A HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW TESTAMENT

ROBERT M. GRANT
COLLINS ST JAMES'S PLACE LONDON 1963
Copyright: Robert M. Grant 1963
Printed in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Limited London, Fakenham and Reading
This edition prepared for katapi by Paul Ingram 2003.

Part Three: New Testament History and Theology

Chapter 19

The Problem of the Life of Jesus

In the nineteenth century, there flourished what Albert Schweitzer called "the quest of the historical Jesus".
It cannot be said that this quest was very successful or that its continuation in the early twentieth century, described by C. C. McCown in his Search for the Real Jesus, was especially fruitful.
In general the trouble with the nineteenth-century quest was that it overlooked

the fact that the gospel materials had been revised as, and before, they were compiled by the evangelists and
the crucial importance of the early Christian expectation of the imminent coming of the reign of God.

Rather naively combining gospel materials as if they were purely factual, many nineteenth-century critics produced a portrait of Jesus, which was actually drawn after their own image and likeness.
In the first half of the twentieth century this kind of search practically came to a halt because of the rise of form criticism, with its emphasis on the role of oral tradition in the creation of the gospels, and the recognition that apocalyptic eschatology had been extremely important in the early Church and (probably) in the teaching of Jesus himself.

To a considerable extent these two factors could have been regarded as mutually exclusive.
If the Church controlled the oral tradition to the extent alleged by the form critics, it might have seemed unlikely that early Christians would have preserved the embarrassing (because unfulfilled) predictions of the immediate coming of God's reign which were to be found in the tradition itself.
But the two factors were often combined, with the result that one could be sure that Jesus actually predicted the immediate coming of the Kingdom, while the Church took pains to adapt his teaching to the various needs produced by situations after his death and resurrection.

At the present time a new concern for the life of Jesus has arisen, partly by way of reaction against the extreme scepticism that flourished a generation ago.
This concern, it is claimed, arises out of the theological study of the New Testament and can be justified in relation to it.
At this point we have no intention of discussing this kind of problem.
We shall simply assume that it is important, in relation to critical historical study, of the New Testament, to determine what can be known about the life of Jesus - and equally important to determine what cannot be known.
If further justification be needed, we should argue that the existence of a visible community of believers at least tends to imply the existence of a Jesus about whom something more can be said than that he appeared.

Our concern, then, is with what can be known historically about him.
But when we use the word "historically" we are already confronted with difficulties.
Traditionally this word has implied the effort to set various data, often divergent in nature, into a context contemporary with them and geographically suitable.
In other words, the data are to be located in time and space and, it is assumed, made more fully comprehensible by comparison with other data derived from the same period and area.
In addition, the chronological arrangement of the data is expected to point towards the establishment of various causal connections.
The discovery or recovery of causal connections is based on a negative premise (what is posterior cannot be a cause of what is prior) and on a positive assumption as well (something which is prior is a cause of what is posterior).
Unfortunately - and this point is often overlooked - given the fact that our knowledge of historical phenomena is limited, we are not always in a position to say what data are earlier than others.
And because historical phenomena owe their existence to various causes, we cannot always determine which causes are the most important.

The difficulties we have already mentioned arise in dealing with all historical phenomena, but in dealing with the life of Jesus we encounter problems, which are due to the nature of the sources we use.
We have seen that the synoptic gospels present a picture, which in general is rather different from the one to be found in John.
At first glance, then, we must be cautious;
we must not assume too rapidly that either the Johannine or the synoptic outline is the only correct one.
On the other hand, since all the gospels agree that Jesus was crucified outside Jerusalem and that prior to this event he taught not only in Jerusalem but also in Galilee, we must admit that there was a certain movement in his ministry, whether it was simply from Galilee to Jerusalem (as in the synoptics) or oscillated between the two areas (as in John).

This conclusion does not amount to much, and because it does not amount to much we have to see what grounds can be used for ascertaining the reliability of more of the gospel materials.
At the end of the nineteenth century P. W. Schmiedel pointed to the existence of what he called "pillar-passages" in the synoptic gospels.
These were verses, which he thought could not have been invented by the later community or communities because the ideas expressed in them ran counter to the developing theology of the Church.
Among them he included Mark 3:21 ("the family or friends of Jesus say, "He is beside himself" "), Mark 6:5 ("he was unable to perform any miracle there"), Mark 13:32 ("of that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven nor the Son"), and others of a similar nature.
In other words, the passages Schmiedel accepted were passages, which pointed towards either the weakness or the ignorance of Jesus.
Since later evangelists or theologians found them difficult to explain, they must have been authentic.
There is obviously something to this judgement.
It implies that the evangelists were so honest that they were willing to report information that may well have seemed incongruent to them.
At the same time, when Matthew 13:58 reads "he did not perform many miracles there because of their unbelief" we must recognize that essentially this is no different from what we read in Mark 6:5, where Mark's words "was unable" do not reflect a historical fact but come from the evangelist's judgement as to what took place.
And when Matthew 24:36 agrees with Mark 13:32 that the Son does not know the time of the end, both may be making use of a saying revised by the Church in order to counteract enthusiasm for eschatological timetables.
Such a conjecture is, of course, not necessary; but it is possible.
We mention it only in order to suggest that the solidity of Schmiedel's pillars leaves something to be desired.

Albert Schweitzer himself erected another kind of pillar when he claimed that the gospel of Jesus had as its centre what he called "thoroughgoing eschatology".
The best passages he could provide came from sections to be found only in the Gospel of Matthew, especially the tenth chapter, where we hear of the imminent coming of the Son of Man.
First, the context is rigidly Jewish (hence authentic):

"Do not go to a way of the gentiles, and do not enter a city of the Samaritans;
go, instead, to the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (10:6-7).

Second, the eschatology is on the verge of realization:

"Truly I say to you, you will not complete the cities of Israel before the Son of Man comes" (10:23).

The difficulty with treating these verses as verbatim reports of the sayings of Jesus lies in the fact that they so closely resemble some other expressions in Matthew which clearly present Jesus' ministry as exceedingly close to "orthodox" Judaism (e.g., 5:18-20) and do not agree with passages in other gospels, and in Matthew itself;
which portray his teaching as farther from a literal interpretation of the law.
It could, of course, be argued that Mark and Luke, probably writing for gentiles, suppressed such verses.
But to make this claim means to hold that whatever in Jesus' teaching is close to Pharisaic-apocalyptic Judaism is genuine, while whatever looks beyond it has been created by the early gentile, or pro-gentile, Church.
And we do not know that Pharisaic-apocalyptic Judaism provided the entire framework within which early Christianity arose.

Once more, there is something to this notion.
If the gospel had originally been regarded as clearly addressed to all, Jews and gentiles alike, it is difficult to see how a gentile mission could have arisen as gradually as it did (according both to Acts and to Galatians).
On the other hand, however, had it contained no seeds of universality the gentile mission could hardly have arisen at all.
There must have been a sense in which Jesus addressed himself primarily to the Jewish people (Paul calls him the "minister of the circumcision", Rom.15:8);
but there must also have been a sense in which he addressed his call to the gentiles as well.
The synoptic evangelists reflect such a picture when they mention his encounters with non-Jews in Galilee and its environs.
All the evangelists record his controversies over the keeping of the Sabbath.

It could be added that if the mission of Jesus could be defined entirely in relation to ideas already present among the Pharisees or at Qumran he would not have been a historical person, in the sense that there was anything worth recording about his message.
To say this is not to assert that his teaching was completely novel, as Marcion urged in the second century.
It is merely to insist that had its content not somehow transcended what was ordinarily believed in the Palestine of his day there would have been no reason to preserve it.

A similar observation can be made in regard to his proclamation of the nature and coming of God's reign.
The notion that God would soon take up his power and reign for the benefit of those who obeyed and served him was fairly widespread in first-century Palestine.
Josephus describes several of the more conspicuous "prophets" who wrongly anticipated God's action, and the War Scroll from Qumran shows how seriously some Jews took eschatological expectations in which they themselves would participate.
Was the prediction of Jesus of the same sort?
Did he die in the mistaken belief that God was soon to intervene?
It is certainly the case that some of his sayings point in this direction.
The comment of Luke that his disciples supposed, as he drew near to Jerusalem, that the reign of God would immediately appear (19:11) seems to reflect a real historical situation;
compare Mark 9:1:

"There are some of those standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come in power."

Many of the parables of the kingdom point in the same direction.

At the same time, there are passages in which the reign of God is regarded as present at least in nuclear form.
The most impressive of these is the saying reported in Luke 11:20 (Matt.12:28):

"If I by the finger [spirit] of God cast out demons,
then the reign of God has already come upon you."

If the reign of God is like a seed or a buried treasure, it would appear that in some sense it already exists.
The idea set forth in such passages has been called "realized eschatology", though in view of the element of expectation which still remains it should probably be called "inaugurated eschatology" or "eschatology in the process of realization".
Whatever it may be called, the presence of this element in the teaching of Jesus clearly suggests that he did not simply make predictions about the future.
In his teaching there was emphasis on the imminent future;
there was also emphasis on the present as an anticipation of the future.
The dividing-line between present and future was to some extent blurred.

Again we can pass from mention of specific passages to more general considerations.
It is obvious that in the Pauline epistles, or in some Pauline epistles, there is a vigorous emphasis on the nearness of the end and the coming of Jesus from heaven (e.g., I Thess.4:16-17; Phil.3:20).
Some scholars have claimed that as Paul gets older and the Lord does not return, the emphasis shifts from eschatological expectation to a greater appreciation of the possibilities in the world. With this notion can be combined the fact that in the Gospel of John eschatology is viewed in two ways:
it is something already realized in the mission of Jesus (e.g., 11:25);
it is also something related to the future (e.g. 5:28-9).
The "hour" often mentioned in John is sometimes future, sometimes both future and present.

One conclusion that has been drawn from such data is that both Paul and John have modified the original, purely futurist eschatology of Jesus, chiefly because of the passage of time.
Against this conclusion two points can be made:

the chronology of the Pauline epistles is not well enough established for us to use it in creating a developmental picture;
and, even if it were, we find futurist ideas in epistles often dated late;
it is by no means certain that the futurist ideas in the Gospel of John are archaic survivals with which John combines his new ideas;
according to Bultmann they are due to ecclesiastical redaction, while on other views they probably represent at least one facet of the evangelist's thought.

