TRANSCRIPT OF LECTURE, DAY 4
DR. G. HOWARD MILLER
"JESUS IN AMERICAN CULTURE"
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
September 8, 2006
The fourth Gospel differs from the synoptics in all kinds of ways. The Book of John may have been written as early at 50 years after Paul's first letter, somewhere around the turn of the first to the second century.
Some believe that the disciple John, the brother of James; John, who is called the Beloved Apostle; John who sat at Jesus' right hand, some believe that that man named John may actually have written part, if not all, of this Gospel.
But most scholars nowadays agree that it is not in its entirety apostolic in origin, that it was written by another hand later in the century, by a leader of what has come to be called the Johanan community of early Christians in the last years of the first century.
The letters of Paul had not been intended to give a history of the life and ministry of Jesus. The first Christian documents had not. The last one doesn't either.
The Gospel according to John does not intend to give a complete sweep narrative of the entire life and ministry of the historic Jesus. There is not birth narrative. There are no parables, there's no Sermon on the Mount, no healing of the lepers, no Lord's Prayer, no eucharistic Last Supper.
How does the Gospel of John begin? Come on. The first words of the Gospel of John: "In the beginning." What other part of the Scriptures begins that way? "In the beginning God created the heavens and earth." The fourth Gospel, In the beginning. What? "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
Folks, I don't care if you're a frigging atheist; that should send chills down ‑‑ that is wonderful prose. The Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word. In the beginning was the Word.
Jesus talks all through the Gospel of John. It's the yakking gospel. But he doesn't teach morals or ethics, he doesn't really give religious instructions. Instead, in a way that is absolutely unique ‑‑ that's redundant, isn't it, it's just unique ‑‑ from the other ‑‑ from the synoptics, he simply proclaims himself.
This is certainly not Mark's secretive Messiah. This Jesus forthrightly refutes the Jews' claim to have independent access to God. How did they claim to have independent access to God? Through the?
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Bigger than the temple. The temple's part of the law. The law. They claimed to have independent access to God through the law, through the Scriptures. No, no, no, says Jesus. He alone knows the Father because he alone has seen the Father. He was with God, he was God.
The fourth Gospel is the only one of the Gospels with a fully developed theological meditation on who Jesus is. It has a Christology. And in Christological terms, it is a high Christology. It emphasizes the divinity, and the majesty, and the otherness of Jesus.
Over and over Jesus says, I Am. I am the Good Shepherd, I am the Lamb of God, I am the True Vine, I am the Bread of Life, I am the Way and the Truth, I am the Resurrection and the Life, I am the Light of the World.
Light, Jesus is from the world of light. Up there, in the cosmos. Down here is the world of darkness. That world up there, the cosmos, is far from earth history and time. The earth is the realm of darkness, ruled by the Evil One.
Jesus' followers become the Children of Light. They alone can know him because they no longer live in the land of darkness. And through Him, although they live in the land of darkness, they become the Children of Light and through Jesus can know the Father in that other place. Light and darkness. It's one of the two central themes of the fourth Gospel.
The second of the central themes is the theme of ascending and descending. Going up and down. Jesus ascends and descends throughout the Gospel. He descended from the realm of light into history and humanity. He supersedes Moses and John the Baptist, and all who came before Him.
The cross is the pivot between the realms of light and darkness in the Book of John. Through the cross, Jesus draws his followers up from the realm of darkness to the realm of light where they will be safe from the Evil One.
He is going to ascend again. Right? Ascend again, leaving his children in the land of darkness, but they are not now alone. Until they can be drawn up by him to the Father, the Lamb of God, the Good Shepherd, the True Vine, and the Bread of Life will feed, nurture, and protect those of children of light that he has left behind, until finally He will come again to gather them all finally up into the realm of light.
John's Jesus is unlike Mark's secretive Messiah. John's Jesus is unlike Matthew's Rabbi teacher. John's Jesus is unlike Luke's patient ‑‑ Rabbi preacher, Matthew's preacher ‑‑ or he's unlike Luke's patient teacher and moral exemplar.
