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I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies [Rom. 8:18-23].

When we read the Apostle Paul’s extraordinary claim that the "whole creation has been groaning in travail," we are likely at first to suppose that our difficulty with such language has to do with the deep, "ugly ditch" (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s term) that divides Paul’s age from our own. Is it possible for us to think in such virtually animistic terms today? Surely we would not ask the astrophysicists who study the "noise" of the radio signals coming from outer space if it might be interpreted as a cosmic groan. One can imagine the derisive laughter that would greet such a suggestion. Yet do we not in our day-to-day pragmatic encounters with the world around us invariably presuppose, as we seek guidance through nature’s mysteries, the cosmic model that is foundational to modern science and technology?

Despite the 20-centuries-wide ditch that separates us from Paul, we would be mistaken to assume that his language about the anguish of the universe would have been more readily comprehensible to his contemporaries than it is to us. To be sure, many in those days would have responded favorably to what they might have thought Paul meant when he described the creation as being "subjected to futility," in "bondage to decay" and "groaning in travail." The Roman Empire of the first century was greatly influenced by a sort of dualism that regarded nature—the physical world—as being at best unworthy and at worst positively evil, the source of corruption, carnality and suffering.

The ancient dualist might have had some difficulty with what Paul says about the creation being "set free." If matter is evil, how could it be liberated? Paul’s words at this point would seem idiosyncratic to the dualist, although he might also feel that a person who could speak of the "futility" of the created order must somehow be on the right track. In fact, however, this seeming idiosyncrasy is not a quirk in an otherwise consistent dualism. Rather, it reveals that Paul was, at least in the usual first-century sense, no dualist at all.

Paul was what might be termed a " redemptionist." He might well grant that the dualist had a point in regarding the functioning of the material world in a negative way—as a world whose process necessitates the extermination of all sentient reality. It does indeed appear that matter supports our individual existences in much the same way that a conveyor belt supports the objects it moves. Objects on a conveyor belt seem almost to float effortlessly and securely—until the belt reaches its limit. Then suddenly it loops back upon itself, and they drop like lead.

Basic to all of Paul’s theology, however, was his insistence that only in its penultimate function is nature such a relentless conveyor of doom. Dualism could never provide a point of contact by which Paul’s contemporaries might have grasped his claim that the creation which presently is the ground of human suffering will one day be made the ground of human redemption! How could any dualist grant Paul’s seemingly paradoxical claim that though our sinful deeds are indeed works of the "flesh," our ultimate hope lies in "the redemption of our bodies"?

We come at the Romans text very differently than would have Paul’s contemporaries, though in our own way we are also dualistic. For us, however, the split between mind and body is not a moral cleavage—i.e., the notion that the body is evil, while the mind or spirit is good. For us the cleavage between mind and matter is simply the place at which our knowledge reaches its limits. What is the reality of things? Do our sense impressions actually correspond to the reality of the material world itself ? Curiously, though the discoveries of subatomic physics signal to some a breakdown of modern dualism, the implications of such discoveries have been slow to penetrate most people’s consciousness (including that of many scientists), and they may in fact merely lead to another sort of dualism. Dualistic impasse, as old as Descartes’s philosophy, stubbornly continues to affect the very philosophic air we breathe.

In ethics the dualistic uncertainty over the nature of "reality" and our perception of it is a major justification for modern moral relativism, or the claim that what is called morality is actually grounded in nothing but people’s emotive and purely arbitrary preferences. On the other hand, for the dualist of Paul’s day, ironically, the split between mind and matter was the basis of moral certitude. One knew what evil was: the body and its temptations. One knew what good was: the spirit or the mind in pursuit of the eternal verities.

The contrast with present-day attitudes is so extreme as to be almost ludicrous. Though we can be shaken by the fear of disease, today’s idea of "health" includes a physical perfection achieved through personal conditioning and control, along with an emotional state that accepts, without guilt, acquisitiveness and hedonism. Interestingly, to be psychologically healthy is to be fully in touch with one’s body. Presumably, if the body is functioning well and is uninhibited in its appetites, the psyche will automatically be "healthy." The ascetic, in contrast, is seen to be a repressed neurotic or, sometimes, a delusional anorectic who is unable to come to terms with his or her physical being. The unwashed, half-starved celibate saint of old would be written off today as a candidate for a psychiatric ward. Today’s paragon is yesterday’s pervert and vice versa.

Though modern dualism tends to lead toward a philosophic skepticism, it is skepticism with a bias. We are uncertain as to whether there is any truth or value. But we are convinced that whatever of either there may be is grounded in the material basis of things. Society’s materialist bias has been given a powerful impetus by the burgeoning success of the sciences and technology. We have nature by the throat.

To be sure, sometimes nature eludes our grasp, as in the case of the AIDS epidemic and the inadequacy of science to find an immediate cure. However, this instance offers only the barest of parallels with the overall non-scientific posture of the ancients toward the mysteries of nature and existence. People of the first century were fundamentally powerless in the face of any illness, since they did not understand the physiological basis of disease. Yet we think we basically know the cause of AIDS, and thus there is no stampede toward superstition or pseudo-science as a remedy. Science, we believe, will in time find a cure or a preventative. We are being assured that in the meantime we can take rational and educational stop-gap measures to slow the epidemic’s progress. In contrast, even as late as the 14^th century the Black Death worked its ruin on a helpless Europe that could not even begin to understand and thus combat it. By the time the plague passed, nearly half of Europe was dead.

In view of earlier periods’ grim life-expectancy statistics and their harsh conditions of existence, is it any wonder that many ancients regarded the sex drive—the cause of souls being brought into this vale of tears—as a curse? When Marcion, the greatest of the second-century Christian dualists, insisted that the world was so fundamentally evil that the Creator God of the Old Testament, who was responsible for so immense a debacle, could only be a morally defective being, he was not speaking as some disillusioned idealist: rather, he was reflecting the hard, unsentimental realism of his time.

In Paul’s day, when modern technical and economic development could not be even remotely envisioned, the alternatives were few: one could indulge in the life of the body in a desperate gamble for creaturely happiness despite the odds, or one could opt for a life of self-denial, which by its studied indifference to earthly joy or sorrow was somewhat insulated from life’s tragedy. Just as we almost automatically try to address the problem of natural evil through the amoral pragmatism of technology, they, lacking the scientific knowledge to control nature, had only their moral capacity to say Yes or No to its ambiguities.

Though the ancients might judge us harshly as mere worldly hedonists, we might well protest that we are in fact Christian worldly hedonists. Furthermore, from time to time we even feel sated by the offerings of the consumer market and, irony of ironies, wonder if perhaps there is something more to life. Maybe Paul had something quite real in mind when he spoke of the longing of the whole creation to "be set free from the bondage to decay." Could it be that modern existence so tranquilizes our spirits that we simply cannot "groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies"? (We might wish that Paul could have broken with the patriarchalism of his age, as he did with its dualism.) However, as modern men and women we cannot long permit ourselves such pangs of unease—and for many reasons.

To begin with, we love what science and technology can do for us. We can scarcely imagine that a technologically primitive existence would be worth living. Therefore, on those infrequent occasions when we admit that even pleasure can cloy and we a experience fleeting desire for a richer spirituality, deep down we suspect that that desire is merely a matter of our looking the gift horse of modern life in the mouth. Having sold any other birth-right of ours for the rich stew of secular existence, we continue to desire a deeper spirituality. This desire is actually our hankering after one more pleasure—the pleasure of richness of soul, which, of course, can be turned on and off like a spigot—to go along with our well-tuned and richly satisfied carnal appetites.

Beyond these merely individualistic concerns, there is the more ethically serious matter of the potentially demoralizing impact of Paul’s vitalist theology of nature on the collective progress of modern life. If nature could indeed suffer, then our headlong, pragmatic exploitation of the natural order might not be value-neutral. Nature may kick back at us from time to time—with erosion, pollution, holes in the ozone layer and so on—but we like to think that these are simply impersonal matters of ecological imbalance. However, if creation were in some way actually to suffer pain—not in a merely metaphorical sense—would this give at least some of us certain pause?

We First World Christians can maintain a comfortable distance in contemplating the worldwide technological assault upon creation. We can afford to deplore the bulldozing of wildernesses, the extinction of various species. We have the luxury of being alarmed by the long-term effects of the destruction of the world’s rain forests upon the oxygen supply. Yet our concerns are conditioned by the fact that we already "have ours." Behind our supposedly responsible ecological worries about the planet is a parallel fear that perhaps we will lose some of what we have. We are not willing to vote for much ecological self-constraint; indeed, the administration we Americans have placed in power seems hellbent on a free-enterprise assault on nature. We are hoping that the ecologists, with their doomsday forecasts, are mere alarmists. But just in case they are right, we are always good for a donation to save the whales.

