Premise: Jesus and Socrates

My speech is in the perspective of seeking the Face of Jesus. The face of Jesus that I seek is that of the historical Jesus, though I know that there is no dissimilarity between this and the Face of the Risen Lord: the Risen Lord is now a personality beyond history, yet He carries with Himself his own earthly face.   

It is not easy to delineate the earthly face of Jesus because it reaches us only through mediations, therefore through portraits. We can say the same thing of Socrates, a personality who has influenced a lot the history of culture, at least the so called Western one. These are two great names with parallel characteristics: both of them ended their earthly life through an unjust process; both were masters of numerous disciples; both of them reach us through various mediations; about Socrates we know nothing but what others testify of him.

It is difficult to delineate exactly the “face” of a person when we do not have any auto-portrait. Let us say something about Paul: this has left his own writings, thus it is easier to discover his personality through his letters; however Luke, in the Acts, gives us a portrait of Paul that does not always coincide with the one we see through the Letters. The interesting thing about Jesus is that the Church at her origin (the end of II century) canonised, at least about the earthly life of the personage, not only one portrait but four of them, namely those portrayed by Matthew- Mark-Luke-John. Before this fact I am filled with admiration, because it would have been much easier for the Church to allow the survival of only one Gospel and throw the others into the waste paper-basket, destroying them. The Church, instead, canonised the four of them, thus making her very life more complicated, because they do not always coincide. It is the matter of a very interesting work, because it substantially expresses the deep conscience according to which we cannot reach Jesus only through one way and he cannot be defined only in one way. Moreover, the Church has not even destroyed the Apocryphal Texts. A certain lay culture loves the polemic about their having been discarded, while in reality they have been transmitted! In fact, Christianity has transmitted also the Judaic apocryphal writings, which the “rabbinism” truly eliminated and which we Christians know only because of a Christian endeavour (without speaking of Authors of pagan antiquity, which reached us through clever and patient amanuenses, more or less monks, who copied even the erotic poems of Catullus: an enormous service to culture…)!    

Anyhow, the comparison between Jesus and Socrates ends here, because they are two very different personalities.

Which Jesus? From the “titulus crucis…”

Which one is the possible Jesus? It is surely the Jesus of the four evangelical narrations, which are interested in his historical events. In fact, there is another portrait built up by Paul and another transmitted by the Apocalypse: however these are not of a narrative character and do not transmit the happenings, the words and meetings proper of Jesus on earth. Apart from all this, we find different qualifications and ways of catching the identity of Jesus in the documents themselves. The most official definition, proposed also to the passers-by under the cross and written in three languages (See: John, 19, 20), is that he was “the king of the Jews”  (See the traditional initials of the cross iconography: INRI, namely Jesus Nazarene King of the Jews). This official definition formulating the motive of the Roman condemnation, apart from the Judaic reaction, has not had any consequence in the faith of the Church or of the primitive churches. No Christian text recuperates it, because actually it does not express the Christian faith; it expresses only the Judaic motive of condemnation, but it is never in any confession of faith; it is a purely external designation, while the attribution of a royal dimension to Jesus (See: John, 18, 36: «my kingdom is not of this world…”) is to be understood in a different perspective! This aspect is to be studied separately. A thing is sure: we do not find it in the Creed, though we read that Christ suffered under Pontius Pilate. Not even our brothers the Jews accept this type of declaration.  

… to the Lord of Lords

There is a series of possible identifications of Jesus in the evangelical narrations. For instance, Jesus is qualified as a “rabbi” (See: Mark 9, 5; John 1, 38). Perhaps you know the book of Jacob Neusner, A rabbi speaks with Jesus (San Paolo, Cinisello Balsamo 2007), which is a lucky book because the Pope has quoted it in his volume on Jesus of Nazareth. It is about an American rabbi in conversation with Jesus. The rabbi confesses that, if he had been at his feet to listen to the sermon of the mountain, he would then have gone back home tranquilly, to his family and work, leaving the Nazarene Rabbi to his destiny. Therefore, Jesus was called Rabbi, that is master, yet there is no confession of faith that defines him as such.  For instance, in Paul Jesus is never called master/didaskalos, similarly he is never called prophet, while, instead, in the Gospels narrations we read it at least on the lips of people, if not of the disciples (See: Matthew, 16,14; 21,11; Luke 7,16). There is also the title of “Christ” given to him by Peter in Caesarea Philippi, but Jesus does not recognise himself fully in that definition, in fact he asks him to be silent (See: Mark 8, 29-30).

