WHERE DO WE GO if we want to answer the question, Who was Jesus of Nazareth? Most historians begin at the same place as the traditional believer, namely, with the documents preserved in the New Testament. The four canonical Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—supplemented by the scattered references to Jesus in the Pauline Epistles, provide the basic building materials for any construction of the historical figure.
But even though the Gospels do provide valuable information, as historical sources for Jesus their status is complicated. For one thing, relative to their subject, they are late. Born, perhaps, in the last years of the reign of Herod the Great (who died in 4 B.C.E.; cf. Mt 2:1; Lk 1:5), Jesus died when Caiaphas was high priest, Pilate the Roman prefect, and Passover fell on a Thursday or Friday (all data suggested by the Gospels’ Passion narratives)—that is, c. 30 or 33 C.E. But the Gospels seem to have been composed in the period between the destruction of the Temple or shortly thereafter (70 C.E.) and the close of the first century (c. 90–100 C.E.)—in other words, some forty to seventy years after Jesus’ lifetime. As chronological gaps in the ancient historical record go (centuries, for example, yawn between the lifetime of Alexander the Great [d. 323 B.C.E.] and the documents speaking about him) forty to seventy years is not bad at all. Still, when we consider the mutagenic variety and intensity of the social, political, and religious forces bearing down on evolving Christian traditions in that period between Jesus’ execution and the earliest narratives about him, we can better appreciate how complex the Gospel evidence really is.
For example, while the traditions they preserve ultimately extend back across the generation or two bridging their day and Jesus’ own, the evangelists’ narratives embody several important and fundamental differences between their subject and themselves. Jesus of Nazareth was a Galilean religious figure whose vernacular language was Aramaic (a close linguistic cousin to Hebrew) and whose teaching was exclusively oral (we have no writings from him, nor do early sources claim any existed). He apparently restricted his activity to the villages of the lower Galilee and to Jerusalem in the south, perhaps with brief excursions across the Jordan; he also would have traversed Samaria, which lies between the Galilee and Judea, when going to Jerusalem. This is another way of saying that Jesus’ audience, like himself, would have been for the most part Aramaic-speaking Jews living in Jewish territory. But the language of the evangelists is Greek, their medium written, not oral. No one knows where the Gospels were composed, nor the identities of their authors—the traditional ascriptions (“Matthew,” “Mark,” “Luke,” and “John”) evolved only in the course of the second century: The original texts circulated anonymously. Most scholars assign locations of origin to somewhere in the Greek-speaking cities of the empire. Accordingly, the question of their communities’ relations with Gentiles, with gentile culture, and with imperial government looms much larger for the evangelists than it could have for Jesus himself.
In brief, where Jesus’ teaching was oral and his setting Jewish, Aramaic, rural, and Palestinian, the evangelists’ is written, mixed (that is, Jewish and Gentile both), linguistically Greek, and probably within the matrix of the Diaspora city. Flung out over the gap between these distinctions, across time, space, culture, and ethnicity, are the human filaments of oral tradition. Ultimately, many stories and sayings presented in the Gospels probably do go back across these various frontiers to the original followers of Jesus. But eyewitness testimony is never scientific or objective, first of all because the witness is human. In this particular case, their conviction that Jesus had been raised from the dead, or that he was God’s special agent working in history for the redemption of Israel and the world, would inevitably have affected the reports that these witnesses gave: Other witnesses, not so convinced, would and presumably did speak differently (cf. Mt 28:17).
Further, these stories would have been told and retold—by those of the original generation during their lifetimes; by the later, intervening generations for theirs—before achieving the relative stability of writing. Revision and amplification inevitably travel along this chain of transmission, again because its links are human. Since no way exists to compare later oral traditions to the earlier or earliest ones, the degree of change or distortion introduced into the tradition as it evolved, like the people themselves who received and passed it on, is lost, silenced by death.
Nor did the eventual achievement of written form fully stabilize these traditions from and about Jesus, as a simple comparison of these four Gospels shows. The Gospels differ among themselves. Sometimes the matter is undeniable but seemingly unimportant: for example, at Mark 8:27, Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do men say that I am?”; but at Matthew 16:13 he asks, “Who do men say that the Son of Man is?” But larger divergences exist. At the end of this scene, the Confession at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus rebukes Peter as Satan in Mark and Matthew (8:33//16:23); Luke’s Jesus is silent (cf. Lk 9:22); John’s Gospel lacks any corresponding scene (though cf. 6:68–69). While Mark’s Jesus seems overtly hostile toward traditional Jewish observances (e.g., Mk 7:1–23, and Mark’s comment at v. 19), Matthew’s Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, actively endorses them (“Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill them,” 5:17). And so on.
To make sense of such contrasting traditions, scholars have to devise interpretive strategies. Do we harmonize these conflicts somehow? Or do we acknowledge the conflict, and then favor one tradition over the other? If so, on what grounds?
Such weighing and choosing, and self-conscious reflection upon the reasons for making our choice, are all part of the process of historical reasoning. As we proceed through the Gospel material, then, the first task must be to become aware of its complications and difficulties as historical evidence. Only once we see, as clearly as possible, what its problems are, can we begin to take advantage of the tradition’s virtues—those places from which, however obliquely, we are afforded a glimpse of the historical figure of Jesus. We discern such discrete vantage points in the ancient evidence wherever we can establish a correspondence of elements in Gospel material with other historical data derived independently from non-Gospel sources—from Paul’s letters, written some fifteen years before the earliest Gospel, or from the vast body of material preserved in the work of the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, or from other near-contemporary Jewish sources, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Where these lines of evidence converge, where the data thicken, we can begin to construct a first-century Jewish historical context—the native environment of Jesus.
It is the contrast between this context and some of the claims made by the later Gospels that enables us to gauge their reliability. If the Gospels claim or depict something that cannot plausibly fit into what else we know about Jesus’ period and culture, we have good reason to hesitate to accept the claim or depiction as historically authentic. Of course, both in terms of constructing this first-century context and in terms of amassing data about Jesus, we will never know as much as we would like to know. But we can still know quite a lot.
First things first. What are the problems with taking the Gospels as gospel?
