Bruce Chilton’s Jesus, a powerful practitioner of throne mysticism, led a Galilean movement to reform the Temple cult.
By James A. Bacon
In Bruce Chilton’s appraisal, most books about the historical Jesus share a common fallacy: They fail to consider the Synoptic Gospels’ literary device of compressing the events of Jesus’ ministry into a single year. “Even the best scholarship has hopelessly confused the abbreviated structure of the Gospels with the actual chronology of Jesus’ life,”[1] he writes.
Chilton, a religion professor at Bard College, believes that much of the Gospel material is authentic in the sense that it can be traced back to events or sayings that actually happened. But that material was originally transmitted to the Gospel authors in the form of stories and sayings with little chronological context. The author of the Gospel of Mark collected that material from independent sources and shaped it into a coherent narrative.[2] By placing the stories in the sequence he did, however, Mark, like the other evangelists, often altered their significance – throwing Jesus scholars off the track centuries later.
In his recent book Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography, Chilton undertook an exercise that he claims no reputable scholar had attempted before: writing a comprehensive biography of Jesus, by which he means a narrative of Jesus’ life from his birth to his death. To construct that narrative, he disaggregated the sayings and deeds contained in the Gospels and reassembled them based on inferences from Galilean and Judean culture, political events and other markers – a method he calls “generative exegesis.”
Thinking critically about the temporal dimension of Jesus’ career freed Chilton from long-held assumptions in New Testament studies and allowed him to advance a number of fresh interpretations:
- Jesus’ association with John the Baptist spanned several years, not the brief encounter implied by the Gospels.
- Jesus practiced an early form of Kabbalah mysticism, which he learned from John. His mastery of the discipline grew over time, leading to ever more specific visions and allowing him to convey his experiences to others. These skills took years of practice to develop.
- After leaving John the Baptist, Jesus returned to Nazareth for a prolonged period and then moved to Capernaum. The Gospel story of his rejection in Nazareth compressed into a single episode a phase of his life that lasted a number of years.
- Jesus spent several years evading the authorities in Galilee; his travel outside the province was far more extensive than the brief, idealized excursions suggested by the Gospels.
- Jesus conducted his messianic entry into Jerusalem during the festival of Sukkoth (also known as Tabernacles), not Passover. His conflict with the high priests of the Temple actually transpired over the half-year interval between Sukkoth and the following Passover, when he was crucified.
In some instances, Chilton found strong support for his chronological reshuffling: His placement of the Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem during the festival of Sukkoth, he says, “fits like a glove.” In other cases, he reached more tentative conclusions based on weighing ambiguous and conflicting data. Given his decision to write “Rabbi Jesus” as a popular biography with a minimum of scholarly commentary, Chilton chose to omit the laborious logic behind his narrative sequencing — a decision that has landed him in hot water with some reviewers.[3] Readers interested in the details of his reasoning are advised to read the Question & Answer piece accompanying this profile, or better yet to consult his previous publications. Not all of the research that went into “Rabbi Jesus” has been published yet, however. As a courtesy to our readers, Chilton has permitted the Jesus Archive to reproduce an excerpt from a forthcoming essay, “The Chronology of John’s Death,” which addresses a crucial issue: The year of John the Baptist’s execution. Dating John’s death is significant because, as Chilton argues, it marks the end of Jesus’ training under John and the year he struck out on his own. A date of 21 C.E. supports a conclusion that Jesus’ ministry spanned a full decade rather than the single year portrayed in the Synoptics.
Adapting a biographical perspective also forced Chilton to grapple with Jesus’ development as a person. People are products of their environment, and Chilton rooted his Jesus in the soil of Galilee and the religious heritage of Judaism. But Jesus did not emerge, like Venus from her shell, as a prophet at the height of his powers. He underwent a process of maturation, subject to a variety of influences. His apprenticeship to John the Baptist was one. His birth as a mamzer, a child of uncertain parentage, was another. Jesus identified with the sinners and dispossessed of Galilean society, surmises Chilton, because he had been an outcast himself, shunned as a boy by village elders and prohibited from participation in the Nazareth synagogue.
