gospels – Jesus Reconstructed

The empty tomb, Part 2: final paragraph

Yesterday as I tried to finish writing and get the section about the burial of Jesus’ body posted, it took much longer than I anticipated. By the time I finished it was late in the day and I was tired. Later I realized I had neglected to write up a final, key paragraph. Here it is:

Final paragraph:

The earliest gospel, Mark, states without explanation that only two of the original group of women witnessing the crucifixion saw Jesus’ body being laid in the tomb. As the gospel was likely written decades after these events, during or after a devastating war in the Jewish homeland, the two witnesses could have been dead or refugees and unable to verify what Mark alleges about the burial. Matthew followed Mark in stating that only the two Marys witness the burial. Luke asserts that all the women saw the burial. John lists only four people witnessing the crucifixion (three Marys and the beloved disciple) and does not specify who saw the burial. However, only Mary Magdalene returns to the tomb later. The record of who actually saw Joseph bury Jesus’ body in the tomb is thus problematic and open to doubt

The empty tomb, part 2: the burial of Jesus’ body

In this post I start my analysis of the gospel accounts of the resurrection of Jesus, focusing first on the burial of his body.

“He was buried”

Mark’s scene of the women “looking on from a distance” at Jesus’ execution is plausible. (Mk 15:40-41) Crucifixions were public events that Jesus’ disciples could have attended, but fear of arrest would have kept his male disciples away. Women however were expected to be present when someone close to them was dead or dying in order to carry out expected customs such as weeping and singing formal laments. (Corley, 2002: 114-115)

Three of these women are named, as though Mark expects they may be familiar names to some of his reader/hearers. Mary Magdalene makes her first appearance in this passage. Her name suggests she was from Magdala, a fishing village on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee. Mark depicts Jesus’ early ministry as occurring in the area around the sea and describes his first disciples as fishermen, thus Magdalene’s name connects her to the early ministry. (Corley, 2002: 33) Mary the mother of “James the younger and of Joses” is not identified further, but earlier in the gospel Mark gives the same two names to brothers of Jesus and so this Mary may very well be Jesus’ mother. (Corley, 2002: 35) Possibly Mary’s son James is called “the younger” to distinguish him from Jesus’ early disciple James the son of Zebedee. One might question why Mark would not have said outright that this Mary was the mother of Jesus; it’s possible that this was another Mary who had sons with the same names. There is also the question of why he would list Mary Magdalene before her. Each of these details may have something to do with a need to highlight Mary Magdalene, even if it entailed downplaying the presence of Jesus’ mother, because Magdalene presumably played a central role in a tradition Mark was relying on. Mark says nothing to identify Salome; nearly half the women in the ancestral Jewish homeland were named Mary or Salome. (Corley, 2002: 32, 36) Likely Mark knew a woman named Salome was at the crucifixion but did not know anything about her. The abrupt introduction of these women, given Mark’s general lack of interest in women disciples of Jesus, suggests that their presence at the crucifixion may have been well known enough to early Christians that Mark wanted to use them as witnesses to the crucifixion and, more importantly, to the events that followed. (Corley, 2002: 28)

Less plausible is the passage about Joseph of Arimathea, who is otherwise unknown to history, and his interaction with the Roman prefect Pilate. (Mk 15:42-46) If “evening had come” there wouldn’t be enough time for Joseph to make his request to Pilate, the centurion to verify Jesus’ death, and the body removed from the cross and entombed before nightfall. These incidents would have to had occured earlier in the day. This could merely be clumsy writing on Mark’s part; I assume by placing the incident at evening he wanted to emphasize the body was removed before night came and the Sabbath began. Aside from that, I question the source for the story. Certainly Pilate did not talk to the early Christians about it. Joseph could possibly be the source, as Mark describes him as “waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God,” which could hint at some sympathy with Jesus’ disciples that led to later contacts. But this possibility conflicts with Mark’s description of Joseph as a respected member of the Jewish council that unanimously condemned Jesus and delivered him to Pilate for execution. Could Joseph condemn Jesus to death at a nighttime council meeting and the next day be so sympathetic to the Christian movement that he would go “boldly” to Pilate to ask for the body? In addition, the fact that Mark feels the need to explain who Joseph is suggests he did not expect his audience to be familiar with him. In sum, there is little evidence in Mark’s description of Joseph to support the idea that he was the source for the scene with Pilate. Did Mark know Joseph played a role in removing the body because the women recognized him and passed this bit of information down in the Christian community until Mark received it and expanded it into the scene with Pilate? I think it unlikely the women would have recognized him, as Joseph is a depicted as a high status Jew living in Jerusalem and the women are from rural Galilee.

