Читать книгу Getting Jesus Right: How Muslims Get Jesus and Islam Wrong - James A Beverley - Страница 27

All four Gospel writers give us essentially the same Jesus: an extraordinary, divine figure who makes extraordinary claims of authority, whose purpose is not to serve himself but to serve—indeed, save—all of humanity. Could such an idea arise from nothing more than a theologically-driven legend? And, if so, who gave it this shape?

The Jesus movement grew out of Jewish soil, a soil that was committed to monotheism and rejected pagan notions of divine men. Exalted Christology—both implicit and explicit—is deeply rooted in the tradition; it won’t do to say that exalted ideas about Jesus, placed on his lips, entered the tradition from non-Jewish sources at a very early stage. Paul is himself a guarantor against such a theory, the man who was a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee, a zealot for the Law of Moses and a persecutor of the Church. But when he encountered the risen Jesus he began to speak of him in very exalted terms, even applying to him Old Testament texts that in their original context spoke of Yahweh, the God of Israel. None of this came from pagan ideas, which he would never have accepted. It came from his experience of Jesus, reinforced by the Jesus tradition itself, with which he became familiar as he matured in his new faith.

The exalted view of Jesus, or what is usually called high Christology, originated in the sayings and deeds of Jesus himself. It did not originate in some post-Easter gradual development, perhaps under the influence of Greco-Roman paganism. Such a proposed scenario strikes us as highly doubtful. Is it credible that four first-century Gospel writers, of whom at least two, if not three, were Jewish, arrived at such an understanding of Jesus—if he were nothing more than a Galilean holy man, prophet and teacher? Jews would hardly invent a story about a divine man, and a friend of sinners and tax collectors at that. Greeks and Romans would hardly invent a story about a suffering savior, especially if he is supposed to be divine. A crucified Son of God? Nonsense! The antiquity, coherence and—we might say—implausibility of the tradition compel us to conclude that it was Jesus himself who entertained exalted thoughts, not later followers.