Jesus of Nazareth 2000 Years After

Preface

When Jesus of Nazareth asked his aide Simon Peter whom he thought he was, Simon is said to have answered; ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God’. Asked the same question others might have replied: ‘You are Jesus, the woodworker from Nazareth’. How is the split between these two personae to be rationally explained? Did Jesus really transit from being a carpenter or construction worker in Galilee to being God’s stand-in and spokesman? Does the information that is available to us give us an acceptable answer? What can we reliably learn about his personality and his role?

These are the sorts of question about this man that have been asked many a time, and it is therefore not easy to justify a new book on Jesus of Nazareth. There are probably thousands, many of them of course written with a theological purpose in mind. Such is not the case with the present book. It is about the Nazarene, not about the Christ or Saviour with whom he is widely identified in religious circles. My account deals with a man, not a god, though a man who has inspired millions. Above all it strives to understand what kind of person Jesus was and what he stood for. Despite the attention he has received, we know far less about this individual than we would like because the sources are scant and not all that dependable so far as historical knowledge is concerned. What we do have has been pored over by New Testament scholars many a time, and such scholars will not find anything new in my book. The drawback with such scholarly books, plus innumerable essays in scholarly journals, is that, valuable as they undoubtedly are, they are written with a specialized readership in mind and reach very few ordinary readers because of their complexity and detail. The object of the present book is not to say anything especially new about Jesus, for it is doubtful that anything new and sensible could be put forward, although numerous aspects remain unsolved and even in dispute, notably the circumstances surrounding his arrest, trial, and conviction. The aim here is historical plausibility: to explain in a clear and forthright manner what can realistically be said about Jesus and to question or reject what appears unlikely or contrived by much later elaborations. What the book lacks in novelty I hope it makes up for in readability.

The book is aimed squarely at educated readers who would like to find out more about Jesus of Nazareth and his background without being overwhelmed by the intricacies of scholarly debate. Judged by his impact, the Nazarene is one of the most significant figures in human history; indeed it is hard to think of a comparable figure, at any rate in what we call the western world. It seems entirely appropriate that we should all know something about him and what he stood for at the time in which he lived. Yet for many today Jesus is little more than a name associated with a religion that in our multicultural society has been in severe decline in terms of active adherents. In my long career as an academic working in the humanities I have become acutely aware of the widening gap in my students’ knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth, despite the fact that the interpretation of his teachings moulded our civilization for close on 2000 years. The knowledge that I took for granted at the start of my career I certainly could not do half a century later, and this despite the fact that Jesus’s legacy went well beyond the religious sphere. Yet in recent times western nations have moved from indoctrination to embarrassment, from prescriptivism to neglect, in matters religious. But the truth is that the Nazarene is not simply a religious figure; he is a historical figure of real relevance because his legacy has exerted a deep influence on much of the world. What, then, can we know about him?

The study of Jesus of Nazareth and of the origins of Christianity by nineteenth-century positivists ended by creating the impression that once the mythical elements in the gospels had been removed there was hardly any reliable information left on the life, actions, and sayings of Jesus. This general conclusion affected religious researchers and commentators until well into the twentieth century, as the well-known case of Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) demonstrates: he held that trying to recover the historical Jesus was pointless and that only the kerygma or proclamation of salvation that the gospels exhibit, and which is ultimately a matter of faith and not at all of history, could be affirmed. Valuable as was the demythologization of the Jesus story, the conclusion that nothing of historical significance was left was an exaggerated claim that later twentieth-century research was able to confute by concentrating on the historical context of Jesus’s life, that is to say, on first-century Palestine and the Judaism of Jesus’s day. ‘Jesus the Jew’ became almost the norm for saying anything of historical value about him, and there is no doubt that placing Jesus in the milieu from which he sprang has enabled a new understanding of his life and his teachings, even if absolute certainty is unattainable.

Mid-twentieth century pessimism about historical research into Jesus was followed in the last quarter of the century by a renewed optimism and a veritable wave of new approaches to and interpretations of ‘the Jesus question’. Jesus stretched all the way from being a practitioner of eastern magic to a quasi-Marxist revolutionary. Commonsensical scholars stuck to more sober interpretations, but even so the divergence of views has been quite striking. At one end of the scale we have a book such as J. N. D. Andersen’s Christianity: The Witness of History which sets out to prove the theological correctness of the gospels and epistles on the basis of their historicity, while at the other end there is a book such as Gerd Lüdemann’s Jesus after 2000 Years: What he Really Said and Did which reduces the historicity of the Synoptics to a mere fraction of their accounts (and that of the fourth gospel to zero) and offers a potted biography of Jesus in which he is an illiterate bastard who claimed divine authority but whose preaching was offensive to mainline Jews and who lived off the charity of disreputable sympathizers. Even more sceptical are the many books of G. A. Wells which seek to reduce Jesus to a fiction created by late first-century Christians.

