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.  

From Jesus to God

While we don’t know much about the relationship between the historical Jesus and the Jesus of the Gospels and Paul, we know a lot about the transformation of Jesus in the course of the development of the New Testament.  Most scholars believe the dates of composition run like this:

• (Crucifixion of Jesus, circa 30 CE)
• Paul’s letters: 48-67 CE
• Mark: 70 CE
• Matthew and Luke: 80-85 CE
• John: 90-95 CE

For the longest time, Biblical scholars believed that the accounts of Jesus in the New Testament run from low to high Christology, as the distinction is often styled.  In Mark, and to a lesser degree Matthew and Luke, Jesus was born a man, becoming a son of God only upon his resurrection and Ascension, 40 days later,  where he “sitteth on the right hand of God,” soon to return on the clouds of heaven (Matthew 26:64; Mark 14:62). /3/   Only in John is Jesus co-eternal with God. “Before Abraham was I am,” Jesus famously says in John  (8:58).  Recall that “I Am” is how Yahweh (God) defines himself in the Old Testament.  Most Christians today are Johannine Christians. 

What did the earliest Christians believe, say around the years 31 or 32?  As mentioned, there are passages in the letters of Paul (for example, Romans 1:3-4) that don’t fit not just because of their Semitisms, but because they reflect a theology that is already Christian. /3/  One can’t see this unusual credal structure in most translations, but creed it is.  Consider Philippians 2:5-7. 

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 

Ehrman (2015, loc 5499) elaborates.  

It must have been no more than twenty years after Jesus died, possibly even fewer, that the Christ poem in Philippians (2:3-11) was composed, in which Jesus was said to have been a preexistent being “in the form of God” who became human.  

More change in first twenty years than next two millennia

Sometimes the most extreme statement says it best.  Martin Hengle states that “with regard to the development of all the early Church’s Christology . . . more happened in the first twenty years than in the entire later, centuries-long development of dogma.” /4/

Of course, a lot did happen after the first twenty years, including the adoption of the New Testament canon  and the Council of Nicea (all this in the first 350 years), whose creed is still recited by Roman Catholic and most Protestant denominations.  Nevertheless, a major leap was made in those first twenty years: from seeing Jesus as a prophet or messiah (a term which did not mean savior, but was closer to a synonym for king), to seeing him as a preexistent divine being who became human only temporarily before returning to the God he already was.  

The puzzling thing about this development, especially if one places as much weight on the oral creeds as Ehrman, is that it was already baked into the earliest folkloric traditions about Jesus, beginning at the time of his resurrection if not before.  There’s not much more to say about this warp in the usual understanding of Biblical history because we know so little, only that it’s a possibility.  Certainly the development of Christianity is no smooth line from Mark’’s Jesus as this-worldly messiah to John’s Jesus as coeternal with God.    

The Gospels are not about Jesus

Adam Gopnik’s fine commentary in The New Yorker (March 31, 2025) on Pagels’ recent book argues that the Gospels are literary constructions from the beginning.  There is no foundational oral tradition underneath the Gospels, written time and worlds away from the life of the Galilean radical preacher.

In The Origins of Early Christian Literature, Robyn Faith Walsh, argues that the Gospels are first of all Greek literature.  

Their closest affinities, she contends, are not with Jewish Folklore or communal memory but with the miraculous novel and excitable bioi or lives, that filled the Hellenistic world–-stories often centered on wonder-workers from a humble social caste. (Gopnik)

The still widespread tendency to see the Gospels as reflecting an oral tradition stems from nineteenth-century German romanticism, which saw the Gospels as refining Judean folklore.    

Walsh, like Richard Miller in Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity, argues that the question “Did Jesus exist?”, a question that has been asked seriously more than once (Carrier), is simply irrelevant. /5/  For us Jesus exists only as a literary character.  In this sense, says Gopnik, Walsh and Miller could be described as postmodernists.  The former regularly cites Bourdieu; the latter cites Derrida. 

Christianity as a religion developed independently of Jesus.  The Gospels are texts about texts,  mostly each others’ texts, but also hypothetical ones.  The study of the Bible reveals a world of wall-to-wall-text, as Edward Said put it.  But, Biblical studies have a better excuse than many other enterprises in what used to be called the humanities.  With the Bible, there is nowhere else to turn, not even a contested historical record.   

Does access to an original oral tradition matter? 

And yet there remains that intriguing suggestion by Ehrman.  A few passages in Paul seem to have the status of oral creeds, possibly going back to the first few years after the death of Jesus.  Do these creeds tap an original oral tradition?  Perhaps, but I don’t think it matters very much. The Gospels live a life of their own, dissected and turned inside out and upside down by scholars because there is so little else to go on.  But what is so terrible about this?  The core teachings of Jesus remain: love your neighbor, and treat the least person as you would treat Jesus himself.  It seems likely that these teachings were inspired by the historical Jesus, known to us via the folkloric tradition.  But about this we cannot be certain. 

Notes

1. 1. It’s possible that a few of the sayings in the Gospel of Thomas precede the canonical Gospels.

1. 2. There is a tiny difference between Mark and Matthew regarding Jesus’ last words, which are a quote from Psalm 22:1.

1. 3. It’s a little more complicated than this.  For Mark, Jesus never becomes God, only his son at the time of his baptism (1:9-11).  Matthew and Luke sometimes suggest that Jesus became the Son of God at his birth.  Nevertheless, the basic pattern is as stated above.  John is different, claiming that  Jesus existed co-eternally with God (Exodus 3:14).

1. 4. Martin Hengel, p 383.

1. 5. Bart Ehrman (2013) devotes a book to arguing against the thesis, titled Did Jesus Exist?   About Jesus’ historical existence, at least, there can be little doubt.   

References

Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason to Doubt. Sheffield Phoenix Press Ltd, 2014.  

Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee.  HarperOne, 2015.

Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?  The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth.  HarperOne, 2013.  

Adam Gopnik, “Do You Know Jesus?”  The New Yorker, March 31, 2025.  

Martin Hengel, “Christological Titles in Early Christianity,” in Studies in Early Christology, by Hengel.  Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1995.

Richard Miller, Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity.  Routledge, 2017.  

Elaine Pagels, Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus.  Doubleday, 2025.  

Robyn Faith Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture.  Cambridge University Press, 2023.