Conclusion: Discovering the Real Jesus
CONCLUSION
I ask myself a question a lot of people have asked: Who is this [Jesus]? Was he who he said he was, or was he just a religious nut?... That’s the, question.
Bono1
It doesn’t mattes what I believe. It only matters what I can prove.
Tom Cruise’s character in A Few Good Men
She was brought up Catholic, but by the age of eighteen she had left the church and abandoned her belief in God. Two years later, she married a fervent atheist. Soon she became not just a published novelist, but one of the best-read authors in America, penning a succession of stories about vampires and witches—unaware at the time that her books “reflected my quest for meaning in a world without God.” Anne Rice, author of Interview with a Vampire and the Mayfair Witches series, spent thirty years as an atheist. Then she began studying the Bible during her frequent periods of depression. Her faith rekindled, she decided in 2002 to “give myself utterly to the task of trying to understand Jesus himself and how Christianity emerged.” She consecrated her subsequent book on Jesus — and herself—to him. And that’s when she discovered something very curious.
An inveterate researcher, Rice prides herself on the accuracy of the historical world she creates for her novels. To prepare for writing about Jesus, she spent more than two years delving deeply into first-century Palestine, which included reading books on the New Testament era written by skeptical and liberal historians.
“I expected to discover that their arguments would be frighteningly strong, and that Christianity was, at heart, a kind of fraud,” she wrote. Surprisingly, the opposite occurred:
What gradually came clear to me was that many of the skeptical arguments — arguments that insisted most of the Gospels were suspect, for instance, or written too late to be eyewitness accounts —lacked coherence. . . . Arguments about Jesus himself were full of conjecture. Some books were no more than assumptions piled upon assumptions. Absurd conclusions were reached on the basis of little or no data at all.
In short, she found the nondivine and impotent Jesus of liberal circles to be based on “some of the worst and most biased scholarship I’ve ever read.” She was stunned that “there are New Testament scholars who detest and despise” the Jesus whom they spend their entire lives studying. “Some pitied him as a hopeless failure,” she said. “Others sneered at him, and some felt an outright contempt. This came between the lines of the books.”
In the end, she became “disillusioned with the skeptics and with the flimsy evidence for their conclusions.” Instead, she discovered that the research and arguments from a wide range of other highly creden-tialed scholars — Richard Bauckham, Craig Blomberg, N. T. Wright, Luke Timothy Johnson, D. A. Carson, Larry Hurtado, and others — were more than enough to establish the early dating and first-person witness of the Gospels.2
If I were to sum up the lesson from her experience — which is quite similar to my own—I’d put it like this: “The emperors of radical scholarship have no clothes!”
For years, skeptical and left-wing historians have bedazzled the public with flashy new theories about Jesus — he’s really a Gnostic imparter of secret wisdom; he’s actually a reworking of the ancient myths about Mithras; he’s a messianic pretender who fails the test of the ancient prophecies; he’s buried in Galilee outside the city of Tsfat; or he’s whatever anyone wants him to be in today’s cacophony of postmodernism.
Didn’t you know that the Christian idea of baptism comes from the sinking of the coffin of the pagan god Osiris in the Nile River? Or that Jesus held initiation rites with young men in the middle of the night? Or that the first century was a cauldron of radically different views about Jesus, but the real story—which is that Jesus wants us to know we’re all divine—was suppressed by the power-hungry church? Or that scribes have irretrievably contaminated the text of the New Testament? Or that Jesus wrote a secret letter to the Jewish authorities clarifying that he never claimed to be God’s Son? Or that Jesus didn’t utter most of what’s recorded in the Gospels?
“These skeptical scholars,” said Rice, “seemed so very sure of themselves.”3
Very sure — but as it turns out, surely wrong. The truth is that skepticism does not equal scholarship.4Finally, other scholars are beginning to speak up to expose the leaps of logic, special pleading, biased interpretations, and tissue-thin evidence that underlies these outrageous claims about Jesus.
Not long ago, Craig A. Evans had enough. With the same righteous indignation that prompted Ronald Nash to debunk the theory that Christianity stole its beliefs from the pagan mystery religions, Evans set out to demonstrate the sloppy scholarship that has confused the public about the real Jesus in recent years.
