The reason I agree with Nolan about the political-economic-social content of the teachings of Jesus is because that is what he is presented as teaching in those very documents

IN WHAT SEEMS like it was months ago but was only a few days ago, I said that I didn't find much significant difference in the different English translations of the Book of Jeremiah that I was reading while going over that book starting at the end of Summer.  

Since then I have been reading the Luke Gospel, adding the recent translation of the New Testament by the Orthodox scholar and classicist David Bentley Hart and I have to say that there are some important differences between his translation and the other English ones I've got - all of them made by  either Roman Catholics or Protestants.  Since all of them purport to base their translations on various editions of the original Greek and not on later translations, it's interesting to see the profound differences based on subtly different readings of the Greek words and how something as profoundly different as the Western dark reading of the Scriptures of Augustine and the like and the far more light filled reading out of the tradition of the Greek speaking and reading theologians and commentators.  The Western, Latin reading of it so influenced by the gloominess of Augustine's late works has had a profound effect through such theories as original sin, predestination, eternal damnation (including the lurid meditations of unbaptized infant damnation) and the necessary denials of the goodness of God those require.  Either that or a compete inversion of the concept of goodness and evil.  And they do present a far darker character to creation and even God that has prevailed for so long in the West - finding some Catholic Jansenist heresy and, ironically, in the Western anti-Christian reaction against it.  I would say that the gaudy idiocy of alleged "Satanism" is a product of that Western misreading of the New Testament and the perhaps even greater attribution of power to Satan that "evangelical" Halloween season "Hell Houses" promote.  I don't think evil is as powerful as God, I think God will prevail, I'm with some of the great Orthodox theologians on that count.  

The notes that DBH made, giving his reasons for why he translated things differently from the prevailiing Western sourced English translations are pretty interesting.  One on the famous camel through the eye of the needle passage is especially interesting to me from my reading of Gregory of Nyssa, in particular the death-bed discussion he had with his sister Makrina.  Note that I have included his demotic transliterations but can't include the original letters of the Greek which Hart gives.

The text speaks of a (kamelos, acc. kamelon), "camel," but from the early centuries it has been an open question whether it should really be the homophonous (but poorly attested) word (kamilos), "rope," "hawser": a more symmetrical but less piquant analogy.

Which reminded me, immediately of what Gregory of Nyssa in On The Soul and Resurrection reported his sister and teacher Makrina conceived happened to a sinner's soul after death to prepare it for union with God, the soul in need of purgation was like a rope covered with mud that could be cleaned by drawing it through a knothole. It makes me wonder if they didn't think the correct reading of it was "rope" and not "camel".  I do have to say that the more of the Orthodox theologians I read the more convinced I am that the Western tradition went seriously wrong in some basic ways through bad translations of the original Greek of the Scriptures into Latin and, from there, through the influence of some bad theology that developed that bad reading.  I think much of Protestantism and even more of Catholic history is more influenced by the hellish theories of damnation than the Gospel of Jesus. He has some interesting things to say about the Catholic medieval innovation of Purgatory in regard to that.

Last week I happened upon a book review by Regina Schulte, published on the twenty-fifth  anniversary of the 1976 publication of Jesus Before Christianity by Albert Nolan (I'd been looking for citations of Nolan to see if I wanted to read his stuff).  The review claimed that it was a different and earlier take on the "historical Jesus" industry from before its most recent and most popular manifestation, aided by cable channel and PBS publicity.  

Nolan, as presented by Schulte, and I would agree on a lot of things:

The author’s specific purpose sets this study apart from many past efforts to find Jesus in his human skin. At the outset, he makes clear that this is not an attempt to convert anyone, not a defense of Christian faith, not a merely academic pursuit. Nolan admits to being moved by an “urgent and practical purpose.”

"I am concerned about people; the daily sufferings of so many millions of people, and the prospect of much greater suffering in the near future. My purpose is to find out what can be done about it."

That is, certainly, something Jesus and the Jewish Scriptures he so frequently and masterfully quoted are concerned with. Since both were speaking to living People living in this world, in this life, that is the central focus of the written Scriptures, why they are so important to the creation of a just society and the attempt to create a decent life here, now and on Earth.

But I think it goes off track.

The all-inclusive political and economic system we have created has brought our world to the brink of disaster. Organized religion has offered little help, and sometimes has even exacerbated the problems. Jesus of Nazareth lived in a time and place that had problems similar to ours, albeit on a much smaller scale. The author wishes to find what, if anything, Jesus sought to do about them. What purpose drove his choice of mission?

