Jesus and the Word

"Rudolf Bultmann was the greatest New Testament theologian of the 20th century. He was an exegete, a Classicist and a historian, but also a theologian. He was a professor of theology relating what he knew as a historian to what he believed as a Christian. The reason I picked him out—in a book that is now 90 years old and therefore in some ways out of date (it was written before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947)—is that he was writing after 60-odd years of people writing lots of lives of Jesus. What he is saying is, ‘That’s not the point.’ A positivistic historical picture of Jesus misses the main point about him, and misses the main point about history too. History is about an encounter with the past, it’s not just a description. It’s about our own relationship to the past, our identity. So when he was asked to write yet another historical book about Jesus, he agreed, but he thought he would try and write one which communicated some sense of why Jesus was important to him. He saw his own history writing as a dialogue with history, and his own apprehension of Jesus as confronting him with a decision about the meaning of his life, God and the world. So he’s written a book that has included what we know about Jesus’s history, but somehow gives it a sense of what it all means for him. He’s not interested in the brute facts of Jesus’s life. Of course Jesus was crucified and that’s at the centre of things, but Bultmann sidesteps the whole dogmatic structure of Christian belief. He’s saying, ‘Here is someone or something that confronts me with a decision about my life and how I understand myself.’ To be a believer is to understand oneself in a particular way, in relationship to the transcendent. Jesus’s proclamation of God or the kingdom of God and the will of God, about how we should live, communicates something of that and says ‘It’s about you: are you going to go along with this and become a disciple or a follower? Or are you just going to look at it in the historical distance and say, “That’s interesting”.’ A lot of Bultmann’s remarks are gunning against the people who have written before him. That particular saying of Jesus—one of the ones he probably said—is an interesting one. The Greek word that we translate as soul—namely psyche— comes up 500 to 600 times in the Greek Old Testament as a translation of ‘nefesh,’ which means life. So you could read it as Jesus saying, ‘What’s the use if you’ve got everything and then drop dead?’ That’s a common sense interpretation. But then, when that got translated into the Greek as ‘soul’, it acquired new levels of meaning. You’ve got all these material possessions but you lose your personal integrity or your real ‘self.’ It’s worthless and pointless. That secondary meaning is also true, and more profound. It shows what happens to some of Jesus’s sayings as they are handed down in people’s reflection about God and the world. It’s part of the Greek tradition and therefore comes into Christianity fairly early on. With Descartes and the modern world you again get a sharp mind/body dualism. Some people think that has messed up the whole of modern philosophy, and therefore a lot of modern theology as well. Going back to the Bible is partly a way of getting away from that the kind of sharp dualism, and saying, ‘No, the Greek idea that the body is just a tomb and the real self is the soul, is bad.’ We are bodies and to understand ourselves we have to recognize that. That’s much closer to Biblical ways of thinking about it. Believers. Tacitus, Pliny the younger and Suetonius all reflect what is widely known through the existence and witness of his followers. No, they don’t. They add hugely to our knowledge of one branch of sectarian Judaism at the time. Some people think John the Baptist may have had some contact with this monastic sect at Qumran, near the Dead Sea. But they were down in the south, so it’s unlikely that Jesus, in the north, in Galilee, would have had much contact with them, and his teaching was different. They had their own founder, the ‘teacher for righteousness’ who died 150 years earlier. Their community, at Qumran, by the Dead Sea, was wiped out by the Romans in the Jewish War. But there were a lot of Essenes living elsewhere and some of them probably became followers of Jesus. For example, some people think that the writer of the fourth Gospel may have been an Essene. “Christ is the Greek for Messiah. The Hebrew word ‘mashiach’ means anointed. So ‘Christ’ means the one anointed by God.” We know a lot about Judaism from the Old Testament and later Jewish writing. All the New Testament is written in Greek, and it contains our main sources of historical knowledge of Jesus. Having some Hebrew and Aramaic writings, some from that sect, enables us to know more about the Judaisms of Jesus’s time, and helps us construct historical pictures of Jesus. That’s what’s so good, when we come to it, about Gerd Theissen’s book, the use he makes of these. Bultmann couldn’t offer so much here because he was writing 20 years before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, and his focus was different. Not breaking up. There were just different points of view, and different sects and groupings — Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots. Some became followers of Jesus, seeing him as Messiah. The followers of Jesus became first a Messianic sect within Judaism. Looking for a Messiah they think they’ve found him. Other Jews were looking for a Messiah but didn’t think they’d found him. Islam was founded some 600 years later. It’s a straight quotation from Deuteronomy 6—Hear O Israel . . . love God with all your heart and soul and strength—and from Leviticus 19, love your neighbour as yourself. But your neighbour is primarily your fellow Jew. Jesus apparently said love your enemies as well. That was startling. Also, putting love God and love your neighbour at the centre. You may get the combination in one Jewish text, but it’s not typical. Loving your enemy is very untypical, some Jews would say. So you’re right to focus on that as at the heart of the matter but of course it’s Jewish. Jesus is thoroughly Jewish and his relationship to other Palestinian Jews is therefore a crucial question about him."