Historical Afterlives of Jesus: Jesus in Global Perspective 1

By Cascade Books

This collection of essays explores the impact of Jesus within and beyond Christianity, including his many afterlives in literature and the arts, social justice and world religions during the past two thousand years and especially in the present global context.
This first volume focuses on selected historical afterlives of Jesus, including the Pantokrator of Byzantium and the Aryan Jesus of Nazi Germany. This collection is not an exercise in Christian apologetics, nor is it an interfaith project--except in the sense that many of the contributors are from a Christian context of some kind, while others are from other contexts. The contributors include scholars in relevant fields, as well as religious practitioners reflecting on Jesus in their own cultural and religious settings. While the essays are original work that is grounded in critical scholarship, reflective practice, or both, they are expressed in nontechnical language so the information is accessible to intelligent nonspecialists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jan 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666746815

Book preview

Introduction to the Historical Afterlives of Jesus

Gregory C. Jenks

In the long history of reception, the Christ of faith has tended to overshadow and displace the Jesus of history. Yet the Christ of faith is forever grounded in the historical human being whose legacy has been diverse and continues to speak into the human situation at times and in places which Jesus could never have imagined. Of course, the Christ of faith represents only one of the many afterlives of Jesus, and that afterlife is itself already pluriform. There are many different understandings of Christ within and beyond Christianity. Several of them will be discussed in the chapters which follow. That discussion will provide a foundation for the further essays in volumes 2 and 3 .

This volume opens with a discussion of the historical figure of Jesus. What do we know about this person? How certain can we be that he even existed, quite apart from what we might know (or think we know) about him? Whether or not Jesus ever existed, there is a rich set of afterlives which preserve, interpret and reclaim Jesus for different communities and diverse individuals. The validity of particular afterlives can be questioned, but their impact is beyond dispute.

The very first of his afterlives was in the memories of those who encountered Jesus in Galilee, southern Lebanon, the Decapolis region, Perea, Samaria, and Judea. Whether followers or family members, supporters or opponents, peasants or rulers, these each formed an intimate afterlife of Jesus. Sometimes it remained a private memory, perhaps shared with just their closest circle. For others, the afterlife was the trigger for action to eliminate this person who posed such a threat to their privilege. At least a few of those who had encountered Jesus prior to his death in April of the year 30 CE, fashioned afterlives which connected Jesus with the covenant traditions of Israel’s scriptures and the contemporary hopes for a messianic age. Soon.

Strangely enough, those with the most exposure to Jesus have the least to say in the surviving literary traditions. The villagers of Galilee fade from view and their voices are limited, perhaps, to the Q Gospel materials preserved in some early traditions preserved in Matthew and Luke. The legendary Twelve are conspicuous by their absence from the Jesus movements that emerged after Easter. So far as we can tell, not a single line of the New Testament can be traced back to any of those who were followers of Jesus during his lifetime. The loudest voice among the early afterlives of Jesus was Paul of Tarsus, and he seems never to have met Jesus, although he claims apostolic status on the basis of private spiritual encounters with the risen Lord (Gal 1:11–24; 2 Cor 12:1–10).

Yet the afterlives flourished and multiplied. We trace some of that diversity in this volume, and even more aspects of these diverse afterlives of Jesus will be explored in the following two volumes. As I comment at the end of my opening chapter, Perhaps every intentional Christian is crafting yet another afterlife for the Galilean sage? To be more accurate, this process is not limited to people with an explicit Christian identity. There are many other people, religious or not, who are creating new afterlives of Jesus for their own time and place.

The next three chapters trace some of the earliest literary afterlives of Jesus that have survived. John Dominic Crossan opens the discussion with reflections on the parables of Jesus, at least some of which (and perhaps only one of which) can be confidently attributed to Jesus. But even in that single secure parable, The Mustard Seed, Crossan finds an afterlife with a distinctive message and program. A message of the coming-yet-always-present reign of God, and a program that requires divine and human collaboration rather than apocalyptic intervention from on high.

David Cohen uses the familiar words of Ps 22 to explore how some early followers of Jesus discerned a biblical prequel for Jesus in their ancient Scriptures. Along with Deuteronomy and Isaiah, the Psalms are among the most frequently cited portions of the Jewish Scriptures in the New Testament. The New Testament passion narratives provide multiple attestation for an early afterlife in which Jesus is seen as the fulfilment of biblical promises and, in the process, offers a nonpolitical rendering of the son of David motif in the earliest traditions.

This first set of three probes into early literary afterlives of Jesus is completed by Kurt Richardson in his essay on Jesus in the apocryphal gospels. These often overlooked early texts from the secondary canon of the New Testament are reclaimed as vital evidence for the reception of the evolving afterlives of Jesus and Mary. These texts are themselves a set of responses to the one dimensional representation of Jesus in the New Testament, yet they both supplement the canonical Gospels, which left later readers dissatisfied while also providing a richer context for the cosmic Christ promoted in the Pauline and Johannine texts.

