Jesus: A Biography From a Believer. (4 page)

John preached that in order to prepare for the Christ and the New Order all must come to him by the banks of the Jordan River and be immersed in it. This act of baptism, as he called it, was necessary to wash off the sins and habits of the past and thereby become a new man. But he recognized that his action was more symbolic than real, and that it required the godly power of the Christ himself to effect the inner transformation. John always insisted on this and made no miraculous claims for himself. All the same, he attracted huge crowds, and the attention of the authorities. According to the Gospel of John (1 : 19-27), they “sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, Who art thou? And he confessed, and denied not; but confessed, I am not the Christ. . . . I baptize with water: but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not.” He then expressed his image of humility—“whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose.”

The closeness of the various evangelical descriptions to one another, and the repetition of the Baptist’s words, make it clear we are dealing with eyewitness accounts, probably more than one. The Gospel of John continues even more dramatically: “The next day John seeth Jesus coming unto him, and saith: Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (1:29). According to the account the eyewitness gave to Matthew (3:14-17), John said to Jesus: “I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me? And Jesus answering him said unto him, Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.” John then baptized Jesus, and when he came out of the water, “lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him: And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” According to Luke, one eyewitness reported, “the Holy Ghost descended in a bodily shape like a dove upon him” (3:22). Whether the dove was real or figurative, all four accounts agree on the essentials, that the baptism of Jesus was an extraordinary event, in which the presence of God was visual and audible, and witnessed by large crowds of men and women.

It may be asked: Why did Jesus need baptism? Was not the Son of God already prepared, in all respects, for his mission? This was John’s own view, clearly. But Jesus was adamant that he must go through the ceremony of renewal. He was stressing the universality of the sacrament—the need for every human being to wash off the stains of the past and to become fresh, and new, and clean. It was the actual as well as the symbolic beginning of his New Testamental mission, which was to culminate in his institution of Communion in bread and wine—his own body and blood—at the Last Supper, immediately before his bodily sacrifice of the Crucifixion.

The baptism of Jesus was also the culmination of John’s own mission. The third chapter of Luke gives details of John’s preaching “the baptism of repentance and the remission of sins.” It was rough and angry in content, adumbrating Jesus’s warnings at their most fierce. When he recognized Pharisees and Sadducees among those seeking baptism, he shouted, “O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (Mt 3:7). He insisted that the Christ, when he came, would “throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire” (Mt 3 : 12). This was dangerous talk, and it was clearly reported to the higher religious authorities. This prepared the way for his arrest by Herod Antipas, the Roman puppet ruler of Galilee, who was already incensed by John’s criticism of his incestuous marriage to Herodias, his brother’s wife. She was not the granddaughter of Herod the Great for nothing. Once John was in her husband’s dungeon, she incited her daughter Salome to dance lasciviously at a feast. Antipas was so enraptured he promised her, as a reward, anything in his power. Coached by her mother, she demanded the head of the Baptist, and her stepfather, though reluctant, complied. This dreadful event filled many pious Jews, who had heard John preach, with horror and fear. To Jesus it was another reminder, like the massacre of the innocents and the murder of Zacharias, of the danger of his mission; it brought home the unbridled brutality of the secular world, whose agents were available at any moment to destroy those ready to do God’s work, and even those involved in it by accident. It was another admonitory prelude to death on the cross.

Immediately after Jesus was baptized, as part of the preparation for his ministry, he went into the wilderness. All three of the synoptic Gospels mention this episode, saying he went there at the bidding of the Holy Spirit (Mk 1 :12-13; Mt 4:1-11; Lk 4:1-12). Mark’s account is perfunctory, but both Matthew and Luke describe the experience in detail. He went into the wilderness—the wild country east of the Jordan—primarily to pray. Jesus was a convivial man, as we are repeatedly shown by the Gospel accounts. But he was also a prayerful man. When convivial he was emphatically a man. But when praying, he spoke directly with God, his Father, and necessarily was himself divine. Hence he always preferred to be alone. He did not stand in prayer, as the Jews were accustomed to do. He knelt, as a symbol of submission to the Father’s will. Prayer, for him, meant separation from his fellow men, an ascent into divinity, and, as such, symbolized by altitude. When praying he preferred to be on a hill or a mountain—as he was in his Transfiguration (as we shall see), on the Mount of Olives in the Garden of Gethsemane before his Passion, and on the high mountain where he said his last prayers on earth before ascending into heaven.