CONFLICTING EVANGELICAL TRADITIONS come, broadly speaking, in two types: conflicts between the first three Gospels (the so-called synoptic tradition); and conflicts between the synoptic tradition and John. Let’s consider each of these, briefly, in turn.
Scholars refer to Matthew, Mark, and Luke collectively as the synoptic Gospels. This is because they can be “seen together” (Greek: syn-, with; opsis, visual object): That is, despite divergences, all three are clearly variations on a shared theme. For example, Matthew and Luke both begin with Jesus’ birth (though their respective nativity stories differ strenuously with each other); both end with Jesus’ post-Resurrection appearances, Matthew’s on a mountain back north, in the Galilee, and Luke’s in and around Jerusalem (Mt 28:16–20; Lk 24:33–43, cf. Acts 1:3–8). Mark’s Gospel, much shorter, begins with Jesus’ baptism by John and ends the first Sunday after the Crucifixion with the empty tomb (Mk 1:9, 16:8, this Gospel’s original ending). Notwithstanding all the differences of detail, emphasis, style, and characterization both of Jesus and of his disciples, however, these three Gospels all take shape around a common narrative chronology. Once the story of Jesus’ public mission is under way, all three present the same basic sequence of events; and for all three, Jesus’ mission runs along a one-way trajectory, from the north, in and around the Galilee, to the narrative and theological climax in the south, in Jerusalem.
In all three Synoptics, Jesus comes to John the Baptizer and is himself baptized; the Spirit of God or the Holy Spirit comes down upon him while a voice from heaven declares Jesus “my beloved son” (Mk 1:9–11 and parr.). After a forty-day retreat into the desert during which he is tempted by Satan, Jesus begins his mission. He calls his disciples and begins to travel in the villages of the Galilee, casting out demons, healing the sick (sometimes, controversially, on the Sabbath), calling his disciples, debating with other Jews (most notably scribes and Pharisees) on the meaning of Jewish law, and pronouncing sins forgiven. And he teaches, often in parables, especially about the Kingdom of God and the Son of Man. Once Peter identifies him as the Messiah—“You are the Christ” (Mk 8:29 and parr.)—Jesus predicts his own impending death and resurrection, and soon thereafter, to Peter, James, and John, reveals himself gloriously on a mountain, conversing with Moses and Elijah, as a voice from a cloud again proclaims, “This is my beloved son; listen to him” (the Transfiguration, Mk 9:7 and parr.).
Finally, after spending most of his time in the north, Jesus turns south, to Jerusalem, for Passover. Through the device of the Passion predictions, Jerusalem has cast the shadow of the cross over the entire first movement of Jesus’ story: we know that, once in Jerusalem, he will die. After his enthusiastic escort into the city by other Passover pilgrims, Jesus disrupts the sale of sacrificial pigeons in the Temple court and so earns the mortal enmity of the priests. Continuing to teach there in the days before the festival, Jesus predicts the Temple’s coming destruction (“There will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down,” Mk 13:2 and parr.) and describes events preceding the End of the Age and the glorious return of the Son of Man—a figure, the reader by now knows, for Jesus himself. Soon thereafter one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, decides to betray Jesus to the chief priests: This must be accomplished on the sly, because Jesus is so popular with Jerusalem’s crowds (Mk 11:18 and parr.; cf. Lk 22:6). At the seder Thursday night, Jesus presents the bread as his body and the wine, his blood, and again predicts his coming death: God’s kingdom, he implies, is near (Mk 14:17–25 and parr.).
After their seder, out walking in the darkness, Jesus is identified by Judas and arrested by an armed crowd sent by the priests. Various authorities—the priests at their councils; Pilate, the Roman prefect; perhaps Herod (that is, Herod Antipas, the Jewish ruler of the Galilee and a son of Herod the Great; only Luke claims this, 23:6–12)—interrogate him. At the insistence of the Jewish authorities, who have a crowd on their side, Pilate orders Jesus crucified that Friday morning; by afternoon he is dead. Pilate then permits the body to be buried before the onset of the Sabbath that evening. When some of Jesus’ female followers come to the tomb early Sunday morning, they find it empty (Mk 16:1–8 and parr.). Here Mark stops; Matthew and Luke elaborate various post-Resurrection appearances.
Looked at synoptically, the first three canonical Gospels represent a confluence of Christian tradition: they come together to present a reasonably unified picture of the life of Jesus. Looked at critically and analytically, however, their differences emerge, and as our awareness of their divergences grows, so does the need to have some sort of criteria to guide our reading. How do we choose between starkly contrasting, indeed occasionally mutually exclusive, evangelical accounts of the past?
For example, while nativity stories about Jesus do not predominate in the canonical material—two of the four Gospels, Mark and John, are completely silent on the topic—Matthew and Luke each have highly developed though divergent birth narratives. According to Luke, Mary and Joseph live in Nazareth, in the Galilee. They journey south to Bethlehem, the scripturally designated natal town of the Messiah, in time for Jesus’ birth. The odd timing of their journey is explained by a Roman census: “In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled” (Lk 2:1. We know from other ancient sources that this tax occurred in the year 6 C.E.—but only in Judea, not in the Galilee). After the birth, they return home to Nazareth. In Matthew, however, Mary and Joseph already live in Bethlehem and so are in situ for the messianic birth. Because of Herod’s murderous antagonism, the family then flees to Egypt, returning only once Herod has died (recall, Herod was dead by 4 B.C.E.). Only then do they move north to settle in Nazareth (Mt 1:18–2:23). Of course, neither story may be true. But if we choose to grant credibility to one, it comes at a cost to the other: both cannot be true.
Oral traditions and various lines of transmission, spoken and written, span the time between the writing of the Gospels and the life of their subject, Jesus of Nazareth. The different evangelists shaped these into their respective narratives. But the multiplicity of their sources implies a further datum about their nature, namely, that each Gospel in and of itself is really an assemblage, a collection of originally distinct stories or sayings, which each writer could deploy as he would. Hence, for example, Matthew’s Jesus, during his Sermon on the Mount, teaches that “you cannot serve God and mammon” when discoursing about the dangers of split loyalties and the nullity of worrying about the future. His essential message is: Don’t worry about tomorrow; put your trust in God (Mt 7:24–34). Luke’s Jesus says no such thing during his (much briefer) Sermon on the Plain (Lk 6:20–49). But this teaching appears elsewhere, much later in Luke’s story, in the course of a long and confusing parable about a dishonest steward (Lk 16:13); there, it sets up an insult to the Pharisees (“The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this and scoffed at him,” 16:14).
