CHAPTER 19 - More Than an Earthly Messiah?
CHAPTER 19
More Than an Earthly Messiah?
For the “first followers of Jesus . . . what mattered most was the body of instructions that circulated in his name.”
BURTON MACK1
“. . . the type of interpretation that makes Jesus a moralist, a teacher of an enlightened and individualistic morality, for all of its significant historical insights . . . does not even come close to the real figure of Jesus.”
POPE BENEDICT2
“. . . devotion to Jesus as divine erupted suddenly and quickly, not gradually and late. . . . More specifically, the origins lie in Jewish Christian circles of the earliest years.”
LARRY HURTADO3
As we have noted, the earliest extant sources about Jesus redefine the traditional nature of “messiahship” in light of his mission. While his mission offered what some of his contemporaries might have viewed as a “low christology” in some respects — he was not a warrior messiah consummating an immediate kingdom — our earliest extant sources also offer a “higher christology” than many modern scholars have supposed.
We have already noted Jesus’ self-designation, “son of man,” which probably connected him with an eschatological role more cosmic than many messianic expectations. As we shall see here, some material in our earliest extant sources — Mark and especially the more sayings-focused “Q” — points to a role for Jesus higher than that normally found in most conceptions of an earthly messiah. Our other extant sources that comment seem to agree.