Another “new quest” figure – one of the most important – is Geza Vermes, who got so into the Jewish background to Jesus that he converted from Christianity to Judaism. Here’s a passage from Geza Vermes
The changing faces of Jesus London: Penguin 2000 p.249
Geza Vermes said:
Our panoramic survey of Galilee, its history, society, culture and popular religion has already made our case and has allowed, however vaguely and sketchily, the face of the real Jesus to emerge. His image, drawn by the primitive church in the Acts of the Apostles, and the portrait of the living Jesus contained in the earliest layers of the Synoptic Gospels, largely overlap. They point to a prophet-like holy man, mighty in deed and word, a charismatic healer and exorcist, and to a teacher whose eyes were fixed on the present task envisaged from a practical-existential rather than an abstract and philosophical viewpoint.
Jewish, and perhaps in particular Galilean, popular religiosity tended to develop along the path followed by Honi, Hilkiah, Hanan, Jesus and Hanina. Compassionate, caring and loving, they were all celebrated as deliverers of the Jews from famine, sickness and the dominion of the forces of darkness, and some of them could even be seen as benefactors of the whole of mankind, since the salutary effects of rain and control over demons reached beyond the boundaries of Jewry. The Jesus of the New Testament fits into this picture, which in turn confers on his image validity and credibility: for there is no denying that a figure not dissimilar to the Honis and Haninas of Palestinian Judaism lurks beneath the Gospels.
There again you have an emphasis on the reality of Jesus. And, again, I couldn’t find a passage where he explicitly addresses the question whether Jesus existed or not, because that’s not a viable question in mainstream contemporary scholarship on Jesus.
That’s illustrated by the following passage from a much more sceptical scholar, who attacks much of the methodology of the “third quest”. This is from Terrence Tilley, “Remembering the historic Jesus – a new research program?” in
Theological studies vol. 68 no. 1, 2007 (no page numbers as I got this online):
Terrence Tilley said:
The quests for the Historical-Jesus all too easily fall prey to the desire for relevance.
Moreover, what does rigorous historical research yield as historical facts, not reconstructions? E. P. Sanders lists eight historical facts that are almost indisputable:
1. Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist.
2. Jesus was a Galilean who preached and healed.
3. Jesus called disciples and spoke of there being twelve.
4. Jesus confined his activity to Israel.
5. Jesus engaged in a controversy about the Temple.
6. Jesus was crucified outside Jerusalem by the Roman authorities.
7. After his death Jesus' followers continued as an identifiable movement.
8. At least some Jews persecuted at least parts of the new movement ... and it appears that this persecution perdured at least to a time near the end of Paul's career. (8)
Minimal as they are, even these items are not perfectly stable as historical conclusions. Fredriksen has argued rather persuasively that nos. 1-5 cannot be certainly sequenced in that order, and that no. 5 cannot be affirmed on historians' grounds to be a cause of no. 6. (9) Other scholars might reformulate no. 3 (to exclude reference to the Twelve) and no. 4 (as not quite as reliable as the others). Of course, the list might also be expanded. (10)
Even if these eight items were completely reliable as historical facts, they are not enough to warrant a reconstruction of a Historical-Jesus. They are but parts of a skeleton that scholars have unearthed and that they imaginatively expand by adding more bones they think "must have been" part of the skeleton and by layering on flesh to give their readers a portrait the readers can recognize. In doing so, scholars often fail to portray the significance of the historic Jesus. The quest cannot reach the goal of portraying objectively the actual man Jesus in any substantive way - the data are simply not there, even if it were possible to "reconstruct" a person from his dry bones.
(The notes referred to in that: )
(8) Sanders, Jesus and Judaism 10-11; I think Jesus not merely a healer but an exorcist, a point too often downplayed in the quests for relevance. Compare Norman Perrin, The New Testament: An Introduction (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1974) 277-78, for a similar list by a scholar sympathetic to the second quest. These factoids are not sufficient for writing a biography of Jesus.
(9) Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Jesus, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University, 2000) xxii. Fredriksen, against a very wide consensus, argues that the cleansing of the Temple (the key action signified in item 5) never actually occurred, but should be attributed to the early church. I am not persuaded that she can sustain her argument (see my "Teaching Christology: History and Horizons," in Christology: Memory, Inquiry, Practice, Annual Publication of the College Theology Society 48, ed. Anne M. Clifford and Anthony J. Godzieba [Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2003] 275-76 n. 18), but the Temple incident clearly is a floating pericope that the authors of John and Mark placed into their texts at different points.
