Recovering Jesus: The Witness of the New Testament

Here is a trustworthy guide through the theological thicket in which Western culture encounters Jesus. Readers wearied by the recent parade of Jesus-de-bunkers will find clarity and inspiration for new understanding. With the mind of a scholar and the heart of a believer, Yoder Neufeld surveys a wide range of perspectives in language a non-specialist can understand.

—J. Nelson Kraybill, Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary

For too long, students of the New Testament were forced to choose between the Jesus of scholarship and the Christ of faith. In lively and accessible prose, Dr. Yoder Neufeld skillfully integrates both courses into a helpful road map for those serious about negotiating the tortuous turns on their way to rediscovering Jesus. He presents all possible historical and theological options available to his readers with competence, never shrinking back from questions that might scandalize the believer or embarrass the scholar. His greatest virtue, however, is that though he is quite clear about his personal convictions on Jesus, he never imposes his views on his readers, content with leaving them with enough directions to find their way home. This is the text I will use next time I teach a course on Jesus.

—Sze-kar Wan, Andover Newton Theological School

A superb guide—unmatched for clarity and accessibility—into an ‘encounter’ with the Jesus of the New Testament and other early Christian writings, offered in gentle, engaging prose by a seasoned teacher whose scholarship and faith complement each other, to the benefit of believers and inquirers/seekers alike. Thanks to its comprehensiveness, sound scholarship, and excellent organization, with subsections clearly labeled, it will also serve as a valuable reference work after the first engrossing read.

—Harold Remus, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario (Emeritus)

Respected scholar, masterful teacher, man of faith—Tom Yoder Neufeld has combined these qualities to produce a solid, eminently readable, and informative study of the New Testament witness for the man, Jesus, and for the early development of christological reflection in the second century. Using the analogy of archaeology, Yoder Neufeld examines carefully the different layers of New Testament evidence, giving particular emphasis to the historical context of the world of the first century and then following the biographical framework of Jesus’s life from birth to death and resurrection. He puts at the center, as well it should be, Jesus’s proclamation of the kingdom of God, and in successive chapters he treats ‘Announcing the Kingdom,’ ‘Teaching the Kingdom,’ ‘Enacting the Kingdom,’ and ‘Living the Kingdom.’ His is a sensitive and nuanced handling of such difficult issues as the virgin birth and the challenges of understanding well the meaning of resurrection. As every good teacher does, he provides an abundant use of analogies and explanatory examples. Never have I read a more skillful presentation of the organic growth of New Testament Christology from low to high, with fine treatment of the origin and function of the various titles applied to Jesus in the New Testament and beyond. The text is unencumbered by laborious footnotes, while clearly reflective of the diverse, ongoing scholarly dialogue of which this book is part. Each chapter concludes with a summary box of ‘Key Terms and Concepts’ and suggestions for further reading. This is a superb text—one I will surely use with seminary students to their certain profit and delight.

—Barbara E. Bowe, Catholic Theological Union

A lucid, engaging treatment of Jesus and the Gospels, attending well to sources and methods. Yoder Neufeld laudably combines faith and scholarship. His lists of reading sources at the end of each chapter are valuable for further study. This book is well designed for introducing Jesus and current scholarship to university students, and to laypeople who want to understand how we know what we know about Jesus.

—Willard M. Swartley, Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary

RECOVERING

JESUS

THE WITNESS OF THE

NEW TESTAMENT

Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld

©2007 by Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld

Published by Brazos Press

a division of Baker Publishing Group

P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

www.brazospress.com

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright ©1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Neufeld, Thomas R.

   Recovering Jesus : the witness of the New Testament / Thomas R. Yoder Neufeld.

      p. cm.

   Includes bibliographical references.

   ISBN 10: 1-58743-202-1 (pbk.)

   ISBN 978-1-58743-202-6 (pbk.)

   1. Jesus Christ—Biography. 2. Bible. N.T.—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.

BT301.3.N48 2007

232.901—dc22

2007001798

For my companion for life, Rebecca, and our children, David and Miriam, with whom to follow Jesus together is a gift too great to measure.