Let us say that we are convinced that, behind the Greek, this verse preserves an actual teaching of Jesus. What did he mean by it? Context helps determine content, by providing an environment of meaning within which to place our interpretation. “I love you” means one thing when Juliet says it to Romeo, something else when Iago says it to Othello. So, too, with the different contexts here. If, as scholars conjecture, a contextless list of some sayings and stories about Jesus circulated, whether as oral tradition or as a (now lost) document, then both evangelists created new contexts that in turn effected a new interpretive content for the saying. Thus, if we think that Jesus of Nazareth did really say, “You cannot love both God and mammon,” we need to know his situation when he said it to understand further what he would have meant. Was he uttering a generic human truth? Or was he moving into a specific polemic against another Jewish group? The evidence as it stands cannot help settle the issue. The same phrase, positioned differently, yields two different meanings.
Finally, crucial matters of fact are in dispute. This is nowhere more so than in the Passion narratives, which many scholars hold to have been one of the earliest and, because so important, most stable blocks of tradition. Matthew and Mark have Jesus appearing before two full sessions of a council, convened at night after the seder, and consisting of the high priest, chief priests, scribes, and elders (Mk 14:53, 15:1//Mt 26:57, 27:1). In both, also, the high priest and Jesus have a highly fraught exchange at the dramatic pinnacle of the hearing: “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?” “I am” (Mk 14:61–62; cf. Mt 26:63–64); and in both, the high priest pronounces Jesus’ words blasphemy (Mk 14:64//Mt 26:65). Luke, however, has no night trial. A single conference is held in the morning, no dialogue between Jesus and the high priest ensues, no accusation of blasphemy pronounced (Lk 22:54–70). And John lacks a Jewish trial scene altogether. There, the action takes place on a different evening—still a Thursday, but with respect to the holiday, on the night before the night of the seder—and the high priest Caiaphas and his father-in-law, Annas, without any council, briefly and separately interrogate Jesus before passing him on, without comment, to Pilate (Jn 18:12–32).
We have no way, simply looking at these texts, to decide which is more reliable or even more plausible. To judge between the evangelists, we have to look at other types of historical evidence—histories of the period, such as those of Josephus; traditions of Jewish and of Roman law; records, where we can find them, of Rome’s judicial practices in its provinces—and use those to reconstruct an early first-century historical context. Only once this general historical context is as clear as it can be do we have a standard of judgment, and an interpretive criterion, by which to sift the Gospel material.
This process of building up a context, a “thick description” of the immediate environment drawn critically from as many contemporary sources as possible is, again, fundamental to the process of historical reasoning in general, and to reconstructing the historical Jesus in particular. If something presented by the evangelists cannot be fitted into a responsible reconstruction of Jesus’ own period, then there is reason to question its historical reliability. If one evangelist’s story coheres better with a reconstruction of early first-century Palestinian Jewish concerns than another, then we have a reason to prefer the one to the other in our quest for the Jesus of history, himself an early first-century Palestinian Jew. This process of reconstruction and critical assessment, further, alerts us to anachronism, both in the evangelists’ presentations and in our interpretations of them. Anachronism, the viewing of persons or events out of their own historical context, is the first and last enemy of the historian, and I will have more to say on it below. Here I simply want to emphasize that the Gospels in themselves cannot settle questions about their own historical authenticity.
So far I have emphasized conflict in this comparison of synoptic Gospels. But what about confluence? What accounts for the substantial areas of agreement between them?
Since the beginnings of scientific Gospel criticism in the modern period, scholars have speculated that the resemblances between the Synoptics, especially their common chronology, echo some relation of literary dependency between them. Virtually every combination has been proposed and defended: that Luke used Matthew, or vice versa; that Mark used both, but condensed them; that Matthew’s Gospel, originally Aramaic, was translated into Greek only later, and thus was the earliest.
Most scholars today accept the (not uncontested) view that Mark wrote first, that Matthew and Luke used Mark independently of each other, and that, besides Mark, these later evangelists also had access to another Greek source on Jesus that contained more of his sayings as well as some stories about him. Scholars designate this last “Q,” from the German Quelle, meaning “source”: Jesus’ teaching on God and mammon is an example of such sayings material. This so-called two-source hypothesis thus addresses two questions. The first is: What accounts for the agreements between these three Gospels? Answer: Matthew and Luke each used Mark. The second question, then, concerns the agreement between these two later Gospels: If they are independent of each other, why do Matthew and Luke verbally replicate so much material not found in Mark? Answer: They also shared another source, the now lost Q. Was Q actually a document? Or was it a collection of sayings and stories that circulated orally? We cannot know. Its most secure existence is definitional: Q is that material common to Matthew and Luke that does not appear in Mark.
Their use of Mark and Q not only explains the patterns of resemblance between the two later synoptic Gospels; it increases our awareness of how these evangelists worked. Matthew and Luke were not only authors but also redactors, creative editors of earlier traditions that they changed even as they preserved. Further, to present their portraits of Jesus they also redacted a text much more ancient and prestigious than Mark. These later synoptists also edited biblical tradition in the form of the Septuagint (academic designation: LXX), a Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures done by and for Greek-speaking Jews during the third and second centuries B.C.E.
All ancient Christians turned to the Bible in order to interpret and defend their understanding of the redemption that God had worked through Christ. Citations of and references to the Bible pervade the earliest strata of the tradition—indeed, its religious dependence on the Bible is the index of the early movement’s intrinsic Jewishness. Thus when Paul refers his Corinthian congregation to Christ’s death and resurrection, he says simply (and, alas, without naming what passages he had in mind), “Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3). Christ in the Epistle to the Hebrews—high priest, minister in the heavenly tabernacle, perfect blood sacrifice (5:5, 9:11–14)—is an assemblage of various Levitical images from the Torah. And without the words of Isaiah, Daniel, and Ezekiel, the Book of Revelation would be unimaginably different. At once both bedrock and building block, the Greek version of the Jewish Scriptures in fundamental ways formed early Christian proclamation.
