THE FAITH OF JESUS

Chapter 6

The Universal Savior

How did the transformation in which the faith of the man known as Jesus of Nazareth become a faith in that same person being the Messiah/Christ who is our "Savior" and "Son of God"?

Here we must ponder the problem of how a particular faith, necessarily limited by the bonds of culture and religious tradition, can somehow be transformed so that these bonds can be transcended to become a universal faith. One senses that beneath the remaining limitations of the cultural context of their faith and beliefs, the really great mystics and saints harbor within themselves a certain universal wisdom and vision that transcends the all too narrow bonds of even the highest religious expression. I suspect that the same is true of those who have passed through the dark night of martyrdom, but for most of these, we simply have no record of their thoughts on the other side of death. It is no longer simply a matter of "new wine" stretching the old wineskins beyond their capacity: it is more like an overwhelming fountain inundating all that stands before it or like the stream envisioned by Ezekiel that grows in volume as it leaves its source (Ezekiel. 47:1f.). So it is with the power unleashed by belief in the Resurrection of Jesus.

6.1 From "Messiah" to Universal Christ

There have been more than enough theories that have attempted to explain this transformation. Here I am not speaking of those theories that would try to explain away the "resurrection" of Jesus as wishful thinking or a hallucination of the apostles. Granted the possibility of such dubious "revelations", they would still hardly explain the successful transformation of a Jewish messianic sect into a world religion. Those who begin by emphasizing the readiness of many people in those days to believe in the return of all sorts of people from the dead -- even Herod thought Jesus might be John the Baptist resurrected -- only undercut their own line of argument. For if people really were rising from the dead with such presumed regularity, how is it that Jesus of Nazareth, put to death as a political criminal by the representative of imperial Rome, would become, within three centuries of his execution, not only the central cult figure of that same empire, but even of many other peoples intent on the destruction of the same empire?

But even presupposing the reality of the resurrection of Jesus, at least in the sense that we allowed in the previous chapter as a "meta-historical" event, neither disprovable in itself nor provable by ordinary evidence, we still have to explain how belief in a resurrected Jesus became a faith in the universal Christ.

Most theories -- some of them admittedly connected with disbelief in the resurrection, as well as those seeking to trace the lines of legitimate theological development -- have given St. Paul most of the credit (or blame) for the transformation that took place.

The reason for this is not hard to see. Saul of Tarsus, the name under which he was first known, was not one of the original disciples, being neither among "the twelve" nor even part of the larger body of close followers that we are told numbered seventy-two. Yet, as an early convert who saw his appointed task as that of an apostle to the gentiles -- though he seems always to have first approached the local Jewish community wherever he went --it is only natural that his version of the teaching of Jesus would soon blossom into a religion centered on a universal Christ. Nonetheless, it still remains to be determined just how, in theological terms, this change came about. Perhaps about a half-a-dozen possible factors were involved.

I should also make it clear at this time that my exploration of these factors does not mean that any of them or even all of them are themselves the reason one might believe that Jesus is in fact who one holds him to be. The believer obviously holds what he believes as truth in its own right. My recounting of various explanations or my attempt at an explanation of my own are only to be taken as contributing factors. Ultimately, a faith of this kind remains a gift or "grace".

The first and the most obvious factor centers around the idea of disappointed apocalyptic expectations. According to this opinion, when the second coming of Christ failed to materialize, the early Christians simply shifted their emphasis from the messianic kingdom to the person of Jesus himself. To paraphrase Albert Schweitzer: Jesus came preaching the Kingdom of God and (after that) the Apostles, especially Paul, preached Jesus. This is, of course, too simple but there is still much truth in it. Even if from the beginning of his apostolate Paul presents Jesus as a universal savior, there can be no question that at first Paul also expected Christ's imminent return. Only gradually do we see Paul shifting his perspective to a situation where the second coming, still delayed, ceases to be a central motif. Indeed some of these later writings, those termed "pastoral epistles" to Timothy and Titus, and certain of the "captivity epistles" (those to the Colossians and Ephesians, in particular) differ so markedly in their vocabulary and themes that they are often ascribed by modern scholars to disciples of Paul instead of to Paul himself.

