SOURCE CRITICISM IN THE SEARCH FOR THE HISTORICAL JESUS

A Paper

Submitted to Dr. Peter Kendrick

of the

New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Course

Systematic Theology I: THEO5300

In the division of Christian Theology

Christopher C. Robinson

B.S., Leavell College, 2008

November 8, 2010

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Introduction

Who was Jesus Christ? This question has been an important one for thousands of years.

For orthodox Christians he is not only the founder of a religion but God incarnate and the only

hope of the world. Others see him as a great teacher, a prophet, a mythological figure, or even a

fraud. The answer to just who Jesus was is important to everyone because whoever he was he

arguably influenced the world more than any other single human being. His followers grew

from a tiny group in an already small Judaism into the massive, history shaping religion that is

Christianity. Historians long divided time by the year he was born and 2,000 years after his

death people still worship him as God. This Jesus that they call Christ is a figure worth

understanding regardless of one’s religious convictions.

For Christians, understanding who Jesus was is even more important. Christians claim

Jesus as their lord and savior. If Jesus is one’s lord then knowing what Jesus taught matters

quite a bit. If Jesus is one’s savior then his existence is of the utmost importance. There has been

much debate about who Jesus was and what he was about. Scholars have searched for the

“historical Jesus” in an attempt to describe just who Jesus the man who walked on the earth

was. Atheists, agnostics, and Christians alike have undertaken the task of describing what the

life and teachings of the Jesus from history must have been like. Within Christianity today, the

search for the historical Jesus is primarily conducted by attempting to examine the Gospels—the

stories of Jesus’ life and teachings found in the Bible—in order to determine which parts of

these Gospels portray an accurate picture of the Jesus from history. Using various methods of

higher textual criticism, christian scholars attempt to decide which passages in the Gospels

came from hypothetical pre-Gospel documents. These hypothetical reconstructions of pre-

Gospel documents are then used to decide which of the passages listed in the Gospels were

actually said by Jesus. This seems like a rather enlightening process but in fact it suffers from a

few fatal flaws that render the results useless. These flaws include: the blatant misuse of source

and form criticism, the naturalistic presupposition that moves scholars to use this criticism and

skews the results they achieve, and the complete incoherence that results when the “historical

Jesus” these methods find is placed within history. Modern scholars will never actually find the

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historical Jesus using higher textual criticism as it has been used in recent scholarship.

Delimit

This work will focus on the dangers and failures of higher textual criticism as it has been

applied in the recent quests for the historical Jesus. The purpose is to demonstrate the

unfeasibility of using source, form, and redaction criticism as they have recently been applied to

find an accurate picture of the historical Jesus. The legitimacy of higher criticism as a critical

tool will not be discussed outside the context of current historical Jesus scholarship; the focus is

not on the tool itself but on its use by modern scholars in the search for the historical Jesus. The

focus will be on scholars that would consider themselves within the realm of Christianity:

Bultmann, the Jesus Seminar, even N.T. Wright, and scholars in their likeness. The term “source

criticism” will be used in lieu of the unwieldy term higher textual criticism to refer to the use of

source, form, and redaction criticism throughout this work.1 Individual passages will not be

discussed as space limitations prevent the adequate examination of even one passage.

History of the Search for the Historical Jesus

The beginning of the modern day quest to find the historical Christ began in the 18th

century with a man named Hermann Reimarus.2 Reimarus argued that the aim of Jesus and his

disciples was to build a worldly kingdom and that the crucifixion was the result of a failed

hostile takeover of the Jewish leadership.3 The disciples of Jesus, having devoted too much

effort to the movement to abandon it, then fabricated the idea that Jesus had to die as a Savior

and wrote entire basis of Christianity back onto the life of Jesus in the form of the Gospels.4

Following Remairus there were quite a few attempts to combine rationalistic and religious

1 Both the unwieldy nature of the term higher textual criticism and the combinations of source, form, and redaction criticism that make up the majority of the historical Jesus research today make it useful to use this liberal definition of the term “source criticism.” No term exactly matches the efforts being made but form and redaction criticism as applied in the search for the historical Jesus fit under the general heading of attempting to find the original source. (The goal of the quest is to determine whether the original source was Jesus or not.) Unless specified “source criticism” will refer to the use of source, form, and redaction criticism in an attempt to discover the historical Jesus from within or behind the Gospels. For a discussion of the required overlap between disciplines see D.A. Carson, Collected Writings on Scripture (Wheaton: Crossway, 2010), 152-60.

