The Historical Jesus in 50 Questions

Part One: The Quest for the Historical Jesus

In previous posts on Jesus’ appearance and the nativity, I have challenged myself to answer 50 questions in quick succession. Readers seem to have enjoyed this format, so in this post I’m using it again to answer your questions on the historical Jesus.

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.

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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)

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

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