Historical Jesus - Lesson 3

Dr. Mark Strauss
Historical Jesus
nt315-03
Historical Research
Lesson Transcript

In our last session, we talked about the significance of worldview in the quest of the historical Jesus. Can naturalists and supernaturalists engage in the same quest if they have very different worldviews? Obviously, if you don't believe miracles are possible, you're not going to judge Jesus's miracles as accurately recorded history. This raises the thorny question of whether it is even possible to conduct "objective historical research." Through the years, some have denied that such a quest is either possible or desirable.

In 1892, Martin Kähler wrote a short book with the title in English, The So-called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ. Kahler's work was a strong challenge to the rationalistic 19th-century attempts to reconstruct the historical Jesus. Kahler's main point was that the historical figure of Jesus constructed by these rationalistic scholars was not the real Jesus at all, but a figment of scholarly imagination.

They were merely creating Jesus in their own image. The only real Jesus today is the Christ of faith, proclaimed by the apostles and now worshiped in the church. Fundamental to Kahler's view was to claim that it is impossible through historical means to reconstruct a biography of Jesus. This is because the kerygma, the Christian preaching about the risen and exalted Christ, is so interwoven into the gospel narratives that there is no non-supernatural Jesus of history to be found. Now for Kahler, this was not a problem or a loss, since what is ultimately important for the church is not the historical events but the faith experience of believers.

Kahler used two German words to draw this distinction. He said that the gospels were not history, a German word meaning the events as they actually happened in space and time. They were instead geschichte, another German word meaning the theological impact or significance of what happened. For true believers, geschichte is all that we have so that Jesus of history and the Christ of faith are one and the same. While Kahler's work was meant to recover the significance of Jesus for the church, it was used by scholars like Rudolph Bultmann really to cut off Christianity from its historical roots by drawing a strict dichotomy between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. Bultmann claim that we can know virtually nothing about the historical Jesus because the gospels are only geschichte, only theology.

Incidentally, Kahler's work has an interesting contemporary parallel in the writings of Luke Timothy Johnson, a Roman Catholic scholar who offered a scathing critique of the Jesus seminar. In his 1996 book, The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels, Johnson rejected the possibility of discovering the so-called real Jesus through critical historical inquiry. For Johnson, like for Kahler, the real Jesus is the Christ of faith. This Jesus is not discovered through criteria of authenticity or historical methodology but through an existential faith encounter with the risen Lord.

A similar pessimistic perspective is found in the later work of Jesus scholar, Dale Allison. In his 2009 book, The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus, Allison concedes, "After years of being in the quest business, I reluctantly concluded that most of the gospel materials are not subject to historical proof, or disprove, or even the accurate estimates of their probability."

All right, those are the skeptics. On the other side, most Jesus scholars consider it both possible and necessary to investigate the historical Jesus using a rigorous historical method. On this side are scholars who reach more conservative conclusions, scholars like N.T. Wright, Craig Keener, and Ben Witherington, as well as those who reach more liberal conclusions like John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg.

Through the years, Jesus' scholars have developed and refined various criteria of authenticity to judge the historicity of the words and deeds of Jesus. In the rest of this session, we'll discuss and critique some of these criteria. The most fundamental and widely accepted of the criteria is the criterion of dissimilarity. This criterion says that a saying or an episode of Jesus in Jesus' life is likely to be authentic if it is dissimilar or unlike the emphases of both ancient Judaism and the early church. In other words, if it is unique, it is unlikely to have been taken over from Judaism or invented by the early church. An example of this criterion of dissimilarity would be Jesus's identification of himself as the Son of man. It's likely true that Jesus used this messianic title since it was not a common title for the "maschiach" in first-century Judaism, nor was it a title widely adopted in the faith confessions of the early church. The church commonly used titles like Christ, son of God, or Lord, but seldom did they use Son of man.

One significant problem with this criterion is that while it may tell us what was unique about Jesus, it does not necessarily tell us what was characteristic about him. Jesus was born and raised as a Jew in first-century Palestine. To ignore everything from this background will inevitably result in an incomplete and distorted picture of Jesus, who was inextricably linked to the history of Judaism and the biblical story. Furthermore, it's beyond dispute that Jesus had a profound effect on His followers and that the early church was greatly influenced by His teaching. To ignore anything about Jesus that was important in the early church will no doubt result in a skewed perspective. So while the criterion of dissimilarity may be legitimate in as far as it goes, it is insufficient to get anything like a full or complete picture of the historical Jesus.