The various problems described above suggest to me that Mark created a short fictional scene with Joseph and Pilate to achieve a few literary goals. First, the scene explains why Jesus’ corpse was removed from the cross, which I regard as a likely event as will be explained below, and does so in a way that legitimizes belief in (and foreshadows) the coming “kingdom of God.” Second, the centurion checking on Jesus provides confirmation that Jesus’ death actually happened. Third, the women witnessing the body being laid in the tomb and the stone being rolled against the door sets the scene for the discovery of the empty tomb when they later return to the location.

Although many commentators have questioned whether Pilate would have consented to the removal of Jesus’ body from the cross, this part of the story is within the realm of plausibility. Jesus’ death is portrayed as taking place during the Passover festival and there is some evidence that Pilate granted such favors on these occasions. (Lüdemann, 2004: 61-62; Allison, 2005: 360-363) A passage in a book by the first-century historian Josephus indicates that prior to 68 C.E. it was common practice for the dead bodies of the crucified to be removed for burial before sunset. (Licona, 2010: 308-309) Rather than having sympathy for the Jesus movement, one or more of the Jewish leaders could have requested permission to remove the body from the cross in order to honor the Sabbath and/or obey the law in Jewish scripture:

When someone is convicted of a crime punishable by death and is executed and you hang him on a tree, his corpse must not remain all night upon the tree; you must bury him that same day, for anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse. You must not defile the land that the Lord your God is giving you for possession. (Deuteronomy 21:22-23)

Their intention would be to avoid defilement of the land, not to give the deceased a decent burial. Pilate could have consented to have the body taken down in order to maintain cooperative relations with the Jewish leaders and to avoid civil unrest while Jerusalem was crowded with Jewish subjects during a religious festival, especially one that commemorated their ancestors’ release from slavery to a foreign nation. Possibly Joseph of Arimathea was a real person known as having been a member of the Jewish council and Mark appropriated his name for verisimilitude in his description of the removal and burial of Jesus’ body. In any event, the exact identity of the person or persons who removed the body from the cross is not as important as its likely removal.

Mark winds up this part of his story by saying that Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses (leaving out mention of her son James for no apparent reason), two of the group of women present, saw where the body was laid. (Mk 15:47) This brings up further questions. Did the other women leave before the body was buried? Were the two Marys the only ones who cared enough to stay to the end? Perhaps the group of women agreed it would be less obtrusive for just two of them to follow the body to the burial place. Yet the tomb seems very near at hand, as Joseph is depicted as taking down the body, wrapping it in a linen cloth, and placing it in the tomb as though this was a set of actions unbroken in time. If that were the case, why would someone have carved a tomb so near to the site of crucifixions? It would not seem to be an appropriate resting place for oneself or one’s family members. The short verse about the two Marys creates a number of problems, but note that it also conveniently reduces the number of witnesses for the body being laid in the tomb to only two (and of course Joseph).

