Jesus: Representation, Reality and Literary Criticism
This essay examines issues surrounding history, postmodernism and the historical Jesus. It will summarise the postmodern challenge to history, and then isolate the areas it wants to study in relation to historical Jesus research. It will look at how the discipline struggles to settle on a consistent depiction of Jesus, and then compare historical Jesus research with Old Testament[1] studies, showing that both fields suffer from similar methodological problems. The essay will argue that in some circumstances, literary criticism is a more useful tool than historical investigation when studying the Gospels. In the essay’s final section, the researcher will reflect critically on his own views concerning historical Jesus research, and justify his new approach to the proposed thesis.
History keeps its secrets far better than most of us acknowledge. Surely way over ninety-nine percent of all human experience goes unrecorded. A large percentage of this experience may concern banal and uninteresting matters (which in themselves may be quite interesting!), but we must surmise that many important things have escaped our eyes as well. We might further consider that what does survive is often recorded for a specific reason. In What is History, E. H. Carr gives the example of mediaeval man and his religious beliefs. The information we have on such a fact was preselected by people who believed it, and wanted others to believe it. If it were not the case, we would have absolutely no way of knowing. ‘The picture of mediaeval man as devoutly religious’ says Carr bluntly, ‘... is indestructible.’ [2] A similar situation applies to the Gospels. They too yield only selective information on Jesus. Anything the early church deemed unnecessary was most likely expunged from the record. This may be why we have no description of Jesus’ appearance or a sketch of his life between childhood and ministry.[3] Either the gospel writers were ignorant of such details, or considered them irrelevant to their needs. Later works, known as infancy gospels, filled in some of the gaps, but they are mostly the entertaining fruition of early Christian imagination.
Although scholars give little credence to the infancy gospels, one cannot underestimate the role imagination plays in their own reconstructions of the past. Any scholar’s reconstruction of Jesus’ life contains more than what is in the sources. This is what the British historian R. G. Collingwood called the ‘historical imagination’ - the process where one interpolates between the available sources to construct a historical narrative.[4] Collingwood’s view of how historians imagine the past has similarities to the postmodern concept of emplotment. Although we should not consider Collingwood a postmodernist— he died in 1943 for one thing, and he still believed that history as partaken by historians corresponded in some way to past events— his idea of history found favour in future scholars who questioned the positivistic role of the historian.[5]
In historical Jesus research, the subjects of history and theology have a peculiar dialectical relationship. Yet for the arch postmodernist, these two disciplines are but two different belief systems. Christian theology for the non-believer may just be a tissue of homiletics and question begging, but history, too, has its own set of presuppositions, many of which seem increasingly untenable. Leopold von Ranke’s nineteenth century endeavour ‘to show how things actually were’[6] today seems like wishful thinking. The same for the belief the historian can stand outside his/her subject and objectively reach conclusions. But at the centre of all problems concerning historical investigation is the perceived instability of language. Language, far from being a window on the world, was a structure that determines our perception of the world.[7] Such an observation drastically downgrades the autonomy of a writer in that he/she is limited by the formal properties of language. Such constraints brought about, in Roland Barthes immortal phrase, the ‘death of the author.’
In his 1973 book Metahistory[8], Hayden White highlighted what he saw as the creative nature of historical investigation. Historical writing existed on purely formal grounds and worked with a limited number of tropes. White called this process ‘emplotment’. The difference, it seems, between emplotment and Collingwood’s historical imagination is that Collingwood viewed the evidence as guiding the historian’s narrative, whereas emplotment involved the historian imposing a narrative on the textual evidence of the past. White’s radical conclusion was one that horrified empiricists: history was merely another branch of literature that wore its ‘literariness’ no less lightly than a novelist composing fiction.[9]
Whilst the essay does not wish to indulge in blanket scepticism concerning the past, it is interested in White’s observation as to the literary constructedness of historical writing. The corollary to this view is that literary and not historical criticism is required when analysing some textual sources (the essay will explore this later). The essay also concurs with the OT scholar Philip Davies’ provocative view that all writing deceives, in that it claims to represent reality in a way that is impossible. A text cannot reproduce reality except as a textual artefact; an artefact that is crafted by rhetoric and bound by the limits of language.[10] All a text can do is ‘represent’ reality. It may do this reasonably well; certainly some texts will give us a better understanding of the past than others. But the written word, still the main medium in which history is recovered and elucidated, can never circumscribe the vastness of human existence. There will always be a difference between how life is lived and how life is recorded. One thinks of Rene Magritte’s painting ‘The Treachery of Images’, which consisted of a pipe with the caption, ‘This is not a pipe’.[11] Magritte’s point? We are not looking at a pipe, but a picture of a pipe: its representation, not its actuality.[12]
Some may object to comparing Magritte’s work with the writing of history. Yet in ancient history in particular, we rarely, if at all, have the chance to compare the historical referent with its representation. All we have left is the representation. And in regards to Jesus, this representation has been refracted through countless different viewpoints, quite possibly over a number of centuries. So it is perhaps surprising that most historical Jesus scholars actually attempt to find a figure that is not in the Gospels. Another representation, as it were. It is one of the major presuppositions of historical Jesus research that the ‘figure of Jesus’ presented in the New Testament[13] and the ‘historical Jesus’ who existed under the reign of Tiberius are not exactly the same person.[14] As the Gospels present Jesus in sometimes quite differing ways, it is reasonable to think there is some unhistorical material in the NT.[15] But finding a solid method to distinguish between fact and fiction seems next to impossible, perhaps signalled by the different representations of Jesus found in scholarship.
