Justified True Belief

(●) A village craftsman from Galilee who claimed the authority of God, was executed by Rome, and whose followers said three days later that they had seen him alive. + He held no office and commanded no troops. He never wrote a book, never in his adult life travelled much more than a hundred miles from the village he grew up in, and was dead by his middle thirties, killed by a method Rome kept for slaves, rebels and provincials. Measured by the things that usually made a man famous in the ancient world, he should have left no trace at all. Within thirty years of his execution there were assemblies of his followers in cities across the eastern empire and in Rome itself, and within three centuries the emperor of Rome was a Christian. What he said about himself is the reason. A first-century Jew who forgave sins committed against other people, who told a paralyzed man to pick up his mat and walk as proof that he could, who said the Sabbath answered to him, and who met the high priest’s question about the Son of the Blessed One with "I am," was not offering a gentle ethic that a listener could take or leave. His neighbors understood him well enough to reach for stones, and said why: "for blasphemy, because you, being a man, make yourself God" (John 10:31–33). The compliment usually paid him, that he was a fine moral teacher and nothing further, is the one description of him the sources do not leave open. Rome killed him for it, and his followers scattered. Within weeks the same men were standing in Jerusalem, a short walk from the tomb, telling the city that God had raised him and that they had eaten with him afterward, and they went on saying it when it cost them their standing, their livelihoods and, for several of them, their lives. Everything that came after runs back to that claim. A crucified teacher explains a memory. A crucified teacher his followers were convinced was alive explains a church. Nothing survives in his own hand. The one time a Gospel shows him writing, he is stooping in a temple courtyard, tracing something in the dust with his finger, and nobody thought to record what it said (John 8:6, in a passage the oldest manuscripts of John do not carry). Everything known about him comes through other people: four Gospels, all written inside about seventy years of the events, letters of Paul that are earlier still, and outsiders who had no reason to be kind, among them the Roman senator Tacitus, the Jewish historian Josephus, a provincial governor writing to his emperor, and the rabbis. Historians who hold none of the theology, and some who are hostile to all of it, generally grant the same short outline. He lived, he was baptized by John, he taught and healed in Galilee, he was crucified in Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate, and his followers were shortly convinced they had seen him alive.

(●) c. 6–4 BC: Born in Bethlehem in the last years of Herod the Great. + Matthew and Luke both place the birth in Bethlehem, a village about six miles south of Jerusalem, while Herod the Great was still on the throne. Herod died in 4 BC on the reckoning nearly every historian follows, though a minority argue for 1 BC, and that is why the birth is normally written as 6 to 4 BC rather than the year the calendar suggests. Herod is worth knowing, because he is the weather of the nativity. He was a client king, which meant that he wore a crown and kept it for exactly as long as Rome was pleased with him. He was also a builder of genius, who doubled the size of the temple platform in Jerusalem, and a man so afraid of rivals that he executed his favorite wife and three of his own sons. The Roman writer Macrobius, around 400 AD, passed on a joke he credits to the emperor Augustus, that it is better to be Herod’s pig than Herod’s son. It reaches us four centuries after the fact and may well be invention, but it tells you what the ancient world remembered about the man. Matthew’s account of Herod killing the boys of Bethlehem is recorded nowhere else, and in a hamlet that size the number of victims would have been small enough for a chronicler to pass over, but it is entirely in character. The two birth accounts have less in common than most readers expect. Nearly all of us met them blended together, in a school pageant where the shepherds and the magi arrive in the same scene, and the blending hides how differently Matthew and Luke actually tell it. Where the two do touch, though, they touch at the load-bearing points: Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph, the virgin conception, and Herod. Luke alone dates the journey to a registration under Quirinius (Luke 2:2), and this is the hardest historical knot in the Gospels, because Josephus places a census under Quirinius in 6 AD, roughly a decade too late. The proposed solutions run from a different reading of Luke’s Greek (a registration before the one Quirinius conducted) to an earlier enrolment otherwise unrecorded, and honest scholarship has not settled it. Matthew alone tells of the magi, the star, and the flight into Egypt. Magi were star-watchers from somewhere east of Judea, men who read the sky for meaning; Matthew neither calls them kings nor says how many there were, and the Christmas card has done the rest.

