Jesus Before Christianity, by Albert Nolan, Sept. 2003, first published 1976.
As Harvey Cox says on the cover, "The most accurate and balanced short reconstruction of the life of the historical Jesus."
This is an outstanding book. I wish I had read it when it was first published. I am not much for "religion" as such, despite my upbringing and education, but this book hit me just right. This is the historical Jesus, based on the best scholarship of the New Testament. It reveals the shape and tenor of his time, and explains how he understood himself, and how his listeners heard him.
If you just sit down to read the gospels from today’s frame of reference, the impressions you form are simply not correct. For just one example, when Jesus speaks of the coming of the "Kingdom of God", most of us think he is referring to heaven and the next life. And we think that "the coming judgment" refers to the end of time. Neither is true! And Gehenna is not a description of hell, but rather refers to the dump outside of Jerusalem. Lazarus is not in heaven when he confronts the rich man, but rather in Sheol, under the earth, together with the rich man. The "salvation" which Jesus spoke of was not to be delivered in the next life, but it was here and now. "Faith" is not a list of things to believe in, but a hope and trust in the ultimate victory of goodness and truth over evil. Jesus did not intend to establish a church of believers, but to change the world fundamentally.
The book is purely scripture driven. It offers no "theological" explanations, outside of some references to the Greek influence on some of the later writers.
If that doesn't persuade you to read it, give a glance at the insights below.
A prophecy is not a prediction, but a warning or a promise, p.19.
John the Baptist and Jesus were both convinced that Israel was heading for an unprecedented disaster, p. 21.
Jesus had great compassion for the poor and oppressed, the criminals, the sinners, the outcasts of his society, p. 35.
"Faith is the conviction that something can and will happen because it is good and because it is true that goodness can and will triumph over evil. In other words it is the conviction that God is good to humanity and that God can and will triumph over all evil." (P. 39.) "The opposite of faith is ... fatalism. Fatalism is the prevailing attitude of most people, most of the time. It finds expression in statements like 'Nothing can be done about it.' 'You can't change the world.' The biblical sense of faith is almost indistinguishable from hope.” (P. 40.)
"It is ... very likely that the miracle-stories which have been handed down to us in the gospels include embellishments and exaggerations and that they include accounts of events that were not originally miracles or extraordinary marvels". ... "Anyone who thinks that Jesus' motive for performing miracles of healing was a desire to prove something, to prove that he was the Messiah or the Son of God, has thoroughly misunderstood him. His one and only motive for healing people was compassion. His only desire was to liberate people from their suffering and their fatalistic resignation to suffering." (P. 43-44.)
The scandal that Jesus caused in his society by mixing socially with sinners can hardly be imagined by most people in the modern world today, p. 45. "Jesus entertained sinners in his house." (P. 46.) Sins were debts owed to God. These debts had been incurred in the past by oneself or one's ancestors as a result of some transgression of the law. Forgiveness meant the cancellation of one's debts to God, p. 48. Jesus' gesture of friendship to the outcasts of society made it clear that he treated them as people who were no longer, if ever, indebted to God and therefore no longer deserving of rejection and punishment, p 49. "The poor and the oppressed and anyone else who was not too hung up on 'respectability' found the company of Jesus a liberating experience of pure joy. He made them feel safe and secure. It was not necessary to fear evil spirits, evil men or storms on the lake. They did not have to worry about how they would be clothed or what they would eat or about falling sick." (P. 51.)
The gospel or good news which Jesus brought to the poor and oppressed was the prophecy of the coming of God's kingdom for the poor and oppressed. This prophecy raised great hopes, hopes which originally had nothing to do with heaven. "Heaven" was a synonym for "God." The "Kingdom of Heaven" is the "Kingdom of God." Having rewards or treasures in heaven means being in the good graces of God. Heaven was the sky, where God and other spirits dwell. All dead people go to sheol, the underworld or the grave, p. 57. "The Christian belief in heaven originated after the death of Jesus with the idea that he had been taken up to heaven ..." "But the good news of the 'kingdom' of God was news about a future state of affairs on earth when the poor would no longer be poor, the hungry would be satisfied and the oppressed would no longer be miserable." (P. 58).
"Jesus' sayings about money and possessions are frequently regarded as amongst the 'hardest' in the gospels. Most Christians tend to water them down. The most astounding statement about the 'kingdom' of God is not that it was near but that it would be the 'kingdom' of the poor and that the rich, as long as they remain rich, would have no part in it." (P. 62.) "There will be no place in the 'kingdom' of God for the rich. There will be no rewards and no consolations for them. In the parable about the rich man and the beggar, Lazarus, one is given no other reason why the rich man should be so dramatically excluded from all rewards except that he was rich and that he did not share his wealth with the beggar." (P. 63.)
