Chapter 14, "The Incident in the Temple"

In my ongoing review of Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity, in which I am taking his chapters in reverse order, I now come to the "definite, though somewhat mysterious, turning point in the life of Jesus" (p. 124, italics Nolan's). Nolan's chapter 14, "The Incident in the Temple," presents the eviction of the traders and money-changers from the Jerusalem Temple courtyard as the hinge event in Jesus' career. Before it, Jesus was a not-so-widely-known teacher and prophet. After it, he was "a figure of national importance [who] could no longer be ignored."

That this incident was the turning point makes sense, Nolan says, only in the light of modern biblical scholarship — as the synoptic gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke give the Temple incident as occurring during Jesus' final, fateful visit to Jerusalem. John, on the other hand, places the incident close to the very start of Jesus' ministry. None of the gospel writers, it seems, was overly interested in what we today would call historical accuracy.

Nolan writes accordingly that "at some stage Jesus became a fugitive ... Shortly after the Temple incident he withdrew and went into hiding ... [at first] in Galilee ... [though later] Jesus wandered about outside his own country as a fugitive and exile" (pp. 128-129). Then, after "he made use of the time to instruct his disciples more thoroughly in the mystery of the [coming] 'kingdom'," he voluntarily came out of hiding and went back to Jerusalem to be arrested and — as he full well knew, in advance — to be executed.

Why did Jesus "act up" in the Temple courtyard? That courtyard was where local Jews, and also Jewish pilgrims from abroad, prepared to exercise their religio-legal obligation "to spend a certain proportion of [their] income in Jerusalem" (p. 126), in order to make devotional sacrifices of "clean animals" in the holy place. The traders in the courtyard sold such animals at exorbitant prices. Meanwhile, the money-changers gouged "pilgrim Jews [who] would have arrived with foreign currency" and who needed local money to buy the animals.

Observing this activity, Jesus "noticed only the widow who gave her last penny ... and the economic exploitation of people's devotion and piety ... [and] his compassion for the poor and the oppressed overflowed once more into indignation and anger." Noting that "it was already too late in the day to do anything about it," Jesus returned on the morrow, when, "according to John, [he] used a whip" in evicting the money-grubbing leeches, provoking police intervention, and bringing himself to the attention of the Temple elders — who may have been complicit in the monetary extortion all along.


Nolan seems to relish the fact that, after, and due to, the Temple incident, Jesus became an outlaw: one who conspicuously displayed a "change of attitude toward the carrying of swords" by his disciples (p. 129). "If you have no sword, sell your cloak and buy one," Jesus told his men, as reported at Luke 22:36. Here, again, is the practical Jesus, the one who Nolan says could never be a pacifist in principle.

At the same time, the attack on the money-changers and traders was "not unpremeditated and unplanned" (p. 126), and we are not justified in believing that Jesus urged violent force as a matter of policy. Jesus was the opposite of a revolutionary hothead. Instead, as we have seen, he urged faith in the coming kingdom, in which "those who have any kind of position of power ... will have to use it to serve others" (p. 130).

As a matter of fact, this chapter contains one of Nolan's most concise summaries of Jesus' insistent teaching: "an urgent appeal for immediate change (metanoia), a warning about the catastrophic consequences of not changing, and a promise of a new Temple or community if there were to be an immediate change" (p. 128).

The chapter also contains a pithy exposition of how Jesus stood with respect to claiming any shred of official authority for his pronouncements: he didn't. Actually, it seems to me that Nolan doesn't make enough of how Jesus may have contrived the Temple brouhaha specifically to establish that "Jesus' right or authority to expel [those whom he expelled] was to be negotiated with the Temple officials" (p. 127, italics mine).

For this, as Nolan makes clear in Chapter 18, "On Trial", set up the venue in which Jesus' refusal to play the authority game with Pilate and his Jewish accusers put them on trial more than himself. Jesus, basically by remaining silent and offering no substantive reply to any of the charges put to him, ended up instead "putting everyone else to the test" (p. 160). In so doing, he made the point for all time that the truth he taught was not one which could be tested by reference to received authority.

Which fact forms the centerpiece of Nolan's eventual argument that Jesus was divine. In Chapter 19, "Faith in Jesus," Part 2, I recounted, "Since Jesus appealed to no outside authority to back up his claim about the change in God's intentions, Jesus himself had to be divine. Only divinity could speak such an earthshaking new truth about divinity."


New truth? The crux of that matter was that ...

... God had changed. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was doing something totally new and unprecedented. God [had in Jesus' time] been moved by compassion for the lost sheep of the house of Israel ... [Jesus attempted] to reveal ... the signs of the times, the signs that God has been moved by compassion to a change of mind ... . (p. 96)

God was no longer bent on vengeance. The Old Testament God had originally been bent on judging us for our sins ... but now, Jesus taught, mercy and compassion were the divine watchwords. Those who had known Jesus before his death, convinced that his compassion was the same as God's own compassion, just knew Jesus was divine truth become flesh.

Which ties in with the subject of the structure of coming kingdom of God. During their exile abroad, writes Nolan, Jesus instructed his twelve leading disciples thus, as told in Matthew's and Luke's gospels:

"You will sit on twelve thrones, judging the twleve tribes of Israel" ... Matthew understood this saying as a reference to the last judgment. Luke did not. To judge in the Bible means to govern, and the idea here seems to be that the twelve would be governors in the "kingdom," sharing with Jesus the basileia, or ruling power of God ... " (p. 130)


As I will mention later in my discussion of chapter 12, "The Coming of the 'Kingdom'," Nolan favors "de-apocalyptizing" the gospels. "What Jesus has to say about the last day was not apocalyptic, it was prophetic," Nolan writes (p. 109). The catastrophe Jesus prophesied was not "supra-historical" (p. 108): it was not an apocalypse at all — it was not "an imminent cosmic cataclysm in which God destroys the ruling powers of evil and raises the righteous to life in a messianic kingdom," as Webster's dictionary says the word apocalypse implies.

