The Nonviolent Messiah: Jesus, Q, and the Enochic Tradition

Sources

Preface

Preface

This study draws together the research results from a number of publications and earlier studies in Early Judaism and Christianity. My first book, Jesus, Q, and the Dead Sea Scrolls: A Judaic Approach to Q (WUNT 2/333), critically compared several major themes in Q 3–7 with relevant texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls. The results of this study suggested that Q is an ethnically Judean text with a distinctive compositional profile, social history, and Christology. Q is a remarkably coherent text in its appeal to certain themes: the role of John the Baptist, the kingdom of God, Jesus as the son of man, the coming judgment on this generation. Its eschatological wisdom traditions are distinctive, as is its apparent lack of interest in Davidic messianism. Q 7:22, in particular, shares a number of Isaianic motifs with 4Q521, and this literary correspondence suggests some kind of relationship between the two faith-communities, as both shared similar messianic expectations. At the end of my book I noted that further work needed to be done on the Christology of Q and the Enoch traditions. Over the last few years I have published a number of articles on the identity, role, function, and influence of the mysterious Adamic figure who appears at the end of the Animal Apocalypse and the diverse ways in which Adamic traditions appear in Early Judaism and Christianity. It is my present conviction that these traditions represent an important key to unlocking some of the most obscure aspects of early Christianity.

Q is not, of course, a perfect solution to the Synoptic Problem, nor is it a simple cipher for Jesus. Nonetheless, Q is a useful hypothesis (or corollary of the Two Document Hypothesis) and makes good historical sense of the data. I suspect that it is precisely because it is widely understood to be an early Palestinian Jewish text containing some of Jesus’ most distinctive ethical teachings that it continues to hold the allegiance of most biblical scholars. We should not lose sight of the fact that Q also represents and reflects our best understanding of how the Jesus movement actually originated and developed: as a Jewish renewal movement in Judea and Galilee that subsequently expanded to greater Syria and the wider Roman Empire. Q is a useful tool because it anchors its traditions in Jesus’ Palestinian Jewish movement and does not reflect or represent the mostly Gentile network of communities founded by Paul.

The present study draws together several streams of research into a new approach to historical Jesus study. It might seem like the height of hubris to presume that one could offer anything new in Jesus Research—it is not so fashionable to do old-fashioned historical study today and many regard the Quest for the historical Jesus as little more than a fool’s errand—but it is my contention that Jesus’ identity, role, teaching, and practice have still not been fully understood in their original Jewish contexts. What does it mean to call Jesus messiah or Christ when he does not appear to fulfill the role many Jews of his day seem to have anticipated a messianic figure to perform? What does it mean to describe Jesus as nonviolent when the New Testament calls for God’s eschatological vengeance? The tensions between the historical Jesus’ apparent nonviolence and the violence attributed to Davidic messianism—not to mention the violence of apocalyptic eschatology—reveal deep, even fundamental paradoxes and ambiguities in the biblical tradition.

Like many, I grew up with the Bible and, like many, I have long been disturbed by the dark side of the Bible. The problems are legion. This study represents my own attempt to wrestle with these questions. A few words, therefore, about its structure are in order.

The study is divided into three parts. The first part, chapters 1-4, is a series of extended methodological essays addressing definitional issues regarding Jesus, Q, the Gospel(s), and the relationship between the historical Jesus and violence. These essays are framed within broader conversations about religion and violence in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. The second part, chapters 5-9, represents a chronological reevaluation of Jewish messianism and the case for a messianic Jesus. There is an incredible variety of messianic texts and templates in Second Temple Judaism—ranging from Davidic to prophetic, apocalyptic, sectarian, Enochic, son of man, new Adam, and Suffering Servant—and the historical Jesus’ own particular messianic identity must be located (if it is to be located at all) on this spectrum. Accordingly, this study reexamines the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ crucifixion and titulus, Paul’s use of Christos, Q’s apparent lack of messianic language, and the so-called messianic secret in the Gospel of Mark, in an attempt to determine whether these traditions might shed light on how and why Jesus first came to be understood as messiah. What emerges from this study, largely as a result of renewed specialist interest in Enoch traditions, is that the Parables’ son of man tradition and the Animal Apocalypse’s Adamic figure represent the two most relevant messianic models or templates for Jesus research. The third part of this study, chapter 10, tests and demonstrates this proposal by analyzing some of the most distinctive and historically reliable texts and themes in Q.

