Who am I to write on this topic? I’m certainly not among the many scholars, Jewish and Christian, who have tried to reconstruct the cultural surround – the assumptions, references and experiences – that made up the atmosphere Jesus took for granted and worked to influence. Still less would I like to trace the development of doctrines within the Jesus movement or track its relation to what the historical Jesus believed and taught.

What then would I like to see emerge out of a visit to the real-life Jesus, if I could do that? Well, as readers of this column know, I would like to roll back the strange, new-to-me-in-this-life tidal wave of hatred that has crashed over Jews on planet earth since the atrocities visited on Israelis on October 7th and 8th of 2023. As if it needed only the scent of Jewish vulnerability to prompt – what shall I call it – atrocity-envy?

Philosophers like to go back to the beginnings of a problem that comes trailing a history. Who was Jesus, actually?

For light on this interesting question, I’ve been reading A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, by the respected scholar John P. Meier. Part Two of Vol. II, “Message,” deals specifically with what Jesus taught, as best we can reconstruct it. Meier notes both the overlaps and the deviations from what later became Christian doctrine. Jesus was of course a Jew before he became the figure embedded in Christian doctrine. What can we make of that?

Three questions and likely answers emerge from Meier’s careful survey of the available evidence regarding Jesus, as well as the range of scholarly opinion about that evidence:

1. What did Jesus think of his achievement,

when he looked back over his life and mission at the time of the Last Supper?

2. What did Jesus think of human history?

3. What is original in the teaching of Jesus?

Let’s start with #1, the Last Supper. Here is Meier: “As Jesus comes into the Last Supper, he is faced with the fact that his ministry, from a human point of view, has been largely a failure. All Israel has not heeded his message and accepted him as the eschatological prophet sent from God. Worse still, the bankruptcy of his life-project may be completed by the bankruptcy of his life, as the possibility of a violent death looms. [307f]”

Supposing Meier reads the event accurately, what would I make of Jesus misreading the success and the failure factors in his life at the moment when he sensed how it would end?

Perhaps it should tell us something about success and failure in our own lives. First, we should ask the right questions. What, so far, have we been seeking to do in our lives? Did we do the best we knew how, even if failure piled on failure? Have we learned at least some of what we hoped to learn? If so – and not taking the future for granted – our lives have been a success!

Now on to #2, Human History and what Jesus thought of it. Here’s Meier again. The “historical Jesus did expect a future coming of God’s kingdom … surmounting this world’s barriers of time, space, hostility between Jews and Gentiles, and finally death itself! [317]” However, “he did not specify any timetable or time limit for this coming. [348]”

So Jesus, like most of us, wanted to get above this world and out of this world – but also wanted to take the best of this world with him on the final voyage up and out. Such expectations were in the air. Actual history was getting intolerable. 

Sound familiar?

Finally, let’s go to #3, where we ask, what’s original or paradigm-shattering in the teachings of Jesus?

Meier reads Jesus as proclaiming that he has made available a new “field of force that is the kingdom of God.” Whoever, in that new field of force, “experiences the power of God transforming his life” – by that very experience – “exists in the kingdom now … .”

So, the longed-for end-time is now. What you waited for, by participating in that field of force, you have.

This upshot seems to me puzzling, mysterious and dramatic. I would like to see my co-religionists uncouple the historical (i.e. the real-life) Jesus from the long train of calumnies linked in Jewish memory to his name.

The original Jesus was ours, after all! We could step back from the past, free him from those who claim to own him by disowning us and after all … 

welcome him back home.

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