What Jesus meant by “the kingdom of God” has been a source of debate among scholars across the academic and religious spectrum. For the past century or so, many scholars and historians have claimed that Jesus of Nazareth never intended to launch a movement or found a community at all, that he was an “apocalyptic prophet” who believed that the end of the world was coming in his own lifetime.

For these scholars, the “kingdom of God” that Jesus had in mind was a fiery cataclysm when God would kill all of the Romans, and anyone else opposed to Jesus, and establish Jesus as the ruler of all the earth. A recent example of this general approach was the international bestseller Zealot, written by a Muslim professor of creative writing, Reza Aslan, in 2013, which portrayed Jesus as a Jewish nationalist who at least sympathized with those elements of his society arguing for a holy war against Rome.

The idea that Jesus was an “apocalyptic prophet,” first popularized in 1906 by the medical missionary and scholar Albert Schweitzer, is still widely taught in many seminaries and Near Eastern Studies departments to this day. The most famous scholars upholding this increasingly challenged theory are Bart Ehrman and Dale Allison, a Christian professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary. As proof that Jesus believed the world was coming to an end soon, scholars such as Ehrman point to sayings of Jesus such as Mark 8:38: “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come in power.” This means, Ehrman says, that Jesus was a false prophet and clearly wrong about what God intended: the world did not come to an end, after all, and Jesus died on the cross a shocked and disillusioned failure.

But in recent years, even many secular New Testament scholars have rejected the idea that Jesus was an “end times” prophet proclaiming the imminent apocalypse.

Oldest Parts of New Testament Don’t Mention the End of the World at All

For one thing, many of the proof texts often cited, such as the one above, don’t actually mention the end of the world at all. The earlier scholars assumed, rather than proved, that for Jesus the “kingdom of God” and the Final Judgement were one and the same… when in fact they are clearly distinct.

The gospels do show that Jesus, like many Jews, believed in a Final Judgement at the end of time but he seems to have envisioned a lengthy period of time before the Final Judgement when the kingdom of God would “arrive in power.” Scholars such as Ehrman speculate that the gospel writers, such as Luke and John, altered Jesus’ sayings to reflect the fact that the promised apocalypse never arrived. They “de-apocalypticized” Jesus’ message.

Yet in the gospel of Mark, likely the earliest gospel to be written, Jesus insists that before the Final Judgment will occur “the gospel must first be preached to all nations (13: 10, emphasis added). In addition, in that part of the gospels many experts believe may be the very oldest of all – the sayings of Jesus found in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark, which scholars call Q – there is not a single mention of an imminent end of the world. Not one.

And so what was Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God?

According to the records we have, when Jesus spoke about the kingdom he said it was “good news” (Luke 4:43), “like treasure hidden in a field” (Matt 13:44), not bad news. He compared it to a wedding feast, not a cosmic artillery barrage (Matthew 22:2-14). Even more to the point, Jesus said that the kingdom he is proclaiming is already “in the midst of you (Luke 17:21)” and is “not coming in ways that can be observed (Luke 17:20).” He added the kingdom is like a tiny mustard seed that when planted, grows into an enormous tree that shelters all the birds of the air (Luke 13:19), or like yeast that when mixed with flour leavens all the dough (Luke 13:21). It is “like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind (Matt 13:47).”

Thus, in recent years many New Testament scholars – even very skeptical scholars at secular universities – have come to reject the century-old idea that Jesus thought the world was coming to an end in his lifetime. These scholars range from Christian experts such as the Anglican bishop N.T. Wright to more skeptical, secular scholars such as John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, founders of the Jesus Seminar, and Richard Horsley at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Instead, these scholars now believe that Jesus was actually someone far more dangerous than a deluded millenarian prophet.

The post Why Jesus was Not an Apocalyptic Prophet Who Thought the World Would End in His Lifetime first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

It’s a warm, sunny day in northern Israel, and I am sitting on the railing of a fishing boat from Kibbutz Ginosar as we slowly make our way along the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee. Behind us, on the burnt-brown hills that rise up sharply from the lake, we can see the resort town of Tiberias, originally built by the first-century Jewish ruler Herod Antipas, with block after block of new condominium developments climbing like ivy up the ridges behind it.

In front of us, the Sea of Galilee remains the same as I remember it when I lived here decades earlier. In fact, the Kinneret, as it is known in Hebrew, looks like it couldn’t be all that much different from what it was like in the time of Jesus, although the shoreline of the lake has changed and some archaeologists claim the region was once much more lush than it is today.

The biblical village of Bethsaida, for example—the hometown of the apostles Phillip, Andrew, and Peter, now being excavated by Israeli and American archaeologists—was discovered about a mile inland from the Sea of Galilee’s current shoreline. No one realized the shoreline had changed that much.

In fact, the discovery of Bethsaida happened almost by accident. On the other hand, Capernaum, Jesus’ adopted hometown (Matt 9:1), is still found right on the shoreline of the lake. A new church (nicknamed “the spaceship” because of its ultramodern design) has been built directly over a first-century house that archaeologists are confident was the home of the apostle Peter and his mother-in-law, and where Jesus stayed on occasion (Mark 1: 29-30). Archaeologists have unearthed the rough stone insula, or housing blocks, where dozens of extended families lived, as well as a well-preserved synagogue from the fourth or fifth century AD.

I walk to the stern of the boat and talk to the captain. He is a wizened old kibbutznik with skin the color of saddle leather, dressed from head to toe in royal-blue work clothes.

“Mishahu amar lee shay-ain harbay dagim be-kinneret achshav,” I tell the captain in my rusty Hebrew. “Someone told me that there aren’t many fish left in the lake.”

He snorts derisively in traditional Israeli fashion.

“Whoever told you that doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” the captain curtly replies. “As the lake recedes, the fish move into deeper water. The Kinneret is full of fish.” He adds that only two hundred fishing licenses are given out at a time, and that fishing is heavily regulated to maintain the fish population.

The Sea of Galilee is a decent-sized lake, about seven miles across and thirteen miles long, with a maximum depth of about one hundred thirty feet. The air is warm but the winds are remarkably strong, with small whitecaps buffeting the shoreline.

I can’t help but think of the scene in the gospels where the apostles are out on the lake, Jesus falls asleep, and a storm threatens to capsize the boat. At Ginosar, they’ve built a modern museum just to house the ruins of a first-century fishing boat, known as the Jesus Boat, discovered in the lake mud in 1986.

Looking back at the lush shoreline, I marvel at how much of the gospel story took place in this small, still quite rural area. The Mount of the Beatitudes, the traditional site of the Sermon on the Mount, looms directly above us, a small clump of trees on a brown ridge. Below that is Tabgha, the meadow area where local Christians believe Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes. Coming to Ginosar, I passed the new development of Magdala, likely the hometown of Mary Magdalene and where a first-century synagogue was discovered in 2009. Just north of the lake, up the Wadi Kerazeh, lies the biblical town once known as Chorazin, which Jesus denounced for its rejection of his message (Matt.11:21–24).

And across the lake, the Golan Heights loom. In the northern Golan lies Caesarea Philippi and the enormous rock cliff that was once the shrine of the Greek god Pan, where the gospels suggest Jesus proclaimed Simon bar Jonah the “rock” (Aramaic kepha) upon which he would build his new kingdom community.

Discovering the Carpenter of Nazareth

I’ve been fascinated by the person and adventures of Jesus of Nazareth my entire life. I always felt that there must have been a lot more to the story than we read in the gospels, not less. Whatever else Jesus may have been, I recognized a figure of enormous power and influence. When I was young, what I admired about Jesus more than anything else was his raw guts and fundamental decency.

I was particularly struck by the way he stood up to an angry mob that was about to stone a woman to death for adultery. I read this passage over and over, imagining the scene in my mind. I now know that this pericope (passage) is not found in the earliest Greek manuscripts we have of John’s gospel, and some translations, such as the scholarly New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), now include it only in brackets (8:1-11).

Nevertheless, it is so characteristic of Jesus that some experts believe it reflects a genuine event that was perhaps part of the Lukan source material and added to the text of John in the early third century. There are many learned monographs written on just this subject.

When I was twelve, however, I knew nothing of all that. I was just impressed by Jesus staring down the mob with the sheer force of human decency. So much of Jesus’ character, as revealed throughout the New Testament, is encapsulated in this brief passage: his concern for the oppressed and scorned, his willingness to forgive “seventy times seven times (Matt 18:22),” his courage, his readiness to stand up against unjust authority, his defiance of legalism.

This passage also had everything a young boy’s imagination could want: Sex (a woman caught in the “very act” of adultery). Defiance of authority. The threat of violence! Also, it made me curious. This wasn’t some boring minister droning on. Whoever this Jesus was, he was definitely different. What else did he say? What else did he do? I began to pay more attention—and I began to read. I wanted to know more about Jesus’ life and times—how he lived, where he lived.

