Robert, is that approach old-fashioned? Then too many would be novelists inhabit academia. I describe myself as a historical minimalist. I accept that Jesus was a historical person but that we can say virtually nothing about him, certainly not his motivations or psychology. To mix me some metaphors we have large blank spaces on our maps and in a field like NT studies the temptation to connect all the dots is well nigh irresistible. I accept the apocalyptic interpretation like I do Markan priority. It is the best explanation that accounts for the data which as you say must be our guide. It’s real dang hard for people to just say “I don’t know”. But said, oddly liberating.
godspell wants to know if I’ve read any history. Since he asked a rare question instead of speculating about my psychology I will respond. I’m about a third of the way through E R Dodds’ PAGAN & CHRISTIAN IN AN AGE OF ANXIETY: Some aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine. An older book, mid 60s, but very influential. Very stimulating. Prof Ehrman got me interested in Late Antiquity with his recent book which I also read. In the last month or so I’ve read Dennis Danielson’s THE FIRST COPERNICAN: Georg Joachim Rheticus and the Rise of the Copernican Revolution, ANCIENT INDIAN WARFARE by Sarva Daman Singh (Singh has a wonderfully musical prose style and the chapter on the use of elephants is fascinating), and A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHINESE FICTION by Lu Hsun (does that count?).
Does that prove anything?
Stephen, you can describe yourself any way you like, but you’re still just a layperson typing stuff into the internet. So am I, so is Robert, but at least he knows some of the languages.
You don’t even agree with Bart, who has gone out of his way to debunk the notion that we can’t know much about Jesus. As he has said, repeatedly, we have a truly exceptional amount of information about him for a person of his era, and certainly a person of his background–much more than we do about far more eminent persons of his time. The information is not unbiased, and guess what? Neither is the information about anyone else from that era. Or really, anyone, full stop. If historians could only depend on unbiased sources, they’d all close up shop.
I am delighted to learn you have read actual history books. Several, in fact.
I studied European history in graduate school for three years. I read little else but history books, stacks of them, recommended by my professors. And had to write papers to demonstrate that I’d understood what I read. The general feedback was that I did. That plus eight bucks will buy me a craft beer at my local. (Depends on the beer.)
But wait–there’s more! Sometimes, if you’d believe it–they recommended NOVELS! ::gasp!:: Dickens, Dostoevsky, Walter Scott–novels can, in fact, illuminate history, because history is about–are you sitting down? well, of course you are–human beings. The study of fiction is, in fact, part of the study of history. Any historian of classical Athens who didn’t know Greek drama would be laughed out of the classroom, for example. As would any historian of Victorian England who didn’t know Trollope.
And nobody who doesn’t understand that is ever going to have the least understanding of history, which is about what people did and thought and believed in the past–and how it relates to who we are now.
It’s one thing to be a pedant. But a pedant without portfolio–or a sense of humor–well.
And all you’ve proven is that this would be a fair description of yourself.
😉
There are things I like about Crossan. Compared to the other historical Jesus scholarship I have read, it seems to me (though I am hardly an expert) that Crossan devotes some good coverage to Roman economic and social history around the time of Jesus, and emphasises what may have been some palpable tensions that arose amidst the ambitions and projects of Herod Antipas, the Roman rulers including Pilate, and the forms of resistance shown by Jewish crowds to Pliate’s and Caligula’s offences in the mid 20’s and early 40’s. This context is quite helpful, I think, for understanding Jesus’ time better. I know Meier criticises Crossan and others for not paying enough attention to the specifically Jewish context here though. There are some specific problems in the Gospels that I find Crossan’s analysis quite insightful on. And, though I’m not on board with Crossan’s comprehensive reconstruction of the last week of Jesus’ life, I tend to suspect that he is generally right in positing that Jesus had to have known, given who he and his followers believed he was and the nature of his ministry, that the Passover mission in Jerusalem would be incredibly provocative and risky. He was, after all, not just a Galilean going to give those southern elites a piece of his mind, but if he was as intelligent as at least some of his debates with the Pharisees and parables make him out to be, he could not have failed to be aware of the danger.
I tend to suspect that he is generally right in positing that Jesus had to have known, given who he and his followers believed he was and the nature of his ministry, that the Passover mission in Jerusalem would be incredibly provocative and risky. He was, after all, not just a Galilean going to give those southern elites a piece of his mind, but if he was as intelligent as at least some of his debates with the Pharisees and parables make him out to be, he could not have failed to be aware of the danger.
