New Testament Christology – An Introduction

Setting the Scene

Christology may be described broadly as the study of Jesus Christ. To refine this definition in terms of the New Testament we would have to say that this study looks at the way the person, work and overall significance of Jesus Christ are presented in the writings of the New Testament. The starting point for our study will therefore be the different writings that makeup the corpus of the Christian Testament.

Immediately we will be able to appreciate that this project has two aspects:

  1. literary study
  2. historical investigation.

Of which Jesus do we speak?

One of the first clarifications we need to undertake is to identify the various focuses that can be taken in looking at the person of Jesus Christ.

  1. The actual Jesus.  This refers to the living breathing man who lived in Galilee 2000 years ago and was killed in Jerusalem. This is the man who would have been recorded in the census of Tiberius. History will never know a great deal about this actual person, his childhood and parents, his daily movements and certainly not about his inner psychology.
  2. The historical Jesus.This term refers to the attempts by historians to reconstruct as much as possible as about the ‘actual Jesus’. Scholarly enquiry into the historical Jesus generally does not doubt that Jesus did actually exist and was a charismatic preacher and healer of first century Palestine. What is known as the ‘quest for the historical Jesus’ tries to understand as much as possible about the world that the ‘actual’ Jesus inhabited. Since the mid-19th century this quest was an increasing focus for scholars and there have been several waves of research into the historical Jesus. Greater detail on these waves can be found here. Waves of the quest for the historical Jesus

To put this picture together, modern scholarship uses the methods and tools of a number of research disciplines such as archaeology,sociology, a critical study of the written texts available to us, both canonical and non-canonical, with special focus on the Gospels, inscriptions and the religious and historical background of the first century Greco-Roman and Middle Eastern worlds.

The following reading offers an insight into the latest scholarship on the quest for the historical Jesus. Allison,D. ‘The general and the particular: memories of Jesus’. In Constructing Jesus: memory, imagination and history. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010.1-30.

  1. The proclaimed Jesus. This is the Jesus witnessed to in the New Testament texts. This is the Jesus who is the focus of later more developed Christological interpretations of his life, death and resurrection and his meaning for the early communities which formed in his name. This is the Christ of faith. With a post-resurrection understanding of Jesus’ identity, his followers formulate a retrospective interpretation of his mission and ministry, his death and resurrection. It is a formulation and interpretation anchored in faith that Jesus is Messiah and Son of God.
  2. The living Jesus. This is the Jesus known and experienced down through history, including our own times. This is the Jesus with whom we form personal relationship and recognise in the poor, the suffering and the marginalised. This is the Jesus celebrated and praised in public liturgy and in private prayer. This is the Jesus with us today.

For the purposes of this study, we will be concentrating our efforts on an exploration of the proclaimed Jesus we meet in the pages of the New Testament writings.

Difficulties in the Sources

Any search for the proclaimed Jesus needs to begin with the extant material that has the most to say about Jesus. The four gospels are the natural starting point but these are not without considerable difficulties. For example:

  • The gospels were written late, some 40 to 70 years after the death of Jesus
  • Jesus’ teachings were delivered orally in Aramaic while the gospels are written documents that use Hellenistic Greek
  • The gospels differ amongst themselves and seem to give evidence of contrasting traditions about Jesus, e.g.
  • After Peter confesses Jesus as the Messiah Jesus rebukes him as Satan in Mark (8:33) and Matthew (16:23). Luke has nothing to say about this (9:22). The Fourth Gospel does not contain any such scene.
  • The Jesus of Mark seems to be hostile toward Jewish observances (Mk 7:1-23) while the Jesus of Matthew is careful to articulate his endorsement of them (Mt 5:17).
  • Jesus of the Synoptics undergoes agony at the thought of being arrested and crucified (Mk 14:32-42; Mt 26:36-46; Lk 22:39-46). John’s Jesus is in perfect control and the agony scene is omitted altogether. In addition to that, the people coming to arrest Jesus fall to the ground in John’s gospel (Jn 18:1-8) whereas nothing like this happens in the Synoptic account of the arrest.
  • Jesus is tried before the High Priest in the Synoptics but there is no Jewish trial scene in John. In Matthew and Mark, the trial takes place at night whereas Luke has a morning conference where Jesus and the High Priest do not actually speak to each other and there is no charge of blasphemy against Jesus as in the other two Synoptics.

