The link between the Gospel of Mark and Peter is a very old one. It takes us all the way back to Papias, the Bishop of Hierapolis (c. 60-130 CE). According to Papias, Mark was the hermeneutés – a ‘translator’ or ‘interpreter’ – of Peter in Rome. Mark wrote down some of the things the Lord said or did, but ‘not in order’.1

Yet in modern scholarship, this tradition tends to raise the eyebrows of biblical critics.

One cause for suspicion is Papias himself. While Papias claims possession of a chain of living memory, some of the traditions he records are highly unusual in character. For instance, in one place, he records a comically gruesome version of Judas’ end. In another, he says that Matthew wrote down the logia of the Lord in Aramaic or Hebrew – but this bears little resemblance to the Greek gospel we call ‘Matthew’ today.

Yet there is another set of reasons why scholars are critical of Peter’s connection to Mark: namely, that there is nothing particularly Petrine about the gospel. The text doesn’t bear the hallmarks of eyewitness testimony – which we might expect from an ancient biography. And it consistently casts Peter in highly unflattering terms.

In this post, it is this second set of objections to Papias’ tradition that I want to briefly consider. While they are often raised as ‘internal evidence’ against the Peter-Mark connection, my doctoral supervisor, Professor Helen Bond, once wrote an interesting book chapter which challenges them. Here, I highlight three arguments from that essay, “Is Peter Behind Mark’s Gospel?” – which is well worth a read!2

1. Social & Personal Memory

The first common objection to the idea that Peter is behind Mark is that very little in the Gospel stands out as vivid, eyewitness memory. Joel Marcus, for example, notes that many of the stories lack the kind of detail expected of a participant.3

Read more

From Pliny the Younger’s letters to the Emperor Trajan to the scathing critique of Christianity by the philosopher Celsus, we will see how this strange, fledgling sect was seen by its elite, literary critics – and why they took the time to respond to it.

1. Pliny the Younger

Our first writer is the Roman lawyer, Pliny the Younger, who was the governor of Bithynia-Pontus (in modern-day Turkey) from around 110-113 CE.

While he was governor, Pliny wrote to the Emperor Trajan to work out what to do with a frustrating group he calls Christiani. The full correspondence is too long to be cited here.1 Yet it contains a wealth of fascinating information about Christianity.

Consider, for example, the question of Christian praxis. When Pliny came across the Christiani, he interrogated them, and they told him about what they got up to:

‘…. they were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, and of singing in alternate verses a hymn to Christ as to a god, and of binding themselves by a solemn oath, not to wicked deeds, but never to commit any fraud, theft, or adultery, never to falsify their word, nor to deny a pledge when they were called upon to deliver it up. After this it was their custom to separate, and then reassemble to partake of food—but food of an ordinary and innocent kind.’

Although Pliny is writing in the 110s CE, he claims to be basing this information on interviews from ex-Christians who had recanted up to twenty years ago. It is fascinating, then, that this letter may give us a glimpse into first-century Christianity.

Their practices seem to tally well with what we know from early Christian literature: the meeting of a ‘fixed day’ may refer to Sunday, the ‘Lord’s day’, while the resumption of a communal meal could refer to the eucharist, which in its earliest moments, took the form of a more ordinary meal rather than a ritual one.2

Most fascinating of all, Pliny says that they were in the habit of ‘singing in alternate verses a hymn to Christ as to a god.’ The fact that the Christians sing hymns to Christ ‘as though (quasi) to a god’ seems to imply that Christ was a mortal who had assumed divine status. If not, Pliny would have written, ‘Christos deo’: to the god Christ.3

Sharing a communal meal, singing a religious hymn, making vows to live decently: none of this seems out of line with ancient Roman religious practice.

What then was Pliny’s problem with these Christians, so much so that he tortured them and – in some cases – put them to death? We get to the nub of Pliny’s political concerns towards the end of his letter:

‘[With the return of Christians to Roman religion it] is certain at least that the temples, which had almost become deserted, are now beginning to be visited again; and the sacred rites, after a long interlude, are again being revived. There is a general demand for sacrificial animals, for which up to now only rarely were purchasers found. From this it is easy to imagine that a multitude of people may be reclaimed from this error, if a door is left open for them to change their minds.’

Here we gather that Pliny’s problem is not only religious, but economic. It is not merely that Christian converts stopped attending the Temple, they have also stopped eating meat sacrificed to idols. Given that a ‘multitude of people’ were becoming Christians – in Pliny’s own words, in both ‘the villages and cities’ – this would have presented a serious problem for Pliny’s non-Christian populace.

The Temples were a significant hub of economic activity, supplying work for priests and lay-people alike. Local craftsmen made votive offerings and images of the gods, offered in thanksgiving in exchange for favours, and farmers sold animals for ritual sacrifices. By refusing to partake in this activity, Christians posed a serious threat.

That this was not an isolated complaint is confirmed by a parallel in Acts 19. Further south in Ephesus, there was a riot when the silversmith and idol maker, Demetrius, was put out of business by the missionary work of Paul. In that scene, the two essential concerns are the same here: the fact that Artemis (or the Roman gods) will not be worshipped, and that as a result the wealth of the people will vanish.

Trajan’s reply to Pliny confirms that Christiani were perceived as a threat. He commended Pliny’s course of action: they should not be searched out, and should be given a chance to repent (by worshipping the Roman gods again). But for any Christians who were denounced and refuse to repent, they should be put to death.

2. Tacitus

Our second reference to early Christianity comes from Pliny’s friend, Tacitus. Among his many writings, Tacitus is well-known for his Annals, which documents the rise (and fall) of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, which came to an end with Emperor Nero.

It is in the final, fifteenth book of the Annals that we find a reference both to Christianity and Christus. There, Tacitus is explaining how the Emperor Nero scapegoated a group called Christians for starting the fire of Rome:

‘Therefore, to squelch the rumor, Nero supplied (as culprits) and punished in the most extraordinary fashion those hated for their vice, whom the crowd called “Christians.” Christus, the author of their name, had suffered the death penalty during the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate. The pernicious superstition was checked for a time, only to break out once more, not merely in Judea, the origin of the evil, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible and shameful collect and are practiced… ’ (Annals 15.44)

Despite doubts in some quarters, the passage is generally considered authentic, in part due to the negative light in which Christianity is cast.4 Tacitus spares no words in describing Christianity: it is “pernicious superstition”, an "evil”, Christians are “hated for their vice” and their faith took hold where all shameful things do: Rome.

As punishment for their ‘crime’, Nero had Christians ripped apart by dogs and set on fire upon crosses. This event was the most severe persecution Christians had faced up until this point in the Roman Empire. Its memory may explain why Mark – often thought to be a ‘Roman’ gospel – focuses so heavily on preparing its readers for persecution, and why 1 Clement recounts recent ‘calamities’.6

3. Suetonius

One of the most enigmatic and contested sources for Jesus outside the Bible is found in the Roman historian, Gaius Suetonius (c. 69-122 CE). Best known for his collection, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Suetonius’ biography of the Emperor Caligula contains what is widely understood as a cryptic reference to Christ:

‘Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome’ (Claudius, 25).

This passage immediately raises questions. Who is this ‘Chrestus’? And what were these disturbances, which led to an expulsion of Jews from Rome in 49 CE?

For many scholars, Suetonius has made a two-fold blunder: ‘Chrestus’ is a misspelling of ‘Christus’, and it was his followers, not Chrestus, who were personally responsible for the troubles. Suetonius was referring to Jesus, but the fact that he has such a poor knowledge of these events only attests to how little he knew about him.

Read more

Christian tradition identified him as ‘Luke the beloved physician’, a Gentile travelling companion of Paul mentioned in the Pauline corpus.2 Yet by the end of the twentieth century, scholars were about “evenly divided” on whether this tradition was correct.3

In this piece, I give a brief introduction to the scholarly discussion. Why do many scholars reject Lukan authorship today, and how do others maintain it?

Where did ‘Luke’ come from?

It is generally accepted that Luke’s name was not originally attached to the gospel. As I have explained elsewhere, the earliest writings were formally anonymous. They appear to have received their uniform titles – ‘The Gospel According to X’ – sometime in the middle to late second century, when they came together as a fourfold collection.

The first unambiguous attestation to Luke as the author of Luke-Acts is Irenaeus (c. 180 CE), perhaps followed shortly afterwards by the Muratorian Canon. Thus, the question is whether Irenaeus (or his source) had good reason to assign the gospel and Acts to Luke, or whether Luke was inferred or even invented as their author.

A point raised in favour of Lukan authorship is that Luke was a relatively obscure figure.4 If the early Church was going to invent an author of these works, it would have selected an apostle or a more prominent follower of Jesus’ disciples. Moreover, while Luke-Acts is formally anonymous, it was surely not anonymous to its recipient, ‘the most excellent Theophilus.’ Taking Theophilus to be a real person,5 how could the author of such a major theological work have been lost to Church memory?

While Irenaeus is the first to mention Luke by name, scholars have sometimes found an earlier allusion to Luke in the writings of Justin Martyr (c. 150 CE). In his Dialogue with Trypho, Justin refers to the gospels as ‘the memoirs of the apostles and those who followed them’ (103). This is sometimes taken to mean that Justin was aware of our four named evangelists: ‘the apostles’ are Matthew and John and ‘those who followed them’ are Mark (who followed Peter) and Luke (who followed Paul).6

On the other hand, critics of Lukan authorship have emphasised that it is not until Irenaeus that we have an explicit attribution of the gospel to Luke. Prior to Irenaeus, Luke is never named. This makes his attribution in Irenaeus quite different to Mark, Matthew and John, who do appear at least as named figures in earlier works.

Get 25% off for 1 year

Also noteworthy is the fact that Marcion, the arch-heretic who knew and used Luke, did not attribute the book to our familiar evangelist (Tertullian, Marc. 2.4.3). This is an intriguing silence, since Marcion cited from two texts which mention Luke: Colossians and Philemon. If Marcion knew that Luke was the author of his favourite Gospel, this would have lent his writing a powerful apostolic authority.7

For the critic of Lukan authorship, the question as to why Irenaeus thought Luke wrote Luke-Acts can be answered. In the second half of Acts, a number of passages are written from the perspective of a travelling companion of Paul. Thus, it was possible for Irenaeus (or his source) to infer that Luke wrote the text, since Luke is mentioned repeatedly in the Pauline corpus (Col 4:14; Phlm 2:4; cf. 2 Tim 4:11).

For the critical scholar, however, there is cause to doubt that this information is historically reliable. Only one of the texts which mention Luke (Philemon) is widely considered to be an authentically Pauline. Moreover, we know that Irenaeus was not always correct about the authorship of the gospels. He is generally considered mistaken, for example, in thinking that Matthew wrote the Gospel of Matthew.

The ‘We’ Passages in Acts

Putting to one side the question of whether Luke was known by the early Church as the author of Luke-Acts, we must turn to the central piece of internal evidence: the use of the first-person plural (“we”) at several points in the second half of Acts.8

From Irenaeus to modern times, these “we” passages have often been taken to mean that the author was himself a travelling companion of Paul and a witness to the events narrated. First-person claims are not unusual in ancient historiography, and are generally (but not always) accepted as genuine where they are found.9 The we-passages also prove some of the most detailed, which coheres with an eyewitness claim.

Read more

Online, a content machine of apologetics and counter-apologetics dispenses easy answers to these questions. The crudest apologists assure us that the gospels are four sources close up to the facts, capturing the past as it actually played out. Meanwhile, their sceptical counterparts inform audiences that the gospels bear almost no connection to the historical Jesus – if there was a historical Jesus at all.

In the view of mainstream critical scholarship, however, neither party is to be fully trusted. It is not that the question of historical reliability is of no interest. The study of the historical Jesus is – in the words of one Oxford historian – “perhaps the most thorough and sophisticated analysis of any set of texts in the history of human thought.”1 Rather, it is that the sources do not afford us an easy ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

In this piece, I hope to sketch why this is. Why is the gospels’ historicity so difficult to determine? And why is it unlikely that this debate is soon to be settled?

#1 The Gospels’ uncertain provenance

When ascertaining the reliability of an ancient source, it is generally helpful to know something about their provenance: who wrote the texts, where and when. Which brings us to our first difficulty in assessing the gospels’ reliability: the gospels’ provenance is highly contested.

Traditionally, the titles of the gospels are attributed to Matthew and John (eyewitnesses and disciples of Jesus) and Mark and Luke (followers of eyewitnesses). Yet as I have unpacked elsewhere, there are good reasons to think that the gospels were originally anonymous writings, like many Jewish texts.

In the view of most scholars today, these titles were attached later, when the gospels came together as a four-fold collection. This would explain why they each have the same formulaic title – ‘The Gospel according to X’ – and why they are not referred to as the work of a particular disciple until Irenaeus in the late second century.

What then are we to make of the names we now find them? One early tradition, found in the writings of Papias, is that Mark knew Peter, and that Matthew composed something in Hebrew or Aramaic. Yet Matthew probably did not write our present Greek Gospel, and the Petrine association with Mark is similarly contested.

The situation with Luke is similarly muddied. The idea that Luke wrote his gospel finds no earlier attestation than Irenaeus, and we know that Marcion knew a version of the text without its traditional title. Many scholars now think that Luke the physician was inferred as the author of the text, since Acts has a number of ‘we’ passages in the second half of the book, and Luke was one of Paul’s companions.

Meanwhile, the author of John hides behind the moniker, ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’. Yet the quest for the beloved disciple has not yielded clear results. Though some think that an eyewitness stands behind the gospel, the fact that the sons of Zebedee are referred to in the narrative (21:2) makes its traditional attribution unlikely. Some scholars now think that the work’s authorship is deliberately obscure, or that the ‘beloved disciple’ functions as a literary device, not a historical figure.2

Other aspects of the gospels’ provenance are enigmatic. For example, the jury is still out on when and where the gospels emerged. Some common dates (70-110 CE) and locations recur in the literature. Mark, for example, is often said to have been written in Rome shortly after Jerusalem’s destruction. Yet it is difficult to pin the gospels to any specific place, and a minority of scholars prefer earlier dates.

I always keep in mind what a Professor once said to me regarding the gospels’ dating: that these really all are just guesses – our best attempt to work out what went on. Without a clearer image of the gospels’ provenance, we are not afforded some of the context about an author which we would like to gain insight into their reliability.

