JESUS OF NAZARETH – MAN OR GOD?

In recent years, much has been suggested that attempts to disprove the divinity of Jesus. People are comfortable viewing him as a historical figure, a wise teacher perhaps, but God? It is no longer vogue to suggest that this man was indeed divine, even for Christians. The notion does not fit easily into our modern consciousnesses.

Was he only a man, born through natural procreation, dying by crucifixion, whose profound teachings inspired the following movement of Christianity, or was he in fact, while being man, also God incarnate, the only begotten son of God, who, though dying by crucifixion, also rose from the dead? Let us examine both view-points from their historical perspectives and how they appear today, looking into the progression of human thought at both points in history. I will then reference what the gospel writers have to say on the subject and their authority (or lack thereof) as historical scribes. And finally, what do our conclusions mean in our lives. 

DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTOLOGY 

How did our Christology come about? At the time of Jesus’ life, the questions more regarded his mission than his divinity. Though his disciples did not understand during his lifetime, after his death they grasped that his salvation was spiritual rather than political. If they did not believe this then they would necessarily have viewed his death as a failure and ceased to follow him. Yet they did follow him, even unto martyrdom. What inspired these men and women to sacrifice their entire lives for the legacy of a dead man… a legacy which differed strongly from the one they expected during his life? In the years following Jesus’ death, years which saw the rapid growth of Christianity even under extreme persecution, it became necessary for Christians to discuss and eventually agree on what Jesus’ life really meant and who he really was. Two opposing viewpoints were in play: divine Christology, which saw Jesus as God incarnate, sent as a redeemer to the world, and the view that Jesus was either a very righteous man, or a lesser form of God, but that the redemption was in the message. The word was from God, but not as John’s gospel so succinctly puts it “The word was God.” Does it really matter?  Must one believe that Jesus was and is redeemer through his death in order to believe in the redemption of his message?

The answer seemed to be put to rest at the Councils of Nicea and  Chalcedon. Jesus was declared to be Christ, God incarnate. The relationship between Father and Son was described as homoousios, which translates as “one in being,” (Karl Rahner: Lexicon for Theology & Church), and that was that for about thirteen hundred years.Now let us not be naïve to suppose that this dogma arose free from a political agenda, or that any of the gospel writers were writing unbiased history. John, the last gospel, is most often discussed with regards to its political agenda, written in response to the gnostics and others who were promoting an almost Buddhist view in the late first century: that Jesus had managed to achieve a god-like state through his goodness, and that by following his example, we could do the same. We will look more closely at the gospel of John and the circumstances of its authorship later on. But the three synoptic gospels were no less written to make certain claims to their audiences. Mark, and Matthew were written primarily to be read by the Jewish community, so they attempted above all to show Jesus as the Messiah, or “Son of Man,” to use the term of the Jewish prophets. They wished to show that in spite of his death (whether or not he rose), his redemption was real. His resurrection provided the proof. The Jews at the time were not concerned with divinity in their Messiah, so much as his authority and power.This being said, the synoptic gospels do make specific claims to Jesus as the son of God in a way that is unique to him. The conception accounts in Matthew and Luke certainly do this, and all four gospel writers recount his baptism with a voice from heaven saying “This is my beloved son.” Mark, the first gospel writer, opens in his very first sentence by naming Jesus as the son of God. This was not a common term in Judaism. Nobody was referred to as a son of God in this manner. Perhaps most convincing of all is the descriptions given of Jesus prayer language, in which he calls God Abba. This would be like us saying Daddy. This type of dialogue was unheard of in Jewish culture. These examples are not meant to be a proof for Jesus’ divinity, but to point out that if we are to accept any of the gospel writers’ words, we must realize that they all viewed him as The Son of God.Around the time the first gospel was being written, Paul the evangelist opened up the entire Mediterranean and near East to Jesus’ message so that by the time John wrote his gospel, he was concerned with a much broader audience than only the Jewish world. He was writing to those learned in Greek and Roman thought as his audience for whom the terms “Messiah” and “Son of Man” would have no meaning or be misunderstood (as they are widely misunderstood today). Some have said that John’s gospel “Hellenized” Jesus, by using images of divine lineage.Yet it is Matthew and Luke, not John, who give Jesus his mythical quality with their accounts of the angel appearing to Mary. The Hellenization, if you will, had already taken place before John.Yet we must keep in mind that the learned world had by this time moved away from the mythology of ancient
Greece. Those stories had faded into the realm of folk tales. The learned world was more interested in Aristotle than Zeus. We were the determiners, governed by the laws of mathematics and science, of our own effects. And wisdom was to recognize how. Everyone could be like unto a God through learning and goodness. A mortal Jesus fit very nicely in this mold, for it professed a beautiful message of love without requiring belief in the seemingly unbelievable. Jesus’ Godship, the Virgin birth, and the resurrection were seen as myth. By using the phrase “God’s only begotten son,” John boldly challenges Aristotle with the very language of Hellenistic mythology, saying that there can be divinity in the modern world and God can come in direct contact with man.

