The Three Faces of Jesus

As a student of philosophy I’m always interested in how people perceive the cosmos in an organised way. A shared view of how the universe works relies on a certain amount of faith. If someone says that lightning is made by a thunder god, and they say it convincingly enough, they will be believed, and then they will be at odds with another group of people who believe in electricity and charged particles and so on. The two groups get together, sparks fly.

There are a great many religions, and they all have some things in common and some things in opposition. For example, all seem to agree that the earth was created in some fashion, but there are a great number of views as to how that happened, exactly. It’s always entertaining to read various creation stories to see how the topic is approached.

How, wise teacher, was the world made?

–me, age five

And, of course, there has to be a creation story. If a wise man cannot answer such a simple question, then what sort of wise man is he? It is not enough for a priest to say, “Well, I dunno” or “it exists, enjoy”; no, there has to be a divine being who shaped the mud, or pulled light down from the sky, or hocked out a loogie or whatever. And once you go down that rabbit hole of gods and divine actions there’s no stopping a fanciful priest.

One of the major religions of our time is Christianity. Not the oldest, not the newest, not the most coherent, but it is certainly popular. I have many friends who are Christian and they seem to me to have a curious mixture of belief in things that are of immense value — such as the concept of loving one another and being of service to the community — and things that are patently ridiculous, such as man and brontosaurus walking together.

Nevertheless, the central figure of Christianity — Jesus — is a figure of importance in our modern world of cultural thought, and I like learning more about how this happened.

My current read is Bart Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God, a best-seller exploring the first three centuries of Christianity and the changing views of Jesus. (Amazon affiliate link above, but if you go to your local library or independent bookstore, that’s even better.)

Professor Ehrman has written several books on religious topics from a historical perspective. A biblical scholar — meaning he reads Ancient Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew — looking at how the sacred texts of the religion came to be written, he comes up with some illuminating and entertaining views of Christianity.

I urge my readers to read through the book, watch the filmed lectures, read his blog, maybe sign up for the video course. Ehrman knows his stuff, has a few jokes, gives many examples. Not a believer himself, he treats those who do believe with respect and understanding, and I like that.

The first face of Jesus: the man in his time

There are those who reject the notion of Jesus being a historical figure of any sort. They say the character was made up by someone — most likely Paul — writing fiction.

I cannot support this view. There are too many diverse sources for there not to have been some historical figure for the stories told by different people to have been based on.

The historical Jesus was born a Jew in the Roman province of Galilee around the year dot. No exact date is possible and there are various different stories of his birth and childhood. What we can be sure about is that he grew to manhood, became a preacher with a following, and was executed by the Romans in Jerusalem.

The details of his career and death differ but they all contain some common ground: he came to Jerusalem with some publicity, caused a stir, was betrayed to the Temple priests by Judas, there was a trial before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate on a charge of sedition, and he was crucified for his claim to be king of the Jews.

His disciples scattered but — and here the story becomes really interesting — some of them claimed to have seen Jesus risen from the dead.

Ehrman gives a plausible alternate view of the resurrection, based on the historical practices of the Romans. This does not involve burial and the discovery of an empty tomb some time later but is rather more gruesome and credible.

Nevertheless, he is adamant that the disciples of Jesus were sincere in their belief that they had seen their teacher risen from the dead, and at this point Christianity began.

The story of Socrates and Plato mirrors the situation. Socrates made many powerful enemies in Ancient Athens and was executed by the state. His student Plato was so incensed by this injustice that he made an effort to record the teachings of Socrates in a series of dialogues and these remarkable texts have survived to this day.

The students of Jesus were in a similar situation. They were determined that the teachings continue, and they did just this, spreading the good words of Jesus throughout the known world.

They were illiterate folk so they didn’t write the stories and sayings down but they could talk and teach and the messages were passed on through oral transmission.

There was nobody with a steno pad taking dictation at the Sermon on the Mount or even at the trial of Jesus. The words were remembered or reconstructed. Then again, Socrates never wrote anything down yet two and a half thousand years later we have his arguments and sayings and they make a great deal of sense.

So, to recap, the historical Jesus was born, commenced his ministry, ran foul of the authorities, was executed for sedition, and in an apparent miracle inspired his followers to continue his teaching through an oral tradition.

The second face: the Gospel Jesus

Jesus and his disciplines spread their teachings orally. They did not write anything down — they were illiterate — but gradually members of the congregations of the early churches assembled whatever stories and sayings came their way. These first texts were in Greek — the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean — and although no writings survive from the first half of the first century CE when Jesus was still a living memory, we have a few tantalising fragments that survived by being incorporated in later writings as pithy creeds or poems, such as these lines from Paul.

(The Son of God) …who was descended from the seed of David according to the flesh; who was appointed Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead.

— Romans I: 3–4

We know that Paul did not compose these words because they do not reflect his own view on the divinity of Jesus, and they contain words and phrases not used elsewhere in his writing. Paul used this fragment to introduce himself and presumably to include some familiar words to establish his bona fides.