(●) c. 4 BC – 28 AD: He grew up in Nazareth as a builder’s son, and almost nothing of those thirty years was written down. + Nazareth was a hamlet in the hills of lower Galilee, two to four hundred people on the usual estimates, though recent excavation there argues for a somewhat larger village. It is not named in the Old Testament, not named by Josephus, who knew Galilee well and listed its towns, and not named in the Talmud. When one of the first disciples hears where the new teacher is from, his reaction is a small masterpiece of regional snobbery: "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" (John 1:46). It is roughly what a modern reader might say about a crossroads with one gas station. Mark calls him a tekton and Matthew calls him "the carpenter" (Mark 6:3; Matthew 13:55). Tekton is the Greek word for a builder who works in wood and stone, closer to a general contractor than to a maker of fine furniture, and in a village of that size the work would have been roof beams, door frames, yokes and plows. Four miles up the road the city of Sepphoris was being rebuilt through the whole of his youth, and it is a reasonable guess, and no more than a guess, that a Nazareth builder and his sons found work there. Mark also names four brothers, James, Joses, Judas and Simon, and mentions sisters (Mark 6:3). Christians have long read that verse differently: as children born to Mary and Joseph after the birth of Jesus, as children of Joseph by an earlier marriage, or as cousins, and the three readings map roughly onto the Protestant, Eastern and Roman traditions. The Gospels themselves show no interest in settling it. They preserve exactly one story from those thirty years. At twelve he stayed behind in the temple after Passover, deep in discussion with the teachers, and his parents were a full day’s travel down the road before they realized he was not somewhere in the caravan (Luke 2:41–52). Joseph is never mentioned as living during the public ministry, and the usual inference is that he died before it began.

(●) c. 28–29 AD: John baptized him in the Jordan, and the public life began. + Luke dates the beginning the way a Roman historian would, by stacking up the officials in office: "in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee" (Luke 3:1). That puts it around 28 or 29 AD. The Herod in that list is not the Herod of the nativity. He is one of that man’s sons, Antipas, who inherited a slice of his father’s territory and governed it as tetrarch, a title that literally means ruler of a quarter. The name comes back a third time, later, for a grandson. Keeping the Herods apart is half the work of reading the period, and the short version is this: the grandfather is the king of the birth stories, the son is the man who executed John and questioned Jesus, and the grandson is the one who executed an apostle. John the Baptist was a desert preacher in camel hair who lived on locusts and wild honey and called the crowds out to the Jordan for a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. He is not only a figure of Christian memory. Josephus describes him independently, along with his execution by Herod Antipas at the desert fortress of Machaerus, and thought well enough of him to call him a good man who urged the Jews to justice and piety (Antiquities 18.116–119). The two accounts do not line up at every point, and the differences should not be papered over. Josephus has Herod acting from fear that John’s hold on the crowds would end in a revolt, and describes the washing as a purification of the body for people already made righteous, rather than as a remission of sins. That Jesus submitted to John’s baptism is one of the least disputed facts about him, and the reason is instructive. It is awkward for the people telling the story. A man his followers called sinless is undergoing a washing meant for sinners, at the hands of a preacher he is supposed to outrank, and Matthew writes the awkwardness down rather than smoothing it away, with John protesting that he has it backwards and needs to be baptized by Jesus instead (Matthew 3:14). Nobody inventing a hero writes that scene. Historians call this the criterion of embarrassment: when a source preserves a detail that works against its own interest, the best explanation is usually that the detail was too well known to leave out. What followed, all three of the first Gospels agree, was a stretch of days alone in the Judean wilderness. Mark says only that he was there forty days and was tempted; Matthew and Luke give the scene, hungry at the end of it, and three temptations he answered every time by quoting Deuteronomy. From here to the crucifixion the ministry is usually reckoned at about three years, because John’s Gospel counts three Passovers in it. The first three Gospels on their own would allow a shorter run, and the length is one of the open questions.

(●) c. 28–30 AD: He gathered twelve, and Galilee filled with reports of healings. + He made his base at Capernaum, a fishing town on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee, which is not a sea at all but a freshwater lake about thirteen miles long. From there he worked a circuit of villages. On the Sabbath, the seventh-day rest, he taught in the synagogue, which was the meeting house where a village gathered to hear its Scriptures read aloud and argued over. The rest of the week he taught wherever people would stand still: a hillside, a courtyard, once a boat pushed out a little way from the shore so that the crowd on the beach could hear him (Mark 4:1). He chose twelve men, and the number was the message. Israel had twelve tribes, and a Jewish teacher who appoints twelve is not assembling a study group, he is announcing that the nation is being restarted. The roster is not what a movement would have designed for itself. Four were fishermen. One, Matthew, collected taxes for the occupying power, which made him a traitor in the eyes of his neighbors. Another, Simon, carries the byname the Zealot. The organized party of that name belongs to the revolt a generation later, so the word here most likely marks a temperament: a burning zeal for the law and for an Israel free of Rome, which is an outlook with no room in it at all for Matthew. One of the twelve betrayed him, and the Gospels name him every time the list is given. A group of women travelled with the company and paid its bills, and Luke names them: Mary Magdalene, Joanna the wife of Herod’s household manager, Susanna, "and many others, who provided for them out of their means" (Luke 8:1–3). In a society where a woman’s testimony carried little weight in a court, this is not a detail a storyteller adds to make the account more impressive. He taught in parables, short stories about seed and debts and lost animals that a farmer could carry home in his head and that stubbornly refuse to reduce to a slogan. And he healed, and cast out what the Gospels call unclean spirits, and the reports ran ahead of him. Even his opponents worked from the assumption that something was happening. In Mark 3:22 the scribes from Jerusalem do not say he is a fraud; they say he casts out demons by the prince of demons, which is an accusation that concedes the exorcisms and disputes only the source. Centuries later the rabbinic tradition took the same line, calling him a sorcerer.

