INTERVIEWER
When Jesus spoke he was so often indirect in his language, answered questions with a question, used parables and metaphors. If you asked him a question, what would you anticipate the answer to be like.

ALLEN DWIGHT CALLAHAN
Jesus had a reputation for responding to people verbally in several ways. One was to use a metaphor or an image from his reality, from the kitchen, from housework, from farm work, from fishing. That's because that is what people knew and he could relate to that. He related to it because he was one of them. These are images that are attributed to him that are very evocative. And they were probably even more evocative in his time than they are now because of us are not from an agrarian population. Some of the richness of his language is lost on us, on the subsequent readership of city slickers who don't completely understand it.

At another level there's indirection. He had a reputation for being indirect, for being cagey in his language. Now in modern scholarship this has been explained by saying that Jesus perpetrated what one scholar referred to as the Messianic secret. Jesus was the Messiah but he didn't want anybody to know it. At least not, not during his lifetime. I think we can put a more fruitful spin on that, or something that helps to clarify what was really going on in Jesus' discourse, and that is this; Jesus was moving people by what he was saying - he was drawing attention to himself, and in this context, in the political context, that's very dangerous.

Jesus is moving masses of people, he's having an effect on them and he has to be careful when he talks. We know from other kinds of folklore of subjugated people who are under oppression or domination at various times. One of the devices they use for communicating with each other is indirect language. So Jesus is in a highly charged, politically problematic, dangerous situation. So he's not going to lay his cards on the table all the time, and he's going to say things and wink. He knows what he's talking about - the people know what he's talking about - he knows they know - they know he knows. There's a lot of communication that's going on there that's not being spoken. There's a lot of things going on between the lines and we have to know how the metaphors play out- what the conventions are for the communication to read that.

But I think the gaps that we see - the indirection, the caginess, the canniness and the language is attributable to somebody who realizes that his situation is perilous and not going to say the first thing that comes to his mind every time. Some people need to know - some people don't need to know. He speaks to both audiences at the same time. The language is going to be unusual.

INTERVIEWER
When Jesus was verbally attacked by a critic he had a capacity to diffuse his attacker with one powerful, irrefutable line. How do you explain this ability and style of engagement?

ALLEN DWIGHT CALLAHAN
Well we have a record of different kinds of public personalities from this period and if you were going to be kind of itinerating public intellectual with your own spin on things, or your own kind of social critique then one of the things you needed to have in your discursive toolbox was a capacity for one liners. You had to be able to say things to put the hecklers in their place. You also had to be able to discern a question which wasn't really a question. There were people who asked questions, not to get certain answers, but to incriminate the people to whom the question was addressed.

There's a classic case of this in Gospel traditions where somebody asked Jesus "Should we pay taxes to Caesar or not? You're talking about this Kingdom stuff, and you know the Kingdom, and we don't have to pay taxes to anybody, I mean God is our king. So should we pay taxes to Caesar or not?"

This is just a no win situation. By this time he's got a public following of people who believe that he really is in some way the agent bringing about the Kingdom of God and they know among other things that means political autonomy for Israel. Throw in the in the yoke of Roman domination. If he says pay your taxes then all of that juice is squandered. He just loses that credibility with the people, with the masses. If he says don't pay your taxes, that's a death sentence - he may as well just call up the police and give them his address.

So what does he do? He gives an answer that's not an answer - that goes down into history as one of the greatest one liners - the greatest wise guy responses of all time; he says you have a coin? Well let me take a look at it. Who's face is on it? Well it's Caesar. He says, well give to Caesar what's Caesar's, and give to God what belongs to God. There's no comeback to that and so that one goes down in Gospel tradition and into history. If you were going to be that kind of person, if you were going to be in the public like that, you had to be able to come up with the sound byte that was going to do the job for you. And if you couldn't do that then you went into the dustbin of history with the all the other people who couldn't do it. So this was one of the things that he could do. There were several things that he could do that really qualified him for this role, and apparently he did them very well. People remembered.

INTERVIEWER
You expressed in your book The World's Religions that the language alone that Jesus used is a study in itself. Can you elaborate on that?

HUSTON SMITH
One of my New Testament teachers referred to Jesus language as a gigantesque in nature. A tamer word would be exaggerated. There are times when the impact of whatever it is we're experiencing is so powerful that that normal language just doesn't float the feeling and we reach out desperately for superlatives and even change the language a little bit to get across the point. This is of a different order of magnitude. Let's call it blessedness rather than happiness. That is what we find just interlacing Jesus' words throughout.

INTERVIEWER
Another feature of Jesus' language that you spoke of was the invitational style in which he spoke. Can you describe what you meant by that term?