Dean’s Sunday School – March 16, 2025
I am out town with family this week, and will send follow up quotes later in the week. Blessings and Godspeed, Alston
All of the quotes in this post are taken from “The New Testament In Its Time,” by NT Wright and Mike Bird. We use these as highlight to our conversation time following an introductory video.
What would the average Galilean have perceived as Jesus came through the village? What categories would have been available for understanding what was going on? How did Jesus himself regard these basic categories? Only when we have asked these questions is it safe, historically speaking, to work forwards and ask about the other aspects of his mindset, and hence also about his beliefs and his aims. [Wright 216]
At one point he took his disciples to Caesarea Philippi, in the northernmost reaches of Israel, and asked them, ‘Who do people say I am?’ The disciples replied, ‘Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.’4 The disciples were merely echoing what they had heard on the Galilean grapevine. The political leaders, the priestly class, the crowds, the recipients of healing, and the disciples, all tried to find a category, either from scripture or from cultural stereotypes, which they could apply to Jesus. [Page 217]
The problem was that Jesus acted and spoke like several different leadership types: rabbi, prophet, healer, priest, sage, royal leader, exorcist, Cynic philosopher, and miracle-worker. Yet he was also unlike any of them. He had a unique sense of authority, an enigmatic form of self-reference as the ‘son of man’. [Page 217]
Jesus’ own account of his identity remained a riddle right up to the time of his execution. Then, after the resurrection and ascension, his identity became an enigma that the early church struggled to find the right words to describe. And the topic of Jesus’ person and nature has remained a scandal for the world ever since. [Page 218]
Thus, in contrast to several wings of scholarship, we propose that—once we understand the great stories that the first-century Jewish world knew, and that he was regularly invoking—Jesus’ self-understanding is in principle knowable; and there are good reasons for thinking that Jesus thought of himself as taking the key role in the eschatological drama that was beginning to unfold upon Israel. And in Israel’s prophetic scriptures that key role belonged to Israel’s God himself. He would return at last to fulfil his purposes and promises and rescue his people and the world. [Page 218]
“A Prophet, Like One of the Prophets Long Ago”
The proper starting-place for understanding Jesus is as a ‘prophet’. We have set this out in the previous chapter. Suffice to say here both that the category of ‘prophet’ was broad and that Jesus himself was happy to use it, and for others to use it, of himself. Since the early church made all sorts of other claims about him it is highly unlikely that this evidence was invented in the post-Easter period.[Page 218-219]
In many ways, it is actually Jesus’ actions and words that provide the best material to try to discern the precise role he was trying to perform and the agenda he was trying to champion. Jesus’ career, characterized by announcing the kingdom, warning of judgment, speaking in parables, healing the sick, dining with sinners, teaching about the seduction of wealth, urging people to pray in a certain way, and criticizing the Temple—all these were part of his kingdom ‘programme’. This programme was rooted in the promises and hopes in Israel’s sacred traditions about the day when God would finally and fully deliver Israel from the effects of exile, where forgiveness, blessings, and peace would reign over a renewed Israel in a renewed covenant with a new Temple. [Page 219]
It would be a mistake to think that Jesus was a prophet merely pointing towards God and God’s kingdom. Jesus’ message was astoundingly self-referential. One’s place in the kingdom would be determined by one’s reception or rejection of Jesus.5 Jesus would sit on a throne in the kingdom with his twelve disciples judging a reconstituted Israel.6 People needed to abandon their families, ambitions, wealth, and follow Jesus, even taking up their own cross, to share in the blessings of a restored Israel. [Page 219]
Jesus was not just announcing the kingdom, as an entity foreign to himself. All the signs are that he saw himself as the central actor in the drama, inaugurating the kingdom and establishing it on earth as in heaven. [Page 220]
He really did believe he was inaugurating the kingdom. Yet the stories that Jesus told also indicate that he did not see himself simply as a prophet entrusted with a task simply for his own generation, one member of a long, continuing line, but as more than that. He was ‘the’ prophet, a final envoy, a beloved son, one greater than the Temple, wisdom vindicated, a new David, sent to warn, gather, and restore Israel as YHWH had promised to do himself. None of the various prophets who have left traces in Josephus thought of themselves in those terms. Jesus stands out all the more precisely because the role he assigned himself was married to an apparently unique sense of purpose in God’s plans. In the same way that Jesus spoke of John the Baptist as ‘more than a prophet’ . . . . [Page 220}
Who Is This “Son Of Man”?