"Jesus did not idealize poverty. On the contrary his concern was to ensure that no one would be in want, and it was to this end that he fought possessiveness and encouraged people to be unconcerned about wealth and to share their material possessions. But this is only possible in a community. Jesus had dared to hope for a 'kingdom' or world-wide community which would be so structured that there would be no poor and no rich." (P. 65.)
Jesus saw that rank and status and prestige were "one of the fundamental structures of evil in the world and he dared to hope for a 'kingdom' in which such distinctions would have no meaning." ... "Jesus' criticism of the Scribes and Pharisees was not primarily a criticism of their teaching but a criticism of their practice -- in practice they lived for the prestige and admiration given to them by others." (P. 68.) "And just as one must be willing to sell all one's possessions, so one must be willing to take the last place in society -- more than that, one must be willing to be everybody's servant." (P. 70.) "Just as the poor are not promised wealth but the full satisfaction of their needs -- no one shall be in want; so the little ones are not promised status and prestige but the full recognition of their dignity as human beings. To achieve this a total and radical re-structuring of society would be required." (P. 71.)
"The point is that the 'kingdom' of Satan differs from the 'kingdom' of God . . . because Satan's 'kingdom' is based upon the exclusive and selfish solidarity of groups whereas God's 'kingdom' is based upon the all-inclusive solidarity of the human race. 'You have learned how it was said: you must love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say this to you: love your enemies (Mt 5:43-44)/'" (P. 75.) "This is not the same as being brothers and sisters in Christ." . . . Jesus appealed first of all for a loving solidarity which would exclude nobody at all." (P. 76.) Jesus did not make use of the vague concepts of humanity or human kind. "He dealt with each individual person who came into his life or into his thoughts, in such a way that nobody was ever excluded and everybody was loved for their own sake . . . In this concrete, personal sense, Jesus loved all people, and lived in solidarity with all mankind. And for this very reason Jesus sided with the poor and the oppressed, with those who had nothing to recommend them except their humanity, with those who were excluded by others. Solidarity with the 'nobodies' of this world, the 'discarded people' is the only concrete way of living out a solidarity with humankind." (P. 79.)
We do not build the kingdom -- we receive it as a gift. The power that can bring it about "is not my power or your power, but it is a power that only I can release in myself, and only you can release in yourself. . . . It is the supreme power that is behind all the powers at work in people and in nature. Most people call this power God. It does not matter what you call it. On occasion Jesus called it God. But more often than not he referred to it in some other way. . . . The sayings and parables of Jesus are about life and the power at work in life and in nature. Only infrequently does he find it necessary to mention God by name. . . . Faith releases a power within us that is beyond us. . . . It is people's faith that enables the 'kingdom' to come." (P. 100.)
"Faith is not a magical power. It is a straightforward decision in favor of the 'kingdom' of God." ". . . the power of faith does not come from the fact that it is a firm decision or a firmly held conviction. Faith derives its power from the truth of what is believed and hoped for." . . . "The 'kingdom' in which Jesus wanted his contemporaries to believe was a 'kingdom' of love and service, a 'kingdom' of human brotherhood and sisterhood in which every person is loved and respected because he or she is a person." (P. 101.)
"In the end the 'kingdom' will come because sooner or later people will believe. Why? Because there is a God. To believe in God is to believe that goodness is more powerful than evil and truth is stronger than falsehood. To believe in God is to believe that in the end goodness and truth will triumph over evil and falsehood, and that God will conquer Satan." (P. 102-103.)
"Many scholars have argued that the one title which Jesus did claim for himself was the title 'Son of Man'. This is not true. Not because Jesus did not refer to himself as 'son of man' but because 'son of man' is not a title." . . . "in the Gospels it is never found on the lips of anyone except Jesus himself; no one ever objects to its being used by Jesus, no one questions it or shows any reaction at all". (P. 145.) The term in Galilean Aramaic is a way to refer to oneself as a "human being." "If we also keep in mind the emphasis which Jesus laid upon the dignity of human beings as human beings and upon the solidarity of the human race we can submit the conjecture that Jesus' frequent and emphatic use of the term 'son of man' was his way of referring to and identifying himself with, human beings as human beings." (P. 146.)
". . . what makes Jesus immeasurably greater than any other human being is precisely the fact that he spoke and acted without authority and that he regarded 'the exercise of authority' as a pagan characteristic (Mt 10:42)." (P. 148.)
“Jesus did not found an organization; he inspired a movement. It was inevitable that the movement would quite soon become an organization but in the beginning there were simply people, scattered individuals and groups, who had been inspired by Jesus. . . . There were at first no doctrines and no dogmas, no universally accepted way of following him or believing in him. . . . The remarkable thing about the movement inspired by Jesus was that he himself remained the leader and the inspiration of his followers even after his death. Jesus was obviously felt to be irreplaceable.” (P. 163.)