The majority of the world’s people, however, have yet to "get theirs." They do not have the luxury to worry about the long-term environmental impact of their attempts to survive. Their often desperate situations make our First World existential agonizing over the effects of our 20^th-century hedonism on our 20^th-century spirituality seem trivial and self-absorbed.

The success of democracy in the West serves as a beacon for many of the world’s wretched. Yet it is clear that the worldwide clamoring for democracy entails, among other ends, a right of access to material progress. Modern democracy does not envision as its goal mutually shared poverty and despair. The very logic of both liberal and socialist democracy, whatever their differences, inevitably involves a wider distribution of the world’s riches as democracy progresses. However, modern economic, social and medical progress can only intensify humankind’s terrible onslaught against nature. For the iron law of progress is that its cost necessitates the radical disordering of nature as we received it, and its rearrangement after the image of our perceived interests.

Human progress feeds on death, on the creation’s decay. The faster the progress, the higher the price that living beings must pay. For example, it is grimly apparent that the remains of aborted fetuses may have great value in medical experimentation, as well as being a potential source of medicine and even spare parts for transplants.

Even assuming that it were possible to do so, what moral right would we have to try to stop modern scientific development simply because our First World nerve had failed us? If we did stop it, the wretched of the earth would no doubt be condemned to countless generations of brief, brutal existences. We are confronted by a serious contradiction in our highest First World ethical values. We liberals are generally supportive of environmental causes, but our even higher ethical priority envisions worldwide social and material progress.

Such modern ethical dilemmas as these come to a focus in the realization that the Apostle Paul knew fully as well as we that we must live out our lives on the horns of a cosmic dilemma. On the one hand, it is our divinely ordained destiny to "populate the earth and subdue it." We were created by the Lord of creation to be creative beings, and if our destiny is eternal life, our creative accomplishments actually have eternal significance. On the other hand, for all our creativity and rationality, for all our spasms of virtue and wisdom, we are caught in the steel vise of evolution’s law. Nothing can be achieved without cost to other persons and other forms of life. Scientific and technical progress is fueled by bloody competition and suffering. Mutilated landscapes, extinct species, vivisection, slaughterhouses, fetal experiments are typical of "progress" when things are going well. On bad days we have wars.

Paul is not saying, "It’s a jungle out there, so let’s all be brutes. " His gospel entails sympathy, mercy, kindness, concern for the environment—in short, the whole bag of traditional Christian sentiments and causes applied to nature as well as to other human beings. The call for the careful, respectful, unwasteful use of our natural resources is the proper Christian stance. Christian ethics is not grounded in the law of the jungle, "nature red in tooth and claw." Christian morality is the attempt to combat the brute child of nature in all of us. To control ferocity, to heal the wounds that we inevitably inflict because of life’s pressure to be competitive, is the business of civilization, and it is the business of Christian social ethics to remind civilization of its civilizing obligation.

Having acknowledged all of this—and putting ourselves on the side of the angels, advocating the cause of the poor, plunging ourselves as wholeheartedly as any sated hedonists can into the cause of human liberation—we should also acknowledge that the best we can ever hope to accomplish is the amelioration of the carnage of existence. Apart from the fact that we are often wrong about what is needed—and apart from the fact that successful campaigns for good causes can breed corruption and themselves become a part of the problem—the larger reality is that we are all mortal and the world is finite. Everything in life necessitates tradeoffs, and finally the success of one person, group, class or species entails the defeat or demise of its rivals. Though Paul wrote in an era during which humanity was less able to deal with the deadly course of a creation groaning in travail, his basic point is confirmed by our very success in manipulating nature. In order to become less victimized by nature, we must become its victimizers. Death is not abolished; it is merely reallocated.

Paul’s theology was not grounded in nature’s decay. Instead of a natural theology, he was creating a theology of nature—a theology that viewed nature from the perspective of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Only from the perspective of that event, which decisively shows the limits of decay, does the ultimate purpose of God who raised Jesus begin to come into focus. Certainly nature nurtures life, but nature is neither the ultimate source nor the ultimate goal of life. God is the alpha and the omega.

Modern and ancient dualistic world views, in spite of their seeming incompatibility, share the conviction that if God existed, he could only be a monster. In the second century, Marcion saw creation’s evils as sufficient reason to reject the lordship of the Creator God in favor of a heretofore unknown God, who through Christ mercifully intervenes and saves souls from the clutches of creation and its God. We moderns, on the other hand, with our profoundly materialistic bias—a bias which leads many influential intellectuals to deny the very existence of a self or a soul—cannot reject the world, irrespective of its evil, for we would then have no metaphysical or moral ground on which to stand. From the materialists’ viewpoint, if there were a God, he would have to be Creator of the only reality we trust, the material world. Thus, our addiction to matter cuts us off from Marcion’s appeal to a totally spiritual God. Yet, to complete the circle of inconsistency, we cannot, because of the suffering inherent in the process of creation, believe in a God who is creation’s Lord. When things are going well, we love matter with an all-consuming passion and have no need of God. When things go badly, we reject the Creator of all matter and passion because of the suffering they cause. God cannot win for losing.

In contrast, for Paul the reality of God was so utterly a given that there was no question of making belief in God dependent on one’s ability to solve the problem of evil. For Paul, there was no escaping our eternal destiny with God. The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ had made it abundantly clear that God will not accept human sin as humanity’s answer to the anguish that creation experiences on its way to God’s ultimate goal. Paul knew all the reasons for atheism.

For Paul, the world as we experience it is not the final expression of God’s creative purpose. God’s ultimate purpose in creation is, and always has been, eschatological. To claim that the world is merely the purposeless vehicle of sin and death is a slander against the honor of God. The notion that life arises out of the nothingness of nonexistence and moves toward the nothingness of annihilating death is a nihilistic conceit. Were this notion true, then sin, death and the devil—and not the "God who loves in freedom"—would be the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega. To embrace an "eschatological" nihilism is finally to offer up all our civilization and sciences to the power of darkness. If there were no God, all our works would be as meaningless as the ground of nothingness out of which they arose and into which they would otherwise sink. The denial of eternal life which is so common among modern Christians is not, as its adherents often claim, a nonegoistic, mature, realistic willingness to face the brutal limitations of finitude; rather, it amounts to a tragically unbelieving denial of God’s honor—and thus of God’s very existence.

Many people are not affected by the pathos of the cosmos. A denial of eternal life violates God’s honor, yet an affirmation of eternal life can lead to a callous indifference to the world’s pain. After all, if the entire creation will eventually be redeemed, why be anguished now? This attitude is also a violation of God’s honor. Perhaps Paul was right; only those who have received the "first fruits of the spirit" have the ears to hear creation’s groaning. However, if passionate sympathy is the Spirit’s first fruit, then it is clear that the Spirit is not confined to the church. The Spirit is frequently anywhere but in the church. To be sure, Paul had a Spirit-touched sympathy, but so did the dualistic arch-"heretic" Marcion—and so too do those materialistically oriented, secular non-Christians who stand up for nature’s rights simply out of their abiding love for living things.

God has created an order in which all is passing away. Yet it is the resurrection faith that death is but a means to a very different end. The notion that the end justifies the means—which many find to be ethically appalling—provides the only way finally to understand Paul’s contention that "the sufferings of the present time are not worth comparing with the glory . . ." God’s capacity to achieve "the glory" is the ground on which Christianity stands or falls. Can God indeed lure all things to himself through the reconciling fervor of his love?

Yet God’s honor is at genuine risk. For the price of glory is high. God’s own son must die to pay its price. The very Godhead is torn in anguish: the plea "Father, let this cup pass from me," is answered by the Father’s relentless No. And what are we to say of the Spirit’s strange selectivity? The Spirit shows the way, but in such diverse degrees that we are all liars even in our most earnest efforts to point to the truth. God is not detached in his creative commitment to the universe: His holy purpose will kill us all, even his son. Yet the death and resurrection of Christ demonstrate that the creation’s very pain is itself an image of God’s redemptive and re-creative commitment to the creation.

Can the end of God’s endeavor justify the means he employs? Christian faith is grounded in the confidence that "the glory" will justify its price. But we Christians must at least be able to understand how others find this faith too much to hope for, given the way life appears to be. Sometimes one feels that most of the world is made up of two kinds of people: those who believe despite their unbelief and, those who wish they could believe, but cannot—half-believers and half-doubters. We could expect nothing else with the stakes so high and the perils so great.

Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith. By Marcus Borg. HarperSan Francisco, 160 pp. $16.00 paperback.

Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. By John Dominic Crossan. HarperSanFrancisco, 208 pp., $18.00 paperback.

The Religion of Jesus the Jew, by Geza Vermes. Fortress, 244 pp., $13.00 paperback.