These differences cannot be harmonised, as they are the product of different ways of telling the story of Jesus to impinge upon the lives and the faith experience of the original readers and listeners.

The Gospels are not Biographies

They are far more concerned with the teachings of Jesus than with his life. For instance, we never get any physical description of Jesus, which is typical of biographies, and we are left in the dark about the whole of Jesus’ youth. The central focus is on Jesus as an adult beginning his God-sent mission with a definite plan in mind. The gospel writers are intent on showing how Jesus is relevant to the communities for whom they wrote.

Reflecting on this helps us realise that the theology of Jesus as the Messiah and agent of salvation is the life-altering truth that the evangelists wish to pass on to their communities. The English writer G.K.Chesterton made a telling remark when he said, “not facts first, truth first.” The kind of truth that Luke writes about in his opening lines (Lk 1:1-4) is the truth that relates to establishing and nurturing a relationship with God that will culminate in oneness with God forever.

The development of Christology

Thus, we need to consider the kind of process that took place in early Christian reflection on the person and work of Jesus. Some scholars label this process as the movement from Jesus to Christ. This process traces the growing understanding and articulation of the identity and purpose of Jesus. This is the process by which the disciples grew to interpret the meaning of Jesus’ life, ministry, death and resurrection.

Considering the earliest stage in this development we might examine how the disciples arrived at an explanation of the death of Jesus. We will look at some of the implications of this issue when we focus on the possibility of the earliest witness to Jesus in what is called Q and then on the sufferings of Jesus in Mark. The disciples were able to find in the Suffering Servant songs of Second Isaiah a theology of the suffering saviour. All this did was reinforce the conviction that had being growing within them that their Master was actually Israel’s Messiah.

Jesus’ self-perception was above the ordinary and he saw himself as more than a prophet but as the essential player in the establishment of God’s Kingdom. Obviously, this interpretation rests on a reading of the New Testament which accepts that there is a core of the original words of Jesus in the logia of the gospels.

Our focus in looking at the development of the interpretations of Jesus presented in the New Testament, will be based the schema proposed by Raymond Brown.

Readings

  • Brown, Raymond E. “The Christologies of New Testament Christians.” In An Introduction to New Testament Christology, 103-52. New York: Paulist Press, 1994. For copyright reasons, not all of this section could be made available.
  • [For a briefer version of Brown’s framework, see Raymond E. Brown, Carolyn Osiek, and Pheme Perkins. “Aspects of New Testament Thought: Christology.” In The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, edited by Raymond Edward Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer and Roland Edmund Murphy, 1357-59. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1990.]
  • The following reading is largely based on Brown’s schema.
  • Rush, Ormond. “Interpreting Jesus.” In Foundations of Christian Faith, edited by Damien Casey, Gerard Hall and Anne Hunt, 15-25. Southbank Vic: Social Science Press, 2004.
  • See also the notes on Raymond Brown’s model of developing Christologies.

Who did Jesus think he was?

An important aspect of the study of the historical Jesus focuses on Jesus’ position within the established religious framework of first-century Palestine. In Jesus the Jew (Glasgow: Collins 1973) Geza Vermes describes Jesus as a most holy Jew conscious of carrying out a God-inspired prophetic mission. The question can be put that if Jesus was a pious Palestinian Jew then why did he incite the kind of opposition that led his enemies to plot and actually bring about his death? Was it something he said, an attitude he adopted or a subversive message he preached that created hostility towards him?

These questions raise the issues of Jesus’ own view of himself and of his mission. While we read the New Testament material and discern various kinds of Christological positions and formulations we are not necessarily penetrating through to Jesus’ self-perception. The point may be put simply with the following questions:

  • did Jesus see himself as Israel’s Messiah?
  • did Jesus see himself as divine?

Putting it another way: what was Jesus’ own Christology?

These are different questions from the one that asks if the New Testament writers saw Jesus as a divine Messiah. Those who follow Bultmann’s lead would say that we have no information in the New Testament about Jesus’ view of himself. All we have are the views of the believing communities represented by the New Testament writers. Other scholars who maintain that this inquiry is not a dead-end would say that we do get hints of Jesus’ missionary aims and can gain some insights into how he saw himself.

Methodological complexities are raised here owing to the nature and purpose of the New Testament writings. For instance, if we could agree that most of the tradition in these texts goes back to Jesus, we still have to face the question of its interpretation. The teachings of Jesus have been edited, paraphrased, modified and applied to various contexts that it is not easy to find their original setting.

