Embarrassing Pictures of Jesus

Dr. Zulfiqar Ali Shah

Even though the central pivot of all New Testament writings is Jesus Christ and crucial information about his life, teachings, death, and resurrection, are contained in the books, none of them were written by him or under his supervision. Philip Schaff observes: “…the Lord chose none of his apostles, with the single exception of Paul, from the ranks of the learned; he did not train them to literary authorship, nor gave them, throughout his earthly life, a single express command to labor in that way.”[1] There is a consensus among biblical scholars regarding this issue, “whereas we possess documents originally written by Paul”, observes J. Jeremias, “not a single line has come down to us from Jesus’ own hand.”[2] These books were the product of later generations and are commonly accepted as the earliest, classical responses to the many-faceted aspects of Christ’s life and existence. R.M. Grant observes, that the New Testament “is the basic collection of the books of the Christian Church. Its contents, unlike those of the Old Testament, were produced within the span of a single century, under the auspices of disciples of Jesus or their immediate successors. The collection is unlike the Koran in that it contains not a word written by the founder of the community, though his spoken words are recorded by evangelists and apostles and reflected in almost all the documents.”[3]

The New Testament in its present shape, number, and order, was not available to the early Christians for centuries after the departure of Jesus and his disciples. Clarke observes that the New Testament writings were “written for the special needs of particular groups of people, and the idea of combining them into one authoritative volume was late and not in the mind of the authors. Christians, therefore, and the Christian Church might conceivably have gone on indefinitely without Christian scriptures.”[4] One of the leading factors may have been the existence of an already compiled Hebrew Bible. “Throughout the whole patristic age”, observes Kelly, “as indeed in all subsequent Christian centuries, the Old Testament was accepted as the word of God, the unimpeachable sourcebook of saving doctrine.”[5] The compilation, collection, and identification of this particular group of writings (the canonization process) as a distinct and authoritative entity resulted from a complex development within the Christian Church. It took the Church 367 years to produce a list of writings and a canon that would contain all the present-day (New Testament) canonical writings. The oldest indisputable witness to the New Testament canon is Athanasius, a fourth-century bishop of Alexandria. Throughout these long centuries, the Hebrew Bible with its strict monotheistic bent was accepted as the scripture of the Christian community. The New Testament books’ universal acceptance and authority was gradual.

Moreover, Jesus historically existed among the Jews, respected their Scripture, thought of himself as a fulfillment of their law, struggled with the Jewish religious hierarchy and claimed to be sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. There may have been features distinctive to Jesus’ understanding of God and His transcendence, but the concept as a whole would probably be not at odds with the Jewish understanding of the Deity. The earliest Christians would perforce have inherited the themes of divine transcendence and monotheism from the developed Judaism around them, meaning that the unity, uniqueness and sublimity of the Creator God must have been the indisputable premise of the original Church’s faith tradition. One can deduce from available historical data that the Church has used the same Unitarian, transcendental and monotheistic premise against the polytheists, Gnostic emanationists and Marcionite dualists to refute their monotheistic violations. Loving God and loving neighbor were the essence of this original Unitarian Christianity. The original Christian monotheistic morality was in line with the Jewish ethical monotheism. This Unitarian Christianity with its strict ethical monotheism on the other hand was at odds with the Roman pagan imperial designs. Consequently, the Christians were persecuted for centuries by the Roman imperial machine.

Finally, tired of Christian persecution and internal Roman strife, Emperor Constantine co-opted Christianity in the 4^th century by issuing the Edict of Toleration in 313. The pagan population was forced to join the new religion. They brought along with them their old beliefs, practices and ideas. The Christian Church was overwhelmed to accommodate the new converts and their religious ideals. The metamorphosis of pagan and original Christian belief systems produced a new synthesis, the Roman Church Christianity of the fourth century. It was neither Roman paganism nor strict Jewish monotheism but a unique Trinitarian version of monotheism. The imperial hands played an important role in giving Christianity this strange anti-Semite twist because the Church was unable to reconcile the contradictions inherent in the new theology. The task was impossible because the new hodgepodge was arbitrary, artificial and mostly political. It was not theology per se but an amalgamation of politics and theology. The Jewish monotheism and the pagan polytheism were poles apart. The Church was at a loss to create a viable synthesis. Self-contradictions, unintelligibility and circular reasoning became the hallmark of the new enterprise. The source of these contradictions was the multiple authors of the New Testament books and their divergent outlooks.