From our perspective that seems eminently reasonable. But Jesus didn’t have our perspective. He could have easily been a naïve religious fanatic who thought Yahweh would intervene on his behalf. Why worry about opposition when you have God on your side? Sorry to be johnny one note but we have no access to Jesus’ inner psychology. All we know is what the NT writers, believers all, tell us about Jesus years after the fact.
“Naive religious fanatic” is not the language of a serious scholar, or even a serious dabbler in history. Any area of history.
By present-day standards, that phrase could apply to just about anyone back then. Or were you not paying attention when Bart told us that educated pagans–powerful members of the Roman government–believed that not sacrificing to the gods of the polis could bring about misfortune; even plagues and earthquakes?
What exactly Jesus believed would happen if he provoked both the Jewish and Roman authorities at the most politically volatile time of year in Palestine, is open to debate. What isn’t is that his teacher John had been imprisoned and decapitated for less not long before, and that the gospels show Jesus telling his disciples he’s going to be killed. According to Mark, he was deeply afraid of this, but felt he had no other choice but to accept the consequences of his actions, while telling his disciples to stay out of it. A fanatic who doesn’t ask anyone else to die for or with him?
Why is he a fanatic, and not the people who put him to a painful death for just talking? Why couldn’t they just let him preach to indifferent passersby, who (according to Bart) weren’t much interested in what he had to say? Turning over a few tables is a capital offense? In tolerant pagan Rome?
I think he knew what he was doing, but was mistaken about what would happen after his death.
For the record, was MLK a naive religious fanatic? How about Gandhi?
I don’t think we can know for sure either. I don’t think anyone can be certain about any of it–with history, it’s all a probability game, and probabilities will decrease the less we know about the circumstances. t’s possible Jesus was an apocalyptic fanatic who was not worried about, or even focused on, the outcome. It’s also possible the entire Jerusalem story as we find it is almost all or entirely a falsification crafted by later Christians. But, if even the skeleton of the story is factual, that Jesus, with followers in tow, was going to Jerusalem during the Passover, when liberation sentiments were high and the Roman guard was on alert, to preach about the overturning of the current world order in any fashion, it’s pretty reasonable to believe he was aware it was a serious provocation. That’s an inference about what he would have been aware of under these circumstances, not an inference about his exact motive. One thing Schwietzer and Crossan have in common, though they draw the inference for entirely different reasons, is that they both deduced Jesus could only have made that provocation intentionally. Maybe deducing the motive with their degrees of confidence is more than the skeletal evidence can warrant. But if the skeletal circumstances did exist, then, it’s at least highly unlikely that Jesus was not aware of the provocative nature of what he was doing.
It’s impossible he didn’t know what he did in the Temple courtyard was provocative. Some scholars think that alone would have been enough to get someone crucified. The Temple authorities were the accepted heads of the Jewish religion in Rome (for which many Jews who never came close to being followers of Jesus resented them). An attack on them, in that setting, at Passover, could easily be construed as an attack on Rome.
The question really isn’t whether he was being provocative. The question is what did he think would happen after said provocation. Would the Son of Man come down and make him king? Or did he think he’d be killed, and that sacrifice would be what brought about the Kingdom? Did he think he was the Son of Man, and return from the dead to rule? Or just to oversee the transition? I think he was mainly thinking about how much this was going to hurt. But he clearly believed it served some greater purpose.
In his last book, Bart wrote about Christians who tended the sick during plagues, and took no precautions to keep from getting sick themselves. Because they believed this brought them closer to God, and to Jesus, made them more worthy of the Kingdom to come, however they perceived it. To lay down their lives for strangers who they saw as kindred. As misguided as this may be in hygienic terms, it was still far preferable to people just shunning those who were ill, or driving them away, as was the norm.
If we know for a fact this and many other such things have happened–if we have actual film of Buddhist monks in Vietnam setting themselves on fire to make a point–how hard is it really to believe that Jesus intended to be crucified in order to save the world? And that seeing the world fail to change, he despaired and cried out to God in anguish?
And to a modern day atheist, of course this is fanaticism (I’m no atheist and I’d consider it fanaticism if someone did it today), but this was not happening in modern times, and nobody was an atheist in the modern sense back then (Christians were referred to as atheists for only believing in their own god).
Anachronism is the enemy of history, always. See what people saw back then, or you can’t see a damn thing.
We’re talking about an Empire that was supposedly founded by two guys who got suckled by a she wolf, and whose first emperor saw to it that he’d be declared a god after his death. Other emperors were not so patient.
Jesus never declared himself God. That I’m quite sure of. Bart went to some pains to show how long it took for people to think of him that way.
I don’t think we can know for sure either.
Thank you, anvishiki, you at least took my actual point. But since the impulse to speculation is almost impossible to resist let me explain why I think the sort of calculation you have Jesus making about his fate is unlikely.
