Dec. 10, 2006

By Harry T. Cook

Luke 3: 1-6

Luke is accomplishing three things in these six short verses. She clearly meant to accomplish two of them, viz., 1) the placement of Jesus’ public career in an attestable historic context, and 2) the connection between Jesus and the figure of a long-anticipated messiah. The third accomplishment intended or not, was to connect a monastic aspect (the Essenes?) to the announcement of messiah’s arrival, who is, in Luke’s view, Jesus of Nazareth.

Luke’s intention in verses 1 and 2 seems clearly to be to connect the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry with the historic setting in which Luke understood it to have taken place. Luke has the names right. Some of the people she mentions were actual people being the actual things she depicts them being, e.g., governor or proconsul of Judea (Pilate), the tetrarch of Galilee (Herod). The marker of the “fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius” would be 28 or 29 C.E.

The main point, however, is that Luke wants her readers to understand that Jesus was not a mythical figure of one of the later First Century mystery religions. Paul seemed to have tried very hard to implant that idea, and the author of the Gospel of John tried to re-enforce in John 1: 1-18). Luke’s Jesus is a real-life person who did what he did and said what he said in real time and in real places to real people about real matters. Of course, Luke eventually succumbs to the lure of mythology when she depicts Jesus ascending into the heavens.

Even though Luke seemed to have been aware that synagogue Judaism had not accepted the idea of Jesus as messiah (only the sons of gods in Graeco-Roman myth religions get killed and resurrected), it is clear that she believed Jesus and the church were the fulfillment of all the Jewish hopes for the inauguration of the rule of God. Luke knew through her study of the Septuagint (the Hebrew bible in Greek) that Jewish messianic hopes were pinned on the patrimony of the House of David (hence the tale of Mary and Joseph’s overland trek to Bethlehem to answer a summons to a tribal census – a deus ex machina device to fix it so Jesus would be born in the city of David. The writer of According to Matthew, however, was the first to give us the Bethlehem connection.

Luke strengthened the bond with Hebraic tradition by connecting Jesus to Isaiah’s vision (see Isaiah 40: 3-5) of the messianic era when “every valley shall be filled, every mountain and hill shall be brought low,” i.e., a social, political and economic playing field. As Mark and Matthew had before her, Luke made John the Baptist the forerunner or herald of messiah.

Whether or not Luke meant to connect any of this with the mysterious sect of the Essenes is not clear. Evidence exists that would tie the bizarre figure of John the Baptist to an ascetic, separatist group whose adherents would have sought purity away from the world in preparation for some kind of Armageddon. It is the emphasis on baptism that makes some scholars think that John therefore called “the Baptist” may have been an Essene or may once have lived among them. Essenes evidently made a great deal of the purification water bath in the rituals, also, perhaps, in a rite of conversion.

The relevance of this Lucan passage for Christians whose thoughts might run to last things – appropriate enough for the season of Advent – is that the ethic of Jesus is messianic in that its practice by enough people could have a definite saving effect. It could inaugurate an era on Earth that would seem, by comparison to most eras, to be heavenly. Thus “last things” do not have to be Götterdamerung if the “first things” of Jesus are lived out.

© Copyright 2006, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.