9. Who Is Jesus?
The question about the identity of Jesus Christ is also a critical one for religious pluralism. Pluralism requires that Jesus is in principle not significantly different from other religious leaders. If the orthodox Christian understanding of Jesus as found in the New Testament is maintained, then it is impossible to affirm religious pluralism. This is clearly acknowledged by John Hick:
Traditional orthodoxy says that Jesus of Nazareth was God incarnate—that is, God the Son, the Second Person of a divine Trinity, incarnate—who became man to die for the sins of the world and who founded the church to proclaim this to the ends of the earth, so that all who sincerely take Jesus as their Lord and Savior are justified by his atoning death and will inherit eternal life. It follows from this that Christianity, alone among the world religions, was founded by God in person. . . . From this premise it seems obvious that God must wish all human beings to enter this new stream of saved life, so that Christianity shall supersede all the other world faiths. . . . Christianity alone is God’s own religion, offering a fullness of life that no other tradition can provide; it is therefore divinely intended for all men and women without exception.43
Hick, as we have seen, rejects this view and calls for a radical reinterpretation of Christology in metaphorical terms.
But why should we follow Hick here? Our only substantial access to Jesus’ life and teachings is the New Testament, and so it must be the New Testament that controls our understanding of who Jesus is. The comprehensive picture that emerges from the New Testament witness is that God was present and active in Jesus of Nazareth in a way in which he is not elsewhere. There is simply no indication that Jesus is merely one among many other great religious figures. In the language of 2 Corinthians 5:19, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and there is no hint in the Scripture that God was also doing this in other religious leaders and traditions. It is not as though the first-century world was unaware of other religious ways. The idea that there are many alternative paths to the divine with each people or culture having their own distinctive way was common in the first-century Mediterranean world. Had the writers of the New Testament wished to say this, they certainly could have done so. They didn’t.
A comprehensive discussion of the New Testament portrayal of Jesus is impossible here, but what follows briefly notes five ways in which Jesus is different from other religious figures.44
The Relation Between Jesus and History in Christianity Is Different from the Relation Between History and Other Religious Leaders
The historicity of the events and sayings attributed to Jesus carries significance for the Christian faith that has no parallel in other religions. In many religions the relevant teachings can be considered independently of the historicity of any particular individual or event.
In 1960, for example, the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich visited Japan, and he asked Buddhist scholars in Kyoto, “If some historian should make it probable that a man of the name Gautama never lived, what would be the consequence for Buddhism?” The Buddhist scholars responded by saying that the question of the historicity of Gautama had never been an issue for Buddhism. “According to the doctrine of Buddhism, the dharma kaya [the body of truth] is eternal, and so it does not depend upon the historicity of Gautama.”45 In other words, whether Gautama actually said and did what is ascribed to him does not affect the truth of Buddhist teaching, which transcends historical events. While most Buddhists would insist that the teachings of contemporary Buddhism are consistent with what the historical Gautama taught, they would also acknowledge that the Buddhist dharma is eternally true and thus not dependent upon anything in the life of Gautama.
Similarly, in Hinduism the doctrines are regarded as eternal truths that transcend history and thus are not rooted in any particular individual or event. Although Islam takes history seriously, we can still distinguish the truths said to have been revealed by Allah to Muhammad from Muhammad as the particular recipient of this revelation. There is no necessary connection between Muhammad and the revelation; in principle, Allah could have revealed the Qur’an to anyone.
The same cannot be said, however, about Jesus Christ. For Christian faith is inextricably rooted in the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth. Christianity is not merely a collection of inspiring religious teachings; it is based upon God’s active intervention in human history. At the center of Christian faith is God’s revealing his purposes for the redemption of sinful humanity and providing the means for our salvation through the Incarnation in an actual human being, Jesus of Nazareth. It is what Jesus did on the cross and through the resurrection, and not simply what he taught, that makes possible our reconciliation with God. The apostle Paul unambiguously states that if in fact Jesus was not raised from the dead then our faith is futile and useless, and we are still in our sins (1 Corinthians 15:14–19). The actual resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead—not merely the inspiring idea of resurrection—is foundational to Christian faith. For the resurrection is God’s stamp of approval upon the life and teachings of Jesus, the defeat of death and evil, and the inauguration of a qualitatively new form of life (Romans 1:4; 1 Corinthians 15:26, 50–58). This distinguishes Christian faith from other religions, such as Buddhism. Whereas it is possible to think of Buddhist teachings apart from the historical life of Gautama, the Christian faith makes no sense apart from the actual life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
The importance of historicity for Christian faith naturally raises the question about the degree to which we can have confidence that the New Testament writings are at all accurate in what they say about the life and teachings of Jesus. Some complex and controversial issues are involved here, but there are strong reasons for accepting the New Testament witness as a reliable account of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.46 While we cannot pursue the issues in depth, we can briefly note one major difference between questions of history and the New Testament as opposed to history and Buddhist sources.
In terms of both the volume and quality of early evidence, we have much greater access to the historical Jesus and the early Christian community than we do to Gautama and the early Buddhist community. There is an abundance of early manuscripts of the New Testament so that we can be confident that what we have in the New Testament today is indeed what the original authors wrote.
