Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age. James Carroll

of unworthiness in the face of what they suffered; how it generated disputes among themselves; and how it made undeniable the recognition that, in the terrible context of omnidirectional wars—fratricidal and imperial both—they had failed and failed again. Instead of standing up to Rome, they hid. Instead of standing up to their fellow Jews, they equivocated. Perhaps they informed on one another. Became collaborators. Ran off to caves in the desert. Or committed suicide, or helped others to do so. Perhaps they betrayed members of their own families, as Jesus himself foresaw: “Brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death.”⁶⁸

      They looked out for their own skin. They behaved as beleaguered, terrified humans always do. They were sinners, and knew it. To that condition, the Gospel spoke directly. Peter was a sinner. And he was their hero. The Lord knew precisely what sort of man Peter was, and chose him anyway. More than that, Jesus loved him. If flawed Peter could answer the call to discipleship—this was not Mark speaking, but Jesus himself—so could they.⁶⁹

      The mass violence inflicted by the Romans in 70 demanded this text. The catastrophe, centered on the destruction of the Temple, was forcing the Jesus people to look back on their memories, prayers, collected sayings, and stories in a new light. So illuminated, the people saw themselves as never before, because, as never before, they saw their Lord. Mark was first to shine that particular light on the figure of Jesus. It was light cast by the fires of war.

Chapter Three

       The Jewish Christ

      The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

      —L. P. Hartley¹

Low Christology

      His followers, all Jews, gathered after the death of Jesus to recall what they remembered of him. The men may have been given mostly to text study, searching their Bible for images and ideas that explained his significance. The women may have mainly given expression to lamentation, through the singing of psalms that had particular relevance to what Jesus meant to them. These resources became ritualized, and informed the composition of stories and hymns. As Jews, in a profoundly Jewish mode, they interpreted their present experience by means of past traditions.

      Through all of this, slowly but surely—reinterpretations of interpretations—a new literature was created. It was a version of what Jews had done before, going right back to the primordial work of the editors and redactors who, as we saw, shaped the Bible during and after the Babylonian Captivity. Experience led to recollection, which led to story. In this quite traditional way, narrative building blocks were put into place across the years after Jesus died. That some from outside the world of Israel—called Gentiles—may have been responsive to what they knew of Jesus, and may have been brought into this process, did not take away from its Jewish character. All newcomers to the Jesus movement, whether Gentile or Jew, would have been initiated into its meaning and purpose precisely by participating in such narrative reflection and reenactment. What began as memory and interpretation became proclamation, catechesis, and instruction. Gospel.

      In the form it took in the Gospel of Mark, the story builds toward, and is centered upon, the Passion narrative: the distinctive and supremely well-shaped account of Jesus’ confrontation with authority in the Temple; the plot by his enemies to arrest him; the betrayal by Judas; the anguished intensification of suspense at the Last Supper, and in the garden of Gethsemane afterward; the failure of his friends; the arrest, trials, torture, and death of Jesus. That dispiriting death, above all, was the inciting incident of the Jesus movement, and finding a hopeful interpretation for it—ultimately known as the Resurrection—was the first challenge.

      That the entire Passion drama is enacted through the hours of the Passover cycle of fast, vigil, sacrifice (literally, the slaughter of lambs), meal, and remembrance is the great clue to Mark’s purpose. With the Last Supper clearly defined as a Passover meal, scholars now conjecture that this earliest Gospel itself began as a narrative recounting the Passover liturgy as conducted by Jesus people in the formative years of the movement. They would have done this to show how Passover, Israel’s constitutive event, took on new meaning because of Jesus; or, perhaps better, how Passover’s meaning survived, especially after the Roman War put Israel’s very existence at risk. Jews were entering once again into their founding liberation—Exodus—but as an adaptation by Jews who saw in Jesus, the paschal lamb, a signal that the liberation now had an explicit meaning for them. The ancient ritual brackets of the blessings of bread and wine took on fresh resonance, the seed of the bread-and-wine Eucharistic liturgy. When the Jesus Jews gathered together for their paschal observance, that is, the story of Jesus, culminating in his death at Passover a few or many years before, would have formed the content of their worship at Passover now. Jesus is Jewish. But so is the shape of the story told about him.²

      But even scholars who mostly assume that “Jesus,” and even the Jesus texts, were Jewish, take for granted that “Christ” was not. Claims made for Jesus by his followers after his death and Resurrection, that is, immediately cut him off from Jewish meaning, especially once he was proclaimed to be “divine.” Supposedly, given the radical otherness of Yahweh, there was no place in the Jewish vision of the created cosmos for any “divine” reality or activity. That Jesus could be the preexisting Word of God—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”³—was held to be inconceivable in Jewish categories, as were claims that God could be “incarnate” in Jesus: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”⁴ This not only led to the rejection of Jesus as a blasphemer by those of his Jewish contemporaries portrayed as hearing him make such claims for himself—“Why do we still need witnesses? You have heard his blasphemy!”⁵—but has erected the defining barricade between Christians and Jews to this day. Contemporary Jews are too polite to put it this way, but ordinary Christian divinity claims for Jesus amount to idolatry.

      Some mainstream Christian scholars, aware of the importance of fully locating Jesus in his human—and therefore Jewish—milieu, informed by post-Enlightenment critiques of anthropocentric assumptions, and aware of contemporary encounters with other religious views that undermine Christian uniqueness, have gotten around these disqualifying problems by finding in the historical research little or no textual evidence for the assertion that either Jesus himself or his first followers understood him as a divine figure. Jesus never claimed to be God. He did not think of himself as God. Obviously, this is vastly more important than most head-of-a-pin scholarly debates. Whether Jesus was “God,” and knew himself to be, is the hinge on which all of Christian history turns—the past, of course, but, even more decisively, the future. Will any recognizably Christian religion survive if a straightforward belief in the divinity of Jesus is jettisoned? This question could shatter the Church. But I raise it as one who could himself be shattered. In a way, it is the problem with which this book is reckoning. We saw the question earlier, and we will see it again—and again.

      Jesus might have been a charismatic figure, a historically unique personality, or even the Jewish Messiah, in the understanding of historians and theologians who now debunk his divinity; but, they insist, he was not put forward as God. Deleting Christ’s divinity from Christian understanding requires nothing less than, as one scholar put it, “a hermeneutical critique of Christological totalization, and a religious critique of Christological idolatry.”⁶ This move away from traditional affirmations helps with the contemporary queasiness one finds in numerous academic settings about what’s called “high Christology,” the set of beliefs—the doctrinal school—that elevates Jesus to equality with God. It soothes the queasiness to be able to say that Jesus himself, and his early followers, had little or no truck with such claims. In simple terms, Jesus was a Unitarian.

      So emphasis in the skeptical scholarship is given, for example, to the fact that Jesus often called himself “Son of Man”—more than sixty times in the Gospels. Rarely, if ever, did he refer to himself as “Son of