Bearings
Matthew says that after Jesus had finished speaking with the Twelve, he “departed thence to teach and to preach in their cities,” suggesting that Jesus went alone on a preaching circuit while the Twelve split up into pairs to canvass the Galilean countryside. If we track the places already documented that they had visited, we get something like the following list:
- Samaria
- Cana
- Nazareth
- Capernaum
- Bethsaida
- Lakeside of Gennesaret (possibly Chorazin)
- Hillsides of Gennesaret
- Nain
- “Other side of the lake” (probably Gergesa)
- “Country of the Gadarenes/Gergesenes” (probably Gergesa, possibly Gadara)
- “Again by the other side” (probably between town of Gennesaret and Magdala)
- Jericho(?)
- Lakeside villages near Capernaum (possibly including Chorazin or Magdala)
Because the gospels refer to “synagogues” all throughout the region, we might infer that Jesus had visited Gamla, Hippos, and Tiberias, sites with synagogues that fell within footpaths between attested preaching sites.
Timeframe
The timeframe for all this preaching between Jesus’s dialogue in the Nazareth synagogue and the commissioning of the Twelve could have meant months, but not likely a year, and most definitely not years. The placement of Jericho within these travels seems out of realistic sequence, since Jericho lay much farther south down by the Jordan. Making a trip to Jericho and back would certainly have added weeks to the timeframe, and the gospels don’t explain what occasioned a trip to Jericho anyhow. While the narrative sequence of the Four Gospels places this journey to Jericho in the middle of the early Galilean ministry, it remains reasonable that Jesus’s time in Jericho lined up with one or another trip to Jerusalem during an unidentified feast, the Feast of Tabernacles, or the Passover. For my part, I consider the Jericho episode part of Jesus’s Judaean ministry, which occurred toward the end of his life and a distinct season of the overall ministry set apart from his tours of Galilee in the gospels.
Regional Footprint
So, while the Twelve “went through the towns, preaching the gospel, and healing every where,” Jesus remained in the vicinity of the commissioning event, presumably on the northwestern end of Lake Gennesaret and still very much within the Galilean hillcountry. Because original texts referred to polis, there’s a probability that Jesus went to more cosmopolitan districts of the region, meaning cities with more of a mixed population of Romans and Jews. This could mean Jesus visited Sepphoris, the most prominent Roman city in Galilee and only a couple of miles from Nazareth. It could also mean visits to Tiberias, Nain, or Scythopolis, each of which lay on established Roman roads, and in the cases of Sepphoris and Scythopolis, lay at prominent intersections where “sinners” lived as a visible class of people apart from Pharisees.
All of this in gathering our bearings is to say that at this point in the narrative, Jesus had gained enough of a regional reputation that people recognized his name and associated him with teaching and miracle-working. Jesus had already encountered rejection, as at the Nazareth synagogue and in the Gergesene/Gadarene areas (when a swine herd drowned in the lake at the exorcism of Legion). The rejections apparently intensified by this point, with many Pharisees, scribes, and villages across the whole Gennesaret region taking issue with Jesus’s teaching and his behavior on the Sabbath. A multitude gatehered with so many in number that they could not “so much as eat bread,” which Jesus’s own friends criticized, saying among themselves, “He is beside himself.”
Some perspective on that—we have a reference to Jesus’s friends who “went out to lay hold on him” that points to his hometown or to his second residence, Capernaum, since the other villages had only been day-trip destinations. If these friends hailed from Nazareth, this could mean people who knew Jesus during his upbringing, people with a memory of Jesus before any ministry or any conspicuous career as a rabbi, exorcist, or healer. For them to think Jesus had become “beside himself” could suggest some kind of before-and-after switch: in their view, Jesus had changed. That tiny reference suggests a lot, I think. Perhaps we have so little on Jesus’s youth because Jesus lived a rather uneventful or typical childhood and adolescence. In any event, the people around Jesus apparently noticed a change in behavior, reputation, or both, and they are described in the gospels as resisting this, wanting to “lay hold on him,” a Greek way of saying “get through to him” as if they wished to stage an intervention and get him to change his ways.
What might this have meant for Jesus? How might his commitment to teaching, healing, and revealing the One True God have cost him and brought stress, discomfort, and isolation?
