How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee (13 page)

But who, then, was telling the stories about Jesus? Just the apostles? It can’t have been just the apostles. Just the people whom the apostles authorized? No way. Just people who checked their facts to make sure they didn’t change any of the stories but only recounted events that really happened and as they happened? How could they do that? The stories were being told by word of mouth, year after year, decade after decade, among lots of people in different parts of the world, in different languages, and there was no way to control what one person said to the next about Jesus’s words and deeds. Everyone knows what happens to stories that circulate this way. Details get changed, episodes get invented, events get exaggerated, impressive accounts get made even more impressive, and so on.

Eventually, an author heard the stories in his church—say it was “Mark” in the city of Rome. And he wrote his account. And ten or fifteen years later another author in another city read Mark’s account and decided to write his own, based partially on Mark but partially on the stories he had heard in his own community. And the Gospels started coming into existence.

Those are the Gospels we now have. Scholars for three hundred years and more have studied them in minute detail, and one of the assured results of this intensive investigation is the certainty that the Gospels have numerous discrepancies, contradictions, and historical problems.
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Why would that be? It would be better to ask, “How could that
not
be?” Of course, the Gospels contain nonhistorical information and stories that have been modified and exaggerated and embellished. These books do not contain the words of someone who was sitting at Jesus’s feet taking notes. They are nothing like that. They are books that are intending to tell the “good news” of Jesus (the word
gospel
means “good news”). That is, their authors had a vested interest both in what they were telling and in how they were telling it. They wanted to preach Jesus. They were not trying to give biographical information that would pass muster among critical historians living two thousand years later who have developed significantly different standards of writing history, or
historiography
. They were writing for their own day and were trying to convince people about the truth—as they saw it—about Jesus. They were basing their stories on what they had heard and read. What they had read was based on what the authors of these other writings had heard. It all goes back to oral tradition.

Some people today claim that cultures rooted in oral tradition are far more careful to make certain that traditions that are told and retold are not changed significantly. This turns out to be a modern myth, however. Anthropologists who have studied oral cultures show that just the opposite is the case. Only literary cultures have a concern for exact replication of the facts “as they really are.” And this is because in literary cultures, it is possible to check the sources to see whether someone has changed a story. In oral cultures, it is widely expected that stories will indeed change—they change anytime a storyteller is telling a story in a new context. New contexts require new ways of telling stories. Thus, oral cultures historically have seen no problem with altering accounts as they were told and retold.
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So of course there are discrepancies, embellishments, made-up stories, and historical problems in the Gospels. And this means that they cannot be taken at face value as giving us historically accurate accounts of what really happened. Does this mean that the Gospels are useless as historical sources? No, it means that we need to have rigorous historical methods to help us examine books that were written for
one
purpose—to proclaim the “good news” of Jesus—to achieve a
different
purpose: to know what Jesus really said and did.

Here I can give only a brief summary of the methods that New Testament scholars have devised for dealing with sources of this kind. I should stress that the Gospels are in fact virtually our only available sources.
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We do not have any accounts of Jesus from Greek or Roman (pagan) sources of the first century, no mention even of his name until more than eighty years after his death. Among non-Christian Jewish sources we have only two brief comments by the Jewish historian Josephus. We do have other Gospels from outside the New Testament, but these were all written later than the New Testament Gospels and as a rule are highly legendary in character. There are a couple of Gospels that may provide us with some additional information—such as the
Gospel of Thomas
and the
Gospel of Peter
, both discovered in modern times—but at the end of the day they actually do not give us much. And so we more or less have our four Gospels.

Nearly everyone agrees that even though these canonical Gospels are highly problematic as sources for the historical Jesus, they nonetheless do contain some historically accurate recollections of what he said, did, and experienced amid all the embellishments and changes. The question is how to ferret out the historically accurate information from the later alterations and inventions.

Scholars have determined that some of our written accounts are independent of one another—that is, they inherited all or some of their stories from independent streams of oral transmission. It is widely thought, for example, that the Gospel of John did not rely on the other three Gospels for its information. The other three, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are called the
Synoptic Gospels
because they are so much alike. The word
synoptic
means “seen together”: these three can be placed in parallel columns on the same page and be seen together, because they tell so many of the same stories, usually in the same sequence and often in the same words. This is almost certainly because the authors were copying each other, or rather—as scholars are almost universally convinced—because two of them, Matthew and Luke, copied the earlier Mark. That is where Matthew and Luke got a lot of their stories. But they share other passages not found in Mark. Most of these other passages are sayings of Jesus. Since the nineteenth century, scholars have mounted formidable arguments that this is because Matthew and Luke had another source available to them that provided them with these non-Markan passages. Since this other source was mainly made up of sayings, these (German) scholars called it the
Sayings Source
. The word for
source
in German is
Quelle
, and so scholars today speak about “Q”—the lost source that provided Matthew and Luke with much of their sayings material.

Matthew has stories not found in any of the other Gospels, and he obviously got them from somewhere, so scholars talk about his M source. So too Luke has unique stories, and the alleged source then is called L. M and L may have each been a single written document; they may have been multiple written documents; they may have been a combination of written and oral sources. But for simplicity’s sake, they are just called M and L.

And so among our Gospels we have not only Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (and, say, the Gospels of Thomas and Peter); we also can isolate Q, M, and L. These three were probably independent of each other and independent of Mark, and John was independent of all of them.

