19:1-12) and he regularly ate with the sorts of persons that ordinary observant Jews did not eat with (Mark 2:13-17 Luke 15:1-2). He didn’t bother with the customary hand-washing ritual that testified to ones commitment to the Torah and its traditional interpretation (Mark 7:1-4) he cut through the legal loopholes that had been scripturally founded by those who thought divorce was not a serious infraction of God’s creation and marriage ordinance (Matt. The words “effect” and bring into reality an assignment that sticks to a person, and the label divides the group’s perception of a person.Ī second label for Jesus was that he was a “lawbreaker.” Jesus did things on the Sabbath that his contemporaries found outside the edge (Mark 2:24 3:2 Luke 13:14 14:1-6). Jesus is called the “son of Mary” (Mark 6:3), a delicate little accusation with social potency, because it was believed by some that he was not truly the “son of Joseph.” This label, to use the words of the linguists, is a “performative utterance,” the way “liberal” and “conservative,” or “capitalist” and “communist,” or “Arminian” and “Calvinist,” or “evidentialist” and “foundationalist,” function in certain settings. Mary was accused by some of adultery, and that made her a na’ap (adulteress), and that meant that her son, Jesus, was a mamzer (illegitimate child), and that meant that both of them had reputations and set people to talking about them. If traditional, orthodox Christians tend to operate with a “Christology from above” (using their creedal conviction that Jesus is Son of God and divine), and strict modernist historians want to operate with a “Christology from below,” the labels tossed at Jesus during his time enable us to construct what amounts to a “Christology from the side” – from those who were with Jesus but who did not follow him and who therefore did not come to the conclusion that Jesus was indeed “from above” and was more than a normal Jewish male.īefore Jesus was born he had a label, and so did his mother. Often ignored, these “labels” pinned to the tunic of Jesus are worthy of explanation. Such a hermeneutic of Jesus that contends that he is (or was) something “else” and “less” began in his own lifetime. For them, Jesus is, however good a man, a “wandering Cynic,” a “prophet,” or a “teacher,” or a “rabbi,” or a “wise teacher”, or a ‘magician.” For the unbeliever, the narrative told is that he is always something else and always something less. For the believer, Jesus is the “Son of God,” the “Second Person of the Trinity,” the ‘Messiah,” and the “Lord.” These labels are how believers tell the “narrative” about Jesus. (Whether he still holds this view with the tenacity and provocation of former years is debatable.)Ī stance, or better yet, a “hermeneutic” of Jesus easily convert s into a label. Narrative reconstructions of the world that is “out there” and stories that seek to tell the Truth of what is really “out there” are but a “linguistic turn,” as Richard Rorty once held. There are just discrete events, random things, out there. There is no “real” world out there, some postmodernists would claim, with which to cohere. Indeed, one does not even need the postmodernist undercutting of all “Truth” (with an upper case “T”) as simply a mental narrative told by an interpreter to make sense of the world, but a sense that is neither realistic, critically realist, nor even approximately coherent with the “real” world. But, one doesn’t need this scientific skepticism about faith to question the orthodox view of Jesus. Science trades in the observable universe and testable hypotheses.” 3 Perhaps it does, and perhaps it isn’t arrogant, but when it assumes that what is observable and testable is all that can be known and all that is worth knowing, her denial is perhaps stretching the skin of the fox over ones epistemology. The question has often been asked, but rarely so well as by Natalie Angier: “How can a bench-hazed Ph.D., who might of an afternoon deftly puree a colleague’s PowerPoint presentation on the nematode genome into so much fish chow, then go home, read a two-thousand-year-old chronicle, riddled with internal contradictions, of a meta-Nobel discovery like ‘Resurrection from the Dead,’ and say, gee, that sounds convincing?” 2 But her premise is clear: “Science is not arrogant. One doesn’t need a sophisticated philosophical system to form a skeptical stance vis-à-vis Jesus.
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