Get 25% off for 1 year

#2 The Gospels are ancient biographies

A second problem is that the gospels are ancient ‘lives’ (bíoi). For some scholars, this fact is somewhat consoling. Many ancient biographers saw their life-writing as something adjacent to history. This meant that they would not generally invent scenes, but relied upon source material to compose their biographies.

The difficulty is that biography was a fluid genre, perhaps especially prone to blur the lines between fact and fiction. Some biographies, such as the Life of Aesop, written around the time of the Gospels in a similar style, were almost entirely fictional. Though drawing upon earlier material and believed to reflect a historical figure, the narrative itself was fictional and bore little connection to the actual past.

The gospels are not about a character of the mythical past, and claim a more direct connection to history (see Lk. 1:1-4). Yet knowing this about their genre tells us little about their historicity, for the value of ancient biographies, like modern ones, often varied. A classicist today might recognise the general value of Plutarch’s Cicero, while also cataloguing a host of errors –3 biography does not equate to historicity.

Perhaps more problematically, historically-minded biographers often worked with different methods of composition to their modern counterparts. Consider this summary of Tomas Hägg, a leading classical scholar of ancient biography:

“Ancient life-writers did not encounter among their contemporaries the same demands for documentary truth as their modern colleagues do, nor did for that matter ancient historiographers… Conversations are allowed to be fictitious, and insight is readily granted into the acting characters’ feelings, thoughts, and motives, as long as some kind of verisimilitude is maintained. The establishment of any form of higher truth – be it poetic, psychological, philosophical, or religious – overrules demands for the truth of facts.’4

As studies by classicist Christopher Pelling and New Testament scholar Michael Licona have demonstrated at length, biographers like Plutarch were trained to rework their sources, using a range of literary techniques.5 This should give us pause for thinking that what we have in the gospels is straightforward reportage of events as they actually occurred. Rather, what we often encounter is a curated representation of the past – a literary attempt to bring to life the character or éthos of an individual.

#3. The Gospels lack independent attestation

A further difficulty for assessing the gospels’ reliability is that they contain many events that are not independently corroborated. The historian is therefore left to work out whether any particular event is plausible – but doing so is not always clear cut.

Consider the custom of Pilate to release a prisoner at Passover. There is no independent attestation of this custom, and it seems highly unlikely for a number of reasons. Not only does it run up against Pilate’s cruel character in independent sources, it makes little sense to release an insurrectionist at one of the most politically fraught festivals of the year. That the rebel is called Barabbas (‘Son of a Father’) – even Jesus Barabbas in some manuscripts – seems to be the icing on the literary cake.

On the other hand, the event does not stretch the bounds of belief. For all his cruelty, we know that Pilate sometimes did make concessions to crowds. He was not stupid. If he knew that the crowds had turned against Jesus, he might have made a concession to them (whatever the reliability of the details.) Might this event be historical?

Or take another example: Jesus’ burial by Joseph of Arimathea. For some scholars, it seems quite clear that the story of burial is a fiction. It is more likely that Jesus was buried in a common grave than that Joseph – a member of the very group that condemned him to death – used his private wealth to honour a convicted criminal. That Paul mentions only that Jesus was ‘buried’ offers little confirmation of the tomb.

I understand this. Given that many crucifixion victims were not buried, it makes sense that Jesus could have met the same fate. But of course, the data we have suggest that he was an exception – and he was not the only exception. The heel-bone of a crucifixion victim named Jonathan has been preserved, precisely because he was buried in a tomb. There is also that obscurest of name, Joseph of Arimathea. Was it preserved precisely because he had done something exceptional for Jesus?

Perhaps one might think I am being too generous to the gospels. There are certainly events that are singularly attested and stretch credulity. A classical example is Matthew’s mass resurrection (27:52-53), where many saints rise from their tombs and come into Jerusalem. The problem is that this most marvellous of miracles is not once found in any other source. For this reason, quite apart from its miraculous nature, even many conservative-minded scholars explain it away as a literary device.

It should be noted, however, that historical biographies also contain events which lack independent attestation and are judged unreliable. This does not necessarily invalidate the overall portrait of the biographer. A wider range of factors have to be taken into account to determine a biographer’s overall reliability. Yet for the reasons I have outlined above – and continue to do so below – this task is a complex one.

#4 The Gospels are intertextual and theological works

Another hurdle in assessing the gospels’ reliability is that they are highly intertextual works. More so than other biographies, they allude to other stories in the Hebrew Bible and the pagan world. For example, Mark draws upon the Elijah-Elisha cycle in the presentation of Jesus’ miracles, while Matthew portrays Jesus as a New Moses.6 Some scholars also see echoes of Homer and pagan mythology in the gospel texts.

What are we to do with this? The answer is not at all obvious. On the one hand, some scholars would see biblical allusions in the gospels as ‘prophecy historicised’.7 The early Christians looked to the Jewish Scriptures to make sense of Jesus’ life, and then they created narratives from those scriptures. For example, just as Elisha fed one hundred people with loaves and bread, Jesus went further and fed five thousand.

I don’t find this account implausible. Presumably, the reading of the scriptures at least influenced the memory of Jesus. For instance, if Jesus had done some Elisha-like things, such as being engaged in a ministry of healing, is it that unlikely that this typology generated other Elisha-like events in the absence of historical data? We have examples of oral tradition moving towards this kind of idealisation.8 There is also evidence that Jews in Jesus’ time crafted characters and stories from scripture.9

Yet there is an alternative to the idea that the gospels are prophecy historicised: that they are ‘tradition scripturalised’.10 That is, the gospel writers drew upon scriptural language – the language most familiar to them – in describing the past. On this reading, scriptural language may have distorted the past, but it does not mean that the evangelists were simply weaving their material whole-cloth from scriptural scripts.

How are we to assess these competing models? We can look at examples one-by-one, but there is no straightforward method to determine which is at play. To take just one example, some will point to Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem as a contrivance designed to fulfil the prophecy of Micah 5:2. The Messiah needed to be born in Bethlehem, and Luke’s awkward census places him there. For others, Micah 5:2 was not read messianically, and Matthew reads Micah 5 messianically because Jesus was born there.

This intertextual problem is just one part of a wider theological one: the gospels are not disinterested texts, trying to chronicle the life of their teacher. They are theological works, written to believers, and devoted to their master, who they believe is alive. As a result, the selection and presentation of their materials are coloured not only by Jesus as a figure of the past, but by the Spirit at work in the Church.

This is seen most of all in John, whose teachings diverge quite sharply from the Synoptics, and whose Jesus serves as a mouthpiece for the evangelist. This is not unusual in ancient biography. Yet it does mean that parsing the teaching of Jesus from his later interpreters is made all the more difficult (if not entirely without hope.)

#5 The Gospels develop and contradict one another

Another difficulty in assessing the gospels concerns the way they are re-written. In our first and shortest gospel, Mark, we find a bare-bones story of Jesus. It begins with Jesus’ baptism by John and ends with an anticipated resurrection appearance. Yet the later evangelists, clearly not quite content with this story, develop it in various ways: they add birth stories, prolegomena and resurrection appearances, and much else.

In the case of John, the overall portrait of Jesus which emerges is quite unlike the earlier Synoptics. In John, Jesus does not speak in parables, does not perform exorcisms, and does not preach the Kingdom of God. The expectation of an imminent in-breaking of God in history is substituted with eternal life known here and now. John also contains a vast amount of material which is absent from the earlier sources. This raises the question: if John was simply narrating history, how was all of it missed?

Yet the developments within the synoptic gospels also raise questions. Consider the story of Jesus walking on water. In Mark, this story ends with the disciples’ hardness of heart, because they don’t understand him. This is a thread running through the gospel. In Matthew, however, the scene ends on a more positive note. Peter initially walks out on the water to Jesus, and the disciples worship Jesus as the Son of God.

How are to assess the development of this story – and others like it? Has Matthew drawn upon his own superior sources to narrate this fuller episode? Or is it more likely that he has freely adapted Mark’s version, finding it unsatisfactory that Mark’s episode ends with the disciples’ lack of faith? One can easily conjecture reasons for why Matthew would want to change Mark’s ending, but it is difficult to say for sure.

#6 The Gospels contain fantastical material

Here we come to the elephant in the room: the gospels contain much material which, to audiences ancient and modern, has a mythic or supernatural character. By some estimates, Mark alone narrates eighteen miracles, more than any comparable narrative in the Graeco-Roman world. What are we to do with this?

It is widely believed that there is good evidence that Jesus was known in his own time as a healer and exorcist. These conclusions are broadly accepted, for healings and exorcisms are attested cross-culturally, and our evidence is diverse. Some gospel material even points to Jesus cultivating a reputation as healer among his enemies.

The difficulty is that there are other events which are less widely attested: a virgin birth, transfiguration, miracles of extraordinary power over nature, and of course the resurrection. According to the historical principle of analogy – that our judgement of the past is based to some extent on our experience of the present – it is less clear to know what to do with these events, which are almost by definition rarities.

I have written on how the gospels’ infancy stories reflect the literary conventions of their time and face a number of historical challenges. I have also written on how much of the common apologetics for the resurrection is not wholly convincing.

Yet it must also be said that considerations of metaphysics come into play with all historiography – and differences of worldview inevitably affect the way one sees an event like the resurrection. Arguably, the Resurrection is simply not the sort of event that could be verified by secular history. And perhaps that is not a problem.11

#7 The Gospel materials are not easily probed

Our seventh difficulty in assessing the Gospels’ historicity is that we do not have good tools to recover their sources. In the past, it was often thought that a meticulous analysis of the ‘forms’ (sub-genres) and sources which comprise the gospels would allow us to peek behind the gospels to recover some of the earlier materials.

Yet today, these recovery projects are often seen as hopeful at best. It is no longer believed that by working back from putative laws governing the oral tradition that we can recover the earliest ‘form’ of a text. Meanwhile, hypothetical written sources such as a pre-Markan passion narrative or detailed constructions of the ‘Q’ source behind Matthew and Luke are themselves facing an increasing number of detractors.

There is also a problem with the material we do have. The building blocks of the gospels are chreiai, the ‘anecdotes’ we find in many ancient lives. Yet anecdotes are often wandering and their origins indeterminate. Where did these anecdotes come from and what were they doing prior to their inclusion in the gospels?

To help respond to this problem, scholars have formulated a number of ‘criteria of authenticity’, through which the gospel materials are sifted. Yet as I have outlined in a previous post, these criteria have not made Jesus research more objective, nor produced anything like a consensus. The oral period remains mysterious, and the ‘criteria’ devised to mine it are increasingly abandoned by scholars.

Are the Gospels Historically Reliable?

In asking whether the gospels are historically reliable, it is important to recognise that we are asking a particular question. We have not asked whether the gospels are true. They can be true in ways that do not satisfy our contemporary historical interests – for example, in expressing profound theological or mythological truths.

Insofar as historical truth is concerned, however, I have suggested that modern historians are faced with a set of challenges. These can be distilled into a single point: the gospels are so difficult to study because evidence about them is underdetermined. That is, one can formulate several theories which plausibly account for their data.

In the philosophy of science, the ‘underdetermination of the theory by the evidence’ is a familiar notion. It may be wise to take it to heart when studying the New Testament, too.12 Like putting together a jigsaw with many of the pieces no longer in the box, there will never be a completely satisfying solution to many questions we pose about the gospels. But if we are to make progress, we must recognise how little we know.

Thank you for reading!

This piece was an updated version of a piece I wrote last year. If you enjoyed it, you might like some of my other pieces which relate to the gospels’ historicity:

• Is the Gospel of John Historical?

• Can we Really Know what Jesus Said?

• Tom Holland on the Historical Jesus

I would love to know what topics you would like me to address on Behind the Gospels. If you have any ideas, drop them in the comments below!

Every so often, there is a fleeting glimpse into his wardrobe: the ‘edge’ of his cloak, the disciples’ gospel dress, his parodic rental of kingly robes. Yet when it comes to detailed description, almost everything is left to the imagination.

That is, until we come to one of the final scenes of the Fourth Gospel.

In John’s crucifixion, we are afforded an extended look at one of Jesus’ garments. Like the Synoptic Gospels - Matthew, Mark and Luke - John tells us that Jesus’ clothes were divided on the cross. But unlike the Synoptics, John unpacks this division:

‘Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took his clothes (ta himatia) and divided them into four parts, to every soldier a part, and the tunic (kai ton chitona). Now the coat was without seam, woven whole from the top down.’ (19:23)

What is this mysterious, seamless tunic? And why does John describe it in such detail?

The most immediate explanation is that John was soberly unpacking a biblical prophecy. In the Greek text of Psalm 22, which John cites a verse later, the righteous sufferer has his clothes (plural) divided and lots are cast for his (singular) garment (v.19).

It is true that this passage illustrates the fulfilment of scripture. Yet this motive alone does not explain why John has gone to such lengths in describing the garment. Nor does it explain what this special tunic might have evoked to his readers. In this piece, then, I want to take a closer look at the meaning of Jesus’ strangest garment.

A Symbol of Unity

One of the most ancient interpretations of the tunic was as a symbol of Church unity. Consider what Cyprian of Carthage has to say about the tunic:

‘… So truly because Christ’s people cannot be torn apart, his tunic, ‘woven without seam,’ and holding fast together, has not become divided amongst its owners. The description ‘unable to be split (united, linked together),’ reveals the concord that holds together the unity of our people who have put on Christ. By the sign and seal of the tunic Christ has declared the unity of his Church.’ (De Unitate, Ch. 7.)

Despite centuries of this reading, modern commentators are often quick to dismiss it. They note that “John makes nothing of this detail and neither should we”1 and often point out that this alleged symbol of unity is ultimately taken away from Jesus.2

Yet I suspect that this reading has largely fallen out of favour in modern (Protestant) commentary due to its allegorical character. Leon Morris betrays this concern when he calls it a “trifle fanciful,” immediately drawing his readers’ attention to Cyril of Alexandria’s genuinely odd reading of the tunic as a symbol of the virgin birth.3

We should not be afraid, however, of reading the tunic symbolically. There are two other places in the gospel where John uses the term anõthen (‘from above’) and in both cases, it has both a literal and a symbolic meaning.4 This should prime us to see beyond the literal meaning of the seamless tunic towards its symbolic meaning.