But the evangelists’ use of the Bible went boldly beyond such theological applications. In the Septuagint, the Gospel writers felt they had a third historical source for information about the life and especially the death of Jesus. We see this most clearly in Matthew, who often prefaces or concludes some action or story with the words, “This was done in order to fulfill the words which were spoken of by the prophet” (whether such a prophecy exists in Jewish Scripture or not). This creative usage of the Septuagint clearly shapes both synoptic birth narratives. The tradition that Jesus’ mother was a virgin at the time of his birth, for example, draws on a prophecy available only in the Greek version of Isaiah 7:14: In the original Hebrew, the word that stands behind the Septuagint’s parthenos, “virgin,” is caalmah, “young girl.” And this biographical usage of ancient Scriptures likewise shapes all four evangelists’ presentation of the Crucifixion scene, where the continuous action of the Gospel narratives actually breaks down into a multitude of references to various lines from the prophets, Proverbs, and Psalms. In light of such dense citation, historians have to ask whether the existence of the scriptural image did not create the details or even the action of the story.
Put differently: The source for a Gospel story about Jesus might lie not in some transmitted tradition going back to a contemporary eyewitness in the early first century, when Jesus lived, but in the religious authority of the distant biblical past. The Gospel story thus may give information about the evangelist’s reading of biblical tradition, and thus also about his theological interpretation of the figure of Jesus. We learn little, however, about Jesus of Nazareth himself. But the contrary also holds: Just because an evangelist refers to the Bible when presenting an episode in Jesus’ life or an element of his teaching does not mean he necessarily constructs the episode or element himself. His biblical gloss of it notwithstanding, the tradition itself may be authentic. In light of these complexities, all Gospel material must be weighed and judged before it can serve as evidence for the historical Jesus.
MARK SERVES AS the narrative linchpin of the two-source hypothesis: His is the Gospel that provides the sequence of events, and in some sense the basic plot, for Matthew and Luke. Since the turn of the twentieth century, however, scholars have grown increasingly aware of the degree to which Mark himself is also a redactor, an editor of earlier traditions. Mark, too, inherited his material from different sources, in different forms—miracle stories, parables, controversy stories, healings. Were these written or oral? How did he decide to organize what he had? Did he have access to some earlier, now lost, historically reliable chronology of Jesus’ mission? Or did he himself assemble what he inherited, joining bits of tradition with the connective tissue of his own imagining, arranging them for his own purposes—polemical, theological, political—into the sequence that ultimately went on to shape the later Synoptics? To answer this question, we must consider Mark together with his canonical alternative, John.
Recall that Mark opens with John the Baptizer’s mission (in Judea? 1:5, 9; cf. v. 14). John baptizes Jesus who, after a period of withdrawal, begins his own mission, taking the gospel message—“The Kingdom of God is at hand!”—to the villages of the lower Galilee. He calls his disciples, works exorcisms and cures, quarrels with other Jews over issues of observance, and wanders well east of the Sea of Galilee into Gentile areas (5:1–21) and northwest “to the region of Tyre and Sidon” (7:31). The content of Jesus’ preaching, in other words, has nothing to do with his own identity. In fact, he is so notoriously reticent on this point, silencing demons when they recognize him (see 1:23–26), ordering those whom he cures to keep quiet (e.g., 1:40–43), that scholars have designated the “messianic secret” a major motif of Mark’s Gospel. This reticence in turn highlights Peter’s confession near Caesarea Philippi where, without any preparation in the story, Peter declares “You are the Christ” (8:29). (Typically, Mark’s Jesus responds ambiguously. Matthew rewrites this scene in part to remove any doubt that Peter had identified Jesus correctly: cf. Mk 8:29–33 and Mt 16:16–23.) Peter’s confession in turn prompts Jesus’ first Passion prediction: “And he began to teach them that the Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. And he said this plainly” (8:31–32).
From this point on, Jerusalem exerts a gravitational pull over the rest of the story. (It is the arena of the “chief priests.”) Jesus repeats this prediction two more times, the last explicitly when he and his disciples are on the way to the city for Passover. “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and deliver him to the Gentiles” (10:33).* Hailed as “Son of David” by a blind man on the Jericho road up to the city (10:47–48), Jesus is soon swept into Jerusalem by excited pilgrims who proclaim him the one “who comes in the name of the Lord” even as they hail “the kingdom of our father David that is coming! Hosanna!” (11:10). Jesus proceeds to the Temple area, then withdraws to the nearby village of Bethany, and returns to the Temple the next day.
In the Temple’s courtyard, Jesus creates a scene that paralyzes all activity, driving out those buying and selling in the outer courtyard (Mark specifies those merchants selling pigeons for sacrifice and money changers, who would charge a fee for the service, 11:15–17). This alienates the chief priests and scribes, who “fear” him and resolve to kill him: They “sought a way to destroy him; for they feared him, because all the multitude was astonished at his teaching” (11:19). Nonetheless, Jesus continues going to the Temple, at one point predicting its utter destruction. When his disciples ask when this will happen, Jesus describes events that must occur first—false messiahs, wars, the persecution of his followers, the evangelization of the nations, an “abomination of desolation” set up where it should not be. (Mark here prompts his audience—“Let the reader understand!” (13:14)—to recall the reference that, drawn from Dn 9, implies the Temple.) It is after all these things occur that the Son of Man will return in glory to gather his elect. “Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away before all these things take place” (13:30).
The priests meanwhile, Mark claims, have resolved to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him: They know that they must be cautious because Jesus is so popular (the arrest must not take place “during the feast, lest there be a tumult of the people,” 14:2). After the sacrifice of the paschal lambs, Jesus holds a Passover meal, offers the bread and wine as a sort of Passion prediction (the bread is his body; the wine his blood, “poured out for many”), and again predicts his own resurrection (v. 28). After the meal, he is ambushed by a crowd sent by the priests and led to their plenum assembly. “False witnesses” accuse him of threatening to destroy the Temple: “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy the Temple that is made by hand, and in three days I will build another not made by hand’ ” (14:58). Jesus’ refusal to respond prompts the high priest to ask, “Are you the Christ, the son of the Blessed?” At this point Jesus finally, publicly proclaims his true identity: “I am. And you will see the Son of man seated on the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven” (v. 62).
