Historic Christian Evidence for Jesus
By far the most important historical information about Jesus of Nazareth appears in the four Gospels of the New Testament. But chronologically, these are not the earliest Christian documents still in existence. Even most conservative scholars acknowledge that the Gospels were not written before the 60s, whereas Jesus was crucified in either 30 or 33 CE The majority of the undisputed letters of Paul, however, were all written at the latest by the 50s. These include Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. Thus, when they report on the deeds and sayings of Jesus, they cannot simply be following one or more of the written Gospels for their information. Rather, they must reflect the oral tradition that was preserving these details before the written accounts were produced. The letter of James contains about three dozen probable allusions to the teaching of Jesus, especially from his Sermon on the Mount, and it may well date to as early as the mid-40s.4 But because this is more disputed, we will limit our focus here to the epistles of Paul just mentioned, before turning to the Gospels themselves.
The Apostle Paul
Readers of Paul’s letters sometimes wonder why he does not refer back to the teachings and deeds of Jesus even more than he does. Several factors no doubt account for this silence. First, he is writing to Christian churches who have already heard considerable details about Jesus. Second, he is dealing primarily with specific issues reflecting the current situations of those congregations. Third, the genre of epistle was not designed primarily to retell the story of the life of Christ. The letters of John, written most likely by the same author as the Gospel of John, barely refer back to specific sayings and events from Jesus’ life at all, even though the author had himself written about them in detail. Finally, Christians quickly recognized that the most important features of Jesus’ life were his crucifixion and resurrection, and Paul has a lot to say about these in his letters.
But it is easy to underestimate the number of quotations and particularly allusions to the Jesus-tradition in the epistles of Paul, precisely because ancient writers felt free to represent the gist of another person’s teaching in their own words. Indeed, in some circles, good rhetoric demanded it.5 Paul clearly knows the basic outline of Jesus’ life:
What Paul appears to know about Jesus is that he was born as a human (Rom. 9.5) to a woman and under the law, that is, as a Jew (Gal. 4.4), that he was descended from David’s line (Rom 1.3; 15.12) though he was not like Adam (Rom. 5.15), that he had brothers, including one named James (1 Cor. 9.5; Gal. 1.19), that he had a meal on the night he was betrayed (1 Cor. 1.23–25), that he was crucified and died on a cross (Phil. 2.8; 1 Cor. 1:23; 8.11; 15.3; Rom. 4.25; 5.6, 8; 1 Thess. 2.15; 4.14, etc.), was buried (1 Cor. 15.4), and was raised three days later (1 Cor. 15.4; Rom. 4.25; 8.34; 1 Thess. 4.14, etc.), and that afterwards he was seen by Peter, the disciples and others (1 Cor. 15.5–7).6
More significantly, he knows very specific teachings of Jesus on a wide range of topics. First Corinthians 11:23–25 quotes Jesus’ words over the bread and the cup at the Last Supper in considerable detail in language very close to what Luke later wrote in Luke 22:19–20. Earlier in the same letter, Paul appeals to Jesus’ principle that those who preach the gospel should receive their living from the gospel (1 Cor 9:14; cf. Luke 10:7; Matt 10:10). He knows that Jesus opposed divorce (1 Cor 7:10; cf. Mark 10:2–12) but supported the paying of taxes (Rom 13:7; cf. Mark 12:17). He taught about not repaying evil for evil but rather loving one’s enemies and praying for one’s persecutors (Rom 12:14, 17–19; cf. Luke 6:27–28, 36; Matt 5:38), and on not judging but tolerating one another on morally neutral matters (Rom 14:13; cf. Matt 7:1; Luke 6:37). Paul understands that Jesus declared all foods clean (Rom 14:14; cf. Mark 7:18–19), that he warned of God’s imminent judgment on the leadership of the nation of Israel (1 Thess 2:15–16; cf. Matt 23:32–36) and that he predicted numerous specific events in association with his return at the end of the age (1 Thess 4:15–17; 5:2–6; see Christ’s discourse on the Mount of Olives in Matt 24–25).
These are simply the clearest references in Paul’s letters to Jesus’ teaching. A much longer list of probable allusions can be compiled.7 As a result, it just will not do to argue that Paul knew little or nothing about the historical Jesus or so distorted his picture of Jesus as to become, for all intents and purposes, the true founder of Christianity. But we may press the point further. In Paul’s most detailed discussion of Jesus’ resurrection, he writes, “Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. . . . For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance [or ‘at the first’]: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas [that is, ‘Peter’], and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters . . .” (1 Cor 15:1, 3–6a).8 The language of “receiving” and “passing on” here is technical terminology for carefully memorized oral tradition. As central Christian doctrine, Saul of Tarsus (whom we know better as Paul) would have been taught these basic gospel facts not long after his conversion, which took place roughly three years after Jesus’ death. Already in that very short period of time the belief that Jesus was bodily raised from death was entrenched as the heart of fundamental teaching new converts had to learn. It cannot be chalked up to the slow, evolutionary development of myth or legend decades after the original facts of Jesus’ life had been left behind.9
The New Testament Gospels
Despite corroborating evidence outside the New Testament Gospels, the bulk of the evidence for Jesus comes from the three Synoptic Gospels (so-called because they are more alike than different and can be set next to each other in parallel columns for easy comparisons among them) and the Gospel of John, which is more different from than similar to any one of the Synoptics.
