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Do we really know anything about Jesus?

Do we really know anything about what Jesus said? Do we even know that Jesus existed?

Elaine Pagels recently published what is likely her final work. Certainly it reads like a career summary, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus (2025). We understand her argument better when we recognize that we know virtually nothing of the historical Jesus beyond two facts. It is almost certain that he existed, and that he was crucified following the orders of Pontius Pilate, Roman prefect (governor) of Judaea during the reign of Emperor Tiberius, probably in the year 30 CE.

Other than the New Testament, there is no historical mention of Jesus until Josephus, who wrote about 80 CE, and whose references to Jesus are suspect, since a Jewish warrior who fought the Romans was unlikely to characterize Jesus as a wise man who performed amazing deeds and so forth. Yet, among scholars there seems almost universal agreement (I’m not quite sure why) that Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews (c. 18), constitutes independent if late historical evidence for Jesus’ existence and crucifixion. Those of a sceptical cast of mind wonder how such an important historical figure as Jesus could have escaped mention from any independent source for over fifty years. The recently discovered Gospels of Thomas and Peter don’t add much, since they seem to be be second-century creations. /1/

Scholars have been remarkably inventive in finding additional sources by parsing the synoptic Gospels and Paul. While Matthew and Luke borrowed extensively from Mark, the earliest Gospel, scholars posit a hypothetical document called Q, containing material shared by each but absent in Mark. In addition, scholars posit additional documents, called M and L. That is, material contained neither in Q nor Mark, but unique to Matthew or Luke. Of course, all this could be more economically explained by arguing that Matthew and Luke draw upon undiscovered passages of Mark, but scholars want many sources out of three.

In addition, there are a few passages in Aramaic, such as Jesus’ well-known last words from the cross in Mark and Matthew, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). /2/ Also in Aramaic is Jesus’ command to Jairus’ daughter, “Talitha cumi,” which roughly means “Little girl, stand up and walk.” (Mark 5:41). There are a couple of other phrases in Aramaic, suggesting that the text is recalling a genuine oral tradition, but this is far from clear.

Even more creative, scholars have found passages in Paul that read like little creeds or poems that don’t fit Paul’s usage or style, and so are presumed to lead directly back to an oral tradition. The passages don’t fit Paul because they have a ritualistic quality, and because they contain what are called Semitisms, a grammatical form not found in Greek, but only in Semitic languages such as Hebrew and Aramaic (Ehrman 2015, loc 3305).

The existence of these separate sources is strictly hypothetical. All we really know is that the synoptic Gospels were written no earlier than 40 years after the death of Jesus, in the case of Mark, by well-educated Greek speaking men who had no direct contact with Jesus or his disciples. Paul wrote earlier, and might have known James, the brother of Jesus. Or might not. Mark and Luke likely wrote in Rome, Matthew possibly in Judea, or possibly not. We know so little the tendency to guess is overwhelming.

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The Book of Revelation Does Not Belong in the Bible

The last book in the New Testament, Revelation, is remarkably popular today. Few people read Revelation itself, but millions have read a book series called Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days. Books seven and eight in the series (The Indwelling and The Mark) by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list. The Remnant began at number one on the Times best-seller list (2002). Roughly 65 million copies have been sold in over forty languages, though only in America has it become a publishing phenomenon.

Rapture

Left Behind assumes an evangelical doctrine called “rapture.” The term nowhere appears in the Bible, but is the relatively recent creation of John Nelson Darby, an evangelical Protestant who came up with the term in the 1830’s. Popularized by Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, and books that followed, The Late Great was the best-selling nonfiction book of the nineteen-seventies. While the Book of Revelation is not widely read, the attraction of end of the world thinking remains remarkably real even in a secular age. Dorian Lynskey’s recent Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, suggests some reasons why. I’ll return to one of these reasons at the end.

Rapture claims that at the end of days, all Christians will rise “in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.” First Thessalonians 4:17 is an often-cited Biblical source, but its meaning is obscure. /1/ The word “rapture” never appears in the Bible. Nor does the Book of Revelation say anything about the followers of Jesus being taken out of the world before it all goes up in flames.

Like all apocalypses, the rapture fantasy can be dangerous. Older readers may remember Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, who stated in testimony before Congress that while it’s essential to preserve our resources for future generations, he remarked that he wasn’t sure how many future generations there would be before the Apocalypse and Christ’s subsequent return. Casper Weinberger, then Secretary of Defense, agreed. /2/ When you think this way, everything from nuclear war to climate change becomes less significant.

