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2010-12-23

“Is This Not the Carpenter? The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Filed under: Biblical Studies, New Testament
Tags: Christ Myth Debate, Thomas L. Thompson, Thompson: Is This Not the Carpenter?

See the introduction linked in this post for the relevance of this image. Image via Wikipedia

The introduction of Thomas L. Thompson’s and Thomas Verenna’s edited volume, Is This Not the Carpenter?A Question of Historicity has been published on The Bible and Interpretation.

The first essential step in any historical inquiry

This is a heartening introduction to the essential basics of valid historical methodology that has been very fudgy in the field of historical Jesus studies. The first thing any historian needs to grapple with when undertaking any inquiry is the nature of his or her sources. While probably most biblical scholars have acknowledged that the Gospels are theological narratives that depict a “Christ of faith” rather than a “Jesus of history”, there has at the same time been an assumption that that theological layer has been created to portray what the “historical Jesus” meant to the authors and their readers. Given this assumption, it has been believed that it might be possible to uncover some facts about the historical Jesus nonetheless. Historical Jesus studies have in this way been confused with the question of Christian origins.

The contributions in this book are from a diverse range of scholars. The introduction explains the purpose of the volume:

 

The essays collected in this volume have a modest purpose. Neither establishing the historicity of an historical Jesus nor possessing an adequate warrant for dismissing it, our purpose is to clarify our engagement with critical historical and exegetical methods in the hopes of enabling the central question regarding the function of New Testament literature to resist the endless production of works on the historical Jesus. Our hope is to open a direct discussion of the question of historicity much in the spirit of the more than decade-long discourse and debate by the European Seminar on Methodology in Israel’s History, which has been so profitably engaged in regard to the historicity of figures and narratives of the Hebrew Bible and the related construction of a history of ancient Palestine.

This sounds a little like an approach I have been suggesting on this blog and elsewhere for some time, so I find such a statement personally encouraging.

Historicity is an assumption

On the question of the historicity of Jesus itself, and how it is always assumed — never argued (despite strident assertions by some scholars to the contrary) — one reads in the Introduction:

For some time, New Testament scholarship has avoided direct questions regarding the historicity of Jesus. Their assumption of an historical Jesus has been secured within a debate about the sayings of Jesus and the events of his life, as referenced in the New Testament, reflect either Jesus’ own life and teaching or a construction of early Christianity. The dichotomous structure of this debate has typically made alternative explanations for the ubiquitous allegorical interpretations and narrative reiterations and allusions of a wide variety of both ancient Near Eastern and biblical motifs, themes and tropes irrelevant in the eyes of many scholars, in spite of the fact that an unquestioning acceptance of the New Testament figures of Jesus, Paul and the disciples as historical can at times be shown to ignore and misunderstand the implicit functions of our texts.

Did that last sentence say “Paul”? (It’s looking even better.)

Although no effort has yet been made to respond to recent efforts to focus on the question of historicity, the question as such is dismissed without argument. While the assumption of historicity has prompted many to attempt to describe what the historical Jesus must have been like, it has also encouraged many to ignore both literary and theological issues central to an understanding of New Testament narrative.  .  .  .   The question of historicity, itself, however, remains unaddressed and there is, accordingly, little discussion of the central questions regarding the significance and function of our texts. One has begun with the unwarranted assertion of a “probability” of an historical Jesus existing in ancient Palestine and freely presented one or other of such a possible figure as a viable alternative to the only known Jesus—the mythic one of our texts. Jesus has become a “concrete entity with recognizable parameters.” This was so thoroughly accepted that, when the Jesus Seminar was originally assembled, it was assumed from the outset that Jesus had been in fact an historical person. The Seminar, hence, could proceed to produce specific guidelines for determining the type of person he had been.

No first century general messianic expectation

It’s nice to see I’m also not alone in attempting to point out the absence of any evidence for a general expectation among Jews of a Davidic messiah in the early first century:

Even what little had been understood as known to scholars of the nineteenth century—such as the existence of widespread Jewish expectations for an apocalyptic messiah—has been found wanting. The ancient world’s many mythic and theological representations of a figure comparable to the Jesus of New Testament texts are not alone decisive arguments against historicity, but they are part of the picture, which needs to be considered more comprehensively.

Jesus, a literary character in the train of Abraham, Moses, Jonah . . .

The Jesus we encounter in literature is by definition a literary Jesus. Whether there is additionally a historical Jesus behind that literary figure is a separate question, and one that cannot be assumed by default solely on the grounds of the existence of that literary one.

An historical Jesus is a hypothetical derivative of scholarship. It is no more a fact than is an equally hypothetical historical Moses or David. To the extent that New Testament literature was written with literary, allegorical and, indeed, theological and mythic purpose, rather than as an account of historical events, there is significant need, not to speak of warrant, to doubt the historicity of its figures to the extent that such figures owe their substance to such literature. The best histories of Jesus today reflect an awareness of the limits and uncertainties in reconstructing the story of his life. Abraham, Isaac, Moses and Sarah, Ruth and Boaz, Jonah and his big fish are but a handful of characters found in the Bible, without the slightest historicity. They are literary creations. The figures of New Testament discourse must also be critically examined in the same light, for the New Testament is to be defined neither as a history of the early Christian church nor as an account of the life of a man named Jesus and of that of his followers.

How many Jesus’s have been reconstructed?