Accusing him of blasphemy (evidently on account of this identification), the priests hand Jesus over to Pilate, who, without enthusiasm, crucifies him as “The King of the Jews” (15:26). Passersby and the chief priests mock him and his prediction of the Temple’s destruction. “Aha! You who would destroy the Temple and build it in three days, save yourself and come down from the cross!… Let the Christ, the King of Israel come down now from the cross that we may see and believe!” (15:26–32). Just as Jesus dies, Mark reports, the curtain of the Temple “was torn in two, from top to bottom” (v. 38). Seeing Jesus die, a centurion—significantly, a Gentile—suddenly declares, “Truly this man was the Son of God.” The last scene is in Jerusalem, when women followers of Jesus discover the empty tomb. The angel who awaits them there reminds them of Jesus’ earlier prediction: He is risen, and he awaits the disciples in the Galilee (16:6–7; cf. 14:28 at the Last Supper).
Now contrast John. Two differences from Mark’s work leap out immediately: Jesus’ itinerary and his character. The Johannine Jesus weaves back and forth between the Galilee and Jerusalem at least four times. When there, he invariably goes to the Temple, because he comes for the pilgrimage festivals, Passover (at least twice, chap. 2 and chap. 12) and Sukkot (7:10); once for the celebration of the Maccabees’ purification of the Temple (the later tradition’s Hanukkah, 10:22); and once for an unspecified feast (5:1). The text even implies that he lives in Jerusalem for a period of roughly four months, from the fall holiday of Sukkot (7:10) through to the winter holiday celebrating the Temple’s purification (10:22).
Equally striking is John’s placement of the incident in the Temple. His Jesus drives money changers and pigeon merchants (as well as sheep and oxen!) out of the Temple in the early stages of his mission (2:13–17). Mark, remember, had also placed this scene at the beginning of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. But in Mark, Jesus’ pilgrimage is the finale of his mission: He comes to Jerusalem only once, and this incident specifically mobilizes the fatal hostility of the priests: in this sense, Jesus’ action is the trip-switch for Mark’s Passion narrative. Mark must, therefore, place the scene toward the end of Jesus’ mission. John’s, on the contrary, comes so soon in his story that it cannot trigger the actions leading to the Passion: otherwise, the Gospel would be over before it were under way.
Still, John’s Temple scene does refer to Jesus’ coming Passion, and in a way that curiously recalls another Markan theme—the relation between Jesus’ fate and that of the Temple. To select one out of a number of instances: Mark connected the ideas of destruction and restoration with the phrase “three days” in two dramatic, key contexts: in Jesus’ predictions of his own Passion and Resurrection (“The Son of Man must be killed … and after three days rise again,” 8:31, 9:31, 10:34); and in the accusation attributed to him before the priests’ council (“We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this Temple that is made by hand, and in three days I will build another, not made by hand,” 14:58, mockingly repeated at the Crucifixion, 15:29). John’s Jesus himself makes the connection explicit, though the agents of the Temple’s destruction, in his rendering, shifts from Jesus to Jerusalem’s Jews: “Jesus answered them [the Jews], ‘Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up.’ … But he spoke of the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this” (Jn 2:19–22). For John, the significance of the actual Temple is subsumed utterly by its Christological significance: The whole image of the destroyed Temple signifies the Passion. The Temple’s function here is symbolic, not (as in Mark) dramatic.
Furthermore, Mark’s Jesus had confided his Passion predictions only to his disciples; John, as we have just seen, publicly broadcasts the news to followers and enemies alike. This points to a second major distinction between the two Gospels, one that will affect any assessment of their respective order of events: the evangelists’ different depictions of Jesus’ character.
Mark’s Jesus is a man of action: dashing, busy, driven in rapid motion from synagogue to invalid, from shore to grainfield to sea, commanding demons with authority, even ordering nature to obey his will. At his word, a sea storm calms and the fig tree withers (4:39, 11:14, 20). These demonstrations of power in turn underscore Jesus’ twin message: the Kingdom is at hand, and the Son of Man has the authority to announce its advent. The story itself makes clear to the reader that this “Son of Man” is really Mark’s Jesus; but Mark allows his protagonist to get no more specific about his own identity than this. In fact, Mark’s Jesus seems to hide his identity in obscure speech even as he announces it in decisive actions. Though by “Son of Man” Mark’s Jesus clearly intends himself (e.g., 8:31), he nonetheless speaks of this figure only in the third person; and he routinely demands silence from those who realize who he really is: the Son of Man, the Messiah (8:29, 14:61–62), the Son of God. “And whenever the unclean spirits beheld him, they fell down before him and cried out, ‘You are the Son of God!’ And he strictly ordered them not to make him known” (3:11–12). To the disciples, after Peter had identified him as the Messiah: “And he charged them to tell no one about him” (8:30); after the voice from the cloud names Jesus “ ‘My beloved son,’ … he [Jesus] charged them [the disciples] to tell no one what they had seen” (9.9).
These three designations for Jesus—Son of Man, Son of God, Messiah—all come together only at the dramatic high point of Mark’s story, the trial before the high priest. Right after the accusation that Jesus threatened the Temple’s destruction, the high priest puts the question (14:61). Only here does Jesus openly affirm his identity, and it is his affirmation that leads directly to his sentence of death (vv. 57–64).
