Craig S. Keener. The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (section I)

 Table of Contents 

Title Page 

Copyright Page 

Dedication 

Abbreviations 

Acknowledgements 

Preface 

Introduction 

SECTION I - DISPARATE VIEWS ABOUT JESUS 

CHAPTER 1 - The Development of Jesus Scholarship 

Earlier Modern “Historical Jesus” 

Studies An Example: Adolf von Harnack’s Civilized Jesus 

The Apocalyptic Jesus of Weiss and Schweitzer 

Bultmann 

Jesus the Revolutionary? 

Conclusion 

CHAPTER 2 - Jesus the Cynic Sage? 

The Noneschatological Jesus Seminar 

Crossan’s “Peasant Cynic” 

A More Extreme Example 

Pagan Origins Again 

Conclusion 

CHAPTER 3 - Jesus and Judaism 

Some Third Quest Views 

Jesus as Charismatic Healer, Prophet and Sage 

Jesus as Jewish Charismatic Healer 

Jesus and Eschatology 

Conclusion 

CHAPTER 4 - Other Gospels? 

Constantine’s Canon? 

Apocryphal Gospels and Acts 

Gnostic Gospels 

Still Later Gospels 

“Q” as a Lost Gospel? 

More Dependable “Noncanonical” Sources 

Why We Must Look Elsewhere 

Conclusion 

SECTION II - THE CHARACTER OF THE GOSPELS

CHAPTER 5 - The Gospels as Biographies 

Premeditated Literary Works 

Suggestions about Gospel 

Genre Biographies 

Greco-Roman Biography and History 

Different from Modern Biography 

Conclusion 

CHAPTER 6 - Luke-Acts as History 

Luke-Acts as History 

Apologetic Historiography 

Conclusion 

CHAPTER 7 - Ancient Historiography as History 

Concerns for Historical Information 

Limited Analogies with Josephus 

Conclusion 

CHAPTER 8 - Ancient Historiography as Rhetoric 

Modern Versus Ancient Historiography 

Ancient Expectations 

Historians and Rhetoric 

Gospels Distorted by Rhetoric? 

Historical Perspectives, Tendenz, and Purpose 

Ancient History as Non-history? 

Conclusion 

CHAPTER 9 - The Gospels’ Written Sources 

Using Sources 

Ancient Historical Writers’ Use of Sources 

Luke’s Relation to Earlier Sources 

Gospel Sources 

Expanding and Condensing Sources 

Redaction Criticism 

Conclusion 

CHAPTER 10 - The Gospels’ Oral Sources 

Orality 

Oral Traditions Besides Written Sources 

Sayings Traditions 

Memorization in Antiquity 

Memory Studies More Generally 

Skilled Memory in Antiquity 

Disciples and Teachers 

Early Christian Creativity? 

Traditional Form Criticism 

Form-critical Criteria 

Narratives about Jesus 

Conclusion 

SECTION III - WHAT WE LEARN ABOUT JESUS FROM THE BEST SOURCES 

Jesus’ Story in the Gospels 

CHAPTER 11 - John the Baptist 

John in Josephus 

John’s Mission in the Wilderness 

Announcing the Coming One? 

John’s Doubts, Jesus’ Praise (Matt 11:2-11//Lk 7:19-28) 

Jesus’ Repudiation of John? 

John’s Execution 

Jesus’ Baptism by John 

John as the Source of Baptism for the Jesus Movement 

Conclusion 

CHAPTER 12 - Jesus the Galilean Jew 

Jesus from Jewish Galilee 

Life in Galilee 

Virtually Certain Information about Jesus 

Conclusion 

CHAPTER 13 - Jesus the Teacher 

Jesus as a Sage 

Jesus and Sages’ Style 

The Teller of Jewish Parables 

Conclusion 

CHAPTER 14 - Kingdom Discipleship 

Preaching the Kingdom 

Son of Man 

Radical Demands of Discipleship 

Eschatological Inversion 

Conclusion 

CHAPTER 15 - Jesus’Jewish Ethics 

Jesus on Possessions 

The Love Command (Mk 12:29-31) 

Divorce Korban Teaching 

Beatitudes 

Some Other Sayings Supported by the Jewish Environment Criterion 

Purity Practices 

CHAPTER 16 - Conflicts with Other Teachers 

Doubting Conflict with Pharisees 

Authenticity of the Conflict Accounts 

Coherence of the Conflict Tradition 

Differing Interpretations of the Sabbath 

Conflicts about the Sabbath 

Why Conflicts with Pharisees? 

Impure Purists 

Killing the Prophets 

Jesus the Wounded Prophet 

Conclusion 

CHAPTER 17 - Jesus the Prophet 

Sign-prophets 

Jesus as Healer and Exorcist 

Prophetic Acts 

Judgment on Israel 

Conclusion 

CHAPTER 18 - Jesus as Messiah? 

Jesus’ Self-Identity 

Early Belief in Jesus as Messiah 

“King of the Jews” and the Disciples’ Perspective

 Qualifying “Messiahship”: The Triumphal Entry Why a Messianic Secret? 

Views of Messiahship in Antiquity 

Conclusion: Jesus as a King 

CHAPTER 19 - More Than an Earthly Messiah? 

The Eschatological Judge in “Q” 

David’s Lord in Mk 12:35-37 

Jesus’ Special Relation to God Who Did 

Jesus’ Movement Think He Was? 

Exalted Figures in Early Jewish Thought 

Conclusion 

CHAPTER 20 - Confronting and Provoking the Elite 

The Parable of Tenants 

Did Jesus Foreknow His Death? 

Provoking Martyrdom 

Jesus and Politics 

The Last Supper 

The Sacrificial Purpose for Jesus’ Death 

Martyrdom and Atonement in Early Judaism 

Conclusion 

CHAPTER 21 - Jesus’ Arrest and Execution 

Historical Tradition in the Passion Narratives 

Genre of Passion Narratives 

The Historical Foundation for the Passion Narratives 

The Abandonment of Jesus’ Disciples 

The Betrayers 

The High Priests and Jerusalem’s Elite 

Annas and Caiaphas in the Passion 

Narrative Historical Tradition in the Trial Narrative? 

The Plausibility of Pilate’s Role 

Jesus’ Scourging 

Jesus’ Execution 

Jesus’ Burial 

Conclusion

 CHAPTER 22 - The Resurrection 

The Traditions 

Pagan Origins for the Christian Resurrection Doctrine? 

Jewish Teaching about Resurrection 

Historical Support for the Resurrection Tradition? 

Conclusion 

APPENDIX 1 - Zealots and Revolutionaries 

APPENDIX 2 - Mack’s Case for a Wisdom Q 

APPENDIX 3 - Jewish Biographical Conventions 

APPENDIX 4 - Jesus’ Sayings about the End 

APPENDIX 5 - John and the Synoptics on Passover Chronology 

APPENDIX 6 - Roman Participation in Jesus’ Arrest? 

APPENDIX 7 - Capital Authority

 APPENDIX 8 - What Really Happened at the Tomb?

 APPENDIX 9 - Some Postresurrection Teachings 

Notes

Bibliography of Sources Cited 

Index of Authors and Modern Names 

Index of Subjects 

Index of Scripture References 

Index of Ancient Sources

Introduction

Some more skeptical scholars consider “uncritical” other scholars who believe that much of the story of Jesus happened anything like how it appears in the traditional Gospels. Yet these skeptical scholars have often uncritically accepted sources or hypotheses on far less evidence than the reports available in our traditional Gospels. (Some of these scholars built much, for example, on the Secret Gospel of Mark, now shown to be a recent forgery.) For a scholar who disagrees with more skeptical scholars to be genuinely uncritical would mean that she is unaware of the skeptical scholars’ arguments and has never thought through her own. For more skeptical scholars to deride less skeptical scholars as uncritical simply because the latter do not find the former’s arguments persuasive is to substitute name-calling for dialogue. This is what we call an “ad hominem argument,” and ad hominem arguments certainly are not good logic (sometimes employed most vociferously, in fact, where the evidence is weakest). Some leading scholars in the field warn that no one is free from assumptions, and that the presuppositions of skeptics are no more valuefree than those of believers. 1 In fact, as most scholars recognize, we cannot know anything very specific about Jesus (excluding, say, his Palestinian Jewish environment) apart from the earliest documents that tell us about him. 2 Reports about Jesus include a brief report in Josephus, mention in two Roman historians, perhaps a few snippets of information here and there, but especially and at significant length early Christian tradition. That is, those most apt to preserve reports about Jesus were those to whom he most mattered — his followers. (We know far less about various other Judean prophets like Theudas precisely because no movement persisted interested in preserving their teachings. Why a movement persisted in the case of Jesus rather than Theudas is a different question worthy of mention in ch. 22.) We may talk about his followers’ “biases” toward him, but ultimately we have little beyond these sources to work with, and if we want to talk about the “historical Jesus,” we must focus on the nature of our sources. In the end, our most complete sources are the traditional ones, though we must approach them with critical acumen. How historically reliable are these “best” sources? That question is the primary subject of this book.

Limitations of This Book Given the size of the book, I have had to defer one major topic (questions concerning Gospel reports of miracles) for a separate work. Moreover, to keep the book within its promised size constraints, I have focused on several key themes, rather than trying to treat the subject exhaustively. That is, I have neither tried to survey all that has been written (I confess this with genuine apologies to those with whose works I have failed to engage) nor tried to evaluate every incident or saying in the gospel tradition (despite offering a number of examples). 3 In contrast to my more detailed work on the Gospels, I am not working pericope by pericope here. Nor am I taking time to challenge attempts to harmonize all details in the Gospels; I am taking for granted that my readers know better. Students regularly consult synopses on the Gospels, comparing and contrasting parallel pericopes; they are thus aware that the Gospel writers both draw on a common pool of information at many points, and also exercise literary freedoms uncharacteristic of modern (though, I will argue, not ancient) writers on historical topics. To take one graphic example, whereas Mark (reflecting his Palestinian tradition) reports supplicants digging through a roof to reach Jesus, in Luke they tear off the roof tiles — an image more understandable to Luke’s northern Mediterranean audience. 4 I think it is fair to surmise that those who protest the theological impossibility of such differences have never taken time to honestly and closely compare parallel texts in the Gospels. For the sake of space, I will not seek to demonstrate such points that are selfevident in the Gospels themselves and barely ever in dispute among biblical scholars. Rather, I will argue instead that such adaptations appear within the acceptable bounds of ancient biography, historiography, and oral tradition. Yet I also wish to emphasize that the Gospels, like comparable ancient works, contain such adaptations in contrast to a novelistic, wholesale creation of events. Because works with historical interest and focused on recent events were expected to report genuine events, but had some flexibility in how they reported them, my focus is largely on events and patterns of teaching rather than on details. The clear evidence for historical tradition in the Gospels (not least being the conspicuous dependence of Luke and Matthew on sources) rules out assigning them to the genre category of novel, and thus invites us to explore the ways they used historical tradition where we can test this use. I am not attempting to survey all works on the historical Jesus, which continue to be published at a rapid rate. While interacting with secondary literature on a subject is an important scholarly enterprise, it is not the purpose of this book. Some important works (such as A.-J. Levine’s Misunderstood Jew) came to my attention too late in the research process; many others are excluded neither for reasons of chronology nor content, but simply because interacting with further conversation partners than I already had would have taken this book in a direction different from its intended purpose. I also do not intend to interact with Bart Ehrman’s textual objections to the reliability of the early Christian sources that include the Gospels, since these objections are not relevant to the main thrust of this book. One need not argue that the entire text of the Gospels as we have them is accurate; most scholars, in fact (including most conservative ones), will agree with most of Ehrman’s major textual decisions (e.g., the inauthenticity of Mk 16:9-20 or Jn 7:53-8:11). 5 Observing that most scholars have not been driven to agnosticism by these textual issues, one scholar suggests that Ehrman’s agnostic response to them reflects his rigidly conservative background; if the text is either completely right or completely wrong, Ehrman’s skepticism is a logical conclusion. Most biblical scholars do not insist on such a forced choice, just as most historians would not. 6 (Ehrman himself has more recently attributed his agnosticism to the problem of suffering in the world, which appears to me to make far more understandable sense as an objection, though not one that draws on his text-critical expertise.) Even if the textual situation were far more muddled than it is, what we have is sufficient for general conclusions. For example, this book will later point to a number of Jewish parallels with Jesus’ teachings, parallels hardly introduced to the Gospels by later Egyptian Christian scribes! 7

The Book’s Objective Although the book involves scholarly work in ancient sources, I have tried to avoid extensive technical jargon from my guild (at least without explaining it first). I have tried to keep the book short and understandable enough to be useful not only to scholars but to students and former students of the subject, as well as others sufficiently interested in the topic to engage ancient sources. 8 Let me explain first what I am not doing. First, my focus will be on the historical sources more than reconstructing yet another new portrait of Jesus. In the second part of the book I will provide a sketch of some of what we can say about Jesus historically based on our sources. Before turning to that, however, I must first establish which sources are genuinely reliable, the extent to which they are reliable, and why they are reliable to that extent. Even in the second part of the book, one of my primary objectives is to show that our sources frequently fit Jesus’ context and the most plausible historical reconstructions of Jesus’ ministry and plan. Second, in contrast to my attempts in some of my more detailed scholarly work to interact with the majority of scholars writing on the subject, I have drawn the net more narrowly here in hopes of keeping this work briefer and more readable. The interested reader can find many other useful works that survey Jesus scholarship, 9 work I do not seek to duplicate here. Third, although I have elsewhere defended the likelihood of substantial historical information in the Fourth Gospel, 10 I draw on that argument very rarely here, for two reasons: (1) The book already has grown longer than my prospectus to the publisher promised, and readers have access to my arguments concerning John’s Gospel elsewhere; and (2) There is sufficient material in the more widely accepted Synoptic sources to make the book’s point. John’s Gospel is different from the others and poses special problems, and there are enough issues of controversy involved in the present discussion that it seemed superfluous to add another one. 11 Fourth, I should make clear for other readers what scholars often take for granted. As scholars often point out, 12 claims based on research concerning the “historical Jesus” are not intended to be identical to claiming a complete or even representative knowledge of the Jesus who lived in the first century. What can be known of Jesus through historical methods, like what can be known of almost anyone by means of such methods, is only a shadow of how the person would have been experienced by those who knew the person. 13 The historical enterprise proceeds based on probabilities and works from a limited base of evidence; it is therefore limited in the claims it makes. (It is certainly not identical with what most believers mean by a “faith” perspective, although this difference of approach does not mean that historians must denigrate a faith perspective in its own sphere.) 14 As Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz point out, historical research by virtue of its character does not “say, ‘That’s what it was’, but, ‘It could have been like that on the basis of the sources.” 15 Or as James Charlesworth puts it, “Historical research is scientific by method but not by conclusion; the historian at best can provide us not with certainty but with probability.” 16 John Meier, too, reckons that the historical method can give us only a partial picture of the Jesus who lived in history. 17 Beyond this observation, reconstructions vary widely based on whether we use minimalist historical criteria (admitting only the most certain evidence), a more maximalist approach (admitting any evidence not clearly inadmissible), or some approach in between these two extremes. Minimalists and maximalists both keep us honest about the outer limits of our historical evidence. The former, for example, help us not to assume more certainty for the elements used for our reconstruction than is publicly defensible; the latter invite us to work creatively with as much evidence as possible to produce a cohesive portrait rather than arguing from silence beyond the boundaries of our knowledge. Scholars may hold various personal convictions (whether religious or not), but we use the constraints of historical method so that we can dialogue with others who may differ from our other assumptions while we nevertheless work together academically on the basis of shared methodological assumptions. Like all scholars (though I think not more than most scholars), I write with my own presuppositions. For those who are interested in the question, I began my interest in questions about religion and, to a much lesser extent, biblical perspectives from a position of extreme (though not totally closed-minded) skepticism, as an atheist. As one who is now a Christian I approach the subject with a special interest I previously lacked, but an interest that I believe makes me more rather than less committed to investigating genuine historical information about Jesus. When I was an atheist I never imagined that my life would take this turn, but I harbor no regrets that it has. Even when I was an atheist I valued pursuing truth, regardless of where it might lead.

Jesus and Judaism I believe that reasons for my emphasis on Jewish sources in this volume should be evident. Whatever else scholars may say about Jesus with confidence, we certainly can say that Jesus was Jewish. One problem in much modern New Testament scholarship is that scholars tend to be particularly competent either in the early Jewish context or in the larger Greco-Roman context of the New Testament. I trust that those who see my work on Acts (Hendrickson) or Paul’s Corinthian correspondence (Cambridge) will recognize that I work in nonJewish Greco-Roman sources as well as in Jewish ones. I trust that the early chapters of this book will demonstrate the same; while Jesus was a Galilean Jew, the finished form of our Gospels reflects approaches to genre that prevailed in the writers’ own Diaspora (non-Palestinian) setting. Yet the more Diasporafriendly Gospels, written in Greek, are to at least that extent removed from the specific milieu in which Jesus primarily ministered. One therefore expects more Palestinian Jewish elements to reflect prior tradition. I prefer a more specifically Jewish context for studying Jesus historically not because I have not studied the other sources, but for two methodological reasons: First, Jesus was a Galilean Jew, for whom Palestinian Jewish sources provide the closest cultural context. Second, as I inductively worked through ancient literature over the years, I often found much closer Palestinian Jewish parallels to Jesus’ speech and actions (sometimes down to turns of phrase) than in other sources. (By contrast, my non-Jewish sources proved more helpful for understanding early Christian writers addressing audiences with a larger Gentile membership.) Because Hellenism influenced Judaism far more than the reverse, sources with mixed influences (apart from some magical texts) are typically Jewish, not non-Jewish. Of course, even Judean Judaism had a larger Greco-Roman context that should be taken into account, but scholars who have worked through only the non-Jewish sources are at a disadvantage in understanding Jesus in his context. (To give a specific example: most “Cynic” parallels for Jesus fit the image of a Jewish prophet better.) For the Gospels, written in Greek and addressing a more cosmopolitan audience, I do draw on the wider range of sources. Although I employ the entire range of Jewish sources in seeking to understand Jesus’ teaching, current debates compel me to offer a brief word of justification for one circle of these sources. Some scholars today are particularly skeptical of employing material from ancient rabbis, a skepticism that I must here briefly acknowledge and hence to which I must respond. It is certainly true that all rabbinic sources in their written form come from after the time of Jesus. (No rabbinic documents precede the early third century, although many traditions are earlier, especially from c. 70-c. 200.) Nevertheless, Jesus was a sage, and consequently some striking parallels appear with sayings of rabbis that are recorded only in later sources (as well as parallels with earlier sage material such as Sirach). Given the limitations of what sources have remained extant, close parallels in material that cannot depend on the Gospels may suggest common sources in earlier Jewish customs, story lines, figures of speech, reasoning patterns and so forth. I have argued at length elsewhere that these sources can be used to help us understand such early ideas or customs. (Later rabbis certainly were not normally deliberately echoing Jesus, and many commonalities prove too close for coincidence.) I have also suggested that New Testament scholars who avoid this material completely for chronological reasons have for the most part misunderstood the warnings about their abuse (which pertain to more particular kinds of information). 18 No major argument in the book rests on the dating of this material, however, and these remain simply one source of information among many. (Sometimes I cite them purely as illustrations of how early Jewish traditions documented elsewhere came to be fleshed out more concretely in these voluminous collections.) Most importantly, it should be noted, even for those who disagree with my approach, that using such material to suggest that some customs or ideas were traditional in some Jewish circles differs substantially from a much greater anachronism I critique at some points in this book — namely, taking later Christian documents (whether gnostic or otherwise) and using them to reconstruct sources alleged to be superior to our extant first-century ones. I seek to give preference to the earlier sources (such as Josephus, Qumran or the Gospels), and secondarily to those later sources (here including rabbinic literature) that are independent (or almost completely independent) from Christian sources.

Notes about Style In capitalizing the titles of “Gospels,” I am following current literary convention, not asserting a theological position. My use of “C.E.” refers to the “common era,” a phrase many scholars use for the same period popularly designated as “A.D.,” but without thereby implying a theological position (“Anno domini,” “in the year of the Lord”). In using “Palestine,” I am following the standard literary convention of most works in biblical studies for Judea, Galilee, and Samaria; I am not, as a reviewer once complained, making any political statement about modern Middle Eastern affairs. (This is also the case when in some contexts I employ the biblical designation “Israel” for the Jewish people.) Although some now use “Judean” for all first-century Jews (including those in the Diaspora), I simply follow the common usage here that is current at the moment without entering that debate. Nonspecialist readers should also take note of some essential terms that will recur repeatedly in this book: “Synoptics” refers to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (called “synoptic” because they overlap so much). “Eschatology” usually refers to what pertains to the “end time,” or to a future era distinct from the present one. “Tradition” refers to information passed on over time, typically orally. When historians speak of “prophets” and “healers,” they normally are using categories from the movements they describe, rather than offering statements of their own belief

Conclusion My primary goal in this book is not so much to add another reconstruction of the “historical Jesus” (although I will expend much of the second half of the book suggesting where I believe the evidence of the best sources points in that regard). My primary goal is rather to investigate how much we can know from the best sources available, and to offer examples of how these sources provide us more adequate information about Jesus than many scholars think we have. If we focus on the earliest sources and approach them with the increased confidence that I believe they warrant, we will arrive at a fuller, more multifaceted picture of Jesus than some single-emphasis portraits of earlier scholarship have permitted.

