Episode 326: Chris Keith - How do Scholars Reconstruct the "Historical Jesus?"
In this week’s episode of The Bible for Normal People, Pete and Jared talk with Chris Keith about the historical Jesus, and how scholars approach the gap between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of the Gospels. They explore why the Gospels themselves raise questions about modern ideas of history, how different methods have tried to reconstruct Jesus, and why certainty can be elusive. Together, they invite listeners to approach both the Bible and their faith with greater humility, recognizing that asking honest questions doesn’t have to diminish meaning, and can actually deepen it.
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Pete: You're listening to The Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared: And I'm Jared Byas.
Pete: Hey folks, we wanna give a quick reminder about our April class, “Is This The Apocalypse?” with Dr. Robyn Whitaker.
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Pete: On today's episode, we're talking about the historical Jesus with Chris Keith.
Now, Chris is a scholar of New Testament and early Christianity,
Jared: And if you've ever wondered, you know, what really happened when it comes to the life and times of Jesus, and what do scholars think about how that interacts with what we have in our Bible? This is the episode for you, so let's get into it.
Chris: I think we can know a lot about the historical Jesus.
I think that we can ask a lot of questions that we can get some answers to, and we might have more confidence in some of those answers than others. But I think the important thing is that you have to have the humility to say, ‘I just don't always get the answers that I so desperately want.’ The gospel authors were not just robots that wrote down what happened.
They have something to say and they have something to say because they really believe it.
Jared: All right, Chris, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you.
Chris: Great to be here. Thank you guys for having me.
Jared: Absolutely. All right, now that we've gotten through all of our, our technical issues that we had, that we've, we are saving our audience from. Now Chris is already exhausted.
We haven't even started, right. But we wanna talk about, um, historical Jesus research. And we were talking just a minute ago about how, for a lot of our listeners, even that phrase may be new, historical Jesus. Like what kind of Jesuses are there and why is there a historical Jesus? Maybe just start by unpacking that phrase, and it has a long history that maybe scholars assume, but might be new for listeners.
Chris: Right. So I think the general meaning of the phrase historical Jesus is the, the first century, you know, uh, apocalyptic figure. Prophet, prophetic figure who had an active ministry in Galilee and then around Jerusalem. And generally speaking, people mean the historical Jesus as opposed to the Jesus is presented in the Gospels and in the New Testament, which those presentations of Jesus, uh, already reflect, developed thoughts about Jesus, developed beliefs about Jesus, that he is, for example, the Messiah and the Son of God, uh, or any number of other categories.
And I think that when people generally, again, scholars will create 30 other different phrases and qualify this thing to the nth degree.
But generally, what people mean is, if you could have traveled back in time and walked next to Jesus, what would you have experienced? You know, when I, I, I grew up with this show called Superbook and these kids and their little robot used to go back in time to Bible stories and it's kind of really the animating force of historical Jesus research is kind of, if, if you could be, have been there at that point in time, what would you have experienced?
That's the historical Jesus.
Jared: So at some point, scholars, and, and maybe we're gonna ask you to trace the, the history of this development, but at some point scholars said, ‘oh, that Jesus, that you're talking about maybe isn't the exact same as the Jesus we have in our gospels.’ Somebody kind of had that idea, and from there, this, uh, historical Jesus research started.
So can you take us kind of through that history and, and how that came to be?
Chris: Yes, sure. So, uh, you know, four out of five textbooks will tell you that historical Jesus research started in the Enlightenment. That basically when people became aware that people don't really walk on water or something like that, that, uh, you know, scholars were animated by this idea of, okay, so what would've happened?
You know, these, these simple ancient people believe people could walk on water, but we know people really don't walk on water. So what could have happened? And so again, you see the historical Jesus constructed as something that is contrary to or other than what's presented in Gospels.
Now it is true that a massive amount of work on the historical Jesus came out of the Enlightenment and was inspired by the Enlightenment. But every once in a while you'll find people who recognize that the deists were doing what looks like historical Jesus work before that, uh, I would push it much farther than that.
Uh, in the third century already, you've got early church fathers doing what sure looks like historical Jesus research, you know, basically saying, well, what we see in the gospels can't really have been the case, and so this probably would've happened, and I would even push it back further. I think that, you know, the, the difference between what you would've experienced next to Jesus and what people later came to believe as a core feature of John's Gospel in the first century.
So, uh, you know, I think that it has really ancient roots much earlier than the enlightenment.
Pete: So, so, um, let's say the problem of the historical Jesus is a very old one.
It's not something just invented by people who hate God.
Chris: Yes. Uh, I've said in print several times that, uh, you know, I think this is a common, really common misperception because, uh, you know, the idea that Jesus was a man has been core to Christian faith from the very beginning.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Uh, you know, the ones, the ones that thought that he only appeared as a man were eventually labeled heretics.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Chris: So the idea that something happened in space and time that could have been observed by the contemporaries is as much a part of the faith tradition, is it, is that, you know, the mean atheist scholars who are trying to use the faith tradition against itself.