(10) In his more popular The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Penguin, 1993) 10-11, Sanders expands this list. He adds Jesus' year of birth, his childhood in Nazareth, his preaching the Kingdom of God, his going up to Jerusalem for Passover about the year 30, an arrest by Jewish authorities, and writes more extensively about the effect of the disciples' seeing Jesus after his death. In the second edition of Perrin's The New Testament: An Introduction (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982) 411-12. Dennis Duling also made a similar expansion. Even these expanded versions are not sufficient to give a biography of Jesus.
(Note the comment in n. 9 that there is “a very wide consensus” that the cleansing of the Temple did occur.)
Now Tilley’s aim, here, is to argue that not much is really known about Jesus, that scholars can’t agree on precisely which core facts are known about him, and that (most important of all) the details which they add to those facts are generally determined by their own preconceptions and their desire for a Jesus who reflects their own religious preconceptions. However, there are two clear points to come from this:
(1) Most “historical Jesus” scholars, as Tilley reports the situation, do think that there are facts that can be known about Jesus, although they may disagree about what those facts are; there is thus consensus among “historical Jesus” scholars that Jesus existed.
(2) While Tilley is sceptical about the methodology used by “historical Jesus” scholars and about what we may know about Jesus, he doesn’t suggest that Jesus didn’t exist at all. He comments in n. 9 that he thinks Fredriksen is wrong to argue that the cleansing of the Temple never occurred – in other words, he thinks that it did; for all his scepticism about what the search for the historical Jesus, then, Tilley still thinks that Jesus existed and that we know something about him.
Now the people I have quoted, or who are referred to in these quotations, are not marginal or minor figures. People such as Norman Perrin, E.P. Sanders, Geza Vermes, and John Meier are major drivers of modern scholarship on Jesus. The others I’ve mentioned are significant and respected scholars. In only one of those books could I find even the question of Jesus’ existence explicitly considered, and answered with a very definitive “yes”. The others take Jesus’ existence as a given and merely question what can be known about him. In the face of this, I don’t see how it’s possible to question that there is a consensus in contemporary, mainstream scholarship on the historical Jesus that Jesus existed. If there were not, then even those who think Jesus did exist would argue for this belief explicitly.
In 2007/8, a group of historians, biblical scholars, and theologians (The Jesus Project) embarked on a 5 year quest for the historical Jesus in response to the failure of a previous project, ‘The Jesus Seminar’, which had been searching for the historical Jesus for more than two decades. The Jesus Project also failed. In short, after decades of scholarly research by these mainstream scholars, no evidence of Jesus as an historical figure appears to have been found.
Well, the Jesus Seminar isn’t very good evidence for the case you’re making, and that’s for two reasons. The first is that it’s not exactly representative of mainstream scholarship. Indeed, all the references I’ve seen to it in mainstream scholarship are rather dismissive, regarding it as populist grandstanding done for the purpose of annoying religious conservatives, not proper scholarship. This passage from James Paget is typical (from the paper cited above, p. 148):
James Paget said:
Some scholars… do not appear to be operating in the “Third Quest” at all, in particular the members of the so-called Jesus Seminar. Individual members of this seminar, as well as its collective publications, present a Jesus altogether different from anything associated with the so-called “Third Quest”. The seminar is not only more sceptical about the gospels’ claims to historicity, but its reconstructions of Jesus’ teaching draw heavily on extra-canonical sources, in particular a stratified Q and the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. As a result, Jesus emerges as primarily a non-eschatological preacher, somehow at odds with the prevailing Jewish culture of his day. Harnack and his ilk stalk the land in the garb of late twentieth-century American liberals.
More importantly, however, the Jesus Seminar operated on precisely the assumption that Jesus
did exist. The scholars who took part would consider sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels or other texts, and vote on whether they thought them authentic or not. Each saying was then categorised by how probably authentic it was, based on the results of that vote. But it’s quite obvious that there would be no point to this exercise if the scholars involved didn’t think that Jesus really existed – if they didn’t, they’d just vote for every text to be inauthentic!