I do not presume to think that this study represents any last words on these subjects. Given the range and scope of the project, I am more than likely to have missed some pertinent publications. Such omissions were unintentional, and I hope to be able to remedy any such deficiencies in the future. I also realize that this study does not adequately address the full complexity of Jesus’ relationship to the Torah and Temple, subjects I also intend to explore further in the near future. I am indebted here to far too many scholars to name, but I would like to acknowledge two who have been more than supportive with their time, kindness, and consideration. James A. Sanders has been exceptionally kind in his support of my work and his expert guidance on the Jubilee tradition. James M. Robinson, as always, has been encouraging at every step along the way, and remains an ever-gracious mentor and friend. I would also like to thank Neil Elliott for recommending this book for publication with Fortress Press and Lisa Gruenisen for her assistance with the project’s efficient production.

I am very grateful to Kathy Horneck, Interlibrary Loan Coordinator extraordinaire at California Lutheran University’s Pearson Library, for so cheerfully facilitating numerous requests. My thanks also go to Julia Fogg and the Department of Religion for the warm and welcoming academic environment within which I have conducted some of this research.

Some sections of the present work are based on my earlier published work and are reproduced here with permission from the publishers. I would also like to thank John Barclay, John Muddiman, Katherine Southwood, Andrzej Gieniusz, Gabriele Boccaccini, Loren Stuckenbruck, James C. VanderKam, David Bossman, and Eibert Tigchelaar for their editorial assistance with these publications, as well as the anonymous reviewers who helped me improve them.

Chapter 6, The Christologies of Q, grew out of a paper presented in the Q Section of the Society of Biblical Literature’s Annual Meeting on November 18, 2006 in Washington, DC, and was subsequently published as Blessed is Whoever is Not Offended by Me: The Subversive Appropriation of (Royal) Messianic Ideology in Q 3–7, New Testament Studies 57, no. 3 (2011): 307–24.

A small section of chapter 7, The Messianic Secret of the Son of Man, originated as a paper presented in the Society of Biblical Literature’s International Meeting on July 2, 2009 in Rome, Italy, entitled A Social Identity Approach to the Rhetoric of Apocalyptic Violence in the Sayings Gospel Q.

A section of chapter 8, The Enochic Son of Man, first appeared in ‘Seventh from Adam’ (Jude 1:14-15): Re-examining Enoch Traditions and the Christology of Jude, Journal of Theological Studies 64, no. 2 (2013): 463–81.

Some of the material in chapter 9, The Enochic Adam, was first published in ‘His Wisdom Will Reach All Peoples’: 4Q534-36, Q 17:26-27, 30, and 1 En. 65.1-67.3, 90,"  Dead Sea Discoveries 19, no. 1 (2012): 71–105, and "The Eschatological ‘Adam’ of the Animal Apocalypse (1 En. 90) and Paul’s ‘Last Adam’: Excavating a Trajectory in Jewish Christianity," Henoch 34, no. 1 (2012): 144–70.

Parts of chapter 10, The Kingdom, the Son, and the Gospel of Nonviolence, were first published as ‘Seek His Kingdom’: Q 12,22b-31, God’s Providence, and Adamic Wisdom, Biblica 92, no. 3 (2011): 392–410; ‘Love Your Enemies’: The Adamic Wisdom of Q 6:27-28, 35c-d, Biblical Theology Bulletin 43, no. 1 (2013): 29–41; and Why Do You Call Me ‘Master’? Q 6:46, the Inaugural Sermon, and the Demands of Discipleship, Journal of Biblical Literature 132, no. 4 (2013): 953-69.

Santa Monica, CA

August 2013

1

1

Jesus, Q, and the Gospels

The quest for the historical Jesus continues to be a site of vigorous debate in the contemporary study of Christian origins.[1] The most distinctive feature of this quest,[2] particularly in the last thirty years, has been its emphasis on the Jewishness of Jesus,[3] although there is still no consensus on what kind of Jew Jesus was.[4] The Gospels portray Jesus as challenging Jewish ethnic boundaries and in conflict with some of his contemporaries, but these conflicts were Jewish conflicts within Judaism. Moreover, despite the fact that Jesus can be relatively easily understood as a Jewish teacher, healer, and prophet, our models sometimes seem to function in mutually exclusive ways and fail to encompass the full range of Jesus’ personality, sayings, and deeds.[5] Our sources do not conform to our desires to extract and secure reliable information from them.[6] The utility and reliability of the traditional criteria of authenticity have also recently come under fire.[7] Different scholars apply the same criteria to the same sources and attain different results. Our criteria are not sufficient in and of themselves to differentiate the authentic from the inauthentic. The criterion of multiple attestation depends on contested judgments regarding which sources are actually independent.[8] The criterion of dissimilarity, in particular, has been rightly criticized for its historical, theological, and methodological inadequacies.[9] Intended to identify what was distinctive about Jesus,[10] the criterion misses much of what was culturally continuous between Jesus and his Jewish environment and risks misrepresenting Jesus by making him different from Judaism.[11] We simply do not have enough information about Second Temple Judaism(s) or early Christianity to determine precisely how Jesus was dissimilar from either. Moreover, the criterion may only tell us what was distinctive, not necessarily what was characteristic of Jesus.[12] The criterion of embarrassment, while useful in certain cases,[13] founders on conflicting interpretations of what Jesus’ early followers might have found embarrassing. The criterion of coherence only confirms the authenticity of sayings or deeds by comparing them to material already determined to be authentic.[14] Recent interest in social memory theory may provide alternative approaches to our sources, assuming that the Synoptic Gospels contain oral retellings of the same events,[15] but memory is fallible, reproductive, and ideologically invested.[16]

