Historical Jesus - Lesson 1

Dr. Mark Strauss
Historical Jesus
nt315-01
Critics of the Gospel Accounts
Lesson Transcript

In Mark's gospel, chapter eight and its parallels in Matthew 16 and Luke 9, Jesus takes his disciples on the spiritual retreat to get some rest and get away from the crowds. He heads north to the region of Caesarea Philippi, and on the way Jesus asks his disciples a question. He says, "Who do people say that I am?" That is perhaps the most compelling question in human history and one that has been asked and answered countless times. Who is this Jesus of Nazareth? By almost all accounts, Jesus is the most influential person in human history.

About a third of the world's population identifies itself as Christians, followers of Jesus Christ. Jesus is the most revered, most debated, most discussed, and most controversial person in the world. Countless books, articles, and movies have been written about him. Many of these focusing on that question, who was Jesus of Nazareth? I read those to my news these days on the internet, but for years I would get weekly news magazines like Time or Newsweek, and it seemed almost every Easter and Christmas there'd be a cover story about Jesus with provocative titles like Searching for the Real Jesus or New Discovery Challenges the Traditional View of Jesus. Often these would pick up some radical new theory about Jesus or some archeological discovery that supposedly gave new insight into his life and times.

Consider the organization of scholars known as the Jesus Seminar. The Jesus Seminar was founded in 1985 by Robert Funk and John Dominic Crossan. Its goals seemed innocent enough. Its goals were "to renew the quest for the historical Jesus and to report the results of its research to more than a handful of gospel specialists." That last line, "to report the results to the general public was full of innuendo." You see, the members of the Jesus Seminar contended that conservative churches and leaders were hiding the real Jesus from their members. The everyday people in the pew. Christians were being duped and deceived by fundamentalists who were glossing over what scholars really knew about the historical Jesus. The goal of the Jesus Seminar was to set the record straight and tell the "real truth about Jesus." This provocative claim attracted much media attention and the Jesus Seminar actively promoted its views through newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and the internet. Meeting twice yearly for about a decade, the Jesus Seminar examined and voted on the individual sayings and actions of Jesus.

Their unusual voting procedure was a parody on red letter editions of the Bible, where the words of Jesus are printed in red. By the seminar's vote, each gospel episode was deemed to be either red, which meant an authentic saying of Jesus, pink, which meant not authentic, but something like Jesus. Gray, meaning inauthentic, but ideas close to Jesus's. Or black, which meant definitely not Jesus. The seminar's results were published in two volumes, one on the sayings of Jesus and one on his actions. The first was called The Five Gospels: The Search For the Authentic Words of Jesus. It was published in 1993. The reference to five gospels was meant to be provocative since the Jesus Seminar study included not only the canonical gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but also the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, which the seminar viewed as a legitimate source for the study of the historical Jesus.

The Jesus Seminar's second volume was called the Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus published in 1998. In the end, only a little over 15% of the sayings and deeds of Jesus were considered to be authentic, that is either red or pink. The seminar's work resulted in a minimalist portrait of Jesus. He was considered to be a countercultural peasant teacher. He never claimed to be the Messiah and certainly never claimed to be God. His revolutionary ideas resulted in his arrest and crucifixion. End of story. Jesus did not rise from the dead. While the Jesus Seminar arose in the context of biblical scholarship, many revisionist portraits of Jesus come to us in popular culture. Movies like Jesus Christ Superstar and The Last Temptation of Christ present new takes on the historical Jesus. Christians watching these movies soon realize they're not in Sunday school anymore.

This is a very different Jesus than the biblical one. Perhaps the most provocative and controversial pop cultural portrayal of Jesus in recent years was the bestselling book and movie, the Da Vinci Code written by Dan Brown. The Da Vinci Code made a huge cultural impact both in the United States and around the world. The book sold over 50 million copies. The movie was directed by famed Hollywood director Ronnie Howard and starred superstar actor Tom Hanks. Like the Jesus Seminar, the Da Vinci Code claimed that the Jesus of the Gospels was a figment of imagination created by the powerful and oppressive church. In reality, they claimed Jesus was not the divine son of God. He was a mere human being. In fact, according to the book, no one claimed Jesus was divine until the fourth century when the Emperor Constantine elevated Jesus to the status of a God for political reasons.

But the most scandalous part of the Da Vinci Code was the claim that Jesus was married and that his wife was Mary Magdalene, whom he appointed to be head of the church and with whom he had a child. According to the Da Vinci Code, Jesus practiced goddess worship and pagan sex rituals. This it said was the real Jesus movement, but it was suppressed by the misogynist disciples like Peter who gained the ascendancy and oppressed Jesus's true followers. The book also claimed that originally there were upward of 80 gospels or so. All of these were suppressed except the four New Testament gospels, which supported the views of the traditionalists.

In the end, the Da Vinci Code was widely discredited by book critics and biblical scholars alike. News organizations like The New York Times, which had originally hailed the book as a great factual expose eventually acknowledged that it was grossly inaccurate. Even liberal biblical scholars like Bart Ehrman and John Dominic Crossan, two of the strongest critics of the biblical portrait of Jesus ridiculed the Da Vinci Code for its gross historical inaccuracies. So while the Da Vinci Code came in like a lion, it went out like a lamb. Indeed, after the massive success of the book, the movie was a bit of a flop, widely panned by critics. Yet in many ways the damage had been done. It got people wondering, is the church's Jesus the real Jesus and can we trust the Bible? And there have been others since then. Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Barnes and Noble, in 2006, we suddenly started hearing from the national media about a new discovery that could be scandalous to the church.