I turned, first, to a sensationalistic novel by a writer of historical fiction named Frank Yerby. I am not particularly proud of the fact that my introduction to critical biblical studies came through the work of a pulp fiction writer, but God works in mysterious ways, so they say, and that was how he worked in my case. The name of the novel was Judas, My Brother. Published in 1968, when I was only eleven, Judas, My Brother was part of a century-old genre that attempted to reconstruct the events of the New Testament on purely naturalistic terms and to tell the reader what “really” happened. Around the same time, Irving Wallace published the steamy novel The Word, about the discovery of a “lost” Gospel that would ostensibly, as its cover jacket proclaimed, “blow the lid off orthodox Christianity.” It was The Da Vinci Code of its day.

Rather strangely for a novel, Judas, My Brother actually came with footnotes, and went out of its way to ground its many dotty historical assertions on something like scholarship—or what seemed like scholarship to a bright-eyed twelve-year-old. The book relied rather uncritically on the work of the early-twentieth-century Jewish scholar Joseph Klausner, but it introduced me, for the first time, to scholarly books and ancient sources about the life and times of Jesus—including the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, the Mishnah, Emil Schürer, and even, I am amazed to see now, the respected Jewish New Testament scholar Geza Vermes.

My fascination with the character of Jesus, as well as his life and times, continued throughout high school and into college. That is probably why I never really rebelled against Christianity, as is common among teenagers. How could you rebel against someone willing to stand up to a mob that is about to stone a woman to death? Rebelling against Jesus would be like rebelling against Oskar Schindler or Raoul Wallenberg. You might decline to follow their example, to be sure, but who would rebel against what they stood for?

My path to the academic study of the New Testament was thus the opposite of many popular writers today, such as Bart Ehrman and Reza Aslan, who embraced fundamentalist Christianity as teenagers and then lost their faith altogether when they studied the New Testament as adults.

In contrast, I just accepted as a self-evident truth that at least some of the New Testament was legendary, that the tale grew in the telling, and that as the great German New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann said, it was virtually impossible to know what really happened behind the preaching—the kerygma—of the early church.

I was taught in high school that the infancy narratives were theologoumena—legendary stories that conveyed important theological but not literal historical truths. I considered myself a faithful Christian, to be sure, and still do to this day. But the historical-critical study of the Bible that Ehrman and Aslan found so shocking in graduate school I just considered, well, standard operating procedure.

In the Land of Israel

All that changed for me when I moved to Israel to learn Hebrew after college. At that time, anyone could come to Israel and study Hebrew for free, provided you were willing to work a little. In exchange for four hours of work per day, usually on an agricultural settlement known as a kibbutz or moshav, the Jewish Agency would provide professional teachers and you would receive four hours of intensive Hebrew language instruction six days a week for five or six months. I did two Hebrew courses, first level Aleph and then, a year later, level Gimel. You didn’t have to be immigrating to Israel to participate; in fact, you didn’t even have to be Jewish. In my class of about thirty students, however, I would say only about four or five were not making Aliyah (immigrating). The rest were Jewish, moving to Israel permanently, and the ulpan course was the first stage of their new lives.

For the first time in my life, the world of Jesus and the gospels was not something I read about in books, but something I could see with my own eyes and feel etched in stones. The Bible really comes alive when you’re living right where it all happened. As I wandered the stone alleys of Jerusalem on my days off, or explored archaeological ruins in Caesarea or Nazareth, I felt like I was stepping back in time.

Suddenly, these ancient stories, characters, battles, place names, foods, plants, animals, genealogies, and even obscure biblical laws took on real meaning. Israelis are fanatical tourists both at home and abroad, and even the most secular of them frequently go on field trips to visit the various locations mentioned in the Bible. They often begin to explore their country while in the army and just keep it up for most of their lives.

As a result, I spent a lot of time exploring the biblical sites I had once only heard about from the pulpit—Megiddo, Mount Tabor (the traditional site of the Transfiguration), Ein Gedi, Mount Carmel, the Jordan River, Tel Dan, Beit Shean, Mount Hermon. My Israeli friends and I would set out in cars, or occasionally in small buses, and explore the countryside. On my second ulpan, I even shipped a motorcycle to Israel from Los Angeles so I could better explore the Galilean countryside.

I quickly saw how the biblical heritage is woven into daily life in Israel through the myriad practices and traditions of Judaism, but also through the geography and the language. Even something as simple as the Kabbalat Shabbat, the welcoming of the Sabbath, was quite moving. I remember sitting at a big table in the heder ha-ohel, the kibbutz dining hall during my first ulpan, while the text of Genesis 2:1–2 was read by a teenage girl (in fluent Hebrew, naturally): “Vah-yehulu ha-shamaim veh-ha-aretz” (“Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done”).

Even these nonreligious socialist kibbutzniks kept the Sabbath, honoring the ancient commandment handed down through generations for literally thousands of years. This naturally made me curious about the other commandments, all those dry and seemingly bizarre laws.

One of my Hebrew teachers gave me a book about the mitzvot, the 613 commandments the Jewish sages find in the Torah, and I spent hours in a nearby town library reading about them—and about how they are put into practice in modern-day Israel. I learned about the Mishnah and the Talmud, the great encyclopedic commentaries on these laws, and the Shulhan Aruch. I learned that, long before there was the Way of Jesus, there was the way of halacha—the way of Jewish law.

When I returned to the United States, I began to read Jewish writers who were then re-examining the question of who Jesus was and what his relationship was to the various approaches to Judaism that existed in his day. I eagerly followed the twisting turns and amazing discoveries in historical Jesus research that were then unfolding. In the 1990s, as a popular religion writer, I occasionally wrote about these developments for publications such as Christianity Today. I was particularly interested in the work of Jewish scholars writing about Jesus, such as the famous Talmud scholar Jacob Neusner, because during my time in Israel I had become fascinated by the Jewish roots of Christianity.

Eventually, I became so interested in the topic that I decided to pursue a graduate degree in New Testament studies at Fuller Theological Seminary, an interdenominational evangelical seminary in southern California.

For eight years, after I had returned to the United States, I drove thirty miles two or three times a week to attend classes in Koine Greek, exegetical method, Near Eastern studies, systematic theology and other, even more arcane topics. My fellow students and I would struggle our way through large swaths of the New Testament, line by line in Greek, trying to untangle the meaning of these ancient texts.

Of course, all this only makes me a “semi-educated layman,” as my professors used to put it, not a real expert. However, in the past few years I’ve been amazed to discover that leading experts in the field of historical Jesus research have been drawing startling new conclusions that are dramatically at odds with the skeptical theories I was taught in college and then in graduate school – skeptical theories that often dated to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Even more startling to me was the fact that these newer conclusions were often not showing up in the media – even though in many cases they were being proposed by secular experts at top universities.

In the TV documentaries I watched and magazine stories I read, the reporters often seemed oblivious to these new developments and merely repeated the older, hyper-skeptical conclusions from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – for example, that belief in Jesus as a divine being only emerged very late as the Jesus movement spread out into the pagan Greek world.

Yet every month, it seemed, archaeologists in Israel and Biblical scholars at major universities around the world were announcing new discoveries that, rather than undermining the basic portrait of Jesus in the gospels, were actually confirming it.

Jesus of Nazareth may not have been an illiterate peasant who expected the world to come to an end in his own lifetime, as so many contemporary authors claim.

He may actually have been a well-trained Jewish rabbi who had a very specific mission—a mission to save the human race from itself.

And therein lies a very interesting story indeed.

This is an excerpt from the book, Searching for Jesus: New Discoveries in the Quest for Jesus of Nazareth (Thomas Nelson, 2015).

The post Searching for Jesus in the Land of Israel first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

Some Catholic apologists are up in arms about the recent Hollywood film, “Young Messiah,” because, they say, it presents an “heretical” portrayal of the child Jesus as not being fully omniscient at age seven. I haven’t seen the film yet and so I don’t want to comment on the film itself. However, the question of what sort of knowledge Jesus had, and what his own awareness of his mission and status was, are very much of interest.

I like both of the Catholic apologists in question and have learned a lot from both of them. The lay Catholic apologist Dave Armstrong wrote about “Young Messiah” in his Patheos blog and concedes that many Catholic bishops were delighted with the film and found little in it problematic. Dave refers to the Catholic writer Brad Miner, editor of the blog The Catholic Thing, who says he found “Young Messiah” to be “appalling.”

Both of these writers refer to some Catholic (non-magisterial) statements on Jesus’ self-knowledge. Dave quotes, not official statements of ecumenical councils, but Dr. Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma. In that classic text, Dr. Ott asserts that it is theologically certain that “Christ’s human knowledge was free from positive ignorance and from error.(Sent. certa.) Cf. D2184 et seq. (p. 165).”

Does that mean Jesus, the human Jesus, was omniscient at age seven? The Gospel of Luke says that Jesus “increased in wisdom and in stature (2:52),” which seems to imply that Jesus did learn as he grew. This is a very complicated question. IN the past, theologians would distinguish between Jesus’ acquired human knowledge (how to nail a board) and his divine knowledge of his own nature and mission (the beatific vision). They asserted that there is no contradiction between the two.

