Someone may argue that there are other reasons, apart from explicit divine self-claims, to suspect that Jesus saw himself as divine. For example, he does amazing miracles that surely only a divine figure could do; and he forgives people’s sins, which surely is a prerogative of God alone; and he receives worship, as people bow down before him, which surely indicates that he welcomes divine honors.
There are two points to stress about such things. The first is that all of them are compatible with human, not just divine, authority. In the Hebrew Bible the prophets Elijah and Elisha did fantastic miracles—including healing the sick and raising the dead—through the power of God, and in the New Testament so did the Apostles Peter and Paul; but that did not make any of them divine. When Jesus forgives sins, he never says “I forgive you,” as God might say, but “your sins are forgiven,” which means that God has forgiven the sins. This prerogative for pronouncing sins forgiven was otherwise reserved for Jewish priests in honor of sacrifices that worshipers made at the temple. Jesus may be claiming a priestly prerogative, but not a divine one. And kings were worshiped—even in the Bible (Matt. 18:26)—by veneration and obeisance, just as God was. Here, Jesus may be accepting the worship due to him as the future king. None of these things is, in and of itself, a clear indication that Jesus is divine.
But even more important, these activities may not even go back to the historical Jesus. Instead, they may be traditions assigned to Jesus by later storytellers in order to heighten his eminence and significance. Recall one of the main points of this chapter: many traditions in the Gospels do not derive from the life of the historical Jesus but represent embellishments made by storytellers who were trying to convert people by convincing them of Jesus’s superiority and to instruct those who were converted. These traditions of Jesus’s eminence cannot pass the criterion of dissimilarity and are very likely later pious expansions of the stories told about him—told by people who, after his resurrection, did come to understand that he was, in some sense, divine.
What we can know with relative certainty about Jesus is that his public ministry and proclamation were not focused on his divinity; in fact, they were not about his divinity at all. They were about God. And about the kingdom that God was going to bring. And about the Son of Man who was soon to bring judgment upon the earth. When this happened the wicked would be destroyed and the righteous would be brought into the kingdom—a kingdom in which there would be no more pain, misery, or suffering. The twelve disciples of Jesus would be rulers of this future kingdom, and Jesus would rule over them. Jesus did not declare himself to be God. He believed and taught that he was the future king of the coming kingdom of God, the messiah of God yet to be revealed. This was the message he delivered to his disciples, and in the end, it was the message that got him crucified. It was only afterward, once the disciples believed that their crucified master had been raised from the dead, that they began to think that he must, in some sense, be God.
CHAPTER 4
The Resurrection of Jesus
What We Cannot Know
I GIVE A LOT OF lectures around the country every year, not just at colleges and universities, but also for civic organizations, divinity schools, and churches. When I get invited to speak at a conservative evangelical school or church, it is almost always for a public debate, in which I am asked to engage with a conservative evangelical scholar on some topic of mutual interest, such as: “Can Historians Prove That Jesus Was Raised from the Dead?” or “Do We Have the Original Text of the New Testament?” or “Does the Bible Adequately Explain Why There Is Suffering?” For obvious reasons, these kinds of audiences tend to be less interested in hearing what I have to say than in seeing how a scholar of their own theological persuasion can respond to and refute my views. I understand that and actually enjoy these venues: the debates tend to be lively, and the audiences are almost always receptive and gracious, even if they think I’m a dangerous spokesperson for the dark side.
In more liberal churches and secular contexts I typically have free reign and more receptive audiences, who are eager to hear what scholars have to say about the history of the early Christian religion and about the New Testament from a historical perspective. I often speak, in those contexts, about the historical Jesus, laying out the view summarized in the previous chapter—that Jesus is best understood as an apocalyptic prophet who was anticipating that God was soon to intervene in human affairs to overthrow the forces of evil and set up a good kingdom here on earth. As we have seen, this view was not unique to Jesus but could be found in the teachings of other apocalyptically minded Jews of his day.
When I deliver talks like this, I regularly and consistently get two questions from members of the audience. The first is, “If this is the view widely held among scholars, why have I never heard it before?” I’m afraid that this question has an easy but troubling answer. In most instances the view of Jesus that I have is similar to that taught—with variations here or there, of course—to ministerial candidates in the mainline denominational seminaries (Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopalian, and so on). So why have their parishioners never heard it before? Because their pastors haven’t told them. And why haven’t their pastors told them? I don’t know for sure, but from my conversations with former seminarians, I think that many pastors don’t want to make waves; or they don’t think their congregations are “ready” to hear what scholars are saying; or they don’t think that their congregations want to hear it. So they don’t tell them.
The second question is somewhat more intellectually challenging: “If other Jews in Jesus’s day taught this apocalyptic view, then . . . why Jesus? Why is it that Jesus started Christianity, the largest religion in the world, when other apocalyptic teachers are forgotten to history? Why did Jesus succeed where others failed?”
It’s a great question. Sometimes a person asking it thinks there is an obvious answer, namely, that Jesus must have been unique and completely unlike all the others who proclaimed this message. He was God, and they were humans, so of course he started a new religion and they didn’t. In this line of thinking, the only way to explain the enormous success of Christianity is to believe that God actually was behind it all.
The problem with this answer is that it ignores all the other great religions of the world. Do we want to say that all great and successful religions come from God himself and that their founders were “God”? Was Moses God? Mohammed? Buddha? Confucius? Moreover, the rapid spread of Christianity throughout the ancient Roman world is not necessarily an indication that God was on its side. Those who say so should think again about other religions of our world. Just as an example: the sociologist Rodney Stark has shown that during its first three hundred years, the Christian religion grew at a rate of 40 percent every decade. If Christianity started out as a relatively small group in the first century but had some three million followers by the early fourth century—that’s a 40 percent increase every ten years. What is striking to Stark is that this is the same growth rate of the Mormon church since it started in the nineteenth century. So these mainline Christians who think that God must have been behind Christianity or it would not have grown as quickly as it did—are they willing to say the same thing about the Mormon church (which they in fact tend not to support)?
And so we are left with our question: What is it that made Jesus so special? In fact, as we will see, it was not his message. That did not succeed much at all. Instead, it helped get him crucified—surely not a mark of spectacular success. No, what made Jesus different from all the others teaching a similar message was the claim that he had been raised from the dead. Belief in Jesus’s resurrection changed absolutely everything. Such a thing was not said of any of the other apocalyptic preachers of Jesus’s day, and the fact that it was said about Jesus made him unique. Without the belief in the resurrection, Jesus would have been a mere footnote in the annals of Jewish history. With the belief in the resurrection, we have the beginnings of the movement to promote Jesus to a superhuman plane. Belief in the resurrection is what eventually led his followers to claim that Jesus was God.