Shaking the Foundations of Christianity

It's over, folks. The gig is up. Christianity has had a pretty impressive 2,000 year run, but new evidence shows that everything we Christians ever thought about the irreducible uniqueness of Jesus Christ is just a tired old rehashing of Jewish messianic ideas that had emerged in the decades before Christ's birth. Or rather, I guess I should say "Jesus of Nazareth," since "Christ" means "the anointed one," a unique messianic figure. Sorry--old habits die hard.

When I read such breathless reports as the article "Tablet ignites debate on messiah and resurrection" (International Herald Tribune, July 5, 2008), I'm never quite sure whether to laugh or cry. The temptation to sob comes from the fact that a significant archeological discovery--"A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus," as the IHT describes it, or "a Dead Sea Scroll on stone," as an expert in ancient Hebrew writing puts it--is being held captive to the political agenda of "an iconoclastic professor of Bible studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem."

The laughter comes from the fact that a professor of Bible studies could be so naive as to believe that he could "shake the world of Christology" by proving that--gasp!--at least some Jews at the time of Jesus had come to believe that a messiah would die and then rise again in three days.

Israel Knohl, the professor, is a man on a mission. Before he'd ever heard of the tablet, which has been dubbed "Gabriel's Revelation," he had already " posited in a book published in 2000 the idea of a suffering messiah--a Jewish national savior--before Jesus, using a variety of rabbinic and early apocalyptic literature as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls." But the book "did not shake the world of Christology as he had hoped" (my emphasis).

As Mark Shea points out at his blog, Catholic and Enjoying It!, that hope "does not bode well for good scholarship." Knohl has an agenda, and he's viewing this rare artifact through that lens. To his credit, Ethan Bronner, the reporter for the IHT, does a pretty good job of letting Knohl give the game away. He quotes Knohl as saying that:

"This should shake our basic view of Christianity . . . Resurrection after three days becomes a motif developed before Jesus, which runs contrary to nearly all scholarship. What happens in the New Testament was adopted by Jesus and his followers based on an earlier messiah story."

The implication, of course, is that, if the story of Jesus is "nothing new under the sun," then Christ cannot have been what He and His followers have claimed Him to be--the incarnate Son of God. And that's where the laughable part comes in, because at the heart of the Christian claim of Christ's divinity is precisely the point that Christ's coming was foretold.

Indeed, "Much of the text, a vision of the apocalypse transmitted by the angel Gabriel, draws on the Old Testament, especially the prophets Daniel, Zechariah and Haggai." In other words, "Gabriel's Revelation" largely amounts to a rehashing of the prophetic tradition that Christians believe offers proof that Christ was indeed Who He said He was.

The idea that "a savior who died and rose after three days was an established concept at the time of Jesus" is hardly surprising. Christ, we believe, was the fulfillment of the Old Testament. Nor, for that matter, is it surprising that the "suffering servant" was often viewed in political terms. We have evidence from the Gospels that such a concept was widespread: Christ's own disciples are surprised that He is not intent on leading a political rebellion; when Pilate offers to release a prisoner, the Jews choose Barabbas, "an insurrectionist," over Christ, Whose "kingdom is not of this world"; Caiaphas, the high priest, declared "that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not."

That such ideas were extant does not, as Knohl claims, give "the Last Supper an absolutely different meaning. To shed blood is not for the sins of people but to bring redemption to Israel." If anything, it gives greater weight to the Christian narrative. After Christ's Death, His disciples were confused. Even after His Resurrection, they weren't quite sure what to make of it all, because they clearly had been thinking themselves that Christ's kingdom would be of this world. It is only when Christ appears to them that they begin to understand that His Death was only the tip of the iceberg.

In other words, the experience of the disciples after the Resurrection leads to a reinterpretation of the ideas expressed in the Old Testament and in "Gabriel's Revelation"--a reinterpretation that goes well beyond the texts themselves. Jesus is not merely a "national savior," whose "blood will be the sign for redemption to come," but the Saviour of all mankind, Who in dying and and rising again has brought us eternal life. If Knohl were not blinded by his desire to "shake the world of Christology" (he gratuitously refers to Jesus as "the son of Joseph"), he might understand that "Gabriel's Revelation" reveals something far different from what he thinks it does.