Other texts were extant as sources for those later incorporated in the New Testament or as apocryphal books not seen as canon, such as the Gospel of Thomas. They are called Q, L, M and so on, and we have a very rough idea of what they contained. They are lost as physical texts, however.

Barring some archaeological find like the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Nag Hammadi Library, we must rely on the New Testament, which began to be written in the later half of the first century CE. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans mentioned above was composed around 55 CE.

These first texts were not written by anyone who had ever met Jesus in the flesh or heard him speak. Paul certainly hadn’t.

The Gospel attributed to Matthew was probably written by a well-educated Jew around the year 80 CE, a half century after the execution of Jesus.

The earliest of the surviving physical texts of the New Testament dates from 125 CE, well after the original had been composed. We are dealing with copies of copies, each copy having a chance of introduced error or editorial amendment.

By this time, Jesus was long gone, as was anyone who had ever met him or heard him speak. The New Testament is not so much the story of Jesus as it is the story of the early Christian churches. However, it is what we have, and we can reconstruct a fair bit of what Jesus taught, the events of his life, and what his followers did and said.

What is overwhelmingly evident is that as time went on the facts of Jesus’ life were modified and added to. Jesus was a young Jewish man, and he almost certainly had a wife and family, of whom we know very little and then only by inference. The story of his birth and infancy differs from gospel to gospel; only Matthew and Luke mention it. The events of Jesus’ execution and resurrection differ according to author.

The reason for these differences is not so much that the authors had different sources as that the divinity and authority of Jesus was being established. For Jesus to have a realistic claim to be the Messiah or king of Israel he had to have been born “according to scripture” into the house of David, a difficult feat for a poor tradesman’s son from the tiny village of Nazareth, so his birth was moved to Bethlehem and attended by various supernatural portents.

The fragment mentioned above ascribes his divinity or godlike nature to his resurrection, but other authors give different times: his baptism, his birth, his conception or (in the case of John) a very long time earlier, predating Abraham.

Jesus does not claim to be divine in any text but John. This is rather surprising if he had actually stated this during his lifetime. Surely such a fundamental characteristic would be noted down along with his speeches on this and that, his meals, his meetings and so on?

But no. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we get the feeling that Jesus has been somehow blessed by the Almighty and is a worthy Messiah but is not himself equal to the Jewish God.

The Jesus of the New Testament, one or two generations from the historical Jesus, is a character becoming divine and able to perform special deeds, but not yet the integral part of the Trinity that later Christians saw him as.

The third face: a part of God

By about 110 CE, the texts of what is now the New Testament had been written. The Christian churches were flourishing in the face of some determined opposition from the Roman Empire, various approaches to dogma and teachings were being worked out, and the enterprise was off to a solid start.

Once the Emperor Constantine embraced Christianity in 312 CE Christianity prospered under imperial patronage.

However, the problem of Jesus and his divinity persisted. It was clear that the Jewish God of Abraham and Moses was one god and there were no others — although there were various angels and divine beings referenced here and there — but if Jesus had been elevated to a divine status and in fact claimed to be the equal of God the Father, just how many gods were there in the Christian pantheon?

How could the Father and the Son be the same being? If one had existed before the other, then surely that implied a hierarchy of godliness?

I stress that the life of Jesus was long over by this point, the New Testament had been written (though its exact composition was still fluid, with what are now called the Apocryphal books such as the Gospel of Thomas, gradually declared to be non-canon) and what was bothering the leaders of the Christian Church was how to perceive the nature of God.

Doubtless they saw themselves as discerning the truth through logic and debate, but I prefer to think of the discussion as being more about tidying away any loose ends so that all Christians were singing off the same sheet.

Two thousand years later and that still hasn’t happened.

Constantine called a council in Nicea in 325 CE to settle the matter, and their statement, as refined by a further council in Constantinople in 381 CE, tied up all the loose threads:

We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds (æons), Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;

by whom all things were made;

who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary, and was made man;

he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father;

from thence he shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead;

whose kingdom shall have no end.

And in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spake by the prophets.

In one holy catholic and apostolic Church; we acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

The interesting thing here is that God Almighty is pretty much accepted at face value, as is the Holy Ghost, but Jesus gets the bulk of the attention and explanation.

He has changed from the wise and charismatic teacher in his life who was perceived as a possible Messiah to deliver Israel from the Roman rule and made divine at his execution, to an entity of the same substance as God the Creator who had always existed from the beginning of time, if not previously.

The concept of Jesus as a co-equal part of a monotheistic god had been nailed down and there was no wriggle room.

To my mind it all seems rather precious and cerebral. Jesus the teacher from Galilee was not the creator of the universe unless you squinted a bit and crossed your fingers, but there it was. If you didn’t say you believed wholeheartedly in all that stuff, there would be consequences.

Christianity claims 2 500 000 000 adherents and supposedly they all understand and believe in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

Personally, I rather suspect that the atheist Professor Ehrman has a better understanding of how it all hangs together than 99% of those claimed Christians, but so long as the faithful keep on putting something in the collection plate every Sabbath, does it really matter in the eyes of the church?

Britni

Bonus content: Professor Ehrman addressing a church congregation