I have, over and over again, agreed with the view of Jurgen Habermass that religion, specifically the Jewish conception of justice as in the Law and the Prophets and the Christian commandments of universal love are the only sources of modern egalitarain democracy and what is, I think, our best hope for the solution to those problems.  That some "organized religion" has hampered that is self-evident but I am skeptical that Nolan's conception of Jesus will be any more helpful than the mildest and generally ineffective efforts in the history of Christianity. Some of the most successful figures and movements toward that have been explicitly motivated by a quite different often more conventional  conception of Jesus and Christianity than the one presented by the "historical Jesuses" of academic imagination.  

I think a lot of it hinges on a non-divine, non-inspired, safely conventional materialistic  Jesus telling us to love our neighbor as our self, doing for the least among us, etc.  and someone who hears that saying, who died and made him God?  Moses posed that possibility to God who appeared as the Burning Bush.  It's even more relevant to today's secular world.  He would not have been believed if he was just saying it on his own.

“Context” is the guiding principle for this study: the socio-politico-religious environment contemporary to Jesus vis a vis our world today. Faith was not a pre-requisite for the author and neither is it for the reader.

To allow Jesus to speak for himself, Nolan set aside all preconceived notions about him—including that he is divine or the Messiah, or the savior of the world, as well as any assumptions that he was not any of these. Knowing that historical objectivity is always to some degree imperfect, Nolan chose our contemporary situation as the place to stand for the most unobstructed view of Jesus within his environment. The picture of that world is critical to a correct interpretation of what we read in the Gospels, and the author has researched it well.

From non-biblical sources he finds knowledge of the social mores, politics, Jewish religious traditions, the variety of Jewish sects operating among Jesus’ contemporaries, and even the way time was measured (very different from ours). Then, situating the gospel texts in that cultural frame, Nolan goes to work as methodically as would an ace detective. He looks for connections, clues, and contradictions that may shed light on a Jesus stripped of all aura in which Christian belief has clothed him.

There is so much in that which I agree with, either specifically or generally that I am sorry to say I think that the present day, common, resort to "non-bibical sources" that supposedly yield "knowledge of the social mores, politics, Jewish religious traditions, the variety of Jewish sects operating among Jesus' contemporaries, . . . " and assuming those give a more accurate and reliable picture of Jesus than the Epistles and Gospels is a huge problem.  The Epistles and Gospels are the only records, apart from several later quotes without much substance by non-Christians about Jesus and the early Jesus movement.  Without those we wouldn't have any knowledge that there was ever a person to be "the historical Jesus" in history.  

One of the most well-established facts about Jesus is that his thinking was not typical of the established Jewish thinking of his time and place, considering that the opposition of several of the major and most powerful strains of those traditions to Jesus and that the Gospel accounts all seem to point to the opposition of the Temple authority to him - AND JESUS NOT BEING ESPECIALLY SIMPATICO WITH THE TEMPLE AUTHORITY - I doubt looking for what modern scholars would present as typical thinking of his time would get you nearer to the Jesus who was at odds with the Jewish authorities and who was executed by the Roman administrator, reportedly at the behest of the Temple authorities who were afraid Jesus would be the motivation of a typical murderous Roman pogrom.  

You have to wonder at why anyone would bother risking themselves to become his followers if his teachings were not at serious odds with the ambient cultures, both Jewish and gentile, why anyone would have bothered to oppose the early Jesus movement, why, for example, his brother James, one of the major figures in that movement,  would be murdered, why, as Christianity developed in that very setting, would be so different from what was already there.  

You have to wonder if Jesus didn't teach something quite different from what was there already why he would have bothered to live such an atypical and often uncomfortable life for his last years, why he knowingly put himself at risk, why anyone noticed his movement.  

I don't think the modern recreations (they certainly don't agree with each other, Nolan thinks Jesus was middle-class, Crossan of the lowest class) of the ambient Jewish or pagan world of that time are any more a reliable recreation than the many "historical Jesuses" that have been created by modern scholars for going on centuries, now.  I don't think, as Nolan seems to claim:

It is a misunderstanding to locate this “kingdom of heaven/God” in an otherworldly, afterlife existence. Rather, it was a just way of living here (on earth) and now (not in an afterlife). In fact, the concept of an afterlife in heaven was unknown to Jesus and his contemporaries.