The historical Jesus will always be a constructed Jesus.[17] Historical Jesus traditions may be accessible in and through the impact Jesus made on his followers, but social memory theory does not work primarily on the level of reconstructing what happened in the actual past; rather, it attempts to reconstruct how Jesus-memories were transmitted and communicated. Social memory theory is therefore less useful in providing access to Jesus than it is in providing access to Jesus’ followers and biographers. Critics of this new methodology have accused its advocates of covertly trying to reinscribe (the social memories found in) the Gospels as historically reliable,[18] but social memory theory—as theory—fails to establish either the reliability or unreliability of the Gospels; it is simply a theoretical tool useful in understanding how groups process their memories. We still have to determine whose memories we are reconstructing. The challenge, in other words, still remains one of applying the best methods and criteria in identifying what is reliably authentic Jesus tradition.

Like the criteria of authenticity, the historical-critical method has also been subject to critical scrutiny,[19] particularly its tendency to produce hierarchical, patriarchal, and Eurocentric readings.[20] It has been charged with a lack of critical self-reflexivity, an interest solely in the past, the exclusion of other traditions of interpretation, and a naively idealistic Romantic quest for mythic origins. Destabilizing grand narratives, however, is not the same thing as constructing plausible accounts of the past. Postmodern approaches may engage in discourses no less mythic than those they deconstruct.[21] What is needed, in other words, is a critical postmodern historiography that can still self-reflexively (re)construct plausible accounts of the past or, in this case, an historical person.

Jesus and Q

Since the mid-1980s historical Jesus scholars have increasingly been basing their research on Q, the so-called Synoptic Sayings Source or Gospel. Q is the single most important source for reconstructing the teachings of the historical Jesus.[22] This does not mean that the historical Jesus can be conflated with the Jesus of Q.[23] The Jesus of Q is a literary character, constructed from a network of sayings, stories, and editorial comments,[24] and the dominant focus in Q studies has long been on its redactional profile, compositional history, provenance, and social setting. Nonetheless, the study of Q has significant implications for Jesus research[25] and is inevitably linked to the quest.[26] Q is our earliest source of authentic Jesus tradition,[27] and while the move from Q to Jesus may be fraught with enormous methodological difficulties,[28] Q also takes us nearer to Jesus than anywhere else on the pages of history.[29] This so-called first Gospel is older than the traditional Gospels, older than the Christian church itself . . . More than any other document, this text holds the answer to the mysteries surrounding Jesus.[30]

The existence of Q continues to be doubted in some circles,[31] but the Two-Document Hypothesis (2DH) of Markan Priority and Q (Quelle) remains the dominant consensus solution to the Synoptic Problem in contemporary New Testament scholarship. Nonetheless, Q’s existence should not be taken for granted, and something should be said at the outset in its defense, especially as the Farrer-Goulder-Goodacre hypothesis (FGGH) also affirms Markan priority, but posits that Luke reworked Matthean material to suit his own literary and theological purposes.[32] The FGGH attempts to resolve the minor agreements,[33] Mark–Q overlaps, and double tradition without positing Q, and so its primary appeal is its apparent methodological economy. The FGGH also affirms, with the 2DH, that Luke used a number of sources.[34] The main problem with the FGGH is that it does not easily explain why Luke changed virtually every detail in Matthew’s infancy narrative, resurrection narrative,[35] and Sermon on the Mount.[36] The amount of textual surgery that Luke would have had to perform on these Matthean sections is formidable.[37] The claim that Luke contains Matthean vocabulary is undermined by Matthew’s use of Lukan vocabulary.[38] There are instances in which Luke seems to retain a more primitive form of a saying in Matthew. Luke also seems to follow the original order of the double tradition more faithfully than Matthew. The minor agreements are a problem for the 2DH, but there are also a number of ways to explain them.[39] The FGGH does not easily, let alone compellingly, explain Luke’s redactional activity, or the distinctive and coherent themes found in Q,[40] including its identification of Jesus as the One Who Is To Come, its Deuteronomistic theology, prominent interest in Wisdom, repeated use of the rejected prophets motif, and its notable non-use of the term Christos.

