Maurice Casey. JESUS OF NAZARETH. An Independent Historian’s Account of His Life and Teaching

Chapter 1. The Quest of the Historical Jesus

 Introduction 

Jesus of Nazareth is a major symbol in our culture. Most of us belong to social subgroups which have a defi nite view of him. Some people belong to evangelical Christian groups who believe in the literal truth of all four Gospels in their sacred text, the New Testament. Many Christians believe that Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, God the Son, and when he lived his life on earth he performed miracles, knew everything and never made any mistakes. He died for the sins of the world, and rose from the dead. Our society as a whole, however, is barely Christian. Many people believe that none of the miracle stories are true, and some non- religious people imagine that Jesus was not a historical character at all. Jewish people generally believe that, whatever else he may have said or done, Jesus was not the Messiah, and God did not raise him from the dead. They are also convinced that no man can be God, and that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity violates the monotheism which God revealed to them, his chosen people. In accordance with their own traditions, the vast majority of Muslims believe that Jesus did not die. This is what one short passage of the Qur’an is believed to say, and it is part of the narrative of a mediaeval forgery known as the Gospel of Barnabas.1 There is a second reason why it is diffi cult to discuss the earthly life which Jesus lived 2,000 years ago. Our main historical sources are the four Gospels which are now found in a Christian book, the New Testament. These Gospels were written for Christian churches some time after Jesus’ death, in Greek rather than in the Aramaic which he spoke, by Christians who included those aspects of his life and teaching which they found most signifi cant. Mark and Luke show signifi cant signs of Gentile self- identifi cation, whereas Jesus and his fi rst followers were Jewish. Matthew, who was at least culturally Jewish himself, shows signifi cant signs of assimilation into the Gentile world. The Gospel attributed to John, which is very different from the other three, appears to have been largely written by Gentile Christians, and in parts it is vigorously anti- Jewish. The purpose of this book is to engage with the historical Jesus from the perspective of an independent historian. I do not belong to any religious or antireligious group. I try to use evidence and argument to establish historically valid conclusions. I depend on the best work done by many other scholars, regardless of their ideological affi liation. I also make abundant use of one relatively recent discovery which should help us to go further than ever before in reconstructing the Jesus of history in his original cultural context. That is the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and above all the eventual publication of all those which are written in Aramaic, the language which Jesus himself spoke. In two complex technical books, I have shown how genuine sayings of Jesus, and the earliest narrative reports of his deeds, can be reconstructed in their original Aramaic versions in a manner unthinkable before the publication of the Aramaic scrolls.2 As all students of language and culture in general are very well aware, language is a central part of culture. Accordingly, the reconstruction of the Aramaic sources of the synoptic Gospels is an essential step in understanding him against the background of his own culture, that of fi rst- century Judaism. All the details of this technical work cannot be presented in this book, but it lies behind it, and I present Aramaic reconstructions of the Lord’s Prayer and of Jesus’ words interpreting the bread and wine at the Last Supper, so that everyone can see what this work looks like, and experience something of what he really said. I also refer to this kind of work at other crucial points. Attempts to see Jesus against the background of fi rst- century Judaism have been made before, notably by Albert Schweitzer, Geza Vermes, and Ed Sanders. Six scholars, Tom Wright, Bruce Chilton, Jimmy Dunn, J. P. Meier, and Martin Hengel with Anna Schwemer, are notable among those who have tried again recently, at a time when seeing the historical Jesus as Jewish has become politically correct in Christian churches.3 No one has quite succeeded, however, and insuffi cient study of Jesus’ language is one reason for this. Another fundamental reason is the cultural background of scholars themselves. The vast majority of scholars have belonged to the Christian faith, and their portrayals of Jesus have consequently not been Jewish enough. Most other writers on Jesus have been concerned to rebel against the Christian faith, rather than to recover the Jewish fi gure who was central to Christianity in its earliest period. This is one reason why a fresh attempt to recreate the Jesus of history is essential. The history of scholarship is however very instructive, especially that since the fundamental work of Albert Schweitzer. For Schweitzer demonstrated how essential it is to see Jesus against his own cultural background in fi rst- century Judaism, and that was in 1906. It was the 1910 ET of this book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, which gave the quest its name. Throughout the twentieth century, however, scholars repeatedly failed to follow Schweitzer’s example. Of especial importance is the framework of Jewish apocalyptic, within which Schweitzer placed Jesus. Jewish apocalyptic claimed to be a literature of divine revelation. It was written by Jews who felt that they lived in such disastrous circumstances that God was bound to intervene in the near future to deliver them. Following the work of Weiss at the end of the nineteenth century, Schweitzer argued that Jesus predicted the immediate coming of the kingdom of God, and with it the end of normal human history.4 This however did not happen. The notion that Jesus might have made a mistake, however natural for the interpretation of a vigorous fi rst- century Jewish prophet, did not fi t with Christian Christology. Whether explicitly or as part of a hidden agenda, this has been a signifi cant aspect of attempts to avoid the Jewishness of Jesus ever since. Avoiding the Jewishness of Jesus is not of course a purely recent or simply scholarly concern. In a fi ne discussion of Jesus books in the period before Schweitzer, Charlotte Allen correctly commented on nineteenth- century liberal lives of Jesus: 

Underlying all the biographies was a universal condemnation of the Jews. In the minds of the liberal Protestants, fi rst- century Judaism was a stand- in for Catholicism and other forms of orthodox religion. Ritualistic, legalistic, and censorious, it had been based on the doctrine of justifi cation by works (obedience to Torah) à la Catholicism, in contrast to the Protestant doctrine of justifi cation by faith.5 

In spite of this, scholars of the Victorian era made one major critical advance which is essential for recovering the Jesus of history. They showed between them that the Gospel attributed to John is not literally true. While this result has not been welcome in the churches, critical scholars, whether Christian or not, have rightly seen it as fundamental. All serious scholarly lives ever since have been based on the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.

2. The Nazi Period 

The years after Schweitzer’s major contribution form the most disreputable part of the story of the quest, and one of the most illuminating episodes in the history of scholarship. This is however being concealed by an academic myth, according to which scholars are now working on the third quest for the historical Jesus. The fi rst quest was supposedly torpedoed by Schweitzer in 1906, when he showed that the liberal quest of the historical Jesus essentially consisted of scholars looking in a mirror and fi nding in Jesus an image of themselves. Schweitzer’s demolition of the fi rst quest was so devastating that it brought the quest to a halt. The second quest was begun by Käsemann in a 1953 lecture, published in 1954. It therefore seems at fi rst sight reasonable that we should call the period between Schweitzer and Käsemann the period of ‘no quest’.6 Reasonable though this may seem at fi rst sight, it is not accurate. In the first place, while Schweitzer’s strictures were from an intellectual point of view so severe that they should have ended the fi rst quest, they did not do so. Conventional lives of Jesus, not seriously different from liberal lives in the nineteenth century, continued to be written. Such included for example those of the Anglican Bishop A. C. Headlam in 1923, and the French scholar Guigenebert in 1933.7 Moreover, another major critical advance was made, which is essential for recovering the Jesus of history. The priority of Mark was basically established. In 1924, Streeter gathered together the evidence that the Gospel According to Mark is our oldest source for the life and teaching of Jesus, and that it was copied and edited by Matthew and Luke.8 He also presented a view of ‘Q’, one or more conjectural sources which scholars have inferred from the non- Markan material used by both Matthew and Luke. Ever since, most serious scholarly lives of Jesus have paid especially careful attention to the Gospel of Mark and to the ‘Q’ material. The second major feature of the scholarship of the supposedly ‘no quest’ period was the radical and anti- Jewish work produced by learned scholars in Germany. As Nazi control of Germany increased in the run- up to the Holocaust, attempts to show that Jesus was not Jewish became more and more widespread. Such attempts were not new. Many Germans had already argued that Jesus was Aryan, not Jewish, but such Germans had not previously been New Testament scholars. In the nineteenth century, one of the most famous was the composer Richard Wagner. Perhaps the single most infl uential book was the 1899 work of H. S. Chamberlain, later translated into English as The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. 9 Chamberlain was originally English, but he settled in Germany, and became a naturalized German citizen. Like Wagner, he sought to understand the whole of Western civilization since the Greeks in terms of a racial struggle. The Aryans were the superior race. Only Aryans were capable of creative culture. The Germans were the fi nest representatives of the Aryan peoples, and best placed to establish a new European order. Chamberlain’s argument that Jesus was not Jewish was based on racist principles. He considered the racial settlement of Galilee centuries previously, when it might be thought that Galilee was re- settled with Gentiles after the deportation of Israelites to Assyria. It was in the light of this that, despite confessing that Jesus was Jewish in religion and education, he declared: ‘The probability that Christ was no Jew, that he had not a drop of genuinely Jewish blood in his veins, is so great that it is almost equivalent to a certainty.’10 With that point made, and an Aryan Jesus apparently established, Chamberlain went on to picture Judaism very negatively, in contrast to the religion of Christ. This enabled him to see Christ as totally opposed to Judaism: ‘His advent is not the perfecting of the Jewish religion but its negation.’11 This book was popular because it satisfi ed the needs of German people who were conditioned by centuries of Christian anti- Semitism. In the 1930s, the infl uence of this culture on biblical scholars was extensive.12 I consider two works as signifi cant examples of the scholarship of the supposedly ‘no quest’ period, one by the distinguished elderly scholar Paul Fiebig, the other by the up and coming Walter Grundmann, who had a ‘distinguished career’, both during and after the war. Fiebig fi rst came to scholarly notice with his 1901 monograph on the use of the term ‘Son of man’. His subsequent publications included books on Jewish material relevant to understanding the Sermon on the Mount (1924), and on the Lord’s Prayer (1927).13 In 1935, he delivered three lectures under the title Neues Testament und Nationalsozialismus. Drei Üniversitätsvorlesungen über Führerprinzip – Rassenfrage – Kampf, which one might translate New Testament and National Socialism. Three University Lectures on the Leader Principle – the Racial Question – Struggle. 14 The preface is programmatic for the whole book: ‘The Führer of each Christian is Jesus Christ, the Führer of each German is in the present time Adolf Hitler’.15 The lectures carry through this comparison, much in favour of both men. For this purpose, it would not do for Jesus to be too Jewish. Fiebig drew a picture of Jesus as opposed to the Judaism of his time, opposed to his family, opposed to scribes and Pharisees, opposed to the chief priests. He was of course able to use real evidence of confl ict. His major distortion was to regard Jesus’ opponents as Judaism, while Jesus and his disciples were presented as not Judaism. This is the frame of reference, and it is not one required by the primary source material. The Racial Question was the only point at which Fiebig did not quite present the picture that German Christians needed. He admitted that Jesus was of Jewish birth on his mother’s side. However, he argued that this did not matter. Jesus was God incarnate, born of a virgin, so God was his real father, and his mother was part of the opposition to him. The continuing importance of Fiebig’s work is that it helps us to see with clarity the nature of the quest of the historical Jesus. There are three main points. First, whereas the quest has had the formal aim of fi nding the historical Jesus, it has frequently had the social function of avoiding him. Fiebig’s whole presentation includes the vigorous avoidance of Jesus’ Jewishness. The social function of the conventional quest is especially clear in Fiebig’s work, precisely because it was also his formal aim. Secondly, it is not a question of merely avoiding what is inconvenient. The quest has been carried through by means of a series of cultural circles with the lives of investigators. In avoiding Jesus’ Jewishness, Fiebig partly satisfi ed the need of German Christians to believe in a non- Jewish Jesus. But he went further than that. In propounding an entirely favourable comparison between Jesus and Hitler, he sought to build a bridge between German Christians and the Nazi Party, some of whose members were not favourable to Christianity. In this way, he reinforced a form of German identity well adapted to Germany’s cultural and imperialistic needs. In short, his presentation of Jesus in comparison with Hitler formed a massive cultural circle with his (Fiebig’s) own life in service to the community to which he belonged. Thirdly, in analysing this situation, we need the traditional distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. What Fiebig did was to replace the Jesus of history with the Christ of his faith. This has been a major feature of the quest throughout its history. This is the more devastating reason why we must suppose that Schweitzer did not end the fi rst quest of the historical Jesus. It continued throughout the immediately succeeding period of history, with the replacement of the Jesus of history with the Christ of German faith. In describing this situation, I use the term ‘cultural circle’ in an unusual way to make a point, so some explanation is necessary. The term ‘hermeneutical circle’, which I used to use, is conventionally used to describe the experience of an interpreter of a text.16 Interpreters generally approach the detailed study of texts with some kind of pre- understanding of the text and its author(s). This understanding is modifi ed by detailed study of the text. This constant process of interaction between a general understanding of the situation of the text and detailed study of it is what is normally known as a ‘hermeneutical circle’. It has however often been observed that this process does not necessarily lead to an understanding of the text closer to that of an original author, nor to an understanding which may be said to be in any reasonable sense more truthful or accurate. It may rather be a process which contains a signifi cant element of distorting the text in the interests of the interpreter’s life, whether an interpreter’s personal life, or the life of a community to which the interpreter belongs. The point which is of central importance in understanding the quest of the historical Jesus is that this way of distorting the evidence is normal in it. Detailed study of Gospel texts frequently leads people to understand them in accordance with the needs of the community to which they belong. Less frequently, but equally importantly, a need to oppose the beliefs of a community which the interpreter does not belong to, or has left, may be an equally effective form of distortion. The process normally denoted by the term ‘hermeneutical circle’ is so central to this process of distortion that it seems to me that we need a term to describe it. Fiebig is a particularly clear example of this process. When the Nazis came to power, he was a distinguished and experienced scholar, well versed in the detailed interpretation of New Testament texts. When he delivered his 1935 lectures, he used the Nazi frame of reference announced in the preface. Into this frame of reference he fi tted the interpretation of texts which he had been studying in detail for a lifetime. I therefore use the term ‘cultural circle’ to refer to this distorting effect of the detailed study of texts. I start with Fiebig and Grundmann, because they are such clear examples of it. Grundmann joined the Nazi Party on 1 December 1930 (membership no. 382544), and became active in the Deutsche Christen movement.17 The term ‘Deutsche Christen’ is diffi cult to translate into English. A literal translation would be ‘German Christian’, but the Deutsche Christen movement was more specifi c than this.18 It was a deliberate attempt to produce a form of Christianity which maintained a Nazi ideology too. It was well known that some Nazis, including some of the most prominent, were very anti- Christian. Though it was internally motivated by people whose German and Christian identities were intertwined, one of the tasks of the movement was to produce a form of Christianity to which most Nazis would not object. Consequently, it was opposed by those German Christians who formed the ‘Confessing Church’ in opposition to it. Members of the ‘Confessing Church’ included three of the most important Christian theologians of the twentieth century, Barth, Bonhoeffer and Bultmann. Grundmann’s activities in the Deutsche Christen movement accordingly place him on the Nazi right of Christianity. Grundmann also served as assistant to the notoriously anti- Semitic Gerhard Kittel from 1930–32, preparing the Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, still the standard Theological Dictionary of the New Testament found in theological libraries and used by students all over the world as if it were nothing but a standard work of reference.19 On 1 April 1934, Grundmann became a supporting member (förderndes Mitglied) of the SS (Membership no. 1032691). In 1936, he became a professor at Jena. He had not written a Habilitationsschrift, the standard German qualifi cation for promotion to professor. Hitler nonetheless signed the papers for his appointment, following a recommendation in which the Nazi rector of the university said that the Faculty wanted to become a stronghold of National Socialism, so that Grundmann’s scholarship could be path- breaking for a National Socialist perspective in the realm of theology. In 1939, the Deutsche Christen movement opened the Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einfl usses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben (Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Infl uence on German Church Life), with Grundmann as its academic director. His address at the opening, on 6 May 1939, was programmatic: ‘The Dejudaization of the Religious Life as the Task of German Theology and Church’.20 This declared that the elimination of Jewish infl uence on German life was an urgent task, a task vigorously pursued by Grundmann and by other members of the Institute.

There is accordingly no doubt about Grundmann’s central life- stance: he was a committed anti- Semitic Nazi. His contributions to falsehood included his 1940 book, Jesus der Galiläer und das Judentum. There is no English translation: the title means ‘Jesus the Galilaean and Judaism’.21 Like Chamberlain, Grundmann argued that not only was Jesus completely opposed to the Judaism of his time, he was not Jewish in any sense at all. Like Chamberlain, Grundmann did this by going back into the history of Galilee centuries previously and by using a racist theory of identity. In this way, the possibility that Galilaeans might have been descended ultimately from Gentiles overrode the fact that at least the majority of Galilaeans at the time of Jesus, including Jesus and all his fi rst disciples, were culturally Jewish. When discussing the second century bce, he commented ‘C.150 B.C., therefore, Galilee is literally free of Jews.’22 He used the term ‘Galilaean’ rather than ‘Aryan’ because it was a respectable scholarly term, and he wished to present the Institute as a place of serious scholarship, not political propaganda. Thus Grundmann avoided the Jesus of history even more comprehensively than Fiebig had done, and completed an even more effective cultural circle with the society in which he lived. Once more, the Jesus of history was replaced with a quite specifi c version of the Christ of faith. Once more, this was done by a professional scholar deeply involved in the study of relevant texts. When I fi rst attended New Testament conferences in the early 1980s, some scholars recommended me to use the commentaries of Grundmann on the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, because of their supposedly excellent theological qualities.23 None of them mentioned his Nazi record, or his Jesus book. What their judgement refl ected, however, was that Grundmann spent his whole life in detailed exegesis. 