(●) c. 30 AD: He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey and cleared the traders out of the temple courts. + Going there was a decision before it was a journey, and Luke marks it with a verb that reads less like an itinerary than like a man squaring his shoulders: "He set his face to go to Jerusalem" (Luke 9:51), where the Greek says literally that he set his face. He arrived for Passover, the spring feast at which Israel remembered being brought out of slavery in Egypt, and the one week of the year when the city swelled several times over with pilgrims and the Roman governor moved extra troops up from his seat at Caesarea to watch the crowds. A festival about a nation walking out of an empire, kept under the eye of an empire, is a combustible thing. Jerusalem at Passover was a city in which the authorities, Jewish and Roman alike, were watching for exactly the kind of man who was coming. He came in on a borrowed donkey while people threw their cloaks in the road, and the animal was not an accident of transport. The prophet Zechariah had promised a king arriving "humble and mounted on a donkey" (Zechariah 9:9), and the people lining that road knew the verse. It was a claim made in gesture rather than in words, which is part of why nobody could arrest him for it. Then he walked into the outer temple courts and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of the men selling pigeons (Mark 11:15–17). What he interrupted matters. Pilgrims arriving with Roman and Greek coinage, which carried images and imperial titles, had to exchange it for acceptable currency to pay the temple tax, and those who had travelled far bought their sacrificial animals on site rather than driving them for a week. The temple was the financial center of the nation as well as the house of its worship. Disrupting its commerce in Passover week, in front of the pilgrims, turned a theological quarrel into an administrative problem. Mark records the leaders’ decision immediately afterward: they began looking for a way to destroy him (Mark 11:18).

(●) c. 30 AD: Rome crucified him outside the city wall on the Friday of Passover. + He was arrested at night in an olive grove across the valley, after a Passover supper with the twelve at which he handed them bread and a cup and told them to keep doing it. He was taken first before the high priest Caiaphas and the ruling council, who asked him whether he was the Christ. Christ is not a surname. It is the Greek for anointed one, the same word as the Hebrew Messiah, and it named the king God had promised Israel and Israel was still waiting for. Rome had no interest in anointing. Rome heard king, and in a Roman province a second king is a rebel, so that is the charge that went down the hill to Pontius Pilate. Pilate was the prefect, the officer who governed Judea for the emperor, and he held the one power the council did not: he could have a man put to death. Both Caiaphas and Pilate have left physical traces in the ground. In 1961 archaeologists at Caesarea Maritima turned up a reused limestone block carrying Pilate’s name and his title, prefect of Judea. In 1990 a burial cave south of Jerusalem yielded an ornate ossuary, one of the limestone boxes in which Jewish families collected the bones of their dead, inscribed with the name of Caiaphas. Two names from the passion narratives, recovered from the dirt within thirty years of each other. Crucifixion was not designed to kill efficiently. Rome used it on slaves, rebels and provincials, always in public and often beside a road, precisely because the dying was slow and the shame total; the condemned man was stripped, and the placard naming his crime hung where the traffic could read it. Cicero, no sentimentalist, called it the most cruel and revolting of penalties (Against Verres 2.5.165), and in another speech asked that the very name of the cross be kept far from the thoughts and the eyes and the ears of Roman citizens (For Rabirius 16). Jesus was flogged, made to carry the crossbeam out to a place called Golgotha, and nailed up between two criminals under a placard that read, in three languages, king of the Jews. The disciples ran (Mark 14:50). Two dates fit both the Gospel data and the astronomy, and scholars remain divided between Friday 7 April 30 AD and Friday 3 April 33 AD. So the year is genuinely open. The execution is not, and it is not disputed even by people who dispute everything else about him, because Rome kept its own note of it. Around 116 AD the Roman senator Tacitus, telling how Nero went looking for someone to blame after the fire at Rome, stopped to explain where the name Christian had come from: the founder of the sect had been put to death under Tiberius by Pontius Pilate (Annals 15.44). One detail there is wrong, and instructively so. Tacitus calls Pilate procurator, a title the governors of Judea carried only from the reign of Claudius onward, while the Caesarea stone shows that in Pilate’s own day the title was prefect. He is writing eighty years after the fact and reaching for the title Rome had given governors of Pilate’s rank ever since Claudius, which is an ordinary sort of slip and no reason at all to doubt the notice. And he is nobody’s friend here. He calls the movement a destructive superstition, which is precisely what makes the notice worth having: a man does not invent a founder’s execution in order to flatter a sect he despises.