Scholars of almost every theological stripe attest to the profound care with which the New Testament books were copied in the Greek language, and later translated and preserved in Syriac, Coptic, Latin and a variety of other ancient European and Middle Eastern languages. In the original Greek alone, over 5,000 manuscripts and manuscript fragments of portions of the New Testament have been preserved from the early centuries of Christianity. . . . [O]verall, 97–99% of the New Testament can be reconstructed beyond any reasonable doubt, and no Christian doctrine is founded solely or even primarily on textually disputed passages.47
Moreover, the gap in time between the death of Jesus and the earliest New Testament writings is much smaller than the gap between Gautama’s death and the earliest written Buddhist texts. Although there is little question about the fact of Gautama’s existence, there is considerable dispute over when he lived, with dates for his death ranging from 480 to 386 BC48 The earliest Buddhist scriptures were put into writing in Pali sometime in the first century BC; prior to that time they were transmitted orally.49 Thus, assuming the Buddha’s death at 386 BC and the writing of the Pali texts around 80 BC, we have a gap of some 300 years between Gautama’s death and the first Buddhist writings. If the 480 BC date for his death is accepted, then the gap becomes 400 years. Moreover, the early Pali writings consisted largely of instructions for monastic life and sayings, stories and anecdotes of the Buddha and the early disciples; the “biographies” of the Buddha appear even later.
By contrast, the temporal gap between the death of Jesus and the writing of the New Testament is much shorter. It is generally agreed that Jesus was crucified in either AD 30 or 33.50 The apostle Paul’s epistles were written between about AD 50 and the late 60s (1 Thessalonians, arguably the earliest of the New Testament letters, was probably written by Paul in AD 50). This leaves a gap of only seventeen to twenty years between Jesus’ death and the earliest New Testament writing, with Paul’s writings falling within about thirty-five years of Jesus’ death. The last of the New Testament books was probably completed around AD 90, leaving about sixty years separating it from the death of Jesus.51 This, combined with the abundance of manuscript evidence for the text of the New Testament, provides grounds for much greater confidence in the reliability of the New Testament portraits of Jesus than is the case with early Buddhist writings concerning Gautama.
Jesus, Unlike Some Religious Leaders, Was a Monotheist
Each religious figure must be understood within the historical context of his time. Jesus was a Jew living in a society in which the reality of Yahweh, the one creator God, was assumed. Like his contemporaries, Jesus was a monotheist who accepted the Old Testament perspective that only Yahweh, the God of Israel, is the true God, the creator and ruler of all things. The importance of monotheism is reflected in the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4). When asked by a religious expert which is the greatest commandment, Jesus answered by quoting the Shema followed by the commands to love God and one’s neighbor (Mark 12:28–31). There is no historical evidence that Jesus questioned the existence of God; to the contrary, God’s reality is presupposed in all that Jesus says and does.
While some religious leaders, such as Muhammad, are also monotheists, many others are not. There has long been debate over Confucius’ views on God or the gods, with some interpreting him as a kind of theist and others regarding him as agnostic on the subject.52 The Buddha rejected the Brahmanical teachings about the reality of Brahman, the supreme being in Hinduism, and Buddhism has generally been understood as rejecting the idea of a creator God. It is common in the West to regard Buddhism as simply agnostic about God, but this is a misleading recent innovation. Most Buddhist traditions have historically been atheistic. The Sri Lankan Buddhist scholar K. N. Jayatilleke observes that, if by “God” we mean a supreme being and creator, then “the Buddha is an atheist and Buddhism in both its Theravada and Mahayana forms is atheistic. . . . In denying that the universe is a product of a Personal God, who creates it in time and plans a consummation at the end of time, Buddhism is a form of atheism.”53 Paul Williams, a leading scholar of Buddhism and former Buddhist who converted to Roman Catholicism, states,
Buddhists do not believe in the existence of God. There need be no debating about this. In practicing Buddhism one never finds talk of God, there is no role for God, and it is not difficult to find in Buddhist texts attacks on the existence of an omnipotent, all-good Creator of the universe.54
Thus, one thing distinguishing Jesus from some religious leaders is his clear commitment to the reality of an eternal creator God.
Jesus Identifies the Root Problem Confronting Humankind As Sin; Others, Such as Gautama, Locate the Problem with Ignorance
As we have seen, the major religions all claim that there is some fundamental problem afflicting humankind and the cosmos at large. The religions offer varying diagnoses of this problem and, accordingly, different prescriptions for its cure. According to Jesus, our root problem is sin, the deliberate rejection of God’s righteous ways (Mark 7:1–22). It is not ignorance or some cosmic imbalance that causes the human predicament. Rather, it is a corrupt heart or a perverted inner disposition such that “everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin” (John 8:34). Sin, of course, is more than merely moral failure; it must always be understood as an offense against a holy and righteous God. In other words, sin is a concept that makes sense only in a theistic context. Furthermore, although Jesus consistently called others to repentance (Matthew 4:17), he never repented for any sin. Not only does Jesus define the human predicament in terms of sin and its consequences, but he assumes the authority to do what only God can do—forgive sins (John 8:46; Mark 2:1–12).
The Buddha, by contrast, diagnosed the root problem as deeply embedded ignorance. Gautama taught that it is ignorance about the true nature of reality—and in particular, about the impermanence of all things and the corollary that there is no enduring person or soul—which results in craving and attachment, and thus the suffering of rebirth. The Buddhist scholar Walpola Rahula says, “There is no ‘sin’ in Buddhism, as sin is understood in some religions. The root of all evil is ignorance (avijja) and false views (micchaditthi).”55 It should not be surprising that we do not find in Buddhism the biblical concept of sin, for in Buddhism there is no holy and righteous God against whom one might sin. Other Indian religions such as Hinduism and Jainism also locate the fundamental problem as one of ignorance, although they disagree over the nature of this ignorance.