"The historical Jesus" is back. For the third time, we are told. The resurgence of interest in the Jesus of history is evidenced not only by the books from Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan and Geza Vermes but also by the publication of The Five Gospels (Polebridge/Macmillan), reflecting the conclusions of R. W Funk's Jesus Seminar in which Borg and Crossan are active participants. Whether or not these works represent a "third Quest of the historical Jesus," it is instructive to view them in light of earlier efforts to recover Jesus "as he really was," and to ask whether the second coming of the liberal Jesus is at hand.

On the whole, 19th-century (German)Protestant scholarship, no longer able to affirm inherited christological doctrines such as atonement and parousia, preferred "the Jesus of history" before he became "the Christ of faith" (to use the title of D. F.Strauss's book-length review of Schleiermacher's Life of Jesus). To show that nonetheless Jesus was both a credible founder of Christianity and the continuing object of devotion, critical historiography had to show his truly heroic quality, usually by contrasting him with his Jewish heritage and environment. The first quest of the historical Jesus foundered, however, when it became apparent that the synoptic Gospels and their sources were so thoroughly permeated by Christian theology that an uninterpreted Jesus could be glimpsed only here and there. Furthermore, the historical Jesus that could be recovered turned out. to be an apocalyptic preacher of the kingdom of God -- as alien to liberal Protestantism as to the Christ of dogma

.In the wake of Barthian theology, Bultmann declared the whole Quest impossible on critical grounds and illegitimate on theological ones. He deemed it simply another attempt to base faith on works (this time, certified facts) rather than on the Word of God. But what sort of continuity, if any, could be discerned between the message of Jesus and the kerygma of the church? If there were only discontinuity between Jesus himself and the proclaimed Jesus Christ, the gospel would be a myth imposed on history, and Jesus would not be the church's sovereign but its hapless victim.

In response to such questions, Ernst Kaesemann launched within the Bultmannian circle a fresh search, later dubbed "a New Quest" by James Robinson. This venture found continuity between the existential understanding of the self before God, expressed in one way by Jesus and in another by the kerygma. This second Quest, like "the new hermeneutic" with which, it was linked, was shortlived, especially on the American scene. The questions that it generated were simply ignored as interest in social and sociological matters took center stage.

The alleged third Quest, while no more uniform than its predecessors, rejects Bultmann's double verdict about Quests, and is determined to know as precisely as possible what Jesus did and did not say, and to understand the critically certified Jesus as a historical phenomenon in the social landscape of his time. Moreover, some of its practitioners, especially Crossan, insist that the noncanonical evidence has as much right to be taken seriously as the New Testament Gospels.

Especially important is the Coptic Gospel of Thomas found in 1947, which consists of 114 sayings of Jesus but has no passion story. It appears as the fifth gospel in the color-coded Five Gospels, showing at a glance what the Jesus Seminar decided was truly from Jesus (red), what probably represents his thought but not his words (pink), what he surely did not say (black) and what he probably neither said nor thought (gray). According to this wisdom, there is but one genuine saying of Jesus in the entire Gospel of Mark, while three are preserved in Thomas. Overall, only 18 percent of what the sources attribute to Jesus is deemed to have been actually said by him. The difference between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith (any form of early Christian faith will do) has seldom been greater. And because the Jesus of history is again portrayed in heroic terms which protect him from becoming a skandalon, one must ask whether we are witnessing the parousia of the liberal Jesus.

Borg, Crossan and Vermes present quite different portrayals of Jesus. The book by Vermes, a renowned Oxford expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, is the most focused because it completes a trilogy (Jesus the Jew, 1973; Jesus and the World of Judiasm, 1983). Crossan's is essentially a condensation, of his The Historical Jesus (1991); Borg's, while drawing on his Jesus: A New Vision (1987), not only records the author's personal pilgrimage of faith and understanding but is the only one that re reflects on the import of the critics' Jesus for contemporary Christian faith

Only in part do the different portrayals reflect the fact that Borg is a Lutheran, Crossan a Roman Catholic and Vermes a Jew. Much more signifi cant is their divergent stance toward the Gospels. Not only does Vermes ignore Thomas, but in contrast with the Jesus Seminar's passion for methodological rigor, ad mits that "methodology ... makes me see red, perhaps be cause more than once I have been rebuked by trans-At lantic dogmatists for illegitimately arriving at the right con clusion following a path not sanctioned by my critics' sa cred rule book." Vermes sees the Gospels (and the whole NT) as "One particular sector on the general map of Jewish cultural history," not as an independent corpus. Whereas Vermes first stakes out a topic and then works his way to particulars by adducing historical considerations, Crossan isolates a cluster of sayings on a topic, considers only the earliest and doubly attested, and then compares the treatment of the theme with Greek as well as Jewish materials in order to develop an interpretation based on anthropological studies of Mediterranean peasants. Vermes finds this approach quite inappropriate.

For Vermes, Jesus was "a charismatic prophetic preacher and miracle worker" who "represents the charismatic Judaism of wonder-working holy men." Vermes examines the nature, style and content of Jesus' preaching, discusses the idea of God as King and Father in relation to Jesus' "eschatological enthusiasm" and portrays "Jesus the Religious Man" before reaching the epilogue "intended to bring into sharp relief the difference between this religion and historic, ecclesiastical Christianity."

Borg explicitly accepts Vermes's classification of Jesus and goes beyond it: "The most crucial fact about Jesus was that he was a 'spirit person'. . . one ... to whom the Spirit was an experiential reality." To this he adds three other categories: teacher of wisdom, social prophet, and founder of a "Jewish renewal or revitalization movement that challenged and shattered the social boundaries of his day."

For Crossan, in contrast with Vermes and Borg, the religious dimension of Jesus' word and deed is almost totally absorbed into his social role as a countercultural itinerant on the border of revolt. Relying heavily on studies of ancient peasantry in order to extract from Josephus and the Gospels a picture of Galilean antipathies and unrest,

Crossan regards Jesus as a Jewish edition of the GrecoRoman cynic. "Jesus and his first followers ... were hippies in a world of Augustan yuppies" -- a remarkably succinct summary. Jesus had a social program which "sought to rebuild a society upwards from its grass roots, but on principles of religious and economic egalitarianism" made concrete in "the combination of free healing and common eating" which "negated alike and at once the hierarchial and patronal normalcies of Jewish religion and Roman power." Whereas Borg's Jesus mediated the sacred, Crossan's.Jesus refused to be the broker or mediator of God and God's kingdom; he was "the announcer that neither should exist between humanity and divinity, or between humanity and itself

In anchoring Jesus firmly in the religion of first-century Judaism, Vermes is part of a growing circle of Jewish scholars whose work makes it possible for modern Judaism to reclaim Jesus as one of its own. His Jesus is not unlike the prodigal son who was welcomed home after years among the gentile Christians. Once back home, there is nothing about the religion of Jesus the Jew that is articularly offensive to Judaism; at the same time, Vermes is spared the temptation to portray the Jesus of history as the center of a fleeting, brilliant moment that stands sharply against the oppressive darkness that surrounded him.

However, for Crossan (and to some extent Borg) the Jesus of history was the center of a Galilean Camelot, the halcyon days when Jesus and his band roamed the countryside, disregarding societal structures, defying hierarchical patterns, irritating elites and confounding the powerful, creating a grass-roots movement with nobodies while at the same time refusing to be its leader or mediator of the New because that would be brokering the kingdom. Ironically, the brokerless Jesus is himself thoroughly brokered by this biographer.

The marked differences among the three Quests should not obscure the continuity that results from shared reliance on key aspects of the historical-critical method and its judgments about the Gospels and early Christianity. Basic for all three Quests is the view that Matthew and Luke used both Mark and Q, and that between Jesus and all written sources stands the oral tradition which shaped and expanded the Jesus materials, so that recovering the Jesus of history entails differentiating what the texts report from what Jesus really said and did. As a result, the volume of "hard data" on which the historical reconstruction of Jesus can rely is markedly smaller than that of the sources. After subtracting sayings in which Jesus speaks of himself in suspiciously Christian terms, as well as those in which he uses Jewish commonplaces, the figure who remains was baptized by John, preached the kingdom of God, healed the sick, relied on striking aphorisms and parables, indiscriminately consorted with those deemed "sinners," and was executed by Roman authorities for reasons difficult to ascertain. Having given up the Gospels' reports that Jesus deliberately sought death, criticism has been unable to determine whether he was executed because he was rightly perceived to threaten the existing order, or was misunderstood, or simply found himself at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Whether the relentless use of methodological skepticism which marks this strand of historical criticism has yielded credible history is precisely what is contested. Peter Stuhlmacher, for instance, says flatly that "without ... acknowledging that the human Jesus already laid claim to being the messianic Son of Man whom God sent to Israel, one cannot make sense historically of Jesus' ministry or even of the passion narrative" (Jesus of Nazareth, Christ of Faith). Crossan says virtually the opposite (see p. 93).

