In Search of the Historical Jesus

[Music] [Music] [Music] thank you very much I understand that I arrived in Santa Barbara on the day it's rained earlier in the fall and in living memory so we get so much sunshine in Denver it's nice to have a break down in and appreciate your providing that for me in case you're wondering what the stool is doing up here I have a knee that is missing certain crucial parts so I will not be able to stand between now and 9 o'clock or however long we go and from time to time I will sit but to hope that that doesn't disrupt your evening too much thank you for the introduction now let me give you the real title of actually it was close and you should have a handout in front of you but you were given which I tried to put enough detail on it so that those of you that really don't want this to feel like another class can at least have an idea where I'm going and you can as they say in the IMAX theaters sit back and relax but for those of you that really are serious students there's at least little tiny bits of space for you to jot a note or two I've entitled this new developments in historical Jesus research which is simply a pompous way of referring to the fact that Jesus continues to be the topic of extensive writing and research all the way from very popular best-selling books in the average secular bookstore all the way to very technical works of biblical scholarship and I want to survey the landscape with you a little bit tonight let you know what's out there some you will have probably heard of much may be new to you and then try to help evaluate a little bit of what that landscape involves and then bring us to some conclusions and as Landon mentioned throw it open for what I hope will be a time of discussion I start by referring perhaps arrogantly to what I have called popular mythology but I think it would be fair to say that university professors from whatever spectrum or background or ideology would agree on one thing and that is that not every book about Jesus however new or touted or marketed it may be in the popular bookstore necessarily reflects scholarship at all and I've given three categories of works that may be well-known or not so well known in various circles that fall under what I have labeled popular mythology the first still sounding very arrogant I have labeled perspectives unrelated to any real historical evidence one example of several that I can think of is a professor retired from the department of atmospheric sciences just up the coast a state from here at Oregon State University who in his retirement became interested in UFO G and became convinced that a German document that he read by a German UF ologist was in fact the original Gospel of Matthew it looked very much like the Bible's Gospel of Matthew accepted key points where Jesus wound up being an alien from outer space who came to this planet to dispense New Age wisdom rather remarkable that someone who's had an illustrious career as a university professor in a particular field could fall for something like this and write two books one of which was published by a almost reputable Academic Press but it's out there a brand new book that is a very good book this year by a man named Robert Van Voorhis on the evidence for Jesus outside the New Testament has one lengthy introductory chapter which does nothing but refute the various people throughout the history of modern scholarship who have tried to deny that Jesus ever existed notwithstanding the fact that there is all kinds of non-christian evidence from the ancient world to support that that stuff is out there people know about it and an informed response needs to be made then there's a second category that I've labeled distortion or misrepresentation of recently discovered evidence now I'm using recently very generously here as in within the last 50 years or so given that Christianity has been around for 2,000 the Dead Sea Scrolls most of you undoubtedly will have at least heard of them discovered in Israel just after world war ii have both in their initial finding and then in the 1990s after a flurry of translation efforts completed the previously untranslated fragments have it time spawned all kinds of sensationalist claims in the media many of which are simply not true one of the strangest and she continues to write even as we speak are the writings of an australian scholar by the name of barbara theorem i had the privilege of speaking in australia for three weeks in August and was running into people who had heard about her work in a number of different contexts who argues that because of what we learned about Jewish backgrounds from the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Jewish community that too went out into the Judean wilderness and created a kind of a commune and set up religious rules for themselves that we can now go back to the New Testament and decode it and discover that all of the main characters Jesus and Paul and the various apostles were actually sceen Jews and also members of this monastery at a site called Qumran nobody in the scholarly world to my knowledge of any spectrum of any place on the spectrum accepted this theory but it's out there and it sold more copies of books than anything I'll ever write which means that I need to continue to worry about the problems of envy and and continue to work on that then in a very different category and there are more examples that could be given in each of these I've listed what I call unfounded claims of textual corruption and again this is not an issue that divides bona fide biblical scholars it is widely agreed that the text particularly of the New Testament certainly of both Testaments compared to works of the ancient world in general but particularly the New Testament because of the thousands of manuscripts first in Greek and in other ancient languages that have been preserved from the first millenium of the Christian era hundreds from the first several centuries from fragments to relatively complete documents that we are able to reconstruct with 97 some would say 99 plus percent certainty what the original New Testament writers wrote now that's a completely different question then do we believe what they wrote but if we're not even sure if we have accurate copies and translations of what they wrote then that makes the the truth question the question that the Veritas forum asks even that much harder to get at but it's widely agreed that we have the New Testament in particular in better textual shape than any document from antiquity on any topic whatsoever specifically because it was so crucial to such a large group of people that care was taken that it would be very carefully preserved that fact is very important in conversations with friends of ours who may represent either the Muslim religion or closer to historic Christianity the Mormon faith because in their writings in the Quran and the Book of Mormon and other writings of Joseph Smith more particularly there are claims that the New Testament was not well preserved either that certain portions had gotten distorted and we don't have the the stories accurately of what the people wanted to tell us or that entire missing books have been left out at some point we probably need to study a little bit about that so that we can get the facts straight but now I want to come to what I want to spend most of our time together tonight on and that's what I have called the scholarly spectrum if scholars are agreed that works in these first three categories do not represent the truth or anything close to it there is still a huge spectrum within bona fide scholarship with what has been called the quest for the historical Jesus a quest that really encompasses largely the last 200 years of the 2000 that Christianity has existed in the nineteenth century more or less the first hundred years with a little bit beginning already just before the 19th century there were many different philosophical schools that all spawned books about the life of Jesus in an age when science was increasingly coming to doubt the miraculous there was a rationalist school of philosophy that