Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

But we should not merely ask what the Our Father says and what it asks; we should also ask what it does not say and what it does not ask for. Then we see that the Our Father speaks neither of Zion nor of Jerusalem nor of the land of Israel nor of Israel as a nation. It does speak of the gathering of the people of God, but not of Israel as a national entity. That is by no means a matter of course, for in the Amida, the Eighteen Benedictions, one of the most important prayers of Judaism and one whose early stages may go back to the time of Jesus,¹² things are altogether different. The seventh petition reads, “Look upon our affliction and plead our cause, and redeem us speedily for Your name’s sake; for You are a mighty Redeemer. Blessed art thou, O L-rd, the Redeemer of Israel.” The fourteenth petition is still clearer: “And Jerusalem, Your city, return in mercy, and dwell therein as You have spoken; rebuild it soon in our days as an everlasting building, and speedily set up therein the throne of David. Blessed art thou, O L-rd, who rebuilds Jerusalem.” Neither the struggle Israel is here conducting with God’s help nor the eschatological rebuilding of Jerusalem nor the coming of the Messiah need be interpreted in the Eighteen Benedictions in a national sense. But one could read the quoted passages from the prayer in that way, and the Zealots did most certainly interpret the prayer just so. In the Our Father, Jesus consistently excludes all the corresponding terms. Apparently he did not want his gathering of the people of God to be misunderstood in the sense of reconstructing a nation-state.

It is true that we do not know exactly when the Eighteen Benedictions were formulated, but we have solid ground under our feet in the Psalms of Solomon, mentioned above. They were created in the first century BCE.¹³ The seventeenth psalm in the collection speaks of the coming Messiah, who will purify Jerusalem of Gentile peoples and destroy all the lawless nations. He will gather for God a holy people and will not permit Israel ever again to give a place to injustice. Foreigners and strangers will no longer be allowed to dwell in the Land. Then the Gentile nations will all be subjected to Israel and be required to serve the people of God under the yoke of the Messiah.

Here, clearly, the author is drawing a picture of an eschatological state belonging to God. It has a center in Jerusalem. It has an authority who acts in the name of God: the Messiah. It has fixed boundaries: those separating Israel from the Gentile nations. It is a “pure community” and in this sense a homogeneous and uniform society: there are no sinners in it, and it no longer contains anything unclean. All that can appeal to individual passages in the Old Testament, perhaps even whole strata of Old Testament texts: compare, for example, Psalm 2; Isaiah 52:1; Joel 4:9-17.

The Hasmoneans attempted to reestablish a Jewish state in the wake of the catastrophe of the royal period. John Hyrcanus I (reigned 134–104 BCE) reconquered parts of Samaria and the land east of the Jordan. He forced the Idumeans in the south to accept male circumcision and incorporated them into the worshiping community of Jerusalem. Aristobulus I (104–103 BCE) reconquered Galilee and joined it once again with Judea. He forced the Itureans in the north to accept male circumcision and assumed the title of king. Alexander Jannaeus (103–76 BCE) brought all of Palestine under his rule, as well as further parts of the land east of the Jordan and the coastal plain. But then came the Romans under Pompey (106–48 BCE) and destroyed all these efforts to re-create a Jewish territorial state. In 63 BCE Pompey entered Jerusalem, seized the temple precincts, and carried out a horrifying bloodbath there. From that time on, Israel was divided and lay under the rule of Rome.

Jesus himself was directly confronted with the attempt to construct a new Jewish state in the Zealots’ dreams of revolt. This time it was supposed to be a real state subject to God. The Zealots longed to revolt against Rome not only because of the profound misery in Jewish society but even more because they were convinced that if God alone were to be the Lord of Israel, then the Romans could not rule in the Land.

Jesus opposed this. He intended something fundamentally different by his gathering of Israel. His idea was the establishment not of a God-state but of a new society under the rule of God. Those are not the same thing. His new society began in his community of disciples, which rested on pure acceptance. Its center was the community of his disciples. So the people of God is not meant to have a state or pseudo-state structure.