Historical Jesus

Virtually all scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed. Historian Michael Grant asserts that if conventional standards of historical criticism are applied to the New Testament, "we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned." There is no indication that writers in antiquity who opposed Christianity questioned the existence of Jesus. There are at least 14 independent sources from multiple authors within a century of the crucifixion of Jesus that survive. Other independent sources did not survive, but are broadly referenced directly in the surviving sources themselves (e.g. Luke) or inferred from modern source analysis. The letters of Paul are the earliest surviving sources referencing Jesus, and Paul documents personally knowing and interacting with eyewitnesses such as Jesus' brother James and some of Jesus' closest disciples around 36 AD, within a few years of the crucifixion (30 or 33 AD). Paul was a contemporary of Jesus and throughout his letters, a fairly full outline of the life of Jesus can be found including details such as being born of a woman, descending from regular people such as Abraham and David, being a Jew and being brought up in Jewish Law, gathering together disciples, having family, the Last Supper, being betrayed, being crucified, people being involved in his crucifixion, etc. Since the 1970s, various scholars such as Joachim Jeremias, E. P. Sanders and Gerd Theissen have traced elements of Christianity to currents in first-century Judaism and have discarded nineteenth-century minority views that Jesus was based on previous pagan deities. Mentions of Jesus in extra-biblical texts exist and are supported as genuine by the majority of historians. The presence of details of Jesus' life in Paul, and the differences between letters and Gospels, are sufficient for most scholars to dismiss mythicist claims concerning Paul. Theissen says "there is broad scholarly consensus that we can best find access to the historical Jesus through the Synoptic tradition." Bart D. Ehrman adds: "To dismiss the Gospels from the historical record is neither fair nor scholarly." Historian James Dunn writes: "Today nearly all historians, whether Christians or not, accept that Jesus existed". In a 2011 review of the state of modern scholarship, Ehrman wrote: "He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees." The Christ myth theory is the proposition that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and the accounts in the gospels. In the 21st century, there have been a number of books and documentaries on this subject. For example, Earl Doherty has written that Jesus may have been a real person, but that the biblical accounts of him are almost entirely fictional. Many proponents use a three-fold argument first developed in the 19th century: that the New Testament has no historical value with respect to Jesus's existence, that there are no non-Christian references to Jesus from the first century, and that Christianity had pagan and/or mythical roots. Contemporary scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed, and biblical scholars and classical historians view the theories of his nonexistence as effectively refuted. Robert M. Price, an atheist who denies the existence of Jesus, agrees that his perspective runs against the views of the majority of scholars. Michael Grant (a classicist and historian) states that "In recent years, no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus, or at any rate very few have, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary." ==Sources==

Historical criticism, also known as the historical-critical method or higher criticism, is a branch of criticism that investigates the origins of ancient texts in order to understand "the world behind the text". The primary goal of historical criticism is to discover the text's primitive or original meaning in its original historical context and its literal sense. Historical criticism began in the 17th century and gained popular recognition in the 19th and 20th centuries. Historical reliability of the Gospels The historical reliability of the gospels refers to the reliability and historic character of the four New Testament gospels as historical documents. Historical reliability is not dependent on a source being inerrant or void of agendas since there are sources that are considered generally reliable despite having such traits (e.g. Josephus). The question of reliability is a matter of ongoing debate. Historians subject the gospels to critical analysis by differentiating authentic, reliable information from possible inventions, exaggerations, and alterations. scholars use textual criticism to determine which gospel variants could theoretically be taken as original. To answer this question, scholars have to ask who wrote the gospels, when they wrote them, what was their objective in writing them, what sources the authors used, how reliable these sources were, and how far removed in time the sources were from the stories they narrate, or if they were altered later. Scholars may also look into the internal evidence of the documents, to see if, for example, a document has misquoted texts from the Hebrew Tanakh, has