The Historical Jesus

Salepage : The Historical Jesus
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I’m bringing this one from the vault because the subject has been on my mind. Enjoy.

The church is a vast relic that attests to the existence and work of Jesus. It might be classified as a society, a culture, a business, or a network. It’s the primary source.

Unsurprisingly, the oldest churches have the most historical continuity with Jesus’ first century movement: this includes the numerous Orthodox churches, the Catholic church, and the churches of the Middle East, all of which have comparable structures, practices, and teachings. These faiths’ conflicts are largely about culture and power structures. This fundamental tradition is what I refer to as “the church.” The Anglican and Lutheran churches have some ties to this major heritage. Despite the racket they make in the English-speaking world, the hundreds of Evangelical churches are recent novelties that make no attempt to claim historical continuity.

The church has kept some documents, seen as definitive, regarding Jesus’ life and activity – the New Testament. The New Testament passages are about as thorough as ancient biographies ever got (not very). They are also stylized and religious, which is vexing for us moderns. One issue that is frequently overlooked in polemics (again, owing to the noise generated by Evangelicals) is that Christianity would exist even if the New Testament did not exist. The literature did not come to existence after the church, but rather the other way around.

So the question is not whether we have historical relics of Jesus; we do, in fact, have a mountain of them; rather, the question is how effectively the items reflect their ultimate source. The question cannot be answered. There is no other testimony of Jesus but the testimony of the church.

Attempts to utilize the New Testament as a source independent of church tradition in order to reach “behind” the text to the “true” Jesus have been fruitful inasmuch as they assist illustrate the theological structure and redaction of the texts, but have never achieved their fundamental purpose. Setting criteria for a “certain” occurrence or teaching of Jesus, discovering those events or teachings in the text, and then creating a parallel theory of Jesus out of those parts, asserting that they have uncovered the historical Jesus, is their technique.

However, just because one approach emphasizes certain teachings and events as more definite than others does not entail that such events actually occurred or did not occur. When the standards for certainty and uncertainty are very subjective, the resultant theory might be worthless. For example, theologians often split St. Paul’s letters into those that were definitely written by him, those that were perhaps written by him or a close disciple, and those that were most likely not written by him. They classify Paul’s biography in Acts of the Apostles as “possible, but not certain,” because he did not write it himself. They then confine their beliefs about St. Paul to only “certain” passages, which results in a radically different picture of Paul than if they founded their views on both “known” and “possible” texts.

The other issue is presuming a totality that the texts do not assert. To use Paul as an example, it is believed that Paul composed three letters to the Corinthians, with the middle one lost. Modern academics would say that Paul had never heard of the Eucharist if the third was gone and the second was retained.

However, it is feasible to cast indirect light on the sources. Our understanding of first-century Palestine and second-temple Judaism can help us make sense of the Gospels. The difficulty, of course, is that in 70 AD, a Roman army essentially devastated the religious and cultural milieu of 1st century Palestine. Our understanding has generally been restricted to Josephus’ books and the New Testament, neither of which claims to be entire. Modern study has revealed that there is far more we don’t know about Jesus’ cultural surroundings than we do.

However, what has been revealed can be illuminating. Consider the evolving picture of the Gospel of John: it was historically attributed to Jesus’ follower John the son of Zebedee and assumed to have been redacted by a close disciple of his. The work was therefore popularly dated to 120-140 AD (far too late to have anything to do with Zebedee’s son), and authored by a gentile inspired by Greco-Roman Gnosticism. Archaeological discoveries in Jerusalem in the twentieth century revealed that the author of the Gospel of John was familiar with Jerusalem before to 70 AD, making a late dating untenable. After two thousand years of ignoring each other’s work, Christian and Jewish exegetes were surprised to discover that the dialogues in John are rabbinical misdrahes, and that John’s depreciating references to “the Jews” have strong parallels with other first century Jewish writings found at Qumram, where “the Jews” refers to Judean religious authorities, making the term anti-Semitic rather than anti-Temple. In summary, current scholarship indicates that the author of John was most likely a first-century Jew with formal theological training who was unaware of Gnosticism.

In sum, there is no Jesus presented to us other than the Jesus proposed by the church, which is one of the New Testament’s themes anyhow. St. Paul dismisses charges that he never met Jesus in the flesh, claiming that it has no influence on his calling as an apostle. John often emphasizes the subject of witness: people believe in Jesus because of personal testimony. Much of Matthew’s Gospel is a reflection on church government, an early form of canon law. Many of the works were most likely never meant to be read outside of a Eucharistic celebration. Jesus sends his apostles to teach, baptize, and repeat the words and practices he taught them throughout the Gospels. The evidence can be accepted or dismissed, but it cannot be explained away.

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