Moreover, just because there are weak allegorical readings of the tunic does not mean that all such readings are wrong. In this instance, there are a number of reasons why the Church-unity reading is far better supported than the ‘virgin birth’ reading, not least for the simple reason that the virgin birth never actually appears in John.5

The first reason is that unity is a major theme in John.6 Just a few chapters before we are introduced to Jesus’ tunic, Jesus explicitly prays for the unity of the Church. He asks that ‘they would be one, just as you and I are one,’ asking God to guarantee the unity of the Church and future believers. The fact that the tunic’s unity is woven ‘from above’ – that is, woven by God – can be read as an answer to Jesus’ prayer.

Yet there is another reason to see this as a symbol of unity. Earlier in the gospel, Jesus has stated that when he is ‘lifted up’ – an allusion to his crucifixion – he would gather all to himself (12:32). And here we find a four soldiers taking a share of his clothes.

Why has John told us that there are four soldiers? On a literal plane, Craig Keener notes that four soldiers was half of a contubernium, a standard Roman unit.7 This smaller unit was typically dispatched for a simple task such as crucifixion.

Yet we might suspect that the number four is also functionally symbolically, as John uses numbers elsewhere in his gospel. Four is a number of totality and completeness. For example, Revelation speaks of the four winds of the earth to refer to the totality of the world. We might therefore see the four soldiers – the whole Church – each taking a share or part (meros) in Christ (cf. 13:8). The seamless tunic slots into this interpretation nicely, representing the unity which will be preserved among them.

Finally, it is not only John who uses garments to symbolise unity. In 1 Kings the prophet Adijah tears his new garment as a sign of the Lord’s tearing apart of Israel (11:30). And in a more contemporary work, Philo provides an exegesis of a high priestly garment as a symbol of the Logos, which holds all things together in unity.

While modern commentators may shy away from this reading, I think it has more plausibility than they imagine. It makes sense of how garments are used elsewhere in biblical and second-temple literature; it fits in well with John’s use of numbers and theme of unity; and it explains why the tunic is undivided among the ‘whole’ Church.

A Priestly Vestment

The view that the seamless tunic is a symbol of unity has the strongest precedent in the ancient Church. Yet in modern commentaries, there is another popular candidate for the tunic’s meaning: the tunic as a high priestly vestment.

The view that the tunic is priestly goes back to 1641, when the Dutch jurist and theologian, Hugo Grontius, found a parallel in Flavius Josephus. The first century Jewish historian describes a high priestly garment as follows:

‘But this tunic (ὁ χιτὼν) is not composed of two pieces, to be stitched (ῥαπτὸς) at the shoulders and at the sides: it is one long woven (ὑφασμένον) cloth, with a slit for the neck, parted not crosswise but lengthwise from the breast to a point in the middle of the back.’ (Antiquities 3. 161 LCL).

What is striking is the number of cognate terms that this description shares with John. For example, Josephus describes a high priestly tunic (ὁ χιτὼν) that is not sewn (ῥαπτὸς), a word relating to ἄραφος (‘without seam’). Moreover, his description of the garment as ‘one long woven (ὑφασμένον) cloth’ bears resemblance to John’s own description of his tunic as ‘woven in one piece’ (ὑφαντὸς δι’ ὅλου; NASB).

There are two criticisms of this parallel raised in the literature. The first is that John shows a lack of interest in casting Jesus in a high priestly role. Craig Keener, for example, notes that “John seems to lack the sort of explicitly high priestly emphasis one finds in Hebrews….”8 Likewise, Andrew Lincoln deems a priestly interpretation doubtful “since a high-priest Christology plays no role elsewhere in his narrative.”9

Yet this criticism carries little force. While John may not have same focus as Hebrews, John shows more interest in the high priest than any of the gospels. Thus, the roles of both Caipahas and his father-in-law Annas are accentuated, while the trial scene seems to display Jesus’ superiority to the high priest (Jn. 18:19-24). What is more, in the build-up to the crucifixion, Jesus may even take upon the role of high priest, when he consecrates himself as a sacrifice, interceding with the Lord (17:19).

A greater problem for Grotius’ parallel is that there is no clear link between Josephus’ description and the Jewish Scriptures. As Joan Taylor notes, scripture describes a sacred linen tunic worn by the High Priest on Yom Kippur (Lev. 16:4) and a ‘checkered tunic of fine linen’ worn on other instances (Exod. 28:29).

But these tunics only have in common with Jesus’ tunic the fact that they are called tunics; neither has anything to do with the tunic that Josephus is describing in this passage.10 What Josephus is calling a ‘tunic’ is actually the robe of the ephod, described in all its glory in Exodus 28:31-34. It is not the simple garment undivided in John.11

This may seem to refute the idea that John has a priestly tunic in mind. Yet while it rules out the specific tunic mentioned by Josephus, it is possible that Jesus’ tunic may be linked to priestly garments more widely. As Helen Bond notes, there are a number of ways in which Jesus’ tunic corresponds to a high priestly wardrobe more broadly.12

Notably, Jesus’ tunic is called ‘woven’ (ὑφαντός), a word used exclusively in the Bible of the high priest’s garments.13 The high priestly vestments were also remembered in rabbinic times as both ‘woven’ (b. Zebahim 88a and b. Yoma 72b) and also as seamless. One text states that the ‘the priestly garments were not sewn’ (b. Zebahim 88b) a point that b. Yoma 27b makes in reference to the woven garments of Exod. 31.10.

There is still a further reason to think that the seamless tunic may be high priestly. Namely, that the presentation of Jesus as high priest fits hand in glove with John’s overall depiction of Jesus as the fulfilment of various feasts and institutions. He is the meaning of the Temple, the Sabbath, the Light of the World, the Living Water, and – importantly, as I have argued elsewhere – the Passover lamb in his death.

But if Jesus is the paschal lamb, who is the priest making the sacrifice? The priest is, of course, Jesus himself. The imagery of Jesus as high priest fits the scene well. As Saint Augustine described, Jesus is both priest and victim (De Civ. De. 10, 20).

A Simple Garment

So far, we have considered Jesus’ seamless tunic as a high priestly vestment that functions as a symbol of ecclesiastical unity. But in her recent book, What did Jesus Look Like? (2018), Joan Taylor proposes a completely different reading of the tunic. Instead of asking what the tunic symbolises, she instead looks to the material culture of first-century Palestine for clues as to what a ‘seamless tunic’ might have been.14

Approached from this perspective, Taylor identifies it as a simple “bag-style” tunic, created by making a hole in a piece of cloth. This is an unusual design for tunics, which are typically made of two pieces of material sewn together, and could have been woven without great skill. Examples of this tunic have been found in the Khirbet Qazone cemetery near the Dead Sea, dating from the first to the third century.15

The idea that Jesus wore such a basic garment certainly fits with Jesus’ overall attitude to clothing and its pretences in the synoptic gospels. It might also explain why some Church fathers associated the tunic with the Galilean poor,16 and why the soldiers did not want to rend it. Dividing it would rid it of the little value it had.

Yet I think we need to be careful to assume that such a basic tunic is in mind. On a material level, the fact that the tunic is said to have been ‘woven from above’ may indicate that it was not a basic garment, but a work of some skill. And the fact that the soldiers did not divide it may be read in line with this. If the garment was of more considerable value, we can understand their rationale in gambling for it.

Notably, not all Church fathers saw this as an item of the poor. Some believed that it was a work of majesty,17 and even today, several Churches prize the relic of Jesus’ ‘seamless tunic’ as a longer and more impressive robe. Seamless tunics were also sometimes worn by the wealthy. It is therefore unclear that John’s readers would have seen this tunic as a basic item, woven without skill.

A Seamless Interpretation?

In this piece, we have tried to understand the strangest item in Jesus’ wardrobe. Yet it may seem like the interpretations we have offered take us in different directions. Whether or not it is a basic garment, does the idea that the seamless tunic is a symbol of church unity stand at odds with the view that it is priestly garb?

In many commentaries, we are invited to choose. But perhaps we do not need to. In Philo’s description of the high priest’s garments, it is precisely their unrent nature which symbolises the unity of the world, held together by the logos (Fug. 110-112).

So now, here in John, we are confronted with the incarnate logos (1:1), who is wearing a high priest’s garment. But the unity which the priestly tunic symbolises is not the unity of the world being held together, but the unity of the Church. These readings –though disparate – also be woven together in their own seamless unity.

Thank you for reading this post!

If you enjoyed it and would like to support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. You will gain access to 50+ articles as well as my monthly lecture series.

Subscribe now

In part one, I examined a range of arguments for the empty tomb, from the women’s testimony to the archaeological evidence. In this piece, I turn to the arguments against.

a. Jesus was not Entombed

The most common ground on which to question the empty tomb is to question the tomb itself. Scholars who reject the empty tomb tend to doubt that a victim of crucifixion would be placed in the tomb of an individual like Joseph of Arimathea. In its place, they have suggested a range of scenarios which they consider more likely.

The most scandalous proposal regarding Jesus’ burial is that he did not receive one. This view, famously defended by John Dominic Crossan – and now, more tentatively by Bart Ehrman – suggests that Jesus’ corpse would have been left on the cross.1

The basis of this view is that crucifixion was designed for the total humiliation of the victim – and a common part of that humiliation was not receiving a burial. As the conservative biblical scholar Martin Hengel puts it in his classic study of crucifixion:

“Crucifixion was aggravated further by the fact that quite often its victims were never buried. It was a stereotyped picture that the crucified victim served as food for wild beasts and birds of prey. In this way his humiliation was made complete.”2

Read more

So, taking his professorial advice to heart, I have compiled some bibliographies on Behind the Gospels for those wishing to become an expert on certain topics. Past reading lists have unpacked the gospels’ christology and the historical Jesus.

Now we’re in Eastertide, I thought it would be apropos to gather some readings on the resurrection. Once again I’ve annotated the bibliography, and it contains not seven, but ten works on the topic… so more than enough to become an expert!

Read more

I told him that we are very confident that Jesus died by crucifixion, and that most scholars agree that at least some of Jesus’ disciples had experiences of him after his death. But historians are more divided on the ‘fact’ of the empty tomb.

In past posts, I’ve unpacked some of the reasons why the empty tomb is so controversial, historically. For example, I’ve discussed arguments for and against whether Jesus was buried in a tomb, and looked at whether women witnesses guarantee its historicity. I have also explored apologetic features in the empty tomb stories, and probed a popular proposal that they are a type of ‘translation fable.’

Yet in this two-part post, I want to offer a more comprehensive survey of the key arguments around the empty tomb. What are some of the reasons a critical scholar might accept its historicity, and what are some grounds for scepticism? Hopefully this will serve as a helpful resource to get to grips with a fascinating historical debate.

Arguments for the Empty Tomb

I begin by surveying some considerations in favour of the empty tomb. These range from the consideration that unlikely individuals are involved in the story (Joseph of Arimathea and women) and its presence in earlier source material to the plausibility of a missing body and the necessity of the empty tomb for resurrection belief.

a. Joseph of Arimathea

To say that Jesus’ body went missing from his tomb is to assume that there was a tomb in which Jesus was buried. Which takes us to our first positive consideration: the fact that a member of the Sanhedrin, Joseph of Arimathea, is said to have buried Jesus.

It is certainly intriguing that a member of the council which condemned Jesus to death is entrusted with burying Christ. The tendency of the gospel is to be critical of the Jewish leadership, not to be sympathetic to its cause. So some scholars have considered Joseph’s role an unlikely detail for a follower of Jesus to invent.

Yet in purely historical terms, Joseph’s involvement may make a good deal of sense. At least according to the gospel stories, Jesus was executed on a Friday just before the Jewish sabbath. If he was left on the cross, his body would have defiled the land. Thus, the idea that the Sanhedrin would have had someone in place to make sure that the land was undefiled seems to make sense within a Jewish context.

Against this point, it is sometimes pointed out that Joseph’s characterisation seems to develop in later gospel literature. In Matthew and John, he is a ‘disciple of Jesus’; in Luke, he is a ‘good and righteous man’, and in the Gospel of Peter, he is even a ‘friend of the Lord’. One might say, then, that if we reverse-engineered Joseph’s character even further behind Mark, he may have played an even more mundane role.1 Perhaps he was involved in Jesus’ burial, but would he have placed him in his own tomb?

Another point against Joseph’s involvement concerns the plausibility of placing Jesus in his own tomb. According to the gospels, it was important that Jesus was buried before sundown. It may have been a hurried burial. But the likelihood that a wealthy man like Joseph would have a tomb close to a site of crucifixion is questionable.

It does seem remarkable, however, that we are told Joseph placed Jesus in his own tomb. Some scholars suppose that it is for precisely this reason that he is remembered. Joseph did something quite out of the ordinary. And for this peculiar deed, he was elevated in the tradition and his rather obscure name was preserved.

b. Pre-Markan Passion Narrative

Another reason for thinking that the tomb was empty is that Mark (c. 70 AD) may be relying upon earlier material for his narrative. So while Paul says that Jesus was ‘buried’ in the creed of 1 Corinthians 15:3-5, we may have a pre-Markan source which indicates that Jesus was buried specifically in a tomb.

What form this source took is much debated. The empty tomb story is sometimes seen as part of a ‘Pre-Markan Passion Narrative’, a text which may date as early as 37 CE. Yet it is worth noting that there is no agreement today on the extent or dating of this written source, with a number of scholars calling it into existence into doubt. For a summary of these arguments, you may want to see my earlier piece, here.

Whether or not we embrace an extended written source for Mark’s passion, however, there are some good reasons to think that Mark has employed some sources in his passion narrative. Beyond the fact that it is common for ancient bíoi to draw upon sources, Mark’s narrative contains some details which don’t seem to fit well with his passover chronology. And in one place, he even alludes to the sons of Simon of Cyrene – an irrelevant detail which may suggest they were known to his audience.

Of course, the fact that Mark seems to have used sources for parts of his story does not necessitate that he has used them for the empty tomb. It also does not necessitate that his sources are historical. Yet the fact that we can detect earlier material in his passion narrative may raise the likelihood that he has done so in this case as well.

c. The Presence of Women

Perhaps the most popular argument for the empty tomb relates to its discovery by women. The argument runs that if the evangelists had fabricated the story, they would not have the tomb discovered by women whose testimony was considered untrustworthy – especially not Mary, who was formerly demon possessed (Lk. 8:2).

Flavius Josephus, the first century Jewish historian, expresses a familiar prejudice. In his elaboration on Deuteronomy 19, he states: ‘… let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex.’ While we know that women were permitted to give testimony in certain legal cases – at least according to later rabbinic sources – their testimony was not treated as the same as a man’s.

