Reconstructing the Historical Jesus

Grizz writes:I should probably give my motive for the thread. I have always been a fan of Greco-Roman history and used to read anything I could get my hands on. I enjoy early Christian History and also have an interest in the textual criticism of the NT. It is kind of like reading a who-done-it novel or piecing together a puzzle. I especially enjoy reading the criticisms of John Crossan and Marcus Borg. My goal in this thread is not to try to negate anyone's faith or 'disprove' the divinity of Jesus. My goal is to try to have a somewhat scholarly and rational discussion on a subject I have always been interested in.

Grizz writes:There are two approaches to the story of the Historical Jesus -- the secular and the theological. These two approaches overlap at times and the conclusions are not always mutually exclusive. It should come as no surprise that the major disagreements revolve around claims of the miraculous. NT Wright is associated with the latter school and his work is certainly well-respected in the field of NT scholarship, among both secular and religious. As a Christian, his interpretations of the texts is liberal enough to make the fundamentalist Christian cringe but also Conservative enough to not offend the traditional sensibilities of the mainstream Christian.

Also, you bring up a good point about faith and it mirrors the one I made earlier regarding presuppositions. Which side of the story you are on depends on the presuppositions you bring to the table. Ultimately, a belief in the existence of the miraculous will depend on your world view and whether or not your subscribe to the notion of the supernatural.

As I discussed earlier, the inhabitants of antiquity possessed a world view very far removed from ours today. Everything and anything about this existence is so foreign to us that we cannot comprehend the true context of the period in which these stories took place. If we say we can, we are only fooling ourselves. We simply cannot fathom what it would be like to inhabit a world without physics, astronomy, chemistry, universities, TV's, cars, books, telephones, magazines, radio, newspapers, and so on . For the majority of those in the first-century, an appeal to divinity or supernatural forces was the only rational and plausible explanation for the mode of operation of the world and man's place within it. Most first-century inhabitants of the Empire explained things via superstition by appealing to unseen forces and deities. God(s) were in control of all facets of existence and the miraculous was not a rare exception, rather it was the norm.

Furthermore, anything out of the ordinary, whether an epileptic having a seizure or the sudden appearance of a comet in the night sky, had something to do with the unseen supernatural activity of these disembodied spirits or gods. This was true whether you were a Pagan, Jew, or Christian. Claims of supernatural events might be met with fear, but rarely, if ever, with outright rational skepticism. Someone might believe a story was fabricated but it would be rare to find someone who would hold the view that it would be unreasonable to conclude such things being claimed were irrational and unbelievable.

Now, if we were to look at such claims as recorded in antiquity, a Christian would likely dismiss the miraculous events attributed to Mohammad on the same grounds that a secular Historian would dismiss the miraculous events early Christian authors have attributed to Jesus. They would likely put on the hat of the secular historian and by employing the same methods would likely state such claims were either the result of superstitious urban legend and folk tale or outright fabrications. Likewise, a modern Orthodox Jew would dismiss the claims in a like manner, most likely seeing them as outright fabrications. The same would hold for a Muslim evaluating the Jewish and Christian literature. The only time they would agree would be when claims of the miraculous overlapped with each respective religious tradition.

In short, if you divorce yourself entirely from the familiarity with the dogma and cut off any emotional attachments and biases, what would be the most plausible and unbiased answers to these questions?

Crossan maintains the Gospels were never intended to be taken literally by their authors. He challenges those who would debate whether Jesus "really" walked on water to recognize that, whether history or parable, the larger issue is the meaning of the anecdote. He proposes the historical probability that, like all but one known victim of crucifixion, Jesus' body never made it to a tomb, but was scavenged by animals.[3] Crossan believes in "resurrection" by faith but holds that bodily resuscitation was never contemplated by early Christians. He believes that the rapture is based on a misreading of I Thessalonians.

straggler writes:Surely the only intelligent way to approach this is to see if the evidence reliably suggests that the miraculous did occur.
If no reliable evidence for the miraculous is available then by default, based on experience of the real world, reason and rationality it must be assumed to the miraculous did not occur.

straggler writes:Try not to confuse this healthy scepticism with philosophical bias.

PaulK writes:I know that. That is what I am asking you to provide evidence for. So far I haven't seen any.

GDR writes:The only evidence available is what we have recorded by those who witnessed it.

Crossan and Borg are theists. Therefore you contradict yourself.

ramoss writes:With holes on his feet, and palms, and a hole in his side, just for doubting thomas.

