Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (40 page)

Like many other scholars, Perrin is convinced that Jesus uses the term “Kingdom of
God” in an eschatological sense. But Richard Horsley notes that while God’s actions
with regard to the Kingdom may be thought of as “final,” that does not necessarily
imply an eschatological event. “The symbols surrounding the Kingdom of God do not
refer to ‘the last,’ ‘final,’ ‘eschatological,’ and ‘all-transforming’ ‘act’ of God,”
Horsley writes. “If the original kernel of any of the sayings about ‘the son of man
coming with the clouds of heaven’ … stem from Jesus, then, like the image in Daniel
7:13 to which they refer, they are symbolizations of the vindication of the persecuted
and suffering righteous.” Horsley’s point is that the Kingdom of God may be properly
understood in eschatological terms but only insofar as that implies God’s final and
definitive activity on earth. He correctly observes that once we abandon the notion
that Jesus’s preaching about the Kingdom of God refers to an End Times, we can also
abandon the historic debate about whether Jesus thought of the Kingdom as a present
or as a future thing. See
Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: Popular Jewish Resistance in Roman Palestine
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 168–69. Nevertheless, for those interested in
the “present or future” debate, John Meier, who himself believes the Kingdom of God
was meant as an eschatological event, lays out the argument on both sides in
Marginal Jew
, vol. 2, 289–351. Among those who disagree with Meier are John Dominic Crossan,
Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography
, 54–74; Marcus J. Borg,
Jesus: A New Vision
(New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 1–21; and, of course, me. In the words of Werner
Kelber, “the Kingdom spells the ending of an older order of things.” See
The Kingdom in Mark
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1974), 23.

For more on the “Jewishness” of Jesus of Nazareth, see Amy-Jill Levine,
The Misunderstood Jew
(New York: HarperOne, 2006). Jesus’s statements against gentiles can be pretty firmly
accepted as historical, considering that the early Christians were actively courting
gentiles for conversion and would not have been well served in their efforts by such
verses in the gospels. It is true that Jesus believed that gentiles would ultimately
be allowed into the Kingdom of God once it was established. But as John Meier notes,
Jesus seemed to have considered this to be the case only at the end of Israel’s history,
when the gentiles would be allowed entry into the kingdom as subservient to the Jews.
Marginal Jew
, vol. 3, 251.

I agree with Richard Horsley that the commandments to “love your enemies” and “turn
the other cheek” in the gospel of Luke are likely closer to the original
Q
material than the parallel statements in Matthew, which juxtapose Jesus’s commandments
with the Hebrew Bible’s command for “an eye for an eye” (
lex talionis
). See
Jesus and the Spiral of Violence
, 255–65.

Regarding Matthew 11:12, I have included here the variant version of the verse—“the
Kingdom of Heaven has been coming violently”—both because I
am convinced it is the original form of the verse and because it fits better with
the context of the passage. The standard version of the passage reads: “From the days
of John the Baptist until now the Kingdom of Heaven operates by force, and forceful
men snatch it away.” That is the translation by Rudolf Otto in
The Kingdom of God and the Son of Man
, 78. Note that this version of the verse is more often imprecisely translated as
“From the days of John the Baptist until now the Kingdom of Heaven
suffers violence
, and
violent men
snatch it away,” though even those translations will include a variant reading to
indicate the active voice that I use in my translation. The problem lies in the verb
biazomai
, which means “to use violence or force.” In the present perfect tense,
biazomai
can mean “to have violence done to one,” but it is not the perfect tense that is
operative in this passage. Similarly, in the passive voice
biazomai
can mean “to suffer violence,” but again, it is not the passive voice that is used
in Matthew 11:12. According to the UBS Lexicon, the word
biazomai
in this passage is actually in the Greek middle voice and thus means “to exercise
violence.” A clue to how to translate the passage in Matthew 11:12 can be found in
the parallel passage in Luke 16:16. Luke, perhaps wanting to avoid the controversy,
omits altogether the first half of the verse—“the Kingdom of God operates through
force/violence.” However, in the latter half of the verse he uses the exact same word,
biazetai
, actively in the phrase “everyone uses violence in entering it.” Ultimately the usual
translation, “the kingdom of heaven suffers violence,” agrees neither with the time
when Jesus spoke the words nor with the context in which he lived. And context is
everything. See
Analytic Greek New Testament
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1981). Also see note on Matthew 11:12 in
Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996) and
Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament
, ed. Johannes P. Louw and Eugene A. Nida (Grand Rapids, Mich.: United Bible Societies,
1988). Louw and Nida correctly note that “in many languages it may be difficult, if
not impossible, to speak of the kingdom of heaven ‘suffering violent attacks,’ ” though
they do concede that “some active form may be employed, for example, ‘and violently
attack the kingdom of heaven’ or ‘… the rule of God.’ ”