What links Borg's and Crossan's Jesus with the liberal Jesus of the first Quest is the absence of the futurist (apocalyptic) horizon of Jesus' message and mission, including the widely accepted view that he believed the coming kingdom was making itself effective proleptically in his work. According to Borg, Jesus was "noneschatological": he did not expect "the supernatural coming of the kingdom of God as a world-ending event in his own generation." With the highly problematic modifier of "a world-ending event" the statement is quite misleading, since there is no evidence that the coming of the kingdom meant "the end of the world." Without this modifier, the statement becomes highly questionable. For Borg, of course, futurity is obviated by a Jesus who mediates the divine.

Crossan, on the other hand, retains the term "eschatological" but reduces it to meaning world-negation --"a radical criticism of culture and civilization." Whereas Borg has little to say about Jesus' message of the kingdom, Crossan emphasizes it as the theme of Jesus' egalitarian activity as well as of his teaching. But Crossan too disabuses Jesus of expecting divine intervention to bring the kingdom, and claims not only that Jesus became "almost the exact opposite of the Baptist" but also that Jesus taught a present sapiential kingdom, though as understood not by elites (like Wisdom of Solomon or Philo) but by peasants, whose dream of an egalitarian world was a matter of social protest.

It may surprise readers to learn that the result of Jesus' enacting the kingdom ("what the world would be if God were directly mid immediately in charge" or "a community of radical and unbrokered equality in which individuals are in direct contact with each other and with God') was a band of hippies among yuppies. In fact, it is by no means clear why "kingdom of God" should be retained at all for world-negation -- unless one is willing to think of God and world in Marcionite terms. Crossan in fact attributes to Jesus "a very different message from a very different God." Nor is it clear why such a Jesus would have been executed. The idea that this Jewish cynic (and his dozen hippies), with his demeanor and aphorisms, was a serious threat to society sounds more like a conceit of alienated academics than sound historical judgment.

Vermes's Jesus is much more plausible. While regarding the parousia as a Christian idea, he not only relates Jesus to first-century Jewish religion but emphasizes his eschatological awareness: "the religion of Jesus the Jew is a rare, possibly unique, manifestation of undiluted eschatological enthusiasm." It is Vermes who sees the correlation between the keen sense that God's imminent kingdom is breaking in and repentance (teshuvah, turning), faithful surrender to God ('emunah), and "an untiring effort to follow God as a model, a constant imitatio Dei" -- motifs absent from Borg and Crossan, for whom Jesus is only externally a Jew. Though Crossan says that "Jesus' Jewishness is particularly important in terms of the body/society interaction" (body as microcosm), there is virtually nothing particularly Jewish left in Crossan's portrait of this Mediterranean peasant. Jesus' social location is far more important for Crossan than his religious location. Indeed, whereas first-century Jewish religion was the wellspring of Jesus' life and mission, for both Borg and Crossan that religion was in effect the oppressive structure that he negated. They neither discuss the role of Torah in Jewish life nor have anything good to say about the Judaism that shaped Jesus and his matrix.

To be sure, Borg insists that Jesus was and remained Jewish, just as he asserts that it was not "the Jews" but the "elite" Jewish collaborators with Roman power who rejected him. He too finds the imitatio Dei motif in Judaism -- two motifs, in fact: be compassionate (that is, merciful) as God is compassionate, and be holy as God is holy. Although compassion and holiness were in conflict, the latter was dominant, producing a "purity system" (with sharp social boundaries). Jesus' mission was really an "attack upon the purity system"; in other words, on the allegedly prevailing form of Jewish religion maintained by priests and the elite, while construed somewhat differently by Pharisees and Qumranians.

Interestingly, Borg apparently has fewer doubts about the Gospels' portrait of Judaism (which reflect the Evangelists' time more than that of Jesus) than about their portrayal of Jesus. Understandably so, for seeing Jesus against the background of later first-century Judaism makes it easier to portray him as the hero of moderns alienated from religious traditions and structures. Vermes is surely on the more solid ground here in contending that there is no evidence that Jesus was "hostile to the Torah in principle or refused to abide by it in practice"; to the contrary, "he acknowledged the Law of Moses as the foundation stone of his Judaism.

What must not be overlooked is that the authors' separation of Jesus from futurist eschatology, the secularized reduction of his message and mission to (peasant) class protest and social reconstruction, and the refusal to acknowledge the positive and formative influence of Jewish piety on Jesus are all of a piece. Whereas the second Quest demythologized the apocalyptic eschatology that informed Jesus' message of the kingdom in such a way that the kingdom remained God's initiative and gift eliciting a new ethos, thereby respecting the biblical-Jewish roots of Jesus' word and deed, the Borg-Crossan construal tacitly posits an inert deity who at best provides a formal warrant for a class-based cultural criticism and who apparently has allowed the covenant-commitment to Israel to lapse, for there remains neither promise nonfulfillment. In this interpretation of the kingdom, Jesus may refer to God but not defer to God's action-. It is by no means clear why this egalitarian Eden, which relies wholly on human will power, is less illusory -- especially in this blood-soaked century when human capacity is unmasked -- than the Jewish apocalyptic hope for the coming of God's kingdom.The value of these books is not in what they say about Jesus so much as in what their saying these things prompts one to think about. The Quest itself continues -- as it must.

In John 14:12 more or less at the beginning of his long Farewell Speech, Jesus issues a startling pledge to his disciples: "Amen, amen, I say to you, the one who believes into me will do the works that I do, and greater than these she or he will do because I am going to the Father." Throughout most of the history of the Christian movement, such a promise of fabulous possibilities has tended to be regarded as unimaginable and unfulfillable. Not only has the church subjected its members to a hierarchical relationship of dependency vis a vis the Christ that would preclude the actualization of such a divine potentiality, but as a participant in the culture of the Western world, the church has been captive to a five-hundred-year trajectory of material rationality that has eclipsed the reality of possibility. Both the verticality of the faith relationship between Jesus and his disciples and the delimitations of the materialist paradigm, which originated in the nominalism of William of Ockham [1] have foreclosed the fulfillment of the covenantal promise of John 14:12. Accordingly, those who have embraced the Christian faith throughout this period have been confined to a kind of Babylonian captivity that has prevented them, like the paralytic at the pool of Bethesda in John 5:5, from entering the promised land of health and wholeness and beginning to experience the transcendence implied in Jesus’ summons "Keep on rising, take up your mattress, and keep on walking."

Concomitantly, this very same trajectory of material rationality has exerted a dominant influence on the exercise of historical reason in its scientific evaluation of the New Testament’s witness to the Easter event. A materialist paradigm determined by causal-calculating reason cannot affirm, much less corroborate, the reality of Jesus’ rising from the dead, and contemporary New Testament scholarship that operates within this paradigm either compromises the witness of the New Testament or relegates it to the realm of faith. [2] A very recent example is Gerd Luedemann’s 1994 monograph, The Resurrection of Jesus. In the concluding chapter, entitled "Can We Still Be Christians?" Luedemann writes:

Why must we stop at the historical Jesus? For Luedemann, of course, it is necessary because the resurrection was nothing more than a hallucination. But is the post-Easter memory of the early church invalid? And should that memory be disregarded because its formulations, which intimate a new, indeed, a divine possibility of human existence, cannot be subjected to enlightened, materialist reason? Moreover, why is it impossible to make statements about Jesus’ present being? Must the directions the post-Easter Gospels offer for such projections be dismissed? And why is Jesus hidden from us while God is manifest? Is it no longer possible to experience the post-Easter Jesus in the narrative worlds of the four Gospels or in those arenas of historical existence that the Gospels indicate? Why, after Richard R. Niebuhr’s formidable critique of earlier interpretations of the Easter event, is New Testament scholarship’s investigation of the Gospels’ resurrection narratives still determined by the dualism of Kantian epistemology?

Luedemann acknowledges that he has conducted his investigation of the resurrection traditions under the "treasured" influence of Wilhelm Herr-mann, and therefore inherently within the framework of Herrmann’s loyalty

to nineteenth-century historical criticism and its determination by Kantian epistemology. Like other Kant-oriented theologians, Herrmann identified history with nature as the realm of necessity and therefore presupposed that the scientific methods employed in the investigation of nature could also be applied to the historical-critical analysis of biblical texts. Christian faith cannot find a resting place or a foundation for itself within this Kantian domain of The Critique of Pure Reason. XVhile the resurrection traditions of the Gospels may be subject to critical analysis, the reality ofJesus’ rising from the dead to which they bear witness is suspect because, like the other miracles, it cannot be integrated into the causal nexus of either nature or history. Ironically, neither can it be regarded as a "noumenal reality" and apprehended under The Critique of Practical Reason, because in his analysis of the antinomies of reason, Kant postulates that the thinking self is an immortal soul. The human body is a material reality, subject to the categories of substance and causality. Its finitude cannot actualize the summum bonum of perfect harmony between human reason and moral law. Practical reason, therefore, presupposes the self-evident proposition of the immortality of the soul, rather than the resurrection of the body, to enable the moral faculty of human being to achieve its perfection.

