Finding Jesus: Faith. Fact. Forgery.: Six Holy Objects That Tell the Remarkable Story of the Gospels

227 Pages·2015·2.54 MB·English

by  Gibson

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For our families
A ’ N
UTHORS OTE
The following experts appeared in the CNN series Finding Jesus, and we have
used quotations from their interviews throughout this book: Nicholas Allen, Rev.
Bruce Chilton, Kate Cooper, Annelise Freisenbruch, Camil Fuchs, Rabbi Joshua
Garroway, Oded Golan, Mark Goodacre, Mark Guscin, Israel Hershkovitz, Tom
Higham, Shimon Ilani, John Jackson, Matthew Kalman, Georges Kazan, Noel
Lenski, Fr. James Martin, Byron McCane, Candida Moss, Elaine Pagels,
Jonathan Pagis, Joan Taylor, and Ben Witherington III.
All Scripture references in the book are taken from the New Revised
Standard Version of the Bible.
Last, in keeping with current practices, we have used BCE (“Before the
Common Era”) and CE (“Common Era”) throughout the book, rather than BC
and AD.
INTRODUCTION
W I J ?
HO S ESUS
The question must be posed in the present tense because, for believers, Jesus is
God and he exists in the here and now every bit as much as he ever did: “Jesus
Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever,” as the New Testament says. To
be a Christian is to have a relationship with a Jesus who is alive in heaven and
with us at every moment of every day.
Yet Jesus is also profoundly present for today’s agnostics and even die-hard
skeptics, who are engaged with Jesus of Nazareth, in their own way, almost as
devoutly as Christians are.
Just look at the reaction to any new artifact excavated from the Holy Land, or
every scrap of papyrus that emerges from the sands of Egypt or the sometimes
shadowy antiquities markets that operate throughout the West. Each is
accompanied by astounding claims and a wave of boldface headlines, and each
prompts a new round of global fascination with a man who died two thousand
years ago, crucified by the Romans on a dusty hill near Jerusalem.
It was a fate inflicted on countless others deemed enemies of the state. Yet
Jesus was different. For believers, he rose from the tomb on the third day, on that
first Easter morning, bringing a message of eternal life and galvanizing a small
band of followers who would go on to create a church and spread a faith that
would reach every corner of the globe. Those who dismiss such claims must
contend with the reality of Jesus’s afterlife in this world, with the historic forces
he unleashed, forces that remain undiminished even in this supposedly secular
age. It’s not surprising that the entry on Jesus in the open-source encyclopedia
Wikipedia is the fifth-most-edited page among the more than thirty million
articles on the site.
Everyone seems to have a stake in who Jesus is, and in what we should
believe about him—but to prove their claims, they have to know who Jesus was.
Exploring that mystery, and that history, is the goal of this book and the
CNN series Finding Jesus. It is a fascinating adventure into theology;
archeology; our contemporary preoccupations with sex, religion, and the
meaning of life; and our age-old love of relics. In six chapters we examine six
relics—or artifacts, if you will—that provide a window onto the past, opening up
our understanding of first-century Judea, of the men and women around Jesus,
and of those who later followed the man they believed to be the Messiah—the
Christ (Christos, in Greek, or the “anointed one”).
These investigations take us deep into history, and modern scholarship on the
Bible, and demonstrate again that finding the truth about Jesus is no easy task. It
never has been. When Jesus was brought before Pontius Pilate, the Roman
governor of Judea wasn’t sure what to make of him. “Are you the King of the
Jews?” Pilate asked him.
Jesus said, “You say so.” But when he was accused by the chief priests
and elders, he did not answer.
Then Pilate said to him, “Do you not hear how many accusations they
make against you?”
But he gave him no answer, not even to a single charge, so that the
governor was greatly amazed.
This famous exchange, with slight variations, is present in all four canonical
gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—which recount the life, and death, of
Jesus. Yet the gospels are not biographies in the commonly understood sense of
the word. They tell the story of Jesus, but above all with the aim of conveying
the “why” of his life (the message of his teachings) as much as the who, what,
when, and where. That is why different gospels cover different aspects of Jesus’s
life: Two give versions of his birth; two do not. Only one mentions anything
about Jesus between his life as an infant and his emergence as a public figure at
about the age of thirty. They vary in details and sometimes recount the same