On the expectation among the Jews in first-century Palestine for Elijah’s return and
the inauguration of the messianic age, see John J. Collins,
Apocalypticism in the Dead Sea Scrolls
(London: Routledge, 1997). On Jesus’s deliberate imitation of Elijah, see John Meier,
Marginal Jew
, vol. 3, 622–26.

Unlike Matthew and Luke, who report a change in the physical appearance of Jesus in
the transfiguration (Matthew 17:2; Luke 9:29), Mark claims that Jesus was transfigured
in a way that only affected his clothes (9:3). The parallels to
Exodus in the transfiguration account are clear: Moses takes Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu
to Mount Sinai, where he is engulfed by a cloud and given the Law and the design for
building God’s tabernacle. Like Jesus, Moses is transformed on the mountain in the
presence of God. But there is a great difference between the two stories. Moses received
the Law from God himself, whereas Jesus only sees Moses and Elijah while physically
receiving nothing. The difference between the two stories serves to highlight Jesus’s
superiority over Moses. Moses is transformed because of his confrontation with God’s
glory, but Jesus is transformed by his own glory. The point is driven home for Morton
Smith by the fact that Moses and Elijah, the Law and the Prophets, appear as Jesus’s
subordinates. See “The Origin and History of the Transfiguration Story,”
Union Seminary Quarterly Review
36 (1980): 42. Elijah, too, went up a mountain and experienced the spirit of God
passing over him. “The Lord said, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence
of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’ Then a great and powerful wind tore
the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not
in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.
After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the
fire came a gentle whisper” (1 Kings 19:11–12). It should be noted that Smith thinks
the transfiguration story to be “from the world of magic.” His thesis deals with his
concept of Jesus as a magician “like other magicians.” Smith, therefore, believes
the transfiguration to be some hypnotically induced mystical event that required silence;
consequently, the spell was broken when Peter spoke. Mark’s attempt to use this story
as a confirmation of Jesus’s messiahship is, for Smith, an error on the part of the
evangelist. All of this demonstrates Mark’s notion that Jesus surpasses both characters
in glory. This is of course not a new notion in New Testament Christology. Paul explicitly
states Jesus’s superiority over Moses (Romans 5:14; 1 Corinthians 10:2), as does the
writer of Hebrews (3:1–6). In other words, Mark is simply stating a familiar belief
of the early Church that Jesus is the new Moses promised in Deuteronomy 18:15. See
also Morna D. Hooker, “ ‘What Doest Thou Here, Elijah?’ A Look at St. Mark’s Account
of the Transfiguration,”
The Glory of Christ in the New Testament
, ed. L. D. Hurst et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 59–70. Hooker sees great
significance in the fact that Mark’s gospel presents Elijah first, stating that Moses
was with him.