The two points to note here are that Jesus’ identity is hidden at his own command until he gets to Jerusalem; and that his identity is bound up, through his death, with the destruction of the Temple. Mark structured his Gospel around this paradox of hiddenness and recognition, which he dramatically resolves by leading his main character, Jesus, along his deliberate one-way path from the north (hiddenness) to Jerusalem (revelation). Further, his Jesus predicts in chapter 13 that, once the Temple is destroyed, the Son of Man will return, glorious, to gather his elect. Jerusalem and the Temple thus play a key role in the revelation of the Son. As Mark presents his story, Jesus’ very itinerary—the single, dramatic approach to Jerusalem—underscores this process of revelation. In other words, the sequence of events in Mark’s story itself assists the theological message of his Gospel. Jesus’ full identity as Messiah, Son of God, and suffering and triumphant Son of Man is revealed or (according to the prophecy in chap. 13) will be revealed only in Jerusalem.
John’s eloquent, talkative Jesus is under no such constraint. From his opening dialogue with Nicodemus to the closing bel canto soliloquies on the night of his arrest, this Jesus proclaims his own high theological identity. He is the Son of God, the Son of Man, and the Christ. And his speeches also teem with a multitude of sacramental metaphors: “I am the bread of life … from heaven” (6:35–38), the light of the world (8:12, 9:5), the source of living water (4:7–15), the Sheepgate (10:7–10), the Resurrection and the Life (11:25), the Way and the Truth (14:6), the True Vine (15:1). Jesus is the only one who has come down from above, from the Father, to the world below; and therefore only those who acknowledge him can see beyond this lower world to the realm above; only they can know the Father (6:45–46, 8:21–58). And he speaks openly and frankly of his own extrahuman status: “Before Abraham was, I am” (8:58) and, yet more daringly, “I and the Father are one” (10:30).
John’s Jesus, in other words, straightforwardly pronounces the evangelist’s sophisticated theological beliefs about him. John’s religious and literary interests center on and are showcased by the lengthy Christological monologues and extended discourses of his main character. His Gospel’s choppy narrative structure, by contrast, serves mainly as a frame from which to hang Jesus’ speeches: It is merely incidental to John’s central concerns. And since his Jesus openly and from the beginning teaches his own elevated theological status, that self-identification cannot serve, as it did in Mark before the high priest, as the reason for Jesus’ execution. Why, then, is he killed? John presents the priests together with the Pharisees determining to kill Jesus because they fear that his activities will somehow jeopardize the Temple and the people: “If we let him go on in this way … the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place [i.e., the Temple] and our nation.” And Caiaphas the high priest adds, “It is expedient for one man to die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish” (11:48, 50).
Perhaps we need not choose between these two different chronologies; perhaps we can fit the briefer timespan Mark depicts into the longer one of John. But then, what of the incident at the Temple? Could Jesus have made exactly the same dramatic protest twice, once early on in his mission and once at its end? Then we would have to account for the priests’ motivation in arresting him: Why be offended and alarmed—even surprised—if such protest were a near-annual occurrence when Jesus was in town? Perhaps we should prefer John’s depiction. Jesus’ multiple pilgrimages to the city make historical sense. Galileans routinely went back and forth for the pilgrimage festivals; two-plus years (as implied) gives Jesus more time to establish his mission and proclaim his message. In light of his subsequent impact on history, a longer period during which his message could take root is, perhaps, intrinsically more plausible. Or maybe Mark’s depiction is better: A short period of public activity conforms better to the itinerancy and poverty that Jesus evidently urged on his disciples. But Mark’s chronology so immediately recapitulates his Christology: Could this really be incidental? If deliberate, then isn’t Mark’s narrative sequence itself evidence of his freedom and creativity as a redactor?
Again, perhaps the issue could be settled by a sort of majority vote: It’s a three-to-one split in favor of one single, climactic ascent to Jerusalem. But Matthew and Luke do not represent independent traditions in this sense. Their chronologies support Mark’s because Mark is the source of their own. The decision gets down to an even split: Mark or John.
Again, considering these Gospels by themselves cannot settle the issue. We need to assess their respective plausibility and coherence by setting them within their contemporary social and religious context, and against what we can reconstruct of Jesus’ own context some forty to sixty years prior to the Gospels. It is this setting, constructed from other ancient sources, together with a careful reading of our primary evidence, that can help us gain some traction up the slippery slope of evangelical chronology. And figuring out when Jesus did what—the point of a chronology—will help us better perceive what he might have thought was the goal of his mission, and why the priests and the Romans stopped him.
PUTTING TOGETHER a picture of Jesus’ historical context requires no less interpretive work than does reading the Gospels in the first place. But for this project there are many more sources to draw on, both literary and archaeological. The literary sources themselves are richer: Simply taking the two main works of Josephus alone, The Jewish War (BJ) and Jewish Antiquities (AJ), increases by a significant order of magnitude the store of information about the Galilee and Judea than what we have from the evangelists alone. And Josephus himself stands no farther from the lifetime of Jesus than do the evangelists. Further, he was a participant in or an eyewitness to major events of his people and century. A young man at the outbreak of the rebellion against Rome in 66, he was from a well-connected priestly family in Jerusalem, where he served in the Temple. He attempted the defense of the Galilee; captive, later, he witnessed the siege of the city. We can augment his reports by appeal to some of the writings of Philo of Alexandria, an elder contemporary of Jesus and Paul who himself made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And we can build up a dossier of relevant data by gleaning the writings of pagan authors—Pliny the Elder, a first-century Roman naturalist who visited Palestine; or the late first-century Roman historian Tacitus, whose writings also treat the Jewish war. While these sources tell us little or nothing directly about Jesus himself, they help us to understand his world.
If these documents form one trajectory of evidence through the first century, then the assorted religious writings and documents specific to various forms of late Second Temple Judaism provide another. This specifically Jewish religious context, built up from a rich collection of texts and commentaries—the so-called Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, documents written in the late Second Temple or the early Roman period borrowing the name and prestige of ancient religious figures like Enoch or Moses or Solomon; the vast library preserved in the Dead Sea Scrolls; some of the letters and sermons collected in the New Testament—tells us how other Jews of Jesus’ period interpreted the Bible, hence their own history and their place in it. The ideas of the Kingdom of God, the resurrection of the dead, the end of evil, the establishment of a new or renewed Temple, the universal acknowledgment of God’s sovereignty—on the evidence of the Gospels, themes sounded by Jesus himself—shaped the hopes and convictions of many Jews in this period. By acquainting ourselves with their teachings, we gain an insight into the range of contemporary meanings of these terms, and hence into the meaning they might have held for Jesus as well.