Contents

Preface

1. One Jesus or Many Jesuses?

2. Development of Jesus Traditions: Digging through the Layers

3. One Jesus—Four Gospels

4. Jesus’s World

5. Birth of Jesus

6. Kingdom of God: What? Where? When?

7. Announcing the Kingdom: John, Baptism, Testing, and the Twelve

8. Teaching the Kingdom: Parables

9. Enacting the Kingdom: Healing, Exorcism, and Food

10. Living the Kingdom: Seek First the Kingdom and Its Justice!

11. Death of Jesus

12. Resurrection of Jesus

13. Jesus—Christ and Lord

Preface

THIS BOOK GROWS out of years of teaching undergraduate students about Jesus. Sometimes they have been religious studies majors, but more typically their fields of study have been some other area of the arts, science, computer science, or engineering. For many the course on Jesus has been the one religion course they have taken while at university. Most, whether or not Jesus has figured in a personal faith, have been primarily interested in learning about Jesus and not in learning about the problems of learning about Jesus, least of all in learning about one particular scholar’s take on Jesus. The pedagogical challenge in this is how to enter into the academic study of Jesus while responding to the primary interest of students to learn about the Jesus the New Testament presents. How do I as an academic, trained in critical scholarship, who has at the same time a deep faith and trust in the biblical witnesses and who himself confesses Jesus as Lord, present the fruit of scholarship hospitably, inviting students to engage the data for themselves, all in the interests of facilitating an encounter with the Jesus to whom the New Testament writers give witness?

This book is the fruit of attempting to respond to those demands and to work within such constraints. Pedagogical rather than methodological interests predominate. Those wishing for a carefully argued historical reconstruction of the Jesus of history or for a literary critical study of the gospels may be frustrated. And those wishing for an explicitly faith-centered Bible study may be equally frustrated. I empathize with both as one who is himself active within both contexts. At the same time, I have discovered that the teaching of Jesus within a pluralistic context such as the university classroom, in which I may not privilege any particular set of students, whether religiously indifferent, highly skeptical, or passionately Christian, does not 10 prevent an encounter with the Jesus presented in the New Testament. More, it encourages such an encounter.

I thus wish to thank those many students, whether at the Bienenberg Seminary outside Basel, Switzerland, who sat through German versions of these chapters during a sabbatical in 2001, or at Conrad Grebel University College at the University of Waterloo, Canada, who have road tested this book and given sharp and gracious feedback. I am most grateful too for the attentive care the good folks at Brazos Press have given this project, most especially Rodney Clapp and Rebecca Cooper, but also Steve Ayers, who many years ago planted the seed of writing this book during a typically friendly visit to my office.

In John 1:44–46, Jesus’s newly enrolled disciple Philip excitedly seeks to recruit his friend Nathanael with the good news that the one promised by Moses and the prophets has been found in Jesus of Nazareth. Nathanael’s skepticism is met with the simple straightforward words: Come and see! Indeed, that is my invitation to the reader.

1

One Jesus or Many Jesuses?

FEW FIGURES IN history are as well known as Jesus. As Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code and Tom Harpur’s Pagan Christ have shown recently, Jesus is big business, regardless of or perhaps especially because of how outlandish the claims are. However much or little Jesus’s teachings actually shape how people live, he is venerated by millions. The sounds of such veneration range from simple singing without the accompaniment of instruments to loud worship bands, from Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion to Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Jesus Christ Superstar. Jesus plays well at the movies too—from Denis Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.

Even a quick search of the internet for images of Jesus illustrates an exciting and also bewildering diversity of depictions, from high art to folk art, from the obviously devotional to the irreverent. Too often Jesus looks European, but he can also be African, Asian, and occasionally also Middle Eastern. He is sometimes even depicted as a woman. Portraits of Jesus range from laughing friend of children, to ethereal epitome of piety, to fierce warrior on behalf of the poor and downtrodden. In other words, Jesus is both an unthreatening omnipresent cultural and religious icon and an inspiration for radical and sometimes violent struggle against power and privilege. Some Jesuses are emotionally accessible, intensely human, much like any normal, vulnerable human being: sometimes sad, pensive, or impatient, at other times joyful and laughing, and sometimes tormented. Other Jesuses are austere and distant, virtually nonphysical, nonmaterial, and transcendent, like the 12 divine ruler of the cosmos many believe him to be. Jesus seems to look like whatever anyone wishes him to look like.