2 Albert Schweitzer. The Quest for the Historical Jesus (New York: Collier Books, 1968), 13-14.

3 G.E. Lessing, Fragments from Reimarus (London: Weirtheimer, Lea, and Co, 1879), 27. 4 Ibid., 29.

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viewpoints to compose books about the life of Jesus. These varied in their opinions about the

historicity of the life of Jesus found in the Gospels, but in general, as time progressed these

writers were more aggressive in their attempts to prove that the miracles could be explained in

non-miraculous, rational ways.5 A change in the approach to finding the historical Jesus

occurred when David Strauss composed his own life of Jesus. First published in 1835 the book

worked from a completely different ideology than any previous author.6 Strauss, unlike those

before him, was willing to put the miraculous accounts described in the Gospels into the

category of myth.7 For Strauss, the previous attempts to explain the miracles as natural events

were misguided; the events themselves were written into the life of Jesus in order to portray

Jesus as the Jewish Messiah.8 According to Strauss, this happened primarily unconsciously on

the part of the authors but conscious addition of myth was also involved.9 Unlike many of his

predecessors, Strauss was not trying to explain the events in the Bible using his reason; he

doubted that the events in the Bible actually occurred. The previous debates had been primarily

about how to interpret the Gospels as they were written; Strauss attempted to interpret how the

Gospels were written based on his understanding of the events.

In the late eighteenth century the beginnings of the foundation for the modern search for

the historical Jesus were laid in the quest to solve a different problem. The majority of the

information available about the life of Jesus and his teaching comes from the four books in the

New Testament known as the Gospels. Entitled Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, these books

are all about the life of the same person so they understandably have many similarities. John is

the most dissimilar of the books; it uses different language and seems more focused on the

spiritual interpretation of the life of Jesus than the other three books. John’s dissimilarity is

made much more apparent because of how much the other three Gospels have in common. At

times they actually have exactly the same text and when they do not most of the material has a

5 Schweitzer, 9-11. 6 Ibid., 78. 7 David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus for the People (London: C. Green and son, 1879), 201.

8 Ibid., 206-7.

9 Ibid., 210.

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close parallel.10 The question of the source of the similarities and the differences between these

three Gospels has been called the “synoptic problem.” The study of this problem has a long

history; the most important development for the current discussion is the idea of a document

containing source material for the Gospels that existed before the Gospels and was a source the

Gospel writers used in their composition. Generally called Q, this hypothetical document was

used in the composition of the Gospels as they stand today. The existence of such a document is

used to explain the similarities between the Gospels and also allows room for the differences.11

A large part of the modern scholarship that goes on in the quest to find the real Jesus

occurs in the field of source criticism. Scholars compare the sayings of the Gospels and attempt

to reconstruct Q and sometimes other hypothetical pre-Gospel documents and decide which

document individual passages originated in.12 The passages attributed to these pre-Gospel

documents are treated as more likely to represent the historical Jesus. The Jesus Seminar took

this idea a step further and view the Gospels as secondhand sources and therefore as hearsay

evidence that cannot be taken at face value.13 Scholars have developed a multitude of different

criteria to decide which passages are actually from the historical Jesus. This search is not limited

to the canonical Gospels; modern scholars often include the Gospel of Thomas in their attempt

to reconstruct what Jesus said. This gnostic Gospel was discovered in 1945 and is interpreted by

the Jesus Seminar and others like them in the same way the canonical Gospels are, and is

treated as having just as much authority.14 The Gospel of John, due both to its difference from

the synoptics and Thomas and its focus on the miraculous, eschatological, and heavenly side of

Jesus’ teaching, is almost completely denied by the overwhelming majority of modern historical

10 D.A. Carson, Moo, J. Douglas, and Morris, Leon, An Introduction to the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), 19.

. 11 William R. Farmer, The Synoptic Problem: A Critical Analysis (New York: Macmillan Company,

1964), 36-47. 12 Robert W. Funk, Hoover, Roy W., and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the

Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan Company, 1993), 12. 13 Ibid., 16.

14 Ibid., 15.

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Jesus scholars.15

The Historical Jesus Today

So what is the consensus opinion among those searching for the historical Jesus today

about what Jesus taught about himself and his purpose? Even a cursory glance at the available

material will reveal that there is no consensus to be found. The quest to find out who Jesus was

has led people to “discover” a Jesus who was a Hebrew revolutionary trying to rule in

Jerusalem, a teacher who taught decidedly un-Jewish things, and a Jewish teacher who taught

in the context of first century Judaism.16 One main point of consensus among those within the

quest for the historical Jesus today is the acceptance that Jesus must be found outside the

description found in a plain reading of the Gospels; the vast majority of scholarship operates

within the realm of source criticism in an attempt to find a historical Jesus within or behind the

picture of Jesus presented in the Gospels.

The Real Jesus

The Problem with Source Criticism

The first step in understanding just what Jesus said in the light of the thousands of

voices claiming to have found the true historical Jesus is to examine modern source criticism

and the problems and dangers that come with it. Reading almost any text purporting to have

found the historical Jesus will reveal an assumption of mistrust of the text of the Bible. A variety

of levels of mistrust and reasons for mistrust will be found but at the heart of the question is the

assumption that one must examine the Gospels and other texts available and determine which

parts of them are true. The focus of this work is on the source critical method used by many

scholars. The assumption of mistrust behind the majority of the current use of this method

should be apparent; it is obvious that the assumption of an enterprise designed to find the

“truth behind” the Gospels is that the Gospels are not true. This highlights the fundamental

problem with source criticism as it is applied to the Gospels among historical Jesus scholars.