made incorrect claims about geography, if the author appears to have hidden information, or if the author has fabricated a prophecy. Finally, scholars turn to external sources, including the testimony of early church leaders, to writers outside the church, primarily Jewish and Greco-Roman historians, who would have been more likely to have criticized the church, and to archaeological evidence. Quest for the historical Jesus (1694–1768) studied the historical Jesus Conventionally since the 18th century, three scholarly quests for the historical Jesus are distinguished, each with distinct characteristics and based on different research criteria, which were often developed during each specific phase. These quests are distinguished from pre-Enlightenment approaches because they rely on the historical-critical method to study biblical narratives. While textual analysis of biblical sources had taken place for centuries, these quests introduced new methods and specific techniques in the attempt to establish the historical validity of their conclusions. According to Tucker Ferda, it is by now "conventional wisdom that the traditional threefold division of the quest for Jesus [...] is flawed". The threefold terminology uses the literature selectively, poses an incorrect periodization of research, and fails to note that the quest did not begin with Reimarus, as Albert Schweitzer had claimed, but started earlier, with critical questions regarding the Christian origins narrative. First quest The scholarly effort to reconstruct an "authentic" historical picture of Jesus was a product of the Enlightenment skepticism of the late eighteenth century. Bible scholar Gerd Theissen explains that "It was concerned with presenting a historically true life of Jesus that functioned theologically as a critical force over against [established Roman Catholic] Christology." The first scholar to separate the historical Jesus from the theological Jesus in this way was philosopher, writer, classicist, Hebraist and Enlightenment free thinker Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768). Reimarus' controversial work prompted a response from "the father of historical critical research" Johann Semler in 1779, Beantwortung der Fragmente eines Ungenannten (Answering the Fragments of an Unknown). Semler rebutted Reimarus' arguments, but it was of little consequence. Reimarus' writings had already made lasting changes by making it clear criticism could exist independently of theology and faith, and by founding historical Jesus studies within that non-sectarian view., whose book coined the phrase Quest [for] the Historical Jesus The enthusiasm shown during the first quest diminished after Albert Schweitzer's critique of 1906 in which he pointed out various shortcomings in the approaches used at the time. After Schweitzer's Von Reimarus zu Wrede was translated and published in English as The Quest of the Historical Jesus in 1910, the book's title provided the label for the field of study for eighty years. Second quest The second quest began in 1953 and introduced a number of new techniques, but faded away in the 1970s. initiating a third quest characterized by the latest research approaches. One of the modern aspects of the third quest has been the role of archaeology; James Charlesworth states that modern scholars now want to use archaeological discoveries that clarify the nature of life in Galilee and Judea during the time of Jesus. A further characteristic of the third quest has been the interdisciplinary and global nature of its scholarship. While the first two quests were mostly carried out by European Protestant theologians, a modern aspect of the third quest is the worldwide influx of scholars from multiple disciplines. or on the evidence concerning his family. By the end of the twentieth century, scholar Tom Holmén writes that Enlightenment skepticism had given way to a more "trustful attitude toward the historical reliability of the sources ... [Currently] the conviction of Sanders, (we know quite a lot about Jesus) characterizes the majority of contemporary studies." Demise of authenticity and the "Next Quest" Since the late 1900s, concerns have been growing about the usefulness of the criteria of authenticity. According to Le Donne, the usage of such criteria is a form of "positivist historiography". According to James DG Dunn, "What we actually have in the earliest retellings of what is now the Synoptic tradition...are the memories of the first disciples-not Jesus himself, but the remembered Jesus. The idea that we can get back to an objective historical reality, which we can wholly separate and disentangle from the disciples' memories...is simply unrealistic." According to Chris Keith, a historical Jesus is "ultimately unattainable, but can be hypothesized on the basis of the interpretations of the early Christians, and as part of a larger process of accounting for how and why early Christians came to view Jesus in the ways that they did." According to Keith, "these two models are methodologically and epistemologically incompatible," calling into question the methods and aim of the first model. In 2021, James Crossley (editor of the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus) announced