Prof: Okay,
we've already talked about the problems of using these texts
historically. If you remember,
early in the semester we talked about Galatians 1 and 2,
and Acts, and we tried to compare exactly when did Paul go
where with regard to Jerusalem, Damascus, Antioch.
And we saw that it's very,
very difficult to harmonize Galatians 1 and 2 with the
account of Acts in Paul's movements around Jerusalem.
We've also got a lot of other
situations where this would be very difficult.
I mentioned the differences
between Matthew and Luke as far as the birth narratives.
Just to try to figure out how
this would work, if you took the birth
narratives of Matthew and Luke it would be very,
very difficult to find out historically what happened.
For example,
if you just take Matthew, as I've said before,
Jesus' family seems to simply be in Bethlehem.
It doesn't say they're from
Galilee, it doesn't say they're
originally from Nazareth, they're just in Bethlehem,
and they're in Bethlehem well before Jesus is born because the
wise men in the East see the star and it takes them enough
time to travel from Persia, we're supposed to understand
from the narrative because they're called Magi,
and those are wise men from Persia,
all the way to Jerusalem. They meet up with King Herod
the Great, he gets his wise men to
consult, they then find out they're supposed to go to
Bethlehem, they journey to Bethlehem,
and then they get there not long after Jesus is born.
So according to Matthew,
you don't have any time actually in the narrative of
Matthew for the whole moving from Nazareth to Bethlehem
narrative that you get in the Gospel of Luke.
You just don't have time in
Matthew, they're just there. And then the angel appears to
Joseph in a dream and says, Herod's going to kill all the
babies, so Joseph takes the family,
they move to Egypt for a while. He gets another dream years
later, how many years, who knows, saying that Herod
the Great is now dead, so they go back--they start to
go back to Bethlehem because it says that's their home,
right? They go back home,
they're going to go to Bethlehem.
Instead they move to Galilee to
avoid Herod's son, who is at the time,
according to Matthew, ruling in Judea.
That's the sort of narrative.
You get to Luke and it's very
different. They're from Nazareth,
that's sort of Mary's hometown, Nazareth.
All the pregnancy of Mary takes
place with Mary in Nazareth. She even goes to Judea to visit
her kinswoman Elizabeth, who is the mother of John the
Baptist according to the Gospel of Luke,
and then she goes back to Nazareth,
and then it's according to this census,
the world census that they go to Bethlehem,
and it's while they're in Bethlehem in the stable,
because you don't have a stable in Matthew,
they're just maybe in a home or according to a lot of traditions
Jesus was-- there was a cave somewhere that
Jesus was born in. It's in Luke that you get the
whole story about--the Christmas story about the stable that
Jesus is born in because there's no room in the inn.
They stay in that area for a
month, we know that because it says
that they first have Jesus circumcised on the eighth day
from his birth, and then the time of
purification takes place, according to Leviticus,
which is about a month long, they take Jesus to the
presentation of the temple in Jerusalem.
And it's after that,
so a month or so after his birth that they then move back
home to Nazareth. Now there's no way you can
basically get these two narratives to fit together in
any respectable historical way. Does that mean that nobody's
ever tried to do it? No, of course you've got all
kinds of very, very smart fundamentalists who
believe that the New Testament has to be accurate in every
historical and scientific detail or they believe then it can't be
scripture. They will figure out some way
to try to make sure that both these narratives can be fit
together, but what I'm telling you is
that no reputable historian will accept this because you just
have to fudge the stuff too much;
you have to fudge the data. What do we believe about the
birth of Jesus? Most of us think we don't know
anything about the birth of Jesus.
All the Christmas stories are
later tradition, probably the one thing most of
us would say is that Jesus probably was from Nazareth,
his family was simply from Nazareth because he's called
Jesus of Nazareth. And the traditions that got him
to Bethlehem for his birth are probably later pietistic
traditions that Matthew and Luke later developed for different
reasons, but to get Jesus born in
Bethlehem for fulfillment of prophecy reasons.
If you take the birth of Jesus
in Luke and Matthew, it's--from a historical point
of view it's impossible really to harmonize them without coming
up with fantastic unbelievable conjugations of Jesus moving
back and forth to Egypt and the holy family and all this sort of
thing. We get lots of other kinds of
things about this too. What are some obvious
historical problems with the historical Jesus?
Well one of the things is the
trial of Jesus. There are different versions of
the trial of Jesus in the Gospels.
Unfortunately,
basically most scholars will say that we don't really know
what happened at the trial of Jesus.
We don't even know for sure
whether there was any kind of official trial.
It may have been that he was
just arrested in the middle of the night,
he was just then--they give him permission to be crucified and
he was crucified the next day. That would be the sensible way
of doing things. You didn't have to have--the
Romans didn't need elaborate trials in order to crucify Jews
who were rabble rousers in the first century,
they did it all the time. If you look at some of the
details of the trial notice how they're very different.
Mark 14, get your Bibles out.
Today we are talking about the
historical Jesus but I'm not just going to tell you what I
believe or what scholars believe about the historical Jesus,
I'm going to try to show you why scholars come up with ideas
that we have, how we get there,
what is our method for arriving at historical Jesus discussions.
