Jesus of Nazareth Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Abbreviations

  Publisher's Note

  Foreword

  INTRODUCTION:

  AN INITIAL REFLECTION ON THE MYSTERY OF JESUS

  CHAPTER ONE: THE BAPTISM OF JESUS

  CHAPTER TWO: THE TEMPTATIONS OF JESUS

  CHAPTER THREE: THE GOSPEL OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD

  CHAPTER FOUR: THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT

  The Beatitudes

  The Torah of the Messiah

  "You Have Heard That It Was Said But I Say to You"

  The Dispute Concerning the Sabbath

  The Fourth Commandment: The Family, the People, and the Community of Jesus' Disciples

  Compromise and Prophetic Radicalism

  CHAPTER FIVE: THE LORD'S PRAYER

  Our Father Who Art in Heaven

  Hallowed Be Thy Name

  Thy Kingdom Come

  Thy Will Be Done on Earth as It Is in Heaven

  Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

  And Forgive Us Our Trespasses, as We Forgive Those Who Trespass Against Us

  And Lead Us Not into Temptation

  But Deliver Us from Evil

  CHAPTER SIX: THE DISCIPLES

  CHAPTER SEVEN: THE MESSAGE OF THE PARABLES

  The Nature and Purpose of the Parables

  Three Major Parables from the Gospel of Luke

  The Good Samaritan (Lk 10:2537)

  The Parable of the Two Brothers (the Prodigal Son and the Son Who Remained at Home) and the Good Father (Luke 15:1132)

  The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Lk 16, 1931)

  CHAPTER EIGHT: THE PRINCIPAL IMAGES OF JOHN'S GOSPEL

  Introduction: The Johannine Question

  The Principal Johannine Images

  Water

  Vine and Wine

  Bread

  The Shepherd

  CHAPTER NINE: TWO MILESTONES ON JESUS' WAY: PETER'S CONFESSION AND THE TRANSFIGURATION

  Peter's Confession

  The Transfiguration

  CHAPTER TEN: JESUS DECLARES HIS IDENTITY

  The Son of Man

  The Son

  "I Am"

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  Copyright

  ABBREVIATIONS

  The following abbreviations are used for books of the Bible:

  Acts

  Acts of the Apostles

  Amos

  Amos Bar Baruch

  1 Chron

  1 Chronicles

  2 Chron

  2 Chronicles

  Col

  Colossians

  1 Cor

  1 Corinthians

  2 Cor

  2 Corinthians

  Dan

  Daniel

  Deut

  Deuteronomy

  Eccles

  Ecclesiastes

  Eph

  Ephesians

  Esther

  Esther

  Ex

  Exodus

  Ezek

  Ezekiel

  Ezra

  Ezra

  Gal

  Galatians

  Gen

  Genesis

  Hab

  Habakkuk

  Hag

  Haggai

  Heb

  Hebrews

  Hos

  Hosea

  Is

  Isaiah

  Jas

  James

  Jer

  Jeremiah

  Jn

  John

  1 Jn

  1 John

  2 Jn

  2 John

  3 Jn

  3 John

  Job

  Job

  Joel

  Joel

  Jon

  Jonah

  Josh

  Joshua

  Jud

  Judith

  Jude

  Jude

  Judg

  Judges

  1 Kings

  1 Kings

  2 Kings

  2 Kings

  Lam

  Lamentations

  Lev

  Leviticus

  Lk

  Luke

  1 Mac

  1 Maccabees

  2 Mac

  2 Maccabees

  Mal

  Malachi

  Mic

  Micah

  Mk

  Mark

  Mt

  Matthew

  Nahum

  Nahum

  Neh

  Nehemiah

  Num

  Numbers

  Obad

  Obadiah

  1 Pet

  1 Peter

  2 Pet

  2 Peter

  Phil

  Philippians

  Philem

  Philemon

  Prov

  Proverbs

  Ps

  Psalms

  Rev

  Revelation (Apocalypse)

  Rom

  Romans

  Ruth

  Ruth

  1 Sam

  1 Samuel

  2 Sam

  2 Samuel

  Sir

  Sirach (Ecclesiasticus)

  Song

  Song of Solomon

  1 Thess

  1 Thessalonians

  2 Thess

  2 Thessalonians

  1 Tim

  1 Timothy

  2 Tim

  2 Timothy

  Tit

  Titus

  Tob

  Tobit

  Wis

  Wisdom

  Zech

  Zechariah

  Zeph

  Zephaniah

  The following abbreviations are used from time to time:

  ATD: Das Alte Testament Deutsch, ed. Volkmar Herntrich and Artur Weiser, Gottingen, 1949-. This is a famous commentary in German on the Old Testament. The figures that follow the abbreviation indicate the volume number and the page number.

