Book Review: The Jesus I Never Knew

A Fair Trade Book

Title: The Jesus I Never Knew

Author: Philip Yancey

Date: 1995

Publisher: Zondervan

ISBN: 0-310-38570-9

Length: 275 pages plus bibliography

Quote: "How would telling people to be nice to one another get a man crucified?"

It used to be trendy to observe that in any conversation where you could see two bodies, six people were present: the real selves of the two people, known only to God, and the incomplete images of self and the other each one saw "as through a glass, darkly" in his or her mind. So with Jesus. The neighbors who said "Is not this the carpenter's son?" obviously didn't know Him as His Mother or His disciples did, and the confusion has only grown since their time.

"The more I studied Jesus, the more difficult it became to pigeonhole him. He said little about the Roman occupation, the main topic of conversation among his countrymen, and yet he took up a whip to drive petty profiteers from the Jewish temple...He had uncompromising views on rich men and loose women, yet both types enjoyed his company...He spoke eloquently about peacemaking, then told his disciples to procure swords."

Even ordinary thought is hard to "pigeonhole" if you understand it. Jesus offers serious bewilderment for anyone attached to the idea of classification.

His family weren't all that poor, under ordinary circumstances. Camping in a stable was a one-time inconvenience Caesar Augustus inflicted on them one year. They had a decent little business that probably paid well. Still, they were working people, in a town, not a royal family (although of royal blood), nor a rich landowning family. Yancey begins by noting the birth of Jesus as an example of radical humility. If Jesus chose to be born when and where He did, for Reasons, then among those Reasons must have been screening out any elitists from among His followers. The elitists of His day just knew the Messiah was going to be a "rich young ruler" type, not a "carpenter's son."

Yancey's next point is that Jesus was Jewish. He was a rabbi. He'd been circumcised, dedicated as His Mother's firstborn Son as prescribed in the Torah. He prayed and preached in synagogues. (Churches came to exist entirely because reactionaries banned His followers from those synagogues.) Although His teaching became like "a sword between" members of many Jewish households, Jesus never ceased to be a Jew. Yancey diverges a bit from this point in an effort to be inclusive of Muslims too, which clearly has good intentions but belongs (I think) in a different book; the mere inclusion of a more general ecumenical argument in this book seems to point up the problem Yancey is addressing.

Historically, as early Christians left their synagogues and buddied up with non-Jewish fellow Christians, they adopted several customs that would have been altogether foreign to Jesus. Some of these changes, like using languages other than Aramaic, Hebrew, and Koine Greek, probably were in harmony with the teaching and practice of Christ, although they weren't part of it. Others, like changing the day reserved for rest and worship from the Jewish Sabbath observed by Jesus to the Sun-day when the Emperor Constantine's family had traditionally worshipped their departed ancestors, are subject to debate. In some places those calling themselves Christians went so far into the practices of the savage Gentile tribes, ha goyim, that they even made war on Jews. Jesus is recorded to have observed that God could convert stones into true spiritual heirs of Abraham, but when we read of so-called Christians persecuting Jews we must agree that the process of conversion has not gone far enough.

It's not just that Christians who want to represent Christ in this world want to practice good will and courtesy toward everybody, although that is also true. It's that Christians who really want to represent Jesus are identifying themselves with a controversial, but still thoroughly Jewish, rabbi. The Hebrew Scriptures are our Lord's Scriptures. The law of Moses is His law, and ours. Yancey could have said much more about this than he does.

Yancey proceeds to consider what we learn about Jesus from His account of His "temptation." Before His public ministry began, Jesus spent forty days fasting, and during this time, whether in a vision or in an ordinary debate with another religious man whose ideas were "of the devil," or in whatever other way, He refused three great temptations: to use supernatural power for His own convenience, to join forces with "the devil," to demand more of God than God was leading Him to take. Yancey summarizes His resistance to these temptations as "restraint." There was no greed, no impulsiveness, about Jesus. More than any ordinary person Jesus must have understood what people wanted. For Him, to give people what they wanted, even what they "needed," was temptation. For Him that aggressive, possessive, "outgoing" craving for control-through-attention, which so many of us have been misled to call friendliness or good will, was clearly understood as mortal sin. Jesus could very easily have been what many still prefer to imagine He was--a popular preacher who told people to be nice to one another, and did faith healings. It would have been much more fun than being a Cosmic Sacrifice! Jesus could have been the greatest salesman, preacher, teacher, poet, or healer of all time, and for Him, any of those things would have been a rejection of His own unique mission, and a sin against God.