Doubting Jesus
Jesus’s own cousin, the one who had prepared the way before and had proclaimed Jesus the “lamb of God,” joined in questioning what Jesus was up to. From prison, John dispatched two of his disciples to put a question to Jesus: “Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?” Apparently, John began to question the Messiahship of Jesus after he heard of Jesus’s “works” from disciples who visited him in prison. This is a considerable narrative twist—here the gospels present John as doubting Jesus. “Do we look for another?” is such a loaded question for someone such as John to ask.
This and John’s own sermons at the Jordan indicate how John had anticipated the Messiah to do something quite apocalyptic, like throw down their Roman occupiers and other kingdoms of the world, restore Israel to its former glory, and inaugurate “the Age,” a new era of God’s heavenly kingdom on the earth. I’ve mentioned before the Essenes, a Jewish separatist sect that congregated in the wilderness to realize the return of an uncorrupted Israelite community. Some Jewish people took the Essene outlook to militaristic proportions, looking back to a successful Jewish revolt by the Maccabees in the 160s BC and the conquest of Canaan by Joshua as models for overthrowing Rome and achieving “the Age.” These hyped-up Jewish people were known as Kana’im, what Greek-speakers called zelotes, a name that entered English as “zealots.” In some instances, the King James Version confused Kana’im with Canaan, and associated people not with Zealotry but rather with a location; one of the Twelve, Simon the Zealot, is listed in one of the gospels as “Simon the Canaanite,” which is an error of translation.
John the Baptist promoted an apocalyptic vision of the future that resembles the Essene variety more than the Zealot, but regardless, his and his disciples’ collective anticipation centered on “the one that should come”: a tradition of prophecy pointing to either the Mashi’ach or the “Son of Man,” or both.
Mashi’ach/Messiah and Son of Man
We’ve arrived at a major theme of the Four Gospels and of early Christianity. The very title “Christ” derives from a Greek translation of the Hebrew/Aramaic Mashi’ach/Meshicha, a title for “the anointed” (Χριστος, Christos). Whenever we hear words like “Christ,” “Christian,” and “Christianity,” these reinforce the historical reality that nearly everything we get from those earliest generations of Jesus’s followers comes from Greek language and culture, not the original Hebrew and Aramaic settings of the Judahite peoples Jesus grew up among and initially ministered to. But for John the Baptist, Jesus, and their collective disciples, words like “Christ” would have sounded foreign; they were used to Mashi’ach (=Messiah) and kibar ’anash (=Son of Man) as titles for apocalyptic figures ancient prophets like Ezekiel and Daniel predicted would judge the world and bring about the Age. Something like “Mashiachim” or “Meshichim” would be a closer name for “Christians” or “Christianity” relative to the Hebrew-Aramaic corridor.
I’ve mentioned before the historical issue of anachronism and pointed out how later generations can easily retroject backward onto the past features that weren’t present back then. When we want to understand those past settings and get the context correct, we’ll have to peel away anachronistic additions. It should come as no surprise that Christians very quickly developed alternative theological narratives about Jesus and retrojected those identities and theologies back onto Jesus and Jesus’s teachings.
Here’s one prominent example we’re already comfortable recognizing as an anachronism and a historical error: the Trinity. In the late 200s and early 300s, leaders of Christian ekklesies, the bishops, found themselves in an empire-wide tussle over the true nature of Jesus: was Jesus fully divine, fully human, or something in between? And because these bishops descended from a Roman philosophical orientation, not a Jewish one, they concerned themselves with Platonic ideals about God, beliving that God to be God must exist in a transcendent mode, formless to human reckoning. And so for Jesus to be fully divine, Jesus must have been some mysterious incarnation of the transcendent, formless God. And bingo—Trinity doctrine was born. But did Jesus ever, ever indicate his own identity as anything other than a human like the rest of us? When we peel away the trinitarian assumptions of fourth-century Roman-philosophically minded bishops and examine the historical sources directly without retrojecting the Trinity backward onto Jesus, we just don’t find it.
While we’re OK with peeling away the later accretion of trinitarian doctrine, we’re not as used to doing this with another idea that had its own arbitrary development relative to Jesus’s teachings: the idea of messianic prophecy. For example, we often attribute Messiah status to passages in Isaiah when Isaiah manifestly refers to himself and to God’s prophetic commission to the prophet. And we don’t call Isaiah the Messiah, either. But we don’t question interpretations of Isaiah as being messianic in places because Christians before us have done this for centuries; it’s in the air we breathe and our own tradition never broadly questioned this the way Latter-day Saints have questioned the Trinity.
