The Galilean Woodworker

 In the four gospels, even with disparities and contradictions, we get an overall picture of the sayings and deeds attributed to a Galilean woodworker from the edges of the Roman Empire, who was executed, then -- surprise! -- rose from the dead.

 These four texts were purposely selected among many to teach us about Yeshua bar Yosif.

 They contain often faulty human recollections of stories told and retold about him until some scribes close to the evangelist decided to set it down in writing.

 Whatever we think of him, he was an unusual guy. He healed the sick sometimes by just speaking to them. He made sweeping statements about human life and reality. He challenged the true teaching and practice of the day among his people. He was brought to trial and executed.

 So far, we have one of hundreds of men in robes from ancient times.

 But then he rose, appeared to his disciples and, at least to them, confirmed his roles as Savior and Son of God. Indeed, the resurrection is what made Jesus singular and appealing even to many those who days earlier were clamoring for his execution.

 Storytellers and writers had, of course, to begin with an august origin of Jesus: a son of David, Abraham, Adam and, ultimately, God. This was literary form in antiquity when speaking of important people. People believed someone important had to be born amid signs foretelling his greateness.

 In collecting the sayings and retelling them, each evangelist has his own theological agenda and his own sources. They chose events and words that fit the major point.

 To Mark, Jesus is a mysterious teacher how slowly reveals his identity. To Matthew, Jesus was first and foremost a Jew, challenging common interpretations of Moses' law, yet in synch with all previous Judaic revelation of God, To Luke, Jesus is a historical subject of a lush and dramatic story birth to death and resurrection. To John, Jesus is the divine Logos (Word) made flesh to teach us, save us and rise to await for our eventual reunion with him.

 The important point to keep in mind is that Jesus was all of these things -- and probably more.

 Was he concerned only with the pious poor in spirit or people who lacked needed goods? Probably both. If he loved everyone, how come he cursed some? He probably loved even those he cursed, in frustration. If he was God and Messiah, why didn't he just fix the world 2,000 years ago? Only God literally knows.

 In the end, his followers spawned a movement that is today the most widespread and populous in the world -- yet still enbraces only little more than one-third of humanity (2.22 billion followers, or 31.5% of the Earth's human population).

 The New Testament is not just about Jesus, but about his early followers and their communities. Let's go look at that next.

The Fourth Gospel

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

 One need only read the prologue to realize that the Gospel of John is different. The author doesn’t bother with Adam, Abraham, or David to point to Jesus’ origin: he goes back to when everything was void and formless and there was only God.

 The Fourth Gospel offers what is known as a high Christology, or study of Christ. High because it starts from above, with the divine Christ.

 In the other three, the identity of Jesus is something of a mystery until the resurrection. Jesus himself only hints he is the “Son of Man” — which points the Hebrew speaker to Adam (אָדָם‎ , 'adam, either man, the gender-neutral “human,” or the plural “humankind.”).

  In John, we are shown that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) as Jesus of Nazareth.

 The author identifies himself as “the disciple whom Jesus loved” in John 21:20–25, but does not give his name. Irenaeus of Smyrna, 2nd-century bishop of modern Lyons, said the disciple was the Apostle John. This meshes with the gospel’s controversial use of “the Jews” for people in conflict with Jesus. 

 The companions of John who wrote down and edited his story had not lived in the boisterous Jewish bazaar of ideas in pre-70 Palestine seen in Matthew, Mark and Luke. To them, the rabbis and congregants of the Jewish diaspora, who fiercely rejected Jesus as Messiah, were the folks who kicked them out of synagogues and even fingered fellow believers to Roman persecutors.

 Add to that their high Christology clashing with the Jewish understanding of a divine Jesus as a blasphemous betrayal of monotheism. “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one!” (Deut. 6:4) is even today the most revered affirmation of Jewish faith.

 The Gospel of John has also a distinctive structure. Opening with Jesus as the Word present at creation, John offers a series of signs of his extraordinary character during the ministry, concluding with post-resurrection appearances that seal the divine claim as reality.

 In sum, the Fourth Gospel is the critical theological text that wraps up the original eyewitness-based preaching about Jesus as God, man and savior.

NT's Sitz im Leben

Now I will turn to the setting of the events and writings of the New Testament, which are hugely important for understanding the collection.

(The synoptic contradictions I have not explored center around the crucifixion and resurrection — the former is the most historically accepted event in the life of Jesus and the latter a matter of faith widely disputed — hence I am abandoning that, for the moment.)

What's more important, before we tackle even a summary on the Fourth Gospel, is to focus on the NT’s Sitz im Leben  (German, setting in life). This phrase has been used in biblical criticism since the 19th century, to speak of its political, social, and cultural setting.

The NT’s people and texts developed within the eastern half of the Roman Empire — Jerusalem to Rome — from about 6 BC to 100 AD. The Empire was a one-man rule of territories from Britain to Spain and from Spain to the Holy Land and Syria. It preserved legal republican forms, such as the Senate, but functioned as a massive military and taxation extortion system serving the Emperor, who at times was regarded as at least a demigod.

The society out of which Jesus and his apostles emerged was a subject Jewish people permitted to practice their religion within certain limits. The Jews were mostly Pharisee, Sadducee, or Essenes. 

The Pharisees were the upstanding and legalistic conventional Jews from whom came the rabbinical tradition after the year 70. Sadducees are most easily remembered as “sad, you see,” because they didn’t believe in life after death. The Essenes were one of several monastic groups that lived in caves near the desert; Jesus and John the Baptist probably lived with them some time in their youths.

In addition, were the Kana’im (or zealots), who eventually led a rebellion against the Romans, from 66 to 70. The civil war led to the siege to starvation of Jerusalem and the razing of the Temple compound, one of whose remaining structures is today called the “Wailing Wall.”

Significantly for the faith and the NT, it also led to the expulsion and  dispersal of Jews throughout the Mediterranean and later Europe. The events of the gospels took place before this earthshaking event; the NT texts were mostly written after.

Jesus was a woodworker, or craftsman, rather than a carpenter in the modern construction sense. The disciples had similar specialized crafts. They likely spoke some koiné, or marketplace Greek, and Aramaic, a Galilean Hebrew dialect — but not biblical Hebrew.

Their people lived in one-room dwellings, traveled no more than 30 miles from their birthplaces in their lifetimes, and lived an average of 30 to 40 years. Perhaps one of the easiest-to-read non-specialist books on the subject is Daily Life in the Time of Jesus by Henri Daniel-Rops.

All of this is to make clear that the New Testament people and authors had no idea of things such as democracy, middle class comforts, nor the particular ethnic diversity of the American continent.