The only source of information we have about the details of Jesus life and ministry

15 Funk, Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, 10.

16 N.T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 4.

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comes from the Gospels.17 Supporting information can be found in extra-biblical sources but

nothing detailed enough to even begin to reconstruct who Jesus was has been found.

Information about Jesus is also present in the rest of the New Testament. This information is

focused primarily on the existence of the death and resurrection and their theological effects.

The purpose of these documents is not to recount the life or teachings of Jesus. A reconstruction

of the life of Jesus from these sources is not feasible. If the primary source of understanding

about who Jesus was comes from the Gospels and the Gospels cannot be trusted then it seems

that finding out who Jesus was is impossible. This is where source criticism enters the equation.

If the Gospels cannot be trusted as they are then perhaps some truth can be gleaned by

attempting to discover the form and contents of the pre-Gospel documents. This has led many,

Bultmann is the obvious example, to attempt to strip the Gospels of their religious nature which

is viewed as compromising their historicity.18 The validity of this attempt to remove religious

language will be discussed below. The focus here is on the practice of source criticism itself and

the difficulties that come with its current use when applied to the Gospels.

Source criticism in the Gospels is not an exact science. It cannot be. The only real

information available with regards to previous forms of the Gospels comes from within the

Gospels themselves. The imprecise nature of the entire proceeding can easily be seen in the fact

that the one almost undisputed pre-Gospel document, Q, has absolutely no physical evidence to

support it. 19 This document, accepted as one of the “pillars of scholarly wisdom” by the Jesus

Seminar who argue that “empirical, factual evidence” is the controlling factor in making

judgments, has only theoretical evidence to support it.20 Whether Q is real or not, this

acceptance demonstrates the large margin for error present within Gospel source criticism

today. The “sources” in question have never been seen, read, or decisively proven. The entire

17 Martin Kahler, The So-called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 48.

18 Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition, trans. John Marsh (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 370-1.

19 Funk, Hoover and the Jesus Seminar, 12-3. 20 Ibid., 13, 35.

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effort of the Jesus Seminar is to decide which parts of the Gospels they have and can read might

fit into the document they argue exists.21 The valid parts of source criticism, such as attempting

to understand the length of time that the Gospels stayed in oral form, how the theology of the

early church affected the Gospels and even what the first documents contained, suffer from this

same weakness. The only documents actually available are the Gospels in their final form.22

Barring the physical discovery of new manuscripts every source critical statement has its basis

only in the land of the hypothetical.

This is not to demolish source criticism as a practice but simply to point out that the

practice is not exact. This can be seen from the extreme disparity of viewpoints extolled by the

members of the Jesus Seminar.23 Scholars within a single group use the same method to confirm

viewpoints quite different from each other. One reason for this is the relative obscurity of the

very early Christian community. While there are descriptions in the Bible of a church primarily

made up of Hebrew Christians gradually adding more and more Gentile Christians this picture

does not serve the interests of many historical Jesus theories. In lieu of the acceptance of this

picture many different groups have been theorized in order to explain the Gospels. A quick

survey reveals arguments for the existence of a large group of very early Gnostic Christians, a

sharp distinction between Palestinian and Hellenistic Jewish Christians, and groups of

Christians containing various mixes of paganism, Gnosticism, Hellenism, and Judaism. 24 There

is not enough evidence to disprove these groups so their existence is often argued in order to

explain a particular passage that seems to appear a bit too early for the traditional

understanding of the spread of Christianity in order to comply with a scholar’s argument for

who Jesus was. This reliance on theoretical communities to explain the theoretical existence of

theoretical documents does not necessarily make those arguing incorrect. It does, however,

21 It should be noted that the existence of Q should in fact be a part of their argument instead of a pillar of scholarly wisdom; the seminar’s ‘pillars’ often have this problem.

22 John W. Drane, “Patters of Evangelization in Paul and Jesus,” in Jesus of Nazareth Lord and

Christ, ed. Joel B. Green and Max Turner (Grand Rapids: Eerdman, 1994), 282-3. 23 Alan H. Brehm, “Will the Real Jesus Please Stand? Evaluating the ‘Third Quest of the Historical

Jesus,’” Southwestern Journal of Theology 38 [June 2006]: 7-8, http://search.ebscohost.com/ login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN=ATLA0001014517&site=ehost-live [accessed 5 November 2010].

24 Martin Hengel, Between Jesus and Paul (London: Fortress Press, 1983), 33-5.

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demonstrate the questionable practices and imprecise nature of the entire endeavor. Using this

method to search for the historical Jesus could possibly result in finding him; it is not however

the best or only method and should a scholar guess correctly it will be rather difficult to prove

that his estimation is the correct one.

Objectively looking at the dubious nature of any results source criticism can claim brings

one back to the starting point. How can one know anything about the life of Jesus? The modern

source critic undermines the majority of the only texts used to know anything about Jesus. In

effect the entire modern search for the historical Jesus is about chipping away at the only

information available about him. The idea that a scholar 2,000 years removed from Jesus will be

able to read four descriptions of his life then decide that they cannot be accurate and present a

new edited version that accurately represents him is preposterous. No new information has

been added and only sources of dubious origins have been found. Even Jesus Seminar scholars

reject the majority of the new material from the gnostic Gospel of Thomas; it cannot be the

source of this new-found understanding of Jesus.25 Scholars who attempt to find Jesus by

eliminating the very Gospels that contain the vast majority of the available information about

him should quickly notice that the ground they are standing on is shaky. If the Gospels do not

represent an accurate picture of Jesus then it is highly unlikely that any picture of Jesus is

recoverable at all.

