Rabbi Jesus (english)
Hier geht es zur deutschen Version
Bruce Chilton's book "Rabbi
Jesus" portrays a fully human destiny what occurred two thousand years ago
in ancient Galilee. Chilton precisely depicts the political, social and
cultural (Jewish) conditions under which Jesus grew up. Based on
several scholarly options Chilton constructs startling and still highly
plausible hypotheses about Jesus' psychological and spiritual development.
Chilton tries "to understand Jesus on his own terms rather
than in the categories of conventional scholarship and theology". Thus
Chilton's alternative picture of Jesus challenges and sometimes contradicts
traditional concepts.
Chilton's
Jesus suffers from the same doubts and concerns and struggles with similar
problems that beset other people. "Jesus’ force resides in his vulnerability (…)
throughout his life. He entices each of us to meet him in that dangerous place
where an awareness of our own weakness and fragility shatters the self and
blossoms into an image of God within us." Chilton brings the
reader in touch with the "inner man" and occasionally goes beyond the
scriptural warrants. He deals with logical surmise, but this is always clearly
stated in the book, and Chilton never leaves doubt that the story could also have been
reconstructed in different ways.
A fully human destiny that changed the world
Jesus' colorful biography ends up in
a tragic but triumphal personal failure. For "Jesus never accomplished the
Galilean reformation of the Temple (at Jerusalem) that he so passionately
desired and dramatically attempted." The Temple he revered was demolished
as his own body was. "He did not make a lasting mark within Judaism. Dead
at thirty, he had not yet framed his mishnah, the formally crafted public
teaching that a rabbi typically transmitted to his students by around the age
of forty."
A great goal has yet to be achieved
But the final disaster at the Roman
cross eventually proved to be the outset of the great success story of
Christianity, something what Jesus probably never had in mind. For Chilton far
too much theology has been "preoccupied with exalting Jesus as the only
human being sitting on the right hand of God". Many theologians have
"denied heaven to others" because they ignored the "vital truth"
of "how Jesus taught his vision and how he crafted a discipline for its
realization".
Chilton sees a great goal that
"has yet to be achieved: to share Jesus’ vision with all humanity. The
rabbi from Nazareth never claimed he was unique. His Abba was the Abba of all. Jesus
never articulated a doctrinal norm or a confessional requirement, but the
events of his life, his public teaching, his kabbalah[1] gave rise to distinctive,
emotionally resonant rituals such as baptism, prayer, anointing the sick, and
the Eucharist. His transformative visions persisted among those who hope that
the pure of heart will indeed see God and become intimate with him. He remained
a measure of how much we dare to see and feel the divine in our lives."
My own perspective
I have read Chilton's book from my
perspective as a medical doctor and psychotherapist. My professional concern is
to relieve human suffering, fear and despair, including my own. Positively
speaking, I want to support people to feel better, empowered, strengthened in
their confidence in life and in themselves. I do so on the basis of my
psychodynamic background. That means, I try to understand a person's
unconscious needs and motivations, inhibitions and fears, and all the other
forbidden and therefore repressed affects involved. I also try to find out the
person's unconscious believes, concepts, and goals.
Moreover, the question is vital for
me, under which conditions religion is helpful for mental health, for wellbeing
in general, and particularly for coping with life crises and approaching death.
A personal experience became decisive for my own professional and spiritual
development. In a period what felt to me like the most difficult in my life I
was in a state of desperation. All my medical and psychological expertise
seemed to be useless. Even my doctor colleagues were unable to help me.
Eventually I found relief and finally something like healing through the care
of a friend and pastor of a German Free Church. Thinking back I am still
impressed by the extent of attention, compassion, affection, and assistance I
received from him and other members of his church.
When I felt better I tried to
understand the forces and the concepts what made my friend and pastor that
efficient. He himself saw all his power grounded in Jesus Christ. The way he
spoke about Jesus was so much animated that it appeared to me as if my friend
just had come back from lunch with Jesus. My pastor friend emphasized that he
was continuously in a deep and close relationship with Christ. I loved the
emotional quality, "the energy", he conveyed and desired to grasp it
more profoundly.
The result of my research was
disillusion. Behind all that fascinating enthusiasm and loving care I
discovered a tough Christian fundamentalism saying: If you do not worship Jesus
as God you will be lost and condemned to go to hell. Other religions are
idolatry, Islam even devil's work. Judaism has to be converted to the only true
belief in Christ. Unwavering faith, extensive prayer, and invoking the Holy
Spirit are considered the best and sometimes only remedies and solutions for
nearly everything.
In light of my own experience of
both dedicated support and disturbing dogmatism in a Free Church I was
delighted to read Chilton's reconstruction of Jesus' life, depicted as an
extraordinary, but still all human personality and career. Chilton provides
rational explanations for the healings and miracles Jesus performed, also for
his Transfiguration and Resurrection. Still Chilton does not deny a parallel
universe, a reality beyond what we can perceive and comprehend.
Emergence of inclusion
Jesus never intended to create a new
religion. The old Galilean loyalty to the Torah was in Jesus' bones. All he
taught and practiced derived completely from his Jewish background, especially
from the Galilean tradition of verbally transmitted religious knowledge that
Jesus had deeply internalized. However, in Chilton's book it becomes obvious,
that over time inside of Jesus and within his movement something fundamentally
new emerged, what we call "inclusion" today. Unequivocally practicing
it by inviting the most despised members of the Jewish society to table
fellowship, was unprecedented in the Judaism of that time. Jesus himself had
terribly suffered from social ostracism. His own painful experiences helped him
to gradually overcome his ethnic and religious prejudices which derived from
his rural Galilean upbringing. He opened up his heart and his mind not only for
his fellow Jews but also for alien people and social outcasts. And he
encouraged his disciples to follow his example.
