Confusion About Our Sources for the Life of Jesus (Part 9)
By way of contrast with the books we looked at in the previous articles in this series, anyone seeking for a lucid summary of contemporary research on the historical Jesus will find the subject well laid out in a book by veteran New Testament scholar James H. Charlesworth, The Historical Jesus: An Essential Guide (2008). This book shows that the tradition of relatively judicious, mainstream Biblical scholarship continues at Princeton Theological Seminary, in contrast with the more radical works emanating from other Ivy League Divinity Schools, and the more headline-grabbing books that were associated with Marcus Borg and the “Jesus Seminar” group.
Charlesworth opens with a convincing defence of the need for historical research into the life of Jesus:
Some knowledge of what Jesus did and intended to accomplish is necessary … to be able to believe in him with an enlightened commitment. Blind faith without any historical knowledge is not the faith in Jesus we find in the Evangelists and Paul. … While Christian faith transcends scientific logic, it does need historical facts. Without some historical control, a putative Christian may jump into a theological black hole or be hoodwinked by Gnostics who thought that Judas was the hero of the gospels. Christian faith today should be continuous with the faith of the first disciples, and they knew far more about the Jesus of history than any historian will be able to provide. (p. 13)
Along the way, Charlesworth gives the reader a clear explanation of five of the most basic criteria that historians use to uncover the most reliable accounts of the words and deeds of Jesus: (1) “embarrassment,” (2) “dissimilarity,” (3) “multiple attestation,” (4) “coherence,” and (5) “Palestinian Jewish setting.” (We discussed these in article seven of this web series). By using these criteria, Charlesworth claims, contemporary scholars can actually tell us quite a bit about the real Jesus of Nazareth. Long gone, he says, are the days of radical historical scepticism in mainstream Jesus Research. Out of fashion as well is the “rationalist” school that assumed one could safely dismiss in advance all accounts of the supernatural and the miraculous in the gospels as mere myths and fables. Gone too are the days when The Gospel According to St. John, the last gospel to be written, could be treated as an entirely unreliable account of the life of Christ.
In fact, according to Charlesworth contemporary Jesus research has attained a remarkable degree of consensus on what we can know with confidence about the man from Nazareth — and some of the conclusions may come as a surprise to the reader. For example, Charlesworth shows, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Jesus performed miracles of healing, and that initially he was a disciple or student of John the Baptist (hinted at in John 3:25-26). The parallels he demonstrates between phrases used by Jesus and the teachings of John the Baptist are especially striking. Moreover, Charlesworth argues that leading scholars now agree, “Jesus thought his primary mission was to declare the Kingdom of God. … Jesus’ fundamental message was the proclamation that God’s rule was beginning to dawn during his lifetime” (pp. 97, 104).
The picture of Jesus that emerges from this book is one of a devout Jew and a non-violent social reformer. Devoted to God as a loving Father, Jesus evidently believed that the decisive dawning of God’s Kingdom in the world had arrived in his own ministry of preaching and healing, and ultimately, perhaps, through his death. The reader cannot help but share in the author’s excitement over the wealth of new information available to historians about Jesus’ own religious culture, much of it stemming from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and from new archaeological discoveries in the Holy Land. This information can sometimes shed new light on the words and deeds of Jesus himself.
On the other hand, even an ocean of historical data will not lead to greater knowledge about the historical Jesus if the material is handled with a faulty methodology. Sadly, this book shows that there is still much confusion about the nature and reliability of our primary sources for the Life of Jesus. As long as this confusion remains, the emerging “consensus” that Charlesworth claims will be short-lived, or at least will be no more substantial than what he presents in his book.
Two problems with regard to our sources are evident from what he writes.
1) The Testimony of the Early Fathers of the Church is Evidently Undervalued in Contemporary Jesus Research
This is especially clear with regard to the issue of the authorship of the gospels. For example, Charlesworth claims, “our first Evangelist, Mark, whoever he was, was never with Jesus in Capernaum or Jerusalem. That means he could not appeal to his own memory for clarifying when and where Jesus said or did something” (p. 31). There is no reason for such diffidence: Papias (ca. a.d. 125), St. Justin Martyr (ca. 155), the Muratorian Canon (ca. 180), St. Irenaeus of Lyons (ca. 190), St. Clement of Alexandria (d. 211) and Tertullian (d. ca. 220) all state or imply that St. Mark was a companion of St. Peter, and wrote his gospel on the basis of that apostle’s eyewitness testimony (cf. I Pt 5:13). Some scholars also see in Mark 14: 51-52, the episode of the anonymous young man who left his clothes behind him as he fled from the Garden when Jesus was being arrested, St. Mark’s own signature on his work, since the account is unique to his gospel. In short, here we have unanimous testimony from the early Christian writers from all over the Mediterranean world regarding the identity of the author of this gospel, and its Petrine, eyewitness basis, and perhaps even an indication that St. Mark was an eyewitness himself to some of the events he records. There is no alternative tradition or alternative line of evidence concerning the authorship of this gospel. Thus, we really do know beyond a reasonable doubt who wrote this gospel, and can be assured of at least one of its (eyewitness) sources.