Did Jesus present himself as the Mashi’ach? Did he present himself as the Son of Man? Yes and no—a lot depends on when and where we find these references and whether we find evidence of anachronism in particular pericopes. I’ll not speculate or try to lead anyone astray of the text—we do have clear statements from Jesus in which Jesus identified himself as the Son of Man. What’s less clear, actually, is whether Jesus proclaimed himself the Mashi’ach. And in the historical setting of Jesus’s lifetime, Jewish people disagreed over whether Mashi’ach equaled Son of Man and what prophecies had to say about both.
So, here’s what I propose: let’s put a pause on whatever assumptions we’ve acquired about Old Testament prophecy regarding the Messiah and the Son of Man, and let’s just concentrate on Jesus’s own teachings and his own indications of fulfilling prophecy. Let’s let Jesus be our primary interpreter of Old Testament prophecy. After all, we will find him on occasion pointing out how he did something “so that [a prophecy] might be fulfilled.” Such instances will represent key moments for our understanding of Son of Man prophecy and Jesus’s own claim of fulfilling such prophecy. I want Jesus to guide us through these important identities. In this episode with John the Baptist questioning Jesus’s status as “the one who should come,” we have something significant and instructive that Jesus teaches, if we maintain focus and keep things in context.
Back to Doubting Jesus
So John sends disciples Jesus’s way with the question whether Jesus was the one who should come and whether they should look for another. The text associates this question with John hearing about Jesus’s works in and around Galilee. It implies that Jesus’s actions clashed with John’s messianic expectations. The real concern at issue, then, was how to understand the Son of Man/Messiah figure. Plenty of Essenes and Zealots had circulated prophecy and interpretations of prophecy that foretold a Son of Man/Messiah coming onto the scene in the name of God, judging the world, and conquering Israel’s invaders. A great deal of these traditions came from earlier pronouncements about King David during the height of the Kingdom of Israel’s power. In ways we’ve recently seen with the coronation ceremonies of Charles III in England, crowds will proclaim “God save the King” and other superlatives as part of their culture of monarchy, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that a prophetic revelation has occurred. Well, folks did this about David, saying David’s lineage would forever rule Israel and that someday, Israel would rule the world. Whoops—the Davidic kingdom of Israel eventually splintered and dissolved from successive invasions to the point that the northern Israelites are totally lost to us. So much for those royal decrees promising an eternal reign. But this didn’t stop post-exilic Israelites and Judahites from telling each other that a royal descendant of David would reclaim the throne, obliterate their enemies, and conquer the world.
The messianic tradition between David and Jesus took on thoroughly militaristic tones and predictions. Imagine John at the Jordan River watching Jesus approach and him thinking along the lines of “Hooray, the war-general and future king has arrived; all those Roman soldiers better get nervous.” And then months later getting news that this same cousin of his up in Galilee has become quite famous—for healing the sick, for casting out devils, for breaking the Sabbath, for hanging out with sinners and unclean people, for raising the dead. Where’s the military takeover? Where’s the ascending to the Israelite throne? Where’s the day of judgment and the inauguration of the Age? Why are the Romans and Parthians still in power?
Gainsaying versus Asking
Take a quick look of this classic Monty Python sketch, “Argument Clinic” (on YouTube) for the full example. If you watch the short sketch, you’ll see a man visit a clinic seeking an argument. He finds Mr. Barnard who argues about having already told him something, to which the two go back and forth, “No you didn’t,” “Yes I did,” “No you didn’t,” etc. The man eventually points out that they aren’t arguing but instead just contradicting each other, and that he came to the clinic for a good argument. He says an argument isn’t contradiction because it involves setting up a series of propositions and establishing logical conclusions. What Mr. Barnard was doing was “the automatic gainsaying of whatever the other person says.”
I like this example of gainsaying for how it demonstrates something Jesus repeatedly encountered. To gainsay is to deny something someone else has said—and most especially, to deny as a posture, only to deny as an automatic response. Gainsaying ignores the content and reasoning of what a person says and just takes a contrary position no matter what. Does this happen to Jesus? Oh yes. Over and over. People putting questions to Jesus not really to ask and learn but rather to catch Jesus or prove him wrong or call him out. But here’s the important thing about gainsayers—if you call out the gainsaying, they can always claim authenticity: “I was just asking a question” or “You’re saying that because you don’t want to answer the question.” There’s always plausible deniability, which is why we see so much gainsaying as an interrogative or interview tactic. (Politicians, anyone?)
