I just posted a new page to my website, Interpretations of the risen Jesus. I go into the ideas available to the disciples to make sense of Jesus crucifixion and his subsequent “appearances,” as well as questions regarding why they would see Jesus as equivalent to God, how they understood the resurrection when the end times failed to arrive, and how Jesus himself understood his role in God’s plan.
Comments about the page can be made on this post. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Alan
I finished a book, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel (2006), by Jon D. Levenson. This was part of my reading on the topic of resurrection. Although it did not add much to my knowledge of Jesus’ resurrection, being about Jewish views of the concept of the general resurrection, it did cause me to reflect on this idea about a new life after the end times.
I found myself thinking about it in a different way. Previously my thoughts were about whether I can believe in such a thing. I think this is common. People think they need to believe such a a wonderful new life is possible before they can have faith in a God who somehow can make up for all the wrongs and suffering of this life. In other words, if I can’t believe this idea of an eternal life in a new earth in which all wrongs are put right, how can I believe in an all-powerful and loving God?
I now think that is backward. It should go like this: if I believe in God’s love, how can I envision all wrongs being put right? The Judaeo-Christian concept of resurrection, judgment, and eternal life in a renewed earth is about as good a picture as I could come up with.
The starting point is faith in God, the consequence is holding some kind of imaginative picture of how God will work things out in the end. The starting point is not believing in the imaginative picture, with a consequence of faith in God.
It has been an interesting journey researching and thinking about these various topics again. I am somewhat surprised at how some of my views are shifting. More on that later, after I’ve traveled a bit farther down this road.
I just finished revising several pages of the website in line with what I had to say in my last post about how a book by Robyn Faith Walsh overturned my picture of how the gospel authors created their compositions.
This was important because I want to make the strongest case possible for what really happened without relying on contested assumptions. Walsh (and other authors) have put in question the idea that the gospel writers were writing within and for particular communities of early Christians, relying on stories passed down in those communities. Rather, there is evidence the authors were addressing literate audiences, both Christian and non-Christian, and relying heavily on literary sources and tropes of the time.
The biggest change from this was on my page about the execution of Jesus. I deleted the passages about how the narrative of Jesus’ final days showed particular signs of oral transmission, an argument which I now regard as less convincing. I still think a story was handed down orally, but that Mark probably invented many of the memorable details.
While revising that page I also expanded the sections on Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple, adding new material that helped fill out what historical information I think we can take away from this story.
I made change to the page on Jesus as an Historical Person (formerly titled Jesus in History) as well, moving my objections to mythicism–arguments that Jesus was purely mythological and not a real person–to the beginning and clarified some of my points. I did this because mythicism seems to have a large following these days and I wanted to address it up front.
That’s it for the revising, now I can return to my draft of the next page for the site. This one is about the ideas Jesus’ disciples drew from in order to make sense of his death and the “appearances” of Jesus that followed his death. I look forward to sharing it with you.
As always, you can make comments on this blog post regarding the changes I outlined above.
I just finished reading a book by Robyn Faith Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature, and it has overturned one of my key assumptions about the gospels: that they are to some meaningful extent based on oral traditions about the historical Jesus. This suddenly brought me back to where my thinking was about 15 years ago when I last delved into recent works on the historical Jesus: that it is impossible with the materials at hand to say much of anything about Jesus as a real person. We only have evidence for him as a figure in literary works.
At that time the field of gospel studies was showing multiple parallels between the incidents depicted in the gospels and earlier Jewish and Greco-Roman texts, demonstrating at least that the gospel authors borrowed liberally from other textual sources to compose their works. At that point I decided that Jesus as an inspirational figure, whether as real as Mohandas Gandhi or as fictional as Sherlock Holmes, was sufficient for the purpose of living my life.
But I must not have fully absorbed the implications of that, as I still held unto the idea that the gospel writers probably used some oral sources about the real Jesus. They shaped them to fit their purposes and inserted them creatively into their narratives and we can’t easily recover them, yes, but we can make some important educated guesses, can’t we?
I am not sure. What Walsh offered me was a different account of how the literary borrowing worked, based on what we (she, not so much me) know about the production of other literary works at the time. In the “bios,” or lives of notable people, authors usually drew from other written sources and utilized familiar tropes. It was from a video of Walsh speaking about this that I first became aware of the empty tomb trope that I reference in my page on the resurrection.