(●) c. 30 AD: On the third day his followers said the tomb was empty and that they had seen him. + All four Gospels have women arriving at the tomb in the early morning, and all four have women as the first witnesses, which is again the sort of detail a fabricator would have removed rather than invented. The earliest surviving account is not in a Gospel at all. Writing to Corinth in the mid-fifties, Paul quotes a formula in the technical language of handing on a tradition, saying he delivered what he had also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day, and that he appeared to Peter, then to the twelve, then to more than five hundred at once, most of whom were still alive, then to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all to Paul himself (1 Corinthians 15:3–8). Because Paul says he received it, the formula is older than the letter that carries it, and scholars across the spectrum, including plainly skeptical ones, date it very early, within a few years of the crucifixion. Something turned a scattered group of men who had run away into public preachers in the same city, within weeks, in front of the people who had arranged the execution. Their claim was not that his teaching lived on, or that he had somehow survived the cross. It was that a dead man was alive, that they had eaten with him, and that they would go on saying so. Some of them died for saying it, and for a few the reports are early: Acts records the execution of James the son of Zebedee by Herod Agrippa, the grandson of the king in the birth stories, Josephus records the stoning of James the brother of Jesus, and a letter sent from Rome within a lifetime of the events speaks of Peter and Paul dying under persecution. What became of the rest reaches us as later tradition.

What He Taught

(T1) The kingdom of God is breaking into the world now, and not only at the end of time. + Imagine a country under long occupation, where everyone agrees that one day the rightful king will come back and set things right, and where that day is always in the future. People sing about it. Children are taught to expect it. Nobody expects it this Tuesday. That was the setting. "Kingdom of God" in first-century Jewish usage did not mean a place you go when you die. It meant God’s rule finally arriving in force, ending the exile, judging the wicked and restoring Israel, and almost everyone located it at the end of history. What he went from village to village announcing was that the waiting was over, and both Mark and Matthew give that announcement as the sentence he opened with. What made the announcement strange was the tense. He spoke of the kingdom as future, in parables about a harvest still to come, and also as something already breaking in wherever he was working, in the healings and the exorcisms and the meals with people the respectable would not eat beside. Scholars sometimes call this inaugurated eschatology, which is a heavy phrase for a simple picture: the decisive event has happened and the mopping up has not. Spring can arrive in a single afternoon while snow is still on the ground for weeks. He described this kingdom almost entirely in small pictures, and every one of them is out of scale. A mustard seed that becomes a tree. A pinch of yeast that changes a whole batch of dough. A coin lost under the furniture. A treasure buried in a field that a man sells everything to buy. It arrives, in his telling, without armies and mostly without being noticed.

(Q) "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." + Source: Matthew 4:17 (ESV; cf. Mark 1:15). Matthew gives the opening announcement in one sentence, seven words of Greek. Mark reports the same moment with the clause that dates it, that the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near (Mark 1:15). "Kingdom of heaven" is Matthew’s habitual way of writing "kingdom of God," most likely a reverent way of not saying the divine name out loud, and the parallel passages in Mark and Luke show that the two phrases carry the same sense (T1). The word behind "repent" is the verb metanoeo, standing here as a command to a crowd, and it is not first of all an apology but a change of mind deep enough to turn a person around and start him walking the other way.

(Q) "But if I cast out the demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you." + Source: Luke 11:20 (ESV; cf. Matthew 12:28). He is answering the charge that his exorcisms are demonic in origin. His reply is that they are the opposite: they are the first evidence that God’s reign has actually landed. "The finger of God" is a deliberate echo of Exodus 8:19, where Pharaoh’s own magicians use the phrase to admit they are outmatched. The tense is the point. Not will come, but has come upon you (T1).

(T2) God is the father who runs down the road to meet the son who wasted everything. + A younger son asks his father for his inheritance early, which in a village culture is a way of saying he wishes the old man were dead. He gets it, sells it, leaves, and spends the lot. He ends up feeding pigs, which for a Jewish audience is the bottom of the world, and he is hungry enough to envy them. So he rehearses a speech and starts home. The story is Luke 15:11–32, and everything in it turns on what the father does next. He is watching the road. He sees the boy while he is still a long way off, and then he runs, which readers who know that village world take as the shock of the scene, since a man of standing there did not gather up his robes and sprint. He does not let the rehearsed speech finish. He calls for the best robe and a ring and kills the fattened calf. Jesus did not invent the idea that God forgives; Israel had sung about it for centuries. What was new was the initiative and the pace. In his telling God is not waiting at the end of a process of restitution, appeased once enough has been paid back. God is the one moving first, and moving fast, and absorbing the indignity of the running himself. He acted the story out as well as told it, eating with tax collectors and people the town had written off, which is precisely the behavior that set up the parable. Luke says the religious leaders were grumbling that this man receives sinners and eats with them, and the three lost-and-found stories are his answer. The parable has a second half that sermons often skip, and it is the sharper half. The elder brother, who never left and never disgraced anyone, will not come in to the party, and the story ends with the father out in the yard pleading with him too, and no answer given. The man who has done everything right is also outside, and for a related reason: he thinks the household runs on wages.