The Left Behind series loves violence. In this respect, it is true to Revelation, the bloodiest book in the Bible. This, though, is not why there was so much debate over whether to include it in the canon we call the Bible, a book of books. One thing that troubled the early church leaders was that the book was too bound to what Christians call the Old Testament. Revelation’s God was a God of power and might, with no hint of God’s willingness to become weak and vulnerable in the person of the son (2 Corinthians 12:9). For many Christians, not Revelation, but the Gospels teach the true lesson of Christianity: non-violence and love of neighbor in the face of hatred (Matthew 22:36-40). Barely a hint of this remains in Revelation.

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Alternative histories of Jesus: four novels

Alternative histories of Jesus: four novels

Each of the 4 stories challenges the divinity of Jesus. Each imagines Jesus as merely mortal; one isn’t sure but wishes he were. The Last Temptation of Christ, probably the most well-known, I read in college. The novel has Jesus imagining that he was a man who chose life over sacrifice. This fantasy turns out to be the Devil’s work. I believe this misses the point of Christ’s dual nature.

The other three imagine that Jesus was fully and only human. Judas betrays Christ because he forgets his earthly revolutionary mission and begins to imagine that he really is divine. All miracles are explained away. D. H. Lawrence’s Jesus is a version of the gardener in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. In it too miracles are either explained away or ignored. The fourth book, The Testament of Mary, is in some ways the odd book out. Originally written as a screen play, it is elegant in its simplicity. Mary looks back on her life as Christ’s mother, and regrets that he chose the to save the world. Better to have lived his own life, a man so talented he could have done anything. She is skeptical about the miracles, especially his resurrection, but does not outright deny them. They just get in the way.

All but The Last Temptation are short, novellas really. I believe that even the most devout would benefit from reading them, for if Christ was fully man as well as fully God, then one has to say that the man side generally gets short shrift. If he were not the son of God, the conflict between his two sides (not parts, but aspects of a whole) would have torn him apart. It should tear us about when we think about it, but we generally don’t let it. Each novel is fascinating reading; they were well worth my time, and I believe yours.

I’ll tell you about each book, and conclude by elaborating on the great value of the Gospels, as well as thinking about Christ as simply man, even if you believe he is more. Here I’ll consider Ernest Renan’s influential The Life of Jesus (original 1863), which purports to be a historical, rather than Gospel based, account of the life of Jesus. It’s not; it’s as fictional as any of the novels we examine. I’ll explain why this is, and must be, the case.

The Books

The plot of The Last Temptation of Christ, by Nikos Kazantzakis (1960) is a little confusing. Just as gypsies are about to nail him to the cross, Christ’s guardian angel (actually an agent of Satan) steals him away and transports him to marriage with Mary Magdalene, who is stoned to death shortly after. The widower Jesus ends up with two sisters, Mary and Hannah, with whom he enjoys a rich family life, including fathering children (pp 445-446).

Judas and other disciples confront him. Jesus lied; he did not live up to his word to die to save the world. Christ is torn with guilt, and at the very end awakens from his dream, accepts his mission from God, and dies with the famous words “It is accomplished” on his lips (p 496).

It is clear in the text, and clearer still in the author’s introduction, that Christ’s dying dream of living a normal human life is inspired by Satan. His guardian angel who saves him from the cross (all illusion) is an agent of Satan. Jesus’ experience of everyday life as deeply satisfying was a fantasy, sent by the devil.

This doesn’t seem right. If Christ was truly all man, as well as all God, then the man part would have naturally wanted a family life, a sexual life, a normal human life. That would be the temptation that the all-God part of him would have to overcome to fulfill his mission. Not Satan, but Christ himself, is the tempter and the tempted. That the last temptation is a dying delusion inspired by Satan fails as a full or honest vision of the duality of Christ’s nature. Kazantzakis may think he is saving Christ’s authentic nature as God, but he sacrifices the mystery of the duality of Christ, the enigma that makes him so fascinating: that he is as fully human we are, while remaining God.*

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How new is the New Testament?

How is it that the Old Testament (OT) seems to predict the coming of Christ? Was the OT inspired by the God revealed in the New Testament (NT)? Could be, but an answer internal to the Bible itself is persuasive. The Gospel writers looked backward more than they looked forward, reinterpreting the experience of Jesus, which none had firsthand, as the fulfillment of OT prophecy. Almost any statement about a good man who suffered, such as the suffering servant songs of Isaiah 52-53, was put to this use.

