Preaching the Historical Jesus
by Peter Brown
Standing in line recently to see a splendid exhibit of early biblical manuscripts at the Smithsonian, I overheard a man talking about Jesus. He was formerly a Christian and had retained respect for the faith that he had abandoned. He had left the fold unable to accept the reliability of the New Testament witness, choosing instead to embrace a Jesus somewhere between Albert Schweitzer and John Shelby Spong. It was fine with him if Christians preferred the Jesus of the Bible, it was just that his Jesus seemed more in tune with the available evidence. What struck me about his remarks was his assumption that the Jesus of the Church's proclamation was purely a theological construction based on little or nothing in the way of hard evidence, while his Jesus was a sober assessment of the facts as assembled by more objective historians. I wondered to myself if there was any figure in history more susceptible to revisionism than Jesus. It is of course one thing to have a person of the past interpreted differently by different people. Some people think Lincoln was the greatest president ever, while others south of the Mason-Dixon line aren't so sure. But does anybody deny that Lincoln was the sixteenth president and that he led the nation through the Civil War? With Jesus, however, everything seems up for grabs. Was he married or not? Did he preach God's kingdom or not? Did he work miracles? Did he claim to be the Messiah? Did he really exist at all? Somehow we have reached the point where people feel they are entitled to any opinion whatsoever on these questions. The Church's proclamation has quietly become just another voice in a growing cacophony of opinions.
The recent flatfooted response to The Da Vinci Code illustrates what I am talking about. Christians flew to their word processors to point out Dan Brown's terrible historiography, his questionable motives, and his outright lies. The sheer volume of the responses and overreaction (six books by my count, and countless documentaries, tracts and web sites) drew far more attention to the book than it otherwise would have received. But the almost universally defensive nature of the responses I am afraid will invite similar revisionist attacks in the future. I guess I cannot blame a neutral observer for wondering if Christians deep down are afraid of finding out what really happened with Jesus of Nazareth in the first century. For Christians have spent far more time in warning against the errors of The Da Vinci Code than in giving the world solid reasons to accept the reports of the New Testament as historically reliable and to conclude that the Bible really does make far more sense of Jesus than any other historical reconstruction down through the ages.
What I propose to do in this essay is to go on offense for a change, while indulging for a moment the attacks of various skeptics and pursuing a bit of hard-nosed historical analysis in the process. I do not pretend that my methods are particularly new. It was the approach called for by Pope Leo in Providentissimus Deus, where he envisioned that the Bible might be defended "against rationalism with the same weapons of philology and kindred sciences with which it had been attacked."1 What I wish to show in my sketch of the trends of recent scholarship is that, mirabile dictu, the unrelenting attacks on the historical character of the Gospels have only served to buttress their credibility.
Did Jesus really work miracles?
It is quite surprising that there are still those who deny this. In fact, the evidence that Jesus did perform miracles is nothing short of overwhelming. Not only are there attestations to Jesus' miracles in each of the canonical Gospels, but nearly all of the non-canonical "gospels" and "acts" of the period — though not Scripture — bear witness to later historical testimony about Jesus as a healer of the sick and an exorcist. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus even attests that Jesus, "the so-called Christ," was a doer of great signs and wonders. Beyond this, there is very good reason to believe that Jesus' miracles were continued through the ministry of the apostles in the early Church. Paul asserts that he himself performed under Jesus' power "signs and wonders" in both the letters to the Romans (15:19) and to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 12:12). Paul was not telling tall tales but writing pastoral letters to real-life communities in which his own credibility as an apostle hung in the balance. Falsely claiming to have performed miracles would be a highly damning assertion to make if it was believed to be true by the Roman and Corinthian communities who had witnessed them. There is nothing "scientific" about claiming that we know today that there were no miracles when all the ancient sources say that there were!
Besides, if the Gospel writers were to invent tales of miracles they would not have included details that were potentially embarrassing. In Mark's Gospel, when Jesus' first round of miracles draws large crowds, his own friends try to seize him and declare him mad (Mark 3:20-22); Matthew and Luke exclude the part about his own friends trying to seize him. Mark also records Jesus marveling at the lack of faith of his own people and actual inability to do many mighty works among them (Mark 6:1-6). Later in Mark, Jesus must make two attempts to heal a blind man, for after the first attempt the man's sight was not fully restored (Mark 8:22-26). Again, if Mark (who critical scholars believe to be the earliest Gospel writer) had wanted to invent miracle stories to build up a legendary Jesus, this is hardly the way to go about it.
