Jesus Through the Centuries

Jesus Through the Centuries is a non-fiction book published in 1985 by the American historian and theologian Jaroslav Pelikan. Each chapter focuses on a different century of the Common Era, tracing the evolution of how Christians and Christian societies viewed Jesus Christ in surprisingly divergent ways. According to Keith Harper, an Associate Professor of Church History at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, "Pelikan captures the complexities of an intriguing and enormously important historical figure, no mean feat in itself, and shows readers how each generation interprets the life and message of Jesus Christ in their own unique way."

The earliest interpretations of Jesus found in the first century place him securely in a rabbinical context. Jesus was, in short, a rabbi, albeit a very important one who was also a prophet, unlike other rabbis. This makes sense from a continuity standpoint. It's only rational that the earliest Christians would think of Jesus as an extension of the highest clerical position the Hebrews had. Moreover, the Gospel of Matthew emphasizes how Judaism's rabbinical traditions were important to Jesus. That said, the Gospels are rather contradictory on this point. The Gospel of John, for instance, depicted Jesus less as a Jew and more as a messiah as earlier defined in classical Greek mythology. By the Third Century, some Christians were even reinterpreting classical Greek texts in a Christian context. For Pelikan, the most problematic consequence of this erasure of Jesus' Jewish identity is that it paved the way for antisemitism.

The second major shift occurred around the fourth century. In a chapter titled "The King of Kings,"  Pelikan writes that in previous generations Jesus' status as a "king" was purely allegorical. But increasingly, religious and political leaders helped foster a more literal interpretation of Jesus' kingly status. Pelikan convincingly argues that this shift was encouraged by self-serving leaders hungry for power. It was an attempt to shore up political authority by effectively conflating religious loyalty to political loyalty. In this context, the king of a sovereign state is framed as an earthly extension of the king of the heavens. Even as conceptions of Christ underwent shifts and refinements over the years, this idea of Christ as a literal king would persist through many generations.



In the fifth century, the idea of the "Cosmic Christ" was born. By this interpretation, Jesus is more than a man or a king, he is the engine of the cosmos, dictating and setting into motion the principles of the natural universe. This interpretation would quickly give way to a more mundane yet arguably more evocative view of Jesus as "The Son of Man," cursed by the same humanity and capacity for sin as the rest of us. This interpretation allowed Jesus to exist as a paragon of human behavior that one might aspire to, unlike the Cosmic Christ which is about as alienating a conception of Jesus as the world would see in the Common Era.

While the association between Christ and the cross or crucifixion seems like it's existed since the Gospels, the crucifixion-centric interpretation of Jesus didn't really take off until the Medieval Era. It was around the Eighth Century that the morbid fascination with Jesus' gruesome death truly became a cultural staple of Christianity. This focus on Jesus' suffering led directly to an interpretation of Jesus as a monk. Pelikan writes, "The monks began by patterning themselves after Christ, but by the time they were finished they were likewise patterning Christ after themselves. The Medieval Era also gave the world the rather bizarre interpretation of Jesus as "The Bridegroom of the Soul" – in other words, a lover with whom Christians wish to marry, albeit in a strictly spiritual sense. Toward the end of the Medieval Era, political considerations once again strongly influenced cultural views of Jesus. In a chapter titled "The Divine and Human Model," Pelikan writes that Jesus' self-imposed poverty and suffering were virtues to which peasants should proudly aspire. It is clear that such an interpretation was designed in large part to keep the peasant class docile.

When the Age of Enlightenment began, Jesus became a symbol of "common sense," Pelikan writes. Rational thinkers like Thomas Jefferson began to exclude miracles altogether from the story of Christ. Later in the Romantic Era, artists thought of Jesus as "the poet of the spirit," while intellectuals like Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that Jesus was an expression of the soul's oneness with nature, a new sort of "Cosmic Christ." Most recently, Jesus became central to movements of social upheaval, casting Christ as "the liberator" in struggles for equal rights.



In the end, Jesus Through the Centuries is at once a valuable historical document of Christian thought and an opportunity to interrogate prevailing cultural attitudes of Christianity today.