Our Gospel readings, for both this week and next, focus our attention on John the Baptist. If we continued reading on from this week’s Gospel by Mark, we would find that Jesus was baptised by John. John the Evangelist, however, whose account we read next week, does not tell us that part of the story at all.
Once critical scholarship let go of the belief that the Gospels were accurate biographies of Jesus and histories of his time, many, from Ernest Renan, through Albert Schweitzer, to the Jesus Seminar of our own days have tried to discover the history behind the Gospels. It is not an easy process. Unlike other religious figures of antiquity, Jesus left no written record. The only mention of him writing, in our extant texts, is in the story of the woman taken in adultery, where it is said that in response to the accusations made against her, Jesus bent down and wrote in the sand. 1 Hardly designed for archival preservation of the record! Outside Christian writings, even mentions of Jesus are scarce indeed.
In the earliest of our canonical writings, the letters of Paul, we find almost no mention of the acts or deeds of Jesus. Paul’s interest centres on his experience of the presence and coming of the Risen Lord. The Gospels we now must realise are narratives formed through the collection and editing of stories passed around orally in the worship and proclamation of the early church. As such, their editorial theology, otherwise known as spin, is of much greater importance than their record of past facts.
With John the Baptist we are on somewhat firmer ground. In Jewish Antiquities, the Jewish historian Josephus has some extended account of John, which is independent of the accounts we have in the Gospels. The historical context of this period, which we can learn both from Josephus and from the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, was a turbulent time. The Jewish nation was under military occupation by the Roman Empire. Parts of the area were governed by the offspring of Herod the Great, to us, somewhat confusingly also called Herod, so that it is difficult to know as we read our New Testament text, which Herod is which. But the Herod family, which was only marginally Jewish, were but puppet kings of the Roman Empire. By the time of John’s death and Jesus’ adulthood Judea was under direct rule from Rome through governors such as Pontius Pilate. Throughout this whole period in the Jewish homeland, revolt was in the air, and there were many who claimed to be divinely commissioned leaders of the revolt. They both modelled and presented themselves in the light of the heroes of the passed, and especially in the light of the apocalyptic and eschatological language, which begins with our texts of Hebrew Scripture, but which had blossomed in the writings of the century or so before the time of John and Jesus. It is against this background that we have to see the historical context of both John and Jesus.
Other than Paul, who, as we mentioned, has little interest in historical facts, most of our Christian writings come from a time after that revolt had come to a head in the Jewish war of 66-70 of the Common Era. One outcome of that war was the total destruction of Jerusalem and its temple worship, leaving only a few of the gigantic foundation blocks of the Herodian Temple, known today as the weeping wall. Another outcome was the birth of a new kind of faith – or rather three new kinds.
One was Torah Judaism, in which the respect for and obedience to the laws of the Torah replaced the sacrificial system of the Temple. The second was messianic or, to use the Greek form of the word, Christian Judaism. The third was centred round Jesus, not a Messiah, but as teacher of Wisdom. This third became partly lost, partly suppressed, party known to history only though the writing of its detractors, but has suddenly come to new light with the discovery of documents last century in Nag Hamadi and Oxrrhyncus in Egypt. The first has come down to the present as Rabbinic Judaism of the Synagogues. The second, which soon passed, first into a largely Gentile faith, and then, regrettable, into a faith which denied its roots in the Jewish community, and which persecuted the Jews, is our inheritance of classical Christianity.The writings with which we deal in our week by week reading of the scriptures, then, come out of this tradition, which sees Jesus as the Messiah. Having said that, however, we have to say that we are not, in our scriptures, dealing with something simple. The first problem the early Christians had to deal with was a crucified messiah. As we saw last week, within the corpus of canonical scripture we see a shift from an understanding of a risen Jesus who will be Messiah at his return, to a Jesus who has been Messiah from birth. Digging a little deeper into the historical strata of the tradition, we see a movement from an understanding of a messiahship which was political and revolutionary, to a messiah who replaced the priestly hierarchy and the Temple sacrificial system for the forgiving of sins, with his own death on the cross. The developing tradition of the relationship of John the Baptist to Jesus, with which we began, has a lot to do with this shift from political to priestly understanding of the role of Jesus. If the early writers were struggling to understand Jesus as Messiah, and how faith in Jesus could replace the destroyed temple, the next generation had yet another problem to deal with, how to proclaim Jesus, not as a Messiah for the Jews, but as Lord for the Gentile Christians and enquirers of the Graeco-Roman empire, for whom the word messiah had little meaning.
For them Jesus and God began to be understood, first in terms of relationship with the divinities of the Graeco-Roman religious system, and subsequently, in terms of the tradition of Greek philosophy descending from Plato and Aristotle. Later still, as Dr Simons spoke of here, two weeks ago, Jesus became the King of Kings, who guaranteed the security of empire and the rights of emperors, a tradition which has continued to the present day.
Jesus and John the Baptist have taken me on a wide ranging tour. Let me see if I can pull this together and out line three thoughts which might be useful for us today.
- The idea being pushed loudly and pervasively in our time by the fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals, that there has only ever been one way of understanding scripture, namely as the inspired and accurate words of God is simply historically wrong. And when it leads to social and political choices which oppress women, abuse children, denigrate people of other cultures, religions and sexual orientations, not to mention the fighting of wars and the destruction of the world’s eco-systems, then it is not only wrong, but evil. 2
- Even if the search for the history behind the gospels is fraught with difficulty, it is necessary and useful first in assuring the historical basis of our faith. Christianity was not just invented. But more importantly to me it serves to provide us with some reference points through which we can see the relativity of the shifting, changing, moving and developing teaching of the church. Christian understanding of God, of Jesus, of Spirit and humanity was fluid from the first, and must remain so.
- In a post-modern world, the fact that we have discovered that our scriptures are less history, and more story (and perhaps in some instances herstory), can only be positive. As Thomas King said in the Massey Lectures of 2003, “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.” I believe the most important task for Christians today is come to know thoroughly their story and their stories, not just those of the canonical scriptures, but the stories of the whole Christian tradition. Some of those stories will help us in coming to understand ourselves, and our relationship to the world. Others will serve as warnings as they bear witness to wrong ways and disastrous choices that have littered our Christian past.
Neither the season of Advent, nor the scriptural passages we have read today, can speak to us directly about a Jesus who will return from the sky like some extra-terrestrial visitor. Nor can they predict how and when the earth or the universe will end. Certainly they cannot replace the work of science and technology in trying to deal with a world overpopulated, its resources over-exploited, its eco-systems in grave decay. But if we read the stories in dialogue with the past and with the present, then they may give us some insights and understanding about our own selves and about humanity as a whole especially as we live in fraught and disturbing times. They may help us to form moral and political choices which go beyond the greed and immediate self interest which drive most of the world’s human systems today. It is still my hope that our scripture and our tradition may be of value in the world of my children and grandchildren.
1 John 8:1-11. The textual history of this passage is obscure. The earliest manuscripts do not have the passage, and in others it is inserted in different places, even in one manuscript, in the Gospel of Luke.
2 As I prepared this sermon I had recently read The Sins of Scripture, Exposing the Bible’s Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love, John Shelby Spong, Harper Collins 2005
3 The Truth about Stories, A Native Narrative, Thomas King House of Anansi Press 2003
The Very Rev Michael J. Pitts, Dean and Rector