Bill and I went to the church on Wednesday evenings, Saturday evenings, and all day Sundays to do the youth pastor sorts of things—lead prayer groups, Bible studies, social events, retreats, and so on. Bill did this for a year; I stayed on through my final two years of college at Wheaton, and so did it for three years altogether. It was a great group of kids (high school and college). I still have extremely fond memories of those days.
The pastor of the church was pious, wise, and energetic, a dynamic preacher and a real care-er for souls. His name was Evan Goranson, and for three years he was my mentor, teaching me the ropes of ministry. My only problem with Pastor Goranson was that I thought he was a shade too liberal. (Even Billy Graham was too liberal for me in those days.) But as a minister, Pastor Goranson was one of the most loving people on the planet, and he was far more focused on helping people in need (there are always lots of them in any church of any size) than in fretting and arguing about religion. And in fact, I now know he had a very traditional, conservative theology.
Years later, when I was working on an advanced degree at Princeton Theological Seminary, this form of traditional theology had come to seem less than satisfying to me, as I had begun to entertain doubts about some of the most fundamental aspects of the faith, including the question of the divinity of Jesus. During those intervening years I had come to realize that Jesus is hardly ever, if at all, explicitly called God in the New Testament. I realized that some of the authors of the New Testament do not equate Jesus with God. I had become impressed with the fact that the sayings of Jesus in which he claimed to be God were found only in the Gospel of John, the last and most theologically loaded of the four Gospels. If Jesus really went around calling himself God, wouldn’t the other Gospels at least mention the fact? Did they just decide to skip that part?
In the throes of my theological doubt, I returned to Chicago to visit Trinity Church and Pastor Goranson. I remember the moment vividly. We were driving in his car, and I began to tell him the doubts I was having about the Bible and about what I had formerly held to be sacrosanct. He was sympathetic, since he had always been a bit more liberal and a whole lot less doctrinaire. His view was that we simply had to hold on to the basics. He told me to remember that Jesus had said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me” (John 14:6). That was all that mattered.
Then I asked him, “But what if Jesus never said that?” He was taken aback and stunned, and, good pastor that he was, tears started to well up in his eyes. It hurt me to see, but what could I do? You can’t believe something just because someone else desperately wants you to.
The question in this chapter is, Did Jesus say that? Or other things that are attributed to him? Did he claim to be the one who came down from heaven who could lead people back to the Father? Did he claim that he preexisted? Did he claim that he was equal with God? If he did, then there is a very good reason that his followers did so as well—this is what he taught them. But if he did not claim to be God, then we need to find some other explanation for why his followers did so later, after his death.
The Historical Jesus: Problems and Methods
FOR AN EXHAUSTIVE STUDY of the historical Jesus, we would need not just an entire book, but a whole series of books, such as the massive and impressive four-volume (and counting) set by New Testament scholar and Notre Dame professor John Meier, A Marginal Jew. For readers who prefer something shorter and quicker, there is my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, or superb treatments by such stalwarts as E. P. Sanders, Geza Vermes, Dale Allison, Paula Fredriksen, and many others.1 These books all vary in a number of ways, in no small part because their authors are so different from one another in religious persuasion (or lack of persuasion), personality, background, and training. But one thing they all agree on: Jesus did not spend his ministry declaring himself to be divine.
The reason we need books like these is that the Gospels cannot simply be taken at face value as giving us historically reliable accounts of the things Jesus said and did. If the Gospels were those sorts of trustworthy biographies that recorded Jesus’s life “as it really was,” there would be little need for historical scholarship that stresses the need to learn the ancient biblical languages (Hebrew and Greek), that emphasizes the importance of Jesus’s historical context in his first-century Palestinian world, and that maintains that a full understanding of the true character of the Gospels as historical sources is fundamental for any attempt to establish what Jesus really said and did. All we would need to do would be to read the Bible and accept what it says as what really happened. That, of course, is the approach to the Bible that fundamentalists take. And that’s one reason why you will not find fundamentalists at the forefront of critical scholarship.
In a few short paragraphs I want to explain both why critical scholars think differently and what approaches to the Gospels they have urged, in view of the fact that the New Testament does not provide stenographic records of Jesus’s words or picture-perfect accounts of his life.
Problems with the Gospels
The first thing to stress is that if we want to know about any figure from the past, we need to have sources of information. This may seem obvious enough, but for some reason, when it comes to Jesus, people seem to think that they simply know who he was, what he said, or what he did—almost as if they gained this knowledge by osmosis from the environment. In fact, however, anything you know about Jesus, or think you know, has come to you from a source—either someone has told you, or you have read what someone has written. But where did these people get their information, what makes them authorities, and why should you think they are right? Every story about Jesus (or any other historical figure) either is historically accurate (something he really said or did) or is made up, or is a combination of the two. And the only way to know whether a detail from Jesus’s life is historically accurate is to investigate our sources of information. The sources available to you, me, and your Sunday school teacher are all the same. Stories about Jesus have circulated by word of mouth and in writing since he lived and died. Obviously, stories that began to be told last year for the first time were made up. So too the stories that first began to circulate a hundred years ago. What we want, if we want historically reliable accounts, are sources that can be traced back to Jesus’s own time. We want ancient sources.
We do, of course, have ancient sources, but they are not as ancient as we would like. Our very first Christian author is the Apostle Paul, who was writing twenty to thirty years after Jesus’s death. A number of Paul’s letters are included in the New Testament. Other Christian authors may have been writing earlier than Paul, but none of their works survive. The problems with Paul are that he didn’t actually know Jesus personally and that he doesn’t tell us very much about Jesus’s teachings, activities, or experiences. I sometimes give my students an assignment to read through all of Paul’s writings and list everything Paul indicates Jesus said and did. My students are surprised to find that they don’t even need a three-by-five card to list them. (Paul, by the way, never says that Jesus declared himself to be divine.)
Our next earliest sources of information about the historical Jesus are the Gospels of the New Testament. As it turns out, these are our best sources. They are best not because they happen to be in the New Testament, but because they are also the earliest narratives of Jesus’s life to survive. But even though they are the best sources available to us, they really are not as good as we might hope. This is for several reasons.