So He went out to be what He was. "A reed shaken by the wind?" Not exactly. People have imagined Jesus in all sizes, shapes, and colors. He didn't want to be remembered by a body type, though. In order to be contained by a physical body Jesus had to settle on one sex, male, and one age, between 30 and 40 during His active life. (There is some question whether the year that marks the beginning of the "Common Era" is in fact the right date for His birth. He might have been as young as 34, or as old as 42, at the end.) I've often wondered whether He might have preferred that we overlook even those aspects of whether or not people have a "physical resemblance" to Him. What Jesus told us to look for, as a likeness to Him, were material needs. "Inasmuch as you have done unto the least of these My brethren, you have done unto Me." For our purposes it might be better to try to imagine Him old, or female--or even unhealthy. From the fact that little children hounded Jesus to tell them stories we can be reasonably sure that His face never had the kind of ugly hostility we see on many convicted felons, but Jesus specifically advised those who wanted to see Him to look in the prisons.

What can we learn about Jesus from the Beatitudes? One thing we can learn from the Beatitudes, surely, is that if Jesus was tempted to be a mere attention-grabber, it was partly by His own rhetorical skills; the Beatitudes certainly grab attention. Yancey describes three ways he's understood the Beatitudes over the course of his career as a Christian writer: as pie-in-the-sky promises of future compensation, as a description of the revolutionary effect of sincere Christianity, and as "psychological truth" about how we instinctively admire people who have suffered. I think he might have been well advised to stop at the "revolutionary" level, because most people do not admire people who have suffered, in any noticeable way. Yancey may need to reexamine his sense of "psychological truth" for feel-good, pop-psychological falsehood.

There are, of course, practical applications of the Beatitudes on what some scholars are accustomed to dismiss as a crude material level. "The meek inherit" when, e.g., two huge corporations pay for an elaborate advertising war by inflating the price of their products, and the small generic producer, who has stayed out of the ad war, keeps prices low and gains loyal customers. (How many of us might never have discovered various off-brand products that have become our favorites if the big-name products hadn't become overpriced?) "Those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake," e.g. at school, because they're not participating in Jane's gossip campaign or buying drugs from Joe, not infrequently end up being admired by the same idjits who had previously done the persecuting. Jesus was not an elitist and, whether that sort of thing was or was not what He meant, He does not read like the sort of teacher who would have sneered at it. Sometimes it just plain pays, in the long run, to be nice. The kids who "hate" you just because the social bully of the class has decided you look like a target probably aren't really loyal to the bully, and may rush to your side as soon as someone (not that this web site would suggest that it needs to be you) gives them a reason or even an opportunity to turn on the bully. And then again, sometimes we all just know that somewhere in the cosmos being nice still earns some sort of reward.

What about the rest of the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus goes even further and becomes positively offensive, even infuriating to His audience? Read it, if you haven't already done, in a modern translation; the good old KJV sounds beautiful but its beautiful sound can veil its profound snarkiness. Perhaps some readers share my childhood memory of being scolded for paraphrasing "My Father" as "my Dad." The KJV gives "Father." The original Aramaic was closer in meaning to "Dad," or maybe even "Pops."  Jesus didn't use slang with the intention of shutting older listeners out, and His grammar was apparently impeccable, but He most definitely favored the vernacular...and He was anything but p.c. In fact, if He missed an opportunity to offend the self-righteously pious, we're not told about it.

Yancey could have said more about the fundamental outrageousness of Christian practice. It's not merely nonviolent; it's positively revolutionary. As an example of revolutionary righteousness Jesus said, "If someone compels you to walk with him one mile, walk with him two." He was not just advocating longer exercise sessions or nature walks, though His intentions might have included those, sometimes. In the Roman Empire private soldiers weren't paid enough that they could afford to pay "armor bearers." Instead they had the right to demand that any able-bodied person they met walk with them, and carry their packs, for one mile. Not only did this eat into civilians' work schedules, it forced righteous Jews into contact with objects that were ritually impure--and probably fairly nasty. So there was this strong young man whose whole job was travelling around as a preacher, saying, in effect, "Freak the soldier out; tell him you'll carry his gear for two miles--give some other Jew a break." Imagine hearing this line as a tired middle-aged parent, maybe a rug weaver with a deadline to meet, one of whose sons had been murdered by a Roman soldier on suspicion because he had allegedly been seen talking to a revolutionary. I don't think Jesus ever gave a flip about the possibility that His extravagant, idealistic rhetoric might be heard as "hurtful." I suspect He revelled in it.

Instead of developing this theme, Yancey retreats into confessionalism. He's not outrageous enough, he tells us. Nobody is. Anyone who thinks very seriously about the Sermon on the Mount is going to find it "hurtful." Yes, but some of us have learned that if a bee stings, the best way to relieve the pain is to dig into it and take out that sting. Yancey, not there yet, feels the need to end his study of the Sermon with a whimper of "It's okay, nobody's perfect..." Jesus empathized to some extent with Christians who have felt unable to do what we think we ought to have done. He Himself admitted that in His own town He "could not do many great works" because people couldn't wrap their minds around the idea of homeboy being even a messiah, much less The Messiah. Nevertheless the bland, feel-good quality Americans communicate by saying "it's okay" has no easily identified parallel in the Gospels. Along with the fact that He was unable to help some people as much as He would have liked to have done, Jesus accepted the "sorrows and grief" that accompany the fact of failure.