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Class Prep
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Later Christs
- Today's readings and reflection focus on the different meanings or interpretations of Christ outside the New Testament—in gnostic gospels judged heretical by the mainstream church (Gospels of Thomas, Mary, and Judas), in apocryphal gospels that were not put in the canon but were nevertheless quite popular (Infancy Gospel of James, Infancy Gospel of Thomas), and in 2000 years of western Christian art, literature and ritual (Williams article).
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- The variety of Christs in the four canonical gospels, New Testament letters, noncanonical books, and later western interpretations, begs a question: if Christ somehow represents "truth" for believers, do these different Christs undermine that truth? How much room is there for interpretation, and when do interpreta-
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tions become erroneous? Who decides? How does the Christian community remain in integrity while allowing that history and cultural differences reshape the Christs Christians follow? This is the essence of today's journal question: "How much room is there in 'the truth' for different versions or different truths?"
- There are three questions to concentrate on in today's reading:
- From the primary reading you choose (and remember, you only need to read ONE of the apocryphal gospels), describe the portrait of Jesus. What part of his life is the focus? What "characterizes" him (words? deeds? what kind of words/deeds)? What implications do you think this focus has for followers of this Jesus?
- From the Swenson reading, how is Mary Magdalene depicted in the canonical gospels? Contrast this to traditions of her in later Christianity.
- Rowan Williams is the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the worldwide Anglican communion. He takes you on a road trip through 2000 years of western Christian beliefs about Jesus. There is one thesis he keeps returning to: that there has been a tension in Christian faith between treating Jesus as the terminus or focus of worship, on the one hand, and entering a restored relationship with God through Jesus, on the other. Here is how Williams puts it:
Jesus is manifestly the focus of the renewed sense of God that constitutes the distinctive news Christianity brings; it is through his life and death and resurrection as an historical individual that change occurs in our standing in relation to God. But that change is precisely a movement into the relation Jesus always and already has to God: he is and is not the "terminus" of devotion, and there is...an absence at the centre of the Christian imagination, a space opening up to the final otherness and final intimacy of encounter with the Father. To move into this space...is to move into the new identity Christ makes possible—to become, as the eastern Christian tradition has always put it, "deified" by coming to "embody" Jesus' own prayer (p. 230).
The believer "puts on" Christ, prays Christ's prayer to God, which is ultimately the prayer of every human creature, and thus is deified, becoming restored to relationship with God. This means for Williams that there should be no cult of Jesus, and that Jesus is not merely a great teacher or moral exemplar either, but one who calls humans to conversion and who enables a reordered relationship with God. Your task as you make your way through the reading is to be able to describe one historical example of Jesus being treated as the focus of worship, one historical example of Jesus being regarded as (simply) a great moral teacher, and one historical example Jesus being revered as God incarnate but also as one who enables humans to incarnate God, to be deified through a restored relationship to God. The slide show above should help you identify some of the examples Williams discusses.
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- Assigned Readings
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- Primary: Gospel of Thomas 56, 114; Gospel of Judas (Camino)
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- Secondary: Swenson, Bible Babel 178-84, 262-5; Rowan Williams, "A History of Faith in Jesus," in The Cambridge Companion to Jesus (ed. Markus Bockmuehl; Cambridge Companions to Religion; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 220-37 (Camino)
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- Slides from Lecture
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- Further Reading
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- Bockmuehl, Markus, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Jesus, Cambridge Companions to Religion. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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- Mathews, Thomas. The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993.
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- McClymond, Michael J. "“Thinking outside the Boxes: A Critique of Contemporary Images of Jesus." In Familiar Stranger: An Introduction to Jesus of Nazareth (The Bible in Its World; Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004) 139-52, 196-8.
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- Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Illustrated Jesus through the Centuries. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1997.
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- Pope-Levison, Priscilla and John R. Levison. Jesus in Global Contexts. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1992.
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- Prothero, Stephen. American Jesus: How the Son of God became a National Icon. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.
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- Links
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- Sources
- Photographs:
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