Other writers, too, have found a way to make the childhood of Jesus work for their own agendas. In the second century, the philosopher Celsus wrote a scathing treatise against the fledgling faith. Working from Matthew’s story of the Magi, he proposed that Jesus learned sorcery during his sojourn in Egypt and came back to Galilee a magician. In more recent times, Nicolas Notovitch’s The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ (1894), proposed that Jesus spent his lost years learning Eastern philosophy in India and Tebet. Both writers use Jesus’ childhood to offer a different framework for interpreting his ministry beyond the traditional Christian mould.

Today, historians find little value in these stories – at least as they pertain to the historical Jesus. Indeed, many scholars of Christian origins, apparently content to follow the gospels’ lead, have left the subject of Jesus’ childhood in darkness. In their eyes, it is a subject for sensationalists and the press – not one for serious scholarship.

But is it really true that the history has nothing sensible to say about Jesus’ childhood? This is the question I pose in my recent lecture, The Missing Years of Jesus. Here I argue that while certainty eludes us when it comes to Jesus’ childhood, there is still a good amount we can say, filling in the gaps of Jesus’ context and working back from Paul and the gospels themselves. Below, I have attached a recording of the lecture, as well as an annotated bibliography, for those wanting to explore the topic further…

Get 25% off for 1 year

Read more

In Christian tradition, Jesus’ closest disciples – a group known as ‘the Twelve’ – have shared a rather staggering history: one betrayed Christ, another became the first Pope, two of them went on to write gospels, while the rest attracted stories of miracles and martyrdom.

But how much of what we know about ‘the Twelve’ is fact, and how much is fiction?

To find out, I went to the writer behind one of the best academic-Bible substacks I’ve come across. Over the last year, Sophia in the Shell has been doing incredible work, making scholarship on ‘the twelve’ accessible in a series of posts. In this interview, I got to ask them about some of their reflections from this project. I hope you enjoy it!

JN: On your substack, you’ve been digesting a lot of scholarly literature on Jesus’ disciples. It is a wonderful resource! What inspired you to undertake this project?

Thank you! Before I ever joined Substack, I was a regular contributor to the forum “AcademicBiblical” on Reddit. The vast majority of the activity in that community is people asking questions related to biblical scholarship and receiving high-quality answers which cite relevant academic work.

There I started to notice a pattern in which, whenever anyone asked a question about Jesus’ closest disciples – and especially what happened to them after and outside the events covered in the New Testament – forum contributors always recommended the same book. I did a deep dive into the book and found… it really wasn’t very good. I started identifying not only outright errors in representation of primary sources, but a remarkable lack of interest in things like genre and intertextuality of those sources. I’ll spare the book a call-out here, but anyone reading can feel free to ask me elsewhere.

The next problem that I identified was that it was no wonder this book kept being recommended; there simply wasn’t much else out there. Scholarship on these disciples existed, to be sure, but it was scattered across countless books and papers and reference texts. So I set out to build an alternative resource of my own, collecting from these various sources.

In doing so, I felt it was important to build the resource in a “low trust” way. That is, you should not have to place a ton of trust in me personally to make use of this resource. So the resource is largely direct quotes from scholars, organized in what is hopefully a sensible way that makes for decent reading.

JN: In the gospels, Jesus gathers a group called ‘the twelve’. How much can we say, historically, about this group, from sources within and outside the New Testament?

We might separate this into two questions: first, how much can we say about ‘the twelve’ as a group and second, how much can we say about the individuals constituting ‘the twelve’?

The first question is certainly interesting on its own. Critically, they appear as a group in 1 Corinthians 15, as a part of what is often considered to be a pre-Pauline creed, when Paul says that he handed on and has received “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.” They then appear also in the Synoptic Gospels, where their names are listed, though these lists are not identical both between the gospels as we read them today and across manuscripts of said gospels.

And so there are a lot of interesting debates in scholarship about the nature of ‘the twelve’ as a group. Did they really exist during Jesus’ ministry, or were they a post-Easter group which was read backwards into said ministry? Were they primarily a council of advisors, a set of missionaries, a prophetic symbol, witnesses? Interesting as they are, these were not the questions I set out to cover with my series; though if anyone wants to learn more, I think the discussion in Volume III, Chapter 26 of John Meier’s A Marginal Jew is still pretty good.

My series, rather, focused on the second version of the question: how much can we say historically about the individual members of ‘the twelve’? I would say, even liberally, that outside of Peter and the sons of Zebedee the answer is very little. The language that John Meier uses in Chapter 27 of the same volume just mentioned is “with the exception of a few persons … next to nothing.” I have not seen much in my research to dispute that.

And yet, we seem to have wound up with quite the number of vivid stories about these disciples, their missions, and ultimately their deaths. I think it remains fascinating to ask then, where did these stories come from? Could we find historical kernels in such stories? What purposes did these stories serve? This is much of what my series covers.

JN: The traditional idea that many people still share is that two of Jesus’ disciples – Matthew and John – went on to write gospels. What do you make of this tradition?

Personally, I do not think either Matthew nor John wrote gospels. I’d love to see someone on Substack steelman the traditional authorship of the Gospel of Matthew because I think that one is uniquely difficult to defend. You either have to commit to the uphill battle of rejecting Markan Priority or you have to defend Matthew approaching the story of his own introduction into the Jesus movement in a very peculiar way, to say nothing of other complications.

Traditional authorship of the Gospel of John has tended to be easier to defend, especially if one takes the view that this gospel has multiple layers. Indeed, for awhile, I really liked the proposed layers presented by Urban von Wahlde in his commentaries. Once you’ve decided that these layers exist, you’re in a better position to argue that John the son of Zebedee was involved with the earliest layer, while later layers account for material that is difficult to attribute to this disciple.

Unfortunately, Hugo Méndez had to go and ruin even that possibility for me with his persuasive book The Gospel of John: A New History. I found his arguments that the Gospel of John is an example of “disguised authorship” to be very compelling, and the picture he paints of this gospel is not something I’ve been able to “un-see” when reading it ever since.

Still, this leaves us with the question of why early Christians came to believe these two apostles had written gospels, which is fascinating in any case. In the case of Matthew, we have our fragment of Papias, received through Eusebius and seeming to begin mid-thought with “so then”, in which we are told that “Matthew compiled the oracles in the Hebrew language, but each interpreted them as they could.” Early interpreters of Papias would understand this to mean that our Greek Gospel of Matthew was translated from a Semitic original, even though today scholars tend to think that the text very much does not look like a translation. We could go on with the story, but Michael Kok is great on this in Tax Collector to Gospel Writer.

Then there is John. Belief in traditional authorship is and was deeply tied into the identities of the “Beloved Disciple” internal to the fourth gospel and a “John the Elder” whom is referred to by Papias, sufficiently complex topics that we won’t get into here. But one thing I might note is that early reception of the fourth gospel and its authorship is also tangled up with gnostic reception of this text. The earliest extant attribution of this text to the apostle John is probably a fragment from Ptolemy, an early student of Valentinus. Still, this does not mean he invented the attribution; indeed, he takes it for granted and probably did not.