Consider these depictions of Jesus in the past fifty years. We have him portrayed as a magician (Morton Smith), a Galilean Charismatic (Geza Vermes), an eschatological prophet (E. P. Sanders), a liberal Pharisee (Harvey Falk), a political revolutionary (S. G. F. Brandon) and a Cynic sage (John Dominic Crossan).[16] This is quite a spread considering most scholars are using the same sources. This researcher often feels impressed by a certain reconstruction of Jesus, only to read another, startlingly different depiction, and feel equally convinced by that one. ‘He who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.’ (Proverbs 18:17).
Surveying the range of historical Jesuses in academia, Robert Price remarks,
[m]any of the current historical Jesus options are quite plausible and make good sense of a number of gospel texts. None violates the historical method. All are the product of serious and deep scholarship. But what these learned labours have yielded may be called an embarrassment of riches. There are just too many that make too much sense, and that fact, it seems to me, vitiates any compelling force of any one of them.[17]
Price’s observations have some power. So many portrayals, all reasonably plausible, but they cannot all be right. John Dominic Crossan makes a similar point, describing the plurality of viewpoints as ‘an academic embarrassment’.[18] As Crossan has added to the cluttered pile of reconstructed Jesuses (Crossan has Jesus as a Cynic sage), such a comment is rather ironic.
Price and Crossan tackle the problem in different ways. Crossan sees historical Jesus scholarship as lacking methodological rigor, and attempts a systematic stratification of the extant sources.[19] Despite this, neither Crossan’s methods nor conclusions have met with widespread approval. For Price, the historical Jesus, if he existed in the first place, is irrecoverable to us, and to keep looking is futile. Get over it, already! Price now deconstructs the gospel narratives in the playful guise of an exegetical Jacques Derrida, although he still seems to value the historical-critical method to discover things about early Christianity. He just doubts whether the Gospels comport to any historical events in the first century.
Some share Price’s scepticism, even if for wildly differing reasons. The conservative scholar Luke Timothy Johnson pours scorn on modern Jesus scholarship and asks us to accept the orthodox Christ of the church, even though he admits there is little historical information in the Gospels accounts.[20] This is ‘The Real Jesus’ of history, not the one soldered together from disparate sources by overconfident historians (‘we can rebuild him; we have the technology’).[21] Johnson has a point. Why not accept Christ (or not) as portrayed in the Gospels and stop trying to find the historical Jesus? The Christ of the church is, after all, the one that most Christians around the world worship. The historical Jesus, on the other hand, is almost entirely a scholarly construct. Perhaps we should admit that the Gospels only give us the information they want: Jesus was/is the Son of God. Yet, essentially, Johnson’s argument is an embrace of fideism: because we do not know exactly who Jesus was, we would be better off accepting what the church (which church?) said of him. Faith trumps history, it seems. For this reason, the researcher finds Price’s approach more interesting, and is the one that informs the rest of this essay.