The Problem with Presuppositions

If it is true that the rejection of the Gospels as a reliable source makes it unlikely that any

accurate picture of the Jesus from history will be found then the next step must be to examine

the source of the presupposition that rejected the Gospels in the first place. What required the

use of source criticism? Why were the Gospels initially rejected? The assumption that requires

the use of source criticism to find the truth about Jesus is the same assumption that guarantees

that modern scholars will never use source criticism to find the historical Jesus.

This fundamental problem with the current state of Gospel source criticism has been

25 Robert J. Miller, “The Jesus Seminar and the Search for the Words of Jesus," Lexington Theological Quarterly 31, no. 2 [June 1996]: 111, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true &db=rfh&AN=ATLA0001020565&site=ehost-live [accessed 5 November 2010].

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present since long before source criticism came to be en vogue; the very beginning of the search

for the historical Jesus contained the same error that leads modern source critics astray.

Remairus, and the lives of Jesus that followed him, began with the presupposition that the

Gospel accounts were untrue. Remairus’ goal was to convince his readers that the Jesus

described in the Bible was not the historical Jesus. The beginning of the quest for the historical

Jesus was not an attempt to learn more about the Jesus of faith; it was an attempt to describe a

Jesus from history that would destroy the faith of those who accepted it.26 Some of the authors

of lives of Jesus after that may have had more admirable goals (Strauss for example) but they all

maintained the same presupposition: the Gospels cannot be an accurate record of events.27

This presupposition is held for various reasons but one reason seems to stand above the

others in that it is held almost universally among historical Jesus scholars: the vast majority of

scholars refuse to admit the possibility that the miraculous events described in the Bible actually

occurred. The search began due to the assumption that the Jesus of history could not walk on

water, could not rise from the dead, and most certainly was not actually God. It is no

coincidence that the eighteenth century brought the rise of this quest for the historical Jesus;

events in philosophy during this time brought about the worldview that made this quest seem

necessary. Empiricism, a worldview that values experience as the primary source of knowledge,

rose to prominence in the seventeenth century.28 While much of philosophy quickly moved on

to new ideals the idea of empiricism resonated enough with much of the thinking world to

leave a lasting impression. Ultimately anyone who does an experiment is operating from an

empiricist point of view. Statements like “I know gravity exists because every marble I have

ever let go of has fallen” exhibit the worldview of an empiricist. The source of knowledge is

experience. This eventually led to scientific empiricism and positivism, which stated that factual

knowledge must be connected to experience in a verifiable way.29 While there were many other

philosophical movements that combined to give Remairus and his contemporaries the idea that

26 Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 16.

27 Ibid., 87.

28 Dictionary of Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1942), s.v “Empiricists.” 29 Dictionary of Philosophy, s.v. “Scientific Empiricism,” “Positivism.”

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miracles could not have happened it seems that this reliance on experience is a key factor. This

acceptance of experience as the source of truth had obvious repercussions on the way 18th

century people read the Bible. An empiricist reads about water turning to wine and cannot find

an experience that supports this occurrence. Walking on water is not something people in the

eighteenth century could observe or experience. For Remairus, the fact that in his experience

axe heads do not float, people do not come back from the dead, and no one can walk on water

clearly makes the miracles in the Bible untrue. Remairus attempted to use this to disprove the

Bible and move people away from religion. Many of the rationalist lives of Jesus after him

attempted to find ways to interpret the miracles as less than miraculous so that the Bible would

line up with their experience. The Jesus Seminar continues this today. They consider themselves

critical scholars and define a critical scholar as some one who “make[s] empirical, factual

evidence—evidence open to confirmation by independent, neutral observers—the controlling

factor in historical judgments.”30 Other modern scholars attempt the same thing for basically the

same reason; different terminology is used but ultimately the reliance on what can be verified

by experience remains a major stumbling block for the acceptance of the Gospels. This

assumption that denies the Gospels also denies that there is anything miraculous or

supernatural about the historical Jesus. Notice that this first limitation on who Jesus might be—

that he is nothing but a normal man—did not come through searching for the historical Jesus

but was implicit in the assumption that moved scholars to search in the first place.

Another factor that keeps many in the search for the historical Jesus from believing that

the Jesus of the Gospels is the historical Jesus is the fact that the Bible is clearly a religious work.

