3. An
Early Portrait of Jesus
The Gospel of Ur-John presents an image of Jesus unlike anything we find
in modern reconstructions. Not only is he a Jesus that scholars have never
seen, he is one that many scholars would never want to see. Ur-John offers a
straightforward, coherent portrait of a man who believes he is a coming king of
Israel, and one who is heralded by believers as the coming king. There are two
explicit references that he is to fulfill the role of an anticipated messiah,
but this title is not primary; the Greek analogue Christ is far more prevalent. He believes the restoration of the
sovereign Kingdom of Israel is at hand, and he is to be the agent of change
that brings it to fruition. Once the Kingdom of Israel is restored, he believes
he is destined to rule as King of the Jews. Anticipating the imminent
revolution, he is dedicated to the task of convincing a sufficient number of
followers that he is the genuine messiah/Christ. He and his first disciples
emerge as a splinter group that separates from the Baptist’s movement. It is unclear
what leads Jesus and his supporters to go out on their own, but one clue may be
that Ur-John’s Jesus is decidedly pro-active, confrontational, and willing to
travel. The Baptist’s apparent preference for remaining in the wilderness and
preaching only to those willing to make the trek to come out to see him would
not have suited the temperament of Jesus as Ur-John portrays him.
Early in his ministry while the Baptist was still active, Jesus takes
his mission directly to Jerusalem and stages the famous Temple cleansing, or what Paula Fredricksen aptly terms the Temple tantrum. In this
episode Ur-John reveals a Jesus who is disturbingly aggressive. This event is
attested in all four gospels, but only in Ur-John do we find Jesus physically
assaulting people and animals with a whip (2:15). The Synoptic authors, not
surprisingly, omit this detail, which is consistent with the view that the
Synoptics contain a later, redacted version of the account in Ur-John; it is
unlikely that the Church would have adopted a newly composed gospel toward the
end of the first century that depicted Jesus wielding a whip in this scene.
Jesus is shown to be confrontational not only in the Temple episode, but
he soon returns to the remote location of the Baptist’s ministry and begins to
compete with him directly, seeking to attract converts among John’s adherents
(3:22-26). Ur-John makes it clear that the Baptist did not become a follower of
Jesus, but rather continued to run his own operation. As described by Ur-John,
Jesus’ decision to set up a competing ministry of baptism adjacent to that of
John appears to be a bold challenge to the validity of John’s ministry as well
as somewhat of a public spectacle. It surely was an unwelcomed intrusion into
John’s domain, as is made clear by his disciples’ comment in 3:26. With the
Temple disturbance and now this confrontation, Ur-John begins to sketch the
image of an aggressive Jesus who stages controversial public spectacles to gain
attention and promote his claim to be the Christ. This theme recurs throughout
the gospel with the feeding of the five thousand, the raising of Lazarus, and
the triumphal entry. In each case Jesus uses dramatic public theater as a means
of promoting his kingship.
In addition to depicting Jesus as a theatrical self-promoter, Ur-John
reveals a Jesus that is really not all that likeable as a person. Jesus is
often abrupt and abrasive even when the situation does not appear to call for
it. He speaks in a demeaning manner to Nicodemus who has purposely sought him
out: “Are you a teacher of Israel and yet
you do not understand this? (Ur-John 3:10). He is coldly dismissive of his
mother: “O woman, what have you to do with me?” (2:4). He speaks in
demanding and condescending tones to the Samaritan woman at the well: “Give
me a drink” (4:7); “You have had five
husbands and he whom you have now is not your husband” (4:18); “You
worship what you do not know. We worship what we know” (4:22). Jesus’
response to the official begging his help on behalf of his ill son is a rather
curt, “Go. Your son will live.”
(4:50). After a dialogue on bread from heaven that many took offense at,
Ur-John states “After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went
about with him” (6:66). At times, arguments with the Jews descend into petty
bickering (ch. 8).
Related to Jesus’ off-putting demeanor is the fact that healings in
Ur-John are depicted with a cool sense of personal detachment. In ch. 5 he
encounters the paralyzed man by the pool and asks, “Do you want to be healed?” The sick man explains his situation,
addressing Jesus as an unknown stranger. Jesus then follows with the simple
command, “Rise, take up your pallet and
walk.” Jesus finds the man later and delivers a terse warning, “see, you are well. Sin no more that nothing
worse may befall you.” The author’s intent is clearly to illustrate the
power of Jesus to heal on command, and that this is to be interpreted as a sign
of his authenticity. Yet the episode is remarkable for its lack of personal
warmth and interaction. The healed man never recognizes Jesus as the Christ, and
never professes a faith of any kind. Jesus performs the healing in order to
make a public statement about himself; the essential element in the story is
the command that the healed man take up his pallet, for it is the public
display of carrying of the pallet, not the fact that the healed man is walking,
that sets up the ensuing dialogue concerning Jesus’ authority to heal on the
Sabbath.
The same cool dynamics are at work in the healing of the blind man in
ch. 9. Here the disciples notice the blind man and ask the reason for his
condition. Jesus states candidly that his blindness was intended to provide
Jesus an opportunity to display his power. Jesus has no preliminary interaction
with the man. The first thing the blind man is aware of is a stranger rubbing
mud on his eyes, then being commanded to go wash it off in the pool of Siloam.
He does so and is miraculously healed, but Jesus has no further interaction
with him. There is no recognition of who Jesus is at the time, and Jesus does
not speak to him again. Presumably Jesus could have healed him on command or
simply by touch, but the mud in the eyes makes the event a more dramatic public
spectacle, as if it were staged for maximum theatric effect.
In these two healings the author of Ur-John is narrowly focused on
portraying the power and the authority of Jesus without giving any thought to
how he interacted with people. Jesus moves among the people with a sense of
aloofness and superiority. He is most concerned with establishing his identity
as the Christ or demonstrating his miraculous powers while routinely
manifesting little compassion or respect for those he encounters. In modern
parlance, he is a self-absorbed narcissist who lacks people skills. Conversely,
the Gospel of Mark offers a portrait of Jesus that is, in breathtaking measure,
an extreme polar opposite to that of Ur-John: in Mark we find an intensely compassionate
Jesus who interacts tenderly with people, while forbidding anyone to discuss or
acknowledge his messiahship. Nowhere is the stark difference between these two
images of Jesus more obvious than in Ur-John and Mark’s respective stories of
the anointing with oil:
The
Anointing at Bethany
Ur-John
12:1-8
|
Mark
14:3-9
|
1 Six
days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Laz'arus was, whom
Jesus had raised from the dead. 2 There they made him a supper; Martha served, and
Laz'arus was one of those at table with him. 3 Mary took a pound of costly ointment of pure nard
and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair; and the
house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment. 4 But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples
(he who was to betray him), said, 5 "Why was this ointment not sold for three
hundred denarii and given to the poor?" 6 This he said, not that he cared for the poor but
because he was a thief, and as he had the money box he used to take what was
put into it. 7 Jesus said, "Let her alone, let her keep it for the day
of my burial. 8 The
poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me."
|
3 And while he was at Bethany
in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at table, a woman came with an
alabaster flask of ointment of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the
flask and poured it over his head. 4 But there were some who said to
themselves indignantly, "Why was the ointment thus wasted? 5 For this ointment might have been
sold for more than three hundred denarii, and given to the poor." And
they reproached her. 6 But Jesus said, "Let her alone; why do you
trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. 7 For you always have the
poor with you, and whenever you will, you can do good to them; but you will
not always have me. 8 She has done what she could; she has anointed my body
beforehand for burying. 9 And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is
preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of
her."
|
The Anointing at Bethany is a beautiful story as told by Mark; Jesus is
aware of the woman as a human being with feelings. He makes a specific point of
honoring the significance of her sacrificial act of applying the ointment to
his head. When she is criticized he graciously affirms her and proclaims her
act as one that will be remembered forever. In Mark, Jesus deliberately turns
the light entirely onto the woman and away from himself. By contrast, this same
episode in Ur-John is arguably the single most offensive performance of Jesus
that exists in the NT. In this version of the story Jesus is content to sit and
watch Mary (the sister of Lazarus in this story, not the mother of Jesus)
perform the supremely debasing act of wiping his feet with her hair. In this
account it is Judas Iscariot in particular, not an amorphous “some” of the
disciples, who challenges the waste of the ointment. The author thinks it is
more important to use this scene to cast further aspersions on the unsavory
character of Judas rather than to keep the focus on Mary’s self-sacrifice, which
indicates something about the author’s intense personal animosity toward Judas,
or his disregard for Mary, or both. As she wipes his feet with her hair, Jesus
sits back smugly and proclaims, “Let her
alone, she can keep the rest of it to bury me, the poor you always have, but
you do not always have me.” The author perceives Mary has having no value
worth commenting upon and puts no words in Jesus’ mouth that would suggest such.
The important element in this author’s mind was to emphasize the kingly greatness
of Jesus as one who deserved to be serviced by a servant in this manner.
These two stories manifest literary interdependence in the details. John
and Mark know that the ointment was one of pure
nard, and that it was worth three
hundred denarii, but Matthew and Luke do not. To describe the value of the
ointment, John and Mark use variants of the same adjective—costly (polutimos) in
John and very costly (poluteles) in Mark. By comparison, Matthew
uses the unique term barutimos, which
the RSV translates as very expensive
(the only occurrence of this word in the NT), and Luke drops any reference to
the value of the ointment altogether. That Ur-John and Mark uniquely share
these insignificant details in common suggests that the later of the two authors
was aware of the earlier account. There is no doubt that Ur-John contains the
original story and Mark the highly redacted and morally improved version.
Matthew carries forward Mark’s whitewashed version with only minor changes in
wording. But Luke apparently did not care for Mark’s approach to the rewrite of
the story. Luke eliminates any notion that the woman was Mary the sister of
Lazarus (per Ur-John) or that she was unnamed and presumably unknown (per Mark).