One scholar has called Jesus ‑‑ John's Jesus the Stranger, with a capital S. Jesus appears in the Gospel of John as an alien, an alien from the world of light momentarily, voluntarily in the realm of darkness.
There is no birth narrative in the Gospel because Jesus' point of entry is irrelevant. How He comes is irrelevant. His true point of origin is the realm of light, far beyond the cosmos and human time with the Father.
From this realm of darkness, as I have said, he will then ascend, and with the Father, become Christ in Glory. And I have a picture, which is as close as I can get to John's Jesus. Christ in Glory. Christ in Majesty. Is that not a magnificent representation? This is John's Jesus. Christ in Glory.
John's Jesus is not quite human. He is aloof and removed, unlike any of the other Jesuses. It's interesting because it is in the Book of John that this man, who hardly is ever moved, does something that he does only once we're told in the Gospel.
What does Jesus do in John that shows him a man of emotion, his humanity? He weeps. Jesus wept. For whom does Jesus weep? Who? The death of Lazarus, for he was Jesus' friend. Right?
But for whom else might Jesus be weeping? Lazarus has died, he's about to be raised from the dead. Who else do you know who's going to die and be raised from the dead? Jesus weeps for himself. Jesus weeps for everybody in the realm of darkness. Jesus wept.
John's Jesus is extraordinarily passive in all of his encounters with authority, he is passive in his encounters with the Jews, he is passive with his encounters with the Romans. And he is passive on the cross.
John's Jesus never really seems to suffer. He is unnervingly imperturbable. He is unprovoked by mockery, sarcasm, and final lethal violence. At his trial and on the cross he is silent, but he is in control.
How do we know Jesus is in control in his trial and his talks with Pilate? He's not scared. But we know it directly because he tells us. He tells Pilate, you're not in control here. Who's in control here? The Father. If the Father wanted to do this, he could do that. You're not in control here.
Jesus is in complete control of himself and every situation. On the cross he dies only when his mission has been fulfilled, and then he simply says, It is finished. In John's Gospel, Jesus is so glorified on the cross that the resurrection seems no surprise, and it almost seems like it's superfluous.
In fact, the resurrection in John's Gospel is a continuation and the conclusion of the fourth Gospel. And the cross. John's Gospel then forthrightly proclaims the post-resurrection Christ in Glory, the cosmic Christ.
The audience for that proclamation is not the children of darkness who can never know the Light of the World. They do not live in the light, they cannot live in the light. They can never know Jesus. They can never know the Father.
But the Christian community of the Gospel's author do live in the light. And it is for them that this remarkable piece of literature is written.
All righty. Questions? Yes, ma'am. What is your name by the way? Stephanie. Does Mary have much place in the Gospel of John? I'm guessing not too, but I'd be guessing. You know, I'm guessing not. She's one of the women at the foot of the cross. I think that's about all she does. I don't know. I'll check and see, you check and see. All righty?
You have a favorite Scripture? How many of you have a favorite Scripture? I'm serious. Bear with me. How many of you, who call yourself Christians, have a favorite Scripture?
My favor Scripture is John 17. What is the 17th Chapter of John? Anyone tell me? It's not just a prayer. What do scholars call it? The High Priestly Prayer of Jesus. Jesus prays for the Disciples, and for the Children of Light as he assumes the task of dying for their sins. Check it out. Some of the greatest prose ever written.
Let's turn then to Paul. Folks, trick question, who created Christianity? Folks, Paul probably created most of Christianity. For good and for ill, and there's a lot of ill that comes out of Paul. But Christians must do some good too. So here we go.
What was Paul's first name? Before he was Paul he was Saul. Saul was a Jewish leader who participated in the persecution of the first Christians in Jerusalem, and he was on his way to Damascus to do same of the bad stuff. And on that road to Damascus he is struck down by glorious light that blinds him. And from the light, as we heard, a voice asking, why are you persecuting me? Who are you? I am Jesus whom you persecute.
The road to Damascus experience transforms Paul ‑‑ Saul. And he takes the name of Paul. The man named Paul, as we know from early documents, had conflicted relations with the apostolic generation of leaders, particularly with a man named James.
