Rev. Beth Dickerson September 23, 2018 Lake Street Church The Historical Jesus In August, as many of you know, I took two plus weeks of vacation at our family cottage in Michigan. This was a time for welcoming extended family, bike riding, and spending a week with our two oldest granddaughters. And it was also time for cleaning out and sorting out what amounts to generations of family paraphernalia and memories. One of the items I found was a photo album. It had wonderful family pictures from the 1920s and 30s. But, and here s the rub, none of the pictures were labeled! I m fairly certain I was looking at baby pictures of my mother and my uncles. What was disappointing was that I think I was also looking at pictures of my great-grandparents and maybe even my great, great grandparents but I guess I ll never know. I m the oldest person left in my generation and the previous generations have all passed on, as they say. Amidst this cleaning and sorting out, I was also doing a lot of reading and planning worship for this fall. It occurred to me that the hours I spent looking at old family pictures and trying to make sense out of them was akin to doing research in order to answer the question of who really was the Historical Jesus. Trying to figure out who Jesus really was and what he really said and did is one giant puzzle. There are a few clues here and there but it s really a speculative game including considering the physical context, the times, a few unearthed antiquities, and the oral history that has been passed down through the generations. The search for the Historical Jesus is a more or less contemporary Christian movement to find a faith that is not rooted in creed or dogma, but rather in a life of spiritual challenge, compassion, and community. By studying the Historical Jesus one can be liberated from the shackles of what many us thought we were supposed 1
to believe about Jesus if we were to remain Christians. It s a relief for many of us to see Jesus in an entirely new light. Marcus Borg in his book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time makes a distinction between the Pre-Easter Jesus and the Post-Easter Jesus. He refers to the Pre-Easter Jesus as the Historical Jesus, a figure with some historic documentation before his death. The Post-Easter Jesus is the Jesus of Christian tradition, but not necessarily a Jesus whose narrative is factually based. We will talk more about the Post-Easter Jesus in a few weeks. For now, we are going to focus on the facts about the Pre-Easter Jesus that are documentable. We start in first century Palestine which included all of modern day Israel and Palestine as well as large portions of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The first century of the Common Era was a century of apocalyptic expectation among the Jewish people. And there were countless prophets, preachers, and messiahs tramping through the Holy Lands delivering messages of God s imminent judgment. We know some of their names because of the meticulous documentation of the Romans. Along with many others there was the prophet Theudas who had four hundred disciples before the Romans captured him and cut off his head. There was a mysterious charismatic figure known only as the Egyptian who, along with his followers, was massacred by the Roman troops and a there was a poor shepherd named Athronges who put a crown on his head and crowned himself King of the Jews. So, Jesus was just one of many zealots who was roaming the countryside performing exorcisms and healings. The reason exorcisms were so commonplace in Jesus time is that the Jews viewed illness as a manifestation either of divine judgment or of demonic activity. Such things such as epilepsy and schizophrenia were understood to be signs of possession. Exorcism instructions have even been found within the Dead Sea Scrolls. Realistically, Jesus status as an exorcist and 2
miracle worker may seem unusual, even absurd, to modern skeptics, but it did not deviate greatly from the standard expectation of exorcists and miracle workers in first-century Palestine. Reza Aslan, in his book Zealot, writes that it is difficult to place Jesus squarely within any of the known religiopolitical movements of the time. The problem with pinning down the historical Jesus is that, outside of the New Testament, there is almost no trace of the man who would alter the course of human history. And even with New Testament documentation, we simply don t have any historically reliable stories about Jesus before the age of thirty. The earliest and most reliable nonbiblical reference to Jesus comes from the first century historian Flavious Josephus who writes in 94 CE of a fiendish Jewish high priest named Ananus who, after the death of the Roman governor Festus, unlawfully condemned a certain James, the brother of Jesus, the one they call messiah to stoning for breaking the law. As fleeting as this reference may be, this passage proves not only that Jesus, the one they call the messiah probably existed but he was also widely recognized as the founder of a new and enduring movement. From the synoptic gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, along with written Roman records, a few conclusions about the historical Jesus may be derived. Jesus was probably born in Nazareth very near the end of the reign of Herod the Great, therefore shortly before 4 BCE. His parents were Jewish and their names were Mary and Joseph. He may have been the firstborn, although this is not certain. He had four brothers and an unknown number of sisters, all presumably children of Joseph and Mary. Jesus grew up in Nazareth, a town that was around two hundred people. Nazareth was four miles from Sepphoris, whose population of forty thousand made it the largest city in Galilee. Sepphoris had been destroyed by the Romans as they 3
were quelling a rebellion that arose when Herod the Great died in 4 BCE and the city was rebuilt during Jesus youth. Sepphoris was quite cosmopolitan. Indeed, Jesus environment was more cosmopolitan than we have typically imagined. It is clear that Galilee was not a bucolic rural backwater. In addition to Sepphoris, there were four other cities within about fifteen miles of Nazareth. One of the most certain facts known about Jesus is in his late twenties or early thirties Jesus seems to have become a religious seeker and embarked on a religious quest. He left Nazareth and became a follower of a wilderness prophet named John the Baptizer. From here on out, over the past two-hundred years, scholars have been trying to pull together a sketch of the historical Jesus. This quest for the historical Jesus is a relatively new phenomenon. All that is known is broad brush strokes and not a lot of detail. According to some stories in ancient literature, Jesus followers experienced a spiritual presence around him that was palpable and contagious. This seems similar to the spiritual presence that other famous religious figures such as the Buddha and Saint Francis of Assisi are reported to have generated. Modern scholars generally accept that there is a historical core to the healing and exorcism stories, even though we may not be confident that any particular story is a detailed report of a specific incident. All this makes it plausible to locate Jesus own spirituality within what we know of Jewish mysticism in his day. Our picture of Jewish mysticism has been recently growing. The more we realize that there was a form of Jewish mysticism in first-century Palestine, the more likely it seems that Jesus was part of that experiential tradition. According to scholars, there were two claims not made by Jesus in the first three gospels. Nowhere in these texts, or other more recent finds like the Nag 4
Hammadi Coptic texts, does Jesus claim to be messianic. We have no way of knowing whether Jesus thought of himself as the Messiah or the Son of God in some special sense. He said nothing about having such thoughts and they were not part of his teaching. In fact, the historical Jesus constantly pointed away from himself to God. His message was theocentric, not Christocentric centered in God, not centered in a messianic proclamation about himself. (Marcus Borg) The second claim not made by Jesus is that in all likelihood the historical Jesus was non-eschatological. Jesus did not expect the supernatural coming of the Kingdom of God as a world-ending event in his own lifetime. So who was Jesus? As previously stated, he was a spiritual person. He was a teacher of wisdom. He was a social prophet. His verbal gifts were remarkable but he probably could neither read nor write (Aslan). He was an extraordinary healer. There are more healing stories told about him than anyone else in the Jewish tradition. He attracted a following and may have had as many as 120 disciples, some of them women. He was young, his life was short, and his public activity was brief. He lived into his early thirties and his public activity lasted perhaps as little as a year. In summary, the image of Jesus as a spiritual person has implications for how we think of the Christian life. It shifts the focus on the Christian life from believing in Jesus or believing in Jesus incarnate to being in relationship to the same Greater Power that Jesus knew. As we study the historical Jesus, we are enabled as Christians to move beyond believing in God to being in relationship with God. Being in relationship with God gives our lives purpose and meaning. I believe we are here as the hands and feet of the Divine Greater Good. We are to be healers, conveying the love of God to all that we meet. Blessed Be and Amen 5