Moreover the date of the Johannine gospel and the Johannine materials remains open to question.
Finally, the rise of Christian Gnosticism at a relatively early period suggests that while the Gnostics undoubtedly made use of only one side of the teaching of Jesus it was apparently there for them to use.
Their eschatology, generally speaking, is realized, although in many systems futurist elements remain.

From this overall picture, as well as from the specific passages already mentioned, we conclude that the teaching of Jesus was not a simple futurist eschatology.
It had futurist elements, and they were very important.
But the eschatology of which he spoke contained aspects both futurist and, in part, present.
During the apostolic age some writers emphasized one aspect, some the other.

It was not until the fifth century that the futurist aspects came to be generally neglected.
When in II Peter we find a de-emphasizing of the futurist element (3:8) it is still combined with stress on the coming of the Lord;
and, in any event, the non-representative character of II Peter is clearly reflected in the failure of most early Christian writers to make use of it.

This conclusion means that one of the cardinal presuppositions of most historical critics of the New Testament is put in jeopardy.
If one cannot simply say that unfulfilled apocalyptic predictions are genuine, while passages that regard the kingdom of God as somehow present are late interpretations or misinterpretations, the clear, one-sided picture drawn by Schweitzer and others tends to disappear.

We should not assume, however, that we have now solved all the problems related to the life of Jesus, or even the major ones.
Obviously, by insisting upon the double nature of early Christian eschatology we have made it possible to claim that Jesus founded the Church or provided for its existence after his death;
[Cf. H. Conzelmann in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart III (ed. 3), 646.]
we have tried to lay emphasis upon continuity rather than discontinuity in early Christian history.
It is equally obvious that this continuity has been challenged and will be challenged.
[ Cf. Conzelmann in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 54 (1957), 277-96.]
In one sense, at least, the continuity is problematic in so far as the resurrection of Jesus is an event that stands outside the ordinary continuities of history; and it was in, and in consequence of, this event that the Church came into full existence.
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Jesus in Non-Christian Writings

Because the Christian movement arose within the Roman Empire and spread throughout it, from east to west, we should expect to find some notice taken of it by Greek and Roman writers.
They ought to say something about Jesus and his influence.
Such an expectation is clearly fulfilled only by four writers of the late first century and the early second;
by the time of the anti-Christian writer Celsus (c. 178),
nothing authentic about Jesus is preserved in non-Christian sources.

The four writers we have in mind are the Hellenistic Jewish general and historian Josephus and the Roman officials C. Plinius Secundus (Pliny the Younger), A. Cornelius Tacitus and C. Tranquillus Suetonius.
In dealing with each bit of information we must be just as critical as we should like to be in considering Christian statements.
Each of these authors has his own axe or axes to grind;
his attitude is not necessarily "objective" simply because he is not a Christian.

The words of Josephus are especially questionable,
since we know that he was militantly opposed to apocalyptic movements,
which in his view had led to the disastrous war with Rome (66 -70);
he himself became a devoted supporter of Rome and his work was subsidized by successive emperors.
He included three passages bearing on Christian origins in his Antiquities, published about the year 93
(significantly, none of them is to be found in parallel passages in his earlier War;
presumably Christians had become more important in the interval).
These three passages deal with
John the Baptist,
James the brother of Jesus,
and Jesus himself.

The passage about John the Baptist (18, 116-19) depicts him as a "teacher of righteousness" and makes no reference to his eschatological views.
His baptism is portrayed as absolutely non-sacramental.
The passage about James (20, 197-203) describes his judicial murder by the high priest Ananas in AD 62 and refers to him as the brother of "Jesus, the so-called Christ".
From this passage two inferences can be drawn.

James was an important figure in Jerusalem up to the year 62;
this confirms the impression we gain from Acts and from the second-century Christian writer Hegesippus.
Josephus probably - indeed, almost certainly - had already given some account of the Jesus to whom he referred in this brief notice, though his account was undoubtedly unfavourable.

If we turn to what he does say about Jesus, it is not what we should expect.
The passage (18, 63-4) reads as follows:

"At this time lived Jesus, a wise man (if it is right to call him a man),
for he was a worker of miracles and a teacher of men who receive the truth with pleasure;
as followers he gained many Jews and many of the Hellenic race.
He was the Christ, and when by the accusation of the chief men among us Pilate condemned him to the cross,
those who at first had loved him did not cease from doing so;
for he appeared to them, alive again, on the third day,
since the divine prophets had foretold this as well as countless other marvellous matters about him.
Up to the present day the tribe of Christians, named after him, has not disappeared."

In this form the description cannot come from Josephus.

It is purely Christian in outlook;
indeed, only a Christian can have written it
Origen, writing about 250, refers several times to Josephus's testimony to Jesus as contained in the passage about James;
he makes no mention of the fuller account.
Since he had read all the later books of the Antiquities, which he regarded as an excellent historical source, this passage cannot have been contained in them - or, if it was, Origen regarded the passage as suspect and therefore refrained from mentioning it.

Various attempts have been made to improve the text by leaving out a few words here and there and by reading "he was not the Christ";
but it is highly unlikely that any authentic original version can be recovered.
We simply do not know the method that the forger used.
All we know is what Origen knew:
Josephus said something about Jesus and spoke of him as the "so-called Christ".

Three other testimonies come from a group of Roman officials hostile to Christianity and other non-Roman religions, which they regarded as expressions of fanaticism or, as they called them, "superstition".
Pliny was legate to Bithynia and Pontus and wrote to the emperor Trajan in January 112;
Tacitus, once proconsul of Asia (where Christians were fairly numerous), wrote his Annals in 112-13;
and Suetonius, formerly an imperial secretary, published his gossipy Lives of the Caesars about 121.

Pliny tells us a good deal about Christians, little about Jesus.

The Christians, he says, were accustomed to sing a hymn "to Christ as to a god".
This sentence shows that Pliny knew, or believed, that Christ should be regarded not as a god but as a man, one who had actually lived and died as a human being.
Renegade Christians were willing to curse Christ;
true Christians could not be compelled to do so.
Pliny was thus aware of the intensity of Christian devotion to the (human) leader.
But his statement (Ep. 10, 96) provides no direct data about Jesus himself.

Tacitus describes a great fire at Rome under Nero in the summer of 64, and he mentions the Christians whom the emperor used as scapegoats.
As is his custom, he gives a brief summary of background material to explain who the Christians were.
We do not know where he got his information.
If it comes from police reports, these in turn were probably based on the interrogation of Christians (Ann. 15, 44).

"The founder of this sect, Christus, was given the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate;
suppressed for the moment,
the detestable superstition broke out again,
not only in Judaea where the evil originated,
but also in the city [of Rome] to which everything horrible and shameful flows and where it grows."

Again, we learn something about Christianity.
Momentarily suppressed at Christ's crucifixion, it "rose again" in Judaea and spread to Rome (compare the account in Acts).
Of Christ himself we learn only that he founded the sect and was executed under Pontius Pilate.
This hardly adds much to what the New Testament says;
and if Tacitus's ultimate source is Christian, it adds nothing.

Finally, Suetonius mentions the fire at Rome in connection with Christians (Nero, 16) and also says that in the reign of Claudius the emperor

"expelled from Rome the Jews who were constantly rioting at the instigation of Chrestus" (impulsore Chresto)
(Claudius, 25).

Since Claudius was emperor from 41 to 54, something is obviously wrong with this statement, even though one later Christian writer (Irenaeus) thought that Jesus was crucified during his reign.
Probably it is a garbled version of a story about messianic riots in Rome, riots that could have resulted in the expulsion of such Christian Jews as Aquila and Priscilla (Acts 18:2).
The passage shows that the name "Chrestus" (= Christus) was known at Rome during the reign of Claudius.
Once more, nothing is added to what we could have inferred from the New Testament.

Our four Graeco-Roman sources, then, contribute nothing to our understanding of the life of Jesus.
The Christian interpolator of Josephus undoubtedly thought that he was helping history to confirm faith.
All he succeeded in doing was to remove any independent value from the testimony of Josephus.

One might hope for some evidence from rabbinical Jewish sources, but the stories the rabbis tell are late in date and reflect no more than the attitude of the synagogue towards an early heretic.

We are left, then, with Christian testimony.
If we wish to recover early non-Christian attitudes towards Jesus we can rely only on what Christian sources are willing to tell us about them.
To be sure, we can find that they give us a considerable amount of information.
Jesus was frequently accused of violating the Jewish law in regard to Sabbath observances and ritual purity.
He was thought to claim divine prerogatives, such as forgiving sins, for himself.
His driving out demons was sometimes ascribed to Beelzebul, the prince of demons.
The expression "son of Mary" used of him may perhaps reflect a suggestion (developed in later criticisms) that he was illegitimate.
According to Luke, he was accused of leading a revolutionary movement, of forbidding the payment of taxes to the Romans, and of calling himself an anointed king.
It is true that in part Christian writers report these accusations in order to contrast them with the true understanding, which they themselves possess.
But the accusations fit the first century situation so well that we need not suppose that they were invented.
Indeed, if we possessed a report from Pontius Pilate the "facts" in it could hardly be very different from what the gospels tell us.

Within the Christian testimony, then, we find non-Christian elements.
These elements are retained in support of Christian faith in Jesus;
but the kind of faith they support is not something unrelated to events.
The apostles and the evangelists are giving testimony to events in which, they believe, the work of God was made manifest -
though not to all.
Because historically the revelation was not received by all, the evangelists are free enough, and honest enough, to record the varying responses that were made to it.
These responses, negative as well as positive, were included in the gospel story as they told it.
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Oral Tradition

It has long been recognized that the gospels as we have them were not written immediately after the events that they describe.
There was a period of oral tradition, which preceded the writing of gospels, and the existence of this period, and of the traditions, can be proved from the New Testament itself.
The earliest New Testament documents -
the letters of the apostle Paul -
make this point clear.

The first example seems to occur in I Thessalonians 4:15-17, where Paul is encouraging those of his readers who are distressed by the fact that some Christians have died before the coming of the Lord.
He therefore makes a statement "with a word of the Lord".
This word is that

"the Lord himself,
at a word of command,
at the cry of an archangel and the trumpet of God,
will descend from heaven;
and the dead in Christ will be raised first,
then we who remain alive will be taken up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air;
and thus we shall always be with the Lord."

The closest gospel parallel to this saying is to be found in Matthew 24:30-1:

"they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory;
and he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call,
and they will gather his elect from the four winds,
from one end of heaven to the other."

And in Matthew 24:34 we read that

"this generation will not pass away until all these things take place".

