Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE QUESTION OF JESUS' SELF-UNDERSTANDING §16.1
wrong direction. No wonder, then, that when the first Christians used it of Jesus,
as use it they must, they did so by transforming its current significance completely.
But for Jesus himself, the pre-Good Friday Jesus, the title was evidently
more of a hindrance than a help.
Priestly Messiah (§15.5) was a title or role which was never thought to be
appropriate by anyone involved in or spectator of Jesus' mission, Jesus included.
The other three categories, prophet, healer, and teacher (§§15.6-8), were
more acceptable, because even when eschatological in character, the roles they
described were not so clearly or fully defined. They could be acknowledged by
Jesus, then, without causing his mission to be misunderstood. They provided
some description and illuminated important aspects of his work, but otherwise,
the implication is clear, their function was subsidiary to his main kingdom objectives.
And no single one of them provided a complete or sufficient description of
his mission. 1
At the same time, the bound-togetherness of Jesus and his proclamation of
God's kingship, the fact that the kingdom was present precisely in and through
Jesus' mission, a fact so clearly attested in the memory of his teaching, bespeaks
an eschatological significance for Jesus of which, however self-deprecating, he
can hardly have been unaware. 2 In the Jesus tradition bearing on each of the
three roles just mentioned, we found what we might call 'the eschatological
plus' or 'the eschatological extra'. It was not simply as prophet that Jesus seems
to have seen himself, but as the eschatological prophet who had been given the
role indicated in Isa. 61.1-3. It was not simply as a healer or exorcist that he
acted, but with a still perceptible sense of a plenitude of eschatological power
evidenced in both his exorcisms and his healings. His disciples recalled an exclusiveness
in his claim to eschatological anointing by the Spirit of God, which,
in his own words, marked him off from other exorcists and healers and from the
prophets who preceded him, including even his own mentor, the Baptist. So too,
he taught, but evidently did not see himself simply as a teacher. More than that,
he is remembered as claiming an immediacy of apprehension of God's will, and
by his very words and manner of teaching he is remembered as claiming an authority
for his teaching which outstripped that of the most obvious contemporary
parallels.
Elsewhere in the world of his time there were, of course, examples of individuals
who in ecstasy spoke in the person of the god who was thought to possess
them. There were kings who claimed to be epiphanies of deity. But there was
1. The same applies to the term 'charismatic' as description of Jesus (Vermes, Jesus ch.
3 [79]; Dunn, Jesus ch. 4; Borg, Jesus: A New Vision ch. 3; Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus
ch. 8) — appropriate, but insufficient.
2. Merklein, Jesu Botschaft 149-52.
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