So in the wilderness, praying, Jesus sought height for solitude. He fasted for forty days. We do not know the severity of his abstention from food and water. But Matthew and Luke insist that he was faint and hungry. Then, when his body was weak, came temptation, not just in his mind but in the bodily shape of Satan. It is not the only occasion when Jesus admitted he was tempted. He was so again at Gethsemane. When appalled at the enormity of the suffering immediately ahead of him, he prayed to his Father that it be lifted, then submitted. In the wilderness, however, the struggle was not in his mind but in the open, with Satan visible, vocal, and formidable in power. The fact that Jesus recounted the details afterward to his followers shows how anxious he was to impress upon them that evil is not merely objective and material but also subjective and personal; that Satan exists and has to be overcome by strength of will and clearness of distinction between the good and the bad. He transformed his personal temptation into a universal experience.

For Jesus himself the temptation was to use his divine powers for earthly material purposes: first, to turn stones into bread; then, to preserve his life from mortal dangers; finally, to possess the world. The third temptation (here I am following Matthew’s account) was the most serious because of its universal scope: it applied not only to such as himself, endowed with divine powers, but also to mankind, who, thanks to high intelligence and industry, can acquire vast powers which—superficially at least—appear godlike. Jesus told Matthew’s apostolic source that on this third occasion Satan “taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me” (4:8-9).

The “high mountain” is significant—the constant image when Jesus is about to perceive important truths—as is the plural reference to “kingdoms.” The temptation concerns not just states and empires but knowledge—kingdoms of the mind, science—the understanding of the universe by physics and mathematics and of the human body by Darwinian evolution, by biology, and by the chromosomal structure, and the explosion of human penetration, in all distinctions, of the secrets of the universe. Here was the most insidious of all temptations: that men obtain huge victories of the intellect by agreeing to worship material success and to renounce the world of the spirit, to put knowledge before goodness and mastery of the elements before their Creator.

Jesus said that there was only one possible reply to this final temptation: “Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve” (4:10). Pride in knowledge, pride in the human capacity to acquire it—at the expense of ignoring God—is just another form of idolatry. Thus dismissed, Satan departed, leaving Jesus alone, “and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him” (4:11).

So Jesus returned from the wilderness uncorrupted and, as a man, wiser and more experienced. He was ready to begin. What sort of a man was he? We are not told. His precursor, the Baptist, is described. But not once, in all the four Gospels, are we given any indication of Jesus’s appearance. Nor are we told what he looked like in any of the canonical epistles or any documents of the first century AD. It is not until well into the second century, by which time the chain of oral eyewitness evidence had long been broken, that we get the first iconography, and these attempts are typology rather than actual portraiture. The Jesus who then appears is a beardless figure of ideal character. There are 104 examples in the catacombs, 97 in sarcophagi, 14 in mosaics, 45 in gold glasses, 50 in other artifacts, and 3 in manuscripts. Later he appears as a grown man, bearded but still idealized: and this Jesus, suitably rendered human, is the man who thereafter is painted and sculpted by artists in the Western tradition. But the earliest appearance of the bearded Jesus dates from centuries after his death. In short, there is no reliable evidence of what Jesus looked like.

On the other hand, we know certain things about his visual personality which struck eyewitnesses and so are recorded in the Gospels. Jesus was very observant. It is notable how many times he is described as “looking,” “looking upon,” “looking round,” “looking up” (the last is mentioned three times). His habit of penetrating observation punctuates the narrative: “[H]e looked round” before speaking. “And he lifted up his eyes on his disciples and said . . .” “And the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter.” “[H]e had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts.” He was a man greatly interested in detail. He missed nothing. He had a penetrating gaze, which eyewitnesses noticed and remembered. His all-seeing eyes were, almost certainly, the first thing that struck people about him.

