The Christ of faith: this is not a history quiz.

There has been a renewal of interest in the "historical Jesus" recently, much of it centered around the publication of John P. Meir's A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (Doubleday, 1991), and John Dominic Crossan's The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (HarperSan Francisco, 1991). There is an understandable fascination with the question: it is central to Christian teaching that a particular person, Jesus of Nazareth, was born and was killed at a specific time - "under Pontius Pilate," as the Nicene Creed makes a point of saying - and what is claimed for him by Christians is that he was God's Son, one with God, so that in seeing him we see the God who is, the Father who sent the Son and sends the Spirit to us.

To want to know more about this person historically is only natural for people who live at the end of the twentieth century. The "historical Jesus" is the one we can all try to agree about - Christians, Jews, agnostics - the one who existed historically, apart from the claims made about him, by himself (maybe or maybe not), by his first followers (probably), by later generations of Christians (certainly). A distinction has been made between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith.

People are threatened on both sides of this. The people who have problems with the Christ of faith are the more obviously troubled: they can't stand the Christian claim that someone has ended death's reign by enduring death and overcoming it, through a real resurrection his followers are encouraged to hope for. If this is true it changes the way our accustomed world of life and death must be regarded. There is no way around this. You accept it or you deny it. This "either/or" is not congenial to a certain sort of allegorical approach to the story of Jesus, which would rather see resurrection as a metaphor for any kind of desired recovery, or any form of enlightenment. Thomas Jefferson was among those who made Jesus relevant by removing from the Gospels anything which made Thomas Jefferson uncomfortable. (He did this, among other things, to make the gospel comprehensible to Indians, who - he seemed to know - would be better served by a deistic, Enlightenment-style Jesus, the moralistically inclined gentleman of Galilee.)

But there are believers who have a problem with the concern of those who care about the Jesus of history. We have been given "the Christ of faith" by an ongoing, living tradition, whereas "the Christ of history" is a secular concern, a worry for those who have rejected the belief in a presently living Christ from the start. Why bother yourself with this?

There are several good reasons. One is that research into the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Judaism that was current at the time of Jesus has revealed a much less monolithic Judaism than had been traditionally supposed; this alters some of the ways in which we have to read Paul and the Gospels. (John, for example, is not nearly so Hellenistic as many scholars had assumed.) Another is that such archaeological discoveries as the probability that the pool at Bethsaida at which Jesus cured a paralytic was a pagan, not a Jewish, healing shrine, can shift the ways in which we read the Gospel, and should: here we have a rabbi working a cure in a pagan place. These discoveries - entirely modern, totally historical - are important to biblical understanding. We know more about Jesus, and how to read the New Testament, when we know more about the world in which he lived, and the social and religious framework within which he worked.

But there is a most reasonable objection to at least some of the emphasis on the historical Jesus. That is the notion that we will know more about what really matters most about Jesus when we learn more facts. The emphasis on factual historical detail reads back a very modern concern into a past which, for important reasons, didn't regard the significance of a life as something one could discern by rummaging through biographical details; this would have seemed, to some of our ancestors, as unreasonable as looking for signs of the future in the entrails of sacrificially slaughtered pigeons.

There is something odd about the growth of the New Testament canon from a modern point of view. The earliest writings are Paul's, and the earliest of these is probably I Thessalonians. There are no details here about Jesus other than what is preached as a present reality: he died, rose, and is present, will save us from the wrath to come, and the dead in Christ will rise.

The earliest Jesus we encounter is the Jesus of faith. Only after a couple of generations of Christians do we find anything like "biographies" of Jesus, and they aren't histories in any modern sense. The sermon on the mountain in Matthew becomes a sermon on the plain in Luke, with significant differences; genealogies conflict; various accounts in the synoptic Gospels differ in what would, from a historical point of view, be important details; the Gospel of John has no Eucharist at the Last Supper, which is not a Passover meal in John; and so forth. These "contradictions" are routinely trotted out by people who imagine that they were never noticed by Christians. (The saddest spectacle is the fundamentalist attempt to reconcile what can't and was never meant to be reconciled here, a doomed effort which assumes the journalistic-historical approach to the Gospels to be the correct one.)

For the authors of the Gospels the questions to be answered were not "What did Jesus like for breakfast, and how tall were his relatives?" but "What did the life of this person mean for the world? What does his life mean for us?" The answers were addressed - from within a community which assumed the living presence of Jesus - to various audiences, and what we would consider important historical details (his ancestry, the place of his birth, where he preached and healed, how many were healed and under what circumstances, the direction of his sojourning in Galilee) are used and varied to make theological points, not to give biographical details. Jesus is the new Moses for Matthew, so his teaching must be given from a mountain.

Even the prejudice that makes the synoptic Gospels seem more "historical" than the Gospel of John, because they concur more and feel to us, at least since the early nineteenth century, more like what we call histories and biographies - even this is more a revelation of the limitations of our way of understanding a narrative than a sign that we might be closer there to what Jesus was "really like."

While it is true to say that there is no contradiction between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith, that isn't really the way to put the question. The Jesus of history is finally both real (no serious scholar doubts that Jesus was a real person) and probably, in the sense that modern people demand historical evidence, more or less inaccessible - certainly inaccessible if what is desired is independent verification of Gospel accounts. That doesn't exist. For that matter, there is only one reference to Israel in ancient Egyptian texts, and it is part of a list of defeated enemies. As in the case of Israel, the question isn't who or what can be proven to have existed historically, but how we are related to it.

The Christ of faith is the only Jesus who can finally matter to a believer. The earliest scriptural layer we have confronts us with the Jesus of faith; and later Scripture doesn't speak of history but of one who was crucified and whose tomb was empty, a way of returning later believers to Paul's earlier emphasis on Jesus' death and Resurrection. To the earliest Christians, and to us, the question was not, "what was he like historically," but the one Jesus put to his followers: "Who do you say that I am?" The gentlemanly Jesus, the great ethical teacher, the mystic who has everything in common with mystics of every age - this is not only not the Jesus of faith; it is not even the Jesus of history. This is the Jesus who leaves us more or less where we are, undisturbed. It is remarkable, if not at all surprising, how much Thomas Jefferson's Jesus resembles Thomas Jefferson. I like Blake on these contradictions: "The vision of Christ that thou dost see/Is my vision's greatest enemy.../Thine is a friend to all mankind;/ Mine speaks parables to the blind."