SECTION I - DISPARATE VIEWS ABOUT JESUS 

“Those who are fond of talking about negative theology can find their account here. There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the Life of Jesus.” ALBERT SCHWEITZER 1

 “Even under the discipline of attempting to envision Jesus against his own most proper Jewish background, it seems we can have as many pictures as there are exegetes. . . . [Their] stunning diversity is an academic embarrassment. It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.” JOHN DOMINIC CROSSAN 2 

In this section I will merely summarize and evaluate some sample proposals in Jesus research. It is not my intention to engage all authors who have written important works on the subject; 3 others have provided more detailed, booklength surveys of the historical and present “quests” for Jesus. 4 For me to repeat their work, except as at most a thumbnail sketch, would digress too long from this book’s primary purpose. I offer this survey of several views primarily to show the diversity of scholarly opinion, hence to demonstrate why one’s choice of sources and methodology is extremely important. 

Despite the limits of my survey, however, we can learn from history, including the history of scholarship, and this history in turn includes its record of failures. Academic history has passed a negative verdict on most of the past two centuries of “historical Jesus” research, which has more often than not replaced earlier conclusions with newer ones, only to find the newer ones themselves displaced. 5 While quests for the historical Jesus start with the reasonable assumption that later orthodox christology should not be read into our earliest accounts about Jesus, they have too often read Jesus in light of too narrow a background (e.g., only a revolutionary, solely a teacher, just a prophet, or exclusively some other category, but often not more than one at a time) or as a reflection of their own values. 6 More recent scholarship has sometimes (though as we shall see, not always) avoided the pitfall of narrow reconstructions. 7 In our own partial reconstruction later in the book, we shall endeavor to avoid the forced category-choices and welcome whatever aspects of Jesus’ activity the evidence of our best sources yields. Nevertheless, even such attempts to synthesize earlier insights inevitably inherit and make use of the categories of previous scholarship. Most helpfully, recent scholarship has increasingly (though not always) focused on the Galilean Jewish setting of Jesus, a perspective invaluable for reconstructing Jesus’ true message and activity

CHAPTER 1 - The Development of Jesus Scholarship 

Each of the next three chapters offers only the briefest summary of views, by way of introducing some of the diverse ideas about Jesus in the past few centuries of academic discussion. Although outsiders sometimes think of scholarship as monolithic (depending on how many books on the subject they have read), “historical Jesus” research has proved to be anything but monolithic. The “assured results” of one generation or school are usually challenged in the next. John Dominic Crossan put the matter well nearly two decades ago: “Historical Jesus research is becoming something of a scholarly bad joke,” due, he noted, to “the number of competent and even eminent scholars producing pictures of Jesus at wide variance with one another.” 1 Consensus has been elusive, 2 as our summary of views in these next three chapters is intended to illustrate. Likewise, whereas outsiders often think of scholarship as dispassionate and objective, scholarship is in fact often driven by scholars’ assumptions, which are in turn often the product of the ideas dominant in their own era. Biographers and historians addressing other ancient figures might interpret their subjects sympathetically, but Jesus scholarship has developed this tendency more than most. In an era that emphasized Christian ethics, writers about Jesus often portrayed him as the epitome of such ethics. In a setting that emphasized a form of existentialism, some scholars presented him as existentialism’s greatest voice. Today, too, we have our variety of contextually packaged, readily marketable “Jesus” figures. While such mundane contextualizations are to be preferred to the Third Reich’s “Aryan” Jesus, they still run a serious risk of distorting and malforming what we know about Jesus. Indeed, if we are interested in the Jesus who lived and died in first-century Galilee, we would do better to read him in the very context that the Reich Church most abhorred — Jesus’Judaism. 3

Earlier Modern “Historical Jesus” 
The current quest — today almost a market — in “Jesus” research builds on a long modern tradition. Some of that tradition bespeaks the courage of inquirers willing to suffer for their convictions (whether against the hostility of theologians or that of skeptics); some of it warns of authors pandering to their market niches in the most profitable manner. The Renaissance emphasis on a return to the sources invited scholars to look for the “original” Jesus behind the portrayals of Medieval dogma. While this inquiry initially remained a pious quest, it was inevitably shaped by the presuppositions about the nature of history with which its scholars worked. Thus sixteenth-century English Deists 4 worked with different presuppositions about what was “possible” than did those of more traditional Christian persuasion. The radical Enlightenment’s prejudice against divine or supernatural causation eventually shaped much of Jesus research. Although the reason that Albert Schweitzer’s famous history of the Jesus quest 5 starts with Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768) may be that Reimarus fits the trajectory Schweitzer wished to emphasize, Reimarus offers an adequate beginning for our summary. Reimarus’ work was a polemic rather than an objective historical study, and his work circulated openly only after his death. 6 Today scholars regard most of Reimarus’ views as wrong, but we can appreciate at least his emphasis on Jesus’ Jewish context (introduced by others before him). 7 Yet once Reimarus’ work pried open previously repressed academic possibilities, some others soon joined attempts to explain the gospel tradition without regard to the miracle claims so offensive to the radical Enlightenment understanding of “reason.” Thus Karl Friedrich Bahrdt wrote of Essenes as a secret society that offered medical and psychosomatic cures. They and Jesus accommodated superstition, Bahrdt supposed, merely to communicate rational truth. 8 Likewise, Karl Heinrich Venturini opined that Jesus healed with medicaments, always carrying his medicine chest as he traveled around. 9 Both Bahrdt and Venturini seem to have conveniently overestimated ancient medical capabilities. More influentially, David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74) endeavored to “demythologize” the gospel portrait of Jesus, seeking to recover the original story behind the later descriptions by stripping or explaining away what he deemed impossible. The “Jesus” such writers produced was a modern rational Jesus amenable to their own tastes. 10 Schweitzer contends that scholars in this “rational phase” of Jesus research sometimes made historically irrational choices (such as preferring John’s testimony to that of the Synoptics) to achieve their portrait. 11 Shaped by Romanticism, most nineteenth-century authors of “lives of Jesus” produced a romantic Jesus, a Jesus of noble sentiment who appealed to likeminded audiences (and, coincidentally, helped sell many of the authors’ books). (Schweitzer complains that one of the most famous of these authors, Ernest Renan, was more interested in his literary public than in scientific objectivity.) 12 Although writers produced a vast number of these “lives,” their basic character remained substantially the same. 13

Studies An Example: Adolf von Harnack’s Civilized Jesus 

One of the last great works in the tradition of nineteenth-century “liberal” lives of Jesus was that of Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930), one of the most revered academicians of his era. Harnack’s work on the “essence of Christianity” (now available as What Is Christianity?) offered essentially an apologetic for liberal Christianity, that is, a Christianity that could accommodate the claims of his era’s modernity. 14 Thus he sought to present the “gospel” in a form relevant to his own time, addressing objections posed by his milieu. 15 He placed heavy emphasis on cultural religion, regarding Protestantism as a notably German contribution to civilization. 16 In keeping with the spirit of his day, he reduced the essential gospel to ethics, 17 and demythologized Jesus’ message of the kingdom to God’s rule in the individual heart 18 or religious enlightenment. Producing a Jesus in keeping with the values of his day, he notes that the true kernel of Jesus’ teaching was far more modern than the ancient husk through which it came. 19 This quest for the true (modern) kernel seems to constitute his historical criterion for establishing the “oldest tradition” about Jesus. 20 Harnack does view the more Jewish portrait of Jesus as earlier and more authentic to Jesus. 21 Nevertheless, he argues that the goal of Jesus’ teachings, while nurtured in Judaism, 22 is safely beyond it. 23 Accommodating “modern” perspectives, he regards the belief that life has vanquished death as more important than anything that might have happened historically at Jesus’ grave; 24 like many after him, he distinguishes between an objective, historical resurrection and the Easter faith. 25 Yet whatever Harnack’s view of the matter theologically, his interpretation of the evidence is quite different from that of the “primitive” apostolic church he in some other respects valued. Historically, they did not separate their Easter faith from the claim that Jesus returned from the dead; mere hope in afterlife or returned spirits offended almost no one and would not have provided a defining boundary for the movement. Unfortunately, divesting the Jesus movement of such elements foreign to modern thought appears to have been part of the price of eliminating the offensive Jewish eschatology of Jesus and his first followers. While Harnack notes that Jesus and his disciples were bounded by their time, 26 it seems also the case that, despite occasional forays against the assumptions of his milieu, 27 Harnack was no less a child of his own, and unapologetically so. 28 For all the positive elements in Harnack’s perspectives, he could not have guessed the dangers that such enculturated Christianity would lead to with the “Aryan Christianity” of the Reich Church a generation later. Individualistic, inward religion may have its value, but it proved more malleable to the cultural demands of anti-Semitic nationalism than respect for a first-century Jewish sage would have. 29 This is not to blame Harnack or his peers for an outcome they could not have foreseen; it is to object to a vision of Jesus so wedded to our own cultural settings that we lose sight of Jesus’ original historical (Jewish and Middle Eastern) setting. Harnack’s optimistic Jesus, designed for modern western readers, perished in the bloodshed of the first world war. 30

The Apocalyptic Jesus of Weiss and Schweitzer 
In 1906 Albert Schweitzer’s survey and devastating 31 critique of previous modern Jesus scholarship 32 put an end to much of the “Jesus” industry of his day. (Schweitzer was also a good marketer: he presented his own view as the natural product of the evolution of sound thinking.) 33 Although Schweitzer’s survey of previous Jesus research was selective and somewhat tendentious, it was sufficient to establish his central point regarding the history of scholarship. His point was that Jesus scholars had produced a Jesus in their own image, to their own liking. Not unlike some preachers and perhaps a few scholars today, 34 they had used respect for Jesus to promulgate their own ideology. Schweitzer’s own portrait of Jesus drew from recent work by Johannes Weiss (1863-1914), who had argued, against his nineteenth-century predecessors, that Jesus proclaimed the world’s imminent end, a prediction that then failed to occur. His emphasis on the future character of the “kingdom” Jesus proclaimed, based on Jesus’ early Jewish context, offered an important challenge to his predecessors’ “liberal” lives of Jesus. 35 Weiss was not ignorant of his era’s scholarship; 36 rather, he addressed particular questions precisely because these questions were being answered differently in his milieu. 37 Eschatology (emphasis on the impending end of the age) was central in Weiss’s reconstruction of Jesus’ teaching. For example, he notes that Jesus’ expression “Son of man” is eschatological imagery; 38 this perspective coheres with Jesus’ proclamation of God’s end-time kingdom. Weiss believes that Jesus expected the kingdom to come immediately (cf. Mk 13:32) 39 or in the next generation. 40 Granted, Weiss sometimes overplayed eschatology. For example, he sometimes 41 may play down too much the rarer texts that could emphasize the presence of the kingdom; 42 for example, “entering the kingdom” in the present becomes for him merely “entering the way that leads to the kingdom.” 43 Like some other “Jesus” scholars, Weiss sometimes draws the net of context too narrowly, in this case exploiting only apocalyptic background. Thus, for example, he traces Jesus’ messianic consciousness to his consciousness of his sonship 44 in an apocalyptic context, 45 even though God’s Fatherhood is a pervasive theme throughout Jesus’Jewish environment. 46 Like Weiss, Schweitzer drew on Jesus’ Jewish, and especially eschatological (“end-time”), environment to portray a more Jewish Jesus than the one embraced by some of his contemporaries, who were generally more interested in “relevant” theology or preaching. Similarly, Schweitzer shared many of the critical assumptions of his era’s biblical scholarship, 47 though like Weiss, not always consistently. 48 He regards Jesus as apocalyptic rather than as a modern rationalist, 49 and observes that an eschatological outlook often suggests the authenticity of early traditions. 50 Unfortunately, like Weiss, he defines ancient Jewish perspectives too narrowly in terms of apocalyptic pseudepigrapha. 51 Nevertheless, scholars have often observed that, regardless of their excesses, “there is no going back behind Weiss and Schweitzer.” 52 Yet Schweitzer’s own conclusions seemed disillusioning for both his own faith and that of many other liberal Christians: Jesus was a deluded (if heroic) apocalyptist dreamer. 53 Of course, Schweitzer found a friendlier way to put this: Jesus’ spirit, in his useful teachings, lives on among his followers. 54 Schweitzer’s emphasis on eschatology or Jesus’ Jewish context would not necessarily have the same effect today. Whereas his generation had little use for eschatology, two world wars, rampant genocide and other factors have since reinvigorated it; 55 oppressed people naturally often resonate with the hopes of a better world more than content people do. 56 This was not, however, Schweitzer’s milieu, and his emphasis on Jesus’ eschatological framework was for him an act of brutal academic honesty. Eschatology did not “preach” well in his circles.

Bultmann 

For some time after Schweitzer’s critique, scholars generally showed much less interest in producing “lives” of Jesus or even producing much scholarship about Jesus’ life. 57 Schweitzer’s argument had decisively altered western liberal Jesus scholarship by producing a Jesus that seemed less useful to the theologians who made Jesus their primary concern. No longer did it appear possible to deny that Jesus’ worldview was apocalyptic; yet liberal western academia deemed the apocalyptic worldview no longer relevant. (In fact this worldview was flourishing outside those circles, especially since the spread of dispensational premillennialism in the U.S.; but when academia took notice of such circles, its notice was not positive.) How could theologians reclaim a Jesus whose message was deemed so irrelevant to good theology? Rudolf Bultmann sought to find a way. 58 He employed the critical tools of his day 59 (though, like most of his predecessors, he did use material in addition to “Q” and Mark). 60 Nevertheless, he remained deeply interested in relevance. 61 Whereas the “Aryan Christians” had tried to make Christianity relevant to a German nationalism recovering from international abuse after the first world war, Bultmann sought a different tack. 62 Bultmann’s apologetic strategy was to demythologize Jesus’ message to make it “relevant” for his day. Yes, the form of Jesus’ message was apocalyptic, but the real nature of that message was existential: God coming as the demander. 63

The Existential Jesus 

While acknowledging Schweitzer’s apocalyptic Jesus, Bultmann theologically circumvented it. Perhaps insufficiently heedful of Schweitzer’s critique of nonapocalyptic Jesuses made in the interpreters’ image, 64 Bultmann created a Jesus relevant to the reigning philosophic paradigm of his own day, especially at the University of Marburg, where he taught. 65 His Jesus preached an existential message akin to that of the university’s renowned philosopher, Martin Heidegger. 66 Bultmann could then accommodate historical skepticism to the fullest, welcoming skeptics to the fold, because he had nothing theologically to lose from it. 67 History could not affect Jesus’ existential message, and this translation for Bultmann’s secular audience could make his Jesus appealing even to those for whom philosophic assumptions had rendered traditional faith impossible. Bultmann felt that realized eschatology (the future promises fulfilled in the present) within the New Testament itself showed that the delay of Jesus’ “return” had already led to this process of reinterpretation in the first century. 68 The problem, of course, is that in most NT documents this realized eschatology stands alongside and anticipates future eschatology as well (see e.g., Rom 8:23; 1 Cor 2:9-10; 15:50-54; Phil 1:23; 3:20-21). Bultmann often deployed a form of “content criticism” in which texts that disagreed with his interpretation were declared in conflict with the genuine spirit of New Testament theology. 69 One danger in producing a Jesus relevant primarily to one’s own era, whether “conservative,” “liberal,” or something else, is that this Jesus is ultimately not very relevant to other cultures or other eras. 70 It has not surprisingly proved much easier to recontextualize the Jesus of the Gospels for other settings than to recontextualize Bultmann’s Jesus. Indeed, Bultmann’s largely skeptical approach to history did not even leave enough information about the “original” Jesus for scholars to rework. Bultmann’s critics complain that the existential approach to Jesus “dehistoricizes” Jesus, taking him out of his first-century context; 71 the relevance of an existential Jesus has naturally faded with the marketability of existentialism. Many have argued that Bultmann was obsessed with a now outof-date worldview. 72 

De-Judaizing Jesus? 

Just as earlier Jesus scholars selected those elements of the Gospels that fit their ideal portrait of Jesus, Bultmann could do much the same. While a better historical scholar than most of his predecessors, all he actually needed for his portrait of Jesus was the “existential” core of his teaching. He wondered if Palestinian Jewish Christianity would have really preserved much information about Jesus 73 (contrary to what we will observe about oral tradition in ch. 10). Although Bultmann allowed more of Jesus’ “Jewishness” than had some of his predecessors, 74 his criterion of dissimilarity laid heavier emphasis on points where he thought that Jesus differed from his Jewish environment. 75 Thus, for example, his Jesus attacked the law as a formal legal authority 76 and is antithetical to the OT and contemporary Judaism. 77 Moreover, although Bultmann had more knowledge of Judaism than some of his critics have implied, 78 it appears to have been limited and either secondhand or (often) sifted through severely distorted assumptions. 79 Most critically, the view of (rabbinic) Judaism he inherited from some of his teachers was excessively legalistic, 80 and no more than a shadow of what can now be known about real Judaism in Jesus’ day (as many scholars would agree that Bultmann’s Jesus was only a shadow of what can be known about the historical Jesus). Worse, Bultmann often uncritically stressed non-Jewish, “gnostic” elements in Christian origins, including a gnostic redeemer myth pieced together from disparate, much later sources. 81 If his minimalist historical Jesus was Jewish, nevertheless he spawned a movement the substance of which became unrecognizable to Judaism with astonishing swiftness. When some lines of Jesus research today deemphasize Jesus’ Jewishness in favor of Greek philosophic and other background, often producing a portrait of Jesus particularly “relevant” to its modern philosophic audience, one wonders how far we have come beyond either Bultmann or his pre-Schweitzer predecessors. 82 One need not agree with all of Schweitzer’s views to appreciate his historical honesty. While Bultmann’s historical skepticism reduced interest in historical Jesus research among his followers, some of them revisited the subject. In 1953 Ernst Käsemann announced a new quest for the historical Jesus, and in 1956 another Bultmannian, Günther Bornkamm, wrote a work about Jesus. 83 Such “Second Questers” did not venture as far beyond Bultmann as most of the so-called 84 “Third Questers” have, but returning to interest in the Jesus of history was at least an improvement (from historians’standpoint). We will introduce recent views in the next two chapters, but will first turn our attention to what has usually been considered an idiosyncratic view from the 1960s. The purpose of this digression is to reinforce our larger portrait of the diversity within Jesus research

Jesus the Revolutionary? 

Several decades ago, S. G. F. Brandon envisioned Jesus as a zealot. 85 Such an approach was not entirely new; two centuries earlier, Reimarus had interpreted the kingdom against the backdrop of Jewish resistance against Roman oppression. 86 While viewing Jesus as a revolutionary would make sense of Jesus’ execution and “kingdom” language, it is hardly the best explanation of these features. Most extant Jewish use of “kingdom” language is not linked to revolutionaries, and a number of prophetic figures (most obviously John the Baptist, as noted in Josephus) 87 managed to get martyred without leading military revolts. (Romans also suppressed most rebels militarily, unlike Jesus.) Brandon’s view is important to us not because it is widely held today; in its fullest form of “Jesus as zealot” it is in fact virtually dead. But Brandon’s view illustrates the diversity within Jesus research, and also serves as a warning about the politics of the academy. Today, for example, there are scholars who make Jesus virtually a Cynic sage. Brandon’s thesis may have been mistaken, but at least it exhibited the virtue of placing Jesus within a genuine first-century Jewish context, rather than importing a context that existed in Galilee barely if at all. 

Was Jesus a Revolutionary? 

Was Jesus a revolutionary? Against Brandon, 88 little evidence connects Jesus with insurrectionist activity; one can unfortunately argue almost any case when one rejects as unreliable the only historical evidence we have. 89 Revolutionary sentiments may have been widespread, shared even by many Pharisees and (before the war of 66-73 CE) some younger Sadducean priests. With that said, those actually directly involved in insurrectionary-type activity or even brigandage around the time of Jesus’ ministry must have been at most a small percentage of the population (see Appendix 1). Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see how some would have understood his popular appeal to the masses and open challenges to some social customs as potential political threats. 90 Indeed, his preaching about God’s “kingdom” could not but have some sort of political implications, 91 whether achieved in the present or the (possibly near) future, through human agents or without them. 92 Contrary to the assumptions of some western academicians today, theology and politics were not mutually exclusive interests in antiquity 93 (or in some parts of the world today). Yet Jesus’ actions (discussed later in the book) place him closer to another category of activity of his day, namely, the paradigm that depended on God to intervene supernaturally to consummate his kingdom. Josephus reports several prophetic figures who sought not to attack Rome but to produce signs of divine deliverance; apparently they expected God to act on their behalf. Nevertheless, because they (in contrast to John or Jesus) had armed followers, Rome’s soldiers intervened militarily; Jesus may have been more nonresistant than they. Similarly, Sanders 94 cites the repeated expectation in some strands of early Jewish literature that God would bring down a new Temple, 95 or fight for Israel and bring in the kingdom by his own power. 96 Jesus may have overturned tables in and pronounced judgment on the temple of his day to prepare the way for a new one, yet done so as a prophetic sign, expecting God himself to bring about the kingdom. Assuming that Jesus waited on God to act, submitting (as we will argue later in the book) even to an execution that he might have been able to avoid, those interested in Jesus for theological questions will ask, “Did God act as Jesus expected?” Some, following Schweitzer’s line of argument, contend that Jesus went to the cross as a deluded visionary, vainly hoping to provoke God’s hand. (In this, he would be like prophetic figures soon after him who expected God to make the Jordan part or Jerusalem’s walls collapse.) Others, impressed by his teaching about a hidden kingdom (Mk 4:30-32) or the value of martyrdom (Mk 8:34-38), affirm instead that Jesus by dying accomplished exactly what he intended. One can affirm this much without asking the further theological question about whether God acted as Jesus expected, beyond Jesus’ execution. Jesus presumably expected to be raised; most Palestinian Jews apparently expected resurrection and reward at the end of the age. If Jesus expected a vindication earlier than this, one cannot answer the theological question without examining the question of his resurrection (introduced in ch. 22; Appendix 8). In any case, we must at least leave open the possibility that Jesus intended to die a martyr’s death in Jerusalem, and that he believed that this death would activate an important phase in God’s plan. 