If this shift in emphasis is true for Paul (and of those who wrote in his name) who represent the earliest christian writers, the same transformation might be expected in much of the rest of the New Testament -- including the gospels themselves. In these latter, as documents claiming to picture Jesus as he was, this same shift in emphasis away from immanent expectation of the return of Christ is evident as well. For The Gospel According to Mark, the earliest of the four, Jesus is an apocalyptic preacher of the end time -- although never simply that. The same is largely true in Matthew, although a new emphasis on the "gathering" (the qahal or ekklesia) modifies this emphasis somewhat.

But when we come to Luke, we find an approach, despite Luke's repetition of the "last days" theme, that is more concentrated on the person of Jesus in contrast to the earlier emphasis on his message. And even as far as Luke's message goes, it already shows a strong tendency toward bringing about the realization of God's kingdom in this world in the present time rather than simply preparing ourselves for a kingdom yet to come. This is even more true when it comes to the Gospel According to John, where the warning of the "Last Days" all but entirely disappears.

In sum, there is, even within the collection of writings that form the New Testament, ample evidence of a development of doctrine concerning the identity of Jesus Christ. The Hebrew term messiach was not simply translated into the Greek christos. Instead, the long awaited, and still largely unfulfilled expectations of a Jewish Messiah are for the most part sidestepped and superseded by the proclamation of universal salvation through the mediation of and even through the person of "the Lord Jesus Christ." And there can be no doubt the failure of history itself to come to a sudden end, which Jesus' first followers seemed to have assumed that he had predicted, had a lot to do with it.

But there is another factor much more ar work here than simply failed apocalyptic expectations, and it has even greater implications than the gradual abandonment of a frustrated Jewish messianism. But it still has a lot to do with the transformation of the expectations of a second return of Christ into the acceptance of the present state of affairs as being already the realization, at least in part, of God's kingdom and the beginning of a new age. Nowhere is this more evident than in Paul's use of the term "Lord" in the way he applies it to Jesus.

That this word (kyrios in Greek) is ambiguous in itself -- indeed many earthly figures have been, and still are in some cultures, addressed as "Lord", even as Jesus sometimes is addressed in the gospels -- does not solve the matter. But when Paul used this term he did so deliberately with more than just the ordinary reverential overtones. In fact, Kyrios was the term selected by the Greek-speaking Jewish Septuagint translators to replace the Hebrew word Adonai which in turn was used in those times to substitute for the sacred name Yahweh. So in his use of the title Kyrios, Paul is in effect designating Christ as being (at least in some way) equal to God.

True, Paul never uses the generic term Theos especially with the article ('o Theos -- literally "the God" in Greek, but generally translated without the article) directly of Jesus, but in at least one place (see Titus 2:13) the same term is so closely associated with Christ that there can be little doubt that for Paul (or whoever wrote this letter) the Lord Jesus Christ is truly divine. The same goes for the authors of the Epistle to the Hebrews and II Peter, and of course, for John's Gospel.

Some would caution that Paul in his earliest writings retains something of the primitive Christian predilection far describing Jesus' exaltation as "Lord" as a result of his resurrection, hence that Paul still thought Christ's divinity as somewhat qualified in some way. But on the other hand, at least when we survey the Pauline writings as a whole, they show a marked tendency toward thinking of Jesus' lordship as the recognition of his return to his former state as God's son. The clearest evidence for this is not any Pauline use of the term theos applied to Christ, but more in his statement in Philippians: (2:6) that his [Christ's] state was divine, yet he did not cling to his equality with God..."

In all this there can be no doubt that Paul and his co-workers introduced a major alteration in, or even what seems to be a serious deviation from, Jewish monotheism into the Christian concept of God, one that holds that Jesus is not only "Son of God" in the Hebrew sense of the term -- one chosen by God and designated to a special task -- but instead as the very incarnation of God. Once that bold step has been taken, then, as we shall soon see, there is no limit to the claims that might be made in his name.

