Jesus and His World - Paul and His World

Peter Walker, Stephen Tomkins

• Publisher: Lion Scholar
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781912552160
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

Have you ever wanted accessible introductions to the key figures of Christian history? In this book two expert authors draw on biblical scholarship to bring Jesus and Paul and their worlds vividly to life.

Jesus and His World

Jesus Christ is probably the single most influential figure in world history, but who was this preacher from Nazareth? Can we be sure he existed? And if he did, what was the world like in which he lived?
Placing Jesus firmly in the Jewish world of 1st-century Palestine, Peter Walker explores the religious and social background to his life, the Jewish expectations of a messiah, Jesus' ministry and teaching, and helps readers interpret Jesus' radical mission and the way he related to the world around him.

Paul and His World
We know little about Paul, yet he has had a greater impact on the development of Christianity than any other person except Christ. For some, his influence has been largely negative. For others, he is simply the greatest mind in Christian history.
Stephen Tomkins argues that Paul would have been quite at home with such a mixed reception. Despite enjoying a degree of hero worship in his lifetime, he was also more reviled than any other Christian, and his Christian life was a constant arduous missionary journey of shipwrecks, prison, mob violence and the depressing politics of church life. This is a lively and lucid portrayal of the man behind the controversy and the drama.

PART 1

JESUS AND HIS WORLD

INTRODUCTION

To understand the real Jesus, we have to make a journey. Jesus lived in a very different world from ours. If we are going to understand him, we have to think our way back into his world. But to get back into his world, we have to be ready for a while to abandon our own. And this can be quite a shock – even for people who see themselves as followers of Jesus.

One of the amazing things about this figure of ancient history is the way his life and story have been transported into very different cultures. We see it in art – the different presentations of an African Jesus, a South American Jesus, the ‘meek and mild’ Jesus of the Victorians. People have been able to latch onto the story of Jesus and make it their own. They find in Jesus’ particular story something universal – the story of Everyman. There are good reasons for this, as we shall see, but the danger is that we begin to make Jesus fit our preferred expectations and agendas. We easily make Jesus ‘in our own image’. So the same Jesus becomes for some a champion of conservative values and for others a radical who overturns the status quo. This variety pays tribute to the way Jesus’ story can resonate with a wide variety of people. But it does beg the question: who is the real Jesus?

The Jesus presented in church is not much better. Stained-glass windows make him seem unreal. They may capture something of the divine, but they lose something of Jesus’ humanity. Can this other-worldly Jesus be reconciled with the real ‘flesh and blood’ person of ancient history? He seems detached, even from the particular issues of his own day. The strange thing is, some people even prefer it this way. They feel quite threatened by the idea of understanding Jesus in his real first-century context. They fear a tension between their ‘spiritual’ Jesus and the historical Jesus. What if the real Jesus turned out to be quite different from the Jesus of their imagination?

There have indeed been some very unhelpful portraits of the ‘historical Jesus’ in the last 200 years. But the right response is not to abandon history, hiding in some ‘spiritual castle’ where the rough and tumble of historical reality cannot reach. The answer is to do history properly. And that means not allowing the agenda to be set by those who insist on driving a wedge between so-called ‘history’ and spiritual reality. This was one of the big divisions that entered Western thought in the eighteenth century (the misnamed ‘Enlightenment’). Historians, we are told, can have no room for miracles or divine activity: ‘God’ and ‘real history’ live in two separate realms.

Viewed in this way, the historical Jesus will obviously be explained in secular terms and the story of his life trimmed to the point where we have no need to speak of God. But suppose for a moment that the Jesus of real history was larger than that. What if the Christian claim just happens to be true – namely that in Jesus we see the activity of God himself, the divine entrance onto the stage of world history? This is an enormous claim, and we shall be examining it in the following chapters. But for now the point is simply this: if it is true, we will need to do history in a different way. We cannot decide in advance what happened, but instead must allow the evidence to take us where it will.

Do not be mistaken: what we are doing here will meet with resistance in certain quarters. On the one hand, religious sceptics will say Christians cannot write history. On the other hand, some Christians – those people who, one might imagine, would be most keen to find out about ‘Jesus and his world’ – would rather leave the whole topic alone.

This is an invitation to go on a journey – to find the authentic Jesus. This will involve going back into his world – or perhaps we should say, into his worlds. For Jesus did not live only in the Near East of the ancient world; he also lived in a very particular part of that world, namely the religious world of Judaism. For many of us, both these worlds are totally different from our own, and we need to think our way back into them. We have to do some cross-cultural travel.

This has always been the case. When Luke wrote his account of Jesus, he ensured that his readers placed the story of Jesus both in the world of the Roman empire (‘in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar’) and in the world of Judaism (‘during the high priesthood of Caiaphas’). People will not be able to understand Jesus correctly, he was saying, if they will not make the effort to enter into these two worlds.

