Some Thoughts on
Historical Jesus Studies
And Reza Aslan’s Zealot
Reza Aslan’s book Zealot:
The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth is an attempt at
reconstructing the historical person Jesus of Nazareth. Some of you are probably familiar with the
issue of the historical Jesus, but others of you probably are not; so here’s a
brief recap of the issues surrounding our knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth as an
historical person.
The only significant sources we
have about Jesus are the Gospels in the New Testament. There are gospels that are not in the New
Testament, but for the most part they add nothing to our picture of the
historical Jesus. They are either merely
sayings gospels that record sayings of Jesus but say nothing about his life, or
they are late, often fantastic gospels that may tell great stories but that
pretty clearly contain little or no historical fact. There are references to Jesus in a few (very
few) extra-biblical ancient sources, but all they really do is confirm that by
the end of the first century CE Jesus and his movement had become at least
somewhat known in the Roman Empire. So
we’re left with the canonical Gospels, that is, the Gospels in the New
Testament.
Of those Gospels only three of
the four contain anything remotely like accurate, factual information about
Jesus. The Gospel of John really
doesn’t. It differs radically from the
other three Gospels in the picture it paints of Jesus. It is a theological tract by a Christian from
the late first or early second century CE for whom Jesus had become the Word of
God Incarnate. The author of John is
interested in a mystical, divine Jesus, not in the very earthly person Jesus of
Nazareth. That doesn’t mean that it is
necessarily theologically wrong, but it does mean that John is no help in any
quest for the historical Jesus. So all
we really have as sources on the historical Jesus are the Gospels of Matthew,
Mark, and Luke.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke are all
we have, but there’s a huge problem with them as historical sources for
Jesus. They may sound to us like
historical narratives of the life and teachings of Jesus, but they aren’t. For centuries Christians took them as
historically reliable. Few if any people
doubted that what the Gospels said happened in fact happened. That’s a comfortable, reassuring approach to
the Gospels to be sure. Many Christians,
unfortunately, still adopt it. With the
assumption that the Gospels are historically factual there are no questions
about who Jesus was or what he did or said.
If you want to know those things, just read the Gospels. The problem is that that comfortable,
reassuring understanding of the Gospels just couldn’t hold up forever because
it simply isn’t true.
Scholars began to realize that the
Gospels aren’t simply historical fact in roughly the eighteenth century in
western Europe as they applied scholarly, critical study techniques that had
developed as part of the European Enlightenment to those Gospels. It became clear to the scholars, most of them
Germans, that the Gospels are actually something quite different from what we
would consider to be historical accounts.
They discovered that the Gospels were written between roughly forty and
eighty years after Jesus’ death, that they were not written by the people whose
names they bear, that their authors were not eyewitnesses to the events they
describe, and that they were written for a purpose far different from conveying
what we call history, that is, far different from recording facts as they
actually happened.
The Gospels are not historical
accounts, they are primarily faith confessions.
Their purpose is to present an orderly account of the life and teachings
of Jesus not to tell us what really happened but to convey to the readers who
Jesus had become for the Gospels’ authors at the time they wrote their Gospels,
decades after Jesus’ death. The authors
of the Gospels order their accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection to
make their theological points about him, not to tell us what he really said and
did.
Here’s one quick example. For the author of Matthew Jesus is the new
Moses. So, among many other things he
does to make that point, he took all of the sayings of Jesus that he knew and
organized them into five blocks of sayings that he put into his narrative of
Jesus’ life. Why five blocks of sayings? Because Jesus actually delivered those
sayings that way? No, but because there
are five books of the Torah, the so-called books of Moses. If the original Moses had five books, Jesus
had to have five books, or at least five blocks of sayings. The first and longest of those blocks is the
Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:1 to 7:27.
(The other, shorter blocks are at Matthew 10:5b to 10:42; Matthew 13:1
to 13:52; Matthew 18:1 to 18:35; and Matthew 23:1 to 25:46.) Jesus never gave the Sermon on the Mount, the
existence of the “Chapel of the Beatitudes” on a hillside in Galilee where the
tour guides say that he gave it notwithstanding. Some of us think that’s a good thing because
the Sermon on the Mount, great as it may be as a body of teaching, is a lousy
sermon. It would never pass a seminary
preaching class, but that’s not the main point here. The main point is that we can’t simply assume
that things in Jesus life just happened the way the Gospels tell them. They didn’t.
