Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: the historical Jesus and the heart of contemporary faith
by Marcus Borg
notes by Doug Muder ;send comments to dougdeb@gurus.com
page numbers from the HarperCollins paperback edition 1995
click here for PDF version (10 pages)
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Marcus Borg is a member of the Jesus Seminar and a professor of religion at Oregon State University who specializes in studying Jesus from a secular historical point of view. This book appeared in 1994. Meeting Jesus Again makes the connection between images of Jesus and models of Christian living. Borg finds the two most popular Jesus images to be inadequate, both historically and in the model of Christian life they lead to. The Jesus-the-divine-savior image leads to a life centered on believing, while the Jesus-the-great-teacher image leads to a life centered on being good.
He presents Jesus as a man whose spiritual experiences led him to see beyond the conventional wisdom of his day and the boundaries that it created between people. The model of Christian life he associates with this image of Jesus is a continuous journey of transformation -- not arriving at a new conventional wisdom and a new set of rules, but always challenging our conventional, rule-based way of thinking.
In most of my published work thus far, I have written from the scholarly place within myself. In this book, I have given myself permission to write as a Christian, even as I also write as a scholar. [viii]
For many Christians ... there came a time when their childhood image of Jesus no longer made a great deal of sense. And for many of them, no persuasive alternative has replaced it. It is for these people especially that this book is written. For them,meeting Jesus again will be -- as it has been for me -- like meeting him for the first time. It will involve a new image of Jesus. [1]
This chapter has two main parts: It discusses the images of Jesus in the public mind, and it describes the images of Jesus that Borg has held during the course of his own life.
Chapter 2 summarizes Borg's conclusions about the historical Jesus, or the pre-Easter Jesus, in the terminology of Chapter 1. Borg describes Jesus as falling into four categories of religious leader: spirit person, teacher of wisdom, social prophet, and movement founder. The central one of these is spirit person. The final several pages of this chapter are devoted to fleshing out the notion of a spirit person.
Chapter 3 begins with a discussion of Luke 6:36, in which Jesus says "Be compassionate as God is compassionate." Borg reads this as Jesus' intentional commentary on the older Leviticus 9:2 "Be holy as God is holy." Holy,in this context, he says, means pure -- in other words,untainted, undefiled. He interprets the politics of first-century Israel as a "purity system," which defined boundaries between the pure and the impure. The difference was partly hereditary, partly behavioral, partly gender-based, and partly determined by bodily health and wholeness. Those of higher purity were expected to avoid contact with those of lower purity, or to have contact only in ways defined by the social code.
Borg sees Jesus as attacking this purity system, seeking to replace the politics of purity with the politics of compassion. He sees irony in the fact that many contemporary Christians devote their efforts to preserve the purity of the community of the righteous.
There are two types of wisdom and two types of sages. The most common type of wisdom is conventional wisdom; its teachers are conventional sages. This is the mainstream wisdom of a culture,"what everybody knows," a culture's understandings about what is real and how to live. ... The second type is a subversive and alternative wisdom. This wisdom questions and undermines conventional wisdom and speaks of another way. [69-70]
Borg presents Jesus as being firmly in the camp of the subversive sages.
Chapter 5 does something rather subtle. Borg is moving toward affirming Jesus-the-Son-of-God as a meaningful metaphor, while denying it as a literal truth. In order to establish this category of meaningful-metaphor-not-literally-true, he first populates it with a metaphor that carries less emotional baggage than the Son-of-God metaphor -- namely, Jesus-the-wisdom-of-God. This Wisdom-of-God metaphor is as old and scripturally supported as the Son-of-God metaphor, but contradicts it in certain essential ways,most obviously that wisdom (sophia in Greek, hokmah in Hebrew) is feminine, while son is masculine. It's also not clear exactly what it would mean for Jesus to literally be the wisdom of God, which points out a similar problem about the Son metaphor. Holding two or more contradictory metaphors in mind simultaneously is a way to grasp that they are indeed metaphors rather than literal truths, which is the point Borg eventually wants to make.
What's more, much of the language eventually used to identify Jesus with God as the second person of the Trinity has its roots in similar statements about Sophia (the personification of wisdom) in the Jewish Bible. And yet this scriptural evidence was not used to make a fourth person of the Godhead.
My central claim [in this chapter] is that there are three "macro-stories" at the heart of Scripture that shape the Bible as a whole, and that each of these stories images the religious life in a particular way. Two of the stories are grounded in the history of ancient Israel: the story of the exodus from Egypt,and the story of the exile and return from Babylon. The third, the priestly story, is grounded not in the history of ancient Israel but in an institution -- namely, the temple, priesthood, and sacrifice.... How does each [of these stories] image us and our lives in relation to God? [121-122]