Look at Mark 14:53:
They took Jesus to the high
priest and all the chief priests, the elders,
and the scribes were assembled. Peter had followed him at a
distance right into the courtyard of the high priest,
and he was sitting with the guards warming himself at the
fire. Now the chief priests and the
whole council were looking for testimony against Jesus to put
him to death but they found none.
Many gave false testimony
against him and their testimony did not agree.
Some stood up and gave false
testimony against him saying, "We have heard him say,
'I will destroy this temple that is made with hands and in
three days I will build another not made with hands.'"
But even on this point their testimony did not agree.
Then the high priest stood up
before them and asked Jesus, "Have you no answer?
What is it that they testify
against you?" But he was silent and did not
answer. Again the high priest asked
him, "Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed
One?" Jesus said, "I am.
And you will see the Son of Man
seated at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds
of heaven." [That's a quotation from
Daniel, so Jesus basically just says,
"I am," and then quotes Daniel.]
The high priest accused him of blasphemy.
Then look at chapter 15,
beginning of chapter 15, "
As soon as it was morning, the chief priests held a
consultation with the elders and scribes and the whole council.
They bound Jesus,
led him away, and handed him over to Pilate.
Pilate asked him,
"Are you the King of the Jews?"
He answered him,
"You say so." Then the chief priest accused
him of many things. Pilate asked him again,
"Have you no answer? See how many charges they bring
against you." But Jesus made no further reply
so that Pilate was amazed. Now notice all Jesus says at
his trial, according to Mark,
the oldest of our written testimonies,
is "I am" and a quotation of scripture at
one point, and then, "so you
say," in the next trial before Pilate.
Now compare that to what goes
on in the Gospel of John. I mentioned this a bit in my
lecture on the Gospel of John, how its narrative details are
very different from the synoptic Gospels.
One of the places where this is
really different is the trial of Jesus.
John 18:19, I'm not going to
read all of this because it's just way too long,
there's a part of--the interesting thing is that the
trial of Jesus goes on for a long time in the Gospel of John.
The high priest questioned
Jesus about his disciples and about his teaching.
Jesus answered,
"I have spoken openly to the world.
I have always taught synagogues
near the temple where all the Jews come together.
I have said nothing in secret.
Why do you ask me?"
Already Jesus has said a ton
more now than he has said in the other Gospels at his trial.
Then he just keeps going on,
he says more things: When he had said this,
one of the police standing nearby struck Jesus in the face
saying, "Is that how you answer
the high priest?" Jesus answered,
"If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong.
But if I have spoken rightly,
why do you strike me?" Then Annas sent him down to
Caiaphas the high priest. So according to John,
Annas and Caiaphas are kinfolk, and they're sort of both
members of the high priestly family.
You can go on and on.
At verse 28 is the trial--they
took Jesus to Pilate. Pilate went out to them and
said, "What accusation do you bring against this
man?" They answered,
"If this man were not a criminal, we would not have
handed him over to you." Pilate said to them,
"Take him yourselves and judge him according to your
law." The Jews answered,
"We are not permitted."
It goes on, Pilate talks to
Jesus, "Are you the King of the
Jews?" Jesus answered,
"Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you
about it?" Pilate said,
"I am not a Jew, am I?
Your own nation and the chief
priests handed you over to me. What have you done?"
Jesus said, "My kingdom
is--" Jesus just has a whole
conversation with Pilate which leads to that wonderfully
quotable phrase that everybody knows about where finally Jesus
talks about truth and Pilate says in a phrase that could be
sincere or a lot of people answered as being cynical,
"What is truth?" Very famous quotation from the
Gospel of John. Then of course there's the
whole passage, any of you seen
the--"Jesus Christ Superstar,"
the play or the movie? There's a whole scene where
Herod, this is actually the son of Herod the Great now,
but there's a trial before Herod also in the Gospel of
John, not really in Mark at all,
but in the Gospel of John you get this whole trial before
Herod. And according to "Jesus
Christ Superstar" this is when Herod kind of
dances around on this raft, and has showgirls,
and they all do this, "so you are the Christ,/
you're the great Jesus Christ,/ prove to me that you're no
fool,/ walk across my swimming pool," and all this sort of
thing. There's a whole scene,
and "Jesus Christ Superstar"
the whole scene wouldn't be possible without the Gospel of
John because it's not in the other Gospels.
This is a famous scene.
All of that's different in
John, so what's historical? How do scholars decide--you
have these very, very different--was Jesus
completely silent at his trial as it seems to be in the Gospel
of Mark? Did he not offer any reasons
for what he did, or did he have theological and
philosophical discussions with Pilate about his message?
What's historical?
In that case,
basically most historians are going to say none of it is.
None of the trial stuff can you
be confident would be historical.
For one thing,
we just have these very varied differences but there's one very
little interesting piece of evidence about this.
According to all the Gospels
where were the disciples after Jesus was arrested?
Anybody remember?
They vamoosed.
The Gospels say the disciples
ran away at the arrest of Jesus. So maybe according to some
traditions--according to these traditions maybe Peter was there
sort of in a courtyard, out removed from the trial.
But none of the disciples of
Jesus would have been allowed to be present at any trial whether
it was with his high priest or Pilate,
they wouldn't have been allowed in.