We might ask also that if the evangelists were so limitlessly creative and the early Christians were as gullible as skeptics have claimed, why they didn't come up with legends a bit more "on message" as far as the central Messiah claim went? Though there was no one-size-fits-all "messianic expectation," everyone expected a conquering king who would reenact the military exploits of David on a grander scale. Why not invent lurid tales of the Lord, say, slaying whole Roman legions with the sword of God's word coming out of his mouth — stuff that really would arouse suspicion that the Gospels were mythopoeia after all? No, there are very good reasons why terms like "myth" and "legend" have slowly faded from New Testament scholarship. Yet it seems anecdotally at least that the terms "myth" and "legend" are very much alive in Catholic parishes. "Demytholygizers" among catechists and homilists sincerely but ludicrously believe that they are nourishing their flocks with the latest of modern biblical scholarship. Actually they are serving the dregs of a style of criticism that turned to vinegar over a half century ago. It's time to get the word out in the Church!
Did Jesus really found a Church?
Speaking of "Church," did Jesus really found one? Critics have long noted that the word "Church" only crosses Jesus' lips twice and in only one of these instances does he express any intention to found one (Matt. 16:16). Because of the dearth of references, it was quite easy for scholars to relativize Matt. 16:16 by attributing it not to Jesus himself but to the creativity of the "Matthean community," whatever that might have been. From this, it could be readily denied that the Church as an institution could really be traced back to Jesus at all. Hans Kung was perhaps the best known Catholic theologian to be taken in by this line of reasoning. But this rather simplistic argument hardly took account of all the New Testament data.
Consider this curiosity. The choosing of the twelve apostles is something we see described in each of the four Gospels as well as Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. But who were the apostles? By my count there were in the entire New Testament seventeen different people designated "apostle." Besides the original twelve there is Matthias (Acts 1:26), Paul, Barnabas, and the mysterious Andronicus and Junias (Rom. 16:7). A hard-nosed historical reckoning of this is that the early Church played rather fast and loose with terminology, perhaps owing to the rapid need for more leaders to serve a growing community. The institution of the twelve, though known to Paul (1Cor. 15:5), plays no part in his ecclesiology — even when he connects the Church with Israel (Gal. 4:26, 6:16). Luke never mentions it again after recording the choosing of Matthias. The Church Fathers show no sign of ever preserving the motif of the twelve within the early bishopric. No, the motif of "the twelve" faded almost immediately from everyday use, which means of course that the Church didn't invent it only to instantly mothball it — Jesus himself did!
And if we're trying to connect the dots between Jesus and the Church, the implications of this are staggering. No one seriously disputes that the twelve are symbolic of a new Israel. And it is becoming harder to avoid admitting that this renewed Israel, this restored people of God, must be interpreted in light of the eschatological hopes of first century Jews. These were hopes that the glory of the Davidic throne would be reinstituted by Yahweh on a grander scale, the exile would be finally ended, and even the Gentiles would return to worship God in a rebuilt temple. But there is an institutional aspect to "the twelve" as well. An early saying provides a clue (I say "early" because if there were a pre-canonical document known as Q, this saying or a close facsimile would have been contained in it): "I confer a kingdom upon you as the Father has conferred one on me. And you will sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel" (Matt. 19:28, Luke 22:28-29). Now the early Church would hardly have invented this saying after Easter, anymore than they would have invented the "twelve." Among other problems, it would have involved exalting Judas Iscariot. That the "twelve" will serve as judges is highly suggestive. The judges of old were rulers over God's people; they exercised a kind of spiritual and temporal dominion. In Jesus' restored Israel, the twelve will fulfill such a mission presiding over the end of the exile by forgiving sins and by leading the renewed people (Jews and Gentiles alike) in unified worship in the new temple not built with hands — that is, the Lord's body. And this corroborates well with the parable of the wicked tenants (Mark 12:112) where Jesus pledges that God will replace the leaders of Israel with new ones. This parable is now widely believed by critics to be authentic, since efforts to trace it back to the Church rather than Jesus have faced insuperable difficulties.2 Here in the Gospels, where we find the new Israel in the mind, will and upon the lips of the historical Jesus, we find the Catholic Church in nuce. The attacks on the authenticity of Matt. 16:16 by critics are quite beside the point.
Did Jesus really predict the fall of the temple?
