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Jesus, Man, and Myth
Dick Bain, Hickory, NC. USA
Jesus once asked his Apostles this question: "Who do men say that I am?" The Apostles told him that he had been identified as Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, or even John the Baptist raised from the dead. Then Jesus confronted them with an even more startling question: "Who do you say I am?" The impetuous Simon Peter jumped up and said, "The deliverer, the Son of God!" Many of those who knew Jesus only by reputation assumed that he was the reincarnation of some well known prophet. Some of his enemies seemed to think that he was a person in league with the prince of devils. But the Apostles, who had lived with him for more than a year, believed he was the Son of God and in some way the Messiah expected by the Jews. That certainly didn't settle the matter; the search for Jesus' identity has continued for over 1900 years and hasn't ended yet.
The Evolution of Christianity's Jesus Concept.
Gnosticism was a 2nd century movement whose name comes from the Greek gnosis, or "secret knowledge." The Gnostics held that Jesus was a spiritual being whose appearance as a mortal was only an illusion. Another group of early Christians known as the Adoptionists believed that God adopted Jesus at the moment of his baptism or at the time of his resurrection. A later group known as the Modalists taught that Jesus was only a manifestation or mode of God. Yet another later group, the Subordinationists, saw Jesus as perhaps divine, but subordinate to God. The church fathers were no doubt a bit distressed by all this theological disorder. It was the Jesus concepts taught by Arius that motivated the church hierarchy to call the Council of Nicea. Arius taught that Jesus was God's first born creature, an agent who made all things. He taught that Christ was divine, less than God, but more than man. The matter was partly settled for the orthodox Christian church at the Council of Nicea in 325 AD. They adopted the ideas of Athanasius: "Christ begotten, not made. He is not creature, but creator, the same essence as the Father." The council was also forced to clarify the Trinity doctrine to show Jesus' relationship to the Father. But it was at the Council of Constantinople in 381 that the three persons of the Trinity were declared equal, which of course made Christ equal to the Father. The Council of Ephesus in 431 dealt with the relationship of the human and divine natures of Jesus, but didn't resolve the issue. It was finally resolved at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD. Regarding Jesus' two natures they stated in part, "...in two natures without being mixed, transmuted, divided or separated....the identity of each nature is preserved and concurs into one person or being." This has ever since been the standard doctrine about the person of Christ for the Christian church. Attempts to enforce such standard doctrines yielded some ominous repercussions.
Since the church had gained considerable political power, expressing opinions that differed from the party line could prove hazardous to your health. Things didn't change a great deal until that upstart priest, Luther, told the Pope what he could do with his indulgences and touched off the Protestant reformation. When the church finally got out of the government business, thus losing the power to barbecue you for expressing contrary beliefs, and when science and the Rationalists began to look at the world, the church's dogmas began to lose authority. Critical scholarship began to ferret out inconsistencies and conflicts in the scriptures. Increasingly, starting at the end of the 18th century, scholars began the search for the historical Jesus. Some of them concluded that not only was it not possible to come up with a historical Jesus, but that he was only a mythological figure, a composite of people's Messianic hopes.
Critical Scholarship and the Historical Jesus
Albert Schweitzer, in his 1906 book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, examined the work of some of the Jesus investigators who preceded him. The conclusion reached by many of these investigators was that the historical Jesus cannot be found in the scriptures. Schweitzer agrees with this conclusion, but he doesn't feel that this means that we cannot find Jesus at all. On the last page of his book he writes, "He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: 'Follow thou me!' and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they pass through in His fellowship, and as ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who He is." Schweitzer accepts the idea that Jesus existed, but feels that we cannot know Him just by studying the scriptures. Unlike Schweitzer, other investigators question Jesus' very existence.
In a book titled Jesus Son of Man, Rudolf Augstein goes to great lengths to totally discredit the scriptures. He sees Jesus as a mythological figure like Mithras. While he makes many excellent points about the inconsistencies and problems with the scriptures, he seems to go overboard in rejecting even the few non-scriptural references to Jesus. In its section about Jesus, The Encyclopedia Brittanica lists three non-scriptural historical references that are represented as credible. First, Jesus' execution was mentioned in the
annals of the Roman historian Tacitus about 110 A.D. The second reference comes from Josephus, the Jewish historian at the court of Nomitian. Josephus mentions the stoning of "James, the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ." Josephus also mentions the death of John The Baptist. The third historical reference to Jesus is in the Talmud, a collection of
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