What Can We Really Know About Jesus
Wayne
A. Meeks:
Woolsey Professor of Biblical Studies Yale University
Every Christian sooner or later has to ask the question, "Who was Jesus really?" And we ask this in our age in a special way because we are very historically oriented. We are modern, or perhaps post-modern, people, but all of us have a sense that we want to know what things were really like. We know that the past is different from the present. We have experienced rapid change, all of us in our generation. And so we want to know what was Jesus really like. And that quest to understand what he was really like has turned out to be very disappointing. So how do we really get at that? We must, first of all, understand that in history facts always lie under interpretations and we never get to the facts. They're only interpretations. There is only an interpreted Jesus, there are many interpreted Jesuses. So where do we begin? We begin not with Jesus, we have no access to him. We begin with the responses to Jesus, by his followers, by outsiders who heard about him.... We begin with those reactions as they're enshrined in the text we have.
All we have from this period about Jesus is text, finally. And we try to work backwards and say, "How did we get these texts? Who wrote these texts? Where did they get the ideas?" Surely behind the written text there were oral traditions, we know that. There were oral traditions that went on after the written text, and we have evidence of those being written down later. So we try to dissect those. We say, "What kind of traditions? How were they shaped? What kinds of stories did people tell about Jesus?" Those stories have a shape to them. Do we find other stories in the culture of the Mediterranean world around Jesus? Other stories about other people that are shaped the same way? We have reports of what Jesus said. He told parables, he told stories, he told little epigrams. Those have a shape to them. Are they like any sayings that are attributed to other people at the same time? We're trying to put this whole story into a context of its own history, of its own time. And our ideal here is to be able to hear those stories, hear those sayings, as someone in the first century would have heard them, recognizing that there were conventions that if people heard a certain way of talking they would say, "Hmm, this person claims to be a prophet." Or this person about whom this story is told is a magician, someone with magical power, a healer, or this is a wise person, a person who delivers certain kinds of maxims or epigrams or tells proverbs or parables and the like. So there are socially conditioned ways of identifying people that one can see almost built into the shape of the tradition about Jesus. If we're smart enough, by comparing other sources from a similar time and place, we can retrace that history, working backwards from the text in the earliest time that we can get to.
Some scholars think that you can, by a process of analysis and text comparisons, figure out what Jesus said... How much more basic can you get than what somebody said? Doesn't that tell you who he is?
So how do we learn about Jesus from what he said? If we could only be sure that he said everything that's attributed to him in the various gospels.... This is complicated by several things. One of the complications most recently is the discovery in 1945 of some other gospels that we didn't know about before. One of them, the Gospel of Thomas, is nothing but sayings of Jesus. It simply goes along and says, "Jesus said this, Jesus said that." Well some of these things that Jesus said according to the Gospel of Thomas are quite familiar. They're very similar to things in the canonical gospels, but not identical. And there are other things which are quite different from any of the things that he said in the canonical gospels.
Then, even among the canonical gospels, the way Jesus talks in the first three, the so-called synoptic gospels, is very different from the way he talks in the Gospel according to John. Now, which is right? Which is the real Jesus speaking here? We discovered that there are several different portraits of Jesus enshrined in the shape of the traditions about him, and that these seem to go back to very early times. Now this runs flatly contrary to our traditional picture in which everything begins with a nice unified beginning in which everything was clear and only later there come heresies which change things. But it's not so surprising if you think about the way human beings tend to remember things. Everybody remembers things in accord with what makes sense in their particular view of the world. We have different portraits of Jesus because from the very beginning people tried to understand the mystery about him. And they understood it within categories which were familiar in their time and place, in their particular corner of that time and place. And so we have a set of variety of ways of perceiving Jesus from the very beginning. And that's built into the earliest sources that we have....
The really important figures in history always generate multiple traditions. Think of the different ways in which people even in our own time think about John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He is the martyr, he is the hero, he is the great liberal, no, he was really rather conservative. He's the Cold War warrior, etc., etc. And this is somebody that we have on videotape. This is the person that we have speeches from and so forth and so on. How much more difficult it is to sort out the various reactions to a figure in the ancient past....