Recently, other books written at the time have come more to light, known as the “Gnostic Writings.” Most popular of these is the Gospel of Thomas. Elaine Pagels’ celebrated book “Beyond Belief” looks into the political environment at the time, and alleges that John and Thomas wrote their gospels in conflict with one another. The church, she suggests, chose John’s book over Thomas’, and that has affected our view of Jesus ever since, but had Thomas’ book been accepted instead, we would have viewed the other three gospels in a completely different light. (chap 2. 2003) The problem with this theory is that John’s gospel is consistent in spirit with the three synoptics, it simply goes further in some areas and with some claims. It is well written, cohesive, and the speech of Jesus in chapters 13 through 18 contains some of the most profound theology ever written. Also, the crucifixion account gives us more detail than any of the others. Thomas’ book, conversely, presents a Jesus that is not always consistent with the earlier gospels, his book is not cohesively written, and some of the sayings attributed to Jesus do not make sense with the things we know about him. The choice not to include Thomas’ gospel in the canon was not so much political, but because it did not meet the literary standard of the New Testament.The leaders of the church took hold of Johannian theology and declared any view of Jesus other than his divinity to be heresy. Thomas’ book was lost to us for centuries. Yet, interestingly enough, this theology of “son of God,” and “King over the world,” though countering Aristotle, actually fit in well with the long standing Roman assertion that King and God were the same. Perhaps this was why Nero feared Christians so much, or why Pilate wrote “King of the Jews” on the cross as Jesus’ execution sentence. The Priests of Jerusalem objected strongly to this placard, knowing its significance in the Roman world. When Constantine converted, Jesus’ kingship was essential. With it, the hierarchy and political states of the church were established in Constantinople and Rome. 

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD: VERUM EST FACTUM

 But Aristotle would not stay quietly in his grave forever. With the Renaissance came new ideas of how humanity interacted with the world and themselves. Galileo and Newton explained the mysteries of the universe and matter. The age of enlightenment dawned as such revolutionary thinkers as Voltaire and Descartes suggested that humanity controlled its own way to the divine.
Newton’s groundbreaking research in physics led us to believe that everything could be known through mathematics and science. Darwin helped us to understand our own origins and the history of the world. By the end of the nineteenth century, humanity believed the statement of eighteenth century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico: Verum quia Factum: truth is the facts we have made.We have come to live by the scientific method, proving truth by observation of multiple experiments and the facts produced thereby. To paraphrase Vico: Verum est Factum  (Truth is Fact). Through the scientific method we have come to an age where we do not believe in miracles, or mysteries, only in what is observable. The philosophy today is actually markedly similar to the philosophy of the Graeco-Roman world at John’s time.