The following three chapters form a set that engages with the christological afterlives of Jesus in Christian theology. Geoffrey Dunn begins this set with his essay on Tertullian, who has particular significance as the first Christian theologian to write in Latin. That in itself constitutes another fresh afterlife for Jesus, as he transitions from Greek into Latin, and the beginning of a long tradition of Western Latin reflection on the meaning of Jesus. Tertullian promotes and defends the divine Jesus, distinct from the Father yet worthy of worship. While secure in his new Latin afterlife, this Jesus remains grounded in the ancient biblical traditions and is understood as the fulfilment of the Jewish Scriptures.

David Galston explores the afterlives of Jesus as the divine Logos within the philosophical framework of antiquity. He notes how the term christos comes to align more with logos and less so with messiah as the Platonic Jesus takes form, and then how both Greek philosophy and the reimagined Jesus were captured by the conciliar bishops in the service of Constantine’s agenda for imperial stability. Galston also notes that both the historical Jesus and the historical Paul interrupt this imperial Jesus, and he encourages us to recover (rescue?) Jesus from the philosophers as well as from the imperial church.

Peter Kline completes this set of overtly christological chapters with an invitation to reimage what it means to affirm that the Word became flesh. Kline seeks to reclaim and revalue flesh in his search for an afterlife of Jesus that remains deeply connected with real humanity. In particular, Kline explores the potential for overlooked and discounted Back, female and enslaved bodies to be mystics of the flesh. Is there another afterlife for Jesus as an affirmation of the flesh and a refusal to accede priority to the spirit? In this new afterlife, Jesus may lead us deeper into ourselves as flesh rather than providing an escape from our existence as earthlings.

A further set of three chapters explores some quite different afterlives for Jesus in the world of empire and conflict. Peter Lewis traces the representation of Jesus on the coins of the first Christian emperors, the Byzantine Empire. During a period of one thousand years—from 450 CE until 1453 CE—these coins represent Jesus as the King of Kings, the Pantokrator. In this new order, the coming kingdom of God is largely identified with the rule of Byzantium, although not without some capacity to resist and modify the autocratic tendencies of those holding power in the name of Jesus.

Jocelyn Kellam outlines a very different—and more recent—afterlife, as she explores the emergence of an Aryan Jesus in the service of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The roots of the Nazi afterlife of Jesus run far deeper than the political platform of Adolf Hitler. As an aside, the legacy of the Aryan Jesus may be seen in some recent afterlives of Jesus in far-right and White-supremacist movements in Western societies. Kellam notes the part played by flawed scholarship in developing an afterlife of Jesus that endorses the worst of imperial evil.

James Tabor concludes this third triplet of chapters with an examination of the Synoptic Apocalypse (Mark 13 and parallels) as an influential and enduring afterlife of Jesus. Tabor traces the apocalyptic warrior afterlife of Jesus, as it emerges in the New Testament and then resurges in more recent Christian dispensationalist thinking. After almost 1,500 years of retirement, this ancient trope has been resurrected and has found a congenial home in Christian Zionism.

Michael Free concludes this volume with an essay that draws on the historical Jesus as a resource to improve the mental health of Western individuals. Free notes that some thinkers argue that Jesus himself was the catalyst for a paradigm shift in which being an individual displaced our primary collective identity. This chapter reviews and assesses the evidence for such claims, but extends the discussion to consider how the wisdom of Jesus might be relevant to mental health issues in our own times.

I commend these chapters to you as a catalyst for your own thoughts about those current afterlives of Jesus with which you may be most familiar. In a statement often mistakenly attributed to Albert Schweitzer,¹ it is said that scholars who peer down the well of history seeking to find Jesus, only see a reflection of themselves. While sometimes understood as a devastating critique of historical Jesus research, I suggest we can reclaim that negative assessment as an invitation to peer down the well and check whether the afterlife we see reflected there is a source of hope and a stimulus to action for a better future.

Bibliography

Tyrrell, George. Christianity at the Cross-Roads. London: Longmans, Green,

1909

.

1

. The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of Catholic darkness, is only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well. Tyrrell, Christianity,

44

.

1

The Once and Future Jesus

Gregory C. Jenks

The once and future Jesus has been a focus of my research since at least 2000 , when I edited a volume of essays with that title. ² That was a collection of keynote addresses from the Once & Future Jesus conference held in Santa Rosa, California, in October 1999 to mark the conclusion of the first stage of the Jesus Seminar project. Twenty years later, I am once again thinking out aloud in public, as writing for publication enables us to do, about the history of Jesus before and since his death in Jerusalem almost two thousand years ago.