Jared: So, but, but there, at some point there was, scholars used some, some methodologies to start kind of sifting through to be able to determine and say these are, this is more of probably what the historical Jesus was about as opposed to in this particular gospel or in this particular way.
So when did, and how did that develop?
Chris: Well, there are a whole bunch of different ways that they do it. Sometimes you just start with the presupposition of antisupernaturalism. So we, we, you start with the idea that supernatural things don't happen and then that kind of becomes your guiding force.
There are people who, uh, you know, are, will do linguistic gymnastics to say Jesus must have spoken Aramaic. So anything that we can kind of reconstruct an Aramaic was probably original.And then the, the real, uh, powerhouse method was the criteria of authenticity, which was a set of kind of logical assumptions about how things must have been that really functioned like a sieve or when, when I was a kid, there was this Play-Doh thing where you put the Play-Doh in the top and then squeeze the thing down, and then a new shape would come out at the bottom.
Jared: Yeah.
Chris: And that really is how the criteria work with ideas.
You know, you filter something into the top and whatever comes out of the bottom, uh, is historical Jesus material and the thing that separates the gospels as the thing that goes in the top. And, you know, individual sayings or ideas about Jesus as the, the little nuggets that come out the bottom are logical assumptions.
Like one of 'em is the criterion of multiple attestations. And this criterion, the general idea is if something happens in more than one independent source. So if you have something like the Last Supper that occurs in all of the gospels, but it also occurs in Paul, okay, the more sources it's in, the more likely it is to have been true.
So it's kind of logical assumptions like that that ends up, that end up serving as a sieve for the gospel tradition. And then scholars have different arguments about kind of what comes out at the bottom, but whatever's left at the bottom is what you use to build up the historical Jesus and recreate the historical Jesus.
Pete: Find what is authentically historical, right?
Chris: Authentic. Yes. Authentic. And, and this, uh, it, it is, it's important, I think, at least for the people that are kind of further into this discussion, to know that that word authentic meant something very, very specific to the people who started using it in the fifties in Germany,
Pete: Uh-huh,
Chris: It meant basically the real Jesus, completely devoid of early Christian interpretation. So what they thought they were getting back to was the real McCoy, not completely separate from what they thought they were, you know, putting through the sieve and getting out of the process, getting out of the gospel tradition was early Christian belief.
So they really did think, you know, that, that later on people, people all the time today say, well, but we know that you can't really do that. But they thought you could. And they explicitly say it.
Jared: Mm-hmm. So, uh, wait, let me make sure I understand what you were, what you just said is, in the, in the fifties, this methodology took on, uh, a, what's the right word?
A, really technical function where they thought if we put the gospel stories through this filter on the other side, we are pretty sure, certain, that we're gonna get the historical Jesus out of it.
Chris: The words of one scholar, to the thing itself. I go behind all Christian interpretation to the thing itself.
They believe they were getting to Jesus, not just to the earliest portrayal of him. Uh, this method came out of really, uh, form criticism as it was developed by Bultmann and before him, Martin Dibelius, these two German scholars, but Bultmann and Martin Dibelius were really interested in finding the earliest version of a saying.
So, you know, you might have a saying of Jesus that appears in two or three different forms in different gospels, and they're trying to get back to the earliest version of that saying. But for them, this was a linguistic endeavor. It was Bultmann’s students who came along and said, actually we can use this to find, to get back beyond sayings to the person.
The historical Jesus. And they did think, they thought it was only possible in just a small handful of ways, but they really did think that's what they were getting to.
Pete: Mm-hmm. Could, could we, um, I mean, flushing this out a little bit, there have been different searches for the historical Jesus, different ways of doing it.
And, um, again, this, this, this, I, I don't want this to get esoteric, but there are different sort of assumptions being made and, what, which I might suggest how sometimes haphazard disappears to people, and I have to admit for myself as more of a Hebrew Bible scholar, sometimes I think really I, it, it seems a, I mean, I don't think we have the historical Jesus in the four gospels.
I don't think that, but it's like sometimes we have these assumptions and we overlay them and stuff, but maybe just. you know, the quests, right? May, maybe, maybe we can look at these. What are they, three quests for the historical Jesus. Or four?
Chris: As typically portrayed, I mean, the quests as they're normally portrayed is that the first quest came to an end with, uh, a book called, that was actually in German, byAlbert Schweitzer, and it was translated into English as The Quest for the Historical Jesus. And that's where the whole discipline gets its name. Uh, and Schweitzer pretty much brought the first quest, which was mainly just antisupernaturalism to an end. Not, not completely. I mean, there were some brilliance there, but uh, and then Bultmann was responsible for what scholars called the No Quest, which was, Bultmann’s impact was such that everybody gave up.
