Do the gospels paint a clear picture of Jesus?

For decades scripture scholars have been questioning the veracity of everything in the New Testament from the true site of Jesus, birth to the reality of the Resurrection. Others claim that every word in the Bible is literally write. Noted expert Jerome Murphy-O'Connor takes a different tack.

"I treat the texts as witnesses, whereas many other scholars treat them as defendants - as if the texts were somehow guilty," says Murphy-O'Connor, who delights in puzzling over the many obvious inconsistencies he and his students at the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem come across.

Murphy-O'Connor is recognized the world over for his scholarship on Saint Paul's and other New testaments. texts. His books include Becoming Human Together (Liturgical Press, 1982), St. Paul's Corinth (Liturgical Press, 1983), The Holy Land: An Archaeological Guide (Oxford University Press, 1992), and his latest, Paul: A Critical Life (Oxford University Press, 1996).

Murphy O'-Connor is not shy about saying what he thinks. Mary, he says, considered Jesus an embarrassment to the family until after his crucifixion, when she came to believe in him. And unlike some of the debunkers of the story of the Resurrection, Murphy-O'Connor defends it as true.

Is he always so sure of himself? "I never say maybe," says Murphy-O'Connor. "I have no problem changing my mind if someone brings up a new bit of evidence, but I'm always definite. I think I owe that to people."

Why do we need to learn

anything about the historical Jesus 

in the first place?

I think people are interested in the historical Jesus because they want to know that there's a historical basis to their faith. Christian ideals can be found in many other religions, but what is unique about Christianity is that it claims that one man actually lived up to these ideals. Consequently it's important to know as much as possible about this historical character.

I'm certainly biased toward history When you live in the Holy Land as I do, you instinctively adapt a radically different perspective from other scholars. I have colleagues who ask me, "Is there any evidence that Bethlehem exists?", I tell them, yes, go down to the corner and get on the bus that says "Bethlehem" on the window.

I treat the texts as witnesses, whereas many other scholars treat them as defendants, as if the texts were somehow guilty - rotten, cheap propaganda that must be proven wrong. I tend to read the texts as I read a newspaper - if I have a reason to be critical, then I become skeptical or suspicious, but the text must be given the benefit of the doubt.

Can you give an example

of how your approach differs

from other scholars?

The virgin birth is a good example. Many scholars will say this is impossible. Then they'll quote examples of similar stories from Greco-Roman literature of gods copulating with humans and claim that the Christians were just adding their own version of that myth. Now, there were such myths at the time, but the Jewish viewed their as pornographic. A conservative Jewish community, such as the one Matthew was writing for, would have no tolerance at all for that sort of story There's no sensible reason why the early Christians would have created a virgin birth myth. It wouldn't attract people to Jesus - it would have had exactly the opposite impact.

What about the story of Jesus' birth

in Bethlehem? Some people claim

that's questionable, too.

Some scholars say that because the first Christians saw Jesus as the Messiah, they had to say he was born in Bethlehem because of the earlier prophecies, whether he really was born there or not. Wrong again. The Jews at that time believed in many different kinds of messiahs, and the one to come out of Bethlehem was supposed to be warrior king, which was exactly what Jesus was not. That's why he got into trouble with a number of disciples, and I suspect even with his mother.

So why would anyone invent something that just generated problems? The Jews were also waiting for a priestly messiah - a gentle, peace-loving sort of messiah - so why didn't his disciples portray Jesus along those lines? answer is that they were stuck withe fact that he was born in Bethlehem.

Now I think he was born in Bethlehem because that's where Mary and Joseph lived. Luke's version of the census was a mistake - any census ordered by the Roman emperor would not apply to Judea, which was not a Roman province.

