SCHOLARS DIG DEEP TO FIND THE ANSWER

WHO on earth was Jesus? Most people probably think they have a fair idea. Relatively few, though, even in the churches, would be aware of the huge amount of historical and literary study that scholars have devoted to that question over the past 150 years, even fewer into what nooks and crannies it has led them.

The question so intrigued English investigative journalist David Boulton that he published a book of that title this year outlining the present state of play – and with the emphasis “Who on earth was Jesus”? This acknowledges that there is a marked difference between the human Jesus who grew up in Galilee, and what he became as his earliest followers mulled over their experience of him.

Boulton, a Quaker and humanist, set himself the task of surveying a vast and expanding field of biblical and other records, and then summarising the conclusions scholars have reached as they asked themselves: Just who was this man? What did he really say (which is not necessarily the same as what he is reported as saying)? What did he really do?

That leads to the further question: What did Jesus think he was doing, and was that different from the way his followers interpreted it? That distinction is pivotal, for seeing Jesus as a man of his time is not the same as seeing him as a man (some would say more than a man) for all time. It is the difference between history and faith.

Scholars today use the tools of historical inquiry to tackle those questions. That means they examine the New Testament accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as objectively as they would any other document of the time.

So they ask how reliable the gospels are as a source of factual detail, as opposed to their religious significance. Beyond the Bible, what other documents throw light on Jesus as a man, and on life in 1st-century Palestine?

The main line of inquiry takes the four biblical accounts and analyses the language, literary forms, probable dating, points of overlap and of difference, and signs of being edited to fit changing circumstances.

Scholars differ on the detail of all of these, but most agree that Matthew and Luke rely on an earlier document recording memorable sayings of Jesus. They call it Q, from Quelle, the German word for source. Q has never been found; nevertheless the scholars conjecture what it may have looked like from overlapping material in those three gospels: wisdom sayings, stories with a punch-line, warnings about the end of the world – but without miracles, healings, exorcisms, or narratives about Jesus’ birth and death.

Nor is there anything here to suggest that Jesus thought of himself as God. The notion of his divinity seems to have emerged later, as his early followers reflected on the continuing impact Jesus was having on them.

Some found that Jesus rang bells with key figures and events in their Jewish religious heritage. Others saw exciting parallels in Greek thought and culture. And when they set down memories of Jesus some 40 to 70 years after his death, they retrojected those later perceptions back into their narratives.

So the gospels interpret Jesus and convey the developing faith of the early Christian communities, rather than record what Jesus actually said and did.

In the past 60 or so years other ancient documents have been unearthed that add to our knowledge of the early 1st century and give the scholars something new to burrow in. Best-known are the Dead Sea Scrolls, stemming from the period before Jesus and found in a cave near Jericho in 1947.

More relevant is a treasure trove of papyrus fragments discovered two years earlier at Nag Hammadi, near Luxor in Egypt. They include the previously unknown gospels of Thomas, which some scholars warm to, and of Philip, which they do not – though that did not stop Dan Brown making hay with it in The Da Vinci Code. Other locations have yielded gospels of Mary, Peter and Judas, two infancy gospels, dialogues, a training manual and thousands of papyrus scraps.

Boulton sums up: “Most scholars, having applied their forensic tools to every jot and tittle of every ragged fragment, have concluded with a few important exceptions these mostly 2nd-century or later documents appear to offer hardly any reliable clues about the historical as distinct from a mythologised Jesus.”

So after all that, who on earth was Jesus? I shall outline an early 21st-century answer in my next column.

November 25, 2008

© Ian Harris, 2012