Interestingly, this issue of the women’s testimony seems to have been taken – at least by one ancient thinker – as a reason to doubt the resurrection. In his treatise, True Doctrine, the second century philosopher Celsus puts it bluntly: ‘But who saw this [the empty tomb]? A hysterical female, as you say, and perhaps some other one of those who were deluded by the same sorcery…” (Origen, Contra Celsum 2.55).

Tempering this point, however, I have suggested that the early Church did not always hold women in as low regard as the prejudicial figures cited above. They were leaders, prophets, and were portrayed as effective witnesses. For example, John records that many believed on the basis of the Samaritan ‘woman’s testimony’ (4:29).

We might also note that, in Mark’s social and narrative world, the women are the most natural characters to find the tomb. Women were entrusted with the responsibility of mourning the dead, and in Mark’s narrative, all of Jesus’ male disciples have abandoned him. It is only the women, then, who know the location of the tomb.

Yet I don’t believe that this argument for the empty tomb is entirely without weight. The women are notably absent from the creed of witnesses in 1 Corinthians 15. And even the evangelists seem unsatisfied by Mark’s narrative of the discovery of the tomb by women, which is described in Luke as an ‘idle tale’ (24:11). Notably, both Luke and John do have men come to the tomb, perhaps to shore up the women’s testimony.

Why then does Mark narrate that women discovered the tomb empty? If it was an invention, we might suppose the women would be absent, or the women might have been accompanied by the men. It may just be that the reason why Mark brings our attention to the women is because they were really thought to be there.2

d. The Necessity of the Empty Tomb

Another argument for the empty tomb is its necessity for the disciples to come to believe and proclaim Jesus’ resurrection. The ‘resurrection’ which the disciples came to profess was corporeal. Thus, if the tomb was not empty, there would be no way for the disciples to confirm Jesus’ resurrection or proclaim it so rapidly in Jerusalem. The authorities him would have been able to rebut their claims by presenting the corpse.3

In my view, this is a considerably weaker argument than those made above. For it makes a number of contested assumptions. One is that it assumes that the earliest appearances of Jesus were in Jerusalem. This is certainly the picture painted by the later evangelists. Yet in Mark, the women are to tell the disciples that Jesus has gone ahead to Galilee – an assumption which might make a good deal of sense.

This argument will also hold no traction with those who do not think that Jesus was buried in a tomb. In this sense, the argument assumes an empty tomb – or at least, an entombment – rather than argues for it. As I have noted elsewhere, if Jesus received a more common burial or was buried with others, the question of checking the grave would not have arisen. No pious Jew would be ‘verifying’ a decomposing corpse.

What does seem to be the case is that an empty tomb would have supported resurrection belief – and may at least help to explain why they thought he was risen. Since one of the more common (if not the only) beliefs about resurrection was that it involved some form of physical re-animation, it would be surprising if the disciples had not deemed Jesus’ burial place to be noteworthy if he was entombed.

e. Different Witnesses to the Event

Another argument for the empty tomb is that it attested not only in Mark, but also by John’s beloved disciple (BD), whose memories are sometimes thought to lie behind the gospel. For those who accept the BD as an eyewitness of Jesus’ ministry, we have at least two distinct witnesses to the empty tomb: Mark and John.

I haven’t made my mind up on the beloved disciple, yet it is important to note that prominent Johannine scholars view the disciple differently. For more conservative scholars, he is identified with John the Son of Zebedee (whose name is attached to the gospel) or another ‘John’ altogether, who was a Judean disciple of Jesus.

For other scholars, the BD is often viewed not as a historical figure at all, but rather as a literary device or a ‘disguised author’.4 This is on account of the stylised role he has in the text, the marked absence of the figure in the earlier material, and John’s distinctive depiction of Jesus which departs heavily from earlier synoptic tradition.

The resurrection is just one point at which a departure is evident. In Mark, an angel tells the women to tell the disciples to go ahead to Galilee, where Jesus will appear to Peter. Yet in John’s account, Jesus himself meets Mary in the guise of a gardener. Rather than ‘telling no one’, Mary goes off to tell the disciples and the beloved disciple beats Peter to the tomb. In this way, again, he serves as an ‘ideal’ witness.

How strong one will find this argument is thus dependent upon one who considers the beloved disciple to be. If the disciple is indeed an eyewitness, perhaps there are ways to reconcile John to Mark’s earlier account. The fact that both attest to an empty tomb – albeit in different ways – would count for much. The difficulty is that the beloved disciple is widely disputed as an eyewitness among contemporary scholars.

f. The Evidence of Stolen Bodies

So far, we have mainly considered arguments for the empty tomb accounts as narrated in the gospels. Yet we might also consider the question of the empty tomb from a different angle: namely, how likely is it that Jesus’ body went missing, generally?

One factor that is often brought up in the literature is the theft of bodies. In particular, there is evidence from classical antiquity that bodies were sometimes stolen for use in magical rituals. The body of a holy man and miracle worker, like Jesus, may have been a prime target for those within the grave-robbing ‘industry’.

In the scholarly discussion, a couple of responses are often raised to mitigate this possibility.5 One is that the odds of a grave robbery are very small. Another is that we have no clear archaeological evidence of grave-robbery from the Jerusalem region, specifically. The evidence for grave-robbery is found mostly in Gentile areas.

Yet I don’t think that these responses are sufficient to take grave robbery completely off the table. For what it’s worth, Matthew’s story of the guard at the tomb seems to assume that the theft of Jesus’ body was a live possibility in his setting. And we know that other ancient Jews considered tomb-robbery a possible occurrence and placed curses on their epitaphs for those who might disrupt the tomb.

Another potentially relevant datum is the so-called ‘Nazareth Inscription’, an imperial edict which sentenced tomb-robbers to death. While the exact provenance of the artefact is disputed, some scholars have preferred a pre-70 CE Palestinian context, on the basis of its epigraphic links with other sources from the same time and place.6 If they are correct, tomb robbery may have been a live problem in Palestine.

None of this is to suggest that Jesus’ tomb was actually pillaged by thieves. Yet it is something to take into account when considering the likelihood of an empty tomb, independent of theological interpretation. It may also help us to see how the original story of an empty tomb would not itself be seen – by outsiders – as especially good evidence for Jesus’ resurrection. This is a further factor to consider in our evaluation of how likely it was for the tomb story to be a wholesale invention.

Excursus: Where is the Tomb?

A subject often overlooked in discussions of the empty tomb is the tomb itself. Yet the reasons for this are quite understandable. The oldest tradition of the tomb is a site in Jerusalem within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. But this tradition goes back only to the reign of Constantine (306-337), which has left many sceptical of its authenticity.

It is worth noting, however, that some believe that the site might betray an older local tradition. When the tomb was first identified in the fourth century, it was found within the walls of the city beneath a Temple of Venus. This temple was itself connected with the foundation of ‘Aelia Capitolina’, the name of the Roman colony founded in Jerusalem by Hadrian in the wake of the Second Jewish War (135 CE).

Yet Jesus was known to have been crucified outside of the city walls. This means that someone searching for ‘Jesus’ tomb’ in the fourth century would probably not have looked within the city. Moreover, it was not until Herod Agrippa built a third wall (c. 41-44 CE) that the traditional site came to lie within the city walls. This may suggest a very early local tradition of Jesus’ tomb in the traditional site.7

At least one recent archaeologist of the sepulchre is convinced that the site is probably authentic.8 She notes that the area of the traditional site matches the descriptions of the tomb and surrounding area in both the gospels and apocryphal literature, which may preserve memory of the tomb. She is also persuaded by the fact of the tomb’s self-evidence to Constantine’s workmen: the tomb was found exactly where Constantine had been told, beneath a statue of Jupiter in the Temple.

Yet this will not compel all interpreters. While Hadrian may have a motive to build a shrine on top of what was known as the site of Jesus’ tomb, it does seem somewhat surprising we have no direct comment on this desecration. It may also be possible to explain the evidence in another way: the tomb was initially chosen as Jesus’ tomb, at some point early on, because it matched the gospels’ descriptions of the tomb.

Thank you for reading part one!

If you enjoyed this post and want to read part two, in which I will be discussing arguments against the empty tomb, please consider supporting my work.

Subscribe now

By becoming a supporter, you will also gain access to the full archive of my posts. This includes many other pieces on the resurrection from a historical perspective:

• Did Jesus Rise from the Dead? features my recent conversation with Dale Allison and Mike Licona as well as my recent lecture on the historicity of Easter.

• William Lane Craig on the Empty Tomb examines a classic case for the empty tomb offered by a popular philosopher of religion.

• Women Witnesses: Proof of an Empty Tomb? discusses the common argument that women’s testimony was considered unreliable in the ancient world, and therefore the accounts of their discovery of an empty tomb are reliable.

• Did Jesus Receive a Burial? looks at some arguments for and against Jesus’ burial in the tomb by Joseph of Arimathea, and explores some alternative scenarios.

• Vanishing Bodies, Ascending Gods examines ancient stories of ‘translation’, in which a person’s body goes missing from their place of death or burial.

• Ancient Apologetics for the Empty Tomb explores apologetic features in the canonical and extra-canonical accounts of Jesus’ resurrection.

• Why We Can’t Prove the Resurrection makes the case that Jesus’ resurrection is not the kind of event that can be proved by ordinary historical reasoning.

• Is the Turin Shroud Jesus’ Burial Cloth? unpacks the view that the world’s most famous relic is not Jesus’ actual burial cloth, but a medieval artefact.

• Seven Evidences for Jesus’ Resurrection is a two-parter which evaluates common arguments for the resurrection, such as the martyrdom of the disciples.

Second only to Christmas, Easter is a biblical student’s favourite time of year. We get to ask fascinating questions, like: what does it mean to say that someone ‘rose’ from the dead? How likely is it that Jesus was buried in a tomb – or that the tomb was later found empty? What are we to make of Jesus’ post-mortem appearances? And in what sense is the resurrection susceptible to ordinary modes of historical analysis?

If those questions pique your interest, I have occasionally weighed in on some of these classic resurrection debates on the blog. Here are some of my pieces:

• Women Witnesses: Proof of an Empty Tomb? discusses the common argument that women’s testimony was considered unreliable in the ancient world, and therefore the accounts of their discovery of an empty tomb are reliable.

• Did Jesus Receive a Burial? looks at some arguments for and against Jesus’ burial in the tomb by Joseph of Arimathea, and explores some alternative scenarios.

• Vanishing Bodies, Ascending Gods examines ancient stories of ‘translation’, in which a person’s body goes missing from their place of death or burial.

• Ancient Apologetics for the Empty Tomb explores apologetic features in the canonical and extra-canonical accounts of Jesus’ resurrection.

• Why We Can’t Prove the Resurrection makes the case that Jesus’ resurrection is not the kind of event that can be proved by ordinary historical reasoning.

• Is the Turin Shroud Jesus’ Burial Cloth? unpacks the view that the world’s most famous relic is not Jesus’ actual burial cloth, but a medieval artefact.

• Seven Evidences for Jesus’ Resurrection is a two-parter which evaluates common arguments for the resurrection, such as the martyrdom of the disciples.

Usually at this time of year, I would add to this collection. Yet this Easter has been particularly busy and I didn’t make it to the keyboard. As well as teaching and writing, I host a discussion show called Unbelievable? and produce a podcast, Biblical Time Machine – so there has been, to paraphrase James Bond, ‘no time to write.’

I am really blessed, however, that my professional life has taken me back to the Easter sources. I recently had the privilege of hosting a discussion with Profs Dale Allison and Mike Licona on Jesus’ resurrection, and put together a podcast in which Profs Helen Bond and Lloyd Lewellyn-Jones discuss the New Testament sources.

I also gave a talk on Easter as part of my Behind the Gospels 2026 lecture series. So instead of my usual Easter post, here is an update of some of what I’ve got up to this Easter! If you are a paid subscriber, you can access my Easter lecture below.

Subscribe now

Read more

Why, for example, does Matthew redact Mark’s account, so that the scene has two donkeys rather than one? Did Jesus actually ride on both? What influence did Zechariah 9:9 bear on the accounts? And how plausible is it that Jesus rode to shouts of acclamation around Passover, one of the most politically volatile times of the year?

The questions that really excite me about this passage, however, are not historical but literary. One of the key aims of this passage is to present Jesus as a king. Yet if Jesus is a king, what does his ‘triumphal entry’ suggest about the nature of his kingship?

In this piece, I want to dig deeper into these questions with reference to Mark, the font of the tradition. I examine how his narrative compares to the ‘arrivals’ of other royal figures, and how it figures in the gospel’s broader characterisation of Jesus’ kingship. As we shall see, Mark is hesitant to claim outright that Jesus is simply another king, and at the end of the piece I probe some reasons for this reluctance.

The Arrival of a King

When Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, he does so as a king. But to see this, we need to take stock of several biblical and extra-biblical traditions which illuminate Mark’s details:

1. First, Jesus procures a ‘colt that has never been ridden’, which seems like a peculiar request. This may be a subtle reference to unworked animals in the Jewish law, which have been set aside for some special, sacred purpose. Yet more likely, Mark is wanting his readers to think about Zechariah 9:9, where a king enters Jerusalem riding on a ‘young colt’ (πῶλον νέον).

2. Second, Jesus rides into Jerusalem on the donkey, which does not seem an obvious mode of transportation. As mentioned above, the likely background for this action is Zechariah 9:9: ‘Lo, your king comes to you, riding on a donkey.’ In several biblical texts, elite Jewish figures ride on donkeys. For example, David’s son Solomon rides on his own mule in an act of kingly succession (1 Kgs. 1:33).

3. Third, the crowd lay down their garments and leafy branches for Jesus in a make-shift carpet. This is redolent of a similar detail in the biblical account of King Jehu’s accession to power, where bystanders hurry to place a garment under the king’s feet (2 Kgs. 9:13, and the ‘leafy branches’ or ‘palms’ (Jn. 12:13) may remind readers of Simon’s entrance into the fort of Jerusalem (1 Mac. 13:51).

4. Fourth, Jesus rides to shouts of acclamation, ‘Hosanna!… Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!’ While Mark falls short of identifying Jesus explicitly as the king of David’s kingdom (cf. Luke 19:38), Jesus is identified as the ‘blessed one’ who ushers in the Davidic Kingdom. It may be significant, in this connection, that Bartimaeus has just identified Jesus as ‘the Son of David’.