So, in the opening chapters, we set Jesus in the context of the ancient world. But we soon discover that we need to enter more fully into the narrower world of Judaism (chapters 5–7). After that, we follow Jesus to his destiny in Jerusalem, the centre of that Jewish world. But something surprising happens there, which enables people to see ‘Jesus and his world’ in a new light.

This narrative, like many others, really has more than one author. So I am truly grateful to those who have influenced what now appears under my name: especially, friends at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, and Christ Church, Abingdon.

To write about Jesus is a daunting task. For anyone who has tried to be a follower of this Jesus, writing such an account becomes a personal reflection on one’s own spiritual journey. You keep remembering the time you first discovered the point you are now trying to convey to others. It is also a humbling task, as you hope that nothing you have written on this most important topic may cause confusion – especially if it conflicts with interpretations faithfully held for many years. And it is also a challenge: how am I responding to the great truths I keep finding in this one remarkable life?

For that reason, no account of Jesus could ever be complete – there will always be so much to say. So please treat this one as a mere taster before the real thing. And if you find yourself going back in a fresh way to the Gospels, those brilliant first ‘biographies’ of Jesus, then this author will be well pleased.

CHAPTER 1

THE STORY OF JESUS

‘He was born in an obscure village to parents who were peasants. Mostly he worked as a carpenter, but he became a travelling preacher …’

‘Two thousand years have passed, yet he still remains the figure at the very heart of the human race. All the kings, rulers and powers that have ever been, all the armies that have ever fought, indeed nothing since time began, has had so great an effect upon the course of human history as that one solitary life.’

The anonymous author who wrote these words may have been overstating the case, but not by much. The quote captures well an issue that we need to remember throughout this book: why has a prophet from a Middle Eastern village called Nazareth had such an influence on the world, seemingly out of all proportion to his few years of teaching? He never wrote a book, but 2,000 years later, not an hour will go by without his name being mentioned somewhere on the face of the planet. Of all the figures of history, he is the one about whom most books have been written.

‘I have regarded Jesus of Nazareth as one among the mighty teachers that the world has had … I shall say to the Hindus that your lives will be incomplete unless you reverently study the teachings of Jesus.’

Mohandas K. Gandhi, The Message of Jesus Christ, 1938

So what was Jesus’ secret? What is it about him that continues to attract such interest? Is it the sheer quality of his teaching, so simple and yet so profound? Is it the awesome sense of God’s reality that he seems to have possessed and been able to pass on to others? Is it something to do with his character? Or was he perhaps just the ‘right person at the right time’? Maybe Jesus, born as he was within the first ten years of the reign of Emperor Augustus (which gave the ancient world at long last an era of peace), knew that this was the perfect time to launch a new religious system throughout the Roman empire? Some suggest that people were increasingly disenchanted with contemporary philosophies – there was a spiritual vacuum. Certainly within Jesus’ own homeland, the land of Israel, a sense of despair had set in after the return of foreign occupation in 63 BC. How could Judaism continue to see itself as containing the truth of the one true God for the whole world – let alone persuade others of this fact – if it was habitually hemmed in by pagan oppressors?

The timing was indeed important. In a sense, what Jesus achieved was to snatch up the brilliant essence of Judaism and make it available on a much wider scale. And he did so just in time – before Rome destroyed the Jewish capital of Jerusalem in AD 70.

Yet, even if the timing was ideal, the explanation for Jesus’ influence ultimately comes back, as we shall see, to his own person and in particular to the pivotal events in Jerusalem at the end of his ministry. He died on a Roman cross, and that should have been the end of the story. But for some reason, which we shall attempt to discover and examine in these pages, it was not.

A singular life

The basic outline of Jesus’ life is well known to many, but it is helpful to remind ourselves of its most important details. The New Testament is the collection of writings treasured by the first Christians: in it, there are various letters, a short history of the early church and four accounts of Jesus’ life. These are known by the Anglo-Saxon word ‘Gospels’ because they contain ‘good news’: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. If for the moment we take these at their face value, what do we know of Jesus’ life? Most of the following outline is based on Mark’s Gospel (especially chapters 1–8).

Jesus was born in Bethlehem, but spent his largely unchronicled childhood in the tiny Jewish village of Nazareth. The story of the adult Jesus, the main focus of the Gospels, commences when he is in his thirties, probably in or around the year which we now know as AD 29. His public career seems to have been launched when he travelled to a point on the River Jordan just north of the Dead Sea. His cousin John the Baptist was there summoning the people of Israel to go through a strange rite – baptism – going down into the waters of the river as a sign that they wanted to be considered clean in God’s sight. It was a sign that they would be ready for that moment when God at last acted to bless his people. And Jesus was ‘baptized’ too.

‘ “I will send my messenger ahead of you … a voice of one calling in the dese...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Part 1: Jesus and His World
• Part 2: Paul and His World
• Further Reading
• Index