Mark seems to imply that Jesus’ corpse was the only one in the tomb by the way the “young man” later expects the women to recognize “the place they laid him.” (Mk 16:5-6) I am skeptical that this was the case. Jesus was crucified as a rebel against Roman rule, and Pilate would not want to allow any chance for the burial site of such a man to become an inspirational symbol of resistance and thus undercut the warning crucifixion was meant to convey. (Corley, 2002: 113-114, 118) Lüdemann posits that Mark’s story of Joseph of Arimathea placing the body in a tomb was a way of covering up what may have been a cursory and dishonorable burial, such as being dumped in a pit with the corpses of other executed criminals. (Lüdemann, 2004: 59-62) Allison, however, states that “burial caves” were set aside for criminals, which may be the kind of “tomb” Mark is referring to. (Allison, 2005: 263) I expect that such caves were meant for the disposal of multiple corpses, not “hewn out of rock” for the disposal of a single criminal’s remains.

To sum up my analysis of Mark in this section, I do think an oral tradition was behind Mark’s narrative in these passages. The tradition probably came from the women witnessing Jesus’ body being removed from the cross and reporting this to other disciples. Mary Magdalene was prominent in the tradition for some reason, which I will discuss below. The women’s report would be an adequate explanation for the early formulaic tradition, evidenced in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, that Jesus’ body was buried. Burial could be inferred from the fact that the body was removed from the cross rather than being left to rot and be scavenged by animals as was the fate of most crucified criminals. (Licona, 2010: 307) The passages about Joseph of Arimathea, both his interaction with Pilate and his placing Jesus’s body in a tomb, I regard as mostly or entirely fictional. Mark’s literary purposes for adding these embellishments to the story would have been as I outlined above: to provide a reason for the removal of the body that legitimates the expectation of the coming kingdom, to certify that Jesus actually died, and to set up the discovery of an empty tomb.

Matthew, Luke and John, the putative authors of the other three canonical gospels, also present the story of the burial of Jesus’ body, but with variations in the details. A reworking of Mark’s story is in line with how authors of popular-novelistic bioi would handle earlier sources.

Matthew’s passage about the women witnessing the crucifixion is clearly a slightly rewritten version of Mark’s, except that in identifying the women Matthew substitutes “the mother of the sons of Zebedee” for Mark’s “Salome.” (Mt 27:55-56) Possibly Matthew had knowledge that Mark’s Salome was the mother of the Zebedee sons, or alternatively he is describing a different woman he knew to be one of those present. It is also possible Matthew had no idea who Salome was and so substituted someone he thought should be there, the mother of two of Jesus’ closest disciples. Matthew’s handling of Joseph of Arimthea is more cavalier. He changes Joseph from a respected member of the Jewish council anticipating the kingdom of God into rich man who was a disciple of Jesus. This move relieves Joseph from participation in condemning Jesus and heightens Mark’s hint of sympathy with the Christian movement into actual discipleship. In making these changes Matthew shows little concern that Joseph’s identity may have been known to his audience, as it probably would not have been if he were a fictional character invented by Mark. The scene with Joseph and Pilate is highly condensed with the centurion checking on Jesus removed entirely. Matthew also notes that the tomb was “new” and belonged to Joseph, both of which are unlikely. (Mt 27:57-61) Matthew probably intended the details of a rich man with his own tomb to make Jesus’ sole presence in the tomb more credible. But as mentioned above, I think it would be unlikely for someone to build a new family or personal tomb near the site used for crucifixions.

Luke expands the witnesses of Jesus’ death to “all his acquaintances, including the women who had followed him from Galilee,” omitting the names of the women. (Lk 23:49) Earlier in the gospel he depicts women traveling with Jesus and the twelve in Galilee but denigrates their attachment to Jesus by saying they had been cured of “evil spirits” and diseases. He notes Mary Magdalene in particular, saying “seven demons” had been cast from her. (Luke 8:1-3) Apparently Luke had a problem seeing women as disciples on the same level as men, presenting them as susceptible to possession and becoming followers due to gratitude rather than in response to Jesus’ call for discipleship. As for Joseph of Arimathea, Luke explains that “though a member of the council, had not agreed to their plan and action,” clarifying that he was not one of those who condemned Jesus. Like Matthew Luke is trying to fix Mark’s seeming contradiction of Joseph voting for Jesus’ death yet wanting to give his body a decent burial. Again like Matthew Luke condenses the interaction with Pilate and removes the part about the centurion. I regard the similarities to Matthew as due to their mutual recognition of problems with Mark’s account, not Luke’s dependence on Matthew as a source. Unlike both Mark and Matthew, Luke doesn’t mention the stone sealing the tomb. He also moves mention of the arrival of the evening Sabbath from before Joseph’s request until after the burial, a more realistic timeline. He notes the “women” who saw the tomb and where Jesus was laid but again omits any of their names. (Lk 23:50-54) He reveals their identity only later, after the resurrection, naming Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Joanna. (Lk 24:10)