stories in different ways, or even contradict one another on particular details.
For centuries this was not much of a problem. The life of Christ was taken
for granted. The different versions just meant preachers had a deeper well of
material upon which to draw, and a greater reservoir of meaning to explore.
Elaboration, even embroidering the stories, was not necessarily a bad thing.
Bible stories, and the myriad images in stone and on canvas that depict them,
could lead people to the essence of the faith. Christianity was mainly a matter of
belief, and that’s what believers argued about—often with deadly results. Yet
when the wars of religion that raged across Europe in the seventeenth century
gave way to the Age of Reason in the eighteenth century, everything changed.
Tradition was subjected to rational inquiry, dogma to scientific scrutiny—and if
they didn’t withstand the Enlightenment’s standards, they were tossed out.
The stories about Jesus in the gospels were a special focus. Thus was born
the so-called First Quest for the historical Jesus, an endeavor led by German
Protestants who brought the critical eye of modern scholarship to holy writ, and
wound up rewriting the New Testament in ways that often scandalized the
faithful. Everything that could not be proven was called into question, and much
of what had mattered to believers for centuries was cast aside. Perhaps the most
famous, and graphic, example of this approach is the Jefferson Bible, a version
of the New Testament that Thomas Jefferson, an accomplished child of the
Enlightenment, created in his later years by (literally) cutting out all the
Scripture passages about miracles and supernatural claims and leaving Jesus’s
ethical teachings, which Jefferson thought were just fine.
The First Quest effectively ended in 1906, with the publication of a volume
that gave the phenomenon its name, Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest of the
Historical Jesus. Schweitzer, a Lutheran who later won renown as a
humanitarian in West Africa and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952,
ultimately concluded that “the historical Jesus will remain a stranger and an
enigma to our time.”
Yet Jesus would not be dismissed so easily. A 1953 lecture by another
German scholar, Ernst Käsemann, titled “The Problem of the Historical Jesus,”
launched what is called the Second Quest, one that brought textual criticism and
other modern scholarship tools to attempt yet again to find solutions to this
“problem.” The Second Quest was bolstered by a number of remarkable
archeological finds that did for the Bible what the 1922 discovery of the tomb of
King Tutankhamen did for all things Egyptian. Suddenly, biblical archeology
was hot.
Until it was not. The Second Quest seemed to run its course by the 1970s,
but the historical Jesus, again, continued to pique the Western imagination, and
by the 1980s a whole new generation of scholars, using a whole new range of
tools and technologies, launched what has come to be called the Third Quest.
This one shows no signs of slowing, for several reasons.
One is that Christian scholars are themselves more engaged than ever in this
research, using science and history not simply to try to prove their beliefs—that
has too often ended in intellectual embarrassment—but also to inform their faith
and to show a suspicious public that faith and reason can work in harmony.
Previous quests for the historical Jesus tended to be dominated by critics of
Christianity who sought to debunk the faith, or by Christians focused on
brushing away the film of myth in order to dig deeper and recover the solid
nuggets of truth that had been buried, to recover the original Jewish prophet who
could speak anew to the modern world.
These efforts led to some questionable projects, such as the Jesus Seminar, a
loose collective of some 150 scholars who, during the 1980s and ’90s, used a
system of colored beads to vote on how much of the gospels was reliable. In the
end, they cast serious doubt on 82 percent of the sayings attributed to Jesus and
84 percent of his deeds—a worse result than even the Jefferson Bible, and with a
methodology that mainstream experts found wanting.
Some scholars, bloggers, and conspiracy theorists have even taken to
reviving the theory that Jesus did not exist, or was nothing like the man the
gospels portray, and that his life, death, and Resurrection were pretty much a
hoax. The arguments have become so insistent that, in 2012, Bart Ehrman, a
leading New Testament scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, wrote a book to refute them. Ehrman has no dog in this fight; on the
contrary, though he was raised an evangelical, he later became a convinced
agnostic. Yet, as he writes, “The reality is, whatever else you may think about