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.

Book Review: A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus

Review of John P. Meier's, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus

John Meier, in appropriate keeping with Historical Jesus questers, warns us up front of the challenges that really shades this field of research. The picture of Jesus that he draws so far for us in this book, in keeping with the methodological rigor, is someone who is quite "marginal" - someone in the social periphery. This Jesus was, even during his ministry, someone who stayed in that periphery until his fateful clash with authorities. This book is still only the first of Meier's as-of-yet incomplete corpus, but it clearly outlines Meier's sensitivity to ancient texts and his dialogue with other historical Jesus scholarship, particularly butting heads with "sensationalist" writers.

I am, however, most taken in by what I had referred to as Meier's methodological rigor, particularly the criteria that he uses to sift fact from "fiction" in the Jesus narratives. Particularly because of the sensitive faith issues, Meier is careful to not use the word "fiction" but simply relegates such material as unprovable or matters of faith. But, I think, he is fair in this matter: Just as he rejects the Gnostic texts, including the Gospel of Thomas, he rejects the Genealogies of Jesus as bereft of information for the Historical Jesus, though for different reasons.

To give an example of one of his criteria, he cites the Criterion of Embarassment. This is basically any of the "hard" truths that would have been embarassing to the early church but had become too connected to the historical figure of Jesus to be discarded. These could be phrases, actions, etc. For example, the phrase, "I have a dream" is forever associated with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; It is the same with Jesus as an inferior when he is openly baptised by John the Baptist, for the "baptism of repentance and forgiveness of sins." Particularly fascinating, for me, is the claim that such actions/words traceable to Jesus remained within the tradition because of a strong "conservative" force within the religious body (however it might have looked like). I imagine a coalition of the "oldies" (A Mary or two, Peter, James, maybe Paul will pop up now and again. Thomas would of course be somewhere in India) mentoring the newbies.

I do not want to write too much about it, since it really is something that you should read on your own, but one minor detail: I really wish that it was written in paperback. It's quite large and difficult to carry around. Also, the book itself is quite short: it is the endnotes that take up a good half of the book. Still, if you're interested in this kind of stuff, this is a must-read. It's rigor and attribute to detail is really great.

BTW, Meier's is a Catholic Priest. :)

Excerpts from A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus

These are found in the chapter titled, Conclusion to Part One: Why Bother?

Funny Quote:

Fundamentalists object to the quest for the exact opposite reason: the historical Jesus is naively equated with the Jesus presented in all Four Gospels. All tensions and contradictions in the four narratives are harmonized by hilarious mental acrobatics. (197)

Good Quote:

Against any attempt to 'domesticate' Jesus for a comfortable, respectable bourgeois Christianity, the quest for the historical Jesus, almost from its inception, has tended to emphasize the embarassing, noncomformist aspects of Jesus: e.g., his association with the religious and social 'lowlife' of Palestine, his prophetic critique of external religious observances that ignore or strangle the inner spirit of religion, his opposition to certain religious authorities, especially the Jerusalem priesthood. (199)

I-don't-get-it Quote:

Like good sociology, the historical Jesus subverts not just some ideologies, but all ideologies, including liberation theology. (199)