But first, before we go on to that, we should look at two more factors that are often advanced as explanations as to how the failed "Messiah" became the triumphant "Lord Jesus Christ." One of these additional factors is the claim that Paul, still desiring to spread the essence of Jewish monotheism to the rest of the world, promoted the idea of replacing the legalistic piety of his early pharisaism with theological elaborations based on ideas derived from various Greek "mystery cults", as well as mixing certain Gnostic rites and speculations with biblical themes. Hence the simple Jewish rites of repentance and purification become the mystical death and rebirth of baptism and the passover seder meal with its barakah or blessing of the bread and cup become the mystical sharing of the body and the blood of Christ in the eucharistic meal. In these sacramental rituals the simple memory of Jesus' life was transformed into means of mystical identification with the exalted Lord who in turn shares his glorified life with his followers here on earth below.

That such an adaptation to the ritualized religious mentality of late antiquity would find ready acceptance, when various mystery cults were sweeping the Roman Empire, seems likely enough. And certainly, for one who really believes that Jesus was raised from the dead and lives eternally in a state of restored divinity, such a ritualization is altogether logical, even if not without its dangers -- as Jesus himself had pointed out in his own critique of both the Temple cult and of pharisaism. But neither does this adaptation to the popular religious mentality explain why it is that Christianity should emerge victorious over the other cults, some of which, for example Mithraism, may have been originally more widespread.

Of course there is always the moral factor to be considered. Christianity, and the rigorous ethical code it represented, in contrast to the moral decay of the late empire, proved, it may be said, a real attraction to good people of high principle who were looking for a sounder foundation for the natural virtues than paganism, at its best, once fostered. That Jewish proselytism had been able to make significant inroads among such people, despite its ritual exclusivity, shows that the world was becoming ripe for such a challenge as Christian morality. But again, this was only another factor, and in itself probably not the decisive one. In fact, the ethical reform espoused by emperor Marcus Aurelius included the persecution of Christians because in that philosopher-emperor's eyes, Christian morals were not rigorous enough! Neither would a turn to moral rigorism, any more than a turn to ritualism, in itself really explain why Jesus of Nazareth would himself become worshipped as God.

Perhaps this is the place to mention one other aspect that might be seen as related to this longing for a higher moral tone. It has often been alleged that early Christianity found it strongest backing among the slaves and lower classes of society, in a word, among people yearning for a better lot in life. No doubt this impression is reinforced by the lingering of paganism among many prominent Roman citizens -- naturally conservative due to their privileged positions in society -- for some time after Christianity was legalized and had begun to make even more serious inroads into the old ways. But at least one recent historical-sociological study has indicated that contrary to this impression, Christianity had made some of its most significant gains among the upper classes, particularly due to the influence of women, even while the persecutions still raged. Perhaps too they saw much to be gained to their advantage.

It should also be noted that on a whole, the rural populations were among the last to be converted. Although the term "pagani" originally had nothing directly to do with religion -- it simply meant the "country-folk" -- we also know that in such a setting, the idea of a universal Christ or savior, along with monotheism in general, tended to encounter greatest resistance from the rural populations with their many gods.

No doubt, a final factor, a more directly political one, comes into play -- the decisive effect of imperial power exercised by Constantine the Great, his legalization of and later official establishment of Christianity, and most of all, his and his successors' interventions in the formulation of Christian doctrines. That Christianity should become so widespread throughout the empire, despite repeated persecutions, is a remarkable enough fact. That an emperor, who was in fact not a practicing Christian (at least not fully so until his death-bed baptism) should be the decisive factor leading to the formation of an official "orthodoxy" is even more significant. If Constantine's ascendancy to the emperorship in 313 needed the legitimization from Christians, the precarious unity of this vast empire demanded the unity of Christianity itself.

That the divine status as applied to Jesus Christ happened at such an early time as the preaching of Paul does not mean, however, that it was accepted completely at face value right away. There were, in fact, many competing interpretations as to how Jesus was considered to be divine, and up to the time of Constantine's ascendancy, no single explanation had prevailed. In fact, shortly before his coming to power, the doctrine of Arius, a priest-theologian in Alexandria, had gained major popularity in almost all areas of the Christian world, even to the extent that it has been estimated that if all the bishops at that time had been asked and felt free to declare their opinions, "Arianism", which accorded Jesus a quasi but not fully divine status, would have prevailed. But thanks to the emperor, this was not to be.