3. Radical Form Criticism 

In this light, we may look back from the 1930s to the social function of a major scholarly movement in the preceding years, that of Form Criticism, or Formgeschichte, as it was originally known. This movement began in Germany. It has fl ourished there ever since, and has spread to other countries too. Its major ‘result’ was to suppose that most of the material in the synoptic Gospels was created by the early church, leaving us with very little information about the historical Jesus. 

For example, in his classic 1921 work on the history of the synoptic tradition, Bultmann discussed the narrative of Mk 2.23- 28. This is a story of disciples going through the fi elds plucking grain on the sabbath. Some Pharisees objected to them doing this, assuming that plucking grain should be regarded as work, which everyone agreed was prohibited on the sabbath (Exod. 20.8- 11//Deut. 5.12- 15). Jesus defended his disciples with two arguments, which presuppose that poor and hungry people are not to be regarded as working if they pluck grain left for them at the edges of fi elds. His fi rst argument was by analogy from the behaviour of David, who obtained and ate the shewbread in the Temple and gave it to his companions when they were hungry, an incident which is assumed to have taken place on the sabbath. His second argument was more fundamental, deriving his decision from the intention of God when He created the sabbath for the benefi t of people. Underlying Jesus’ arguments is the natural assumption that work is ploughing, carpentry and the like. Underlying the question from his opponents is the practice of expanding the biblical regulations as they are applied to the whole of life. This practice was widespread in the Judaism of the time. These points were thus natural in the life of the historical Jesus, and do not meet the needs of the early church.24 Bultmann argued that this story was entirely the product of the early church, and gives us no information about the historical Jesus.25 Bultmann’s fi rst point is that Jesus is questioned about his disciples’ behaviour rather than his own. Bultmann does not however discuss why the disciples might be going through fi elds plucking grain, so no reason for the difference between the behaviour of Jesus and that of his disciples could possibly emerge. Bultmann next declares that the church ascribes the justifi cation of her sabbath customs to Jesus, but he does not discuss the absence of all such disputes from Acts and the epistles. Nor does Bultmann discuss whether this kind of legal dispute is typical of early Judaism, which it is, to the point that the historicity of such stories is very probable. Bultmann suggests that the scriptural proof, the use made by Jesus of the story of David, was used apart from its present context in the controversies of the early church, but he does not discuss the absence of any evidence that the early church had such controversies, nor the appropriateness of such an argument in Jesus’ Jewish culture. He declares the fi nal argument from man as Lord of the sabbath an originally isolated saying on the ground of the typical connecting formula ‘and he said to them’: he does not however show that this expression usually does indicate the addition of secondary material, nor does he discuss how natural it is as part of a continuous narrative in Aramaic, the language which Jesus spoke and in which the earliest traditions were transmitted. At no stage does he make any attempt to uncover a coherent argument in the passage. Moreover, Bultmann’s treatment of this passage is typical. Again and again he and other form critics made arbitrary declarations that material uncharacteristic of the early church was created by the early church: again and again they refused to read texts as consecutive wholes: again and again they refused to even examine Gospel passages as if they might derive from Jesus within the environment of Second Temple Judaism. Moreover, this process was carried through by scholars who spent their whole lives in detailed study of the texts which they so drastically failed to understand. It is no wonder that more conservative scholars coined the phrase ‘form- critical circle’, to denote the repeated assumption that a narrative has been created by the early church, when the passage itself is the only evidence that the early church was interested in the matter. What went wrong? It is at this point that the work of Fiebig and Grundmann is so illuminating, because it enables us to home in on the social function of the work of Bultmann and others. The effect of their radical criticism was to ensure that out from under the synoptic Gospels there could never crawl a Jewish man. If moreover we can become convinced that we do not know anything much about the Jesus of history, the Christ of faith can continue unhindered. We can see this in Bultmann’s 1926 book Jesus, translated into English as Jesus and the Word. 26 This contains not one single episode in which Jesus is immersed in detailed discussion of the practice of the Law. This is supposed to be for critical reasons. In fact, however, it is the effect of a cultural circle in which Bultmann removed an indelibly Jewish aspect of Jesus, an effect of working in a German environment in which Jewishness was so unwelcome. This was moreover done by means of a process of detailed exegesis, in which Bultmann engaged existentially with the biblical texts throughout his life. This is well indicated by his vigorous presentation of the Matthaean antitheses (Mt. 5.21- 48), the nearest Bultmann gets to detailed discussion of the practice of the Law. In each case, the Matthaean version of Jesus’ teaching begins with something on the lines of ‘you have heard that it was said’, to which Jesus responds with authoritative teaching beginning ‘but I say to you’. It is however notorious that most of the content of the Matthaean antitheses is paralleled in Luke, whereas the actual form of the antithesis, with the authoritative ‘but I say to you’, is unique to Matthew. For example, Mt. 5.31- 32 presents Jesus’ remarkable prohibition of divorce as follows: Now it was said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certifi cate’ [cf. Deut. 24.1]. But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of her having sex with another man, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. 

The version at Lk. 16.18 is simpler, and typically lacks the Matthaean rhetoric: Everyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and he who marries a divorcee commits adultery. It is therefore most unlikely that the Matthaean antithesis form is original, and it is certainly much less well attested than some of the disputes between Jesus and his opponents over details of the Law. Bultmann concludes that ‘Jesus . . . opposes the view that the fulfi lment of the law is the fulfi lling of the will of God.’27 That conclusion is clean contrary to the teaching of Jesus. It was however just what German Christians needed from the Christ of their faith, for it bluntly contradicts the centre of Judaism. It was moreover produced by means of detailed exegesis of selected texts. It also illustrates the centrality of anti- Judaism in the work of a distinguished member of the Confessing Church, the opposite wing of the German churches from the Deutsche Christen movement. Bultmann’s general cultural environment led him to write Judaism out of the teaching of Jesus, using spurious intellectual arguments which wrote most of Jesus of Nazareth out of history altogether. He was left with the Christ of his faith in the guise of a historical fi gure about whom little can be known.

 4. Not the Second and Third Quests 

A few years after the Second World War, some attempts were made to restart the quest of the historical Jesus, what is sometimes known as the second quest. It is generally dated from a lecture delivered by Käsemann in 1953, and published in 1954.28 This was genuinely a new start after the Nazi period, but not the fi rst thing to have happened since Albert Schweitzer. I draw attention to one book, the 1959 work of J. M. Robinson, A New Quest of the Historical Jesus. 29 The title of this book recognizes the new start made by Käsemann. In this light, the whole book is devoted to justifying the basic idea of having a quest for the historical Jesus. It moves entirely within a Christian frame of reference, especially one which refl ects German concerns. Robinson correctly believed that the French and Anglo- Saxon quests were an untroubled continuation of the nineteenthcentury quest. He noted for example Guignebert’s Jésus, published in 1933, and Vincent Taylor’s 1954 book, The Life and Ministry of Jesus. 30 Robinson accepted however German concerns that a Jesus of history might become a result of man’s striving before God, and therefore illegitimate. Robinson himself argued that the Incarnation, the Gospels and the kerygma demanded that the historical Jesus be taken note of, and that the historical- critical method would be necessary to fulfi l this task. What is interesting is that this argument should have been necessary. The profound irony of the standard German concern is that it is so remote from the social function of not having a historical quest for the historical Jesus, which remained what it had been for Bultmann, Fiebig, Grundmann and others, avoiding a Jewish man. By 1987, enough new work had been done for some scholars to feel that another new start to the quest of the historical Jesus had been made, and this was clearly articulated by Tom Wright, in a paper read to a meeting of British New Testament scholars that year. He made three points which seemed plausible to many of us at the time.31

1 Standards of proof have risen. Of particular importance at the time was Morna Hooker’s demolition of the criterion of dissimilarity in her 1971 paper.32 This criterion had been in use for many years, but it was not properly labelled and described until the 1960s. When clearly described, it states that anything in the Gospel accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus which is paralleled in Judaism or the early church must be attributed to the church, rather than to Jesus. This produces a quite unique Jesus, who cannot be connected with the Judaism of his time, and who is so remote from the early church as to make it impossible to see how Christianity started. Hooker was therefore right to argue that we should stop using this criterion. The criterion of multiple attestation was of major positive importance. As used at the time, it asserted that anything attested more than once in our oldest sources was likely to be true. For example, there is clear evidence that the controversy over Jesus casting out demons by the power of the devil was featured both in Mark (3.22- 30) and in ‘Q’ (Mt. 12.22- 32//Lk. 11.14- 23; 12.10). This was taken to be strong evidence that the controversy really took place. Again, multiple attestation by form was important: so when we fi nd exorcisms in narratives, summaries, parabolic sayings and controversy, that was very strong evidence that Jesus performed exorcisms. 

2 Wright’s second point was that the quest is being carried out by people who have different perspectives. The work of the Jewish scholar Geza Vermes was especially important, and I had been seeking to make some technical contributions from a non- religious perspective. In 1987 we seemed to be part of a welcome trend. 

3 Wright’s third point was that increased attention has been paid to Jesus’ cultural background. This again seemed obvious in many people’s work at the time. Two scholars, Geza Vermes and E. P. Sanders, had been conspicuously successful in portraying Jesus as belonging to fi rst- century Judaism, and they continued to do so in subsequent years. I therefore consider briefl y the main points of their work.

 5. Vermes and Sanders 

Vermes came in from an overtly Jewish perspective. The great strengths of his work are his complete knowledge and profound understanding of the Jewish primary source material, and the sober and judicious manner in which he locates Jesus within the Judaism of fi rst- century Galilee. Noteworthy achievements include an illuminating comparison between Jesus and other Galilaean holy men, or ḥasīdīm, devout Jews of a generally unconventional kind about whom miracle stories were told. Vermes discussed particularly Honi the Circle- Drawer, who successfully prayed for rain during a drought, and Ḥanina ben Dosa, who was said to have cured Gamaliel’s son at a distance.33 In discussing them and Jesus, Vermes also made fruitful use of the modern category of ‘charismatic’. At a different level, Vermes wrote a seminal paper on the ‘Son of man’ problem,34 which is from a technical point of view one of the most diffi cult problems in New Testament studies. He was able to bring new evidence to bear on this problem because of his thorough knowledge of rabbinical literature and his careful analytical technique. In general Vermes always handles rabbinical literature in a careful and critical way, never taking it for granted that late material must represent Judaism at the time of Jesus. His work on the Dead Sea Scrolls also enabled him to contribute with great methodological skill to discussions of the relative importance of the Scrolls and of rabbinical literature for our understanding of Jesus. He also made signifi cant contributions to particular aspects of the teaching of Jesus, notably the Fatherhood of God. It is only regrettable that Vermes has not written a complete life of Jesus. In spite of this, his contributions have been so extensive and wideranging that every scholar trying to contribute to our knowledge of the historical Jesus should benefi t from Vermes’ work. Nonetheless, Vermes’ work is not without fault, and it is instructive to see what goes wrong when something does. The major diffi culty is that Vermes has not been able to give a convincing explanation of why Jesus was crucifi ed. Vermes of course knows the relevant texts very well, having spent his whole life in detailed exegesis of both Jewish and Gospel texts, and he has seen the importance of the Cleansing of the Temple (Mk 11.15- 18). But he belongs to the Jewish community, whose members were persecuted for centuries partly on the grounds of deicide, a charge which held them responsible for crucifying Jesus and thereby killing God. This appears to be what has prevented Vermes from understanding the fundamental nature of Jewish opposition to Jesus, and its importance as a cause of the crucifi xion. Thus Vermes’ own life, and especially his membership of the Jewish community, has caused the same kind of distortion familiar to us from the work of Christian scholars. A second problem lies in instances where Vermes uses conventional scholarship to discount the historicity of parts of our oldest sources. Like many other scholars, he got into diffi culties over Mk 9.1: ‘Amen I say to you that there are some of those standing here who will not taste of death until they see the kingdom of God come in power.’ This saying predicts the coming of the kingdom of God within a short time. Unable to fi t this into the teaching of Jesus, Vermes turned to Bultmann for the view that it is a Christian ‘community formula of consolation in view of the delay of the Parousia’.35 Yet the term ‘kingdom of God’, which is central to this saying, was central to the teaching of Jesus, and this saying does not mention the parousia. Accordingly, the saying fi ts perfectly into the teaching of Jesus, and it is not expressed in terms appropriate for Bultmann’s ‘formula of consolation’. Given Bultmann’s lack of understanding of Judaism, it is deeply ironical that Vermes should resort to him at times. As a result of his knowledge of ancient Judaism, as well as his own Jewish identity, Vermes’ picture of the Jesus of history is more Jewish than that generally produced by Christian scholars. This led Vermes to launch an entirely proper challenge to orthodox Christian belief. Correctly using the traditional distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, Vermes pointed out that the historical Jesus the Jew is not consistent with the deifi ed second person of the Christian Trinity. Christian scholarship has not met this challenge, though it is a scholarly version of a complaint made by persecuted Jews for centuries. This illustrates the domination of a supposedly academic ‘fi eld’ of ‘study’ by members of a single religion, who usually set the agenda and determine what is to be commented on.36 The other most important contributor to our knowledge of the historical Jesus during the last century was E. P. Sanders. His most signifi cant contribution in scholarly terms was his 1985 book Jesus and Judaism, perhaps the most brilliant book on Jesus written so far. In 1993, he also contributed what is arguably the best single- volume life of Jesus so far written, The Historical Figure of Jesus. One of the major reasons that Sanders was able to make such an important and wide- ranging contribution to our knowledge of Jesus was his understanding of Second Temple Judaism, expounded at greater length in other books and articles.37 Christian control of otherwise respectable scholarship in this fi eld has been so extensive that one of Sanders’s fi rst tasks was to demolish Christian prejudices about Judaism, a task which he achieved with intellectual brilliance and incisiveness. For example, in his excellent introduction to Jesus and Judaism, Sanders repeatedly shows how twentieth- century scholars put forward a view of Judaism which was dependent on their need to regard Judaism as inferior to Christianity, rather than on their understanding of Jewish source material. In particular, Judaism was held to be legalistic, nationalistic and with a remote God, so that Jesus could be portrayed as bringing love, universalism and nearness to God. Among numerous advances at a detailed level, Sanders showed that the common scholarly discussion of Mt. 12.28//Lk. 11.20 was distorted by ideological motivation: ‘the kingship of God has come upon you’ is an important comment on Jesus’ exorcisms, but customary Christian moves to ‘the uniqueness of Jesus’ self- consciousness or claim’ are not justifi ed by the primary source material.38 Sanders’s extensive demolition of contemporary prejudice is doubly remarkable because Sanders himself came in from a perspective of Christian commitment. In addition to purely scholarly brilliance, therefore, this is one of the most remarkable examples of a critical scholar transcending his ideological background in order to produce, by means of evidence and argument, correct new results. Sanders’s fi rst positive achievement was to direct attention away from sayings of Jesus to the prime importance of facts which can be established beyond reasonable doubt. At the beginning of his excellent outline of Jesus’ life for general readers, he listed the following:

• Jesus was born c.4 bce, near the time of the death of Herod the Great; 

 • he spent his childhood and early adult years in Nazareth, a Galilaean village; 

 • he was baptized by John the Baptist; 

 • he called disciples; 

• he taught in the towns, villages and countryside of Galilee (apparently not the cities); 

 • he preached ‘the kingdom of God’; 

 • about the year 30 he went to Jerusalem for Passover; 

 • he created a disturbance in the Temple area; 

 • he had a fi nal meal with the disciples; 

 • he was arrested and interrogated by Jewish authorities, specifi cally the high priest; 

 • he was executed on the orders of the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate.39 

