Historical Jesus

T&MP: 2022-1-11 The Historical Jesus - Centre Place

The Historical Jesus

Transcript for The Historical Jesus by Centre Place

(77) The Historical Jesus - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYB91lRYyOE

Transcript:

The Historical Buddha

(00:01) Our topic tonight is the historical Jesus. Um, what can we really know about the historical Jesus? Uh, was there a historical Jesus? What can we say about the historical Jesus, and what does that matter for then? And what are the implications for Christians and everyone else? I want to um start by providing a little bit of context by looking at um the historicity or um questions about the founders of other world religions in addition to Christianity. So let's look for a second at the historical uh Buddha. So according to Buddhist tradition, the

(00:49) religion's founder was born as an Indian prince named Siddhartha Gautama. He's raised in a palace. He's shielded uh by his father from any kind of suffering, so inside the walls of the palace it's only wonderful. Uh, and the child is not, or all the way up to his young adulthood, he's not um able to even see that people in old age or disease or anything like that. And it's only when he gets outside of the walls and he kind of goes on a tour of the real world that he observes um, you know, someone bent over in old age walking with a stick and he and he sees

(01:29) what's that, you know, this is somebody who has grown old in infirmity. He then uh experiences or observes people who are suffering terribly from a disease and finally he also sees someone who is dying or who has died. And in each one of those cases, those are new realizations for him considering his sequestered life. So these observations in the story uh lead Gautama to Buddhism's First Noble Truth, which is life is suffering, or um uh life is unsatisfactory, however we translate that into English. He then um renounces his princely status and his property so that

(02:13) he can instead uh uh focus on spiritual goals uh that include becoming an ascetic, which is to say um not uh not indulging in all sorts of worldly pleasures, and then also mendicant; in other words, someone who is uh begging for um life's necessities uh because you're not focused on worldly things, you're instead uh focused on an other-worldly and spiritual path. And then there's more stories in this um general overall kind of like traditional biography of the Buddha that explain kind of the pathway that he eventually charts: the middle

(02:57) path between extreme asceticism—you know, the kind of uh things that some of the monks had been doing where uh where they try to eat on very little or to give up most every kind of food, meat and or whatever all the different kinds of things that you do, meat they did give up—but anyway, a middle path between giving up everything or almost everything uh and and then also just being worldly indulgent. So kind of the middle path of that. All right, so that's kind of like just a very brief brief thumbnail uh of the story of the Buddha um

(03:31) and we don't know exactly when uh that historical Buddha, if there is a Siddhartha Gautama, uh when exactly he would have lived. One of the traditional or, you know, dates that scholars kind of have given is, let's say, uh living between the middle of the 500s BCE and then to the very um let's say early 400s of the um of that century. So I'm kind of like right in that kind of time period. However, um the kind of maybe earliest kind of possible date for the composition of Buddhist texts is, let's say, in the 300s, but the manuscripts of those don't

(04:14) actually exist until the 100s or the, I'm sorry, the 100s of the BCE, the first century uh BCE. And the kind of first real mentions we have in the historical record of the historical Buddha is during the reign of Ashoka, who's the Emperor of Maurya, one of these Indian uh one an Indian empire, and he gives a series of edicts that include mentioning the Buddha. Um, and so Ashoka here is essentially a a ruler who is instituting Buddhism as kind of his state religion. Um, and so in some ways we kind of be like for Jesus the first kind, as if

(04:57) the really the first actual um evidence we have of the historic Jesus comes with the Emperor Constantine, who is instituting uh Christianity uh, you know, three centuries after, more than three three centuries after Jesus's life, um as the state religion of the Roman Empire. Obviously that's not the case in terms of Jesus; we'll get to what we have in between those kind of things. Um, the earliest biography of the Buddha comes even later uh in the first century of the Common Era, the first century AD, and there's actually other components of the

(05:32) biography that come in the centuries after that. Um, anyway, it's a kind of a long distance to get from the time period when the historical Buddha would have been alive to our sources that describe him. And so, like I say, for that um from that kind of historical figure to maybe the earliest texts, maybe it's 100 years in there or so that separates them because we don't know exactly when the historical Buddha would have been alive. So I think most historians agree there probably was a historical Buddha and it's possible that if you glean through

(06:12) uh the earliest texts, you can reconstruct some of the basic details of the historic figure's life because again, it's only separated by maybe a century. But when we get to that biography, like I was telling you, kind of this um this story of a prince who has been shielded from suffering and so forth, um that's almost, you know, what, five centuries or more separated from the historical figure. Um, and that's too long to preserve um to have preserved historical details really in just oral tradition. Uh, and so rather than histories, um I think almost all

(06:51) historians agree that these are foundational myths of the religion of Buddhism. And by foundational myths here, I mean to say stories that are told to explain and share and experience the identity of Buddhism for Buddhists as opposed to um an actual historical story of how uh Siddhartha Gautama actually developed the religion. It's actually they're written the reverse way: we already know as Buddhists what the First Noble Truth is, and so the story explains how that insight is achieved, or is written to explain that. So although historians agree generally that

(07:33) there was probably a historical Buddha, very little can be said about his actual life and, like I say, even the proposed dates are as far as a century apart uh, so we don't even necessarily know where uh when the Buddha would have lived. Now, were they a good idea? Um, uh portraits like this one that we are so familiar with are are very, very late. So this picture is from the first century, I'm sorry, second century of the CE of the Common Era, and um it's again among the earlier anthropomorphic portraits. Uh, the earliest

Moses and the Exodus

(08:08) representations of the Buddha in Buddhist art would just be the Buddha's footprints because he's enlightened, he's gone. So the biographical stories of the prince, like I say, shielded, those are identity myths written later by Buddhists. All right, I wanted to also look at context for another founder: so, Moses. So Moses is traditionally understood to be the author of the Pentateuch or Torah, which is to say the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Um, and as such, uh Moses is very, very important in the foundation story for the earliest era of Judaism—what we

(08:52) call, historians call, First Temple Judaism, um the time the Judaism that existed prior to the destruction of Solomon's Temple by the Babylonians. So according to the Bible, Moses led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt to the land of Canaan, uh which was a Promised Land promised to them by God, but which they in turn conquered militarily. Um, and according to uh the Book of Joshua anyway, uh they exterminated most of the Canaanite inhabitants in order to do that. So let's again kind of try to look at some of the dates and try to put the

(09:33) give ourselves a timeline framework for this. So the dates again for Moses, we don't really know. Uh, in Rabbinical Judaism, the the the rabbis uh kind of identified 1391 BC to 1271 BC uh for the dates of Moses. Um, the famous Christian fundamental literalist Bishop Usher, who tried to date everything for a short Earth chronology, puts it a century or so earlier. Anyway, we'll just put these down here to kind of show um the—if we look though at the again the composition for the earliest source text of the Torah, um it's maybe in the generation immediately

(10:15) before uh the destruction of Jerusalem. So that Babylonian captivity period, which where the um the nobles of Jerusalem are taken to Babylon, and before Babylon is conquered by Persia and the nobles are allowed to go back and refound Jerusalem and create the Second Temple period. So that 587 to 539 BCE period. So it's possible that the uh earliest source texts for the Pentateuch and Torah were written before that. The Pentateuch and Torah as we have it were edited edited together after the Babylonian captivity, and so in any event it's a

