Jesus associated with John the Baptist at the outset of his ministry. Most scholars think Jesus started out as a disciple or follower of John before he broke off on his own. Jesus of course had lots of religious options to him in the religiously diversified world of first-century Judaism—he could have joined the Pharisees, for example, or moved to Jerusalem to focus on the worship in the temple, or joined up with some other religious leader. But he chose to associate with an apocalyptic preacher of coming destruction. It must have been because he agreed with his message. Jesus started out his ministry as an apocalypticist.
But the key to this particular argument is that the aftermath of Jesus’s ministry was also apocalyptic in its orientation. What happened immediately after Jesus’s life? The Christian church started. His disciples started converting people to believe in him. And what did these early Christians believe? All of our evidence suggests that they too were apocalypticists. They thought that Jesus was soon to return from heaven in judgment on the earth. Our earliest Christian author, as I’ve pointed out, was Paul. He was thoroughly entrenched in apocalyptic thinking. He was so sure that the end was coming soon that he thought he himself would be alive when judgment day arrived (thus 1 Thess. 4:17; 1 Cor. 15:51–53).
Jesus began his ministry by associating with a fiery apocalyptic preacher, and in the wake of his death enthusiastically apocalyptic communities of followers emerged. The beginning was apocalyptic and the end was apocalyptic. How could the middle not be? If only the beginning were apocalyptic, one could argue that Jesus shifted away from John the Baptist’s apocalyptic message—which is why his followers did not subscribe to an apocalyptic view. But they did subscribe to such a view, so that doesn’t work. Or if only the end were apocalyptic, one could argue that Jesus himself did not hold such views but that his followers came to subscribe to them afterward, and so they read their views back onto his life. But in fact the beginning of Jesus’s ministry was heavily apocalyptic, so that doesn’t work either. Since Jesus associated with the Baptist at the beginning of his ministry and since apocalyptic communities sprang up in the wake of his ministry, the ministry itself must have been characterized by an apocalyptic proclamation of the imminent arrival of the Son of Man, who would judge the earth and bring in God’s good kingdom.
Who Did Jesus Think He Was?
THROUGHOUT THIS DISCUSSION I have been focusing on the character of Jesus’s message. I do not, by any stretch of the imagination, want to suggest that his message was all that mattered to the historical Jesus or all that matters to scholars trying to understand his life. But one could argue that the various deeds that Jesus is known to have performed, the various controversies that he was involved with, the various events that led up to his death—all of them make sense within an apocalyptic framework in particular, as fuller studies have shown.8 My interest in this book, however, is on a theological/religious question of how (and when) Jesus came to be thought of as God. And my argument is that this is not what Jesus himself spent his days teaching and preaching during his public ministry. Quite the contrary, the burden of his message was an apocalyptic proclamation of coming destruction and salvation: he declared that the Son of Man would be coming on the clouds of heaven, very soon, in judgment on the earth, and people needed to prepare for this cataclysmic break in history, as a new kingdom would arrive in which the righteous would be vindicated and rewarded for remaining true to God and doing what God wanted them to do, even when it led to suffering.
But what about Jesus, the messenger himself? What was his role in that coming kingdom? The way I want to begin reflecting on this question is by considering what we know about what Jesus’s earliest followers said about him.
The single most common descriptive title that was applied to Jesus in the early years of the Christian movement was the term Christ. Sometimes I have to tell my students that Christ was not Jesus’s last name. Most people at the time Jesus lived, apart from the upper-crust Roman elite, did not have last names, so he was not Jesus Christ, born to Joseph and Mary Christ. Christ is a title and is, in fact, the Greek translation of the Hebrew word for messiah. Saying Jesus Christ means saying Jesus is the messiah.
There are reasons for thinking that some of Jesus’s followers thought of him as the messiah during his lifetime, not simply afterward. And there are further reasons for thinking that Jesus himself said he was the messiah. But to get to these reasons, we first have to examine briefly what the term messiah meant to first-century Palestinian Jews.
The Jewish Messiah
We know from various Jewish writings of a number of ways the term messiah could be understood.9 To begin with, I should stress what I mentioned: the word messiah in Hebrew means “one who is anointed.” And anointed in this context always means something like “chosen and specially honored by God.” It usually carries with it the connotation “in order to fulfill God’s purposes and mediate his will on earth.” As we have seen, 1 Enoch speaks of the Son of Man as the anointed one. This is a somewhat unusual interpretation of the term, in that it applies to the future cosmic judge of the earth; but it makes sense that some Jews would interpret it in this way. Who better could be described as God’s special chosen one than that divine, possibly angelic being who would come to destroy the forces of evil and to set up God’s kingdom? From 1 Enoch we know that some Jews clearly did think of this future judge—whether he was called the Son of Man or something else—as God’s messiah.
More commonly, though, the term was used to refer not to a divine angelic being, but to a human being. We know from the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, that some Jews—especially those deeply committed to the ritual laws given in the Torah—had the idea that a future ruler of Israel would be a great and powerful priest; in the Dead Sea Scrolls this priestly ruler is understood to be a messiah. He would be anointed by God and would be an authoritative interpreter of scripture who would rule the people by explaining to them God’s laws and enforcing them as need be. This priestly interpretation of the term messiah also makes sense because in the Hebrew Bible priests were sometimes said to be anointed by God.
But a much more common understanding of the term did not involve an angelic judge of the earth or an authoritative priest, but a different kind of ruler. Again, as we have already seen: it was the king of Israel who was understood to be God’s “anointed one” par excellence. Saul was made the first king of Israel through a ritual ceremony of anointing (1 Sam. 10:1). So too the second king, the great David (1 Sam. 16:13). And so too the successors in his family line.
The key to this most widespread understanding of “messiah” is the promise that God is said to have made to David in 2 Samuel 7, as discussed earlier: he promised that he would “be a father” to the son of David, Solomon. In that sense, the king was the “son of God.” But a second thing God promised is just as significant, as he tells David: “Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me; your throne shall be established forever” (2 Sam. 7:16). This is about as plain as God could make it. David would always have a descendant on the throne. God promised.