HOW DOES the short-spoken, powerful exorcist-healer of Mark’s Gospel relate to the loquacious hero of John’s? Why does Matthew’s Jesus revile the Pharisees, while Luke’s Jesus virtually befriends some? How do these various interpretations of the figure of Jesus, all written in the final third of the first century, relate to the triumphant cosmic agent so blazingly announced by Paul some fifteen to forty years earlier? And how well do any of these later Greek documents afford a glimpse of the Galilean Jew executed by Rome around the year 30, whose mission and message inaugurated a movement that would ultimately transform the West?
I attempted to answer these questions in my earlier book, From Jesus to Christ. Most of my discussion there focused on the development of the New Testament’s theological images of Jesus. The actual person whose Jewish life and Roman death stood at the source of these later Christian images, however, proved more elusive; and my chapter specifically on the historical Jesus was a scant four pages long. I felt that I needed to know more before I could say more.
In the ten years of reading and thinking that stand between that effort and this one, I have benefitted enormously from my encounters with a broad range of people variously engaged or interested in current historical research on Jesus of Nazareth. Senior colleagues in the field—particularly Marc Borg, Dom Crossan, Ed Sanders, Geza Vermès, and Tom Wright—have made room for me in their fractious fellowship. Over the years we have commented on each other’s ideas and presented our own in numerous panels, seminars, joint lectures, and professional meetings as we all work with common commitment (and occasional consensus) in the effort to reconstruct the Jesus of history. The passionate intellectual attention of the many different communities who have invited me to speak before them—churches of all different denominations, equally various synagogue groups, communities engaged in interfaith dialogue, intensive learning sessions for pastors, nonspecialist audiences intrigued by this period of history—has continuously renewed my own sense of the public importance of this research. Perhaps most of all, my own students at Boston University, undergraduate and graduate, both from the College of Arts and Sciences and from the School of Theology, have pushed me to reflect critically on and to think more clearly about the questions and issues that currently shape the quest for the historical Jesus. I am profoundly grateful.
More debts: Sandra Dijkstra, literary agent extraordinaire, first prodded me to shape my ideas into the sort of book that could bring the latest scholarship to the broadest reading public. Producer Marilyn Mellowes of WGBH, Boston’s Public Broadcasting station, together with my colleague Mike White of the University of Austin, involved me intimately with their PBS special From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians. It was thrilling to see close up how effectively television can serve as an instrument of education. John Loudon, editor at HarperSanFrancisco, criticized an early draft and gave me many helpful suggestions, even though he knew I was taking my manuscript elsewhere: I deeply appreciate his intellectual and professional generosity.
Special thanks to Bill Green of the University of Rochester, whose invitation to spend the summer of 1994 digging at Yodefat in the Galil—the Jotapatha of Book 3 of Josephus’ Jewish War—enabled me to plug a hole in my own text-based training with a season of remedial archaeology. My learned friend Oded Irshai of the Department of Jewish History at the Hebrew University walked me again and again, in wet weather and dry, through the ruins of Herod’s Jerusalem. Guy Stroumsa and David Satran enabled me to spend 1994–95 in Israel as a Lady Davis Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University in the Department of Religion. Simply being in the country for a whole year sharpened my sense of its topography, its seasons, and the ways that the cycles of Shabbat and of the High Holidays, even in our own secular age, shape Jewish time and social life. Herschel Shanks and the staff at the Biblical Archaeological Society aided my search for pertinent photographs with enthusiasm and efficiency. When I began to conceive that the Gospel of John might in some ways surpass the Synoptics as historical evidence for the shape of Jesus’ mission, I was abetted in my heresy by the valuable insights, knowledge, and wisdom of John Ashton and Brian Rice McCarthy. Ed Sanders interrupted his prodigious schedule of research and writing to read the penultimate version of my entire manuscript: he saved me from many errors, and forced me to sharpen my argument. My chairman at Boston University’s Department of Religion, John Clayton, and my dean, Dennis Berkey, secured my leave of absence in the fall of 1998: without their understanding and active support, I would doubtless still be fighting with my first draft. The staff at Knopf fielded all my incoming phone calls, FedExes, and faxes with efficiency and good cheer. Finally, my editor, Vicky Wilson, with firmness, understanding, laser-keen scrutiny, and dry good humor, kept both me and my project on track. To all, my deepest thanks.
During the time that I worked on this book, the affection and support of friends and family steadied me in essential ways. For their loyalty and love I thank especially my mother, my daughters, and Zev.