tried to preserve elements of New Testament faith in the Gospels pictures of Jesus but explaining the apparently miraculous with rationalistic explanations Jesus didn't really walk on the water there were sandbars or stones shortly beneath the surface and in the night in a stormy period of time on the lake could Jesus walked out on these and it was mistaken for a supernatural event and other examples of that kind there was a Phyllis Ithaca school that increasingly studied the religious work of antiquity in terms of myth and in terms of legend and and try to also wrestle with the question of the miracles of Jesus and of the New Testament not by giving them scientific explanations but by saying that these were not written as stories designed to communicate historical fact in the first place like many religions in the history of the world they were sacred myth they were not true stories of something that happened but they communicated theological truth things that people believed were important there was a school of philosophy known as Romanticism which for those of you that haven't studied philosophy has nothing to do with Hollywood movies and back in the area when in the era when they were romantic rather than just lustful which seems to be increasingly the case and and and out of this school came a picture of Jesus as a wonderful kind teacher who inspired the crowds who uplifted and exalted his audiences with lofty thoughts but did little that would embroil him in controversies sufficient to get him crucified and then there was a yet another school of thought that today after another century has passed is sometimes called the old or the 19th century liberal position influential in many aspects of the settling of America back before we had crowded this country to the extent that we have now and there was optimism that Americans in particular and Christians as a significant part of them were going to Christianize the earth we're going to create a better humanity and a better earth than had ever been seen in his history before it talked about the Fatherhood of God in the brotherhood of man long before anybody dreamed up inclusive language and the problems that those terms would create until at the end of the 19th century a young German scholar who would live into his 90s into the 1970s by the name of Albert Schweitzer who would go on one day to have an illustrious career in West Africa as a humanitarian doctor medical doctor as well as a theologian Albert Schweitzer wrote a book that was translated into English in 1906 with the title the quest of the historical Jesus and what it was was a several hundred page very detailed chronicle of all of the different writers in the 19th century and the philosophical schools of thought they represented who had penned lives of Jesus and what Schweitzer demonstrated in a very devastating expose was that in virtually every case these authors had simply recreated today we might say reinvented Jesus in the image of the school of philosophy to which they belonged they were not doing pure historical research by a long shot interestingly some would say ironically Schweitzer himself was a member of a school of theological study that focused on apocalyptic literature literature about the end of the world literature from the ancient Jewish and Greek and Christian environment about how the only solution to humanity's plight would be for God to supernaturally intervene into the universe and recreate what humanity could never make right on its own and ironically as some would say Schweitzer after convincingly showing how so many others had recreated Jesus in their own image so to speak in the minds of many fell victim to the same air as he portrayed in the closing chapters of his book Jesus who was a firebrand of a preacher a radical apocalyptic who believed that God was going to bring about the end of the world within the lifetime of his followers that his crucifixion would begin the events that would lead to this but as history has shown it turned out he was sadly mistaken and because it became quickly apparent to other scholars that Schweitzer had fell victim to the very same trap that he had so carefully exposed in other writers a period of time ensued which some more recent scholars have simply dubbed the period of no quest people still continue to study Jesus they still continue to write books about him but not nearly to the same degree not nearly in the same number and not nearly with the same confidence that much of anything could be known about Jesus if it seemed we were always doomed to recreate him in his own image the dominant figure from roughly 1900 to 1950 in New Testament scholarship and in historical Jesus research in particular was another German by the name of Rudolf Bultmann another man who lived into his 90s and had a very illustrious career and in one famous quotation in an early writing Bultman said that all that we can be certain of about Jesus was that he existed he moderated that skepticism as his career went on and in fact he wrote a detailed book about the history of the synoptic tradition the first three Gospels Matthew Mark and Luke in which he did indicate a number of things that he believed could be said about Jesus but it was a very small shell of the sum total of the four Gospels in the New Testament interestingly philosophically Bultman was an existentialist and his Jesus was also an existentialist but after World War two and all of the upheavals that that created in university life around the Western world a trio of boatman's former graduate students all now beginning and well into new testament teaching careers two of them German Ernst K Zaman and Gunther born calm and one of them an American who still teaches here in Southern California though in retirement James Robinson all got together at a reunion in Marburg Germany for former students of Rudolf Bultmann and held a conference in which papers were given a couple of them were entitled the new quest for the historical Jesus and these students had come to the conclusion that the skepticism of Bultmann was unwarranted and that more could be said and known about this figure who was the founder of Christianity they analyzed Jesus sayings in considerable detail they suggested that he did and said things that at least implicitly suggested that he believed he was God's agent use the term cautiously Messiah if you like but because of the era still coming out of the events of World War two they focused in the minds of most scholars who have subsequently read them too much on Jesus uniquenesses against his environment and too little on the ways that Jesus was thoroughly and comfortably Jewish in his first century Jewish milieu and so that movement - after having its heyday in the early 50s and into about the mid-60s began to tail off and from roughly the mid 60s to about 1980 there was again a diminishing of interest and scholarly research in Jesus that brings us to the last twenty years if my arithmetic is still correct nineteen - mm and what I have now labeled the current diversity perhaps the most publicized group of individuals to write and talk about Jesus in the last 20 years is the group that from the perspective of a number of outsiders to their movement still smacks of Bultmann and the new quest in terms of a fairly outdated historical methodology and that is the famous Jesus Seminar centered for many of its events here in Southern California publishing with Polebridge press out of Sonoma Robert Funke and John Dominic Crossan in Burton Mack perhaps the three scholars who are both the most famous and most have spearheaded that movement from the mid 80s until quite recently they became famous because they courted media attention and created two large books that were published in the 90s where every verse in the four Gospels and an apocryphal document known as the Gospel of Thomas were color-coded either red pink grey or black according to the probability they thought that Jesus really said or did that particular item when they came out with their book on the sayings of Jesus the news that was flashed around the country was that only 18 