  CSEL: Corpus Scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum, Vienna, 1866-. Like the more famous Patrologia latina, this is a collection of Christian sources in Latin.

  PG: Patrologia Graeca, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, 161 vols., Paris, 1857-1866. This is a collection of ancient Christian sources in Greek.

  RGG: Die Religionen in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Tubingen, 1909-1913; 2nd ed., 1927-1932; 3rd ed., 1956ff. Some articles were contributed to this last edition by the young Professor Ratzinger.

  TDNT: Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. G. Kittel and G. Friedrich, 10 vols., Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1964-76.

  Publisher's Note

  The Revised Standard Version (RSV) is the preferred translation for Scriptural quotations within the text. In some instances, however, in order to reflect as clearly as possible the verbal associations emphasized by the author, it has been necessary to translate directly from the original biblical text.

  FOREWORD

  This book about Jesus, the first part of which I am now presenting to the public, has had a long gestation. When I was growing up--in the 1930s and 1940s--there was a series of inspiring books about Jesus: Karl Adam, Romano Guardini, Franz Michel Willam, Giovanni Papini, and Henri Daniel-Rops were just some of the authors one could name. All of these books based their portrayal of Jesus Christ on the Gospels. They presented him as a man living on earth who, fully human though he was, at the same time brought God to men, the God with whom as Son he was one. Through the man Jesus, then, God was made visible, and hence our eyes were able to behold the perfect man.

  But the situation started to change in the 1950s. The gap between the "historical Jesus" and the "Christ of faith" grew wider and the two visibly fell apart. But what can faith in Jesus as the
Christ possibly mean, in Jesus as the Son of the living God, if the man Jesus was so completely different from the picture that the Evangelists painted of him and that the Church, on the evidence of the Gospels, takes as the basis of her preaching?

  As historical-critical scholarship advanced, it led to finer and finer distinctions between layers of tradition in the Gospels, beneath which the real object of faith--the figure [Gestalt] of Jesus--became increasingly obscured and blurred. At the same time, though, the reconstructions of this Jesus (who could only be discovered by going behind the traditions and sources used by the Evangelists) became more and more incompatible with one another: at one end of the spectrum, Jesus was the anti-Roman revolutionary working--though finally failing--to overthrow the ruling powers; at the other end, he was the meek moral teacher who approves everything and unaccountably comes to grief. If you read a number of these reconstructions one after the other, you see at once that far from uncovering an icon that has become obscured over time, they are much more like photographs of their authors and the ideals they hold. Since then there has been growing skepticism about these portrayals of Jesus, but the figure of Jesus himself has for that very reason receded even further into the distance.

  All these attempts have produced a common result: the impression that we have very little certain knowledge of Jesus and that only at a later stage did faith in his divinity shape the image we have of him. This impression has by now penetrated deeply into the minds of the Christian people at large. This is a dramatic situation for faith, because its point of reference is being placed in doubt: Intimate friendship with Jesus, on which everything depends, is in danger of clutching at thin air.

  Rudolf Schnackenburg was probably the most prominent Catholic exegete writing in German during the second half of the twentieth century. It is clear that toward the end of his life, this crisis surrounding the faith made a profound impression on him. In view of the inadequacy of all the portrayals of the "historical" Jesus offered by recent exegesis, he strove to produce one last great work: Jesus in the Gospels: A Biblical Christology. The book is intended to help believing Christians "who today have been made insecure by scientific research and critical discussion, so that they may hold fast to faith in the person of Jesus Christ as the bringer of salvation and Savior of the world" (p. x). At the end of the book, Schnackenburg sums up the result of a lifetime of scholarship: "a reliable view of the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth through scientific effort with historical-critical methods can be only inadequately achieved" (p. 316); "the efforts of scientific exegesis to examine these traditions and trace them back to what is historically credible" draw us "into a continual discussion of tradition and redaction history that never comes to rest" (p. 318).

  His own account of the figure of Jesus suffers from a certain unresolved tension because of the constraints of the method he feels bound to use, despite its inadequacies. Schnackenburg shows us the Gospels' image of Christ, but he considers it to be the product of manifold layers of tradition, through which the "real" Jesus can only be glimpsed from afar. He writes: "The historical ground is presupposed but is superseded in the faith-view of the evangelists" (p. 321). Now, no one doubts that; what remains unclear is how far the "historical ground" actually extends. That said, Schnackenburg does clearly throw into relief the decisive point, which he regards as a genuinely historical insight: Jesus' relatedness to God and his closeness to God (p. 322). "Without anchoring in God, the person of Jesus remains shadowy, unreal, and unexplainable" (p. 322).