Popular Views about Jesus 

The context Brandon offers for Jesus may be inadequate, but it is not without all merit. Whatever Jesus’ own intentions, some followers were likely attracted to the possibility of a charismatic figure strong enough not only to produce healings and exorcisms but to lead the people to political liberation (cf. Jn 6:15). In many cultures, oppressed peasants naturally sympathize with resistance movements, and some scholars have argued for such a situation in Judea, 97 most clearly in the first Judean revolt. 98 This proposal is also useful in reminding us that Jesus was in fact executed as a revolutionary; 99 this role was a natural way for the elite to view, or at least to dispose of, a wilderness or Galilean prophet. That Jesus was executed on the charge of claiming “kingship” is virtually certain (see discussion in chs. 18, 21); and even a prophet figure passively awaiting God’s intervention (as perhaps some of Josephus’ sign-prophets were) could threaten the stability of society by stirring hopes of Rome’s overthrow. Yet at least some Judeans, like Josephus, apparently did not share this view of Jesus. 100 Josephus presents John the Baptist and Jesus differently from the wilderness prophets whose armed followers suggested a threat to the authorities. This evidence suggests that John and Jesus did not advocate violent revolution, despite the charge conveniently leveled against the popular teacher Jesus. 101 What survived of Jesus’ teachings confirms this suggestion. As we shall argue later in the book, Jesus expected both a kingdom and a role for himself in that kingdom. But he expected this to occur solely by God’s intervention, and voluntarily offered himself for martyrdom in expectation of that intervention. 

Jesus on Nonresistance 

The preserved sayings of Jesus do not naturally lend themselves to the interpretation that Jesus was a revolutionary, 102 apart from a few sayings that fit Jesus’ use of hyperbole and shocking metaphor. 103 For example, the words that Mark attributes to Jesus on the week before his crucifixion, “Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s” (Mk 12:17), do not sound like a revolutionary. Jesus’ beatitudes may criticize oppression, but they emphasize the way of dependence on God rather than resistance or any attempt to seize the kingdom (Lk 6:20-23; especially Matt 5:3-12). Jesus teaches radical nonretaliation (Matt 5:38-47; 7:1; Lk 6:27-37). Although he was not unique in teaching against avenging oneself, 104 he was certainly emphatic about it. Yet Jesus takes this ethic of nonretaliation to its furthest possible length when he invites disciples not only to refuse to strike back, but to rejoice when persecuted (Matt 5:10-12; Lk 6:22-23). One should accommodate oppressors 105 for the sake of peace, trusting in divine reward and vindication (Matt 5:39-48; 7:1//Lk 6:27-37). In enduring persecution, his disciples would follow the model of the earlier prophets (Matt 5:12//Lk 6:23), 106 a model amplified in Jewish tradition. 107 Linked with his other teachings about radical dependence on God (e.g., Matt 6:25-33//Lk 12:22-31), such passages suggest nonretaliation not simply for its own sake, but as an act of radical dependence on God rather than oneself. As we shall see later, accepting suffering is precisely the behavior that Jesus himself models in the passion tradition; the gospel tradition as a whole is coherent on this point. At Gethsemane he refuses to resist (cf. the apparently multiply attested warning in Matt 26:52 and Jn 18:11). 108 Jesus and those of the Pharisees who advocated peace rather than revolution were ultimately vindicated when Rome brutally crushed the aspirations of the Jewish resistance in 66- 73. 109

Conclusion 

The history of Jesus scholarship illustrates the wide range of views scholars have articulated about Jesus in recent centuries. Biases and the demands of constituency affect not only popular religion, but also academic Jesus research. The presuppositions with which we start tend to dictate the way that we select our evidence about Jesus, the context in which we read that evidence about Jesus, and consequently the conclusions to which we come about Jesus. We have noted these tendencies in the liberal Jesus frequent in the Romantic era; in the apocalyptic Jesus of Weiss and Schweitzer; in the existential Jesus of Bultmann; and in the revolutionary Jesus of Brandon. Some of these approaches have offered more useful historical perspective on Jesus than others have, but all illustrate that the context in which we read our sources affects how we understand them. The following two chapters offer a few more examples of this diversity and this problem.

CHAPTER 2 - Jesus the Cynic Sage? 

“The historical Jesus was, then, a peasant Jewish Cynic. His peasant village was close enough to a Greco-Roman city like Sepphoris that sight and knowledge of Cynicism are neither inexplicable nor unlikely.” JOHN DOMINIC CROSSAN 1 

“Jesus’ use of parables, aphorisms, and clever rejoinders is very similar to the Cynics’ way with words. Many of his themes are familiar Cynic themes.” BURTON MACK 2

 “. . . especially among certain authors now or formerly connected with the Jesus Seminar, emphasis on the Jewishness of Jesus is hardly a central concern. Whether one looks at the more serious works of writers like John Dominic Crossan and Burton L. Mack or the sensationalist popular works of authors like Robert W. Funk, one finds Jesus the Cynic philosopher or Jesus the generic Mediterranean peasant . . . largely overshadowing the specific 1stcentury Palestinian Jew named Jesus.” JOHN P. MEIER 3

 Most of the approaches sampled in this chapter will be echoed later in this book less often than those treated in the following chapter. The authors surveyed here portray a Jesus who does not fit a first-century Jewish context nearly as convincingly as views to which we will turn in ch. 3. Not all of the sample views surveyed here are equally widely held among scholars, but they do illustrate the wide range of proposals that scholars have offered in recent decades. Although the “Jesus Seminar” is somewhat of an amorphous group, it has popularized the idea of Jesus as a noneschatological sage, an image that can appeal to much of our modern culture without much translation. I use the Jesus Seminar to introduce my discussion of the Cynic Jesus of Crossan and especially that of Burton Mack.

The Noneschatological Jesus Seminar 

If a revolutionary view of Jesus (such as we find in S. G. F. Brandon) takes Jesus’ kingdom language too narrowly in one way, some others manage to take it still more narrowly in a different way. Indeed, whereas Brandon at least situated Jesus in a Jewish environment, these scholars have often severed him from that environment. 

Marketable Relevance

ln recent years, the “often-maligned Jesus Seminar” 4 has produced a noneschatological Jesus that many scholars criticize as taking insufficient account of Schweitzer’s critique of earlier “lives of Jesus.” That is, their Jesus is not very Jewish, 5 not very eschatological (i.e., does not talk much about God’s distinctly future activity), and suspiciously resembles the values of the scholars who depict him. 6 The divergence from Schweitzer proves to be no mere oversight, however; the Seminar admits an agenda to displace “Schweitzer’s eschatological Jesus.” 7 The Jesus Seminar is popularly known for having voted with marbles on Jesus’ sayings. (Although voting makes some sense, 8 the use of marbles in particular was probably designed partly for marketability, since it could readily attract media attention.) 9 More critically, the method of calculating these votes has been critiqued for its subjectivity. One critic offers an example: whereas 25% of the scholars voting on the assigned day thought that Jesus surely said Matt 25:29, and another 11% thought that he likelier than not said it (for over onethird in favor), a majority thought that he either did not or probably did not say it. Thus the Seminar’s published conclusion was that Jesus did not utter the saying, even though a third of even the Seminar itself disagreed with that verdict. 10 Emory professor Luke Timothy Johnson argues that the Jesus Seminar is “an entrepreneurial venture” that speaks not for major scholarly associations (such as SBL or SNTS) but is a “self-selected” group based largely on shared “goals and methods.” 11 He notes that most major graduate academic institutions are unrepresented, that the Seminar lacks significant European representation, and that most participants have not produced major academic work in Jesus research. Moreover, well over half of the members have their doctorates from the five specific institutions where such ideas have flourished (especially from three of them, although certainly by no means do all the faculty at these institutions, still less all their graduates, hold such views). 12 (A member of the Jesus Seminar himself also laments the predominant cultural and gender homogeneity of the group.) 13 Johnson complains that the process is biased against the authenticity of Jesus’sayings 14 and that it has garnered attention by seeking the media coverage that most scholars have ignored. 15 Whatever one makes of several aspects of Johnson’s critique (some of the Seminar’s “criteria” are more mainstream than others), 16 he is certainly correct that the Jesus Seminar’s claim to speak for the broader range of scholarship is inaccurate. Unfortunately, the Seminar does publicly claim to speak for scholarship. Thus they hail their version as “the Scholars’ Version,” in contrast to other English translations (which they charge are theologically controlled). 17 They thereby concisely dismiss the scholarly integrity of hundreds of other NT scholars. Likewise, they contend, their acceptance of only 16% of the gospel accounts as historically accurate will not surprise “critical scholars,” whom they define as “those whose evaluations are not predetermined by theological considerations.” 18 Apparently they do not regard as genuinely critical or openminded the majority of NT scholars who accept much larger amounts of the gospel material as reliable than the Seminar does. These “noncritical” scholars would include many who have published more extensive scholarly work on the subject (including many of the influential volumes cited in this book) than the vast majority of Jesus Seminar members have. The Seminar in fact can accurately represent only its own narrower range of scholarship, though for much of the public its dominant voices apparently deliberately conflate its claims with the voice of scholarship more generally. For this radical group to claim to speak for Jesus scholarship more generally would be like a group of professors from fundamentalist institutions issuing a portrait of Jesus that would then be hailed as “the scholarly portrait.” The problem is not such professors summarizing the views of their own group (which is their right), but the presentation of those views as a scholarly consensus. The Jesus Seminar does not have the right to speak for scholarship as a whole. 19 

The End for the End-Times?

I will not treat the Jesus Seminar in detail here, since its target audience has been the general public (especially through popular media); the scholarly guild advances ideas in different ways. But the Jesus Seminar does help introduce one of the issues on the table in this chapter. The Jesus Seminar claims to be representative of mainstream Gospels scholarship particularly in its skepticism concerning Jesus’ eschatology — a claim that many other scholars reject. 20 Johnson complains about a particular scholar’s claim that most scholars today regard Jesus as noneschatological, pointing out that this supposed majority scholarly opinion is simply based on 59% of the Jesus Seminar, “a self-selected group of like-minded scholars (at most, seventy out of the 6,900 members of the Society of Biblical Literature).” 21 Indeed, a member of the Seminar helps explain how the Seminar’s own perspective became so emphatically noneschatological: “When the cynic school prevailed, for example, in the voting at the Jesus Seminar, the apocalyptists quit coming; this further skewed the vote.” 22 Many scholars argue that, while scholarship after Schweitzer for a time abandoned Jesus the comfortable, noneschatological sage, the pre-Schweitzer position has made its comeback in circles like the Jesus Seminar. 23 The resulting experience of déjà vu has prompted one critic to remark, “There is something disturbingly familiar about a mildly reforming, sagacious teacher, who . . . does not use language and imagery that promises the reversal of the rulers of the world.” 24 As John Meier, one of the most textually thorough scholars in Jesus research, 25 complains: A tweady poetaster who spent his time spinning out parables and Japanese koans, a literary aesthete who toyed with 1st-century deconstructionism, or a bland Jesus who simply told people to look at the lilies of the field — such a Jesus would threaten no one, just as the university professors who create him threaten no one. 26 The Seminar’s critics suggest that its view fails to explain how its harmless, noneschatological sage, like that of the nineteenth-century lives of Jesus, would get himself crucified. 27 E. P. Sanders complains that those uncomfortable with an eschatological Jesus who fit his milieu, followed John and left an eschatological church must instead resort to claiming “that everybody misunderstood Jesus completely.” This is, he opines, a position based on wishful thinking without evidence. 28 

Ignoring Jewish Environment 

In addition to challenging the eschatological content of some of Jesus’ securest sayings (see ch. 17), the noneschatological Jesus suggested by such scholars ignores basic historical constraints such as Jesus’ historical context. Jesus’ radically eschatological predecessor John and his eschatological subsequent followers make a noneschatological Jesus highly improbable. 29 Some scholars try to counter this observation by making Jesus an opponent of John’s eschatological approach. Since no extant saying of Jesus repudiates John’s eschatology, they must make this argument by means of inference. They do so particularly by contending that Matt 11:11//Lk 7:28 denigrates John. 30 But this interpretation of the saying rests on inadequate understanding of ancient Jewish speech patterns; as we shall argue in our chapter on John the Baptist, this saying simply reflects standard Jewish rhetoric of praising others not by denigrating the point of comparison but by choosing a positive object of comparison. 31 Later Christians would not likely have conformed Jesus to John (the competition), 32 but his own contemporaries sometimes compared him with John (Mk 6:14-16; 8:28) or with Elijah (Mk 6:15; 8:28). 33 Doubting Jesus’ eschatological orientation is just a symptom of the larger problem of insufficient attention to Jesus’ immediate Jewish environment. The older liberal view that the earliest views about Jesus’ identity evolved from a Palestinian Jewish apocalyptist to a hellenistic divine man does not fit all the evidence (see ch. 19), but certainly fits better than the contemporary “Jesus Seminar’s” essential reversal of the sequence, which must assume that later Christians Judaized Jesus. 34 Such an approach makes no sense of their world: in view of Roman anti-Judaism and the growing influence of Diaspora Christianity as years passed, inventing greater attachments to Judaism would be counterproductive to the movement. 35 Indeed, Paul, an early missionary to the Greek world, shares an apocalyptic worldview with much of Palestinian Judaism as much as two decades before Mark, our first extant Gospel. 36 Jesus’ Jewish movement proclaimed a coming eschatological kingdom from the beginning. And apocalyptic and eschatological ideology was largely Jewish in the forms in which we have it in the Jesus movement.

Crossan’s “Peasant Cynic” 
Later in this chapter (and in ch. 4), we will treat a particularly extreme exponent of the “Cynic Jesus” thesis, namely Burton Mack. Here I will survey instead a position of John Dominic Crossan, namely that Jesus was a “peasant Jewish Cynic.” This description of Jesus does not actually summarize all of Crossan’s approach to Jesus, 37 and in critiquing it I do not imply disagreement with every contribution of Crossan to the historical Jesus discussion. Nevertheless, it constitutes one of Crossan’s own summaries of his view in his most widely used “historical Jesus” book. 38 It thus provides a particularly useful illustration of a pole in the wide range of disparate views on the “Jesus” market today. An assorted survey of basic but well-written information about the ancient Mediterranean world dominates the first part of Crossan’s book. 39 Here Crossan simply lays the background for his approach to Jesus. Most of this background is unobjectionable, although some elements are closer to Jesus’ specifically Judean context than others. 40 Crossan then turns to a survey of various types of ancient leaders: visionaries, teachers, revolutionaries, leaders of peasant protest, healers, magicians, prophets, bandits and would-be kings. 41 After this survey he finally turns to Jesus’ teachings and activities, 42 his death, 43 and the resurrection experiences. 44 Thus perhaps 190 pages (less than 40% of the book) focus primarily on ancient sources about Jesus in particular, as opposed to the ancient world in general. 45 My point here is that Crossan, like many scholars today (including myself), places a heavy weight on Jesus’ context. But on what aspects of Jesus’ context does he focus? We return now to Crossan’s description of Jesus as a “peasant Jewish Cynic.” By now it will be obvious that at least one element of Crossan’s reconstruction is unobjectionable, namely, that Jesus was Jewish. It is thus the two other elements of the description that we must investigate. While scholars may debate whether or not Jesus was a “peasant” (depending largely on the meaning they assign to that designation), the title “Jewish Cynic” runs strongly against what we know of the first-century world. If Jesus was a “Jewish Cynic” (in contrast to a Jewish sage, signs-worker and/or eschatological prophet), he is the only one we know about. Since the main point of placing Jesus in categories is to help us understand him in context, this proposal therefore proves particularly unhelpful.

Peasants in the Ancient Mediterranean World

Extrapolating from traditional societies today, some scholars contend that peasants must have constituted at least 90% of the empire’s, and Jewish Palestine’s, population. 46 These estimates could be high, but everyone agrees that peasants comprised the majority of the population of Judea and Galilee. Indeed, if we define “peasant” broadly as simply an agrarian worker without much land, the estimates could well be accurate. Most of the empire was rural, 47 and the infrastructure of the Mediterranean economy could not support many massive urban centers like Rome (which depended on its empire for its needs). 48 Most of the empire’s labor force thus consisted of subsistence-level agricultural labor. 49 In a system that persisted and developed in Medieval Europe, much of this agricultural force worked other people’s estates; although some smallholders remained, in regions like Italy and Asia Minor most poor people no longer owned their own land. 50 Those who lived on and worked the estates of the rich were poor tenant farmers, 51 who were often subject to exploitation. 52 There is also no question that most of the rural empire was poor, 53 so that the connotations readers today often assign to the designation “peasants” are apt for these agrarian laborers. One ancient composer of fables, himself a former slave, opined that it made little difference whether one was a peasant or a slave; it was merely a matter of changing masters. 54 Subsistence for the poor was minimal, so that most died young; in parts of the empire, most peasants probably made barely enough to stay alive. 55 That rich landowners oppressed the poor was widely enough known. 56 The letters of a Roman aristocrat writing the better part of a century later illustrates how aristocrats viewed the problem. Pliny fancies himself a benevolent absentee landowner, but his tenants have fallen so far into debt, despite his reducing the rent, that they no longer even try to catch up on it. 57 (Meanwhile, his urban servants supervise the peasants to make sure they are working while he enjoys a bit of leisure.) 58 He complains about a former landowner who sold the peasants’ possessions to compensate for their debt, thereby diminishing their future resources. This, he reasoned, foolishly diminished their future ability to pay. 59 His response is to consider completely displacing the tenants by some more profitable labor such as slaves. 60 The aristocrat’s strongest concern, of course, is how to guard his own economic interests. 61 The difficulties that farmers endured throughout much of the rest of the empire presumably impacted Galilee as well. Agriculture was central to the Palestinian Jewish economy; 62 with only two large cities, Galilee’s population primarily resided in agrarian villages and towns. 63 Although much land was fertile, 64 the peasant farmers held few concerns more pressing than harvest, 65 an image frequent enough in Jesus’ parables (Mk 4:29; 12:2; Matt 20:1-7). Probably most Galileans, while not destitute, lived challenging lives. 66

Was Jesus a Peasant?

We may thus agree fully with Crossan (and others) that peasant culture is an essential part of the background for the Gospels. Regardless of how one defines “peasant,” Jesus of Nazareth grew up in a rural village setting. As we shall note again in ch. 12, Nazareth is too insignificant a site 67 for tradition to have invented. 68 Indeed, detractors might even count this location against Jesus’ credibility (cf. Jn 1:46). 69 (It is rarely disputed today; that Jesus was from Nazareth is multiply, independently attested.) 70 

Much of Jesus’ audience must have also consisted of rural, agrarian peasants. In contrast to the settings of later rabbinic parables, the settings of the majority of Jesus’ extant parables reflect an agrarian environment. 71 That such a setting generates perspectives that differ from an urban setting should go without saying. (For example, my wife, a Congolese professor who spent much of her childhood in rural village settings, was able to make more sense of many details in Genesis’ patriarchal narratives on the basis of her personal background than I was with my academic training in biblical studies.) But was Jesus himself a peasant? Leaders of movements do not always arise from the same socioeconomic status as most of their followers (although they sometimes do). The answer to the question of Jesus’ peasanthood may depend largely on how we define “peasant,” but if we define it in its basic sense as an agrarian laborer, Jesus was probably not a peasant himself. 72 

Our only concrete sources for Jesus’ occupation preceding his teaching career portray him as a carpenter, a woodworker. This was not a despised profession like some others, 73 but neither was it a sufficiently prestigious occupation (such as, say, a scribe) to suggest that later members of the Jesus movement would have invented it. Conjoined with the near certainty that Jesus spent most of his childhood in Nazareth, this occupation readily fits what we know of Jesus’ period and location, knowledge probably absent to most non-Galilean Christians. From 6 CE, when Jesus was perhaps a boy approaching adolescence, Antipas immediately began rebuilding the devastated Galilean capital of Sepphoris 74 — from which Nazareth was a distance of only four miles. 75 That Joseph (Matt 13:55) and Jesus (Mk 6:3) 76 were carpenters fits this situation quite well, since precisely that work (along with stonemasons) would have been in high demand. 77 Yet carpenters were artisans, not peasants, and many assign them to the upper ten percent of nonaristocratic Galilean society. 78 

The few disciples whose backgrounds are mentioned in the Gospels are also not agrarian peasants: four fishermen and one or more tax gatherers (Mk 1:16, 19; 2:14; cf. Lk 19:8). 79 Perhaps the Gospels specify only those with striking occupations; or perhaps fishermen could better afford to follow Jesus than farmers could (though the latter could probably travel seasonally, especially outside harvest and planting times). 80 In the final analysis, the dominant element in the crowds that followed Jesus most likely consisted of peasants; but they did not comprise all of Jesus’ followers, at least not if we mean “peasant” in any technical sense. Thus, although general studies of peasant culture shed some light on Galilean agriculturalists, 81 the picture of Jesus as a “peasant” 82 is not very nuanced, dependent as it is on a rather broad definition of “peasant.” 83 Some could also use the title to detract from more specifically Jewish characteristics of Jesus’ identity. 84 

Was Jesus a Cynic? 