“Everyone felt that despite his death Jesus was still leading, guiding and inspiring them. Some of those who had known him and seen him before he died (especially the twelve) were convinced that they had seen him alive again after his death and that he had instructed them again as he had done before.” (P. 164.)
“Their admiration and veneration for him knew no bounds. He was in every way the ultimate, the only criterion of good and evil and of truth and falsehood, the only hope for the future, the only power which could transform the world.” (P. 165.)
“Everyone has a god – in the sense that everyone puts something first in one’s life: money, power, prestige, self, career, love and so forth. There must be something in your life which operates as your source of meaning and strength, something which you regard, at least implicitly, as the supreme power in your life. If you think your priority in life is to be a transcendent person, you will have a God with a capital letter. If you think of your highest value as a cause, an ideal or an ideology, you will have a god with a small letter. Either way you will have something that is divine in you. To believe that Jesus is divine is to choose to make him and what he stands for your God. To deny this is to make someone else your god or God, and to relegate Jesus and what he stands for to second place in your scale of values.” (P. 165-166.)
“By his words and praxis, Jesus himself changed the content of the word ‘God.’ If we do not allow him to change our image of God, we will not be able to say that he is our Lord and our God. To choose him as our God is to make him the source of our information about divinity and to refuse to superimpose upon him our own ideas of divinity. This is the meaning of the traditional assertion that Jesus is the Word of God. Jesus reveals God to us, God does not reveal Jesus to us. . . . To argue from God to Jesus instead of arguing from Jesus to God is to put the cart before the horse. This, of course, is what many Christians have tried to do. It has generally led them into a series of meaningless speculations which only cloud the issue and which prevent Jesus from revealing God to us.” (P. 166.)
“We cannot deduce anything about Jesus from what we think we know about God; we must now deduce everything about God from what we do know about Jesus.” (P. 166.)
“We have seen what Jesus was like. If we now wish to treat him as our God, we would have to conclude that our God does not want to be served by us, but wants to serve us; God does not want to be given the highest possible rank and status in our society, but wants to take the lowest place and to be without any rank and status; God does not want to be feared and obeyed, but wants to be recognized in the sufferings of the poor and the weak; God is not supremely indifferent and detached, but is irrevocably committed to the liberation of humankind, for God has chosen to be identified with all people in a spirit of solidarity and compassion. If this is not a true picture of god, then Jesus is not divine.” (P. 167.)
The other side.
Most reviewers loved this book, but to be fair, there is another view. If you have a world view of sin and evil that has a transcendent being and SIN as a reality, then this Jesus of Nolan is not up to the task. As:
The confessors at Augsburg criticized the scholastic theology of their day for doing the same thing Nolan does--under-diagnosing the malady of the patient, and therefore proposing a "smaller" Savior than the N.T. proposes in the crucified and risen Jesus. Nolan doesn't see sin as such a big deal. Maybe it never was, he hints with his "if ever." If sinners have no real problem when facing God, then Nolan's Jesus will suffice. But if God's own "law of sin and death" really is a sinner's inescapable nemesis, then Nolan's Jesus just won't do. If justifying sinners into life is indeed the fundamental good news of Jesus, to avert their being justified to death as God "counts trespasses," then Nolan's Jesus is too tame, not radical enough, still a rookie in the bush-leagues.
But I'll venture a step farther. I don't think Nolan's Jesus is even big enough to fulfill the restricted salvation agenda Nolan proposes for him. I'm teaching in Lithuania right now. The older of my students, and the parents of all of them have seen truth and goodness go down the drain, not conquering, but being conquered. And not just once, but three times in just half a decade, the 5-year sequence of 1940-45. In 1940 the Russians annexed the Baltic countries, and anybody who was somebody was either shot on the spot or sent to the Gulag. In 1941, a year later, Hitler came in and Nazi terror with its slave labor and/or death camps, not only for Jews, made short shrift of truth and goodness. Three years later the Russians came back and another 200,000 Lithuanians disappeared. So much for truth and compassion. Christian faith here has to mean something else than the conviction that truth and compassion will eventually triumph. If I read my students right, they believe in God and his Christ alongside their head-knowledge conviction that truth and compassion will always lose. They need a better Jesus than Nolan's. Even though I'm tongue-tied in the Lithuanian language, I pick up signals: Christians here know that they've got one.
http://www.crossings.org/theology/theolo84.htm
See also: http://www.priestsandpeople.co.uk/cgi-bin/archive_db.cgi?priestsppl-00095