Chilton demonstrates strong evidence
that Jesus was a mamzer, i.e. a child of suspect paternity. His parents, Joseph
and the thirteen years old Mary, had slept together before their marriage was
publicly recognized. Due to his illicit conception Jesus had an extremely
difficult status in the small village of Nazareth what made Jesus particularly compassionate
with all sorts of social outcasts. Being highly sensitive for what it meant to
be excluded from social life he eventually broke with custom and dared –
against all inner and outer obstacles – something extraordinary: He celebrated
communal meals with people deemed as impure.
Chilton verbatim: "Jesus was
speaking from personal experience; he had himself known poverty, hunger, the
bereavement of a protective father, and ostracism. He knew when you are
exploited and alone, you are in the best position to identify the sustaining
force of God’s compassion. The poor, hungry, and shunned were Jesus’ people.
Many were virtual untouchables, viewed by observant Jews (some of them
Pharisees) as unclean. Yet Jesus ate and drank with them. We often see him
attacked for consorting with 'publicans [agents who collected customs and
taxes] and prostitutes' and claiming they enjoyed God’s preference."
For Jesus all Israelites and also
their land were already pure. He opposed the prevailing Pharisaic assumption
that purity still had to be achieved. He taught: "There is nothing outside
a person, entering in, that can defile one, but what comes out from a person
defiles the person". Jesus used the innate cleanness of Galilee and its
people to invoke the presence of God at their meals. Drinking and eating
together was celebrating and enjoying God's Kingdom in their midst from which
compassion emanated and what made them forgiven and acceptable to God.
According to Chilton the meaning of
the meals shifted in the last phase of Jesus' ministry. After years of working
with Aramaic sources and anthropological studies of sacrifice Chilton opposes
to the traditional understanding of the Eucharist and concludes: "The
meals were Jesus’ last, desperate gesture, that his own meals were better
sacrifices than those in the corrupt Temple. When Jesus spoke of his 'blood'
and 'flesh', he did not refer to himself personally at all. He meant his meal
really had become a sacrifice. When Israelites shared wine and bread in
celebration of their own purity and the presence of the Kingdom, God delighted
in that more than in the blood and flesh on the altar in the Temple."
Chilton insists that Jesus cannot have meant: “Here are my personal body and
blood”, that interpretation makes sense only if Jesus distinguished himself
from Judaism. The only meaning of his words was that wine and bread replaced
sacrifice in the Temple.
Why was Jesus crucified?
Members of the Sanhedrin, the supreme
council and court of the Jewish people, like many other observant Jews in Jerusalem were offended
by that scandalous new element in Jesus’ practice. He had made his meals into
an altar that rivaled the Temple’s altar. The Temple cult at Jerusalem was
economically highly important for both the Romans and the Jewish priest cast.
They could not allow Jesus to debase it. Furthermore Jesus had urged resistance
against paying the customary tax for the Temple. The Temple was not to be
supported with currency, but by the offerings of one’s own hands, according to
a Zecharian prophecy Jesus was determined to fulfill.
The book of Zechariah (chapter 14)
predicts that God’s Kingdom will be manifested over the entire earth when the
offerings at the Temple are presented both by Israelites and non-Jews. It
further predicts that these worshippers will offer their sacrifices themselves,
in the Galilean manner, without the intervention of middlemen. The book also promises
that “there shall never again be a trader in the sanctuary of the Lord of hosts
at that time” (Zechariah 14:21). Sacrifice in the Temple would be an universal
feast with God, open to all peoples who accepted the truth. Jesus believed the
apocalypse was coming soon and that the world as he knew it would end.
As surreal as the Zecharian
apocalypse may seem to many of us, it did change history, although not in the
ways Jesus anticipated. Chilton clarifies that Jesus had become a serious
menace for the ruling class. Already his exorcisms and his healing powers had invited comparison with
the greatest of Israel’s prophets: Elijah, who had brought the son of a widow
back to life. The memory of Elijah during the ninth century B.C.E. had always
been linked to his resistance to King Ahab and Ahab’s accommodation to foreign
deities. Herod Antipas was just such a collaborator, who had already been
challenged by John the Baptist and had reacted with deadly force. Jesus
ministry had come to Herod’s attention, and he knew of Jesus’ connection to
John the Baptist.
Jesus believed to speak and act with
prophetic authority. Prophets in the mold of Elijah confronted the rulers of
their time with the threat of divine judgment, reinforced by means of signs.
Elijah’s authority had been confirmed by prophetic feats that were often
destructive: he brought about drought and deluge (1 Kings 17:1–7; 18:41–46),
called down fire from heaven to consume a sacrifice (1 Kings 18:25–38), and
killed the prophets of the god Baal (1 Kings 18:39–40). Elijah's signs
encouraged revolution in the name of God. By the first century, many Jews
believed that God would again send Elijah.
The first century saw several
examples of men who took Elijah as their model. They promised their followers a
sign, then a revolution. On each of these occasions, when the would-be prophet
announced the promised sign and then called for armed rebellion against Rome,
the Empire reacted swiftly and the aspiring prophet was killed before he could
enact his promised sign. No publicly acclaimed prophet was only a religious
figure but a potential military threat. Also Jesus and his followers appeared
as a potential army, a band of revolutionary rabble rousers. Galileans compared
Jesus to Elijah, and his prophetic fame branded Antipas a greater threat than
John the Baptist.
Among Jesus' followers were many
zealous Galileans who hoped that through Jesus they would be powerful enough to
enter the Temple and free the land of Herod Antipas and the Romans. Chilton
holds that it was not only visionary fervor that propelled Jesus toward
Jerusalem, knowing that this step was dangerous. There was a realistic side. By
enacting the Zecharian prophecy he hoped that everything might change without a
military revolt. He would lead the ragamuffin band of Galileans to the Temple to
lay their Galilean sacrifices on the altar. God would be moved to reenter
Israel’s history, and the Kingdom would come. Without knowing it, he was coming
to Jerusalem at exactly the time that the Temple itself had been turned into a
marketplace.