(Q) "But when he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him and kissed him." + Source: Luke 15:20 (ESV). The hinge of the parable of the prodigal son, the third of three stories about lost things told to critics who had objected that Jesus ate with the wrong people (T2). Note the order of events: the father moves before the confession is spoken.

(Q) "Come to Me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest." + Source: Matthew 11:28 (ESV). The parable puts the welcome in the third person, in a story about somebody else’s father (T2). Here he says it in the first person and in his own name, and the invitation is open to anyone tired enough to want it. The next two verses fill in the picture with a farm image his hearers saw every working day: a yoke, the wooden crosspiece that harnesses two animals so a load is shared rather than carried alone, and his, he says, is the comfortable one (Matthew 11:29–30).

(Q) "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life." + Source: John 3:16 (ESV). It comes out of a night conversation with Nicodemus, a Pharisee who came after dark to ask questions he would rather not be seen asking in daylight (John 3:1–21). Translators disagree about where his words stop and the evangelist’s commentary starts, because ancient Greek was written without quotation marks, and English Bibles close the quotation in different places. The New American Standard Bible keeps him speaking all the way to verse 21 and adds no note about it; the New International Version closes the quotation at verse 15 and footnotes that some interpreters carry it on to verse 21. The love in the sentence is not described as a feeling. It is measured by what it hands over (T2).

(T3) God’s law reaches past the act to the heart that wanted it. + A man can go his whole life without killing anyone and still have wished a colleague dead every morning for a decade. Most systems of law would call that a clean record. The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5 to 7) says it is not. The sermon contains six passages built on the same frame: "You have heard that the ancients were told" or "You have heard that it was said," and then, every time, "but I say to you." Scholars call them the antitheses, which simply means the sayings set against something. In each one he takes a command everyone already accepted and pushes it inward. Do not murder becomes do not nurse the contempt (Matthew 5:21–22). Do not commit adultery becomes do not cultivate the appetite (5:27–28). The certificate of divorce, the practice of swearing oaths, the old limit of an eye for an eye, and the duty to love your neighbor all get the same treatment, and the last of them ends somewhere nobody had gone: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (5:44). Two things stand out here. The first is the authority. He is not offering an interpretation of Moses in the way the rabbis debated interpretations, citing earlier teachers as support; he sets his own "but I say to you" against the text itself, and Matthew reports that the crowds noticed, because he taught them as one who had authority and not as their scribes (Matthew 7:29). The second is that this makes the standard impossible, and he seems to know it. The same sermon ends its central section with a demand to be perfect as the heavenly Father is perfect (5:48), and at its middle stands a prayer in which you ask for bread and then, in the next breath, for the forgiveness of debts (6:11–12). Christians have never fully agreed on how to hold those two together. Some traditions have read the sermon as a rule of life for the church, others as a standard designed to drive a person to grace, others as the ethic of the coming kingdom. What none of them can do is soften it, because he keeps summarizing the whole law as two commandments, love of God and love of neighbor (Matthew 22:37–40), and there is no version of that a person can complete and then rest.

(Q) "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. ... Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied." + Source: Matthew 5:3, 6 (ESV). The first and the fourth of the Beatitudes, the nine blessings that open the Sermon on the Mount (T3). Beatitude comes from the Latin beatus, blessed, the word each line begins with in the old Latin Bible, and the form itself was familiar from the Psalms, which open with one. What was not familiar is the guest list. Every person named is one the world counts as losing: the bankrupt in spirit, the grieving, the ones with no power and no standing, the ones still hungry for a rightness they do not yet have. Luke’s parallel sharpens it into plain poverty and plain hunger, and adds matching woes for the rich and the full (Luke 6:20–26).

(Q) "You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’; but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart." + Source: Matthew 5:27–28 (ESV). The second of the six antitheses in the Sermon on the Mount (T3). The command he is quoting stands in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:14). The words rendered "with lust for her" translate a Greek phrase of purpose, and the pronoun in it matters: what he forbids is not the noticing but the wanting, aimed at a particular woman. The move he makes on it is the move he makes on all of them, that the law is not a fence around behavior but a description of what a whole person is meant to be.

(Q) "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’" + Source: Matthew 22:37–39 (ESV; cf. Mark 12:29–31; Luke 10:25–28). In Matthew a lawyer asks which commandment is the greatest, a question the schools argued over, and the answer is not original in its parts. He quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, two verses any literate Jew already knew. The originality is in the welding. He binds the two into a single demand and then says that the whole Law and the Prophets hang upon that pair (Matthew 22:40). Luke tells it the other way round, with a lawyer reciting the two verses himself and Jesus answering that he has it right (Luke 10:27–28). This is (T3) in two sentences, and it is why reading the commands inwardly is not extra strictness added on top of them. It is the only way anyone could keep them.

