Attitudes to the Evidence

People have been attempting to write lives of Jesus for a very long time. There have been more of them than of any other man or woman in history; 60,000 were written in the nineteenth century alone. [2] Unable, like anyone else, to dissociate themselves from their own environment and age, these writers have all superimposed upon the history of the first century AD something which more properly belongs to their own time. As Günter Bornkamm points out,

We need only read Albert Schweitzer's famous book The Quest of the Historical Jesus to realize swiftly how the individual essays and pictures were determined by the typical dominant images of the Enlightenment, of German idealism, of incipient socialism, by the image of the rationalistic teacher of virtue, by the romantic concept of the religious genius, by the ideal of the champion of the abused proletariat and of a new, more just order of society, by the idea of Kantian ethics, and finally also by the bourgeois religiosity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
          Of course we can say that every period, like history in general, sees Jesus' own history and figure with its own eyes.

The task has often been declared impossible on the grounds that our information is too little and too late, and can do no more than create the picture of a picture, and can yield only the whisper of Jesus' voice. But nowadays more and more scholars appreciate that this conclusion is unduly pessimistic. T.W. Manson, for example, has declared: "I am increasingly convinced that in the Gospels we have the materials - reliable materials - for an outline account of the ministry as a whole." J. Knox, too, believed us to be "left with a very substantial residuum of historically trustworthy facts about Jesus, his teaching and his life". And now Geza Vermes expresses "guarded optimism concerning a possible discovery of the genuine features of Jesus". [4]

Note that Vermes speaks of a possible future discovery. for, in spite of all this vast literature, the historical reconstruction of the life and history of Jesus has as yet hardly begun. Those were the words of Stephen Neill, published in 1962, and the passage of a few more years has not impaired their accuracy. [5] So the further attempt that has been made in the present book is surely in itself not unjustified, though the degree of its adquacy is, of course, a very different matter.

There are many who maintain that no one except a believer in Jesus' divinity is entitled to write a single word about him. W.G. Kümmel and Vincent Taylor expressed this view in uncompromising terms. [6] In the same spirit, the Pelican Commentaries are explicitly intended to "help Christian readers to a deeper and more informed appreciation of the Gospels". But in fact they help many others too; and so they should. For the opinion that only believing Christians are entitled to study New Testament history cannot win any historian's acceptance. Unacceptable, too, is the insistence of C.H. Dodd and J.M. Robinson that the burden of proof has passed from the believer to the historian: that greater weight is required to discredit a Gospel statement than to authenticate it. [7] If we are going to write history, that is not the right balance to strike.

In reaction against this "criticism conducted under church bells", Wilhelm Bousset has put forward the opposite proposition: "If we believe and honour, we no longer see objectively." According to his view, then, only an unbeliever could write a truly historical record of Jesus; [8] and Schweitzer, who liked a paradox, pointed out that some of the greatest of Jesus' Lives were written with hate. [9] Certainly, some partial measure of scepticism regarding the Gospel stories is inevitable, if historical standards are going to be applied. And it started extremely early, even inside the church. Indeed, it goes back to the new Testament itself, in which Martha commented that Jesus could not possibly raise Lazarus from the dead since his body was already decomposing. [10] In the third century, too, the Christian philosopher Origen conceded to his pagan opponents that some passages in the Gospels were by no means literally true, and indeed both absurd and impossible.

This sceptical way of thinking reached its culmination in the argument that Jesus as a human being never existed at all and is a myth. In ancient times, this extreme view was named the heresy of docetism (seeming) because it maintained that Jesus never came into the world "in the fles", but only seemed to; [11] and it was given some encouragement by Paul's lack of interest in his fleshly existence. Subsequently, from the eighteenth century onwards, there have been attempts to insist that Jesus did not even "seem" to exist, and that all tales of his appearance upon the earth were pure fiction. In particular, his story was cmpared to the pagan mythologies inventing fictitious dying and rising gods.

Some of the lines of thinking employed to disprove the Christ-myth theory have been somewhat injudicious. For example, the student of history, accustomed to the "play of the contingent and unforseen", will remain unimpressed by the argument that the vast subsequent developments of Christianity must have been launched from imposing beginnings, or that mighty religions must necessarily have derived from mighty founders: some, notably Hinduism, have not. More convincing refutations of the Christ-myth hypothesis can be derived from an appeal to method. In the first place, Judaism was a milieu to which doctrines of the deaths and rebirths of mythical gods seems so entirely foreign that the emergence of such a fabrication from its midst is very hard to credit. [12] But above all, if we apply to the new Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned. Certainly, there are those discrepancies between one Gospel and another. But we do not deny that an event ever took plce just because pagan historians such as, for example, Livy and Polybius, happen to have described it in differing terms. That there was a growth of legend around Jesus cannot be denied, and it arose very quickly. But there had also been a rapid growth of legend around pagan figures like Alxander the Great; and yet nobody regards him as wholly mythical and fictitious. To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory. it has "again and again been answered and annihilated by first-rank scholars". In recent years "no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus" - or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary. [13]

They have not, that is to say, been accepted as presenting an objective picture. True, the life of Jesus is a theme in which the notorious problem of achieving objectivity reaches its height. And in consequence certain critics have concluded, not merely that most writers, whether they admit it or not, approach the Gospels with preconceived ideas, but that in dealing with a subject such as this which stirs profound feelings, it is impossible to be objective; [14] so that it is obligatory for everyone attempting to deal with the subject to commit himself, to stand up and be counted, to make "a personal response for or against the New Testament explanation" - as the evangelists demanded. [15]