Coming from someone of Evans’s impressive caliber, this was highly significant. Few Jesus scholars are as universally respected by both liberals and conservatives as Evans, the distinguished professor of New Testament and director of the graduate program at Acadia Divinity College in Canada and the first expert I interviewed in my quest for the real Jesus.
Evans looked at the current controversies swirling around Jesus — was he a mystic or Gnostic; did he fake his death; has his grave been found; did he deny his divinity; are the four Gospels unreliable; are there better sources about his life than the New Testament; is there a grand conspiracy to suppress the truth; did Jesus ever really exist at all? — and shook his head in disbelief.
“When I first began academic study of Jesus and the Gospels some thirty years ago, I could never have guessed that I or anyone else would find it necessary to write a book addressing such questions,” he said. “Surely no one in all seriousness would advance such theories. Surely no credible publishers would print them. Yet, all of that has happened.”5
Evans knows the sweep of historical evidence. He’s well aware of what conclusions it reasonably supports and what it can’t. And he was aghast at what he was reading in popular books about Jesus.
“We live in a strange time that indulges, even encourages, some of the strangest thinking,” he wrote in the introduction to his well-titled book Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels. “What I find particularly troubling is that a lot of the nonsense comes from scholars. We expect tabloid pseudo-scholarship from the quacks, but not from scholars who teach at respectable institutions of higher learning.”6
Nevertheless, what he found were “daring theories that run beyond the evidence,” distortions or neglect of the four Gospels, misguided suspicions, unduly strict critical methods, questionable texts from later centuries, anachronisms, exaggerated claims, and “hokum history” — all resulting in “the fabrication of an array of pseudo-Jesuses.”7
In sum, he said, “Just about every error imaginable has been made. A few writers have made almost all of them.”8
Evans is hardly alone in his assessment. Numerous other New Testament luminaries also have started to publicly condemn the way the public is being duped by ill-supported assertions concerning Jesus.
James H. Charlesworth, the highly regarded professor of New Testament Language and Literature at Princeton Theological Seminary and an expert on Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, decried “the misinformed nonsense that has confused the reading public over the past few years.”
James D. G. Dunn, professor emeritus at the University of Durham in England, agreed. “The quest of the historical Jesus has been seriously misled by much poor scholarship and distorted almost beyond recognition by recent pseudo-scholarship,” he said.
Equally adamant was John P. Meier, professor at the University of Notre Dame, who wrote A Marginal Jew, the widely acclaimed multivolume work on the historical Jesus. “For decades now,” he said, “the unsuspecting public has been subjected to dubious academic claims about the historical Jesus that hardly rise above the level of sensation-alistic novels.”
Gerald O’Collins, professor emeritus of the Gregorian University in Rome, warned of the “sensationalist claims about Jesus that quickly turn out to be based on mere wishful thinking.” Gerd Theissen, professor at the University of Heidelberg, bemoaned “sensational modern approaches in Jesus research that do not live up to the standards of academic research.”9
“Readers should beware of shocking new claims about Jesus or his earliest followers based on flimsy evidence,” said New Testament professor Ben Witherington III in his 2006 book What Have They
Done with Jesus?10 Unfortunately, he added, Americans have been “prone to listen to sensational claims . . . even when there is little or no hard evidence to support such conjectures.”11
Meanwhile, scholars have been breaking new ground in academic research that flatly contradicts many of the recent radical assertions about Jesus, including the claims that his divinity was the product of legendary development and that the four Gospels lack eyewitness support.
Larry W. Hurtado, professor of New Testament Language, Literature, and Theology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, demonstrated in a 746-page volume that the exaltation of Jesus wasn’t a later development. Rather, he said, “an exalted significance of Jesus appears astonishingly early in Christian circles.”12 He pointed out that early Christians defined and portrayed Jesus as God’s “Son,” “Christ/ Messiah,” “Word,” and “Image.”13
“Well within the first couple of decades of the Christian movement [or AD 30 - 50] Jesus was treated as a recipient of religious devotion and was associated with God in striking ways,” Hurtado concluded.14
Where would the monotheistic Jews of the early church come up with the idea of Jesus’ divinity after his death if he had not made the claim himself during his ministry and then backed it up with his resurrection?