Luke's story of isolation, of Mary and Joseph coming into a strange village - I don't think there's any historical basis for that at all. The reality was much worse. Herod was in his declining years, and his children were fighting over who would succeed him. Bethlehem was named in scripture as the one place from which a warrior king of Judea would come. You can bet your life that Herod's secret police were all over the place. We know that at any moment Herod could raze the whole village if it would give him 10 minutes, peace. So under those conditions it made perfect sense for a husband to say to his wife, "Let's get the hell out of here until this lunatic dies." There were only two roads out of Bethlehem, one north into Jerusalem and one south to Egypt. Joseph and Mary may have only gone across the border, but they stayed there until Herod died. They may have planned to come back to Bethlehem, but it turned out that Herod's son was as bad as his father, and they ended up moving to Nazareth.

Why Nazareth?

Because it's only an hour's walk from Sepphoris, the capital of Galilee, which was being rebuilt by Herod's son. Joseph probably envisioned work for himself for 10 or 12 years. He wouldn't have put his wife and child in the immediate vicinity because the city itself would have been a very rough environment. But I imagine the sober married men looked for villages within easy walking distance in which to set up house.

Was Jesus an only child

In the gospels of Matthew and Mark, four brothers are named, and two sisters are named in later sources. The impression given by the apocryphal literature, meaning early Christian writings not included in the New Testament, was that the siblings of Jesus were much older. So I would suggest that they were children of Joseph by a previous marriage. That's confirmed by the fact that Jesus was known as "son of Mary," a boy was known by his mother's name only when there were multiple wives of the same father. The first Christians weren't stupid. How could they think of Mary as a perpetual virgin if in fact she had six children after Jesus?

But we usually hear that the

brothers of the Lord were

realty cousins.

Eusebius of Vercelli identifies the second bishop of Jerusalem as a cousin of Jesus. So the early Christians didn't routinely use brother, to mean cousin. "James, the brother of the Lord," is probably just that. Of course, his siblings weren't disciples of Jesus during his lifetime, so they weren't very prominent.

So now Jesus is growing up

in Nazareth ...

On the fringes of a big international work camp, which is very important. Most traditional Catholics in their souls think Jesus grew up in a tabernacle, or at least in a village in a remote valley through which no one ever passed. He actually grew up on the side of the main road between Sepphoris and Jerusalem. Presumably he helped his father in Sepphoris, where there were Roman engineers, decorators from Greece, and the riffraff of the Roman world. Instead of imagining a sheltered existence, think of a street-smart kid who picked up what he could culturally, linguistically, and financially in that sort of workplace.

Would Jesus have known

he was special?

Mary must have told him but that's all she could tell him. That's why I take seriously the episode of Joseph and Mary finding the young Jesus with the elders in the Temple. If you read the story closely, you'll see that Luke has overlaid one story with another. In one verse Jesus is questioning the elders, and yet it also says they were amazed at his answers. Now that's the literary technique known as the glorification of the hero. Going to the Temple was obviously part of his quest to discern his vocation. But he gets no answers there, so he has to wait until John the Baptist arrives. What happens during that interval we don't know. He would certainly have inherited the trade of his father, who was described as an artisan. You might think of Joseph as a small-town builder who could do everything.

So what role did John the Baptist

play?

Jesus thought that John could provide the answer that the teachers in the Temple failed to produce. For Jesus to visit John, he had to take a full week off work - it's a four-day walk from Galilee to the Jordan. The matter must have been urgent. After Jesus was baptized by John in the Jordan, he became a disciple of John's, preaching what John was preaching: observance to Judaic law. Obey the law perfectly, and God will smile on you. This is the message of all the Jewish prophets, of which John was one. When John was arrested, Jesus became the leader of his movement. But the Jesus we know in the gospels is certainly not preaching obedience to the law. So we have to explain this "second conversion." How and why did Jesus stop being a disciple of John the Baptist and start thinking of himself as the Messiah?

How did it happen?