Therefore, there is a Jesus for those outside his group, who knew him superficially, and there is a Jesus he himself knows to be, but who does not reveal himself fully in his earthly phase, at least not in a glittering way. On his side, there has never been any ostentation or explicit vindication of a super-human identity. I have been impressed by a sentence attributed to Jesus by Mario Pomilio in his Fifth Gospel, where he makes Jesus to say, “I have not come to prove but to show”! In reality, Jesus introduced himself to Israel and to the world with a sure self-knowledge of what he personally thought to be, but He did not do it with solemn auto- definitions of high profile. By stating this I limitedly refer to the three synoptic Gospels, thus making a choice of methodology: in fact I do not think that the definitions of Jesus in the fourth Gospel, put on His lips, belong to the earthly Jesus. In this I am dissonant with the above- mentioned book of the Pope…In fact, I do not consider the fourth Gospel fit to rebuild the earthly Jesus from the viewpoint, I do not say of his conscience, but of his historical self-declaration, of the language he used to speak of himself.

Thus we reach the fundamental confession of faith, a faith of Easter, but not of the earthly Jesus: his own confession as “Lord”. This is the true confession of Christian faith, not that of Jesus as “God”. It is very rare to find in the New Testament the definition of Jesus as God (in Greek theòs, only twice: in John, 20, 28 and Titus 2, 13, while the text of Romans  9, 5 should be translated differently from what the Cei does); on the other side that of Lord ( in Greek kyrios) is typical and fundamental; only in the authentic Letters of St. Paul they amount to almost 150 times (See at least 1 Co. 8, 6 and Phil. 2, 11)! We could of course say that the title Lord is more or less the same thing as to say God, seen that in the Greek Old Testament the qualification of “Lord” is used for the Hebrew name of the God of Israel (Yhwh).

There is a truly interesting path in the development of the ways Jesus is defined; there is a crescendo that meets its critical moment in total humiliation. There is an obligatory interrogative: Where is the Christ, the prophet, the rabbi on the cross? According to the pre-comprehension of the Jews, only a condemned, miserable and abominable man was on the cross. However, it is interesting that at the moment of the cross, rather than ending the work of discovering the identity of Jesus, it was the crucible that conferred an extraordinary identity to him by re-assuming an extraordinary exaltation of his humanity, naturally together with the event of the resurrection (which, however, has no sense without its being strictly associated with the cross). 

Thus we can see that the figure of Jesus, from this viewpoint, can in no way be compared to Socrates, or with any other face of the Messiah foreseen in Israel. In between the first century before Christ and the first century of our era there are old sources (literary, epigraphic, papyrus…) attesting some tens of Hebrews called “Jesus”. Well, there is no comparison between Jesus of Nazareth and all the other Jesus.

Sources and documents

The thing we must understand well to be of great importance is that the history of our Jesus has been transmitted only by faith interests!

In fact, the very interesting thing, to be absolutely underlined, is that the sources of documents about the history of Jesus are all produced by persons of faith, namely by persons who have believed in him. Today, there is a tendency, that could be defined presumption, to rebuild a Jesus beyond faith; a tendency that we can find in some of recent publications and that in their history of research goes back hardly to 1700, namely at the illuminist epoch. 

 However, the noteworthy thing is that interest for the historical dimension of Jesus characterised from the very beginning only (I repeat: only) those who believed in him. Herod, or Pilate, Caiaphas never were interested in the history of Jesus; they have transmitted no narration of him. Not even Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny the Young, who are the unique pagan sources on Jesus, have done it: they just mention his name, not because they were interested in him, but because they got interested with the group of those who followed him. The problem was not caused by Jesus, but by the Church (I use this term, though neither Tacitus or Suetonius or Pliny knew it): the problem was that of the testimonies of Jesus; only starting from them they reached the One who was the reason and the content of their testimony.