These are interesting questions because, first, they effect how we view the historical Jesus and, second, because they have an impact on how Christians go about apologetics and evangelization.

As most of my readers know, I think the only honest way to approach these issues, at least at first, is to acknowledge what we don’t know. We don’t know what Jesus knew. All we have are the writings of the New Testament and, secondly, the reflections of later Christians on what these writings tell us.

When facing the issue of miracles in the New Testament, Christians, I think, must be mindful of two dangers when they approach these texts. The first danger is to read more into the texts than the texts actually say.

The life of Jesus has been retold thousands of times over the centuries, in all sorts of media – from stained glass windows in medieval cathedrals to “rock operas” in films. Many times Christians interpret what the texts say in the light of these popular retellings even when a close reading of the text does not justify such an interpretation. This is particularly true of the various miracles attributed to Jesus.

For example, in the story of the feeding of 5,000 people – reported in all four gospels – we Christians naturally assume that Jesus miraculously materialized bread out of thin air, like the replicator on the old Star Trek TV show. That’s certainly possible.  But a close reading reveals that the text doesn’t actually say that. In Mark’s version, Jesus went off with his disciples to a lonely place but throngs of people discovered when he was and came there. Jesus felt sorry for them, because, he said, they were like sheep without a shepherd, so he taught them “many things.” But as the hour grew late, Jesus’ followers took him aside and told him to send the crowds away so they could buy themselves something to eat. Jesus replied, “You give them something to eat!” At that point, his followers protested, sarcastically asking if they should buy two hundred denarii of bread – that is, 200 days’ wages – and give it to the crowds.

As a result, Jesus asked his disciples how many loaves of bread they had. Mark reports that the followers took inventory and told Jesus they had only five loaves of bread and two fish. Now, here is what the Gospel text says next:

“Then he commanded them all to sit down by companies upon the green grass. So they sat down in groups, by hundreds and by fifties. And taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples to set before the people; and he divided the two fish among them all. And they all ate and were satisfied.”

Note: no replicator so far. Jesus simply broke the loaves and fish and had them distributed.
Here comes the miraculous part, though: “And they took up twelve baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish. And those who ate the loaves were five thousand men.”

So, this is what the text actually says: (1) Jesus blessed, broke and distributed the five loaves and two fish; and, afterwards, (2) they collected twelve baskets of leftovers.

Still no replicator, not really. When I was in high school, my Jesuit teachers proposed a simple explanation for this. As Jesus took what little food he and his disciples had and willingly shared it with everyone, others, too, shamefully “discovered” that they actually had some food hidden in baskets and cloaks.

As the food was passed around, people began to add what they had – a half a loaf here, some olives there, maybe a package of dates. When everyone was finished eating, they discovered that the amount of food left over filled twelve baskets.

Was it a miracle that so many people were fed? Certainly. Does it require that we believe Jesus could materialize food out of thin air whenever he wanted to? No, it doesn’t. That isn’t what the text says.

I realize that this approach will strike many educated readers like the absurd rationalizations proposed in the 19th century by the early practitioners of “higher criticism.” The difference is that I am not saying miracles, as we commonly understand them, can’t and never happen. I am only saying that we shouldn’t immediately jump to conclusions that are beyond what the Biblical texts actually say.

This leads me to an even bigger danger that Christians face: the danger of heresy. Many modern Christians appear to be afflicted by the ancient heresy of Docetism – which is the doctrine that Jesus only appeared to be a human being.  Apologists like Dave and Brad are no doubt concerned about the opposite heresy of Arianism, that Jesus was in no sense divine.  But it’s possible, and I believe actually more likely, to fall into the heresy of viewing Jesus as in no sense really human.

In this view, Jesus pretended to be cold and hungry but wasn’t really. He pretended to fear death… but, being God, he didn’t really. In other words, Jesus was really Superman dressed up like Clark Kent. He wasn’t from heaven but from the planet Krypton. Jesus could never really be hungry or fearful because he could magically materialize any food he wanted. He didn’t really fear death because, being divine, he knew already that death would be only a brief instant.

This is a profoundly unbiblical doctrine because, if there is one thing that the New Testament teaches and reveals, it’s that Jesus was a very real man – like us in all things but sin, as the Catechisms put it. Yet we humans do get hungry. We do fear death. We can be killed. Jesus did fear death – and he most definitely was killed.

My point is simple: if Jesus did perform miracles as we commonly understand them – supernatural violations of the laws of nature – they were rare, highly unusual occurrences even for him. Out of the thirty-seven miracles ascribed to Jesus in the New Testament, fully twenty-five, or 67%, were miracles of healing.  Only twelve were non-healing miracles, and of these twelve at least six were likely “doublets” — the same event reported twice.  That leaves only six non-healing miracles.

Even more properly, Jesus himself likely did not “do” them because he, if he had, then he wouldn’t have been really human – because human beings can’t walk on water or raise people back to life. Of course, I realize that many contemporary Bible scholars don’t believe Jesus worked any miracles in the strong sense, that these stories are legends (theologoumena) not meant to be taken literally.

But that is not what I am saying. Since I wasn’t there, I can’t really say what “really happened.” All I can say with certitude is what the texts say… and the texts say that these supernatural events were rare. Miracles in the strong sense are violations of the laws of nature that only an all-powerful God could be capable of – and indeed, that is precisely what the New Testament (mostly) says. Usually whenever a “big” miracle happens – like, say, Jesus raising Lazarus back to life – Jesus doesn’t perform the miracle. Instead, he prays and asks God to – and God answers his prayer.

For the first thousand years of Christianity, of course, the greatest minds in Christendom pondered what it could possibly mean to say Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. How would that work exactly? If Jesus was fully divine in the sense of omnipotent divine power, then he couldn’t be really human. And of course, the New Testament itself insists that Jesus didn’t have super powers: in Philippians 2, St. Paul says that “though [Jesus] was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.” All sorts of complicated theologies have been developed to try to explain how this divine-human matrix could be explained or at least imagined. Theologians speak of the “two natures” in Christ, one human and one divine, but united in one person (homoousios).

The upshot for scripture scholars trying to make sense of the biblical texts was that Jesus’ mind and will appeared to have been united with God – he willed what God willed – without himself having omnipotent physical and mental powers.

Again, if he did have omnipotent divine power – the power to walk on water at will, the power to materialize anything he wished – then I don’t see how he could have been really human.  Human beings can’t walk on water, at least not without help.  Thus, the way I think about this is that Jesus, as God’s son, knew what God wanted but was as limited as any real man. He “increased in wisdom and in stature,” as Luke put it (2:52). If this were not true – if Jesus had, for example, omniscient divine knowledge of the future – then he wouldn’t have feared death.

Some theologians say that Jesus was omniscient, that he feared only the pain of crucifixion, but that doesn’t seem to fit what the biblical texts say. According to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus cried out on the Cross, as any real man might have, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? (15:34)” Yet if Jesus possessed total divine omniscience, he would have known that God had not abandoned him, that within moments he would be glorified and “all power on heaven and earth” would be given to him.

I realize that these are difficult topics that are hotly debated in Christian circles. Many Christians really do think of Jesus as a kind of Jewish Superman who only pretended to be like an ordinary man. He could really have waved his hand and made anything he wanted to happen. I think this is Docetism, personally, but it’s a fascinating topic to debate.

I only bring this issue up so non-Christian readers and modern skeptics can understand how Christians wrestle with these issues – and with the New Testament texts. We certainly shouldn’t read more miraculousness into the miracle stories than is actually in them – and should accept as at least possible natural explanations whenever they seem plausible. For example, I have no problem seeing the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand as involving Jesus’ ability to soften people’s hearts more than a Star Trek-like replicator, magically making loaves appear out of thin air. It’s possible that this is actually what happened – I wasn’t there and anything is possible – but that isn’t strictly what the texts actually say.

The post “Young Messiah” and the Self-Consciousness of Jesus first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

The entrance to the Mary of Nazareth International Center in central Nazareth doesn’t look like much. It’s just a simple doorway off narrow Casa Nova Street, a few hundred yards from the Basilica of the Annunciation.

Yet inside this recently built Catholic evangelism center lies an amazing discovery that has sent shockwaves through the world of Biblical archaeology: the remains of a first-century stone house reliably dated to the early Roman period in Palestine.

The Nazareth excavations are the first concrete archaeological proof that Nazareth was settled in the time of Jesus – and, judging from the limestone cups found at the site, almost certainly by observant Jews.

This shoots down one of the central arguments used by those who claim that Jesus never existed and that the Gospels are entirely fiction: that we know Jesus of Nazareth never existed because there never was a village called Nazareth.

Incredibly, the archaeological excavations at Nazareth are merely one among dozens of startling recent discoveries that are forcing many secular, Jewish and agnostic scholars, at top universities all over the world, to re-think old skeptical ideas about who Jesus was and what he was trying to achieve.

Many people in the pews, however, haven’t heard about these amazing, very recent discoveries.

