Tatian’s amalgam was called the Diatessaron, because it was made ‘out of’ (dia) the ‘four’ (tessaron) gospels, and for centuries, it was used liturgically in some Syrian-speaking Churches. In the fourth century, Ephrem the Syrian wrote an extensive commentary on the work, and Theodoret of Cyrrhus later reported that he had found over two hundred copies of the text when he became Bishop of the region.

Tatian does not tell us why he wrote the Diatessaron, though one can see a clear incentive for producing a gospel harmony. While the gospels relay much of the same material, they do not always agree. This opened up Christianity to the accusation, levied by later critics such as Poryphry and Julian the Apostate, that the gospels were a hodgepodge of contradictions and that no single gospel was perfect. Tatian’s Diatessaron might have been an early attempt to dissolve this issue.

For many early Christians, however, the fact that there were four gospels – or one gospel told in four voices – was not a bug but a feature of the faith. Around the same time that Tatian was bringing the four gospels into one, the Church father Irenaeus was mounting a theological argument for the necessity of the fourfold gospel.

In Irenaeus’ view, there could be no fewer or greater than four gospels, because of the theological significance of the number four. There are four compass points of the earth, and four winds; there are also four faces to the cherubim – the creatures found in Ezekiel – and four covenants of God (through Adam, Noah, Moses and Christ).1

Such an argument for the necessity of four gospels may not sound convincing today. Yet the broader point that Irenaeus makes is compelling. For Irenaeus, each of the gospels is distinctive in the way that it presents Jesus. Thus, while the gospels are about the same person, to splice them together into a single narrative – like the Diatessaron – would be to lose the distinctive portrayal of Jesus of each gospel.

In modern scholarship, the distinctive portrayal of each gospel has been fleshed out by two methodologies. Redaction criticism studies the way that the gospel writers edited their sources, in keeping with their overall themes. Meanwhile, narrative criticism applies the insights of literary theory to the gospels, exploring the way that meaning is forged within the discrete narrative world that each gospel has constructed.

Irenaeus did not have these tools at his disposal. But he did recognise that each of the gospels had a peculiar essence. To capture this, Irenaeus associates each of them with a different animal, corresponding to four faces of the cherubim as they are ordered in the book of Ezekiel. In the original Western ordering of the gospels (Matthew, John, Luke, Mark), this meant Matthew was a human, John a lion, Luke an ox, and Mark an eagle. Or to take the Eastern/canonical order, which was standardised by Jerome in his Vulgate translation: Matthew = human, Mark = lion, Luke = ox, and John = eagle.

As these shifts in symbolism indicate, there is no mystical reason why each of the gospels corresponds to its particular creature. Still, I want to suggest that there is some value in this typology today. When we read the gospels or hear them read in Church, it can be easy to drift into Tatian’s way of thinking. We can think that each of the gospels are gospels, and so must be essentially conveying the same things.

But Irenaeus was right. The gospels are distinct, and seeing them as a menagerie of creatures can help us to avoid the temptation of collapsing their differences. Irenaeus’ typology can also serve as a useful aide-mémoire, with each animal being a peg on which can hang some of the gospel’s major themes. In what follows, I want to give a taster of some of the ways I think of the gospels as animals today.2

1. Matthew the Human: Matthew depicts Jesus as a true Israelite and a true human, who teaches others what it means to be human. This is seen not only in rooting Jesus’ humanity in the messiness of Israel’s story from his opening genealogy, but in the way that Matthew’s Jesus goes on to echo the figure of Moses. Like Moses, Jesus survives an infant massacre, passes through the waters (of baptism), spends time being tested in the desert, and delivers the law of God to the people. Yet where Moses and Israel faltered, Jesus completely aligns himself to God’s will, showing what it means to be fully human. His Sermon on the Mount, which echoes Moses’ instruction from Mount Sinai, can be seen as a treatise on authentic human life. Having shown his disciples what it means to be fully human, Matthew calls the twelve to take the same teaching to all of humanity.

2. Mark the Lion: If Matthew presents Jesus as a human teacher, then Mark presents Jesus as a bounding lion, a man of action and a figure of triumph. One of Mark’s favourite words is eutheos – suddenly, immediately, forthwith! This creates a sense of pace as Mark’s Jesus moves through Galilee, vanquishing the forces of darkness, casting out demons and binding Satan. Yet as the lion moves towards Jerusalem, another side to his triumph is revealed. Whereas Matthew is devoted to teaching throughout the gospel, Mark has only one major teaching block (chs. 8-10), which is devoted to correcting a common mistake we might have about the ‘lion’ – that he won’t have to suffer and die. Laying down his life for his pride, Jesus shows that his ultimate triumph is not in conquest, but in death.