Here is where the problem arises at Thessalonica:
some Christians have already passed away.
There is another saying in the tradition, however, which allows for the distinction Paul makes;
it is found in Matthew 16:27- 8.
The Son of Man will come with his angels, and there are "some standing here" who will not taste death until they see him come (cf. Mark 9:1).
We conclude that Paul is relying upon a tradition, which is also reflected in these sayings in Matthew.

Similarly, when he reminds the Thessalonians that the Day of the Lord comes like a thief in the night (5:2) he has in mind the parable related in Matthew 24:43 (Luke 12:39-40); and his words about the unexpectedness of the Day recall such verses as Matthew 24:39 and Luke 21:34-5.
The apocalyptic passage in II Thessalonians 1:7-2:12 is nothing but a further development of the apocalyptic elements in the synoptic gospels.
In view of the differences between Paul's words and those reported in the gospels, we infer that he has relied upon oral tradition, however, not written accounts.

In I Corinthians Paul's use of oral tradition becomes even more evident.
For instance, when he is giving instructions to married couples, he says (7:10-11)

"to the married I give charge,
not I but the Lord,
that the wife should not separate from her husband
(but if she does, let her remain single or else be reconciled to her husband)
and that the husband should not divorce his wife."

The whole passage, including the words inserted parenthetically, is close to the words of Jesus as reported in Mark 10:11-12.
It may well be that an earlier form of Jesus' saying is to be found in Matthew 19:9, where only divorce by the husband, as in Jewish practice (Deut.24:1-4) is mentioned;
but the extension of the principle is logical, indeed obvious, and is implied by the union of the couple to which Jesus refers (Mark 10:6-9; Gen.1:27, 2:24).

In this section of I Corinthians it is quite clear that Paul is able to differentiate his own injunctions from those of the Lord. In dealing with mixed marriages he is able to state,

"to the rest I say, not the Lord" (7:12)

and he can point out that

"concerning the unmarried
I have no command of the Lord" (7:25).

At the same time, in dealing with the unmarried he lays emphasis on the principle of being free from worries (7:32-4), and this principle is fully set forth in the tradition underlying Matthew 6:25-34 (Luke 12:22-31).

"The payment of ministers is based on a commandment of the Lord" (9:14):
"the Lord commanded those who proclaim the gospel to get their living by the gospel"

and this is almost certainly a reflection of the saying addressed to the Twelve in Matthew 10:10 and to the Seventy in Luke 10:7:

"the workman is worthy of his food" [or wages].

When Paul is introducing liturgical reforms at Corinth he reminds his readers of the words and deeds of the Lord Jesus

"on the night in which he was betrayed" (I Cor. 11:23-5).

Here he says that he received the tradition "from the Lord";
he means that the Lord, whether in his earthly ministry or now exalted, is the ultimate source of this account, which is very close to the narratives in the synoptic gospels (Mark 14:22-4 and parallels;
especially Luke 22:19-20).

It is not so clear in I Corinthians 14:37 that Paul is referring to words of Jesus.
Here he insists that what he is writing is a commandment of the Lord, and he is discussing the necessity for order in Corinthian worship. Perhaps it could be claimed that he is looking back to his injunction to be "mature" or "perfect" in thinking (14:20), and this could be based on something like Matthew 5:48,

"be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

Tradition is evidently reflected in I Corinthians 15:3-7, where Paul sets forth the common account of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus and then adds two lists of resurrection appearances;
apparently the first comes from the circle of Peter, the second from that of James.

Such traditions are not so apparent in the later letters, though it seems hard to deny that, in setting forth the commandment to love one's neighbour as oneself and treating it as a summary of the law (Gal.5:14; Rom.13:8-10), Paul had in mind the fact that Jesus had done the same thing (Mark 12:28-31 and parallels).

From these passages we conclude that Paul was acquainted with collections of traditions, which related both the words and the deeds of Jesus.
Were they oral or written?
From the freedom with which Paul handles them we should incline to think that they were oral.
When he refers to writings he seems always to have the Old Testament in mind, and in his letters there is no reference to any gospel materials as recorded in written form
("the scriptures" in I Cor. 15:3-4 are Old Testament prophecies).
The only possible exception to this statement occurs in I Timothy 5:18, where "the scripture" says,

"You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain" (Deut.25:4; 1 Cor.9:9)
"and the workman is worthy of his wages" (Luke 10:7; cf. I Cor.9:14).

Here it would appear that the Pastor has referred to a written gospel what in I Corinthians was an allusion to oral tradition.
It is most unlikely that the Gospel of Luke was written in Paul's lifetime (see chap.13, on the Pastoral Epistles.)

We conclude that Paul was acquainted only with oral traditions about the words and deeds of Jesus.
Does this mean that in his time written records did not exist?
Such an inference is not justified by what we know about Judaism in the first century, when Jewish teachers produced many apocalypses and other documents.
Evidence is provided in abundance at Qumran, and students of rabbinic traditions do not confirm the notion that the 'oral law' was entirely oral.

At the same time, it seems significant that the tradition of Jesus' sayings, or at any rate of many of them, bears the marks of oral circulation.
Many of his sayings have been handed down in an arrangement, which reflects not the subject matter involved, but a correlation by means of verbal association.
Such an arrangement is especially conspicuous in Mark 9:33-50, where the subject changes from "servant" to "child" (the same word in Aramaic) to "my name", then back to "little ones" and on to "cause to stumble", "gehenna", "fire", and "salt".
Still more important, at points where Matthew and Luke report the same sayings, often the sayings subsequent to them are different because the verbal associations used as points of departure are different.
As one example out of many, Matthew 10:19-21 is bound together by the word "deliver";
Luke 12:10-12 is based on the phrase "Holy Spirit".
[Cf. J. Jeremias in ZNW 29 (1930), 147-9.]
Such arrangements are characteristic of the transmission of oral materials.
They suggest that until a time not long before the composition of the written gospels there was no uniform arrangement of the sayings of Jesus but that the sayings continued to be circulated orally.
This is to say that oral traditions not only were characteristic of Paul's day but also continued to be utilized considerably later -
at least into the decade between 60 and 70.

Certainly oral tradition continued to exist in much later times.
But after written gospels began to be circulated, there was some tendency to favour the written at the expense of the oral, even though defenders of oral tradition like Papias insisted that oral reports of eyewitnesses were more reliable than written documents.

"I supposed that materials taken from books would not assist me as much as those received from a living, surviving oral witness" (Eusebius, H. E. 3, 39, 3).

If the tradition underlying the gospels was primarily oral, it is not surprising that efforts have been made to analyse it and to attempt to differentiate more authentic materials from less authentic, and to treat the analysis as demonstrating the existence of various layers or levels of tradition.
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Form Criticism

Especially since the end of the First World War, scholars have been trying to get behind the written gospels to various stages of the tradition.
They seem to have based their method primarily on similar studies of the "sagas" underlying the patriarchal narratives of the Old Testament and of Germanic folk tradition.
Though there is an obvious difference between traditions in circulation over a long period of time and the gospel traditions, crystallized in writing after being transmitted orally for little, if any, more than a generation, these scholars believed that the Christian traditions must have recapitulated in a very short time the processes which in other circles had extended over centuries.

Partly because of the different ways in which the various evangelists connected the single items contained in the traditions, form critics proceeded to their task by first removing the framework provided by the evangelists.
The function of this framework was only that of holding together the small units of tradition, which originally, it was believed, circulated independently.
Such a conception of the framework is largely correct.
We have already seen the part which verbal association played in combining sayings of Jesus.
In addition, many of the links provided in the gospels are not very important.
When Mark says "after some days" or "again" or "immediately", it is doubtful that his chronology is very meaningful.
When Luke arranges a good deal of material in relation to a journey of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem (Luke 9:51-18:14), the connectives he uses ("while on the way", "after this", "when he was in a certain place") do not seem very precise.
Similarly, the arrangement provided by Matthew seems to exist primarily for the sake of relatively systematic teaching.

After the framework has been removed, we are left with collections of materials of various kinds in which non-literary "forms" can be detected.

One form, especially favoured by Jesus, has already been discussed;
this is the parable. (See Chapter IV).
In addition to parables, there are, of course, other kinds of sayings.
These have sometimes been classified as
proverbial sayings of the type to be found in Jewish - or for that matter Greek and Egyptian - wisdom literature;
prophetic and apocalyptic sayings;
legal prescriptions, perhaps formulated within Christian communities; and
"I-sayings", usually of a kind that can be called "programmatic" ("I came not to... but to...").
It is a question whether or not classifications such as this really illuminate the meaning or the transmission of the sayings involved.

There are also stories of various kinds.

There are "apophthegm stories" in which a situation is described so that a setting may be provided for a saying or pronouncement by Jesus.
The "apophthegm" gives the whole story its point.
There are miracle stories, usually concerned with healings and exorcisms but sometimes demonstrating Jesus' power over "inanimate nature".
In them we find
(a) a description of the situation,
(b) mention of the word or deed of Jesus, and
(c) a brief remark about the effect of the miracle.
Here too we may wonder whether our understanding of such stories is notably advanced by this classification.
In human experience generally, stories are intended to set forth something striking that has been said or done.
They begin with a situation and proceed to the word or act which this situation, so to speak, demands.

The basic purpose of form criticism is not, however, limited to classifying the various units of tradition.
Form critics have generally made use of their classifications to get behind the gospels and look for earlier, purer "strata of tradition".
For instance, they have that the explanations of the parables do not belong with the parables, and that the moralizing conclusions often provided are secondary.
They have also claimed that some miracle stories can be classified as "Jewish" (healings and exorcisms) and therefore relatively early and authentic, others are to be regarded as "Hellenistic" (the so-called "nature miracles") and therefore late and unreliable.
This analysis is not very satisfactory, for

it introduces historical considerations into what was supposed to be literary, or pre-literary, analysis, and
as far as the miracle stories are concerned, those classified as "Hellenistic" have very few Hellenistic parallels.

On the other hand, it cannot be denied that those who transmitted the traditions about Jesus may have handled them with some measure of freedom.

The question of the nature of the witnesses to the oral tradition thus becomes important.
Did Mark, for example, rely on miscellaneous witnesses when he compiled his materials,
or did he make use of the teaching of the apostle Peter?
Is the Gospel of Matthew really associated with the apostle whose name it bears?