Yet it seems clear that at least
the Synoptic Gospels (although John only to a considerably lesser extent)
contain some accurate historical, factual information about the life and
teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. We can
be confident that the existence of a person called Jesus of Nazareth is
historical fact contained in the Gospels.
We can be certain that the Romans crucified him, a truth which the
Gospels contain despite their desperate attempts to shift the blame for his
crucifixion onto the Jews and to excuse the Romans. We can be quite sure that he conducted a
public, itinerant ministry of preaching and healing in Galilee and that he then
went to Jerusalem, where he was crucified.
We are confident that he had followers, although it is difficult to know
just how many followers he had. The
Gospels are primarily theological confession, but they do contain historical
facts as well.
Once scholars had figured out
that much about the Gospels the question arose:
How can we tell what in the Gospels is historical fact about Jesus and
what isn’t? With that question began
what came to be called the first quest for the historical Jesus. Throughout the nineteenth century many
different authors, mostly but not exclusively Germans, undertook to get behind
the theological confession of the Gospels to discover just who Jesus of
Nazareth was as an historical person rather than as the Christ of Christian
faith. Scores or even hundreds or more of
portraits of the historical Jesus were published, each claiming to have discerned
who the man behind the Gospel stories actually was. There was quite a cottage industry in
publishing such books. So far from them
all painting the same portrait of the historical Jesus, they gave us as many
historical Jesuses as there were authors writing the books.
Then along came Albert
Schweitzer. You know Albert Schweitzer,
one of those people who drive you nuts because it seems there’s nothing he
didn’t do masterfully. He’s the one who
took his medical practice to serve the poor in Africa. He was also one of the world’s greatest
organists. In 1911 he published a book
that put an end to the first quest for the historical Jesus. It’s title is The Quest of The Historical Jesus, and (despite the different preposition)
that title is where the phrase we’re using here, the quest for the historical
Jesus, comes from. In that book
Schweitzer denied that it is possible to get behind the Gospels to the
historical person Jesus of Nazareth. The
Gospels are all we have, so the Jesus (or I would say Jesuses) of the Gospels
is (are) the only Jesus(es) we have.
Schweitzer insisted that when all those authors went looking for the
historical Jesus they found exactly what they were looking for—not the actual
historical person Jesus of Nazareth but the Jesus they wanted to find. All those historical Jesuses were nothing but
projections of the many authors’ personal preferences for who Jesus should have
been, not who he actually was.
Schweitzer’s argument was so compelling that the first quest for the historical
Jesus dried up. That little cottage
industry of publishing such books went out of business.
It went out of business, but it
didn’t stay out of business. There was a
brief revival of the quest for the historical Jesus in the 1950s, sometimes
called the second quest for the historical Jesus. That one didn’t last very long, but there is
a third quest for the historical Jesus that is much more significant. To a considerable extent we’re still in it. We can examine this latest quest for the
historical Jesus by looking briefly at the famous Jesus Seminar, the most
prominent and important expression of that quest.
In 1985 a scholar named Robert
Funk founded the Jesus Seminar. It
consisted of about 150 scholars and laypeople, and it undertook to find the
historical Jesus behind the Gospels. Its
most famous members were John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, or at least they
became famous largely as a result of their work on the historical Jesus. Most famously, the Jesus Seminar undertook to
determine which of the sayings that the canonical Gospels (and the Gospel of
Thomas, but don’t worry about that too much) attribute to Jesus he is likely
actually to have said and which he is likely not to have said. Their method for doing it became famous, or
infamous. The members of the Seminar
would vote on whether Jesus said a certain thing attributed to him in the
Gospels using red and black balls. If
the Seminar member was sure Jesus said the thing they were voting on he or she would
put a red ball into the pot. If he or
she was sure Jesus did not say the thing, he or she would put in a black ball. They they’d tally up the balls, with each saying
of Jesus being characterized as red, pink, gray, or black. The Jesus Seminar published the results of
this work in a book titled The Five
Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus
in 1996. (Five Gospels because, as I said,
they included the Gospel of Thomas, a sayings Gospel that is probably older than
the canonical Gospels.) In that book the
Seminar members explain their methodology for their determinations. That methodology includes things like how
many independent sources we have for Jesus having said the thing, is the thing
something the later community would have preferred Jesus not have said and
would have left out if they could have, and, finally, just how much do we think
the saying sounds like Jesus rather than like a later Christian community
talking. It’s an interesting read with
the sayings of Jesus not all in red as in so many editions of the Bible but in
red, pink, gray, or black depending on how likely the Seminar folks think it is
that Jesus said it.
