The Historical Jesus

Five Views

James K. Beilby, Paul Rhodes Eddy, Paul Rhodes Eddy

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780830878536
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Studi biblici

Christianity Today Book Award winnerThe scholarly quest for the historical Jesus has a distinguished pedigree in modern Western religious and historical scholarship, with names such as Strauss, Schweitzer and Bultmann highlighting the story. Since the early 1990s, when the Jesus quest was reawakened for a third run, numerous significant books have emerged. And the public's attention has been regularly arrested by media coverage, with the Jesus Seminar or the James ossuary headlining the marquee.This Spectrum Multiview volume provides a venue for readers to sit in on a virtual seminar on the historical Jesus. Beginning with a scene-setting historical introduction by the editors, prominent figures in the Jesus quest set forth their views and respond to their fellow scholars.On the one end Robert M. Price lucidly maintains that the probability of Jesus' existence has reached the "vanishing point, " and on the other Darrell Bock ably argues that while critical method yields only a "gist" of Jesus, it takes us in the direction of the Gospel portraits. In between there are numerous avenues to explore, questions to be asked and "assured results" to be weighed. And John Dominic Crossan, Luke Timothy Johnson and James D. G. Dunn probe these issues with formidable knowledge and honed insight, filling out a further range of options.The Historical Jesus: Five Views offers a unique entry into the Jesus quest. For both the classroom and personal study, this is a book that fascinates, probes and engages.Spectrum Multiview Books offer a range of viewpoints on contested topics within Christianity, giving contributors the opportunity to present their position and also respond to others in this dynamic publishing format.

1

Jesus at the Vanishing Point

Robert M. Price

At the outset of a controversial essay, let me try for a moment to make it easier for readers to resist the temptation to dismiss what I say based on tired stereotypes. I will argue that it is quite likely there never was any historical Jesus. Some will automatically assume I am doing apologetics on behalf of “village atheism,” as some do. For what it may be worth, let me note that I began the study of the historical Jesus question as an enthusiastic would-be apologist. Eventually quite surprised to find myself dis-illusioned with “our” arguments, I shifted toward a more mainstream critical position more or less like Bultmann’s. I was even more surprised, as the years went on, to find that I was having a greater and greater difficulty poking holes in what I had regarded as extreme, even crackpot, the­ories. Finally and ironically, I wound up espousing them for reasons I will shortly be recounting. In all this time, while I gladly admit I wrote with some indignation against what Albert Schweitzer called “the twisted and fragile thinking of apologetics,”[1] I have never come to disdain Christianity. Indeed, I was for half a dozen years pastor of a Baptist church and am now a happy Episcopalian. I rejoice to take the Eucharist every week and to sing the great hymns of the faith. For me the Christ of faith has all the more importance since I think it most probable that there was never any other.

Methodological Presuppositions

Which is the greatest commandment for historians? The first and greatest is the principle of analogy. It is for seeming failure to understand this important axiom that many hurl charges of “antisupernaturalist bias” and “naturalistic presuppositions” in the study of the Gospels. Historians do not have access to H. G. Wells’s time machine. We cannot know what occurred in the past and thus do not dogmatize about it. We deal only in probabilities. How do we decide what probably did or probably did not happen in the past? When we are looking at an ancient account, we must judge it according to the analogy of our experience and that of our trustworthy contemporaries (people with observational skills, honest reporters, etc., regardless of their philosophical or religious beliefs). There is no available alternative. Again, we weren’t there and thus do not know that natural law always operated as it does now (the “uniformitarianism” decried by “scientific creationists”), but there is no particular reason not to think so, and unless we do, we have no criterion at all. We will be at the mercy of old stories of people turning lead into gold, turning into werewolves, using magic to win battles. If in our experience it takes a whole army to defeat an army, we will judge improbable any ancient tale that has a single man defeating an army. What else can we do? So we will judge an account improbable if it finds no analogy to current experience. Regarding the Gospels, for instance, this means that we will not reject out of hand stories in which Jesus heals the sick and casts out demons. We cannot do clinical follow-ups in these cases, but we do know such scenes may be found in our world today, and so they do not present a stumbling block to historical Jesus research. Even Bultmann admitted Jesus must have done what he and his contemporaries considered miracles.[2] (There may be other reasons for doubting it, of course, but not that it violates the principle of analogy.)

On the other hand, the historian must ask if an old account that does not fit the analogy of present-day experience does happen to match the analogy of legend or myth.

If it looks more like a legend than like any verifiable modern experience, what are we to conclude? If the story of Jesus walking on the water bears a strong resemblance to old stories in which Hermes, Pythagoras, the Buddha and others walk on water, mustn’t we conclude we are probably dealing with a legend in the case of Jesus too? We don’t know. We weren’t there. But we could say the same thing about the Hercules myths. Must we gravely admit it is entirely likely that the Son of Zeus killed the Hydra just because someone once said so?