For
Caiaphas, Israel's high priest, had recently ordered the vendors of sacrificial
animals in Jerusalem to move from the Mount of Olives to the Temple itself. This was to protect the
animals from being injured on their way and from failing to meet the exacting
criteria to be accepted for sacrifice (besides, it was hard to know which
animal was yours in the confusion of herds). But from the point of view of the
Pharisees and most Jews, trade on the southern side of the Great Court was anathema.
The Pharisees insisted that the act of sacrifice should be a noncommercial
encounter between the people of Israel and God.
When Jesus entered the Temple in the
early autumn of 31 C.E. and saw the vendors' busy transacting business in the
Great Court he felt a catastrophic contradiction of Zechariah’s prophecy. How
could he and his followers enact the final, apocalyptic sacrifice predicted by
Zechariah in a Temple that had been defiled? After three days he returned with
his supporters, 150 to 200 men. Jesus shouted: “Is it not written that: my
house shall be called a house of prayer for all the Gentiles? But you have made
it a cave of thugs.” His followers overturned the vendors’ tables, released the
birds, untethered animals and drove them out the ceremonial gate on the west
side of the Temple. The vendors were pushed and dragged out of the Temple by
Jesus’ followers. Others were beaten, punched, and kicked. There was at least
one murder of a vendor by Barabbas, one of the many violent militants who had
attached themselves to Jesus.
The Cleansing of the Temple had
Jesus made an hero. Large numbers of Jews had opposed Caiaphas' moving the
vendors into the Temple and showed sympathy for Jesus’ occupation. Especially Galileans
were appealed: Jesus was speaking the language of their revolution, centered on
the act of sacrifice. Months later, in the year 32 C.E., Jesus returned again
to Jerusalem simultaneously with thousands of devout Jews who streamed into the
city for the festival of Passover. Many pilgrims had heard of Jesus and fell in
with his company. The processional march became a delirious event. The crowds shouted
their expectation of the Kingdom of God, which they knew was Jesus’ focal
concern, and they sang out that expectation in Davidic, messianic terms: "Blessed
is the coming kingdom of our father David, Hoshannah in highest heights!"
Jesus had consciously played up the
Davidic lineage that he claimed through his father, Joseph. As David’s son, a
wise, healing master of demons in the lineage of Solomon, Jesus now led the growing
numbers of his followers, including his brother James, to Mount Zion. Although Jesus’
focus was on sacrifice in the Temple, rather than military revolt, some of his
followers still clung to the hope that his intention included direct action
against Rome and its minions. For Caiaphas a new Galilean insurrection in the
Temple seemed imminent. His police force was not strong enough to control the
violent reaction he might face if he tried to arrest Jesus. He turned to Pilate
and convinced him that Jesus was not just an harmless lunatic. He denounced
Jesus as the source of an illegal movement of violent opposition centered in
the Temple. Jesus had to be arrested with Roman support.
The death sentence
Jesus
had repeatedly provoked conflicts with Pharisees and priests. The Pharisees had
blamed him for his table fellowship with impure people. Jesus was repeatedly
attacked not to keep the Shabbath and not to respect the laws of dietary and
ritual practice of purity during his holy feasts. He had even claimed a spiritual
authority greater than the Pharisee's and priesthood's. But Jesus had not
actually blasphemed the Temple or the Torah. He had not said anything against
what Judaism held sacred. The charges against Jesus did not
necessarily compel the death penalty. Jesus had supporters among the Pharisees and even
within the Sanhedrin. Nicodemus, a member of the Sanhedrin, could not find anything
specific with which to charge Jesus. It was not easy for Caiaphas to justify
Jesus' conviction.
When Jesus had cited Jeremiah 7:11, equating
Caiaphas’ arrangement in the Temple with “a cave of thugs”, he implicitly had invoked
Jeremiah’s prophecy of the Temple’s destruction, what could easily be distorted
into the claim that Jesus wanted to see the Temple destroyed. Jesus’ message had
not been the Temple's demolition. But Caiaphas and his supporters encouraged
precisely that distortion, to whip up opposition to Jesus. Still such
prophecies were no capital crime. Therefore Caiaphas focused on a more
fundamental question. He asked: "Are you teaching that your feasts replace
Temple sacrifice because you are God’s own son?" Jesus answered: "I
am, and you will see the son of man sitting at the right of the power and
coming with the clouds of the heaven!"
Chilton holds: "Silence at this
point might have saved his life, but not even the high priest was equal to
Rabbi Jesus’ obstinacy." This was a curse from Jesus’ own lips, that his
authority delegated to him by God was greater than the authority of the high
priests, mandated by the Torah. According to the theology of first-century
Judaism, if you attacked any divinely sanctioned institution you were
denigrating the God of Israel and exposed yourself to divine retribution,
either directly or through the decisions of Israel’s courts. Even among Jesus'
own followers Judas was not the only disciple who was disaffected by Jesus' direct
challenge of established ritual tradition in Israel and who deserted him.
Development of Jesus' particular mystical spirituality
Over time Jesus developed a
particular mystical kind of spirituality. According to Chilton the mystical
quality of Jesus' spirituality explains both the miracles he performed, and the
experience of the resurrected Jesus, that many of his followers shared after
his death. Chilton considers the ostracism and the forlornness that Jesus faced
as a child as important factors for his spiritual development. Chilton imagines
a small child, standing apart from other children, wishing to play but not
being included, defensively ironic about the gang’s incapacity to agree on a
game. Jesus must have spent much of his time alone. All the insults explain why
Jesus came to see God as his father, his Abba in Aramaic. If Joseph’s
fatherhood was in doubt, God’s fatherhood was not.
