When, as an ancient historian, I look at the evidence about Jesus and
say, what did he think he was doing, I am putting him alongside other figures
in the world of first century Judaism, who we have some evidence for.
And the first thing that I say, quite clearly, is that Jesus thought he
was a prophet.
He spoke of himself as a prophet.
When other people referred to him as a prophet, he didn't say, no, no,
you're wrong.
So that's the historical starting point.
The second thing is, what sort of a prophetic movement was this?
What did he think he was doing as a prophet?
And the answer is quite clear again.
He thought he was a prophet announcing the kingdom of God.
Not just announcing it in the sense that it might happen in a day or a week or a
year, but saying, it's happening now under your noses.
This was his prophetic message and he not only said it, he did it with the symbolic
actions of healing and feasting and so on.
And that's why he got into trouble, because people didn't like it.
Now, the next thing in line from there is that not only was he announcing the
kingdom of God, by bringing it himself, he seems to think he was not just a
prophet announcing it, he was actually the Messiah.
That is to say, not he was the divine incarnate one, we'll get to that,
that's the fifth stage, but that he was the one who was Israel's anointed,
who was the Lord's anointed, he was the king.
And messiahs, there were always two things that messiahs had to do.
Messiahs had to defeat the pagans and build or cleanse the temple.
And Jesus was going to fight a different sort of battle.
He talks about having battles with the enemy, but it isn't Rome he has in mind,
it's the darker force of evil that he called the Satan or the accuser,
the ultimate source of evil.
And he wasn't going to build a new temple.
He was going to do and be things which would, as it were, replace the temple.
We'll get to that in a moment.
So he's a prophet, he's announcing the kingdom, he believes he is the Messiah.
But then fourthly, Jesus believed that his messianic movement was not about blitzing
the enemy into submission in a political sense, but by actually taking the full
force of evil onto himself and dying under the weight of that evil in fulfilment of
the scriptures.
The long story of Israel's tortured career was going to come to its climax in his own
death at the hands of the pagans.
And then fifthly and finally, and this is the really scary thing when we think about
it historically, Jesus as a historical individual believing this, he believed
that this entire vocation was appropriate for him because he was actually the
personal embodiment of Israel's God.
He told stories about Israel's God coming back to Zion in order to explain what he
was doing in his own last journey to Jerusalem.
And that's the way that I come round to saying that Jesus actually...
You see, if you say, did Jesus believe he was God?
People in our culture have this idea of God as a rather distant dictator or
whatever.
And if you say Jesus believed he was that sort of figure, you have this idea of a
rather lofty detached Jesus, like the Jesus of some of the movies from the 50s
and so on, with a far away look in his eye and being very sort of, I don't know,
heady.
Jesus has his feet on the ground of first century Palestine.
And as a human being with this vocation, he believed he was embodying the personal
presence of Israel's God.
And then you get a very different picture of God.
You get a God who doesn't stay detached from the process.
You get a God who comes and gets his feet dirty and gets his hands nailed to a cross
in order to rescue his people.