This time the focus is on Jesus after Easter, and especially current global perspectives on the continuing significance of Jesus. In beginning this collection of essays concerned with the afterlives of Jesus, it seems appropriate to start with original life of Jesus: Jesus before Easter. First, I consider the problematic nature of our knowledge of Jesus as a figure of history, followed by a discussion of whether Jesus even existed. After that I offer a positive appraisal of the Jesus Seminar as an influential contributor to recent historical Jesus research before outlining briefly my own profile of Jesus as a historical figure. Finally, I turn my attention to the diverse afterlives of Jesus as we prepare to consider Jesus from various global perspectives.

The Problem of the Historical Jesus

The question of whether Jesus actually existed—or, more particularly, whether the accounts of Jesus provided by the four Gospels which are included in the New Testament accurately preserve and reflect his legacy—continues to be a controversial issue that matters deeply to many people.³ For people of Christian faith, the historical existence of Jesus and the reliability of the New Testament Gospels are articles of faith. It is equally so for Muslims since Prophet Isa has considerable prominence in the Qur’an and a special role on Judgement Day at the end of time. Indeed, the miraculous conception of Jesus and his birth from the Virgin Mary is a more central belief for Muslims than for many Christians.

The problem of describing the historical Jesus derives from the fact that there are very good reasons to question the historicity of the canonical accounts in the New Testament and—at least for non-Muslims—no compelling reasons to accept the Quranic witness as a more reliable tradition. Decades of critical biblical scholarship have sharpened our awareness of the inconsistencies within and between the New Testament Gospels, and most notably between the so-called Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) and the Gospel according to John.

Far beyond the communities of faith and the cloisters of religion scholarship, there are other reasons to engage in a quest for the historical Jesus. At least we may wonder what this amazingly influential character may have been like in his own time and place, and as an adherent of late Hellenistic Judaism. We can, of course, be confident that Jesus was not a Christian.

Those who have been victims of sexual and spiritual violence perpetrated by Christianity in one or other of its many forms have more personal reasons to wonder if Jesus is validly represented by the religious institutions that have wounded them. Might there be a future with Jesus beyond and outside of the churches which claim to represent him?

People of faith traditions where Jesus is not explicitly given special status may wonder about this Palestinian Jew who has long dominated the cultural landscape of the Mediterranean region, Europe, Russia, great swaths of the Middle East, and many colonial societies far from his native land. How does this holy man who matters so much to so many people connect with their own spiritual traditions, and what wisdom might they glean by incorporating him into their own religious practices?

People who remain skeptical of religion in general or Christianity in particular have also demonstrated an interest in the historical Jesus. For some, the historical Jesus is an ideal character from which Christianity and its scriptures represent a loss of spiritual courage. For others, the possibility that Jesus may never have existed is a powerful tool to use in their campaign against Christianity’s privileges and influence.

There is no shortage of reasons why people might be interested in knowing more about the historical Jesus. Quite apart from the cultural and spiritual debt of Western societies to Christianity, the concept of a divine Christ with human origins is intrinsically fascinating. It could be the ultimate rags-to-riches narrative.

The task soon proves itself more complex than many people expect. This can be demonstrated by asking people to complete a death certificate for Jesus, including the kind of information we would expect to see in a contemporary document of that kind: parents, date and place of birth, siblings, education, occupation, military service, intimate partners, children, date and place of death. What may seem like a simple task at first soon becomes more complex. When pressed to validate particular details even people with high confidence in the historical reliability of the New Testament may find the task beyond them.

As the recent definitive survey of the reception of Jesus during the first three centuries has demonstrated,⁴ we have a wealth of materials showing how Jesus mattered to diverse individuals and communities around the Mediterranean world prior to the merger of Christianity and the Roman Empire under Constantine. It is not that we have too little information, but rather that the information available to us provides very little data for historians to reconstruct the life of Jesus himself. In particular, there is a dearth of material relating to the life and activities of Jesus, and even less when we seek biographical information which might be used to describe Jesus as a historical person rather than as a cultural meme.

The contributors to The Reception of Jesus would argue that questing for the historical Jesus is an impossible task, and one better abandoned. This is not necessarily because they question the historicity of Jesus, but because they think we are better advised to focus on the historic significance of Jesus. Although the present collection will focus on the afterlives of Jesus in various contexts over time, it may still be helpful to offer a provisional sketch of the historical figure whose many afterlives we shall be tracing.

The Historicity of Jesus

Before offering such a sketch it is important to note that the historicity of Jesus has also been questioned. Proponents of the Christ myth argument deny that there ever was a historical figure whose legacy has been preserved—accurately or otherwise—in the New Testament. Rather, they assert, the Christ deity promoted by Paul of Tarsus was a mythical character with no more basis in history than Mithras or Serapis.⁵

It is important to distinguish this approach from questions over the historicity of various actions, events and sayings attributed to Jesus. This debate is not about the reliability of the Gospel traditions, but rather goes to the core issue of whether Jesus of Nazareth ever existed as a real person.