The contrasting Jesuses in scholarship may not surprise us with what we know of early Christian origins, where the figure of Jesus was worshipped in highly variegated ways.[22] Walter Bauer’s Orthodox and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (1934) among others highlighted this diversity, often showing that groups later deemed heretical emerged earlier in the historical record than first assumed. The modern scholar Burton Mack also argues that primitive Christianity was a highly disparate phenomenon.[23] Such reconstructions of early Christianity are speculative, as reliable evidence is surprisingly limited. When looking at the Gospels, one cannot help but think of Jacques Derrida’s postmodern aphorism ‘there is nothing outside the text’. Derrida, of course, meant it to mean a text was self-contained and reflected no external reality except other texts. Whist the study does not wish to go this far, it uses Derrida’s saying in a slightly different way to illustrate the silence in the historical record concerning Jesus. Despite showering Palestine with miracles, not least his own resurrection, Jesus left little impact on his contemporaries outside the NT. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus makes two references to Jesus, but these remain the subject of much scholarly dispute. A majority of scholars seem to suggest that Josephus did refer to Jesus in his writings, although most acknowledge that the so-called Testimonium Flavianum passage has also gone through some early Christian tampering.[24]
This study is not qualified to say whether the Josephus passage is genuine, but it does note its importance in respect to NT studies. One is sorely tempted to view the Testimonium Flavianum as historical Jesus scholarship’s toehold on the real world.[25] Without this, there is no credible first century mention of Jesus from a non-Christian perspective. Outside the Christian texts that tell his life story, Jesus is alarmingly absent. Of course, the fact that there are no external witnesses to the gospel narratives does not mean they are unhistorical, but it should perhaps give scholars more pause for thought than it does. In 1913, Albert Schweitzer stated,
…in the case of Jesus… all the reports about him go back to one source of tradition, early Christianity itself, and there are no data available in Jewish or Gentile secular history which could be used as controls. Thus the degree of certainty cannot even be raised so high as positive possibility.[26]
Schweitzer was no historical sceptic. He believed there was much authentic material in the Gospels. He wrote the above when discussing and criticising claims that Jesus did not exist, and in typical Schweitzer style highlighted a fact detrimental to his own argument. Schweitzer pugnaciously defended the historicity of Jesus, but he also recognised how uncertain this knowledge was without reliable evidence external to the Gospels. It forces scholars to accept that the narratives, in a sense, authenticate themselves. Such a process is dangerously circular.
One could defend the lack of non-Christian attestation in the first century by stating that just because there is scanty evidence does not mean the Gospel narratives are false. Moreover, is not treating the Christian sources of the period with hyper-scepticism unfair? Surely this is a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ run wild. But the fact we have little from a non-Christian perspective means we only receive the opinion of one side: believing Christians. Imagine if historians only had access to sources written by the Southern Confederacy when examining the American Civil War. What picture would those sources tell? Would it reflect reality in any way?[27] The absence of evidence from first century non-Christians, either hostile or disinterested, is potentially very grave. Historical Jesus scholars pay lip service to this fact, but then seem to forget about it once they enter the hermetically sealed world of the Gospels, where if something is mentioned in two or more independent sources, it suddenly becomes near historical certainty.[28]
An analogous discipline to this situation is the study of ancient Israel. Much mainstream scholarship now sees little historical information in the Torah, or the book of Joshua and Judges,[29] although there are scholars who still seek evidence for the historical Abraham and Moses, not to mention those who continue to valiantly search for Noah‘s Ark. [30] Emphasis is now placed on Kings 1 and 2, the so-called Deuteronomistic history, and the Davidic and Solomonic kingdoms it describes. Yet despite commanding vast territory according to the OT, David and Solomon left little unambiguous trace in the extra-biblical record. Nevertheless, many still believe such kingdoms existed, even if on a smaller scale than depicted in the OT.
The biblical scholars Philip R. Davies and Thomas T. Thompson criticise such a procedure. Davies highlights the circular nature of much OT studies: the assumption being that there is history within the narratives - and the evidence for this history is the narratives themselves.[31] Davies also cites the artificiality of dismissing so much of the early OT narratives as unhistorical, yet still insisting that the David and Solomon stories contain genuine aspects of real history when they are probably cut from the same cloth as the early narratives. The OT is the story of God’s chosen people. It is a metanarrative, and simply rejecting the first half as fiction and accepting the second half as containing fact makes little sense, either from a literary or historical perspective.[32] One simply ends up with a curious hybrid that is neither one thing nor the other.
What Davies and those like him (scholars known as ‘minimalists’) are saying is that the OT’s depiction of ancient Israel is largely a literary construct. Many of its characters probably have as strong claims to historicity as King Arthur. Davies contends that,
[b]y recognising… that the reason why so many things are told in the biblical literature, and the way they are told, has much more to do with literary artistry and much less if at all to do with anything that might have happened.[33]
If one is to write the history of Iron Age Israel, it needs to be through primarily archaeological evidence, using the OT only sparingly (if at all). Otherwise, the historian will constantly read biblical presuppositions into any external evidence.[34]
First, it should be clear that historical Jesus and OT studies are not exactly the same disciplines. One is focused on a single individual, the other a nation’s purported existence over the best part of a millennia. In this respect, the historical Jesus search is a more difficult task: scholars are less likely to stumble across evidence of one individual than they are a vast kingdom.[35] Conversely, the relatively short period between the end of Jesus’ life and gospel composition ¾ 40-70 years; compare this to the estimated four century (?) gap between the writing of Kings 1 and 2 and the events it describes ¾ may demonstrate that historical Jesus research is the more realistic proposition. But where this study sees a similarity between the two disciplines is in the basic trust of a narrative that is unattested outside its particular religion and the general assumption that the biblical narratives contain history in the first place. There is the same danger of circularity, brought on by the fact that David and Solomon left so little trace beyond the religious texts that confines them.