In 325 Constantine convened and personally presided over the first of what became known as a series of "ecumenical councils" that formulated, in rapid succession, a body of dogmas defining the divinity of Jesus, the nature of God as a trinity, and the dual divine and human natures of Christ. But to all these factors, I would like to add one more.

What we see here is, I would contend, a final "universalization" of the faith of Jesus. Not a universalization in the sense that some of the above theories would envision -- a deliberate manipulation of the memory of Jesus by his disappointed messianic followers, or a calculated effort by Paul to create a "Judaism for Gentiles" or even an opportunistic move by the imperial powers to capitalize an what they could no longer resist. Instead, what I am talking about is the universalization of Jesus' own religious consciousness, his own beliefs, and his own faithful trust in God.

This may sound strange at first, but ideas have their own momentum -- often well beyond the initial awareness of their own originators. The story is told of Einstein, that well after his proposal of the theories of both special and general relativity, that a society was formed by his admirers to propagate and advance the applications of his thought, partly by awarding prizes to the most outstanding disciples. Einstein himself was persuaded to act as a judge. But after examining one particularly brilliant competitor, the great man of science sent a note to the officers of the society, complaining that he had no idea of what this young man was talking about!

Some, of course, would say that this would have been Jesus' own comment about the ideas that Paul would advance in his own, that is, in Jesus', name. Perhaps so. But is that to say that Paul was wrong? Add to this: just as Einstein himself can be said to have started a revolution, not only Jesus but Paul himself can be said to have started a "school" of theological interpretation that outstripped its founder. Thus the ascended "Lord Jesus" of the early Paul becomes even more expansively the universal "Christ".

Paul advanced, at a very early date, beyond the primitive formulations of Jesus' exaltation to Lordship, to a recognition of his pre-existent divinity. This is not only clear in his letter to the Philippians, but also in the letter to the Colossians, where the use of a hymn-like canticle extols Christ as:

...the image of the invisible God,
the firstborn of all creation...
all things were created through him and for him.
He is before all things,
and in him all things hold together. (Colossians 1:15-17)

In this, we find a strong parallel to the prologue of John's gospel. But there is something more. Both this hymn and the Johannine tradition draw from the late Old Testament image of divine wisdom (see especially Wisdom 7:22-8:11), but instead of recasting this tradition in terms of the Greek concept of the Logos (divine "reason" or "The Word"), as the prototype of all creation -- note the parallel between John 1:1 and Genesis 1:1 -- the Pauline mode of thought leaps ahead with its focus not on the beginning so much as the end. In this way Christ becomes, as the later Pauline tradition was to say in so many words, what we might describe as being "coextensive" with the universe. Glorified by the Father, Jesus is now revealed (through his church) as the "fullness" (pleroma) of him who fills the universe in all its parts" (Ephesians 1:23 -- New American Bible translation or in the latest revision of the same, "the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way").

And as if this were not enough, there are also those who would see this "pleroma" as not only a fulfillment of the universe by God through Christ, but even as a fulfillment of God through Christ! Indeed, even apart from the pleromic themes of the Pauline captivity epistles (especially Ephesians and Colossians) which seem to have deliberately used language borrowed from Stoic philosophy, we find Paul incontestably claiming much the same, but in different language, even as early as I Corinthians when he tells us that the redeemed cosmos will be handed over by Christ to his Father so that "God may become all in all" (I Corinthians 15:28).

Clearly, the vision of the glorified Christ presented by Paul and his disciples far outstrips in its universality anything imagined in the synoptic gospels, and even, to some extent, that presented somewhat later by John. But in all this, could not we, or Paul -- or even Jesus himself -- have been wrong?

6.2 The Aims of Jesus

What really were the aims or intentions of Jesus of Nazareth? In terms of what we can find in the synoptics, or even from a more careful reading of John, Jesus' own ambitions seem to have been considerably less than those of his followers. What appears to have begun as a mission to ready his own people for the coming of God's kingdom, or at most, less apocalyptically, to actuate the reign of God here and now in the hearts and in the lives of his followers has become, practically speaking, a movement far more universal and ambitious in its scope than anything Jesus may have, humanly speaking, possibly imagined. And, as we have already seen, the transformation that took place may have been due, to begin with, to the fact that if Jesus was expecting the immanent coming of God's kingdom, that in this he was dead wrong.