I think it can only be explained in socioeconomic terms. In Matthew, Chapter 11, Jesus is proclaimed as a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. "A glutton and a drunkard," was a formal, legal phrase referring to a rebellious son. Why is Jesus rebellious? Because he's a friend of tax collectors and sinners. Sinner is a technical term, meaning not people who commit sin, but people in a line of business that facilitates dishonesty. There are lists of sinners in Jewish sources: donkey drivers, camel drivers, sailors, shepherds. Why are they sinners? Because they can pilfer. There's no such thing as a good shepherd in Jewish law. Shepherds are by definition sinners.

Because they steal sheep?

Exactly. Or they might eat a few of the lambs and tell their boss, "Sorry, the flock wasn't very healthy this year." Then they could sell the wool, sell the meat and make some money on the side.

Jewish law is very stringent on dishonesty: thieves were obliged to restore what was taken, plus 20 percent of the value. If Jesus is criticized for associating with these people, it must be because he wasn't demanding any change in their lifestyle. He was accepting them as sinners and eating with them. A shared meal was a significant sign of acceptance.

Why did he accept them?

The economic situation in Galilee at the time was very tenuous for small farmers. The taxes in Galilee have been estimated by scholars to be about 60 percent of income, Jews had to pay taxes to the Temple and taxes to the king. Many farmers were forced to sell their land to get out of debt-remember all the parables of Jesus that deal with the problem of debt.

So these farmers became land-less; they ended up taking jobs as herdsmen, donkey drivers, and so on. Jesus was forced to confront that situation, and this is where he begins to break with John the Baptist. John would have said to these people, "You've got repent, you've got to change your lifestyle." But Jesus began to see them not as sinners but as unfortunate people who were forced into these trades by socioeconomic forces over which they had no control. He told them, "God loves you," without asking for any change in their lifestyle. Jesus accepted people as they were. That was the scandal.

Jesus realizes that the law has to be viewed critically Then he brings that conflict right out into the open by certain specific healings: the woman with the hemorrhage and the man with the withered arm. In these cases, the sick person doesn't ask for healing. It,s Jesus who calls forth the sick person and says, "I'm going to heal you," in the synagogue on Saturday. The rabbis object. Why? Because these diseases were not life-threatening. If they were life-threatening, Jesus could act on the Sabbath - the law permitted that. Jesus is making a very explicit statement: God's mercy is available seven days a week. He's setting himself above the law. Jesus continues this at the start of the Sermon on the Mount, where he says "It was said to you of old ... but now I say to you ..." He's putting himself not merely on the level of Moses but correcting Moses.

What was Mary's attitude

toward Jesus?

Mary didn't believe in Jesus, mission during his lifetime. In Mark 3:21 it says, "He went home again, and once more such a crowd collected that they could not even have a meal. When his relatives heard of this, they set out to take charge of him, convinced he was out of his mind."

Mark then clearly identifies these relatives as Jesus, mother and brothers. Jesus was obviously considered an embarrassment to the family No gospel writer would invent a story like that at a later stage.

Mary certainly knew that her son was special, but she may have been led astray by the fact of his birth in Bethlehem, which indicated to her that he was supposed to be a warrior messiah - which of course he was not.

Do you think she was actively

disapproving of his ministry?

It was something with which she had to struggle. She became a disciple only after the Passion, as the brothers of Jesus did. Mary appears at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, and Jesus, brother James appears very shortly thereafter.

Mary wasn't at the foot of the cross, according to the synoptic gospels - Matthew, Mark, and Luke. All sorts of insignificant people are mentioned in these gospels as present at the foot of the cross; it's totally implausible that they would have left out Jesus, mother.

But doesn't she appear at the foot

of the cross in John's gospel?

Only in John's gospel, the last written. By then her absence had become such a scandal that she had to be inserted into the narrative.

What about all this theology

about Mary being the first disciple

of Jesus? is that just political

correctness.?

