My Own Search for the Truth about Jesus (Part 5)
As we said in the previous article in this web series: honest seekers of the historical truth about Jesus do not always end up as skeptics.
New Testament scholar Dale Allison claimed that the typical path for those who engage in historical Jesus research is a journey from naïve orthodoxy to a more academically enlightened agnosticism on the subject. The more we know about the historical facts about Jesus, the more likely we will be to doubt the historic Christian faith in him as God incarnate, crucified and risen from the dead, and Lord of all.
This was certainly not the path I trod myself.
Born into a predominantly Liberal Protestant family and the son of a Protestant pastor, I was brought up to believe in the legitimacy and importance of the quest for the historical Jesus as a way to make the Christian faith intellectually credible in our time. This quest presumably leads us to a thoroughly human Jesus: a first century Jew devoted to the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. This conviction was central to my family’s Christian faith — and to some extent it remains so for me even today. However, as a teenager I picked a volume off of my father’s bookshelf one day entitled Jesus and His Story (1960) by the Lutheran New Testament scholar Ethelbert Stauffer. The author marshalled the historical evidence for — among other things — the miracles of Christ, his Resurrection, and his consciousness of his divine identity. While far from flawless, the book opened me up for the first time to the possibility that a stronger historical case could be made for a classically orthodox Christian interpretation of Jesus as the divine Son of God, crucified and risen, than I had ever realized before.
As an undergraduate I started my studies with the intention of doing a major in the ancient classics, with a focus on ancient history. In the process I discovered that given the number and nature of the early sources for the life of Jesus that we possess, we probably know more about him than about any other figure of the ancient world (Julius Caesar probably comes second). I also discovered that many of the historians working on the life of Jesus often violate a fundamental tenet of all historical research: witnesses in a position to know the facts (first-hand or second-hand), especially multiple witnesses, must be presumed to be telling the truth unless one can clearly demonstrate otherwise. In other words, in this kind of situation the burden of proof is on the skeptics. Moreover, when witnesses disagree in relatively minor ways, the historian should first make a reasonable attempt to harmonize their accounts. Again, the testimony of witnesses in a position to know the facts, and not otherwise known to be liars or fantasists, or known to be operating with a self-seeking motive to distort the facts (e.g., to curry favor with a rich patron or with a political regime) should be given the benefit of the doubt. In contemporary Jesus-research, however, “harmonization” of seemingly discrepant gospel testimony is practically a dirty-word. Indeed, it is generally presumed that the gospel witness to the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus was mostly a product of the so-called “theological creativity” of the early Christian community, and an exercise in “haggadic [pious Jewish] fiction” as Allison would say. In other words, they deliberately concocted largely fictional stories about the words and deeds of Jesus to establish and illustrate theological truths about his significance that they wanted to convey to the wider community. In short, far from being presumed innocent, the gospel writers, and the earliest Christian communities who passed on the Jesus-story, are presumed guilty of telling “tall tales” right from the start.
The plot thickened, so to speak, when it became clear to me that the rate at which such legend and myth-making normally occurs with regard to religiously significant figures down through history does not match the claims that most New Testament historians want to make about the alleged speed with which the early Christians developed their legendary or mythical story of the life of Jesus. For example, as a graduate student I studied the development of the stories of the teachings and deeds of St. Francis of Assisi: from the early accounts of his life by Thomas of Celano, to the official, more theologically reflective biography of Francis written by St. Bonaventure about 40 years after his death. Major evidence of the process of “theological creativity” and legendary accretion resulting in extensive “haggadic fiction” on the life of St. Francis, however, does not really appear until The Little Flowers of St. Francis (The Fioretti) in the fourteenth century, about 100 years after the death of the saint. Yet the synoptic gospel accounts of the life of Jesus were penned not more than 50 years after his death — and probably much earlier. Allison contends that “a tendency to mythomania” seems to be part of human nature:
The reverent imaginations of some Jews bestowed omniscience upon Moses and gave him a seat in the heavens. In Mahayana Buddhism, the proclaimer became the proclaimed when some adherents identified Gautama with the absolute deathless reality beyond all things. … The questions this raises are obvious. (p. 86)
Jews and Buddhists, however, certainly did not make such exalted claims about Moses or Gautama within anything like 50 years of their deaths, that is, while many people were still alive who were eyewitnesses, or friends of eyewitnesses of the lives that these two men actually lived on this earth. In the case of Jesus, however, we are dealing with an historical event of an altogether different kind. The impression that Jesus of Nazareth made on those who first followed him, and on their immediate disciples, was so overwhelming that it led them to violate a fundamental tenet of their own Jewish heritage and confess that this man, who, lived and died as a fully human being in their midst, was also truly “Emmanuel, God with us” (see Mt 1:23, 28:18-20; Jn 1:14, 20:28; Acts 2:36; I Cor 8:6, 12:3, 16:22; Phil 2:5-11; Col 1:15-20; Js 2:1; Heb 1:1-13).
Back in the 1960s the great historian of the ancient world at Oxford, A.N. Sherwin White, examined the rate at which legends accrued about significant historical figures in that era. He concluded that more than two generations would have had to pass by to wipe out an historical core of truth with legendary material — and the gospel records were written at the transition from the first to the second generation after Christ. A passage of more than two generations after the death of Jesus would land us at the beginning of the second century AD, which is precisely when the legendary “apocryphal gospels” began to appear.
All of this is not to say that the historian can iron out every apparent discrepancy or contradiction among the gospel accounts of the life of Jesus, or easily overcome every reasonable doubt about aspects of the story that they tell. Research into ancient literary genres, for example, has shown that the gospels were never meant to be the exact equivalents of modern historical biographies: rather, they are highly selective accounts of the words and deeds of Jesus, arranged in such a way as to bring out the theological significance of the life of Jesus for particular, early Christian communities. As such, the authors felt free to do what ancient historians often did: to paraphrase the words and deeds of their subject, or elaborate upon them in order to bring out their true meaning, and sometimes they even chronologically rearrange the sequence of events of the story for pedagogical purposes. All of this needs to be taken into account whenever one discusses the historical “reliability” of the gospels, and even the most “conservative” New Testament historians today accept the importance of paying attention to literary genre. The evident intent of the gospel writers, however, was neither to deceive nor to develop legends, but to communicate the words and deeds of Jesus (“the things that have happened among us”—Lk 1:1) in a way that truly exhibited and clarified their religious significance.
In short, what I discovered is that most historical Jesus research is plagued by an unwarranted “hermeneutic of suspicion”: again, the early Christian communities and the gospel writers are presumed guilty of weaving dogma-driven fictional tales, except where they can be proven innocent. In part, this prejudice is based on an underlying philosophical Deism (i.e. there is indeed a God, but he is not the kind of God who miraculously intervenes in the affairs of men, as he seems to do in the gospel narratives), or on Kantian and Humeian philosophical presuppositions (i.e. we cannot with any confidence get behind the perceptions of the gospel writers to find out what Jesus really said and did, and certainly not with regard to the many accounts of his miraculous deeds, which are in any case maximally unlikely to be accurate). But suppose one does one’s historical Jesus research by gazing at his life through an altogether different (and, frankly, more philosophically defensible) pair of spectacles? Suppose we replace the typical “hermeneutic of suspicion” with a more fair and open approach? Next time, we will begin to piece together a method to enable us to do just that.
Next Time: Finding our Way Through The Fog
Robert Stackpole, STD
©The Mere Christian Fellowship, 2017