Rather, if people did not listen up, and soon, Jesus preached, a fully "historical and political catastrophe ... was just about to take place."

Nolan's interpretation here seems to imply that the gospel writers misconstrued Jesus' message, to the extent that the "judgment on the last day" — a "supra-historical" event which the evalgelists supposed to be in the offing — "is then used, in typical apocalyptic fashion, for moralizing purposes and as as threat concerning the individual rather than society."

Matthew's "great emphasis upon the coming judgment day and upon the apportioning of reward and punishment" compounds such supposed wrongheadedness, Nolan says, in spades — see pp. 108-109.


I find the tension between views which emphasize the coming judgment day and those which, like Nolan's, insist on the approaching compassionate kingdom to be hard indeed to resolve. A voice in my head keeps nagging at me, saying that there would be no Christianity today were it not for the appeal of the notion of a coming judgment day to the religious imagination. Judgment, righteousness, being subject to God's punishment for the lack thereof — these are important elements of what people have always derived from Christian teaching.

I feel, consequently, that Nolan fails the reader by not really showing how to bridge the theological gap between "Jesus before Christianity" and (shall we say) "Christ after Christianity."

In fact, the sketchy swatches of prose I have already outlined are just about it, when it comes to Nolan stating how he would square his "prophetic" view of the gospels with the dominant "apocalyptic" one that has held sway over the last 2,000 years. And that's a shame, since I believe Nolan is essentially right about how Jesus preached, above all else, universal solidarity and compassion. We need to be shown how to honor that without necessarily abandoning the moral teachings we have long associated with the Church.

Heart Too Small? Try Jesus.

This may pertain to this blog: "A spirited explorer of religion's role," appearing in The Baltimore Sun over this past weekend, tells of the new book by religion elucidator Huston Smith, The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition.

How can we recover the core teachings of Christianity, Smith, in his book, seems to be asking, so to heal the rift between conservatives and liberals in the faith today?

Smith, author of the well-known survey The Religions of Man, updated as The World's Religions, disparages the conservative Christian outlook on grounds that it "ignores the contexts that give words their meaning — different contexts, different meanings." Failing to compensate for the very different context in which Jesus preached and then the changed one in which the evangelists wrote leads many of us today to misinterpret the words, giving them meanings that were never intended. We can thereby become "narrowly dogmatic and chauvinistic," as we find ourselves "in constant danger of slipping into disastrous political agendas."

Liberal churches, meanwhile, lack "a robust, emphatically theistic worldview to work within." Their "rallying cries to be good" are simply not enough. Without firm commitment to a belief in "a two-story universe: this world, and another world that is greater and more important than this," they wither on the vine.


Smith accordingly undertakes "a re-examination of the life and language of Jesus." In doing so, he of necessity "returned to first-century Palestine, where [says the Sun article] those he encountered would have found both to be utterly alarming." This sounds like exactly what Albert Nolan in Jesus before Christianity has done as well.

In a side article available here, we learn that Smith, a lifelong Methodist, also "returns [in his book] to the early church — the community of believers before the Great Schism of 1054 divided Catholic and Orthodox, before the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century further split the faith." The failure to say much if anything about the early, 2nd-century/1st-millennium church mars Nolan's work, I feel, quite badly. We need to see what Jesus meant in his day, and we need to see what he meant, and why, to the unsplintered early church, that vital bridge between the original Jesus movement and now.


"In all, a wind of freedom blows through these teachings," Smith is quoted from his book in the Sun review, "that frightens the world and makes us want to deflect their effect by postponement — not yet, not yet! H.G. Wells was evidently right: Either there was something mad about this man, or our hearts are still too small for his message."

That resonates, sad to say. I know my heart to be way too small to put me squarely among, per Smith, "the happy people ... those who are meek, who weep, who are merciful and pure in heart."

But I'm working on it.

Chapter 15, "The Temptation to Violence"

I've been reviewing Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity in chapter-reverse order, seeking greater understanding of a message of universal compassion and solidarity that often gets hidden in formal church theology and doctrine today. Having covered Chapter 16, "The Role of Suffering and Death", I turn now to a tiny chapter with a big message.

"The Temptation to Violence," chapter 15 of the book, posits that Jesus refused to be crowned Messiah-king of the Jewish people in first-century Palestine — a throne which was offered to him by nationalists seeking an end to Roman dominion — for one simple reason. "The power of force" could never remedy his people's woes, absent "a widespread change of heart" on the part of the Jewish people themselves (pp. 134, 135).

As Nolan puts it:

To have accepted the kingship over a people who had not transferred their allegiance to the "kingdom" of God and to lead such people in battle was to play into the hands of Satan. (p. 135)

The truly important thing was to bring the people to compassionate solidarity, based on faith in God's own compassion. That's why "Jesus was angry with Peter" in Mark 8 and parallel passages in other Gospels. Peter was urging Jesus to seize the opportunity he had been offered to become Messiah-king, first, and only then preach the "kingdom" of God. "Get behind me, Satan!" said Jesus to Peter, "... the way you think is not God's but man's" (see p. 134).