I don't want to shock people, but I think it's healthy if we gain a real respect for Mary, if we see that she had to work through the same doubts as every other woman does about the future of her child. Is he doing the right thing? Is he doing the wrong thing? Mary had to struggle for faith, just as we do.

What about the wedding feast

at Cana?

That's John again. I think at Cana Mary appears to be aware of Jesus, miraculous powers. But maybe she was wondering whether he should be using those powers to raise an army rather than healing the sick. He was, after all, the Davidic messiah. I see Mary as a model of faith, but a model of faith through great anguish and despair at certain moments. Then she comes to believe.

When did Jesus start to realize

what his true mission was?

The key episode here is the Trans-figuration account found in Luke, which I think has a historical nucleus. Jesus and his disciples go up onto a mountain. There he prays, and as he prays, the aspect of his face changes. Two men, or angels, in bright robes appear with him, speaking of his exodus, which he would fulfill in Jerusalem. "Exodus" can have two meanings: the exodus from Egypt, and also the exit from this life - dying.

The meaning here is that Jesus, death will be a saving event, which is part of God's plan. That's the answer. But the answer to what? What was the problem? Jesus was convinced that he had a mission from God and that his mission was superior to the law. He also recognized that the powers of evil were going to block him, that he was going to be killed as John the Baptist was. He wasn't a great success. Not many people were listening to him.

As far as Jews of this time were concerned, there were no historical accidents: everything was under God's control. So Jesus faced a dilemma: what God was giving with the one hand, he was taking away with the other. Then in a moment of prayer, the solution suddenly hit him, and his face lit up.

The answer was that his death would not be the abortion of his ministry, but the means whereby his mission would be fulfilled. That's the meaning of the original nucleus of the Transfiguration story Even though he came to this insight, he still had to fight his way through perplexities and trials, which you find in the temptation narratives.

So you're saying that at the

Transfiguration, he knew he was

going to be killed?

Sure, but that had been clear all along. Every prophet had been killed. Jesus could see, by the upset he was causing in the synagogue every Saturday, that he was going to face real trouble.

What led Jesus to think he was the

Messiah?

When he started to work miracles this was an indication to him of God's approval.

In Matthew, Chapter 12, Jesus says, "If it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the Kingdom of God has come among you." Why does he say "if"? Is he not sure?

I would suggest that Jesus didn't know where his power to heal came from at first, but he subsequently realized that because this power was always beneficent, it must be the power of God.

He saw his power to heal as God's way of telling him that his attitude toward the law was justified. That's why he doesn't apologize when he acts in opposition to the law on the Sabbath.

Did Jesus know he would be raised

from the dead?

I think so. In Second Macabees, we see the beginning of Jewish belief that God will raise from the dead those who died obeying God,s will. Jesus, of course, was fully convinced that he was a just man obeying God,s will, so I see no reason he shouldn't,t have said, "I will be raised from the dead."

Don't some scholars question the

truthfulness of the Resurrection

accounts in the gospels?

Those scholars would say that the disciples, after the death of Jesus, somehow experienced him as living. The only way they could describe that was to use the category of resurrection.

Then, once they said he was risen, they had to say the tomb was empty But that approach is all wrong. Most Jews in the first century believed in the immortality of the soul.

They had adopted the new Greek philosophy that saw the body as the prison of the soul, an death freed the soul for immortality. So if anyone was making up stories," it would have been natural to say, "The spirit of Jesus lives."

But they didn't say that. Why did they create problems for themselves by saving that he rose from the dead, something that would satisfy' no one in the first century? As far as I'm concerned, the tomb was empty The Christians didn't have the body, and the Jews knew the Christians didn't have it. Believers could only conclude that Jesus had been raised from the dead.

Before Jesus was

crucified, did he

become aware he was actually

the Son of God?

He certainly knew it right from the beginning. That's not the sort of knowledge that starts up ten years after you're born. Self-knowledge, however, is nonconceptual. You can't tell me who you are as a distinct individual because you can't put that into words. You don't have a mental image of it. Similarly, Jesus' knowledge of his divinity would have been that sort of knowledge, so he could never have talked about it.