JN: A lot of the disciples attract legends about them after the fact. Which of the disciples has the most interesting or surprising after-life?

It would be far too difficult to select the single one with the most interesting “after-life”, but I’ll take the opportunity to highlight, perhaps surprisingly, Thaddaeus. Thaddaeus becomes surprisingly important in a very roundabout way.

In early church legends, you have a figure by the name of “Addai.” Now, originally, Addai doesn’t seem to be a member of the twelve, but one of the seventy or seventy-two disciples from Luke 10, and in fact seems to be operating at the direction of the apostle Thomas. But as your readers may have guessed, there is a close relationship between the names “Addai” and “Thaddaeus”, and so these names switch back and forth in the legends. Eusebius, for example, speaks of a Thaddaeus of the seventy sent by Thomas to evangelize Edessa. The same story, but regarding an “Addai”, is represented in the Syriac text known as the Teaching of Addai or Doctrine of Addai. Critically, Addai in this text makes succession arrangements and dies in Edessa.

Now at some point, the Armenian Christians get their hands on this text. Valentina Calzolari is great on this in The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles in Armenian. At this point, a tradition may or may not have already existed in which the apostle Thaddaeus was one of the founders of the Church of Armenia. In any case, the Armenians translate the Teaching of Addai in a way that is, as Calzolari says, “generally faithful”… until the end. Addai’s death is completely rewritten into a departure from Edessa to continue journeying east. The changes are systematic; for example, Addai’s funeral procession becomes a procession of people accompanying Addai leaving Edessa.

This then sets the stage well for another text, the Martyrdom of Thaddaeus. Thaddaeus in the text receives Armenia as his mission by lot, but simply stops in Edessa along the way to fulfil his part in the King Abgar legend as articulated by Eusebius. But he arrives to Armenia, preaches there, and Thaddaeus is eventually executed by order of a local king.

Many steps in the development of this tradition are unclear. But it sure looks like Thaddaeus of ‘the twelve’, a total blank slate in the gospels, is combined with another disciple of legend, and that this legend is extended to flesh out a narrative of how one member of ‘the twelve’ came to establish the Church of Armenia. This is actually not the only member of the twelve to which the Church of Armenia claims a connection, but we’ll leave it at that.

JN: Judas is the most infamous of the twelve disciples. He raises all sorts of questions for the biblical historian. Why did he betray Jesus? How did he die? Was he a real person at all? Where did you land with the person of Judas?

I tend to think Judas Iscariot existed and did betray Jesus in some way, but I don’t consider skepticism on these questions to be absurd. For example, I’m convinced that “paradidōmi” in 1 Corinthians 11:23 has nothing to do with Judas, which loses me one of the best reasons to believe that Judas existed. Ultimately I personally lean towards his existing for no better reason than that it’s the simplest way to explain his presence in the gospels. The arguments that some have made for why one might invent this figure have not been that compelling to me, but nor have I found them (all) ridiculous.

Beyond that, however, I don’t know what to make of how or why exactly he betrayed Jesus. I do not have much confidence in the early church to represent his reasons for his actions fairly, if they even knew such things, but I also do not think the data justifies any confidence in the more romantic views of Judas’ motivations one might see in William Klassen’s Judas: Betrayer or Friend of Jesus? or, for that matter, the wonderful musical Jesus Christ Superstar.

Nor do I think we know how he died. Both the Gospel of Matthew and the Acts of the Apostles seem like they could be drawing, at least in part, upon preexisting traditions (or legends?) regarding his death in their descriptions of such. If I had to choose which of the contradictory accounts is more likely, certainly I’d opt for the one in the Gospel of Matthew. But I wouldn’t be surprised if neither account is historical.

JN: Perhaps the most well-known of the disciples is Peter. In tradition, he becomes the first ‘Pope’, he is connected to the Gospel of Mark, and dies in Rome. How much of this tradition – if any at all – do you think is historically reliable?

I think it is plausible that Peter died violently in Rome, quite possibly by execution. I could be biased by how little there is to work with regarding the fates of most of the other disciples, but it seems there is a respectable amount of data consistent with that conclusion and relatively little to contradict it.

Beyond that, I am more skeptical. Did he have a formal leadership role in Rome? It’s possible, and I don’t doubt he was very influential in any time he spent there, but I think the evidence for his having been in a role we would recognize as sole “bishop” is pretty slim. Was he crucified upside-down? This strikes me as an invention of the Acts of Peter. Unless we are also prepared to say that Peter was executed because he convinced the wives of noblemen to stop having relations with their husbands, we probably owe ourselves some caution in trying to pull historical kernels out of that particular apocryphal text. I do not find Timothy Barnes’ speculation that Peter was executed by being burned alive to be on that much weaker ground than the claim that he was crucified.

Did Peter have some sort of connection to a member of the early Jesus movement named Mark? Maybe, but I’m not even really sure what this would mean. C. Clifton Black’s Mark: Images of an Apostolic Interpreter left me with the impression that almost anything we might want to say about this “Mark” is on incredibly shaky ground. So in some sense my reaction to those asking “did Peter know Mark?” and further “did a man named Mark write the Gospel of Mark?” is perhaps—but what does this get us?

JN: I wonder, are there any findings in your research that have seriously altered your perception of any particular disciple, or the group as a whole?

I think I’ll live dangerously and stay on Peter for this one, as he would be my honest answer. Hopefully this isn’t too controversial.

It was not until my research on Simon Peter that I really began to appreciate how important the movement’s belief in the Resurrection was for Peter’s role in the early church. Certain types of commentators, generally outside academia, have had a tendency to give Paul a hard time about the nature of his introduction into the movement. “He didn’t even meet Jesus!” you’ll sometimes see it said.

But Peter is not in that much better of a position. True, he knew Jesus in life. But at the point of Jesus’ execution, what had Peter done? He had denied Jesus, essentially disavowed the movement. It is the idea of a risen Jesus that creates an opportunity for an early redemption of sorts for Peter. As far as I can tell, Peter’s credibility and Paul’s credibility were each deeply tied into the Jesus movement’s early belief in the Resurrection.

JN: Finally – it would be remiss of me if I didn’t ask! Do you have a favourite disciple, or a disciple that you think more of us should know about?

You know, I keep going back to Philip, actually. He’s very interesting to me in that we may know next to nothing about him, or, if one particular thesis is correct, we may know a respectable amount. A major source of my research on Philip was Christopher Matthews’ book Philip: Apostle and Evangelist, a revision of his Harvard dissertation.

Here is the context of Matthews’ thesis. Acts of the Apostles suggests to its readers that there are two figures named Philip: a Philip of ‘the twelve’, and a Philip of ‘the seven’, a separate group appearing in Acts 6. The Philip narratives in Acts, then, are about this latter Philip, and not Philip of the twelve. Then when one turns to second-century and third-century patristic sources, there often seems to be only one Philip, generally seen as a conflation of the two.

But what if the patristic sources are not wrong? What if the author of Acts was wrong? What if these two men named Philip really are the same person? That is the position of Christopher Matthews. He thinks that what may have happened is that the author of Acts had access to the list in Acts 6:5, had access to lists of the twelve, and simply made a mistake in interpreting the existence of a name which appeared twice.