Luke retains Ur-John’s disturbing image of the woman wiping the feet of Jesus
with her hair, but he adds colorful details that she was weeping, wetting
Jesus’ feet with her tears, and kissing his feet. Most importantly, Luke
identifies her as a “woman of the city,” a prostitute who was already maximally
debased. Thus, the implication is that the use of her hair to clean the feet of
Jesus could not possibly degrade her any further. So Luke portrays this as an
act of abject contrition that ultimately leads to the woman’s forgiveness. The
story is no longer about Jesus being served in an obsequious manner, but rather
the woman’s restoration to grace.
The fact that Mark and Luke each offer morally improved revisions to the
Anointing at Bethany indicates that they were as offended by Ur-John’s account
as anyone would be today. However, they resolved the problem in radically
different ways. Mark simply erases the image of a woman cleaning Jesus’ feet
with her hair and instead has her apply the ointment to his head. Luke retains
the degrading spectacle, but places it in a radical new context such that the
woman’s act might be compassionately understood. In both versions Jesus appears
decidedly noble in spirit and acutely sensitive to the needs of the
woman—traits that are wholly absent in Ur-John.
There is little chance that Ur-John’s account appeared later in the
first century as per conventional academic theory. The early Church surely
would not have adopted Ur-John’s unseemly portrayal of Jesus if the more
compelling treatments by Mark and Luke were already in circulation. Clearly,
Ur-John represents a primitive account that the Synoptic writers were motivated
to correct. However, the most remarkable aspect of the Anointing at Bethany is
not that we find the Synoptic writers offering substantially revised and enhanced
versions, but that John’s repellant account survived at all. Since the Synoptic
authors sensed the need to create morally corrected versions of the story, why
not simply delete the offending account from the official records? Once again,
as we saw several times in the previous chapter, the specter of apostolic
authorship provides a likely explanation. This must have been a long
established text, composed by an author whose reputation and authority were an
essential part of the movement’s history, so much so that his words could not
be deleted from the traditions.
If Ur-John was indeed written by an apostle who knew Jesus personally,
what could account for his characterization of Jesus as imperial, aloof, and
aggressive? We can only speculate, but the answer may lie in the fact that
Ur-John was composed at a time when the movement of the Baptist was regarded as
the established dominant force and Jesus was the newcomer and challenger who
did not have the reputation, gravitas, or following of the Baptist. Within this
context, the author of Ur-John may have been motivated to overcompensate in
portraying the superior power and authority of Jesus over the Baptist. Thus he
was inclined to emphasize him as one who strode among people with a kingly
presence and a decisive, awe-inspiring confidence—a man who was head and
shoulders above the common man: “No man ever spoke like this man!” say
the authorities who failed to arrest him (Ur-John 7:46); “including John the Baptist” was perhaps the unstated subtext. At
that early juncture it did not occur to the author that issues pertaining to
Jesus’ moral behavior and his attendance to the emotional needs of people would
be relevant to establishing the superiority of Jesus over the Baptist as a
messianic claimant. Essentially, we might imagine that his primary objective
was to portray Jesus as one with a commanding presence that struck awe in all
whom he encountered, so much so that a perfectly natural reaction would be for
a woman to fall at his feet and wipe them with her hair. So consumed was the
author with the desire to highlight the power and authority of Jesus that he
simply failed to produce a more nuanced, multi-dimensional portrait of Jesus as
a human being.
Indications of an
Early Composition Date
Ur-John offers a fascinating glimpse of Jesus as remembered by one who
had known and traveled with him. It certainly predates the Synoptic tradition.
As discussed in Chapter One, it contains a formidable attack on the integrity
of Peter, indicating that it was composed prior to the martyrdom of Peter circa
65 CE. But how early could it be? The evidence that it was composed in Aramaic
is consistent with its primitive origin but it does not help any further with
dating, for one might expect any document produced by Jewish factions of the
Jesus movement prior to 65 CE to have been written in Aramaic. However, there
are other indicators of extremely primitive origin that would suggest a date as
early as the 40s:
The Calling of
Twelve Disciples. Many scholars have expressed skepticism that the historical Jesus had
actually called twelve disciples to symbolize the twelve tribes of Israel.
Skepticism is warranted based on the fact that it seems intrinsically
implausible that a new movement could have manifested such a formal
hierarchical structure so quickly. Furthermore, for anyone who grants that the
historical Jesus has been mythologized at all, the concept of the twelve would
have been an easy and obvious mythical element to incorporate into the
tradition. Add to that the fact that the lists of the twelve in Mark and
Matthew differ slightly from the lists in Luke and Acts, and there is a reason
to doubt the historicity of the twelve.
However, Ur-John is intriguing for the fact that, though it contains no
formal account of the calling of the twelve, it does contain a muted
remembrance of the twelve. Their existence is acknowledged in passing but not
featured. While the Synoptic gospels all highlight the calling of twelve
special disciples and make a point of naming each, Ur-John provides no list,
and contains only one passage in which the twelve are addressed by Jesus:
66 After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about
with him. 67 Jesus said to the twelve, "Do you also wish to go away?"
68 Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; 69 and
we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of
God."
70 Jesus answered them, "Did I not choose you, the twelve, and one of you
is a devil?" 71 He spoke of Judas the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one
of the twelve, was to betray him. (John 6:66-71)
In this passage the author clearly assumes his readers are aware that
Jesus called twelve disciples, for he uses the oblique phrase the twelve casually without further
exposition. Throughout Ur-John, the author finds occasion to name six of the
twelve that appear in the Synoptic lists: Simon Peter, Andrew, Philip, Thomas,
Judas Iscariot, and the Beloved Disciple, whom we identify herein as John, son
of Zebedee. The remaining six go without mention at all. Ur-John also mentions
Nathanael, a disciple who does not exist in the Synoptics, but it is not clear
whether the author viewed him as one of the twelve.
There is one other use of the
twelve at the end of the gospel: “Now
Thomas, one of the twelve, called the Twin, was not with them when Jesus
came” (20:24). However, this is a suspicious reference; one would expect the
author to have written this descriptor in the more appropriate order “Thomas called the Twin, one of the twelve…”
Since editorial glosses throughout the gospel tend to result in clumsy
grammatical constructs, we might suspect that this was a gloss intended to imply
that the rest of the twelve disciples were present at this first appearance of
Jesus in the upper room—information that would not have otherwise been in the
original composition.
It is important to note that Ur-John is quite in harmony with Paul in
treating the twelve has having only minor relevance. Paul is evidently aware of
the twelve, but he only acknowledges their existence once in all of his
letters, and then only in passing:
3
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ
died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that
he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, 5 and that he
appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. 6 Then he appeared to more than five
hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have
fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. 8 Last of
all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. (1 Cor. 15:3-8)
Thus, in both Ur-John and the letters of Paul, the existence of the
twelve is remembered but not proclaimed with any enthusiasm. This muted
treatment of the twelve is not likely to have been a mythologized overlay; the
existence of the twelve is taken for granted and mentioned in passing by both
authors without highlight or explanation. This is not what one would expect
from the pen of an editor who was introducing a newly minted symbolic myth of
the twelve. What, then, could explain this cursory treatment of the tradition?
Two possible motives come to mind. First, Ur-John is written to
highlight the special relationship that the Beloved Disciple had with Jesus and
to bolster his claim to leadership in the movement based upon that unique
relationship. (As an aside, the author of Ur-John, the apostle John son of
Zebedee and the “disciple whom Jesus loved” are all one and the same person, in
the present interpretation.[1])
To draw attention to the fact that Jesus had called eleven other disciples in
addition to himself might have been viewed as an unnecessary distraction from
this objective of the work. To some degree the same motive may have been
influencing Paul as he was promoting his own unique mission and ideology. For
Paul there simply was no compelling reason to draw attention to the twelve
since he was not one of them.
However, an intriguing clue to the mystery may be found within Ur-John’s
reference to the twelve itself. It
may be no accident that Ur-John remembers the
twelve only in the context of Jesus questioning their allegiance.
Realistically, if Jesus had indeed called twelve associates, it is likely that
many of them abandoned the movement upon Jesus’ crucifixion; the desertion by
these disciples was the likely historical reality behind the tradition that the
sheep would be scattered. In point of fact, eight of the twelve named by Mark
were never remembered as having played any role in the movement either during
Jesus’ ministry or after his death. Peter, James, John, and Judas are accounted
for, but what of the other eight? For the disciples still committed to the Jesus
movement in the 40s, those who were remembered as deserters would not have been
recalled with fondness. There would have been no interest in featuring their
activities in the Gospels, or indeed even in highlighting the fact that Jesus
had once called twelve disciples. Seen in this light, the muting of the
tradition of “the twelve” in the earliest records of Ur-John and Paul would be
understandable.
By the time Mark was composed almost forty years after the death of
Jesus, a second generation of believers had risen up for whom awareness of the
original twelve would have been minimal. So Mark was free to reaffirm the
theological significance of Jesus’ calling of twelve without concern for how
they might have been remembered. Thus Mark emphasizes the calling of the twelve
so much so that he names them individually. This may not seem remarkable when
viewed from a modern perspective in which Luke, Acts, and Matthew did the same.
But at the time, if Ur-John had not called them out and Mark was the first to
do so, it would have been regarded as a bold new development. Not surprisingly,
Mark opened his list of the twelve with the active disciples, Peter, James, and
John, and rounded it out with names of those who played no subsequent role in
the movement, including Andrew, Philip[2],
Bartholomew, Matthew[3],
Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus, Simon the Cananaean, and Judas
Iscariot. For Mark, the symbolic power of twelve trumped the fact that most of
them were unknown, for the significance of twelve was fully exploited in the
literary structure of his gospel—Mark’s Gospel is constructed on a brilliantly
conceived framework of seven and twelve for theological reasons (see Appendix
3: The Literary Structure of Mark).
The muted remembrance of the twelve in both Ur-John and Paul is
compelling evidence that Jesus did indeed assemble a group of twelve, for if the
calling of twelve was a legend fabricated for theological reasons it would not
have been introduced in the off-handed, inconsequential fashion that it appears
in these works. For John and Paul, Jesus’ calling of the twelve was a subject
better left forgotten than highlighted, for it would not have served the
movement well to acknowledge that many of the original twelve disciples had
chosen not to follow the post-Easter Jesus tradition. The cursory treatment of
the twelve in Ur-John and Paul is consistent with a very early composition date.