After reading her book I now have in my mind a different picture of how the gospel authors worked than the one I had long held and been unable to shed. Rather than working within Christian communities to gather and rework oral traditions to advance theological agendas, they read other texts and addressed a wider literate audience not only to advance a theological agenda but to challenge prevailing norms, satisfy curiosity about other cultures, and even to entertain.
The upshot for me is that I want to go back over my writing on this site to date, especially the pages on Jesus and History and the Execution of Jesus, and be even more cautious about my assessments of the likelihood that particular events happened. I have been unsatisfied with my use of the term “near certain” anyway, because even though I tried to qualify it the term still seemed to suggest some degree of unassailability to my conclusions. So I will replace that term with “very likely” in my rewrites.
To my relief, in a video interview released just yesterday Walsh did say she believes at least one fact about the historical Jesus: that he was crucified. So something can be said. I do think we can go beyond that, even if not as far as I hoped. It will be interesting for me to try to sort that out with this new picture in my head.
A final word here that may clarify what I am up to. A friend mentioned to me his (not uncommon) view that accepting the core claims about Jesus is important as a matter of religious faith and not on the basis of tenuous historical findings. I can accept that view, but I am not exploring this topic as part of a search for something to believe in. In large part I am motivated by the hope that both believers and skeptics of Christian claims could at least agree on some points of what Jesus was about, given how our culture is currently riven in large part by efforts to claim the sanction of Jesus for political agendas. The other part of my motivation is my desire to see if my own spiritual orientation–which I have no desire to change, although I am open to it–can fit within Christianity, at least insofar as I understand that term.
As always, my thanks to those of you engaging with what I write here.
Alan
I once again revised the homepage, this time to make it more inviting for readers and less dry. Here’s the new opening:
What did Jesus teach? What did he see as his mission? And what does all this mean for us today?
These are the questions I am aiming to address with this website. The site is a continually updated publication of my views on these topics, using an historical perspective to try to answer the first two questions. I also intend to cover how Jesus was understood in the first few centuries after his death and how that affects views about him today.
I also reordered the rest of the paragraphs to talk about myself before talking about how the pages and posts on the site will work together.
Alan
Today I finally finished my page assessing the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. I cover Paul’s list of appearances in 1 Corinthians, the empty tomb story in the four gospels, and the three gospel accounts of Jesus’ appearances. I published the page this afternoon and invite you to take a look.
Honestly, I did not expect to reach all of the “conclusions” (always tentative) that I did. It is surprising how much a close reading of the scriptures, even those you are very familiar with, may give you a different perspective.
Alan
In a post a few days ago I mentioned that both Luke and John tell the story of Peter returning to the empty tomb to see it for himself, and that it caused me to question whether John knew one at least one of the synoptic gospels, the gospel of Luke. I was working on the assumption that John did not know the synoptics, therefore he and Mark must have been drawing from an independent narrative known to both.
My thinking was this. If Mark did not know the story of Peter returning to the tomb, it couldn’t have been in the earlier narrative. Then how did John know it? He must have gotten it from Luke, therefore John at least knew the gospel of Luke. Right?
Wrong! It occurred to me today that there was a simpler explanation. An early copyist of the gospel of Luke added the one line telling the story of Peter to harmonize it with the story in John. I checked and sure enough, the line (Lk 24:12) is not found in all the early manuscripts. It doesn’t look like there is a consensus on whether it was in the original Luke, but it is certainly possible, and to me likely.
So I wasn’t on my toes when first thinking about this. The good thing is that it did send me looking into more recent research on the independence of John from the synoptics and finding that the experts’ views on this have been changing over the last decade or so. As a result I am being more careful about the idea that John and the synoptics represent independent attestation of an earlier narrative, an example of where my previous knowledge has become outdated.
I didn’t expect to be posting so often, so I hope you don’t mind. I am learning new things as I work on this website, and thought my subscribers would like to follow along and perhaps learn something new themselves.
Over the weekend I was a virtual attendee at the New Insights on the New Testament Conference 2025. I saw four good presentations by outstanding Biblical scholars, and one half a good presentation when the presenter’s internet connection from Europe lagged too much to understand him.
Two of the presentations were particularly relevant to my page on this website about the Execution of Jesus. Paula Fredriksen gave a thorough discussion of the episode of Jesus’ disruption at the Temple. Helen Bond talked about the last 24 hours in the life of Jesus. I was gratified that neither of these presentations conflicted with the findings on my page! I did slightly revise the page and added a bit of new material to it in light of what they had to say.
