With a doctorate in psychology, years of experience as a detective, and a natural talent for understanding human behavior, Douglas has become renowned for his profiling prowess. He has coauthored several best-sellers on the topic, and when Jodie Foster won the Oscar for her performance in Silence of the Lambs, she publicly thanked Douglas for being the real-life figure behind her character's FBI mentor. How is Douglas able to understand the thinking process of individuals he has never even talked to? "Behavior reflects personality," Douglas explained to Biography magazine. In other words, Douglas closely examines the evidence left behind at the crime scene and, where possible, interviews victims to find out exactly what the criminal said and did. From these clues the left-behind products of the person's behavior-he deduces the individual's psychological makeup. Now to Jesus: without dialoguing with him, how can we possibly delve into his mind to determine what his motivations, intentions, and self-understanding were? How do we know who he thought he was and what he understood his mission to be? By looking at his behavior, Douglas would say. If we want to figure out whether Jesus thought he was the Messiah or Son of God or merely considered himself to be a rabbi or prophet-we need to look at what he did, what he said, and how he related to others. The question of what Jesus thought about himself is a critical issue. Some professors maintain that the myth of Jesus' deity was superimposed on the Jesus tradition by overzealous supporters years after his death. The real Jesus, these professors believe, would roll over in his grave if he knew people were worshiping him. If you strip away the legends and go back to the earliest material about him, they say you'll find he never aspired to be anything more than an itinerant teacher and occasional rabble-rouser. But is the evidence of history on their side? To find out, I flew to Lexington, Kentucky, and drove the winding roads past a series of picturesque horse farms to track down the scholar whose acclaimed book The Christology of Jesus confronts this very subject.
There isn't much to tiny Wilmore, Kentucky, except Asbury Theological Seminary, where I found Ben Witberington's office on the fourth floor of a colonial-style building off the rustic community's main drag. With the gracious hospitality of a Southern gentleman, the North Carolina native offered me a comfortable chair and some coffee as we sat down to discuss who Jesus of Nazareth thought he was. The topic is familiar territory to Witherington, whose books include Jesus the Sage; The Many Faces of the Christ; The Jesus Quest; Jesus, Paul, and the End of the World; and Women in the Ministry of Jesus and whose articles about Jesus have appeared in specialized dictionaries and academic journals. Educated at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (master of divinity degree, summa cum laude) and the University of Durham in England (doctorate in theology with a concentration in New Testament), Witherington has taught at Asbury, Ashland Theological Seminary, the Divinity School of Duke University, and Gordon-Conwell. His memberships include the Society for the Study of the New Testament, the Society of Biblical Literature, and the Institute for Biblical Research. Speaking distinctly and deliberately, weighing his words with care, Witherington definitely sounded like a scholar, yet his voice betrayed an unmistakable undercurrent of fascination-even awefor his subject. This attitude emerged even further when he took me on a tour of a high-tech studio where he had been mixing images of Jesus with songs whose lyrics illuminate the compassion, the sacrifice, the humanity, and the majesty of his life and ministry. For a scholar who writes heavily footnoted, cautiously nuanced, and academically precise prose on the technical issues involving Jesus, this artistic wedding of video and music is a poetic outlet for exploring the side of Jesus that only the creative arts can come close to capturing. Back in Witherington's office, I decided to begin examining the issue of Jesus' self-understanding with a question that often springs to the minds of readers when they're exposed to the gospels for the first time. "The truth is that Jesus was a bit mysterious about his identity, wasn't he?" I asked as Witherington pulled up a chair across from me. "He tended to shy away from forthrightly proclaiming himself to be the Messiah or Son of God. Was that because he didn't think of himself in those terms or because he had other reasons?" "No, it's not because he didn't think of himself in those terms," Witherington said as he settled into his chair and crossed his legs. "If he had simply announced, 'Hi, folks; I'm God,' that would have been heard as 'I'm Yahweh,' because the Jews of his day didn't have any concept of the Trinity. They only knew of God the Father-whom they called Yahweh-and not God the Son or God the Holy Spirit. So if someone were to say he was God, that wouldn't have made any sense to them and would have been seen as clear-cut blasphemy. And it would have been counterproductive to Jesus in his efforts to get people to listen to his message. Besides, there were already a host of expectations about what the Messiah would look like, and Jesus didn't want to be pigeon-holed into somebody else's categories. Consequently, he was very careful about what he said publicly. In private with his disciples-that was a different story, but the gospels primarily tell us about what he did in public."