The overarching theme of the gospel of Mark is that the traditional triumphalist view of the Jewish Messiah is incorrect. The Messiah, Jesus, must suffer and die at the hands of his enemies. His triumph will come by his being resurrected by God. This seems to be an entirely Christian innovation. It reflects a response to events that had already happened. They thought Jesus was the Messiah. Jesus was destroyed by his enemies. How can both be true?
The early Christians went back to the only source of authority they had, the OT scriptures, and seized upon passages that seemed to portend Jesus’ fate. Specifically in Mark’s case the so-called “Suffering Servant” passages in Isaiah and Psalm 22. But in neither of these cases were these scriptures interpreted Messianically prior to Christianity. This is retrospective reinterpretation. A post-Easter phenomenon.
Do you see where I’m going with this? Pre-Easter the only Messiah concept available to Jesus and his followers was a triumphalist one. And we have hints of this tension between the Pre and Post Easter Messiah concept in the text. In Mark 1:15 Jesus is preaching the imminent advent of the Kingdom. Nothing about his death or his redemptive suffering. And when he sends his disciples out two by two what exactly are they preaching? It can’t be his suffering and redemptive sacrifice because in the narrative he hasn’t told them about that yet. I think this is the clearest glimpse we have of the pre-Easter historical Jesus and what he might have taught. Repent for the Kingdom is coming. Soon.
What did Jesus think his own role was? We don’t know. Jesus’ own thoughts are forever occluded. But whether he thought he was the Messiah or it was some other the fact remains, the triumphalist Messiah concept was all he had available to him. The suffering Messiah is a post-Easter conception and I think Mark having Jesus predict his own fate was part of that post-Easter conception.
Anyway that’s my line of reasoning. It’s all speculation but I do think it makes best use of our sources.
Your point is clear, but the notion that Jesus could only blindly follow the existing models is wrong–innovation occurs in all religions, or religions would never change. Judaism was going through a lot of changes under the pressures of Roman colonization. Jesus was just one result of that. He was not a conventional person, even by the standards of an Apocalyptic preacher. That’s why he and John the Baptist went separate ways (and John wasn’t exactly by-the-book either).
We know a great deal about what Jesus thought. The notion that he cared about nothing except overturning Roman rule in Palestine is clearly wrong. That was a secondary goal, at best. His goal was to change the way the world worked. Where selfish people prosper and good hearted people get the shaft. He couldn’t see any way to accomplish this without God intervening, and he knew that had been predicted for centuries, and never actually happened. He seems to have had visions, and those visions led him to believe he could trigger the transformation–but not without a sacrifice. You don’t get something for nothing. Look for internal logic, and remember that most pagans believed you could cause natural disasters by not sacrificing to minor civic deities.
What’s tricky is to know what he thought would happen when he did something all the sources agree he did–defy both Jewish and Roman authorities, in Jerusalem, at Passover, without any army of zealots to back him up, and almost certainly be executed for that. (The zealots, in the main, were not fans of his, and he probably thought, correctly, that they lacked the numbers and training to beat Rome). There can’t be much doubt he hoped God would intervene, at last. But how, precisely? Even he might not have been sure.
But it seems quite sure that he knew he himself was mortal. He’d seen what happened to his teacher, who was at least somewhat closer to the conventional Jewish idea of a messiah, which is why John remained a much bigger deal to most Jews for some time after he and Jesus were dead. He is reported to have said no one born of woman was greater than John. Even in the gospels, Jesus was born of a woman. (John’s gospel would rather he wasn’t, but tough). Why do you assume he didn’t believe the same thing (or worse) could happen to him? There’s ample evidence he said it would, and his disciples (who were following the more established messianic model) were duly scandalized, even angry, when he broke with the messianic model they believed in, but he (apparently) did not.
The simplest explanation for why Jesus did what he did is that he believed his death was necessary, and he wanted a larger more symbolic stage for his intended martyrdom, which John’s had been a necessary prelude to. Also guesswork, but guesswork that fits the data better.
You call him a religious fanatic. Are religious fanatics universally known for being averse to doing things that will almost certainly get them killed? It seems like the only thing Jesus was averse to was getting other people killed. A most unusual fanatic.
The history of religion is people have a more or less agreed-upon set of beliefs and then somebody comes along and dissents, and the dissent becomes the new consensus (usually with modifications), and it goes from there. Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis.
So it seems a fair assumption Jesus got into trouble by doing the antithesis part.