N T Wright writes:We are forced to conclude that when the early Christians said that Jesus had been raised from the dead, and gave that as their reason for reshaping their beliefs about resurrection itself on the one hand and Messiahship on the other, they were using the language in its normal sense. That which Aeschylus said couldn’t happen to anyone, and Daniel said would, to all God’s people at once, had happened to Jesus, all by himself. That was what they intended to say. And this brings us, at last, to the resurrection narratives themselves.The first point to make here is vital. I have argued that the early Christians looked forward to a resurrection which was not a mere resuscitation, nor yet the abandonment of the body and the liberation of the soul, but a transformation, a new type of body living within a new type of world. This belief is embroidered with biblical motifs, articulated in rich theology. Yet in the gospel narratives we find a story, told from different angles of course, without such embroidering and theology ” told indeed in restrained, largely unadorned prose. Yet the story is precisely of a single body neither abandoned, nor merely resuscitated, but transformed; and this, though itself totally unexpected, could give rise to exactly that developed view of which I have spoken. The Easter narratives, in other words, appear to offer an answer to why the early Christian hope and life took the form and shape they did.Were the four gospels, then, all derived from this developed theology? Are they all later narratival adaptations of a doctrinal and exegetical basis, from which of course all traces of dogma and exegesis have, in each case, been carefully extracted? Hardly. It is far easier to say that the stories, or something like them, came first, and that Paul and the other later theologians have reflected deeply upon them, have indeed reshaped and rethought one branch of mainstream Jewish theology around them, but have not substantially modified them.A few more remarks about the narratives themselves. Matthew’s story is often seen as anti-Jewish apologetic ” not surprisingly, because he himself tells us that he is countering a story current among non-Christian Jews of his day. But even if Matthew does represent a later polemic, the debate itself ” that some say Jesus’ body was stolen, and others say it wasn’t ” bears witness to my more fundamental point, that in the first century ”resurrection’ wasn’t about exaltation, spiritual presence, a sense of forgiveness, or divinization; it was about bodies and tombs. If someone had been able to say ”oh, don’t you understand? When I say “resurrection”, all I mean is that Jesus is in heaven and he is my Lord, that I’ve had a new sense of God’s love and forgiveness,’ the dangerous debate about tombs, guards, angels and bodies could have been abandoned with a sigh of relief all round.24Second, a word about Mark. When Mark says that the women ”said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid,’ he does not mean they never said anything to anyone. I do not think, in any case, that Mark finished his gospel at chapter 16 verse 8.1 think he wrote more, which is now lost. But I think his emphatic denial that the women said anything to anyone is meant to counter the charge, actual or possible, that if the women really had seen something remarkable ” an empty tomb, a rolled-away stone, an angel ” they would have been bound to tell everyone they met. This they had not done; so (the charge would run) maybe they had not seen anything much after all? Certainly not, replies Mark: the reason they said nothing to anyone (until, we presume, they got to the disciples) is because they were scared stiff.Third, a word about Luke and John. They tell, of course, much fuller stories than Matthew and Mark, and it is they who are normally accused of having developed, or invented, these stories to combat the danger of docetic views within the early church, beliefs that Jesus in his risen body wasn’t really a physical human being, but only seemed to be. Leave aside the fact that that is not what mainstream docetism wanted to say anyway ” it was a belief about Jesus’ pre-crucifixion humanity more than about his risen body ” and concentrate on what Luke and John actually say. Yes, they have him eating food. Yes, he invites them to touch him, to inspect him, to make sure he is a real human being. But these are the same accounts, in the same passages, which have Jesus appearing and disappearing, sometimes through locked doors. If Luke or John wanted to invent anti-docetic, no-nonsense real-body stories, they surely could have done better than this. No: it really does look as if they are telling, with continuing bewilderment, stories which, though astonishing at the time as they still are, provided the basis we are seeking for the transformed belief about resurrection we have outlined earlier: stories about Jesus’ body being neither abandoned (as though he had simply ”gone to heaven’ and was now a ”spiritual’, ”non-bodily’ presence) nor merely resuscitated, like Lazarus, and like (perhaps) the martyrs expected to be, but transformed, so that, though in all sorts of ways still ”bodily’, and certainly so as to leave an empty tomb behind him, his body was now significantly different, with new properties, in a way that nothing in the Jewish tradition had prepared him or his followers for. Indeed, the one new property which you would have expected them to include, had they been making these stories up on the basis of scripture, they do not. In none of the accounts is there the slightest suggestion that Jesus’ body was shining like a star.I suggest, in fact, that the gospel stories themselves, though no doubt written down a good deal later than Paul, go back with minimal editorial addition to the very early stories told by the first disciples in the earliest days of Christianity. They are not the later narratival adaptation of early Christian theology; they are its foundation.This does not mean, of course, that they are photographic descriptions of ”what happened’. No historical narrative is ever quite that. But they challenge today’s historian, as they challenged their first hearers, either to accept them or to come up with a better explanation for why Christianity began and why it took the shape it did.