Am I convinced? I don’t know. I go back and forth. But I think his argument is strong. I’d love to see more scholars discuss the possibility because it could have all sorts of implications related to Philip’s daughters, the nature of early Christian ecstatic practice, and perhaps even the origins of the Montanists.

JN: Sophia in the Shell, this has been totally fascinating. I have learnt a great deal from your work. For readers who want to find out more about the disciples, I highly recommend your most recent piece: ‘What we (don’t) know about the Twelve.’

Studying for a PhD is no easy task, but I was helped along by a very supportive cohort in Edinburgh, including my wonderful ‘Doktorbruder’, Edward Wong, who started his doctoral research at the same time as me under the supervision of Professor Helen Bond.

Dr Wong is now Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies at China Graduate School of Theology. In this short-written interview, I got the chance to ask Dr Wong about his forthcoming book, Representations of Trauma in the Fourth Gospel, which is out in just a few months time.

Ever since Edward first told me about his project, I was totally fascinated by it. It raises so many questions: was John the product of trauma? Should we see John as an anti-semitic text? And how might a scholar’s personal journey shed light on their biblical research? If any of this piques your interest, read this interview – and of course, pre-order the book!

JN: Edward, as some background to you: how did you become interested in biblical studies? Why did you become a biblical scholar rather than something else?

EW: I stumbled into biblical studies during my seminary years as an MDiv student in Canada, thanks largely to my New Testament prof, Sam Tsang. He showed me that the discipline is not just a more professionalised version of the Bible study I had done for years as a Christian — the two aren’t unrelated — but it’s also about learning to read a text with academic rigour by attending to its language, rhetoric, narrative, and the historical world that shaped it.

When we reached John, I was hooked. Here was a writer, apparently Jewish himself, capable of beautiful poetry, yet whose rhetoric against “the Jews” was strikingly hostile. Where the Synoptic Gospels name particular groups, like Pharisees, Sadducees, or scribes, John reaches for the sweeping language of “the Jews.” I was fascinated, too, by an earlier generation of scholars like J. L. Martyn and Raymond Brown, who tried to reconstruct the history behind the text; their reconstructions are heavily contested now, but I still find them a compelling way to imagine how the Gospel came to be.

I never stopped reading John while I served as a pastor. Then came the Hong Kong protest movement in my home city, and I watched “China” and “Chinese” turn into contested terms when vilifying a generalised group, even one’s own kin, was not merely tolerated but encouraged. It sent me back to the Gospel with a new spark: could something similar lie behind, and within, the text of John?

Reading Bart Ehrman’s blog back then had convinced me that high-level research needs the specialised, expert-guided training only a PhD offers. So I decided to try — partly to find out whether I could do it, since you never know if you don’t try, and partly because life felt too short to stay comfortable. I was after an adventure, and I figured the experience would be worth it whether or not I finished. So I crossed the ocean to Edinburgh, and the rest is history.

JN: In a nutshell, what was the argument about John that you made in your doctoral research? What new lens did you bring to bear to the Fourth Gospel?

EW: In a nutshell, I argued that perceived experience of conflict gave shape to the Fourth Gospel, both its story and its rhetoric, and above all its troubling habit of speaking about “the Jews.” My aim was not to reconstruct the precise history behind the Gospel, which the text won’t let us pin down, but to read its language as the trace of a writer working under and through distress, with “the Jews” shaped by how the writer perceived his opponents. Read that way, John can be understood as what I call a “trauma narrative,” a text that claims suffering, names victims and perpetrators, builds protective boundaries, and reaches toward survival.

To get there, I brought together two bodies of theory usually kept apart, the psychology of individual trauma and the study of collective, social trauma. Through that double lens, John’s hostile language looks less like plain prejudice and more like a wound speaking. I tried to show that the same rhetoric that carries the injury is also the writer’s cathartic release and defence, as a way of holding a group together in the midst of bitter group conflict by retelling who they are and who has wronged them.

JN: In your PhD thesis, you bring your background in neuroscience to bear on John’s gospel. In particular, you argue that John – or parts of John – shows signs of trauma. To demonstrate this, you statistically analyse the language of the gospel. Can you unpack how you did this?

EW: In my neuroscience and psychology training, we could wire a person up to instruments that measure heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, brain activity on an EEG, or blood flow on an fMRI, and watch the body react to something frightening. It would be wonderful to borrow a time machine, bring the writer of John into the lab, and see whether his body spiked every time he thought about “the Jews.” Obviously, we can’t. But there is another option. A large body of research shows that when people speak or write about traumatic material, their language shifts in measurable ways across a wide range of settings. They use more first-person singular words like “I”, “my,” and “me,” which signal that attention has turned inward. They use more negative emotion words. And they use more of what are called cognitive processing words, the vocabulary of working something out and trying to make sense of it, words like “know,” “because,” and “think.”

So I put a simple question to John. When the text speaks about “the Jews,” does the language carry more of these trauma-related markers than when the text discusses other characters? I broke the Gospel into scenes and sorted them into two sets, one where “the Jews” are Jesus’ main conversation partners and a control set where he talks with others, such as his disciples or the Samaritan woman. I used a piece of software called LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) and ran some straightforward statistical tests comparing the two sets. Across all three categories, the difference came out statistically significant.

This does not prove that the writer was retraumatised every time he mentioned “the Jews.” What it shows is that the language of these scenes turns more inward, more emotionally charged, and more preoccupied with explaining and making sense of things when “the Jews” enter the story. That supports the rest of my argument, the claim that John’s language does not exist in a vacuum, and that lived experience of conflict and distress very likely shaped how the writer told his story and presented his characters.

JN: I know that for a long time, scholars saw John as reflecting a distinct brand of Christianity (‘the Johannine community’) which had been expelled or removed itself from the synagogue. How does your thesis differ from how other people have viewed the relationship of the Gospel of John to Judaism?

EW: Yes, for a long time the reigning picture was the one you describe. Martyn and Brown read the Gospel’s battle between Jesus and “the Jews” as a coded record of one congregation, the so-called Johannine community, expelled from its synagogue largely based on their reading of John 9 and a few verses about expulsion. That reconstruction has come under heavy fire, since we can’t objectively rebuild a precise past from a single narrative. One issue is that biblical scholars sometimes assume that if you can’t reconstruct the traumatic events, you can’t study the trauma in the text at all. But that isn’t so. A represented wound can be studied in the shape of the language, whether or not we can recover what happened behind. We can’t even be sure expulsion happened as an event, only that the writer perceives that kind of danger, and that is the key. A line like “they will put you out of the synagogue… those who kill you will think they are offering worship to God” (16:2) may not record an event so much as mediate a threat the writer feels as real and present. So the question I find worth asking is what the writer is doing with that perceived threat, how he negotiates it and writes his people toward survival by retelling how Jesus himself survived his persecutors.

On the issue of John and Judaism, the field today tends to split two ways. One names John the most anti-Jewish of the Gospels and condemns it. The other, gaining ground as “John within Judaism,” points to how thoroughly Jewish the Gospel is and relocates the quarrel inside Judaism, so the evangelist writes as a Jew among Jews and his invective is just the heat of a family argument, no more hostile in intent than the language of the Dead Sea Scroll writers used on their fellow Judeans. Intra-Jewish, and so the argument concludes, is not really anti-Jewish at all.