But if he knew he was God,

doesn't that take away his

humanity?

What is God for Christians? The only revealed definition of God we have is that God is love. If you accept that, you'll understand how the church began with Paul's understanding of Jesus as the perfect man and ended up with the divinity of Jesus as affirmed by John.

Paul had no concept of the divinity of Jesus. He'd never even thought about it; whereas it's formally part of John's gospel. For Paul, what makes a person, like Jesus, truly human is creative love, which enables and empowers others. The early Christians saw the effects of that love in the explosive growth of the church. As time went on, they realized that the only parallel to this sort of love is not human love but the divine love that created the world. This is how the church moved from understanding Jesus as the new Adam, the perfect man, to seeing Jesus as the Son of God in a genetic sense.

Did Jesus make a decision as God

to suffer for us?

No, I think he made a decision as a man to suffer for us. Even though I believe in the divinity of Jesus, I have to stop right there. I can't use that as a starting point because what the gospels tell me about God is that God's ways are not our ways

The more important question is why do Catholics want to think of Jesus as God? The reason is, if you think of him as God, you can't thin of him as a man, and then he's so far up on a pedestal that he can no longer be a role model.

Can you give an example?

The Agony in the Garden is the classic example. It,s very clear that two versions of the story have been combined in Mark's account. The most primitive text says Jesus and his disciples came to a place called Gethsemane. Jesus is a man on the edge of a complete breakdown, physical and psychological, due to fear. Then he collapses. It doesn't look like he even prays. What he says is, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. He's not even sure that God can help him.

If he had accepted that he was the Messiah, and that his death would be the high point of his mission, how did he end up like things Remember, he had recently been threatened in Jericho. After the raising of Lazarus, the danger became more imminent. The High Priest had decided that one man must die for the people.

At the Last Supper earlier that evening, he had the premonition that one of his friends was a traitor, and then he saw one of them suddenly leave the house. And with all that weighing on his mind, Jesus goes out.

Now here is where it's helpful to live in Jerusalem. Where did he walk that night? We read that he went to Gethsemane, near the Mount of Olives. With all this on his mind, on the night of a full moon, Jesus had to walk up the Kidron Valley, which was a huge graveyard with 900 years of burials.

All of a sudden death stopped being theoretical, and his whole being revolted. He had to stop and deal with it, but eventually he was able to go on. The early church could not deal with that humanity No one wants a savior who's paralyzed by fear, even though it might be only temporarily.

So the gospel writers weave another story into that more primitive version. In this later story, Jesus begins quoting Psalm 42, "My soul is sorrowful even unto death." This creates the image of Jesus as a fellow with a long list of prophecies to fulfill. Then he says, "All things are possible with you," and finally the gospel writers add the bourgeois control elements: "Not my will, but thine be done." It's a complete whitewash. There's no "shuddering horror", here, as scripture scholar Father Raymond Brown has described it. These other elements were introduced to distract us from seeing Jesus as too human.

We overemphasize the divinity of Christ not because we have great faith, but because it's a way to remove Jesus from the center of our lives. That's why Paul kept pulling people back from theology to Christ. The will of God can be made anything we want, but we can't change the meaning of following Christ.

If we really follow Jesus, then we have to give up everything for others. We couldn't walk past a homeless person without doing something about it, and none of us wants to be in that situation. So instead, we try to change Jesus to justify ourselves and our comfortable version of Christianity

Well, how did Christianity get so

popular if no one wants to do

anything Jesus asks of us?

In the early church, when it was a difficult thing to be a Christian, you did see people suffering for each other. The description of the early Christians was "Look how they love one another," and the meaning there is "Look how they empower one another." No one in America will define love as power. Love to us means openness - I'll help you if you bother to ask. But in the New Testament, love is power that reaches out. Why don't we want that definition? Because then we can tell if we truly love someone.