5. Finally, Jesus approaches the city from the Mount of Olives. Some have seen a parallel here to Zechariah 14, in which the LORD himself comes to Jerusalem, after standing on the same hillside outside of Jerusalem. The purpose of the Lord’s coming is so that that ‘the LORD will become king over all the earth’.

Taken together, these Jewish allusions comprise a set of subtle signals that Jesus is a kingly messiah. Yet this fills out only one side of the picture. To grasp how Mark’s readers would have understood Jesus’ arrival into Jerusalem, we need to pay close attention to the way that kings would conventionally make an entrance.

Arrivals in the Ancient World

There is a wide body of literary and iconographic evidence for the arrival of Greek, Roman and Jewish leaders into cities. These celebratory ‘arrivals’ or parousiai would have been completely familiar to Mark’s audience, and his readers would have likely seen Jesus’ own parousia into Jerusalem as part of this familiar parousia ‘genre’.

Scholars have sometimes tried to pin-down a precise ‘script’ for what took place on these occasions, which has proved notoriously difficult. Yet there are a few common features in many ‘arrival’ narratives. The leader or king is typically greeted near the city gates and hailed by the citizens; he is then escorted into the city, with songs or acclamations; and finally, the procession tends to end at the city’s Temple, where some form of ritual, such as a benevolent sacrifice, will take place.1

Some of this sounds familiar. Jesus is hailed with shouts of acclamation as he rides into the city. He is also Temple-bound. Yet when we inspect the schema a bit more closely, there are several elements to Mark’s story which begin to seem rather odd.

For a start, there is the background to Jesus’ arrival. In an ancient parousia, it is not uncommon for the leader or king to arrive off the back of a military conquest. Yet here, there is no military victory to celebrate. At most, we have Jesus’ triumph over the forces of darkness, symbolised in the (Roman) ‘Legion’ of demons. Yet Jesus does not come as a conquering king with military might; he comes to the city in peace.

Next, there is Jesus’ mode of transportation. We have already noted that mules were not necessarily un-kingly; Solomon rides on David’s mule. Yet when we look at other parousiai, there is no indication in any of our sources that a king would arrive on a donkey. A horse or a chariot was the conventional transport for a military leader. To arrive to the city on a ‘donkey’ verges on satire of the standard imperial practice.

And finally, our narrative ends with a twist: ‘Then he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve’ (v11). In some processions, the concluding ritual was a sign that the figure was ritually appropriating the city.2 Yet here, Jesus inspects the Temple and leaves. He has not been embraced as Jerusalem’s king, nor has he taken the city captive. Once he has looked around, it’s time for bed.

Kingship in Mark’s Gospel

We have seen that Jesus’ arrival subverts royal expectations. Yet this is not an isolated instance of subversion, but part of a wider scheme in which Mark contrasts Jesus with other kings and emperors – often called ‘sons of God’ – in the Roman world. Here we shall take a brief look at three instances where this scheme manifests, from the beginning of the gospel all the way to the cross.

a. Omens at his Baptism

The first clear sign of Jesus’ kingship takes place at his baptism. A dove descends on Jesus and a voice from heaven proclaims him as the Son of God. Many scholars have pointed out that the words of the divine voice bear a clear semblance to coronation Psalm 2 ‘You are my son [today I have begotten you…]’ (v7).For Jewish readers, this was the moment that Jesus was declared, and perhaps even ‘adopted’, as God’s royal son.

Yet here is where things get interesting. Michael Peppard has argued persuasively that the declaration of Jesus as God’s son, coupled with the omen of a dove, would indicate to Roman readers that God had adopted Jesus.3 Bird omens were often seen in the rise to power, and Suetonius describes that it was in the context of a dove omen that Julius Caesar knew that he would adopt Octavian – that is, Augustus – as his son.

But what did it mean for Jesus’ reign to be symbolised by a dove? The bird that Augustus, and other Roman emperors, were more typically associated with was not the dove, but the eagle. And in classical literature, the bellicose eagle is often contrasted with the peaceful dove. To have Jesus’ kingship symbolised by the dove was to comment on the nature of Jesus’ kingship – one of peace, not military conquest.  

b. Two Kingly Banquets

Later in Mark, we find Jesus’ kingship contrasted again with the rulers of his age. The most intriguing example of this is found in Mark 6. For the first time in Mark’s bíos, the narrative takes a detour away from Jesus, and we are plunged into the middle of Herod’s birthday banquet, which ends with the death of John the Baptist. What immediately follows is the story of Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand.

At first glance, these narratives seem utterly disconnected. The story of Herod perhaps provides a useful bit of information about how John the Baptist was killed. Yet it does not bear much semblance to the story of Jesus’ miracle that follows.

Yet a closer analysis reveals that Mark has deliberately placed these two ‘banquets’ side-by-side. And the key to unlocking this comparison is single word: Basileus – King. Everyone knew that Herod Antipas was not a basileus, but was rather less prestigiously a tetrarch (‘a ruler of a fourth’). When his father King Herod the Great died, he had been allotted only part of his father’s kingdom.

Mark, however, is absolutely insistent that Herod Antipas was a king, calling him basileus no less than six times in this single episode. This cannot be an accident, because Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand is saturated with messianic allusions. Thus, as Helen Bond argues, it seems that Mark is deliberately contrasting the feasts of King Herod and ‘King’ Jesus.4 While Herod celebrates with the elite few and his banquet ends in death, Jesus comes for all and his feast ends in satisfaction.

c. Dressed as a King

Our final presentation of Jesus as a king takes place in his passion narrative. After Jesus is arrested but before his road to Golgotha, he is placed in a purple robe, given a crown of thorns, and satirised by the Roman soldiers: ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ The same expression, ‘King of the Jews’, then appears as a placard upon Jesus’ cross.

For the soldiers who mock him, this is all parody. Jesus does not belong in an expensive purple robe; he does not deserve a crown. Yet for Mark’s readers – who have been ‘in the know’ from the outset that Jesus is the Messiah – Jesus truly is a king. Yet he is a king quite unlike the Roman emperors. He did not come to subject others to imperial power; rather, he came to subject himself to it.

This may be one of the keys to Mark’s motif of the messianic secret: Jesus’ repeated hushing of the notion that he is the Messiah. It is not that Jesus altogether rejects the notion that he is the Messiah, Son of God, or ‘Son of David’. But he is careful not to let people get the wrong impression about what this entails. For Mark, it is only when the Messiah is crucified that he is rightly identified by the centurion as the ‘Son of God’.

For some modern readers of Mark, this proclamation by the centurion is the climax of another procession that has just taken place. In ancient Rome, there was a custom of the ‘Triumph’, in which a military victor draped in purple and laurel crown processed to the Capitoline Hill to celebrate his conquest. Sometimes, this procession would end with a sacrifice to the gods, or with the killing of a foreign king now held captive.

I am not convinced by all of the parallels to the Roman Triumph and Jesus’ procession to the cross. Yet the logic of the Triumph may lie in the background of Mark’s account. Instead of going to the Capitoline Hill (the place of the head, the caput), Jesus is taken to Golgotha, the ‘place of the skull.’ And there he is lifted up. While Roman writers saw crucifixion as a parody of exaltation, Mark’s audience would have seen this as a moment of real glory. Jesus is now exalted, but exalted in his suffering.

Why another sort of King?

In this piece, I have suggested that the logic of that first arrival into Jerusalem is anticipated and mirrored throughout the gospel. Without using the term explicitly, Mark is depicting Jesus as a king, but he is a very different sort of king to the kings who occupied the surrounding Roman world. The question which this leaves us with is – why? Why is Mark so coy about his presentation of Jesus as a kingly figure?

Perhaps the most obvious answer to this question is that Mark does not want us to have an incomplete picture of Jesus. To portray Jesus as a king is to evoke an array of images of conquest and violence that he is explicitly trying to avoid. Yet we know that the historical figure of Jesus was not a royal figure bent on violence. So this only pushes back the question further: why is he so adamant that Jesus was not like this?

Some scholars may account for this by using post-colonial theory. In particular, Homi Bhabha has developed the idea of ‘colonial mimicry’, the idea that oppressed peoples both imitate and adapt the language of their oppressors.5 Applied to Mark’s gospel, we arguably see ‘colonial mimicry’ at play. In some sense, Jesus is presented as a kingly or imperial figure, but importantly he is not a king in the same way.

Yet I think there is also a more specific explanation which relates to Mark’s setting. Mark Lamas Jr has argued that after Nero’s despotic reign, there was a revival of the notion of libertas – ‘freedom’ from kingship.6 This revival lasted from Julius Vindex’s revolt (c. March 68 AD) to 73 AD (the fourth year of Vespasian), the very period when most scholars think that Mark was composing his gospel.

By avoiding any direct portrayal of Jesus as a king, Mark could therefore have tapped into this wider current of libertas. Instead of calling Jesus a king – a term best avoided – he anticipates Jesus’ reign with an omen of peace; he contrasts Jesus with the bloody ‘King’ Herod; he has Jesus arrive in Jerusalem on a donkey, not a war horse or chariot; and when Jesus finally takes on the garb of a king, it is a moment of satire and parody.

In all of these scenes, Mark is re-defining what true kingship looks like. It is not to wage wars, celebrating bloodshed and terror. It is not to take upon the symbol of the eagle, still adopted by great military powers today. It is simply to arrive in peace.

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed this post, you may like some of my other Easter-related posts:

• Good Friday: An Anti-Roman Triumph?

• Did Jesus Receive a Burial?

• Can the Dates of Jesus’ Death be Reconciled?

• Seven Evidences for the Resurrection

Like many NY’s resolutions, I was on a good streak for about a month! After my Christmas lecture on the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke, I gave a January talk on my new book, Jesus’ Physical appearance (2025). But in February, I was busy on tour across the UK with Alex O’Connor, and my resolution fell by the wayside.

I had intended to give a lecture for Lent on the stories of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness (often seen as the ‘biblical basis’ for the fast). But since the Church calendar is still in the season of Lent, I thought it wouldn’t be too late to return to the topic. On the weekend, then, a handful of us gathered for a double-whammy to catch up: a discussion on Jesus’ temptation, followed by a talk on Jesus’ resurrection.

In the Lent lecture below, I address a range of questions.

• What are the differences in the Temptation stories and why are they there?

• Do Matthew and Luke’s narratives have their origins in ‘Q’?

• Who are the ‘wild animals’ with Jesus in Mark’s account?

• What are the arguments for and against the episode’s historicity?

• If the temptation narratives did not happen, does this mean they are not true?

For those who couldn’t make it, I hope you enjoy the recording!

Read more

No. 1 Christianity Expert, Wesley Huff: Here is The Proof that Christianity is True!

For those who have been living under a rock – or whose algorithm simply differs from mine – Huff has become a massive name in Christian apologetics over the last year.

He shot to fame after rather coolly debunking conspiracy theorist Billy Carson and was interviewed shortly afterwards by Joe Rogan, in an episode I reviewed here.

I am sure that Huff would not describe himself as the ‘no. 1 Christianity expert.’ Nor is it quite true – as the description says – that he specialises ‘in the historical accuracy of ancient Biblical texts.’ Huff is a Canadian apologist who is pursuing a PhD in the para-textual features of ancient biblical manuscripts, not the historicity of the Bible.

With that said, Huff has surely become one of the most desirable guests in Christian podcast-dem. He speaks with confidence on a plethora of theological topics, and is putting out his case for Christianity on some of the biggest platforms in the world. Whether you like or lump his approach, Huff’s presence looms large in the online space.

I think it is important, then, that his arguments receive critical engagement. If he is – at least in the eyes of some people – the no.1 Christianity expert, what do scholars in the field make of his arguments?

In this piece, I review some of his arguments on The Diary of a CEO which overlap most closely with the subjects I have treated on this substack: the historicity of the gospels, memory and oral tradition, and the resurrection of Jesus.

1. Dating the New Testament

Coming up to their conversation about Jesus, Bartlett first wants to know when the New Testament texts were written. Huff unpacks the debate in this way:

“So the debate…. it’s a question of if John’s gospel is written before 70 AD or after 70 AD. And if it’s written after 70 AD it’s written in the 90s. So it’s written pretty far afterwards…. At minimum I think like 99% of historians, biblical scholars, classicists would argue that the 27 books of the New Testament are written in the first century. And so in that sense, they’re in the lifetime of the eyewitnesses to a certain degree.”

Huff is certainly right that there is a debate about dating, but it is not the debate he outlines here. It is simply false that 99% of relevant scholars would argue that the 27 books of the New Testament are written in the first century. This is a misrepresentation of the debate within the field, and it is hard to know how Huff would gain this impression from reading the scholarly literature.

It is not rare to find texts such as the pastoral epistles (1 & 2 Timothy, Titus)1 and 2 Peter dated into the second century.2 The Johannine epistles are also sometimes dated into the second century,3 while late dates for Luke-Acts are also becoming increasingly common, especially for those who think Luke relied upon Josephus.4

The framing of the debate about the dating of the NT as a question of whether John is pre-70 or post-70 – and if it’s post-70, it is in the 90s – is therefore really odd. A more representative summary may be that the majority of New Testament was written in the first century, while more than a handful of texts are debated as second century works.

Read more

My monograph, Jesus’ Physical Appearance, was published in December with a rather hefty price-tag (£81… at 10% off). So in this mini-series, I have begun to sketch its key arguments.

Previously, I have asked whether it is surprising that the gospels don’t describe Jesus’ appearance, and explored the gospels’ relationship to ancient biography. In this piece, I turn to the gospels’ characterisation of Jesus.

The question of why Jesus’ appearance is not described in the gospels has long puzzled scholars. Not only was physical description a common topos in ancient life-writing, there was a whole panoply of models in which Jesus might have been cast: the evangelists might have said that Jesus was ugly and disfigured, based on the suffering servant of Isaiah, or beautiful and strong, like a royal figure or divine man.

Yet rarely have scholars stopped to ask themselves: do the physical profiles of these types – a disfigured slave, or a beautiful divine king – actually match the profile of Jesus we encounter in the gospels? Or is there something about the gospels’ characterisation of Jesus which precludes a description along such familiar lines?

That is the question I ask in chapter 3 of my book (‘The Christology of Appearances’), the results of which I outline here. As we shall see, the question of Jesus’ missing image in the gospels leads us to a range of fascinating problems that relate to it: Is Jesus depicted as the suffering servant? How do the gospels construct Jesus’ masculinity? And what might a missing image have to do with Jewish aniconism?