Some scholars have claimed that the sayings of Jesus were remembered because Jesus taught his disciples to remember them.
There seems to be no direct evidence to support this attractive theory, but it can at least be held that the fact that the sayings were remembered suggests that they were spoken in order to be remembered.
There is an emphasis upon the words of Jesus in the gospels which seems inexplicable had he not regarded them as worth remembering (see Mark 13:31 and parallels).

It may be that modern analysis of the process of memory will contribute something to our consideration of this problem.
In his classical work entitled Remembering, F. C. Bartlett has analysed two types of oral transmission.

The first he calls "repeated reproduction";
this takes place when the same person reiterates what he has seen or heard.
This kind of transmission presumably existed in the early Church, since not all the apostles died immediately.
In repeated reproduction, Bartlett found, stereotypes are likely to arise and literal accuracy is unusual.
There is a tendency to introduce rationalizations and even to substitute explanations for what they originally explained.
Details are preserved only when they correspond with the transmitter's pre-formed interests and attitudes.
The accuracy of the apostles' remembering, then, would depend in large measure on the extent to which they were genuinely dedicated to their mission.
We may assume that they were so dedicated, and we may add that, in Bartlett's view, the total effect of repeated reproduction is often close to the original occurrence being remembered.
The second kind he calls "serial remembering";
this takes place when a tradition passes down through a chain of rememberers.
Here the situation is less satisfactory.
Indeed, "it looks as if what is said to be reproduced is, far more generally than is commonly admitted, really a construction, serving to justify whatever impression may have been left by the original".

This is to say that Bartlett's experiments confirm what common sense would expect.
A record derived from an eyewitness is more reliable than one that has come from a chain of secondary witnesses.
In dealing with the gospels, common sense would also suggest that at the time they were written, or may be supposed to have been written, there were eyewitnesses and their testimony was not completely disregarded.
This is not to say that everything in the gospels is precisely and literally true.
It is to say that in spite of the weaknesses of memory the evangelists? accounts should be given the benefit of the doubt.

The gospels are not simply the product of the Church.

Individuals, not communities, write books.
The evangelists regarded their function as that of bearing witness to Jesus Christ, not that of composing edifying fiction.

There is no reason to suppose - though one form critic supposed it - that there was ever a special class of "story-tellers" in the Church.
At the same time, the gospels were produced within the Church.
They were not produced simply to "meet the Church's needs" in various historical situations.
The evangelists were not trying to "make the gospel relevant".
They believed that it was relevant because they had accepted the call of Jesus.
Though they inevitably wrote what they believed was meaningful to themselves and to others, they were not free to explain the apostolic testimony away.

This means that the gospels must be regarded as largely reliable witnesses to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and that the attitudes of the evangelists cannot be completely separated from the materials they are transmitting.
For example, Christians had disputes about keeping the Sabbath;
they had them because Jesus himself had treated the Sabbath with considerable freedom.
They were concerned about divorce because Jesus had been so concerned.
The life of the Church was not completely disjoined from the life of Jesus.
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The Birth of Jesus

At a relatively early time, Christians were concerned with asserting that Jesus had not simply "appeared" among men as if he were an angel or a spirit.
He was actually born as a human being;

he "was born of the seed of David according to the flesh" (Rom.1:3);
he "was born of a woman, born under the law" (Gal.4:4).
"The Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14).

In neither Mark nor John, however, is there any statement about the way in which he was born.
In the New Testament such statements are provided only in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, which are in agreement in regard to several points.

The mother of Jesus, Mary, was betrothed to Joseph, a descendant of King David, but was a virgin at the time of his birth.
The conception of Jesus was due to the Holy Spirit.
An angel instructed either Mary or Joseph to name the child Jesus.
Jesus was born in Bethlehem during the reign of Herod I.

The measure of agreement is obviously significant.

On the other hand, the stories diverge in regard to details.

The genealogies of Jesus in both Matthew and Luke genealogies which
(a) disagree with each other and
(b) lead from Abraham or Adam to Jesus through Joseph, not Mary.

According to Matt. 13:55 a crowd asks,

"Is not this the son of the carpenter?"

just as in John 6:42 (cf. Luke 4:22) the Jews ask,

"Is not this Jesus the son of Joseph,
whose father and mother we know?"

Of course, it can be answered that

genealogies can be traced in several ways and that

legally, Joseph was the father of Jesus.

Crowds are not necessarily reliable authorities.
The reference to the brothers and sisters of Jesus (Mark 6:3) is harder to explain,
though they may have been children of Joseph.

There are some difficulties in relation to the place of the birth.
Mark 6:1 speaks of Nazareth as the patris or native city of Jesus.
Even though the word patris does not necessarily refer to a birthplace, Jesus is described as "from Nazareth" in Acts 10:38 (cf. John 1:45-6).
Matthew describes Joseph and Mary as first going to Nazareth after the death of Herod;
Luke says that they came from Nazareth to Bethlehem and then returned there.
Finally, Matthew 2:5-6 states that the birth in Bethlehem was to fulfil the prophecy of Micah 5:1-3 (cf. John 7:41-2),
while Matthew 2:23 relates that Jesus lived in Nazareth because of what was said "through the prophets":

"he shall be called Nazoraios" (Lev. 21:12? Judges 13:5?).

What conclusion should be drawn from these passages?

As we have said, Matthew and Luke agree that Jesus was born in the reign of Herod, in other words not later than 4 BC.
On the other hand, Matthew 2:22 describes the family as coming to Nazareth while Archelaus was reigning,
and Luke 2:1-3 says that Joseph took Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem at the time of a census which was made for the first time when Quirinius was governor of Syria.
The chief difficulty here is that Josephus (War 2, 118; Ant. 19, 355) describes what seems to be the same census as taking place when Judaea was placed under direct Roman rule in AD 6.
There is no direct historical evidence for an earlier census, though it is possible that one was taken.
It is hard to believe, though not inconceivable, that all who claimed Davidic descent were enrolled at Bethlehem rather than at the places where they lived.

Historically, then, there are strong, if not insuperable, difficulties in regard to the story or stories of the conception and birth of Jesus.
None of the New Testament evidence shows that the earliest Christians regarded the virginal conception as an indispensable dogma.

There are some historical analogies to this idea.
The idea that God's work is reflected in the births of patriarchs or heroes is to be found in the Old Testament patriarchal narratives
(Gen. 17:19; 18:14; 21:1; 25:21; 29:31; 30:22)
and in the accounts of Samson (Judges 13:3)
and Samuel (I Sam. 1:19-20) -
as well as in the story of John the Baptist (Luke 1:25).
In addition, whether the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 refers to a young woman or to a virgin who would conceive and bear a son Immanuel, among Hellenistic Jews, and doubtless among others, the word was understood to mean "virgin".
The fact that Greeks, Romans and others told stories about the miraculous conceptions of various "divine men" suggests how the virginal conception of Jesus may have won ready acceptance in the Graeco-Roman world, but it does not explain the origin of the belief.
In other words, analogies to be found either in the Old Testament or in the world outside Judaism are nothing but analogies.
They neither substantiate nor demolish the historical nature of the story.
Indeed, while some Graeco-Roman writers regarded virginal conceptions as possible, others insisted that they were not.

It has been suggested that the story of the virginal conception reflects an attempt to solve the problem of Christ's nature in relation to his origin.
On this view, the picture of the pre-existence and incarnation of the Word in the Gospel of John is the result of a similar attempt with different results.
We do not know, however, that the story came into existence for this reason.

If we turn from the main emphases of the stories in Matthew and Luke to their details, we find that Matthew concerned with relating his version as closely as possible to the Old Testament.
He stresses the fulfilment of prophecy and describes Joseph as a dreamer like his Old Testament prototype.
Some details have often been questioned.
What of the star of Bethlehem and the visit of the Magi?
Presumably the star is that predicted in Numbers 24:17, and the Magi are Zoroastrian astrologers who played a significant role in the first century.
At the court of Archelaus were Chaldaean astrologers and Essenes who interpreted his dreams (Josephus, War 2, 112).
Magi came to Rome in the year 66 and acknowledged the divine nature of Nero.
This is to say that some aspects of the story are historically possible, at least.
As for the slaughter of the innocents (Matt. 2:16-18),
Matthew regards it as a fulfilment of Jeremiah 31:15.
Did he or some predecessor invent the story after finding the prophecy?
Is the story intended to explain why Jesus was in Egypt and could be regarded as fulfilling Hosea 11:1?
Or was there actually some such massacre in the last years of Herod?s bloody reign?

Our judgement on such questions will depend upon the view we take of Matthew's writing as a whole.
The entire second chapter of his gospel is tied together by means of a series of "prophecies" regarded as fulfilled in the early life of Jesus.

There is an allusion to the star and rising sceptre of Numbers; then
comes an explicit quotation from Micah 5:2 (Bethlehem).
The journey to and return from Egypt fulfils Hosea 11:1, treated as prophecy because in Hebrew the perfect tense can refer either to past or to future. At the end of the chapter come
the quotation from Jeremiah and
the statement about the Nazoraios to which we have already referred.

What are we to make of this collection of prophecies, and of the stories related to them?

Some scholars have spoken of Matthew as a writer of haggadic legends, based on Old Testament texts and imaginatively expanding them.
This theory might well explain the choice of all the Old Testament passages but one, Jeremiah 31:15, and Matthew or some earlier Christian may have been meditating upon the general resemblances between the early life of Jesus and such messianic texts as those discovered at Qumran.
The fact that Matthew's narrative is historically possible does not prove that the events occurred just as he describes them, and it is very hard to reconcile with the account given in Luke 2:8-40.

The ultimate difficulty with the whole narrative of the conception, birth and infancy of Jesus lies in the modern (and ancient, too) belief in the general regularity of natural processes.
In early Jewish Christianity there were those who held that Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary, though we do not know why they maintained this view.
Theological ideas have varied in relation to this subject.
Most Christians have insisted that if Jesus was the Son of God he must not have had a human father.
Others have argued that if he was fully human as well as fully divine he must have had two human parents.
The more traditional view is based on a definition of human and divine nature in terms of essences, natures or origins.
The less traditional view is primarily concerned with Jesus in terms of the response of faith to him, though the question of "nature" is not necessarily overlooked.