These were peasants from
Galilee, they're fishermen, they don't go walking into
Pilate's headquarters, so who would have been there to
report these different trial things?
There are no stenographers in
the ancient world sitting down taking notes of these trials.
There are no court records,
there are no journalists, nobody was there who later
Christians had access to so that they could possibly have known
what went on in the trial. According to most historians
who just say, all of this trial stuff was
very much made up by later Christians.
Why?
Because they figured you had to
have a trial if you're going to have Jesus condemned and so they
figured, well what would have taken place?
These Gospel writers,
or maybe they're using traditions that developed before
them, they're using traditions that
developed because people just say,
well what would have happened at Jesus' trial?
What's likely to have happened?
Then they make up that
likeliness and they put that into the story.
Now so you've got a couple of
different situations where we historians are very,
very skeptical about some of the basic aspects of the
Gospels' accounts as far as what they tell us about the
historical Jesus. The birth narratives,
we just throw up our hands. The trials before Pilate,
nope probably none of it rises to the level of history.
This leads to a couple of
different problems. The first one I'm going to talk
about is, so what? And I'm saying this because
once critical scholars start talking about the historical
Jesus, we immediately start stepping into sand traps.
On the one hand we have good
Christian people who are a bit afraid that if you start
questioning the historical reliability of the Gospels then
you're going to undermine every aspect of Christian faith.
If the birth narratives are not
as they say they are in the Gospels, then how can you trust
any of it to be true? If none of it is true,
how do you even know that Jesus actually even existed?
Or even if he did exist how do
you know that he wasn't a liar or a magician,
or just a bum? How do you--and if that's true,
why have faith? Why not just give up the whole
thing? On the one hand,
you've got Christians who are very threatened by using typical
historical tools on the Gospels and the very question of the
historical Jesus. On the other hand,
we have just as many people who are anti-Christian and they want
to grab onto this and say, aha, notice how reputable
scholars like Dale Martin, Woolsey Professor or Religious
Studies at Yale University, points out that not everything
in the Gospels is reliably history.
Well that means it's all a
bunch of bunk, and every Christian in the
world is basing their faith on things that are known by
scholars to be lies. Well that's not exactly right
either is it? But on both sides you get some
people who say-- who grab onto any sort of idea
that historians would say these are the discrepancies in the
Gospels, or these are places where we
don't have historical evidence to back us up and they want to
run with that precisely in order to impugn the faith of
Christians. So scholars have to be very
careful. What we basically want to
say--there was actually one or two scholars in the nineteenth
century, reputable scholars,
Bruno Bauer was one of them, a German scholar who denied
that Jesus ever existed. He just said it was all--even
the person of Jesus was a myth created by the church.
You'll find every once in a
while somebody on the web, or the internet,
or something or in some crazy blog,
saying that Jesus never existed, but reputable
historical scholars all admit that Jesus of Nazareth existed.
There was a guy back there,
Jesus of Nazareth. There's just too much evidence
that he existed and it's just not controvertible when it comes
to reliable historical evidence. That's a big difference from
saying, yes, we believe he existed and
there are some things we think we can say about him,
to accepting all of the Gospel materials as reliable.
Scholars basically are caught
in the middle of saying we believe there was a Jesus of
Nazareth, we believe we might even be
able to say some things as historians about who he was,
what he said, what he did,
why he may have been executed, and that sort of thing.
That means we have to use
critical historical tools to analyze these faith-based texts,
these theological texts, what are indeed,
in some cases, mythological texts.
We read theological texts to
try to figure out what we could say historically.
That leads to the other issue.
I keep saying "the
historical Jesus" because a whole lot of people
have the idea that once I give you the historical Jesus then
you've got the real Jesus. You've got Jesus as he really
was and so therefore Jesus as he really is.
Now the problem with that is
that theologians and I can put on my historical hat most of the
time, because I actually have a job as a historian.
I don't really have a job as a
theologian so I kind of a call myself sometimes an amateur
theologian. If I want to put on my amateur
theologian hat, I can make a case for you why
the historical Jesus is not a very good foundation for
Christian faith. It's not reliable as a
foundation of Christian faith, it's not sufficient as a
foundation for Christian faith. The theological Jesus,
the Jesus of Christian confession is not the historical
Jesus. The Jesus of theological
confession is the Jesus that matches what the church has
traditionally believed about Jesus.
For example,
Jesus that matches the creeds, a Jesus that matches Christian
confessions, so one of the most important
things for Christian confession, for example,
is--would you lose your faith if you believed that Jesus
wasn't born in Bethlehem but was rather born in Nazareth?
Probably most Christians would
say, well, no that's not really that important.
What's the most central thing
for most Christians of the Christian faith?
Do you believe that somehow God
was in Jesus Christ reconciling the world to himself,
to quote the Apostle Paul, or do you believe that Jesus
Christ is divine? Do you believe that Jesus is
God? Do you believe that Jesus is
God incarnate, God in the flesh?
That's a fundamental aspect of
Christian faith for most Christians.
Notice that's not something
that historians can pronounce about one way or another.
There's no possible way that I
practicing history by the normal historiographical tools of
history could tell you whether God was in Jesus Christ,
is there? I mean just think about it,
how would I test that? How would I figure it out?