Though most of Jesus’ Galilean followers would have been peasants, no one would make the claim that most of them were Cynics. Some have compared Jesus’ demands on disciples to those of wandering Cynics (usually without claiming direct Cynic influence). 85 The comparison of Cynics to elements in the early Jesus movement (often offered negatively by outsiders) is not unreasonable; Diaspora missionaries like Paul 86 may have helped make this model acceptable. Nevertheless, one may claim with confidence that Crossan’s “peasant Jewish Cynic” 87 type never existed. Aside from the lack of any Jewish Cynics known to us (and appeal to unknown ones argues from silence against all our extant evidence to the contrary), Cynics were (as Crossan also concurs) 88 characteristically urban, 89 whereas peasants were by definition rural. 

Jesus’ Non-Cynic Environment 

Despite some similarities, Jesus’ itinerant ministry in Galilee is hardly distinctly Cynic (even in Luke, who is most apt to present Jesus to his readers in such culturally relevant terms). 90 For example, Jesus may have had a home, probably in Capernaum (cf. perhaps Matt 4:13; Mk 2:1; 9:33; Jn 1:38-39), from which most of Galilee was in walking distance. 91 Further, Cynics were not the only sages, even among Greek philosophers, who traveled. 92 Jewish Torah teachers also could travel “from place to place to speak.” 93 Most telling, Cynics were surely too rare in Jewish Palestine to provide the primary model. 94 Although rightly placing the emphasis of Jesus’ ministry in Galilean villages, Crossan opines that Jesus’ “peasant village was close enough to a Greco-Roman city like Sepphoris that sight and knowledge of Cynicism are neither inexplicable nor unlikely.” 95 How plausible is this view about Sepphoris? Sepphoris was hellenized in many respects, 96 was the most pro-Roman city in Galilee, 97 and refused to participate in the revolt against Rome in 66 CE. 98 Sepphoris was, however, a thoroughly Jewish city, and remained faithful to Judaism as its inhabitants understood it. 99 Archaeology shows that though many pork-eating Gentiles later settled in Sepphoris, pig remains are absent from the city of Jesus’ day. 100 Later rabbis emphasize (admittedly probably partly for propagandistic reasons, given their own work there) that Sepphoris was particular about the purity of Israelite lineage 101 and acknowledge the surrounding region to be Jewish. 102 Moreover, Nazareth may have existed in the shadow of the wealthy Hellenized Jewish city of Sepphoris, but Galilean villages and towns were not severely economically dependent on the two Hellenized cities. 103 Whatever other drawbacks Nazareth may have had (Jn 1:46), its inhabitants seem to have been entirely “orthodox,” as attested by priests probably a generation later. 104 Sepphoris’ prominence and later Christian tradition about it make its absence in the Gospels all the more striking; Jesus probably had little contact with it, 105 certainly during his ministry. 106 Traditions about Jesus ignore these cities even when Jesus denounces sites that had not responded adequately to Jesus’ ministry among them (Matt 11:21, 23//Lk 10:13, 15). 107 This neglect is not surprising: large cities usually were economically parasitic on the countryside, 108 and most Galileans hated the two cities. 109 

The Character of Real Cynics 

What were real Cynics like? Despite complaints we will note below, Stoics sometimes respected Cynics, 110 and others also followed the example of “good” Cynics. 111 Stoic views toward Cynics in this period are typically ambivalent, with both positive and negative characteristics. 112 Nevertheless, Cynics got their name from being compared with “dogs” (kunes, pl. of kuōn), 113 and not without reason. Their indecent, private acts in public gained them this reputation; thus Diogenes, while preaching, squatted and did something considered dishonorable, leading the crowds to denounce him as crazy. 114 Even most other philosophers despised such behavior: for them, being “bestial” meant being led by passions instead of by reason. 115 They and others thus ridiculed Cynics’ “doggishness.” 116 Some philosophers denounced fake Cynics and other philosophers, 117 accusing them of greed 118 or of abandoning real work for the easier job of preaching. 119 Many viewed excess Cynics as demagogues; 120 the masses, some complained, could not distinguish between true and false philosophers 121 (the sort of complaint many scholars offer today about public voices on the historical Jesus!). Cynics were known for their uninvited public preaching. 122 Lucian gives us a sample of the style of preaching attributed to harsh Cynics. 123 He mentions Cynics harshly and indiscriminately abusing passersby. 124 They were loud and boisterous, 125 and might rant angrily if contradicted by another speaker. 126 One comic portrayal presents Cynics hitting each other with their staffs. 127 Cynics were known for their rudeness and especially their disrespect for social rank and status. 128 When a person of status warned the famous Cynic Diogenes not to spit in the wealthy home where he had brought him, Diogenes allegedly spat in the man’s face, explaining that nothing of poorer quality was available. 129 They were also antisocial enough to criticize rulers, but given their established tradition, they usually got away with it. In stories about Diogenes, he desired as much honor as Alexander of Macedon 130 (a clear example of Cynic hubris). A Cynic could, of course, go too far; when Demetrius the Cynic in Rome denounced baths on the day that Nero dedicated his new baths, Tigellinus allegedly had him banished from Rome. 131 

Comparing Jesus with Real Cynics 

While Jesus speaks boldly in the Gospels, the traditional Jewish model of prophet seems a closer parallel than such socially alienated Cynics. Unlike Cynics, Jesus had close friends and many followers. Jesus’ miraculous ministry likewise recalls some biblical prophets, but not the activities of Cynics, who did not perform miracles but lived on the street and harangued passersby on urban street corners. It was the Cynic’s lifestyle that above all distinguished one as a Cynic rather than something else. 132 Granted, elements of Cynic behavior were adapted by others without adopting the Cynic tradition wholesale. 133 In the case of Jesus, however, we must ask whether Cynic models are the nearest cultural sources for similar elements in Jesus’ behavior and teaching. The radical lifestyle of the Cynics does provide a historical analogy for the wider sort of traveling sages in the first-century eastern Mediterranean world. These other sorts of teachers also used witty sayings for often analogous purposes. Radical Greek teachers, including Cynics, used humor, shock and incongruity to hold attention. 134 But of course so did the biblical prophets (see e.g., the Hebrew puns in Mic 1:10-16) and, as we shall see later in the book, Palestinian Jewish sages (to varying degrees). Jesus used rhetoric meant to attract attention; in this he resembled Cynics, but also a wide range of other ancient sages. It thus seems more profitable to explore analogies closer at hand to his culture, the sort of analogies with which he may have actually had some contact (in contrast to Cynics). Cynics and other radical teachers shared with Jesus a notable departure from established societal roles and readiness to critique the social order. Yet Jesus did not obscenely defecate or stimulate himself sexually in public as Cynics were known to do. He did not cajole hearers while begging for money, threaten anyone with a staff, or even spit on a host. He and his disciples are not said to live on the street, or in the shadow of temples. In contrast to Cynics and even John the Baptist (Jesus’ explicit, and Jewish prophetic, foil), 135 Jesus was not completely antisocial (Matt 11:18-19//Lk 7:33-34). Jesus was not interested merely in critiquing the social order for the sake of philosophy; like some other Palestinian Jews, he prophesied a new order to be established by God. Moreover, Jesus’ itinerancy is explained more simply without recourse to the example of Cynics. Those most apt to wander from town to town were socially dislocated people, like landless persons seeking work. 136 Some point to a more particular model of wandering prophets. 137 Itinerancy — perhaps a feature of ancient mobility in general — was hardly a central or distinctive feature of early Christian prophecy. 138 Nevertheless, the most relevant background for Jesus’ itinerant mission widely known in Jewish Palestine is that of the Old Testament prophets; 139 Jesus and his followers did, after all, have a prophetic mission (see ch. 17). Some compare with Cynics Jesus’ instructions that his disciples should travel lightly on their mission (Mk 6:8-9). Urban Cynics voluntarily limited themselves to a single cloak; they chose a simple and toilsome lifestyle living on the street (unlike Jesus’ disciples) to prepare themselves for hardships. 140 But the very passage that some use for this comparison reveals that Jesus forbade his disciples to carry a pouch for begging (Mk 6:8), 141 in contrast to Cynics! 142 Some even think that the prohibition is designed to distinguish the disciples from typical wandering preachers (probably similar to Cynics in the Greek world) “whose questionable reputation they did not want to share.” 143 Far more relevant to Jesus’ immediate environment were the abundant rural peasants; at least in the poorest parts of the empire some might own only one cloak. 144 Some Jews known as Essenes also showed their devotion to God by a simple lifstyle; those who lived in the wilderness devoted all their goods to the community. 145 Josephus also indicates that Essenes did not take provisions when they traveled, expecting hospitality from fellow-Essenes in every city, fitting Jesus’ instructions in this passage. 146 Likewise, Israel’s ancient prophets (the relevance of which we have already noted) lived simply in times of national apostasy. 147 Most scholars note that, whatever the parallels with Cynics in Jesus’ teaching and ministry, the differences are far greater; 148 they were not known, for example, “for healings and exorcisms.” 149 Even one scholar who does portray Jesus in Cynic terms elsewhere offers a sound methodological warning that, in light of the foregoing evidence, should bring any extensive use of Cynic parallels into question: many abuse the comparative method by simply “seizing a few elements in diverse cultures, describing them in very general and similar terms, and then positing a causal connection.” 150 Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz put the matter well from a German perspective (although as an American I would hesitate to blame our state of California for this idea). Noting that the current Jesus “quest” divides between those advocating a non-eschatological, Cynic-type Jesus and a Jewish Jesus focused on restoration eschatology, they complain that the former view “seems to have more Californian than Galilean local colouring.” 151 

Greek Background Is Not the Problem 

I should clarify at this point that I am not minimizing the value of Greek background for the study of the Gospels or the historical Jesus. First, the Gospels are written in Greek and presumably bear marks of literary adaptation for Greek and Diaspora Jewish audiences. We must take these features into account when working back to the historical Jesus. But second, and more important for the study of the historical Jesus, much evidence suggests that Palestinian Judaism was hellenized 152 (influenced by the pervasive Greek culture), though of course less thoroughly than Judaism in the Greek-speaking Diaspora. 153 (On the limits to this approach, see our warnings about Sepphoris, above.) By contrast, the Greco-Roman world on the whole was far less Judaized. Yet this clear direction of Greek influence in Jewish culture but mostly negligible Jewish influence on Greek culture invites another conclusion. Wherever we have a mixture of Jewish and hellenistic motifs we must be dealing with something primarily Jewish, not something primarily Gentile (since the latter would exhibit much less Jewish influence). 154 This observation has serious implications for some theories proposed today. Thus, for example, Burton Mack’s view that Jesus, though Jewish by birth, was more “hellenistic” in his behavior, 155 has nothing historically to commend it. James D. G. Dunn is right to complain that the “neo-liberal quest” of Crossan and Mack still treats Jesus’ Jewishness as not central to his identity. 156 It is to Mack’s views, generally less grounded or nuanced than Crossan’s, that we now turn.

A More Extreme Example 

Like Crossan and others, Burton Mack’s Jesus is a teacher of wisdom without an embarrassing eschatological agenda. 157 As we have noted, the nineteenth century liberal “lives of Jesus” pursued such a noneschatological, wise Jesus created in the image of each writer’s ethical ideal. Like the Jesus Seminar, 158 Mack agrees with these sources in finding a noneschatological Jesus. But Mack goes beyond Crossan and some members of the Jesus Seminar.

What Kind of Sage? 

Mack portrays a more pervasively Cynic Jesus than Crossan does. He does so by isolating and focusing exclusively on a very slender element of our sources for Jesus, namely, what he considers the earliest part of the source “Q.” This leaves him with only seven pages of wisdom sayings to work with for who Jesus was and what he taught. (“Q” is scholars’ label for a source no longer extant, which Matthew and Luke shared. It is reconstructed on the basis of Matthew and Luke. I will deal with Mack’s perspective on Q in ch. 4, but for now I simply mention that his method of determining the “earliest” part of this hypothetical document is astonishingly subjective.) The traditions Mack counts earliest (based on his premise that Jesus was only a sage) not surprisingly portray Jesus as a sage. Since Jesus was certainly a sage (whatever else he may have been as well), Mack has no trouble finding genuine “sage” aspects of Jesus. Whereas eschatology tends to be distinctively Jewish, 159 highlighting Jesus’ “sage” features can allow for a less ethnic-specific feel to Jesus. By itself, the observation that Jesus was a sage would not prove particularly profound, controversial or problematic. By definition, everyone recognizes that both Jewish sages and Cynic sages were “sages.” The problem is Mack’s faulty assumption that such sage characteristics must make Jesus like a Cynic, when we know that Jewish sages abounded in Galilee, and we lack evidence for any Cynic ones there! 160 As I will show later in this book (in chs. 13-15), Jesus’ teachings show abundant parallels to specifically Jewish teachers. As Cynic parallels to what he thinks is the earliest layer of Q, Mack adduces Jesus’ “aphoristic style, unconventional behavior,” bold straightforwardness, and so forth. 161 But as we have noted, most of these characteristics appear in other wisdom traditions and beyond wisdom traditions, and certainly beyond Cynics. 162 The biblical Book of Proverbs, cited regularly among Palestinian Jews, is full of “aphorisms”; aphorisms also characterize Jewish wisdom teaching more generally. 163 Many other philosophers besides Cynics were known for their impudent boldness, 164 and the same was true for Jewish biblical prophets (e.g., 1 Kgs 21:20-24; 22:28; 2 Kgs 3:13-14). Geza Vermes focuses on similar behavior among Galilean “charismatic sages,” who preserved ancient Jewish prophetic traditions, not new Cynic ones. 165 If Vermes’ examples are a bit limited (see our next chapter), they are at least more common in Galilee and much more relevant for a Galilean Jew than Mack’s are. 

Either Sage or? 

To argue against Jesus being an eschatological prophet, Mack forces an illogical choice: if Jesus was a sage, Mack contends, then he was not an eschatological prophet. 166 Because Mack accepts only the “wisdom” “layer” of Q as early, he argues that its image represents the real Jesus, suppressed by a church antagonistic to this image of Jesus. (As noted above, I shall deal later with the subjective way that he defines which part of “Q” is early, but a central factor seems to be that whatever fits his thesis about the authentic Jesus is early.) Mack contends that the later canon purposely excluded “Q” to destroy evidence of the earliest Christian genre of instruction. 167 In reality, we lack any evidence that “Q” even remained extant in the second century. (Christians probably simply did not feel a need to keep using “Q” independently because they found most of it incorporated in more complete Gospels.) By contending that the church did away with the instruction genre, Mack must ignore the inconvenient fact that the church actually continued to use this genre, even more frequently than it appears in the New Testament. (Compare the “Two Ways” instruction format in Barnabas and the Didache.) Contrary to Mack’s conspiratorial thesis, the catechetical model probably increased rather than declined in subsequent centuries. Mack suggests that for the “first followers of Jesus . . . What mattered most was the body of instructions that circulated in his name”; only later, he contends, did “groups in different locations” produce varied mythologies of his life somehow harmonized with his teachings in the later gospels. 168 After Mack has eliminated the context of Jesus’ prophetic life (contrast our ch. 17), it is much easier to reinterpret his sayings that remain. Simply comparing other ancient sources would ruin Mack’s thesis, however: his forced-choice logic cannot work in any document where it may be tested objectively. His assumption that the roles of wisdom teacher and eschatological prophet are incompatible 169 does not fit all ancient Jewish teachers. That a figure expecting the imminent end of the age might also provide rules for a community expected to survive that final holocaust or endure for some time is evident in the conjunction of both modes of thought in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are preChristian. 170 The Dead Sea Scrolls moreover include wisdom texts as well as eschatology, showing that the same people could accept both approaches. 171 Some also contend that even the eschatological Similitudes of Enoch (no later than the first century) blend “wisdom and apocalyptic or eschatological sayings.” 172 Similarly, that Rabbi Akiba (early second-century) was purportedly a mystic and also among the most vocal supporters of Bar Kochba suggests that even the early rabbinic trajectory did not absolutely separate revelatory, rabbinic, and revolutionary streams of thought. First-century Judaism does not allow us to simply force a choice among options such as teachers, prophets, healers, and messiahs, as if such categories were logically incompatible. While these categories did not always overlap, they sometimes did so. 173 Recognizing (rightly) that Jesus was a sage thus affords us no license to automatically infer that he was not also a prophet (or whatever other category we might conceive for him). We must grapple fairly with all potential roles for Jesus claimed by the texts without assuming that demonstrating one refutes another, except in cases of true contradiction (e.g., a pacifist versus an armed revolutionary). Cynic parallels for the study of Jesus prove useful only when placed in a larger context of ancient sages, especially the closer and more abundant Jewish cultural parallels. Likewise, Jewish wisdom parallels should be pursued heavily but not to the exclusion of Jewish apocalyptic, legal and “charismatic” parallels. Early traditions about Jesus also attribute these roles to him (see chs. 13, 17-18), and our sources indicate that these categories were no less a part of Judaism nor incompatible with the wisdom tradition. 

A Cynic Kingdom?

Mack’s assumption that noting Jesus’ role as a teacher makes him like a Cynic sage (incompatible with an end-time prophet) is astonishing enough. Yet still more astonishing is Mack’s comparison of Jesus’ clearly authentic “kingdom” teaching to Cynic teaching about rulership. 174 When Mack tries to defend this quite distant comparison by denying that the “kingdom of God” is a preChristian Jewish conception, 175 he ignores several important points. First, he ignores with but brief argument the consensus of most Jewish and New Testament scholarship on the question. A consensus can be and sometimes is mistaken, but that claim should be argued rather than assumed. 176 Second, Mack ignores the precise parallels in wording between the opening lines of the “Lord’s Prayer” 177 (“Hallowed be your name; your kingdom come . . .”) and the regularly uttered Jewish prayer known as the Kaddish. Most commentators familiar with Judaism recognize this prayer as the background of, or at least derived from the same milieu as, the opening lines of the Lord’s Prayer. 178 In its earliest form, the Kaddish runs something like, “. . . hallowed be his great name . . . may his kingdom reign . . .” 179 The parallel between the Kaddish and the first stanza of Jesus’ model prayer was so obvious in a Jewish setting that an eighthcentury translation of the Lord’s Prayer from Latin into Hebrew borrows some of its wording directly from the Kaddish. 180 Third and most significantly, as we note below, Mack ignores the Bible known and regularly quoted by Jesus and his Jewish hearers. Because the kingdom is the most pervasive element in Jesus’ teaching, Mack must make it a Greek idea to maintain his thesis. But consider the evidence. Which is closer to Jesus’ teaching about God’s kingdom: the ideal of wise philosophers’ right to rule, 181 to which Mack appeals, or the common Jewish expression “kingdom of God”? Let us for the sake of argument exclude from consideration our earliest rabbinic sources that employ the expression and all other Jewish sources (including pre-Christian Qumran scrolls) 182 from the first centuries of this era. When Mack excludes from consideration all Jewish evidence as too late, did he think to first check the Jewish Scriptures, used widely by Jewish people? Jewish people regularly employed the psalms in worship, and the psalms praise the reign (“kingdom”) of God (Ps 22:28; 145:11-13; cf. Ps 47:8; 93:1; 96:10; 97:1). The expected Davidic king would rule over David’s kingdom (Is 9:7). Daniel 2:44, 47, even implies the “mystery” of God’s future “kingdom,” just as in Mk 4:11. Is not the Jewish conception of the one, Jewish God’s kingdom closer to Jesus’ message about God’s kingdom than a Cynic sage claiming that sages have the right to rule? Why would a scholar bend over backwards to avoid that conclusion? 

Jesus’ Gentile Movement Became Jewish?

Mack’s view of how Jesus’ movement developed must presuppose that Jesus (though a Galilean Jew) spawned a movement that was essentially Gentile in character, some part of which later became conservatively Jewish. Since an ancient Gentile movement would not likely respect a conservative Jewish trajectory, it is not surprising that we have no parallels to any such phenomenon in antiquity. 183 More specifically, Mack claims that the Christ cult quickly evolved “on the model of the mystery religions, complete with entrance baptisms, rites of recognition (the holy kiss), ritualized meals (the lord’s supper),” as well as a new emphasis on conversion. 184 I will return at the end of this section to Mack’s logic of preferring Gentile to Jewish parallels, but for the moment want to survey these specific examples. Mystery cults were non-Jewish and polytheistic, hence do not provide ready background to Jesus’ early movement. Had Mack looked elsewhere, he would have seen that the parallels he suggests were in no wise limited to mystery religions. Thus, for example, kisses were standard greetings for family or close associates throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, 185 in no way limited to cult associations. Likewise, Jewish parallels to conversion (also “with entrance baptisms”) are much closer than joining various mystery cults. 186 Mystery “baptisms” were simply an initial lustration — like the regular cultic lustrations many temples required on normal occasions — that were part but not the center of cultic initiation. 187 By contrast, Jewish proselyte baptism was a rite of initiationconversion, known even in Greek writers like Epictetus. 188 Even if one rejects the priority or influence of Jewish proselyte baptism, as some do, the Jewish initial lustrations at Qumran 189 are at least closer to the milieu in which Jesus’ movement originated and initially grew than are pagan mystery lustrations. Mack’s suggested origin of the “lord’s supper” also ignores closer parallels for more distant ones. It is easy to understand how a cult meal modeled after the Jewish Passover Seder could be adapted in a Greek context to resemble a Greek banquet or cultic meal, 190 but difficult to see why Jewish Christians (who were influenced by Greek culture but mistrusted Gentile religious practices) would have transformed a Greek cultic celebration into a Passover meal. (We discuss the last supper later, in ch. 20.) Certainly Diaspora Jewish missionaries to Greeks adapted Greek language and Mediterranean Christianity became increasingly hellenized over the next few centuries. But as we have noted, Judaism was heavily influenced by Greek culture, and the reverse was not true (apart from magical texts). Texts that share both Jewish and Greek elements — as all New Testament documents in varying degrees do — are thus primarily Jewish rather than non-Jewish texts. One cannot be certain of a writer’s motives, but Mack at least seems to suggest that part of his motivation for writing is to disabuse Christians of faulty thinking (an agenda one can certainly appreciate). He seeks to force them to see that they alone (he opines) of all religions demand that their adherents believe their myth to be history, and he summons them to recognize that their myth is not history. By such a procedure, Mack hopes to make Christians “multicultural,” able to dialogue evenhandedly with other faiths. 191 Regardless of what one thinks of this agenda (most of us favor true multiculturalism), Mack’s agenda, like that of the Jesus Seminar, seems to drive his reading of historical data.