Luke was very likely also the author of the Acts of the Apostles, a canonical Christian scripture narrating the history of the early church after Jesus’ resurrection. A purported speech by Paul in Acts has him talk of Jewish leaders burying the body of Jesus, with no mention of Joseph of Arimathea:

“The people of Jerusalem and their rulers did not recognize Jesus, yet in condemning him they fulfilled the words of the prophets that are read every Sabbath. Though they found no proper ground for a death sentence, they asked Pilate to have him executed. When they had carried out all that was written about him, they took him down from the cross and laid him in a tomb.” (Acts 13:27-29)

This is possibly based on a source other than Mark, as those taking the body of Jesus are the leaders in Jerusalem who wanted him killed, not the more sympathetic Joseph. (Lüdemann, 2004: 59) It is another indication that Joseph may have been a fictional character. Luke does make sure to include the tomb in Paul’s preaching, although this detail is nowhere evident in Paul’s extant letters.

The gospel of John is not as clearly connected to Mark as those of Matthew and Luke are, and there are ongoing debates as to whether he knew the earlier gospels. I will go into that question on a future page, but here I will say that I see signs that John was familiar with at least Matthew and Luke’s gospels, albeit knowing other sources and exercising a lot of creative freedom. There are also signs that this gospel in its original form had been subject to further editing before it reached the version we now have.

John moves the scene of the witnesses to the crucifixion earlier in his narrative and places them “near the cross,” which is less likely than placing them at a distance but allows John to insert a new scene which we will see in a moment. He changes the order of the women, first noting Jesus’ mother explicitly, then a second Mary who is now her sister and “the wife of Clopas” rather then the obscure Salome. Mary Magdalene is listed last. John then mentions that the “disciple whom [Jesus] loved,” a recurring character in his gospel, was nearby and Jesus spoke to his mother and this unnamed disciple. (John 19:25-27) The scene of Jesus talking to them while dying on the cross is implausible, and none of the other gospels mention it. (Corley, 2002: 29) Various symbolic meanings have been hypothesized for this scene, but I am uncertain which if any were intended by John.

After Jesus dies, John describes how “the Jews”—most likely meaning the Jewish leaders—didn’t want bodies left on crosses during the Sabbath, so Pilate has soldiers break the legs of two crucified men to hasten their deaths. The soldiers discover Jesus is already dead and instead of breaking his legs one of them pierces his side with a spear, bringing a flow of blood and water. John insists that a witness gave testimony to this and vouches for his reliability. This reads like an alternative version of Mark’s centurion going to check if Jesus was dead, one in which John underwrites new details with Jewish scriptural passages. (Jn 19:31-37) As in Mark the point seems to be verifying to the reader/hearer that Jesus did die, as well as verifying that these events fulfilled what John regarded as scriptural prophecies.