What would count as a positive
proof? What would count as a
non-controvertible negative truth?
There's no such thing.
When I'm talking about the
historical Jesus I have to get over several hurdles.
One of the hurdles is trying to
show you that the historical Jesus is a construction made by
historians practicing the typical trade of modern
historians. It's just like,
for example, if I say what's the historical
Socrates? We don't have direct access to
Socrates either, right?
Socrates left no writings.
All we know about Socrates are
mainly the things that either Plato,
his disciple, said about him or Xenophon
another of his disciples said about him and a few other
things. You know what?
Plato and Xenophon don't give
the same picture of Socrates, so figuring out what this--who
is the historical Socrates is also a difficult historical
question that historians debate about.
That's the one thing is just
using typical historical data. For example,
if I say, we're going to talk about George Washington and
we're going to talk about the George Washington of history,
the George Washington that historians will come up with,
that's a different George Washington than say,
let's talk about the George Washington of popular American
piety. The George Washington of
popular American piety threw a dollar across the Potomac.
No historian believes that
George Washington threw a dollar across the Potomac,
at least not at Mt. Vernon.
If you've been to Mt.
Vernon you know that's a super
human feat. In popular American piety,
George Washington as a little boy chopped down the cherry tree
and when his father got onto him he said,
I cannot tell a lie father, it is I.
That's a George Washington,
it's the George Washington of American popular tradition,
and it's important to know that about George Washington.
No historian believes that
George Washington as a child actually chopped down the cherry
tree and that happened, and mainly because we actually
found the preacher who made up the story for a sermon.
It made a good sermon point.
Remember my motto,
what's the motto of the class? De omnibus dubitandum,
especially when you're listening to preachers or
professors. The historical Jesus is not the
same thing as the theological Jesus, so that's one point to
remember. Another--this is another
theoretical issue and this is very confusing for some people
when you first start thinking about it.
We often use the word
"history" in two different ways in common
English. We often use the word history
to refer simply to stuff in the past.
For example,
the Civil War is historical. That just means it happened in
the past. That's one way we use the word
"history" but it's kind of a sloppy way,
because if I want to say the history of the Civil War,
I'm not really talking in that case of the whole Civil War,
right? A historical account of the
Civil War is something-- is a narrative that will be
constructed by a historian to represent a story about whatever
happened in the past, but it can't replicate the
past, right? In order to replicate the Civil
War you would have to actually have the full four years--wasn't
it four years? However long the Civil War took
to fight you would have to have that amount of time because
every tiny detail, every action,
every person, every word,
every letter, everything anybody said all--
every tiny battle, every ant that crawled over a
decomposing corpse is part of the past of the Civil War.
That's not the history of the
Civil War, that's the Civil War as it occurred in the past.
The history of the Civil War is
an account of whatever happened in the past that a historian
constructs and then tells you. When we use the word
"history" in that more professional
sense, we're not talking about the
past, we're talking about an account of the past.
Often philosophers of history
like to separate these two words out,
and they'll use the word "past"
for the event that occurred in the past.
They'll use the word
"history" for an account of the event
that occurred in the past. Now notice what that means.
Histories are accessible to us,
right? You can go to the store and buy
a history of the Civil War, you can buy a history of George
Washington, and you can buy a history of Jesus Christ.
Does the history of the Civil
War that you buy in the store give you the Civil War?
No, it gives you an account of
the Civil War. The actual Civil War is
radically inaccessible to you. It's inaccessible,
you can't get it. Think about this,
how would you actually recover the actual past of the Civil
War? How would you do it?
Let's say you can't travel in
time like in TV, let's just say that
hypothetically. Does the Civil War exist
somewhere in space where the light that emitted from it is
still flying off in the universe somewhere?
If you could faster,
than the speed of light, fly out to that thing you could
actually experience the Civil War as it actually happened.
Well maybe theoretically,
but for any of us sitting here in this room,
that's not possible is it? In other words,
this is a radical thought to some people, but the past no
longer exists for you and me, it's radically gone.
The past is non-existent when
it comes to our experiences of it.
All we can experience are
different accounts of the past. We can experience different
constructions of the past. We cannot experience the past
itself. It's gone;
it's lost to us forever. That means the historical
Jesus, as Jesus actually existed in history, is inaccessible to
you. You will not find him,
you cannot find him, you will never find him.
What you can do is using
the trades-- the tricks of the trade of
modern historiography, you can play by the rules of
modern historiography and you can construct a historical
Jesus. That means a Jesus of Nazareth
constructed using the same kinds of historical tools as
historians would use to construct the historical George
Washington, the historical Socrates,
the historical Plato, the historical Abraham Lincoln.
That's a construction though.
Those theoretical points are
very important because when I talk about the historical Jesus
you cannot think, like most popular people think,
that what I'm talking about is the real Jesus,
the Jesus as he really was, or certainly not the Jesus of
Christian faith. What I'm giving you is an
account of Jesus that modern historians construct using the
typical tools of modern historiography.
That's a lot of theoretical
philosophy of history stuff that I tried to boil down in
straightforward language. Is there any questions or
comments about that before I go on?
