In the Quest for the Historical Jesus: Summing up the Challenges and Pointing out Solutions

A Basic Chronology and the Most Important Sources for the Historical Jesus

In the last couple of posts (see: here, here, here, and here), I explained the basic methodological problems historians are faced with when dealing with the Historical Jesus. As I reminder, I should point out that the so-called “Historical Jesus” refers to the reconstruction of the life and teachings of Jesus by critical historical methods. In other words, scholars who pursue this line of research approach Jesus as they would approach any other figure from antiquity (e.g. Vespasianus, Alexander the Great, etc.). The quest for the Historical Jesus started back in the 18th century when German theologian Hermann Reimarus (1694 – 1768) wrote a book about Jesus that was conveniently published only after his death. His contribution was in the fact that he distinguished between the historical Jesus (as a person who lived in Palestine) and the “Christ of faith”. This distinction was, of course, largely developed in association with the Enlightenment, which advocated the role of reason as the basis of authority over tradition. We have moved a long way from Reimarus. One significant development of the Historical Jesus research (that happened in the last 20 years) has been a more explicitly historical focus: the larger disciplines of history and philosophy of history are having a greater impact, the cognate disciplines such as cultural anthropology and sociology are being drawn upon, and theologically-driven agendas are viewed as inappropriate to the explicitly historical enterprise of historical Jesus research. All in all, the Historical Jesus research did yield several methodological challenges which make it difficult to penetrate into every detail of Jesus’ life. In what follows, I’ll just emphasize those challenges that I’ve dealt with in the last couple of posts.

  1. The time gap between the death of Jesus (c. 30 CE) and the first written biography (The Gospel of Mark, c. 70 CE)
    • In a nutshell: stories about Jesus (his sayings, his actions, his disciples, etc.) were transmitted orally for decades before they were written down. In that process, changes occurred, and details faded away (this is how our memory works!). On top of that, every evangelist had his own perspective that colored his portrayal of Jesus.
  2. Unknown authors of the New Testament Gospels
    • Briefly: even though people today think that the Gospels were written by two Jesus’ apostles (Matthew, and John) and two companions of the apostles (Mark/Peter, and Luke/Paul) critical scholarship have shown this to be false.
    • It seems that the Gospels circulated anonymously among the Christian communities for decades before they were finally named. There are numerous reasons for thinking that:
      • Internal anonymity: No Gospel contains the name of the author in the narrative itself. The structure of the narrative is always from a perspective of a third person. Even the Gospel of Matthew talks about Matthew (chapter 9) from a third-person perspective. The author doesn’t tell us: “When Jesus and I…” Look the chapter 9 for yourself! Moreover, the titles that we have today were added only later – probably around the middle of the 2nd century! The structure of the titles (with a preposition κατα) clearly demonstrates that!
      • The lack of external attestations: The earliest Church fathers (80 – 170 CE) quoted segments from the New Testament Gospels, but they never referred by name to either Mark, Matthew, Luke, or John. They would just quote a passage without naming the author. The first person who clearly names our evangelists was bishop Irenaeus who wrote his masterpiece around 180 CE. That’s 80 to 120 years after the Gospels were written!
        • Bishop Papias (60 – 140 CE) doesn’t seem to refer to our Gospel of Matthew, and Gospel of Mark – see more about that: here!

That being said, we are far from being in a “black hole of agnosticism” with regard to the Historical Jesus. Scholars can still say a lot of things about his life and actions with a reasonable degree of probability. As a matter of fact, in the last hundred years, they developed a whole range of methodological tools to help them analyze the sources at hand. But, more about that in the next post!

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