1.Oddly enough, given the supposedly greater authority of science, the modern world has seen a considerable growth in so-called ‘fundamentalist’ readings of the Bible, most notably in the United States. These see scripture as ‘inerrant’ (incapable of error): ‘We affirm that the Scriptures are the supreme written norm by which God binds the conscience, and that the authority of the Church is subordinate to that of Scripture. We deny that church creeds, councils, or declarations have authority greater than or equal to the authority of the Bible … We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit. We deny that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science. We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood.’ (Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, 1978)
2.See for example Thomas L. Thompson, The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest for the Historical Abraham, 1974.
3.Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorised Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible, 1991, p. 229.
4.Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, 2009, p. 121.
5.Lane Fox, op. cit., p. 237.
6.Quotations are as follows: 1: Ezekiel 5:8–10; 2: Deuteronomy 28:47–57; 3: Leviticus 25:45–46; 4: Deuteronomy 21:18–21; 5: Ecclesiastes 3:19; 6: Psalm 137:8–9; 7: Proverbs 17:8 and 21:14–15; 8: Joshua 10:39–40; 9: Genesis 9:2; and 10: Sura 110 of the Qur’an.
7.John Barton and John Muddiman, The Oxford Bible Commentary, 2001, p. 7.
8.The argument of this passage closely follows Richard Elliott Friedman’s Who Wrote the Bible?, 1998.
9.For a dissenting view, see Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, 2000, pp. xix–xx.
10.Ibid., p. 18.
11.See also 1 Corinthians 7:31, 1 Thessalonians 5:2, 2 Thessalonians 1:6–10, 2 Timothy 3:1, Hebrews 9:26 and 10:25 and 37, James 5:8, 2 Peter 3:10–12, 1 John 2:18, Jude 1:18.
12.Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, 2013, p. 31. Used by permission of Penguin Random House LLC.
13.Paul Q. Beeching, Awkward Reverence: Reading the New Testament Today, Bloomsbury Continuum, 1997, pp. 7, 15. © Paul Beeching, used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.
14.Aslan, op. cit., p. 31.
15.See Lane Fox, op. cit., pp. 28–33.
16.David Dewey, Which Bible? A Guide to English Translations, 2004, p. 174.
17.Beeching, op. cit., p. 5.
18.Aslan, op. cit., p. 166.
19.Beeching, op. cit., p. 15, emphasis added.
20.Aslan, op. cit., p. 165.
21.E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 1985, cited in Lane Fox, op. cit., p. 285.
22.See Geza Vermes, The Passion, 2005, pp. 20–24 for an exhaustive demonstration that such a meeting would have been completely out of the question.
23.Ibid., p. 111.
24.Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, 2000, p. 223; see also Vermes, op. cit., 2005, p. 102.
25.For a fascinating and very plausible account of the reasons behind this, see Lane Fox, op. cit., p. 300.
26.Aslan, op. cit., p. 156.
27.Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ (2nd edn), 2000, p. 55.
28.Aslan, op. cit., pp. 183–4.
29.Lane Fox, op. cit., p. 285.
30.Cited in Aslan, op. cit., p. 53.
31.Cited in ibid., p. 242.
32.Cited in Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, p. 213.
33.Fredriksen, ibid., p. 212.
34.Beeching, op. cit., p. 4.
35.Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, p 180.
36.Though see Étienne Trocmé, The Childhood of Christianity, 1997, p. 37, for a very plausible alternative view.
37.Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ, p. 185.
38.Fredriksen, ibid., p. 192.
39.Fredriksen, ibid., p. 199.
40.Much of the dualism of John is also found in the Dead Sea Scrolls: see J.H. Charlesworth, ‘A Critical Comparison of the Dualism in 1QS 3:13–4:26 and the “Dualism” Contained in the Gospel of John’, in John and the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. J.H. Charlesworth (New York: Crossroad, 1990).
41.Lane Fox, op. cit., p. 300.
42.H. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance, 1976, p. 13 and passim.
43.Beeching, op. cit., pp. 15, 18.
44.Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew, 1973, pp. 53–60.
45.A Cynic philosopher (F. Gerald Downing, Christ and the Cynics: Jesus and Other Radical Preachers in First-Century Tradition, 1988); a Jewish sage (Ben Witherington III, Jesus the Sage: the Pilgrimage of Wisdom, 1994); a political agitator and rebel with an agenda of social justice (John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, 1994, and Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: Popular Jewish Resistance in Roman Palestine, 1987); and a passionate prophet of the approaching End Time (Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ (2nd edition) and Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, both 2000, Marcus Borg, Jesus: A New Vision, 1988, E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, 1985, John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 1, 1991, and Vol. 2, 1994, and N.T. Wright, Who Was Jesus?, 1992).
46.In this context we must not forget the remarkable Julius Wellhausen, who, not content with revolutionising Old Testament scholarship, remarked later in his life that ‘Jesus war kein Christ, sondern Jude’ – ‘Jesus was not a Christian, but a Jew’ (Wellhausen, 1905, cited in Markus Bockmuehl, Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Study, 2006, p. 201).
47.Aslan, op. cit., p. 101.
48.Rowan Williams, Christ on Trial, 2000, p. 76.
49.Aslan, op. cit., p. 111.
50.Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, p. 210.
51.Fredriksen, ibid., pp. 247, 252.
52.Theodor Mommsen, cited in Sand, op. cit., p. 154.
53.Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953, p. 45.
54.Ibid., p. 555.
55.The argument of this latter part of the chapter draws heavily on H. Northrop Frye’s The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, 1981.
56.H. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism, 1957, p. 315.
57.Ibid., p. 56.
58.Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, pp. 41, 48. Used by permission of Victoria University in the University of Toronto.
59.Ibid., p. 171.
60.Ibid., pp. 219–20.
61.Ibid., p. 212.
62.Ibid., p. 232.