In a 2006 scholarly book that N. T. Wright called “a remarkable piece of detective work,” Richard Bauckham, professor of New Testament studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, meticulously documents how the four Gospels are closely based on the eyewitness testimony of those who personally knew Jesus.15 That might not sound controversial to many people, but it dramatically deflates revisionist theories that say the Gospels are unreliable and disconnected from first-hand accounts.
In short, the four Gospels — once denigrated and mocked by skeptics—are making a powerful comeback. “When put to the test,” summarized Evans, “the original documents hold up quite well.”16
After traveling a total of 24,000 miles on my mission to investigate six of the most current and controversial objections to the traditional view of Jesus, I went alone to my office, sat down in a comfortable chair, and flipped through reams of notes, transcripts, and articles.
In the end, none of these seemingly daunting challenges turned out to be close calls. One by one, they were systematically dismantled by scholars who backed up their positions not with verbal sleights of hand or speculation, but with facts, logic, and evidence:
• Are scholars discovering a radically different Jesus in ancient documents just as credible as the four Gospels? No, the alternative texts that are touted in liberal circles are too late to be historically credible—for instance, the Gospel of Thomas was written after AD 175 and probably closer to 200. According to eminent New Testament scholar I. Howard Marshall of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, the Thomas gospel has “no significant new light to shed on the historical Jesus.”17 The Secret Gospel of Mark, with its homoerotic undercurrents, turned out to be an embarrassing hoax that fooled many liberal scholars too eager to buy into bizarre theories about Jesus, while no serious historians give credence to the so-called Jesus Papers. The Gnostic depiction of Jesus as a revealer of hidden knowledge—including the teaching that we all possess the divine light that he embodied — lacks any connection to the historical Jesus.
• Is the, Bible’s portrait of Jesus unreliable because of mistakes or deliberate changes by scribes through the centuries? No, there are no new disclosures that have cast any doubt on the essential reliability of the New Testament. Only about one percent of the manuscript variants affect the meaning of the text to any degree, and not a single cardinal doctrine is at stake. Actually, the unrivaled wealth of New Testament manuscripts greatly enhances the credibility of the Bible’s portrayal of Jesus.
• Have new explanations refuted Jesus’ resurrection? No, the truth is that a persuasive case for Jesus rising from the dead can be made by using five facts that are well-evidenced and which the vast majority of today’s scholars on the subject — including skeptical ones — accept as true: Jesus death by crucifixion; his disciples’ belief that he rose and appeared to them; the conversion of the church persecutor Paul; the conversion of the skeptic James, who was Jesus’ half-brother; and Jesus’ empty tomb. All the attempts by skeptics and Muslims to put Jesus back into his tomb utterly fail when subjected to serious analysis, while the overblown and ill-supported claims of the
Jesus Tomb documentary and book have been decimated by knowledgeable scholars.
• Were Christian beliefs about Jesus stolen from pagan religions? No, they clearly were not. Allegations that the virgin birth, the resurrection, communion, and baptism came from earlier mythology simply evaporated when the shoddy scholarship of “copycat” theorists was exposed. There are simply no examples of dying and rising gods that preceded Christianity and which have meaningful parallels to Jesus’ resurrection. In short, this is a theory that careful scholars discredited decades ago.
• Was Jesus an imposter who failed to fulfill the, messianic prophecies? On the contrary, a compelling case can be made that Jesus—and Jesus alone — matches the “fingerprint” of the Messiah. Only Jesus managed to fulfill the prophecies that needed to come to fruition prior to the fall of the Jewish temple in AD 70. Consequently, if Jesus isn’t the predicted Messiah, then there will never be one. What’s more, Jesus’ fulfillment of these prophecies against all odds makes it rational to conclude that he will fulfill the final ones when the time is right.
• Should people be free to pick and choose what they want to believe about Jesus? Obviously, we have the freedom to believe anything we want. But just because the U.S. Constitution provides equal protection for all religions doesn’t mean that all beliefs are equally true. Whatever we believe about Jesus cannot change the reality of who he clearly established himself to be: the unique Son of God. So why cobble together our own make-believe Jesus to try to fulfill our personal prejudices when we can meet and experience the actual Jesus of history and faith?
