The ‘historical’ Jesus? – Book Review

Bruce Chilton, Rabbi Jesus, An Intimate Biography: The Jewish Life and Teachings that Inspired Christianity (New York: Image/Doubleday, 2000)

At the core of Chilton’s study is a true observation. The Jewishness of Jesus has tended to be overlooked, or even deliberately obscured, throughout history.

From such a start, one might expect a critical historiographical survey, or a rigorous reexamination of the evidence.

Sadly this is not what Chilton gives us.

Instead, Rabbi Jesus is an ‘intimate’ biography, which seems to mean a consciously one-sided and impassioned account of Chilton’s own reconstruction of the life of Jesus.

Chilton’s account draws on historical research and archaeological excavations, some of which is no doubt accurate. However, it is treated in a haphazard and unscholarly fashion. Chilton favours the existence of a Galilean Bethlehem about which I had never heard, for example, and helpfully contextualises Herod and Pontius Pilate within the Mediterranean power politics of the time. But Chilton also relies on very old traditions, such as the early death of Joseph, and on apocryphal sources whose authenticity has been questioned since the early centuries of the common era.

There is therefore a lack of care in Chilton’s handling of sources. The same can be said of his translations from the Greek of the New Testament. Aiming for freshness, Chilton certainly conveys the strangeness of the text, without necessarily helping us to understand it better (the true aim of translation). Thus he renders the familiar phrase ‘the Son of Man’ as ‘one like a person’, on the basis that Jesus seems to have taken it from Daniel 7:13, where it refers to a creature that looks like a human being. Leaving aside the problematic nature of the word ‘person’ itself, as well as the fact that the phrase ‘son of man’ occurs throughout Ezekiel and also in Daniel 8:17 (where it seems to be a circumlocution meaning ‘you the addressee, as a representative member of human society’), Chilton’s translation seems to suggest that Jesus was not really a human being, but only seemed to be one. Yet this is more or less the opposite of what Chilton means to say, given his view that Jesus was a human being who discovered himself as a son of God, just as all of us can.

On the basis of Daniel 7, Chilton develops the idea that Jesus’ teaching revolved around meditating on what he calls ‘the chariot’ (or God’s throne), although Jesus himself never used these terms.

On the plus side, Chilton emphasises the radical nature of Jesus’ shared meals and shows how much of his teaching revolves around a radical new understanding of purity (which he terms ‘Galilean’ because it bypasses the temple system policed by the Pharisees and Sadducees). Chilton therefore notes the ways in which Jesus himself supersedes the temple, following the author to the Hebrews but with a different spin.

Another plus is that, whatever its scholarly failings, Chilton’s account treats Jesus as a historically contingent human being, responding to political, economic, and cultural events. His reconstructed changes in the location and focus of Jesus’ teaching (Galilee, idealism, Jerusalem, militant radicalism, etc.) are intriguing but textually hard to prove.

I felt there was enough good in this book to make me wish it were better. Prediction: you may react strongly to the ‘intimate’ biography of Jesus!

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