Experts in the media are still repeating the same century-old, increasingly discredited theories that date to the late 19th and early 20th century – for example, that Jesus was an “apocalyptic prophet” who believed the world was coming to an end in his lifetime or that he was a revolutionary “zealot” who plotted a violent overthrow of Roman forces.

Nevertheless, recent dramatic archaeological discoveries and developments in New Testament studies are challenging these older, now obsolete theories:

Discovery No. 1: The people and places mentioned in the Gospels really existed.

Like most figures of ancient history, there is little archaeological evidence for many New Testament figures, including Jesus. However, in just the past few years archaeologists have uncovered some astonishing finds – including the burial box (ossuary) of the high priest Caiaphas and, perhaps, that of James the Just, the brother, step-brother or close relative of Jesus.

Experts widely believe the Caiaphas ossuary is genuine. While there is fierce debate about the James ossuary, it’s possible that it too is authentic. Dated to the first century, it has inscribed on its side the words in Aramaic, Ya’akov bar-Yosef akhui diYeshua (James son of Joseph, brother of Jesus).

Some archaeologists believe that the ossuary and the words “James, Son of Joseph” inscribed on it are authentic, dating back to the first century, but that the words “brother of Jesus” were added later by a master forger.

If all of it is genuine, however, as some evangelical scholars such as Ben Witherington III argue, then it represents the first ever archaeological confirmation of Jesus.

Along with these finds are numerous recent archaeological discoveries of places mentioned in the Gospels – such as the dramatic 2009 discovery of a large and remarkably ornate first-century synagogue at Magdala, on the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus almost certainly preached.

Discovery No. 2: Jesus’ followers didn’t make up the idea of a messiah who would suffer and die.

For more than a century, many academic Bible scholars have claimed that the Jews in Jesus’ time had no concept whatsoever of a suffering messiah, let alone a messiah who would actually die.

Therefore, they suspected the whole idea was invented by the early Christian community and put into the mouth of Jesus decades later, by the evangelists. The Jews in Jesus’ day expected the messiah to be a military leader and king, the argument goes, so obviously a suffering messiah is just a Christian apologetic device created after the fact to explain away the scandal of the cross.

But in 2008, Israeli archaeologists announced the discovery of a first-century stone tablet, written in ancient Hebrew, that mentioned the angel Gabriel and a messianic figure who would suffer, die and perhaps rise again in three days.

Known as the Gabriel Revelation, this was dramatic confirmation of other textual discoveries that suggested many Jews in the first century were expecting a suffering and dying messiah.

This is important because it shows that this theme – that of a suffering messiah – wasn’t just “made up” by the early Christian community as a way to explain the scandal of the cross, as literally generations of scholars have claimed for over a hundred years.

Discovery No. 3: Jesus’ earliest followers – Jewish followers – came to see him as in some way divine very early, perhaps within a year or two of the crucifixion.

Through a variety of methods, including identifying Aramaic phrases embedded in the Greek texts of the New Testament, scholars have identified the very earliest parts of the New Testament writings.

Much to their shock, however, it looks as though it was the Jewish followers of Jesus who proclaimed him “son of God” and “standing at the right hand of God,” not the pagan Gentile followers who joined the movement in the decades after the crucifixion.

This flies in the face of a century of scholarship that believed the opposite, that claims to divinity only arose as the Jesus movement fanned out into the pagan Greek. Even skeptics such as New Testament scholar and bestselling author Bart Ehrman now concede that belief in Jesus’s divinity arose very, very early.

In addition, some Jewish scholars now argue that the idea of a divine-human savior was a thoroughly Jewish concept… rooted in the Biblical prophets. These scholars point to the biblical book of Daniel, as well as intertestamental Jewish writings known as apocalypses, as evidence that some Jews in Jesus’ day could expect “one like a Son of Man,” as Dan. 7:13–14 puts it, coming on the clouds of heaven.

It was only later, as Judaism reacted to the rise of Christianity, that such ideas became forbidden among Jews.

Discovery No. 4: The Gospels are almost certainly based on eyewitness testimony – and, at least partially, written sources.

The whole idea of a “creative” and exclusively oral transmission of traditions about Jesus – as opposed to written sources based on eyewitness accounts – is now questioned by many top secular scholars.

The skeptical New Testament scholars of the early 20th century based their much of their theory of oral transmission on German folk tales that evolve over centuries, such as the Brothers Grimm. The idea was that the “tale grew in the telling,” like the “telephone game.”

“The stories were being told by word of mouth, year after year, decade after decade, among lots of people in different parts of the world, in different languages, and there was no way to control what one person said to the next about Jesus’ words and deeds,” explains skeptic Bart Ehrman in his 2014 book, “How Jesus Became God.”

The implication is often that the gospels are more myth than history, and certainly not reliable records of what actually occurred.

But increasingly, leading New Testament scholars reject this unproven theory altogether. Some argue that the Gospels, including the Gospel of John, show numerous signs of first-hand observations and written sources — and that those sources could well have been written while Jesus was living and preaching in Galilee.

The British New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham, author of the 2006 book “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses,” has forced a new debate on the existence of eyewitness testimony in the Gospels.

In addition, many Jewish scholars now believe the Gospels preserve accurate traditions about Jesus from people who saw and heard Jesus first-hand.

As the Israeli scholar David Flusser put it, who believes the Gospels were based on written sources, the synoptic gospels “preserve a picture of Jesus that is more reliable than is generally acknowledged.”

Discovery No. 5: The Gospel of Mark, widely considered to be the first gospel written, may have been penned only five or 10 years after the crucifixion, not 40 years later as scholars have thought for over a century.

Many (but not all) modern scholars believe that the gospel of Mark was likely written first, probably in Rome in the late 60s or early 70s AD, followed by Luke in the mid-80s, Matthew in the 80s, and then by John sometime after AD 90.

The reason is due to passages in the gospels where Jesus seems to be predicting the fall of Jerusalem (such as Mark 13:2, where Jesus refers to the temple and says, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another”).

The idea is that the writers of the gospels, living after the Jewish War began in AD 66, simply put words in Jesus’ mouth predicting the coming catastrophe—words that he didn’t actually say. Scholars call this “prophecy after the fact.”

But recently James Crossley, a secular British New Testament scholar at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, has challenged this idea.

In a fascinating 2004 book, “The Date of Mark’s Gospel,” Crossley defies more than a century of New Testament scholarship to argue that the gospel of Mark, far from being written in the late AD 60s or even early 70s as older scholars have long believed, could well have been written as early as the mid 30s—perhaps just five to ten years after Jesus was crucified.

He insists that the “desolating sacrilege” mentioned in Mark 13 that would be “set up” could very likely refer to the statue of the Emperor Caligula that the mad emperor attempted to have erected in the Jerusalem temple in AD 39-40.

If he’s right, and Mark was written in the late AD 30s, that means that some of the earliest source material for the gospels was put to paper within five to ten years after Jesus’ crucifixion—and not thirty, forty, or sixty years, as previous scholars believed.

This strengthens the argument, therefore, that the gospels are likely based on eyewitness testimony, even if that testimony was often rearranged according to the editorial decisions of the different evangelists.

Discovery No. 6: Jesus was not an “illiterate peasant” but likely well trained in Jewish law and scripture.

In the past few decades, Jewish scholars have taken a closer look at the debates in the Gospels between Jesus and the Pharisees.

For much of the 20th century, skeptical New Testament scholars claimed that these debates were not historical – that the reflected the conflicts the early church was having with Jewish authorities in the 80s and 90s and not what Jesus said and did in the 20s.

But many Jewish experts now deny this. In addition, some Jewish scholars argue that the Gospels prove that Jesus had a thorough command of Jewish legal reasoning.

According to Orthodox Rabbi Schmuley Boteach, when Jesus is criticized for healing a crippled man on the Sabbath (John 5:1-47), Jesus quotes a legal precedent preserved in the Talmud to prove that his action is justified.

Boteach explains that the Torah commands that a male child be circumcised on the eighth day after birth, but if that day happens to fall on the Sabbath, the circumcision is still allowed even though it is “drawing blood.”

The Talmud draws from this exception the notion that medical procedures can and must be done on the Sabbath. According to Tractate Yoma, “if circumcision, which concerns one of the 248 members of the body, overrides the Sabbath, shall not a man’s whole body override the Sabbath?”

Boteach then points to the nearly identical reasoning used by Jesus for his justification of healing a crippled man on the Sabbath, recorded by John: “Now if a boy can be circumcised on the Sabbath so that the Law of Moses may not be broken,” Jesus says, “why are you angry with me for healing a man’s whole body on the Sabbath? (7:23 NIV).

This suggests that Jesus was not an “illiterate peasant”—as many contemporary authors claim—but a highly trained rabbi fully conversant with the complex legal and religious debates in his day.

Conclusion

In the end, there has been a veritable revolution in New Testament scholarship over the last 10 or 20 years yet few experts in the media seem to know about it.

The foundational assumptions that guided a century’s worth of skepticism towards the New Testament have been under relentless assault – and often by secular, Jewish and agnostic scholars at top universities around the world.