Of course, I have assumed in this example that Jesus conceived of himself both as a prophet and as the Jewish messiah. Let's consider both of these seriatim. The prophet part is easy. No one seriously disputes the authenticity of Jesus' self-identification as "prophet"; the synoptics would hardly have invented a designation that falls well below the Christology they seek to advance. But that anyone would seriously deny that Jesus was an eschatological prophet promising doom for God's enemies and reward for his friends has always been astounding. Both Jesus' most prominent predecessor, John the Baptist, and successor, Paul, were steeped in eschatology. It is just hard to see how anyone could believe that Jesus didn't speak in the same terms, and since Albert Schweitzer, very few have even attempted to argue this.3 Jesus' vivid predictions of judgment against his enemies and the coming reign of God made him a marked man by the religious and political establishment. If he simply went about preaching the "timeless truths" of brotherly love and other banalities couched in witty aphorisms why would anyone have bothered crucifying him?
And the prophecies of Jesus about the Jerusalem temple were not made up after the fact, as nearly all critical scholars alleged prior to the late twentieth century. The predictions, especially as Mark records them, in no way bear the mark of ex eventu prophecy. If the temple had already fallen, why does Mark bother to write with urgency, as in: "pray that the events do not take place in winter," "let the reader understand" and "flee to the mountains" (Mark 13:14-18)? Besides, the early Jerusalem Church didn't exactly "flee to the mountains," but to the Decapolis city of Pella to the north; why don't the evangelists pin down that rather large detail with greater accuracy? Why manufacture other details like the "abomination of desolation" (Mark 13:14) that closely correspond (in the details provided in the Gospels) to no known historic event in the early Church.4 Moreover, as C.H. Dodd showed in a masterful 1947 article, all the prophetic material attributed to Jesus in the Olivet discourse concerning the imminent Roman war and the destruction of the temple without exception was stock terminology found in the Septuagint's account of the first temple destruction in 587 B.C.5 These texts were just as available to Jesus himself as to his followers. If the Church were to have invented all this after the fact they would have done a much less clumsy job of it by tailoring their language to fit details precisely as they transpired. This doesn't by a long shot solve the myriad of problems concerning the precise content of Jesus' historic eschatological message. But the upshot is this: the temple was destroyed in A.D. 70 and Jesus himself correctly predicted it.
Did Jesus really claim to be the Messiah?
The prediction was part and parcel of his Messianic claim. The Messiah in Jesus' view was to announce and even inaugurate the beginning of a new eschatological age. The attacks upon Jesus' self-identification as Messiah have largely assumed that the Church invented or, to put it more charitably, discovered Jesus as Messiah serendipitously post-Easter. As the argument goes, experiencing the risen Lord they learned that he was the Messiah despite the fact that Jesus had advanced no such claim in his earthly ministry. We can ironically embrace the kernel of truth in this by noting that it is certainly true that the Church would not have kept on believing that Jesus was the Messiah if he had not risen from the dead. This is admitted in the Gospel's themselves; "We had hoped that he would be the one to redeem Israel" is revealing (Luke 24:21). His followers had hoped this but did no longer after Good Friday. Jesus would have been just another failed Messiah claimant but for the empty tomb. The indisputable historical fact that a Messianic movement exploded after Jesus' death is perhaps the strongest historical argument for the truth of the Resurrection. Propagating a Messianic movement around a humiliated Messiah claimant vanquished by pagans (who was yet decaying in the grave) is historically unbelievable in the extreme.
But many critics have extracted from the ounce of truth in this a pound of lie. Easter confirmed Jesus' messianic identity but it was hardly the origin of the Church's faith in it. N.T. Wright grinds the counterclaim into sawdust with this simple thought experiment. Suppose that the good thief on the cross was raised from the dead. Would anyone have thereby concluded that the good thief was the Messiah?6 To ask this question is to answer it. The post-Easter preaching of Jesus as the Messiah makes historical sense only if one assumes that his messianic credentials were firmly impressed in the minds of his followers by his own earthly words and deeds well before he rose from the dead.
For this reason, an honest analysis of Jesus' words and deeds in light of their historical context vitiates the need to find knock-down proof in the synoptics of Jesus explicitly saying, "I am the Christ" or "I am the Messiah." Wilhelm Wrede and other early exponents of modernism made much of the fact that such a search would be in vain. So what? We can admit that the synoptics portray Jesus being a bit more artful than this about his identity and intentions. The words and the deeds still speak volumes. Critics have had to come to terms with the fact that Jesus' enemies interpreted those words and deeds as blasphemy in the case of the Jews and sedition in the case of the Romans. Even if they misunderstood the nature of his kingship, his enemies deduced from his words and deeds at least an implicit claim of royal authority. So they charged him and were, in the end, able to make the charge stick!
Did Jesus really claim to be God?