Many New Testament data or phenomena are related primarily to what we should regard as historical events.
The resurrection of Jesus must somehow belong to this category.
Without such an event the existence of the Church is inexplicable (cf. Cor.15:14-18), though obviously the theological significance of the event is not in any way limited to its "happened-ness" or to the explanations given by the earliest witnesses.
On the other hand, such a story as that of the virginal conception is much less important. In the New Testament it is never regarded as possessing central significance.
It has no place in the apostolic preaching to Jews or to gentiles;
there is not even an allusion to it except in the two narratives in Matthew and Luke; even where Paul and others point towards esoteric teaching they are not pointing in the direction of this story.
What it must represent is an attempt to state a way in which God's creative activity reflected in the resurrection and in the ministry of Jesus, was manifest in the way in which he was generated.
In Matthew the virginal conception takes place in order to show that Jesus' origin was due to the Holy Spirit.
He is, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, Emmanuel, "God with us".
Similarly in Luke's account Mary is to conceive because the Holy Spirit will come upon her and the power of the Most High will overshadow her;
her son will be called the Son of God.
The environment of both stories is to be found in Jewish Christianity, but it is a kind of Jewish Christianity concerned with making the meaning of Jesus comprehensible to gentiles.
And it is at this point that we can probably understand the tendency of Ebionite Jewish Christianity to speak of Jesus as the son of Joseph and Mary.
Not only did the Ebionites often retain archaic traditions;
they had no mission to the gentile world except in the sense that they wanted gentiles to become Jews and accept Jewish customs.

The kind of Jewish Christianity in which the story of the virginal conception makes historical sense is one which, like that of Philo, looks outward to the gentile world and has a mission to it.
And this is obviously the kind of Jewish Christianity reflected in both Matthew and Luke.
In Matthew, Jesus first sends his disciples only to the empirical Israel, but after his resurrection he sends them out to the entire world.
A similar picture is set forth in Luke.
After the resurrection the disciples are told to remain in Jerusalem until they have received power from on high and then to preach to all nations.

The story of the virginal conception, then, is likely to be an explanation of the significance of Jesus in terms of origins and in the light of the resurrection and the consequent gentile mission.
It is analogous to Paul's interpretation of Jesus as the pre-existent Wisdom of God,
the instrument not only of redemption
but also of creation,
and to John's picture of the pre-existent word of God who became incarnate.
Symbolically it is important because it reflects an insistence upon God's freedom to act and to create novelty.
God's freedom is not limited by his creatures.
But at the same time, as some of the early Fathers recognized, the Jesus who was son of Mary was not a creature in the sense that God created him absolutely de novo.
Because he was son of Mary he was a human being.
He really lived, really grew up (as Luke makes clear), and really died.

It is always difficult, if not dangerous, to try to separate events from their significance, or vice versa.
But there are examples in the Old Testament of "events", which, while not historical in the ordinary sense, convey important theological insights.
The most obvious example is the story of creation and the life of Adam in paradise.
And it may well be the case that not everything in the New Testament should be regarded as historically true.
Probably it would be right to say that everything is historically true in the sense that it reflects the life and thought of the early Church, but not in the sense that it is literally true.

If one attempts to by-pass theological questions by an "appeal to history" it must be admitted that the historical method as such can provide little guidance on this problem.
Two evangelists describe the virginal conception and the birth of Jesus in rather different ways.
If they were in complete agreement, it might be suspected that they had relied on a previously invented story.
Suspicion arises in relation to the differences that now exist.
How many differences would be required in order for us to regard their narratives as absolutely authentic and reliable?
To ask this question suggests that it cannot be answered.
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Jesus in the Temple

The apocryphal gospels tell us stories of the early years of Jesus.
He made clay pigeons that would actually fly;
he restored to life a playmate whom he had accidentally pushed off a rooftop;
he amazed a teacher who wanted him to express the second letter of the alphabet by asking him the real meaning of the first letter.
The legendary character of such accounts is self-evident.

In three of our gospels we hear nothing of Jesus' early years.
Luke, however, describes two episodes from this period, both related to the temple in Jerusalem.
The first story deals with the purification of Mary after childbirth, in accordance with the law of Leviticus 12:4-8.
Since her means were inadequate for the purchase of a lamb, she bought two sacrificial birds, as the law allowed. Luke's emphasis, however, is not on the mother but on the child.
The visit of the family to Jerusalem took place so that Jesus could be presented to God in the temple, in accordance with Exodus 13:2,

"Sanctify unto me all the first-born."

It was the occasion of prophecies delivered by the aged Symeon and Anna, both of whom were awaiting the deliverance of Israel.
They found prophecies fulfilled in the presence of Jesus.
The second story is concerned with a visit of Jesus to the temple at the age of twelve, when he was probably first regarded as old enough to participate in the Passover celebration there.
His parents left him behind when they began their homeward journey, and when they returned to Jerusalem, they found him in the temple, raising questions with the "teachers" there.
Naturally they were surprised at his situation;
they were even more surprised when he told them that he had to be in his Father's house.
This view of the temple suggests that the story comes from early Jewish Christianity such as that reflected in Acts 3:1, where Peter and John are described as going up to the temple to pray.

The source of these stories is clearly described by Luke (2:51) as the mother of Jesus.
Their atmosphere is clearly quite different from that of the apocryphal gospels,
and it may well be the case that Mary did remember them and transmit them to others.
According to Acts 1:14 she was a member of the early Church in Jerusalem.
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John The Baptist

By the time Jesus was "about thirty years old" (Luke 3:23),
a prophet had arisen in the region near the Jordan River and not far from Qumran.
Luke dates the coming of God's word to this person, John the Baptist, as taking place in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar (3:1);
by this year he means either AD 26 on AD 27.

In order to understand the rise of John we must bear in mind the expectations of the Essenes.
They looked forward to the time when God would act to destroy evil and evil men, and reward those who had become members of the holy congregation.
There would be a final war, a final victory, and a final judgement.
But when?
The Habakkuk Commentary says that

"the final moment may be protracted beyond anything the prophets have foretold."

The War Scroll seems to suggest that unpredictable comets will indicate the coming of the final struggle.
And a fragment on the new covenant says that God will choose a people in the time of his good pleasure;
in other words, one cannot tell when he will do so.

At that time, there was to come a prophet, the one foretold by Moses, and two Messiahs, one a layman, the other a priest.
Sometimes the prophet is not mentioned and we hear simply of the coming of a "faithful shepherd" like Moses himself.
At the hour of judgement, says one of the hymns of thanksgiving, rivers like fire will pour forth, consuming everything in their way.

Now if we bear these expectations in mind we can understand the sudden appearance of John the Baptist.
John was an ascetic.
He wore camel's hair clothing and a leather girdle;
he ate locusts and wild honey (mentioned in the Zadokite Document).
And he preached a

"baptism of repentance for the remission of sins."

To his hearers he repeated the words of the prophet Isaiah,

"The voice of one crying in the wilderness,
"Make ready the way of the Lord, make his paths straight" (Is. 40.3).

Here we must wonder whether our evangelists have quoted John correctly,
for we now know that in the Manual of Discipline men were told to go into the wilderness to prepare the way -
reading Isaiah not as "a voice in the wilderness" but "in the wilderness make ready a way".
This is what those who followed John did;
they went into the "wilderness" to be baptized by him.

To those who went out he said,

"You offspring of vipers,
who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?"

Then he launched into an attack on those who thought that they would be saved simply because of their Jewish descent.

"Do not say in yourselves,
"We have Abraham for our father,"
for God can raise up children for Abraham from these stones.
Right now the axe is laid at the root of the trees;
every tree that does not bring forth good fruit will be cut down and cast into the fire."

This is the same sharp distinction between good and evil, which we have already seen in the Dead Sea community and its message.
And John's prescription for goodness is the same as that of the Essenes.

"He who has two coats is to give to him who has none,
and he who has food is to do likewise."

All were to share their property.

But then who was John?
Was he himself the expected Messiah?
No, he says,

"I indeed baptize you with water;
but after me there comes one greater than I am,
whose sandal's thong I am not worthy to loosen;
he will baptize you in spirit and fire:
his winnowing-fan is in his hand,
and he will thoroughly cleanse his threshing-floor,
and gather the wheat into his barn;
but the chaff he will burn up with unquenchable fire."

John himself was the "prophet" of the coming Messiah, not the Messiah himself;
and he predicted the sprinkling of the Spirit by the Messiah, and the cosmic fire, which the Dead Sea people foretold.

Here we must turn aside to look at a different account of John's work which is given by the historian Josephus;
and we must remember that Josephus is always anxious to show how politically harmless the leaders of Jewish religion were, and how little they predicted coming disasters.
Josephus can be expected to leave out whatever was distinctive about John's message.
In any event this is what Josephus says of John:

This good man told the Jews to practise justice towards one another and piety towards God, and then to come to baptism.
For the washing would then be acceptable to God, not as a begging-off for certain sins but as a purification of the body;
justice already purified the soul.

Two points deserve notice.

It has often been supposed that the contrast between body and soul is Josephus's own contribution, based on Greek ideas.
We now know, however, that the Essenes of Qumran also contrasted body with soul.
Moreover, while "justice" and "piety" are clearly Greek terms (Josephus was writing in Greek), he uses the same ones when he describes the initiation oath of the Essenes.
The Qumran Manual of Discipline agrees exactly with what Josephus says when it states that

"no one is to go into water to attain the purity of holy men;
for men cannot be purified unless they repent their evil."

In other words, Josephus describes John in language that reveals how close John was to the Essenes.
He gives no reason for John's proclamation and omits any reference to God's wrath or to one who would come later, since he wants to divorce "this good man" from apocalyptic hopes.

The preaching of John thus closely resembles that of the Dead Sea community,
near which his baptism was performed.
But the two kinds of baptism were not identical.
At Qumran baptism was not only a rite of initiation but also a rite frequently repeated.
It was only for members of the monastic community.
For John, baptism took place once only,
and he offered it to anyone who would come.

It is possible that John had once been a member of the Qumran community.
He differed from it, however, in two respects:

God would express his wrath without the military assistance of the Essene army, and
God's blessings were to be offered to the Jewish people as a whole, not just to the sect?s members.

In this way, it might be supposed, he modified the teaching of the Dead Sea group much as the apostle Paul modified that of earlier Jewish Christianity.
And just as the old Jewish Christianity gradually disappeared while gentile Christianity flourished, so the Qumran group was finally destroyed while in John and Jesus its message, completely reinterpreted, lived on.
Neither Jewish Christianity nor the Dead Sea group was able to last for long after the fall of Jerusalem.