My thesis is that this is a false binary. The Gospel is both at once, along two different lines. It is within Judaism in its materials, steeped in the scriptures, the feasts, the Mosaic and Abrahamic traditions it knows intimately and does not leave behind. And it is anti-Jewish in its aim to the extent that it takes that very inheritance and reappropriates it to push its readers to disaffiliate from the Jews who will not follow Jesus. The familiarity does not soften the hostility. So the more useful question, I argued, is not whether John is Jewish or anti-Jewish, but how the evangelist puts his Jewish inheritance to work against his opponents.

I recognise this reflex because I have seen versions of it up close. In Hong Kong, amid seasons of social strain, I watched people who share an ethnic and cultural kinship insist on sharp boundaries against those nearest to them by disowning a resemblance that was their own substance, and watched “the other” swell into a whole people, “the Chinese,” much as John reaches for the sweeping “the Jews.” Trauma can have a generalising effect, both destabilising and reshaping identities. Anyone who has lived through that kind of rupture knows the lines are never as clean as they look.

JN: John’s gospel has often been read in ways that are anti-Semitic. How does your new book contribute to the discussion regarding anti-Semitism in the fourth gospel?

EW: John’s words have had a long and violent afterlife, and we need to take that seriously. The hinge, I think, is the generalising label. Once a sacred text hands you an enemy called simply “the Jews,” with no faces and no particulars, the phrase lifts off its original context and settles onto any Jewish neighbour in any century. A Jesus-following community that was increasingly Gentile, with no memory of the intra-Jewish pain that produced the words, heard “the Jews” as an opposing outsider and did just that. In ordinary parish life a preacher had only to repeat the Gospel’s “the Jews” from the pulpit, and the abstract phrase became the actual Jews down the road, and often, by easy extension, whatever other outsider was near at hand. A generalised enemy is endlessly transferable.

So my book tries to refuse simply condemning or cancelling the text. Those same boundaries, drawn against “the Jews,” were probably what gave the first readers — a wounded group trying to survive — their shelter and their sense of who they were. But the boundary that shelters is the boundary that can also exclude, and that’s the danger. When we take up its victimising language and aim it towards deviant groups, we do not just misread John. We keep the wound turning by extending the very cycle of harm the text was caught in. My hope is that seeing this plainly makes us more nuanced, and slower to reach for a generalised group as the enemy, in John’s day or in ours.

JN: The idea that John’s gospel is written by someone who has experienced trauma is quite poignant, especially for those who view John as an inspired and sacred text. Do you see any particular theological significance in this?

EW: For those who read John as sacred and inspired, it means that inspiration does not come only in the voice of serene authority or from a place of comfort. Scripture can also speak through wounded words, through a writer working out his pain; the text does not bypass the injury but works through it.

That carries a kind of permission for hurt readers to confront their pain instead of dodging it. If even a Gospel can be the speech of a wounded people, then a reader who comes to it frightened, angry, or unable to tidy their grief and conflict is standing close to where the writer stood. John becomes a place where such a reader might find their own hurt spoken, and begin to work through their own trauma. The same caution applies here as everywhere else in this material. The pain that gave the first readers shelter is also what was later weaponised, and the two must be held together. Read with that awareness, a text so often used as a weapon might instead be met as a companion for the wounded.

JN: Edward, thank you so much for taking the time to share your research with us!

For those who may be new to Behind the Gospels or are simply interested in taking a look back at what I’ve written since I started in 2024, I have collected all my pieces, and grouped them according to theme (‘historical Jesus’, ‘dating and authorship’, ‘gospel origins’, etc.). I hope you have a peruse, and perhaps find a piece to enjoy!

The Historical Jesus

The Historical Jesus in 50 Questions

What did Paul know about Jesus?

Why does Paul say so little about Jesus?

Was Jesus an Exorcist?

How to Become a World Expert on the Historical Jesus

The Missing Years of Jesus

Could Jesus Read and Write?

Was Jesus Married?

Was Jesus Tempted in the Wilderness?

Jesus’ Temptation in the Wilderness [Lecture]

What was Jesus’ hometown really like?

Was Jesus a Disciple of John?

Criteria of Authenticity in Jesus Research

Did Jesus Claim to be God?

Did the Historical Jesus Sing?

How Famous was Jesus?

Recovering the Lost Years of Jesus

Feeding the Five Thousand: Fact or Fiction?

Was Jesus an Apocalyptic Prophet?

The Apocalyptic Jesus: Answering Three Common Objections

The Historicity of the Gospels

Are the Gospels Historically Reliable?

Eyewitness Testimony in Mark?

The Puzzle of Judas’ Death

Is the Gospel of John Historical?

Can We Really Know what Jesus Said?

Five Facts about the Gospels (You Might Not Hear in a Pew)

What C.S. Lewis got Wrong about the Gospels

When the Gospels Go Viral

Fact-Checking the Gospels on Joe Rogan

Can the Dates of Jesus’ Death Be Reconciled?

Authorship and Dating of the Gospels

Who Wrote the Gospels?

Why are the Gospels Anonymous?

Is Matthew an Eyewitness Text?

Matthew’s Money – An Eyewitness Tell?

Was Peter Behind the Gospel of Mark?

Did Luke Write Luke-Acts?

Did a Woman Write Luke-Acts?

Who was the Beloved Disciple?

Dating the Gospels Early

Dating the Gospels after AD 70

Anti-Supernaturalist Bias in Dating the Gospels

Gospel Origins, Oral Tradition and Memory

A Telephone Game Behind the Gospels?

Memory and the Jesus Tradition

What on Earth is ‘Q’?

Editorial Fatigue in the Gospels

Did John Know Mark?

What Happened Before the Gospels?

Why Write a Gospel?

The Pre-Markan Passion Narrative

Did Paul know ‘Q’?

Improving the Gospel of Mark

The Birth of Jesus

Does Christianity Rise & Fall on the Virgin Birth?

The Nativity: History, Theology & Literature

Behind the Nativity Stories

Did Matthew Invent the Virgin Birth?

Q&A: Have we got Christmas all wrong?

Was Mary a Perpetual Virgin?

Five Myths about Matthew’s Magi

Who are the Magi? (Q&A)

The Nativity: Seven Historical Problems

O Little Town of Bethlehem

How to Write an Infancy Narrative

Jesus’ Death, Burial and Resurrection

Good Friday: An Anti-Roman Triumph?

An Eclipse at Jesus’ Death?

Did Jesus Receive a Burial?

Was the Tomb of Jesus Empty?

Wrestling with the Empty Tomb

Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?

Vanishing bodies, Ascending gods

Why We Can’t Prove the Resurrection

William Lane Craig on the Empty Tomb

Ancient Apologetics for the Empty Tomb

Seven Evidences for the Resurrection [Part 1]

Seven Evidences for the Resurrection [Part 2]

Women Witnesses: Proof of an Empty Tomb?

A New Argument for the Empty Tomb?