Only then does John introduce Joseph of Arimathea, who he describes, as Matthew did, as a secret disciple of Jesus. Instead of Joseph removing the body from the cross, Joseph asks Pilate to let him take the body away and Pilate permits it. John’s account fits with my hypothesis that it was actually the Jewish leaders who wanted the body removed from the cross, and that the role of Joseph in the narrative has more to do with the burial of Jesus than the removal of his body from the cross. John then reintroduces the character of Nicodemus, who is mentioned twice earlier in his gospel. (Jn 19:38-39) In his first appearance Nicodemus was identified as a Pharisee and “leader of the Jews” who visits Jesus at night to profess that Jesus is a God-sent teacher. (Jn 3:1-21) Later he defends Jesus’ right to a hearing when the “chief priests and Pharisees” complain that Jesus had not been arrested. (Jn 7:45-52) Both Joseph and Nicodemus are thus members of the Jewish elite who are sympathetic to Jesus but hide it from others elite members, and like the disciples fail to stand by Jesus in the events leading to his death. They give the body an even more respectful treatment than in the other gospels, wrapping it with spices in the linen cloth. As in Mark and the other gospels, John wants to depict a respectful burial rather than a cursory and dishonorable one. They lay the body in a tomb in a garden because it is nearby. (Jn:19:40-42) This makes the scene of the nearby tomb even less plausible as they place the body in a tomb they did not own. John does not mention the women observing the placement of the body in the tomb, although the narrative goes on to make it clear Mary Magdalene knew the location.

My analysis of the burial of Jesus in Matthew, Luke and John reinforces points I raised in my discussion of Mark. To summarize:

Hypothesis: the gospel accounts of the women followers of Jesus who witnessed his crucifixion were based on one or more oral traditions originated by some of the women reporting what they saw to other disciples.

Matthew, Luke, and John all follow Mark in naming women witnesses of the crucifixion without much further identification. This suggests that the names were expected to be familiar and associated with the women present at the crucifixion by the expected readers/hearers of their gospels.

Matthew, Luke, and John all follow Mark in listing Mary Magdalene as one of the witnesses. Matthew and Luke follow Mark in listing Mary, “the mother of James,” while John identifies Mary the mother of Jesus, probably the same woman. Each of the authors list other women witnesses by name or a brief description, such as “Salome” (Mark), “the mother of the sons of Zebedee” (Matthew), “Joanna” (Luke), and Jesus’ aunt, “Mary the wife of Clopas” (John), as though they had independent knowledge of a source or sources naming some of the women who were present.

Hypothesis: Jesus’ corpse was removed from the cross by Jewish leaders for religious reasons and not out of sympathy or respect for Jesus.

There is some disagreement in the texts about who removed Jesus’ body from the cross. Although Luke follows Mark in stating that Joseph removed Jesus’ body, in Acts Luke has Paul say it was the Jewish leaders who did it. Matthew is ambiguous as to whether Joseph removed the body from the cross or took possession of it after it was removed by others. John clearly states the latter.

The gospels provide two motives for the removal of Jesus’ body. Mark does not directly state Joseph’s motivations, but mentions both the arrival of the Sabbath and that Joseph was “waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God.” These details hint at a religious reason as well as some possible sympathy for Jesus and his movement. Matthew does not state the reason Joseph sought Jesus’ body, but in describing him as a disciple he implies Joseph acted out of respect for Jesus. Luke does not provide Joseph’s reason either, but he agrees with Mark that Joseph was “waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God” and states that he did not consent to Jesus’ condemnation. This again implies some sympathy with Jesus and his movement. However, in the Acts of the Apostles Luke has Paul say Jewish leaders had the body removed from the cross in obedience to the commandment in Deuteronomy. John states the leaders had the body removed due to the Sabbath, which Mark implied was a motivation for Joseph. Jewish leaders removing the body for religious reasons corresponds with what we know from historical sources about the handling of the corpses of crucified criminals. The credibility of the idea that Joseph removed the body out of sympathy or respect for Jesus depends on the credibility of Joseph as an actual person that the gospel authors had reliable information about.

The four gospel authors identify Joseph of Arimathea in somewhat different ways. Presumably they believed their readers/hearers were not familiar with Joseph and thus needed an explanation of who he was. The variations in their accounts show creative freedom in how they identify Joseph. These two observations reinforce my impression that Joseph was not featured in any oral traditions which would have constrained how the gospel authors describe who he was, but rather was a fictional or fictionalized character intended to serve the authors’ literary purposes.