The
Non-mythologized World. Ur-John stands apart from the Synoptic tradition
in many ways, but one of the most intriguing is that supernatural events, other
than the miracles performed by Jesus, are rare. Jesus conducts his ministry on
the stage of an almost exclusively natural world. This is ironic in that the
Gospel of John is widely perceived as the most theologically evolved of the
four gospels and therefore the most mythologized and the least relevant in
historical research.
Supernatural
Events in the Gospels
(excluding
the miracles of Jesus)
Event
|
Ur-John
|
Mark
|
Luke
|
Matt
|
Virginal Conception
|
|
|
1
|
1
|
Star of Bethlehem
|
|
|
|
1
|
Warnings in Dreams
|
|
|
|
2
|
Angelic
appearances
|
1
|
1
|
4
|
4
|
Heavens open upon Jesus’ baptism
|
|
1
|
1
|
1
|
Spirit descends upon Jesus like a dove
|
1
|
1
|
1
|
1
|
Voice from heaven
|
1
|
1
|
1
|
1
|
Temptation by Satan
|
|
1
|
1
|
1
|
Conversations with Satan
|
|
|
1
|
1
|
Angels minister to Jesus in wilderness
|
|
1
|
|
1
|
Conversations with demons
|
|
3
|
3
|
1
|
Transfiguration/ Moses & Elijah appear
|
|
1
|
1
|
1
|
Voice from cloud during Transfiguration
|
|
1
|
1
|
1
|
Sky darkens on afternoon of Jesus' death
|
|
1
|
1
|
1
|
Tearing of the temple curtain
|
|
1
|
1
|
1
|
Earthquake upon Jesus' death
|
|
|
|
1
|
Earthquake at the tomb
|
|
|
|
1
|
Saints resurrected/appear in Jerusalem
|
|
|
|
1
|
|
____
|
____
|
____
|
____
|
Total
Supernatural Events
|
3
|
13
|
17
|
22
|
Clearly, canonical John’s portrayal of Jesus as an eternal being who
visited Earth and returned to heaven is theology rather than history, but once
this distinctive mythology is lifted out the underlying Ur-John narrative is
remarkably natural compared to the Synoptic gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke
envision Earth as a place where the forces of heaven and the underworld duel
for influence and control as they frequently break through into daily life in
the form of dramatic angelic appearances, temptations by Satan and demons,
perfectly timed earthquakes, darkening skies, and the opening of the heavens at
key moments.
While supernatural events are commonly used to
punctuate the drama of the Jesus story in the Synoptics, there are only three
events that qualify as supernatural in Ur-John. Yet even these three are oddly
natural compared to their Synoptic counterparts. In Ur-John, the spirit
descending as a dove is represented as a private vision of the Baptist
(1:32-33). It involves no public “voice from heaven,” but rather the Baptist
recounts what he has heard from God in a vision. The Synoptics report it as a
vision experienced by Jesus, and the voice from heaven is the voice of God
himself making a public announcement.
Ur-John’s account of the angelic appearance at the
tomb is the most uneventful angelic appearance of the NT; the angels say nothing
of consequence, they deliver no message or insight, they behave as if they are
human, and Mary Magdalene reacts to them as if they are human (20:11-13). Oddly
enough, the Beloved Disciple and Peter have been called to the empty tomb by
Mary; the Beloved Disciple realizes that the resurrection has occurred, and
both he and Peter return home before the angels even appear. Conversely, in the
Synoptics the essential role of the angels is to deliver the news of the
resurrection.
The third supernatural event in Ur-John is a “voice
from heaven.” This appears to be an ironically timed thunderclap, which the
author forthrightly indicates that the crowd recognized as such (12:28-29). We
do not find the Synoptic authors volunteering natural interpretations of their
supernatural events as we do here. As supernatural events go, the thunderclap “voice
from heaven” in Ur-John is of a kind with the inconsequential human-like angelic
appearance at the tomb and the Baptist’s private vision.
In short, Ur-John is decidedly sparse in its report
of paranormal events when compared to the Synoptic gospels. The three that it
does offer can be interpreted as natural phenomena due to the remarkably candid
impulse of the author, a writer who simply does not rely upon mythologized
imagery to amplify the drama of the story. At the opposite extreme stands
Matthew, the most mythologized of the Synoptic gospels. Though it is
conceivable that a gospel sans all of
the dramatic supernatural imagery could have been composed later in the first
century, the most likely explanation for its absence in Ur-John is an early
composition date. Ur-John was composed prior to the time that the movement had
begun to incorporate supernatural events into the gospel story in order to
recast Jesus’ mission as a cosmic spiritual drama rather than an earthly
political conflict. When interpreted in this manner it appears that Ur-John
predates Mark by a significant period of time.
John the Baptist. Ur-John states
that Jesus conducted a ministry of baptism in competition with John the Baptist
prior to John’s arrest. Early in his ministry he was baptizing near the same
location in Judea as John and winning more followers than John (John 3:22-26).
This is contrary to Mark’s contention that Jesus did not begin his ministry
until after John’s arrest, and that he began his ministry in Galilee (Mark
1:14-15). Ur-John’s account appears to be the earlier of the two, for the Jesus
movement had begun to claim that the Baptist’s prophetic role was to act as a
forerunner announcing the coming of Jesus as Son of God. In Mark’s version he
performs this role, then is removed from the scene by his arrest. This scenario
eliminates the need to ask why the Baptist did not himself become a follower of
Jesus if he had indeed perceived him to be the Son of God.
Ur-John retains this difficulty. It is candid about the competition
between the two:
22 After this Jesus and his disciples went into the land of Judea; there
he remained with them and baptized. 23 John also was baptizing at Ae'non near
Salim, because there was much water there; and people came and were baptized.
24 For John had not yet been put in prison. 25 Now a discussion arose between John's disciples and a Jew
over purifying. 26 And they came to John, and said to him, "Rabbi, he who
was with you beyond the Jordan, to whom you bore witness,
here he is, baptizing, and all are going to him." (John 3:22-26)
4:1 Now when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was
making and baptizing more disciples than John 2 (although Jesus himself did not
baptize, but only his disciples), 3
he left Judea and departed again to Galilee. (John 4:1-3)
The curious thing however, is not that Ur-John reports concurrent
competing ministries of Jesus and the Baptist, but that the author does not
anticipate that anyone would wonder why the Baptist did not become a disciple
of Jesus. This would make sense if the Baptist had a larger movement and a more
established reputation than did Jesus at the time Ur-John was composed. There
are remnants of tradition in the NT gospels that John was thought by some to be
the messiah; there are also remembrances that the Baptist had been
resurrected—some even wondering whether Jesus himself was the resurrected
Baptist. Furthermore, Ur-John represents Jesus and his initial followers as
having split off from the Baptist’s movement. In this scenario the notion of
the Baptist giving up his formidable ministry to follow Jesus would never have
occurred to the author of Ur-John, nor would he imagine anyone wondering about
it. It is all the more true if the author himself had been a disciple of the
Baptist who left him to follow Jesus, as Ur-John rather candidly implies—the
mysterious unnamed disciple who was the first, along with Andrew, to recognize
Jesus as the true messiah was no doubt the author of Ur-John. There is also no
doubt that the community of Ur-John recognized in this unidentified figure a
surreptitious reference to their leader:
35 The next day again John was standing with two of his disciples; 36
and he looked at Jesus as he walked, and said, "Behold, the Lamb of
God!" 37 The two
disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. 38 Jesus turned, and saw
them following, and said to them, "What do you seek?" And they said
to him, "Rabbi" (which
means Teacher), "where are
you staying?" 39 He said to them, "Come and see." They came and
saw where he was staying; and they stayed with him that day, for it was about
the tenth hour. 40 One of the two who heard John speak, and followed him, was
Andrew, Simon Peter's brother. 41 He first found his brother Simon, and said to
him, "We have found the messiah" (John 1:35-41)
Related to this is the fact that Ur-John refers to John the Baptist
simply and exclusively as “John,” and it does so fourteen times. It does not
refer to him as the baptizer, as Mark
does twice (1:4, 6:14), or the Baptist,
as Mark also does twice (6:25, 8:28), Luke does thrice (7:20,33, 9:19), and
Matthew does seven times (3:1, 11:11-12, 14:2,8, 16:14, 17:13). In addition,
the Jewish historian Josephus refers to him as John called the baptist in Antiquities
of the Jews (93 CE). In Ur-John, neither the baptizer
nor the Baptist are used and were
obviously not required to identify the John being discussed. There is an
assumed intimate familiarity with John. Readers/hearers clearly knew of whom
the author was speaking and had no need for a distinguishing appellation. It is
possible that Ur-John was composed before the practice of referring to John by
the title “the baptizer” or the more legendary variant “the Baptist” came into
vogue.
We have looked at three unusual features of Ur-John—the oddly muted
record of the twelve, the peculiar absence of supernatural events, and the
portrayal of John in a uniquely familiar manner. These traditions have nothing
in common except that they each can be explained by supposing Ur-John to be a
primitive composition written very close to the historical events, and
certainly prior to the Synoptics. Once Ur-John is perceived as a primitive
composition written by one who had known Jesus personally, a number of other
Synoptic traditions that are missing from Ur-John become of acute interest,
including the lack of moral vision, the absence of the tax collectors, the
absence of tradition related to open table fellowship, the almost total silence
on the kingdom of God, the unawareness of Jesus as the son of Man, the lack of the idea that Jesus taught in parables,
or that he practiced exorcism. Each of these will be considered in turn.
Moral vision. We have already
seen that Ur-John views Jesus as detached and aloof in his dealings with
people, while the Synoptics portray him as more intimately engaged. In concert
with this, Ur-John recalls no sayings of Jesus that bear upon moral conduct and
thinking. Conversely, the Synoptics are laced throughout with teachings of a
moral essence including admonitions on praying in public, forgiveness, divorce,
lust, anger, swearing, blaspheming against the Spirit, the hoarding of earthly
treasure, serving God and mammon, turning the other cheek, etc. In Ur-John
there are no beatitudes to honor the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart, the
peacemakers. There is no Lord’s Prayer in Ur-John; in point of fact there is
almost no prayer at all in Ur-John—the Greek words for pray and prayer do not
exist. In Ur-John there are two brief displays of prayer on the part of Jesus.