Finally, there is the trajectory provided by specifically Christian evidence. The Gospels obviously figure as the prime source. But equally important, for different reasons, are the letters of Paul.
Paul stands as a sort of halfway point between Jesus of Nazareth and the later evangelists upon whose portraits we depend. Like the evangelists, and unlike Jesus, Paul’s first language was Greek, his biblical tradition the Septuagint, his ambit the cities of the Mediterranean Diaspora. Like them, too, he is much more conscious than the Jesus of history ever would have had to have been about gentile culture and the consequences of the gospel message for Gentiles: Paul addressed his letters specifically, even exclusively, to gentile believers. And again like them—and presumably not like the historical Jesus—his gospel is informed by a post-Resurrection faith. Paul had seen the Risen Christ (1 Cor 15:8; Gal 1:16), and much of his good news, his euangelion, concerns what to expect at Christ’s glorious, imminent return.
But like Jesus, and unlike the evangelists, Paul lived to the far side of the year 70. This fact, together with his conviction that God, through Christ, was about to bring human history to a glorious finale (1 Cor 15; Rom 11), must caution us when we designate Paul a “Christian.” Of course Paul was a Christian, and it is difficult to know what the term would mean at all if we did not use it for him: He believed that Christ was God’s Son, his agent in Creation, and the key actor in bringing about the redemption of the universe (for example, Phil 2:5–11).
But Paul thought of himself as a Jew. He worked within a very condensed time frame: “The appointed time has grown very short … the form of this world is passing away” (1 Cor 7:29, 31). Upon him and his community “the end of the ages has come” (1 Cor 10:11). “Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed: the night is far gone, the day is at hand” (Rom 14:11–12). Such a time frame would scarcely allow him to conceive of his mission as establishing new communities separate from and independent of Jewish ones. When he argues with fellow apostles, also Jews, it is over typically Jewish concerns: lineage (“Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I,” 2 Cor 11:22; “of the people of Israel, the tribe of Benjamin; a Hebrew born of Hebrews,” Phil 3:5); level of religious observance (“as to the law a Pharisee … as to righteousness under the law blameless,” Phil 3:5–6; his opponents in Galatia “do not themselves keep the Law,” Gal 6:13); religious authority (“the gospel which was preached to me is not man’s gospel, for I did not receive it from a man, nor was I taught it, but it came through a revelation,” Gal 1:11–12). When he organizes a major charity fund, it is for relief of the poor back in Jerusalem (1 Cor 16:1–3; 2 Cor 1:1–9:15; Rom 15:25).
But it is Paul’s own words that most effectively make this point—namely, that his spiritual orientation centered on the Torah and Temple of his own time, pre-70 Judaism—when he describes his work as God’s envoy (apostolos) to the nations bringing the good news of redemption in Christ. Paul conceived his apostolate on the analogy of the Jerusalem priests’ service in the Temple. Thus, when urging his Gentiles in Corinth to understand that the material support of the community is an apostle’s right, he drives home his argument by citing Deuteronomy:
Do I say this on human authority? Does not the Law say the same? For it is written in the law of Moses, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain.” Is it for oxen that God is concerned? Does he not speak entirely for our sake?… If we have sown spiritual good among you, is it too much if we reap your material benefits?
(1 Cor 9:8–11)
An apostle is as entitled to support from the community he serves as are the priests who serve the community in Jerusalem:
Do you not know that those who are employed in the Temple service get their food from the Temple, and those who serve at the altar share in the sacrificial offerings? In the same way, the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel.
(1 Cor 9:13–14.
In a later letter, writing to introduce himself to the gentile community in Rome, Paul enumerates the privileges and prerogatives by which God has distinguished Israel:
They [Paul’s people] are Israelites, and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the Law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race according to the flesh is the messiah.
(Rom 9:4–5)
So runs the translation in the Revised Standard Version (RSV). I have highlighted two words in Paul’s list, “glory” and “worship,” because the English obscures their immediate connection with the Temple. For “glory” Paul’s Greek text has doxa; the Hebrew word that this translates is kavod, which in Jewish literature refers not to God’s glory in general, but specifically to God’s glorious presence that dwells on earth in the Temple in Jerusalem. As Matthew’s Jesus says, “He who swears by the Temple, swears by it and by Him who dwells in it” (Mt 23:21). Further, behind “worship” stands Paul’s Greek word latreia: this recalls the Hebrew avodah, the worship of God. And how is God worshiped? Through the cult he mandated for Israel through Moses that Israel preserved before God’s presence in Jerusalem. “Worship” is a rather bloodless translation, for what Paul intends is “cult,” specifically the cult of animal sacrifice (which in turn, as we saw above, provided food for God’s priests) enacted at the Temple.
The Temple and the Jewish service to it stand for Paul as the acme of the human worship of God. Thus, when he speaks of his own role as an apostle, bringing the charity collected from the diaspora gentile communities in Christ for the poor in Jerusalem, Paul says that God has given him the grace to be “a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles in priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable” (Rom 15:16). Behind the English of the Revised Standard Version are Paul’s words leitourgos (“minister”) and hierourgeo (“priestly service”). In Greek, the first word means specifically “a priest’s attendant,” someone who assists with the sacrifices; the second, literally, means “priest’s work,” that is, making offerings at the altar. And since Paul in this passage names Jerusalem as his destination, we have a further clue that these images are not generically sacrificial, that is, related to just any first-century priestly service or priestly cult to any god, but they evoke specifically the cult of the God of Israel. For Paul, behind hieros, the Greek word for priest, stands the Hebrew cohen, the priest who in Jerusalem offers sacrifices to Israel’s God.