Hypothesis: the gospel authors’ did not know the details of the interment of Jesus’ body; the depiction of Joseph burying it in a tomb by itself is fictional.

The four gospel authors all present Joseph burying the corpse by itself in a tomb, but as noted above it is likely they were obscuring the leading role of Jewish leaders in these events. As also noted above, the authors definitely exercised creative freedom in their handling of Joseph; another example is how John uniquely presents Nicodemus as assisting Joseph in burying the body. This all leads me to suspect Joseph is a fictional or fictionalized character covering the truth about how Jesus’ body was likely buried.

Other historical sources indicate that when crucified criminals were not left on the cross to rot, they were buried in a mass grave such as a pit or a public burial cave meant for the disposal multiple dead bodies. The gospels do not provide convincing evidence that the fate of Jesus’ body was any different.

References

Allison, Dale C. (2005). “Resurrecting Jesus,” pp. 198-375 in Resurrecting Jesus: The Earliest Christian Tradition and Its Interpreters. T&T Clark.

Corley, Kathleen E. (2002). Women and the Historical Jesus: Feminist Myths of Christian Origins. Polebridge Press.

Licona, Michael R. (2010). The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographic Approach. IVP Academic.

Lüdemann, Gerd (2004). The Resurrection of Christ: A Historical Inquiry. Prometheus Books.

Empty tomb, part 1: the gospel genre

It’s been a couple weeks since my last post so I want to update you. Having (pretty much) finished with Paul on the appearances of Jesus, I have turned to the empty tomb story. There is a LOT written on the gospels so I’ve been taking the time to select books, read and take notes before writing. The good news (not “gospel”) is that I am near to finishing my reading list–just a few more books to go, although a couple of them are big ones (600 or more pages).

I can share the start of what I am writing on the empty tomb, looking at the genre of the gospels and what to expect from them as historical sources. This piece is mostly a rewrite and updating of my earlier version, but the next part will have more that is new. Soon I plan to put all this new stuff up as webpages instead of leaving it on my posts.

Empty tomb, part 1:

As I discussed previously, Paul handed down an early Christian tradition which in part said:

Christ died…he was buried and…he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. (I Corinthians 15:3-4; translations from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition of the Christian Bible)

The tradition tells us Christ died, was buried, and was raised on “the third day” after his death. Nowhere in the letters we have from Paul does he tells us how, when or where Jesus was buried or how it was known that he rose on the third day.

For that information we have only the story of the empty tomb in the Christian gospel narratives. Here I will examine the genre of the four canonical gospels, analyze the empty tomb while comparing the four gospels, and present what I regard as the most plausible theory of the origin of the story.

Mark’s story of the empty tomb

The earliest reference to the empty tomb that we know of is found at the end of the anonymous gospel which is traditionally attributed to “Mark,” who was thought to have been an associate of Peter. The writing of Mark’s gospel (often referred to simply as “Mark”) is usually dated at around 67-70 C.E. or later, a decade or more after Paul’s letters were written and about four decades after Jesus’ execution is assumed to have taken place. If this estimate is correct, the first documentation of the empty tomb story was produced decades after it is depicted as taking place. (Later on this website I will have more to say about the gospel and the dating of documents and events.)

The following is how Mark’s gospel ends, picking up the story with a group of women disciples witnessing the crucifixion of Jesus:

There were also women looking on from a distance. Among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome, who followed him when he was in Galilee and ministered to him, and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem.

When evening had come, and since it was the day of Preparation, that is, the day before the Sabbath, Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council who was also himself waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. Then Pilate wondered if he were already dead, and summoning the centurion he asked him whether he had been dead for some time. When he learned from the centurion that he was dead, he granted the body to Joseph. Then Joseph bought a linen cloth and, taking down the body, wrapped it in the linen cloth and laid it in a tomb that had been hewn out of rock. He then rolled a stone against the door of the tomb. Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where the body was laid.