It was a 1977 book by British theologian John Hick and half a dozen like-minded colleagues that prompted a firestonn of controversy by charging that Jesus never thought of himself as God incarnate or the Messiah. These concepts, they wrote, developed later and were written into the gospels so it appeared that Jesus was making these claims about himself To explore that allegation, Witherington has gone back to the very earliest traditions about Jesus-the most primitive material, unquestionably safe from legendary development-and discovered persuasive clues concerning how Jesus really regarded himself. I wanted to delve into that research, starting with this question: "What clues can we find about Jesus' self-understanding from the way he related to others?" Witherington thought for a moment, then replied, "Look at his relationship with his disciples. Jesus has twelve disciples, yet notice that he's not one of the Twelve." While that may sound like a detail without a difference, Witherington said it's quite significant. "If the Twelve represent a renewed Israel, where does Jesus fit in?" he asked. "He's not just part of Israel, not merely part of the redeemed group, he's forming the group-just as God in the Old Testament formed his people and set up the twelve tribes of Israel. That's a clue about what Jesus thought of himself." Witherington went on to describe a clue that can be found in Jesus' relationship with John the Baptist. "Jesus says, 'Of all people born of woman, John is the greatest man on earth.' Having said that, he then goes even further in his ministry than the Baptist did-by doing miracles, for example. What does that say about what he thinks of himself? And his relationship with the religious leaders is perhaps the most revealing. Jesus makes the truly radical statement that it's not what enters a person that defiles him but what comes out of his heart. Frankly, this sets aside huge portions of the Old Testament book of Leviticus, with its meticulous rules concerning purity. Now, the Pharisees didn't like this message. They wanted to keep things as they were, but Jesus said, 'No, God has further plans. He's doing a new thing.' We have to ask, What kind of person thinks he has the authority to set aside the divinely inspired Jewish Scriptures and supplant them with his own teaching? And what about his relationship-if we can call it that-with the Roman authorities? We have to ask why they crucified him. If he had merely been an innocuous sage telling nice little parables, how did he end up on a cross, especially at a Passover season, when no Jew wants any Jew to be executed? There had to be a reason why the sign above his head said, 'This is the King of the Jews.'" Witherington let that last comment hang in the air, before providing the explanation himself: "Either Jesus had made that verbal claim," he said, "or someone clearly thought he did."
While Jesus' relationships provide one window into his self- understanding, Witherington said that Jesus' deeds-especially his miracles-offer additional insights. However, I raised my hand to stop him. "Certainly you can't say that Jesus' miracles establish that he thought he was God," I said, "since later his own disciples went out and did the same things-and certainly they weren't making claims of deity." "No, it's not the fact that Jesus did miracles that illuminates his self-understanding," replied Witherington. "What's important is how he interprets his miracles." "What do you mean?" I asked. "Jesus says, 'If 1, by the finger of God, cast out demons, then you will know that the kingdom of God has come upon you.' He's not like other miracle workers who do amazing things and then life proceeds as it always has. No-to Jesus, his miracles are a sign indicating the coming of the kingdom of God. They are a foretaste of what the kingdom is going to be like. And that sets Jesus apart." Again I interrupted. "Elaborate on that a bit," I said. "How does it set him apart?" "Jesus sees his miracles as bringing about something unprecedented-the coming of God's dominion," replied Witherington. "He doesn't merely see himself as a worker of miracles; he sees himself as the one in whom and through whom the promises of God come to pass. And that's a not-too-thinly-veiled claim of transcendence." I nodded. Now his point made sense to me. With that I turned to the words- 'of Jesus, in search of more clues concerning his selfunderstanding.
"He was called Rabbouni, or 'Rabbi,' by his followers," I said. "Doesn't this imply that he merely taught like the other rabbis of his day?" Witherington grinned. "Actually," he said, "Jesus taught in a radical new way. He begins his teachings with the phrase 'Amen I say to you,' which is to say, 'I swear in advance to the truthfulness of what I'm about to say.' This was absolutely revolutionary." "How so?" I asked. He replied, "In Judaism you needed the testimony of two witnesses, so witness A could witness the truth of witness B and vice versa. But Jesus witnesses to the truth of his own sayings. Instead of basing his teaching on the authority of others, he speaks on his own authority. "So here is someone who considered himself to have authority above and beyond what the Old Testament prophets had. He believed he possessed not only divine inspiration, as King David did, but also divine authority and the power of direct divine utterance." In addition to employing the "Amen" phrase in his teaching, Jesus used the term "Abba" when he was relating to God. "What does that tell us about what he thought about himself?" I asked. "'Abba' connotes intimacy in a