This article by James Burkinshaw was originally delivered as a talk to the PGS Philosophy Society.
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| Jesus in the Tomb by Hans Holbein |
As always, it is a great pleasure to talk to the Philosophy Society and I am grateful to Dr Richmond for generously inviting me to take part in this term’s series of talks on religion. Last term, as part of your series on philosophers, I spoke about the life and work of Baruch Spinoza. And I want to start with him today.
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| Baruch Spinoza |
As I discussed then, Spinoza was expelled from the Jewish community in Amsterdam in 1656 and for the rest of his life remained under threat of violence, even death, from many members of the Christian community, particularly the Dutch political authorities. This was because of his spoken and written criticism of the Bible in his Tractatus Theologico Politicus. And I don’t just mean ‘criticism’ in the sense of pointing out the Bible’s flaws, although Spinoza certainly did that, but in the more literary sense: subjecting biblical texts (Christian New Testament as well as Hebrew Scriptures) to detailed linguistic and structural analysis, just like any other historical or literary text. In the process, Spinoza pioneered the field of ‘Higher Criticism’ that came to fruition in the 1800s with the work of biblical philologists like David Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach and Ernest Renan. Two centuries before these scholars, Spinoza pointed out that the Pentateuch was clearly not written by one man, Moses, but by many different writers reflected in the different styles, vocabulary choices and structural patterns. He noted that the Bible, as a whole, was full of internal inconsistencies and historical inaccuracies. This clearly was not the revealed word of God but a series of texts written, edited, redacted and compiled by a diverse range of human beings, with many competing purposes and beliefs, over many hundreds of years.
Furthermore, Spinoza wrote: “we possess but fragments of it.” Just how true this was became apparent 300 years later with two significant discoveries at the end of the Second World War. In 1945, an Egyptian farmer from the town of Nag Hammadi dug up a sealed jar buried deep in the ground, which turned out to be packed with ancient Christian and Gnostic texts from the 3rd and 4th centuries CE. Just a year later, in the Qumran caves, on the north shore of the Dead Sea, Bedouin shepherds discovered, again buried in jars in the ground, ancient Jewish texts dating from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE (the period just before and during the life of Jesus). These finds confirmed just how many texts from that era had not made it into the Hebrew Scriptures and Christian Bible, reinforcing Spinoza’s argument that this was a contingent collection of texts, not a providential one.
The Dead Sea scrolls, in particular, gave scholars far more context about the beliefs and practices current in Jewish society in the centuries leading up to and including that of Jesus (the first century CE). And what they suggest is that Jesus himself was a man of his time. Certainly, he was a historical figure - or, at least, that is the consensus of most scholars today, despite the fact that, outside of the New Testament, there are only two other references to Jesus’ life within 100 years of his death, from a Jewish source (Josephus, c. 90 CE) and a Roman one (Tacitus, c. 115 CE). New Testament scholar E P Sanders outlined what he called five ‘indisputable’ facts about the historical Jesus’ life: (1) he was a preacher from Galilee; (2) he was baptised by John the Baptist; (3) he was involved in a controversy at the Temple in Jerusalem; (4) He was crucified by the Romans; (5) after his death, many of his disciples continued to follow him.
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| Reconstruction of the face of a 1st century man from Judaea |
2. He was baptised by John the Baptist: John the Baptist, who is shown as baptising Jesus in the gospels, was certainly a historical figure, referred to extensively in the Dead Sea scrolls and by the Jewish writer Josephus. His ministry, like his follower Jesus’, was based around healing and forgiveness of sins. It is striking, when reading the three Synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), just how much space is devoted to stories involving Jesus performing acts of healing and exorcism (‘miracles’), which are often glossed over today. And we can see that non-Biblical texts such as the Prayer of Nabonidus, anticipate the gospels a century earlier in linking healing the sick to the forgiveness of sins. In this sense Jesus seems to have been quite typical as a charismatic healer and holy man in his time and place.