First, the phrase ‘son of man’ in Hebrew (ben adam) can simply mean ‘human being’. We read in Psalm 8.4: ‘What is man [enosh] that you are mindful of him, or the son of man [ben adam] that you should care for him?’ (NIV 1984, italics added). The verse contains a synonymous parallelism so that ‘man’ and ‘son of man’ are identical terms for human beings, as English translations make clear. In the book of Ezekiel, the most frequent form of address by God to Ezekiel is ‘son of man’, which appears to be the equivalent of something like ‘mere mortal’. [Page 220]
Second, the ‘son of man’ language in the gospels reflects influence from Daniel 7, where a mysterious human figure with royal and transcendent qualities is enthroned beside God and even worshipped alongside God. In brief, Daniel 7 is a vision report about four terrifying beasts, who arise one by one out of the sea to ravage the earth, including Israel. But then the beasts are stripped of their power, and Daniel narrates:
In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshipped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed. Dan. 7.13–14 [Page 221]
The reign of God will be exercised through the human one. The figure of ‘one like a son of man’ is closely connected with God’s reign (Dan. 7.13–14); he is the heavenly counterpart to the beasts, who are explicitly designated as kings (Dan. 7.8, 11, 17, 23–24); and, in the interpretation of the vision, the dominion given to the human figure is the same as that given to the people of Israel (Dan. 7.18, 27). It is important to note that Daniel’s son of man was given an explicit messianic interpretation in later Jewish writings like 1 Enoch 37—71, 4Q246 from the Qumran scrolls, obviously in the gospels, the book of Revelation, and in the post-AD 70 visionary tract known as 4 Ezra. In the developing tradition, some came to regard ‘the Son of Man’ as a definite figure, even a heavenly or preexistent being. [Page 221-222]
Third, ‘son of man’ in Aramaic, Jesus’ mother tongue, is bar enasha. This could have a generic meaning of ‘humanity’, an indefinite sense of ‘a man’ or ‘someone’, or a definite self-referential connotation of ‘this man’. Jesus seems to have used the Aramaic idiom in this way, designating himself as the person in question, or at least one person within a particular class of people. Consider the following:
Jesus replied, ‘Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ -Lk. 9.58/Mt. 8.20
John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’
-Lk. 7.33–34/Mt. 11.18–19
Thus ‘son of man’ can operate as a Hebrew term for ‘human being’; it can signify vindicated Israel as in Daniel 7, perhaps with messianic overtones, perhaps even with the further sense of a quasi-divine being; and it can constitute an Aramaic self-referential idiom. [Page 222]
However, there is no need to collapse all ‘son of man’ sayings into the category of idiomatic self-reference. Even if Jesus did sometimes use the phrase as a circumlocution, this, in and of itself, has nothing whatever to say about the likelihood or otherwise of his also making more explicit use of Daniel 7, in its wider settings both within Daniel (especially Dan. 2 and 9) and within the re-readings of Daniel that took place in the first century. [Page 222]
