The historical Jesus according to the dean of Catholic scholars
by James A. Bacon
In 1988 John P. Meier sat down with a representative of the Doubleday publishing company to discuss writing a book about the historical Jesus. As the conversation unfolded, both assumed the project would be a single volume. “Little did we imagine it would be a tetralogy,” Meier recently told an audience at Virginia Commonwealth University, whimsically comparing the resulting product to Wagner’s four operas, the Ring of the Nibelungen.
Fourteen years later, Meier can visualize the end of his epic project. Having published last year Part 3 of “A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus,” he has commenced writing the fourth and final volume. But don’t expect to see it any time soon. Meier, a Catholic priest and professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame, has left the most intractable problems of historical-Jesus scholarship for last.
Much like Wagnerian opera, the Marginal Jew series may seem endless and formidably dense to the uninitiated. But also like the Nibelungenlied, Meier’s tetrology is the work of a powerful intellect that will withstand the test of time. Some of Meiers’ peers are proclaiming the Marginal Jew series the most thorough and comprehensive work of scholarship on the historical Jesus in this generation. Critics may quarrel with Meier’s reasons for characterizing Jesus as an eschatological prophet, but no one disputes the extraordinary erudition of his scholarship.
It is axiomatic among contemporary New Testament scholars that Jesus was a Jew, noted Meier in his April address to the VCU history department. That represents an advance over the so-called “first” and “second” quests for the historical Jesus in the 19th- and mid-20th-centuries. Early scholarship, dominated by German Protestants with strong theological biases, emphasized Jesus’ distinctiveness from a supposedly legalistic and decaying religion. The great contribution of the current, “third” quest for the historical Jesus – as exemplified by the work of Geza Vermes and E.P. Sanders – has been to root him in the mainstream of 1st-century Judaism.
The Jewishness of Jesus is now an academic cliché. But strangely enough, Meier noted, a number of modern scholars – especially those associated with the highly publicized Jesus Seminar — have tendered interpretations that submerge Jesus’ Jewish identity. In recent years, Jesus has been portrayed as a religious iconoclast, a social revolutionary, a generic Mediterranean peasant, even an itinerant philosopher in the mold of the Greek cynics.
“To be sure, words like ‘Jew’ and ‘Jewish’ adorn the works, and politically correct noises are made about his Jewishness,” said Meier, “but one searches in vain for treatment of the ways that Jesus interacted with and reacted to other Jewish groups.”
The influence of the Jesus Seminar was pervasive in the popular media when Meier began writing in the late 1980s. By entitling his work, “A Marginal Jew,” Meier cast himself in opposition to the Seminar, planting Jesus firmly back in Judaism’s mainstream. By employing the adjective “marginal,” he did not mean to imply that Jesus was only marginally Jewish, but to pose a question, inspired by the style of Jesus’ own riddle-speak and parables, that would focus on Jesus’ relationship to Judaism.
Jesus certainly was not marginal in same literal way as those who dwelled in the desert monastery of Qumran, Meier noted: The Qumranites deliberately isolated themselves from what they regarded as the corruption of the Temple cult in Jerusalem. Rather, Jesus was marginal in the sense that he moved in circles outside the centers of power and influence. As a Galilean, he lived on the periphery of the land of Israel. Indeed, he may have marginalized himself politically by criticizing the Temple priesthood and prophesying the Temple’s demise.
The first three volumes of A Marginal Jew endeavor to frame a coherent answer to the question posed by the title. In Vol. 1, Meier took readers through a survey of the sources and an explication of his methodology for determining if a Gospel verse reflects an early source, perhaps capturing an authentic saying or deed of Jesus. Vol. 2 aimed the spotlight on Jesus himself, focusing on key sayings and deeds, with special attention to Jesus’ miracles and his relationship to John the Baptist. Most notably, Meier concluded that Jesus presented himself to Israel as a prophet of the end of time, patterning himself after the miracle-working Old Testament prophet Elijah.
In the third volume, Meier said, he deemed it time to “widen the circle of light” around Jesus. No person is adequately understood in isolation from others. A charismatic individual such as Jesus is defined largely by his relationships with his followers and his opponents. In Meier’s estimation, contemporary scholars have often neglected this perspective. “The full range of Jesus’ relationship with Jewish groups has not been a thrust of modern academic research lionized by the media.”
