The Historical Figure of Jesus

The hermeneutical circle emphasizes the importance of context in interpreting the Gospel narratives about Jesus, and the primary task in this first portion of the essay is to place Jesus in his historical context. Any explanation of the significance of Jesus’ teachings and actions should be based on an account of the circumstances and issues to which he was responding. However, before outlining the particulars of the historical and cultural framework for our sketch of Jesus, the content of and criteria for what should be regarded as historical need to be considered. This is a more challenging task than one might imagine because of the paucity of sources about Jesus outside the Gospels that can be used to verify the historicity of the tradition. The two basic aspects that need to be assessed historically are the sayings of Jesus and the actions of Jesus. Establishing the historical probability of what Jesus did is the less disputed of the two tasks, though it is complicated by how to interpret the healings, exorcisms, and other deeds of power attested by the Gospels.

In The Historical Figure of Jesus, E. P. Sanders offers a list of statements about Jesus that are almost beyond dispute and belong to the framework of Jesus’ public career (Sanders 1993, 10–11).

•Jesus was born c. 4 BCE, near the time of the death of Herod the Great;

•he spent his childhood and early adult years in Nazareth, a Galilean village;

•he was baptized by John the Baptist;

•he called disciples;

•he taught in the towns, villages and countryside of Galilee (apparently not in the cities);

•he preached “the kingdom of God”;

•about the year 30 he went to Jerusalem for Passover;

•he created a disturbance in the Temple area;

•he had a final meal with the disciples;

•he was arrested and interrogated by Jewish authorities, specifically the high priest;

•he was executed on the orders of the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate.

Sanders adds another short list of what he regards as equally secure facts about the aftermath of Jesus’ life:

•his disciples at first fled;

•they saw him (in what sense is not certain) after his death;

•as a consequence, they believed that he would return to found the kingdom;

•they formed a community to await his return and sought to win others to faith in him as God’s Messiah.

With some qualifications, these lists serve as a foundation of most of the recent accounts of the historical Jesus. Jesus’ birth is usually dated somewhere around 4 BCE. The birth narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are very different and are best seen as theological interpretations rather than historical accounts. The historical starting point for a reconstruction of Jesus’ life and ministry is his baptism by John. The other historical bracket is his death by crucifixion. However, the Gospel traditions of both his baptism and death provide examples of historical traditions that have been expanded on. The Gospel accounts of the baptism highlight the superiority of Jesus to John and the voice from heaven, which announces that he is “Son of God.” These, again, are theological appraisals that cannot be validated historically. The crucifixion, which is also on solid historical ground, is intertwined with chronicles of his trial which indicate that the Jewish authorities are ultimately responsible for his death. As Sanders suggests, it is likely that members of the priestly aristocracy were complicit in the trial and execution of Jesus, but from a historical perspective, Jesus was executed for sedition as an enemy of the Roman order. Historical information from other sources shows that Pilate summarily executed thousands of Jews and therefore was probably not as tentative in sending Jesus to his death as he is portrayed in the Gospels.

What the above comments demonstrate is that even the most basic historical information is interpreted in the Gospels in ways that reflect the circumstances and perspectives of faithful followers of Jesus. The four different accounts of the resurrection in the Gospels are further evidence of the interpretive process from the vantage point of such followers. All four Gospels narrate in different ways the common conviction that God raised Jesus from the dead, but that claim cannot be validated by historical investigation as such. What is clearly historical is the disciples’ belief that they saw him after his death. So the resurrection faith of the first followers of Jesus is itself historical in some sense, but it is impossible to get behind the tradition to ascertain exactly what happened. What is historical is their conviction that the risen Jesus was alive and present to them and through them, and this conviction had an impact on the continued expansion and growth of the Jesus movement.

Probably the most challenging aspect of efforts to reconstruct the historical Jesus is deciding which words and deeds are authentic to Jesus. It is generally acknowledged among scholars that the Gospel of Mark was the first Gospel, and was written around 70 CE, shortly after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple. So there is approximately a forty-year period between the historical Jesus and the earliest narrative of his ministry, death, and resurrection. During that forty-year period, the memory of Jesus was first preserved and passed on in oral tradition and then written down in collections of Jesus’ sayings, deeds of power, suffering and death, and resurrection before being crafted into a narrative of his ministry, death, and announcement of his resurrection by whomever wrote the Gospel of Mark. As the memory of what Jesus said and did passed through these various stages, it was transformed. The question is, How can what the historical Jesus said and did be ascertained from the narrative accounts in the Gospels, where the memory of him has been shaped by forty years and more of adapting the tradition to new contexts, and by the perspectives of the Gospel writers themselves?