The attention Chilton gives to Jesus’ psychological development is bound to stir controversy as well. Reacting to the treacly “lives of Jesus” written in the Victorian era, New Testament scholars have denied even the possibility of describing Jesus’ personality. In the mid-20th century, theologians insisted that it was futile to seek human influence on the heroic and divine figure of Jesus. “Psychologizing” Jesus was the realm of cranks and amateurs. Ironically, the biographical focus on Jesus also opens Chilton to criticism from modern-day feminists from the opposite direction: Glorifying Jesus as the heroic founder of the social movement that bears his name downplays the contributions of the men and especially the women who comprised that movement.
Historians and theologians today are more willing to examine the human side of Jesus, but many still frown on psychological analysis. Everything known about Jesus has been filtered through the writings of others. Scholars are hard pressed to agree what Jesus said, much less what his state of mind might have been. Furthermore, recent social-scientific scholarship has emphasized the gulf between 1st-century and 21st-century personality types. Any effort to reconstruct Jesus’ psychology is vulnerable to the temptation of projecting the historian’s modern, individualistic frames of reference onto a figure imbued with the mental constructs of an ancient, collectivist society.
Undeterred, Chilton believes the effort is worth the risk. He peeks through a number of windows into Jesus’ emotional state. The sources tell us that Jesus got angry. He wept. He was “moved in his entrails.” The Gospels portray a man of powerful emotion. “Most ancient biographies of which we’re aware don’t emphasize religious figures getting angry, shouting, crying, or being harsh to their disciples and critics,” Chilton says. Jesus’ frequent display of emotion was remarkable, he insists, and it’s a legitimate subject of historical inquiry.
What’s more, by adopting a biographical perspective, Chilton takes a holistic approach. Most books on the historical Jesus compartmentalize aspects of his life – his teaching, his healing, his social setting, his struggle with the authorities. At some point, each of these topics must be reconciled with one another to create a coherent whole. They must be consistent with what we can see of Jesus’ personality and what we can deduce of his personal development. And they must be organized around a plausible timeline, anchored around reliable dates, that allows sufficient time for events to unfold.
“The twentieth century saw a variety of ploys to downplay the human reality of Jesus’ life,” says Chilton. “Reference to his emotions was dismissed as psychologizing. Allowance for his creativity was accused of elitism. But if we let the sources speak in their own contexts, we can infer how he developed, and give Jesus back a life. Obviously, seeing him in historical terms does not alone resolve issues of faith, nor does it make him the only important person in the history of the Christian movement … but the time has passed when questions of faith can be evaded by denying Jesus his place in history.”
* * *
Bruce Chilton was born and raised in Long Island, N.Y. After World War II, his parents settled in Levittown, the quintessential suburban community. He describes his family as “rationalist Waspy,” attending Episcopal churches sporadically. Faith did not run especially strong in the Chilton clan. His grandfather, he recalls, was a proud atheist and member of the Masons. When Bruce was later ordained as a minister, his grandmother joked that he was the “white sheep of the family.”
As a teenager, Bruce rejected Christianity and dabbled in Buddhism and meditation. But he underwent a transforming experience in 1967, his 17th year, an event he describes in Rabbi Jesus. He was traveling through Europe with members of the World Youth Forum, a current-affairs debating club, when he found himself one oppressively hot day within the cool, dark confines of a medieval church in Dubrovnik. He was drawn to a portrait of the crucified Christ, spikes driven through his palms, blood running down his arms, his body twisted and broken. “I had a momentary but searing impression of agony,” he writes. “I was moved by the figure’s fragility in the face of a vast and violent universe, and I felt the crushing pain of our common mortality.”[4] But he also felt something beyond pain, beyond despair, though he could not define it then. Leaving the church, he drank a beer and went swimming in the Adriatic. But the image never left him. Eventually, the experience inspired him to seek ordination.
Chilton attended college at Bard College, a small, liberal arts university beautifully situated on the Hudson River in upstate New York. Although he majored in theater, he took the religion courses on offer as well. In 1971, he decided to pursue the ordination course at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in New York City. There, reading extensively in Hebrew, Aramaic and classical Greek, he discovered his love of New Testament studies.