The first is that he is said to have given thanks prior to the feeding of the
five thousand (6:11), and the second is part of the public performance in
advance of the raising of Lazarus (11:41). In short, the author of Ur-John does
not remember Jesus as a teacher of wisdom and moral conduct, or one who
counsels extensive reliance on prayer.
Tax collectors. There is no record of Jesus befriending
tax collectors in Ur-John. The Greek term telones
which is rendered tax collector in
the RSV appears 21 times in the Synoptic gospels, but not once in John. How
might this be explained? It is probable that the historical Jesus, anticipating
the fall of Roman domination and the rise of a sovereign Kingdom of Israel, was
encouraging civil disobedience in the form of tax resistance. Luke remembers
this as one of the accusations against him:
1
Then the whole company of them arose, and brought him before Pilate. 2 And they
began to accuse him, saying, "We found this man perverting our nation, and
forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar, and saying that he himself is Christ a
king." (Luke 23:1-2)
If Jesus had been advocating tax revolt as part of a popular uprising to
hasten the coming of the new kingdom, the surviving post-Easter movement would
have been strongly motivated to deny and suppress it. An ideal way to neutralize
the memory of Jesus as one who had advocated tax resistance would be to spread
the story that he had actively befriended and socialized with tax
collectors—after all, how could Jesus be remembered as one who had incited a
tax revolt if the tax collectors were in his camp? The tradition that Jesus
befriended tax collectors was introduced in Mark, embellished in Luke, and
taken to its extreme in Matthew, wherein the otherwise unknown disciple Matthew
is declared to have been a tax collector. Once the early Church was claiming
that a Roman tax collector was not only one of the original twelve but also the
author of the movement’s First Gospel, this rather transparent
whitewashing of the memory of Jesus as one who had encouraged tax resistance
was complete.
Since the Synoptic tradition actively fosters the friendly and penitent
tax collector meme, it is noteworthy that Luke candidly recalls the accusation
that Jesus had forbidden the payment of taxes. Would this not have been
counterproductive? Not at all. Luke’s Gospel repeatedly claims that Jesus went
out of his way to eat and drink with tax collectors, so in context the charge
that Jesus had encouraged tax revolt appears ludicrous. At the time Luke was
composed, there was evidently a remembrance of Jesus advocating tax resistance.
By documenting the accusation in the manner that he did, the effect was to make
the historically accurate memory of Jesus as one who had advocated tax
resistance appear nonsensical. To this day, people interpret Luke 23:2 as an
apparently absurd charge, which was no doubt the author’s intent.
This also makes more sense of Mark’s claim that a key question asked of
Jesus upon arrival in Jerusalem was his position on the payment of taxes:
13
And they sent to him some of the Pharisees and some of the Herodians, to entrap
him in his talk. 14 And they came and said to him, "Teacher, we know that
you are true, and care for no man; for you do not regard the position of men,
but truly teach the way of God. Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? 15
Should we pay them, or should we not?" But knowing their hypocrisy, he
said to them, "Why put me to the test? Bring me a coin, and let me look at
it." 16 And they brought one. And he said to them, "Whose likeness
and inscription is this?" They said to him, "Caesar's." 17 Jesus
said to them, "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God
the things that are God's." And they were amazed at him. (Mark 12:13-17)
Behind this repetitive questioning of Jesus’ position on the payment of
taxes is the historical memory that Jesus had encouraged tax resistance. There
is no other way to rationalize the premise that his adversaries had posed the
questions in order to “entrap him in his talk.” This episode is intended to
erase that memory via the famous “render
to Caesar…” quotation, which is intentionally obscure. Mark successfully
blurs the line between the historical position of Jesus as one who stood
against an onerous taxation system and a politically inoffensive response that
seems to honor Caesar. The brilliant obfuscation is responsible for render to Caesar being one of the most
memorable of Jesus sayings.
In light of the foregoing, a reasonable inference would be that Ur-John
contains no mention of Jesus associating with tax collectors because in reality
he never did associate with tax collectors. Ur-John was written prior to the
time this mechanism designed to sanitize the memory of Jesus had come into
vogue.
Table fellowship. Among the
activities many modern scholars ascribe to the historical Jesus is his eating
and drinking with tax collectors and sinners—a concept promoted in the Synoptic
gospels. Elevated to the level of a theological imperative, Jesus is widely
supposed to have actively promoted the practice of inclusive table fellowship,
or in the language of the academy, open
commensality, with friends and acquaintances. There is no indication of
such a thing in Ur-John. There exists one account in which Jesus sits at table
with the recently raised Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha (12:1-2), who
are already identified as cherished personal friends (“Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.” Ur-John 11:5).
This sets up the problematic scene of Mary cleaning Jesus’ feet with her hair,
already discussed. Yet this one episode does not a tradition make. We find
nothing of Jesus seeking the opportunity to dine with tax collectors and random
sinners as he does in the Synoptics. In Ur-John, Jesus dines once with intimate
friends, and that is all.
The practice of open commensality appears to have been attributed to
Jesus by the Synoptic writers to support the concept that he befriended tax
collectors. But it also serves to nullify Ur-John’s disturbing memory of Jesus
as aloof and detached; the image of the gregarious Jesus eating and drinking
with tax collectors and sinners is the polar opposite of the Jesus depicted in
Ur-John.
The kingdom of
God/heaven. In the present reconstruction of Ur-John, Jesus makes one reference to the kingdom of God in 3:3. Other than
this, the phrase is non-existent. This is alarming, for the kingdom of God is mentioned 15 times in
Mark, 39 times in Luke and 52 times in Matthew, mostly in the variant phrase kingdom of heaven. Its dominating
presence in the Synoptic gospels (especially in Mark and “Q”) causes scholars
to suppose that the revealing of the kingdom of God, reflections upon its
spiritual nature, and qualifications for entry into the kingdom were central to
the message of Jesus. No other single concept has had as much defining
influence on contemporary historical Jesus reconstructions. As New Testament
scholar Douglas Oakman observes:
All critical
scholars today accept that Jesus’ main concern and aim was expressed under the
term Kingdom of God.[4]
Thus it is striking that Ur-John recalls almost nothing of Jesus’
teaching or preaching on the kingdom of God. What could account for this? The
answer may lie in the same reasoning we have already explored—Ur-John contains
historical memories of a Jesus who had promoted his own kingship. He was
anticipating the rise of a sovereign state of Israel, and the author perceived
Jesus to be the coming King of the new state. Thus he has Nathanael proclaim “Rabbi, you are the King of Israel!”
(1:49). In Ur-John 6:16 the crowds are incensed to the point that they want to
seize Jesus and make him king by force. During the triumphal entry, the people
hail him as the arriving King of Israel:
13 So they took branches of palm trees and went out to
meet him, crying, "Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the
Lord, even the King of Israel!" 14
And Jesus found a young ass and sat upon it; as it is written, 15
"Fear not, daughter of Zion;
behold, your king is coming,
sitting on an ass's colt!" (Ur-John 12:13-15)
In stark contrast, in the Synoptic triumphal entry scenes the writers
delete the politically inflammatory King
of Israel language and replace it with softer variants. In Mark, Jesus is
said to herald the coming of the kingdom
of our father David (Mark 11:10); in Luke he is the indistinct "king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace
in heaven and glory in the highest!" (Luke 19:38). By the time Matthew rewrites
the story, Jesus is no longer explicitly proclaimed as king at all: “And the crowds … shouted, ‘Hosanna to the
Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’” (Matt.
21:9)
The remembrance of Jesus as a self-proclaimed king who challenged the
authority of Caesar would have been as politically problematic for the Jesus
movement as the memory of his tax resistance. The solution was to redefine the
kingdom as a uniquely spiritual realm with no political consequence, and then
to claim that the spiritual kingdom
is what Jesus had been referring to all along. Thus the Synoptics are peppered
with reflections on the “true” nature of the kingdom of God. Jesus is seen as
one who visualized, revealed, and promoted a spiritual kingdom, and who in Crossan’s
influential view brokered access to
it. But more importantly, an essential aspect of the Synoptic kingdom of God
teaching is that it is cloaked in mystery, revealed in parables that do not say
precisely what it is, but rather what it is like. For the Synoptic authors it
is vital that readers understand that the kingdom of God as revealed by Jesus
was an elusive, amorphous concept that was not easy to define or comprehend. It
had been revealed in parables that mystified outsiders by design. Therefore,
the Synoptics would have us believe that it is no surprise that the kingdom
language used by Jesus had been wholly misunderstood. The message of Mark,
Luke, and Matthew is obvious: “You may have
memories of Jesus as advocating the restoration of a sovereign Kingdom of Israel,
but he never did speak of such a thing; he had been speaking of a spiritual
kingdom of God; his message was misconstrued.”
Teaching in parables. Ur-John contains
no tradition that Jesus taught in parables, or that he spoke in allegories that
only those who had “ears to hear” could understand. The Greek word parabole is used 48 times in the Synoptic
gospels, but not once in the Fourth Gospel. Beyond this, the parabolic form of
sayings is largely absent from John. Instead, the thought of Jesus is revealed
through conversational and often argumentative dialogue. That Ur-John contains
no recollection of the parable tradition suggests that Jesus may not have
spoken in parables after all, and that this was a secondary development in the
interpretive traditions. Why would the movement have invented the parable
tradition? Very simply, it supported the claim that Jesus’ message regarding
the coming Kingdom of Israel had been misunderstood. Many of the parables are
about the kingdom of God, its nature, what it means, and how one may participate
in it. But only those granted the ability to discern were able to understand
these obscure sayings. Mark says of the purpose of the parable:
10
And when he was alone, those who were about him with the twelve asked him
concerning the parables. 11 And he said to them, "To you has been given
the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in
parables; 12 so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear
but not understand; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven." (Mark
4:10-12)
The background context is that Jesus had in fact been teaching about the
coming Kingdom of Israel as a restored sovereign state, and the consequent fall
of Roman power. If the movement were to survive, that message would need to be
altered or suppressed. The parable tradition was invented as a smoke screen—the
“confusion” people had concerning the spiritual kingdom of God derived from the
fact that Jesus had, by design, revealed the kingdom in parables that most
people did not understand.
