Jesus as Man: Acts 5:35-39

What does it mean that Jesus was man? (warning: pretentious, pseudo-intellectual, and potentially blasphemous musings ahead; I also freely admit I was and am heavily influenced by Levinas and Kierkegaard, that is, to the best of my ability to understand them)

Perhaps this theological truth carries far more weight than has been traditionally explained. While tradition says Jesus was fully man, it does so in dealing only with his ontology, which confines Jesus' humanity solely into the idea that he was man, and totally ignoring the external aspects of mankind.

While ontology is limited to interiority (ie., what is man? How do you describe man?), one can and must also talk about the exteriority of man - which deals with the location - both spatially and temporally - of man (ie., where is man? How do you locate him in time - culture, society, etc?) Because all things in creation are historically-mediated, that is, they exist through history, we must also be able to locate man within that same mediation. Therefore, because man is historically-mediated, Jesus must also have been if he was to be fully man.

This might come as a no-brainer to many people, but if so, I would really challenge them to think about the issue and press it further. If Jesus was historically-mediated, and he must have been since he was fully man, then he must have been born into a world in which he was similar to the others around him. This is not to say that he was not unique, but at the exterior level, he must have come at a moment when his contemporaries would have found him unremarkable in relation to other's who had preceded, contemporaneous, and after him.

So how do we situate Jesus? Firmly in the late second-Temple Era in Israel, a time when many "prophets" and wonder-workers arose: Honi the Circle-Drawer, Judas the Galilean, Theudas, The Egyptian, Simon "the Magician," perhaps even, John the Baptist, the Essenes, and later, Simon bar Kochba. By coming from this very milieu, with its many colorful figures, Jesus demonstrated his full humanity.

To make this even more specific, within the breadth of this time period, Jesus would have been no one particularly special in his exteriority; and this is precisely what was necessary. In order for Jesus to have been fully man, he must have come at a time in which he would not have been recognized by the retrospective eyes of history (though not necessarily by the contemporaneous individual who is easily amazed by Jesus' miracles) as someone altogether special. Jesus hardly announced his dual nature, fully man (in both interior and exterior sense) and fully God, to the world with a blast of the shofer.

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I wish I was a child again because everything was new back then.