According to Thomas L. Thompson, someone who has written on the OT and NT, ‘[b]efore we can speak of a historical Jesus, we need a source that is independent of Matthew, Mark and Luke and refers to the figure of the first century’.[36] If this standard of verification was adhered to, historical Jesus research would no longer exist. Such scepticism, one feels, is anathema to biblical studies. But Thompson’s argument is actually very similar to Schweitzer’s; the difference being that whereas Schweitzer believed one could still draw historical conclusions from the Gospels despite the lack of external evidence, Thompson views the endeavour as mistaken from the outset. It would be like trying to find the historical Nephi in the Book of Mormon, another religious text largely untroubled by outside corroboration.[37]
Thompson and Davies draw attention to the laboured attempts to wring history out of texts that seem more suitable to some kind of literary criticism To illustrate their general point in respect to the NT, this essay will look at Jesus’ cleansing of the temple. As told by Mark,
[Jesus] …entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers... and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. And he taught, and said to them, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.” (Mark 11: 15-17).
The scene creates a number of historical problems. First, the temple was the size of thirty-four football pitches; a demonstration by a single individual could never have ‘cleansed’ it, or stopped the thousands of pilgrims carrying things through the temple at Passover.[38] Second, if Jesus had led a violent insurrection, it is likely he would have been arrested on the spot, not allowed to come back a bit later and tell parables (Mark 11: 27, 12:1). Third, the narrative of the passage shows similarities to Nehemiah 13:8-9, where Nehemiah throws Tobias' furniture out of the rooms that had wrongly been given him.[39] Fourth, Jesus’ words are a conflation of Isaiah 56:7 and Jeremiah 7:11. Whilst it is possible that Jesus went around Palestine quoting remarkably apt scripture when angry, it seems a more likely someone has put these words into his mouth. And as Robert Price notes, as Rudolf Bultmann did before him, who would remember Jesus quoting someone else?[40] Lastly, no one outside the Gospels recorded such an event, although this fact applies to almost everything in the Gospels.
Many critical scholars acknowledge these points, yet still argue real history lies behind the scene. E. P. Sanders and Bart Ehrman are two scholars among many who insist strongly for Jesus making a prophetic threat against the temple. In fact, Sanders concentrates more on how we should interpret the scene, rather than whether it happened or not.[41] But in acknowledging the problematic nature of the passage in Mark, many scholars feel the need to ‘rewrite’ the scene in a more realistic fashion. Jesus’ actions now become a small-scale ‘symbolic protest’ signalling his apocalyptic intentions and the imminent destruction of the temple.[42] The trouble with doing this is that there is no source saying Jesus made a small-scale symbolic protest. If we had such an (earlier) source, historians could plausibly suggest that what we find in Mark is an exaggeration. But no such source exists. Taking an improbable scene and rewriting it to make it more realistic is an unsound historiographical methodology. It is similar to the eighteenth century deists who would argue against Jesus’ miracles by coming up with naturalistic explanations for them. For example, Jesus did not walk on water, but simply walked along the shore. Granted, there is no supernatural agent in the temple scene, (apart from Jesus, of course) but a similar procedure is involved. Under such a rationale, one could historicise any myth or legend from the past.
It is understandable why historians look at the temple scene for clues to Jesus’ life. The most certain fact about Jesus is his crucifixion. This is even attested outside the NT in Josephus (albeit controversially) and Tacitus.[43] They then look for reasons why this occurred, and the temple demonstration is the prime candidate. But the myriad of problems in the passage suggest that Mark’s primary interest was theological and not historical. This is a situation where literary criticism can shed more light on the Gospels.
This essay defines literary criticism as examining a text apart from the consideration whether its contents refer to real-life events, along with seeking to uncover the intended effect an author would like his/her story to have on readers. Using such a tool, the temple demonstration may become more explicable. Instead of trying to rewrite the scene so that Jesus is making a symbolic act, is it easier to see the whole event as a symbol, a Markan narrative device that brings Jesus to the attention of the authorities, and thus instigating the beginning of his passion? Mark is pulling together his literary themes (judgement, Jesus’ authority, Jerusalem’s destruction) and dramatically increasing the thematic tension. Mark may even prelude the entire scene a few verses earlier (Mark 11: 12-14) when he has Jesus wither a hapless fig tree. Jesus judges the fig tree for not bearing fruit in much the same way as he will shortly pass judgement on the temple; both are signs of the coming Kingdom.[44] As Burton Mack contends when discussing the entire temple act, ‘if one deletes from the story those themes essential to the Markan plots there is nothing left over for historical reminiscence.’[45]
Of course, this is but one possible reading. This researcher is not an exegete, so his conclusions do not carry much weight. Furthermore, if one accuses Mark of using literary devices and then deem his writing a fiction because of it, one would probably have to do the same for all historical writing, as they too employ tropes and rhetorical techniques to get their points across. This, of course, is one of the charges postmodernism levels at history: historians cannot help but apply literary forms onto the past that inevitably distort reality. But even if we accept that historians can produce history that sometimes corresponds with the past, the outlook for many of the gospel stories still seems bleak. It is not so much that the gospel writers were bound by the same strictures of human language that we are today (although they were). It is more the fact that a lot of biblical events simply read like literary creations: literary creations that display their antecedents in earlier biblical texts, Hellenistic novels and other Mesopotamian literature.