The most likely reason that the parable tradition and the focus on the kingdom of
God do not appear in Ur-John is that the historical Jesus did not speak in
parables, nor did his message have as a central theme the revealing of a
spiritual kingdom of God. Ur-John was composed prior to the time these
interpretive elements were incorporated into the Jesus story.
No reference to the Son of man. Due to the
frequency of the Son of man in Mark and the sayings alleged to come from Q, it is
common for scholars to assume that this was a favored self-reference of Jesus.
However, there are no references to the Son
of man in Ur-John. The Gospel of Mark contains 14 instances of Jesus
referring to the Son of man. It occurs 25 times in Luke and 30 times in Matthew. In
most cases the context of its usage makes it obvious that Jesus is referring to
himself in the third person. Sometimes it appears that he may be referring to a
separate spiritual being yet to be revealed from heaven.
There is a similar phrase son of
man in the Old Testament, but the title in the NT routinely includes the definitive
article and its use as an honorific title is unique and specific to the NT
gospels. The title generally appears in sayings placed on the lips of Jesus
wherein he refers to himself in the third person. However, the voice of the
narrator can on occasion reproduce a saying of Jesus as in Mark 8:31: “And
he began to teach them that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be
rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed,
and after three days rise again.” No other character in the gospels refers to Jesus
as the Son of man, and it is odd indeed to imagine Peter or Nathanael
declaring, “You are the Son of man!” Other than the gospels, no other book of
the NT uses it. The institutionalized churches quietly ignore it, for it never
appears in any official creeds of the Church, and no formal article of
Christian faith professes Jesus to be the
Son of man. Yet it appears 81 times in the NT gospels.
What might explain the frequent use of the Son of man in the Synoptics and in John’s editorial overlays,
but its absence from Ur-John? Once again, the political dynamics appear
relevant. The titles used for Jesus in Ur-John are messiah, king, King of the Jews, King of Israel, prophet, and most
frequent, the Christ, all of which
carry uncomfortable political connotations of challenge to establishment
authority. However, the
Son of man does not. This phrase is often translated the son of the man, meaning simply a human being. Bruce Chilton
translates it as “the one like the
person” which is to be interpreted as “one human among others in the
Aramaic of his time.”[5] Practically
speaking, the title is meaningless, but it appears to be its very
meaninglessness that made it of substantial value to the movement. For unlike messiah, the Christ, King of the Jews,
and Son of God, there was no way to
infer from the Son of man any
tangential association with political activism. Thus it is reasonable to surmise that it
was placed in the mouth of Jesus precisely for that reason.
If this is the case, it becomes clear why the Son of man does not appear in Ur-John. The title was introduced
by Mark to underscore his portrayal of Jesus as one with no concern for politics
or the Roman domination of Israel. Luke and Matthew carried it forward with new
Son of man sayings that were being
developed and attributed to Jesus in the post-70 era. The editorial overlays
onto Ur-John that contain 13 occurrences of the
Son of man were added for the same purpose—that of depoliticizing the image
of Jesus.
No Exorcisms. Ur-John contains
no remembrance of Jesus performing exorcisms. However, the author does not even
acknowledge the existence of demons or unclean spirits, so there is no
opportunity for Jesus to perform exorcisms. In general, the author avoids the
supernatural across the board—there is no mythologized Transfiguration on the
mountain with appearances by Elijah and Moses, no resurrection of the saints,
no glorious descending angel and earthquake to open the sealed tomb, and no
conversations with Satan as there are in the Synoptics. And, quite in concert
with all of this, there are no conversations with demons or unclean spirits as
there are in the Synoptics (e.g., Mark 1:24; 3:11). Ur-John does use the
concept of “having a demon,” but only as a euphemism for simply being crazy or
out of one’s mind (7:20; 8:48-52; 10:20-21). There is no evidence that the
author of Ur-John believes that autonomous evil spirits can indwell a person,
or that they can be cast out.
The present theory holds that the supernatural elements of the Jesus
story found in the Synoptics are intended to portray Jesus as having been at
the center of a cosmic spiritual battle between good and evil. The unspoken
corollary is that he should not be viewed as one who was negotiating the more
terrestrial political conflict between God’s chosen people and the evil Roman
occupation. Seen from this perspective, Ur-John’s failure to mention the
exorcisms of Jesus is simply due to the fact that he had never performed
exorcisms. The notion that Jesus was an exorcist is a mythologized construct,
part and parcel of the overarching tendency of second-generation interpreters
to situate Jesus within the context of a cosmic spiritual struggle in order to
depoliticize his memory.
The Passion
Narratives in Ur-John and Mark
Ur-John and Mark both offer extensive commentary on the arrest,
interrogation, condemnation, and crucifixion of Jesus. The stories are radically
different, and in many respects mutually exclusive. Close scrutiny of how these
two accounts differ reveals a great deal about the authors and their respective
objectives. The details documented in these two accounts are vital to the quest
for the historical Jesus. They add significantly to the evidence that Ur-John
is a primitive work written by someone closer to the events, and that Mark
constitutes a major revision of events designed to appeal to Rome.
The Arrest of
Jesus. Ur-John indicates that Jesus
was arrested by a detachment of Roman soldiers and “some officers” from the
Temple authorities. The author seems aware that the arrest is being conducted
after dark, as he makes specific reference to the incidental fact that they
carried lanterns and torches:
2 Now Judas, who
betrayed him, also knew the place; for Jesus often met there with his
disciples. 3 So Judas, procuring a band of soldiers and some officers from the
chief priests and the Pharisees, went there with lanterns and torches and
weapons. (Ur-John 18:2-3)
The lanterns and torches are not mentioned in the Synoptics. This would
have been an unusual detail to add to the story in the late first century with
Mark, Luke and Matthew already in circulation. Moreover, the Synoptics
eliminate the Roman soldiers from the scene and depict the arrest party as an
unofficial “crowd” with swords and clubs that is exclusively Jewish. The
Synoptic language connotes an angry mob:
And
immediately, while he was still speaking, Judas came, one of the twelve, and
with him a crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests and the scribes
and the elders. (Mark 14:43)
47
While he was still speaking, there came a crowd, and the man called Judas, one
of the twelve, was leading them…. 52 Then Jesus said to the chief priests and
officers of the temple and elders, who had come out against him, "Have you
come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs? (Luke 22:47, 52)
47
While he was still speaking, Judas came, one of the twelve, and with him a
great crowd with swords and clubs, from the chief priests and the elders of the
people. (Matthew 26:47)
Was Jesus arrested by Roman troops as per Ur-John, or by an incensed Jewish
mob as per the Synoptics? If Roman troops were involved in the arrest it
indicates that Jesus was recognized by the Roman administration as a threat to
social stability; they surely would not have dispatched a contingent of
soldiers to arrest a preacher accused of blasphemy. The Synoptic writers
eliminate the Roman soldiers from the scene and replace them with a Jewish mob,
making it appear that Jesus was embroiled in a dispute with other Jews over
matters of religion. Elsewhere in the Synoptics we learn that the dispute was
over the offense of blasphemy—a charge that would have been of no concern to
the Romans. The notion that Jesus was accused of blasphemy does not appear in
Ur-John.
The Nature of the
Betrayal: There is a significant
difference between Ur-John and the Synoptics in the way they report the
betrayal by Judas. In Ur-John, the betrayal consists of Judas disclosing to the
authorities the whereabouts of Jesus; according to Ur-John 18:2, Judas “knew the place, for Jesus often met there
with his disciples.” The Synoptics eliminate this language and replace it
with the famous story of betrayal with a kiss. The role of Judas in the
Synoptics is not to reveal where
Jesus is, but who Jesus is.
Presumably, without the kiss, they would not have known whom to arrest:
44
Now the betrayer had given them a sign, saying, "The one I shall kiss is
the man; seize him and lead him away under guard." 45 And when he came, he
went up to him at once, and said, "Master!" And he kissed him. 46 And
they laid hands on him and seized him.
(Mark 14:44-46)
Why the shift in the story? As Ur-John tells it, the reader would
suppose that Jesus and his disciples were in hiding and that the authorities
wanted to know where he was. Judas betrays Jesus by agreeing to reveal his
location, so the story operates on the premise that Jesus and his band are
hiding from authorities due to an awareness that they are subject to arrest for
some reason. The arrest by Roman troops indicates that his concerns were not
ill-founded, and that he was in some way perceived by the administration as a
threat.
In Ur-John, Jesus does not deny his identity upon their arrival, and
there is no occasion for the theatrical kiss. Moreover, in one remarkably
telling reference, Ur-John portrays Jesus as pleading with the troops to let
his disciples go:
7 Again he asked
them, "Whom do you seek?" And they said, "Jesus of
Nazareth." 8 Jesus answered, "I told you that I am he; so,
if you seek me, let these men go." (Ur-John 18:7-8)
With this one candid phrase, the author of Ur-John reveals that there
was an intent to arrest not only Jesus but his disciples as well. The writer
falls silent on whether the arrest party complied with his request. The balance
of the scene focuses primarily on Jesus’ arrest and interrogation at the house
of Annas. However, it does include the highly suspicious tale that an unnamed
disciple and Peter voluntarily followed the arrest party at a distance and
walked into the courtyard of the high priest. This account seems incredible in
light of the report that Peter had (allegedly) attacked a member of the arrest
party with a sword, that Jesus had pleaded for the release of his disciples,
and that they had been in seclusion for the purpose of evading arrest. Notice
that at face value, the story in Ur-John states that Peter and the unnamed
disciple ended up at the same interrogation facility as did Jesus, and that
Peter was questioned concerning his association with Jesus at that location. If
there is a historical core underlying this story, it seems probable that the
disciples did not simply wander in as innocent spectators but rather that they
had been arrested and brought to the premises along with Jesus. It surely would
have been in the movement’s interest to whitewash any hint that Jesus’
disciples had been subject to arrest by the Romans, and this is what we seem to
have in this account.