Pagan Origins Again 

Mack is not alone in suggesting a Gentile context for much of the Jesus tradition. For example, another scholar charges that modern scholars usually prefer a Jewish setting for the gospel materials due to ecumenical and apologetic motives: that is, a Jewish setting is useful for Christian-Jewish dialogue and for “defending” the Jesus traditions. 192 Many scholars using Jewish sources would be surprised to find their work characterized in such terms. (Many historical scholars lack strong ecumenical commitments, and even more lack apologetic interests. Some indeed profess no religious faith.) In any case, this scholar considers his own alternative less “biased”: some of the purported sayings of Jesus make better sense, he thinks, from backgrounds in Cynicism, gnosticism, or Hellenistic mystery religions. 193 While later sources did create some Jesus-sayings relevant to their setting (particularly clear in gnosticism), and Gospel writers reworded and reframed sayings for their own audiences, we shall argue later in the book that we possess a great abundance of gospel material that makes the best sense in a specifically Jewish context. We will treat gnostic materials in ch. 4, and have treated Cynic parallels (the most plausible of the three suggestions) above. As we have suggested, a background in mystery cults suffers from the same drawbacks as the Cynic proposal: these cults are far removed from Jesus’ milieu. 194 They were also less publicly accessible than knowledge of Cynics, even in urban settings. Jewish people did not need to appeal to Gentile mystery cults for their concept of “mystery,” which already appears long before Jesus’ day in Daniel and possibly 1 Enoch, 195 as well as in Qumran Scrolls dependent on them. 196 Today, even most works on early Diaspora Christianity place little emphasis on the mysteries, because their secretive character made them less relevant for informing discourse shared with any not initiated to the mysteries. 197 To conclude this section, I return to the problem of any portrayal in which the earliest Jesus movements’ context was hellenistic and Jewish ideas (like Jewish eschatology or messiahship) entered later. Does it not make more sense to start from the Galilean Jewish framework of Jesus and his first disciples and regard non-Jewish ideas as the later adaptations? (Jesus’ ministry also developed in the context of the prior ministry of the Jewish prophet John, attested in the Jewish historian Josephus.) 198 After all, even Paul, working in a Diaspora environment, recognizes that Palestinian Jewish apostles (whose prominence rested on their association with Jesus) with conservative Jewish sentiments or constituencies dominated the Jerusalem church (Gal 2:9-12). The Jesus movement originated in Jewish Palestine, not in the Diaspora, and Jews would hardly have adapted a pagan cult (that happened to exalt a Galilean Jew!). Pagan anti-Judaism was common enough that hellenizers would not have made their message more Palestinian Jewish (e.g., more eschatological), hence less acceptable in the Diaspora, to commend it to their audiences! Clearly a Palestinian Jewish context makes the most sense for Jesus of Nazareth, as we shall argue more fully in following chapters. We shall also argue that the substance of a large amount of the tradition preserved about Jesus in the Synoptics reflects that same context rather than a later one.

Conclusion 

Scholars who argue for a non-eschatological Jesus usually (though not always) resort to primarily Gentile contexts for Jesus rather than the most obvious context we know to be true of him: Jesus was a Jewish Galilean. In their most extreme form, the non-Jewish portrayals of Jesus place him in the context of Cynic philosophers, and seek to explain away the Jewish character of even specifically Jewish language such as “kingdom of God.” A much nearer context for Jesus, one more often preferred in the current socalled “Third Quest” for him, is his known setting as a Galilean Jew. Scholars adopting this approach have come to a higher degree of consensus about Jesus, although, as we shall note in the following chapter, some disparity (even about his eschatological message) persists.

CHAPTER 3 - Jesus and Judaism 

“When the Third Quest was launched, one of the main characteristics that distinguished it from the First Quest of 19th-century German Protestantism and the Second (existentialist) Quest of the students of Rudolf Bultmann in the 1950s and 1960s was its determination to take the Jewishness of Jesus with utter seriousness and to situate him squarely within Palestinian Judaism at the turn of the era.” JOHN P. MEIER 1 

“The chief finding of Jesus the Jew is the recognition of Jesus within the earliest Gospel tradition . . . as a charismatic prophetic preacher and miracle-worker, the outstanding ‘Galilean Hasid.’” GEZA VERMES 2 

The discussion of Jesus’ Jewish context is close to the heart of most current Jesus scholarship. A major earlier phase of Jesus research pursued the Gospels’ sources; Bultmann’s phase, more interested in the early church’s preaching than in what could be known historically about Jesus, asked how the traditions were shaped by preaching. By contrast, Jesus’ historical context dominates the present discussion. 3 Partly for this reason, Jesus research today is on the whole less skeptical about what we can know about Jesus than mid-twentieth-century scholarship was. 4 The largest divide today is between the view that Jesus was a Cynic-type wisdom teacher and the view that he was an eschatological prophet. 5 The latter remains the majority view, 6 although if one subtracts the specifically Cynic element these categories need not be mutually exclusive. What most unites the majority of Jesus researchers today (including some scholars who deny Jesus’ eschatological approach) is an emphasis on Jesus’ Jewish context. 7 The pictures of Jesus this scholarship produces are more plausible than other reconstructions because they are more accurately grounded in what we can know historically about Jesus’ setting. Nevertheless, a range of views exist, depending partly on the aspects of Jesus’Jewish setting selected for attention. The handful of representative views selected in this chapter each work to build a cohesive picture of Jesus around a key theme or themes. In so doing, they leave out some evidence, but also offer more of a distinctive thesis about Jesus’ mission than one would gather from works focused on methodology, sayings traditions, and so forth. They also overlap on many points despite their distinctive emphases. Thus Borg insists on Jesus as a sage, prophet, and founder of a renewal movement, though not a strictly end-time prophet. Vermes compares the perspectives of Sanders (and Martin Hengel) to his own, suggesting that Jesus was “charismatic healer — teacher — prophet.” 8 For heuristic purposes, however, I shall highlight some characteristic and relatively distinctive features of each of these portrayals.

Some Third Quest Views 
The so-called Third Quest includes a diverse range of views, but its dominant expression among scholars today is a recognition of Jesus’ Jewish context. 9 This approach represents a significant improvement over most previous discussions, retaining the Jewish (and in the majority of cases the eschatological) emphasis of Weiss and Schweitzer, while reflecting a much fuller understanding of firstcentury Judaism than was available to earlier generations of scholars. In practice, this means closer attention to first-century, firsthand Judean sources like the Jewish historian Josephus (despite his Hellenistic apologetic approach) and the Dead Sea Scrolls (despite their sectarian perspective), as well as archaeological and other data. (Even those who portray Jesus as more Cynic than Jewish reflect the trend to take into account Jesus’ environment; they simply choose a different and, in my view, much less plausible environment.) Several “Third Quest” scholars, among them E. P. Sanders, Geza Vermes, and James Charlesworth, are well known for their work in Jewish sources more generally. Beyond a common emphasis on reading Jesus in his context, however, these scholars have produced a wide array of views. The Jesus of Richard Horsley is notably political; the distinctive feature of the Jesus of Marcus Borg is more like a mystic or (in cross-cultural terms) a shaman (though he is also prophet and teacher); the Jesus of Geza Vermes is a signs-working prophet like Elijah or Honi; and the Jesus of E. P. Sanders is an eschatological prophet. Naturally, some of these perspectives overlap, and (as some of their proponents acknowledge) they are not all incompatible. For example, those who wanted Jesus killed undoubtedly saw his activity as politically threatening, and shamanism provides a crosscultural rubric for discussing the activity of a prophetic healer. Signs-working and eschatological prophets were also compatible, as some of their proponents concur (although Josephus’ eschatological and politically problematic “sign-prophets” differed starkly from a mere wonder-worker like Honi). In addition to different pictures of Jesus, scholars pursue different approaches in their scholarly task. N. T. Wright and John Dominic Crossan, for example, synthesize a wide range of other scholarship into (very different) coherent pictures of Jesus’ mission. Whereas they are particularly noteworthy for their skillful big-picture approach, John Meier (like Raymond Brown on Jesus’ passion) focuses on detail, painstakingly and voluminously examining each line of evidence. 10 E. P. Sanders works from particular historical data that are undisputed to construct a portrait of what can probably be known about Jesus. Whereas Sanders starts with Jesus’ actions, many others start with his teaching (an approach reflected earlier in e.g., T. W. Manson or Joachim Jeremias). Ideally one would like to synthesize the best of all these approaches, although ideally this could also invite an enormous range of competence (and perhaps a team of scholars working together from complementary angles). Although not all the “historical Jesus” scholars writing today reflect this emphasis, the third quest on the whole reflects an increasing recognition of Jesus’ Jewish context. While one could have sampled any of the perspectives mentioned briefly above (or others), and I could have surveyed other carefully thought-out approaches below (such as Horsley, Meier, Gerd Theissen, Amy-Jill Levine, or Tom Holmén, among many others), my purpose here is merely to offer some samples, so I have elected to treat only three works here that have been influential in my own continent’s academic circles for some time. The first, Marcus Borg’s approach, is one that could have been placed in the preceding chapter, because he questions Jesus’ eschatology in the traditional sense. Nevertheless, the Jewish context of his basic approach seems sufficient to justify placing it here as well. The second, the Jewish scholar Geza Vermes, helpfully sets Jesus’ healing ministry in a Jewish context. Because I have deferred most discussion of Jesus’ healing activity for another book, it is helpful for me to introduce the influential approach of Vermes here. Vermes has long been a major voice in scholarship on early Judaism and is among the best-known early scholars on the Dead Sea Scrolls. The third is the approach of E. P. Sanders, whose research also leaves its imprint on this book (especially in my understanding of Jesus as an eschatological prophet). Sanders is also well known for his work in early Judaism as well as early Christianity. Despite my affinity for Sanders in most respects (as suggested in the book’s dedication), I shall try to engage what I feel are weaknesses as well as strengths in his approach. 11

Jesus as Charismatic Healer, Prophet and Sage 
Of the sample views here, Borg is the one who could in some sense most easily have fit either this chapter or the previous one. Borg’s Jesus challenged injustices in the present rather than promising an urgent future kingdom (although he did warn of impending judgment). Borg emphasizes the side of Jesus that “preaches” best in a modern framework, 12 but to what extent is this the Jesus of history? I believe that Borg does in fact correctly emphasize one side of the Jesus tradition, and that we can profit from his work on that aspect even if we find it less helpful with some other aspects of the sources. Although Borg’s Jesus: A New Vision and other works are useful, I focus here most frequently on a seminal academic work revised from his doctoral thesis, Conflict, Holiness & Politics in the Teachings of Jesus. If eschatology is not limited to the literal sense emphasized by Weiss and Schweitzer, he notes, it need not exclude Jesus’ interest in his nation’s political situation. 13 He shows that resistance against Rome was widespread, rather than limited to a single Jewish movement; 14 he also views what he calls the “quest for holiness” in terms of resistance against gentile oppression. 15 Jesus, he believes, challenged this ethos of exclusivist holiness used for resistance. 16 Unlike some scholars who force a choice between Jesus as a sage and Jesus as a prophet, Borg recognizes Jesus as both sage 17 and prophet. 18 Like Sanders and some others, 19 he argues that Jesus intended a renewal movement, exemplified by choosing twelve disciples as the nucleus of a new community. 20 (We will address some of these points more fully in ch. 17.) He combines the miracleworking “holy man” model (similar to Vermes’ charismatic that we summarize in the next section) with “a prophet who spoke of the consequences of his people’s present course.” 21 He rightly emphasizes how the tradition reveals Jesus’ intimacy with God 22 and radical dependence on, or faith in, God. 23 Like Sanders, Borg views Jesus’ action in the temple as a prophetic act, though unlike Sanders, he treats Jesus’ recorded pronouncement as the key to understanding it. 24 He argues that Jesus had to defend his behavior (such as table fellowship with sinners) against pious detractors. Whereas some scholars play down Jesus’ conflicts with Pharisees, Borg emphasizes such conflicts that are so central to the tradition, 25 and contends that these focused on the correct interpretation of Torah. 26 On Borg’s view, Jesus posed mercy as an alternative to exclusivist holiness. 27 He believes that Jesus’ merciful interpretation of the law led to a distinctive approach to the Torah regarding the sabbath 28 and the temple. 29 Thus, for example, he thinks that Jesus condemned the Pharisees’ practice of extrabiblical tithes. 30 His Jesus treats holiness in terms of humility and selfdeath 31 rather than in terms of separatism, in contrast to Pharisaism. 32 Borg rightly critiques some traditional critical assumptions. 33 He is intensely concerned with Jesus’ social settings, 34 and rightly emphasizes Jesus’ continuity with Judaism. 35 Although he does not draw the net of ancient sources as widely as some, he makes heavy use of Josephus, a first-century Jewish historian who is one of our most useful sources. More problematic is his reduction of traditional eschatology, as we have noted. 36 Whereas many scholars see Jesus as an “eschatological prophet,” Borg envisions him as a social prophet. 37 Borg relates “the future threat” to Israel to its misguided present course, a course that Jesus’ mission challenged. 38 The alternative perspective on Jesus’ message, he says, is “apocalyptic calculation . . . that the end of all was near,” a view he claims is now rejected by “most scholars.” 39 Expectation of the imminent end need not entail calculations of its precise timing (some ancient sources even include multiple estimates), but in any case one need not pose alternatives so starkly. However one counts the number of scholars (I believe that Borg is mistaken on this point), 40 is the “alternative” perspective so incompatible with his own evidence? Some alternatives are not mutually exclusive in ancient Jewish sources. For example, Jewish sources could lay side by side the alternatives of the end coming at a foreordained time 41 or at a time contingent on Israel’s repentance. 42 Such alternatives were no more inconsistent than God’s sovereignty factoring in human responsibility, a combination many or most Jews accepted. 43 However subsequent believers might temporally separate the temple’s destruction from cosmic destruction or transformation after 70 CE, distinguishing coming catastrophes may have been no more necessary for a prophet c. 30 CE than comparable earlier prophets’ warnings of imminent judgment in light of the coming day of the Lord. Likewise, the Qumran scrolls did not distinguish the two; apocalyptic sources sometimes allowed for stages of transition to the kingdom, but we might count all the future ones as eschatological in some sense. While I do agree with Borg about the impending crisis in Israel, I would argue that the early gospel tradition also suggests a climactic future kingdom (cf. Mk 9:47; 10:23, 25; Matt 6:9//Lk 11:2; Matt 8:11-12//Lk 13:28-29) that was imminent at least in the sense of being potentially near (Mk 1:15; 9:1). 44 Likewise Jesus’ promise about the twelve reigning on twelve thrones suggests the future kingdom (Matt 19:28//Lk 22:30). Our earliest extant Christian source, Paul, seems to suggest a form of imminent eschatology different from what Borg envisions for Jesus (1 Thess 4:13-5:11; 2 Thess 1:5-2:15), although including trouble in the temple (2 Thess 2:3-4). 45 I will argue later (ch. 17 and especially appendix 4) that Paul here is directly echoing Jesus’ end-time teachings, hence providing our earliest extant interpretation of Jesus’ future message (within two decades after Jesus’ teaching). Nor was Paul’s interpretation, offered to many confused Gentile Christians for whom it was clearly not originally designed, eccentric; scholars have often shown that Jesus’ language resembles that of other Jewish eschatological sources, 46 hence would naturally be understood by his followers in that light. Still, the heart of Jesus’ eschatological teaching undoubtedly did involve imminent historical crisis. The old order was collapsing; his people could no longer take for granted the continuance of any structures on which they depended. Such announcements from society’s fringe could not but disturb anyone with political, economic, or other interests in the old order. Indeed, Jesus must have calculated such warnings to dislodge his hearers’ comfort and security, and must have been aware that it would provoke hostility from the elite. It did so when other prophets challenged the old order (and would undoubtedly have similar effect on modern western hearers as well). Healings and exorcisms could point people to depend on God rather than the old order for their most fundamental needs. But while all of this squares well with envisioning Jesus as a social prophet of impending crisis (such as the war with Rome a generation later), it does not rule out the possibility of eschatological transformation, whether at that time or later. In Joel, for example, a locust plague foreshadows the judgment of the nations. Apart from specifying the end as unknown and expecting judgment within a generation (see ch. 17), quantifying the times was not Jesus’ primary interest. Borg’s appeal to shamanism (what he more often calls the “holy man” model) provides a cross-cultural model for examining Jesus’ activity as a healer. 47 Nevertheless, as a context for understanding Jesus’ use of “kingdom of God” 48 it is inadequate, since close Jewish parallels for Jesus’ terminology exist. For the most part, he doubts that Jesus’ kingdom teaching is clearly future eschatology, depicting it more in terms of experiential reality 49 and numinous presence. 50 Although Borg does not in this work rule out the possibility of future elements absolutely, 51 on this point, at least, he comes close to forcing a choice that perhaps need not be forced.

Jesus as Jewish Charismatic Healer 

In chs. 13-17 we will examine in greater detail the evidence that many of Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries understood him as a sage and prophet; these views fit our textual evidence much better than proposals that neglect first-century Jewish sources. Nevertheless, we must introduce such categories briefly here lest some readers suppose that our position is a novel or idiosyncratic one. I will revisit Vermes’ work briefly in ch. 17 (though trying not to repeat all that I have said here). Moreover, because I have deferred most questions about Jesus’ miracles to a separate book, I will not treat Vermes’ approach here as thoroughly as if I had tried to include all my material in one volume. Nevertheless, it is valuable to introduce his work here, as illustrative of a key element of the current discussion. 52 The brief way in which scholars usually summarize other scholars’ views may be too rigid. Although Vermes emphasizes the “charismatic” rather than “eschatological” character of Jesus’ ministry, he recognizes that Jesus probably expected God’s imminent kingdom. 53 Nevertheless, Vermes is best known for his comparing Jesus to “charismatic” sages, 54 and it is to this comparison that we now turn. 

