Jesus: A Very Short Introduction

by Richard Bauckham

Recently, some Jewish thinkers have been reclaiming Jesus as an authentically Jewish teacher.

The Gnostic Gospels, therefore, were designed to add. They are subsequent to the four Gospels not only chronologically but also logically.

The Gnostic Gospels sharply disconnect Jesus from the story of Israel, for a very good reason. For them, the Old Testament God is the inferior creator of this material world, from whose power the Gnostic is to be delivered by the enlightenment Jesus brings from the true supreme God, a God not known to the Hebrew Bible. Inevitably, the Jewishness of Jesus, which is integral to his portrayal in the four Gospels, disappears from the Gnostic Gospels.

an eschatological prophet, a Galilean holy man, an occultic magician, an innovative rabbi, a trance-inducing psychotherapist, a Jewish sage, a political revolutionary, an Essene conspirator, an itinerant exorcist, an historicized myth, a protoliberation theologian, a peasant artisan, a Torah-observant Pharisee, a Cynic-like philosopher, a self-conscious eschatological agent, a socioeconomic reformer, a paradoxical Messianic claimant and … one who saw himself as … the very embodiment of Yahweh-God. James K. Beilby and Paul Rhodes Eddy (eds.), The Historical Jesus: Five Views (London: SPCK, 2010), p.

The earliest such testimony is in the fragments (sadly all that we now have) of the work of Papias, bishop of Hierapolis at the beginning of the 2nd century. He reported that Mark was Peter’s interpreter (who presumably translated Peter’s Aramaic into Greek or Latin) and based his Gospel on Peter’s accounts of the activity and teaching of Jesus. I have argued that this claim is confirmed by the Gospel of Mark itself when we look carefully at the place and role of Peter within this Gospel. If Mark’s Gospel was closely associated with Peter, this would account for the high value that Matthew and Luke evidently placed on it, adopting most of its content into their own Gospels.

Originally, purity and impurity only really mattered when one visited the Temple. God’s presence in the Temple made it a kind of pure space that would be defiled by someone in a state of impurity. But by the 1st century AD, there was a tendency to think that, since purity was a good thing, one should aim at being pure as much as possible.

One intriguing piece of evidence suggests that Jesus may in fact have worked on the family farm as well as practising carpentry. Hegesippus, a 2nd-century writer, preserves the information that two grandsons of Jesus’ brother Judas were peasant farmers sharing a farm whose precise size was remembered. This must have been the family smallholding in Nazareth. The fact that they owned it jointly indicates that this family still followed the rather old-fashioned practice of not dividing the farm but keeping it as the common property of the extended family. Since Joseph had to provide for at least seven children (Jesus, his four brothers, and two or more sisters), he may well have taken up carpentry only to supplement the inadequate produce of the family farm. For this purpose, there would have been enough work within Nazareth.

He saw the kingdom arriving in the sorts of things he was doing: bringing God’s healing and forgiveness into the lives of people he met, reaching out to those who were pushed to the margins of God’s people, gathering a community in which service would replace status. These are the sorts of things that happen when God rules.

Jesus did not treat the sick as mere passive recipients of healing. He sought their engagement in their own healing. He made their experience part of their relationship with God.

While the Pharisees turned ordinary meals into a practice of ritual holiness, Jesus turned ordinary meals into a practice of the coming of God’s kingdom.

Jesus does not rely on knowledge of the tradition or professional expertise, but speaks as someone comparable, one might suppose, with Moses himself, who knew the will of God at firsthand.

Jesus thus took the unparalleled step of abolishing social status, not by giving all the disciples the status of master (then there would always be others, outside the community, to set themselves above), but by reducing all to the lowest social status: that of slave. In a society of slaves, no one may think him- or herself more important than others.

When Jesus said, ‘Your sins are forgiven’, he would no doubt be understood to be using a ‘divine passive’, meaning, ‘God forgives your sins’. But this is not a prayer for God to forgive. It is an unequivocal declaration of God’s forgiveness, as though Jesus claims the right to speak for God.