The Synoptic writers tell a completely different story. In the
Synoptics, the Roman soldiers are eliminated from the scene altogether. The
arrest party consists of a crowd of angry Jews who are presumably incensed by
the reports of Jesus’ blasphemy. Of central interest in the Synoptic accounts
is the famous betrayal with a kiss by Judas. At first glance, the “betrayal
with a kiss” seems to operate on the premise that the crowd would not have
otherwise been able to recognize Jesus, and/or that he would have refused to
identify himself. However, there is no chance that the authors would have meant
to suggest that Jesus was so unknown as to be unrecognizable, or so cowardly
that he would have declined to identify himself. So what is the purpose of
Judas’ betrayal with a kiss? We need only to focus on the effect of the kiss—it
functions as a dramatic and memorable sign that Jesus had been singled out as
the only one subject to arrest. (“Now the betrayer had given them a sign, saying, ‘The one I shall kiss is
the man; seize him and lead him away under guard.’" Mark 14:44). The Synoptic
betrayal with a kiss makes it clear that the disciples were never in danger of
arrest, so it is fair to presume that this was the intended message behind the
legend. Thus while the arrest scene in Ur-John leaves the door open to the
possibility that Jesus’ disciples had been subject to arrest, the Synoptic writers
slam that door shut.
Were Two Disciples
Crucified with Jesus?
It is just at this point that we confront what Paula Fredriksen deems
the “core historical anomaly of the Passion stories”—the fact that “Jesus was
crucified but his followers were not.”[6]
For if Jesus and his followers had been perceived as a political group that
stood against Roman rule, it seems highly unlikely that Pilate would have
executed Jesus alone. Fredriksen accepts at face value the gospel traditions
that Jesus was the sole member of his movement to die; this assumption is
foundational to her reconstruction of Jesus and the events surrounding his
death. She is certainly not alone among elite Jesus scholars who have been
willing to accept this premise. Yet Ur-John gives us reason to question whether
Jesus was in fact the only member of his movement to have died. The key passage
is this:
15 They cried out,
"Away with him, away with him, crucify him!" Pilate said to them,
"Shall I crucify your King?" The chief priests answered, "We
have no king but Caesar." 16 Then he handed him over to them to be
crucified. 17 So they took Jesus, and he went out, bearing his own cross, to
the place called the place of a skull, which is called in Hebrew Gol'gotha. 18 There they crucified him, and with him two
others, one on either side, and Jesus between them. 19 Pilate also wrote a
title and put it on the cross; it read, "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of
the Jews." (Ur-John 19:15-19)
The incidental reference to “two others” who were crucified with Jesus,
one on each side, warrants very close scrutiny. We are accustomed to reading
this passage through the filters of both Synoptic interpretation and modern
academic presuppositions. Mark, widely alleged to be the earliest gospel,
maintains that these two were robbers, not to mention rather unsavory
characters who reviled Jesus while on the cross. Matthew essentially repeats
Mark’s tale. Luke gives an altered and embellished account, saying that the two
were criminals without specifying the nature of their crimes; one taunts Jesus
while the other repudiates the first and asks Jesus for grace. Since
scholarship routinely dates John to the end of the first century, the reference
to the two crucified with Jesus in John 19:18 is typically interpreted as an
abbreviated version of the Synoptic stories.
However, since the Ur-John account predates the Synoptics it must be interpreted
without reading the derogatory Synoptic commentary into it. At face value, it
simply says that two unknown persons were crucified with Jesus. The Synoptics
say that the two were crucified “one on the left and one on the right.” The
author of Ur-John presents the same scene with language that has a slightly
more delicate tone, saying Jesus was crucified “and with him one on either
side, and Jesus between them,” as if it were an intimately shared tragedy.
Unlike the Synoptics, Ur-John makes no disparaging comments about the two at
all. The author’s silence on the two who died with Jesus speaks volumes. He has
done here what he did at the beginning of the gospel where he introduced an
unnamed disciple as the first to recognize Jesus as the messiah. There is no
question that the audience for whom the author was writing knew the identity of
that first follower of Jesus, and there is little doubt they also knew the
identities of the two who died with Jesus.
Roman crucifixion was used as a means to torture the victim, but its
primary value to the Romans was its terrorizing effect on those who witnessed
it. Crucifixions were carried out on well-traveled roads for maximum deterrent
effect. It was intended as a gruesome public announcement that those who challenge
Roman authority will pay a horrific price. With this in mind, picture the scene
as painted by Ur-John: Three are crucified together, Jesus between them with a
sign proclaiming him to be King of the Jews. If the other two were known to be
disciples of Jesus, this would have constituted a dramatic public condemnation
of the movement at large. It is reasonable to suspect that these two were
indeed disciples, and that this triple crucifixion was a warning to all who
would dare to associate with the Jesus movement. If this were the case,
Ur-John’s silence on the identity of the two is understandable—the movement
would not have wanted to publish any evidence that the movement as a whole had
been condemned. In this case the author’s brief mention of the two unidentified
souls who died with Jesus might best be interpreted as a covert honorary
remembrance of their martyrdom.
Not only does Jesus plead for the release of his disciples in the arrest
scene, but if there is any doubt that the disciples were subject to arrest, one
might consider the telling comment in Ur-John’s first resurrection appearance:
On the evening of
that day, the first day of the week, the doors being shut where the disciples
were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to
them, "Peace be with you." (Ur-John 20:19)
With this one riveting detail that the doors were shut for fear of the Jews, the author reveals
a memory that the disciples were in hiding after the crucifixion. This makes
little sense if Jesus had been the only one subject to arrest, but it makes a
great deal of sense if two of their comrades had been arrested and executed
with Jesus. Whether this was indeed the history behind the tradition or not, it
is clear that Ur-John leaves the door open for such an interpretation. As
always, the Synoptic writers are anxious to eliminate potential evidence of the
Jesus movement’s historical anti-Roman roots. Mark obviously wrestled with the
problem of the two who died with Jesus. The most obvious solution would have
been to eliminate any reference to the two at all—just drop them from the
story. If it was important for the movement to propagate the notion that Jesus
was the only one in his movement to have died, why bother to carry forward the
tradition that two unknown persons were crucified with him?
Clearly Mark did not believe that editing them out of the scene was an
option. Ur-John had been in circulation for some time and its report that two
others had died with Jesus was (evidently) not an inconsequential detail that
could be deleted from the account. There was an established historical memory
that two individuals had died with Jesus under some dramatic circumstance. So
Mark’s first order of business was to make clear that these two were not disciples in order to prevent
readers from drawing the inferences we have just rehearsed. Since crucifixion
was reserved as a punishment for political sedition, his first thought might
have been to claim that they were guilty of “murder in the insurrection,” just
has he alleges of Barrabas in 15:7. Yet to claim that they were being crucified
for insurrection would risk painting Jesus with the same brush. No, it would be
important to maintain that these two had been guilty of a mundane crime that
had no political ramifications. He settled on the notion that they were guilty
of robbery, despite the fact that it was a common crime for which people were
not typically crucified. So Mark ended up constructing the improbable scenario
of two robbers unassociated with Jesus being crucified with him, one on each side, which in light of the
foregoing is an astounding detail for Mark to have carried forward. For what
goes unnoticed is that if the Romans had indeed staged the crucifixion scene in
this highly theatrical manner, their intent would have been to make the other
two victims appear to be disciples of Jesus whether they were
or not. So the message would have been the same either way—the scene would
have functioned as a public condemnation of both Jesus and his followers, not
just of Jesus alone.
One cannot lightly dismiss the fact that Ur-John’s record of events
would have been far more politically problematic than the Synoptic versions. If
the only surviving gospel account was that of Ur-John, we would understand that
Jesus was arrested by a detachment of Roman troops, that he had pleaded for the
release of his disciples, that at least two disciples ended up at the same
location to which Jesus had been taken, that Peter was interrogated concerning
his association with Jesus, that Peter denied knowing Jesus, that Peter’s
denial was motivated by the fear of dire consequences should he have been
identified as an associate, that two others were crucified with Jesus as a
public warning, and that after the crucifixion the remaining disciples were in
hiding for fear of arrest. There is no question that readers of that time as
well as historians of the present day would assume from this account that the Jesus
movement had been perceived by the Romans as socially subversive in nature, and
that the movement had been condemned for its seditious activities. It is only
the Synoptic whitewashing of events that prevents this interpretation of
history. One cannot help but wonder if Jesus scholarship has been quite naïve
in assuming Jesus was the only member of his movement to die.
Ur-John’s record of events is by large measure historically coherent.
Given that Jesus was crucified by the Romans, it is easy to believe he would
have been apprehended by Roman troops. There is no reason to doubt that Jesus
would have pleaded on behalf of his followers for their release. It makes sense
that he would have been detained in the compound of the high priest where he
was interrogated and abused over night before being delivered to Pilate. One
can understand the author’s reluctance to document in writing the specific
allegations against him, or to record the actual message of Jesus. If Jesus had
been expected to spark a riotous revolt while 200,000 pilgrims were in town for
the Passover, the administration’s urgency to arrest and summarily execute
Jesus as a warning is no particular surprise. Both in its specifics and the
occasions on which it is purposefully silent, the account in Ur-John manifests
an aura of authenticity. The author, aware that he is addressing a politically
sensitive subject, treads carefully, confident that his audience will read
between the lines.
In comparison, Mark’s version has little historical coherence. It
appears to be a strained attempt to cover up the story as it exists in Ur-John.
In Mark, the Roman soldiers disappear. In their place an incensed Jewish mob
materializes out of nowhere, evidently desperate to apprehend a man whom they
believe may have uttered blasphemy and who had staged a disturbance in the
Temple earlier in the week. What was the pressing emergency on this evening
before the holy day of Preparation? What did the crowd intend to do with him
had they succeeded in finding him? Had they been told that if they captured
Jesus that night, that officials would roust the members of the Sanhedrin out of
bed to conduct an emergency late night trial? To what purpose? Who among the
Jews would have imagined that it was urgent to apprehend Jesus, condemn him for
blasphemy at an impromptu trial, and then convince the Romans to execute him?