that historical Jesus scholarship now had moved to the era of the Next Quest. The Next Quest has moved on from the criteria, obsessions with the uniqueness of Jesus, and the supersessionism still implicit in scholarly questions of the Jewishness of Jesus. Instead, sober scholarship now focuses on treating the subject matter as part of the wider human phenomenon of religion, cultural comparison, class relations, slave culture and economy, and the social history of historical Jesus scholarship and wider reception histories of the historical Jesus. The book by Crossley and Robert J. Myles, Jesus: A Life in Class Conflict, is indicative of this new tendency. Others have criticized claims of a Fourth Quest and had a more measured response to critique of the criteria. The actual problem is arguably that critics use them inappropriately, trying to describe the history of minute portions of the Gospel text, rather than a true flaw in the historical logic of the criteria. According to Tucker Ferda, "...criticisms of the criteria have sometimes produced rather grandiose claims about their "uselessness," which do not seem justified when one looks at the kind of argument that those same critics will use when making positive claims about the historical Jesus...criticisms of the notion of "authenticity" or "historicity" can create the impression that there is more disagreement with earlier research than is actually the case." ==Methods==

Textual, source and form-criticism The first quest, which started in 1778, was almost entirely based on biblical criticism. This took the form of textual and source criticism originally, which were supplemented with form criticism in 1919, and redaction criticism in 1948. Form criticism views Gospel writers as editors, not authors. Redaction criticism may be viewed as the child of source criticism and form criticism. and views the Gospel writers as authors and early theologians and tries to understand how the redactor(s) has (have) molded the narrative to express their own perspectives. The criteria are a variety of rules used to determine if some event or person is more or less likely to be historical. These criteria are primarily, though not exclusively, used to assess the sayings and actions of Jesus. In view of the skepticism produced in the mid-twentieth century by form criticism concerning the historical reliability of the gospels, the burden shifted in historical Jesus studies from attempting to identify an authentic life of Jesus to attempting to prove authenticity. The criteria developed within this framework, therefore, are tools that provide arguments solely for authenticity, not inauthenticity. By the 21st century, the "maximalist" approaches of the 19th century, which accepted all the gospels, and the "minimalist" trends of the early 20th century, which totally rejected them, were abandoned and scholars began to focus on what is historically probable and plausible about Jesus. ==Baptism and crucifixion==

'' from Caesarea Maritima, now at the Israel Museum There is widespread disagreement among scholars on the details of the life of Jesus mentioned in the gospel narratives, and on the meaning of his teachings. Baptism The existence of John the Baptist within the same time frame as Jesus, and his eventual execution by Herod Antipas is attested to by 1st-century Roman-Jewish historian Josephus and the overwhelming majority of modern scholars view Josephus' accounts of the activities of John the Baptist as authentic. One of the arguments in favor of the historicity of the Baptism of Jesus by John is the criterion of embarrassment, i.e. that it is a story which the early Christian Church would have never wanted to invent, as it implies that Jesus was subservient to John. Another argument used in favour of the historicity of the baptism is that multiple accounts refer to it, usually called the criterion of multiple attestation. Technically, multiple attestation does not guarantee authenticity, but only determines antiquity. However, for most scholars, together with the criterion of embarrassment it lends credibility to the baptism of Jesus by John being a historical event. Crucifixion John P. Meier views the crucifixion of Jesus as a historical fact and states that based on the criterion of embarrassment, Christians would not have invented the painful death of their leader. Most scholars in the third quest for the historical Jesus consider the crucifixion indisputable, as do Bart Ehrman, On the other hand, Maurice Casey and John P. Meier state that Jesus did predict his death, and this actually strengthened his followers' belief in his Resurrection. Mara bar Serapion is the only source from the ancient world that mentions the execution of Jesus for the charge of "King of the Jews". Bart Ehrman states that Jesus portrayed himself as the leader of the future Kingdom and that a number of criteria – the criterion of multiple attestation and criterion of dissimilarity – establishes the crucifixion of Jesus as an enemy of state. Possibly historical elements In addition to the two historical elements of baptism and crucifixion, scholars attribute varying levels of certainty to various other aspects of the