This paradox invites further reflection -- again, a further comparison with Albert Einstein. This great and much honored genius of modern thought is considered by many scientists today to have been completely wrong, not about relativity as such, but about the role of chance in the universe and the truth of Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle". "I refuse", Einstein was to say, "to believe that God plays dice with the universe!" And consequently he was unable, in his later years, to follow the development of much of the cosmological thought that owed so much to his early insights and inspiration. As a result, those who limit themselves to following Einstein's insights, as great as they are, prove themselves almost as hampered to cope with modern discoveries as those who would limit their understanding to the clockwork model of the universe proposed by Newton.

In the same way, do we not hamper ourselves by placing all our faith in Jesus, or even more, to being restricted to duplicating Jesus' own faith? If Jesus was, for example, wrong about the imminent arrival of "The Kingdom of God", do we not end in committing the same error as the early Christians at Thessalonika, who in their anticipation of the sudden end of the world, much to Paul's dismay, seemed to think that they need not contribute to the world -- indeed, that the world apparently owed them a living? Paul's answer to that was "if a man will not work, neither let him eat!" (II Thessalonians 3:10). In the same way, should we not wonder if it might not have been possible that early Christianity took a wrong turn, not only about the immanent end of the world and the return of Christ, but also, in reaction to those failed expectations, about the identity of Jesus himself?

To answer this question, look at it this way. Even if Jesus really was wrong in anticipating an early end to history, is this to say that the rest of his ideas were thereby invalid? Or is it not possible to say that such were the power of his ideas that in fact a new era indeed has arrived? Did not the interpretation of traditional biblical religion that he himself embodied prove to be so radical a reinterpretation so as to in effect become the beginning of a complete transformation of religious consciousness for the whole human race? (Notice, I say the "beginning" -- for the process is far from complete, even among those of us who claim to be "Christians".)

Or, again, consider this. The earthly Jesus may have been the embodiment of Jewish piety at its holiest, totally given over to the will of God, totally committed to the honor of God's name, and totally, even radically, partisan for the holiness of God's temple. Again, this may be disputed by some. But if "holiness" (Hebrew kadosh -- here must be understood especially in the sense of an apartness or separation from the profane) then the same actions that earned him such enmity, such as his sabbath day healings and his disruptive incursions into the Jerusalem temple with his angry reactions to the buying and selling activity, then we can we not say that he was in the footsteps of the great Hebrew prophets who were sent to their own nation? But can we not also say that his predictions of the future, like those of the prophets before him, also turned out to be something less than the literal truth, yet, at the same time, in an uncanny way typical of other events that were yet to come?

In the same way, even if Jesus only reluctantly allowed his mission to reach out, on a few rare occasions, to "gentiles", his outrageous tolerance for sinners and his preaching to the outcasts among his people was a harbinger of a much broader movement than the reformation of Israel. Not because of any explicit instructions -- unless the command to go out and baptize "all nations" be taken literally as the actual words of Jesus, which few scholars would admit today. But because of the implicit openness that Jesus showed to those Jews and Samaritans who existed beyond the pale of the law, and on a few occasions, even to pagans of good will, early on Christianity would explicitly call itself "catholic" (kata + holos or "all-embracing") because, in the words of Cyril of Jerusalem it would attempt reach the whole world, to teach all of Christ's message, to all people, to forgive all sins and promote every kind of virtue.

True, there is no solid exegetical foundation to claiming that in any sense Jesus understood himself to be founding a "church" as we understand the word today. The word ekklesia occurs only twice in the gospels, both times in Matthew. We can guess that behind this Greek word stands the Hebrew (or at least the Aramaic equivalent of) qahal, meaning a group that is "called together", clearly reflecting the situation of the infant congregation some years later. The first example, of course, is the famous "confession" of Peter (Matthew 16:18) as interpolated into the event at Dan ("Who do people say that I am?"). It points to the stability of his following in resisting the encroachment of the outside world with the promise that "the gates of hell shall not overcome it." The second gospel use of the word is in Matthew 18:17, where in reference to settling disputes within the local congregations, it would seem to have an even more limited and local meaning.