The new discoveries discussed above are causing some experts to wonder if the basic portrait of Jesus in the gospels is far more plausible than the elaborate reconstructions created by academic skeptics over the past 150 years.

In other words, the New Testament may be truer than scholars once thought… and Jesus of Nazareth, rather than being smaller than the gospels portray him, may actually be much bigger… and far more interesting.

The article was originally published on TheBlaze.com

If you’d like a free sample chapter of “Searching for Jesus,” fill in the form below:

The post 6 Shocking New Discoveries About Jesus of Nazareth first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

The post Fox News Interview with Lauren Green: Debate over Jesus Being a ‘Revolutionary Prophet’ first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

In just three years or less, the mysterious figure we now know (or think we know) as Jesus of Nazareth somehow changed the face of the world.

His real name was almost certainly Yeshu’a bar Yosef. From all the available evidence, he was a semi-skilled Jewish journeyman from a tiny village in northern Palestine who became, very briefly, an itinerant prophet, miracle worker and social revolutionary, one who challenged the religious and social institutions of his day so radically that he was put to death for it.

Of course, for two billion people on the planet today, he was also something much more: The Word of God… the wisdom and mercy and justice of God … incarnate.

What is undeniable to the honest historian is that this one man’s life, teaching and symbolic acts eventually created a social and cultural revolution that reverberated far beyond Palestine and altered almost every institution on earth — and is still felt today.

In short, Jesus changed everything: politics, art, science, law, the rules of warfare, philosophy, sexual life, the family. Even Napoleon was amazed: “Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and myself founded empires; but upon what foundation did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded an empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him.”

But the question is: how?

Beyond the piety of believers and the doubts of modern skeptics lies an enduring mystery:

What did Jesus do and say, in as little as one year and a maximum of three years, that could possibly have had such an impact?

How could his rag tag band of illiterate fishermen, reformed prostitutes and tax collectors create the philosophical and social revolution that we have described in this book – one that made possible such diverse realities as experimental science, the abolition of slavery, the recognition of universal human rights, even authentic feminism?

In short: How do we explain the fact of Christianity?

****

One answer, given by scholars from a wide variety of perspectives – including that of so-called liberation theology – is that Jesus’ movement was neither small nor “rag tag.”

Instead, it was just as portions of the New Testament describe it as being, a massive popular outpouring of messianic enthusiasm, especially among the poor and marginalized, that alarmed the Jewish religious leaders of the time and made Roman military officials very nervous.

Many modern people think of Jesus as something like the befuddled hippy Christ in the 1970 play and 1973 film Godspell, teaching his message of peace and love to small groups of dazed flower children.

But what if Jesus was actually more like the figure depicted in the film and stage play Jesus Christ Superstar: A fiery, charismatic, rugged populist who drew crowds by the thousands, even tens of thousands — and whose caustic, subversive, often very funny parables about the “reign of God” and the arrogant elites who try to stand in its way electrified an entire country already seething with rebellion?

What if Jesus wasn’t the meek and mild pacifist of Christian iconography but actually something far more dangerous – a genuinely courageous iconoclast who had the sheer guts to stare down a crowd about to stone a woman to death and who stormed right into the holiest place on earth (a place with every bit of polished awe and grandeur as St. Peter’s in Rome) and began attacking the sales people and moneychangers with a whip?

Such a man could very well have put the fear of God (quite literally) into almost everyone in power — the moneyed aristocracy who controlled the Jerusalem Temple (the Sadduccees); the pious frauds who lay unjust burdens upon people’s shoulders; certainly the small band of Roman military officials charged with keeping the peace.

The truth that both religious believers and modern skeptics have forgotten is this: Jesus proclaimed his message of divine reconciliation and universal peace in a time of ferocious violence and red-hot religious hatred. It was a time eerily like our own: an age of empire and brutal terrorism, of ethnic hatred and spiritual yearning.

The reign of God that Jesus inaugurated and proclaimed with his own blood was born in fire, in the social tumult preceding of one of the most violent civil and religious wars in the history of mankind. It was a war that would turn out to be a thousand times more deadly than the current Israeli-Palestinian stand-off and at least two to four times more deadly than the “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo in the late 1990s. Historians estimate that fully forty percent of the Jewish population in Judea may have been wiped out in the Jewish War of 66-7- A.D., when the Roman army besieged Jerusalem, tore the famous Temple down and slaughtered hundreds of thousands.

Jesus and the Zealots

One of the few attempts to look seriously at the military context out of which the Jesus Movement arose is S.G.F. Brandon’s classic, albeit controversial work, Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967).

Brandon was a professor of comparative religion at the University of Manchester from 1951 until his death and not a professional biblical scholar as such; nevertheless, his work was enormously influential. He was a spokesman for the traditional view that saw the Zealots as an organized movement, founded perhaps by the Jewish robber-baron Hezekiah but hearkening back to the Maccabees, that existed throughout the New Testament period and had many important ties to, and affinities and minor disagreements with, the movement inaugurated by Jesus.

Brandon’s work is 384 pages of dense, detailed, extensively quoted arguments that, in essence, make the claim that the evangelists radically misrepresented who Jesus was and what he was all about. For Brandon, Jesus was a radical Jewish nationalist fully in harmony with the primary goals and attitudes of the Zealots… including with the use of violence to achieve his means. Unlike the Zealots, however, the object of Jesus’s reformist zeal was not the Roman occupiers but rather the corrupt sarcedotal aristocracy in Jerusalem which controlled the Temple. Jesus, like the Zealots, sought to establish the Reign of God on earth… but Jesus believed the way to do that was through a radical reform of Jewish religion, particularly in the Temple.

For Brandon, Jesus’s brazenly messianic and triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday was immediately followed, if not on the very day, by a virtual assault on the Temple precincts… not merely by himself alone, but by thousands of his followers, all clamoring that he be made King of Israel. This violent, albeit primarily religious mission may have occurred simultaneous with a far more violent uprising by Zealot forces against the Romans or Roman sympathizers, and two of these men, possibly led by Barabbas, were executed side by side with Jesus on Calvary.

For Brandon, in other words, the Gospels are a complete white-wash of what really happened… an attempt to make Jesus and his movement palatable to a Roman world after the Jewish Revolt of A.D. 66-70 had been crushed. His critical reading of Mark points out a number of apparent inconsistencies in the narrative that are not, for Brandon, easily reconciled. For one thing, Mark portrays Jesus as a innocent victim of scheming on the part of Jewish leaders, falsely accused of sedition and executed by the Romans… yet the evangelist also admits that Jesus’s popularity with the crowds was so great that Jewish leaders “feared to arrest him publicly” and had to send an armed party to do so, and at night. The fears of the Jewish leaders were apparently somewhat justified, Brandon says, because their attempts to arrest Jesus were met, at first, by armed resistance (when one of the “bystanders” cut off the ear of the High Priest’s servant).

Yet there are important differences between the Zealots, as Brandon describes them, and Jesus and his followers. For one thing, the Zealots, like the Pharisees, were shomrei ha-mitzvot, Torah rigorists. Josephus describes them as being unwilling to even touch a coin that bears the image of a pagan king. Indeed, the paying of tribute to a foreign king was a casus belli of the entire Zealot movement. That is the politically-charged context, then, of the question posed to Jesus about paying tribute: Is it lawful, then, to pay the census tax to Caesar? Jesus’s brilliant answer, “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God,” upholds the principle of divine sovereignty without conceding the Zealot ideal of tax resistance. For Brandon, however, this authentic saying of Jesus was meant to say, and was taken by his audience to mean, that pious Jews should not pay the Roman tribute: In other words, that Jesus agreed with the Zealots! Indeed, says Brandon, had Jesus taught anything other than that – given the universal hatred of the Romans by ordinary Jews – he could not have had any support whatsoever among the people, and the historical evidence indicates that he had a substantial following.

However, as much as Brandon wishes to make Jesus and James out to be conservative, traditional Jews, and thus in sympathy with the Zealot cause – as opposed to Paul, the Gentile-loving innovator – it is difficult to build that case from what the Synoptic Gospels say about Jesus’s many run-ins with the Pharisees. Throughout the Synoptics, Jesus is shown to be at odds with conservative Jewish (Pharisaical and Zealot) ideas of what it means to serve God. Jesus’s somewhat defiant attitude towards Sabbath-keeping… his willingness to openly challenge accepted Jewish practice in the Temple… his table fellowship with tax-collectors (considered nothing less than collaborators with the hated Romans)… his own willingness to speak with Roman officials and even Samaritan women… his sayings about ritual hand-washing and unclean food… all of these things in the Gospels present a Jesus who would not have been in sympathy with the violent xenophobia of the Zealots.

The Quest for the Historical Jesus

Brandon is typical of much of the scholarly work done on Jesus over the past two centuries. This work often raises fascinating, tantalizing questions that religious people often never thought of before – and therefore is quite valuable – but it often operates out of one overriding, often unquestioned assumption: that the “real” Jesus was something quite other than what his followers have always said that he was or as he is depicted as being in the New Testament.