If he was guilty of blasphemy, why demand of the Romans that they crucify him
as an enemy of the state? Why do all of these on the eve of the Passover, one
of the holiest days of the year? If Jesus’ offense was blasphemy he represented
no threat to anyone. Jesus could simply have been detained and the issue dealt
with the following week after the pressing distractions of holiday rituals had
concluded. Thus, the entire premise of Mark’s account is absurd on the face of
it. It is a fictionalized tale punctuated with the ludicrous kiss of betrayal,
a nonsensical trial, and a Roman crucifixion as penalty for a Jewish religious
offense. Jesus ends up dying between two morally depraved thieves who, unfazed
by the agony and terror of their own crucifixion, remain outwardly focused
enough to heap ridicule upon Jesus. Mark finished his tale with the sad
caricature of the despicable Jewish authorities mercilessly taunting Jesus in
his dying moments, followed in counterpoint with the angelic Roman centurion’s
recognition of Jesus as Son of God. From end to end, Mark’s account is
historically incoherent, an imaginary tale manufactured out of whole cloth
designed to appease a Roman audience.
The Message Vacuum
in Ur-John
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Ur-John’s
portrayal of Jesus is that it does not contain much information about the
message of Jesus other than his proclamation of messiahship. His message
obviously provoked the wrath of the authorities, but Ur-John remains largely
silent on what that message was. Jesus is characterized as a teacher on
numerous occasions, but other than calls to believe in him as the Christ, it is
unclear what he taught. In this passage, the author indicates that the audience
is impressed with Jesus’ teaching while making no mention of what it was that
impressed them:
14 About the
middle of the feast Jesus went up into the temple and taught. 15 The Jews
marveled at it, saying, "How is it that this man has learning, when he has
never studied?" (Ur-John 7:15-15)
A similar reference occurs here, in which the officers are overwhelmed
by the teaching of Jesus, but it is not clear what he had said to garner such a
reaction:
43 So there was a
division among the people over him. 44 Some of them wanted to arrest him, but
no one laid hands on him. 45 The officers then went back to the chief priests
and Pharisees, who said to them, "Why did you not bring him?" 46 The
officers answered, "No man ever spoke like this man!" 47 The
Pharisees answered them, "Are you led astray, you also? 48 Have any of the
authorities or of the Pharisees believed in him? 49 But this crowd, who do not
know the law, are accursed." 50 Nicode'mus, who had gone to him before,
and who was one of them, said to them, 51 "Does our law judge a man
without first giving him a hearing and learning what he does?" (Ur-John
7:43-51)
In the interrogation of Jesus by Annas, the author indicates that there
is confusion regarding the content of Jesus’ teaching. However, Jesus refuses
to clarify or summarize, but instead tells him to go ask those who had heard
him:
19 The high priest
then questioned Jesus about his disciples and his teaching. 20 Jesus answered
him, "I have spoken openly to the world; I have always taught in
synagogues and in the temple, where all Jews come together; I have said nothing
secretly. 21 Why do you ask me? Ask those who have heard me, what I said to
them; they know what I said." (Ur-John 18:19-21)
Thus, not only does Ur-John maintain silence
on the historical message of Jesus, but the author is acutely aware that he is
doing so; this was not an unintended oversight. He knows the audience for whom
he was writing was aware of the content of Jesus’ teaching—“ask those who have heard me, what I said to them; they know what I
said.” Furthermore, the author did not construct this overarching theme of
secrecy just to avoid a few incidental aphorisms and parables. The author knows
he is suppressing the central tenets of the message of Jesus. Anyone who read
Ur-John in the mid-first century would have come away with the same question we
ask today: What did Jesus teach that the
author did not want to put in writing?
The explanation for Ur-John’s silence on
Jesus’ message is likely the most obvious one: Given that Ur-John’s Jesus was
promoting his kingship, that people proclaimed him as the coming King of
Israel, and that he was put to death via a method reserved for persons accused
of sedition, it is not much of a stretch to suppose that the central teachings
of Jesus were anti-Roman in nature. If Jesus was convinced that a restored
Kingdom of Israel was imminent and that he would be instrumental in shepherding
its arrival, there is little doubt that he would have been preaching the illegitimacy
of the Roman occupation of Judea. He would have been railing against the
injustice of an onerous taxation system in which the peasant class was forced
to pay taxes to Caesar. He would very likely have been advocating civil
disobedience in the form of tax resistance. And he would have been using this
highly charged rhetoric to stir the people to rise up. There is no mystery as
to why this message would have been fully suppressed by the movement. It would
explain the fundamental anomaly at the heart of the Ur-John document—that it
depicts a messiah without a message. Yet it also resolves other pervasive but
unexplained elements of the Jesus story including the immediate and persistent
hostility of the authorities, the reports that they were out to kill him, the
peculiar confusion, ambivalence, and possible openness toward Jesus among some of the Pharisees,
the outward hostility of others, and most obviously, the arrest of Jesus and
his crucifixion as a would-be King of the Jews.
Ultimately, the message vacuum in Ur-John
explains the rise of the radically different Synoptic tradition. If major
components of Jesus’ teaching had consisted of anti-Roman rhetoric, then
suppressing that material would have left a gaping ideological hole in the
movement’s preaching quite like the one visible in Ur-John. As the movement
matured, there would have been an urgent need to fill that hole, and it would
need to be filled with messaging acceptable to the Romans. So as the movement
faced a pressing need to redefine the mission and message of Jesus it when
through a metamorphosis driven by fundamental questions: If Jesus had been a
teacher, what did he teach? If he was the Christ, what did it mean to believe
in him? If he was raised, where was he now and what should we anticipate in the
future? If Jesus had not meant to usher in a restored Kingdom of Israel, what
was the purpose of his life and death, and what was the mission of the ongoing
movement? The movement’s answers to all of these questions are found in Mark,
Luke, Matthew, and ultimately the later interpretive overlays in canonical John.
Newton’s Third Law says that for every action
there is an equal and opposite reaction; forces always come in pairs. What is
true in physics applies here as well. Though the early Jesus movement suppressed
the inflammatory anti-Roman rhetoric of Jesus, we can certainly witness the
equal and opposite reaction to it in the Gospel of Mark, the first publication
to offer a decisively pro-Roman alternative to Ur-John. Mark began by relocating
the ministry of Jesus exclusively in rural Galilee; not only does Jesus avoid
Jerusalem, he also avoids Tiberias and Sepphoris, the two centers of political
and economic power in Galilee at the time. The objective of the mythical rural
Galilean ministry was to eliminate any possibility of construing Jesus as one
who had intended to confront the Jerusalem establishment. Mark highlighted a
ministry of healing the sick and casting out demons—activities wholly unrelated
to political concerns. Mark introduced the spiritual kingdom of God as a
central theme of Jesus’ message—an otherworldly kingdom that had nothing to do
with Roman rule. Along with it came the parable tradition—a source of confusion
foundational to the claim that Jesus’ coming
kingdom message had been misunderstood all along. He created the Messianic
Secret to argue that Jesus had actively resisted attempts to characterize him
as messiah or political aspirant of any kind. Mark also introduced the Son of man as a spiritual/apolitical
title that invokes no hint of messianism. He introduced angels, demons, and a temptation
by Satan to situate Jesus at the center of a cosmic spiritual drama rather than
a political one. He introduced the theological premise that the death of Jesus
was preordained by God, which had the side benefit of mitigating Roman moral
culpability in his execution. Mark promoted the newly minted concept of Jesus
befriending and dining with tax collectors to offset the memory that he had
collaborated against them. He neutralized the memory of Jesus as having
advocating tax resistance with the saying “Render
unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.” Mark eliminated the Roman
soldiers from the arrest party and replaced them with a crowd of Jews with
swords and clubs. He concocted the dramatic kiss of betrayal to illustrate that
Jesus alone, not his disciples, was marked for arrest. Mark introduced the
accusation of blasphemy as the source of conflict between Jesus and Jewish
leaders—a religious infraction of no consequence to the Romans. He created the
fictitious midnight trial before the Sanhedrin at which Jesus is condemned for
blasphemy, absolving the Romans of responsibility and creating a distraction
from the memory that he had claimed kingship of Israel. As a final tip of the
hat to Rome, after the Jewish chief priests and passers-by despicably revile
Jesus in his dying moments, Mark produces the angelic Roman centurion
declaring, “Truly this man was the Son of
God.”
Thus at every opportunity, Mark is driven to
cloak the Jesus story in Roman-friendly garb, even to the point of obvious
fabrication. To be sure, in many ways the Gospel of Mark is a brilliantly
conceived literary composition. It is an impressive display of theological
interpretation featuring an occasional prophecy historicized, but far less
history remembered. Despite its literary complexity, at the end of the day the
Gospel of Mark is, in its essence, a mythical whitewashing of the Jesus story
motivated by the need to survive under Roman rule. Its sweeping revisualization
of Jesus reads like an obsequious bow to Rome. This cannot have emerged out of
a politically neutral context. It is a reactionary text by an author consumed
by the desire to negate historical memories of Jesus as one who had stood
against Rome. The Gospel of Mark is, in essence, a whole cloth fabrication of the
Jesus story designed to obscure history rather than to record or enlighten it.
The Jesus quest has failed in no small measure due to the academy’s misguided
reliance upon Mark as a trustworthy historical source.
The Historical
Jesus
At the historical core of the Christian tradition stands a man who led
an uprising against the Roman occupation of Judea. He was cheered by his
followers as an arriving king, and he actively promoted himself as one. He
operated out of a conviction that if the people rose up with sufficient faith
and political action, God would purge the hated Romans from Jerusalem and
reestablish a sovereign Kingdom of Israel. The anti-Roman rhetoric of the
historical Jesus was largely suppressed by the movement, but echoes of it still
resonate in the surviving first century writings of those who followed him.
There is nothing remarkable about this understanding of Jesus. There
were several Jewish peasant uprisings featuring leaders who were proclaimed as
kings both before and after Jesus. Athronges, a self-proclaimed messiah, led a
rebellion against the Romans and Herod Archelaus (4 BC – 6 CE). Josephus writes
of him:
Together with his
brothers, [Athronges] slew a great many of both of Roman and of the king's
forces, and managed matters with the like hatred to each of them. They fell
upon the king's soldiers because of the licentious conduct they had been
allowed under Herod's government; and they fell upon the Romans, because of the
injuries they had so lately received from them.