So then what about the famous command to "go out and proclaim the good news to all creation ... "(Mark 16:15ff.)? This ending to Mark's gospel (the whole block of verses 9-20 is even missing from some very early manuscripts) is widely recognized as a second, later ending added to Mark's original. Hence it is obviously second or even third level material according to the Biblical Commission analysis, while the parallel passages in Matthew and Luke are most likely a borrowing from this later addition. It clearly represents a later stage of apostolic consciousness from what his disciples first understood their task to be -- either that or "all creation" here has to be understood like the French toute le monde -- not literally "the whole world" but more like "everyone in sight" -- thus the change "to all nations" in Matthew proves that this expansion of missionary consciousness was growing at a pace that is truly surprising.

But with that exception, what we see in the New Testament writings taken across the board is a slowly dawning realization that the message of Jesus has to be taken out of its strictly Jewish context and "universalized" for the sake of the whole world. But note that this is not a conscious program, a plan ar a plot of some sort. Instead, when we look at the real story of this transformation, even given in a somewhat dramatized and idealized form, as in Luke's Acts of the Apostles, we find that instead of an unmitigated outpouring of missionary zeal, there is at first a certain hesitancy and even, in some quarters, a stubborn resistance to any expansion of membership in the group of followers, particularly when it comes to gentile or non-Jewish people. So while Luke's parallel passage to Mark's epilogue, like Matthew's, suggests an immediate mission "to all nations" or "peoples", Luke's second version of the same in Acts not only slows the process down somewhat, even if in geographical instead of ethnic terms -- beginning first in Jerusalem but then to "Judea and Samaria" next and only then "to the ends of the earth." (See Acts 1:8.)

Although the Samaritans were seen as foreigners in Jewish eyes, to a gentile like Luke, they must have seemed like half-Jews -- which was more or less true. So even here Luke's new geographical approach appears to reflect an original policy of going out to the "ends of the earth" but probably only with the object of reaching scattered Jews. Thus we are being set up by Luke in a way that we'll be in for a big surprise. After his accounts of the first activities and sufferings of the apostles in Jerusalem in their mission to fellow Jews, we are introduced to some upsetting new developments for the conservative followers in Jerusalem.

First, Philip the "deacon" -- who was supposed to stay in Jerusalem "waiting on tables", not preaching -- baptizes a group of Samaritans, and even worse, an Ethiopian eunuch who offered him a ride along the Gaza road. So Peter and John have to travel up to Samaria to legitimate Philip's rash move there, while the Ethiopian is long gone back to Africa. As far the Jerusalem community, perhaps they just pretended that the Gaza road incident didn't happen or hoped that the eunuch was one of those black Jews down there.

Next, Peter himself becomes carried away while on a mission to the coastal cities and baptizes a Roman centurion and his whole household. This is too much for the people back in Jerusalem when they hear of it, so Peter has to go back and defend himself to the rest with an appeal to the Holy Spirit, including his account of a thrice-repeated vision that abolishes all distinctions between "clean" (kosher) and unclean food, and by implication, between Jew and gentile as well.

But even then, the issue was not fully resolved, so later, after the firebrand Pharisee Saul is converted and becomes Paul the Apostle, we see the whole issue raised again, this time to be settled, as it were, by the first Christian church "council" held in Jerusalem about the year 50. There is dissension in the ranks to be sure, but even here, Luke may have altered the story somewhat. An agreement of sorts is reached: gentiles are to be accorded equal status with Jews in the fledgling church -- providing they keep a few major points of Jewish law for harmony's sake.

But the facts of the real story, as are more than hinted by the rest of Acts and by the early Pauline epistles, tell a less idyllic tale than at first meets the eye. What the message of Jesus was at first simply called "The Way" (Acts 9:2) and its first followers were called "the brotherhood" (Acts 2:42), or "Nazareans", and eventually became known, possibly by the mid-century, as "Christians" (Acts 11:26), all this only partially reflects the long process of the movement's slow separation from its parent religion and its gradual universalization.