John's relation to the Essenes is important;
much more important is the relation between him and Jesus.
Here we have to deal with the gospels with considerable care.
The evangelists are very anxious to make two points clear.
First, they want to remind their readers that John was not the Messiah;
this point is stressed in the gospels of Luke (3:15) and John (1:20; 3:28).
They say plainly that he is not the Messiah;
and this view seems to be historically sound,
at least in the sense that he makes no claim for himself;
even though in the second century there was a Jewish sect, which made the claim for him (Clem. Rec. I, 60).
Second, the evangelists want to indicate that John recognized Jesus as the Coming One whom he preceded.

At this point their evidence is somewhat ambiguous.
It is undoubtedly a fact that John baptized Jesus.
The evangelist Matthew finds the story so embarrassing that he has John say that he would prefer to be baptized by Jesus (3:14).
But both Matthew (11:13) and Luke (7:19) tell us that when John was in prison he sent disciples to ask Jesus,

"Are you the Coming One, or do we expect someone else?"

This question suggests that by having John recognize Jesus at his baptism the evangelists are making explicit a relationship that was not quite so clear.
Before his death, John may have decided that Jesus was the one whose coming he had foretold; probably he did not recognize him in the crowds who came to the Jordan.
In the Gospel of John, Jesus' earliest disciples come from those of the Baptist.
This idea may well be historically correct, and it helps explain the Gospel of John itself;
as we shall later see.

It is significant that John baptized Jesus.
This means that he, like others who took part in this baptism, believed that John was right in predicting the coming fire and cosmic conflict;
that he too believed that the end was at hand.
It means that he believed that God was going to act as judge,
and that those who lived in accordance with God's will would be judged favourably.

Once more, just as John's message was not precisely that of the Essenes,
so the message of Jesus was not that of either the Essenes or John.
For the Essenes, the way of the future was the way of battle and victory.
For John it was escape from the coming disaster.
For Jesus it was wholehearted acceptance of what God might bring, in obedience to his will.
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The Baptism of Jesus

The synoptic gospels agree that John baptized Jesus, and that as he came up from the water he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove upon him. Luke adds that he was praying and that the Spirit

"descended in bodily form like a dove."

John says that it was John the Baptist who saw the Spirit descend.
Apparently both evangelists are trying to make the experience less subjective.

A similar tendency is evident when Matthew rewrites Mark.
In Mark there is a voice from heaven (like the bath qol mentioned by the rabbis) which says,

"You are my beloved Son;
with you I am well pleased" (Psalm 2:7; Is. 42:1).

In Matthew the voice says,

"This is my beloved Son." ...

Thus testimony is given to the witnesses present rather than to Jesus.
A few manuscripts of Luke modify the statement still more by making it a direct quotation of Psalm 2:7, but this reading is hardly original.
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The Temptation of Jesus

According to the three synoptic gospels, Jesus was tempted or tested by Satan in the desert immediately after his baptism.
John makes no mention of this occurrence, probably because in his view the incarnate Word was not subject to temptation.
The accounts in the synoptics are rather divergent.
According to Mark, the Spirit (received at the baptism) drove him into the desert, where for forty days Satan tempted him.
There he was with wild animals, and angels served him - presumably with food, as in the story of Elijah (I Kings 19:5-8).
Angelic guardians and the danger of wild beasts are also found in Psalm 91:11-13.
Matthew and Luke, evidently following a common written source at this point, describe Jesus as fasting for forty days and nights (as Moses did, Exod. 34:28), and then being tempted by the devil.
The first temptation was therefore "if you are the Son of God" to convert stones into bread.
To this suggestion Jesus replied by quoting Deuteronomy 8:3:

"Man will not live by bread alone,
but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God."

Matthew and Luke present the other two temptations in different sequences.
According to Matthew, the second took place when the devil took Jesus to the "wing" of the temple and said to him,

"If you are the Son of God, cast yourself down."

Psalm 91:11-12 contained a promise that angels would protect the godly man.
Jesus replied by quoting Deuteronomy again:

"you shall not test the Lord your God" (6:16; cf. Isaiah 7:12).

Finally the devil took him to a high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world;
these would be his if he would worship him.
Once more a verse from Deuteronomy provided the answer:

"you shall worship the Lord your God" ... (6:13).

The point conveyed by this story may be that, though Jesus as Son of God possessed the powers ascribed to him by the devil, he was unwilling to use them for Satan's purposes.
But since this point is not brought out in the third temptation, it is more likely that the basic purpose of the narrative is the same as that in Mark.
It depicts a struggle between Jesus and Satan,
which resembles the testing of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
Adam and Eve yielded to Satan's wiles;
Jesus resisted them and remained obedient to God.
The details of the story can hardly be taken literally.
As Origen pointed out,
there are no mountains from which all the kingdoms of the world can be seen.
Presumably the account was not intended literally.
It is a portrayal of an inner struggle,
not one that can be located geographically.

Some of the Church Fathers thought that the devil did not know who Jesus was;
he was trying to find out by means of his suggestions.
This interpretation is improbable since the devil's ignorance is intimated, in the New Testament, only in I Corinthians 2:8, and in the synoptics as a whole, demonic powers are depicted as recognizing Jesus without difficulty.

It has also been held that in this story Jesus is rejecting the use of miraculous powers altogether.
Such a notion finds a parallel in Mark 8:12, where Jesus tells the Pharisees that

"no sign will be given to this generation."

It is evident, however, that none of the synoptic evangelists can have understood it in this way.
All three of them describe the multiplication of loaves and fishes and the stilling of a storm;
Matthew and Mark report that Jesus walked on the Lake of Galilee.
It is hard to find a non-miraculous kernel of the gospel.

After the temptation, the public ministry of Jesus begins.
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The Gospel in Galilee

Though the baptism of Jesus took place in the Jordan, probably near the point where it enters the Dead Sea,
and the temptation was in some desert region perhaps in the same vicinity,
Jesus began his ministry in Galilee, the region in which he had been brought up.
The gospels disagree as to the way in which this beginning was made.

Mark (1:14-21) gives the following sequence of events:

the arrest of John the Baptist,
Jesus' entrance into Galilee,
his call of the first four disciples, and
his teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum.

Matthew and Luke agree that Jesus entered Galilee after John's arrest, though the Fourth Evangelist explicitly states that John had not yet been imprisoned (3:24).
Both Matthew and Luke place the call of the disciples after Jesus' teaching in Capernaum.
Matthew emphasizes the importance of Capernaum by saying that the preaching there fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah 9:1-2;
but he does not describe Jesus' activities as Mark does.
Luke has the ministry begin at Nazareth (4:16-30),
though he alludes to events which previously took place at Capernaum (4:23);
Jesus then goes to Capernaum, now identified as "a city of Galilee" (4:31).
Oddly enough, though John gives a completely different account of the beginning of the ministry,
he does state that from Cana in Galilee Jesus went down to Capernaum with his mother, his brothers and his disciples;
but he adds that they stayed there "not many days" (2:12).
For John the "holy city" of Galilee is Cana, not Jerusalem.

In the gospels only two indications of the occasion of Jesus' first preaching can be found.
(1) The quotation of Isaiah in Matthew points towards "Galilee of the gentiles" as a land of messianic expectation.

"The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light:
they that dwelt in the land of the shadow of death,
upon them has the light shined."

It was in Galilee that the revolutionist Judas had proclaimed that God alone should be king.
Though no other evangelist uses the prophecy in this way (cf. Luke 1:79), Jesus may have chosen Galilee not only because he was familiar with it but also because it was a land of "darkness".
Certainly Judaeans were not enthusiastic about it.

"Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" (John 1:46)
"Search, and see that no prophet arises out of Galilee" (7:52).

(2) The synoptists' mention of the arrest of John the Baptist may provide an occasion for Jesus' proclamation.
Having been baptized by John, he could recognize in his arrest a beginning of God's wrathful judgement.
Such an explanation, however, seems suspect in view of the explicit statement in the Gospel of John that the Baptist had not yet been put in prison.
More probably, both Jesus and John were working at the same time, at least for some months.

Mark briefly sets forth what Jesus proclaimed in these words:

"the time has been completed
and the kingdom of God has drawn near;
repent and believe in the gospel."

(Luke 4:16-27 is an expansion of this theme and contains typically Lucan allusions to gentiles.)
Like other allusive reports of mission preaching (e.g., I Thess. 1:9-10),
this one is not fully comprehensible unless it is expanded.

What is the "time" that has been completed?
Presumably the background of this word lies in Jewish apocalyptic literature like the book of Daniel, in which we read that

"the ancient of days came, and judgement was given to the saints of the Most High, and the time came that the saints, possessed the kingdom" (7:22).
The "kingdom of God" is his everlasting dominion, which he will give to "the people of the saints of the Most High" (Dan. 7:27).
The "gospel" is the message that the kingdom of God is at hand, though it could be expanded by statements about God's demands upon men such as we find in the synoptics.

If men sought evidence that the reign of God was being inaugurated, they could find it in the power of Jesus over demons and diseases, as we learn elsewhere in the gospels.
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The Call of the First Disciples

Jesus was not content to proclaim the coming of the reign of God;
he also called disciples to assist him in his mission.
The various evangelists present this call (and consequently the picture of the mission) in different ways.

In Mark 1:16-20 Jesus is walking along the lake of Galilee when he sees two brothers, Simon and Andrew, casting their nets.
He says to them,

"Follow me
and I will make you fishers for men."

They follow;
soon afterwards, they encounter two more brothers, James and John, who join the group.
In the Old Testament the image of fishing for men is used of God's judgement.
The fishermen are representatives of God's wrath;
they take the fish from the water and harm them with nets or hooks (Amos 4:2; Hab.1:15; Jer.16:16).
The same figure is to be found in the Dead Sea Psalms of Thanksgiving (Col. 5, 7-8).
The meaning of the word of Jesus is presumably analogous.
Those who follow him will be proclaiming the coming wrath of God, though they must also be telling men how this wrath is to be avoided by repentance (cf. Mark 1:15).

The same story is told in Matthew 4:18-22, but in Matthew 13:47-50 the significance of the net is modified in relation to the Church.
In the kingdom of heaven there are both good and bad fish;
they will be separated by angels at the end of the world.
Luke (5:1-10) changes the story by placing it in a context of a miraculous catch of fish.
He makes no reference to any possible eschatological meaning. Instead, Simon, James and John are astounded by their catch and because of their astonishment are ready to follow Jesus.
In the Gospel of John (1:35 -51) the saying about fishing for men disappears entirely.
John the Baptist tells Andrew and someone else that Jesus is the Lamb of God.
After the two visit Jesus, Andrew brings his brother Simon to him.
The next day, Jesus calls Philip simply by saying, "Follow me", and Philip informs Nathanael that Jesus is the one predicted in the law and the prophets.
Nathanael, impressed by Jesus? recognition of him before his call, hails him as the Son of God and the king of Israel.
The whole account has been set in a different key.