The Gospels are clearly written by religious people for religious people. They are arranged in a

specific way in order to convey a decidedly religious message. Some scholars attempt to cut

through the religious language to find the historical Jesus using what is called the “criterion of

dissimilarity.” This criterion is used to argue that the passages that are not like the Jewish

heritage before Jesus and the Christian church after him are most likely to be actual

30 Funk, Hoover, and The Jesus seminar, 34.

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representations of Jesus.31 There are multiple problems with this argument, but for now, it will

suffice to point out the assumption that if something is religious, either Jewish or Christian, it is

necessarily not attributable to the historical Jesus. This disdain for religious language is

common to many historical Jesus scholars. Many argue that this religious bias stains any piece

of information the Bible has to offer.32 This perceived bias on the part of the biblical authors is

generally portrayed in contrast to the claimed objectivity of the researcher. The problem with

this is of course that the researcher, every researcher, operates from his or her own worldview,

has his or her own biases, and without fail will only see the world through his or her own eyes.

The “objectivity” of the researcher is only seen as objective by those who accept his

presuppositions. Does this mean that everyone’s opinion should be thrown out? Do our own

worldviews drown out the possibility that truth can be known? Should the Bible be discarded

simply because its authors operated from within their worldview? Surely not! Being biased one

way or the other has literally no bearing on the veracity of someone’s statements or opinions. A

pacifist who states “people are going to die if we go to war; we should not go to war” is no less

correct because he is biased. His bias should be taken into consideration when attempting to

understand his statement; his pacifism could lead him to support peace even when war will

yield less total loss of life. His bias may lead him to say something untrue but the veracity of his

statement is independent of his biases. In the same way the Gospel writers bias—their

allegiance to Christ and theological beliefs about Him—is not an indicator of the truth of their

words. A bias can move the researcher to question the validity of a text but the bias itself can

have no bearing on the results they find. The researcher should keep in mind his or her own

biases as well. The goal is not to free oneself of one’s worldview in order to be truly objective; it

is to recognize the bias and take it into account when interpreting results.33 The same truth must

be applied to understanding any text including the Bible. Removing anything written from a

biased perspective will not inherently reveal the truth in any statement, including those found

31 R.S. Barbour, Studies in Creative Criticism: Traditio-Historical Criticism of the Gospels (London: Talbot Press, 1972), 6.

32 Funk, Hoover, and the Jesus seminar, 7-10. 33 N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 88-91.

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in the Gospels.

Unfortunately, the bias that comes with the positivism associated with modern science

and therefore modern biblical scholarship includes the presupposition of empiricism. It is

therefore biased against the phenomenal, the eschatological, and the religious. It views itself as

objective and anything that disagrees with its views as biased by some other factor and

therefore untrue. This lack of intellectual honesty has led to the assumptions that come with the

positivist worldview being unquestioned and, as a result, any historical Jesus that is found must

be shaped to fit this ideology.

This is the source of a major flaw in the much of the quest for the historical Jesus; the

majority of scholars have already decided what sort of Jesus is acceptable to them. A good

example of this can be found in Jesus by Marcus Borg.34 In his attempt to describe what Jesus

actually said, Borg gives criterion to decide which parts of the Gospels are true.35 Borg’s two

main criterion are: multiple attestation and coherence. If a passage is present more than once in

the Gospels, especially if two of those statements are made independently of one another, and if

that passage is coherent with other statements attributed to Jesus then that passage has a strong

claim to be historical. 36 This seems to be a reasonably objective way to search for the true Jesus.

It does seem that a similar statement made by multiple, independent observers is more likely to

be true than a statement made by one person alone. Four eyewitnesses who without consulting

each other make the same claim about a robbery are less likely to be lying or wrong than one

eyewitness. Our judicial system would trust the witness of multiple, independent witnesses

over a single witness or multiple witnesses who had reason and opportunity to corroborate

their story. Unfortunately in addition to his reasonably objective criteria Borg also gives three

factors that should be used to interpret these criteria. Borg argues that if a passage does not

seem to line up with the environment it was written in, shows evidence of “a demonstrable

34 Marcus Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary (New York: HarperOne, 2006).

35 Borg uses the terminology pre-Easter Jesus because of the combination of adoptionism and

pure rejection of any Christological language that was not redacted into the text by later Christians he espouses in this book. For Borg, pre-Easter Jesus is the Jesus of history and post-Easter Jesus is the product of his followers mostly misguided beliefs. See Borg, 44-50.

36 Ibid., 70.

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tendency of the developing tradition,” or contains spectacular events then it is probably not

historical.37 The environment issue has some validity. If a Gospel recounted a story in which a

disciple approached Jesus and asked for his advice on whether to purchase a hybrid automobile

it would be fairly convincing evidence that the passage in question was edited in at a later date.

However, the criterion of environment must be used cautiously, because the environment in

which Jesus lived is both well known and unknown. There is a lot of information about it

available but to make definitive statements about what ideas and information Jesus did or did

not have access to is almost impossible. This idea also implicitly carries with it a denial of any

chance that Jesus possessed special knowledge. If Jesus had special knowledge, if prophecy is

possible, then a statement made referring to hybrid cars is not out of the question.38 In denying

“spectacular events” Borg denies anything miraculous or supernatural occurring in the Gospels.

This is evidence of the complete acceptance of positivism referenced above, but it is mentioned

here to point out that by arguing that any passage that contains a miracle is untrue Borg is

clearly paving the way to find the sort of Jesus he is looking for.