Doherty has observed that the sheer number and widely divergent reconstructions of the historical Jesus is an indicator that there is something seriously wrong with the nature of the so-called evidence for such a figure. As I have asked a few times also, what other historical figure do historians have such fundamental diversity of view of their very identity? Socrates was a philosopher, Caesar a politician and military leader, Aristophanes a playwright.

Here is the Introduction’s list of the many Jesus’s modern scholarship has produced:

 

1. itinerate preacher (Crossan)
2. a cynic sage (Mack, Downing)
3. the Essene’s righteous rabbi (Allegro)
4. a Galilean holy man (Vermes, Thiering)
5. a revolutionary leader (Brandon, Buchanan)
6. an apocalyptic preacher (Ehrman)
7. a proto-liberation theologian (Robinson)
8. a trance-inducing mental healer (Davies)
9. an eschatological prophet (Sanders, Meier)
10. an occult magician (Smith)
11. a Pharisee (Falk, Maccoby)
12. a rabbi seeking reform (Horsley, Borg, Chilton)
13. a Galilean charismatic (Vermes)
14. a Hillelite (Maccoby)
15. an Essene (Maccoby)
16. a teacher of wisdom (Borg)
17. a miracle-working prophet and an exorcist (Koester)

See the online introduction at http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/carp358009.shtml for a summary of each of the contributions to appear in the volume.

Thompson’s introductory exegesis points one way to where the evidence and discussions in the ensuing chapters leads. I am not so sure that each of the contributors would be willing to follow Thompson here, but maybe I can be pleasantly surprised to find at least an acknowledgement of the validity of Thompson’s position. (Previously on this blog when Thompson’s views on the Historical Jesus and the assumptions underlying HJ studies have been raised, they have been dismissed on the grounds that Thompson is “not a New Testament scholar”. Hopefully this volume will open a wider understanding that the methodological approach one adopts to inquire into Christian origins trumps all other considerations.)

Edited By Thomas L. Thompson  Professor emeritus, University of CopenhagenDecember 2010
and
Thomas S. Verenna Independent Researcher http://tomverenna.wordpress.com

Mark’s story brings together two central but distinct sayings of Jesus, each of which has a significant, thematically driven, sub-motif. The first embodies our title: “Is this not the carpenter?” with its subordinate leitmotif of hands doing wonders, significantly emphasized in the story’s conclusion wherein hands are laid on some of the sick to heal them. The other saying is Jesus’ complaint that a prophet is unrecognized in his own home town, and the corresponding anger and dissonance that this provokes. These distinct thematic elements are treated independently in the variants of this story we find in the other gospels. While the saying about the prophet rejected is given its own distinctive role in John 4.44-46 in support of the contrast John creates in the foregoing narrative between Jews and the Samaritans on the one hand and foreigners, represented by the royal official, who believes Jesus even before his son is cured (John 4.47-53) in the following story segment on the other. Even Galileans welcomed him, but, for John, the Jews insist on miracles! John’s story, in fact, has little understanding for or interest in an historically viable understanding of Jesus’ reception. He is so committed to a Christian supersessionist polemic against Jews that he freely compares the Jews negatively with Samaritans, Galileans and foreigners in support of his presentation of Jesus as “the savior of the world” (John 4.42). Jesus’ proverb that “a prophet has no honor in his own country” is hardly about any Jesus of history, but summarizes for John contemporary Jewish opposition towards a newly formed Christianity’s alternative understanding of an implicitly common religious heritage.

In the closure of Mark’s story of Jesus in his hometown, as in Mark’s presentation of the saying about a prophet in his homeland, motifs of rejection and disbelief are subordinated to the theme of Jesus’ identity: “Is this not the carpenter?” This episode in the synagogue of his home town begins within the larger context of Jesus’ growing fame, in which he is everywhere met with amazement and wonder at his wisdom and “the great things done with his hands.” In the segment immediately preceding his arrival in his home country, Jesus has amazed a crowd of mourners by taking a young girl by the hand that she might arise from the dead (Mk 5.41). So also in Mark 6, Mark’s prophet wonders over the distrust with which he is met: a distrust, which, although preventing him from doing any “great deed,” is nevertheless undermined by Jesus laying “his hands on some of the sick and healing them.” This simple, but ironic play on the hands doing great deeds effectively directs Mark’s audience to wonder over the story’s central question about this man who does wonders with his hands that they might ask: “Is this not the carpenter?”¹

One does well to consider, here, how the scene, with its pivotal motifs of the craftsman and his wonderful hands, readily evokes the figure of the Greek god, Hephaestus,² who was the god of craftsmen, who, himself, had forged the magnificent equipment of the gods and almost any finely-wrought metalwork imbued with powers that appears in Greek myth. He too was—though crippled by Zeus—strong-armed. According to Hesiod’s Theogony, he was born of the virgin goddess Hera³ (though he is also described as the son of Zeus and Hera by Homer⁴ and indeed, in later tradition, the son of the Cretan sun god, Talus⁵). Does the question about the carpenter identify Jesus as a Jewish Hephaestus?⁶ Within biblical tradition, a comparable figure can be recognized in the craftsman, Besal’el, who, like Jesus, is both filled with divine wisdom and the ability to create wonderful things with his hands (Ex 31.1-11; 35.30-39.43; 1Chron 2.20; 2Chron 1.5).

Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying: “Behold, I have chosen Besal’el, son of Uri, son of Hur from the tribe of Judah and have filled him with the divine spirit, with wisdom and learning, with understanding for craftsmanship so that he might create artistic designs in gold, silver and bronze, engrave stone for inlay, carve wood and, indeed, carry out all types of handwork (Ex 31.1-5).

It is also in the Old Testament that one finds an early linkage between the creative identity which this thematic element gives to the figure of Jesus and his role as the prophet, unrecognized by his own people, which is fundamental to the construction of Mark’s episode. The figure of the prophet as one who is mistreated by both friends and family is nearly ubiquitous in biblical literature and there are numerous passages which help us in understanding Mark’s story (esp. Ps 31.12bc; 38.12; 69.9-10; 88.9 and Job 19.13-19). Several Old Testament narrative figures have also been portrayed in this role. Joseph is scorned by his whole family for his ability to prophecy and to interpret dreams. He is thrown into a pit by his brothers and, escapes death by being sold into slavery in Egypt (Gen 37). A reiteration of such a rejected Joseph also structures the “life of Jeremiah.” He, too, is hated by the people. Attempts are made on his life (Jer 11.18-12.6). He is ostracized and rejected (Jer 15.10-21), publicly persecuted (Jer 19.1-20.6) and is barred from the temple (Jer 36.5-10), arrested and imprisoned (Jer 37.15-21). Like Joseph, Jeremiah is thrown into a pit (Jer 38.5-13) and finally forced to flee to Egypt after the death of Gedaliya (Jer 42.18-43.7). It is, however, the less precise reiteration in Mark of the development of the figure of Moses which fully brings together the thematic figures of the prophet rejected in his homeland and the wonderworker whose hand creates mighty things. Although Moses’ life, in the brief sketch of a story in Exodus 2.11-15, has been threatened by Pharaoh and he needed to flee his homeland, in Exodus 3, he is sent as Yahweh’s prophet to Pharaoh to free his people (Ex 3.10). Yahweh knows that the Egyptian king will refuse, “except that he be forced by a mighty hand” (Ex 3.19 Gr.). It is therefore that—pointing ahead to the coming story of miracles and wonders—Yahweh tells Moses that he will strike the Egyptians with many wonders and that Pharaoh will let the people go (Ex 3.20)! Moses is to tell the Israelites that God will strike the Egyptians with wonders: “with great power and a mighty hand” (Ex 3,20; 6.1; 32.11)⁷—a phrase which finds an echo in Mark’s story.

Matthew’s version of the story primarily distinguishes itself from Mark’s through its context. The nearly verbatim reiteration of Mark’s story in Matthew 13.54-58⁸ finds its place in Matthew’s gospel with the help of Jesus’ statement at the close of chapter 12. His “true mother and brothers” are his disciples and “those who do the will of his father” (Matt 12.50). In contrast to Mark’s use of the story in developing the figure of Jesus as wonder worker in the style of Moses and Hephaestus, with the theme of mistrust by the people providing its ironic support, the discourse in Matthew 13 presents the story rather as a “living parable” about the kingdom.⁹ Matthew’s story of Jesus in the synagogue follows a series of brief similes about contrasts and distinctions related to the kingdom of heaven; namely, the parables of the weeds and wheat growing together (Matt 13.24-30), of the little mustard seed becoming a great tree (vv. 31-32) and of the leaven in flour (vv. 33). These are loosely organized similes, functioning as illustrative variants of the discourse’s opening parable of the sower (Matt 13.1-9), a story which Matthew uses to supply his parables with a reiteration of Isaiah 6.9-10: a most defining passage of Isaiah, which supplies a structure for Matthew’s gospel and suggests a pedagogically oriented contrast between the understanding reader of this gospel to the role that is played by the rejecting, misunderstanding generations of the story’s Isaiah-like figure. Much as the author of Isaiah has his prophet sent to speak to the people of his generation, which Yahweh had himself made deaf, blind and without understanding that they not turn and be forgiven (Isa 6,9-13; cf. Mk 4.12-13!), so that they might all the better serve their pedagogical role of a lost generation, so Matthew will have his hero speak to the “great crowds,” about the kingdom of heaven only in parables, that they also will not understand. He, thereby, rather evokes in his readers an understanding akin to Jesus’ Isaiah-like disciples, who are given the role of understanding the secrets of the kingdom (Matt 13.14-17)! Matthew has Jesus interpret the parable of the sower precisely in terms of understanding or not understanding parables (Matt 13.18-23), and follows this with similar interpretations of the three similes for the kingdom of heaven (Matt 13.24-33).

Matthew closes his discourse on parables with the help of the opening of Psalm 78, in which the psalmist defines the parable as a riddle of revelation in a striking reversal of Isaiah! Matthew will not hide the “glorious deeds of Yahweh, his might and his wonders” from the children of his generation (Ps 78.4): “I will open my mouth in parables; I will speak of what has been hidden since the foundation of the world” (Matt 13.35)! The next scene offers a further expansion as, Jesus, alone with his disciples, is asked to explain his first “parable of the weeds of the field.” Jesus responds with an allegorical coding of his earlier interpretation of the parable of the sower (Matt 13.36-43), followed by three additional similes for the richness of the kingdom: treasure hidden in the field (Matt 13.44), a merchant in search for fine pearls (Matt 13.45-46) and a net thrown into the sea (Matt 13.47-50) and closes his discourse on parables with a final simile, comparing his understanding disciples with “every scribe who is trained for the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 13.51-52). It is within this context that Matthew’s paraphrastic version of Mark’s allegory makes the story itself of his preaching in his home town’s synagogue into a parable. It provides a key to the brief discussion about Jesus’ wonders and the scribes’ request that he do a sign in Matthew 12. With Psalm 78’s singer, Matthew will speak in parables to Jesus’ true family of disciples and followers about the “glorious deeds of the Lord, of his might and wonders,” but few such mighty signs will be given to the disbelieving. Matthew’s story radically transforms Mark’s tale, but is broadly ’unaware of its mythic potentials. His orientation toward rewriting Isaiah and his preoccupation in creating a suffering servant for his own generation of readers precludes any historical interest in Mark’s figure of Jesus.

