Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith

by Marcus J. Borg

a resurrected person will not die again.

What about Lazarus?

When I am asked, “Do you believe Jesus died for your sins?,” my answer is no and yes. If they mean, “Do you think Jesus saw his own death as a sacrifice for sin?” or “Do you think that God can forgive sins only because of Jesus’ sacrifice?,” my answer is no. But if they mean, “Is the statement a powerfully true metaphor of the grace of God?,” then my answer is yes. Let me explain. I begin with a reminder that I do not see this as Jesus’ own purpose but as a post-Easter metaphorical interpretation of his death using sacrificial imagery. Sacrifice as a way of dealing with sin was central to the world of Jesus. Moreover, both the timing and location of Jesus’ death meant that such imagery was close at hand. He died at Passover, when the Passover lambs were sacrificed; and he died in Jerusalem, the location of the temple and sacrifice.24 The temple and temple sacrifice are the linguistic home of the metaphor “Jesus died for our sins.”

I conclude this section by commenting on two very different ways “Jesus died for our sins” has been understood. Among some Christians, it is seen as an essential doctrinal element in the Christian belief system. Seen this way, it becomes a doctrinal requirement: we are made right with God by believing that Jesus is the sacrifice. The system of requirements remains, and believing in Jesus is the new requirement. Seeing it as a metaphorical proclamation of the radical grace of God leads to a very different understanding. “Jesus died for our sins” means the abolition of the system of requirements, not the establishment of a new system of requirements.

There are also theological reasons why I do not like an emphasis upon the historical factuality of the empty tomb. (1) It can have a distorting effect on the meaning of Easter faith: Easter faith easily becomes believing in the factuality of a past event, rather than living within a present relationship, and the truth of Christianity becomes grounded in the “happenedness” of this past event rather than in the continuing experience of the risen Christ. (2) In conservative Christian apologetic, the factuality of the empty tomb is often used to prove the truth of Christianity and even its superiority to all other religious traditions. But I do not believe that the truth of Christianity can be proved in this fashion, and I do not believe that God is known primarily or only in our tradition. The claim conflicts with what I know of other religions, and it is difficult to reconcile with the Christian notion of grace.

the gospels are the church’s memories of the historical Jesus transformed by the community’s experience and reflection in the decades after Easter. They therefore tell us what these early Christian communities had come to believe about Jesus by the last third of the first century. They are not, first and foremost, reports of the ministry itself.

I learned that the portrait of Jesus in John’s gospel was essentially one of the Christ of faith, and not the Jesus of history. Jesus never spoke of himself as the Son of God, as one with God, as the light of the world, as the way, the truth, and the life, and so forth. Indeed, he never spoke the words of John 3.16–that verse from my childhood that had summed up my image of Jesus. I am aware that this is still news for some Christians, even though it has been old hat in the seminaries of mainline denominations throughout this century.

I realized that God does not refer to a supernatural being “out there” (which is where I had put God ever since my childhood musings about God “up in heaven”). Rather, I began to see, the word God refers to the sacred at the center of existence, the holy mystery that is all around us and within us. God is the nonmaterial ground and source and presence in which, to cite words attributed to Paul by the author of Acts, “we live and move and have our being”11

I began also to understand what it means to say that God is both everywhere present and “up in heaven”–both immanent and transcendent, as traditional Christian theology puts it. As immanent (the root means “to dwell within”), God is not somewhere else, but right here and everywhere. To speak of God as being “up in heaven”–that is, as transcendent–means that God is not to be identified with any particular thing, not even with the sum total of things.

I no longer see the Christian life as being primarily about believing. The experiences of my mid-thirties led me to realize that God is and that the central issue of the Christian life is not believing in God or believing in the Bible or believing in the Christian tradition. Rather, the Christian life is about entering into a relationship with that to which the Christian tradition points, which may be spoken of as God, the risen living Christ, or the Spirit. And a Christian is one who lives out his or her relationship to God within the framework of the Christian tradition.

The most widely accepted scholarly understanding is that Mark is the earliest gospel, written aroundA.D. 70. Matthew and Luke were written some ten to twenty years later, and both used Mark as well as the document known as “Q,” a collection of sayings of Jesus totaling about two hundred verses, perhaps collected together as early asA.D. 50. John may be independent of the other three gospels and is typically dated aroundA.D. 90 to 100.

In Matthew, the genealogy of Jesus goes back to Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, and from David onward is traced through the kings of Israel. In Luke, the genealogy of Jesus goes back to Adam, the father of both Jews and Gentiles, and from David onward is traced through the prophets of Israel. In Matthew, the family of Jesus lives in Bethlehem, where Jesus is born at home, and moves to Nazareth after returning from the flight into Egypt. In Luke, the family of Jesus lives in Nazareth and travels to Bethlehem because of the census, and so Jesus is born “on the road” in a stable, after which the family returns to its home in Nazareth. In Matthew, the people who come to the birth are the wise men following the star. In Luke, there is neither star nor wise men; rather, there are shepherds. In Matthew, King Herod the Great orders the slaughter of male infants in Bethlehem, which leads Jesus’ family to seek refuge in Egypt. In Luke, there is no such slaughter and no flight into Egypt. These differences are the basis upon which most scholars conclude that the birth stories are not historical accounts but symbolic narratives created by the early Christian movement. To some extent, they reflect themes important to each evangelist. For example, with his tracing of Jesus’ genealogy through the kings of Israel and with his story of the wise men seeking the one who is born “king of the Jews,” Matthew emphasizes Jesus’ kingship. Luke, with Jesus’ genealogy traced back through...