(10:54) fair distance from the actual dates of Mo—of Moses. Um, the manuscripts are centuries later still, but um are are are many of them were witnessed, for example, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and so they're quite old still, first century uh BCE and so forth, but um anyway, still fairly mount far removed from the uh the composition moment. So the time frame here between maybe the dates of when Moses would have been alive and when the text would have been written is some 600 or more years. And so, as with the Buddha, the many centuries separating the composition of

(11:36) any stories about Moses from the time he supposedly lived means that the details of the story are almost certainly mythic. Um, and as with all texts, the stories as written reflect the context of the author; in other words, when the person is writing. So that may be, like I say, as early as the late First Temple period, and it is certainly also reflecting the early Second Temple period in terms of when the uh the Pentateuch, the Torah is actually edited together, rather than the period of time when the character was supposed to have

(12:12) lived that 600 years earlier when Moses would have been alive if he were a historical figure. Um, and so why—one of the reasons why though—why is Moses most likely thought to be um entirely legendary as opposed to the Buddha? So unlike the figure of the Buddha, who can potentially be discerned from the teachings of the historical movement of Buddhist mendicant monks, um the Exodus story as we have it in the Pentateuch, in the Torah, actually contradicts the rest of the historical and archaeological record. So for example, the Exodus itself doesn't fit into

(12:55) recorded Egyptian history. Um, Egypt has the kind of wonderful distinction of being uh the the most stable ancient society that um has just a massive amount of uh, you know, records that have been kept, and uh chronology and king lists that go so much further back than almost anywhere else. Um, nowhere does this—has this fit into the actual Egyptian story where they talk about people who are as numerous as them uh leaving and so forth. Usually they would—even if the Egyptians always put a good spin on their history, they

(13:33) would at least mention they cast them out or something like that, if they were going to try to say that uh they wanted them to go or something like that. There's no mention, there's nothing in the archaeology about any such thing. And indeed the time frame um when people would like to fit Moses into Egyptian history—let's say around the time of Ramesses the Second or something like that—um the problem is, at that point the Egyptian Empire actually owned the land of Canaan, so they wouldn't have actually been going anywhere. In other words,

(14:02) that's still under Egyptian uh dominance at that time. And then and then also the problem is from the other side: um the archaeological uh records, the archaeological um what we have of—in Canaan also uh records that there's really no mass destruction of all the Canaanite cities. There's no time period when an alien force of Israelites came in and absolutely leveled everybody. Uh, rather what we find is uh when we look at the uh archaeological evidence and also the linguistic evidence, um the ancient Israelites are

(14:38) in fact the same people speaking the same language with more or less the same customs and so forth as all of their Canaanite neighbors. And so um what historians have concluded is that not that the Israelites were uh interlopers who came in from somewhere else, but rather they evolved as a distinct people um out of their Canaanite neighbors and that, in fact, you know, Syrians, Phoenicians, Canaanites, Israelites, they're all uh essentially the same people, um but they, you know, they diverged alternate different identities out of

(15:14) that same uh common origin from being from that place. Okay. So historians then kind of agree that Moses is therefore a legendary figure. The stories that are told about him, um if they were based on, like I say, kind of these late First Temple sources, they may have originally reflected the identity of a line of Israelite priests who looked to Moses as an ancestor. And so um they're talking about things that he did in order to um explain and create identity, their their role as priests uh within originally the northern kingdom of the Israel area and

(15:59) then later in the Kingdom of Judah, the southern kingdom uh and their role in and above, let's say, that the other priests who claimed descent from Aaron, who were the priests of the temple in Jerusalem. Um, but the Exodus story as we have it, when it got edited together and became central to the Torah as we know it, when it was compiled um after the return from Babylon by the exiles, um you can immediately see why a story of people uh going—coming out of Egypt and uh coming into a Promised Land, why that could be central to the identity of the exiles as

(16:43) they are returning from a foreign land, from Babylon, and coming to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple and so on. And so um Ezra, who is a leader of the um Israelite exile community that returns, an official in the Persian Empire, um he is one of the first people who, in the book of Ezra anyway, he reads uh the law for the first time. And this may well be a reflecting of a story where the Torah has now been edited together, possibly um possibly by Ezra or at Ezra's um, you know, at his command within his uh bailiwick or whatever within his school,

Jesus of Nazareth

(17:29) and that may well be the first um kind of reading of Torah as it now now existed uh and speaks to the Second Temple Judaism. Okay. So those are kind of our contexts just looking at what are we seeing for his—you know, historical founders in other other uh in Judaism and and Buddhism. So Jesus of Nazareth uh is generally said to have been born at the end of King Herod the Great's reign, uh which is to say around 4 BCE. And then after he's baptized by John the Baptist, he gathers disciples, he shares teachings to those disciples

(18:12) during a relatively brief active period of his ministry—a couple years, maybe maybe three—and then he is generally understood to have been executed during the uh administration of the Roman official Pontius Pilate, and that would have taken place then either in the year 30 or the year 33 of the Common Era. Okay. So let's do the—the kind of framework exercise where we have here four to, let's say, 33 as possible dates um for Jesus. Um, the very earliest composition dates for some of these Christian texts may be the 40s. So it may be that the

(18:55) Lost Sayings Gospel Q and maybe the Signs Gospel and others are being composed there uh as early as that; that would be the earliest kind of possible date. Uh, other Christian texts are being written by the 50s by Paul and so forth. Our earliest manuscripts are only a few decades later at the beginning of the 2nd Century. Um, the earliest gospel, Mark, is written around 70. And then we also have this additional uh figure in the um time frame of the historical Jesus: uh the ministry of this guy Paul. So this is—by ministry I mean

(19:36) active um planting of Christian communities um by the earliest surviving Christian author. And so um Paul is active as early maybe as 31 but definitely after Jesus has died—so that would only be if if Jesus died at 30, you know, but maybe as late as 36. Anyway, somewhere within just a few years of Jesus's death uh for the next couple decades. And so um the time frame here is just amazingly shorter than what we saw either for the Buddha or for Moses. So um, you know, maybe it's 10 or 20 years before texts start getting—after Jesus's

(20:15) death—the texts start getting uh written. Um, it's 40 years to the earliest you know biography-like book, the Book of Mark. And it may be just two to five or so years between um uh Jesus's death and the first kind of active historical person—no for certain known historical person—Paul is actively spreading Christian teachings and writing letters and stuff that survive to us. Okay. So in contrast then to the centuries separating the stories about Moses and the Buddha from their own time frames, uh Christian sources are only a

(20:56) couple decades removed from the historical Jesus. You know, nevertheless, like Socrates, the historical Jesus left us no writings. But unlike with Socrates, um most scholars have concluded that we don't actually have any eyewitness accounts of Jesus. So Socrates didn't write anything, didn't believe in that, but we have his—we have the writings of his students like Plato and Xenophon. Um, and so there's, you know, very clear clearly writings of lots of people who knew Socrates. There's also negative writings of uh of people who were

(21:30) contemporaries who didn't like him, like Aristophanes the comic playwright, who who makes fun of Socrates and so forth. So what do we mean by "there's no eyewitness accounts"? Doesn't isn't the isn't the New Testament filled with eyewitness accounts? So although um the earliest canonical gospel, which we call the Gospel of Mark, was written within 40 years of Jesus' death, all four of the canonical gospels, which we attribute to Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, those attributions are actually simply traditional. So later Christians um said