3. He was involved in a controversy at the Temple in Jerusalem: The challenge to the priests in the Temple, in Jerusalem, is one of the dramatic highlights in each gospel, seen as initiating the final confrontation with the authorities that leads to Jesus’ death. However, Jesus’ insistence on seeing the Temple as significant as a spiritual concept rather than as a physical building had been anticipated by such Jewish sects as the Essenes, who were still in existence in his time and who, like him, argued that prayer and a holy life should replace offerings and sacrifices. In his readiness to challenge the Temple priests, Jesus was not only following in a long-standing tradition of Old Testament prophets, from Elijah to Amos, who expressed a suspicion of priests and temples, and claimed a direct communication with God, but also groups such as the Essenes.
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| 1st century monument from Caesarea mentioning Pilate's name |
4. He was crucified by the Romans: In the Synoptic Gospels, the Roman governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilate (who was most definitely a historical figure) asks Jesus whether he is ‘King of the Jews’, which is how he understands the Jewish term, Messiah, which means ‘anointed one’. Over many centuries in which Jews had been exiled or occupied by imperial powers from Babylon to Greece, the Messiah had grown to be seen as liberator who would free the Jewish people. It seems almost certain that it was Pilate’s misunderstanding of Jesus as being some sort of nationalist rebel that led to the latter’s crucifixion, which was a Roman political punishment, not a Jewish religious one. In fact, tolerance of varied beliefs and behaviours within Judaism, as we can see from the long-standing existence of such groups as the Essenes and the proliferation of charismatic healers such as Hanina ben Dosa outside of the big urban centres such as Jerusalem. The concept of the Messiah was intertwined with the idea of the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, which Jesus refers to many times in the Synoptic Gospels. Like the epithet ‘son of God’, reference to a ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ was one widely used among other Jewish sects such as the Essenes, who, like many Gnostics later, saw the Kingdom as something not up in the sky but as here on earth, or even within ourselves, something that was either here already or imminent. For the Essenes, by the first century, under Roman occupation, the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ had become a description of those who were purified, in counterpoint to those corrupted by the Roman empire, who were the ‘the Kingdom of the wicked’. Again, it is not hard to see how Pilate, not well versed in the complexities of Jewish belief, could simply see this as a political threat, with crucifixion the brutal result.
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| 3rd century mosaic of Dionysus |
5. After his death, many of his disciples continued to follow him: The Synoptic Gospels, in particular, show Jesus as believing that the Kingdom was already happening or was imminent. It was Paul, writing twenty years after Jesus’ death, around 55 CE, who first seemed to realise that the Kingdom of Heaven was not coming soon and that, as a result, an administrative structure, a formalised church, needed to be put in place, something that would last the long term. And many scholars would argue that it is Paul, not Jesus, who is the most significant figure in shaping Christianity and in creating the figure of ‘Christ’. It is very clear from the Acts of the Apostles, the Letters of Paul and other contemporary texts that for several decades after Jesus’ death (around 33 CE), the vast majority of his followers continued to see themselves as Jews and required those joining their group to follow Mosaic Law, including circumcision. However, just as Paul saw the need for a long-term church structure, he also saw that, if this small group was to thrive, it needed to expand, appealing beyond the Jewish community.
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| 3rd century mosaic of Christ |
As you know, while the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the New was written in Greek. Greek was the language of cultural exchange throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, dating back to the empire of Alexander the Great. Paul himself was Jewish, but a Greek speaker and writer. His letters were written between 50-58 CE, and are the earliest Christian texts known to exist. Through his letters, we can see the early Church relatively quickly become Greek rather than Jewish, in thought as well as speech. For example, whereas in Jewish tradition, baptism was a purification ritual to cleanse sins (as we saw with the Essenes and with John the Baptist), Paul’s fertile, poetic mind re-imagined baptism as a myth-drama in which the baptised individual re-enacted the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus himself. This idea of myth-drama drew on the mystery cults that flourished in the Roman empire in this era (not just Greek but Egyptian, Syrian and Persian), for example that of the man-god Dionysus. What is striking about Paul is his relative lack of interest in Jesus’ healing or preaching. What Paul focuses on is just three days of Jesus’ life, around his death and resurrection. For Paul, Jesus shifts from a Jewish healer, teacher and prophet whose life ended on the Cross to the heavenly son of God not in the Jewish sense of favoured human being but the Greek sense of half man half God. ‘Christ’ is usually seen as the Greek translation of ‘Messiah’ but the translation also changes the meaning fundamentally: from an earthly king or liberator to an unearthly, divine figure.