The temptation is, out of all of the various figures of Jesus that emerge in our sources, to pick one and say, "That's the real one." And usually we will pick one, of course, that accords with our notion of what we would like Jesus to have been like. You know, someone at the margins of society, the hero of the proletariat revolution or the anti-establishment figure, and so on. That's probably inevitable that we will all do this, but it's not very good history writing. I myself am very skeptical finally that we can describe independently of any of these traditions what the real Jesus was like.
Harold
W. Attridge:
The Lillian Claus Professor of New Testament Yale
Divinity School
Speaking as a historian, why is it such a problem to know anything about the life of Jesus, and what are the sources you can draw on?
The problem in understanding Jesus as a historian begins with the fact that we have rather limited sources for reconstructing his life. Those sources are primarily the gospel traditions that we have in the New Testament, some apocryphal materials from the early Christian tradition, and some sources external to the New Testament. Those sources external to the New Testament are particularly valuable because they're not directly statements of faith, the way the New Testament materials are. Chief among those external sources is Josephus, a Jewish historian who wrote at the end of the first century and who in book 18 of his "Antiquities of the Jews," has a small passage about Jesus. He also reports about John the Baptist, and about James, the brother of Jesus. And those passages constitute the first external testimonies to the existence of Jesus by someone who was not a follower. They may have been tampered with in the transmission, but at the core there probably is a reliable historical account by Josephus of the existence of Jesus.
Why do professional historians give more credence to Josephus than, say, the gospels?
Professional historians, I think, try to assemble all of the evidence that's available for reconstructing an event. And they're concerned about the bias in any of those sources that they use. And at the first stage in reconstructing an event is to analyze the bias of sources. We had to do so both with the sources internal to Christianity as well as the sources external to Christianity. So the gospels, for instance, are clearly statements of faith and they have certain takes on who Jesus was and what he meant to his followers. External sources like Josephus don't have the same faith commitment, they may have some other axes to grind, but in any case you have to see what the biases of the sources are, and try to take those into account as you do your reconstruction.
Shaye
I.D. Cohen:
Samuel Ungerleider Professor of Judaic Studies and
Professor of Religious Studies Brown University
What can we really know about the life of Jesus? Are we dealing with facts here? Are we dealing with bits and shreds of evidence? Are we dealing with hypotheses?
Scholars have long debated what we know and what we think we can know about the historical Jesus. The quest for the historical Jesus has claimed many, many victims. Scholars have trotted out their favorite theories, and theories come and go. My own approach is to say that while we cannot possibly know the historicity of any single incident related in the gospels, we can't possibly know the authenticity of any single saying attributed to him. We can't possibly identify the truth of any given verse in the gospels, nevertheless, certain large patterns do emerge, and those patterns seem to me to likely to be true, or likely to have a certain amount of historical veracity, even if you might not be happy with the patterns as being too vague or too general, but at least here I think we can see a clear consistent pattern of evidence in all the four gospels.
The core of the gospels is Jesus as the miracle worker, Jesus as a man who made a deep impression upon those who he came in contact with, his ability to attract large crowds, his ability to attract a dedicated core group of followers or disciples, and then a much larger group of people sort of in the margins of the core group who saw him as somebody special. After all, there presumably were many Galilean teachers or preachers in the first century of the Common Era. There will have been many who were executed by Rome as trouble makers or people who are threats to the social order. They will have been many wandering holy men around about Judea or even the Roman Empire. But this man clearly was peculiar. This man clearly made a mark, left an impression, somebody you didn't forget. Somebody who had power in a social sense. Someone who actually was able to somehow attract, enchant, and hold a large group of followers already in his lifetime. And this point, I think clearly must be true. I don't see how else we can understand the stories that are told in the gospels, even if the stories themselves may not be true, but the pattern, I'm arguing, has some truth to it.
So what pattern do we see? He's a holy man, a miracle man, someone who gets in trouble with the authorities, whoever they may be - Pharisees, scribes, priests, elders, he is constantly in trouble with them as a free-spirited individual. Someone who apparently preaches in the synagogue. All of [these activities] I think are the function of his power, the power as he has as a miracle worker and a holy man. And in the final analysis this is what does him in. This is what gets him into trouble with the authorities. At some point, such a restive individual simply could no longer be tolerated by the powers that be.
