The Jesus Archive chatted recently with Bruce Chilton about his controversial book, Rabbi Jesus. Because Chilton wrote in a popular, biographical format, keeping scholarly notes to a minimum, he did not explain in detail the reasoning behind many of his interpretations. With this Q&A we press him to explain the basis for some of his more controversial propositions.
Jesus Archive: With a title of “Rabbi Jesus,” your book courts controversy before the reader can even open it. Why did you portray Jesus as a rabbi?
Bruce Chilton: Rabbi is the designation applied to Jesus in the New Testament texts more than any other, including “son of God” and “messiah.” If you want to know how Jesus was known in his own time, both by friends and by enemies, then you have to start with the title rabbi. The book explains that a rabbi was a teacher within Judaism, recognized by the community as someone who conveyed the Torah. In later Rabbinical tradition, the title became associated with literary expertise, formal training, and ordination. This was not the case in the time of Jesus. In calling Jesus a rabbi, I’m not saying he went to a yeshiva. In the same way, we can call Peter an apostle without implying he belonged to the College of Cardinals.
JA: Scholars have long argued about Jesus’ legitimacy. You suggest that Jesus was the biological son of Mary and Joseph. He wasn’t illegitimate, as some claim, but a mamzer – someone with suspect paternity. What were the circumstances of his conception?
BC: Mary was living in Nazareth. Joseph was living in Bethlehem — the Galilean town seven miles from Nazareth, not the Bethlehem of Judea. I would conclude from Matthew 1:18 that Mary’s pregnancy became known after the families had exchanged the contract of marriage but before the couple moved into a common residence. That meant that Jesus’ paternity was suspect. Suspect paternity was designated by the term mamzer. If someone was called mamzer, it meant that his or her genealogical identity could not be known with certainty, and the result was marginalization.
JA: In your reconstruction, Mary and Joseph wind up living in Nazareth because Joseph moved into the house of Mary’s parents there, a pattern that anthropologists call matrilocal residence. But some scholars maintain that Judeans practiced patrilocal residence, in which case Jesus’ family would have ended up with Joseph’s father’s household in Bethlehem — which they clearly did not. What basis do you have for thinking that the Judeans were a matrilocal society?
BC: The Judeans (especially near Jerusalem) did practice patrilocal residence when possible, but the Galileans did not with any regularity. To some extent, that was for economic reasons, but also out of consideration for the distances women could be forced to move under a rigidly patrilocal practice. (In this case as in others, cultures turn out to be more complex and humane than anthropological theories!) The marital custom of Judaism, as reflected in Mishnah, was not to alienate a woman from her community. Mishnah lays down that you don’t move a woman from the country to the city, from the city to the country, or from Galilee to Judea, out of regard for her relationship to her family. When Mishnah talks about the circumstance of a man living with his father-in-law, special legislation is arranged for a Judean setting, but such arrangements were far from unusual in Galilee. That suggests that a man’s residence with his father-in-law was more regularly practiced in Galilee than Judea.
JA: You speculate that around age 14 Jesus traveled with his family to a festival at Jerusalem, ran away, wandered the city as a beggar, and then, in desperation, joined John the Immerser along the banks of the Jordan. This sounds like fiction, not biography. What’s the basis for this speculation?
BC: Jesus and his family are shown making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem in Luke’s Gospel. In that story, the family went back in a caravan and only later noticed Jesus’ absence, as if his parents belatedly and implausibly said, “By the way, where’s the kid?” That enables us to surmise that Jesus stayed in Jerusalem, and the rest of the story in Luke is a patchwork to keep the family together. The suggestion that there was an early relationship between John the Baptist and Jesus comes from the work of the German scholar, Ethelbert Stauffer. John the Baptist was a distinctive figure in the Judaism of the time. He was known for the development of a particular halakhah, how the Torah was to be applied. There was a public side of his practice, and an esoteric practice based upon the spirit of God. If John transmitted this esoteric knowledge to Jesus, as it appears he did, Stauffer suggests that we need to think of the encounter between John and Jesus as lasting much longer than the single exchange described in the Gospels. In Rabbi Jesus, I infer what must have occurred in order to produce the results we find in the texts. That early meeting between John and Jesus is the most reasonable inference. It accounts for the so-called missing years of Jesus.