But it is Paul who then takes the Gospel to the Gentiles and takes the Gospel to Asia Minor, and Turkey, Syria, Greece, and finally to Rome. The letters that this man wrote to those churches around the middle of the First Century are the oldest of the origin of Christianity documents.
Let me emphasize. Paul does not know the Jesus of history. It's clear that he knows only a few what he calls sayings of the Lord. He seems to have known nothing of Jesus' miracles. That's really interesting too. The oral tradition didn't get that to him. But undeniably he knew those who did know Jesus.
But Saul knew the cosmic Christ in a way that no one else knew, because He had appeared to him and knocked him off his horse and made him blind. Folks, I suggest that's an extraordinary introduction to anybody.
Folks, if somebody appeared to me a blinding flash of light, spoke to me, and I then got my eyes again, I would think I was pretty hot stuff. And I would think I was damned lucky too.
Paul thought he was pretty hot stuff. You have to understand that actually to understand the way in which Paul carries himself in the First Century of Christianity. He believed that the divine appearance had been a supremely important act of God that had set him, Paul, apart. Set apart Paul from all others as one with a uniquely important task.
He had been called by God through the cosmic Christ to take the Gospel to the world outside of Judaism, the Gentiles. This is an extraordinary change for this man who was a quintessential Jew. Paul now believed that the Christians he, as Saul, had been persecuting, they were, as it turns out, the true means by which God would redeem the world. Not the law as sent to the Children of Israel.
The Jews, including Saul, had rejected Jesus, and now said he, who is responsible for the Jews? Who is now responsible for the Jews? Not the Christians. God. They'd had their chance. They were now God's task. His task was to take Christianity to the Gentiles, the rest of the world.
The Jews, as I said, believed that they had unique access to God through the law and through Scriptures. But Paul now proclaimed that God through Jesus had demonstrated his righteousness apart from the law. Access to God now was only through Jesus Christ.
The writings of Paul are crucial because they are the earliest of the surviving canonical documents to use the oral traditions about Jesus and his ministry.
For instance, in the 11th Chapter of First Corinthians we find the earliest account of Jesus' instituting the Lord's Supper, the eucharistic meal that became the foundation of Christian ritual and worship. Before the Gospels told us about it, Paul's letter tells us about it.
These are crucial also because seven of them are recognized by scholars as coming directly from him. There aren't many things that scholars, about this ‑‑ all this stuff, agree on. But most scholars agree that at least seven of them are unmediated by anybody else.
These seven letters of Paul, chronologically, are the closest we can get to the historic Jesus. They are the first letter to the Thessalonians, both the first and second letters to the Corinthians, the letter to the Ephesians, the letter to the man named Philemon, the letter to the Galatians, and Paul's supreme statement, the letter to the Christians who are at Rome, the letter to the Romans.
We know more about Paul than we know about any of the early Christian leaders. About most of the Christian leaders we know virtually nothing. Paul's Christology is very high.
We learn very little about the man named Jesus as he lived on earth. Paul doesn't preach or write about Jesus' teaching and moral precepts. He doesn't talk about Jesus as the founder of a church, or an institution. You realize that? There's nothing about a church, institution.
Paul's Jesus is Lord, Adonai, He is the Divine Son of God, the uniquely pre-existent Son of the Father. And the message of Paul is simple, the Son of God has descended from heaven, has now ascended, and is about to come again. And he meant about, soon.
Paul's writings are unabashedly, urgently apocalyptic, eschatological. The end time had begun with the resurrection and the ascension he said. And Paul firmly believed that the end time would soon culminate in Jesus' glorious return. This much is very clear from the authoritative writings of Paul.
All righty. And finally now let's turn to the way in which the church began in the first few centuries to fuss with each other about who Jesus is. You got your Gospels, you got the oral tradition, you got the letters of Paul, you got the letters ‑‑ the Gospels, the four Gospels.
Now let's fight. The first four centuries of the Common Era sees the church resolve three basic problems. The first problem, the problems of Israel's failure to embrace Jesus as Messiah. The second problem, the problem of the failed promise, the problem of the failed prophecy, the eschatological failure, the fact that Jesus didn't come. And finally the problem of defining Jesus.