percent of all of the sayings in all five Gospels were colored either red Jesus said it exactly that way or pink we have it at least close and only three sayings out of the entire Gospel of John we're anything other than black which means there must be some mistake and that was a direct quote of the Jesus Seminar but when one studied their methodology one wasn't surprised by some of the results as presuppositions they ruled out of hand anything that is attributed to gee that can't be detached from its context unless something could have circulated as a short proverbial potentially cryptic saying all by itself doesn't qualify well that wipes out a considerable amount to start with Jesus could never have talked about the future never matter the question of whether he could predict the future he didn't even talk about it he never talked about judgment because judgment is not a worthy concept of an enlightened religion he never talked about himself no it's not that he just didn't make exalted claims for himself he never talked about himself and identified who he was in any category anybody know any religious teacher in the history of the world that didn't do that and so it's not surprising that the resulting portraits of Jesus have been called by some more akin to a cynic sage using cynic in the technical sense of the greco-roman school of philosophy of the wandering cynics itinerant philosophers who love to subvert the cultural mores of the day and point out flaws with received tradition and received wisdom and and act in very counter cultural ways in public never mind the fact that cynicism is the greco-roman philosophy that had least inroads into Israel of all this is the portrait that emerges in many circles but there is another spectrum there is another development that is much more encouraging that has increasingly been called the third quest of the historical Jesus some of its defining characteristics include very different from the first to a conviction that any convincing portrait of Jesus must ground him thoroughly in early first century Israeli Judaism he must make sense in a Jewish context even when he differed from many of his contemporaries it's not enough for the third quest to focus somewhat atomistic Leon individual sayings and deeds and try to rank their probability but one has to ask broader integrating questions what were Jesus aims what were in his intentions particularly what on earth got him crucified the most secure fact historically because we know it from both Jewish and greco-roman sources from the ancient world what in the world got him crucified under Pontius Pilate what was so dangerous or perceived to be dangerous or subversive about this man and so different kinds of portraits are beginning to emerge there's a growing appreciation that science has not disproved the miraculous in the least science by definition can only adjudicate on that which follows laws that are recurring and that can be traced and repeated in the laboratory with experiments if there is a God then it makes sense that he could if he chose at times suspend or work through in unique ways the forces of nature in ways that we cannot explain and there is a recognition that the historical support again not simply within Christian sources but outside Christian sources as well from the ancient world is extremely strong that Jesus was perceived as a miracle worker and there is increasing agreement to cross many different to parts of this spectrum that Jesus did indeed see himself as some kind of Messiah some kind of Savior sent from God in ways that would have been perceived by at least some in his world as to exalted acclaim and which could indeed get him in trouble with various authorities now even as we keep narrowing things down from the mythological to the surely to the old scholarship to newer scholarship to better newer scholarship there still is a broad spectrum a very helpful book by man named Ben Witherington called the Jesus quest just out couple of years ago I have shamed face ugly plagiarized the next titles from him but since I've now acknowledged it it's no longer plagiarism there are scholars who have focused on elements in the Gospels that portrayed Jesus as what we might call a charismatic holy man someone who like one or two other Jews that were written about in ancient rabbinic literature completely outside all of the typical institutional channels of religious power nevertheless had a charisma to their personality that attracted masses taught important and helpful religious truths had a reputation for working miracles and challenged the authorities because they were perceived as a threat both in popularity and power to those authorities there's another approach that has been labeled by Witherington Jesus as a social reformer I've listed some scholarly names under all of these circles that you probably don't want to hear about in detail in this context but we can get into them in the question answer time if you like there is an element in the Gospels that seems legitimately to point to Jesus as a wandering teacher who was trying to begin a renewal movement within Judaism and bring people who had fallen away from the morals of their own religion and the practices of their scriptures back to God and who in doing so attracted crowds of others who went on the roads much like a peripatetic philosopher in the greco-roman world and literally took his message around the countryside that he was in many ways protesting against social corruption and injustice in his society and preaching a love for one's enemy which is not a popular message in in many cultures modeling a kind of nonviolent resistance to oppression and injustice in ways it could very much work both religious and political authorities in his day there's another school that perhaps has received as much attention as any in this set of categories that harks back to Schweitzer's emphasis on Jesus as a prophet one who looked to the future and who looked for God to soon intervene and create a new world and a new world order it hasn't always been attached to the notion that Jesus had a timetable for all of this so that one can look back and say he was mistaken but there are some including two books that are brand-new this past summer one by Paula Fredrickson from the University of Boston and one by Bart Ehrman from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill that have tried to revive even that dimension of Schweitzer's approach then there are writers who have focused on all of the allusions throughout Jesus teaching to that body of Jewish literature known as wisdom literature books like Proverbs and psalms and Ecclesiastes other intertestamental Jewish works that contained further proverbs and wise instruction and it began to develop a notion found already in the Old Testament in Proverbs 8 and 9 of God himself being personified as wisdom so that wisdom isn't just an abstract virtue but begins to be a lady who can call out to the young men of the streets common and learn from me and find wisdom from God that branch can be subdivided into two quite different approaches there is a burgeoning feminist scholarship including in the study of the historical Jesus the matriarch of that movement is almost certainly Elizabeth Schuessler Firenze now in partial retirement for many years at the University of Notre Dame where the emphasis was on the fact that in both Hebrew and in Greek wisdom was personified as a woman and exploring all of the possibilities of Jesus alluding to and drawing on this divine feminine tradition a man like Ben Witherington a professor at Asbury seminary in Kentucky who also wrote to Jesus quest that I alluded to isn't so much concerned with gender issues as simply to show Jewish precedence for how Jesus and subsequent Christians could use language that sounded like language of divinity when the Jews were so unrelentingly monotheists there is only one God and you cannot create another God and then perhaps at the most conservative end of the spectrum our number of scholars not all of them have angelical Protestants by any means who have focused on the question of