Читать книгу What is Christianity? - Douglas Jacobsen - Страница 11

Jesus was an unlikely leader. Neither a priest nor a scholar, Jesus lived his first thirty years in relative obscurity as the son of Mary and her husband Joseph, a carpenter in the small town of Nazareth in the region known as Galilee. Then, for just a few years before he was killed, he took on the role of a wandering Jewish prophet and teacher, at first in the rural region where he had been raised and later for a very short time in Jerusalem.

His message was simple but profound. Jesus affirmed much of the Judaism of his day, including the Golden Rule (which Jews usually expressed in the negative as “do not do to others what you would not want done to you”), but Jesus frequently added his own twist to these teachings. Some of his additions – the folksy way he referred to God as “abba” (best translated as “daddy”), his willingness to bend the law to accommodate human frailty, his claim that he was able to forgive sins – were troubling to traditional Jews, and some Jewish leaders plainly disliked Jesus and his movement.

His message was also troubling to Rome. Jesus spoke of a coming “kingdom of God” and described his own actions as the dawning of that kingdom. He instructed his followers to give appropriate respect to Caesar (the Roman Emperor), but he also told them to give their complete obedience to God, a qualification that obviously limited any loyalty owed to Caesar. And, while he did not seek political power for himself, he refused to cower when Rome’s political appointees detained and interrogated him. His behavior seemed potentially subversive to an empire that demanded absolute obedience, and Rome responded vigorously. Using the gruesome spectacle of execution on a cross, the Empire eliminated Jesus and sent a public message to his followers that insolence in the face of imperial authority would not be tolerated.

Jerusalem’s residents, and many of Jesus’s own closest followers, thought that was the end of the matter. His male disciples were despondent and ready to abandon the cause. But some of his female friends began to claim they had seen Jesus alive, and soon his male disciples were making the same claim. They believed that somehow Jesus had been resurrected from the dead and had been given a new and glorious body. They also came to believe that this resurrected Jesus had given them a task to accomplish: they were to continue the work that Jesus had started, preaching the gospel message throughout the world, to every person, in every nation, in every tongue, and they were not to stop until they reached the ends of the earth.

The fourth-century historian Eusebius of Caesarea says that the disciples of Jesus cast lots to determine where each of them should go. Thomas was supposedly assigned to Parthia (now Iran and Iraq), Andrew to Scythia (now Ukraine), and John to the province of Asia Minor (now Turkey). Peter, as the group’s leader, was given freedom to travel wherever he wanted.¹ Eusebius did not always get his facts straight and this particular story may well be a pious fiction, but his basic point is accurate. Within a century of Jesus’s death, the Christian gospel had been exported far beyond the boundaries of Palestine, taking root as far west as Spain and as far east as India.

What exactly was this “gospel” or “good news” that the followers of Jesus sought to transmit around the world? Much of its content was derived from the teachings of Jesus himself: that God was humanity’s dear father, that people were required to love each other, that repentance was the pathway to true righteousness, that ultimately everyone would stand before God and be judged, and that somehow Jesus’s own suffering and death was part of God’s plan to redeem humankind and the world. But Jesus himself never wrote any of this down; a literary legacy was not left behind. Jesus was not a writer, nor was he a systematic thinker or an institution builder. He was a storyteller who reveled in the spoken word. Later on, some of his followers recorded their memories of Jesus, preserving his teachings and the stories he told in short books called “gospels” (four of which are included in the New Testament). These accounts of Jesus’s life and message do not, however, define the entirety of the gospel as Christianity proclaimed it.

The gospel of Jesus, what Jesus himself taught his followers, was quickly augmented within the Christian movement with a gospel about Jesus, a description of who Jesus was and why his life and teachings were so important. This gospel about Jesus proclaimed that he was more than merely human and more than merely one more prophet in a long line of Jewish prophets. He was the Messiah, a special and unique messenger from God, or perhaps he was even God incarnate. The Christian movement would later decisively emphasize the latter of these interpretations, but such a degree of clarity did not exist in the early decades. Everyone agreed, however, that Jesus was no mere mortal. He was the Christ (the anointed of God), and the gospel preached by his followers would ever after combine the message of Jesus of Nazareth with this additional message about Jesus the Christ.