In his Masters thesis, Chilton focused on the first exorcism story in the Gospel of Mark. “You could determine by the analysis of style that you were dealing there not only with Mark’s characteristic presentation, but an underlying Semitic source that presented the exorcism as a very contentious event,” he says. “You can see the Aramaic words coming through, the fractures in grammar and syntax.” He does not believe that Mark drew upon a written Aramaic document, as some suppose, but he does think the exorcism story reflects an oral Aramaic source, perhaps passed from Peter by means of a source to the author of Mark’s Gospel.
Ordained as a deacon in the Episcopal Church, Chilton completed his Master of Divinity in 1974 and then continued his studies at Cambridge. He thrived under the classic European method of study. “You have an advisor and a world-class library,” he says. “They tell you to go to work, and that’s what you do!” Mastering yet two other ancient languages, Coptic and Syriac, he immersed himself in the Gospel of Thomas. One of his supervisors, Ernst Bammel, made a particular impression upon the students of his dissertation seminar. Each week, five doctoral students would present their latest work for critique by the group. “He had the best technique for motivating students to work,” Chilton recalls. “If you didn’t have any material, he’d bring out photocopies of Aramaic and Hebrew papyri for you to translate!”
At this time, the mid-1970s, there was still a strong tendency in New Testament scholarship to give only grudging acknowledgement to the Jewishness of Jesus, Chilton recalls. Theologians tended to interpret Jesus as an opponent of the Judaism of his day and to see the Christian movement as outgrowth of that rejection. But Chilton came to think it impossible to disentangle early Christianity from the Judaism that it sprang from. “I saw Christianity as a reconfiguration of Judaism rather than an effort to dispense with Judaism.”
Christianity’s roots in Judaism became all the clearer as Chilton researched his doctoral dissertation about Jesus’ concept of the Kingdom of God. He found close analogies to Jesus’ concept in the Aramaic targums, a set of documents that have been largely overlooked by New Testament scholarship. As renderings of the Hebrew Bible in the Aramaic tongue, the targums were transmitted orally for several centuries then set in writing beginning during the 4th century C.E. They did not replicate the Hebrew scriptures literally. They paraphrased, added paragraphs and inserted new concepts. Yet they are important to historical-Jesus research because they reveal an oral form of the Hebrew scriptures that circulated among Jesus and his Aramaic-speaking contemporaries.[5] Indeed, if Jesus was illiterate, as some scholars conjecture, the orally transmitted targums may have been the version of the scriptures that he knew best.
The targums include references to the Kingdom of God that the Hebrew scriptures do not, and Chilton believes they shed light on Jesus’ understanding of that concept. At the time he worked on his dissertation, Chilton says, most New Testament scholars believed Jesus thought of the Kingdom of God as a future phenomenon. Some exegetes argued, however, that Jesus considered the Kingdom to be already present. In his dissertation, Chilton argued that the dichotomy between a realized kingdom and a future kingdom was a false one: The Kingdom of God, as found in the targums and as used by Jesus, had simultaneous present and future dimensions. In Jesus’ mind, Chilton says, God had begun the process of transforming the world. The transformation was not yet complete, but it would be very shortly.
While finishing his graduate work at Cambridge in 1976, Chilton was ordained as an Anglican priest. He took a job at the University of Sheffield deep in the heart of Labour country — the Socialist Republic of Yorkshire, locals call it – where he taught New Testament and studied the targumin. During this time, he met and wed his wife, Odile. In 1985, Chilton took a position at the Yale Divinity School, but he did not stay long. He found one aspect of the academic administration particularly frustrating: The system made it exceedingly difficult to collaborate with anyone outside the Divinity school, such as his colleagues in Jewish studies. Also, with the birth of his first child impending, he faced the prospect of less time to pursue his pastoral work.
