After a few crucial moments of quiet prayer following a disappointing reminder of His own disciples’ lack of understanding, Jesus asked His followers a most important question. “Who do people say that I am?” The small list of possibilities being gossiped about then have only multiplied over the past 2000 years. The world has been steadily coming up with various beliefs about the identity of the mysterious Galilean whose actions and teachings turned the world upside down.
Even in Jesus’ day, the disciples revealed how diverse the opinions were. Some labeled Him a prophet, in the line of the faithful prophets of the Old Testament, predicting the coming destruction upon God’s people due to their disobedience. Others saw Him as another miracle-working Elijah, symbolically proving God’s sovereign power through His actions and words. Perhaps He was God’s replacement for the recently-executed John the Baptist, the strange, yet beloved prophet who had preached a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
Today, the diverse selection of answers to Jesus’ own question has only grown. In answering His question, one could write book after book, trying to summarize the different opinions and scholarly research that has taken place only in the last 500 years. Yet, the interpretations of His life and significance cannot be reduced to just recent history. From the time of the early church, theologians have wrestled with the meaning of His deity and humanity, His actions and words, His death and resurrection.
Views of the Gospels
The portraits painted by scholars and theologians, preachers and teachers alike, depend heavily on the view these take towards the Gospel material included in the biblical canon. Some come to the Gospel texts with the presupposition that they are inspired by God, thus any contradiction found within them must have some sort of logical explanation “behind the scenes” of the text. Some try to harmonize the Gospels so much that they argue that Peter denied Christ 9 times!
Others believe the Gospels to be theologies of different communities that sprang up in the early days of Christianity. John the Apostle had his community of believers who saw to it that his specific theology was recorded. Luke’s community of “socially active” Gospel-promoters logically influenced the Jesus-biography that best promotes their own theology of social-awareness. I guess it’s just too difficult to imagine that Jesus Himself was a theologian. Only the Gospel writers could have done theology.
Some don’t believe the Gospel writers to be even capable of recording history. Thus, their works are “overrated” and in need of quite a striking demotion. These are the scholars who trade in first-century wine (the canonical Gospels that have only gotten better with age) for 2nd century beer (the apocryphal and gnostic works such as The Gospel of Thomas). Then in their stupor they claim the 2nd century gospels to have been written much earlier than usually accepted.
Others hold to the Gospels as the main source of information about Jesus Christ, but then radically slash their historicity by negating the truth of many of their claims. Despite Jesus’ fervent teaching against divorce, some Jesus scholars have chosen to put Him through another sort of “divorce” – robbing Him of His specifically Jewish background. What’s left is some kind of Greek cynic walking around spouting off strange euphemisms about love and peace and only getting into it with the religious politically incorrect nuts of His day. So, in a modern world with 24-hour news programming, we get our “talking head” Jesus too. Just call in with your questions.
Divinity – Humanity
I don’t want to give the impression that these are new developments. People have been debating about the identity and role of Jesus of Nazareth ever since He was still in Nazareth. All throughout Christian history, some have denied His humanity in one way or another, making Him out to be an all-knowing Superman of the 1st century, flying from place to place and just “pretending” to be a man. Jesus going to the bathroom? You gotta be kidding. Sure He was a man, but was He really like one of us? Did He really get tired? Did He really get furious in the temple? Was He really hurt when His disciples turned their backs on Him? No, He was only pretending, so people wouldn’t catch on too fast.
Believe it or not, this idea of Jesus being a “semi-human” strange alien sort of being is a heresy that still persists in some Christian circles today. I don’t have to come up with too much evidence to prove that in some evangelical circles, we tend to lean toward the heresy of denying Jesus’ humanity than to lean the other way.
Of course, it’s precisely the other view that tends to ruffle us up the most. And for good reason. Many scholars and Christian teachers have thrown out Jesus’ claims to divinity and have demoted Him to the position of a marginal “only-human” teacher about which little historical evidence can be retrieved. Impossible that Jesus would actually think He was more than just a man. Impossible that He would actually let people worship Him. There’s no way that all those “I Am” statements in John could possibly go back to Jesus Himself. He was too humble to talk of Himself that way, and plus, He wasn’t really divine anyway. All those myths ultimately arose later so that people wouldn’t forget His really important life and ethical teaching. If you want to make a conservative Sunday School teacher of 4 and 5 year olds stop cold in their tracks and then point you to the door, just make a little statement about Jesus not being God and then you’ve got the way paved for you to purgatory.
Yet, is this really the right way to deal with those who bring legitimate questions to the table regarding Jesus’ identity? Liberals are ashamed to give too much credence to a Jesus theory that doesn’t sound like that of a peacenik. Conservatives would rather exclude someone from the dinner party than to dine with someone who calls into question one of our fundamentals.
The Faith – History Barrier
These camps have led to yet another wilderness retreat, this one actually being a true retreat into nowhere-land. Some scholars have just thrown up their hands in surrender, affirming that we will never know much about the historical Jesus and had just better put our faith in the doctrines of the later church and forget the historical search altogether.
From a labor standpoint, who wouldn’t be for it? Why all the blood, sweat and tears to get to the actual historical physical human person who walked the earth so long ago? Is it not easier to just leave it all behind and say, “Hey, give me Luther and Augustine. We know who they are.” Faith is faith and history is history. Why mix the too? Well, that sounds very deep, but I can give a good reason why they should be mixed.
The Christian faith is based on a very historical person, who lived in a very historical time and died on a very historical cross and (although it is fiercely denied from many corners) very historically and physically rose from the dead. If Jesus is not a part of history, you can throw the New Testament out the window and go start your own religion. Sure there has to be a place for faith; no one is denying that. God forbid we make Christianity a totally rationalistic religion. It’s not and in its true form won’t ever be that. Yet, the questions persist.
I’ll write more on this tomorrow…
written by Trevin Wax © 2007 Kingdom People blog