JA: You suggest that the parable of the prodigal son was to some extent autobiographical: After the execution of John the Baptist in 26 C.E., Jesus returned to Nazareth as a prodigal son. What’s the basis for this speculation?
BC: The parable is so vivid, many scholars have suggested it is more than an illustrative story. Research on the parables suggests that there’s more going on here than a simple narrative of God’s Kingdom. The story has a much more developed plot line than, say, the parable of the mustard seed. It contains within it the implicit tension between the prodigal and his brother. When there’s narrative development in a parable and it involves tense family relations, that suggests Jesus is developing the parable out of his own experience.
JA: You describe Jesus at one point in his life as “shorter than the norm, overweight, and tending to baldness.” Did he whine and kvetch like Jason Alexander in Seinfeld?
BC: I saw my first complete episode of Seinfeld a couple of weeks ago, so I appreciate your allusion! Your comment reminds me of something I read while writing the book: If you want to know what Jesus looked like, look at Yasser Arafat. I thought, “No I can’t quite go there.” Actually, my description of Jesus derives from second-century patristic literature, especially Tertullian’s On the Flesh of Christ. There, Jesus is described as shorter than most, ugly and difficult to look at. At a later period, a Syrian father, Saint Ephraim, came to the conclusion that Jesus was only about four and a half feet tall. That seems a little extreme to me, but if we put Jesus in the Judean wilderness with John the Baptist at a period of life when he should have been growing, on the diet that he was likely to have enjoyed there, he wouldn’t have attained his natural height. At a later stage of his life, Jesus had a reputation of eating more than well, hence the overweight. The baldness also comes from Tertullian. Within the classical period — as in many of the commercials that come with Seinfeld — when people are referred to as ugly or not handsome, that frequently meant they were bald.
JA: Central to your biography is the notion that Jesus practiced an early form of kabbalah mysticism. Clearly, he experienced an Alternate State of Consciousness. But most scholars believe he thought of himself as being possessed by the spirit of God. What makes you think he meditated on the throne of God, which Ezekiel described as a Chariot?
BC: We have to pose the question: In what context does a person imbued with the traditions of Judaism achieve an intimate involvement with the spirit of God? Look at the narrative of Jesus’ baptism. A voice calls out, the spirit descends as a dove, the heavens split open so as to give access to the divine world. That is in accord with the way other Jewish teachers describe approaching the throne of God and how the divine presence manifests itself. All of these are instanced in Rabbinic literature, the scrolls of the Qumran, the books of Ezekiel and of Enoch. If Jesus announced that he had an intimate association with the spirit of God, we need to explain what he meant within the development of the Judaism of his time. It will not do to imagine him leaping into the language of spirit as used in the later Church, as if he were one of the Christians in Corinth that Paul writes about. There was a disciplined, meditative side to Jesus’ practice, which is frequently overlooked, because we still tend to marginalize mystical practice as if it were somehow deviant. To see this discipline operating from the very center of the Jesus movement is a challenge, but it is basic to an apprehension of Jesus in his own terms.
JA: You suggest that Jesus learned this discipline from John the Baptist. What evidence is there that John practiced mystical meditation?
BC: John’s persistent reference to the spirit of God and its coming. The scholarly consensus is that this aspect of his teaching comes from the book of Ezekiel – the promise that God would pour the spirit on Israel like water is poured. A second element, associated with the first, is John’s teaching of an impending judgment. Ezekiel links spirit, impending judgment and the presence of the Merkabah, the Chariot-throne of God. In Jesus’ baptism, the same elements are present, because that narrative represents his mastery of John’s teaching.