Now, I'm going to use the term the church in discussing these developments, but the definition of the church is slowly evolving over these centuries. So I'll use it as a shorthand way of referring to the gradually emerging forms of Christian ecclesiastical authority, the church authority.
Let's turn first to the problem of Israel. The first thing that the church said is that Jesus had superseded Israel. Jesus is no longer the only means of approaching and knowing God ‑‑ I'm sorry ‑‑ Israel is not the only means of approaching and knowing God. Jesus is.
This position is best seen in the figure of Jesus that appears in the letter to the Hebrews, one of the great statements of Christian origins. The letter to the Hebrews was written by an unknown author, somewhere between 90 and 115 C.E., 90 and 115 C.E., a little bit after John, I suspect.
No one knows who wrote it. But Mr. Clement, one of the early church fathers, said, as to who wrote it, only God knows. Maybe God wrote it.
The risen Christ of the letter to the Hebrews is gloriously exalted in heaven, He supersedes everybody. He supersedes Moses, he supersedes the high priests. Jesus in the Book of Hebrews is now the ultimate high priest. He even supersedes the temple in Jerusalem itself.
The writer of the Book of Hebrews uses the word "superior" 14 times to describe Jesus' position with respect to any other part of spiritual authority. The theology of the Book of the Hebrews, the letter to the Hebrews, excludes all other means of access to God except the risen Christ.
As early as the end of the First Century, the church insisted, with increasing ferocity actually, that the opposition to Jesus had not been Roman, but Jewish. The opposition to Jesus has not been Roman, but Jewish. He was religiously offensive to the Jews, not politically offensive to the Romans, and had to die.
Hence the demonization of the Jewish leaders and people in Matthew's Gospel, and even more emphatically in the last of the Gospels, the Gospel of John. Folks, the Jew language of the fourth Gospel is a scandal. It is one of the Christian scandals. Read it, looking at the Jew language, the way in which they are demonized.
The leaders of the church in the Second Century traced their origins back to the apostolic generation, not to Israel. They, in fact, repudiated Jewish law and ritual, and then to add insult to injury, they simply claimed that the biblical promises that are given to Israel by God were ‑‑ now belonged to what institution? The Christian church. Those biblical promises of God to Israel now were their own.
They also redefined what Messiah means. The prevalent Jewish view of Messiah, the Anointed One, did not allow for a dying Messiah. Especially one who died in the ignominious way in which Jesus died, on a Roman cross with common criminals.
But the church leaders now argued that Jesus had to die. The death of the Messiah was now seen as a necessary pre-condition for the glorious resurrection and the eternal life that it purchased. The cross was not vile and loathsome, it was glorious. Only a crucified Messiah could be a true Messiah. They turned it on its head.
And, in any case, just wait. When Jesus finally comes back, guess what he's going to come back as? He said hopefully. Who is he going to come back as? What are we talking about? The true Messiah. He's going to establish his kingdom. The true Messiah.
He's going to come back as a true Messiah and overthrow the forces of evil. What do Messiahs do? And establish His earthly kingdom. It turns out that Jesus didn't have a messianic past, he had a messianic future. Good. This is really quite clever. Best way to take an argument is to stand it on its head. Makes its terms your terms. And they did.
But the early church leaders didn't want to talk too much about Jesus' second coming, did they? Did they? Why not? Because of the second problem. Thank you. Can you say transition?
Let us now turn to the failed prophecy, that Jesus will return soon. The writing that's so prominent, that dominated that first origin of Christianity documents, the letters of Paul. In the Second Century, the unfulfilled prophecy became an increasingly embarrassing problem for at least two reasons.
Now, folks, most students can't imagine this is a problem, because we don't think of Christianity having been established on the basis of a failure. But, folks, it just was. And it was a very serious problem. So let's uh, and get back there. Take it seriously.
It basically wasn't happening. That's an embarrassment. But more than that, the church now was finding itself responsible for the present, increasingly. The church now sought to assert its own institutional forms and authority over the growing Christian community. They wanted to assert their power over the here and now.
And, folks, that's just real difficult if everyone is talking about the future. We need to focus people on the here and now, not some future messianic kingdom. Christians had to be led to live in the present, a present dominated by the church, not to be preoccupied with a future kingdom that never arrived.