life of Jesus, although there is no universal agreement among scholars on these items: • Jesus lived only in Galilee and Judea: Most scholars reject that there is any evidence that an adult Jesus traveled or studied outside Galilee and Judea. Marcus Borg states that the suggestions that an adult Jesus traveled to Egypt or India are "without historical foundation". John Dominic Crossan states that none of the theories presented to fill the gap of 15–18 years between Jesus's early life and the start of his ministry have been supported by modern scholarship. Nazareth is not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian gospels portray it as an insignificant village, John 1:46 asking "Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?" Craig S. Keener states that it is rarely disputed that Jesus was from Nazareth, an obscure small village not worthy of invention. Gerd Theissen concurs with that conclusion. • Jesus spoke Aramaic, and may have also spoken Hebrew and Greek. The languages spoken in Galilee and Judea during the 1st century include the Semitic Aramaic and Hebrew languages as well as Greek, with Aramaic being the predominant language. N. T. Wright accepts that there were twelve disciples, but holds that the list of their names cannot be determined with certainty. John Dominic Crossan disagrees, stating that Jesus did not call disciples and had an "open to all" egalitarian approach, imposed no hierarchy and preached to all in equal terms. • Jesus caused a controversy at the Temple. Some scholars have proposed further additional historical possibilities such as: • An approximate chronology of Jesus can be estimated from non-Christian sources, and confirmed by correlating them with New Testament accounts. • Claims about the appearance or ethnicity of Jesus are mostly subjective, based on cultural stereotypes and societal trends rather than on scientific analysis. • The baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist can be dated approximately from Josephus' references (Antiquities 18.5.2) to a date before AD 28–35. • The main topic of his teaching was the Kingdom of God, and he presented this teaching in parables that were surprising and sometimes confounding. • Jesus taught an ethic of forgiveness, as expressed in aphorisms such as "turn the other cheek" or "go the extra mile". • The date of the crucifixion of Jesus was earlier than 36 AD, based on the dates of the prefecture of Pontius Pilate who was governor of Roman Judea from 26 AD until 36 AD. ==Portraits of the historical Jesus==

Scholars involved in the third and next quests for the historical Jesus have constructed a variety of portraits and profiles for Jesus. However, there is little scholarly agreement on the portraits, or the methods used in constructing them. Such conceptions are merely a sketch or model which may inform about but never will be the real Jesus of history; similar to how models exist in the natural sciences that inform about phenomena without specifying a particular object. W.R. Herzog has stated that: "What we call the historical Jesus is the composite of the recoverable bits and pieces of historical information and speculation about him that we assemble, construct, and reconstruct. For this reason, the historical Jesus is, in Meier's words, 'a modern abstraction and construct.'" Contemporary scholarship, representing the "third quest" and the "next quest" places Jesus firmly in the Jewish tradition. Jesus was a Jewish preacher who taught that he was the path to salvation, everlasting life, and the Kingdom of God. A primary criterion used to discern historical details in the "third quest" is that of plausibility, relative to Jesus' Jewish context and to his influence on Christianity. Contemporary scholars of the "third quest" include E. P. Sanders, Géza Vermes, Gerd Theissen, Christoph Burchard, and John Dominic Crossan. In contrast to the Schweitzerian view, certain North American scholars, such as Burton Mack, advocate for a non-eschatological Jesus, one who is more of a Cynic sage than an apocalyptic preacher. Given that Jesus was poor, long-established historiographical approaches associated with the study of the poor in the past, such as microhistory, are relevant to the study of his life. Mainstream views Despite the significant differences among scholars on what constitutes a suitable portrait for Jesus, the mainstream views supported by a number of scholars may be grouped together based on certain distinct, primary themes. The works of E. P. Sanders and Maurice Casey place Jesus within the context of Jewish eschatological tradition. Ehrman, Adams, and Ferda align with Schweitzer's view that Jesus expected an imminent apocalypse. Ehrman argues that the earliest Christian sources, such as Mark and the First Epistle to the Thessalonians, present Jesus as more apocalyptic than sources produced towards the end of the 1st century, contending that the apocalyptic messages were progressively toned down. Dale C. Allison Jr. does not see Jesus as advocating specific timetables for the End Times, but sees him as preaching his own doctrine of "apocalyptic eschatology" derived from post-exilic Jewish teachings, and views the apocalyptic teachings of Jesus