Now of course the Jesus seminar did not succeed in producing some kind of definitive “answer” to the question which sayings attributed to Jesus were authentic, or to the wider question of what the historical Jesus was really like. So perhaps in that sense you can say that it “failed”. But it would have been impossible to “succeed” by those standards. It certainly succeeded in annoying religious conservatives, at any rate, so it wasn’t a total waste of time. And more seriously, whatever its “failure” may have been, you can’t cite that as evidence that mainstream scholars do not believe Jesus existed. As I said, the seminar was predicated precisely upon the supposition that he did.
As for the “Jesus Project”, again, you don’t say how you think it “failed” – although it didn’t really get off the ground, for a lack of funding.
David Noel Freeman (the General editor of the Anchor Bible Series and many other works) said, "We have to accept somewhat looser standards. In the legal profession, to convict the defendant of a crime, you need proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In civil cases, a preponderance of the evidence is sufficient. When dealing with the Bible or any ancient source, we have to loosen up a little; otherwise, we can't really say anything." (Bible Review magazine, Dec. 1993, p.34). Exactly how "loose" is one expected to get?
That’s another citation that I can’t track down at the moment, but still, it doesn’t tell us much, taken by itself. It’s perfectly true that most ancient texts don’t give us proof beyond reasonable doubt of many things; but which sorts of things is he talking about here? The claim that Jesus existed – or the claim that (say) he delivered the Sermon on the Mount? Usually when biblical scholars urge caution they are thinking of more particular things like the latter.
I am not aware of anyone claiming Josephus “invented” Jesus. There is a claim that Josephus may have been an Ebionite Christian. If true, it becomes possible that he would repeat a Christian fiction.
I’m afraid I have never encountered this claim, including not in any of the books I looked at while putting this post together, which includes some that treat Josephus pretty thoroughly. So I can’t say much about it other than that it sounds pretty wild to me. This is not least because
nothing whatsoever is known of the Ebionites. There’s an often-repeated theory that the Ebionites were the successors of the original Jewish Christians, and that, after Christianity went all Greek in the second century, they were regarded as heretics for preserving the original version of the faith, and this is all very tragic and ironic. (I suppose that might be part of the rationale behind making Josephus, a Jewish writer, one of them, on the theory you mention.) It’s a cute story and it may even be true, but unfortunately there is no evidence for it at all, so this is really just speculation.
(In the 5th century, John Chrysostom in his Treatise on the Priesthood, Book 1, wrote, "And often it is necessary to deceive, and to do the greatest benefits by means of this device, whereas he who has gone by a straight course has done great mischief to the person whom he has not deceived."). The Testimonium Flavianum found in the Antiquities of the Jews 18.63-64, summarises the ministry and death of Jesus. I think this was after the first gospels were written, therefore, even if his accounts about Jesus were written by him, his account could only serve as hearsay. Either way, the authenticity of this passage does remain hotly contested by many scholars.
The authenticity of the passage as it stands isn’t simply contested, I think it’s flat out rejected by pretty much all scholars, on the grounds that Josephus would never have calmly informed his readers that Jesus was the Messiah. However, I don’t think most scholars reject the claim that Josephus said
something here about Jesus. I’ve already cited Meier and Tuckett to the effect that Josephus here spoke of Jesus’ ministry and death (very briefly) and the continued existence of his disciples, and that this is very good evidence for Jesus’ historicity.
I’m not sure this proves that there was a historical person called Jesus Christ. Certainly it is evidence of ideas undergoing an evolutionary development.
It doesn’t
prove it. No historical claim can be
proved. But it is evidence. By itself it may not be strong evidence, but when you consider the many cases of this kind together, the evidence becomes pretty strong.
At any rate, this is not evolutionary development. Quite the contrary, it is two completely different ideas. As I said, Jesus is presented as calling himself the “Son of Man”, and what’s more, he does so in many different contexts and with different apparent meanings. Moreover, he never calls himself the Messiah; at best he agrees when other people call him that, and this only happens a couple of times. Outside the Gospels, Jesus is referred to as Messiah absolutely constantly, to the point where “Christ” is used as if it were simply his name. And he is referred to as the “Son of Man” only twice, and both passages are references to the original source of the title, Daniel 7. That’s not evidence of evolution – that’s evidence of two totally different titles, and, moreover, of one being used almost exclusively by Jesus, and the other being used almost exclusively by the later Christians. There’s no evidence of the one developing into the other.