(T4) Greatness runs downward, and the master is the one who washes feet. + Two of the twelve came to him and asked for the seats on his right and his left when he came into his glory. It is a job application, and the other ten were furious when they found out, which tells you they had been thinking the same thing. His answer redefines the whole scale: the rulers of the nations lord it over people, he says, and it shall not be so among you; whoever would be great among you must be your servant (Mark 10:35–45). Then he did it with his hands. On the last night, John says, he got up from supper, took off his outer clothing, wrapped a towel around his waist, poured water into a basin, and washed the feet of the men at his table, including the one who was about to sell him (John 13:1–17). Foot washing was the work of the lowest slave in a household, and later rabbinic sources single it out as one job a Hebrew servant should not be required to do, leaving it to Gentile slaves, to women, or to children. The disciples were not moved; they were appalled, and Peter said so out loud. This is the point at which his ethics and his account of his own death meet. He does not present the serving as a virtue he practiced well. He presents it as the shape of what he came to do, and the word he uses for it is ransom, the price paid to free a captive or buy a slave out of bondage. Christians have argued for two thousand years about how exactly his death saves, and those arguments divide serious people to this day. What is not in dispute among them is that he taught, plainly and in advance, that the death was the purpose and not the accident, and that it was for others.

(Q) "For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many." + Source: Mark 10:45 (ESV; cf. Matthew 20:28). The closing line of the answer to James and John, who had asked for the best seats (T4). "Son of Man" is the title he used for himself more than any other, drawn from Daniel 7:13–14, where a human figure comes on the clouds and receives from God an everlasting kingdom. It sounds modest in English and is not: the phrase carries his humanity and Daniel’s vision at the same time.

(Q) "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing." + Source: Luke 23:34 (ESV). Spoken from the cross, over soldiers who were dividing his clothes at the time. The ransom he had described in advance (T4) is being paid here, and the first words Luke records from it are spoken for the men carrying out the execution. One honest note about the text. This sentence is missing from several of the oldest and best manuscripts of Luke, among them the papyrus catalogued as P75 and the fourth-century Codex Vaticanus, and present in many others, so the editors of the standard Greek New Testament keep it in place inside double brackets. The New American Standard Bible does the same in English, printing the sentence between double brackets with a note that most early manuscripts do not contain it. Its defenders answer that no scribe is likely to have invented it, and that it matches the way the same author has Stephen die, praying for the men stoning him (Acts 7:60).

(T5) He put himself where only God belongs. + Suppose somebody backs into your car in a parking lot, and while the two of you are standing there a stranger walks over, claps the driver on the shoulder, and says, "Don’t worry about it. I forgive you." Everyone would stare. The stranger has no standing to say it, because forgiveness belongs to the person who was actually wronged, and we all know it without ever having been taught it. The striking thing about Jesus is not a list of occasions when he announced "I am God," because in the first three Gospels he does not put it that way. It is that he kept doing things that only made sense if he were. He forgave sins that had not been committed against him. The scribes watching understood the implication at once and called it blasphemy, meaning speech that takes God’s own place and honor, and the law of Moses made blaspheming the Name a capital offense (Leviticus 24:16). Their reasoning was the parking-lot reasoning, that the injured party alone can pardon and every sin is finally against God (Mark 2:5–7). From there the list runs on. He spoke of the angels as his own and of the final judgment as his to conduct (Matthew 13:41; 25:31–32). He claimed to be lord of the Sabbath, an institution given by God at Sinai (Mark 2:28). He told people that their standing before God turned on their standing toward him, and he received worship without correcting anyone for it. In John he says outright that before Abraham was born, "I am," using the words spoken from the burning bush, and his hearers picked up stones, which is the response of people who have understood him exactly (John 8:58–59; Exodus 3:14). Then, at the end, he said it under oath. The high priest, having got nowhere with the witnesses, put the question directly, and the answer Mark records is not a hedge. He affirmed the title and then went further, promising the court that they would see the Son of Man seated at God’s right hand and coming with the clouds, which fuses Psalm 110:1 with Daniel 7:13. The high priest tore his garments and asked what further witnesses the court could possibly need. C.S. Lewis pressed the obvious consequence in the plainest terms available. A man who says the sort of things Jesus said is either telling the truth, or he is deceiving people on purpose, or he is deluded on a scale that removes him from serious consideration, and the one option genuinely closed is the popular one, that he was simply a fine moral teacher. Fine moral teachers do not talk this way about themselves. The argument does not settle which of the remaining options is true, and the case for the first turns on the evidence for the resurrection. What it does is close a door most people would prefer to leave open.

