Quite coincidentally, three things came together for me since last Sunday! First, the excellent PBS program entitled From Jesus to the Christ. This four-hour special explored how Jesus, a simple peasant from Nazareth, became, over time, the Anointed Christ of the Roman Empire. Second, today was the last Sunday in my own mini-seminars here at UUS on the historical Jesus where in small groups we've explored the whole question, Who Was the Historical Jesus? Third, this morning, I planned to talk of my own view of who Jesus was in the light of the work of the Gospel Seminar with all the sayings and deeds of Jesus color-coded according to their authenticity. Red designates, Yes, Jesus really said or did this. Pink designates words or deeds that are heavily conditioned by what Jesus actually said or did. Grey designates words or deeds influenced by what Jesus might have said or done. Black designates words or deeds that Jesus did not say or do! Only a small percentage of Jesus' words and deeds can be designated as red. Let's call it 20%! Let's put it more brutally — 80% of the sayings ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke are not — repeat not — from the mouth of Jesus himself. In John's Gospel, only 1% of the words that used to be written in red have survived the Gospel scholars' scrutiny! The conclusions are illuminating or depressing according to your point of view.
At the very end of Matthew's Gospel, Jesus appears to the disciples on a mountain. He says to them: "All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost…and so I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." Here ends the Gospel, but here also begins all the real problems of Gospel criticism! First, these verses presuppose that Jesus is risen from the dead, is alive, and among them. Whereas, many of the words in the famous sermon on the Mount do go back to the historical Jesus, the words I have quoted do not. There is no question that the disciples believed Jesus rose from the dead — whether he did or not — but the words just quoted reflect the faith of the church a generation or so later. Words composed in good faith to justify the reality of resurrection and the church's mission to the world. The reference to the formula, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost is an early quasi- Trinitarian formula far removed from what Jesus, the peasant of Nazareth, could ever have said! Jesus may or may not have been the son of God, but it's not a title he ever claimed. Also, it is extremely doubtful whether he ever claimed to be Messiah.
Of course, our historical doubts can go much further than this and actually deny such a person of Jesus ever lived at all, but precious few scholars, Christian, Jewish, or Marxist would go that far these days! The best way for us at UUS is to look at our own Unitarian tradition and see how the image of Jesus changed since the birth of Unitarianism. First, Jesus was the son of God. He was a reflection so to speak of God's divinity — a great and good man — a prophet certainly, but not God. There is one God and one God alone. Jesus is his chosen one, but even without the rise of historical criticism, Unitarians are quick to be skeptical of many aspects of the Gospel tradition. We asked "are the birth stories of Matthew and Luke to be taken seriously as history?" All the angels, stars in the East, and wise men and, of course, Virgin Birth? Unitarians are increasingly skeptical about certain aspects of the life and work of Jesus. His ethical teachings, like the sermon on the Mount or the so-called Lord's prayer were profound, but what about all his references to hell and damnation? Yes, we said, Jesus may well have been a healer, but what about all those nature miracles, like walking on the water, changing water into wine, the calming of the sea? Are the doctrines of Incarnation and Resurrection to be taken literally? I'm just saying that the doubts of earlier and later generations of Unitarians have been born out of literary and historical criticism! For Fundamentalist Christians, this situation is outrageous; for Mainline Christians, puzzling and depressing; for Unitarians, the confirmation of very old suspicions. The only sure historical facts are that Jesus spoke in parables and Jesus was crucified. To this connection, I'll return later.
Many folks in our culture who would be mildly shocked by the thrust of what I have said so far, but I haven't come to either bury Jesus or to resurrect him. I try to be honest to the historical record as we have received it and — in the light of modern criticism, reviewed it and — not least — true to myself as I have struggled over many years to better understand the tradition I have inherited. So much mischief and misunderstanding surrounds the biblical record. Fundamentalists have used the bible as a power tool to read people into or out of heaven, to set or unsettle political and social agendas. On the other hand, the widespread skepticism and rejection of the Hebrew/Christian Scriptures has created something of a religious vacuum, a crisis of meaning itself — a crisis of meaning for honest people, inside and outside of Unitarian Universalism, who accept the main conclusions of historical criticism, but feel that somehow the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater. What I like about the Jesus story, is that in his authentic sayings, like the sermon on the Mount, most certainly the parables, and in the drama of whatever happened in Jerusalem that Passover week to secure his crucifixion, the story carries an existential, archetypal, even theatrical meaning. Jesus spoke in parables! Jesus was crucified! He was crucified because he spoke in parables. If you will, his words were so devastating in their implications for contemporary Jewish religion and its authority that the man simply had be put away somehow, anyhow! It has the character and all the high drama of a Greek Tragedy — like those of Aeschylus and others which cleansed the spectators with pity and terror. Theatre, for the Greeks, was in a sense their religion. Where people wrote about the Jesus Story, however sympathetic or hostile their words or attitudes, they are rewriting, they are processing, the story for themselves, however skeptical they are or seem to be about later and larger Christian claims. That is precisely what the early disciples did. There was no empty tomb, no obviously risen Jesus. To say the least and perhaps the most they were left with that pre- springtime feeling of hope that, since such a man lived at all, all might yet be well.