Jesus seeing himself as a messiah even if he was we might call a marginalized Messiah one who was not ultimately viewed in those categories by many in his world one of these scholars and I think now is the time for me to both sit down and take off my coat basically because it's hot up here I guess you're making up for the cool day I came into a specific focus on a man who I think has done the work that it may be the most significant historical Jesus research of the past decade if not a considerable longer time than that his friends call him Tom write his books use NT if you want to tackle a bite-sized bit of write he has written a little book called who was Jesus if you want to tacky tackle a medium-sized book he has written the challenge of Jesus and if you want to get your PhD in New Testament you will need to read the 700 small print pages Jesus and the victory of God right like many in the third quest takes the more holistic or integrative approach of asking a narrative question in all the diversity of first century Judaism he observes there is one particular feature that any Galilean peasant fisherman waking up and going out to the lake for his morning's work would have daily been reminded of the Jews you see believed that they were God's elect people they believed that God had chosen to deal with them in certain unique ways that he had not chosen to deal with any other people he created they believed their Scriptures were the infallible inerrant Word of God and in those scriptures Christians today call them the Old Testament it was said over and over and over again that if the Jews would follow God and accept his covenant they would live in the promised land they would live in the land of Israel and they would live in the land in freedom from any invading power and in peace without warfare and in prosperity enjoying the fruit of the land but you see in the first half of the first century Rome had been an occupying force since 63 BC no one living at the time of Christ except perhaps the very oldest by the time he began his public ministry could ever have remembered a time when the Jews were free people in the land the infallible God had promised to them in their inerrant scriptures and so the question was what went wrong and what are we to do about it in order to claim those promises right also wrote a book called the New Testament and the people of God which goes into Jewish backgrounds in great detail and in a very fascinating way takes a look at all of the different Jewish groups and sects that we've ever uncovered and know about and one can differentiate them in very helpful ways by asking and answering as best we can that specific question the problem was the problem of Exile of not living in freedom many Jews were literally in exile scattered around the Roman Empire but even those that were living in their homeland we're not living in freedom free to enact and enforce their own laws and obey their God in all the ways they wanted to what's gone wrong and what are we to do about it is an excellent way to get a handle on all the diversity of first century Judaism Jesus as a first century Jew belongs in that spectrum of answers and writes thesis boiled down the 700 page book or the 300 page book or the 150 page book to one sentence which would never be fair but we'll try anyway is that Jesus came and noun Seng that the Exile was over without one Roman soldier having been removed from his post makes no sense how can this be well because in Jesus teaching according to right and I think he's right Jesus implicitly and explicitly made five significant redefinitions a very central Jewish tenants he redefined monotheism the Lord our God the Lord is one is straight out of the heart of the Jewish law and Jesus quoted it and affirmed it but yet he spoke about himself and he spoke about the invisible Spirit of God in ways that would at least plant the seeds for what later was called the doctrine of the Trinity that somehow God was involved with himself and with the spirit that empowered him in a way that at the very least became problematic for many Jewish people secondly he redefined the doctrine of election no I'm not talking about Bush versus Gore I already voted by the way we have early voting in Denver maybe you do too and so I did that last Tuesday I won't tell you and that would be to change the topic instead of one ethnic group being the guaranteed ticket to being part of God's chosen people Jesus taught that his followers of any ethnic group certainly all of his first followers were Jews but not all Jews became his followers only a small minority did he also traveled occasionally outside of Israel engaged in brief ministry to Gentile non-jewish people and planted the seeds for a substantial Gentile mission following his thirdly he implicitly and explicitly redefined liberation or salvation Rome was not the worst enemy Satan was the devil or to put it another way it's not political freedom that is the most important issue it's spiritual freedom although we do have to remember that the separation of church and state was an American notion invented a little over 200 years ago and nobody would have thought of politics and religion not being intimately intertwined in the ancient world fourthly he redefined the Messiah and his role focusing on passages of Scripture particularly out of the prophecies of Isaiah 52 and 53 that spoke about a suffering servant who would be despised and rejected and died and the sins of the world would be placed on him and by his sufferings humanity would be healed texts that most Jews thought was being fulfilled corporately by the people of Israel that they were suffering for the sins of the world Jesus understood that as a Messianic job description if you like and so instead of leading a group of soldiers in warfare against Rome saw his death as central to his mission and then finally and fifthly redefined the notion of a new age of a messianic age of that coming time of a golden era of peace and prosperity as something that in fact would have to come in two stages so that there were many Old Testament prophecies that were fulfilled in his lifetime but that there were many left to be fulfilled including the vision of universal peace and Lyon lying down with the lamb and a little child leading the wild animals without being harmed that reconstruction of Jesus I would like to suggest makes sense and it helps us to answer some of those bigger questions like why was Jesus crucified now Wright is a believer but he writes a lot of puns here as a historian and does not intentionally presuppose his belief in his historical work so one of the things that he very helpfully does is develop a historical methodology considerably more sophisticated than the previous quests have developed where in the past the tendency has been to see Jesus just in his uniqueness over against Judaism right develops what he calls the double similarity and dissimilarity criterion what does that mouthfull mean well he points to a number of features of repeated frequently attested information about Jesus both inside the Gospels and elsewhere that fulfills actually four separate criteria this criterion really has four parts to it first of all it must make sense within first century Judaism nobody can be so totally different from their culture that they're not even intelligible within it but secondly for Jesus to have had the effect and in essence start an entirely new religious movement he had to have differed in significant ways from conventional Judaism similarly there will be lines of continuity between what he did and taught and the movement he founded the early church and emerging Christianity but there will also be differences ways in which his followers were not able to keep his high standard in which some of his harder teachings were misunderstood or toned down and when one particular theme or teaching fits all four of those criteria or that one four-part criterion simultaneously it's quite likely we have genuine historical tradition that wouldn't have been made up by anybody else interestingly a large number of the major themes of the Gospels