The timing of this event is curious for one side note worthy of mention.
There are two references to the age of Jesus in Ur-John. At one point the Jews
say to him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?”
(8:57). This would be a normal thing to say to a man in his mid-40s, but quite
an odd thing to say to one who was only thirty as Luke suggests. The second allusion to Jesus age in
Ur-John is in this exchange:
Jesus answered
them, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up." 20
the Jews then said, "It has taken forty-six years to build this temple,
and will you raise it up in three days?" 21 But he spoke of the temple of
his body. (Ur-John 2:19-21)
The use of irony in John is well recognized. This may be one example of
it. If the author perceived Jesus to have been forty-six years of age at the
time, this would account for the unusually specific reference. And it would harmonize
with the comment in 8:57 that Jesus was not yet fifty. If we had nothing but
Ur-John to go on, we would assume Jesus was in his late forties at the time of
his death. We do have Luke’s note that Jesus begun his ministry when he was
about thirty years of age (Luke 3:23). However, Luke is writing about fifty
years after the fact, and his birth narratives are the stuff of legend with
obvious historical error. So there is no reason to believe Luke over Ur-John.
The point of this side note is that if Jesus was in his late forties at
the time of his death in 30 CE, he would have been in his mid-teen years at the
time of the death of Herod in 4 BCE. The death of Herod sparked numerous peasant
uprisings that were brutally suppressed by the Romans. Jesus would also have
witnessed the Roman destruction of Sepphoris, just four miles from Nazareth, in
4 BCE. He would have seen many lives destroyed by the Romans very close to his
own home town. These events would have provided ample opportunity for the
radicalization of Jesus as a young man. The insurrection of Athronges would
also have been something Jesus was following as a young man. It could well have
been a role model, planting seeds and even the inspiration that led to Jesus’
own uprising.
In the end, there is insufficient data to determine the age of Jesus. The
interpretation of Ur-John’s references is speculative. However, we do know that
at the time of Jesus peasant uprisings led by persons proclaiming themselves to
be king or messiah were not unusual. Richard Horsley, in Bandits, Prophets and Messiahs writes:
It appears that
the ancient Israelite tradition of popular anointed kingship, though dormant
during the Persian and Hellenistic periods, remained alive. It certainly
reemerged in vigorous form just before and after the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
In response to foreign domination, severe repression, and illegitimate Herodian
kingship, peasant attempts to set things right took the form of messianic
movements. They took back or destroyed the excesses of wealth that the ruling
class had gained by exploiting their labor. They fought against the hated
foreign domination by the Romans so that, led by the king whom they themselves
had recognized or acclaimed, they could once again be free to live under the
rule of God, according to the traditional covenantal ways. In some cases (Athronges,
Simon bar Giora, Bar Kochba), before the Roman troops could suppress these
large-scale movements, they were able to control and apparently govern their
territories for several months, even years.[7]
All three of the rebels cited by Horsley, Athonges, Simon bar Giora and
Simon bar Kokhba, were hailed by followers as messiahs that would restore the
nation of Israel. Simon bar Giora was executed by the Romans as a would-be King
of the Jews, just as Jesus was. If there were at least several messianic
rebellions against Rome, occurring both before and after Jesus, why would we
have difficulty perceiving the Jesus movement as simply another example of it?
Richard Horsley, writing more recently in 2011, sheds light on this conundrum:
For over a century,
many critical scholars have come to one or another of two almost opposite
conclusions, that Jesus must have been an apocalyptic visionary or that he was
a wisdom teacher. It is hard to imagine, however, that either a visionary or an
itinerant teacher would have been sufficiently threatening to the Roman
imperial order that he would have been crucified. Not surprisingly, therefore,
to explain why Jesus was crucified, some still argue that Jesus must have
claimed to be or must have been acclaimed by followers as “the Messiah”
(presumably at the “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem).
Historical
research and critical examination of the sources in the last forty or fifty
years suggest that this last position is highly unlikely, however, for two
principle reasons: (a) there is little textual evidence for a standard Judean
expectation of “the Messiah,” which means that the question must be
reformulated; and (b) the earliest sources for Jesus death
do not present him as (claiming to be or acclaimed as) an anointed one or king
during his mission or in its climax in Jerusalem.[8]
(emphasis added)
Our earliest sources for
Jesus (other than Paul), the series of speeches in Q,
Mark’s Gospel, and “Peter’s” speeches in Acts, thus offer no support
for the view that Jesus was crucified because he or his followers claimed he
was a messiah or king.[9]
(emphasis added)
The problem therefore is simple: contemporary New Testament scholarship
over the last half century has operated on the premise that Q and Mark are the
“earliest sources.” Scholars routinely assume this to be an assured finding of
NT scholarship that is beyond question. Accordingly, Q and Mark are proclaimed
to be our most reliable windows into the historical Jesus. All Jesus reconstructions
in the last half-century have been heavily influenced by this one foundational
presupposition. If a saying or concept is not in Mark or Q, then its
historicity is doubtful. To the example at hand, since Mark and Q do not
support the view that Jesus was a would-be king, Horsley does not entertain the
possibility.
The problem is that Mark is not the earliest source, for the Ur-John narrative
certainly predates Mark. As discussed above, Mark is best understood as a
second-generation reinterpretation of Jesus, a thoroughly reworked vision of
Jesus designed to appeal to (or at least to not offend) Roman authorities. The
notion that Mark can be relied upon for trustworthy information concerning the
historical Jesus is simply false. Furthermore, Ur-John, the actual earliest
surviving source, does portray Jesus
as an acclaimed king and messiah and it does so unabashedly. Conversely, there
is no hint in Ur-John that either Jesus or John the Baptist were in any sense
apocalyptic preachers, contra Erhman’s claim that the “earliest sources available
to us…all portray Jesus apocalyptically.”
What are we to make of this confusion? In the last half century Jesus
scholars have produced a variety of plausible but mutually incompatible reconstructions
based on the assumption that the Jesus of history must be located somehow,
somewhere, in Mark and Q, and that John’s Gospel is of marginal relevance to
the quest. Discounting the historicity of John is an egregious error that has
so far been fatal to the enterprise. Geza Vermes states unequivocally of Jesus
quest methodology:
Research has to be
restricted to Mark, Matthew, and Luke and to exclude John because, despite the
occasional historical detail it contains, its Jesus portrait is so evolved
theologically as to be wholly unsuitable for historical investigation.[10]
Paul Anderson summarizes the role of John’s Gospel in the modern Jesus
quest as follows:
John’s historical
riddles are among the most perplexing features of any biblical text. Whereas
John’s theological riddles especially captivated the attention of ancient
theologians, John’s historical riddles have evoked some of the most explosive
religious and scholarly discussions in modern times. Put bluntly, the
“consensus” of modern critical scholarship regarding John’s historicity
actually involves two platforms: the dehistoricization
of John and the de-Johannification of
Jesus. First, because John differs so much from the three Synoptic Gospels,
its historicity is often doubted where those differences are most pronounced.
Second, its pervasively theological thrust eclipses its distinctive historical
features in the judgment of many a critical scholar. Therefore, the three
modern quests for Jesus (the “Original Quest” of the nineteenth century, the
“New Quest” from the 1950s to the present, and the “Third Quest” using more
interdisciplinary methodologies over the last three decades) have one thing in
common: they leave John on the shelf, and programmatically so.[11]
(emphasis original)
Thus, there is no mystery as to the root of the confusion: The only
first century document that provides a coherent (albeit incomplete) image of
Jesus in a credible historical context is the primitive narrative embedded in
the Gospel of John. Meanwhile, the Synoptic gospels are second- and
third-generation amalgamations of evolving depoliticized mythologies—Jesus as
aphoristic sage, exorcist, healer of the sick, friend of outcasts and tax
collectors, teacher of moral wisdom, magician, apocalyptic prophet, purveyor of
parables, broker of the spiritual kingdom, son of a virgin, descendent of
David, born in Bethlehem, misunderstood messiah and mystical Son of Man—anything
but a would-be King of the Jews who challenged the legitimacy of Roman rule in
Judea and was crucified for fomenting social unrest. The academy dives headlong
into the Synoptic miasma of competing revisualizations of Jesus with confidence
that there must be a way to sort the historical wheat from the mythical chaff,
not realizing that it is overwhelm-ingly the latter. On the sidelines, far out
of the limelight sits the theological Gospel of John, universally disqualified
as admissible historical evidence, but containing the essential keys to the
puzzle. NT scholarship has gotten it exactly wrong: the narrative in John is the earliest and best source for the historical
Jesus; the Synoptic gospels are the mythologized and marginally relevant works.
Little wonder that the two-hundred year quest for Jesus has failed to generate
any consensus.
[1] As noted previously,
Ur-John was composed by a literate and talented writer. This may very well have
been an assistant to John, son of Zebedee, who was writing under his direction
and authority.
[2] The Philip named as one of
the Twelve is not to be confused with the Philip in Acts 6:5 and later
references, who was clearly not one of the Twelve.
[3]
The Church attributed
authorship of the Gospel of Matthew to the apostle Matthew, whom the gospel
itself identifies as the tax collector otherwise known as Levi in Mark and Luke.
There is no historical credibility in this attribution, or in the notion that
any of Jesus’ disciples were tax collectors. Matthew is otherwise unknown in the gospels and Acts.
[4] Oakman, Douglas, The Political Aims of Jesus, p. 70
[5] Chilton, Bruce, Rabbi Jesus, an Intimate Biography, p.
172
[6] Fredriksen, Paula, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, p.
255
[7] Horsley, Richard and
Hanson, John, Bandits, Prophets, and
Messiahs, 1999, p. 131
[8] Horsley, Richard, Jesus and the Powers; Conflict, Covenant,
and the Hope of the Poor, p. 198
[9] Horsley, ibid, p. 194
[10] Vermes, Geza, The Religion of Jesus the Jew, 1993, p.
4
[11] Anderson, Paul, The Riddles of the Fourth Gospel: An
Introduction to John, 2011, p. 46