The Real Meaning of Doubting Thomas

Christology and Ancient Heroes

Is Jesus Divine in the Gospels?

Worshipping Jesus in the Gospels

Jesus, the Tortoise and the Hare

Was Jesus Modelled on Moses?

Jesus and Vespasian

Destroying the Jerusalem Temple

Jesus, Dionysus and Olympic Outrage

The Gospels as Literature

Reading the Gospels as Animals

Why does Mark call Antipas ‘King’?

The Arrival of the King

Are the Gospels Graeco-Roman ‘Lives’?

Why No Exorcisms in John?

Did Jesus Cleanse the Temple… Twice?

Seeing Double in Matthew’s Gospel

Three Gospel Number Puzzles

Four More Gospel Number Puzzles

Coins, Stones and Ossuaries

Who is Mark’s Mystery Man?

The Gospels are Bíoi – So What?

Jesus’ Physical Appearance

The Missing Image of Jesus

What did Jesus Really Look Like?

Jesus’ Strangest Piece of Clothing

Was Jesus a Manly Man?

Jesus’ Physical Appearance – A Conversation

50 Questions on Jesus’ Physical Appearance

Was Jesus… Short?

Before Jesus was Beautiful

Q&A – Jesus’ Physical Appearance

Is the Turin Shroud Jesus’ Burial Cloth?

Does God Actually Look Like Elon Musk?

Searching for Alexamenos

Jesus’ Seamless Tunic: A High Priestly Vestment?

Christianity and the Roman World

Suetonius – A Roman Source for Jesus?

Our Earliest Description of Jesus

Jesus through Roman Eyes

Are we all Ancient Christians?

The Jesus Fish – A Secret Christian Code?

Did Luke use Josephus?

Bibliographies & Interviews

The Resurrection: An Annotated Bibliography

Christology: An Annotated Bibliography

Biblical Scholarship & Shifting Beliefs

Jesus’ Titles in the Gospels

The Gospels in Historical View

Behind Mark’s Gospel with Dr Vette

Who Were ‘The Twelve’?

Is John a Wounded Gospel?

Miscellanea

Two Years Behind the Gospels

The Story of Behind the Gospels

A Summer Behind the Gospels

A Reader’s Digest

C.S. Lewis on the Bible as ‘Word of God’

How Classical Art Gets the Gospels Wrong

Contradictions Teach us How to Read the Gospels

Want to become a paid subscriber – or give BTG as a gift? See below!

Get 25% off for 1 year

Give a gift subscription

This is the second part in my crash course, ‘The Historical Jesus in 50 Questions’. In the first instalment, we explored the sources for Jesus’ life. Now I turn my attention to the period before Jesus’ ministry began. The so-called ‘lost years’ have been the subject of endless speculation and sensationalist claims. Here I address what can we say about Jesus’ early life – his family, profession, education and upbringing – from a more sober, historical perspective.

11. What do we know about Jesus’ family?

Our earliest biography of Jesus, Mark’s gospel, fleshes out what we know about Jesus’ family by making passing reference to his brothers and sisters. As we might expect from an ancient text, only the men are named – James, Joses, Judas and Simon. In this context, Jesus is unusually identified by his matronym, ‘Son of Mary’. Jesus’ father is no longer in the picture, but later gospels call him Joseph. The most probable explanation for why Joseph does not appear in Jesus’ ministry is that he had passed; by one scholarly estimate, the average lifespan of a Galilean man just was twenty-one. Remarkably, James went to lead the Jerusalem church and is attributed a New Testament epistle, like his brother Judas. (This latter point often escapes notice, with the diminutive ‘Jude’ distinguishing Jesus’ brother from his more familiar betrayer.)

12. Were Jesus’ siblings his blood relatives?

The second-century Infancy Gospel of James imagines that Jesus’ siblings were in fact sons and daughters of Joseph’s previous marriage. This is the origin of the Catholic dogma that Mary was a perpetual virgin. Many scholars have a problem with this source, due to its legendary character. Yet there may be some truth to this point in the narrative, insofar as it seems unlikely that Mary had at least seven children. Mixed families were common in antiquity, in part due to childbirth fatalities. Thus, some scholars suggest that the James’ point about Mary’s perpetual virginity is actually an outworking of the memory that Jesus’ siblings were his own. Yet how many of Jesus’ siblings were not blood relatives is difficult to say. Notably, Matthew implies that Mary was not a perpetual virgin, but consummated her marriage to Joseph.

13. Was Jesus’ family special in some way?

There does seem to have been something peculiar about Jesus’ family, in that it gave rise to not one but two major religious figures: not only Jesus, but his brother James. For some scholars, this is evidence of a Jesus ‘dynasty’. I also believe we can say with some confidence that Jesus was recognised as being of the line of David, a point already attested in Paul (Rom. 1:3). We know that some Jews from around the time of Jesus traced themselves to David, and so it is not surprising that Jesus’ family did so as well. Interestingly, Jesus’ hometown, Nazareth, finds its root in the Hebrew NZR meaning ‘shoot’. Some have therefore speculated that this community, formed of migrants from Judea, may have seen their re-population of Galilee in the north as a sign of the reconstitution of Israel. If so, Nazareth may have been an allusion to the coming ‘shoot’ of David, a community waiting for the son of David to arise.

14. Did Jesus ever get married?

It is not completely out of the question that Jesus was once married. Even though the sensationalist claim that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalen is unattested in our early sources, marriage was held in great esteem in Jewish culture and most men got married. There is reason to think, however, that Jesus proved an exception to the norm. Jesus lauds those who were ‘made eunuchs for the Kingdom of God’ and relativised the importance of family relations for spiritual ones. There is also no mention of a wife or children of Jesus in early Christian literature. While this is an argument from silence, it convinces most scholars that Jesus was a lifelong bachelor.

15. What was life like in Nazareth?

In one of his earliest epithets, Jesus is frequently called ‘the Nazarene’, an allusion to his hometown. Under the spell of German Romanticism, many nineteenth century lives of Jesus understood Nazareth as an idyllic Galilean hamlet – the perfect context for the amiable Jesus they went on to construct. Yet life in Nazareth would have been far from easy. Most people in Nazareth would have lived at or just above subsistence level, doing what they could to survive. It is sometimes thought that Jesus might have found work in Sepphoris, a Greek-style city less than 5 miles from Nazareth. But if there is something we know archaeologically about Nazareth, it is that it took ritual purity and Judaism very seriously. Despite their close proximity, there seems to have been little contact between rural Nazareth and its urban ‘Greek’ neighbour.

16. Was Jesus a carpenter?

In Mark, the Greek word tektōn is often translated ‘carpenter’, but this is overly precise. A tektōn refers to some who worked with hard materials, including wood and stone, while still distinguishing Jesus from a stone-mason (a lithologos) or stone-cutter (lithoxoos). A better translation might be ‘craftsman.’ What exactly this involved is difficult to say with precision. Some speculate that Jesus was a boat-builder, which might explain his connection to the Sea of Galilee. Perhaps more likely is that Jesus was involved in constructing houses. Houses in Galilee were typically made of stone, with wood working required for their doors and beams. What is important to emphasise, however, is that a tektōn was a ‘lower class’ profession. When the townspeople of Nazareth ask, ‘is this not Jesus, the tektōn?’, they do so with some surprise: a construction worker should not be teaching them in the synagogue!

