Christobiography

Memory, History, and the Reliability of the Gospels

Craig S. Keener

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781467456760
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Crítica e interpretación bíblicas

Are the canonical Gospels historically reliable??

The four canonical Gospels are ancient biographies, narratives of Jesus's life. The authors of these Gospels were intentional in how they handled historical information and sources.?

Building on recent work in the study of ancient biographies, Craig Keener argues that the writers of the canonical Gospels followed the literary practices of other biographers in their day. In Christobiography he explores the character of ancient biography and urges students and scholars to appreciate the Gospel writers' method and degree of accuracy in recounting the life and ministry of Jesus. Keener's Christobiography has far-reaching implications for the study of the canonical Gospels and historical Jesus research. He concludes that the four canonical Gospels are historically reliable ancient biographies.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Publishers get to name books or adapt authors’ titles, so before explaining the main title, let me qualify this book’s adapted subtitle. This book is not about the historical reliability of the details of the Gospels, although it should contribute to challenging frequent assumptions of their overall unreliability. Instead, more precisely, I explore here the degree of historical intention in comparable works from the era of the Gospels, as well as the sort of prior information to which the Gospel writers could possibly have had access. It is thus a prolegomenon to using the Gospels as historical sources, rather than an examination of the Gospels themselves.

I did, however, propose the main title, because it points to what I believe this prolegomenon suggests. That is, it suggests what ancient analogies lead us to expect in the Gospels: depending on and shaping earlier material, they proclaim the story of Christ. Preaching of Christ’s passion and resurrection in light of the Scriptures, often in at least partly narrativized form, had been a central feature of the gospel message from the beginning (1 Cor 15:3–7; cf. 11:23–26; Acts 10:37–42). Not everyone has interest in exploring historical experiences recalled in such early Christian proclamation, but those who do will find it helpful to consider partial ancient analogies to gospel genre and memory.

Christobiography draws attention to an old and yet sometimes neglected insight for historical-Jesus research: in terms of recognizable ancient genres, the Gospels are like ancient biographies. That is, the type of literary work from the Gospels’ era that they most closely resemble is the bios, or “life,” of a subject—what we call (and this book regularly titles) ancient biography.

Although a majority of Gospels scholars today recognize that the Gospels are more like ancient biographies than like anything else, only a minority of Gospels scholars have actually examined other ancient biographies in order to understand what implications this shared basic genre might have for the Gospels. What does ancient biography tell us about the way the Gospels communicated their message about Jesus?

Examining other ancient biographies, however, entails a problem. Many have defined ancient biography so broadly that this wide genre appears to offer little of value in the way of specific comparison. Yet some forms of what they call biography are more relevant than others. The genre of biography developed over time, and naturally biographers typically had better sources for events within living memory than for subjects who lived many centuries earlier. (“Living memory” means that some people who knew the subject were still alive when the biographer wrote.)

Most relevant for comparison with the Gospels, then, are biographies from the early empire, especially biographies of real figures who lived within roughly a half century of the writers. They should also be full-length narrative biographies, not the less comparable “lives” that were sometimes just a few paragraphs. At the risk of marring suspense, producing synoptic charts of such biographies similar to those used for the Synoptic Gospels suggests that the sort of adaptations found in the Gospels were standard expectations for this kind of writing.

This conclusion is not particularly surprising, but it is, again, one that is sometimes neglected in historical-Jesus research. Establishing that somewhat analogous biographers drew on historical sources suggests implications for how we should approach the Evangelists’ treatment of preexisting information. An ancient audience would have expected the features of both reliance on prior material and adaptation that we find in critical study of the Gospels today.

1.1. Jesus in Ancient Historians

Christianity recognizes Jesus as its founder, and Islam deems him a major prophet.¹ Together these religions encompass four billion adherents, more than half of the world’s population. For this reason, if for no others, Jesus is a figure meriting significant attention among historians of antiquity, regardless of the historian’s own religious horizons.²

Yet it has not always been so. The primary interest of Roman historians in the early empire was Rome and incidents that directly impacted Rome, such as revolts in the provinces, wars on the borders, or the moral antics of emperors that often dominated political gossip.³ One crucified sage or rebel in a minor Asian province invited little attention until, a few decades later, his followers became public news in the Roman capital itself.

On a popular level, some writers dismiss all evidence for Jesus as inconsequential and view him as a pure creation of his followers. Even apart from the dismissal of many lines of evidence, this skeptical approach, if followed consistently for other topics, would make much of history unknowable.⁴ As in the case of other new movements, whether from disciples of Socrates, Muhammad, Buddha, or Joseph Smith, the life of the founder was initially of little interest beyond the circle of his own followers. The Dead Sea Scrolls revere the founder of their community, the Teacher of Righteousness, yet he appears nowhere outside their own literature.

Likewise, the first-century Jewish historian Josephus claims to have been a Pharisee, yet he nowhere mentions the Pharisaic sage Hillel, whom most subsequent Pharisaic traditions name as one of their central figures.⁵ Meanwhile, the Judean king Agrippa I, whom Josephus depicts as prominent even in Rome, merits only the barest passing mention in a Roman historian covering the period.⁶ Another major Roman historian devotes little space even to Herod the Great.⁷

By the same criterion of relevance, the earlier Greek historian Herodotus neglected not only Judea but Rome.⁸ And Josephus himself, despite his prominent role in the Judean war and as an interpreter of Judea for the gentile Greco-Roman world, merits no interest in later rabbis (who in fact show greater interest in Jesus).

