Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

And now, on the soil of this very Israel, in the midst of Judaism, Jesus is confessed and called upon as true God—and by Jews. From the religious-historical perspective that is an unbelievable phenomenon. Precisely because it runs counter to every expectation of the Judaism of the time and also to everything that could have been anticipated, a broad current of liberal theology has tried to explain it away with the phrase “Hellenization of Christianity.” This trend asserted for a long time that in the oldest church, that is, in the Jewish-Christian communities, the confessional tradition that ultimately came consistently to assert that Jesus was true God did not exist at all. That, it is said, is Greek thought and only forced its way gradually into the church by way of the Gentile Christian communities. Such thought was utterly foreign to the Jewish-Christian church. In pure Jewish Christianity, it is asserted, Jesus was regarded simply as a great wisdom teacher or an eschatological prophet or the longed-for messiah. It was Hellenistic thought that deified Jesus. For the Greek world—in contrast to Judaism—that was supposedly no problem because the Greeks saw something divine in everything out of the ordinary and unusual, in everything great and beautiful. There were many “divine men,” theioi andres, and the title “Son of God” was said to have been common. Was Alexander the Great not revered as “son of Zeus,” Julius Caesar in Ephesus as “the god made manifest, offspring of Ares and Aphrodite, and common saviour of human life,” and Augustus—at least in the East—as “god of god”?⁶

In fact, there was no dearth in antiquity of self-proclaimed sons of God or rulers who were deified after their deaths or even before. But this knowledge does not take us a single step farther, for “Jesus, true human and true God” is not a Greek idea. That confession arose in the midst of Israel, in a spiritual milieu that loathed divinized humans. We only need to compare John 5:18; 10:33 and Acts 12:21-23; 14:8-18. Certainly this confession “grew,” but in such a way that the knowledge of the mystery of Jesus that was present from the beginning developed more and more clarity.

Why does the assertion that Jesus was not deified in Jewish-Palestinian but instead in Gentile-Christian “Hellenistic” communities miss the point entirely? Simply because this opens a cleft between Jewish-Christian and Gentile-Christian communities that never existed in such a form. Israel’s conflicts with Hellenism had begun much earlier, not at the time when Gentile-Christian communities were created. Since Alexander the Great (356-323 BCE) Israel had been confronted with Hellenistic ideas and had adapted many of them to its own uses. That is unquestionably true. But the question is: what was adapted? Most surely it was not anything that touched the center of Israel’s faith. It is true that, especially in its mission literature, Israel had taken over Hellenistic stylistic figures, literary genres, Greek concepts and patterns of thought—but it never employed Hellenism to water down its faith in the one unique God, creator of heaven and earth.

The clear separation of communities—“Jewish-Christian here, Gentile-Christian Hellenistic there”—is also, for another reason, a construct that does not stand up to comparison with historical reality: the great successes of the mission in the Mediterranean region did not happen, at least in the first decades, by means of Paul and other apostles and missionaries having converted a large number of Gentiles. The people they gained for the Gospel were overwhelmingly drawn from the so-called God-fearers, that is, Gentiles who had long sympathized with Judaism, who attended the synagogue on the Sabbath, heard the readings from the Torah and the prophets, tried to live according to the Ten Commandments, and felt themselves drawn to the monotheism of Judaism. From a purely religious-historical perspective they did, of course, remain Gentiles; the men had not yet accepted circumcision. Nevertheless, they were already immersed in the Jewish faith tradition.⁷ At least as far as the time of Paul is concerned, the notion that there was such a thing as a “pure” Gentile Christianity is a phantasm. And yet it was precisely in that period that the basic substance of the christological confession developed. Thus what the early Christian communities said about Jesus must be understood entirely in terms of internal Jewish forms of thought.