Much the same thing could be said of the “Kingdom of God”, a very important concept in Jesus’ teaching as presented in the Synoptic Gospels, but pretty much entirely absent from the rest of the New Testament. Now what are we supposed to think? That there was some early version of Christianity which had these ideas, but they later died out or evolved into the different ideas that we find elsewhere in the New Testament and later Christian literature? And that for some reason, a generation or two later, Christians invented this person called “Jesus” and attributed the views of the earlier Christians to him, but not their own? Why would they have done that? Isn’t it just far simpler and more plausible to suppose that Jesus was real and that the ideas in question were actually his?
As for ripping out books, he ripped out A BOOK because he didn't believe it was supposed to be scripture. He later repented of this. So to continue to hold it against him is silly. Unless you want to consider Paul an evil man and a disgrace to Christians because he USED to persecute Christians. Yeah but he repented so...
This is off-topic, but in fact Luther rejected quite a lot of books of the canon – the book of James and also all of the deutero-canonical books of the Old Testament. If you ever look at a Catholic Bible you will notice that it contains books in the Old Testament that, in a Protestant Bible, are relegated to the Apocrypha. The Reformers placed them there because the Jewish rabbis did not regard these books as scriptural. They had made it into the Christian canon because the Christian canon of the Old Testament had been based on the Septuagint, which did include those books. But the Reformers thought that the rabbis should be followed in this matter rather than the early Christians.
Plotinius, how well does Jesus fit the criteria for a Messiah under the Hebrew prophecies? From what I have read elsewhere, the Hebrew Messiah was supposed to be a political leader and Jesus flatly rejected the idea that he was a political leader.
I don’t know enough about this to say much, other than that it was complex. Different people had very different ideas about what the Messiah was supposed to be, or even how many there were supposed to be (some of the Dead Sea Scrolls envisage more than one). Certainly there was a strong tendency at the time to expect a political Messiah, given the political state of affairs in Palestine – but I think this was more in the decade or two after Jesus’ death, as tension mounted leading up to the Jewish revolt.
Equally important, however, is the point that there aren’t many passages about the Messiah in the Jewish scriptures. The idea that the Old Testament is full of prophecies about the Messiah is as much a Christian invention as the idea that Jesus fulfils them all. What the early Christians did was basically to trawl through the Old Testament and, when they saw passages that seemed to match Jesus, call them messianic prophecies. The fact that the passages in question might not be about the Messiah at all, or even prophecies, didn’t bother them (they had very different attitudes to scripture from modern people – and in this respect they were like most ancients, Christian, Jewish, or pagan). A good example is the “suffering servant” passages of Isaiah 53, which aren’t presented as prophecies at all – they appear to an account of some contemporary of the writer. But the Christians thought they referred to Jesus so they interpreted them as prophecies.
This is why Christian apologists have generally not succeeded in converting Jews by showing how Jesus fulfils all their prophecies – Jews don’t accept that these are prophecies to be fulfilled in the first place.
Plot, I'm curious as to why you voted for Samson, would you be willing to explain to us good people? (and me too)
Just on the basis that, as far as I know, there’s no particular reason to doubt the historicity of the major figures from the books on the judges and kings; but I know pretty much nothing about them so I’m certainly not going to be dogmatic about that.
I've never heard of the book of Wisdom. Reading what you linked to, it's clearly not a Jewish text. Concepts there like "the devil" are Christian & have never been part of Jewish canon or tradition. If it was originally written in Greek, it's glaringly obvious that it was never Jewish canon. That's a Christian text, therefore it can't predict the Christian messiah. It was written after he was born.
For once I’m afraid you’re quite wrong on that one. The book of Wisdom, also known as the Wisdom of Solomon, is both Jewish and pre-Christian. It dates from the second or first centuries BCE and was written in Greek for Greek-speaking Jews, probably in Alexandria. It is influenced by Greek philosophy, making it an interesting precursor to both Philo and Christian theology (especially the Gospel of John and the Apologists of the second century). But I’m afraid it’s not Christian!
Obviously, Jesus was never a king. If he indeed claimed to be, it's no wonder the Romans crucified him. They did that to many people for much less threatening reasons.
