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Trying to Find the Historical Jesus
By Administrator | October 23, 2007
by Rev. Scott Elliott
Attempting to describe the historical Jesus is akin to locating the original flakes from a small snow ball which has rolled and tumbled and gathered in gigantic size for two thousand years; somewhere parts of some first flakes exist, but so much snow and dirt has gathered, melted, molded and mixed together that it’s very difficult to locate them. The evidence we have is fragmented and puzzling: “We simply do not have very much historical information about Jesus. The ancient historians leave us helpless; the Christian texts at our disposal leave us confused” (Patterson, GOJ, 14). In short, while there may seem to be a huge ball of snow about Jesus, only some of it may evidence the historic Jesus –and getting to it is challenging.
The dearth of evidence about the historic Jesus, and its complexity, has to do with many factors. To begin, history is not about facts, but, human life and experience as retold through the experiences of a historian(s)(GOJ, 252; 9/7/05 Lecture). In this case the subject life and experience is Jesus, a relatively obscure man living in a remote place and time with no practice of keeping records on such obscurities, let alone on a criminal and his followers (GOJ, 15). The later growth of the Jesus movement, however, did serve to generate a few sparse extant outside reports referencing Jesus (Ibid., 15-16; Crossan, Birth, 3-14). But, from these reports basically
[a]ll we learn . . . is that Jesus was a Jewish teacher of wisdom with a reputation for sorcery. Who had a few disciples, and perhaps a somewhat larger following, which, after his execution at the hands of Roman authorities did not entirely give up on him (GOJ,17).
In addition to these “voices of the first outsiders” (Birth, 3), there is also a literary record based on decades old oral traditions of the early followers, and perhaps even eyewitnesses to the historic Jesus (Birth,49-58, 59-68). But oral transmission and witness accounts are by nature intrinsically doubtful with respect to accuracy (Ibid., 49-58, 68). Furthermore, the New Testament books, and the non-canonical gospels, 1 were not written as history, but rather to reflect the theologies of the authors and their communities. In other words, the canonical gospels contain flakes of history about Jesus, but each is a compilation made decades after Jesus’ life and death. Moreover, each is an author’s report of a community’s reflection on their experiences, not of the historic Jesus but of the Jesus they had come to experience God through. This included listening to stories which incorporated their experiences with other’s stories such as the other Gospels, Q, The Gospel of Thomas and the Passion Gospel.
That is not to say that these literary theological works do not contain flakes of history going back to Jesus, but that such history is mixed in layers of theological text and inherently unreliable reports of oral tradition and witnesses.
Beginning in the nineteenth century historians have used methods such as “The Hypotheses of Markan Priority,” “The Two Source Hypothesis,” “Positive Criteria,” and “Negative Criteria” to try and sift out flakes of history in the Gospel texts (GOJ, 19-22). More recently “The Gospel of Thomas” and other extra-canonical sources have been used to aid in this search to describe the historic Jesus.
In addition to Greco-Roman history and literary analysis, anthropology has provided evidence of the world in which Jesus lived and died.
There is, then, a minute, yet complex mix of anthropological, historical, and literary sources to sift through in order to describe the historic Jesus.(Crossan Historical, xxviii-xxix.) On top of which there are two-thousand years of tradition and present day oppositional snow also wrapped around those little flakes of history.
End Notes:
1. Paul’s letters are not only theological, but he rarely reports historic events about Jesus. Moreover he had no first hand knowledge of the historic Jesus.
The works I have cited in the parethesis are:
-Patterson, Stephen, The God of Jesus, Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, (1998), 63.
-Patterson, Stephen, Lectures in Biblical Studies III, Eden Seminiary Fall 2005.
-Crossan, John Dominic, The Birth of Christianity, San Francisco: HarperSanFranciso, (1998), 152-159.
-Crossan, John Dominic, The Historical Jesus, San Francisco: HarperSanFranciso, (1992), 43-71.
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