The whole narrative sequence of Daniel (especially Dan. 7), and the ways in which that narrative could be invoked, echoed, or otherwise appropriated among Jesus’ near-contemporaries, was adopted as a messianic prophecy that, ‘more than anything else, incited the Jews to revolt’.20 Fourth Ezra 11—12 picked up the narrative of Daniel 7 and used it in a fresh, and explicitly messianic, oracle, envisaging the Lion of Judah triumphing over the Eagle of Rome. Second Baruch 35—40 did the same, with the ‘vine’ of Israel opposing the ‘cedar’ of Rome. The so-called ‘parables of Enoch’ (1 En. 37—71), which used to be thought possibly post-Christian and therefore not relevant, are increasingly now regarded as earlier, and not therefore affected by Christian thought. They reflect a different, but related, messianic development of the Daniel 7 story and picture (see ‘Portals and parallels: the Enochic son of man’). These texts do not seem to depend upon one another. They provide good, varied evidence of what appears to be a widespread expression of hope. The setting remains the national hope of Israel: YHWH would vindicate the nation against the pagans, rescuing it like a human figure from among monsters—like, you might say, a solitary but faithful Jew delivered from a den of lions. (We should not forget that Dan. 7 follows at once after Dan. 6!) And at the centre of this picture we find Israel’s anointed king. [Page 224]
If we take this understanding of the Danielic son of man, and map it onto Jesus’ use of the same designation, what is the result? In the case of the famous passage in Mark 13, it looks like this. Jesus has been asked about the destruction of the Temple. His reply has taken the disciples through the coming scenario: great tribulation, false messiahs arising, themselves hauled before magistrates. They need to know both (1) that Jerusalem is to be destroyed and (2) that they must not stand and fight, but must escape while they can. There will then occur the great cataclysmic event which will be at the same time (1) the final judgment on the city that has now come, with awful paradox, to symbolize rebellion against YHWH; (2) the great deliverance promised in the Prophets; and (3) the vindication of the prophet who had predicted the downfall, and who had claimed to be embodying in himself all that Jerusalem and the Temple had previously stood for. [Page 224]
In sum, the phrase ‘son of man’ is used as a self-designation by Jesus, exploiting the ambiguity of the Aramaic idiom and marrying it to the mysterious figure of Daniel 7.13–14, as a cipher for the eschatological role that he exercises as the divine agent of the kingdom. In this sense, ‘son of man’ is more of a ‘role’ than a ‘title’: the point is that this figure now does two things: he embodies God’s own reign, seated at his right hand; and he symbolizes God’s people, vindicated after suffering. What is more, when we frame this in the context of Jesus’ mission to restore Israel, his eschatological teachings on the kingdom, his comparisons of himself with David and Solomon, his claims to be uniquely anointed with the spirit for his actions, and his symbolic actions themselves, then the vagueness of the designation starts to disappear. What emerges instead is a much more concrete sense, along the lines of a definite messianic claim.[Page 225]
THE MESSIAH
Among the Jewish authors and groups who did anticipate a Messiah, there were diverse opinions as to what type of figure he would be. Some envisaged an anointed military leader, who would lead the people in a successful purge of gentiles and sinners. Others imagined a Messiah with transcendent qualities and supernatural powers. The Qumran community envisaged two ‘anointed’ leaders in the final days: a ‘Messiah of Aaron’ and a ‘Messiah of Israel’. Philo held out a hope for a Hebrew king who would establish a Jewish kingdom and subjugate the nations.