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| 4th century image of Christ, Rome |
For Paul, this elevation to divine sonship was posthumous, postdating Jesus’ earthly, human existence in a very Greek way: apotheosis is a common feature of Greek myth. In contrast, the author of the Fourth Gospel (the Gospel of John) writing 50 years after Paul and 70 years after the death of Jesus, suggests ‘In the beginning was the word’ (Greek: Logos) to suggest deification not as posthumous but as pre-existent: The Fourth Gospel describes Christ as there with God from before the Creation; in fact, the two are portrayed as barely distinguishable (“He who has seen me has seen the Father”). And this imagery of the Logos, the Word, in temporary exile in human form on Earth, is a Greek concept, a Platonic one, not a Jewish one.
Thus, over a 50-year period, in the aftermath of Jesus’ death, Paul and the author of the Fourth Gospel, above all, transformed the God-centred, Jewish-based religion of Jesus to a Christ-centred Christianity that was Greek in its cultural heritage. Over the next two hundred years, as texts discovered at Nag Hammadi make clear, this view of Christ was widely contested, with rigorous and vigorous debates over the true nature of Jesus and of his message. However, under the intimidating gaze of the first Christian Roman emperor Constantine, church leaders finally defined the nature of Christ in 325 CE at the Council of Nicaea: ‘homoousia’, in other words, the Father and Son were one.
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| Anti-Semitic medieval representation |
As I said, both Paul and the author of the Fourth Gospel were sophisticated thinkers and artists, who produced a myth-drama that has had a transformative effect over the past two thousand years. However, it came at a terrible cost. The Fourth Gospel, in particular, presents “the Jews” collectively as antagonists to Jesus (rather than focusing on the priests or other leaders, as the other gospels generally do). In John’s poetic symbolism, the Jews represent darkness (versus the light represented by Christ). Much of this can now be understood in the context of the split between those Jerusalem-based followers of Jesus who still saw themselves as Jewish and the Greeks or Gentiles who, under the influence of Paul had, as we have seen, moved in a completely different direction owing more to Greek than Jewish culture. What Paul and John seemed to be suggesting was that God had rejected Judaism and replaced it with a new people of God - the Greek speaking Gentiles - and the consequences, not least in the medieval era and the twentieth century were catastrophic.
For me, such destructiveness derives in part from reading religious texts literally rather than metaphorically. As writer Karen Armstrong argues in her book ‘The Lost Art of Scripture’, this was not how religious texts were approached in the ancient world, where they were conceived as an art form designed to achieve the moral and spiritual transformation of the individual. As Armstrong notes, "In our modern cultivation of the rational activities of the left hemisphere of the brain, we too often marginalise the important insights of the right hemisphere." For me, this is the value of religion: as an art form. I see Christianity as a myth, not in the sense of being a lie or a misconception, but as an aesthetic form of great mythopoeic power, through which we encounter truth, like any great artistic work.
And finally, what of Jesus the man, the historical figure? Well, there are two moments from the gospels that, for me, always seem particularly real. One is his cry of agony and abandonment on the cross: “Eli, Eli, lemana shabakthani!" which is so notably presented in the Aramaic that Jesus would actually have spoken (even though the rest of the gospel is in Greek): “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’I think it is a moment of such extraordinary tragic power. In contrast, the other is remarkable for its ordinariness. The Fourth Gospel describes how "Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not." It is a quiet moment, without any theological or narrative purpose, that has always seemed, to me, to be someone’s genuine and lasting memory of the historical figure of Jesus kneeling down and distractedly doodling in the dust.
Bibliography
Armstrong, Karen, The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts
Sanders, E P, The Historical Figure of Jesus
Vermes, Geza, Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea, AD 30-325
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