Jesus, Skepticism, and the Problem of History

Criteria and Context in the Study of Christian Origins

Zondervan, Darrell L. Bock, J. Ed Komoszewski

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780310534778
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In recent years, a number of New Testament scholars engaged in academic historical Jesus studies have concluded that such scholarship cannot yield secure and illuminating conclusions about its subject, arguing that the search for a historically "authentic" Jesus has run aground.

Jesus, Skepticism, and the Problem of History brings together a stellar lineup of New Testament scholars who contend that historical Jesus scholarship is far from dead.

These scholars all find value in using the tools of contemporary historical methods in the study of Jesus and Christian origins. While the skeptical use of criteria to fashion a Jesus contrary to the one portrayed in the Gospels is methodologically unsound and theologically unacceptable, these criteria, properly formulated and applied, yield positive results that support the Gospel accounts and the historical narrative in Acts. This book presents a nuanced and vitally needed alternative to the skeptical extremes of revisionist Jesus scholarship that, on the one hand, uses historical methods to call into question the Jesus of the Gospels and, on the other, denies the possibility of using historical methods to learn about Jesus.

Part One

The Value of New Testament Historical Studies

CHAPTER 1

The Historical Jesus and the Biblical Church: Why the Quest Matters

ROBERT M. BOWMAN JR. AND J. ED KOMOSZEWSKI

In a provocative essay, Scot McKnight argued that “historical Jesus studies are useless for the church.”¹ McKnight’s claim—which he did qualify in some important ways—invites Christian scholars to reflect on the significance of the quest of the historical Jesus for the church. How should the church view the modern, historical study of Jesus? What role, if any, should Christians play in historical Jesus studies, and what does the church stand to gain from participation?

THE REAL FIRST “QUEST”

Given that Jesus Christ is the founder and central figure of the Christian faith, the church obviously has legitimate concerns as to what people say about Jesus. The New Testament writers were well aware of a diversity of opinions about Jesus and reported in the Gospels on such diverse views, even during Jesus’s own lifetime. Christ’s question to the apostles, “Who do people say I am?” (Mark 8:27, cf. Matt 16:13; Luke 9:18) is as relevant today as it was in the first century.

In answer to this question, the disciples replied that at the time people identified Jesus as John the Baptist, Elijah, or perhaps one of the other prophets (Matt 16:14; Mark 8:28; Luke 9:19). These speculations were sparked by the reports of the exorcisms and miracles performed by Jesus and his disciples (Mark 6:12–15; Luke 9:7–8). The notion that Jesus was John the Baptist redivivus originated because Jesus’s miracles became widely known not long after Herod Antipas had ordered John beheaded. Even Herod entertained this explanation (Matt 14:2; Mark 6:16–17; cf. Luke 9:9). The identification of Jesus as Elijah suggests that Jews at the time recognized that at least some of his miracles bore resemblances to miracles performed through Elijah. These two theories were closely related since John’s own ministry marked him, if not as Elijah literally returned from the dead, as a kind of latter-day Elijah (Luke 1:17; cf. Mal. 4:5; see also John 1:20, 25), a view Matthew and Mark report Jesus himself affirmed (Matt 11:14; 17:10–13; Mark 9:11–13).

Of course, the idea that Jesus might have been John the Baptist would have been quickly dispelled, even before his final week in Jerusalem. It is certain that this explanation for the miracles of Jesus would have had no currency after his crucifixion. Nor does there seem to be any indication that the early church found it necessary to debunk suggestions that Jesus was the latter-day Elijah as they propagated the gospel. We can securely identify the Sitz im Leben of these “Jesus theories” as the Galilean ministry of Jesus.