Does Jesus Get Lost in the Crowd?

Is this diversity a problem? After all, who knows what Jesus really looked like? We have no eyewitness descriptions of him. To complicate matters, the Christian tradition itself insists that Jesus was just like us, that is, representative of humanity as a whole (e.g., Hebrews 2). Mother Teresa spoke often and movingly of seeing Christ in the face of the poorest of the poor, echoing Jesus’s unforgettable words in his parable of the great judgment:

I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me. . . . Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me. (Matt. 25:35–36, 40, emphasis added)

Indeed, one of the central Christian convictions is that Jesus as the Christ encompasses all of liberated humanity in himself, regardless of race, sex, or social and economic status:

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female. (Gal. 3:28)

Paul of Tarsus, one of the most important of the early leaders in the Jesus movement and the writer of those words, went so far as to call the many diverse people making up the community of Jesus’s followers the body of Christ (Rom. 12:4–5; 1 Cor. 12:12–27). Should we be surprised, given the diversity of the human community, that Jesus would be represented in a countless variety of ways?

That raises an urgent question: is there anything about Jesus that is distinct? Is there something that draws our attention not only to ways in which Jesus looks like us, but also to what makes him special and distinct? Are we not interested in what makes Jesus Jesus, and not simply a projection of a community’s highest ideals or its most fervent wishes? Such a desire is often put today in terms of getting at the real Jesus.

Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up!

Perhaps the first thing we should acknowledge is that real is itself a loaded term when it comes to the study of Jesus. For example, for some real refers to the Jesus we can reconstruct on the basis of strict historical investigation. Most people today use the term in that way, and much contemporary Jesus scholarship goes about its work with that objective in mind. At the other end of the spectrum are those who look upon the work of such scholars with suspicion. The real Jesus is in fact the Christ that the Christian community believes in, confessed in the creeds, and celebrated in worship. In the broad middle are many, both scholars and ordinary folk (and you will find me among them), who care about Jesus precisely because he matters religiously or theologically, but who do not consider historical investigation to be the enemy of such a perspective. In their view it is the Son of God, Savior, and risen Lord who is the real Jesus, the Jesus who also lived, taught, and died in Palestine some two millennia ago, that is, who lived a very specific historical existence as a first-century Jew in Palestine. Such a real Jesus can be both believed in and investigated with the tools of the historian. But even among these people the arguments are often heated.

Just Read the Bible!

Some might think that we can settle who Jesus was and why he matters by going back to the sources, which means, for the most part, going to the Bible, specifically the New Testament. At first glance that appears to be a good solution. After all, here we have a set of documents that come from the very time in which Jesus lived, give or take a few decades. We do not often have such excellent sources for figures of the distant past. However, the moment we set out to use the Bible, we encounter several problems.

First, people view the Bible in very different ways. Some view the Bible as a sacred text and understand that to mean that it must be read straight up as a historically accurate depiction of what once happened. Others view the Bible as a collection of religious documents that have to be evaluated much the way one evaluates any documents from ancient history. Just as in the case of ancient accounts of Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar, fact must be separated from fiction. Not surprisingly, many view the biblical depiction of Jesus to contain more fiction than fact, especially when it comes to reports of virgin birth, miracles, and resurrection. There are many others, scholars and nonscholars, who consider the Bible to be sacred Scripture, but not a historically reliable record in any simple sense. So, the first difficult issue we encounter in the search for Jesus is how the Bible should be viewed and approached.

Second, the biblical sources themselves present us with a set of difficulties. To begin with, the New Testament contains not one record of Jesus, but four gospels, each of which to varying degree tells the story of Jesus in a distinctive way and from a particular perspective. Three of them depict things roughly the same way, which is why we call Matthew, Mark, and Luke the Synoptic Gospels (syn = together with and optic = look). The Gospel of John is very different from the three look-alikes. To complicate matters further, Jesus is centrally important to the Apostle Paul, the New Testament author who wrote years, perhaps even decades, earlier than any of the gospel writers. But stories of Jesus’s ministry and most of his teachings are largely absent from Paul’s correspondence. It is the death, resurrection, and imminent return of Jesus that take center stage. Should Paul count in the search for the real Jesus?