So, this seems at least one possible crucial point–there are surely others–with respect to the historical Jesus where we make a choice. It seems the choice between historical speculation and textual criticism. If we assume it’s historically likely that Jesus took followers to Jerusalem during the Passover, with all its heightened tensions, to preach some kind of message that would challenge the authorities, but we conclude there is no reliable way to speculate about his probable intensions, then the historically skeletal narrative is all we have and that’s the ballgame. Scholars like Schweitzer and Crossan, not to mention Allison, Sanders, Meier, Casey and whomever else works in the area choose to press on and make definitive guesses about his intentions. But, if we are not warranted in any such guesses, we just go into textual criticism to find out the variety of things that early Christians wanted to believe.
I certainly acknowledge the value and importance of textual criticism. But if the road of the historical investigator into the life of Jesus of Nazareth ends with the skeletal narrative, then the interest I’ve found revived in me from 25 years ago of reading historical Jesus research will just pretty much end at this point. For a figure so pivotal to the course of world history, that’s kind of disappointing. On the other hand, we know historically next to nothing about figures like Confucius, the Buddha and the central figures of scores of religious texts, while other figures like the “Laozi” of Daoism are most likely entirely literary fictions. So, for ancient history, maybe this kind of dead end is not unusual either.
And not just with regard to religious figures, anvikshiki. But we do learn things by trying to solve the puzzles. It isn’t futile. And it isn’t unique to history. Science is one long progression of errors, which lead towards better understanding of the facts as they are discovered and corrected. But the work is never complete. Because our understanding, while endlessly perfectible, is never perfect.
I disagree with Bart about some things, but reading his work has improved my understanding. I see no reason to think otherwise about Crossan. It’s a collaborative effort. No one authority has a monopoly on fact, or fallacy. Even theories that are ultimately proven false can lead to better theories, as Einstein said.
Jesus had a theory, and it was proven false. He may have in fact acknowledged this error with his dying breath, only to have his followers refuse to accept this conclusion–they eventually rewrote him in order to show he had not been wrong on any point, and that was how Christianity took hold, and his ideas were preserved for posterity, albeit not in their original form. (It’s not as if Social Darwinism hasn’t lived on as well, even though Darwin didn’t approve of it–a much more destructive idea than the very worst Christian dogmas).
But it was only the part of his thought about how and when the transformation would come that was falsified. His ideas about how to live, how to treat others, how to understand that people can only be judged by their deeds, have been used to good effect by many since then. In trying to change the world in a moment, he changed it over a long period of time. But it seems to me that religious veneration of him gets in the way of understanding him. As Dorothy Day said, “Don’t make me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” Making someone a god is even worse.
anvikshiki, it is a real problem. I have used the metaphor of blank spaces on our maps. There is just a point beyond which we cannot reach. But I have no problem with informed speculation as long as it’s labeled as such. But there are other approaches. In the last few years I have become interested in what is called Narrative Theology which is just a jumped up name for literary criticism of the NT. What are the authors saying to us by telling us the story they are telling us? It looks at the texts as complete works and not as traditions to look behind. Here’s a link to a classic text in the field ** you do not have permission to see this link ** already in its third edition. Although I work in the IT field my actual educational background is almost exclusively literary and philosophical and this reading has only increased my love of Mark and the unknown genius who composed the work. As far as I’m concerned Mark is the best text in the NT. Matthew and Luke are better craftsmen surely but Mark has all the best ideas. Only John can match him but he’s interesting for completely different reasons.
What I tell people who want to read the gospels is to leave aside at first the question of whether any of it actually happened and to use the power of your imagination to allow it to come alive in your mind. Read it like the story it is. If people find some spiritual value in this exercise fine, but at the very least you will make a connection with a completely different world in the only way we moderns can ever really do it.
Beautifully put, and I agree–Mark is the best of the gospels, the one that rings the truest, goes the deepest, and seeing it as a carefully constructed story with a unifying theme (written in somewhat awkward Greek) helps you understand it better.
However, even most works of pure fiction, written for publishers to sell books, still have a basis in fact. Storytellers never spin a fable out of thin air (the Harry Potter novels stem from J.K. Rowling’s school days; Lord of the Rings was influenced by Tolkien’s experiences in WWI).
Mark was not a professional novelist (the profession did not exist, nor did the literary form), and he was adapting already-existing stories (in both written and oral form) that were unquestionably based in part on real events. An author of fiction will avoid sticking too close to the original story, for fear of a lawsuit. An author of a religious text will hew as close as possible to the known facts (which are not invariably factual) for fear of divine retribution.
There’s a subgenre in genre fiction known as a ‘fix-up’–meaning that an author (usually in science fiction) has written a number of stories for magazines, featuring the same general setting, with some overlapping characters, and writes linking material to make them a unified whole (and get a book contract).