What about the divinity claim? For many this seems a slam-dunk. Did not Jesus say, "The Father and I are one" (John 10:30)? Not so fast, say the critics. Even if one were to allow that the fourth Gospel is historically reliable (which almost no one in the guild does) it is not clear that the saying would have packed the same meaning in the context John presents it, coming as it does in a Gospel that sets out the divinity of Jesus from the beginning. And the attacks on the historicity of John's Gospel have been so potent that even the most ardent conservatives have been sent back to the drawing boards. It must be acknowledged that the traditional apologetic on this point at least was (and perhaps still is) in some disrepair.
But the critics' counter claim, as it turned out, had even more serious problems. If Jesus never saw himself as divine, how did his followers delude themselves into thinking that he was? The German history-of-religions school was quick with an answer: the Church invented the divinity of Jesus by co-opting various pagan mythic demi-god heroes and as a Christian response to the claims of the pagan Caesar-cult that divinized the emperor. In order to make the theory seem faintly plausible, late datings well into the latter half of the second century were proposed for "high-Christology" books like John and Hebrews. Legends of this magnitude needed time to develop, after all, and the early Jewish Christian Christology would have required decades to be supplanted by the later Hellenistic divine "wonder-worker" model.
A great deal of scholarly detritus remains of this theory today, but the "pagan-creep" hypothesis in its pure form is now widely seen as untenable. The central argument in the letter to the Hebrews (that Jesus' sacrifice is better than the Levitical priestly one) not only had nothing to do with Hellenistic paganism but made no sense unless the old pre-A.D. 70 temple system was a live option. Hebrews presupposed a setting that was Jewish and early rather than Greek and late. And the discovery of the Rylands papyrus has now made it impossible to date John much after A.D. 100 and very few scholars go past A.D. 90 today. Furthermore, critical readings of Paul have demonstrated that the apostle did not propose but assumed that the Lord Jesus was one with the Father (1 Cor. 8:4-6). And no one to my knowledge has answered N.T. Wright's exhaustive study on Phil. 2:5-11 proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Paul believed that Jesus Christ was preexistent and divine!7 This so-called Christ hymn is a special problem for divinity deniers. It was likely not written by Paul himself but was already being sung as early as A.D. 48 by the Church in Philippi. Paul took for granted that its contents were known and believed by the church he founded on his second missionary journey. The belief by the Church in the divinity of Jesus can be firmly placed within the first generation after Easter with texts that are thoroughly Jewish (and not Hellenistic) in argumentation. Those who want to claim that the belief in Jesus' divinity was a late, post-Easter development under pagan influence have now been forced to retreat to the view that Jesus' apotheosis was invented sui generis by monotheistic Jews within a decade after Easter. And, historically, this is hardly very likely!
It is of course a fair question to ask what impression Jesus formed on his earliest followers that caused them to believe in some way in his divinity. How indeed would a first-century Jewish man have seen himself as God and be able to communicate this to his apostles in terms intelligible to the thought matrix of first-century Judaism? Convincingly answering this question is, in my view, the next frontier of historical Jesus research. The best we can say now is that Jesus understood his mission as being called to do what God himself had promised through the prophets to achieve. His claim to being able to forgive sins is tantamount to claiming to be a new kind of temple — where God himself promised to dwell. Jesus' multiplication of the loaves made him not only a new Moses but a new Yahweh. His claim to be bridegroom of Israel echoes God's own self-identification given many times in the prophets. As N.T. Wright puts it, we have in Jesus a man who first tells stories of God "returning to Zion as judge and redeemer and then embodies it by riding into the city in tears symbolizing the temple's destruction and the final exodus."8
Concluding thoughts
Let me make clear that I am not proposing that we ought only to preach the Jesus that can attract a majority of votes by the Catholic New Testament guild. The faith of the Church and not just historical research can give us true knowledge of the past. Such academic positivism is the essential flaw, for instance, in Cardinal Kasper's book Jesus the Christ.9 And I don't want to paint too rosy a picture of New Testament studies, since it is still possible for responsible scholars to critique any number of points I have made above. The trends in academia, though, are quite encouraging. Radicals who would propose a Jesus significantly different from the portrait I have painted generally have had to venture quietly outside the increasingly hostile terrain of the New Testament itself toward other ancient writings thought more congenial. John Dominic Crossan, for instance, has reconstructed Jesus as cynic-sage based upon the gospel of Thomas. This is not the actual extant gospel of Thomas, mind you, that nearly everyone agrees was penned well after the latest New Testament book and composed by a Gnostic community whose own guiding philosophy precluded any serious interest in the history of Jesus. Using the real Thomas would be an historical non-starter. Rather it is Crossan's own reconstructed hypothetical gospel of Thomas that supposedly underlies the real Thomas as well as Matthew, Mark and Luke; this hypothetical gospel gives us Crossan's hypothetical Jesus.10 Even those scholars who would welcome a Jesus other than the one in the canonical Gospels rightly see this as special pleading. Our New Testament has proven remarkably durable in its ability to tell a historically credible story that is truer to the real Christ-event than any alternative that the revisionists have come up with.