Luke’s version of the story is found within the opening chain-narrative of his gospel, which is linked to the birth narrative with the plot-supporting leitmotif of the divine spirit which fills or leads the episode’s central figure (Lk1.15, 34, 41, 80; 2.25-27; 3.16,22; 4.1). So Jesus, filled with the spirit, comes to “Nazareth, where he had grown up” (Lk 4.16; cf. Lk 2.39-40, 51). Luke’s singular identification of Jesus’ home town as Nazareth reflects more than merely a simple identification of the unnamed patrída of Mark’s story.Much as the opening of Luke’s genealogy had identified Jesus as “the son, as was supposed, of Joseph” in order to accommodate the fatherly role of the divine spirit in Jesus’ birth story (Lk 1.34), the naming of Jesus’ home town as Nazareth seems to accommodate Matthew’s earlier narrative and create a harmony of the seemingly conflicting geographies of Matthew and Luke’s birth narratives. Whereas Luke had Joseph and Mary travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem, where they unsuccessfully sought temporary lodging, Matthew has Jesus grow up in Nazareth, because, in their return from Egypt, Joseph and Mary had been afraid to return to their home town of Bethlehem in Judea and went rather to Nazareth so that a passage from Isaiah might be interpreted as a prophecy; that Jesus would be a “Nazarene” (Matt 2.19-23; cf. Isa 11.1; 61.1), a role which Luke’s own birth story—reiterating the role of the spirit from the Samson story—had given to the Baptist (Lk 1.14-15; cf. Lev 19.9; Num 6.3; Judges 13.4-5). It is the leitmotif-figure of the spirit which leads Jesus to Nazareth. There, Luke associates Jesus’ sermon in the synagogue with both the driving spirit and Isaiah’s figure of the suffering servant. The text of Jesus’ sermon, reiterating the great ancient Near Eastern trope of “the song for a poor man”,¹⁰ is used by Luke to define the proclamation of the good news, which had marked the opening of Mark’s gospel as an inauguration of the kingdom of God and which had already developed a stereotypical configuration of Jesus’ role as miracle worker in Luke (Mark 1.1; cf. Luke 1.19; 2.10; 4.43):

The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me. He has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom to prisoners and sight to the blind; to free the oppressed and to proclaim a year of grace from the Lord (Isa 61.1-2; Lk 4.18-19).

The people, at first, react with wonder and acceptance at Jesus’ interpretive claim that the text, marking the kingdom of God with the expectations of the “poor man’s song,” now finds its fulfillment. However, the form of the question, with which Luke has them express their wonder, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” both turns the story away from the defining themes of the good news and healing reversals of the fortunes of the poor and centers it within the thematic element of the unacknowledged prophet in his homeland. This shift of focus is also stressed by the expansion of Mark’s story with references to two miracle stories of Elijah and Elisha (1 Kgs 17.9-24; 2 Kgs 5.1-14). Although both are classic and fitting illustrations of the “song for a poor man”, both are strongly marked by an unfavorable contrast between foreigners and Israelites. It is this pejorative distinction which provides the cause for the people’s wonder, which turns to anger and grows to fury as the story closes with the people driving Jesus out of the village and attempting to throw him over a cliff-hang which is strikingly similar to that which had been used in Mark’s foregoing story to destroy a flock of demon-possessed pigs—a story that had also closed on the motif of Jesus being rejected by the people (Mk 5.11-17)!

Both the distinction between those who are saved and those not and the death-threatening fury the discrimination evokes fits the distinctive Christian supersessionist context of John 4’s story which contrasts the Jews of Jesus’ homeland so unfavorably with the Samaritans. This is akin to the comparable emphasis on the accepted and rejected in some of Matthew’s parables. Only the people’s inability to lay hold of him: his “passing through their midst”, allows Luke to continue Jesus’ triumphant tour with a following brief, three-fold closing story of healing and driving out demons and fevers, through which both his fame and his popularity grow (Lk 4.31-44): all illustrations of Jesus, “preaching the good news of the kingdom of God” (Lk 4.43), which define him as “the holy one of God” (Lk 4.34), “son of God” and “messiah” (Lk 4.41). Luke’s narration is emphatically influenced by the other gospel traditions about Jesus. Indeed, his dominant commitment to the central Old Testament folkloric motif of the spirit seems to draw him to ignore the historical potential of any of the significant thematic elements he develops. For Luke, the crowd’s wonder offers an opportunity of asserting the theological and mythic values of his and Matthew’s narrative above anything which might represent a description of events. His own Jesus was Yahweh’s servant announcing the good news of the kingdom of God to the poor. The people’s wonder over this son of Joseph whom they knew is interpreted by Jesus himself as a threatening demand to John’s unrecognized prophet in his home town, as the episode turns from wonder to discord, threat of violence and mutual rejection.