Jewish messianism grew out of earnest reflection on Israel’s sacred traditions in the light of the social and political context of the Jewish people in the Persian, Greek, and Roman periods. [Page 226]
An older explanation, going back to William Wrede, appeals to the so-called ‘messianic secret’ in the gospel of Mark to explain the origins of messianic faith. One notices in Mark that Jesus is constantly telling his disciples, and people he had healed, things like, ‘Don’t speak to anyone about this’ and ‘Tell nothing to anyone.’ This is seen rather dramatically in Jesus’ response to Peter’s confession of him as the Messiah, where Jesus ‘warned them not to tell anyone about him’.31 William Wrede and others, picking up on this, argued that the ‘messianic secret’ was a literary fiction, without historical basis, to explain why no-one in the early Jerusalem church had known about Jesus claiming to be the Messiah. The answer was that he kept it a deliberate secret from outsiders. The biggest problem with the messianic secret thesis is that what is silenced in the gospel of Mark is not necessarily messianic, like healings and exorcisms (see Mk. 1.44; 7.36), while some material that is very messianic is not silenced at all, such as Bartimaeus calling Jesus the ‘son of David’ (Mk. 10.47–49), Jesus’ triumphal entry (Mk. 11.1–10), and his enigmatic remarks about David and his lord (Mk. 12.35–37). Moreover, the injunctions to secrecy regularly fail. Word about Jesus continues to get out, resulting in crowds being drawn to Jesus. Mark has an obvious motif of secrecy and mystery in his gospel, but it does not function as the explanation for the sudden emergence of messianic faith in Jesus. Wrede’s theory, growing out of the speculative reconstructions of late nineteenth-century German scholarship, has had a long run for its money, but it is time to set it aside. [Page 228]
There are some good reasons for thinking that Jesus did in fact claim to be a messianic figure. Several lines of evidence can be considered:
1. Isaiah 61, which in its own context concerns an anointed prophetic figure, seems to have played a significant part in Jesus’ own vocational understanding. There is an explicit appeal to a spirit-anointed ministry in Luke’s Nazareth Manifesto (Lk. 4.18–21) and similar Isaianic echoes in the material common to Luke and Matthew about John the Baptist’s question as to whether Jesus really is the ‘one who is to come’ (Mt. 11.2–6/Lk. 7.18–23) . . . .
2. Jesus appears to have envisaged himself as possessing a special role in the future kingdom. Jesus’ choice of twelve disciples was symbolic of the restoration of Israel that he believed he was effecting (Mk. 3.13–16). Yet Jesus did not cast himself as one of the Twelve, but rather, as their leader and commander . . . . It seems that Jesus saw himself as the royal leader-to-be of the restored people of God—a king of a future kingdom.
3. We also have to take into account the prominence of allusions to David and Solomon in Jesus’ teaching activities (Mt. 12.42/Lk. 11.31; Mk. 2.23–28; 12.35–37). Solomon and David were both regarded as prophets and allegedly performed exorcisms, which aligns also with the pattern of Jesus’ ministry, but obviously their main role was kingly . . . . .
4. Jesus’ final week was manifestly messianic. We have a messianic action in the triumphal entry that deliberately acts out Zechariah 9 (Mk. 11.1–10) and at the same time mirrors in some ways the triumphal entry of Judas Maccabaeus, which staked an effective claim to royalty (1 Macc. 3.36–59; 2 Macc. 10.1–9). Jesus’ action in the Temple, warning of its imminent destruction, implies that he is claiming royal authority over it (Mk. 11.11–18); elsewhere we are told that he predicted the rebuilding of the Temple, which is a messianic task (Mk. 14.58; Jn. 2.19; cp. 2 Sam. 7.11–14) . . . .
