25Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels (New York: Macmillan, 1973); cf. Geza Vermes, The Religion of Jesus the Jew (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993).
26Ben F. Meyer, The Aims of Jesus (London: SCM, 1979).
27E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985).
28Richard Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: Popular Jewish Resistance in Roman Palestine (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987).
29Examples include James H. Charlesworth, Jesus Within Judaism (Garden City: Doubleday, 1988); John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 1 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1991) and Mentor, Message, Miracle, Vol. 2 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1994).
30Some representative volumes include the following: Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993); John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991); John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994); Marcus J. Borg, Jesus: A New Vision: Spirit, Culture, and the Life of Discipleship (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1987). A volume that exhibits some similarities is Burton L. Mack, The Lost Gospeclass="underline" The Book of Q and Christian Origins (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993).
2Did Jesus Ever Live?
Very few scholars hold the view that Jesus never lived. This conclusion is generally regarded as a blatant misuse of the available historical data. Even Rudolf Bultmann, in his program of demythologizing the New Testament, said, “By no means are we at the mercy of those who doubt or deny that Jesus ever lived.”1
However, this idea is a persistent one and does appear from time to time. This especially seems to be the case with more popular treatments of the life of Jesus. What would such an argument look like? Here we will examine the views of two scholars who hold such a position.
G.A. Wells
In several recent writings,2 G.A. Wells has explained his position that Jesus may be a historical personage, although an obscure one. He even asserts the possibility that Jesus never existed at all, but that New Testament authors patterned his story after the ancient mystery religions.
A central theme in Wells’ writings is the chronological order of the New Testament books, an arrangement that supposedly reveals much Christological development. Wells delineates four stages, the earliest being Paul’s epistles, all of which were written before AD 60. These are followed by the non-Pauline canonical epistles, then the pastoral epistles and non-canonical writings of Ignatius, with the fourth stage being the Gospels. With the exception of Paul’s epistles, Wells believes that the rest of these books are rather late. He dates the last three stages between AD 70 and 120.
Wells believes that the comparative lack of historical details about Jesus in Paul’s writings meant that he knew virtually nothing about Jesus’ life, including neither the time of his birth, death, nor when the reported resurrection appearances occurred. Paul is said to have conceived of Jesus as “a supernatural being who spent a brief and obscure period on earth in human form and was crucified,” perhaps even centuries before Paul’s own time.3
The second stage of New Testament writings, the non-Pauline epistles, denotes a slight shift in thinking. They assert that Jesus lived on earth recently, an element that Wells believes is absent from Paul altogether. The pastoral epistles and Ignatius’ non-canonical writings indicate a later stage in the early second century when Jesus was linked with the governorship of Pilate, meeting his death at Roman hands. The Gospels, which are more-or-less fabricated, represent the fourth stage in which there is an interest in a full history of Jesus. According to Wells, the early church simply accepted any reconstruction of Jesus’ life as long as there was no conflict with other well-established beliefs. Mark was the earliest Gospel (AD 90), followed by Matthew and Luke, with John being the last one written (early second century).4
Armed with his own reconstruction, Wells concludes that the historical facts of Jesus’ life were mostly a later addition to the New Testament, since Paul, the author of the earliest books, did not know and was not too interested in such details. Neither did the earliest Christians emphasize the historical Jesus, but only the divine Christ who was little different from the mystery gods of other ancient peoples. Besides the mystery religions, Jewish wisdom concepts helped to inspire the early picture of Jesus.
It is thus possible that Jesus never existed at all or, if he did, that he attracted very little attention. At any rate, Christianity got its start, according to Wells, without any contact with a historical Jesus who supposedly died about 30 AD, because “only in later documents is his sojourn on earth assigned to a specific time and place.” Nothing precise was known about him, since no firsthand information is presented in the New Testament.5
1. Early interest in historical Jesus
Of the numerous problems with Wells’ thesis, we will mention five major points here. First and perhaps most important, the earliest books of the New Testament exhibit sufficient interest in the life of the historical Jesus, especially in his death and resurrection. This includes the preservation of eyewitness testimony to these facts.
It is no coincidence that Paul is the author who includes one of the most important indications of this interest in 1 Corinthians 15:3ff.,6 where he incorporates a very early Christian creed that is much older than the book in which it appears. Such early traditions appear frequently in the New Testament and consist of oral teachings and proclamations that were repeated until recorded in the book itself. These creeds, then, actually predate the New Testament writings in which they occur. This particular tradition reports the death, burial, resurrection, and appearances of Jesus, reciting that he rose the third day after his death. A list of persons to whom he appeared then follows.
This confession links the historical life of Jesus, and the central Christian message of the gospel, in particular (vv. 3-4), with those eyewitnesses who testified to his resurrection appearances, beginning on the third day after his death (vv. 5-7). In addition, Paul had not only met some of these witnesses personally (Gal. 1:18-19; 2:9), but he explains that his message concerning these facts is identical with their eyewitness testimony (1 Cor. 15:11; cf. 15:14, 15). So the eyewitnesses of Jesus, and especially of his resurrection, were relating the same findings as Paul. It is crucially important that this information is very close to the actual events, and therefore cannot be dismissed as late material or as hearsay evidence. Critics not only admit this data, but were the first ones to recognize the early date.7
Paul shows just how much he values the historical facts concerning Jesus’ resurrection appearances when he points out that, if they are not true, then there are absolutely no grounds for any distinctly Christian faith (1 Cor. 15:12-19, 32). This early creed and the subsequent testimony disprove Wells’ thesis concerning the lack of early interest in the facts of Jesus’ life, for they demonstrate clearly that Paul is even willing to base the Christian faith on the truthfulness of Jesus’ death and resurrection.