In concluding this brief exegetical excursion, one must ask once again, with themarveling people of Jesus’ home town in the Gospel of Mark, our historicist question: “Is this not the carpenter?” And we must answer, just as quickly: Yes, even so! Those “few sick people” on whom he laid his wonder-creating hands give us the key to our allegory, and we, too, can marvel with Jesus at the disbelief with which he was met by his own people! It is Jesus as Hephaestus … the myth, which demands affirmation. It is that which Mark writes of and which also forms the modest center of focus for the present collection of essays.

The Quest for the Historical Jesus

For some time, New Testament scholarship has avoided direct questions regarding the historicity of Jesus. Their assumption of an historical Jesus has been secured within a debate about the sayings of Jesus and the events of his life, as referenced in the New Testament, reflect either Jesus’ own life and teaching or a construction of early Christianity. The dichotomous structure of this debate has typically made alternative explanations for the ubiquitous allegorical interpretations and narrative reiterations and allusions of a wide variety of both ancient Near Eastern and biblical motifs, themes and tropes irrelevant in the eyes of many scholars, in spite of the fact that an unquestioning acceptance of the New Testament figures of Jesus, Paul and the disciples as historical can at times be shown to ignore and misunderstand the implicit functions of our texts. While early critical scholarship has exposed many of the flaws in contemporary assumptions of historicity already in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the absence of a coherent comprehensive understanding for an understanding of the New Testament literature at the time created a stereotype, which has not yet faded. As late as 1977, for example, Michael Grant could maintain that "no serious scholar" would "postulate the non-historicity of Jesus."¹¹ Even more recently, Geza Vermes has remarked in his most recent book on Jesus' resurrection, in an affirmation of his own belief in the historicity of the figure of Jesus, set his own perspective as opposed to "rationalist dogmatists" (2008).¹²Although no effort has yet been made to respond to recent efforts to focus on the question of historicity, ¹³ the question as such is dismissed without argument. While the assumption of historicity has prompted many to attempt to describe what the historical Jesus must have been like, it has also encouraged many to ignore both literary and theological issues central to an understanding of New Testament narrative.  An analysis of this problem is important, as the current discussions about which of the many proposed historical figures of Jesus might be judged the more probable have become all too predictable. The question of historicity, itself, however, remains unaddressed and there is, accordingly, little discussion of the central questions regarding the significance and function of our texts. One has begun with the unwarranted assertion of a “probability” of an historical Jesus existing in ancient Palestine and freely presented one or other of such a possible figure as a viable alternative to the only known Jesus—the mythic one of our texts. Jesus has become a "concrete entity with recognizable parameters."¹⁴ This was so thoroughly accepted that, when the Jesus Seminar was originally assembled, it was assumed from the outset that Jesus had been in fact an historical person. The Seminar, hence, could proceed to produce specific guidelines for determining the type of person he had been. "Over the…years a flood of works…has inundated scholars and the public, as the range of portraits of Jesus broadens."¹⁵ Jesus became all of the following: an itinerate preacher,¹⁶ a cynic sage,¹⁷ the Essene's righteous rabbi,¹⁸ a Galilean holy man,¹⁹ a revolutionary leader,²⁰ an apocalyptic preacher,²¹ a proto-liberation theologian,²² a trance-inducing mental healer,²³an eschatological prophet,²⁴ an occult magician,²⁵ a Pharisee,²⁶ a rabbi seeking reform,²⁷a Galilean charismatic,²⁸ a Hillelite,²⁹ an Essene,³⁰ a teacher of wisdom,³¹ a miracle-working prophet and an exorcist³² and the list continues to grow…. Jesus is as fluid a figure as is our understanding of early Christianity. "The mistake was to suppose that Jesus could come to mean more to our time by entering into it as a man like ourselves.”³³

[A]ttempts to say what we could really know about the historical Jesus actually told us more about their authors than about the person they sought to describe. The authors seem to have looked into the well of history searching for Jesus and seen their own reflection.³⁴

Such projection represents the crux of the problem this book hopes to address. Historical Jesus research did not come about through the discovery of an actual historical Jesus as focus for such research. Despite what many have suggested, the data we have is no more useful for an understanding of an historical Jesus today than it had been a century ago. Even what little had been understood as known to scholars of the nineteenth century—such as the existence of widespread Jewish expectations for an apocalyptic messiah—has been found wanting.³⁵ The ancient world’s many mythic and theological representations of a figure comparable to the Jesus of New Testament texts are not alone decisive arguments against historicity, but they are part of the picture, which needs to be considered more comprehensively. Literarily viable figures have been represented—historically—in many clarifying ways.

The role genre studies play in investigations of the Jesus of the New Testament rests largely on an analysis of intertextuality, which is well defined in terms of an analysis of the functions of tale-types, stock figures, sayings, motifs, narrative patterns and thematic elements through a process of reiteration, refraction, allusion and emulation. An historical Jesus is a hypothetical derivative of scholarship. It is no more a fact than is an equally hypothetical historical Moses or David. To the extent that New Testament literature was written with literary, allegorical and, indeed, theological and mythic purpose, rather than as an account of historical events, there is significant need, not to speak of warrant, to doubt the historicity of its figures to the extent that such figures owe their substance to such literature. The best histories of Jesus today reflect an awareness of the limits and uncertainties in reconstructing the story of his life. Abraham, Isaac, Moses and Sarah, Ruth and Boaz, Jonah and his big fish are but a handful of characters found in the Bible, without the slightest historicity. They are literary creations. The figures of New Testament discourse must also be critically examined in the same light, for the New Testament is to be defined neither as a history of the early Christian church nor as an account of the life of a man named Jesus and of that of his followers.