(22:08) that—they don't—those books don't say, "I, Matthew, you know, the Apostle of Jesus, am writing this text." When Jesus comes and calls Matthew to be one of the apostles in the text of the Gospel of Matthew, he doesn't say, "And then Jesus called me." There's nothing like that. Um, the texts do not claim to be written by Matthew. Early Christians who were trying to figure out who might have written them um kind of just assigned these to those, and those have stuck as attributions. So we've explored this um at length in some of our previous

(22:42) lectures, and so I invite you especially to go see or to go maybe rewatch if you haven't, "The Lost Gospel Q" and "Recovering the Signs Gospel". We kind into a lot more detail about kind of this this kind of question. But likewise our other letters and texts that are in the New Testament, while often written in the names of Jesus' apostles, sometimes they're also anonymous and just attributed to an apostle. Um, and it may well be that um that the texts are reflecting communities that might have been founded by those apostles at some point or other,

(23:22) or even schools that were maybe established by them, so that the followers felt that they were writing within, let's say, Peter's name or in Peter's authority, or the authority of James and and so forth. Um, again, scholars do not think they were actually written by them. So for example, Peter is not the author of the letters of Peter, nor James James's letter, nor John John's letters. In addition to the gospels, and even though um lots of Christians even continue to think that the Book of Revelation is also written by the same John, um John the Revelator

(23:58) is actually—doesn't—also does not claim to be John the Apostle. And uh the writing styles are so very different; they're clearly different people. It's simply a different—it's a different John. There's lots of people uh named John. There continue to be lots of people named John to this day. Okay. So how do we know that? Well, anachronisms and literary criticism is the way scholars have um have pieced these uh, you know, studied these for centuries and come to these conclusions. So apostolic authorship in general is discounted because the texts themselves

(24:31) tend to contain anachronisms. Figure early Christianity was evolving pretty rapidly in the first years, and so we can kind of tell when they're talking about um later, more orthodox, more structured, more Christian ideas than that those are anachronistic to the time periods of the first disciples. I mean another example would be um, you know, the historical Peter as described in the stories: he's got rather humble beginnings; he's an Aramaic speaker; he's a Jewish fisherman; um, you know, not—well, not not a high—not an educated person who is highly literate

(25:19) in and able to compose you know letters in Greek. It seems very unlikely that that would have would have been the case. Um, and also the letters—the letters, as we can tell, are not written by him. So, so for example, the Second Epistle to Peter: it's—although canonically in the New Testament part of the New Testament text—literary criticism in this case has pretty much conclusively demonstrated that the text is, in fact, a reworked expansion of the Epistle of Jude, which again is not written by the person who says it says wrote it, but

(25:55) anyway, was written between let's say 90 and 120 CE, and therefore long after that source text is—long after Peter died. And indeed, because the text is simply a reworking of another text and not a letter by Peter, it's also clearly not by Peter. So second Peter was written by somebody in the second century of the Common Era, and so that's somewhere between 50 and 100 years after Peter would have died. Okay. Even though the texts though that we have are not by Peter, uh John, and James, we actually can be confident that Peter is an actual historical figure um

(26:36) because we do have a known historical figure who tells us he met Peter a couple times and spent time with Peter. So in his letter to the Galatians, which is written somewhere between 50 and 60 of the Common Era, Paul of Tarsus—the first Christian whose author—first Christian author whose writings survive—describes meeting Peter along with Jesus's disciple John and also Jesus's brother James. So Paul's letter is to a group of Christian communities that he founded in Galatia, which is um an area in Asia Minor or Anatolia that—what we now think

(27:19) of as Turkey, or what now become Turkey. Um, the context of this letter is that rival apostles with what Paul kind of disparages as "human credentials"—and we don't know exactly what those are, but perhaps they have letters from the disciples in Jerusalem that say so-and-so who has come to you as an apostle uh comes with the authority of Peter or comes with the authority of James or something like that—we don't know because Paul doesn't want to um Paul doesn't want to give these guys any—he wants to just call them false and so on

(27:54) and and demean them by saying that his um his own calling comes from God, not from any human beings and so forth. Anyway, these rival apostles have been preaching what Paul calls a "different gospel" to the Galatians, other than the one Paul has presented. And he also says even though he calls it a different gospel, it can't—it's not really a different gospel because there's only one gospel. So they're just preaching falsehoods. Anyway, so throughout this letter Paul is really on the defensive, and it's therefore very, very interesting.

(28:27) So let me—I'm actually going to read a bunch of it because uh I think that we can see an awful lot and it's kind of very critical to understanding both early christianities uh and what's happening here right at the very beginning of christianities. So in the kind of a formal writing uh of a letter, Paul writes at the beginning: "Paul, an apostle"—you always start with your own name, and then you're saying "to" in the Roman style—"Paul an apostle sent neither by human commission nor from human authorities, but through Jesus Christ, to the churches

(29:01) of Galatia." So he's setting up right from the beginning: "I'm not being called here by some human um qualifications; I've got a bigger qualification, which is from God, right?" "I am astonished uh that you Galatians here have so quick—are so quickly deserting the one [me] who called you in the grace of God and now you're turning to a different gospel." So he's he's very upset that uh anyway that these rivals have arrived and are turning—again, turning—uh being turned—turning the churches against Paul. He says, "Am am I now seeking human

(29:37) approval, or am I seeking God's approval? For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin. For I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ." And so he is turning here um what might have been a very big liability in the mind—in the minds of the Galatians here. The Galatians have been receiving these other apostles who maybe have credentials uh from the church in Jerusalem, maybe from Peter, maybe from um

(30:12) Jesus's own brother. Um, but Paul's saying, "No, that doesn't matter. I have the—I don't have human credentials; I have credentials from Jesus Christ." You have heard—he as he tells a little bit of his story now: "You've heard no doubt of my earlier life in Judaism: I was violently persecuting the Church of God, and I was trying to destroy it. But when God was pleased to reveal his Son to me"—when he had a vision of the risen Christ—"he—that happened so that I might proclaim him [Christ] among the Gentiles," which is to say the non-Jews. "And when

(30:51) that happened," he says, "I did not confer with any human being, nor did I go to Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me; but I went at once to Arabia, and afterwards I went to Damascus." So he's going on and just going about his business as an apostle, fulfilling his calling to preach about Christ to non-Jews um without getting—seeking any human authority or even, frankly, any um any instruction from uh Jesus' pre-existing apostles. "Then after three years then I did go up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas." And so Cephas here, um this is the

(31:30) Aramaic word for "stone", which in the same way is um is Petra, Peter, in Greek. And so the name here is for um Peter's nickname as as Paul is recounting it. So the guy's original name is Simon, but Jesus calls him, you know, "the Rock." Uh, and so um he's called by that nickname here in Aramaic. Uh, anyway, because that would have been the word the way that Jesus and Peter would have spoken. "Anyway, I did go to visit Cephas (Peter) and I stayed with him 15 days. But I did not see any other Apostle except James the Lord's brother." So here

(32:11) Paul is saying that after, you know, three years after he had his own vision of Christ and began to consider himself to be an Apostle of Christ, he did meet—he go—went to Jerusalem, met with the uh Church in Jerusalem there, the leaders there, and among those were Peter and James, the Lord's brother. "In what I am writing to you, before God I do not lie," he says. "Then I went to the regions of Syria and Cilicia. Then after 14 years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas"—one of his missionary companions—taking another one

(32:47) of his missionary companions, Titus, along with me. "Then I laid before them—though only in a private meeting with the acknowledged leaders—the gospel that I proclaim among the Gentiles, in order to make sure that I was not running or I had not run in vain." So, in other words, he had a private meeting with these leaders in Jerusalem and he—and he outlined before them his own kind of teachings on the gospel, his feelings about—and his interpretation uh about how Christianity can be spread among non-Jewish Christians.