3. Luke the Ox: Luke’s gospel is traditionally associated with a calf or an ox, a creature who bears burdens. There could be no more fitting animal to describe Luke, which is focused more than any other gospel on Jesus’ mission to the poor. Unlike Matthew, where Jesus is visited by the magi, Luke has Jesus visited by humble shepherds. When the Ox comes to Nazareth, he announces that he has come to ‘bring good news to the poor’, and in his sermon on the plain, he proclaims, ‘blessed are the poor’ (contrast Matthew’s, ‘blessed are the poor in spirit’). The ox comes to those on the margins of faith and society – to Gentiles, tax collectors, women, sinners, non-able bodied persons – and brings them into his Kingdom. This is all part of Luke’s great reversal, foretold in Mary’s song, in which ‘the humble are exalted’ while the rich and powerful are sent empty away.

4. John the Eagle. The first three gospels are often referred to as Synoptic gospels, because they share a lot of the same material and can be ‘seen together’ (syn-opsis). But John gives us a very different angle on Jesus. It is entirely fitting that he should not be seen not as an earth-bound creature (a man, a lion, an ox) but as an eagle who soars over the ministry of Jesus and gives us a bird’s-eye view. Unlike the other gospels, which begin at Jesus’ birth or ministry, John takes us all the way back to the beginning of time. From his nest in heaven at the father’s side, the divine eagle swoops down to earth to accomplish the father’s will, before returning to his former glory he had with him. With perceptive eagle eyes, John glides over the whole of Jesus’ earthly life, revealing its true spiritual meaning. Jesus’ miracles are not simply demonstrations of power, but ‘signs’, which point to his identity. To help unpack the meaning of who Jesus is, John draws on a range of Jewish symbols, from the Temple and the Manna to the High Priest and Passover Lamb, all of which Jesus embodies in his sweeping descent.

What are we to make of this typology? Of course, the gospel creatures do not exhaust what is distinctive about the gospels, and each symbol can be spun in a variety of ways. For example, the Church has often seen Luke’s ox in relation to sacrifice, which draws our mind to Jesus’ priestly relations in his infancy narrative and the ‘fattened calf’ slaughtered in his sublime parable of the prodigal son. Equally, one finds some of the most tender moments of Jesus’ humanity not in Matthew but in Luke and John.

Still, I have found the gospel symbols helpful for reminding me that the gospel is expressed in four distinctive ways. If anything, it also makes the task of visiting churches and museums more interesting! Statues and portraits of the evangelists often feature their corresponding creature; it can be fun to see which is which. Perhaps next time you step into a church or museum, you might take up the task of spotting these animals and remember their distinctive portrayals of Christ.

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Thank you for reading Behind the Gospels! If you enjoyed this short piece, you might also enjoy these other pieces on the gospels:

• Can the Dates of Jesus’ Death be Reconciled?

• Is the Gospel of John Historical?

• Who is Mark’s Mystery Man?

• Are the Gospels Graeco-Roman ‘Lives’?

• Three Gospel Number Puzzles (You’ve Probably Never Noticed)

• The Gospels are Bíoi – So What

Suggested Reading

Richard Burridge, Four Gospels, One Jesus. London: SPCK, 1994.

The expression surprised me, because for some time I have been wary about speaking about the gospels’ readers as “communities.” In my thesis I consciously avoided it. Little did I know that I was once an unwitting proponent of “community” speak!

The lesson I might pull from this brief foray into my essay is that it is easy to employ scholarly language without properly interrogating it or – dare I say – knowing what it means. As a master’s student, I didn’t have a studied view of the gospels’ audiences, yet I had seen scholars write of a “Markan community,” so I simply did the same.

Now that I am older (and slightly better read), I wish to return to the question of the gospel audiences. Were the gospels written with specific local “communities” in mind? Or did they have a wider audience in view? To begin with, I set out by addressing what the community model is, and why it became so popular.

The Community Theory

In the twentieth century, it became increasingly fashionable to see the gospels as written to “local groups” or “communities” of Christians. Mark was to Roman Christians in Rome; Matthew to Jewish-Christians; Luke to Gentile converts; and John to a mixed group of Christians who were now distanced from Judaism.

One key piece of evidence for these communities was a “mirror reading” of the gospels. While we lack solid external evidence about the gospels’ earliest readers, it is believed that we can reconstruct an “implied” reader from the gospels themselves.

For example, Matthew upholds the validity of the Torah and has Jesus regularly debate with Pharisees about the law, so scholars assumed that he wrote for a community of Jewish-Christians. By contrast, since Luke is more universalistic and pro-Gentile throughout his gospel, we might assume a specifically Gentile audience.

The extremes of this mirror reading were found vis-a-vis the Fourth Gospel, which had as its audience the so-called “Johannine community.” By mining clues within the text, some scholars believed that they could not only identify a community but reconstruct a multi-staged history of the community behind the gospel.1

This produced a ‘two level’ reading of the gospel. On the first level, John appears to be a story of Jesus. Yet on another level, it can be read as a coded history of the Johannine community who produced it. For example, the expulsion of a man from the synagogue was seen to reflect the community’s own synagogue expulsion, and Jesus’ mission to the Samaritans was actually the mission of the community.