Meier categorizes Jesus’ followers in three circles defined by degree of intimacy with the prophet. The outer circle consisted of the crowds who flocked around him. The middle circle was comprised of the disciples called to follow him. An inner circle of the Twelve symbolized his mission to the 12 tribes of Israel. Like any academic model, Meier conceded, his scheme does not capture all the nuances. Relationships were fluid; people moved in and out of different circles. Furthermore, certain people do not fit into the construct: Think of stay-at-home disciples such as Martha and Mary. Or think of Mary Magdalene, an ever-present companion who did not belong to the Twelve.
Jesus was defined as well by those he opposed, Meier noted. Several Jewish groups competed for power in 1st-century Palestine; religious influence was a hotly contested commodity. The fact that Jesus persuaded a number of people to follow him put him in competition with others, even if he did not engage them directly. The most prominent of these groups were the Pharisees who, like Jesus, were active among the common people. The difficulty in dissecting Jesus’ interaction with the Pharisees lies as much with the Pharisees as with Jesus.
“The dirty little secret of New Testament exegesis,” said Meier, “is that nobody is sure who the Pharisees were. … In the end, the quest for the historical Pharisee is even more difficult than the quest for the historical Jesus.”
Data on the Sadducees is even scarcer: The party of the Jewish aristocracy left no self-descriptive literature. As Meier observed: “They were described only by their opponents. We all know the Sadducees were the bad guys… because their opponents tell us so.”
The vast majority of Jews in Palestine shared basic common beliefs, according to Meier. They worshiped one God, believed that God had a covenant with the children of Israel, and accepted the Temple in Jerusalem as God’s sanctuary on earth. Most Jews were happy to practice the basics of their religion: the Sabbath, circumcision, the food laws and the pilgrimage to the Temple. Whatever their feelings about Annas or Caiaphas or other high priests in power, they followed the Temple calendar and liturgy and looked to the priests as the divinely constituted leaders of their generation. Within the parameters of this mainstream, there were many expressions of Judaism – of which Jesus’ movement was one. Jesus emerged from the mainstream tradition, Meier said, and he addressed other Jews within it.
With the first three volumes, Meier said, he has laid the groundwork for the final book, which explores what he considers to be the four greatest enigmas posed by the study of Jesus. These include:
- Jesus and Jewish law. Scholarly treatment swings between two extremes. Either Jesus opposed or abolished the Mosaic law, or his attitude toward the law was largely uncontroversial. Jesus was a devout Jew, Meier said, but his attitude towards the law – as made clear, among other things, by his prohibition of divorce and oath taking – was hardly uncontroversial.
- Jesus’ parables. Many scholars have used the parables as the starting point for understanding the historical Jesus. But many have accepted the parables uncritically, Meier said. Favorites such as the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son get “free passes.” He intends to approach the parables with the same strict criteria of authenticity he has applied to other Gospel material.
- Jesus’ self designation. Scholars have been consumed by what kind of titles – Son of God, Son of man, messiah etc. – that Jesus might have applied to himself. Meier is not so sure that Jesus had a clear meaning in mind: He suspects, for example, that he might have used the term “Son of man” as enigmatic, riddle-speak to tease the mind of the audience into active thought.
- The crucifixion. Why did this Elijah-like prophet from Galilee wind up crucified in Jerusalem on grounds of claiming to be king of the Jews? Any reconstruction of the historical Jesus must be judged adequate or inadequate based on its ability to explain how Jesus came afoul of the Temple priests and Roman authorities.
*****
Meier still has plenty of questions, but he has reached some firm conclusions as he nears the end of his task. First, contrary to a number of theories that would identify him with any of the well-known groups active in 1st-century Palestine, Jesus was not a Pharisee, Sadducee, Essene or a Zealot.
Jesus did bear significant similarities to the Pharisees, Meier said. He, like they, enjoyed a base of support among the common people. Both shared a desire to call all of Israel to the doing of God’s will, and both believed that God would guide his people to the end of times. Some scholars perceive a likeness between Jesus and the “liberal,” or tolerant, strain of Hillel: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Others suggest that his uncompromising attitudes toward divorce bear greater resemblance to the stricter Pharisaic school of Shammai.