The Synoptics: Matthew, Mark, and Luke
The various “quests for the historical Jesus” that have proved so influential in the last two centuries of New Testament scholarship have focused primarily on the three Synoptic Gospels. The upshot of all this research is that a significant cross-section of current scholarship believes that at least the broad contours and most central items common to Matthew, Mark, and Luke are likely to be historically reliable. Those central themes include such features as the following: Jesus was a Jewish teacher who was raised as a carpenter, but who began a public ministry when he was around the age of thirty. He submitted himself to John’s baptism, announced both the present and future dimensions of God’s kingdom (or reign) on earth, gave love-based ethical injunctions to his listeners, taught a considerable amount in parables, challenged conventional interpretations of the Jewish law on numerous fronts but never broke (or taught others to break) the written Law, wrought amazing signs and wonders to demonstrate the arrival of the kingdom, implicitly and explicitly claimed to be the Messiah or liberator of the Jewish people but only inasmuch as they became his followers, and counterculturally believed that he had to suffer and die for the sins of the world, be raised from the dead and return to his heavenly throne next to Yahweh, only to return to earth at some unspecified point in the future ushering in Judgment Day. He called all people to repent of their sins and form the nucleus of the new, true, freed people of God led by his twelve apostles.10
A number of factors converge to make the assumption probable that a portrait relatively close to this one can be viewed as historically accurate.
Authorship and Date
Many conservative scholars present plausible arguments for accepting the early church’s unanimous attributions of these three documents. Mark is a relatively minor character on the pages of the New Testament, probably best known for deserting Paul and Barnabas on their first missionary journey for a reason we are never told (Acts 13:13; 15:37–38). He would not have been a likely person after which to name a Gospel if he did not actually write it, with many other more prominent and respected first-generation Christians available for such an ascription. The same is true of Luke, who was Paul’s beloved doctor, but who appears by name only three times in the New Testament, in each case tucked away in the greetings at the end of an epistle (Col 4:14; 2 Tim 4:1; Phlm 24). Matthew, on the other hand, was one of the twelve apostles—Jesus’ closest followers during his lifetime—but, as a converted tax collector (Matt 9:9–13), his background could easily have made him the least respected of the Twelve!
Many liberal New Testament scholars nevertheless doubt that Matthew, Mark, and Luke wrote the Gospels bearing their names. But they almost all agree that they were written well within the first century by orthodox Christians in the orbit of apostolic Christianity. Typically suggested dates place Mark in the late 60s or early 70s and Matthew and Luke in the 80s. Conservatives, accepting the Church Fathers’ testimony concerning the composition of these Gospels, date all three to the early or mid-60s. On either set of dates, however, we are speaking of documents compiled about fifty years or less after the events they narrate. In our age of instant information access, this can seem like a long time. But in the ancient Mediterranean world, it was surprisingly short. The oldest existing biographies of Alexander the Great, for example, are those of Plutarch and Arrian, hailing from the late first and early second centuries CE Alexander died, however, in 323 BCE! Yet classical historians regularly believe they can derive extensive, reliable information from these works to reconstruct in some detail the exploits of Alexander. This remains true despite various problems in harmonizing certain differences between these two sources and despite certain ideological grids through which each author filtered his information.11 The words penned nearly half a century ago by the British historian of ancient Greece and Rome, A. N. Sherwin-White, remain as applicable today as then: “So, it is astonishing that while Graeco-Roman historians have been growing in confidence, the twentieth-century study of the Gospel narratives, starting from no less promising material, has taken so gloomy a turn . . . that [for some] the historical Christ is unknowable and the history of his mission cannot be written.”12 This gloom should be replaced by a much more optimistic spirit.
Literary Genre
A second issue is that of Gospel genre. Did the Synoptic writers intend to produce works that would be viewed as serious history and biography by the conventions of their day? The evidence strongly suggests that they did. The clearest indication of what any of the three thought he was doing appears in Luke 1:1–4:
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.
A careful reading of this prologue demonstrates that (1) Luke was aware of previously written sources that documented aspects of the life of Christ; (2) he interviewed eyewitnesses of Jesus’ ministry, along with gleaning additional information from others through the oral tradition; and (3) he made his own selection and arrangement of material in order best to persuade his patron, Theophilus, of the validity of the Christian faith. These are precisely the kinds of details that one finds, at times even in very similar language, in the lengthier prologues to volumes of that era which are generally viewed as among the most reliable works of history produced back then—most notably, in the histories of the Jewish author Josephus and the Greek writers Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, and Lucian.13 Even closer analogies appear in Greco-Roman “technical prose” or “scientific literature,” including treatises on such topics as medicine, philosophy, mathematics, engineering, and rhetoric.14 This proves a far cry from the fictitious genres of literature to which modern skeptics often wish to assign the Gospels.
Of course, a historical intent by no means equates with success in accomplishing one’s objectives. Indeed, three questions call out for an answer at this juncture of our investigation. (1) How carefully would the Gospel writers have wanted to preserve historical detail? (2) What ability did they have to do so? (3) How successful were they in their endeavors? With respect to the first question, it is often argued that the compilers of the Gospels would not have had a strong interest in meticulous preservation of accurate detail. Sometimes this conclusion is based on the conviction that words of the Risen Lord spoken through early Christian prophets would have been intermingled with the sayings of the earthly Jesus. At other times it is alleged that a movement that thought that the world might end at any moment would have had no reason to chronicle the life of Jesus with great care. On still other occasions, critics complain that an ideological (in this case, theological) ax to grind necessarily skews one’s ability to report objective facts. Let us look at each of these objections in turn.