Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (9 page)

T
HE
T
IME
HAS
COME
: the Kingdom of God draws near. Open your hearts and believe the Good News.”

These are the first words that Jesus speaks in Mark’s Gospel, which—at least in the form that we now have it—is the most primitive of the four canonical accounts of Jesus’s life. There is scarcely a word of this proclamation that does not call for explanation, though in Jesus’s day each word would have carried a clear, if surprising, meaning to the Galilean peasants who heard it. The “Time” that has come is the time of the fulfillment of Jewish dreams, the time when God will show his special love for the Jews by breaking the bonds of their servitude and exalting them among the nations. It is the time they have been waiting for—waiting so long that they had almost ceased to believe that it could ever come to pass, so long after the destruction of ten of the Twelve Tribes, so long after the disaster of the
Babylonian Captivity, which had been followed only by further oppression, so long after the drying up of prophetic inspiration had left them without direction. The “Kingdom” that they will participate in will be God’s Kingdom, as he promised.

They are invited to shake off their worldly preoccupations and “open [their] hearts.” The Greek imperative is
metanoeite
, which means literally “change your minds.” It is usually translated as “repent” or “convert,” both more harsh than the Greek. The word certainly refers to a spiritual turnaround, but the change that is looked for here is an openness to something
new and unheard of. This “something new” is
to euaggelion
, not simply “good news” but
“the
good news,” the best news ever. Our word “go’spel,” an Anglo-Saxon elision of “good spell” (meaning “good word” or “good news”) is the Old English translation of the Greek
euaggelion.
¹

Jesus’s idea of the Time-That-Has-Come has no suggestion of catastrophe, no smell of fire and brimstone in it. Though present in his announcement is a challenge, his words caress the listener with welcome possibility. He does not threaten or condemn; he opens his arms to invite and encourage. The gentleness of this prophet is as unexpected as his message.

This does not mean that Jesus did not know the apocalyptic tradition. His precursor,
John the Baptizer, stood squarely within that tradition, which was, in any case, in the air that Jesus breathed. And Jesus, by beginning with the normally dreadful words “the Time has come,” is making direct reference to this tradition of expectation. But the surprise is that this Time-That-Has-Come is to be
Apocalypse without
Armageddon.
²
Jesus takes the tradition and gives it a twist, develops it beyond what might have been thought possible, and transforms it into something new. It is a method we will see him use repeatedly throughout his short life.

There is perhaps no more important word in this brief formula, remembered from Jesus’s early preaching, than the word
believe.
No news is good news, as we know even today and as the ancients knew in their bones. But Jesus’s audience is invited to allow themselves to experience an inner change, so that they may put their trust in this Good News—so that they may believe, despite the ingrained presuppositions of the ancient world, that news
can
be good.

What made this man think that he could get away with this—this patent nonsense that went so directly against the grain of ancient society? For an answer we may turn to the first figure to present himself in Mark’s Gospel—not Jesus but an even more marginal character, the wild and (literally) woolly
John the Baptizer, who inhabited the deserts south of Jerusalem, lived off locusts and wild honey, clothed his loins in camel skin, and could be counted on to put the fear of God in people. He, too, told them that “the Time has come” and that they’d better get themselves ready. He was a man removed from ordinary human commerce, a desert crazy quite outside the life of society, one probably associated with the exceptional community of
Essenes, but people sought him out and submitted to his
baptism
³
because his predictions of the coming re-tribution both thrilled and terrified them. Having been cleansed with water while confessing their sins, they thought themselves ready for the coming Time. Mark connects the Baptizer to the prophecy of
Deutero-Isaiah: this John is “the voice of [one] that crieth in the wilderness, ‘Prepare ye the way of the
Lord,’ ” who “make[s] straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

Then Jesus arrives on the scene and allows John to immerse him in the Jordan. As he breaks the surface of the water, he sees the heavens torn open and God’s Spirit “like a dove, descending on him”; and he hears a voice, saying: “You are my Son, the Beloved One. You delight me.”
Mark fails to tell us if anyone but Jesus saw and heard these marvels. But there can be no question that this moment is central to Jesus’s life. Like all the prophets before him, he has received the Spirit, lamentably absent during the preceding prophet-less centuries. Henceforth, the words that come from his mouth, like those of Isaiah and all of Jesus’s prophetic predecessors, will be the words of God himself.

This is a difficult scene for modern readers to take seriously. Despite the fact that many of us secretly harbor uncanny experiences that have helped us lead our lives, the tenor of our age encourages us to brush these off as “coincidences,” and we don’t talk about such things lest everyone think we’re nuts. Instead, we—publicly, at least—relegate all such experiences to the dustbin of pathology and speak dismissively of narcissism, Messiah complexes, and delusions of grandeur. The trouble with this response is that it fails to explain the rest of Jesus’s life, including what happens next.