Like Wilhelm Herrmann, Luedemann makes a Kant-like differentiation between historical criticism and existential faith, but, unlike Herrmann, the "living personality of Jesus" is not encountered in the domain of practical reason but in the historical-critical reconstruction that New Testament scholars have derived from the texts of the Gospels. To quote Luedemann again: "The man Jesus is the objective power which is the enduring basis of the experiences of a Christian. Through Jesus we are ‘first lifted into a true fellowship with God’. Jesus grasps me, makes me bow down, exalts me and makes me blessed, loves me, through all the strata of the tradition. He is the ground of faith." [4] But can a historical-critically reconstructed Jesus serve as an adequate foundation on which to build faith? Like Gerd Luedemann, John Dominic Crossan seems to think so. He concludes his critical investigation in The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant with the astonishing sentence "If you cannot believe in something produced by reconstruction, you may have nothing left to believe in…" [5] Yet no critical reconstruction of any kind can achieve a representation of the original reality of Jesus’ career beyond the realm of probability. And if such a reconstruction were to be adopted as the ground of faith, faith would be nothing more than intellectual consent.

Luedemann’s form- and redaction-critical analysis of the Easter stories results in a virtual identification of the interpretations of the post-Easter Jesus by the earliest Christians with the critical reconstruction of the pre-Easter Jesus. "Finally, our historical reconstruction led to the insight that the structural characteristics of the Easter experience . . . of the forgiveness of sins, the experience of life, the experience of eternity, are contained in the words and story of Jesus. So we have to say that before Easter, everything that was finally recognized after Easter was already present." [6] For Luedemann the Easter event, whatever it was, is nothing more than the reinforcement of earlier experiences conveying to the disciples a better understanding of the Jesus they had known. But can this or any historical reconstruction constitute a provenance of human transformation? Can a historically reconstructed Jesus empower us to do his works, much less greater works than those the Gospels attribute to him? What is the basis of the extraordinary possibility that Jesus presupposes for his disciples? It appears that Luedemann’s investigation of the resurrection of Jesus leaves us captive to a Kantian epistemology, which, as Richard R. Niebuhr has recognized, absolutizes the categories of Newtonian science and cosmology as the forms of sensibility and the categories of reason by which the mind organizes and interprets the exogenous world. [7] But if the universal structure of thought is essentially a sign process, that is, if the mediation of thought is always subject to a historically determined linguistic system, then no epistemological theory can ever establish the limits of pure reason. Luedemann, however, is content in his reductionism to embrace an elementary faith. As a last word he acknowledges that "the unity with God experienced in faith continues beyond death." [8}] That evidently is enough, and consequently he exhorts "Christians to live by the little that they really believe, not by the much that they take pains to believe." [9]

A postmodern approach to the New Testament witness to Jesus’ resurrection, as it is developed by Marianne Sawicki in her book Seeing the Lord: Ressurrection and Early Christian Practices, [10] is more efficacious in enabling access to the reality of resurrection than any analysis of the biblical texts that is determined by a critical methodology founded on a Kantian epistemology. The reality of the Easter event is not established by academic scholarship performing autopsies on those Gospel narratives that bear witness to the Easter event but rather by engaging in those activities prescribed by them, that is, identifying with the hungry and the poor, obeying the teaching of Jesus, and devoting oneself to liturgy. Evidently influenced by Jacques Derrida’s dictum "There is nothing outside of the text," [11] Sawicki contends that the continuity of the risen Lord’s presence and the experience of "seeing the Lord" are constituted by the reality of intertextuality. Of course, if there is nothing outside of the text, there are many different kinds of texts that are inscribed with meaning: not only the great diversity of printed matter but also culture and human beings. Ironically, however, the texts of the New Testament Gospels are, like Jesus’ tomb, empty. [12] They will not enable us to encounter the risen Lord. At best, they are "professional training manuals," which convey bodily and textual strategies that indicate those contexts and activities in which the risen Lord will be seen. According to Matthew, that experience will occur in the practice of the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount; according to Luke-Acts, it will take place in our participation in and our response to a community of hungry people. [13] The referents of the term "resurrection" are established by the Gospels and are always beyond the New Testament texts, enabling readers to identify and recognize the living presence of the risen Lord in the texts of the world. Accordingly, Sawicki argues, "It would be a misconception to regard the gospel words as referring, after the fact, to some event separate and self-contained that happened independently of those words and that subsists apart from them somewhere in the human past.,,, [14] And "those who want to see the Lord must devote themselves to liturgy and the poor (better yet, the liturgy with the poor) as well as to printed texts." [15]

Certainly the Gospels are not historical reconstructions that re-present the actuality of the unfolding of Jesus’ career in its original Palestinian context. But are they simply "professional training manuals," designed to instruct us where we will see the risen Lord? As artistically constructed texts, they, by the signs that constitute them, put forward potential narrative worlds; and we, by the activity of reading, (1) transform those signs into people, places, actions, and teaching and (2) concomitantly create discrete, self-contained story worlds. Our own discipleship is not deferred as we engage in this aesthetic activity. But we are the advantaged disciples because we are listening to an omniscient narrator informing us of events and actions in the life of Jesus that his original disciples do not experience. For example, as the disciples from outside the text, in contrast to the disciples inside the text, we learn from the narrator of Mark’s Gospel the words the heavenly voice spoke to Jesus as the Spirit descended into him at his baptism, "You are my beloved Son; in you I began to take pleasure." Flow will we, privileged with this knowledge, answer the question the disciples verbalize when they have experienced Jesus’ authority over the forces of chaos in the stilling of the storm, "Who then is this for even the wind and the sea obey him?" How will we evaluate Simon Peter’s confession, "You are the Christ," or how will we judge his subsequent elevation of Jesus to the rank of Elijah and Moses in response to the transfiguration? What happens to us, or what do we do when we reach the conclusion of Mark’s Gospel and discover there is no closure? The end proves not to be the end! According to the youth of Mark 16:5, Jesus has been raised from the dead, and, even as he is no longer in the tomb, he is no longer in the text. He is on his way to Galilee, most likely to inaugurate a second career that will be similar to the first. Inexplicably, the three women who came to complete the burial of Jesus’ corpse remain silent in spite of the ecstasy of their revelatory experience. What will be our response? Will we believe the good news of Jesus’ resurrection? Will we, the disciples outside the text, create a continuation of the narrative by following Jesus to Galilee? Evidently that is our only recourse to determine the truth of the youth’s testimony. Words cannot deliver the certainty of Jesus’ resurrection, even in the light of the witness of Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Jesus inscribed in the Gospel according to Matthew. Nevertheless, their empirical experience of both seeing the risen Lord and grasping his feet is indispensable in establishing the ontological reality of his resurrection.

Jesus did not merely rise into the Christian proclamation, as Rudolf Bultmann maintained; nor did he rise into intertextuality, as Sawicki proposes. At the same time, the Easter event is not to be reduced to a hallucination or a psychological episode that occurred within the consciousness of the disciples. In his post-Easter appearances, Jesus presented himself to his disciples as an objective—not physical! but objective—reality; and a number of Easter stories utilize attributes of physicality to express that objectivity. According to Luke 24:34, Jesus invites his disciples to "Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and blood as you see that I have." To provide additional confirmation, he asks for and receives a piece of broiled fish, which he eats in their presence.

The ontological reality of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead can only be experienced in terms of physicality. Sawicki, therefore, rightly connects resurrection with the bodily imaging of God. [16] Seeing the Lord occurs concretely in "sharing the necessities of life,,,, [17] that is, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, giving hospitality to the stranger, caring for the sick and visiting the imprisoned, as the parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25:31—46 discloses. Nevertheless, resurrection is more that caring for the poor and celebrating the litugy. Resurrection is more than engaging in bodily and physical strategies. Resurrection is more than something that happens between and among persons. [18]

Resurrection is the entry into a new moral order that is constituted as a terrestrial reality by the creative act of God, and therefore it is something that happens to individual human beings. It is a principle component of the eschatological projection of a new heaven and a new earth that originated in the millennialism of Jewish apocalypticism, and it seems to have made its earliest appearance in the Apocalypse of Isaiah (Isaiah 24—2 7), specifically in Isaiah 26:29.

our dead shall live, their corpses shall rise.

Daniel 12:2 enlarges this eschatological vision to include the despicable and the ignoble. "Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt."

