The Nonviolent Messiah: Jesus, Q, and the Enochic Tradition

by Simon J. Joseph

When scholars have set Jesus against various conceptions of the messiah and other redemptive figures in early Jewish expectation, those questions have been bound up with the problem of violence, whether the political violence of a militant messiah or the divine violence carried out by a heavenly or angelic figure. Missing from those discussions, Simon J. Joseph contends, are the unique conceptions of an Adamic redeemer figure in the Enochic materialconceptions that informed the Q tradition and, he argues, Jesus own self-understanding.

Genres: Religion

240 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2014

Reviews

[John Martindale · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot tell you how good it was to find this book. It was so affirming and helpful to find someone who sees the problem that had been plaguing me, and provide a possible way forward.

I honestly cannot think there has been any deeper blow to my faith then when I read Matthew again a few years ago. It was an ax laid at the root of my Christian belief. For I saw as Simon Joseph wrote “Jesus’ God is non-judgmental, merciful, unconditionally loving, healing, forgiving, and inclusive” while elsewhere “God seems to be envisioned as judgmental, vengeful, conditionally loving, punishing, and exclusive. Is God somehow inscrutably both forgiving and unforgiving, judgmental and non-judgmental, inclusive and exclusive?” I was so bothered by Matthew's Jesus absolute obsession with eschatological violence, Jesus practically can't open his mouth with out envisioning the nearby world-wide genocide that only a tiny few super elite fanatical disciples who were more holy than the Pharisees would survive.
In the gospels it seemed everything given with one hand was taken back with the other, the entire ethic of the sermon on the mount is made utterly vacuous--a very temporary ethic. We learn “my kingdom is not of this world, if it was my disciples who fight” and that His kingdom is advanced through enemy love, laying down one life instead of taking life, forgiveness instead of violence. Jesus' kingdom is contrasted to Caesars kingdom. But then in the same gospel and in Revelations portrait especially. its all negated, its like Jesus is says “No I laid, the kingdom of God actually does only come through violence, you thought Caesar was cruel and violent? You've seen nothing, just wait for the son of Man, when he comes to engage in the world-wide genocide, the blood will come up to the horses bridle and there will be a world-wide feast for the birds of the air, after he tramples people in the wine press of his wrath. So yes, I lied, my kingdom is of this world, it only comes through force, it only comes through violence. I really am no different than Caesar, Just I got WAY more power and I am far more brutal and cruel. So yes, you just turn the other cheek now, for next week I will bring the genocide!”
Ugg... it is so repugnant. More recently I've begin to notice how persistent also is proclamation that the Son of Man coming to establish his kingdom through the greatest imaginable act of violence and force, was to be on "this generation." (which of course was THAT generation) Once one sees this, it cannot be unseen, the message is everywhere and found in many other New Testament books. If Jesus actually said all of this then, 2000 years later we must conclude “the apocalyptic Jesus was wrong about the end-time, wrong about his return as the son of man, and wrong about final judgment on “This generation”. The  apocalyptic  Jesus  “did in fact  erroneously hail  the  end as near.” But ”Was Jesus really a tragically misguided messiah broken on the wheel of history?” If he actually said these things, it seems impossible to escape this conclusion reach by Albert Schweitzer all those years ago, without doing violence to the text.
So yes, this book was therefore a Godsend, helping me continue in my faith.
What this book gave me was a way to see how in Q we may have an early tradition and message of Jesus which is consistent in message, but later, after Christians were ostracized and persecuted by their Jewish community, they grabbed on to Jesus' non-Danielic references to himself as the Son of Man, and possibly inspired by the Enoch's Son of Man tradition, started to put in his mouth of their apocalyptic hopes that the Son of Man would come and establish the everlasting Kingdom in that generation. They made Jesus message a temporary ethic, they just couldn't believe Jesus meant what he said, surely the kingdom was to come in violent power, possibly they felt they could only turn the other cheek, if the Son of Man was to soon come and kill all of their enemies who they hated. But yes, Jesus' didn't comply with all the words they put in his mouth. Just as all their previous hopes for a violent Messiah to establish the kingdom ended up hanging on the cross, they tried to revive this hope and once again it died.