They thought you can't get to it. And, and Bultmann, I could, it was actually Bultmann’s students, Ernst Käsemann and others who came along after him. And they used the exact same methods as Bultmann, but they believed that in rare little cases we can get little nuggets and we can use those nuggets to build up the historical Jesus.
Pete: Okay.
Chris: And, and by and large, that was what was called the second quest or the new quest. And by and large, that new Quest methodology rolled straight into the third Quest. The Jesus seminar used it. The Evangelicals participating in what's called the Third Quest, which was really at its heyday in the eighties and nine 1980s and 1990s.
They used the same methodology. The only thing that was different was that, namely, there were a bunch of believers who were also participating, right. But also there was a bunch of media attention, but methodology in terms of how you're sifting through the gospels to find those little nuggets did not change between the No Quest and the so-called Third Quest.
Pete: There, there are, I, I'm sure there are people listening who might not know, you know, a lot of the technical language, but they may have heard of the Jesus seminar.
Chris: Right.
Pete: So, and you just mentioned that. Could you just explain how that fits into this whole history? That was a very popular thing. It was in the news and stuff like that, so.
Chris: Right.
The, the Jesus seminar was exceedingly popular and arguably the best, uh, media relations that biblical studies as a discipline has ever had. I mean, it was, uh, it, it was Robert Funk and, uh, there are still a lot of people alive today who participated in the Jesus seminar. It got a lot of media attention.
I think it was in Time Magazine. It was on the news all the time. There was a cottage industry of believers responding to the Jesus seminar with their own versions of it, you know, riding the coattails in, in terms of their book sales. Uh, but the Jesus seminar basically was a response to, in my opinion, uh, the rise of evangelicalism and Evangelicalism's influence in scholarship.
And it was really kind of an anti that. So it was popularizing the idea of the historical Jesus, you know, at the exact same time as, uh, you know, megachurches were exploding all over the country. So you were kind of, it, it, I have to take my hat off to him because, uh, they were really geniuses in terms of what they did with the media and they did a really good job of it.
The scholarship in general was very poor and uh, really came straight outta the 1950s. Uh, but you did have people, like there was a scholar there named John Dominic Crossan, who was kind of brilliant in his own way.
Pete: Yeah.
Jared: Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah. Well, and maybe the way you've kind of framed it, 'cause this is kind of me growing up. That would've been exactly how it was, uh, you know, being evangelical. It was, these guys are picking apart the Bible and trying gospel to, like, they're smarter than God and they're gonna reconstruct all this.
So it does, it raises the question. Yeah.
Chris: It's their Jesus.
Jared: Yeah.
Chris: They're reclaiming Jesus and, and I think they understood it explicitly as this, they are reclaiming Jesus from, you know, what they would've considered the zealots. This is sober real research into Jesus, and we will ride the exact same kind of, uh, emotions as the people who wanna protect him.
Jared: But from a scholarship perspective, I could see the argument or the question from a more conservative or traditional faith stance to say, why don't historians just read the gospels and assume that the gospels are giving us the historical Jesus? Isn't it the burden of proof on scholars? Because it seems like the common sense way to do it is in, you know, whenever we read about Julius Caesar, we're sort of assuming that it's portraying the real Julius Caesar.
The burden of proof is on other people to show that that's not the case. So from a scholarship perspective, why do we need to reconstruct Jesus and not just take the gospels of face value? '
Chris: Because of the gospels.
Jared: Those darn, the pesky gospels themselves.
Pete: And with that, we're done. Thanks folks for tuning in.
Chris: Yeah. Uh, I'm being serious, because of the gospel. Yeah. You know, I grew up in a conservative, uh, household and, uh, you know, and certainly what would've been broadly defined as kind of the mega church evangelical traditions. It’s what I, I, I grew up in, and I think that the idea that you just read the gospels and affirm whatever's there is born out of, uh, that faith commitment from the start that reads the gospels and frankly, all of the Bible, against what it's actually trying to do.
In other words, and you know, Pete's, Pete's done his own work in this uh, field, but they. The decision about what the gospels are and what they're trying to do and trying to tell their audience and what type of history that it's trying to communicate is settled before you ever get there. Where most of most faithful readers in the conservative tradition, they're not really thinking about those.
They've already decided on them, they are usually in faith communities where that doesn't get challenged. And the biggest thing, you know. In the church traditions I grew up in, there was always this boogeyman professor at liberal colleges that was gonna destroy your students' faith. And I always thought, if, if it only takes one semester to destroy your faith, what in the world did you send them with?
But, uh, but also it's not that, it's the gospels themselves, they will outright tell you that's not what they're trying to do. I don't know a clearer place in this than in the gospel of John when at the beginning, when Jesus goes to the temple and predicts the destruction of the temple, and the author of the Gospel of John straight out tells you.