I don't think there is anything we should regard as more authentic about what Jesus thought than what the Gospels presents him as saying, exists.  About the afterlife, for example:

- The parable of Lazarus and the Rich man - which certainly presents something close to a conventional Christian conception of "heaven" and "hell" as happening while the present age of life on Earth is going on, that being a parable out of the imagination of Jesus. Where was Abraham's bosom supposed to be if not somewhere other than Earth, a where was the Abraham that Lazarus was in, where was the rich man being afflicted?

- The Transfiguration in which Jesus talks to both Moses and Elijah - Moses certainly believed to be dead by Jews and Elijah said to have been taken bodily into heaven.  Though their description matches best, if anything, the risen body of Jesus, including sudden appearances and disappearances.

- His answer to the Sadducees (who, being Hellenized Jews, are believed to have not believed in an afterlife) when they gave him the riddle of the woman who was married to seven infertile brothers in succession is certainly relevant, where he tells them, citing the Words of God in Exodus to prove that Abraham and Jacob are alive in a present-tense conception of that, even though they were both dead in the here and now.

- The account of Jesus telling one of those being crucified with him that he would be with him that day in heaven.

- On top of that there are the arguments among his followers about which of them would sit closest to him at the side of God.  I don't think there is any reason to believe that they thought Jesus was talking only of the life here on Earth during the present age.

Even if, as modern scholars would seem to imagine Jesus as believing what Madalyn Murray said, that when you die your body rots and that's all there is to it, those presenting his life and thoughts closest to him, certainly don't seem to present him as believing in that.  He is recorded as saying his "Kingdom is not of this earth."  Where is it, then?  Though he doesn't go into much detail about it because his ministry was, indeed, to those living here and now, he said so.  I can agree with this next passage on that count.

The kingdom of heaven would replace the established system, the kingdom of Satan. Key elements of the latter were: 1) money, 2) prestige, 3) exclusive group solidarities, and 4) power. (Sound familiar?) A chapter is devoted to each of these, demonstrating how embedded they were in the socio-politico-religious fabric of those times. The recognition of these dynamics in the twenty-first century will surely come easily to readers.

I certainly agree with all of that at least in some sense, and I am even quite prepared to agree that, from what is presented in the Christian Scriptures, that any culmination of Creation would extinguish those features of reality that comprise our conception of physical creation.   I think there is some evidence of that in the testimony about the post-crucifixion appearance of Jesus.  The body of the risen Jesus was physical but it is also presented as more than physical. Jesus says, explicitly, that his risen body is not a "spirit."  Frankly, I'm more concerned that the risen Jesus ate some broiled fish instead of being a vegan, but he did claim that People are more important than many birds. Maybe that requires a different post to go into. He also warned against coming into contact with his body after the Resurrection.  Though he told Thomas to touch him, Hart's notes about that in the Gospel of John giving Thomas the role of declaring Jesus to be divine are especially interesting.  

I think one of the problems with Nolan's and most of the "historical Jesus" creators' is that they think there is a simple binary distinction to be made between the physical and the "spiritual."  The same enlightenment notion that, somehow, the Creator is detached from the Creation in our everyday as well as modern scientific conception of that.*  I think the "historical Jesus" industry in academia and elsewhere reads the available evidence quite superficially and is, itself, as embedded in an ideological (I'll be provocative and say secular theological) system as they accuse early and later Christians of imposing and even the writers of the very sources we have that there ever was a Jesus.  The whole thing is saturated by the materialist-scientism of modern ideology, academic orthodoxy, the means of educated people to gain status and cred for their claims, the way to get asked to talk on camera by PBS or some cable channel or whatever.  

I doubt any modern scholar, even very good ones, are more credible about the teachings of Jesus, the ambient thinking of Jews and gentiles, the world of Jesus than Paul or the authors of the Gospels, especially the Synoptics.  Paul confesses himself to have been in the thick of that ambient Jewish culture to an extreme degree before his conversion, one it authorized to suppress the Jesus movement. It's possible that James may have actually been related to Jesus, it is as certain as anything about him that the same Peter who Paul had an argument with was among the closest followers of Jesus. To take them and their earliest readers who developed Christianity on the basis of the reported memories of what Jesus said, as not credible seems to me to make even less sense than to historically-critically debunk every non-Christian source modern scholars base their claims about the "context" of Jesus in.   And it would certainly be possible to do that with those.