His gaze was linked to his air of decision. It astonished people. He appeared and spoke not as an interpreter of the scriptures but as a fountainhead of truth. Matthew makes this clear: “For he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (7:29). Moreover, the authority he exercised was there from the beginning of his ministry. He did not need to acquire it. It was innate. In the light of what followed, we can see it was divine. Being God, he had no need to scrabble about among the texts and commentaries: he was the truth incarnate. But he was man, too, visibly and obviously, and therefore his air of authority struck observers, from the very first day, as arresting. He was man, and he needed to be man, for four reasons: First, to put people to the test of faith. Second, to communicate as a human being. Third, to suffer. And fourth, to serve as a model for all time, which he could do only as man—“the way of Jesus.” And, being a man, he needed helpers, disciples, apostles.

The choosing of the apostles, the first important act of Jesus’s ministry, is variously described by the evangelists (Mt 4:18ff.; Mk 1:16ff.; Lk 5:3ff.; Jn 1:38ff.). Luke says that after the wilderness experience Jesus began to preach, alone, in Galilee, his home territory, where there were well over one hundred small towns and villages, many with synagogues. In one (according to Luke 4:18ff.) he was given the book of Isaiah, and he read from it: “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, . . . to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and the recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.” When he closed the book and handed it back to the priest, he sat down. “And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him.” So he continued to talk while sitting. And they all “wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth. And they said, Is not this Joseph’s son?” But Jesus determined to tell them things they did not wish to hear. He quoted the proverb “Physician, heal thyself” and noted, “No prophet is accepted in his own country.” He went on to criticize Elias and Eliseus and to remind the congregation of the limitations of their power. His listeners were outraged. “[W]hen they heard these things, [they] were filled with wrath, And rose up, and thrust him out of the city, and led him unto the brow of the hill whereon their city was built, that they might cast him down headlong.” He was obliged to exercise his miraculous powers: “But he passing through the midst of them went his way.”

He went to Capernaum, on the Sea of Galilee, and it was there that he chose his first followers, sturdy fishermen, strong and resourceful, to stand around him and protect him when his words angered the self-righteously orthodox. According to the fifth chapter of Luke, he taught the people from Simon Peter’s fishing boat, which was close to the shore while Simon was washing his nets, having toiled all night in vain. To thank Simon he performed a minor miracle. He told him: “Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught.” Despite having caught nothing in this spot, Simon did as he was bid, and “they inclosed a great multitude of fishes: and their net brake.” They called their partners, James and John, sons of Zebedee, and together they took so many fish aboard that their boats began to sink. Simon fell down at Jesus’s knees, saying, “Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” Jesus replied, “Fear not; from henceforth thou shalt catch men.” Luke adds: “And when they had brought their ships to land, they forsook all, and followed him.”

John has another version of this choosing which concerns Andrew, Simon’s brother. He and another man are described as “disciples” of the Baptist. When they heard the Baptist say of Jesus, “Behold the Lamb of God,” they followed him and asked, “Master, where dwelleth thou?” He said, “Come and see.” They did and stayed with him, and then Andrew got hold of Simon and told him, “We have found the Messiah.” It was when Simon was introduced to Jesus that he was renamed Peter, meaning a stone or rock. Matthew again varies the tale by having Jesus say to Simon and Andrew, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Mark uses the same phrase and says that, thus accompanied by the four stalwart fishermen, Jesus went into Capernaum and began teaching in the synagogue “straightway on the sabbath.” The fact that Andrew was a disciple of the Baptist suggests to me that the little group of fishermen who worked together were already hovering on the brink of religious revivalism. But Andrew was only a part-time follower of John. Jesus insisted that the group come with him full-time, and they obeyed. The sons of Zebedee, Mark says, “left their father Zebedee in the ship with the hired servants.”