He wasn't talking about the temple, he was talking about his body, but we didn't know that until after the resurrection.
Jared: Yeah.
Chris: John is telling you straight up what I think about truth. Truth with a capital T changed after the resurrection experience, which means had you been standing next to Jesus when he said that, you would not have understood what he was really talking about.
So even on the gospel's own terms. They're not trying to tell you what we popularly think of as quote unquote what really happened.
Pete: But did Jesus say that? It doesn't matter how it was understood. And that's the issue really with the historical Jesus. What did he say? What did he do?
Chris: What did he think about himself?
Pete: What did he think, and what's self knowledge? And people have all sorts of ideas about that, right?
Um, help us with, maybe get into more specifics about the gospels and that lead, I mean, very reasonable people to say it's really hard to recover historical Jesus. We have to almost try to reconstruct a historical Jesus. But what is it about the gospels that do that?
Chris: Well, I think that if, if you zoom out to, you know, the 30,000 foot view, I think that the gospels are frustrating and fascinating, uh, on this issue precisely because they do think that something happened in space and time that was observed by people.
This is not some docetic version of Jesus. They believe things happened to the man. What's in Jesus' body?
Pete: What's, what's Docetic? Jared doesn't know what that means.
Chris: What came to be defined as a heresy in early Christianity that said that Jesus just seemed to be a man, but he wasn't really a man. You know that, that, so people around him thought he was a man, but that was just a trick,
He wasn't really, he, of course he couldn't have been. He, he was a God.
Um, but the gospels don't think that. The gospels think that Jesus had a body, that things happened to that body, and that he was a real man in space and time, whatever else he was. And I would also push the idea that, on my reading of the gospels, no one around him thought those more developed things until later.
They tell you, we didn't think those things until later. But they're, they're, so, the gospels are frustrating because they make historical claims and they mean to make historical claims, but they don't answer them. The way that we do, you just use the idea of, um, you know, what did he really say? We all grew up in a time where if you wanted to know what Guns N Roses really said in this song, you could go pull the lyrics out of the cassette tape, you know?
And, and check.
Jared: Right.
Chris: And so there's this idea that somehow we can get down to the bottom of this and figure out what really happened. And that is the same thing that animated a lot of historical Jesus research, is trying to figure out what really happened. And we just don't get that kind of thing.
Pete: I mean, that's one thing that they're, they're talking, the gospels are written from a post-resurrection perspective.
Chris: Absolutely.
Pete: Right. I mean, regardless of what people. and regardless of what people think about resurrection, that's irrelevant. It's, they're written after that, in, in light of that belief, right?
So, um, but I would imagine too, what raises a question would be just the plain old differences between the gospels and how they tell the story. I mean, I mean if, if you could, you could just take all four gospels, lump them into one big one that was tried right in the second century and it's like that, that's not working.
'Cause you have Jesus going to two opposite places after the same miracle or something. And that, that raises questions and, and I think alert people's minds. What the heck's going on here? I mean, are we reading history or just what is it, you know, and, and how, and can we get to where did Jesus really go after this miracle, after this event or after this speech?
Chris: Yeah. And, and I mean, ultimately the answer is, I don't know. And I don't trust people who think they do know the answer to that question, but that doesn't stop anybody including us from asking and trying to answer it. Uh, you know that I think one of the interesting things about the discussion is, you know, I, I don't ever remember being told this, but I remember growing up with the idea that somewhere along the line, like there was a stenographer in Jesus' group that was writing down everything that he said.
And so when you finally start reading the gospels for what they are and notice all these differences, and not just the fact that. You know, there's geographical matters. Uh, there's, uh, there's also, you know, different portrayals of the same event. You know, was, were the temptations this long, drawn out thing with this conversation between Jesus and Satan, or was it, you know, in Mark, he just went out in the wilderness.
Or you know, uh, was he born in Bethlehem according to these two, or was he, maybe not. And we don't say anything about it according to the other two, but it's also the fact that somewhere along the line, they seem to be in dialogue with each other. Uh, John has Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane say, what am I supposed to say that this cup would pass?
You know, no, I'll never, I would never say that. Well, that's precisely what Mark has him say. So somewhere along the line, it's not just that. They're different versions, but they seem to be saying, no, no, no. That's not what he meant. This is what he meant.
Jared: Well, and I, I think that's an important point because again, whenever you're reading some of the older scholarship, there can be a bit of a vibe that it's, oh, these kind of dummies, they, they were doing this as history, but they weren't very good at it.
And so they have these contradictions. And then as you kind of mature, you realize, oh, maybe they are intentionally crafting these for different purposes in different communities and other things.
Chris: I think that in gospel scholarship it is particularly pronounced, but it's true elsewhere in biblical scholarship that we serially underestimate the imaginative and creative abilities of biblical authors.