5. Finally, Jesus was executed on the charge of being a messianic pretender. The ‘titulus’ nailed above his head (the statement of his ‘crime’, in Roman practice) mocked him as ‘the king of the Jews’. All four gospels highlight this (see Mt. 27.37/Mk. 15.26; Lk. 23.38; Jn. 19.19). This would have been widespread public knowledge; it is difficult to imagine later Christians inventing it, especially in such a shameful context. It is more or less impossible to explain why that charge would have been levelled against Jesus had he never given any indication of royal aspirations. As Dale Allison says, the ‘Romans probably crucified Jesus as “king of the Jews” because he did not distance himself from that derisive epithet’. [Pages 228-230]
The messianic faith of the early church did not burst into life from nothing. True, Jesus had not gone around telling people, ‘I’m the Messiah.’ Still, if you proclaim the kingdom of God in Roman Palestine, declare that the day of national restoration is dawning, compare yourself to David and Solomon, perform what various people considered to be signs of messianic deliverance, enter Jerusalem on a donkey with people shouting ‘Hosanna to the son of David’, and end up on trial on a messianic charge, being then mocked in death as a Jewish king, it all seems fairly obvious. Jesus deliberately acted out a messianic role. This was why the early church began as a ‘kingdom-movement’, venerating him as its messianic leader. [Page 230]
DID JESUS THINK HE WAS GOD
On the first side, many Christians are content with some form of the argument advanced by C. S. Lewis in his various writings. According to Lewis, Jesus claimed to be divine. Yet this means that he was either a deliberate crook, a liar (which his whole life and particularly his death tells strongly against), or a madman, engaged in the religious ramblings of a lunatic (which the rest of his teaching makes very unlikely), or he was telling the truth—he was Lord (which we must accept and face up to). [Page 231]
On the other side, several theologians have said that this talk of Jesus as ‘God’ is simply nonsense. We know, so many have said, that it is simply absurd to think of God as human or for a person to be divine. The categories are mutually exclusive. No sane person could think of themselves as God incarnate. This line of thought was advanced by (among many others) the American theologian John Knox in the 1950s, and it has been repeated ad nauseam in many circles ever since.34 More particularly, many have been taught, no first-century Jew could think of himself as in any sense ‘divine’, since Jews were after all monotheists. The idea of a human somehow being divine could only be a later idea, a pagan corruption of the original non-incarnational thinking and teaching of Jesus and indeed of the early church. [Pages 231-232]
Our first move should be to set aside the Enlightenment view of God with its romanticized Deism where a semi-personal God made the world and then permanently retreated into a distant ‘heaven’. Instead, we should examine the Jewish account of God and God’s relationship to the world. The Jews believed in a specific God, of whom there was only one, who had made the whole world and who was present to it and active within it while remaining sovereign over it and mysteriously other than it. They knew this God (though at some point they stopped saying this name) as YHWH, ‘the One Who Is’, the Sovereign One. He was not remote or detached. Nor was he simply a generalized sense of a sacred dimension within the world, or for that matter the objectification or personification of forces and drives within the world. Rather, he was the maker of all that exists, and remained powerful and involved within, though by no means reduced to terms of, the creation itself. Classic Jewish monotheism thus came to believe that (1) there was one God, who created heaven and earth, and who remained in close and dynamic relation with his creation; and that (2) this God had called Israel to be his special people. [Page 232]
In many places in Israel’s scriptures and in subsequent post-biblical Jewish writings there were concrete ways of thinking about God’s presence and saving activity, within the world and within Israel. We have set these out in a previous chapter: (1) God’s glory; (2) God’s Torah; (3) God’s spirit; (4) God’s word; and (5) God’s wisdom. These five ways are folded into a story in which Israel’s God, the creator, was promising to rescue Israel and the world. He would return in person and glory; and, as he took his throne, so he might exalt, to share that throne, ‘one like a son of man’. [Page 233]
JESUS AND THE RETURN OF YHWH TO ZION
The first aspect we need to consider is how YHWH’s return to Zion is a major theme of the exilic and post-exilic Old Testament books. It is central to Isaiah, particularly chapters 40—55 and the developing theme, there, of the kingdom of God. Ezekiel, the prophet who declared most emphatically that YHWH had abandoned his people to their fate, envisages him returning to the newly built eschatological Temple. The Psalms celebrate the coming of YHWH to judge the world. Haggai, faced with the puzzling second Temple that failed to live up to expectations, envisages YHWH returning to a yet more glorious house. Zechariah employs exodus imagery—the pillar of cloud and fire—to express the way in which YHWH will return to dwell with and defend his people, and offers an apocalyptic scenario in which YHWH will come with all his holy ones to become king of all the earth, reigning from Jerusalem. Malachi promises that the Lord whom Israel seeks will suddenly come to his Temple, even though his coming will bring judgment as well as salvation. [Page 233]
