The Communitarian Gospel According to Jesus

For over a decade now, I've been searching for an answer to a fascinating question: What on earth was Jesus trying to do? He expended a great deal of effort to teach his disciples and send them out with a definite message for his people. What message? What goal did Jesus strive to accomplish? That goal must have appeared threatening to both the Jewish priests and Roman officials; otherwise, why was he executed? Clearly Jesus held strong beliefs for which he was willing to die. Something about those beliefs inflamed the imaginations of first-century, Palestinian Jews, so much so that the effects are still being felt.

From the beginning, my search was not directed toward an analysis of every word or phrase of Jesus. It is too easy for the non-professional to become bogged down in details. I am neither a theologian nor a New Testament scholar. My academic training is in sociology and history rather than theology; training that affords a glimpse into the cultural fluidity, class antagonisms and religious ferment of the first century of the Common Era, particularly in Palestine. Society and culture, community and hierarchy, upper-class and underclasses, priests and sinners are the stuff of history and sociology, as well as the New Testament in general and the four Gospels in particular.

As the years and books began to pile up, I slowly gained some general ideas about my quest. Chasing those ideas, down some blind alleys and a few dead-ends, led eventually to some rather satisfactory conclusions -- I may be on to something. So I began to write them down and surprisingly they fit together without forcing. The stunning aspect of Jesus' gospel is that it is not confined to his time and place; it is not a message of bliss beyond the skies, but an earthly possibility.

The lack of a means of refuting the accepted interpretations of Jesus as the Christ of Faith actually benefited me; by simply setting them aside, I avoided a mountain of unnecessary effort. Once the westernized Christian costume, in which Jesus has been customarily clothed down through the centuries, is removed, it is easier see him in his native setting prior to his deification. The layers of time and dogma can be disregarded. Happily I discovered that the historical Jesus does not dissolve when the fabulous and faulty accretions are pulled away.

Once the Christ of Faith is set aside, an outline of a wholly Jewish Jesus is revealed, having a distinctly Jewish voice, distinctly of his own time. But a clear view of Jesus the man, the pious Jew from Nazareth, who climbed the green hills of Lower Galilee and walked the dusty roads to Jerusalem, does not readily appear in the biblical Gospels. Often he seems just beyond view, his head dipping below the hill before we can get a glimpse of him. We see only shadows, hear only echoes. Doubtless there was something about Jesus' gospel that so impressed his followers to the point that they remained convinced, even after his death, that it was the answer to Israel's problems. It is inconceivable that a movement so influential in history could have developed around Jesus had he not been a remarkable person of admirable virtue, personal magnetism and extreme intelligence; a man who, by his teachings, convinced his disciples that they understood God's plan for humankind. What manner of man was he who would create a brave, new world for his people?

Whatever Jesus taught, it must have made sense first of all to his loyal circle of early disciples, also to his audiences in Galilee, Samaria and Judea. A lot of people were in the market for his ideas, for he attracted crowds wherever he preached. Jesus was clearly a man with a mission. Determined, resolute and purposeful, he dedicated his life to fulfilling that mission. And it is the mission that reveals the man.

Surely Jesus was not merely another apocalyptic preacher proclaiming the end of the world. A long parade of apocalyptics moved from time to time across the pre-war, Palestinian scene. Something must have been different about Jesus' gospel since it set both him and his movement apart from many others. What was so appealing about his gospel that gave his movement such an impact that it would carry far beyond his own time and place? Apocalypticism is inadequate to answer this question. There must have been more to Jesus' message -- much more.

The customary place to find Jesus' Good News is in the four biblical Gospels; but the other-worldly Jesus of the Fourth Gospel, announcing his divinity before his critics, cannot be reconciled with the rushed and secretive Markan Jesus, commanding his followers to tell no one who he is. The world in which Jesus lived, of early first-century Palestine and early first-century Judaism, was already removed from the time and place of the four writers who were credited with the authorship of the biblical Gospels. Unfortunately, many important details of Jesus' life were omitted from those Gospels. There is no hint of why a poor, devout Jew from the provinces could have aroused the murderous intent of both the wealthy and powerful Jewish aristocracy and the Roman Prefect, Pontius Pilate, who did in fact order the execution of Jesus and his soldiers carried it out. What was the actual cause of that fateful crucifixion outside the walls of Jerusalem? Jesus died by a Roman method of execution as King of the Jews. However, this information does not explain the underlying reason for his death.

Even with the four portraits of Jesus in the biblical Gospels, much about him remains obscure and enigmatic. On the other hand, it is possible to glimpse Jesus' world in his parables. It is a peasant's world of plowing a field and finding something extremely valuable. The parables are peopled with peasants: a neighbor who asks for help in the middle of the night, a compassionate wayfaring stranger, a woman who cleans her house but leaves it empty and thereby creates even worse problems for herself. Beggars and day-laborers, "those who toil and are heavy laden," are common to the everyday scene. Not only the poor, but the Rich populate Jesus' parables: the person in the position of trust, a rich landowner, and a suddenly returning master. Some unattractive characters are also used to emphasize his mission, such as a jealous brother, an unfaithful wife, even a crooked bookkeeper. The Jews in his audiences could see themselves and their own life-conditions in the mirror of Jesus' parables, which he used to draw them into the story and then turn their expectations upside-down.

Despite what the four Evangelists have done to obscure Jesus' mission, he is still the central figure who commands our attention. Sometimes he is barely in focus, standing on the shore after preparing a meal for his disciples. At other times he is lost completely, as in the lofty, Greek discourses and monologues of the Fourth Gospel. This makes it all the more wonderful to find scattered throughout the four Gospels some tantalizing echoes of Jesus' personality, as in the consistent clue of his own verbal mannerism: Amen, amen lego soi, "truly, truly I say to you... ". The historical Jesus is much more than the creation of the Gospel writers living decades after his death, and far more than a creature in stained-glass windows or forever hung on an artist's cross. The cumulative effect of studying his teachings is to be confronted with a wholly Jewish view, of his own time and place. He laughed and cried. He loved and lost. He gave his life for what he believed, believing to the end that his mission was worth it all.