(33:29) My um slides are not working to advance—oh, here we go. So now it works; sorry about that. So um, thank you, corrected that. So, but um so this continues, he continues: "So he's had that meeting, but even Titus—so his his missionary companion who was with me—um uh was not compelled to be circumcised, though he was a Greek. But we did not submit to them even for a moment. And from those who were supposed to be acknowledged leaders—what they actually were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality—those leaders contributed

(34:10) nothing to me." And so he it goes on to call James and Cephas and John uh the acknowledged "pillars of the church", and in the later in the letter he actually uh tells a story of how when he is in Antioch with Peter, he rebukes Peter. So um so Paul calls Cephas (Peter), James, and John—I'm sorry, John and James—James the brother of Jesus, the acknowledged "pillars of the church." Um, and nevertheless he's forced to explain his disagreements with them over his interpretation of Christianity's uh relationship and Jewish law. Um, and so there's—this is an

(34:51) embarrassing story for Paul to make. If Paul were making the story up, he would be much more likely to claim that Peter, James, and John had given him, let's say, the full authority as the Apostle of the Gentiles. And indeed, when the author of Acts kind of retells the story, the author of Acts retells it in a much rosier way. Um, and that's how it's remembered in Christian tradition. Um, but it's only because there are these, like, rival apostles in Galatia—maybe ones that are even authorized by James—um, and that they're talking to the

(35:24) Galatians that Paul is forced to kind of tell this story and kind of lay out this disagreement and his difference of interpretation. Um, and so anyway, um because of Paul's account, I think we can be pretty confident that three of the direct disciples of Jesus were actively leading that movement in the 40s of the Common Era from Jerusalem. So Paul identifies one of these three pillars as Jesus's brother. And so as a result of um, you know, kind of this testimony, this eyewitness testimony, we're actually within two degrees and frankly just a

(36:01) handful of years from the historical Jesus. So um I want to talk a little bit about how we also can have confirmation of a historic James. Multiple attestation is one of the ways we establish historicity. Um, and so beyond that direct experience that Paul has uh with Jesus' brother James—again, an experience that is um is kind of of rivalry, not one that um that Paul is like wanting to make up in order to—if he makes it up, you would think he would be very positive like I say—the character figures also in multiple other Christian sources,

(36:40) everything from the letters of James and Jude to Mark, Acts, and many other uh non-canonical texts of the um you know Christian texts that didn't make it into the Bible. Um, but James is also mentioned uh by the Jewish historian Josephus. And when I say James here, this is really confusing to anybody who's not an English speaker, because um uh the Bible—the New Testament—uh is translated from Greek uh into English during initially during the time of King James. Because the King James Bible um to um flatter the king, everywhere where the

(37:23) the um the name Ya'akov or Jacob in the New Testament appears, um it gets translated as James into English. And so we could also be calling these guys Jacob or Ya'akov or something like that, and that's kind of what we mean by the by the name. But anyway, I'll keep saying James because that's how we say it in in English. But anyway, it's not—it's a far far translation difference into English from the original name. So, okay, who's Josephus? So Josephus um lived in the later part of the first century of the Common Era. He's a Jewish noble um who defected to

(38:00) the Romans uh during the First Roman-Jewish War. So he defected in the year 67 of the Common Era, so he's actually—may not being a contemporary of Jesus—but he is a contemporary for sure of the emerging early Christian movement. So he becomes a client of the Roman Emperor Vespasian and uh in—who had been a general in fighting that war, and then later was able to um uh seize the throne and become the the Emperor of Rome. So uh under under uh uh Vespasian's patronage, Josephus writes a number of histories: he wrote a history of the war; he also

(38:40) writes histories of the Jewish people and an autobiography. So he's a very prolific writer. Um, and because of all of that text, um Josephus really gives us the most detailed accounts of Jewish history that we have for the first century of the Common Era. And he also has more writings about um Jewish history before that than anything outside of the Bible. Um, and so he's a very important uh source for both Jewish and um Christian history. Um, Josephus' works provide non-Christian accounts of figures that include people like Pontius Pilate, King

(39:16) Herod the Great, John the Baptist, Jesus' brother James, and possibly Jesus himself. Although um, unfortunately, the—his component of the where he describes Jesus, um that text for sure has been vandalized by a Christian scribe. Um, and it may just—he may not have ever talked about that about Jesus in that—that passage itself might have just been a Christian um addition. So, so in order to survive, the text—texts have been copied uh in a manuscript tradition by Christian monks and so on, and some of the monks um were not uh they weren't

(39:54) able to stop themselves from wanting to fix it so that Jesus is in there, or that or that what Josephus said about Jesus um is more in keeping with what Christians understand. So a lot of scholars think that the part about Jesus is actually—there was an actual mention of Jesus that has been um has been vandalized by a Christian interpolation. But even so, that—be that as it may, we don't even have to get into that one. Um, there are other passages about John the Baptist and about James the brother of

(40:27) Jesus that almost all scholars kind of universally um agree are actually uh non-vandalized and are the way they existed in Josephus's original. So I want to read the passage here that Josephus has about James the brother of Jesus. So Josephus writes: um, "This younger Ananus, as we have told you already, took the high priesthood." So he's becoming High Priest. This is talking about, again, the history of the Jews; so this is the High Priest of the temple in Jerusalem. "So Ananus become—took the high priesthood. He's a bold man in his temper

(41:08) and very insolent according to Josephus." He was also of the sect of the Sadducees, so these are the nobles who are the traditional priests who consider themselves to be descendants of Zadok, the descendants of Aaron. So this um priestly elite in Jerusalem and the Sadducees, um Josephus says, "are very rigid in judging offenders above all the rest of the Jews, as we've already observed." So he's talked about the different sects within Judaism before. "When therefore Ananus was of this disposition, he thought he now had an

(41:46) opportunity: so Festus, who had been the Roman procurator of Judea, was now dead, and Albinus, the future one that's being appointed, was but on the road." So Judea here is under Roman rule. There have been uh Roman procurators who are in charge of the um of the province as it's part of a Roman Empire, but they have also been allowing regular Jewish worship to continue, and they—they've been appointing um uh different local Jewish nobles, Sadducees, to the high priesthood. And so now that there is no civil administration for a little bit of a

(42:25) moment, that that local religious administration [is] saying, "Well, this is our time that we can um get rid of our enemies," according to Josephus. So Ananus the High Priest assembles the Sanhedrin of judges—the local uh Jewish council—and "brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others. And when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned." But as for those who seemed the most equitable of citizens, uh such as they