Various scholars have taken issue with the more speculative histories of gospel communities. Yet the idea that the gospels were written with specific Christian communities in mind has been standard fare. Even when scholars disagreed on the location and specifics of the “Markan”, “Matthean” or “Lukan community,” the existence of these particular communities was largely taken for granted.

Two approaches appeared to reinforce this consensus. One was the application of social-scientific analysis to the gospels, which promised to identify the social situation of the gospel audiences with greater precision. Another was the rise of redaction criticism, which analysed the way the evangelists altered their sources. These alterations could be seen to reflect the interests of a particular setting.

The Gospels for All Christians

In more recent scholarship, the idea that the gospels were written exclusively for specific communities, isolated from a wider body of Christians, has received substantial criticism. This is largely due to an influential 1997 collection of essays from leading scholars, The Gospels for All Christians, edited by Richard Bauckham.2

As the title of the volume suggests, Bauckham set out a very different paradigm for the gospel audiences. Instead of seeing the gospels as written for specific communities, he suggests that the gospels were written for all (Greek-speaking) Christians. In what follows, I provide a precis of four arguments for this alternative view, before highlighting some important criticisms raised against it.

a. The Circulation of the Gospels

Bauckham begins by drawing our attention to the gospel of Mark. Putting aside for one moment the question of whether Mark intended to write only for his local context, the fact is that the gospel certainly did circulate beyond that context. We know of at least two of Mark’s early readers (Matthew and Luke) who chanced upon Mark’s gospel, and many scholars are starting to think that John used Mark as well.

This should give us pause when thinking that the evangelists only envisaged their works to be read or heard by a small group of people. If Matthew and Luke were written to supplant Mark – which they seem to be, incorporating much of Mark within their own gospels – we might suppose they envisaged an equally wide reach.

b. The Gospels as Ancient Biographies

Another factor to consider when thinking about the audience of any text is its genre. If we open up Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, we immediately get a sense about the audience of the text. It was not written for ‘all Christians’ everywhere – rather, it was a circumstantial letter addressed to a specific community in Corinth.

But the gospels are not circumstantial epistles. Many scholars today consider them a form of ancient life-writing or bíos. This is important, for while biographies may have had an immediate ‘target market’ or niche, their audience was not limited to the immediate circle or ‘community’ of readers.3 Moreover, they were not intended to chronicle the history of a community, but to tell the life of an individual.4

c. Networks in Early Christianity

A third challenge to the “community” theory is the interconnectedness of early Christian communities. On the community model, we gain the impression that the early Churches were largely isolated, self-sustaining groups, detached from the wider Jesus movement. Thus, the evangelists wrote only for their specific Christian group.

Yet this overlooks the high degree of interconnectedness within early Christianity.5 Jerusalem was a centre of coming and goings, and information could spread relatively from the centre of the Christian network in just a week. Early Christian literature also furnishes us with frequent references to itinerant preachers, as well as back-and-forths between leaders and the diverse Churches to whom they wrote.

d. The Problems with Mirror Reading

A final methodological problem with the evidence for “gospel communities” is circularity. Starting from the assumption that the gospels were written to local communities, the gospels’ features are seen to reflect those distinctive communities, which is then taken as evidence for the particular communities in question.

Yet it does not follow that if the gospels bear the marks of their context that they were reflective and written for that specific context only. For example, John 9 has been taken to be the product of a community that was ‘excommunicated’ from the synagogue. Yet if John reflects a widespread expulsion of Christians from the synagogue, we might assume that other Jewish-Christians faced a similar situation.6

The Gospels for Some Christians

Bauckham’s volume challenged the consensus, to the point that it is now common for scholars to cite the ‘gospels for all Christians’ hypothesis, even if they do not embrace it themselves.7 Yet to what extent is Bauckham successful in making his case? Here I highlight three strong objections or qualifications to Bauckham’s argument.

a. How Universal was the Church?

One curious fact – make of it what you will – is that Bauckham’s theory has had more traction among evangelical scholars than non-evangelicals.8 This is not to discredit it. But it is to note that Bauckham’s portrait aligns (perhaps too conveniently?) with certain theological convictions, such as the universality of the gospel and the ‘communion of the saints.’ For some, Bauckham makes a tacit assumption: that gospels with a universal message would have, as their audience, a universal church.

Such commitments make for good theology, but there is a question as to how seriously they convey the messy historical reality of the early Church. Consider, for example, the mobile and global nature of early Christianity. Bauckham cites various pieces of evidence that the Church was made up of mobile and highly communicative leaders, and that the Church saw itself as a universal (fictive) family of believers.

Yet not all of the evidence pushes in this impression.9 In the early Church, there was a significant divide between those who believed that they should follow the Torah and those ‘Pauline’ Christians who did not. For fourteen years, Paul did not apparently feel the need to visit Jerusalem (Gal. 2:1). In turn, there is no clear evidence that James, the leader of the Jerusalem Church, left the city. This raises the question of whether ‘all Christians’ saw themselves as part of a “worldwide” Church.

b. The Circulation of Mark

The starting point of Bauckham’s argument is that we know at least that Matthew and Luke came across Mark. From this, he supposes that Matthew and Luke would have imagined their own gospels as having a similarly wide reach.