If Paul, a diaspora Jew and active spokesman for the post-Resurrection faith in Jesus as Christ, so naturally and immediately esteemed the Temple and its cult, by that much more should we expect to see that same esteem evident in the pre-Resurrection mission and message of Jesus. But the Gospel sources complicate our view of him on this issue, because they are written after, perhaps in some sense in light of, the Jews’ war with Rome. Thus, though the Gospels’ narrative context is, roughly, the first third of the first century, from the final years of Herod the Great (d. 4 B.C.E.) to Pontius Pilate’s term of office (26–36 C.E.), the Gospel writers’ historical context is, roughly, the final third of the first century, c. 70–100 C.E. Between these authors and their subject yawned the unbridgeable breach in Israel’s traditional worship. The evangelists’ position as regards the Temple, then, is closer to ours, despite the nineteen centuries that intervene between us, than to that of those generations who immediately precede them. They, like us, know something that none of the historical figures about whom they wrote could have known: that is, that Jerusalem’s Temple was no more.
This knowledge cannot but affect what the evangelists saw, and what we see, when we look backward. Both we and they are in the position of someone reading a novel or watching a film for the second time. Gestures and actions that the first time through seemed simply to give texture to the story now throb with heightened poignancy, because we know where things will end. Juliet’s passionate outburst as Romeo prepares to leave Verona for exile—“O, think’st thou we shall ever meet again?”—heard in innocence, seems both to Romeo and to an unknowing audience an exaggerated anxiety in the face of traumatic separation. His assurances that all will be well—“All these woes shall serve / For sweet discourses in our times to come”—are a soothing and sensible response. But the second time through, her words take on a terrible accuracy, making his seem touchingly naive, even pathetic. We know too much to hear them the same way twice.
So, too, with the evangelists. Whatever the traditions they inherited about Jesus and Jerusalem, they received them in a period with a much-altered religious reality: the cult mandated by God to the Jewish people, whose details stretched through four of the first five books of Scripture, whose performance had been the particular responsibility of the Jerusalem priesthood, and whose manner of execution had fueled the wars of interpretation and the vigorous sectarianism of the late Second Temple period, had ceased to exist. Inherited sayings and stories about Jesus and the Temple, or about Jesus and the laws of purity concerning the Temple, or about Jesus and those groups whose piety focused especially on the Temple, accordingly acquired a dimension added by the evangelists’ own, post-70 perspective: Jesus spoke about and interacted with an institution and its religious authorities that had vanished. How could he not have known what would so shortly happen? What could God have meant by permitting such a massive destruction? The evangelists’ efforts to respond to these questions intimately affected their retelling of tradition.
So, too, with historical scholarship: It also is burdened with (in this sense) knowing too much. Our retrospective knowledge unobtrusively shapes what we see. We know that the Temple ceased being a focus of active Christian piety soon after the lifetime of Jesus; that most of the purity laws soon became irrelevant to the evolving movement; that the churches would become increasingly Gentile and, eventually, anti-Jewish. And this knowledge in turn can lend weight to those modern readings of New Testament material whereby Jesus himself seems alienated from or hostile or indifferent to the concerns and commitments of his Jewish contemporaries. The retrospect inevitable to the historical project can, ironically, threaten to collapse the distance between the present and the past. And such collapse in turn threatens the historical project both morally and intellectually.
Morally, this diminution of difference between present and past can lead us to project what is meaningful to us back onto and into our subject of inquiry. Especially when studying religious texts such as the Gospels or culturally central figures such as Paul and, even more, Jesus, the desire to have these ancient voices speak immediately to the present, to be spiritually and morally consonant with current concerns, too often pulls them out of their own historical context into territory familiar to later generations but foreign to them. We see the results in the Christ of the western Imperial church, depicted in a sixth-century Italian mosaic as a Roman army officer. We see them in the Jesus of liberal Protestant scholars in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who emerges from their weighty tomes as a religious liberal himself. We see them now, as the Jesus of the late twentieth-century academy battles nationalism, sexism, and social hierarchy. Such a Jesus is immediately relevant to the concerns shaping these later contexts. But his relevance comes purchased at the price of anachronism.
To do history both honorably and well, then, requires the moral discipline of allowing the gap of twenty centuries to open between us and our ancient subjects. What matters to us, what is meaningful to us, will coincide at best only rarely with what mattered to them. They lived in a different world. Some aspects of this world can be felt as well in ours: We, too, can understand the social consequences of oppression and poverty, the spiritual effects of prayer. But some aspects will remain obdurately other, forever outside our experience and our categories of meaning, precisely because the ancient past is ancient. It is not our own world at all, but a place where leprosy and death defile, where ashes and water make clean, and where one approaches the altar of God with purifications, blood offerings, and awe.
Respecting their historical integrity and moral autonomy, allowing Jesus or Paul or the evangelists as late Second Temple Jews or post–Second Temple Christians to be concerned with what concerned them and not with what concerns us—for which they had no responsibility and of which they had no knowledge—is the only way to see them in their full humanity. Anything less simply drapes disguised versions of ourselves in antique garb, presenting figures in a costume drama who comfortably inhabit a modern stage, not the ancient past. Thus, whether reading the Gospels themselves or assessing modern studies of them, we need to ask if later sensibilities affect the presentation of the past, the past as truly lived by Jesus and by his contemporaries—sympathizers, admirers, opponents, enemies.
The “backward” thrust of history also poses intellectual dangers. Again like the reader of the twice-read novel or the viewer of the twice-seen film, we cannot help knowing more than we should. Beyond the moral discipline of allowing for otherness, then, we need to cultivate as well the intellectual discipline of viewing the past as if we knew less than we know.
This is difficult precisely because history in its very nature is retrospective. We start from our vantage point in the present and work ourselves back into an imagined past. But though history is always done backward, life is only lived forward. We all move from our present into the radical unknowability of the future. If in our historical work we wish to reconstruct the lived experience of the ancient people we study, then we must forswear our retrospective knowledge, because it gives us a perspective on their lives that they themselves could not possibly have had. We, looking back now, know how their stories ended; they, living their lives, did not.
To understand our ancient people from the evidence they left behind, we must affect a willed naïveté. We must pretend to an innocence of the future that echoes their own. Only then can we hope to realistically re-create them in their own historical circumstances. Only by accepting—indeed, respecting and protecting—the otherness of the past, can we hope to glimpse the human faces of those we seek.
I propose that we start the search for Jesus of Nazareth by looking at an activity ostensibly common to both modern and ancient culture: the worship of God.
* Wherever italics appear in quotations, I have added them for emphasis.