(43:06) were uh most uneasy at the breach of the laws, they disliked what what was done. They also sent to the king, desiring him to send to Ananus that he should act so no more, for what they had already done was not justified. So so Josephus is just talking about this as getting rid of some people when they have an opportunity. The local high priest decides, "Okay, this is an enemy that's been hanging around here in Jerusalem; now that there's no Romans watching us, we can we can stone them for that." But that the a lot of the people in the city

(43:38) didn't think that this is a justified act. Let me just take a wait over here for a second. Okay. So "James the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ" is essentially an unimportant example in this story. Josephus is actually talking about Jewish politics during a change of Roman administrations. Scholars accept this as original to the text because uh a Christian wouldn't write, you know, "Jesus who is called Christ"; the Christians would just more or less say "Jesus who is Christ," you know. And so, in other words, Josephus, you know, knows that

(44:20) James and his followers call Jesus the Christ, the Messiah, but um but Josephus doesn't agree with the title, so he's saying "Jesus who Jesus who is called Christ." Nor, as we see, is the story Christian-focused; it's Jewish-focused, or told from a Jewish-Christian perspective and so on. So in other words, it's very—seems very authentic to um the rest of Josephus's text. And all it is doing is giving us a detail that um that there's a a group or here—the whose leader here is James, who is the brother of Jesus called—who is called Christ—who's

(44:57) executed then by Jewish officials um at this time period. So there's another passage, too, that is also generally accepted—or universally accepted, I think—by scholars, on John the Baptist. And so this is—comes earlier in the story. "Now some of the Jews," Josephus writes, "thought that the destruction of Herod's army"—and this—a lot of the people in Herod the Great's dynasty, all of his descendants, also have the name Herod. So what we mean here is Herod Antipas, who is the son of Herod the Great. So "a lot of the Jews, or some of

(45:32) the Jews, thought the destruction of this Herod's army came from God, and that very justly as a punishment for what he did against John that was called the Baptist. For Herod Antipas slew John, who was a good man." Herod uh "who feared lest the great influence John had over the people might put it into his power and inclination to raise a rebellion. Accordingly, he uh John the Baptist was sent as a prisoner, out of Herod's suspicious temper, to Machaerus, the castle I before mentioned, and there was put to death." So we can see

(46:12) here, anyway, there's a historical figure, John the Baptist, who has a lot of influence over the people according to Josephus. And Josephus thinks that that's why uh Herod had him put to death, for political reasons, to prevent there from being any kind of a uh a religious movement that might lead to rebellion against Herod Antipas' rule. So like the James passage, um scholars conclude that this is authentic because it's—conf—it's actually confirming actually also that New Testament accounts that John was a religious leader that was executed by

(46:44) Herod Antipas. So for example, in the account in Mark, um Herod Antipas keeps John in prison and he ultimately beheads him at the behest of uh of his wife/niece Herodias. So this is another descendant of Herod the Great, a Herodian princess who um was married then to her half-uncle uh and demands John the Baptist's head, according to the text. All right. In his description of John the Baptist, Josephus does not even mention Jesus. So in his view, um John—John is an important leader in his own right.

(47:30) And this actually is a um another kind of interesting and and and characteristic of the um in favor of talking about a historical Jesus, uh even though Jesus isn't mentioned in it. And that's because um it starts to bring a criterion—what we kind of call the Criterion of Embarrassment. And it fits with the embarrassment that the gospel writers approach John the Baptist: so John is very clearly an important leader, and John baptizes Jesus. And so the the role and the symbolism in the story really makes it seem like Jesus is subordinate to John. And maybe, you know,

(48:09) the actual underlying history is that Jesus began his career as a disciple of John the Baptist. And it is only after John the Baptist's execution that Jesus emerges as one of the main leaders, or the main leader, of that movement uh in his own right. So I want to read how the gospel writers deal with John the Baptist and how they uh make sure that nobody has that interpretation that I just gave, you know, that perhaps Jesus had been John's disciple. So in Mark, which is the earliest of the four gospels, we read: "John the Baptist

(48:48) appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him and were baptized by him in the River Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel's hair and a leather belt around his weight waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey." So in other words, he's an ascetic, again just like we kind of even have seen with what the Buddha is doing and so forth. He proclaims, though—and this is what he

(49:18) says right away: "The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit." In those days—he goes right after he says that—the text says: "In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and he was baptized by John in the Jordan." So um anyway, right from the start in Mark's narrative, um uh into John's mouth we have uh a a statement, a testimony that he's not going to be the leader; that actually the person who's

(49:57) coming next is the leader. Um, this is built upon in the—in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, both of whom use Mark as a source and so include most of Mark's narrative, and then they add this. So Matthew writes: "Jesus came from the Galilee to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, 'I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?' But Jesus answered him, 'Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.' Then he [John] consented. And when Jesus had been

(50:36) baptized"—so it even puts it into the passive tense there; instead of saying "John baptized Jesus," it now says "when Jesus had been baptized", you know; it doesn't say by who or anything like that. So in other words, that's even softened there, too, from Mark's account. Um, and then also Luke's account: same thing. So um "when Herod the ruler [Herod Antipas], who had been rebuked by John because of Herodias, his brother's wife, and because of all the evil things that Herod had done, added uh to them by shutting up John in prison. Now when all

(51:09) the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, and heavens opened up." So um Luke actually—the author of Luke here—actually includes um this detail of John being imprisoned by um Herod Antipas before mentioning that Jesus, you know, "was baptized", kind of again passively past-tense; it doesn't say that John baptized Jesus. Um, but in fact actually because John gets imprisoned in this Luke's narrative, or at least is mentioned about that, the confusion that maybe the author is trying to have here

(51:46) is not, "Well, maybe John didn't baptize him at all." We're not even seeing that, you know, this subordination of Jesus in Luke's account. And finally the um Gospel of John: so this is a different John than John the Baptist, it's not—this is uh attributed to John the Beloved. But anyway, the fourth gospel um has the last and um and and least um role for for John the Baptist in this whole baptism scene. So um in this account we read: "This took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing. The next day he [John] saw Jesus

(52:25) coming toward him and declared, 'Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, "After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me." I myself do not know him, but I came baptizing with water for this reason: that he might be revealed to Israel.' And John—and then John testified: 'I saw a spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. And I myself have seen and testified that this is the Son of God.'" So this vision that exists in Mark, of the—of the spirit descending on Jesus like a

(53:03) dove during the baptism scene of Jesus—that's in Mark, that's in Matthew, that's in Luke—here in John, this happens without anybody having mentioned that Jesus is getting baptized. So in other words, they preserved the um the spirit descending from heaven without explicitly mentioning that uh Jesus is baptized at all. So already as we saw in Mark, the evangelist puts into John's mouth, "I'm not worthy" in comparison to Jesus. In Matthew, John the Baptist initially refuses to baptize Jesus; he [says] what would it do? He should be baptized

(53:37) by Jesus, not the other way around. And in Luke, as I showed, John is already kind of put into prison and so um again, both of these—the John—Jesus's baptism is kind of put in passive tense: it's not "John baptizes him," but "Jesus is baptized." And then finally in the Gospel of uh John, the fourth gospel, the baptism isn't even mentioned explicitly anymore. And so um these are increasingly kind of like strident, I think, apologetics as Christians are at pains to kind of explain away um this story, this idea that maybe um Jesus was a disciple of