It is, of course, theoretically possible that Luke knew of or about Matthew’s structural modifications to Mark (that is, Matthew’s Davidic genealogy, infancy narrative, post-resurrection appearances) without having a physical copy of Matthew at hand, which could explain some of the similarities between the two Gospels, maintain the relative independence of the two authors (and thus Q) without appealing to the close re-working required of the FGGH, but Luke’s alleged use of Matthew can only dispense with Q in so far as it adequately explains how and why Luke used Matthew. The FGGH does not address, let alone explain, where Matthew got these traditions from. The FGGH simply increases—to a significant degree—the amount of special M material available to Matthew, essentially renaming Q M. But whether we call this material Q, M, a pre-Matthean sayings collection,[41] or double tradition, much of Q, especially its instructional material, is arguably coherent, authoritative, dominical, canonical, and authentic Jesus tradition. There is, in other words, and for our present purposes, no dispensing with Q. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Q and Christian Origins

Following the founding of the Jesus Seminar in 1985, John Kloppenborg’s Formation of Q proposed that Q developed as a collection of six sapiential speech-clusters conforming to the instructional genre. Kloppenborg’s proposal became a working hypothesis for many North American scholars and directly influenced Burton Mack and John Dominic Crossan, both of whom appropriated Kloppenborg’s stratification theory in their work on Jesus. Mack found a Galilean Cynic-like Jesus in Q,[42] whereas Crossan found a radical Galilean Jewish peasant Cynic.[43] Responding in part to the methodological confusion elicited by (mis)applications and (mis)representations of his proposal, Kloppenborg published a study on the methodological challenges involved in using Q as a source for the historical Jesus.[44] He argued that interpreters must (1) acknowledge Q as literary invention and arrangement,[45] (2) carefully interpret Q’s silence (that is, its notable lack of a passion and resurrection narrative),[46] and (3) recognize Q’s essential conservatism and continuity with its inherited traditions. For Kloppenborg the redaction of Q is neither the result of an editor introducing previously unknown materials nor a massive change from a ‘noneschatological’ to an ‘apocalyptic’ document.[47] Rather, the redaction of Q signifies a fundamental change in rhetorical posture, so that one must presume a basic continuity in eschatological outlook between Q1 and Q2.[48]

In July 2000, the forty-ninth Colloquium Biblicum Lovaniense was held in Leuven, Belgium, and focused on the study of Q and the historical Jesus. William Arnal acknowledges this impressive wealth of scholarship, but holds that the Colloquium’s collected papers also testify to the impasse Q scholarship appears to have reached,[49] a field in serious danger of stagnation. For Arnal, Q scholarship remains too invested in, and charged by, its (putative) implications for reconstructing the historical Jesus.[50] For Arnal the golden age of Q studies began with Kloppenborg’s work,[51] but this breakthrough has not yet been developed or extended to other areas of Christian origins.

In 2004, the Society of Biblical Literature’s Seminar on Ancient Myths and Modern Theories of Christian Origins published Redescribing Christian Origins, a collection of papers that attempt to identify a number of viable alternative methodological approaches to the canonical narrative of early Christianity.[52] The volume focuses on three projects: (1) the social formation of the Q community; (2) the early Jerusalem community; and (3) the messianic and titular interpretation of Paul’s use of Christos. Taking Q and the Gospel ofThomas as alternative points of departure to the typical assumption of the apocalyptic and kerygmatic orientation of the first followers of Jesus,[53] and presupposing Kloppenborg’s stratification of Q, Willi Braun and William Arnal see the Q community as a kind of philosophical school, a Galilean Jesus Association or collective of deracinated village scribes.[54] At the same time, Dennis Smith, Burton Mack, and Luther Martin question the historical existence of a Jerusalem community as a product of early Christian mythmaking,[55] challenging Paul’s references to a Jerusalem community (Paul’s churches of Judea)[56] comprised of the pillars Peter, James, and the brothers of the Lord, not to mention the Twelve and the five hundred.[57] Merrill P. Miller further argues that Jesus research fails to explain the relationships between Jesus’ teaching, his messianic death, and a messianic Jerusalem community that survived relatively unmolested for more than a generation.[58] He concludes that it is unlikely that either the death of Jesus or the identity of the group of followers in Jerusalem revolved around messianic confrontations, claims, or titles.[59] The appeal to Jerusalem thus has more to do with early Christian mythmaking and social history than with historical fact.[60] Merrill Miller and Barry Crawford also pursue Burton Mack’s thesis that the Christ-kerygma-cult was created by pre-Pauline Hellenistic groups, and that Paul’s use of Christos is non-messianic and may even have originated as a kind of nickname.[61]

