Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

I am certainly aware that the theologians of the early church brought the Jesus tradition up to date and interpreted it in terms of their own historical situation. I am also aware, of course, that the gospels (like the traditions that preceded them) spoke of Jesus from very different perspectives. But in doing so they were not falsifying Jesus; they were formulating the unfathomable mystery of his life in deeper and deeper ways. It is, in fact, just this fruitful tension between the oldest layers of interpretation in the gospel tradition and newer layers that were added later that makes it possible for us really to understand Jesus.

To mention another example besides the interpretation of the “day in Capernaum,” we find in John’s gospel, clearly the latest of the four, a passage in which Jesus says to Philip, “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?” (John 14:9-10). Jesus certainly never talked like that. This is meditative reflection on a claim that is present in Jesus constantly and wherever anything is said about him, though in other rhetorical genres and forms of discourse, but much more reservedly. And yet the language of the Johannine Jesus touches precisely what Jesus was. The two levels of tradition, the Synoptic and the Johannine, must not be set off against one another. We must not make the oldest interpretation a monopoly, because it is only the whole body of layers of interpretation that, in their unity, bring out the picture of the real Jesus.

In this book the weight will certainly lie on the oldest texts, that is, the oldest layers of meaning available to us. I will not explicate the Christology of the Gospel of John, but I will attempt to extract Jesus’ claim and (to a degree) his self-understanding from the earliest possible texts. But this is not done against later Christologies; it is done with them and under their guidance. I am writing not as a student of religions but as a theologian. Nor am I putting up an “iron curtain” with watchtowers and barbed wire between words of Jesus that are certainly authentic and others whose authenticity cannot be demonstrated with the same assurance. Such drawing of boundaries, which is carried out among biblical scholars with an immense expenditure of intelligence and acuity, have a little whiff of silliness. Anyone who has thought about the oscillation between “fact and interpretation” can understand why in this book I will not constantly ask, to the point of exhaustion, whether Jesus really uttered a particular saying in precisely this form.

Pope Benedict XVI once summarized my concerns in this first chapter as follows: The Jesus of the gospels is “the only real historical Jesus.”¹²

Chapter 2

The Proclamation of the Reign of God

If we want to talk about Jesus—what he wanted, and who he was—we must speak first and above all about the reign of God. The expression “reign of God” is less familiar than “kingdom of God,” the phrase used most commonly in biblical translations, including the New Revised Standard Version. Martin Luther, in his epochal translation of the Bible into German in 1545, rendered the corresponding Greek expression as “kingdom of God [Gottesreich],” and that has remained the usual reading.

But, without making a rigid principle of it, we should prefer the translation “reign of God,” or “rule of God,” not only because the Nazis talked about a “Reich/kingdom” whenever occasion offered, so that in German-speaking countries the word still arouses a certain disgust in many people, but above all because “reign” or “rule” better reflects the underlying biblical concept.

A Little Bit of Philology

Where we speak of “kingdom” or “reign” (German translations use “Reich” and French ones “royaume”), the Greek has basileia. This refers primarily to the status of a king, the king’s power, the king’s rule, and, by derivation then, the spatial realm within which the king reigns. In Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke every day, the Greek basileia reflects the word malkuta. And malkuta is first of all the “king’s rule or reign,” and only secondarily the extent of the king’s rule or a particular territory.

With Jesus the concept of “reign of God” has something utterly dynamic about it. The reign of God has an event-character. It is something that happens. It “comes” or “is coming.” For that reason also we should prefer the concept of the “reign of God.” But obviously the notion “kingdom of God” also reflects a certain aspect of the event, namely the realm within which God is establishing his rule. One can “go into” the basileia or “enter into” it (cf., e.g., Mark 9:47; 10:15).