This parable connects with the indications we have already noticed that Jesus understood himself to be in a uniquely special relationship to Abba, his divine Father. Just as the son in the parable transcends the role of the slaves, so Jesus spoke and acted with God’s authority in a way that went beyond how prophets and other figures in the Jewish tradition usually did.

There is no doubt that in John’s Gospel, Jesus is no mere human son of the divine Father, but the eternal Son who has taken on human identity in order to give eternal life to the world. Yet it is through his self-denying obedience to God that Jesus fulfils his identity as the divine Son.

The connection of his blood with ‘the (new) covenant’ is another aspect of the Exodus theme. After the Exodus, God made Israel his own people by making a covenant with them, and the covenant was sealed with the blood of sacrificed oxen, called ‘the blood of the covenant’. In the book of Jeremiah the prophet, God promised ‘a new covenant’, one that would transcend the people’s disobedience to the first covenant.

All the Gospels except Mark tell at least two of these stories of Jesus’ ‘appearances’, but it is evident that there were quite a lot of such stories from which the Gospel writers chose a few. In fact, the earliest account of them comes from Paul, writing in the year AD 52 or 53. He reproduces an established list which he had received from the Jerusalem apostles and which lists Jesus’ appearances after his death to the following: Cephas (that is, Simon Peter, the leading member of the twelve), the twelve, five hundred believers at the same time (most of whom, Paul notes, were still alive when he was writing), James (Jesus’ brother, who became a leading figure in the early Christian movement), ‘all the apostles’ (a larger category than the twelve), and finally Paul himself. Paul, who admits that his own encounter with the risen Christ was somewhat anomalous, had added himself to a traditional list.

About a century after the death of Jesus, Rabbi Aqiva (Akiba) also suffered death at the hands of the Roman government, though the circumstances are obscure. What was remembered was that, under torture, he continued to recite the Shema, the Jewish confession of faith in the one and only God of Israel, until he died. He was one of the leading teachers of the early rabbinic movement. His interpretations of Torah were remembered and transmitted by his disciples. Had Jesus been no more than a teacher of Torah, he might have been remembered in the same way. His disciples would have honoured his memory and passed on his teaching. But Jesus was far from merely a teacher of Torah. He claimed God’s authority to enact the arrival of God’s kingdom. His disciples thought he was the Messiah, and he didn’t deny being something of the sort. After his death, the disciples became much more confident that he really was the Messiah, because God had vindicated him, raised him from death and exalted him to sit on the divine throne in heaven. A remarkably new religious movement arose, first within Judaism, then of wider scope, that was based around the confidence that Jesus was the Messiah and was alive and active in the lives of those who followed him.

But there was already a large Christian community in Rome long before Paul visited the capital. Christianity must soon have spread to Egypt and to Mesopotamia, developments with which Paul had no involvement.

The centre from which the early Christian movement developed and spread throughout the ancient world was not Paul, but the Jerusalem church, led initially by the twelve apostles and subsequently by James the brother of Jesus. What was common to the whole Christian movement derived from Jerusalem, not from Paul, and Paul himself derived the central message he preached from the Jerusalem apostles. The heart of Paul’s teaching was common early Christian faith, though he was undoubtedly a thinker of genius who shaped that faith into a characteristic form, as did a number of other major teachers in the early church (such as the author of John’s Gospel).

It is not too much to say that the earliest Christians incorporated Jesus into their Jewish understanding of the one and only God. This was the origin of the doctrine of the incarnation, which in historic Christianity has been the central summary of the way Christians understand Jesus’ relationship to humanity and to God. A brief explanation of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation will be an appropriate way to conclude this brief account of the place of Jesus in Christian faith. (The word ‘incarnation’, meaning enfleshment or embodiment, is based on the prologue to John’s Gospel, which says that ‘the Word became flesh’.)

What the doctrine adds is that that human person was God’s humanity. Uniquely in the case of this man, God actually lived a fully human life from birth to death. Moreover, it is important to realize Jesus never ceased to be human. In his resurrection and his heavenly glory, he models the destiny of all human beings.

A useful reference book is the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, edited by Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight, and I. Howard Marshall (Downers Grove/Leicester: InterVarsity Press, 1992).