In retrospect, this may look both obvious and not much. Its importance in 1993, and of the earlier version already in Sanders’s 1985 book, was the certainty with which these points can be established. Sanders showed that the main points of Jesus’ ministry ought not to be in doubt. Into this outline Sanders fi tted a considerable amount of material in a logically ordered and culturally appropriate manner. Among many good points was his treatment of miracles. Chapter 10 of The Historical Figure of Jesus begins with an excellent treatment of the ancient perspective on miracles, which has so often been ignored in modern treatments of them. In particular, Sanders noted that ancient people ‘saw miracles as striking and signifi cant, but not as indicating that the miracle- worker was anything other than fully human’.40 One of the reasons for this was the occurrence of healings which were not understood, to the point that they were taken to be the action of a healer or of the God prayed to. Sanders noted particularly the healings reported by devotees of Asclepius, reports in which possible and impossible healings stand side by side. Accordingly, stories also include ‘nature miracles’: for example, Honi the circle- drawer, already known to us from Vermes, was held to have successfully prayed for rain, while a prophet called Theudas was followed into the wilderness by many people who evidently believed that the waters of the Jordan would part before him.41 Finally, Sanders noted that exorcisms and other healings lay within the culture of Second Temple Judaism. All this enabled Sanders to take a more informed perspective on Jesus’ exorcisms and other healings than is usually found. He situated them within Jesus’ ministry, as events which were important to him but which were not events of such power and uniqueness that they persuaded most Jews to follow him. This is much the best treatment of these stories that I have seen. Sanders was more puzzled by the so- called ‘nature miracles’. He did not have available to him the work of Roger Aus, who has shown that most of them are basically Jewish Haggadah.42 The diffi culty of carrying out such work indicates that we cannot expect to explain the origin of every story when all we have is a story, and no indication of why it might have originally been told. The good sense which informs Sanders’s treatment of miracles pervades all his work. It is reasonable to consider his combination of learning and sanity as a reasonable summary of what has made his work better than that of anyone else so far. Nonetheless, with Sanders as with everyone else, we have to see what goes wrong when something does. The twofold answer highlights two major faults of scholarship as a whole: resorting to radical criticism when stuck, and inadequate appreciation of Jesus’ use of Aramaic. Like Vermes, Sanders cannot quite cope with the confl icts between Jesus and his opponents. When he discusses the dispute between Jesus and the Pharisees over the disciples plucking grain on the sabbath (Mk 2.23- 28), he invokes Bultmann, for Bultmann argued that such disputes are so unrealistic that they could not have taken place.43 We have however seen that Bultmann’s discussion of this passage is unsatisfactory because of its arbitrary and dogmatic nature, and we shall see that the passage fi ts perfectly into Jesus’ ministry in fi rst- century Judaism.44 Moreover, the social function of Bultmann’s discussion was to remove Jesus from a Jewish environment. This is profoundly ironical, because Sanders was coming in from a liberal Christian perspective disturbed by the evidence of Jesus’ ferocious confl icts with some of his fellow Jews. The reasons why Sanders could not cope with the evidence of these severe confl icts were accordingly almost the opposite of those which affected Bultmann. Jesus’ opponents also objected to him associating with ‘sinners’. Sanders believed that these people were really ‘the wicked’, because he supposed that behind the Greek word hamartōloi, which means ‘sinners’, there lay the Hebrew reshā‘īm, which means ‘the wicked’, or its Aramaic equivalent.45 This is a standard mistake. The texts about the sinners are diffi cult. Instead of trying to reconstruct possible Aramaic sources, Sanders altered the meaning of these Greek texts by substituting one different word in Hebrew. In his more learned book, he should have offered complete Aramaic reconstructions, and proper philological discussion of the semantic areas of the relevant Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic words for ‘sinner’, ‘wicked’ and the like. It would be wrong to end this discussion of Sanders on such a note. His great learning and good sense have enabled him to make the most important contribution of all to our understanding of the historical Jesus. If most scholars had worked like Vermes and Sanders, there would be no doubt that the quest of the historical Jesus is a quest to fi nd him, and it would have been a great deal more successful than it has generally been. 

6. Crossan and the American Jesus Seminar 

When Wright read his 1987 paper, the outlook for the quest was very hopeful. Since 1987, however, a lot of unfortunate work has been done. Wright’s 1996 history of scholarship in Jesus and the Victory of God tries to draw a somewhat wiggly line down the centre of the scholarship of his time, with work that belongs to the third quest on one side, and work of the same period which does not belong to the third quest on the other side. On the wrong side of the line is Crossan’s enormous 1991 book The Historical Jesus, with its subtitle The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. 46 Though he regards it as ‘a book to treasure for its learning, its thoroughness, its brilliant handling of multiple and complex issues, its amazing inventiveness’, Wright feels he has ‘to conclude that the book is almost entirely wrong.’47 This is correct. Crossan presents Jesus as ‘a peasant Jewish Cynic’.48 This is inconsistent with the fact that the Gospels do not mention philosophy, cynics, major cynic philosophers such as Diogenes, nor cynic peculiarities such as living in a barrel. Moreover, there is insuffi cient evidence that cynic philosophy had penetrated Judaism in Israel: Jesus lived in a different culture from cynic philosophers. Most of the time Crossan works with fi ve primary sources: Mark, ‘Q’, the rest of Matthew or Luke, John, and the Gospel of Thomas. He does not admit the authenticity of material unless it is independently attested twice. This may look at fi rst sight like a reasonable development of the criterion of multiple attestation, but its effects are quite destructive. If anything is attested by our oldest Gospel, Mark, Crossan will accept it only if it is independently attested. So out goes the whole of Mk 1.16- 38, with the call of the fi rst disciples and an early exorcism on the sabbath, as ‘a Markan creation’. Yet this passage has many features of authentic tradition. One of the most notable is that people wait until the end of the sabbath before bringing other people to Jesus to be healed (Mk 1.32). This is because they obeyed their natural interpretation of the Law prohibiting the carrying of burdens on the sabbath (Jer. 17.21- 22), a point which Mark did not need to mention.49 If Mark had created this passage after a successful Gentile mission, he would have had to explain it, though he would have had no rationale for making it up in the fi rst place. Equally, Jesus’ teaching that it is difficult for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God (Mk 10.23f.) is accepted only because it turns up also in the Shepherd of Hermas (Sim. 9.20.2b- 3). Yet the repetition of only one aspect of this Markan passage in a second- century Christian source is irrelevant to whether Jesus said it. It is more important that it fi ts into Jesus’ teaching, that the disciples’ amazement refl ects the natural assumptions of more conventional Jews, and that it is not the kind of thing that the early church was interested in. We may therefore be quite sure that the incident really took place.50 In practice, therefore, good early tradition which fi ts perfectly into the life and teaching of Jesus is excluded unless later Christian tradition repeats it. Later Christian tradition may however be acceptable, if it is independently repeated. Hence the high proportion of parables and wisdom material accepted by Crossan. There is also serious distortion of one of the central concepts of the teaching of Jesus, the kingdom of God. On pp. 284–87, Crossan discusses the apocalyptic kingdom of God. He gives appropriate quotations from the Psalms of Solomon, the Testament of Moses and the Similitudes of Enoch, all documents written in Israel at about the right time. Such documents provide the cultural background within which Jesus preached the coming of the kingdom. On the following pages, however, Crossan discusses the sapiential kingdom of God. His evidence is taken from Philo, the Wisdom of Solomon and the Sentences of Sextus. All these sources were written outside Israel, and resulted from far too much Greek infl uence to be helpful in understanding the ministry of Jesus. Under the general notion that Hellenization had penetrated Israel, however, these documents are taken to provide a serious cultural framework for the ministry. Once this has been done, Crossan declares that he will locate Jesus’ kingdom as sapiential and peasant. There is no proper discussion of sayings such as Mk 9.1: ‘Amen I say to you that there are some of those standing here who will not taste of death until they see the kingdom of God come in power.’ From Crossan’s point of view, a saying like this is attested only once, since Mt. 16.28 and Lk. 9.27 both resulted from editing and copying Mk 9.1. Such sayings are therefore not acceptable, not even if they have an excellent setting in the ministry of Jesus, a doubtful one in the early church and none at all in later documents like the Gospels of John and of Thomas. The overall result of this process has the same social function as most scholarship on the Jesus of history: it reduces his Jewishness. Moreover, the depiction of Jesus as a cynic forms a cultural circle with Crossan’s intellectual environment. Crossan’s work also includes massive evidence of the detailed exegesis of texts. At this point, moreover, we encounter a change in the nature of some of the controlling cultural circles consequent upon the development of our massive academic bureaucracies. A circle may be formed with recent trends which are found attractive in academia, not only with major ideologies or opposition to them. There has been a lot of recent work on peasants, some of it very fruitful. Crossan has read this work. This led him to the extraordinary view that Jesus was illiterate.51 Thus his book illustrates the major faults of the quest of the historical Jesus: its picture of Jesus is dependent on Crossan’s own social environment and consequently, Jesus does not emerge as a plausible fi rst- century Jewish leader. At this point we must consider the work of the American Jesus Seminar as a whole. The Seminar was set up by Robert Funk with good intentions. Funk was distressed by the signifi cant role played in American life by Christian fundamentalism, a version of the Christian faith which he himself had left. Funk set up the Jesus Seminar to tell the truth about Jesus, and to do so with people who had the authority of critical scholarship behind them. In 1996 he wrote a book entitled Honest to Jesus, which correctly refl ects his intentions.52 The methods adopted by the Seminar were however suffi cient to prevent these aims from being achieved. In the fi rst place, some of the best scholars in the USA, such as E. P. Sanders, J. A. Fitzmyer and Dale Allison, were not members of it. The absence of these scholars was compounded by the actual membership, and by the method of deciding whether material in the Gospels was historically accurate. A number of ‘Fellows’ of the Seminar had only recently completed doctorates at American institutions, and the Seminar decided the authenticity of material about Jesus by majority vote, averaged out as the ‘Fellows’ did not agree with each other. In practice, this meant an averaged majority vote by people who were not in any reasonable sense authorities at all. In a published version of some of their results, one version of the coloured beads with which they voted was given like this: 

Red: Jesus undoubtedly said this or something very like it. 

Pink: Jesus probably said something like this. 

Gray: Jesus did not say this, but the ideas contained in it are close to his own

Black: Jesus did not say this; it represents the perspective or content of a later or different tradition. 

This is from the introduction to a 1993 book appropriately entitled The Five Gospels. 53 This is because of the exaggerated importance which they have attributed to the Gospel of Thomas, their addition to the canonical four. Their voting was so bizarre that they ended up with more red in that Gospel than in our oldest genuine source, the Gospel of Mark. Moreover, this is another example of a cultural circle. For all its limited learning, the Jesus Seminar consists of professional academics who spend their whole lives in detailed examination of these primary texts, including detailed exegesis of the Gospel of Thomas. The result of this process is that they have ended up with a fi gure whom they are happy with. In particular, he is much like a cynic philosopher, which suits their intellectual ambience, and has nothing to do with the apocalyptic and eschatological concerns which characterize American fundamentalism. It is ironically appropriate that the major recent attempt to reinstate Jesus as a millenarian prophet should have been made by Dale Allison, one of the most brilliant scholars who conspicuously did not belong to their group.54 

7. From Bad to Worse 

The effect of the American Jesus Seminar on conservative American Christians has been just as disastrous as the work of Seminar itself. Some of them write books which appear to assume that, if they can demonstrate that the Jesus Seminar is wrong, they thereby demonstrate the absolute truth of Protestant fundamentalism or Catholic orthodoxy, whichever the perspective from which the author is writing. For example, as early as 1995, Wilkins and Moreland edited a collection of essays devoted to refuting radical scholarship, under the title Jesus under Fire. The vast majority of its criticisms are fi red back at the American Jesus Seminar, and its own life- stance wobbles between conservative and fundamentalist, including feeble defences of the historicity of the Fourth Gospel in general and the Raising of Lazarus (Jn 11.1- 45) in particular.55 Within quite a short space of time, therefore, the effect of the American Jesus Seminar was the opposite of its intentions. On the one hand, it grievously misled anyone who believed what it said. Equally, it did not correct the views of Christians who look at the world  from inside extreme dogmatic blinkers. It rather encouraged them to imagine that all their dogmatism is right, because they can see with perfect clarity that the Gospel of Thomas is not a major source for the historical Jesus, and Jesus was not an imitation cynic philosopher. As time has passed, the American debate about Jesus has got worse and worse. For example, in 1999, R. J. Miller launched a defence of the American Jesus Seminar, under the title The Jesus Seminar and its Critics. 56 At times, Miller does not seem to realize what a feeble defence he is conducting. For example, he notes that most ‘Fellows’ of the Seminar ‘have the modest publication records typical for college or seminary professors who are full- time teachers’ and alleges that ‘a few prominent gospel scholars declined to participate in the Seminar because of its democratic organization’.57 This is one of the weirdest outbursts of democracy that I have encountered. The mediocre quality of the ‘Fellows’, and the absence of the most able independent critical American scholars from the Seminar, are two major reasons for the poor quality of its work, and no explanation of how this regrettable situation came about suffi ces to remedy it. Again, Miller declares that ‘some scholars who make confi dent claims about the Gospel of Thomas cannot read Coptic, the language in which the only extant copy of this gospel is preserved.’58 What Miller does not say is that at least the vast majority of the ‘Fellows’ cannot read Aramaic, the language which Jesus spoke, and that this is one factor in their rejection of major facets of the life and teaching of the historical Jesus, and in their inability to fi t him into his fi rst- century Jewish culture. Miller does however cast light on the appalling quality of American debates about Jesus. He alleges that a few members ‘have been pressured by their institutions to resign from the Seminar’, two have been fi red and one tried for heresy, apparently because even attending the Seminar is seen as inconsistent with holding a position in a conservative Christian institution.59 This should be scandalous, provided that it is true. What the current situation requires above all is genuine debate between scholars of different convictions and opinions. The presence of conservative Christian scholars in the seminar should have enhanced its work greatly, provided that everyone was willing to participate in genuinely independent scholarly debate. Miller also quotes opinions about the Seminar’s work which go beyond legitimate scholarly criticism into unscholarly polemic. For example, he quotes this criticism from Witherington in 1995: ‘Too often scholars . . . assume they know better than the early Christians who preserved and collected the sayings of Jesus and composed the Gospels what Jesus was or was not likely to have said. This assumption is founded on hubris.’60 Miller is right to see this as rejection of critical scholarship, not just a critique of this Seminar’s work. Witherington, whose PhD qualifi ed him to teach at an independent university, wrote these comments when he taught at Ashland Theological Seminary, whose ‘Core Values’ include the belief that the Old and New Testaments are ‘God’s infallible message for the church and the world’, and whose ‘Statement of Faith’ calls them ‘the infallible record of the perfect, fi nal and authoritative revelation of his work and will.’61 In 1995, he was appointed as ‘Amos Professor of New Testament for Doctoral Studies’ at Asbury Theological Seminary, whose ‘Statement of Faith’ describes the Old and New Testaments as ‘the only Word of God, without error in all that it affi rms . . . the only infallible rule of faith and practice.’ Its trappings of scholarship can be seen at the inauguration of Dr Timothy C. Tennent as its eighth President on 9 November 2009, replete with lots of distinguished- looking academic gowns.62 All these statements illustrate the hollowness of the trappings, because they ensure that independent critical thought is not allowed. Witherington illustrated this especially well in 2009 when he made a malicious and mendacious attack on the Department of Biblical Studies at the University of Sheffi eld. When the department was threatened with the closure of its undergraduate department, and being turned into a ‘research centre’, which did not seem likely to work, its students protested, and the university received a massive quantity of letters of support for the department from all over the world. The situation was rapidly reviewed, the department was saved from this drastic damage, and it was promised that new staff would be appointed. Witherington, however, was quoted in Christianity Today: Other faculty [at Sheffi eld] were ‘bent on the deconstruction of the Bible, and indeed of their students’ faith,’ according to Ben Witherington, a New Testament scholar at Asbury Theological Seminary. Apart from its unacademic use of the technical term ‘deconstruction’, this accusation is false. In the subsequent debate on blogs, Witherington further alleged, ‘Sheffi eld has deliberately avoided hiring people of faith.’ This allegation is false too.63 Unlike American theological seminaries, independent British universities like Sheffi eld do not discriminate on grounds of religion, any more than race, gender or colour, when making appointments. Independent critical thought is encouraged, whether from a Christian perspective or not. Witherington thus demonstrated not only that he does not understand independent British universities, but that he does not always tell the truth, the most fundamental requirement of independent critical scholarship. This shows how right Funk was to set up the Jesus Seminar with the intention of telling the truth about Jesus: too many people in American theological seminaries do not do so. This also explains how Miller came to locate the opposition central to the Seminar’s concerns. For example, he comments with reference to two of the Seminar’s major publications: ‘The analysis in The Five Gospels and The Acts of Jesus is an alternative to the fundamentalism and naive literalism so entrenched in our society.’64 This accurately labels two major anti- scholarly faults in American society, faults to be found abundantly in American theological seminaries which offer students the opportunity to be processed in American fundamentalism, and call it ‘Christian education’. In 2005, Kloppenborg edited a collection of essays which originated in a symposium held in 2003, when some members of the American Jesus Seminar debated with outsiders, including two outstanding American scholars, Dale Allison and Paula Fredriksen.65 Kloppenborg describes their aim as ‘not to debate, yet again, whether the historical Jesus ought to be thought of as an apocalypticist of some variety, or to discuss the particular location within Second Temple Judaism that he and his immediate followers occupied. Instead, it was to ask why these issues are seen to matter as topics of intellectual inquiry and matter so acutely.’66 This puts aside two major faults of the Seminar, and prepares for the essays of Arnal, Kloppenborg and Miller, which seek to reject criticisms of the American Jesus Seminar without suffi cient scholarly discussion of the main primary sources and cultural background. For example, Kloppenborg raises the question of ‘the kind of Jew that Jesus was’, in the context of what the limits of Judaism might be. He comments: ‘this issue is seen most acutely in the criticism leveled at Burton Mack and John Dominic Crossan for their characterizations of Jesus as a “Jewish cynic” – criticism that appears often to rest on an unargued, indeed probably unarguable, assertion that “Jewish” and “cynic” are mutually exclusive conceptual categories.’67 Kloppenborg offers no documentation for his view that this underlies scholarly critiques of Mack and Crossan, nor does he discuss the more obvious points that our primary sources for Second Temple Judaism do not discuss Jewish cynics, and the Gospels do not mention philosophy, cynics or anything of this kind. Arnal suggests that outstanding American scholars such as Chilton, Fredriksen and Sanders conform Jesus to the fi gure of an ‘Eastern European Jew’ to distance themselves from anti- Semitism and anti- Judaism in previous scholarship. He objects to ‘a Jesus who was circumcised, who had a recognizably Jewish name . . . i.e. Yehoshua or Yeshua . . . If multiple attestation tells us anything, it is that Jesus’ name was, in fact, Jesus.’68 This is exactly the sort of rejection of Jesus’ Jewishness to which scholars such as Fredriksen and Sanders have properly objected, and Arnal’s use of the criterion of multiple attestation is quite bizarre. With arguments of this kind, Arnal’s allegation that outstanding scholars have the ‘Eastern European Jew’ at the centre of their reconstructions of the historical Jesus never appears plausible. 