particularly Matthew Mark and Luke passed through this grid and come out with flying colors if all of that approximates what someone simply wearing a historians hat not necessarily presupposing faith in God or in the Bible of Christians if anything like that is close to being true then we have an explanation for the polarization that occurred in Jesus day and the polarization that is still occurring in many parts of the world as there are record number of Christians as we speak suffering as martyrs for the Christian faith more in the 20th century than in the previous 19th centuries of Christian history alone it's ironic that we can live in the United States and particularly in university campuses but scarcely limited to them where where the attitude is whatever works for you is fine you do your thing I'll do mine all things are equal all things are equally true when people are dying for their faiths and not just Christianity in other parts of the world where people perhaps recognize better than we do that if certain religious claims are true then other ones are dangerous and cannot be tolerated and vice versa the redefinitions that Wright describes of Judaism that Jesus brought would have transcended enough of the conventional boundaries of acceptable Jewish faith and in arousing mass interest in attention would have also caught the attention of the Roman authorities who were very concerned to keep the peace and very plausibly explained why Jesus according to the Gospels was condemned by a Jewish court for blasphemy and by a Roman tribunal for sedition or insurrection maybe the more astounding question to ask is why did any Jew ever follow Jesus with such radical redefinitions not many of them do today but all of the first Christians were Jews and for at least one generation in early Christianity the substantial majority of Christians were Jews and there has always been a Jewish Christian wing of the church throughout history though and sometimes in places it has been very small maybe the amazing thing is not that Jesus was put to death in his environment but that anybody out of a Jewish milieu followed him at all how could they have and here I think is an untapped argument that Christians and non-christians alike have not I think wrestled much with on the one hand there have been scholars who have done quite a bit of work in in recent years perhaps a Canadian man now teaching in Edinburgh Scotland by the name of Larry Hurtado has done more than anyone to point out that the kind of monotheism that preceded the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome in AD 70 and a Rhian trench manoosh religion that followed that date was more diverse did allow for some pretty exalted things to be said about people who were not got in the intertestamental Jewish literature angels the patriarchs like Abraham and Moses later heroes of the Jewish faith like Kings David and Solomon and others are spoken of in very exalted language there's an intriguing passage in Daniel 7:9 that speaks of two Thrones in heaven one is obviously gods but who is sitting at his right hand if there is only one God and there was Jewish speculation that made it was an archangel there is even a document that came out of those Dead Sea Scrolls it proposed it was Melchizedek and if you know who Melchizedek is I know you've been a Christian for some time either that or you're really a scholar an obscure priest back in Genesis who is referred to in a few other passages throughout the Bible so there was freedom in ways that the Jewish faith later we might say clamp down on to to speak of people other than Yahweh the God of Israel in very lofty heavenly language that's that's part of the logical or conceptual possibility that lies behind Jesus and the Apostles words though admittedly Jesus pushed things further to suggest at least in some sense actual equality with God the other piece of the argument I think again following a British writer by the name of James Dunne is what I've called the experiential necessity these Jews initially twelve disciples then large crowds than many of the crowds fell away but immediately after the account of his resurrection we breed of 120 and the Apostle Paul talks about a larger group of 500 who were witnesses early in the book of Acts the numbers are up into the thousands of Jews in the Jerusalem area alone who have become followers of this new movement there was apparently something in the experience on the one hand of those who walked and talked and lived in ate and slept with Jesus whose humanity they never would have questioned that suggested to them they simply could not describe him within the friendly confines not a Wrigley Field near State where I grew up but in the friendly confines of conventional Jewish monotheism they never deny there was only one God but somehow they had to start speaking of Jesus in similar language and for those who only experienced Jesus in his or through the power of the Holy Spirit after the resurrection they had to say the same thing about that power which they perceived to be a personal power not an impersonal force that they called the Spirit of God so what to conclude since my watch says it's time CS Lewis the famous British writer professor of English literature Christian apologist of a generation ago made very famous a an argument for Christianity which was popularized in this country by a well-known lifelong member of Campus Crusade which some of you are part of Josh McDowell and the way Lewis posed what McDowell called a trilemma which is a dilemma plus one went something like this I'm trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about him that is Jesus namely I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher but I don't accept his claim to be God unquote that's the one thing Lewis writes we must not say a man who is merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher he would be either a lunatic on a level with the man who says he's a poached egg or else he would be the devil of Hell you must make your choice either this man was and is the son of God or else a madman or something worse you can shut him up for a fool you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God but let us not come still Lewis's words they may sound a little harsh in our modern age of tolerance but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher he has not left that open to us he did not intend to if you go back to the pages of the Gospels you can find all three of those options you can find some of his brothers and sisters in mark chapter three coming and saying publicly he's mad in that same chapter a little bit further on you can find certain Jewish leaders saying he casts out demons by the power of Beelzebul who was a name for the devil he was either demented or demonic to change the alliteration or he was divine it's interesting that the most pervasive Jewish tradition non-christian Jewish tradition in several sources over the next four to five hundred years of the air in which Judaism and Christianity overlapped was that Jesus was a sorcerer who led Israel astray no attempt to deny the miracles no attempt to deny the exorcisms in fact tacit admission both what convinced that his power was not from God but from a different supernatural a diabolical power I entitled the suction just before the conclusion the resulting polarization then and now and I'd like to suggest not that I want to turn the United States into the Middle East don't hear me wrong I'm not for violence I come from Littleton Colorado which probably means something to some of you but the parts of the world and the places where people hear the message G of Jesus carefully enough to realize that stakes of life and death are involved here probably understand things better whichever side they come down on then the sort of general apathetic pluralistic environment of you do your thing and I'll do mine and everything is fine for everybody as long as it works for them I would hope as I trust is the purpose of all of these Veritas forms that you've had a number of in the last few years here that you would accept the challenge if