Faith

June 17, 2007

By Howard Bess

What we know about Jesus is minimal. He grew up in a small town named Nazareth in northern Palestine.

He was a teacher and interpreter of Torah, the Jewish law. He had no credentials to play the role of teacher.

He was an outsider to the religious system. His audiences were almost exclusively rural and illiterate.

The Kingdom of God was central to his teaching. When still a young man, he went to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. He caused a disturbance around the Jewish Temple.

He was killed on a cross, a usual way to handle people who did not keep in line.

There are no written records about Jesus that come from the time he lived nor from the first 15-25 years after his life.

What we know with some measure of accuracy is from oral traditions passed along by women. Oral tradition does quite well in passing the stories that Jesus told and the sayings that he repeated. However, stories about what he did are more of a problem.

Stories about great people tend to grow with every new telling.

The stories become longer and more detailed with retelling. The stories from the Bible about the life of Jesus are not credible in their detail. Miracle stories become more dramatic and more difficult for a critical mind to embrace.

A year or so ago, Mel Gibson produced a movie entitled &#8220The Passion of the Christ.” The movie drew huge crowds. It is the perfect example of taking a story of which we know few details and blowing it up far beyond credibility.

The movie made me cry out within &#8220Is there an historian in the house?” I was amazed at how many people were totally hooked by the movie and thought they had seen the real thing.

In the past 50 years a dramatic change has taken place in Biblical scholarship. We have more bona fide Bible scholars than ever before in history.

Many of our finest Biblical scholars have moved from seminaries and church sponsored colleges into state universities. I know of no major American University today that does not have a quality Department of Religion.

The result is that literary and historical study of the Bible has taken a new turn. We now have scholars who are not bound by theological statements, by creedal orthodoxies or by church hierarchies.

Scholars are now free to strip away the layers of theological interpretations and identify the Jesus of history.

The Jesus of history is the one in which I am most interested. After historians and literary critics peal off the layers of non-historical material from Jesus, do we have anything left?

The honest answer is &#8220not a lot.” But it is enough to do honest work on the Jesus of history.

As already mentioned, without doubt Jesus was a significant teacher, who interpreted the Jewish Torah and applied it to every day living for his listeners.

He was a master story teller and had the ability to make memorable statements that were applicable to his own day and to ours as well.

From the perspective of a historian or a literary critic, there is an amazing amount of the teaching material of Jesus that can be embraced as truly authentic.

Another almost universally accepted statement about Jesus is that he was a healer and an exorcist.

These labels are difficult to translate into our modern setting.

The understanding of physical illnesses in Jesus day was very different from our understanding today. What today we identify as treatable mental illness was understood as demon possession in the time of Jesus.

I suspect that healing and exorcism had a different meaning in Jesus' day than it has today. New Testament scholar William Herzog Jr. puts this in perspective. The things Jesus did were not important in and of themselves. The real point is that Jesus saw the need of people to be whole and worked toward that end.

Over and over again, people that Jesus helped were restored to family, community and the kingdom of God.

Was Jesus a miracle worker? You are free to make that judgment. For me, he is better seen as a broker for the God he loved and the kingdom in which God ruled.

If a few things happened along the way that we call miracles, I say &#8220to God be the glory.”

Churches are not at their best when building buildings and drawing large crowds at Christian rock concerts. Churches are at their best when we help people become their best selves and become whole. A few miracles might take place along the way.

The Rev. Howard Bess is pastor of Church of the Covenant, an American Baptist church in Palmer. His email address is hdbss@mtaonline.net.