Our problem here is that, as Pope Benedict XVI points out, we are unable to apply the scientific method to history. (Ratzinger: “Introduction to Christianity,” part II, I, C, 1968)  There is no way to reproduce the facts to make them truth. We must choose to rely on the word of those who lived through the events of the past… or not. Ever since the age of enlightenment history has been under much greater scrutiny, and in a large part for good reason. After all, history is always written by the winners: winners of war, and winners of thought. Certainly John’s gospel represents the “winning” idea. Much of our recent skepticism about history has helped us to better decipher the events of the past, but it has also allowed us to “pick-and-choose” which historical authors we believe, and which we disregard. It has become popular, even respectable to challenge formerly accepted history with new perspectives. Surely for any text written so long ago as those in question, cases can be made against their authenticity. But our modern mind is sometimes quicker to believe a new theory on minimal evidence, then the old theory whose evidence, though not without fault, remains strong.The authors of scripture come under the strongest scrutiny. But if only age were the question, why do we not question the validity of Plato and Socrates, or Seneca and Cicero? Certainly it is impossible to prove via the scientific method that John, Luke, Mark and the other Biblical authors actually witnessed the events of which they wrote, but the historical evidence for the validity of these texts (not necessarily the truth of their content, just the actuality of their historical context) is clear. We can trace an unbroken lineage from our time directly back to the time these documents were written. Of the four gospels, John is the one most often argued to have different authorship. But if you read the gospel, the author has to be John, or someone attempting to attribute the work to John. (This is the only way to interpret the use of the “Beloved Disciple” designation. It has to be someone from within Jesus’ inner circle of friends, evidenced by language which is too specific to come from anyone other than an eye witness. Obviously, John’s name gives the book authority, coming from an original disciple. But any of the other male disciples who might have written it would have had the same authority, so they would have put their own name on it. Which leaves us to wonder if it was written by one of Jesus female disciples, such as Mary Magdalene, which has been suggested. (Who next! Francis Bacon?) First of all, she did not have access to the education it would have taken to write this book, and though it is clear any female author would have had motivation to give the work a male name, it would have been a very difficult forgery to pull off in the late first century, for John, among others, was still around, and would have protested. We have, through contemporary writers, evidence of John living in
Ephesus after the time of Paul’s death. In the second century, some sixty or seventy years after the book was supposed to be written, multiple independent sources, among them Theophilos of Antioch and Irenaeus of Lyons, make reference to John the son of Zebedee as the author of the fourth gospel. The fragments we have found of these and other second century authors were not closely related, suggesting a common tradition that must have preceded them by some time, likely a generation or two, judging by the length of time it took texts to be reproduced and travel at that time. This would put the tradition of Johannine authorship back to the beginning of the second century, very shortly after the time John was living in Ephesus. (Daniel B. Wallace, Th.M.,Ph.D: “The Gospel of John: Introduction, Argument, Outline,” 2005) This is the same type of evidence we use to determine validity in all realms of the field of history. As I said earlier, today’s historians gain more popularity by suggesting alternative interpretations. Certainly, revisionist history has in many cases opened our eyes to new truths. But in this case, the historical evidence against Johannine authorship pales compared to evidence for it. There is no way to categorically prove history, but based on internal and external evidence, the most reasonable conclusion is that John the son of Zebedee wrote the fourth gospel.But even if we accept the historical validity of John and the other New Testament books, we are certainly free to disagree with the opinions of the authors. So in this age Christians are free to point out John’s agenda for his take on Christology and, when discussing Paul’s teachings about the cross, point out that Paul did not actually know Jesus, and that nowhere in the three synoptic gospels does Jesus declare himself unequivocally to be God. In our age of Verum est Factum it would certainly be easier to embrace a view of Jesus as a great teacher, a moral pioneer, whose message of love can indeed redeem humanity. The incarnation, virgin birth, and resurrection do not fit the scientific method at all. It is hard to believe these mysteries today. 

 THE MEANING OF PENTECOST: VERUM EST MYSTERIUM

But what has become of the scientific method and the philosophy of Verum est Factum? Has science really eliminated mystery?If modern science has taught us anything, it is that we cannot always trust formulae as simple as the scientific method. Quantum physics has especially opened our eyes to the fact that the rules for one practice or system do not necessarily apply to another. When our experimentation falls short, we need to have faith that the truth is there beneath our abilities to test it, based on what we see played out in the world we know. But the scientific method does not answer the questions of quantum mechanics, just as it fails to answer the questions of history. In Quantum theory, the problems arise when attempting to apply the laws which work very well for a macro world to a quantum system. In the same way, we cannot measure the metaphysical realm with the laws of the physical realm. The truth remains a mystery. Verum est Mysterium. We do not understand how Jesus can be simultaneously both God and man, yet that mystery is central to the Christian faith. It is futile to try to test the history of Jesus with the scientific method.The Christology of John and the early councils takes us one step further and says Mysterium est Factum! (Mystery is Fact). In other words, we must have faith in what cannot be seen. Any modern physicist would agree with this statement.

Let us return now to the period of the early Christian church and try to really determine whether or not Jesus was divine. The significant event which establishes it is the resurrection, and the significant event which promulgated it is Pentecost. Pentecost can be looked at one of two, and only two, ways. Before this meeting in an upper room a few weeks after Jesus’ purported ascension, his followers seemed to understand very little about how to continue and spread his message. Luke’s book of Acts tells us that this group was divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit to go and preach Jesus’ message, his resurrection, even the glory of his death. They then did this, many even to their own martyrdom. The other way to view Pentecost is that they gathered there in the upper room, mourning Jesus’ death and wanting to continue his message. So they either invented or convinced themselves to believe a resurrection that had been staged by Peter, John and Mary Magdalene, and agreed one and all to stick to this story, for the sake of Jesus’ message, even unto death. John was so emphatic in his gospel of Jesus divinity because he was in on the hoax. Pentecost has to mean one of these two scenarios. There is no in between that makes any historical sense at all.

