Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

And he learned that Israel began to grumble, even as it was being rescued from Egypt, and that the grumbling kept breaking out again and again. That Israel took a dim view of the land God wanted to give them and even slandered it. That it was frightened by the nearness of God, that it broke its covenant with God, that it wanted to be like the other nations. That God nevertheless sustained his people, with great endurance and unwearying patience, that he forgave them again and again, that he created the temple for them in Jerusalem as a place of atonement so that the horrible consequences of sin were broken asunder and the people could always begin anew.

He learned that God had given Israel festivals that divided the year, so that one could live from feast to feast. That at these festivals Israel gathered to remember its history and join in a holy community to praise God. That God raised up prophets for his people to snatch them out of their hard-heartedness and blindness. That Israel did not listen to its prophets, did not live according to its social order, sought out the gods of the nations, and so became like the Gentiles. That God therefore had to scatter it among the nations in order to bring it to repentance and reflection.

And he learned that, even in this most profound crisis of Israel’s history, God never forgot his people. That he promised to gather them again, renew the fertility of the land of Israel for them, and one day to raise up a king for them who, after all the many kings who had so miserably failed them, would be the true Anointed, the true Ruler, the true God-fearer.

And finally, he learned that God had begun a history with his people that was crucial for the whole world because it brought it to the moment of decision. That this God who had resisted every name and certainly every image was the absolute Lord of history. That he would bring all history to its goal without damaging human freedom: as its Creator, its Judge, but also its Lover. Then God would be all in all and the world would breathe a sigh in God, and God himself would take away the shroud of sorrow that still covers the nations.

All that and much more the young Jesus heard, recited it daily like every faithful Jew, and took it into his heart.⁴ It is impossible to measure the depth to which it penetrated, because that was a secret between him and his heavenly Father. The reader of the gospels can only dimly perceive it, for example, when the evangelist Luke tells his interpretive story of how the twelve-year-old Jesus, during his first pilgrimage to Jerusalem, remained in the temple and explained to his parents, who had sought him with great anxiety, that he had to be in what belonged to his Father (Luke 2:41-52).

Jesus, a Scribe?

All that had to be said at the outset if we are going to talk about Jesus and the Old Testament. But we have not yet come to the real topic of this chapter. We are interested not in how Jesus, as a pious Jew, lived his life on the basis of Scripture but in what role Scripture played in his preaching and his public activity. How did he deal with it as a teacher, a preacher, a prophet, and someone who was more than any prophet?

There is some indication in the very existence of his disciples (cf. chap. 5 above) that Jesus did not work with Scripture as a scribe would: the disciples did not come to Jesus to “learn Torah” but to “follow” him. Moreover, at the time of Jesus the scribes had already located themselves deliberately within the existing tradition of interpretation and relied on authorities for doing so. To ground an opinion on the Law, they appealed either to one or more passages in Scripture or to a respected teacher. Sequences of tradition handed down under the names of great scribes were of the greatest significance for rabbinic theology, for they build bridges to the oral Torah, which—according to the rabbinic view—had been given at Sinai in addition to the written Torah.⁵

But this very scribal technique apparently played no part in Jesus’ thinking. The gospels do not contain a single text in which he mentions acknowledged scribal experts by name and quotes them. He does use scriptural references, but they differ from those of the later rabbis.

So what was his way of drawing on Sacred Scripture? That subject would really require a whole book. In this chapter I will merely offer three samples; we might compare them to test shafts. They are meant to show how Jesus worked with his Bible. The samples touch on three themes: first, and once again, the subject of Jesus and the reign of God (cf. chap. 2 above), then that of Jesus and the state, and finally Jesus and nonviolence.

Jesus and the Reign of God