Jesus as Charismatic Sage

Vermes doubts that Jesus was a “rabbi” in the later sense of that term. 55 By this he does not mean that we cannot find fruitful comparisons between Jesus’ teaching and that of later rabbis. Vermes himself draws these at numerous points, since rabbinic sources preserve some wider Jewish traditions, and certainly did not borrow ideas corresponding to the Gospels from the Gospels themselves. 56 Nevertheless, he envisions a closer model for first-century Galilee: that of the charismatic holy man. In his early work, Vermes can envision Judean Pharisees having a difficult time with Jesus. 57 Following the form critics, however, Vermes attributes the Gospels’ particular stories about Jesus’ interpretive conflicts with Pharisees, involving Scripture debates, to later Christian tradition. 58 Although I believe that this approach oversimplifies our data, Vermes is not apparently denying that conflicts occurred. On Vermes’ reading, Jesus was devoted to the law, but was interested more in fulfilling its larger purpose than in observing its specific regulations. 59 While I believe that Jesus may have engaged in more midrashic (traditional Jewish interpretive) treatment of the law than Vermes allows, one can well imagine how even Jesus’ frequently non-Pharisaic approach to the law would have brought him into conflict with Pharisees at times. Vermes notes such conflict between Jewish charismatics and Pharisees. 60 Nevertheless, Vermes is undoubtedly right that Jesus was crucified not for challenging interpretations of Jewish law nor for leading an insurrection, but for having caused a commotion in the temple during Passover season. 61 (We will return to this idea in chs. 20-21.) Vermes strikes a useful balance: “There is little doubt that the Pharisees disliked his nonconformity” on matters like healing on the sabbath; “There is no evidence, however, of an active and organized participation on the part of the Pharisees in the planning and achievement of Jesus’ downfall.” 62 Even here, he allows that “some individual Pharisees bore a measure of responsibility,” but he lays most of the blame on “representatives of the political establishment — Herod Antipas and his supporters in Galilee, and the chief priests and Pilate in the capital.” 63 This perspective, incidentally, fits well what we find in our Gospels; even the Fourth Gospel, known for its polemical relationship to Pharisaism, shifts the focus to the chief priests and Pilate in the passion narrative. 64

Honi and Hanina

Most scholars today accept the claim that Jesus was a healer and exorcist, as his contemporaries would have understood such categories. 65 Vermes naturally looks for the closest parallels to miracle workers not among Gentiles but among Jewish sages, and cites the most prominent, namely Honi and Hanina. He probably goes too far in suggesting that holy men like Hanina ben Dosa dominated first-century Galilean religious experience more than the priests or scribes did; 66 we do not hear of many other miracle-working sages, 67 especially from Jesus’ era. This observation conflicts with what we would expect if such miracle workers were as common as Vermes allows. 68 Still, he is surely correct to emphasize that many people would have followed such charismatic leaders. 69 Vermes appropriately looked to the most obvious context for understanding Jesus as a miracle-working sage, namely those available in his Palestinian Jewish setting. Hanina was a Galilean, like Jesus, although he is the only other Galilean we know of to whom signs are attributed. 70 Nevertheless, the value of these sources is more limited than we might hope, if taken by themselves. Thus rain-making is the only miracle common to both Honi and Hanina, yet it is absent from Jesus’ ministry. 71 Relatively few of the divine interventions reported involve healing. 72 We also have a more difficult time knowing as much about these sages’ miracles as we would like because most sources for them come from centuries after their time. While Honi (Onias) was earlier than Jesus and undoubtedly known for getting answered prayer regarding rain, 73 most of the details we hear about him surface only perhaps half a millennium after he lived. 74 Most scholars place Hanina ben Dosa in the first century, 75 but his association with miracles is mild in early rabbinic sources. 76 Later material about Hanina is much more abundant, but was transmitted and developed over the course of three or four centuries. 77 Many scholars also conclude that while Jewish wonder-workers offer closer parallels than pagan ones do, they differ significantly from Jesus (especially because they operate only through prayer and because they lack an explicitly eschatological context for their miracles). 78 But Vermes and others have also appealed to the biblical model of Elijah’s signs. 79 However relevant Honi and Hanina are for understanding Jesus’ prophetic ministry, Jesus and most of his Jewish contemporaries knew very well the model of Elijah. (Vermes shows that the rabbinic portrait of Hanina ben Dosa is also modeled on Elijah.) 80 Some biblical prophets like Elijah and Elisha were particularly emphasized as healers; 81 some others, like Isaiah, might heal occasionally (Is 38:21); 82 and Jewish sources continued to link miracles with many of the biblical prophets. 83 

Elijah’s Model 
The observation that some of Jesus’ activity resembles Elijah allows us to bring together both an emphasis on Jesus’ signs and an emphasis on his end-time approach, that is, the best of both Vermes’ and Sanders’ insights. Vermes himself notes Jewish future expectations for Elijah, suspecting that some Galilean sympathizers probably viewed Jesus in this manner. 84 Jewish tradition naturally developed the biblical promise of Elijah’s return found in Mal 4:5-6 (MT 3:23-24). This development appears quite early, in preChristian sources like Ben Sira (Sir 48:10); 85 some also find reference to Elijah as forerunner in 1 En. 90:31. 86 4 Ezra 6:26 assumes him among historic figures with special roles at the end of the age. 87 Moreover, the obviously knowledgeable Jewish writer Matthew (Matt 17:10) unhesitatingly follows Mark (Mk 9:11) in presupposing that this role was widely known in Jewish circles. Later rabbis also seized on this feature of eschatological expectation, although they more heavily emphasized Elijah’s present activity. 88 The rabbis were clearly aware of Malachi’s prophecy and anticipated Elijah’s return at the end of the age, 89 destined to appear alongside rabbinism’s other eschatological figures. 90 In ch. 17, we shall explore in more detail ancient Jewish expectations of an eschatological Mosaic prophet. Some sources appear to coalesce the end-time Elijah with the promised prophet like Moses. 91

Jesus as an Eschatological Prophet

Although a number of scholars have argued that Jesus functioned as an eschatological prophet, E. P. Sanders has offered one of the seminal and most influential cases for this position in our generation. I am addressing in this section especially Sanders’ seminal work on Jesus research, Jesus and Judaism, even though I believe that his later work for a broader audience, The Historical Figure of Jesus, works out some earlier inconsistencies and in some respects presents a more coherent picture of Jesus. Sanders shows clear evidence that Jesus anticipated a future kingdom. 92 For example, the Son of man will be ashamed of those who are ashamed of Jesus and his message (e.g., Mk 8:38). 93 He accepts the pervasive evidence from the tradition that people believed that Jesus worked miracles. 94 Given Jesus’ eschatological message (such as the kingdom and apparently the new temple), Sanders thinks Jesus’ healing activity was closer to the promised signs of eschatological prophets (like Theudas) than to charismatic sages like Honi (Vermes’ view) or to the magical papyri (Morton Smith’s view, usually treated as eccentric today). 95 (One cannot simply object to this that the sign-prophets were not known for healing in contrast to Honi or magicians, since Honi and magicians were also not known primarily for this.) I believe (and will argue in ch. 17) that Sanders and other like-minded scholars have a solid case for viewing Jesus as an eschatological prophet. As we have noted above, Elijah and Moses were both miracle-working prophets expected to return at the time of the end. Especially because some miracles attributed to Jesus resemble those of such prophets (e.g., Mk 6:41-42), it appears that even from an early point in the tradition Jesus’ followers envisioned him at least in some way along such lines. Indeed, he may be the source of their perception on this point. In the decades immediately after Jesus’ ministry, Josephus reports a prophet who wanted to make city walls collapse or the Jordan to part 96 — like Joshua, Moses’ original successor. 97 These prophets apparently depended not on military might but on an anticipated eschatological miracle to deliver them and their people. 98 The expectation of signs-working prophets is thus relevant for understanding Jesus, and we will return to it more fully in ch. 17. 

Jesus in Context

Unlike most of his predecessors, Sanders starts with some fairly certain historical information about Jesus’ life, rather than with the sayings. 99 For example, he seeks to learn about Jesus’ expectations and mission based on his act in the temple, which he regards as historically secure. 100 Working from this secure point, he compares expectation of a new temple and restoration in early Jewish literature, 101 to which Jesus’ views seem comparable, and finds other indications of Jesus’ Jewish restoration eschatology. 102 (Many or most scholars do now view Jesus as somehow a prophet of Israel’s restoration.) 103 These indications include the continuity of thought regarding eschatological restoration from John the Baptist to Paul — implying the intervening influence of Jesus. 104 By comparing contemporary sources, Sanders shows that Jesus’ choice of a special group of twelve disciples also marks his movement as a remnant movement interested in Israel’s restoration. 105 Such features would have readily marked Jesus out to his contemporaries as an eschatological preacher. Some of Jesus’ other behavior contrasts with contemporary expectations. Sanders presents Jesus’ fellowship with “sinners” as highly unusual, a practice neither borrowed from contemporary Judaism nor fully endorsed by his followers. It is, he contends, thus both authentic and revealing about Jesus’ mission. 106 Sanders connects Jesus’ welcome of sinners with his view that Jesus was not calling for national repentance. 107 I would view the evidence differently: on my view, national repentance was so urgent that Jesus went out of his way to seek sinners, and his mission as an agent of the kingdom was so central that embracing his message counted for more before God than did conventional forms of expressing repentance. (I will return to that subject in ch. 14.) He doubts most supposed cases of Jesus rejecting the law (e.g., the sabbath), but does find evidence that Jesus allowed the law to be set aside in some cases, probably related to the emergency situation of the impending kingdom. 108 He doubts much conflict with the Pharisees, but given Jesus’ action in the temple, he (like Vermes and others) allows the more lethal opposition of the aristocratic priests. 109 

Forced Choices?

Although the reader will recognize that I agree with Sanders’ basic thesis and agree with most of his approach, I wish at this point to note some areas where I think Sanders has treated the evidence too narrowly. 110 Like many other scholars, Sanders sometimes presents alternatives in such a way as to force choices, offering two alternatives without allowing for the possibility of other options. For example, he argues that Jesus either attacks purity or the necessary business arrangements in the temple, if he is attacking anything at all; 111 but a detractor could (if one wished) suggest that Jesus’ complaint had some other basis than these two alternatives (for example, the location of the trade). More importantly, while I believe that Sanders is right to argue for the future kingdom, he may too readily play down some evidence for its presence in Jesus’ ministry. In the gospel tradition, the kingdom is received as a gift, entered as a child (Mk 10:14-15), and apparently parabled as a current, smaller foretaste of the future (Mk 4:26-32). Here again, the division of options seems part of the culprit in excluding potential evidence. Dividing material about the kingdom into six categories, Sanders includes this “present” material in two other categories (covenant 112 and the kingdom’s character). 113 Because he includes each piece of evidence in only one category, he thus excludes them from the category of the kingdom-as-present in Jesus, a category that consequently has so little remaining in it that Sanders can essentially reject it. 114 Yet many of these sayings could belong to multiple categories, a possibility excluded only by the arbitrary choice of including them in only one category each. Even so, Sanders does allow it as at least conceivable that Jesus believed that the kingdom was breaking in through his message, 115 in the same way that some other prophets of his day may have thought this for their own activity. 116 

Repentance and Conflict

Sanders doubts the tradition’s portrayal of Jesus’ call to public repentance. 117 Yet I believe that his helpful approach to Jesus as an eschatological prophet may challenge his own suggestion that Jesus did not emphasize public repentance. Sanders distinguishes this repentance aspect of Jesus’ mission too sharply from that of John the Baptist. But repentance’s occurrence in John’s teaching and that of many of Jesus’ followers provides an argument from continuity, the very sort of argument he elsewhere accepts in the case of restoration eschatology. 118 If Mark portrays Jesus as calling Israel to repent (Mk 1:14-15) or sending his disciples to do so (Mk 6:12), Sanders thinks that the evangelists “felt it necessary to remedy” the lack of Jesus’ teaching on the subject, hence concludes that “the sayings were added.” 119 By this line of argument, one could account for any evidence in the tradition that conflicts with one’s thesis as proof that one’s thesis is correct! He doubts that Jesus required restitution. 120 His case is somewhat stronger at this point; the Gospels do not offer extensive evidence for Jesus demanding restitution. Nevertheless, one can argue against Jesus’ concern for restitution completely only by discounting a story like Zaccheus (Lk 19:8) and by ignoring Matt 5:24 (which he elsewhere seems to accept as authentic). 121 While Jesus surely ate with sinners (hence accepted them on a social level), to claim that he accepted them without repentance and moral reformation 122 seems to exclude a large amount of the Jesus tradition solely on the grounds of its content (at least, if Jesus’ acceptance is construed as making them his followers without transformation). Not only does Jesus’ message of repentance appear in multiple strata of the tradition (e.g., Mk 1:15; 6:12; Lk 13:3-5; 15:7, 10), but Jesus’ demands for discipleship are radical. Sanders could be right that Jesus did not require sacrifice with repentance 123 and perhaps limited restitution; but in a different context Sanders accepts the force of Matt 8:21-22//Lk 9:59-60, 124 which necessarily involves radical obedience for converts. As we shall note in ch. 14, many other texts also emphasize radical discipleship (e.g., Mk 1:16-20; 8:34; 10:21-30). Limited use of the term “repentance” need not entail any denial that Jesus demanded radical change. Part of the conflict here is a matter of definition; “repentance” in first-century Judaism required restitution and sacrifice, which Sanders finds lacking in Jesus’ teaching. 125 (He may not hold John the Baptist to the same standard; although he allows that John preached repentance, we find no requirement of restitution or sacrifice in John’s teaching.) 126 We should not argue against a practice from silence when ancient hearers may have simply assumed it, but it does seem that Jesus’ interests differed from those of priests and even Pharisees. Moreover, Sanders does allow that Jesus would have believed in repentance in the general sense, but argues that, unlike other Jewish restoration sources, Jesus did not emphasize national repentance. 127 It seems to me more likely, however, that this very context in early Judaism supports the probability that Jesus did call for national repentance, like John. I believe that this call would support rather than detract from Sanders’ larger emphasis on Jesus’ restoration eschatology. Indeed, in “Q” material that is difficult to doubt, Jesus laments entire towns that have not adequately repented (Matt 11:21//Lk 10:13), and perhaps Israel as well (Matt 12:41//Lk 11:32). (In a later work, Sanders also contends that Jesus probably concurred with John’s message of repentance because of coming judgment, 128 though he continues to believe that “repentance” was not a prominent theme for Jesus.) 129 Just as Jesus should be more in continuity with John’s mission on the matter of repentance, it would not be surprising if his mission led to conflict with Jewish teachers who disagreed with him. While Sanders rightly reacts against Christian scholarship that has traditionally demonized ancient Judaism as a foil for Jesus, I believe that he too often minimizes or eliminates tensions in the tradition between Jesus and the Pharisees. 130 Although we must read Jesus within Judaism, we do know that most Jewish groups did in fact have conflicts with others. Of course, Sanders’ emphasis is appropriate: the Pharisees did not go around trying to kill people who differed with their interpretation of the law. Even in the Gospels, where some Pharisees “plotted” against Jesus, it is, as Sanders notes, Jerusalem’s priestly leaders who get Jesus executed, and that within a few days of their decision. 131 But interpretive conflict with some Pharisees and/or scribes pervades the tradition, appearing in every level of it. 132 We address these issues in ch. 16.

Jesus and Eschatology 

What of Sanders’ contention that Jesus was an eschatological prophet? Many, probably most, scholars find this conclusion difficult to evade (despite differences among themselves on what they mean by “eschatology”). Jesus is eschatologically oriented in Mark, Q (in our current and least speculative form), and in our earliest Pauline sources that probably reflect Jesus’ teaching on the subject (a point we will address more fully in ch. 17 and appendix 4). Only the Fourth Gospel emphasizes realized eschatology while playing down the future, and even that gospel includes some future eschatology. 133 Further, Jesus historically followed an eschatological prophet (John) and generated an enthusiastically eschatological movement. The closest parallels to his earliest movement are found among Palestinian Jews who expected an imminent divine intervention of some sort. (I include in this comparison those who expected divinely enabled political deliverance from Rome through protest or revolt, and the “sign” prophets depending on divine intervention.) 134 Why then are some scholars today skeptical of an eschatological Jesus? It is noteworthy that some of the scholars who do so appeal to non-Jewish analogies to support their understanding of Jesus, even though no one can seriously deny that Jesus was Jewish. There is also more intellectual cultural appeal today in a non-eschatological Jesus, as was the case before (as well as for most of the years since) Weiss and Schweitzer. Most scholars who emphasize Jesus’ Jewish framework recognize that Jesus spoke prophetically about the future, whether as a matter of an imminent crisis in the political order (which did materialize), a more cosmic cataclysm, or both. 

Conclusion 

We have surveyed several approaches to Jesus with an emphasis on his Jewish context, and suggested that these offer a more satisfactory framework for understanding Jesus’ ministry. Although I have focused here on Borg’s early work and especially the approaches of Vermes and Sanders, many other scholars could have been named. My primary objective in this book is not to survey earlier literature, however, but to argue for a synthesis that also draws on some additional information offered in the following chapters. My point has been to illustrate the diverse range of views in Jesus scholarship and provide a sense of where this book will fit within that range. Before I turn to various traditions about Jesus, I need to explore the written sources that have preserved them. What are the most dependable sources? That is, which ancient gospels or other works provide generally useful information about Jesus? To this question we turn in the following chapter

CHAPTER 4 - Other Gospels? 

“I propose a single stream of tradition for the passion-resurrection traditions from the [Gospel of Peter’s] Cross Gospel into Mark. . . . My theory, then, is that canonical Mark dismembered Secret Mark’s story of the young man’s resurrection and initiation.” JOHN DOMINIC CROSSAN 1 

“The claims that these writings contain independent valuable historical evidence for the life and teaching of Jesus do not stand up to scrutiny.” GRAHAM STANTON 2 

“. . . the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Peter, to cite just two examples . . . drip with indications of lateness, yet some scholars hope to date forms of these writings to the first century. They do this by attempting to extract early, hypothetic forms of the text from the actual texts that we have. But they do this without any evidence.” CRAIG EVANS 3 

Whether due to theological dissatisfaction with the canonical Gospels or due to historical curiosity, talk of “lost Gospels” is in vogue today. Fortunately for such interest, we have good reason to believe, as we shall note more fully later, that many accounts of Jesus’ life did circulate in the first century (as noted in Lk 1:1). I doubt that there is a New Testament scholar alive today who could contain her or his excitement should one of these documents come to light. Nevertheless, and unfortunately for our interest, none of the noncanonical “gospels” currently circulating are authentic first-century works. This deficiency proves especially unfortunate for scholars who have reconstructed alternative pictures of Jesus and his earliest followers to a significant extent based on these documents. 4 In the case of at least some of these scholars, the wish may be mother to the thought. As Craig Evans, a scholar who has worked extensively in these sources, warns, “In marked contrast to the hypercritical approach many scholars take to the canonical Gospels, several scholars are surprisingly uncritical in their approach to the extracanonical Gospels.” 5 On the whole these works bear all the signs of lateness rather than reflecting early Palestinian Jewish tradition. 6 At the end of the chapter we shall briefly survey some other noncanonical evidence, though the results of that examination also prove slender.

Constantine’s Canon? 
Not many years ago parts of the media hyped the “lost” Gospel of Judas. 7 While this “gospel” is valuable for understanding beliefs in the era from which it emerged, however, for the most part neither the scholars who worked on it nor New Testament scholars found it very relevant for understanding the historical Jesus. The work is simply too late to preserve reliable traditions about Jesus. 8 Some popular writers today have spoken of scores of ancient “gospels” competing with the canonical gospels until purged by Constantine. 9 This claim is either disingenuous or stems from ignorance of the facts. 10 If we count as a “gospel” any “life of Jesus” regardless of the date of its composition, we would have to include the plethora of nineteenth-century “lives of Jesus” (along with a few movies about Jesus today). Clearly, however, the only “lives of Jesus” that can be counted on to give us independently reliable information are those that were composed within the earliest generations of the church. As we shall argue, of the “gospels” that survive today, for better or for worse only the four preserved and accepted by the mainstream second-century church into their functioning canon can lay a solid claim to stem from the first few generations (i.e., from the first century, although the Fourth Gospel probably meets this criterion by less than a decade). For the most part, what they failed to preserve failed to survive. We will argue later that far more works about Jesus circulated in the first century than the four now in the Christian canon; apart from these four, however, none was circulated widely enough to survive. The other extant works are later, some from the second century, but many from centuries following. One can in fact find scores of extant (most of them barely extant) works that can be called “gospels,” but only a few of these date even to the second century, and many stem from long after Constantine. The popular claim is also disingenuous because matters were settled for the vast majority of the church long before Constantine. By 170 CE, Tatian in Syria harmonized the four gospels now accepted as canonical, probably developing earlier work from the mid-second century. From the same generation Irenaeus in the western Empire, far from Syria and addressing a culturally quite different form of the Christian movement than Tatian addressed, also emphasized these four gospels. Toward the end of the second century, Irenaeus treats Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as the only gospels universally accepted by the “orthodox” circle of churches. 11 Irenaeus’ modern detractors may dispute his claims about how early these works were accepted, but they were certainly widely accepted by his day, and to place other works on an equal footing with the four as late as Constantine is simply inaccurate. Works circulating in some minority circles never attained sufficient readership to become standard or displace their earlier public competitors. 12 Most importantly, the popular claim is disingenous because it compares apples and oranges under the rubric “gospels.” The other works that we call gospels mostly fall into two broad categories: “apocryphal gospels” and “gnostic gospels.” 13 Neither of the two are exactly “lives” of Jesus (in the sense of ancient biography), and gnostic gospels are especially disqualified. Most gnostic gospels are simply collections of sayings.

Apocryphal Gospels and Acts 
Until recent times most scholars agreed with Bultmann’s assessment of the apocryphal gospels as legendary and historically valueless. 14 The apocryphal gospels tend to display second-century tendencies far removed from a Palestinian tradition; they exhibit many more clearly secondary and tendentious features than the earlier Gospels ultimately received as canonical by the Church. 15 

The Genre of the Apocryphal Gospels 

The apocryphal gospels seem concerned to fill in missing details of Jesus’ life, 16 and are closer in genre to novels than to biographies. 17 Novels generally reflected the milieu of their readership more than that of their characters, 18 and this characteristic fits these apocryphal gospels’ cultural horizons. Thus the apocryphal gospels did not even need to draw extensively on earlier gospels, 19 although there are some parallels. 20 

Ancient readers knew the genre of novel, but in the overwhelming majority of cases could distinguish between historical and fictitious narratives. 21 Although this distinction was probably somewhat less obvious once the apocryphal works became widely circulated beyond their original audiences, there is little indication that they offered any serious competition with the four gospels ultimately deemed canonical. Distinctions in genre revealed distinctions in purpose. Even when historical works have incorrect facts they do not become fiction, and a novel that depends on historical information does not become history; 22 what distinguishes the two genres is the nature of their truth claims. 23 (We address the contrast between novel and history further in our following chapter.) 

Most scholars recognize that the apocryphal gospels and acts bear various similarities to ancient novels. 24 The apocryphal acts include “faked documentation and other devices used in ancient fiction to create an atmosphere of verisimilitude.” 25 One scholar points out such apocryphal works’ “large ration of the absurd,” such as “talking dogs and competitive displays of magic, sky travels and a miracle competition (Acts of Peter), obedient bed-bugs (Acts of John), baptized lions (Acts of Paul),” and “cannibals (Andrew and Matthew among the anthropophagoi).” 26 Needless to say, many are enjoyable to read. 