Many disagree with viewing biblical texts in primarily literary terms, perhaps made obvious by the fact that historical Jesus studies continue at a pace. Amongst other criticisms, accusations of postmodernism have been levelled at the likes of Davies and Thompson. One can see how such a label might arise. In that he considers many ancient texts as not reflecting an actual reality, but instead representing a rich tapestry of hopes, legends and mythemes that have circulated around the Mediterranean for millennia, Thompson may be judged as having a postmodern outlook. For him, the figure of Jesus simply fulfils a narrative function. Jesus, like many individuals in ancient literature, is potentially nothing more than the ‘bearer of a writer’s parable’.[46] Such a view goes against mainstream scholarship, and, of course, two-thousand years of Judeo-Christian tradition.
In a sense, the scholar who sees the Gospels and other ancient writings as nothing more than texts reflecting other cultural memes of the age has an easier task than those who carefully mine them for nuggets of historical gold. As many have noted, the Gospels’ miracles do not lend themselves to easy historical investigation, and even stories unaffected by fabulous wonders often suffer from anachronisms (Pharisee presence in Galilee before 70CE; synagogues in Galilee before 70CE; Nazareth possibly uninhabited at the time of Jesus; Jesus quoting the Septuagint) or other historical implausibilities (the temple scene; the Jewish night trial; the Barabbas incident, etc.).[47] Picking out what is left and trying to do history is a far harder task than pulling on the deconstruction pants and jumping in for some Derrida-inspired mayhem. In this respect, the historian attempting to earnestly reconstruct Jesus’ life can perhaps assume a higher purpose in the belief they are ‘doing history’ and not merely deconstructing texts. Conversely, a scholar like Robert Price, who makes no attempt to ‘find’ the historical Jesus, has the freedom to dart around the edges of the Gospels (and of biblical scholarship) whilst making lots of exegetical insights, (some perceptive, some speculative), without taking on the onerous pressure to make the Gospels match up to some kind of events in the distant past. In this researcher’s view, Price has the easier task; but given the nature of the available evidence, his approach may well be the correct one.
Postmodernism is often linked to scepticism. However, even before postmodernism, a historian’s toolbox always included a certain incredulity when examining the past. If not, the modern historian would still be the ‘scissors and paste’ antiquarians that Collingwood believed characterised pre-critical history, where individuals merely copied out their ‘authorities’ and harmonised away any apparent contradictions.[48] This is not how a modern historian works. What place is there, then, for scepticism within biblical studies? Philip Davies states that ‘[i]n the language of Christianity, believing is good and doubting is bad.’[49] Whilst the comment applies a very broad brush, it does raise the question as to whether biblical scholarship can ever be truly critical, especially when creedal doctrines are at stake. In the interest of space, the essay will prescind from a detailed discussion on the matter. However, it will now examine its own role in the research process.
The researcher brings no particular religious affinity to this study. In making such an admission, one must also acknowledge the peculiarity of being very interested in the historical Jesus without harbouring a religious belief in the subject. This researcher puts it down to wilful perversity. On a more serious note, this may be the reverse of how most people approach Jesus, with many becoming interested in him through their faith, which then leads to a curiosity of the historical dimension of Christianity. The approach of the researcher therefore aims to give an outside interpretation on the historical Jesus question. Of course, simply being an outsider to Christianity does not make one’s interpretation correct. Nevertheless, the study hopes that being free from dogma held on belief grounds will be an asset, even though it will inevitably suffer the problem of subjectivity that afflicts all historical writing.
This essay must also admit it is selective. All history is selective, of course: as E. H. Carr noted, the historian begins with an idea of what he/she wants to find, and then goes looking in the place where he/she knows it will be.[50] Even though the study is not directly examining the past, it has chosen scholars who mostly approach the biblical texts from a sceptical perspective. It freely admits that one could easily pick more conservative scholars to counter the arguments made, and no doubt such scholars would outnumber the more sceptical. As the study does not propose to make any groundbreaking claims, but instead examine a small section of secondary literature to explore various interpretations of Jesus, it believes it can justify emphasising more left-field scholars, although it will still make much use of more traditional scholarship.