The Suffering Servant

If you ask Christians today whether there is a physical description of Jesus in the Bible, they might turn to a figure in Isaiah 52-53 known as the ‘suffering servant’.

While the Hebrew Bible has no word for ‘ugliness’, the passage in Isaiah piles on a litany of unflattering terms to describe the servant. He is ‘marred’ in his appearance, and he has ‘no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him’ (53:2). In short, he was far from a stunner.

The reason why Christians might look to this passage today is that the New Testament saw the servant as a type of Christ. In an arsenal of early Christian texts, Jesus is looked to as this rejected, servant type. In very gospel-sounding language, Isaiah goes on to say that he ‘bore the sins of many’, as Jesus would come to do.

Strikingly, however, the New Testament authors – including the gospel writers – swerve around the servant’s physical appearance, when they might have employed it. One of the questions I considering during my research was: why? Was there any problem with using Isaiah’s suffering servant as a depiction of Jesus’ appearance?

In my book, I offer two broad suggestions. The first is that it is far from clear whether the evangelists had any special interest in presenting Jesus as the servant. As scholars have pointed out, there are a number of allusions to the servant in the synoptics. Yet there is no clear identification of Jesus with the servant in John. And where the allusions do appear in the Synoptics, they are generally regarded as ‘traditional’. That is, they are not allusions which the evangelists have crafted themselves.1

Yet I think there is a second – and more vital reason – why the evangelists may not have cast Jesus in the servant’s likeness. Namely, that his appearance would have been a considerable source of embarrassment for early Christian writers and theology.

Consider what Celsus, a pagan philosopher writing in the second century, has to say about Jesus’ appearance, having heard from Christians that he was unattractive:

‘If a divine spirit was in a body, it must certainly have differed from other bodies in size or beauty or strength or voice or striking appearance or powers of persuasion. For it is impossible that a body which had something more divine than the rest should be no different from any other. Yet Jesus’ body was no different from any other, but, as they say, was little and ugly and undistinguished.” (Origen, Cels. 6.75)

Today, we are used to insults being thrown at the looks of politicians and celebrities. Yet Celsus was not merely being churlish. In the mindset of ancient Rome, the gods and their human counterparts were expected to be beautiful, and many of Celsus’ readers would have thought he had a point: if Jesus was ugly, he could not be divine.

Yet the PR problem gets worse. To say that someone was ‘ugly’ in the ancient world was not merely to comment on their physiology – it was to comment on their soul. The ancient Roman milieu was saturated with physiognomic ideas. It believed that one could discern (gnomon) the nature (physis) of someone from their outward appearance. To say that Jesus was ugly would be to open him up to slander and invective – a point that the evangelists may have wished to avoid.

We see the same avoidance strategy in the work of other first-century Jewish writers. For example, in the biblical story of Exodus, we find that Moses was not a good public speaker, and at one point his hand turns white like leprosy – both traits a source of embarrassment. So in their re-telling of Moses’ life, the biographer Philo and historian Flavius Josephus variously explain these bugs or cut them out altogether.2

A perceptive reader might argue that it is plausible that the evangelists wanted to avoid the ugliness of the suffering servant, but the early Church did not seem to have a problem with it. In a host of apostolic and patristic writings – from Irenaeus, Tertullian and Origen, all the way through to the present day – Christians have often drawn upon the imagery of the suffering servant to describe the appearance of Jesus.

Yet as I point out in my piece Before Jesus was Beautiful, the early Church drew upon the servant typology for very specific reasons. Primarily, it helped them to establish Jesus’ humanity, against heretics who thought Jesus was only divine. For there was no way that a being who was ugly, like the servant, would have been non-fleshly.

Yet as it turns out, the early Church were not entirely comfortable with letting Isaiah have the last word on Jesus’ appearance. Several of them said he was in fact beautiful (for those with eyes to see), or at least he would be on his second coming. We see, then, that there were good reasons for the evangelists to avoid casting Jesus in the image of the suffering servant. With all of the problems that could arise in its wake, the image of an unattractive Jesus was simply not that attractive to them.

Jesus and the Elites

If an ugly Jesus didn’t suit the evangelists, we might consider why they did not choose a more attractive mould. Like David in the Hebrew Bible and countless figures in the Roman world, kings and elite men were expected to be strong and beautiful. This not only displayed their proximity to the gods, it showed that they were, by nature, destined to rule. Often, this is why we are told that a king was beautiful from birth.

At first glance, it may seem that Jesus is an obvious fit for a handsome casting. All four of the gospels cast Jesus using imperial language: he is a Son of God or Divi Filius who takes on standard kingly traits. And in Matthew and Luke (it is less clear in Mark), Jesus is depicted as the royal Davidic messiah. All of this might lead us to expect a Jesus who was, at least literarily speaking, handsome, tall and strong.

Yet I think when we look closer at how the gospels define Jesus’ kingship, we see something curious going on. Jesus does not like a ‘kingly king’, but rather subverts the standard expectations of kingship. The ‘omen’ at his baptism is not the war-like eagle, but a dove;3 his adventus into Jerusalem is not on a horse and chariot, but a donkey;4 and his joyful messianic symposium starkly contrasts the bloody feast of King Herod.5

Read more

That the ‘Jesus tradition’ was transmitted orally is widely agreed. First-century Palestine was largely illiterate, and the early followers of Jesus had little access to formal education. Yet this itself tells us very little. What we want to know is how the Jesus tradition was told. Was it handed on in a fluid way, with early Christians passing on tradition like hearsay, or were there constraints placed on the process?

In the first part of this series, I looked at a model of the Jesus tradition developed by the form critics. On their view, the gospel materials freely morphed over time to meet the needs and interests of the Jesus movement. Some of the oral tradition goes back to the disciples, but much of it was invented later in the Greek-speaking world.

In this piece, I look at a completely different model of the oral tradition, which developed in Scandinavian scholarship as a response to form-criticism. Advanced among others by Harald Riesenfeld and his student, Birger Gerhardsson, the so-called ‘Scandinavian school’ argued for a stricter, more controlled process of tradition.1

On this view, Jesus’ teachings and deeds were learnt in much the same way as Jewish rabbis learnt their material: by committing it to memory. Jesus’ disciples memorised his teaching, and the Church did not seek to alter their materials freely – as the form critics supposed – but handled their master’s memory with attention and care.

I begin by fleshing out the evidence for this view and reflect on where it offers a helpful corrective to the form-critical position, before offering points of critique.

Jesus and the Rabbis

The form critics had supposed that the oral tradition emerged freely and anonymously like folklore. Yet the Scandinavian model takes as its starting point the fact that we must attend to how ancient Jews actually learnt. As Riesenfeld summarises:

“… in New Testament times the specifically Jewish tradition, at any rate, was not possessed and shaped by an unlimited and undefined anonymous multitude… [Rather, t]he bearer of the tradition and the teacher (rabbi) watched over its memorizing by his approved pupils (talmd) and what was passed on in this way was, in the matter both of content and form, a fixed body of material.”2

The Scandinavian model thus looks to the Jewish rabbis as an analogy for how Jesus and his followers would have learnt and preserved his teaching. In both elementary education (bet sefer) and more advanced education (bet hammidrash), Jews would commit material to memory before an attempt was made to grasp its meaning.

On this view, the process of learning was already underway within Jesus’ ministry. Before Jesus sent out his disciples on their mission, he would have to have ensured that they could repeat the essentials of his teaching. In total, Jesus’ teaching in the Synoptic tradition only amounted to 15,000 words. This was far less than the Torah and the ‘oral Torah’ – the Torah’s interpretations – which students memorised.3

By the time of Jesus’ death, a good deal of Jesus’ teaching was already stored in the memory of his disciples. Yet on this model those same disciples would have made an effort to control and preserve his teaching. In Gerhardsson’s view, the disciples formed a collegium, led by Peter, whose purpose was to preserve Jesus’ teaching.

In support of this view, we might note that Paul, who in some ways forged his own path from the apostles, nevertheless submitted to the disciples’ authority. In his epistles, he even uses the technical rabbinic language of ‘receiving’ and ‘passing on’ tradition. This may suggest that Paul had received an authoritative tradition (from the disciples) and committed it to memory before handing it on.

Before we move on, it is important to make two points of clarification. First, the Scandinavian school were well aware that Jesus was not a ‘rabbi’ in the formal sense of the rabbinic Judaism that emerged after the destruction of the Temple in AD 70. Rather, the Scandinavians were proposing that rabbinic education provided an analogy for the kinds of learning which could have taken place in Jesus’ own time.

Second, while they believed that stories and events in Jesus’ life were handled with care, this did not preclude development and interpretation of the tradition. For example, Gerhardsson deemed the infancy, baptism and temptation narratives in the gospels as the product of later Christian scribes, in which literary license was taken.

Memory and the Gospels

What then are we to make of this Scandinavian model of the Jesus tradition?

I think there are a few advantages it has over the form critical view it was supplanting. For a start, I think the Scandinavian school rightly stresses the importance of memory. Whether or not one imagines the learning of material as analogous to rabbinic methods – a point we shall reason to doubt – it is clear that memorisation was a more central aspect of learning in antiquity than in modern, technological societies.

This is borne out by the materials we find in the gospels. Something that strikes me is just how memorable many of Jesus’ teachings are. I think not only of his parables, which are still learnt easily by children, but also his pithy aphorisms: “the last shall be first and the first shall be last,” “the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath” or “the harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few.”

Here is where things get interesting. There are 247 independent units which comprise Jesus’ teaching in the Synoptics. And of these, 42% are just a single verse long. Such terse sayings are typically recalled in verbatim memory, which is short-lived. But if they are continuously recited, they are likely to be recalled – and to be recalled accurately. This may offer some evidence for the repetition envisaged by this model.4

I also think there is some a priori plausibility to the idea that Jesus’ followers would want to commit their master’s teaching to memory. The form critics envisaged a model in which the early Church had little regard for the historical Jesus. Yet I take it as a basic assumption that the status of Jesus would have affected how traditions of Jesus were received and subsequently remembered. The early Church would have wanted to remember – and to tell accurately – their master’s teaching.

Qualms and Quibbles

The rabbinic model drew attention to the role of memory in the Jesus tradition missed by the form critics. But like the form-critics’ own model, it has faced its fair share of criticism. Here, I focus on two key problems: (1) the strength of the rabbinic tradition for the Jesus tradition; and (2) its weaknesses in explaining the NT data.

a. The Rabbinic Parallels

The biggest question for the Scandinavian school concerns how well the early Jesus movement can be likened to rabbinic education. Accepting that the rabbinic methods for learning the Torah and its interpretation (the oral Torah) only furnished an analogy for the Jesus tradition, how well does that analogy stand up?

E.P. Sanders points to a number of ways in which the Jesus tradition differs from the (later) rabbinic one.5 The Jesus tradition existed in two languages (Aramaic and Greek), and its period of transmission was relatively brief. Jesus’ followers also believed in him as the living Lord, not just as a past teacher. All of these factors may have encouraged a greater level of creativity and fluidity than the rabbinic tradition.

Others have highlighted the discrepancy between rabbinic education and the disciples’ formation. The rabbis were highly educated. Yet the gospels present the disciples as labourers, while Acts describes James and John as illiterate (agrammatoi). Given low literacy rates in Palestine, we might assume that most of Jesus’ disciples were unlettered labourers – not people who were used to formal learning.

This criticism takes on a greater force when we consider the rabbinic tradition itself. While the Scandinavian school stresses the role of orality and memory in rabbinic learning, Martin Jaffee has observed that rabbinic learning was never purely oral. There was always an interplay of the written text along with the spoken word.6 This is a further dissimilarity between the illiterate disciples and the rabbinic schools.

In response, it might be imagined that Jesus would have educated his own disciples. Yet it is perhaps notable that the gospels never describe the disciples as learning in the way that this model envisages.7 Perhaps Jesus’ disciples did sit at his feet and rehearse his teachings. But I wonder if a more informal method is more plausible. His disciples heard him on multiple occasions in different settings – often in crowds, rather than in a formal learning context – and the disciples remembered his teaching.

What they then did with this teaching is also up for debate. I take it for granted that the basics of Jesus’ message was protected by the authority of the Jerusalem Church. Yet the message of Jesus spread rapidly in diverse (Greek-speaking) settings, and by the time the gospels were written down, the original generation were mostly dead.8 I think this raises a problem for the control the disciples exercised over the tradition.

b. Does it Explain the Evidence?

We have had reason to question whether rabbinic learning provides a suitable analogy to the disciples’ transmission of tradition. Yet there is another way to assess whether the rabbinic model is compelling – and this is to question whether it makes sense of the data we find within early Christian sources. In brief, does it look like the material was handled in the way that the Scandinavian school suggests?

Perhaps the most intriguing piece of evidence in favour of the Scandinavian model is Paul’s language of ‘receiving’ and ‘handing’ on tradition. In 1 Corinthians 15, for example, Paul cites what appears to be a creed about Jesus’ death and resurrection. It has a repetitive structure, and elements which may indicate an Aramaic origin. For instance, Peter is not called Petros but goes by his Aramaic name, Cephas.

Yet it is important to handle this evidence with care. One issue is that Paul himself was a highly educated Pharisee. Thus, when Paul uses the technical terminology for ‘receiving’ and ‘handing on’ tradition, it may reflect his own learning, rather than the way material was always handed on at large in the Jesus movement. We might readily imagine that the kinds of information Paul cites in the creed were learnt by memory, but should we imagine the same is true for the Jesus tradition as a whole?

In my view, the evidence is mixed. As I pointed out above, it is certainly true that the sayings materials in the gospels have a memorable quality. It is partly for this reason that I think we can recover Jesus’ teaching. At the same time, even the synoptic gospels do not betray verbatim agreement. To see this point, one need only compare the different gospel versions of the Lord’s prayer, or the Beatitudes, or Jesus’ instructions about what his disciples should wear on their missionary journeys.

At the same time, these differences are ones that also obtain in the rabbinic material. As P.S. Alexander observes, when one compares different versions of the same rabbinic tradition, “it is at once obvious that the material has not remained stable but has changed over time.”9 In these rabbinic materials, what is stable is the ‘gist’ of the tradition, not the exact wording. This presents a problem for those who believe that the gospel texts preserve the exact wording of Jesus’ teaching, let alone his deeds.