One thing I really appreciate is I now can in good conscious “cherry pick” the beautiful and good, non-apocalyptic words of Jesus and I can now use Jesus as the plumbline by which I judge the Old Testament portrayals of God. I couldn't do this comfortably before knowing that the gospels portrait of Jesus had all the contradictions, inconsistencies, assertion and subversion as we see of the of the occasionally loving, but typically violent and cruel YHWH of old. Thank goodness, Jesus might just be the perfect revelation of God, and He might be perfectly consistent and not as utterly morally bankrupt as the Ancients envisioning of their tribal warrior deity.

Here is the song this book inspired:

“Have I found a way to exorcise the demon in the details?
To rewind the clock to a time before the fly descended into the ointment?
A time before the person was a mere skeleton to be stuffed into the closet?
Possibly He is innocent, perfectly consistent, and still relevant.

The tribal warrior god died
They thought to conjure him back Riding upon a cloud.
To bring death upon their hated neighbor
To force and coerce,
Every bloody knee down
But this portrait of God,
The promises put on his lips
Was an idol of their making
For Christ once again did it in
Crushing every expectation
Refusing to act in line
Showing such hopes need to die

Now let the chaff blow away See what remains...
Now that fire of reality have raged See what remains...

Possibly He is innocent, perfectly consistent, and ever relevant. Not a failed apocalyptic prophet”

[Andrew Marr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simon Joseph’s book The Nonviolent Messiah is another helpful study on the question of whether or not Jesus truly preached peace and is a complementary study to A Peaceable Hope by David Neville. Whereas the latter worked from the final version of the New Testament and made a mathematical study of how much violence there was and how much peace, with peace being much the more preponderant element, Joseph uses examination of the Q document and the Adamic model of the Messiah in Enochic literature to argue that the historical Jesus consistently preached peace.
Like some atomic particles that are never seen but are inferred from visible reactions, Q has never been seen but is inferred from a study of the canonical Gospels and other non-canonical material. There may be some guess-work and there remains controversy as to what actually is in Q but there is enough evidence to work with what we have so far.
With a stress on the inaugural sermon in Q which would include the proclamation of the Jubilee and material used in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and the Sermon on the Plain in Luke, Joseph builds a case that Jesus preached nonviolence and a violent eschatology was added later by the Q community.
The lesser known Enochic literature is examined for a lesser-known element: the Adamic model that emerged in some of this literature in contradistinction to the Davidic Messiah who would be a political and military figure. The Adamic model posits the hope of a renewed creation that would involve all people and would be achieved by totally peaceful means. The Animal Apocalypse, so-called because animals signify the figures, is a particularly strong example of this. We can easily see the influence of this model on Paul’s use of the New Adam in his epistles. Joseph provides much evidence to suggest that this Adamic model, which was very well-known at all levels of Jewish society in Jesus’ time, strongly influenced Jesus’ self-understanding of the kind of Messiah he was.
If we take Joseph’s historical-critical work and bring it to the final result analyzed by Neville, he get the following plausible historical trajectory on the issue of peace in the formation of the New Testament: 1) The early Q community with its collections of sayings by Jesus preaching peace, 2) The community of Mark’s Gospel proclaiming the peaceful, crucified Messiah, 3) the preaching of Paul stressing peace & using the Adamic model of Messiah, 4) a later stage of the Q community where persecution and rejection led to a vengeful eschatology where God would do the vengeance, 5) The community of Matthew’s Gospel using Mark & Q, including the vengeful material but also the peace teachings, 5) The community of Luke’s Gospel mostly rejecting the violent eschatology & stressing peace with many unique elements stressing peace, 6) community of John’s Gospel with a very strong emphasis on peace.
Although a meticulous examination, the book is readable and is an important contribution to the investigations on Jesus’ attitude to peace and violence.

[John Kirkley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Simon Joseph offers a persuasive argument for Jesus as a nonviolent messiah, based on his reading of the "Q" tradition (the accounts of Jesus' ministry shared by Matthew and Luke but not found in Mark) and set within the context of the variety of messianic expectation in second temple Judaism.