The shift in emphasis to a more postmodern perspective generally reflects the researcher’s changing views as he learned more about historical Jesus research. At first, mainstream scholarship offered an attractive prospect. It seemed refreshingly free from fundamentalist axe grinding and it genuinely felt like it was conducting a historical rather than a theological endeavour. This has changed, with the realisation that much historical Jesus research is unavoidably circular: scholars begin with an idea of who Jesus was, and then search the Gospels for material fitting that initial idea. It also relies on assumptions about first century Judaism and early Christianity (outside the Pauline mission), the latter being especially difficult to quantify as evidence is so scarce.[51] Many commendable attempts have been made to break the pattern of circularity, but as this essay has shown, the lack of evidence external to the Gospels vitiates any reliable conclusions. It has also recognised the inherent subjectivity in the discipline. When E. P. Sanders describes ancient history as requiring ‘common sense and a good feel for the sources’, one automatically feels we are in a highly subjective field of study. [52] One person’s ‘common sense’ is often sharply different to another’s. And whilst history is a mostly qualitative discipline where value judgements are unavoidable, historical Jesus research seems acutely hindered by its subjective nature.
In the opinion of this essay, historians should never avoid asking the question, ‘why is this story being told?’ And the answer cannot always be, ‘because it describes what happened.’ As previously stated, all literature is ersatz in that it is a substitute for the real thing, reality. But literature is also ideology: it is a powerful form of persuasive communication.[53] This is surely apparent with the Gospels, where the figure of Jesus serves an ideological function. Historians are not oblivious to these facts, and make allowance for the theological slant of the evangelists, whilst still maintaining there is a historical core at the Gospels’ centre. Yet it is the belief in the ‘historical core’ that this study has found increasingly problematic: that one can reach the real history just by peeling back the layers of legend. Such a procedure assumes what it should be proving: that the Gospels contain actual history. These methodological assumptions arise because we lack any solid evidence outside the Gospels that can act as a control and that can give us reasonable assurance that we are not simply reading fiction. None of these issues conclusively proves that the events in the bible are untrue, or that Jesus (or David and Solomon) are unhistorical. It has not been the purpose of the essay to debunk the historical Jesus; in fact, it still believes the historical Jesus is a reasonable assumption to make. However, it has concluded that finding him is a forlorn effort, in that there are so many plausible depictions available. If postmodernism means that history is but a matter of interpretation, then it can find no better example than the quest for the historical Jesus.
This essay began with discussing the historical imagination. There is a name given for most imaginatively written works: they are called fiction. To understand them, people employ literary critical techniques, and this essay has argued that the Gospels might lend themselves better to such a method. But whatever the case, historians should never underestimate the power of the human imagination. Not just in respect to their own narratives that can elucidate or distort the past, but also the imagination that can create complex grand narratives with an impressive degree of verisimilitude, (the Torah, Arthurian Chronicles, the Book of Mormon) that can capture our religious and secular hearts, yet still not reflect any reality other than the human minds that composed them.[54] One may disagree with Hayden White’s contention that all history is created rather than discovered, but some narratives wear their fictionality heavier than others. Words can indeed create worlds.
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Miller, Robert, The Jesus Seminar and its Critics, (Santa Rosa: Polebridge Press, 1999).
Munslow, Alan , Deconstructing History, ( London: Routledge, 1997).
Price, Robert M., Deconstructing Jesus, (New York: Prometheus Books, 2000).
Price, Robert M., The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, (New York: Prometheus Books, 2003).
Sanders, E. P., Jesus and Judaism, (London: SCM Press, 1985).
Sanders, E. P., The Historical Figure of Jesus, (London: Penguin Books, 1993).
Schweitzer, Albert, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, (New York: Macmillan, 1978), (originally published 1906).
The Book of Mormon - Another Testament of Jesus Christ, (originally published 1830).
The Holy Bible, (Revised Standard Version).
Theissen, Gerd, Merz, Annette, The Historical Jesus: A Comprehensive Guide, (London: SCM Press, 1998), (trans by John Bowden).
Thompson, Thomas L., The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David, (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006).
Tosh, John, The Pursuit of History, (fourth edn.), (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2006).
Vermes, Geza, Jesus the Jew - A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels, (London: SCM Press, 2001), (first published 1973).
Vermes, Geza, Who’s Who in the Age of Jesus, (London: Penguin Books, 2005).
Vermes, Geza, The Passion, (London: Penguin, 2005).
White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in the Nineteenth Century, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
Journal Articles
Jacquette, Dale, ‘Collingwood on Historical Authority and Historical Imagination’, Journal of the Philosophy of History, 3 (2009). 55-78.
Internet Resources
“The Bible and Interpretation”
<http://www.bibleinterp.com>.
Goodacre, Mark, “New Testament Gateway”
<http://www.ntgateway.com/>.
“History in Focus: What is History?”
<http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Whatishistory/>.
Turton, Michael, “Michael A. Turton's Historical Commentary on the Gospel of Mark” <http://www.michaelturton.com/Mark/GMark_index.html>.