Pete: That's a big statement right there. I mean, I totally agree with you. I just know that there are people who might be clutching at their heart at this moment, wondering if they're gonna survive that. You know, it's just that, that's the hard part, right? Because it's like imagination has to be there, you know?
I mean, it's clearly, it's there, but it, it renders, it renders historicity of relatively minor importance when, I'm gonna say a mouthful here. When Fundamentalism has bought into the Modernist Certainty Project, and you can actually get a handle on objective historical truth. The Gospels don't seem to support that.
Chris: And the problem is, as I suspect you guys would agree, but at least in my perspective, it's not that you don't get that in the Gospels or the Bible, it's that you don't get it anywhere.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Chris: The gospels in the Bible are subject to the exact same constraints of human knowledge as every other topic.
And you don't remember the past as anything other than yourself. And if you're going to remember it as yourself, the only way that it has any meaning at all is if you use your imagination to project what things could have been like. So that the, the, I think that you're right that underneath a lot of this, uh, conservative reaction to something like the quest for the historical Jesus is, is that it bumps up against their idea of inspiration.
That what we see in the Bible must have been exactly what happened. But whatever else the Bible is, it's not, it's not less than a human project. And humans remember things with their imaginations. It's, and, and it's not that that's that, uh, taints it, it's that that's how it gets through at all.
Pete: Right, right.
Chris: I, I should say on the flip side, you know, on the flip side, there's people, there are people who say, oh, well, if what you're saying is true, there, there's no such thing as history. We can't ask any historical questions. No. That's not what that means either.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Chris: What it means is that you have bought into the exact same certainty project that you're trying to tear down.
Jared: Right? Right.
Chris: What you, what you like is the fact that you can use this weapon against the people that you don't like, but. I say a plague on both your houses. That's not the game that the gospels are playing.
Jared: Right. And well, that, that brings me to this question you said earlier about the history, and I think what for people, if you come from a more progressive stance on the Bible, you can get your arms around, well, they're trying to tell you, uh, fables, they're trying to tell you these stories with a, they're not trying to tell you history, and you can come from the more conservative, which is they're trying to tell you exactly what happened.
And what's, I think trips everybody up is what you said earlier. It's not any of those things that they're trying to do some kind, they're making historical claims, but they're doing it from a certain perspective. So how do we navigate not ending up on one side of that ditch or the other?
Chris: It's, well, I don't think it's a ditch, but I know what you're saying.
But you know, one of the things, this is very boring, but one of the things you do is just, read the texts and see what claims they make for themselves. You know, I, I used to teach my students all the time, uh, you know, there are texts in the Bible where the text itself does not think this happened in space and time.
Uh, David's parable, uh, or, uh, sorry, Nathan's parable of the ewe lamb to David. Uh, he does not claim this happened in space and time. I mean, it did kind of, he's making a point about what David did, right.
Jared: Right.
Chris: But you know, the texts have parables that are supposed to be just stories. You know, the, the story of the prodigal son is just a story.
Um, but then there are other claims. Jesus died. He was crucified by the Romans outside of Jerusalem during Passover week. In my opinion, the authors really believe that. They believe that that happened in space and time. That's not just a story. Alright. Then there are other texts. I mean, I'm, I'm outta my depth here, but on, for example, Jonah, I genuinely don't know whether the author of Jonah expects the reader to believe that this happened in space and time.
Or we do just a story.
Pete: We do, we do. The answer is no. No. The author definitely did not. Yeah. Anyway, got that cleared up. Thank you.
Chris: Yeah, thanks. There we go. So, you know, I think part of the problem is that those of us who come out of conservative backgrounds, we think that the Bible is one thing.
And one of the most important first steps that we have, either toward or away from faith in this regard, is to realize that the Bible is many things.
Pete: Yeah. And, and I think one lesson here maybe for people to sort of latch onto is that it's the gospels themselves that are at least partly responsible for, you know, for, for, um, I'm gonna put this the right way, not for questioning history, but for questioning that this is history in our contemporary sense of the word. It's a very different kind of writing
Chris: That, uh, that is a hundred percent correct. And that is probably, the core issue is that what the gospels think that they're doing in portraying the past is not what we think we're doing in checking for accuracy.
Pete: Yeah. To me, that's exactly the issue that we come down to. And it's a matter of not imposing modern assumptions onto an ancient text. Even though we want to do that.
Chris: Because you asked the ‘what really happened’ question to John about Jesus's statement about the temple. John, what really happened?
Pete: Yeah.
Chris: What? What did Jesus really, what was he saying? John's answer is, well, when I was standing right next to him, I thought it was one thing. Then later I came to believe he was saying something else. And so what's true, what's historical truth is that Jesus was gonna be raised. That's, that's what John thinks is historical truth.
