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But the disciples, mistaking that kingdom for a future event, persist in naïve questioning: “When will … the new world come?” Jesus said to them, “What you look forward to has already co...
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The Gospel of Thomas teaches that when one comes to know oneself, at the deepest level, one simultaneously comes to know God as the source of one’s being.
Gospel of Thomas tells the same story differently: Jesus said to his disciples, “Compare me to someone, and tell me whom I am like.” Simon Peter said to him, “You are like a righteous messenger.” Matthew said to him, “You are like a wise philosopher.” Thomas said to him, “Master, my mouth is wholly incapable of saying whom you are like” (NHC II.34.30–35.3).
Thomas, who recognizes that he himself cannot assign a specific role to Jesus, transcends at that moment the relation of disciple to master. Jesus declares that Thomas has become like himself: “I am not your Master, for you have drunk, and become drunk from the bubbling stream I measured out.… Whoever drinks from my mouth will become as I am, and I myself will become that person, and things that are hidden will be revealed to him” (NHC II.35.4–7; 50:27–30).
Far from regarding himself as the only begotten son of God, Jesus says to his disciples, “When you come to know yourselves” (and discover the divine within you), then “you will recognize that it is you who are the sons of the living Father”—just
The Gospel of Philip makes the same point more succinctly: one is to “become not a Christian, but a Christ.”
“You, the reader, are the twin brother of Christ” when you recognize the divine within you. Then you will see, as Thomas does, that you and Jesus are, so to speak, identical twins.
One who seeks to “become not a Christian, but a Christ” no longer looks only to Jesus—and later to his church and its leaders—as most believers do, as the source of all truth. So, while the Jesus of the gospel of John declares, “I am the door; whoever enters through me shall be saved,” the Teaching of Silvanus points in a different direction:
Knock upon yourself as upon a door, and walk upon yourself as on a straight road. For if you walk upon that road, it is impossible for you to go astray.… Open the door for yourself, that you may know what is.… Whatever you op...
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Thomas appeals to people engaged in spiritual transformation, but it does not answer the practical questions of many potential converts who lived in or near Jewish communities scattered throughout the cities of Palestine and the imperial provinces. Potential converts asked questions like these: Do you want us to fast? How shall we pray? Shall we give alms? What diet should we observe? In short, are believers to follow traditional Jewish practices, or not? According to the Gospel of Thomas, when the disciples ask “the living Jesus” these very questions, he refuses to give them specific
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The gospels included in the New Testament, by contrast, do offer such guidelines. According to Matthew and Luke, for example, Jesus answers each one of these questions authoritatively and specifically: “When you pray, say, ‘Our Father, who art in heaven …’ When you fast, wash your face.… When you give alms, do so in secret” (6:2–12).
As for the kosher laws, Mark says that Jesus “proclaimed all foods clean.”
while Thomas says that finding the kingdom of God requires undergoing a solitary process of self-discovery, the gospels of the New Testament offer a far simpler message: one attains to God not by spiritual self-knowledge, but by believing in Jesus the Messiah. Now that God has sent salvation through Christ, repen...
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The author of Mark, then, offers a rudimentary model for Christian community life. The gospels that the majority of Christians adopted in common all follow, to some extent, Mark’s example. Successive generations found in the New Testament gospels what they did not find in many other elements of early Jesus tradition—a practical design for Christian communities.
With the Temple’s destruction the high priest, formerly the chief spokesman for the Jewish people, lost his position, along with all his priestly allies. The Sanhedrin, formerly the supreme Jewish council, also lost its power.
When the Romans besieged the Temple in March, 68 C.E., the Jewish teacher Johanan ben Zakkai fled Jerusalem and took refuge in a Roman camp. There, anticipating the Roman victory, he asked Vespasian for permission to found an academy for Jewish teachers in Jamnia, a town the Romans had already recovered. Vespasian and his advisers, apparently expecting that Jews would resume internal self-government after the war, granted permission to Johanan to establish this school as a legitimate Jewish authority. According to the historian Mary Smallwood, Rabbi Johanan’s escape, technically an act of
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teachers, mostly Pharisees, many of them self-supporting tradesmen (like Paul, a tentmaker, who had been a Pharisee), now took over leadership roles, expanding their authority throughout Judea, and eventually in Jewish communities throughout the world. Thus began the rabbinic movement, which would become increasingly dominant in Jewish community life.18
Matthew, proclaiming the message of Jesus the Messiah c. 80 C.E., found himself in competition primarily with these Pharisaic teachers and rabbis,
The Pharisees wanted to place the Torah at the center of Jewish life as a replacement for the ruined Temple.
But because Matthew’s Jesus interprets the Torah so that Gentiles can fulfill it as well as Jews, Matthew in effect encourages people to abandon traditional ethnic identification with Israel. This was a radical position that most Jews found—and declared—anathema.
In Matthew, Jesus repeatedly attacks the Pharisees as “hypocrites” obsessed with petty regulations while ignoring “justice and mercy and faith”—attacks
In writing his gospel, Matthew was concerned to refute damaging rumors about Jesus—for example, that his birth was illegitimate, which would disgrace and disqualify him as a suitable candidate for Israel’s Messiah. Furthermore, Jesus was known to have come from Nazareth in Galilee, and from a common family—not from the royal, Davidic dynasty established in Bethlehem, as would befit a king of Israel. Even more serious, perhaps, was the charge that Jesus, according to Mark, neglected or even violated observance of Sabbath and kosher laws.
in opposition to the rumor that Jesus was born illegitimate, Matthew and his predecessors found vindication for their faith in Jesus in Isaiah 7:14. There the Lord promises to give Israel a “sign” of the coming of God’s salvation. Apparently Matthew knew the Hebrew Bible in its Greek translation, where he would have read the following: “The Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son; and shall call his name Immanuel—God with us” (Isaiah 7:14).