as a form of asceticism. it was contingent on the repentance of Israel, with some Jewish contemporaries and the Synoptics not viewing the date of apocalypse as unchangeably fixed. Hays thus suggests that unfulfilled eschatological expectations would not be failures or unusual in the Jewish prophetic context. Other scholars follow most themes of the apocalyptic portrait, but take such teachings of Jesus as relating to the destruction of the Second Temple and not the end of the world due to the wider significance of the Temple in Judaism that would warrant apocalyptic language. The characterization of Jesus as an apocalyptic or millenarian prophet can also be combined with other categories, such as in the work of James Crossley and Robert J. Myles (see below) who regard the end-time teaching of Jesus as a culturally credible way of responding to social and material upheaval in Galilee and Judea. Marcus Borg views Jesus as a charismatic "man of the spirit", a mystic or visionary who acts as a conduit for the "Spirit of God". Borg sees this as a well-defined religious personality type, whose actions often involve healing. Borg sees Jesus as a non-eschatological figure who did not intend to start a new religion, but his message set him at odds with the Jewish powers of his time based on the "politics of holiness". In John Dominic Crossan's view Jesus was crucified not for religious reasons but because his social teachings challenged the seat of power held by the Jewish authorities. Burton Mack also holds that Jesus was a Cynic whose teachings were so different from those of his time that they shocked the audience and forced them to think, but Mack views his death as accidental and not due to his challenge to Jewish authority. Prophet of social change The prophet of social change portrait positions Jesus primarily as someone who challenged the traditional social structures of his time. Gerd Theissen sees three main elements to the activities of Jesus as he effected social change: his positioning as the Son of man, the core group of disciples that followed him, and his localized supporters as he journeyed through Galilee and Judea. Richard A. Horsley goes further and presents Jesus as a more radical reformer who initiated a grassroots movement. David Kaylor's ideas are close to those of Horsley, but have a more religious focus and base the actions of Jesus on covenant theology and his desire for justice. Elisabeth Fiorenza has presented a feminist perspective which sees Jesus as a social reformer whose actions such as the acceptance of women followers resulted in the liberation of some women of his time. Rabbi The rabbi portrait advances the idea that Jesus was simply a rabbi who sought to reform certain ideas within Judaism. This idea can be traced to the late nineteenth century, when various liberal Jews sought to emphasize the Jewish nature of Jesus, and saw him as something of a proto-Reform Jew. Perhaps the most prominent of these was Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, who in The Doctrine of Jesus wrote: Bruce Chilton, in his book Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography, painted Jesus as a devout student of John the Baptist who came to see it as his mission to restore the Temple to purity, and purge the Romans and the corrupt priests from its midst. Jaroslav Pelikan, in The Illustrated Jesus Through the Centuries stated: The most neutral and least controversial of these words is probably Rabbi, along with the related Rabbouni. Except for two passages, the Gospels apply the Aramaic word only to Jesus; and if we conclude that the title "teacher" or "master" (didaskalos in Greek) was intended as a translation of that Aramaic name, it seems safe to say that it was as Rabbi that Jesus was known and addressed. He concludes by writing, as to Judeo-Christian values, that "the hyphen between Jewish and Christian values is Jesus himself." Non-mainstream views Other portraits have been presented by individual scholars: • Ben Witherington supports the "Wisdom Sage" view and states that Jesus is best understood as a teacher of wisdom who saw himself as the embodiment or incarnation of God's Wisdom. • Hyam Maccoby proposed that Jesus was a Pharisee, that the positions ascribed to the Pharisees in the Gospels are very different from what we know of them, and in fact their opinions were very similar to those ascribed to Jesus. Harvey Falk also sees Jesus as proto-Pharisee or Essene. • Morton Smith views Jesus as a magician, a view based on the presentation of Jesus in later Jewish sources and on (dubious) apocryphal writings such as the Secret Gospel of Mark. • Leo Tolstoy saw Jesus as championing Christian anarchism (although Tolstoy never actually used the term Christian anarchism; reviews of his book following its publication in 1894 coined the term.) • Psychiatrists, psychologists, and neurologists, from the late 19th century (Oskar Panizza), through the 20th century (including Emil Rasmussen, George de Loosten, Charles Binet-Sanglé, William Hirsch, Władysław Witwicki) to the early 21st century (Evan D. Murray, Miles G. Cunningham, Bruce H. Price), have suggested that Jesus had a mental disorder or psychiatric condition. ==See also==