Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (30 page)

But when we are called forth from the dust of death, the Just Judge will ask us if we lived by the
Cosmic Code, the underlying principle that animates the universe, the code of
justice and
mercy, the code of caring for the neighbor who is in need. The Good Samaritans of this world, except in extraordinary cases, see only the man fallen among thieves, the person who needs help. They do not see Christ; they may never even have heard of him. But he is there, warming human encounters, softening the harshness of existence, lighting the darkness of faith, as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:

W
HO DO YOU SAY
I
AM
?” asked Jesus of Peter. Peter’s answer—that Jesus was “
Messiah” and “
Son of God”—pleased Jesus; and since he did not deny these titles, we may assume that he was not simply flattered: he thought Peter had got it right. But though “Messiah” can be rightly used of only one man (since the Jews do not seem to have been expecting more than one), “Son of God” is an oft-used phrase in earlier biblical literature: it is used both of
angels and of prophets, indeed of anyone who could be considered God’s mouthpiece. And we know that, like “Savior,” it was in currency within the Roman world as a description of Caesar—whichever Caesar happened to be occupying the imperial throne. The Christian use of such phrases was meant to convey that Caesar was no messiah, just another inevitable disappointment; Jesus was the one Messiah. Thus, Christians found themselves relying on a Greek acronym to affirm their most basic belief:

This acronym,
ICHTHUS
in Roman letters, is also the Greek word for “fish” but it stands for

in Roman letters
Iesous Christos
Uios Soter
, meaning “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.” The outline of a fish
, which we find scratched into the walls of catacombs among the earliest examples of Christian iconography, masqueraded as
a seemingly harmless ornament, the radical political message of which would be overlooked by the uninitiated.

Did the first Christians mean by this that Jesus was “God’s Only-Begotten Son” and humanity’s only “Savior”? Apparently not. He was
Christos
, certainly (that is, God’s Anointed, his Messiah); and, therefore, of necessity he was “God’s Son” (that is, one who spoke God’s message) and he surely came to “save”
Israel or, as the disciples on the road to Emmaus put it, “to set Israel free.” The Greek word
soter
means not only “savior” but “preserver” and “deliverer”—that is, the one who saves the polity from chaos, as Oedipus had saved Thebes from the terrorizing Sphinx. But to assert that Jesus was uniquely God’s Son and mankind’s savior seems to push beyond the articulations of the first Christians.

The earliest Christian preaching, like Peter’s at
Pentecost, emphasized that God’s raising of Jesus from the dead was the ultimate confirmation of his life and message. He had been “anointed” to bring “the Good News to the poor,” the afflicted, the lonely, the handicapped, the rejected—that is, to Israel—though, soon enough, the apostles come to believe that Christ’s message is for all without distinction. But thanks to
Paul’s preaching, Christianity begins to deepen its understanding of Jesus’s role as “savior”; and this is done through Paul’s prayerful meditation on Christ’s
sufferings and cross. He is not only God’s anointed healer and teacher. “Christ died for our sins,” Paul tells the
Corinthians, and thus set us free. This is how he has saved us; and this is the underlying “message of the Gospel.”

But even for Paul, Jesus’s “sonship” did not make him, in the words of the later creeds, “of the same substance as the
Father.” He was a
human
son of God, made in God’s image like all human beings, but the perfect image of God because he was the only child of
Adam and Eve to act in perfect obedience to God—“even to death on a cross.” None of the believers that we have encountered so far—neither Mark nor Matthew, neither Paul nor Luke, none of the apostles and none of the disciples who gathered around Jesus and then formed the early Church—considered Jesus to be God. This would have seemed
blasphemy to them. Their belief in Christ was, after all, a form of Judaism; and Judaism was the world’s only
monotheism. God had raised the man Jesus and made him Lord. Even though his is now the Name by which we are saved, he did not raise himself—such an idea would have been unthinkable.

By the end of the first century, however, the Fourth Gospel, the one attributed to John, had reached its final form; and here we find, for the first time, Jesus acclaimed as God. This Gospel opens with a rewriting of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible, which begins with the words “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth” and goes on to describe how he went about it.
John the Evangelist (whose relatively facile Greek precludes his identification with
John the Visionary, author of Revelation) means to bring out the hidden meaning of God’s original Creation, as described at the outset of Genesis, that Book of the Beginning of All Things. He begins:

These are carved words; they have little in common with Mark’s roughness or Luke’s cheerfulness. Before them, Matthew’s occasional attempts at an elevated style seem downright informal. They are intended to be chanted in clouds of incense or incised in stone. Like a solemn organ prelude, they
sound notes that let us know that we are no longer seated in a comfortable circle chatting with Paul and Peter, Martha and Mary. We are meant to bow our heads.

We know nothing of the author of this Gospel apart from what we can glean from his text. The texture of its language, making it appear at times an alien body within the corpus of the New Testament, has sometimes driven scholars to fantastic theses about its composition. There have been those, for instance, who have maintained that this Gospel’s philosophical complexity indicates that it belongs to the second half of the second century. Others have noted that its accurate use of detailed Palestinian Jewish information argues for a date in the 40s of the first century. The second-century hypothesis, based on an assumption of sophisticated Greek influence on the conceptual framework of the Fourth Gospel, lost ground when the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed that concepts once thought to have derived from Greek philosophical circles—such as “the Word” and the cosmic divisions between light and darkness—were current among the Essenes of the Judean desert even prior to Jesus’s day. A growing scholarly consensus puts the composition of the gospel as we now have it in the last decade of the first century (or the first decade of the second century, at the latest). The Palestinian elements of this gospel, however, indicate that it was, to begin with, a work based on the testimony of an eyewitness to Jesus, but revised and expanded over the course of the first century by later hands. What we have today is a pastiche of early testimony and late theological reflection. The seams of the pastiche are almost invisible because this gospel has been given its present form by a refined and subtle editor. John’s Gospel gives evidence,
therefore, of being both our earliest and our latest gospel.
¹