In 1987, Bard College made Chilton an offer he couldn’t refuse: The school gave him a teaching load light enough that he could continue his research, spend time with his family and act as campus chaplain. The move to Bard, as it turned out, also gave him the opportunity to work with Jacob Neusner, a leading scholar of early Rabbinic Judaism, in one of the most productive collaborations in New Testament scholarship. Not only do Chilton and Neusner teach classes together, they have co-authored and edited a number of books exploring the intersections of Christianity and Judaism. They present the New Testament scriptures not as hostile or alien to 1st-century Judaism but as writings that arose from the diverse and complex thought of Judaism. The two professors work so well as a team that students sometimes ask if they disagree about anything, Neusner chuckles. “That amused us because when it comes to politics, I think he’s off the map, and he thinks I’m off the map. I’m a mainstream Republican and he’s a far-left Democrat.”[6]
In the 1980s, Chilton’s work came to the attention of the Jesus Seminar, and he joined that high-profile organization for several years. At the time, the Seminar’s priority was to seek a consensus on which of the sayings attributed to Jesus were historical. “I found their work interesting and in many ways stimulating,” Chilton says. “We were breaking down the notion that you couldn’t know anything about Jesus.” While useful, the Jesus Seminar’s methods were limiting. The work was atomistic, he says: It focused on individual words and deeds shorn from their original contexts. No one put the authentic material into anything resembling a narrative of Jesus’ life. It was around this time, Chilton says, that he became interested in the possibility of writing such a narrative himself.
* * *
More than a decade ago, Chilton developed one of the key arguments that laid the foundation for “Rabbi Jesus.” In 1992 he published “The Temple of Jesus: His Sacrificial Program Within a Cultural History of Sacrifice,” which explored Judean sacrifices and purity practices from an anthropological and historical perspective. Two years later, he followed up with “A Feast of Meanings: Eucharistic Theologies from Jesus through Johannine Circles,” which demonstrated how the mealtime ritual invented by Jesus evolved into the full-blown Eucharist of the early church.
In these books, Chilton tackled one of the great challenges of New Testament scholarship: explaining the origins of the Eucharist. The Synoptic Gospels portray the ritual as originating with Jesus at the Last Supper:
“And as they did eat, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and brake it, and gave to them, and said, Take, eat: this is my body. And he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them: and they all drank of it. And he said unto them, This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many.”[7]
A traditional reading of Mark would suggest that Jesus exhorted his followers to eat his flesh and drink his blood in a cannibalistic-inspired ritual that would have repelled most Jews. Alternatively, some exegetes have suggested that early Christians in a Hellenistic setting invented the practice but attributed it to Jesus in order to legitimize their rite. Chilton took issue with both schools of thought. He could not accept the Gospels as literal history: By urging his followers to consume his blood and flesh, Jesus would have advocated a deliberate and radical break from Judaism that is presaged nowhere else in the Gospels. Nor could Chilton agree with those who would dismiss the Gospels as Hellenistic fairy tales and recast the Eucharist as a Dionysian mystery cult. “The Gospels were no fairy tales and Jesus was no apostate,” he wrote.[8]
Chilton started with the premise that Jesus operated within a Judaic milieu. He was loyal to the Temple cult. But as a Galilean, he resisted certain forms of worship imposed by the Jerusalem-dominated parties in power: the high priests and the Pharisees. The ambivalence of the Galileans towards the dominant Judeans of Jerusalem comes through clearly in the works of Flavius Josephus, a Jerusalem priest who tried with mixed success to organize Galilean resistance to the Romans during the revolt of 66 C.E. “The Galileans are presented as enthusiastic for Israelite worship in the Temple,” says Chilton, “but they often come into conflict with the Judean authorities.”
In particular, according to Chilton, Jesus objected to a decision by the High Priest Caiaphas to relocate the market for sacrificial animals from the Mount of Olives into the Temple itself. The move made sense from a logistical point of view: Pilgrims didn’t have to worry about their animals receiving cuts, scrapes or other blemishes on the way to the Temple, where a levite could disqualify them from sacrifice. But the new arrangement deprived celebrants of the opportunity to bring their own beasts up the Temple Mount to offer to God. Caiaphas’ innovation transformed a ritual that provided the Galilean peasant an intimate contact with the Almighty into an impersonal commercial transaction. Jesus disrupted that commerce by assaulting the vendors and moneychangers and dispersing them with their wares, then escaped before he could be arrested. However, he dared not return to the Temple. Effectively exiled from the Temple and its ceremonies, Jesus introduced an innovation of his own – a symbolic mealtime offering to God.