The speculations that Jesus was John or Elijah were among the more complimentary theories about Jesus circulating during his itinerant ministry. All four Gospels report that Jesus’s critics sometimes alleged that he was either demon possessed or in league with the devil (Matt 9:34; 10:25; 11:13; 12:24–28; Mark 3:22, 26; Luke 7:33; 11:15–20; John 7:20; 8:48–52; 10:20–21).² Here again, what people outside the circle of the disciples of Jesus were seeking to explain were the apparently undeniable reports of his impressive exorcisms and healings. Unlike the short-lived speculation that Jesus might have been a resurrected John, though, the theory that Jesus performed miracles by demonic power probably continued as a stock criticism of Jesus that the early Christian movement needed to answer. There is even evidence for this criticism centuries later in the Babylonian Talmud, which accused Jesus of “sorcery” (b. Sanh. 43a).³

Closely associated with the accusation of demonic activity or sorcery was the charge that Jesus was a blasphemer and a false prophet. The charge of blasphemy for making divine claims is found in all four Gospels (Matt 9:3; 26:65; Mark 2:7; 14:64; Luke 5:21; John 10:33).⁴ Jesus’s captors taunted him with challenges for him to “prophesy” (Matt 26:67–68; Mark 14:65; Luke 22:63–65), implying of course that he was a false prophet. The accusation that Jesus “was misleading the people” (Luke 23:2, 14) uses language that in Jewish parlance was an accusation of being a false prophet.⁵ These numerous statements in the Gospels demonstrate that his Jewish critics viewed Jesus as a false prophet and magician or sorcerer—a purveyor of demonic power.⁶

All of these assessments of Jesus from outside the community of his followers had in common the acknowledgment that he was a miracle worker. As Barry Blackburn notes, “Scholars almost unanimously agree that this Galilean performed both cures and exorcisms, the success of which led both to a devoted following and opponents who charged him with sorcery.”⁷ People in the ancient world who did not believe in Jesus generally found the evidence for Jesus’s miracles compelling but reinterpreted those miracles to fit with their cultural and religious assumptions. In the modern world people who do not believe in Jesus generally deny his miracles because they do not fit with their cultural and religious assumptions. What seemed most implausible about Jesus to many of the ancients was not that he did miracles but that he did so in ways that turned their cultural expectations upside down. What seems most implausible about Jesus to many moderns is not that he turned ancient cultural expectations upside down but that he did so in miraculous ways. Above all else, contemporary skeptics cannot abide a Jesus who turns their expectations upside down. Thus, the issue of plausibility is always with us but manifests itself in changing ways. The Christian church has always preached a Jesus who seems implausible to many.

ONE JESUS OR MANY?

The modern Quest that launched in the early years of the Enlightenment assumed, as did the church, that there had been one actual Jesus. For Hermann Samuel Reimarus, the eighteenth-century father of the Quest, the project had a simple, clear aim: to determine who Jesus really was and what he really did. Some 240 years later, scholarly thinking about Jesus has largely given up on the idea of knowing the truth about the actual Jesus. Instead, modern scholarship commonly distinguishes many different “Jesuses.”

McKnight, for example, in his Christianity Today article on the subject distinguishes among the “Jewish Jesus” (the one Pilate crucified, “set in his Jewish context”), the “canonical Jesus” (the New Testament writings’ interpretation of Jesus as “the agent of God’s redemption”), the “orthodox Jesus” (the Second Person of the Trinity), and the “historical Jesus.” Regarding the last of these, McKnight offers the following definition:

The historical Jesus is the Jesus whom scholars have reconstructed on the basis of historical methods over against the canonical portraits of Jesus in the Gospels of our New Testament, and over against the orthodox Jesus of the church. The historical Jesus is more like the Jewish Jesus than the canonical Jesus or the orthodox Jesus.⁸

In the essay cited earlier, McKnight does more or less affirm the identity of the canonical and the orthodox Jesus. The Gospels “have provided for us a depiction of Jesus (Son of God, Lord, Messiah, Son of Man, teacher, etc.), the creeds then developed that same Jesus into another set of meaningful categories (the divine-man), and that two stage depiction of Jesus is the church’s Jesus.”⁹