Never do we hear that the pillar of cloud and fire that accompanied the Israelites in the wilderness has gloriously led the people back from their exile. At no point do we hear that YHWH has now returned in splendour to Zion. The closest we get is the idea, in Ben-Sirach chapter 24, where ‘wisdom’ comes, in the form of Torah, to dwell in the Temple. But that optimistic vision, written about 200 BC, had itself been shattered by the events of the subsequent two centuries. In any case, at no point does anyone say that the Temple has once more been filled with the cloud that veils the divine glory. At no point is the rebuilt Temple universally hailed as the true restored shrine spoken of by Ezekiel. No new festival was invented to mark the start of the great new era. Significantly, at no point either was there a final decisive victory over Israel’s enemies, or the establishment of a universally welcomed royal dynasty. [Page 233]
One central passage that promised the kingly return of God was Isaiah 40. Verse 3 spoke of ‘A voice of one calling: “In the wilderness prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” ’ This verse was programmatic for both John the Baptist, out in the Judean wilderness, and the Qumran community on the shores of the Dead Sea. Both were quite literally ‘out in the desert’, preparing for this future event of God’s coming, either by way of prophetic warning to the masses (John the Baptist) or by a separation from the impurity of the masses (Qumran).37 Later in Isaiah 40 we read more about YHWH’s coming reign and YHWH’s return to Zion:
Isa. 40.9–11
You who bring good news to Zion,
go up on a high mountain.
You who bring good news to Jerusalem,
lift up your voice with a shout,
lift it up, do not be afraid;
say to the towns of Judah,
‘Here is your God!’
See, the Sovereign LORD comes with power,
and he rules with a mighty arm.
See, his reward is with him,
and his recompense accompanies him.
He tends his flock like a shepherd:
he gathers the lambs in his arms
and carries them close to his heart;
he gently leads those that have young. [Page 234]
Isa. 52.7–10
How beautiful on the mountains
are the feet of those who bring good news,
who proclaim peace,
who bring good tidings,
who proclaim salvation,
who say to Zion,
‘Your God reigns!’
Listen! Your watchmen lift up their voices;
together they shout for joy.
When the LORD returns to Zion,
they will see it with their own eyes.
Burst into songs of joy together,
you ruins of Jerusalem,
for the LORD has comforted his people,
he has redeemed Jerusalem.
The LORD will lay bare his holy arm
in the sight of all the nations,
and all the ends of the earth will see
the salvation of our God.
First, Jesus’ journey through Jericho became the occasion to engage in some scandalous activity seen in his willingness to dine in the house of the much-despised tax-collector named Zacchaeus. As we have seen, reclining with such reprehensible persons was one of the most characteristic parts of Jesus’ career. At the end of the story, once Zacchaeus’s repentance has become public, Jesus explains why he does such things with the words: ‘the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.’ Jesus does not talk like an ancient prophet, telling wayward sinners to seek out God while he may be found. Instead, he is himself seeking out marginalized Israelites in a manner reminiscent of how God, in his climactic return to Zion, was believed to be coming to regather the lost flock of Israel. The story is full of echoes of YHWH himself coming to seek out and shepherd his people.
Second, Luke follows this story with the ‘parable of the talents’. This concerns a nobleman who goes abroad to be granted kingly authority, and then returns to his homeland. This parable has long been read as a prediction of Jesus’ second coming. However, Luke’s version of the parable is not dealing with what a generation of scholars once thought it was, namely, the sense of anxiety at why Jesus was taking so long to come back, and what might happen when eventually he did. The occasion for the parable is not the problem of the kingdom’s postponement; on the contrary, Luke explicitly states that the reason why Jesus uttered the parable was because his audience thought the kingdom was going to appear immediately. Far from extinguishing such hopes, Jesus’ parable actually excites them all the more, as we can see by the enthusiasm of his followers in the triumphal entry that follows. On the parable of the talents itself, rather than think of it as a morality tale for the faithful to be ready for the second coming, it is preferable to take the story as Jesus’ own retelling of the well-known scriptural narrative about the return of YHWH to Zion. Jesus thereby deliberately evoked the hope that God’s saving justice was about to be dramatically revealed—and that this would mean judgment on the unfaithful as well as reward for the persevering.