In Chilton’s interpretation, Jesus equated bread and wine with flesh and blood – but not his own. Jesus substituted wine for the blood poured on the sacred fire of the Temple and bread for the flesh of butchered meat offered to God on the altar. His followers could atone for their sins by partaking in the sacramental meal rather than the corrupt Temple sacrifices. In performing the ritual, Jesus challenged the monopoly of the priesthood and intermediaries between man and God – bringing down the wrath of the Temple priests upon him.
It was not easy reaching this conclusion. Chilton recalls sitting in his study in the spring of 1989 when the pieces all came together. He was correcting a manuscript of “The Temple of Jesus,” “in which he had argued that Jesus had traveled to Jerusalem for the purpose of fulfilling the climatic prophecies in the book of Zechariah: entering Jerusalem on an ass and disrupting the commerce of sacrificial animals in the Temple. At that point in his thinking, though, Chilton did not recognize the full import of Jesus’ Eucharistic rite that took place at the Last Supper. Like other scholars, he had noted the similarity of the Last Supper with the mealtime fellowship Jesus had enjoyed back in Galilee. He even saw a tie-in to the universal banquet at the End of Time described by Zechariah and other apocalyptic writers. But nothing challenged his long-held belief that the meaning of the words was identical to the traditional teaching of the Church: that Jesus was offering his own flesh and blood for his disciples to consume.
Gazing out his window towards the Annandale woods, the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains beyond, Chilton ruminated upon the link between God’s Kingdom and nature. Zechariah’s prophecy promised that nature would be overturned by the final, divine revelation: The Mount of Olives would be split in two, yielding a continual flow of water to nurture the earth. That’s when it hit him: Jesus also saw nature being transformed – wine and bread becoming the blood and flesh of the sacrificial animal.
Chilton found it profoundly disturbing to think that Jesus wasn’t referring to his own blood and flesh. “My theological world was turned around,” he says. Postponing publication of The Temple of Jesus, he took time to consult with friends and ponder the idea as he celebrated the Holy Communion himself. Eventually, he became comfortable enough to begin teaching on the topic. He published the book in 1992, then even circulated his theory in a book written for church circles, “Jesus’ Prayer and Jesus’ Eucharist.”
In writing “Rabbi Jesus“ a few years later, Chilton took on the task of integrating his Eucharistic thesis into the narrative of Jesus’ life. When describing Jesus’ move from Nazareth, a village with a cashless economy, to the commercial center of Capernaum, he advanced the argument that Jesus detested money. Accustomed to a village society based on barter and the exchanging of favors, Jesus equated currency with the “mammon of injustice.” As one who regarded commerce as a blight, Jesus would have been all the more distressed to see money exchanged in the house of God.
Chilton also reconstructed crucial events that transpired between Sukkoth, when Jesus chastised the moneychangers and fled from the Temple, and Passover, when he was arrested and executed. In Chilton’s revised chronology, Jesus’ raid on the Temple initiated six months of tension with the High Priest. Enraged by the assault on his authority, Caiaphas wanted to arrest the Galilean. He took the case to the Sanhedrin, but council members were little disposed to cooperate: They were still irate at Caiaphas for having recently evicted them from their chamber of hewn stone at the Temple and transplanted them to the old marketplace. Chilton conjectures that the Sanhedrin was hamstrung by debates over the nuances of Jesus’ actions. During this same interval, Jesus introduced his mealtime rite. Though not the dining-on-the-deity rite portrayed by the early church, the symbolic sacrifice to God proved scandalous to many for usurping the role of the Temple and its priests. As indicated in the Gospel of John, a number of Jesus’ followers parted company with him. One of those was Judas, who informed the priests of Jesus’ activity and agreed to help arrest him in the hopes of having him expelled from Jerusalem.
By this point, Caiaphas had no interest in trying Jesus before the Sanhedrin. Interrogating the would-be prophet in his palace, he extracted sufficient material from Jesus to justify going directly to Pilate and demanding his execution. In a private hearing that probably did not involve Jesus at all, Caiaphas persuaded the Roman governor to crucify him on the grounds that he was a threat to public order. Displaying none of the remorse described in the Gospels, Pilate agreed. On the eve of Passover in 32 C.E., Jesus died on the cross.