And the statement about the temple being destroyed. And in three days he'd raise it again. That by all accounts in that narrative, everybody around Jesus misunderstood. That was like, um. I always think of it as the Wizard of Oz. Uh, you know, it's in, it's in black and white, and then it becomes colorized.
Pete: Okay. Yeah.
Chris: And so it's, it's not, it's not that the, the black and right was wrong because from John's perspective, Jesus did say that, but it's not the fullness, it's not the full truth. What Jesus really meant was something else, and that example, which is only one, completely breaks apart the idea that we're gonna get back to what really happened because on the gospel of John's terms, if we got back to what really happened, we will have missed the truth.
Pete: Yeah. You know, um, John Behr, uh, the Orthodox theologian, um, I forgot the name of the book. It is, it is about all this stuff, and he says. The gospels are written from a post-resurrection perspective. We're not to find in it what we want to look for for the historical Jesus. And Jared, remember Luke Timothy Johnson, we read his book together, uh, for a book club years ago, The Real Jesus.
He says the same thing. He says, probably the historical Jesus is unrecoverable in our sense of the word historical, but what we do have is testimonies of Jesus. Which are in, of, in and of themselves valuable, let's say historical kinds of, um, not that it proves anything but someone's impression of Jesus is a historical thing to look at. And that's sort of what the gospels do.
Chris: And it's important, uh, based on earlier, our earlier conversation, Johnson's book was a response to the Jesus Seminary.
Pete: Yes, absolutely. He didn't like it at all. Yeah,
Chris: No, he did not like the Jesus Seminary. But you know, the, one of the things that I've come across in teaching and also speaking in church contexts and general people who send me emails saying they don't like my books is that they think that you're taking something away from them.
When you have this conversation, they feel like, and, and if, if they perceive you as being on their side of the church aisle, it's particularly, uh, disturbing to them because you know those godless atheists, they can say whatever they want about Jesus, but you're supposed to be on our side. How could you say that?
One of the things that I've always tried to remind people of is you never had that to start with. You just thought that you did. And furthermore, people knew these things all the way back. All the way back then they thought these things, the Christian faith as it has trudged along through these many centuries has always been like this. You just now figured it out.
Jared: But the, I'm glad you went there. 'Cause I think that's really important. There does seem to be a shift needed in how we conceive of faith, whenever we start going down this road. We get a number of people who, they're fine with the Hebrew Bible getting messed with in terms of the historicity.
It's like, yeah, that's all fine and good. 'Cause that was a long time ago. And you know what? My faith doesn't really rest on that. Yeah. But the resurrection of Jesus, that we got, we got historical fact, right?
Like that is, the New Testament is, but without that, I think it does require some shifting. So you said church context. How can we reframe? 'cause you said. This isn't new. This is going back a long way. But when I think back to the faith tradition of the 300’s and 400’s and that it is decidedly different than it is now in the sense that for a lot of people, their faith rests on an inherent Bible telling them the fact about Jesus's resurrection.
And if you start to mess with that, it really does mess with their entire sense of faith.
Pete: System of existence.
Jared: So yeah, if we, if we pull that card from the house of cards. There are certain houses of cards that will, that will fall apart. But I'm hearing us say, which I firmly believe, there is a way to construct your faith where the whole thing doesn't fall apart when you ask those questions.
So how do you navigate that when you're talking to people so that faith isn't so fragile?
Chris: Well, part of it is to remind them. Fragility is the wrong way to think about faith. The, the problem is that they want to have a confidence that they never should have had in the first place. What, what in reality, they, they think they know.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Chris: And that's what they think that you're taking away from them. That, that they knew that this was the case and now they're confused and they're not so sure. But that's, in my opinion, that's the right posture in the first place. We're not sure. We don't know. Paul himself says, we know now in part, we’ll know then in full that partial knowledge is not just part of the faith project, it's part of the human project.
It's not by coincidence that the, the most staunchly Calvinistic contexts are also the most staunchly inerrants. You know, there's a confidence that both of those theological categories, you know, the idea that I know exactly what God is like and I know exactly what truth is in this text.
And they feed off each other. And, uh, what's always struck me as odd as somebody who didn't, who grew up in church, but not in the reformed tradition. Is that there's an insistence that you know what the text is and-
Pete: Oh yeah.
Chris: You know, Pete and I, watch this, scholars do this all the time. There's a mental gymnastics that gets done to make the text say what you want it to say.
Just ask somebody who is a staunch believer in inerrancy, whether God made David take the census or Satan made, God made David take the census. Who did it?
Pete: Yeah.
Chris: And they will force a solution that will hold their view of the Bible intact. And that is that posture is forcing the text to be and forcing God to be from their perspective.
Who they want him to be. Who they're comfortable with.
Pete: They need him to be. They need him to be this.
Chris: It is not submitting to the text, it is not letting the text or in this construct, letting the God behind the text change who you are, which is, as I read, what the Jesus followers were about is what we're supposed to be doing.