The increasingly desperate character of revisionist scholarship should give tradition-minded Catholics cause to take heart. There is much more cause to be cautiously optimistic about the direction of critical biblical scholarship than when the method first hit the Church in full force after Vatican II. Yet many conservatives have never gotten over their allergy to "the method" and its practitioners — all but breaking out in hives and convulsing every time "historical" and "Jesus" are mentioned in the same sentence. Their response to the rationalistic mindset of modern biblical scholarship is understandable, but I fear that there have been negative repercussions. Fideism, biblical or otherwise, officially kicked out of the front door of the Church at Vatican I, may be creeping in stealthily through the back. When confronted by attacks on the reliability of the Gospels, those who bother to respond at all seem to content themselves by reiterating the Church's teaching "unhesitatingly asserting their historical character" and by impugning the motives of the critics. Trouble is, it is the very credibility of the Church that is in question and refuting the motivations of skeptics is in the end much less satisfying than refuting their ideas.
Besides, those who would resort to such magisterial positivism ought to hear the words of the magisterium; as Pope Leo XIII wrote in Providentissimus Deus, "But since the divine and infallible magisterium of the Church rests also on the authority of Holy Scripture, the first thing to be done is to vindicate the trustworthiness of the sacred records at least as human documents, from which can be clearly proved, as from primitive and authentic testimony, the Divinity and the mission of Christ our Lord, (and) the institution of a hierarchical Church." Those undertaking this also should be "not unaccustomed to modern methods of attack."11
The first order of business for Pope Leo is to use the knowledge of the very methods of modern attack to show that the Bible really does tell a story that we should accept after careful investigation. The difficulty is that those whose temperament would be to practice modern scholarship in this vein have largely shunned the entire enterprise. This has left the field wide open for those whose agenda is not apologetic in nature. John Meier, the preeminent Catholic Jesus-quester in the field, has much to offer as an historical scholar. But I would say, tongue in cheek, that his Jesus dies not so much on a Roman cross but a death of a thousand scholarly qualifications.12 As for solid defenses of traditional Christology that can easily be adapted to popular preaching and teaching, critical evangelical scholars have done nearly all the heavy lifting.
The result of this is that the Church in North America is full of two sorts of people: those who believe the Gospels on faith alone — as though there were no objective grounds at all to find them historically believable — and those briefly exposed to biblical criticism who have imbibed just enough liberal revisionism of yesteryear's scholarship to make them dangerous. This has left the Church very vulnerable to future Da Vinci Codes, as warmed-over radical scholarship — while steadily losing ground in the academy — finds a ready audience in the general public. But this should not be so. Apart from supernatural faith in God's word and ecclesial faith in the teaching of the Church, there are very good historical reasons to accept the basic veracity of the New Testament. It's high time we started saying so.
End Notes
- Providentissimus Deus #8
- Craig Evans aptly summarizes these problems in Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL, Intervarsity Press 2006), 128-134.
- Albert Schweitzer utterly blew the lid off the non-eschatological Jesus concocted by nineteenth-century liberal Protestants who wanted to reduce the message of Jesus to one of bourgeois morality. See Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study from Reimarus to Wrede (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985). The Jesus Seminar has been totally unsuccessful in its attempt to bring this paradigm back.
- This is a problem admitted now by, among many others, the critical scholar Martin Hengel; see Studies in the Gospel of Mark (London: SCM, 1985), 16-17.
- C.H. Dodd, "The Fall of Jerusalem and the Abomination of Desolation," in More New Testament Studies (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968).
- N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 110
- N.T. Wright, Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 56-97.
- Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1996), 653.
- Walter Kasper, Jesus the Christ (New York: Paulist Press, 1977).
- J.D. Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991).
- Providentissimus Deus #17, emphasis mine.
- John Meier, The Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1991-2001). Of course, when Meier does vindicate the Christian tradition, as he often does, he is quite useful; he cannot be readily dismissed as a Catholic apologist.
Mr. Peter D. Brown has degrees from Yale University and Franciscan University of Steubenville. Currently he is pursuing doctoral studies in Scripture and biblical theology at the Catholic University of America. He is married to Elizabeth, who is active in post-abortion speaking and ministry. His last article in HPR appeared in January 2007.
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