This modern quest for the “real” or the “historical” Jesus began with a German Deist named Hermann Samuel Reimarus (c. 1694-1798), wound its way through works by the German theologian David Strauss (1808-1874), the French philosopher Ernest Renan (1823-1892) and the Alsatian physician and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), and then hit a dead-end with the radical historical skepticism of the Lutheran New Testament scholars Martin Dibelius (1883-1947) and Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976).

In recent decades, however, there have been a second and then a third “quest” to identify who the “real” Jesus was – with the portraits as varied as the scholars who fashioned them. Recent efforts have sought, often successfully, to more fully recover the “Jewishness” of Jesus and his first followers. These respected, often quite “conservative” historical Jesus scholars include Joachim Jeremias (1900-1979); the Jewish scholars Hyam Maccoby (1924-2004) , Jacob Neusner (1934-), and Geza Vermes; E.P. Sanders; the Catholic priests Raymond Brown and John P. Meier; the Anglican bishop N.T. Wright; and the evangelical scholar Ben Witherington III.

However, the most notorious and controversial of “historical Jesus” scholars are those associated with what was called the Jesus Seminar – an ad hoc committee of liberal intellectuals and writers, organized under the auspices of the Westar Institute in 1985, by Robert Funk and the former Irish priest and bestselling author John Dominic Crossan. The seminar included dozens of liberal scholars and just ordinary liberals, including the Dutch film maker Paul Verhoeven (who has a Ph.D. in mathematics but is best known for directing such epic religious films as “RoboCop, “Total Recall,” “Basic Instinct,” and, of course, “Showgirls”), Episcopal bishop John Shelby Strong, and ex-nun and author Karen Armstrong.

The Jesus Seminar was best known for its practice of meeting in groups and voting, according to a pre-determined system of colored beads, on which words and deeds of Jesus were “authentic” and what were likely invented by the early Church. Unfortunately, the Seminar participants found most of the New Testament to be fall into the latter category. They voted only 11% of the words of Jesus in Mark to be authentic, 17% in Matthew, 20% in Luke and pretty much none in the Gospel of John. Jesus’s deeds didn’t fare much better: The seminar participants found that only 16% of 176 distinct “acts” recorded in 387 “reports” to be authentic or probably authentic (meaning they actually occurred) . The Jesus Seminar liberals were pretty sure that there was a Jesus from Galilee who was born of Mary with the “assistance” of Joseph, that he was baptized by and was a disciple of John the Baptist, that he cured sick people, that he was crucified by the Romans , that his body decayed as all corpses do, and that the resurrection didn’t literally happen. Beyond that, they can’t say much.

Although the Jesus Seminar participants tried to present themselves as cutting-edge scholars in the “mainstream” of New Testament research, they immediately had many critics from within the scholarly community. One common criticism was that very few members of the Seminar were actually professional Bible scholars; the majority were, instead, public intellectuals and educated persons but without any formal training in Biblical studies. One critic, the Catholic New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson of Emory University in Atlanta, even went so far as to call the Seminar a “self-indulgent charade.” That’s because the Seminar’s conclusions were pre-determined before a single vote was cast by the selection of the seminar participants and the methodology they used to evaluate the Biblical evidence. Whatever else they may have been, co-founders Funk and Crossan were certainly not what you would call an orthodox believers. “The plot early Christians invented for a divine redeemer figure is as archaic as the mythology in which it is framed,” Funk explained on the Jesus Seminar website. “A Jesus who drops down out of heaven, performs some magical act that frees human beings from the power of sin, rises from the dead, and returns to heaven is simply no longer credible. The notion that he will return at the end of time and sit in cosmic judgment is equally incredible. We must find a new plot for a more credible Jesus.”

Other critics pointed out that at least some of the criteria that the Jesus Seminar used to judge whether the New Testament passage was “authentic” or not were logically consistent. These criteria included…

The criterion of dissimilarity: This is the notion, common outside of the Seminar, that if a saying or act of Jesus is unlike something the early Church would say or do… it is probably authentic. But this is a crazy notion, when you think about it: It requires you to believe that Jesus’ early followers had nothing in common with the Teacher whose memory and message they were risking their lives to preach to the entire world.

The criterion of embarrassment: As noted earlier in this book, this is the belief that if something is inherently embarrassing, such as the apostles being a bit cowardly or stupid, it is probably authentic because people don’t usually make up things that make them look bad.

The criterion of self-reference: This is the assumption that Jesus would never refer to himself in grandiose terms or to his having an important mission. This is why the Seminar rejects most of the sayings in the Gospel of John, such as “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:1).

The criterion of diverse settings. As we’ll discuss below, the synoptic gospels often quote the same saying of Jesus but have it in varying contexts. As a result, the Seminar participants believed most of the “framing” material around a saying was made up by the evangelists.

The criterion of community needs. If a saying of Jesus has anything to do with the early Christian community, such as instructions for missionaries or references to Peter as “the rock” upon which the church is built, it is almost certainly inauthentic.

The criterion of theological agendas: The Seminar participants believed that any saying that is in harmony with the identified theological “agenda” of a given evangelist is almost certainly inauthentic. For example, the prophecy of the sheep and the goats was voted almost certain inauthentic because it allegedly fits in with Matthew’s intent to distinguish between true and false followers of Christ.

Of course, some of these criteria are used by mainstream biblical scholars, although in different ways. As we will see below, it is widely accepted by virtually all reputable New Testament scholars that the evangelists, in writing their own gospels, arranged their material and selected from their sources those parts of the story that emphasized the points they, the evangelists, were trying to make. But mainstream scholars don’t draw from this commonsense observation the radical skepticism exhibited by the Jesus seminar. For example, the fact that a given evangelist includes a saying of Jesus that makes one of the evangelist’s key theological points, or puts it into a particular place in his narrative, doesn’t necessarily mean that he made it up. We know, because we can see for ourselves in the Gospel texts, that one evangelist will use a saying of Jesus and another one won’t. All this means is that the evangelists, like modern journalists choosing which quotations to use in an article, selected those sayings of Jesus, and arranged them in a particular way, to support the points they were trying to make – and not that they made them up.

Contemporary Biblical Scholarship

It goes without saying that the Jesus Seminar at least engaged Biblical scholarship. Some of its leaders were real scholars trained in some of the best universities in the world. To that degree, it’s possible to debate the Jesus Seminar’s conclusions.

But there is a whole other “school” of New Testament bashing that is beyond the reach of reason or of critical comment. That would include those who, like Christopher Hitchens, still insist that Jesus Christ was likely a mythical figure who never even existed in the first place . It also includes the millions of people who believe The Da Vinci Code was based on real events – that Jesus survived the crucifixion, married Mary Magdalene (the real “holy grail”) and fathered descendents who became the kings and queens of France. In a similar way, most faithful Christians and Jews don’t really have ready answers for those who insist that the Old Testament was based on aliens docking the Mother Ship on Mt. Sinai (after all, Exodus describes a mountain of “fire and smoke”) – a view popularized by a series of books (e.g., Chariots of the Gods) in the 1960s by Swiss author Erich von Däniken.

The truth is, recent attacks on the New Testament by atheist crusaders, such as Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens, are closer to the Chariots of the Gods or Da Vinci Code school of Biblical scholarship than to that of the Jesus Seminar.

Christopher Hitchens, for example, in Why God is Not Great, titles his chapter on Jesus “The ‘New’ Testament Exceeds the Evil of the ‘Old’ One.” He asserts that the Gospels’ “multiple authors – none of whom published anything until many decades after the Crucifixion – cannot agree on anything of importance.” He finds any differences at all in the Gospels to be ipso facto proof that they are all complete frauds and contain nothing worth thinking about.

“They flatly contradict each other on the ‘Flight into Egypt,’ Matthew saying that Joseph was ‘warned in a dream’ to make an immediate escape and Luke saying that all three stayed in Bethlehem until Mary’s ‘purification according to the laws of Moses,’ which would make it forty days, and then went back to Nazareth via Jerusalem,” he says. Elsewhere, Hitchens explains that the “contradictions and illiteracies of the New Testament have filled up many books by eminent scholars, and have never been explained by any Christian authority except in the feeblest terms of ‘metaphor’ and ‘a Christ of faith.’”

But the reality is that the discrepancies and “inconsistences” in the four canonical Gospels, far from being an argument against their authenticity, are actually arguments for their genuine testimony. In the earliest days of the Church, the Christian community had the opportunity to publish a harmonized “one volume” account of Jesus’ life and teaching with all the inconsistencies and disagreements of fact ironed out. In fact, many of these harmonizations were actually written and were quite popular. The most famous and influential was called The Diatessaron, probably written in Syriac around A.D. 175 by an Assyrian (Syriac) Christian named Tatian and used in the Syriac Church for two centuries.