Memorising the Jesus Tradition

Overall, there is much that is valuable to the Scandinavian model of oral tradition. Offering a helpful corrective to form criticism, it highlights the role that memory – and memorisation – must have played in the oral culture of classical antiquity. I believe that the echoes of this memory can still be felt within the gospel texts.

Yet I wonder whether this model is, in the end, too ambitious. The disciples were not formal students, sitting at the feet of their rabbi, nor were they in a position to control the tradition as it spread across the ancient world. This would explain why the gospel texts show not only signs of memory, but of adaptation and invention. Memorisation likely played a part – but only one part – in a more complex traditioning process.

When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads…

When the English actually believe that they know "intuitively" what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt.

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

I’m currently on tour across the UK, hosting conversations with Alex O’Connor on theology, philosophy and religion. A question I’ve put to Alex so far is what he makes of the argument that Christianity was vital in shaping the moral imagination of the West. This argument was advanced most famously by Nietzsche, quoted above, and has returned to public consciousness with Tom Holland’s history, Dominion.

In its most ambitious form, the argument runs that many of the things we love about Western civilisation – its emphasis on personal liberty, limited government, care for the poor and marginalised, and the inherent dignity of humanity – can all be traced, directly or indirectly, to Christianity. The concerning payoff is that as the West moves beyond Christianity – if indeed it does – the very fabric of civilisation will be torn.

Alex is not convinced by this argument, calling it “almost complete nonsense.” In our Liverpool show, he pointed out that human freedom may have been supported by (evangelical) abolitionists, but other Christians were perfectly fine with owning slaves. And for Alex, these Christians were not reading against but rather with the grain of their scriptures. The Old Testament gives advice on how to own slaves, and the New Testament similarly assumes – and never wholly contests – the widespread practice.

I am similarly sceptical of those who would argue that Western rights can be read directly out of the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures. Yet this has never been the ‘Tom Holland’ argument – at least not as articulated by Holland himself – and I think there is a variation of it which is more defensible. This is the view that early Christianity made some surprising moves which anticipate ideas that the West now finds intuitive.

The basis for this argument is set out by Larry Hurtado in Destroyer of the Gods. As the subtitle of the book suggests, Hurtado has plotted several modes of ‘Early Christian distinctiveness in the Roman world.’ These idiosyncrasies have become common-places in the way we see the world today, whether or not we are Christian. In this post, I sketch three ways in which early Christianity anticipated Western ideas.

A Voluntary, Trans-Ethnic Faith

In the opening line of his magnum opus, Theology and Social Theory, John Milbank reminds us that ‘once there was no secular.’ To be religious in the ancient world was simply to be. Making sacrifices to the gods was a daily part of life. To revere the gods was not something one chose; it was a state one inherited, like one’s family or race.

In this world full of gods, the Jewish people were something of an exception. As staunch monotheists, they made sacrifices to God on Caesar’s behalf, but were not required to sacrifice to the Roman deities. For this, they were routinely decried by Romans as socially deviant. Yet this practice was still accepted, because it bore a likeness to the Roman’s own system: it was perceived as ancient and ancestral.

In this religio-political framework, Christians occupied a very peculiar position. For a start, Christianity was populated largely by Gentiles (non-Jews) who were now refusing to sacrifice to the Roman gods. They were not Jews. They had no ancestral or ethnic obligation to join the new cult. Yet they were also – now – not properly ‘pagan’ either. As Paula Fredriksen describes them, they were “ex-pagan pagans.” Or to translate this into the language of ancient Roman writers – they were atheists.

It is difficult to overstate how weird this made Christianity. Today, we see faith in much the same way as the Christians did: as a voluntary act that transcends ethnicity. Yet in the ancient world, to be Roman was to worship the Roman gods; to be Jewish to worship the Jewish God. The idea that there was ‘no Jew nor Gentile… in Christ Jesus’ was a radical notion which detached faith from race and cult. It is an idea that anticipates the common notion of religion we have today as a voluntary choice.

The Limits of the State

I have already noted that the early Jesus movement was comprised largely of “ex-pagan pagans,” who refused to make sacrifices to the Emperor or worship the gods. This did not mean that the early Christians completely ignored Caesar’s authority or were deliberately deviant. Paul claims that earthly authorities derived their power from God, and Jesus calls his followers to ‘give to Caesar what is Caesar’s’.

Yet Jesus’ teaching comes with an important second clause: ‘give unto… God what is God’s. For the early Christians, Caesar may have a proper claim over taxes and governance, but not on the deeper matters of conscience, morality and worship. In brief, the early Christians began to drive a wedge between the authority of the government and God’s own authority. They set limits to the authority of the state.

This is another idea that may seem obvious to us today in the West. Of course, the government is not divine! Of course religion and politics are distinct. Yet in antiquity, such an idea was absurd. The early Christians resisted it because they recognised a different authority over their lives. This planted the seeds for the kind of separation between state and religion which would be later codified in Western law.

To be clear, I am not claiming that Christianity necessitated the rise of secular democracies. Nor is it possible to ignore the fact that Christianity came to tether itself in various ways to Roman power. I am suggesting, however, that this later wedding of Church with state was originally an unnatural one. For the earliest Christians, these two phenomena were kept largely distinct.

Women, Slaves and Children

We have suggested so far that early Christianity made two radical moves for its gentile followers: (1) it creates the notion of a religiosity that transcended ethnicity or kin; and (2) it separates religion from politics. Yet when people suggest that Christianity laid the ‘foundation’ of the West, they are usually thinking in more moral terms. They are suggesting that there was something distinctly Christian about Western values.

It is here that the ‘Tom Holland’ argument seems to face its greatest hurdle. For today, we recognise that all people – men, women and children – have the right to freedom and liberty. Yet in the ancient world, Christians simply assumed the practice of slavery and a steeper division between women and men. Rather than denying the oppressive power structures at play, Christians in some ways reinforced them.

Consider a selection of passages in the New Testament which scholars refer to as ‘household codes’. These texts call for women to submit to their husband’s authority, and for slaves to submit to their masters. A particularly troubling instruction is found in 1 Peter, which states: ‘slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle but also those who are harsh’ (18-20).

It is clear from these codes that early Christians were unconcerned with the overhaul of societal norms. Yet on one level this is completely unsurprising. Many of Jesus’ early followers were anticipating his return, and were in no social position to imagine a society without slavery. To fault first-century Christians – a small sect of no more than ten thousand people, many of low status – for not holding a modern view of these issues, seems to mis-comprehend the position of the early Jesus movement.

With that said, I do think there are some ways in which early Christians stood out ethically from their Roman neighbours. Here I will briefly list just three:

a. The dignity of women and slaves. The first way in which Christians stood out was in granting a degree of moral dignity and spiritual equality to women and slaves. We see this in the household codes themselves, which – to my knowledge – are the only form of their kind which address both women and slaves. We find household codes in other ancient writers, yet these texts are always written by men to other men.

Imagine, then, that you are an early Christian slave hearing the household codes read aloud. You will hear that slaves are to submit to their masters, and women to their husbands. But in the same assembly, you will hear that husbands must love their wives, and that masters must not threaten their slaves, ‘since you know that he who is both their master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him.’

There are two interesting things at play here. The first is that women and slaves are granted a degree of moral agency; the second is that the worst aspects of Christian husbands and masters is tempered. This is one practical way in which Paul’s statement that ‘there is no male or female… nor slave or free’ was manifest in early Christian meetings. It would also help to explain why it seems that Christianity seems to have been especially attractive to the lower classes, slaves and women.

b. The treatment of children. Another way in which Christianity stood out from the wider Roman world is in its treatment of children. Early Christian texts prohibit both abortion and the widespread practice of “exposure”, in which an unwanted infant was abandoned to die. For example, the Didache, an early Christian instruction manual, states: ‘You shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is begotten.’

A still more striking way in which Christians stood out from their Roman neighbours was in their opposition to child abuse. In an ethic we find morally egregious today, Roman writers lauded pederasty, the sexual use of children and young adolescents. Yet Christian writers from the earliest period were completely opposed to this abuse.

So emphatic was Christian opposition to pederasty that Christians appear to have coined two new terms to condemn the practice: paidophthored (‘to corrupt/sexually abuse children) and its corresponding noun paidophthoros. The Didache and Epistle of Barnabas independently use these terms to condemn the practice alongside adultery and murder, which suggest their origin in even early Christian discourse.

c. The restraint of men. Finally, it is noteworthy that Christianity diverged from the wider Graeco-Roman world on other issues of sexual morality. Of special interest is the way in which early Christian texts restrain the sexual behaviours of men.

In the Roman world, it was widely tolerated for married men to have sex with prostitutes, courtesans and slaves, but not the reverse. Yet in early Christian discourse, all of these sexual activities are brought under the umbrella of what Paul calls porneia (‘sexual immorality’) – a term usually used by Roman writers to refer only to adultery. Resisting this double standard of male versus female sexual behaviour, Paul claims that men’s bodies belong only to their wives, and vice versa.

Another illustration of Christian resistance to sexual double-standards is the call for men to remain faithful to their wives, in a world in which divorce was common. In ancient Rome, the loyalty of women to their husbands was prized. There were even Latin and Greek words (univira and monandros) used to honour such women.

The striking move that Christianity makes is praising men who are faithful to their wives. Lacking a term to describe such men, the author of 1 Timothy has to compose a term to praise them: mias gynaikos andra (literally, ‘a one woman husband/man’). While this requirement was not placed on all Christians, it was held for both leaders and deacons of the Church as a model for righteous behaviour. We see here again that sexual standards typically reserved for women were applied by Christians to men.

Are we all ancient Christians?

I am under no illusion that ‘the West’ as we know it today is the product of a long process of technological development, political and philosophical reflection. It would be anachronistic – and palpably false – to impose a framework of human rights, secularism and feminism onto the early Christian texts, as if Western values can be read directly out of the Scriptures. I think Alex is rightly opposed to this argument.

Yet when we consider the ways in which early Christianity stood out from the wider Roman world, I think we all have much more in common with ancient Christians than we might imagine. Though there are other elements to tease out, I have here highlighted three ways in which Christianity anticipated ideas we now find intuitive:

1. The notion of faith as a voluntary act which transcends ethnic boundaries, anticipating the modern notion of ‘religion.’

2. The recognition that the state is not divine, anticipating the modern secular division between ‘religion’ and ‘politics’.

3. The spiritual dignity accorded to people – women, slaves and children – across the social spectrum, anticipating a modern concern for equality.

To point to these values is not to say that Christians lived them out, either in the past or today. On the contrary, the very fact that these ideas had to be argued for in early Christian debates is evidence that they were not intuitive or always easily liveable.

Yet to forget the distinctiveness of early Christiaity is to our own loss. There was something different about Christianity in the early Roman empire; something attractive and unobvious about it which was appealing. To get back in touch with that early Christian weirdness is to connect to an early part of our own history again.

I (iota) = Iésous (Jesus)

CH (chi) = Christos (Christ)

TH (theta) = Theos (God)

Y (upsilon) = Huios (Son)

S (sigma) = Sōtér (Saviour)

Taken together, it reads: Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.

Growing up, I imbibed the view that the fish was used as a secret symbol for Christians to identify each other during persecution. Just as someone might stick a fish on the bumper of their vehicle as a sign that a Christian is on board, so the ancients used fish to identify believers, though in a more clandestine manner.

We find this theory about the Jesus fish represented in all sorts of popular literature:

Jeroen Temperman: “This [fish] was a secret symbol used by early Christians to help them identify one another without exposing themselves to their enemies.”1

Garth S. Jowett & Victoria O’Donnell: “Initially used as a secret sign during the time when Christians were persecuted by the Roman authorities, the fish symbolized the mission of the group it represented and did so simply and effectively.”2

Wikipedia: “The fish was originally adopted by early Christians as a secret symbol, but the many variations known today first appeared in the 1980s.”

Bible Study Tools: “During the times of persecution by the Romans in the first centuries, the fish symbol was used among Christians in hiding to display meeting places for everyone to meet and worship. They could be spotted on trees or doorways or even tombs and at the same time, the fish symbol was also used by several pagan religions so they wouldn’t bring about suspicion from anyone about what it could be.”

Early Christian History: “In the first three centuries of persecution, Christians used to identify each other by casually drawing the Ichthus, the fish in the dirt or sand. If the other person responded, it was good. If they did not, it was just an idle doodle.”

These kinds of theories about the Jesus fish are widespread online. But is there something fishy about them? In this post, I unpack the real meaning of the fish as a symbol for Christ, and examine the evidence that it was a secret code.

Jesus as Fish in Ancient Texts

Read more

This is the second post in which I sketch the contributions of my PhD research on Jesus’ physical appearance. This week’s sketch takes me to the question of the literary genre of the gospels, and whether or not we should see them as Graeco-Roman ‘lives’.

In the last three decades, a quiet revolution has taken place in gospel studies. Some of its first tremors were felt at my alma mater, the University of Nottingham, in the 1980s, when a doctoral student turned up with the intention to prove that the gospels were not biographies. Equipped for the first time with computer software for textual analysis, and a degree in classics, Richard Burridge seemed to be in a good position to prove his thesis. He gathered a collection of ten ancient ‘lives’ (Greek bíoi; Latin: vitae) and ran their features through his software, comparing them with the gospels.

Yet what Burridge found took him by surprise. Far from differing from ancient ‘lives’, the gospels fit the genre well – and the data from his analysis seemed to prove it. Just like the gospels, ancient lives revealed the character (éthos) of an individual through a selection of their words and deeds. They had a strong ethical component, encouraging their audiences to imitate the subject’s virtues (and avoid their vices). They paid significant attention to their subject’s death, believing that one’s death was the greatest testimony to a life well lived. And all of this would often fit on a single scroll.

By the time I turned up for a degree in biblical studies over two decades later, Burridge’s work had already become mainstream. In my very first undergraduate essay, the question I was assigned was the title of this post: Are the Gospels Graeco-Roman biographies? In response, I argued that they were. What principally convinced me was their keen focus on an individual, unparalleled in Jewish literary forms.

Yet the longer I sat with the label, ‘Graeco-Roman biography’, the more uncomfortable, and even useless, it seemed to be. As Burridge himself had pointed out in his original study, the term bios (‘life’) does not cast much light on the Gospels’ purpose, for it is a wide-ranging term that can encompass a great variety of texts. Some lives were highly fictional – others more historiographic. To say that the Gospels are biographies of a sort seems likely, but the hermeneutical payoff is weak.