But the circulation of Mark can be read for the opposite effect. David Sim notes that if Matthew and Luke set out to displace Mark, they have been “mindful of the inherent dangers associated writing for a general audience and expecting their message to be preserved intact.”10 On this reading, Sim judges it more likely that Matthew and Luke envisaged a more limited readership – namely, those who were partial to their own distinctive portraits.

Furthering his critique, Sim suggests that many Christians did write gospels for a limited audience. For example, second-century gnostics envisaged a gnostic audience for the Gospel of Thomas, and the same can be said of later Jewish-Christian gospels. The evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls also reveals texts written for the Qumran community, even when the community was part of a wider Essene ‘movement’.

If we apply this model to the gospels, we might not envisage that the gospels were written exclusively for a community in a specific locale; but we might see them as writing for a brand of Christianity that was closely related to their own.

c. Internal Clues in the Gospels

A lot of the evidence that is presented in Bauckham’s volume is circumstantial. That is to say, it does not provide evidence from the gospels themselves that the gospels were written for ‘all Christians’. Rather, it looks elsewhere: to the genre and circulation of the gospels and the methodological problems with mirror reading.

Perhaps one might point to evidence from the content of the gospel to support Bauckham’s point. Matthew, for example, imagines a worldwide gospel for the nations. Yet it is difficult to know what can be inferred from this. Paul’s circumstantial epistles also envisage a worldwide gospel – and like the gospels, circulated across the empire – yet their intended audience remained limited in scope.

It is the internal evidence that I think presents the greatest challenge for the ‘gospels for all Christians’ model. Consider the gospel of Mark. It is clear that Mark assumes some level of familiarity with his readers. This is why he can give them prompts (‘let the reader understand’) or why he can introduce Simon as the ‘father of Alexander and Rufus.’ He clearly thinks that his audience will understand who they are.

It also seems likely to me that each of the gospels was more suited to some audiences than others. Matthew clearly presumes a familiarity with the Jewish law on the part of his readers, while Mark seems to have envisaged an audience who would take to heart its message on suffering and persecution. Luke, too, writes to a Gentile, the ‘most excellent Theophilus’. While this dedication does not preclude a wider audience, his gospel does seem particularly tailored to the interests of Gentile readers.

To recognise this is not to indulge in the flights of fancy associated with the “Johannine community”. I am not suggesting that we can use the gospels to delineate the precise social-structures of the early Church. Nor is it to perpetuate the notion that the gospels were written for sectarian churches. But it is to push back against the notion that the evangelists had their audience as all Christians everywhere.

It is not circular to recognise that there is an implied reader of the gospels, and that implied reader was not every Christian, but those of a particular background and persuasion. Unless the gospel writers were hermits, they wrote within particular churches. In my view, it is a natural step to see that the differences in the canonical gospels can be accounted for, in part, by the needs of their social location.

The Gospels’ Readers

Who then were the gospels’ intended readers? Bauckham and company have pushed back strongly against the notion that the gospels were written for sectarian communities attached to specific locations, whose histories we can now reconstruct.

In my mind, one of their better arguments concerns the gospels’ genre. While a life of Pythagoras might be read with great interest by Pythagoreans, or a life of Plotinus by neo-Platonists, no one would speculate that these lives had as their sole intended recipient a ‘Pythagorian’ or ‘Neo-Platonist community’. One reason to write a biography – rather than communicating orally or through community documents – was so that a broad audience might learn something from the subject of the life.

The biggest problem with Bauckham’s thesis is whether it fully accounts for the diversity of the gospels and the early Jesus movement. The gospels were written within, and thus naturally shaped by, particular contexts. Though not limited to these immediate contexts, the internal evidence of the gospels suggests that they do have a particular audience in mind. A broad audience beyond a particular community is not a text written to a specific Church. But it is also not a ‘gospel for all Christians’.

Further Reading

Richard Bauckham (ed.) The Gospels for all Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998.

David C. Sim, “The Gospels for all Christians? A Response to Richard Bauckham,” JSNT 84 (2001): 3-27.

Edward W. Klink III (ed.) The Audience of the Gospels: The Origin and Function of the Gospels in Early Christianity. LNTS 353. London: T&T Clark.

Justin Marc Smith. Why Bíos? On the Relationship Between Gospel Genre and Implied Audience. LNTS 505. London: T&T Clark, 2014.

When I was set…

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“You mention Licona when discussing Miller as if Licona might have been mentioned elsewhere in the list but I don't see any other reference to him - was he initially on the list?”

This was an astute observation! I had indeed included Michael Licona’s book The Resurrection of Jesus in my list, but it ending up not making the final cut.

