Paula Fredriksen; Yale University Press; New Haven, Conn.; 1998
by James A. Bacon
The quest for the historical Jesus leans heavily upon the writings of five men: Paul, Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. Though drawing upon many of the same early Christian traditions, each author presents a distinct image of Jesus. Indeed, these portraits are so startlingly different that the aims and biases of the authors must be taken into account by anyone employing evidence from the New Testament to limn the life of Jesus.
In From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus, Paula Fredriksen illuminates the five portraits of Jesus. She writes crisply and briskly, employing a minimum of footnotes and sidestepping many scholarly controversies. She spends little time, for instance, speculating about the identity of the authors. She does not especially care about their geographic origins or the socio-religious circumstances of their churches. She makes no effort to uncover different layers of source material such as Q. Fredriksen simply approaches each Gospel (or, in the case of Paul, the epistles) as a cohesive literary work reflecting the author’s perspective on Jesus at a given point in the evolution of early Christianity.
Among the more interesting features of From Jesus to Christ is the way Fredriksen develops two recurring issues: the timing of the parousia, and the relationship between the Jesus movement and the synagogue. She shows clearly how each author’s perspective on those two unavoidable questions shaped his image of Jesus.
For anyone who believed Jesus was the messiah, there was no evading the question of when the Kingdom of God would appear. Jesus had prophesied that the End of Time was at hand and that God would transform the world. He passed along this expectation to his followers. Paul lived shortly enough after Jesus that he could maintain a feverish expectation of the messiah’s return throughout his entire life. Mark wrote some 40 years after Jesus, but the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem in a seemingly apocalyptic war with the Romans rekindled hope that the End of Time was nigh. However, that expectation diminished over the succeeding decades. Writing 10 to 20 years later, Matthew and Luke downplayed the imminent coming of the Kingdom. By the turn of the century, John transmuted the apocalyptic expectation into a doctrine that claimed the Kingdom had already arrived but existed only among believers. Resolving this cognitive dissonance — the conflict between Jesus’ prophecies regarding the Kingdom of God with the fact that the prophecy, to all outward appearances, remained unfulfilled — required a reinterpretation of Jesus with each passing generation.
The writings of Paul and the evangelists also reflected the evolving relationship between the Jesus movement and the Jews. According to Fredriksen, Paul wrote from the perspective of a devout Jew who differed from other Jews mainly in that he accepted Jesus as the messiah. He embraced the Jewish law and worshiped at the Jewish Temple. Although Paul saw it as his mission to take his message of salvation to the Gentiles, the Jesus movement started as a Jewish movement. Over time, however, a rupture developed between the Gentiles and the Jews. When Mark wrote around 70 A.D., tensions were already evident. Mark’s Jesus attacked the law and challenged the leading elements of Jewish society: the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the scribes and the Temple priests. Matthew, who drew heavily upon the Jewish scriptures in order to legitimize the idea of Jesus as messiah, could not repudiate Judaism to the same degree. As Fredriksen sees it, Matthew saw a “good” Judaism, the prophetic tradition in touch with God, and a “bad” Judaism which violently rejected Jesus as it did the rest of the prophets.
When Luke wrote towards the end of the 1st century, the split between the Jews and Gentile Christians was well advanced, yet he portrayed the Jews fairly sympathetically in his Gospel. Luke’s Jesus was a traditionally pious Jew, and the people accepted him eagerly; only their leaders rejected him. In Acts, he presented the disciples as observant Jews worshiping in the Temple. His villains, Fredriksen argues, were the Jews of the Diaspora, whose persecution of Paul and others caused the split between the followers of Jesus and other members of the synagogue. The author of the Gospel of John was so estranged from Judaism that he referred to “the Jews” as alien and distinct from Jesus. In John’s theology, Fredriksen notes, the Jews were virtually predestined to reject him.
Despite her emphasis on the biases of each author, Fredriksen is optimistic that it’s possible to sketch the outlines of the historical Jesus. Inspired by E.P. Sanders’ monumental work Jesus and Judaism, published three years previously, she builds around those traditions that appear to be most historically certain. Like Sanders’ Jesus, Fredriksen’s Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, preached that the Kingdom of God was at hand, alarmed the Temple priests with his actions in Jerusalem, and was crucified by the order of Pontius Pilate.
In a later book published in 1999, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, Fredriksen revised her account of Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem, particularly taking issue with Sanders’ interpretation of the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem and the chastisement of the moneychangers in the Temple. Where Sanders had regarded the Temple priests as the instigators of Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion, Fredriksen shifted more of the onus to Pilate.
One might might quibble with Fredriksen for a bias of her own: a clear preference for canonical over non-canonical sources. It’s one thing to limit a work to the New Testament images of Jesus; it’s quite another to reconstruct the historical Jesus purely on the basis of those sources. To be sure, Fredriksen sets her historical Jesus in the context of Judaism and the broader Hellenistic world, but she makes no use of the apocryphal writings and she ducks the Q controversy entirely.
Nevertheless, From Jesus to Christ stands as an insightful and readable overview of what are clearly the most important sources, if not the only ones, for uncovering the historical Jesus. Adopting Fredriksen’s framework for deciphering these critical texts — how they explain the delay of the parousia and the rejection of Jesus’ message by the Jews — will prove helpful to anyone hoping to uncover the Jesus of history.
— March 3, 2001