There is also evidence from early Galilean rabbinic documents that the followers of Jesus, while still attending the synagogues, were already being called minim by the orthodox (apparently from the Hebrew word min, denoting a "portion" or "party") and that a deliberate attempt was being made to exclude them, but that such were the number of his followers, at least in Galilee, that it could no longer be a simple matter of exclusion from the synagogues or excommunication. There is also an increasing amount of archeological evidence of early Jewish-Christian enclaves scattered throughout Israel, even as far south as Hebron.

So it seems that the difficulties that the original followers of Jesus, who saw themselves entirely as Jews within Judaism, but who instead soon found themselves considered a schismatic sect, only served at first to steel their resolve to redouble their efforts to be considered as orthodox Jews and to see their following of Jesus as a fulfillment of the authentic Jewish tradition. This was the group that identified with James, "the brother of the Lord". For these people, it was not so much the decision made in Jerusalem in the year 50 to admit gentiles into the fellowship, but the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman army in the year 70, that did more to separate the followers of Jesus from the rest of Judaism than did any other event.

In fact, there are those who see this disaster, along with the aftermath of the Bar Kochba revolt about century later, as the real beginning of modern "Judaism" as well. Be that as it may, it was the better part of four centuries before the distinctively Jewish form of Christianity died out in the Holy Land while some vestiges of it persist today in the non-Byzantine churches of the Near East, particularly in the Syrian Rite and in the Maronite Rite in Lebanon, where in a few locations even the Aramaic language of Jesus' own time survives in limited liturgical use.

At the same time, a somewhat different strain of Christianity developed under the impetus of the Apostle Paul. Instead of stressing continuity with Judaism, this ex-rabbinical student, from the first flush of his sudden conversion, took a predominantly "supplantational" line. According to Paul (see especially Romans chapters 9-11), his ancestral people, the Jews, still remain special to God, but as far as the old law, the old covenant, is concerned, it is dead -- "put to death" with the earthly Jesus on the Cross. A new covenant, a new law of love and grace, is born with the resurrection of the "Christ" Jesus, now revealed fully as Lord. In this way the tentative and halting steps begun by Philip and by Peter are vindicated and multiplied by Paul and his missionary band with vigor that the left the mother church in Jerusalem dumbfounded and alarmed. Christianity was rapidly ceasing to be Jewish.

Could Jesus have possibly foreseen this? If one reads history backwards and, against all prevailing scholarship, takes the closing "missionary" passages of the synoptic gospels as actual records of the words of Jesus -- and these in turn, as expressions of the divine Christ who knew how it was all to turn out to begin with, then, of course, there is no problem with all this. From this point of view, it was only the residual Jewish stubbornness of the other disciples that stood in the way.

But the fact is that there is precious little evidence in the gospels that Jesus really did have any such program in mind. True, he did express amazement over and admiration of the "faith" of those pagans who persisted in seeking his healing powers. According to John's gospel (chapter 5) Jesus actively courted the attention of a Samaritan woman who in turn would draw her fellow townsfolk to hear him. But, at the same time, to those Greeks who requested the apostle Philip to arrange an interview, Jesus seems to have given short-shrift (see John 12:20ff.).

At most, perhaps, Jesus envisioned a reform of Judaism that in turn would reach out -- as it already was in its more liberal forms of proselytism -- with a truly universal mission to the rest of the world. But as far as we can see, Jesus would have been grateful even if he could have kept his Galilean following intact, much more if he could have moved the Judaean hierarchy and its following. He succeeded in neither.

What Jesus clearly intended, the revitalization of the Jewish faith under the call of the demands of God's Kingdom turned out have been a complete failure. That he might have possibly envisioned a renewed Judaism as a source of moral renewal in the world is not beyond possibility, but again, he would not live to see that result in any substantial form. Instead, after his tragic and untimely death, what resulted, despite Luke's somewhat revisionist account in Acts, was a break-away sect that has painfully transformed itself into a major contender in the arena of the world's would-be universal faiths.

6.3 Seeking a Universal Faith

Here then is the paradox. Jesus, who appears to have experienced a truly "unitive" degree of faith in God may never have reached, on this side of the grave, a truly "universalized" faith -- one that was, without further development at least from a doctrinal standpoint, capable of being the nucleus of a truly "world religion". Instead, it was precisely in his failure even to convert the bulk of his own people, that the seeds of a universal "Christianity" was born.