Resurrection and its attendant reconstitution of all things is preceded, however, by a cataclysmic judgment that terminates the old moral order. The process of redemption in society has disintegrated. [19] New forms of power have been introduced that have altered the distribution of wealth. The old rules that governed the ordering of power no longer guarantee the truth of things. As political oppression and economic exploitation intensify the social unrest, those who become aware of their disenfranchisement isolate themselves from the current moral order and form communities that are oriented toward the search for a new kind of social being. Intellectual activity aided by scriptural interpretation endeavors to comprehend the changes that have occurred in the social construction of reality.

Exemplifying this phase of millenarian formation is book I of I Enoch, which, by an appropriation of the myth of Genesis 6:3—4, attributes the disintegration of the current social order to the birth of giants who "consumed the produce of all the people until the people detested feeding them. So the giants turned against the people in order to eat them" (1 Enoch 7:3-4). [20] These giants are identifiable as systemic structures and social institutions that transcend the power and control of the peasantry and extract the surplus of their agricultural production. The injustices that prevail cannot be eradicated by a reformist response. A new condition of being is required, and therefore the irremediable moral order that predominates must be terminated.

Book (1 of I Enoch foretells the eternal punishment of the watchers, "the children of heaven," as well as the destruction of the giants. Daniel foresees the annihilation of the four chaos monsters that devour much flesh. First Enoch’s Apocalypse of Weeks anticipates the final judgment to occur during the tenth week of human history:

The Messiah apocalypse of 2 Baruch offers essentially the same vision. The creation will be returned to primordial chaos during the thirteenth epoch of human history, and the fourteenth and final age will mark the beginning of eternal justice and peace.

Resurrection is God’s re-creation of the deceased elect, those who are identified in Isaiah 26:19 as the dead who belong to God: "Your dead shall live; their corpses shall rise." Resurrection opens the door to a joyful participation in the reconstitution of all things. In the Similitudes of I Enoch, Enoch is assured:

The righteous and elect ones shall be saved on that day.. . . The Lord of the Spirits will abide over them; they shall eat and rest and rise with that Son of

The Easter appearances of the risen Jesus to Cephas, the twelve, and "to more than five hundred sisters and brothers at one time" unquestionably engendered intellectual ferment I Cor. 35:5—6). Recognition was vital, requiring the identification of the risen one with Jesus of Nazareth and alternately determining the significance of both the event and the person. Among the variety of interpretations that emerged was the myth of resurrection, derived from the eschatology of Jewish apocalypticism and imposed on the event of Jesus’ rising from the dead to signify the inauguration of the millenarian vision of a new heaven and a new earth. Attendantly, from within this millenarian orientation, Jesus himself was identified with the bar nasha of Daniel 7:13—14, a type of new Adam, who, on the basis of his appearance before the Ancient of Days, recovered the characteristics that distinguish the human being created in the image and likeness of God: dominion, glory, and kingship (see Ps. 8:4—8). In the Hellenistic Jewish-Christian community, the identification ofJesus with the bar nasha of Daniel 7: 13—14 was translated into the christological, but corporately oriented, title: ho huios tou anthropou. By raising Jesus from the dead, God appointed him to be the founder of a new humanity. Accordingly in (I Corinthians 15:45, the apostle Paul acknowledges him to be the "Last Adam" who is a "life-giving spirit," the image of the glory of God into which those who follow him are being metamorphosed from one degree of glory to another (2 Cor. 3:38).

A number of passages in the letters of the apostle Paul indicate that he embraced this interpretation of the Easter event. Above all, of course, is (2 Corinthians 15, where it is especially obvious in his circular argumentation of verses 12 - 13 2—I "Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised." What the Corinthian Christians evidently are rejecting is the eschatology of the resurrection of the dead, a reality of the future when "the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed." In an effort to convince them, Paul utilizes the analogy of a grain of wheat in order to develop the difference between two kinds of bodies, the flesh-and-blood body of the present, which has its own glory, and the spiritual body of the future, which will be superior in glory to the physical body as one star is superior in splendor to another.

But the millennial myth of resurrection, as applied to the Easter event, not only guarantees the future resurrection. Above all, it identifies the reality of Jesus’ rising from the dead as the beginning of a new creation as well as the birth of a new humanity. The realized eschatology of the new creation is the hub of Pauline theology from which the spokes of his contextualizing interpretations radiate. J. Christiaan Beker has articulated it well. The apocalyptic reality of the regnum Christi is the "deep structure" or "coherent center" from which "a variety of symbols" is drawn in response to the contingencies of Paul’s evangelizing contexts. [21] Paul himself acknowledges it as such in Galatians 6:15. "For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything, but a new creation. And as many as follow this rule, peace on them and mercy and upon the Israel of God."

If the Easter event of Jesus’ rising from the dead, as interpreted by the myth of resurrection, signifies the establishment of a new creation, Jesus’ death, accordingly, must denote the end of the old creation. In this respect the millennialism of Jewish apocalypticism also functions as the "deep structure" of Pauline theology. For if Jesus’ death terminates the old moral order, Paul can simultaneously declare, as he does in 2 Corinthians 5:17, "old things passed away; new things have happened."

Moreover, Jesus’ death, like his rising from the dead, becomes a vital factor in the establishment of a paradigmatic experience into which all humanity can enter, namely, dying and rising with Christ. Paul enlarges on this in Romans 6:4. "Therefore we were buried with him through baptism into death so that even as Christ was resurrected from the dead through the glory of the Father, so let us walk in the newness of life." The myth of resurrection, accordingly, provides the key to the interpretation of Jesus’ rising from the dead and, retrospectively, to the interpretation of Jesus’ death.

But the consequence of participating in Jesus’ death must be clearly apprehended. "If;" as Paul says, "one died on behalf of all and consequently all died," that death must be claimed as the end of my involvement in the old moral order. "Old things passed away." My eschatological death, therefore, terminates my participation in the human condition of sin that dominates the old moral order as well as the alienation that that disease engenders. The wonderful outcome is reconciliation with God. Paul’s understanding of atonement is derived not from the temple cult but from the interpretation of Jesus’ death as the end of the old creation. [22] "For if being enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, how much more, being reconciled, shall we be saved by his life" (Rom. 5:30). We are reconciled to God through the death of his Son, but not without our own participation in that death. We are also saved by his life, but not without our participation in his resurrection. There is no cheap grace here!

"Being saved" begins with an entry into the reality of resurrection. It is analogous to the experience of Lazarus, the Beloved Disciple in the narrative world of the Fourth Gospel. After the stone, which seals the cave of nonbeing in which he is buried, has been rolled away and Jesus has issued the call to come forth, he, with hands and feet bound and eyes covered with a burial cloth, by some prodigious effort succeeds in exiting from the tomb. Recreated or resurrected, he is ready to begin a journey into a new moral order. But unbinding must first take place before he is able to walk and to see; and since he is unable to set himself free, he needs some assistance from the community to which he belongs. Like Lazarus’, our salvation, our being saved, lies in our being unbound and set free. By entering the new creation, which God constituted through the Easter event, we have been resurrected with Christ, and therefore we have become members of a new humanity bearing the identity of "life-giving spirits." As Paul says in Corinthians 35:45, The first human Adam became a living being; the last Adam a life-giving spirit." Those who are "in Christ," the last Adam, are "life-giving spirits"! That, however, is a paradoxical identity. For although we have died with Christ and have been raised with Christ, and therefore are participating in the new humanity of "life-giving spirits," we are undergoing a metamorphosis that is transfiguring us into the image and stature of our pioneer, the resurrected Christ. The process of transformation gradually enables us to "rule in life" and to engage in the activities of the dikaiosyne tou theou, the justice of God (Rom. 5:37).

It is in this domain of being "in Christ," the last Adam, and consequently also being on the way into a reordering of power that all the possibilities of this new creation become realizable. The scale and scope of those possibilities, disclosed by Jesus in the narrative world of the four Gospels, are originated and activated by God’s breath, the Holy Spirit. We, who are "life-giving spirits" because we belong to a new humanity and are therefore being metamorphosed from one degree of glory to another (2 Cor. 3:18), are called to incarnate those possibilities as God’s surrogates with and for our fellow human beings.

The Easter event, as interpreted by the myth of resurrection, has inaugurated the long awaited reconstitution of all things. This is the time of the regnurn Christi, the reign of Christ. Paul characterizes it as the age in which the Christ abolishes every rule, every authority and every power; that is, all the forms and forces of death that prevent all who have been created in God’s image and likeness from "ruling in life." Only after this work has successfully been completed will the Christ return the kingship to God and become subordinate to God, as Paul states in I Corinthians 35:28. This reign of Christ, however, must not be construed as the elite sovereignty of the Lord Jesus Christ. The new creation is not a reconstruction of a hierarchical ordering of power. The kingship of the risen Christ is a horizontally structured rule in which all the members of the new humanity have an equal share. For the Christ, as Paul contends in I Corinthians 12:12, is the commnunity of the one and the many: "For even as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body being many are one body, so also the Christ." [23]

The objective of this corporate, horizontally constituted kingship is the deliverance of the creation from its bondage, the redemption of the old moral order and all who participate in it. This is the work that God has reserved for and entrusted to the new humanity; and the languishing creation is awaiting its manifestation. "For," as Paul declares in Romans 8:19 --21, "the eager expectation of the creation is waiting for the unveiling of the sons and daughters of God. For the creation was subordinated to futility, not willingly, but on account of the one (who) subordinated it in hope. Because the same creation will be liberated from the enslavement of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God."