“Vridar”
<http://vridar.wordpress.com/>.
[1] ‘OT’ for the rest of the essay. This means committing the Christian-centric sin of referring to the Hebrew Bible as the Old Testament. The essay also chooses not to capitalise ‘bible’ unless it is a specific bible, e.g. the King James Bible. All bible quotations are from the Revised Standard Version.
[2] The religious persuasion of mediaeval women was probably of no interest to the chroniclers. Or Carr, for that matter. E. H. Carr, What is History?, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), (first published 1961), p. 8.
[3] Luke 2:41-51 does feature a charming story of the twelve-year-old Jesus authoritatively discussing scripture in the temple, although its historicity is somewhat doubtful. The Jesus Seminar sees the episode as following the convention of Hellenistic biography, which commonly featured fictive scenes from the hero’s childhood. Robert Price speculates that the story is actually cut from the same cloth as the infancy Gospels. The Gospel of John’s water into wine miracle (2:1-11) may also be a stray piece of infancy material that somehow found its way into the canonical Gospels. Funk, et al, The Five Gospels, (1993), p. 276, Price, Son of Man, (2003), pp. 76,77.
[4] R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), (first published 1946), pp. 241-242.
[6] ‘Wie es epigenetic gewsen.’
[7] John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2006), p. 194.
[8] Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in the Nineteenth Century, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
[9] Stefan Berger, Heiko Felder, Kevin Passmore, (eds), Writing History Theory and Practice, (London, Hodder Arnold, 2003), p. 121.
[10] Philip R. Davies, In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’, (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992), pp. 14, 15.
[11] ‘Ceci n'est pas une pipe.’
[12] Hector Avalos, The End of Biblical Studies, (New York: Prometheus Books, 2007), p. 209.
[13] NT for the rest of the essay.
[14] Without this supposition, there would be no historical Jesus studies. It would just be a case of looking in the bible and finding him. Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology - An Introduction, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), p. 317.
[15] Also, the Pauline epistles present Jesus in a strikingly different manner from the Gospels.
[16] Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician, (New York: Harper and Row, 1978); Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew, (London: SCM Press, 2001), (first published 1973); E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, (London: SCM Press, 1985); Harvey Falk, Jesus the Pharisee, (New York: Paulist, 1985); S. G. F. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity, (New York: Scribners, 1967); John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, (New York: Harper Collins, 1991).
[18] John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), p. xxviii.
[19] Crossan believes historical Jesus research methodology to be at the same level archaeological studies were a century ago. Crossan, The Historical Jesus, p. xxviii.
[20] Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels, (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1996), p. 108.
[21] From the opening credits of The Six million Dollar Man. A parallel between Steve Austin and Jesus: both suffered catastrophic mishaps, but still managed to come out the other end in significantly better shape than when they started.
[22] Wayne Meeks, The First Urban Christians: the Social World of the Apostle Paul, (Binghamton: Yale University, 1983), p.5.
[23] Mack questions the ’Big Bang’ model of Christian origins, with everything unfolding from the discovery of the empty tomb. Burton Mack, The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins, (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 8.
[24] The Testimonium Flavianum appears in Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities (Antt. 18.3.63). Another possible reference appears in Antt. 20. 9.200, which mentions ‘the brother of Jesus [James] who was called Christ’. Again, many scholars consider this a genuine reference, but even to this non-Greek reading research student, it seems more likely that the ‘Jesus’ in the passage probably refers to an entirely different person, possibly Jesus, son of Damneus, who Josephus mentions later in Antt. 20.9.203. Jewish Antiquities is dated around 93-94 CE, about sixty years after the death of Jesus.
[25] Of course, one should not accept uncritically Josephus’ version of events either. Josephus wrote for a Greco-Roman audience (Josephus’ patron was the emperor Vespasian) with the intent of glorifying the Jewish people. Nevertheless, many regard him reliable, despite composing fictive speeches for historical characters and viewing historical events as unfolding through divine fiat. Such techniques were the stock in trade of the ancient historian, and need not disqualify their work from containing genuine material. These points apply to the Gospels as well.
[26]Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, (New York: Macmillan, 1978), (originally published 1906), p. 402. Schweitzer wrote at a time when the Testimonium Flavianum was considered by most scholars to be a forgery (see p. 359). It is only in the last fifty years or so that scholars have started to view the Josephus passage as containing a genuine reference to Jesus.
[27] One could substitute any sort of historical circumstance here. And of course, one could reverse the example given and have the North as the sole source of information on the Civil War. However, the researcher admits using the Confederacy for its rhetorical effect. He bows in deference to the majesty of Hayden White.
[28] The study admits unfairly characterising historical Jesus scholars in the last part of the above sentence, but it does believe that multiple attestation is one of the weakest criterions at their disposal. First, it is not certain how independent the sources are: a sceptic might suggest they all boil down to just two, Q and Mark. Second, because some saying appears in independent sources does not necessarily mean it goes back to the historical Jesus. Multiple attestation might demonstrate antiquity, but in cannot establish authenticity.