Third, in Luke’s version of the triumphal entry, Jesus approaches Jerusalem weeping with grief over the city. His words sound more like an oracle of woe than an ode of lament: ‘They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.’ Jerusalem faces dire consequences, namely, destruction at the hands of Rome, because the people have not recognized the time of deliverance, or what they should do about it. ‘The time of God’s coming to you’ translates a word sometimes rendered ‘visitation’, an idea we find elsewhere in Luke and also in the Dead Sea Scrolls, referring to the dramatic arrival of YHWH to sort everything out. Tragically, the great day of YHWH’s return has arrived, but it receives at best a mixed reception. This will mean that, in God’s long-awaited judgment, unrepentant Jerusalem may itself be condemned. Thus Luke presents Jesus, in his final journey to Jerusalem, as intending to enact, symbolize, and personify the climactic hope of YHWH returning to Zion. [Pages 235-237]
EXHATATION AND ENTHRONEMENT
According to some texts from our period, when YHWH acted in history, the agent through whom he acted would be vindicated, exalted, and honoured in a truly unprecedented manner.
There is a complex range of Jewish texts from different periods that speculate about the exaltation and heavenly enthronement of a figure who may be either an angel or a human being. These speculations grow from meditation upon and discussion of certain key texts we have already noted, such as Ezekiel 1, in which the prophet receives a vision of YHWH’s throne-chariot, and Daniel 7, where ‘one like a son of man’ is presented to ‘the Ancient of Days’ and shares his throne. Such speculations formed the staple diet of a whole tradition of Jewish mysticism and accompanying theological and cosmological enquiry.
Sometimes the texts speak of a mystical journey, of people attempting to attain to the vision of the one true God himself. Sometimes they speak of an angel who has the name of Israel’s God dwelling in him. Sometimes they speak of a human being sharing the throne of Israel’s God. [Page 237]
But the point should be clear: this kind of thing was thinkable. Such ideas were not obviously self-contradictory, nor were they regarded as necessarily a threat to what second-Temple Jews understood when they affirmed that God is One. (Our word ‘monotheism’ is of course a comparatively modern coinage.) They were attempts to find out what that belief actually meant in practice, particularly when dealing with God’s involvement with, and reconciling judgment of, his creation and his people. Thus, out of a much larger and highly complex set of speculations about the action of Israel’s God through various mediator-figures, one possible scenario that some second-Temple Jews regarded as at least thinkable was that the earthly and military victory of the Messiah over the pagans would be seen in terms of the enthronement-scene from Daniel 7, itself a development of the chariot-vision in Ezekiel 1.
We must tune our modern ears to hear overtones like this when reading Jesus’ answer to Caiaphas. The high priest has asked him about the accusations that he had been threatening to destroy the Temple and build another one; as we have seen, this is almost certainly what Jesus’ Temple-action implied, and the warnings in Mark 13 and parallels, coupled with the cryptic saying in John 2.19, point in the same direction. Modern ears may fail to pick up the massive significance of this. But a glance at Acts, where the charges against Stephen and then later against Paul have to do with sedition against the Temple, tells its own story.54 The Temple was the meeting-place of heaven and earth, guaranteeing the security and hope of Israel. [Page 238]
The whole trial-scene in the gospels is, not unnaturally, a morass of textual, historical, and theological issues. Suffice it to say here that one plausible way of reading the exchange goes like this. Rumours have circulated about Jesus’ words of warning against the Temple. It is quite plausible that, at his trial, Jesus was asked point blank by the high priest if these rumours were true. Was he really making such seditious statements, apparently attacking God himself by attacking his house? If so, was he claiming to be Messiah? Jesus answers with an affirmative, ‘I am.’ However, the charge of blasphemy does not come (as some have supposed) from Jesus pronouncing the divine name, the Tetragrammaton ‘YHWH’, when he says, ‘I am.’ More probably it comes from the larger context of Temple-subversion, and, in that context, his conflation of Psalm 110.1 and Daniel 7.13. All this implied that with the forthcoming destruction of the Temple Jesus himself would take its place. He was not only claiming authority over the Temple, the place where God and his people met. He was claiming that he himself was now that place . . . .