The Gospels were written no earlier than 40 years after the death of Christ. Mark was written in about 70 CE, John about 100 CE. Educated men wrote them in Greek. The apostles were uneducated, probably illiterate, who spoke Aramaic. The Gospels were written to make sense of the fact that the Messiah, who was supposed to be a mighty warrior who would liberate the Jews, died a miserable and degrading death by crucifixion.

Even that seems to have been predicted by the OT, which says that if a man is guilty of a capital crime “you hang him on a tree.” (Deuteronomy 21:22-23) Acts refers to this passage three times (5.30; 10.39; 13.29). The principal goal of the NT was to transform a humiliating death into the liberation of humankind from the grip of death. The OT provides plenty of evidence for this reinterpretation.

But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. (Isaiah 53.5)

It certainly sounds like the prophet Isaiah was talking about Jesus. But was he?

Hardly any passage of the Hebrew Bible is and has been of such fundamental importance in the history of Jewish-Christian debate . . . or has played such a central role in it, as has the fourth Servant Song of Second Isaiah. Nor has any other passage experienced such different and sometimes mutually exclusive interpretations as this one. (Schreiner, p 419)

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Wild Gods: Barbara Ehrenreich and William James

Wild Gods: Barbara Ehrenreich and William James.

Better known for her books on low-wage workers, such as Nickled and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich wrote her dissertation on cellular immunology, and had always considered herself a scientist, even as she began to write on social issues.

Author of about twenty books, the one that breaks the pattern is among her last, Living with a Wild God, in which she writes about an encounter with god, an event for which she was unprepared. “I saw God,” she says about an encounter years earlier in which she experienced the world alight with what the traditionally religious might call glory, “where God or gods or at least a living Presence” appeared to her (pp 127, 215). Previously imperceptible “conscious beings . . . . that normally elude our senses” seems to be the expression she is most comfortable with, but she freely employs the terms God and gods.

This does not lead her to say “I believe in God.” Rather, she says she knows God because she has encountered him in a wilderness called Lone Pine. But if she knows God, her god is nothing like the traditional theistic God, for he (or it) has no interest in our welfare.

As Eckhart . . . had asserted centuries earlier, referring to the Other as “God,” the religious seeker must set aside “any idea about God as being good, wise, [ or ] compassionate.” This of course poses a nearly insoluble problem: Mysticism often reveals a wild amoral Other, while religion insists on conventional codes of ethics enforced by an ethical supernatural being. (p 226)

If this wild god has a purpose, then it is to keep us company. Since Descartes, we have made ourselves the center of reality, creating a lonely world, the result of the “collective solipsism” of our species.* While the wild gods are unconcerned with humans’ need for cosmic company, she makes the surprising suggestion that they may be seeking us out (p 237).

The suggestion is surprising not only because nothing else in the book prepares us for it, but also because it faintly reflects the traditional Judeo-Christian view of God as intensely involved with his people, first rescuing them from Pharaoh, and then saving them from the obliteration of death.

Ehrenreich’s gods are more modest, seeking only companionship. Or perhaps this experience of an invisible companion is how we put together our chaotic experience of the world when we are in a mystical state. Or a psychotic one (p 215). Ehrenreich is certain there is a difference, but not always certain which one prevails at the moment, and she is wise to hesitate. She does not hesitate in her assertion that these gods are other than human, other than ourselves. We may experience them in a mystical state, but their existence is independent of human desires.

William James: “Something really wild in the universe”

In his 1895 essay, “Is Life Worth Living?” William James concluded that human life is either a “real fight in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success” or it is a trivial game from which “one may withdraw at will.” With the latter phrase, he is referring to suicide. As evidence for the first possibility, he stated that

it feels like a real fight, as if there were something really wild in the universe which we . . . are needed to redeem. (paragraphs 61-63)

Ehrenreich reveled in this wildness, which reached out to grab her and might even need her. James would redeem it. But what does that mean, and does nature need redeeming? Theodor Adorno (1984) answered that anything that looks like the redemption of nature is bound to be domination in disguise. What James seems to mean is that we need to “redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears.”