Borg’s statements go beyond just the rejection of the miraculous. When Borg says, “a

demonstrable tendency of the developing tradition,” he means any Christological reference,

anything that lines up with the early church’s teaching, and especially anything that might line

up with Paul.39 Following Borg’s guidelines, any passage that references Jesus as anything but

what Borg thinks Jesus was like must be eliminated; any hint of the Jesus described by the early

church was obviously placed there by the early church. It is impossible for Borg to examine the

scriptures using his methods and find anything but confirmation for his own opinion! The

exegetical impropriety involved should be obvious. Like the majority of those in the historical

Jesus movements, Borg takes a reasonably objective method and interprets the results

subjectively based on what can or cannot be true in his opinion. This same tendency can be

37 Borg, 71-3. 38 It is interesting that the opposite of this very idea is also used to disprove the Bible. Biblical

authors, writing in their context, that refer to a morning star and an evening star, to the sun rising and setting or who approximate pi as 3 are used as evidence that the Bible is not true. According to Borg’s ideas these statements are evidence that it is!

39 Ibid., 71.

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found in the Jesus Seminar proper. They vote on which passages did or did not come from Jesus

using a system of colored beads. A red bead means a passage did come from Jesus, pink means

it probably came from Jesus, gray means that the ideas may have come from Jesus but he

probably did not say it, and black means that neither the statement nor the idea behind it came

from Jesus.40 This ends in the same result that Borg’s plan does; the Seminar will undoubtedly

find a Jesus that is identical to the idea of Jesus that the majority of its members are looking

for.41

Herein lies the problem with the current movement in the search for the historical Jesus.

This “search” was over before it started. The people involved decided what Jesus they were

looking for and then used source criticism as a vehicle to cut out any evidence that did not

support their pre-existing idea. The idea of the criterion of dissimilarity is a great example. In

order to use this method to determine what Jesus said one must first eliminate all references

that are particularly Jewish, and then eliminate all references that are particularly Christian.

What is left after this process is the historical Jesus. Unfortunately, adherents to the criterion of

dissimilarity never admit the possibility that Jesus could perhaps have been Jewish or Christian.

The Jesus they find is necessarily neither Jewish nor Christian because they start with the

assumption that he cannot be either. They search for a non-religious Jesus and they find him.42

Scholars look for and find a Jesus who is just an image of their own ideals.43 Even Schweitzer, a

major player in the historical Jesus quest, recognized that the result of the majority of inquiries

40 Funk, Hoover, and The Jesus seminar, 36-7. 41 The results are actually weighted towards the negative however. A 53% vote for red and pink

can result in a gray compromise. See N.T. Wright, “The Five Gospels but no Gospel: Jesus and the Seminar,” in Authenticating the Activities of Jesus, ed. Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans (Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 1999) 83–120.

42 This tendency to find the Jesus we want to find applies not just to historical Jesus scholars,

however. Borg and others are right to question the many orthodox Christians who have looked for and found a Jesus who condones their wealth, laziness, and immorality. Within orthodoxy this is often done with creative hermeneutics instead of textual criticism. Christians have made many fantastical hermeneutical leaps in order to avoid taking Jesus at his word. In this respect many within the historical Jesus movement (e.g. Borg) have a better understanding of and willingness to follow Jesus’ teachings than many people who would claim to be “people of the Book.”

43 Thomas Scott Caulley, “What’s Right with the Jesus Seminar?” Resoration Quarterly 40, no. 4

[January 1998]: 238-318, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=rfh&AN= ATLA0001002523&site=ehost-live [accessed 20 October 2010].

15

into the historical Jesus found nothing more than a projection of the person searching.44 Surely

this is not the path to finding the Jesus from history.

The Discontinuity of a Jesus who was not Christ

Another major flaw in the current application of source criticism to the Gospels in the

search for the historical Jesus is the huge gap it leaves between the Jesus of history and his

followers. If Jesus did not claim to be God, did not teach most of the things that he taught, and

did not rise from the dead then by what phenomenon did Christianity get its roots? This

question is important for any evaluation of source criticism in the search for the historical Jesus

and is particularly important given the broader definition of source criticism being used in this

work. If it is assumed that the early church redacted the phenomenal back into the Gospels, it

must be explained how the early church first came to believe that Jesus was God, did miracles,

and thought of himself as the Messiah. This is a major question that cannot be glossed over.

Very, very early Christians were worshipping Jesus as God. Scholars may try to write Paul off

by arguing that his teachings do not represent Christ but they still have to deal with how to get

from their view of what Jesus was about and the faith Paul and other early Christians

expounded in Jesus as the Christ. Even if it is accepted that Paul’s letters are not authoritative

they surely describe a fairly developed Christological worldview that was active relatively soon

after the death of Christ.45 The source critic must seek to find the Sitz im Leben—the situation in

the lives of the authors—that led to the composition of both the original pre-Gospel documents

and all four finished Gospels that fits with the Jesus he or she expounds.46 In the case of much of

the quest for the historical Jesus such a Sitz im Leben did not exist.