All that stuff is necessary,
though, because people,
especially when they turn to objects of faith,
that you start asking historical questions,
people's minds start turning into mud.
All right, now let's just jump
right in, what could we say about the historical Jesus as
historians? Today I can't give you the
whole thing. If you want the whole thing,
all the answers to life-- well I won't give you cooking
recipes and that kind of thing, but if you want all the answers
to historical Jesus stuff as it comes from the expert,
moi, you can take my seminar in the fall that I'll be
teaching on the historical Jesus;
a whole semester just on the historical Jesus question,
so I'll do that in the fall. I'm going to give you the next
twenty minutes a little version of sort of the results,
I'll show you some of the results that we--
that I would say about the historical Jesus and I would
also say that Bart Ehrman, the author of your textbook,
will agree with most of this in his chapter in your textbook.
If you want more of that,
Bart Ehrman has a book on the historical Jesus called--
I think it's called, Jesus of Nazareth or
Apocalyptic Prophet of a New Millennium.
It's also published by Oxford
Press and its several years old, but he and I agree to a great
extent about this sort of thing. If you want more of this you
can look at Bart's book and it'll pretty much agree with a
lot of the stuff that I'm going to say,
or you can take my seminar next fall.
Here are some things that I
think we can agree about, most historians might agree
about, the historical Jesus and then I'll tell you how we got
there. We're going to talk about first
some results and then some methodology.
First, the sign on the cross,
does anybody remember what the sign on the cross when Jesus is
crucified says? Pardon?
Student:
> Prof: Say it again.
Student:
> Prof: Jesus of Nazareth,
King of the Jews. Anybody else?
Student:
> Prof: What did you say?
Student:
> Prof: Not "here
lies" but there's one verse that says "this is Jesus of
Nazareth," and it's because the four
different Gospels have slightly different wording but they all
have something version of "Jesus of Nazareth,
King of the Jews," which is of course why you
sometimes see this abbreviated from the Latin,
right? If you've seen it in churches,
INRI, have you ever seen that on a cross or something like
that in a church? Jesus of Nazareth in Latin,
rex King Iudaeorum of the Jews.
Notice how though it's slightly
different. Let's look--if you've got your
Bibles it's Mark 15:26, if you've got a parallel
version, I'm going to be looking at Throckmorton because it has
the synoptic parallels, it's Throckmorton paragraph
249, but somebody put your finger on Mark 15:26.
It's also Matthew 27:37,
it's also Luke 23:38, and it's also John 19:19.
Now in Mark 15:26 it says,
"The inscription of the charge against him read the King
of the Jews," that's it.
Then it goes on about other
stuff. Look over right next to it on
Matthew, it says, "Over his head
they put the charge against him said,
'This is Jesus, the King of the Jews,'"
so it's slightly different. Luke 23:38, there it is,
"There was also an inscription over him,
'This is the King of the Jews,'" and who has the
John version? John 19:19, did anybody put
their finger on John 19:19? "Jesus of Nazareth,
King of the Jews," and doesn't it say in John that
it was in different languages or am I--
Student: >
Prof: That's right;
Hebrew, Latin, and Greek in the Gospel of
John, so that's what we've got. One of the things that most
scholars will say is, we think that's historical.
Why do we think it's historical?
Well, for one thing,
it comes from at least two independent sources,
right? What are the two independent
sources that it comes from? It's in all four Gospels but
all four Gospels aren't independent sources are they?
Why?
Because we believe that Matthew
and Luke used Mark, so if Matthew and Luke copied
it from Mark, that makes Mark one source.
Did the author of John use the
Gospel of Mark? Not according to the theory
we're using in this class. Some people might say yes,
some scholars might say yes, but in this class we're going
on the theory that the Gospel of John probably didn't use Mark as
one of his sources. You've got the Gospel of John
as one source for this; you've got the Gospel of Mark
as another source for this, so you have two of what
scholars are willing to treat as independent sources,
which both have this nice little piece of data,
this data right there. Now the other thing is
that--might be interesting for you to know,
"King of the Jews" is not a Christological title
that early Christians used about Jesus.
Remember in the Gospels we've
seen a lot of different titles for Jesus.
He's the teacher,
he's the Son of God, he's the Messiah,
he's the Holy one of Israel we just saw.
He was a lot of things,
and these things are obviously things--
early Christians call him Lord, they called him Son of God,
but they didn't call him King of the Jews.
It was one of the titles of
Jesus that apparently the earliest followers of Jesus
didn't latch onto. So we don't see it in the
letters of Paul and we don't see it elsewhere in the Gospels.
So what scholars have said is,
look, this thing King of the Jews
doesn't look like a Christological confessional
title that Christians made up and then put into the Gospel.
It goes against the tendency of
the Christian writers themselves because it's not one of their
titles. If it had said,
"This is Jesus of Nazareth,
the Lord of heaven and earth," then scholars would
say, well that sounds like a
Christian confession. But saying, "Jesus of
Nazareth, King of the Jews," doesn't sound like a
Christian confession so it goes against the tendency of the
writers themselves and then we say,
well maybe then it's historical, maybe it's a little
glimpse of history sitting in there,
so that's one thing. The sign on the cross,
most scholars say that's historical.