In the ancient time there was no trace of Jesus outside the circle and tradition of those who believed in him. The numerous Christian apocryphal writings never presumed to oppose the Jesus of the canonical Gospels, the historicity of the “canonical” Jesus; they intended only to express another hermeneutic of faith in him, at least to recognise his messianic identity (the Judaic-Christian, for instance the so called Gospel of the Hebrews) or his heavenly dimension that cannot be reduced to our earthly world (such as the Gnostic Gospels, for instance the Gospel of Jude). All this is very interesting because it shows that Christian faith cannot go without history: Jesus of Nazareth is not a fantasy or a myth; it is not an abstraction, and the understanding we can have of him cannot be alienated from his historical dimension. Vive-versa, we must also recognise openly that the history of Jesus has been transmitted through interpretations, too many interpretations. A neutral history of Jesus does not exist, it has never existed. As we have already said, not even the apocryphal writings are neutral. No one has ever presumed to write a neuter history of Jesus in antithesis to a believing tradition, a neuter history of Jesus alienated from comprehensions of faith. Never until 1700 years later! Have we anything else to say but that these other productions are themselves also interpretations? It is inevitably so, it is evident, above all if we consider the long lapse of time that separates us from the origin. Therefore, we clearly see that history and faith or faith and history, in our Christian field, have always gone together and must always go arm in arm.  

Belonging to Hebraism and originality within it

The case of Jesus, from the biographic viewpoint, is unique within the Israel of the time.

It is part of the indissoluble bond of the whole Christianity with Israel. The Christians have hands and feet bound with Israel, thus we cannot take it away from our back, not in the sense that Israel is a burden, but in the sense that it defines us. In good historiography we must say that Christianity is nothing else but a varied Judaism. Well, our earthly Jesus belongs fully to Judaism, to the history of Israel.

The thing I wish to insist upon is that we have no story about the life of any other considerable Israelite figures of the first century, except the story of this Hebrew man from Galilee. Other personages, though famous and important, have not aroused any narrative interest, as this Hebrew from an insignificant village has done, from a village of the most peripheral region in the land of Israel: an extraordinary paradox! Let us see some examples.

1. Let us think about the founder of the Qumran community, a very important person who, according to the manuscripts of Qumran (discovered after 1945), was the founder of a community towards the second century before Christ. Well, he is hardly mentioned not by name but by his title: Master of justice. However, the manuscripts do not use this term, do not narrate anything of this figure to whom, probably, some very beautiful hymns are attributed; there is no story narrating anything about him.

2. Another personage is Rabbi Hillel, who died when Jesus might have been ten years old. Before Jesus he enunciated the Golden Rule: “Do not do to others what you do not want to be done to you”, which we find on the lips of Jesus in the Gospel (See, Matthew, 7, 12: in a positive sense). Yet, there is no biographic narration of him; the pieces of news that we have are scattered here and there in the rabbinic tradition after the Talmud. Moreover, the mentioning of this master (as well as of the others whom we shall say something about) is only functional for a comment of the Torah where they speak of these personages because they help to illustrate principles or some lessons proposed by the Torah, without any specific interest on the history of the person.

3. The same thing is valid when we speak of Gamaliel, above all of another very important rabbi in the history of Israel, R. Jeohanan ben Zakkai, who, after the tragedy of the year seventy safeguarded the survival and identity of Hebraism, when with the destruction of the temple the priesthood was no more and with it the whole complex liturgical-sacrifice rituals in the temple of Jerusalem disappeared. We can say that with this rabbi a re-foundation of Judaism around the Torah took place. They say that one day, going out of Jerusalem after the destruction of the temple, a disciple said to him, “Master, the place where our sins were forgiven is reduced to a heap of debris: what shall we do?” He answered quoting a text from Hosea, which we read also in the leaps of Jesus (See: Matthew, 9, 13), “Mercy is what pleases me, not sacrifice”! Well, even of this rabbi there is no biographic narration: we have only tiny pieces of information scattered here and there in the rabbinic tradition of a commentary to the Torah in the Talmud.  

4. We can quote another great rabbi of the second century, R. Akibà, who, among other things, under the Judaic war during the reign of Adrian in the year 130, showed as Messiah the head of the military opposition against Rome, Bar Kokeba (naturally making a mistake so much as another Master said to him, «Akiba, Akiba, grass will sprout out of your two mandibles before the coming of the Messiah»!). Anyhow, he died martyr of monotheism and when they snatched his flesh he kept on repeating the same word, “Unique, unique, unique!” (with reference to Deuteronomy: 6, 4). Yet, once again we realise that no specific narrative interest on him is attested by the sources

We have a true narrative documentation only of Master Yehoshuah from Nazareth, a multiple documentation containing the four canonical Gospel and at least some twenty apocryphal gospels. These are writings that show interest in him specifically at narrative level, expressing a diffused and deep attention paid to his historical personal identity. Healthy philosophy recognises that every effect must have a proportioned cause. Why is there so much interest on this Jesus and not on any other rabbi? Let us put aside this interrogative, but surely it has at least an elementary answer: it is because he aroused an interest that all the others were unable to arouse! The evangelical traditions, in fact, offer us an abundant material of events and words, whose content has truly signed his generation, at least the group of his disciples, who could not help transmitting his memory in a specific and organic way.  

