The Human Face of Jesus

By J.A.T. Robinson

“For we have been insisting that, whatever more may need to be said of Jesus as the Christ, nothing must be said that in any way detracts from a humanity, as the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it, ‘at all points’ like our own. There could indeed be no more traditionally orthodox demand than that. Yet there is also an entire range of statements about Jesus as the Christ (and nowhere more than in [Hebrews]) which appears to undermine this requirement at source. These cluster around the concept of pre-existence of an eternal, heavenly being who enters the conditions of our history and humanity to dwell within it from the outside. This, too, is apparently so fundamental a statement of Christian doctrine as virtually to be a definition of what ‘the Incarnation’ means.  Yet Knox, writing as a NT scholar and as a Christian, has recently made the outright judgment:

We can have the humanity without the pre-existence and we can have the pre-existence without the humanity. There is absolutely no way of having both. [Knox, The Humanity and Divinity of Christ, p. 106.]

If that is really true, it appears to pose an irreconcilable contradiction or an ultimate choice for a modern Christology.

It may be that we shall have to agree that pre-existence is a way of speaking that [it] can no longer be taken literally or descriptively and is so misleading as to be unusable today.” pp.143-144.

“Jesus was not, I believe, for Paul, as he became for later dogmatics, a divine being veiled in flesh or one who stripped himself of superhuman attributes to become human; he was a man who by total surrender of his own gain or glory [cf. John 7.18; 8.50, 54] was able to reveal or ‘unveil’ [cf. 2Cor 3.12-18] the glory of God as utterly gracious, self-giving love [cf. Rom 5.6-8].” p.166.

“For John there is no contradiction between coming or being sent from God and being utterly and genuinely a man…the word ‘man’…is employed of him exactly as it is of John the Baptist [cf. 1.6, 30; 3.27; 9.11]…It is characteristic of this evangelist that, for all the stress on Jesus’ otherness, the language he uses to designate Christ in his profoundest relationship to the Father is the same language that he applies in a weaker and more general sense to men in general. If Jesus is unique, it is not because he does not share the human origin and condition or the relationship to God open potentially to all the other men…Thus, to ‘come into the world’, which might suggest some special kind of supernatural entry, is used identically of Jesus [John 9.39; 12.46; 16.28; 18.37], of ‘the prophet’ [John 6.14], of the Messiah [John 11.27; cf. 4.25; 7.27, 31, 41f.], and indeed (if this is the right punctuation) of ‘every man’ [John 1.9]. it is the equivalent of being ‘born’ (18.37) or being ‘born into the world’ (16.21), which again is applied indifferently to Jesus and to any woman’s child. Similarly, not only Jesus but John the Baptist is a man ‘sent from God’ (1.6; cf. 3.28); and even Nicodemus acknowledges Jesus as a teacher ‘come from God’ (3.2) – for no one, he admits, could do such signs unless God were ‘with him’…Yet this intimate union itself is grounded in a moral affinity potentially open to any man [John 8.29; 15.10].” pp. 171-172.

“There is no suggestion [in the Gospel of John], unlike the first and third, that [Jesus] enters this world in any other way. [John 1.13] is for John a description not of Jesus but of believers. Of course, it is also true at this level of Jesus: he is par excellence the one who is ‘from above’ (3.31), who ‘comes down from heaven’ – yet not in a way to deny the physical links (6.42) or to separate him from others…The reason why language that is eternally true of God can be applied to Jesus without measure [cf. John 3.34] or qualification is not because he is not a man but because, unlike other men, all that the Father has is his (5.19f.)…John never implies, any more than the writer of Hebrews, that because Jesus is son he does not stand in the same human relationship to God as every other man.” pp. 175-176.

“…the gospel is telling us another story, the history of a human being who comes from nowhere more exalted than Nazareth in Galilee and whose connections are known to all. There is no mystery about his origin, and it is absurd to say of this historical individual that he is pre-existent. To mix up the stories, to confuse the categories, as the Jews do, is to make nonsense of everything, as crudely as when Nicodemus confuses birth from above [‘born again’] with being born again here below [John 3.3-12]. Yet the possibility, and indeed inevitability, of misunderstanding is for John an essential part of the whole…For in our age it has become important to discriminate, if the humanity is not to be threatened by the preexistence.” p. 177.

“…I have re-read G.B. Caird’s essay, ‘The Development of the Doctrine of Christ in the New Testament’, Christ for Us Today, pp.66-80 [where he strongly] supports the line I have taken at so many points, especially from his much greater knowledge of the apocryphal literature. He writes: ‘The Jews had believed only in the pre-existence of a personification. Wisdom was a personification, either of a divine attribute or of a divine purpose, but never a person…Neither the Fourth Gospel nor Hebrews ever speaks of the eternal Word or Wisdom of God in terms which compel us to regard it as a person. If we are in the habit of crediting them with such a belief in a pre-existent person, and not just a pre-existent purpose, it is because we read them in the light of Paul’s theology’ (p.79)…I do not regard Paul as an exception. I believe he appears to be so only because we read him in the light of later theology.” f. 182, p.178.

“…Christian doctrine became committed to an understanding of incarnation that involved the veiling in flesh of a heavenly being…I believe that the word [incarnation] can just as truly and just as biblically (in fact more truly and more biblically) be applied to another way of understanding it. This is: that one who was totally and utterly a man—and had never been anything other than a man or more than a man—so completely embodied what was from the beginning the meaning and purpose of God’s self-expression (whether conceived in terms of the Spirit, his Wisdom, his Word, or the intimately personal relationship of Sonship) that it could be said, and had to be said, of that man, ‘He was God’s man’, or ‘God was in Christ’, or even that he was ‘God for us’.” p.179.