How are prayers answered?

Each statement about the prayer of petition in the New Testament is associated with a statement about fraternal charity. We are the hands and ears of God. And if we don't listen, God doesn't hear.

So if we're praying for the hungry,

we should be making sure food

gets to them?

Precisely, according to the New Testament. Prayers are answered only in a genuine community The Christ who answers prayers is we who act as the Body of Christ.

Do you always sound so sure

of yourself?

I never say maybe. It's like saving to someone, "l love you-maybe." I have no problem changing my mind if someone brings up a new bit of evidence, but I'm always definite. I think I owe that to people. I certainly owe it to students.

Don't you think most average

Christians read the Bible with an

optimism similar to yours?

The Bible is a collection of books, a library. Some books are peotry, some prose, some history, some fantasy - even rather erotic fantasy like the Song of Songs. You should read the Bible as you would any other body of literature. Poetry, has its own way, of conveying truth - so do fiction, drama, and history.

The trouble is that people are brought to the Bible without preparation. Even though they, may be English majors, they're told the Bible is the word of God, so they approach it in a completely different way - a fundamentalist way Then, once they see that fundamentalism doesn't work, because there are far too many different versions of stories that cannot be reconciled, their instinctive reaction is to become hypercritical, to say the whole Bible is myth.

What about people who just use

the Bible to help them in their

spiritual life, and who don't worry

about historical accuracy.?

I think that's a perfectly valid approach, one which n percent of people use, and one which I use in my sermons, for example. The trouble is that it can lead too easily to fundamentalism. So I'd suggest that that approach should be used only in a group, which can help cancel out our subjective biases. The group has to decide whose perception is accurate, and by doing so the members will get most of the spiritual message of the gospels. Some people will feel the need to learn more about why the accounts are different, and that's where scholars like me come in. But man people will never feel a need for that at all.

How do you begin to sort out

contradictions then when you read

your Bible?

Paul in First Corinthians is a good example. In Chapter 11 you find one text that gives women a leader ship role in public liturgy. They pray and prophesy, which is the equivalent of giving the homily. In Chapter 14, you find a flat prohibition that women must not speak in public. The prohibition in Chapter 14 was not written by Paul, but it's still part of the canonical scripture. So we have to choose between the two.

By comparing the texts to what else

Paul has written?

Yes, but also we have to consider the newness of the gospel and the oldness of the world. If a statement reflects the values of the world - a put - down of women, for example that statement comes from the world, not from the gospel.

And if we find a new insight the goes against the grain of society, that is the message of the gospel. We can also look back and see the egalitarianism of the Jesus movement and note the return of patriarchalism in later texts. The version chosen has to include the central features of the gospel, and one of those is newness.

Aren't some people afraid to

confront the inconsistencies in the

Bible? After all, most Catholics

don't feel equipped to deal with

these historical questions.

If I were teaching high-school New Testament, I'd highlight every difference in the New Testament accounts and say, "Okay, let's see how we can solve this problem." Students are then drawn into the excitement of the detective quest, and very quickly you'll find that theological reasons are being introduced: "John put this bit in because he had this particular belief."

So the historical approach is not

something to be afraid of?

No, not at all. But we should be afraid of the fundamentalist approach that, as I said, can lead to pure skepticism once you realize that the different accounts don't match up.

Don't you think this interview will

make people feel like they have to

second guess everything they read

in the Bible?

But they should pay attention to the inconsistencies. That's God's way of teaching us. God has given us four versions to force us to think about them, not simply in a spiritual way but in a human way. Which version is closer to the truth? They can't all be right.

I think this is all part of God's teaching, which legitimates our need to think in this critical way, which then brings out other dimensions of the original story.

And don't forget that people don't take scripture scholars all that seriously. The people we really upset you could count on the fingers of one hand. Thank God for that.