There is much evidence to support this early Christology and the rapid expansion of the

Christian faith. Jesus’ death occurred sometime in the early thirties. Paul’s conversion has been

dated as sometime between AD thirty-two and thirty-four and the Apostolic Council at

Jerusalem occurred around AD forty-eight. Paul’s letters were being composed throughout the

44 Schweitzer, 10. 45 D.A. Carson, Moo, J. Douglas, and Morris, Leon, An Introduction to the New Testament (Grand

Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), 242, 282, 294, 309, 322. 46 Vincent Taylor, The Formation of the Gospel Tradition (London: Macmillan, 1964), 27.

16

sixties and the years surrounding them. These dates are fairly widely accepted given a variance

of a few years. This places the fully developed Christology present in Paul’s letters only twenty

years after the death of Christ. This becomes even more problematic for those who argue a huge

gap between Christ and Paul given the fact that Paul’s missionary visits to these churches

occurred before his letters. In his letters Paul presupposes Christological terms and ideas even

as he clarifies them. It took less than twenty years for this fully developed Christology to come

into being and be spread across a fairly wide geographical area.47 This Christology was not just

attributable to Paul, as the church in Rome at the time Romans was written was not started and

had not been visited by Paul.48 Extra-biblical evidence for the early spread of this Christology

abounds. Polycarp claimed to have been a Christian since AD seventy.49 Pliny, a pagan Roman

governor, knew that Christians worshipped Christ as if he was a god in the very early part of

the second century.50 How this widespread religion based on Christ came into existence so

quickly is a question that must be answered by anyone who rejects the orthodox interpretation

of the Gospels in their quest for the historical Jesus.

There are various opinions about how this might have occurred. Remairus argued that

Jesus crucifixion was the result of a failed attempt to take over Jerusalem and that his disciples

fabricated the resurrection and then wrote the Gospels to support the lie that Jesus had been

working for a different kind of kingdom all along.51 Evan Fales, an atheist thinker, would argue

that the Gospels were written as mythology—that the original writers did not intend for the

stories to be understood literally— and as the story came to be accepted as true people’s

devotion to it increased until it became the religion known as Christianity today.52 This and

other arguments based on an intentional lie hold little weight however because of the

47 Hengel, 31.

48 Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 2-3. 49 Wright, New Testament and the People of God, 348. 50 Pliny Letters 10.97. 51 Lessing, 27-29. 52 Evan Fales, “Taming the Tehom: The Sign of Jonah in Matthew,” in The Empty Tomb: Jesus

Beyond the Grave, ed. Robert M. Price and Lowder, Jeffery Jay (New York: Prometheus, 2005), 311.

17

persecution Christians faced quite early in their existence.53 That the apostles would refuse to

recant of the lie they made up in the face of death is simply not reasonable. It is also

unreasonable that the Gospels openly composed and treated as a myth would so quickly be

treated as true. Neither explanation deals with the obviously altered lives depicted in the New

Testament and in extra-biblical literature or the rapid spread of Christology presented as truth.

The growth of the scripture from a myth into acceptance as truth can explain the actions of

Christians hundreds of years after Christ but not those responsible for the creation of the

supposed myth. Source critics must completely ignore the presence of eyewitnesses to the life,

ministry, and death of Jesus when they argue that it was completely fabricated or that the

Christology that developed was not even remotely representative of the Christ these witnesses

saw. The disciples who walked with Jesus during his life were not immediately taken to heaven.

They lived on in the Christian community and were a part of the formation of the Christology

that is argued to have been antithetical to the actual teachings of Jesus. It seems quite unlikely

that none of them would have spoken up when lies were being spread about the person they

served and eventually died for.54

Other explanations for the rapid development of this Christology rely on theoretical

groups of early Christians who developed, agreed upon, and expounded their views and

eventually won the day. This is sometimes referred to as a pre-Pauline tradition; scholars

attempt to demonstrate that Paul actually drew on a tradition before him.55 This explains very

little and does not actually provide support for those arguing a break between Jesus the man

and the Christ of Paul. It explains little because it simply moves the same argument back a step

and it actually provides support for an orthodox interpretation because it moves the

development of this Christology closer to the date of Jesus’ death, making it less likely that it

was unrelated to the Jesus of history. A viable explanation for a complete dichotomy between

Jesus and the church after him has not been offered.

53 Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity: The First Five Centuries (London: Eyre & Spottiswood, 1939), 9.