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The Quest for the Historical Jesus

The quest for the historical Jesus

Is Jesus Christ best understood as a prophet of the apocalypse? Yes, argued Albert Schweitzer in 1906 in The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Moderns, said Schweitzer, tend to miss this reality, turning Jesus into a wise and pacific God-man. Schweitzer’s claim has been renewed and popularized by Bart Ehrman in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium.*

It’s a strong argument, though a complicated one, for there exists no history of Jesus without its own theological agenda. The first Gospel, Mark, as well as the hypothetical source called Q, are filled with apocalyptic sayings of Jesus, many emphasizing that the end of the age would fall within the lifetime of his followers. “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the Kingdom of God has come in power.” (Mark 9:1).

The problem, of course, is that Jesus was wrong. The Kingdom did not come within the lifetime of his followers. It has yet to arrive. Though the revision of the message is present in all the Gospels after Mark, it was most clearly changed in John. The Kingdom was in heaven. It was not coming to earth, at least not for some time. Jesus was telling us how to live now, not how to prepare for the apocalypse.

“Already but not yet” makes it complicated

The complexity is best captured by what is called inaugurated eschatology, and reflected in the phrase “already but not yet.” There is much in the New Testament, virtually our only historical source, that says that the Kingdom of Heaven is already at work among the followers of Jesus. The Beatitudes (blessed are the poor in spirit . . . ) or the antitheses, also in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount (5:21–48), are exemplary.** There is virtually no way to read them but as advice for how to live in this world now. It is a stretch to argue that the Beatitudes are a statement about the reversal that will occur when God’s Kingdom is realized on earth. About the antitheses, Ehrman argues simply that they are not independently attested, an especially weak argument about a Gospel he relies on heavily (p 171).

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Does Paul Tillich make any sense?

Since my first post on Paul Tillich, I’ve become convinced that his project is important, finding a new way of talking about God that doesn’t assume he is an actor in the world. However, this new way works only for those with a traditional religious background. Without this background, Tillich offers only a new and confusing vocabulary.

During the 1950s, Tillich was the most well-known theologian in America. He was on the cover of Time magazine (2/16/1959), and a serious essay of his, “The Lost Dimension of Religion,” was published in the Saturday Evening Post (6/14/1958), then the most popular magazine in America. His sermons were popular and well-attended.

Tillich reinterpreted the Bible in terms of existentialism. Existentialism was fashionable in the 1950s, addressing the isolation and lack of meaning that many felt after World War Two. We had won the war, the economy was booming, but what was the point of it all? The fundamental existential question is the meaning and purpose of an existence from which God has been displaced. This was, and is true, even for many who attend church. They don’t act like they believe. There is nothing sacred in their lives (Tillich, Depth).

Being-itself

Instead of the word “God,” Tillich substituted the term “being-itself.” With this term, Tillich wanted to get at the “God above God.” For Tillich, God doesn’t do things. He doesn’t intervene in the events of the world. That’s our responsibility. Rather, God is present in all things, allowing them to be. God isn’t like a powerful person. God is the structure of the universe itself, the force that brings everything into being. God makes the grass grow. God is no longer personal but remains transcendent (Novak, p 11). He creates, supports, and maintains the world. The “ground of being” is Tillich’s term for this God.

God as being-itself is the ground of the ontological structure of being without being subject to this structure Himself. He is the structure; that is, He has the power of determining the structure of everything that has being. (Systematic Theology, p 239)

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Karen Armstrong, the new physics, and religion

Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God is an impressive, impossible survey of beliefs about God from 30,000 BCE to the current God wars between the new atheists (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, among others) and Christian fundamentalists. Armstrong synthesizes an enormous amount of material, including basic introductions to Buddhism and Confucianism, while concentrating on the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Her work is aimed at the well-educated lay person.

Where she goes wrong is in imaging that developments in the new physics, such as indeterminacy, can change the way we think about God.* She’s wrong because while the new science of sub-atomic physics, strangeness, string theory, and quarks may inspire us to think more flexibly about God, there is no reason that it should. The same may be said of astrophysics, and the fantastically beautiful images of distant galaxies brought back to us by the Hubble and Webb telescopes. The situation laid out by Albert Camus remains. We call out for the universe to tell us that we are not abandoned, isolated, and alone, and the universe is silent.

The absurd is born of the confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. (Camus, p 28)

The new science is a source of the sublime, that experience that shatters our previous categories of experience. “Beauty is the beginning of terror we are still just able to bear,” said Rilke. The new science is beautiful; the new science is terrifying. But unless one is looking strictly for inspiration, it does nothing to change the absurdity of human existence. Humans long for a world that cares about us, and the world cares not. Camus calls that the absurdity (absurdité) of the human condition, and it’s as good a word as any.

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