A new gospel had been discovered, and this one shockingly told the story of Jesus from the perspective of Judas the Betrayer. The headlines read "Long lost gospel of Judas cast a traitor in a new light." The reports announced that scholars had unearthed a new gospel in Egypt, which revealed a very different and surprising perspective on Judas. He was portrayed not as the enemy, but as Jesus's closest confidant. In betraying Jesus, Judas was merely doing Jesus's own bidding. Equally disturbing was the way in which the new finding was described.

The headlines read Scholars Confirm the Authenticity of the Gospel of Judas. Some went so far as to say that this would require a complete rethinking of Jesus in the early church. New Testament Scholar Elaine Pagels of Princeton University trumpeted the discovery was astonishing and Bart Ehrman identified it as "one of the greatest historical discoveries of the 20th century, rivaling the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic Gospels of Nag Hammadi." Coming just before Easter, and in the wake of the fever surrounding the Da Vinci Code, Christians naturally asked, what's going on?

Is the Gospel of Judas a real document, a giant hoax, a concerted attempt to undermine Christianity? The answer turned out to be quite simple and not very controversial. Scholars on both the left and the right agreed that the gospel of Judas does not tell us anything about Jesus or about the historical figure of Judas. It does, however, tell us some things about Second Century Gnosticism. Gnosticism was a major religious rival to orthodox Christianity in the second and third centuries, and the gospel of Judas was one of a number of gnostic gospels, including among others, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. The Gospel of Judas, like these other gnostic gospels, claimed to be a secret revelation of Jesus given to a favored disciple. The first line of the gospel describes the work as "the secret revelatory discourse in which Jesus spoke with Judas' chariot for eight days.

In the discourse, Jesus teaches Judas secrets that will provide enlightenment. Jesus actually commends him for his role as Jesus's betrayer. This is understandable in the context of Gnostic thought, since Jesus' death will enable him to shed this earthly body and return to the realm of pure spirit. So when scholars said the gospel of Judas was likely authentic, they were not saying it actually described actual historical events. Rather, they're saying it was an ancient document rather than a modern forgery. It's an authentic gnostic gospel from the second century AD written to promote gnostic theology. We know this approximate date because the Gospel of Judas was known in the early church. The church leader Ireneaus writing in the mid second century referred to it as a heretical gospel and as fictitious history. Though historians knew about the Gospel's existence, we had no physical copies of it until one was discovered in Egypt in 1978.

It was eventually published in 2006. So in conclusion, no respected scholar claims this gospel contains authentic historical information about Jesus or Judas. It is rather a fictional dialogue between Jesus and Judas composed over a hundred years after Jesus's time and intended to promote gnostic theology. The Jesus Seminar, the Da Vinci Code, the Gospel of Judas. What did these have in common? These are all attempts in one form or another to answer the question, who was this Jesus of Nazareth? That is the topic of our study in these sessions together. We call this field of study historical Jesus research, and it's the focus of countless books and journal articles. Now, at this point, if you are a Christian, you might be a bit confused. You might be saying, but wait, don't we have biographies about Jesus written by eyewitnesses who were there? Weren't Matthew and John two of Jesus's 12 disciples? Weren't Mark and Luke close associates of the apostles who knew and interviewed the eyewitnesses? Didn't Jesus explicitly claimed to be the Messiah and the Son of God?

Didn't he perform amazing miracles? Didn't he heal the sick and raise the dead? Didn't he cast out demons? Didn't he feed 5,000 people with a few loaves and fishes? Didn't he intentionally go to the cross to pay the penalty for our sins? Most important of all, identity rise victorious from the dead, gaining victory over death and ensuring that we too will be raised. How in the world do we get from the Jesus of the Gospels to the Jesus presented by the Jesus Seminar?

It should be obvious that these writers and scholars are starting from a very different perspective. They would argue, for example, first of all, that the gospels were not written by eyewitnesses, but by later Christians far removed from the original events. Second, they would say that the stories in the gospels are filled with myths and legends that were created in the early church as the church came to believe that this Jewish teacher was in fact the divine son of God. Third, they would assert that the gospels are not objective historical accounts, but rather theological propaganda meant to promote the church's own claims about who Jesus was.

So which is it, history or propaganda? These different starting points create a great challenge for studying the historical Jesus. Think about it. Suppose I say, we know Jesus performed miracles because the gospels say so and the gospels are the inspired and authoritative word of God, but my opponent then says, "I don't believe these writings are divinely inspired or the word of God. They're like any other documents from ancient history written by fallible human beings. Reading them, we see historical errors and inconsistencies." So I say to him, "No, they're the word of God." And he says, "No, they're not." And I say, "Yes, they are." He says, "No, they're not." We're not going to get very far obviously. Before we can have a conversation about the historical Jesus, we obviously have to establish some common starting points.

In the next two sessions, we'll seek to do this. First, we'll discuss the issue of worldview and the thorny question of whether it is legitimate to accept supernatural explanations for historical events. In our next session, then we'll discuss what are called the criteria of authenticity, the attempt to establish a common methodology for testing the authenticity of the words and deeds of Jesus.