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (Mark 1 5:40-16:8)

Where did Mark get this story? Some commentators argue that it came from an oral tradition originating with women followers of Jesus who did actually witness his empty tomb. N.T. Wright (2003) asserts that Jesus’ disciples’ belief that he was resurrected entails the reality of the discovery of his empty tomb; otherwise they would have interpreted his appearances after death as that of his disembodied soul, that is, a ghost or spirit, not a resurrection of his body. Others argue that Mark made the story up. Richard Carrier (2014) proposes that Christianity started with visions of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus taking place not here on earth, but in a low celestial realm, and that Jesus was not a real historical person at all. In his view the gospels are attempts to historicize a figure who is mythical, both in the sense that he never existed and that his story served to shape the worldview and behavior of a community of people. Here I will navigate between the positions that the story was based either entirely on a reliable oral tradition or it is entirely fictional. Instead I will follow the position most commonly accepted by Biblical scholars and historians, which is that the gospel narratives are built around reports of events that actually happened, but the narratives were also freely shaped to fulfill the authors’ literary purposes.

It is important to understand the kind of book Mark and the other gospel authors had written. Since the 1992 publication of Richard Burridge’s first edition of What Are the Gospels?, his thesis that the Christian gospels fit the genre of the ancient Greco-Roman bios has received wide support. (Burridge, 2004) A bios is a medium-length (in terms of the literature of the time) prose narrative focusing on the deeds and words of a particular person, usually someone famous. Overall they have a chronological structure, usually from either birth or entry into public life to death, but with a variety of anecdotes, stories, sayings and speeches from various sources sandwiched between and often organized in a more topical manner. Authors felt free “to select and edit sources to produce the desired picture of the subject” (Burridge, 2004: 198-199) and had a mixture of aims such as informing, instructing, preserving memories, defending the subject and attacking opponents, and holding the attention of the target audience for the book. The gospels were written in koiné Greek, not the high literary style of Attic Greek, and we can infer they were aimed at a popular audience, probably including illiterate listeners as written works were usually read aloud to groups of people. The gospel of Mark, which exhibits an unsophisticated writing style, can be read aloud in under two hours. Popular bioi were “quite common,” although less likely to be preserved than bioi aimed at an audience higher on the social scale. (Burridge, 2004: 235)

Matthew Ferguson, in a 2015 conference paper and a 2016 webpage based on his paper, expanded upon the distinction between bioi aimed at a more educated readership and those aimed at a popular audience. The former are “historiographical” bioi which identify their author and use sources critically. The latter “novelistic” bioi feature an anonymous author, an omniscient narrator, a description of direct speech, and the creative adaptation of both written sources and oral traditions; all of which are features of the gospels. Did authors of bioi ever just make things up? Michael Licona writes that it is “clear that ancient biographers varied in the liberties they took pertaining to their use of embellishment and invention” and “the commitment to accuracy and the liberties taken could vary greatly” (Licona, 2010: 204). I infer that the gospels, as novelistic bioi, lean more toward “embellishment and invention.”

What we therefore should expect from the gospels is creative story-telling meant to make a point, especially to explain and spread their interpretations of Jesus’ significance. Mark may have made use of whatever factual information was available to him, but he would have felt free to shape his story and perhaps invent incidents in line with his literary objectives. This freedom is apparent in the later gospels, who often copied Mark while making obvious changes to what he wrote, as we shall see.

Sources referred to:

Burridge, Richard A. (2004). What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography, 2^nd edition. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.

Carrier, Richard. (2014). On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield Phoenix Press.

Ferguson, Matthew. (2015). “The Certamen of Homer and Hesiod and the Gospels of the New Testament: A Comparison of Biographical Genre.” Presented at the Pacific Coast Society of Biblical Literature, March 2016.

Ferguson, Matthew. (2016). “Greek Popular Biography: Romance, Contest, Gospel.” ἱστορία φιλοσοφία σκέψις website.

Licona, Michael R. (2010). The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographic Approach. IVP Academic.

Wright, N.T. (2003). The Resurrection of the Son of God. Fortress Press.

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