The term “messianic secret” is a translation of the German word
Messiasgeheimnis
and is derived from William Wrede’s classic study,
The Messianic Secret
, trans. J.C.G. Greig (London: Cambridge University Press, 1971). Theories about the
messianic secret can be divided into two schools of thought: those who believe the
secret can be derived from the historical Jesus and those who consider it a creation
of either the evangelist or the early Markan community. Wrede argued that the messianic
secret is a product of the Markan community and a
redaction element of the gospel itself. He claimed that the messianic secret stems
from an attempt by Mark to reconcile a primitive Christian belief in firstcentury
Jerusalem that regarded Jesus as becoming messiah only after the resurrection, with
the view that Jesus was messiah throughout his life and ministry. The problem with
Wrede’s theory is that there is nothing in Mark 16:1–8 (the original ending of the
gospel of Mark) to suggest a transformation in the identity of Jesus other than his
inexplicable disappearance from the tomb. In any case, it is difficult to explain
how the resurrection, an idea that was alien to messianic expectations in first-century
Palestine, could have raised the belief that Jesus was messiah. The point of Wrede’s
study was to use the “messianic secret” to show that, in his words, “Jesus actually
did not give himself out as messiah” in his lifetime, an intriguing and probably correct
hypothesis. Those who disagree with Wrede and argue that the messianic secret can
actually be traced to the historical Jesus include Oscar Cullman,
Christology of the New Testament
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963), 111–36, and James D. G. Dunn, “The Messianic
Secret in Mark,”
The Messianic Secret
, ed. Christopher Tuckett (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), 116–36. For more general
information about the messianic secret, see James L. Blevins,
The Messianic Secret in Markan Research, 1901–1976
(Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1981), and Heikki Raisanen,
The “Messianic Secret” in Mark
(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990). Raisanen correctly argues that many of the theories
offered for the “messianic secret” generally presume the notion that “the theological
viewpoint of Mark’s gospel is based on a
single
secrecy theology.” He believes, and most contemporary scholars agree, that the “messianic
secret” can be understood only when the secrecy concept is “broken down … into parts
which are only relatively loosely connected with each other”; Raisanen,
Messianic Secret
, 242–43.

For a brief précis on the many messianic paradigms that existed in firstcentury Palestine,
see Craig Evans, “From Anointed Prophet to Anointed King: Probing Aspects of Jesus’
Self-Understanding,”
Jesus and His Contemporaries
, 437–56.

Although many contemporary scholars would agree with me that the use of the title
Son of Man can be traced to the historical Jesus, there remains a great deal of debate
over how many, and which, of the Son of Man sayings are authentic. Mark indicates
three primary functions of Jesus’s interpretation of this obscure title. First, it
is used in the descriptions of a future figure that comes in judgment (Mark 8:38,
13:26, 14:62). Second, it is used when speaking of Jesus’s expected suffering and
death (Mark 8:31, 9:12, 10:33). And finally, there are a number of passages in which
the Son of Man is presented as an earthly ruler with the authority to forgive sins
(Mark 2:10, 2:28). Of these three, perhaps the second is most influential in Mark.
Some scholars, including Hermann Samuel Reimarus,
The Goal of Jesus and His Disciples
(Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1970),
accept the historicity only of the noneschatological, so-called lowly sayings. Others,
including Barnabas Lindars,
Jesus Son of Man
(London: SPCK Publishing, 1983), accept as authentic only those among the “sayings
traditions” (
Q
and Mark) that reproduce the underlying
bar enasha
idiom (there are nine of them) as a mode of self-reference. Still others believe
only the apocalyptic sayings to be authentic: “The authentic passages are those in
which the expression is used in that apocalyptic sense which goes back to Daniel,”
writes Albert Schweitzer,
The Quest of the Historical Jesus
(New York: Macmillan, 1906), 283. And of course there are those scholars who reject
nearly all of the Son of Man sayings as inauthentic. Indeed, that was more or less
the conclusion of the famed “Jesus Seminar” conducted by Robert W. Funk and Roy W.
Hoover,
The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus
(New York: Polebridge Press, 1993). A comprehensive analysis of the centuries-long
debate about the Son of Man is provided by Delbert Burkett in his indispensable monograph
The Son of Man Debate
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). An interesting comment by Burkett is
that the Gnostics apparently understood “son” literally, believing that Jesus was
stating his filial relation to the gnostic “aeon” or god Anthropos, or “Man.”