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Much is made, in this argument, of the climax in Mark when the high priest asks Jesus, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?” Jesus replies in the affirmative but immediately, as it were, corrects the high priest’s title mistake: “And Jesus said, ‘I am; and you will see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.’ ”8 When, in the Gospel of Luke, the interrogator puts to Jesus the question “Are you the Son of God, then?” he pointedly refuses to accept the title, replying instead, “You say that I am.”9
As the Jesus movement spread across the Mediterranean region in its first decades, so the reasoning goes, the relatively narrow worldview of the Palestinian villagers, and even of the Jerusalem urbanites who first embraced the movement, was challenged and expanded by encounters with Greek thought, which had strongly influenced Diaspora Judaism. This so-called Hellenization was especially important as ideas about Jesus developed, with the introduction of Greek philosophical categories infused with God talk and divinity claims. High Christology was the native language of the Hellenized Jesus movement.
We will presently look more closely at the question of whether these sharp distinctions between “Hebrew” and “Greek” classifications do justice to ancient understandings: what did Jews and Greeks actually mean by “God” anyway? The point for us here is to note how a contemporary near consensus has developed among Jesus experts that ideas about Jesus underwent a more radical shift the farther they traveled from Palestine.
Historical Jesus scholars show how a Galilean Jew, with his followers on the move, morphed into a supra-historical cosmic figure more at home in a Greek milieu than a Hebrew one. Metaphysics trumped metaphor, and soon enough the human Jesus was lost in the divine Savior. Jews and Christians, who disagreed about so much else, agreed from then on that high Christology—Christ is God—destroyed any tie to the Jewishness of “Jesus Christ.” Jews derided “Christ” as idolatry, while Christians celebrated “Christ’s” distance from Judaism. In subsequent Christological debates across the centuries, Christian heresies that denied or subordinated Jesus’ true human nature were condemned, but thrived anyway. High Christology went through the ecclesial roof. In the Christian imagination, from early on right down to today, the divine Jesus is definitively understood, as I described earlier by means of quickened model birds, to have been a pretend human being.10
Thus, whatever one made of Jesus of Nazareth, “Christ” could not be Jewish,11 and the Incarnation-proclaiming Jesus movement was necessarily cut off from what remained of “Israel” just at the point—the war in 70—when Judaism had to find a new self-understanding. Much emphasis is given, in this line of reasoning, to the fact that in the New Testament, the “highest” Christology—that dual equation of “the Word” with Jesus and with God—comes in the latest book, the Gospel of John, dated to after 100.
Indeed, the idea itself of “Word,” from the Hellenized Logos, is a name for the divine first used by Heraclitus (535–475 B.C.E.), and then by the Stoics, and as such is taken to be far removed from any Hebrew reference. Never mind that throughout the Mediterranean world before and after the time of Jesus, Hellenized Jews accustomed to think in Greek categories readily applied them to their own texts. To take only one example, the great Jewish sage of Alexandria, Philo (30 B.C.E.–50 C.E.), whose lifetime overlapped with both Jesus and Paul, elaborated a doctrine of the Logos as a “second God,” which might have been controversial, or even meaningless, to illiterate rural Jews of Galilee or their rabbis. Philo’s Logos nevertheless found a secure place in the intellectual history of Diaspora Judaism.12
The ancient world is a foreign country, as L. P. Hartley reminds us; they did things—and, I would add, they thought—differently there. Very differently, and nothing makes the point more powerfully than the question of the “divinity” of Jesus. If that was the blade that cut Jews off from Christians, removing Jesus from his own people once he was proclaimed as godly “Christ,” it makes sense to start with this larger question of ancient understandings. And the best figure with whom to begin that inquiry is, indeed, the Hellenized Philo.
Those who assume a sharp division between Hebrew categories (the Yahweh of Moses) and Greek (the unmoved mover of Aristotle) ignore that vast population of ancient Jews, perhaps a majority, living in Palestine as well as in the Diaspora, who were, in fact, thoroughly Hellenized. Also missing from such analysis is that sizable population of Gentiles who associated with Jews and Jewish cult, as admirers and even devotees—the “proselytes” and “God fearers.”13 The single largest obstacle to our authentic reimagining of Jesus Christ is the inability of contemporary thinkers to be at home in the truly foreign landscape of the ancient intellect—Greek and Hebrew, but also Babylonian, Egyptian, Sumerian, Canaanite, and the general intermingling of all these. Biblical and other sacred texts reflect such multiple influences to varying degrees—and can therefore never be fully understood by readers today as they were understood by those who wrote them, first read them, or heard them proclaimed.
In general, the ancients saw a three-tiered universe: Earth bracketed by the dome-like firmament of the stars above and the unplumbed underworld below. Some saw in the blue of the sky a signal of a vast overhead ocean. Earth was broadly taken to be flat, with four corners. Unseen worlds had as much reality as the seen. The native language of ancient cosmology was myth; its diction was metaphor. Yet moderns make a mistake by dismissing the long-ago-conjured images of space, time, origins, personified forces, and fate as mere naïveté. An assumption of the superiority of our more critically considered worldview may lead us to miss the ingenious character of the old imaginings as sensitive penetrations to an impressive depth of the perennial mysteries of existence.
Having insisted that the past is different, however, one must equally reckon with the way in which humans are united across eras and cultures. The sublimity of the cosmos, perceived with the naked eye or through the Hubble telescope, generates responses in mind and heart that in one place and time can give rise to religion, and in others can give rise to a secular sense of transcendent value that, while making no reference to a deity, still reaches toward what can only be called, despite itself, the supernatural. This is true of the beautiful and of the horrible—the glorious sunset and the devastating earthquake; good and evil. There is nature, and there is what is beyond nature. “To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists,” the atheist Albert Einstein wrote, “manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness.”14
The point is that, compared with the impenetrables in the universe that generate awe and stir moral feeling, all human faculties are dull—whether ancient or contemporary, credulous or atheist, religious or scientific. If the creation myths, three-tiered cosmologies, and sky-god faiths of long ago—including the biblical—are now taken to be “primitive forms,” so are the myths, cosmologies, and faiths of a metaphysics that reduces everything to the “facts” of, well, physics. “It was Einstein’s faith that some transcendental and objective value permeates the universe,” as the scholar Ronald Dworkin commented, “value that is neither a natural phenomenon nor a subjective reaction to natural phenomena.”15
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