But when it came time for the Christian Church to officially approve those books that most accurately portray the Christian faith as it has been handed down, from teacher to disciple, over the generations, the early Christian leaders deliberately chose the four canonical Gospels (with all their “inconsistencies”) rather than a neatly harmonized account. They did so because they believed the truth of who Jesus was and what he taught and did was better served by these varying accounts, with all their discrepancies, than by any attempt to try to fit them all together in a neat package.

As Brandon and others have argued, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people heard Jesus teach and saw his deeds. Decades after his death, there were undoubtedly thousands of “hearers of the Lord” still living. They naturally traded stories about things Jesus had done and said. Eventually, these sayings of Jesus were translated from their original Aramaic into koine Greek and gathered together into a collection or collections which modern scholars call “Q” (from the German word Quelle for source). Later, when the evangelists began their task of writing about Jesus’ life and teaching, they almost certainly had access to this basic “sayings source” as well as to other, independent sources and to the various eye-witness testimonies of apostles and disciples still alive. The evangelist Luke says this explicitly:

“Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the events that have been fulfilled among us,” he says in the opening words of the Gospel – and note the words “many” and “compile” – “just as those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning and ministers of the word have handed them down to us, I, too, have decided, after investigating everything accurately anew, to write it down in an orderly sequence for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may realize the certainty of the teachings that you have received” (Like 1:1-4)

In other words: Luke, at least, claims that he investigated “everything accurately anew” and drew upon the testimony of “those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning.”

Most (but not all) modern scholars believe that the Gospel of Mark was likely written first, in Rome in the late 60s A.D., followed by Luke in the early 70s and Matthew in the late 70s – who both used the same Q sayings source — and then by John sometime after 80 A.D. Most liberal scholars tend to push the dates back later but virtually all still believe Mark was written first. They believe this because Luke and Matthew follow the basic order of events in Mark almost exactly, although they appear to make minor changes (such as cleaning up poor Greek grammar) found in the Markan account; and there are big chunks of texts that are not in Mark but are found, word for word, in both Matthew and Luke.

What’s more, in piecing together the facts of Jesus’ life, and drawing upon the same or similiar “sayings source” (Q), the evangelists sometimes differed as to where a particular “saying” should be put in the narrative (its setting) and sometimes modified the saying itself. The evangelists were each individuals, writing from different locations, perhaps in different languages, and each had their own “agenda” or particular points they wanted to make. Of course, Christian apologists have long pointed out that Jesus traveled from town to town all over Palestine, preaching his message and telling his parables, and it is likely that he would have repeated himself often. Thus, it’s natural that some eyewitnesses would remember his saying something in one context and another witness might remember him saying it in another.

Anyone interested in the details of all this can see for themselves by consulting what’s called a “synopsis” of the Gospels (such as the one published by the United Bible Societies and edited by Kurt Aland) that shows the accounts of Jesus’ words and deeds arranged in parallel columns by Gospel. A humorous example of how the concerns of the individual evangelists can determine what they do and do not put into their version of events – and which demonstrates how so-called “critical” scholarship often strengthens the case for the authenticity of the Gospels – is the account of the woman with a hemorrhage.

According to all three of the synoptic gospels, when Jesus was on his way to cure the daughter of a synagogue official named Jarius, a woman who suffered from hemorrhages for years came up to him and touched him, seeking to be cured. Keeping in mind the idea that Mark probably wrote his gospel first, notice how the three versions differ slightly – and remember that, according to tradition, the evangelist Luke was a physician by trade:
Mark 5:25 Matthew 9:20 Luke: 8:43
And there was a woman who had had a flow of blood for twelve years, and who had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse. She had heard the reports about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment.

And behold, a woman who had suffered from a hemorrhage for twelve years

came up behind him and touched the fringe of his garment.

And a woman who had had a flow of blood for twelve years

And could not be healed by any one,

Came up behind him, and touched the fringe of his garment.

Minor differences, of course. But notice that the version by the alleged physician Luke removes the biting comments about how the woman had suffered under “many physicians” and had spent all she had on them but only grew worse. Also, notice how Mark, probably writing from Rome for at least some Gentiles, refers merely to Jesus’ “garment” while Matthew, whose concern above all else is to show how Jesus is the fulfillment of Jewish prophecies and teaching, adds the detail about the “fringe” (Hebrew: tzitzit) of his garment, a reference to the traditional tallit or “prayer shawl” commanded in Numbers 15. It is through this kind of careful, “critical” reading of the New Testament that scholars attempt to discern the theological assumptions and emphases of the Biblical writers and, through them, to discover more about who Jesus really was and what he did. In other words, we learn more looking through the eyes of four evangelists – each with his own agenda and purposes – than we would from a “harmonized” account that tried to remove the apparent contradictions and inconsistencies that skeptics so dislike.

Interestingly enough, modern scholarship is not as original, or as shocking, as modern skeptics would have people believe. Faithful Christians have always known the basic facts of how the New Testament came to be written. We have numerous (again, conflicting accounts) of how the New Testament came to be written in the writings of early Christian theologians, such as Papias (c. 120) and Eusebius (c. 270-339). Papias, a bishop in what is now central Turkey, wrote a lost book called Interpretations of the Sayings of the Lord that obliquely testifies to the existence of a Q source. We no longer have his works, but the Church historian Eusebius quotes Papias’s account of how the New Testament books came to be written:

“Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatsoever he remembered. It was not, however, in exact order that he related the sayings or deeds of Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied Him. But afterwards, as I said, he accompanied Peter, who accommodated his instructions to the necessities [of his hearers], but with no intention of giving a regular narrative of the Lord’s sayings. Wherefore Mark made no mistake in thus writing some things as he remembered them. For of one thing he took especial care, not to omit anything he had heard, and not to put anything fictitious into the statements. Matthew put together the oracles [of the Lord] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could.”

This account actually jives quite neatly with what many modern scholars believe. Due to the many semiticisms and Aramaic words in the Greek text of Matthew, for example, many scholars believe it was originally written in Aramaic and later translated into Greek.

The Lost Gospels

A final issue when it comes to New Testament studies: The so-called “lost” Gospels. As skeptics tell it, reflecting the worldview captured in The Da Vinci Code, the Christian church systematically suppressed the truth about Jesus and his early disciples, “censoring” alternative accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching because these texts didn’t reflect the “dogma” (primarily the alleged “sexism” and “homophobia”) of the institutional Church. Examples of these “alternative” Gospels include the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of James. More recently, a Gospel of Judas was discovered and published.

The Da Vinci Code was hardly original in taking this line: In 1972, novelist Irving Wallace wrote a thriller called The Word that described, interspersed with lots of sex, the alleged discovery of an alternative gospel (the Gospel of James) that would “blow the lid” off of institutional Christianity and reveal the truth that the evil Church had kept hidden for millennia. There’s even a secret society that has suppressed the truth that Jesus survived the crucifixion – and a man who, “if he can survive long enough,” struggles to tell the whole world what really happened.

So, is there truth to the charge? Did the Christian church “suppress” lost facts about and sayings of Jesus?

The answer of mainstream biblical scholars would be: If only! That’s because, for two centuries now, scholars have been poring over every word of every “apocryphal” (non-canonical) gospel available, desperately searching for a lost saying or an authentic new fact. Far from being “lost,” every single apocryphal gospel extant can be easily read in translation in such collections as The Nag Hammadi Library (edited by James Robinson), or in more popular anthologies such as The Complete Gospels (edited by Robert J. Miller) or The Other Gospels: Non-Canonical Gospel Texts (edited by Ron Cameron).

Alas, the results have been disappointing.

The researches of such scholars as Elaine Pagels and Bart Erhman have taught us a lot about early Gnosticism but precious little new about Jesus. The primary reason for this is because these lost, “apocryphal” gospels were written, by and large, decades, sometimes even centuries after the canonical Gospels. They were the creation of Gnostic sects (sort of second- and third-century New Agers) that usually just followed the outlines of the canonical Gospels and simply put into the mouth of Jesus various philosophical ramblings of a particular Gnostic sect. Most of them strike modern readers as deadly dull and quite bizarre… and nothing like the canonical Gospels in vivid, real-life detail.

Here is a typical passage from The Gospel of Mary (Magdalene), a favorite with New Agers and conspiracy theorists:

The Savior said, “All natures, all formations, all creatures exist in and with one another, and they will be resolved again into their own roots. For the nature of matter is resolved into the [roots] of its nature alone. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

As you might guess, if the church “suppressed” these texts it was probably more for bad writing than for heresy. The simple truth is that, when the early Christian leaders looked over the various works purporting to be about the life and teaching of Jesus, they found that most had little if anything to do with the Jesus proclaimed by the Church and instead were full of bizarre Greek philosophical ideas (about various deities and emanations from the godhead) that Jesus would have had nothing to say about. That’s why the church historian Eusebius, writing around A.D. 324, spoke of the books that are “adduced by the heretics under the name of the apostles, such as the Gospels of Peter, Thomas, Matthew, and others beside them or such as the Acts of the Apostles by Andrew John, and others.” He added the common sense observation that “indeed the character of the style itself is very different from that of the apostles, and the sentiment and purport of those things that are advanced in them, deviating as far as possible form sound orthodoxy, evidently proves they are fictions of heretical men.” These “other” gospels, Eusebius concludes, are “spurious writings [that] are to be rejected as altogether absurd and impious.”