Since Q does not use the term Christos, several members of the Seminar argue against the common assumption of the emergence of Christianity as a messianic sect.[62] They suggest that the use of christos as a messianic title first appears not in Paul’s letters, but only later in the narrative tradition of the canonical Gospels.[63] The Seminar concedes that Paul did not introduce the term and that its near-ubiquitous presence in his letters demonstrates that both he and his readers were intimately familiar with it,[64] but holds that its original referent and significance cannot be derived from what is to be found in the Gospels and Acts.[65] Miller’s proposal, for example—that "pre-Pauline usages of christos did not presuppose the usages of the term in the Gospels—attempts to reverse the usual assumptions about the provenance and significance of the term in its earliest usage.[66] The open agenda of the Seminar, in other words, is to deny any historical appeal to a messianic conception of Jesus" and to any pre-Pauline messianic Jewish Palestinian Jesus movement.[67] The earliest use of the term christos was not titular, not royal, not eschatological, and not martyrological: the identification of Jesus as Christos reflects (Hellenistic) mythmaking, not Palestinian Jewish messianism.[68]

The Seminar’s attempt to reinvent the term Christos does have the virtue of recognizing that the messianic identification of Jesus has long been a puzzle in modern critical scholarship,[69] but it is problematic to limit the range of scholarly responses to this problem to two models: either Jesus was a political revolutionary who failed or the messianic identification of Jesus is a stunning reinterpretation of Jewish messianic hopes,[70] with the latter model basically recapitulating  the canonical paradigm of Christian origins. In seeking to find a more plausible reading of beginnings, the Seminar’s greatest concern is exposed: "if messianic beginnings are a point of departure, then the Jesus movements as we have understood and redescribed them [Q and Thomas] will be lost, absorbed by the dominant (canonical) paradigm of Christian origins.[71] In conclusion, the Seminar claims that they have successfully problematized . . . the picture of messianic beginnings and achieved . . . a more reasonable explanation for the emergence of the designation christos."

This confidence is not echoed widely outside the Seminar’s relatively small circle of contributors.[72] Cameron and Miller may reject the Gospel story because Jesus did not fit the expectation of a Messiah,[73] but even if we were to bracket the diversity of first-century messianism for a moment, what are we to make of the Seminar’s claim that they have sought to resolve this anomaly while most other scholars simply seek to retain it?

The Seminar provides us with a welcome set of experiments attempting to determine whether a non-messianic paradigm of Christian origins can be sustained. The question is whether their proposals have sufficient explanatory power to compel a non-messianic reading of the early Jesus tradition. They do not. Despite the theoretical validity of a sociological redescription of the data, the Seminar is unable to explain away Paul’s 270 references to Jesus as Christos, unable to divorce the term from its titular associations, and unable to explain why the title originated, if not from an early messianic identification of Jesus, a man crucified as "king of the Jews." The Redescribing Christian Origins project is an extreme example of the Quest for an alternative ideological narrative—a tradition that can be traced back to the dawn of the Enlightenment—but its claims fail to convince, with the end result being a further polarizing of the field. We see this most clearly in ongoing debates about wisdom and apocalypticism,[74] where our terms have become so freighted with misconceptions, ambivalences, and ideological concerns that they have ceased to function as good descriptive categories.[75] In Q and Jesus studies these terms have been deployed to construct oppositional paradigms to the question of whether or not Jesus proclaimed an empirical cosmic transformation in the imminent future.[76] The real impasse in Q studies, in other words, may not be the conservative leanings of a guild unwilling to accept any particular leap forward in research, but rather the exaggerated claims attending the appropriation of Q in ideological redescriptions of Christian origins, claims that have turned out to be easily countered, easily refuted, and easily dismissed, taking with them many of the more reliable results in recent Q studies.

For example, many historical Jesus scholars have appealed to the stratigraphy of Q in order to reconstruct Jesus as a non-messianic Galilean peasant. It is debatable, however, whether Q is really non-messianic or represents a low Christology.[77] It is also debatable whether the provenance of Q should be located in a rural Galilean setting. Simplistic descriptions of Q’s sapiential/instructional material have led to ideological and polemical caricatures of Jesus as a teacher of wisdom when this proposal is clearly undermined by the pervasive eschatology contained throughout Q. We clearly need to revisit the social, cultural, and theological matrices of Q in Second Temple Judaism if we are going to use Q more responsibly in Jesus research.

Q is an ethnically and geographically Palestinian Judean text.[78] Compositionally, Q is a composite text, a collection of Jesus’ sayings arranged into discursive structures containing disparate voices from different forms of social experience. The Inaugural Sermon (Q 6:20-49), for example, is framed by the Temptation and Centurion narratives. This Sermon is not worldly wisdom by any common standard, nor is its guarantor a mere teacher of wisdom. The Jesus of Q is the Son of God who defeats Satan and can work signs and wonders at will. The Inaugural Sermon also begs the question: what was the original good news or message of Jesus? And should that original message or good news also be designated as a Gospel?

Q and the Gospels

Q does not so much provide us with new information about Jesus as it allows for a different perspective on the origins and development of the earliest Jesus traditions.[79] There has been some discussion about whether Q qualifies as a Gospel as opposed to a theoretical literary source, but that discussion is more than academic. If Q is a Gospel, perhaps even the earliest Gospel, then its theological authority must also be reckoned with. Q makes a difference.[80] If the term Gospel is limited to the Pauline interpretation of Jesus’ life and death, then maybe Q is not a Gospel.[81] But if what we mean by Gospel is a literary-theological narrative representation of Jesus, then Q certainly seems to qualify. Finally, if Q represents our best access to the good news proclaimed by Jesus, then what was that good news all about?

The word Gospel is an English translation of the Greek word εὐαγγέλιον, which means good news. The term εὐαγγέλιον was used in imperial Roman inscriptions to celebrate the blessings of peace and prosperity brought about by Caesar Augustus,[82] but our earliest evidence for the use of the term in the New Testament is found in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, where Paul refers to "the good news (τὸ εὐαγγέλιον) through which you are saved (σῷζεσθε).[83] Paul’s Gospel, which he claims to have received" from the Lord,[84] focuses on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Today the semantic range of the word Gospel seems to include a wide variety of possible meanings. According to Darrell Bock, for example, the gospel is the good news of God’s love and initiative . . . to bring us into a healthy relationship with Himself and save us from hell.[85] Jesus delivered the good news that God’s promised rule had arrived, although the gospel should not be understood simply as a transaction—the removal of a debt, as this does not sound like very good news.[86] For Bock, the cross is "the hub of the gospel, but Jesus’ dying for sin is not the entire gospel.[87] Here the term gospel has essentially become a cipher for the entirety of the Christian faith. Similarly, Scot McKnight notes the dissociation between Jesus and the cross-centered Gospel of contemporary Evangelical Christianity and argues that the Jesus story can only be understood in relation to the larger story of Israel and God’s plan of salvation.[88] First Corinthians 15 is the true gospel of the church’s tradition.[89] For McKnight the ‘gospel’ is the Story of Jesus that fulfills, completes, and resolves Israel’s Story.[90] Paul’s gospel was the same as Jesus’ and—in fact—the same as everyone’s in the first century,[91] and since Jesus claimed Israel’s story was fulfilledin himself, this means that Jesus also preached the gospel!"

The word Gospel did not initially signify a particular literary genre, but rather a story, preaching, or proclamation (κήρυγμα) about Jesus.[92] The Gospels appear to be theological biographies (βίοι) of Jesus,[93] but there is no denying a certain degree of ambiguity in the use of the term, both in contemporary usage and in the Gospels. The Gospel of Mark, for example, opens with the "good news of Jesus Christ,[94] but Jesus has not taught anything yet, so it seems that what Mark had in mind was something like Paul’s gospel of Jesus’ death and resurrection.[95] Mark’s Jesus also preaches the good news of [the kingdom of] God (τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τοῦ θεοῦ).[96] The Gospel of Matthew portrays Jesus as preaching the good news of the kingdom (τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τῆς βασιλείας). It would seem, therefore, that Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom, his good news to the poor,[97] can also be called a Gospel."[98] It is no accident that Luke portrays Jesus as announcing his mission by citing Isaiah 61:1:

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me . . .

the Lord has anointed me (משח/ἔχρισέ)

to proclaim good news to the poor (εὐαγγελίσασθαι πτωχοῖς).[99]

Isa. 52:7 also envisions a coming age of peace and salvation as good news to be inaugurated by a divinely authorized messenger:[100]

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger

who announces peace (שלום/εἰρήνης),

who brings good news (εὐαγγελιζομένου),

who announces salvation (ישועה/σωτηρίαν),

who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns’ (βασιλεύσει σου ὁ Θεός).

In his response to John the Baptist’s inquiry, the Jesus of Q 7:22 cites a number of Isaianic passages in order to confirm his identity as the One Who Is To Come, explicitly referring to the eschatological good news being proclaimed to the poor:

"the blind see, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed,

and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised,

and the poor have good news preached to them (καὶ πτωχοὶ εὐαγγελίζονται)."