Significant advances in the study of memory and orality in recent years have contributed to an understanding of the development of the tradition behind the Gospels. On the one hand, oral cultures tend to preserve traditions with more accuracy than literary cultures such as ours. On the other hand, memory is always selective and involves imagination. Since the Gospels and the traditions they used cannot be read uncritically as unvarnished historical records, scholars have developed criteria to determine what in the Gospels should be regarded as historical and what should be regarded as a creative reworking of the tradition. A brief consideration of a couple of these criteria illustrates the difficulty of getting behind the Gospels to establish a historical substratum of the Jesus tradition.

The criterion of dissimilarity was at first applied to posit that if a saying of Jesus could not be attributed to Judaism or to the early church’s theological reflection on Jesus, then it was deemed to be something Jesus probably said. The problem with this approach is that it breaks off the lines of continuity with both Judaism and the earliest communities of his followers to put forward a minimal collection of genuine sayings of Jesus that depict him as unique. This approach reinforced a portrait of Jesus that is at the very least non-Jewish, and in some instances anti-Jewish. The criterion of multiple attestation maintains that if a saying of or tradition about Jesus is attested in multiple independent sources, it is likely authentic. Although this is a historically sound approach, there is still much debate about the relationship of the Gospels and their underlying sources. One of the main debates concerns the hypothetical document Q. Q is from the German word Quelle, for “source,” and refers to the sayings of Jesus common to the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke. Although Q is not an extant document, many scholars regard this hypothetical source as the earliest collection of Jesus’ sayings from Galilee. Given the ongoing debate about the status of Q in scholarship, the material common to Matthew and Luke will be referred to as the double tradition in this essay.

Evaluation of what in the Gospel traditions goes back to the historical Jesus is a complex enterprise that requires a repertoire of tools and approaches. Although there have been gains from the application and refinement of these historical-critical methods to the study of the historical Jesus over time, they are typically focused on a particular aspect of the tradition. One of the most difficult challenges in these historical reconstructions of Jesus is that no single one of them can account for all the data in the tradition. Every interpreter of the Gospels, expert and nonexpert alike, brings to their reading of the text a working portrait of Jesus that privileges certain sayings or deeds and then interprets everything else in the Gospel tradition through that lens. In some instances, what one privileges in the tradition is the basis for bracketing something in the Gospel tradition as being less important or even inauthentic. Historical investigation is by its very nature circular inasmuch as it begins with a minimal amount of historical data and then builds a case informed by underlying assumptions that will inevitably have blind spots. The use of the various historical methods can contribute to this phenomenon because they tend to be used in ways that confirm one’s preconceptions about Jesus. In other words, interpreters tend to find the Jesus they are looking for.

In view of this methodological impasse, I would propose that more emphasis should be placed on a holistic reading of the Gospel narratives of Jesus applying the criterion of historical plausibility. Theissen and Merz succinctly define the criterion of historical plausibility in this way: “Whatever helps to explain the influence of Jesus and at the same time can only have come into being in a Jewish context is historical in the sources” (116). The Gospels are realistic narratives that depict Jesus as a Judean, conversing and interacting mostly with other Judeans. Given the thicker and more richly textured view of first-century Judaism that has emerged in recent years, the primary task is to make sense of what the Gospels depict Jesus doing and saying within his Jewish context. This also pertains to the depiction of his contemporaries. For example, the portrait of the Pharisees in the Gospels is something of a caricature. It more likely betrays a conflict between them and the followers of Jesus after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE, which was then projected back onto the ministry of Jesus.

It is unlikely that there will ever be a definitive reconstruction of the historical Jesus that everyone will agree on. However, a critical reading of the Gospels, paired with a good working understanding of Judaism in its imperial context, provides the most promising path to a historically plausible interpretation of Jesus. Such an interpretation must account for the particularities of the Gospel tradition in relationship to a broader comprehension of what Jesus was trying to accomplish in Galilee and then Jerusalem. The attempt to construct a contextually credible account of Jesus’ words and deeds will also benefit from the use of social-science models to examine the socioeconomic dynamics of Jesus’ Galilean context. An important premise of this discussion of Jesus’ significance is that he was addressing concrete circumstances in his own local context, and hence his message had practical significance for those who heard and followed him. The force of Jesus’ teaching and ministry are more discernible when viewed against the backdrop of the local situation in Galilee, and so are those elements of the tradition that have been shaped by later theological reflection. From the standpoint of the hermeneutical circle, this requires greater awareness of and appreciation for the historical distance and cultural difference between Jesus’ world behind the text and the interpreter’s world in front of the text. Interpretations of Jesus’ significance for contemporary contexts will be more socially relevant and less abstract when he is viewed as a Galilean Jew engaging local religious and social issues in Galilee.