Well, fine, but what about that promise? The church had an answer for this. They adopted a position that came to be called realized eschatology. Realized eschatology. The church argued that, in fact, Jesus had already returned.
How had he returned? Well, let's get ‑‑ but ‑‑ he returned actually in the form he said he would. How did he return? No. Was it? Say it. He came as the Holy Spirit, folks. You're supposed to be ‑‑ if you're Christians, you're supposed to be trinitarians. Well, let's get that other guy in there.
He came as the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit led to the formation of the church. That is the second coming, or at least that fulfills the eschatological promise of Jesus. Now, does that work for you? Does that work for you? Didn't work for lots of people. But it worked for lots of people too.
The kingdom was not in the future, it has already been realized in the present form of the church. The concept of realized eschatology saved the church from the embarrassment of its own apostolic failure, its own apostolic origins and past.
And it vastly increased the importance and prestige of the church because, it turns out, that establishing it had been Jesus' primary purpose in coming to the earth. Now, did Jesus ever say that? Did Jesus every say that? No. Not exactly in those words anyhow. But there's enough there that they can use.
All right. Those are the two easy ones. The really hard one is the last problem. Who is Jesus? Now, I must hasten to warn you that we are not going to figure this out today, or by the end of the semester, because, guess what? It's still an open-ended question.
What is the nature of Jesus and his mission? The first thing that they had to do to figure this out was to sort out all of these different gospels. And by the time they get serious, the oral traditions are dying out, but those oral traditions have produced scores, folks, if not hundreds, we don't know, do we.
Why do we not know how many gospels there were? Oh, you little conspiratorial thing. The church suppressed them. Well, they suppressed the ones maybe they could find. But what about the ones they didn't find? What about the ones that were lost? Folks, can you imagine? I don't know. Who knows? Who knows by the way? In Christian terms, who knows? God knows. That's supposed to be enough for you too, by the way. So give it up. Give it up.
All right. But we've got all these gospels, and we've just got to assert control over them. Or do we? Notice my assumption. The only way that we could have an institution would be for us to come up with some sort of canon and say, you, you, you, you, and nobody else.
Well, wait. Why could we not say, we are going to glory in the multiplicity of all of this stuff. What are the chances? Probably not. Probably not. So we start sorting out the canon. Folks, this is a fascinating story. The ones that almost made it and didn't, the ones that made it, and almost didn't. Fascinating story.
The canon was fairly threshed out and decided by the end of the Fourth Century. The Council of Carthage in 394 laid out the Christian canon. And while that process was going on, actually this is part of that process, the church worked its way toward an authoritative statement of the nature of Jesus.
Most of the issues that emerged in that process revolved on how human and how divine was Jesus. Folks, that's the problem, isn't it? You've got someone who's both human and divine, well, what are you going to say? How much?
Let's begin by looking at some of the important suggested solutions to the problem raised by the incarnation. One logical position would be to say that Jesus was very important, even uniquely crucial and necessary. Very important, even uniquely crucial and necessary, but not divine. Really important, but not divine.
This was the position of a whole strain of Jewish Christian who wanted to cling to significant parts of Judaism. They believed that Jesus was the Messiah, but that he was not divine. He was born of human, and he had been sort of adopted by God for the all important mission of redeeming Israel.
These Christians, these Jewish Christians who accepted that Jesus was crucially important but not divine were called Ebionites. Folks, it's just a word you have to learn.
All right. Important but not divine. What's the opposite of that? How about Jesus was divine and only appeared to be human. Jesus was divine, and only appeared to be human. Jesus was kind of a divine apparition, who just appeared to be human. These folks were sometimes called docetists, from the Greek "to appear."
Folks, religion has a technical vocabulary. You simply have to learn definitions. Suck it up. I don't want to hear any complaining about it. Every study has a technical vocabulary. This is your assignment. I don't want to hear a word about it. This is all acquirable skills.
But religion's supposed to be easy, Dr. Miller. No, it's not. At least not the study of it. It's very complex. What do you mean he just appears to ‑‑ you know, this is kind of silly, you know, Jesus is a ghost, kind of walks ‑‑ but, you know, it explains one thing about Jesus, and which is really weird in the Gospels.