The four Gospels, the most significant of the New Testament books, were not the biographies of Jesus in the strict sense of the term.[6] They were a mythical account of a few weeks of his presumed activity. They did not present a systematic, objective, progressive, or developmental account of Jesus’ life but were highly selective following a loose chronological framework bent on theological significance and moralizing anthology of Jesus’ sayings and actions. The gospel writers were faith-driven preachers who had an ax to grind. The gospel of John made this fact abundantly clear. (20:30-31) The Gospels were good news exactly as the word “gospel” meant. Moreover, there were other Christian gospels and writings, probably written before some of the so-called canonical gospels, which were later rejected by the Church during the long canonization process. Luke’s confessed frustrations in the prologue of his gospel attested to this very fact. Even the carefully handpicked gospels did not present a systematic view of Jesus. John D. Crossan rightly observes that if one reads “those four texts vertically, as it were, from start to finish and one after another, you get generally persuasive impression of unity, harmony, and agreement. But if you read them horizontally, focusing on this or that unit and comparing it across two, three, or four versions, it is disagreement rather than agreement that strikes one most forcibly. By even the middle of the second century, pagan opponents, like Celsus, and Christian apologists, like Justin, Tatian and Marcion were well aware of those discrepancies, even if only between, say, Matthew and Luke.[7]

The Church has over the centuries been selective when it comes to scripture, using only those documents validating its theological position and credentials. In other words, the documents chosen were mainly those which allowed the Church to prove what it wanted to have proven. Yet ironically, even these carefully selected documents contain no single uniform picture of the person around whom the entire material is supposed to revolve. Following the New Testament, Christianity has always grappled with the question of Jesus’ identity, forever trying to understand who he is and what he represents.  D. Cupitt rightly observes that “More than any other religion Christianity has revolved obsessively around one particular man: it has loved him, worshipped him, mediated upon him, portrayed him, and sought to imitate him – but he slips away.”[8] There is no single preached Christ, “An immense variety of ideals of character have been based upon the example of Jesus: an historical man who lived only one life has been made the exemplar of a great range of different forms of life. Jesus has been declared to be a model for hermits, peasants, gentlemen, revolutionaries, pacifists, feudal lords, soldiers and others. If we restrict attention to the religious life of men in the Latin West alone, the diversity is great among the ideals of Benedict, Francis, Bruno, and Ignatius Loyola.[9] 

Even contemporary scholarship is polarized over which picture or image of Jesus is to be accepted as authentic. In a presidential address to the Catholic Biblical Association at Georgetown University on 6 August 1986, Daniel J. Harrington categorized this variety into seven different images of Jesus currently prevailing in contemporary scholarship. We have Jesus the political revolutionary (S. G. F. Brandon), the magician (Morton Smith), Galilean charismatic (Geza Vermes), Galilean rabbi (Bruce Chilton), Hillelite or proto-Pharisee or an essene (Harvey Falk), and eschatological prophet (E. P. Sanders).  To Crossan, this “stunning diversity is an academic embarrassment.”[10]

This “embarrassing” diversity of pictures, ideals, concepts and interpretations of Jesus Christ has led some to conclude that “everyone who writes a life of Jesus sees his own face at the bottom of a deep well.”[11] To compound matters there exists only a very limited number of reliable narrations concerning Jesus, which even if combined fail to give us access to the man himself. One is left with no choice but to conclude with R. H. Lightfoot that, “the form of the earthly no less than of the heavenly Christ is for the most part hidden from us.”[12]

[1] Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church (Michigan: W. B. Eerdmans, 1976), vol.2, p.570.

[2] Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology, John Bowden, trans. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), p.1.

[3] Robert M. Grant, The Formation of The New Testament, New York, Harper and Row, 1965, p.8.

[4] C. P. S. Clarke, Short History of The Christian Church (London: Longman, 1966), p.28.

[5] John N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), p.53.

[6] See John D. Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991 p. XXX

[7] Crossan, The Historical Jesus, p. XXX.

[8] Don Cupitt, Christ, Faith and History: Cambridge Studies in Christology, S. W. Sykes, J. P. Clayton, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p.134.

[9] Ibid., p.137.

[10] Crossan, The Historical Jesus, p. XXVIII.

[11] Ibid., p.132.

[12] Lightfoot, History and Interpretation in the Gospels, p.22.