borg
does provide in his description, these categories can only be, but highly abstract. If taken as the summation of religious
experience they reflect a sort of empty universality in which the specific
context of any particular religion are evaluated not on their own terms, but
how they measure up to these intangible depictions. Truth, in effect, is defined by the
authenticity of experience which, in its depth, is beyond the capacity of
language to describe, although it can be pointed to metaphorically. According to Wright what drove this “Galilean
Jewish peasant” (p. 59) to the point of ultimate commitment was his proclamation
of the kingdom of God in the restoration of Israel’s most fundamental calling
as a light onto the Gentiles, which to the Jesus of history was no mere
metaphor.
Without this radical specificity at
the heart of second temple
Judaism
The third and most fundamental of
Wright’s claim about the historical Jesus (in which Wright’s last two points
are briefly incorporated here) was “that the kingdom [of God] was breaking in to
Israel
What Wright argues is that given
the temper of the times and that all that contemporary scholarship discloses of
the period and the historical Jesus, there was nothing in the nature of those
times that would have impeded his self-identification as Israel’s Messiah and
much to support it based on the trajectory of his mission and the logical
conclusions that it assumed. Wright is
quick to point out that this messianic consciousness was still a good distance
from a fully developed Trinitarian Christology, a topic to be discussed in the
next section, but a logical development, which Wright fleshes out in vast
detail in his more extensive works, based on the life, the mission and death of
the Jesus, and the proclamation of his resurrection by his earliest followers. Wright acknowledges theological enhancements of
claims linking the constructed Christ to the prophecies of old in the gospel
narratives. Nonetheless, the substance
of the literary artifice has, on Wright’s view, a much more substantial
historical core than that posited by Borg and his associates of the Jesus
seminar. In conjunction with the main
thrust of contemporary biblical scholarship Borg posits a fundamental divide
between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith as articulated in the New
Testament in which Jesus’ messianic vocation is a literary construct created by
the early church. With Borg, also, there
is a nucleus in history—history remembered, yet more fundamentally, history
metaphorized. With Wright there is much
greater symmetry between history as lived and faith as received even as the gap
between the two remains, in the most literal sense of the term, unfathomable.
No comments:
Post a Comment