(54:13) John the Baptist. All right. So talk that about a scholarly consensus about the historical Jesus: given that Jesus' disciples, Peter and then John the Beloved, are you know—and [to] just be [clear], the "Beloved" part may not have been his real title, but anyway there's the John that that that Paul says he met, right? So he says he met Cephas and and John, not John the Baptist—are authentic historical figures; and given that James is a known historical figure and um you know and he's also Jesus's brother; and then given that um Jesus is

Scholarly Consensus and Conspiracy Theories

(1:16:33) John the Baptist, Jesus, James the Just, Peter, John the Beloved: these are all historical figures alongside Paul. All right. So despite um that scholarly consensus, we are in an age of dis—disinformation and there are many conspiracy theories that appeal to readers um who really aren't—haven't—aren't aware of the sources, maybe, and

(55:31) they probably aren't trained in historical methodology. Um, we just did a uh—we just aired last week a, you know, debunking of "The Da Vinci Code". Some people in the comments were asking, "Well, why do you need to debunk 'The Da Vinci Code'? It's just fiction; it's not meant to be real." But the problem with it is—is that some of the ideas that have been um popularized in that, the idea that Jesus is—is married to Mary Magdalene, that is absolutely baseless. We can say, "No way; that's not not the case," you know. There's no—there's no basis for that. Uh,

(56:05) nevertheless, people think, "Oh yeah, Jesus must have been married to Mary Magdalene," because they've read um like you—what people said is a work of fiction that I shouldn't need to debunk, but ended up doing so anyway. This one is—is presented as if—this conspiracy theory is presented as if it's actual history: um, Joseph Atwill theorizes that Jesus is simply a propaganda idea that's invented by the Roman emperors—that same Titus and Vespasian dynasty um who are you know who are employing Josephus in order to control

(56:39) Judaism in the aftermath of that First Roman-Jewish War. So um Atwill imagines that Josephus, in his own works, occasionally is inserting weird and cryptic references to the fictional Jesus. Um, and then he is helping the Empire concoct the Christian texts to promote the idea that it's Titus, Vespasian's son and his later emperor in 79 to 81, is actually the coming "Son of Man" that Jesus is always talking about in the text and so on. Um, so in order to, you know, believe this conspiracy theory, it really—you have to ignore all of the

(57:19) texts in what they actually all say, including all of Josephus, um their history, and then also really have to be kind of amazed at how unsuccessful Christianity was among the Jews of the first century, given the fact that it has this Imperial backing. I mean, the amount of patronage that um that the—the emperor actually did have, that allowed Josephus to write all these massive texts that he wrote, and in comparison the, you know, the really actually paucity of uh of texts that are actually in the first century Christian Christian corpus—

(57:56) um, it's—it's anyway, it's a preposterous flop. Um, uh, it also doesn't create a um Christian—it doesn't create—make Jewish Judaism um more controllable, you know, by Christianity or appealing, or make um a kind of Judaism that is um more consonant with the Roman Empire yet, because in fact actually um what Paul and the other uh early Christians find is that actually Christianity has a lot more success among non-Jews. And so even though it starts as a Jewish religion, actually what it does is it converts a lot of um you know Pagan Romans, uh and

(58:38) and they continue to be you know all sorts of uh anyway Jewish—Jewish people who mostly you know be—become—absolutely reject Christianity and ultimately organize Second Temple—I s—Rabbinic Judaism. So anyway, it would be a flop. It doesn't have any—I'll have to do I guess maybe a whole real debunking of it, but we can just say that there's nothing to this. Um, there are a couple of uh of people who are not just conspiracy theorists but who um are holding to the idea that Jesus is entirely a mythical creation, and that retains some proponents.

(59:14) I think the most popular person on the internet is Richard Carrier. Um, um his work—one of this—he's written several books; one of them is called "Proving History". Um, it provides, I think, scientific-seeming results, and so one of the things that he does is he takes a theorem to make kind of an equation um that generates, like, odds that he's, like, trying to calculate. And it's—one of them, he calculates that it's as little little as 1-in-12,000 odds that Jesus is a historical figure. Um, but this methodology, as all historians have kind

(59:46) of who commented on it and written on it is—is entirely faulty there. He created an equation. History isn't—isn't a math problem. Um, the reason why you get numerical results out of this equation is that Richard Carrier has to assign um arbitrary numerical values on the in—input, then you run it through the equation and you get the answer and the output. And so essentially, "garbage in, garbage out"; the results um are meaningless. The chances that um Carrier's methodology has any value are 0%. So I mean, there's a—there's a statistic—

(1:00:21) anyway, it's—it's—that doesn't mean that um there's nothing to it. There's another prominent mythicist, Richard—I'm sorry, Robert Price, who's much more meth—methodologically sound, which means generally speaking that he kind of has to retreat to skepticism. Obviously the skepti—skeptic def—defense is um is always the most defensible. So when you don't make any assertions and you just say, "Well, we're skeptical that anything happened," you know—when he's agnostic on the historical Jesus, um you know, that's the most defensible position. Although we

(1:00:52) have to be then amazing amazingly suscep—skeptical of the mythicist position, which is um you know comparatively just just immensely less likely. So this is the reason why there's a historical consensus. So for the non-scholars, however, um these ideas are very popular because I think separating the historical Jesus from the "storybook Jesus"—maybe the Jesus that you have heard about in Sunday schools—um, you know, the existence of a historical Jesus does not mean those stories—it does not mean the gospel accounts are history

(1:01:31) texts. So just because there was a historical Jesus, that doesn't mean that somebody was walking on water and we have witnesses of that or any such thing; not at all. Um, the—establishing a historical figure just means a very minimum of details: there was a guy named Jesus of Nazareth uh, you know, and he was born in the—you know, lived in the early first century, he was executed by the Romans, and so forth. He he uh was baptized by John the Baptist, may have been a disciple of John the Baptist; he um gathered disciples of his own, and so

(1:02:01) on. Those limited details are there. That doesn't mean all the rest of this—doesn't mean um that follows. Um, so as we've shown in many past lectures, actually there is good reason to believe that um much or most of the narrative of Jesus's life in the gospels are actually typologically constructed from Old Testament antitypes. And so uh the gospel writers, as we say, they're anonymous, they are writing in a different language, they are not eyewitnesses; uh they believe very strongly—they're already Christians—and they believe very strongly that Jesus's

(1:02:38) life uh was a fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. And so when they don't know details of Jesus's life, uh they feel very um able at—to to write out details based on what they read that Jesus should have been doing according to old Old Testament prophecy. And so we talk about this a lot in some of our previous lectures, and I'd point you to the lecture we did, "Is Easter Historical?"—a recent one last month—"Prophecies and the Christmas Stories"; also had one on "Lost Christianities". So um if we—if the only positive images or

(1:03:16) the only detailed images that we really have, though, are from the gospel portraits, how can we construct the historical Jesus? So we do have tools: the tools of literary criticism, um which involve then source criticism, looking at those gospel sources. And so one of the things that we do as we read each individual part: you know, are they consonant with the rest of the historical archaeological record? So um we look for multiple attestation from independent sources, like we did with finding figures like John the Baptist

(1:03:49) being a religious leader before—beforehand, uh and and James the brother of Jesus being a religious leader after. We look at the things like um where the accounts are dissimilar from early Christianity. So if we know how Christianity develops, if some of our early texts describe something very different from what Christians later believe, well, that's that dissonance is um maybe preserving something uh that goes back to the historical Jesus. Likewise the Criterion of Embarrassment, like we said: um when something happens