Chilton explains that Jews of this
time recognized themselves as God’s children and addressed God as "our
father, our primordial redeemer is your name" (Isaiah 63:16). To call God "father"
signified that the creator of the entire world had entered into a special
relationship with Israel, as a father to his children. And Jesus joined some
rabbis in a further, bolder claim, asserting God’s personal, fatherly care for
his children as individuals. Aramaic stories in the Talmud show that
"father" was a Jewish way of referring to God, and when Jesus was a
rabbi he instructed his students to pray regularly to God as Abba. The divine
relationship became particularly intimate with Jesus.
From the age of ten, when Jesus had
joined his biological father travelling as a journeyman he got in contact with
the variety of folk tales and different unique ways of rendering Scripture in
its Targum (the Aramaic word for “translation”). Targums are paraphrases of the
Hebrew Bible translated in Aramaic. They represent the oral “Torah on the
lips,” what Jesus and the other illiterate Jews (the majority of the Israelites
of his time) used. A Targum was not a mere verbatim translations of the Hebrew
texts. Those who memorized, translated and recited the oral Scripture added
whole paragraphs and paraphrased long sections. Targums were the foundation of
the faith of the ordinary people. According to Chilton they are the key to
understand Jesus’ Judaic orientation and the vocabulary of his teachings.
Later Jesus became a master of the rich
oral traditions of Galilee. He improvised with their themes and created so many
parables and metaphors. The Kingdom of God was the pivotal hope of Galilean
Judaism. Jews believed that God ruled them and that one day his Kingdom would
be the only power on earth and in heaven. The Hebrew Bible claims that God
helps his chosen people conquer their enemies when they keep his covenant, and
lets them fall victim to oppression when they stray from righteousness. Many
Galileans believed that if they lived in accord with God’s commandments and
prohibitions, God would drive the Romans out from Israel and institute a reign
of justice.
The Kingdom of God became the
principal theme of Jesus’ message throughout his adult life. When his father
Joseph died, the Kingdom of God was the only support and the only thing for
which Jesus yearned at the core of his broken heart. Jesus' Jewish tradition saw
God’s immanence everywhere, in the force of a mustard seed and yeast. Later, as
a rabbi, he saw the divine Kingdom in how one person relates to another. Chilton
suggests that even as a child, Jesus had a direct intuition of how his Abba,
moment by moment, was reshaping the world and humanity. Like other great
religious teachers, emotions led Jesus to an insight put into words only later.
Chilton claims that already as an
teenager (during a visit in the Temple of Jerusalem) Jesus abandoned his family
and the daily suffering from disdain in Nazareth. He joined John the Baptist
(Yochanan the Immerser), a famous rabbi known to offer ritual purification in
the Jordan River. For Chilton John is the key to Jesus’ crucial teenage years.
Jesus wanted to learn John's way of living God’s covenant with Israel. John's
disciples were willing to endure hardship and deprivation, passionately seeking
the way that brought access to God. They lived in the wilderness, supporting themselves
by food that grows of itself, washing with cold water day and night. When repeatedly
immersed by John the hurt of Jesus' childhood, being an outcast, was healed. Jesus
gained a place in a respected religious group.
John initiated Jesus into the
esoteric side of his teaching. John's path into the mysteries of the divine
mind was a part of the ancient rabbinic tradition. It focused on the first
chapter of Ezekiel that describes the Chariot, the moving Throne of God, the
source of God’s energy and intelligence, the origin of his power to create and
destroy. By meditating on the Chariot, John and his disciples aspired to become
one with God’s Throne. Already Moses had seen God's Throne during an ecstatic
vision while receiving the Torah. The Throne appears again with Elijah's
transport into heaven. The Chariot became the master symbol of Jewish
mysticism.
The majority of rabbis in the
ancient period, Jesus included, were illiterate. Ezekiel’s words had to be
memorized in all details. The initiate’s meditation had to be on the text’s
meaning, not on the mechanics of recitation. The disciples also had to master
the text’s intonation and cadence. The musical phrasing of the words (like
mantras in Hindu and Buddhist traditions) was deemed essential to clear the way
for divine realization. The words themselves were viewed as sacred, imbued with
divine force. Jesus learned to become Ezekiel’s text, embody its imagery, and
master the many other complex texts within Jewish tradition that embellished,
augmented, and refined Ezekiel’s vision. Like any aspiring rabbinic visionary,
he needed a superb memory and concentrated devotion to pursue his quest.
John was like a guru. His voice, his
attitude, posture and gestures during the meditations, his intense mindfulness
and ecstatic vision were as much the text that Jesus learned as the words from
Ezekiel. Jesus learned the secrets of God’s Spirit, which flowed from the
Chariot through all creation. John promised his disciples that just as he had
immersed them in water, God would immerse them in holy Spirit. Immersion in
Spirit would not only lead to repentance and release from sin but also overcome
the basic prophetic criticism of Israel: the lack of compassion and disregard
one Israelite showed another. John expected that God’s Spirit was ready to be
poured out on Israel anew as it had been at the time of Moses. John and then
Jesus were seen as prophets inspired (literally “breathed into”) by Spirit and
speaking directly on God’s behalf.
Jesus believed that the holy Spirit
was upon him and that he spoke for God. Repetitive, committed practice, diet,
exposure to the elements and repeated immersions intensified his vision of
God's Chariot and made him have a vivid vision of the heavens splitting open
and God's Spirit descending upon him as a dove: "You are my beloved son,
in you I take pleasure." Jesus related his experience of Spirit to his
friends, and John and his disciples embraced it as the beginning of the
fulfillment of God’s promise. Expressing deep affection John called Jesus “the
lamb of God”, because in his innocence he embodied both release from sin and
the arrival of Spirit. Jesus received from his fellow visionaries the first
sign of the special role he would play in Israel’s destiny. Some of John’s
disciples said they themselves had heard the voice that spoke to Jesus. Their
communal vision welded them together.
