A wholly fresh perspective on the story of Jesus, this book argues that the life and teaching of Jesus represent a direct challenge to all our human political agendas. The faith that stems from Jesus’ words, acts and sufferings is not one that turns away from politics, but one that exposes the workings of power, and both demands and promises a fuller, more fully communal human experience in love beyond judgment. Radical, learned and inspiring, this is a very important study indeed for our times.--Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury
JESUS THE STRANGER
We no longer know how to think about Jesus. In one of his memorandum books, Ludwig Wittgenstein mentions that he cannot call Jesus Lord for the simple reason that he cannot meaningfully “utter the word ‘Lord’”. However, he remarks: “I could call him ‘the paragon’, ‘God’ even—or rather, I can understand it when he is so called.”1
In Human, All Too Human, Friedrich Nietzsche refers to Jesus disarmingly as “the noblest human being”.2 He writes in a later book that “one could, with a degree of license, call Jesus a ‘free spirit’”.3 In Nietzsche’s lexicon, there is no higher praise. Immanuel Kant’s idea of Jesus is that of “a person whose wisdom, even purer than that of previous philosophers, was as though descended from heaven”.4 And Benedict de Spinoza makes this arresting confession: “I believe no one has achieved such perfection compared to others as Christ, to whom the decrees of God which lead humankind to salvation were revealed directly.” If the legislator Moses met God “face to face,” the philosopher Christ knew God “mind to mind”.5 (See fig. 1.) A book could be written about this sequence of fragments on Jesus—and other texts could be brought forward.6 But this is not that book. Rather, we can take these fragments as a bare indication that even many of Christianity’s harshest critics have held Jesus to be thought-worthy. If we no longer know how to think about the enigmatic figure who moves through the four gospels, the fault may be ours.
H. S. Reimarus and the Modern Idea of Jesus
One reason for our lack of philosophical interest in Jesus may be confusion. We tend to confuse the person of Jesus with the legacy of Christianity, and to confuse mere denunciation with critique. Nietzsche is clarifying. He finally decided to call The Antichrist—his 1888 tirade—a Curse upon Christianity, and not a Critique of Christianity, as in early drafts.7 A curse is not critique. And critique is not the root of any culture.
In a volume of her lectures and conversations, Julia Kristeva suggests that there can be no culture of pure critique. The deepest sources of any culture must be not only interrogated, but—in a highly nuanced way—believed. She argues that Christianity “has introduced and continues to diffuse radical innovations … we have not done taking the measure of”, and that we “do not dare recognize … as ‘Christian difference’”.8
But there is, to my mind, a more specific cause of our philosophical disinterest in Jesus. It is that late modern historians often envision him in the terms described by Anna Della Subin in the first pages of her shimmering book, Accidental Gods.9 Subin writes that “scholars who search for the man-in-history” behind the gospels find Jesus to be immersed in “the politics of his day.” He is “a Jewish dissident preacher who posed a radical challenge to the gods and governors of Rome.” And this is how Subin fleshes out her modern idea of the Jesus of history: He practices the rite of baptism as liberation, from sin and from the bondage of the empire that occupied Jerusalem. Jesus, like many in his age, warns that… the current world order, in its oppressions and injustices, will soon come to an end and the kingdom of the Israelites will be restored, the message for which he will be arrested for high treason.10 Here, Subin is restating a theory which was first formulated in secret notebooks kept in the 1760s by a scholar of the high Enlightenment, Hermann Samuel Reimarus, and only printed a number of years after his death. (See fig. 2.) What made Reimarus’ theory iconoclastic is not the idea that the Jesus of history is, in Subin’s words, a Jewish dissident preacher. He manifestly is that. It is rather the idea that Jesus is not a dissident. According to Reimarus, the historical Jesus held a relatively orthodox conception of Israel’s divinely chosen liberator, or “Christ” (from the Greek Christos or Messias, from the Hebrew Mashiah and Aramaic Meshiah).11 But Reimarus’ Jesus is not a liberating figure. He is himself a captive of the first-century political imaginary.12 In Reimarus’ words, Jesus is not “a spiritual deliverer of humankind”, but a hill-country rebel who longed to become the “worldly deliverer of Israel.”13 His Jesus—the exemplarily modern one—is not a mystic visionary of a divine kingdom “within you” (Luke 17:21), but a Zealot-style aspirant to sovereignty in a last-days kingdom of Israel.
What happens when a stranger comes onto th scene and immediately begins to share his opinions... Jesus was from Galilee but began to move around and then ultimately came to Jerusalem where he visited the Temple. And began to talk...
In the sample of the first few pages in Part I: A Place to Begin, we find that there are many wide and critical opinions that arose across the world of philosophers in the area who were used to having new faces, new voices come and go. But slowly, little by little there were those who listened, stayed to listen more, and then started coming back again and again. Jesus soon had a following...
As, unfortunately, we are seeing today, people began to formulate definite opinions and to choose whose words were most relevant to them. Note: it is assumed that, at this time, there was no concerted actions on anybody's part to speak deliberately to deceive; i.e., to provide false or misleading statements.
As we move forward, the author shares exactly what he believes and hopes to show:
(i) that the modern theory of a political Christ is utterly incongruent with the dramatic structure of our earliest texts on the life of Jesus; and (ii) that something like Kant’s theory of an ethical Jesus, whatever its limitations, is far more philosophically interesting. and concluding with
It is this strangeness that shaped his political life, and that led—I will argue—to his death as a political criminal. It is this strangeness, too, that makes Jesus’ life intriguing and his sayings still worthy of reflection.
Chapter 2 leads us to explore the great wisdom that Jesus was to become known for. Many called him a wise philosopher such as they had come to know, including Socrates, Kant and many others that speak to the area of religion...and politics... Dusenburg spotlights his support of Christ as a philosopher using scripture written later: The first scene to which I referred is in Mark, where the inhabitants of Nazareth ask where Jesus obtained his wisdom. It ends with him saying: “A prophet is not without honour, except in his own country” (Mark 6:4). And, indeed those in Galilee soon began to question Jesus who was "just a carpenter" shortly before...
One of the things I've always enjoyed about the Bible is the use of stories to provide examples; i.e., parables. This is the first teaching found in this book:
As [Levi, a tax collector,] reclined at table in his house, many tax collectors and sinners were reclining at table with Jesus and his disciples; for there were many who followed him.27 And the scribes of the Pharisees, when they saw that Jesus was eating with sinners and tax collectors, said to his disciples, “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” And when Jesus heard it, he said to them, “Those who are strong have no need of a physician, but those who are ill. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Mark 2:15–17)28 This image of Jesus as a divinely skilled healer—Christus medicus, in later tradition—has a rich history, not only in theology but in art.29 Yet Jesus’ saying about the physician’s calling—to visit the sick, and only then to heal them—may also have an intriguing prehistory.30
One final chapter, Jesus The Philosopher, in Part 1 is significant for setting the stage for everything thereafter... as the author makes his goal clear:
The risk taken in this book is a return to the old idea: that it is Jesus’ resistance to the political which makes his life and death, unexpectedly, redemptive. Jesus can only judge the political world in a world-historical way because he can say, resolutely, “I judge no one” (John 8:15).
Moving on...In the meantime, please pray that I will be taught what He wants all of you to know about... I Judge No One. Watch for conclusion tomorrow...
God Bless
Gabbie
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