With our basic homework done, knowing the multiple takes on Jesus by the early theologians (the Gospel writers) who have lived with Him or known Him from His close associates, in this write up we discuss a talk by Raymond E. Brown (Bangalore, 1978) that connects the dynamics of the New Testament understanding of Jesus. In other words, we learn about how the early Christians have come to understand Jesus. The whole context of Jesus’ life and ministry was Judaism – Jewish people, their expectations, their concepts, their understanding from the OT. Jesus comes and proclaims the KOG, but he fails to fit in their expectations. This was a major problem. Though his close associates recognized his divinity, yet he was no were close to the standard (Jewish) expectations of a Jew – the Messiah. Christian Christology is fundamentally our attempt to find a language to express this reality ‘Jesus’.We start from Resurrection. We must always remember that there is only a gradual growth in our understanding of the mystery; in the case of Jesus, the early Christians were no exception. The Christians of the year 35 AD have one understanding of Jesus, later we see another emerging, though connected yet different, always with an elbow room for further insights and broader understandings. After the resurrection, at least those close to him were convinced that God has proved that He was the expected one; that the kingdom He preached was authentic. And yet everything they read in the prophets about Messiah had not yet happened: a kingdom in this earth, a king of Israel who conquers the surrounding countries to bring perfect peace and prosperity, and so on. Therefore there was a tension between their faith experience that ‘Jesus came from God’ and the failure to accomplish the expectations.
Our efforts to resolve this tension, is the beginning of our Christology. First, they introduced the concept ‘second coming’. Interestingly, this is altogether strange to Jewish culture. Jews have no idea of two comings, He is supposed to come once and do all things. Christians however caught up between the tension developed the notion of second coming/parousia. Jesus, who has ascended to the father, will come back again in the near future and then fulfill all their expectations. They applied all the standard Jewish terminology to explain the concept: ‘He would come as an anointed King to establish His kingdom on earth’; and would make his Messiahship explicit. It is called as ‘Future Christology’. We find echoes of it in the NT see Book of Acts and Gospels. It is in this context they adapt titles ‘Maranatha’, ‘Son of Man’ to explain Jesus. This pattern of thought required only a little change from the Jewish tradition. This in all probability might have been the first step to understand Jesus.
Gradually however, they grew out of this understanding, to the conviction that God has made Jesus both ‘Lord and Messiah’ already in His resurrection – ‘Present Christology’. It was the most prominent thought in the early preaching. In this preaching, they explained that He would not be Messiah only when he would come back, but already one in His resurrection. This required a change in the Hebrew thought. It required a new understanding of the concept Messiah. He is a king but His kingdom is not of this world; he brings peace but its different kind of peace. They begin to adapt the standard titles ‘Messiah, Lord, Son of Man, Son of God, and King’ to fit Jesus. I quote, “they don’t make Jesus fit the terminology; they make the terminology fit Jesus. And the newness of […] Jesus eventually reshaped the whole theological vocabulary of Judaism” says Brown. Thus, gradually we begin to part from Judaism.
St. Paul, is a prominent protagonist of this theology: ‘we are bringing you the good news of the promise which God has fulfilled through us their (patriarchs) children, by raising Jesus from the dead’. See Acts 13; Rom 1.3. Thereafter he begins to explain how Jesus though man through the power of God (the Holy Spirit) is lifted up/raised from the dead. He argues it to be the proof of his divine sonship. He repeatedly attaches the title ‘Lord’, to the name of Jesus. See Phi 2.6-11. To know the name in the Jewish tradition is to know the identity of the person. Therefore with the name ‘Lord’ attached to Jesus, Paul means that He is divine. Thus the new understanding gave a new status for Jesus - a statue of Lordship, Messiahship and Divinity. This probably was the main Christology during the early preaching but it sustained its importance till the Gospels were written. This forms the major corpse of Pauline writings the earliest available Christian writings.
Mark is the earliest available gospel. It is composed in the sixties. It is about thirty years from the time Jesus died. So there must have been another corpse of writings with a different pattern of thought available when Mark writes. Because for Mark it is neither future Christology nor present Christology, instead past Christology i.e. Jesus was already Messiah during his life time. This is true for all gospels; they are working backwards. Enlightened by the resurrection experience, they begin to understand the divinity of Jesus manifest in his words and deeds. Unlike Paul who is content with crucifixion and resurrection, Mark is interested in Jesus’ ministry. And therefore he has the responsibility to bridge the relationship between Jesus of the ministry and the risen Jesus. In his response Mark insists that Jesus was not one thing during his life time and then became another thing with resurrection; Instead he already was the Messiah, the Lord and the Son of God during his whole ministry. If for Paul Jesus is designated as God’s Son in resurrection, for Mark it is already done at his baptism. Compare Rom1.3 to the drama of Baptism in Mark. We have all the essential symbols: ‘Power of God’, ‘Holy Spirit’ and the phrase ‘You are my Son’. Besides, the Holy Spirit henceforth is not something to be added in the resurrection; rather it becomes associated already in the baptism. Thereafter, they discover that it is through the power of the spirit that he worked miracles.