As Jesus grew older and more
confident, his ability to invoke Spirit and the power of his vision of God’s
Throne made him increasingly successful in gathering pilgrims for immersion.
Jesus started to move into settled areas, where he could immerse more people
than John did. Jesus was convinced that the people he invited to cleanse
themselves by immersion were already clean. That was why he could eat with
them. Eating with people was vivid testimony that one considered them to be
pure. Jesus joined in holy feast with them. He spoke of the Abba of all who was
the source of Israel’s blessing: “Abba, your name will be sanctified, your
Kingdom will come.” Jesus gradually replaced immersion with communal meals as
the ritual symbol of the coming Kingdom of God.
Sporadic and short-lived retreats
allowed Jesus constant meditation on the Chariot in which he found solace. Chilton
claims that Jesus began to use a vision from the book of Daniel, an angel with an
human face standing beside the Throne of God, called in Aramaic “one like a
person”, engaged in a cosmic battle with the angelic representatives of the
great empires that had conquered Israel. The “one like a person” brought Jesus
close to his Abba and became the anchor of his visions. Jesus and his disciples
identified themselves with the “one like a person”, what can also be translated
as “son of man”. In Daniel’s vision, God himself intervenes and elevates "the
one like a person" within the heavenly court.
In the mystical tradition of Judaism
of this time, a vision of the Chariot was also called an entry into Paradise,
the original Garden Eden of Genesis. Jesus entered consuming trances, and saw
faith as a means by which people could share his vision of Eden, and be
transformed by its eternal vitality. His healings effectuated the restoration
of the Paradise that was part and parcel of God’s primordial intent in making
the world. Jesus began to insist that his disciples have the same kind of faith
in him that they had in his Abba. This was an outgrowth of his identification
with the “one like the person.” Jesus had begun to see himself as part of the
heavenly court.
On Mount Hermon Jesus was
transformed before Peter, James, and John into a gleaming white figure,
speaking with Moses and Elijah. Years of communal meditation made what Jesus
saw and experienced vivid to his disciples too. Covered by a shining cloud of
glory, they heared a voice say: “This is my son, the beloved, in whom I take
pleasure: hear him.” When the cloud passed they found Jesus alone as God’s son.
The voice did not make Jesus into the only (and only possible) “Son of God”
like the later doctrine of the Trinity. Rather, the same Spirit that had
animated Moses and Elijah was present in Jesus and could be passed to his
followers, each of whom could also become a “son” (like in Buddhism principally
everybody following Buddha's path can become a Buddha).
According to Chilton the story of
the Transfiguration represents the mature development of Rabbi Jesus’ teaching.
He had led his disciples into the richness of the vision of the Chariot by sharing
his vision with them and transforming them. His teaching shifted away from what
can be discerned of God’s Kingdom on earth to what can be experienced of the
angelic pantheon around God’s Throne. It must have seemed to the apostles at
that moment that all the hardships, struggles, and disappointments were finally
rewarded in the intimacy he gave them with the divine presence.
Jesus’ advanced esoteric teaching
For Chilton the most difficult part
of Jesus’ science of approaching the Throne is expressed in Mark 8:31–33,
Matthew 16:21–23,and Luke 9:21–22: "And he began to teach them that: The
one like the person must suffer a lot and be condemned by the elders and the
high priests and the letterers and be killed and after three days arise." Here
the Aramaic phrase “one like a person” is used to designate ordinary human
beings. Rather than a precise foreknowledge of Jesus' imminent death (a later
distortion of its meaning) this text conveys Jesus' deep sense that all of us must
remain aware of our frail, suffering nature in the midst of the vision of the
Throne and its angels. One faces Abba with a child’s vulnerability.
For Chilton one of the pitfalls of
any spiritual discipline is that the practitioner might exalt his own
importance, claiming to be as infallible and powerful as the divine world he
trains himself to see. Forgetting our mortality betrays God, and we run the
risk of supplanting God’s majesty with our own arrogance. Jesus insisted on conscious
acceptance of suffering. Jesus did not treat pain as a virtue in itself, but
turned the endemically human experience of suffering into a means of
discovering divine power in the midst of our own weakness. Danger and suffering
were to be embraced as signs that God’s Kingdom was making its way into a world
that resisted transformation:
"For whoever wishes to save
one’s own life, will ruin it, but whoever will ruin one’s life for me and the
message will save it. For what’s the profit for a person to gain the whole
world and to forfeit one’s life? Because what should a person give for
redemption of one’s life? For whoever is ashamed of me and my words in this
adulterous and sinful generation, the one like the person will be ashamed of
also, when he comes in the glory of his father with the holy angels" (Mark
8:35–38; Matthew 16:25–27; Luke 9:24–26).
The disciples learned that putting
their lives in jeopardy enabled them to stand before the heavenly Chariot with
the one like the person. Jesus reminded them that the prophets of Israel had
suffered for the sake of their vision and for the reward of the vision of God.
He insisted that his followers learned humility, of what he set them an example
in the way he lived. He taught them to recognize that one is limited, weak, in
need of nurture and forgiveness in the presence of the creator of all things. Jesus’
execution became the vehicle for an unconquerable vision. The “cross” he
expected to carry, and expected each of his followers to carry, symbolized the
potential of suffering to serve as the gateway from this world to the realm of
God.
The vision of the resurrected Jesus
The promise of resurrection was unequivocally
articulated in the book of Daniel, one of the Hebrew Bible’s latest works: “Many
of those who sleep in earth’s dust shall awake." Priestly Zadokites argued
that the Torah did not require belief in resurrection, some Pharisees insisted
that one was raised from the dead in the same body in which one had died.
Against the Zadokites, Jesus found the resurrection hope within the Torah
itself, in its reference to the enduring lives of the patriarchs. Against the
Pharisees, he compared the resurrected patriarchs to angels. He never stated
that the dead are raised physically, in the same bodies they had at death. For
Jesus resurrected humans were like angels in the heavens.