Third, all four gospels and the other writings in the New Testament were written with matters of faith being absolutely central. They were written with a concern to communicate who Jesus was, but from a view to who Jesus is, from a belief in a Jesus who is presently alive and who communicates with his followers through his spirit. That does not mean that the New Testament writers did not have an interest in telling what actually took place. Indeed, that was one of their chief concerns. But they were not historians; they were witnesses, preachers, evangelists (to use the technical term for the authors of the New Testament gospels), relating the past in order to persuade readers of Jesus’s present significance. That is why their documents are called gospels (Greek euangelion = evangel, good news) and not archives or even biographies.

Fourth, the writers of the gospels wrote in order to help out the fledgling communities of Jesus’s followers who needed guidance. A historian will thus easily recognize that one of the factors in the selection and transmission of Jesus’s teachings and actions was to provide a community that venerated him with an example to follow. An excellent example of this is the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5–7 (see chapter 10 below).

Fifth, for all their desire to convince readers of the present importance of Jesus for them and their world, the gospel writers, or evangelists, are concerned to tell a story of what happened in history. At the same time, they tell the story of Jesus in such a way as to indicate that Jesus’s followers did not comprehend who he really was until after Easter. In other words, as much as the evangelists intend to recall the pre-Easter Jesus, they also signal that it is only after Easter that his followers caught on to his true and full identity. Contemporary search for the historical Jesus is largely restricted to that pre-Easter Jesus. The New Testament writers would insist that this search stops well short of a full appreciation of who Jesus turned out to really be, namely, the Christ, the Son of God, fully revealed in both identity and significance with the resurrection and exaltation.

Sixth, the existence of nonbiblical ancient sources dealing with Jesus has become an embattled part of the contemporary search for Jesus. Among the most well known are the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, the gnostic library found at Nag Hammadi in the Egyptian desert, and especially the Gospel of 15 Thomas (see the next chapter). Most recently, in 2006 a manuscript of the second-century Gospel of Judas came to light. Just as scholars differ on how to use the Bible as a source for the study of Jesus, so there are significant differences of opinion about what status to give these nonbiblical ancient writings in the search for a full understanding of Jesus. With the possible yet limited exception of the Gospel of Thomas, none of these sources give us more information on Jesus per se.

It is not hard to see why this state of affairs regarding the sources renders the search of the real Jesus rather difficult. Can one trust the sources we have, even those within the New Testament? In what sense? Are they historically reliable sources? Or are they theologically reliable? Even when scholars have restricted themselves to a search for a pre-Easter or pre-Christian Jesus, results have been frustratingly diverse.

Searching for the Jesus of History

The nature of the sources and the troubled relationship between religious commitment and historical enquiry have marked what is often called the quest for the historical Jesus since that search began with the Enlightenment. The first to attempt a historical investigation of Jesus was Hermann Samuel Reimarus, whose fragmentary work The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples was published posthumously in 1778. Under the impact of a new interest in history and historical research, the church’s official portrait of Jesus was largely ignored in favor of one of Jesus as teacher of ethics, captured in the phrase kingdom of God and parsed largely as the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, as it was commonly known.

The first quest came to an end with the German publication in 1906 of The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede by the famous Alsatian physician, organist, and New Testament scholar Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer insisted that, far from being a liberal teacher of brotherhood, Jesus would have been a stranger to contemporary sensibilities. Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, anticipating the end of this present world at any moment. By giving himself over to death, Jesus intended to hasten its end. Schweitzer’s dismissal of the lives of Jesus up to that point was joined by a very thoroughgoing skepticism that the gospels, given their prime concern for matters of faith, would divulge much of anything historically reliable about Jesus. Schweitzer’s work ushered in a time of severe skepticism among many scholars regarding the New Testament as a historical source for Jesus. The name most often identified with this radical historical skepticism is Rudolf Bultmann, arguably the most influential New Testament scholar of the first half of the twentieth century. He wedded his historical skepticism with an existentialist theological approach where what truly matters is the authentic decision of faith, not whether one can verify something historically. In his view, the New Testament provides much more historical information about the early church, its traditions, and its beliefs than it does about Jesus.

