This is the conclusion to yesterday’s post, In the Beginning Was the Word (I). I am considering why the Orthodox consider all that Christ did as God including creating the world to be part of the “historical Jesus.” I made my first two points in yesterday’s post.
The modern scholarly search for the historical Jesus is only interested in history, therefore can’t acknowledge that Jesus was written about before He was born. From an Orthodox faith perspective, the true search for the historical Jesus is what the first disciples had to do – is Jesus the person who fulfills the promises and prophecies of the Jewish scriptures?
The third point I want to make: The Disciples and first believers argue from Scripture that Jesus is the Christ. The Scriptures they were using are the Jewish Scriptures, our Old Testament. They obviously believe that these Scriptures are written about Jesus Christ:
And Paul went in, as was his custom, and for three weeks he argued with them from the scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, “This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ.” (Acts 17:2-3)
[the Apostle Apollos…] “… powerfully confuted the Jews in public, showing by the scriptures that the Christ was Jesus” (Acts 18:28).
The Apostles had to convince themselves first, and then others, that Jesus actually is the promised Messiah. They “shape” Jesus by constantly looking through the Jewish scriptures to find prophecies related to the Messiah and then emphasizing those points about Jesus [which also means they ignored other aspects of Jesus’ life which they couldn’t find prefigured in the Jewish scriptures]. They are able to argue from Scripture about Jesus because they think the Scriptures are in fact about Him.
Jesus in the Gospels challenges the Jews of His day with how they read the scriptures – they are way too pedantic, majoring on the minor details of the Law while ignoring the big picture that the Torah is about loving God and neighbor (Matthew 22:36-40). The Jewish scriptures are also about the Christ, Jesus who is the God of love. This is a cornerstone issue for early believers.
The search for the historical Jesus may be a good modern scholarly pursuit, but it is also a detour if not a rabbit hole because without the Church (or believers), Jesus would have been forgotten. Believers had reason to want to preserve His narrative in the Gospels (after all He fulfills the Old Testament prophecies and He performs the “signs” promised in the Jewish Scriptures – see my post The Witness of John the Forerunner). Without their testimony and their evangelical efforts, we would know nothing of Jesus. We cannot separate the “Jesus of faith” from the “historical Jesus” because all we know about Him comes from people of faith. There is no real purpose for encountering the “Jesus of history” if it means nothing more than a Jewish man who lived in Palestine 2000 years ago. Jesus is important to study because of what people of faith claim He claimed about Himself and also because of what they claim about Him. Recreating what life was like 2000 years ago in Palestine is hardly saving news.
Discovering what we can about the “historical Jesus” may support our faith (or refute it), but it is not the most important question (except maybe for historical scholars). There is no “historical Jesus” without the Gospels, and the Gospels are a product of people of faith. The search for the historical Jesus is a search for a worldly Jesus, not for the Holy Messiah. “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, we regard him thus no longer” (2 Corinthians 5:16).
For Orthodox at least the historical Jesus is the Word of God who created all things with the Father and the Spirit. The saints of the Old Testament inspired by God knew of Him and wrote about Him. He is significant precisely because He fulfills the prophecies and promises of the Jewish Scriptures. And now some 2000 years after His birth, we still have a relationship with Jesus Christ, another reason to discount the search for the historical Jesus. He is not simply a past historical figure since He also has a presence in the world today.
Fraternized 