According to Nolan, Jesus was no pacifist, except in those specific circumstances. He was willing to entertain — but reject — the use of force. Jesus' "injunctions to turn the other cheek and not to resist evil ... do not exclude violence as such, they exclude violence for the purpose of revenge," says Nolan. A "practical and realistic man," Jesus forbade a Jewish coup d'etat on his behalf, not out of pacifism, but out of recognition that "to draw the sword was plain suicide" under those particular circumstances:

A war with Rome could only end in a wholesale massacre of the people. This was indeed the catastrophe which Jesus feared and which he felt could be averted only by a widespread change of heart. (p. 135)

Still, even if Jesus was willing to commit violence under some circumstances, clearly he preferred "individual conversion" as a master strategy (see p. 133). Only a "change of heart," he preached, could usher in a "kingdom" of God in which there was no earthly potentate whatsoever.

After the coming of this "kingdom":

Messiahship would then not have been a title of honor, prestige and power but a form of service, and the Gentiles [such as the Romans and the non-Jewish peoples of the area] would then have been brought into the "kingdom" not by the power of the sword but by the power of faith and compassion. ... The "kingdom" of total liberation for all people cannot be established by violence. Faith alone can enable the "kingdom" to come. (p. 136)


There are several interesting points which emerge. One which I'll not comment on further, for the nonce, is that Nolan quite clearly is a proponent of "liberation theology." Another has to do with Nolan's sophisticated method of exegesis. Nolan holds that Jesus absolutely rejected being named Messiah or king, forbade his followers to call him such, and was firmly the source of the "so-called Messianic Secret" spoken of by biblical exegetes (see p. 132).

That claim goes right against a surface reading of several Gospel verses which Nolan lists in an endnote (endnote 4 for chapter 15, p. 182). For example, Mark 9:41 reads: "For truly, I say to you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ, will by no means lose his reward" (RSV). "The name of Christ" is how the word "Messiah" was rendered in Greek. So, if this verse and similar ones can be taken at face value, it would seem Jesus did call himself Christ or Messiah.

Such interpolations are, says Nolan, however, "obviously the words of the evangelists" — the writers of the Gospels, well after Jesus was gone — "who were all convinced that Jesus was the Messiah" (pp. 131-2; italics mine). Accordingly: "What was originally a 'temptation'" — for Jesus to accept the Messiahship, that is — "became for the early Christians a 'confession of faith'" (p. 134).

And that change in outlook is absolutely key. The church as we now know it, with the Christian system of beliefs that we today inherit, passes Jesus' actual life and original teachings through an optic that to a great extent filters out the specific historical circumstances which Jesus coped with and the strategic approach Jesus consequently used.


This is a fact which leads me to one of my few major criticisms of Nolan's book. Although he writes (p. 134), "How that [distortion of Jesus' original message] can have happened, we shall see later," I don't feel that Nolan actually comes close to dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's in this regard, in subsequent parts of the book.

True, Nolan's Jesus could be — despite the emphasis placed by the book on his humanity and his historicity — called divine. (See Chapter 19, "Faith in Jesus," Part 2 and Chapter 19, "Faith in Jesus," Part 1.) In Jesus the truth about faith and compassion, and about the coming of God's kingdom, were "made flesh." The core truth about life radiated from his every word and act. No wonder his followers "were convinced that they had seen him alive," says Nolan, after his death. "He was on a par with God" (pp. 164, 165).

That having been said, however, there still remains the question of how to square all the developments in the post-resurrection church, as embodied in the Gospels and other New Testament writings, with the teachings of Jesus as elucidated by Nolan. I don't feel Nolan fills us in adequately on that. And it's important: Most Christians today invest their faith squarely in our post-resurrection notions of Christianity, and feel at least some congnitive dissonance when confronted by Nolan's pre-resurrectionist exegesis. Two salient points, along these lines:

• Was Jesus really, in bodily terms, resurrected? Most Christians today would say, emphatically, yes — that's how we know he was divine. All Nolan says is:

Some of those who had known him and had seen him before he died (especially the twelve [apostles]) were convinced that they had seen him alive again after his death and that he had instructed him again as he had done before. The women who discovered the empty tomb, followed by the other disciples, proclaimed that Jesus had risen from the dead. (p. 164)

• Did Jesus really perform miracles? Nolan explains the "miracle of the loaves and fishes," Mark 6:35-44, with its parallels in other Gospels, in everyday terms: "... the event itself was not a miracle of multiplication; it was a remarkable example of sharing" (p. 64).

The only "miracle-stories" Nolan accepts as such, in the Gospels, are the ones in which Jesus did in fact "exorcise and heal people in a quite extraordinary manner" (p. 43). The others, he says, were the result of "embellishment and exaggeration" in the oral tradition that Mark and the other evangelists relied on in writing the Gospels. Or they were "not originally miracles or extraordinary marvels" — as with "the walking on the waters, the multiplication of the loaves, the cursing of the fig tree and the changing of water into wine."

For Mark "wished to correct [what he felt was a] one-sided picture": "the portrait of Jesus as a teacher which was current in the Church at the time. Those who had not known Jesus ... came to know him principally through his sayings and parables. ... [But Mark knew] miracles were a particularly easy and convenient way of convincing his readers" (p. 42). So we today inherit Mark and the other evangelists' exaggeration of the importance of miracles.

That fact is abetted by the concept we now have of natural laws which miracles presumably violate. But Nolan points out that no such concept existed in biblical times; there was no necessary distinction as yet between otherwise-explicable events and astonishing wonders and marvels, to be experienced as signs of God's power and might.

Today, many people want or even need to believe in miracles that defy science's insights. It's hard for us to cast our minds back to a time before the scientific method had even been invented. It's not easy to see the Bible through the eyes of the people it was originally intended for. And it's even more difficult to strip away 2,000 years of teachings, predilections, and assumptions to resurrect the actual "historical Jesus" in our own consciousness.

In that way, Nolan's approach can be said to (ahem) "do violence" to some of our most cherished beliefs.

Chapter 16, "The Role of Suffering and Death"

Now, more on how Albert Nolan reads the gospels in Jesus before Christianity. I've been reviewing the book's chapters in reverse order in a search for greater understanding of a message that often gets hidden in formal church theology and doctrine today.

In previous posts up to and including Chapter 17, "The Man Who Emerges", I've established what Nolan makes explicit in chapter 16, "The Role of Suffering and Death": "Jesus was determined to destroy ... the sufferings of the poor and oppressed, the sufferings of the sick, the sufferings that would ensue if the catastrophe were to come" (p. 138). That was his main purpose: to awaken faith in the kingdom of God which would come instead of the catastrophe (the predicted expulsion of Jews from their sacred homeland and the destruction of their Temple) if enough people had enough compassionate faith.

The poor, the downtrodden, and the oppressed would be first to enter the new kingdom, Jesus preached, ushered in by a solicitous and merciful God. But what of everyone else? Here, in this chapter, is where Nolan takes up "the paradox of compassion," for Jesus showed that "in order to enter the 'kingdom' with the poor and the oppressed ... one must deny oneself ... and be willing to suffer (p. 138; italics mine).

At the extreme, "a willingness to die for all people" is required, the ultimate "expression of universal solidarity" as preached by Jesus (p. 139; again, italics mine). "As [Jesus] understood it," writes Nolan, "one should be willing to give up one's life for exactly the reason as one gives up possessions, prestige, family, and power, namely for others."

And that's what Jesus did, in the end: gave up his life in service to others. Faced with two equally inappropriate alternatives of remaining in hiding after the incident in the Temple courtyard or coming out of hiding to be crowned secular Messiah-King, Jesus discerned the third — and right — option. He could make of his own execution "a service ... rendered to all people" (p. 139; italics Nolan's). His death would be "a ransom ... given to redeem or liberate others" and to awaken in them faith in the coming kingdom of God.


Jesus knew at that point that "there was no other way of saving people from sin, suffering and the catastrophe to come ... of enabling the 'kingdom' to come instead of the catastrophe." He found himself in "circumstances in which [he] could serve the world better by dying for it than by continuing to live for it. ... The only alternative was to die. ... Jesus died so that the 'kingdom' might come" (pp. 140-141; italics Nolan's).

When Jesus in the gospels predicted his own end to his disciples, "each of the three main '[passion] predictions' is followed by instructions about self-denial, the willingness to die, being a servant and taking the last place" (p. 141). And we are back to the riddle of riddles: "Anyone who saves his or her life will lose it; anyone who loses his or her life will save it" (p. 139; italics Nolan's). In other words:

The paradox is that the person who fears death is already dead, whereas the person who has ceased to fear death has at that moment begun to live. (p. 139; italics mine)

Accordingly, we who are not poor and oppressed gain the kingdom of God by our willingness to suffer with and even die for the downtrodden, where that will serve to ease or curtail their suffering. That realization is tantamount to the awakening of faith. For, as Nolan states in an endnote:

... the awakening of faith also makes God's forgiveness effective in a person. ... It follows that one of the results of Jesus' death would be the forgiveness of sin. This is the sense in which Jessus' death may be called an atonement for sin. Jesus did not have to placate an angry God who was unwilling to forgive. God is always willing to forgive and to forgive unconditionally. Jesus' death reveals this and awakens our faith in it, thereby allowing God's forgiveness to transform our lives. (endnote 11, p. 183; emphasis mine)


Thus is self-denial linked, albeit paradoxically, to the coming of the compassionate kingdom and to the soul-transforming effectiveness of forgiveness. I, for one, find that notion a bit difficult to take ... not really because it's so paradoxical, though it is, but because I have never been particularly keen on self-denial as a concomitant of my religious faith.

That I may be able to count myself now ready for more self-denial than I 've been accustomed to manifesting in the past 58 years is — if it's real and lasting — a function of increased spiritual maturity on my part, or so I imagine.

The idea of spiritual maturity is not one we hear preached in every sermon, from every pulpit, but I would say the Christian journey is ever one of "putting away childish things" — something I've had an exceptionally hard time doing.

In fact, when I talked about the crucial distinction between the "beast" and the fully humane human in Chapter 17, "The Man Who Emerges", what I had in mind was in part the notion that "childish things," in this usage, betokens not just the innocence of the infant but also the "beastliness" of much childhood behavior — an aggressive, self-centered, me-me-me tendency which, if you believe in evolution, comes from our red-in-tooth-and-claw, pre-human heritage.

One of my favorite spirtual gurus, Fr. Ron Rolheiser, speaks of "crucifying the ego" as the prime Christian desideratum. This would seem to be synonymous with "caging the beast" — the "beast" within us all, that is. This "beast" is the voice in our skulls which says don't be a sap. Don't even think about giving up possessions, prestige, family, power, and even your life for others. Don't for one moment imagine that such foolishness will bring you any lasting joy or peace.


"Crucifying the ego" or "caging the beast," clearly, demands spiritual maturity of us. Otherwise, we might have a tendency to "go off the deep end" and make useless sacrifices simply to prove to ourselves that we would and could. That's just another form of egoism, cleverly disguised.

So Nolan's version of the gospel message of Jesus demands that we accept "on faith" what our ego tells us is crazy: that our true mission in life is compassionate solidarity with and service to others. That's the real "role of suffering and death" in our lives: to vouchsafe our compassion, our solidarity, and our service.

Chapter 17, "The Man Who Emerges"

The kingdom of heaven will come on earth as the triumph of human solidarity, unbounded compassion, and unstinting fellow-feeling, founded on the faith that all our sins and trespasses will be — by one another, as by God — forgiven. Jesus, the man from Nazareth, presented that truth to us so authentically that, after his crucifixion, he was understood to be divine; death could not contain him.

This is how Albert Nolan reads the gospels in Jesus before Christianity. I've been reviewing the book's chapters, in reverse order, in a search for greater understanding of a message that often gets hidden in our formal church theology and doctrine today.

Nolan has it that, to Jesus, the Lord God in heaven, whom he called Father or Abba, had changed! God had relented with respect to his erstwhile intentions to judge and punish sinners. The "signs of the times" were manifest: God's mercy was at hand. That was shown by the great number of healings that were happening, all around Jesus, in first-century Palestine.

Jesus preached faith: the power of forgiveness and compassion to unify humanity and avert looming catastrophe. But if faith was not strong, or forgiveness not universal, dire catastrophe would come instead of the kingdom of God. In his time, the pending catastrophe Jesus prophesied was the turning out of Jews from their homeland at the hands of the conquering Romans, and the fall of the Temple. That actually transpired, a mere few decades later.

Even so, Nolan says, Jesus also preached that the kindgom of heaven would eventually come to, and on, our earth. Even if there wasn't enough faith and compassion in men's hearts to head off catastrophe in the short term, there would be enough in the long term to make the kingdom one day come true.


In Chapter 17, "The Man Who Emerges," Nolan makes the point that Jesus conspicuously "spoke and acted without authority" (p. 148, Nolan's italics). He would accept no titles. He declined even the accolade "good," saying that such an honor was to be reserved for God alone (Mk 10:18; Lk 18:19).

If he was in any sense a "king," his would be a metaphorical kingship only ... for the "kingdom" was specifically one in which the highest in society would serve the lowest. There would be no authority figures, no wielding of power in its literal sense.

From Jesus the man shone forth the truth expressed in 1 Jn 4:7-8: " ... everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God. Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love." Or, as Nolan puts it:

We know that [Jesus] was moved to act ans speak by a profound experience of compassion. And we know that the Abba-experience was an experience of God as a compassionate Father. This would mean that Jesus experienced the mysterious creative power behind all phenomena (God) as compassion or love. (pp. 151-152)

The "kingdom of God" is therefore a reign of compassion and love.


The only "title" Jesus gave himself was Son of Man. Nolan shows that it is mistaken of us to read it as a title.

For one thing, it can be taken as an idiom along the lines of how we sometimes use "yours truly": "If you want to know what yours truly thinks, you have only to ask."

For another — and this is the really important thing — "son of man" was understood by Jesus' contemporaries as synonymous with "human being." Per Nolan, that expression "could be used to underline the human as opposed to the bestial" (p. 145).

I think that interpretation is key. In so saying, I am treating what for Nolan is a mere "matter for conjecture" (p. 146) as fact: "Jesus' frequent and emphatic use of the term 'son of man' was his way of referring to, and identifying himself with, human beings as human beings" (p. 145, italics mine).

Nolan cites verses from the Book of Daniel, the Old Testament prophet, in this regard. For my purposes verses 11 through 14 from chapter 7 give the flavor of it:

I watched, then, from the first of the arrogant words which the horn spoke, until the beast was slain and its body thrown into the fire to be burnt up.

The other beasts, which also lost their dominion, were granted a prolongation of life for a time and a season.

As the visions during the night continued, I saw One like a son of man coming, on the clouds of heaven; When he reached the Ancient One and was presented before him,

He received dominion, glory, and kingship; nations and peoples of every language serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not be taken away, his kingship shall not be destroyed.

The contrast is drawn between the "beast" or "beasts" whose time has come and gone and "a son of man" whose "dominion" or "kingship" shall never cease.

Nolan quibbles (p. 145) about whether Jesus actually claimed to be this particular "son of man" or not, inasmuch as the "son of man" passages in the Gospels were possibly "not formulated by Jesus himself but by the very early Christians." But, really, his hypothesis about Jesus is strengthened by assuming that Jesus did claim this non-title, Son of Man, but never exclusively.

Rather, as Nolan in a page or so asserts:

Jesus must have been aware of the fact that he was fulfilling the prophecies and expectations of Scripture but it does not seem to have mattered to him who was fulfilling them. When according to the gospels, John's disciples ask [Jesus] whether he is the one to come, he does not answer the question directly, he simply points to the fulfillment of Scripture in what is now happening: "The blind see again and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed ... and the good news is proclaimed to the poor" (Mt 11:4-5).

He does not say, "I give sight to the blind, I am proclaiming the good news to the poor." What matters is that this kind of thing is being done, people are being liberated and saved. Who does it is irrelevant. He wanted his disciples to go out and do the same as he had done. It never occurred to him to stop anyone, even complete strangers, from participating in the work of liberation (Mk 9:38-40 par). Jesus' only concern was that the people be liberated. (pp. 147-148)


Putting this all together, we can deduce that the divine Jesus was, and wanted to be seen as, the embodiment of all that makes us human (and humane) beings, not beasts. Love and compassion are our birthright, he told us, and once we come fully and communally into our inheritance, the kingdom of God will arrive for us. We will be liberated, all of us together, from the beast within. Jesus just knew that ... and he made others know it and manifest it too.

That's the kind of God-man he was.

Whither Personal Morality?

Herein, a break from my backwards, chapter-by-chapter review-in-depth of Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity. Before moving on, I have something I want to discuss further. In the installment I called Chapter 19, "Faith in Jesus," Part 2, I mentioned that:

... the evangelists who wrote the four New Testament Gospels "apocalyptized the message," according to Nolan. They "adapted [it] to other situations or indeed to any and every situation," by using it "in typical apocalyptic fashion, for moralizing purposes and as a threat concerning the individual rather than society ... laying great emphasis on the judgment day and upon the apportioning of reward and punishment" (pp. 108-109).

I find that a key passage which raises a question I can ask but don't think I can answer: if we take Nolan's version of Jesus' teaching to heart, whither personal morality? If traditional Christian moral teaching rests on a "threat concerning the individual" — on the "apportioning of reward and punishment," come judgment day — what does Nolan have to say about it?

Not a lot, it would seem. For, aside from the above-cited passage of his book, Nolan makes few if any other references to moral issues as we would customarily tend to think of them. I may be reading too much into what he does say about these matters, but it appears to me that Nolan's emphasis on boundless mercy and unquestioning forgiveness as a pathway to compassionate solidarity among all humans suggests he is "soft on morality."


I think of the "sins" traditional Christian morality abhors as falling in two groups: sins of aggression and sins of appetite. The former group is pretty much self-explanatory. Blind hostility, gleeful violence, brutal mayhem, homicide, genocide, thirst for vengeance — all are sins of aggression.

Sins of appetite include, of course, sexual sin (misused genital appetite). They also include such things as gluttony (exaggerated appetite for comestibles) and sloth (overweening appetite for ease).

Nolan gives short shrift to such sins in his exegesis of Jesus' teachings. He seems to imply that Jesus considered sins of alienation and aspersion more key than those of aggression and appetite. There is little mention of sins of appetite in Nolan's book whatsoever — except to say that Jesus' enemies accused him of immorality by virtue of his willing association with known drunkards, gluttons, and prostitutes.

Nolan does take up the question of whether violence is always forbidden, a topic I'll cover in depth when I deal with Nolan's chapter on "The Temptation to Violence." The short answer: "Jesus was not a pacifist in principle, he was a pacifist in practice" (p. 136). "Unlimited compassion" for the poor and oppressed could, under just the right circumstances, justify "violent indignation" — as when Jesus ousted the money-changers from the Temple courtyard.


It is possible to read Nolan, therefore, as "soft on morality." Or, rather, to read Nolan's Jesus as way too permissive.

In fairness, one must admit that for Nolan to take up such questions would have cluttered up his exposition fatally. He wants to show that Jesus' main thrust was to wipe out the sins of alienation and aspersion which were fragmenting his people and inviting the historical catastrophe which did in fact occur within the lifetime of many who had known Jesus.

Furthermore, it would be foolish to fail to note that Nolan wrote in the mid-'70s, a time when the air was filled with angst over unjust war, environmental desecration, apartheid, impending nuclear doom. Meanwhile, the sexual revolution was in full stride. Those of liberal mindset were apt to consider the latter small potatoes by way of contrast with the former.


Reading the signs of today's times is, however, a different matter.

Religious conservatives say they are embroiled in a culture war. Depending on which pundits you believe, the 2004 presidential election was or was not decided on "moral values." The country debates abortion rights and gay marriage. It is generally understood that a big chunk of the populace wants to re-enshrine traditional Christian assertions about sins of appetite.

Oddly, that same chunk seems willing to turn a blind eye to Abu Ghraib and other sins of aggression against the "enemies" whom Jesus said we should love. But, never mind.

Inevitably, it comes time for full disclosure: I myself am quite torn about such things. Especially sins of appetite, since I've long since been able to get my aggressive instincts under some semblance of control. Or, at least, I think I have.

I'm, it seems, half Puritan and half libertine. Mostly, the Puritan rules my life, the libertine my X-rated imagination. It likely is the libertine in me that most resents religion when it clamps down on sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, and the like. But it is definitely the Puritan in me that turns up its nose, of late, at the manifest coarsening of our culture.

So there are admittedly dueling agendas in my soul ... a fact which I feel disqualifies me from making any for-all-time pronouncements about traditional Christian morality. When I read the signs of today's times, I'm apt to come to different conclusions depending on which lobe is in charge at the moment: the rigid Puritan or the relaxed libertine.


Yet it seems clear to me that the religio-cultural warriors of today are much more in the mode of worrying about the threat to individual souls come judgment day than about the threat to the community posed by, say, marginalizing gays who won't recant. These warriors seem to me to take an apocalyptizing, moralizing view of the Gospel message ... not the "de-apocalyptized" prophetic view Nolan prefers.

Many Christian conservatives — though surely not all — think we are approaching the "end times." Witness the vast popularity of the Left Behind series, with its instant "rapturing" of the faithful into heaven, followed by tribulation for those remaining on earth.

If that's not using the Bible message "in typical apocalyptic fashion, for moralizing purposes and as a threat concerning the individual rather than society ... laying great emphasis on the judgment day and upon the apportioning of reward and punishment," I don't know what is.

As I say, I don't feel qualified to resolve such tensions, but I also feel I would be remiss in not mentioning them. There does seem to be a rift between conservative outlooks of the moment and Nolan's take on Christian morality, in which sins of alienation and aspersion far outweigh those of appetite and aggression.

Chapter 18, "On Trial"

I now continue my investigation-in-reverse- chapter-order of Albert Nolan's spiritually challenging book Jesus before Christianity. My last installment, Chapter 19, "Faith in Jesus," Part 2, found me at a loss to figure out how to fit Nolan's central motif of compassion-vs.-catastrophe into today's reality. Before I discuss the next-to-last chapter of his book, "On Trial," I'd like to take another crack at that.

Nolan's central thesis is that Jesus preached a radical change of heart as the only thing which could ward off a looming catastrophe, in his time, and lead instead to the kingdom of God.

The catastrophe which Jesus prophesied was the Jews' eviction from their homeland as well as the fall of their Temple in Jerusalem.

The radical change of heart which was needed among the Jews of that time to avert this pending catastrophe, Jesus preached, was compounded of faith, hope, and compassion. Compassion for and solidarity with not only those who are like us but also those who are not — the poor, the afflicted, the marginalized, all of whom are called sinners; and our so-called enemies — would make God's kingdom come instead of the prophesied destruction. That this was so was a matter of faith and hope: faith had the power to justify our hope and bring about the kingdom of heaven.

The kingdom didn't come, though. Destruction did. In an earlier chapter of the book Nolan asserts:

Jesus had not been mistaken; he had failed, or rather the people had failed him. A unique opportunity had been lost. But it was by no means the end. There would be another chance and still another because the "kingdom" of God will come in the end — God will have the last word. (p. 108)

Another chance, and another, and another ... and today we still have a choice between the compassionate kingdom and the coming catastrophe. But how?

In my previous post I suggested the coming catastrophe has to do with Islamic terrorism, but it escaped me how a change of heart on our part might help to avert it. On further consideration, however, various ways present themselves. I'll discuss some of them after I deal with the "On Trial" chapter, inasmuch as it seems we are presently on trial.


On its face, Nolan's chapter 18 appears to be about the trial of Jesus at the hands of the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, with the collaboration of Caiaphas and the leaders of the Jewish Temple. But it turns out that those who were really on trial include Pilate, Caiaphas, Jesus' disciples ... as well as us Jesus, and Jesus.

The chapter divides into two halves. In the first, Nolan seems to delve into pointless minutiae about exactly which of a raft of possible charges were actually laid against Jesus, by whom, and according to what ulterior motives. Who was more to blame, Pilate and the Romans or Caiaphas and the Jews? What were their respective intentions?

And what were the intentions of the Gospel writers who documented the trial of Jesus? Their combined accounts of Jesus' persecution today seem to us "muddled and confused" (see p. 153). Says Nolan of the Christian evangelists:

Their intention was not to deceive or to twist the historical facts. Their intention was to help the reader to understand what really happened despite all appearances. (p. 154)

Today, we might call this "investigative journalism," but it was more. The early Christians were committed to a "despite-all-appearances" worldview, since "appearances" had it that Jesus was dead. And so:

On the surface of it the Romans were to blame but the truth of it was that the Jews were more guilty. There is no anti-semitism here, nor is there a prejudice in favor of Rome, only disappointment. The truth of the matter is that Jesus appealed to a particular nation [the Jews of Palestine] at a particular time [the 1st century] and that nation rejected him as most other people might well have done in the circumstances. (p. 154)


Accordingly, Nolan pores over the evidence in the Gospel accounts to try to see, in effect, "What did Pilate and Caiaphas know about Jesus and when did they know it?" Answer: unclear. Each of Jesus' accusers probably knew something about Jesus before acting as he did ... but only just enough to recognize his threat, not his truth.

For Pilate, the threat was to his power. He was apparently a control-mad sadist, genocidally jealous of any challenge to his hegemony. He didn't understand that Jesus' challenge was not one of armed insurrection, à la the Zealots and other whom he also persecuted. But he knew Jesus' movement was a danger to Roman rule.

For the high priest Caiaphas and his associates, the challenge was to their status as privileged collaborators with Pilate. If they did not eliminate Jesus, Roman reprisals would destroy their sinecure. Out of expediency, says Nolan, either they initiated Jesus' persecution on their own, or they responded to Pilate's call to (in modern parlance) extradite Jesus.

Thus were two false gods, power and status, implicated in Jesus' betrayal. There was also a third, money. The Romans extorted taxes and tribute money from the Jews. And the priests had a cozy arrangement with the profiteering money-changers in the Temple courtyard.


So Jesus was brought to trial before Pilate ... and the second half of Nolan's "On Trial" chapter begins. In it Nolan shows how Jesus, basically by remaining silent and offering no substantive reply to any of the charges, ended up "putting everyone else to the test" (p. 160).

Their words were turned back at them, and they condemned themselves out of their own mouths. Pilate, firstly, was found ... guilty of a lack of interest in the truth ... . Caiaphas and his associates were even more guilty [for not having] gone to the trouble of finding out more about Jesus ... . (pp. 160-161)

But also being put to the test of their "willingness to die with him for the sake of humankind" (p. 161) were Jesus' disciples themselves. "But Judas betrayed him, Peter denied him and the rest fled."

And Jesus himself was put to the test:

He sweated blood over it ... [and] alone was able to accept the challenge of the hour. It set him above everyone else as the silent truth that judges every human being. Jesus died alone as the only person who had been able to survive the test. Everyone else failed and yet everyone else was given another chance. (pp. 161-162)

So, implicitly, we today are also the ones being put to the test:

The history of Christianity is the history of those who came to believe in Jesus and who were inspired to take up the challenge of his death — in one way or another.

Seeking not to be put to the test is, per Nolan, "the literal meaning of the prayer: 'Lead us not into temptation'." The temptation or ultimate test is not something that Jesus wanted for anyone: "He had always taught his disciples to hope and pray that it would not come to this [i.e., Jesus' persecution], that God would not bring them to the test or trial" (p. 161).