Helen Cook emphasized that we don’t know for sure that the Jewish council that condemned Jesus was an official gathering of the full Sanhedrin, and that Jesus’ hearing before Pilate was not a formal “trial” in the way we are accustomed to think of them. Pilate could have condemned Jesus simply on the basis of reports about him if he deemed it necessary; he brought Jesus in for questioning to get a better sense of the person he was dealing with.
I thought both points were sound and so revised my page to remove references to the Sanhedrin and to change the word “trial” when it appeared to “questioning” or “hearing.” Small change but I don’t want my page to have even small inaccuracies when I become aware of them.
Paula Fredriksen had a lot to say about Herod’s Temple and how it functioned. She doubted that Jesus would not have been arrested right away if his disruption actually happened, as there were soldiers watching everything from easy vantage points around the court of the nations where the financial transactions were taking place. As the gospel accounts of the incident conflict on when it happened–John moved it way back to the beginning of Jesus’ public life rather than at the end–she regards it as a separate story from the narrative of Jesus’ final days which the gospel authors placed where they did for literary purposes. Specifically, she suggested Mark inserted it between Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and his arrest as a transitional device between Jesus’ conflict with Pharisees in Galilee and his conflict with the high priests in Jerusalem. She said it made more sense for Jesus to be arrested quickly after his entry into Jerusalem to avoid any potential problems before they happened. She also used this to explain why Jesus’ disciples were not also arrested.
I thought that was an interesting suggestion and incorporated some of it into my own discussion of the arrest of Jesus, as you will see if you take another look at the final paragraphs.
Unfortunately, none of the presentations were on the resurrection, which I am currently working on. Yeah, I know I keep promising it will soon be ready to publish, but it is getting close. Stay tuned.
Alan
Well, here I am posting again much sooner than I thought I would.
I changed my mind about something important while researching the gospel accounts of the discovery of the empty tomb. That led me to do some revision of my already published page on the execution of Jesus, so I wanted to let you know about that change and why I made it.
In writing the page on Jesus’ execution I relied on my memory that the majority opinion of Biblical scholars was that the author of the gospel of John did not know the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke), although there was still a lot of dissenters from that opinion. Looking into this the last day or so, it seems a consensus is emerging that John DID know of the synoptics. The upshot is that I should not treat John as an independent source for the events of Jesus’ life and death.
And life after death! The thing that caught me while comparing the gospel accounts of the empty tomb was that Luke and John say Peter inspected the tomb but Mark and Matthew do not say this. I could not think of a reason why Mark would neglect that story if he knew of it, or why both Luke and John would insert it–unless John knew the gospel of Luke.
Thus a hurried search of current academic opinion on John’s independence, and my realization that I had relied too heavily on my assumption that there were two sources for the story of his execution. I revised that page but found that this new insight did not change my main conclusions.
By the way, I am about two-thirds of the way through a draft of my soon-to-be published page on the resurrection. It’s taking longer than I thought because I keep noticing and discovering new things, so I guess that is a positive.
Onward!
Alan
I was thinking this morning about why I am doing this, spending so much time of late intensely focused on reviewing recent research about Jesus as an historical figure and writing up my evolving views about the subject. It then occurred to me I haven’t explained that anywhere on the website.
So I rewrote the beginning of the homepage again, this time to spell out my motivations. Here is what I added:
My motivations are both personal and political.
On a personal level, I was raised as a Roman Catholic Christian and the teachings and example of Jesus as portrayed in the Christian scriptures are deeply embedded in me. My beliefs about Christianity have altered over time, but I still derive inspiration and guidance from how I understand Jesus. I want to insure that my understanding is well-grounded, and determine how honestly I can consider myself a follower of Jesus.
On a political level, for many years now I have been concerned about the political activities of people who regard themselves as conservative Christians. More recently the rise of Christian nationalism in the U.S., and its hold on many members of the MAGA alliance supporting Donald Trump, is something I want to challenge with better information and understanding of what Jesus actually did and taught.
That is it in a nutshell. I think you deserve to know that as people who have shown enough interest to sign up for my blog, and I think those who take the time to read any of what I’ve written also deserve to know.
Thanks again for your interest and I always appreciation hearing from people.
Alan
Jesus Reconstructed 