A second important criterion is the criterion of multiple attestation. This criterion claims that a sane or story is more likely to be authentic if it appears in a wide variety of gospel sources. How one uses this criterion will depend on their conclusion concerning the sources behind our gospels. For example, as we noted previously, most scholars believed that Mark was the first gospel written and that Matthew and Luke both used Mark as a source. They also believed that Matthew and Luke independently used another common source, designated as Q. In addition, there is the material that Luke alone presents, called L material, and the material unique to Matthew, identified as M material.

Then there are sources proposed by scholars behind John's gospel, as we mentioned, such as the sign source. We mentioned all of these in our last session. The criterion of multiple attestation says that a particular saying of Jesus or an event in his life is more likely to be authentic that appears in multiple different sources. A good example of this is Jesus' highly counter-cultural practice of eating or dining with sinners. We find this immaterial originally in Mark, for example, the Call of Levi in Mark 2:15-17, where Jesus goes to Levi's house. He's invited to eat a meal there. We find it in two material, for example, when Jesus caught a friend of tax collectors and sinners. That's in Matthew 11 and in Luke 7. We find it in Luke's unique material. For example, in the introduction to the parables of lost things in Luke 15, and we find it in Matthew's unique material. For example, when Jesus tells the religious leaders, "The tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you," that's in Matthew 21:28-32. Something so widely attested in the gospel tradition is almost certainly historically true.

Another example of Jesus' sayings affirmed by this criterion are his predictions of the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, which appear in multiple layers of the gospel tradition, including both the synoptic gospels and the Gospel of John. The criterion of multiple attestation also applies to literary genres. A theme that appears in multiple genres, such as parables, controversy stories, and miracle stories, is considered more likely to be authentic. Of course, the legitimacy of this criterion depends on which sources are given priority. Is John's gospel an early and independent source? And what about the apocryphal gospels? For example, is priority given to a saying attested in both the canonical gospels and the Gospel of Thomas? These two criteria, dissimilarity, and multiple attestation are probably the most widely utilized by historical Jesus scholars, but there are others.

The criterion of embarrassment claims that events or sayings that would have been embarrassing or theologically difficult for the early church are more likely to be authentic. The rationale is that the church is unlikely to have invented things that created problems for itself. A classic example of this is the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. The church would never have invented an account where John baptizes Jesus since this might suggest that John was superior to Jesus or that Jesus was John's disciple. John's reluctance to baptize Jesus in Matthew 3:13-15 is viewed as evidence that the early church was uncomfortable with this event.

Another example of possible embarrassment is the odd two-stage healing of a blind man at Bethsaida in Mark 8:22-26. The church would surely never have invented a story in which Jesus' first attempt to heal a blind man apparently partially fails. Another example is Jesus' statement that not even the Son of man knows the day or the hour of his return. Mark 13:32. It seems unlikely the church would've created a saying that attributed such ignorance to the son. One potential problem with this criterion is that what seems embarrassing to us may or may not have seemed so to the early church. There may also be theological or narrative reasons for the difficulty that may not be readily apparent to the reader. For example, the two-stage healing in Mark 8 may be a metaphor for the partial sight of the disciples. A theme that appears in the following passage, "When Peter confesses that Jesus is the "mashiach" but then is blind to the fact that Jesus must suffer and die."

A fourth criterion, the criterion of semitic flavor, states that traditions that have a pronounced Jewish or Palestinian flavor are more likely to be authentic since that was Jesus's original context. This includes sayings that contain Aramaic words or word plays or that envision Palestinian social conditions. For example, Jesus' use of the term abba, an Aramaic word meaning father, in Mark 14:36 is most likely authentic since it goes back to Jesus' original language, Aramaic.