17. Did Jesus learn to read and write?

To what extent Jesus was literate is a hotly debated issue. The reasons usually put forward to doubt his literacy are two-fold. First, the vast majority of people in first-century Galilee and Judea were illiterate, due to the lack of schools and the costs associated with education. Typically, only elites could afford the leisure (otium) to learn. Second, there is nowhere in the gospels which compels a historian to accept that Jesus was literate. Jesus does read from a scroll in Luke, but here the evangelist is redacting Mark’s account. On the other hand, Jesus regularly quotes scripture and asks his opponents, ‘have you not read?’, the force of which would be considerably tempered if he was not perceived as being able to read himself. It is also possible that Jesus was an exception to the norm, and received some education at home, in addition to hearing the Scriptures read aloud at the synagogue. As we noted above, Jesus’ family might have been somewhat exceptional. It is important to bear in mind, however, that literacy was a matter of gradation. It surely would have been helpful for Jesus to have had some basic literacy for his business. Even if this literacy did not extend very far, Jesus may have given some people the impression of being literate.

18. What languages could Jesus speak?

While the gospels are written in Greek, the primary language spoken in the Levant, including Galilee, was Aramaic, a sister-language of Hebrew. This is why the Gospels, especially Mark, sometimes translate Aramaic for their readers. We have phrases like talitha koum (‘little girl, get up’), Jesus’ cry of dereliction (‘eloi eloi lama sabacthani’) and the term abba (‘father’), which is picked up in Paul. The more controversial question, on which scholars are divided, is whether Jesus would have also known some Greek as a second language. In favour of this suggestion, some scholars have pointed to the presence of Greek loanwords in (later) rabbinic literature, the presence of Greek inscriptions and texts in Palestine, and the close proximity between Nazareth and ‘Greek’ Sepphoris. Yet none of this evidence is unambiguous. An elite educated Jewish writer like Flavius Josephus learnt Greek – but even he struggled (Ant. 20.263–264). My estimation is that Jesus had limited knowledge of Greek. He may have also known some Hebrew, providing his contact with the scriptures, read aloud in the local synagogue, was with Hebrew scrolls, rather than an Aramaic targumim (‘translations’).

19. Was Jesus a child prodigy?

In apocryphal texts such as the The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is presented a Wunderkind, a child already imbued with the wisdom and miracle working that would later define his ministry. There, Jesus is found to be a somewhat recalcitrant child prodigy; he bests his school-masters, makes a bird out of clay and even murders (and resurrects) another boy. Historians find no truth in these tales. Yet it is interesting to consider why they might have been told. In ancient life-writing, it is common to present the child or young man as already possessing the qualities that would show up in their adult life. Even Luke’s infancy narrative presents a twelve year old Jesus amazing the teachers in the Temple with his questions, which has a parallel with the education of King Cyrus of Persia in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. Whatever we make historically of this story, it raises the question of to what extent the young Jesus knew of his future mission. Unfortunately, we cannot pontificate on this with any certainty.

20. Was John the Baptist Jesus’ teacher?

It is now common place for historians to describe John the Baptist as Jesus’ teacher. But what is meant by this varies. A maximalist version of the idea states that many of Jesus’ teachings were derived from John. The problem with this is that the evidence of John’s teachings in our early sources are very sparse, and the teachings they do share could be attributed their common milieu. A more modest version of the idea is that Jesus was baptised by John and could appeal to John’s authority as a grounding for his own (Mk. 11:30). How much time Jesus spent with John is unknown, and what exactly he derived from John’s ministry is difficult to say. But what is fascinating is that John’s gospel seems to let slip that Jesus himself was a baptiser (3:22). If this is the case, it might be appropriate to see Jesus initially as a “franchisee” of the baptist’s movement. At some point, however, it seems that the two parted ways. Jesus did feel the need to adopt the baptist’s ascetic lifestyle. He also painted a more positive vision of the imminent future: not only one in which the axe was laid at the root of the tree, and the fire was coming, but in which all were called to feast in the Kingdom of God.

Recommended Resource:

Joan E. Taylor, Boy Jesus: Growing up Judean in Turbulent Times. Zondervan, 2025.

Thank you for reading this piece! If you enjoyed it, please consider supporting my writing as a paid subscriber. By supporting my work, you will get access to 60+ exclusive posts on the gospels and the historical Jesus, including the following:

• Christ the Construction Worker? Taking a Closer Look at Jesus’ Profession

• Was Jesus a Disciple of John the Baptist? Evidence for Jesus the Baptiser

• The Missing Years of Jesus: What really happened in Jesus’ childhood?

• Was Jesus Married? The Arguments For and Against

• Could Jesus Read and Write? A Primer on Jesus’ Literacy

Subscribe now

The passage my friend had in mind is found in all three Synoptic gospels, with its source in Mark. During Jesus’ crucifixion, Mark tells us that ‘from noon on, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon’ (15:33). Matthew copies out Mark, but Luke seems to bring out the ecliptic resonances of this event further.

Luke’s version states: ‘It was now about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, while the sun’s light failed; and the curtain of the temple was torn in two.’ What is fascinating is that if we inspect Luke’s Greek here, he uses the phrase tou héliou eklipontos, with ‘eklipontos’ giving us our English word ‘eclipse.’

So what’s going on? Is an astronomical eclipse obscuring light from the earth? To get to grips with the subject, we need to consider the main two types of eclipse.

The event we celebrate today is a solar eclipse, with the moon passing between the earth and the sun. This event requires a new moon. But according to the gospels, Jesus’ death took place around Passover, which required a full moon. What’s more, the darkness that covers earth in a solar eclipse lasts a matter of minutes – not three hours. So the phenomenon does not map on nicely onto our gospel texts.

What may be slightly more relevant to the gospels is the second type of eclipse – a lunar eclipse – where the earth moves between the sun and the moon. This sort of eclipse can take place around the full moon required for Passover, and might also produce a blood-red effect. Some have therefore tied the event to Acts 2:20, with its quotation of the prophet Joel: ‘The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the coming of the Lord's great and glorious day’ (2:31).

Again, the lunar eclipse does not fit snugly with the darkness described in the gospels. For a lunar eclipse takes place when the moon is above the horizon – usually the evening or at night – and is short-lived, but the gospels describe the darkness as occurring for three hours from noon. Yet since red lunar eclipses are referred to in ancient texts as the moon ‘turning to blood’, some have wondered whether an (evening) lunar eclipse might account for the language used in Acts’ quotation of Joel.

Most famously, Sir Colin Humphreys, a scientist at Cambridge, noted that Jesus’ death on a Friday on the day before Passover gives us a very narrow window of possible dates for Jesus’ death.1 If Jesus died on 14th Nisan, then there are two main days on which he could have died: Friday 7th April AD 30, and Friday 3rd April AD 33. (This is why you may have heard these years as familiar dates for Jesus’ death).

