THE STORY OF JOSHUA BEN ADAM

The World-view Setting:

The story of JBA is very compatible with a modern cosmology of awesome space and time. In this universe, God is the creative spirit who is everywhere and equally present to the whole of his creation.

In terms of the creation process stretching across eons of time, the human species is a very recent arrival. There never was a "fall of man" from a perfect estate, and God has never abandoned the creative process wherein humanity is still emerging to realise his and her destiny of becoming fully human, in "the image and likeness of God."

The Human Story

The story of Joshua ben Adam is a scandal from beginning to end because it is the story of a man who was human and nothing but human. He was mortal and fallible like everyone else, but responding to a vision of what it meant to be human in an inhuman world, he was transparently human like no one before him.

In the cosmic setting of an emerging humanity, he represented a new and advanced state of human consciousness.

The key to understanding Joshua's story is found in the name that he deliberately chose for his self-identity. He called himself "ben Adam," which means "son of man" or simply "the human one." Refusing all titles, this humble name gave him solidarity with common humanity. It became his only claim to authority.

The critical issue of his identity had its roots in the scandal of his birth. To be born of a peasant woman and then brought up as a Galilean in the village of Nazareth was enough on its own to disbar a man from any significant status as a teacher in Israel. But his birth took place in very irregular circumstances. It was very likely that his young mother Miriam was a violated victim of a war ravaged province. This kind of "collateral damage" in military conquests was not an uncommon thing then, nor has it been an uncommon thing throughout the entire course of human history.

The hero in this part of the story was Joseph. He defied the conventions of honour and shame. By taking Miriam as his wife, he gave her protection and provided a legal paternity for the child who was called Joshua. We can assume that Joshua's profound experience of God as Abba (an Aramaic expression equivalent to papa or daddy) had its roots in his strong and affectionate bond with Joseph.

The cruel innuendoes about the irregular circumstances of his birth continued to follow Joshua throughout the whole course of his life. Soon after he became a baptised disciple of John (a scandal in itself that Christian tradition has been at a loss to explain), the Baptist was arrested and put to death by Herod Antipas. The mantle of continuing John's work fell on Joshua. He would have known that the question of his authority would be linked to the question of his paternity. This was always a critical issue in a culture that would quickly discredit a man on the grounds of his defective pedigree. How would Joshua answer such questions as "Whose son are you?" and "What is the sign of your authority?"

Joshua's baptism and John's execution represented a critical turning point in his life. It was a moment of enormous enlightenment, reflection and transformation that would move Joshua in a giant leap of human development that was far beyond anything contemplated by his mentor John. It had to do with Joshua's new understanding of God and humanity.

The basis of Joshua's taking the name "ben Adam" and announcing a new kind of human society was his profound experience of God as Abba Father. This meant

God did not want to be vertically related to humanity as a monarchical sky-God - aloof, distant, and needing a hierarchy of religious mediators to know his will or to seek his favours.

God desired to be horizontally related to humanity as the Abba Father - lovingly intimate, always with us, beside us and in us. Joshua made God immediately and equally accessible to all without any brokers of any kind. In this he abolished a religiously mediated relation to God - there was no need of priests, authoritative figures, gurus, temples, rituals, sacred places, times, foods, garments or sacred anything to put common humanity into contact with God. Joshua abolished religion!

At the same time this new understanding of God abolished apocalyptic - the popular notion, held even by John the Baptist, that God's kingdom was soon to arrive in a fiery display of divine, end-time violence. Rather, Joshua would announce and celebrate that the kingdom of the ever forgiving, healing Abba Father was already in the world, among us and in us, working silently, mysteriously and powerfully like leaven hidden in the dough or like the seed of the ubiquitous mustard weed. He abolished apocalyptic!

Having taken the vertical relationship ( religion and apocalyptic ) out of God, Joshua had a solid basis to take the vertical out of all human relationships.