(1:04:24) that early Christian writers you know are embarrassed about and are trying to say, "No, no, no, well he wasn't—John the Baptist was very clear um that uh that Jesus is greater than him" and so forth, um that maybe also points us to an actual historical detail. And obviously historical plausibility is also, you know, part of the way we uh—historians—the toolkit for historians. So you know, there's all kinds of things that we can list that have multiple attestation: so one of the most ubiquity is Jesus' association with the Galilean village of

(1:04:58) Nazareth, and that's attested throughout the sources. So Jesus is often just called "of Nazareth"; that's how he's identified. He's also sometimes called "the Nazarene"; they're used as if they're like sur—names, although obviously they're not—it's not a family name, it's where he's from. Um, and so as we talked about last month in the um in the Christmas Story lecture, only the infancy gospels associate Jesus with Bethlehem because of uh Old Testament prophecy, whereas Nazareth had no other important historical associations. And so uh what

(1:05:34) almost all—I think all—scholars um most all scholar I think all scholars, maybe, um agree that Jesus was born in Nazareth and not not in Bethlehem. That criteria of dissimilarity from early Christianity: so Christian writers would like to tell Jesus' story in keeping with their own practices. So uh um by contrast though, the gospel is record that Jesus' followers did not fast. So fasting became an important part of uh early Christian tradition; they're p—fasting in Paul's time and so on. But in the uh Gospel of Matthew, we read: "John the Baptist's

(1:06:14) disciples came and asked Jesus, 'How is it that we, the disciples of John the Baptist, and the Pharisees, one of the sects of Judaism, fast often, but your disciples do not fast?'" And so um there's an apologetic that Matthew inserts: "Jesus said, 'John came—John the Baptist came neither drinking eating nor drinking, and they say he has a demon. The Son of Man [Jesus] came eating and drinking, and they say, "Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!" Yet wisdom has vindicated her deeds.'" So this is a passage in Matthew

(1:06:55) that's actually taken from the Sayings Gospel Q. And so one of the earliest kind of sayings, then, is attributed to Jesus. So it's not Matthew's apologetic, but he pulls it from there to this. And so that what kind of seems like is being saying here is that although early Christians valued asceticism and fasting—so in other words um not you know maybe refraining from drinking alcohol and and not overeating and so on—um critics, according to Q here and as as repeated in Matthew, called Jesus a "glutton and a drunkard". And so in this sense um that may

(1:07:34) be a um something that goes back to the historical Jesus; in other words, that he he didn't practice—you know, we talked about that "middle path" of asceticism that uh that the Buddha practiced—so maybe Jesus's practice did not involve uh fasting. So also the Criterion of Embarrassment: we talked about the the embarrassment of maybe Jesus being a disciple of of John—another—John the Baptist. Another is Jesus's execution in Jerusalem by crucifixion, by Pontius Pilate. And when that happened, he was abandoned by all of his disciples. That

(1:08:06) certainly isn't what was expected in Second Temple Judaism by almost anybody for the Messiah. And so that also um is very consonant with the contemporary record: what uh Romans [doing], putting to death uh you know revolutionary troublemakers and so on. Uh, and it also is embarrassing. It also has multiple attestations. So that's one of the things we can probably say about the historical Jesus: uh, that he was crucified. So from that bare of bones though, it is very, very possible to um to create competing and plausible and even academically defensible portraits.

(1:08:46) And I'm just going to mention, you know, just a four of these very briefly, but you we'd have to go into each one of these as their own um lecture to go through them all. Um, one of them here is from John Meier, who is essentially p—port—painting a portrait of a historical Jesus that is as close to the Jesus as described in the um canonized New Testament as a scholar can conceivably make it. Uh, and so he tries to do that in a very in very elaborate study. Um, Reza Aslan in a kind of a um very popular recent book has pres—

(1:09:27) presented Jesus as a Zealot, which is to say a political revolutionary. Um, uh, Bart Ehrman talks about uh the historical Jesus as a failed apocalyptic prophet. And people like Burton Mack talk about the historical Jesus as a teacher, and by analogy he talks about uh the kind of revolutionary teacher like the cynic philosophers um that are contemporary in the uh Greco-Roman world. So as I mentioned, John Meier's book is multivolume study. He looks for the historical Jesus and he seems to find one that's close to the canonized

(1:10:04) accounts, and he even holds out the possibility that reports of the supernatural go back to the historical Jesus. Um, and so if you—I mean, if you would like to preserve as much of the of the uh the gospel accounts' history as you possibly can, um I think that this is a great study for you. Um, the problem with this is, even though John Meier just goes into incredible detail about all of the methodology—so he teaches us a lot about the study of the historical Jesus—um, he doesn't seem to apply that very consistently. And so he, in my opinion, he

(1:10:37) doesn't just apply the methodology consistently and instead um the goal almost seems to be to get to, like I say, preserve as much of the canonical Jesus as possible academically. Um, and so that he doesn't persuade me there. But one of the things that does happen is every single time that he admits, "Well, there's just no way we can figure out to make this have actually happened," like the Christmas stories—uh when when John Meier admits that that's not history, you can kind of say, "Well, it's hard for anybody to make the case." Um, like I say

(1:11:09) Aslan um uh he has Jesus as a political revolutionary. He puts a lot onto a um saying from Jesus in Matthew: "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to—I did not come to bring peace, but a sword." Um, uh there's a bunch of different problems I think with this kind of focus: Reza Aslan is not a um doesn't have a lot of background in in uh the the long-standing anyway study of the historical Jesus on the one hand. Um, this particular uh saying doesn't have the multiple attestation and so forth, and in any

(1:11:50) event, the imagery of coming to bring a sword and so forth throughout the Christian New Testament, the sword is always the word; the sword is an analogy for the gospel. So and also the Zealot movement is um and it's peaked before Jesus's time. So anyway, it's a different—um I uh I would have to go through anyway, look at that all that background, but there's some problems with this book. Um, Bart Ehrman has probably the most uh popular take among scholars: uh that Jesus is best fit within the

(1:12:23) prophetic tradition of ancient Israel, um and specifically what had happened in the end of the Second Temple period, the kind of prophetic um prophets that are apocalyptic prophets; in other words, people who are um predicting an imminent end of the world. And so Bart Ehrman notes that John the Baptist uh in our sources seems to be an apocalyptic prophet, and that many of Jesus's followers, like the author of Mark and also Paul, are apocalyptic uh in nature. They believe in a literal apocalypse: Mark believes it's happening right when he's writing his

(1:12:57) book uh during the second—uh, I'm sorry, during the First Roman-Jewish War. Paul believes it's going to happen in his lifetime. Uh, and because of that um that prism, um and Bart Ehrman says, "Well then, Jesus is also an apocalyptic prophet in between there," you know, because you know from the follower to the—I mean sorry—to the previous leader. Um, I'm not sure I agree because the uh—all of our ear—some of our sources are seen through the lenses of those guys, the author of Mark and also through Paul. Uh, and so they may well be