To adjudicate between these dates, Humphreys notes that a partial lunar eclipse would have been visible from Jerusalem on Friday 3rd April AD 33. This had the potential to create the blood-red effect of the moon in the evening, following the darkness covering the land. So according to Humphreys, there was a partial lunar eclipse on the evening of Jesus’ death, but not during the crucifixion itself. The fact of the eclipse helps us to date Jesus’ death more precisely than we otherwise would.

But what then caused the darkness? According to Humphreys, the effect of darkness might have been produced by a khamsin – a dusty desert wind that blows across the Levant, including regions like Jerusalem, which could easily last a few hours. This is not contradicted by Luke’s ‘eclipse’ language, which could refer to an actual eclipse, but could also refer to a general faltering. For example, in Luke, Jesus also says: ‘I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail (ekleipē)’ – using the same ‘eclipse’ verb.

Humphreys’ solution is ingenious, but it relies on the argument that Jesus died on 14th Nisan, the eve of Passover. The problem is that this flatly contradicts the earlier Synoptic account that Jesus died on the 15th Nisan. As I have argued elsewhere, following many others, I think there is a very strong case that John moved the date to 14th Nisan, so that Jesus could die on the same day that the Passover lambs were slaughtered, thus presenting Jesus as the paschal lamb.2

Where then does this leave us with the darkness that covered the land? As Humphreys observes, there are genuine reasons to think that a darkness could have a natural explanation, even if it has nothing to do with an eclipse. Yet we must also note that omens of darkness are scattered throughout ancient literature. Thus, if we want to know the meaning of the gospels’ darkness, it is to this that we must take heed.

In the Hebrew Bible, darkness often has strong apocalyptic edge. In texts like Joel 2 and Amos 5, it is used as a symbol of God’s divine judgement. Perhaps in this case then, it is the judgement over Israel for putting God’s anointed one to death. (For a fuller explanation of this motif with respect to Mark, see The Destruction of Jerusalem).

For a more direct parallel, however, we might turn to Graeco-Roman literature, where eclipses could portend a King’s death (Philo, Prov. 2.50). This is illustrated by Virgil’s poetic account of the death of Julius Caesar, which precipitated sixteen unusual phenomena, including prolonged darkness (Georg. 1.466-488). On this reading, the darkness that covered the land fits well with Jesus’ death as ‘King of the Jews’. There, it serves to confirm that Jesus truly is – as the centurion says – the ‘son of God.’

Thank you for reading this piece – and I hope you enjoyed the eclipse! If you liked this post, please consider supporting my writing as a paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

By supporting my work, you will get access to 60+ exclusive posts on the gospels and the historical Jesus, including the following:

• Can the Dates of Jesus’ Death Be Reconciled?

• Good Friday: An Anti-Roman Triumph?

• The Destruction of Jerusalem

Do you think the Gospel of Matthew and the Book of Acts of the Apostles give contradictory accounts surrounding Judas Iscariot’s death?

I personally think that Matthew and Acts’ accounts of Judas’ fate are very difficult to reconcile. It is often said that the main contradiction between Matthew and Acts concerns the manner of Judas’ death. In Matthew, Judas hangs himself; in Acts, he falls headlong in a field. This is then typically harmonised by saying that when or after Judas hanged himself, he fell headlong in the field, spilling his guts. This was a classic harmonisation employed by the Church fathers, and is still used today.

Yet the accounts differ in at least two further ways beyond Judas’ manner of death:

1. The Purchase of the Field: In Matthew, Judas returns the money and the priests use it to buy a field (27:7), while in Acts, Judas himself acquires the field ‘with the reward of his wickedness’ (1:18). The fact that Acts uses the word ‘acquire’ is sometimes taken to mean that he did not buy the field, but rather it was ‘acquired’ in his name. If that is what Luke meant, that is what he could have said.1

2. The Name of the Field: In both Matthew and Acts, the field is known as ‘the field of blood’. But the reason for this differs. In Matthew, it is called ‘the field of blood’ because it was bought with the blood money that Judas returned. In Acts, it is called the ‘field of blood’ because Judas’ death in the field was bloody. To reconcile this, one might suggest that the field was known for both reasons.

There is also a third potential discrepancy between Matthew and Acts with respect to Judas’ response. In Matthew, Judas shows remorse for the part he played in Jesus’ death. This is why he gives away his blood money – because he realises that he had sinned. But in Acts, there is no indication of Judas’ remorse. On the contrary, Judas goes on to buy a house. This seems to suggest that Judas had the purpose of taking up residence there (hence Acts 1:20, ‘let his house become desolate’).

Read more

It is not quite so easy to ‘crash course’ the historical Jesus, so in each instalment, I’ll move through Jesus’ life in 10 (slightly longer) answers. This first set concerns Jesus’ existence, the sources for his life and the so-called ‘quest for the historical Jesus’.

1. Was Jesus a historical figure?

Yes. Historians across the ideological spectrum think that Jesus existed. The two most common objections to his existence are (1) that he did not leave behind any physical artefacts, and; (2) that he was a supernatural being who was historicised within early Christian literature. Neither of these objections is compelling. The vast majority of people from the ancient world left behind no physical remains (texts excluded). Moreover, when scholars speak about the ‘historical Jesus’, they are not referring to the figure of Christian theology, but the one we can reconstruct using ordinary historical methods. This figure is attested (as a human!) in several early sources, whatever one might believe about the ‘supernatural’ claims which engulf him.

2. What are the sources for Jesus’ life?

There are some ancient, extra-biblical sources for Jesus. The first-century Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus mentions Jesus in his Antiquities of the Jews; Pliny the Younger knows of a figure called Christ, who was worshipped ‘as a god’ (implying his humanity), and Tacitus mentions Christ’s death under Pontius Pilate. Yet the more important sources for Jesus’ life are found within what later became known as the New Testament. Particularly important are the writings of Paul (c. 50 onwards) and the Synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke). These biographies of Jesus began to be published forty years after Jesus’ death and themselves draw on earlier sources. These may have included a source called ‘Q’ and pre-Markan passion material.

3. What does Paul say about Jesus?

In his letters, Paul provides a panoply of traditions about Jesus. These include Jesus’ Davidic descent; the fact that Jesus had brothers, one of whom was Iakobos (‘James’); that Jesus taught against divorce; that he spoke of his death as a ‘new covenant’ in his blood; that he died a shameful death by crucifixion and was subsequently buried. It is possible that Paul received some of this information during his visits to Jerusalem, where he met Jesus’ brother James and another leading figure called Peter/Cephas, who feature in the canonical gospels; some scholars also believe that Paul knew ‘Q’, the (hypothetical) source used by Matthew and Luke. However, the fact that Paul does not say more about Jesus in his epistles is painful and has perplexed some historians.

4. Is John’s Gospel a historical source?

The gospel of John is contested as a historical source for Jesus’ life. In the most conservative estimates, John draws on the eyewitness testimony of a disciple of Jesus, identified in the text as the ‘beloved disciple’. Yet today, few mainstream scholars accept that John was written by John, the Son of Zebedee, with some preferring to see the beloved disciple as a literary invention, or a different John altogether. Whatever one makes of the gospel’s authorship, one must reckon with its distinctive portrayal of Jesus. Here, Jesus does not speak in parables, exorcise demons, or proclaim the Kingdom of God as we find in the Synoptics; rather, he reflects more explicitly and metaphorically on his own identity. Many scholars therefore see John as a more ‘spiritual’ gospel, which leans on and significantly adapts the earlier gospels.