Now I'll talk about why that's
important; it's a very small detail but it
could be very important. Yes sir?
Student:
> Prof: It could have,
exactly. In other words in the--the
questions was, didn't this come from the
mocking terms in the trial? That's exactly right.
The Christians,
if you notice, it's the people who are mocking
Jesus who call him King of the Jews and so why--
this is not something that the Christians writers want to
invent and then put in the story.
That supports that point,
so that is a nice little detail.
One other thing that scholars
often say may well be historical: Jesus was baptized
by John the Baptist. Why would scholars say this is
historical? Well there's not complete
agreement about how it happened. The Gospel of John doesn't
exactly tell you about the baptism of Jesus by John but it
has Jesus and his disciples, also baptized in the Jordan,
and it has Jesus very much connected to John the Baptist in
the beginning of its Gospel. The other Gospels do have Jesus
baptized by John, but notice how the story goes
along. All of the writers who have
Jesus baptized by John the Baptist,
they have Jesus come to John the Baptist and they say I want
to be baptized, and John the Baptist says,
oh no I shouldn't baptize you, you're the big kahuna,
you're bigger then I am. I'm not worthy to untie your
sandals, so I should be baptized by you,
you shouldn't-- I shouldn't be baptizing you
and Jesus says, no, no, no, it's okay baptize
me and so he does it and then you have the confession and the
voice from heaven and that sort of thing.
Notice what's going on here.
The Gospel writers are very
concerned because they know that it could be interpreted that
John baptizing Jesus makes John superior to Jesus and makes
Jesus a disciple of John. And they're not comfortable
with that because of course they believed Jesus is the Messiah
and so he's therefore superior to John the Baptist,
and John the Baptist was just a prophet or a precursor to Jesus.
The story is told to play down
this baptism a bit and make Jesus come out as insisting on
the baptism, wanting to do it for the right
kinds of reasons but not making Jesus a disciple of John.
And also this tradition about
the baptism of Jesus is in different sources in different
ways. Again, scholars say,
the baptism of John the Baptist baptizing Jesus doesn't look
like something early Christians would make up.
In fact, you can even see that
they try to tone down its implications.
It's not something they're
likely to make up, it kind of goes against their
tradition of raising Jesus up completely,
and therefore, it may be historical.
Notice what we've got then.
We've got two very small
details that a lot of scholars would say probably are
historical because they seemed to be witnessed by more than one
source and they also seem to go against the theological tendency
of the documents in which they're found.
And they frame the Gospel of
Jesus. The baptism of Jesus,
the beginning of his ministry, and the charge on the cross at
the end of his ministry, and now I'm going to back up.
Those two events,
let's just say I'm going to argue that those two are certain
historical events in the life of Jesus,
and then we'll fill in some of the other details later.
Right now let's talk about
method, how did I get here? First method,
first little rule, and this is something that a
lot of people use when they do historical Jesus research.
It took all of the twentieth
century for people kind of to develop these rules and to spell
them out in scholarship but this is kind of where we are now.
The first rule,
multiple attestation, that means when you have more
than one independent source that has a saying or an event about
Jesus, you tend to give it a little
more weight. Now of course what are
independent sources? If you have something in both
Matthew and Luke that doesn't count as two independent
sources, right? Because both Matthew and Luke
could have gotten it from Mark or they could have gotten it
from Q, but if you have something in
Mark and you have something in John,
well those are two independent sources.
If you also have something in
the Gospel of Thomas then most of us scholars would say,
well some people say the Gospel of Thomas may have known the
other Gospels, but most of us would say,
we're going to treat him as an independent source because he's
not verbatim quoting the other Gospels most of the time.
If you have an event or a
saying that occurs in Mark and John, and Q, and Thomas those
are three [correction: four]
independent sources. What if it also occurs in Paul,
Paul's letters? There's another independent
source. As we'll see there are some
places where Paul gives us a little clue about something.
Then obviously you can take Q
as being one of those sources, so if something is in both
Matthew and Luke but it's not in Mark then you can say it's in Q,
and sometimes people would even say you have one form of parable
that seems to have occurred in Q and you have a different form of
that parable that seems to have occurred in Mark.
Then you can say,
okay we have this one parable in two independent sources,
one is Q and one is Mark, but that's kind of complicated
because of course the very definition of what's in Q is
something that's in both Matthew and Luke but not in Mark,
usually. If something is in more than
one source it fits this criterion.
Now remember criteria is the
plural, criterion is the singular.
Let me illustrate this again.
One of the things is the sign
on the cross, the divorce sayings is another
situation. According to Mark 10 and
Matthew 19 you have this saying, "What God has joined
together let no man put asunder,"
and then you have a few other sayings.
Clearly Jesus,
in this passage, is teaching no divorce for his
disciples, no divorce at all, period, none,
against the rule to get divorced.