The literary and theological relationships between Jesus, Q, Luke, and Isaiah 61 are significant, not least because Isaiah 61 served as an exegetical key for Early Jewish groups and provided a Judaic semantic root and anchor for the Greek gospel genre (LXX: εὐαγγελίσασθαι). Q 7:22 contains a series of clauses reflecting passages from Isa. 29:18, 35:5-6, and 61:1.[101] Isaiah 61 is used to inform and delineate the teaching of Jesus . . . and his own interpretation of his work.[102] Q 7:22 provides an organizing principle for the first major section of Q 3–7.[103]

The publication of 4Q521 in 1992 provided a remarkably similar description of what God would perform when his messiah (משיחו) arrived:[104]

. . . liberating the captives, giving sight to the blind,

straightening the bent . . .

For he will heal the wounded, revive the dead,

and proclaim good news to the poor.

4Q521 refers to a messianic figure and a series of eschatological blessings described in Isaiah, including an explicit reference to the resurrection of the dead. Jesus’ good news was part of an exegetical tradition in which Isaiah 61 was understood as heralding an eschatological new age of peace, salvation, healing, and debt-forgiveness: the Jubilee year.[105]

According to Leviticus 25 and Deuteronomy 15, God commanded that a Jubilee year be held every forty-nine years for the release of slaves, the remission of debts, and the restoration of property.[106] The Jubilee year was a day of physical and spiritual release and restoration.[107] The socio-economic difficulties associated with the Jubilee motivated the Pharisees to invent a legal compromise (the Prosbul) in order to avoid implementing the Jubilee. The authority to proclaim the Jubilee was ultimately shifted from the king to the priests to God and the eschatological age. The Dead Sea Scrolls illustrate that the Qumran community was well aware of the Jubilee tradition of liberty to the captives and release from debt, slavery, and sin.[108]

11QMelchizedek, a pesher (scriptural interpretation) drawing from Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, and the Psalms, announces the arrival of an eschatological Jubilee. Melchizedek appears as a heavenly figure inaugurating the liberation of the captives[109] and ushering in the day of [peace] (יום ה[שלום). This text, drawing directly from Isa. 61:1-2,[110] may have been "the first messianic re-interpretation of the jubilee,[111] conflating Isa. 52:7 and Isa. 61:1-2 in its depiction of the coming messenger . . . anointed of the spirit (משיח הרוח המבשר הואה), who will announce salvation.[112] 4Q521 and 11QMelchizedek illustrate that the Jubilee tradition was developed by the Qumran community, for whom eschatological redemption and salvation—the time when the poor, oppressed, and imprisoned would hear the good news" of God’s favor and release—was an imminent reality. The Jesus of Q 6:20, Q 7:22, and Luke 4 takes a special interest in Isaiah 61: Jesus announces his ministry as the arrival of the Jubilee year.[113] The Lord’s Prayer in Q explicitly refers to the cancelling of debts:

Forgive our debts (ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν) for us,

as we too have cancelled for those in debt to us.[114]

Jesus’ instruction to repeatedly forgive interpersonal sin is also found in Q 17:3-4:

"If your brother sins (ἁμαρτήσῃ) . . . forgive him (ἄφες αὐτῷ).

And if seven times a day he sins against you,

also seven times shall you forgive him."

As James Sanders notes, such an announcement—the eschatological release of debts and the forgiveness of sins—would have transformed the social, economic, and political landscape of first-century Judea.[115] Whether or not Jesus believed that the Jubilee year’s provisions should have been implemented literally—and is not simply Luke’s symbolic representation of Jesus’ eschatological significance—it seems safe to conclude that Jesus’ central message was not an announcement of his own imminent death, but rather the proclamation of God’s restorative work occurring in and through his own life and ministry, that is, the kingdom of God.

Jesus proclaimed the good news of the kingdom of God, but after Jesus’ death the Gospel of Jesus became the Gospel of Christ crucified:[116] "The proclaimer became the proclaimed.[117] It is not likely, however, that Jesus intended his teachings to be ignored, compromised, or superseded. Jesus’ teachings may be idealistic and inconvenient, but they are not irrelevant. If the ultimate goal of Jesus Research is to accurately reconstruct the social, economic, political, and theological contexts of Jesus’ life and teachings, and if the requirements of Christian discipleship—that is, following Jesus"—have anything to do with the historical figure of Jesus’ life and teachings, then careful historical and theological reexaminations of the historical Jesus are clearly still in order.