Yet this attitude is the very negation of history and must be rejected by anyone who seeks to study it. Certainly, every such student will have his own preconceptions. But he must be vigilant to keep them within limits; as J.B. Bury remarked, it is essentially absurd for a historian to wish that any alleged fact should turn out to be true or false. [16] Careful scrutiny does not presuppose either credulity or hostility. [17] neither the believers nor the unbelievers must be allowed to make him their slave. [18] He must first try to decide, as far as he can, what Jesus said and did. And then he has to consider the significance of those words and deeds. he has to consider, also, what significance Jesus himself attached to them. It is not his job to determine whether Jesus was right or wrong in so doing. But he does have the function of deciding what that significance was. This is the critical approach he must adopt; and without it, as Peter de Rosa insists, "Jesus Christ will never be relevant to our time." [19]

A short way back, exception was taken to the view that everything the evangelists say must be assumed correct until it is proved wrong. Should we, therefore, accept the opposite opinion, which has been locked in an agonizing struggle with it for two hundred years, that all the contents of the Gospels must be assumed fictitious until they are proved genuine? No, that also is too extreme a viewpoint and would not be applied in other fields. When, for example, one tries to build up facts from the accounts of pagan historians, judgment often has to be given not in the light of any external confirmation - which is sometimes, but by no means always, available - but on the basis of historical deductions and arguments which attain nothing better than probability. The same applies to the Gospels. Their contents need not be assumed fictitious until they are proved authentic. But they have to be subjected to the usual standards of historical persuasiveness.

Another standard that is also sometimes proposed is of a sceptical, negative character; it insists on the rejection of all events which "fulfilled" the Old Testament, on the grounds that, in order to achieve such a fulfilment, they must have been invented by the evangelists or their sources. Yet this principle, too, is not invariably effective, since, as we have seen, jesus himself sometimes deliberately arranged and adjusted his acts and sayings in order to make sure they did fulfil scriptural predictions. The only way for the historian to proceed is to estimate the probabilities in each separate instance, on its own individual merits.

A further criterion requires the rejection from the lifetime of Jesus of all material which seems to be derived from the days of the Christian Church as it existed after his death. [22] This yardstick has to be used very often and, in spite of the acute difficulty of applying it correctly, it provides our principal valid method of research. As A.J.P. Taylor observed, "no man can recall past events without being affected by what has happened in between"; and there is no reason why the evangelists should be expected to escape this natural tendency. Moreover, two factors made them particularly vulnerable to it: first the partial or predominantly oral nature of their sources, which were thus peculiarly susceptible to influence by contemporary colour, nd secondly the extraordinarily rapid, radical developments which transformed the infant Church during the decades that separated the Gospels from Jesus' death and made it difficult for their writers to understand how things had been before these changes occurred. Nor is it a coincidence that the author of Luke's Gospel is general considered to have written Acts as well: it all seemed to him the same story, so that he projects the later period onto the earlier one. [23]

To solve this riddle of the New Testament, to distinguish between the authentic words and deeds of Jesus and the tendencies of the deveoping tradition which so easily overlaid them, was one of the principal tasks of the "form critics" whose activity spanned the middle years of the present century. it is a process that can be applied too severely or not severely enough, depending on one's ideas about how the original features, dating back to Jesus, can and should be identified. [24] But the criterion as such - the need somehow to eliminate from the Gospels the accretions that were introduced after Jesus' death - remains essential.

One way of attempting this task is to look out for surprises. For anything really surprising in the Gospels is quite likely to be authentic - anything, that is to say, which clashes with what we should expect to find in something written after the time of Jesus. [25] It has been objected that whenever we think we detect such a clash our impression cannot fail to be wrong, since nothing unacceptable to the Church that epoch could possibly have been allowed to find its way in the Gospels. [26] But this objection is not convincing since the evangelists manifestly do include some unpalatable or even incomprehensible doings and sayings of Jesus, and incidents in his life. They include them because they were so indissolubly incorporated in the trdition that their elmination was impracticable; in other words, because they were genuiine. Examples are: his proclamation of the imminent fulfilment of the Kingdom of God which never materialied; his rejection by his family because "he was beside himself"; other references to his imperfections, and to rude things that were said about him; his association with outcasts; his harsh remarks about the Gentiles, and the pleas by some of them, the Gadarenes or Gerasenes and the Samaritans, that he should leave their country; the friendliness of a member of that much-criticized class, the scribes; the Suffering Servant and Son of Man teaching, which soon became unacceptable or incomprehensible after his death; and his burial by a Jew, a member of the hated Sanhedrin, without the participation of any of his own disciples.

In culmination, these authentic points and others add up to a coherent general impression of Jesus, persisting in spite of the differences between the evangelists. True, once again, one must not underestimate the possibility that this homogeneity is only achieved because of their employement of common sources, not necessarily authentic in themselves. Yet, even so, the impression remains plausible not only because the personality that emerges is so forceful and individual and satisfying but because it conflicts in a nubmer of ways with what one might have expected to appear in the productions of the Church after Jesus' death. As C.F.D. Moule observes,

It is difficult enough for anyone, even a consummate mater of imaginative writing, to create a picture of a deeply pure, good person moving about in an impure environment, without making hiim a prig or a prude or sort of plaster saint.
          How comes it that, through all the Gospel traditions without exception, there comes a remarkably firmly-drawn portrait of an attrctive young man moving freely about among women of all sorts, including the decidedly disreputable, without a trace of sentimentality, unnaturalness, or prudery, and yet, at every point, maintaining a simple integrity of character?
          Is this because the environments in which the traditions were preserved and through which they were transmitted wre peculiarly favourable to such a portrait? On the contrary, it seems that they were rather hostile to it. [27]

By such methods information about Jesus can be derived frm the Gospels. And that is what this book has tried to do.

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FOOTNOTES

[27]  C.F.D. Moule, The Phenomenon of the New Testament (SCM, 1967), p. 63ff.