Unlike the Pharisees who saw God as the principal agent of the end of time, however, Jesus made himself a key figure in the eschatological drama. Also, unlike the Pharisees, Jesus performed remarkable deeds. No individual Pharisee was identified in his own lifetime as a miracle worker. Furthermore, Pharisees were punctilious in their observance of tithing, purity laws and temple ritual. Jesus, by contrast, forbade his disciples from fasting. He was a friend of toll collectors and sinners. “Jesus loved a good party,” Meier observed. Conversely, Jesus also appears to have been celibate – which the Pharisees certainly were not.
Jesus had even less in common with the Sadducees, a small group concentrated in Jerusalem and consisting mainly of Temple priests. Jesus and the Sadducees perhaps would have found common ground in rejecting the body of oral tradition – the so-called tradition of the elders – esteemed by the Pharisees. But there is little evidence that they interacted. In the only encounter between Jesus and the Sadducees recorded in the Gospels – the incident in which the Sadducees disputed Jesus’ teaching on the resurrection — the confrontation was marked by vigorous disagreement, even hostility.
How about the Essenes, or the Qumranites, who are widely held to be Essenes? Jesus and the dwellers in the Qumran monastery did share an eschatological mindset, Meier noted: They awaited the coming of God’s Kingdom on earth. Jesus, like the Qumranites, practiced a fiercely radical moral ethic in anticipation of God’s imminent intervention. Jesus advocated restrictions on divorce and, like some of the Essenes, apparently practiced celibacy. But while the Qumranites had withdrawn from the Temple, Jesus regularly attended Temple festivals. For all of his criticism of the Temple priesthood, he followed their lunar calendar for dating the festivals. He even participated in the feast of Channukah, a relatively recent innovation of the Jerusalem priesthood. Likewise, while the denizens of Qumran practiced an intensive – some might say obsessive – concern with ritual purity and the Mosaic law that exceeded even that of the Pharisees, Jesus advocated a more relaxed view: The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Far from focusing on the minutiae of purity rules, Jesus dined with the toll collectors and outcasts. Finally, noted Meier, Jesus did not display the scribal proclivity of the Qumran monks to pore over the sacred texts. Jesus typically spoke on his own authority in a charismatic manner, rarely citing scriptural justification. The Gospels never once mention the Essenes or the Qumran community, Meier said. In all probability, Jesus never spoke of them. “Jesus and Qumran did not occupy the same spiritual universe.”
Meier reserved special scorn for the depiction of Jesus as a revolutionary Zealot, an image that periodically surfaces in Hollywood and historical fiction. Serious scholars long ago abandoned the notion, bandied about in the 1960s, that Jesus advocated the violent overthrow of the Romans. When Flavius Josephus, whose writings comprise the main source for 1st-century Palestine, used the term “zealots,” he referred to a group of armed revolutionaries who fought the Romans in the great uprising of 66 C.E. – 40 years after Jesus was crucified.
There is no hard evidence that any organized armed rebellion against Rome took place during Jesus’ ministry. There were protests and bandits, but the homeland of the Jews, administered by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem and the Jewish potentate Herod Antipas in Galilee, was relatively pacific, Meier observed. “You can count on one hand the number of significant protests and demonstrations of passive resistance. There was not a single instance of armed rebellion.” By the standards of the ancient world, Pontius Pilate, working in collaboration with the high priest Caiaphas in Jerusalem, did a good job of keeping a lid on things – in contrast to later governors, who did much worse. “In the ancient Near East, you had two choices: a cruel and efficient ruler or a cruel and inefficient ruler. Pilate, Caiaphas and Herod should have been canonized.”
If Jesus wasn’t a Pharisee, Sadducee, Essene or Zealot, what kind of Jew was he? It is a difficult question to answer, Meier said: He combined so many contradictory roles: He was a prophet, a son of David, a spinner of parables, an exorcist and a miracle worker. No one of these attributes was unique. There were other prophets, other teachers, other exorcists, other wonder workers. But no other figure, Meier said, combined all these talents.