You could view all the gospels as something along those lines, except most of the stories in question would have been written down by others, earlier on (perhaps oral history in some cases), and collected (with added linking material) by the gospel authors. No copyright to worry over.
They would, however, worry about getting it right as much as possible–even while wanting to add to the story. They wouldn’t be satisfied with it, because perpetual dissatisfaction with a story, wanting to improve it, is what makes a good writer (and you agree they were all of them good writers).
So they are pulled in different directions, as were their predecessors–needing to improve the story, but also needing to believe in its veracity, meaning that they have to leave in some things they’ve inherited from earlier sources, things that bother them, that stand out, that present more questions than answers. This is the flaw in the structure where the historian can creep in and find clues as to what really happened.
And of course, they have editors–other Christians. Who have heard versions of most of these stories before, and are going to come down hard on anyone who strays too far from the original sources. I agree with Bart that oral history is not 100% reliable, but it’s where most of our memories of ancient history come from (if you’re reading Thucydides or Herodotus, you are reading things they heard from others whose memories were likewise imperfect). We do have to trust it to some extent. Or we got nothing.
I very much appreciate all of your responses. I have just come back to this interest in the historical Jesus in the past year, even though I specialise academically in entirely different areas (classical Chinese and Indian philosophical traditions). I’m fascinated by the literature but am perhaps being reminded of the seeming futility that led me to stop reading the scholarship almost 30 years ago. (Good grief, time flies.)
I like all that has been said, about the middle ground, about literary and narrative approaches and so forth. And, in the past year, I’ve gained an admiration for Mark that I did not have before. There is, however, a certain asymmetry, at least as far as I can tell, between traditions like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, which base their truth claims so heavily on whether certain events actually happened or not, and traditions like the ones I work in, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Brāhmiṇical traditions, where the historicity of the pivotal figures, since they are not themselves civilizationally or transcendentally salvific figures, is not nearly as important as the content of their thought, teaching, practices. Clearly, it would be perfectly possible, as has been suggested, to treat Judaism, Christianity and Islam the same way in effect, but they become quite different traditions. I, of course, not being a believer, do not have any stake in validating the historical claims of these traditions, and as far as I’m concerned, practitioners and interpreters can do whatever they like with their traditions, as they always have. That’s what makes these traditions living traditions. But, the historical figure of Jesus is such a compelling figure in terms of his effect on world history that the fact he is so historically elusive himself is a bit of a bummer. But, on the other hand, maybe we should be amazed precisely by how much we can know about him, given the doggedness and determination of his relatively small number of first and second century followers, who pulled victory for the jaws of defeat many times in many creative ways. There is probably no single peasant craftsman in ancient history that we can be comfortable knowing nearly as much historically about as this one.
That is an interesting observation, about eastern religions, and I wonder to what extent it holds up? There are Hindu and Buddhist extremists, who have in some instances engaged in violence. Just because the founders of these religions are harder to talk about in historical terms doesn’t mean that they don’t have iconic power, for good and ill.
I think most people in the west who know these religions don’t really know much about most of the people who follow them–they know the westernized versions, for well-off educated people. My sister was a Buddhist for a while. Now she and her husband are Astrologists. Yeah, I didn’t know that was a religion either. But apparently so.
I think most conservative Christians don’t actually want to know about the historical Jesus. That’s not the Jesus they’re interested in. For their purposes, he might as well be The Buddha. It’s not that different.
And you know, a whole lot of people in parts of the world go to see statues of the Buddha, and rub them for good luck, to the point where you can tell which parts they touch, because they’re worn down. The notion that Buddhists are really just mystical atheists (Sm Harris)–crap. There are millions of Buddhists who treat him as a defacto deity, because they never really absorbed the deeper ideas of the discipline–well, the same goes for most Christians. There are different levels and types of belief in all major religions, and probably most minor ones. And it’s all good, as long as we respect everybody’s right to believe as he or she wishes. Not merely accept. RESPECT.
…base their truth claims so heavily on whether certain events actually happened or not…
This is why the Abrahamic religions crashed so heavily into modernity with the repercussions we see all around us today. And this is also why I think in the far future, long after Jesus and Mohammad are just obscure names in a history book, there will still be Buddhists and Hindus.
anvikshika, I’m fascinated to discover that your area of expertise is Chinese and Indian philosophy. Although I am not a believer nevertheless I have always been fascinated by impersonal concepts of god. And that leads east. And given my proclivities I am interested in Charvaka (Lokayata).
Care to recommend a good scholarly translation of the Bhagavad-Gita?
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert