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.