Since the title Son of man is a distinctly Semitic expression, and so is unlikely to have been first introduced in the Greek-speaking church. This criterion, however, also has limited validity. Aramaisms take us back to the Aramaic-speaking church, but not necessarily to Jesus himself. Aramaic continued to be spoken in some context for many decades, and so Aramaic saints may well have been created later on, nor does a Greek expression necessarily rule out authenticity. This is true for two reasons. First, recent studies have demonstrated the multilingual nature of first-century Palestine. Jesus may even have taught in Greek at times. Second, an authentic saying could have lost its semitic flavor through a fluent translation into Greek.

A fifth criterion, the criterion of divergent traditions, says that when authors preserve traditions that do not necessarily serve their purpose, these texts are more likely to be authentic. A good example of this is Jesus's command to His disciples in Matthew 10:5-6, "Do not go to the Gentiles," which appears to be at odds with the great commission to go to all nations in Matthew 28.

Well, this criterion certainly has some validity. It must be used cautiously since it assumes full recognition of an author's intentions. Matthew 10:5-6 does not contradict Matthew's theology if it's part of the author's purpose to show that Jesus' first mission was to the Jews, who were then expected to be a light to the Gentiles.

The same theological perspective is expressed by Paul in Romans 1:16, for example. When he says the gospel is first for the Jews and then for the Gentiles, in other words, statements that at first seem contradictory may, on closer examination, be seen to be complimentary.

A sixth criterion, the criterion of coherence, is used in conjunction with other criteria. Once characteristics of the teaching of Jesus are established by the other criteria, these can be used to substantiate similar sayings that might not themselves meet that test. For example, if the parable of the minas in Luke 19:11-27 is deemed to be authentic on other grounds, it could be argued that Matthew's similar parable of the talents in Matthew 25 has a good claim to authenticity. Well, these are some of the most widely utilized criteria.

In addition to the problems we have noted concerning individual criterion, there are also more general concerns that have been expressed by scholars. For example, the criteria can be used subjectively to contradict each other. The criterion of Semitic influence can be used to support things that agree with first-century Judaism. While a criterion of dissimilarity can rule these same things out, too often the criteria are used selectively and arbitrarily to prove whatever the investigator wants to prove. For example, in the synoptic gospels, there are three kinds of Son of man sayings. There are those that relate to Jesus's earthly ministry, Son of man's sayings that relate to his suffering, and Son of man's sayings that relate to his return, his second coming in glory. Using the criterion of similarity, we might conclude that the suffering usage is certainly authentic since the early church did not take up the title Son of man in his confession of Jesus.

And since there is little evidence that first-century Jews were expecting the suffering "mashiach," Rudolph Bultmann, however, argued that only the apocalyptic Son of man sayings, the ones relating to his return, were authentic. This is because he believed Jesus was expecting the return of a messianic figure called the Son of man, but that he could not have anticipated his own suffering role. In other words, he ignored his own criterion when it contradicted his notion about what Jesus could or could not have said.

While the six criteria we have mentioned have been the most widely used for the years, recent scholars have proposed additional criteria that relate to broader explanations of the gospel story. John P. Meyer, for example, identifies as essential a "criterion of rejection and execution." This criterion asks, "What historical words and deeds of Jesus best explain his trial and crucifixion as King of the Jews?"

Gerard Tyson and Dagmar Winter proposed, instead of dissimilarity, a criterion of historical plausibility which seeks to provide a plausible explanation for the rise of Christianity within its first-century Jewish context. This criterion is used not so much to examine and analyze the authenticity of individual passages but to explain Jesus's message in mission as a whole in relation to its antecedents. Those that came before first-century Palestinian Judaism and its successors, the early Christian. N. T. Wright similarly seeks to overcome the mostly negative results of the criteria of dissimilarity by proposing a "double criterion of similarity and dissimilarity." By this, he means that "when something can be seen to be credible within first century Judaism and credible as the implied starting point of something in later Christianity, there is a strong possibility of our being in touch with a genuine history of Jesus."

In conclusion, using these and other criteria, scholars sift through the data and seek to make sense of the historical Jesus. Yet, as we have seen, they still often come to vastly different conclusions. This is in part because of very different starting points with reference to the historical value of the gospels. Are the gospels generally reliable historical sources, or are they generally unreliable, fictitious, and tendentious accounts?

In our next session, we'll examine the evidence for a generally reliable gospel tradition.