This is not to imply that non-Christian reports about Jesus are altogether absent. Most scholars today recognize that the first-century Judean writer Josephus, who wrote about John the Baptist and Jesus’s brother James, also wrote about Jesus himself.⁹ Josephus treats Jesus as a sage and wonder-worker executed by the governor, probably with the complicity of some of Jerusalem’s elite.¹⁰ Many scholars argue that an early Arabic version also confirms the key points about Jesus that scholars have reconstructed as original (before scribal tampering) in Josephus’s account.¹¹ Possibly as early as forty-five years after Jesus’s crucifixion, a Syrian philosopher named Mara bar Sarapion speaks of Jews executing their wise king, bringing judgment on Judea. (He probably heard this report from Syrian Christians.)¹²

By the early second century, one historian includes a report, from just two decades after the crucifixion, about Jewish debates in Rome, apparently concerning the Christ.¹³ Another, reporting the slaughter of vast numbers of Jesus followers in Rome roughly thirty-four years after the crucifixion, mentions that Jesus himself was earlier crucified under Pontius Pilate.¹⁴ Rome itself had finally taken notice, because subsequent events had made Jesus’s movement a matter of local significance. In fact, the movement had become more significant in Rome than was the governor who executed Jesus. Although Jewish sources and an inscription mention Pilate,¹⁵ this passage marks his only appearance in surviving Roman literature.

Most important and most early, we have considerable information about Jesus in Paul’s letters to his congregations, beginning perhaps eighteen to twenty years after Jesus’s execution. Paul was certainly a Christian, but by his own admission he began his involvement with the sect as one of its persecutors rather than as one of its friends. While focusing on Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection, Paul also mentions other information about Jesus, including the Twelve, Jesus’s brothers, Jesus’s being mocked and abused, his burial, his teaching about divorce, his words at the Last Supper, and so forth. Paul also attests what seems to be a widespread early Christian consensus about Jesus’s role as Christ and exalted Lord. Nevertheless, Paul’s situation-occasioned letters do not supply anything like a biography of Jesus or even narrate any episodes from his life before the passion.

1.2. What Can Be Known about Jesus?

Popular ideas have created a groundswell of skepticism that has begun to produce its own literature, so far largely nonacademic but eventually undoubtedly producing some work that will merit an academic response.¹⁶ Some writers even question Jesus’s historic existence, in some cases potentially fueled by religiously motivated bias,¹⁷ although this concern is inconsistently not applied to other past religious figures such as Muhammad, the rise of whose movement is rightly recognized as implausible without him.

Yet in contrast to some popular ideas that circulate on the internet, specialists in the study of Jesus, almost without exception, agree that Jesus historically existed.¹⁸ His movement had no reason to invent him, and certainly not his execution for treason as a “king”; following someone so executed was itself deemed treasonous, so inventing such a narrative would be suicidal. Certainly Jesus’s execution by crucifixion is consistent with Pilate and/or members of the local elite viewing Jesus as a rebel king.

Imagine that we had documents today from multiple recent writers about someone who founded a movement a few decades ago. Further imagine that this movement revolved around that founder. Naturally, we would expect most writings from within the movement to take very positive views of the founder, but very rarely would we consider doubting that founder’s existence. Yet this is precisely what we have in the case of Jesus; Paul’s letters attest such a movement’s devotion to its founder within twenty years of his death. Denying Jesus’s historical existence hardly makes sense of the data available to us.

Furthermore, almost all scholars concur on some basic features of the gospel story. They agree that Jesus was a Galilean Jew from Nazareth, a popular sage and prophet whose disciples began a distinctive Jewish movement. Jesus was influenced by the (likely eschatological) baptizing prophet John, announced the approach of God’s kingdom on earth, and taught in parables and often riddles.

Most scholars also agree that Jesus’s contemporaries experienced him as a healer and exorcist, offering divine help to the vulnerable.¹⁹ He viewed his healings and exorcisms as signs of the promised kingdom.²⁰ He embraced for the kingdom many people whose status was marginal and/or normally overlooked by their society, including those deemed marginal morally or (in the case of tax collectors) nationalistically. He appealed to the poor, the disenfranchised, the disabled, and the ill, and he encountered conflict with various elites.

This conflict climaxed in Jerusalem, probably at Passover, when Jesus and other Galileans made pilgrimage. Virtually indisputably, he died by Roman crucifixion, decreed by the governor, Pontius Pilate. Within days, his disciples were claiming that God had raised him from the dead and they had seen him, a message that may have become quickly coordinated with Jesus’s teachings about the kingdom and with God’s favor for the weak and the oppressed.²¹ Distinctively, Jesus’s movement claimed the restoration of the prophetic Spirit (in a fuller sense than in even the Dead Sea Scrolls), spread to major cities of the empire within a few decades, and in the Diaspora began converting gentiles, sometimes without requiring circumcision.

Besides the more direct sources, general information based on Jesus’s environment allows us to screen out the plausibility of some approaches. Indisputably, Jesus was Jewish, so we may dismiss reconstructions of Jesus that do not take this feature into account (from some thinkers’ Aryan Jesus in Nazi-era Germany to today’s populist mythicists in the United States). Recent decades’ “Third Quest” for Jesus (e.g., as exemplified in the works of E. P. Sanders, one of my own professors; also Geza Vermes, James Charlesworth, and Amy-Jill Levine) has thus rightly focused on Jesus in his Jewish setting. Indeed, these Gospels, though all written in Greek for probably Diaspora audi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• Part 1. Biographies about Jesus
• Part 2. Biographies and History
• Part 3. Testing the Range of Deviation
• Part 4. Two Objections to Gospels as Historical Biographies
• Part 5. Memories about Jesus: Memories before Memoirs
• Bibliography of Secondary Sources Cited
• Index of Authors
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Scripture References
• Index of Ancient Sources