This is the assignment the new humanity is called to fulfill. To say the least, it is an awesome undertaking, and, as each year passes, it seems more preposterous. Nevertheless, God will not rescue the creation unassisted. Incarnation is the instrumentality by which this objective will be achieved. All who participate in the new humanity of the risen Christ and therefore are "life-giving spirits" are called to collaborate with God and fulfill this commission to save the creation. There is no other legitimation for Christian identity.

The undertaking is realizable only if the reign of Christ is a horizontally shared kingship. Jesus himself acknowledged that in his confession at his trial before the Sanhedrin, "You will see the Son of the Human Being (the new humanity) seated on the right hand of power." Christian self-understanding humbly but courageously embraces this privileged position of being coenthroned with the resurrected Jesus and therefore also being co-enthroned with God. It is from this source that divine possibility originates and becomes actualizable in historical existence.

The Synoptic account of the stilling of the storm dramatizes this reality. Jesus falls asleep in the middle of a storm while sailing across the Sea of Galilee. From fear of drowning, his disciples awaken him, not because they want a miracle to save them but because Jesus, who in view of his location "in the stern on the pillow" is the pilot, has, by falling asleep, lost control of the boat. They simply want him to get his hand back on the rudder and guide the boat through the storm. They are acting according to the old paradigm of Psalm 107:23—32. To quote the most pertinent verses, "Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he brought them out from their distress; he made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed." Jesus delivers them, but in an unanticipated manner, namely, by assuming the role of the Lord and calming the wind and the sea. But immediately afterwards he reproaches them for being cowardly and not having faith. Yet, at least according to the old paradigm, they had faith. They had cried out to the Lord in their trouble. Why does Jesus reprimand them? Evidently, the old paradigm of dependence is no longer valid to those who are following Jesus into a new moral order. Verticality promotes dependence and paralysis. "Having faith" now involves acting out of the empowerment of participating in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. When Jesus subsequently sends the disciples across the Sea of Galilee alone, they are hesitant to go without him because they remember how safe and secure they were when he was in the boat with them. Consequently, it is necessary for him to compel them to get into the boat (Mark 6:45). In view of the time when he will be taken away from them, they must learn how to be pioneers in his place for those who will follow them into a reordering of power. As they begin to sail across the sea, Jesus ascends "into the mountain" to pray for them; when he descends at dusk he observes that they have made little progress. Yet he does not interfere. During the fourth watch of the night he comes to them walking on the sea, and, as the narrator informs us, "he was wanting to pass them by" (Mark 6:48). Jesus is anxious about them, but he refuses to be paternalistic. They must be trained for the future, for their exercise of sovereignty and power will be essential for the fulfillment of their commission. They must learn the limits of the authority they bear as members of the community of the Son of the Human Being.

The disciples, however, see Jesus walking on the sea and, imagining him to be a ghost, cry out in fear. He responds to their alarm immediately, "Keep on being courageous! I AM. Stop being afraid!" In his self-disclosure he employs the phrase ego eimi, the Septuagint translation of Yahweh’s self-identification to Moses at the burning bush, and also the Septuagint translation of Yahweh’s declarations of transcendence and matchlessness in Isaiah 42—48. In performing an act that is traditionally limited to God, as Job 9:8 indicates, Jesus by his use of "I AM" reveals the identity and destiny of the new humanity, that community of "life-giving spirits" that is willed by God to be transformed into the image and stature of the risen Lord. When Jesus climbs into the boat, the wind ceases, but his disciples are profoundly unsettled: "They went out of their minds!" They do not understand the significance of what they have witnessed because, as the narrator explains, "they did not understand about the loaves, but their heart was hardened" (Mark 6:5 3). The sovereignty that Jesus manifested by walking on the sea is the same as that by which he fed the multitudes; it is the sovereignty of the New Human Being whom God gave birth to and who therefore is God’s Offspring. The disciples, however, continue to let their society and its culture determine the limitations of possibility in historical existence.

Marianne Sawicki is right when she states, "The first evangelists find that they cannot bring anyone to the possibility of resurrection through the mere telling of a story." [24] Her insistence, however, is on the teaching that succeeds the wonder working of the early prophets, teaching that will enable the disciples "to reach and recognize the risen Lord," to see "what they literally cannot see: Jesus in the hungry, the thirsty, the strange, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned." [25] But the possibility of resurrection is not established simply and only on the basis of "seeing the Lord" in the communities of the poor and the oppressed. Personal participation in Jesus’ resurrection and its entry into a reordering of power is paramount. If the disciples and Peter follow the risen Jesus to Galilee where he is initiating a second career, they will not only "see the Lord" as he continues his ministry among the marginalized masses, they will also participate in his resurrection, even as they participated in his death; and consequently, like him at the beginning of his career in the narrative world of Mark’s Gospel, they will be called into being as God’s beloved daughters and sons and simultaneously be empowered to actualize the possibilities of the reign of Christ.

At the conclusion of Matthew’s narrative world, the eleven representatives of the new Israel "see the Lord" on the Sinai-like mountain of Galilee where the risen Jesus appears to them. "But some doubted" (28:17). What they doubt is not clarified, but most likely the reader is to assume that it is the reality of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Nothing is said or done to resolve their doubts. The risen Jesus claims to have received "all authority in heaven and on earth," thereby intimating the fulfillment of Daniel 7:33—14 and the confirmation of his identity in resurrection as the bar nasha or the New Human Being. He issues the so-called Great Commission and at the same time insinuates the means by which their doubts will be resolved. By fulfilling their authorization to make disciples of all ethnic communities in the same way Jesus disciples them, any doubts of the reality of his resurrection that might persist will be dispelled.

But there is more than the teacher’s teaching that is to be taught to disciple others. Eleven ascended the cosmic navel of the mountain in Galilee; twelve descend. The teacher joins the eleven, and as the twelfth, constitutes the new Israel and imparts equal participation in his identity as the bar nasha, the New Human Being, and equal participation in the fullness of his authority in heaven and on earth. The I AM, with which he identified himself to his disciples while walking on the Sea of Galilee (34:27), now encloses them—and us! "See, I with you AM ego meth hymon eimi) even to the consummation of the age." Drawn into the I AM of Emmanuel, "God with us," the community of the New Iluman Being, which the risen Lord constitutes on this Sinai-like navel in Galilee, is empowered to continue the world-transforming ministry of Jesus.

In the Acts of the Apostles, the evangelist Luke draws his readers into the Pentecostal experience of the disciples, after Matthias has been chosen to replace Judas as the twelfth representative of the new Israel. "All were together in one place; and suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them" (2:1—3). All of them, both the women and the men, receive empowerment through the same gift of God’s Spirit that had descended upon Jesus at his baptism. While Jesus was anointed by the Spirit’s settling upon him in the physical appearance of a dove, signaling that he was being sanctioned by heaven, his disciples are ratified by a supracephalic flame that signified the dawn of the new age and their participation in the apotheosis of the risen Lord. [26]

In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus breathes the Spirit on his disciples on Easter evening (20:22), and as a result his earlier promise of 14:1—3 is fulfilled, "In my Father’s house are many rooms; and if not, I would tell you because I am going to prepare a place for you. Again I am coming and I will receive you to myself so that where I AM (ego eimi) you also are." As bearers of God’s presence they become "rooms" in "the Father’s house," rooms that Jesus prepared by going away into death and resurrection. Accordingly empowered, they will begin to fulfill Jesus’ promise, "the works that I do you will do and greater works than these because I am going to the Father."

The Gospels are not "about" access to one who died. Their generic content is not to communicate the means of approaching someone dead.[27] All of them, in their own distinctive modes, end without closure indicating or intimating where and by what means the reality of the Easter event can be experienced. The "seeing" that is required results from a personal entry into death and resurrection with Jesus and concomitantly actualizing the divine possibilities that belong to the legacy of the new humanity. Seeing clearly is a divine gift, but sometimes, as in the story of Jesus’ opening the eyes of a blind human being in two stages, the sight that is gained is imperfect, and a second remedial touch is necessary (Mark 8:22—26).