Charlesworth argues that in general, “Tradition regarding the authors of the gospels is late and appears for the first time about one hundred years after Jesus” (p. 39). This surely underestimates the conservative nature of the early Christian community, a group passionately committed to preserving the apostolic testimony (e.g., II Thess. 2:15, II Tim. 2:2, and Jude 3), as well as the closeness of the early Fathers to the apostolic witnesses themselves. Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, for example, who died about 198 a.d., was taught the faith by St. Polycarp (martyred at the age of 86, in 156 a.d.), who knew the apostle John personally. St. Clement of Rome (d. ca, 100) sat “at the feet of the apostles,” according to St. Irenaeus, and still had the apostles’ own teaching “ringing in his ears.” In short, there were many Fathers of the Church living in the second century at only one remove from the first-hand testimony of the apostles themselves, and devoted to the apostolic foundation of the faith. Some of the questions that Charlesworth finds historically unanswerable (such as “Was Jesus a Carpenter?” and “Was Jesus married to Mary Magdalene?”) probably would not be unanswerable at all if the combined testimony of the early Fathers was taken seriously.
2) Historical Reconstruction of the Life and Teachings of Jesus Continues to be Built on the (uncertain) Foundation of the Two Earliest Sources Theory: Mark and “Q”
It is not hard to see from this book how much of contemporary Jesus research would come “crashing down” if the famous “Two Source Theory” of the composition of the gospels had to be abandoned. This is the theory that Mark, the shortest gospel, plus a collection of sayings of Jesus that are common to Matthew and Luke (sometimes called the “Q” document) must have been the two earliest written sources of the life of Jesus that circulated in the early church, and that Matthew and Luke drew upon these sources, and their own special sources as well, to write their own, more elaborate gospel accounts some years later.
Unfortunately, Charlesworth gives no space at all to the minority of New Testament scholars such as Farmer and Wenham who have seriously called into question this theory, and opted for the priority of St. Matthew’s gospel instead (in accord with the consensus witness of the early Church Fathers). Suffice it so say here that to base one’s historical picture of Jesus of Nazareth on the alleged existence of an early collection of his sayings (so-called “Q”), a document that was allegedly so important to the early Christians that both St. Matthew and St. Luke supposedly possessed copies of it, and felt compelled to quote the document at length and almost verbatim in their gospels — but a document no copy of which has ever been found, and about which there is not the slightest mention in the works of any early Christian writer — all this would seem very much like building one’s “house” of Jesus research firmly on “the sand.” Far more prudent is the approach taken by N.T. Wright in Great Britain, who refuses to presuppose any particular “source theory” on which to base his historical work. As Wright stands outside the contemporary scholarly mainstream on this point, however, his approach is given only passing and oblique mention by Charlesworth.
The truth is that we have four first century gospel sources for the life of Jesus, and we honestly do not know for sure in what order they were written (although it is likely, as the early Fathers attest, that St. John wrote his gospel last), or how much they relied on each other, if at all. If we had to choose, then the simplest hypothesis is most likely to be the right one: that St. Matthew wrote first (as all the early Christian witnesses say); that St. Mark wrote second, a shorter gospel because in writing to mostly Gentile converts in Rome, based on the preaching of St. Peter in that city, he deliberately left out many things from Matthew that related to Jesus’ relationship to the Jewish law and the prophets. Saint Luke probably wrote third (again, as the early Christian witnesses all say) and relied in part on the other two, for he mentions in his prologue that “many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us” (implying that he was familiar with these earlier works — no doubt including Matthew and Mark), and that he intended to write his own “orderly account” of the matter (Lk 1:1-4). It stands to reason, therefore, that Luke’s gospel ended up the longest, since he had the most written material on hand to draw from. And the reason why Matthew and Luke contain so many teachings of Jesus in common, and almost verbatim, is that Luke probably relied upon Matthew in this respect when Luke wrote his gospel (in part because the apostle Matthew was an earwitness of the teachings of Jesus, and Luke was not): no need to postulate the existence of the mythical “Q” source.
In fact, if we look at some of the more recent scholarship on these questions, we can see that this hypothesis about our sources for the life of Jesus (although every gospel source theory is somewhat speculative) is defensible not only for its simplicity, but also when examined in depth. As we shall see next time, it is arguably in harmony with all that we know about the authorship and dating of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Next Time: We Know Who Wrote the Gospels, and We Probably Know When
Robert Stackpole, STD
© The Mere Christian Fellowship, 2017