For Jesus the transformation from a
physical to an angelic state was the substance of resurrection and inextricably
rooted in a Semitic understanding of human life and personality. The Hebrew word
"nephesh", meaning both life and breath, coordinated body and
breathing within a single, living whole. Nephesh was linked categorically to
the view that God was Spirit, the almighty force of wind breathing life into
all creation. For Jesus human beings could shape their innermost breath, the
pulse of their being as well as their cognitive awareness of the Chariot, to
correspond to the overpowering creativity of divine Spirit. Jesus focuses us on
the essence of our humanity, and allows us into his parallel universe, imbued
with the justice and glory of God. The resurrection is both the most elemental
and the most difficult to grasp of all Gospel teachings. And yet the confidence
that God raises life from death, is still sustaining Christianity.
Chilton suggests a rational
explanation for the disciples' experience of the resurrection of Jesus: Like
Buddha, Jesus was a superb teacher, capable of imparting the inner energy as
well as the outer form of the religious wisdom he had discovered. The disciples’
mystical practice of the Chariot only intensified after Jesus’ death, and to
their own astonishment and the incredulity of many of their contemporaries,
they saw him alive again. The fear and pressure due to Jesus’ crucifixion
intensified his followers’ experience of his angelic persona and their vision
of the spirit world where they, like he, increasingly dwelled. The resurrected
Jesus appeared to them in vision, alive in the glory of the Throne but
profoundly changed. At times, they didn’t even recognize him.
According to Mark (16:1–8) Miriam
Magdalene, Miriam of Yaaqov and Shalome, were the first to have this visionary
experience. Mark speaks of the women's “trembling and frenzy”. Fear and ecstasy
were typical emotions related to the vision of the divine. The angelic young
man the women encountered in the empty tomb signaled that they had entered the
trance world of the Chariot. When he said in the majestic rhetoric of Luke,
“Why do you seek the living among the dead?”, the event we call the resurrection
was born. When Jesus' followers met together, meditated, and prayed, their
journey into the world of the Chariot brought them face to face with Rabbi
Jesus. Chilton suggests that their collective visionary trances engendered a
form of religious hysteria.
When Jesus' disciples returned to
Jerusalem for the great feast of the Pentecost, the wheat harvest, which
occurred seven weeks after Jesus' death at Passover, they gathered privately in
festal meals. They had many experiences of the resurrected Lord what made them
feel vindicated and reenergized. In their understanding, the risen Jesus poured
out on them the same Spirit he had been immersed in since his time with John. The
New Testament records that five hundred other followers in Galilee also saw the
rabbi raised from the dead. Jesus appeared in distant places nearly
simultaneously and walked through doors. He insisted that Miriam of Magdala kept
her hands off him, but invited Thomas to finger his wounds? To understand these
confusing accounts Chilton suggests to see the resurrection as an angelic,
nonmaterial event.
In Paul’s first letter to the
Corinthians, written around 56 C.E., he listed twelve delegates, the five
hundred “brethren” of Jesus, James, Peter, other apostles, and himself, as having
experiences of the risen Jesus. Paul’s own resurrection vision occurred in 32
when he was still named Saul. On a mission from Caiaphas to denounce Jesus’
followers in Damascus he was suddenly surrounded by light. A heavenly echo
identified itself as Jesus of Nazareth. For Chilton this was in no sense a
physical encounter with Jesus. The appearance is depicted very similar to what Jesus'
disciples experienced, complete with prophetic commissioning and the symbolism
of the holy Spirit in the surrounding light.
Saul turned around. After a retreat
into solitude for three years he went back to Jerusalem. He spoke about his
vision only to Peter and James. Chilton holds that Paul understood that his
experience was more visionary than physical, as he carefully says in a passage
of straightforward Greek that has been perennially mistranslated as "God took
pleasure to reveal his son to me.” According to Chilton the correct
translations is “God took pleasure to uncover his son in me” (Galatians
1:16). By distorting the meaning of a single preposition, traditional
Christianity has falsified its premier apostle’s own visionary experience of
what he explicitly (1 Corinthians 15:8) understood to be the resurrected Jesus.
The meaning of what we know about Jesus for our own life and death
According to Chilton's experiences
with terminally ill patients, a little Golgotha awaits us all at the close of
our lives in one way or another. "Fear sometimes makes us wish for a
quiet, sudden and even violent end, rather than confront that inexorable and
unyielding moment. But trying to evade the instant when we truly and completely
lose ourselves only compounds pain with delusion." Standing by the graves
of the people Chilton burries, he is aware that a person has passed beyond our
reach. "Here we know that we all, too, are broken. But Spirit does not
die. (…) The sacrifice of our own lives frees Spirit to fly across the heavens.
There is no one way to die, as there is not a unique wisdom of what dying
means, or a single cross we all have to bear." For Chilton Jesus' "discovery
of who we are in our pain, offers the vision that death’s change is not simply
degradation and despair. It is not the end of us, but the end of who we think
we are. To lose one’s life is to save it. Death is our hardest lesson, but it
is also the gateway into the true, divine source of human identity."
I would like to add some aspects:
Jesus life, as Chilton depicts it, is a fascinating story of human struggling,
development, triumph, error, and failure. Jesus was able to transform his
suffering into compassion and visions. He consequently lived his visions. His
devotedness was complete. He gave thousands of underdogs comfort, hope, self
confidence, and orientation. He resisted the temptation to head a violent upheaval.
Instead he trained his followers to experience a parallel world of divine
peace, justice, and glory. He taught them to trust in it and to transform their
intrinsic fervor for God into care for their neighbors and even into love for
the enemies. He acted as a trustworthy model for what he taught. He
successfully opposed the rigid positions and practices of the powerful and
established new spiritual concepts and rituals that better suited the needs of
the indigents and social outcasts. He left such a strong impression on his
followers that after his death his movement rather than vanishing lived up to
its full potential.