The inconsistency arose because I hadn’t tidied up the post when editing. So when it came to talking about another book, I left in a mention about Licona (showing that I had mentioned him more fully in an earlier draft).

There are two lessons to take from this. The first is some of my readers – I am looking at you, Karl! – are more fastidious as readers than I am a proof-reader.

The second is that even the most basic piece of composition (a short substack article) can reveal slips and seams which betray an earlier stage of composition or redaction. In movies and films, these are sometimes referred to “continuity errors”.

Interestingly, the same kind editorial slips can be seen in the gospels. Matthew and Luke made changes to Mark, but on occasion, they fail to carry through those changes consistently. This left traces of Mark’s earlier narrative.

Mark Goodacre famously called this phenomenon “editorial fatigue.” In his classic article on the subject, he defines editorial fatigue as follows:

“a phenomenon that will inevitably occur when a writer is heavily dependent on another’s work. In telling the same story as his predecessor, a writer makes changes in the early stages which he is unable to sustain throughout.”1

In this piece, I want to give some examples of editorial fatigue in the gospels.2 I also consider what this might tell us about the gospels’ composition.

Examples of Editorial Fatigue

There are several examples of editorial fatigue which are often raised in the scholarly literature. Let us take a look at just four of them:

a. The Feeding of the Five Thousand. In Mark, the evangelist tells us three times that the feeding of the five thousand took place ‘in a deserted place’ (6:31, 32, 35). This is why Jesus initially tells his disciples to send the crowd away to the ‘surrounding country and villages’ to buy something to eat.

When the narrative is re-produced in Luke, he changes the location to ‘a city of Bethsaida’ (9:10). Yet he maintains parts of the dialogue that follows, so that Jesus tells them to go to the ‘surrounding country and villages’ to get provisions, because we are ‘here in a deserted place’ (9:12). Luke appears to have forgotten his location change.

b. The Cleansing of the Leper. One of Mark’s favourite motifs is the messianic secret, in which Jesus instructs those he heals not to tell anyone about their healing. One example is Mark’s healing of the leper, after which he instructs the leper: ‘See that you don't tell anyone. But go, show yourself to the priest’ (1:44).

When Matthew reproduces the narrative, he keeps Jesus’ instruction to secrecy. But this element no longer makes sense, because Matthew has reset the narrative so that it takes place among ‘many crowds’ (8:1), so many have already witnessed the miracle. His introduction of the crowds to Mark is at the expense of narrative consistency.

c. The Parable of the Sower. Another example of ‘editorial fatigue’ is found in Luke’s version of the parable of the sower. Luke removes three of the features that are found in Mark’s version of the parable. But he then assumes some of the same features when he interprets the parable, reverting to Mark’s own interpretation of the parable.

This is clearest with reference to the second seed that is sown. Mark tells us that the seed fell on rocky ground, that the sun scorched it and it withered away because it had ‘no root’. Yet in Luke’s version, he initially explains that the seed withered lack for lack of moisture. But then he reverts back to Mark’s explanation that it had ‘no root’ in his interpretation.

d. Is Herod a King? Finally, we might take another example of Matthew’s editorial fatigue. Quite unusually, Mark refers to Herod Antipas the tetrarch as a king (for reasons I explore here). When reading Mark, Matthew initially corrects Mark and refers to Antipas by his more appropriate title, ‘tetrarch.’ But then later – seemingly forgetting that he has made this change – he reverts to calling him king.

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Widely referred to as the ‘Second Gospel’ (when in fact it was the first), Mark has had a rather rough reception from ancient times to the present. The main culprit here is one of Mark’s earliest readers, whom we now call Matthew (of First Gospel fame).

Matthew took over nearly the entirety of Mark (600 of his 660 verses) – many word for word – but also spruced up Mark in various ways: he added extra material (a birth story, post-resurrection appearances, the sermon on the mount), took out some of Mark’s weirder and more interesting moments (like when a young man flees naked in Gethsemane) and smoothed out the rougher parts of Mark’s grammar and vocabulary.

The effect is a sort of Mark 2.0. Although the result was not so much an update as a near total eclipse of the earlier model. Mark’s gospel was not nearly as popular as Matthew, nor copied out as frequently by Christian scribes. Moreover, since Matthew came to be (wrongly) attributed to Matthew, Mark’s gospel could not compete against the super attribution to one of Jesus’ own disciples. In its classic treatment by Saint Augustine, Mark’s gospel was a mere abbreviation of Matthew’s earlier text.

Fast forward to the twentieth century, and a close literary analysis had rectified some of these earlier mistakes. If there is one prized result of New Testament scholarship since the modern era, it is that of Markan priority. A huge body of converging evidence shows that Mark wrote first, and then Matthew and Luke made use of Mark.

