Tag: bible

My picture of how the gospel authors worked has been overturned

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

Why didn’t this occur to me?

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.

More on the Temple event and the death of Jesus

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

The independence of the gospel of John

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