Jesus of Nazareth and Christian Origins

It is an honour for me to be invited to speak about Jesus Christ on this occasion, on which the Sikh Community is celebrating the 550^th anniversary of its founder, Guru Nanak Dev Ji. I am no expert on Guru Nanak’s life and teaching, but understand that he transformed the heritage of his ancestors, in which he was nurtured, and offered the world something that was at once new and ancient, rooted in his experience of the divine. I therefore believe that there is much to be learned through our reflecting together on these two figures.

There are a number of observations to be made before speaking of Jesus in any detail. The first is that modern scholarship on the origins of Christianity is rigorously historical, and those who participate in the academic study of this subject are themselves by no means all Christian. For reasons which will become obvious in a moment, this area is of interest to Jewish scholars, and also to historians of Graeco-Roman and Syro-Palestinian antiquity who would not regard their religious beliefs as relevant to their professional field of study. Therefore, although I am a Christian priest, what I have to say today is essentially the fruit of research in which colleagues of different persuasions have used the same range of historical methods as I have, to discover what we can reconstruct of Jesus as a significant figure of human history.

Through two thousand years of Christian history, Jesus has been revered and proclaimed on all continents, in an immense variety of languages and cultural contexts, the inherited tradition blending and sometimes conflicting with emergent local expressions of the faith. What Christians believe about Jesus, therefore, varies considerably as the tradition of interpretation of the Gospel continues to develop, and to respond to the challenges of contextualisation and inculturation, seeking authenticity and relevance while remaining faithful to the heritage of faith. Behind the long and diverse tradition of interpretation is the historical figure whom scholars seek to discern, using such records as are available, comparable to those which other historians would use for their particular tasks. For convenience, some distinguish between the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history, between Christian beliefs about Jesus and what historical records can tell us about him. This distinction, essential as it is to the academic task, is not as clear and simple as may at first sight appear to be the case. Not only are history and theology inextricably linked in most writings before the modern period, as well as in the experience of people of faith, but Jesus is a figure of significance beyond the parameters of Christianity. He features, under the Arabic version of his name, Issa, quite prominently in the Qur’an, and is accordingly a figure of quite unique importance in Islam – but clearly not in the same way as in Christianity. Jesus also has an ambiguous and contested place in Judaism, and may be mentioned in some Jewish writings of the first centuries of the common era.

The records of Jesus are essentially documentary. There are archaeological artefacts which testify to buildings being used for Christian worship from an early date, but the earliest of these have been found in the ruins of Pompeii, and can therefore be dated to not later than 79 CE. However, they do not take us back to Jesus himself. We are therefore dependent on documentary sources, complemented by what we know from other sources about the environment in which Jesus lived. These include archaeological records and the surviving writings of the period which shed light on the world in which Jesus lived.

As a general principle, historians favour documents closest in time and place to the people and events they record, and regard later and more distant writings as secondary to these. The earliest records of Jesus are written by Christians, and reflect their beliefs as well as conveying historical information. Jesus is mentioned by some Roman writers of the second century, but they provide little concrete or reliable historical information. Jesus is mentioned also by the first century Jewish historian Josephus, but in a passage which has subsequently been redacted by Christian scribes. Possible rabbinic allusions date from the second and subsequent centuries, and the references to Jesus are far from certain, and if they do refer to him they reflect the conflicts of the period, and are intended to be offensive. The Qur’an is later still, dating from the early seventh century. We are therefore left, essentially, with the Christian New Testament, a compilation of documents written by different authors over a period of at least several decades during the second half of the first century. While the New Testament documents as we know them were written in Greek, we know from later writings that there were works written in Aramaic also, which have since been lost, together with their particular perspective on who Jesus was.

The gospels according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke are our most important sources of information on Jesus. There is considerable similarity between them, but also significant differences of detail and emphasis. Scholars believe that the narrative of Mark was used as a principal source by Matthew and Luke, along with an oral or written account of the teaching of Jesus incorporated by both (Q). The gospels are all written from a perspective of Christian faith, but their belief that Jesus of Nazareth was the son of God and the messiah (anointed one) awaited by some Jews of the period is expressed and developed in different ways. The gospel writers’ faith influences their interpretation of Jesus, what he said and what he did, and what happened to him. They record events which cannot be verified by historical means, but which have nonetheless been received by the Church as truth. Therefore, what can be known about Jesus with historical certainty is considerably less than Christians believe by faith, and this impinges very directly on the question of Jesus as a religious founder.

What we know with absolute certainty is that Jesus was a Jew, that he lived and died a Jew, that his disciples were Jews, and that the gospel they proclaimed to the world was addressed firstly to their fellow Jews, and articulated in terms of the hopes expressed in the documents commonly known by Christians as the Old Testament, of God’s intervention to deliver the nation of Israel from foreign oppression, and to bring people of all nations to worship the god to whom Israel bore witness. The Christian faith accordingly embraced people of all nations from a very early date – a development which was not without its challenges – so that the movement within Judaism initiated by the teaching of Jesus became, over a period of centuries, a world religion with its own doctrines, rituals, and scriptures, all of which have been transmitted in a very considerable diversity of traditions, Christianity today is accordingly a very varied phenomenon, and while each seeks to remain faithful to the teaching of Jesus and the heritage of faith, the Church is also constantly interpreting the gospel anew in varied and changing cultures. While it would be reasonable, and beyond all doubt, true, that no Christian today, and no movement within the Church is exactly like Jesus and his first disciples, it would be beyond my competence (and time allocation) to presume to make any judgement of the fidelity of any to the spirit of Jesus’ teaching, and still less to their experience of God as mediated by Jesus. I therefore return to the question, what more can we know about Jesus, and about how Christianity emerged from the movement which arose in response to his teaching.