you have never done so before to study Jesus to study him as a man of history not necessarily presupposing the truth of Christianity or of the scriptural testimony about him but that if you do so with an open mind and it will bring you to a point where a decision needs to be made that could lead to an entire change of your life or direction or Allegiance because that's what the historical Jesus my opinion and the opinion of many though not all was in fact about now we've got a half an hour for hopefully it gets cooler up here and I'll indicate the informality by moving the chair which is easier to move in the podium and we have mics here the the ground rules as have been laid out are ask a question that is at least marginally related to the topic and please don't ask me something totally unrelated please don't make any speeches but please do feel free to come forward wait your turn if somebody's the mic before you and let's talk about whatever you want to talk about here comes somebody I think go for it I have two questions the first one I'm not very familiar with ancient history that I was reading this book the penguin guide to living religions are you familiar with that in it they mentioned that was some of the letters and maybe even revelations who are in dispute during that time between I guess different villages in the region that they weren't really sure which ones to include which to exclude some were excluded that should have been included maybe some were included they should have been excluded and your second one oh the other one was just to see if I can relate them in any way actually I don't know if the other one's related at all okay well let me talk about what and if anybody else comes to a Michael I'll let somebody else go first before we give him second but otherwise fair enough and what I'm what I'm suspecting you were reading from that description is a question not directly related to Jesus and not directly related to the Gospels but certainly related to the question of how Christianity got the entire package of 27 books that came to be known as the New Testament and there were seven of those 27 books and you were right including the book of Revelation the apocalypse at the end of the New Testament as well as seven different letters the letter to the Hebrews and several short one chapter letters such as second John 3rd John and Jude also 2nd Peter what am i up to missing one James being the seventh and that were not immediately accepted as the church began discussing canonicity which is the question of which works to include the reasons why there was some debate over those seven very there was debate over Hebrews because there was no claim in the text for an author so there was uncertainty as to who wrote it there was debate over the book of James because as Martin Luther centuries later would reopen the debate James seemed to stress good works in a way that that Paul didn't there was debate over the three short little letters just because it was so short and little used and not as well-known there was debate over second Peter because there was question whether Peter was indeed the author and there was debate over Revelation for the same reason there is today people didn't know what to do with it such a strange book and and there were other books at times that different groups often small sectarian groups valued and it's hard to tell going back and assessing the evidence whether they they actually valued them to the same degree as the other twenty to twenty seven books and there were a couple that did get suggested for inclusion but were we're not accepted with nearly the same amount as the others and that that debate is an important one it's a it's a good issue to talk about it's it's not necessarily relevant to making a decision about Jesus because the heart of the gospel the heart of the Christian claim is amply contained in the twenty books that were never contested the four Gospels the book of Acts and all of the letters of Paul so it's a little bit tangential but I understand why you raised it I see nobody else the mic so have a shot at number two all right um the last one is just what we finished with do you mentioned that the Jews in the first five centuries after his death believed him to be a supernatural sorcerer just would like to know what you base that on would and you have one famous paragraph in length from the writings of the first century Jewish historian Josephus that refers to him as a worker and the Greek word that is used there is the word we in English get our word paradoxes from kind of an interest term but then the the encyclopedic body of work that became next only to the Bible itself the Christian Old Testament the most authoritative document for that ox Judaism was a collection of writings known as the Talmud a Palestinian version appeared in roughly the 300s a Babylonian Edition in the 500s and in about five or six different texts scattered around the Talmud one of which I was directly quoting said he was a sorcerer who led Israel astray and the gist of that is is repeated in several other places if you want to see all the evidence conveniently laid out for that and for Jesus outside the New Testament the book by Van Voorhis which is van the ORS T that Edmunds published in 2000 last spring Jesus outside the New Testament is a good source for that thanks for both of those good ones was it a Jewish officials or just were they Jewish rabbis readers yeah okay thank you much you bet yes sir um my question is about Jesus and his relationship to Mormonism and how I don't really know really anything about it I was just wondering how I've heard that he at some point in his career came to maybe near South America or somewhere around there I was just wondering if you could elaborate on that Joseph Smith who was born in New York State in the early 1800s claimed to have an appearance at age 14 of God the Father and Jesus as two identical embodied people who appeared to him and set him on his spiritual pilgrimage and career there were subsequent appearances so Joseph's claimed by angels including the angel Moroni who if you've ever seen a Mormon temple sits atop their temples with his with his trumpet and predicted that a time would come when it would be revealed to Jos where he could find buried golden tablets of ancient scripture that had been deposited there by what we today would call Native Americans centuries ago and at the appointed time as he tells the story he was directed to a hill by the name of kumara also in New York State and dug and uncovered golden tablets and was given over a period of a considerable period of time with the help of various friends the supernatural ability to translate these tablets and what emerged in English is what we know today as the Book of Mormon there is of course a massive debate surrounding the origins of the book and the story itself in a nutshell which really doesn't do justice to all of its details but to boil the story down to a nutshell is that a group of Jews four hundred plus years before Christ closer 600 BC migrated across West Africa across the Atlantic Ocean into Central America spread out among the Americas fought wars with the people that we knew as the American Indians that Jesus at some point not long after his death and resurrection in Israel had a similar exalted appearance to Native Americans perhaps in Central America and that then over time the knowledge of Jesus revelation died out as this tribe of people died out and one of the last things that was done was that this record was buried now to be revealed again in these last days and that was Joseph's message in a nutshell and there were some distinctive doctrines that over time God increasingly revealed to him as he claimed and people who believed the story became the initial followers of the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day saints it continues to be a very controversial movement it has spawned a large research university that's very respectable in many academic fields Brigham Young University in Provo Utah and it has it boasts the largest Department of religion anywhere in