Jesus - Apocalyptic Prophet?
Right out of the gate, Jesus is portrayed, by Paul, the earliest New Testament writer, as being an apocalyptic figure, who, soon after his death (which happened a few years before Paul’s conversion) would return and bring his followers up into heaven, resurrected, as he had been. Then he would cause great destruction to those unbelievers left behind. It’s strange how that thread of thinking has continued for 2000 plus years, despite Jesus being the perennial party guest who never shows up. Paul and the Jesus groups he wrote letters to believed Jesus would return within their lifetimes. He, like modern apocalyptic preachers, had to keep stressing patience, while adjusting the timeline and theology.
Tangentially, I’d like to share an insight from Dr. Richard Carrier, historian/scholar with a mythicist view, (the view that Jesus may have never existed, but was created as a myth), that I saw recently on Derrick Lambert’s excellent source of information on this kind of stuff, MythVision. Carrier said that in advising his followers to turn the other cheek, don’t engage in lawsuits, commit no action that could turn into an offence, or sin, the New Testament figure of Jesus wasn’t asking for morality so much as putting out the practical idea that the end was coming soon, God was going to smote all the evildoers to dust and hell, so it was best to just bear up and wait. In the meantime, do not get yourself involved in any transgression that could prevent you from joining in the general resurrection. And remember, they’d all get theirs when the end comes.
In any case, this apocalyptic man/god is the Jesus Paul portrays in his letters and the Jesus who appears in the first written narrative of his life, The Gospel of Mark.
Substacker David Armstrong, who puts out the excellent Substack newsletter A Perennial Digression, said about Jesus and John the Baptizer -
The picture this paints, as many scholars recognize, is one where John the Baptist was the more important and publicly accepted prophet by comparison to Jesus during their own lifetimes. John was well-known and active in the 20s and 30s until his death; he is more visible in Josephus’s memory of the earlier first century than Jesus, who, in the portion of the Testimonium Flavianum that scholars hypothesize to be original, receives scant mention by comparison.*
Put more simply, Jesus was a blip historically, John wasn’t. If we had accreditation on Jesus similar to what we have on John, there’d be no historicity issue to fret over for eternity. John was clearly portrayed as an apocalyptic prophet. He preached a message of both forgiveness, to set your soul right, and judgement, if you didn’t. The latter message led to his eventual death.
If Jesus had been an even greater prophet, with a much larger number of followers than John, 5000 on a hillside listening to him preach - and if that same Jesus had been carrying on John’s apocalyptic message, then the historical record at the time of his life would have no doubt, absolutely, positively, hands-down made note of this.
History didn’t. This is the problem we have. As far as him being apocalyptic, it’s certainly in the Gospel of Mark, but that narrative has no mooring in evidentiary records. In other words, the Gospel stories exist independent of any corroborating sources. The Gospel of Mark could very well be completely fictional, if you follow the highly educated, literary author theory recently proposed by scholar Robyn Walsh. Many of the stories in Mark certainly strain credulity. As far as Paul, he never met Jesus. All of his Jesus theology is his own, which came from a vision where the Jesus he converses with and receives revelations from is purely a spiritual entity. Paul himself stresses this in his letters over and over, saying in essence, ‘I don’t need to talk to men for my information. I talk directly to the Lord, Christ Jesus.’ Paul was the proto born-again Christian.
So from the above, we can deduce, using these few facts and common sense, that, though there may have been a preacher named Jesus (Yeshua) who wandered around Judea teaching, who may have been charismatic and had a knack for a phrase, we don’t have any evidence he had an apocalyptic message. In fact, if he had raised the ruckus he was supposed to have raised, enough for the Roman authorities to decide to kill him for sedition, for claiming to be a Messiah King, the definition of which was someone who’d overthrow existing authority, this would have been on Josephus’ radar. And other people’s radar. There would have been records about this figure. It’s local news, fairly large local news, exactly the kind of thing Josephus wrote about. But Jesus gets barely a mention from Josephus, and the one he does is suspect as a later addition to the text. The apostle James is cited as ‘a brother of Jesus’ by Josephus, but that could merely mean a follower, a ‘brother’ in a Jesus community. So that’s it for historical mention, until the Gospels. If someone was trying to raise up forces against Rome, even if those forces are spiritual, it’s still sedition. Getting the rabble roused. Which is what we’re told he did, and died for. But again, no mention. If we was in fact raising the rabble, he was pretty much a dud at it. No one appeared to take notice.
If there was a Jesus, Yeshua, teaching, and I tend to think there was, he didn’t make waves. He wandered around preaching something non-threatening, a moral code, spiritual insights, and when he visited the Temple he was outraged, like Martin Luther at the Vatican. We’re told. If there’s any truth in that, the disruption he caused would have been sufficient grounds for the Roman guard to march over, grab him by the scruff of his tunic, and drag his sorry ass away to be put to death. No trial, no fuss. This is what Rome did. If that was what happened, Jesus, a small-town guy, first time in the big city, severely misjudged the swift and brutal order of Rome. The only sins he died for, if that were the case, would be naivete and an over-abundance of righteousness. Humanity’s sins haven’t changed since he died for them, last I looked.
And Rome received no apocalyptic punishment in return.