JA: One of the reasons that people mastered the mystical discipline of ascending through the heavens was to bind the power of angels and demons to their will. Do you see any evidence that Jesus conducted exorcisms and healings by such means – by binding Beelzebub, for instance? Could that have been the basis for the charges of sorcery against him?
BC: I would agree that the evidence of amulets and ostraca is important to developing a familiarity with exorcism in the ancient world. That permits us to perceive Jesus as quite comfortable within that idiom. On the other hand, I don’t think he uses the same methods evidenced in the magical artifacts that have been discovered — such as finding the correct formula and repeating it many times. He doesn’t use amulets or bowls. One of the elements that distinguishes Jesus, on the basis of his possession of spirit, is the ability to address an unclean spirit directly. Another is the persistent motif of the demon answering Jesus back, a struggle, a shouting match. I think it’s that side of these scenes that prompted the charges that Jesus was performing exorcisms with demonic cooperation. He was an exorcist outside the norm.
JA: What insight does Jesus’ throne mysticism give us into Jesus’ understanding of the “Son of Man” – or, as you translate it, “the one like the person”?
BC: Daniel 7 gives us a classic depiction of the angelic figure described in human terms, as “one like a person,” or “like a son of man.” Sometimes, Jesus refers to that angelic representative of Israel within the heavenly court. The angel is, for Jesus, the agent of God’s judgment at the end of time. But sometimes Jesus uses the phrase as it often is in ordinary Aramaic – as meaning “anyone,” “someone–” including himself. There is a poetry in his religious insight, which can see a person on the ground as linked inextricably to a counterpart in the divine court.
JA: After a brief stint in Capernaum, you say in Rabbi Jesus, Jesus spent four years crisscrossing Galilee, ducking in and out of neighboring provinces beyond Herod’s jurisdiction. What’s the basis for this interpretation?
BC: The Gospels report Herod Antipas’ antipathy and fear of Jesus, and his concern that he was John the Baptist risen from the dead. In Luke’s Gospel, the Pharisees tell Jesus that Herod seeks to kill him. The typology of the Synoptic Gospels overall is to show Jesus active first in Galilee, then later in Jerusalem. So why do we find him outside Galilee and far from Jerusalem, in the jurisdiction of Herod Philip, in Decapolis, in the region of Tyre and Sidon? My answer is, since Jesus does not manage to expand the scope of his movement appreciably into those areas, he’s there to avoid Herod Antipas. What fascinates me is that despite the dangers of staying near Galilee and Judea he doesn’t, for example, just go voluntarily to Antioch or to Damascus, where Aramaic is spoken — much less does he venture to a Greek-speaking city, such as Alexandria! He wasn’t comfortable outside Galilee and wanted to remain in territorial Israel -– something was pushing him outside that center. That “something” was Herod Antipas.
JA: Jesus didn’t make any friends among the Temple priests either. He opposed paying the collection of the Temple half shekel. What kind of influence did the Temple authorities exert in Galilee?
BC: The attitude towards the Temple on the part of the Galileans is well described by Josephus, and it is definitely ambivalent. On the one hand, the association of the Galilean Jews with the Temple made them a part of Israel as they understood it. The God of Judea was their God as well. On the other hand, there was the recent memory that their connection with the Temple had come with a price. The Hasmoneans had to conquer many parts of Galilee to gain control of it, with what we would now call collateral damage. Josephus describes Galileans as periodically engaging in revolts, which were often against Rome but also involved the Temple, as if they wanted to assert their ownership of the Temple. I think there’s a great deal in the Gospels that reflects this ambivalent attitude towards the Temple. The choice wasn’t as simple as embracing it fully on the one hand, or rejecting it on the other. The Galileans wanted to be part of the Temple, but they clearly wanted it to be different, friendlier to their way of life.