the world all of its 20,000 students in any given semester must take one religion course and and I have good friends who teach there that I've gotten to know through several different avenues and interestingly a number of years ago with all the archaeological interest and and there has been a wing of Mormonism that has tried to to find remains of these ancient peoples in the new world and evidence of the battles and the various activities the Smithsonian Institute after barrage of questions created an official document that basically said to date no archaeological discovery has ever corroborated a single distinctive claim of the Book of Mormon what has been corroborated are things that Mormonism and historic Christianity share and but that does not keep many people increasingly from joining the movement so that's the story in a nutshell trying to be fairly objective as I say it so that if any Mormon friends are here you'll feel I've said it fairly let's see so you first and we'll go over there and all arts just wandering okay yeah this is actually more of a clarification okay but for your discussion of the new quest I think I heard you say something that certain of these scholars were too emphatic on understanding Jesus as a Jew and if other way around that okay yeah and that from from 20/20 hindsight which is always greater and it has seemed to many that because it was largely a German movement and it was largely a movement still pretty fresh from the experience of those who lived through the Nazi era that that the emphasis was too much on Jesus uniquenesses okay versus his Jewish milieu god forbid she this turned out to be jus because we just tried to exterminate alright to put it quite crossly okay yeah thank good sir could you give us some context of what a first century Middle Eastern Jew was about what do we know from anthropology what do we know from archaeology maybe give us a better picture of a profile of this this man Jesus as he would have been in the you know first three decades of the millennia there and they write whole books on that how much time do you have and good question I think one thing that's important to say up front is sometimes particularly Christians who just learn a few names like Pharisees and Sadducees zealots as scenes sort of think it's kind of like Republicans and Democrats that everybody falls into one category when in fact the vast majority probably our best estimates ninety-five percent of Jewish people in first century Palestine were ordinary folks in fact the pharisees came up with a term for them which in hebrew was the amma Haaretz which means the people of the land it's fairly neutral term but they kind of used it like the greeks used the hoi polloi the masses the many the the rabble it doesn't know much and the average Jew would have been a farmer or a fisherman or carpenter or small artisan a Potter but some kind of trade most of the Magra cultural workers if he was faithful as most of them seemed have been certainly far more so than the diversity of Judaism worldwide today and they would have very faithfully circumsized all their male children they would have gone to Temple if they could make the distance three times a year at festival time they would very scrupulously observe Sabbath every Saturday from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown resting from anything that qualified as work they would have attended the sin God for worship on a weekly basis they would have educated their male children from ages 5 to 12 in a elementary school education that only taught one subject Bible and rote memorization was the only method of teaching we have made some progress well then again they had a rule you couldn't discuss any given Scripture until you had accurately memorized it and we might avoid some problems if we reinstituted that one but the average person was too busy just trying to eke out an existence living for him or herself women had a relatively limited number of roles open to them in terms of what we today would call domestic work but it certainly was hard work to provide for the family to be the main rear of children and what was usually large families to do all the cooking without any modern conveniences to perhaps tender garden to wash clothes by hand to haul water at times from long distances things that if any of you are here from the 2/3 world you could probably give this lectures as easily as I could in many impoverished parts and rural parts of our world today it was only a handful of the more well-to-do the more fortunate who had time for the deep theological discussions and debates and who then separated themselves into various groups according to the way that that they would answer these various questions but the advantage of something like what Tom Wright does is to distinguish between what are the things that were true of of all Jews they all believed in one God they all believed that they were the elect people as far as we can tell they all believed that a time was coming when God was going to create a messianic era and things are going to be a whole lot better than they were now and finally all those unfulfilled promises throughout their history we're going to be fulfilled you didn't have to belong to any one of the sects you didn't have to debate the issues the sects debated and those things you knew you believed but you have what psychologists today would call cognitive dissonance you believed him but they weren't happening so now what that's maybe the short answer it may not have sounded very short yeah in your survey of the literature you mentioned Bart Ehrman yeah and I have a question related to an early topic you took up the unfounded claims of textual corruption I'm not referring to Aaron's work there right professor Ehrman's written a book the Orthodox corruption structure and as I believe what he claims there is that in the 4th century disputes of the nature of the deity of Christ the followers of Athanasius actually changed the text of the New Testament altered it in certain ways that would support their claims over against areas I'm wondering if you have some ferrozzo now sure she' an excellent question I didn't know there would be anybody here such a sophisticated question and UCSB has now gone up to right up there with Harvard and not sure it's joking ouch somebody says I didn't like that comparison and I can see this topic isn't interesting as people file out and when I spoke about textual corruption I spoke about the claims relatively unique to Islam and Mormonism that entire books of what should have gone in the New Testament were suppressed deliberately lost and gone forever I'm talking about claims that the text of John 1:1 did not originally read in the beginning was the word in the Word was with God and the Word was God that word was God just wasn't there that to the claims of Jesus exact divinity and equality with the father were not in the original text of Scripture that when first Corinthians 15 talks about there being different kinds of glory among the heavenly bodies the Sun the moon and the stars just like there's a difference between a earthly body and a resurrection body that the original new Testament is Joseph Smith rewrote it actually read that there will be three categories of bodies in the in the celestial and the terrestrial and the Telestial Kingdom that there are several hundred places in the New Testament or Joseph Smith through inspiration rewrote passages of the Bible or of the New Testament and that those in fact reflected the original text even though not a single textual variant from antiquity supports it there still is having said all that the genuine least scholarly science of textual criticism and while I'm sure Erman himself would agree maybe going for the 97% rather than 99% of the New Testament being reconstructed with a very high degree of accuracy based on the state of the manuscripts that we have there still were hundreds thousands of textual variants because you had thousands of manuscripts and one of the tendencies that you can you can see for yourself if you care to take the time to do it and get a King James