If we assume, as we probably should, that both Matthew and Luke represent versions secondary to that in Mark, we are left with a choice between Mark and John.
Both narratives treat Simon and Andrew as among the earliest disciples, though in John, Simon is the third disciple to follow Jesus, not the first (cf. John 20:2-8; 21:7, 15-23).
The call itself is delivered in different ways.
In Mark it consists of the saying about fishers for men, while in John it is based on a word of John the Baptist and Jesus' own command to come and follow him.
In John, as in the rest of his gospel (except 21:2), there is no mention of the sons of Zebedee.
How can these differences be explained?
Presumably the most satisfactory conclusion is to admit that both are right and that some disciples followed Jesus for one reason, others for another.
Some of his disciples may well have come to him from John the Baptist; others probably did not.
The notion that Simon Peter was called only indirectly may be due to a special concern of the Fourth Evangelist, but we cannot tell whether this concern was based on fact or not. Mark's notion of Peter's chronological primacy may be due to Peter's own view of the matter.

These human factors must be borne in mind rather than any a priori theory as to how early Christianity developed.
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Apostles

According to Mark 3:14-16 there was a special group among the disciples of Jesus.
Mark says that

"he made twelve to be with him
and to send them to preach and to have authority to cast out demons."

Then he repeats his first words:

"and he made the twelve."

There follows a list of twelve names.
In Mark 6:7 we read that he sent out the twelve, two by two;
when they return, Mark (6:30) speaks of them as "the apostles".
Matthew (10:1-2) identifies the twelve disciples as the twelve apostles.
So does Luke.

It is fairly evident that at a very early time it was recognized that Jesus was accompanied by a group of disciples called "the twelve";
this title occurs in all four gospels, as well as in I Corinthians 15:5.
In Luke 22:30 Jesus tells his disciples that they will

"sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel;"

Matthew (19:28) probably does no more than make explicit what was already implied when he refers to "twelve thrones".

Difficulties arise when we try to determine

who the Twelve were and
(2) whether Jesus called them apostles or not.

In the synoptic gospels and Acts we find four lists of the twelve.

Mark 3:16-19

Simon Peter
James s. Zebedee
John s. Zebedee
Andrew
Philip
Bartholomew
Matthew
Thomas
James s. Alphaeus
Thaddaeus
Simon Cananaeus
Judas Iscariot

Apart from minor differences in order, the lists all agree as to the first eight names,
though some manuscripts of Matthew substitute "Lebbaeus" for Thomas (No. 8, in seventh position);
others combine Lebbaeus with Thomas;
and the Old Latin version substitutes "Judas the Zealot".
In Luke-Acts the description of Simon as Cananaeus is interpreted by calling him "Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James" is substituted for Thaddaeus.
Only half of these names are mentioned in the Gospel of John, but the evangelist mentions "the Twelve" three times.
From these facts we should conclude that the names of most of the Twelve were fairly well known, but that some of them were not especially significant in relation to the story of Jesus.

Did Jesus call them "apostles"?
Only Luke (6:13) says that he did so, and it seems more likely that the name developed from later recognition of the mission that they performed.
In the non-technical sense ("one sent") the word occurs in John 13:16 (compare Matt. 10:24, where "disciple" is used), and it may also be non-technical in Mark 6:30. I Corinthians 15:5-7 may confirm such a picture, where the Twelve are differentiated from "all the apostles".

What we discover in the New Testament record, then, is that Jesus called twelve disciples to accompany him and to proclaim his gospel;
at the coming of the kingdom they were to act as judges of the twelve tribes.
That they expected such honour is suggested by the story about the request made by James and John, the sons of Zebedee (Mark 10:35-45), who asked Jesus for positions on his right and on his left.
It should be added that an element of judgement was already present in their preaching mission.
Those who accepted the gospel would enter into the kingdom;
those who rejected it had judged themselves already. I
f men did not receive them, they were to shake off the dust under their feet as a testimony to them
(Mark 6:11; cf. Matt.10:14-15; Luke 10:10-12).
There is no record of their going into gentile territory or of conducting any mission to gentiles.
As Matthew (10:5-6) reports, they were to go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel --
primarily to those Jews who owed no allegiance to the parties of the Pharisees or the Sadducees or, for that matter, the Essenes.

The Twelve, then, had a present function and a future office.
Apparently it was after the death and resurrection of Jesus that they came to be called apostles and that, indeed, the conception of apostles as the leaders of the community arose.
This question will be discussed in Chapter XXI.
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Miracles

For modern readers of the gospels it is often something of an embarrassment that works of power characterizes so much of the ministry of Jesus, by "paradoxical events", by "works", and by "marvels" - in short, by miracles.

Sometimes refuge is sought in the meaning of the word especially favoured by John, a "sign" which points beyond the outward and visible "work" to its inner meaning for faith.
This solution is not very happy for John not only lays Stress on signs but also insists upon the reality of the works.
Other ways of avoiding miracle have been found by means of a kind of historical criticism.
Exorcisms were characteristic of first-century Palestine, and Jesus therefore performed them.
Stories which describe miracles, which we find more incredible, can be assigned to the Graeco-Roman world.
Such criticism, while in matters of detail perhaps correct, does not touch the real problem:
the ministry of Jesus is full of miracles and the expectation of more miracles;
his resurrection is the miraculous culmination of his ministry.
Sometimes it is supposed that miracles are the result of "projections" backwards into the ministry from the resurrection.
It seems more accurate, however, to suggest that the disciples would not have believed in the resurrection had they not been prepared to accept its reality on the ground of something that had happened earlier.

It may be added that objection to miracles is not a modern phenomenon.
In antiquity there were those who did not accept the truth of stories about them.
Indeed, the so-called Gospel of Thomas can be regarded as an anti-miraculous document.
Jesus was so spiritual that he cannot have bothered to deal with the natural world.
(Of course this is not the only ground on which miracles were or are rejected.)

In dealing with miracle-stories we may make a distinction, for convenience, between

exorcisms and healings and
what we call nature-miracles,

though we must bear in mind that the early tradition did not draw such a line.
Jesus addressed a demon and a storm at sea in the same way (Mark 1:25; 4:39) and he once cursed a fig tree (11:14).

Yet he himself clearly regarded exorcisms and healings as of primary importance.

"If I by the finger of God cast out demons",
he said,
"then the reign of God has come upon you" (Luke 11:20; cf. Matt.12:28).

The expulsion of these invisible powers, responsible for sin and disease, was the chief sign of the coming of God's kingdom.
Mark tells of an unclean spirit who recognizes Jesus as the Holy One of God and comes out of a man at his command (1:23-6).
According to Mark's summaries Jesus cured many demoniacs (1:34; 2:11), though the evangelist gives only three other examples, all special cases (the Gerasene demoniac, 5:2-20; the Greek woman's daughter, 7:25-30;
and the man whom the disciples could not cure, 9:14-29).
It is plain that Jesus was well known as an exorcist, for it was said that others used his name in order to expel demons (9:38-9), and the "scribes from Jerusalem" argued that he possessed the demon Beelzebub and therefore was casting out demons by their chief.
Jesus pointed out the absurdity of their claim.
How could Satan cast out Satan?
Such inconsistent conduct would bring his reign to an end (3:22-6).

In ancient belief it was necessary for demons, since they were discarnate spirits, to find some other abode once they had left their victims.
For this reason the "legion" possessing the Gerasene demoniac went into two thousand swine and may have drowned with them in the sea.
Sometimes, as Jesus observes, an unclean spirit returns, along with others more wicked than himself, and with their aid makes the victim's final situation worse than it was originally (Luke 11:24-6; Matt.12:43-5).
The power of the exorcist is shown by the numbers expelled, as in the ease of the seven driven out of Mary Magdalene (Luke 8:2).

The presence of demons was detected by abnormal actions such as shouting (Mark 1:23), living in tombs while shouting and cutting oneself with stones (5:5) foaming at the mouth, gnashing teeth, and fainting, as well as jumping into fire (9:18, 20).
Inability to speak could also be caused by a demon (Luke 11:14; Matt.9:32).
Clearly such cases resemble those of psychological ailments common enough today.
Jesus cured them with a word of command (Mark 1:25; 5:8; 9:25), following a preliminary question of concern and recognition by the demon (1:24; 5:7) or a statement of faith by a relative of the patient (9:24).
The result was a loud cry of crisis (1:26; 9:26) and an immediate cure, with subsequent health (7:30).

Closely related to these illnesses which we should call mental are the cases of physical illness.
Jesus regarded his cures of these as important, for he sent word about them to John in prison (Luke 7:22-3; Matt. 11:4-6).
He cured Peter's mother-in-law of a fever by raising her by the hand;

"the fever left her and she served them" (Mark 1:29-31).

Jesus touched and spoke to a leper, and the leprosy left him at once (1:40-2;
ultimately it makes little difference whether or not ancient and modern leprosy are the same).
When he stated that a paralytic's sins were forgiven, and told him to get up, lift up his bed, and walk, he was cured (2:3-12).
He restored a withered hand with a word (3:1-5).
Jairus's daughter was actually dead when Jesus held her by the hand and said,

"Girl, get up";

she got up, walked, and ate (5:22-3, 35- 43).
A woman whom doctors could not cure touched Jesus' garment in a crowd and was healed at once.
Jesus felt that power had gone out from him and looked for her, telling her that her faith had healed her (5:25-34).

Sometimes the technique of healing is more fully described.
In order to cure a deaf-mute he put his fingers in his ears and touched his tongue with spittle;
with a groan he looked up to heaven and said,

"Be opened" (Mark 7:32-5).

Again, to cure a blind man he spat on his eyes and laid his hands on him, producing a partial cure which was completed only by a second imposition of hands (8:22-5).
Both examples are omitted by the later evangelists;
both resemble the "sympathetic magic" employed by other healers in the ancient world.
Neither is discussed in any extant writing, of ante-Nicene commentators, perhaps because both were regarded as too much like other instances of thaumaturgy.
But there is no reason to suppose that our standards, or those of some early Christians, as to what is edifying can serve as historical criteria.
From the complaints of critics as recorded in the gospels we should suppose that Jesus was not concerned with the question of technique. He could use whatever technique seemed suitable at the moment.
In the last healing in Mark, that of blind Bartimaeus, Jesus simply says,

"Your faith has healed you" (10:52; cf. 7:34).