Returning to his native
Galilee, he calls out to two fishermen (whom we may presume he knew previously) to “follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” These two,
Simon and his brother
Andrew, surnamed bar-Jonah,
⁴
two rough, down-to-earth laborers unlikely to follow a madman, “immediately dropped the nets [that they had been casting into the Lake
of Galilee] and followed him.” Even if these two had been unusually suggestible, it’s unlikely that any self-enclosed whacko could have pulled off this trick a second time—but this is what Jesus proceeds to do. “And when he had gone a bit further,”
Mark tells us, “he noticed
James son of
Zebedee and his brother John, sitting in their boat and mending their nets. Straightaway, he called them to him; and they left old Zebedee behind in the boat, along with the hired men, and they too followed him.” A single loner might have heeded this call, but surely not two separate sets of brothers, the second two overseeing employees at their father’s behest.

The next scene goes to the heart of the extraordinary impression that Jesus’s presence made on his contemporaries and relieves us of any lingering suspicions about his sanity. Jesus and his four fishermen travel on to
Capernaum, where the bar-Jonah brothers live. On the Sabbath, Jesus enters the local synagogue, reads aloud a passage from the scroll of scriptures, and then begins “to teach. And everyone was amazed at his teaching, because he taught them with authority, unlike the scribes.” We all know what this means, for we have all encountered people who instill confidence in others by the air of authority that issues from them. The other teachers (scribes or rabbis, to use the usual appellations) could not compare.

What did Jesus teach? Recent, and highly publicized, arguments among scholars (and some who just parade themselves as such) concerning this question have left many with the impression that there is no scholarly consensus on this issue. Jesus was a peasant revolutionary. No, he was an urbane wise man, something like an Eastern sage—no, more like a Greek skeptic. It’s all in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Vatican is trying to keep it quiet: Jesus didn’t actually die on the cross; he managed
to escape, marry Mary Magdalene, and move to southern France (as who would not if he could?). Well, actually, we know almost nothing about him, because nearly all the sayings attributed to him were invented by his followers after his death.
⁵

Amidst this cacophony of competing theories, the press tends to give the most attention to the loudest voices and the most sensational hypotheses. So it may come as a surprise to the common reader that there
is
a broad scholarly consensus about what Jesus taught (as there has been now for nearly half a century), even though inventive new theories do keep popping up, a tribute (as much as anything else) to the intense, metahistorical interest that Jesus continues to generate after two thousand years. Certainly, it would be hard to imagine such a plethora of theories sprouting around the life of any other ancient historical figure, even one as important as, say, Julius Caesar.

But before investigating what Jesus taught, let’s step back a bit and take a look at the
origins of Mark’s Gospel, as well as at
Matthew’s, since these are the gospels that bear the closest resemblance to each other. According to a tradition established by the second century, Matthew, a tax collector (employed by the Romans to dun his own people)
who left his profession to follow Jesus as the fishermen had done, wrote the first gospel “in the Hebrew tongue”—probably the same Aramaic that Jesus and all Judea spoke as their daily language. But we have lost this Aramaic
Matthew,
⁶
and what we have bears evidence of having been lifted from Mark and mixed with another source, which, because Matthew’s Gospel contains many more of Jesus’s words than does Mark’s, must have been a collection of the sayings of Jesus. This collection, now also lost, may well be the original Aramaic Matthew. Since scholars can no longer consult it, they have given to this putative source the name “Q” (short for German
Quelle
, or “source,” as modern biblical scholarship got under way among German scholars). Matthew’s Gospel, at least as we have it, could not have been written directly by Matthew, the Jewish tax collector who abandoned his careful ledgers to follow Jesus. It was written rather by someone who had a Greek-speaking audience in mind (and, therefore, one outside Palestine), an audience that included at least some gentiles, who needed explanations of Jewish customs that would need no explaining to Jews. But this does not mean that this gospel has no connection to Jesus’s truant tax collector. Its origins, especially its meticulous preserving of Jesus’s sayings and discourses, may well lie with such an eyewitness.

Mark is traditionally remembered as an “interpreter” for
Simon Peter, an Aramaic-speaking fisherman and Jesus’s first follower, who would certainly have required interpretation when he arrived, as we know he did in later life, in Greek-speaking cities, such as Antioch, and Latin-speaking cities, such as Rome,
where he was crucified in the seventh decade of the first century by Augustus’s notorious successor,
Nero, as part of an evening’s entertainment. If Mark was Simon’s amanuensis and this is his gospel, it is unlikely that he could have written it before
Simon Peter’s death, for in such a case it would almost certainly have borne the fisherman’s name. As with Matthew, close analysis of the text reveals that this gospel came into existence over time—starting from oral testimony, advancing to written drafts and then to its final form—a process that cannot now be reconstructed exactly. But there is no compelling reason to doubt that at the beginning of the process stands the apostle
⁷
Simon Peter, just as the apostle Matthew may stand as the ultimate source of the gospel that bears his name.

Matthew’s account is considerably more developed than Mark’s—which makes sense if the origin of Matthew’s Gospel lies with a fairly sophisticated Roman official, used to keeping accounts and comfortable in passing from one culture to another, while the origin of Mark’s Gospel, written in all likelihood after 63 but before 70, lies with a fisherman. Matthew’s Gospel, as we have it, must have been written after Mark’s—probably in the 70s or early 80s—which suggests that both gospels, dependent ultimately on eyewitness (and earwitness) accounts, were committed to the written page within a few decades of Jesus’s death. And though Jesus certainly speaks in Mark, it is Matthew to whom we must look for an elaboration of Jesus’s teaching.