Bible and get a modern translation NIV NASB RSV or whatever and read a long stretch of Paul's epistles and you will find places where the modern translations going back to the earliest and and the most reliable manuscripts most of which have been discovered since 1611 and the writing of King James may say Jesus and later scribes wanting to exalt Jesus came and added the word Christ or added the word Lord or added both and there are tendencies and the reason for Herman's title the Orthodox corruption to take verses of scripture in for the most part just very tiny little ways son becomes son of God perhaps in a passage in John the only son becomes the only begotten Son in one text in John 1:18 I think it is out of a probably well-intentioned desire to magnify this Jesus that the scribes copying the manuscripts worshipped not good enough to calm Jesus Christ let's call him the Lord Jesus Christ and so to that extent there are our ways in which as we go back and sift through the the manuscripts we can assume that that the shorter versions the the less that titles have tried to be harmonized with language elsewhere is most likely to be original but that's a far cry from saying even if you take all of that quote/unquote corruption out you still have the historic Christian Jesus you don't you don't have a different Jesus you don't have Arianism rather than Athanasian Christianity and at that point I would part company with Herman you referred to Isaiah 52 and 53 during during your talk could you give us some other examples of Messianic prophecies that are important in your own faith and how the Jews interpreted those in the first century and perhaps even today well interestingly a number of them that that the New Testament takes in a messianic fashion and were taken at least by some Jews in that way as well particularly in the Psalms and one of the fascinating results set Barbra Theory to one side metaphorically and one of the results of the the Dead Sea Scrolls has not been to undermine historic Christianity in the least but to give us much more fascinating insight into the rich diversity of first century Judaism and its predecessors and in several places to discover Old Testament texts being interpreted messianic Lee which previously we weren't sure if Judaism ever did but the New Testament does so we now know that there's precedent within Judaism of the time for doing that one of those is Psalm 2:7 royal Psalm Christianity has taken it as a messianic Psalm enthronement of the Messianic King I will proclaim the degree of the Lord he said to me the king is saying you are my son today I have become your father and that whole father-son relationship a passage that very few Christians ever memorize or think much about but for your next Bible trivia game it is the chapter of the Old Testament more often quoted or alluded to in the New Testament than any other one I won't even see if anybody here knows it embarrass you Psalm 110 the Lord says to my lord sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet and then it goes on to also speak about the Lord being a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek and those are the two parts that get quoted the most Jesus himself quoted that teaching in the temple last week of his life taking it with Jewish tradition as a psalm of David and there are two Lords in the passage those of you that have English Bibles that print some lords in all capital letters that's when it's Yahweh God God the Father is we would call it the other Lord is the Hebrew word Adonai which sometimes can just mean a human master like medieval England had lords and ladies but when it's David who is the highest lord of Israel saying Yahweh God said to my lord there's an exegetical question who'd the other guy put it in colloquial non-university language appropriate only at 5:00 to 9:00 in the evening and and Jesus quoted that very psalm in the last week of his life and said how then can the scribes say that the Messiah the Christ is in essence merely David's son merely his human descendant must he not also be somebody who is at least exalted above the king of Israel above whom nobody's exalted humanly speaking and it's interesting the Gospels say that nobody could answer him nobody in the crowd gave an answer one of the things we discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls was at least at Qumran Psalm 110 had been taken his messianic those are two examples coming down the homestretch my watch says we have three minutes okay I've been time 8 so I'm not very well studying in this aspect of it but I Jesus before his ministry and after his birth in that period of time why isn't there very much written about that or why don't you hear very much about that what was going on with him hey don't feel shamed every entering seminary in class asks me that too and the real honest answer is we're not sure I think there might be a reasonable inference that he didn't distinguish himself in any particularly extraordinary way it's fascinating to read later early Christian literature they were preoccupied with the question what was the boy wonder really like with apologies to Robin to Batman Fame for those of you to go back that for or watch the reruns or rent the movies when I was a kid the first episode never mind what was it boy blundering that's a joker called him and what was the question the early Christian apocryphal literature is filled with stories of Jesus miraculous feats breathing life into play sparrows that he fashioned and watching them fly away or taking vengeance on a playmate who was taunting him and withering him up much to the chagrin of his dad who then went to Joseph and pleaded for him to ask Jesus to undo it which he did and the guy was resurrected and and just you know the carpenter's table that was built but one leg was shorter than the others so Jesus stretches out his arm and miraculously makes them level great great stuff not a shred of historical support for it there's always been this Christian fascination to want to answer the question to fill in the hidden years fast-forward the tape and in the last four to five hundred years there's been Christian fiction wrote about Jesus the young adult traveling to India - you know he was really a closeted Buddhist and met with the gurus over there and and I can go into Walden books in Denver and buy the books that people are buying and reading and believe in this stuff when when they won't read or believe the real stuff and but but the best that I can come up with theologically is the last verse of the Gospel of Luke chapter 2 after that one episode the only one that we're told about in any of the Gospels between age 2 and and 30-ish when he had amazed the teachers in the temple at age 12 even that's not as miraculous and I was at it I didn't even comment on it but I was in a friend's or was it was it at Westmont I think where they took me earlier today look around at paintings on a wall and and at one place oh is this this picture of Jesus standing up teaching the the Jewish teachers who were all seated around spellbound looking at him in amazement that in fact is the most common media evil artwork for the event of Jesus and that's not what the Gospel of Luke says it all says in verse 46 he was sitting among the teachers listening to them and asking them questions they were still in charge now he did amaze them with his understanding and his answers no he was probably the head of his class but that's really all it says and then you come to the end of Luke 2 and he goes back home to Nazareth with Joseph and Mary he's obedient to them and we read Jesus grew in wisdom intellectually and stature physically and in favor with God he grew spiritually just like any other human being you got a problem with that deal with the Bible not with me and he grew in favor with humans he grew socially it was a good Jewish boy [Music] you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 82,532

Rating: 3.9284525 out of 5

Keywords: bible, studies, historical, Jesus, religious

Id: N0ws463jX4k

Length: 86min 33sec (5193 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2008