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Lesser Puzzles of Jesus’s Ministry 2

Father And Son
Links with Ecclesiasticus
Adoptionism

Abstract

Were the disciples of Jesus fishermen or were they appointed by him as fishers of men? The gospel explicitly says, “I will make you fishers of men”. It is code. The disciples were never fishermen but all were fishers of men whatever their jobs beforehand. Evidence that Jesus was homosexual, like the evidence for his being married, is circumstantial. Nazarenes were converts to Essenism mainly from apostasy, and might normally have become village Essenes. They accepted Essene teaching, but were not willing to put up with the hard celibate and monastic regime of the devout Essene leader. Pious Essene leaders like Jesus could not indulge in heterosexual activity, something impure given by God as a punishment. Homosexuality did not lead to procreation. Jesus’s circumstances as an Essene fit better with his being homosexual than with his being married. If he were one of the village Essenes that did marry, then plainly he could have done, but then he could not have been an Essene leader.

Father And Son

The Christian theological idea of the Son of God was initially developed by Paul and the author of John. To the Greeks it denoted a being who was part god, a man with supernatural powers or apparently godlike, notionally the product of an Olympian’s desire for mortal women. But for Jews it signified initially the people of Israel in general (Exodus 4:12, Hos 11:1)—all of the Chosen People were sons or daughters, that is, children of God.

More especially a son of God to the Jews was a saviour king (2 Sam 7:13) of the seed of David and therefore any king (Ps 2:6-7) or leader, like a priest appointed by God because God’s will might be that they should become great. But did Jesus think of himself as having a divine relationship with God as His son conferring on him the qualities of a god?

He habitually spoke of God as my father and elsewhere we have argued that the robber who was said to have been exchanged for Jesus in the four gospels was really Jesus himself, necessarily distinguished falsely from Barabbas, literally the Father’s son, because the church was desperate to prevent anyone from knowing that Jesus was a robber, a robber in the gospels not simply meaning a thief but a rebel.

Christians argue that he did think of himself as the son and cite the parable of the wicked husbandmen as evidence. Now plainly Jesus was referring to himself in his role of saviour king in this parable because he was justifying his kingly act of clearing out the wicked priests, the husbandmen, from ruling Israel, the vinyard. But it does not signify that Jesus thought of himself as a god or demi-god.

The particular evidence favoured by Christians is Matthew 11:25-27 paralleled in Luke 10:21-22. The passage is poetic and has the style of an Essene thanksgiving hymn with its intimation of hidden things which are revealed. For the Christians’ idea of filial consciousness the important stanzas are:

All things have been delivered unto me of my father;
And no one understands the Son, save the Father;
Neither does any know the Father, save the Son;
And he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him.

The special understanding of the Father and Son pair is evident. The manuscript confirmation of these passages is almost unanimous and the close verbal agreement between Matthew and Luke is also taken to indicate that the passage is reliable. However the only early manuscript which differs does so in a remarkable way: it omits the Father understanding the Son, and quotations of the passage in early polemics suggests that the poem was not as polished as it now appears. The Son’s knowledge of the Father is often quoted before the Father’s knowledge of the Son. The inference is that the Son’s knowledge of the Father was added as a gloss.

All things have been delivered unto me of my father;
And no one understands the Father, save the Son;
And he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him.

The sense of the poem supports this idea in that it is thanking God and therefore concerned with human understanding of the Absolute and not with the Absolute understanding man, however exalted. Furthermore there are grammatical reasons why the two phrases cannot be used as they are. The conclusion is that this is not a didactic point of self revelation but a simple song of praise to God for some important success.

The earlier verse refers to babes meaning simple folk, certainly those called, by the Essenes, the simple of Ephraim. It must be a prayer of thanks on an occasion when many people converted or when the converts achieved a great success. However, telling against this is that the whole hangs together as a typically Jewish poem in which rhymes are replaced by repetition of elements in different words and poetic parallels and contrasts.

Links with Ecclesiasticus

In fact, the form of the whole passage in Matthew is that of Chapter 51 of Ecclesiasticus, an apocryphal book. It could almost be a much shortened and reworked version of the same. Some of the wording is almost identical.

Draw unto me, ye unlearned.
Ecclesiasticus 51:23

Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden.
Mt 11:28

Put your neck under the yoke and let your soul bear the burden.
Ecclesiasticus 51:26

Take my yoke upon you and learn of me…
Mt 11:29

Behold with your eyes how I laboured but a little and found for myself much rest.
Ecclesiasticus 51:27

For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
Mt 11:30

For I am meek and lowly in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls.
Mt 11:29

At the end, the mention of ”soul” in Matthew and ”myself” in Ecclesiasticus draws the identity closer because they are the same word in Hebrew as any educated Jews would have known. Of course, it could still have been Jesus who did the revising of Ecclesiasticus but it suggests that there might have been a tradition in which God was thanked for revealing a mystery and men were urged to learn from it.

Similar stanzas occur in the Hermetica though with the revelation appearing first. In fact the ”these things” of verse 25 refer to nothing that we have been told about and might indicate that the revelations of verse 27 are misplaced. Furthermore since the urge to unburden of verses 28-30 are absent from Luke, the original threefold nature of Matthew’s poem night not have held in Q.

Overall the evidence that the origin of the piece in Matthew is Essene is reasonably strong but verse 27 still looks odd, seemingly more appropriate to John’s gospel than Matthew’s. The solution might have been given by J Weiss who felt it signified the moment when Jesus had the revelation that God had destined him to be the messiah and he gave thanks.

