in order to understand who Jesus Christ is and the nature of his saving significance. It was as a result of Jesus’ resurrection that he was proclaimed as the Christ and became the center of what became a new religion. In the course of this Jesus’ resurrection triggered a far-reaching doctrinal development that eventually helped transform the Christian understanding of God.
Chapter 3 traces the course of this transformation, examining the development of the patristic church’s understanding of Jesus Christ that culminated in the decisions of the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon. These decisions did not end christological inquiry. They are interpreted here as providing guidelines for understanding Jesus Christ. In tracing this development this chapter also notes some gains and losses it involved for the early church’s understanding of Jesus Christ.
Chapter 4 reverses the direction of inquiry and presents a descending Christology. Chapter 3 traced and critically accepted the developments leading to the affirmations of Nicaea and Chalcedon. This chapter seeks to understand Jesus Christ and God in light of them. Given that Jesus is the Christ, the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity, how should the Trinity be understood? What was the reason for the incarnation? By answering these questions, this chapter provides a metaphysical framework for the understanding of Jesus’ saving significance and relationships that follows in parts II and III.
1 The Historical Jesus:
His Message and Person
The gospels differ among themselves in regards to historical details about Jesus1 and in their overall interpretations of him. These differences, along with the extraordinary claims the gospels make about him, raise the question, what can be known historically about Jesus? In a society where historical inquiry is an accepted form of knowledge this question cannot be avoided. This is the starting point for the quest for the historical Jesus, which can be traced back through various stages to Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768).2 This quest is usually undertaken with some purpose related to the Christian faith.3 It has theological importance. Historical inquiry is one source of knowledge about Jesus. It can help assess the continuity and discontinuity between what faith claims about Jesus Christ and the life he lived.4 It can also give historical concreteness to one’s understanding of Jesus, showing how he was situated amidst the social conflicts of his day.
The quest has produced numerous contradictory images of Jesus. These often betray an ideological bias in relation to cultural, political, and religious conflicts of the present. Yet understandings of Jesus produced by the quest cannot be simply dismissed as expressions of current
ideologies. Research into the historical Jesus needs to be critically evaluated in terms of whose interests it serves. But it remains a potential source of knowledge about Jesus that has emancipatory power. The presence of ideological distortions in historical claims about Jesus can only be demonstrated through further historical inquiry. Therefore this inquiry needs to continue.5 What can be known historically about Jesus, like any historical knowledge, is always subject to correction or refutation by further research. It is not the basis of faith in Jesus Christ. This faith is based on experiencing the proclamation of Jesus Christ as true in a compelling way. But knowledge about Jesus gained through the quest can and should inform this faith.
This chapter presents a description and interpretation of Jesus’ message and person drawn from the work of people engaged in the quest for the historical Jesus. Subsequent chapters will return to the historical Jesus in relation to particular questions. This chapter has a broader focus: Jesus’ proclamation of the coming reign of God and how this was intertwined with his person. Who Jesus was and how he lived was a medium for his message. Conversely this message and the way he proclaimed it made an implicit claim about his person, which eventually led to his death.
The Setting
Apart from one or more trips to Jerusalem, Jesus lived and worked in Galilee. He probably first became publicly active between 26 and 29 CE. His death outside Jerusalem probably occurred in 30 CE. These dates cannot be certain, partly because of the nature of the evidence in the gospels, and partly because of the time and place in which he lived.6 Galilee was a hinterland to Jerusalem. Jerusalem was a hinterland to imperial Rome. Jesus had no significant impact on the Roman Empire during his lifetime. From a Jewish perspective he was only one of a number of charismatic leaders of messianic movements who were killed by Roman forces or by Herod, their client-king.7 In relation to the political and cultural centers of his time, he lived and died in almost complete obscurity. Consequently, little exists in the way of records or historical references independent of the New Testament or related literature like the Gospel of Thomas 8 by which a more precise dating of his activities could be obtained.
Galilee in Jesus’ time was experiencing deep social tensions along religious, cultural, political, and economic lines. Hellenism had been challenging and interacting with Judaism for several centuries. Taxation from Roman and subordinate regional authorities was pushing many peasant families into permanent debt. The divide between rich and poor was growing. Local and family authorities frequently had difficulty coping with the erosion of social values9 caused by these cultural, economic, and political forces. This helped create an openness to successive eschatological renewal movements led by charismatic figures like John the Baptist and Jesus. These movements in turn created tensions between themselves, more established forms of Jewish religion, and Roman and Jewish political authorities.
Jesus was a first-century Jew. He lived in the period known as Second Temple Judaism.10 It was a time of religious ferment and divergent movements within Judaism, to the extent that some suggest speaking of Judaisms rather than Judaism in this period. The gospels all describe Jesus as having an understanding of the Jewish religious traditions and practices sufficient to present himself as an authoritative interpreter of these and to defend his views in debate with other Jewish religious leaders. Evidence in the gospels suggests that he came from Nazareth in Galilee, a rural village off the beaten track yet close enough to the city of Sepphoris that he might be exposed to broader cultural currents.11 Jesus was a layperson with no official qualifications or group affiliation to fall back on when resistance rose up against him. By all accounts he remained unmarried. His public ministry began after his baptism by John the Baptist, a charismatic Jewish religious leader preceding him. Jesus’ relationship to John was in some ways analogous to his relationship to the institutions and traditions of Second Temple Judaism. Jesus accepted many of the teaching of both, yet he also creatively interpreted these and departed from them in significant ways. In doing so, he helped give rise to one of the covenantal renewal movements12 that were part of Second Temple Judaism.
John the Baptist
John the Baptist was a preacher of eschatological renewal whose message centered on the theme that all people, even those considered righteous and good, needed to repent to escape God’s impending judgment. Jesus went to John to be baptized. The significance of this can be summarized as follows:
By doing this Jesus acknowledged John’s charismatic authority as an eschatological prophet, accepted his message of imminent fiery judgment on a sinful Israel, submitted to his baptism as a seal of his resolve to change his life and as a pledge of salvation as part of a purified Israel, on whom God (through some agent?) would pour out the holy spirit on the last day.13