JA: Joseph Caiaphas was consolidating his power over the Temple during this time. He took advantage of Pontius Pilate’s political weakness – the prefect’s patron, Sejanus, was out of favor with the emperor – to expel the Sanhedrin from the Temple. You base this on an account in the Babylonian Talmud, which few scholars regard as a reliable source of information for the 1st century. Why do you give it credence?
BC: Few scholars regard the Talmud as reliable – except when they do regard it as reliable! We quite rightly use the Rabbinic sources with caution. But it would be as uncritical to throw out the Talmud as to accept everything that the Talmud happens to say at face value. One must evaluate a Talmudic statement the same as one would evaluate a statement in the Gospels, or in the Hellenistic sources from the second century, and later that New Testament scholars commonly refer to (for example, to inform us about Sejanus). In the case at hand, the Talmud has no interest in contradicting the picture of the Sanhedrin as the supreme authority. But if the rabbis admit the Sanhedrin was exiled, that implies that someone within Judaism was more powerful than the Sanhedrin itself was. In other words, the rabbis had no motive to make up the story. Also, the Talmud is in accord with Josephus on a number of details like placing the Chanuth, the marketplace, on the Mount of Olives. Archaeological excavations also have confirmed much of what Talmud and Mishnah say about the dimensions of the Temple and arrangements for sacrifice.
JA: What was Caiaphase trying to accomplish by exiling the Sanhedrin?
BC: The Sanhedrin had been set up at the instance of the Romans. It was very much a part of Roman style of governing. The Romans established sanhedrins in all the major cities they conquered in Israel. The purpose was to give the Roman governor someone to talk to – someone to blame when went things went wrong. The Romans wanted a diverse constituency in the council, not out of any passion for democracy, but to represent the ruling class. The high priest would have had his own priestly constituency represented on the council, but there would also have been local aristocrats, Pharisees and other groups. The Sanhedrin was not at the beck and call of the High Priest.
Caiaphas was at an extraordinarily successful period of his life. He’d been in power 13 years. The average tenure of a high priest was only one year. With the influence of Pilate now in doubt as a result of Sejanus’ fall from Imperial favor, Caiaphas undertook two moves to make the high priesthood more influential in the Temple and Jerusalem. The first move was to get control of the area around the sanctuary by removing the Sanhedrin, which included Pharisees like Joseph of Arimathea, from their locum, the Chamber of Hewn Stone. The other was to bring the merchants of sacrificial animals into the Temple. By two moves, one political and one financial, he asserted the dominance of the high priestly party. It represented a consolidation of power personally, but also for his own class. The reason the Romans removed Caiaphas in 37 (C.E.) was that he was getting too powerful – and there were strong local objections to him. When Vitellius (the legate of Syria) intervened, he supported traditional arrangements. He returned the priestly vestments from Antonia (the Roman fortress) to the Temple. It’s likely that he reversed any other innovations Caiaphas had made and had not already fallen by the wayside, including putting the Sanhedrin back in the Temple.
JA: Caiaphas’ second power play was moving the animal sellers and moneychangers to the Great Court of the Temple. What’s the basis for this interpretation?
BC: This comes straight from the Gospels. The Gospels clearly and unequivocally report that the animals are in the outer court. At the same time, the Talmud is clear that the ordinary placement of the animal stalls is on the Mount of Olives. One scholarly solution to this discrepancy has been to discard the evidence of Gospels completely. Given what we know of Caiaphas, I think we should accept the Gospels’ account. The inference is that someone moved the animals to the Temple. The only candidate we have is Caiaphas. If Caiaphas did that, it would have been in the character of his tenure as High Priest.
JA: You visualize Jesus entering Jerusalem for the festival of Sukkoth – not Passover as portrayed by the Gospels — at the head of a throng of fired-up Galileans. They proclaimed him the messiah, yet this action provoked no response from Pilate or the priests. Some scholars have found such a scenario totally implausible. Wouldn’t Pilate have arrested Jesus then and there?
