Tom Holland on the Historical Jesus

An Evening Discussion in London

Last night, I went to All Souls Langham Place for a discussion on Jesus. Host Justin Brierley was joined by Dr Peter Williams, principal of Tyndale House, Cambridge. Yet perhaps like most people in the room, I was there not so much for Williams but rather his interlocutor: the popular agnostic historian, Tom Holland.

The Rest is History podcast host has often found himself getting invited to Church since he wrote Dominion, a book arguing that Christianity is deeply embedded in the West’s moral imagination. Yet in that book, as he confessed last night, he was nervous to broach the subject of the historical Jesus. I was eager, then, to finally hear what Holland made of Jesus, and where he might aver from Williams. In this piece, I offer some reflections on the event.

The Sources for Jesus

The discussion opened with an exploration of Roman sources for Jesus. Holland explained that when he was an atheist teenager, he believed that the evidence for Jesus’ life was much weaker than, say, the evidence for the prophet Mohammad. Yet in researching his book on Islam, he realised he had got it the wrong way round: the key sources for Mohammad’s life were written hundreds of years after his life. By contrast, Jesus appears in a relatively “astonishing” number of sources relatively early on.

The sources in question are diverse: Pliny the Younger’s letter to the Emperor Trajan, asking the Emperor what to do with these pesky Christians who ‘worship Christ as a god’; Tacitus’ reference in his Annals to Christians who were blamed by Nero for the fire in Rome; Suetonius’ possible reference to a certain “Chrestus”; as well as the first century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus’ descriptions of Jesus in his Antiquities.

All of these sources are fascinating windows into early Christianity, and an indirect witness to Jesus. Yet I slightly lament the fact that discussions of Jesus’ life are often framed by them, giving the impression that the Roman sources somehow provide a more stable foundation for Jesus’ life than the ‘Christian’ ones. If we did not have these sources, our understanding of Jesus would remain largely unaffected.

It is perhaps telling that the sources did not come up again in the discussion, attesting to their rather threadbare historical interest. The more pressing concern is whether Paul and the gospels get Jesus right – and that is where the conversation turned next.

What the Gospels get right – and wrong…

Peter Williams opened his case for the gospels by pointing to what they get right. They mostly understand the local ‘colour’ of the region – the names we find in them are common Jewish names, and the terminology they use is often appropriate. Unlike later apocryphal gospels, which show little concern for Palestinian realia, the canonical gospels bear a closer familiarity with the people and places they describe.

I agree with Williams, and would add that it is not only the content but the form of the (Synoptic) gospel tradition which points to its origins in a Palestinian setting. Philip Alexander puts it this way, comparing the gospels to anecdotes in rabbinic literature:

“In terms of form, function, setting and motif, the Rabbinic anecdotes are very close to the Gospel pericopae, and there can be little doubt that both belong to the same broad Palestinian Jewish tradition of story-telling.” (2015, 42)

On the gospels’ historicity, Tom was happy to concur that the gospels may get the “macro” right, but they are not always so great on the details. He offered three examples where the gospels fall short of documentary truth: the unlikelihood that Pontius Pilate would offer Barabbas as a substitute for Jesus (a ‘custom’ nowhere attested in history); Herod’s massacre of the Bethlehem innocents, which does not appear in Josephus; and Luke’s presentation of an empire-wide census under the reign of Quirinius, governor of Syria. As far as we can tell, there was no such census.