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The First Coming: How the Kingdom of GodBecame Christianity (1986—electronicedition 2000)
Thomas Sheehan 
Introduction:How Christianity Came Into Crisis
Today at the dawn ofher third millennium, the Christian church is undergoing a theological crisisin what she thinks and believes about Jesus of Nazareth.The crisis grows out of a fact now freely admitted by both Protestant and Catholic theologiansand exegetes: that as far as can be discerned from the available historical data, Jesus of Nazarethdid not think he was divine, did not assert any of the messianic claims that the New Testamentattributes to him, and went to his death without intending to found a new religion called"Christianity." That is, the theological crisis has to do with the
 prima facie
discrepancy betweenwhat Jesus of Nazareth apparently thought he was (a special but very human prophet) and whatmainline Christian believers now take him to be (the divine Son of God, consubstantial with theFather and the Holy Spirit).[1]The apparent difference between the "Jesus of history" and the "Christ of faith" is not a newproblem in Christianity. Since the last century liberal Protestant scholars like Adolf von Harnackand agnostics like Ernest Renan have tried to strip away what they thought were
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the church's divinizing embellishments of Jesus of Nazareth so as to arrive at the "real" (that is,the human) prophet of Nazareth.More recently Roman Catholic exegetes and theologians have joined the discussion.[2] With theencouragement of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, Catholic scholars now teach that theGospels are not accurate "histories" of Jesus but religious testimonies produced by the secondand third generations of Christians, whose faith that Jesus was their savior colored their memoryof his days on earth.[3] Thus, even though all Catholic biblical scholars believe that Jesus is God,
 
they do not necessarily maintain that Jesus himself thought he was the divine Son of God, whohad existed from all eternity as the Second Person of the Trinity.[4]Just as the question of discontinuity between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith is not anew problem, so too solutions to it have long been available in Christian teaching. Today,however, those solutions and the presuppositions on which they rest are being called intoquestion.Did Jesus actually think that he was the divine Son of God? Christian theologians havetraditionally answered this question by asserting that their savior, insofar as he was both God andman, was quite literally of two minds about himself. Relying on a complex distinction thatancient Hellenistic philosophy made between "nature" and "person" (or "rational hypostasis"),these theologians claim that Jesus, even though he was only one person, did have both a humanand a divine nature, joined in "hypostatic union." Each of the two natures, they say, had acorresponding intellect, finite in the one case, infinite in the other. And therefore, even if in hishuman self-understanding Jesus was not aware of his own nature as God, in his divine mind hedid know who and what he really was. And he chose to reveal his identity gradually andindirectly, in ways that believers came to fully comprehend only after Jesus' death andresurrection.[5]How, then, do believers know that the Jesus of history is Christ and God? Some Christians assertthat faith is a higher form of cognition than empirical, historical knowledge and therefore thatChristian believers have a deeper insight into who Jesus really was than do nonbelievers.According to this thesis, historical research gives us only the "historiographical Jesus"—that is,only those aspects of him that are
7
available via historico-critical method—but it cannot show us the authentic,
divine
Jesus of history, who actually lived and preached two millennia ago. To arrive at that real Jesus, so thetheory goes, one must have faith; and unlike the scientific historian, the believing Christiansupposedly knows that Jesus really was the Son of God, even if the historical evidence does notshow that.But this solution does not work. Faith provides the believer with no more data about who Jesusof Nazareth "really" was than does normal historical experience. There exists no revealed bodyof supernatural information that is given over to the Christian faithful while being kept hiddenfrom nonbelievers. Christians have at their disposal only the same public evidence about Jesusthat everyone else has—but they interpret the data differently. That is, Christianity is a"hermeneusis," or interpretation. Its beliefs and doctrines are but one of many possible andequally valid ways of understanding the universally available empirical data about Jesus of Nazareth. Christians may claim that their faith is based on revelation, but as far as one can tellempirically, such revelation is a name for the historically relative and culturally determinedhermeneutical process in which Christians, confronting the humanly available information aboutJesus of Nazareth, choose to interpret him as their savior, who reigns with God in heaven.
 
Despite these attempts at solving the problem, the critical fact remains: At the root of Christianity there lies the difference between how Jesus apparently understood himself while hewas alive—as the eschatological
 prophet 
—and how the church came to interpret him within ahalf century of his death: as the divine
Son of God.
Does this difference constitute a discrepancy, an incompatibility between the evidence of historyand the claims of faith? On the one hand, no one can scientifically prove (and no believer wouldwant to) that Jesus actually was the divine savior that Christianity eventually took him to be. Onthe other hand, it can be established with a high degree of historical certitude that the earlychurch did not create her christological understanding of Jesus out of absolutely nothing, butrather based it on the earliest believers' firsthand impressions of Jesus' dramatically propheticcomportment. That is, Jesus spoke and acted with an extraordinary
authority
that he attributed toGod, who was working through him. His disciples interpreted this authority as evidence
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that Jesus was God's final prophet, sent to prepare Israel for the end of time. Thus earlychristologies, which interpreted Jesus first as the Son of Man and eventually as Christ and God(see [Part Three]), were an extension and enhancement of what Simon Peter and the originaldisciples believed that Jesus had been, whether or not that belief corresponded to what Jesusactually thought of himself and (if this were knowable) who he ontologically was.It is perhaps impossible and arguably unnecessary for Christianity to show any inevitableconnection between Jesus' evaluation of himself when he was alive and Simon Peter's evaluationof Jesus both before and after the prophet's death. Christianity begins not with Jesus but withSimon Peter, and it maintains itself throughout history by staying in continuity with that firstbeliever. Christianity essentially is its sense of history, its unique claim of historical continuity—but the continuum is with Peter and the first disciples rather than directly with Jesus. That is themeaning of the Catholic dictum
Ubi Petrus, ibi ecclesia:
Christianity is present whereversomeone traces his or her faith back to that of Simon and the first believers. Those who choose topreserve continuity, in one way or another, with Simon Peter's evaluation of the prophet fromGalilee can rightly lay claim to the title "Christian." Ultimately, Jesus' understanding of himself is not essential to Christianity. But Peter's is.The gap that contemporary Christian exegetes have confirmed between the historical evidenceabout Jesus and the claims of faith about him is potentially salutary and illuminating. For onething, this difference, once it is acknowledged, offers believers and nonbelievers alike anopportunity to reevaluate Christianity at its roots, not so as to destroy it out of hand or to salvageit at all costs, but in order to discover what Christianity intends to be about, to probe what it mayhave missed about Jesus, and to ask what kind of future lies ahead for it.The present book is that kind of investigation, carried out along the border between the findingsof empirical history and the questions that inspire faith. Working along that border, I take the
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ami

ok-ur description makes me laugh.

reply10 / 25 / 2009
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