BC: I don’t think so, for several reasons. One is that, within the feast of Sukkoth, processions were a typical feature of what went on. These processions were not orderly. Mishnah, which loves order, describes people shaking their leaves, shouting out, taking their old clothing and throwing it about, priests even hitting one another with their palm branches. As prefect, you had to be concerned with arrangements for security. But if you saw a gaggle of Judeans, and a bunch of Galileans, and Parthians, and Syrians and Babylonians, all heading toward the Temple, singing in languages you didn’t understand, and the Galileans were saying something messianic in their distinctive dialect of Aramaic — no, I don’t think you’d intervene. I do not think you would know exactly what was going on. If this were an isolated procession that occurred within a different view of Gospel chronology some time before Passover, that might look bad in the eyes of a Roman prefect. My view on that goes back to T. W. Manson and Cecil Roth, the Oxford scholar. The Sukkoth argument and the Zechariah argument go together hand in hand. Jesus was fulfilling Zechariah’s prophecy of a climactic sacrifice in the Temple, including Jews and non-Jews, without commercial mediators. And Zechariah 14 is explicitly a Sukkoth text.
JA: You visualize Jesus and his followers “moving in squads” in an orchestrated attack against the merchants in the Temple. Again, no response from the authorities. Do you think he caught the Roman garrison and the Temple police flat-footed?
BC: That’s a good description: They were caught flat footed. Jesus had enough people there to overcome the ordinary Temple police, but he was in no position to do anything had the Roman soldiers intervened. That’s why I do think it was a hit-and-run attack. That distinguishes it from raids on the Temple that Josephus talked about, in which the Galileans actually got inside and held the place. The attack on the vendors was much more in the nature of prophetic demonstration, to enact what the book of Zechariah predicted in its vision of God’s Kingdom.
JA: Next, Jesus slipped away, hung out in Bethany and waited for something to happen. During this time he introduced a crucial innovation: offering a meal – symbolic flesh and blood – as a sacrifice to Yahweh. You insist that Jesus was not referring to his flesh, his blood as later Christians came to believe. If he was making a symbolic Temple offering, why were people so scandalized?
BC: Because the ritual represents a replacement of the Temple and its sacrifices. This takes Jesus into the area of blasphemy, which is defined as any sort of impugning of Moses, the law, the High Priest, the Temple and the sacrifices. It makes the charge of blasphemy against Jesus understandable. But Jesus wouldn’t have thought that the wine and bread represented his personal blood, his personal flesh. Human flesh and human blood were not for human consumption at all according to any Judaic theology of the time we are aware of. This picture could have been developed only in a Hellenistic environment. That’s why many scholars say that the institution of the Eucharist was invented in a Hellenistic environment, then retrojected back into Jesus’ ministry. I can understand why they argue that. But if you look at what Jesus is saying, how he could celebrate a meal and remember the sacrificial relationship he could no longer enjoy in the Temple, you can see how it originated with him. He claimed that his meals of the Kingdom were more pleasing to his Abba than corrupt offering in the Temple.
JA: Just before the Passover, the priests finally nabbed Jesus. They held an informal inquiry. You suggest that Caiaphas asked the question, “Are you teaching that your feasts replace Temple sacrifice because you are God’s own son?” Jesus replied in the affirmative, providing Caiaphas grounds to execute him for blasphemy. None of the Gospels even hint that Caiaphas raised the issue of Jesus’ feasts. How can you justify this portrayal?