* * *
Rabbi Jesus weaves a number of other fresh perspectives into the life of Jesus. In one of many examples, Chilton draws upon the Rabbinic writings to shed light on Jesus’ birth. Judging by discussions in the Mishnah, ancient Israelites conferred extraordinary importance to confirming a child’s paternity. If there were any question about the father’s identity, the worst was often assumed. The child was labeled a mamzer, the offspring of a prohibited union. Given the unusual circumstances of his birth, Jesus confronted just such a stigma.
The Gospels of Matthew and Luke affirm that the circumstances of Jesus’ conception were unusual, to say the least. Even if modern-day Christians accept the notion that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, Mary would have had a difficult time persuading the villagers of Nazareth that such had been the case. Chilton contends that Mary and Joseph engaged in sexual relations while betrothed but Mary’s pregnancy became evident before the marriage contract could be sealed in public. The problem in public perception arose, Chilton explains, because Joseph resided in a nearby village (Bethlelem of Galilee) and Mary became pregnant before they lived together.
Whether one hews to the doctrine of the virginal conception, accepts Chilton’s interpretation or adopts the more controversial position, occasionally argued, that Mary was raped by a Roman soldier, Jesus’ social status would have been the same: He would have been a mamzer, or “silenced one,” deprived of a voice in the public congregations that regulated village life in Nazareth. This pariah status, in turn, would have driven Jesus from Nazareth as a youth and made him sympathic to other outcasts of Galilean society, Chilton says. “Being marginalized had a huge impact on his personality.”
The Mishnah and Talmud contain extensive commentaries on the results of illicit unions, yet in 200 years of historical-Jesus study, no one had connected them to the New Testament accounts – until last year. Remarkably, says Chilton, at least two other authors, working independently, published works exploring Jesus’ mamzer roots. Says Chilton: “Mamzer had a very big year in 2000.”
Chilton also adds material from an ancient work, “In Praise of Barnabas,” which has been long dismissed as legendary. A 1998 book published by Bernt Kolleman, a German scholar, persuaded him that Barnabas preserves some authentic early traditions. The text describes a young levite named Joseph residing in Jerusalem who extended hospitality to Jesus. Despite his family’s wealth and levitical status, Joseph’s origin in Cyprus, outside the land of Israel, prohibited him from participating in the priestly administration of Temple ritual, Chilton says. An outsider like Jesus, Joseph found inspiration in the Galilean’s teachings. In turn for his hospitality, Jesus bequeathed him a nickname: Barnabas, “the son of consolation.”[9]
Perhaps most significant is Chilton’s view that Jesus practiced a form of Jewish mysticism known as the merkabah, or meditation upon the chariot throne of God. It is widely acknowledged in New Testament scholarship that Jesus entered trances when performing exorcisms and even, perhaps, when healing. But the conventional wisdom asserts that Jesus viewed himself as being possessed by the spirit of God. Chilton is the first, to his knowledge, to suggest that Jesus achieved the ability to enter these trances at will by systematically cultivating a mystical discipline.
In ancient Jewish mysticism, the adept sought to ascend through the heavens in order to gaze upon the chariot-like throne from which God, in all his awesome glory, ruled all creation. The origin of the practice can be traced at least as far back as Israel’s exile in Babylon when the prophet Ezekiel first described the Lord of Hosts surrounded by a court of angelic creatures. Over the centuries the heavenly geography grew increasingly complex, metastasizing into multiple levels, each populated by its own bestiary of fantastic creatures. The Dead Sea Scrolls and other apocalyptic literature, dating to the century before Jesus, displayed an intimate familiarity with this mystical cosmology. Extrapolating forward from these texts and backward from the Jewish Kabbalistic literature, Chilton argues that masters taught the discipline to students, passing along their knowledge. One such master was John the Baptist. His star pupil was Jesus.
The Gospels contain rich throne-mysticism imagery. At Jesus’ baptism, the heavens opened, God’s voice boomed from the heavens, and his spirit descended like a dove. Jesus spoke of “one like a human” (commonly translated as the Son of Man), a mighty angel who would carry out God’s will at the end of days. He promised the Twelve that they would sit upon thrones to judge the tribes of Israel. John and James vied for pre-eminence and the right to sit on thrones beside Jesus. Evidence of Jesus’ mystical experiences also punctuate the Gospels: the retreats to the wilderness, the temptation of Satan and the transfiguration. Chilton even sees Jesus meditating upon the chariot when performing exorcisms and seeking to rejuvenate himself.