Then Matthew 5:32 has a
parallel with Luke 16:18 which makes it look like a Q source
and that has this wording, "Every man who divorces
his wife and marries another commits adultery,
and whoever marries a woman who has been divorced by her husband
commits adultery." In other words,
there's another teaching on divorce here,
both of which forbid--it also forbids divorce and remarriage,
but it's not the same wording as in Mark,
so scholars say, that looks like a Q saying on
divorce in which Jesus still forbids divorce and remarriage
but it's not the same wording as the Mark saying,
so we have two separate sayings and different wordings,
but they both have Jesus forbidding divorce,
at least divorce and remarriage; one in Q, one in Mark,
two independent sources. It's really neat then when we
find Paul in 1 Corinthians 7:10-11 says this,
so this is Paul, a quotation from Paul,
"To those who are married I command,"
that is Paul and then he says, "Not I but the Lord."
Paul even knows he's quoting a
saying of the Lord Jesus, so he goes onto say,
"That the woman must not separate from her husband,
if indeed she does separate let her remain unmarried or be
reconciled to her husband, and a man must not put away his
wife." Now most of us believe that's
Paul's wording because you can tell the way he's kind of
fudging around with some of the details of the saying.
At least Paul gives a witness
that he knows of an anti-divorce saying by Jesus also.
Three separate independent
witnesses that Jesus taught against divorce.
One from Mark that Matthew
copies, one from Q that both Matthew and Luke have,
and one from Paul, so that passes the multiple
attestation rule. It also passes the next rule,
which is dissimilarity. When you find something in a
source, the early Christian source,
that seems to go against the very inclinations of that
source, or of early Christianity,
it's more likely to be historical.
Something that swims against
the tide of early Christian expectation.
Now why does the--divorce
saying is multiply attest-- it also passes the
dissimilarity thing because almost all of these authors,
except for Mark, they both seem to know that
Jesus prohibited divorce entirely but then they go on to
modify the rule a bit because I mean let's face it people get
divorced, early Christians got divorced.
So Paul says,
well you're not supposed to get divorced, but if you do get
divorced then you should do this.
The very writers who pass on an
anti-divorce saying also fudged the saying just a bit,
which shows that the saying is more radical than their own
ethics are. In other words,
the anti-divorce saying is dissimilar to the very practices
of these early Christians. It's more radical then they are
themselves practicing and that's a clue that the saying itself
goes back to the historical Jesus,
according to this method. Dissimilarity is any kind of
thing that doesn't fit early Christian tendencies.
The sign on the cross,
I already talked about that, it wasn't a confession of
Jesus. The baptism of John,
it's not something they likely would have invented.
There's another one,
the swords at Jesus' arrest, and according to Mark 14:47 and
it's followed by Matthew and Luke,
somebody had a sword at Jesus' arrest in the garden,
and somebody used it. According to the different
traditions it was Peter, according to John and somebody
made-- the others don't name,
somebody whacked off the high-- the ear of the high priest's
slave, but there are these different
stories about somebody in Jesus' entourage was armed and in some
of the sources-- one of the sources there are
two of them-- or there were two
swords--others say one sword. Now I think this is historical.
Why?
Because all the Gospel writers
want to go out of their way to say Jesus was not mounting a
violent revolution. He was not a criminal,
this was not an armed rebellion, he is completely
innocent of any political charge of insurrection.
But if Jesus' disciples were
armed with swords at his arrest, in the middle of the night,
at the Passover in Jerusalem, that's insurrection,
folks. The Romans did not allow Jews
just to go around in the middle of the night in gardens carrying
swords. For a Jew to be armed,
at the Passover, an especially dangerous time,
that the Romans were really worried about,
for a Jew to be armed following around a guy who some people
were saying was the King of the Jews,
you can be arrested for that, you can be crucified for that.
I don't think early Christians
invented it. I think some of these early
Christians knew that at least one and possibly more of Jesus'
disciples were armed at his arrest.
Why do I think that?
Because it's not something they
would have invented. In fact, it goes against their
tendency. There's another passage,
Mark 10:18 which is also in Luke 18:19.
You may have come across this,
the man comes and asks Jesus about what should I do to have
eternal life, what's the good thing for me to
do, and Jesus says,
why do you ask me about the good,
there's no one good but God. Now, apparently,
Mark writing that didn't have a theological hiccup but now let
me--I'm a good Episcopalian. Why should you ask Jesus about
the good, God's the only who is good.
Sound weird?
If Jesus is actually God then
you wouldn't say it like that. In other words,
this sounds like Jesus himself is denying that he's God.
Don't ask me about the good,
the only one who knows about good is God, and Jesus goes and
answers the question. I think this saying was
actually--something like this was said by the historical
Jesus. Why?
Because early followers of
Jesus believed Jesus was God in some sense.
I don't think this is something
they would invent. It goes against their
confession. It goes against their theology,
so it's one of these cases where it's dissimilar to their
faith, and therefore,
we tend to give it a higher grade when it comes to
historicity. A couple of other criteria are
a bit weaker, these are the two strongest.
Social coherence.
This is when you say--when you
use something that is either anachronistic and it doesn't
look like it would fit in with the life of Jesus or it does fit
very well with the life of Jesus.
If I decide,
for example, on lots of different other
sayings that I've decided are historical because of these
other reasons, and then something looks like
it--a saying of Jesus looks like it's apocalyptic and I've
already established that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet,
then I'm going to say well it coheres with the social
situation of Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet in Galilee.
Or take a negative example,
in Matthew 18 there are a lot of rules about what you should
do in the church, the very word
"church" is used.