Grizz writes:Wright's critics will contend, however, that he leaves too many stones unturned and has left a bit too much to the imagination. For Wright, everything seems to boil down to how such a messianic figure like Jesus would appear to the traditional temple Jew. At times, he appears to have an obsession with this issue. There is life outside the temple tradition, however, and we know from the Gospel canon itself that Christianity was a very hard sell within Judaism.It would be hard for anyone to objectively state by reading the gospels that the Christian campaign to convert the Jews was a success; if anything, it was a failure. It appears there was rare success making the case with the orthodox and only limited success elsewhere within Judaism. The documents indicate early Christians were thrown out of the temple, hunted down, and to a great degree persecuted by the orthodox culture. Indeed, the majority saw the early Christian movement as heretical nonsense filled with absurd messianic claims.

Most scholars conclude that the very early Jewish converts to Christianity were likely coming from the same pool that Jesus gained popularity with before his death --- those well outside Jerusalem and far away from the establishment. These are the Jews on the outskirts and fringes of society and those who fall well outside the established orthodoxy. Among many Jewish communities outside Jerusalem, and Galilee in particular, there was distaste for the temple culture and the hypocrisy of the dominant temple sects like the Sadducees and the Pharisees. Many Jews were marginalised by the temple authorities and the poor were treated like outcasts and pariah. These were the folks out there in the dessert hanging out with the unorthodox sects and fringe groups like the Hemerobaptists. This crowd was just the type that would be more easily swayed and less likely to see the gospel message as something threatening to their particular Jewish sensibilities.

Regarding Wright's claim that Christians would have a hard time convincing anyone had the resurrection not occurred and people did not have the opportunity to see for themselves:I simply don't understand this one. According to the documents and claims, the resurrected Jesus appeared only to a very small handful of his close followers for an extremely brief period of time. If seeing is believing, how did they convince Jews or Gentiles that Jesus was resurrected once he disappeared? Also, if the goal was at first to 'save the lost sheep of the house of Israel', as Wright claims, why were the appearances so clandestine and secretive and limited to only a select number of his immediate followers?

1 Cor 15 writes: 3For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance[a]: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. 6After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

Grizz writes:The real question to be answered is, what was it about Christianity that appealed to the gentiles and pagans? Christianity may have started as a small Jewish apocalyptic sect, but it became an entirely gentile movement within a generation following the death of Jesus. None of these converts would have witnessed the bodily resurrection of Jesus, nor would they have seen Jesus when he was alive.

Joseph Campbell would note here that the power of myth is awesome and it makes people accept and do any manner of things. In the twenty-first century, if Oral Robert can convince his followers that though prayer he had raised someone from the dead, I certainly see no reason why members of an apocalyptic Jewish sect could not be sucessful in convincing first-century inhabitants of the empire that Jesus had raised from the dead. Given people with the right dispositions and mind sets, anything is possible. One need only look at some of the beliefs floating around the world today to figure this out.

For some odd reason we no longer witness visitations from beyond and we never see people become resurrected after their bodies have begun to decay. The more our knowledge of the world has grown, the more we realize that many of the stories of our childhood no longer make much sense when viewed in the context of what we see going on around us in the here-and-now. This is the reason why I am hard pressed to give the extraordinary stories of antiquity any credibility.

ramoss writes:Well, spoken like a true believer, but his basic premise is that the Gospels recorded things accurately.. and he is trying to rationalize that position.

Somehow, the Gospels don't seem to back up the claim he was resurrected in a new body to me. It seems to be an addition from earlier beliefs.I know that the cult in Qumram were waiting for their 'great teacher' to come back. Since they are now extinct, I guess that never happened either. The concept of a resurrection seems to be from the fringe groups of Judaism.

Straggler writes:Having read the links you provided earlier I think it is fair to say that Crossman and Borg approached the subject with what we can both agree to be a healthy, and indeed necessary, skepticism whilst Wright has approached the subject with a distinct philosophical bias in favour of the miraculous.
Do you dispute this?
Do you still think the two approaches are equally valid?

Grizz writes:One statement Wright made in his address that would give one pause is: "No Christian group or sect in the first two centuries following the death of Jesus denied the resurrection and his appearance to the disciples." This statement is true or false depending on how you define resurrection and appearance. I will attribute this statement to a poor choice of words; unfortunately, it might very well lead someone to a false conclusion about the uniformity of early Christian beliefs.

Claims of Visions, apparitions, and visitations from beyond are not exactly something unique to Christianity, nor is the belief in resurrection. In fact, if we are to believe the story, the Gospels themselves tell us that "Herod believed Jesus to be John the Baptist raised from the dead." Inhabitants of antiquity(and even inhabitants here in the twenty-first century) often believed they were being visited by angels, spirits, or deities.

The moral here is that if you are looking for a supernatural explanation to events then you will certainly find them. This approach is sufficient for a theologian immersed in Christian orthodoxy but from the perspective of a historian whose goal is to be exhaustive, this won't fly.