Several of Bultmann’s students broke rank and began what has come to be known as the new quest or second quest for the historical Jesus. These scholars recognized that the gospels make access to Jesus difficult, but they insisted that at least in the most theologically important ways, they do provide access. Well known from this period is the work of Günther Bornkamm, simply titled Jesus of Nazareth (1960; original German, 1956).

A so-called third quest has emerged on the scene in the last few decades, marked by renewed interest in the Jewish matrix of Jesus’s life, identity, and teachings, as well as a renewed debate over the historical value of the gospels and extrabiblical writings. As part of this effort, scholars like James Dunn and N. T. Wright attempt to show the continuity between Jesus and his Jewish matrix, as well as continuity between Jesus and the community that venerated him as Messiah and Son of God.

Who Was Jesus?

There is today little consensus among scholars who have attempted to recover and reconstruct the Jesus of history. Paula Fredriksen, a leading Jewish scholar of Jesus, puts it well:

Jesus the charismatic leader; Jesus the existential religious thinker; Jesus the hypnotic healer; Jesus the witty, subversive sage; Jesus the passionate social revolutionary; Jesus the prophet of the End—all these diverse images of Jesus populate the most recent books; all are presented with the same flourish of authority; all are constructed by appeals to the same data. . . . If this is progress, we might wish for less of it. (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, 4, emphasis added)

Scholars are used to this diversity of opinion. Indeed, their work is energized by it. They take it as an inevitable consequence of the nature of the data with which they must work. At the risk of serious oversimplification, we can distill the diversity of proposals or portraits into the following categories.

Jesus the Healer and Exorcist

Some believe that Jesus best fits the profile of a first-century wonder worker, healer, and exorcist. In short, Jesus was a magician. That does not imply agreement among these scholars as to what actually happened in Jesus’s activity as 17 a healer and exorcist. However, they recognize that his contemporaries would have explained his activity as acting with divine power in dramatic fashion to change people’s experience of illness and spiritual bondage.

Jesus the Sage

Particularly popular at present is a view of Jesus as a teacher of wisdom, as a sage. Focusing less on his powerful deeds and even less on his fate at the hands of his enemies, this portrait highlights Jesus’s use of parables and pithy sayings, often expressing very nonconformist or even subversive wisdom. Not surprisingly, such scholars give great weight to ancient documents not found in the New Testament itself, such as the Gospel of Thomas, which show little interest in the death or resurrection of Jesus. Members of the well-known and rather notorious Jesus Seminar have championed this interpretation.

Jesus the Prophet

Others, as did Schweitzer a century ago, view Jesus as a prophet who came to announce the kingdom or reign of God and with it to bring history to an end—at least history as we know it. Some propose that Jesus was mistaken in this conviction, but that it was nonetheless the basis of his actions and his teachings, even his death. Some see social revolutionary traits in Jesus’s words and actions, traits we today might dub political. Others think of Jesus as a prophet who announced and indeed inaugurated the reign of God and in the process set the scene for the subsequent developments of the church as the embodiment of the kingdom.

Jesus the Messiah

Whereas many scholars have serious reservations about whether Jesus saw himself as a messiah, as a king or deliverer, there are those who believe he and especially his followers would have seen him as such. By itself, his death at the hand of the Roman imperial authorities would have made such claims difficult to sustain. Most scholars thus consider the claims to messiahship, and the related claim that Jesus was Son of God, to be respect accorded him by those who believed that God raised him to life following his execution at the hands of the Romans (see chapters 12–13 below).

