Apologetics 7 – The Historical Jesus

It would not be much of an overstatement to say that the historical claims about Jesus of Nazareth get very close to the heart of the Christian faith. While Christianity may be many other things, it is above all, a commitment to a personal God that we believe was revealed in an actual flesh and blood human being who lived in Palestine in the first century AD, who died a criminal’s death and was physically raised from the dead three days later.

So Christianity is a fundamentally historical faith. It’s not as if Jesus was merely an exemplar of a life lived in union with God, nor is it the case that Jesus primarily sought to offer some kind of spiritual enlightenment (much of which would align with the teaching of other religious perspectives). No, in the case of Christianity, if the things we say happened didn’t happen, then what we’re left with is not much at all.

Yet we live in a time when people are more and more suspicious regarding how much we can actually know about who Jesus actually was. There is a suspicion in the air (popularized, for example, by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code) that the church probably covered up the truth about Jesus and presented a view that reaffirmed their own authority.

At a scholarly level there is widespread suspicion that the four canonical gospels are not reliable historical accounts of Jesus’ life because they were written by people who believed in him and were committed to propagating certain theological views about his identity. So many have seen the job of New Testament scholarship as that of getting behind the gospels themselves to the real Jesus of history (as opposed to the exalted Christ of faith).

Of course this begs the important question of what we mean by this term ‘history’. The most obvious answer is ‘history is simply what happened’. We might imagine someone on the scene as events are unfolding, hopefully recording them on a video camera so that there will be no doubt about what actually happened. There is simply the objective reality that ’something happened’ or ’something was said’. The challenge is to get at what that something was with as great a degree of accuracy as possible.

Increasingly people are realizing that this type of history is nearly impossible to record. Someone is behind the camera deciding which events or words to focus on and which to ignore. Even a brief glance at the evening news and the rampant use of ’sound-bites’ should make this obvious. So we might be forced to the conclusion that every historian, whether someone recording on video or writing on ancient papyri, is forced to be selective. And this means that whatever ‘really happened’, historical records of anything are acts of interpretation.

In the first century, history was primarily oral and the primary interest was in the meaning and significance of events (as opposed to detached, objective reporting of facts). It is very difficult for us to think about a world in which our knowledge of the past was passed down around a campfire or through a song.

Our minds immediately jump to questions of how reliable this information was or how it could be verified. But we must continually remind ourselves that these are our questions not those of the writers of the gospels. While we may have standards for what counts as reliable history, those standards cannot be imported back into a first century context in which they would have made little sense.

And this is not merely a ‘Christian’ view of history, this seems to be the view of Greco-Roman historians as well. Our basic historical knowledge of the ancient world is dependent upon sources that would seem dubious by contemporary standards. One of the more famous examples comes from a Greek historian named Thucydides who recorded the history of the Peloponnessian War of the 5^th century before Christ. Thucydides writes,

It was difficult for me to remember the exact substance of the speeches I myself heard and for others to remember those they heard elsewhere and told me of… I have given the speeches in the manner in which it seemed to me that each of the speakers would best express what needed to be said about the ever-prevailing situation, but I have kept as close as possible to the total opinion expressed by the actual words.

It seems that Thucydides thought his responsibility was to record the ‘gist’ of what happened and what was said and the uncomfortable fact is that most of our knowledge of the ancient world depends on this kind of historical work.

So are the gospels historical? They do undoubtedly look different than modern historical writing. Each of the four gospels has a clear ‘theological angle’ and there is no effort present Jesus in a detached, objective manner. The gospels omit many key biographical details (e.g. Jesus’ childhood and early adulthood, his appearance) and focus predominantly on a handful of key teachings and the events of the last week of Jesus’ life. The overwhelming emphasis throughout is on interpreting the meaning of Jesus’ life and teaching. While this kind of ‘agenda’ may seem unreliable to modern historians it was very common in ancient literature and does not force the conclusion that because the writers of the gospels believed in Jesus, their writings are unreliable.

Craig Blomberg summarizes the ancient view of history well, “The attitude then was: Why bother to record and pass on the story of certain events unless there was a moral to be learned from them? So if the Gospels were not ideological, they would have been unparalleled among ancient historical and biographical writing.”

All this to say, our evaluation of the sources of our knowledge of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus must be made on first century and not twenty-first century terms. To fail to do this may say more about our ideologies than those we are purporting to uncover. When we do evaluate the gospels in this light we see that they cannot be so casually dismissed. There is the issue of ‘other gospels,’ other accounts of the life of Jesus that were excluded from the New Testament canon but that is a subject for another day.