For example, Jesus’ parable of the Lost Sheep is told in Matthew 18 with the message that the members of Jesus’ community should seek out sinners and bring them back into the fold. It also has an application to the community leaders to be careful that they do not cause any of their number to go astray. In other words, there is a clear statement here of pastoral responsibility for church leaders. In Luke 15 the same parable explains why Jesus associates with sinners and social outcasts. The parable demonstrates Jesus’ aim of bringing the lost back into the fold of Israel. He is thereby censuring the Pharisees for their criticism of his outreach to sinners and outcasts in his attempt to restore them as children of the covenant.

Of the two contexts Luke’s is probably closer to the original setting since it demonstrates Jesus’ concern for his fellow Jews and does not refer to the broader gentile mission that developed among Jesus’ followers after his death. Luke’s message is closer to Jesus’ objective of being an agent of reform within Judaism.

Our enquiry now requires us to examine New Testament writings to see if they contain any hints of Jesus’ self-perception. The gospels are the most satisfactory documents to work with. Again, we need to give more consideration to the Synoptic gospels than to the Fourth Gospel. The latter contains so much developed theology that it cannot be relied on to accurately reflect Jesus’ view of himself. For instance, the Jesus of the Synoptics preached about the Kingdom of God while the Jesus of John preached about himself. There is a focus on the person of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel that is not part of the synoptic agenda.

While the Jesus of Matthew, Mark and Luke is directing his listeners to God and the reign of God, the Johannine Jesus is saying that the only way to God is through himself. In Matthew 5 Jesus insists that he has not come to negate the Law of Moses. That is to say, the Mosaic Law is still valid as a guide for living and as a way to God. In John 14:6 Jesus says the only way to God is through himself, nothing else is necessary.

    Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

While this expresses the certitude of the Johannine community, and they are totally convinced that the only way to God is through Jesus, it does not harmonise with the teachings of the Jesus of the Synoptics. The conviction of the Johannine community is a basic truth for them, but this is not the same as saying that Jesus uttered this statement, which suggests that Judaism and its long tradition are finished, and following Jesus is the only way to salvation for all humanity.

Reading

N.T. Wright, Jesus’ Self-Understanding [Originally published in The Incarnation, ed. S. T. Davis, D.Kendall, G. O’Collins 2002, Oxford: OUP, 47–61]. See a host of other articles and audio presentations on this website.

Can Jesus be called God?

To go to the next step, which is to say that Jesus has a unique relationship with God that predicates a share in the divinity, is to move into uncertain territory. Raymond Brown has a scholarly response to the question: Did New Testament Christians call Jesus God? [An introduction to New Testament Christology. NY: Paulist Press, 1994. 171-195]. [For copyright reasons, this chapter cannot be provided online. It is available at the ACU Library.]

This question, of course, hinges on the first century Christians’ understanding of the term ‘God’. Jewish Christians of this era could not entertain the idea that Jesus was Yahweh, the creator God of the Hebrew Bible, who spoke to the patriarchs, gave Torah to Moses and guided Israel’s history for centuries. Neither could they understand Jesus as a second God. This would offend their notion of the one God which is the foundation of their religious beliefs.

Further Readings

Rush, Ormond. “Receiving Jesus Christ in the Spirit.” In The Eyes of Faith: The Sense of the Faithful and the Church’s Reception of Revelation, 91-115. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009.

J.D.G. Dunn,“The Making of Christology. Evolution or Unfolding?” in J.B.Green & M.Turner (eds) Jesus of Nazareth: Lord and Christ, Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1994, 437-452

This reading is a response to M.P.Casey, From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God: The Origins and Development of New Testament Christology, Cambridge: James Clarke, 1991. Casey maintains that by calling Jesus God, Christianity became gentile and abandoned Jewish monotheism. Dunn argues against this view.

Larry W. Hurtado, “Devotion to Jesus and Second-Temple Jewish Monotheistic Piety,” in How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? 31-55, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans Publishers, 2005.

J.Moingt, “The Christology of the Primitive Church: The Cost of a Cultural Mediation,” in W.Jeanrond & C.Theobald (eds) Who Do You Say That I Am? Concilium. London: SCM, 1997, 61-68

YouTube: Jesus of History John D. Crossan