Furthermore, Chilton insists, Jesus instructed his disciples in the work of the chariot, and it is through this practice, Chilton suggests, that the disciples encountered the resurrected Jesus after his crucifixion. The influence on Christianity was profound, though widely unappreciated. Imagery from merkabah mysticism is evident in the letters of Paul. Jesus’ mysticism contributed also to the doctrines of Gnostic Christians, though they recast the discipline in an abstract and theological way.
* * *
As Chilton looks back upon his work, he regards his explication of Jesus’ throne mysticism as one of his most original contributions to understanding the historical Jesus – almost on a par with decoding the origin of the Eucharist. In the long run, though, he hopes “Rabbi Jesus” is remembered for firmly rooting Jesus in the political and cultural context of 1st-century Judaism. “The whole issue of Jesus’ social location within Judaism,” he says, “has been highlighted in a way that’s never going to go away.”
The book has received a mixed response, Chilton concedes, but much of the criticism has been ill informed. Appearing on radio talk shows, he says, “I’ve been called impious. I’ve been called an agent of Satan.” If nothing else, the experience has confirmed to him “how central this discussion is to us culturally. … I’m happy I’m saying things so plainly.”
[1] “Rabbi Jesus”; Doubleday; New York; 2000. p. xx-xxi.
[2] Papias, the bishop of Hierapolis, gave the earliest account of the composition of the Gospel of Mark. As preserved by Eusebius in the 4th century, Papias said: “Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatsoever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but afterward, as I said, he followed Peter, who adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearers, but with no intention of giving a connected account of the Lord’s discourses.”
Thus, we learn that Peter never gave a “connected account” of Jesus’ life and that Mark did not write down Jesus’ deeds and sayings in order. We can conclude only that sequence and chronology of events of Mark’s Gospel – including the one-year time frame — were based on the author’s inferences and/or narrative aims. It’s conceivable that Mark sometimes did get the sequence of events right, but historians should be acutely sensitive to the probability that he often did not.
[3] Chilton’s footnote-free approach may be a blessing to lay readers, but it confounds some scholars. In a recent book review, Craig L. Blomberg, professor of New Testament studies at Denver Seminary, compliments Chilton for bringing Jesus’ Judean milieu to life, but castigates his chronology:
“Clearly Chilton feels free to reject canonical chronology and invent his own, seldom with any comment explaining his rationale. When certain episodes seem improbable, he rejects them or redefines them similarly. Completely contra the prevailing wisdom of both New Testament and rabbinic scholarship, he feels free to draw widely on Jewish traditions of the first five or six centuries of the Common Era and to assume that they were all in place in the first century and defined the Judaism of Jesus’ world. When something offends Chilton’s religious sensibilities, he rewrites the story so that the historical Jesus no longer violates them.”
[4] “Rabbi Jesus,” p. xvii
[5] Some scholars have argued that the targums originated after Jesus lived but, according to Chilton, close analysis demonstrates that much of their language and interpretation is contemporaneous with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which would indicate an origin as much as a century before Jesus. Chilton translated the Isaiah targum as part of a recently completed translation of the Aramaic Bible, complete with commentary and text notes.
The band of Aramaicists is a small. New Testament scholars generally learn the Greek and Hebrew required to complete their degrees, Chilton observes. Only a few are sufficiently motivated to learn Aramaic as well. Because people study what they know, however, disproportionate attention has been given to analyzing Greek documents at the expense of Aramaic ones.
[6] Sure, teases Chilton, Neusner is in the Republican ”mainstream” – like Ulysses S. Grant!
[7] Mark 14:22-24
[8] Rabbi Jesus, p. 253
[9] Chilton regards the nickname as evidence supporting the authenticity of the Barnabas material. Jesus, like the current U.S. president, had a proclivity for giving pet names to his followers: Peter the “rock” (Cephas), John and James the “sons of thunder,” Simon the “zealot,” and so on.