The principle of analogy is simply a “surprise-free method,”[3] like that of the sociologist, the futurologist, the meteorologist. These three specialists predict what probably will happen based on current trends, and they can be wrong since there are sometimes factors in play that are invisible to them. But what can they do? We do not reproach them because they are not oracles, infallibly predicting what will happen. Likewise, the historian does not claim clairvoyant knowledge of the past as Rudolf Steiner did. The historian, so to speak, “postdicts” based on traceable factors and analogy. But it is all a matter of probabilities. This is why Gospel critics who reject the spectacular nature miracles of Jesus feel they must. They are judging those Gospel reports “improbable.” One may not be satisfied with this and decide to believe in them anyway, but that will be a matter of faith, the will to believe, not of historical judgment, and the two must not be confused.

I will momentarily explain why I believe the principle of analogy compels us to go much further than this in our judgment of the historical Jesus question. But first, one more observation. The principle of analogy is important even in our choice of criteria for evaluating the sayings tradition. It underlies the criterion of dissimilarity (concerning which, more just below), but it also enters into the question of how we view the transmission of the sayings material. As is well known, Harald Riesenfeld and Birger Gerhardsson[4] urged critics to view the oral transmission of Jesus-sayings as analogous to the oral tradition of the Tannaim, the early Torah sages (if the term “rabbi” be deemed slightly anachronistic) who strove to be like “a plastered cistern that loses not a drop” (Avot 2.11), that is, not a word of one’s master’s teaching. That is a possible analogy, available in a closely related historical-cultural milieu, to be sure. But there is another, only slightly later, and that is the transmission of the hadith of Muhammad, which Muslims themselves were the first to realize had grown like a cancer to the point where only a century after Muhammad there were thousands of spurious sayings and precedents ascribed to him. Al-Bukhari, Muslim, and others began the process of weeding them out, but they retained a huge number, and today’s Western, critical study of the hadith suggests virtually the whole corpus is inauthentic, that is, for the purpose of reconstructing Muhammad’s teaching.[5] What all this means is that the early Muslim savants simply had no problem with fabricating hadith if they thought the content was valid.[6] It must have been no different for the creators of the Pistis Sophia and many Nag Hammadi Gospels to coin huge amounts of teaching and ascribe it to Jesus.[7] So were the Gospel tradents more like the rabbis and their disciples, or more like the Muslim hadith-masters, or even the Nag Hammadi writers? Only a close scrutiny of the various sayings can tell us, if anything can. No a priori decision can short-circuit the critical process. One certainly cannot go into the study of the Gospels armed with the assurance that the material must be authentic or inauthentic.

If the principle of analogy is the first historiographical commandment, the second, the criterion of dissimilarity, is like unto it. Norman Perrin formulated this axiom most clearly, though as he himself pointed out, it was nothing new. The idea is that no saying ascribed to Jesus may be counted as probably authentic if it has parallels in Jewish or early Christian sayings. Perrin was no fool. He understood well enough that if Jesus taught among Jewish colleagues, his opinions would frequently overlap theirs, and that if he founded a movement (even inadvertently!), the members of it would repeat his ideas.[8] But he was right: even in rabbinic sources it becomes clear that the same saying, not just the same sentiment, might be attributed to various rabbis (Jacob Neusner has made this even clearer),[9] and so the same was likely to be true with Jesus. Someone might naturally like a Jewish saying he heard without attribution and ascribe it to Jesus. This is all the more true in light of a discernible Judaizing tendency in early Christianity. And as for the early church, the contradictions between Gospel sayings on eschatology, divorce, fasting, and preaching to Gentiles and Samaritans are most easily explained as church factions ascribing their diverse views to Jesus because they thought them valid inferences (or revelations from the risen Lord).

No, I believe the opposition aroused by Perrin’s proposal was that it made the game too difficult to play: too little data would be left; so why not change the rules of the game? Indeed, I think Perrin’s own application of the criterion of dissimilarity was selective and inconsistent. Worse yet, he failed to see that the criterion of dissimilarity must be all devouring because of the central tenet of form criticism, which is that in order to be transmitted, every Gospel pericope must have had some pragmatic use. On that assumption, an entirely natural one as it appears to me, form critics sought with great ingenuity to reconstruct the Sitz im Leben of each and every Gospel pericope, and with great success. (Again, remember that it is all a matter of probability; of course, it is speculative, but who has anything better to offer?) But Perrin did not seem to see that this meant that every single Gospel bit and piece must have had a home in the early church, belonged to the early church (no big surprise! The Gospels, after all, weren’t written by Buddhists!), and thus all must be denied to Jesus by the criterion of dissimilarity. A saying may have been preserved because of its relevance, but it may as easily have been created, as many appear to have been, and so one must assume the latter. As F. C. Baur said, anything is possible, but what is probable? And if the criterion of dissimilarity is valid, then we must follow unafraid wherever it leads. I know many will protest at this point, saying I have reduced the criterion to its ultimate absurdity, demonstrated despite myself how wrong-headed it always was. But no: this is just to cut and run when the going gets tough. When one objects that the criterion is too strict because it doesn’t leave us enough pieces of the puzzle, agnosticism is transforming into fideism. The objection presupposes the conclusion that there was a historical Jesus and that we ought to be able to find out about him.