In contrast to Luke’s Acts, the apocryphal acts date from the period of the heyday of the Greek romances. 27 At least some of them, most obviously the Acts of Paul, appear dependent in content on Luke’s Acts. 28 Just as later apocryphal gospels diverge significantly from Palestinian and Semitic traits in the early strata of the Jesus tradition, so these apocryphal acts often diverge much further from the undisputed epistles’ portrait of Paul than Luke’s Acts does. 29 

Most novelistic gospels and acts were theologically compatible with the majority of the church of their day, and simply appealed to the popular imaginations of many Christians eager to fill in gaps of what was known about Jesus’ earthly life. Still, their narrative form came too close to canonical forms for some critics’ comfort, and not everyone took well to composing fiction under the guise of fact: the church defrocked the well-meaning presbyter in Asia Minor who compiled the Acts of Paul. (And it should be admitted that, from a literary perspective, these early Christian novelists were hardly forerunners of John Bunyan, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, J. R. Tolkien or Anne Rice.) 

Nevertheless, a work can be harmless or even edifying and widely recommended, without meeting the ancient church’s criteria for canonicity. (To my knowledge, no one has recommended C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia for canonization, at least not officially.) Many early churches viewed their gospels as “memoirs” of Jesus; 30 novels might be good or bad, but they were not memoirs. Simply because someone wrote a religious work, even in the first century, would not automatically invite early Christians to treat it as Scripture. 

The church felt that its canon’s Gospels had to stem from those who knew Jesus directly or through close association with those who did, to guarantee accurate information. While scholars debate the authorship of the four Gospels today, most place all four within the first century (within three to six-and-a-half decades of the events they narrate). Works that appeared suddenly at a later time, claiming a previously “hidden” tradition of apostolic authorship (such as some apocryphal gospels do), would naturally be suspect. When these later works contradicted the long-circulated, publicly preserved traditions of Jesus’ teachings, as gnostic sources did, they could hardly command a widespread hearing outside their own circles. 

Examples from the Apocryphal Gospels 

The character of Jesus in some of these “gospels” differs noticeably from the character of the Jesus in our extant first-century sources. Thus, for example, in the Infancy Story of Thomas (not the same as the earlier Gospel of Thomas), Jesus strikes dead a boy who bumped him. When the deceased boy’s parents complain to Joseph, Jesus strikes them blind, to his stepfather’s dismay. 31 When another observer complains because Jesus made clay sparrows on the Sabbath, Jesus claps his hands and the birds fly off. 32 A child died accidentally and when Jesus was accused of having pushed him, Jesus raised him to testify. 33 

The apocryphal gospels vary in kind, 34 including infancy gospels (such as those attributed to James and Thomas); a passion gospel (Acts of Pilate); and the Gospels of Bartholomew; of Nicodemus; and so forth. For some, like the Gospels of Barnabas, the Ebionites, and the Hebrews, we possess only fragments quoted by other authors. Some of the apocryphal gospels are very late (the Apocryphal Gospel of John, for example, not to be confused with our canonical Gospel of John, may derive from the eleventh century). Others probably stem from the second century, though probably dependent on our canonical Gospels. 35 A small minority of scholars think that the Gospel of Peter comes from the first century; 36 it is not docetic and has some apocalyptic elements. Thus Crossan, an “alternative gospel” advocate, dates part of it (the so-called Cross Gospel) earlier than any of the canonical Gospels, and relies on it for part of his reconstruction of events surrounding Jesus. 37 Its date, however, is surely later than the first century. The ninth-century document scholars today call the “Gospel of Peter” has no title, and its putative original is dated to the second century only because some have supposed it to be the work condemned (though not really described) by an ancient bishop later quoted by Eusebius. Some argue that our document is not in fact the one referred to in Eusebius; if they are correct, the original version of this work could date as late as the ninth century. 38 In any case, it would be difficult to argue that this text, with its self-rolling stone, walking cross, and other features strikingly uncharacteristic of the securest Jesus tradition, is earlier than the canonical gospels. 39 It appears to draw on all four canonical Gospels, and sometimes apparently includes wording characteristic of those sources. 40 The level of anti-Jewish prejudice resembles some second-century works. 41 Most importantly, the work is so far removed from any knowledge of early Judaism as to portray Jewish leaders keeping watch in a cemetery at night (obviously violating Jewish belief and practice regarding ritual purity). 42 Our standards and expectations for novels, however, differ from those for biographies and histories.

Gnostic Gospels 

As we have noted, comparing many other surviving “gospels” with the canonical ones is somewhat like comparing apples and oranges. If this observation is true regarding apocryphal gospels, which are essentially novels but at least share the canonical Gospels’ narrative form, it is much more the case with regard to “gnostic gospels,” most of which are largely collections of sayings. (While Jesus researchers are happy to study Jesus’ teachings, what we could say about his “life” would be severely limited if these sources were all we had to work with.) With regard to literary form, the gnostic gospels are nothing like the canonical Gospels; they are called gospels only because they purport to convey good news. 43 Thus at most we could look there for some of Jesus’ sayings, not a biographic narrative about him (though some do frame sayings with narrative, the emphasis is normally on the sayings). Much of what we find in the gnostic “gospels” are in fact random sayings collections including both sayings of Jesus (often randomly arranged) and later gnosticizing words attributed to him. Indeed, most of what appears in the gnostic gospels is not helpful even for reconstructing Jesus’ teachings. Most sayings that first surface in the gnostic “gospels” are hardly early, though the earlier of these collections may preserve or adapt some authentic agrapha as well as sayings also reported in our canonical gospels. 44 The collections as a whole are tendentious in a gnosticizing (and hence later) direction and lack most of the sort of early Palestinian Jewish material frequently found in the Synoptics and even John. 45 The leading gnostics for the most part represented an academic elite, and in their purely gnostic form never commanded a majority within ancient circles of Christians. It is also unclear to what degree the plethora of “gospels” and other works functioned as “canon” among them, and to what degree some gnostic schools appreciated the authority of other gnostic schools’ revelations. Groups categorized as gnostic by the later church were more diverse than we usually assume; 46 today some scholars even regard our category as anachronistic, a neologism. 47 Gnostics emphasized the secrecy of their knowledge partly because they appealed to an elite class of “insiders,” 48 but probably also because they lacked any true sources that allowed them to claim earlier public traditions.

 A Sign of Lateness

The absence of full gnosticism in any first-century sources is significant, since those extant sources from the early Empire report even prominent individual philosophers and orators in Greek cities. One could cite the gnostic claim of information passed on secretly, in contrast to the public transmission of information in philosophic schools or the apostolic church. Even to appeal to this secrecy, however, one must concede to a point that works against the likelihood of any pre-Christian gnostic sects: gnostics’ appeal to secret traditions constituted their own tacit admission that their traditions lacked any demonstrably early, publicly testable special information. 49 When we find clearly gnostic elements in a work, therefore, these elements indicate that the work in its current form cannot predate the first century. Many respected scholars have argued for a pre-Christian, pagan gnosticism, 50 but today an increasing number of them admit the scarcity of the evidence. 51 Certainly in the areas of NT scholarship with which I am most familiar (Synoptics, John, and Paul), appeals to gnostic backgrounds have declined substantially in recent years, supplanted by more concrete evidence from Jewish and Greco-Roman sources. While “gnosticizing” tendencies as broadly defined clearly exist in preChristian middle Platonic and related traditions, the features unique to Christian gnosticism do not appear in any texts prior to the spread of Christianity. Alongside other elements in gnosticism, the Christian element is also clear in all extant bodies of gnostic literature. 52 Many of the early gnostic texts found in the Nag Hammadi corpus depend on Christian tradition. 53 The individual texts that do not, might presuppose Christian or at least mixed gnostic influence by virtue of the collections in which they appear. 54 Despite the contention of many scholars that these texts preserve pre-Christian gnostic tradition, 55 the clear Christian influence in many of these texts shifts the burden of proof to the defender of this thesis. Regardless of proposed antecedents, the gnosticism found in these documents is from the Christian period and at times clearly polemicizes against more traditional Christian “orthodoxy.” 56 The extant texts, therefore, do not prove a clear preChristian gnosticism. 57 Still later are other collections like the Hermetica; scholars most familiar with the documents do not date them before the Christian period. 58 Comparing the Hermetica with the latest of the canonical Gospels, John, shows far less overlap than some have supposed. Whereas only about 4% of John’s words do not appear in the most common Greek version of the Old Testament, 60% of John’s words do not overlap with the Hermetica; all words shared by John and the Hermetica also appear in the Greek translation of the Old Testament. 59 This may suggest that John’s vocabulary is derived most commonly from the Jewish Bible in its Greek form. 60 Among the canonical Gospels, by contrast, even John’s thinking is much farther from gnosticism than, say, the Jewish philosopher Philo’s is. The discovery of the Qumran scrolls moved Johannine scholars to a greater appreciation for John’s Palestinian Jewish elements; in chs. 14-16 we shall focus on various Palestinian Jewish elements of the traditions in the Synoptic Gospels. Even John includes substantial knowledge of Jerusalem’s topography, long after Jerusalem’s destruction; 61 most gnostic gospels, by contrast, would probably not care about topography. 

The Gospel of Thomas
While most scholars do not go this far, the Jesus Seminar treats the Gospel of Thomas as an independent source. 62 Of the surviving works that we call “gospels” that were not accepted into the canon, the one thought to contain the largest amount of early tradition is the sayings Gospel of Thomas. This optimism seems likely correct, but if the post-canonical works include little of value, it could be true without saying much. More than likely, Thomas does contain some reliable traditions besides where it draws on the canonical Gospels (or, on some views, their sources); but given clearly later elements in Thomas alongside them, it is clear that much of Thomas is not original. 63 For most scholars, the later elements in Thomas bring into question how much we can be sure of the elements that are impossible for us to date. Most scholars today agree that even the Gospel of Thomas in its present form (some argue as many as one-third of its sayings) involves gnostic influence, 64 even if it is less gnostic than many later documents. This state of affairs contrasts with the canonical Gospels, especially the Synoptics, which lack clearly gnostic elements. These canonical Gospels often retain Palestinian Jewish figures of speech, customs, and so forth (sometimes in spite of their authors’ own tendencies) that point to early Palestinian tradition (see later chapters in this book). Although even the most obscure of Greek philosophical schools in this period stand well documented among our ancient sources, we lack evidence for full-blown gnosticism before the second century (although its constituent parts, such as Middle Platonism, were already evolving, as we have noted). 65 Thus Thomas represents a late document compared with the canonical Gospels. 66 As in the case of the gnostic gospels in general, Thomas belongs to a different genre than the canonical gospels. 67 On the assumption that Q (common material behind both Matthew and Luke) is purely a sayings source, some wish to make Thomas as early as Q. But this argument depends on a disputed (though defensible) major premise and an indefensible, implicit minor premise. I address both more fully below, but let me comment on them briefly at this relevant point. First, not all scholars accept “Q” (though I accept it as very probable and employ it as a working hypothesis in this book), and not all who do so accept it as purely a sayings source. 68 But the second, implicit premise is the more astonishing one. Sayings collections existed for over a millennium before “Q” and for centuries afterward. Why must one first-century sayings source invite us to date Thomas (but not the many later gnostic sayings sources) to the same period? Against a first-century date for Thomas is also the recognition, with probably the majority of scholars today, that Thomas in its current form depends on the Synoptics. This is because Thomas has parallels to every stratum of Gospel tradition (including John and distinctively Matthean redaction) and some of its sayings follow others solely because of the sequence in the canonical Gospels. 69 Such dependence may limit how much we can rely on Thomas as an independent source. 70 If Thomas or a collection that grew into Thomas existed in earlier stages, 71 it seems to me that trying to uncover these stages invites as much caution as it would if we tried to uncover preliminary stages in, say, Mark’s Gospel — what most scholars today would consider a speculative exercise (see below our comments on stages within “Q”). Some scholars have gone further, reconstructing a specifically late-secondcentury date for Thomas. This thesis remains disputed, and I do not rest my more general argument on it; the consensus dating is already over a century after Jesus’ execution, outside personal memory of the eyewitnesses, so adding an additional generation does not really change our point much. Nevertheless, it is a thesis currently under discussion and illustrates a possible milieu for the finished gospel. Noting commonly recognized parallels with second-century Syrian ideas, 72 Nicholas Perrin recently reverted this Coptic document back into Syriac. Although “back translation” is always precarious, in this case it produced what appears to be a startling discovery: all but three of the couplets in the Gospel of Thomas are linked by 500 catchwords 73 (such links being a common practice in Syriac and other sources). 74 (Syriac puns often occur in adjacent verses as well; 75 for example, “fire” and “light” are similar Syriac terms.) 76 Thus Perrin argues that the work as we have it is clearly an “organic unity,” 77 composed (at least in its present form) all at one time. 78 In itself this discovery would not necessarily render Thomas late; it suggests, in fact, that the work is at least somewhat earlier than our earliest Coptic example of it. 79 What is more troubling for an “early Thomas” hypothesis is that Thomas bears numerous characteristics of Syriac Christianity from the second half of the second century, more than of a Palestinian Jewish milieu well over a century earlier. Worse yet, the Gospel of Thomas sometimes follows the sequence and content of Tatian’s Diatessaron (and other Syrian tradition from that period or later). 80 It sometimes shares readings with the Diatessaron that do not appear in the Greek manuscripts. 81 In some cases where some have regarded Thomas’ readings as earlier than the canonical Gospels, they instead reflect precisely the later Syrian tradition (even to the mix of second and third person in Thomas 54). 82 Tatian’s Diatessaron is a harmony of our four canonical Gospels dating to c. 170 CE (i.e., from shortly before Irenaeus was defending the church’s commitment to these four Gospels). 83 If the Gospel of Thomas follows Tatian’s Diatessaron, it would stem from some time after c. 170 CE. 84 In this case it could be assigned safely to the last quarter of the second century — roughly a century after the average date assigned to the canonical Gospels by critical scholars. This is the very latest at which one could possibly date this work, given most scholars’ dating of P.Oxy. 1 (which attests it) to 200 CE. 85 Against this conclusion, we could argue that Tatian and Thomas may simply reflect a common Syriac tradition. 86 Though the points of common sequence might suggest more than a common oral tradition, granting a common oral source would allow an earlier date than dependence on the Diatessaron would require. This solution is a possible one, but Perrin’s most important observation would nevertheless remain. We would still have a Syriac provenance (probably not before the mid-second century) and dependence on mid- to late-secondcentury Syriac tradition, not the original Jesus tradition. 87 Even without dependence on the Diatessaron, most scholars date Thomas in its present form to the mid-second century; 88 dependence would simply make the case firmer and a few decades later. By contrast, very few scholars would try to date the Synoptics or John this late. 89 Perhaps not surprisingly, the gospel’s closing paragraph sounds more like some Greek philosophers than like the Jewish teacher and prophet we hear in the canonical Gospels. When Peter insists that Mary Magdalene, as a woman, is unworthy of spiritual life, Jesus responds, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” 90 One might compare such thinking in the first-century Jewish Middle Platonist thinker Philo, whose world of thought is almost universally recognized to differ substantially from Jesus’ Palestinian Jewish milieu. Wishing to praise the intellectual ability of the empress Livia, Philo remarks that she became male in her intellect. 91 In contrast to some popular portrayals of this second-century gospel today, Thomas, like Philo, was no feminist. Nor do such remarks belong to the same conceptual world as the Palestinian Jewish sage and prophet of Synoptic tradition. Some argue that the original Gospel of Thomas lacked all the late material found in its present form. One cannot of course rule out this possibility, but this approach’s appeal to a hypothetical source constitutes a tacit admission that no concrete documentary evidence supports the “early Thomas” idea. (It offers the same problem as arguments for stages in Q: it becomes more speculative than most scholars can find persuasive.) All the concrete evidence that we do have suggests a later work simply drawing on some earlier sources (at least including the canonical Gospels). Moreover, if we do accept the catchwords thesis, they are so deeply embedded in the work’s structure as to render quite difficult any attempt to reconstruct a mid-first-century original. In some cases, Thomas may appeal to scholars of a particular bent today because of its noneschatological approach. 92 Some of the same scholars who appeal to Thomas, however, are fairly skeptical of much historical tradition in John’s Gospel, 93 which also emphasizes the present experience of God much more than the future kingdom. 94 In such cases, the double standard is telling, for our textual evidence for John is earlier. 

Mixing Types of Gospels

A minority of scholars have argued that apocryphal and gnostic gospels reflect a form earlier than that of the canonical Gospels and similar gospels no longer extant. 95 Working from the apocryphal gospels, for example, Helmut Koester has suggested that they reflect genres earlier than our canonical Gospels, . . . such as sayings collections, aretalogies (miracle collections), and apocalypses. As a result, the Coptic Gospel of Thomas should be seen in a trajectory from Q, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas from collections like the Johannine Semeia source, and the Apocryphon of John from revelations like the Apocalypse of John. 96 In principle, such genre comparisons are not objectionable (regardless of whether or not they are correct). Any attempt to designate these later works as early based on such genre considerations, however, would reflect an illegitimate inference. All the relevant genres coexisted in the first century, so chronological inferences on the basis of such genres are unwarranted. Some have compared even the canonical Gospels with a kind of writing called aretalogies (narratives celebrating marvelous deeds of heroes). 97 Aretalogies do have some features in common with some gospel narratives, but our ancient examples are normally brief narrations or lists of divine acts, hence do not provide the best analogies for the Gospels as whole works. 98 These narratives might support the hypothesis of early circulated miracle-collections, as Koester thinks (though they differ even from apocryphal gospels). But aretalogy was not even a clearly defined genre, 99 and, as we have already noted, the apocryphal gospels generally fit the genre of novels. The Gospel of Thomas probably does intentionally follow the ancient form of a sayings collection; but acknowledging this form does not require us to retroject gnosticism into earlier Christian sayings collections, or to imply that Thomas must be as early as “Q.” First, as we have noted, sayings collections are as old as Israelite and other ancient Near Eastern proverbs and also extend to Greek collections of philosophers’ witticisms. 100 We thus cannot date a work based simply on its “sayings” genre. 101 Sayings collections hardly disappeared after the first century! The rabbinic collection Pirqe Abot and the Syrian Sentences of Sextus in fact date to the later period likely for the Gospel of Thomas. 102 Moreover, as we have also noted, it is not clear that Q excluded all narrative (the matter is debated). Although Q is probably primarily sayings (some with narrative frames), it probably includes some narrative (especially in Matt 3:1- 12// Lk 3:7-17; Matt 4:1-11//Lk 4:1-12; Matt 8:5-13//Lk 7:2-10); 103 we will address the issue of Q more fully below. Of course, some sayings sources could include narrative frames (even when simply, “so-and-so said”) when needed. Reasonably assuming that Q was largely a sayings source, however, would still not clarify the relationship between these works and Q. Since various sayings sources existed, there is no reason to assume that gnostic sayings collections made Q their model unless they can be shown to draw substantially from Q material. In fact, they appear to have had access to “Q” material only the way we do — through Matthew and Luke. (As we have noted, even the Gospel of Thomas, the possible exception, includes sayings that include Matthew’s or Luke’s editing. Later works are even far more problematic than Thomas.) We should also observe that the sayings form does not invite us to assume that the sayings genre was opposed in principle to narrative gospels, as some scholars have argued. 104 Both forms could exist simultaneously without representing competing “communities.” Ancient collections of sayings of famous teachers did not preclude an interest in the deeds of those teachers; reports of sages’ teachings frequently incorporated accounts of their lives or settings for their sayings; 105 and Ahiqar’s wisdom sayings and narrative were probably already combined more than half a millennium before the Gospels were written. 106 Most of the proverbs in the Old Testament collection called Proverbs are traditionally attributed to Solomon (cf. Prov 1:1; 10:1; 25:1); but it hardly follows that those who followed this wisdom-genre therefore rejected the narrative reports concerning Solomon in 1 Kings (cf. 1 Kgs 4:32). Ancient rhetorical experts also addressed how to combine sayings with narrative. 107 Early Christian tradition and use of narrative genre were not likely isolated in a single stream; where Paul’s incidental use attests Jesus traditions, they attest both Q and Mark, and some of the Q material is more like Matthew whereas some is more like Luke. 108 Historically, it is simply nonsense to pretend that writers and communities were limited to writing in a single literary genre. While sayings collections, like narratives, could be either early or late, both the gnostic texts and their more “orthodox” second-century competitors are clearly later, expansive, and considerably farther removed from the Palestinian Jesus tradition than the canonical Gospels are.

Still Later Gospels 

We will not explore in any detail gnostic “gospels” later than Thomas. This is because they tend to be more “gnostic” than Thomas, offering fewer parallels with authentic Jesus tradition and even fewer signs of Jesus’ original milieu. In other words, few of their sayings offer much good claim to derive from the Jesus of history, however much they may teach us about what people were teaching in his name in a subsequent period. Such later “gospels” include the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary. The Gospel of Truth is a purely gnostic meditation, even further from a “gospel” form. The majority of churches (what we might call the “mainstream” of churches, what has traditionally been called “orthodox”) rejected gospels composed based on gnostic “revelation.” They insisted instead on the standard established by first-century Gospels, composed by eyewitnesses or those who knew them. This reflects not simple bias on their part but their insistence on materials known to be early, publicly believed to be from the apostolic circle that knew Jesus, and those who learned from them directly. This was a claim that the later gnostic works, despite their attributions, could not meet; traditions supposedly passed on in “secret” were rightly suspected of being later inventions. Thus, apart from some disputed sayings in Thomas, it is unlikely that any of the apocryphal or gnostic gospels reflect any degree of authentic Jesus tradition. 109 Groups that claim “secret” traditions, as the gnostics often did for their works, thereby concede their lack of public attestation, in contrast to the widely circulated Gospels accepted by the mainstream of early Christianity. 110 As noted above, gnostic “gospels” constitute an entirely different genre than the “biographic” genre now generally assigned to the four Gospels later deemed canonical. 111 Conclusions concerning them should not, therefore, be read back into studies of the canonical Gospels. 