Despite the uncertainties in New Testament exegesis, the outlines of Jesus’ ministry seem clear enough. He emerged from an obscure and ordinary life as a woodworker in Nazareth, a hill town in Galilee, then joined John the Baptist. Jesus broke away to start his own movement, poaching some of John’s disciples, practicing his form of ritual immersion and preaching his eschatological message. But Jesus emphasized the good news, that God was coming to save all of Israel. Performing exorcisms and practicing faith healing, he patterned himself after another prophet from Northern Israel, the miracle-working Elijah, whom the Jews associated with the coming kingdom of God. Jesus appointed an inner circle of 12 disciples symbolizing the 12 tribes of Israel, reinforcing the idea that salvation would come to all Jews.
Despite the lack of formal training, Jesus taught his own interpretation of the Mosaic law. He elevated the humanitarian aspects of Judaism to the fore, preaching a radical ethic of love, mercy and forgiveness. It is nonsense, as some Christians have done, to suggest that Jesus wanted to abrogate or nullify the Torah. The Jewish law was a given – “the sacred canopy” of his teaching, Meier said. Jesus’ radical insistence upon doing God’s will completely and without compromise may have conflicted with other interpretations, particularly the practice of divorce, but his logic and symbolism were thoroughly Jewish.
Somewhere along the line, Jesus angered the Temple aristocracy. Around the year 30 C.E., Meier said, Jesus went to Jerusalem in a “make it or break” confrontation with the people in power. A belief had spread among his followers that he was descended from King David. After the attack on the moneychangers in the Temple, Caiaphas and the other high priests might have seen Jesus as a Davidic claimant and a threat to public order. Launching a pre-emptive strike, they arrested Jesus before things got out of control. Pontius Pilate crucified him on the charge of claiming to be King of the Jews.
What sort of Jew was Jesus? He defied simple categories. He fit no formulas. But the total pattern, “the gestalt,” was unique, Meier said. Such a conclusion is not entirely satisfying, he conceded. “I can well imagine Regis Philbin asking, ‘Is that your final answer?’ … That sort of answer will have to do for now.”
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Meier’s study of the historical Jesus has consumed more than 14 years. As a benchmark of his thinking, Meier said, he occasionally refers to an article he wrote about the historical Jesus for the New Jerome Biblical Commentary in the mid 1980s. The outlines of his interpretation have remained consistent, but he has refined his outlook in a number of areas.
As a result of his inquiries, Meier says, he has elevated the importance he attaches to John the Baptist as the mentor of Jesus. Also, his examination of Jesus’ miracles led him to the view that Jesus modeled himself as an Elijah-like prophet of the end time. There were only three miracle workers in the Old Testament – Moses, Elijah and Elisha. Elijah was an itinerant prophet from Northern Israel; so was Jesus. Elijah called a disciple, Elisha, to follow him; Jesus summoned disciples to follow him. Elijah was expected to return at the end time; Jesus saw himself as an end-of-time prophet. “That’s not where my quest was supposed to go,” Meier said, but the evidence was compelling. “My arms were twisted to come to that conclusion.”
Meier also revised his thinking about the parables. There is no question that Jesus taught in parables, but there is reason to suspect that many of his best-loved stories were either invented or altered by the early church. As he writes his fourth volume of Marginal Jew, he said, he will rethink the parables from the start.
Meier is modest about his own contribution to the study of the historical Jesus. He commenced his work around the same time as the Jesus Seminar. And, though he certainly hadn’t intended such when he began, “in one sense, my work has been a detailed argument against every single thing the Jesus Seminar ever said.” On a more positive note, he has taken the Jewishness of Jesus with utter seriousness. Previous quests for the historical Jesus denied his Jewishness or made Judaism a negative foil against which the positive Jesus could be defined. One of the delights of working at Notre Dame has been the ability to collaborate with “an incredibly international, ecumenical group” of Catholics and Protestants — and Jews. If he can advance the appreciate of Jesus as a Jew, Meier said, it’s all the contribution he could hope for.
As Meier winds up his study of the historical Jesus, he is looking forward to future projects. His next project will focus on the Gospel of Matthew. After that, he may return to the historical Jesus. He has kept his historical study “militantly untheological,” he said, but he looks forward to engaging in theology. “I’ll begin dialoguing with my theological colleagues and ask if they see [the historical Jesus] as useful for contemporary Christology.”
– May 1, 2002