Almost all of us scholars would
say a lot of that stuff in Matthew 18 about the church,
the church rules, the church leadership,
that's not historical. Why? Because the church didn't exist
in Jesus' lifetime. Jesus sounds like he's giving
rules about a constitution for a church but we think that's
anachronistic. The church is something that
developed after Jesus' death when his followers came to
believe that he had been raised from the dead and then they
should continue doing things in his name.
In Jesus' own lifetime,
traveling around Galilee, talking about--now when you
have the church you should meet on Sundays,
I think for Easter you should wear white--
Jesus didn't do this sort of thing.
All of that stuff in Matthew 18
that looks very much like later church life,
we believe was read back into the life of Jesus by the author
of Matthew or other people. Then the last thing is,
the last criterion is rather weak, it's called the criterion
of coherence. This basically just says,
if you've established something as being historical about Jesus
by these other stronger criteria,
and then something else seems to cohere with it,
then you can kind of throw it in the pot.
It's a very loose kind of
criterion to use for historical purposes.
Now--so where are we?
That's the methodology.
If we're going to come up with
some basic ideas about Jesus here's where I would say I would
end up with. There's some of this that's
very controversial. I would say,
though, that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet,
an apocalyptic Jewish prophet. One of the reasons is that
Jesus' life was framed by two apocalyptic events.
If Jesus was baptized by John
the Baptist, and John the Baptist seems
clearly to have been preaching some kind of apocalyptic message
about the coming kingdom, that means I think,
that Jesus was originally a follower of John the Baptist,
although the later Gospel writers will play that down.
If Jesus was a follower of an
apocalyptic Jewish prophet I think that,
at least the beginning of his own ministry,
was wreathed in that apocalyptic Jewish prophecy kind
of world, and he was executed on a charge
of sedition as being the King of the Jews,
against the law. Only the Roman senate got to
make kings, and if Jesus was going around
claiming-- and I'm not saying he was
claiming, but if other people were
claiming that he was the King of the Jews,
the only way to understand that I think in this situation is
that he believed that he was going to be the Messiah that
would come at the end of time and overthrow the Romans.
So his death was also
apocalyptic. The temple incident,
we could talk about that, did Jesus go in and throw the
money changers out and cleanse the temple as it said?
I think that's historical.
It goes against the tendency of
the Gospels to portray Jesus as violent and confrontational in
that last week. I think he therefore did it.
What did it mean?
I think it--this is more
debatable, I think it was a prophecy meant
to enact what he saw would be the coming future destruction of
the temple by God and some kind of apocalyptic event at the end
of time. I think Jesus was therefore a
lower class Jewish peasant who spoke mainly Aramaic.
I think he had a group of
disciples of twelve, I won't go into some of these,
but I think he actually did form twelve of his disciples to
be an inner core group. I think even that's apocalyptic.
Why would he have twelve
disciples? Why did he choose the number
twelve? Because there were twelve
tribes of Israel that would be reconstituted at the end of time
according to Jewish expectation. I think there are also women
that were part of his inner circle,
and this is because women later in early Christianity were
marginalized from leadership positions,
but there's all kinds of evidence from the resurrection
narratives, to the presence of Mary
Magdalene, to other women that they were part of his inner
circle of disciples. I think that he never taught
the end of the Jewish law but I think he did teach what was
something of a liberalizing version of the Jewish law.
In other words,
that the ethical treatment of your fellow human beings counted
as more important than actual details of observing the Jewish
law, such as keeping kosher,
washing your hands, keeping the Sabbath.
Did Jesus think he was the
Messiah? I think this is a really big
problem. I don't know.
There seem to be places where
he makes no open claim to Messiahship in his ministry,
except in the Gospel of John remember.
So the Gospel of John actually
we tend to treat that as less historically reliable in these
things because it looks very much more like Christian
theological confession. In the Synoptic Gospels,
Jesus doesn't make open claims to being the Messiah.
On the other hand,
he was executed for being King of the Jews.
The Romans at least thought he
was claiming to be the Messiah, or they thought that other
people were claiming that about him.
What he thought himself is very
difficult. One of the things,
though, and I think we can say for sure, and this is where I'll
end today. Jesus, himself,
I believe, never saw himself as the founder of Christianity.
He didn't think about himself
as starting a new religion. I believe he saw himself as
preparing the people of Israel to make them ready for the
apocalyptic in-breaking of God that was to happen at the end of
time, or at the end of our time,
and the setting up of a new time of the Kingdom of God,
the Kingdom of Israel that would incorporate the whole
world. The way I would do this is
Jesus was an apocalyptic Jewish prophet who was executed because
the Romans at least believed that he or his disciples were
making dangerous claims that he was the King of the Jews.
That's all you get on the
historical Jesus, sorry.
Next time we start on Paul.
See you next time.
Introduction to New Testament (RLST 152)
It is obvious that certain narratives in the New Testament contradict each other and cannot be woven into a historically coherent whole. How, then, do scholars construct who the "historical Jesus" was? There are several principles that historical Jesus researchers follow, which include considering data that 1) has multiple attestations and 2) is dissimilar to a text's theological tendencies as more likely to be historical. Using the modern methods of historical research, it becomes possible to construct a "historical Jesus."
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