What Do the Earliest Texts Say?

So: If the “real” Jesus can’t be found in the New Age ramblings of third-century Gnostic Gospels… or in the radical revisionism of Jesus Seminar intellectuals and pundits… or in the violent revolution planned by the forerunners of the Zealots… where can he be found?

Perhaps in the last place many people appear to want to look, in the New Testament itself.

Modern New Testament scholars have actually done a pretty good job of identifying which parts of the New Testament were written first – by correlating passages with known historical events. When they did this, however, they made a discovery that undermined two centuries worth of “certainties” about Jesus and Christianity. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, liberal theologians (such as Adolf von Harnack) believed that the first followers of Jesus were pious Jews for whom Jesus was a rabbi, perhaps a prophet, but nothing more… and it was only after the Jesus Movement spread out into the Gentile world that his followers began using grandiose language that described Jesus as having divine or quasi-divine status. The idea was that the early Greek followers of Jesus (pagans all!) simply adapted Greek “divine man” myths to speak about Jesus. These liberals theologians believed, therefore, that the earliest Christian tradition would speak of Jesus as a simple teacher, the later writings as an exalted quasi-divine figure.

But after scholars successfully identified the lowest “strata” in the New Testament, the earliest pieces of tradition, they made a shocking, very disturbing discovery: The very earliest traditions, not just the latest, speak of Jesus as sharing in God’s unique sovereignty over all things. In fact, a fairly “high” christology of Jesus permeates virtually the entire New Testament.

The British New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham names this strange, unexpected phenomenon “Christological monotheism,” meaning the earliest traditions about Jesus see him sharing in the very life and wisdom and even the power of God . This can be seen, Bauckham says, in a number of ways.

First, the earliest New Testament texts speak of Jesus’ lordship over “all things,” which is a status in Jewish thought previously allocated to God alone. Writing to the Corinthians in A.D. 55 or thereabouts, Paul says that Christ will destroy death itself (1 Corinthians 15:26).

Second, Bauckham says, Jesus shares God’s exaltation above the angels. In Ephesians 1:21-22, perhaps written in A.D. 62, Paul (or his scribes) say that “[God] raised [Jesus] from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet…”

Third, Jesus is given the Divine Name, the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) – the name, says Bauckham, “which names the unique identity of the one God, the name which is exclusive to the one God…” According to Philippians 2:9…

Christ Jesus… Who, though he was in the form of God

Did not regard equality with God

Something to be grasped.

Rather, he emptied himself

Taking the form of a slave…

Because of this,

God greatly exalted him

And bestowed on him the name

That is above every name,

That at the name of Jesus

Every knee should bend,

Of those in heaven and on earth and under the hearth

Fourth, Jesus participation in the divine sovereignty extends even to worship. The central, unalterable truth of Israelite religion is the Shema: Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. Or as the First Commandment puts it: “You shall have no other gods beside me.” Yet in the Gospel of Mark, which scholars almost unanimously believe to be the first gospel written, Jesus is asked by the High Priest, “Are you the Messiah, the son of the Blessed One?” And Jesus answers…

“I am, and you will se the Son of Man

Seated at the right hand of the Power

And coming with the clouds of heaven.

At this, Mark says, the high priest “tore his garments” and said, “Have we further need of witnesses? You have heard the blasphemy.”

The word that the New Testament uses to express this unique incorporation of the man Jesus into the very life of God is “sonship.” The way the New Testament scholar Burton Mack describes what this means is:

“In Paul’s mind, the Christ was now a historic person, now a son of God, a ‘corporate personality’ representing a collective humanity, a cosmic king, a spiritual power pervading the cosmos, the hidden meaning behind the significant events of Israel’s history, and the incarnation of the very mind, promise, and intention of God for humankind… The Christ had become an overwhelming, all-encompassing symbol of the agency of a Jewish God in a Greek world.”

The important point to remember, however, is that these unusual, mind-boggling modifications to traditional Jewish monotheism were made, not by Greek-speaking Gentiles in far away Rome or Athens, but by the earliest Jewish followers of the very Jewish Jesus.

The same man who quotes the early Christological hymn in Phillipians (quoted above), the Pharisee convert Paul, brags in the very same letter that he was “circumcised on the eighth day, of the race of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, in observance of the law a Pharisee” and claims he was a Jewish zealot who studied under the great Torah scholar Gamaliel and persecuted the early followers of Jesus.

Some scholars have pointed to Semitic characteristics behind the Greek text and argue that this hymn originated from the early Jewish-Christian community at Jerusalem. This means that perhaps the earliest extent stratum in the New Testament, from a distinctly Jewish provenance, perhaps learned by Paul within the first five or ten years after Jesus’ death in A.D. 30, displays the same elevated understanding of Christ that liberal theologians used to believe came only very late, in the second century, among pagans.

The bottom line for faith

What this means is this: You don’t have to go as far as evangelical apologists like C.S. Lewis or Josh McDowell and say that either Jesus was a madman or the Son of God… because that begs the question as to whether the Gospels accurately report what Jesus really said or merely put words into his mouth, as modern skeptics claim and as later Gnostic writers actually did.

But any fair evaluation of the historical evidence has to at least admit this: The earliest, most authentic documents we have – which are, to the chagrin of Gnostic fans everywhere, the canonical books of the New Testament – clearly claim that Jesus was something much more than merely a prophet or even the long-awaited Jewish messiah.

Of course, many faithful Jews then and since could not accept that… and many modern people can no longer accept it as well. But that is precisely what the New Testament says, at the very earliest strata of the tradition: The man Jesus of Nazareth… the carpenter of Nazareth who electrified all of Galilee and Judea with his fiery denunciations of religious hypocrisy and calls for true repentance… somehow shares in the very mind and mercy and even power of God himself.

Far from refuting that fact, the best Biblical scholarship of the past century actually confirms it.

Of course, that doesn’t answer the most important question of all: Whether it’s true. In this, the great New Testament scholar and theologian Rudolph Bultmann was correct: from a strictly historical perspective, we can never really know what Jesus actually did and said but only what the Gospels say he said and did. The New Testament is virtually the only historical document we have. As a result, whether Jesus really is the Son of God is not a question that can be answered by “critical” Biblical scholarship or archaeology. It can be illuminated through such scholarship, explored and debated and expanded, but not, ultimately, answered.

That is why people rarely come to faith in Christ based on a critical study of textual variants in the Gospel of Luke. Instead, they come to faith in Christ as the ultimate revelation of God primarily because they are born into, or encounter, communities of faith (which we call “churches” or “assemblies”) that have preserved his memory for nearly 2,000 years.

For two millennia, the tribe that calls itself Christians has gathered together in groups – some large, some small – to hear Jesus’ words, meditate upon his deeds and obey his last request that he be remembered in the breaking of the bread.

Across the ages, this international community has continued to pass on the memory and the testimony of who Jesus Christ was and is – from father to son, mother to daughter, catechist to student, in an unbroken chain of “apostolic succession,” for generations. This faith is often communicated orally and visually, depicted in the stain glass windows of Gothic cathedrals and celebrated in songs in “rock operas.” That’s why you don’t have to be an historian or a Biblical scholar to believe in Jesus – and why the great saints and mystics of Christendom, from St. Francis of Assisi to John Wesley, Corrie ten Bloom to Mother Teresa of Calcutta, knew more about who Jesus was than the hundreds of supposed experts in the Jesus Seminar.

Thus, on a practical level, deciding whether to believe the Christian testimony is less about history, archaeology and Greek paleography than it is about our own understanding of people, the world and our eternal destinies.

People usually decide to remain or become Christians because the story of who Jesus was and did, and the words he said, seem to “fit” their experience of the world. Put simply, it rings true. The Gospel stories of Jesus’s encounters with sinners and sycophants, the powerful and the impoverished, seem believable… often far more believable than the elaborate conspiracies and dubious reconstructions postulated by scholarly skeptics. Jesus’s words of mercy and forgiveness… his challenge to live a life of integrity far beyond the minimum required by religious law… his humor and courage and simple decency… strike ordinary believers as too authentic and “real” to have been made up. That is not, as undergraduate philosophizers like Sam Harris like to say, blind faith, but rather a judgment that attends to data other than those produced by scientific instruments or the random facts we can cull from archaeology.

The simple truth is that the New Testament claims that Jesus of Nazareth is Lord of heaven and earth… the ultimate revelation of who God is and what he wants from his creates… and about one third of the planet’s population finds it credible. The snide put-downs, sophomoric arguments and thinly veiled threats of people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Penn and Teller do not impress them. Forced to choose between what the cynical media say is plausible and “scientific,” and what the Bible says about Jesus, billions prefer the Bible. They know Jesus, and trust him – more than all the scholars in the Jesus Seminar.

The post Jesus Christ Remains the Greatest Enigma in History to Believers and Skeptics Alike first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.