A Twentieth-Century Forgery

The “Secret Gospel of Mark,” not to be confused with the canonical Gospel of Mark, is an important source for John Dominic Crossan’s reconstruction of the historical Jesus. But while some scholars have wished to use the “Secret Gospel of Mark,” more scholars have cautiously warned against its use in reconstructing the life of Jesus. 112 In fact, Secret Mark, once hailed by some New Testament scholars (especially by its putative discoverer Morton Smith) as an early (even pre-Mark) source, 113 has come to be regarded by most as a forgery dating from anywhere between the late second and the twentieth century. 114 The most recent discussion suggests that a twentieth-century date is most likely for the forgery, offering New Testament scholarship’s own version of science’s famous “Piltdown Man.” 115 The only manuscript (actually, a photograph of a manuscript) seems to derive from a different provenance than the monastery where it was supposedly found, and evidence appears to suggest that it appeared at the monastery only in recent times. 116 Its attribution to Clement is stylistically open to question; 117 it also clearly presupposes modern idiom and perhaps modern custom. 118 In fact, recent analysis reveals the typical “forger’s tremor” throughout the document, 119 as well as characteristics of Morton Smith’s Greek handwriting style, convincing many that Smith himself was the forger. 120 Smith’s publications on Secret Mark reflect the same “cut-and-paste” excerpting techniques that characterize the composition of both Secret Mark and the allegedly Clementine document in which it is embedded. 121 Its understanding of homosexuality reflects that of Smith and his twentieth-century context rather than that held in the first century, 122 and some thus suggest that it may have been composed precisely to advance that twentieth-century perspective. 123 The work may even reflect some twentieth-century literary models. 124 These include a novel about a fraudulent document discrediting Christianity, discovered at the very same monastery and exposed by one “Lord Moreton” — published one year before Morton Smith’s first visit to this monastery! 125 We are all capable of being taken in occasionally, and it is understandable that many scholars (including myself) would have been reticent to charge such a noted scholar as Morton Smith with forgery. Given the breadth of information today, we must depend on other scholars at many points. The evidence, however, now seems to be in on this case: the Secret Gospel of Mark is a forgery, hence any reconstructions based on it must be re-reconstructed.

“Q” as a Lost Gospel? 

One proposed “lost gospel” is in a different category from the other ones for at least two reasons. First, “Q” is hypothetical — we have no actual manuscript of the document. I would not, however, for this reason make Q a less likely source than the others we have surveyed, and that is because of a second reason: Q is probably genuinely earlier than any of our extant, finished Gospels. Thus if there is a “Q,” it is one of our best sources for reconstructing Jesus’ teaching, although it must be taken in connection with other reasonably early sources. The major problem in this case is not the date of the document, but that the version of “Q” some scholars are citing is essentially nothing more than a collection of sayings selected to fit their narrower reconstruction of Jesus. Since we concluded our survey of various approaches to Jesus research in ch. 2 by observing Burton Mack’s approach, it seems consistent to conclude this chapter on “other gospels” by commenting on the hypothetical “early” version of Q on which much of his case rests. Many scholars recoil at Burton Mack’s announcement that “Q is . . . a new text that has recently come to light.” 126 Scholars used the Q hypothesis through most of the twentieth century, so what Mack implies is that his circle’s understanding of Q is a recent “discovery.” To put the matter less charitably, the Q hypothesis has been coopted for a new agenda. 127 I am among those who think the Q hypothesis quite likely (a number of respected scholars today do not even grant this point), 128 but acknowledging and working from the hypothesis of Q is not the same as building a speculative hypothesis on a speculative reconstruction of a hypothetical document. 129 Mack’s particular version of Q is not a consensus document of NT scholarship. I will address Q more fully in the chapter on the Gospels’ sources, but should make a few comments about my own perspective here. I will draw on “Q” in my own reconstruction of sources about Jesus, but in doing so, I am clear that we know nothing about “Q” other than what we can reconstruct from Matthew and Luke (“Q” representing the material that they share in common). I had once considered “Q” simply a convenient label for any traditions (probably many of them oral) outside Mark that Matthew and Luke shared in common. It was working through the Synoptics together again in D. Moody Smith’s Luke seminar that convinced me that at least much of the Q material represents some shared written source, because Matthew and Luke often follow it in the same sequence. 130 I should note, however, that some of my colleagues in that very seminar came to dispense with Q altogether. I suspect that none of us subscribed to the various editorial “layers” in “Q” that some scholars have found. Despite claims of consensus about Q in some circles, there is very much a lack of consensus about it.

Are Wise Sayings Incompatible with Everything Else?

Mack uses the form of “Q” as a sayings source to argue for a “Q community” that did not know accounts of Jesus’ deeds. This proposal rests on at least four questionable premises: First, it assumes that we can reconstruct entire “communities” from documents (even documents just seven pages long) that use these documents, a premise that many scholars reasonably find problematic. 131 Second, it assumes that when a community employs a brief document that omits mention of a particular belief, we can safely argue from that silence that the community did not accept (or know of) that belief. Yet any number of comparisons would demonstrate the logical falsehood of this assumption. (I could even use the premise to argue that different books I have written, some of which do not mention issues central to the other books, were produced by different “communities.”) 132 Third, it assumes that Q was exclusively a sayings-gospel. 133 This premise, not unique to Mack, is more plausible than any of the other premises involved in this case, but may be somewhat problematic in at least a few passages. 134 Fourth and more problematic, it offers a dramatic leap of logic on the basis of this third premise. It assumes that if “Q” (which it further assumes as the earliest source) was a sayings source, then Jesus must have been remembered originally for his teachings rather than his deeds. 135 The fourth premise does not follow from the third, even were the third true. I will return to the other premises later, but let us start with the third, least objectionable, premise. Was Q a purely sayings gospel, completely lacking narrative? Many scholars argue that Q consisted mostly of sayings, yet concede that it included some narrative (certainly one need not assume that it proved hostile to narrative). 136 To argue that Q was exclusively a sayings-gospel, Mack eventually must inform the reader that he distinguishes layers within Q. Mack’s “Q” is not simply shorthand for the common material shared by Matthew and Luke, the way many scholars use it. Rather, he refers to what he considers the earliest “layer” of “Q.” 

A Non-eschatological Wisdom Source?  

Mack’s reconstruction of the “early layer” of Q not only excludes Q’s arguably few narratives, but also its many sayings about future judgment and a future figure, at least sometimes identified with Jesus. Omitting eschatology from Q requires some major surgery! It is “Q” (the shared material behind Matthew and Luke, apart from Mark) that mentions the Twelve reigning and judging Israel in the end-time (Matt 19:28; Lk 22:30); or the incomparably powerful end-time judge burning the wicked (Matt 3:7-12; Lk 3:7-9, 16-17); or Jesus rejecting the wicked at the judgment (Matt 7:21-23; Lk 13:26-27). 137 Following the work of some of his colleagues, Mack’s “early” version of Q not surprisingly presents Jesus as a nonapocalyptic, Cynic-type sage, just what Mack considers Jesus to be. 138 Yet the idea that wisdom sayings in “Q” constitute its earliest layer is hardly a consensus. 139 Indeed, some scholars, by contrast, have argued that the eschatological sayings are the earliest layer in Q and that wisdom sayings were later embedded in this apocalyptic framework! 140 And any who regard even some of Jesus’ eschatological sayings as authentic will come up with a completely different picture of Jesus than Mack does. 141 Many other scholars are skeptical, I believe rightly, of the value of the quest for finding specific layers of editing in Q. 142 Literary critics outside the discipline consider such procedures even more eccentric. 143 Not only is the entire procedure of distinguishing “layers” based on emphases too speculative. Here it is also circular: the assertion that the “sage” layer is earliest rests on the very reconstruction of Jesus the argument is designed to prove! A basic principle of historiography is that the more one builds hypotheses on other hypotheses, the less the overall probability of the additional hypotheses. If “Q” were (for example) 70% probable, and if one granted (which I would not) that some layers within Q were 70% likely, one would have already conceded that the overall likelihood of these layers is less than 50% (49%, to be exact). To then hypothetically reconstruct those layers and argue (as again I would not) that one’s reconstruction was 70% likely, one would be left with an overall probability of 34.3% (about one-third). Of course, scholars differ on all the likelihood of each of these hypotheses, but my point is simply that the more one adds speculation to speculation, the further on a limb one’s speculation goes. Inevitably the limb becomes unable to support the scholar’s weight. 144 

Arguments from Silence

Mack assumes that ideas not present in what he identifies as the earliest recension of Q were not held by Q’s compilers. If Mack wishes us to apply this methodological assumption consistently and rigorously, there was actually quite little the “Q community” believed. If we cannot assume their early Christian context on the basis of what they do clearly have in common with early Christianity, perhaps we cannot assume their broader Jewish or Greco-Roman context either. In short, a consistently minimalist approach must insist that they believed only seven pages of wisdom sayings and nothing else. 145 If we assume Mack’s document for the sake of argument, it originally focused primarily on ethics; but does a community that produced a manual of ethics believe in nothing other than ethics? No one would accept this thesis if it were applied to Qumran’s Manual of Discipline (1QS) or to most of the later rabbinic tractate Aboth. As an example of how Mack’s approach functions, one may take his argument that the Q people did not accept Jesus’ Messiahship, since his severely edited version of Q does not affirm that teaching. 146 But assuming that Jesus’ Messiahship was not accepted by the earliest Jewish Christians, when did the idea arise? Diaspora Jews might believe in a messiah, 147 but our evidence generally indicates less messianic sentiment among Jews outside Palestine than among Jews within Palestine. 148 And messianic speculation certainly would not arise among Gentile Christians who had not first borrowed it from Jews: Gentiles had no messianic categories, and for Greeks “Christ” often simply became Jesus’ last name. Who then invented Jesus’ messiahship? 149 If one argues that the authors of Q, as part of the early Jesus movement, accepted other tenets that all surviving evidence indicates that all Jesus’ known followers believed, one offers an argument (rightly or wrongly) on the basis of some explicit evidence we do have. 150 By contrast, dismissing all the concrete evidence we do have and then constructing a hypothesis on the basis of silence offers only a specious argument. 151 What a document says may provide us some insights concerning the community it addresses, but what it does not say tells us very little, especially in a seven-page document addressing a particular issue (as Mack makes Q1 out to be). Yale professor Leander Keck made this case rather strongly in an influential article in 1974. 152 As Keck puts it, given the randomly preserved and situationspecific character of the early Christian sources, . . . can we convert silence into absence? That is, can we argue that the “silence” with regard to certain forms and traditions in the literature in hand shows that the material itself was absent from the community? . . . Can the theology and ethics of a community be inferred from one strand of tradition? For example, was the church which developed and used Q dependent on this material alone? 153 It is unfortunate that some scholars have continued to neglect this important methodological caution. 

Forced-Choice Logic
The assumption that the earliest version of Q must include either eschatology or wisdom, but cannot include both, typically rests on the still less likely assumption that these genres of thought are theologically incompatible. 154 (We briefly addressed this sort of forced-choice logic with regard to genres, above.) Leander Keck bolsters his case against communities that believed only particular documents by appealing to first-century Jewish texts: Surely Qumran has shown us that the same community uses and produces multiple forms which function side by side. It is tantalizing to imagine how the Qumran community would have been reconstructed if the total finds from the caves had been limited to the Hymns and the Genesis Apocryphon! “Since Qumran shows us divergent ideas, as well as diverse forms,” he contends, whoever seeks “to reconstruct discrete communities and theologies on the basis of rigorous logical coherence alone” must bear the burden of proof. 156 Other scholars have noted the blend of wisdom and eschatology in such early Jewish sources. 157 Ben Witherington similarly complains: Arguing there was a Q community is rather like arguing there was a Proverbs community, or an Aboth community. Besides the fact that it is wholly an argument from silence, with no data outside of Q by which to check such a view, where is there any precedent in early Judaism for such a community? The related view that Q must include only one outlook fails to fit what we know of much of either early Judaism or early Christianity. 159 Single communities used different documents in multiple genres that expressed multiple interests. The Qumran community seems interested in its founder’s teachings; many scholars have attributed many of the community’s hymns to the same founder. Besides hymns, the same community employed a manual of discipline, eschatological texts like the War Scroll, and pesher interpretations of the Old Testament. More specifically, single documents sometimes freely mixed wisdom and apocalyptic thought; 160 no necessary boundary in antiquity rendered these categories mutually exclusive. 161 Indeed, one need not search as distantly as Qumran to discern authors, documents or communities that combine divergent perspectives. Matthew, Mark, and Luke each freely combine narrative with sayings, and eschatology with wisdom (especially in Matthew). If Matthew did not find Mark and “Q” irreconcilable, 162 if Mark himself may have used Q at points, 163 why need the original users of Q have found narratives intolerable? Why need the first users of a first edition of “Q” have found wisdom and eschatology incompatible, when that edition’s supposed editors felt free to add the alternative perspective to the same document? If “Q” were so incompatible with the canonical Gospels, why would Matthew and Luke make such abundant use of a source so dramatically antithetical to their theology? 164 The wisdom version of Q that Mack accepts as the earliest recension seems more determined by the conclusion that he and some of his colleagues wish to arrive at than by any other consistent or objective method. He uses “Q” as an anti-“Gospel” that, by virtue of its greater antiquity, trumps claims to accurate Jesus tradition in the early Gospels we actually do have. Thus J. Andrew Overman, chair of classics at Macalaster College, understandably complains about Mack’s earlier Myth of Innocence: The data that constitute historically reliable information about Jesus are largely based on a particular version of Q. There is great trust in our ability to determine which traditions are “early” and which are “late.” The selection of what is authentic material frequently seems arbitrary.

More Dependable “Noncanonical” Sources 

Are there then no surviving non-Christian sources about Jesus? Indeed there are some, and several of these confirm some important points about the historical Jesus. Yet all are fragmentary, and some depend on the reports of Christians. 166 Some scholars note the brief but early comments of Thallus, apparently in the 50s CE, regarding darkness around the time of Jesus’ crucifixion; 167 the Syrian Stoic Mara bar Serapion, who claimed (c. 73 CE) that Jesus was a “wise king of the Jews”; 168 and various others. 169 It is helpful to note these sources, but the information available in them is slender. 170 The most relevant material appears in the early-second-century Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius and in the first-century Jewish historian Josephus. Tacitus notes that Pontius Pilate had “Christus” executed; 171 Suetonius’ report may suggest that Jewish people in Rome were debating Jesus’ identity within two decades of his execution. 172 We shall briefly discuss Josephus further below. Why do these sources not comment more? These writers addressed only what was in their purview; the focus of Tacitus and Suetonius was on Rome itself, and on the provinces or foreign wars especially insofar as they affected matters in Rome. They had little reason to be interested in Jesus himself, 173 although the massive growth of his followers in Rome apparently twice called for comment. Both these passages mention Jesus only in connection with Rome. This neglect is not a result of prejudice against Jesus (though of course such prejudice existed); these historians simply did not focus on figures that seemed irrelevant for their audience’s interests. By comparison, Tacitus has little reason to discuss even the first-century Judean king Agrippa I. 174 Pontius Pilate appears in Tacitus only as the governor who ordered Jesus’ execution. 175 Jesus does appear in these Roman historians more than any other “messianic” or prophetic leader of Palestine. Despite the prominence of Josephus’ War as a firsthand Jewish account to the Roman world’s elite, he is of no interest to later rabbinic sources (less, in fact, than Jesus was). Later rabbinic sources acknowledge Jesus as a wonder-worker, but view him with hostility, treating him as a magician. The rabbis write over a century later than the Gospels (at the earliest nearly two centuries after Jesus), however, and where they have “information” it tends to be secondhand, based on Christian reports. 176 Josephus offers more information about Jesus than Tacitus or Suetonius do, though diplomatically remaining silent on the troublesome popular movement that Jesus spawned. 177 While Josephus plays down potentially “messianic” elements in recent history 178 and even in the OT, 179 Josephus does mention Jesus’ brother James (Ant. 20.200) and likely does mention Jesus himself (Ant. 18.64). (For his treatment of John the Baptist, see ch. 11.) Although three brief lines in Josephus’ passage about Jesus seem to be later additions, the vast majority of scholars today believe that the passage is authentic once these additions are set aside. 180 (Only a few have defended its complete authenticity, without interpolations.) 181 One supporting factor is the passing mention of Jesus in the passage on James; a Christian interpolator would not mention Jesus only in passing, and Josephus would mention him in passing only if he had already (in 18.64) mentioned him. 182 Another factor is that the passage seems mostly neutral, not what an ancient Christian would likely write about Jesus. 183 Interestingly, the Arabic version of Josephus, transmitted without the same tampering, independently confirms the hypothesis that the passage was genuinely from Josephus apart from these interpolated Christian remarks. 184 When we examine what Josephus actually says about Jesus, he portrays him as a wise sage and apparently as a worker of miracles, 185 both features that recur in the Gospels that we will consider in greater detail there

Why We Must Look Elsewhere 

Even for Josephus, however, Jesus was not a central figure. He is treated far better than any of the leaders of movements considered a threat to the land’s political stability, but is not accorded more space than those other popular leaders. Josephus is interested in government leaders and prominent members of the aristocracy. It was instead those who were interested in Jesus who would preserve his teachings and report more of his life. Not all who came to be interested in Jesus began that way; at least some people began with hostility to Jesus yet became his followers (Paul being the best-known case in point). 186 But only those with interest are likely to focus on a person. Jesus’ group was like other groups in this regard. Qumran documents revere their founder, the teacher of righteousness; but no extant sources outside Qumran speak of him, not even those authors (like Philo, Josephus, and Pliny) who mention the Essenes. 187 Josephus claims to have been a Pharisee, and tells us much about the historic role of Pharisees. Yet he never mentions Hillel, founder of the Hillelite school revered in later rabbinic sources. 188 Dio Cassius reports the Judean revolt of 132-135 CE without ever mentioning Bar Kochba — its leader! 189 Similarly, we would not expect to find much interest in Jesus himself in contemporary Gentile documents, 190 or in fact among anyone except his followers. Similarly, Israeli scholar David Flusser points out, “We can hardly expect to find information about Jesus in non-Christian documents. He shares this fate with Moses, Buddha, and Mohammed, who likewise received no mention in the reports of non-believers.” 191 Or as Flusser complains elsewhere, for most charismatic figures in history, outside sources provide a control, but we can know about them only through critically reading their followers’ testimony. Thus All that is significant about Joseph Smith (1805-1844), founder of the Mormons, can be learned only from him, and from Mormon documents. Then there is the case of Simon Kimbangu, the African who performed miracles of healing in the Belgian Congo from March 18 to September 14, 1921. He died in exile [sic: prison] in 1950 . . . the testimony of the Belgian authorities in the Congo are [sic: is] as helpful in his case as the imagined archives of Pilate or records in the chancellery of the high priest would be in the case of Jesus. 192 Similarly, only four works informative about Socrates and from his era survived, and the only three with any useful information derive from his followers. 193 (Even if one emphasizes divergences in these portrayals, the agreements point to elements of the common figure of Socrates behind them.) 194 It is no surprise that it was those who followed his teachings, or came to follow his teachings, who had the greatest interest in preserving them. And, contrary to what some have said, ancient followers of a teacher were normally interested in what the teacher actually did and taught (especially in the first generation or two, the period in which the canonical Gospels were forming). (We shall argue for ancients’ historical interest more fully in ch. 7.) Most Jesus scholars recognize the canonical Gospels as the earliest substantive sources for historical Jesus research. 195 It is thus to these more detailed sources that we must now turn.

Conclusion 

Apart from minor comments about Jesus, the extracanonical sources scholars have used to reconstruct the story or teachings of Jesus date from the second century or later. These sources tend to be significantly later than the first-century Gospels that early Christians chose to preserve. Although the Gospel of Thomas may contain some authentic traditions, the Gospel of Peter may be very late and Secret Mark appears to be a modern forgery. The apocryphal gospels are novels mostly from the late second and early third century; the gnostic “gospels” differ starkly in genre from our canonical Gospels, and in any case reflect gnostic elements underlining their later date. These features are quite in contrast to the abundance of Palestinian Jewish elements that we shall note (e.g., chs. 11-16) in our canonical Gospels. The pre-Gospel source we can probably reconstruct to some degree, “Q,” is helpful, but cannot easily be divided into “authentic” and “inauthentic” stages. It can be reconstructed only on the basis of our canonical Gospels. It is, then, the canonical Gospels to which we must look for our most secure information about the historical Jesus. The rest of the book divides into two sections. First, we must examine the question of the canonical Gospels’ genre and its implications for discovering substantial historical information in them. (This may be our most distinctive contribution to the discussion of historical Jesus research.) Second, we must explore sample forms and passages within these Gospels to evaluate how well their picture of Jesus fits his time and place (often in contrast to the time and place of their writing). (We will focus on the less controversial issue of the “Synoptic” Gospels — Matthew, Mark, and Luke — and their sources, rather than on John.) In the process, we will also ask how the most historically certain elements of their story about Jesus cohere to tell us something about the Jesus who lived in history