Still, Mark was not often given the literary credit it deserved. According to the form-critics in the early twentieth century, Mark was not really an author as much as he was a chronicler. His main achievement was collecting together earlier oral traditions, placing them side by side like beads on a string. Even today, Mark is sometimes seen as an unfinished note-book (hypomnemata) rather than a complete, literary work.1

To be clear, Mark was no Homer – though some believe he leant on the poet.2 In the Graeco-Roman world, only Homer (and perhaps Virgil) was Homer. Nor do I believe, as it is now fashionable to say, that Mark and the evangelists were “elite cultural producers,” writing for a cadre of similarly-educated Roman intellectuals. I think my doctoral supervisor more accurately characterises Mark as a “middle brow” work.3

Yet the point remains that Mark was a writer of considerable literary genius. It is now widely recognised that the gospels are some type of ancient “life-writing” or biography (bios).4 As far as we know, then, Mark was the first person to have the idea to set out the ‘good news’ in the form of a biography. His ‘beginning of the good news’ (1:1) refers not to an abstract set of ideas about Christ, but to the life of Jesus itself.

Literary Techniques in Biography

There are many theoretical debates as to what kind of biography Mark is, which I waded into elsewhere.5 Yet whether we see Mark as a fictionalising work (like that of Aesop) or a more historical biography (akin to Suetonius’ Lives), one of the immediate payoffs of reading Mark as a bios is to acknowledge his literary artistry. Mark was not merely compiling material – he can, and indeed must, be appreciated as an author.

In his literary arsenal, Mark employs a panoply of familiar techniques. From the outset of his gospel, he plunges us into a world of irony, secrecy and foreboding, culminating in stunning moments of recognition (anagnorisis) like the transfiguration and the cross.6 Moreover, like other biographers, Mark crafts Jesus’ death in conformity with his teaching – though his slave-like death subverting noble ideals.7

Even more wonderfully, Mark hides a number of ‘easter eggs’, which invite his readers to go back through his narrative to grasp their true meaning. (The most famous of these is the aforementioned young man). And most deliciously of all, he serves us several literary ‘sandwiches’, placing one story inside another to create new layers of meaning. (Elsewhere, I have written on the widow’s mite, the haemorrhaging woman, and the fig tree as good examples of this ‘sandwiching’ technique)

In this piece, however, I want to draw attention to another literary device which was common in ancient biography. The Greeks called it synkrisis – judging one character alongside another. Today, we think of it more simply as contrast or comparison.

Synkrisis is smattered across the biographies of the early imperial period – the epoch in which the Gospels were composed. For example, in his Life of Caligula, Suetonius launches a literary assault on the deranged Emperor. But instead of diving straight into his crimes, he first puts on display the saintly Prince, Germanicus.

It might seem like a simple technique to us. Yet synkrisis was so prized by ancient biographers that it often became the organising scheme of their work. Here we might think of Cornelius Nepos’ lives, which places military and illustrious men side-by-side, or Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, which compares Greeks and Roman figures like for like. While Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars can be read more discretely, the collection as a whole also invites comparison of the early Emperors of Rome.

Comparison was certainly not limited to biography. But given how popular synkrisis was in ancient life-writing, it is no surprise that readers have detected its presence throughout the gospels. Commentators have pointed to the way that John is contrasted with Jesus in the Lukan infancy narrative; Judas is contrasted with Peter and Jesus in Matthew; and Jesus and the High Priest are contrasted in John.

A Tale of Two Banquets

My favourite example of synkrisis in the gospels is nestled within Mark chapter 6.

Here, for the first (and only) time in Mark’s bíos, the narrative takes a significant detour from Jesus. We are suddenly taken to Herod’s birthday banquet, at which Herod offers Herodias’ daughter up to half of his kingdom. She requests the death of John the Baptist, and Herod’s hand is forced. According to Mark, Herod liked listening to John, but he does not want to lose face and so complies with the request.

From a literary and historical standpoint, there is much about this scene which is strange. For a start, it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Jesus, the subject of nearly every scene in Mark from beginning to end. While the death of John is surely an interesting point of historical context – and has some linguistic parallels with Jesus’ death later on – the clear focus of the narrative is Herod.

Even more unusual is the fact that Mark repeatedly describes Herod Antipas as a basileus – a king. Anyone who knew anything about Herod the Great’s son, Antipas, knew that Antipas was not a king, but a tetrarch (literally, a ‘ruler of a fourth’). When King Herod died, his son did not inherit his title and received only a portion of his kingdom. This apparently did not please Antipas’ wife, who at one point sent him off to Rome to petition for the title. For these efforts, Antipas was banished in 39 CE.

The fact that Mark calls Antipas a king has sometimes been seen as betraying Mark’s lack of historical awareness. Perhaps he was confusing King Herod the Great with his son. This would be as egregious an error as a modern historian referring to William Gladstone, the British MP, with his father, William Gladstone – the PM!