What made Jesus that effective and influential?
How
come an illiterate construction worker from a petty province of the Roman
empire crucially changed history? Was it his divine nature,
was he part of a divine plan as it is taught in churches? Like other great
religious personages, Jesus must have had a particular sensitivity and
receptivity for the reality beyond what we can perceive with our ordinary
senses and what we can grasp with our usual reasoning. He must have had a
particular visionary capacity. He did not only repeat and elaborate the
patterns of his culture, like the Pharisees did, but he generated – always
based on his Judaic background – novel, advanced and realistic ideas and
practices. He was a great reformer of Judaism, maybe the most important. It is
not seriously conceivable that Jesus intended to create a new religion apart
from Judaism.
Chilton's book suggests that the
evolution of early Christianity was not the outcome of the ministry of a single
unique person, but an interactive and reciprocal group effect, to which many
contributed and for which the time was ripe. When John the Baptist had been
executed his disciples had scattered. Some had joined Jesus. Surprisingly
Jesus' death and failure at the cross turned out to be crucial for the unswerving
and unstoppable process of future development of his movement. Obviously Jesus
had created an extraordinary quality of attachment and community with a part of
his followers, and also among themselves. He had bestowed on them orientation, trust
in God and in themselves, and an enormous extent of visionary enthusiasm.
Through him they had found a new assignment and meaning for their life. Already
before he died he had encouraged them to speak and act in his name.
Psychodynamic aspects of the experience of resurrected Jesus
From my psychodynamic background I
would like to suggest to view the apostles' experience of the resurrected Jesus
and of the descent of the Holy Spirit as a manifestations of a particular grief
process. Intensively trained to change their state of consciousness into a
meditative trance and to experience common visions of the divine some hundred
of Jesus' followers were able to transform their fierce longing for their
master into a collective experience of perceiving him alive.
According
to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross there are five stages of grief: denial, anger,
bargaining, depression and acceptance. In the first stage, the loss of the
beloved person is denied, the mourner thinks: "This isn't happening."
In psychodynamic terms denial can be understood as a temporarily useful defense
mechanism preventing the mourner's self organization from collapsing due to the
unexpected bereavement of an so called self object (a person that provides
emotional security and stability). The vision of the resurrected Jesus can be
considered as an expression of the apostles' transient mental state of denial.
But
the vision of the resurrected Jesus is more than just a defense mechanism. The
emotional relationship and the bonding between the mourner and the deceased
person goes on. Important aspects of the beloved person are internalized and
remain alive as a so called internal object. From the psychodynamic perspective
Jesus continued to
live within his followers as a good, stable and nourishing inner object. In a
way the apostles' experience of the resurrected Jesus represented a realistic
part of their inner truth. After forty days of collective mourning Jesus did
not appear to his followers any longer, what is called Ascension of Jesus in
the New Testament. As a rational explanation I suggest that the grief process
of Jesus' followers – facilitated by sharing the pain and sadness – had reached
a stage in which there was no further psychological need for visioning Jesus
alive and denying his death.
Psychodynamic aspects of the experience of Pentecost
Jesus had spent his last years
covert in the wilderness to evade the persecution of Herodes Antipas, the ruler
of Galilee, who had already ordered the execution of his teacher John the
Baptist. In order to go on spreading his message in Galilee, Jesus had dispatched
his disciples as his delegates. He had encouraged them to proclaim God’s Kingdom
in Galilee and to heal people on his behalf. Hence, after his death, his
followers had a lot of practice and were well prepared to continue their
master's ministry. Pentecost, more than fifty days after Jesus' crucifixion,
indicates the moment when the desperation and paralyzation of his disciples had
completely turned into new confidence and determinedness. The New Testament
depicts the recovery of the disciples' power and courage as the descent of the
Holy Spirit.
It is a natural psychological phenomenon
that, after the death of a parent or an important teacher who are role models,
the successors adopt the parent's or teacher's qualities, habits, values,
opinions, goals, visions, and even their mental power. There is a conscious or
unconscious identification with the deceased. When the evangelist John (15,4)
lets Jesus say: "Abide in me,
and I in you", it reflects the simple psychological truth, that after the
death of a beloved parent or teacher the internal attachment of his successors
persists and can even deepen, especially if over time the deceased is strongly
idealized. All religious doctrines seem to have in common that their
originators and were idealized and their objectives deformed by later
generations. It is tempting to project one's own ideas and needs onto an
idealized person who cannot defend herself any more.
How to facilitate relationship with Jesus for people of today?
Many people need a simple
concept of what is right and what is wrong. For them religious or political simplification,
fundamentalism, and intolerance towards other ethnic groups, religions and
wisdom teachings provide a feeling of stability and consistency. Those people
will not be open for Chilton's ideas. But there is a growing number of people
who are not longer reached by the established concepts and by the wording of
the churches. The traditional Christian glorification of Jesus as the only begotten
son of an all-knowing and almighty God, the teachings of virgin birth, original
sin, Holy Trinity, and much more dogmata insult the enlightened mind and do not
correspond to the everyday experience of the majority of modern people.
I am one of them. For me it
is much easier to become friend with a fully human, non-transfigured,
vulnerable Jesus who struggled, vacillated, erred, failed and missed his messianic goal of saving
Israel and establishing God's kingdom. Precisely through his glorious failure
at the cross Jesus caused the very miracle of his ministry: his frightened and
demoralized followers did not scatter and resign although the crucifixion had unequivocally
proved that Jesus was not the messiah the way most ancient Jews expected him.
There was something much more sustainable than political and military power. A
new quality of bonding, solidarity, and mutual care had emerged within the core
group of Jesus' followers. Jesus' movement provided a completely novel answer
to the feeling of collective impotence and despair of the Jewish people in the
first century C.E. and to their deathful hatred against the Roman occupiers.