In his reply to Caiaphas, then, Jesus was clearly identifying himself with the enthroned figure of Daniel 7.13–14 (see text grid: ‘Jesus’ “son of man” language compared with voices from the Old Testament’). This was and is an astounding claim; we have no example of any other person from the first century saying such a thing. We have to remember that the whole point of Daniel 7 is that when God acted in history to deliver his people, the agent through whom he acted would be vindicated, honoured, enthroned, and exalted in an unprecedented manner. Jesus’ claim was not that he was going to sit on his own smaller throne next to God, but rather that he would share the judgment seat of God himself. If Jesus thought that Daniel 7.13–14 was about him, then Jesus was placing himself, as a human being, Israel’s representative, within the orbit of divine sovereignty, claiming a place within the divine regency of ‘God Almighty’. That is certainly how several early Christian traditions understood the matter. [Page 239-240]
JESUS AS GOD: POSTSCRIPT
Obviously a lot more could be said for Jesus’ self-understanding as ‘divine’. We have glanced at his sense of unmediated divine authority, at his implicit understanding that he was in some sense the personal replacement for the Temple. Taking all this together, we could say that Luke seems to have got it right: Jesus’ last great journey to Jerusalem was indeed intended to symbolize and embody the long-awaited return of YHWH to Zion. This journey, climaxing in his actions in the Temple and the upper room, and undertaken in full recognition of the likely consequences, was intended to function like Ezekiel lying on his side, or Jeremiah smashing his pot. The prophetic action embodied the reality. [Page 240]
What might it mean, then, to say that Jesus ‘knew’ he was God? On the one hand, Jesus knew Israel’s God as his own father. He prayed to him, and served him as a faithful son over the course of his life. Yet Jesus also seems to have known that what he was doing was what, in scripture, YHWH had promised to do. In Jesus we see the biblical portrait of YHWH come to life: the creator God who defeats the power of stormy waters, the loving God who rolls up his sleeves to do in person the job that no-one else could do, forgiving sins, renewing the covenant, shepherding the people, defeating the satan, and dwelling in the midst of his people . . . .
If so, Jesus did not ‘know’ he was God in the same sense that one knows one is hungry or thirsty, or in the sense that he knew he was middle-eastern and Jewish. It was not a mathematical knowledge, like knowing that two and two make four; nor was it straightforwardly observational knowledge, like knowing that there is a bird on the fence outside my room because I can see and hear it. It was more like the knowledge that I am loved by my family; like the knowledge of a musician not only of what the composer intended but of how precisely to perform the piece in exactly that way—a knowledge most securely possessed, of course, when the performer is also the composer. It was, in short, the knowledge that characterizes vocation.
If that is the case, then, forget the ‘titles’ of Jesus, at least for a moment; forget the attempts of some well-meaning Christians to make Jesus of Nazareth conscious of being the second person of the Trinity; forget the arid reductionism that some earnest liberal theologians have produced by way of reaction. Focus, instead, on a young Jewish prophet telling a story about YHWH returning to Zion as judge and redeemer, and then embodying it by riding into the city in tears, symbolizing the Temple’s destruction and celebrating the final exodus. We are proposing, as a matter of history, that Jesus of Nazareth was conscious of a vocation: a vocation, given him by the one he knew as ‘father’, to enact in himself what, in Israel’s scriptures, God had promised to accomplish all by himself. He would be the pillar of cloud and fire for the people of the new exodus. He would embody in himself the returning and redeeming action of the covenant God. [Page 240-241]
The Carpenter's Nail 