(Q) "Are You the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?" ... "I am; and you shall see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of power, and coming with the clouds of heaven." + Source: Mark 14:61–62 (ESV). The first line is the high priest’s question at the night hearing; the second is the answer. "The Blessed One" stands in for God, and so does "power" in the phrase "the right hand of power." Both are reverent substitutes that let a speaker say what he means without pronouncing the divine name, which is itself a mark of a Jewish source rather than a Greek one. The answer is not merely a yes. It takes the throne language of Psalm 110:1 and the cloud-riding figure of Daniel 7:13 and applies both to himself, in front of the court trying him (T5). Mark reports that the high priest tore his robes and the council judged him deserving of death.

(Q) "I am the resurrection and the life; the one who believes in Me will live, even if he dies." + Source: John 11:25 (ESV). Said to Martha on the road outside Bethany, four days after her brother Lazarus was buried and before Jesus had come near the grave, and said before anything had happened to back it up (John 11:17, 20, 30). Martha had just made the ordinary confession that her brother would rise at the last day, which was the hope most Jews of the period held. The reply takes that hope out of the calendar and puts it in a person: not something God will get around to eventually, but someone standing in front of her (T5). It is one of seven sayings in John that open with "I am" and then say what he is.

(Q) "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through Me." + Source: John 14:6 (ESV). The answer to a practical question. Thomas has just objected that the disciples do not know where he is going, so they cannot possibly know the road (John 14:5). The reply declines to give directions and offers a person instead. It is the sharpest of the "I am" sayings and the one that most plainly puts him where only God belongs (T5). It is also the hardest sentence in the Gospels for a modern reader, and the church has never found a way to make it optional.

(Q) "But who do you say that I am?" + Source: Mark 8:29 (ESV; cf. Matthew 16:15; Luke 9:20). On the road near Caesarea Philippi he asks the twelve first what the crowds are saying, and gets back a survey of respectable opinions: John the Baptist, Elijah, one of the prophets. Then he narrows it to them, and Peter answers, "You are the Christ." That is not a compliment about a teacher. It is a claim that the king Israel had waited centuries for was standing on the road in front of them. Everything the church has said about him since is an attempt to answer that question, and every generation has had to answer it again.

(Q) "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to follow all that I commanded you; and behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age." + Source: Matthew 28:18–20 (ESV). The last words of Matthew’s Gospel, spoken on a mountain in Galilee to eleven men, of whom Matthew says frankly that some doubted (Matthew 28:16–17). Two things in it set the course of everything that came after. The first is the reach: all nations, from a movement that had so far worked a circuit of Galilean villages. The second is the threefold name, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, held together in one formula three centuries before the councils found language to account for it.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) Within a few years his followers were praying to him as God. + The expected pattern is familiar enough. A remarkable man dies, his followers remember him warmly, admiration grows into legend across the decades, and eventually somebody calls him divine, by which time everyone who knew him is safely dead. It is a tidy account, and it does not fit what the earliest documents actually contain. Paul finishes his letter to Corinth, written in the mid-fifties to a Greek-speaking congregation, with a word in Aramaic that he does not bother to translate: Maranatha, which means "Our Lord, come" (1 Corinthians 16:22). Aramaic was the everyday language of Palestinian Jews, not of Corinth, which means Paul is quoting a prayer already so fixed and familiar that it travelled west untranslated. And it is a prayer addressed to Jesus. There is more in the same letter. Earlier in it, Paul reworks the Shema, the confession Israel recited daily, "The LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4), so that it reads: for us there is only one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 8:6). He does not set Jesus beside the one God. He puts him inside the sentence that says God is one. And in Philippians 2:6–11, in a passage many scholars think Paul is quoting rather than composing, every knee bows and every tongue confesses at the name of Jesus, in the words Isaiah 45:23 reserves for the LORD, the same God who says twice in those chapters that he will not give his glory to another (Isaiah 42:8; 48:11). The outside record agrees about the practice, if not about its propriety. Around 112 AD Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia, wrote to the emperor Trajan for guidance on what to do with Christians, and described what his interrogations had turned up. They met before dawn on a fixed day and sang a hymn to Christ "as to a god" (Letters 10.96). He is filing an administrative report about a superstition he finds tiresome. He is not trying to help.

(†) It took the church four centuries to find words for what it had confessed from the start. + Worshipping him was one thing. Explaining how that could be true without abandoning the one God of Israel was another, and the argument took three centuries to come to a head and the better part of another to settle. The crisis came in Alexandria around 318 AD, when a presbyter named Arius began teaching that the Son was the first and highest of all creatures, made before time but made, so that, as the slogan went, "there was when he was not." A presbyter was a senior clergyman with charge of a congregation, an elder, and the word is the ancestor of the English word priest. His opponent Athanasius, then a young deacon in the same city, an assistant to his bishop with no authority of his own, saw what was at stake in practical terms: if the Son is a creature, then Christians had spent three centuries worshipping something less than God, and a creature cannot save. The Council of Nicaea in 325 sided with Athanasius and reached for a word to make the difference unmistakable, homoousios, "of the same being," which says the Son is not merely similar to the Father but shares whatever it is that makes God God. The debate was not over. Athanasius was driven into exile five times before the matter settled at Constantinople in 381. The next question was how one person could be both. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 answered with four famous negatives: in Christ the divine and the human are united without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. Notice that this defines nothing positively. It is a fence, put up on four sides of a mystery, marking where explanations go wrong rather than explaining. That is what creeds are for. Fairness requires one more note. The Assyrian Church of the East and the Oriental Orthodox churches did not accept the Chalcedonian wording, and were called heretics for fifteen centuries over it. Joint declarations in recent decades among Catholic, Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox and Assyrian theologians have concluded that the ancient split was in large part a matter of the same faith confessed in different vocabularies and different languages. Communions that still differ about a great deal have found that they were saying the same thing about him.