When the Christians proposed a ‘future Christology’ they had nothing much to change: ‘Well, he would come back to set up the kingdom to conquer our enemies’. The ‘present Christology’ though would not buy that idea, still retained the kingly image. The difference was that he ruled from heaven. But now, in the third pattern – ‘past Christology’ – Jesus was Messiah in his life time, who though truly son of God would be a suffering Messiah rejected and crucified. This was a drastic/radical change in the Jewish thought. Hence there arise conflicts between orthodox Jews and Jesus, later with his disciples. The people around him fail to understand the radically new insights of Jesus about the kingdom. Synoptic gospels allow this tension, and reveal the truth about Jesus gradually. Gospel of John on the other hand, follows a new style, in it everyone knows right from the start the truth about Jesus. All the Gospels basically follow ‘past Christology’. They recapitulate events in this light.
But, there is a limitation in the Gospel of Mark. If we know through it Jesus is God’s son at the baptism, the question follows about his life before the baptism: was Jesus son of God before baptism? Other Gospels begin to work on it. None of them begin the story with baptism. Though his disciples came into contact with Jesus only at the baptism, Christian writers are not content to start the story there. But, they take two different routes: one from baptism to the Conception another from baptism to the time before conception, before his existence as a human being i.e. pre-existence. The latter is chosen exclusively by John. Mathew and Luke have nothing to tell about this, while they repeatedly contend that all along his life he was son of God. In their infancy narratives we find the familiar language: ‘Holy Spirit’, ‘power of God’, ‘Son of God’ etc. Thus they argue that Jesus was God’s son even before baptism, from his conception. John does not speak about conception he rather jumps to pre-existence, his existence before creation. ‘In the beginning was the word and that was God’s son’ writes John. In the Gospel, hence we find references where Jesus makes note about his pre-existence; he talks about the glory he shared with God before the world began. He argues that Jesus came down from God and became man. The theology of incarnation, pre-existent god taking on flesh is his contribution to the NT Christology – Pre-existent Christology.
Now these different answers were later put together by church fathers like Ignatius of Antioch. He writes, “the divine word became man (John’s thought) in the womb of the Virgin Mary (Mathew’s and Luke’s thought)”. We are not yet done. While we may think that at this point all the questions are answered, people are always going to be asking about ‘Jesus’. We have not yet fully understood him. We learnt from John that in the beginning was the word. In the 4th C Arius takes it up to argue that the word had a beginning, hence it is created and not infinite. Enter Athanasius and the fathers of Nicaea who struggle with the problem and finally decide that Jesus never had a beginning. John went back before creation. But they push it back beyond John to say that there never was a moment when he was not.
Athanasius must have been a profound theologian, because he is able to convince the conservative camp to say this. The fathers of the Church were reluctant not because they sided Arius, instead they were not yet prepared to hold something which was not in the scripture. But Athanasius tells them, I quote: “There is no use quoting Scripture at Arius! He accepts the Scripture. But Arius is asking a question that was not asked when the scriptures were written. And so to answer him, we have got to give an answer that goes beyond the scripture, but goes in the same direction in which the scriptures point”. This is a good theological insight. We cannot be repeating the past formulas when people and socio-political situation poses new questions. The readymade answers may not be relevant, the need therefore to go beyond them. This is done not with an intention to put down past doctrines (the orthodox doctrines), instead with a great awareness of their limitedness (space and time) and at time inadequacy for the contemporary problems. Council of Nicaea has not solved everything, if you have temporal questions of Jesus, they have an answer. If someone has another kind of question, we have to think of another kind of category. In other words there is a constant attempt to understand Jesus.
Thus we have seen the dynamics of the NT Christology. It happens to most us that we read NT as if the understanding of Jesus was given to them, as it is the case with us in catechism. We forget that they have got them after lot of struggle, with the passage of time. Without such mind set, the NT corpus especially Gospels remain a puzzle. We wonder, “why do they not understand?” It is only when we realize that NT writers did not have all the answers it took a bit of struggle to attain them, we grow to appreciate it. We actively participate in their journey of understanding ‘Jesus’. This is important for us, without this struggle to understand ‘who he is’ and ‘his Kingdom’ we would not really understand what NT teaches about Jesus.
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