Holland
Lee Hendrix:
President of the Faculty, Union Theological Seminary
In my own view, the earliest layer of evidence is still an interpretation, so what we can know is only the range of interpretations that we first encounter in Jesus' traditions. And that is really a plurality of Jesuses. A Jesus that's understood as a sage and wise man in some traditions, a Jesus that's understood as a superhero, a great performer of miracles in another, divine person in another tradition. A Jesus who is understood as primarily the sacrificed, now risen and enthroned savior in another tradition. One finds the plurality of Jesuses even at the earliest stage of interpretation. That's why as far as we keep going and excavating the tell of Jesus, the earliest stage is still interpretation.
L.
Michael White:
Professor of Classics and Director of the Religious
Studies Program University of Texas at Austin
From a historical perspective what we really know about the life of Jesus is very, very limited depending on which gospel you read. His actual career may be something less then one year and maybe even as little as only a few months, whereas in John's Gospel his career is nearly three years long. So there are these kinds of historical discrepancies among the gospels themselves. They range from the way his birth occurred to the actual day on which he was executed and even to the kinds of teachings and miracles that he performs throughout his career. As a result we begin to see that the gospels themselves are not as useable as historical information as we might have hoped.
He Was Born, Lived and Died As A Jew
What was the
dominant religious influence on [Jesus]?
Jesus was certainly subject to the influence of the traditions of Israel, there's no doubt about that. But in what form those traditions came to him in Galilee at the beginning of the first century is somewhat unclear. He certainly would have known of the Temple in Jerusalem, and probably, as traditions report..., would have gone up to Jerusalem for the major pilgrimage festivals. He would have known of the rituals of the Temple, their atoning significance. He would have celebrated Passover, I suspect, with his family, and would have known of the hopes embedded in Passover for divine deliverance. He probably was aware of the growing Pharisaic movement which preached a notion of purity that was available to all Jews, not simply those who were officiating at the Temple cult. He certainly would have known Jewish scripture.... And we can see in some of his parables how he plays on images from scripture. For instance, the great Cedar of Lebanon from Ezekial probably plays a role in his description of the mustard seed, which becomes a tree, and there's probably an element of parody there. So his relationship with the scriptural heritage is a complex one, but it certainly is an important one in his formation....
Shaye
I.D. Cohen:
Samuel Ungerleider Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of
Religious Studies Brown University
Was Jesus Jewish and, if he was, how would that have influenced his experiences as a young man growing up in Galilee?
Was Jesus a Jew? Of course, Jesus was a Jew. He was born of a Jewish mother, in Galilee, a Jewish part of the world. All of his friends, associates, colleagues, disciples, all of them were Jews. He regularly worshipped in Jewish communal worship, what we call synagogues. He preached from Jewish text, from the Bible. He celebrated the Jewish festivals. He went on pilgrimage to the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem where he was under the authority of priests.... He lived, was born, lived, died, taught as a Jew. This is obvious to any casual reader of the gospel text. What's striking is not so much that he was a Jew but that the gospels make no pretense that he wasn't. The gospels have no sense yet that Jesus was anything other than a Jew. The gospels don't even have a sense that he came to found a new religion, an idea completely foreign to all the gospel text, and completely foreign to Paul. That is an idea which comes about only later. So, to say that he was a Jew is saying a truism, is simply stating an idea that is so obvious on the face of it, one wonders it even needs to be said. But, of course, it does need to be said because we all know what happens later in the story, where it turns out that Christianity becomes something other than Judaism and as a result, Jesus in retrospect is seen not as a Jew, but as something else, as a founder of Christianity. But, of course, he was a Jew.
Paula
Fredriksen:
William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of the Appreciation of
Scripture, Boston University
Was Jesus Jewish? Why is it so important to us and why would it have colored his perceptions?
What astonishes me when I read the stories about Jesus in the New Testament, is how completely embedded he is in this first century... Jewish world of religious practice and piety. We tend to get distracted by the major plot line of the gospels, because we're waiting for the story to develop up to the crucifixion. But, within that story, and the stories that are told by the evangelists that fills in the gap between the Galilee and Jerusalem, Jesus presented continuously as going into the synagogue on the Sabbath. He is presented as going up to Jerusalem for the pilgrimage holidays, specifically in John, for any number of pilgrimage holidays, and in the synoptic gospels, most importantly, for Passover. Jerusalem at Passover is not the sort of place you'd want to be in unless you were really committed to doing an awful lot of ritual activity with tremendous historical resonance....
