Un Messie polémiste : esquisse d'une histoire littéraire d'un motif évangélique

The evangelists present Jesus in a wide variety of ways, reflecting the diversity of contemporary messianic expectations. These pre-Christian texts foretell a number of very different Messiahs: king, priest or prophet; violent or pacifist; particularist or universal; human or divine. However, what all these Messiahs have in common is that they exercise their own authority. When they confront the wicked, the outcome is never in doubt and the very identity of the Messiah is never called into question. He does not need to prove his messianic status: at first glance, it does not appear that he needs to engage in rhetorical combat. Yet Jesus’s polemics against the various contemporary Jewish groups are numerous. All the Gospel writers record them. An obvious explanation for this is that the ‘real Jesus’ – or the early Christian communities – had to defend his or their point of view. It was only when Jesus came to be regarded as the Messiah that, in literary terms, the historical reality of the polemics associated with the figure of Jesus merged with the portrayal of the Messiah foretold in the Scriptures. Another approach is to draw parallels between Jesus and prophetic figures who were angry with the people of Israel. This article aims to explore another possibility: that the literary motif of the polemical Messiah has a literary history whose origins, rooted in wisdom literature, predate the New Testament texts. In particular, the Sitz im Leben of these discourses seems rather to define Jesus as the undisputed master of the interpretation of the Law, capable of responding to any controversy relating to it, and thus, in this respect, the true Messiah, according to what the evangelists intended to convey.