(†) Hostile writers kept their own record of him, and it agrees on the outline. + Nobody outside the movement wrote a life of him, which is unsurprising. Provincial preachers executed on the edge of the empire were not news in Rome. What survives instead is a scatter of unfriendly notices, and their value lies exactly in the unfriendliness. - Josephus, the Jewish historian writing in the nineties, mentions him twice. The longer passage (Antiquities 18.63–64) reads in its received form like a Christian confession and is widely judged to have been embellished by a later copyist, though most specialists hold that Josephus wrote something there. The shorter notice, identifying James as "the brother of Jesus who was called Christ" (Antiquities 20.200), is accepted as genuine by nearly everyone. - Tacitus, around 116 AD, records the execution under Pilate while explaining Nero’s persecution, and calls the resulting faith a destructive superstition (Annals 15.44). - The rabbinic tradition preserved in the Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 43a) reports that he was hanged on the eve of Passover for sorcery and for leading Israel astray. It is a hostile summary that nonetheless concedes the timing, the death, and the wonder-working. - Celsus, who wrote around 178 AD, produced the earliest detailed pagan attack on Christianity that can still be read. His book survives because Origen quoted it at length in order to answer it. His explanations, that the miracles were Egyptian magic and the resurrection a report from a hysterical woman, again concede the events they explain away. The modern discussion begins in the eighteenth century, when Hermann Samuel Reimarus proposed that the disciples had stolen the body, and it has run ever since through David Friedrich Strauss, Albert Schweitzer, Rudolf Bultmann and the Jesus Seminar. The reconstructions differ wildly. The residue does not. Even scholars who reject every miracle in the record, including agnostic critics who have written books against the claim that he never existed at all, generally treat two facts as fixed points: he was baptized by John, and he was crucified by Rome under Pontius Pilate.

(†) The hard sayings are his too, and the church has never managed to soften them. + There is a version of him that circulates on posters and greeting cards: gentle, affirming, hard to disagree with. It is not the man in the documents. In John 6 a large following listens to a teaching about eating his flesh, says out loud "This statement is very unpleasant; who can listen to it?", and many of them walk away and stop following him (John 6:60, 66). He does not chase after them or explain it down. He turns to the twelve and asks whether they want to leave too. The difficult material is not a fringe of the record. It sits in the same documents, in the same voice, often in the same paragraph as the comfort. - The exclusive claim. "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6; T5). Christians have argued at length about what that means for people who never heard of him, and the New Testament says less about that question than either side would like. What it does not offer is a reading on which the sentence is optional. - Judgment. He returns to final judgment more often than any other speaker in the New Testament, in images of fire, outer darkness, and a door that shuts (Matthew 25:10–12, 30, 41, 46; Mark 9:43–48). Christians differ genuinely on its nature and its duration. The words are his, and they are not spoken coldly; the same speaker weeps over the city he is warning (Luke 19:41–44). - Family. "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers" (Luke 14:26). The idiom is a Semitic way of stating a comparison, and Matthew 10:37 gives the plainer form, loving them more than Me. Softened as far as the grammar allows, it still puts him ahead of a mother. - Money. He told a good and sincere man to sell everything he had, watched him leave sad, and then remarked that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God (Mark 10:21–27). There is no evidence for the popular story about a low gate in Jerusalem called the Needle’s Eye. The disciples’ reaction, "Then who can be saved?", shows they heard it as impossible, which is what he meant. - What he did not give. He left no political program, no code of law, and no denunciation of Roman slavery by name. Christians who later fought slavery and tyranny had to reason from his principles rather than cite a ruling, and their opponents inside the church quoted the silence back at them. That is a real cost of teaching in parables. And Christians have divided over him ever since. Communions that agree he rose from the dead still differ on what happens at his table, on how his death saves, and on who may be baptized and by whom. Those divisions are old, they are serious, and settling them is a different job from telling a life. But notice where they run. They run through the interpretation, not through the person. The sharpest quarrels in Christian history have been quarrels between people who were all trying to be faithful to the same man, and who all knew that the hard sayings arrived in the same envelope as the kind ones.