In our terms, Jesus had hitherto not been well received but then he had this flash of insight that he had to take on the full role of the messiah and lead the people against their traditional enemy, without having to win over all of the simple of Ephraim. The simple would rally to him in the course of the struggle, but meanwhile the secret was for only the few to whom he revealed it, the band of Nazarenes who remained loyal.

But Jesus says:

Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy laden.

Who are they but the put upon Children of Israel hoping to have the yoke of oppression lifted from them? The parallels of 27 have to be reversed for this to make sense. Jesus as the Son of God knows he is the champion of the poor and the burdened.

In Matthew, it is placed after the return of the disciples with the news that many towns had rejected them, leading to the woes of Jesus on those towns, and also the rebuke of the generation which had rejected John the Baptist and Jesus. It therefore seems out of context but Matthew might have regarded this as another poetic contrast to emphasise that the rejection led to Jesus’s inspiration.

An interesting point is that it implies that the wise did not understand this. The wise might have meant the Essenes and the passage suggests that by taking on the role of messiah before the mass of the people had rallied to the cause, he had been rejected by the Essene leadership, or some of them.

If Matthew 11:27, stems from genuine Nazarene tradition it is odd that it did not seem to influence the early church. It seems that the importance of sonship had to wait for the gospel of John to really catch on. Since it became such an important aspect of Christianity, it seems odd that it was not considered important at first, especially since it was supposed to have been uttered by Jesus himself.

The reason might be that it was not really part of the document Q but was something imported into both Matthew and Luke at a later date. However it seems to be genuinely Jewish tradition and not a Greek import.

The Wisdom literature plainly influenced the passage and the whole concept of knowing God is important to the later prophets (Jer 31:34; Hos 4:1, 6:4) and the reason is that they are the Chosen People, the only people God has known of all the people on earth (Amos 3:2). Furthermore Matthew was at pains to make his prophet the equal of the first prophet Moses, and Moses the Lord knew face to face (Dt 34:10).

Adoptionism

Some Christians argue that the gentile Christians, unfamiliar with the Jewish notion of the Son of God as a reverent title for a human king or priest, would have believed from the outset that the Son of God was a supernatural being, at least partly a god from the outset, but not a mere man. Reverend A E J Rawlinson (The New Testament Doctrine of the Christ) says the apostles had to work out the incarnationist theology which ”alone was capable of providing an adequate interpretation of the meaning of Christianity” and therefore prevailed—quite honest stuff for a Christian scholar.

Evangelists like Mark certainly relied on the Greek concept of a Son of God as a divine or semi-divine being but the Greeks were also familiar with apotheosis as Rawlinson concedes. The idea of a man becoming a god was familiar and reasonable to the Greek mind, and so this was easily understood in its day—an exceptionally good man could become a god. It fitted the synoptic gospel accounts and John’s gospel was not yet widely accepted.

Those who believed in Christ’s apotheosis—Jesus was a man who became a god—were believers in ”Adoptionism,” a heresy current in Rome at the end of the second century. Though miraculously born of a virgin, Christ was a man, Jesus, elevated by the Holy Ghost of God at his baptism, after proving himself throughout a pious life, and at his death raised from the dead and taken into God’s presence.

Eusebius tells us the Adoptionists claimed that theirs was the original teaching of the apostles and had been the accepted teaching in Rome, but by the time of Pope Victor (190-198 AD) the church was ready to excommunicate the leader of the Adoptionists, Theodotus of Byzantium.

The Christology of the Shepherd of Hermas is thought by many scholars to be mainly Adoptionist, and some believe that Romans, Hebrews, 1 Peter, 1 Clement and Mark’s gospel are all Adoptionist in outlook. Jesus was the divine messenger of God (Mal 3:1) chosen and appointed as a man in whom the spirit of God could dwell to appoint the apostles as the foundation of the church.

Scholars accept that Adoptionism was the idea originally held in respect of the Sonship of God. Paul in Romans 1:4 says that the resurrection was proof of Jesus’s Sonship but in Acts 13:23-25 he traces Jesus’s appointment by God to John the Baptist. In the most ancient tradition of Christianity, Jesus was adopted as the Son of God at Jesus’s baptism when the voice from heaven declares him to be the Son (Mk 1:11) and the spirit descended upon him.

In Luke 3:22, the phrase ”in thee I am well pleased” is really a deliberate corruption of ”I have begotten thee this day” the original adoption formula from Psalm 2:7. Subsequently the church carried back the holy appointment to the actual birth rather than the ritual rebirth and then to the beginning of time when Jesus as the Word pre-existed at the creation.

Plainly the earliest tradition was that Jesus was made the Son at his baptism. As an Essene prince, he was! The baptism was an Essene ceremony. Initially, therefore, Jesus was regarded as a man—a special man certainly, but nevertheless a man. His followers were Jews though many had been Hellenised. When he seemed to be the first of the resurrected, he was considered to have been enthroned with God according to Jewish tradition. Thus he seemed to Hellenised Jews to have undergone apotheosis.

Among the gentiles both those who accepted the idea from the Hellenised Jews that Jesus had been made a god and the idea that he was always a god held sway among different sections. Ultimately the church preferred the idea that Jesus was God and declared Adoptionism, which reflects the truth of history, a heresy.

Truthfully, it is doubtful that the first missionaries to the gentiles were that bothered precisely how their converts regarded these mysteries. After all clergymen do not pay much attention to how the faithful think of Christ today as long as the offerings continue to come in.