(1:13:35) imposing their kind of literal apocalypticism on the historical Jesus. Side-by-side with that literal apocalyptic tradition in first-century Christianity is an idea of a of a symbolic or "realized" Millennium—in other words, the Second Coming of Jesus has already even happened—which can be found even in the in the Gospel of John and so forth. Um, finally among these portraits, Burton Mack um talks about a cynic-like historical Jesus; in other words, a a kind of a revolutionary uh philosopher sort of like the Buddha as well. Um, uh, u—

(1:14:14) person who fits this role of a wandering sage as opposed to a prophet or a Zealot. Um, and so uh he doesn't necessarily argue that Jesus is influenced by the Greek cynics directly, but simply that he's doing the same kinds of things. Um, and there's some compelling things about that too. But anyway, that's um only that's, let's say, a minority of scholars who are also following that. Um, when we look at Jesus as a sage as opposed to a prophet, um in a lot of our sayings that we have from him, Jesus doesn't speak with a traditional prophetic voice by

(1:14:49) saying things like "Thus saith the Lord," or like an apocalyptic prophet who talks about a vision where an angel comes to him and talks to him, shows him the visions of the heavens and so forth. Rather, Jesus tends to attempt to persuade. Um, and so he'll start things off like, "What person among you would not..." or "Consider the lilies..." or consider that. So in that sense there's a possibility that Jesus uses the tools of a sage, um such as teaching in things like parables and so on, as opposed to uh um being a prophet. On the other hand,

(1:15:23) there also um components that are in Mark and everything else where there are apocalyptic uh prophecies. And so again, which of those go back to the historical Jesus? It's—your—depends on your reading of the sources. This is why there are multiple defensible academic positions and portraits that could be painted. Okay. Um, the teachings of the historical Jesus: because Jesus seems to have taught parables and maxims that are relatively short in—easy to transmit orally, we actually may have better ability to reconstruct these than most

Conclusion

(1:15:59) of his life events. So we may have more of the historical Jesus preserved in the teachings than in the details of his life. And we've talked about that in previous lectures, and I'm just going to point you to the "Lost Gospel Q" lecture and the "Gospel of Thomas" lecture that we've already had. And so then to conclude, I just want to ask us kind of, well, where does this leave Christians? So um and in some ways it may have been—if you're watching this and and it depends on your background in Christianity or maybe your background as

(1:16:33) an ex-Christian or post-Christian, or in a post-Christian world and so on, you may actually um you may think it s—looks pretty bleak. On the other hand, I'm going to suggest actually that Christians effectively created the academic discipline of literary criticism in order to study the Bible. And so this is something that they have been doing for two centuries or so. Um, and so a lot of this has been known for a whole bunch of time. So contradictions in the New Testament texts, the fact that some of the texts are pseudepigraphic, the fact that the texts

(1:17:07) are not eyewitness accounts—that's all very familiar to Christian scholars and ministers, anybody who's attended um a an academically uh-minded seminary for over a century. And in almost all of this that I've talked about has been very, very well known and well studied uh in the past 50 years. So this is not um certainly by any means something that is um I broken the bank or anything like that for um Christian scholars and leaders. If you are from a literalist tradition and you have always viewed the New Testament texts as actual history

(1:17:46) that happened exactly as written, the problem for you is, yes, literary criticism has disproved this view. And so for people who want to maintain that, um the really the only recourse has been to simply reject, you know, like the rational tools of—tools of truth and to simply kind of just embrace um magical thinking that doesn't have a um academic or uh let's say logical basis. And that for it—it's just you believe the things you want to believe; that's also a thing that people have done. Um, that kind of fundamentalism

(1:18:22) though, is a break from historic Christianity, which actually was always aligned with academic thought all the way up to the Enlightenment, when there started to be um some break-off and and reactions to um the main line of of thought. Um, but there's a reason why uh uh this scientific language and the language of the church in the West are both Latin. Uh, there's the reason why um when you go to universities um and you graduate from high school and university univ—and things like that, you dress up in medieval clerical robes. It's

(1:18:56) because uh universities are Christian foundations and grew out of the Christian uh cathedral system. And so throughout um you know again Antiquity in the Middle Ages, it's Christian monks and so on that are actually preserving all of the texts and are the scientists and are the thinkers and all that kind of thing. So it wasn't that they were believing stuff that was opposed to everything that was known or the the extent of knowledge of the time; it was actually everything they believe was entirely consonant with that. And it is

(1:19:25) only uh in modern times where there has been this kind of divergence, especially in the emergence of a fundamentalist Christianity, that um there's become this disconnect. For progressive Christians though, the gospels are not histories but rather they're stories that are lived in the living life of the church, and they shape the church's identity in practice. So the Jesus of scripture, not of his history, informs them that lived experience um which happens in in the present of the church. And then I would also say that because the gospels are

(1:20:03) written to include symbolic meaning, that's what makes them meaningful. Um, they're not simply writing something that simply happened to happen; they're actually uh an intentional uh an intention, an intent by the evangelists and apostles and other writers to um convey meaning uh about how to live life meaningfully, and also about our relationship to the Divine, to the One, to the Source, and so forth. So as we're now wrapping up, um I have a couple questions for discussions.

Previous Lectures or Episodes

Name of previous lecture or Episode

Description

Link

Date of Release

The Lost Gospel Q

Lecture on Q source

Link

-

Recovering the Signs Gospel

Lecture on Signs Gospel

Link

-

Is Easter Historical?

Historical analysis of Easter

Link

-

Prophecies and the Christmas Stories

Analysis of Christmas narratives

Link

-

Lost Christianities

Historical overview

Link

-

Religious Studies Terms

Term

Description

Link

Apocalyptic

Predicting the end of the world

Link

Ascetic

One who practices self-denial

Link

Mendicant

One who begs for necessities

Link

Messiah

Anointed one

Link

Pentateuch

First five books of the Hebrew Bible

Link

Individuals Named

Name

Appears in other transcripts

Link

Ashoka

No

Link

Bart Ehrman

Yes

Link

Buddha

Yes

Link

James (the Just)

Yes

Link

Jesus

Yes

Link

John the Baptist

Yes

Link

Josephus

Yes

Link

Moses

Yes

Link

Paul of Tarsus

Yes

Link

Peter

Yes

Link

Bible Passages

Chapter/Verse

Type

Link

Galatians (Epistle)

Referenced

Link

Gospel of John

Referenced

Link

Gospel of Mark

Referenced

Link

Gospel of Matthew

Referenced

Link

Non-English Words

Word

Language

Definition

Link

Cephas

Aramaic

Stone/Rock

Link

Petra

Greek

Stone/Rock

Link

Ya'akov

Aramaic/Hebrew

Jacob

Link

Books Mentioned

Book

Author

Link

Proving History

Richard Carrier

Link

The Da Vinci Code

Fiction

Link

Linguistics Terms

Term

Definition

Link

Anachronism

Something out of its proper time

Link

Literary criticism

Method for analyzing texts

Link

Biblical Cities

City

Link

Antioch

Link

Babylon

Link

Bethlehem

Link

Damascus

Link

Jerusalem

Link

Nazareth

Link

Archaeological Sites

Site Name

Link

Machaerus

Link

Second Temple

Link

Solomon's Temple

Link

Chronology

Date

Event

Link

500s BCE

Traditional dates for Buddha

Link

4 BCE

Birth of Jesus (approx)

Link

30/33 CE

Execution of Jesus

Link

70 CE

Composition of Mark

Link