An effort to define the question

The essays collected in this volume have a modest purpose. Neither establishing the historicity of an historical Jesus nor possessing an adequate warrant for dismissing it, our purpose is to clarify our engagement with critical historical and exegetical methods in the hopes of enabling the central question regarding the function of New Testament literature to resist the endless production of works on the historical Jesus. Our hope is to open a direct discussion of the question of historicity much in the spirit of the more than decade-long discourse and debate by the European Seminar on Methodology in Israel’s History, which has been so profitably engaged in regard to the historicity of figures and narratives of the Hebrew Bible and the related construction of a history of ancient Palestine.³⁶ The essays we collect here are presented by a wide range of scholars and deal with three central issues: 1) some problems and issues of past scholarship regarding the historical Jesus; 2) new perspectives regarding the figure of Paul and his epistles as our “earliest testimony” of the figure of Jesus; and 3) intertextual literary reading and the significance of the function of a rewritten Bible for literary composition. These collected essays will close with a related, theory-oriented discussion about the history of Christian origins without an historical Jesus.

Past Scholarship on the Historical Jesus

Whether or not one wishes to use the term “minimalism” to identify some of the questions which are addressed and the methods that are used in the essays of this volume, the first, brief article by Jim West, in his article “A Very, Very Short Introduction to Minimalism,” opens our discussion by pointing to some of the central issues engaged in different ways by most of the contributors. When one is dealing with biblical traditions, one is not dealing with texts that are historical in their orientation, however much they construct a past. Theology is rather the medium of biblical discourse. If one does insist on reading biblical narratives and the literature related to them as if they were histories of Israel and of early Christianity, from which modern histories of Israel and early Christianity can be constructed, one is quickly caught in a web of circular reasoning. The trap, West further argues, is difficult to avoid, as one is unable to write such a modern history without drawing directly on the narrative perspectives of the biblical text itself. The Bible, indeed, is both the most important source in constructing such a history and its only viable confirmation! On the other hand, lacking a history of Israel and of early Christianity which are independent of biblical perspectives, one cannot reasonably or convincingly identify an historical Jesus or an ancient Israel, which existed apart from their story worlds. One can neither affirm nor deny their existence. One can only conclude that we lack evidence for such constructs. With this dilemma in place, West argues that the function of historical construction is neither biblically based nor appropriate for an understanding of the biblical literature.

Roland Boer’s article, “The German Pestilence: Re-assessing Feuerbach, Strauss and Bauer”, which asks whether we have yet seen the end of the Bible’s territorial dominance over rational thought or, indeed, German dominance over biblical scholarship, which had been furthered through a Kulturkamp fought with and through theology, the then lingua franca of public debate. He reminds biblical scholars of their well-known irrelevance to nineteenth century intellectual life in France and Britain and draws out some relevant implications of our field’s long flirtation with what had been once known as the “German pestilence.” Instead of “dismissing the Bible as a document of outmoded superstition,” nineteenth century German intellectuals developed their theories of society in terms of biblical criticism. Boer’s discussion, for example, of the diminished humanity resulting from Ludwig Feuerbach’s understanding of God as a projection of what is best in ourselves, David Strauss’ mythic representation of Jesus as “a poetic expression of deeper truths” and a natural way of understanding life and religion and Bruno Bauer’s critical historical perspectives about Christian origins in the second century, CE, which defined Christianity as a form of sectarian, exclusivemonotheism, all develop a discourse which deconstructs the orthodox understanding of early Christianity. Boer, because of his understanding of Bauer as a forerunner of “minimalism,” may surprise some readers by his assurance that Bauer continues to be relevant to our discussion. However, his assurance rests on the caution Bauer’s work maintains even for today’s scholarship that “one must be very careful with using the Bible for any historical reconstruction.”

Lester Grabbe, in his contribution, entitled “‘Jesus Who is Called Christ’: References to Jesus Outside Christian Sources,” underlines such caution with his unfortunately—but appropriately—brief survey of the few and ambiguous extra-biblical references to the figure of Jesus which exist apart from the Bible: our present, quite limited, store of early Jesus testimonies which is unfortunately neither large nor growing. Beginning with the known Roman sources, he refers to Tacitus’ use, nearly a century after the date of Jesus’ alleged death, of what are presumably Roman sources, which enable him to describe the success of Nero’s efforts to punish a group called “Christians”, a name that was derived from one, Christus, who had suffered the death penalty under Puntius Pilatus and who had become the source of superstitions in Judea and Jerusalem. Grabbe then turns to Tacitus’ younger contemporary, Suetonius, who had also referred to Christians who had been punished by Nero (emperor from 54-68 CE). In contradiction to Tacitus, however, he refers to a Chrestus/ Christus as an instigator of Jewish disturbances in Rome under Claudius, who had been emperor from 41-54 CE. This reference Grabbe judges “problematic” for several reasons, not least that of chronology. Pliny the Younger (110 CE), speaking of his own (limited) involvement with the trials and executions of Christians, describes how these people had chanted verses in honor of Christ “as if to a god” and made vows to him to live virtuously. Finally, turning to a more detailed discussion of Josephus, who wrote in the second half of the first century, and to his medieval commentators, Grabbe argues that Josephus, who might well have used one or other Christian tradition for his brief paraphrase, did have knowledge of the execution of James, who is described as Jesus’ brother. He, however, also argues, on the basis the witness of Origen and Jerome, that Josephus’ bold and famous assertion: “This was the Christ!” (the testimonium Flavianum) is to be understood as a later, Christian insertion. Grabbe goes on to offer his own “hypothetical reconstruction” for what Josephus “might have written.” He further argues that Rabbinic references to Jesus are secondary and based on “Christian” sources and closes on an all too brief discussion about two attempts at an early “Jewish”life of Jesus, the Toledot Yeshu, and the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew.