Such fundamental questions about the historicity of Jesus are entirely different from criticism of Christianity, even if they are sometimes raised by people with personal animosity to the church. After all, Christianity has acted badly even if Jesus was a historical figure, and it has also been a blessing to humanity even if Jesus is a mythical character.

These valid historical questions are also unrelated to the question of whether Jesus was the founder (consciously or unintentionally) of a religious movement that developed into Christianity or whether someone like Paul of Tarsus was the effective founder of Christianity as a Christ cult. While such considerations sometimes add heat to the discussion, they are irrelevant to the question of whether Jesus was a historical figure or a fictional character.

We can treat this as a routine historical question and set aside any religious reasons to pursue the question or oppose it. This is not a blasphemous question even if some people of faith find it confronting for such questions to be asked. In principle, this is no different from asking whether John the Baptist or Herod the Great or Amos the prophet actually existed. In fact, figures like Amos or even Elijah are better examples than Herod the Great or Pontius Pilate, since—like Jesus—they were not high-status individuals with the capacity to erect monuments or commission state records.

In seeking to establish the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth, there are certain kinds of questions we want to ask and particular sets of data we would hope to obtain. It is important to note that since this is a historical question, it cannot be solved with a religious or supernatural answer. The same kind of data as would count for evidence of any other figure from the distant past is required in the case of Jesus.

The first step is to establish what information we do have for this character. Apart from the New Testament itself and the beliefs of early Christianity, what other sources of information are available to us? Then we need to consider the probability that Jesus was an actual historical person rather than a character in a legend or a fictional work.

It will assist us to do that if we consider the historical period in which the character is set, and whether what we are told about this person is consistent with that period in time. In the case of Jesus that means the Late Hellenistic and Early Roman periods prior to the Jewish War, which culminated in the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. In particular, how does the name, social location, family system, and occupation attributed to Jesus fit with what we know of Galilee around the time of Herod the Great and his successors?

We would also need to consider what accomplishments were attributed to this character, and to what extent they can be verified. Does this person have any claim to political power, military conquests, technological innovation, literary works, or philosophical influence? Are they associated with buildings or other monuments? Did they issue coins, erect inscriptions, or generate any other tangible legacy items?

In the case of an itinerant religious healer and teacher with no literary legacy or institutional positions, we would be asking what kind of footprint such a character might be reasonably expected to have left were they a historical person? How does that hypothetical footprint fit with what we have in the case of Jesus? What level of historical evidence should we properly require for such an individual?

It seems to me that the kind of data we have available includes the following. First of all, there is the data for the historicity of first-century Nazareth and the Jewish presence in Galilee after 100 BCE.⁶ The data are modest but in my view persuasive. More importantly, it is exactly the kind of footprint we might anticipate for a figure such as Jesus of Nazareth. I note the following observations by Ken Dark in his recent definitive report on the excavations at the Sisters of Nazareth Convent, which I quote in full:

To an archaeologist or historian accustomed to working on the Roman provinces it would seem extraordinary that anyone could assert that there is insufficient evidence for the historicity of Jesus, when historians and archaeologists of the Roman world routinely accept the historical existence of many people for whom there is no more, and often much less, textual evidence. So rather than reiterating the arguments of biblical scholars here, it may, therefore, be worth briefly considering counter-arguments arising from the perspective of secular Roman studies.

For a named individual to be attested in the first-century Roman provinces it is necessary to have either epigraphic or textual evidence for their existence. The likelihood of such evidence existing is usually dependent on a range of factors such as social position, date and geographical location. For example, lower-status farmers and rural craftsworkers are seldom recorded in inscriptions or texts in the Early Roman empire, at least outside Egypt (Bodel

2001

; Meyer

1990

). More specifically, among the many Early Roman-period farms and villages (or ‘small towns’) known from Galilee, inscriptions commemorating individuals are rare before the Byzantine period (Poirier

2014

,

255

–

256

; Chancey

2007

,

141

; Eshel and Edwards

2004

; see also Charlesworth

2016

).

Textual sources for named people of any sort in first-century Galilee are also rare, let alone for those living outside major urban centres (Root

2004

). As Géza Vermes (

2005

) and Scott Caulley (

2014

) have shown, the range of individuals attracting the attention of the authors who wrote the surviving textual sources for Early Roman Galilee is extremely limited, and most of those who are mentioned are attested only by a single source.

Consequently, in the context of the history of the first-century Roman provinces, what is unusual about the number of textual sources referring to