The Search for a Sub-Type

In response to this quandary, many scholars have attempted to qualify exactly what kind of biography the Gospels are. In the last couple of decades, there has been a whole fleet of scholars who have promised to deliver a specific sub-type of biography in which the gospels might fit. They are ‘subversive’ rather than ‘civic’ (so Robyn Faith Walsh); they are ‘historical’ rather than ‘novelistic’ (so Craig Keener); or they are biographies written in a peculiar ‘mode’, such as tragedy (as proposed by Jeffrey Jay).

These proposals shed light on aspects of the gospels, yet I am sceptical of this ‘fine-tuning’ exercise for two reasons. The first is that it is a modern attempt to put order to a genre that is, by its very nature, amorphous. One can say that the gospels are civic rather than subversive biographies – but did any ancient author have these schemata in mind when they set out to write their ‘lives’?

Read more

Yet there is an even more complex literary puzzle in Mark – something scholars have dubbed the ‘messianic secret’. This refers to the way in which the Markan Jesus – in contrast to the way Jesus is presented in John1 – frequently conceals his identity.

When the demons identify Jesus as the ‘holy one’ of God, he silences them. When he heals people, he commands them not to tell anyone about it. And when the disciples begin to clock on to Jesus’ messianic identity, he instructs them to be silent.

The question I want to address in this piece is: why? Why does the Markan Jesus not want those around him to reveal his identity? Is this something that goes back to the historical Jesus, or should we credit it to the literary artistry of Mark?

Did Jesus claim to be the Messiah?

The phrase ‘Messianic secret’ (Das Messiasgeheimnis) can be credited to William Wrede, who also offered an explanation for it.2 In Wrede’s view, Jesus never actually claimed to be the Messiah. Rather, this belief arose after his resurrection, when the Church assigned him a role he never arrogated. The ‘messianic secret’ is thus a way to explain why people didn’t think that Jesus was the Christ during his lifetime. It says that Jesus acted in a way that was messianic, but he told people to keep it a secret.

Today, I know of no scholars who fully endorse Wrede’s explanation. For one thing, it is notable that Jesus is often deeply unsuccessful in telling people to keep his identity a secret. In Mark 1 and 7, the people Jesus heals refuse to keep his command to secrecy. If Mark invented the Messianic Secret to explain why no one thought that Jesus was the Messiah during his lifetime, he totally failed to give this impression.

Yet there is another crucial problem with this idea: namely, that there are good grounds to think that Jesus did claim a messianic identity. It would be impossible to catalogue all of Jesus’ ostensibly ‘messianic’ deeds here – you may inspect this footnote for a few3 – but they are found in multiple strata and different forms within the gospels. Thus, even if Jesus did not explicitly go around telling people, ‘I am the Messiah,’ he did do things that look implicitly messianic.

We might also take issue with Wrede’s claim that Jesus’ messiahship was a post-Resurrection belief. As James Dunn has pointed out, “messiahship was not an obvious, far less necessary, corollary of resurrection.”4 Other figures such as Moses, Elijah and Isaiah were thought to have been exalted to heaven after their deaths, but none of these men attracted messianic associations. The simplest explanation of the fact that Jesus was proclaimed ‘Son of God’ at his resurrection is the fact that he was already viewed as messianic, and the resurrection experiences vindicated this claim.

The Historical Jesus

If Wrede was wrong that Jesus was not perceived as a messianic figure in his lifetime, could the messianic secret go back to Jesus himself?

On the one hand, scholars have reasons to be sceptical. Did the demons really know who Jesus was when they spoke to him? Did Jesus hush their recognition of who he was? Even if one believes that these episodes did happen – and certainly, strange exorcistic experiences occur in the modern world – it would be difficult to establish historically that these scenes unfolded exactly as they were narrated.

At the same time, it seems plausible that something in the ‘messianic secret’ might go back to Jesus himself. To see how, we must bear in mind that messianic notions in the first-century were varied and diverse. Assuming that Jesus had a messianic self-understanding, but did not buy into the more martial, political strains of messianism which were prevalent in the first century, one might understand why he may not have gone around claiming to be ‘the messiah’.

When I say that Jesus may have wanted to avoid certain messianic overtones, I do not simply mean that he wanted to clarify, philosophically-speaking, what he was about. Avoiding claims to messiah-ship may have also served as a survival strategy. John the Baptist was put to death by the state. Several other kingly claimants of the first-century shared his fate. If Jesus wanted his mission to be successful, he would not have wanted to have run similarly afoul with claims to kingship.

It is possible, then, that the Messianic secret had its roots in Jesus’ own avoidance of kingly claims. Yet this theory is not without problems. On the one hand, it does not explain why Jesus does on occasion tell those he heals to spread the news (e.g. 5:19-20). If Jesus was trying to hide his identity, he does not seem to have done a very good job.

And even if we suppose that the historical Jesus did strategically conceal his identity, we are still left with a cluster of literary questions: For what purpose does Mark include the motif in his story? And how does the motif function within his narrative world? Before we understand the secret, we need to consider how Mark employs it within his wider narrative.

A Literary Secret

To see how the Messianic Secret works literarily, it is important to recognise that we –the readers – know from the outset of the narrative that Jesus is ‘the Christ.’ This places us on the same spiritual plane as the demons, who also recognise Jesus’ identity as the ‘holy one of God’. Yet beyond this, the characters in the story consistently misunderstand or have Jesus’ messianic identity concealed from them. Why is this?

The most common suggestion is that Mark is trying to re-configure his readers’ understanding of what it means to be the Messiah. Like the disciples, Mark takes us on a journey towards the cross. We are not to understand messiahship simply in terms of glory, power or military subjection – the most common ways in which first-century Jews would have viewed it. We are to see it in terms of Jesus’ death.

Consider the first moment Jesus is explicitly ‘revealed’ as the Son of God to his inner ring: the mount of transfiguration. When Jesus is coming down from the mountain, he tells his disciples not to share what they have heard until after his resurrection. It is not before Jesus has died and risen that they will understand his sonship. And on the Mount, they are told to ‘listen’ to Jesus. What follows is a block of teaching in which Jesus informs his disciples of the necessity of his coming suffering and death.

The same dynamics are at work in Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus does not want Peter to share this truth – and immediately, we are told why: Peter thinks that Jesus’ messiahship should not involve Jesus going to the cross. In this regard, Peter is like the first blind man Jesus heals in the same portion of material: he is healed partially and can therefore ‘see’ Jesus – but only to some extent, not fully.

Within this unfolding journey, when is it that a human character can finally clocks and realise who Jesus is? It is only once Jesus has breathed his last, and the centurion proclaims: truly, this man was the Son of God. Here we finally have a figure who understands what has been hidden from the disciples. Jesus is the Messiah, but he is the Messiah in a way that no one expected: he is the Messiah who suffers and dies.

Considered as a narrative, the cross and resurrection appear integral to Mark’s framing of Jesus’ messianic identity. Yet there are two reasons why I don’t think that this fact alone provides a comprehensive explanation of the ‘messianic secret’.

The first is that most of Mark’s readers would have already been familiar with the notion of Jesus’ death as the messiah. And many of Mark’s readers, who were gentile, would have first come across the term ‘messiah’ when they came into contact with the Jesus movement. This poses a problem for the idea that Mark was setting out to correct an errant Christology in which the messiah does not suffer. For as Helen Bond explains, Mark’s readers “would have no need for the title to be reconfigured.”5

The second is that this narrative unfolding of Jesus’ identity – which reaches its zenith on the cross – does not explain earlier instances of the ‘secret’ in which Jesus (inconsistently) tells people he heals not to spread the news. For that aspect of the secret, I think we need another explanation, to which we shall turn next.

Is the Secret… A Secret?

So far, we have couched Mark’s material as a messianic secret. Yet we might pause for a moment to consider whether this is the best framing of the motif. As David Watson has pointed out in his ground-breaking study, Honor Among Christians, the ancient language for ‘secrecy’ is remarkably absent from the gospel.6 For instance, Mark virtually never uses terms like kruptō, apokruptō, lanthanō, arrétos or mysterion.

Rather than seeing Mark’s material in terms of secrecy, then, Watson proposes an altogether different framework for making sense of the motif – that of shame and honour. He observes that many of the episodes in which Jesus grants healing or accrues titles (‘holy one of God’ or the ‘Christ’) can be seen within the context of a patron-client relationship. In the Roman world, a patron would provide services to a client for which he was, in turn, granted ‘honour’, titles and devotion.

Seen through this lens, Watson argues that the Markan Jesus deliberately subverts the dynamics of shame and honour in the ancient world. Rather than receiving the honour that is due him on account of his wondrous deeds, Jesus tells people not to spread the word. Rather than ‘lording’ over others, he establishes new markers of what is considered honourable: sacrifice, service and suffering – even to the point of death.

The notion that the Markan Jesus inverts the dynamics of shame and honour is especially appealing. Yet like other explanations we have surveyed, it is not seamless. Its greatest problem is that it does not account for several moments in the gospel in which Jesus does refuse honour but embraces it. Watson himself notes eighteen such instances. Thus, if he is correct that the motif is designed to invert shame and honour, Mark has not followed through with these dynamics in a completely coherent way.

A Counter-Imperial Resonance?

Watson’s thesis may not completely account for the way that Jesus embraces honour. Yet more recently, Adam Winn has adapted Watson’s argument in a way that attempts to account for Jesus’ simultaneous embrace and rejection of honours.7 The key to Winn’s view is that Jesus is presented in Mark like a Roman emperor; and several of the emperors positioned themselves in a similar way to the Markan Jesus – they embraced honour on occasion, but were known for deflecting it in others.

Consider Vespasian, who was likely Emperor during the time that Mark was composed. Vespasian receives all kinds of honour. Yet following the deflective style of earlier emperors, Vespasian was hesitant to accept the title ‘Father of the Country’ or his powers as tribune. Winn also observes that Vespasian ended the practice of worshipping the ‘genius’ of the living emperor, instituted by Caligula.

Winn’s thesis may not explain why Jesus rejects or embraces honour in any specific instance.8 It also does not – to the best of my knowledge – draw upon the particular language that might be used of imperial deflection. Nonetheless, I find it plausible that Jesus’ relationship to honour may be seen within a wider set of imperial parallels.

As I have set out in earlier posts, there are several ways in which the evangelists present Jesus as ‘Emperor-like.’ Broadly speaking, Jesus is the Son of God (divi filius), is associated with ‘good news’ (euangelia), performs miracles – including the use of spittle – and ascends to heaven. Even more specifically, Jesus is ultimately responsible for the demise of the Temple in Jerusalem. With these parallels in mind, Winn thinks that Jesus’ deflection of honour may be another way that Jesus “out-Caesars Caesar.”

Disclosing the Messianic Secret

The Messianic Secret is no easy puzzle to solve. And I think this is in part due to the panoply of materials that scholars have placed under its umbrella. In the first instance, we have Jesus instructing those he has healed not to spread the news. Yet we also have a sub-plot in which Jesus instructs others not to out him as ‘the Christ’ or ‘Son of God’ when he is explicitly proclaimed as such.

I wonder whether untangling these separate threads might allow us to see the ‘messianic secret’ more clearly. In the first case, the Markan Jesus did not always want to embrace the honour that was due to him in his healing miracles. This aspect of the ‘secret’ fits into Jesus’ wider characterisation as an emperor or ‘counter’ Son of God.

Yet in the second case, Mark is laying out what it means to be the Messiah. He is showing us that any notion of messiah-ship which leaves out Jesus’ death and resurrection is incomplete. This may not be to ‘reconfigure’ his readers’ notions of messiahship, but to emphasise one aspect of Jesus’ identity that would have resonated with early Christian experience: not present glory, but suffering, service and death.

Thank you for reading this post on Mark! If you enjoyed it, you might also enjoy:

• Who is Mark’s Mystery Man?

• Did Someone Order a Markan Sandwich?

• Eyewitness Testimony in Mark?

If you would like more pieces like this, consider becoming a paid subscriber to Behind the Gospels. In addition to 50+ exclusive articles, you will gain access to my new monthly lecture series, addressing different aspects of gospels’ research.

Get 25% off for 1 year

This is the beginning of a series of posts in which I sketch the argument I make in my recent book. This first one looks at physical descriptions in ancient biography, and whether it is surprising that the gospels don’t describe Jesus’ appearance.

I often quip that my PhD was a hundred-thousand word argument from silence. The silence in question: why do the gospels not describe Jesus’ physical appearance?

This may not seem like an obvious question to ask. Yet a quiet revolution has taken place in the last three decades of gospels’ research. Rather than seeing the gospels as non-literary compilations of oral traditions, most scholars now view them as a form of ‘life-writing’ or ancient biography.

This paradigm shift has re-opened the question of Jesus’ appearance, as many ancient ‘lives’ do describe their subject’s physical appearance. To be sure, not every bíos contains a physical description. Yet it seemed curious to me that not just one – but rather all four – of the evangelists fail to tell us what Jesus looked like.

In this introduction to my research, then, I want to explore whether it really is surprising that we find no description of Jesus the gospels. Is this a silence which subverts the conventions of biography – or is it a silence which fails to speak?

Descriptions in Ancient Biography

The first task in my thesis was to work out how common descriptions were in ancient lives. So I read all of the complete biographies I could get my hands on, four hundred years either side of the gospels. This took me from the origins of the genre in Greek literature up to the emergence of ‘Christian’ biography in the Roman Empire.

What I found took me by surprise. The evangelists were the only biographers in antiquity not to describe their subject in any of their works. Whether it was highly fictional works like The Life of Aesop or the Alexander Romance, or more historical biographies like Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars, physical descriptions kept popping up. Moreover, Jewish biographers would make sure to mention their subject’s physical appearance – even when it was absent from their primary source material.

Read more

Each month I am hosting an interactive lecture for my paid subscribers, and the topic of this January lecture was ‘What did Jesus really look like?’, incorporating material from my recent book, Jesus’ Physical Appearance: Biography, Christology, Philosophy (2025).

The lecture covered a range of topics:

• Why are the gospels silent on Jesus’ physical appearance?

• What would an average Galilean man have looked like?

• Does Luke 19 describe Jesus as ‘short in stature’?

• Does Christian iconography, including the Turin Shroud, recover Jesus’ image?

• What are the earliest images of Jesus?

• It it possible that Jesus was physically impaired?

I want to give a huge thank you to Carl, who came to the lecture and recorded it, after I faced some technical challenges at the start.

The lecture is now available below:

Read more