[W]hat we've learned from the gospel stories is not that Jesus was not Jewish. Quite the opposite. He's completely embedded in the Judaism of his time. What we learn from the gospels is that he's not a member of one of the groups whose identifying characteristics Josephus gave to us. He's not a Sadducee. He's not a Pharisee. He's always arguing with the Pharisees. He's not an Essene. He's not an insurrectionist. And the fact that he's arguing with other people who may be members of these other groups just simply signifies that he's a Jew, because that's what these Jews all did with each other -- argue with each other all the time...
Jesus' Ministry and Teaching
Shaye
I.D. Cohen:
Samuel Ungerleider Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of
Religious Studies Brown University
Did Jesus preach, as best we know? And if he did preach what kinds of things did he preach about?
When Jesus
speaks, the major verb that is used in the gospel accounts is "to
teach...." He teaches his disciples, he teaches in the synagogues, he
teaches the crowds.... What is he teaching? Well, we have again a complex
variety of things, which don't quite hang together entirely. We, of course, have
notions of repentance.... He is asking Jews to repent of their sins, to expect
the end time or the Kingdom of God, that somehow that we need to improve our
ways so as to prepare ourselves for whatever God has in store for us. That is
one clear notion of preaching on his part, which we might say is a preaching for
repentance. But we also have him teaching verses from the scripture, which he
quotes, verses from Isaiah or other passages, and again dealing with the Son of
God, whatever that means exactly, referring again, apparently the Messiah, or
some equivalent redeemer figure of the end time. It's hard to make sense out of
all these different things together.
We also of course have the parables, which seem to be a kind of social commentary on the world of Galilee. We occasionally meet in these parables the land owner and the tenant farmers or the master and the slaves, which may be veiled or not so veiled social commentary....
We put all these different things together, it's not a simple case where we can say Jesus came and preached X, as if somehow that X is clear and consistent and unambiguous. We have different messages that are ascribed to him in the gospel text. And especially once you come to Jerusalem, and we have Jesus confronting the priests of Jerusalem and the cleansing of the Temple scene, it's hard to figure out exactly what all of this means. The only common denominator seems to be the sense that the end of the world is at hand, or the end of history is at hand....
What scriptures was Jesus teaching from?
In the first century of the common era, Jews possessed a collection of sacred books, the books that we will come to call the Bible or Christians will come to call the Old Testament. Jesus apparently knew many, some, all of these books. The synagogue service on the Sabbath would consist of communal group study of various collections from these books. Jesus in his teaching referred frequently to the Laws of Moses, by which we mean the Pentateuch, the five books of the Torah, and refers frequently to the prophecies of Isaiah or passages from the Psalms. These are the most widely quoted books in the New Testament. The important thing to remember of course is that Jesus is not reading the New Testament, he is not preaching the New Testament as a book. These books do not yet exist.... Whatever it was that Jesus spoke, he was speaking words of his own, he was speaking words of common wisdom, or he was referring to or explicating verses from the Hebrew Bible, specifically from the five books of Moses, from the Torah, or more especially the prophet Isaiah or the book of the Psalms. These will have been the stuff out of which Jesus will have created his teaching and his preaching. And it is only later of course, much later, that we begin to have the creation of books that you and I call the gospels, or you and I call the New Testament. This is a product of, these are the products of the late first and early second century of our era.
John
Dominic Crossan:
Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies DePaul University
The core of Jesus' preaching is the kingdom of God. And the difficulty is for us to hear that term as 100 percent political and 100 percent religious. Not one, not the other. In the first century those were inextricably intertwined.... "The kingdom," if you use that expression in the first century, would have meant the Roman kingdom, it meant the Roman Empire. When you talked about the Kingdom of God..., you were making a very caustic criticism of the Roman Empire, and you were saying that its system was not the system of God.
Well, that seems to kind of limit the relevance of what Jesus had to say, if part of his preaching was considered [directed at] the Roman Empire; is it more universal than that, in your opinion?
By talking about the Kingdom of God, but by focusing it on the Roman Empire, what Jesus was focusing on was the systemic injustice, which are really the normal ways that life is run. The Roman Empire was no worse than any other empire we've ever had. And in fact, what we are criticizing there is really the normal life of discrimination and oppression and persecution and hierarchy, all the normalcies of life are what are being criticized. It applies to us; if Jesus was here today, we are Rome.