He took a name - ben Adam - which put him in solidarity with all of humanity without distinction. The kingdom of God that he announced and invited all to celebrate with him was a kingdom of the human ones. The only qualification for entry was being human. No religious tests would apply. There would be no lords or lackeys. No superiors and inferiors. No one better than anyone else - or worse. No titles granting status above any one else. It would be a kingdom of nobodies, a celebration of God in fellowship with common humanity.

Joshua never stopped repeating his theme that the kingdom of God was manifested in the mundane affairs of common humanity. God's image and likeness was seen in people being human - in forgiving each other's debts, in compassionately standing up for the weak and the oppressed, and in living in a horizontal order of equality and love.

Joshua's message of the kingdom of God was given visible expression in a scandalous kind of table fellowship. To celebrate the arrival of the kingdom of the human ones, he ate and drank, especially in banquet mode, without making any discrimination between "clean" and "unclean" people. He attracted the company of women. In fact, he appeared to be biased in favour of eating and drinking with the kind of people his society had marginalised by their inability to keep the "purity codes."

Here was a man who could laugh and talk without a trace of social distance in the conversation. This was a sage who could disguise his savage protest against an inhuman society with short stories, verbal cartoons and witty one-liners.

A social deviate, a subversive sage, a religious iconoclast, Joshua was dangerous to the entire religio-political system. He was dangerous because he dared to be human. But he worked discreetly as an itinerant who kept moving from village to village without allowing a movement to consolidate. He founded no organization, and he never appointed anyone to anything. The kingdom he proclaimed could never be identified with any institution, hierarchy, religion, or party.
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Whilst he was passionately dedicated to sharing his vision of God's kingdom with all who had ears to hear, this self-effacing man never set himself up as the way to the Father, nor even as the role model for others. He did not quote Scripture for his authority, nor claim a "thus says the Lord" like the OT prophets. When challenged to give some sign of his authority, he refused to do so. Being human was enough. He said this gave him - or anybody else - the authority to be lord over all things that were designed to serve human needs.

After showing an initial interest in Joshua's message, the villages throughout Galilee turned again him. They preferred to follow the bandit messiah's and their own apocalyptic dreams of a violent deliverance from oppression. Even Joshua's inner band of "disciples"(did he even use such a word?) were dull of understanding and could not put away their dreams for some violent apocalyptic salvation.

Turning his back on Galilee, Joshua set off to declare his vision of a new humanity in Judea.

When he came to Jerusalem he got himself arrested for what appeared to be an uncharacteristicly rash and ill-timed act. In a rush of blood he overturned some tables for money exchange associated with the temple during the Passover festival.

Galileans were always under suspicion for being trouble makers. He was hurriedly tried and brutally crucified as just another discredited Galilean rabble rouser. In his last hours his male companions all forsook him the fled, probably back to Galilee where some of them had been engaged in the fishing trade. Only a small band of faithful women supporters remained nearby until the bitter end.

Thus ended a life that begun in scandal and ended in scandal. Being hanged on a tree was taken as sign of God's curse. His only "crime" was that he dared to be human.

After the shock of Joshua's brutal end had devastated his companions, they began to reflect on how much he had mirrored the image of the God. They believed that they had seen in his life the face of the invisible God. They came to the conviction that a life such as this was indestructible. They sensed his presence with them still in a powerful way, and believed that God had acted to raise him from the dead.

To what extent this conviction about his "resurrection" was confirmed by tangible evidences of post-death encounters we do not know because they left us no eyewitness testimonies. At the end of the day, they could only know by faith the same as we may know by faith that God had raised him from the dead. The first Christians certainly believed this to the point where they were prepared to stake everything on it.

Some said that the thought of God raising this discredited Galilean from the dead was laughable. God thought so too. He's still laughing - and celebrates with that man who dared to be human.

We say that JBA was "God manifested in the flesh" because he was so fully and transparently human. The later Christian legends which made him more than human destroyed the real point of the story, namely that God is revealed only through our common humanity