Now the problem with the latter scenario is that it falls out of line with what the disciples all thought Jesus’ mission was during his lifetime—to liberate Israel from Rome. Yes, his message was powerful, but they did not understand it at the time. Perhaps as years went by they would have understood, and begun to preach it, but in the few short weeks between crucifixion and Pentecost, they would have felt let down and disheartened by the death of their leader. This would have surely trumped all comprehension of the message. If you look at all the other great moral teachers of the world, it took a long time after their deaths before their movements really began to take hold. Since many years had passed, myth became intertwined with the message. The difference with Jesus is that it took weeks, not decades and centuries! This is really much more astonishing than we often realize. The only way this shift in understanding could have occurred so quickly was through an event as profound, unbelievable and inspiring as the resurrection.Furthermore, if it was a hoax, at all in doubt, some of the group would have deserted the cause, at least faded into the background. It would be sheer madness to lay down your life for a message you had made up, for no visible gain If Peter made up the eyewitness report he gave to Mark of the empty tomb and risen Jesus, would he have been willing to be nailed upside down to a cross for that story? What could give Peter, who denied Jesus before his death, the strength to die for him except an event as powerful as the resurrection? Perhaps we could dismiss one man as a lunatic, but there was also Andrew, who died on an X-shaped cross in Greece, James who was beheaded by Herod Agrippa, Philip, who was also crucified in Asia, Bartholomew, who was skinned alive in Albanapolis, and Simon and Jude, who were both martyred in Persia. All of them died because they preached the message of Jesus and declared him to be the way of salvation.People do not go to their deaths for lies. If it had been made up, someone would have at least had a deathbed admission, but no one from that upper room did. Some might think that any such admission would have been covered up by the early church, but remember that the church had no political authority until the fourth century. The Jewish and Roman authority would have made sure to spread any rumor of a Christian hoax.

We must also examine Jesus himself. Why would he have chosen crucifixion unless he felt it was his purpose, and what meaning can his death have unless he is something more than only man? And make no mistake, he chose to be crucified. When he was praying at Gethsemane the night before and the soldiers came to arrest him, he could have escaped. The back-side of the Mount of Olives leads away from Jerusalem, into the desert. Jesus was familiar with the desert and knew how to survive in it. A mob coming up the hill with lanterns and torches, as John’s gospel describes them, would have been seen while they were still climbing the hill. Jesus and his three friends would have had plenty of time to retreat down the other side of the hill and escape. Later, when Pilate questioned him, he could have defended himself, but he remained silent. Pilate wanted to acquit him. This attitude would have been pure madness unless his words were true, that to die was his redemptive purpose. “Verily I say unto you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24) Likewise his message of salvation, through himself, would be absurd and vain unless he had a special authority on which to speak. He consistently references his authority as coming from the Father. We must believe that his authority was real, if we are to believe anything he said.  A thorough reading of each gospel text makes us realize that we cannot simply take his moral teachings and forget about the rest of the things he said and did. If his words were not true, he must have been both a psychopath and a brilliant weaver of deceit. A normal man of the remarkable morality we attribute to Jesus would not say these types of things. C.S. Lewis says “we must make our choice. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.” (“Mere Christianity,” book 1, chap 3, 1943) Truly, what lunatic could single handedly turn world morality on its heel?

There is one other option we may consider: that Jesus of Nazareth is a folk character. That Mark, Peter, Paul, Luke, John, etc. came up with these remarkable moral teachings, perhaps at a gathering such as Pentecost, and invented the story and the person of Jesus (perhaps a real man who had been recently crucified), in order to give their teachings some credibility. Thus, the mythic quality of his life makes some sense. Again, however, we must look at the motivations these people would have had to suffer unto death for a new message that had been invented. Why would the Roman and Jewish leaders have feared the movement, which talked about a king that was already dead, unless said king had already stirred things up before his death? The words of Jesus written by the gospel authors are too fantastic to be invented and followed. They could have couched the message in something much easier if the whole thing were invented. Why point the entire religion toward this man if he were only a myth. It would be an inconsistent message. If you look at any of the other religious leaders whose messages are similar to Jesus, they point their followers away from themselves. This is necessary for their salvific messages to carry any weight. Peter himself attempted to dispel this idea in his second letter when he wrote: “We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty.” (Second Peter, 1:16) The fact that a man named Jesus was crucified by Pilate, and that he wrote “King of the Jews” above his cross is known through historical sources unattached to the Christian writers. Furthermore, we would have had much more argument amongst the early Christians on the real meaning of their religion, especially if they constructed something as fantastic as the “Only begotten son of God.” The minor disputes of Peter and Paul, or John and Thomas are small compared to what they would have been if Jesus had not existed. The idea that Jesus was a myth is more historically implausible than the notion of a Pentecost hoax. 