The reason I agree with Nolan about the political-economic-social content of the teachings of Jesus is because that is what he is presented as teaching in those very documents. Especially the author of Luke and in the Epistles of Paul and James.  The same documents that are picked apart to fit the remnant into that modern ideological system as they were cherry picked to support medieval pagan remnant political-economic inequality as will be on display in the coronation of Charles III.  I think a lot of it is based in an ahistorical context by the teachings of some far, far later Jewish writers and theologians who had their own perhaps quite valid motives for deemphisizing speculations about the after-life. I am not convinced that the Jewish Bible is as non-eschatological as modern readings of it claim.  The passages indicating an afterlife are few, things like Saul having the spirit of Samuel conjured after his death, but they are there. There seems to have been widespread Jewish belief in ghosts. I wonder if maybe their emphasis on the here and now isn't a reaction against the Egyptian and other gentile fixations on life after death.  As Jessica Mitford said, that was a society where the funeral directors got entirely out of hand.  The fixation on the afterlives of the Pharaohs was certainly part of the oppression of those living in the here and now, which, after all, is the thing that sets the entire Old Testament off.  There is a good reason why the Jewish religious tradition - including Jesus and those who first followed him - is useful in the struggle for equality, democracy, justice and a decent life in the here and now and it is that emphasis on the here and now, but that isn't the only thing there, perhaps not even the thing that empowers it.

I think it is impossible to understand the original appeal of the Gospel of Jesus unless it had some very distinct and radical departures from the ambient culture of his and slightly later times.  If that is true then trying to reconstruct "the historical Jesus" by watering him down with the norms of the very culture that opposed him in life and killed him in death and, reportedly, violently opposed his earliest followers who remembered him, is an obvious folly.  I think it is a product of academic specialists who want to water down Christianity to make it fit comfortably into our own culture, the one that Nolan and Schulte and I want to criticize, academia is as much a part of that as banking is.  I think for that there is no better or likely more successful resource than the actual Gospels and Epistles, Acts that make up the New Testament. And I don't think stripping Christianity of its scandalous differences from our current materialism and scientism is going to do much but discredit Jesus and the radical Jewish tradition he was probably the most radical representative of.

I have the same motives as Albert Nolan says are his.  Honestly, I don't see any more appeal in a non-eschatological Christianity than I do in the vapid generalities of mid- to late 20th century Unitarianism.  I don't see anything in a demoted Jesus that would go anywhere in the future just as I don't believe the "historical Jesuses" of modern creation would have generated any kind of movement, never mind one of People prepared to become martyrs, one to have been Christianity, especially in the period when the ambient world was of most danger to it, the period in which the world resorted to in retrospective recreation was up and running instead of merely many modern scholarly claims.  Gregory of Nyssa and his sister Makrina were one generation removed from that, their parents were alive for the very end of it, their grandparents were dispossessed in an anti-Christian pogrom. I don't think the Jesus of the "historical Jesus" efforts has a future and I certainly wouldn't depend on them to get me my daily bread or bring any kind of kingdom which will distribute God's will for equality and justice in the tradition of Moses even as well as it's at times happened in the past. I think the disasters we are in now are a product of the abandonment of the Gospel, both by modern materialist-atheist-secularists and the pseudo-Christianity of Mammonist "white evangelicals" and "traditional Catholics," or the incumbent Patriarch of Moscow.   I think the disasters of Christendom in the period when there was such a thing are generally due to a slightly different nipping and pruning of Jesus.  I think we need more Jesus as presented by Luke and Matthew and Paul, not cutting him down to less.

* Modernism, in its many superstitions in regard to science, doesn't seem to get that the exclusion of God from science is a human choice, just as they don't seem to understand that a realistic view of what legitimate science tells us is not an all-encompassing, all-inclusive view of even those things science can discern through its exclusions from consideration and within the limits of its ability.  It is a product of the highly ideological and self-interested presentation of science as an ideology instead of a convenient methodology.  As a fascinated student of the ubiquity of ideological scientism, it's amazing how much of that replaces actual science in the public's imagination.  It is as remarkable that the biggest, fattest promoters of "science" are as apt to misrepresent it as the biggest, fattest (and most ready to claim their ownership of Jesus)  religionist Christians to misrepresent the Gospel, the Law and the Prophets.  I think the historical-critical movement that arose in reaction to that has combined the first with the wreckage of the second one.