  This is also the point around which I will construct my own book. It sees Jesus in light of his communion with the Father, which is the true center of his personality; without it, we cannot understand him at all, and it is from this center that he makes himself present to us still today.

  To be sure, in the particular contours of my own presentation of Jesus I make a determined effort to go beyond Schnackenburg. The problem with Schnackenburg's account of the relationship between New Testament traditions and historical events stands out very clearly for me when he writes that the Gospels "want, as it were, to clothe with flesh the mysterious Son of God who appeared on earth" (p. 322). I would like to say in response that they did not need to "clothe him with flesh," because he had already truly taken flesh. Of course, the question remains: Can this flesh be accessed through the dense jungle of traditions?

  Schnackenburg tells us in the foreword to his book that he feels indebted to the historical-critical method, which had been in use in Catholic theology ever since the door was opened for it by the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu in 1943 (p. ix). This encyclical was an important milestone for Catholic exegesis. Since then, though, the debate about method has moved on, both inside and outside the Catholic Church. There have been significant new methodological discoveries--both in terms of strictly historical work and in terms of the interplay between theology and historical method in scriptural interpretation. Dei Verbum, the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, made a decisive step forward. In addition, two documents of the Pontifical Biblical Commission communicate important insights that have matured in the course of debates among exegetes: The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (Vatican City, 1993) and The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible (Vatican City, 2001).

  I would like to sketch at least the broad outlines of the methodology, drawn from these documents, that has guided me in writing this book. The first point is that the historical-critical method--specifically because of the intrinsic nature of theology and faith--is and remains an indispensable dimension of exegetical work. For it is of the very essence of biblical faith to be about real historical events. It does not tell stories symbolizing suprahistorical truths, but is based on history, history that took place here on this earth. The factum historicum (historical fact) is not an interchangeable symbolic cipher for biblical faith, but the foundation on which it stands: Et incarnatus est--when we say these words, we acknowledge God's actual entry into real history.

  If we push this history aside, Christian faith as such disappears and is recast as some other religion. So if history, if facticity in this sense, is an essential dimension of Christian faith, then faith must expose itself to the historical method--indeed, faith itself demands this. I have already mentioned the conciliar Constitution on Divine Revelation; it makes the same point quite explicitly in paragraph 12 and goes on to list some concrete elements of method that have to be kept in mind when interpreting Scripture. The Pontifical Biblical Commission's document on the interpretation of Holy Scripture develops the same idea much more amply in the chapter entitled "Methods and Approaches for Interpretation."

  The historical-critical method--let me repeat--is an indispensable tool, given the structure of Christian faith. But we need to add two points. This method is a fundamental dimension of exegesis, but it does not exhaust the interpretive task for someone who sees the biblical writings as a single corpus of Holy Scripture inspired by God. We will have to return to this point at greater length in a moment.

  For the time being, it is important--and this is a second point--to recognize the limits of the historical-critical method itself. For someone who considers himself directly addressed by the Bible today, the method's first limit is that by its very nature it has to leave the biblical word in the past. It is a historical method, and that means that it investigates the then-current context of events in which the texts originated. It attempts to identify and to understand the past--as it was in itself--with the greatest possible precision, in order then to find out what the author could have said and intended to say in the context of the mentality and events of the time. To the extent that it remains true to itself, the historical method not only has to investigate the biblical word as a thing of the past, but also has to let it remain in the past. It can glimpse points of contact with the present and it can try to apply the biblical word to the present; the one thing it cannot do is make it into something present today
--that would be overstepping its bounds. Its very precision in interpreting the reality of the past is both its strength and its limit.

  This is connected with a further point. Because it is a historical method, it presupposes the uniformity of the context within which the events of history unfold. It must therefore treat the biblical words it investigates as human words. On painstaking reflection, it can intuit something of the "deeper value" the word contains. It can in some sense catch the sounds of a higher dimension through the human word, and so open up the method to self-transcendence. But its specific object is the human word as human.

  Ultimately, it considers the individual books of Scripture in the context of their historical period, and then analyzes them further according to their sources. The unity of all of these writings as one "Bible," however, is not something it can recognize as an immediate historical datum. Of course it can examine the lines of development, the growth of traditions, and in that sense can look beyond the individual books to see how they come together to form the one "Scripture." Nevertheless, it always has to begin by going back to the origin of the individual texts, which means placing them in their past context, even if it goes on to complement this move back in time by following up the process through which the texts were later brought together.