I have noted that Jesus was a Jew. Notwithstanding traditions that he was born in Bethlehem in Judaea, Jesus was raised in Galilee, an area to the north with a quite distinct history and culture, within the considerable breadth of the Judaism of its day. Over the centuries Galilee had seen a mingling of people and cultures, and it lay along a very permeable boundary between Judaism and the multiplicity of religions and cultures which populated the Levant. Although he came from Nazareth in central Galilee, Jesus’ ministry seems to have been centred on Capernaum, a fishing port on the Sea of Galilee, close to the border with Gaulanitas, and located on one of the caravan routes which crossed Galilee to the Mediterranean. Politically, Galilee was separated from Judaea, and ruled by Antipas, one of the Herodian family which dominated the region for over a century as vassals of the Roman empire. Jerusalem and the temple and its hierarchy were remote, and, even if symbolically important, had limited influence on the ways in which Judaism was lived in the more cosmopolitan environment of Galilee.

The teaching of Jesus has two principal and related emphases, reflecting the distinctive forms which Judaism took in Galilee. In continuity with the prophets, Jesus proclaimed the coming establishment of God’s reign. Jews had for centuries hoped and prayed that God would intervene in human history, to deliver them from domination and oppression by whichever superpower dominated the region at the time. Some hoped that a descendant of David would restore his dynasty and empire, others had little confidence in human rulers and sought a heavenly solution to their earthly problems, awaiting armies of angels and other supernatural beings to overcome their enemies. Jesus is identified as a descendant of David in the gospels, and also in the letter of Paul to the Romans, and his death by crucifixion indicates that he was regarded as subversive of the Roman order. The evidence, nevertheless, is that Jesus proclaimed future events which would come about, not through human efforts but through divine intervention.

While there is no evidence that Jesus instigated or led any armed uprising against the Romans in Judaea, or their vassal in Galilee, it is clear that he taught his disciples a way of life which prepared in meaningful ways for the establishment of God’s reign. In this Jesus is an interpreter of the law, which, inherited tradition taught, had been revealed to Moses many centuries earlier. By Jesus’ day, the law had been supplemented by the prophets and by other writings, including but not restricted to those which today constitute the canon of Jewish scriptures and the Christian Old Testament. There was also an evolving tradition of interpretation of the law, a form of jurisprudence in which the opinions and arguments of acknowledged authorities were debated and transmitted. Some of these traditions were, centuries later, committed to writing in documents known as the Mishnah, Tosephta, and the Talmudim, but we know very little of the form these took at the time of Jesus. It is clear from the gospels that Jesus engaged in these debates, and that he took quite distinctive positions on some issues to representatives of rival traditions of interpretation, that known as the Pharisees in particular. Jesus clashed with the Pharisees on matters of sabbath observance, ritual purity, and, possibly, dietary laws. This may, to some extent, reflect his Galilean context, more open to congenial coexistence with people of other nations, and with people not bound by the Jewish law in any of its schools of interpretation. It reflects also Jesus’ concern for the poor, for whom sabbath rest and scruples about ritual purity and particular foods would have been impossible luxuries, and fasting a meaningless concept in the face of starvation. It reflects also something of the nature of the community that would be formed through Jesus’ teaching, which would prepare the ground for the establishment of God’s rule.

In the gospels, Jesus is depicted as endowed with supernatural power, which he used to heal the sick and feed the hungry. While traditional healers are a known phenomenon in many societies and cultures, Jesus is shown as engaged in a contest with evil spiritual forces ranged against God, and his works of power are a sign that God would ultimately triumph over evil in the world. It is beyond the competence of historians to verify events such as these, but we need to recognise that Jesus and his disciples lived in a world perceived to be populated by spiritual forces, which posed a potential threat to human beings, who were dependent upon stronger and benevolent spiritual forces to defend them from lesser and malign ones.

Jesus, like many religious pioneers, died the violent death of a criminal, through judicial execution. This took place in Jerusalem, the temple city and centre of high priestly power. While the process was in all probability initiated by the Jewish hierarchy, the judge and executioner was the Roman occupying power. Within days of his death, Jesus’ disciples experienced his presence among them, risen from the dead. The resurrection, like Jesus’ own works of power, is beyond the competence of historians to verify or interpret, but this experience nonetheless forms the basis of the Christian faith, proclaimed by his disciples, through which the Church was formed.

To what extent Jesus may be considered the founder of Christianity, is as much a question of the extent to which his disciples continued with his message, and to what extent they developed something new. The Church certainly evolved, over decades if not longer, structures which ensured its stability in a hostile world, but which were unknown to the movement around Jesus. More significantly, Jesus himself was central to the gospel his disciples proclaimed to the world, in ways he had not been to his own teaching, and Christian doctrine is the consequence. The Christian church is undoubtedly rooted in the life and ministry of Jesus, his death on the cross, and his disciples’ testimony to having experienced his presence among them, risen from the dead, and interpreted their experience in the light of Jesus’ teaching and their Jewish heritage. The multinational, multicultural, phenomenon which is the Christian Church is built on the foundations laid by the disciples of Jesus and their successors, as they continued his work, and identified him as the one through whom God would bring to fulfilment the hopes and expectations of which Jesus had spoken.