Yet when we bear synkrisis in mind, there may be another reason why Mark calls Antipas king. For the only other character that Mark calls a king is Jesus. And the very narrative that follows Herod’s banquet is another kingly banquet: the feeding of the five thousand. Instead of making a historical blunder, Mark is inviting us to compare the respective “kingship” of Herod and Jesus. As Gabriella Gelardini has framed it, the two banquets should be seen as “The Contest for a Royal Title.”8

A Tale of Two Kings

How then does ‘King’ Herod compare with King Jesus? Others have offered an extensive scholarly comparison.9 But it is really enjoyable to read through the text for oneself and notice points of similarity and contrast. I was recently leading a seminar on reading Mark as an ancient biography, and here are three things that stood out:

Fear versus compassion. In this scene, Antipas’ violent actions are driven by fear. Modelled on King Ahasuerus in the book of Esther, Antipas offers Herodias’ daughter up ‘to half of his kingdom’.10 When she requests John’s head, he does not want to kill him, because he recognises that he was a ‘righteous’ man. But he puts John to death anyway, because he does not want to lose face in front of his esteemed guests.

By contrast, Jesus’ kingship is motivated by compassion. Mark tells us that Jesus had ‘compassion’ on the people, because they were like ‘sheep without a shepherd.’ This shepherding image is commonly used of kings in the Hebrew Bible and the wider ancient near east. It is no surprise, then, that when John retells the story of the feeding of the five thousand, the crowds attempt ‘to make him king’ (6:15).

The Elite versus the Crowds. The whole atmosphere of Herod’s banquet is marked by opulence and exclusivity. The occasion is the king’s birthday, and so he invites his ‘high officials and military commanders and the leading men of Galilee.’ Herod surrounds himself with people just like himself in a who’s who of Galilean society.

Jesus’ banquet is also an abundant affair. Mark says that the crowds ‘reclined’ on the green grass. Together with the language of a symposion (a drinking party) and the presence of fish (a standard condiment of classical dining), we are to picture a lavish banquet. Yet while Antipas’ lavish banquet was exclusive, Jesus’ is inclusive. It does not take place among social elites, but among the throng of the Galilean poor.

Death versus Healing. Finally, ‘King’ Herod is modelled on the tyrants of the Hebrew Bible who oppress the righteous people of God. Like the Gentile rulers chastised later in Mark’s gospel, he ‘lords’ his authority over others. The result is that when he sends out those under his authority, it is on a mission for death.

The contrast here with King Jesus could not be sharper. Jesus also has people under his authority, but in the narrative that precedes Herod’s feast, he sends them out to extend the Kingdom of God, preaching, healing and casting out demons. Moreover, in Jesus’ feast itself, a situation of despair (not having food to eat) is turned into a situation of abundance. Jesus appears not as a ruthless tyrant, but as a true philosopher king, who both teaches the people and satisfies their hunger.  

The Importance of Synkrisis

Wrapping up, there are four reasons that I like this example of synkrisis so much – and four corresponding lessons we can draw from it for reading the gospels:

1. The first is that it is not at all obvious upon a first reading. It is only when we have synkrisis in mind – when we consider the techniques available to an ancient biographer – that we work out what Mark is doing. Once we have seen it, we can’t un-see it. This establishes the importance of understanding the gospels as writing within a particular literary milieu for uncovering their meaning.

2. The second is that it goes against one scholarly narrative about Mark, that he was a shoddy writer whose gospel is rife with factual errors. While I think that Mark was fallible, one of his mistakes – calling Antipas ‘King’ – turns out to be a key literary move which unlocks the synkrisis between Herod and Jesus.

3. The third is that it forces us to move beyond a ‘lectionary’ reading of Scripture as individual units. In more traditional churches, Herod’s banquet is often read as a stand-alone episode (in Matthew’s version). This does not allow us to fully appreciate the way that Mark has placed the two kingly banquets side-by-side for comparison. I once heard a Professor say that ‘one should never read a bible verse.’ One might expand their advice and say: one should never read a pericope!

4. Finally, I enjoy this synkrisis of Herod and Jesus because it guides the reader without over-determining what comparisons the reader will draw. Mark is gently inviting us to make a comparison – to read the two characters side-by-side – but the actual work of comparing the two figures is left to the reader. Perhaps then, I might invite you to do the same. Read through the story of Mark 6 again and see how the kings and their kingdoms compare. What points stand out to you?

Thank you for reading this piece! If you enjoyed it, you might also like:

• Who is Mark’s Mystery Man?

• Are the Gospels Graeco-Roman ‘Lives’?

• Three Gospel Number Puzzles (You’ve Probably Never Noticed)

• The Gospels are Bíoi – So What?

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Who were the real authors of the Gospels?

Scholars generally think that the names traditionally attached to the gospels were not original to the gospels. But what does this mean for their authorship? Was the Church correct to associate them with the four figures we call Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Or is the identity of the gospel authors now impossible to recover?

The question is too large to tackle in a single post. But over the last few years, I have written a cluster of pieces which touch on the topic from different angles.

Below is a digest of seven of my posts on the gospels’ authorship.

1. Why are the Gospels Anonymous?

Scholars often say that the gospels are anonymous. Their titles, ‘The Gospel according to X’, were added to the texts after their publication. Yet this claim may seem to rub against the fact that many of our earliest manuscripts do bear those titles. Why then are many scholars insistent that the gospels were anonymous, and what does this even mean? This piece explores the reasoning behind the majority scholarly view.