Pete: Yeah.
Chris: So there's a fundamental posture of like, do you get to define who God is or does God?
Jared: Well, the great irony is though, that's exactly what those in that tradition would lob at Bible scholars.
Pete: Because they're both stuck in that same modernist mindset.
Jared: Right. I would say it's scholars who are trying to make God out to be in your own image. You're making God the way you want to be. You're messing with the Bible.
Pete: And that's sort of missing the point.
Chris: In the very very least we can say, we all do this. Because we cannot think of God otherwise. There's no way that think of God outside of our own existence,
Pete: But but the, but the key, Chris, I think for so many people is gonna be, it's not just ‘we all do this.’ That all includes the writers of the Bible itself.
Chris: Of course.
Pete: And of course we see this throughout the Hebrew Bible with different takes on things. And you know, Chronicles has a different view of history than Samuel, Kings. And time had passed and there was reflection, and they told a story differently.
The gospels tell the story differently, even if they're interdependent. And, and as, as they certainly seem to be, they're still intentionally telling the story differently. You know, the gospels differ, they differ intentionally. Matthew said, I'm gonna change this for Mark, or add something from Mark if that's in fact what happened.
Chris: Or disagree.
Pete: Or disagree. Exactly.
Chris: I mean, when I worked in, when my first job, uh, basically, was all these issues cost me that job way or another. You know, one of the things that my research was dealing with at the time was that, you know, Mark believes that Jesus, uh, that Jesus was a carpenter, an artisan.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Chris: And Matthew believes that Jesus's father was one. So in the very least, Jesus came from that stock. And as soon as Jesus starts teaching in a synagogue, he gets kicked outta the synagogue. Then he never steps foot in a synagogue again. He gets thoroughly rejected in Mark and Matthew. He gets thoroughly rejected as a synagogue teacher.
And one of the things that I was looking at was when Luke comes to tell this story, there's conflict, but, but Luke completely removes, tells the exact same story and completely removes the identification of Jesus as a carpenter and he gets kicked outta the synagogue. But it has nothing to do with who Joseph is or the rest of his family.
Jared: Hmm.
Chris: Luke, in my opinion, is looking at Mark and saying, no, Jesus, Jesus didn't get kicked out because he wasn't qualified, and Luke puts him in a synagogue, the very next story.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Chris: So Luke's like, they disagreed with him because he was a powerful teacher, not because they questioned whether he was a teacher.
Pete: So, so there, there, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they're, they're crafting a story, a, a perspective on Jesus.
Chris: Yes.
Pete: The question, I mean, I know people who would say, yeah, I basically believe that. However, yeah, there's still a historical core to this mm-hmm. That we can access. Right. And I think what I'm hearing you say, correct me, Chris, um, yeah, that's, those are questions worth thinking about and looking into if we can, but maybe we can't, we will not be able to arrive at that one Jesus, we know exactly what he said and did and what he did and where he did it. And when he did it.
Chris: It's a, it, it is a, a confidence that we can seek, but we can't attain, in my opinion. And that doesn't mean it's not worth seeking. Uh, I think and we have to remember that historical knowledge is not a zero sum gain.
The fact that you can't get everything doesn't mean that you can't get anything.
Pete: Right. Right.
Chris: And so, you know, I think we can know a lot about the historical Jesus. I think that we can ask a lot of questions that we can get some answers to, and we might have more confidence in some of those answers than others.
But we also have to recognize that the questions that we ask of the historical Jesus aren't all created equal, so to speak.
Jared: Mm-hmm.
Chris: You know, it's one thing to say, it's one thing to say, uh, you know, do, can we have scholarly confidence that Jesus died on a hill outside Jerusalem, crucified by the Romans.
Yeah. I think that there's, Ithink there's really good reason to think that the reason the gospels think that is because it really happened.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Chris: In time and space. Now, did the transfiguration happen in time and space?
Pete: Mm-hmm.
Chris: That's a different question.
Pete: Or did Jesus walk on water in time and space and calm a storm?
Chris: Doesn't make it a less interesting or less important question, but the, but what we can say about it as historians, as scholars, is not just limited, but we can't ultimately answer those questions outside of bringing other truth in. Right? And this is where I think Luke Timothy Johnson actually makes a good point that not all truth is historical.
And so people bring these things. Do I think it's illegitimate for somebody to say, I believe Jesus could have walked on water? Look, the world's a big world. Sure. There's a bunch of stuff that I don't know about.
Jared: Right.
Chris: But I think you have to, I think the important thing is that you have to have the humility to say, I just don't always get the answers that I so desperately want.
Pete: And, and something that's in, I mean, again, this is gonna be triggering for some people, but the fact that there's a story in the Bible of Jesus doing X, Y, or Z doesn't automatically necessarily mean that he did X, Y, or Z.
Chris: That's right. That's right.