Niels Peter Lemche follows Grabbe by taking up the classic question of historical Jesus study: the compatibility of the two faces of Jesus that one meets in the gospels: the Jesus of Nazareth and the church’s mythic, divine figure of Christ in an article, entitled: “The Grand Inquisitor and Christ: Why the Church Doesn’t Want Jesus”. Likening David Friedrich Strauss’s Jesus, without myth, to Dostoyevsky’s Christ in the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, Lemche discusses today’s conservative and evangelical alienation from studies of the Bible which are both historical and critical, an alienation which undermines the idealistic independence of exegesis from the authority of church dogmatics that had been so sorely sought by the eighteenth century theologian, Philipp Gabler. While the nineteenth century’s critical exegesis has often been accused of having alienated believing Christians from their Bible, its more appropriate role and self-understanding was determined by the role of ridding the Bible of ancient beliefs and superstitions, so that it might more legitimately serve as a reliable source for the history of both Judaism and Christian origins. However, as in the nineteenth century, so too today, doubts about the historicity of the Bible’s events and figures—not least those related to the figure of Jesus—and a return to an understanding of the mythic qualities of biblical literature is also intolerable, as can readily be seen in reactions to the deconstruction of biblical history by the “Copenhagen school.”

In closing the first part of our book, Emanuel Pfoh’s essay, “Jesus and the Mythic Mind: An Epistemological Problem”, addresses the implications of a renewed emphasis on a mythic Jesus in his effort to distinguish—from a historical and anthropological perspective—knowledge about an historical person behind the New Testament figure of Jesus from what should be understood as an aspect of mythic creation. Pfoh addresses what he calls “the mythic mind in the intellectual world of antiquity” on the one hand and the question of whether knowledge of an historical Jesus is possible at all, on the other. Contemporary understanding of an historical Jesus is not based on evidence so much as it is rooted in theological necessity. The mythic character of the figure of Jesus relates to the perspectives ancients had of reality and the role which humans were thought to hold beyond what is known and tangible in this world. Bearing and illustrating a tradition, great figures of ancient literature reiterate each other in their behavior, values and function. In such a context, the question of historicity, as might be implied, for example, in the Jesus Seminar’s efforts to identify the ipsissima verba of Jesus, is wholly inappropriate. The matrix of biblical literature can hardly accommodate the rational presuppositions about reality that modern historicism has as its point of departure. Bultmann’s understanding of kerygma precludes the theological function of an historical Jesus, however much the goals of the second and third quests for the historical Jesus assume just such historicity as their theological point of departure. As Old Testament studies has learned over the past forty years of critical research, the limitations of historical knowledge are hardly to be ignored and biblical texts be allowed an understanding as historical sources. Pfoh closes this paper on perspectives with a discussion of some of the ways that “cultural memory” can help clarify issues further.

Paul and Early Christianity

Part Two of our book comprises three articles which take up the New Testament’s purportedly earliest references to Jesus and the question of their relevance to the question regarding the historicity of this figure. The first essay, by Robert Price, “Does the Christ Myth Theory Require an Early Date for the Pauline Epistles?”, addresses fundamental methodological questions concerning the dating of the genuine Pauline epistles. Price begins by examining some of the assumptions of “mythicists” today by using George Wells and Earl Doherty as his primary examples. He draws the conclusion that the originally mythic savior of Paul’s epistles was gradually historicized and then found its place in the later gospels. One of whose central functions was the legitimation of early Christianity through an origin story. In this effort, the gospel stories expansively fill a void left by the epistles. Acknowledging the traditional early dating of the epistles, such scholars see an apparent lack of knowledge about Jesus’ life in the epistles, even as, if such knowledge had existed, such references would have been highly relevant to many of the arguments of the epistles. Nor do they see Paul evoking Jesus’ authority, when he might be most expected to do so. Turning to the history of “mythicist” scholarship, Price first discusses the implications of the theories of Couchoud and Dujardin from the late 1930s concerning Paul’s knowledge of an historical Jesus, in so far as such knowledge might be implied on the basis of their understanding of the authorship and date of the Pauline epistles. Price then turns to Arthur Drew, a writer of the early twentieth century, in an effort to raise the question of whether a “mythicist” theory requires an early dating of Paul. Taking up the questionably principle that sayings precede narratives and epistles gospels, one might easily add that the more spectacular can enhance the less and one might arrive at the conclusion that, therefore, the gospels expand on the themes of the epistles. However circular, the argument is rhetorically simple and unfortunately persuasive. Even if the epistles are late, the gospels must be much later, because they are unknown by the epistles. Citing Robertson’s argument that even if the epistles were later and had accepted the tradition of gospel myths, this would not establish the historicity of these miraculous and heroic myths, Price goes on to argue that there is a lot less difference between the Jesus story of the gospels and the Christ myth of the epistles than we usually assume. Following a brief discussion of the similarities between myths and legends, Price turns to the possibility of Marcion’s authorship of some of the epistles in an effort to raise the question of whether he knew of the gospel tradition as well as to turn his discussion to the anti-Marcionite structure of the gospels as rewritten scripture, an understanding of the gospels which has long been argued by Thomas Brodie and others. He then turns to the apparent Marcionite influences on the gospels of Mark, John and Thomas. Price concludes his essay by recognizing the self-serving character of the early twentieth century “mythicist” acceptance of an early date of the Pauline epistles and hints at what he sees as a (historical) priority of the epistles’ “Christ myth” to what he calls the “Jesus epic.”