But Jesus can discern the heart and soul of the people who approach him. He knows when he’s being gainsaid and when someone is really asking because they wish to know or wish to learn. One analysis we could make of the gospels is finding all the instances of questions being put to Jesus and tracking whether Jesus sees gainsaying or whether he sees authenticity. I’ve done this myself (I’ll spare you the footnotes!), and I’m persuaded there exists a clear pattern—Jesus responds compassionately and with truth always, but to the gainsayers, he’ll have no trouble calling out performative or false pretenses; to the authentic questioners, he answers their questions, and often goes even deeper than the surface question implies.
Is John doubting Jesus unrighteously? Based on Jesus’s reply, it doesn’t appear so. Jesus treats the question as an authentic inquiry, not as some debate opponent gainsaying Jesus’s ministry. “Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard,” Jesus replies, “how that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached.” Not only does Jesus affirm that his works are consistent with the Son of Man/Messiah, he enlists John’s disciples as witnesses to this effect: you go and tell John what things ye have seen and heard.
Doubters among Us
It’s my everyday experience to engage with doubt. It comes with the job of a historian, and it comes with the territory of working in the Church History Department. We are trained to be skeptical, to be careful, to rely on evidence and sound reasoning, and to leave no stone unturned in our research. We learn to build spiritual and intellectual muscles that can handle reading any source and considering any historical truth, no matter how much our own preconceived notions must evolve. And we receive regular assignments to interact with questioners, some of them gainsayers and some of them deeply authentic people, some of whom have felt real pain and injury at having been told inaccurate stories and been raised on false traditions. I have had the privilege of observing time and time again the authentic soul (and I include myself in that description) approaching Jesus with their doubts and even amid the growing pains of learning the truth, finding Jesus embracing the inquiry.
I trust fervently in this statement from John 3:20–21 (my own translation):
All who do evil hate the light
and do not approach the light,
that their deeds not be exposed.
But those who engage the truth
approach the light,
that their deeds may be made known
that they have been wrought in God.
Doubt is crucial for clearing falsehood and concentrating on truth. We need to doubt, and Jesus didn’t reject doubt, he responded to it and nurtured it toward light and truth. Even Jesus is on record expressing existential doubt, one of the very few places the very Aramaic words were remembered—ēlī ēlī lemā shebaqtanī, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He encouraged trust, belief, and fidelity and virtues that accompany doubt, and those aspects do appear to separate the gainsayers and hypocrites from the authentic inquirers. Like John, we could be a witness to the voice of God declaring Jesus’s status as beloved son—and in Aramaic, the word “beloved” is literally “david,” something we could hear as Davidic/messianic prophecy!—and still ask whether Jesus is really Messiah, and Jesus receives the question.
Ask, and ye shall receive. (But ask, not gainsay.)
I personally know people who, when they inquired into their beliefs and questioned their upbringing, their neighbors, friends, and sometimes even family members took offense and placed testimony above humanity. What unforced errors. We have plenty of room to accommodate anyone’s questions and doubts. I feel the utmost confidence in Jesus and in Jesus’s gospel, that they survive whatever angst any of us may feel. Territorial grandstanding resembles the gainsayers in Jesus’s time who had little to no intellectual tolerance for the “new wine” Jesus introduced, and boy, was it their loss and others’ injury.
Sidenote—We have it in our latter-day “Torah,” the revelation the Lord and Joseph Smith called “the Law,” D&C 42, a series of commandments that include the Ten Commandments. Among them, we have some new ones: “Thou shalt stand in the place of thy stewardship”; “Thou shalt live together in love”; “Thou shalt weep for the loss of them that die.” We do have this as a commandment to the Church: “Thou shalt ask.” We’re not only encouraged, we are commanded to ask. So let’s never belittle anyone actually asking and inquiring after the truth, even if the truth or the asking make us uncomfortable.
Support for John
Jesus didn’t end with his answer to John’s disciples. He continued affirming John’s goodness to the audience that observed the exchange. “What went ye out into the wilderness to see?” Jesus asked. “A reed shaken in the wind? … A man clothed in soft raiment?” If I may paraphrase, this is like Jesus recognizing how John doubted Jesus, and Jesus countering their skepticism by defending John: What did you expect, a flimsy man who can’t handle much? A wiffle-waffle preacher in the wilderness? “I say unto you, and more than a prophet.… Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist,” Jesus declared. John’s relationship to Jesus remained unchanged. Jesus reaffirmed John’s courage. John’s doubts clearly did not threaten Jesus or weaken John in Jesus’s eyes.