In other words we have numerous streams of tradition that independently all go back, ultimately, to the life of Jesus. In light of this fact—taken as a fact by almost all critical scholars—we are in a position to evaluate which of the Gospel stories are more likely to be authentic than others. If a story is found in several of these independent traditions, then it is far more likely that this story goes back to the ultimate source of the tradition, the life of Jesus itself. This is called the
criterion of independent attestation
. On the other hand, if a story—a saying, a deed of Jesus—is found in only one source, it cannot be corroborated independently, and so it is less likely to be authentic.

Let me give a couple of examples. There is a reference to John the Baptist—a fiery apocalyptic preacher—in close association with Jesus in Mark, John, and Q, all independently. Conclusion? Jesus probably associated with John the Baptist, a fiery apocalyptic preacher. Or an obvious one: Jesus is said to have been crucified under Pontius Pilate in both Mark and John, and there are independent aspects of the story reported in M and L. And so that’s probably what happened: he was crucified on order of the Roman governor Pilate. Or take a counterexample. When Jesus was born, we are told in Matthew (this comes from M) that wise men followed a star to come worship him as an infant. Unfortunately, this story is not corroborated by Mark, Q, L, John, or anything else. It
might
have happened, but it can’t be
established
as having happened following the criterion of independent attestation.

A second criterion is predicated on the fact that the accounts found in all these independent sources came down to their authors through the oral tradition, in which the stories were changed in the interests of the storytellers—as they were trying to convert others or to instruct those who were converted in the “true” view of things. But if that’s the case, then any stories in the Gospels that do not coincide with what we know the early Christians would have wanted to say about Jesus, or indeed, any stories that seem to run directly counter to the Christians’ self-interests in telling them, can stake a high claim to being historically accurate. The logic should be obvious. Christians would not have made up stories that work against their views or interests. If they told stories like that, it was simply because that’s just the way something actually happened. This methodological principle is sometimes called the
criterion of dissimilarity
. It states that if a tradition about Jesus is dissimilar to what the early Christians would have wanted to say about him, then it more likely is historically accurate.

Let me illustrate. Jesus is said to have grown up in Nazareth in Mark, M, L, and John; so it is multiply attested. But it also is not a story that a Christian would have been inclined to make up, because it proved to be an embarrassment to later Christians. Nazareth was a small village—a hamlet, really—that no one had ever heard of. Who would invent the idea that the Son of God came from
there
? It’s hard to see any reason for someone to make it up, so Jesus probably really did come from there. A second example: the idea that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist proved discomforting for Christians, because John was baptizing people to show that their sins had been forgiven (“for the remission of sins,” as the New Testament puts it). Moreover, everyone knew in the early church that the person doing the baptizing was spiritually superior to the person being baptized. Who would make up a story of the Son of God being baptized because of his sins, or in which someone else was shown to be his superior? If no one would make up the story, why do we have it? Because Jesus really was baptized by John. Or take a counterexample. In Mark, Jesus three times predicts that he has to go to Jerusalem, be rejected, be crucified, and then be raised from the dead. Can you imagine a reason that a Christian storyteller might claim that Jesus said such things in advance of his passion? Of course you can. Later Christians would not have wanted anyone to think Jesus was caught off guard when he ended up being arrested and sent to the cross; they may well have wanted him to predict just what was going to happen to him. These predictions show both that he was raised—as Christians believed—and that he knew he was going to be raised—as they also believed. Since this is precisely the kind of story a Christian would want to make up, we cannot establish that Jesus really made these kinds of predictions. He may have done so, but following this methodological principle of dissimilarity, these predictions cannot be
shown
to have happened.

Finally, scholars are especially keen to consider whether traditions about Jesus can actually fit in a first-century Palestinian Jewish context. Some of the later Gospels from outside the New Testament portray Jesus teaching views that are starkly different from what we can plausibly situate in Jesus’s own historical and cultural milieu. Such teachings cannot obviously be accepted as ones that a first-century Palestinian Jew would have spoken. This is called the
criterion of contextual credibility
.

This final criterion insists that we understand Jesus’s historical context if we want to understand what he said and did during his life. Any time you take something out of context, you misunderstand it. For situating any historical personage, context is everything. And so, before proceeding further, I need to say a few things about Jesus’s context and then about what we can know about his message and proclamation from within that context, applying the methods I have just recounted, in order to see whether he talked about himself as God.

I
N BROADEST TERMS
, J
ESUS
needs to be understood as a first-century Jew. In Chapter 2, I discussed the basic religious views of Judaism at the time. Like most Jews, Jesus would have believed that there was one true God, the creator of heaven and earth, who had chosen Israel to be his special people and given them his law. Keeping the law of Moses would have been of paramount importance to Jesus, as it was to all religious Jews of his time. Later controversies are reported in the Gospels when Jesus is said to have violated the law—for example, the law of Sabbath—but in fact it is very difficult to find any instance in which he actually did what the law forbade. What he violated was the understanding and interpretation of the law by other Jewish leaders of his day, especially the Pharisees, who had developed complex rules to be adopted in order to be sure the law was kept. Most Jews didn’t follow these additional rules, and Jesus didn’t either. To that extent he was probably like most Jews. (The Pharisees were not hypocritical in developing these rules: they simply believed that one should do everything possible to do what God had required and so formulated policies to help make that happen.)
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