2. Is Matthew an Eyewitness Text?

According to second-century tradition, the Gospel of Matthew was written by Jesus’ disciple. But mainstream scholars today reject this attribution. In this piece I outline why Matthew was probably not written by Matthew. I point to the late attribution of the Greek text to Matthew, its use of sources, its narration of Matthew’s call, among other pieces of evidence, to show that Matthew likely did not write the gospel.

3. Money in Matthew – An Eyewitness Tell?

The rare few who defend Matthean authorship often point to the way that money is used in the gospel. Money is referenced more frequently and in a greater variety of ways than the other gospels, which is sometimes taken as internal evidence that the tax collector, Matthew, wrote it. In this piece, I ask whether the argument cashes out.

4. Was Peter Behind the Gospel of Mark?

One early tradition from Papias, the Bishop of Hierapolis, suggests that Mark was based on the preaching of Peter. But many scholars today are doubtful of this tradition. They note that Mark’s gospel does not have the flavour of eyewitness testimony, and its presentation of Peter is largely negative. In this piece, I consider whether these are strong objections to a Petrine connection to Mark.

5. Did Luke Write Luke-Acts?

If there is a single person who composed more of the New Testament than any other, it is probably the author of the third gospel and its sequel, Acts of the Apostles. Christian tradition identified this author as ‘Luke the beloved physician’, a Gentile travelling companion of Paul mentioned in the Pauline corpus. But many scholars today doubt this attribution. In this piece, I unpack the key arguments for and against thinking that Luke the beloved physician composed the Doppelwerk.

6. Did a Woman Write Luke-Acts?

If Luke the travelling companion of Paul did not write Luke-Acts, who did? Many scholars assume that it was written by a man. But in this piece, I examine a proposal by Professor Joan Taylor that the writer we call ‘Luke’ was a woman. This takes us to another look at the “we” passages and the relationship between Paul and Thecla.

7. Who was the Beloved Disciple?

John’s gospel claims to have been written by a figure known as the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’. But who was this figure? Tradition identifies him as John the Son of Zebedee, yet mainstream scholarship is sceptical of this view. In this piece, I compile a guide to the scholarly debate, presenting seven candidates for the beloved disciple – from Zacchaeus and Jesus’ brother, to Mary Magdalene and a literary device.

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One of the older arguments I came across for this view is that medical terminology is strewn across Luke-Acts.1 This provides what we might call ‘internal evidence’ for the traditional view that its author, Luke, was a physician.

This argument still has a few contemporary advocates. Most notably, Luuk van de Weghe has recently revived the argument in a paper for the evangelical Tyndale Bulletin.2 Yet most modern commentators today do not find this argument compelling, even if they otherwise accept Lukan authorship.3

Some key problems were spelt out long ago by Henry Cadbury, who is said to have earned his doctorate by ridding Luke of his. In his note, “Luke and the Horse-Doctors” Cadbury subjected the argument to a reductio ad absurdum, comparing Luke’s wording to a corpus of veterinary literature.4 In his view, the same arguments from medical terminology could be used to show that Luke was not a doctor but a vet.

In this short piece, I look at a parallel argument that is sometimes made for Matthew.

According to second-century tradition, our Greek gospel was written by Jesus’ disciple Matthew, whom the gospels identify as a tax collector. Since tax collectors know about money, and Matthew seems to know about money, Matthew’s references to money are sometimes taken as evidence Matthew wrote the gospel.

Money in Matthew

I came across this argument a while ago when I was reading Peter J. Williams’ little book, Can We Trust the Gospels? (2018). There Williams writes:

“Matthew himself was traditionally identified as a tax collector, and Matthew’s Gospel shows the greatest level of financial interest, including numerous references to money and treasure that Matthew alone records.”5

Williams points to:

• Matthew’s unique parables about hidden treasure (13:44), the discovered pearl (13:45-46), the workers in the vineyard (20:1-16) and the talents (25:14-30); and his comparison of scribe to someone bringing out old and new treasures (13:52).

• The mention of money in specific narrative episodes: the expensive gifts of the magi (2:11); Peter and the temple tax collectors (17:24-27); Judas’ betrayal money and its use (27:3); and chief priests’ bride to the guards at Jesus’ tomb (28:12).

• Matthew’s mention of corban (Mt. 27:6), the offering of money to the temple. This term is spelt slightly differently from its use in Mark 7:11 and used in different episodes in each Gospel, suggesting an independent familiarity with the term.

Does the argument cash out?

There are several reasons why most scholars working on the gospel do not think that Matthew composed it. Arguments which are undiscussed by Williams. (If you want to read about them, see my piece, Is Matthew an Eyewitness Text?) In this piece, however, I want to focus on the argument from money. Does it cash out?

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Was Matthew a Tax Collector?

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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#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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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

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