Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

Certainly it is beyond the scope of this religious-historical phenomenology to speak of a “last prophet” who represents the summit of all prophecy. That is the case, for example, in Islam. Muhammad called himself “the seal of the prophets” (Sura 33.40)—that is, the last of all Jewish, Christian, and Arab prophets.⁴ With him, it is said, all prophecy is completed, for he received the Qu’ran, the perfect and final revelation. But in the view of Islam, Muhammad in no way embodied this perfect truth. It was only conveyed to him. Still, he is the “last” prophet and no other can come after him.

Moreover, Jews would not accede to either position, the Christian or the Muslim. They would say: God had expressed himself definitively long before Jesus. The Torah tells human beings everything they must know and live in order to achieve salvation. They might quote Micah 6:8: “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” That is, in fact, one of the great texts of the Old Testament. Jesus would have agreed heartily. But probably he would have added: if Israel is really following its path with God—alertly, willingly, and attentively—its path will lead it exactly to the place where now, in this hour, the signs of the reign of God are appearing: to the place toward which the history of the people of God was always on the way and where Torah and prophets are fulfilled because their whole meaning is now illuminated for all to see.

2. If Jesus were only a human being and nothing else, then the church, which regards itself, after all, as “made holy by Jesus Christ” (cf. Eph 5:26-27), can only be a human endeavor and nothing else. Then God does not dwell in the midst of it, even though the whole Old Testament had said that ultimately God will dwell wholly and entirely in the midst of God’s people.⁵ Then there are no sacraments in which God acts; then the assemblies of Christian congregations are merely human assemblies, no different from millions of other gatherings. Then the church is ultimately a religious society, a community of opinion, an organization for mutual assistance, an agent of meaning, or still worse, an umbrella organization in pursuit of Christian interests.

3. If Jesus was only a human being and nothing else, then there is no redemption in the Christian sense. Then God has not become “one of us”; then the distance between God and the world remains an unbridgeable chasm. Then the miracle that God can already be seen in the face of the man Jesus Christ (John 14:7-9) does not exist.

Stating these consequences is simply meant to make the weight of the question clear. Jesus is true human and true God: infinitely much depends on that statement, far more than one suspects at first glance. For Christians this is not a purely theoretical question. On it depends, for them, whether there really is liberation and rescue. On it depends whether the church is a purely human coalition or the “body of Christ” (Eph 1:22-23). On it depends whether the world contains only the chaos of opinions constantly chasing their tails and eternally contradicting each other, or whether there is a revealed and ultimate truth to be found because God has completely opened God’s self to the world.

Hellenistic Thought?

But enough preconsiderations! Much more important is the following: that Christians, only a few decades after the death of Jesus, said that he was truly God and yet at the same time truly human is one of the most remarkable and exciting phenomena in the history of religions. Why? Because faith in the divinity of Jesus Christ arose within Israel, that is, within the sphere of the strictest monotheism, of the strictest belief in one God. Israel confesses the uniqueness of God. Over centuries it had wrestled its way to the knowledge that there is only the one unique God who made heaven and earth and leads his people through history. Israel very rightly said that the many gods do not exist, and the church holds inexorably to this confession along with Israel. There are not many deities, many divine entities like those that fill the world of other religions; there is only the one God who is Lord of the world but is not identical with the world.