BC: Caiaphas wants to ship Jesus to Pilate and affirm, “I am not the only one to accuse him. Others agree that this person represents a danger to the public order, and therefore to Roman rule.” He cannot act simply on his own authority at this point, because the riot in the Temple had discredited him. He has enough political acumen to know he needs to get the agreement of the Sanhedrin — or, at least, a number of its members – which he has exiled. They don’t like him. He’s got to discover reasons that would give some other members of the aristocracy justification to join him in denouncing Jesus. In his interrogation of Jesus, Caiaphas develops a line of inquiry along several fronts. One is Temple practice and what kind of authority Jesus is claiming as he presumes to get into the Temple and upset arrangements there. Another aspect he is following up on – and he’s apparently well informed – is whether Jesus’ authorization has to do with divine sonship. A third strand is represented by the fact that many of Jesus’ own disciples began to leave him over his mealtime ceremony, which is why Caiaphas focuses on Jesus’ disciples and his teaching. If Caiaphas can link sonship, the attack on the Temple and strange meal-time practices, he can get other members of the Sanhedrin to oppose Jesus on the charge of blasphemy. Of course, the particulars of charges would not concern Pilate, who would simply be impressed by the depth of support for Caiaphas.
JA: What do you mean by “sonship?”
BC: The title “son of God,” like “rabbi,” has a well-established meaning in the Judaism of Jesus’ time. Long before Christianity developed its doctrine of Jesus’ unique birth, a divine “son” was someone whom God has favored with his revelation. Jesus’ conviction that he enjoyed such a relationship with his Abba was such that he believed he did speak authoritatively of God’s Kingdom, and that he could extend this divine sonship to others, whom he also taught to address God in that way.
JA: You suggest that Jesus never had a hearing before Pilate. The priests conferred with the prefect, who pronounced the death penalty in absentia. It’s one thing to say that the Gospels invented the details of the hearing before Pilate, quite another to say that they invented the fact that such a hearing took place.
BC: That’s a good observation, and you can imagine that my editors would have liked a scene of Jesus before Pilate. My decision is one I lingered over for a number of years, precisely because the Gospels are so insistent about the public accessibility of this scene. What stands against it is a familiarity with the Roman practice of crucifixion, and the low status of anyone who is not a citizen. Getting yourself a hearing under Roman law was quite difficult. From the point of view of ordinary legal proceedings, it appears that the Gospels are at variance with the other sources. I would suggest that what we see in all of these scenes with Pilate and Jesus are attempts on the part of the communities that produced the Gospels to explain that while it was the Romans who crucified Jesus, it really wasn’t their fault. This is transparent in the hand-washing scene in Matthew. These are apologetic legends with little factual content to show the constituencies of the Gospels how they can worship as God’s son someone who was killed by crucifixion; they try to exonerate Pilate and pin any blame on the Judaic leaders or the Jewish people.
JA: Throughout Rabbi Jesus, you leave the reader uncertain as to whether you regard his miracles as truly miraculous or as explainable, natural phenomena. Your theology comes through when you discuss the resurrection, which you describe as “an angelic, nonmaterial event.” In other words, Jesus really did appear to his disciples, but not in corporeal form.
BC: I’d rather put it this way: He did appear to them in bodily form, but not in the material flesh they once knew. On this question, I side with St. Paul. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul sets out three paradigms for understanding the resurrection. He rejects two and accepts the third. The first conception that he doesn’t like is of a purely spiritual resurrection. That point of view is hopeless, he says. He personally would not endure the danger he does for the prospect of a purely ethereal, spiritual resurrection. The next view is of a carnal or fleshly — what I call material — resurrection. He poses the question: Do you think that Jesus was raised from the dead in exactly the same body he died? He in effect replies, “You fool, don’t you know that when a seed goes into the ground it doesn’t sprout unless it changes?” The third option is where he develops the idea that Christ appears in a spiritual body. By that he means that Jesus was recognizable, but that the substance of his body was spiritual.
JA: If Jesus appeared to his disciples in a “spiritual body,” what happened to his earthly body?
BC: In the earliest form of the resurrection narrative, Mark’s, the women at the tomb turned around, having been told by the angel that Jesus is risen, and not to look for him inside. They didn’t go into the tomb. It’s only with the later development of the story that the empty tomb story develops and Peter and the other disciple going into the tomb are elaborations of the story of the women. We do not have a story from the earliest period that reliably tells us what happened to the corpse of Jesus. Historically, the question of what happened to Jesus’ body is an open question.