54 Vincent Taylor, 41-3. 55 Hengel, 48.

18

The evidence actually works in favor of a more orthodox interpretation. A continuous

development of the perception of Jesus is much more likely than a discontinuous one. A

complete break between Jesus and the movement attributed to him is less plausible than a

continuity in thought.56 Putting this concept in a modern context may help explain the absurd

lengths scholars have gone to in an attempt to disprove the Jesus from Christian tradition. If

four biographies of some theoretical person were found that seemed to be written in order to

convince the reader that the person was about idea X, and then some writings of people who

claimed to be disciples of this person were found that claimed that the person was about X and

expounded on what he meant in his teaching, then the logical conclusion would be that the

person in question actually was about X. This would not be proof that X was true, but simply

that the person in question likely talked about X. In this context, historical Jesus scholars would

attempt to argue that the person was not about X but instead the entire idea of X was created by

his followers. It is possible that this could happen, but it is much more likely that the stated facts

are true. In any case the burden of proof lies on the person arguing that the most likely

conclusion cannot in fact be true. Birger Gerhardsson described this well, “The high Christology

cannot be disconnected from the impression made by Jesus on his disciples, and furthermore it

must have some original connection with Jesus’ own view of his work, of his position, and of

himself. The opinion expressed by so many scholars, that the Christology of the N.T. is

essentially a creation of the young Church, is an intelligent thesis, but historically most

improbable.”57 Indeed it is more likely that the Gospels represent Jesus more or less accurately

and that the tradition that arose afterwards actually stemmed from him than that there was a

complete dichotomy between Jesus the person and the tradition that arose regarding him.

The problem of discontinuity applies not only in the tradition moving from Jesus to his

followers but also in the followers supposed redacting of later theological elements back onto

the Gospels. The early church faced quite a few problems in its first fifty years. Paul’s writings

56 Aloys Grillemier, S.J., Christ in Christian Tradition: From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon, trans. J. S. Bowden (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964), 5.

57 Birger Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabinnic

Judaism and Early Christianity (Copenhagen: Enjar Munksgaard, 1961), 325.

19

reference struggles with the Gentile mission, with circumcision, with Gnosticism, and quite a

few other problems.58 There is no evidence of these problems in the Gospels. Even Bultmann,

who argues that the Gospels are almost completely a product of later tradition, finds it

noteworthy that there are no evidences of answers to the problems the early church faced

within the Gospels.59 If the Gospels were being composed and shaped to suit the needs of the

early church throughout the entire first century then some explanation must be made as to why

no references to the actual needs of the church were included.60

There are many problems that stem from even a cursory evaluation of the Sitz im Leben

that would lead to the creation of the Gospels as a whole. If the Gospels were written with no

claim to historical accuracy then it seems odd that the early church made no attempt to portray

its founders in a positive light. The disciples of Jesus seem confused, mistaken, and off base

throughout the Gospel narratives. If these accounts are fiction then why would the authors not

choose to portray the heroes of the faith in a more positive light? If the historicity of Jesus was

not important then why would the Gospels contain so much historical narrative? If the words of

Jesus could be altered to convey the message needed then why were they not altered to combat

the heresies and problems the church was dealing with at the time? It is highly unlikely that

Christians who were simply creating the Gospels with little concern for historical accuracy

would create the Gospels in their current form. It is difficult to construct a situation that leads

people to create the Gospels as a myth about the founder of their religion that does not address

their problems but does address problems not relevant to their day, that is written as a history

but composed with little regard to history, and that describes the heroes of the faith as

bumbling idiots. It is impossible to find in history a people who would want or need such a

document; it seems just as likely that the existence of such a people may be the real myth.61

58Craig A. Evans, Fabricating Jesus (Downers Grove: Intervarsity, 2006), 234. 59 Rudolph Bultmann,”The Study of the Synoptic Gospels,” in Form Criticism: Two Essays on New

Testament Research (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), 16. 60 Wright,The New Testament and the People of God, 421.

61 Ibid., 435.

20

Conclusion

Source criticism itself is not the reason historical Jesus scholars will not find the Jesus of

history with their current methods. It is simply a method that can be used to better understand

a text. It is not the method used that prevents modern scholars from finding Jesus; it is the

presuppositions that led scholars to apply the method. The entire search for the historical Jesus

is based on the assumption that if there is a God he cannot act in ways that the scholar cannot

prove empirically. Assuming that nothing supernatural, nothing Messianic, nothing religious

that is contained within the Gospels could possibly originate with Jesus leads one to find a

completely natural, un-Messianic, unreligious Jesus. This is the only Jesus scholars in the search

for the historical Jesus are willing to find. No one who attempts to find an unreligious,

unmiraculous, completely secular Jesus from the completely religious and miraculous writings

about him will succeed. If it is true that the Gospels do not convey Jesus as he was then finding

an accurate picture of him is no longer possible. There is no reason to make this conclusion,

however. The simple answer, the answer that does not require conspiracy theories or

hypothetical documents, is that the Gospels as they are present an accurate picture of the Jesus

from history. Accepting this may require the submitssion of one’s dedication to empiricism to

faith, but it does not require the complete rejection of rationality or logic in general. Once one

accepts that there is or even that there may be a God who can act within history, the miraculous

no longer needs a rational explanation and Jesus’ claim to be the Christ no longer needs to be

rejected. The Gospels once again become the source for information about Jesus, and finding

“the historical Jesus” requires simply reading the stories about his life. No amount of dissecting

the Gospels will lead to an accurate understanding of Jesus Christ. When faced with a choice

between an unknowable Jesus and the Jesus described in the Gospels, the best choice is the one

Christians have made for centuries: to take the Gospels at their word and believe that Jesus was

who he said he was.

21

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