DIVINE: MYSTERIUM EST FACTUM   So the alternative is to believe that the resurrection really occurred, and this means Jesus was divine. Surely, what mortal could perform such a trick? If he had the power to rise from the dead, then his power was from God. And if his power was from God, we cannot suppose that he was mistaken about his relationship with God—the relationship of son to father, in a unique, intimate way (John 3:16, Mark 1:11, 14:36, Matthew 16:16, etc.). Yet the meaning of his incarnation and resurrection was not immediately understood by his followers. Instead, they preached on his message and followed his example of good deeds. Only through Paul, and then John, did the meaning of the cross begin to take hold in Christian theology, and it should be noted that the Christian leaders took a long time and great argument before they accepted the teachings of Paul. Rather, the man who really gave us our Christianity as we know it, was John. Even though Paul wrote his letters first, without the acceptance of John’s gospel, I am not sure Paul’s writings ever would have been accepted in the Christian canon.From the very beginning and throughout both his gospel and his three letters, John points to Christ’s divinity and the redemptive quality of the cross. Some literalists, Christians who hold to a version of verum est factum, focus on the other three gospels and dub John a “mystic.” But John is as much a literalist as any historian of the time. Look at his detailed eye-witness account of the crucifixion. Yes, he had an agenda, but it was in regards to a man he had personally known, and whose mother he cared for. This is another point which gives John his authority. A short time after Pentecost, John disappears from the scene for awhile, for he took Mary, Jesus mother into his home and cared for her (John 19:27). He does not reappear on the scene until many years later, presumably after Mary’s time on earth has ended. But consider the implications of John’s declaring Jesus divinity, having Mary in his house! Who would know better than her what special qualities Jesus had? We have no better authority on Christology than his own mother, and if John was considering or even already working on his gospel while she was alive, they must have discussed it. If Jesus was not God then John lied, and if John lied we have little on which to base what we think we know about Jesus.

But even so, what motivation would John have had to lie, first at Pentecost in his resurrection account, and later in his gospel, after years of one on one conversations with the Blessed Virgin Mary herself? Why re-emerge on the Christian scene years later with his controversial book if he did not believe it? After all the earlier martyrdoms, he had to know he was risking his life by publishing his work. There was nothing personally to be gained. It was not like today, when lucrative publishing contracts await controversial books. Furthermore, from a purely secular approach, John shows himself to be the most virtuous of the twelve male disciples. When Jesus, his friend, is going to be executed, only John stays with him till the end. And Jesus’ final commission to him (which he gives simply as a dying man to a loyal friend, not as God), to care for his mother, is met with acceptance and joy, though it removed John from the action of the early church after the first few chapters of Acts, a scene in which John no doubt would have loved to be a part. There is no evidence of duplicity or deceit in John’s life (some self-righteousness, we must admit, but not deceit, and always loyalty). It is difficult to imagine him intentionally writing falsehoods about Jesus, his dear friend.To sum this all up, if we believe the message Jesus’ followers spread in the time shortly after his death, then we must accept the validity of the gospel authors, based on the same type of historical evidence with which we have gathered all the other world history we know. If we accept these writings then we must believe that Jesus rose from the dead, and if we believe that he rose from the dead, then we must believe the authors when they describe him as the son of God. Our reluctance to accept this comes from our modern reliance on the scientific method, which has been promulgated by the age of enlightenment, but as we have seen in such fields as quantum physics, the laws (factum) which we apply to the world as we know it do not always work to describe the world we cannot see (quantum). Similarly, God cannot be governed by the laws of science he created. Knowing this, why should it surprise us that God could incarnate as a human being?

So if it is all true, that Jesus, as God incarnate died as a redemptive gesture and rose from the dead, what does this really mean for us? Jesus told us that salvation is through him, and if we are to follow him, we are to do as he commanded. This, simply broken down, means to love God and one another. God’s unending love is waiting for us, and whenever we give love to those around us, especially those who are difficult to love, we are in turn giving our love to God. This is the heart of Jesus’ message. By believing what his disciples have told us, by sharing in the spirit of truth that came upon them at Pentecost, we believe not only in the Jesus who is God, but the God who suffered not to become man, and by so doing, proved his phenomenal love.