Richard Soulen offers a similar analysis in his book Defining Jesus: The Earthly, the Biblical, the Historical, and the Real Jesus, and How Not to Confuse Them. As the subtitle suggests, Soulen also distinguishes four different kinds of Jesus. The “earthly Jesus” is synonymous with McKnight’s “Jewish Jesus” (the known, certain facts about Jesus), the “biblical Jesus” is the same as McKnight’s “canonical Jesus,” the “historical Jesus” means the same thing as in McKnight, and the “real Jesus” means the Jesus subjectively experienced in the church.¹⁰ In Soulen’s analysis, McKnight’s “orthodox Jesus” is left on the cutting-room floor. A fifth type, Jesus “as he actually was,” is unknowable. The actual Jesus was unknown even to Jesus, because objective knowledge of oneself or of others is impossible for human beings. Only God knows who Jesus actually was.¹¹

Of course, we do not know everything about Jesus as he actually was. The Gospels do not purport to give an exhaustive or comprehensive account of the life of Jesus. Rather, they claim to present accounts about Jesus based on eyewitness testimonies of people who reported what they saw and heard (Luke 1:1–4; 24:48; John 15:27; 19:35; 20:30; 21:24; cf. Matt 26:13; Mark 14:9). John even makes a point of denying the possibility of giving an exhaustive account (John 21:25). Yet we can and do know something about Jesus as he actually was. The perspectival and partial nature of eyewitness testimony means that we do not know everything about Jesus, but it also assures us that what we know pertains to the actual Jesus “on the ground.”

It is one thing to distinguish different aspects of what can be known about Jesus, but quite another to use such distinctions to make knowledge of the actual Jesus inaccessible. Against such analyses, the church must insist that there is really only one Jesus and that we have genuine knowledge about him. This means, on the one hand, that the church proclaims that its Jesus is the actual Jesus, the one who lived in history. As Lesslie Newbigin put it, “The long-running debate about the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith is simply one manifestation of the illusion that has haunted our culture ever since the Enlightenment. There is only one Jesus, and there is only one history.”¹² On the other hand, it means that the church is genuinely committed to making sure that what it proclaims and teaches about Jesus is faithful to what we can know about the actual Jesus. Thus, Michael Bird is right when he comments, “If Jesus is not to become the product of our own minds and aspirations we must vigilantly ensure that the Jesus of creeds, of worship, of faith, of scholarship, of liturgy, of devotion, of sermons and piety is the one and the same Jew who walked the plains of Palestine.”¹³ Thus, the church has a genuine interest in any intellectual or scholarly pursuit of knowledge that might shed some light on Jesus—refining or if necessary even correcting the way the church talks about Jesus.

THE EARTHLY JESUS IS THE CHURCH’S JESUS

As both McKnight and Soulen point out, and as most scholars in historical Jesus studies agree, we can be reasonably sure about quite a number of basic facts about the “earthly” or “Jewish” Jesus. Most generally, of course, we know that Jesus of Nazareth really existed. Against the popular atheist memes that Jesus never existed, supported by only a handful of writers with any academic credibility,¹⁴ the church is on absolutely solid historical ground in speaking of Jesus as an actual historical individual.¹⁵ Beyond this rationally incontrovertible fact, a considerable number of specific facts about Jesus are so well supported historically as to be widely acknowledged by most scholars, whether Christian (of any stripe) or not:¹⁶

• Jesus was born about 6 to 4 BCE.

• He was a Galilean Jewish man.

• He grew up in Nazareth.

• His mother tongue was Aramaic (though he may also have known Hebrew and Greek).

• He was baptized by a wilderness prophet named John in the Jordan River shortly before John was arrested and executed by order of Herod Antipas, the tetrarch of Galilee.

• He c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• Part 1: The Value of New Testament Historical Studies
• Part 2: The Gospels and the Historical Jesus
• Part 3: The Book of Acts and Christian Origins
• Part 4: Responses and Reflections
• About the Editors
• Contributors
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Author Index