Have you ever noticed how many times in the Gospels Jesus simply seems to disappear? He's a ghost, he was there, and he's not there. And he pops up over here. A pop up Jesus. It happens a lot actually. Well, if he's not really here, that's easier.
Now, if you want to try to touch him, or how about nailing him to the cross, that's a problem. Folks, none of these can answer all the problems, can they? How do we finally just sort of figure all this out anyhow?
It's a mystery, it's kind of both. Because it's insoluble. So don't hurt your mind trying to figure it out, because we can't ever figure it all out.
The Docetists tended to be essentially Greek, or Hellenistically inclined Christians, Gentiles. Christians who insisted that Jesus had never been human at all. He was divine, pre-existent, and had entered the world of flesh but had never really assumed a human body. Or maybe he kind of adopted a human body. Some of them kind of thought of that. That's kind of creepy, isn't it? Jesus says something weird in the last ‑‑ on the cross. One of the last ‑‑ seven last words is, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me. Some Docetists say that was Jesus' adoptive body after the spirit left him. Well, so you thought you had all this figured out.
Yes. They never ‑‑ the question was ‑‑ and that's not offensive at all ‑‑ the question was, what do you mean, he's just kind of like a, what, kind of a spooky ‑‑ what was ‑‑ spirit possessing a body? What do you call those? Body snatchers, zombies. Jesus is a zombie. How about that? Is that offensive enough? What is it? Not till ‑‑ oh, there you go. Who knows.
None of these could explain everything, can they? But they really argued about it. And some people really believed that. Well, because the Greeks believed that the bodies don't matter anyhow. See, we think bodies are really important, don't we? We think the material world is really important. They didn't.
All righty? Okay. So he ‑‑ maybe he was a hallucination? He hallucinated everybody, charmed everybody, he's a magician.
Now, one of the early fathers, a very important one named Marcian, had something to say about this. Marcian, among a whole lot of other things that he said ‑‑ how many of you have studied Marcian? Some of you have studied Marcian ‑‑ he is the one who said sort of explicitly that Jesus was divine, but he was not born of flesh and blood. He instead temporarily inhabited a human body. Kind of borrowed it, and then abandoned on the resurrection.
Then there was the man named Arius, A-R-I-U-S. Arius was a fourth century church father who did not believe in the Trinity. Now, folks, we are going to come up with lots of Christians, American Christians, who do not believe in the mystery of the Trinity.
And Arius said in the Fourth Century that Jesus was not part of a triune God. He was, in fact, not part of God in any sense. But Jesus ‑‑ now, folks, this is the first time I've said this, first time it's appeared, this is important ‑‑ Jesus is not part of God, he's not divine. But he is a special creation of God.
He is not made of the substance of God, he is not made of our substance. He is between us, he is unique in creation. He is a special creation. He was a unique being with a unique task in God's plan for the redemption of mankind. Got it? Folks, they cannot stamp out that idea. Thomas Jefferson's idea, basically.
Then there was the persistent tendency to talk about Jesus in terms of wisdom. Wisdom. Now, those of you ‑‑ and your numbers are growing every year, God love you ‑‑ who are studying early religions, not just Christianity, or those of you who are studying ancient philosophy, know that the world in which the Christian Jesus was born into was a world awash with wisdom literature. Not just in Judaism, or in Hellenism, but wisdom literature in all kinds of traditions. Wisdom literature.
Wisdom literature in all these traditions refers to the righteous person, the adept, A-D-E-P-T, who is often a prophet of one sort or another in the tradition. And this adept, or prophet, someway has found his way, or her way, to a higher form of wisdom, a higher form of enlightenment, and the word is often they have found gnosis, knowledge, wisdom.
And in some Eastern traditions, one way to make the point was to talk about these adepts as the Children of ‑‑ can anyone ‑‑ what's it? Light? Particularly a person. People in wisdom literature often spoke of as being the Children of Sophia. Sophia: wisdom.
The female incarnation of wisdom in several ancient belief systems. Folks, in the early centuries Jesus was often called the Child of Sophia.
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