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February 15, 2018
James, the son of Zebedee, was martyred too early to be this Gospel's author (AD 44; cf. Acts 12:1-2). That leaves only his brother, the apostle John.
Interestingly, this John never appears by name in the Gospel, while the John that does appear is always the Baptist, without ever being called by that title.
At least three main approaches predominated during this first quest of the historical Jesus. Rationalists and mythologizers
Romantics, most notably the French Catholic Ernest Renan, portrayed Jesus as the consummately gentle teacher of love, beauty, and joy who offered compelling moral precepts for his people.
kerygma
(faith-proclamation)
An Emphasis on the Deeds of Jesus. Quite unlike Bultmann and most of his disciples, many “third questers” focus more on the deeds of Jesus than on his sayings.
Both developed reputations for working miracles as a result of the effectiveness of their prayers—Honi for being able to make it rain and Hanina for a variety of healings and exorcisms.
Pacifists, especially from the Anabaptist or Mennonite traditions, have often found an ally in Jesus, taking one additional step beyond what scholars in the last group propose. Thus they view him both as a non-violent revolutionary and a proactive peacemaker.
Still other scholars see in Jesus the marginalized Messiah.
He was a teacher, a miracle worker, a prophet, and a gatherer of Israel, but it was ultimately his messianic claims and deeds that ran him afoul of the authorities.
Again, four main subcategories may be discerned. The first two focus on Jesus and Wisdom; the second two focus on Jesus the teacher of short, subversive sayings.
Esther Ng, however, has shown that, while Jesus certainly affirmed women in a way radically positive by the social norms of his world, he cannot be considered a full-fledged egalitarian, and subsequent New Testament Christianity still remained sufficiently liberating so as to counter Schüssler Fiorenza's charge that it degenerated from its earlier ideal form.
Finally, we may speak of those who give pride of place to Jesus' role as messianic herald of the kingdom.
We could expand this chapter considerably if we also surveyed those minimalistic or idiosyncratic portraits of Jesus painted by scholars outside the guild of New Testament scholarship or by non-scholarly writers.
Thus one recent, insightful survey of portraits of Jesus in the United States contains chapter headings that include not only “enlightened sage,” “oriental Christ,” and “rabbi” (similar to views we have already considered) but also “sweet savior,”
Craig Evans summarizes five main gains of the third quest: (a) understanding the ethnically, religiously, and socially Jewish contexts of the historical Jesus; (b) recognizing Jesus' aims and mission; (c) approximating Jesus'self-understanding; (d) accounting for the specific nature of his death; and (e) interpreting the miracle stories, especially the resurrection.
A second important issue involves the “burden of proof.” Does one assume a saying or deed of Jesus to be authentic unless contradictions or inconsistencies with other data emerge?
Why this apparent double standard? The most common answer is because the Gospels are not straightforward accounts of history or biography; they are the products of faith communities that could easily have biased their reporting—intentionally or unintentionally—in order to glorify their founder, Jesus.
First, an ideological bias can actually create a greater concern to tell the story “straight.”
Second, in antiquity, all history writing was ideologically biased. No one ever thought of recording information
On the other hand, even for those who insist that we begin from a position of methodical doubt, various standard “criteria of authenticity” have been developed that can go a long way toward enhancing our confidence in the reliability of the Gospel record.60 Four stand out in particular:
dissimilarity
Potentially awkward or embarrassing information about Jesus also falls into this category.
Such material would not likely have been invented by any Christian, Jew or Gentile.
This, of course, would require Jesus to have been totally different from every Jew of his day and misunderstood by every one of his followers, a hypothesis which is patently absurd.
multiple attestation
The criterion of Palestinian environment or Semitic language reminds us that in many ways Jesus was thoroughly a person of his times.
Distinctive Greek idioms may reflect an evangelist's paraphrase, and occasionally Jesus himself probably spoke in Greek.
coherence
A promising advance in the last decade has appeared in the writings of a trio of German scholars, Gerd Theissen, Annette Merz, and Dagmar Winter and, independently, from N. T. Wright.
Wright dubs it the criterion of double similarity and double dissimilarity.
By now the student who believes in the inspiration of the Bible may be asking, “Where is the Holy Spirit in all of this discussion?”
By definition the quest involves ascertaining what can be known on purely historical grounds—what results believer and unbeliever alike can affirm.
best. What we call the first century included the years 754-854 for the Romans (reckoning from the supposed date of the founding of Rome) and 3760-3860 for the Jews (counting from the supposed date of the creation of the world).
What is more, Jewish and Roman calendars started at different times of the year.
Paradoxical as it sounds, the date of Christ's birth was probably somewhere between 6-4 BC.
Our division of the calendar into BC (before Christ) and AD (anno domini = in the year of the Lord) is, of course, a Christian invention.
account. The date we call AD 1 eventually became so well entrenched that changing the calendar proved impossible.
Herod must have died in what we now know as 4 BC. Because, shortly before his death, he had the babies in Bethlehem slaughtered “who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi” (Matt 2:16), it may be that Christ had been born up to two years earlier.