I might say that the core of his preaching are these sort of enigmatic sayings of his.... When you get back to his doctrine, if that's the right word, what do you arrive at and what you make of this?
The sayings of Jesus are very often enigmatic, only because of their lack of context. If, for example, you say "the last shall be first and the first shall be last," that can mean almost anything taken out of context. It can be a banal cliche, or it could be a call to rebellion. Put back into the context of an occupied country, a Jewish homeland occupied by the Romans, the urbanization of lower Galilee, these statements such as "blessed are the destitute" take on an acute religio-political edge and are not quite so enigmatic as they may sound to us.
Jesus is most famous, I think, for parables and aphorisms. And both of them are really ways of teaching ordinary people. Now, if you read them in the New Testament, it might take a minute to read; I imagine them as maybe an hour long interaction between Jesus and an audience, who are probably talking back to him, and interrupting him and debating with him and disagreeing with him and fighting with him. And the parable is a way, really, of getting them to think. It's a way of provoking people to think for themselves....
[For example], Jesus tells a parable about somebody who takes a mustard seed, plants it in the ground, and it grows up to be a great tree, or a bush at least, a weed, though, in plain language. Now, imagine an audience reacting to that. Presumably the Kingdom is like this, and you have to figure out, "What's it like? You mean, the Kingdom is big? But you just said it's a big weed. So why don't you say a big cedar of Lebanon? Why a big weed? And besides, this mustard, we're not sure we like this mustard. It's very dangerous in our fields. We try to control it. We try to contain it. Why do you mean the Kingdom is something that the people try to control and contain?" Every reaction in the audience ... the audience fighting with themselves, as it were, answering back to Jesus is doing exactly what he wants. It's making them think, not about mustard, of course, but about the Kingdom. But the trap is that this is a very provocative, even a weird, image for the Kingdom. To say the Kingdom is like a cedar of Lebanon, everyone would yawn, say, "Of course." It's like a mustard seed ... "What's going on here?"
Is this [style of teaching] unique to Jesus?
The parables are unique only in a very limited sense, in that the primary teaching of Jesus is not taking texts out of the Hebrew scriptures and explaining them, blasting them, commenting on them. What he is doing is telling a perfectly ordinary story. And using that as the major teaching. "The Kingdom of God is like this." Now you have to think, well, I hear the story, but how on earth is the Kingdom of God like that? That's your job as the hearer. So it's open to anyone. And that's, I think, the point of the parable.
So right from the start his teaching depends on interpretation?
If you teach in parables, you give yourself to interpretation. If you really want to tell people what to think you preach them a sermon. If you tell them a parable then you're leaving yourself open, inevitably, to interpretation.
L.
Michael White:
Professor of Classics and Director of the Religious Studies
Program University of Texas at Austin
From a strictly historical perspective, then, we don't really know all that much about the ministry of Jesus. It might have been very brief, depending on which gospel you read, it might have been as short as only a few months or as long as three years, but if we take the smaller version of the story, if we take the more limited historical perspective that Mark's gospel offers us, for example, Jesus seems to have started preaching in the Galilee. He's associated with cities, smallish cities like Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee, market towns, fishing centers and so on. And he deals with some farmers and some city folks but that's about all we hear....
His public ministry, though, seems to have focused especially around the working of miracles, casting out demons, healing people. He was known as a miracle worker. He travels around some but mostly in the Galilee. And, at least in Mark's gospel, he never even thinks of going to Jerusalem until the very last week of his life. So the geographical frame of reference of Jesus' life, at least in Mark's gospel, is limited to the Galilean context for the most part. And that's very different than John's gospel which has Jesus in Jerusalem from a very early stage. Now from a historical perspective, these two stories don't mesh together very well, and we have to be very careful about what we say about the life of Jesus....[I]t's probably better to be safe than sorry and say "What's the least we can say? What can we really know?" And then work from there in talking about how the stories developed.
It sounds as if, when you come right down to it, you really can't know very much about it.
We don't know much about the life of Jesus in the final analysis: We know he was a public figure, we know he gathered some kind of a following, we know he eventually went to Jerusalem and there he was arrested and executed. The rest of the story is filled by the gospels by talking about his life as a significant life. But the minimalist perspective of the historian has to say, it's a life that we don't know in detail until his death.