Thus far we have discussed only the stories in Mark.
Those reported by the other synoptic evangelists are not essentially different, though there is a slight tendency to heighten the difficulty of the miracles.
Luke gives five additional instances.
The slave of a centurion in Capernaum is about to die when, because of the centurion's faith, Jesus heals him without seeing or touching him.
And the only son of a widow at Nain is about to be buried when Jesus takes pity on the mother, touches the bier, and says, "Young man, be raised." He sits up and speaks (7:1-16).
A woman had a "spirit of sickness" for eighteen years and could not stand erect;
she was healed by a word of "release" and the laying on of hands (13:11-13).
A man had dropsy and was cured (14:2-4).
Ten lepers - among whom the only grateful one was a Samaritan - were cured (17:12-19).
Matthew's stories are essentially the same, except that he twice tells a story, based on that about Bartimaeus, about two blind men (9:27-31; 20:30-4).

In all three synoptics the stories about exorcisms and healings are told only in relation to Galilee or its surroundings.
Only in Matthew (21:14) do we read that

"the blind and the lame came to him in the temple
and he healed them"

- but he knows no miracle story related to Jerusalem.

From these stories it is evident that his contemporaries knew Jesus as one who could drive out demons or perform the analogous function of healing diseases.
He was not what today is called a "faith healer".
Sometimes faith is mentioned in the stories;
sometimes it is not.
The tradition is concerned with one thing only, to show that the power of God was present in him.
That this power existed is also plain from the criticisms made by his opponents.
They did not question his power;
they only argued that it was demonic rather than divine.
That others had it as well, and that Jesus believed that they did, is also clear.

"By whom do your sons cast them out?" (Matt.12:27; Luke 11:19).

We conclude that the existence of a power to exorcise and to heal was not open to question in Galilee in Jesus' time.
What differentiated his work from that of others?
We must assume that the context was what was important.
Jesus did not exorcise and heal "for the works' sake" but because these activities were united with his proclamation of the coming kingdom, already potentially present in the miracles.

The exorcisms are absent from the Gospel of John, perhaps because the evangelist or his readers did not find them edifying.
The charge that Jesus was possessed by a demon is set forth, but it is understood as meaning that he was crazy (8:48; 10:20).
Some of the healings are described;
they have become great signs of Jesus' heavenly glory manifest on earth.
Four healing stories are told.
The centurion's slave (Luke) or boy (Matthew) has become a royal officer's son,
and as in Matthew he is healed just at the hour when Jesus speaks to his (here) father (4:46-53).
A man has been paralysed for thirty-eight years and Jesus tells him to take up his bed and walk, and to sin no more (5:8-9, 14).
This story resembles the version in Mark (2:3-12), and like it is related to Sabbath observance.
A third healing is that of a man born blind;
it is effected by putting a mixture of mud and spittle on his eyes (cf. Mark 8:23)
and by ordering him to wash in the pool of Siloam (9:6-7).
The fourth is the most striking of all:
the raising of Lazarus, dead for four days (11:1-44).
Nothing quite like it is found in the synoptic tradition, even though there too we find raisings from the dead.
The uniqueness of John's story lies in his insistence that Jesus rejoiced because he had not been with the sick Lazarus;
therefore Lazarus could die and rise.
The miracle is performed not so much for the sake of Lazarus as to manifest the glory of God.
Here John expresses a meaning, which is less explicit in the synoptic tradition.

It is undoubtedly significant that exorcisms of demons occur in the synoptic gospels (but only in relation to events in Galilee) and that they are absent from the Gospel of John and are not mentioned in the Pauline epistles (or in any of the epistles except, by implication, James).
The only exorcisms to be found in Acts are mentioned in a brief summary (Acts 19.11-12) describing the effects of contact with Paul's handkerchiefs or aprons, and in the subsequent verses which describe the activities of "seven sons of a Jewish high priest named Sceva" (19:14); but demons are not mentioned.

This means that exorcism, while characteristic of the Galilean period of the church's life, was not characteristic of the gentile mission, at least until the time of the Apologists, when mention of it recurs.

Exorcisms, healings and raisings thus make up the bulk of the gospel accounts of the miracles of Jesus.
We now turn to the other stories which illustrate the power of Jesus, and of his disciples, over "nature" -
remembering once more that the distinction we draw is our own, not theirs.
This power is clearly set forth in the word of Jesus,

"Whoever says to this mountain,
Be lifted up and be cast into the sea,
and does not doubt in his heart
but believes that what he says is taking place,
for him it will take place" (Mark 11:23; cf. Matt.21:21).

A similar saying is preserved in different contexts in both Matthew (17:20) and Luke (17:6) and is referred to by Paul (I Cor.13:2).
We shall later discuss what seems to be the probable original context.
Here it is enough to say that the saying illustrates the faith of Jesus and of his disciples in a God who works "mighty acts" and can make his power available for believers.

"All things are possible for him who believes" (Mark 9:23).
"I can do all things through him who strengthens me" (Phil. 4:13).

The miracles are closely related to the belief of Christians that in Jesus God has decisively acted;
and Jesus himself shared this faith.
Thus the nature miracles do not really differ in kind from the others, which we have already discussed.
The most important of them is the story of the feeding of the five thousand, related by all four evangelists, handed down by three of them in connection with Jesus' walking on the lake of Galilee.
(Mark and Matthew give the story twice, once as the feeding of five thousand, once as that of four thousand.)

In Mark the story is set after the Galilean mission of the disciples (6:30-3, 34-44).
The weary missioners are to come to a desert place and "rest a little", but a crowd follows, eager to satisfy its curiosity.
The hour becomes late and Jesus tells the disciples to feed the crowd.
Among them, however, they have only five loaves of bread and two fish.
Jesus then commands the crowd to recline in groups of fifty and a hundred;
taking the bread and fish he blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to the disciples to distribute.

"All of them ate and were filled."

The leftovers fill twelve wicker baskets (characteristic of Jews, says the Roman poet Juvenal).

There are several ways of looking at this story.
The most common view in Western Christendom has been that it provides an example,
and can be used as a proof,
of Jesus' power over nature.
This view, doubtless given credence by the following miracle of walking on water,
leads to almost insuperable difficulties when the details are pressed.
Hilary of Poitiers (fourth century) was embarrassed by such questions as these:
Where did the bread multiply?
In the hands of Jesus?
In the hands of the disciples?
In the mouths of those who ate?
Naturally rationalists advanced an equally literalistic explanation.
Even a tiny amount of bread and fish (1/5000 of 7 loaves + 2 fish) seemed a considerable amount to men under the spell of Jesus.
Alternatively, those in the crowd had bread and fish of their own and suddenly began to share at this point.

More modern students have attempted to explain the story in relation to various motifs, which can be found by considering parallels.

There is a somewhat similar story about Elisha in II Kings 4:42-4,
where the man of God, through his servant, feeds a hundred men with only twenty barley loaves
(the barley loaves recur in John's version, 6:9, 13).
If Elijah had come as a forerunner of Jesus (Mark 9:13),
it was conceivable that the work of his successor Elisha,
who had received a "double portion of Elijah's spirit" (II Kings 2:9-14),
should be surpassed by Jesus.
A second motif is Eucharistic.
As Mark tells the story, it is remarkably similar to his account of the Last Supper,
where Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it, and distributed it to the disciples.
All his disciples (and the crowd) eat of the loaves and fish as they all ate and drank at the Last Supper.
A third motif is eschatological.
The feeding of the five thousand corresponds to God's miraculous feeding of the children of Israel in the desert on their way to the Promised Land.
Jews and Christians regarded this feeding alike as a prefiguration of the "messianic banquet" in the kingdom of God.
The rabbis give various picturesque details - thus the marine monsters will finally serve God's purpose when they are eaten in the kingdom.
No such details are given in the gospels, but the expectation of such a banquet is there;
Jesus swears that he will not drink wine again until he drinks it
(a) new in the kingdom of God (Mark 14:25).
The reclining of the crowd by fifties and hundreds points closely to the eschatological idea.
It was Moses in the Exodus who instructed the children of Israel to assemble in groups of thousands, hundreds and fifties;
and this command was reiterated among the covenanters by the Dead Sea.
As one greater than Moses, Jesus prepares his disciples and the crowd for their march into the new land of promise, the kingdom of God.

As Schweitzer puts it, Jesus

"consecrates them as partakers in the coming Messianic feast,
and gives them the guarantee that they, w
ho had shared his table in the time of his obscurity,
would also share it in the time of his glory."

The baskets of leftovers may be related to the mention of leftovers in the story of Elisha or else to the Exodus story of the double supply of manna, which was provided on the day before the Sabbath (Exodus 16:22-7).
The numbers of the baskets (twelve after the feeding of the five thousand,
seven after four thousand) may be symbolical,
but the twelve is easier to explain (apostles, tribes) than the seven is.

These motifs certainly illuminate the meanings that early Christians may have found, and indeed almost certainly did find, in the story.
They do not indicate either that the event took place or that it did not.
A decision on this point must be reached on grounds extraneous to the New Testament itself.
The same kind of decision must be made in regard to the story of walking on water.
Some critics have suggested that the story is simply a heightened account of the parallel, or somewhat parallel, story of the stilling of the storm (Mark 4:35-41).
In both instances Jesus and his disciples wish to cross the lake of Galilee;
it is evening, and a strong wind troubles the disciples, who are afraid.
At a word of Jesus the sea goes down and the disciples either fear even more or are astonished.
There are differences, however.
In the first storm story Jesus is calmly asleep in the boat and the disciples criticize his lack of concern (4:38),
while in the second he comes to them by walking on the sea,
just as in Job it is God who, poetically speaking, walks on the waves (9:8; 38:16)
and in Sirach it is Wisdom who does so (24:5).
Again, in the first story Jesus rebukes the wind as if it were a demonic power (cf. Mark 1:14, 23),
while in the second the wind goes down after he announces, "It is I, do not fear", and gets into the boat.
Finally, the points made by the two stories are different. In the first the emphasis is laid on stilling the storm;
in the second, on walking on water.
Both stories may reflect the Old Testament motif of Yahweh's victory over chaos.

The conclusion in regard to Jesus, no in matter how different the stories may be, is the same.

"Who is this,"
the disciples ask (4:41),
"that wind and sea obey him?"

The power of Jesus over water, an unpredictable element of