In the original Hebrew, the passage had read “young woman” (almah),
apparently describing an ordi...
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Matthew says, but Jesus’ father, knowing that Herod’s son still ruled Judea, chose to protect Jesus by taking his family to live incognito in the village of Nazareth. Thus Matthew explains how Jesus came to be associated with this obscure Galilean town, instead of with Bethlehem, which was his actual birthplace, according to Matthew.
many New Testament scholars regard the story of the “slaughter of the innocents,” like the “flight into Egypt,” as reflecting Matthew’s programmatic conviction that Jesus’ life must recapitulate the whole history of Israel.
Many scholars have noted these parallels between Jesus, Moses, and Israel.
Matthew reverses the traditional roles, casting the Jewish king, Herod, in the villain’s role traditionally reserved for Pharaoh.
Matthew includes among Jesus’ enemies the chief priests and scribes as well as all the other inhabitants of Jerusalem,
not only was Herod “troubled” to hear of Jesus’ birth, but so was “all Jerusalem with him” (2:3).
The Pharisees are widely respected and honored, accepted by the people as religious authorities; Jesus’ followers are a suspect minority, maligned and persecuted.
Many scholars have noted and commented on the bitter hostility expressed in this chapter.25 Biblical scholar Luke Johnson shows that philosophic groups in antiquity often attacked their rivals in strong terms.26 But philosophers did not engage, as Matthew does here, in demonic vilification of their opponents. Within the ancient world, so far as I know, it is only Essenes and Christians who actually escalate conflict with their opponents to the level of cosmic war.
Scholars know that many Jewish teachers at the time of Jesus—teachers like Hillel and Shammai, Jesus’ contemporaries—engaged in moral interpretation of the law.
Inclusion in God’s kingdom depends, then, not on membership in Israel but on justice combined with generosity and compassion. Ethnicity as a criterion has vanished. Gentiles as well as Jews could embrace this reinterpretation of divine law—and in Matthew’s community many did.
To account for the common rumor that Jesus’ disciples had stolen his body, Matthew says that the Jewish authorities bribed the Roman soldiers to start this rumor.
speaks for those Gentile converts to Christianity who consider themselves the true heirs of Israel.
Luke also goes further than Mark and Matthew in making explicit what Mark and Matthew imply—the connection between Jesus’ Jewish enemies and the “evil one,” the devil.
the moment Jesus appears as a grown man, baptized and “full of the holy spirit,” the devil immediately challenges him.
At that point, Luke says, “Satan entered into Judas Iscariot,” who “went and conferred with the chief priest how he might betray him; and they were glad, and agreed to give him money.”
After Jesus sends out seventy apostles to heal and proclaim the message of the kingdom, they return “with joy,” astonished and triumphant, saying, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name.” Jesus exults, foreseeing Satan’s impending defeat: “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven: Behold, I have given you power to tread on snakes and scorpions, and upon every power of the enemy” (10:18–19).
Luke alone, among the synoptic gospels, inserts the words “the king,” taken from Psalm 118, into the acclamation the disciples shouted at Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem: “Blessed is the one, the king, who comes in the name of the Lord!”
Jesus himself declares that neither Satan’s role nor God’s preordained plan absolves Judas’s guilt: “The Son of man goes as it has been determined; but woe to that man by whom he is betrayed” (22:22; cf. Mark 14:21).
Raymond Brown disagrees, and sides with those who are convinced that the titles Messiah and Son of God emerged later, from Christian communities (in this case, from Luke’s community) and not from the Jewish Sanhedrin.
Luke omits Jesus’ anguished cry (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Luke goes so far as to say that many of the bystanders, seeing all this, repented what they had done: “When all the crowds who had gathered there for the spectacle saw what had taken place, they returned home, beating their breasts” (23:48). He also changes Mark’s account to say that the Roman centurion who saw Jesus die “praised God,” and echoed Pilate’s verdict: “Certainly this man was innocent!”
Acts of the Apostles Luke again emphasizes the role of the Jews rather than of the Romans in Jesus’ crucifixion.
Peter again addresses the “men of Israel,” preaching of Jesus, “whom you delivered up and denied in the presence of Pilate, when Pilate had decided to release him … you denied the holy and righteous one, and you asked instead for a murderer to be granted to you.”
“The Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue”—literally, would become aposynagoge, expelled from one’s home synagogue. New Testament scholar Louis Martyn has shown that whatever it meant in particular, this traumatic separation defined how John’s group saw itself—as a tiny minority of God’s people “hated by the world,” a group that urged its members to reject in turn the whole social and religious world into which they had been born.8
scholars, led by the rabbi Gamalial II (80–115 C.E.), introduced into synagogue worship the so-called birkat ha-minim (literally, “benediction of the heretics”), a prayer that invoked a curse upon “heretics,” including Christians, here specifically identified as “Nazarenes.” This might have enabled synagogue leaders to ask anyone suspected of being a secret “Nazarene” to “stand before the ark” and lead the congregation in the benediction, so that anyone guilty of being a Christian would be calling a curse upon himself and his fellow believers.
