Jesus Christ

The name Jesus Christ designates one of the most recognized religious personas in history, and who is also one of the most contested figures. That such a name should be invoked in an encyclopedic initiative aimed at offering comprehensive treatment of questions of activism and social justice undoubtedly occasions some amount of surprise. Yet the very title carried by Jesus, the Jewish cultural term that most adequately summarizes the meaning of his life—the term Christ or Messiah—already hints at a form of activism on behalf of social justice that was quite pointed in his own cultural world. It was also quite potent in galvanizing a similar kind of quest for justice on the part of his followers for the first few centuries after his execution. Jesus comprehended as Christ is not simply a spiritual claim about a human character, but in historical context, is also a political claim about a religious leader.

The question of how to interpret historical figures—as indeed the question of how to interpret any public event or social movement—is a subject that would itself require an entire encyclopedia to explore under the rubrics of hermeneutics (“interpretation”). Central to any hermeneutical effort to recover some of the meaning of Jesus in his own context, carried out by those of us living in 21st-century America, is an understanding of the nature and history of empire, both then and now. Jesus lived, moved, and had his being—as well as suffered his end in criminalization, torture, and execution—in a predominantly rural Palestinian context ruled by Rome. The socio-religious movement galvanized by his vision and mobilized by his earliest followers quickly translated his memory into a quite different cultural context of urban imperial centers throughout the Mediterranean basin.

Within 300 years, that nascent urban resistance movement, periodically subjected to imperial persecutions designed to ferret out and arrest followers as subversive of imperial policy and polity, was taken up by the new Emperor Constantine (in AD 313) to become the religious glue by which to unify a fractious domain. The Christianity that resulted quickly became an imperial religion of Rome, serving as the vehicle for Roman aristocratic identity and later, after the collapse of the empire by the 6th century, as the repository of the memory of imperial grandeur into which “barbarian” European peoples such as the Franks, Saxons, Slavs, and Celts were gradually converted. Beginning in 1492—after the loss of Spain to the newly emergent Islamic empire in 711 and its slow reconquest by Castilian Christian forces over the course of 7 centuries—Christianity became the subtext of and theological motivation for ongoing European (and subsequent American) colonization/domination of the globe.

These three moments of quite different relationship to imperial formations—first as rural and urban resistance to ancient Roman control, then as expression of the Roman imperial cult and later feudal nostalgia for that older Roman achievement, and finally as rationale for Western takeover of the planet—significantly shape our received vision of Jesus the Christ. Retrieving some sense of Jesus as actor for justice in his own context requires unmasking the ideological cooptation to which the historical Jesus has been subject for almost two millennia. Recent scholarly work has helped recover some of the shifting cultural context that shaped both the human Jesus and the literary tradition that has conserved his memory in the genre of gospel.

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