Jesus (the Son of) God

If many scholars have reservations about whether Jesus saw himself as a messiah, they will have even more difficulty with attributing the traditional Christian claim of his divinity to Jesus himself. Many (most?) scholars view this as an emerging conviction among the followers of Jesus in the years following his life in Palestine. This claim is thus typically bracketed out when getting at the historical Jesus. Christian claims are viewed as post-Easter phenomena. As a result, Christology, the study of the theological meaning and identity of Jesus as the Christ, has largely become a separate field of enquiry. The very nature of the sources, however, as well as the interest that brings most readers to this book, requires an account of christological beginnings (see chapter 13 below).

This brief menu of profiles greatly oversimplifies the scholarly proposals, as Fredriksen’s comments quoted earlier suggest. Plenty of data in the sources give rise to each of these profiles, and many scholars rightly combine elements of each of them in their reconstructions of who Jesus was. Of particular importance in contemporary scholarship is the question of the Jewishness of Jesus as it relates to each of these portraits. The debate is a lively one, not least due to important Jewish participation in the study of Jesus (see the work of Jewish scholars like Paula Fredriksen, Geza Vermes, and David Flusser).

But We Do See Jesus!

These words were penned by an anonymous preacher whose sermon we know as the letter to the Hebrews (2:9), one of the writings that make up the New Testament. They express the conviction of the writers of the New Testament that in the end seeing Jesus, the man from Nazareth, is essential to any full appreciation of him, regardless of how exalted his status and great his significance.

It would be the height of arrogance to say that in this study we truly will get at the real Jesus, if by that we mean the definitive portrait of what he was truly like. But it is not, in my opinion, arrogant in the least to believe that in the honest listening to and wrestling with the testimony of his first-century followers—and of more recent witnesses, scholarly and popular—we are in a position to see the Jesus the writers of the New Testament give witness to. That is the conviction informing this book. I trust the biblical witnesses to provide windows on Jesus. True, fingerprints, smudges of scribes, and the dust kicked up by the struggles of early followers of Jesus with each other and their detractors are found all over these windows. But I do not believe that these witnesses, with their deep and profound convictions about Jesus, pulled the blinds on those windows, preventing us from seeing Jesus. Even so, much room remains for testing and evaluating the sources, for diversity of insight, even for serious disagreement. Indeed, any truly attentive, inquisitive, and honest reading of the gospels will raise questions about them as sources, about Jesus, and, importantly, about our cherished views of Jesus.

Goals for This Book

This book treats the scholarly task respectfully and empathetically. Students should know what kinds of issues the academic search for Jesus has raised. The workshop of scholarship is a sometimes raucous place. And we can be grateful that through the work done in that noisy workshop we have been alerted in our day to such crucially important issues as the Jewishness of Jesus, the subversiveness and wonder of his wisdom, and the creativity of those who saw to his legacy. Most importantly, however, this book is intended to be an introduction to the Jesus we encounter in the New Testament, not primarily the one that modern historians attempt to reconstruct. So, whereas readers will necessarily come to understand some of those problems associated with the study of Jesus, it is the encounter with the New Testament witnesses, our primary sources for Jesus, that constitutes the heart of this effort. This book is therefore no substitute for reading the raw data, the New Testament. This is so not only because this book will often make sense only in light of a direct reading of the Bible, in particular the gospels, but also because only so will readers be able to engage this book critically and to form their own considered opinions.

About the Author

In the interests of inviting readers to be honest about themselves and the perspectives they bring to the study of Jesus, I will introduce myself. I come to the study of Jesus both as a believer and as a scholar. The first has much to do with the respect with which I come to the task, the energy with which I engage it, and the intensity of interest I have in the outcome. In addition to a career in teaching, I have been a pastor as well as a hospital and prison chaplain; I preach and teach often in church settings. So the stuff of Jesus matters a great deal to me as a believer. As much as I am a believer, I am at the same time a scholar. I do not experience faith and scholarship to be in tension with each other, even if they often ask each other terribly hard and vexatious questions. I believe that it is appropriate and illuminating to bring to the study of Jesus the tools of a scholar who is trained not only in theology, but in the study of history and literature, especially as they relate to the biblical literature.