The image I have sketched views Jesus differently: rather than being the exclusive revelation of God, he is one of many mediators of the sacred.

Legends have sought to fill in the missing or “silent” years of Jesus. Suggestions abound that he traveled to India, or encountered Buddhist missionaries in Alexandria in Egypt, or studied magic with Egyptian magicians, or was part of the Qumran community on the shores of the Dead Sea. But all such suggestions are extremely hypothetical speculations, about which one might say, “It is possible (virtually anything is possible), but why should one think so?” We can account for everything we see in Jesus without needing to hypothesize influences from outside of the Jewish tradition.

The Enlightenment is the “great divide” in Western intellectual history that separates the modern period from all that went before it. The Enlightenment began in the seventeenth century and gave birth to the modern worldview with its understanding of reality as material and “self-contained,” operating in accord with “natural laws” of cause and effect.

For Jesus, compassion was the central quality of God and the central moral quality of a life centered in God.

“To be compassionate” is what is meant elsewhere in the New Testament by the somewhat more abstract command “to love.” According to Jesus, compassion is to be the central quality of a life faithful to God the compassionate one.

The critique of the purity system is the theme of one of Jesus’ most familiar parables, the story of the Good Samaritan.31 Most often interpreted as a message about being a helpful neighbor, it in fact had a much more pointed meaning in the first-century Jewish social world. It was a critique of a way of life ordered around purity. The key to seeing this is to recognize the purity issues in the story: the priest and Levite were obligated to maintain a certain level of purity; contact with death was a source of major impurity; and the wounded man is described as “half-dead,” suggesting that one couldn’t tell whether he was dead without coming close enough to incur impurity if he was. Thus the priest and Levite passed by out of observance of the purity laws. The Samaritan (who, not incidentally, was radically impure according to the purity system), on the other hand, is described as the one who acted “compassionately.” Thus this beloved and often domesticated parable was originally a pointed attack on the purity system and an advocacy of another way: compassion.

In the midst of our modern culture, it is important for those of us who would be faithful to Jesus to think and speak of a politics of compassion not only within the church but as a paradigm for shaping the political order. A politics of compassion as the paradigm for shaping our national life would produce a social system different in many ways from that generated by our recent history.

The issue of community (rather than the maximizing of individualism) would become the primary paradigm for thinking about the political order.

Paul uses the word love where Jesus used the word compassion. Thus when Paul, in the great “love chapter” in 1 Corinthians 13, speaks of the greatest of the spiritual gifts as love, he is essentially saying that compassion is the primary fruit of the Spirit.

As a teacher of wisdom, Jesus was not primarily a teacher of information (what to believe) or morals (how to behave), but a teacher of a way or path of transformation. A way of transformation from what to what? From a life in the world of conventional wisdom to a life centered in God.

As Lutherans, we all knew that we weren’t saved by “works.” Rather, we were saved by “grace through faith.” Yet this strong emphasis on grace got transformed into a new system of conventional wisdom, not only in my own mind but, I think, in the minds of many Lutherans, and many Christians generally. The emphasis was placed upon faith rather than grace, and faith insidiously became the new requirement. Faith (most often understood as belief) is what God required, and by a lack of faith/belief one risked the peril of eternal punishment. The requirement of faith brought with it all of the anxiety and self-preoccupation that mark life in the world of conventional wisdom. Was one’s faith/belief real enough, strong enough? Thus, for many of us latter-day Lutherans, the system of conventional wisdom remained. Only the content of the requirement had changed–from good works to faith.

the Kingdom is not somewhere else; rather it is among you, inside you, and outside you. Neither is it some time in the future, for it is here, spread out on the earth; people just do not see it.

The alternative wisdom of Jesus sees the religious life as a deepening relationship with the Spirit of God, not as a life of requirements and reward.

The path of transformation of which Jesus spoke leads from a life of requirements and measuring up (whether to culture or to God) to a life of relationship with God. It leads from a life of anxiety to a life of peace and trust. It leads from the bondage of self-preoccupation to the freedom of self-forgetfulness. It leads from life centered in culture to life centered in God.

As noted in the previous chapter when I spoke about the open table fellowship of Jesus, banquet imagery is central to the gospels. It is tempting to generalize and to suggest that Jesus saw life as a banquet from which many people exclude themselves because of perceptions and preoccupations flowing out of their embeddedness in the world of conventional wisdom.