This is the crucial point. We need only to add that the “place” that is the church that protects Jesus from our own interests is not something that has been prepared for him after the fact; it surrounds him from the outset. It is around him as the space belonging to the people of God, into which Jesus was born and in which he grew up, in which one day he followed the Baptizer to the Jordan to be baptized. Jesus comes out of Israel, and without the traditions of Israel he is unthinkable and cannot be understood.
But the place of the people of God, namely, the newly gathered, eschatological people of God, also surrounds what Christians have said about Jesus since Easter and Pentecost. The very first words of Jesus that were handed on, and the first accounts and stories that told what Jesus had done, were shaped within the “space” of the church. The Jesus tradition is grounded in the interpretive community that is “church.”
It could not be otherwise, for we have seen that there is no such thing as a pure fact. Every fact that is told is already interpretation. Without interpretation, no event in our world can be understood. And when we are talking about the history between God and the world—still more, when the subject is the culminating point of that history, the fidelity of Jesus to his mission even to death, which set in motion a history of freedom that overturns everything—how could such an event be grasped and told without interpretation? We could also say: how could it be grasped and understood without faith?
A Radical Process of Division
But at this very point another objection arises, and we dare not evade it: I quoted Romano Guardini’s question: who will protect Jesus from us? Who will preserve him from the “cunning… of our own ego,” which does everything to avoid really following Jesus? And his answer was: the encounter with Jesus must not be left to subjective religious experience; a place is appointed for Jesus, one that is built in such a way that he can be rightly seen and listened to—and that place is the church.
Lovely, and quite right! But is it so simple, “the church”? Have there not been some totally different interpretations of Jesus within the church itself, interpretations that were mutually exclusive? We only have to think of the great christological battles that led to the councils of Nicaea (325) and Chalcedon (451).
But to review the lengthy history of christological interpretation carried out in the major councils of the ancient church would, in our context, take far too much time and be too complicated. Let me simplify things. Instead of looking at the great christological confrontations in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries, let us look at the pictures of Jesus produced by the so-called infancy gospels.
In the “Infancy Gospel of Thomas,”10 for example, we read how the boy Jesus is playing at the ford of a brook; he diverts the flowing water into small pools and then, by his mere word, makes the muddy brew “clean.” Jesus is practicing, so to speak, for his later activity. The son of a scribe is standing near; he takes a branch and lets the water Jesus had gathered flow out again. How does little Jesus react?
When Jesus saw what he had done he was enraged and said to him: “You insolent, godless dunderhead, what harm did the pools and the water do to you? See, now you also shall wither like a tree and shall bear neither leaves nor fruit.” And immediately that lad withered up completely; and Jesus departed and went into Joseph’s house. But the parents of him that was withered took him away, bewailing his youth, and brought him to Joseph and reproached him: “What a child you have, who does such things.” (2.2-3)
This writing, which originated in the second century CE, goes on in the same vein. Not only does it lack narrative skill and good taste, its Christology is also pathetic. A miracle child does whatever comes to mind and so shows himself to be a child of God.
There can be no question but that this gospel has its own image of Jesus, and a pretty miserable one. No doubt it was written with good intentions. It wanted to illustrate Jesus’ divinity, his wisdom and miraculous power. As a result, it circulated widely in the ancient church. The Greek original was translated into Latin, Syriac, Georgian, Ethiopic, and Church Slavonic. Apparently it was favorite reading for many Christians, or people liked to tell the legends collected in it.
And this was only one part of the much larger production of gospels and sayings of the Lord. We have a great number of other gospels and revelatory writings, preserved entire or at least in fragments—for ex ample, a Gospel of Peter; a Gospel of Thomas; a Gospel of Philip; an Infancy Gospel of James; various acts of the apostles, such as the Acts of Andrew and the Acts of John; as well as an Apocalypse of Peter, an Apocalypse of Paul, an Apocalypse of Thomas, and many other apocalyptic writings.
Certainly some of these were abstruse compositions that promised secret knowledge and could be rapidly dismissed. Others contained Docetic and Gnostic heresies, against which the church was in any case struggling to defend itself. But many of these writings certainly addressed the thoughts and feelings of the Christians of the time, especially their religious curiosity. Only against the background of all these so-called apocrypha can we discern the true quality of the New Testament, and above all the power of discernment exercised by those who created it. They had an inerrant instinct for the authentic Jesus tradition going back to the apostles.
This is the crucial point: the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and similar creations may have been widely read and popular in the ancient church; they may even have borne the names of apostles; but they were not acknowledged as apostolic writings. And that means that they were not accepted into the canon of the New Testament. The theological significance of that nonacceptance should not be underestimated. In principle, what happened here was a radical process of division—altogether comparable to the process of division that was taking place in the great christological discourses of the first councils.
This immense process of considering and choosing, of distinction and division, but above all the deliberate selection and assembly of the writings ultimately chosen as the canon of the New Testament was an “ecclesial” process. We could even call it “authorial activity,” because the result was the composition, the authoring, of the one book that is the New Testament, which is more than a bundle of randomly associated writings.11
Obviously the authors of this process were concrete persons, often even clergy or others commissioned by the church in some fashion. But they were supported by all those among the people of God who believed with their whole being and who for that very reason possessed the gift of discernment. Without the faith instinct of the many, without the sensus fidelium, the process of coming-to-be of the New Testament as the final, concluding book of the Bible would have been impossible. What would have happened without this ultimate critical process of discernment is evident in the apocrypha, which over long stretches are bizarre, confused, and unhistorical. A constant rereading of the immense apocryphal Jesus literature from the ancient church is urgently needed, because only that can show us how unique and precious are the gospels of the New Testament canon.
Faith as Recognition
What does all that mean for a book about Jesus? It shows that for a scholar who works theologically it cannot be a question of reconstructing a “historical Jesus” against the New Testament and its interpretation of the figure of Jesus. Any theologian who does that exalts herself or himself above the first witnesses and the church and thus abandons any chance of understanding Jesus.