Not only had the six challenges been answered, but my journey also had yielded a fresh and powerful affirmative case for the overall reliability of the four Gospels, Jesus’ fulfillment of the messianic predictions, and his resurrection. For me, it was further confirmation that the traditional view of Christ is amply supported by a firm foundation of historical facts.
Yet if that case is so convincing, then why do so many critics rely on flimsy evidence and feeble arguments in order to build a much weaker case for a fabricated Jesus? For instance, why would they ignore or denigrate the first-century, eyewitness-based Gospels of the New Testament and instead manufacture a different Jesus out of second century — or later—documents that lack historical credibility?
It’s not always easy to discern people’s motives. Still, I can’t help but notice a common thread that runs through the efforts to discover another Jesus: many of them, in their own way, attempt to put humankind on the same level as him.
Some critics try to accomplish this by reducing Jesus. They reject his uniqueness, his miracles, and his divinity, transforming him into just another human being. This is the tactic employed by the Jesus Seminar, advocates of the “copycat” theory, and the skeptics who deny the resurrection. It’s the message behind the Jesus Papers: Jesus never claimed to be God but only embodied God’s Spirit in a way that anyone can.
Others take a different approach: rather than tearing Jesus down, they elevate themselves. In other words, they’re fine with affirming the divinity of Jesus—as long as they too are indwelled by the same spark of the divine. This seems to be the strategy of many New Agers and Gnostics, as well as the people who set out to create their own do-it-yourself religion, only to “discover”—as Ed and Joanne did—that they’re gods themselves.
Whether reducing Jesus or elevating ourselves, the result is the same: Jesus becomes our equal. As such, he doesn’t deserve our allegiance or our worship. He cannot judge us or hold us accountable. His teachings become mere suggestions that can be followed or disregarded according to our whims. He isn’t our savior; at most, he’s a friendly guide.
On the other hand, the one Jesus that skeptics refuse to tolerate is a uniquely divine, miraculous, prophecy-fulfilling, and resurrected Jesus — even if the historical evidence points persuasively in that direction. After all, that would put them in the place of being beholden to him. Their personal sovereignty and moral independence would be at risk. The problem is: that’s the real Jesus.
We are not his equals. We don’t occupy the same stratum or possess the same status. He is God, and we’re not. For many people, that’s the crux of their predicament: if Jesus is God incarnate, then he could demand too much. And in fact, he does demand everything. Said C. S. Lewis:
The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says, “Give me All. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No halfmeasures are any good. . . . Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked — the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.”18
That kind of surrender sounds scary for many people. But if Jesus really is God—if he really did sacrifice himself so that we could be forgiven and set free to experience his love forever—then why should we hesitate to give all of ourselves to him? Who could be more trustworthy than someone who lays down his life so that others might live?
This is what Jesus has done. The church has been telling this same story for two millennia. As I sat in my office, I found Evans’s words echoing in my mind: “I come down on the side of the church,” he declared. “Doggone it, bless their bones, I think they figured it out. They avoided errors and pitfalls to the left and to the right. I think the church got it right.”
As imperfect as she is, the church has preserved for us the four Gospels that constitute the most reliable reports about Jesus. The church has formulated the ancient creeds that efficiently sum up the implications of his life and ministry: Jesus is fully God and fully man, who offers forgiveness, hope, and eternal life as a free gift to all who want to receive it.19
As the church has affirmed from the beginning, he is utterly one of a kind. “Jesus was entirely different and new and stunning,” said author Don Everts.
There was just something so clear and beautiful and true and unique and powerful about Jesus that old rabbis would marvel at his teaching, young children would run and sit in his lap, ashamed prostitutes would find themselves weeping at his feet, whole villages would gather to hear him speak, experts in the law would find themselves speechless, and people from the poor to the rugged working class to the unbelievably wealthy would leave everything . . . to follow him.20
This is the real Jesus, who all along has been alive and well as he dwells in the lives of his people—the community whose door is always open.