Lazarus, as the Beloved Disciple of the Fourth Gospel, offers an apposite epistemological model. Although he is not identified by the narrator as the Beloved Disciple, we as the readers can make that identification on the basis of the first of the Easter episodes in the Fourth Gospel. When Mary Magdalene reports her discovery of an empty tomb, two disciples, Simon Peter and "the one whomJesus loved," scramble to investigate. The details the narrator gives are crucial for the identification of the Beloved Disciple.

There is no way to account for the strange conduct of the Beloved Disciple except to identify him with Lazarus. He outruns Peter but does not enter the tomb. He has surmised what has happened, but he is hesitant to enter the tomb because he himself came out of a tomb. Nevertheless, he eventually enters, stands beside Peter, eyeballs the same empirical objects ofJesus’ burial garments, and believes. His faith is not simply a leap into the dark, nor is it based on scriptural proof. "For," as the narrator observes, "they did not yet know the scripture that he must rise from the dead." lie believes because of his own experience of resurrection. When he sees the strips of linen folded up into one place, he remembers that he himself came out of his tomb, bound hand and foot, and had to be set free. Jesus, in his resurrection from the dead, had the authority of the New Human Being "to lay down his life and to take it up again." The seeing and believing of the Beloved Disciple are determined by his own experience of resurrection as Lazarus. That is the epistemological foundation of his faith.

Marianne Sawicki ends her inquiry into Christian origins by contending for postmodern theology that does not "insist on a God beyond text or on causality from beyond the textual world.,, [28] "As modern theology worked out a place for God in the ‘depth dimension,’ postmodern theology must work out a place for God in/as some dimension of textuality.,,, [29] But the Easter event is not simply Jesus’ rising into the texts of hungry and naked bodies. Those are texts that belong to the old moral order. Certainly Jesus is alive and active in these texts. As the youth in Mark’s Easter story declares, "He is going before you into Galilee." Jesus, however, enters those texts from the new text of the rule of God, which he established and which God constituted ontologically by raising Jesus from the dead.

Is Jesus alive? Did he really rise from the dead? Or to phrase the question as Sawicki does toward the end of her book: "Could he recognize himself? Did his personal awareness continue; was he himself still around to enjoy whatever happened after Calvary? Did he come out of the tomb laughing? Will I?" [30] Sawicki considers these questions important but does not answer them. Those who, like Lazarus, have responded to the call to exit from the cave of nonbeing and follow Jesus into the metamorphosis of resurrection can answer with a joyful affirmation.

Martin Luther designated the papacy of his time "the kingdom of Babylon and the power of Nimrod the mighty hunter." [31] In his treatise "The Babylonian Captivity of the Church," he identified the configurations of bondage in the seven ecclesiastically constituted sacraments that controlled Christians from birth to the grave and prevented them from realizing their freedom in Christ. The biblical scholarship of modernity, insofar as it continues to be captive to the dualism of Kantian epistemology, is another kind of Babylonian captivity, which debars the signs of identification and recognition by which the risen Jesus made himself known. [32] Instead it substitutes a reconstructed historical Jesus "as the clue to God in our life" and closes the door to participation in the new moral order of the resurrection and its inherent possibilities. The ecclesiastical promulgation of transcendent Christologies, informed by ancient creeds torn out of their historical contexts, is another kind of Babylonian captivity that restrains Christians from entering into a horizontal relationship with the risen Lord and enjoying the ecstatic sense of self-worth that he wills to share by drawing them into his I AM. Postmodernity’s intertextuality into which the risen Jesus disappears without the perspective of the new creation is yet another kind of Babylonian captivity. Although it acknowledges the identification of the risen Jesus with the hungry and the homeless, the sick and the diseased, the immigrant and the imprisoned, its efficacy is limited by its denial of the gospel’s referent of the text of a new humanity.

The apostle Paul acknowledges the empirical reality of this text in 2 Corinthians 3:2—3, where he identifies the Corinthian Christians as a "letter." "You are our letter, written in our hearts, known and read by all human beings, and thereby made visible that you are a letter of Christ being ministered to by us, not written with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on stone tablets but on the physical tablets of the heart." The old covenant was inscribed on stone tablets and issued to Moses in an ambiance of glory for transmission to the people of Israel. Its splendor, however, which was reflected in the face of Moses, was temporary; and to conceal its fading character Moses covered his face with a veil. The new covenant, in contrast, is a text inscribed on the tablets of the human heart. Accordingly, it is a text within a text, and insofar as it is inscribed on the tablets of the human heart, it may remain concealed and invisible. The text of the new covenant becomes legible only when it is expressed externally through the text of the physical body in terms of deeds and words. The Word, God’s speech activity, must become flesh. Incarnation is the medium of the textuality that discloses the ontological reality of the new moral order that was constituted by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Those who embody the new humanity are letters of God addressed to the world. They are texts that make the reality of the new creation readable; they are texts that glow with an ambiance of glory. To quote Paul again: "Now if the ministry of death, chiseled in letters on stone tablets, came in glory so that the people of Israel could not gaze at Moses’ face because of the glory of his face, a glory now set aside, how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory? . . . What once had glory has lost its glory because of the greater glory" (2 Cor. 3:7—8, 10). But where is that "greater glory"? If the text of the new covenant supposedly manifests itself with a greater glory than that of the old covenant, in what ways does it make that glory visible? How is it disclosed in the lives of human beings? Somehow the effects of participation in the new creation must shimmer in and through the lifestyle of those who are "life-giving spirits." That kind of lifestyle would radiate the supremacy of life in the face of all the forms and forces of death that tend to dominate the sociocultural order. That kind of lifestyle would reflect an increasing diminishment of alienation and, conversely, a flowering reconciliation with God and fellow human beings. That kind of lifestyle would exhibit a freedom that struggles to remain outside the vicious cycle of exchanging rejection for rejection, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. That kind of lifestyle would display the integrity of the five wise virgins of Jesus’ parable, who expressed their identity of being light bearers by their vocational activity of bearing light. That kind of lifestyle wotmld reveal a dedication to the subversion of any and every pollution system that divides the world into the realms of the clean and the unclean, and disadvantages and dehumanizes those who are identified as the unclean. Accordingly, that lifestyle would be engaged in service and ministry to, with, and for all humankind, but always out of the freedom and unobligedness of participating in the lordship of Jesus Christ.

Involvement in this kind of a lifestyle is not a journey into diminishment but an odyssey into the fullness of life and, simutaneously, a transfiguration into the glory of God. As Irenaeus articulated it, "The glory of God is the human being fully alive." Yet as the Apostle reminds the Corinthians,

NOTES

* Dedicated to my beloved father, Henry Waetlen, in his ninety-third year, in profound gratitude for his unconditional love and faithful support.

1. My thanks to D.R. MeGaughey of Willamette University for the insights from the last chapter of his forthcoming book, Strangers and Pilgrims: On the Role of Aporiai in Theology.

2. See Richard R. Niebuhr’s critique of biblical scholarship’s interpretation of Jesus’ resurrection in terms of Kantian epistemology in Resurrection and Historical Reason (New York: Charles Schribner's Sons, 1957), 1 - 71.

3. The Resurrection of Jerus: History, Experience, Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 383. See also his more recent book, What Really Happened to Jesus: A Historical Approach to the Resurrection (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995), 131—37.

4. Resurrection of Jesus, 382.

5. (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 426.

6. Resurrection of Jesus, 381—82.

7. Resurrection and Historical Reason, 39.

8. Resurrection of Jesus, 384.

9. Ibid.

10. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994).

11. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Jobns Hopkins University Press, 1976),

158.

12. Sawicki, Seeing the Lord, 84—89.

13 Ibid., 83, 89—91.

14 Ibid., 93. See also 302—3.

15. Ibid., 303.

16 Ibid., 336.

17. Ibid., 84.

18. Ibid., 79.

19. See Kenelm Burridge, New Heaven—New Earth: A Stndy of Millenarian Activities (New York: Schocken, 3969), 4—14.

20. All quotations of Enoch are taken from the translation by F. Isaac, in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols., ed. James H. Charlesworth (Garden City: Doubleday, 1983—85), 1:13-89.

21. J. Christiaan Beker, Paul the Apostle: The Triumph of God in Life and Thought (Philadelphia: Fortress, 3980), 37.

22. See Matthew 27:53—53 for the influence of the millennialism of Jewish apocalypticism.

23. See Beker, Paul, 306—10.

24. Seeing the Lord, 84.

25. Ibid., 81.

26. For the significance of the "tongue of fire," see Richard Oster, "Numismatic Windows into the Social World of Early Christianity: A Methodological Inquiry," Journal of Biblical Literature 101 (1982):212 --14.

27. Against Sawicki, Seeing the Lord, 302.

28. Ibid., 332.

29. Ibid., 333.

30. Ibid., 336.

31 Trans. A.T.W. Steinhaeuser, in Works of Luther, vol. 43 (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg,

1943), 373.

32. Niebuhr, Resurrection and Historical Reason, 375.