In fact, it seems paradoxical to claim that, by God's grace, such tests might be avoided, and also to realize that this particular test of Jesus' trial and execution was (at least in hindsight) inevitable.

The only imaginable resolution to the paradox is to recognize that the other catastrophe Jesus predicted, the imminent fall of the Jewish nation, could have been averted by people's faith in the coming of the compassionate kingdom of God. That was the core of what Jesus taught his fellow Jews.

Projecting Jesus' message for Jews onto the world at large: universal solidarity among all humans is the way to avert the test, so as not to be "led into temptation."


Thus do the Gospels give us a template, as it were, for understanding our current situation. Before I attempt to elaborate on that notion, I'd better first warn that what I'm about to say is sketchy and intuitive. I feel quite the inadequate prophet, having, as I do, nothing like the clarity of vision Jesus had when he predicted the fall of his nation and its Temple.

It seems to me that the catastrophe we face is much more murky. It has something to do with terrorism abroad, emanating mostly from Islamic sources — I can see that much, but I have no idea how it might manifest itself as a specific, definitive catastrophe.

As I said in Chapter 19, "Faith in Jesus," Part 2, nor can I give chapter and verse on how any sort of compassion-favoring change of heart on our part would help. Yet in general it seems clear that compassion — fellow-feeling for all our "neighbors" — is the basis for social solidarity. We obviously will need solidarity to ward off the terrorist threat.

How might that work? Well, with greater solidarity we might be able to summon up the political will to do certain things that pundits and commentators across the ideological spectrum have called for, but bemoaned the difficulty of passing.

For example, voices from the left, center, and right have been raised in favor of undertaking to make the U.S. "energy independent," thereby weaning it from foreign oil. It would take a lot of planning — à la what we did in the 1960s to get to the moon — and a lot of sacrifice. Yet few doubt it could be done ... if our leaders led us in that direction and we followed.

At the same time, such sensible proposals are (having been made) typically immediately pronounced D.O.A. Why? Because it seems the necessary political solidarity isn't available.


The very same thing happens when the subject of re-instituting a military draft is brought up. A lot of smart people think a draft is needed to get enough troops into the armed forces while not busting the budget and ballooning the deficit. Plus it would (if implemented properly) distribute the burden of fighting in places like Iraq more fairly among ethnic groups and economic strata. Yet almost no one thinks such a sensible proposal stands a ghost of a chance in today's sacrifice-averse political climate.

A third example of where we need greater willingness to abandon expediency and face the truth concerns proposals made by reputable, knowledgable experts to the effect that the Senate ought to reassert its constitutional prerogative and actually require American wars to be declared, by the Senate itself, as in the distant past. Having the legislative branch vet a President's war-making intentions in advance would help us stay together, politically, after the fighting begins. If it begins, that is — the Senate would have to step up to the plate and deny the President his or her war, if it looks to be a hopeless muddle in the making.

None of this will happen in exactly the way it should, however, if we don't stop sniping at one another and take back the moral high ground of "love thy neighbor." If cynics say plans for energy independence are excuses to fatten the coffers of privileged corporations, kiss that thrust goodbye. If black folks insist a reinstated draft is a clever way to force more African Americans into harm's way, fugeddaboudit. If neo-conservatives say America's muscle is at risk and shoot down Senate initiatives to declare wars or never fight them, there's no chance for change.


We have to have faith that cooperation — as in "love thy neighbor" — is the moral high ground and will work. And we have to live by that faith even when it seems like the height of folly.

Note that compassion as Jesus taught it is also fellow-feeling for our "enemies," whom Jesus instructs us to "love." If we were indeed more compassionate in this way, perhaps we'd not find it so hard to pass laws forbidding the torture and abuse of prisoners we're holding offshore, detainees not now covered by the Geneva Convention.

Still, those of our leaders who refuse to zero out the torture option do have a case. If we don't subject the "enemy" to mental and physical abuse, we might be missing an opportunity to squeeze out much needed intelligence information. Wouldn't that be, in fact, the height of foolishness?

That's where faith really comes into play. The template of truth which Albert Nolan lays out for us says that we will paradoxically avoid catastrophe only by eschewing, in the name of total compassion, exactly the "foolish" things our reason tells us must be done.


That, at any rate, is a sketch of how investing our souls in a commitment to compassion, to a righteousness that would please the Jesus of Nolan's book, might begin shifting our future away from a catastrophe of terrorism.

But, clearly, we'd have to follow it up with such a degree of righteousness as to convince even our enemies.

I'm put in mind of the story told in the movie Gandhi. Mohandas K. Gandhi, in his compassion, saw an India poor, starving, and desperate for independence from the British crown ... but powerless to gain it. He realized that, foolish as it might seem, the only way to oust the colonials and gain home rule was to adjure the use of violent force.

Gandhi's movement of non-violence even — after a struggle lasting decades — gained the grudging respect of some of the English overlords. In part, it was because they realized that they were not being demonized, but were being treated honestly and fairly by Indians in the gradually succeeding movement. Finally the time came when the British simply felt moved to hand over their power to the Indians, as if conceding a well-played cricket match.

In a nutshell, the righteousness of Gandhi's cause and methodology was not lost on the so-called enemy. At the end of the day, compassion, faith, and hope proved stronger than complacency, expediency, and the traditional instruments of power.

Could we do that? Could we "fight" terrorism with righteous compassion, faith, and hope, and win? Could we convince our enemies that we indeed love them, and all people, and that we are not the infidel brutes whom they think we are?

Are we "on trial" here? Are we being "put to the test" which Jesus taught us to pray we would never be put to? Is compassion our only ticket away from catastrophe and toward the kingdom of God?