If you have time and desire, you can read the recent study of the famous English researcher  James Dunn, Jesus remembered, translated into Italian in three big volumes with the title,  “Gli albori del cristianesimo (Paideia, Brescia 2006-2007). Among other things, we read in it “The idea that we can see the writings of the New Testament through the perspective of faith that “to see a Jesus unable to inspire faith or inspiring faith in a different way is an illusion” (I, p. 142). Just like this: as I said above, the cultivation of Jesus’ memory must have an adequate cause. This is why the title of my conversation says that there is only a short step between the historical Jesus and the Jesus of faith (1). In fact, there is a logical link between the two moments: If the effects produced by him , even only at documentation level, are so very considerable (and I do not speak of the vital and spiritual effects, of martyrdom, etc…) it means that at the very start there must be an extraordinary cause, outside the common one, which is actually literally incomparable within Israel!

The multiplicity of interpretations  

The sermon on Jesus cannot help going on considering the various interpretations given about him starting from the “third day”. The four Gospels already give us four interpretations or four different forms of Christology. Within the New Testament there are several forms of Christology. I call them “original portraits” of Jesus, the Christ, because they precede that of the successive history of theology and are normative in their confrontations. Here is the difference. Just think if Picasso had to make the portrait of the “Gioconda”: God knows what the result would have been, even if it had been a masterpiece of art and, besides that of Leonard, there would have been at least a matter of artistic polyvalence. In fact, there are many different ways of portraying and interpreting a unique subject. The non hypothetical examples could be multiplied.   

Well, in the New Testament we have many different portraits of our unique Jesus.

Here our talk goes beyond the simple documentary datus, namely faith in him. Anyhow, we repeat it, we must be aware of the fact that Jesus reaches us mediated, filtered by the testimony of others. This is an extraordinary conclusion concerning both Christology and ecclesiology. This means that it is not possible to know a full, integral and total Jesus outside the Church or without the Church. The often heard alternative, “Christ yes, Church no” makes me laugh as well as it makes me to feel pity because this kind of alternative reveals only, at least straightaway, ignorance of historiography. We said it at the beginning; Jesus cannot be reached not even by the too many lay or laicism authors, unless through documentations of faith, namely those of the Church or the churches of the first century. Therefore, there is an inextricable intersection between Jesus and the Church. Te only trouble is that the term Church along the centuries has taken on himself too many pejorative semantic incrustations, which are not stirring at all: however, here we are having a talk on original, fundamental values, thus we can say that Jesus without Church does not exist, because it has never existed

The paschal faith attests various portraits

Faith in the Risen Lord acted like a prism, through which the refraction of rays is provoked and various colours of the examined object are decomposed. 

This is what certainly happens in the Gospel narrations about the earthly Jesus (some tens of years after his death). In fact, his historical identity is associated, above all by the fourth Gospel, with various declarations in the form of “I am”, besides being associated with the qualification of Son of man; or in an attributive form (e.g.. I am the bread of life, the light of the world, the resurrection and the life) or in an absolute form (See: John 8, 58: Before Abraham ever was, I am”).

However, this happens even more in the after-Easter elaboration of various forms of Christology in the so-called apostolic writings, expressing the faith of the communities in the Crucified-Risen Lord. With this regard I want to mention rapidly the following qualifications; (te term Lord, being common to all the layers of original Christianity).

• Radical liberator of man from the dominion of sin (Letters of Paul).
• Head, both of the church and the cosmos (Deuteron-Pauline letters: Colossians-Ephesians).   
• A lay person paradoxically proclaimed Priest (letter to the Hebrews) 
• A slaughtered lamb standing on his feet (Apocalypse of John)

I suggest you to read my book on all this: The DNA of Christianity. The Christian identity at its birth, St Paul, Cinisello Balsamo ³2007, mainly pages 56-153.

Romano Penna
Lecturer in the Pontifical Gregorian University
Via Aurelia Antica, 284 – 00165 Roma