I am not naïve about my biases, conscious and unconscious. Everyone has biases. As will be the case with many readers of this book, I have a deep and abiding interest in Jesus, one that is rooted in heritage and tradition, in the rich deposit of faith, and in culturally nurtured convictions and perspectives. The specific church tradition in which I have been nurtured is the Mennonite church, within the Anabaptist part of the Christian tradition. I am also conscious of my social location as a North American, specifically Canadian, scholar and that there are many within North America and certainly around the globe whose access to Jesus is from a very different set of convictions, experiences, and perspectives and who therefore do not share either the vistas or the limitations of my location.

That said, I undertake the study of the gospels and of the New Testament, as well as of the scholarship dealing with Jesus, with an openness to be estranged from cherished notions and perspectives. Nothing is gained by holding up a mirror to already existing convictions and having them substitute for a fresh examination of the sources, as illustrated by titles of recent books, such as Marcus Borg’s Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, Philip Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew, and Michael J. McClymond’s Familiar Stranger: An Introduction to Jesus of Nazareth. Bias, interest, and heritage need not prevent us from meeting on the common ground of the New Testament and wrestling there together to come to fuller understanding of who Jesus was and how he matters.

Suggested Exercise

In preparation for the next few chapters, begin reading the gospels rapidly, each one at one sitting. Originally the gospels were written without chapter and verse divisions and were meant to be heard at one sitting. They were meant first and foremost to work as a whole story rather than as a collection of snippets. To read it this way will mean that you will not comprehend nearly everything or be able to linger at favorite passages. It will, however, open up new vistas and insights.

For Further Reading

Following are only a few select resources that can point the way to further reading. Readers should mine the voluminous and accessible information on virtually every topic in encyclopedias like the six-volume Anchor Bible Dictionary (ed. David Noel Freedman et al.; 6 vols.; New York: Doubleday, 1992) and in one-volume encyclopedias like the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (ed. Joel B. Green and Scot McKnight; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1992). These resources have excellent articles on the issues, themes, and personalities raised in this book, most often with extensive bibliographies. Even larger bibliographies are to be found in the major studies listed below. The web has a wealth of academically respectable and scholarly resources as well (New Testament Gateway [www.ntgateway.com] is an excellent portal to many relevant websites).

Primary Sources

Most of the primary sources such as the Bible and noncanonical literature are available in various translations and editions online at sites like Early Christian Writings (www.earlychristianwritings.com). See also the following:

Apocrypha or Deuterocanonical writings (e.g., Wisdom of Solomon [or Book of Wisdom] and Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach [Ecclesiasticus]); found in all Catholic translations (Jerusalem Bible/New Jerusalem Bible and New American Bible) and in most Protestant translations (except New International Version), where they are called Apocrypha.

New Testament Apocrypha. Edited by Edgar Hennecke and Wilhelm Schneemelcher. Translated by R. M. Wilson. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964.

Gospel of Thomas. In The Nag Hammadi Library. Edited by Bentley Layton and James M. Robinson. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977.

Josephus. Translated by William Whiston. Edited by Paul Meier. Revised edition. Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1999.

The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated: The Qumran Texts in English. By Florentino García Martínez. Translated by Wilfred G. E. Watson. Leiden: Brill, 1994.

Overviews of Contemporary Jesus Scholarship

Borg, Marcus J. Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity, 1994.

Evans, Craig A., and Stanley E. Porter. The Historical Jesus. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995.

Powell, Mark Allan. Jesus as a Figure in History: How Modern Historians View the Man from Galilee. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1998.

Tatum, Barnes W. In Quest of Jesus. Revised edition. Nashville: Abingdon, 1999.

Witherington, Ben, III. The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth. 2nd edition. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1997.

Major Jesus Studies

All introductions to the New Testament treat the gospel literature; many also have a section on Jesus per se. Commentaries (analysis and interpretation of biblical texts) on each of the gospels are too numerous to list. All of them take up virtually every issue related to the study of Jesus, but within the context of the particular gospel being interpreted. Following are some major works devoted to the study of Jesus:

Crossan, John Dominic. The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. San Francisco: Harper, 1993. A leading Jesus scholar, Crossan has, together with Marcus Borg (cited above), been an important member of the Jesus Seminar. Under the direction of Robert W. Funk, the Jesus Seminar has published The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (San Francisco: Harper, 1997) and The Acts of Jesus: What Did Jesus Really Do? (San Francisco: Harper, 1998).