None of this is justified. True, one can barely establish totally reliable facts about Jesus, but historians, and especially those who deal in ancient history, do not work on facts alone but also, and at times very largely, through inference and implication, and inference is regarded as a form of knowledge, even if susceptible to error. The task of finding out the truth about Jesus is subject to uncertainty and misunderstandings. Why bother, then, with an enterprise that is condemned from the start to leaving things uncertain? The answer is that being nearer to the truth is to be preferred to being further from it. It is worth trying to separate the likely from the unlikely and the possible from the impossible.

The stark truth is that what we can infer historically about Jesus’s status defies any neat category, even while offering characteristics of several: a faith healer; a mystic or visionary; a teacher of wisdom; an apocalyptic prophet; a peasant Jewish Cynic; a social reformer; a holy man or Hasid; a quasi-Pharisee, or a Rabbi avant la lettre. The various labels can be made to fit partly but not all that comfortably. Something about Jesus remains to challenge us. As Matthew the evangelist made the disciples ask, what kind of man is this? My book is not a synthesis of all the – almost bewildering one could say – number of interpretations of Jesus that have been offered in the past fifty or sixty years. It is a much simpler summary that tries to understand the person in his milieu. I trust that it is acceptable historically, but in Jesus studies there can be no absolute historicity.

We have to recognize that the inner personality of Jesus is not available to us any more than it was to St Paul and to the evangelists writing just a few decades after his death, and it is fairly obvious that they did not know precisely what to make of him, however hard they tried to weave together the stories heard about him. Jesus’s dedication to his mission is clear but his motives remain obscure. Those who wrote about him were interpreters, not chroniclers, as much then as now, and their interpretation cannot easily be filtered and laid to one side: fact and fancy are meshed together. Some aspects have been inherited and we can do nothing about it, as for example that Jesus was to some degree an eschatological or, more correctly, apocalyptic prophet in the Jewish tradition, whatever else he may have been. We cannot doubt this particular classification of him but we can certainly be dissatisfied if we leave it at that. After all, if Jesus was seen purely and simply as a prophet predicting the imminent or early arrival of the end-time or of the restoration of divine rule, when the end-time or the restoration did not come he would have been discredited and forgotten. That this did not happen indicates that there was rather more to him than eschatology. And indeed we can see that there is a great deal more about him that the original writings seem to point to, even without transcending the limits of his humanity. One of the things that comes through most clearly is the devotion and trust of his close followers starting from the early days of his public ministry. They evidently saw something rather special in him. What? That is the fascinating and challenging question about Jesus of Nazareth. The question is not answered by replying that his loyal followers were an invention of the evangelists, for that only raises even more imponderable questions.

Who, then, was this man, and what was his message? These are the questions this book seeks to examine and to answer, inasmuch as they can be answered, in as straightforward and uncomplicated a way as I have been able to manage. A word of warning though: we cannot unfortunately get to the man Jesus, the man who walked the roads of Galilee two thousand years ago, in any direct way. There is no-one to answer the question: what was he like as a person? We have to work back from effects. Jesus left no writings, only memories of him to those who had shared his life and who in turn passed on those memories to others. It is extremely difficult to judge just how accurate those memories are. For this simple reason a great deal about the Nazarene has to be inferred, and such inferences are a matter of probability, hardly ever of certainty. One has to exercise caution in the interests of avoiding unsustainable claims.

Contrary to many recent books on Jesus of Nazareth, this book seeks to uphold no particular thesis apart from the fact of his existence. It simply puts forward those aspects of his life and teaching that can be sensibly and rationally sustained without forcing the evidence and without resorting to mythologization or mystification. In particular the book endorses no religious viewpoint. ‘Belief in’, as distinct from ‘belief that’, is not a part of historiography, although it may well be a part of the historian as a private individual. Belief in the greatness of Napoleon or Alexander the Great should not govern what the historian, qua historian, writes of them. Similarly any attempt to identify those facets of Jesus of Nazareth that can be put forward with some – no more than some – degree of probability of historical truth should not be led by the intention either to bolster or to undermine a reader’s religious affiliation. By the same token to pass as historical truth what is patently theological invention is equally inadmissible. Neither the historian nor the theologian can do without imagination, but intellectual integrity demands that we keep them recognizably apart, at least to the extent that we remain aware at all times of the kind of statement we are making.