The third commandment is to remember what an ideal type means. Conveniently forgetting it, many have ignored the importance of the mystery religions,[10] the theios anēr (divine man),[11] the dying-and-rising gods,[12] and, most recently, Gnosticism,[13] for the historical Jesus question. An ideal type is a textbook definition made up of the regularly recurring features common to the phenomena in question. The ideal type most certainly does not ignore points of distinctiveness of the member phenomena, nor does it presuppose or require absolute likeness between all members of the envisioned category. Rather, the idea is that if discreet phenomena possess enough common features that a yardstick may be abstracted from them, then each member may be profitably measured and better understood against the yardstick. If the ideal type of “religion” includes the feature “belief in superhuman entities,” then we do not conclude that Buddhism is not a religion after all. Rather, we turn around and use the yardstick of what is generally true of religions to better understand this particular exception.

Nor do we conclude that, since all members of the proposed category do not match up in every respect, that there is no such category after all. There is a natural range of variations on the theme, and it is only the broad theme that the ideal type sets forth. Neither do we expect that all typical features will be present in all specific cases. We do not deny there is such a thing as a form of miracle stories just because not every one of them contains, say, the feature of the skepticism of the onlookers, though most do.

Fourth, we must keep in mind that consensus is no criterion. The truth may not rest in the middle. The truth may not rest with the majority. Every theory and individual argument must be evaluated on its own. If we appeal instead to “received opinion” or “the consensus of scholars,” we are merely abdicating our own responsibility, as well as committing the fallacy of appeal to the majority. I dare say that, had we really been content to accede to received opinion, none of us would ever have entered the field of New Testament scholarship. I accept the dictum of Paul Feyerabend at this point. The only axiom that does not inhibit research is “anything goes.”[14] Let’s just see how far. It matters not whether a particular hypothesis comports easily with the majority paradigm or with one’s own other hypotheses. Since all must be but tentatively and provisionally held anyway, we must follow the evidence wherever it seems to be taking us in this or that particular case. We may wind up overturning and replacing the regnant paradigm, though in the meantime we will expect defenders of “normative science” to do their best defending the ramparts of their cherished paradigm—as they should, since a new one must show its worth by bearing the scrutiny of one’s peers.[15]

In the same vein, the fifth commandment is to remember that scholarly “conclusions” must be tentative and provisional, always open to revision. Our goal is to try out this and that paradigm/hypothesis to see which makes the most natural sense of the evidence without “epicycling.” We must seek the minimum of special pleading for fitting an item of recalcitrant evidence into the framework.

The Traditional Christ-Myth Theory

Virtually everyone who espoused the Christ-Myth theory has laid great emphasis on one question: Why no mention of a miracle-working Jesus in secular sources? Let me leapfrog the tiresome debate over whether the Testimonium Flavianum is authentic. For the record, my guess is that Eusebius fabricated it[16] and that the tenth-century Arabic version[17] represents an abridgement of the Eusebian original, not a more primitive, modest version. My opinion is that John Meier and others are rewriting a bad text to make it a good one, to rehabilitate it for use as a piece of evidence.[18] But who cares? It is all moot. The silence-of-the-sources argument at most implies a Bultmannian version of a historical Jesus whose relatively modest activity as an exorcist and faith healer would not have attracted much attention, any more than the secular media cover Peter Popov today. It does not go all the way to imply there was no historical Jesus. (Indeed, it may even be circular in assuming there was either a real superman or a mythic superman, without a middle option of a mortal messiah.)

The second of the three pillars of the traditional Christ-Myth case is that the Epistles, earlier than the Gospels, do not evidence a recent historical Jesus. Setting aside the very late 1 Timothy, which presupposes the Gospel of John (the only Gospel in which Jesus “made a good confession before Pontius Pilate”),[19] we should never guess from the Epistles that Jesus died in any particular historical or political context, only that the fallen angels (Col 2:15), the archons of this age, did him in, little realizing they were sealing their own doom (1 Cor 2:6-8). It is hard to imagine that the authors of Romans 13:3 and 1 Peter 2:13-14 (where we read that Roman governors punish only the wicked, not the righteous) believed that Jesus died at the order of Pontius Pilate. We should never even suspect he performed a single miracle, since none are mentioned. Did Paul think his Jesus had been a teacher? We just don’t know, since his cherished “commands of the Lord” (1 Cor 7:10, cf. 25; 9:14), while they might represent quotations from something like the Q source, may as well be midrashically derived inferences from Old Testament commands of Adonai in the Torah, or even prophetic mandates from the Risen One.

Paul seems to know of a Last Supper of Jesus with his disciples, at which he instituted the Eucharist (1 Cor 11:23-26), but this is a weak reed. On the one hand, for reasons having nothing to do with Christ-Myth theory, some have pegged this piece of text as an interpolation.[20] On the other, suppose Paul did write it; Hyam Maccoby argued that in 1 Corinthians 11:23 we see Paul comparing himself with Moses, the one who receives material (in this case, cult law) directly from Adonai and passe...