Pete: The example you've been giving from the beginning of John's gospel and that sort of thing.
Chris: It is more complicated than that. I mean, the claims of the gospels themselves, I mean, if anything else, I hope that people realize that the gospel authors were not just robots that wrote down what happened.
Pete: Right.
Chris: They have something to say. And they have something to say because they really believe it.
Pete: And so the, to get those beliefs across the depth of their faith, they will tell the story in a certain way that accentuates that.
Chris: Unapologetically. John tells you at the end of his gospel, Jesus did a lot of other things that don't appear in this gospel.
These were written that you may believe that he is the Christ and the son of God. John makes no bones about the fact he's not trying to tell you what really happened. He's trying to make you believe Jesus is the Christ.
Pete: Mm-hmm. That's his goal. Yeah.
Jared: So, as we, as we wrap up our time, you said there are, just because we can't get to everything, doesn't mean we can't get to some things.
Is there from a historical, uh, Jesus research point of view, are there things that scholars broadly agree with? You mentioned earlier, yeah, it seems like Jesus was crucified by the Romans in this. Are there a couple of others that scholars kind of hang their hat on that's like, well, yeah, I mean, we we're fairly confident.
Again, we're never gonna have the certainty 'cause that's just not how historical research works. But are there things that, uh, scholars do kind of say, yeah, we're, we're getting to a higher level of confidence?
Chris: Right. Of course there's always disagreement, so it's not, it's not gonna be like a complete consensus or something like that.
But I think that most scholars are convinced that Jesus had some type of association with John the Baptist probably, uh, was part of his movement for a little while. Uh, whatever other historical circumstances surround that, uh, most scholars believe that Jesus was some type of a teaching figure, or at least in dialogue with other teachers.
I think it's hard to, uh, I’ve written two books on Jesus as a teacher, I think we can know a lot about Jesus as a teacher.
Pete: Parables as well?
Chris: Parables, yeah. That he taught in parables, that the Kingdom of God was the hallmark of his teaching. You know, people always mention that he actually taught the most about money, uh, somehow that always gets cast aside a little bit in the sermons.
But they, you know, uh, his death, certainly the movement around him, and ironically, a lot of scholars have no problem with something like the idea that there were literally, literally 12 disciples. There were probably more, but there probably was a special group of 12 because it makes so much sense of the kind of apocalyptic or end times overtones of so many of his teachings.
So a lot of times it's kind of what of this, what of this general picture, uh, makes sense of the rest of it. And I think that has been the trend in Jesus studies has been to say, okay, what kind of things, you know, Dale Allison speaks of the gist, what, what are the types of broad statements?
It's one thing to say, did Jesus get in arguments with other teachers? Almost certainly pretty confident in that. Did he have this one specific argument in Mark 12? That's harder to answer,
Jared: Yeah. Right. That's a great way of saying that. And, um, a good way to kind of end our conversation.
So thank you Chris, for, for jumping in. I think it's gonna be a good episode for, for people who, again, I'm glad that you could do it. Kind of, kind of rock the boat a little bit on some of these questions. So appreciate your pastoral approach to it.
Chris: Well, if you get any hate mail, make sure to give 'em a wrong email address for them.
Jared: For sure.
Pete: No, we handle the odd stuff in house. That's okay. But we, we appreciate you putting things and, um, and the way that you did and centering it also on the sort of the character of the gospels themselves. I think that's something people walk away with from this episode who are maybe new to this and are a little bit troubled, it's the text itself that drives people in that direction to ask, then, other and bigger questions.
Chris: You know, if you guys would permit me two quick comments. Uh, the thing that led me into historical Jesus studies was that it, it made my faith seem more real. I always didn't trust the Jesus with a bow tied up on top. And when I found out that things were a little bit more complicated and that the text wasn't trying to tell me, what vacation Bible school was trying to tell me.
That the texts themselves were answering and asking other questions. All of a sudden that was animating for me.
Jared: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Chris: I loved that. It was more complicated. I always suspected it was more complicated.
So it is not the case that critical study of the gospels always destroys people's faith.
It does sometimes and sometimes it does both. Um, uh, and finally, if you'll prevent me just a second, 'cause I don't know how many other times I'll get to say it. Pete, you have been a, uh, really important mentor figure in lots of ways for those of us who came out of a similar background, so I just wanna tell you Thank you.
Pete: I appreciate that a lot. Yep. Yeah,
Jared: We'll make sure and cut that outta the episode. I'm glad you got to say it, Chris. I'm just kidding.
Pete: All right, man. Thanks again, Chris.
Jared: Thank you. Thank you.
Chris: Thank you guys.
Jared: Well, thanks to everyone who supports the show. If you wanna support what we do, there are three ways you can do it.
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Outro: You’ve just made it through another episode of The Bible for Normal People.
Don't forget, you can catch our other show, Faith for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People team.