What can we say about the work
of the Jesus Seminar? It’s
interesting. It’s often
provocative. Some of its conclusions
seem very likely to be correct. In The Five Gospels, for example, all the
sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of John are in black, meaning the Seminar is
sure Jesus didn’t actually say any of them.
Given how different those sayings are from anything Jesus says in the
Synoptic Gospels or in the Gospel of Thomas, and given the fact that people
would have thought anyone who said those things totally mad, it seems likely
that Jesus in fact never said them. Even
more than the other Gospels, John is faith confession not historical fact. As faith confession it can be true. As historical narrative it isn’t. I believe that the Jesus Seminar gets it right
about Jesus’ sayings in John. I’ll give
them that much.
There is much of value in the
work of the Jesus seminar, but does it escape the criticism that Albert
Schweitzer made of the first quest for the historical Jesus? Not really.
Schweitzer said that the questers of the first quest found who they
wanted to find when they went looking for the historical Jesus. The Jesus Seminar is vulnerable to the same
criticism. The Jesus Seminar gives us a
Jesus who is socially and economically progressive, whose main focus is
speaking up for the poor and the marginalized, and who preached
nonviolence. I love that image of Jesus,
for that is the Jesus I would look for too; but how do we know that the Jesus
seminar didn’t just find the Jesus they wanted to find? We don’t.
They claim objective criteria for their search, but their criteria
aren’t really all that objective. One
gets the real sense that the decision mostly came down to the question does
this sound like Jesus to us or not.
That’s a purely subjective evaluation, and the Seminar’s claims of
objectivity are not very convincing. I
strongly suspect that they too found who they wanted to find in their search
for the historical Jesus. Schweitzer was
right, and the failing he found in the first quest is probably unavoidable in any
quest for the historical Jesus.
Which brings us to Reza
Aslan. His book Zealot is an exercise in the contemporary quest for the historical
Jesus. Like the Jesus Seminar and so
many others before him Aslan seeks to get behind the Gospels to find the real
historical person Jesus of Nazareth. He
does it, as indeed it must be done if it is done at all, using the Synoptic
Gospels as his sources on Jesus. He
cites passages from them for proof of things Jesus said. Unfortunately he never address the issue of
how to determine which things in the Gospels can be used that way and which
can’t, but that’s what he does. So far
I’ve read a bit less than half of the book, so this is subject to change; but
it looks to me like the supposedly historical Jesus that Aslan finds is one who
knew, expected, and probably hoped that his teaching would lead to a violent
rebellion of the Jews against Rome. Aslan’s
Jesus even called for violence on occasion, as when he told his disciples to
buy swords.[1] I am as convinced that that is not who Jesus
was as Aslan is convinced that it is who Jesus was.
Can I prove he’s wrong? No (and he can’t prove me wrong either), but
consider this. Aslan is Muslim. Being Muslim doesn’t in any way disqualify
him from writing on Jesus. It doesn’t
question his credentials as an author.
He is in fact a very good author.
Zealot is a fairly easy read,
and his book No God But God is a
wonderful introduction to Islam for non-Islamic audiences. Yet the fact that Aslan is Muslim seems
significant to me in evaluating Zealot. I have long taught that the major difference
between Jesus and Muhammad is that Jesus taught nonviolence while Muhammad was,
among many other things, a fighter.
Jesus wouldn’t let his followers us violence to defend him. Muhammad used violence to defeat the forces
of Mecca that came out against him.
Aslan works very hard in Zealot
to downplay Jesus’ rejection of violence and to make him one who knew that his
teaching would necessarily lead to a great deal of it if people followed that
teaching. I saw a reference recently to
one critic of the book who said that Aslan’s Jesus sounds like a failed Muhammad. That’s probably overstating the matter a bit,
but I think there is truth in it. In any
event, like every other author who has searched for the historical Jesus, Aslan
seems pretty clearly to have found the historical Jesus he was looking for. Is that who Jesus really was? I don’t think so. You can decide for yourself; but as you read the
book keep in mind what Albert Schweitzer said about the quest for the historical
Jesus. Seek and ye shall find—find precisely
what you want to find, not what really was.
[1] See Luke 22:36. But see also Luke 22:37-38, in which Jesus
says having swords is only a matter of prophecy fulfillment and says that only
two swords are enough, enough it must be to fulfill the prophecy but hardly
enough to fight Rome or much of anyone else.
This passage really isn’t a call for violence. Aslan just gets it wrong.
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