In the following article in this section: “Paul: The Oldest Witness to the Historical Jesus”, Mogens Müller, though also accepting both an early date for the letters of Paul and the highly “mythic” or theological character of Paul’s figure of Jesus, understands these letters as providing the earliest witness to the historical person of Jesus. The letters themselves reflect the process by which this figure has been transformed into a “heavenly savior,” and transformed so thoroughly that the historical figure of the past has nearly disappeared from our texts. The process, itself, is viewed as evidence for the early dating of the genuine Pauline epistles, relative to the gospels. Diametrically opposed as his perspective of the early dating of Paul is to Wells’ and Doherty’s “mythicist” use of the early dating of the Pauline epistles, Müller argues that all four of the canonical gospels reflect Paul in the saving significance of Jesus’ life and death. Müller’s use of Paul’s letters as witness to the historical Jesus is not oriented to identifying specific elements of Jesus’ life and teaching within the epistles which have been reiterated in the gospels. He avoids that argument’s intrinsic, circular argumentation, by associating Paul’s witness rather to the significance attached to his life and conduct in subsequent interpretations. Assuming that Paul had never met the historical Jesus, the whole of his understanding would have been derived through others, even as, in Paul’s self-understanding, his own calling came directly from the “mythical” Christ. That is, Paul understood Jesus according to the transformation of his own life. The argument for Paul as witness to the historical Jesus rests on the effect of his message on Paul. While one learns admittedly little about a “life of Jesus” from the genuine letters of Paul, these letters rather witness to the theological consequences Paul drew from Jesus’ life and death. What we meet in the epistles is Jesus as faith sees him. We only have access to him through this reception: as expressed in confessional statements. Through this indirect way, Müller finds the Jesus of history behind the letters of Paul, not so much in the mythic figure Paul developed, as—through his reception—as “a charismatic interpreter of the will of God,” an understanding of the figure of Jesus which is also cast in the gospels. He closes his paper with the assertion that if Paul must be assumed to be a historical person, the same assumption must be made in regard to Jesus.

The paper of Thomas Verenna, “Born Under the Law: Intertextuality and the Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus in Paul’s Epistles,” also directly engages the question of Paul’s witness to an historical Jesus and questions whether Paul in fact believed his Jesus to be historical, rather than an allegorical figure within the genre of “rewritten Bible,” reiterating Isaiah’s “suffering servant.” Beginning with a discussion of the Psalms, Isaiah and the historicity of the crucifixion, he considers Mark’s representation of “crucifixion” and “resurrection” in the context of Ezekiel’s reference to the myth of Tammuz, which, having roots in ancient Near Eastern traditions from as early as that of the Sumerian Inanna, is evoked in the gospels through Mark’s allusions to Psalm 22. Such insight into Jewish culture can also be recognized in Paul’s keying the crucifixion to the Passover tradition, an association based not in history but literature; namely, Leviticus 16 and Psalm 22. Verenna argues further for early Jewish familiarity with mystery religions and early forms of Gnosticism with the help of Paul’s discussion of Archons in Galatians, Romans and 1 Corinthians in an effort to explain, with the help of I Enoch, Paul’s understanding of Jesus death and rebirth as hidden and spiritual rather than historical. The reference in Galatians of Jesus as “born of a woman” has led historical Jesus scholarship to two claims. He points out that the passage in Galatians is entirely allegorical and rooted in Old Testament rhetoric and, accordingly, hardly meant to be taken literally. A further example is taken up from 1 Corinthians 11, which is set in the context of a discussion of disputes in the community of Corinth, in which the author introduces the allegory of the last supper with its interpretive echoes on Exodus 24’s covenant meal, which had been introduced in 1 Corinthians 10. In closing, Verenna takes up a passage in Galatians 1, which refers to “James, the brother of the Lord.” This, he describes as “the strongest case” for Paul referring to a historical Jesus. Reminding the reader of the possibility that the term “brother” is not necessarily to be understood literally and, at the same time, lightly suggesting that Paul’s use of the term might derive from the fellowship language so well known from mystery religions of the day, and as, for instance, might be actually supported by 1 Corinthians 15, he leans rather apologetically on the much later Gospel of Luke to hold to the possibility that the passage not be understood literally. In concluding, he points out that Paul’s Christ is taken from his understanding of scripture and then asserts that he had not been an historical figure, living some decades earlier, but an allegorical figure, reiterating themes of the Old Testament.