In response, the essays of Fredriksen and Dale Allison restate some basic points. For example, Fredriksen prefers ‘to judge the adequacy of our reconstructions of Jesus not by criteria of ethical or theological utility, but by the usual standards by which any historian judges a historical description.’ Allison comments on the centre of the lives of our most outstanding critical scholars, ‘surely the desire to fi nd the truth of some things of interest really does partly animate some of us.’69 It is a regrettable comment on the current state of American scholarship that such basic points need restating. Conservative Christians and fundamentalists have continued to respond vigorously to the work of the American Jesus Seminar. Moreover, they have broadened their target so extensively that there is a danger of serious critical scholarship getting lost to view in a plethora of publicity. There have been two major additional targets. One is the discovery of additional Gospels. The two most notable have been the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Mary. These are both Gnostic works written in the second century, and neither of them contains any signifi cant historical information about Jesus, or Judas Iscariot, or Mary Magdalene.70 Nonetheless, both of them have been given such exaggerated publicity that responsible conservative scholars such as Craig Evans have felt obliged to include discussion of them in books which seek to reassure the faithful that they should not be taken in by what are seen as scholarly attacks on the faith. Indeed, Evans devotes two whole chapters to ‘Questionable Texts’, one of them entirely devoted to the Gospel of Thomas. Yet the subtitle of his book accurately portrays his main target: ‘How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels’.71 It is tragic that he can accurately describe the people at whom he fi res as ‘modern scholars’. It is tragic that he can describe going to meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature and fi nding New Testament scholars who ‘had only the feeblest ability with Hebrew and Aramaic (if at all). Most knew little of early rabbinic literature and the Aramaic paraphrases of Scripture.’ Evans goes on to suggest that this ‘helps explain the oddness of much of the work of the Jesus seminar’.72 Another major unscholarly feature of recent debate has been a novel by Dan Brown! The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003.73 One of the major characters in it is Sir Leigh Teabing, who declares in an authoritative manner a lot of inaccurate things about the origins of Christianity. For example, Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and fathered her child, Sarah. More than 80 Gospels were considered for inclusion in the New Testament. All such ‘facts’ were covered up. Jesus was not considered divine until the Council of Nicaea. By offi cially endorsing Jesus as the Son of God, the emperor Constantine turned Jesus into a deity. He ‘commissioned and fi nanced a new Bible, which omitted those gospels which spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike. The earlier gospels were outlawed, gathered up, and burned.’74 All this is from a historical view such nonsense that it is quite amazing that anyone should believe it. The name ‘Leigh Teabing’ is derived from the names of two of the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, a supposedly scholarly work from which Dan Brown obtained a signifi cant part of his supposedly factual material.75 From a scholarly, historical perspective, this work is so discredited that it is only a little less surprising that anyone has believed any of it either. Yet these works have been so infl uential that a sane and highly respected scholar, Bart Ehrman, must be considered to have performed a service to decent scholarship in 2004 by devoting a whole book to truth and fi ction in The Da Vinci Code. Others did the same.76 With this massive debate bizarrely caused by the publication of a novel, it is only natural that The Da Vinci Code is a target in Craig Evans’s sights too.77 When a New Testament professor at Dallas Theological Seminary, together with two of its former students similarly employed, sought to defend their faith in 2006 with the book Reinventing Jesus, they used the subtitle What THE DA VINCI CODE and Other Novel Speculations Don’t Tell You. 78 What is so misleading about this book and others like it is that, in fi ring almost indiscriminately at this novel, a selection of late inaccurate Gospels, the American Jesus Seminar and a selection of decent critical scholarship, it gives the impression of scholarly respectability when it is in effect a fundamentalist tract. For example, the introduction concludes with the story of Thomas from Jn 20.24- 28 as if it were literally true. While differences between the synoptic Gospels and John are noted, the discussion of the signifi cant work of Gerhardsson in defence of accurate transmission of oral tradition simply assumes that this work may be used in defence of the accuracy of all four canonical Gospels. The defence of the authenticity of Jesus’ unusual and probably unique use of ‘Amen’ at the beginning of some synoptic sayings proceeds as if the authenticity of Johannine sayings which begin ‘Amen, amen . . .’ is thereby defended too.79 Yet for more than a century critical scholarship has based historical work primarily on the Gospel of Mark and the so- called ‘Q’ material because these are our earliest sources, whereas the Gospel of John is a relatively late theological document which contains hardly any accurate historical information that is not already to be found in Matthew, Mark and Luke. It is accordingly almost to the credit of Craig Blomberg that he did at least write a book in defence of the historicity of the Gospel of John.80 His main targets are the American Jesus Seminar and my 1996 book, Is John’s Gospel True?. 81 These are natural enough targets: the American Jesus Seminar because it is so famous/notorious, Is John’s Gospel True? because it is the only book in which all the main arguments against the historicity of John’s Gospel are conveniently laid out. What is more remarkable is the virtual omission of all the most important scholarly lives of Jesus. The works of Bornkamm, Sanders and other critical (Christian!) scholars had been well known for years, and by 2001 Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God was also well known, and none of them makes signifi cant use of the Gospel of John.82 A fair debate should therefore have meant a vigorous attack on them too. Moreover, Blomberg’s arguments are extraordinarily feeble. For example, he seeks to defend the historicity of the uniquely Johannine story of the wedding at Cana in Galilee, in which Jesus is said to have turned water into wine (Jn 2.1- 11).83 In Is John’s Gospel True?, I put forward a complete and largely conventional argument of cumulative weight against the historicity of this incident. Blomberg begins his response by raising the question of miracles, commenting that ‘if one takes the position of Casey (1996: 52) that they are impossible, then further discussion proves fruitless.’ But this is not the position which I took. I drew attention to the obvious fact that changing water into wine ‘is, in normal circumstances impossible’, whereas Jesus does it abundantly, producing no less than 120 gallons. I also drew attention to analogous incidents in stories to do with Dionysus, which Blomberg omits, and which he is in not in any danger of believing, because they are not part of his sacred text, a major point about miracles which he leaves out. Moreover, I noted the division of people into ‘the Jews’ (Jn 2.6) and ‘his disciples’ even though all Jesus’ disciples were Jewish. I attributed this to the Gentile self- identifi cation of the Johannine community in confl ict with ‘the Jews’. The fact that the chief steward is known only from sources concerned with Gentile weddings rather than Jewish ones also indicates the Gentile origin of the story. I concluded that all my points, taken together, ‘form a devastating argument of cumulative weight against the historicity of the story.’ Blomberg does not answer most of these points. His positive arguments include the supposed ‘historical verisimilitude’ of Nathanael coming from Cana at John 21.2, ‘so it would be natural for Jesus and his small group of followers to go there (2.1).’ But neither Nathanael nor Cana is found in the synoptic Gospels, and ‘natural’ items are characteristic of fi ction and of rewritten history as well as of true stories, so much so that they are often termed ‘reality effects’. Blomberg goes on to defend the historicity of John’s version of the Cleansing of the Temple (Jn 2.13- 22), which is not miraculous.84 Jesus really did cause a major incident in the Temple at the end of his ministry, and we shall see from Mark’s accurate account (Mk 11.15- 17) that this was an important event which led directly and understandably to his death.85 Matthew and Luke repeated the story with some elaborations and omissions (Mt. 21.12- 14; Lk. 21.45- 46). John rewrote this story and moved it to the beginning of the ministry as part of his replacement symbolism according to which Christianity has replaced Judaism, symbolism which marked the previous story too. Blomberg’s view of scripture is so uncritical that he is still inclined to believe all four versions, and since the Johannine version is at the beginning of the ministry and the synoptic versions at the end, that would leave him following the fundamentalist tradition that Jesus cleansed the Temple twice! None of the Gospels says this. Blomberg comments, ‘these two accounts do not contradict each other at any point and can be combined to form a plausible, harmonious whole’.86 This is neither historical criticism nor obedience to God’s Word. It is an uncritical tradition which rejects historical research altogether.87 Americans do not however have a monopoly of regrettable recent work on Jesus. A recent European example was produced by the Pope.88 One of its outstanding features is a whole chapter devoted to a defence of the historicity of John, and an exposition of its theology. Its historical arguments are basically circular. For example, the Pope comments on the uniquely Johannine event of a soldier piercing the side of Jesus when he was crucifi ed:

‘and at once there came out blood and water’ (Jn 19.34). These weighty words immediately follow: ‘He who saw it has borne witness – his testimony is true, and he knows that he tells the truth – that you also may believe’ (Jn 19.35). The Gospel traces its origins to an eyewitness, and it is clear that this eyewitness is none other than the disciple who, as we have just been told, was standing under the Cross and was the disciple whom Jesus loved (cf. Jn 19.26).89 This argument presupposes its result, for if we do not believe that this Gospel is literally true from beginning to end, we have no reason to believe this claim, and good reasons, which the Pope omits, not to do so. For example, the whole incident is omitted from the synoptics; Jesus’ side is omitted from the recognition scene at Lk. 24.39- 40, where the risen Christ identifi es himself only by his hands and feet; the group standing under the cross is quite impossible and contrary to our oldest source, according to which the disciples fl ed (Mk 14.50- 52); Peter alone made it to the high priest’s house where he was in mortal danger (Mk 14.54, 66–72) and female followers watched from a long way off (Mk 15.40- 41), the only safe place; and the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’ is absent from the synoptic Gospels and from the public ministry in John. The Pope is however aware that many Christian scholars do not believe in the literal historicity of this Gospel, and regard the ‘beloved disciple’ as an ideal rather than a historical fi gure. Contradicting the arguments of the respected Christian scholar Ulrich Wilckens to this effect, he comments: If the favorite disciple in the Gospel expressly assumes the function of a witness to the truth of the events he recounts, he is presenting himself as a living person. He intends to vouch for historical events as a witness and he thus claims for himself the status of a historical fi gure. Otherwise the statements we have examined, which are decisive for the intention and the quality of the entire Gospel, would be emptied of meaning.90 This is also circular, for it is only if we believe that this Gospel is literally true that we are dealing with ‘the favorite disciple in the Gospel’. Otherwise, we may be dealing with a narratively convenient ideal fi gure, who is introduced occasionally when the authors needed him, after the public ministry was over. The notion that in such a case the statements referred to ‘would be emptied of meaning’ is entirely a matter of opinion, since a different meaning could be attributed to them, albeit a meaning not suffi cient for the Pope’s view of what Christian scripture ought to have said. The Pope’s book has generated a massive amount of discussion, especially in his native Germany.91 This is due to the fact that it was written by a major religious leader. If this book had been written by a New Testament scholar, it would have attracted very little attention. As this book was being written, two more American social subgroups produced, or threatened to produce, further misleading work on Jesus. One is the fi rst life of Jesus to emerge from the Context Group. This is a group of American Catholics, with enough foreign and non- catholic members to describe itself as a ‘working group of international scholars committed to the use of the social sciences in biblical interpretation.’92 A South African member, Pieter Craffert, recently produced The Life of a Galilean Shaman. 93 Craffert begins with a lengthy caricature of critical scholarship. He criticizes its lack of consensus on aims and methods. However, Craffert includes Sanders, who did so much to advance our knowledge of the historical Jesus, together with scholars such as Burton Mack, whose work is almost completely wrong. Accordingly, this lack of consensus is neither surprising nor signifi cant. Craffert declares, ‘The basic assumption’ (my emphasis), ‘which functions as programmatic structure for most of historical Jesus research, is that the historical fi gure was different from the Jesus (or Christ) portrayed in the Gospels’.94 This is not an assumption at all. It is a conclusion drawn from a large quantity of research, which the best scholars always assess critically. It should moreover be obvious that the picture of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel is so different from that in the synoptic Gospels that all four cannot be altogether right. Craffert rejects basic historical research in favour of ‘cultural bundubashing’. He says this metaphor is ‘taken from off- road driving’.95 Its crudity correctly represents Craffert’s work: he rejects critical scholarship, and bashes it as hard as he can. Freed from the constraints of critical scholarship, Craffert creates his shamanic fi gure by means of creative and uncritical use of whichever pieces of evidence suit him. After early work by Jung, and a highly infl uential book by Eliade, shamanism has been widely discussed by anthropologists, some of whom have used it very broadly.96 Craffert majors on ‘ASC experiences’, that is, altered states of consciousness experiences, which are very important to genuine shamans in their own cultures. Craffert begins with Jesus’ baptism, the best place to start, because Jesus really did have a vision, a Jewish experience which fi ts into the more general category of ASC experiences. Moreover, the spirit drove him into the wilderness, where he was tempted by Satan, and angels ministered to him (Mk 1.12- 13). These are all Jewish experiences which may reasonably be interpreted within the more general category of ASC experiences. Almost at once, however, Craffert starts to push the evidence too far. Apart from describing the angels as ‘sky messengers’, thereby turning a Jewish element into something more congenial to Gentile anthropologists, he suggests that Jesus being ‘with the beasts’ (Mk 1.13) was ‘most likely also the product of a visionary experience . . . rather than an encounter with real desert animals’, which goes beyond the evidence of our primary sources.97 At this point, Craffert’s discussion leaves the ground altogether. Since many shamans are supposed to go on soul fl ights, or sky journeys, Craffert presents texts in which he supposes that Jesus does the same.98 He begins with a ‘middleworld journey’: ‘Guided by Satan, Jesus journeyed to the Temple in Jerusalem and to the top of a high mountain (Mt. 4.5, Luke 4.5, 9).’99 For Craffert, this is also an ASC experience: it is of no concern to him that Mt. 4.3- 11a//Lk. 4.3- 13 might be a midrash created after the event. Craffert fi nds further evidence of Jesus’ sky journeys at Jn 3.13, where, according to the shorter text, which Craffert translates, Jesus tells Nicodemus ‘No- one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.’ This has nothing to do with sky journeys by the earthly Jesus: it refers to his pre- existence in heaven as the eternal Word, followed by his birth, and, as the longer text makes clearer, his ascension after his earthly life. The longer text reads ‘. . . the Son of Man, who is in heaven’, which sets the discourse in the Johannine community long after the earthly life of Jesus, as should be clear from its use of the purely Hellenistic concept of rebirth, and its indirect exposition of the theology of Christian baptism (Jn 3.3- 8). Craffert also declares that ‘During his lifetime, members of Jesus’s disciple group often experienced ASCs.’100 For these supposedly frequent events, he has only three pieces of evidence. His second example, following his wondrously anthropological reminder that in some Pygmy groups in the Ituri rain forest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all adult men can easily switch into their culturally approved ASCs, is from the Fourth Gospel, where ‘Jesus promised Nathanael that he “will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man” (1.51). The casual way in which this is reported suggests that everybody accepted such visionary practices as culturally possible and likely.’101

Everything is wrong with this. The saying, which cannot be reconstructed in satisfactory Aramaic, is part of an extensive passage consisting of creative Johannine rewriting of synoptic tradition in the light of the faith of the Johannine community. Thus, for example, John the Baptist confesses Jesus as ‘the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’ (Jn 1.29), which the historical John the Baptist did not do.102 Jesus says of Nathanael, a character absent from the synoptic Gospels, ‘Look! truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit’ (Jn 1.47), a striking contrast to Jacob/Israel (Gen. 27.35). Nathanael makes a sound Johannine confession, which is also absent from the synoptic Gospels: ‘Rabbi, you are the son of God, you are the king of Israel’ (Jn 1.49). Jesus’ response is a midrash which uses the story of angels ascending and descending on Jacob’s ladder in Gen. 28.12 to avoid all the problems of Mt. 26.64 and similar texts, according to which Jesus predicted that ‘. . . you will see the Son of man . . . coming on the clouds of heaven’, and the like. Jn 1.51 itself has caused a lot of problems to interpreters who have taken it too literally.103 Much the most probable interpretation was given long ago by Lightfoot: ‘the meaning of this important verse is like that of I 14 and I18; it is a description of the coming ministry in which His disciples will witness their Lord’s unbroken communion with the Father and will themselves partake in it.’104 Accordingly, Jn 1.51 does not provide evidence for Craffert’s assertion that ‘members of Jesus’s disciple group often experienced ASCs.’105 This illustrates Craffert’s failure to fi t Jesus into some of the main points of the experiences of a ‘shamanic fi gure’. The remainder of the book contains many lamentable examples of pushing Jesus into this category. For example, Craffert suggests that Jesus’ ‘use of “Amen” to introduce particular sayings’, and ‘the formula “I say to you” . . . often found in antitheses . . . is the style of someone claiming to talk with a personal authority – a feature typical of shamanic fi gures . . .’.106 That Jesus spoke with authority is not to be doubted, but the Matthaean antitheses are due to Matthew’s editing, and ‘Amen’ is obviously Jewish, and more appropriately seen in the tradition of authoritative Jewish prophets than shamanic fi gures imported from other cultures. Despite its unique features, this book illustrates the worst features of the quest of the historical Jesus: Craffert’s Jesus is not recognizably Jewish, and he fi ts into Craffert’s social subgroup, the Context Group. For example, Pilch has written on ‘Altered States of Consciousness in the Synoptics’, proposing that ‘Jesus clearly fi ts the social scientifi c fi gure of a shaman’, and giving Jesus’ baptism, and ‘Testing’ among examples of Jesus’ ASC experiences.107 Elliot has proposed that we should stop using the term ‘Jew’ for the people of the time of Jesus, and ‘eliminate the term “Judaism” altogether’.108 He also adds a dose of moralizing, as if other scholars use the terms ‘Jew’ and ‘Judaism’ because we are ignorant and immoral. This is accordingly the appropriate social subgroup from which Craffert’s bizarre discussion might emerge. The formation of another American social subgroup was recently announced, but when this was written it was not clear that it would go ahead. This was the Jesus Project. Its Chair was R. Joseph Hoffman, and one of his co- chairs was R. M. Price, who does not believe in the existence of the historical Jesus. The question ‘Did Jesus exist?’ seemed likely to be of central importance to it, though professional scholars generally regard it as having been settled in serious scholarship long ago.109 Since however the view that Jesus did not exist keeps being promoted, I discuss the main arguments which are still being repeated. I have taken the fi rst ones from Price’s book The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the Gospel Tradition?110 Price proposes ludicrously late dates for the Gospels, a major feature of arguments against the historicity of Jesus. For example, he suggests that Mark 13, which predicts the destruction of the Temple, must have been written after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 ce, on the assumption that apocalypses are always written after the events which they are supposed to predict.111 We shall however see that Mark’s predictions are not accurate enough to have been written after the event.112 Moreover, predicting the destruction of Jerusalem is not what makes Mark 13 rather like an apocalypse: as we shall see, anyone living under Roman rule when Gaius Caligula threatened to set up his statue in the Temple might well have predicted a revolt followed by the destruction of the Temple, an event which had happened in real history before.113 What makes it more like apocalyptic is events such as the stars falling from heaven and the Son of man coming on the clouds followed by the gathering of the elect from the four winds (Mk 13.24- 27), events which were obviously predicted since they have still not happened. Furthermore, apocalypses were not written after all the events which they predicted. For example, the book of Daniel was written after the beginning of the persecution of Jewish people led by Antiochus Epiphanes, which is mentioned by means of symbolic predictions (e.g. Dan. 7.8, 19–21; 8.9- 14), whereas its predictions of, for example, the kingdom being given to the people of the saints of the Most High for ever (Dan. 7.27) and the resurrection of the dead (Dan. 12.2- 3) are genuine predictions, which have still not been fulfi lled.114 Mark’s Gospel is not like this. Most of it is an account of the ministry of Jesus, and Mark 13 is a collection of genuine predictions. Price’s supporting arguments are also very weak. For example, Price discusses Mk 9.1: ‘Amen I say to you that there are some of those standing here who will not taste of death until they see the kingdom of God come in power.’ Price says that ‘all interpreters admit this prediction must have the Parousia in mind (the apocalyptic coming of the Son of man at the end of the age) . . .’ All interpreters have not adopted this incorrect exegesis,115 for the very good reason that this saying mentions the kingdom of God, an important feature of the teaching of Jesus, whereas belief in the parousia was created by the early church after Jesus’ death.116 Price then interprets Mark’s placing of the Transfi guration next in his narrative (Mk 9.2- 8) to mean that he really wrote after the death of all Jesus’ original disciples, which is contrary to the content of the saying. Supposing that John the Apostle died at the end of the fi rst century, which he sees refl ected at Jn 21.20- 23, Price therefore dates the Gospel of Mark in the second century. Then he suggests that we should perhaps date it even later on the ground that it refl ects the destruction of Jerusalem after the Bar Kochba revolt in 132 ce, citing an article by Detering, a named Fellow of the Jesus Project.117 Like Price, Detering presupposes that Mark 13 cannot contain any predictions of historical events in Jewish and Roman history, not even inaccurate predictions. For example, he objects to the correct dating of Mark 13 at about the time of emperor Gaius Caligula’s threat to have a statue of himself set up in the Temple, on the ground that ‘the actual erection of this desolating sacrilege . . . was never carried out.’118 Indeed it was not, but this is because Mk 13.14 was a prediction which was not fulfi lled as expected, not because it was a prophecy after the event. Unlike Price and many American scholars, however, Detering noticed that Mark 13 does not fi t the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 ce very well. This is his main argument for dating it after the emperor Hadrian set up a statue of himself in the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, which he built to replace the Temple in Jerusalem, which he rebuilt as Aelia Capitolina. Detering sees this as the reason for the ‘prediction’ of the Abomination of Desolation (Mt. 24.15//Mk 13.14).119 One of the main reasons why he is wrong is that all his arguments depend on the same assumption, that none of Mark’s predictions could be genuine predictions. The other reason is that, like Price, he omits all the positive arguments for an earlier date.120 The point of these unconvincingly late dates is to allow Price to argue that the Gospels are fi ctional, which, on the face of it, may seem more plausible the later they are dated. One of the most important arguments in favour of the historicity of parts of the synoptic Gospels is that they contain a number of things which the early church would never have wanted to invent. One is the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist, which might seem to make Jesus inferior to John, and which was a historical event of profound importance, when Jesus had a vision which was the equivalent of the call visions of the prophets.121 Price suggests that John may not have been a historical fi gure at all, citing from the German philosopher Arthur Drews a century ago the extraordinary view that John (Greek Iōannes) was a historicized version of the ancient pagan fi sh God Oannes. 122 This arbitrary plucking of a dissimilar event from a pagan myth is another characteristic of arguments against the historicity of Jesus. Another obvious objection is that there is a brief account of John’s historical ministry and death in the Jewish historian Josephus (Ant. XVIII, 116–19). Price therefore fi nds spurious grounds for regarding this as a late interpolation into Josephus.123 Price invents a mythical ‘Christian (or Baptist) who was trying to correct Mark by interpreting what he said about a “baptism for the forgiveness of sins” in a nonsacramental direction.’124 But Mark actually reported that John was preaching ‘baptism of repentance for forgiveness of sins’ (Mk 1.4//Lk. 3.3), when Jewish people believed that God invariably forgave repentant sinners. Mark also reports that people were baptized by John in the Jordan ‘confessing their sins’ (Mk 1.5//Mt. 3.6). This is perfectly correct, as we shall see, and means that John’s baptism symbolized repentance, and that it was people’s repentance which enabled God to forgive their sins.125 This is not ‘sacramental’, as Christian baptism became. Moreover, writing this passage into Josephus to correct Mark is too bizarre and improbable a procedure for it to be plausible to suppose that this is a reason for an ‘interpolation’ into Josephus. It is however entirely reasonable to suppose that the Jewish author Josephus had heard of Christians being baptized ‘in the name of Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins’ (Acts 2.38), and perhaps even being ‘baptised into Christ Jesus’ (Rom. 6.3). He therefore made sure that John’s baptism was interpreted within its original Jewish frame of reference, as Mark had done in a slightly different way. Price further suggests that there is a ‘redactional seam, a telltale sign of a copyist stitching in new material’.126 His only reason for this is that the opening of Josephus’ account says that the destruction of Herod Antipas’ army in 36 ce by the Nabatean king Aretas was interpreted by some Jews as God’s punishment of Herod for putting John to death, and Josephus repeats this at the end of the passage, before passing to his account of Vitellius’ abortive preparations for a Roman attack on Aretas and his successful visit to Jerusalem with Herod Antipas. Price’s conjecture is no more than arbitrary invention, caused by what Price does not wish to believe. Josephus’ passage makes perfect sense as all his own work, and the passage about John fi ts perfectly where it is. It does not mention Jesus, and it is in no way particularly Christian. Ancient texts should not be tampered with like this, and the removal of inconvenient evidence in this way is another signifi cant characteristic of attempts to show that the historical Jesus did not exist. Price proceeds to make fun of Jesus’ vision when he was baptized by John. During this vision, Jesus heard a heavenly voice saying ‘You are my beloved son, in you I am well pleased’ (Mk 1.11). Price claims that this speech was put together from scriptural texts, and that ‘The fi ctive character of this brief speech is evident from its scribal nature.’127 Price supports this by chopping this short speech into very small pieces. His fi rst piece is ‘You are my son’, which he derives from Ps. 2.7, ‘You (are) my son’, which is at least similar, though it does not have the word ‘beloved’, and what it does have in common is too short for this derivation to be obvious or necessary. Price says that the ‘second scripture fragment’ is Isa. 42.1. Here, however, for ‘in you I am well pleased’ (Mk 1.11) he reads ‘whom’ rather than the much better attested ‘you’ and he quotes the end of Isa. 42.1 as ‘in whom my soul delights’. But he has added ‘in whom’ to the text of Isa. 42.1 from translations, citing the Greek translation at Mt. 12.18, so he has made a small part of Mk 1.11 more like Isa. 42.1 than it originally was, whereas ‘in you I am well pleased’ (Mk 1.11) is not suffi ciently like ‘my soul delights’ (Isa. 42.1) for the derivation to be plausible. Price’s third fragment is ‘beloved son’ from the (Greek) Septuagint description of Isaac as ‘your beloved son’ by an angel of the Lord addressing Abraham at Gen. 22.12, as well as from ‘behold two chosen ones’ in unspecifi ed (Aramaic) Targums. This is a mistranslation from a massive Targumic insertion fi rst found in Targum Neof I at Gen. 22.10, which includes a heavenly voice (bath qōl) saying of Abraham and Isaac, ‘come see two unique ones [yḥīdhīīn]’.This cannot be earlier than the third century ce, is probably much later, and has many parallels in very late Jewish sources, so it cannot possibly have been known to Mark. Price has simply depended on a discussion by Stegner, who cites the Targums in English in an associative manner without properly learned references or suffi cient discussion of the dates of the traditions in them.128 Assuming all these scriptural derivations, Price declares Mark’s heavenly voice ‘not historical, unless one wishes to imagine God sitting with his Hebrew Psalter, Greek Septuagint, and Aramaic Targum open in front of him, deciding what to crib. Only then does it come to seem ridiculous.’129 But it is Price who has manipulated it to make it seem ridiculous. The whole speech makes perfect sense as part of the vision of a fi rst- century prophet. Imagining that one word comes from the Septuagint is, in Price’s hands, simply destructive: ‘beloved’ is a perfectly reasonable translation of the Aramaic ḥabhībh. It is diffi cult to avoid the impression that Price is caricaturing scholars who see Mark’s use of scripture both where they should and where they should not, whether they believe this comes from God, or refl ects the use of scripture by Mark in a more learned manner than he was capable of. It is symptomatic of Price’s lack of learning that he cites Stegner, without noting that he sought to describe the work of Mark rather than God, instead of interacting with a learned scholar such as Marcus, who made a genuinely learned case for Mark putting together different texts, which is in no way ridiculous.130 Finally, leaving aside Price’s destructive claim that one word comes from the Septuagint, there would be nothing wrong in supposing that a fi rst- century Jew, as soaked in the scriptures as Jesus, would have a vision in which a heavenly voice spoke in scriptural terms. Visions were much commoner among normal people in their culture than in ours.131 Heavenly voices are often reported in them, as for example in Peter’s vision at Acts 10.13, 15, and Paul’s vision at Acts 9.5- 6; 22.7- 8; 26.14- 15. All that is needed for a heavenly voice to speak in scriptural terms, amalgamating different texts, is for the person experiencing the vision to be as soaked in the scriptures as Jesus was. What Price has done is to remove from history part of a fundamental human experience which he holds in contempt. Price fi nally suggests parallels to Jesus’ baptism and temptations in a variety of mythical fi gures. He suggests that the most important is the story of Zoroaster, who waded into a river to obtain water for the haoma ceremony, and returning to the riverbank after immersing himself, beheld in a vision the archangel Vohu Mana.132 This is not the same as being baptized, Jesus did not see an angel in his baptismal vision, and Zoroaster was not tempted until later, when the evil Ahriman sought to avert him from this mission. This imaginative use of pagan traditions which are not much like the Jewish traditions in our Gospels to posit them as the origins of Gospel stories is very widespread among opponents of the existence of Jesus, and should be regarded as completely unconvincing. Another major argument concerns what is not said in the Pauline epistles. For example, Wells, the main recent British proponent of the view that Jesus did not exist, declares that the extent of Paul’s silence is ‘truly staggering’. His epistles ‘mention neither John the Baptist . . . nor Judas, nor Peter’s denial of his master . . . They give no indication of the time or place of Jesus’ earthly existence. They never refer to his trial before a Roman offi cial, nor to Jerusalem as the place of his execution.’133 All this means is that Paul wrote epistles about the problems which he found in his (largely Gentile) churches in the Graeco- Roman world, not an account of the life of Jesus, which the epistles take for granted. Consequently, they mention only a few main points, mostly when there was some point of controversy. For example, in writing to the Corinthians, Paul mentions Jesus’ crucifi xion at the centre of the Gospel: ‘Christ crucifi ed, a scandal to Jews, foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks, Christ power of God and wisdom of God’ (1 Cor. 1.23- 24). Again, in dealing with the controversial issue of divorce, Paul quotes Jesus’ prohibition of divorce as absolutely authoritative, distinguishing it from his own recommendations about the new situation of believers married to unbelievers (1 Cor. 7.10- 16). That the churches would invent the points listed by Wells would be ‘truly staggering’, as would their absence from the Gospels. Their absence from the epistles is nothing more remarkable than a defi nition of what kind of documents they are. In The Jesus the Jews Never Knew (2003), Zindler, an atheist who is not a qualifi ed New Testament scholar but who is nonetheless another Fellow of the Jesus Project, contributed further destructive arguments which are remote from the environment of Jesus and the fi rst Christians.134 In a subsequent lecture to the Jesus Project, Zindler, who was a scientist, claimed that ‘we should be as scientifi c as possible in our inquiry into the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth.’135 With this as his excuse, he does not employ historical methods, but uses the requirements of proof proper to the natural sciences as a cloak for rejecting everything which, as a committed atheist as biased as a Christian fundamentalist, he does not wish to believe. A good example is the caricature with which his book opens. We can be quite certain that the miracle- working Jesus described in the New Testament never existed. Even if we disregard the fact that from a scientifi c point of view his magic- mongering can be ruled out a priori, if he really had ‘cleansed’ all those lepers, given sight to the congenitally blind, catered a large mob with a bit of fi sh bait and pigeon snacks, restored locomotion to the halt and the lame . . . at least someone would have recorded it at the time . . .136 Everything is wrong with this tendentious description. First, ‘magic- mongering’ is an inaccurate, hostile and unscientifi c description of Jesus, who is not recorded in the New Testament to have done any magic. What Zindler has really done is to rule out a priori from the historical Jesus anything which any of his followers regard as miraculous. Secondly, Zindler’s summary lumps together real events in the life of Jesus with secondary developments in an unscholarly way which appears to presuppose that his target is American fundamentalism rather than critical scholarship. For example, there is every reason to believe that Jesus cleansed or healed the man with a skin disease at Mk 1.40- 45, a narrative translated from an Aramaic source, an aspect of the evidence which Zindler always omits because he is not learned enough to see it.137 The historical truth of Mk 1.40- 45 is in no way affected by the improbability of the story of the instantaneous healing of ten lepers in Luke alone (Lk. 17.12- 19), as Zindler’s comments seem to presuppose. Again, there is every reason to believe that Jesus healed a blind man from Bethsaida who had previously been able to see (Mk 8.22- 26, also based on an Aramaic source), whereas the Johannine story of his healing a man blind from birth (Jn 9.1- 7) has been at least written up secondarily.138 Many Christian scholars have cast doubt on the historicity of the story of the feeding of the 5,000 (Mk 6.30- 44), but Zindler never refers to such work, and there is no excuse for his uncomprehending description of this piece of midrash Haggadah as ‘catered a large mob with a bit of fi sh bait and pigeon snacks’. His comment ‘restored locomotion to the halt and the lame’ is equally uncomprehending. There is every reason to believe most of Mark’s story of the healing of a paralytic (Mk 2.1- 12), but not, for example, Matthew’s insertion of an extra piece into Mark’s account of the Cleansing of the Temple, beginning with Jesus healing blind and lame people in the Temple (Mt. 21.14- 16).139 Finally, several people did record events from Jesus’ ministry at the time and not much later. We shall see that there were several Aramaic sources underlying parts of Mark and the ‘Q’ material and some pieces found in Matthew or Luke only.140 I fi rst wrote this up for some pieces of Mark in 1998, and I cannot be regarded as a Christian apologist since I left the Christian faith in 1962. I suggested that the Jewish nature of the material implied an early date for these sources, perhaps c.40 ce. 141 Zindler omits all work of this kind. His contemptuous summary of aspects of Jesus’ supposed miracles also underlines his omission of scholars such as Sanders and Vermes.

In his lecture to the American Jesus Project, Zindler further claimed that his book ‘showed that the ancient Jews had never heard of “Jesus of Nazareth”.’142 This claim, which is a major feature of his book, is contrary to fact. Zindler appears to have assumed, without discussion, that no Christians can have been Jews. The most important Jews who proclaimed the Gospel centred on Jesus were Matthew the Evangelist and St Paul. Paul describes himself as ‘circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, according to the Law a Pharisee, according to zeal persecuting the church, according to the righteousness in the Law become blameless’ (Phil. 3.5- 6). This is a perfectly intelligible description of Paul by Paul himself, and one which later Christians would have no reason to make up. Moreover, we have seen that while Paul did not have reason to cite the life and teaching of Jesus very often in epistles written to deal with problems in (mostly Gentile) churches, major points such as Jesus’ crucifi xion were extremely important to him, and he evidently regarded Jesus’ teaching as authoritative. Inferring the Jewish identity of the Gospel attributed to Matthew is more complicated, but a complete argument of cumulative weight should not leave any doubt. The major arguments were fully discussed by Davies and Allison in 1988.143 The main point is that, although Matthew’s Gospel is a Christian work which vigorously approves of the Gentile mission (Mt. 28.16- 20), it clearly argues that Christianity ought to remain within the bounds of Judaism. For example, in the programmatic opening to the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew has Jesus say, ‘So whoever sets on one side one of the least of these commandments and teaches people thus, shall be called least in the kingdom of Heaven, but whoever does and teaches (them), he shall be called great in the kingdom of Heaven’ (Mt. 5.19). It follows that Gentile Christians who do not take on the observance of the Law will still be saved, but that this position is not to be approved of. That is intelligible only in a Christian who lives within Judaism. Furthermore, a number of Matthew’s comments show a profound understanding of Jewish observance of the Law. For example, when he edited Mark’s prediction of the destruction of the Temple, Matthew added the instruction to pray that the fl ight of ‘those in Judaea’ (Mt. 24.16) might not happen ‘on a Sabbath’ (Mt. 24.20). This shows great concern for, and understanding of, the observance of Jewish Law. There should therefore be no doubt that Matthew was Jewish, an ancient Jew who had not merely heard of Jesus, but who went to massive trouble to revise the First Gospel with masses of additional material, because he regarded Jesus as such an important historical fi gure.144 Zindler omitted all those Jews who wrote in Greek and whose work was so prized by Christians in general that they later included them in the New Testament. That is not a scholarly procedure. Nor does Zindler offer any satisfactory discussion of later Jewish believers in Jesus: on the contrary, he deliberately excludes evidence of Jews who knew a lot about Jesus on the ground that they were Christians.145 Zindler sets up quite unrealistic expectations as to what non- Christian Jewish sources would have said if Jesus did exist. For example, he concludes, quite correctly, that Jesus is not mentioned in the Mishnah, a major codifi cation of Jewish Law written down c.200 ce. 146 Why should a major codifi cation of Jewish Law mention the centre of what was by then a largely Gentile religion of Christians who rejected Judaism? Zindler proceeds to discuss late Jewish sources which are as maliciously critical of Christianity as he is. This is also because of the split between Judaism and Christianity, on account of which surviving late non- Christian Jewish sources are full of unrealistic falsehood.147 Zindler excludes large quantities of evidence from primary sources of different kinds by means of arbitrary hypotheses of interpolations. For example, he alleges numerous Christian interpolations into Josephus.148 These include the whole of his short passage about Jesus (Ant. XVIII, 63–64), the passage about John the Baptist (Ant. XVIII, 116–19), and the passage about the death of Jesus’ brother Jacob (Ant. XX, 200).149 Zindler’s criteria are uniformly unsatisfactory, with no adequate literary or historical reasons. He has a massive diatribe against Christian forgery, for which he uses many genuinely inaccurate statements which are however found in phenomenally late sources (as well as a forged passage which he wrongfully attributes to Augustine so that he can accuse him of an astonishingly stupid lie).150 He uses this to cast doubt on the authenticity of these brief and relatively early reports, only one of which, the one about Jesus, shows any sign of the text being tampered with. For example, the passage about Jesus’ brother Jacob says entirely reasonably that the high priest Ananus, a son of Annas, whose son- in- law Joseph Caiaphas handed Jesus over to Pilate, convened a Sanhedrin which accused ‘the brother of Jesus who is called Christ, Jacob by name, and some others’ of transgressing the Law, and had them stoned, which led to protests by Jewish people, all of whom can hardly not have known anything about Jesus. Because of this, King Agrippa dismissed Ananus from the high priesthood (Ant. XX, 200–3). Zindler uses comments on this passage by the Christian writer Photius in the ninth century CE, in which Photius naturally referred to Jacob as ‘the brother of the Lord’ as some Christians from Paul (Gal. 1.19, cf. 1 Cor. 9.5) onwards had done for centuries (e.g. Eus. H.E. II, 1, 2; Epiph. Pan. 29.3.8; Jer. De Vir. Ill. II; Hipp.Th. frg. I, 6), not least because the Pauline occurrence became canonical. Zindler simply assumes that Photius must therefore have read ‘the brother of the Lord’ in his text of the Jewish author Josephus, which was accordingly interpolated by a Christian!151 This shows a total lack of historical sense. Zindler even fi nds interpolations in the Gospel of Mark, as part of his attempt to remove evidence of John the Baptist from the earliest Gospel. He begins with Mk 8.27- 28, part of a passage which is largely secondary.152 It records the views of people in response to Jesus’ (surely secondary) question, ‘Whom do men say that I am?’ The fi rst response is ‘John the Baptist’. Zindler correctly treats this confusion between the two most important prophets of the time as a ‘snippet of gossip’, but nonetheless regards it as absolutely reliable evidence that ‘John the Baptist could not have been a contemporary of Jesus’, even though all the evidence indicates that they were contemporaries. He assumes it means that Jesus was ‘thought of as the reincarnation of John the Baptist’.153 He seems oblivious to the fact that reincarnation was not a Jewish idea. We should rather suppose that Mark’s report refl ects gossipy confusion among people who knew neither Jesus nor John. Zindler then seeks to remove Mk 1.2- 14a as an interpolation, but his arguments amount to little more than pouring scorn on the text. He removes Mk 1.14a, oddly translated ‘Now after that John was put in prison’, rather than ‘And after John was arrested’, on two grounds. First, he describes it as ‘the jarring beginning of verse 14’, because he fi nds it ‘hard to believe that “Mark” could have assumed his readers would already know the tale of the imprisonment and execution of the Baptist’. This misinterprets the circumstances in which Mark’s Gospel was written. It was the fi rst Gospel written in Greek for Christian churches, many of whose members had heard lots of the story before, and who might well know of John the Baptist’s arrest and execution. It would be read aloud at Christian meetings by someone who knew the story better than most people, and who would explain anything like this which the less knowledgeable members of the audience did not know, an unavoidable feature of some church meetings. Moreover, it was already known in the ancient period that Mark’s Gospel was not written down in order, which indeed it was not.154 Zindler then objects that at Mk 1.9, ‘Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee’, and at Mk 1.14, ‘Jesus came into Galilee’. He claims that this ‘has forced apologists to draw the implausible inference that “the wilderness” in which Jesus contested with Satan was not in Galilee.’155 This is completely misleading. John the Baptist conducted his ministry much further south, in a general area correctly described by Matthew as ‘in the desert of Judaea’ (Mt. 3.1). This is how it came about that people from Judaea and Jerusalem went out to be baptized by him in the Jordan (Mk 1.5//Mt. 3.5- 6). Just the other side of the Jordan was Antipas’ territory of Peraea, dangerously near Nabataea, the territory of Aretas, father of Herod’s wife, whom Herod divorced, thereby causing a war. John will have been arrested in Peraea, before he was executed in the fortress of Machaerus (Jos. A.J. XVIII, 119), further south in Peraea. This is how it came about that Jesus went to be baptized by him where he was baptizing, miles south in Judaea, with the result that his experience of being tempted by Satan was not in Galilee at all.156 Zindler has again dismissed ‘apologists’ without noting the work of decent critical scholars. Zindler further claims that Jesus coming from Judaea ‘only heightens the incongruity: Why doesn’t the Greek text say that Jesus “came back into Galilee?”’157 This is because Mark wrote the First Gospel by piecing together different traditions, and the tradition of Mk 1.14- 15 is not likely to have come from the same source as Mk 1.7- 13. It refers to the extraordinary fact that after John’s arrest, Jesus went into Herod Antipas’ territory in Galilee and preached openly, when he might have laid low or even fl ed. This is a completely different event from Jesus’ baptism by John. For all we can tell, this important tradition may have been etched in Mark’s memory from repeated oral retellings, rather than in a written source. Zindler does not say which word Mark might have used for ‘came back’. This matters because Mark uses ‘come’ (erchomai) no less than 86 times, and hardly uses any of the possible words for ‘come back’.158 Mark’s Greek makes perfect sense for anyone who appreciates normal Hellenistic Greek or Aramaic (a written Aramaic source might have said ’thā’, which would have made perfect sense, as Mark’s text does). Zindler has simply invented his criticism on the basis of his English, instead of studying Mark’s Greek or the possible effects of Aramaic sources. His work does not show any proper understanding of Greek or Aramaic. Zindler also claims that various places where Jesus conducted his ministry did not exist at the time. We shall see that archaeological evidence for the main places in the ministry is perfectly adequate.159 Finally, people who deny Jesus’ existence leave most of the main points out, and in that sense the whole of this book is required to refute them, not just this section. In Chapter 2, I establish the relatively early dates of the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, in Chapter 3 I discuss methodology, and the whole of the rest of this book puts the historical story of Jesus fi rmly in Israel in the early fi rst century ce. Nothing less is required to do so, together with all the other scholarship which undergirds it and which I cannot repeat in a single volume. This is all genuine critical scholarship, whereas Price, Zindler and others seem to be fi ring at fundamentalist Christians without any proper awareness of what critical scholars have achieved.

Meanwhile, conservative work continues to pour off the press. Paul Barnett, the former Anglican Bishop of North Sydney, now a Visiting Fellow at Macquarie University and still teaching at Moor College in Sydney and Regent College in Vancouver, argues in Finding the Historical Christ (2009) that the Jesus of history was the Christ of Christian faith.160 He defends the historicity of John as the most conservative Christians do. For example, after commending Blomberg, he suggests the term ‘chief- steward’ at Jn 2.9 and the raising of Lazarus as authenticsounding details in favour of the historicity of this document.161 Yet the term ‘chief- steward’ is otherwise known only at Gentile weddings, and the story of the raising of Lazarus is full of specifi cally Johannine theology, the absence of which from the synoptic Gospels cannot be explained if it is attributed to the historical Jesus. Moreover, Lazarus is never mentioned in the synoptic Gospels, whereas in the Fourth Gospel Jesus’ amazing miracle is the trigger of the passion, replacing in this respect the Cleansing of the Temple. Barnett does not offer proper critical discussion of such points, but relies on the uncritical discussion of Blomberg. On the basis of a selective discussion of the authoritative use of sayings of Jesus in the epistles, Barnett announces that ‘the leaders in early Christianity did not invent sayings of the Lord.’162 This makes it impossible to explain the origin of synoptic sayings about Jesus’ second coming, and Johannine discourses.163 Barnett further announces, with especial reference to the gospel writers, they ‘did not omit any saying of the Lord’.164 This is not consistent with the omission of most synoptic sayings from the Fourth Gospel, and since Barnett believes in the historicity of the Fourth Gospel, it is not consistent with the omission of the Johannine discourses from the synoptic Gospels either. Nor is it consistent with the omission of Markan sayings by Matthew and Luke: for example both omit from the story of the plucking of the grain – ‘The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath’ (Mk 2.27). Moreover, the Gospels are too short for us to suppose that the Gospel writers did not omit any sayings of Jesus. On this uncritical basis, Barnett offers some discussion of the criteria of authenticity. The most remarkable is the ‘criterion of inclusion’. This ‘points to the likelihood of authenticity based on the simple reality that a saying included in the canonical gospel is more likely than not to be authentic.’165 If adopted, this would render all other criteria irrelevant. It is not a historical criterion at all. Barnett’s whole presentation is the outworking of his commitment to a particular conservative view of Christian tradition, not a genuinely historical presentation.

This section illustrates the unsatisfactory state of public debate about Jesus. It is remarkable that, with the exception of Dan Brown, everyone whom I have discussed is regarded by a signifi cant number of relatively well educated people as a serious professional scholar. This is no guarantee of adequate qualifi cations, learning or good sense. I turn fi nally to recent attempts to write a life of Jesus. I begin with the Bishop of Durham, who belongs to the wonderful line of scholar bishops who have recently occupied this see, a welcome change from the Norman barons who were the fi rst Prince Bishops of Durham! 

8. Recent Lives of Jesus 

Together with the work of Vermes and Sanders, Tom Wright’s 1996 book Jesus and the Victory of God, written before he occupied the see of Durham, must rate as one of the best books on Jesus so far.166 It is distinguished by a lengthy history of scholarship. Despite its regrettable classifi cation of the quest into three stages with a huge gap, Wright’s history of scholarship contains many useful analytical comments. His demolition of recent American books on Jesus, including the Jesus Seminar, Mack and Crossan, is especially careful and effective. On the positive side, he gives a clear discussion of method, and especially how Jesus is to be related to the Judaism of his time. The substantive discussion takes seriously the categories of the primary source material, with lengthy discussion of Jesus as prophet, and it engages with the variety of material which is related to the kingdom of God, including the function of judgement. The discussion includes major events, in particular a whole section attempting to explain why Jesus was crucifi ed. The discussion of sayings of Jesus does not isolate one or two single sayings as central but attempts to take an overall view of the synoptic tradition. The result is a logically coherent presentation of Jesus as the Messiah of Israel. Nonetheless, there are serious problems with this book. One is the misunderstanding of apocalyptic and eschatological language as metaphor. This is done without satisfactory discussion of the nature of metaphor. For example, an important saying is Mk 9.1, which we have already seen dismissed by Crossan, causing trouble for Vermes, and misinterpreted by Price: ‘Amen I say to you that there are some of those standing here who will not taste of death until they see the kingdom of God come in power.’ Wright fi rst reduces this to a ‘clear promise of future victory and vindication’, then expands it to such things as ‘return from exile’ and ‘rebuilding of the Temple’.167 This replaces what the text says with something more congenial. The most notorious feature of this saying is that it indicates that the kingdom of God would come very soon, and this did not happen. This is a natural mistake by a fi rst- century Jew, but any mistake at all by Jesus is inconsistent with orthodox Christian Christology. The driving force of Wright’s interpretation is a cultural circle with which the mistaken Jesus of history is replaced by the infallible Christ of faith. But there is a second feature of equal importance in understanding why Wright holds a view which entails so much alteration of the text, and that is the bureaucratization of academia. Wright is repeating the view of his teacher G. B. Caird.168 He has not taken seriously criticisms of Caird from outside Oxford, nor has he made suffi cient use of modern linguistics. Another unsatisfactory aspect of Wright’s attitude to language is the conventional fault of not discussing genuine sayings of Jesus in Aramaic, the language which Jesus spoke. As so often, this is most regrettable with the term ‘Son of man’, because genuine uses are virtually untranslatable, with the result that examples of this expression shift signifi cantly in meaning when attempts are made to translate them into Greek, English, German or the like.169 Wright declares the expression ‘notoriously ambiguous, even cryptic’,170 without any attempt to reconstruct an Aramaic sentence and explain what is ambiguous or cryptic about it, and without answering the classic point that the synoptic tradition does not show any signs of diffi culty in understanding this expression. He suggests that those with ears to hear would understand this term in Mk 2.28 in the light of its Danielic context. I published a reconstruction of Mk 2.23- 28 in 1988, with full critical discussion.171 Wright should have explained how this could have been intended to call up a particular Danielic context, or offered an alternative reconstruction which does. Here again, we have dependence both on a cultural circle which pushes this expression as far as possible in the direction of being a Christological title found in Scripture, and on an academic habit. Scholars in several fi elds, Translation Studies above all, have noticed what a massive difference is made to our understanding of written texts by the language in which they are transmitted. New Testament scholars have however traditionally ignored this in their detailed examination of sayings of Jesus in Greek, and Wright has ignored it too. A third problem is the interpretation of Gospel texts in the light of later Christian understanding of them. For example, it is important that John the Baptist offered a baptism of repentance in a culture where God was believed to forgive the sins of people who repented, thereby leading a renewal movement within Judaism which caused many people to accept him as a prophet. Wright describes this not unreasonably as ‘water- baptism for the forgiveness of sins’, but paraphrases its signifi cance as ‘you can have, here and now, what you could normally get through the Temple cult’, and further declares that John ‘presented a clear alternative to the Temple’.172 This is not supported by the primary source material. It may however be congenial to people within the Christian tradition, for whom it is very important that they have forgiveness of sins, who think of the Temple cult as obsolete, and Christianity as superseding Judaism. It follows that despite Wright’s learned and genuine attempt to set Jesus in his original cultural context, he cannot be said to have altogether succeeded in this task. The next signifi cant attempt to write a life of Jesus was Bruce Chilton, Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography. 173 Chilton is one of the best qualifi ed people in the world to write a life of Jesus. While he comes in from a Christian perspective himself, he is fully familiar with the Judaism of the time of Jesus, and he reads all the ancient sources in their original languages, including Aramaic. Consequently, this book contains a lot of accurate information about the Judaism of Jesus’ time. This begins on the fi rst page with the importance of his circumcision on the eighth day of his life, and the Aramaic language spoken by him because it was the normal language of Jews in Israel at the time. This positive aspect of Chilton’s work continues throughout his book. Chilton has however endeavoured to write what he calls a ‘narrative’, and this involves him in conjectural episodes some of which are more like a historical novel than a work of scholarship. Some conjectures are reasonable. For example, Chilton follows a handful of scholars in supposing that Jesus was born at Bethlehem in Galilee. We shall see that the stories of Jesus’ birth at the traditional site of Bethlehem in Judaea are not literally true. They might have been sparked off by his birth at a place called Bethlehem not far from Nazareth, modifi ed by searching the scriptures and fi nding Mic. 5.2- 4. As the book goes on, however, Chilton’s conjectures and narrative become more and more unlikely. He presents the so- called ‘hidden years’ as years during which Jesus rejected his family and lived apart from them. There is no evidence of this, and it can hardly be considered probable. By the time he gets to the mysterious man with the water pot who helped with the arrangements for Jesus’ fi nal meal (Mk 14.13), we fi nd ourselves in the presence of Barnabas, supposedly Jesus’ close associate for years. He was a wealthy man, in whose crowded house the last of many ‘Eucharistic’ meals before Passover took place.174 By this stage, Chilton is writing a mixture of fact and fi ction. Another important life of Jesus is that of J. D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered. 175 The fi rst part, ‘Faith and the Historical Jesus’, is effectively a history of the quest of the historical Jesus, together with extensive discussion of the philosophical and hermeneutical problems involved. This discussion contains much correct information, and some reasonable opinions. Dunn is especially good at seeing the cultural presuppositions of recent work by scholars such as Crossan, Funk and the American Jesus Seminar.176 It is however regrettable that, despite questioning the description of recent work as a third quest, Dunn describes the 40 years after the outbreak of the First World War as a ‘hiatus’ or ‘diversion’ in life of Jesus research, and discusses very little work done during that period, apart from a section on Bultmann and Form Criticism. He declares that the period was dominated by Barth and Bultmann, and omits scholars such as Fiebig and the very infl uential Nazi scholar Walter Grundmann, while a stray remark shows some awareness of what he did not discuss.177 Part II, ‘From the Gospels to Jesus’, discusses the main source material, with many remarks on appropriate methodology. Dunn follows the conventional view that the Gospel of Mark is our oldest and most reliable surviving written source, and what he calls a ‘very large consensus of contemporary scholarship’ in dating it 65–75 ce. 178 This obscures serious disagreements between scholars who date it before or after the fall of Jerusalem (in effect 65 or 75 ce), and Dunn offers no discussion of the reasons conventionally given for each of these different positions. He regards ‘Q’ as a Greek document, but he contemplates a wide variety of possible dates.179 This entails a long period of transmission for the Gospel of Mark, and possibly for ‘Q’. In what is effectively the centre of this book, Dunn argues that the Jesus traditions were transmitted orally.180 The case for such widespread orality is not however adequately made. For his theoretical orientation, Dunn seeks to apply to the Gospels the work of his fellow evangelical Ken Bailey on oral traditions in the modern Middle East.181 Bailey’s work among Arab Christians is a very limited study of a different culture at a different time, and therefore could not be determinative for understanding fi rst- century Judaism, even if it were independently verifi ed. When Weeden pointed this out, together with some evidence that oral traditions are not necessarily accurate even among modern Arab Christians, Dunn responded with scholarship no better than that of Bailey.182 For example, he comments that ‘the social habits and modes of passing on tradition in Middle Eastern villages I suspect have differed very little over the centuries’, and asks ‘Are personal experiences stretching over several decades to be dismissed simply because they are recorded with an anecdotal casualness that the scientifi c mind abhors?’183 What sort of scholarship is that supposed to be? It is no excuse for following the unverifi ed conjectures of an evangelical amateur who has taught modern Arab Christians, and applying them to fi rst- century Jews. From a practical perspective, Dunn’s presentation of the Gospel evidence does not always support his view. For example, in his discussion of ‘Jesus’ last supper with his disciples’, Dunn declares that in his A tradition (Mt. 26.26- 29 and Mk 14.22- 25) Jesus blesses ‘the bread’. He does not however discuss what an Aramaic tradition might have said, so he does not consider the possibility that in Mark’s source Jesus might have blessed God. He has the variation from his B tradition (Lk. 22.17- 20 and 1 Cor. 11.23- 26) ‘most obviously’ explained ‘in terms of two slightly variant liturgical practices’, for it would be ‘somewhat farcical to assume that this tradition was known to the various writers only as written tradition’. But this rhetoric of obviousness demonstrates nothing, and Dunn does not answer arguments for supposing that Mark’s account of the Last Supper is a translation of a written Aramaic source, and that Paul deliberately rewrote the tradition in order to control the riotous behaviour of Corinthian Christians at common meals, in parts of what are obviously written documents. 184 This means that Dunn’s book is seriously defective in its attempt to show that the oral transmission of Jesus tradition was as widespread as Dunn thinks, and the immediate source of our written documents. At the same time, however, when Dunn sketches ‘the likely process of traditioning’, he offers reasonable conjectures which might help to explain how some of the Jesus traditions were transmitted orally.185 For example, he discusses Mt. 22.1- 14 and Lk. 14.15- 24, stories which have central common elements including a man inviting to a feast guests who did not come, but major differences such as whether he was a king, whether it was a wedding feast and what if anything happened to the absent guests.186 These stories may well have emerged from repeated oral retelling. The rest of the book works methodically through Jesus’ mission, his ‘selfunderstanding’, and the climax of the story in his death and Resurrection. Here Dunn seeks to build up a picture of Jesus as remembered from orally transmitted traditions about him. Apart from his conviction that the traditions were all orally transmitted, Dunn’s discussions of some points are very good. For example, he provides an excellent discussion of the place of faith in God in Jesus’ ministry.187 This makes all the main points accurately, including the interpretation of key Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic words, transliterated into English letters so that the discussion should be comprehensible to the general reader. He also provides a fi ne discussion of Table Fellowship, which makes the most important points with clarity.188 Sections such as these, together with many parts of the opening section, make this book a genuine contribution to knowledge.

Other sections are problematic. For example, the section on Messiahship is out of date.189 Dunn formulates the questions in terms of royal Messiahship, and does not offer adequate discussion of the Hebrew (ham)mashīaḥ or the Aramaic me shīḥ(ā), both of which mean ‘anointed’ as well as ‘Messiah’, and are consequently used of the high priest and of other fi gures. Dunn is inclined to vote in favour of the historicity of Peter’s confession ‘You are the Messiah’ (cf. Mk 8.31), and the high priest’s question, ‘Are you the Messiah, the son of the blessed’ (cf. Mk 14.61), both of which are diffi cult partly because of the range of meaning of the Aramaic me shīḥ(ā), which cannot function as a title in this simple way.190 The section on ‘Son of man’ is also problematic. Dunn declares that Jesus used the term ‘the Son of Man’ of himself, and he further supposes that the ‘articular form’ may be rendered ‘that son of man’. There is however no independent article in Aramaic, and Dunn offers no proper discussion of the defi nite and indefi nite states, which are often thought to be equivalent to the presence and absence of the English defi nite article, nor of the Aramaic bar (e )nāsh(ā). This is serious, because the Aramaic bar (e )nāsh(ā) cannot function as a title.191 Given that both these sections are concerned with the maintenance of traditional Christian interpretations of Christological titles, we must suspect the infl uence of a cultural circle formed with Dunn’s Christian life, and this is made certain by this book’s extraordinary conclusion. In short, through the Jesus tradition the would- be disciple still hears and encounters Jesus as he talked and debated, shared table- fellowship and healed. In hearing the Jesus tradition read from pulpit or stage, in sacred space or neighbour’s sitting- room, we sit with the earliest disciple and church groups as they shared memories of Jesus . . . Through that tradition it is still possible for anyone to encounter the Jesus from whom Christianity stems, the remembered Jesus.192 This is culturally inaccurate. The earliest disciple groups were Jewish, and modern Christian groups are almost entirely Gentile. The passage of almost 2,000 years has involved other major cultural changes. Consequently, ‘the would- be disciple’ never encounters a fi rst- century Jewish prophet and teacher. Dunn has concluded by replacing the Jesus of history with the Christ of faith, who is encountered in church and evangelical Bible study sessions in neighbours’ sitting rooms. Another important life of Jesus is that of Hengel and Schwemer, which I discuss briefl y because it is not at present available in English, and it is heavily immersed in German rather than English- language secondary literature.193 This is regrettable, because it is very learned and contains a lot of correct and relevant information. This is especially true of the opening section on Judaism at the time of Jesus. The section on the sources has a very strong argument, based mostly on the Pauline epistles, for supposing that early Christian preaching would have required a lot of information about Jesus. They have a properly chaotic model of the ‘Q’ material, with an appreciation of the importance of the witness of Papias that the apostle and tax- collector Matthew wrote down Jesus traditions in Aramaic.194 After an appropriate section on John the Baptist, Hengel and Schwemer work through all the most important aspects of the ministry of Jesus. Some of this discussion is excellent. For example, they have a clear understanding of the kingship of God being seen as both present and future.195 Despite the great learning shown in many excellent discussions, this book suffers from two serious problems characteristic of the quest as a whole. One is its religious enthusiasm, shown especially in their discussion of Jesus’ unparalleled Messianic authority (the best I can do to translate the quintessentially German ‘messianischen Vollmacht’).196 Their discussion of this is seriously out of date, especially in their view of recent discussion, so that the work of Martin Karrer is dismissed as if it were no better than the old view of German scholars such as Wrede and Bultmann that Jesus’ ministry was ‘non- messianic’.197 Secondly, they do not make proper use of the Aramaic level of the tradition, and this is conspicuous, as so often, in their treatment of the term ‘son of man’. They offer a quite inadequate discussion of the Aramaic term bar (e )nāsh(ā), and rely heavily on the discussion of their German colleague Colpe, which was outstanding when it was written in 1969, but is now out of date.198 They do not discuss the work of the Jewish scholar Vermes, nor the work of Lindars and myself, all of whom write in English.199 In short, the work of Hengel and Schwemer has all the virtues and faults of the best of existing scholarship. On the one hand, it is a genuine attempt to recover the historical Jesus in his original Jewish environment, and much of the time it does so with great learning. On the other hand, it is biased by the cultural environment of the authors, and even their great learning lets them down at points where this really matters to them. The potentially most important life of Jesus has been thought to be J. P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, in four large volumes so far.200 The fi rst volume is mostly about background and methodology. It contains some exemplary discussions. For example, the discussion of the Gospel of Thomas is eminently sober, and properly presents it as a relatively late source which can be fi tted into secondcentury Christianity. The discussion of the criterion of multiple attestation is equally exemplary. Meier applies it soberly to New Testament sources, and notes that it applies to forms as well as to sources. He also notes that if used mechanically it is not infallible, since secondary material might originate so early as to be repeated in more than one strand of tradition, and genuine material was not always repeated by the early church.201 The quality of these discussions made this book an essential resource. Nonetheless, some problems can be seen ready to emerge. The most serious is Meier’s attitude to Aramaic, which begins to emerge in a section headed ‘Secondary (or Dubious) Criteria’ beginning with ‘6. The Criterion of Traces of Aramaic.’202 This consists almost entirely of negative comments, and while these are largely justifi ed in themselves, Meier does not discuss more promising recent developments. The second volume moves on to John the Baptist and then to Jesus himself. Here again, there is some fi ne scholarship. For example, Meier supplies a very careful and fully critical discussion of John the Baptist and his baptism, correctly presented as emerging from the customs and symbolism of Jewish washing.203 On the other hand, it is not probable that Meier’s extensive discussion of Jesus’ miracles will satisfy anyone. For example, the healing of a man with a supposedly withered hand at Mk 3.1- 6 is treated as indefi nable, inexplicable, involving improbable argumentation and leading to a quite incredible conclusion, a plot to put Jesus to death. After all that, Meier sits on the fence on the historicity of the actual miracle story.204 What is worse, Meier’s comments on this story have two major faults. First, he ignores any possible Aramaic level of the tradition. So his discussion of Jesus’ argument about saving life (Mk 3.4) proceeds as if the text says ‘life’, without any consideration of the Aramaic ne phash, which means ‘person’ as well as ‘life’. Secondly, Meier rejects aspects of Judaism. For example, he decides that in the actual healing, ‘Jesus performs no action’, so that ‘in no sense can he be said to break the Sabbath by working’, an important point in his view that the story cannot be historically accurate.205 This shows no understanding of the fl exibility of Torah interpretation within Jewish culture, which allowed Jesus’ most serious opponents to expand the commandment not to work on the sabbath more extensively than Meier is willing to contemplate. Meier’s third volume, ‘Companions and Competitors’, has many excellent features. The fi rst part has separate chapters on the crowds, the ‘disciples’, the Twelve and individual members of the Twelve. Each chapter contains fine discussion of what we really know about these groups and their relationships with Jesus. Anything which disturbs some people, such as that there is not much information about the Twelve, or that the word ‘disciple’ is not used of women, is squarely faced and discussed. Meier is also exceptionally effective in demolishing some regrettable opinions which are left over from the last generation of criticism. Thus he defends the existence as well as the main functions of the Twelve, and does so excellently. The second half of the book discusses Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Samaritans and other groups. At one level, these discussions are learned and fully critical in orientation. At the same time, problems continue to emerge, especially when Meier deals with Jesus’ confl icts with his opponents. For example, Meier’s discussion of Mk 2.1–3.6 is heavily dependent on the work of Dewey, who envisaged Markan patterns.206 He declares that ‘the cycle of Galilean dispute stories in Mark 2.1–3.6 is carefully composed to create an artistic and theological pattern’, and describes it as ‘from Mark’s redactional hand’.207 Throughout his discussion, Meier ignores Aramaisms as indications of pre- Markan tradition. His comments on Mk 3.1- 6 repeat the faults in his more detailed discussion of this passage in volume 2.208 He ignores the signs of authenticity of Mk 2.23- 28, which he discusses in detail in volume 4.209 Instead, he comments for example that ‘the stories are driven by an ever increasing tone of antagonism and an ever more direct attack on Jesus himself.’210 He does not seriously consider the possibility that this refl ects increasingly hostile opposition to Jesus as the historic ministry continued. The fourth volume, ‘Law and Love’, is deeply fl awed. Meier begins with worthy aims, declaring that a ‘basic insight’ which will emerge is that ‘the historical Jesus is the halakic Jesus’.211 Most of the fi rst substantial chapter (Chapter 31) is devoted to the Torah, or Law, and serious problems begin to emerge here. For example, Meier fi nds it ‘startling’ that the Law of Moses was believed to contain ‘important commandments that, from our historical- critical perspective, simply are not there in the text.’212 Students of the Torah within Jewish culture should not fi nd this startling. Texts frequently imply cultural assumptions which their authors do not need to state. People who lived the whole of their lives in accordance with the Torah believed that its general commandments entailed details which it did not state explicitly. Nowhere is this more obvious than with Meier’s example, sabbath observance. During the Maccabaean revolt (167–164 bce), some Jews died rather than fi ght on the sabbath (1 Macc. 2.29- 38), and Mattathias and his supporters made the obvious decision that they should fi ght on the sabbath (1. Macc. 2.39- 41). Meier comments, ‘Remarkably, the issue is never explicitly raised in the Jewish Scriptures’, adding that there are numerous examples of Israelites fi ghting on the sabbath, with the caveat that ‘an argument from silence is always perilous.’213 This is not in the least remarkable, and arguments from cultural assumptions should not be confused with arguments ‘from silence’. The centre of the Torah is God’s covenant with Israel. So Moses commanded Israel, ‘obey the statutes and the ordinances which I teach you to do, so that you may live’ (Deut. 4.1). Again, ‘For if keeping you will keep all these commandments which I command you to do, to love YHWH your God to walk in all his ways and to cleave to him, YHWH will drive out all these nations from before you . . .’ (Deut. 11.22- 23). This means that God will fi ght Israel’s battles, so he was known as ‘YHWH of hosts, God of the battle array of Israel’ (1 Sam. 17.45). Any notion that God’s heavenly and earthly hosts would stop fi ghting one day a week was quite ludicrous. Mattathias and his followers took this for granted, because it was a cultural assumption at the heart of their relationship with God. Meier describes the decision of Mattathias and his followers to defend themselves on the sabbath as a result of ‘appealing to common sense rather than to subtle legal reasoning’, and he believes that they saw no need to appeal to ‘particular Scripture passages or legal reasoning based on Scripture.’214 This is misleading in two ways. First, the account of this decision is only two verses long (1 Macc. 2.40- 41). We have no idea of the extent to which Mattathias and his followers may have discussed particular passages of the Torah as well. Meier has assumed that what is not mentioned in a very brief text did not happen, an ‘argument from silence’ which is ‘often perilous’, but which he often uses. Secondly, the decision to fi ght in self- defence on the sabbath did not require ‘subtle legal reasoning’ or ‘particular Scripture passages’ because it was based on the centre of God’s covenant, which brought Israel life, not genocide. Nor does Meier understand ‘one stringently observant group’, who refused to defend themselves when attacked on the sabbath. He observes, ‘The predictable result was total slaughter’, and correctly sees their decision refl ected in the halakhah of the book of Jubilees, whose expanded list of sabbath prohibitions concludes with waging war. He comments, ‘In the mind of the author of Jubilees, the Torah does deal directly with fi ghting on the sabbath, and it totally forbids it.’215 Meier offers no explanation of this, and it is central to understanding the development of Jewish Law. The persecution of Antiochus IV Epiphanes was part of an ongoing Hellenizing movement which reached a climax in the attempt of Antiochus’ Greek government to prevent the observance of the Torah. In response to that movement, many Jewish people reinforced their Jewish identity not only by observing the Torah as they had before, but by expanding its ordinances, so that more and more things they did were distinctively Jewish. Thus the authors of Jubilees rewrote part of the Pentateuch to include their expanded sabbath regulations, all revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai. That is also why the immediately succeeding period saw the emergence of orthodox groups of Pharisees, Essenes and the Dead Sea sect. This same trend is a fundamental reason for the eventual emergence of Jesus’ opponents among scribes and Pharisees. After failing to understand the decision of Mattathias and his followers, Meier describes it as ‘not the most startling point. What is truly astounding’ is that ‘Josephus states fl atly that “the Law [ho nomos] permits [Jews on the sabbath] to defend themselves against those who begin a battle and attack them, but it does not allow [Jews] to fi ght their military opponents if the latter are doing anything else”’.216 What Meier appears to regard as ‘truly astounding’ is the ‘equating of a relatively recent rule with “the Law”’, for he proceeds to further examples of development. He cites for example passages of Philo and Josephus which ‘affi rm that Moses commanded in the written Law that Jews should study Torah (Philo: “to philosophize” in “prayer houses”) and/or to attend synagogue (Josephus: “to come together”) on the sabbath’, adding that Ps- Philo, ‘goes so far as to include communal worship on the sabbath in his list of the Ten Commandments’ (Ant. Bib. XI, 8).217 All this refl ects Meier’s failure to understand the nature of Torah. The Torah was a living text, at the centre of the daily life of Jewish people, and at the centre of God’s relationship with Israel. That is why it could be expanded to clarify for Jewish people how it was to be observed. With such fundamental mistakes at the heart of Meier’s attitude to the Torah, every subsequent chapter contains serious mistakes. The worst examples are in Chapter 34, ‘Jesus and the Sabbath’. For example, Meier refuses to believe in the historicity of Jesus’ fi rst reported exorcism, in a Capernaum synagogue one sabbath (Mk 1.23- 27). His reasons are that the exorcism and Jesus’ teaching provoke astonishment, but there is no dispute about Jesus exorcizing a demoniac on the sabbath, and previous scholarship often portrayed Mk 1.23- 34 as an ‘ideal scene’.218 As before, Meier ignores all signs of transmission of the material in Aramaic, and the perfect setting of the incident in the life of Jesus. He does not take seriously the obvious possibility that the absence of dispute is due to the absence of scribes and Pharisees. He also ignores the fact that the early church had no interest in creating such stories, and interprets the recurrence of some features of the story elsewhere in Mark as evidence of Markan creativity.219 In preparation for further comments on Mk 3.1- 6, Meier stresses repeatedly that Jewish texts do not prohibit healing on the sabbath. For example, he comments on Philo: ‘Nowhere is there any mention of prohibiting the healing of illnesses, the only action Jesus ever directly does that supposedly violates the sabbath.’220 He draws all such comments together as an argument against the historicity of the incident, commenting, ‘no Jewish document prior to a.d. 70 gives the slightest indication that an act of healing was considered a violation of the sabbath rest.’ Yet Meier makes this claim while considering Mk 3.1- 6, which is the vital piece of evidence to the contrary. He adds that in the much later Mishnah, ‘in the full fl owering of lists of acts prohibited on the sabbath, healing is absent.’ He argues again that ‘Jesus does nothing, he does no “work”’.221 All this shows again Meier’s lack of understanding of the development of Jewish Law. In general, the halakhic judgements made by scribes and Pharisees who opposed Jesus were stricter than those of most other Jews. Pharisees separated themselves from other Jews and tried to live in a state of purity.222 Other orthodox Jews, who included Essenes and the Qumran sect, also made halakhic decisions which were stricter than those of most Jews. For example, Josephus records that the Essenes would not defecate on the sabbath (War II, 147), and the book of Jubilees prohibits sex on the sabbath (Jub. 50.8). These judgements are quite different from the views of later rabbis, who wrote the Mishnah and other collections of Jewish Law. The rabbis did not separate themselves from other Jews, but sought to legislate for all Israel after the disastrous defeat of the Roman war (66–70 ce). This is what is so pointless about Meier’s repeated stress on the absence of a prohibition of healing on the sabbath from Jewish texts. Jesus’ opponents did not leave any written texts, which is why this prohibition is absent from other texts. Equally pointless are Meier’s repeated declarations that in this healing Jesus did no ‘work’. This is Meier’s opinion, and it may have been widespread, but Mark’s text is straightforward evidence that it was not the opinion of Jesus’ opponents. Two other major faults reinforce these mistakes. Meier is extraordinarily reluctant to believe that Jesus’ opponents in this passage were Pharisees, apparently because they are not mentioned at Mk 3.2, and he attributes too much to Markan redaction. He comments for example, ‘In Mark’s mind, the adversaries are probably to be identifi ed with the Pharisees in 2.24’ (my emphasis), and again refers to the ‘clearly redactional conclusion to the dispute in 3.6 (the Pharisees consult with the Herodians on how to destroy Jesus)’.223 The removal of these important points from the level of history to that of redaction is quite arbitrary. These verses are the evidence that the Pharisees were the opponents in Mk 3.1- 6. Mark’s failure to repeat the subject in 3.2 is due to Mk 2.23–3.6 being a literal translation from an Aramaic source which I reconstructed with full critical discussion in a 1998 book which is not even mentioned in Meier’s extensive bibliographical footnotes.224 Aramaic stories often change subject without marking the change, and frequently do not repeat subjects either. I also showed how appreciation of Mark’s Aramaic source makes it possible to explain the peculiarities of his narrative, and I fi tted the whole narrative into the historic ministry of Jesus.225 Meier does not consider any of this. Similar faults recur throughout the chapter. Consequently, Meier’s treatment of Jesus and the sabbath cannot be regarded as reasonable historical research.

Chapter 35, ‘Jesus and Purity Laws’, has similar weaknesses. For example, in rejecting the historicity of Mk 7.1- 23, Meier argues that ‘the scriptural debate presented by Mark in 7.6–8 is not conceivable as an event in the life of the historical Jesus’, because Jesus’ argument ‘demands the LXX of Isaiah . . . slightly tweaked by Mark.’226 That Mark quotes the LXX of Isa. 29.13, as he quotes the LXX elsewhere, is to be explained by the position of the LXX as the Bible of the Greek- speaking churches for whom he wrote. Meier also quotes Isa. 29.14, which Jesus did not, and stresses the absence from the LXX of ‘because’ at the beginning of Isa. 29.13. If a major prophet quoting another major prophet to denounce hypocritical opponents did not wish to quote his opening conjunction he did not have to, doubly so because he is likely to have spoken in Aramaic, rather than quote the original text in Hebrew. Once again, Meier has no idea about the parameters within which fi rst- century Jews could interpret scripture, nor does he take seriously the fact that we have before us the result of the work of a translator who has used the LXX to make perfect sense of Jesus’ argument. What we lack is the exact Aramaic words of the historical Jesus, of which Mark may have given us a precise or approximate translation. Meier also discusses Mk 7.15, which he translates as follows: There is nothing outside a man that, by entering into him, can defi le him; but those things that come out of a man are the things that defi le the man. Meier discusses this in the context of Mk 7.14- 23, and simply assumes that it overthrows the Jewish food laws, so he argues that it does not go back to the historical Jesus.227 He does not consider the opinion of scholars who believe that ‘This is the ultimate answer to the question of the Pharisees and scribes as to why Jesus’ disciples eat with unwashed hands.’228 Meier then argues that the introduction in Mk 7.1- 5, in which Pharisees and some of the scribes who came from Jerusalem ask why Jesus’ disciples eat with unwashed hands, cannot be authentic because ‘there is no historical Jesus tradition for which vv 1–5 can serve as the introduction.’229 He adds his own scepticism to the whole idea that handwashing before meals was practised as early as this, again discounting Mark as evidence and failing to see that Jesus’ opponents were especially strict. The sophisticated discussion of Crossley, who argues for the authenticity of the incident and separates out Markan redaction towards the end of the passage, is not even mentioned in Meier’s massive bibliographical footnote.23

The ‘halakic Jesus’ could not possibly emerge from such destructive scholarship. Moreover, when a Christian scholar does not understand Judaism, Jesus’ teaching is seen at some point to contradict Torah. Meier does this twice, with divorce and with oaths.231 On oaths, it is evident that the main passage (Mt. 5.33- 37) has suffered some secondary editing, but Meier’s discussion completely fails to sort this out. He does not consider any possible Aramaic underlay. He therefore takes seriously ‘at all’ in Mt. 5.34, so that Jesus may have said, ‘Do not swear at all’. There is however no Aramaic expression for ‘at all’, so Jesus cannot have said that. Treating Jas 5.12 as an alternative version of the same tradition, which it does not claim to be, Meier supposes that an alternative version of the tradition was ‘Do not swear by heaven or by earth or by any other oath’, which is supposed to ‘make it fairly certain that the primitive tradition contained some way of stressing the absolute nature of the prohibition.’232 Meier also fi nds spurious reasons for not attributing to Jesus most of his examples of the oaths which he criticized. For example, noting the absence of most examples from Jas 5.12, which does not claim to reproduce Jesus’ teaching, let alone all of it, Meier claims that ‘almost all critics identify Matt 5.36 (“do not swear by your head . . .”) as a secondary accretion’ also because it ‘breaks the pattern seen . . . in Matt 5.34c- 35d’ because it is so different from swearing by heaven, earth or Jerusalem, ‘all names of places important in Israel’s sacred traditions’.233 This is irrelevant: Jesus objected to people swearing to each other by anything. Nor does Meier give adequate consideration to Jesus’ further criticism of oaths in Mt. 23.16- 22.234 This leaves Meier attributing to Jesus a blanket prohibition of oaths with precious few examples. This is essential for Meier to reach the conclusion, which he does not suffi ciently discuss, that ‘Jesus is abrogating an important social and legal institution that is permitted and regulated by the Torah.’235 Jesus’ teaching nowhere discusses the very infrequent occasions on which the Torah prescribes an oath, as for example when a man’s animal kept by a neighbour dies or is hurt or is driven away without anyone seeing it (Exod. 22.10- 11). Once again, Meier’s methodology has prevented the emergence of the halakhic Jesus. Meier’s enormous book began promisingly, but each volume has problems, and volume 4 is an unmitigated disaster. He is not suffi ciently sympathetic to ancient Judaism to conduct accurate historical and cultural research in this area. Consequently, he has adopted destructive methods, a fact which was not to be expected from his discussion of methodology in volume 1. This has combined with his lack of understanding of ancient Judaism to remove from the historical Jesus a large portion of his words and deeds. Meier’s refusal to make proper use of Aramaic is central to this. Its effect is that the picture of Jesus which emerges from Meier’s work is not that of a fi rst- century Jew immersed in Judaism.

This is an appropriate place to end this survey of modern scholarship. Meier made a genuine critical attempt to recover the historical Jesus from our earliest sources. In the end, however, a Catholic priest came to grief because he cannot understand Jewish Law. Moreover, his basic refusal to take seriously the Aramaic level of the tradition is at the heart of this failure. These are central faults in the quest of the historical Jesus. Jesus was not a ‘marginal’ Jew, and he did not seek to contradict Torah. The fi rst traditions about him were written down in Aramaic, and have to be recovered from the synoptic Gospels and interpreted in the light of the Jewish assumptions which they made. 

9. Conclusions

It is evident from the above discussion that the quest of the historical Jesus has been a diffi cult enterprise. Not only is the source material diffi cult to handle, the quest has suffered badly from the religious, and sometimes anti- religious, convictions of scholars. The time is now ripe to succeed in the task attempted by Schweitzer, Vermes, Sanders, Wright, Chilton, Dunn, Hengel and Schwemer, and Meier, by setting Jesus in his original cultural context. For this purpose, I use our oldest sources, which make clear that this cultural context was fi rst- century Judaism. As part of our renewed efforts to set Jesus in his original cultural context, I have begun the task of reconstructing the sources of Mark and of ‘Q’, and a few passages of Matthew and Luke, in their original language, Aramaic. The past history of work of this kind has not been good, but the publication of all the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls has put us in a position to revolutionize this work. This is the work which I have begun in recent years, and all the following chapters have benefi ted from it. Jesus’ language has been a missing link which should now help us to reconstruct his whole ministry against its original background. It is with this Judaism, the Judaism of the fi rst century ce, that we must carry through the task of fi nding the historical Jesus. First, however, we must consider the nature of the primary source material which is available to us. Until recently, all critical scholars agreed that our oldest sources are the Gospel of Mark, and the so- called ‘Q’ material, and that some further historically accurate material is to be found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. As we have seen in this chapter, however, this consensus has not been maintained. Apocryphal Gospels have been considered equally important, especially the Gospel of Thomas, and there has been a resurgence of conservative scholars who treat the Gospel of John as a serious historical source. Moreover, there is no longer anything like general agreement as to the methods which we must use. I have therefore written two further introductory chapters, one to establish our oldest primary sources, and one to discuss method. I discuss other Gospels, including those attributed to John and to Thomas, in the Appendix.