[30] David Howard Jr. and Michael A Grisanti, eds., Giving the Sense: Understanding and Using the Old Testament Historical Texts, (Grand Rapids, MI, Kregel, 2003), Ian Provan, V. Philips Long and Tremper Longman III, A Biblical History of Israel, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003) are two examples of a more conservative approach to the OT.
[31] Davies, In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’, pp. 35-37.
[32] Davies, In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’, pp. 26-27
[33] Davies, In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’, p. 28
[34] Davies challenges the view that archaeological evidence actually shows any trace of a Davidic or Solomonic kingdom. ‘Whoever is living in the Palestinian highlands around 1000 BCE, they do not think, look or act like the people the biblical writers have put there.’ Davies, In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’, p. 28.
[35] There is of course the Turin Shroud, but this seems more an article of faith rather than historical evidence. A better bet was the discovery of an ossuary baring the inscription ‘James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.’ In 2003 this was deemed a forgery. “Final Reports on the Yehoash Inscription and James Ossuary from the Israeli Antiquities Authority”, The Bible and Interpretation, 15 June 2003, <http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/Final_committees_reports.shtml>, [accessed 28 April 2110].
[36] Thomas L. Thompson, The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David, (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), p. 9.
[37] In the distant future the Book of Mormon may offer an analogy to today’s historical Jesus search. Imagine that in two thousand years time Mormonism has become a dominant faction of Christianity and material largely sceptical of the BoM has disappeared. Trying to find historical antecedents for its contents would seem quite justifiable. When we consider that even today thirteen million members of the Church of the Latter Day Saints already believe the BoM a fairly reliable document, such speculation - and this is all this footnote is: speculation - is not entirely specious. An unattested narrative could easily assume the guise of true history.
[38] Robert M. Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, (New York: Prometheus Books, 2003), p. 294.
[39] There are more possible scriptural allusions, e.g. Malachi 3:1, Hosea 9:15, Zechariah 14:21 amongst others. By itself, references to scripture do not automatically make something unhistorical. Jesus could have purposely acted out OT events. However, the Gospels are so weighed down with OT allusions that it seems plausible that some literary invention has taken place. Witness Mark’s reliance on Elijah and Elisha OT narratives for his own miracle stories.
[40] Price, Son of Man, p. 134.
[41] E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, (London: SCM Press, 1985), pp. 61-76.
[42] Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 212.
[43] Tacitus mentions ‘Christus’ a person convicted by Pontius Pilate in Tiberius’ reign, in Book 15 of the annals, dated around 117 CE.
[44] Thompson, The Messiah Myth, pp. 77-79.
[45] Burton Mack, A Myth of Innocence, (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), p. 292
[46] As Thompson doubts the historicity of Jesus, he can also do away with the concept of oral tradition. Scholars generally appeal to oral tradition to bridge the gap between Jesus’ death and Gospel composition. As Jesus probably did not exist (according to Thompson) such a concept is superfluous to requirements, and therefore under threat from Occam’s Razor. Oral tradition, of course, is only assumed. It is not actually provable. Thompson, The Messiah Myth, pp. 8, 9.
[47] Scholars tackle these problems in a variety of ways, with sceptics like Robert Price gleefully pointing them out whilst more conservative scholars like N. T. Wright and E. P. Sanders make a case that such issues do not seriously harm historicity. Concerning the Barabbas episode, Geza Vermes, despite acknowledging the lack of precedence for such a Roman prisoner amnesty, argues for its historicity because there was no reason for the Gospel writers to fabricate such a scenario. Such argumentation is unbecoming of a scholar of Vermes’ excellence: even this amateur researcher can see the scene as another opportunity to portray the Jews in a less than positive light. It still may have happened, of course, but this type of argument (‘I don’t know why they’d have made it up, therefore it happened’) is a bit too common amongst Jesus scholars. Geza Vermes, The Passion, (London: Penguin Books, 2005), pp. 113,114.
[48] Collingwood, The Idea of History, pp. 257-266.
[50] Carr’s uses a rather clever angling metaphor to make his point: ‘…what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he [sic] chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use - these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he [sic] wants to catch.’ Carr, What is History?, p. 18.
[51] This especially affects the criterion of dissimilarity. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, p. 15.
[52] E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus, (London: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 56.
[53] Davies, In Search of ‘Ancient Israel’, p. 13.
[54] This study admits it is predisposed to believing that Joseph Smith created the BoM rather than receiving it from the Angel Moroni on golden plates. This is perhaps one instance of blatant anti-supernatural bias that many orthodox Christians will find agreeable.
posted by The Harbinger of Nothing @ 06:05
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