What can we learn from Jesus and his followers for the challenges of today?
Today
we face an alarming rise of religious and ethnic intolerance, increasing
enmity, war and terror. Unfettered capitalism destroys the environment and the
livelihoods of millions of people. Important public, political and economical
institutions like banks, insurances, and other big business concerns, even the
press and the political system do not seem trustworthy any more to many people.
There is also a growing social isolation and loneliness of millions of
individuals. There is a loss of trust, solidarity and mutual care even in
private relations. The material abundance that capitalism engendered taught us
that the full satisfaction of our material needs does not automatically create
happiness. In contrary many people in the wealthy western countries suffer from
overweight, addiction, prosperity diseases, pressure to perform, burn out,
depression, anxiety and psychosomatic disorders.
The
recovery of trust, solidarity and mutual care seem to me one of the most
important challenges of our time. How could we, how could our world cure
without solidarity, care for and trust in each other and without trust in a
truth beyond of what we can perceive and intellectually comprehend? Trust in
the divine along with solidarity and community with the indigent and the ostracized
were crucial points in Jesus' message and practice. After Jesus' death his
followers did not seek – like the zealots – salvation in futile and suicidal
rebellion against Rome, but strived for inner liberation by the means of
meditation, love and reconciliation. Are those principles applicable to the
problems of today? I think yes.
Christ
In
the Christian tradition of faith Jesus is called "Christ". The Greek
word "Christós" means "the anointed", in Hebrew "Meschiach".
Chilton explains that the
term “Messiah” could be defined in different ways in ancient Judaism. Messiah
could refer to one chosen of God from the house of David to rule as king and to
achieve the expected removal of foreign dominion by war. Messiah could also
mean anointed to offer sacrifice, or anointed to prophesy. The Old
Testament's Book of (the second) Isaiah speaks about a servant of God assigned to
call Israel to its vocation as the people of God and to lead the other nations, but
also to endure horrible suffering:
"He was despised,
and forsaken of men, a man of pains, and acquainted with disease, and as one
from whom men hide their face: he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely
our diseases he did bear, and our pains he carried; whereas we did esteem him
stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded because of our
transgressions, he was crushed because of our iniquities: the chastisement of
our welfare was upon him, and with his stripes we were healed. All we like
sheep did go astray, we turned everyone to his own way; and the Lord hath made
to light on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, though he humbled
himself and opened not his mouth; as a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and
as a sheep that before her shearers is dumb; yea, he opened not his mouth. (…) He
had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it pleased the
Lord to crush him by disease; to see if his soul would offer itself in restitution,
that he might see his seed, prolong his days, and that the purpose of the Lord
might prosper by his hand: Of the travail of his soul he shall see to the full,
even My servant, who by his knowledge did justify the Righteous One to the
many, and their iniquities he did bear. Therefore will I divide him a portion
among the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the mighty; because he
bared his soul unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore
the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors." (Isaiah, Chapter 53)
Many
Christians believe that this text heralds the messianic role and passion of
Jesus. Chilton does
not share the view that Jesus saw his role in intentional suffering and in
sacrificing himself. Jesus' own idea of his messianic role was
rather to be chosen of
God and empowered by the holy Spirit for his particular prophesy. There is no
evidence that Jesus considered himself as a divine figure, as the only son of
God or as the lamb of God designated to die for the salvation and redemption of
Israel. Such an exalted meaning of the Messiah
appeared only later.
There is broad consensus among
scholars that the Gospels cannot be considered as literal history. After
280 years of scientific quest for the historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer's
claim remains still valid that a solid and precise historical reconstruction of
Jesus' life is impossible. But are the Gospel just fanciful Hellenistic fairy tales and useless for
historians? Did the evangelists and later Christian authors even
deliberately manipulated and fraudulently altered the original facts? Chilton
would not agree with such a stance although he holds that the authors of the
Gospels extensively reworked, arranged and edited the available accounts of
Jesus and his ministry.
Everybody
who had encountered Jesus had made his or her utterly subjective experience
with him. Therefore the accounts of Jesus rendered by different individuals
varied of course. The stories and the pictures of Jesus, as they are conveyed
in the Gospels and in the later Christian literature, consist of hundreds,
maybe thousands of individual encounters, emotional reactions, intellectual
preoccupations, spontaneous imaginations, intuitions and interacting
narratives. Thus the Gospels might reveal much more about the needs, longings,
projections, cultural backgrounds and states of consciousness of those whose
experiences and accounts are melted together in the New Testament than about
the real person of Jesus.
If
we do not view Jesus as an unique figure, chosen by God to play the dominant
role in a particular divine plan, but if we look on Jesus as just the prominent
opponent of a collective development process evolving a novel kind of
spirituality and religious practice within ancient Judaism, we must not lament
the persistent vagueness of Jesus' historical profile. Instead we can focus on
the obvious outcome of that process, what was in fact the notion of Jesus as a
divine figure. Obviously there was and there still is a strong need to exalt
Jesus and to exalt oneself by participating in Jesus' messianic glory. According to Chilton Jesus
himself rejected the role of a victorious messiah. He resisted the temptation
of being exalted and insisted that his followers learn the same humility. He
taught them to recognize that one is limited, weak, in need of nurture and
forgiveness in the presence of the creator of all things.
I would like to close my provisional
review by posing some questions: What is the particular Christ quality that
Jesus could have had in mind? What kind of Christ quality is appropriate nowadays?
How can that Christ quality contribute to individual and collective healing, to
liberation from fear, hate and despair, to more solidarity and mutual care, to
preventing the world from further war, terror and ecological suicide?
 |
| Bruce Chilton: Rabbi Jesus |
Kommentare
Kommentar veröffentlichen