For the widely accepted facts, see E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 11; idem, The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Penguin, 1993), 10–11; Craig A. Evans, Authenticating the Activities of Jesus, in Authenticating the Activities of Jesus, ed. Bruce D. Chilton and Craig A. Evans (NTTS 28/2; Leiden: Brill, 1999), 3–29.↵

N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, vol. 2, Christian Origins and the Question of God<ƒ/i> (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), xiv–xv, coined the term The Third Quest. See also Stephen Neill and N. T. Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament 1861–1986 (2d ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). But see Fernando Bermejo Rubio, The Fiction of the ‘Three Quests’: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Historiographical Paradigm, JSHJ 7 (2009): 211–53; Dale C. Allison, Jr., Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters (New York: T&T Clark, 2005), 1–18; Stanley E. Porter, The Criteria for Authenticity in Historical-Jesus Research: Previous Discussion and New Proposals (JSNTSup 191; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 28–59.↵

See Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, Der historische Jesus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 29; Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 119–20; Tom Holmén, The Jewishness of Jesus in the ‘Third Quest,’ in Jesus, Mark and Q: The Teaching of Jesus and its Earliest Records (JSNT Sup 214; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 143–62; idem, ed., Jesus from Judaism to Christianity: Continuum Approaches to the Historical Jesus (London: T&T Clark, 2007).↵

The rabbinical literature—late, negative, and polemical—is not particularly reliable. See, for example, b. Sanh. 43a, where Jesus/Yeshu is hanged because he practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy. See also b. Sanh. 107b; b. Gittin 56b; 57a. For Jesus as the son of Pantera/Pandera, see Qohelet Rabbah 1:8(3); Tosefta Hullin 2:22f; Toledot Yeshu. See also Peter Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Hermann Strack, Jesus, die Häretiker und die Christen nach den ältesten jüdischen Angaben (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrischs’sche Buchhandlung, 1910); Morris Goldstein, Jesus in the Jewish Tradition (New York: Macmillan, 1950); Jacob Z. Lauterbach, Jesus in the Talmud, in idem, Rabbinic Essays (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 1951); Johann Maier, Jesus von Nazareth in der talmudischen Überlieferung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978); Jacob Neusner, Judaism in the Matrix of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986). But see Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth (Boston: Beacon Press, 1925).↵

Mahlon H. Smith, Israel’s Prodigal Son: Reflections on Reimaging Jesus, in Profiles of Jesus, ed. Roy W. Hoover (Santa Rosa: Polebridge, 2002), 87–113, esp. 93; Ben Witherington III, The Christology of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 267; Marcus J. Borg, Con: Jesus was not an Apocalyptic Prophet, in The Apocalyptic Jesus: A Debate, ed. Robert J. Miller (Santa Rosa: Polebridge, 2001), 35; John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 2, Mentor, Message and Miracles (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 407.↵

Rafael Rodriguez, Authenticating Criteria: The Use and Misuse of a Critical Method, JSHJ 7 (2009): 152–67, at 167, calls them "vehicles of subjectivity."↵

See Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity: The 2012 Lincoln Christian University Conference, ed. Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne (New York: T&T Clark International, 2012). For reservations, see James D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 92–97, 191–92; Rodriguez, Authenticating Criteria; Dale C. Allison, Jr., How to Marginalize the Traditional Criteria of Authenticity, in Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, ed. Tom Holmén and Stanley E. Porter (4 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 2011), 3–30. On the criteria, see also D. G. A. Calvert, Examination of the Criteria for Distinguishing the Authentic Words of Jesus, NTS 18 (1972): 209–19, at 211; M. Eugene Boring, Criteria of Authenticity: The Beatitudes as a Test Case, in Foundations and Facets Forum I (1985): 3–38, at 3.↵

E. P. Sanders and Margaret Davies, Studying the Synoptic Gospels (London: SCM, 1989), 323–30, esp. 323; Dennis Polkow, Method and Criteria for Historical Jesus Research, ed. Kent H. Richards, Society of Biblical Literature 1987 Seminar Papers (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), 336–56, at 350–51; John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, I, The Roots of the Problem and the Person (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 174–75; Allison, Resurrecting Jesus, 75. See also Jens Schröter, The Historical Jesus and the Sayings Tradition: Comments on Current Research, Neot 30 (1996): 151–68, at 158.↵

See Morna D. Hooker, On Using the Wrong Tool, Th 75 (1972): 570–81; David L. Mealand, The Dissimilarity Test, SJT 31 (1978): 41–50; Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 16–17, 252–55; R. T. Osborn, The Christian Blasphemy: A Non-Jewish Jesus, in Jews and Christians: Exploring the Past, Present, and Future, ed. James H. Charlesworth (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 211–38; Tom Holmén, Doubts about Double Dissimilarity: Restructuring the Main Criterion of Jesus-of-History Research, in Authenticating the Words of Jesus, 47–80; Richard B. Hays, The Corrected Jesus, First Things 43 (1994): 43–48, at 45. For responses to Hooker, see Reginald H. Fuller, The Criterion of Dissimilarity: The Wrong Tool? in Christological Perspectives, ed. Robert F. Berkey and Sarah A. Edwards (New York: Pilgrim, 1982), 42–48; Craig A. Evans, Jesus’ Dissimilarity from Second Temple Judaism and the Early Church, in Memories of Jesus: A Critical Appraisal of James D. G. Dunn’s Jesus