This is a shocking assertion, but consider the alternative. Let us suppose, to the contrary, Jesus had been an unqualified success. To take a more recent example, consider the cult leader, the Rev. Sun Young Moon, founder of "The Unification Church", which he originally called "The Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity", but later broadened it's goal to unite all religions, not just Christianity. Moon claimed that Jesus was a failure at becoming the messiah because he was killed before the real work of reforming the human race could be begun by him. According to Moon, this reform would have involved Jesus' eventual marriage and the founding of a perfect family to set a new divine pattern for the restoration of the human race (odd that Moon's theory rather sounds like the final fantasy in The Last Temptation of Christ). But suppose that this might of happened and that the whole world responded to this revelation of "The Divine Principle" -- the title of Moon's own doctrinal testament? What would happen? (Interestingly, Moon did not claim, as his critics charged, to be the "messiah": but instead would have been proven to have been so if his doctrine succeeded in converting the world! But if he had, what then?)

It is difficult if not foolish to speculate about such things. Yet it raises profound questions. Did God really intend Jesus to die? Or, if he had to die like the rest of us, why not a gentle passing away at a ripe old age -- like Gautama the Buddha for example? Did the will of God the Father, or an angry sense of divine justice, somehow demand that his "Son" be cruelly, bloodily "sacrificed" on a cross to appease God's wrath, as one line of Christian theology has taken to explain this apparently tragic miscarriage of human justice?

Of course, in terms of human memory, there is nothing like an unjustly afflicted violent death to immortalize a person. Socrates would be little remembered today outside of his role in Plato's Dialogues, and his memory not nearly as hallowed, were it not for his forced suicide. Lincoln has gone down in history as a martyr for human rights much more than as the tragic, brooding figure who oversaw what was, until World War I came along, the bloodiest war in human history. John F. Kennedy -- who alive at that time can forget that day? Then his brother, Robert; then Martin Luther King -- the list goes on and on.

Here indeed is the true "Divine Principle" -- the "paschal" mystery, the fact that it is only in dying that we live, and that "he who would save his life shall lose it, where he who loses it...shall live." The seed must die before it can bear fruit. The religions that set out consciously to convert the whole world through messages of peace and prosperity are probably the least likely to succeed and those that would attempt to do it through fire and sword even less likely to do so. Self-proclaimed "messiahs" are doomed to fall fiat on their face. And so are successful ones!

Luke, in The Acts of the Apostles (5:34ff.) tells us that the more liberal Jewish scholar and Sanhedrin member, Gamaliel, gave some sage advice about would-be messiahs. Let them be. If spurious, their movements will come to nothing: but on the other hand, if sent by God, who are we to resist them? -- and God!

It is a little more than ironic that Gamaliel's most well-known disciple did not follow his master's advice at first. Saul of Tarsus took an active part in the killing of the first Christian martyr, Stephen, and then went on to become one of the chief agents of persecution. Only after his traumatic conversion did he become the apostle Paul. Almost inevitably, the blood of martyrs becomes the seed of faith. In this we follow in the footsteps of Jesus himself.

When all is said and done, it appears that the lesson of the life and death of Jesus should teach us more than one thing, and that foremost, even if the most overlooked, is the eventual collapse of all human plans, agendas, paradigms, beliefs, and even faith itself to same extent in the face of the unfathomable mystery of God. This is why I quoted the long passage I did at the beginning of chapter five. As tentative and as nuanced as it may be, it contains an awful truth -- a truth that perhaps, if I am correct, even Jesus himself could not escape learning the only way it can be learned, which is the hard way.

That truth is this: not only do we have to die to the sureness that we are somehow "called" or singled out by God before we can become the instruments that God wishes us to be, but that even our ideas, our comforting "beliefs" about God must also die before we can experience the fullness of the truth. Not only that, but only through the radical divestment of the "unitive" state itself, through the sundering of our own unity by death, can a full "universalization" of our faith take place. For it is no longer our "faith" that is at stake, but our very selves, and it is only when they both die, together, that resurrection to true life can take place!

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