Dunn, James D. G. Jesus Remembered. Christianity in the Making, vol. 1. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003. Dunn has been a major force in the so-called third quest and one of the most prolific Jesus scholars working in the United Kingdom. His work provides a very readable and at the same time thoroughly scholarly treatment of the Jesus the New Testament presents.

Meier, John P. A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. 3 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1991–2001. The three volumes are subtitled The Roots of the Problem and the Person; Mentor, Message, and Miracles; and Companions and Competitors. Erudite and comprehensive, Meier is one of the leading contemporary Catholic Jesus scholars. An excellent reference work.

Wright, N. T. Christian Origins and the Question of God. 3 vols. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992– 2003. The three volumes are subtitled The New Testament and the People of God; Jesus and the Victory of God; and The Resurrection of the Son of God. Always a pleasure to read, Wright, the Bishop of Durham in the United Kingdom, is one of the most prolific and engaging New Testament scholars today, keenly appreciative of the evangelical tradition of the church.

Shorter Studies of Jesus

The following is a small sample of the many books on Jesus accessible to the nonspecialist. They reflect quite different methodological and theological perspectives:

Allison, Dale C. Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998.

Bockmuehl, Markus. This Jesus: Martyr, Lord, Messiah. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1994.

Borg, Marcus. Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith. San Francisco: Harper, 1995.

Borg, Marcus, and N. T. Wright. The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions. San Francisco: Harper, 1999.

Burridge, Richard A., and Graham Gould. Jesus Now and Then. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004.

Crossan, John Dominic. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. San Francisco: Harper, 1995.

Herzog, William R., II. Jesus, Justice, and the Reign of God: A Ministry of Liberation. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000.

McClymond, Michael J. Familiar Stranger: An Introduction to Jesus of Nazareth. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004.

Pope-Levison, Priscilla, and John R. Levison. Jesus in Global Contexts. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992.

Senior, Donald C. P. Jesus: A Gospel Portrait. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1992.

Soelle, Dorothee, and Luise Schottroff. Jesus of Nazareth. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002.

Stein, Robert H. Jesus the Messiah: A Survey of the Life of Christ. Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity, 1996.

———. The Method and Message of Jesus’ Teachings. Revised edition. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994.

Wright, N. T. Who Was Jesus? Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993.

Yancey, Philip. The Jesus I Never Knew. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995.

Jewish Studies of Jesus

Flusser, David. Jesus. Translated by R. Steven Notley. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1997.

Fredriksen, Paula. Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. New York: Vintage, 1999.

Vermes, Geza. Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1981.

———. The Religion of Jesus the Jew. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.

2

Development of Jesus Traditions

DIGGING THROUGH THE LAYERS

SEVERAL YEARS AGO I spent half a year in Israel and the Occupied Territories (the West Bank). I was fascinated by the work of archeologists, by the skill with which they meticulously dig down through the layers of accumulated debris that time and events have deposited. Often the surface gives an indication that underneath might lie the leftovers of an important past. Using archeology as a metaphor for beginning our study of Jesus, we will begin in this chapter from the present and dig down through the layers of history on our way to the bedrock of the first century.

Surface

We begin by observing a highly diverse surface, a wide variety of views of Jesus informed by personal taste and conviction, but also by church traditions and theology, by the results of scholarship informed by academic research, by geography, race, class, gender, and politics. We find recognizable religious traditions, from orthodox and mainline Christianity to charismatic renewal movements and Pentecostalism. But we also find species of piety that do not easily fit any of these categories or that run right through them, such as so-called liberation theologies, whether black or feminist, and New Age religious movements. Given that Christianity is a truly global phenomenon, a consequence of missionary efforts in the early decades and centuries, later aided by imperial and colonial aspirations of Western powers, perceptions and veneration of Jesus are strongly marked by geographical and cultural diversity.

Chart 1 Development of Jesus Traditions An Archeological Exploration

Surface____________________________________________

surface marked by great diversity