5. What on earth is ‘Q’?

Matthew and Luke share a lot of material that is not in their base text, Mark, but they often place it at different points in their narratives. This has led a lot of scholars to think that Matthew and Luke were not copying from one another, but relied on a shared source that pre-dates either text. They call this ‘Q’, from the German Quelle (source). For the most part, its material is sayings, with the exception of a few narratives, such as Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. If it existed, Q is a hugely valuable source, with some scholars dating it as early as the 40s CE. Yet there is a growing wave of Q-scepticism in current gospel research, with the favoured alternative to Q being that Luke relied on Matthew’s gospel. This might explain why Luke has so much in common with Matthew, without hypothesising an extra source.

6. Do later gospels contain historical information?

Historical Jesus scholars rarely draw upon sources outside of the New Testament. Some have tried to extricate a pre-gospel source in the second-century Gospel of Peter, yet most critical scholars see this text as dependent upon the earlier canonical gospels. More promising is the argument that the Gospel of Thomas preserves at least some teachings of Jesus in its collection of 114 sayings. There are also several sayings that float outside of the canonical gospels, known somewhat misleadingly as agrapha (‘unwritten’ things), such as this one in Acts: ‘It is better to give than to receive.’ Some historians also think that a text like the Infancy Gospel of James, though legendary, might be correct in its assertion that not all of Jesus’ siblings were born of Mary.

7. What is the ‘Quest for the Historical Jesus’?

The quest for the historical Jesus refers to the attempt of modern scholars to study Jesus with ordinary methods of historical analysis, stripped of traditional doctrinal assumptions about Jesus. The ‘historical Jesus’ is thus often contrasted with the ‘Christ of faith’. In the latter half of the twentieth century, it became common to divide the quest into four stages: the ‘old quest’ (c. 1778–1906), ‘no quest’ (c. 1906–1953), the ‘new quest’ (c. 1953-1970s), and the ‘third quest’ (c. 1970s onwards). Some would now say we are currently within a ‘fourth’ quest (c. 2010s +). However, this periodisation of the field has come under heavy scrutiny in recent research; it may therefore be more fitting to speak, as many do, of the fourth quest as the ‘next quest.’

8. Why is the historical Jesus so difficult to study?

The historical Jesus is so difficult to study because of the nature of our sources, the methods we use, and the people who study him. A word on each. Almost all of our most important sources for Jesus are written by people within the Jesus movement, who had an interest in depicting Jesus the way they do, and whose identities are difficult to recover. To impose a degree of objectivity in evaluating our sources, scholarship has devised a number of criteria to discern whether particular sayings and deeds go back to the historical Jesus. Yet these so-called ‘criteria of authenticity’ are themselves highly controversial, methodologically. One problem – which has always afflicted the field – is that Jesus rarely escapes looking like a bit like those who imagine him. As George Tyrell once said, in a sentiment picked up more famously in Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus, Jesus historians tend to look down the well of history, only to find their own reflections staring back at them.

9. Is the Quest necessarily minimalist in its conclusions?

If by ‘conclusions’ one is referring to the facts that are almost beyond dispute among all Jesus’ scholars, then the Quest is certainly minimalist. In his influential 1993 work, The Historical Figure of Jesus, E.P. Sanders’ list of assured results about Jesus would fill no more than a single page, including facts like his baptism, his preaching of the Kingdom of God, and his sentencing to death by Pontius Pilate – and I don’t think the field has moved much since then. Of course, however, individuals and groups of scholars believe that they can say a lot more about the historical Jesus. How much we know partly depends on what one considers historical ‘knowledge’. Now that we are coming onto a next quest, where the very notion of ‘authentic’ information about Jesus has become far more blurred, we might no longer speak so much about isolated ‘results’ of the field, and focus more on giving a holistic impression of who Jesus was.

10. What is the Next Quest?

The ‘Next Quest for the Historical Jesus’ is a new research movement, given its name by a recent collection of essays. It is distinct from the other ‘quests’ in a few ways, which include but are not limited to the following four emphases: (1) it reckons with the demise of the ‘criteria of authenticity’ and approaches the historical Jesus using different methods, including social memory theory; (2) it spends renewed effort to understand the world of Jesus, moving us away from a ‘great man’ theory of history in which Jesus is the principal actor; (3) it interrogates the study of the historical Jesus and the biases of scholars of the quest; and (4) it explores topics and approaches that have typically been neglected in Jesus studies, such as gender and corporeality.

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

• How to Become a World Expert on the Historical Jesus (my top seven book recommendations for studying Jesus as a historical figure)

• What on Earth is ‘Q’? (considering arguments for and against the hypothetical source used by Matthew and Luke)

• Is the Gospel of John Historical? (an exploration between the different portraits of Jesus in the Synoptic gospels and John)

• Eyewitness Testimony in Mark? (considering names in the gospels)

Subscribe now

You may also enjoy these fantastic Substacks on the historical Jesus!…

Sophia in the Shell

Biblical studies, early Christianity, and extraordinary social behavior.

Contingent History

Writing on History, Religion, & Christian Origins | Book & Pipe Enthusiast

By Tyler Blaine Wilson

Notes from Gehenna

A blog about the historical Jesus, ancient Christianity, and the mystery of faith.

By Joseph Sigurdson

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 if I can tell which is which. Perhaps next time you step into a church or museum, you might take up the task of animal spotting and remember the gospels’ distinctive portraits of Christ.

Subscribe now

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…

Read more

“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.

Read more

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?

Subscribe now

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.

Thank you for reading Behind the Gospels!

If you would like access to 50+ exclusive articles on the gospels, as well as the opportunity to have your questions answered, consider becoming a paid subscriber using the offer below.

Get 25% off for 1 year

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?

Get 25% off for 1 year

Was Matthew a Tax Collector?

Read more

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

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

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

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

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

1. Social & Personal Memory

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

Read more

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

1. Pliny the Younger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Tacitus

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

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

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

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

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

3. Suetonius

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

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

Where did ‘Luke’ come from?

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

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

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

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

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

Get 25% off for 1 year

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

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

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

The ‘We’ Passages in Acts

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

#1 The Gospels’ uncertain provenance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get 25% off for 1 year

#2 The Gospels are ancient biographies

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

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

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

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

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

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

#3. The Gospels lack independent attestation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#4 The Gospels are intertextual and theological works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#5 The Gospels develop and contradict one another

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

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

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

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

#6 The Gospels contain fantastical material

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

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

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

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

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

#7 The Gospel materials are not easily probed

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

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

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

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

Are the Gospels Historically Reliable?

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

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

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

Thank you for reading!

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

• Is the Gospel of John Historical?

• Can we Really Know what Jesus Said?

• Tom Holland on the Historical Jesus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Symbol of Unity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Priestly Vestment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Simple Garment

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

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

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

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

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

A Seamless Interpretation?

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

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

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

Thank you for reading this post!

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

Subscribe now