Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

If we read carefully and place the similitude in the context of his activity we have to say that yes, he broke into the spaces of the old society, the realm of the demons’ power and that of the gods of the world, the taken-for-granted things from which people interested only in themselves build the houses of their lives. The old society would have defended itself; it would not have let him in; it would have secured itself, locked up everything, blocked all entrances. But he surprised it. He came like a thief in the night, secretly, in silence, unexpected, when no one was thinking about any of it. With him the reign of God was suddenly there, and the new had already begun—in the midst of the old world.

In this form it is an unbelievably bold similitude! And it is full of truth. The similitude of the burglar who comes in the silence of the night is a cry of victory. Jesus has broken into the model images, the self-deceptions and compulsions of a society far from God. He has succeeded, and he goes on succeeding. No one is safe from him.

What a self-awareness speaks in this text from Jesus! And yet he keeps his restraint, and that very restraint is what fascinates me about Jesus. It makes his language tactful and yet lends it an enormous power. Above all, this incognito allows for the necessary space in which one can decide for him, or not.

Chapter 20

The Church’s Response

The church confesses and teaches: Jesus Christ is true human and true God—the latter, of course, in full unity with the Father and the Holy Spirit. It has said that not just since the Council of Chalcedon in the year 451.¹ The New Testament says the same.

It is not hard to believe that Jesus is truly human, at least not in the West. In the sphere of the Orthodox churches, however, things are different. There the image of Jesus is projected more powerfully in terms of his divinity; it can draw Jesus’ humanity into itself and almost conceal it altogether. Orthodox believers sometimes admit that they have difficulties with Jesus’ radical humanity. Apparently a long history of theology and belief has left its traces here.

In the West, theology and the history of devotion have acquired different accents. We only have to think of the late medieval images of the crucifixion that depict its horrors with ultimate realism. Scriptural interpretation is differently weighted in the West as well. It holds to the saying that Jesus “increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor” (Luke 2:52). That means Jesus learned. He struggled to gain insight, he prayed, he wept, he sorrowed, he was tempted by the Evil One, he suffered unspeakably. It really should not be difficult to believe that he was a true human being.

Jesus Deified?

But true God? Isn’t it the case that here a Jew who was certainly deeply believing and charismatic has been retrospectively made into a superhuman, divine figure? We read and hear that statement over and over, not only from our non-Christian contemporaries but even from quite a few Christian theologians. In the year 2000 Gerd Theissen published a book titled Die Religion der ersten Christen. Eine Theorie des Urchristentums.² Part 1, section 3 in the book is titled “How Did Jesus Come to Be Deified?” Theissen’s intention in this book is not to write a “theology of the New Testament,” that is, to consider early Christianity from within, but to analyze it in strictly religious-historical terms from a deliberately chosen external perspective. Obviously that is a legitimate effort. It even makes good sense. But it seems to me that he does not respect the boundaries of such a perspective. A historian of religions can say that the early church, using Jewish concepts and forms of thought, confessed Jesus as Messiah, as Son of God, even as true God, and was convinced that in doing so it was adopting Jesus’ own claim and developing its implications.